On 8/30/17, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Election after election American citizens have shuffled off to the
polls, picking one or the other of the two Political Parties offerings
in our vaunted "Free Choice", carefully regulated election System.
And election after election Americans are greeted with pretty much the
"same old, same old", especially as it effects their daily grind.
During political campaigns promises are a dime a dozen, floating like
butterflies among the television and radio networks, telling voters of
the wonders awaiting them. And following election results? Business
as usual. Old politicians, safe for another span of years, or new
ones settling in, rolling up their sleeves and going about the task of
pleasing their Masters.
And one fine day the People simply got fed up with it all. They
smirked, they held their noses, they closed their eyes and ears, they
said, "What the Hell, it don't matter anyway", and they voted for the
"Jester". Mister Reality TV. Master of deception. skilled
manipulator who turns Fiction into Fact and Fact into Fiction. The
man who stands before his mirror and asks, "Who's the Fairest of them
all?"
And as he enters the second half of his first year in office, he is
creating change, if you call opening the veins of the Working Class
and allowing the dollars to freely flow upward into the coffers of the
bloated rich, change.
And all the while, the Jester moves about the Land seemingly immune to
those laws governing ordinary citizens. The Jester makes the Wizard
of Oz appear to be a Country Bumpkin. And unlike Nero, he is not
fiddling around while he tears down the lofty American Empire. For
that is what is happening. The Billionaire Club, those CEO's of the
giant international corporations, are drooling as they jockey to get
their greedy fingers on everything. American voters have turned the
Jester loose in the Land, and there is no Batman and Robin to save the
nation.
For the first time in our nation's drive to conquer the Land, from sea
to shining sea, for the first time the working class is not needed.
We are as disposable as the many cats and dogs we turn out into our
streets, as useless as the children we spawn and neglect until they,
too run to the streets. We are nothing to the fat corporations, aside
from serving as cannon fodder in the Corporation's Eternal War on
Everybody.
But as history shows, the day of the American Empire is coming to a
close. The People, tricked over and over, have been deceived to the
point that they have no recourse other than to rise up and be done
with their Masters. Why not? When you have watched all of your
efforts to play the game according to the Rules of the Ruling Class,
only to find out that those Rules are theirs, not ours, then we turn
on our self serving, greed driven Wealthy, shouting that we no longer
look to them for solutions to our needs. And we set them aside and
take what we can from their ill gotten wealth. And the cycle starts
all over again. Years from now, if we still exist, folks will wonder
how it was that such a Golden Opportunity was missed. With such power
in numbers, why didn't the Masses set up a new government that really
was a government of the people, instead of allowing a new Ruling Class
to set up housekeeping, and begin the same old process all over.
There are many little components that go into creating conditions for
a mass upheaval. But if there is no plan, no direction, no
understanding of what is happening, then we will simply be set up to
repeat history. Over and over, and over again.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/30/17, Miriam Vieni <`miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I suppose that what you should be concerned about is a political system
that
doesn't impeach Trump for crimes that he has clearly committed, (and I've
seen at least 10 of them clearly listed), and instead, chooses to mislead
the public with innuendos about Russian interference with his election.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 12:42 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda
Let me see, should I be more concerned with the great influence of Putin
in
America's politics? or should I be more concerned with Donald Trump and
his
billionaire Cabinet? Hmm...
Carl Jarvis
On 8/29/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda
August 29, 2017
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media is touting a big break in
Russia-gate, emails showing an effort by Donald Trump's associates to
construct a building in Moscow. But the evidence actually undercuts the
"scandal,"
reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
There is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by
"confirmation bias" when they want something to be true so badly that
even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist the
revelation to fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington Post,
The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media are
reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald Trump's
team having little or no influence in Moscow.
President Trump discusses his meeting with Russian President Vladimir
Putin at G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017. (Screenshot
from
Whitehouse.gov)
On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article
designed to advance the Russia-gate narrative, stating: "A business
associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real
estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V.
Putin, that he said would help Mr.
Trump win the presidency."
Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying
together the loose and scattered threads of the
Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election
story. Here you have a supposed business deal in which Putin was to
help Trump both make money and get elected. That is surely how a
casual reader or a Russia-gate true believer would read it - and was
meant to read it. But the lede is misleading.
The reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story,
is that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a
Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump's international business
prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the incident
really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no pull in
Russia as Putin's government apparently didn't lift a finger to
salvage this stillborn building project.
But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times' endless
promotion of Russia-gate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep
in the story, after a reprise of the "scandal" and the Times hyping
the significance of Sater's emails from 2015 and early 2016. For good
measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of the Ukraine
crisis.
The Times reported: "Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined
up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank
that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow's efforts
to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater
envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. 'I will get Putin on
this program and we will get Donald elected,' Mr. Sater wrote."
But the idea that Russia acted "to undermine democracy in Ukraine" is
another example of the Times' descent into outright propaganda. The
reality is that the U.S. government supported - and indeed encouraged
- a coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the democratically elected
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even after he offered to move up
scheduled elections so he could be voted out of office through a
democratic process.
After Yanukovych's violent ouster and after the coup regime dispatched
military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly ethnic
Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent their
destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme
Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the Times'
preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow trying
"to undermine democracy in Ukraine."
Empty Boasts
However, leaving aside the Times' propagandistic approach to Ukraine,
there is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater's
boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the
lack of useful connections between Trump's people and the Kremlin. One
of Trump's lawyers, Michael Cohen, even used a general press email
address in a plea for assistance from Putin's personal spokesman.
The New York Times' connect-the-dots graphic showing the Kremlin
sitting atop the White House.
Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts: "There
is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises,
and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In
January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S.
Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had
stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov's direct
email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries."
The Times added: "The project never got government permits or
financing, and died weeks later. . The emails obtained by The Times
make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton's
campaign or the hacking of Democrats' emails."
In other words, the Russia-gate narrative - that somehow Putin foresaw
Trump's election (although almost no one else did) and sought to curry
favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump's pockets with
lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help
Trump win - is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by
them.
Instead of clearing the way for Trump to construct the building and
thus - in Sater's view - boost Trump's election chances, Putin and his
government wouldn't even approve permits or assist in the financing.
And, this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in
Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan
died apparently because Trump would not - or could not - put up
adequate financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump
brand. But one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to
be its Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money
would have been no obstacle.
Along the same lines, there's the relative pittance that RT paid Gen.
Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network's tenth anniversary in Moscow
in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn netting
$33,750 after his speakers' bureau took its cut. Democrats and the
U.S. mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence of
Russia buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House, since
Flynn was both a campaign adviser and briefly national security adviser.
Green Party leader Jill Stein and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn
attending a dinner marking the RT network's 10-year anniversary in
Moscow, December 2015, sitting at the same table as Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
But the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides
Flynn's relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT
negotiated Flynn's rate downward, a fact that The Washington Post
buried deep inside an article on Flynn's Russia-connected payments.
The Post wrote, "RT balked at paying Flynn's original asking price.
'Sorry it took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that
the speaking fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the
moment,' Alina Mikhaleva, RT's head of marketing, wrote a Flynn
associate about a month before the event."
Yet, if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray
their country, it makes no sense that Putin's supposed flunkies at RT
would be quibbling with Flynn over a relatively modest speaking fee;
they'd be falling over themselves to pay him more.
So, what the evidence really indicates is that Putin, like almost
everybody else in the world, didn't anticipate Trump's ascendance to
the White House, at least not in the time frame of these events - and
thus was doing nothing to buy influence with his entourage or boost
his election chances by helping him construct a glittering Trump Tower
in Moscow.
But that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved story
of Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are
downplayed or ignored - all the better to deceive Americans who are
dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media.