Category Archives: culture

Wikileaks Emails Bring New Attention to Hillary Victory Fund “Money Laundering” Charges

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By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Source: Wall Street on Parade

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that, quite frequently, the theorists lack adequate imagination. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Democratic National Committee’s behind-the-scenes machinations to muscle Hillary Clinton into the White House while plotting against her main challenger, Bernie Sanders. That conclusion stems from the trove of 20,000 DNC emails dumped into the public sphere by Wikileaks last Friday.

The leaked emails have cost Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as Chair of the DNC but other top DNC officials captured in devious plots against Sanders in the email exchanges still have their jobs – or at least no official firings have been announced. This makes the conspiracies seem more like a DNC business model.

The DNC’s own charter demands that it treat all Democratic primary candidates fairly and impartially, but top DNC officials made a mockery of that mandate. In addition to conjuring up ways to smear Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders during the primary battles, the leaked emails show a coordinated effort to cover up what the Sanders camp called “money laundering” between the Hillary Victory Fund and the DNC.

Despite the fact that the Sanders campaign had no such active arrangement with the DNC, the DNC agreed to participate in the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that sluiced money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the DNC. To a much tinier degree, funds also went to dozens of separate State Democratic committees.

On May 2 of this year, the Sanders campaign released a statement charging Clinton with “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”

Despite Clinton’s promise to rein in tax dodges by hedge funds, Wall Street On Parade reported in April that major hedge fund titans were also big donors to the Hillary Victory Fund. We wrote at the time:

“Federal Election Commission records show that S. Donald Sussman, founder of hedge fund Paloma Partners, gave $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while also donating $2.5 million to Priorities USA, the Super Pac supporting Hillary. Hedge Fund billionaire George Soros donated $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while sluicing a whopping $7 million into Priorities USA to enhance Hillary’s efforts to move into the Oval Office.”

Today, reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf of Politico have provided significant new details from the leaked emails to show how the DNC worked behind the scenes to control the media’s handling of revelations involving the Hillary Victory Fund.

Vogel was criticized by some media outlets when the Wikileaks emails revealed he had allowed a DNC official to review one of his articles critical of the joint fundraising operation prior to publication. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post has provided some necessary clarity to that issue here.

The Clinton camp and the DNC had attempted publicly to defend the joint fundraising operation as providing critical help to State Committees in order to help down-ticket candidates. But today, Vogel and Arnsdorf report the following:

“Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of last month, the fund had brought in $142 million, the lion’s share of which — 44 percent — has wound up in the coffers of the DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), according to a POLITICO analysis of FEC filings. By comparison, the analysis found that the state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the cash brought in by the committee — or only 0.56 percent.”

Vogel and Arnsdorf also detail how the DNC attempted to stonewall reporters on the topic, writing:

“The emails show the officials agreeing to withhold information from reporters about the Hillary Victory Fund’s allocation formula, working to align their stories about when — or if — the DNC had begun funding coordinated campaign committees with the states.”

The Politico reporters also note that Hillary Clinton’s campaign attorney, Marc Elias of law firm Perkins Coie, also appears in a Wikileaks email suggesting media strategy to the DNC:

“ ‘The DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful to the Democratic party,’ Marc Elias, an attorney who advises the DNC and the Clinton campaign, wrote in an email to DNC officials. [DNC] CEO Amy Dacey responded ‘I do think there is too much of this narrative out there — I also worry since they are emailing to their list (which has overlap with ours!)’

“In another email, Miranda, the [DNC] communications director, suggested that the campaign tell other journalists seeking to follow POLITICO’s story that “Politico got it wrong.” But the rest of his email failed to indicate any errors in POLITICO’s story, nor did the DNC or the Clinton campaign seek a correction.”

Politico’s latest revelations build on the allegations in the class action lawsuit that has been filed against the DNC and Wasserman Schultz by Sanders’ supporters. One document submitted in that lawsuit came from a previous hack of the DNC server by an individual known as Guccifer 2.0. That document shows that even after Bernie Sanders had announced he was entering the race on April 30, 2015, the DNC was brainstorming on how it could advance Hillary Clinton to the top of the ticket. The memo is described as follows in the lawsuit:

“Among the documents released by Guccifer 2.0 on June 15th is a two-page Microsoft Word file with a ‘Confidential’ watermark that appears to be a memorandum written to the Democratic National Committee regarding ‘2016 GOP presidential candidates’ and dated May 26, 2015. A true and correct copy of this document (hereinafter, ‘DNC Memo’) is attached as Exhibit 1. The DNC Memo presents, ‘a suggested strategy for positioning and public messaging around the 2016 Republican presidential field.’ It states that, ‘Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC.’ [HRC means Hillary Rodham Clinton.] The DNC Memo also advises that the DNC, ‘[u]se specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.’ In order to ‘muddy the waters’ around Clinton’s perceived vulnerabilities, the DNC Memo suggests ‘several different methods’ of attack including: (a) ‘[w]orking through the DNC’ to ‘utilize reporters’ and create stories in the media ‘with no fingerprints’; (b) ‘prep[ping]’ reporters for interviews with GOP candidates and having off-the-record conversations with them; (c) making use of social media attacks; and (d) using the DNC to ‘insert our messaging’ into Republican-favorable press.” [Read the full memorandum here.]

The response to all of this from Hillary Clinton has further enraged Sanders’ supporters. After the emails were leaked and written about in the media over the weekend, Hillary Clinton made Wasserman Schultz the honorary chairperson of her 50-state program and President Obama praised Wasserman Schultz in a statement that can only be described as bizarre, given the contents of the leaked emails. Obama said on Sunday:

“For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful. Her leadership of the DNC has meant that we had someone who brought Democrats together not just for my re-election campaign, but for accomplishing the shared goals we have had for our country.”

Apparently, missing from those “shared goals” is allowing a fair primary process within the Democratic party or a challenge to the political machine that controls Washington.

 

Related Article: IRS Will Investigate Clinton Foundation ‘Pay-to-Play’ Corruption Accusations

Dem politician questions Israel’s ties to terrorism

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Source: Press TV

Former US Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney has questioned Israel’s ties to recent attacks in France and Germany, after an Israeli reporter managed to capture both attacks as they were happening.

“Same Israeli photographer captures Nice and Munich tragedies,” the six-term congresswoman from Georgia said in a tweet on Saturday.

The journalist in question is Richard Gutjahr, who videotaped the truck attack in Nice, France, that killed more than 80 people and injured dozens more on July 14.

Eight days later, the reporter happened to be on the site of another attack in Munich, Germany, where a shooting rampage claimed nine lives.

“How likely is that? Remember the Dancing Israelis?” McKinney asked, referring to reported Israeli celebrations during the September 11, 2011, attacks in the US.

The former American lawmaker also posted a video, showing an article with the headline: “Same Israeli photo-propagandist pre-positioned in Nice AND NOW MUNICH.”

“The fact that this guy happened to be at both, there’s no way it’s a coincidence,” the narrator of the video said.

He went on to talk about Gutjahr’s wife, a former Israeli Kensset member, before concluding that “it’s 100 percent clear that Israel’s fingerprints are all over these events.”

During the Nice attack, Gutjahr filmed the whole incident from a balcony at the Westminster Hotel, right next to the street where the French National Day celebrations were being held.

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He also provided major Western media outlets with extensive reports about the Munich attack, posting images and videos on his Twitter account. Some of the tweets like the one showed above were deleted later on.

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae identified the gunman as an 18-year-old German-Iranian man from Munich, who had no criminal record and whose motive was “completely unclear.”

 

Related Articles:

Shooter apparently inspired by Anders Behring Breivik

München Shooting: Terror Embedded Journalism?

 

Proving She Can Do Anything She Wants, Clinton Hires Disgraced DNC Chair for Own Campaign

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By Clair Bernish

Source: The Free Thought Project

A spectacular implosion has beset the Democratic Party following the Wikileaks release of memos and emails proving, well, just about every accusation from independent media and Sanders supporters made throughout the past year — many of which had been mocked publicly as conspiracies by party insiders.

In the latest jaw-dropper over the nearly 20,000-document leak deserving of the title, DNC-Gate, already-loathed Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — shamed into resignation from decisive evidence of party collusion with corporate presstitutes against Sanders, among multiple other once-conspiracies — has been dutifully scooped up in an act of mordant hubris by none other than her teflon idol, Hillary Clinton.

“There’s simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie,” Clinton pontificated on her loyal lackey, “which is why I am glad that she has agreed to serve as honorary chair of my campaign’s 50-state program to gain ground and elect Democrats Robby Mooin every part of the country, and will continue to serve as a surrogate for my campaign nationally, in Florida, and in other states.”

Yes, the former secretary of state did, in fact, say exactly what Sanders’ adherents, Republicans, and responsible journalists have been screaming about for months — Wasserman Schultz will continue to serve as a Clinton campaign proxy.

At least one thing is too patently obvious to warrant Clinton-esque deception.

As the daytime drama cum reality show now masquerading as the Democratic Party kicks off its convention in Philadelphia today, complete with tens of thousands of protesters of every stripe, Bernie Sanders issued a statement praising Wasserman Schultz’ scandal-tinged resignation.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party,” the Guardian quoted Sanders, adding party leaders must “always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.”

Such moralizing, however, glistens only with a gilded glint given Sanders’ refusal to withdraw support for the establishment monarch, Hillary Clinton — in fact, the choice to remain loyal in the face of staggering coordination against his own campaign only lends credence to widely-held suspicions he’d been sheepdogging for Hillary for the duration. For Sanders to continue to plead fealty to the party whose insiders secretly denigrated his faith, derided his ardent supporters, and unscrupulously plotted his downfall either betrays his surreptitious role as longstanding Hillary shill, or denotes an ethically-void capitulation to the manufacturers of his demise.

Rendered effectively moot by both the DNC-Clinton alliance and his own lackluster lack of retort, Sanders’ affirmation of Wasserman Schultz’ rightful, humiliating self-removal from the helm merited little more than a footnote in the party’s bizarre damage-control scramble on the eve of its quadrennial main event.

In an apparent attempt to besmirch the legitimacy of the massive document drop — and distract from the telling contents — DNC officials proffered a ridiculous Russian red herring.

“Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s ‘This Week’ that the emails were leaked ‘by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump’ citing ‘experts’ but offering no other evidence,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance.”

Mook only slightly elaborated on this gelastic allegation for CNN, stating:

“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

He added, “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails are being released on the eve of our convention here” in Philadelphia.

Though Mook unsurprisingly failed to provide even a smidgen of evidence — much less names — to back up his claim, apparently the public should rest assured, because, he promised humorlessly:

“This isn’t my assertion. This is what experts are telling us.”

In echo-chamber support of this theoretical Russian plot — which the Trump camp and others have written off to absurd musings of an unraveling party — the Clinton campaign attested in a statement cited by the Guardian:

“This is further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.”

A similar accusation of Russian infiltration, dutifully parroted by corporate media in June, cited nameless, unverified DNC and U.S. ‘officials’ and anonymous ‘security experts’ claiming “Russian government hackers” penetrated the DNC’s network and, reported the Washington Post, had “so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they were able to read all email and chat traffic.”

Of course, Russian officials wholly denied the claim, offering a far more sound explanation for the breach:

“Usually these kinds of leaks take place not because hackers broke in, but, as any professional will tell you, because someone simply forgot the password or set the simple password 123456,” mused President Putin’s top Internet advisor, German Kimeko, according to RIA Novosti state news agency cited by the Post. “Well, it’s always simpler to explain this away as the intrigues of enemies, rather than one’s own incompetence.”

Floundering under the weight of leaks revealing its slavish devotion to Clinton and inability to remain neutral while mendaciously claiming the contrary throughout the election season, the DNC might have effectively swindled a rift so broad as to be insurmountable.

As the convention gets underway, Sanders delegates and protesters might be sufficiently enraged to splinter from the Democratic Party so blatantly servile to its establishment darling against the conspicuous will of the people — with or without support from their populist hero, Bernie Sanders, himself.

Hillary Clinton’s Email Absolution: Two Parties, One Criminal Regime

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By Eric Draitser

Source: StopImperialism.org

What was your reaction when you heard FBI Director James Comey announce to the world that the Bureau would not be recommending that charges be filed against Hillary Clinton over her handling of emails while she was Secretary of State?  Did you do a humorous spit take with your coffee like some modern day Danny Thomas?  Were you frozen in place like Americans were on November 22, 1963?  Did your jaw hit the floor with your tongue rolling out like a flabbergasted cartoon character?

Chances are you weren’t the least bit surprised that no charges were recommended.  But what does that tell you about our political system?

That millions of Americans weren’t remotely caught off guard by the exculpation of Hillary Clinton is less a commentary about American attitudes than it is a clear indication of the all-pervasive criminality that is at the heart of America’s political ruling class.  And the fact that such criminality is seen as par for the course demonstrates once again that the rule of law is more a rhetorical veneer than a juridical reality.

But consider further what the developments of recent days tell us both about the US and, perhaps even more importantly, the perception of the US internationally. For while Washington consistently wields as weapons political abstractions such as transparency, corruption, and freedom, it is unwilling to apply to itself those same cornerstones of America’s collective self-conception. Hypocrisy is perhaps not strong enough a word.

Not Even Hiding It Anymore…    

Remember the good old days when corrupt politicians committed their crimes in smoke-filled rooms, making handshake deals in quiet corners of luxury hotel suites or over lobster at five star restaurants? Those things certainly still happen, but the transgressions, like all things, seem to have lost a bit of their classiness. It may not be the Plaza Hotel, but the Phoenix airport was no less a scene of wanton lawlessness and impropriety when former President, and soon to be First Gentleman, Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The meeting, which only came to light thanks to the work of local ABC15 morning anchor Christopher Sign, has been widely criticized by pundits and legal experts from both sides of the political spectrum.  Naturally, questions about impropriety, and potential illegal tampering in a federal investigation, were immediately raised once the meeting was made public.  Of course, nothing was done to alleviate any of those concerns, calling into question the very impartiality of the investigation.

But the larger story has to do with symbolic message being sent by the meeting.  Specifically, there is one set of laws for American citizens, and an entirely different set of laws for political elites like the Clintons.

Moreover, there’s more to it than just criminality.  There is the air of superiority which oozes from every action taken by the Clintons who have made hundreds of millions of dollars unscrupulously pandering to, and serving the interests of, the financial elite of Wall Street and the corporate oligarchy.  That feeling of invincibility is what drives someone like Bill Clinton to demand that the FBI surrounding him at the Phoenix airport dictate to bystanders that there are to be “no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.”  To make such a demand is to see oneself as above the law, above the First Amendment, above the plebs, as it were.

And this sort of behavior is what we’ve come to expect from the Clintons.  Who can forget the seemingly endless rap sheet that the dynamic Democrat duo has earned over the decades?  The Whitewater Scandal, in many ways a template for the Clinton email scandal, involved shady business practices and political insider dealing by the Clintons and their real estate developer cronies.  And, like the email scandal, Whitewater was an example of the Clintons deliberately destroying records that likely implicate them in very serious crimes.

As the New York Times reported in 1992, “The Clintons and Mr. McDougal disagree about what happened to Whitewater’s records. Mr. McDougal says that at Mr. Clinton’s request they were delivered to the Governor’s mansion. The Clintons say many of them have disappeared. Many questions about the enterprise cannot be fully answered without the records.”

So it seems the Clintons have this nasty habit of committing crimes and then destroying the records of those crimes and claiming complete ignorance about what happened.  For you and me, such a flimsy excuse would go over like a lead balloon, likely leading to jail time.  For the Clintons, the controversy quietly fades away and slips down the memory hole.

And then of course there’s the mysterious death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, the man who filed three years of delinquent Whitewater corporate tax returns, and then was subsequently found dead a month later.  While his death was officially ruled a suicide, the serendipitous development for the Clintons led to speculation that Foster was killed on the order of the Clintons in order to silence a potentially damning source of information about Clinton misdeeds.

Indeed, some claim that evidence exists that Foster was in fact murdered, including the statements from one of the lead prosecutors investigating the death, Miguel Rodriguez, who claims that photos showed a gunshot wound on Foster’s neck, a wound that was not mentioned in the official report.  Whether true or not, the speculation about the Clintons’ involvement in a political assassination has only grown.

But of course there are so many more scandals it’s hard to keep count.  From appointments of Clinton Foundation donors to key State Department positions in a sort of “pay for play” scheme, to the salaries paid to people like Hillary’s Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin who, while working for the State Department, alsoworked for Teneo, a consulting firm run by another close Clinton crony.  And who could forget the Clinton Foundation and the myriad conflict of interest issues, lack of transparency, and outright criminality associated with it?

This article would go on for tens of thousands more words were it to chronicle all of Clinton’s scandals.  But the true focus here is not even simply on Clinton crimes, but rather on the culture of corruption and lawlessness that exists unfettered in Washington; it is the endemic corruption that the Clintons represent, perhaps better than anyone.

Corruption and Malfeasance: As American as Apple Pie

It is difficult to encapsulate in a few short paragraphs the multi-layered forms of corruption that are embedded in the very fabric of America’s political culture. Perhaps it could be best separated into three distinct, though interrelated, categories: the open door, the closed door, and the revolving door.

The open door of corruption and criminality represents the kind of wrongdoing that takes place out in the open, in full view of the public, but which is treated as anything but criminal.  Whether it be lying the US into wars of aggression – the Iraq War was based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, the war on Libya was sold on the pretext of lies about civilians being murdered by the government – or simply the obviously corrupt form of campaign financing that allows Wall Street and the corporate elites to bankroll the alleged “democracy” that the US so proudly proselytizes the world over; these forms of corruption and criminality are in many ways the bedrock of American politics.

As the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg famously stated, “To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” By this very definition, every political leader in the US going back decades is guilty of war crimes.

Going further, one can draw on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in a now legendary speech at Madison Square Garden in 1936, unequivocally proclaimed:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.

But today, rather than welcoming the hatred of Wall Street and the corporate oligarchy, America’s politicians pander to them, grovel before them, kiss their rings in hopes of securing for themselves a financially and professionally lucrative future. So deep is the rot that most Americans passively accept this as business as usual, failing to understand that it is anything but acceptable.

The closed door forms of criminality are often completely concealed from public view, and what does become known is only thanks to courageous actions by reporters and whistleblowers.  Take for instance the activities of the CIA, only a fraction of which were exposed by the Church and Pike Committees, which included obviously criminal activities ranging from the overthrow of governments to assassination of political leaders to domestic spying and propaganda, all of which being blatantly illegal.

But the closed door also conceals the activities of prominent political figures such as Hillary Clinton, whosesecret lobbying for things like right wing coup governments in Honduras, shows the degree to which politicians literally conspire in secret.  Clinton, like so many of her colleagues, also grovels at the feet of Wall Street financiers, including taking massive payoffs for speeches with the tacit wink-wink-nudge-nudge that goes along with them.

Finally, the revolving door is one of the shining examples of America’s political corruption, or perhaps better put, complete subservience to the corporate oligarchy.  When key government officials leave public life and head to that oft-lionized “private sector,” what they are actually providing is access – access to government for corporations and capital.

When the head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) leaves her government post and takes a job as President of Merck & Co. Inc’s vaccine division, no one bats an eye.

When the architect of Obamacare, who before working on the health plan was an executive at one of the nation’s largest health insurance providers, leaves her government job and takes a position with Johnson & Johnson’s government affairs and policy group, it garners barely a passing comment.

When Wall Street executives take positions at head of the Treasury Department – Tim Geithner and Hank Paulsen both worked for Goldman Sachs, as just one example – it is simply “the way things are.”  This revolving door form of political corruption may not be anything new, but it is so rarely defined as corruption.  But that’s exactly what it is.

However, none of this prevents Washington from publicly admonishing other countries for their corruption problems.  Russia? Zimbabwe? Venezuela? China? Nigeria? All corrupt.  United States? Well, er, ummm…Democracy! Freedom!  This is the sort of reflexive hypocrisy that typifies American exceptionalism or, as the rest of the world might call it, the arrogance of empire.

 

Related Podcast:

Progressive Commentary Hour – 7.19.16

Hillary and Tim Kaine: a Match Made on Wall Street

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By Eric Draitser

Source: CounterPunch

Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders warned that Hillary Clinton’s eventual vice presidential pick must not be someone from the milieu of Wall Street and Corporate America. And while Sanders is still fighting to win the Democratic Party nomination in what many have argued is a rigged system with a foregone conclusion, it appears that Sanders is also intent on influencing the course of the Clinton campaign and the party itself.

In a thinly veiled demand that Clinton embrace the core principles of the Sanders campaign in order to secure the support of Sanders’s political base, the insurgent Democratic candidate hoped aloud “that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies…taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

And while that description may sound positive for its sheer idealism, it does not seem to account for the fact that banks and corporations effectively own both major parties, and that nearly every top Democrat is in various ways connected to the very same entities. In any event, it is useful still to examine a few of the potential Clinton running mates in order to assess just what sort of forces are going to be put in motion to help deliver a Clinton presidency.

The Actors on the Playbill

Beltway pundits are fond of remarking that Tim Kaine, the underwhelming centrist Democrat senator (and former Governor) from Virginia, is at the top of the list for Clinton. He’s safe. He’s experienced. He’s safe. He’s a Democratic Party loyalist with experience fundraising. Oh, and did I mention that he’s safe? Such is the general tenor of the conversation around Kaine, a politician with a long track record and a mostly forgettable personality known more to DC insiders than to the general voting public.

What could be better for Hillary Clinton, perhaps the least liked Democratic (presumptive) nominee in decades, than to have a party establishment insider who represents the status quo as her running mate in an election year that will undoubtedly be remembered for the ostensibly anti-establishment candidates and rhetoric on display throughout?

To be fair, Kaine does represent Virginia, a swing state that is crucial for Donald Trump, and which could spell victory for Clinton should she carry it.  And of course, Kaine can also posture as “tough on Wall Street” from his days as DNC Chairman and party mouthpiece during the passage of the so-called “Wall Street reform” bill.  Despite nothing substantive coming out of the bill, Kaine is still able to cash in the political currency derived from that bill, and perhaps meekly shield Clinton from continued attacks vis-à-vis her connections to Wall Street.

Of course Kaine also comes with his own baggage, including his anti-abortion stance which earned him the ire of many pro-choice activists in Virginia when he was Governor.  Considering the shameless droning from Clinton and her backers about being “the first woman president,” it would certainly raise serious questions – and open up an obvious angle of attack for Trump – were she to sport her feminism and focus on women’s reproductive rights by selecting a man with an anti-abortion record.

A look down the list of other potential choices reveals that Clinton truly has very little to choose from.  Both Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro, as well as Labor Secretary Tom Perez, have both had their names bandied around as Clinton seeks to solidify the Latino vote in an election where the Republican candidate has worked tirelessly to alienate that all-important demographic as much as possible.  But of course, the obvious question to be asked in response to either of these potential selections would be “Who?” Neither Castro nor Perez is well known nationally, nor have either of them won major elections or really done anything of note in their tenure in Obama’s cabinet.  Despite being Latinos, they are utterly forgettable, and unlikely to bring significant returns to Clinton.

While other names such as New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker, as well as Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, have been discussed, both men hail from states with Republican governors, meaning that were they to accept a VP slot, their senate vacancies would be likely filled by Republicans, a scenario that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has already said “Hell no!” to, vowing to “yell and scream to stop that.”

Who Else Is “Ready for Hillary”?

So that then leaves the two most interesting potential running mates: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders himself. Warren, who conspicuously refused to endorse Clinton over Sanders, has tremendous upside for Clinton as she has been perhaps the Democratic Party’s most vehement opponent of Wall Street, having led many high profile attacks on the major banks in her tenure in the Senate.  From a public relations branding perspective, she is essentially the female Bernie Sanders, a progressive Democrat who presents herself as an ally of working people and an enemy of bankers. For Clinton, Warren would also round out the “First Woman…” card, allowing the Clinton campaign to quite literally become a campaign about breaking the glass ceiling in US politics. The stump speeches almost write themselves.

Finally, there’s Mr. #FeelTheBern himself. His latest comments (mentioned above) certainly do have a subtext that implies his willingness to accept a running mate slot.  Having fashioned himself as the champion of the middle class and threat to the Washington establishment, Bernie would provide much in the way of credibility to a lackluster Clinton campaign which has failed to excite even many ardent Democrats.  Sanders would also guarantee a unified Democratic Party ticket, and provide much needed defense of Clinton’s left flank.  In short, Sanders, like Warren, would give anti-Clinton progressives the pretext many of them need to justify their voting for the much-hated Clinton.

Never mind the fact that neither Sanders nor Warren would actually do anything to combat Wall Street finance capital as Vice President.  Never mind the fact that no one on Wall Street is particularly scared of either politician being given the ceremonial power that comes with the Vice Presidency.  These are just the kind of uncomfortable, but inescapable, facts that progressives must choose to ignore.

The difficulty for either Sanders or Warren is the marketing of their decision to left progressives, some of whom would see collaboration with Clinton and the Clinton political machine as a betrayal and a complete sell-out.  However, aside from driving a some relatively small number of progressives to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party (or stay home entirely), it is unlikely that the negative impact in the progressive base would amount to anything more than some hurt feelings followed by the usual acquiescence to the Democratic Party line.

If such an analysis sounds cynical and jaded, that’s because it is. Perhaps a better descriptor would be disdainful.  Indeed, as someone who watched with bemused melancholy as progressives lined up to support Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, my position on support for ANY Democrat is the same as Harry Reid’s position on swing state senator VP picks: Hell no!

Indeed, the very notion of collaboration with a war criminal and Wall Street puppet such as Clinton is anathema to everything the left and “progressives” are supposed to stand for.

Of course, there is also the elephant (and donkey) in the room: both major parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of finance capital and the corporations that rule over us. This is the realization that millions of Americans have already made, and which millions more are making.  This is the realization that keeps Democratic and Republican apparatchiks up at night.  And this critical revelation is what Bernie, Liz, & Co. are there to suppress.

Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.

The Eye of the Beholder: There is Never Anything New

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A review of John Steppling’s new book, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest

By Paul Haeder

Source: Dissident Voice

it is through mimesis, (identification with the mirror image) that one gains a sense of unity, self-containment and mastery over the body. If that was all that there was to it, humanity would be condemned to dwell forever entombed in the hell of mirrors. However, the identification with an Other in the mirror opens out the possibility for symbolic thought.

— John Desmond, author, thinker, who is interested in the history of marketing; construction of knowledge in marketing; consuming culture; morality and marketing; advertising and public policy

The beauty of ideas and words and sculpting frames and philosophical groundings is that we in Western culture having nothing more challenging than the numbness of a consumer-wrecked world where crass hucksterism and financial voodoo wizardry – even with its nuclear tipped propaganda, surveillance and missile dragnet technological orgasm science serves up – pales in comparison to any tried and tested narrative grammar of idea wizards.

Yet, dealing with words now, we see, as one noted playwright and thinker attests, involves PR packaged thinking, possibly a flagrant fascism tied to what can be written (thought) and what cannot be (said).

The title to his book says it all, sometimes – Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest – That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said. This is just out in 2016, by playwright, raconteur and philosopher, John Steppling, from the organization, Mimesis International. The book is a compilation of some of his blog postings, and not to denigrate the word “blog” to mean anyone and their uncle expressing anything out there on the world wide web.

Like stepping stones into Steppling’s mind, each essay is a revving reverberating call to mental action, as each essay follows the Introduction with more nitrous oxide pumped into each cylinder of the 12 cylinder motor of his mind: one, Narrative & Empathy; two, Magical Thinking; three, Pedagogy; four, Nothing is Art; five, The Impossible Playwright; six, Someone to Watch Over Me; seven, The Political Uncanny; eight, That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said; nine, The Hidden Narrative.

Here, Steppling drills down into the cortex of the American – European, white, patriarchal, Puritan and Elitist – brain, sort of the flash mob mentality we are downloading determinedly. He plugs holes in the tinny junk thinking and pseudo intellectualism hovering around academia, the So Called Liberal Media, the Corporate boardrooms, the waiting rooms at TED Talks 3.0, and the ER’s resuscitating the pop culture that doubles in the minds of the masters of consumption as true art (sic). It’s a violent country, the art is anti-art, and the world of the Imperialist, right-wing or leftie, is predicated on a Heart of Darkness destruction that Steppling decants into the incantation:

The unfinished and fragmentary now emerge as comments all by themselves. When the worst aggressions in society today are often those paraded as benign, or self branded as innocent, even curative, the default response must be one of disconnection. The age of marketing, fueled by Imperialist Capital, has obliterated ideas of belief. Ideas of evidence and trust in our own feelings are all the time under duress and coercion. Aesthetic coercion is the staple of a system of image and narrative control the erases the individual while unrelentingly trumpeting his triumph.

Mimesis conceptually and psychoanalytically is something Theodore Adorno, Robert Hullor-Kentor and Fabo Akcelrud Durao study as they break into the mind of the human condition under the duress of capitalism-hucksterism-market competition-cultural posturing in order to understand how we as thinkers and believers re-narrate when we read a novel or watch a film, as well as engage with poetry and theater. Steppling is looking at this sirocco of thought tied to art, and it’s only that, art, if it changes us somehow. Art can mean buildings, parks, ways entire city blocks and towns are laid out and made to be something more than a mess against nature or utilitarian. Or practical in the Puritanical way. Looking at the Palaeolithic rock paintings around the world, Steppling posits that these sophisticated and voluminous paintings are “exclusively mimetic participation in a magical object .. and that Neolithic artifacts represent a significant change of consciousness, and of the human relationship to the group.”

This short book delves into the heart of what it is to be human, what Pierre Janet (L’Evolution de la Memoire) says how we become the very beingness of “I” – Narration created humanity. This book is just a small sluice into the larger wetlands that spread across the more rarefied postulations of Steppling’s thoughts and comments, here, at this blog: John Steppling – The Practice of Writing – Theatre Film Culture).

Ironically, his most recent post talks about his youth, when he was born in 1951, Laguna Beach, where his mother worked at Woolsworth and father acted in community theater. Steppling looks at Charles Olson and his work in the Yucatan, the same year, 65 years ago, and in that looking back, Steppling unfragments the fragments of memory, youth, childhood, origin, which all boils down to a Western culture seeded with capitalism that is moved by destruction and the boom in the bust:

When Olson dug into the dirt of the Yucatan hills, my parents had moved to Laguna Beach. My mother worked at Woolworths as a counter girl. My father acted in the community theatre there. It was a sleepy beautiful barely touched village, really. It lay off the old Highway — the old PCH. In those years nobody thought about the destruction of entire pine forest in the San Bernadino mountains. Olson didn’t dream of tourist high rises, resorts for white people, all across the Yucatan peninsula.

A half century has been spent in the West destroying things, and destroying people, and destroying beauty. A post apocalyptic treeless suburb, that is the inner circle of hell. Having to live next to affluent white men who bitch about Jews, and then look to play a round of golf at one of the thousands of courses in drought ravaged California. While in far off corners of the globe U.S. made bombs explode and kill and maim. These same guys, over drinks, might discuss topics like ‘reverse racism’. Fifty solid years of this. — John Steppling’s blog

Imagine in this crass, Hollywood-drenched, Chosen Few World of high financial and structural violence and rape and rapine, resource wars, total cultural and physical annihilation of the tribes, and we have Steppling surfing these monster 100-foot waves seeking what it means to be in the present reading the footprints of the past, histories written and rewritten, and into the eye of the poet, which is the vortex of our cultural wars: “The sedimentation of terror into language, specifically into the naming of things, is that magical element in spoken text that differentiates it from reading to oneself silently. Both can be mimetic, but the range of the frightening is greater when it happens on stage.”

Steppling dis-interns the graveyards of humanity and philosophy in a process of eliminating vis-a-vis this modern, scientific and technocratic metallic world the magic, the thoughtful, the greater good of humanity to express, as poets and as the players, actors, in this life theater. He ties this into those who have fought to erase memory, to dominate:

The domination of nature coincided with the neutralizing of Language. Shorn of terror, the cry became the concept, Dionysian energy was expelled, superstition replaced by logic. This was the force of Enlightenment thinking, and the correctives were real, but less observed, the cleansing of that which allowed for the tragic to reveal itself. The tragic as a sensibility; and without that sensibility, the infinite domination, unchecked rational horror grow on the underside of the image and word.

He’s looking at class in most of his work, and Steppling discovers that corporate interests have eliminated the outsider, helped to cull the very idea of class and what the artist’s role is in “the great Spectacle today.” We see threaded like glacial melt Steppling’s look at how we in this punishment society put down the poor, forcing the poor into some crazy reformulaton in our theater or film.

Housebreak them. Make them heel. Make them sentimental. This is the paternalism of ‘encouragement.’ I’ve always felt insulted when anyone wanted to encourage me. Encouragement is the sadism of the ownership class, the good plantation owner, those who enjoy the power that comes from encouragement. I’ve said before, grants and the writing of applications for grants is a form of psychological servitude.

Art, politics, education, and creativity, the word, the intersection of a neoliberalism, a fake Left, all those ideas come into the mental landscape of Steppling, who is a studied playwright, living in a world of intellectual conceptualizations, and he sees the bright line of mimesis as how Adorno formulated it – “as a way out from under the crushing conformity and standardization of mass culture, to trace authentic artworks and to trace the path of their occurrence,” John writes.

I’ve been experiencing first-hand this deadening of culture, ideas, words, poetry, in the education systems I have taught in, and the echo of William Burroughs who called school “the Job” is a place where Steppling and I and so many others see as penal colonies where “the spontaneous fantasies of children are literally beaten out of them . . . the business of extinguishing that fantasy and creativity.”

Mimesis is a form of expression, not a Xerox copier in the head. – John Steppling

This book is a slice on the microscope slide looking at the DNA of modern American psychosis – and the truth is in the antithesis of human and narrative truth, Steppling has discovered in his six decades on the planet:

The only truth now is bureaucratic, administrative, or data based. The fixedness of both ideas and beliefs in those ideas, has disappeared from the contemporary life. One feels that people, in general, deal with quantifications, with administrative rules and regulations. The age of regulations. They do not explore the nature of meaning.

I can digress here, which is one of Steppling’s favorite pastimes writing — entering and exiting the rabbit hole. Punishment, retribution, class war, patriarchal bullshit. Check this out — state of ever-Blue Politics of Washington State:

Division of child support services killing the parent (mostly men) big time if some part of child support has not been paid:

a warning — driver’s license will be suspended; no commercial driver’s license shall be gotten; all Fish and Wildlife licenses issued suspended (can’t fish, hunt, or trap); can’t gather seaweed or shellfish; you won’t be able to maintain insurance coverage; doing business in the state of WA will be affected; your ability to practice your licensed profession, occupation, or trade in WA will be suspended; you shall be held in contempt of court by the state of WA.

In so many ways, Steppling speaks to my own struggle with education and social work and social justice in this state or anywhere. Imagine, you fuck up and don’t pay child support, so, the state goes after you with vengeance. Ahh, then you end up in Haeder’s casebook, homeless, strung out, lost, abandoned. It does happen, these laws and punishments, this retributive society, one that is spittle from Hollywood and the leadership (sic) class that is bent on eviscerating the poor. Steppling says there are no writers, poets, musicians, artists, philosophers really chipping away at the pedantic or the narrow self-important angles to get a real narrative of what sort of fascism that is here now and has been here for decades. Again, time and time again, I talk to these Democrats, these people voting for same sex marriage, same sex adoption, goofy ideas about girls and women in war, all the shitty PC and broken diversity crap, and, alas, we are in a time of collective abandonment, a psyche that is cleaved by trauma, because really very few care to know the cause of so much class hate, class pain.

The bedrock of this lack of thinking and struggle to see meaning as the universal pathway to thought is a society transforming nature and the inclination of the human to work within self outward, working to be original and the same at the time, but now we are a culture denuded of agency, split into identities created by marketing and advertising, and transfixed into a “giant apparatus of policing.” The checks and balances are those so-called culture purveyors, those gesticulating freaks that are unwilling to see a life, live a life, outside of Capital Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Fascism of Privatization.

Steppling doesn’t delve deeply in some of the neo-tribalist thinkers in any of his work; I’ve always been able to make that leap by thinking about the ideas of tribalism cocooned in the philosopher Daniel Quinn’s brain, who calls this a period of remembering, dislodging the great forgetting around what it is to be human outside the narrow constraints of 12,000 or 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture. John does see tribes of the past living in relatively stable settings. The elimination of so many tribes around the world in the name of capital, manifest destiny, whiteness, is a testament to Western societies slurping up the coin of the realm at a price: “ . . . contemporary societies of the West have perfected a kind of industrial level violence and irrational lust for conquest, and a fetid clenched jaw blindness that has no rival in history. It is the culmination of something that went very wrong.”

Steppling looks at theater, architecture, post-modernism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, the art scene, fine art, photography, Hollywood, propaganda, education, all the lower forms of capitalism, all those devolving collective dendrites of a culture preened by cultural gatekeepers and the models of each generation’s tragically hip pseudo thinkers, all those posing intellectuals.

The crucible of Steppling’s galvanizing thinking is tied to what is authentic artwork, what is the concrete thing that is the spontaneous creative gravity pulling forth this flash-point of the highly creative, which is at the same instance a series of contradictions that make the process magic and concrete.

Edward Said calls this the undefined time and place. Steppling adds, “These are the contours of the imagination. We hear, we invent, we are deaf – but all of it is engaged with, and absorbed.”

In the larger frame of Steppling’s looming and far-ranging essays on/at/in his blog, we are taken into a minefield of the depraved minds of those cultural and propaganda spinners who have not only co-opted liberalism and urbanity . . . but what it means to be a writer, someone telling stories versus someone marketing stories, spinning and PR-lobbing things that are not accurate. This world Steppling covers extensively in his writing, calling to task the posings/posturing and the denaturing of figurative art into something set in a ghost-land of misled identities, narratives and characters.

We get to the data driven shit world of today, all the bureaucracies, this punishment culture, this one driven by a war machine run by USA, Israel, the G-7, the wicked stinger of the scorpion called capitalism. There is a critique of the whiteness of this imperialism, depraved and puritan all in one heave, and there is gentrification of the land and culture and arts, as well as this art-loving haute bourgeoisie class that has denuded meaning and hard work from education, learning, and thinking. This is the class warfare that provides the fodder for ever more Draconian and pervasive punishment and retribution and financial recriminations.

A world people by bearded Duck Dynasty creeps and nerds stuck in Ikea-furnished prisons. It all comes down to lacking curiosity and dependence on technocratic dogma. Titrating back into this deadening tool of marketing and generic history and measured thinking. Steppling calls for open schools which “must offend, must drive some off, must never be bland or generic. Better to be wrong.”

Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, “teaching people to see and hear is the first thing. And then to stimulate the mimetic in relation to all of it. To relearn narrative and story. That is the beginning.”

What Freire posits – He who thinks and does not learn is in great danger.

The vocabulary of our times is not up to snuff in Steppling’s view. It’s torn from our collective memory, reshaped as a kind of amnesia, what Russell Jacoby calls “… the general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychological . . . . Rather it is social amnesia – memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamics of this society.” In the critical mass of the mind in this human condition is what we might like to consider true artwork, a type of “force of negativing the madness of society, the waste and abuse, and this is the negative dialectic; negate the negation, for that is the reality today.”

Daily I toil teaching people around me – younger – to live with resistance and refusal as the underpinning of any life in this hijacked capitalism, the drone warfare of consumerism bombarding us every nano second. Steppling is a friend of Henry Giroux, and in this short book pulls from one of his books, The Violence of Organized Forgetting (2014):

Students are now taught to ignore human suffering and to focus mainly on their own self-interests and by doing so they are being educated to exist in a political and moral vacuum. Education under neoliberalism is a form of radical depoliticization, one that kills the radical imagination and the hope for a world that is more just, equal, and democratic.

This insight Steppling brings to art, unraveling the fabric of mass media, his microscope on those attempts at art in TV, and his dog-earing philosophy-psychology-the dark arts of culture. For him, there is a real sense of lamentation in America, longing for some imagined or pre-invented past where there was “order” or some sense of commonly held beliefs.

We are in a time of conformity, Steppling poses, even in our supposed non-conforming perception, and in that broken covenant this society has a  “narcissistic desire . . . self aggrandizement . . . splitting and projection of our bad selves onto the Other.”

He ventures back to how much we have changed in America, how culture is tied to an infantile psyche, “ever afraid of being found out in its incompleteness, in turn cannot afford to gaze too long at certain things.”

I see it everyday, working in Chinatown, Portland, serving as a case manager for homeless, recovering addicts, early release prisoners, veterans, families. This gaze, this head down society looking at those flip after flip pages of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, well, it is madness to see the broken people living on pavement, actually in the doorways of fancy restaurants and hip shoe stores. Raging lunacy, pickled brains, entire families and their dogs out there, in the oh so hip Portlandia represents what Steppling pinpoints in his work.

I stop and talk to those really down and out, on my way to my office where I serve people who have at least gotten teeth yanked, bellies checked, and are in temporary housing and tied to the recovery model of Narcotics Anonymous, Heroin Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, you name it, all those sponsors and other case managers. These people on the streets have their stories too, amazing ones, torn from the psychological hell that people create for their children, spouses, friends, lovers.

“The purpose of Western capitalist society is to erase ALL stories and replace them with commercials, or, in other words, with anti-stories,” he writes. This is the crux of what Steppling uncovers throughout his musings and philosophical ministerial show. Until the story we have in 21st America is one where the working stiffs, including social workers and teachers like me, imagine we may be moving up some ladder, to be the kings and queens of our castles, to have those two week trips to Machu Pichu, or wherever, any fantasy that has been peddled in the crap we consume — TV, drama, movies, news, magazines, the WWW, education.

I find it more and more difficult to find empathy coming from these people, and even supposedly successful folk with jobs and mortgages and some flimsy undergraduate degrees can spew some of the most hateful fascist craps — “Way too many people on earth. Seven-point-one billion, so someone has to go. I have no problem putting the needle in the arm of some loser druggies shooting or snorting up. They should be the first to go.”

This propaganda consumed by these suburbanites, calling for eugenics and mass slaughter against those we love to stigmatize. You know, people who were once loved or held as babies, now on the streets, struggling, lunatics panhandling, voices in their heads, forever driven to show us how close we are to disaster. Ourselves.

Steppling cites Arno Gruen, how hatred is fueled to destroy empathy. “Sometimes we blame the victims. They make us feel very uncomfortable; we are ashamed of our empathy because we hate the victim ourselves.” (The Betrayal of the Self, 2007)

This is what Steppling unseals in this hermetically coffined society where the stories of struggle — real struggle, the hardscrabble struggle of barely knowing who we are, let alone the struggle of the streets, this school to prison pipeline and cradle to grave social system that has been set up by Capitalism  — are never written about with depth and empathy and understanding, and the victims grow, and nothing Hollywood or literary-wood or drama-wood produces even is close to the reality of struggle, near death, Dickensian and Kafka-esque, all of the stories that need to be told, never get told.

Just cut-outs, the reality of people who do not exist in the minds of the controllers, those gate-keepers, those plied with money artists and editors and MFA instructors and super-star Oprah Book of the Month folk.

His look at the death of agency and the death of independent thought, the killing of questioning minds and the suffocation of the soul speak loudly in this book and on/in/at his blog.

Just today . . . . Thinking about Steppling’s look at this failure of the punishment state, the war on drugs, the war on people, I ran into story after story on my caseload — people the triple victim of a penality-corrupt legal-penal system. Older women, now clean and sober, in stable housing my organization provides, with some hands up, and yet, story after story of obscene legal bills being busted for possession, spending 75 days in the clinker and coming out with $3000 bills for the court costs and the fees and such, and, then, two years later, after homelessness, after living on the streets, dumpster diving, scrapping, anything but dealing with letter and summons and warrnats, bam, the $3000 is now $5000, and then the driver’s license is suspended, another $1500 owed there for penalities.

Imagine, trying to get these people minimum wage jobs, and then all these fees and retributions and pounds of flesh held against them, in the tens of thousands per person. Former homeless people, who were not worrying about US Postal deliveries or summons or the long arm of the law creating debtors’ fees, prison, etc. These are not the stories of the elite, the vaunted value-added ones educated at Harvard or UCLA. The stories of my people are on the police blotters or are ripped to shreds by the middle class Speilbergs or anyone with hearts of stone and brains channeled for the One Percent, to tell stories that are both lies and false memories.

Imagine this entire gambit broken down as a way to push more propaganda and the dark arts of vilifying and blaming the victim.

Foreclosure after couch surfing after stolen children after endless payments to the ferryman and the financial philanderers.

This is the way Steppling points his readers to, as the underskin of his work:

And one sees it today in corporate news coverage. The control by the state of “message.” The “message” of the Olympics is Russia is bad, and full of stupid people. You see terms like “cassocks” used a lot. You see the control in what is covered and what is NOT covered. Your see it in the idiotic disinformation on the planned covert destabilizing of Venezuela (as an example). . . . The media distorts Israeli violence and apartheid. It treats all dissent in the US as either terrorism or kooks. And most of all, the control is exercised via ” entertainment.” The constant, CONSTANT, outpouring of stupidity.

So we are here, where disagreements with the law, the financial rules, all those bankers’ games, everything that culls any sense of common sense, that is somehow suspect. There is madness in what Steppling points to, and this is a country that is in possession of a stone (stoic) heart of a killer, as D.H, Lawrence wrote.

The struggle to understand and value art that “knows something that we do not know” is a constant theme in John Steppling’s work-world.

Saturday Matinee: Once Upon a Time in the West

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“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) is one of Sergio Leone’s most beloved epics for good reason. It tells a powerful tale of a widow landowner’s struggle against a railroad tycoon intertwined with a conflict between men with an archaic code of honor. The film is well known for arguably the greatest soundtrack of Ennio Morricone’s career and iconic performances from Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and a memorable cameo by Woody Strode.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2c770m_1968-once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-henry-fonda-claudia-cardinale-jack-elam-charles-bronson-jason-roba_shortfilms