Boilerplate praise: Yes, they do, and have covered many stories very well, including Standing Rock, police state news, (and of course anything anti-Trump), Puerto Rico post-Irma and Maria, many others, although they over-sell the Saints McKibben and Klein brands, and longtime Café readers here know how I (ahem) feel about them.
Longtime readers will also know that Amy and Juan used to interview one of the sanest voices on Russia, Stephen Cohen (professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University) whose oeuvre at the Nation can be found here. At some point DN began to have Christopher Miller, the editor of the Kyiv Post and a few other major Russia pinhead detractors on. In fairness, I did discover that Cohen had been on a couple times in mid-April debating a couple Russian/Putin critics. Big.Woop.
When the site glorified the White Helmets and played the trailer or the ‘award winning documnetary’ in ‘The White Helmets: As Syria Death Toll Mounts, Meet the Rescue Workers Saving Thousands of Lives’ in Oct. 2016, I was disgusted, as it was quite well-known even then who in the western empire was funding the psyop, and for what nefarious anti-Assad proxy war purposes. Vanessa Beeley of 21centurywire, for one of many. Of course, the fearless investigative reporters at Pierre’s place did the same thing, but in comments, Maz Hussain had taken a drubbing; good!
Are we beginning to sense…a trend?
‘‘Russian Journalist Masha Gessen on Trump & Putin’s Autocracy and Media’s Refusal to Call Out Lies’, October 05, 2017, democracy now
Gessen’s wiki is here; kinda fun, in a way, including: in addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report, US-funded Radio Liberty in Prague… Gessen is the Russian translator of the TV show The Americans.
Ah, scribes to the Imperium, eh, Masha? Are you on the board of the CFR, as well? Of course, all of this could be by way of DN’s nod to ancient the fairness doctrine, yes?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the things that you say, and you’ve said several times in your articles—I mean, you said just now that, obviously, Trump and Putin are not identical, but they do share much in common. And, in fact, in one of your pieces, you suggested that Trump, in certain ways, may actually be worse. You say—and let me quote you—”Where Putin’s unpredictable persona is a carefully cultivated one, Trump has given no evidence that his madman act is an act.” So, could you elaborate on that?
MASHA GESSEN: So, for many years, Putin established what he thinks of as power, which is basically being feared, by demonstrating to other world leaders that he will stop at nothing. Right? So, in that sense, for example, his invasion of Ukraine, which, again, a lot of people have tried to interpret in sort of conventional strategic terms—you know, Russia is interested in Ukraine for this, that or another reason. And that doesn’t hold up, because it’s a losing war, it’s an extremely expensive war, it’s an extraordinarily expensive and pointless occupation in Crimea. But it does something very important, and it continues to do it as long as Putin stays in Ukraine, which is that it shows that Putin will do the inconceivable. Right? He will do things that, even as he is doing them, continue to be absolutely shocking, so shocking that we can’t even—can’t really imagine it. And that is a message that he’s sending both to his people in Russia and to world leaders, right? And so, sort of the conventional wisdom on Russia has consistently, under Putin, in the West, moved toward the containment and just, you know, “Let’s not poke the Russian bear, because the Russian bear will stop at nothing.” And Putin does think that that’s power. As long as Russia is feared in the world, then he has established Russia as a great world—re-established Russia as a great world power.
So now we have Trump, who keeps doing shocking things on the world stage, like threatening to obliterate North Korea, which is just as much—it seems as much of a madman act as what Putin has done, and basically has one-upped Putin’s game, except that, for Putin, it’s at least partly strategic. Right? Not that I think he has any sort of moral limitations on his actions. But, to him, being—doing the unimaginable is always a power play. I think, for Trump, nothing is really unimaginable. I mean, he perceives the world in exactly the terms that he puts out in his tweets. He thinks that standing up to North Korea is probably equal to threatening it with obliteration. And, you know, we’re lucky if it continues to be just a threat.
Well, you get the gist. But whoa, Nellie. When I went back to Democracy Now to find a misplaced link or two, I was astonished to find ‘‘Julian Assange on Roger Stone & Accusations About WikiLeaks and Trump Campaign Ties to Russia’, October 10, 2017, democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I wanted to ask you about Roger Stone. In March of 2016, he posted on Facebook that he, quote, “never denied that Assange and I had a mutual friend who told me Wikileaks had the goods on HRC“—that’s Hillary Rodham Clinton—”and would begin disclosures in Oct. He did and they did. I didn’t admit it- I announced it,” unquote. In a series of tweets, which he later deleted, Roger Stone also attacked a woman who challenged him on Twitter, writing, quote, “You stupid, stupid [B-word]–never denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary [sic].” I now wanted to talk about the latest, Roger Stone going to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee and what came out of that. Your response to that?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Roger Stone has been trolling Democrats all his life, and he’s doing exactly the same thing, in order to elevate his profile. That’s all. You can look at our statements at the time. He didn’t say anything that I hadn’t been saying in public at the time. [snip]
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I think the issue is his closeness to Trump. And whether or not you think Trump or Roger Stone is credible, the—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Look, he’s—if he had something to worry about, why would he be deliberately playing it up, constantly? He doesn’t have anything to worry about. That’s why he’s playing it up.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
JULIAN ASSANGE: He doesn’t have anything to worry about because there is no back channel. There was never a back channel. I’ve said it at the time. He’s produced no evidence of it. We have complained about it. He’s simply trolling the absolute—you know, they want to be trolled. They don’t care. They don’t care what the truth is at all. All they want is some little propaganda point that they can use to somehow satisfy their ridiculous fantasies about taking down Trump in relation to Russia. And if Roger Stone is going to help with that, they will give him a massive platform. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. And he’s sold a lot more book as a result. I mean, you have to admire the chutzpah and, I suppose, the cleverness at which he’s done it. It’s, in some sense, admirable. What is not admirable, even though it’s really irritated us, is the—I don’t know, the slavish reaction of those—you know, he just throws a ball, like that, and these mindless mobs of people aligned to the Democrats and the Democratically aligned media in the United States run after it, and eventually over the cliff.
Goodman presses and presses, brings in Stone, Adam Schiff, Guccifer, tra la la…
AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, Roger Stone [background here at Politico; I confess I’d had no idea who the hell he is] isn’t a journalist, but what is your response to what he’s saying right here, that there was an intermediary between you and him, who was a journalist?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That the United States’ political culture has gone mad. Roger Stone is trolling epically the Democratic political class in order to elevate his profile. And it’s sad to see that Democracy Now! is buying into it.
AMY GOODMAN: Presenting the news is not buying into it. Presenting the news is having you respond to what he’s saying because you are the center of this, in this particular case, and it’s important to hear your voice.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, look, Amy—look, Amy, I’m getting annoyed. There is a historic event occurring this afternoon involving Catalonia, that could well change the nature of Europe, what forms of repression are acceptable within the Western world, and what moves populations can take in order to resist repression and come together to secure their self-determination. This has been the greatest Gandhian project that has occurred….,and so on.
And Assange was on an earlier segment describing what secure apps Catalonians could use to communicate with one another. Now I’ll leave it to you: did Goodman do a hit job on Assange, or was she simply asking so that ‘his voice be heard’? Easily one might conclude that he’d wanted to change the subject, but was it by way of an issue he thought was far more…important?
Now at the beginning of the interview, Amy Goodman had asked him to comment on the ‘thousands of Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. that had trumpeted Orange Julius, as in: collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. He zinged back, and DN did provide the link to the Nation piece, penned by none other than…Democracy Now’s own Aaron Maté on Oct. 6.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I think there’s a very good article recently published in The Nation which goes through all of that, and it’s shown to be nearly all fiction. The parts that you can actually determine, where you can compare with internally contradictory statements or other things, shows that it’s nearly all fiction. Whether there’s any truth to it, I don’t know. We haven’t researched that.
Yeah, I would say that I think it’s very concerning to see this neo-McCarthyist hysteria, very, very dangerous in geopolitical terms. And, of course, it’s an attempt to, you know, to unite the Democratic Party. CIA structures it together in—and the media, in their assault against the Trump regime.
the lyrics to bob dylan’s ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’, Bob Dylan
‘The moral of this story…
The moral of the song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
So when you see your neighbor carryin’ somethin’
Help him with his load
And don’t go mistakin’ Paradise
For that home across the road.’
……………………………………………………………………………………
Bonus: ‘The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: ‘Black Identity Extremists’; Law enforcement calls it a violent movement. Critics call it racist; FP.com
If you’ve used your free clicks into Foreign Policy, and can’t get in, this is the Guardian’s coverage.
“The report, dated August 2017 and compiled by the Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, said: “The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” Incidents of “alleged police abuse” have “continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement”.
The FBI’s dedicated surveillance of black activists follows a long history of the US government aggressively monitoring protest movements and working to disrupt civil rights groups, but the scrutiny of African Americans by a domestic terrorism unit was particularly alarming to some free speech campaigners.”
Shorter: COINTELPRO lives. And sure Sessions and Julius Cheezer are white supremacists, but then, it’s a white supremacist nation, and this shite didn’t start with them.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report was on TRNN recently talking about it. An informative interview, but he ends with these final thoughts:
GLEN FORD: Yeah, in terms of the new era that we’re in that makes this different from the old era of COINTELPRO repression, this is the era of preventive detention. This is the era in which you can be locked up without trial and without even being charged, and this has been since 2009 under President Obama. The NAACP came out with a statement rather quickly denouncing the FBI’s new nomenclature or categorization, but in that statement they seem to be trying to put the onus for the new policy, or new words on President Trump. But the leak itself shows that the FBI is dating its offensive back three years, to 2014. And we’ve been hearing about the FBI stepping up its surveillance of Black organizations ever since Ferguson. So, this is not about Obama or Trump, it’s about the permanent National Security state and its special project to keep the lid on Black politics.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Gotta start with a head’s up about Pepe’s latest on the Saudi-Russian oil alliance and how Mohammed bin Salman’s current predicament of “reform” plays into it.
Gessen had very good reason to leave Russia. But she overstates how inconvenient it is to defend a well-situated strategic naval base with a sympathetic population from those with ethnic and political agendas contrary to the local population. Sebastapol is Russia’s Guantanamo, but with more legitimacy.
It is the international “alt-right” (white supremacist, anti-immigrant) movement that aligns Trump through Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to the Russian alt-right. And his own ego that thinks that one Miss Universe pageant made Putin his bosom buddy. Whichever advisers to Clinton encourage her, she still persists on what has become self-destructive of her and Democratic Party interests. (She is not alone. Biden did two things to make sure that he Alabama US Senate seat will go to twice-disgraced Judge Roy Moore. He brought Democrat and prosecutor Doug Jones to the attention of the national Republican campaign. The media provided the context that instead of being a non-entity, Jones was the prosecutor who finally convicted the KKK members who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. Biden also made the claim that, unlike the Bern, Jones doesn’t hate rich people. Business as usual is back.
Now because HRC is mostly responsible for Assange being the Cardinal Mindzenty of the 2010s, of course Assange is trolling Clinton. He has his own political agenda beyond the involvement in Wikileaks. The eradicating of Francoism from Spain, either nationally or region by region, seems to be one of the things he particularly follows. And balancing US imperial power through information is one of the things that Wikileaks does to well to suit the US national security state. Thus the grand jury; thus the charges of collusion with Trump-Putin. Thus the accusation of being the Harvey Weinstein of the Scandinavian Left (and the action of the Australian government.)
The accusation of what Assange actually did with Russia and Trump and Roger Stone are not too clear. Amy’s attempt to get clarity was resisted through coy answers about Roger Stone, whose horseshit could have been undercut when he made it save for how much it made HRC squirm.
Yes, I too miss the once very mainstream(ed) Professor Cohen. His disappearance from PBS was my canary to stop depending on their reports (simultaneous with their tongue-bathing of Tom Friedmann).
i’m a bit lost; are you saying that gessen is russian alt-right? i’m not sure that assange did anything w/ stone, although i’m way behind on the program, admittedly. there were so many various ‘hacks’, some of them actually leaks (craig murray, et.al)…that it would take a score car for the likes of me.
but hell, yeah, assange has been trolling the red queen since his ‘Google Is Not What It Seems’, a fave of mine. now coupled w/ this recent calumny: ‘The New York Times reports World Socialist Web Site charge of Google censorship and blacklisting’, wsws.org
so you reckon assange was a bit too coy them? i admit i’m agnostic, but…coupled w/ everything else above, i’m leaning toward a hit. now she hadn’t brought it up w/ his segment on catalonia, but this is great: , via Newsweek: Boris and Natasha again, quoting the Atlantic Council quoting El Pais; ‘In Catalonia, Is Russia Trying to Influence Another Vote?’ ‘Another? got it!yeah, Assange is certainly mentioned, but the ironclad innuendo really gets seriously into the weeds, with ‘bots’ retweeting, etc..
By the way, Puigdemont announced Catalan independence yesterday, then immediately suspended it in hopes that Madrid would negotiate, and not invoke article 155, revoking all autonomy.
more soon as i can. and where is the escobar piece? i allus hafta check ten places less ya say. ;-)
i was disgusted to see that putin had also made a major weapons deal with salman. i guess he has no heart for the millions being killed in yemen? is ksa really privatizing oil, and does putin want the bit almost on sale? i’ve read a very smart diarist™ predicting that the kingdom will disappear in five years; ha: i can’t imagine that’s so.
but this: “Thus the accusation of being the Harvey Weinstein of the Scandinavian Left (and the action of the Australian government.)” i finally checked into who the hell the lech weinstein is, and whose campaigns he’s funded, lol. but the accusation must indicate that his detractors don’t know that he no longer stands accused of rape in sweden? it’s a complicated story, but er…duck duck go-able.
ha, first try, asia times, tho it doesn’t always work. this must be it, though. i’ll read it when i get a chance.
i dinnae know anne applebaum, either, but here’s one of her tweets. does this make any sense whatsoever? roosians targeted veterans?
Speak a devil’s name, and I’ll happen upon this Atlantic article from Friday: How Stalin Hid Ukraine’s Famine From the World
How Stalin Hid Ukraine’s Famine From the World
Neither the Ukrainian famine nor the broader Soviet famine were ever officially recognized by the USSR. Inside the country the famine was never mentioned. All discussion was actively repressed; statistics were altered to hide it. The terror was so overwhelming that the silence was complete. Outside the country, however, the cover-up required different, subtler tactics. These are beautifully illustrated by the parallel stories of Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones.
such a memory you have as to where links are most pertinent! oy, i’d seen a couple tankies on twitter laughing about that applebUm ‘exposé’, with 146 characters worth of commentary, of course.
Anne Applebaum is the wife of a right-wing Polish former politician.
Yep, Asian Times.
Yes, Sweden has given up, but the US-UK haven’t. Never was about the sex charge anyway; that was press-coverage-candy.
Gessen had to leave Russia because of the alt-right hangers-on in the vicinity of Putin’s people. It’s very complicated and personalized politics.
Roger Stone (in direct apostolic descent from Roy Cohn, just like Trump) cryptically claimed knowledge of Hillary Clinton information and sources that the media (based on who?) claimed were references to Assange and someone else. Assange here claims that Stone was trolling the Clinton campaign; obviously only the principals involved know the true tale and they are all being coy for maximum disruptive effect.
“In 1980 he co-founded the Washington, DC-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone along with principals Paul Manafort and Charles R. Black Jr..”
“Black says that he fell in love in politics when he worked on the presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater as a high school student in 1964.
In 1972, he was a campaign worker in the first senatorial campaign of Jesse Helms running against Harvey Gantt. [Harvey Gantt did not run against Jesse Helms until 1990; Helms beat Nick Galifianakis in 1972 by portraying the ethnic Greek-American as a foreigner and “dark”.]
Black co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) with Terry Dolan and Roger Stone.” [Another hard right organization from the Reagan era.]
And Dolan:
“Dolan was also, during the mid to late 1970s, in the leadership of Christian Voice, “the nation’s oldest conservative Christian lobby”.
While Dolan was a proponent of family values and the organizations he led were persistently critical of gay rights, he was revealed to have been a closeted homosexual who frequented gay bars in Washington, D.C. He died from complications of AIDS at the age of 36.”
The National Conservative Political Action Committee is the difference between Nixon conservatism and post-Reagan conservatism. And in the aggressive style of Stone, Black, and Dolan, you saw the emergence of politicians like Gingrich and other slash-and-burn types. And the growth of the hard right shock jocks for profit.
Stone became the link between Roy Cohn-mentored Trump and this conservative movement. The people that Dolan mobilized in the late 1970s and early 1980s became the links between the religious right and Trump in an unlikely alliance that is blatantly hypocritical for both.
And the NCPAC became the means of gaining Congressional backing for Trump. NCPAC owns some of the GOP members of Congress.
whooosh; i appreciate all the backgrounds, thd. it seems i’d avoided most of those names since there were so many sites featuring ‘will this fact/connection bring herr Tee’s impeachment (always that step, not ‘removal from office’). and never any comparisons with obomba’s wars on the people, civil liberties, war crimes, of course.
and yeppers, it must have been you who’d told us that Tee had been an acolyte of roy cohn. that kinship does speak volumes, as did his blatant gay-hating while gay echoed by dolan as well. wonder about james dobson of the dark side, of course, reminding me so much of ted haggard, who was saved, now has a church again in c springs.
i did get to thinking about what amy goodman told assange that he would be there to discuss. isn’t that the usual procedure? in the twittersphere, so often it’s ‘i’ll be on with so-and-so tonight to discuss x, y, or zed’. causing me to wonder again if she hadn’t sand-bagged him. well, no matter, they both did what they did.
This is all very interesting but it occurs to me reading it that it amounts to little more than fragmented lines in a play. Cue deep frequency voiceover: “In a world where all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, every job given is a part cast in the play.”
The reason for the coyness and trolling and references to trolling and coyness is because that’s the most anyone can do with the information they’re given to do their chosen job. The assumption that one or another guy or gal knows something about certain somebodies’ collusions or that the collusions are significant as anything other than more movement along the boards and/or dialogue is based on the idea that they know the part for which they were cast. They probably don’t. They only know they were hired to do a job. In this light Wikileaks would mean at best a lot of stage directions. Even media’s manufactured distractions distract from nothing but another distraction from the first one. Given the dearth of difference between the fomenters of fascism and creators of communism — of course, as depicted by the oppressed opposition to each — the only thing that matters to any one of the most unnoticeable supernumeraries among us is the work we take on insofar as it defines the part we play. In this modern era the acting purveyors of both the aforementioned styles of control are fond of touting democracy as their way to keep the people free. Everybody else is a threat to democracy, yet as we’ve seen, this democracy doesn’t do anything other than exploit labor by shifting a lot of elusive numbers around.
What’s the biggest possible bombshell might one discover that would take on importance as it relates to any of the names mentioned on this page? Would it lead to anything other than a cue for someone else to speak? Does anyone really expect Assange or anyone else to lift the veil that reveals the secret to anything demonstrably new?
i do like your metaphor, davidly, and you seem to be seeing the wider angle. well, if i’m actually getting your drift. i suppose ‘the part’ the various figures i’ve highlighted may have shifted, rewritten…their parts due to what’s in their financial advantage, specifically in the case of democracy now. as in:
“Democracy Now! is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations. We do not accept advertisers, corporate underwriting, or government funding. This allows us to maintain our independence.” as if ‘foundations’ don’t direct content? in any event, it’s long been by way of a gatekeeping site, according to research i’ve read (stuart jeanne bramhall and others), including knowing that the cia funds both ‘left’ and ‘right’, and that george soros is said to fund DN, although all of the aforementioned is strictly ‘fwiw’. but deleting stephen cohen for masha gessen, chris miller, et.al. speaks volumes to me in the never-ending ‘russiagate’ crap formulations.
you’ll remember their segment on ‘is USAID the new cia’?; well, of course, as we know…it’s always been the cia, a fact that amy and GG wanted not to know (pierre, usaid, and ukraine, etc.) somewhere here i have a video of philip agee instructing listeners in that key…fact.
of course democracy is an abused term; i agree. and if it has any meaning at all, it’s ‘democracy for some, but not the working class rabble™’.
now as far as the always creepy intercept, their brand has been tarnished a bit of late. yanno, ‘kinda progressive (libertarian?) except syria and assad’, much life compromised leftist sites like jacobin. and yet they’re doubling down on it, after having burned reality winner (yeah, some claim she might be a useful construction like ‘bana’, but here’s b at MOA’s ‘Intercept Augments Its Anti-Syrian Stable’
as to your final question…whooosh; i’ll need to think about that. for now: “we open governments” is a fine credo to me. ;-)
I’m not sure I fully understand your point davidly but “flooding the zone” with “information” and “catapulting the propaganda” go together. all this hoohah about “impeaching Trump” b/c he can’t shut his mouth. is that a crime? is it even a misdemeanor? who gives a shit? everyone applauds when he threatens to nuke NK, Masha Gessen types go orgasmic when expressing anti-Russian war lust, so what do the palace intrigues & rumor-mongering swirling around the White House even mean? oh Lord, Rex Tillerson called (or not) Trump a moron! I mean, civility really is the masquerade of barbarity, isn’t it? as long as RExxon maintains a façade of collegiality in public, what else could possibly matter? that HRC is at least as morally insane as anyone on earth ever in history doesn’t matter cuz she polished her mad dog talking points at Wellesley & Yale.
I think the Russia-Saudi deal is pretty instructive. on the one hand, rival powers feel compelled to make deals against the hegemon. and to be fair, neither Russia nor S.A. bear the brunt of the responsibility for global militarization. but such deals cast doubt on whether the demise of the US will not spawn a global leader (or leaders) every bit as bad as the predecessor. “the strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.” will that be less true w/capitalist China atop the global economic trash heap? I seriously doubt it. the “weaker” powers *must* act like they are more just, fair, etc. ergo, things like the new Silk Road initiative. “hey, we Chinese are not interested in bombing your country. no, we are into economic integration & ‘fair’ trade.” a newer, better, shinier, glossier, sparklier, capitalism. will anyone be surprised that China suddenly discovers it too needs a gigantic military to “preserve global order & security”? so it goes.
OFM; all i entered to juliania (the yemen story) was in pepe’s piece. but i take your point, esp. given the massive weapons system build ups/sales. it used to be said that trade furthered cooperation and respect and understanding between cultures, as with kokopellis. now? not.so.much.
there’s no reason trade couldn’t aid in cooperation & understanding, is there? but as control of money is used to create scarcity in the midst of a superabundance of wealth, so is control of “trade.” oh lard! trump is threatening NAFTA!!!!!!!!! what a monster. and Senator Porker or Cockring or whatever said Trump’s potty mouth will start World War 3! 1st NAFTA, then all of space, time, and existence. he must be stopped!
well, grandson of a j, kokopelli brought shells, coral, etc. from central, mebbe south amerika to the pueblos, and perhaps spread his seed about (he’s depicted as a tall, handsome, flute-playing sod). the urantia book says that interplanetary trade promotes peace thru understanding.
with the weapons deals being more about land war shooting, blowing the shit out of __, fill in the blanks, no not so much peace and cultural exchanges..to realize ‘the other’ doesn’t have to be…’the other’. yeah, but herr orange julius just decertified the iran nukes deal, i’ve forgotten the acronym. hello bibi! goodbye reconciliation (?) between fatah and hamas (possible, not? i dunno much about it.)
Even hired shills are not the always-obedient automatons your brief comment imagines. Coyness can be ambivalence about what one knows and ambiguity about how deep the secret goes or how visible it could be from surface comments. There are people with richer contexts than the general pubic who could learn quite a bit from a seemingly benign statement.
Erving Goffmann in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life already universalized the “All the world’s a stage” notion. Are there collaboratively scripted versions of talking points? Yes, and that superimposes another mask (persona) beside the “consistent person” mask.
Someone in Mueller’s or the Eastern District of Virginia (the CIA’s own) prosecutor’s role subpoenas emails and receives FISA seraches to find documented evidence of those stage directions and slippage of information about motives. Investigation seeks to reverse-compose the narrative to disclose or propose to a jury the breaking of the law, which becomes its own drama.
There is the “democracy” fig leaf of modern imperial states. There is the “democracy” that in ancient and modern times was the mass movement that ushered in the tyranny of a populist tyrant. There is the Enlightenment “democracy” that caught up the passion of the emerging middle classes (including Paine, Jefferson, Marx, and Engels). And whose failure to provide liberty, equality, and community (the gender-neutral form of fraternite [e-aigu] spawned the birth of critical analysis of capitalist society. There is the “democracy” of late-20th-century participatory “democracy” that carries over into anarchist thinking.
The one that is important is the one that sets a limit to autocratic power (including once-popular tyranny) and aristocratic privilege (including the privilege of those who are indeed the socially-useful “best”). That once was a pretty common-sense grassroots opinion, denied much in daily life in segregated post-war US society.
The biggest bombshell relative to any of these names is that Trumpism is within the apostolic succession of Goldwaterism as transmitted through Nixon and Reagan and the Bush family and that it has failed to provide “peace throrugh strength” and “prosperity through global competition and markets”. No need to let one’s cynicism go wild here. And that that conservative philosophy was seen by Democrats as a cynical key to affluence and political victory. Of course, the Republican cynical key outright racebaiting and xenophobia, only moderated to dog-whistles as long as there were moderate swing voters.
That could open the way to party realignment or even post-Duopoly realignment. Mueller need only discover that transactions with Russian political operatives (from any of the Russian parties and not just Putin’s) were mediated through US lobbying firms and political action committees. Unloaded on Trump, the go-to defense is to smoke out similar situations on the Democratic side (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey are likely countries).
It is possible because the defenders of the status quo are already positioning against realignment.
In my humble opinion — which you’re free to take as cynicism run amok — the failure is not the unsuccessful realization of peace through strength but the failure to recognize that that’s not an actual goal; just as tax cuts for the wealthy are not for the purpose of having the wealth trickle down; just as tax cuts for the middle class are not to strengthen the ‘backbone of the economy’ but to start the ‘trickle down effect’ with a different demographic. The failure is failing to acknowledge the notion of free global trade as a sham rather than a inadequately proportioned prosperity seeker on behalf of the general populace. If all of these failures were indeed failures in the classic sense of a genuine goal unachieved, the failure would be mind-boggling. Since the failure is only one of not delivering ostensibly sought results, then we in a free democratic society can theorize all we want about people with richer contexts than the general pubic who could learn quite a bit from a seemingly benign statement, but if we cannot first admit, for another example, the reality of intentionally perpetual warfare, then even the notion realignment is a predetermined failure.
(sorry to be so very slow this a.m.; it’s just how it is, smile.)
i’d ended assange’s answer to goodman too soon w/ ‘This has been the greatest Gandhian project that has occurred…’, etc. he’d continued with
Assange: “Millions of Catalonians turning out to vote in the street are being beaten aggressively by Spanish security forces, being hacked by Spanish security forces, having their telephone exchange occupied, having their political leadership arrested, being threatened, as we saw today, with rebellion and put in prison for a minimum of 25 years.
That is going to spread throughout the Western world. The lessons of this are going to spread throughout the Western world to—yes, to secessionist movements, but also to the states trying to repress them and to repress people’s struggles for self-determination, in general. The discipline with which the Catalan population have carried out their referendum is astounding. Astounding, that millions of people are going to the polls, being beaten by the police, and not one image of them fighting back. Not one image. That’s incredible discipline. And similarly in their marches and so on. And if the U.S. left is not absolutely obsessed with what is happening there and the redefinition that is occurring of the nature of the relationship between population and state, well, I mean, I have no time for you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we certainly had time for you today, Julian, and I think you made some really critical points, and they’re important.
now the trotskyites have made it clear that puigdemont is not a leftist, and that the ‘fake left’, podemos, et.al. are supporting the crackdown on separatists, including attending a huge military parade yesterday (“but just for the parade, not the reception afterward!”). but perhaps assange not knowing that may be less crucial to him than sovereign self-determination being beaten down by a fascist police state. i can’t find it again, but wsws, iirc, had said that there are 71 multinationals operating in catalonia, many now ‘leaving’ w/ fast-track permission from madrid. hint: “you will have no taxes coming in, get it? negotiate? fuck you, we got ya by the huevos!”
now as for bombshell-awakenings and leaks, in juliania’s link daniel ellberg is calling for more pentagon papers leaks on iraq and afghanistan. would they matter now? as you note, perpetual war has become normalized, and ‘war is the health of the state’, and ‘rising tides lift all boats’ are only too easily believed, at least depending on which teams are in power at the time…
the leaked chapters of the TPP and TTIP assange had published were indeed what killed the tpp, but only really in the proposed signatory nations. note to trumpistas: herr Tee did NOT kill it, save for making it formal. but here comes nafta. now in their ‘‘Trump threatens to jettison NAFTA, as trade disputes intensify’wsws.org, yes leaks of the text so far would be very much appreciated to show just how far christa freeland and her counterparts are willing to sell out the working class. any amerikan criticism from the political class would be another con job.
“Over 300 US state and local chambers of commerce addressed an appeal to Trump Monday, urging him not to withdraw from NAFTA. Thomas Donohue, head of the US Chamber of Commerce, sharply criticized the negotiating tactics being pursued by Trump administration officials in the talks, describing some of the US demands as “poison pills” designed to scuttle any deal.” ha ha ha. but would the text chapters so far enable this from lopez?
“This requires making the objective unity of workers in all three countries a conscious strategy, the unification of their struggles, and the fight for workers’ government in Ottawa, Washington and Mexico City that would use North American economic integration to raise the economic well-being and cultural level of the population, not maximize profit for a tiny, rapacious elite.”
as a side note, i remember that arthur silber used to say that ‘creating a better world is an illusion’, in any event. ;-) hope he’s wrong, but right now it does seem further away then ever. it seemed almost possible during the occupy days. but a revolution of awareness and the potential of people power creating an actual democracy (one definition of ‘socialism’ is equal power.)
on edit: #NoNafta2 on twitter
small so far, but…doughty?
Excellent piece and comments. I would draw attention to rt.com as taking up the torch Amy for whatever reason has dropped. I know folk cast aspersions as to it being Russian propaganda, but articles there this morning pertain directly to this post:
Ellsburg
UNESCO
Yemen
These are need to know. (Sorry, I have to be brief; this phone has,a mind of its own.)
here they are, juliania:
ellsberg: (can’t wait)
unesco:
yemen:
and mike gravel read the pentagon papers into the congressional record. but ay yi yi; does he not know how similar obomba was on whistleblowers?
re: the us quitting unesco: is it the dollars or is it the anti-israel bias. that, of course.
‘Schumer blasts Trump’s ‘indecisiveness’ in pushing off embassy move,
Democratic Senate minority leader urges president to ‘show the world’ the US acknowledges Jerusalem as Israel’s capital’ timesofisrael, oct. 10
“Trump, in an interview last week with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said the time was not ripe to move the embassy.
“I want to give that a shot before I even think about moving the embassy to Jerusalem,” Trump said, referring to his efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Trump had promised while campaigning to move the embassy, but in June he waived a 1995 law mandating the move, as every president has done before him.
3 months ago: ‘The Gathering Storm: The United Nations Continues its Barbaric Assault on Israel and Human History’, ajlc
ajlc’s wiki entry; some real peaches…
Interesting that Kalashnikovs will be made in Saudi Arabia. If SA is not running jihadis, what possible need do they have for a Kalashnikov factory. Are about to see the cross-Gulf invasion to deal with Shi’ites once and for all?
Also interesting on the limits of (or lack of them) of Schumer. One of the two (the other is Wall Street) concerns that people had about him as Minority Leader.
Also, the critter ate an earlier post to Davidly’s comment.
yeppers, it was in trash, didn’t explicitly say it was in response to davidly, tho. took me three tries to restore it. i hope to one day figure out all of this stuff. but then, i keep swearing i’ll learn how to read (forget ‘typing’, lol).
re: yemen; good on them, now the bill has 28 cosponsors. but why just yemen?
#HConRes on twitter
re: well, at least the intercept objects to that war. and how ugly/discouraging this is: ‘Saudi Arabia agrees to buy Russian S-400 air defense system – al-Arabiya TV’, via RT (in their ‘bidness’ tab)
and Saudi Arabia: ‘(russian) Kalashnikovs set to be made in Saudi Arabia’, arabnews, oct. 5
“A memorandum of understanding between the two sides could also see Russia supply Saudi Arabia with Kornet anti-tank guided missile systems, rocket launchers and automatic grenade launchers.
The preliminary deal also involves the transfer of knowledge in the defense field to Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom has set a target for half of its significant defense budget to be spent within the country.”
boooo, hisssss!
Difficulty posting is still on phone – it has a mind of it’s own.
Sorry for repeats.😣
It’s because my phone seems to be minding what I try to say.
my comment just got ‘et, too; the nerve!!
‘The CIA’s Absence of Conviction’, 11 Dec, 2016, by former ambassador craig murray
‘As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.’
murray quoted an interview that the guardian had done with him that included this: ““I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”… he says the piece was pulled down 3 hours late, replaced w/ a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. (jonathan freedland) but i do remember him saying so on twitter, and that he’d met w/ him on a trip to deecee.
Many thanks in general, wendye, for tidying up my post, plus providing links as I’m not going to present luck on that, given how poorly I’m doing of late with this oh-so-teeny box.
Hopefully not too off topic (phone refuses to let me type the initials) the formation of NZ’s government still awaits the decision of “my” Winston – he being my with respect to relationship (a distant one) but also had I still voting rights there, his party, NZ First, would get my votes.
There are a couple of provocative posts up top on thedailyblog.co.nz, both of which have good comment streams.
Tiny country, I know, but they have all our problems and then some.