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

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Clair Bernish

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 and Tim Kaine: a Match Made on Wall Street

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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.

Commodifying Dissent: Media, the Arts and the Hope in Cooperatives

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Yoav Litvin

Source: CounterPunch

In the latest onslaught of apocalyptic news updates: The European Union is in crisis after the BREXIT vote, endless wars continue to ravage Africa and the Middle East causing millions of refugees to flee for their lives, ISIS strikes again, this time slaughtering over one hundred and fifty innocent Iraqis in Baghdad, and man-made climate change is wreaking havoc, fueling the third major mass extinction of species on Earth.

Meanwhile, back in the halls of empire the theatrics of the electoral process, together with the usual seasonal sports spectacles are mesmerizing and distracting the vast majority of the American public from the pressing issues threatening society. Despair and hatred mar our streets, nightclubs, schools, churches and movie theaters. Greed has overtaken empathy and a few powerful individuals have squashed the collective. Whole communities have been ravaged by neoliberal agendas that imprison and impoverish, all in the name of the almighty greenback.

But it is just another day at the office for the 1%. They own the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. As Chris Hedges frequently stresses: “We’ve undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. And it’s over. We’ve lost, and they’ve won.”

The vast majority of media sources, the watchdogs meant to protect democracy and the people’s interests at all costs, have succumbed to the rule of profit, aka “ratings”. They have become de factopropaganda outlets meant to manufacture consent and sell us on the faux virtues of consumerism and the American dream.

The corporate-owned mainstream media has been complicit on many levels. It is business as usual when a major outlet like MSNBC casually interrupts US Congresswoman Jane Harman speaking about NSA mass surveillance to feature the “breaking news” of teen pop star Justin Bieber’s DUI arrest. News networks carry on for hours with mind-numbing repetition about Donald Trump’s racist and misogynist antics, while all but completely ignoring a massive sit-in led by Democracy Spring, a movement that champions an end to the corruption of big money in our politics. Pundits whose job is to cry wolf endlessly discuss ISIS and the “threat of radical Islam”, but thorough analyses of the continued crimes of capitalism and imperialism are taboo, not to mention any productive discussions about systemic alternatives.

In this climate of corrupted news outlets, media that are independent of corporate funding are crucial in providing the people accurate information about systems of power and control.

But historically, the media has not been the only watchdog for the people and against powerful interest groups. Artists and other creatives have often used their works to voice progressive ideals that rebel against widely held conceptions of gender, race and class. As such, artists have been among the first voices of dissent to be targeted by totalitarian and fascist regimes. In the American capitalist culture, artists fall prey to a system that monetizes and commodifies all walks of life, including health care and education. Many artists willfully sell out, becoming court jesters who contribute their art to the needs of empire, i.e. as propaganda. Now studied as a degree at schools for higher education, the bulk of arts have become part of an “art market” – a multi-billion dollar industry that is more about a lifestyle and an investment, than it is about progressive messages or a passion for a new and interesting aesthetic. In the current cynical era when replicas sell for $100,000, there is little room for political art that expresses genuine and independent notions that challenge systemic conventions.

There are exceptions. Some artists refuse to corrupt themselves and their art by adhering to the whims of the “art market”. Notably, since the late sixties, there has been a movement of graffiti and street artists who have claimed public space from private owners. Born in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City (arguably) and now a global phenomenon, graffiti and street art often empower disenfranchised communities by serving as a voice of dissent, and providing free, uncensored messages regardless of commercial constraints.

The pathology behind the hijacking of media and the arts by the lords of capital runs deeper than the mere criminality of the 1%. It lies at the roots of one of the fundamental American values- individualism, where the achievements of the lone genius are sanctified, and those of the collective are ignored or even vilified. Individualism divides and conquers, providing the promise of immense spoils for victors, while always blaming failure on individual inadequacies, not systemic ones.

The cult of individualism has been so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that it has degenerated the biological human affinity to empathize rather than disregard, collaborate rather than dominate and has stifled the desire to give without the expectation of immediate return. Individualism has made cooperation a waste of time. But the fact of the matter is that humans have evolved as a social species and naturally yearn for and need connection, affirmation, love and stimulation to survive, thrive and create.

The crises humanity faces leave no choice but to decommodify dissent, abandon notions of individuality at the expense of others, topple hierarchies, and unite around democratic cooperatives that promote community, democracy and solidarity. Returning ownership of dissent to the public is a crucial step towards revolutionizing the workspace, en route toward a truly free and just democratic society.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience.

FBI Investigation Produces No Indictment, But Proves Hillary Clinton’s a Serial Liar

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

Hillary Clinton may or may not be a crook. That remains to be proven, though the sheer magnitude of the wealth that she and husband Bill have amassed since leaving the White House, and while she was serving as Secretary of State — nearly a quarter of a billion dollars earned by two people with no known skills capable of producing that kind of income — should raise questions. What can be stated now as fact though, is that Hillary is a serial liar.

If this wasn’t clear already from her long history of distortion and prevarication — like her false claim that she had to “duck to avoid sniper fire” during a state visit to Bosnia — it is clear now from FBI Director James Comey’s 11-page public report on his agency’s year-long investigation into her use of a private server for all her private and official emails during her term as Secretary of State.

That report has exposes her serial lying to both Congress and the public about that illegal use of private email service to handle her public business.

As the Associated Press reports, Clinton lied in March 2015 when she declared in one of her rare news conferences, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

But as Comey reports, she did. Quite often in fact. The FBI in its exhaustive investigation found at least 113 email chains –some of which had to be uncovered after they had been erased by Clinton’s private lawyers — contained material that was classified at the time of sending, including some that were classified Top Secret and that referred to a “highly classified special-access program.”

She lied again at that same press conference when she asserted, “I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work related” to the State Department.

Not true, according to the FBI, and also, of course, to the Inspector General of the State Department, with whose own investigation of her actions, Clinton simply refused to cooperate.

Clinton lied when she said earlier this month, in an NBC interview, “I never received nor sent any material that was market classified.” Comey says that in fact her system did handle emails that bore specific markings indicating they were classified.

Clinton lied when she tried, as she explained more than once, including in that same March 15 news conference addressing the issue, to claim that she had used her own Blackberry phone rather than a State Department secure phone, simply because she “thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails instead of two.” In fact, Comey said his agents determined that Clinton had “used numerous mobil devices to view and send email,” all using her personal account. So much for wanting to use “just one device”! Comey said she also had used different non-government servers, all of them vulnerable to hacking.

Clinton lied again when she claimed that her private server was on “property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches.” She lied again when she added, “The use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.” Her campaign website adds the equally false assertion that “There is no evidence there was ever a breach.”

In fact, all Comey will say is that the FBI did not uncover a breach, but he adds that because of the sophisticated abilities of “hostile” forces (i.e foreign countries’ intelligence services) that would be engaging in any such hacking, “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.” They would just not leave any “footprints,” he explains.

We also know Clinton was lying when she said, “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.” The falsity of that particular lie was exposed by the State Department Inspector General, who in his own report on her private server scandal, found that she had never “sought or received approval” to operate a private server for her State Department communications, and added that as Secretary of State, she “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with State Department offices.”

Some of these violations that Clinton has objectively lied about may not be crimes. Others clearly are. At a minimum, Clinton deliberately sought to violate the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, which make all but classified documents public records that are supposed to be made available on request to journalists and the public on request (and even many secret documents upon appeal). By conducting her official business on a private server, Clinton was assuring that no FOIA requests could touch her.

The question of Clinton’s “trustworthiness” is a huge issue among the public, with all but her die-hard supporters — a minority within the Democratic Party.

Maybe some people don’t care in these cynical times when it’s simply assumed that “all politicians lie,” but one hopes that those lies will relate to personal foibles and sins, not official business. A nation that celebrates great leaders like George Washington, who at least according to the national mythology once said, “I cannot tell a lie,” and Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln, for their integrity and forthrightness, surely can demand at least a semblance of truthfulness in its top leader.

Clearly Hillary Clinton has failed that test of leadership, and in a big way.

I’m concerned that the FBI and the State Department’s own Office of Inspector General, as well as Republicans in Congress, have missed the real import of Clinton’s lying. It is not that she violated rules and standards that may have led to national security secrets being hacked, serious though that may be. For one thing, powerful intelligence agencies like those of the Russians and Chinese, just like the US’s own National Security Agency, have the capability to hack even the government’s most secure servers.

The question of Clinton’s “trustworthiness” is a huge issue among the public, with all but her die-hard supporters — a minority within the Democratic Party.

Clearly Hillary Clinton has failed that test of leadership, and in a big way.

LONDON CALLING! The DNC in England on ‘hols’

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCowNews

Primaries polished off, the Democratic National Committee has apparently decided to pop over to swinging London on holiday. Because what’s happening right now in Great Britain explains how Bernie Sanders somehow “lost” the California Democratic primary to a candidate who couldn’t fill a high school auditorium there without trucking in busloads of middle-aged white women wearing boxy pantsuits and smug smiles.

What’s happening in London puts what happened in California in the context of globalization.

Voting in the “Brisket” Referendum

They were voting on “Brisket,” the surprisingly highly-contested election about choosing the Best BBQ in the UK.

In the end, newspaper columnists were shocked by the voter’s bad taste. Members of the commentariat were said to be absolutely appalled, especially at a few sneers and dirty looks conflated into a rise in racist and anti-immigrant hate crimes, like the non-existent chairs that weren’t thrown after the Nevada Democratic convention.

Disinformation acknowledges no borders, knows no terrestrial bounds!

“The Brexit vote has precipitated the deepest political crisis in Britain in a generation. The nation is divided and the climate is lurching dangerously towards the far right. At this critical moment for the future of the country, the Blairites have opportunistically mounted an anti-Corbyn coup. They have been incubating this coup from day one despite Corbyn’s overwhelming mandate.”

Some guy Americans have never heard of—or if they’ve heard of him don’t know how to pronounce his name— named Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labor Party (only they spell it “Labour,” like teen-aged girls spelling their names cute: “That Cyndy! She’s special!”

Dozens of Labour Members of Parliament (confusing, don’t they know “MP’” stands for Military Police?) want this Corbyn guy to resign.

It seems they never liked him from the get-go, and would have shrugged him off long before now, except he won a massive victory from the Party’s rank-and-file in an election.

And now he won’t go!

I thought, OMG! He’s just like Bernie!

And that’s when everything began to make sense.

The ‘objective correlative’

Remember how just after the California primary everything looked very “Through the Looking Glass? Remember? Bernie Sanders drawing monster crowds all up and down California… and then going on to “defeat” in the Democratic Presidential primary?

Losing to a candidate who couldn’t fill a third-grade classroom without sprinkling the crowd with California Democratic officials?

Sure ya do, mate.

“Mister Peabody Almost Goes to Washington”

We’ve all seen the movie. A candidate barnstorms across the state. Draws multitudes. Enthusiastic slogans chanted all around.

Election night is always the next scene in the montage. Basking in the approval of an excited crowd at a victory party roaring in celebration. The candidate waves for quiet (who are they kidding? Everyone knows they don’t mean it.)

But not this time. Not in California. Lucy picked up the football, took it home. It was DEFLATE-GATE writ large.

Romeo wakes up, sees Juliet dead, tears all around.

Many thought, “I must be dreamin’. This can’t be real.” Because there was no “objective correlative” to help bring sense to the experience. No recognizable human moment, as in “Romeo wakes up, sees Juliet dead, tears all around.”

On Youtube, a baby struggles to stand; we all smile. Watch a toddler stumble across a room, swaying side to side like a drunk on a gambling cruise unexpectedly caught in high seas.

We silently urge the drooling little thing on. “Trust your tiny gyroscope, diapered one. In your forehead. Behind your Third Eye.”

There was no recognizable human moment in California, nor many of the other Democratic primaries.

Just a sinking feeling that—once again—we’ve been had.

Hey! That sinking feeling! Stay outta London

But the jury’s still out on London.

“A massive show of support for Jeremy Corbyn has left the coup coalition of media pundits and disgruntled MPs with their jaws to the floor. With only 24 hours notice, over 10,000 people marched on parliament square to reinforce the Labour leader’s unprecedented democratic mandate.”

Being Britain, things quickly got snarky.

We wish them well. They’re a plucky bunch. Some have even had their lips surgically removed, which must be a pretty painful procedure.

Dallas Shootings: White Supremacists Succeeded in Provoking Black Extremism

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: Though at this time it’s still too early too tell whether the shooting was in fact an act of black extremism and/or a more complex situation intended to appear that way, the author’s central argument, that the social chaos created by such events benefit a select few, remains valid.)

By Eclinik Learning

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Considered to be one of the worst in US police history, five police officers were shot dead and scores wounded by snipers, presumably as a retaliation to the blatant killings of two black men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Initial reports said that the three snipers were not part of those who joined the Black Lives Matter rally where the shootings occurred.

This event has just raised the confrontation between the white police and the black community to a new level.

The existence of a well-organized group of white supremacists that are occupying positions of power and within the armed services of the government is at the root of all these perennial deadly and racially loaded confrontations.

The graphic video of the murder cannot be subjected to wild speculations because it shows beyond doubt of a cold blooded murders by police officers who happens to be white.

These fanatics are not just hurting black people but they are those same extremists who were aiming their pepper spray to black and white kids alike during those massive Occupy Movement rallies, in close coordination with those same mindless talkingheads who are still running the mainstream media today.

Their aim is to provoke racial, political, and cultural conflict wherever possible. It would be a complete waste of our time to try and change their trajectory considering that these extremists completely believe in their own superiority just by the virtue of the color of their skin.

A more drastic action, like removing them all from power, should be done. These people don’t respond positively to vocal street protests.

As far as this recent event is concern, there is now a very high probability that a counter-retaliation will occur against the black people. But we don’t think that it could reach the level of a full blown racial confrontation considering that a sizable number of the Americans know exactly who the real enemy is.

Who has benefited from this drastic shift of the national attention?

This event undoubtedly and effectively shifted the national conversation away from the FBI’s absolution of one Hillary Clinton for her “extremely careless” handling of state secrets via her personal email server, which in itself was just a mere diversion of more heinous crimes that the Clinton couple have to cover-up all these years.

It would not surprise us a bit if something bad will happen on the other side of the Atlantic to stop the fallout from the Chilcot Report indicating that Tony Blair was lying about everything that has to do with the invasion of Iraq.

Aside from these obvious motivations of escaping executive accountability by covering lies with more lies, and by putting the people of the world constantly on the edge, the endless appetite for gun control and mass surveillance lies at the very foundation of all these unprovoked police shootings and false flag operations.

Only this time, those who survived for a while begun to shoot back. The only problem is that the wrong police may have been the casualties.

It is therefore a lot wiser for those would-be snipers to set their sight directly on the Eye of the Pyramid.

Related Video:

FBI Whitewashes Serious Hillary Criminality

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

After President Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret meeting, Lynch's Justuce Department announced that it would not indict Hillary Clinton for her private email server and destruction of public dcuments, because she had no obvious intent to break the law, just extreme carelessness for it. Whatever happened to "ignorance of the law is no excuse"?

After President Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret meeting, Lynch’s Justice Department announced that it would not indict Hillary Clinton for her private email server and destruction of public documents, because she had no obvious intent to break the law, just extreme carelessness for it. Whatever happened to “ignorance of the law is no excuse”?

By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

Reacting to FBI director James Comey whitewashing Hillary’s criminality serious enough to send ordinary people to prison, Trump was right calling the system “rigged.”

In a Tuesday afternoon statement, he said she “compromised the safety of the American people by storing highly classified information on a private email server with no security.”

“Our adversaries almost certainly have a blackmail file on (her), and this fact alone disqualified her from service.”

She lied saying she didn’t use her home server to maintain or send classified information. Comey confirmed over 100 emails classified when sent, including top secret ones.

Deleting thousands of emails compounded her criminality, ordinary Americans held to one standard, figures like Hillary and husband Bill another.

The system isn’t just rigged. It’s too debauched to fix. So far, Bernie Sanders remains noticeably silent on Comey’s whitewash. He acknowledged support for Clinton earlier, saying through a spokesperson the FBI’s decision won’t affect his campaign.

House Speaker Paul Ryan indicated Comey may be called before Congress to testify, saying “(w)e’re going to have hearings. There are a lot of unanswered questions here…”

“What really just mystifies me is the case he makes and then the conclusion he draws. This certainly does underscore the belief that the Clintons live above the law.”

“He shredded the case she had been making all year long. I think we need to know more…” She should be “block(ed) from access to classified material” as a tainted candidate.

“Based on (Comey’s) own statement…damage (was) done to the rule of law.” On the same day, Obama campaigned with Hillary in North Carolina, stumping for her for the first time – leading the crowd in chanting “Hill-a-ry,” adding he’s “fired up! Ready to go for her!”

“I’m here today because I believe in Hillary Clinton, and I want you to help elect her to be the next president of the United States of America,” he ranted, ignoring Comey’s whitewash.

Instead he lied, saying “there has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office than Hillary Clinton. Ever.”

One unindicted war criminal endorsed another. As secretary of state, she orchestrated naked aggression on Libya and Syria, raping and destroying both countries – responsible for mass slaughter, destruction and unspeakable human misery.

Her deplorable rap sheet includes numerous other high crimes, including involvement in toppling foreign leaders, rigging Haiti’s election to install a US-controlled puppet, and racketeering – the Clinton Foundation a self-enrichment, influence peddling, money-laundering scheme masquerading as a charitable NGO.

Her record in office and since leaving government shows support for imperial lawlessness, indifference to human suffering, and addiction to self-aggrandizement, along with using her high office to accumulate great wealth.

She’s the only presidential aspirant in US history responsible for multiple high crimes demanding prosecution, yet favored to succeed Obama, things likely rigged to assure it.

With Democrats meeting later in July to nominate her their standard bearer, there was virtually no chance of Comey throwing party politics into disarray by recommending she be charged and prosecuted.

A loyal soldier, he’ll likely be asked to remain FBI director in a Clinton administration if she’s elected. Reportedly so will ethics-challenged Attorney General Loretta Lynch, longtime close Bill and Hillary ally – virtually certain not to indict her on other major charges.

Her non-recusal recusal gives her final say, Bill and Hillary free from prosecution despite committing high crimes too serious to ignore.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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