By Philip Weiss for Mondoweiss – Last fall I winced whenever Hillary Clinton or her surrogates promised regime change in Syria. Don’t these people get it? Americans don’t want to be waging more wars in the Middle East. Now an important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate. By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars. The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note: With so much post-election analysis, it is surprising that no one has pointed to the possibility that inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.
By Oliver Tickell for Ecologist. Looking at the evidence as a whole there can be little doubt that the Copenhagen climate talks were deliberately and highly effectively scuppered by a ‘dirty tricks’ operation carried out by the NSA and other US security agencies – including the pivotal leak to The Guardian of the Danish text. Following Snowden’s revelations, we know that they had the ability to do that in spades. They also had motives. The US wanted: * to protect their politically powerful fossil fuel industries, and their right as a nation to carry on polluting; * to avoid having to pay out billions of dollars in climate funding to developing countries; * to deny China the global leadership role it sought to secure for itself, and instead leave it humiliated; * to present the USA and its President Barack Obama as trying against the odds to secure a climate agreement, in the face of obdurate resistance by other countries.
By Jeremy Scahill for The Intercept – WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE is hitting back at Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo following a speech last week in which Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a “hostile nonstate intelligence agency” operating outside of the protections of the First Amendment. “We can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for,” Pompeo declared, adding an ominous assertion: “It ends now.” Speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living since June 2012, Assange said Pompeo appeared to be issuing a threat. “So how does he propose to conduct this ending? He didn’t say. But the CIA is only in the business of collecting information, kidnapping people, and assassinating people. So, it’s quite a menacing statement that he does need to clarify,” said Assange.
By Michael Krieger for Blitzkrieg – In yesterday’s post, Credibility of Cyber Firm that Claimed Russia Hacked the DNC Comes Under Serious Question, I examined how CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to look into its hacking breach, had been exposed as being completely wrong about a separate attack it claimed originated from the same group it claimed broke into DNC systems, and supposedly works for Russia’s military intelligence unit, GRU. Here’s some of what we learned: An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.
By Ekaterina Blinova for Sputnik News – That was confirmed by House of Representatives Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, who told journalists on January 26 that the investigation continues. “There are still a lot of unanswered questions. We don’t have literally tens of thousands of documents that we still need,” Chaffetz told Fox News. However, it appears that not all of the documents related to the Clinton email investigation will find their way out. Politico.com reported on February 21 that conservative watchdog Judicial Watch’s request to release some of State Department records about Clinton’s use of a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State was denied by a federal judge. The Clinton email scandal erupted back in 2015 when it became publicly known that Hillary Clinton had used her private email server for official communications during her tenure as Secretary of State.
By Ben Mallicote for The Con – You voted for Trump because Clinton was going to be in Wall Street’s pocket. Trump wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and eliminate the Fiduciary Rule, letting Wall Street return to its pre-2008 ways. You voted for Trump because of Clinton’s emails. The Trump administration is running its own private email server. You voted for Trump because you thought the Clinton Foundation was “pay for play.” Trump has refused to wall off his businesses from his administration, and personally profits from payments from foreign governments. You voted for Trump because of Clinton’s role in Benghazi. Trump ordered the Yemen raid without adequate intel, and tweeted about “FAKE NEWS” while Americans died as a result of his carelessness.
By Caitlin Johnstone for Newslogue. We need to take away the dominance of political discourse away from liberals. We need to fight it, and fight it hard, because if we don’t we can kiss this whole revolution goodbye. You can’t have a grassroots movement that you’re not allowed to talk about. A progressive revolution cannot possibly coexist with a conspiracy of silence. They are mutually exclusive. How do we fight it? We speak the truth, even when our voice shakes. We publicly share our perspectives, and when our liberal friends close in, we tell them why they’re wrong. We can be polite (if we feel they deserve it), but we must be unyielding. We speak our truth wherever we’re at, whenever we can. The foremost battleground for the progressive awakening is in your own social circles. If we can only speak about this in hushed voices, with a select few woke friends or in secret Facebook groups, then our movement dies here. Kiss it goodbye. So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight. We will never be more than a fringe movement if we’re not able to openly and directly resist the political establishment.
By Craig Murray for Russia Insider – So what are the Clinton gang doing while Trump introduces anti-Muslim immigration discrimination? Oh, they are pushing for war with Iran, which might give pause to some who think the world would have been less awful had Hillary won. Here is the front page of the resolution introduced into the House of Representatives by Democrat Alcee L Hastings, an extremely close ally of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had to resign in disgrace as chair of the Democratic National Committee after WikiLeaks published emails establishing her corrupt endeavours to fix the primary elections for Hillary against Bernie Sanders.
Newsletter 2016 Elections, Corporate Media, Democracy, Donald Trump, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Human Rights, Immigrant Rights, Indigenous Rights, Medicare for all, oligarchy, People's Agenda, Propaganda, Public Banking, Russia, Vladimir Putin By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org
December 18th, 2016
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. As the day that the Electoral College casts its vote for President draws near, so does the frenzy of accusations that Russians hacked the election to benefit Donald Trump and are spreading ‘fake news’ full of Russian propaganda. It seems like everyone is jumping on the anti-Russia bandwagon, including past Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and most of the organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party. Many are calling for the Electors to switch their votes to Hillary Clinton. Russian spying image from the Intercept Russian spying image from the Intercept The absurdity of the 2016 Presidential election doesn’t seem to have an end. We urge readers not to get drawn into the manufactured distractions of the day. We have real work to do, no matter who is elected, to organize across multiple fronts of struggle.
By Alana Goodman For Dailymail – A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia. Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September. Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’
By Mark Hand for DC Media Group – A protest march that started at the new Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, DC, on the night of Saturday, Nov. 12 and snaked its way through several blocks of the city was not a protest against deportations. Nor was it a protest against police violence or a protest against America’s endless wars. It was not a protest against an unfair economic system or a protest against authoritarianism, or even a plea for empathy and compassion.
Newsletter Bigotry, Black Lives Matter, Climate Change, Democracy, Donald Trump, Fair Trade, Hillary Clinton, Immigrant Rights, Labor, Living Wage, oligarchy, Racism, TISA, TPP, Trade, TTIP, War crimes, Wars and Militarism, Women's Rights, Worker's Rights By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org
November 11th, 2016
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. In this moment, the movement for economic, racial and environmental justice needs be bold, clear and assertive in putting forth an agenda that will serve the economically dispossessed, those under attack by militarized police, immigrants facing detentions and deportations and demonstrate policies that ensure economic security. Where Trump is right, as in detente with Russia, the movement will support him against the neocons and humanitarian war supporters; and we will push him further for an end to war as the primary tool of foreign policy. Both parties are confronting major fissures, leadership challenges and questions about where they go from here. Their confused leadership provides an opportunity for the popular movement to fill the leadership void with policies that put people, planet and peace over profit.
By Stephen Collinson, Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny for CNN – With those simple words, Hillary Clinton, who thought she would wake up Wednesday as the first woman president-elect but crashed to a stunning election defeat to Donald Trump, ended her White House quest and likely her political career. The Democratic nominee unequivocally conceded the presidential race, and said that the Constitution requires a peaceful transfer of power.
By Robert Parry for Consortium News – In the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America. There is clearly much to fear from a Trump presidency, especially coupled with continued Republican control of Congress. Trump and many Republicans have denied the reality of climate change
By Staff of WashingtonsBlog – Today, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened
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