PropOrNot?
Okay, major Time fail: it’s really Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral, a landmark Church on Red Square, but why not instead the Knesset or the Presidential Palace in Riyadh? For one thing, Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have been our ‘partners in peace’ for decades, and haven’t ever made it onto any US President’s ‘Axes of Evil’ lists have they? Oh, and don’t miss that the painting-in-progress is dried blood red.
And oh, my, what an easy sell ‘the Rooskies are Enemy No. 1’ to Amerikans.
In Paul Street’s May 19 ‘How Russia Became “Our Adversary” Again’, after advising for the moment we forget all the ‘the Russians hacked the last election in favor of Donald Trump without any hard evidence’ silliness, he writes that it’s been an enemy of the Western Capitalist elite from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to allegedly Marxist-Leninist breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Describing the state as holding tyrannical power over Eastern Europe and East Germany, and was no workers’ paradise, still it created an industrialized system that permitted all citizens to be educated, provided health care, housing, and food security, outside capitalism.
“It therefore posed a political and ideological challenge to U.S-led Western capitalism – and to Washington’s related plans for the Third World periphery, which was supposed to subordinate its developmental path to the needs of the rich nations (the U.S., Western Europe, and honorarily white Japan) of the world-capitalist core.
Honest U.S. Cold Warriors knew that it was the political threat of “communism” – its appeal to poor nations and people (including the lower and working classes within rich/core states) – and not any serious military danger that constituted the true “Soviet menace.”
(The USSR also provided) “military and other assistance to Third World targets of U.S. and Western attack (including China, Korea, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos). Along the way, it provided an example of independent development outside and against the capitalist world system advanced by the superpower headquartered in Washington.”
Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, Street quotes George HW Bush as having crowed “What we say goes!” in a new unipolar Western Imperial world as Russia turned to a ‘not-so-free-market form of neoLiberal capitalism dictated by DeeCee consensus, and creating a new capitalist oligarchs while everyday citizens suffered from imposed austerity and inequality.
How did cold war enemy become the new hot war enemy? Enter Vladamir Putin:
“The bottom line is that proud, post-Cold War Russia finally experienced too much brazen humiliation and betrayal at the hands of the U.S.-led West. It got up off the canvass under national/nationalist strongman Putin (a former KGB Lieutenant-Colonel wise in the ways of the West) and marshaled enough of still-intact natural and military resources and patriotic to challenge the American Empire’s hubristic claim to the right to rule Eurasia with impunity. “What we say goes” hit a new wall of Russian dignity and power.”
And of course Putin’s giving the West his bird finger is a major reason that he’s so popular in Russia. Now he doesn’t say so expressly, but propagating Cold War 2.0 has also ‘repurposed’ NATO and caused insane expansionism with new members, ‘under out NATO umbrella’ states, and ‘provisional or pending Nato states right up to Russia’s borders.
But oh, yes, Street does indeed see how far the Dems’ shrill cries of ‘Russiagate’ (along with their compliant MSM stenographers) have brought the trope-a-dope to an ear-splitting crescendo, along with neo-con Bear-baiters like John McCrankypants and friends who’v feared any earlier Trump Tweets concerning his desire for rapprochement with Russia. Can’t have that, nossir! The epically loud bipartisan screams against that idea is why Street and others believe that “Clockwork Orangutan found it necessary to absurdly tell Russia to “give Crimea back” to Ukraine and why he theatrically launched 59 cruise missiles onto a Syrian airbase.”
I’m not down so much with the latter theory as there are competing and plausible other reasons for Syria as another proxy war ground zero. There’s a lot more Street at the link to read if you care to.
From Mike Whitney’s ‘Putin’s New World Order’, April 28 at Counterpunch on why the US political class loved ‘buffoon’ Yeltzin but not Putin (I might have said ‘fears Putin, myself):
“Putin has repeatedly condemned Washington’s unilateral war-mongering around the world, in fact, the Russian president has become the de facto leader of a growing resistance movement whose primary goal is to stop Washington’s destabilizing regime change wars and rebuild global security on the bedrock principle of national sovereignty. Here’s how Putin summed it up at Valdai:
‘We have no doubt that sovereignty is the central notion of the entire system of international relations. Respect for it and its consolidation will help underwrite peace and stability both at the national and international levels…First of all, there must be equal and indivisible security for all states.’
“Putin’s opposition to unipolar world rule, that is, Washington dictating policy and everyone else falling in line, is not a sign of anti-Americanism, but pragmatism. Washington’s 16 year-long rampage across Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, has only intensified crises, fueled instability, bred terrorism, and increased the death and destruction. There have been no victories in the War on Terror, just endless violence and mountains of carnage. On top of that (as Putin says) “No one feels safe.”
Say what you will about Putin and Lavrov (and they have plenty of detractors), but as far as I’ve seen, there are no other current Statesmen who are anywhere near their equals.
Now we also need to bring Julian Assange and WikiLeaks into the equation, don’t we?
‘Sweden’s investigation into Julian Assange was a political frame-up from the outset’, 20 May 2017, wsws.org
“On Friday, Swedish authorities announced they were dropping their investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. In fact, they have no case whatsoever and never did. The entire affair was a “dirty tricks” operation from the outset, aimed at discrediting and paralyzing WikiLeaks and creating conditions under which Assange could be extradited or abducted to the US, to be executed or condemned to a lifetime in prison.
WikiLeaks’ sole “crime” was to shed light on the illegal and murderous activities of American imperialism and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the globe.” [snip]
“The US has let it be known that it has prepared charges against Assange, and Washington would like to see Assange extradited to the US. The British authorities, moreover, said they would still arrest Assange if he left the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been trapped for five years, for a breach of bail offense.
In his fascistic rant delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on April 13, Donald Trump’s CIA director, Michael Pompeo, asserted that “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service… It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is—a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” He further proclaimed, “We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. Threats of violence against Assange and WikiLeaks are nothing new.”
He then lists a boatloads of them. There are many competing narratives as to who leaked the DLC cables, but ‘an insider’ gets my vote (Craig Murray, et.al.).
John Pilger’s verrrry lengthy May 19 ‘Getting Assange: the Untold Story’ doesn’t relate to Russiagate, but as it contains some major f’ed up history that I’d been totally in the dark about, but this bowled me over:
“The previous editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. Yet no attempt was made to protect the Guardian’s provider and source. Instead, the “scoop” became part of a marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.
With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.
(The privileged little punk; yeah, I’d edited out ‘prick’.)
~ Bertholdt Brecht
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
a late addition, as i’d forgotten to check in w/ stephen cohen and as the wordpress blogging software is giving me fits today, i’ll add it here:
‘On May 9, while Russia was commemorating the 27 million Soviet citizens who died fighting Nazi Germany, the US political-media class was vilifying the Kremlin and seeking its American “puppets.”, by Stephen F. Cohen at thenation.com (a kinda/sorta transcript/synopsis of an interview he’d done on the John Batchelor Show:
“Meanwhile, on May 8 and 9, today’s Russia was being portrayed—at renewed Senate hearings in Washington—as an existential threat to America, as having committed an “act of war against American democracy” by “hijacking” the 2016 presidential election on behalf of President Trump, with whom the Kremlin is said to have “colluded.” By end of day on May 9, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was said to be a cover-up of that collusion. About these events in Washington, Cohen made (or reiterated) the following points, which he and Batchelor discussed:
§ After nearly a year, no actual facts have yet been presented to support the charges of Kremlin “meddling” in the 2016 election or of “collusion” by Trump or his “associates,” only allegations and vague intelligence “assessments.” On the other hand, strong evidence has appeared that for more than a year elements of the US intelligence community—almost certainly the FBI and CIA—have been engaged in shadowy operations designed to link Trump to Putin’s Kremlin. Cohen terms this “Intelgate,”
and he thinks it is what must be investigated first and foremost. Certainly, Intel leaks and “reports,” in evident “collusion” with the failed Clinton campaign, have driven the “Kremlingate” narrative from the outset, eagerly amplified almost daily by the mainstream media, but which show no interest at all in Intelgate.”
the rest is here, even if a bit outdated.
i’ve been awake since 3:30 and need to go rest my weary bones and eyes for a bit.
on edit: jason just remindned me/us that deep throat mark felt was an upper level fibbie. also, i just ran into this. beats me. #seth rich.
not only are the msm’s perpetuating a false history of their own heroism, specifically around Nixon & Watergate, the journalizms are also leading the crusade to save “our” country from the evil Crimea-invading, Assad-supporting Rus. the not fake newz media, that is. who knew what heroes the capital press gang contains? those guys & molls on face the nation & meet the press? they, they are the real heroes. after the troops, of course.
here’s another example of excellence in journalizms: since the fall of the soviet union, what country to this date has suffered the most in terms of total number of deaths from capitalism? Afghanistan? Iraq? not even close. it’s Russia itself. w/in a couple of years of the reintroduction of capitalism to R, millions and millions of people were just dead as the lifespan plummeted.
now those wily Rooskies all know this, despite all the vodka they drank to get thru dark times. quite unlike their dumbass “we beat hitler AND japan” USAian counterparts.
leaders and govt’s are relative in their evil and putin is fer shur no saint, but w/o putin, imagine the world in a right bloody mess. still, even though on a certain level maybe the kind of personal anecdotal stuff revealed in the CP article below doesn’t matter, putin does not sound like a nice guy. in fact, he and trump might have a lot of fun together. Clinton? Obama? wilted violets compared to the real men. I bet trump & putin would get together & pay to shoot some hobos.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2001/04/17/down-the-river-with-vladimir-putin/
ack! thar she blows! when i’d mentioned putin has plenty of detractors, i’d been thinking of st. clair, and even tried to find it, but i hadn’t looked far enough back. and of course empire burlesque chris floyd.
yeppers, and that’s just one of the reasons putin’s approval ratings are something like 86%, including international polls, according to cohen, i believe it was. but peek at the dotcom tweet i just edited in when ya have a chance. stay tuned. one journalist, caitlin johnstone says if he produces the goods, amerikans will have to wake up. dunno that i agree, but i hope we get to see. assange just continues to say ‘we don’t reveal sources’.
good.gawd.all.friday. imagine retweeting this about yourself. ‘scotus likely won’t be too particular how he got here’. another msm warrior for ‘right’, eh?
Well, yes. It is getting pretty entertaining if you forget about the nuclear-armed missiles and bombers that the US and Russia still have facing each other. (Trump won’t mess with that because the people who have actual control of the hardware won’t obey a crazy order; at least that’s the reported situation at the moment.) So enjoy the show of grown partisans chest-beating and other forms of aggressive dance.
I’m waiting for Dotcom’s jaw-dropper but expecting little more than self-promotion. The people who know for sure about Seth Rich’s death likely could be implicated in a wrongful death if they went public about what they know. Current indications are that it is a totally unrelated event. Until someone big like Assange or Dotcom or who(?) spills.
The same situation exists on the other side of the ledger. It’s nothing more than allegations until the US intelligence community spills chapter and verse. They could do that with the immunization of a Congressional hearing, but do you think that a Congressional committee in the current Congress would grant immunization of top secret (er, NSA-derived) information?
It gonna be like a bad soccer match for quite a while.
it’s likely just entertaining insofar that it’s all so surreal, not unlike the bertholdt brecht quote above. that the generals in charge of the hardware may not obey herr T may be just another leak attributed to ‘anonymous well-placed sources’, yes?
i’m not getting which investigations, immunized testimony, etc. you’re referring to here, though: ” It’s nothing more than allegations until the US intelligence community spills chapter and verse. nor do i grasp “The people who know for sure about Seth Rich’s death likely could be implicated in a wrongful death if they went public about what they know.” do you mean the police investigators who’d spoken to fox news according to mike whitney?
i guess i might just try to find his not hyperlinked article titles. but i did read on the #sethrich tag one news (?) organization claiming to have gone to the bar where rich was last seen just before his murder, saying no one in the bar had been questioned, no one asked for security camera tapes, etc. true? not true? now i suppose there’s an outside possibility that his death wasn’t connected to his leaking, but it sure as hell ain’t been properly investigated.
odd-bodkins, though. reading juliania saying something ‘as per thd’ i was baffled. i hadn’t even known you were on this thread at all, i guess as per my being bonkers pain-whinge. i usually read comments in email to place them as to which diary, etc., but i’m not getting emails from the site.
Mike Flynn wanted immunization of his testimony in exchange for testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. Typically in recent years, people who get immunized clam up further and tell nothing, keeping their Omerta.
Police investigators would be the last to know for certain about Seth Rich’s death unless they were the agents who bumped him off. Anybody else who “saw him last” automatically becomes an addition to the suspect list. Interesting about the police curiosity about the bar before he was supposedly last seen. (That depends on some reporter’s reporting, which in the current environment is also suspect.)
Yes. surreal. The commodification of information and truth likely is what triggered the term “post-modern”. This is a step further in which at least two nations are engaging in shaping the standards and initial information by which the news is reported and truth evaluated. And doing so from the perspective of national security strategy if not an actual military campaign. Because it is aimed both at their own population and their competitors. And they have successfully eliminated most alternative evaluating media of any size and general national power. We scurry around trying to piece together what is going on, based on a lot of the media that are not longer trustworthy. Surreal. Certainly not conducive to running anything deserving the name democracy.
thanks for the explanation, but i thought i’d seen a headline about flynn refusing a subpoena. ya know, i’ve looked up ‘post-modern’ more than once, and have found so many wikis, definitions…is that your working definition then? fascinating. yes, we scurry, try to weigh sources, etc. but i did go to all mike whitney’s links, got on various other sites, and found that fox news kinda pulled the story as ‘not fully vetted’ (see below). but rod wheelers story started sounding less than reliable.
but if seth rich still had his watch and wallet when they found him, it’s hard to believe robbery was the cause. unless of course, he had more valuable things w/ him.
as to ” Same reactions then as now. Just substitute “muslim” for “Irish”. isis hasn’t claimed credit?
So much to read and so little time to read it! Thank you, all, for these fast moving stories – this one you’ll have read already, wendye, but it surely belongs right here (and ‘hair on fire’ does come to mind for me – here, hair, everywhere!)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/seth-rich-craig-murray-and-the-sinister-stewards-of-the-national-security-state/
Mike Whitney pointing to your ‘ someone big like Assange’, TarheelDem. Dotcom? Shades of the Auckland, NZ Town Hall extravaganza.
I have SO much catching up to do – you guys are way ahead of me! (Sigh) But I betcha didn’t know Sergei Lavrov speaks Sri Lankan, and that as a student he helped to build the tallest free standing structure in Europe. Now you do.
i hadn’t seen it, and look forward to reading it, as it’s a ‘3-bagger’: seth ritch, murray, (who’d said long ago that he’d met w/ the dlc insider leaker in deecee), and mike whitney.
for now, i’m havin’ a hella time w/ hurtin’ i’m using all my potions, balms, and creams, but even a shot of cheap liquor hasn’t helped yet. it makes i too hard for me to sit still and read, much less my eyes to stop their cursed jiggling. i’ll try again later, but it may be that you and i remember the aukland town hall differently. assange had offered a reward long ago for info leading to naming seth rich’s murderer. so dotcom might spill the beans after monday; guess we’ll just have to stay tuned. i’m a lttle loth to trust him completely, myownself.
thanks for the link, fer certain. myopia, tunnel vision…when i’m on a trail, i guess.
I don’t think we remember it differently,wendye. I saw a post by another kiwi to the effect that DotCom’s alliance with a popular Maori politician had dragged the pol under in the last election – made sense to me. It sort of puts DotCom into the same category as Trump for me – bombastic and erratic and that is putting it mildly. The damage both have done to worthy causes is eerily similar.
I did hope the ‘star’ power would shine a light on said worthy causes, he not running himself for political office, but it then had the opposite effect on the populace more closely annoyed by his antics, so better he stayed quiet in the long run perhaps.
Just goes to show I am often not right, very shortsighted me at times.
it may have just been other doin’s at the ‘moment of truth’© town hall i’m remembering, sorry for getting it wrong. by then, the luster had gone off the epic star-power snowden and greenwald, including their jejeune politics. good v. bad whistle-blower was only too evident that day, and greenwald just had to do it once again when he covered chelsea manning leaving prison.
but yes, dotcom lives (or lived) like trump, as well, too lavish to be anywhere near ‘tasteful’ in choices.
it’s a bit hard for me to believe that i hadn’t seen wikileaks’ tweet to fox news, but if it just had a wee video w/o any explanation as to its importance, that may be why. weirdo that i do be, i check in w/ him/them regularly, as i do w/ my favorite tankie. ;-)
but oy, the #sethrich hashtag is busy now, including ‘bombshell! donna bazille..!’ (whatever) and mush limbaugh’s on the prowl. i’m a bit lost now as to several claims/counter-claims, nor if rich’s family tried to get tom wheeler pulled off the investigation because they do or don’t reckon his murder had anything to do w/ leaking the files to wikileaks.
but i did watch an interview in which assange kinda blew it, spoke of rich’s murder as a bad signal to other potential whistle-blowers and leakers. he tried to walk back it back, but it didn’t go too well. “so you’re saying that seth rich WAS the leaker?” ooops. but fancy the epic strain he’s been under. “they seem to want to rendite me to the us.” picturing, perhaps, he’s on the balcony of the embassy, gets shot w/ tranquilizer darts, swat teams rapell down from the roof, tie him into a helicopter harness, and hoist him away. i’d never known (as per john pilger) that he’d spent so many days in solitary confinement.
plenty of wing-nuttery, but maybe that’s part of the plan to discredit…everything?
https://twitter.com/hashtag/SethRich
from fox news, an interview w/ rod wheeler, PI, hired by rich’s family, funding unknown, plus more background:
“An FBI forensic report of Rich’s computer — generated within 96 hours after Rich’s murder — showed he made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now-deceased American investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, and director of WikiLeaks who was living in London at the time, the federal source told Fox News.
“I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” the federal investigator told Fox News, confirming the MacFadyen connection. He said the emails are in possession of the FBI, while the stalled case is in the hands of the Washington Police Department.”
now is the federal investigator named anywhere? fbi sure denies…everything.
wheeler said that after rich’s family had hire him to investigate, the police wouldn’t tlk to him. he says that yesterday (which would have been may 15, he was told that a high-level operative from the DNC (garbled) wanted know why wheeler was snooping around. so that must be the ‘bazille bombshell’ on the #sethrich hashag. on edit: it was. and wnd is claiming that rod wheeler named her yesterday. ““Why shouldn’t I reveal who it was?” why didn’t you spit out her name five days ago? oh, hell.
creepy-bo-peepy to watch sean hannity.
‘Brennan says he warned Russia to stay out of US election’, house hearing, fox news, this morning
““I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Brennan testified. “It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
Q: did you see evidence of collusion, coordination, conspiracy, between trump and russian state actors?
B: i saw evidence and intel that was worthy of an investigation by the bureau; it’s classified, i’ll be happy to talk about it in a classified session.
gobbledy gook innuendo he spaketh. rather like what m. whitney’d said here:
“A major problem with this process is that it gave John Brennan, CIA’s hyper-partisan former director, enormous influence over the drafting of the ICA. Given Brennan’s scathing criticism of Mr. Trump before and after the election, he should have had no role whatsoever in the drafting of this assessment. Instead, Brennan probably selected the CIA analysts who worked on the ICA and reviewed and approved their conclusions….”
“Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) that found Russia deliberately interfered in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump’s candidacy… Repeat: “the report contained no direct evidence”, no “actual proof”, and a heckuva a lot of “guessing”. That’s some “smoking gun”, eh?”
this is great; every retweet of hers note that brennan has Proven Russiagate!
and we now have breaking news that v putin was originally included in the Swedish allegations against Assange!!!!!
yeah, hard to know what to say. oh, i’m surprised that suicide bombers (if that’s what it was) haven’t been more frequent? it’s a mad, mad mad mad world. yesterday wsws reports that the French press is ablaze w/the news that the weapons supplier for the c hebdo murders was a known French intelligence asset.
wheels within wheels indeed. one axle on the global SUV to nowhere is fear.
i just can’t click into any of those suicide bomber stories; they’re all just soooo made for teevee. yep, just another way to commodify fear, close borders, ratchet up ‘security forces’, both internal and military, yad, yada. i missed the hedbo murders gun suppliers story.
so come on; what’s you headline about vlad, assange, and sweden read like? i’m too brain-dead to think of one just now. but i do have yet another addition to the fox news/seth rich story i’ll post in a minute. only found it by accident poking around for more info on the new deputy director of dhs: drain the swamp, baby!
it’s a hunker in the bunker here at fearville.net. omg! childrens! and dead, too! who will bust up our chiffarobes????? (sorry. a to kill a mockingbird joke.)
wow; i’m shocked, i tell you, shocked that you didn’t come in under ‘fearville.net’ brilliant. iirc, that reference was the first time i’d ever heard of ‘chiffarobes’, and had to look it up. in an actual dictionary. i couldn’t remember ever having read ‘the crucible’, so i binged, found a film version, and mr. wd ordered it by liberry loan.
come on in here boy and bust up this chiffarobe and i’ll give you a nickel.
even the #notfakenews sites like nbc are reporting that the reported Manchester suicider was well known to british “security” (as found at MoA).
the crucible is one of the few pieces of lit I actually read in high school. of course I remembered none of it. I was living next door to Salem when they were filming the movie. “theology is a fortress, mr. proctor.” lol. hope you enjoy. “won’t you come into the woods w/me and dance w/the devil?” oh wait, scarlet letter. same deal. dancing in the woods.
i’d scanned b’s essay, but i really went to collect galustian’s new piece on libya for the sigh (next war report). too, too many for a ‘café’; might have it call it ‘a buffet’.
well, i reckon we’ll love it. it may have been HS where i’d read ‘death of a salesman’, come to think of it. living next door to salem during the filming; my stars.
on edit: ‘fearville weevil’; you clever sod. ;-)
on the fox news story on seth rich by private investigator rod wheeler: i found this accidentally, but:
‘Fox News retracts Seth Rich conspiracy story’, the hill, 5/23/17
“Media Matters for America said it will be making an effort to convince Hannity’s advertisers to pull out of supporting the show.
The group targeted former Fox host Bill O’Reilly’s advertisers amid sexual harassment allegations, helping lead to his ouster last month after more than 50 companies pulled their ads from his program.” hannity says they’ll keep investigating; editorial staff says they didn’t vet it hard enough.
http://thehill.com/media/334781-fox-news-retracts-seth-rich-conspiracy-story
Bomb in Manchester in 1996 — Provisional IRA claimed credit. Same reactions then as now. Just substitute “muslim” for “Irish”.