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Don't miss this. (Trump stealing from the progressive playbook?)
It's like not having to pay the gypsy.
Just watch.
And listen (and save your money):
Gee, I'm so glad we have Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich and Ralph Nader and Bill Black and Russ Feingold and Jill Stein and . . . oh well . . . no one with real power to ensure that the feared, horrific Trump War events on the horizon do not occur. (Except for our nation's citizens.)
The real winners have turned out once again . . . to be Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America . . . have I left anybody out?
I keep thinking that if we'd been able to read all those missing emails that we'd have been more ready for the reign of the forever rulers.
You know.
The ones we don't need to vote for directly.
We get them no matter what we do.
And since what they have done in the past was not legal, why would anyone think what they will do in the future will be?
Is it too late to just recall that whole last election "event?"
Things are sliding downhill at such a rapid pace now that recalling all of the last two years may be our only hope.
Anyone got a spare time machine?
Reporting from the excellent commentary found in the world of blogtopia:
The Purges Begin
The New Red Scare: Fake News
Media Assisted Suicide Watch Continues
I don't want to have to say too much more about fake organizations fooling Americans about fake Russians (or other fakes) but . . .
The suppression of truth website, "PropOrNot," which hides behind a secret identity in order to libel truth-tellers, claims that the Russian government worked with 200 websites, described as “Russian agents,” in order to achieve the election of Donald Trump. A number of Hillary advocates include Trump as a member of the conspiracy.
Trump himself told "Time" magazine: “I don’t believe Russia interfered.”
Indeed, how would the accused websites reach millions of red state Americans? I doubt many of them read my website, and if they did they would probably regard me with suspicion.
Americans know what happened to them financially under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. They don’t need “Russian agents” to tell them that they are suffering. They heard Trump say that the system doesn’t work for them. Finally a presidential candidate told them what they already know and have been waiting for a politician to say. They didn’t need Putin to tell them to vote for Trump.
You didn't think the Hillary troops were napping, did you?
They may have lost.
But they haven't quit.
Blacklisted by fake organizations?
Only in the USA! USA! USA!
Yves Smith, the founder and widely respected writer at "Naked Capitalism" has appeared on RT television on several occasions. In the interview featured below from 2010, she was afforded the time to make her brilliantly cogent points on the systemic corruption on Wall Street that has yet to be remedied despite the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression. In 2011, Smith alerted her readers that she was going to be appearing on "RT America," noting that she “seemed to be banned from US TV channels, but the flip side is this was a much more substantive conversation than you’d find on the usual suspects here.” Indeed, "RT America" has allowed independent journalists and professors adequate time to make detailed arguments against establishment group-think in America, something that is regularly lacking on corporate-controlled news media in the U.S.
Another independent journalist landing on "PropOrNot" ’s blacklist is Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan, a former Associate Editor of the "Wall Street Journal" and a former columnist at "BusinessWeek." In this segment on RT television, Roberts states that the “political system in the United States is as corrupt as it is integrant.” In another appearance on RT, Roberts spoke favorably of Senator Bernie Sanders, stating that “he has independence” and that the special interest groups “don’t like candidates who think for themselves.”
The long-tenured and widely respected Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller, has landed on the "Professor Watchlist." In this RT interview, Miller called U.S. media a “disgrace,” adding that the quality of journalistic material is “embarrassingly low.” Miller went on to characterize U.S. media as a “cartel,” stating that “we have a system that’s owned and dominated by a handful of huge corporations.”
The above comments made by Smith, Roberts and Miller on RT television are completely factual and are views shared by tens of millions of fellow Americans. Rather than attempting to censor their well-founded arguments that America is dangerously headed in the wrong direction, perhaps we should get to work on the critical problems they are attempting to bring to the fore.
Oliver Stone constantly enlightens us.
Or tries.
Earnestly.
Whistleblower Special: Oliver Stone on Edward Snowden & the Extradition of Lauri Love (E361)
U.S. Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals, Now Officially Honors Them
By Glenn Greenwald
December 07, 2016
"The Intercept"
As vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million. As such, he is one of the planet’s most notorious war criminals.
President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use._ _ _ _ _ _ _
But now, the Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled a marble bust of former Vice Cheney, which — until a person of conscience vandalizes or destroys it — will reside in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol.
At the unveiling ceremony, Cheney was, in the playful words of NPR, “lightly roasted” — as though he’s some sort of grumpy though beloved avuncular stand-up comic. Along with George W. Bush, one of the speakers in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke movingly of Cheney’s kind and generous soul:
As I look around this room and up on the platform, I want to say thank you for letting me crash your family reunion. I’m afraid I’ve blown his cover. I actually like Dick Cheney. … I can say without fear of contradiction, there’s never one single time been a harsh word, not one single time in our entire relationship.Leading American news outlets got in on the fun, as they always do, using the joviality of the event to promote their news accounts and generate visits to their sites.
Watch former President Bush unleash the Dick Cheney jokes at Washington ceremony https://t.co/3Ps6PKxU3O pic.twitter.com/EAWtdlYIR3
— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 4, 2015
As NPR put it, “This was not an event for Cheney critics — on the war or torture or related topics.” Totally: why let some unpleasant war criminality ruin a perfectly uplifting ceremony?
It is a long-standing trope among self-flattering Westerners and their allies that a key difference between “us” and “them” (Muslim radicals) is that “they” honor and memorialize their terrorists and celebrate them as “martyrs” while we scorn and prosecute our own.
Yesterday, the U.S. government unambiguously signaled to the world that not only does it regard itself as entirely exempt from the laws of wars, the principal Nuremberg prohibition against aggressive invasions, and global prohibitions on torture (something that has been self-evident for many years), but believes that the official perpetrators should be honored and memorialized provided they engage in these crimes on behalf of the U.S. government. That’s a message that most of the U.S. media and thus large parts of the American population will not hear, but much of the world will hear it quite loudly and clearly. How could they not?
In other news, U.S. officials this week conceded that a man kept in a cage for 13 years at Guantánamo, the now 37-year-old Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, was there due to “mistaken identity.” As Joe Biden said yesterday, “I actually like Dick Cheney.”
Comments:
mike · 2 hours ago
The word 'Good' comes from the Latin for sword. The man who carried the sword and fought the wars was; 'good'. In the history of The British Empire the profits made from slavery were invested in huge estates back in the UK. The colonizers who first made space by committing genocide against the indigenous people before setting up their slave plantations eventually adopted the grandiose manners and grand mansion style buildings of their British forefathers. In England the refined manners and ways of speaking and thinking are designed to elicit respect and convey authority. 'Public' schools are designed to turn out ruthless kids able to assert power over the masses. We honor criminals like Chenney as we have always done, it is part of our imperial traditions dating back throughout European history, and the USA is just an offshoot of Europe. We know the refined English gentleman, able to sit atop the moral high ground. Who is able to ignore the fact that his estate was bought and paid for, as was his education and prestigious career by roasting Kenyans alive in the 1950s. Admitted to in the UK parliament just recently. Such gentlemen are given honors by Her Majesty The Queen, we call them lords and ladies. Our whole cultural edifice is about projecting the power of a ruthless elite over an unsuspecting horde of sheep.
(Glenn Greenwald is one of three co-founding editors of "The Intercept." He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four "New York Times" best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.)
Fake News Alert: CNN Finally Admits “White Helmets” Staged Fake Video
Having people in national positions of authority calling real news fake and fake news real: this is actually terrifying information although it is being casually dismissed currently as just S. O. P.
Welcome to the new America.
The Military America?
S. O. P.
The mainstream corporate media is desperate.
They want to suppress independent and alternative online media, which it categorizes as “fake news”.
Readers on social media are warned not to go onto certain sites.
The intent of this initiative is to smear honest reporting and Truth in Media.
Our analysis confirms that the mainstream media are routinely involved in distorting the facts and turning realities upside down.
They are the unspoken architects of “Fake News”.
One area of routine distortion is the use of fake videos and images by the mainstream media.
Four Notorious Cases of Media Distortion
These are four examples and there are many more. The manipulation of videos and images is routine. In some cases, these manipulations are revealed by readers, independent media and social media. In most cases they go undetected. And when they are revealed, the media will say “sorry” we apologize: they will then point to technical errors. “we got the wrong video”.
What is important to emphasize is that these media distortions are invariably deliberate.
(Professor Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America's Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO's war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com.)
Read the entire essay here.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Ready for the bloodbath? The Trumpian Bloodbath?
We have a simple thesis that is being reinforced by each new appointment or policy utterance of the nascent Trump Administration. Namely, there's going to be a fiscal bloodbath in 2017, not a giant Trump Stimulus. And it is in the vasty deep of the ultimate beltway swampland - the Pentagon - where the Trump Reflation fantasy will sink into oblivion.
Have you been affected yet by the seething unrest now being felt amongst the population becoming more and more worried about Trump's domestic policy screwups/rational choices and less focused on his no-war promises? (Can you hear the Hillary troops deciding not to move out quite yet?)
Put it all together. A man with the temperament of an earthquake, utterly devoid of self-control, with no one around him apparently capable of reining him in, a man who admittedly lives for revenge and retribution, who is completely incapable of absorbing criticism without having a very public meltdown, who knows little of the world, and who thinks nothing of throwing people who commit minor acts of dissent in prison … this man is about to be invested with astonishing legal powers. Make no mistake: Donald Trump wants to make history, and he doesn't give a damn how he does it. His ego demands nothing less.
We live in a country where executive powers involve extreme, rights-secondary muscle. Martial law. Suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act. These are clubs in Mr. Trump's bag. Safeguards against abuse of these provisions have been in place for many years, but those were drastically watered down by the Bush administration in 2007, and again by the Obama administration in 2012. Terrorism, you see. Imagine Trump reacting to a serious act of terrorism in the US. Those two options will be waiting on his desk. There is no guarantee he will use them, but again, there is no guarantee he won't.
. . . The unrest over Trump's looming presidency is only going to grow as his policies begin to sink their teeth in. If Paul Ryan and the Republican-dominated Congress are able to do as they wish and gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that unrest will explode in all manner of unexpected directions. Trump and the GOP can bring the nation to the brink of chaos and beyond, and his administration will have the option of using the powers of the presidency to sweep away anyone who doesn't like it.
He's got just the people to help him, too. National Security Advisor Mike Flynn sees enemies everywhere. Stalwart Tea Partier Mike Pompeo will have the CIA under his control. Hell, the guy Trump is considering to run the Department of Homeland Security wants to send a million people to Guantanamo Bay. Through it all will be Jeff Sessions as Attorney General saying everything they do is perfectly legal. If Trump and his GOP friends are able to get a couple of Scalia clones on the Supreme Court, Richard Nixon's fever dream will become a stark reality: If the president does it, it's not illegal.
Will Trump nuke the world? Maybe. Will he abuse the powers of his office? You can damn near count on it. If and how he does so will be the whole ballgame. Take appropriate precautions._ _ _ _ _ _ _
December 06, 2016
Our "Gaslight" Economy
Charles Hugh Smith
Here's a chart of full-time employment. Does that tiny blip higher after eight years of "recovery" look like a widely distributed boom to you?
What else can we make of the vast gulf between the status quo's ceaseless projection of "the economy is strong" and these charts - and our own experience? As for memory - those of us who have been working for the past 40+ years recall real prosperity - the past eight years are not at all like periods of prosperity in the past.
Rather, the few at the top have amassed vast wealth while the bottom 95% have experienced stagnant wages and declining real wealth.
If you don't like what these charts are saying, please notify "The Washington Post" to add the St. Louis Federal Reserve to its list of Russian propaganda sites.
And as to increasing, not solving the neoliberal educational morass for which our citizens had hoped they had voted?
UnKoch My Campus: Opposing Billionaires' Efforts to Infiltrate Higher Education
Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout: Students and faculty across campuses in the US are mobilizing to oppose the influence of Charles and David Koch. The billionaire brothers have been using their money to actively interfere with academic governance, faculty autonomy and course content at cash-strapped public and private institutions._ _ _ _ _ _ _
And how about that new jobs report?
Not really as advertised (as usual).
Dismal.
The presstitute media delivered the false news, not from Russian propaganda websites such as the Washington Post accuses this one of being, but from Obama’s US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The false news is that the collapsing economy continues to boom with 178,000 new jobs in November and a further fall in the rate of unemployment to 4.6%.
What are the facts? Nothing you will ever hear from the presstitutes or the corrupt Obama regime._ _ _ _ _ _ _
The facts are that November produced only 9,000 full time jobs, an improvement over the previous month when full time employment declined by 103,000 jobs — another fact that you did not hear about from the presstitutes.
According to the BLS payroll jobs report, the jobs available in November were waitresses and bartenders, temporary help, and ambulatory health care services. These are not the kind of jobs that result in home ownership or an independent existence.
As there are no jobs, which is reflected in the continuing decline in the labor force participation rate, how did the rate of unemployment fall to 4.6%?
The answer is that the unemployed are simply moved into the uncounted category of discouraged workers who are so discouraged about finding a job that they have ceased looking. If you are not looking for a job, you are not considered to be part of the labor force. Therefore, your unemployment is not counted.
As John Williams (www.shadowstats.com) put it, the drop in the November unemployment rate was the result of kicking the unemployed out of the labor force faster than the unemployed could find a job.
Occasionally the presstitutes screw up and report news that contradicts the the fake news picture of the recovering economy that Americans have been force fed sine 2009. On November 30, 2016, the "Wall Street Journal" reported: “The number of subprime auto loans slipping into delinquency climbed to the highest level since 2010 in the third quarter, and is following a pattern much like the months heading into the 2007-09 recession, according to fresh data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”
So somehow we have all the claimed jobs, GDP growth, etc., etc., but people can’t pay their car payments.
Democracies are afflicted with false news, because false news is the way the ruling oligarchy controls the explanations given to the public. The public must be kept in the dark about their exploitation by the oligarchy, or they might revolt against the handful that rule them.
The oligarchy learned this during the Great Depression when the public, aware that they were being ruined by the rich, were approaching a state of rebellion. In his history, The Crisis of the Old Order, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reports the many warnings from seasoned politicians that something must be done to relieve the hardships or revolution was on the horizon.
FDR, a rich aristocrat, saved the oligarchs with rhetoric and a few public spending programs that appeared helpful until he could get America into World War II. The war scooped up the unemployed youth and put them into the military, and put the rest of the unemployed to work producing guns, ammunition, tanks, airplanes, and naval vessels. War rescued the oligarchs.
Today the situation is worse than Roosevelt faced. In FDR’s time, the factories were shuttered, but they were still there. Today America’s factories are gone, moved to China and other areas of Asia. The supply chains are closed down. The skilled workforce is dying off.
Essentially, Wall Street and the global capitalists have de-industrialized America. They have destroyed the ladders of upward mobility that made the United States an “opportunity society.”
It remains to be seen if Trump, even if so inclined, can do anything about the economy that globalism destroyed.
Max and Stacy visited Pittsboro, North Carolina to learn about the ongoing rebuilding of the American economy.
If you believe that nothing very progressive is going on in the South, allow this video to unconvince you.
[KR1001] Keiser Report: Neoliberalism Strikes Back
We discuss neoliberalism “striking back” as China gets to have a plan: one that involves buying up German high tech companies. In the second half, Max visits Piedmont Biofuels, a community-scale biodiesel project in Pittsboro, North Carolina, to talk to its president and co-founder, Lyle Estill.
[KR1002] Keiser Report: Restoring Faith in Capitalism
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