The Charge of the Invisible Army of Kremlin Trolls By Diana Johnstone

The Charge of the Invisible Army of Kremlin Trolls By Diana Johnstone

December 30, 2017 

Diana Johnstone explains that President Trump can be excused from being prosecuted as a Russian agent if he will give up his intention of normalizing relations with the necessary enemy of the US military/security complex and join in the orchestrated demonization of Russia.

Washington Trembles

The Charge of the Invisible Army of Kremlin Trolls

By Diana Johnstone

31 December 2017

There is no holiday truce in the propaganda war. On this Christmas day, The Washington Post offered its readers a scare story entitled “Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options”.

The article is long – nearly 4000 words. The only part that is sure to be read in these busy times of short attention spans is the headline, whose two themes are rich in subliminal messages.

First, a slash and burn operation by an army of Kremlin trolls is laying waste to the Internet. Second, official Washington in its benevolent innocence is having trouble facing up to this nefarious threat.

Let’s take these two themes one at a time.

Invasion of the Troll Army

The journalistic peg for this story is a phantom freelance journalist named Alice Donovan whose “first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. – the middle of the day in Moscow”.

Aha!

Drawing on its abundant intelligence community sources, the WaPo article continues: “The FBI was tracking Donovan as part of a months-long counterintelligence operation code-named ‘NorthernNight’. Internal bureau reports described her as a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of Kremlin-led trolls seeking to undermine America’s democratic institutions.”

Now, it is interesting to note that the only evidence provided in this article for “Russia’s army of trolls” (the expression pops up again) is the existence of this pseudonymous foot soldier named Alice Donovan. And the only evidence of her existence is numerous articles published on about a dozen websites over the past two years. Because when CounterPunch attempted, alarmed by the FBI, to find out who she is, it was unable to do so.

So, in this account, one ephemeral foot soldier is cited as proof of an “army”.

This should immediately raise questions. Why was the FBI investigating someone whose only trace of existence was authorship of website articles? It couldn’t be investigating “a person”, since apparently no one knows who this person is. So it was investigating a website writer. Why? What was its criterion?

“As the 2016 presidential election heated up,” the article continues, Alice Donovan “seemed to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding by stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia’s broad influence operation to affect the presidential race.”

In short, “stoking discontent” toward Hillary is the distinguishing sign of being “a tool” of a Russian operation. Incidentally, there are a lot of us who did just that. I am one of them, having written a whole book of discontent toward Hillary. Are we all under FBI investigation?

Is it or is it not the mission of the FBI to run a counterintelligence operation investigating website writers who digress from the official Washington line on Hillary Clinton, Russia and Syria? Alice Donovan did so but her pieces were relatively mild. Why should she be singled out for an FBI counterintelligence operation?

Why was CounterPunch warned against her and not against all of us who write such articles?

The not so subliminal message was: any article submitted to a website that contradicts the official line may be the work of sinister Kremlin agents. The evidence: they’ve found one! Its name is Alice Donovan. So be very careful what you publish.

Of course, the “evidence” is just as invisible as all the “proof” of Russian subversion produced so far by U.S. security agencies. Nobody has seen Alice Donovan. Nobody has talked with her. So far, there is no proof of her existence. But that has not prevented leading mainstream media from proclaiming her as exhibit A for Alice in the media prosecution of Vladimir Putin for “undermining our democracy”.

“The FBI, in keeping with its standard practice in counterintelligence investigations, has kept a close hold on information about Donovan and other suspected Russian personas peddling messages inside the United States”, according to the WaPo. But not such a close hold that it refrained from unnerving CounterPunch editors with suggestions that it was facilitating Kremlin cyberwar, or from passing along confidential intelligence reports to the most influential newspaper in the Nation’s Capital, whose ties to the CIA are longstanding.

If Alice Donovan is such a threat, why not expose her/his/its identity?

Reacting to FBI warnings, CounterPunch did its own investigation and came up with significant facts.

First, since it was impossible to trace “Alice Donovan”, the FBI must have been alerted by the writings, not by the person. When and how did the snoopers discover that she was apparently using a pseudonym? Did they know that first, meaning that the FBI equated pen names with Russian subversion? But what counts in an article is above all the content, not the signature. Throughout history, writers have used pen names as protection from potential persecution. The FBI exchange with CounterPunch indicates an intention to warn “left-leaning” websites not to publish anonymous articles, which could be a first step toward excluding persons who have something to say but fear getting in trouble because their views are unorthodox, especially in a period of intensifying witch hunt.

But the most significant fact emerging from CounterPunch’s own investigation is that articles by “Alice Donovan” failed to introduce some new strain of Russian propaganda into American cyberspace. They were not at all original. The phantom commentator picked up pieces of articles found on other left-leaning websites, and pasted them together as her own. The articles were cut and paste – in a word plagiarism.

That is the smoking gun, and the fingerprints are not Russian.

Indeed, inasmuch as there was nothing new, nothing particular sensational, no great “fake news” revelation in the Donovan prose, what could the “Kremlin” hope to gain? Why attempt to “undermine our democracy” with a few shadows of other existing internet articles?

This simply makes no sense.

There is another hypothesis, however, that does make sense. It is clear from the very creation of Operation NorthernNight that the FBI was charged with the task of producing proof that Internet dissidence has its origins in a Putin plot. But when such evidence turns out to be difficult or impossible to find, it can be manufactured instead – just as a certain number of “terrorist plots” have been manufactured by luring some gullible fool into a sting operation. It could be well worth the trouble of the FBI to entrap leftist publications into publishing articles that could be “exposed” as “Kremlin propaganda”.  It is obvious that the Deep State is desperate for “evidence” to back up their Russia-is-destroying-our-democracy fairy tale, and this would fit right in. The invention of “Alice Donovan” could provide such “evidence”.

If you were an FBI hack, commissioned with writing articles to be signed by “Alice Donovan”, how would you go about it? As an FBI hack, you probably have no idea how to write such an article. The easiest way would be to copy what real “left-leaning” authors had written. The Donovan papers added nothing to what was already in the public domain. They said nothing that other writers had not written, and that might risk further poisoning the minds of gullible Americans.  She just cut and pasted.  That would be a most convenient way to “invent” a fictional Russian troll – set her loose among the websites and then “discover” the scandal.  Just a new twist on the FBI’s perpetual entrapment ploys. A variation on the theme of sting operations. We lure you into doing something we can accuse you of. But it is the “left-leaning” websites that are lured into having published “fake news” by a “Kremlin troll”. This should teach them to be careful!

There is indeed no proof that “Alice Donovan” is a creation of the FBI undercover operation known as Northern Night, just as there is no proof that “Alice Donovan” was a creation of a Kremlin disinformation campaign. However, there is proof that the FBI undercover operation existed. From its secret sources, The Washington Post reveals that a “previously unreported order – a sweeping presidential finding to combat global cyber threats – prompted U.S. spy agencies to plan a half-dozen specific operations to counter the Russian threat.” Why couldn’t “Alice Donovan” have been one of those operations?

On the other hand, the Kremlin disinformation campaign is still a matter of speculation – despite all the mainstream reports based, like this one claims to be, on “interviews with dozens of current and former senior U.S. officials at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and U.S. and European intelligence services, as well as NATO representatives and top European diplomats.”

Since all those interviews are anonymous, what makes them more credible than an anonymous blogger? Where is the evidence – of anything?

This whole article is built on the a priori assumption of the existence of “an army of Kremlin trolls” out to destroy American democracy. The theme is imaginatively elaborated, but never supported by solid facts.

Saving Trump From the Trolls

If the first theme in the article is designed to intimidate “left-leaning” websites, obliging them to tow the official line, and henceforth threatened with accusations of colluding with “the Kremlin’s army of trolls” if they do not do so, the second theme is indirectly addressed to Trump. The subliminal message: jump onto the anti-Russia bandwagon and you may not be impeached after all.

This message is delivered by innuendo. Whereas the whole “Russian fake news” campaign got off the ground as a way to explain the preposterous election of Donald Trump, and also as a way to discredit the despised president and prepare his destitution, the tone has changed. Now, the WaPo reports, Trump is not a beneficiary but a target of Russian disinformation:

“After Trump took office, Russia’s army of trolls began to shift their focus within the United States, according to U.S. intelligence reports. Instead of spreading messages to bolster Trump, they returned to their long-held objective of sowing discord in U.S. society and undermining American global influence. Trump’s presidency and policies became a Russian disinformation target.”

“Donovan and other Kremlin-backed personas” began attacking the Trump administration for, among other things, supporting “terrorists” and authorizing military strikes that killed children in Syria.

“ ‘They are all about disruption,’ said a former official briefed on the intelligence. ‘They want a distracted United States that can’t counter Vladimir Putin’s ambitions’.”

What ambitions are those? According to Washington informants, this was because Putin wanted to “make up for its diminished military” by seizing on “influence campaigns and cyber warfare as equalizers.”

Now, one might think that if all Russia can muster to “equalize” the United States’ unprecedented military machine is an army of Alice Donovans, all those security experts in Washington should relax and stop worrying.

According to this tale, that is just what they did, convinced that “it was all over and we’d won the propaganda war”. Then came – horrors! – RT, a Russian sponsored American television channel than offers viewers a vision of the news that strikes the Washington Post like an exorcism chant.

Poor, Fragile America

So now U.S. security officials run whimpering to The Washington Post claiming that top policy-makers were misled by “a misguided belief in the resilience of American society and its democratic institutions.” Miscalculations and “bureaucratic inertia” left the United States “vulnerable to Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election”… The world’s greatest democracy turns out to be a house of cards.

What a confession! It turns out that if the Russians huff and puff, they can blow the house down.

“I thought our ground was not as fertile,” said Antony J. Blinken, President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state. “We believed that the truth shall set you free, that the truth would prevail. That proved a bit naive.”

Gee whiz, the guys in Washington are just too honest to dream of the nasty things those mean Russians can do. But now The Washington Post is there, hand in hand with “the intelligence community”, to warn us, and to warn you, Mr. Trump, that the Russians are the bad guys out to destroy America and you must do everything to stop them.

These complaints have a familiar ring. Whenever the Pentagon is gearing up to bomb some hapless country into regime change, we hear the same chorus from the mainstream media, from intelligence experts and high officials “on conditions of anonymity”, as well as from assorted semi-governmental “non-governmental” human rights organizations, proclaiming that American leaders must be awakened from their idealistic dreams in order to stop the latest Hitler from doing whatever it is such villains do. Of course, America’s naive leaders are just too kind and innocent to take this latest terrible threat seriously – until alerted by diligent spooks and their mainstream media collaborators.  We’ve heard this again and again.  Remember how human rights advocates had to nag and nag the gentle US war machine to get it to bomb Serbia, to bomb Libya, to arm “good” Syrian rebels.  Official America is so good and trusting that it has to be forced to take necessary defensive action.

So come on, Trump, just wake up to the Putin cyber threat, and all will be forgiven.

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How Much Death and Destruction Awaits Us in 2018? Paul Craig Roberts The New Year is one fu

How Much Death and Destrution Awaits Us in 2018?

December 30, 2017

How Much Death and Destruction Awaits Us in 2018?

Paul Craig Roberts

The New Year is one full of economic, political, and war threats.

Among the economic threats are stock, bond, and real estate markets artificially pumped up by years of central bank money creation and by false reports of full employment. It is an open question whether participants in these markets are aware that underlying reality does not support the asset values. Central banks support stock markets not only with abundant liquidity but also with direct stock purchases. The Japanese central bank is now one of the largest owners of Japanese equities. Central banks, which are supposed to provide economic stability, have created a massive fraud.

Throughout the Western world politics has degenerated into fraud. No government serves the public’s interest. (See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/12/29/eric-zuesse-explains-americas-worst-enemy/ ) Except for some former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, European governments have defied the will of the people by admitting vast numbers of refugees from Washington’s wars and others pretending to be refugees. The European governments further imperil their citizens with their support for Washington’s rising aggression toward Russia. The universal failure of democratic politics is leading directly to war.

The Saker explains that Americans with intelligence, honor, courage, and integrity have disappeared from the US national security establishment. In their place are arrogant morons high on hubris who believe: (1) We can buy anybody, (2) Those we cannot buy, we bully, (3) Those we cannot bully, we kill, (4) Nothing can happen to us, we live in total impunity no matter what we do.http://www.unz.com/tsaker/2018-war-or-no-war/

Scott Bennett reports that US soldiers are being propagandized that Russia is an enemy with whom we are headed to war. https://www.facebook.com/capsule.ninetynine.7/videos/1992321041038611/ 

The Anglo-Zionist empire is trying to overturn the Iranian agreement and to restart the attempt to overthrow the government of Syria. Lebanon’s Hezbollah is also in the empire’s sights. Washington is arming Ukraine in order to enable an attack on the breakaway provinces of Novorussia. Threats against North Korea escalate. Even little Venezuela is threatened with military intervention simply because the country wants to control its own destiny and not be controlled by Washington and the New York banks.

In the opinion of some, Russia’s very cautious diplomacy has increased the likelihood that Washington will miscalculate and give the world a third world war. By not accepting the requests of the breakaway Russian provinces in Ukraine to be reunited with Russia, the Russian government paved the way for Washington to provide the military means for its Ukrainian puppet to attempt to reconquer the provinces. Success would damage Russian prestige and encourage Washington in its aggressive actions. Sooner or later Russia will have to stand and fight.

Russia’s premature declaration of victory in Syria and withdrawal has made it possible for US forces to remain in Syria and attempt to restart the effort to overthrow the Assad government. Russia would have to defend its victory, or by the failure to do so encourage more aggressive actions by Washington.

Hopes have evaporated that President Trump would restore the normalized relations between the nuclear powers that Reagan and Gorbachev made possible. The question for the New Year is when does Washington’s aggression against Russia ignite a hot war.

Your website will be examining these issues as they unfold in 2018. From the perspective of today, it is unlikely that the New Year will be a happy one. Nowhere in the West is there a sign of leadership toward peace and the well-being of humanity.

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Eric Zuesse Explains Who Is America’s Worst Enemy

 Eric Zuesse Explains Who Is America’s Worst Enemy

December 29, 2017 

Eric Zuesse Explains Who Is America’s Worst Enemy

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48499.htm

Polls Increasingly Confirming that America Is a Dictatorship

By Eric Zuesse

December 26, 2017 "Information Clearing House" -  Gallup headlined on December 18th, “Americans View Government as Nation’s Top Problem in 2017”. Their report made clear that though this finding was unprecedented, it’s part of a longer-term trend, toward Americans naming America’s own “government as the most important problem facing the nation.” In a democracy, the public do not view the nation’s government to be (as in America) their enemy (which is the case if they view the “government as the most important problem facing the nation”). Americans increasingly view the Government as their enemy.

In a dictatorship, only the people who control the government are satisfied with the government; but, in a democracy, the public are satisfied with the government — or else that government will be replaced in elections by people who control the government and who do provide government that the public approve of. In the United States, we’re instead moving in the exact opposite direction: steadily going from one government to another, none of which wins the public’s approval; and the present American government winning the public’s approval even less than its predecessors did. This is notthe situation that exists in authentic democracies. It’s what one expects to find in a country that’s ruled by a dictatorship. Dictators don’t need to worry so much about polls, because they don’t represent the public; they exploit the public — they use the public.

The only scientific study that has yet been done on the question of whether the U.S. is, in fact, run by a democratic government, or instead by a dictatorial one (specifically by an oligarchy, or a government that represents only the richest citizens), was published in September 2014, and it found clearly that the U.S. is definitely not a democracy, but the other type: that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, whereas “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy”; and, furthermore, that, “The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater” than their statistics indicate, because the researchers weren’t able to measure the impact that the super-rich have on policy, but only the impact that the rich have on policy (versus the impact that the total American public have on policy). The rich control America’s Government, but whether the richest do, wasn’t able to be researched, as of 2014.

This academic study’s scientific methodology was so good, so that no one, as of yet, in the more than three years since its publication, has been able to find any flaw in its data or methodology. Its headline, like its writing, was as dull as possible, “Testing Theories of American Politics”, and this (and especially its atrocious writing) might at least partially explain why America’s mainstream press overwhelmingly has ignored that seminal and landmark study in the social sciences, and especially has ignored that study’s enormous implications, regarding contemporary U.S. politics and government. (A vastly clearer presentation of that study, and of its findings, can be found here in this 6-minute video summary of it.)

Increasingly after that time, particularly after Donald Trump’s becoming U.S. President on 20 January 2017, polls are confirming strongly that what this scientific analysis said, describes, even more starkly than before, the American reality — that the U.S. federal Government now blatantly ignores public opinion, and is controlled instead only by the rich.

One example of this phenomenon was recently headlined by me “Poll: By 2-to-1, Americans Oppose Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem”, and it reported that in the only two published national polls in the U.S. that were taken prior to Trump’s announcement that the U.S. Embassy in Israel will be moved from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem — one having been a November 2017 poll of 2,000 Americans, published on December 11th, and the other being a September 2017 poll of 1,000 U.S. Jews — the overall U.S. public opposed any such move by 63% to 31%, and U.S. Jews opposed it by around similar percentages (though the polling-questions on the two polls differed significantly and therefore their findings are not directly comparable). Furthermore, that article also linked to another question which was included in the November poll, and which showed that only a minority of Americans — almost all of whom are Democrats — believe that Russia is a “foe” of the United States; and, of course, the U.S. federal Government (even the existing Republican one) does consider Russia, more than any other country, to be America’s foe; so, that, too, presents a stark contrast between the Government and its public.

Furthermore, on December 14th, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager, the pollster Mark Penn, whom she had mis-cast into the role of her campaign’s strategist in 2008, headlined at The Hill, “Mueller, FBI face crisis in public confidence”, and he summarized numerous polls which were finding that whereas Americans overwhelmingly distrust President Donald Trump, Americans distrust even more the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that’s trying to find reasons to impeach and remove him from office. Americans are getting increasingly scared of their Government, and now distrust both sides of it.

Another addition to these polls that show America’s public to be ignored by America’s Government (other than for the public to be manipulated by means of the major newsmedia that the billionaires who control this Government own), was also issued on December 18th, and this poll was headlined “Half The Public Say Their Taxes Will Go Up Under GOP Plan”. It scientifically sampled 806 Americans, and reported that:

“Nearly half the American public (47%) disapprove of the tax reform bills passed by the Senate and House and just 26% approve. … Strong disapproval (35%) of the proposal far outweighs strong approval (13%). … In ‘swing’ counties where the margin of victory for either candidate was less than ten points, 30% approve of the plan compared with 38% who disapprove. … Many Americans see this bill more as an attempt by Republicans to gain a political victory and would rather see Congress scrap this plan and start over. … Half of the public (50%) predict that the federal taxes they pay will go up with the plan now under consideration by Congress. Just 14% say their taxes will go down. … The public was much more optimistic right before Trump took the oath of office in January. Back then, two-thirds expected that the middle class would benefit from the policies of a Trump administration.”

All polls show that the American public believe overwhelmingly that only the rich will benefit from the Trump/Republican tax-law changes. (If purely the long-term impacts, such as the resultant soaring public debt, are considered, then this perception, by the public, of the tax-law changes, is almost certainly accurate.) The blatancy with which U.S. federal policy violates what the polls show that the American public overwhelmingly want (such as reducing the federal debt), and imposes instead upon the public what they clearly don’t want (such as increasing that debt), is now stunning.

Such findings provide yet additional evidence that the far more extensively documented findings in the massive study “Testing Theories of American Politics” apply with special force today, probably even more so than they did in the period from 1981 to 2002, which was the period that that empirical study had examined in detail. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter expressed publicly on 28 July 2015 (even before Trump was President), that, “Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president.And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members.” He was stating what is, by now, an increasingly proven fact. America is a dictatorship.

However, current U.S. Government office-holders haven’t publicly expressed any such view, although the Democratic U.S. Presidential candidate whom Hillary Clinton ‘beat’ in 2016, Bernie Sanders, has come the closest to saying it.

It’s not even clear, however, whether a majority of Americans actually want a democratic government. On 9 September 2015, the YouGov poll headlined “Could a coup really happen in the United States?” (which question presumed that a U.S. coup hadn’t already happened, such as on 9 December 2000, or on 22 November 1963, though there is evidence that it happened in both cases), and YouGov reported that “when people are asked whether they would hypothetically support the military stepping in to take control from a civilian government which is beginning to violate the constitution, 43% of Americans would support the military stepping in while 29% would be opposed.” Perhaps many in that large 43% plurality of Americans were somehow blissfully ignorant that the American Government routinely not only was “beginning to violate” but routinely had been and were violating, the U.S. Constitution, such as by placing onto its Supreme Court, anti-Constitutional ‘Justices’ who arbitrarily label political money as “speech” that’s unlimitedly protected by the First Amendment, so that unlimited political spending by billionaires can effectively control the U.S. Government (such oligarchy as is now scientifically established to be the case), or by violating the Constitution in so many other ways, such as by simply not enforcing certain laws in certain cases, such as by refusing to prosecute the banksters whose frauds caused (and who profited from) the 2008 financial crash — they perpetrated a massive unpunished crime against the public, and this is supposed to be ‘democracy’. But regardless: a 43%-to-29% plurality of the nation’s public are so pro-military as to favor a U.S. coup under that vague condition; they would prefer the military, an intrinsically anti-democratic authoritarian institution, to take direct control over the U.S. Government — as if there could be some valid excuse for this intrinsically dictatorial institution to overthrow the established and supposedly legal government, and to replace it by one that’s not just supposedly, but blatantly, illegal to be in control of the Government. This would mean that America’s billionaires — people who already own and profit from the military’s weapons-making firms — will take control of America, even if they don’t already have control. They control the military-industrial complex, because they control the Deep State that, in any capitalist country, IS the military-industrial complex. They control the weapons-manufacturing firms such as Lockheed Martin, and also the megabanks, and the lobbying firms, and all the rest of the systematic corruption (the Deep State), which controls the U.S. government.

That same poll (question 13) also asked “Do you believe that the military has a duty to protect the Constitution against domestic enemies?” and 72% answered “Yes” and 12% answered “No.” Thus, by a 6-to-1 margin, Americans don’t know the difference between the function that the military and CIA are supposed to perform, versus the function that the police and the FBI and entire Justice Department are supposed to perform. As if that’s not frightening enough about America, Americans now support the nation’s military-industrial complex above all other institutions, public or private. The war-making institution isn’t used only for defense (though its PR euphemism is ‘the defense establishment’ and it should instead be called “the invasion-and-coup establishment”), but it is also — and now almost exclusively — used for invasions and coups that are based on lies (from ‘the defense establishment’, boosting their own business), such as invasions and coups against Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Ukraine 2014. Instead of despising that institution of conquest, Americans now admire it, above all others — and far above all the rest of the U.S. Government.

So: “Could a coup really happen in the United States?” A coup wouldn’t even be necessary in order to produce here dictatorship, which has already long existed in this country. And, while domestic spending is being slashed by the existing U.S. regime, military spending (which already is as large as the next ten largest national military budgets in the world) is soaring. Why would America’s generals want to perpetrate a coup? They’re already getting almost everything they want — and without the opprobrium they’d suffer from a coup. It would be plain stupid for them to do that. The very question which was asked in that poll was a bad joke, but a full 72% of the U.S. public not only didn’t ridicule the idea, but actually endorsed it. They endorsed what’s commonly called a ‘police state’, but which actually is a “military state” — rule by the military. Maybe that’s what we’ve already got. But, behind the military-industrial complex, stand the nation’s billionaires — the people who really run U.S. foreign policies. If that brute fact can’t become understood by the American people, then not only does democracy no longer exist in the U.S., but the basis to create (or restore) democracy here is likewise absent. Americans are big supporters of the military-industrial complex. The U.S. public have been deceived about what it is, and what it isn’t — so deceived, that they place it at the top, as the most respected of all institutions. How much more upside-down — black is white, white is black — like Big Brother’s “Newspeak,” could the U.S. public be duped to be, than that? If America’s invasion-and-coup institution is at the top, then why are all the others held in lower esteem than this — the most-corrupt of all institutions in America?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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The Feminist Threat To Women And Men by Paul Craig Roberts

The Feminist Threat To Women And Men

December 27, 2017 

The Feminist Threat To Women And Men

Paul Craig Roberts

Recently I read in CounterPunch two feminist rants against men. Not all men, just white heterosexual men. It is not always easy for a male of my generation to understand what feminists are saying, but I try. One seems to be saying that women live in a society that puts in power men who believe that violence against women is acceptable. Elevating her accusation to a fact, the writer says that women should not have to prove their case when they bring sexual harassment and assault charges, much less prove their “personal validity to even be making a case against a man.”

Is the writer saying that any irate woman should have the right to inpugn a man with an unchallenged charge? Do men and American society believe that violence against women is acceptable? I think not, unless the violence is committed by police. Americans seem to accept police violence against men, women, children, the handicapped, and the family dog.

The other writer says women have to sell themselves to live. She, despite a degree from a prestigeous university, went to work as a stripper, lap dancer, and apparently as a prostitute. She blames men for her poor decisions.

To be clear, I sympathize with anyone who finds themselves in the position that survival requires the sacrifice of their self-esteem. This happens to people everywhere all over the world. It is not an unique experience of women.

The woman who was a stripper writes that “what I learned in the strip club taught me more about the realities of being a woman in the 21st century than anything else has done.” It was there, she writes, that she learned that her handicaps in life were her intelligence and sharp tongue, and “that while men dictated the terms of my existence, women were complicit in maintaining systemic inequality.” Complicit women, she writes, sliced off parts of her soul just as did men.

What caught my attention was her reference to “being a woman in the 21st century.” How different that is from being a woman in the pre-feminist era that I experienced. It was feminists who denounced men for putting women on a pedestal and worshiping them. The inculcated respect that men showed women, doffing their hats in their presence, standing when women entered the room, opening doors for them, helping to seat them at tables, never using a four-letter word in their presence, and never ever striking a woman, an action that would isolate a man and deprive him of male friends.

In my day, no one struck a woman. It was beyond the pale.

It was the feminists who said that putting women on a pedestal was the male’s way of disempowering women. What ignorant nonsense. The most powerful members of my family were my grandmothers, mother, and aunts. Little decisions they left to the men. The big decisions they made.

Feminists said that women had to reject the pedestal and come down into the male world and prove their worth. It never occurred to feminists that women had more worth and more power on the pedestal. Feminists taught women to be promiscuous. Cosmopolitian magazine taught women to find fulfillment in orgasm with as many sexual partners as they can find. A number of years ago I wrote about young men telling me that they would like to get married, but every woman they knew had been in bed with all of their classmates. They said they would feel funny having their friends at their wedding who had sexual experience with their bride.

Corporations contributed to worsening the position of women that feminists initiated. In my day women were protected by families being in the same place. Any man who abused his wife would be confronted by his father and mother, his wife’s father and mother, his and her grandparents, his brothers and sisters, his wife’s brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles, her aunts and uncles, and by the cousins of both.

What the corporations did was to bust up this protective environment by sending its employees to some distant location where the husband and wife were isolated from family. Kids grew up never knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, people they might see one or twice a year. Isolated from the normal support systems, families broke apart, and the divorce rate soared.

A society that lowers everything to survival and to profit destroys women and men. That is what feminists should be complaining about.
But feminism has succumbed to Identity Politics and can only generate hatred of men who find women appealing. Judging by the growth of homosexuality, there is a reduction in the number of men who find women appealing. Consequently, feminism is complicit in the destruction both of the status of women and of Western society.

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Roger Stone Explains That Under Mueller and Comey the FBI Became a Criminal Organization

Roger Stone Explains That Under Mueller and Comey the FBI Became a Criminal Organization

December 21, 2017 

Roger Stone Explains That Under Mueller and Comey the FBI Became a Criminal Organization

http://russia-insider.com/en/trump-should-prosecute-illegal-nsa-cia-cabal-and-put-mueller-jail/ri22001

Trump Should Prosecute the Illegal NSA / CIA Cabal and Put Mueller in Jail

" ... the president must completely disempower and dismantle Robert S. Mueller’s fraudulent rogue prosecution gang, which is merely an extension of a larger corruption of power that is unparalleled in our history."

Roger Stone 

Wed, Dec 20, 2017

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As I noted in an editorial last week, President Donald Trump has only one viable option to repel the partisan lynch mob now nipping at his heels in the form of a taxpayer-funded pack of legal hyenas, masquerading as objective prosecutors under the droopy eyes of old reliable deep state hatchet man Robert Swan Mueller III, the special counsel appointed to “investigate” the Clinton-Podesta-Schiff-Democrat Party-Corporate Media fabricated Russia collusion delusion.

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Mueller is a partisan hatchet man with a dirty past

As the GOP Congress finally begins to stir, as rapid-fire events make it increasingly impossible to deny the true nature of Mueller’s handpicked partisan hit squad of Trump-hating, Hillary-supporting D.C. swamp lawyers and arrogant federal careerists, as firings and other departures quickly erode the carefully-contrived, totally-counterfeit veneer of credibility ascribed to Mueller and his henchpeople, my advice to the president has only become more apropos…and more imperative.

President Trump can, and must, kill two birds with one stone.

First, the president must completely disempower and dismantle Robert S. Mueller’s fraudulent rogue prosecution gang, which is merely an extension of a larger corruption of power that is unparalleled in our history.

Second, the president must use every resource at his disposal to prosecute the almost-seditious abuses of power by lawless Clinton-Obama FBI and NSA apparatchiks who:

1) Politically weaponized the federal government’s electronic intelligence capabilities to spy on a presidential candidate and his campaign,

2) Colluded with foreign and non-state intelligence agents to manufacture evidence used as false pretexts for securing FISA warrants that employed the national security laws of the United States to give illicit, illegal cover to this political espionage,

3) Used the fruits of this political espionage activity to damage or otherwise hinder this candidate, once he had become president-elect and eventually President of the United States, through surreptitious releases of the criminally-procured information,

4) Fabricated and instigated false allegations about foreign state collusion implicating the president’s election campaign and family members, and

5) Perpetuated this massive criminal fraud on the American people for nearly a full year by manipulating and abusing the investigatory and prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice.

To this end, President Trump must begin at the intersection of these seditious current and former federal officials who had previously facilitated and covered up a similarly-breathtaking and brazen criminal fraud on the country during the previous presidential administration, to include the previous president.

The president must order his Attorney General to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Obama-Clinton-Mueller-Rosenstein criminal collusion that enriched the Clinton-Democrat crime syndicate by 100s of millions of dollars and further embedded the power of the deep state operators who facilitated what may be the most brazen of self-serving criminal treasons in American history: the multi-billion-dollar Uranium One pay-to-play scam.

This incredible scheme perpetrated by the criminal Clintons and their coterie of minions and fellow travelers, implicates top officials of our federal government…including and especially the U.S Department of Justice, including and especially Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein.

This course of action is manifestly in the best interests of this country and of justice. It is not some political maneuver against the president’s cynical partisan persecutors or some clever machination to spare his presidency from the illegitimate cabal that is single-minded in its intent to fraudulently remove the president from office, by any means possible.

This action by the president is both legally and constitutionally necessary to preserve any remaining credibility in our institutions of government, which now hinges on whether or not justice will, once and for all, be visited upon the Clintons and their well-placed partisan accomplices, finally vindicating our system of law and justice after decades of brazen, yet unpunished, corruption that the Clintons and their ilk have insinuated into these institutions, bringing unparalleled and a now-accelerating degradation to American civic life itself.

Pro-active Republican lawmakers have already demanded the resignation of Robert Mueller, as a start, and are calling for a thorough probe of his entire ad hoc operation, which is now coming apart at the seams with almost daily revelations of its rotten fraudulent core.

Mueller’s decades as an establishment federal careerist, which only ended with his ceding of the FBI’s top job to his good pal, criminal leaker and manipulator Big Jim Comey, offer more than enough grounds for Mueller’s disqualification for merely the appearances of impropriety and professional conflicts of interest they raise, just at the outset. They are of such incestuous nature as it concerns key figures of the conspiracy to remove the president that Mueller should never even have been considered for appointment.

That Mueller took the Special Counsel appointment without even blinking, despite his own close professional and personal connections to key figures implicated in the DOJ, NSA and FBI corruption in service to ulterior partisan ends, via the Clinton crime family, was a major red flag, right from the beginning.

Reinforcing this red flag was the fact that Mueller’s entire (supposed) vetting for this sensitive, consequential special counsel position amounted a single-sentence approval letter signed by some faceless Deputy AG barely a day after the appointment was promulgated.

Aside from Mueller’s blatant disregard for both attorney and public service ethics in accepting the special counsel appointment, some GOP lawmakers have also cited the former FBI director’s close involvement with the Obama administration’s secret Russian-U.S. uranium deal as more than enough reason for his immediate removal and the commencement of a real (untainted) investigation of the Obama-Clinton Russia-connected treason that Mueller has been instrumental in abetting and covering up.

So exactly what is the story with Uranium One?? The short version is that in 2010, when Mueller was FBI director, the Obama administration and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved and facilitated a highly-suspicious business deal that had grave public implication in that the result of it was that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton effectively handed Russia and Vladimir Putin control over upwards of 20% of the uranium assets of the United States.

As this deal was coming to fruition, after years of nefarious Clintonian machinations urging it along, Mueller’s FBI was not only investigating, but had uncovered clear evidence of, Russian bribery and fraud to the detriment of U.S. uranium contractors, as part of a larger Russian (Putin) racketeering scheme to gain control of global uranium resources, namely by purchasing the power and influence being peddled by the Clintons to anyone who would meet their terms.

As early as 2009, the FBI had obtained evidence (secret recordings and intercepted emails) showing that a Moscow-compromised uranium trucking company called Tenex was engaged in racketeering through a pattern of bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. At the same time, Russian nuclear officials were routing millions of dollars to benefit the Clinton Foundation. Mueller’s evidence even included a secret informant willing to testify to these illicit schemes.

Tenex was operating out of Bethesda, Maryland through a subsidiary named “Tenam USA.” The company was run by a corrupt Russian official named Vadim Mikerin. As the FBI was investigating Tenam’s extortion and bribery scheme, Russia was seeking permission from the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department to acquire ownership of Uranium One. Despite evidence of Tenex and Mikerim’s ongoing corruption as early as 2009, the Obama administration rubber-stamped a U.S. work visa twice for Mikerim, as late as 2014.

And what did our intrepid paragon of justice Robert Swan Mueller III do to thwart this brazen scheming and arrest its perpetrators? The answer is absolutely NOTHING. In fact, and even worse, the deep state’s Russia collusion fantasy crusader Mueller actually moved to silence the FBI’s confidential informant, forcing the informant to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This otherwise-inexplicable gag order on a key witness to the Clinton-Russia uranium treason was only just lifted on October 25, 2017, a full seven years after the fact, under pressure from Congressional intelligence committee leadership.

Robert Mueller ensured that his own FBI investigators were effectively walled off from exposing the real players in our own government who were complicit in this epic influence-peddling scam founded on the Clintons’ ruthless greed and epic criminality.

Obama’s Justice Department and Mueller’s FBI knowingly kept Congress and the American people in the dark about Russia’s significant and illegal manipulations involving American uranium companies and the highest officials of American government, first and foremost among them U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The result was that the Clintons’ criminal treason, in collusion with Russian nuclear criminals, went full steam ahead, unperturbed.

Mueller’s key role in the covering up of these Russia-Clinton uranium dealings constitutes more than enough justification for Robert Mueller’s immediate and unceremonious removal — an autonomous, secretive inquisitor limitlessly probing the newly-inaugurated president who defeated his former Obama administration crony Hillary Clinton.

There are probably a dozen other reasons why Mueller should be criminally charged, but for now let’s just focus on this most heinous of schemes to which Mueller has been party: the transfer of our precious uranium resources to criminal Russian oligarchs to benefit the Clinton-Obama crime junta and sleazy hucksters from the ranks of the Democrat party.

How is it even possible that Russia (a supposed enemy) could acquire a 20% interest in U.S. uranium production, you might ask. The answer is that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, was handed official U.S. Government authorization to purchase a Canadian company named Uranium One which controlled uranium mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West, including approximately 20% of America’s known uranium resources.

Uranium One, as handed over to the Russians by Obama-Clinton, was effectively the creation of a Canadian entrepreneur named Frank Giustra. Mr. Giustra “coincidentally” and quite conveniently happened to be a major Clinton donor and a personal friend of Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton and Frank Giustra

The Clinton-Giustra genesis of the Uranium One scam was detailed in a lengthy New York Times story in April 2015 titled “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.” [Based on the old Grey Lady’s incessant animus for Donald Trump and its complicity in puffing up the Russia collusion delusion about the president, it would seem that amnesia is the order of the day at the Times.]

In 2005, Clinton was flown on Giustra’s lavish private jet to Kazakhstan, a central Asian country once part of the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan possesses around 12 percent of the world’s uranium resources and Giustra wanted to acquire ownership interest in several uranium mines.

Using his substantial network of contacts as a former U.S. President, Bill Clinton had arranged for himself and Giustra to dine with Kazakhstan’s despotic ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev. During the meal, Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when Clinton expressed support for Nazarbayev’s bid to head an international elections monitoring group.

Apparently, it was of no consequence or concern to officialdom in Washington that this move by Clinton ran directly counter to American foreign policy and undermined much-deserved criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Clinton’s wife, at the time a U.S. senator.

The new company Giustra formed to effectuate the Uranium One deal, UrAsia Energy Ltd., signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by Kazatomprom, the government agency that runs Kazakhstan’s uranium mines and nuclear energy industry. In 2007 UrAsia merged with Uranium One in what was described as a $3.5 billion transaction, with the successor company retaining the name Uranium One.

Mukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, subsequently revealed that then-Senator Hillary Clinton had pressured Kazakh officials to cede the uranium rights to Giustra. Hillary served as the stick to her husband Bill’s proverbial carrot in making the deal happen.

According to the Washington Post, Dzhakishev “described the deal as 'a financing mechanism of the Democratic Party' and said a Clinton adviser named Tim Phillips championed it in meetings with him and other officials.”

From the same WaPo article:

“At the time, Clinton denied taking any action to support Giustra’s purchase. Giustra also said Clinton played no role in the deal and rejected any link between the deal and his Clinton Foundation donations.

But in the leaked video of him speaking to the authorities, Dzhakishev said a senior Kazakh official told him to look into the deal after then-Sen. Hillary Clinton canceled a meeting with him. Dzhakishev said he was told that “investors who currently work in Kazakhstan and have ties to Clinton have problems and meetings will be resumed only after Kazakhstan resolves the problems.”

“I called them, and they came. I met them in Astana and then Clinton’s aide, Tim Phillips, began to scream that this deal involves Democrats and is financed by them, and that we were hampering the deal,” Dzhakishev said.

When all was said and done, UrAsia’s investors controlled the new Uranium One. Chairman of the new company was Canadian Ian Telfer. Telfer donated $2.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Frank Giustra, who had shepherded Bill Clinton’s influence with the Kazakhstanis, held a personal stake in the deal estimated at about $45 million. Through a spokesperson, Giustra said he sold his stake in 2007. According to the New York Times, one year after the 2005 uranium deal was final Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation with a promise of $100 million more.

One adviser on the Uranium One-UrAsia merger was Paul Reynolds. Reynolds donated $1 to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

A company called U.S. Global Investors Inc. held $4.7 million in Uranium One shares. A U.S. Global executive named Frank Holmes donated $250,000 to $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

This is just the short list of Uranium One-connected donations that flowed back to the Clintons. Although the Clintons had an obligation to report these donations, they conveniently waited until 2008 to do so, and only when the New York Times was poised to expose and publish details about this obvious multi-million dollar pay-to-play scheme.

As is modus operandi with all of the Clintons’ sleazy machinations, any questions or suggestions posed about the connections between shady Clinton influence-peddling business deals and the inevitable cash windfalls realized by the Clintons were glibly pooh-poohed as either mere coincidence (please) or lacking any “evidence” (as if we need signed receipts and written agreements to connect the obvious dots of the Clintons’ epic lucre).

With classic Clintonian prevarication, treating the public as either blind, stupid or both, the Clintons steadfastly deny the obvious quid pro quo connections at the root of the Uranium One Kazakhstan acquisitions. Of course, the crony beneficiaries of the deal know enough to follow suit with similar huffy denials, lest they meet with an unfortunate premature demise like so many others who have dared run afoul of the Clintons’ scamming and scheming, all the way back to the Arkansas backwater days.

Russo-Clinton Treason: Phase II

Bubba and Putin in 2010 contemporaneous with the Clinton uranium treason

Once Uranium One was set up with the Kazakhstani uranium holdings and firmly in the control of Clinton cronies, the stage was set for the next step in the Clintons’ treasonous plot: handing over Uranium One and its holdings (including 20% of America’s uranium resources) to the Russians, or more accurately to Vladimir Putin. The Clinton cabal’s uranium wheelings and dealings began immediately at the commencement in 2009 of the Obama administration, under the close direction of newly-installed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In order for Russian nuclear entity Rosatom to purchase Uranium One the deal required approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. The committee consists of top officials from nine different federal agencies. Not surprisingly, given the foreign subject matter intrinsic to the committee’s work, the key agency — the main driver out of all government players involved — is the U.S. Department of State, conveniently headed by Mrs. Bill Clinton in 2009.

To be clear, Hillary Clinton did not have the authority to push such a potentially-controversial deal through by herself. Such power ultimately resides with the president, in this case, Barack H. Obama. But also joining Madame Clinton on the CFIUS was the contemptible, corrupt, partisan U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Under the careful orchestration of the Obama-Clinton-Democrat graft artists, the CFIUS voted twice, first in 2010 and then in 2013, to approve Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One, thereby giving Vladimir Putin control of 20% of all U.S. uranium.

It would be ridiculous to think that Obama, Hillary, Holder, and Mueller would not have been well aware of the FBI’s investigation into the Russian racketeering and all of the bribes and kickbacks, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that formed a backdrop to the Uranium One acquisition by Russia.

These sworn federal officials did not step in to expose and halt the tainted Uranium One deal, they quite unabashedly cleared the way for it. Robert Mueller, far from being just the head of the FBI investigating Russia’s racketeering activities around the deal, seems to have in fact been an active participant in it, going so far as to personally deliver ten grams of HEU (highly enriched uranium) to the Russians in September 2009.

The HEU in question had been confiscated in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Energy in a “nuclear smuggling sting operation involving one Russian national and several Georgian accomplices.” A cable, one of several released by WikiLeaks details Director Mueller’s mission to personally deliver the HEU to Russian law enforcement at the behest of Hillary Clinton.

Another interesting bit of “innocent timing” or convenient coincidence (take your pick): in June of 2010, the same month that Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One, Bill Clinton spoke in Moscow for the tidy sum of $500,000, the 2nd highest fee he had ever received for a speech.

Clinton’s half-million dollar bonanza for 90 minutes “work” was paid by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin. Renaissance Capital analysts talked up Uranium One’s stock, assigning it a “buy” rating and saying in a July 2010 research report that it was “the best play” in the uranium markets. Of course this, too, is just a “coincidence.”

If you think all of these connections and occurrences are too mind-boggling to accept as mere coincidence, hold on to your seat for this next one. Remember how the Tenam/Rosatom racketeering activities were centered in Bethesda, Maryland at the Tenex U.S. offices? As rank-and-file FBI agents were assiduously investigating these Russian schemes to obtain U.S. uranium resources through the corruption of public officials, Robert Mueller knew he had to suppress the case, what with Hillary impatiently waiting in the background for the deal to close so she and Bill could realize the multi-million dollar windfalls to their “Foundation.”

Since the case technically arose in Maryland, Mueller moved to hand it to a trusted ally who conveniently happened to be a prosecutor with jurisdiction over the case. Mueller had known this prosecutor for over 20 years. In fact, the prosecutor’s career began as a trial attorney working for Mueller in (ironically) the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ’s Criminal Division.

At the time Mueller handed his longtime legal crony the Uranium One case to be buried and forgotten, clearing the way for approval of the Rosatom deal by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton, the attorney was serving as United States Attorney for the District of Maryland. His name was Rod Rosenstein.

And the rest is history. I leave you, good reader, to draw the obvious conclusions about what is really behind this cozy little bromance between Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the two lawyers who promulgated Mueller’s grotesque, unaccountable partisan hit squad that is clearly intent on taking out our president.

Let’s not forget what Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton and the entire nation in a televised presidential debate on October 9, 2016:

“I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

After his election, Donald Trump chose to be magnanimous and forward-looking rather than follow-through on his words and appoint that special prosecutor. Trump naively thought he could commence his presidency free from the tentacles of his seething, embittered dragon lady of an opponent.

Donald Trump genuinely did not want his presidency tangled up with the Clinton stain. He knew it this would be impossible to avoid were he to see to the much-deserved prosecution of Hillary Clinton and her extensive syndicate of cohorts, cronies, flunkies and fellow travelers, including the likes of Mueller and Rosenstein, for their countless crimes and endless scandals.

Unfortunately for him, they gave him his “special prosecutor.” And now this prosecutor is ruthlessly and illegitimately driving towards nothing less than a coup d’etat, ending with Donald Trump’s being removed from his duly-elected office.

It is time for President Trump to end this despicable sedition and begin the work of draining the swamp…for real.

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Source: Stone Cold Truth

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