Secretive ‘Children of Israel’ backs Trump at $25,000-per-head California fundraiser
RT | August 31, 2016
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump headlined a $25,000-per-ticket fundraiser at the California home of Saul Fox, a private equity CEO and secret donor behind the “Children of Israel.”
Forty people attended the Monday fundraiser including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who arrived with Trump.
The visit was the billionaire’s first visit to San Jose since a clash between his supporters and protesters in the Silicon Valley city.
Fox is one of the many political donors who use so-called ‘ghost corporations’ to conceal their identity.
It was revealed only earlier this month that he was the main donor behind ‘Children of Israel,’ who have donated $734,000 to the Republican party so far this year, according to The Intercept.
This includes a $400,000 donation to the Super PAC Stand for Truth, which supported Ted Cruz’s presidential run, as well as $334,000 to the RNC.
Shaofen Gao, a realtor in Silicon Valley with no history of making political contributions, was listed as the registered agent for Children of Israel in mid-2015, but a later filing revealed that the sole person behind the money was Fox.
Fox hasn’t commented on why he channeled the money through the company, keeping his identity hidden. In addition to the company’s donations, Fox himself has also donated to the GOP.
Most recently, he donated $100,000 to speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s aptly-titled fundraiser “Team Ryan” as well as a $25,000 donation to Trump’s joint fundraising committee.
Fox’s 2016 donations also include $2,700 to Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid and the $5,400 maximum to the campaigns of both Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision in 2010, the 2016 election cycle has seen an unprecedented influx of corporate donations with one out of every €8 collected by super PACs coming from ‘ghost corporations,’ according to the Washington Post.
In 2015, Children of Israel gave $50,000 to Pursuing America’s Greatness, a super PAC supporting Huckabee’s run, as well as $100,000 to a pro-Huckabee group.
Clinton gets more donations from arms industry: Report
Press TV – August 24, 2016
American weapon manufacturers have made bigger contributions to the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, a major turnaround after years of backing the Republican ticket.
According to a report by Politico released on Wednesday, Clinton has received more donations from high-ranking employees of giant Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, outperforming her GOP rival Donald Trump by a 5-to-1 ratio.
According to filings with the Federal Election Committee, Trump’s campaign has banked nearly $55,000 in contributions from executives of the 25 major defense contractors, compared to $273,000 given to Clinton.
This marks a significant break from the years-old habit of supporting the Republican candidate. In fact, the arms industry has teamed with Republican congressional and presidential candidates in eight of the past 10 election cycles.
In the 2012 election cycle, for example, then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney received far more support from military contractors, compared to President Barack Obama.
Analysts attribute the change to Trump’s stance on national security, including his criticism of NATO and other military allies.
The real estate mogul said in late July that if he is elected president, the US would only aid the allies who have “fulfilled their obligations to us.”
The New York businessman has also blasted military contractors for the way they influence government spending.
Clinton, however, made a reputation for having good relations with military contractors during her run in the US Senate, where she served on the Armed Services Committee.
“I’ve worked with Republicans and Democrats of all stripes over the years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen one who scares the hell out of me if he were to become president,” said Linda Hudson, who once headed the US branch of British arms provider BAE Systems, which is the Pentagon’s eighth largest contractor.
One Republican defense lobbyist told Politico that the arms manufacturing “community is just much more comfortable with Clinton.”
“With Hillary Clinton we have some sense of where she would go, and with Trump we have none,” the lobbyist said. “He knows nothing about the system.”
The alternate reality of Anders Fogh Rasmussen
By Danielle Ryan | RT | August 23, 2016
Reading through a recent interview with former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, it becomes clear that his world is one in which US foreign policy has only ever made us all safer and the biggest risk we now face is diminished US power.
The entire premise of his argument throughout the interview is that if the US steps back from playing global policeman, the “bad guys” will win. Simple as that.
Tempting Putin
The interview, which focuses on Donald Trump, opens with a question about Trump’s views regarding the NATO alliance and how the candidate sees the US’s role in the world. Rasmussen immediately declares he is “not taking sides” in the US election, but his attempt at neutrality goes swiftly out the window moments later when he complains that Trump is undermining “the credibility of the United States” and putting at stake America’s “role as the global superpower”. If Trump were to be elected, he laments, that could usher in “the end of the American-led world order”.
This would be very bad, he says, because if NATO is undermined by a Trump victory, then Vladimir Putin would “open a bottle of champagne” and be “tempted to test” the alliance. This assumes that Putin has simply been waiting in the wings for the 16 years that he has held positions of power for Donald Trump to come along so that he can invade Estonia for no reason. Because Rasmussen doesn’t give us a reason and we’re not supposed to ask. We’re just supposed to assume invading the Baltics is on Putin’s to-do list.
So, keeping with his policy of “not taking sides” Rasmussen then argues that Hillary Clinton would be “more determined to defend” the country’s NATO allies than Trump would. When asked whether eastern European nations are worried about Trump’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to NATO’s Article 5 (principle of collective defense) Rasmussen says they are indeed very concerned, particularly following “Russian aggression” against Ukraine. So concerned in fact, that only five of the 28 alliance members have reached the 2 percent of GDP benchmark that NATO requires. Now, this is either because they aren’t really as terrified of Russia as they claim, or that they’re simply taking the US for a ride — in which case, Trump might actually have a point about getting them to cough up before putting American lives in harm’s way to defend them.
It’s hybrid warfare, stupid!
Next up, Rasmussen is asked whether the threat environment for NATO has changed and how the alliance is dealing with the changes. Rasmussen here employs one of my favorite terms: “hybrid warfare”. It’s not just conventional warfare (tanks rolling across borders etc.) that eastern European nations need to be aware of, he says. It’s a whole load of other stuff, too. Like what? Well, sophisticated “disinformation campaigns” for one thing.
But the great thing about “hybrid warfare” is that when you use the term, you don’t really need to explain what you mean. Even NATO itself published an article about the fact that it can mean everything and nothing at the same time. Pretty nifty, right?
Moving on to Crimea, another victim of hybrid warfare. Trump isn’t too bothered by the fact that Crimea was annexed by/invaded by/reunited with Russia in 2014. That’s Europe’s business, he has said — and it shouldn’t prevent Washington and Moscow from getting along and working together on common threats like international terrorism. You don’t have to be a Trump fan to see the common sense in this, but it’s another no-no for Rasmussen.
Trump also hasn’t been so gung-ho about sending weapons to Ukraine. This is very scary and “disturbing” Rasmussen says, because if the US doesn’t support the government in Kiev, the West “risks losing a democratic Ukraine”.
Democracy and world peace
So, how is “democratic Ukraine” doing, then? Well, a few months ago The Guardian published an op-ed arguing that Ukraine was at risk of becoming not a democracy, but a “failed state”. Since the country’s democratic “revolution” in 2013, living standards have plummeted, as has the value of the country’s currency — and the government, ideologically driven to sever all ties with Russia, has pursued economic policies that “can only be termed suicidal”. But the solution is obviously to send them some new weapons. Regardless of whether you believe Russia has acted aggressively in Ukraine or not, this kind of thinking is simply delusional.
Next Rasmussen is asked about Trump’s “America first” campaign slogan, which he also doesn’t happen to like (surprise!). Using the term “America first” for an American presidential election is “out of touch” he says. How so? Well, of course it comes back to America’s role in the world again. You can’t use the term “America first” when you’re supposed to be “the world’s leader”. I swear, I’m not making this up.
After World War 2, Rasmussen tells us, the US established a “rules-based world order” and it has “served us very well” because “freedom has flourished” and we’ve seen “world peace”. All of this freedom and world peace (really?!) is now at stake… because of Donald Trump (are you sensing the “not taking sides” thing?). Anyway, I could list all of the occasions on which the US decided to flout its own “rules-based” order, but that would take too long.
If the US “retreats and retrenches” now, it will create a power vacuum that will be filled by “the bad guy,” Rasmussen warns. He doesn’t tell us who the bad guy is this time; he’s just there, malevolently waiting for Trump’s election. Trump needs to understand that the US has “special obligations” to “maintain world order” and “promote peace”. Not only this, but it’s the “only power on earth” with such a “destiny”.
Barack Obama has also been a disappointment to Rasmussen. He has been “too reluctant” to use American force around the world. Obama and Trump are proponents of a “less interventionist” movement in the world and this simply won’t do.
By the end, Rasmussen had lavished so much praise on the United States and its role and “destiny” in the world that I had forgotten he was not an American himself, but a Dane. The real kicker was when he dramatically pleaded with the next president: “We need a global policeman, and that policeman should be the United States. We don’t have any other.”
Could he really be so profoundly in awe of Washington and its power, or is this waxing lyrical about American destiny simply, as one writer put it, “the practiced gambit of a con man, who knows flattery is the surest means to success” ?
Decide for yourself.
Donald Trump’s Neocon Foreign Policy Advisor
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day In The Empire | August 13, 2016
Donald Trump has appointed at least two neocons to his foreign policy group.
First, let’s consider Joseph E. Schmitz. He is a former Inspector General of the Department of Defense and a former executive with Blackwater Worldwide. He fled the Pentagon after he was accused of protecting top Bush officials accused of wrongdoing.
Blackwater, now Academi, the military contractor founded by Eric Prince, played a substantial role during the Iraq War. It is infamous for killing seventeen Iraqi citizens in 2007, the same year the corporation was accused of illegally smuggling weapons into the country. Blackwater did not like being investigated for its misdeeds. In 2007, Blackwater Manager Daniel Carroll threatened to kill Jean Richter, a State Department Investigator.
Schmitz is connected to the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a think tank formed by Frank Gaffney, a neocon so radical he was rejected by the Pentagon when he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the Reagan Administration. He is associated with other neocons, including Richard Perle, who rose to prominence as aides of the late Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
The Center for Security Policy, described by William Arkin as the “Domino’s Pizza of the policy business,” claims there is a “stealth jihad” underway in America and Muslims plan to install sharia law. Former CIA director and staunch neocon James Woolsey coauthored a report for the center claiming sharia law is a major threat to the United States.
After CSP sent a letter to the State Department Inspector General accusing Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of working undercover for the Muslim Brotherhood, a number of Republicans, including John McCain, John Boehner, and Marco Rubio, denounced the group.
Trump and former Republican member of the House, Michele Bachmann, often cited CSP propaganda.
Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” was in part inspired by the results of a CSP poll. The poll said 25% of Muslims queried supported violent jihad and more than half favored sharia law. The methodology and accuracy of the poll is suspect. Philip Bump of The Washington Post said the poll’s structure encouraged Muslims to select the options endorsing violence.
On Friday The Canary reported Schmitz worked with a Saudi prince to illegally provide arms to the jihadists in Syria. “Schmitz was in direct contact with then Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander Gen. Salim Idris. Schmitz hoped his deal with Gen. Idris would be a first step toward potential future assistance from Blackwater founder Erik Prince himself,” writes Brad Hoff.
Idris, a former Syrian Army commander, was appointed to lead a Salafist dominated military command in 2012. “The unified command includes many with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Salafists, who follow a puritanical interpretation of Islam. It excludes the most senior officers who had defected from Assad’s military,” Reuters reported.
Its composition, estimated to be two-thirds from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, reflects the growing strength of Islamist fighters on the ground and resembles that of the civilian opposition leadership coalition created under Western and Arab auspices in Qatar…
“Idris and [Col. Abdul Jabbar al-Okaidi] were the very men that Joseph Schmitz stood ready to arm through a mysterious Saudi middle man before the whole private venture was reportedly shut down by a CIA official who intervened in Amman, Jordan,” writes Hoff.
Trump has a second fringe neocon in his circle of confidants—Walid Phares.
Phares is associated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neocon organization that teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute to propagandize (and lie) America into invading Iraq.
In 2011, Phares became one of several neocon advisors to the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. Other advisers included Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Michael Chertoff, Eric Edelman, John Lehman, Dan Senor, Vin Weber, and Paula Dobriansky.
Phares, a Christian Maronite of Lebanese origin, was associated with the Lebanese Forces in the 1980s.
In the 1970s the Lebanese Forces were part the Kataeb Party, also known as the Lebanese Phalanges Party. Its militia killed 3,500 Palestinians at the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Elie Hobeika, a prominent figure in the Phalanges, served as the Lebanese Forces intelligence chief and liaison officer with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Many of Donald Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements are contradictory. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has demonstrated her willingness to do the bidding of the neocons in Libya and Syria. She has not vacillated in her commitment to total war. More than a few neocons, most notably Max Boot, have said they will vote her.
The danger for America “is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton,” writes John Pilger. “She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”
Trump may indeed rollback the aggressive military posture of the United States, as promised, then again, considering his coterie of foreign policy advisers and his penchant for flip-flopping, he may continue to engage in foreign interventionism, albeit with his signature flair.
Trump: Americans May Be Tried In Military Tribunals Under His Administration
By Jonathan Turley | August 12, 2016
I have long been a critic of military tribunals as constitutionally dubious and practically ineffectual institutions. The tribunals at Guantanamo Bay have resulted in few actual trials and undermined the standing of the United States as a nation committed to the rule of law. The principle rationale cited by former officials in defense of Gitmo has been that it would not be used to try citizens. Now in a deeply disturbing interview, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has stated that he might try citizens at Gitmo — maintaining a shadow court system for stripping citizens of basic rights of due process just a few miles off the United States shore.
As an attorney who has long practiced in the national security field (including terrorism cases), the tribunal system has never made a great deal of sense to me. Federal courts have long tried terrorists and the government has a high success rate in such cases. The creation of a faux court system only gives our enemies a rallying cry and fuels those who to call us hypocrites.
Those concerns are magnified by Trump’s dismissal of any distinction between citizens and non-citizens in the use of such tribunals. In an interview with the Miami Herald on Thursday, Trump was asked if he would use the tribunals against U.S. citizens. Trump responded: “Well, I know that they want to try them in our regular court systems, and I don’t like that at all. I don’t like that at all. I would say they could be tried there, that would be fine.”
That may be fine in Trump’s view but it would also be unconstitutional. Presidents are not allowed to create alternative court systems for denying citizens of core rights at their discretion. Such a Caesar-like role runs against the very grain of the American constitutional system. The statement by Trump reflects a disconcerting lack of faith in our court system and a fundamental misunderstanding of the limits placed upon presidents in our constitutional system.
The significance of the GOP’s attempted purge of Donald Trump
By Daniel Haiphong | American Herald Tribune | August 11, 2016
The GOP is trying to oust Donald Trump from the Presidential campaign trail. Numerous GOP officials and corporate media reports have indicated that Donald Trump may drop out of the race. Curiously, the news comes just weeks after Trump walked away from the Republican National Convention with the nomination. No other candidate came close in total number of delegates in the state primaries and the proposed roll call from dissenting delegates failed to bring results. The attempted ousting of Trump reflects both the fracturing of the Republican Party and the rupture of the two-party corporate duopoly generally in this election cycle.
This isn’t the first time establishment Republicans have attempted to push Trump out of the race. When Trump began picking up momentum earlier in 2016, many well-known Republicans refused to endorse him. Republican Mitt Romney made a video appearance at the Democratic Party National Convention to warn of the dangers of a Trump presidency. The Business Round Table, a collection of corporate executives, also warned New York Times readers of Trump’s possible Presidential victory. Even the Koch Brothers are sabotaging Republican Party supporters of Trump by pulling their funding from his supporters in Washington.
The reason for the ruling class’s fear of Trump is clearly articulated from the source. Trump is unpredictable and his message uncontrolled. There are times when Trump speaks to working class anxiety by repudiating trade deals and calling to re-regulate the financial sector. There are others when Trump is easily baited into traps set by the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, the Democratic Party has attempted to frame Trump as an unpatriotic traitor. Trump has reaffirmed his support of Russian President Vladimir Putin and refused to take back remarks regarding the heroism of a Muslim American soldier who died in combat in Iraq.
While power struggle between the Democratic Party and Republican Party is nothing new, Trump’s impact on the two-party corporate duopoly should not be understated. Trump has destroyed the GOP’s infrastructure. His rhetoric has inspired emboldened racist elements of the working class as well as legitimate class grievances among the Republican Party base. Trump has occupied a vacuum that its corporate-backers have refused to fill. No longer can the Republican Party operate as it did in the past without losing ground to the increasingly conservative Democratic Party.
For nearly five decades, the Republican Party has positioned itself the party of white supremacy. The Democratic Party has been able to place unions, Black voters, and white liberals under its tent over this period. However, the neo-liberal crisis of capitalism has changed this dynamic dramatically. The gap between Democratic Party rhetoric and policy has widened since the early 1980s. This has forced Republicans to move further to the right in the midst of Democratic Party-led wars, austerity measures, and assaults on civil liberties.
Donald Trump represents an existential threat to the very existence of the GOP. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton herself admitted that she would be a President for “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.” She was thus very forthright in extending an invitation to refugee Republicans into her “big tent” campaign. Clinton’s neo-liberal, imperialist agenda is attractive to a Republican Party establishment that has effectively lost its base to Trump. Trump’s erratic behavior only further endangers his ability to defeat Clinton’s strategy and bring victory to what is left of the Republican Party.
A series of interviews on “Democracy Now!” have clarified the depths to which the Clinton campaign seeks to use fear of Donald Trump as its catalyst for victory. In two separate debates, Green Party supporters Kshama Sawant and Chris Hedges confronted Clinton operatives Rebecca Traiser and Robert Reich. Traitser and Reich refused to address concrete policy and instead promoted a Clinton Presidency on the basis of the dangers of Donald Trump. The debates confirmed that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party have become virtuously indefensible. Such a realization has forced the two-party corporate duopoly into a crisis situation, especially on the Republican Party side. Either the Republican Party establishment gets behind Trump or it joins forces with the increasingly conservative Democratic Party machinery led by Clinton to defeat the “fascist” casino capitalist.
The fact the Republican Party has not distanced itself from rumors of Trump’s departure indicates that there is a significant portion of GOP leaders who would prefer a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Hillary Clinton is, after all, the chosen politician to serve the capitalist oligarchy. Clinton has received tens of millions of dollars in donations from hedge funds and various other Wall Street donors. This places Trump at a glaring disadvantage. Yet this disadvantage has been mitigated by the open rebellion both Democratic and Republican Party bases are waging against the establishment.
The conditions that created the revolt of young voters in the Democratic Party and the entire base of the Republican Party are not going away. Trump may step down, or he may continue on in his campaign. Whatever the case, the legitimacy of the two-party duopoly will remain tenuous at best. Millions of people are sick and tired of war, austerity, poverty, and a system that represents no one but the elite. A mass break with the two-party system is on the horizon and Trump’s campaign has played a significant role in speeding up the process. So the conversation about Trump should not be confined to his personality or his reactionary character. It should center on the root causes of his rise to the GOP nomination and what that means for the future of US political landscape.
Ex CIA chief’s ‘kill Russians, Iranians’ comment – Clinton job application
RT | August 11, 2016
Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell has proposed the US escalate the conflict in Syria by targeting President Bashar Assad’s allies. He added that killing Russians should be done covertly, but in such a way that the Kremlin would get the message.
Morell endorsed Hillary Clinton for US president and is known as a strong critic of Donald Trump.
RT: Russia and Iran are helping the Syrian government fight terrorists. So what would the US achieve by killing Russians and Iranians there?
Annie Machon: I think it would be jeopardizing world peace, to be quite frank. I think this is more like an alarming job application by Morell – so he would love to have a senior post in any Clinton administration, if she were to be elected. He is saying what he thinks she would like to hear about how America should deal with the situation in the Middle East. If indeed this does reflect her own views, then we’ve got to the absurd position, where actually world peace might be in safer hands if Donald Trump were elected president.
RT: Is Clinton running any risks by siding with a man who is proposing such a radical foreign policy move, do you think?
AM: I think this is a general reflection of the American establishment. Ever since the presidency of George W. Bush there has been a hit list of the countries that America has tried to ensure a regime change happens within. This was the list he called ‘the axis of evil’ comprising Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Now, North Korea is under the patronage of China, so it’s relatively safe; plus it has a nuclear capability. So America can’t really do much about that one. But we’ve seen what they have done in all the other countries.
In fact, back in 2008 America was on the brink of going to war against Iran, as well. The only reason that rush to war was stopped – and this is something Bush has actually acknowledging in his memos – was because of the leaking of the national intelligence estimate of 2008, which is the combined thinking of all 16 US intelligence agencies – about Iran’s nuclear weapons capability and the development thereof. Their assessment then – and it has been re-ratified every year since – is that Iran gave up trying to develop any nuclear capability in 2003, and did not therefore pose a threat to Western interests. That is the only reason Iran is still standing. And we’ve seen all the mess in all the other countries.
RT: How consistent is Clinton’s foreign policy track record?
AM: I think fundamentally consistent with the sort of hawkish neocon approach the American establishment has been taking against many countries in the Middle East – preserve their interest there to prop up some of their close allies like Saudi Arabia and the dictatorships across the Middle East, as well.
But also consistent in trying to provoke reaction from Russia. The US and EU backed coup in Ukraine was an immense provocation. It is because Russia has managed to show a great deal of self-restraint in that area and in the face of provocation with big NATO exercises in the Baltic States and Poland and all the rest of it. That is the only reason that we haven’t seen an escalation into war.
RT: Clinton and her supporters claim Donald Trump is doing Russia a favor. His motto is making America great again. Why would that be perceived as beneficial for the Kremlin?
AM: I think mainly because he has made noises about the fact that he would ratchet down the pressure against Russia. In opposition to what Hillary Clinton has been describing – that the pressure needs to be kept on Russia. She represents the American establishment which is very keen on a unipolar world.
Now, with the resurgence of Russia that monopoly on power that America has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War, they deem to be under threat. Trump himself has said: “We don’t need to think like that. We can focus on building up our own country and let other countries get on with what they want to do, as well.” I think that is an unusually sane comment from the presidential hopeful.
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public speaker, writer, media pundit, international tour and event organiser, political campaigner, and PR consultant. She is also now the Director of LEAP, Europe. She has a rare perspective both on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies and the media, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness and accountability in both public and private sectors.
Obama versus Trump, Putin and Erdogan: Can Coups Defeat Elected Governments?
By James Petras | Dissident Voice | August 9, 2016
Many of our interlocutors have been purged or arrested.
James Clapper, US Director of Intelligence on Turkish Coup, Financial Times, 8/3/16, p. 4
Washington has organized a systematic, global, no holds barred campaign to oust Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump from the electoral process. The virulent anti-Trump animus, the methods, goals and mass media resemble authoritarian regimes preparing to overthrow political adversaries.
Comparable propaganda efforts led to political coups in Chile in 1973, Brazil 1964, and Venezuela in 2002. The anti-Trump forces include both political parties, a Supreme Court judge, Wall Street bankers, journalists and editorialists of all the major media outlets and the leading military and intelligence spokespeople.
Washington’s forcible and illegal ouster of Trump is part and parcel of a world-wide campaign to overthrow leaders and regimes which raise questions about aspects of the imperial policies of the US and EU.
We will proceed to analyze the politics of the anti-Trump elite, the points of confrontation and propaganda, as a prelude to the drive to oust opposition in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The Anti-Trump Coup
Never in the history of the United States, has a President and Supreme Court Judge openly advocated the overthrow of a Presidential candidate. Never has the entire mass media engaged in a round-the-clock one-sided, propaganda war to discredit a Presidential candidate by systematically ignoring or distorting the central socio-economic issues of their opposition.
The call for the ouster of a freely elected candidate is nothing more or less than a coup d’état.
Leading television networks and columnists demand that the elections be annulled, following the lead of the President and prominent Republican and Democratic Congressional and Party leaders.
In other words, the political elite openly rejects democratic electoral processes in favor of authoritarian manipulation and deception. The authoritarian elite relies on magnifying tertiary, questionable personal judgement calls to mobilize coup backers.
They systematically avoid the core economic and political issues which candidate Trump has raised – and attracted mass support – which challenge fundamental policies backed by the two Party elites.
The Roots of the Anti-Trump Coup
Trump has raised several key issues which challenge the Democratic and Republican elite.
Trump has drawn mass support and won elections and public opinion polls by:
(1) rejecting the free trade agreements which has led major multinationals to relocate abroad and disinvest in well-paying industrial jobs in the US.
(2) calling for large scale public investment projects to rebuild the US industrial economy, challenging the primacy of financial capital.
(3) opposing the revival of a Cold War with Russia and China and promoting greater economic co-operation and negotiations.
(4) rejecting US support for NATO’s military build-up in Europe and intervention in Syria, North Africa and Afghanistan.
(5) questioning the importation of immigrant labor which lowers job opportunities and wages for local citizens.
The anti-Trump elite systematically avoid debating these issues; instead they distort the substance of the policies.
Instead of discussing the job benefits which will result from ending sanctions with Russia, the coupsters screech that ‘Trump supports Putin, the terrorist’.
Instead of discussing the need to redirect investment inward to create US jobs, the anti-Trump junta mouth clichés that claim his critique of globalization would ‘undermine’ the US economy.
To denigrate Trump, the Clinton/Obama junta resorts to political scandals to cover-up mass political crimes. To distract public attention, Clinton-Obama falsely claim that Trump is a ‘racist’, backed by David Duke, a racist advocate of “Islamophobia”. The anti-Trump junta promoted the US-Pakistani parents of a military war casualty as victims of Trump’s slanders even as they rooted for Hillary Clinton, promotor of wars against Muslim countries and author of military policies that sent thousands of US soldiers to their grave.
Obama and Clinton are the imperial racists who bombed Libya and Somalia and killed, wounded, and displaced over 2 million sub-Saharan Black-Africans.
Obama and Clinton are the Islamaphobes who bombed and killed and evicted five million Muslims in Syria and one million Muslims in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
In other words, Trump’s mistaken policy to restrict Muslim immigration is a reaction to the hatred and hostility engendered by the Obama-Clinton million-person Muslim genocide.
Trump’s “America First” policy is a rejection of overseas imperial wars – seven wars under Obama-Clinton. Their militarist policies have inflated budget deficits and degraded US living standards.
Trump’s criticism of capital and job flight has threatened Wall Street’s billion-dollar profiteering – the most important reason behind the bi-partisan junta’s effort to oust Trump and the working class’s support for Trump.
By not following the bi-partisan Wall Street, war agenda, Trump has outlined another business agenda which is incompatible with the current structure of capitalism. In other words, the US authoritarian elite does not tolerate the democratic rules of the game even when the opposition accepts the capitalist system.
Likewise, Washington’s quest for ‘mono-power’ extends across the globe. Capitalist governments which decide to pursue independent foreign policies are targeted for coups.
Obama-Clinton’s Junta Runs Amok
Washington’s proposed coup against Trump follows similar policies directed against political leaders in Russia, Turkey, China, Venezuela, Brazil, and Syria.
Russian President Putin has been demonized by the US propaganda media on an hourly basis for the better part of a decade. The US has backed oligarchs and promoted economic sanctions; financed a coup in the Ukraine; established nuclear missiles on Russia’s frontier; and launched an arms race to undermine President Putin’s economic policies in order to provoke a coup.
The US backed its proxy Gulenist ‘invisible government’ in its failed coup to oust President Erdogan, for failing to totally embrace the US Middle East agenda.
Likewise, Obama-Clinton have backed successful coups in Latin America. Coups were orchestrated in Honduras, Paraguay, and more recently in Brazil to undermine independent Presidents and to secure satellite neo-liberal regimes. Washington presses forward to forcibly oust the national-populist government of President Maduro in Venezuela.
Washington has escalated efforts to erode, undermine and overthrow the government of China’s President Xi-Jinping through several combined strategies. A military build-up of an air and sea armada in the South China Sea and military bases in Japan, Australia, and the Philippines; separatist agitation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and among the Uyghurs; a US-Latin American-Asia free trade agreement which excludes China.
Conclusion
Washington’s strategy of illegal, violent coups to retain the delusion of empire stretches across the globe, ranging from Trump in the US to Putin in Russia, from Erdogan in Turkey to Maduro in Venezuela to Xi Jinping in China.
The conflict is between US-EU imperialism backed by their local clients against endogenous regimes rooted in nationalist alliances.
The struggle is ongoing and sustained and threatens to undermine the political and social fabric of the US and the European Union.
The top priority for the US Empire is to undermine and destroy Trump by any means necessary. Trump already has raised the question of ‘rigged elections’. But each elite media attack of Trump seems to add to and strengthen his mass support and polarize the electorate.
As the elections approach, will the elite confine themselves to verbal hysteria or will they turn from verbal assassinations to the ‘other kind’?
Obama’s global coup strategy shows mixed results: they succeeded in Brazil but were defeated in Turkey; they seized power in the Ukraine but were defeated in Russia; they gained propaganda allies in Hong Kong and Taiwan but suffered severe strategic economic defeats in the region as China’s Asian trade policies advanced.
As the US elections approach, and Obama’s pursuit of his imperial legacy collapses, we can expect greater deception and manipulation and perhaps even frequent resort to elite-designed ‘terrorist’ assassinations.
Obama’s options on Putin’s Russia
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | August 8, 2016
Never since the smears that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Soviet agent has there been a McCarthyite campaign in American politics as scurrilous as the present one about Donald Trump being a creation of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Michael Morrell who left the CIA as recently as 2013 penned a weekend piece in the New York Times “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” Morrell analysed that Russian president Vladimir Putin who is “trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them… played upon Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him”.
And, Trump “responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated” by taking up “policy positions consistent with Russian, not American interests”. Morrell concluded,
- In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
This may seem hilarious, but then Morrell is a veteran spook and at that level people don’t easily crack jokes.
The bottom line is, no Soviet leader has ever been credited with such supernatural powers – not even Joseph Stalin – the way Putin has been in his capacity to remote control battle-scarred American politicians.
One way of looking at such ravings is that Hillary Clinton is the candidate of the establishment – the military-intelligence complex and the political establishment, Wall Street, Jewish lobby, appealing to billionaires, the military brass and the intelligence agencies and so on – and a caricaturing of Trump as a monster who must be kept out of the White House may help her campaign.
Frankly, there is very little to choose between the two. Neither is a friend of the working class. Trump himself had enjoyed the support of corporate media and political establishment through decades when he made his way as a hugely successful specimen in the corrupt circle of real estate speculators in New York City.
Trump and the Clintons were family friends and the latter on occasions even sought donations from him for their political campaigns and dubious ‘charities’.
Perhaps, things might not have come to this sorry pass, if only Hillary were a genuinely popular political figure with mass appeal and charisma. There is a credibility problem about her integrity and consistency and fellows like Morrell are chipping in to make her look presidential material by lampooning Trump as a Russian poodle.
The Russophobes will unlikely dismount before the November election. But the danger lies in their need to relentlessly expand the demonizing of Trump as a Russian agent. One way of doing that will be to willy-nilly establish that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Arguably, it is no big deal if Russia actually did that. Both countries should be hacking each other almost routinely. But then, if it somehow gets established today that Russia hacked the DNC, what next? Having already gone on record that he won’t rule out Russian interference in US domestic politics, President Barack Obama would come under pressure from the Hillary bandwagon to ‘act’.
The influential American newspaper The Hill has begun discussing what options Obama would have in such emergent circumstances. It reported today that “pressure is growing on the White House” and Obama is finding himself “in a delicate political position”.
The paper discusses 6 options open to Obama but cautions that each would carry a price in terms of Russian retaliation or Russian ‘non-cooperation’ on issues affecting US interests. Now, interestingly, this is precisely what Moscow also has forewarned some ten days ago. (MFA)
The great irony is that the US-Russia relations cannot get much worse than they are today – except if they decide to fight a hot war. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov is spot on when he told the Washington Post, “We are at such a black spot in our relationship, it is unlikely that anything could make it worse.”
No one could have thought eight years ago when Obama set out from Chicago with a check list that included a reset with Russia as one of his presidential legacies that he would end up in such a whirlpool of bathos. Read the report in The Hill.
The New York Times’s Outrage at Trump’s Refusal to Demonize Russia
By Matt Peppe | Just The Facts | July 31, 2016
After baseless allegations from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that the Russian government was behind a hack of the DNC’s emails, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sarcastically quipped that he hoped Russia would find and release the deleted emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server from her time as secretary of state. The New York Times failed to note the sarcasm and treated the comments as evidence of high crimes against the state. It was an example of the modern day red-baiting against Trump, who is portrayed as being in league with Russian President Vladimir Putin to conspire against the United States itself.
The Times said Trump was “essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.” While Trump is such a narcissitic buffoon that it is often difficult to discern when he is being facetious, he was clearly making a joke.
But treating the comment in the spirit it was intended would mean passing up a golden opportunity to bash Trump for what has become common knowledge in mainstream political analysis: Trump is anti-American for being diplomatic instead of vilifying Russia and Putin at every opportunity. They scrutinize and make a point of every statement Trump makes that fails to antagonize Russia for actions the US government doesn’t antagonize other countries for.
While they merely imply “urging” cyberespionage is treasonous rather than state it explicitly, the Times finds it so important that they place it in the lead paragraph. This is curiously prominent, much more prominent than when President Barack Obama literally joked about incinerating a family with a remotely guided missile.
At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2010, Obama said:
“The Jonas Brothers are here. (Applause.) They’re out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But, boys, don’t get any ideas. (Laughter.) I have two words for you – predator drones. (Laughter.) You will never see it coming. (Laughter.) You think I’m joking. (Laughter.)” Unlike Trump’s joke, which warranted its own headline (“Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails”), Obama’s joke wasn’t mentioned in the Times’ headline about the event (“Obama and Leno Share a Time Slot“) nor the lead. Their summary of the night’s newsworthiness noted “jokes about Representative John Boehner’s tan, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lack of restraint and the Fox News-MSNBC divide.”
You had to go all the way down to the eighth paragraph to find the briefest possible mention of Obama’s obscene drone murder joke/threat:
“Mr. Obama noted the presence of the Jonas Brothers, who can count Sasha and Malia Obama among their fans. But the First Father warned the band: ‘Two words: predator drones.’ ” If another world leader hypothetically ran a global assassination campaign under which he unilaterally assumed the power to kill anyone he wanted in the world, anywhere, any time, with the only criteria needed to order someone’s death being internal deliberations within the executive branch, it would produce such a frenzy in corporate media they would devote themselves nearly exclusively to beating the drums for regime change, much as they did leading up to the Iraq War.
If that hypothetical leader then joked about people he was killing, it would undoubtedly be a banner headline on the front page for days or weeks. There would certainly be apoplectic outrage, and you most definitely wouldn’t have to scroll down to the eighth paragraph to learn about it.
Mark Karlin wrote in Buzzflash at Truthout in 2014 that Obama’s mock threat to the Jonas brothers “evoked the US indifference to those persons killed overseas by drone strikes. That is because the guffaws of the corporate media were based on the subconscious premise that Obama’s boasting of his power to authorize kill strikes is limited to people of little note to DC insiders, Middle-Eastern civilians (collateral damage) and persons alleged to be terrorists or in areas where terrorists allegedly congregate.”
As Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, writes in Drones and Targeted Killing: “If the person against whom lethal force is directed has not been convicted of a crime for which a death sentence is permissible in the state where the killing occurs, the targeted killing is also an ‘extrajudicial’ killing, outside of any legal process. Targeted extrajudicial killing is, by its very nature, illegal.” [1] But corporate media like the New York Times could care less that Obama is violating international human rights law and the US Constitution itself by assassinating people.
What produces the greatest moral outrage in the Times and the media elites is perceived attacks on the American state, or perceived threats to American supremacy. Thus the Times calls Trump’s joke “another bizarre moment in the mystery of whether Vladimir Putin’s government has been seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.”
What is supposedly bizarre is unclear. What is dubbed a “mystery” is really nothing more than a conspiracy theory. The Times cites the DNC’s accusations that Russian intelligence agents hacked the committee’s emails. The DNC’s frantic finger pointing at Russia are a transparent tactic to distract from the damning content of the emails themselves, as Nadia Prupis has written at Common Dreams.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange noted in an interview with Democracy Now that any such claims are “simply speculation” and when Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook was asked in a TV interview to name the experts he was citing as evidence, Mook refused flatly.
The Times validates the DNC’s objective evidence-free accusations by saying American intelligence agencies have confirmed with “high confidence” the Russian government was behind the attack. They have not publicly presented any evidence at all, but their word at face value is good enough for the Times to consider it damning proof.
American intelligence agencies and the military have a motive to hype the Russian “threat” to justify their own budget requests and advance the US government’s policy of global hegemony, presumably unaware that the Cold War ended 25 years ago.
In case Russia’s transgressions are not self-evident enough for Times readers, they call attention to Trump’s refusal to condemn Russia’s “seizure” of Crimea and willingness to consider whether to lift sanctions against the Russian government as a “remarkable departure from United States policy.”
It would be a departure from US policy against Russia. But it is not US policy to sanction countries for incorporating territory outside their recognized borders in general. Quite the opposite in fact. Unlike Crimea, which voted with roughly 97 percent support to join Russia in a peaceful transition to re-integrate itself into the country it had been part of for several centuries, Israel seized the Palestinian territories nearly 50 years ago through violent military aggression against the unanimous wishes of both the Palestinians themselves and nearly the entire Middle East and beyond. In the subsequent half century, the US has showered Israel with more than $150 billion in aid while fighting tooth and nail any attempt in the United Nations to hold Israel to account for its indisputable violations of international law.
The US has also generously gifted millions of dollars in aid to countries like Indonesia after they had seized East Timor and carried a genocidal assault against nearly one third of the country’s population and sponsored France’s attempts to reconquer their former colony Vietnam after World War II (before stepping in directly and unleashing the most horrific military assault on a country’s people and environment in modern times.)
But policies of supporting other country’s human rights and international violations are not of interest to the Times if those countries are seen as allied with US “interests” or “values.” It is only when someone questions whether it is necessary to continue treating another government as an enemy that they are called on to take a hard-line in standing up for international law.
The Times calls Russia “often hostile to the United Sates” while NATO continues to encircle the country from all sides and Obama has ordered what amounts to a permanent buildup of NATO personnel and weapons along Russia’s borders and instigated a new nuclear arms race by spending $1 trillion to upgrade the US nuclear arsenal and make weapons more usable, i.e., more likely to be employed.
In another article titled “As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue,” the Times asks what they purport to be a widespread question: “Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election.”
While this is merely another conspiracy theory without any actual evidence supporting it, it is the case that countries often do meddle in the elections of other countries. But it is almost always the US government itself doing it to others, which explains why it is ignored by the Times and the rest of the media establishment.
In Rogue State, William Blum lists twenty cases of US interference in the elections of sovereign countries (including Russia itself) [2]:
Philippines, 1950s
Italy, 1948-1970s
Lebanon, 1950s
Indonesia, 1955
Vietnam, 1955
British Guyana, 1953-64
Japan 1958-1970s
Nepal, 1959
Laos, 1960
Brazil, 1962
Dominican Republic, 1962
Chile, 1964-1970
Portugal, 1974-75
Australia, 1974-75
Jamaica, 1976
Nicaragua, 1984, 1990
Haiti, 1987-1988
Russia, 1996
Mongolia, 1996
Bosnia, 1998
But the actions themselves are not the issue. Not all violations of international law or subversion of state sovereignty are created equal. If the US government is the perpetrator of such actions, they are glossed over or ignored entirely. But when the US itself is seen as the subject of such violation (even when it is purely in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists and others seeking to demonize official enemies, as appears to be the case in the current moment) any one who doesn’t join forcefully in the demonization is vilified relentlessly, as Trump is experiencing in the pages of the Times and across the mainstream media.
References
[1] Cohn, Marjorie. Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Olive Branch Press, 2014. Kindle Edition.
[2] Blum, William. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. 2016. Kindle Edition.
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Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
The Cradle | March 24, 2024
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva (religious school) in the occupied city of Jaffa, called on the Israeli army to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
During a conference on 8 March, Mali said that “according to the halachic principle (a religious-ethical system of legal reasoning in Judaism), all residents of Gaza must be killed.”
When asked during the conference if babies should be killed as well, he said: “The same thing. You can’t be clever with the Torah. Today he’s a baby, tomorrow he’s a fighter. There are no questions here. Today’s terrorists were previously 8-year-old children.”
“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, he said in reference to women in Gaza.
The Rabbi went on to explain that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “Mitzvah war,” which is defined as a war of “commandment” in Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, this kind of war does not require permission from a “Sanhedrin,” also known as a council or assembly, such as the war against Amalek – previously declared in a biblical reference by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the war on Gaza.
“There is a difference between a civilian population in other places and a civilian population in Gaza. In Gaza, according to estimates, 95 to 98 percent want us destroyed.”
“Since this is a sensitive issue, and I was told that it is being uploaded on the Internet, I want to be ahead of the curve and say that the bottom line is that you have to do exactly what is said in the IDF’s order,” Mali added.
The rabbi’s students in the Shirat Moshe yeshiva serve in the Israeli army. The Yeshiva is sponsored by the Israeli government. … Full article
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