Taxi's Articles

Election Impressions

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By now, after a long presidential campaign season marked by shocking levels of corruption scandals and salacious smut – and the election right now being a mere handful of days away – there’s really no need to repeat or parse information that everyone already knows.  But if you’ll kindly indulge me here, I will share below some random, haphazard, stream of consciousness impressions of this election, which I’ve been quasi following from the faraway hills of the Levant:

Well, there’s that weird uncontrollable coughing and plenty of groping and charitable cronyism; there’s Putinism and much perverted poll-ism; there’s thugs in duck-suits waving banners on pavements and a porn star is weeping on TV.  I’ve got my rigged race and your rigged race together in our nation’s deplorable basket case.  See them rancid rats and DC gurus in their thousand dollar swimsuits abandon Donald’s ship?  Forget NATO and remember our tax cuts and spit on Obamacare, these deserters were being told by an odd orange face that fucks with disgraced democracy.  Booby-trapped race card played under and over the table and nasty feminism here, there and everywhere –  no lives matter more than their divisionism and their blood-stained brand name.  Is there anyone in the whole goddamn country who doesn’t suffer from an unsavory ism?!  Oh lookie: thunder from blue skies and then some undignified fainting fit on 9/11.  Why not rig the elections in Washington and in Palestine, whispered the lady making marmalade out of kosher lemons in her Chappaqua kitchen.  Why not baseball bat Syria for Israel and the Al Saud family with the help of Turkey and ISIS and the neocons croaking in sealed crypts?  Trump laughs at no-fly zones and his index finger wags when he asks us to bring down the vast-footed refugees with a small tremendous vote – (now watch yourself add busy graffiti to his walls made of ghetto gold, if he wins).  Say Wikileaks and pantsuits ninety nine times before breakfast and you just might get your genitals grabbed by the Midas touch.  Look at them two gleaming blonds debating and not a hair out of place, all thanks to 50’s hairspray and all that Reaganesque toothpaste diet – in their hands, a long list of sex predators and the Socratic National Enquirer – on their lips, corncheese lies and memorized witless hate – oh  nightmare to be stuck with Hillary’s laugh in an echo chamber – eternal slo-mo torment, the kind of torture that never kills but drives one darkly insane.  Nightmare too to be stuck in an elevator with Trump harping on about his perfect… hands.  Oh so heartbreaking to have no American Jesus!  Look, here we have greed, greed, and more greed – triple greed gnashing at gnashed-out tax payers – and Babylon Bill can make you barf and make himself a million bucks in five minutes flat – he, priap with bulbous nose and beady eyes and pink-as-worms skin, he reeks of white collar crime and leaking semen and irredeemable wife in handbag of bacon rinds.  My, my, pfff, just look at the Hollywood sign and attack dogs on botox and the media mad at the upstart who came in from the cold and rattled their bones and their cagey bank accounts.  Brings to mind Assange and Hannity and project Veritas and that stunner with cats eyes called Melania in Furs.  Establishment trillionaires against anti-establishment billionaires dueling with bejeweled swords – not nice to be stabbing someone in the face with diamonds and laughing, madam secretary.  Trump worries about size when blade size don’t matter but the comeback thrust does – he with bricklayer wolf-whistle and big bad gold ring, look at him bingeing on Mad Men series and a bevy of beauty queens with crow-feet smiles.  This is what it’s like to have an election where the powerful run all crazed and disheveled down the corridors of power, panicking and deleting their Twitter and emails before sunrise.  Best to throw bricks through the windows of the establishment while they’re counting their loot, people!  Burn down the PC towers and the establishment just might follow!  But… good grief!  Is that Huma’s Wiener I see in Hillary’s falling teardrop?  Yes.  And the FBI now doth penetrate for fingerprints on corpse…

Who will win the election after such a mass amount of rank speculation and propaganda has been dumped on us?

Either way it goes, our grand Ship of State will indeed be steered by small hands.

 

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175 comments:

  1. Taxi says:

    Welcome to Plato’s Election 2016 thread – I will keep it open past the election date – this will give readers the opportunity to comment before and after the election results, should they feel so inclined. One thing’s for sure, there’s a heckalotta stuff, bad stuff, being kept behind closed doors in the final days leading up to the election. The situation is fluent – I will keep you updated with breaking news and developments – and I welcome readers to share and link us to any information they think may be enlightening to the rest of us. Thank you for your support and patronage. If you’re voting, good luck wading through the swamp of democracy our nation finds itself in!

  2. Taxi says:

    Funny how all these west coast old hippies I know are supporting Madam Establishment instead of anti-establishment Trump.

  3. Taxi says:

    List of neocons who’ve infiltrated Trump’s camp (off the top of my head):  Giuliani, Gingrich, Trump’s jewish son-in-law and Dr. Evil himself, Dick Cheney (can’t believe he’s still alive!), Adleson too (though apparently he’s pissed at Donald and he only gave Donald’s campaign 10 million as opposed to 100 million he gave to that loser Romney); not forgetting Pense, Donald's running mate, a high priest of the despicable cult himself.  But as we’ve all already observed, Donald is a wild and spontaneous horse that would be hard to tame (unless they have some kinda blackmail material on him from his time at Lolita island).  When Donald says that there’s a conspiracy against him between Clinton and the global bankers, we know that he knows what we all know:  there‘s an indisputable case to be made that the Elders of Zion has by now become a case of life imitating art.  That the global bankers he refers to have jewish names and their fists are throttling the western world.

  4. Taxi says:

    When you're 69 years of age and the FBI are knocking on your door… well, I don't call that a successful political career.

    • Taxi says:

      It's stunning to me that contemporary American feminists support a woman like Hillary.

      It seems that our feminist leaders are under the delusional belief that corruption does not penetrate and infect women in politics.

      True feminists would reject a criminal in the highest office, regardless of their gender.

      And besides, what did Hillary ever do to the women of Syria, Iraq and Libya:  unleashing ISIS kidnappers and rapists and beheaders upon them and their already frail lives?

      And what did Hillary ever do for American women?  After 30+ years of public service, she still hasn't managed to even make into law the issue of equitable wages for women in the workplace.  Her charity foundation even pays men more than they do women workers.

      Give me a break, feminists!!!!!

       

  5. Bornajoo says:

    Great to see you back dear Taxi, with another masterful piece. You've been sorely missed

    I'm not sure what words to use to describe the so-called election. A debacle, spectacle and tragi-comedy all rolled into one. But also a good barometer which shows just how low things have sunk in these days which feels like the End Of Times if you're a born-again or the final moments of the Kali Yuga if your a Hindu. 

    I  like the Hindu version which takes us through the 4 periods starting with the Golden Age, when everything was all luvvie duvvie but it all ends horribly at the end of the age of Kali. And according to the Hindus we're right at that stage now. This is when humankind has reached its lowest point of self degradation in almost every dimension. And it's at that point that the universe destroys itself with everything in it, only to be born again starting with the Golden Age

    Well let's have a quick look around the world; the warmongers, the psychos, the bankers, the Zionists, the one percenters…. All topped off with the Election to choose the most powerful person to lead the free world. It's a choice between a psychotic warmongering crook and a complete idiot. And I find myself hoping that a complete idiot will win because it's less likely that life on earth will end in the very near future.

    So if we've reached the point where I'm praying for the complete idiot to become the most powerful person on planet earth I also find myself hoping that the current universe does indeed destroy itself, and as quickly as possible please. It's what we deserve and there's no hope anyway

    Oh dear, I didn't intend that to be such a dark and gloomy rant but it all just sort of came out that way

    Wishing you good, happy zionist-psycho free days over there in the beautiful Levant

    • Taxi says:

      Woohoo David!  Longtime'o!

      I've got friends who've never voted Republican and they're doing it for Trump next week – not because they love him, but because, like one of them said: "A groper beats a killer".

      I'm not into the end of the world thing – I mean the possibility is there but the probability is extremely low – the only people crazy and desperate enough to seriously consider using nukes are actually the israelis.  The rest of the nuke club members do not suffer from incurable Masadatitis.

      Sure, we can have a thousand wars that kill millions of people, but resorting to nukes is understood by leaders to be tantamount to national suicide, followed by possible and absolute global death if nukes are used against a nuclear-armed foe.  So many conditions have to be right to be triggered for such a cataclysmic event.  As hot-headed as leaders can sometimes be, they do not want to personally die or go down in history as the leader that killed his own nation.

      That's not to say that nuclear war could never happen, but it's unlikely to also happen before world leaders figure out a successful vaccination against the deadly effects of a nuclear attack.  Leaders are not martyrs who are prepared to die for a cause – they're narcissistic and cowardly and selfish, and just like when madmen soundly run out of burning asylums to save their skin, so too would mad leaders look for an exit from a hot spot.

      (Sorry am a bit long-winded cuz am tired – long day).

  6. Cloak And Dagger says:

    Magnum Opus, Taxi style! Love it!

    Ah, our 4-yearly festival of make-believe and despondency as we contemplate who has been chosen for us to “elect.” From a population of 300+ million, lo and behold, the best of the best! A war-mongering shrew with a trail of corpses in her wake, and a flamboyant, narcissistic megalomaniac. These, ladies and gentlemen, are our saviors, who will lead us to Nirvana.

     Emails, cover-ups, crotch-grabbing, oh my! Pots calling kettles black. The wife of an ex lecher-in-chief, proclaiming how offended she is for all women because of her potty-mouthed opponent, and Israel-pandering homilies. Oh, we are not offended by the carnage we perpetrated on the planet, with drones annihilating young dreams of the brown-skinned, reducing the Middle East to a factory of refugees to repopulate Europe, drowning in blood and the Mediterranean alike. But, we are so offended because the orange one said a naughty! A nation of hypocrites and stooges, two steps away from self-destruction.

    Salvation? Hardly. The best we can hope for is chaos, and perhaps, that is what we need to bring down the pillars of this cesspool of corrupt bottom feeders. A revolution of a different kind – with an orange bull in a china shop, wrecking it all so that we can start over. Is that too much to hope for? Or is this another step in making our nihilistic and dystopic future complete?

    Happy Halloween! This one may last for years.

     

    • Taxi says:

      Cloak,
      It’s clear from the unpopularity and blatant imperfections of both candidates that our republic is in the midst of a profound crisis of leadership – a reflection too of our waning Empire.  And the trend will continue downhill, till a fresh-face who has spine and integrity arrives on the scene and rights some of the political disfunctions we're currently suffering from – and yet, sadly, no such person is within sight or is even far upon the horizon and heading towards our turbulent shores.

      Begs the question here:  how the hell did we get this low?   Political scientists should spend the rest of their lives studying exactly the factors that are slowly dragging the greatest nation on earth (ever!) under pungent, watery sewage.

      As an observer of the political stage and its actors, it's clear that politicians are at fault for getting us to this dire and unseemly stage – they have been either compromised or they've willfully neglected their state affairs and paid-for duties – and done so thus over a long, long, long, long, lonnnnnng period of time.  There is no other explanation for the rot clinging to our political organ:  Capitol Hill.  Political scientists need to start getting proactive and naming names.

      We the voters are also at fault for giving our vote to these useless and corrupt politicians – especially if we vote the same corrupt suits into power at the next elections 2020.  We desperately need an overhaul!

      'It's The Hypocrisy Stupid!' – that to me is the very source of our political malaise and moral anemia.

      "… an orange bull in a china shop", you say.  Donald as the American 'red heifer' perhaps?

      • Cloak And Dagger says:

        You asked:

        Begs the question here:  how the hell did we get this low? 

        Oh, that is simple: we were infiltrated by a horde of Israel-firsters who, over several centuries, put themselves in positions of power: political, financial, and media, and systematically deconstructed this great nation for the benefit of a tribe that only had its self-interest in mind, America be damned.

        No mystery there. The real question is, now that we are here, what are we going to do about it?

         

        And speaking of red heifers:

      • Taxi says:

        You’re absolutely right, Cloak. No “mystery” how we got here at all.

        What to do about it? Feeble-powered citizen can vote their zionist reps out of office. A long and arduous process as it involves ‘educating’ and ‘informing’ deeply brainwashed (by the zio media) citizenry.

    • Cloak And Dagger says:

      I think Trump is pandering because he believes that is the only way to slide past the temple guards. Judging by the what I read, it doesn't look like the zios are buying it and they seem to be all piling on him. The real test will be when he chooses his cabinet. If he chooses another Rahm, then all bets are off.

      That is not to say that they don’t have a Lolita tape on him, but he would probably brag about it if they did. Character assassination doesn’t work on someone like him as he takes it as a badge of honor.

    • Taxi says:

      Hillary To Be Arrested?

      Writes Graham Dugas:

      Comey has an insurrection on his hands beyond the ability of anyone to control. These mutinous senior FBI agents have enough dirt to toss Obama, Comey, Hillary and others in jail. They also loathe the idea of being subjected to Clinton in the future as they know they will be forced to perpetrate more cover-ups and stain the bureau even more. They presented Comey and Obama with a choice… “give us Hillary’s head on a platter and we will be silent on Obama’s complicity in federal crimes [effectively a Nixon type pardon by omission of pursuit] and we will allow Comey to quietly be succeeded by a person of our choosing on an incoming Trump Administration.” OR ELSE THEY WILL GO PUBLIC. Comey could have been silent until after the election no matter what they found on Weiner’s laptop because they already have seen ALL the emails including the deleted ones. The fact that Comey is taking this action indicates that his hand is being forced and that he [and Obama] have accepted the terms offered by the insurrectionists in exchange for the face saving terms offered. This also dovetails with Assange saying his next batch [the FBI knows the contents of ALL of Podesta’s emails] will result in the arrest of Hillary. The FBI cannot weather another PR storm revealing them complicit in a cover-up. They also must be proactive and use Hillary’s arrest/indictment/forced withdrawal from the race as a lightning rod to quell a furious public by granting them their ‘pound of flesh’. No one likes Hillary, and don’t think that the Pentagon is going to silently sit still as one of their 4-Star generals get ramrodded for MUCH less than Hillary did. They are aligned with the insurrectionists at the FBI. Comey and Obama’s hand is being forced. Hillary is toast and going to jail. You will know this is true within a few days because the sheriff is about to slap the cuffs on Hillary. Weiner’s laptop is just a cover story.

    • seanmcbride says:

      Emergent social media meme: Loretta Lynch could turn out to be the John Mitchell of the Obama administration — head of the Department of Obstruction of Justice.

       

      • Taxi says:

        Thanks Sean.  Here's a John Michell's Wiki page:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Mitchell

        I'm hearing much rumor-milling around Obama's involvement in the email scandal – how he knowingly exchanged emails with Hillary on her unsecured private server – he was using a fake name and a yahoo email address apparently.  If this is true, then it just blows the mind to think of the president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the history of mankind (to date), was actually using a common yahoo email address to communicate with his Secretary of State. 

        The pair of them (Hilary and Obama) probably thought they were real smart hiding in plain view in cyberland in order to exchange information that would be untraceable by government bureaucrats, the intelligence community and others that supervise governmental process and propriety.

        Somehow I can't imagine Putin opening himself a yahoo email account and using a fake name.

        We desperately need to get rid of our Irresponsibles!

  7. Taxi says:

    First major paper to ask Hillary to hit the road:

    Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside/John Kass, Chicago Tribune

    Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday's FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state?

    We'll find out soon enough.

    It's obvious the American political system is breaking down. It's been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they're properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.

    FBI director James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

    This can't be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been "reckless" with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution.

    So what should the Democrats do now?

    If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process:

    They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

    Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea.

    Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails.

    What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

    The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it.

    But what will Hillary do?

    She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence.

    She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been.

    Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

    If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired.

    As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

    And there was no prosecution of Hillary.

    That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous.

    And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants.

    I've always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes.

    The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars.

    All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it.

    If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?

    Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside – Chicago Tribune

    • Taxi says:

      The Chicago Tribune is NO fan of Trump – they've been attacking him as per the Clinton memo – so it's pleasantly surprising to find an adult in their room.

      The article 's honorable message is worth repeating here:

      The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it. (John Kass)

      • Cloak And Dagger says:

        Well, now that her downfall looks imminent, the rats will leave the sinking ship, and all her shills will distance themselves from her. Watch as more of the media backpedals in the days ahead.

    • Taxi says:

      More Clinton thugs and cheaters and liars and enablers exposed:

      Donna Brazile Tells Campaign That Hillary Will Get a Debate Question 'From a Woman With a Rash'

      Donna Brazile should be kicked out of the party altogether – join that Deborah Shultz in some dark D.C. dive where our disgraced political representatives hide and drown in alcohol and sorrow at eight in the morning.  Donna Brazile should be immediately sacked and denounced by all party members – well, she's not exactly gonna leave of her own accord – she doesn't have the spine to do the honorable thing.

      These public servants spit on our democracy and our beloved constitution when they cheat during elections.  They really should be punished for this by the law and be banned from political life altogether.  It's now gonna take a heck of a lot of smoke and mirrors and magic tricks for us to sell the sound concept of western democracy to the rest of the world when everyone can clearly see that our political halls are infested with cockroaches and crypto dictators.  No one believes us anymore – our reputation is dirt – heck we don't even believe us anymore!

  8. Taxi says:

    I know I'm putting more heat on Hillary than I am on Donald, but the fact is that Clinton's list of crimes is by far-far-far longer and more egregious than Trump's.

  9. Taxi says:

    Here's what Moon of Alabama has to say about the Clinton Crime Inc. troubles:

    The FBI's Clinton Investigation Is Wider Than Assumed

    The Washington Post editors today added to their hypocrisy with three additional anti-Comey op-eds:

    Eric Holder: James Comey is a good man, but he made a serious mistake
    The costs of Comey’s appeasement
    Comey’s mistaken quest for transparency

    I interpret that as naked fear that their candidate Hillary Clinton may now loose. That fear is justified.

    The Wall Street Journal today added to its so far excellent reporting on the Clinton issues by revealing the much bigger story behind it: FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe – Laptop may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton’s private server (open copy here).

    According to the reporting, based on FBI sources, FBI agents in New York and elsewhere have been looking into the Clinton Foundation for several months. They suspect that this "charity" was selling political favors by then Secretary of State Clinton in exchange for donations that personally benefited the Clinton family.

    The Justice Department blocked further aggressive investigations into the issue, allegedly because of the ongoing election. A high FBI official, Andrew McCabe, also showed disinterest in a further pursuit of the issue. McCabe's wife had just tried to get elected as state senator and had receive a campaign donation of nearly $500,000 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton friend and at times board member of the Clinton Foundation. The FBI agents pursuing the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were not amused.

    The separate investigation into former Congressman Weiner for sexual contacts with minors was looking for pedophile stuff on Weiner's electronic devices. It didn't find any as far as we can tell, but found some 650,000 emails archived on a laptop.

    Several thousand of these emails were sent or received by Weiner's spouse, the intimate Clinton aide Huma Abedin. They came through Clinton's private email server. At least some of these thousands of emails are likely copies of those that were deleted from Clinton's server when the (separate) investigation into it started. They may be evidence that Clinton sent and received classified documents through her unsecured system. Some of these emails may also contain serious dirt related to the Clinton Foundation. (It is highly likely that at least some FBI agents know "unofficially" what these emails contain. Legally they could not look at them without a warrant which they only got today.)

    Thus we have three ongoing FBI investigations:

    – into Clinton's private email-server used illegally for official State Department business;
    – into the Clinton Foundation and its role in peddling political influence in exchange for donations;
    – into the personal conduct of Anthony Weiner.
    Additional investigations that may come up are on:

    – the mixing of donations to the Clinton Foundation and personal compensation for Bill Clinton for holding highly paid speeches;
    – for profit activities by the group of people running Bill Clinton's businesses as well as the Clinton Foundation financing;
    – inappropriate hindering of the FBI investigations by the Justice Department and/or by McCabe.

    With such a list of potentially very serious scandals pending it is highly understandable that FBI director Comey went public and did not follow the advice from the Justice Department to pursue these issues only on a reduced level. It would have been political suicide to try to keep this silent. Way too many FBI agents eager to pursue these case were in the known and would have talked, as they do now, to the media.

    If Clinton gets elected she will be hampered by these scandals for the next two years. The Republicans in Congress will jump on these issues as soon as possible. There will be endless hearings with large media coverage. The only question is when the first attempts at an impeachment process will be made – before or after she moves back into the White House. She and her family may be better off with her losing the campaign.

    http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/10/the-fbis-clinton-investigation-is-wider-than-assumed.html#comments

    • Cloak And Dagger says:

      I don't like Donald. However, he is not running for the position of the Pope. I couldn't care less how many skirts he has chased, how many  crotches he has grabbed, or how many women he has groped. It is not like he is in a company of saints. Here is a video of Obama displaying his erection to a bevy of giggling female reporters:

      https://youtu.be/04RhsO_fyZQ

      All I need from Donald is to upset the applecart and pull open the blinds to let the sunlight in and to send the cockroaches scampering from the kitchen floor. I need him to stop all our wars and bring our troops home. I need him to stop sending foreign aid (bribes) to all countries, especially Israel. I need him to break up the foreign lobbies and force AIPAC to register as an agent of a foreign nation. I have no problem with immigrants in general, but we don't need any more foreigners to move here until we can find jobs for all our people and shelter for all our homeless. Charity begins at home. But most of all, I want the DOJ under him to investigate the entire political elite, starting with congress, and incarcerate them all.

      If he does that, he can have all the tail he wants, and I won't even bat an eyelid.

       

      • Taxi says:

        My problem with the 'Access Hollywood' hot tape is actually the ridiculous response to it.  AND THE HYPOCRISY!

        That kind of 'locker-room' shit-shooting is the norm around the whole damn world and it was ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS FOREVER THUS!  Women talk locker-room shit about men too, you know!

        And besides, Donald was talking about female star-fuckers, not 'women' as a whole – obviously!  I lived in LA for 18 years and I can tell you that a good one out of three or four women there are starfuckers  – including stars themselves!!

        When I was younger, I used to hate being whistled at and harassed etc but I certainly didn't view this ungentlemany behavior as a crime against my person!  I saw it as stupid, pathetic and base male behavior – and rather common!  So of course I think it's disgusting behavior – but I'd be stupid too if I thought that the solution to such rampant and uncouth behavior is the suppression and oppression of the animal in man.  We are nowhere near ready for that level of collective enlightenment as a species.  The best that our society can do is to ensure that ALL laws are gender-equal – that's all society can do.  We certainly cannot stop mankind's rabid  sexuality – especially that our western society is soooo highly and hyper sexualized to boot!!!

        Donald's hot tape incident demonstrated to me how utterly lost and "nasty" the modern feminist movement has become.  They've forgotten that the fundamental goal of feminism was to liberate women not just from institutionallized sexism, but from the psychological chains of victimhood too.

  10. Taxi says:

    E-mails – Hillary Clinton and the Muslim Brotherhood – Thierry Meyssan/Voltaire.net

    The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails is not directed at a case of negligence in the face of security regulations, but at a conspiracy attempting to eliminate any trace of her correspondence which should have been archived on the servers of the Federal State. It could include exchanges about illegal financing or corruption, and others concerning the links between the Clintons, the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadists.

    The reprise of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails no longer concerns questions of security, but rather acts of skulduggery and cheating which could be as serious as high treason.

    Technically, instead of using one of the secured servers of the Federal State, the Secretary of State had ordered the installation of a private server in her home, in order to be able to use the Internet without leaving any trace on a machine belonging to the Federal State. Mrs. Clinton’s private technician had voided the server before the arrival of the FBI, so that it was impossible to know why she had set up such a network.

    First of all, the FBI noted that the private server was not protected by the same security system as the State Department server. Thus Mrs. Clinton had only committed a security fault. Secondly, the FBI confiscated the computer of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the ex-husband of Huma Abedin, Hillary’s chief of staff. The FBI found e-mails from the Secretary of State on his computer.

    Anthony Weiner is a Jewish politician who is very close to the Clintons, and who harboured the ambition of becoming mayor of New York. He was obliged to resign following a very Puritan scandal – he had sent erotic SMS’s to a young woman who was not his wife. Huma Abedin officially separated from him during the scandal, but in reality, did not leave him.

    Huma Abedin is a US citizen who was raised in Saudi Arabia. Her father is director of an academic revue – of which, for many years, she was the sub-editor – which regularly prints comments from the Muslim Brotherhood. Her mother is president of the Saudi association of female members of the Brotherhood, and worked with the wife of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Her brother Hassan works for Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious authority of the Brotherhood and spiritual counsellor of Al-Jazeera.

    Huma Abedin is today a central figure of the Clinton campaign, alongside the campaign director, John Podesta, ex-General Secretary of the White House under the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Podesta is also the appointed Congressional lobbyist for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – for the modest amount of $200,000 per month. On 12 June 2016, Petra, the official Press agency of Jordan, published an interview with the crown prince of Arabia, Mohamed Ben Salmane, in which he affirmed the modernity of his family, which had illegally financed Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign to the tune of 20%, despite the fact that she is a woman. The day after this publication, the agency cancelled the dispatch and claimed that its Internet site had been hacked.

    Mrs. Abedin is not the only member of the Obama administration linked to the Brotherhood. The US President’s half-brother, Abon’go Malik Obama, is the Treasurer for the Brotherhood’s missionary work in Sudan, and also President of the Barack H. Obama Foundation. He is under the direct orders of the Sudanese President, Omar el-Béchir. A Muslim Brother is a member of the National Security Council – the highest executive position in the United States. From 2009 to 2012, this was the case of Mehdi K. Alhassani. We do not know who succeeded him, but the White House denied that a Muslim Brother was a member of the Council until the proof surfaced. A Muslim Brother, Rashad Hussain, is also US ambassador to the Islamic Conference. The other Brothers who have been identified occupy less important functions. However, we must name Louay M. Safi, a current member of the Syrian National Coalition and ex-advisor to the Pentagon.

    In April 2009, two months before his speech in Cairo, President Obama secretly received a delegation of the Brotherhood in the Oval Office. During his induction, he had already invited Ingrid Mattson, the President of the Association of Muslim Brothers and Sisters in the United States.

    From their side, the Clinton Foundation had employed Gehad el-Haddad as director for his «Climate» project – he is one of the world leaders of the Brotherhood, and had until that time been director of a Koranic TV programme. His father was one of the co-founders of the Brotherhood, when it was created by the CIA and MI6 in 1951. Gehad left the Foundation in 2012, when he became the spokeman for candidate Mohammed Morsi in Cairo, and then the official spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood world-wide.

    Given that all the jihadist leaders in the world have either come from the Muslim Brotherhood or the Sufi Order of the Naqshbandîs – the two components of the Muslim World League, the Saudi anti-Arab nationalist organisation – we would like to know more about Mrs. Clinton’s relations with Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    As it happens, in the team of her challenger, Donald Trump, we note the presence of General Michael T. Flynn, who attempted to oppose the creation of the Caliphate by the White House, and resigned from the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency in order to signal his disapproval. He works alongside Frank Gaffney, a historical «Cold Warrior», now qualified as a «conspiracy theorist» for having denounced the presence of the Brotherhood in the Federal State.

    It goes without saying that from the FBI’s point of view, any support for jihadist organisations is a crime, whatever the policy of the CIA may be. In 1991, the police – and Senator John Kerry – had provoked the ecollapse of BCCI, a Pakistani bank (although it is registered in the Cayman Islands), which the CIA used for all sorts of secret operations with the Muslim Brotherhood and also the Latino drug cartels.

    http://www.voltairenet.org/article193924.html

     

  11. Taxi says:

    This Hillary Clinton war crime in Libya should disqualify her from the Presidency – Adam Garrie/The Duran

    Hillary Clinton’s war crime in Libya is the most serious of her many violations of the law. Not only are there international implications beyond merely breaking US Federal law, her war on Libya left a trail of blood which continues to run. It was and remains both illegal and morally unconscionable.

    In 2011 Libya was the wealthiest state in Africa whose citizens enjoyed the highest living standards in African history. Libya stood as an example not only to the rest of Africa but also the Arab world, many of whose leaders resented Gaddafi’s success, his policy making independence, his ability to combine Islamic tradition with secular realities and his good treatment of non-Arab, black Africans. They may also have been jealous of his penchant for philosophy and literature. This certainly is true of the philistine Gulfis.

    But few nations get bombed and have their leader executed purely because of internal peace and prosperity. Hillary Clinton had greater ambitions for Libya. As many knew at the time and as we all know now thanks to Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton was enraged that Gaddafi was on the verge of creating a gold-backed African Dinar which would have replaced the US Dollar as Libya’s main trading currency. The idea was to use Africa’s natural resources to break free from the shackles of Dollar dependence. That would not do for Hillary Clinton.

    This of course came after Gaddafi’s rapprochement with none other than George Bush and Tony Blair in late 2003. The wisdom of Gaddafi’s decision to make peace with the western powers he built a career on denouncing remains controversial. Nevertheless, Libya was able to maintain its independence in spite of the initial ‘opening up’ of Tripoli.

    But what was good enough even for the hardened war criminals Bush and Blair was not good enough for the more sinister Clinton. Any sign that Libya might want monetary and trade independence from the Federal Reserve was enough to call for a war on Libya. Without any UN approval, the NATO planes buzzed in.

    Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were the useful idiot poster boys for the campaign.  Barack Obama took a conspicuous back-seat and recently admitted Libya was the worst decision of his presidency. Although Obama made many decision, I have to agree that going into Hillary’s war was the worst of many.  But as we now know, Hillary Clinton agitated for the war against the wishes of many in Obama’s government and also in the Pentagon. It was Hillary’s war beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    Therefore whilst others must also share in the criminal culpability for the war, she must be regarded as the wars leader. Libya today is now a failed state, some would say a non-state. Whilst Iraq’s weak government attempts to bring some measure of unity to the once strong country, whilst Yemen fights surprisingly valiantly against Saudi aggression and whilst Syria will likely free her country of Islamic terrorists thanks to the support of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and others, Libya looks more and more like a lost cause.

    The world has abandoned Libya and ISIS and others like them have filled the gap. Libya has no friends and oddly has no powerful enemies. Even those spending millions to destroy Syria, Yemen and Iraq seem to have let Libya be cast out to die in a disorganised terrorist inferno. Libya, once a gatekeeper to Europe’s southern maritime border, is now a free for all. Hillary Clinton’s war is a proximate cause of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’.

    The imagines of Gaddafi’s brutal execution have haunted the world, including many in the west. The bloodied body of a once proud man asking his executioners, ‘what have I done to you’?

    He gave them modern homes for little or no money, he brought water to the desert, electricity to a land where many lived in tents prior to his rule. He gave them modern agriculture, cars and farm machinery, pensions which were the envy of the region. He gave them literacy and education. He protected them from invasion for decades. This is what he did for Libya.

    And what did Hillary Clinton do? She totally destroyed it for both Gaddafi’s allies and his legitimate opponents. And what’s more she laughed about it! “We came, we saw, he died”, Was her mantra.

    I’d like to say, ‘we saw, we cried, you must be tried’.

    http://theduran.com/this-hillary-clinton-war-crime-in-libya-should-disqualify-her-from-the-presidency/

      • bintbiba says:

        Colour me naïve now… 

        All this is too confusing and being a a-politically minded as I am , some of it made sense , some didn't. 

        But Steve Jones, with whom I am not too familiar , makes a habit of annoyingly interrupting his guest every few seconds which must drive the speaker (who was asked a question!) insane while striving to answer !

      • Taxi says:

        Yes it can be very confusing – sometimes the internet psy-ops are so very sophisticated. One must be intellectually vigilant to find the truth these days.

        I don’t know much about Alex Jones myself – I tried listening to his show once but didn’t last more than 3 minutes – his voice grated on my ears and his pathos was too violiny for me. He is a right-winger and I do know he reaches a heckalotta people – he speaks their language – and whether the people are right or wrong, he seems to be able to articulate their grievances and concerns with much gusto.

  12. Taxi says:

    Finally!  The liberal MSM cracks and begins talking about Hillary's deceptions instead of 'the Russians did it!"

    Mika Brzezinski to Andrea Mitchell: "It Feels Like Hillary Clinton Is Lying Straight Out" | Morning Joe | MSNBC

    https://youtu.be/bkJE0U8Qby4

    • bintbiba says:

      Wow Taxi,  what a fantastic two days  reading all that you have amassed and written after so many months we've missed your ever so stimulating and intelligent articles !

      I am just an outsider observing, contemplating  and being  horrified at the sad disaster that  those elections are presenting to the whole world ! 

      The youtube of Alex Jones interviewing Dr. Steve Pieczenic is riveting  in its entirety.  So much many of us so far away from it all have no idea about the way things work in the back rooms and byways of politicians' minds and intrigues !  Very scary !  So much corruption is truly inconceivable .

      Are we to  expect some cataclysmic event in the next few days that will change everything  everywhere on the planet ? 

      • Taxi says:

        It’s five days to election day and at this stage, ANYTHING can happen between now and then.

        The anticipation is killing me! I’ve been waking up to shocking new scandals everyday now for at least eight straight days!

        Very exciting final sprint to the White House.

        But whoever wins, this excitement will immediately turn to wrath on the 9th November. Unless some serious housecleaning is immediately undertaken by the new president, I’m gonna be shaking my head with bitter disappointment for the next four years.

        Enough nefarious backroom deals!!!

    • Cloak And Dagger says:

      Taxi,

      Plato is a believer in Aristotlean "virtue ethics," which says that the actions of a virtuous person are moral irrespective of the intent or consequences of those actions. I think that is naive in its faith in human nature that someone is consistently good or consistently bad because of who they are.

      No, we do need laws, and we take pride in being a nation of laws rather than a nation of people. Where it all falls apart is when we don't evenly uphold and enforce those laws as depicted by the blindfolded "lady justice." We have one law for me and another for thee. Social contract theory is based on the concept of justice and fairness.

      Who accounts for the theft of our fortune and the death of the millions over the past several decades (and yes, even before that)? If the likes of Clinton, Obama, the shrub, and all the king's neocons, etc., can just walk around like cherubs with no blood on their hands, then we can no longer call ourselves a nation of laws – perhaps we never could before either.

       

       

      • Taxi says:

        Corruption has been around since Cain and Abel.

        But it's never, ever, ever been THIS bad.  All thanks to the Clinton Crime Family and the likes invading the political scene and setting these lowly, banana republic standards.

        As to Plato's words in the poster above:  I read it slightly differently to you.  I read it personally and like this:  I personally don't need a government to set me laws to keep my behavior in check.  I just simply don't enjoy doing the wrong thing anyway so I just don't do wrong.  Of course I make mistakes occasionally – mistakes that usually hurt me much more than they do other people.  And if I do hurt others, I'm quick to rectify the situation – most certainly without the government's help or guidance! 

        But, of course, I do know that we need laws cuz not everybody is like me – and often people WILL break the law if they think they can get away with it.

  13. Cloak And Dagger says:

    One observation that I make about WikiLeaks is that it relies on whistleblowers for its information. So, this whole discourse about "hackers" and Russia is nonsense. WikiLeaks and others did not "hack" anything to get the Clinton emails or all the other scandalous information. It was gifted these by insiders, including those in the CIA and FBI, not to mention the Whitehouse.

    Just look at the explosion of inside dope being released this week from the FBI alone:

    Here is a bunch of documents on Vince Foster that people have been asking for many years:

    https://vault.fbi.gov/vincent-foster/vincent-foster-part-01-of-04/view

    Then, yesterday, they released information about Marc Rich, who was pardoned by the male Clinton:

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-releases-bill-clinton-closed-case-files-days-232844166.html

    Even the reopening of the investigation on Clinton by the FBI was apparently done, at least partly, due to internal pressure within the FBI who made Comey's life a misery.

     

    We forget, we are many and they are few. If we can block out the noise from the MSM and defy the PTB, we can change the power equation, just as the Soviets did, and do so bloodlessly. We have much to learn from the Russians.

     

     

    P.S. I don’t endorse WikiLeaks, and Assange has never said a foul word about Israel or Zionists. This is limited hangout.

    • Taxi says:

      I myself approve of hacking public servants. Our vote also includes a giant nod for transparency and when we’re not getting it from our politicians, we have the right to get it for ourselves.

      Who guards the dog? The hackers do.

    • Taxi says:

      Also, hacking is no different to an old-school wily journalist who steals information in the interest of the general public.  Hacking is just a technological method of scooping and exposing corruption.

      All the journalists I know have stolen information from politicians at one time or another.  I had one journalist once tell me how he pretended to be doing a fluff piece on a politician, got himself invited into the politician's office and when the politicians back was turned from his desk for just a second, this journalist stealthily stole a fat bunch of papers from his pending tray!

  14. Taxi says:

    Well it's five days away from election day and it's looking like there's suddenly a "huuge and tremendous" public battle between the Clinton Crime Machine and the FBI – and a simultaneous fight between the Department of Justice (working on behalf of the Clintons) and the FBI.

    To bring down the current status quo, it would need a very rich and independent person (Donald), plus a law enforcement agency with giant muscle (FBI).  The double wallop hopefully will render the enablers of corruption insensible and dizzy with fear and grief.

    Yet… I don't really think that if Don was prez he'll deliver much.

    By now, my cynicism about politics is so incurable and profound that I'd have to see the changes with my own eyes first before I can applaud the change agent.  I'd say I've never been disappointed by a politician the way I've been disappointed by Obama.  His reign is the very definition of disappointment.  He is the LAST politician I will ever believe.

    • Taxi says:

      It was very wrong to categorize Obama as a 'black' president.  He's not!  He's actually of mixed race: snow-white mother and African father.  He agreed to go along with this racial category cuz he wanted to be the 'first' black president.  I don't know what's wrong with being the first mulatto president – but evidently, the mixed-race Obama didn't like the sound of that at all, even though it is actually what he truly is: mulatto.  I know that some PC people might object to the word 'mulatto', but there's nothing wrong with it – it is derived from the Spanish 'mullatos', a common word that's still widely used in Spain and the wider South American nations today.  The word has beautiful music and grandeur in it to my ears.  (To those offended by the 'molatto' word, just substitute it with any of the following dry and lackluster PC words: biracial, multiracial, mixed-race, or multi-ethnic – knock yourselves out!).

      I think his label of 'black president' was false and detrimental to our country's strained race relations.  It reinforced citizens who viewed him with political suspicion – people who were never 'racist' before became new bigots when their negative feelings/thoughts/political instincts about Obama were challenged. It is undeniable that race relations have worsened greatly under Obama's presidency – for a multitude of complex, socio-political reasons, and not just the fundamental falsity of making him into the first 'black' president.  He is, in fact, in reality, half black and half white.

      Moreover, by falsely claiming the title of the first black president, he has in actual fact robbed the next (fully) black president from the pioneering honor of being called the first black president.

  15. Taxi says:

    Donald Trump Will Stop Zionism and Immigration | TYT Politics

    https://youtu.be/rMLg_0vAefo

    Well… there you have it:  a slice of the future of America:  cringe-worthy outro shoutout and all.

    Donald stopping zionism?  We'll see about that.

    War against israel and victory going to the Levant Axis of Resistance (plus Iran)?  Definitely!

     

  16. Taxi says:

    Here below is a vid of Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, himself doing some nauseating hasbara propaganda and song and dance – the motherfucker's twisting stuff up, trying to taint all anti-zionists (regardless of their depth of understanding of zionism) as antisemites.  Pathetically trying to throw the antisemite mud on Donald some seven days before the election.  The Dems and their media sluts are desperate, obviously – and clearly, they got nothing but plenty of nothing-cheeseburgers on Donald.

    https://youtu.be/tXVkGtg1t0o

    • Taxi says:

      And Cenk Uygur's got the audacity to wear a V-Vendetta t-shirt while he's fellating the donkey!

      Of course he has to wear the rebel t-shirt with a brown suit jacket on top.  If that isn't a square pretending to be a circle, I don't know what is.

      What a media minion and fakester!

  17. Taxi says:

    Trump’s Teen Jane Doe Rape Accuser Disappears Again – Brandy Zadrozny/Daily Beast

    Gloria Allred’s daughter heralded a press conference with a woman who has accused Trump of raping her as a teen—only to cancel it at the last minute, citing security concerns.

    With six days to go before the election, attorney Lisa Bloom announced a woman was going to come forward to accuse Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of rape. In a press conference from Bloom’s office, to be broadcast on Facebook Live, Katie Johnson (which may or may not be a pseudonym) would appear in public for the first time to allege that Trump had raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old, and sexually assaulted her on other occasions while attending sex parties at the New York City mansion of pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.  

    And then she didn’t.

    “Jane Doe has received numerous threats today…She has decided she is too afraid to show her face,” Bloom said, according to MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon. “We’re going to have to reschedule. I apologize to all of you who came. I have nothing further.”

    Katie’s press conference and sudden cancelation is just the most recent turn in a bizarre case that started in April of this year, when Katie filed a civil lawsuit in California accusing Trump of rape. As a reporter covering Katie’s case, I wasn’t surprised at Katie’s no-show. Through lawyers and handlers, I have been promised interviews on several occasions—meetings and phone calls which have been ultimately withdrawn, usually at the last minute.

    Unlike more than a dozen women who have come forward to allege nonconsensual groping, kissing, or otherwise inappropriate sexual contact by Trump, Katie’s allegations are by miles the most explosive and the only claims also being made in a court of law. The first hearing in Katie’s lawsuit is scheduled for December 16 in Manhattan federal court.

    “The allegations are not only categorically false, but disgusting at the highest level and clearly framed to solicit media attention or, perhaps, are simply politically motivated,” Trump told RadarOnline after Katie filed her original lawsuit. “There is absolutely no merit to these allegations. Period.”

    Trump did not respond to a request for comment on Katie’s press conference.

    The complaint accuses Trump and Epstein of “rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress, duress, false imprisonment, and threats of death and/or serious bodily injury.”

    The lawsuit also includes sworn statements by two witnesses. A woman with the pseudonym Tiffany Doe claims she helped procure underage women, including Katie, for Epstein’s sex parties and allegedly witnessed Katie’s rape firsthand. Another woman, known by Joan Doe, was a classmate of Katie’s who says she was told about the rape at school.

    Katie initially filed the complaint without legal representation in California, where she resides. After that case was thrown out by a judge on procedural grounds and her allegations were reported by a few tabloids, New Jersey patent lawyer Thomas Meagher took her case on. Meagher has since been joined by James Cheney Mason, best known for his representation of Casey Anthony in 2011, and Evan Goldman, a personal injury lawyer who practices in New Jersey. Bloom is not involved with Katie’s legal case.

    When reached for comment on Bloom’s relationship to the case, Meagher told The Daily Beast, “[Bloom] is representing her at a minimum for the work she’s been doing over the last few days.”

    Bloom, daughter of Gloria Allred, who has held press conferences of her own with several women accusing Trump of inappropriate sexual contact, is also representing Jill Harth, a former business associate of Trump who alleges he sexually assaulted her on several occasions in the 1990s.

    In June, Bloom published a column on Huffington Post arguing the media had been irresponsible to ignore Katie’s lawsuit. Trump’s history of derogatory comments about women paired with two prior legal actions accusing the Republican nominee of sexual misconduct (one from Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, who claimed in a divorce deposition Trump had violently raped her, another from Jill Harth, whom Bloom now represents) made Katie’s allegations credible, Bloom claimed.

    And Trump’s friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been well documented. Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago, and as gossip rags noted in the 90’s, Trump was often a guest at Epstein’s New York parties.

    “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. Calling him a “terrific guy,” Trump said, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

    Yet, despite the history and the lawsuit and even a tape of Katie detailing her allegations—which has been in the hands of various media agencies for months—most reporters have been hesitant to report on Katie’s claims. This caution is a result of a number of red flags: Katie’s anonymity, some explosive claims in the original lawsuit (which were taken out in subsequent filings), and the motley crew of politically and financially-motivated handlers pushing Katie’s story.

    The tape of Katie’s testimony, which has been reviewed by The Daily Beast, was at one time for sale for $1 million. The proceeds were, according to her supporters, going to be used for Katie’s security.

    The questionable characters surrounding Katie—most notably “Al Taylor,” a lewd ex-producer of The Jerry Springer Show who was shopping the tape, and conservative mega-donor and email agitator Steve Baer, who provided thousands of dollars to move Katie into a new apartment, again for her safety—at one time was even too much for Bloom to bear. In one of hundreds of emails concerning Katie’s case circulated by Baer, Bloom wrote (to Baer, who then forwarded the email with responses to dozens of reporters), “I am not willing to get involved in the case, not now, not in the future, not ever, not pro bono, not for any amount of money. Because Steve and Al, you have destroyed it.”

    But things change. And with today’s press conference, and Bloom’s representation, the media blackout on Katie’s case just might have ended. Instead, the reporters Bloom had criticized for failing to cover Katie’s case were sent home.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/02/trump-s-teen-jane-doe-rape-accuser-disappears-again.html

    • Taxi says:

      Whoah – WTF?!!

      If this be true (and it could be), then the Clinton machine had better not trot out the sordid Jeffrey Epstein laundry as Bill Clinton would INSTANTLY be dragged into the muck along with Donald.  After all, Jeffery had five different direct phone numbers to Bill Clinton on his cellphone, the investigators tell us.

      I kinda wish they would play the dirty Epstein card so that the mossad's sex blackmail op that was set up with the help of Epstein at his 'Lolita Island' can get full scrutiny and exposure.

    • Taxi says:

      So an African American republican is a "sonderkommando"?

      That's brutal, but yet not surprising coming from the race-card vendors and zionist tribalists.

  18. Taxi says:

    Reward Clinton's Hawkishness Because Trump's Foreign Policy Is Uncertain? – Moon of Alabama

    For me, as a non U.S. person, the major issues of the U.S. presidential elections is always foreign policy. There Trump is not hawkish at all. He has somewhat confused, unlearned blustering positions on foreign policy but is basically a cautious, risk averse businessman. He consistently criticizes the war mongering in Washington DC. Hillary Clinton is a run-of-the-mill warmongering neoconservative compatible with the imperial "mainstream" of the power centers in Washington and elsewhere.

    Trump has called up this contrast again and again (as do I). In a speech (vid at 53:20 min) in Grand Rapids Michigan on October 31 he again highlights these points. Some excerpts (taken from this partial transcript part 9, 10):

    Hillary led us to disaster in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya. … Hillary and our failed Washington establishment have spent $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East, and now it’s worse than it’s ever been before.

    Had Obama and others gone to the beach, Obama could have gone to the golf course, we would have been in much better shape.

    We shouldn’t have gone into the war, and she thinks I’m a hawk. Oh, Donald Trump.

    Imagine if some of the money had been spent, $6 trillion in the Middle East, on building new schools and roads and bridges right here in Michigan.

    Now Hillary, trapped in her Washington bubble, that’s blind to the lessons, wants to start a shooting war in Syria in conflict with a nuclear armed Russia that could drag us into a World War III.

    Okay, folks. She – I’ll tell you what. She will get us into World War III. She will get us into World War III. I will tell you that. She’s incompetent. She will get us into World War III.

    The arrogant political class never learns. They keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. They keep telling the same lies. They keep producing the same failed results.

    Trump may well be lying when he says he does not seek a conflict with Russia or anyone else. Trump surely lies on other issues. But those are mostly rather obvious lies and some are even a bit comical. He is playing Reagan on economic issues, promising tax cuts that can not be financed (and which Reagan had to take back in the end when he introduced the biggest tax hike ever). On many issues we do not know what Trump is really planning to do (or if he plans at all). But he has never given the impression that he is hawkish or willing to incite a war.

    Clinton on the other hand has a proven record of being a proactive hawk. She is willing to go to war and to kill people because the U.S. can.

    She is a political animal totally dependent on her sponsors. Economically she is pro-banks, pro-big-business and for further deregulation. A neoliberal. The only "liberal" standpoints she has are on some hyped identity issues relevant only for a very tiny group of people like transgenders. She told her real voters, the people who pay her, that her public standpoint on many issues is different from the one she will pursue. She did not mean that what she will pursue will be less hawkish than her public stand, or that she will be more progressive on economic issues than she openly claims.

    Clinton assures us that Trump is Putin's puppet who will start a nuclear World War III with Russia. She doesn't say how that computes. Will Putin order Trump to give him asylum in Washington while Moscow and Washington get nuked?

    With Trump the U.S. would get a president who is a pretty unknown factor but, in my judgment, a less dangerous one to the U.S. and the world than Clinton. With her the next useless and deadly wars are practically guaranteed.

    Micah Zenko, who's opinion I value, agrees with my diagnose, Trump is less hawkish, but has a different judgement:

    When it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s own positions make him the most immoral, poorly informed, and dangerous presidential candidate in recent American history.
    If Clinton is elected, there will undoubtedly be troubling foreign-policy positions and actions which must be thoroughly questioned and scrutinized. I just deeply hope that citizens have the opportunity to hold a President Hillary Clinton to account.

    The citizens of the United States now have an opportunity to hold Secretary of State Clinton to account for her "We came, we saw, he died" war on Libya and for escalating the war on Syria. The militaristic (and failed) pivot to Asia, the "regime changes" putsches in Honduras and Ukraine and the deterioration of relations with Russia are also to a large part her work. Should the voters reward her for all the death, misery and new dangers she created as Secretary of State by making her President?

    Who would I vote for? Not Hillary. Not for Trump either. Some third party candidate – probably Stein of the Green Party. It would be a "useless and wasted" vote in the short term though such votes have some light influence on the programs of the big parties. In the long term the example of voting third parties will hopefully induce more people to do the same. If it becomes a more common, regular thing to do it might over time break the duopoly of today's consensus in Washington. It is a small chance, but possibly a big long-term reward.

    http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/11/reward-clintons-hawkishness-because-trumps-foreign-policy-is-uncertain.html#more

     

    • Taxi says:

      A bunch of petrified globalists brown-nozing the zionist-owned Clinton a-hole.

      Pathetic!

      But I had to share this panel with y'all just to show you why I think CNN is a mega propagandist factory.  Out of every 50 pitches they throw out there, maybe one or two is based on fact. 

      Truthless, toothless CNN!

  19. Taxi says:

    Clinton server faced hacking from China, South Korea and Germany – Politico

    Hillary Clinton's private email server containing tens of thousands of messages from her tenure as secretary of state — including more than 400 now considered classified — was the subject of hacking attempts from China, South Korea and Germany after she stepped down in 2013, according to Congressional investigators.

    The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee has found evidence of attempted intrusions into Clinton's server in 2013 and 2014, according to a letter Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) sent Monday to a Florida-based security firm tasked with protecting the hardware.

    The contractor, SECNAP Network Security, identified the attacks, but according to internal emails cited and briefly quoted in the Johnson letter, Clinton's sever may have lacked a threat-detection program for three months, Johnson says.

    The Associated Press first reported the news.

    The attempted security breaches and apparent gaps in protection raise further questions about the level of security Clinton used to prevent malicious intrusions from breaching her network. The FBI is currently probing whether her rare email arrangement at State — exclusively using her own personal server rather than a State.gov account — ever put national security at risk. The State Department has now classified more than 400 Clinton emails that were stored on that hardware, though Clinton's team notes they were not marked classified at the time.

    The last batch of Clinton's emails released by the State Department under a court order in a Freedom of Information Act suit showed that Clinton received at least five emails from hackers linked to Russia. If Clinton opened attachments in the emails, her account and server could have been vulnerable to hacking, although it is unclear if she did so.

    POLITICO reported last week that there were likely many more so-called phishing messages sent to Clinton during her four years as secretary, but virtually all those messages appear to have been deemed "personal" by Clinton's attorneys and deleted, although the FBI is reportedly making progress recovering some or all of the messages from tech firms that worked on Clinton's server.

    The attempted intrusions reported late Wednesday by AP were more direct attempts from abroad to gain unauthorized access to Clinton's server and did not rely on email messages. However, it is unclear whether they represented a concerted effort by one or more foreign intelligence services to access Clinton's data or if the efforts were part of the far more commonplace hacking on the internet.

    According to the Johnson letter, Clinton's representatives purchased SECNAP's threat monitoring device in June of 2013 but does not appear to have been activated until October 2013. A Clinton representative seemed to be aware of the issue, according to an email quoted in the letter:

    “We really really need to do this,” the internal Aug. 19, 2013 email reads. “We are left in a bad state… We want to add in this extra security. We are paying for it and no[t] using the security.”

    Johnson blasted the time gap.

    "This gap raises questions about the vulnerability of Secretary Clinton’s private server during the multi-month period that the CloudJacket devise and management service was unable to monitor the network,” the Johnson letter reads.

    SECNAP notified Platte River of the attempted attacks from China in February 2014, Korea in March of that year and Germany in June of that year, according to footnotes in the letter.

    The story could undermine another part of Clinton's public response to the email controversy. She has repeatedly said there's no indication that her server was hacked.

    Asked in a CNN interview last month whether attackers from Russia or China hacked into her private account, Clinton replied: "There's no evidence of that."

    In 2011, after Google revealed a wave of hacking attacks against accounts belonging to senior U.S. officials and human rights activists, Clinton's State Department warned employees to avoid using personal email accounts for official business. However, she continued to exclusively use a private account and server for her work.

    Clinton has said the practice was permitted by State Department rules and is consistent with similar practices by past secretaries.

    It's unclear whether Clinton's emails would have been more protected in the State Department's systems. Those systems are high-profile targets for foreign intelligence services and have been repeatedly breached in recent years by intruders believed to be from Russia.

    Clinton's private email set-up, first created for her husband President Bill Clinton after he left office, was less well known and may have been a less obvious target. However, experts say sophisticated intelligence services monitoring the secretary of state's communications when she was abroad would have likely been able to pinpoint her server and use that information to attempt to access her system.

    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/hillary-clinton-email-server-hacked-china-south-korea-germany-214546

  20. Taxi says:

    It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses – James Traub/Foreign Policy

    I was born in 1954, and until now I would have said that the late 1960s was the greatest period of political convulsion I have lived through. Yet for all that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle changed American culture and reshaped political parties, in retrospect those wild storms look like the normal oscillations of a relatively stable political system. The present moment is different. Today’s citizen revolt — in the United States, Britain, and Europe — may upend politics as nothing else has in my lifetime.

    In the late 1960s, elites were in disarray, as they are now — but back then they were fleeing from kids rebelling against their parents’ world; now the elites are fleeing from the parents. Extremism has gone mainstream. One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. British Prime Minister David Cameron thought that voters would defer to the near-universal opinion of experts; that only shows how utterly he misjudged his own people.

    Both the Conservative and the Labour parties in Britain are now in crisis. The British have had their day of reckoning; the American one looms. If Donald Trump loses, and loses badly (forgive me my reckless optimism, but I believe he will) the Republican Party may endure a historic split between its know-nothing base and its K Street/Chamber of Commerce leadership class. The Socialist government of France may face a similar fiasco in national elections next spring: Polls indicate that President François Hollande would not even make it to the final round of voting. Right-wing parties all over Europe are clamoring for an exit vote of their own.

    Yes, it’s possible that all the political pieces will fly up into the air and settle down more or less where they were before, but the Brexit vote shows that shocking change isn’t very shocking anymore. Where, then, could those pieces end up? Europe is already pointing in one direction. In much of Europe, far-right nativist parties lead in the polls. So far, none has mustered a majority, though last month Norbert Hofer, a member of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, which traffics in Nazi symbolism, came within a hair of winning election as president. Mainstream parties of the left and right may increasingly combine forces to keep out the nationalists. This has already happened in Sweden, where a right-of-center party serves as the minority partner to the left-of-center government. If the Socialists in France do in fact lose the first round, they will almost certainly support the conservative Republicans against the far-right National Front.

    Perhaps these informal coalitions can survive until the fever breaks. But the imperative of cohabitation could also lead to genuine realignment. That is, chunks of parties from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only alternative to irrelevance.

    The issue, at bottom, is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces and thus the demand that someone, somehow, restore the status quo ante. It may seem strange that the reaction has come today rather than immediately after the economic crisis of 2008, but the ebbing of the crisis has led to a new sense of stagnation. With prospects of flat growth in Europe and minimal income growth in the United States, voters are rebelling against their dismal long-term prospects. And globalization means culture as well as economics: Older people whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and multicultural celebrations are waving their fists at cosmopolitan elites. I was recently in Poland, where a far-right party appealing to nationalism and tradition has gained power despite years of undeniable prosperity under a centrist regime. Supporters use the same words again and again to explain their vote: “values and tradition.” They voted for Polishness against the modernity of Western Europe.

    Perhaps politics will realign itself around the axis of globalization, with the fist-shakers on one side and the pragmatists on the other. The nationalists would win the loyalty of working-class and middle-class whites who see themselves as the defenders of sovereignty. The reformed center would include the beneficiaries of globalization and the poor and non-white and marginal citizens who recognize that the celebration of national identity excludes them.

    Of course, mainstream parties of both the left and the right are trying to reach the angry nationalists. Sometimes this takes the form of gross truckling, as when Nicolas Sarkozy, who is seeking to regain France’s presidency, denounces the “tyranny of minorities” and invokes the “forever France” of an all-white past. From the left, Hillary Clinton has jettisoned her free-trade past to appeal to union members and others who want to protect national borders against the global market. But left and right disagree so deeply about how best to cushion the effects of globalization, and how to deal with the vast influx of refugees and migrants, that even the threat of extremism may not be enough to bring them to make common cause.

    The schism we see opening before us is not just about policies, but about reality. The Brexit forces won because cynical leaders were prepared to cater to voters’ paranoia, lying to them about the dangers of immigration and the costs of membership in the EU. Some of those leaders have already begun to admit that they were lying. Donald Trump has, of course, set a new standard for disingenuousness and catering to voters’ fears, whether over immigration or foreign trade or anything else he can think of. The Republican Party, already rife with science-deniers and economic reality-deniers, has thrown itself into the embrace of a man who fabricates realities that ignorant people like to inhabit.

    Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them. Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it.

    It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses

    • bintbiba says:

      May I just add that some of the Brexit voters  had nothing to do with what the Farage, BoJo , etc.. clique had to say !

      Some voted as a Protest Vote ( among other things) over the total lack of democracy within the European Commission and the secrecy by their decision behind closed doors about the TTIP giving all powers to the massive  Corporations  and  Banks … ceding to them the capacity to sue governments over possible loss of profits within those countries  when the local Health and Safety laws were contrary to what these Corporations deemed permissble according to the US laws.

      Going back to when  the greatly missed Tony Benn was against the  formation of the EU , foreseeing that it was going to be trasformed from the then intended Economic Union into a totally  subjugated Political Union , as it has turned out . 

  21. Taxi says:

    Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems – George Monbiot/The Gaurdian

    Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

    Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

    Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

    So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

    Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

    Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

    We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

    Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

    Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

    ***

    The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

    In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

    With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

    As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

    Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

    At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

    But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

    After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

    ***

    It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

    Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

    As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

    Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

    Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

    Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

    The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

    Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

    Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

    Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income

    Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

    The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

    Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

    Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

    Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

    ***

    Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

    The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

    The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

    A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

    These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

    The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

    ***

    For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

    Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

    Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

    What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

    • George Monbiot’s How Did We Get into This Mess? is published this month by Verso.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

  22. Taxi says:

    Good morning and howdy, you discerning, consciensious voter.  Well, election day is finally upon us.  Do I hear you sighing with relief?  I sure am. As of tomorrow, I will not have to listen to all that pathetic he-said-she-said election banter.  This surely must be the most sordid election season I have ever seen in my lifetime.  It's also the most anti-intellectual campaign season probably in the history of our country – so much analysis and chatter was wasted on allegations and genitals and sneaky coverups.

    We will have a new president in 24 hours, and the misguided masses will no doubt be celebrating the new liar-and-thief-in-chief.  As the saying goes: ' the people deserve the leader they get’.

    Even before the results are out, I already feel disappointed.  Not a twinge of excitement in my bones.

  23. Taxi says:

    Well…. there you have it folks:  President Trump is in the (White) House!

    Trump's Victory Speech:  https://youtu.be/mFWHm_Vnn2g

    (I've a few things to say about this victory – I hope to have time tomorrow to write up something about it – no time to do it today).

    • Taxi says:

      Congratulations to Mr. Trump, his family, his worker-ants and his faithful supporters.

      ANYONE who goes up against the Clinton Crime Machine and wins deserves the victory and the RESPECT!

  24. american200 says:

    Had to pop in to say..

    I told you so.

    You can attribute Trumps win to Newton's Law…..''for every action there is an equal and opposing action''..

    The Dems did it to themselves.

     

     

    • Taxi says:

      The Dems, they sure brung the pox on their own houses. We all witnessed what the Arabs describe as ‘the magic turning on the magician’. And hoisted by their own petard, is what the Great Shakespeare would call it.

      Cool to see your finger wagging around here.

      (I’ve been trying to get it together to write a piece on the election result but I’ve been real pushed for time. Hope to get it together to squiggle something down in the next couple of days or so).

    • Taxi says:

      Hello Rudy – thanks for checking in.

      Yeah I got sent the same link by a friend about a week ago.  What a weird list – no cohesive political rhyme or reason to it – I mean equating Roger stone to Paul Craig Roberts, or Infowars to Moon of Alabama – sheesh.  It's stupid and desperate – amateur propagandists themselves.  I read through the 'About' page and all that and low and behold, their fundamental aim is to curtail 'antisemeicism'.  Yeah right!

      That site (whose black list keeps growing, btw) stinks of Soros money.

    • Taxi says:

      And what an unsavory name for a political website it is: propornot – pro porno t? LOL! I actually hesitated to click on the link when it was first sent to me.

    • Taxi says:

      Someone ought to make a list of all the lying, conspiratorial rags out there and… on second thought, what's the point really?  Everybody now knows the mainstream media dudes and dudettes are elitist liars and cheats – seen it with out our collective eyes.

    • Taxi says:

      Who cares what the despicable losers think?!!!

      So far, the only good thing about Trump's victory is that it rattled the very (rotten) bones of the Republic's Establishment.  I totally approve of this.  However, this does not mean Trump gets my full support at all.  If everyone gave their support ONLY AFTER a politician performs on their promise, our voting standards will rise and our democracy will be healthier.  A healthy dose of cynicism will take us a long way.

      And btw, most of the democrats are deluded in thinking that they're progressive liberals – they're frigging globalist neocons now who desperately tried to install a war-mongermongering, war criminal, elitist, pathological liar and kleptomaniac in the White House.  Thankfully, they failed.

       

       

      • RudyM says:

        Don't worry, I don't misunderstand you as endorsing Trump. I certainly have my doubts about him, and in a healthy political climate, I wouldn't have taken him seriously as a candidate.

        (FWIW, I've decided I'm a political independent, and not left-liberal or even just liberal any more, even if that's where I am on some key issues.)

  25. RudyM says:

    This seems odd, although it's not clear to me that anyone actually recorded this hourly donation information, so I'd be tentative about it. (I consider Jim Stone pretty suspect, to put it mildly.)

    http://alexanderhiggins.com/soros-bot-funding-stein-recount-campaign-steady-rate-160k-per-hour/

    Still, I find Stein's role in the recount thing a bit odd. Also there is this record of how her goal kept increasing:

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-25/mysterious-case-jill-steins-surging-recount-costs

    • Taxi says:

      Stein… tsk, tsk, tsk.  Political Alice in Wonderland – nothing is what it seems like anymore in politics.

      If they rip the presidency out of Trump's hands, there will be a frightful spike and an ongoing violence in our nation – a low-grade and bloody civil war where actual bombs will be randomly going off, not just nasty protests and bullets on the streets.

       

  26. RudyM says:

    Extended piece on this propornot list, on Naked Capitalism (which I read pretty regularly, often especially for the comments threads):

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/washington-post-promotes-shadowy-website-that-accuses-200-publications-of-being-russian-propaganda-plants.html

    To go back to the election, I was surprised by the extent to which Hillary doubled down on the anti-Putin rhetoric (and especially her claim that Putin was the father of the alt-right in the west). I still wonder just how much the Democratic base went for that, or if they were just indifferent to it. It frightens me that so many people who have lived through 9/11 and its aftermath have not developed more skepticism about propaganda. When you see the same world leader being caricatured as evil incarnate on multiple mainstream publications, isn't that enough reason to stop and ask what is going on? Things have gotten really party-partisan in the U.S. and unfortunately a lot of Democrats will overwhelmingly give the benefit of the doubt to a Democratic president (especially when he is a "cool" person of color).

    • RudyM says:

      I didn't even notice that article is actually by Max Blumenthal, who seems to have changed his tune a lot on Syria and toned down some of the Russia bashing. I guess this is a reason to check Alternet more often. Every time I go there I just don't see anything I want to read.

      • Taxi says:

        Too late for Max – he can belatedly soften up all he wants – it won’t enhance his piss-poor street cred.

    • RudyM says:

      In fact, practically that whole alt-right speech was perfectly designed to alienate people like me. She also went after people who believe 9/11 was an inside job or who think Sandy Hook was a hoax (Hi there!), even if she mentioned Alex Jones in particular (who I also find it almost impossible to listen to because his voice makes me want to stick pencils in my ears). But I was never going to vote for her anyway. And maybe it played well with the cognitive conformist liberal bores like so many of the ones I work with.

    • Taxi says:

      It frightens me that so many people who have lived through 9/11 and its aftermath have not developed more skepticism about propaganda.

      I know people who are really smart yet they still take CNN for gospel.  They voted for 'her' and were actually traumatized by her loss. 

      I despair.  I don't know why some people are more susceptible to propaganda than others.

    • Taxi says:

      I just watched some interesting youtubes on this whole ‘fake news’ controversy. To stay in the spirit of ‘fake news’, here’s a good discussion on the topic on RT – I’m purposely using RT in defiance of the list’s McCarthism, though I hardly normally pay RT any attention:
      https://youtu.be/qRZeme-YW1U

  27. RudyM says:

    This could be serious. If they are able to run out the clock and prevent enough electoral college votes certified by the deadline, then it would get tossed to the House. I think I read that the Pennsylvania deadline is tomorrow, however. It's going to be difficult for Stein & Co. to make that deadline.

  28. Taxi says:

    Congress passes bill against so-called Russian covert influence (read: bill against sites on the fake 'fake news' list):

    https://youtu.be/Xcq9V1RI-Ro

    Man!  The internet (which I call: double free speech) is proving so very problematic for governments – even the most powerful governments are despairing and wrestling with how to sustain their propaganda's muscle against even humble little nobody sites like this one.  If I were not going thru a super nonchalant and lazy phase (winter's hibernation), I would get it together to write an analysis piece called:  How the Internet Punched the Living Daylight Out Of Government Propaganda.  Or maybe I'd take the literary route and call it Ars Politica and the Intrepid Internet.

    It is indeed surreal to know that the name 'Plato's Guns' has now been bureaucratically mummified in governmental files.  Till civilizational eternity. 

    Wow!  How weird and crazy is that?!

     

  29. RudyM says:

    Yes, I am very worried about the latest pushes in relation to censorship on the internet. Something like Google is private, but it's practically a public utility (plus of course it is really an offshoot of government-funded research, if not quasi-governmental–and not in a good way–right now).

    A lot of people are saying pizzagate is a diversion from the meatier content of the leaked Podesta emails. I have been surprised (though not that surprised) by how substantial the case is to suspect the pedophile angle is true. Hats off to Unz.com for running this:

    http://www.unz.com/article/pizzagate/

    Notice how little coverage the big British pedophile ring scandals have received in the United States. Wouldn't want to give anyone any ideas on what might need to be investigated here.

    • Taxi says:

      Great site you linked us to, Rudy – thanks.

      It’s even worse in the UK where English lawmakers are pushing to make mere criticism of zionism into a hate crime – the biggest crime syndicate on the planet (israel) is trying to get foreign countries to legally classify any derogatory use of the word ‘zionism’ as an actual crime: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/uk-lawmakers-push-outlaw-criticism-zionism

      Also, did you notice that the so-called ‘fake news’ list put out last month also includes UFO and Vegan sites?!!!! Apparently they too are promoting anti-American Kremlin policy. And let’s just look at the number of sites included on the infamous list: 200 of them – 200 sites not 199 or 201 – but a nice and neat rounded up number of 200. If THAT in itself isn’t a clue to the bullshit anti free speech witch-hunt, I don’t know what is.

      • RudyM says:

        Thanks. Reason is an okay site, but very libertarian which isn't really my thing (across the board anyway); but I appreciate the civil liberties coverage.

        I realize things are worse in the UK and EU (and Canada, and probably Australia?).

        Some interesting stuff from Thierry Meyssan, the first I've seen some of this information:

        While Propaganda or Not? does not publish the names of its directors, it does indicate that it unites four organisations – Polygraph, The Interpreter, the Center for European Policy Analysis and the Digital Forensic Research Lab.

        - Polygraph is one of the sites of Voice of America, the US public radio and television organisation controlled by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
        - The Interpreter is a magazine of the Institute of Modern Russia, now broadcast by Voice of America.
        - The Center for European Policy Analysis is a pseudopod of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) directed by Zbigniew Brzeziński and Madeleine Albright.
        - And finally, the Digital Forensic Research Lab is a programme of the Atlantic Council.

        In a document distributed by Propaganda or Not?, this pseudo-NGO, born of associations financed by the Obama administration, clearly names its enemy – Russia. It accuses Russia of having been the origin of the 9/11 Truth Movement and the Internet sites supporting Syria and Crimea.

        http://www.voltairenet.org/article194344.html

      • Taxi says:

        "Reason is an okay site, but very libertarian which isn't really my thing (across the board anyway); but I appreciate the civil liberties coverage."

        A kernel of justice and truth is found in most political persuasions.  That's why when I vote, I vote for overall policy package of candidate and its effects on our present and future, not on party-shamarty affiliations and manifestos.  They call politics the 'art of the possible' – but that's just too freaking grandiose.  Politics is literally 'the art of persuasion' – it is exactly that.  Take a kernel of truth and spin it bigger and wickedly bigger so it becomes a tangled web of mass mind-control.  That's what politicians do.  They practice mind-control.  They don't fix problems, au contraire, they actually create them then spin stories to convince the masses that the opposition created the ruinous conditions we live under.  This is how they all stay rich and keep us all divided.  And keeping us divided is the whole point of the scam.  Without these very distracting divisions, there would be united mobs breaking down doors and windows of government – and politicians, well, they just can't have that going on now, can they?

        I did not vote this past season, though if you'd put a gun to my head, I would have voted Trump: the lesser 'known' evil.  No way in hell would I have ever voted for an exposed serial pathological liar, an entitled, corrupt warmonger and war criminal like Hillary Clinton – absolutely no fucking way EVER!

        I'd rather go to prison than vote for Hillary Clinton.

  30. RudyM says:

    Meanwhile, the Naked Capitalism website (a personal favorite) is threatening the Washington Post with a lawsuit over their support for the Propornot claims:

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/we-demand-that-the-washington-post-retract-its-propaganda-story-defaming-naked-capitalism-and-other-sites-and-issue-an-apology.html

    More:

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/propornots-grandiose-fabrications.html

    I think this is good. I'm a little ambivalent about libel law since I think it's easy for it to get out of hand. It's hard not to gloat over the Washington Post being sued, however.

    • Taxi says:

      Considering my site is on the bogus list, I would most definitely sign up for a Class Action against the WaPo and the funders and fabricators of ‘the list’.

      I know I got plenty of congratulations for making the list, but I actually feel annoyed at being pigeonholed as pro Russian – though I do actually like Russia (oh Rasputin, Pushkin and Boris Pasternak!!) just as much as I like France (oh Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant and Proust!!!!). Yes, I do tend to judge countries by their literary merit. And considering that all cultures have produced amazing literature at some point or another (oral and written), I kinda love the whole world equally, from a literary point of view. Excluding, of course, the narcissistic, pretentious, cheap and melodramatic works of all israeli writer fuckers. Eat my shorts, Amos Oz!

      Plato’s Guns is on the list NOT because it supports Putin/Russia’s intervention in the Levant etc., but because it is most certainly, positively, undeniably and wholeheartedly ANTI ZIONIST!

      And proud of it!

    • RudyM says:

      I know. I find myself agreeing with Fox News anchors more often these days (at least when I end up with a link to something on Fox–I don't actually watch it as a normal thing).

  31. RudyM says:

    Good Alternet piece, though it kind of goes off on a tangent at the end:

    http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and?akid=14983.2563761.sjjiqo&rd=1&src=newsletter1068511&t=10

    It picks things up from the Ukrainian angle. For instance the PropOrNot Twitter account actually tweeted the old Ukrainian Nazi slogan (which has been common since the 2014 coup if it wasn't already in continuous circulation): Heroiam Slava!! ("Glory to the Heroes!!"). It also makes a conncetion to the repression and killing of journalists in post-coup Ukraine:

    Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists.

  32. RudyM says:

    Tulsi Gabbard is looking more and more promising, but she has plenty of time to disappoint everyone. They really don't like her on Crooks & Liars, it seems. (Is the cartoon at the top of the page supposed to be Nixon? I've run into Baby Boomers who still think taking swipes at Nixon is edgy. It's 2016.) Check out the comments, especially.

    http://crooksandliars.com/2016/12/tulsi-gabbard-scolds-critics-trumps

    I don't necessarily disagree with some of the criticism directed at what Gabbard is saying, but I think it's much ado about nothing. I think the real issue is that they don't like her independence, or that she speaks as much of the truth as she does.

    • RudyM says:

      As far as Trump's reliance on generals for cabinet positions, Xymphora commented that the military might be the only place to find high level figures in the government who aren't under Zionist sway. Not sure about that, but it's an interesting slant.

      Also, given some of the wild talk about what could be done about a Trump presidency, it probably makes sense for him to ingratiate himself with the military.

      • Taxi says:

        I agree with Xymphora's slant on Trump's Generals' picks.  He is trying his best to place as many able American-Firsters in key positions (well how else is he going to 'Make America Great' again?!).   He is consciously trying his best to avoid the neocon ideologues – he knows they are essentially zionists – he knows that zionists are backstabbing motherfuckers – no loyalty to America.  And despite his supposed 'warm' friendship with Netanyahu, I think Trump will put America before israel.  But he knows he has to do it most delicately, most stealthily – he knows the power the likudists have.  I also think Trump actually has very few friends that he can really trust.  Most of his so-called friendships, including the one with Netanyahu, are purely for… well, business.  Of course!  His real, real friends are his family:  his wife, his children and his siblings.  Everyone else is replaceable.

    • Taxi says:

      That's a despicable article about Gabbard.  More frigging fake news bs from the lovers of war and madness.  And them comments writers are clearly sooty from hate.  Gabbard is slowly but surely establishing her political brand name:  anti status quo, anti-war, American-firster – she is spreading the good word while mad war dogs bark at her exotic ankles.

    • Taxi says:

      Yeah great article title!  But I can't be bothered to read ANYTHING about Ms Stein.  Controlled opposition agents bore me.

  33. RudyM says:

    Hey there's nobody around at the moment who would understand why this is so funny. Here's some fake (archival) news from AP I just stumbled across. Look at the caption. Can really trust these people for middle eastern coverage:

      • RudyM says:

        Did some Turkish ultra-nationalist infiltrate AP: "well, it's really just Turkish music with a slight twist, you know."

        (I love Fairouz and plenty of other Lebanese and Syrian music, but I am a committed Oum Kalthoum man.)

    • Taxi says:

      But they need to produce this little thing called ‘EVIDENCE’ that Russia hacked and manipulated the elections.

      It’s a ridiculous wet-noodle ploy and it just simply won’t work.

      Trump is the new president – full stop.

  34. Taxi says:

    Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act":  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-10/senate-quietly-passes-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act

    In other words, the Act will i) greenlight the government to crack down with impunity against any media property it deems "propaganda", and ii) provide substantial amounts of money fund an army of "local journalist" counterpropaganda, to make sure the government's own fake news drowns that of the still free "fringes."

    So while packaged politely in a veneer of "countering disinformation and propaganda", the bill, once signed by Obama, will effectively give the government a full mandate to punish, shut down or otherwise prosecute, any website it deems offensive and a source of "foreign government propaganda from Russia, China or other nations." And since there is no formal way of proving whether or not there is indeed a foreign propaganda sponsor, all that will be sufficient to eliminate any "dissenting" website, will be the government's word against that of the website. One can be confident that the US government will almost certainly prevail in every single time.

    "… the bill…. will effectively give the government a full mandate to punish, shut down or otherwise prosecute, any website it deems offensive and a source of "foreign government propaganda from Russia, China or other nations."

    Hey Mr. President, don't forget to add that dreadful israel on the list – this would effectively shut down the mass of ziocon propaganda the msm keeps shoving down our unwilling throats.

     

    • RudyM says:

      I'm having trouble getting a handle on this legislation. Could it really be as bad as it sounds? I don't see how it could survive a first amendment challenge.

      • Taxi says:

        Another sign of the total meltdown, the complete freakydeak flailing of the pierced and dying dragon. Sneak-passing a Pyrrhic bill is yet another example of their desperation – everything and the kitchen sink is being thrown by the failed-loser Establishment, in the direction of the agitating anti-Establishment brigade.

        But it’s all so utterly hopeless for them old goats – I mean a first amendment challenge aside, it’s an utterly impractical bill. Short of shutting down the internet itself and all other platforms of social media, there will always be views that counter the mainstream group-think and thus spread alternative views far and wide. No government would survive imposing that level of censorship on its citizens. The old guards, the no-change teamsters – the faghags and snowflakes in psychosis – the I’m losing my religion and my narrative posse – they’re all traumatized by the short straws of reality – and the reality is, the absolute reality, the ultimate cosmic reality is that all things must end – there is no such thing as a state of eternal victory.

        Everything the deluded losers are doing is boomeranging back at them. The system is being uniquely questioned en mass and its enforcers are having public breakdowns and fits of episodic irrationality. It’s an astonishingly ugly sight. One almost feels sorry for them writhing in desperate agony, but for their appalling sycophantic support of a mass-murderer and warmonger like Hillary Clinton.

        The historians and political scientists of the future are going to have a ball studying the intricate and multiple dimensions of the so-called ‘fake news’ phenomenon; spurned on by election hysteria, breakdown of the old Establishment, and the un-censurable reach of the internet.

  35. seanmcbride says:

    Taxi,

    I have been following these issues closely on my Facebook feed, here —

    https://www.facebook.com/sean.mcbride.94043

    and in some other Facebook feeds.

    I just wrote this in Sheldon Richman's feed:

    https://www.facebook.com/SheldonRichman/posts/10154649831402184

    BEGIN COMMENT
    A case could be made — or speculated about — that the CIA has been running a major op against Donald Trump for the last few months by promoting several propaganda memes in concert:

    +the Russian government hacked the 2016 election
    +Trump is in cahoots with the Russian government
    +America is facing a crisis of fake news
    +most of the alternative media are fake news outlets that are under control of the Russian government or are in cahoots with it
    +the 2016 election results must be reversed
    +alternative media on the Internet must be censored and shut down

    A few points to consider:

    +the mainstream media have been blaring these propaganda memes, loudly and relentlessly, day after day, in unison
    +the CIA is capable of playing the mainstream media like a mighty Wurlitzer — they are basically propaganda arms of the CIA
    +Trump strongly attacked and offended the bipartisan foreign policy and intel establishment, including the Bush and neocon factions in the CIA
    +a high-level CIA official, Michael Morell, has prominently attacked Donald Trump with quite hysterical language
    +the Clintons have long been reputed to be high-level CIA players

    If the CIA, or any part of the CIA, were running an op like this against Trump in American domestic politics, it would be extremely illegal. Could it be happening?

    The Russian hacking and fake news memes are hollow at the core — classic deception operations. Lots of noise and loud banging of trash can covers, no substance.

    Is PropOrNot.com a CIA op? Was the Washington Post serving as a conduit for CIA propaganda when it publicized PropOrNot.com and offered it a megaphone? Why are the origins, backers and members of PropOrNot.com being shrouded in mystery by the Washington Post?

    There are some legitimate dots here to connect.
    END QUOTE

     

    • seanmcbride says:

      The Russian hacking/fake news memes have the same look and feel as the powerful propaganda campaign that propelled Americans into attacking Iraq — highly coordinated and sophisticated.

       

    • Taxi says:

      Hi Sean – it's great to have your voice added to the mix – thank you.

      I think you're definitely onto something.  But why would the CIA get involved when it' the job of the FBI to investigate governmental cyber security?  We know that the CIA's specialty (apart from clumsily assassinating tin-horn leaders) is their psy-ops of chaos and confusion – so who exactly benefits from creating suspicion and confusion after an election is won?  The Clintons won't get into the White House thru the 'fake news' back door, and Donald Trump seems utterly unconcerned and unfazed by the whole theater of it.  Maybe we should be looking at the head honchos who run the msm – what is their exact agenda – they're the ones who are really hammering at it and creating chatter about 'fake news'.  Maybe them big cheezes are CIA assets as well?

      Or maybe the MSM bosses are trying to save their own asses and reputations after their worse ever journalistic performance since records began in the USA.  After all, under glaring sunlight, everyone could see how the non-msm media surpassed the msm in truth finding and truth transmission, practically taking away half of the msm's usual customers.  I'm seeing this as a savage 'media war' between the msm and the 'new' media, where the msm is getting help from its friends in high places (including in the CIA and congress), as opposed to a political war between the Status Quo brigade (both sides of the isle) and the Trump camp.

      p.s. hey your face book link is dud – I think the page has been removed – when clicking, I'm getting this message: 

      Sorry, this page isn't available

      The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.

      Must have been a shit-hot thread wot?!  Sorry I missed it!

      So is the government here using the current media wars to opportunistically lay down new internet censorship laws?  If this is the case, it's yet another bad idea from government to even attempt mass censorship of the internet.  People everywhere in the world love their internet and its fantastically copious amount of information – mess with that at your own peril.

      Of course, soon as Trump is inaugurated, the 'fake news' shebang excuse will be kicked to the curb by him.  I have no doubt about that.

      In the meantime, the msm's theater of the absurd continues… but we can counter it by referencing 'New Media' instead of the tag of 'fake news' – cuz New Media (NM) is exactly what it is.

      In a sense, we are witnessing the simultaneous death-throes of the msm and the birth pangs of New Media, simultaneously.

      • seanmcbride says:

        Taxi,

        Regarding my Facebook feed, this link is working for me this morning:

        https://www.facebook.com/sean.mcbride.94043

        And it is working for other people — I am still able to receive likes and comments from others.

        Regarding the discussion in the Sheldon Richman feed about the CIA, this link also still works for me:

        https://www.facebook.com/SheldonRichman/posts/10154649831402184

        And I can find my comment in that discussion here:

        https://www.facebook.com/SheldonRichman/posts/10154649831402184?comment_id=10154651085557184&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R0%22%7D

        I am just trying to make sure there no kind of weird shadowbanning going on.

        Definition of shadowban: "Banning a user from a web forum in such a way that the banned user is unaware of the ban. Usually takes the form of showing that user's posts/profile/etc. only to that user; other users never see them. Considered underhanded chicken-shit behavior."

        http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shadowban

        Your remarks on the battle between the New Media and Old Media (mainstream media) are perfectly on target. This struggle is going to be ferocious. The Old Guard has completely lost its shit and is violently flailing away at the free and open Internet. That is what the manufactured "fake news" controversy is all about. They are desperately lashing out and looking for a pretext to impose draconian political censorship on the Internet.

         

      • Taxi says:

        Sorry Sean, I should have made it clear that the link that’s ‘disappeared’ is the Richman link, not your facebook page – and I actually just now tried the Richman link again and I’m getting the same message that I cut and pasted above.

        The main stream media do not serve the public anymore – they serve the very institutions they’re supposed to protect the public from: they serve governments (including foreign ones like israel) as well as the intelligence community’s agendas. They are so unbearably out of touch with their professional oath and with the needs and aspirations of regular people – not surprising when their contracts are worth 20 million a year just for reading propaganda from a teleprompter. And not surprising too that they would viciously fight us all and anyone else who would threaten the golden fleece-rug being pulled from under them. It’s gonna be a long and ugly battle but they will lose – like all fascists and anti free-speechers before them did.

      • Taxi says:

        Hey btw I visited your facebook page and bookmarked it – I really like it, Sean – but I can’t comment there without a facebook account and I’m kinda reluctant to be a facebooker at the moment. Having said that, I will be periodically visiting your facebook.

      • seanmcbride says:

        Thanks to the Internet, we've entered an era of decentralized news and many competing narratives in which mainstream media personalities are just bloggers, like everyone else, with no special authority. In most cases, they are the least interesting bloggers of all — dull, conformist, uncreative, unimaginative — corporate bots.

        They are reacting to their reduced status with blind fury — thus the campaign to brand all non-mainstream media news as fake news — and not only fake news, but forbidden news that should be censored by government fiat. This is the only way they can deal with their competition — to shackle it.

        Anyone who was taken in by the Russian hacking and fake news propaganda memes for even a moment is not very bright or politically acute — those storylines smelled off from the get-go. You just have to look at who has been promoting them and why.

         

      • Taxi says:

        It was bound to come to this ugly mess, Sean – the fabricators and propagandists in the msm had to at some stage come to terms with the internet’s full impact and especially its individuating powers.  And because they hadn't for the longest time even acknowledged the wit and strength of the electronic competition, they crashed into the big black wall that awaits all deniers and deluded creatures.  We see them today all disorientated and stumbling from the wreck.  The msm's Big Five bosses had been sitting on their throne for so long, all arrogant and mighty and monopolizing the all important and highly prized national collective narrative.  And because they never had the foresight to anticipate having to one day face the real and tangible powers of the emerging New Media, they made no plans or preparations for such a dark and cataclysmic day.  I mean they've had years (since the advent of the internet, in fact) to either confluence their vibe in with the internet's zeitgeist and spirit (defined as: maximum free speech and flow of information – ever expanding), or else be left behind in the dust – and left behind was the fork turn they chose to take years and years ago.  They thought it was beneath them to put themselves on par with the dynamic, electronic New Media – they foolishly thought they could force their own elitist rules and narratives right across the unfathomably vast swath of cyberspace and all non msm writers would, just like that (*snap fingers*), obey and step aside, or else blindly follow suit.  In other words, the Five Caesars thought they could rule everywhere forever and made no other survival plans – they showed no flexibility in thought or true appreciation for modernity (the internet's ability to shift paradigms) – they demonstrated no basic wisdom or business acumen whatsoever – and now they find themselves losing money and crazed and thrashing and permanently on the defensive.  A pitiful, but well deserved tattered end.

        The MSM now has two choices:  either start telling people the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (a desirable commodity that people very evidently want on a daily basis), or else die after a long, bloody, humiliating and drawn out battle with New Media.

        The old codgers would be smart to realize that as long as there is the internet, New Media lives.

  36. seanmcbride says:

    "I will tell you what Fake News Is (Gilad Atzmon)"
    http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/12/12/i-will-tell-you-what-fake-news-is

    BEGIN QUOTE
    But what is fake news?

    Fake news is a deliberate and conscious attempt to spread disinformation.

    Fake News is when ‘progressive’ Max Blumenthal fabricates a story on the Benghazi attack on the pages of the Guardian of Judea in order to divert attention away from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s blunders in Libya. Meanwhile, Papa Sidney Blumenthal, financially invested in reconstruction and regime change in Libya, sends the fallacious Guardian article to Secretary of State Clinton, to which she approvingly replies ‘your son is a Mitzvah.’

    Maybe Hillary Clinton should tell us more about the Fake News epidemic.  It is indeed an infectious one. It seems as though Clinton was, herself, infected by the disease while in proximity of the Blumenthals.
    END QUOTE

     

    • Taxi says:

      The Blumenthals (father and son) and the (Rahm) Emanuels of this world – well, there's no difference in their thug social-engineering, their corruption and their mass-murder ops.  I don't know why we even bother talking about them – treasonous motherfuckers are crooked to the bone, incessantly doing the 'tribe's' work and willfully adding to the ruin of our country.

      Accountability is coming!

    • Taxi says:

      No "mystery" at all.  There is a nefarious and coordinated effort by all branches of the Status Quo (gov, msm, some intelligence agencies) to destroy the popular New Media so as to maintain their corrupt hold on power.  And most important of all: to maintain their 100% control of our country's narrative.

      It's the narrative stupid!

  37. RudyM says:

    This is kind of obvious, but one thing that strikes about the fake news hysteria is that in the past couple years a lot of the alternative media I've been taking in has been focused specifically on taking apart the official account presented in the MSM. Alternative media often plays the role of a foil to the MSM. Moon of Alabama, various Twitter feeds (Partisan Girl's, for example), often quite good "fringe conspiracy sites" like Memory Hole Blog or Crimes of Empire, and so on, all have presented damning evidence and analysis contradicting the narratives pushed by the MSM. A notable example in the last year has been the extensive unmasking of the White Helmets.

    In the mid-90s, it might have taken a decade or so to find out about some propaganda op from years before, if I was lucky enough to read the right issue of Covert Action Quarterly. Now, there will often be multiple critiques debunking a mainstream account, within 24 hours, if not within an hour. When the Odessa Massacre occurred in the Ukraine a couple years back, mainstream accounts could be compared with extensive raw footage which was available right away. (Indeed, I think some of it was actually live-streamed.)

  38. Taxi says:

    So Platosguns.com experienced a "suspension" for plenty of hours yesterday.  I was informed about this when a regular blogger on the site had the mental tenacity to use the old 'platosgun.wordpress' website to send me notice of this suspension – (platosgun.wordpress used to be our old website before we went fully dotcom – yes it's abandoned but still active) – the blogger sent me a comment thru wordpress about Platosguns.com lockdown  – this warning comment then came to my email address as a 'comment notification'.  This is how I found out about it.

    My site tech was alerted of the situation and after some investigation, it turned out to be a technical glitch by my server provider.  Phew!  It was NOT a content issue (I was concerned as my site is on the politically charged 'fake list').

    I have to thank the blogger for alerting me to the glitch.  And to also let readers know that if there ever was a government crackdown on this site, they can send me comments at the old Plato's here:  https://platosguns.wordpress.com/

    Just add your comment on the any article thread at wordpress and I will receive an email notification of it.

    Okay, so we're open and back in business again!  Thanks for your continuing visits.

  39. RudyM says:

    Glad to be useful. (Lord knows I could do more of that.)

    I have not been a fan of Jill Stein's recount efforts, for reasons we've already discussed a little, but that doesn't mean I don't think there are plenty of problems with our voting systems.

    Team Hillary, which was supportive of Jill Stein's recount efforts, should be careful what they wish for.  New data from Michigan's State Elections Director Chris Thomas, reveals that voting machines in 37% of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they had of actual voters showing up at the polls.  The scale of the "voting irregularities" has prompted an automatic vote audit by the Michigan Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson.

    That's pretty blatant.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-14/mass-detroit-voter-fraud-37-detroit-precincts-tallied-more-ballots-voters

     

    • Taxi says:

      Yeah a big fat public thank you to you RudyM for commenting on my wordpress page and alerting me to the "site suspended" glitch.

      We thought it might be Plato's anti zionist/Establishment content that caused the (temp) suspension, but it was a technical glitch that was caused by my site server's camp afterall.

      We live in jumpy times wot?!

       

    • seanmcbride says:

      I just posted this:

      The mainstream media confidently claimed that:

      +Saddam was behind 9/11 and the 9/11 anthrax attacks
      +Iraq possessed WMDs
      +the Iraq War would be a cakewalk
      +Syrian extremists were "moderates"
      +the Benghazi attack was motivated by a YouTube video
      +Donald Trump couldn't win the nomination or presidency

      Now they are claiming that Russia hacked the 2016 election even though the US intelligence community continues to drag its feet in providing solid evidence to support the claim.

      The mainstream media have failed to respond to Craig Murray's revelation that WikiLeaks received the DNC emails from disgusted Democratic Party insiders, not from the Russian government. They won't even acknowledge that Murray has made the claim — they are pretending that this story isn't being widely discussed on Facebook and Twitter.

      The mainstream media are also now demanding the authority to separate real news from fake news — to be final the arbiters of truth — and to censor "fake news" on the Internet — news they don't like — through the tool of self-appointed supreme authorities on these matters that have a long track record of being politically biased.

      So here is my question: why are any strong and independent minds lining up behind the mainstream media on these issues? What happened to your bullshit detector?

      The skeptic's approach to this controversy: I don't have enough solid information yet to know with a high degree of confidence who was behind the DNC leaks. Show me your best evidence.

      https://www.facebook.com/sean.mcbride.94043/posts/10207889235054840

       

      • Taxi says:

        The fuckers would rather start the 2nd American Civil War and WW3 together instead of accepting a defeat in a presidential election. An election they couldn’t win even after rigging it to their advantage! They are suffering from a massive attack of pathological pride and prejudice – leading to a state of unreality and to pernicious attacks on bystanders and pedestrians.

        There are no more gentlemen who bow acceptance and peacefully retreat when faced with defeat.

    • seanmcbride says:

      This sums it up nicely:

      "The fuckers would rather start the 2nd American Civil War and WW3 together instead of accepting a defeat in a presidential election. An election they couldn’t win even after rigging it to their advantage!"

      Hillary Clinton has dragged the Democratic Party right over the cliff — she has ruined it. I have been suspecting for a few years now that she would succeed in doing this — there is something in her personality that is outright psychopathic — it's unmistakable when you attend to her closely. Everything for her is about her maniacal lust for power and hysterical vindictiveness when she is thwarted.

      The Democrats who engineered and supported her candidacy — they fully share the blame. There were better candidates who could have easily beaten Trump.

       

    • Taxi says:

      Some of the allusions and information in your linked article are not true – the John Bolton thing, for instance.  Here's a list of all Trump's cabinet picks thus far:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html?_r=0

      Even though the writer lists many facts, I disagree with the premise of their article:  that Trump is secretly intent on keeping the status quo – he is referred to as a 'shape shifter', yet also a predictable entity (statements of contradiction, I'd say).

      DC is so horrifically infested with neocons on both sides of the aisle that you could hit a dozen of them at a time with a single bouncing rock.  There's no escaping the neocons in the hallways and doorways of Alphabet Street – they're frigging everywhere!  The cabinet list to me looks like Trump is making picks as far away from the neocon ideology as he possibly can.  Yes his picks all have 'connections' to neoconism, but only Pense (as far as I can tell) is a true ideologue and Trump put him there for the evangelical vote and not for the love of Pense's neocon ideology.  Same with Ben Carson.  A couple of billionaire zionists on the list have been added for their banking and negotiation skills – not for their hawkish warmongering.  The rest are pragmatists who've played the neocon game in DC here and there but are not themselves committed neocon ideologues.  If anything, there are more of what I would call WASP power ideologues in lofty positions on his list than there are neocon ideologues.

      Actually, I have much more to say on this in my new article, which I hope to publish tomorrow.

      • seanmcbride says:

        Taxi,

        Your instincts are on the money, in my opinion. Trump is a wild card, but a traditional America Firster at the core — he will probably upset many neoconservative, neoliberal and globalist applecarts — unless his many enemies in high places JFK him first. He is already heavily into it with the CIA.

         

      • seanmcbride says:

        Taxi,

        Regarding instincts: both you and I predicted that Trump had a good chance of winning the election *before* he won the nomination. We were right.

         

    • Taxi says:

      JVP, Mondoweiss, Code Pink – these are just a few of the despicable and neurotic gatekeepers – controlled opposition thru and thru. Palestine is all the sicker for these fuckers’ poisoned support.

      So no surprises there that their events would exclude the sanguine and sober Alison. What I don’t understand is why regular and informed attendees don’t kick up a loud fuss over this at the events themselves. You know, make a big din just like the Pink Coders do when they think an injustice has been done.

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