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Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Guest MINDSETTER Andrew Stewart

I am not a dolt and, as someone who has studied media history, I recognize this narrative discourse quite clearly. Unfortunately many local progressives do not and it is to all our peril. Essentially everyone is being played by the deceptive, manipulative and corrupt media responsible for, among other things, justifying the Iraq war with a false story about WMDs, biased coverage of the recent presidential campaign to favor Hillary Clinton at the expense of Bernie Sanders, and a whole host of other fake news stories that have been used to the detriment of the public. So heres my brief on how unfathomably and unbelievably dangerous this Russia nonsense actually is.

Since at the latest 2012, the overwhelming majority of the population has been getting pretty sick of what has been known for 25 years as consensus politics, a set of policies and laws that alternatively can be called neoliberalism/neoconservatism, corporatism, or cronyism. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter/Movement for Black Lives, the anti-fracking/fossil fuel infrastructure expansion movement, all these and more are instances of a popular revolt unseen in over a century. Or more precisely, 156 years.

We have entered into a period where the public is finally waking up and becoming ungovernable in a fashion akin to 1861-65, when we had this little fracas known as the Civil War. Now obviously there are some massive differences, including the fact that a separate republic has yet to form out of secessionist states. But in the same way that the governors of certain states jutted out their mutton-chopped chins to towards Washington and said NO so we have seen the public telling the powers-that-be to take a hike. Obviously the reason for this resistance is the absolute opposite from the motivation of the Confederacy, slavery, but in terms of the power dynamics, the people have become ungovernable. And because it is the absolute opposite of the Confederate motivation, we can actually applaud this. Rhode Island native Grace Lee Boggs said in the final years of her life We are the leaders we have been looking for, by which she meant we need no parties or politicians to tell us what to do. Instead we are the agents of our own destiny and can do far more than any elected official ever would.

If you doubt me, just look at Providence, which seems to be hosting every week some sort of protest, picket line, or demonstration on multiple days that wholeheartedly rejects an element of the consensus politics. This made itself on the national stage most recently in the case of the populist uprising that gravitated around the presidential campaigns of retro-New Dealer Bernie Sanders and retro-Dixiecrat Donald Trump.

The elites in the 1% have also caught onto this. And they are getting pretty nervous. As such they are trotting out an old strategy from their playbook of public manipulation tactics.

Just over seven decades ago, something like this also happened. The United States emerged from the ritualistic human sacrifice known as World War II as the only victor totally unscathed by the conflagration. While Berlin, London, Rome, and Tokyo were effectively nothing more that vast expanses populated with bloody piles of rubble, the American home front was host to sprawling metropolises that were peopled by an extremely civically-engaged, patriotic, and progressive-leaning white voter base living in the northern half of the United States. What is forgotten about World War II is how, at a time when the AFL, the CIO, and the Communist Party USA all demanded their members abide by a near-sacred wartime no-strike pledge, the country was host to hundreds of unauthorized, illegal wildcat strikes. This was when the government and press were able to say without a hint of hyperbole in their inflection that If you walk off the job, Hitler will win the war! Simultaneously gays, women, and Blacks began to organize into a cohesive element agitating for civil rights.

So what did the ruling elites do?

The Democrats started a false panic about Russia.

Harry Truman got the ball rolling with his loyalty oaths and purging federal employment of Communist subversives while blaming domestic protests on Joseph Stalin rather than Democratic Party mistreatment of progressives and minorities they allied themselves with. Sen. Susan Collins has already begun this sort of discussion again by having Dr. Eugene Rumer testify on March 30 that Occupy Wall Street was supported by Russian media, saying that It's a perfect example in that Occupy Wall Street was a genuine movement on the Left. But it certainly serves the interests of Russian propaganda to play it up as a major challenge, as something representing a major fault line in our society. because, you know, it drives the message that the United States is in decline, that the United States is in crisis, it plays up to audiences at home in Russia and abroad, that the United States is not the perfect society, something that they really like to emphasize. So that's -- that's -- that's an excellent example. And I think it deserves the attention that you -- the spotlight that you cast on it It's blown out of all proportions. And as you know, the best propaganda is that which has a grain of truth to it. Heaven forbid that the ruling elites actually admit how awfully they treat the 99% via austerity policies!

Then a raving lunatic named Joe McCarthy recognized he could make big headlines out of this stuff. Accusations of espionage and subversion leveled against a minor third party of progressives, the Communists, snowballed into accusations against the entirety of the Democratic Party. Indeed, as documented by Susan Jacoby in her book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, the political discourse as framed by the Republicans continues today to carry antecedents that go back to the Red Scare. Right wing ideologues funded by the Koch brothers still say that Social Security, school desegregation, and other elements of the welfare state that come out of the New Deal and LBJs Great Society were in reality Communist plots.

This is all pertinent because it has now been revealed in the new book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clintons Doomed Campaign that this whole notion of Russia hacking the election was in fact merely a talking point manufactured hours after the end of the most bizarre 24 months in American history. Since last November the Democrats aligned with the Clinton machine have been pumping out through their lackeys in the press reams of absolute nonsense about Vladimir Putin and Russia that directly mimics the major talking points from the McCarthy years.

Now, did Russian-owned media, such as RT and Sputnik Radio, publish pro-Trump stories during the election? Yes, and this is because they have no principles and will support any politician who says they oppose saber-rattling towards the Kremlin. RT and Sputnik acted the same way most recently with Marine Le Pen because she was opposed to the forces which have been steadily and without warrant encircling the Russian border with heavy artillery pointed directly at Moscow over the past 20 years. But then again the Daily Worker, the news venue also getting cash from the Kremlin, would endorse FDR during an election, does such endorsement mean he was a stooge of Joseph Stalin? And does this indicate more than anything else how progressives have so substantially abandoned opposition to war that such anxieties find expression only in the anti-interventionist/isolationist right? Over the past eight years the anti-war movement locally has been reduced to low ranks from its peak over a decade ago at the start of the Iraq war.

Quite obviously there are certainly plenty of qualms to raise about Putin and the Russian government he leads. As a queer man I have a significant feeling of solidarity with LGBTQQIA+ folks in Russia who are subjected to state violence stemming from laws that target same-sex attracted people. But I also am forced to wonder whether these local liberal/progressives would be raising this sort of stink about the connections of a President Hillary Clinton and that veritable oasis of feminism known as Saudi Arabia. At this point multiple news agencies and reporters, including my current editor at Washington Babylon, Ken Silverstein, have pointed out in serious muckraking venues that the Clinton Foundations ties with the House of Saud were quite substantial and were going to seriously impact American foreign policy in the Middle East regardless of domestic protests to the contrary.

As for the firing of James Comey, I shed not a single tear for the man who unleashed militarized goons on the protesters at Standing Rock and created from whole cloth the fantasy of a War on Cops. Local progressives who mourn his martyrdom are unwittingly saying therefore that Comeys COINTELPRO-styled espionage against American political protesters was part of a great career they wish to restore. Donald Trump is a nasty narcissistic white nationalist whose own bluster, blunder, and diet of Big Macs perhaps will either cause his ejection from office before 2020 or compel him to follow the lead of LBJ and limit himself to a single term. If there were devious items related to Trumps business connections with Russia, why only now and not in the past 36 months has this become an issue? Trumps garish and galling graft is simply so sloppy and saucy that he truly merits the respect shown anyone doing stand-up on amateur night at the Apollo.

Hillary Clintons foundation, by contrast, remains a galling hive of the most wretched malfeasance. Julian Assange told John Pilger in a November interview:

JOHN PILGER: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, thats where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Theres an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well its just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS Libya, more than anyone elses war, was Hillary Clintons war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. Thats documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; theres more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that weve published, just about Libya. Its not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President. So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and its the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itselfwas no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa previously people fleeing those problems didnt end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: What do these Europeans think theyre doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? Theres going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.

Say what you will about Putin, the plain fact is that Moscow does not publicly stone and behead women for things as offensive as atheism, witchcraft, adultery, and homosexuality as these Clinton Foundation clients do. Lets just put those things into perspective while we are on the topic of foreign entanglements, business connections, and political corruption stemming from it. This Putin-phobia is senseless and dangerous for several reasons.

We are trotting down a very well-worn and repeatedly rotten-resulting road here. I say that we should get off this path and stay ungovernable. The Democrats are entirely and solely responsible for the election of Donald Trump. We should never forgive them this as long as they live. We should not allow ourselves to be played for fools by a manipulative and deceptive media industry with a faux-progressive sheen that aligns with these Democrats and promotes militarism and war with Russia in the name of distraction from their own wrongdoing. Lets instead given them the misery they deserve. A century ago, a certain Democratic Socialist said in an interview that one must be as radical as reality itself.

Lets do it.

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Guest MINDSETTER Stewart: Local Progressives Aiming Gun at Own Foot, Will They Pull Trigger? - GoLocalProv