(Editor’s note: While the case presented by the research isn’t hard evidence, it it highly suspicious and deserving of further investigation. But don’t expect any investigation from corporate media, many members of which have been outed by Wikileaks as shills for Hillary Clinton.)
Redditor account Bopbopiposted an image this morning which follows the deceitful tale of the website, ToddandClare.com.
What you should know about the website:
This website is a supposed dating site whereas Julian Assange was allegedly offered $1 million to help create a video. It is supposedly owned by an Indiana couple, but has ties to the Bahamas. The UN opened a case on Assange and it is suspected this specific case is the fuel behind getting him extradited, possibly to the United States. But when you have a look at the site (which I encourage you to do), you will notice it is an extremely amateur website (search dating sites on Google and compare). How did an unknown dating site suddenly come up with $1 million dollars and why did they happen to choose Julian Assange as their desired contract worker?
Assange is now being accused of having cybersex with an 8-year old on the website. To be honest, most of the profiles appear to be fake (again, compare with other dating sites and draw your own conclusions).
Now check out the timeline posted on the previously cited Reddit account:
Update:
As of 10/21/16, ToddAndClare.com has posted the following message on their landing page:
Company Statement 10/21/2016
Following a serious hack of our website, to protect our members we’ve taken the decision to close the network until further notice. If you are a member of Todd and Clare requiring support, please contact us.
+ I’ve spent the week greedily consuming the treats offered up by Wikileaks’s excavation of John Podesta’s inbox. Each day presents juicy new revelations of the venality of the Clinton campaign. In total, the Podesta files provide the most intimate and unadulterated look at how politics really works in late-capitalist America since the release of the Nixon tapes.
+ There’s a big difference, though. With Nixon, the stakes seemed greater, the banter more Machiavellian, the plots and counter-plots darker and more cynical.
+ The Podesta email tranches show the inner mechanics of a much more mundane, petty and banal political machine. Instead of shaping a campaign around an ideological movement, the Clinton operation resembles the packaging of a political mutual fund, a balanced, low-risk portfolio of financial interests, captive NGOs and dependent demographic sectors.
+ The red meat in the emails can be found in the disclosures of the internal rivalries, self-aggrandizement and sycophancy of hired guns and consultants, especially as they gravitate toward Podesta, whose chilly presence looms behind the scenes like the ghost of Thomas Cromwell.
+ The three prevailing obsessions of the Podesta emails: raising money, containing the contamination of the Clinton Foundation and screwing Bernie Sanders. There’s barely any hint of anxiety over Trump. In fact, they relish his every false move, almost as if each faltering step had been pre-visualized, if not orchestrated.
+ If possible, the press corps comes off worse than Team Clinton. Almost every reporter is revealed as pliable, servile and so lazy that they basically beg the Clinton PR shop to write their stories for them.
+ The press has reiterated this obsequiousness over the course of the last seven days with what can only be described as an orgy of coverage of the Trump sex tapes and assorted scandals. By all accounts, the Trump campaign is dead and has been for weeks. The 24/7 obsession now amounts to a kind of political corpse abuse. Forsaken in this feeding frenzy has been any serious attention at all to the Wikileaks email dump, except to echo Clinton camp assertions that they were the victims of a Russian plot to tilt the election to Trump. If so, the Russians have proved even more incompetent than we thought them to be.
+ Of course, the Russian diversion is a convenient excuse for the lapdog press having missed one major scandal after another that has been staring them in the face for months, if not years.
+ Significantly, the email dump also proves what many of us have long suspected: that there are no walls separating the Clinton campaign, its foundation and Super Pacs and the DNC itself. Those supposedly distinct entities are, in fact, all part of one vast, interconnected organization–a syndicate, if you will, that has deftly evaded campaign finance laws (created by Democrats) and rigged its own primary process to ensure a pre-ordained winner.
+ The key thing to remember about the DNC is that it has been under the complete control of the Clintons and their operatives since the 1990s. Obama never cleaned house and installed his own people, a lapse that proved fatal to his own political and legislative agenda. The Clintons’ loyalty to Obama was always paper-thin and conditioned on whether it would advance their own interests: Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency and Bill’s maniacal quest for lucrative speaking fees.
+ It was no surprise that Bill unloaded on ObamaCare a few days ago, calling it the “craziest thing in the world.” The Clintons want to efface Obama’s legacy and replace it with their own, the same way the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt smashed the images of the previous ruler and replaced it with their own visage.
+ So what follows are a few of my favorite revelations from Podesta’s inbox, starting with an email where Podesta is joking about a fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard. John Podesta: “I didn’t think wet works meant pool parties at the Vineyard.” Another Clinton murder? Check the drain for trace evidence?
+ I can picture the invitation: “HRC Pool Party: Donate or Drown!”
+ Rightwing websites, of course, are taking this as proof, HRC, murdered Scalia.
+ Peter Berlios reminded me of the global outrage when Trump’s special friend, Vladimir Putin, used a similar expression in regard to the Chechens: “We will wet them even in the shit house.”
+ By the way, John Podesta owned 75,000 shares in Leonidio LLC, a firm linked to who? Yes, Vladimir Putin.
+ Podesta’s correspondent in this exchange is Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic powerbroker who was Dick Gephardt’s chief of staff. Over the years, Elmendorf has perfected the art, crucial to any Democratic candidate, of seducing progressive sectors of the party to dutifully line up behind a neoliberal candidate. A few years ago, he explained his strategic thinking this way:
“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections. The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”
+ Bill Richardson is the famously irascible former Governor of New Mexico, who served as Energy Secretary and UN ambassador during Bill Clinton’s second term. The relationship soured when the governor broke ranks and endorsed Barack Obama in 2008. Richardson and the Clintons have been feuding ever since. Indeed, Bill once described the antagonism as a “permanent” state of hostilities.
In August of 2015, Podesta took it on his own initiative to negotiate a detente between the two men. Apparently, Hillary was furious at Podesta’s impertinence. She doesn’t forgive. Podesta writes back urging her to consider the political consequences, especially with Hispanics in must-win western states like Colorado and New Mexico, where Richardson still has pull.
“I had heard that you were upset that I encouraged a call between [Bill Clinton] and Richardson to bury the hatchet. I did that at the request of Jose Villarreal who pushed me and made the point that Richardson is still on TV a lot, especially on Univision and Telemundo and not withstanding the fact that he can be a dick, it was worth getting him in a good place. Probably worth a quick call to ask him to stay stout and publicly endorse, but if it’s too galling, don’t bother.”
+ Even someone as close to the Clintons as Podesta keeps running into the couple’s aversion to apologizing for anything. After issuing a non-apology apology on her email server scandal, Podesta gripes to his number two, Neera Tanden: “No good deed goes unpunished. Press takeaway was the whine of but ‘she really didn’t apologize to the American people. I am beginning to think Trump is on to something.”
Tanden notes: “Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles heel…This apology thing has become like a pathology. I can only imagine what’s happening in the campaign. Is there some way I can be helpful here? I know if I just email her she will dismiss it out of hand.”
Podesta replies tersely: “You should email her. She can say she’s sorry without apologizing to the American people. Tell her to say it and move on, why get hung on this.”
+ Few figures in the Podesta emails come off as more appalling than Neera Tanden, whose primary mission, perhaps the only thing she is really competent at, is detecting even minor deviations from obedience to Clintonian orthodoxy. No one agitates her more than Bernie and his Sandernistas, who she seems ready to dial up a drone strike against at a moment’s notice. She’s the Lee Atwater of neoliberalism, without Atwater’s malign intelligence and sense of humor.
+ Here’s Neera in panic mode over a Wall Street Journal piece on Hillary’s email server quoting an anonymous White House as saying Clinton may have “screwed up” on the matter. Tanden gets so worked up that she seems ready to target Obama: “WH crapping on her is going to send this into orbit.”
+ During one of her speeches-for-hire, Hillary promised Wall Street tycoons that she would block marijuana legalization (don’t want to cut into those tobacco stocks). Here’s her archly worded back and forth with Xerox’s CEO, Ursula Burns, following March 2014 speech. Clinton used Wall Street lingo to express her opposition to ending pot prohibition “in all senses of the word.” Who says she doesn’t have a sense of humor?
URSULA BURNS: So long means thumbs up, short means thumbs down; or long means I support, short means I don’t. I’m going to start with — I’m going to give you about ten long-shorts.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Even if you could make money on a short, you can’t answer short.
URSULA BURNS: You can answer short, but you got to be careful about letting anybody else know that. They will bet against you. So legalization of pot?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Short in all senses of the word.
+ When served with subpoena for records on Benghazi, a seriously agitated Robbie Mook asks, “We’re not releasing EVERYTHING, right?”
+ Among the things the Clinton damage control team must deal with: “Tony Rodham hustling gold mining deals in Haiti.”
+ I wonder if they considered setting up a special squad to deal with Clinton Hustler Eruptions?
+ Mark Siegel, the former executive director of the DNC, emailed Podesta on the eve of the Convention outlining strategies to entice the “self-righteous (Bernie) ideologues” to “work their asses off for Hillary.”
+ “Let’s throw Bernie a bone,” Siegel recommends, in the form of reducing the number of super delegates in 2020 primary campaign. Perhaps “Bernie Bones” could be come a new treat at Ben & Jerry’s?
+ Hillary’s closest advisor and most intimate confident is Huma Abedin. No one more aggressively enforces Hillary’s own wishes or guards her privacy. Abedin, who we must assume is speaking directly for Hillary, is adamant that Hillary continue with her strategy of avoiding press conferences. Each time Hillary answers a few questions at one of her events, the message gets lost, Huma frets. “Can we survive not answering questions from press at message events?”
Podesta swats down this notion emphatically.
“If she thinks we can get to Labor Day without taking press questions, I think that’s suicidal. We have to find some mechanism to let the stream [sic] out of the pressure cooker.”
Not a huge deal, Huma. If HRC is compelled to answer, she can just lie the way she usually does. Hillary’s a natural.
+ One email to Podesta from Hillary’s account in August of 2014 provides confirmation for what we’ve long suspected: Clinton was well aware that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the principle funders of ISIS in Iraq and Syria:
“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
+ There’s a reason I started calling MSNBC MSDNC. Here we have an email from a producer of “All In with Chris Hayes” slobbering all over Hillary Clinton in an attempt to secure an appearance on Hayes’ tendentious show:
“Hey Adrienne,
Thanks for your help in getting Karen on with Chris the other night. I have a question for you. As you guys have probably seen, we’ve been airing a ‘Hillary Clinton for Millennials’ segment on our program every night this past week.”
“The point of the segment is basically to inform young people about all of the crap and nonsense that Sec. Clinton and President Clinton (but mostly Sec. Clinton) had to face back in the 90s when President Clinton was running for office…everything from cookie-gate to stand-by-your-man-gate to Hillarycare.”
“The point isn’t to dwell on the past but the point is to talk about this amazing, intelligent woman who probably faced more nonsense back in the day because she is a woman…and she continues to have to face it. She is smarter than most men and more qualified than most men to be president.”
This kind of shameless groveling makes Sean Hannity seem like an objective reporter.
+ How to deal with the Sanders phenomenon haunted even veteran political operators on Team Clinton. Here’s an exchange from January 6, 2016 between Mandy Grunwald and Jennifer Palmieri:
Palmieri: “I liked messing with Bernie on wall street at a staff level for the purposes of muddying the waters and throwing them off their game a bit. But don’t know that it is most effective contrast for her. Seems like we are picking the fight he wants to have.”
Grunwald: “Bernie wants a fight on Wall Street. We should not give him one.”
+ Here’s an excerpt from the Clinton campaing’s press policy, cautioning against allowing coverage of the anemic turnouts at Hillary rallies: “‘Less than a 100 people at a rally? No cell phones! No press!”
+ The emails in 2015 show increasing fear that Elizabeth Warren’s freelance attacks on the big banks and investment houses will alienate the tycoons and moguls who fund the DNC. Nancy Pelosi (Net Worth: $58 million) & Co. scurry to reassure Wall Street: “Elizabeth Warren doesn’t speak for Dem Party!”
+ HRC HQ knew she needed to run against a candidate like Trump. It was her only hope of winning the election & they went to work to make it so. It unnerved some her allies, one of whom wrote Podesta: “Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump.”
As the World Burns
+ When there’s no opposition to a war, it will go on forever. See Afghanistan, 15 years and counting. Barbara Lee was the lone vote against it then and one of the few who remember it now. The Authorization for Unilateral Military Force, which launched the Afghan War, has been involved 30 times now for other interventions. Lee should get some kind of peace prize, though not the one awarded to Kissinger, Peres and Obama.
+ Russian meddling in US elections? Yet to be proven. US role in trying to overthrow more than 50 governments worldwide in last 65 years? Fact.
+ Twelve Bush officials sign letter denouncing Trump. Get ready for the Fourth Bush Term!
+ Obama announced this week that Russia will pay a price for hacking into the DNC’s computers, implying that some kind of cyber-attack will be launched on the Kremlin. What’s Obama going to do to the person who leaked the Trump tape or Trump’s tax return? Drone them?
+ Chris Christie, now a wanted man, calls Trump’s comments on kissing and grouping unsuspecting women “completely indefensible “. This is rich coming from a man who publicly humiliates women at his press conferences and then mocked, demonized and locked up a nurse named Kaci Hickox, who had shown the humanity to actually treat Ebola victims.
+ Instead of being subjected to condescending Western philanthropy, Haiti desperately needs to be allowed to chart the course of their own reconstruction. Be sure to read Mark Schuller’s important piece in this week’s CounterPunch.
+ Where’s the feminist outrage over the noxious Jeffrey Goldberg being tapped as the new editor-in-chief of The Atlantic? Judy Miller got run out of the reporting biz for her yellow journalism. Goldberg gets promoted for his! Sexism?
+ With Jeffrey Goldberg helming the Atlantic and Hillary heading for White House, everything is aligning for next big bang war. Good morning, Teheran!
+ Glenn Beck is tortured by a simple question: should he or shouldn’t he vote for Hillary Clinton? When he comes to a resolution perhaps can make his announcement live on Rachel Maddow Show? All together now, follow the bouncing bombs…
+ It took Nixon to go to China, and Donald J. Trump to destroy the GOP from the inside-out. Credit where credit is due. The Donald is fragging the entire GOP establishment, from Paul Ryan to John McCain, as his campaign goes down in flames.
+ Those freaking out over Trump’s joke about jailing Hillary have never shown the slightest angst about her policy of assassinating people, including American citizens, by drone without trial, hearing or indictment.
+ Trump didn’t rise from the swamps of the GOP. He is a monster created, promoted and advertised by the media. Even now they feast on him.
+ Of course, if Trump didn’t exist, the Clintons would have had to invent him. In a way, they did, elevating Trump as the “pied-piper candidate.”
+ Here’s the revolting Curt Schilling, another Pervert for Jesus.
+ Bernie Sanders took off enough time this week from campaigning for Hillary to broadcast this platitude: “When the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution, I’m pretty sure they weren’t thinking ‘Let’s make sure billionaires can buy elections.’”
But Bernie your old buddy Howard Zinn would have told you that is exactly what the Founding “Fathers” were thinking, which is why they only permitted white land-owning men to enjoy the franchise and doubled down by allowing the southern land barons to keep, breed and sell their slaves to buy elections.
+ The Democrats’ decision to reduce the entire closing chapter of the campaign to a rather prudish emphasis on sexual politics represents a retreat from the party’s frail commitment to tolerance and sexual liberation. Of course, it also protects Hillary from having to grapple with her entangled record on trade, economics, criminal justice and militarism. Just wait for the renewed attacks on rap music, heavy metal, and “Game of Thrones.” Will Tipper Gore be named Culture Czar?
+ Few people know where more of the Clintons’ skeletons are buried than Ken Silverstein, the founder of CounterPunch and one of the best investigative journalists around. As pre-Halloween treat, he unearths a few here regarding the Clinton foundation’s deplorable escapades in Colombia. Silverstein quotes a Colombian union organizer as saying:
“They are doing nothing for workers. I don’t even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money.”
+ Every President needs an Axis of Evil to justify their existence (and those all important defense contracts). Here’s Hillary’s. Read it and bleed.
+ Still, people see through her. Latest WSJ/NBC poll from Ohio, taken after the Trump sex tape and the St. Louis debate, shows HRC still below 50%…with WOMEN voters!
+ Someone sent me a link to a story claiming nervously that while Russia Prepares for War, the US Sleeps. Sleeps? Making Russia prepare for war (and sink billions it doesn’t have into a weapons production that will never come close to rivaling the Pentagon’s armory of mass destruction) has been the point of US foreign policy toward Russia for the last 60 years. Putin is walking blindly into same quagmire that doomed the Soviet Union. (See Andrew Cockburn’s indispensable The Threat. The book may be out of print, but it’s central thesis isn’t.)
+ When Human Rights Watch isn’t clamoring for a humanitarian cruise missile intervention or sabotaging the peace deal in Colombia, it can actually produce some compelling documents, such as this important report on the human toll of the war on drugs. The gist of the report is that every 25 seconds someone is the United States is arrested on simple possession of drugs for their own personal use, totaling more than 1.5 million arrests every year. Each day, there are more than 137,000 people in the US in prison or jail on possession charges, with tens of thousands of others under detention, house arrest or some form of probation.
+ The truly deplorable Joy Behar slimes Bill Clinton’s accusers as “tramps.” I guess that means they should feel grateful that Bill mauled them.
+ Perhaps Trump was just besotted with too much Fitzgerald. After all, he does live in a penthouse as big as the Ritz: “Hard to sit here and be close to you and not kiss you.” (Tender is the Night). Nah…
+ The Washington Post frantically conspired to kill off Nate Parker’s incandescent new film on the Nat Turner slave revolt, Birth of a Nation. After weeks of unrelenting negative publicity, the box office results were meager. The Post couldn’t help but gloat, publishing a stupid little piece by Caitlin Gibson titled: “The Big Debate Over ‘Birth of a Nation’ is Over: Audiences Just weren’t that Interested.”
+ Imagine the Post’s verdict on the greatest American novel: “The big debate over Moby-Dick is over. Only sold 500 copies upon release. Likely never hear from that author again…”
+ The concerted effort to destroy Parker and his film reminds me of the sabotaging of Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons (where a third of the footage was actually dumped in the Pacific Ocean) and John Huston’s fiercely anti-war film of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which MGM studios mutilated, cutting the film from its original 2-hour length and adding maudlin voice over narration (See Lillian Ross’s Picture for the gory details.)
+ The announcement that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature induced much carping from uptight academics about the alleged degeneration of the award. How dare they honor a rock singer? My question is what took them so long? The crusty Nobel committee should have recognized the role of popular music at least 35 years ago and given the prize to Bob Marley. Even Dylan would probably admit that Smokey Robinson should have been in line ahead of him.
+ Still Dylan deserves the recognition. He’s the greatest white blues singer and probably the best songwriter of the rock era. My favorites from across the decades: Masters of War, Highway 61 Revisited, Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, I Want You, All Along the Watchtower, The Man in Me, Forever Young, I Shall be Released, If You See Her Say Hello, This Wheel’s on Fire, Tears of Rage, Hurricane, Precious Angel, Blind Willie McTell, Julius & Ethyl, Heart of Mine, Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, Dark Eyes, Everything is Broken, Love Sick, Not Dark Yet.
+ But I hope he tells the committee to shove it, as did Jean-Paul Sartre. If not, I trust he will stay in character and mumble Dylanesque obscurities to a mystified audience.
+ Wikileaks reports that Keith Richards was on the short list for Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Robbed!
It has become conventional wisdom that “education is in crisis.” I have been asked about this question by many interviewers. They say something like: “Do you think American education is in crisis? What is the cause of the crisis?” And I answer, “Yes, there is a crisis, but it is not the one you have read about. The crisis in education today is an existential threat to the survival of public education. The threat comes from those who unfairly blame the school for social conditions, and then create a false narrative of failure. The real threat is privatization and the loss of a fundamental democratic institution.”
As we have seen again and again, the corporate education industry is eager to break into U.S. public education and turn it into a free marketplace, where they can monetize the schools and be assured of government subsidization. On the whole, these privatized institutions do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, except for those that cherry-pick their students and exclude the neediest and lowest performing students. The promotion of privatization by philanthropies, by the U.S. Department of Education, by right-wing governors (and a few Democratic governors like Cuomo of New York and Malloy of Connecticut), by the hedge fund industry, and by a burgeoning education equities industry poses a danger to our democracy. In some communities, public schools verge on bankruptcy as charters drain their resources and their best students. Nationwide, charter schools have paved the way for vouchers by making “school choice” non-controversial.
Yes, education is in crisis. The profession of teaching is threatened by the financial powerhouse Teach for America, which sells the bizarre idea that amateurs are more successful than experienced teachers. TFA — and the belief in amateurism — has also facilitated the passage of legislation to strip teachers of basic rights to due process and of salaries tied to experience and credentials.
Education is in crisis because of the explosion of testing and the embrace by government of test scores as both the means and the end of education. The scores are treated as a measure of teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness, when they are in fact a measure of the family income of the students enrolled in the school. The worst consequence of the romance with standardized testing is that children are ranked, sorted, and assigned a value based on scores that are not necessarily scientific or objective. Children thus become instruments, tools, objects, rather than unique human beings, each with his or her own potential.
Education is in crisis because of the calculated effort to turn it into a business with a bottom line. Schools are closed and opened as though they were chain stores, not community institutions. Teachers are fired based on flawed measures. Disruption is considered a strategy rather than misguided and inhumane policy. Children and educators alike are simply data points, to be manipulated by economists, statisticians, entrepreneurs, and dabblers in policy.
Education has lost its way, lost its purpose, lost its definition. Where once it was about enlightening and empowering young minds with knowledge, exploring new worlds, learning about science and history, and unleashing the imagination of each child, it has become a scripted process of producing test scores that can supply data.
Education is in crisis. And we must organize to resist, to push back, to fight the mechanization of learning, and the standardization of children.
The new evidence provided by Wikileaks’s Podesta files makes a convincing case that the Clinton team wanted extreme Republicans as the best possible opponents. They wanted not rational discourse but exactly the kind of mean-spirited bigotry that Trump has delivered so well.
The Wikileaks documents are a window into the soul of power. We can see how the Clinton machine played the strategy of triangulation on the level of action and tactic.
The Motive
For the Clinton machine to maintain power, it needs the likes of Donald Trump. It’s a package deal. The Clinton’s lesser of two evils campaign can corral voters most efficiently if their Republicans competitors are extreme, scary and incoherent. Trump is so frightening and potentially disruptive that even powerful Republican elites turn to Clinton for refuge.
So essential is the extreme right-wing to the Democrats strategy that the right-wing must be encouraged and promoted! Apparently Clinton wants and needs Trump.
The Intent
Here are excerpts from an email (click on attachments) outlining strategy and goals to the DNC dated 4/7/2015. Well before Trump officially declared his candidacy.
Force all Republican Candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election…
The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Ted Cruz
Donald Trump
Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.
Here it is: a premeditated, purposeful and extremely reckless design to bring Trump into the national spotlight. If doing so sabotages the informed public discourse that democracy depends on, so be it.
The strategy of triangulation has been moving Democrats, Republicans and public discourse to the right for three decades but rarely do we see this kind of direct evidence of intent.
The sad, truly tragic, truth is that without Trump, or his kind, the Democrats would lose one of their main forms of control over voters. Without Trump they might be forced to have a message, offer a positive program, or mobilize the millions of occasional voters and non-voters. But to do so would be to serve the people and that is incompatible with endless war and the rule of the corporations.
The Means
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.
Given the already “cozy relationship” between political elites and the corporate media the means to do the deed was right at hand.
And indeed the press did follow orders and took Trump seriously.
I always wondered why media giants, so deeply committed to the Clinton machine — big donors to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton campaign alike — lavished so much attention and so many resources on Trump.
They are driven by the same desire to maximize profit as other corporations, true, but it still seemed like there were other stories that could sell soap. The candidacy of a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn was such a story but, well, never mind. And it’s true that Trump fit the entertainment model of what we still think of as mainstream news.
The New York Times estimates that two billion dollars worth of free media coverage was given to Trump. Half that would be astounding. The Trump campaign is a study in corporate welfare.
Well, disasters like the election of 2016 have an overabundance of causes. But the Democrats desire to elevate Trump was part of the potion. And the media followed direction with gusto.
The racism, sexism and trash-talking commentary from Trump, and its effect on public discourse, is acceptable collateral damage, a toxic side effect of the Clinton’s will to power.
This is the crime: premeditated Trump love. The Democrats had the motive, intent and means to make Trump great.
The verdict: a vote for Clinton is a vote for Trump.
Such is the twisted two-party system. A system that, unless disrupted, will continue to produce Trumps and Clintons and worse.
Sorry Clinton fans, but this kind of mass manipulation is deeply destructive of what little remains of democratic culture in the US.
I am afraid that millions will stay home on election day. Withdrawal is a predictable outcome when politics are so debased, but so is resistance. It’s to build a new civil rights, anti-war and environmental moments and get real political issues back on the front burner.
Richard Moser writes at befreedom.co where this article first appeared.
As the evidence mounts that we are fast approaching the final point-of-no-return beyond which it will be impossible to take sufficient effective action to prevent climate catastrophe – see ‘The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently‘– the evidence of ineffective official responses climbs too. See, for example, ‘Climate Con: why a new global deal on aviation emissions is really bad news’.
Even worse, we continue to be given response options that, even when they are well meaning, are naïve and inadequate whether they are suggested by individuals – see, for example, ‘Committing Geocide: Climate Change and Corporate Capture‘– or major environment organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org and
Friends of the Earth.
Moreover, given the myriad indications of progressive environmental breakdown in domains unrelated to the climate catastrophe, one must be terrified and delusional to suggest or even believe that anything less than a comprehensive strategy, which goes well beyond anything governments and corporations will ever endorse, gives us any chance of averting the sixth mass extinction event in planetary history. A mass extinction that will include us.
As an aside, if you believe the ‘end of century’ scenario (for human extinction) being driven by the same corporate interests that drove climate denial for so long, then you are simply a victim of their latest attempt to drive ‘business as usual’ while delaying action for as long as possible at any cost.
Another problem, if you understand anything about human psychology and political organization, is that mobilizing people in large numbers to act strategically and powerfully is not easy. Of course, if it wasn’t so difficult, this crisis would not have arisen in the first place. We would have responded intelligently and strategically decades ago as some aware individuals, starting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 100 years ago, suggested.
To briefly recap the wider nature of the crisis we face: Consider our synergistic and devastating assaults on the environment through military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and the spreading radioactive contamination from Fukushima. We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet which means that water scarcity is becoming a frequent reality for many people and the collapse of hydrological systems is now likely by 2020. Human activity drives 200 species of life (plants, birds,animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings.
So what are we to do?
Well, if you are inclined to assess the evidence and to design a response strategy that has the possibility of success built into it,then I invite you to consider the strategy outlined on the Nonviolent Campaign Strategy website. This strategy identifies all twelve components of a nonviolent strategy to end the climate catastrophe, including the myriad of strategic goals for such a strategy to be comprehensive and effective. You are very welcome to suggest improvements in this strategy and to invite other individuals and groups to participate in helping to implement it.
One final point: a tragic outcome of modern humans terrorizing their children into obedience (to maintain social control) is that most of the human population is (unconsciously) terrified, self-hating and powerless. For a full explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.
So don’t wait around waiting for others to act first. It is your leadership that is required in this circumstance. And it is your leadership that might ultimately make the difference.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
Robert J. Burrowes P.O. Box 68 Daylesford Victoria 3460 Australia Email: flametree@riseup.net
Recall that you’re sitting in a rapid transit vehicle, carried along the sky-line above cement highways, paved in homage to the Romans, who designed a system of militarized paths stretching everywhere, causing everything to lead back to one place. Here we are everyone, the year of the Monkey, 2016, 98 years after The Great War … too bad it isn’t the year of the Dalmatians … Mickey Mouse recently Tweeted that Disney is working on buying the rights to the Chinese lunar calendar. Imagine 12 animated classics framing each and every year for the remainder of humanity’s existence.
At this point human society is so vast, so complex, so multilayered, that it is impossible to stay updated, engaged, and participating in every area of local and global importance. Education takes us from a place of innocence, creativity and joy, forcing us to fall into the institutional lines of desks and faced forward attention. As a nodal point of knowledge each new person will be filled to the brim with information that makes them useful to the status quo.
Neuroscience now tells us that the brain has plasticity and the neurosynaptic networks that are created through nurturing, which become identity and personality, can be changed and overwritten. Newer pathways can be formed and strengthened and older ones can be reduced. Does this mean that our free-will has a physical manifestation as identity, as culture, and every choice affects the people, animals and objects around us? Everything we think and do reinforces everything we think and do, creating a strange logical loop which justifies our lives as ourselves. Without any major impetus, what reason do we have to change? Why compromise our internally consistent narrative and accept the narrative of someone else? What stands to be different?
Surreality is becoming a more constant state as life in the present starts to look like Science Fiction of the future from the past. The last historian wandering around Paris in the 21st Century, forgotten by a technologically advanced world that cares only for materialism. A beguiled Case, the lead character of Gibson’s Neuromancer, disenfranchised because he can no longer participate in the romance of cyberspace, looking something like a hacker barred by the law to approach or touch a computer. Of course cyborgs, robots, virtual reality and AI dance at the periphery, the momentum of current technological trends, yet we titillate ourselves with the practical possibility of these totems nearing our hearts and minds.
Information overflows like never before. Some cry Apocalypse! End Times! The Rapture! But most of the world is still filling up their gas tanks, believing that the day when Climate Change will actually affect them is the day that it will be clearly outlined in a power point presentation, at their offices or wherever they work, explaining the equity found in maintaining current profit margins while in the same breath rearranging the economic vehicle of prosperity.
“Change without Changing!” might be the Party Slogan for whoever runs for the Presidency after Obama sputters to a close.
Take my hand and run through the ever-increasing fields of soya beans, where we can hear the Monsanto genetically-modified breeze blowing the answer in the wind, whispering corporate sonatas, proving that commercial capitalism is a system of religion. Faith in Profit! The Gospel of Endless Progress! Join our Church of Business! Maybe Monsanto can use its private militia to assassinate Thomas Piketty, because of the seeds he’s sowing about capitalism being a mechanical beast that needs regulation because its fuel is the disparity between rich and poor … the larger the gap the more efficacious the fuel.
Then I think whether or not you’ll be reading this on paper or a flat-screen … whether either will be made from recyclable resources, and the argument that the printed word is less sustainable than the digital, so let’s put them to the test, right here, right now:
What can you do with a single piece of printed paper? Read it, eat it, burn it, re-write on it, make origami, a paper airplane or a boat, use it as a funnel, snort powders with it, wipe our bums? What can we do with a tablet? Access every possible available medium via the Internet and software?
It takes at least a lumber, ink, metal, and print industry to create the basic elements to manufacture printed media on a large scale. The average printed matter, kept in modest condition, can last up to 100 years and still be usable. The space that a single printed work takes up is quite large, creating the need to provide space of the material itself. When recycling an old book there are few components to worry about, making it rather simple.
It takes at least most types of mining and the processing of raw materials (petroleum, silicon, zinc, aluminum), software and hardware development, manufacturing, and the assembly of components to create a tablet. The average tablet, kept in modest condition, can remain functional until it’s obsolete. It certainly will not last 100 years, and even if it did the components, chips and circuitry would be so worn down that anything you might have used it for would no longer be possible. Of course you can store a million, a billion, even a zillion books on a single tablet, but will everyone have equal access to it? Tablets are extremely difficult to recycle, their components don’t just make up another tablet. The loss from entropy alone assures destruction, and we cannot grow more zinc, petroleum, or aluminum.
But really none of this matters, we don’t have any control over what corporations choose to do with our futures, or what medium we will use. These new, futuristic developments, intended to define human culture, are being devised and formed inside of grand boardrooms, in tall skyscrapers, by CEOs and shareholders. They, the 1%, are only concerned with whether the product they create for us will become a necessary commodity, like food, like water, like shelter … like Subway, like Coke Cola, like Single Room Occupancies (SROs).
You hear someone talking about the protest on Burnaby Mountain. People don’t want Kinder-Morgan expanding the capacity of an already existent pipeline because it will significantly increase the traffic of oil tankers in the Burrard Inlet. Someone else discusses the unrest of activist groups in Vancouver; about the substandard living conditions; the war on the poor; the two new prisons … they care about housing those who arise from poverty and have been given nowhere else to go. Anger overtakes you for a moment and you think, I don’t like this, why is there so much injustice, maybe I can do something about it…
A flabbergasted voice backtracking intellectual missives comes on over the radio, you’re not sure if it’s in your head or not: “Revolution is just going around and around, it’s a cycle, it begins with violence and it ends with violence and it only achieves the same power structure that precedes it.”
You think about the French Revolution, the Arab Spring, Anonymous, and realize grass-roots change can rise up from the ground, from the dirt, from the dust whence we came, to challenge the oligarchical deities of the political / corporate aristocracy. We can sell everything we own and buy whole streets collectively, live there together, change the land and what’s on it together. We can join all kinds of innovative communities. We can gather in massive groups and walk through the streets, calling attention to everything corruption has built up around us. We can participate in Civil Disobedience, because the obedience that is asked of us causes harm to someone or something that is alive and is not fairly allowed to defend itself.
No matter how much Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan and Justin Trudeau tell you that the money will trickle down, no matter how much they tell you that they are the ones who created the railroads, produced the banks, developed the industries that sustain our economies … they didn’t do a damn thing. We laid the tracks, we hammered the spikes, we drove the trains, we maintained the services, we built the buildings, we painted the walls, we fitted the plumbing, we opened the doors, we mopped the floors, we surveyed the land, we mineral tested the rock, we operated the drills, we processed the crude and we shipped the products. None of these things that they presume to own did they make or build. They didn’t put one brick in the wall, they didn’t dig one trench, and they didn’t turn one switch. It’s all ours…
Now an unsettling feeling might skitter across you when you realize that you are implicated in this whole thing. Why do we feel so disenfranchised? Why does the 1% own so much more influence, so much more than we little peons? I feel powerless but every day I participate in the construction of human society. Every action contributes to a massive effect called the singularity of my life. Don’t fall into the kinds of aporia that Jacques Ellul observes in The Technological Society, where no one claims responsibility for the projects of technology. Who made this computer? Was it the engineers, or the design team, the software developers, the hardware makers? Or was it the companies who mined the silver, the petroleum, the zinc, the aluminum, the silicon? No single person in the process can take responsibility for the whole … so no one does, they just accept it, and its justification is its presence.
Well then … we are in a pickle aren’t we? But maybe revolution is the act of taking responsibility? Clips of revolution flicker through your mind-film, you see riots, Molotov cocktails, police lined up with transparent plastic shields. You realize you do not want to risk your comfort, your coziness, your conformity, so you fit in and play nice and salute whoever is in power. Or maybe you are just not interested, you have your soma, your serial monogamy, your fair trade Americano. Besides, you’re too busy, you’ve got kids, you work 60 hours a week, you recently bought a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, you already have enough responsibilities …
“The Cable Guy” (1996) is a dark satire written by Judd Apatow and directed by Ben Stiller which straddles the line between comedy and psychological thriller. Jim Carrey (still in the midst of his rapid rise to fame) stars as Chip Douglas who, after setting up free cable for Steven (Matthew Broderick) begins to behave in increasingly comical yet unsettling and stalker-like behavior to attach himself to his new “friend”. The film features metacommentary on Hollywood narrative tropes while effectively using them in the service of a cautionary tale about mass-media obsession and social alienation.
Update:
After the Crash 