Category Archives: State Crime

After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure

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By Benjamin Dangl

Source: CounterPunch

Last week a research wing of the International Monetary Fund came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology’s death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, “So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?”

Many of the report’s findings which strike to the core of the ideology echo what critics and victims of neoliberalism have been saying for decades.

“Instead of delivering growth,” the report explains that neoliberal policies of austerity and lowered regulation for capital movement have in fact “increased inequality.” This inequality “might itself undercut growth…” As a result, the report states that “policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are.”

However, the report leaves out a few notable items on neoliberalism’s history and impact.

The IMF suggests neoliberalism has been a failure. But it has worked very well for the global 1%, which was always the IMF and World Bank’s intent. As Oxfam reported earlier this year, the wealthiest 1% in the world now has as much wealth as the rest of the planet’s population combined. (Similarly, investigative journalist Dawn Paley has proven in her book Drug War Capitalism that far from being a failure, the Drug War has been a huge success for Washington and multinational corporations.)

The IMF report cites Chile as a case study for neoliberalism, but never mentions once that the economic vision was applied in the country through the US-backed Augusto Pinochet dictatorship – a major omission which was no casual oversight on the part of the researchers. Across Latin America, neoliberalism and state terror typically went hand in hand.

The fearless Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh, in a 1977 Open Letter to the Argentine Military Junta, denounced the oppression of that regime, a dictatorship which orchestrated the murder and disappearance of over 30,000 people.

“These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed,” Walsh wrote of the torture and killing. “It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery. . . . You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours to check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.”

This “planned misery,” as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine vividly demonstrates, was the neoliberal agenda the IMF has pushed for decades.

The day after Walsh mailed the letter to the Junta he was captured by the regime, killed, burned, and dumped into a river, one of neoliberalism’s millions of casualties.

 

Benjamin Dangl has worked as a journalist throughout Latin America, covering social movements and politics in the region for over a decade. He is the author of the books Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, and The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. Dangl is currently a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at McGill University, and edits UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America, and TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events. Twitter: https://twitter.com/bendangl Email: BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California from Bernie Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick

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By Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

Source: GregPalast.com

Woop!  Woop!  Alert!  Some California poll workers have been told to give “provisional” ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s Democratic Party.

That’s wrong.  That’s evil.  That’s sick and illegal.

Here’s the 411.  If you’re registered as an independent voter in California, you have the right to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary.  Just ask for the ballot.

But look out!  Reports out of Orange County are that some poll workers have been told to give “No Party Preference” (NPP), that is, an independent voter, a PROVISIONAL ballot, as opposed to a regular ballot.

Do NOT accept a provisional ballot. As one poll worker told me, “They simply don’t get counted.”

Who would benefit from this switcheroo from legal ballot to “provisional” ballot?  It’s just a stone cold fact that independent voters favor Senator Bernie Sanders. Among voters who describe themselves as having “no party preference,” Sanders leads Sec. Hillary Clinton by a humongous 40 points—though Hillary is hugely ahead among registered Democrats.

So one way to steal the election is to make sure those independent voters’ ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

Two million “Placebo Ballots” not counted

And for our readers in the other 49 states:  you can bet that the GOP will be shunting voters to these placebo provisional ballots in November.  In the last presidential election, over two MILLION voters, overwhelmingly  voters of color, were shifted to these rarely-counted ballots.  Two million voters could have justwritten their votes on bubbles.  That’s how they steal elections.

No, I’m not promoting Bernie nor my uncle Ernie, nor anyone.  I’m promoting democracy.  Let’s make sure your vote counts.
What is a “Provisional” ballot?  “Provisional” ballots were created by George Bush and Karl Rove as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after they swiped Florida in 2000.

The original idea of provisional balloting was sound: The Congressional Black Caucus was very upset that African-Americans were not able to vote in 2000 in Florida because they were falsely removed from the voter roles for all kinds of cockamamie reasons. So the Black Caucus proposed that, if your name is not on the voter roles, you should still be able to vote provisionally. The state can then check the records and count your vote later.

The Black Caucus won the right to a provisional ballot, but didn’t win the right to have them counted. They rarely are.

Say you are tagged an “inactive” voter, you CANNOT get your provisional ballot counted even if you were wrongly listed as “inactive.”  You’ve been removed from the register.  So, it’s a Catch-22.  You get a provisional ballot because you were wrongly left off the voter roll, but it can’t be counted because, well, you’re not on the voter roll.

And that’s why I call provisional ballots “Placebo” ballots.   They let you feel like you voted, but you haven’t.  It’s ridiculously easy to challenge a provisional ballot – so in a tight race, it’s just tossed out.

California Reamin’
I am currently reporting from Southern California, and I got a tip from Ashley Beck, a poll worker in conservative Orange County . Listen to her story.  She was being trained with other poll workers, and they were given some very strange information.

“I was told that all NPP [independent] voters are to be given provisional ballots. I was bothered by that, because I was always told that NPP voters in California can vote for Democrats and their vote would be counted.  I was a little worried that he was telling all 18 of us poll workers to give all NPP voters provisional ballots. We all know what happens most of the time with provisional ballots. They are not being counted.”

Provisionally Black

Who gets these placebo ballots?

I was on a book tour in Palm Springs—with an audience of about 200. I asked, “Has anyone here ever gotten a provisional ballot?” The only two Black people in the room both raised their hands, and that was it.

Black people know what provisional ballots are, and they probably know that if they fill one out, the chance of it getting counted is slim.

With the attempt to steal votes by giving independent voters provisional ballots; a lot of white people are being treated as if they turned Black. So to Bernie voters experiencing vote suppression for the first, welcome to the United States of Apartheid voting.

 

Related Podcast:

Greg Palast on the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show

Hillary Clinton is an Astrological Plague (Gonzo & Conjure ’16)

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By Dr. Bones

Source: Disinfo.com

“He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.”- Hunter S. Thompson

There are times when the entire cosmos turns against humanity for whatever reason. Perhaps the gods are fickle or better yet intent on keeping humanity’s collective nose in the dirt. The cosmic explosion of Mars, Mercury, and Pluto joining Saturn and Jupiter in a massive retrograde has devastated nearly everyone I know. People have been murdered, jobs lost, houses caught fire, infectious diseases caught, and my own car took a shit and died an hour outside of where I live.

And Hillary fucking Clinton, the horse-thief and reptilian creature from the swamps of D.C., seems to be soaking in the malignant energy and using it to power her own nefarious schemes.

I had missed a week of reporting, the widespread panic and disasters leading to an uptick in people seeking answers and magical aid. Between peering into the realm of probability and haggling with spirits I had very little time for the National Cataclysm Affairs desk here at Disinfo. I hadn’t just been working but studying, picking up a copy of Hadean Press’ Conjure Codex, a fascinating little journal blending old school grimoires and demonology with New World traditions like my beloved Hoodoo as well as Quimbunda, Vodoun, and many others. Ole’ Bones was adding new techniques and allies to his repertoire(check my facebook for more on that).

I was studying a stolen borrowed copy of Jake Stratton-Kent’s superb edition of The True Grimoire, contemplating how the demon Surgat might help in road opening work when the editors at Disinfo called me.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Bones! It’s XXXXXXXX over at Disinfo. What are you up to?”

“Me?” I peered over to the altar, a jar of graveyard dirt along with 13 different roots and herbs empowering the spirit of a dead soldier I needed for a case. “N-nothing in particular. Just uh….the usual.

Why are you calling me? Are you going to start paying me?”

“Uh….” The man on the line coughed, trying to distract from the question, “….hey, uh, noticed you haven’t posted in awhile. Everything alright?”

“Alright? No, everything is not alright. Between my car fucking blowing up and Mars deciding to take a fucking piss on humanity I would say it’s safe to assume nothing is alright. I’m knee deep in case work here, you know: clients, i.e. people that give me money for my services. D-do you know how much shit I need to get done before the moon starts to wane, let alone before the mansions of Al-Jubana and Iklil Al-Jabhah pass?”

“I uh…”

“Jesus CHRIST, your just walking around in all this aren’t you? Don’t you understand the very HEAVENS are against us?!? You’re letting your KIDS go UNPROTECTED through all this madness??? Y-y-y-you want them to be eaten alive by a pack of wild dingoes, or maybe even shot dead by some shitty cop with a chip on his-”

“BONES!” His shout came tinged with fear. When the wizards of the world start to board up their windows for a storm you can’t see the wise are quick to follow. “Look man, just…just email me whatever you think I should do. But I need another piece.”

Truth be told I had one bumping around in my head, for just as surely as the fortunes of my clients faded as Mars dropped ever out of sight, so too the American “people” seemed doomed in the truest, most poetic sense of the word.

Hillary is that doom.

It’s should come as no surprise that American elections are rigged. Everybody who isn’t completely braindead (so of course we’re speaking about a minority here) gets that uneasy feeling in the stomach about electoral politics. Like someone trying to sell you a car radio in front of a liquor store it seems shady as all hell.

That’s because it is.

First let’s recall that while you may be free to vote in whoever the hell you want, the actual lawmaking part is out of the hands of both you and your “representative.” Take for example ALEC, the massive corporate lobbying machine, merely one stinky carp in the cesspool that is American politics. They simply offer “ideas” on bills to be submitted to congress that heavily favor corporate interests and they pay their lapdogs well. Most may be voted down, but consider that while a success rate of 9% may not seem like alot, less than 2% of introduced bills passed the 112th session of the U.S. Congress. That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.

Or, to put it in the vernacular “shit walks, money talks.”

Corrupt is one thing. Hell, even the Vatican Bank launders drug money. Corrupt is no surprise. Even stolen elections are no surprise, but at least they never did it in plain sight.

This Hillary thing is a new beast entirely. Let’s recall that this thing all started less like a campaign and more like a mafia.

“In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving $10,000 a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund.  For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.”

The classic you-scratch-my-back-and-I-scratch-your’s.

And scratch they have.

In Iowa:

“It’s been reported that Hillary Clinton instructed her staff in Iowa to rig the caucus voting by falsely standing in the O’Malley corner of the room when the final precinct hand counts are tallied…

Mega-giant corporation Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now in charge of counting both the Democratic and Republican votes in this year’s state primary elections…the fact is the Gates Foundation along with Microsoft employees have literally donated millions of dollars to Hillary and the Clinton Foundation…

Both CNN and The Blaze reported that the final tally was missing votes from 90 Iowa precincts…

C-SPAN actually captured on video at the Polk County precinct the caucus chair and the Clinton precinct captain not even bothering to conduct a final count of the caucus voters and then the Clinton precinct captain caught lying to the Sanders precinct captain…

This week in Iowa is that the results were determined by six coin tosses in a row all favoring Hillary to ultimately decide the winner. After six county precincts ended up in dead ties between Clinton and Sanders, by state protocol those six precincts did a coin toss to determine the winner and in all six counties we’re supposed to actually believe that Hillary’s tails won. Though Clinton’s known for telling fish tales, it shouldn’t have overturned the virtually impossible statistical odds of just 1.56%.”

In Arizona:

“The Arizona Democratic Party has officially announced that it will be investigating multiple accusations of election fraud across the state’s Democratic primary vote Tuesday, where voters who claimed to have previously registered as Democrats say their party affiliation was unknowingly changed to independent– and therefore, they weren’t allowed to cast ballots in the closed primary.”

In Nevada:

“The Nevada Democratic Convention…began with a highly debated decision to change the Convention rules despite not getting the needed majority of vocal votes. But at the end of the night, when a motion was made to recount the delegates, the chair of the Convention closed out the meeting without even giving the delegates’ a chance to say “nay”…The Convention is not reconvening tomorrow, it was announced. Instead, protesters will have to pursue legal avenues.”

In New York:

Multiple investigations were launched and a top election official was suspended this week after tens of thousands of registered voters were found to be missing from the rolls during Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York….Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said.

In Kentucky:

WKYT, a local news station in Kentucky, was told by the Pike County Clerk’s office that there were issues with one of their card readers, which caused a delay in the numbers. AP then erased the votes, pushing Hillary to the lead by over 4,000 votes….It was later reported that 31 counties in Kentucky reported election fraud on Tuesday.

Oregon alone seems untouched, mainly due to the automatic registration of all it’s citizens to vote, but that doesn’t stop the corporate owned media from howling about how “vulnerable” THAT system is; it’s quite telling that the one state possibly impervious to the Hillary Mafia is the only one they seem so concerned about, everybody else simply getting a shrug of the shoulders and almost no airtime.

The sheer audacity, the open contempt for the electoral system so plain for all to see not only hints that Hillary has been chosen as the next heir to the Imperium but that the Powers That Be couldn’t even bother to hide it from you.

That’s how little power you have, that’s how much “democracy” exists in the United States: Uncle Sam is literally ignoring your pleas and if he does hear you he spits in your face and simply says “what the fuck you going to do about it?”

All this during the election! She doesn’t even wear the drone-encrusted crown yet! What kind of madness might we expect when she sits upon the Throne of Skulls?

Ask our friends in Haiti.

“In June 2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law requiring that the minimum wage be raised to $0.61 an hour, or $5 a day. (The average cost of living is estimated to be the equivalent of about $23 a day.) This pay raise was staunchly opposed by foreign manufacturers who had set up shop in the country, and the United States Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development backed those manufacturers. After Haiti’s government mandated the raise, the United States aggressively (and successfully) pushed Haiti’s president to lower the minimum wage for garment workers to what factory owners were willing to pay: the equivalent of about $0.31 an hour (or $2.50 per eight-hour day).

In 2011, WikiLeaks released a set of previously-secret diplomatic cables. The American publication The Nation partnered with Haitian news organization Haïti Liberté to cover them, finding (among other things) how strongly the United States had opposed the minimum wage hike”

Haiti, a nation that has been harassed and abused by the criminal Imperium of the United States since day-fucking-1, has become the playground for wealthy capitalists looking for a captive population to exploit. And the one leading the way for all the plunder is none other than the Clinton Foundation.

“Less than 1% of this amount(the $10 billion in aid) made it to the Haitian government. Bill Clinton had total control of the balance,” Dantò claimed.

She added, “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘opened Haiti’ as their private asset to liquidate. They used the resources of the World Bank, the State Department, USAID, the UN, the private military security contractors, the US military, and the Fed’s passport and visa issuance capabilities. They got kickbacks called ‘donations’ from anyone who wished to buy from them a piece of Haiti lands, oil, iridium, uranium or gold. The Clintons have used governmental power to conduct their private business and called it ‘helping poor Haitians.’”

How much of a scum-sucking, evil, predatory reptile do you have to be to profit off of the earthquake that devastated Haiti? The Clinton Foundation not only sent toxic trailers to the homeless but mysteriously “misplaced” millions in aid and awarded building contracts to mostly non-Haitian companies.

It’s fucking Batista’s Cuba all over again, expect this time we made sure to import an Imperium-style police state, regardless if it was “needed:”

“The U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH), giving police chief Mario Andrésol“command and control advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett, whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed” bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it, FOX News reported. The crowds never materialized.”

Taken all together what does Hillary mean for the American electorate?

It means that the gods themselves have conspired against us, that the United States has finally taken it’s dark turn from Empire to barbaric Thralldom; it means an openly criminal “government” that exists on a network of dirty money, whispered memos, secret handshakes, and backroom deals; it means human beings demoted to mere walking sources of profit, expendable livestock for Capitalists to fund million-dollar vacations and mansions in countries where the common folk eat on less than a dollar a day.

Hillary IS the wrath of heaven, a plague upon a nation of sinners that made it possible for such an invertebrate to even come into being; the Kingdom of Mole Rats has birthed a bloodthirsty creature hellbent on devouring as many souls as possible while she reshapes the face of the planet for her Neo-Liberal masters.

Buckle in comrades: a darkness not thus seen is slowly spreading across the savannah, propelled onwards by international finance and warmongers hungry for profit. The stars have aligned against the free-spirits; I write this from a Florida ER room, my wife having slipped into toxic shock mid-article. Like I said: bad shit is happening everywhere. Hillary is just a symptom. The stars and unseen hands toy with humanity and invisible currents shift the tides of the luck plane.

In this age of scavengers the jackals seek to capture the rotting throne for no other reason than to keep the tides of blood flowing, vampires seeking to drain us down to the very last drop. The stars smile upon the senseless bloodletting and those that would bring us holocaust are going to get what they can while the getting is good.

But, as we know, their best efforts are all for naught. Mars will return to it’s proper place, and the forces of death will in turn be feasted upon. The stars are never set, and even the moon must change in her courses; nothing can withstand the forces of entropy, even entropy itself. After the offending appendix is torn out of my wife her body will heal; just as the “body politic” is eaten and polluted by Hillary and her reptiles so too shall the time come when even her tyrannical efforts shall fail and she in turn is feasted on. This we have foreseen. Welcome to the motherfucking jungle that is modern living.

Hillary’s desperation only hints that things are far worse off then we can even imagine, and her crimes, though blatant, can only slow the inevitable. We Hyenas shall wait with bared fangs for the inevitable collapse.

The stars may not be right today, but they drift ever further in our favor.

 

 

Democrats can’t unite unless Wasserman Schultz goes!

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The Democratic National Committee chair has thrown fuel on the flames of infighting just as the party faces a critical November election.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Source: Intrepid Report

To paraphrase the words of that Scottish master Robert Burns, the best laid plans of mice, men—and women—go often astray, or “gang aft agley,” as they say in the Highlands. No one knows this better than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Twice now, the flight of her presidential aspirations has been forced to circle the airport as other contenders put up an unexpected fight: In 2008, Barack Obama emerged to grab the Democratic nomination away and this year, although all signs point to her finally grabbing the brass ring, unexpected and powerful progressive resistance came from the mighty wind of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Certainly, Hillary Clinton is angered by all of this, but the one seemingly more aggrieved—if public comments and private actions are any indication—is Democratic National Committee chair and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Hillary surrogate who takes umbrage like ordinary folks pop their vitamins in the morning.

As we recently wrote, “ . . . She embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence.”

And that ain’t all. As a member of Congress, particularly egregious has been her support of the payday loan business, defying new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would rein in an industry that soaks desperate borrowers. As President Obama said, “While payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt.”

In fact, according to an article by Bethany McLean in the May issue of The Atlantic, “After studying millions of payday loans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that 67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year, and the majority of borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.”

A recent editorial in the Orlando Sentinel notes that 7 percent of Florida’s population “must resort to this predatory form of small-dollar credit—nearly the highest rate in the nation . . .” What’s more, “Based on a 14-day loan term, the typical payday loan . . . had an annual percentage rate of 278 percent. Many lenders advertise rates of more than 300 percent.” Let us repeat that slowly . . . 300 percent!

So why has Wasserman Schultz been so opposed to the CFPB’s proposed rules? She has said, “Payday lending is unfortunately a necessary component of how people get access to capital, [people] that are the working poor.” But maybe it has something more to do with the $2.5 million or so the payday loan industry has donated to Florida politicians from both parties since 2009. That’s according to a new report by the liberal group Allied Progress. More than $50,000 of that cash has gone to Rep. Wasserman Schultz.

But we digress. It’s the skullduggery going on within the Democratic Party establishment that’s our current concern and as we wrote in March, Rep. Wasserman Schultz “has played games with the party’s voter database, been accused of restricting the number of Democratic candidate debates and scheduling them at odd days and times to favor Hillary Clinton, and recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that superdelegates—strongly establishment and pro-Clinton—are necessary at the party’s convention so deserving incumbent officials and party leaders don’t have to run for delegate slots ‘against grassroots activists.’ Let that sink in, but hold your nose against the aroma of entitlement.

Now Wasserman Schultz has waded into the controversy over what happened or didn’t happen last weekend when Sanders supporters loudly and vehemently objected to the rules at the Nevada State Democratic Convention. In truth, some behaved badly at the event and others made trollish, violent and obscene threats to Democratic state chair Roberta Lange via phone, email and social media. There’s no excuse for such aggressive, creepy conduct, and Sanders was quick and direct in apologizing for the behavior of the rowdies and bullies.

But there is a double standard at play here. Why, pray tell, shouldn’t the peaceful majority of Sanders people be angry at the slow-motion, largely invisible rigging of the political process by Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton machine—all for the benefit of Secretary Clinton?

Wasserman Schultz claims the party rules over which she has presided (and manipulated) are “eminently fair.” She told CNN on Wednesday morning, “It is critical that we as candidates, we as Democratic Party leaders, everyone involved needs to make sure that we can take all the steps that we need to, to ensure that the process is not only run smoothly but that the response from the supporters of both candidates is appropriate and civil.”

In response to the DNC chair’s remarks, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver talked to CNN, too, and said Wasserman Schultz had been “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign since the very beginning . . . Debbie Wasserman Schultz has really been a divider and not really provided the kind of leadership that the Democratic Party needs.”

The Nation’s Joan Walsh, a Clinton supporter critical of the Sanders campaign, concurs: “Once again, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz escalated a conflict that she should have worked to defuse,” she writes. “ . . . Wasserman Schultz is not helping her friend Hillary Clinton with her attacks on Sanders. Just the appearance of fairness can go a long way in assuaging worries about fairness. Wasserman Schultz’s defiant rebuke to the Sanders camp has made it worse.”

So, too, has her abolition of the restraints that had been placed on corporate lobbyists and big money—now they can write checks bankrolling what doubtless will be swank and profligate parties during this summer’s Democratic National Convention. At The Intercept, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani report that a number of the members of the Philadelphia host committee “are actively working to undermine progressive policies achieved by President Barack Obama, including health care reform and net neutrality. Some . . . are hardly even Democratic Party stalwarts, given that many have donated and raised thousands of dollars for Republican presidential and congressional candidates this cycle.”

This is a slap in the face to progressives calling for a halt to big money and allowing lobbyists to buy our elected officials. And it’s contrary to what Hillary Clinton herself has said about money and politics on the campaign trail. The Sanders movement has shown that lots of cash can be raised from everyday people making small donations. His supporters and all of us should be outraged that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and convention officials have kowtowed not only to the corporate wing of their own party but also to those high rollers who back the opposition and ideas antithetical to a democracy.

Rep. Wasserman Schultz is facing a primary challenge for the first time this year, her opponent a law professor, activist and progressive Sanders supporter named Tim Canova. But the primary’s not until late August, long after the Democratic National Convention. Unless she steps down now or Hillary Clinton has her removed, Philadelphia will be dominated by someone who represents everything that has gone wrong with the Democratic Party and Washington. At the convention’s opening session, Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be bringing the gavel down squarely on progressive hopes of returning the party to its legacy as champion of working people and the dispossessed.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Time for her to go.

 

Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.

Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship.

Wikileaks Releases Smoking Gun Email Proving Once and For All Clinton is Lying Through Her Teeth

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hillary-frustrated

By Claire Bernish

Source: The Free Thought Project

Wikileaks appears to have found the smoking-gun email proving almost inarguably Hillary Clinton broke the law — but not necessarily simply because she used the now-infamous private email server.

“Is this the email the FBI’s star exhibit against Hillary Clinton (“H”)?” Wikileaks tweeted Tuesday night.

At issue is an email thread, beginning with a note from Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, Jake Sullivan, which tellingly states:

“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.”

To which an apparently impatient Hillary replies:

“If they can’t, turn it into nonpaper w no identifying headline and send nonsecure.”

What she’s requesting from Sullivan is that he strip sensitive information of anything marking it as sensitive so it can be sent through without following security protocols. Clinton, in other words, blatantly asked Sullivan to break the law — because she apparently didn’t want to wait.

Though she’s claimed the private email server had been employed for several unbelievable reasons — from a laughable claim of naivete to the ‘everyone’s doing it claim’ that her predecessors had similar arrangements — the truth might have just become clear.

In January, rumors of this email surfaced, however, the state department had it redacted. An actual image of the email hasn’t existed until now which dispells any doubt that Clinton did, in fact, commit a crime.

In the past, Clinton has explicitly denied she ever requested sensitive information be stripped of confidential markings in order to send through the private server. Now, we’ve been shown the truth.

Besides the basic issue of sending classified or sensitive information on an unsecure server, Clinton willfully requested documents be doctored so she could intentionally have them sent to her in that unsecure manner. To be clear, this isn’t a simple case of not knowing any better — or accidentally being on the sending or receiving end of sensitive information.

Interestingly, this email also shows a level of hypocrisy seemingly only possible by Clinton. Nearly a year ago, as The Free Thought Project reported, another batch of the notorious emails showed the then-secretary of state requesting — and receiving — censorship of an unidentified video on YouTube. So potentially-classified information, to Clinton, can justifiably be sent through an unsecure server, but a video she finds unfavorable should be removed from public viewing.

Lacking favorable public opinion, Clinton continues to succeed in primaries around the country — though she seems to garner the best results in places where voting machines have proven susceptible to hackers. In fact, questionable electoral practices seem to follow Clinton wherever primaries are held.

An outside observer might wonder what Hillary Clinton wouldn’t do to win the White House — or, based on today’s Wikileaks revelation — what she would do once there.

This is the deliberate thwarting of protocol and policy in place for reasons of national security. This statement shows Hillary plotting how to receive potentially classified information without having to bother with waiting for proper channels. This is, as Wikileaks suggested, at the very least, one smoking gun.

This is also reason to question why Clinton is running for office — instead of facing charges. Though, perhaps, this email proves that will soon change.

 

Related Video:

Keep Fear Alive

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DHSFEAR3

The bald-eagle boondoggle of the terror wars

By Kade Crockford

Source: The Baffler

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

—Thomas Fuentes, former assistant director, FBI Office of International Operations

Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ponder the most enduring fallout from any such attack: our own government’s prosecution of the Terror Wars.

This failure generates all sorts of accompanying moral confusion. We cast ourselves as good, but our actions show that we are not. We rack up a numbing litany of decidedly uncivil abuses of basic human rights: global kidnapping and torture operations, gulags in which teenagers have grown into adulthood under “indefinite detention,” the overthrow of the Iraqi and Libyan governments, borderless execution-by-drone campaigns, discriminatory domestic police practices, dragnet surveillance, and countless other acts of state impunity.

The way we process the potential cognitive dissonance between our professed ideals and our actual behavior under the banner of freedom’s supposed defense is simply to ignore things as they really are. They hate us for our freedom, screech the bald-eagle memes, and so we must solemnly fight on. But what, beneath the official rhetoric of permanent fear, explains the collective inability of the national security overlords to imagine a future of peace?

Incentives, for one thing. In a perverse but now familiar pattern, what we have come to call “intelligence failures” produce zero humility, and no promise of future remedies, among those charged with guarding us. Instead, a new array of national security demands circulate, which are always rapidly met. In America, the gray-haired representatives of the permanent security state say their number one responsibility is to protect us, but when they fail to do so, they go on television and growl. To take but one recent example, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the morally bankrupt pundit panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to explain that intractable ethnic, tribal, and religious conflict has riven the Middle East for more than a century—the United States, and the West at large, were mere hapless bystanders in this long-running saga of civilizational decay. This sniveling performance came, mind you, just days after Politico reported that, while choreographing the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld had quietly buried a report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicating that military intelligence officials had almost no persuasive evidence that Saddam Hussein was maintaining a serious WMD program. Even after being forced to resign in embarrassment over the botched Iraq invasion a decade ago, Rumsfeld continues to cast himself as an earnestly outmanned casualty of Oriental cunning and backbiting while an indulgent clutch of cable talking heads nods just as earnestly along.

And the same refrain echoes throughout the echelons of the national security state. Self-assured and aloof as the affluenza boy, the FBI, CIA, and NSA fuck up, and then immediately apply for a frenzied transfer of ever more money, power, and data in order to do more of what they’re already doing. Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business. And with the latest, greatest, worst-ever terrorist threat always on the horizon, business is sure to keep booming.

The paradox produces a deep-state ouroboros: Successful terrorist attacks against the West do not provoke accountability reviews or congressional investigations designed to truly understand or correct the errors of the secret state. On the contrary, arrogant spies and fearful politicians exploit the attacks to cement and expand their authority. This permits them, in turn, to continue encroaching on the liberties they profess to defend. We hear solemn pledges to collect yet more information, to develop “back doors” to decrypt private communications, to keep better track of Muslims on visas, send more weapons to unnamed “rebel groups,” drop more cluster bombs. Habeas corpus, due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and human rights be damned. And nearly all the leaders in both major political parties play along, like obliging extras on a Morning Joe panel. The only real disagreement between Republican and Democratic politicians on the national stage is how quickly we should dispose of our civil liberties. Do we torch the Bill of Rights à la Donald Trump and Dick Cheney, or apply a scalpel, Obama-style?

Safety Last

Both Democrats and Republicans justify Terror War abuses by telling the public, either directly or indirectly, that our national security hangs in the balance. But national security is not the same as public safety. And more: the things the government has done in the name of preserving national security—from invading Iraq to putting every man named Mohammed on a special list—actually undermine our public safety.

That’s because, as David Talbot demonstrates in The Devil’s Chessboard, his revelatory Allen Dulles biography and devastating portrait of a CIA run amok, national security centers on “national interests,” which translates, in the brand of Cold War realpolitik that Dulles pioneered, into the preferred policy agendas of powerful corporations.

Public safety, on the other hand, is concerned with whether you live or die, and how. Any serious effort at public safety requires a harm-reduction approach acknowledging straight out that no government program can foreclose the possibility of terroristic violence. The national security apparatus, by contrast, grows powerful in direct proportion to the perceived strength of the terrorist (or in yesterday’s language, the Communist) threat—and requires that you fear this threat so hysterically that you release your grip on reason. Reason tells you government cannot protect us from every bad thing that happens. But the endlessly repeated national security meme pretends otherwise, though the world consistently proves it wrong.

When it comes to state action, the most important distinction between what’s good for public safety (i.e., your health) and what’s good for national security (i.e., the health of the empire, markets, and prominent corporations) resides in the concept of the criminal predicate. This means, simply, that an agent of the government must have some reasonable cause to believe you are involved with a crime before launching an investigation into your life. When the criminal predicate forms the basis for state action, police and spies are required to focus on people they have reason to believe are up to no good. Without the criminal predicate, police and spies are free to monitor whomever they want. Police action that bypasses criminal predicates focuses on threats to people and communities that threaten power—regardless of whether those threats to power are fully legal and legitimate.

Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business.

We can see the results of this neglect everywhere the national security state has set up shop. Across the United States right now, government actors and private contractors paid with public funds are monitoring the activities of dissidents organizing to end police brutality and the war on drugs, Israeli apartheid and colonization in Palestine, U.S. wars in the Middle East, and Big Oil’s assault on our physical environment. In the name of fighting terrorism, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, which gave state and local law enforcement billions of dollars to integrate police departments into the national intelligence architecture. As a result, we now have nearly a million cops acting as surrogates for the FBI. But as countless studies have shown, the “fusion centers” and intelligence operations that have metastasized under post-9/11 authorities do nothing to avert the terror threat. Instead, they’ve targeted dissidents for surveillance, obsessive documentation, and even covert infiltration. When government actors charged with protecting us use their substantial power and resources to track and disrupt Black Lives Matter and Earth First! activists, they are not securing our liberties; they’re putting them in mortal peril.

Things weren’t always like this. Once upon a time, America’s power structure was stripped naked. When the nation saw the grotesque security cancer that had besieged the body politic in the decades after World War II (just as Harry Truman had warned it would) the country’s elected leadership reasserted control, placing handcuffs on the wrists of the security agencies. This democratic counterattack on the national security state not only erected a set of explicit protocols to shield Americans from unconstitutional domestic political policing, but also advanced public safety.

Mission Creeps

As late as the 1970s, the FBI was still universally thought to be a reputable organization in mainstream America. The dominant narrative held that J. Edgar Hoover’s capable agents, who had to meet his strict height, weight, and dress code requirements, were clean-cut, straight-laced men who followed the rules. Of course, anyone involved with the social movements of that age—anti-war, Communist, Black Power, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence—knew a very different FBI, but they had no evidence to prove what they could see and feel all around them. And since this was the madcap 1970s, the disparity between the FBI’s glossy reputation as honest crusaders and its actual dirty fixation on criminalizing the exercise of domestic liberties drove a Pennsylvania college physics professor and anti-war activist named William Davidon to take an extraordinary action. On the night of the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, Davidon and some friends broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every paper file they could get their hands on. In communiqués to the press, to which they attached some of the most explosive of the Hoover files, they called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.

Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon.

When Davidon and his merry band of robbers broke into the FBI office, they blew the lid off of decades of secret—and sometimes deadly—police activity that targeted Black and Brown liberation organizers in the name of fighting the Soviet red menace. According to Noam Chomsky, the Citizens’ Commission concluded that the vast majority of the files at the FBI’s Media, Pennsylvania, office concerned political spying rather than criminal matters. Of the investigative files, only 16 percent dealt with crimes. The rest described FBI surveillance of political organizations and activists—overwhelmingly of the left-leaning variety—and Vietnam War draft resisters. As Chomsky wrote, “in the case of a secret terrorist organization such as the FBI,” it was impossible to know whether these Pennsylvania figures were representative of the FBI’s national mandate. But for Bill Davidon and millions of Americans—including many in Congress who were none too pleased with the disclosures—these files shattered Hoover’s image as a just-the-facts G-man. They proved that the FBI was not a decent organization dedicated to upholding the rule of law and protecting the United States from foreign communist threats, but rather a domestic political police primarily concerned with preserving the racist, sexist, imperialist status quo.

In a cascade of subsequent transparency efforts, journalists, activists, and members of Congress all probed the darker areas of the national security state, uncovering assassination plots against foreign leaders, dragnet surveillance programs, and political espionage targeting American dissidents under the secret counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. Not since the birth of the U.S. deep state, with the 1947 passage of the National Security Act, had the activities of the CIA, FBI, or NSA been so publicly or thoroughly examined and contested.

Subsequent reforms included the implementation of new attorney general’s guidelines for domestic investigations, which, for the first time in U.S. history, required FBI agents to suspect someone of a crime before investigating them. Under the 1976 Levi guidelines, named for their author, Nixon attorney general Edward Levi, the FBI could open a full domestic security investigation against someone only if its agents had “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence.” The criminal predicate was now engraved in the foundations of the American security state—and the Levi rules prompted a democratic revolution in law enforcement and intelligence circles. It would take decades and three thousand dead Americans for the spies to win back their old Hoover-era sense of indomitable mission—and their investigative MO of boundless impunity.

False Flags

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began Hoovering up our private records in powerful, secret dragnets. When we finally learned about the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, it was a national scandal. But just as important, and much less discussed, was the abolition of Levi’s assertion of the criminal predicate. So-called domestic terrorism investigations would be treated principally as intelligence or espionage cases—not criminal ones. This shift has had profound, if almost universally ignored, implications.

Michael German, an FBI agent for sixteen years working undercover in white supremacist organizations to identify and arrest terrorists, saw firsthand what the undoing of the 1970s intelligence reforms meant for the FBI. And German argues, persuasively, that the eradication of the criminal predicate didn’t just put Americans at risk of COINTELPRO 2.0. It also threatened public safety. The First and Fourth Amendments, which protect, respectively, our rights to speech and association and our right to privacy, don’t just create the conditions for political freedom; they also help law enforcement focus, laser-like, on people who have the intent, the means, and the plans to harm the rest of us.

Think of it like this, German told me: You’re an FBI agent tasked with infiltrating a radical organization that promotes violence as a means of achieving its political goals—the Ku Klux Klan, for example. KKK members say horrible and disgusting things. But saying disgusting things isn’t against the law; nor, as numerous studies have shown, is it a reliable predictor of whether the speaker will commit an act of political violence. When surrounded by white supremacists constantly spouting hate speech, a law enforcement officer has to block it out. If he investigates people based on their rhetoric, his investigations will lead nowhere. After all, almost no white supremacist seriously intending to carry out a terrorist attack is all that likely to broadcast that intent in public. (Besides, have you noticed how many Americans routinely say disgusting things?)

Today, more than a decade after it shrugged off the Levi guidelines, the FBI conducts mass surveillance directed at the domestic population. But dragnet surveillance, however much it protects “national security,” doesn’t increase public safety, as two blue-ribbon presidential studies have in recent years concluded. Indeed, the Boston bombings, the Paris attacks, and the San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood shootings have all made the same basic point in the cold language of death. The national security state has an eye on everyone, including the people FBI director James Comey refers to as “the bad guys.” But despite its seeming omniscience, the Bureau does not stop those people from killing the rest of us in places where we are vulnerable.

The curious case of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev demonstrates the strange consequences of sidelining criminal investigations for national security needs. In 2011, about eighteen months before the bombings, Tsarnaev’s best friend and two other men were murdered in a grisly suburban scene in Waltham, Massachusetts—their throats slashed, marijuana sprinkled on their mutilated corpses. These murders were never solved. But days after the marathon bombings, law enforcement leaked that they had forensic and cellphone location evidence tying Tamerlan Tsarnaev to those unsolved crimes. Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon. But if the police leaks were correct in assigning him responsibility for the 2011 murders, plain old detective work likely would have.

If security agencies truly want to stop terrorism, they should eliminate all domestic monitoring that targets people who are not suspected of crimes. This would allow agents to redirect space and resources now devoted to targeting Muslims and dissidents into serious investigations of people actually known to be dangerous. It’s the only reasonable answer to the befuddling question: Why is it that so many of these terrorists succeed in killing people even though their names are on government lists of dangerous men?

After the terrorist attacks in November, the French government obtained greater emergency powers in the name of protecting a fearful public. Besides using those powers to round up hundreds of Muslims without evidence or judicial oversight, French authorities also put at least twenty-four climate activists on house arrest ahead of the Paris Climate Change Conference—an approach to squashing dissent that didn’t exactly scream liberté, and had nothing to do with political violence. As with the Boston Marathon and countless other attacks on Western targets, the men who attacked the Bataclan were known to intelligence agencies. In May 2015, months before the attacks in Paris, French authorities gained sweeping new surveillance powers authorizing them to monitor the private communications of suspected terrorists without judicial approval. The expanded surveillance didn’t protect the people of Paris. In France, as in the United States, the devolution of democratic law enforcement practice has opened up space that’s filled with political spying and methods of dragnet monitoring that enable social and political control. This is not only a boondoggle for unaccountable administrators of mass surveillance; it also obstructs the kind of painstaking detective work that might have prevented the attacks on the Bataclan and the marathon.

Our imperial government won’t ever admit this, but we must recognize that the best method for stopping terrorism before it strikes is to stop engaging in it on a grand scale. Terrorist attacks are the price we pay for maintaining a global empire—for killing a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, for which we have never apologized or made reparations, and for continuing to flood the Middle East with weapons. No biometrics program, no database, no algorithm, no airport security system will protect us from ourselves.

Gurus of the progressive community . . . Chomsky and Goodman

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Amy Goodman Say Something for FB Promo

By Dave Alpert

Source: Intrepid Report

There was a time when I, like tens of thousands of my progressive partners, held Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman in awe. After all, Amy informed us and Noam spoke for us, coherently explaining the issues. However, as I became more aware and more informed, I realized that there were great differences between their thinking and mine.

In many instances, our gurus spoke with forked tongue. Although Amy’s program Democracy Now! was informative, there were many areas of reporting that were out of bounds and were not reported on.

One could legitimately claim that reporters cannot report on everything and they would be right. But let us be honest. When 9/11 occurred, it was an historical event and an event that changed the course of history. Where was Amy? Relatively silent. She invited David Ray Griffin, who has written several books illustrating the lies and misdirections of the government’s narrative about that day, to Democracy Now! which one could claim was a significant journalistic move.

However, instead of interviewing him so that he could reveal to her listening audience the facts that he had accumulated that put into question the government’s explanations of that day, she paired him with a pro-government guest who spent the hour attacking Griffin personally and ignoring any of the data Griffin produced. It became a three-ring circus and helped sabotage any impetus the Truth Movement might have gained within the progressive community. Was that her goal? I’m not sure I can answer that but it was a successful strategy, progressives seemed reluctant to support the Truth Movement. The Movement was being portrayed as one in which there were marginal “conspiracy nuts” leading the charge and should be avoided.

Where was Noam Chomsky on this issue? Despite the significance of 9/11, Chomsky has remained relatively passive concerning this event.

During an interview on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent, which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

In two peer-reviewed papers published in 2008–2009, independent scientists reported finding residues of nanothermite, an incendiary, military level explosive which is capable of cutting through steel, in dust samples from the collapsed World Trade Center. The scientists also found tiny flakes of unexploded nanothermite.

How did this explosive material get into the dust at the WTC? Certainly, one could conclude that the explosives were used to bring down all three towers (WTC #7 collapsed later that day in free fall time despite the fact a plane never touched it).

This evidence of explosives coupled with the testimony of many New York City firemen, who claimed they heard a continuing series of explosions before the towers collapsed, and the testimony of Willie Rodriquez, a maintenance worker in the towers, who stated that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before any planes flew into the towers, make it clear that it was the explosives, not the planes that brought the towers down. The question now is, who planted these explosives in the three buildings that collapsed? It takes time to set up a controlled demolition which means the explosives had been placed in the buildings prior to 9/11. Does this sound like a conspiracy to anyone?

In response to a question at the University of Florida recently, Noam Chomsky claimed that there were only “a minuscule number of architects and engineers” who felt that the official account of WTC Building 7 should be treated with skepticism. Chomsky followed-up by saying, “a tiny number—a couple of them—are perfectly serious.” The reality is that close to 2,500 architects and engineers have expressed their doubts about the government’s explanation of how and why the towers fell. It doesn’t matter how many professionals or intellectuals are willing to admit it. The facts remain that the U.S. government’s account for the destruction of the WTC on 9/11 is purely false. There is no science behind the government’s explanation for WTC 7 or for the Twin Towers and everyone, including the government, admits that WTC Building 7 experienced free fall on 9/11. There is no explanation for that other than the use of explosives.

Also, Chomsky’s assumption that only a small number of architects and engineers have expressed support for the notion that the towers fell because of explosives planted in the buildings and that a much larger majority of architects and engineers have remained silent, is the argument of the absurd. It is equivalent to implying that if 10,000 New Yorkers claim the schools are substandard, because the rest of New Yorkers remain silent, the schools cannot be considered substandard.

Chomsky and Goodman are bright, knowledgeable, intelligent people. What has influenced them to avoid confronting the government regarding the events of 9/11?

The fact that 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading connected to the CIA, withdrawal of most of the U.S. fighter planes from the east coast to participate in military exercises on that particular day, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in identities and timelines of “hijackers” did not appear to influence either Amy or Noam.

Their influence on people who view themselves as progressive cannot be over estimated. When I began questioning the government’s role regarding 9/11, several of my friends responded to me negatively and said specifically that if my suspicions had any legitimacy, Chomsky and Goodman would be speaking out.

Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.

This kind of response from Chomsky regarding possible government conspiracies is not new. He still insists that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas. Anyone who still supports the Warren Commission hoax after 50 years of countering proofs is either ill-informed, dumb, gullible, afraid to speak truths to power or a disinformation agent.

Michael Morrissey stated, in one of his articles, “Rethinking Chomsky,” in 1994, “we should be clear about the stand that ‘America’s leading intellectual dissident,’ as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view ‘widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals’ and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.”

Michael Parenti states, “Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.”

However, the word conspiracy is often used by those in power, who have participated in a conspiracy to advance their own power and/or wealth, as a label to marginalize and neutralize those who seek to reveal the conspiracy. Thus we, as a society, have developed what Parenti calls conspiracy phobia.

The behavior of both Chomsky and Goodman have led me to conclude that they hesitate to see the conspiracies for fear that such acknowledgment would compromise their reputations. Either that or they are controlled by powerful people who censor their behavior. We cannot afford to accept what they say at face value.

Chomsky’s questionable political positioning is still evident today. On May 17, Chomsky appeared on Democracy Now! and was asked by Amy Goodman to speak on the Syrian crisis. Chomsky is a linguist and words are very meaningful to him. So what he said and how he said it is significant.

“It’s necessary to cut off the flow of arms, as much as possible, to everyone. That means to the vicious and brutal Assad regime, primarily Russia and Iran, to the monstrous ISIS, which has been getting support tacitly through Turkey, through—to the al-Nusra Front, which is hardly different, has just the—the al-Qaeda affiliate, technically broke from it, but actually the al-Qaeda affiliate, which is now planning its own—some sort of emirate, getting arms from our allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Our own—the CIA is arming them.”

I found it particularly informative that he describes Assad’s regime as vicious and brutal and places Russia and Iran right alongside ISIS.

If Assad’s government is really brutal and vicious, why did 86% of the Syrian people vote for him in the last election. Also, let it be clear that it was Russian’s entrance into the conflict last September that led to the retreat of ISIS from many cities and villages, a success that the U.S. had avoided for a year. Syrians who were freed from ISIS rule were openly happy to welcome Assad’s “brutal” army into their villages. Many Syrian refugees began returning to their homes.

Chomsky also managed to portray the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as terrorists in their conflict with Britain. He conveniently omitted the context for their behavior . . . the brutality of British rule against the Irish Catholics for hundreds of years.

Both Amy and Noam are extremely influential and have attained a degree of power amongst progressives. It is crucial that we remain aware of what they are telling us, how they are framing it, and what it is they are not telling us. Both seem to have provided, and continue to provide today, a cover from the left for the U.S.’s imperialist agenda.

Chomsky is called upon to address various issues periodically. Amy, on the other hand, is viewed every week, Monday through Friday. It is easy to identify her evolution into someone slightly to the left of MSNBC.

With the world collapsing around her, she offers relative silence on issues such as the U.S. supported takeover of the Ukrainian government by neo-Nazis, the surrounding of Russia by U.S. and NATO military forces, the threat of WW3 which would likely be a nuclear war, the Syrian crisis and the U.S. desire to overthrow Assad’s government, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the coup to oust Dilma Rousseff from office in Brazil, the ongoing collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the threat to the Madero government (please note: both Rousseff and Madero are progressive thinkers—is the U.S. behind the collapse of their governments?). She does not address the continuous wars sponsored by the U.S. and NATO countries in their imperialistic ventures.

Instead, most of her time is spent covering the election and interviewing guests who have recently published books. Her program has mellowed. Most of her guests are establishment people, people MSNBC would not hesitate to have on. The radical view, the view that challenges the establishment, is no longer part of her coverage.

Amy’s audience expects to get the news coverage and the variety of views the MSM does not provide. Today’s Democracy Now! no longer provides that.

 

Dave Alpert has masters degrees in social work, educational administration, and psychology. He spent his career working with troubled inner city adolescents.

 

Mad About Rigged Elections? Mainstream Media Says YOU Are the Problem

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By Claire Bernish

Source: AntiMedia

Mainstream headlines constantly decry Bernie Sanders supporters for disrupting events in outrage, as if their protests and demonstrations somehow illustrate the devolution of the elections. But that focus by the corporate media utterly negates the consistent and continual reports of fraud and disenfranchisement fueling their ire.

And it’s getting ridiculous.

Newsweek, though far from alone, offered a prime example of the obfuscation of the election fraud and questionable campaign tactics by Hillary Clinton in its skewering of Sanders’ supporters.

“Get Control, Senator Sanders, or Get Out,” Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald titled his op-ed — which thoroughly blasts the Vermont senator — as if he were somehow responsible for both the electoral chaos and the actions of an irate voting public.

“So, Senator Sanders,” Eichenwald writes [with emphasis added], “either get control of what is becoming your increasingly unhinged cult, or get out of the race. Whatever respect sane liberals had for you is rapidly dwindling, and the damage being inflicted on your reputation may be unfixable. If you can’t even manage the vicious thugs who act in your name, you can’t be trusted to run a convenience store, much less the country.”

Really?

Because what Eichenwald obviates most readily in his attack is the inability to understand why those protests might be occurring in the first place. Judging by the timing of his article, it’s likely Eichenwald wrote it after chaos broke out at the Nevada Democratic Convention on Saturday — chaos that transpired after the party took it upon itself to ignore thousands who rightly believed Sanders delegates had been excluded unfairly from the caucus proceedings.

Despite the call for a recount, party officials refused to follow necessary procedure and abruptly adjourned the convention, leaving thousands of voters in the lurch — and hotel security and local law enforcement to deal with the aftermath. When things seem suspicious, apparently Eichenwald feels voters should not only have no recourse, they should be happy about it.

“Sanders has increasingly signaled that he is in this race for Sanders,” he continues, “and day after day shows himself to be a whining crybaby with little interest in a broader movement.”

It would be nice if Eichenwald’s hit piece were as much a joke as it comes across, but clearly he’s missed the point — and the vast movement supporting not only Sanders, but electoral justice. Worse, he didn’t stop there:

“Signs are emerging that the Sanders campaign is transmogrifying into the type of movement through which tyrants are born.

“The ugly was on display” at the aforementioned Nevada convention, Eichenwald adds, “where Hillary Clinton won more delegates than Sanders.”

No kidding. That would be precisely the issue that “cult” expressed fury about — Clinton managed to put yet another state under her belt under highly questionable circumstances. In fact, suspect happenings at nearly every primary and caucus so far oddly favor the former secretary of state — and Nevada stood as further testament to why voters are practically up in arms over what appears to be electoral favoritism.

But Eichenwald wasn’t alone in overlooking those concerns — or in blatantly mischaracterizing both that bias and its consequential thwarting of the wishes of a hefty segment of the voting public.

In the New York Times, Alan Rappeport also took the chance to strike at Sanders’ followers by citing Roberta Lange, Nevada State Democratic Party Chairwoman, who adjourned the convention early — earning the wrath of Nevada’s voters.

“‘It’s been vile,’ said Ms. Lange, who riled Sanders supporters by refusing their requests for rule changes at the event in Las Vegas,” Rappeport notes, adding, “The vicious response comes as millions of new voters, many of whom felt excluded by establishment politicians, have flocked to the insurgent campaigns of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump.”

Though he at least presented that aspect of the elections fairly, his description of what Lange actually did in Nevada misses the mark — that rules change had originally occurred prior to the convention, and Lange’s hasty and subjective decision on a contentious voice vote to permanently install the change arguably created the eruption of anger. But a number of Times staff have contributed sizeable amounts to Hillary’s campaign — and a Clinton family organization also donated $100,000 to the Times’ charitable organization the same year it endorsed her. Funny how bias thus peppers its reporting.

But the media roasting of Sanders and his supporters also appeared in the Sacramento Bee — where the editorial board also called the senator to task for the Nevada incident in lieu of calling out the controversial elections. According to the Bee,

“The episode had the reek of Trump rallies, where threats, insults, and sucker punches to defend the presumptive Republican nominee have been common. Yet looking back at the hundreds of Sanders supporters who descended on a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles earlier this month to intimidate her supporters, making one little girl cry, it now seems inevitable that the same kind of violent eruption would afflict those ‘feeling the Bern.’”

Seriously?

While the protest in L.A. certainly rattled Clinton supporters, violence didn’t pepper the event. One Sanders supporter — sporting a Free Hugs tee-shirt, no less — even assisted Clinton-supporting families with teary-eyed children in tow navigate through the crowd. While reports that someone ripped apart a young girl’s pro-Hillary sign might be valid, it would stand as the exception to what amounted to a boisterous demonstration over justifiable grievances. And, again, this obfuscation forgets entirely the need for demonstrations, which Hillary Clinton — in repeated lies, controversial policy proposals, and a campaign replete with fraud complaints — has clearly helped create.

Perhaps corporate, mainstream media — instead of targeting the symptom — should attempt to report its root cause.

Perhaps enormous swaths of voters being dropped from the rolls in New York; Clinton’s inexplicably astronomical luck in coin tosses in Iowa; inexcusably untrained elections volunteers and their equally inexcusable tendency allowing Clinton supporters to participate in caucuses without first being registered; or any number of other examples from the mountain of ever-growing evidence the elections are, indeed, rigged, are infinitely more deserving of headlines than hit pieces against those protesting such affronts to the American electoral process.

Or perhaps we should all just do as Eichenwald suggests — swallow our pride and our desire for a less corrupt and fairer system — and turn tail.

Or not. Because this system is rigged — and the corporate media helps pull the strings. But as long as independent media reports what the mainstream refuses, and as long as fraud inundates the 2016 election, there will be protests — regardless of whether or not Newsweek and the Times and the rest of their ilk ever grasp accuracy in reporting.