Sunday, November 20, 2016

BE EVIL Wins!  (Cleverer Trump)  Neofascist Bang, Not Whimper Ends Era - Next Financial Catastrophe Upcoming  (Google Evil Apparent)  Hard Evidence Trump/Pence Stole Election (So Where's the Left?)  Why We'll Never Have a Real Investigation of Anything Involving Acquisition of Power, Money and Influence  (Google/Facebook, Mass Surveillance and The Endless War)


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"The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties - both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."

I think I've been clear enough in my designation of Trump as the most clever candidate in this past election - even cleverer we see now than Hillary Clinton, who's won the clever race for over 40 years against all comers. After all, we know in his personal life he is hardly racist, xenophobic, ethnically-challenged, or, perhaps, even sexist (unless you count pussy-grabbing in private, which may be out of his conscious control due to the sad circumstances of his birth and family influence), although he seems to be trying to make clear through his Twitterings that he is mentally at sea - but the acuteness of his personal yachting skills will have to await another essay.

One thing that is becoming much clearer lately though is that he's run a campaign with his chosen apparatchiks being people who take your breath away with their deeply-held racism, sexism and ethnically-inspired hatreds. I've been thinking just this past week that these choices are, once again, very clever (the Hawkish trio – Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Mike Pompeo as CIA chief and Michael Flynn as national security adviser – have made inflammatory statements about race relations, immigration, Islam and the use of torture).

Imagine . . . populating your Cabinet, and other governmental lead positions, with candidates sooo controversial, who will receive so much guaranteed negative media coverage, that your serious concerns/actions (in the financial deregulatory sphere most probably for starters) will either be completely missed or just superficially reported on if at all, and interpreted, let alone thoroughly understood, even less. As it stands, the campaign to totally denigrate the Sanders/Warren faction of the Democratic Party should be being vastly funded by these sources. If it's not at least in part already.

Get ready for the next yuuuuge financial catastrophe. It's on the (darkening) horizon.

But not for the money boys. (The "brilliant" - or so said President Barack Obama - Jaime Dimon may soon be crowned Secretary of the Treasury by the brilliant President Donald Trump just as the brilliant Obama had attempted previously.)

They'll be raking it in.


From our trusted source, The Angry Bear:

A Particularly Poignant, and Revealing, Juxtaposition of Politico Articles Published a Day Apart

Beverly Mann | November 19, 2016
Terry Havener, 62, a retired union carpenter, pictured with Johnstown in the background. He was hoping for Bernie. He voted for Jill Stein.
– Photo caption in THE FRIDAY COVER: What Trump Voters Want Now - The blue-collar workers who put Donald Trump in the White House are ready for him to deliver. How much time will they give him?  Politico
Juxtapose that article with this "Politico" article by Ben White, from a day earlier, titled “Bankers Celebrate Dawn of Trump Era:  A Populist Candidate Who Railed Against Shady Financial Interests on the Trail Is Putting Together an Administration that Looks Like an Investment Banker’s Dream.
Yesterday’s article is mostly about lifelong Democrats in Johnstown, PA, who voted at least once for Obama (who won the town and its county both times) but who voted for Trump decisively. So Mr. Havener is the exception in that he didn’t vote for Trump.  But neither did he vote for Clinton.
These are not Trump’s “base” voters, and they make clear that Trump will not hold them for long by trying to lie his way through his administration.  The Mad Hatter routine will not work with them. This will be the most virulently pro-corporate, pro-already-extremely-wealthy administration since Warren Harding’s, and they will know it.
Elizabeth Warren on Thursday gave a fairly detailed speech on the Senate floor listing Trump’s many statements and explicit promises to working-class voters, juxtaposed with the express positions of the people in charge of respective relevant parts of Trump’s transition team:


an aggressive proponent of privatizing Social Security in charge of selecting top people at HHS, is just one of many specific examples Warren listed.
I would love to see ads run on Rust Belt media markets showing that part of Warren’s speech.  And then warning that Trump will simply say that he’s doing exactly the opposite of what he’s actually doing.  This is the way to fight this.  It is the only way to fight this.  These are not terribly expensive media markets.
These ads also should run through social media, on Facebook as ads and in news feeds, and in Twitter feeds.  They should become a regular feature of American life.  They would be funded in the same way that the Sanders campaign was.  And they should say that.

Read it all here.


The following items are just too expected (no, not really) to be true.

NYPD Takes Rutgers Professor For Psych Evaluation Because Of Political Tweet

Daesh Document Tells Daesh/ISIS to NOT Strike US/Coalition Planes

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And, about that election coverage?

Sorry this section of the essay is sooo loooong, but I lifted it (gently) from The Sideshow and you know how thorough they are there.

. . . We won't know what's really going on unless we have paper ballots, hand-counted in full public view on the night.

Still, I think the best explanation for how Trump won was that his opposition was a candidate who as much as promised that people would not get the change from her that they wanted, and that they were childish to want that change - and whose principle campaign argument for her election was that she wasn't Trump. This is never a winning strategy for Democrats. The candidate who admitted that things were bad and needed to be fixed was Trump. Trump had the message of hope and change, and Hillary was the candidate of fear.

So let's hear it for the one lefty who told us months ago why Trump would win: Michael Moore. Nobody listened, but he was right.

* And here was Moore after the election, saying it again on Morning Joe.

Al Gore said the people usually get it right. For all I know, maybe they did. God knows those smug, self-satisfied "centrist" elites who've been running the Democratic Party needed a wake-up call. And much as it terrifies me to think that we really will have President Pence, appointing GOP crackpots to head our agencies, I can't help but notice that in the last few days, Trump has been backing off of some of his most odious campaign policies, and the week before the election, there was this at Reuters: "Trump calls for '21st century' Glass-Steagall banking law." Right? The Republican called for a new Glass-Steagall. Believe me, it would not hurt to see that happen.

What was the disheartening message on my feeds on Wednesday morning? That Clinton Democrats were unfriending any Sanders supporter who expressed their own bitterness about the results, who said, "I told you so," who said, "Bernie would have won." Well, maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn't have - it appears that the polls were right all along - but the fact is that after nearly two years of being told that Clinton was the inevitable next president, the sure thing, and anyone who wanted a different candidate was just being childish, selfish, and "privileged", they're entitled to. (Oddly, "The Washington Post" let Freddie deBoer say, "Hillary Clinton lost. Bernie Sanders could have won." Tuesday night, Krugman was in my Twitter feed blaming it all on Jill Stein, whose poll numbers were so low she might as well not have been there. That Nader fever just keeps infecting some people.)

There are still plenty of Clintonites making embarrassing arguments about why Trump won. Lambert Strether debunks some of the most popular ones over at "Naked Capitalism". (Just for the record, I really get upset when people write off election results they don't like as "the public is stupid". The public is often a lot smarter than our highly-educated technocrats, and they seem to know what's going on a lot better than the "smart" people do. And, as I said privately to Matt Stoller, it's almost funny listening to people who love Obama talk about how Trump voters were taken in by a con man.)

Anyway, the net is full of recriminations and even self-recriminations, like this one from David Plouffe: "What I Got Wrong About the Election," He has a list of things he got wrong, but I really think this is the one that mattered most: "IT REALLY WAS A CHANGE ELECTION The voters were serious about that. And there was only one change candidate." 
. . . And from the old socialist Jew himself, "Trump Won Because Democratic Party Failed Working People, Says SandersAdding his voice to the chorus of condemnation heaped on the Democratic Party in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday attributed the Republican win to the failure of the liberal elite to represent working people. 'It is an embarrassment, I think, to the entire of [the] Democratic Party that millions of white working-class people decided to vote for Mr. Trump, which suggests that the Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country,' the progressive senator and one-time presidential candidate told the Associated Press. 'You cannot be a party which on one hand says we're in favor of working people, we're in favor of the needs of young people but we don't quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class,' he continued. 'People do not believe that. You've got to decide which side you're on.'"
Matt Taibbi, "President Trump: How America Got It So WrongJournalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency - now, we all must pay the price [...] The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's victory - the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt states, like Michael Moore - spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness. Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told. [...] These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits. The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political system."
Richard J. Eskow and Mike Lux both did useful post-mortems.
It's pretty disgusting watching people killing themselves to insist that the sole takeaway from the election result is that well-to-do whites voted for Trump only because they are racist and sexist, and that no other factor was involved. The demographic that broke most strongly for trump made $50K-$70K - not poor, but certainly not rich. They may make more than the median, but these are the people who can't afford to send their kids to college and know the only way to do it is see them saddled with crushing debt. They aren't people who have helicopter pads, and they probably don't even have a pool. They aren't simply looking at an imaginary loss of status because being white doesn't make them better than blacks anymore, they are looking at a world of real, material loss.
They remember when they were young and they were able to find jobs that had real hours and a straight salary and they could plan an evening out in advance, and their kids can't because their employer won't give them a reliable schedule and might just call them up at a moment's notice to come in to work. They remember a time when it was possible to say, "Take this job and shove it," because it was a reasonable expectation that you could walk away and find something better. They remember that yes, even black teenagers could get a job and rent an apartment and know that the job would cover the rent every month - hell, cover the rent in the first week of the month - and now their kids can't possibly find a place where they can expect that they will get enough hours this month to pay the rent when it comes due. They started with the same dream their parents had, to make life better for their kids, to give them those things they never had - and now they know they can't even give them what they did have. Employers and banks are doing things that used to be illegal - for good reason! - and they can't promise their kids anything at all, least of all that, "Everything will be all right," because it's become pretty obvious that it won't. Here's David Atkins responding to myriad articles purporting to show that only racism and sexism account for the election results:  "The Twisted Pretzel Logic of the 'It's Not Economic Anxiety' Crowd.
"Here's to all the lonely progressives living outside the liberal echo chamberHow did this happen? I'm a progressive. I see government as a tool of the people, and I think things like food and healthcare should be basic human rights. What am I doing out here, shunned and exiled by all my liberal friends and keeping it a secret how relieved I am that Hillary Clinton lost the election?"
Atrios wrote what for him is a long piece, for a change - long enough that I'm not just going to quote the whole thing, here. But the shortened version is: "Shit is fucked up and bullshit and neither our benevolent nor our malevolent overlords know or care." Go read it:   "Don't Overlearn."
* Also:  And Piss Off About That:   I've seen some prominent liberals fretting "oh noez Trump now owns the NSA!!!" Well, uh, yeah, principled opposition to the NSA's ever-expanding powers never depended on whether one thinks the guy in charge is a good guy or a bad guy. Abuse of those powers never required that the person on top was the one abusing them. The powers are themselves intrinsically abusive, and giving them to a secret, largely unaccountable, and powerful for rather obvious reasons agency is nuts even if you trust the person who is supposedly their boss."
"Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump - but Pundits Told You to Ignore ThemThere was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders' consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator's strongest argument:  He was out-polling Trump in the general election by an average of 10 or so points, whereas Clinton was only slightly ahead. His favorables were also much higher, often with a spread as much as 25 points. Never mind, the pundits said - Clinton had been 'vetted' and Sanders had not [...] The idea that Sanders had not been 'properly examined' was pure dogma, asserted by pundits with hardly any critical thought. It was true because Important People in Important Media Outlets simply said it was. Most in the media failed to meaningfully push back against this dogma, and it was a major contributing factor to the Democrats nominating someone who, by all available measures, was a stronger candidate than Clinton."
Thomas Frank in the "Guardian," "Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there:   Hillary Clinton was exactly the wrong candidate:   a technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine."
Jimmy Dore says Bernie at the DNC is now the most heartbreaking video of 2016.
Let's get to some good news. "Controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio ousted after 24 years in Democrat upsetEnd of sheriff's reign, whose crackdowns on undocumented residents foreshadowed Trump, triggered rare scenes of Democratic jubilation on Tuesday."
* Actually, there was some other good news, in spite of what you may have heard.
* Blue America backed some progressive winners, so it ain't all gloom and doom.
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But there again . . .

Google Scores a Pro-Monopoly Seat on Trump Transition Team


(Click on figure to enlarge.)

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgJrlD1ViK8hWzCvC3k6Db-gsGcX4r1skoEJOilGILHlIZcK3-xHLFbO_yO5gdq9H5cqJCKqX2sl82Skl69iCB8kzUAvu_VCssgJyxZ8XgB-wzbdopUysqOiW3t6bYXN4ZPbNWZvO0KqI/s1600/prism-slide-5_2-660x495.jpg

Google says "Don't be evil." Look for their name as the third to sign on to NSA spying.

Google and Trump, Together At Last

Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.

. . . Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission [FTC] after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

The Intercept has documented how Wright, as a law professor at George Mason University, received Google funding for at least four academic papers, all of which supported Google’s position that it did not violate antitrust laws when it favored its own sites in search engine requests and restricted advertisers from running ads on competitors. George Mason received $762,000 in funding from Google from 2011 to 2013.


 Wright then became an FTC commissioner in January 2013, agreeing to recuse himself from Google cases for two years, because of his Google-funded research. He lasted at the FTC until August 2015, returning to George Mason’s law school (now named after Antonin Scalia). But Wright also became an “of counsel” at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Google’s main outside law firm. Wilson Sonsini has represented Google before the FTC.

Wright’s leadership position in the Trump FTC transition flips him back into government work....


Why is the FTC so important? The FTC "has responsibilities over consumer protection and policing anti-competitive business practices, like the employing of monopoly power. Outside of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, no government agency is more responsible for competition policy than the FTC."

Score one for the google. They appear to have joined forces with Trump to make sure no high-tech billionaire is harmed in the relentless march toward monopolistic capitalism. Are they still "our" billionaires, or just their own?

Don't Be Evil indeed.
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His transition appointments are delighting the corporatists. The man chosen to oversee the changes in the Environmental Protection Agency denies that climate change is man-made and scowls at regulation of harmful pollutants. Trump has opened the door to the big oil and gas lobbyists to control the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior. Wall Streeters are smacking their lips over Trump cavorting with opponents of regulating that giant gambling casino.
His military advisers do not come from the ranks of prudent retired officials who see perpetual war for what it is – a mechanism for national insecurity, authoritarianism and profits for the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address.
To the contrary, many of Trump’s military advisors have been quick to embrace an Empire mentality and its warfare state.

One can imagine how a major stateless terrorist attack on the U.S. during his administration could provoke Trump into a heavy-handed retaliation with dangerous and unforeseen consequences. This is exactly what these adversaries want him to do in order to further spread their propaganda campaign against the U.S. Meanwhile, our civil liberties, and the domestic necessities of the people are shoved aside. 
His first two major assistants – Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon – have called for corporate tax reductions and elimination of the estate tax on the rich (the only ones who pay it). Despite the “small government” façade, they are not likely to challenge the deficit-swelling combination of a larger military budget, decreased revenue and continuation of the bailouts, subsidies and giveaways known as crony capitalism that have enriched Trump and his plutocratic allies over the years.
Intrigue and internal fighting inside the White House and top Cabinet levels are likely if Trump insists on giving powerful roles to his three children and son-in-law (albeit without pay). Nepotism and conflicts of interest are acidic cocktails and undermine the integrity and transparency of public office.
Then there is the explosive crackdown on immigrants – many of whom benefit millions of Americans by working in low-wage jobs – that can produce daily turmoil, not to mention the exorbitant human cost of breaking up families in communities across the country.
In past Republican Party electoral victories, there was always a modicum of checks and balances to slow their plutocratic greed and power grabs. As of January 21, 2017 the Republican Party controls the Executive Branch, the Congress, the Supreme Court and most likely 33 governorships and 32 state legislatures. The anti-democratic Electoral College is the cause this November of giving the GOP control over the White House and, by extension, the Supreme Court (see nationalpopularvote.com).
Other than an unlikely vigorous and fearless free press, not just in Washington but also back in the localities, or a self-destructive Trump implosion, the redeeming power of the people can only come from the grass roots.
Our country is in an extraordinarily high-risk condition, given who possesses the reins of power. Self-described conservatives and liberals can curb that power if they form alliances back in the Congressional districts around the major initiatives on which they agree (See my book Unstoppable:  The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State). Such alliances have occurred with success in the past.
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Dr. Jill Stein confirmed that she too felt it strange that the Hillary campaign has declined to speak up about these exit poll anomalies around the electronic voting states, but pointed out that that has been a pattern of the Democrats. “We’ve been here before. Al Gore, and John Kerry for that matter, would not pursue the discrepancies in those elections either. Also from my understanding, there was still hundreds of thousands of uncounted mail-in votes that were not counted in Wisconsin when it was declared. There’s a bunch of funny things.”

“There is stuff there that really is curious.”

Dr. Stein wondered if Hillary’s own spotty record in the exit polls was to blame.

You can’t help but wonder, for example, that because there were such huge discrepancies in the primaries, like up to twenty points or something like that, where Bernie was just way ahead and then lost,” she said. “There were some really big discrepancies and maybe Hillary feels like she can’t raise questions because her own record is a little tarnished on this? I don’t know, we’ll see.”

Professor Mark Crispin Martin agrees. “First of all, few ever question the official outcomes of elections, however strong the evidence of theft; and Hillary’s not in a position to contest her “loss” to Trump, since she herself would not have been her party’s nominee if not for serial election theft throughout the primary season,” he said.

Considering the outpouring of anger from Hillary supporters over the result and their many efforts to challenge the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s win, it would appear a given that the Democrats would pursue these exit poll anomalies which, if proven correct, would almost certainly give Hillary the presidency.


Speaking of which . . . I've documented the "stealing" of the votes many times previously here. Looks like the chicanery continued. Bigtime.

So glad the New Dims were in charge during this election season!

Exit Polls Indicate Hillary Clinton Might Have Won

Exit polls are showing that Hillary Clinton won in four key battleground states that the vote tally gave to Donald Trump. These states are North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida.

According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and reported by TDMS Research show that in North Carolina, there was a 5.8 point discrepancy in favor of Donald Trump, which would have awarded him the state. In Pennsylvania, there was a 5.5 point anomaly to Trump, a 4.8 percent swing to him in Wisconsin, and 2.7 point swing to him in Florida, taking him over the line in these three states as well.

If these states were counted, Hillary Clinton would be declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election.

In other countries, exit polls are considered a very accurate measure of voter intent and a clear indicator of election fraud, and have at times been used to prove fraud and force a new election, as CNN reported the Ukraine had to do back in 2004. Unlike opinion polls, they are known to be accurate to within a very small margin of error.

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, and author of “Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform” has noted that the American public generally demurs from placing importance on exit polls due to a long history of elections veering from the exit poll data. In fact, in America, a practice is made of “correcting” the exit poll data so it better matches the voter count, going under the assumption that voter count is correct.

There were other anomalies around the electronic machines too. Miller is particularly concerned with the 90,000 voters in Michigan who appeared to choose to “undervote” — that is, they did not vote for president, but they voted down ballot for all the other positions. In a state that was awarded to Trump by only 0.3 of a percent, these votes were crucial.

Add to that the voter purges and other voter suppression techniques, it’s little wonder that the United States electoral system comes dead last in the western world. The Electoral Integrity Project reports that American elections are less fair and secure than countries like Mongolia, Tunisia, Rwanda, and Brazil.

Miller asked in a press release, “Did 90,000 non-white workers, and ex-workers, in that state all cast those undervotes to mount that protest or were their ballots changed without their knowing it?”

Pointing to the deafening silence from the Hillary campaign itself, but also its many famous surrogates and endorsers, Miller wondered where “all the other lefty stars who worked so hard to get us all to vote for Hillary” have gone “in the face of ever-mounting evidence that Trump ‘won’ this election just as Hillary ‘won’ her party’s nomination: through rampant vote suppression and computerized election fraud.”

“With millions disenfranchised, coast to coast, through purges of the electronic voter rolls, and voter caging, and voter ID requirements, and partisan interference by election officials, and the deliberate placement of too few machines in certain precincts, and volleys of disinformation on the times and places to go vote — and as the exit polls suggest widespread manipulation of the vote counts throughout the swing states — why are we not hearing anything at all about it?” he said, going on to list the vast array of celebrities who were vocal during the campaign for Hillary, but are now conspicuously silent.

Dr. Jill Stein, Green party candidate and vocal campaigner for fair elections is also voicing her concerns. She told Inquisitr “These discrepancies have come to our attention and we have some people who are looking at them, so stay tuned.”

Dr. Stein confirmed that she too felt it strange that the Hillary campaign has declined to speak up about these exit poll anomalies around the electronic voting states, but pointed out that that has been a pattern of the Democrats. “We’ve been here before. Al Gore, and John Kerry for that matter, would not pursue the discrepancies in those elections either. Also from my understanding, there was still hundreds of thousands of uncounted mail-in votes that were not counted in Wisconsin when it was declared. There’s a bunch of funny things.”

“There is stuff there that really is curious.”

Dr. Stein wondered if Hillary’s own spotty record in the exit polls was to blame.

“You can’t help but wonder, for example, that because there were such huge discrepancies in the primaries, like up to twenty points or something like that, where Bernie was just way ahead and then lost,” she said. “There were some really big discrepancies and maybe Hillary feels like she can’t raise questions because her own record is a little tarnished on this? I don’t know, we’ll see.”

Mark agrees. “First of all, few ever question the official outcomes of elections, however strong the evidence of theft; and Hillary’s not in a position to contest her “loss” to Trump, since she herself would not have been her party’s nominee if not for serial election theft throughout the primary season,” he said.

Considering the outpouring of anger from Hillary supporters over the result and their many efforts to challenge the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s win, it would appear a given that the Democrats would pursue these exit poll anomalies which, if proven correct, would almost certainly give Hillary the presidency.

The silence about this avenue of pursuit from the Hillary camp is deafening.

“Have they ever pursued fraud like that? I don’t think they ever have; they all back away from it,” Dr. Stein told Inquisitr. “It’s only the Greens who take up these cases you know and just for the sake of election integrity, and we’ve been losing them anyhow, but I think it’s very important for the public to have our guard raised about this stuff.”

The Green Party are campaigning for ranked voting and hand-counted paper ballots among other measures to bring up the standard of American elections.

Dr. Stein remains hopeful that there will be movement in this area soon. “I know that people are poring over these numbers right now, and I’m hoping there will be some light to shed on this soon.”
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The above differences between Exit Polls and Vote Counts strongly indicate election fraud in favor of Trump and Republican Senators in Key States
When properly conducted, exit polls should predict election results with a high degree of reliability. Unlike telephone opinion polls that ask people which candidate they intend to vote for several days before the election, exit polls are surveys of voters conducted after they have cast their votes at their polling places. In other words, rather than a prediction of a hypothetical future action, they constitute a record of an action that was just completed. Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections. The United States has funded exit polls in Eastern Europe to detect fraud. Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia.
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Eric Zuesse | 16.11.2016 | WORLD

The Noose that Obama Had Wanted to Hand to President Hillary to Hang U.S. Democracy

This will be a summary, update, and extension from, a 25,000-word masterpiece of historical writing: the obscure, little-noticed, but hair-raising and scrupulously documented, account of how U.S. foreign policy, starting in 1994 (shortly after Bill Clinton became President), began to be subcontracted-out or privatized to Silicon Valley and America’s top weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s magisterial 22 January 2015 article, «How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet».
His detailed account is 100% consistent with theorists who have alleged that ever since at least the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. government has been moving more and more in the direction of becoming a police-state, but Ahmed’s focus is earlier than that and on the international-affairs portion of that, and on the participation of Google and other Silicon Valley firms — and Wall Street (basically the entire aristocracy) — in making it all happen.

Ahmed, perhaps the greatest of all investigative journalists, had previously been the first person to publish a book (in 2002, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001) disproving and exhaustively replacing the ‘historical’ (which is largely mythological) narrative that the U.S. government and its aristocratic masters promulgate regarding 9/11. He there proved that networks of individuals inside the U.S. government participated along with some major U.S. corporations, in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. He also crucially noted (page 42) that «The only countries that openly accepted the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — all of which happen to be U.S/Western clients», but he probed in depth only into the U.S. side of the planning of the 9/11 attacks. He didn’t deny the Saudi and other foreign involvement, but he documented high-level U.S. government-and-corporate assistance in the operation’s success.

Much additional information came to light after 2002 filling in crucial details of the higher-level cooperation between the U.S. aristocracy and the aristocracies of mainly Saudi Arabia but also of those other Sunni-Islamic nations, to produce not only the 9/11 attacks but the entire jihadist movement, which is solely a Sunni-Islamic phenomenon (not at all Shiite, but specifically Sunni and headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which is the core of fundamentalist-Sunni belief). (Even Hillary Clinton said that it was the Sunni nations’ aristocracies that were providing the «terrorist financing».) 

In an ironic turn of history, the U.S. aristocracy is allied with the Sunni aristocracies against the Shia ones, and therefore pretends that Shiite Iran, and Syria’s non-sectarian but mainly Shiite-led government, have posed the chief terrorist threat against non-Islamic-majority countries. But this narrative has never actually been true except for Israel, which is the sole target of Shiite terrorists, as well as being also a target of Sunni ones. Other than in Israel, virtually the entire problem of Islamic extremism comes from fundamentalist-Sunnis, who are financed by the royal Sunni families of Arabia, and (to a lesser extent, and also acknowledged by Clinton) by Pakistan’s Sunni aristocracy. In Israel, terrorism comes both from Shiites and from Sunnis, due to the apartheid Israeli occupation, which galvanizes all types of Muslims, but only in Sunni Islam is jihadism (the phenomenon that terrorizes the entire world) a reality. All jihadists are fundamentalist Sunnis. And yet, the United States aristocracy and thus the government it controls has latched itself to the Sunni aristocracies, which are fundamentalists and actually enemies of not only the publics of Christian-majority nations, but of Shiites and even of non-devout Sunnis, everywhere — and even of publics everywhere, including of many people within their own countries. (For example:  the Shiite minorities in the Arabic oil kingdoms are legally discriminated-against, and this anti-Shiite discrimination by Sunni aristocrats, causes significant resistance to their regimes.)
The U.S. government is allied with state-sponsored enemies of the U.S. people, but this is an extremely profitable partnership for both the U.S. aristocracy (who control America’s ‘defense’ firms and high-tech firms and oil-and-gas firms), and the Sunni aristocracies (who are not only top oil-and-gas producers but also the largest foreign buyers of U.S. weaponry and much else — buying weapons in order to crush their domestic dissent). Arabic royals will always need plenty of weapons in order to control their publics, and that’s a market which to a large extent shapes U.S. foreign policies.
However, Nafeez Ahmed didn’t discuss the crucial support that Google (now called «Alphabet») Corporation had been supplying both to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then to her Presidential campaign against first Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump; but this Google-and-U.S.-government operation is a crucial part of the U.S. aristocracy’s plan since at least 24 February 1990 to conquer post-communist and post-Soviet Russia, and to impose upon the American public also a police state dictatorship, and I have covered that in «How America Double-Crossed Russia And Shamed The West».
And here now is my selection of excerpts from Ahmed’s 25,000-word fully-documented-by-links account of what Hillary Clinton was calling (with praise) «public-private partnerships», which have produced a U.S. national government that is controlled by America’s wealthiest investors, and that does their bidding, especially in foreign affairs and the military, but also regarding control of the domestic public — a modern, sophisticated, police-state (Hillary Clinton’s goal to complete). I am reducing his 25,000-word account to 5,500 words, and removing the links. Obviously, anyone who wants to explore Ahmed’s account in more detail and also to explore his sources, can easily do that by clicking onto his article. I urge readers to do that, especially to donate to that great investigative journalist’s crowd-funded site so that he will be able to produce and make available to the public, his brilliant articles and books. Here is my summary of that article by means of excerpts:
ABBREVIATED VERSION OF AHMED’S ARTICLE
In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.

Known as the «Highlands Forum,» this private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.

Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation [SAIC] are sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence community’ due to the revolving doors between them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors compete for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off-the-record space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries. …

"New Scientist" magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like «Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,» describing it as «far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop». Regular Forum meetings bring together »innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare»…

In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One:  The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a «Highlands Forum» gathering, an «invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration». This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions  — «captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders» as well as «members of the DoD leadership»…

Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015…

«Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz»  —  widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics  —  were among Marshall’s «star protégés»…

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has thus operated through three main channels:  its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.

According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, «what happens at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum, could, over time and through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world». He wrote that the Forum’s ideas have «moved from being heretical to mainstream.


Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later» …

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence bridge’:  on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence the formulation of information operations policy across US military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is going on in the private sector...

O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW [Information Warfare]:  adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, »so they perceive the cause [of war] as just»; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they «perceive the cost as worth the effort». A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work «made its way to the top leadership» at DoD. «They acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury it. [Ahmed here presumes that a reader understands what this means:  that the Pentagon agreed but wanted O’Neill’s proposed strategy never to become publicly known.]

Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry  —  who went on to join SAIC’s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.…

In 1998, the Highlands «Group» became a «Forum». According to O’Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to »bureaucratic restrictions». What he was alluding to was the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way the US government can formally solicit the advice of special interests.

Known as the «open government» law, FACA requires that US government officials cannot hold closed-door or secret consultations with people outside government to develop policy

In bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even the loose restrictions of FACA, by permanently excluding any possibility of public engagement…

Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.

Other participants have included senior media professionals:  David Ignatius, associate editor of the "Washington Post" and at the time the executive editor of the "International Herald Tribune;" Thomas Friedman, long-time "New York Times" columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at "Washington Times" and "United Press International" Steven Levy, a former "Newsweek" editor, senior writer for "Wired" and now chief tech editor at "Medium;" Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the "New Yorker;" Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the "Daily Beast;" Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of "Global Voices Online;" Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the "New York Times."

Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD’s Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the main US surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces.

(Continued in Part Two of Three)

I've read this history book and I recommend it as a fine and well-written source that should be consulted by everyone interested in the events transpiring in the time of President John F. Kennedy and the various people affiliated with the secret agencies of the U.S.

No kidding.

Not a conspiracy read.

A history book.

Although sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

For those who revel in study of the Cold War culture in Washington in this era, the book is full of well-documented revelations about Phil and Katherine Graham of the Washington Post; James Jesus Angleton (the Head of CIA Counterintelligence), who was godfather to the children of Cord and Mary Meyer; and Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era (who is exposed in the book as one of the CIA’s major media assets). In my view, knowing that Bradlee was in the CIA’s pocket helps explain why the Washington Post was so successful in taking down Richard Nixon following the Watergate break-in. Nixon had used his Chief of Staff, Haldemann, to attempt to get the CIA to “warn off” the FBI in its investigation of the Watergate break-in and the “plumbers.” Nixon instructed Haldeman to threaten the CIA (Richard Helms) with exposure of its involvement in the JFK

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assassination, as an incentive for the Agency to cooperate with him. This “hardball” leverage failed, and Bradlee was allowed (and perhaps encouraged) to take down Nixon. He acted as the CIA wished in the Watergate matter. Unaccountably, Bradlee never employed the considerable investigative resources of the Post to look into the Kennedy assassination…well, perhaps that is not so “unaccountable” after all, now that we know he had been a CIA asset since the early 1950s, a part of the Agency’s remarkably successful penetration and control of foreign and domestic media. As Janney reveals, Cord Meyer (Mary’s husband from 1945 until the late 1950s) was in charge of that CIA program of media penetration and propaganda, and Ben Bradlee was married to Mary Pinchot’s sister, Toni. The proximity of these relationships — between Cord Meyer, James Angleton, and Bradlee — make it easy to believe that Bradlee’s links with the CIA, that began in the early 1950s, continued into the 1960s and early 1970s when he was in powerful positions at Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Peter Janney’s own father, a World War II Naval aviator and a recipient of the Navy Cross, was also a CIA man, and Peter grew up amidst the CIA culture in Washington. Mary Meyer’s son Michael was his best childhood friend. He knew Mary Meyer as his best friend’s mother. He was therefore perfectly placed to write this book, for his own family had frequent social contacts with Cord and Mary Meyer, James Angleton, Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, and William Colby. Janney’s knowledge of the CIA Cold War culture in our nation’s capital in the 1950s and 1960s is very well-informed, on a personal level.
Janney compellingly relates how the D.C. metropolitan police and the U.S. Justice Department attempted to railroad an innocent black man, Ray Crump, for the mysterious murder of Mary Meyer in October of 1964, just three weeks after the Warren Report was issued. Due to the heroic efforts of African American female attorney Dovey Roundtree, Janney explains how against all odds, Crump was acquitted. Peter Janney reveals the likely motive for her murder—she was about to publicly oppose the sham conclusions of the Warren Report as a fraud. Furthermore, she had kept a private diary which presumably recorded details of her relationship with President Kennedy (and perhaps even of affairs of state). In October of 1964, she was literally “the woman who knew too much.” This book reveals the numerous lies and falsehoods told about her diary (and its disposition) by Ben Bradlee, James Jesus

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Angleton, and others, in a way not adequately covered by previous articles and books. The media in this country, misled by the CIA and by former acquaintances of Meyer’s who had much to hide, has consistently distorted the true story of what likely happened to her diary, and Peter Janney lays all of this out in a way that anyone can understand.
Peter Janney also solves the mystery of her murder 48 years ago, in as convincing a fashion as one can, so many years later. Many have asked, “If Ray Crump did not kill Mary Meyer, then who did?” This book answers that question. (I will not provide any spoilers here.)

And as Donald Trump, President To Be, has promised to reopen the 9/11 Investigation . . .

I'm holding my breath as I'm sure he'll also expose all the facts hidden within the government records about the planning and implementation of the JFK assassination. Maybe also for Bobby and Martin?

Dreamer!

Happy Thanksgiving!




2 comments:

TONY @oakroyd said...

'So where's the left?' is a good question worldwide. France on the threshold of falling to the rightists. Hollande turned out to be a rightist. UK already there.

Cirze said...

Yes, Tony.

Captain Obvious here.

The left exited stage left long before Castro did.

Love you!