Congress Members Urge Trump to Meddle in Hungary’s Elections
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | October 12, 2018
There’s no hypocrisy like Capitol Hill hypocrisy. Congressional Democrats have been beating the dead horse of “Russian meddling” for nearly two years, obsessed with claims that “Russia hacked our democracy” and that a few Facebook posts from “Russia-linked” accounts are actually a massive Putin-led effort to make Americans lose faith in their democracy.
To date no evidence points to any significant or effective Russian government effort to alter the outcome of US elections in any way. With each passing day we learn more about how the “Russia hacked us” story is just a bunch of hot air. In fact just yesterday, award-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter published an extensive report demolishing a recent 10,000 word New York Times piece on the “influence” of Russian social media over US elections.
One of the loudest voices screaming “Russia is meddling in our democracy!” has been Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). Last year she signed a letter to the Speaker of the House demanding that Homeland Security and the FBI brief Congress on “the Russian attack on 21 states’ voting systems” (a charge since disproven). The letter complained that “when a sovereign nation attempts to meddle in our elections, it is an attack on our country.”
To be fair, it is hard to disagree with Rep. Kaptur and her colleagues on that final point. No one wants a foreign country meddling in their elections, hacking their ballot machines, funding opposition parties, manipulating the media in favor of one side, etc.
But here’s the rub: Rep. Kaptur has just sent a letter to the State Department demanding that the United States government commit all of the above violations against NATO partner country Hungary!
Yes, Kaptur is furious over unproven claims that the Russians fiddled in our democracy while at the same time demanding that the US fiddles in Hungary’s democracy.
This week Rep. Kaptur (and 22 Democrat colleagues) sent a letter to President Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Wess Mitchell, demanding the reinstatement of a cancelled State Department program to send $700,000 to finance anti-government stories in Hungary’s media in advance of the upcoming 2019 local elections in that country.
“Supporting an independent media in Hungary should be a priority” for the United States, the Congressional letter says.
Do Kaptur and her Capitol Hill colleagues not understand the basic fact that when a foreign government funds a sector of another country’s media, that media can no longer be considered “independent”?
How is it not meddling in Hungary’s democracy for the United States government to finance stories attacking the democratically-elected Hungarian government?
In Lewis Carroll’s classic “Through The Looking Glass,” Humpty Dumpty scowled at Alice for demanding that his words mean something. Dumpty said:
When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
This is the world of Rep. Marcy Kaptur and all of Washington’s interventionists. They have been stricken with hysterical paranoia for two years over unproven claims that Putin was pulling our strings when we went to the ballot box, yet at every turn they demand that the United States government do that exact thing: manipulate the ballot boxes of other sovereign states.
As Lou Reed (among others) put it, “you’re going to reap just what you sow.”
Danish Bill Proposes 12 Years in Prison for ‘Pro-Russia’ Opinion
Sputnik – October 13, 2018
Danish lawmakers have gone on the offensive against interference in public debate, sparking criticism that a new proposal, which could entail criminal liability for expressing opinions similar to those of Moscow, may become a step toward silencing public debate.
According to a bill brought forward in local parliament, Danes could face a jail term if they voice dissent over the government’s position on Russia.
The proposal, which is said to be meant to “strengthen efforts against illegal influence from foreign intelligence services,” would introduce criminal penalties for perceived “meddling” in public debates and attempts to influence decision-making. Crimes committed during an election campaign would entail a maximum prison term of 12 years.
Berlingske, the country’s oldest newspaper, has bashed the bill, claiming that it would narrow the scale of political conversation in Denmark.
Berlingske’s Flemming Rose argues that the law could be stretched to the point where a Danish director is targeted for changing a burnt-out light bulb following the advice of a foreign intelligence agent.
He also warns that a Danish subject could face punishment for sharing an opinion in the local media that anti-Russia sanctions damage the country or attempting to publicly downplay concerns over the Russia-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline project (Denmark has so far failed to give its approval of the pipeline passing through its territorial waters).
The bill is understood to mean an attempt to influence public opinion in Denmark and concrete decisions in both the private and public sectors as it targets legitimate opinions that can be taken to be propaganda.
This comes at a time when Russia is facing a flurry of accusations from Western countries that it had hacked doping agencies and other international organizations in a bid to influence public opinion. Russia has vehemently dismissed the allegations as “spy mania.”
Banned alternative media speak to RT after mass Facebook purge
RT | October 13, 2018
Some 800 anti-establishment accounts and pages have been yanked from Facebook in a sweeping crackdown the social media giant framed as a fight against spammers. RT talked to those who were targeted in the cleansing.
Among the hundreds of pages and accounts Facebook and Twitter took down were those both on the political left and right, ranging from conspiracy theorists and police brutality watchers, to news outlets with non-mainstream angles, While their content could be at times described as controversial, the bulk of the banished pages boasted large followings and outreach.
RT spoke to some of the voices silenced by the Facebook move. Here is what they had to say.
Jason Bassler, The Free Thought Project, 3.1mn followers
The Free Thought Project bills itself as a “hub for free thinking conversations.” Both its Facebook and Twitter accounts were shut down in the pre-midterms purge. Jason Bassler, who co-founded the project in 2013, told RT that what Facebook did is an act of political censorship and has nothing to do with its stated goal to clean up its platform from spam.
“If that was just spam, if that was just irrelevant garbage they wouldn’t be so threatening, they would not ban us, they would not care, we would not have been on their radar.”
By spinning the story as a fight against unworthy news trash, Facebook itself is misleading users with its own version of fake news, he said: “This is nothing more than political censorship and trying to eradicate certain political ideologies.”
Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media, 2.1mn followers
Nicholas Bernabe, blogger and entrepreneur behind the independent news aggregator The Anti-Media, believes that “the most troubling” thing in Facebook’s treatment of media pages is that tech giants are now trying to police cultural dialogue by posing as politically neutral.
“That could actually be perceived as Facebook itself meddling in elections, because we are only a few weeks away from the midterms and they go and target 800 politically-oriented media pages for deletion.”
He added that the majority of the banned pages held “very anti-establishment, very anti-authoritarian views,” that appealed to those whose take on election is very different from what mainstream media has to offer.
Matt Savoy, The Free Thought Project, 3.1mn followers
It is hard to overestimate the implications for those that were swept up in the purge, Matt Savoy of The Free Thought Project said. Many of the affected websites will be out of business and “thousands of people will be out of work.”
“This is like a death blow. Facebook was a source of how we were able to get our links out and drive traffic to the website, and we no longer have it. The few remaining employees that we have, they are going to be gone.”
Journalists did not have any time to prepare for the looming crackdown, Savoy said, and at first the staff thought it was a mere glitch.
Matt Bergman, Punk Rock Libertarians, 190,000 followers
Matt Bergman, who founded the Punk Rock Libertarians in 2010, told RT that his ‘The Daily Liberator’ podcast was taken down from Facebook without any explanation. Bergman’s own account was also briefly suspended, as well as those of other page admins.
The purge is the result of the pressure Congress put on Mark Zuckerberg, and its first targets were independent outlets “right of the dial,” since it’s easier to get away with banning relatively small outlets than major channels like RT, he argued.
“Their terms of service agreement is probably a million words long. Nobody has ever read it all the way through and I would think that if they wanted to they can ban CNN, they can ban you guys, if they wanted to, they can ban anybody.”
Bergman said he is filing an appeal in a bid to restore the account.
Dan Dicks, Investigative Journalist, 350,000 followers
Vancouver-based investigative journalist Dan Dicks, who writes for The Press for Truth, said the Facebook crackdown was “clearly political” as it saw tech companies assuming the role of “the gatekeepers of political thought.”
“What we are dealing with here today is the silencing of anybody who goes against the status quo right now, does not matter right or left side of the political spectrum.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, expunged from Facebook and Twitter, might have been “the first domino to fall,” but now the crackdown has widened to affect smaller outlets that vie for minds of the people on par with mainstream media, he said.
The crackdown on anti-establishment voices will come back to bite Facebook, UK Labour Party activist and political theorist Dr. Richard Barbrook argued.
Facebook and other tech companies who feel compelled to impose more “traditional media censorship” are likely to see a mass exodus from their platforms, he believes.
“The problem is if they are doing it too much, people would be gone somewhere else, where they don’t have network effects working against them,” Barbrook told RT.
Naomi Klein’s Patriarchal Christian Nation
By Eve Mykytyn | October 13, 2018
Naomi Klein’s piece “Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Rule of Pampered Princelings,” is a thoughtful consideration of how the children of the moneyed classes propagate the ‘self made’ myth in which individual effort is lionized. In this fiction, government ‘interference’ is the enemy, and, as Klein points out, those with a lifetime of safety deride the frail safety net society allows to others. She notes that although these ‘princelings’ may include the less privileged in their rhetoric, they propagate social policies of low taxes and fewer regulations that primarily benefit the very rich.
Klein asks, “But what must it take to pour large parts of a fortune that came to you by accident of birth into a relentless campaign of further affirmative action for the rich?” Klein’s answer is that the rich attribute their riches to what Trump has called, ‘good genes,’ the corollary of which is that those without must have ‘bad genes’ and deserve their fate as ‘losers.’
To Klein, this is the basis of Trump’s bargain: native born whites, although they lack Trump’s wealth, are invited to celebrate “their own, albeit more modest, birthright entitlements as white, middle-class Americans,” and their entitlements as white citizens of a “Christian patriarchal nation.” This is where my disagreements with Klein begin.
Some of Trump’s supporters may well like to identify with (or would like to possess) Trump’s wealth. But whether or not the US is a ‘Christian patriarchal nation,’ I don’t see the evidence that Trump’s support comes from people who would like to see it as such.
First, it is unfair to put all of Trump’s supporters in one barrel. Trump won a majority of votes from all white Americans of every education level. Interestingly, while analysis of votes is broken down by race, education and income, there was no category that includes both race and income. Or to the point, we have little direct data on how whites who enjoy little of the vestiges of ‘white privilege’ voted. An analysis in Medium divides the US by region and finds Trump’s strongest support in the US’s poorest and perhaps whitest regions, Appalachia and southern Louisiana, which he won by 22% and 25% respectively. So the data we do have does not support Klein’s assertion that Trump’s voters support him to protect their white privilege; in fact, it seems that his strongest support comes from whites who have few, if any, privileges.
A glance at any Trump rally shows large numbers of women, does Ms Klein believe all these women want a patriarchy? And, according to Money magazine, women inherit 70% of the assets passed down in the United States and own more then 50% of investable assets. Not much of a patriarchy.
Further, the claim of Trump’s voters as holding on to a Christian nation seems purely speculative. While Jews voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, Orthodox Jews supported Trump by a margin of 29%. The Orthodox would seem to have little interest in preserving the United States as a Christian Nation.
If, as Klein claims, the United States has always been the province and protector of ‘propertied white men,’ wealth is no longer solely in the hands of men or of Christians.
The exclusive classes contain a large number of self-identified Jews. A Jewish newsletter counted 139 of the Forbes top 400 (richest) as Jewish. Despite the so called dog whistling (apparently heard primarily by Jews who found anti Semitic content in Trump lambasting the non Jewish Koch brothers) Trump as president has not been anti Semitic. Far from it. Trump has duly rewarded his Jewish benefactors, the Mercers and Sheldon Adelson, and has sicced his Zionist son in law on the Middle East. His appointments have contained so many of the mostly Jewish Goldman Sachs once and future anointed that Goldman’s chair, Lloyd Blankfein stated that having so many Goldman people in the Trump administration made him “a little apprehensive about it because for fear of how it might look.”
Klein’s complaint that Trump has posited himself falsely as a self made man is legitimate. His response that the New York Times’ report on the source of his wealth as being largely his family’s money was that the report was ‘boring.’ This is hardly a repudiation. But the wealth of Trump and other scions of the very wealthy will not enure to the non college educated whites who largely supported Trump.
If Klein’s goal is a change in the administration, her goal might be better served by finding a way to appeal to Trump’s voters rather than smearing them with condescending and unproven shibboleths.
Israel advocates are the 2 largest donors in lead-up to U.S. midterm elections
Former New York City Mayor and political donor Michael Bloomberg with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | October 13, 2018
Two Israel partisans are the top campaign donors in the midterm elections, each pumping millions of dollars into campaign coffers.
Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who once said he wished he’d served in the Israeli military instead of the American one, is donating tens of millions of dollars to Republicans. He is expected to be the top donor in this election cycle.
Adelson, accompanied by his wife, speaking to an Israeli group in July 2010 :
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has twice flown to Israel in the midst of its massacres in Gaza to demonstrate his support for Israel, is coming in second, giving tens of millions of dollars to Democrats. Bloomberg has pledged to spend $100 million in the final weeks leading up to the election.
Bloomberg, who was a Republican until recently, has hinted that he may run for President in 2020.
In addition to giving candidates money, Bloomberg is also personally campaigning for some, including Tennessee’s Phil Bredesen and Florida’s Andrew Gillum.
Last week the Tampa Bay Times reported: “[Andrew Gillum] walked into one of the most dependable voting precincts in South Florida wearing a yarmulke and touted his ties to Florida’s Jewish community. In the company of the Jewish former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, [Andrew] Gillum delivered a short speech in which he spoke about his three trips to Israel during his time in office in Tallahassee and his family’s history.”
Michael Bloomberg, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Andrew Gillum at Century Pines Jewish Center in Pembroke Pines, Florida, 10-7-2018. Gillum is the Democratic candidate for Governor.
Bloomberg gives both personal donations and PAC donations from his political action committee “Everytown for Gun Safety.”
While Bloomberg appears to be an opponent of guns, he supports Israel, where settlers on illegally acquired Palestinian land carry and use guns regularly.
Israeli settlers open fire in vicinity of elementary school near Bethlehem, June 2018. Also see “Israeli settlers injure dozens of Palestinian students in Nablus“
For a list of Israelis and Palestinians killed since 2000, see this Timeline:
US Coalition Strikes Syrian Town Using Banned White Phosphorus – Reports
Sputnik – October 13, 2018
The reported strikes are not the first time that the US-led coalition has been accused of using the banned munitions in recent weeks. Last month, the Russian military reported that US strikes using white phosphorus had resulted in major fires and civilian casualties in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ez-Zor.
The strikes, taking place Saturday across multiple districts in the town of Hajin, Deir Ez-Zor province, included the use of white phosphorus, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has reported, citing local sources.
The agency did not provide any immediate information about possible civilian casualties.
Syrian television station Ikhbariya later reported that several people had been killed and several others injured following separate coalition strikes in al-Soussa, Deir Ez-Zor in an attack which hit a local bakery.
SANA said the strikes involving the use of white phosphorus appeared to have been carried out “under the pretext of fighting Daesh (ISIS).”
The coalition has not yet made any official commentary regarding the alleged incident.
This week, the United Nations’ humanitarian watchdog expressed concern regarding the safety of an estimated 10,000 civilians believed to be trapped in the Hajin area amid reports of civilian deaths during ongoing SDF and coalition operations in the area against Daesh.
Saturday’s incident was not the first suspected use of white phosphorus by the US-led coalition. Last month, the coalition denied using the substance in Syria after the Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation issued a report of airstrikes carried out using the internationally-prohibited weapons by US F-15 fighter jets on September 8. Damascus has repeatedly accused the coalition of using white phosphorus in its attacks, charging Western forces of using the agent in strikes which have led to the deaths of multiple civilians, including children, last year.
Under Geneva Conventions, white phosphorus munitions are prohibited for use against civilians or in civilian areas.
US-led coalition operations in Syria are not sanctioned by Syrian government, nor the UN.
Palestinian Woman Stoned to Death by Israeli Settlers
IMEMC News – October 13, 2018
A group of Israeli paramilitary settlers attacked a Palestinian couple south of Nablus, in the northern part of the West Bank, on Friday, killing the woman and severely injuring her husband.
Aisha Mohammed Talal al-Rabi, 47, was riding in a car with her husband near the Za’tara roadblock, south of Nablus, in the northern part of the West Bank, when a group of Israeli settlers came onto the road and began throwing rocks at their car.
The slain woman was from Bidya town, northwest of Salfit.
The Israeli colonial settlers threw a number of large rocks, breaking the windshield of the car. They then continued to throw rocks, according to local sources, hitting the couple multiple times in the head and upper body.
Aisha died of blunt force trauma to the head, caused by a rock that was thrown at her head by the settlers.
Armed Israeli paramilitary settlers have launched a number of attacks on the Palestinian civilian population in the Nablus area, with the number of attacks drastically increasing since two Israeli settlers were killed by a Palestinian in the area on Monday.
‘Evidence’ Saudi-led coalition aims to destroy food production in Houthi-controlled Yemen – report
RT | October 13, 2018
As the war in Yemen rages on, a new report says there is “strong evidence” that the Saudi-led coalition has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in areas of the country controlled by Houthi rebels.
The report, titled ‘Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Aerial Bombardment and Food War’, is a compilation of data from various sources on the impact of the coalition’s bombing campaign on the production and distribution of food in rural Yemen, and on fishing along the Red Sea coast.
“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanaa,” the report, published earlier this week by the World Peace Foundation, says.
It goes on to explain that the deliberate destruction of “family farming and artisanal fishing” is a war crime.
The report includes data collected by several organizations within Yemen, including the Yemen Data Project, the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, and the Ministry of Fish Wealth.
Read more
Yemenis grieve beside the grave of a child killed in last month’s coalition airstrike on a school bus © Naif Rahma Pompeo says Saudi coalition exercising caution in Yemen – facts show that’s not true
“Together, the data detail the overall levels of targeting civilian, military and unknown sites… the systematic targeting of agricultural areas including the character of the site, and the frequency and timeline of targeting.”
It goes on to document the killing of fishermen along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, and the destruction of boats and infrastructure required to support small-scale fishing which “otherwise could provide life-saving food for a civilian population on the brink of famine.”
The report cites data from the General Authority of Fishing in the Red Sea when it states that 146 fishermen have died as a result of coalition airstrikes from the beginning of the war until December 2017.
Yemen has seen major civilian loss and suffering since the country’s civil war broke out in 2015, with many on the brink of starvation. The country has also endured a major cholera outbreak and a severe lack of medical supplies which has led to many cancer patients having to forego treatment.
Over 16,000 civilians are believed to have perished since the start of the civil war. Meanwhile, the UN and rights groups have repeatedly accused the Saudi-led coalition of not sparing the lives of civilians during its aerial bombardment of Yemen. Up to 50 people were killed when a wedding was bombed in April, while an attack on a bus saw dozens, including many children, die in August.
FILE PHOTO A displaced Yemeni woman from Hodeida cooks food outside a shelter © AFP / Essa Ahmed
The coalition has denied allegations that it is targeting civilians. It did, however, express regret over the bus attack. Such an admission is rare for the coalition, particularly after it previously referred to the bus attack as being “legitimate.”
The Saudi-led coalition intervened in the conflict in Yemen in 2015, in an effort to restore the internationally recognized government after it was driven out by Houthi rebels.