CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: Debunking Russiagate, Part 1



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HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

This is the first of a three-part series of arguments from the crowdsourced journalism project, The Big Fat Compendium of Russiagate Debunkery, which I have now divided into segments for ease of loading and viewability.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Russiagate is like a mirage: from a distance it looks like something, but once you move in for a closer look, there’s nothing there. Nothing. Nothing solid, nothing substantial, nothing you can point at and say, “Here it is. This hard evidence justifies saturating the media waves with obsessive 24/7 coverage, escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower, stagnating political discourse in America and fanning the flames of a hysterical, xenophobic McCarthyist feeding frenzy.”

Let me preface this article by affirming that I am not a Russian propagandist or shill and I have never received any money from the Russian government, nor, contrary to a blatant lie currently being circulated by establishment loyalists, have I ever written for any Russian publications of any kind. Due to the aforementioned McCarthyist witch hunt this obnoxious accusation will inevitably be leveled by more than a few people as a result of my circulating these arguments, but anyone who does so is wrong. My loyalty is and always has been to truth and peace, in that order.

The other day I asked my social media circles for their very best links, ideas and arguments countering the anti-Russia sentiment that the American psyche has been pummeled with relentlessly by establishment politicians and the corporate mass media, and the response was overwhelming. There’s no way I can use everything I was given, but for right now here are 27 solid reasons to reject the narrative being promulgated by the American power establishment about Russia.

1. There is no proof.

This was by far the most common point I saw people emphasizing in my exercise in crowdsourced journalism that gave rise to this article. People who question the establishment’s Russia narrative are acutely aware that the American people have seen no solid, tangible evidence of either the alleged Russian hacking or of collusion between Trump and the Russian government to win the 2016 election. We have seen analysis reports in both official and now unofficial releases, but none of them contain a single shred of hard evidence, raw intelligence, or testable data.

In reality, the certainty that establishment liberals feel in Russia’s having meddled in US elections and Trump-Russia election collusion is built entirely upon the way official-looking people have been saying in official-sounding voices that these things have happened and repeating this self-assured assertion until their audience assumes that there must be some solid evidence underlying it. There is not. There’s just official-looking people pointing at unsubstantiated claims in a confident tone of voice and trying to connect them to innocuous factors like businessmen doing business with a newly-capitalist nation in the nineties.

We have been shown no proof. They refuse to show us any proof. That is extremely suspicious, and by itself is sufficient reason to be intensely skeptical of the Russiagate narrative.

“Eh, you could just start with evidence,” Eoghan O. points out on Facebook. “There is none. I have repeatedly offered $1,000 to the first person to provide me actual direct evidence of Russian hacking interfering with the US election. Or Brexit, the French elections or the German elections. Silence. Evidence.”

“ ‘Because I Said So’ is not evidence,” Liz B rightly notes.
“Or if Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid say it a million times,” adds Greg G.

“As a lawyer, when you accuse someone of a wrongdoing, the burden is ON YOU to provide evidence. They have not provided any evidence to support that assertion,” says Esha Krishnaswami.

2. The NSA could at any time provide public proof of Russian hacking without compromising any intelligence sources, and yet they don’t.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden has attested that the NSA “certainly” has evidence that could prove Russians hacked the DNC, but the NSA has refused to share this information with the public despite the massive impact that the Russian hacking allegations have had on the American people, on US foreign policy, and on the relationship between two nuclear superpowers. This entire dispute could be settled without blowing the cover of any US spies and without revealing any sources or methods, but instead the American people have to settle for “trust us, we wouldn’t lie to you” from an organization that knowingly kept its domestic surveillance programs a secret from the public, and which James Clapper brazenly lied about to the US Senate.

 The NSA either has proof and is refusing to share it for stupid reasons, or there is no proof and they therefore cannot provide it. And speaking of the NSA…

3. This is all coming from the same people who told us, incorrectly, that Russia hacked the French election.

 

 

NSA Director Mike Rogers asserted that his agency “watched” Russia hack the French election infrastructure. For the last month establishment media outlets and establishment loyalists have been repeating this allegation as unquestionable fact, in the exact same way they repeat the Russian hacking narrative of the 2016 US elections as an unquestionable fact. And yet they were all dead wrong. Guillaume Poupard, the head of France’s cyber security agency, told the Associated Press that there was “no trace” of Russian meddling and that the hack of the Macron campaign “was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”

In fact, Rogers was so off the mark from France’s own findings that Poupard was absolutely baffled as to what he could have been talking about.

“Why did Admiral Rogers say that, like that, at that time?” Poupard asked. “It really surprised me. It really surprised my European allies. And to be totally frank, when I spoke about it to my NSA counterparts and asked why did he say that, they didn’t really know how to reply either.”

Speaking of Mike Rogers, guess who was one of the handful of intelligence officials publicly suggesting that Russia hacked the DNC?

 

4. The “17 intelligence agencies” narrative was a lie.

Since October, Hillary Clinton has been advancing the falsehood that “17 intelligence agencies” agreed that the Russian government was responsible for hacking Democratic party documents and giving them to WikiLeaks. This assertion has been repeated as fact in thousands of articles and by countless pundits, and anyone who debates this stuff regularly has heard it repeated as fact by establishment loyalists ad nauseum. This was an extremely funny-looking assertion from the beginning since, as WikiLeaks notes above, in order to be true it would need to include opinions from agencies which would have no business involving themselves in such a case. And now it has been thoroughly debunked.

Since October, Hillary Clinton has been advancing the falsehood that “17 intelligence agencies” agreed that the Russian government was responsible for hacking Democratic party documents and giving them to WikiLeaks. This assertion has been repeated as fact in thousands of articles and by countless pundits, and anyone who debates this stuff regularly has heard it repeated as fact by establishment loyalists ad nauseum. This was an extremely funny-looking assertion from the beginning since, as WikiLeaks notes above, in order to be true it would need to include opinions from agencies which would have no business involving themselves in such a case. And now it has been thoroughly debunked.

Investigative journalist Robert Parry of Consortium News reports that on May 23, former CIA Director John Brennan testified that the only agencies involved in the hacking report were the NSA (see debunkeries #2 and #3 in this list), the FBI and the CIA, along with James Clapper’s (see debunkery #2) overseeing Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Clapper himself had said the same thing in another hearing on May 8, stating that only a couple dozen “hand-picked” experts from these three agencies were involved in compiling the report Clinton falsely referenced.

This has been a known, established fact since May 8, reinforced on May 23, and yet Clinton repeated the same falsehood in her interview at the Recode Conference on May 31, saying, “Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election.”

Now we know for a fact that she wasn’t merely speaking a falsehood out of ignorance. She was lying, she knew she was lying, and to this day establishment pundits like Megyn Kelly are repeating this same lie:

These people are deliberately lying to make the evidence seem far more overwhelming than it is. It wasn’t “17 intelligence agencies”, it was two dozen hand-selected establishment stalwarts. On this point Parry rightly notes, “as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you ‘hand-pick’ the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.”

5. The CrowdStrike report on the alleged DNC hack is extremely suspect.

Because the DNC refused the FBI access to their servers to investigate the alleged hacking incident, third-party cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike took on sole responsibility for that investigation, which means that the security report from CrowdStrike is, as Progressive Army puts it, “literally the only link that exists that is pointing the finger at Russia.”

The trouble, apart from the fact that the DNC are the ones who financed this singular crucial report, is that CrowdStrike itself is sorely lacking in credibility. Dmitri Alperovich, its chief technical officer, is a senior fellowwith the Saudi-funded, virulently anti-Putin Washington think tank, the warmongering neocon Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council, which Paul Craig Roberts calls “the marketing arm of the military-security complex”, has been cranking out think pieces with such vitriolically anti-Kremlin titles as “Distract Deceive Destroy: Putin at War in Syria” and “Six Immediate Steps to Stop Putin’s Aggression,” and is funded by a Ukrainian billionaire.

As if this weren’t incriminating enough, Consortium News reports that this neocon think tank is also a longtime supporter of one Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, the Atlantic Council presented Clinton with its Distinguished International Leadership Award in 2013. Mike Sainato reportsthat the aforementioned Ukrainian billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, donated at least $10 million to the Clinton foundation.

CrowdStrike’s credibility took an even bigger hit when it came to light that data they’d cited in their report to marry the hacks to the Russians has been denounced as erroneous by two of the parties involved, the Ukrainian military and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). The report asserted that Russians had previously hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists, and that the same fingerprints of that hack were found in the DNC hack. According to a report by VOA which names Alperovich specifically, however, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense asserts that these combat losses and hacking never happened, and IISS says CrowdStrike reached its conclusions by misreading IISS data.

Jeffrey H. writes the following:

How many people have actually read the Crowdstrike and joint intelligence agency reports, publicly available and very brief considering the gravity of the allegations. Some highlights:
- Crowdstrike prejudicially renamed the APT28 and APT29 malware to the now infamous “Fancy Bear”, “Cozy Bear” and “Grizzly Steppe”. There was no reason whatsoever to do that, apart from propaganda.
- Crowdstrike used the words “likely” and “suggests”, in the absence of concrete evidence.
- Joint intelligence reports took the Crowdstrike report as a starting point and quoted liberally from it, adding their bureaucratese: “we assess” with “high [moderate in the case of NSA] confidence”. William Binney pointed out that when you see words like that, it means there is no evidence — otherwise they would have said “we have direct evidence that…”
- Joint intelligence reports spent 2 -3 pages repeating the Crowdstrike material, adding no new evidence, then fluffed out to 12–13 pages with diatribes against RT’s exercise of their First Amendment rights, and windy explanations of how to detect malware in general.
- Which of course led to the “scandalous” discovery of malware on one non-connected laptop at Burlington Electric Co. (Sanders’ town — huh!) and the media erupts with fantastical claims about attempts to hack the power grid.
- APT28 and APT29 are everywhere, loose in the wild.

So the evidence for Russians hacking the DNC is paper thin and highly suspect. Oh yeah, and guess what?

6. There’s no good reason to believe the Russians (or anyone) hacked Podesta’s emails, either.

When the Seth Rich murder investigation spiked in public interest recently, the CIA-funded Washington Post hastened to tell its readers that Seth Rich being the source of the DNC leaks wouldn’t invalidate Russiagate because Russia still definitely hacked the Podesta emails. The following completely debunks this assertion.

There’s a common belief that Clinton campaign manager John Podesta was using the word “p@ssw0rd” as a password, but that was just a temporary one given to him after he carelessly left his phone in a taxi in early 2015. An under-appreciated WikiLeaks document reveals that Podesta’s password was actually “Runner4567”, and from the context of the email appears to have been commonly known among his office assistants. He’s seen asking his assistant Eryn Sepp if she knows his password, and she tells it to him “in case Milia hasn’t gotten it to you let [sic],” referring to Podesta aide Milia Fisher. This remained his password for many months, and still wasn’t changed after WikiLeaks began publishing his emails, which was almost certainly how one of the naughty boys on 4chan was able to access Podesta’s Twitter account and make this tweet:

The Twitter hack was confirmed by the Clinton campaign, and Podesta hasn’t had any issues with that account since. That mischievous /pol/ anon was able to get in there because Podesta not only used this very weak, easy-to-remember password for months, but apparently used it for everything, not just his Apple ID.

So we’re really meant to believe that this guy who couldn’t even keep track of who at his office knew his weak password, and who used that weak password for everything, needed to be hacked or phished by Russian operatives in order for those emails to make their way to WikiLeaks? In an environment like that, anyone who spent any time around his office could’ve gained access to those emails; read the drama about Podesta’s taxicab experience for a clear picture of how involved his assistants were in his passwords and technology access. Anyone with any insider access could have leaked Podesta’s emails to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray insists that this is exactly what happened. Podesta’s email security was as airtight as a sieve, so there’s no reason to attribute their release through WikiLeaks specifically to Russia.

7. Many experts are highly doubtful of the hacking narrative.

8. Also worth noting: the CIA is known to have actively cultivated the ability to forge signs of Russian cyber intrusions.

“The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation,” WikiLeaks wrote upon release of the first of their Vault 7 CIA leaks.

9. The Democrats are flat-out lying when they say the WikiLeaks emails didn’t contain anything incriminating.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o as we’ve discussed, both the DNC leaks and the Podesta emails have massive, gaping plot holes in the official establishment narrative about how they were released. These hacking allegations were what sparked off the anti-Russia blame game we experience today, but the Democrats knew they could never get away with simply saying “The Russians cost us the election by telling the American people the truth!” They needed a new narrative, which was where all the talk about “fake news” and “Russian propaganda” came in.

If you’re feeling a bit masochistic, watch Hillary Clinton’s recent appearance at the Recode Conference for a pure picture from the horse’s mouth of what this carefully-crafted narrative is meant to look like. She says the information in the Podesta emails are nothing but innocuous run-of-the-mill shop talk and calls them “anodyne to boredom”, then goes on to speak about how bits and pieces of these 100% boring, innocuous emails were picked up out of context by outlets like Infowars and spun into “the most outrageous, outlandish, absurd lies you could imagine.” Throughout her interview she speaks of how “weaponized information” like this was spun into “fake news” and then circulated by Russian agents in targeted areas.

So to reiterate: the establishment narrative, per Hillary Rodham Clinton herself, is that there was absolutely nothing incriminating in the WikiLeaks emails, but they were spun into fake news stories and circulated throughout America by a sophisticated Russian propaganda network, which Clinton asserts was probably informed by the Trump camp.

 

In reality, the conspiring and “us vs. them” language between DNC officials in their leaked emails unquestionably reveals a blatant violation of Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter, which promises the American people that the DNC Chairperson (who was included in and participated in many of these emails) “shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” This plainly did not happen, as a glance at some of the nastiest emails reveals. The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.

And as bad as the DNC Leaks were, the later leak drops were far more incriminating. From Donna Brazile serving as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, to an email from a CitiGroup executive instructing Obama what cabinet picks (who would then go on the shape policy for dealing with Wall Street crooks after they caused the 2008 global financial crisis) he was permitted to choose from prior to his election in 2008, to the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, to evidence that the DNC was stacking the deck for Clinton as early as 2014, to a suggestion that the Clinton campaign had some sort of “leverage” over Bernie Sanders, to Clinton promising a group of Goldman Sachs executives that she would lie to the American people for their benefit by assuring them that she understood the importance of having both a “public position and a private position” when it comes to economic matters, there was more than enough shocking data there to rightly hurt Clinton’s approval rating.

So this notion that fake news and Russian propaganda were needed in order for the WikiLeaks releases to hurt the Clinton campaign are blatantly deceitful. Clinton wasn’t hurt by fake news and Russian propaganda, Clinton was hurt by the truth.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even tossing me some money on Patreon so I can keep this gig up. 

About the Author
 
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 

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uza2-zombienationAnd as bad as the DNC Leaks were, the later leak drops were far more incriminating. From Donna Brazile serving as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, to an email from a CitiGroup executive instructing Obama what cabinet picks (who would then go on the shape policy for dealing with Wall Street crooks after they caused the 2008 global financial crisis) he was permitted to choose from prior to his election in 2008, to the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, to evidence that the DNC was stacking the deck for Clinton as early as 2014, to a suggestion that the Clinton campaign had some sort of “leverage” over Bernie Sanders, to Clinton promising a group of Goldman Sachs executives that she would lie to the American people for their benefit by assuring them that she understood the importance of having both a “public position and a private position” when it comes to economic matters, there was more than enough shocking data there to rightly hurt Clinton’s approval rating.

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THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT HAS BETRAYED OUR ENTIRE PLANET



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Donna Brazile is still acting chair of the DNC.

Still.

The new head of Senate Democrats is going to be Chuck Schumer, who supported the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Wall Street bailouts.

The elites of the Democratic party conspired to subvert the influence of the will of the people upon the Democratic nomination process using superdelegates, endorsements, their unbelievable amount of control over the media, manipulations of primary dates and the number of debates along with untold leverage behind the scenes in order to ensure the nomination of a half-dead unfathomably corrupt candidate under multiple FBI investigations who nobody liked or wanted.

As a direct result of this, the most powerful and influential nation on the planet is now controlled by a man who has tweeted to his millions of followers that global warming is a Chinese hoax, and who has not thereafter tweeted “Sorry, my account was hacked, I might be crazy but I’m not global-warming-is-a-Chinese-hoax crazy.”

A new climate change estimate published in Science last week predicts an increase in global average temperature of between 4.78 and 7.36°C by 2100 unless something changes very drastically very soon. This statistic isn’t fully relevant to humans though because at the upper end of that estimate it’s unlikely there will be any humans around to experience it. So at least we can take comfort in our grandchildren not having to cope with those pesky seven degree average temperature hikes.

An increase in global average temperature means that the whole entire planet is that much hotter as temperatures average out for an entire year. So an average increase of one degree doesn’t mean you go from having a 31 degree day to a 32 degree day, it means there were enough massive temperature spikes in the summer months of each hemisphere to increase the entire average by one degree. The higher the average increase, the more record-shattering temperature spikes are being experienced around the world. More record-high temperature spikes means dead crops and the collapse of industrial agriculture, which means global famine, mass migrations, wars over resources, panic and predation as plant proteins are unable to survive extreme heat spikes and the ensuing deep freezes in the winter months as climate chaos ensues.

We are hurtling toward that, and the establishment Democrats just pressed their foot down on the gas, not just by choosing a losing candidate against a climate-denying imbecile, but by running their own candidate who wouldn’t likely have been much better. Yes, unlike Trump she would have made some small, feeble changes to climate policy within the strict permissions of her billionaire owners, but she would have also tried to push forward planet-killing trade agreements, a war in Syria over a pipeline and a likely war with Russia as a result, all of which would have been environmentally catastrophic, especially if somebody deployed a nuclear weapon in the chaos of a Russian war. With Trump, we at least get a pause on American oil wars and the death of the environmental policy-killing TPP, and hopefully congressional term limits, so we might have to evolve beyond our ecocidal ways somewhat just to build a different kind of economy than the ones the sociopathic plutocrats have us running out of necessity.

Either way, Mother Earth wasn’t getting much help from either of these historically awful candidates. And either way, that is the fault of the leaders of the Democratic party. They did this to us. They have betrayed our future, our species and our planet, all to keep their billionaire donors ensuring their continued political careers. It’s entirely possible that they signed the death warrant of our species this year all for a little money.

And for this, they must pay. The Democratic establishment has proven beyond a doubt that it does not deserve to live. We must kill it. All inertia bogging down our progressive revolution must be expunged from the mechanisms of the Democratic party so that we can harness the energy and enthusiasm of the people just like Bernie Sanders did, enabling us to make one last-ditch effort to steer our species away from the brink of extinction by winning elections like Bernie would have done, had he not been actively sabotaged by these soul-sucking parasites every step of the way.

This is it, humans of America. It’s time to wrest the steering wheel completely free from the talons of these ecocidal maniacs and steer this thing where we know it needs to go. We must make sure that these horrible people are acutely aware that they do not get to surf on the waves of our energy like Hillary Clinton tried to do with our revolution; we must make them acutely aware that we will cast them off just like we did her if ever they try. We do not have time to compromise, we have only time to sprint for the finish line. Let’s shuck them off once and for all and work on getting this thing done like our world depends on it.

About the Author
 
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 

horiz-long grey

uza2-zombienationThis is it, humans of America. It’s time to wrest the steering wheel completely free from the talons of these ecocidal maniacs and steer this thing where we know it needs to go. We must make sure that these horrible people are acutely aware that they do not get to surf on the waves of our energy like Hillary Clinton tried to do with our revolution; we must make them acutely aware that we will cast them off just like we did her if ever they try. We do not have time to compromise, we have only time to sprint for the finish line. Let’s shuck them off once and for all and work on getting this thing done like our world depends on it.

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Beyond Neoliberal Identity Politics

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HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by PAUL STREET

Wall Street shill Obama on the stump for Hillary. The wounds he inflicted on the nation and around the world will not heal for a long time.

This “peak” neoliberal identity politics (NIP) is a great weapon on the hands of the privileged capitalist Few and their mass-murderous global empire. It was central to the Barack Obama phenomenon and presidency. And it is very much alive and kicking atop the corporate Democratic Party and its various media allies more than half a year after Mrs. Clinton’s humiliating defeat.

It works like this. You couldn’t stand and vote even just “lesser evil”-style for the lying neoliberal warmonger (LNW) Hillary Clinton, the vicious tool and ally of the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, and white supremacy?

Well, NIP says, that just proves that you are a sexist. You’ve got a gender problem. You just can’t deal with women in positions of authority.

Same to you if you dared to note the grotesque imperialism of Hillary’s good and fellow Russia-hating friend Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State.  Albright is the revolting imperial operative who told CBS that the murder of half a million Iraqi children (girls included) by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions was “a price worth paying” for the advance of U.S. foreign policy objectives. (Albright also said that there’s “a special place in Hell” for young women who didn’t vote for the LNW last year).

Same if you don’t do cartwheels over the participation of female U.S. pilots in the bombing of Afghan villagers.

Never mind all the women and girls included among the countless U.S. and world citizens harmed and menaced by neoliberal and imperial agenda that Mrs. Clinton has advanced no less fervently and viciously than her epic woman-abusing husband.

This “peak” neoliberal identity politics (NIP) is a great weapon on the hands of the privileged capitalist Few and their mass-murderous global empire. It was central to the Barack Obama phenomenon and presidency. And it is very much alive and kicking atop the corporate Democratic Party and its various media allies more than half a year after Mrs. Clinton’s humiliating defeat.

Never mind that fact that many feminist and progressive women could not stomach the corporatism and militarism of Hillary Clinton and backed Bernie Sanders (along with men who were absurdly shamed as “Berniebros” by the Hillary campaign) in the Democratic presidential primaries? Or that you voted for a woman (Jill Stein) for president.

No, NIP says. you hated on Hillary because you don’t believe in women’s rights.

You criticized the first Black U.S. president’s captivity and service to the aforementioned unelected dictatorships and you refused to jump on board his fake-progressive hopey-changey train?  You denounced Obama’s relentless and dedicated service to the rich and powerful? You, didn’t support Obama’s drone-bombing of Muslim women and children with a not-so targeted assassination program Noam Chomsky rightly called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”?

Well, NIP huffs, that just shows what a racist you are.  You must have a problem with Black people in positions of authority.

Never mind the many millions, nay billions of people of color who were harmed and menaced by the neoliberal and imperial agenda that Obama advanced no less fervently and viciously than the Clintons.  Never mind your warnings and observations on the many-sided disaster that the Obama phenomenon and presidency was (and still is) for the cause of Black equality. Or the fact that many Black Americans dissented from the sickening notion that putting a technically Black face in the nation’s top symbolic high place was a solution to racism’s persistent presence at the heart of American life.

Concerned about the downward pressure that African and Mexican immigrants can have on wages and union bargaining power in your local labor market?

Well, NIP sneers, that just shows what a nativist, white-nationalist FOX News-watching racist you are.

Never mind local employers’ gleeful exploitation of immigrant labor as a low-wage and working class-dividing windfall – or your own efforts to fight for immigrant rights and the inclusion of immigrants in struggles for improved working and living conditions.

Worried about how the influx of rich students from China is helping inflate college and university tuition costs, helping price working-class U.S. kids out of higher education in the U.S.? Find the conspicuous consumption and single-minded business orientation of many of these Chinese students distasteful?

NIP thinks that just shows that you are a racist nativist who secretly wants to bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Never mind how much you have written, said, and/or done about and against the ruthless, neo-Dickensian exploitation of the Chinese proletariat – the source of the wealth that makes it possible for upper-echelon Chinese families to send their only children to U.S. universities.

Dare to note that the massive influx of women into the U.S. job market during and since the 1970s has helped the employer class suppress hourly wages and contributed to a crisis in working class family life?

Bill and Hillary Clinton have made political scamming into a science. They are grifters, pure and simple, like much of the professional politicians in the duopoly.

NIP says that shows what a male chauvinist you are.  You obviously believe that “a woman’s place is in the home.” You must be a sexist who wants to roll back the clock on women’s rights

Never mind your own longstanding support of gender equality within and beyond the workplace.

Worried about recent data showing that white U.S. working class males are undergoing an historic decline in their life expectancy thanks to the collapse of the job market for working class men in the neoliberal era?

That shows NIP that you are a white sexist who only cares about white men.

Never mind your long opposition to sexism, racism, nativism, and other evils.

Find it less than surprising that many working class and rural whites react poorly to the phrase “Black Lives Matter” given the fact that they have been told that their lives don’t matter by neoliberal capitalism over the last four-plus decades?

That just shows that you are a racist who doesn’t understand the special oppression experienced by people of color.

Never mind your long record of denouncing and opposing racism and your defense of the phrase “Black lives matter.”

You don’t support the dangerous U.S.-imperial project of humiliating Russia?

That just shows that you adore great white nationalist strongmen like Vladimir Putin. You secretly want to go back to the good old days of unchallenged white male supremacy.

Never mind your consistent and steadfast criticism of Putin’s neoliberal oligarchy along with his racism and his sexism.

Can’t stand history or sociology (or other humanities or “social science”) professors who focus  on race and/or ethnicity and/or gender and/or sexual orientation and/or religion and/or nationality and/or age and/or ecology to the absurd exclusion of class in the making of history and current events?

That just shows that you are a racist and/or nativist and/or homophobe and/or religious bigot and/or ageist and/or eco-cidalist.

Never mind the centrality of class inequality and power to the development of race/racism, ethnicity/ethnic oppression, gender/sexism, homophobia, age-ism.

Never mind that the environmental crisis is rooted above all in the exterminist madness of capitalist class rule

There’s a name for all this identity-politicized madness in which so many fake-progressive bourgeois liberals are invested: ruling class divide-and-rule.

I am not one of those social democratic and conomistic, class-reductionist sorts who says that any and all identity politics must be forsaken.  No Left worthy of the label should deny or ignore the specific experience and oppression of females, Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, gays. transgendered people, Muslims, Arabs. Africans, and so on. Discounting the particularities of peoples’ lives and subjugation as they relate to racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and national identity leads nowhere morally or politically.

What needs to be rejected is the paralyzing and reactionary kind of bourgeois identitarianism to which the dismal, dollar-drenched neoliberal Democratic Party is so deeply attached. As Conor Lynch noted on Salon last fall, “The Clinton campaign tried to make [the 2016] election all about Trump’s hatefulness (‘Love Trumps Hate’) and his ‘basket of deplorables,’ while offering no real vision of progressive and populist change…when those on the left raised legitimate concerns about Clinton’s uninspiring message or her political baggage during and after the primaries, they were ridiculously labeled sexist or racist ‘bros’ by establishment figures (even though some of Clinton’s harshest progressive critics were in fact women and people of color ).”

The left at its best has understood identity in ways opposed to both ruling class divide-and-conquer and class reductionism.  As Louis Proyect reflected last December on Counterpunch:

“While the idea of uniting workers on the basis of their class interests and transcending ethnic, gender and other differences has enormous appeal at first blush, there are no easy ways to implement such an approach given the capitalist system’s innate tendency to create divisions in the working class in order to maintain its grip over the class as a whole… Back to the 1960s…Trotskyist …leaders conceived of the coming American revolution as a kind of united front of different struggles that would come together on a basis of shared class interests. If that is a concession to ‘identity politics,’ I plead guilty A socialist movement that disavows particular Black demands and those of other sectors of the population acting on their own interests on the basis of gender, sexual preference, etc. will inevitably lack the universality it needs to triumph over a unified capitalist class. To state it in dialectical terms, denying the existence of contradictions and refusing to resolve them will only lead to deeper contradictions.”

That’s exactly right. It approaches identity in a way meant to build working class solidarity in opposition to capital whereas NIP is all about dividing the working class in service to capital. Imagine. 

About the Author
Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014) 

horiz-long grey

uza2-zombienationNever mind the many millions, nay billions of people of color who were harmed and menaced by the neoliberal and imperial agenda that Obama advanced no less fervently and viciously than the Clintons.  Never mind your warnings and observations on the many-sided disaster that the Obama phenomenon and presidency was (and still is) for the cause of Black equality. Or the fact that many Black Americans dissented from the sickening notion that putting a technically Black face in the nation’s top symbolic high place was a solution to racism’s persistent presence at the heart of American life.

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The Magic Liberal


by JOHN STEPPLINGhoriz grey line

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Dateline: MAY 15, 2017

“Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.”

— Richard Hofstader

“Imperial privilege is this strange ability on the part of the U.S. public to ‘shrug off’ the consequences experienced by people impacted by the direct and indirect result of U.S. militarism.”

— Ajamu Baraka

The recent firing of James Comey is interesting more for the reaction from liberals than what it means in substance. First off…lets harken back to the early days of post WW2 America. The Dulles brothers, and Henry Cabot Lodge and the like. Max Forte wrote a very comprehensive piece on his site.

It is useful to check the notes on the Eisenhower administration and the links to the United Fruit Company. And to the law firm that represented United Fruit, Sullivan and Cromwell…who today, drum roll, represent Goldman Sachs.

Now this relates to the current situation because the real delusion among liberals has to do with legitimacy of any of these governmental organizations. Also, to be clear, the engine behind the outrage of this firing has to do with the Clinton wing of the DNC. The truth is that Comey should have been fired, and in fact one wonders why he was ever appointed, and second, yes, Trump is awash in all manner of shady dealings and has been for twenty five years. And sure, love to see Trump go, and Pence, and Kushner and the entire grotesque White House. But….but…the liberal left clings with a kind of hallucinatory tenacity to the Russia collusion story.

From Moon Over Alabama….

“But the political dimension of the dismissal is not about the Clinton email affair at all. It is about the “Russia interfered with the election” nonsense Clinton invented as excuse for her self-inflicted loss of the vote. The whole anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign run by neocons and “Resistance” democrats, is designed to block the foreign policy – detente with Russia – for which Trump was elected. The anti-Russia inquisition is dangerous groupthink.

There is no evidence – none at all – that Russia “interfered” with the U.S. election. There is no evidence – none at all – that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign. The Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Judiciary Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, recently confirmed that publicly (vid) immediately after she had again been briefed by the CIA:

“Blitzer mentioned that Feinstein and other colleagues from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had visited CIA headquarters on Tuesday to be briefed on the investigation. He then asked Feinstein whether she had evidence, without disclosing any classified information, that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“’Not at this time,’ Feinstein said.”

All the intelligence and law enforcement organizations of the U.S. are corrupt. One should not forget the abuses of J.Edgar Hoover during his extended tenure as head of the FBI. Just as one should not forget the crimes, over six decades, of the CIA. And yet, and yet, the liberal pundits are screaming in indignation at this firing. They are again lining up with the very most repressive and authoritarian elements in government and the deep state. It really is rather breathtaking.

Robert Parry writing on the new McCarthyism of *Russia-Gate*….

So, while one can legitimately criticize Flynn’s judgment, the larger civil-liberties issue surrounding the Russia-gate investigation is the prospect of criminalizing otherwise innocuous contacts with Russia and punishing American citizens for resisting the New Cold War.

Many Democrats, liberals and even some progressives appear excited over the prospect of wielding this new McCarthyism against Trump’s advisers with the hope that Russia-gate can be built up into a case for Trump’s impeachment.

But the precedents that are being set could be very dangerous for the long term. If Americans can be put under invasive FISA warrants for going abroad and criticizing U.S. policies or if intercepted phone calls can be used to test the memories of citizens during FBI interviews, many of the warnings from civil libertarians about the dangers of “war on terror” surveillance powers being applied more broadly may be coming true.

Speaking as an ex-pat living abroad, I can tell you personally that this is very dangerous, in terms of precedent, for anyone speaking critically of U.S. policy. But the American white liberal would rather have a fashionable and urbane police state than allow real class integration and anything resembling equality. It is also useful to think back to the Reagan years and the Iran-Contra affair. The blatant lying and misuse of government funds, and manipulation of congress.

All the intelligence and law enforcement organizations of the U.S. are corrupt. One should not forget the abuses of J.Edgar Hoover during his extended tenure as head of the FBI. Just as one should not forget the crimes, over six decades, of the CIA. And yet, and yet, the liberal pundits are screaming in indignation at this firing. They are again lining up with the very most repressive and authoritarian elements in government and the deep state. It really is rather breathtaking.

Unprincipled to the core, the Clintons definitely worsened the social conditions of America, but they did not quite start it. They took advantage of the existing American disease.

The propaganda wing of the state department and Pentagon, not to mention that black budget of the CIA all stepped up their game after Vietnam. And much of the change took place under Reagan. But perhaps a more significant shift took place in propaganda, at least in Hollywood, under Clinton in the late 90s. Bill and Hillary spent a lot of energy and money infiltrating Hollywood in critical and calculated ways. One can clock the ideological movement in countless TV drama and even comedy. But also in feature films. Much as Clinton ushered in and paved the way for the Bush administration, so Obama paved the way for Trump. The Democrats — certainly at least in recent history — have parroted the most reactionary policy positions of the Republican Party. And there was a steep uptick in liberal criticism of Republicans starting around the this time, too. The binary trope was really pushed hard, with blame being heaped on Bush and his neocon cabal after 9-11. But in fact a great number of Obama appointments were of men and women who cut their teeth in political intrigue under Bush. And some all the way back to Bush pere. Remember the first Bush was once head of the CIA. And many of these neo-cons can even be traced back to the Reagan administration. There is no overstating the extremism of Reagan’s appointees.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut the real story here is the response and reaction of the liberal intelligentsia to the Comey firing. And it’s not only the Comey firing of course, but also the manufactured narrative that demonizes Russia and Putin. The anti Russia propaganda was one of the benchmarks of Clinton’s influence in Hollywood.

Kevin Spacey (gay and liberal) heads the cast of Netflix' hit House of Cards, a political melodrama with heavy anti-Russia overtones. Netflix, which recently sponsored the wide dissemination of a White Helmets propaganda documentary, is quite probably a fully-financed or bought CIA disinformation asset.

Look at House of Cards, for example. A show that might well have been scripted by the Clinton staff…oh wait…it was scripted by a former staffer and intern. But behind this is a cultural shift that has taken place over the last thirty years but intensified under Obama’s two terms. The oft quoted fact that the movement of wealth from the bottom to the top was greater under Obama than under any previous President is quite to the point here. People have called it the New Gilded Age, and so it is. For the first time in a hundred years new homes are being built with servant’s quarters. And of course Trump has taken this even further with an administration made up almost entirely of millionaires. In some cases billionaires. But what Trump’s victory has exposed, or at least made clearer is the sensibility of the affluent classes. The educated white bourgeoisie, or haute bourgeoisie. What Forte termed The New Victorianism. And this is certainly my experience of the U.S. today. I worked in Hollywood for over a decade and in theatre and the arts for far longer than that. And while I knew I never fit in, class wise, it is only recently that the gap between classes has become so visible and palpable. The historical age of Queen Victoria cemented ideas on race (scientific racism), globalism (telegraph and railways), the ascension of scientific elites, of a technocratic class — something which has, rather obviously, increased dramatically in the current era, social sciences, and as I’ve written of several times on my blog, the rise of detective novels and the attendant ideas therein; optical discoveries that revealed a hidden world, a world of clues and forensic truths. It marked the beginning, in science, of colonial justifications that evolved into eugenics and hierarchical class order.

Here is Forte again:

In terms of empire as moral responsibility, we see one of the most direct, strongest links between the Old and New Victorianism. In an 1847 British magazine for Victorian ladies, we read about a massacre in Africa in these terms: “assuredly, in the year 1847 of the Christian era, a scene so horrible as that narrated above ought not to stain the page of modern record” (quoted in Ledbetter, 2004, p. 265). In 2011, we hear the president of the United States say this about an alleged massacre threatened in Africa, specifically Libya: “if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world” (Obama, 2011). In both cases, imperialism is sold as a stain remover for the world’s moral conscience.

The liberal class today, and the media voices (MSNBC, CNN, et al) are one in being outraged by everything Donald Trump does. And indeed, everything he does is reactionary and authoritarian. The problem is that everything Obama did was also reactionary and authoritarian, only the style was suitable to this affluent class of new Victorian. And this is sort of the core problem in a sense. Trump is the intensification and worsening of everything reactionary in U.S. But if liberals cared about the abuses of government they would have been outraged by Hillary Clinton’s nearly countless illegal financial dealings, and they would have been outraged by Veteran’s Administration scandal, or the Benghazi affair…and allow me to quote former CIA operative Clare Lopez…

Absolutely, they [Hillary and Obama] lied. There’s no question. We know, again, from Judicial Watch documents obtained through the FOIA process that the administration, including the President and Secretary of State Clinton, were actively involved that very night while the attack was still going on in concocting a false narrative to deflect the story from the truth and to defend at all costs, even the cost of American lives, the re-election campaign of the President. They were not even decided on which video they were going to blame. They only knew that they were going to blame a video.

Or, say health care, which as Danny Haiphong wrote….“Obama has worked tirelessly to protect and fulfill the interests of the corporate healthcare system.” Indeed Trump is again going to make it even worse. That doesn’t or shouldn’t preclude recognizing Obama’s creation of a corporate healthcare system designed by the corporations themselves. As Roger Aronoff put it…“A key counterpart to the elevation of Obama is the necessary criticism of his successor.”

Obama was the perfect shill for the Wall Street establishment. Here is Paul Street…

Ex-prez “O” has been spotted kiteboarding with Branson, the British billionaire airline mogul, who is leading the charge for the privatization of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Obama’s been seen boating in the Pacific with Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Bruce Springsteen on a $300 million luxury yacht owned by recording mogul billionaire David Geffen. The Obamas reached an eight-figure publishing deal ($65 million) for his-and-her memoirs on their years in the White House. And Obama will speak for $400,000 at a Wall Street health care conference in September, hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald LP.

And so we return to the firing of James Comey. And this story has less to do with the Trump’s motivations and the fact that Comey probably needed to be fired (though not because of anything to do with Russia Gate) than it does with the sudden open embracing of throughly corrupt and compromised institutions. I’ve had people tell me the integrity of the Judiciary in peril. One wonders how such sentences can be uttered with a straight face. I have read people writing of the attack on Democracy signaled by Comey’s firing. What can that possibly mean to anyone who says it? The anti democratic actions of Obama over 8 years seems to pass unnoticed. What was NDAA? Obama expanded surveillance, prosecuted whistleblowers and expanded military tribunals. And this just scratches the surface. What was TTP for that matter? And yet, if you can find me a liberal willing to actually debate this, I will clean your house for a year, free. No, the New Victorian, the American white educated liberal is in crises. He or she is in a panic over Trump not because they fear global conflagration or nuclear annihilation, but because their Yoga class might get cancelled. They are forever aggrieved over the violation of feelings — of selected vulnerable groups. This never includes the poor, Arabs, Communists or Africans. Well, ok, on occasion it does include Africans but only in very broad abstract ways (i.e. when George Clooney argues for saving South Sudan or whateverthefuckever it was he was on about). The adoration of the White Helmets, a proven group of psychopathic jihadist mercenaries is a perfect example. The White Helmets fit the white paternalist narrative. It is a form of colonial logic. The subaltern needs rescue. And it's just so wonderful that some clearly teachable Arabs can help themselves with the rescue. Let's give them an Oscar. The style codes are what matters here.

Comey of course has a long history of screw-ups. The Boston Marathon bomber was well known by the FBI — but then that whole story is one big fiction, actually. But whatever the analysis one wants to run with, Comey was the director of the Bureau. Then there was the Apple backdoor issue. And then the Eric Holder private jet for personal business issue, or the Nidal Hassan story. Or the Pulse Nightclub shooting. In fact the FBI has seemed to mostly be in the business of setting up patsies to take the fall for idiotic and ham fisted attempted terror attacks. Entrapment USA. Comey was also, more to the point, a sort of bagman for HCBC, the notorious bank of international money laundering. And Comey sat on the board of directors.

From 21st Century Wire…

Many will also be unaware that before Comey was installed by the Obama Administration as FBI Director, he was on the board of Director at HSBC Bank – a bank implicated in international money laundering, including the laundering of billions on behalf of international drugs and narcotics trafficking cartels.

Not to mention HSBC was closely tied to the Clinton Foundation, oh and the LIBOR scandal.

Snowden: For all his status as an anti-establishment hero, his pronouncements on Comey show him as a card-carrying liberal. Clearly he has got only a thin veneer of understanding of true politics. Thus he is a man of very narrow‚ albeit important—expertise.

And still, the liberal intelligentsia are delirious with outrage that Trump fired a man who was, in theory, investigating him. Never mind the rest of it. Never mind a half century of racist policing and investigatory abuses and covert CIA missions to destabilize governments resistant to Western capital. Or the dozens of assassinations. What matters are appearances. Suddenly the integrity of government institutions and law enforcement is paramount to them. Or rather, the appearance of integrity. The sensibility of the Democratic Party voter, at least the more affluent variety, is one far more concerned with their own style and feelings and in particular their own defining of self worth. And these feelings are tied into the appearances of the society in which they live. Keeping the more horrific crimes of domestic police and the FBI or ATF out of sight is really, though not admitted, seen as a good thing. The liberal must write narratives of their own virtues. And Trump does not allow for that because he is NOT one of them. He is the guy they make sure isn’t invited to their summer parties in the Hamptons. When Arkansas went into an orgy of death, including the suppression of new evidence for one condemned man, the liberal Victorian was silent. They are silent about U.S. and Saudi war crimes in Yemen (including now a predictable outbreak of Cholera), and silent about Syria for that matter. The new gilded age is different from the old one in the sense that today the conspicuous display of wealth and the belief in their own exceptionalism is tied more to a kind of narcissistic absorption with their own lives. They protest when they knew other liberals will share their viewpoint. I know almost zero liberals in the U.S. who ever take unpopular positions on anything.

Now, one of the voices of outrage is that of Edward Snowden.
“Set aside politics: every American should condemn such political interference in the Bureau’s work.”

Let me say for the record I harbour great suspicion about Snowden and his potential for being a spook. But I digress.

But that liberals love the status quo, the keeping up of appearances (something Obama was very good at) is not new. It is only that today’s liberal is profoundly less informed than earlier versions. Ask any well paid liberal supporter of the Democratic Party about Syria and see what they say. Or don’t say. Ask them about Libya and the history of Qadaffi’s social programs for his country. Ask them about Fidel Castro and why the U.S. supported the dictator Batista. Ask them about North Korea and they will ridicule the DPRK. They mostly will see great humour in the Adam Sandler comedy about killing the DPRK head of state. Ask about U.S. and their role in installing a Nazi party to rule Ukraine. Ask about color revolutions and the CIA and State Dept. front groups. Ask about Israel and the protracted siege of Gaza. I know what they will say. They’ve said it to me. Am I generalizing? Sure, but such is the uniformity of opinion of these people that I’m sure Im mostly correct. Or maybe ask why Obama is making 3 million dollars to speak at a convention on global warming (the answer is for services rendered).

“It’s the Saturday Night Massacre all over again, cry the Democrats, harkening back to the weekend in 1973 when President Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. But this is not about the rule of law — quite the opposite: it’s about continuing the momentum of the U.S. military offensive begun in 2011 under President Obama, a wholly illegal aggression that has destroyed Libya, killed half a million Syrians, delivered vast regions to the control of the two feuding factions of al-Qaida, and brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.”

— Glen Ford

Trump is now widely described as fascist. And liberals are now terrified that the U.S. is going to be a fascist state. Oh the horror. None of them remotely know what they even mean except that in terms of style Trump resembles a kind of Hollywood version of a fascist leader. Obama did not. Hillary did not. I remain curious exactly who watched The Apprentice for all those seasons? This whole narrative was just repeated in France where financial sector managed to appoint the new Prime Minister, a baby faced android built in a laboratory in the basement of Goldman Sachs, that is being credited with saving the French from, yes, fascism. For fascism is now pretty much interchangeable, as a term, with populism and the implication is pregnant with fear and hatred of the working class. And all of this manufactured narrative has resulted in the term working class being interchangeable with racist. Never before, not in the previous Victorian Era even, have the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie so hated the working classes. Never before. As much as they hate them, though, the real story is their own fear. It is a fear that paralyses all discussion and debate. Or, rather, prevents debate. And the Russian stigmatizing is absolutely evidence free. There is literally not a shred of evidence. None. Nothing of even a remotely concrete nature can be pointed toward as evidence of Russian collusion in the U.S. election. But this doesn’t matter. Style matters. And Russia is and always has been a scary *idea* to the American liberal. Russia is the slavic barbarian hoards. It is the evil Slavic communist. Mike Whitney summed it up best…

It has been eight months since the inception of this unprecedentedly-pathetic and infinitely-irritating propaganda campaign, and in those eight months neither the media nor the politicos nor the Intel agents who claim to be certain that Russia meddled in US elections, have produced anything that even remotely resembles evidence.

So, when I think back to that Eisenhower administration and the links to the United Fruit Company, and powerfiul WASP ruling class that ran the country and then how Kennedy sort of upset the status quo, to some extent anyway, and then the assassination of Kennedy, followed by Johnson, and Nixon, Vietnam and the unchanging foreign policy that included eventually the destruction of much of central America and Iran-Contra, while at home the FBI was carrying out COINTELPRO and illegal surveillance on nearly everyone…I wonder at this strange desire to sanctify the institutions of domination in the U.S.

Trump is the unvarnished naked face of U.S. capital. He is indeed fascistic, but he is also just a rube, a place holder for various forces that clearly turned on the Clinton machine. Appointees like the ugly Jeff Sessions, destined to be the worst Attorney General in U.S. history, a stiffly contested title at that and then Neil Gorsuch, and Rick Perry and Betsy DeVos and it's hard not to shudder just a bit. And to be clear, Trump is worse than almost any President before him. But he is not some anomaly. He is simply the naked nuance-free version of all earlier Presidents of the era. He could only have become president in a throughly compromised and corrupted electoral system. One that finally has been more widely exposed. The liberal elite, and their reps in media, have always been quick to uphold the organs of neo-liberalism. The reaction to Brexit for example (more contempt heaped upon the working class) or their defense of NATO, or now, the FBI, but the crisis now is that so much of their hypocrisy is so visible.

“One can safely conclude that one of the primary operations of this type of social imperialism is the basic act of mystification. Mystification, the primary goal of “soft power,” has two sides to it: abroad it unites (that is, it assimilates and joins to empire), and at home it divides (breaking up class by fomenting cleavages along identity lines).”

— Maximillian Forte

The preeminence of appearance means the appearance of self in a regulated and well crafted landscape under control of the ruling system of Capital. The new gentrifying Victorians of this new dysfunctional Gilded Age are scrambling in desperation for way to impeach Trump. The only problem is that they want it for all the wrong reasons.

 

About the Author
 John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International. 

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uza2-zombienationThe propaganda wing of the state department and Pentagon, not to mention that black budget of the CIA all stepped up their game after Vietnam. And much of the change took place under Reagan. But perhaps a more significant shift took place in propaganda, at least in Hollywood, under Clinton in the late 90s. Bill and Hillary spent a lot of energy and money infiltrating Hollywood in critical and calculated ways.

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The Politics of Protest: Forgetting the Crimes of Obama will not aid Democracy.


Daniel Readhoriz grey line

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Originally published on March 5, 2017 by

In 2011, President Barrack Obama committed the US to a military assault on the nation of Libya, initiating an air and naval bombardment in support of an insurgency that ultimately led to the collapse of government authority. In the ensuing chaos, tens of thousands of people were killed, with US backed militias committing themselves to a campaign of ethnic cleansing that led to further calamities, including myriad abuses such as looting, rape, and torture. The response from much of the American people was minimal.

In 2016, the Republican Donald Trump won the Presidency, recently issuing an executive order placing travel restrictions on seven nations, Libya included. Dubbed a “Muslim Ban” by political opponents, the legislation was intended to prevent targeted citizens entering the US for some ninety days prior to the formulation of fresh immigration controls designed to target “terrorism”. The order also seriously curtailed the number of new refugees being admitted, with a blanket prohibition on those from Syria. The response from American liberalism has been staggering, with mass protests demanding the resignation of “fascist” Trump.

This is all well and good. Trump is evidently a man of undesirable sentiments, his business acumen of multiple bankruptcies being matched by a political vision marred by incoherence and belligerence. Yet the fact of the matter is that Obama bombed Libya and multiple other nations. People died. The resulting destabilisation has killed countless more. This was, by and large, accepted as just another policy decision. Trump has attempted to stop people from such nations entering the US. He is a “fascist” as a result. To kill people en masse is acceptable. To prevent their free movement is authoritarianism run amok. Obama’s missiles met with silence. Trump’s decrees prompt uproar. There is something seriously wrong here.

I’ll say again that I find Trump and the political movement behind him extremely unpleasant. Such a force constitutes a clear and present threat that, if allowed to go unchallenged, could lead to a definite shift to the right on an alarming scale. Some might say this is already on the cards and, given Trump’s political allies and the behaviour of some of his supporters, there’s a definite logic here.

I’ve already made this more than clear in several instances on this blog. But this itself is getting tiresome. Every time I point out inconsistencies in the camp of American liberalism (primarily the Democratic Party) the immediate response is to simply accuse me of admiring Trump. In one outlandish instance I was actually denounced as “supporting fascism”. In another I was informed that I was a “f*cking piece of sh*t” who apparently needed to “shut the f*ck up”.

Despite the outrage over the “Muslim Ban”, the actual military bombardment of Muslims themselves is nearly always entirely omitted from the liberal narrative...Don’t for a moment, so goes the logic, look at the events that led to the creation of such a large population of refugees, or, most emphatically, the role the US has evidently played in creating such a malady. That would lead us back to questioning the previous administration, one that, for its supporters, appears to be beyond reproach, regardless of the sheer number of lives lost.

This would be all very well if the situation were not so serious, although I don’t particularly care for Americans and their bizarre insistence on equating people with faecal matter. But the situation is serious, and serious people need to formulate serious politics when it comes to dealing with the situation in the US and indeed globally. Resorting to hysterical denouncements that are, to be blunt, factually untrue and frankly stupid just won’t cut it.

It also won’t do to entertain crass hypocrisy when it comes to the actions of Obama. Libya is a prime case in point. Despite the outrage over the “Muslim Ban”, the actual military bombardment of Muslims themselves is nearly always entirely omitted from the liberal narrative. Indeed, the prevailing argument never goes further than the notion that Trump has attempted to stop Muslims coming here purely because he’s a terrible person. Dump Trump. He’s “not America” etc.

This is self-evidently myopic for anyone genuinely concerned. Don’t for a moment, so goes the logic, look at the events that led to the creation of such a large population of refugees, or, most emphatically, the role the US has evidently played in creating such a malady. That would lead us back to questioning the previous administration, one that, for its supporters, appears to be beyond reproach, regardless of the sheer number of lives lost. It may also lead you to question the very fundamentals of US foreign policy, something predicated on more than just bad people in positions of power who may or may not say stupid things on Twitter.

In a piece recently published on Foreign Policy in Focus, Max Paul Friedman denounces Trump’s “Muslim Ban”, claiming it as potentially (or indeed immediately) more draconian a decision that the turning away of Jewish refugees on the MS St Louis in 1939. Friedman goes to some extremes to defend President Roosevelt’s decision to reject said refugees, claiming that to allow the St Louis to dock would have further antagonised a rabidly anti-immigrant Congress.

Whilst excusing the misdeeds of Democratic Presidents due to an apparently reactionary Congress/Senate/Supreme Court is a tried and tested tactic, Friedman makes the strange claim that Roosevelt’s decision was less harsh than it seems, given the apparent lack of “death camps” in Germany at the time. He also fixates on the fact that the St Louis refugees did not have US visas, presumably because that renders their need for assistance against the Third Reich less pressing. Trump, on the other hand, is turning people away who are self-evidently vulnerable, and, most importantly, may have the appropriate paperwork.

Here lies a prime issue. Much of what appears to have outraged the Democrats in particular is that Trump’s “ban” would (or may yet) have prevented those with Green Cards or even those with links to US citizens from returning home. Those who are suffering the most, however, as in the thousands upon thousands of refugees with no clear ties to the US, do not appear to warrant much mention, or if they do, appear to be of secondary importance. After all, Obama wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty when it came to mass deportations or placing heavy duty obstacles in the way of refugees, something that, once again, appears to be a taboo subject.

Indeed, there is an entrenched attitude in evidence where what appears most outrageous is that Trump has taken a step against “America” or, specifically, those with ties or aspirations of becoming suitably American. Those with no hope or desire of attaining such a lofty identity do not merit much consideration. If it were otherwise, Obama’s brutal assault upon Libya and the tragic aftermath would have presumably met with staunch protests on the streets. The sad reality is that, with some honourable exceptions, this did not happen.

Friedman appears to embrace similar sentiments, completely omitting from his analysis any mention of why the refugee crisis even exists to begin with. No policy is cited, no specific locale, nor is any person, institution or nation mentioned that may have had a hand in the exacerbation of the situation. Trump is purely a bad character. He deserves blame. Obama and his bombing of seven (Muslim) nations in 2016 alone (dropping a grand total of twenty six thousand bombs in the process) goes entirely unmentioned.

It’s also disingenuous for Friedman to infer that the situation in Germany was somehow more temperate than might otherwise be suggested. Granted, his claim that there were no “death camps” in evidence in 1939 is true. That horror of a systematic, mechanised holocaust had yet to manifest. Yet there were camps, filled with assorted dissidents, communists, social democrats, trade unionists and assorted other “deviants”. These were not places of gentle correction. Brutal hard labour would be a more accurate description of what went on inside. Anti-Semitism and associated street thuggery was also clear and evident reality.

Europe was also on the brink of war. Large scale fighting would in fact break out just a few months after the St Louis was denied permission to dock. The refugees at heightened risk were thus sent back to a continental war zone that would expand into the largest armed conflagration in history. Let’s face it, “progressive” Roosevelt made a bad call. Obama’s bombardment of Libya and proven hand in exacerbating the refugee crisis elsewhere was also a bad call. Let’s acknowledge that, learn from it, and put opposition to Trump in some much needed context. Anything else is just dishonest. 

About the Author
 Daniel Read is a UK-based journalist specialising in human rights and international affairs. He originally studied journalism at Kingston University, London, prior to obtaining post-graduate degrees in both human rights and global politics. He blogs at uncommonsense.me and tweets at @DanielTRead.

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uza2-zombienation

Despite the outrage over the “Muslim Ban”, the actual military bombardment of Muslims themselves is nearly always entirely omitted from the liberal narrative. Indeed, the prevailing argument never goes further than the notion that Trump has attempted to stop Muslims coming here purely because he’s a terrible person. Dump Trump. He’s “not America” etc. This is self-evidently myopic for anyone genuinely concerned

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