"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"...
“Marmion” by Sir Walter Scott.
When the lies and counter lies of the Corporate Capitalists become too
tangled, I simply apply my rule of thumb: Whenever their mouths are
open, what comes out are lies.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/31/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2017/03/31/the-unmitigated-corruption-of-capitalist-politics/
The unmitigated corruption of capitalist politics
/ 10 hours ago
April 2017 Trump & ObamaBy JEFF MACKLER
“The evidence is in,” say gleeful Democratic Party cheerleaders. Donald
Trump was elected president because his Russian spy collaborators stole
20,000 secret e-mails from Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer
servers, including e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s national campaign
chair, John Podesta.
The stolen e-mails demonstrated proof positive that the Democratic
Party, violating its own charter and signed statements of “neutrality”
by DNC leaders, went all out to thwart the Bernie Sanders primary
campaign, including laundering money raised for all Democrats to fund
Clinton’s picks only. So blatant were the Democrats’ crimes that top
party functionaries, including DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were
forced to resign and the party itself was compelled to defend itself
from lawsuits claiming fraud while publicly apologizing to Sanders.
An obliging Sanders, playing the sheepherding “lesser evil” fiddle to
the end, insisted that Hillary Clinton had adopted his program. He
endorsed her campaign and stumped the realm for Hillary.
When the DNC computer hacking was first discovered, Democrats found
themselves in a dilemma when the FBI demanded access to their systems to
ascertain whether Vladimir Putin’s Russian government was directly
involved. There is still no proof from anyone that it was. WikiLeaks
insists that it got the DNC files from an internal government leaker and
not the Russian government.
Whether to expose their base internal corruption, maneuvers, and dirty
tricks to steal the primary or to use the incident to expose a possible
Trump connection to the Russians was a tough choice. Caught in its own
scandal, the DNC first opted for the cover-up route and refused the FBI
entry. Today, Democrats have shifted gears to redeem and resurrect their
racist, anti-immigrant, warmongering, sexist party of Wall Street
billionaires and their corporate/banking empire as they prepare for the
2018 election cycle, refurbished a bit, with the likes of Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, and Minnesota congressman and DNC deputy chair Keith
Ellison in tow.
Capitalist elections
A note on capitalist elections is in order here in case any readers
might still believe that we are discussing any semblance of democratic
process in the periodic charade that is presented to the world wherein
two billionaires and their corporate sponsors and media vie for the
nation’s top office. Democracy in capitalist America is for the rich
only, whether it be in the electoral arena or in the rarified one
percent world of big capital, in which the Obama administration bailed
out the nation’s leading and virtually bankrupt banks and related
institutions to the tune of $32 trillion.
Many outraged voters rejected the most obvious candidate of the ruling
rich, Hillary Clinton, who received, according to the Wall Street
Journal, $23 million from Wall Street’s elite in direct election
contributions. In recent years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have raked in
$153 million from Wall Street speaker fees. They charge $225,000 a pop.
And yet, their speeches, especially Hillary’s to Goldman Sachs, are
still banned from public scrutiny. We note here that U.S. elections are
today billion-dollar affairs, with Hillary Clinton spending $1.4 billion
as compared to Trump’s “paltry” $958 million.
FBI/NSA side with Democrats
In mid-March the FBI and the National Security Agency broke with their
longstanding “code” to publicly announce that they were undertaking a
long, perhaps multi-year investigation to determine if Trump and/or his
associates had collaborated with the Russians to rig the U.S. election
or to otherwise interfere with the workings of U.S. “democracy.”
This departure from the agency’s (feigned) secrecy as to their
investigations, said FBI Director James Comey, was in the “public
interest.” In truth, it amounted to an open declaration of war against
the Trump administration—a sign of emerging deep divisions within the
U.S. ruling class, wherein important sectors are increasingly concerned
that Trump and company cannot be trusted to serve broader ruling-class
interests. The latter includes maintaining a semblance of public
civility in the workings of government, as compared to Trump, who has
effectively torn off the thin veneer of rationality from a crisis-ridden
U.S. capitalism whose ugly deeds need to be shielded from public view.
The implication of an FBI/NSA investigation finding Trump guilty of a
conspiracy to undermine U.S. elections in collaboration with Russia can
only lead to future measures to remove him from the presidency.
No doubt Comey and his spy agency associates had a hand in leaking
whatever information they deemed helpful to begin the process of
undermining Trump’s legitimacy. Today, Democrats are the chief
beneficiaries, with various leakers, including top unnamed officials,
anonymously providing them with the names of various Trump campaign
associates who had dealings in one form or another with Russians. In
truth, such contacts are the norm with regard to virtually all contacts
between the business and political representatives of all foreign
governments and U.S. officials. “Big Brother” monitors all!
Democrats today rely on the world’s most extensive surveillance/spy
apparatus, whose porous operations always manage to reach the public eye
when political advantage is to be had. This is the same corrupt and
murderous spy apparatus that was exposed by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange,
as well as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, all honest leakers and
heroes, today deemed criminals by capitalist America, while unnamed
government leakers who reveal Trump or Clinton affairs are taken for
good coin.
WiliLeaks exposes CIA cyberweapons
In the middle of the “who spied on whom?” Democrat-Republican spectacle,
the CIA suffered yet another devastating blow when WikiLeaks revealed,
according to the March 8 New York Times, the most massive trove of
deadly cyberwar spying in history. The CIA’s cyberweapons/malware
included, “instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer
tools for use in spying: the online calling service SKYPE; Wi-Fi
networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus
programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their
computers.”
The WikiLeaks trove includes 700 million lines of secret computer code
aimed at hacking smartphones, televisions, the security applications of
Google and Apple, and more. WikiLeaks affirmed that this was the first
installment in a more massive trove of secret CIA material, including
7818 web pages with 943 attachments.
WikiLeaks reported that the CIA and allied intelligence services had
compromised both Apple and Android smartphones, thus providing their own
hackers the capability to bypass the encryption systems on popular
services such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks
government sleuths can now penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and
message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another CIA program called Wrecking Crew “explains how to crash a
targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the
autocomplete programs on Internet Explorer.” WikiLeaks revealed that NSA
hackers could now masquerade as Russian hackers! Patriotic to be sure,
WikiLeaks redacted the actual CIA “cyberwar codes.” One can only imagine
if it had published them as well, perhaps allowing the world’s few
whacked-out thrill seekers as well as governments everywhere to play
with computer-driven mechanisms that include nuclear missiles and other
such weapons of mass destruction. Not unaware of such possibilities, the
most recent issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted past
breaches in various U.S. missile systems.
At least for the moment, until the next hacker discovers these
cyberweapon codes, we can be reassured in the knowledge that they remain
in the “safe” hands of the world’s sole superpower, with 110 military
bases around the world and at present conducting wars of mass murder and
destruction in seven countries. No doubt the U.S. drone killers make
good use of their ever more sophisticated cyberwar toys. The same
superpower has intervened some 140 times with military force in other
nations since 1880 to advance U.S. imperialist interests. (See:
Evergreen State College’s Dr. Zoltan Grossman’s “From Wounded Knee to
Syria: A Century of U.S. Military Interventions.”)
Obama spies on Trump
The latest media hullabaloo revolves around President Trump’s repeated
twitter allegations that the Obama administration tapped his Trump Tower
phones or otherwise spied on him and his associates. On this one, I side
with Trump 100 percent! The notion that the top surveillance operation
in the world would stop at spying on a U.S. president-elect is patently
absurd! We already know that in the name of “national security”
President Obama and his predecessors authorized NSA spying on virtually
everyone on earth, provided, so his recently expanded spying rules say,
the spying is authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) judge.
Virtually all Russian officials or businesspeople working in the
U.S.—including their hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists, UN and
Washington, D.C., functionaries and the Russian ambassadorial staff—are
subject to U.S. government spying, based on the explicit thesis that
they are all “foreign agents.” Indeed, as we shall see, “foreign agents”
are everywhere; they include the agents of “enemy” and “allied” nations
alike.
A March 23 New York Times article entitled, “Trump Buoyed In New Version
Of Surveillance,” commented on Republican chair of the U.S. House
Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes’ revelation of documents secretly
leaked to him by his own informants in a U.S. spy agency. The documents
pointed to Obama administration spying on Trump and his campaign
associates, a charge that Obama and all spy agencies have, until now,
categorically denied. The Times blithely commented, “the incidental
intelligence gathering on Trump associates—during the presidential
transition late last years, when Mr. Obama was in office—was not
necessarily unlawful or inappropriate.”
The Times continued, “American intelligence agencies typically monitor
foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely
sweep up Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are
being spoken about.”
The Times added, “The real issue Mr. Nunes told reporters was that he
could figure out the identity of Trump associates from reading [secret]
reports about intercepted communications that were shared among
administration officials with top security clearances. He said some
Trump associates were also identified by name in the reports. Normally
intelligence agencies mask the identities of American citizens who are
incidentally present in intercepted communications.” (Emphasis added).
In this case, Obama employed his own changes in surveillance rules to
“unmask” the names of those on the Trump team that had contacts with
Russians. It was likely all “lawful,” says The Times, even though Obama
and company denied doing it.
Nunes’ revelations also exposed as a blatant lie FBI Director Comey’s
official statement before Congress two days earlier. Said Comey, “I have
no information that supports those [Trump’s] tweets.’’ In the same vein,
President Obama had previously issued a statement saying that neither he
“nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S.
citizen.” Lies, lies, and more lies!
In dirty politics, “two can play the same game.” In this case while the
Democrats lambast Trump, based on their leaked documents, Nunes, like
the Democrats, used his own “anonymous” sources to obtain incriminating
“evidence.”
“I have seen intelligence reports,” said Nunes, “that clearly show that
the president-elect and his team were at least monitored and
disseminated out [unmasked] in intelligence,’’ he said, adding that he
hoped to ascertain who in the government had sought details about the
Trump team and had asked for their identities to be “unmasked.”
When the sound and fury of today’s bipartisan corruption scandals
subsides, what will be left is whether or not Trump’s presidency will be
allowed to run its four-year course. We have not heard the last of these
government spying scandals. Indeed, Trump himself, if he so chooses, has
the “legal” right to demand to know if his phones were tapped.
Demonization of Vladimir Putin
Today’s Cold War demonization of Russia and President Putin has
qualitatively less to do with any overtures by Trump for a rapprochement
with Russia than it does with the defense and advancement of U.S.
military, political, and economic interests in general, including the
marginalization of Russia as the world’s leading fossil-fuel exporter
and as a minor but still significant player in world affairs. U.S.
interests in Ukraine regarding oil pipeline routes and control over
Eastern Ukraine’s vast coal resources were dominant in the 2014 European
Union-U.S./Ukraine-Russia events. Replacing Europe’s dependency on
Russian oil exports with U.S.-controlled pipelines, as well as
U.S.-fracked natural gas, stood high on U.S. imperialism’s priority
list, not to mention NATO’s ongoing military encirclement of Russia itself.
To date Trump’s policies have differed little, if at all, from Obama’s
on these key issues, despite Trump’s rhetoric, if not his personal
identification with Putin’s courting of right-wing and neo-fascist
groups across Europe and elsewhere. But in its essentials Trump has
neither made nor proposed any changes in U.S.-Russia policy. Punishing
sanctions stemming from the Ukraine/Crimea events remain intact.
Readers will recall that in 2014 the U.S. backed a neo-fascist-led coup
that removed the Ukrainian president and replaced him with a corrupt and
murderous regime replete with U.S.-backed officials who do the bidding
of the European Union and U.S. imperialism. Russia’s annexation of
Crimea, accomplished in a referendum in which 86 percent voted to
secede, was accomplished without the slightest resistance and in a
context where Ukrainian fascists in the coup government moved to
virtually outlaw the Russian language in the majority Russian-speaking
portions of the country. Virtually the entire Ukrainian army in Crimea
peacefully surrendered, with the majority joining the Russian army. (For
a full account, see Socialist Action’s “Ukraine in Turmoil” by Michael
Schreiber and this writer.)
A final note on U.S. interests in Russia and the former Soviet Republics
is in order. Trump and associates are far from the key U.S. investors in
these regions. Despite the sanctions, Russia’s dealings with the U.S.
still amount to at least $9 billion annually, with major U.S.
corporations contractually relying heavily on Russian metallurgy and
mining industries for the manufacture of U.S. airplanes and a broad
range of other products.
Indeed, U.S. billionaire capitalists, Democrats and Republicans
alike—not limited to ex-Exxon Mobil chief Ross Tillerson, today Trump’s
Secretary of State—have long before invested in or collaborated with
Russia and everywhere else a handsome profit can be made or influence
peddled. Viktor Vekselberg, for example, the Russian billionaire head of
the Renova Group and the head of a partnership called the “Russian
Silicon Valley,” donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton
Foundation, according to donor records. Renova, whose offices were
raided by U.S. government officials, is under criminal investigation for
bribery. Renova’s interests in mining, oil, and telecommunications
boosted Vekselberg’s fortunes, making him one of Russia’s richest
individuals.
Russia’s largest bank, Sherbank, confirmed that it hired the consultancy
firm of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of Hillary Clinton’s former
presidential campaign, John Podesta, “to lobby its interests in the
United States and proactively seek the removal of various Obama-era
sanctions,” according to the Russian press agency, TASS. “Standard
business,” said a Sherbank official. None of the above is aimed at
demonstrating Clinton’s or her associates’ illegal action! Just business
as usual.
Trump/Obama military policies
With regard to Syria, U.S. war policy remains intact, with the Trump
administration sending more than 1000 troops to Northern Syria in an
effort to bolster U.S. negotiating influence in a future Syria. Under
Obama, U.S./NATO coalition forces, Gulf state monarchies, U.S. and
Turkish-trained jihadists and U.S. secretly approved Nusra
Front/al-Qaeda terrorists led an unsuccessful six-year imperialist war
aimed at imposing a pro-Western regime in Syria. The Obama
administration previously spent $1 billion annually in a failed effort
to secretly train and supply its own mercenary army to oust the Assad
government.
While the Trump administration calls for a $54 billion, 10 percent
increase in military spending, Todd Harrison, director for defense
budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
informs us that “there were at least 10 higher increases since 1977 and
four since 2002.”
No solutions to capitalist crisis
The present rift between Democrats and Republicans reflects their
sometimes conflicting approaches to world capitalism’s ever-deepening
crisis. Their common denominator, however, is how to most effectively
transfer the wealth created by working people to themselves. Today’s
financialization of capital, wherein “profits” are increasingly
generated in highly speculative stock market and related uncontrolled
money manipulation, as opposed to commodity production, is a sure sign
of a system in crisis, with bubbles galore waiting to burst, e.g., the
Dow Jones current astronomic 20,600 mark.
Similarly, the globalization of capital, aimed at increasing ever
flagging average profit rates, has slowed considerably as competing
capitalists scramble to shore up their bottom lines by the super
exploitation of the world’s poorest people. Trump’s anti-globalization
rhetoric reflects the fact that imperialist foreign competition in
previously U.S.-dominated near slave-labor markets, as in China, has cut
deeply into U.S. corporate profit rates. His solution, far from
incompatible with that of the Democrats, is to increase the rate of
exploitation in the U.S. in an environment free of unions and social
benefits, replete with robot-automation-driven production and
distribution centers, while ever shifting the tax burden from the
wealthy one percent to the broad population.
Today’s capitalist crisis has graphically exposed the inherent horrors
of a predatory social system incapable of meeting the basic needs of the
vast majority. Capitalism has brought unprecedented millions into the
streets who reject its scapegoating the working-class majority in all
its manifestations—immigrants, oppressed national minorities, women, the
LGBT community, etc.
Capitalism’s victims, as never before in the modern era, are in search
of new forms of organization and a fighting leadership capable of
winning back and expanding what has been stolen by the twin parties of
plunder. In this environment, receptivity to revolutionary socialist
ideas opens important opportunities to those who seek capitalism’s
abolition.
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March 31, 2017 in Civil Liberties, Police & FBI, Trump / U.S. Government.
Related posts
Sanders, socialism and the U.S. left in crisis
Bernie Sanders’ demise: What are the lessons?
The politics of deception
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https://socialistaction.org/2017/03/31/the-unmitigated-corruption-of-capitalist-politics/
The unmitigated corruption of capitalist politics
/ 10 hours ago
April 2017 Trump & ObamaBy JEFF MACKLER
“The evidence is in,” say gleeful Democratic Party cheerleaders. Donald
Trump was elected president because his Russian spy collaborators stole
20,000 secret e-mails from Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer
servers, including e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s national campaign
chair, John Podesta.
The stolen e-mails demonstrated proof positive that the Democratic
Party, violating its own charter and signed statements of “neutrality”
by DNC leaders, went all out to thwart the Bernie Sanders primary
campaign, including laundering money raised for all Democrats to fund
Clinton’s picks only. So blatant were the Democrats’ crimes that top
party functionaries, including DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were
forced to resign and the party itself was compelled to defend itself
from lawsuits claiming fraud while publicly apologizing to Sanders.
An obliging Sanders, playing the sheepherding “lesser evil” fiddle to
the end, insisted that Hillary Clinton had adopted his program. He
endorsed her campaign and stumped the realm for Hillary.
When the DNC computer hacking was first discovered, Democrats found
themselves in a dilemma when the FBI demanded access to their systems to
ascertain whether Vladimir Putin’s Russian government was directly
involved. There is still no proof from anyone that it was. WikiLeaks
insists that it got the DNC files from an internal government leaker and
not the Russian government.
Whether to expose their base internal corruption, maneuvers, and dirty
tricks to steal the primary or to use the incident to expose a possible
Trump connection to the Russians was a tough choice. Caught in its own
scandal, the DNC first opted for the cover-up route and refused the FBI
entry. Today, Democrats have shifted gears to redeem and resurrect their
racist, anti-immigrant, warmongering, sexist party of Wall Street
billionaires and their corporate/banking empire as they prepare for the
2018 election cycle, refurbished a bit, with the likes of Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, and Minnesota congressman and DNC deputy chair Keith
Ellison in tow.
Capitalist elections
A note on capitalist elections is in order here in case any readers
might still believe that we are discussing any semblance of democratic
process in the periodic charade that is presented to the world wherein
two billionaires and their corporate sponsors and media vie for the
nation’s top office. Democracy in capitalist America is for the rich
only, whether it be in the electoral arena or in the rarified one
percent world of big capital, in which the Obama administration bailed
out the nation’s leading and virtually bankrupt banks and related
institutions to the tune of $32 trillion.
Many outraged voters rejected the most obvious candidate of the ruling
rich, Hillary Clinton, who received, according to the Wall Street
Journal, $23 million from Wall Street’s elite in direct election
contributions. In recent years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have raked in
$153 million from Wall Street speaker fees. They charge $225,000 a pop.
And yet, their speeches, especially Hillary’s to Goldman Sachs, are
still banned from public scrutiny. We note here that U.S. elections are
today billion-dollar affairs, with Hillary Clinton spending $1.4 billion
as compared to Trump’s “paltry” $958 million.
FBI/NSA side with Democrats
In mid-March the FBI and the National Security Agency broke with their
longstanding “code” to publicly announce that they were undertaking a
long, perhaps multi-year investigation to determine if Trump and/or his
associates had collaborated with the Russians to rig the U.S. election
or to otherwise interfere with the workings of U.S. “democracy.”
This departure from the agency’s (feigned) secrecy as to their
investigations, said FBI Director James Comey, was in the “public
interest.” In truth, it amounted to an open declaration of war against
the Trump administration—a sign of emerging deep divisions within the
U.S. ruling class, wherein important sectors are increasingly concerned
that Trump and company cannot be trusted to serve broader ruling-class
interests. The latter includes maintaining a semblance of public
civility in the workings of government, as compared to Trump, who has
effectively torn off the thin veneer of rationality from a crisis-ridden
U.S. capitalism whose ugly deeds need to be shielded from public view.
The implication of an FBI/NSA investigation finding Trump guilty of a
conspiracy to undermine U.S. elections in collaboration with Russia can
only lead to future measures to remove him from the presidency.
No doubt Comey and his spy agency associates had a hand in leaking
whatever information they deemed helpful to begin the process of
undermining Trump’s legitimacy. Today, Democrats are the chief
beneficiaries, with various leakers, including top unnamed officials,
anonymously providing them with the names of various Trump campaign
associates who had dealings in one form or another with Russians. In
truth, such contacts are the norm with regard to virtually all contacts
between the business and political representatives of all foreign
governments and U.S. officials. “Big Brother” monitors all!
Democrats today rely on the world’s most extensive surveillance/spy
apparatus, whose porous operations always manage to reach the public eye
when political advantage is to be had. This is the same corrupt and
murderous spy apparatus that was exposed by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange,
as well as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, all honest leakers and
heroes, today deemed criminals by capitalist America, while unnamed
government leakers who reveal Trump or Clinton affairs are taken for
good coin.
WiliLeaks exposes CIA cyberweapons
In the middle of the “who spied on whom?” Democrat-Republican spectacle,
the CIA suffered yet another devastating blow when WikiLeaks revealed,
according to the March 8 New York Times, the most massive trove of
deadly cyberwar spying in history. The CIA’s cyberweapons/malware
included, “instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer
tools for use in spying: the online calling service SKYPE; Wi-Fi
networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus
programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their
computers.”
The WikiLeaks trove includes 700 million lines of secret computer code
aimed at hacking smartphones, televisions, the security applications of
Google and Apple, and more. WikiLeaks affirmed that this was the first
installment in a more massive trove of secret CIA material, including
7818 web pages with 943 attachments.
WikiLeaks reported that the CIA and allied intelligence services had
compromised both Apple and Android smartphones, thus providing their own
hackers the capability to bypass the encryption systems on popular
services such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks
government sleuths can now penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and
message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another CIA program called Wrecking Crew “explains how to crash a
targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the
autocomplete programs on Internet Explorer.” WikiLeaks revealed that NSA
hackers could now masquerade as Russian hackers! Patriotic to be sure,
WikiLeaks redacted the actual CIA “cyberwar codes.” One can only imagine
if it had published them as well, perhaps allowing the world’s few
whacked-out thrill seekers as well as governments everywhere to play
with computer-driven mechanisms that include nuclear missiles and other
such weapons of mass destruction. Not unaware of such possibilities, the
most recent issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted past
breaches in various U.S. missile systems.
At least for the moment, until the next hacker discovers these
cyberweapon codes, we can be reassured in the knowledge that they remain
in the “safe” hands of the world’s sole superpower, with 110 military
bases around the world and at present conducting wars of mass murder and
destruction in seven countries. No doubt the U.S. drone killers make
good use of their ever more sophisticated cyberwar toys. The same
superpower has intervened some 140 times with military force in other
nations since 1880 to advance U.S. imperialist interests. (See:
Evergreen State College’s Dr. Zoltan Grossman’s “From Wounded Knee to
Syria: A Century of U.S. Military Interventions.”)
Obama spies on Trump
The latest media hullabaloo revolves around President Trump’s repeated
twitter allegations that the Obama administration tapped his Trump Tower
phones or otherwise spied on him and his associates. On this one, I side
with Trump 100 percent! The notion that the top surveillance operation
in the world would stop at spying on a U.S. president-elect is patently
absurd! We already know that in the name of “national security”
President Obama and his predecessors authorized NSA spying on virtually
everyone on earth, provided, so his recently expanded spying rules say,
the spying is authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) judge.
Virtually all Russian officials or businesspeople working in the
U.S.—including their hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists, UN and
Washington, D.C., functionaries and the Russian ambassadorial staff—are
subject to U.S. government spying, based on the explicit thesis that
they are all “foreign agents.” Indeed, as we shall see, “foreign agents”
are everywhere; they include the agents of “enemy” and “allied” nations
alike.
A March 23 New York Times article entitled, “Trump Buoyed In New Version
Of Surveillance,” commented on Republican chair of the U.S. House
Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes’ revelation of documents secretly
leaked to him by his own informants in a U.S. spy agency. The documents
pointed to Obama administration spying on Trump and his campaign
associates, a charge that Obama and all spy agencies have, until now,
categorically denied. The Times blithely commented, “the incidental
intelligence gathering on Trump associates—during the presidential
transition late last years, when Mr. Obama was in office—was not
necessarily unlawful or inappropriate.”
The Times continued, “American intelligence agencies typically monitor
foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely
sweep up Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are
being spoken about.”
The Times added, “The real issue Mr. Nunes told reporters was that he
could figure out the identity of Trump associates from reading [secret]
reports about intercepted communications that were shared among
administration officials with top security clearances. He said some
Trump associates were also identified by name in the reports. Normally
intelligence agencies mask the identities of American citizens who are
incidentally present in intercepted communications.” (Emphasis added).
In this case, Obama employed his own changes in surveillance rules to
“unmask” the names of those on the Trump team that had contacts with
Russians. It was likely all “lawful,” says The Times, even though Obama
and company denied doing it.
Nunes’ revelations also exposed as a blatant lie FBI Director Comey’s
official statement before Congress two days earlier. Said Comey, “I have
no information that supports those [Trump’s] tweets.’’ In the same vein,
President Obama had previously issued a statement saying that neither he
“nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S.
citizen.” Lies, lies, and more lies!
In dirty politics, “two can play the same game.” In this case while the
Democrats lambast Trump, based on their leaked documents, Nunes, like
the Democrats, used his own “anonymous” sources to obtain incriminating
“evidence.”
“I have seen intelligence reports,” said Nunes, “that clearly show that
the president-elect and his team were at least monitored and
disseminated out [unmasked] in intelligence,’’ he said, adding that he
hoped to ascertain who in the government had sought details about the
Trump team and had asked for their identities to be “unmasked.”
When the sound and fury of today’s bipartisan corruption scandals
subsides, what will be left is whether or not Trump’s presidency will be
allowed to run its four-year course. We have not heard the last of these
government spying scandals. Indeed, Trump himself, if he so chooses, has
the “legal” right to demand to know if his phones were tapped.
Demonization of Vladimir Putin
Today’s Cold War demonization of Russia and President Putin has
qualitatively less to do with any overtures by Trump for a rapprochement
with Russia than it does with the defense and advancement of U.S.
military, political, and economic interests in general, including the
marginalization of Russia as the world’s leading fossil-fuel exporter
and as a minor but still significant player in world affairs. U.S.
interests in Ukraine regarding oil pipeline routes and control over
Eastern Ukraine’s vast coal resources were dominant in the 2014 European
Union-U.S./Ukraine-Russia events. Replacing Europe’s dependency on
Russian oil exports with U.S.-controlled pipelines, as well as
U.S.-fracked natural gas, stood high on U.S. imperialism’s priority
list, not to mention NATO’s ongoing military encirclement of Russia itself.
To date Trump’s policies have differed little, if at all, from Obama’s
on these key issues, despite Trump’s rhetoric, if not his personal
identification with Putin’s courting of right-wing and neo-fascist
groups across Europe and elsewhere. But in its essentials Trump has
neither made nor proposed any changes in U.S.-Russia policy. Punishing
sanctions stemming from the Ukraine/Crimea events remain intact.
Readers will recall that in 2014 the U.S. backed a neo-fascist-led coup
that removed the Ukrainian president and replaced him with a corrupt and
murderous regime replete with U.S.-backed officials who do the bidding
of the European Union and U.S. imperialism. Russia’s annexation of
Crimea, accomplished in a referendum in which 86 percent voted to
secede, was accomplished without the slightest resistance and in a
context where Ukrainian fascists in the coup government moved to
virtually outlaw the Russian language in the majority Russian-speaking
portions of the country. Virtually the entire Ukrainian army in Crimea
peacefully surrendered, with the majority joining the Russian army. (For
a full account, see Socialist Action’s “Ukraine in Turmoil” by Michael
Schreiber and this writer.)
A final note on U.S. interests in Russia and the former Soviet Republics
is in order. Trump and associates are far from the key U.S. investors in
these regions. Despite the sanctions, Russia’s dealings with the U.S.
still amount to at least $9 billion annually, with major U.S.
corporations contractually relying heavily on Russian metallurgy and
mining industries for the manufacture of U.S. airplanes and a broad
range of other products.
Indeed, U.S. billionaire capitalists, Democrats and Republicans
alike—not limited to ex-Exxon Mobil chief Ross Tillerson, today Trump’s
Secretary of State—have long before invested in or collaborated with
Russia and everywhere else a handsome profit can be made or influence
peddled. Viktor Vekselberg, for example, the Russian billionaire head of
the Renova Group and the head of a partnership called the “Russian
Silicon Valley,” donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton
Foundation, according to donor records. Renova, whose offices were
raided by U.S. government officials, is under criminal investigation for
bribery. Renova’s interests in mining, oil, and telecommunications
boosted Vekselberg’s fortunes, making him one of Russia’s richest
individuals.
Russia’s largest bank, Sherbank, confirmed that it hired the consultancy
firm of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of Hillary Clinton’s former
presidential campaign, John Podesta, “to lobby its interests in the
United States and proactively seek the removal of various Obama-era
sanctions,” according to the Russian press agency, TASS. “Standard
business,” said a Sherbank official. None of the above is aimed at
demonstrating Clinton’s or her associates’ illegal action! Just business
as usual.
Trump/Obama military policies
With regard to Syria, U.S. war policy remains intact, with the Trump
administration sending more than 1000 troops to Northern Syria in an
effort to bolster U.S. negotiating influence in a future Syria. Under
Obama, U.S./NATO coalition forces, Gulf state monarchies, U.S. and
Turkish-trained jihadists and U.S. secretly approved Nusra
Front/al-Qaeda terrorists led an unsuccessful six-year imperialist war
aimed at imposing a pro-Western regime in Syria. The Obama
administration previously spent $1 billion annually in a failed effort
to secretly train and supply its own mercenary army to oust the Assad
government.
While the Trump administration calls for a $54 billion, 10 percent
increase in military spending, Todd Harrison, director for defense
budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
informs us that “there were at least 10 higher increases since 1977 and
four since 2002.”
No solutions to capitalist crisis
The present rift between Democrats and Republicans reflects their
sometimes conflicting approaches to world capitalism’s ever-deepening
crisis. Their common denominator, however, is how to most effectively
transfer the wealth created by working people to themselves. Today’s
financialization of capital, wherein “profits” are increasingly
generated in highly speculative stock market and related uncontrolled
money manipulation, as opposed to commodity production, is a sure sign
of a system in crisis, with bubbles galore waiting to burst, e.g., the
Dow Jones current astronomic 20,600 mark.
Similarly, the globalization of capital, aimed at increasing ever
flagging average profit rates, has slowed considerably as competing
capitalists scramble to shore up their bottom lines by the super
exploitation of the world’s poorest people. Trump’s anti-globalization
rhetoric reflects the fact that imperialist foreign competition in
previously U.S.-dominated near slave-labor markets, as in China, has cut
deeply into U.S. corporate profit rates. His solution, far from
incompatible with that of the Democrats, is to increase the rate of
exploitation in the U.S. in an environment free of unions and social
benefits, replete with robot-automation-driven production and
distribution centers, while ever shifting the tax burden from the
wealthy one percent to the broad population.
Today’s capitalist crisis has graphically exposed the inherent horrors
of a predatory social system incapable of meeting the basic needs of the
vast majority. Capitalism has brought unprecedented millions into the
streets who reject its scapegoating the working-class majority in all
its manifestations—immigrants, oppressed national minorities, women, the
LGBT community, etc.
Capitalism’s victims, as never before in the modern era, are in search
of new forms of organization and a fighting leadership capable of
winning back and expanding what has been stolen by the twin parties of
plunder. In this environment, receptivity to revolutionary socialist
ideas opens important opportunities to those who seek capitalism’s
abolition.
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March 31, 2017 in Civil Liberties, Police & FBI, Trump / U.S. Government.
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