Posts
Because they know what's really important:
Hillary Clinton took the stage at the charity event, a respite of humor in a bruising campaign against Donald J. Trump._ _ _ _ _ _ _
Damn it.
She is not that good.
I may have to give up Diet Coke!
Coca-Cola Marketing Guru Secretly Worked Behind the Scenes to Brand Hillary as a Super Hero
Emails released by WikiLeaks have led to the outing of an elaborate scheme to scour, buff and shine the decades of scandals attached to Hillary and Bill Clinton using the marketing, branding and messaging tricks employed by corporations to resuscitate a stale, discredited or sagging brand. We’ve also learned that at least one of those re-branders, Wendy Clark, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Clinton camp, agreeing not to divulge details of her work. Clark acknowledged that agreement at a recent Fortune Magazine forum._ _ _ _ _ _ _
We know, through Wikileaks, that Hillary and the Clinton campaign rigged, in many ways, the Democratic primary, using the State Department to influence the FBI, lying and deceiving within the DNC, collaborating with the mainstream media. Trump has every reason to believe that the Clinton campaign will do all it can to rig the election.
It appears that Trump will fight such rigging. He's started fighting it already. He's preparing his supporters to be furious, to take action. I don't know what kind of action, but they'll be ready for action.
. . . his message that he does not trust the election is not a bad one for democracy. It is a good one. It is getting millions of people to look more closely at the election system and process. The risk of corruption of electronic voting, with the inability to do a verifiable recount is very real, yet the mainstream media have literally mocked those who raise the concern as conspiracy theorists. Chuck Todd, current host for "Meet The Press," is one of the worst.
It's hard to know where to begin.
The very idea that trusted "pundits" and every clown imaginable on the nation's stage would not try to mislead the poorly informed (by necessity) population mindlessly (as much as possible), on and on, who are trying to carefully evaluate the purposely ambiguous election "festivities" is just over the top.
And it's all happening beneath the big top now. So get your cotton candy and snow cones, kids, as the elephants and asses are prancing in fanciful anticipation for the "shot from the cannon" finale.
Get out of the way!
And keep laughing heartily as they continually try to convince you that it's all real.
And you have no chance to change it.
‘Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,’ said the candidate over the weekend. Is the election really rigged? Probably not in the way Mr Trump intends listeners to believe. But the ‘system’ is so rigged that the election results hardly matter.
A real conservative would shift the debate away from fanny pinching and other ungentlemanly comportment to how it is rigged. Americans want to know. How come the economy no longer grows as it used to? How come most Americans are poorer today than they were in 1999? How come we no longer win our wars? He would explain to listeners that much of the rigging took place while Hillary and Bill Clinton were collecting more than $150 million in speaking fees, telling us how to improve the world! Then, he would help listeners put two and two together - explaining how the fake dollar corrupted the nation’s economy…and its politics, too. And he would offer real solutions.
As it is, nobody seems to care. Not the stock market. Not the bond market. Not commentators. Not Hillary. Not Donald. Nobody.
Hillary receives debate question in advance? She gets insider break on server usage illegality (not to mention all the other breathless press coverage of the first-woman-ever-President-of-the-USA USA USA)? Lloyd Blankfein is in charge of denying banking cabal agenda? Who'da thunk it? (Although it's seemed clear to me for quite some time now that this must be her payoff for screwing up that early 90's healthcare program.) THANK YOOOOU! (h/t Steve Martin)
And why not? Everything else is rigged.
There’s a new mantra making the rounds of Washington and Wall Street. No matter how big the lie you’re caught in, no matter how much documented evidence exists against you, just deny, deny, deny. That’s how Democratic National Committee Interim Chair Donna Brazile handled the email released by WikiLeaks showing that she leaked a debate question to Hillary Clinton; that’s how Hillary Clinton handled revelations about sending classified government material over an unclassified server in the basement of her home; and that’s how Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is handling the widespread public perception that there’s a banking cabal meeting in secret to plot its continued dominance over the interests of the average U.S. citizen.
Yesterday, CNBC’s David Faber interviewed Blankfein and asked about the suggestion that Donald Trump had made on October 13 in a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida that there is an international banking conspiracy undermining the sovereignty of the United States. Faber asked Blankfein: “So am I to take it that you weren’t meeting in secret with international banks and Hillary Clinton to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty?” Blankfein responded: “We could parse that clause by clause, but to every clause, the answer is no, we weren’t doing it. We weren’t meeting in secret and we certainly weren’t plotting destruction.”
The first half of Blankfein’s answer is flatly false and he knows it. The big Wall Street banks do meet in secret and have been doing it for decades. His own General Counsel, Gregory Palm, part of the Management Committee at Goldman Sachs, is part of the secret cabal.
Just five days before Blankfein made his false denial, Bloomberg News’ reporters Greg Farrell and Keri Geiger had landed the bombshell report that the top lawyers of the biggest Wall Street banks had been meeting secretly for two decades with their counterparts at international banks. At this year’s secret May meeting at a posh hotel in Versailles, the following were among the big bank lawyers in addition to Palm according to the Bloomberg report: Stephen Cutler of JPMorgan (a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC); Gary Lynch of Bank of America (also a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC); Morgan Stanley’s Eric Grossman; Citigroup’s Rohan Weerasinghe; Markus Diethelm of UBS Group AG; Richard Walker of Deutsche Bank; Robert Hoyt of Barclays; Romeo Cerutti of Credit Suisse Group AG; David Fein of Standard Chartered; Stuart Levey of HSBC Holdings; and Georges Dirani of BNP Paribas SA.
The Bloomberg report indicates that the meetings are secret and that this is the first time their existence has been reported to the public. But this is hardly the first time there have been reports of Wall Street banks huddling in secret.
Just this past July we raised the question as to whether the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, was violating anti-trust law by meeting secretly with competitors following a February 1 report in the "Financial Times" of “secret summits.”
. . . Secret summits that are by invitation-only, have no boards or bylaws, no public minutes would certainly appear to be both violations of anti-trust law as well as fueling the public perception of conspiratorial meetings.
The top Federal regulator of the Wall Street bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve, has also fueled the perception of banking cartels by allowing the New York Fed to sponsor its own bank groups like the Foreign Exchange Committee, which has been operating for the past 38 years and whose members, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, each pleaded guilty on May 20, 2015 to a felony count brought by the U.S. Justice Department for – wait for it – engaging in rigging foreign exchange markets. The New York Fed-sponsored group, among other things, writes best practices rules for Wall Street.
The New York Fed also bizarrely sponsors the Financial Markets Lawyers Group. Its web site is an extension of the New York Fed’s web site. Members of the group are from the same Wall Street banks whose General Counsels are meeting secretly in posh hotels once a year.
While the New York Fed sponsored groups (see its latest one here) have regularly scheduled meetings, bylaws and minutes, it’s an affront to common sense to suggest that Wall Street banks serially charged with crimes against the public should be writing their own best practices rules. This Ayn Randian concept that businessmen will do what’s best for the public interest without any interference from government has twice in the past century nearly bankrupted the United States – in the Great Depression when Wall Street banks were allowed to hold savings deposits and again in 2008 when the Wall Street banks crashed with the taxpayer on the hook for the trillions of insured savings deposits they held, thanks to the mass de-regulation of Wall Street in 1999 under the Bill Clinton administration.
We don’t believe that Wall Street banking executives have ever plotted the destruction of the United States. We believe the majority want their children and grandchildren to grow up in a socially stable America. But we also believe they have been blinded by their greed, their multi-million dollar bonuses, their mansions in Greenwich, their yachts and penthouses, from consciously acknowledging that their actions brought us to the brink and continue to endanger America’s economy and future.
. . . Following the financial crash in 2008, the Federal Reserve battled in court for years to avoid providing details of the money it funneled to the Wall Street banks and their global brethren during the years of the crisis. When the Federal Reserve lost that court battle, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) eventually issued a detailed report in 2011 that chronicled the mind-boggling secret Fed loans, all of which had been made at super low interest rates, many below 1 percent, without any public disclosure or authorization from Congress. The final tally came to $16.1 trillion in cumulative loans. (See Table 8 below from the GAO report.) It was not just Wall Street banks that got the bailout but their foreign competitors as well, as millions of families in the U.S. were foreclosed on by the same banks.
Since the crisis, the U.S. national debt has skyrocketed from $9 trillion to $19.5 trillion, more than doubling in just eight years while the $9 trillion took 232 years to accumulate while financing major wars and the Great Depression. In no small part, that debt growth came from the fiscal stimulus needed to shore up the economy as a result of the Wall Street-fueled financial collapse.
But don't worry about that debt (we are instructed).
It's not like household debt.
It's not real. We owe it to ourselves - okay - to anyone who wants to buy it actually (and those Red Chinese do loves them some American equity (bonds)).
So, yes, everyone's proud to be the biggest liar?
And we're stunned . . . stunned that anyone thinks the candidates for the highest office in the land are also lying (or mentioning, even casually, that the election is rigged! Rigged! I tells ya!).
Shame on us.
Charles Hugh Smith always has to mention these facts about the consent of the governed. As if anyone else is paying attention to that. Or cares.
Spoilsport.
He is not a rigging fan.
(Probably not a sailor.)
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed._ _ _ _ _ _ _
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed. This reality is being masked by the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the ruling class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
1. The "great divide" in American politics is between left and right, Democrat/Republican
2. The ruling Elite has delivered "prosperity" not just to the privileged few but to the unprivileged many they govern.
Both of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America is between the ruling Elite and the governed that the Elite has strip-mined. The ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed are unprivileged and unprotected. That's the divide that counts and the divide that is finally becoming visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of debt-serfs.
The "prosperity" of the 21st century has flowed solely to the ruling Elite and its army of technocrat toadies, factotums, flunkies, apparatchiks and apologists.The Elite's army of technocrats and its media apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up phony statistics (the super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the illusion of "growth" and "prosperity" that benefit everyone rather than just the top 5%.
The media is 100% committed to promoting these two false narratives because the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality that the ruling Elite has been stripmining them for decades. As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word for maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing, price-fixing, and so on) - it is neofeudal, meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes - all of which benefit the financiers and political grifters.
The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the privileged ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information (information asymmetry) and political influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social contract by skimming the income/wealth of the unprivileged. The fake-"progressive" pandering apologists of the ruling Elite - Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists - turn a blind eye to the suppression of dissent and the looting the bottom 95% because they have cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty (or equivalent).
They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the marginalized rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems that enrich the privileged Elite by stripmining the unprivileged: healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare because sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable), higher education and Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its partner the privately owned Military-Industrial Complex).
While the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare premiums and co-pays soar year after year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels skim off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and stock options.
The system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you get a 30% increase in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services - the system is broken.
If you're skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the provost for student services (or equivalent) plus gold-plated benefits, higher education is working great. If you're a student burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt who is receiving a low-quality, essentially worthless "education" from poorly paid graduate students ("adjuncts") and a handful of online courses that you could get for free or for a low cost outside the university cartel - the system is broken.
If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor - the famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry - the system works great. If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and served at the point of the spear somewhere in the Imperial Project - your perspective may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged enablers and apologists, they have already lost the consent of the governed. They have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of political legitimacy and "the rising tide raises all boats" has cracked wide open, and the machinery of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn't being paid to cover their eyes.
The demonization of Vladimir Putin is rigged. Nobody has seen evidence that he or his government did us the favor of informing us of the DNC's corruption. He proposed a ban on cyber "war" that was rejected by the United States, for goodness sake. There's no evidence that Russia shot down an airplane in Ukraine or invaded Ukraine or seized Crimea or plotted attacks on the United States. The United States pulled out of the ABM treaty, expanded NATO to Russia's border, built missile bases, arranged military "exercises," facilitated a Ukrainian coup, and pushed a string of hostile lies. Russia has shown even more restraint than your typical U.S. voter (who usually sits home and does not vote, especially in primaries).
Rigged?
Badly.
Or goodly (for whom?).
But really rigged.
Well.
That's what we in the U.S. live with daily.
It's tough to get away from the idea that this election has been rigged against the interests of the citizens (voters) from the start.
So many people have theories about how.
And who.
David Swanson provides an excellent examination of our mea culpa moment (after this last so-called "debate" of the issues).
Rigged
By David Swanson
The 2016 Republican presidential primary was rigged. It wasn't rigged by the Republicans, the Democrats, Russians, space aliens, or voters. It was rigged by the owners of television networks who believed that giving one candidate far more coverage than others was good for their ratings. The CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves said of this decision: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." Justifying that choice based on polling gets the chronology backwards, ignores Moonves' actual motivation, and avoids the problem, which is that there ought to be fair coverage for all qualified candidates (and a democratic way to determine who is qualified).
The 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged. It wasn't rigged by bankers, misogynists, Russians, Republicans, or computer hackers. It was rigged by the Democratic National Committee and its co-conspirators in the media, many of whom have helpfully confessed (in case it wasn't obvious) in emails leaked from the DNC and from John Podesta. The DNC chose Hillary Clinton and worked hard to make sure that she "won." Nobody has produced a hint of evidence as to who leaked the emails that added unnecessary confirmation of this rigging, but they should be thanked for informing us, whoever they are.
The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's misuse of email was as rigged as the non-prosecution of the CEO of Wells Fargo. The U.S. political system is bought and paid for. Without millions of dollars to funnel to television networks for advertising, any candidate is rigged right out of participating. This rigging of the system is not fixed by someone like Donald Trump pretending for a while that he won't take bribes, that he'll spend only his own money, because most people don't have that kind of money to spend. This rigging is not fixed by making someone like Hillary Clinton take her bribes through her family foundation or requiring that her political action committees remain theoretically separate from the campaign they are collaborating hand-in-glove with, because money buys power.
The debates are rigged by a private entity with no official status that calls itself the Commission on Presidential Debates and transforms open debates among multiple candidates into exclusively bipartisan joint appearances with many large and fine points negotiated beforehand.
Actual governance of the United States is rigged. Congress plans to attempt to ram through a number of intensely unpopular measures just after the election, including a supplemental spending bill for more wars and including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The hope is that most people will have tuned out after the election circus, and that most of them will forget what happened 2 or 4 years later.
The demonization of Vladimir Putin is rigged. Nobody has seen evidence that he or his government did us the favor of informing us of the DNC's corruption. He proposed a ban on cyber "war" that was rejected by the United States, for goodness sake. There's no evidence that Russia shot down an airplane in Ukraine or invaded Ukraine or seized Crimea or plotted attacks on the United States. The United States pulled out of the ABM treaty, expanded NATO to Russia's border, built missile bases, arranged military "exercises," facilitated a Ukrainian coup, and pushed a string of hostile lies. Russia has shown even more restraint than your typical U.S. voter (who usually sits home and does not vote, especially in primaries).
Military spending is rigged. Nobody knows it amounts to over half of U.S. discretionary spending. Nobody knows it's as much in the U.S. as in the rest of the world (allies and otherwise) combined. Nobody pays attention to the bribes from war profiteers, or to the threats held over Congress members to pull weapons jobs out of districts or states. Supporters of both big candidates claim their candidate plans to cut military spending. Both candidates have said the exact opposite. The debates and interviews steer clear of the whole topic.
The shapes of the districts are blatantly rigged by gerrymandering. The existence of the Senate, in which Rhode Island and Wyoming each have as much say as California is rigged against the popular will. The electoral college is rigged against the popular will and in favor of concentrating national campaigns in a handful of "swing states."
Voter registration is rigged. A handful of states have now made it automatic, as most states have long-since done for military draft registration. In the rest of the country, thousands of young people run around registering voters, imagining they are engaged in "activism." Meanwhile, the right to vote can be denied to anyone by claiming they aren't registered.
People's names are stripped from voting rolls through a so-called justice system that brands them as felons, and through the careful rigging of those rolls by corrupt and partisan state governments that intentionally strip out people likely to vote for a particular party. This includes racial profiling. Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Greg Palast and others have reported extensively on these practices.
Election day is rigged as well. It's not a holiday. Most people have to work. Poor districts and racial minority districts tend to have fewer machines and longer lines. ID requirements are used to deny people the right to vote. Intimidation and racial profiling by partisan activists serve the same function of rigging the election. The myths and lies about the virtually nonexistent phenomenon of "voter fraud" also serve to rig the election.
The election machines are also rigged. That is to say: instead of verifiable paper ballots publicly hand-counted in front of observers from all interested parties in each polling place, we have a faith-based system of voting on black-box machines that can never, even in theory, be checked for accuracy. These machines have been very easily hacked in demonstrations. These machines have visibly flipped votes before the eyes (and cameras) of countless voters. These machines have almost certainly played a key role in flipping the results of numerous elections.
Now, the wider the margin of victory, the less likely an electronic flipping. And the fact that machines can easily be used to steal an election does not mean that they always will be. But it was very odd during the late summer of 2016 to watch the U.S. media announce that these machines were totally unreliable - just what many of us had been saying for years. But the media said this in order to accuse Russia of planning to sabotage the coming U.S. election, or in order to accuse Russia of exactly what these media reports themselves did: plant seeds of doubt in U.S. minds.
Those doubts should be there. People should watch for visible problems with machines and with partisan and racist intimidators, and report all such to 1-866-OUR-VOTE, to county clerks, to secretaries of state, and to corporate and independent media. Then we should work for necessary reforms, including a respectful cessation of the U.S. government's routine practice of interfering in elections and overthrowing governments in other people's countries - a practice that has clearly resulted in the U.S. media projecting such behavior on others.
Ultimately, an unrigging of the U.S. system might take the form of amending the U.S. Constitution to slip in words like these:
The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law. The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.
The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.
All elections for President and members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate shall be entirely publicly financed. No political contributions shall be permitted to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. No political expenditures shall be permitted in support of any federal candidate, or in opposition to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. The Congress shall, by statute, provide limitations on the amounts and timing of the expenditures of such public funds and provide criminal penalties for any violation of this section.
State and local governments shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for state or local public office or any state or local ballot measure.
The right of the individual U.S. citizen to vote and to directly elect all candidates by popular vote in all pertinent local, state, and federal elections shall not be violated. Citizens will be automatically registered to vote upon reaching the age of 18 or upon becoming citizens at an age above 18, and the right to vote shall not be taken away from them. Votes shall be recorded on paper ballots, which shall be publicly counted at the polling place. Election day shall be a national holiday.
Nothing contained in this amendment shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press. During a designated campaign period of no longer than six months, free air time shall be provided in equal measure to all candidates for federal office on national, state, or district television and radio stations, provided that each candidate has, during the previous year, received the supporting signatures of at least five percent of their potential voting-age constituents. The same supporting signatures shall also place the candidate's name on the ballot and require their invitation to participate in any public debate among the candidates for the same office.
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Must read.
Please.
Sardonicky!
Shake, Rattle, and Rickroll
And I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. So while I’d love nothing more than to pretend like this isn’t happening, and to come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous to me to just move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream.Her voice was shaking so dramatically, I thought for a minute that First Lady Michelle Obama was talking about the latest lethal attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital by American forces or their Saudi surrogates. Or maybe she was reacting to one of the almost daily shootings of a black person by militarized American police, or the shocking news that one American citizen is being arrested on a drug charge every 25 seconds.
But why dwell on such mundane nightmares affecting vulnerable people, both near and far, when one can pretend to be shocked that Don John Trump is a vile-mouthed oafish sexual predator who forgot to take a charm school course in the Fine Art of Seduction? It's been common knowledge for decades that the man has been a gross serial groper of women, but nobody important much cared until the final weeks of the presidential campaign. When they weren't ignoring his criminal history, they were laughing at him. When they weren't laughing at him, they were giving him more than a billion dollars' worth of free advertising, the better to ignore Bernie Sanders's liberal policy ideas and Hillary Clinton's own scandals, lackluster campaign, and paranoid penchant for secrecy. As America's highest paid media mogul Les Moonves gushed to a group of Morgan Stanley bankers last winter, Trump "may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS."
If disgust at Trump during the final weeks of the campaign isn't enough to propel consumer-citizens to the polls to vote for Hillary, then maybe shaming them and intimidating them and impugning their patriotism will do the trick.
Today's message from The Establishment: if you report on or even so much as read the hacked Podesta emails, you're going to hell in a deplorable hand basket.
There's more than one reason that elite cores are shaking this week. As reported by The Hill, Clinton's Deep State advisers held a McCarthyesque emergency conference call with reporters on Friday to hysterically warn them that revelations about the shoddy inner workings of their corporate political party are a threat to national security and to democracy itself.
"I'm simply enraged by these Russian hacks," fumed Clinton surrogate and former acting CIA Director and CBS analyst Michael Morell.“It shakes me to my core. This is a direct assault on our democracy. It’s a direct assault on how we choose our leaders. And quite frankly, I can’t think of a more serious issue at the moment than Russia trying to interfere in our election.”
It matters little that no proof exists that Russia is actually behind the leaked emails. The truthiness is out there in a million Tweets and Retweets and Clintonoid propaganda in the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and MSDNC.
It matters little to Morell that the CIA's entire 70-year-old raison d'etre has been to interfere in the politics of other countries and to foment violence, coups, proxy wars, and death. It matters little that in the leaked emails, Hillary Clinton acknowledged - and not for the first time - that Saudi Arabia (recipient of billions of dollars' worth of American weaponry) is the prime backer of ISIS and other extremist groups.
What matters is the deflection of public attention away from the tawdry content of the Clinton machine's anti-democratic correspondence and toward the alleged source of the damaging information. What matters is ramping up the attack on press freedoms and the public's right to know what our candidates and our government are doing in all our names.
The waning days of this dreadful election season have devolved into the two kinds of pornography that sell the best: sex and violence. The elites have all but abandoned any pretense at caring about poverty, health, jobs and most of all, climate change.
Thanks to the wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump's imploding campaign and psychopathy and the endless reverential coverage of the pseudo-rattled First Lady's feminist outrage at same, a meeting on Friday of her husband's National Security Council to weigh a deadly escalation of the undeclared American war in Syria went almost unnoticed by the media. Ditto for the US naval missile attack on poverty-stricken Yemen the previous day, in a direct escalation of that undeclared war. Ditto for the American-backed Saudi bombing of a Yemeni funeral last week that resulted in the deaths of 150 innocent people. Including many women and children.
But pay no attention to the mass atrocities and the looming World War III and unhinged American aggression abroad. Instead, be outraged and amused and shaken to your very core by the unhinged Donald Trump and #PussyGate. Support President Obama's pledge to vanquish Putin by secretly launching an "unprecedented" cyber-attack of our own on the Kremlin.
In case you hadn't guessed, the media-political complex is attempting to punk, or "rickroll" the American public with the usual weapons of mass distraction. But their methods are becoming increasingly desperate. They're as inept at disseminating their self-serving propaganda as Donald Trump apparently is at consummating his own serial predations.
From all accounts, the Trump victims coming forward this week managed to escape his grotesque slimy tentacles right in the nick of time. It's too bad we can't say the same for the silent and silenced victims of the unending state-sanctioned economic, social, physical and mental violence directed at millions of innocent people all over this country and all over this world.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
- Allen Ginsberg, 1956.
I'm thinking about that Diet Coke right about now.
And I'm not smiling.
Washington Moves to Silence WikiLeaks
Why is the Truth on Syria Difficult to Decipher?
Clinton Emails Reveal Direct US Sabotage Of Venezuela
The Aleppo / Mosul Riddle
Turkey and US Consolidate Terror Assets from Iraq to Syria
FOCUS: Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Klein Discuss the Podesta Emails
FOCUS: The Question I Get Asked the Most
Internet sleuths connect Clinton to mysterious intelligence contractor associated with Assange false accusations 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/587lbg/i_have_been_looking_into_the_san_fransisco/…
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