Great Unwashed,
Washington Post Issues Correction to Fake News Story:
"Many people in Washington are irate over Wikileaks — not because the email were untrue but because they proved what many had long suspected . . . that Washington is a highly corrupt place full of truly despicable people. For people who make their living on controlling media and information, it was akin to the barbarians breaching the walls of Rome. So the answer is to call for government regulation to combat what will be declared “fake” news or propaganda."
The Washington Post now has a more polished version of how the Russians influenced the presidential election to favor Trump, citing inside information from government intelligence sources that a contact of a contact was briefed on. President Obama took months of worrying about what people would think before finally being driven by conscious to let friends of friends leak that Vladimir Putin was probably opening channels of information to hurt Hillary & Co.
(Really, Don't Look at the Information!) Thanks, Tom.
President Barack Obama, 9/10/13 : "I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue and open-ended action, like Iraq or Afghanistan."
Update: President Obama announces sending 200 US Intel/Special-Forces personnel, presumably wearing flip-flops, to Syria, to arm and direct the moderate-rebels our country is creating-jobs-for there, before Donald Trump takes office and creates some kind of nightmare-scenario.
The President has been forced to reverse the ban on transport of weapons of war into Syria, which the US has not invaded, due to extreme threat or something.
US Foreign Policy will be vastly different under a Trump administration (I guess).
EXXON CEO Rex Tillerson is nominated for Secretary of State.
The 64-year-old Texas oilman, whose friends describe as a staunch conservative, emerged as a Secretary of State contender only last week following a meeting with Trump, when it was speculated that he would consider the offer "due to his sense of patriotic duty and because he is set to retire from the company next year. The son of a local Boy Scouts administrator, Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. He attended the University of Texas, where he studied civil engineering, was a drummer in the Longhorn band and participated in a community service-oriented fraternity. He joined Exxon in 1975 and has spent his entire career at the company. For most of his adult life, he has also been closely involved with the Boy Scouts of America, even occasionally incorporating the Scout Law and Scout Oath into his speeches. Mr. Tillerson played an instrumental role in leading the organization to change its policy to allow gay youth to participate in 2013. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates subsequently moved to lift the organization’s ban on gay adult leaders as Boy Scouts president in 2015. Mr. Tillerson said in a speech after the 2013 decision, “We’re going to serve kids and make the leaders of tomorrow.” (Ruh, Roh...)
Tillerson will sell his $150+ million in XOM shares tax free, courtesy of the tax break that was introduced in 1989 under the administration of President George H.W. Bush.
Tillerson helped shift Exxon’s response to climate change when he took over as CEO in 2006. He embraced a carbon tax as the best potential policy solution and has said climate change is a global problem that warrants action. (but more tellingly...)
In 2011, Mr. Tillerson struck a deal giving Exxon access to prized Arctic resources in Russia as well as allowing Russia’s state oil company, OAO Rosneft, to invest in Exxon concessions all over the world. But it was subsequently blocked by sanctions on Russia that the U.S. and its allies imposed two years ago after the country’s invasion of Crimea and conflicts with Ukraine. As such, many have speculated that under his regime, the State Department may quietly drop any existing sanctions against Russia.
Finally, as NBC also adds, Tillerson's deputy secretary of state for day-to-day management of the department will be former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.
To summarize: a cabinet run by Wall Street and big oil (with a neocon backstop), and a handful of veteran generals thrown in.
The Senate passes the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" (because Fake-News is from Russia, and has to be countered by our government at every turn. It will take the whole government, and every loyal-citizen, some of them paid, to ferret out the many foreign-influenced agents within our country, but we will all be safer for their efforts.)
Has Liberty Departed from America?
Paul Craig Roberts introduces a book, a scholarly work from a UT Political Science Professor, Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America.
The book looks at State Crimes Against Democracy, "SCAD", exploring the JFK assassination and 9/11 WTC attacks among others.
It contains the CIA memo, laying out the "Conspiracy-Theory" tag, to mark people with different analysis to the official government story as weird-kids, to be shunned.
That worked pretty well. Somehow that memo never got destroyed, like it said to do to it.
A critical part of these crime against democracy is to have the explanation completely ready by the afternoon of the shock, and to reject any other interpretations or considerations as weird-tinfoil-hat stuff. Thanks Eleni.
The EU wants all of the whipping boys and whipped refugees from wars-for-oil in the Mideast to be stuck in Greece. Germany suddenly has that 100,000 refugees to push back out the still-open-door, so that Angela Merkel might be re-elected, for instance. According to the once-upon-a-time Dublin Agreement, asylum seekers must register in the first EU state the set foot upon. Other states can send them back to that one. That state seems to be Greece for a ot of these refugees from wars. That was suspended in 2011, for obvious reasons. Greece was getting a massive flood of war, famine and political-repression refugees. Everybody else was going to pitch-in.
Not now. Everybody gets sent back to Greece, starting next spring, unless they first set foot in Italy, of course...
German MPs (rightly) say that Germans never agreed to Greek "bailout" without IMF participation, which was always known to shift massive debt-burden onto German citizens. German lawmakers may prevent German (still good credit) participation in this most recent financial-capitalist search for more revenue-flows-from-taxpayers. The Greeks are as bled-dry as they can be by now.
Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, and still sits on over a third of the island nation and closer to half of the coastline. US/NATO really sides with Turkey in this outrage, but can only support the status quo, not more invasion, due to other political structures. Cyprus won't get help from "guarantor" UK. "Guarantor" Greece is generally financially exhausted, and "guarantor" Turkey is the invader, so what can be done to help Cyprus?
Good question, not answered here. Greece and Russia want to help. The EU wants this to be over. Turkey wants more, and the UK wants to keep it's good military bases, but is probably open to huge bribes of a meaningful sort. Thanks Eleni (in Athens).
Indian farmers briefly sell tomatoes for 4 cents per kilo, less than the cost of transport, before just dumping them on roads for cars and trucks to run over. There is no money in India. This was supposed to be a good year for farmers. It was before 88% of Indian cash disappeared one night.
Manus Island is a holding camp for unwanted refugees seeking to go to Australia. It's a strange twilight zone of despair, where Papua/New Guinean islanders resent these foreigners thrust onto their land, while profits flow elsewhere, and violence between islanders and prisoners, and within the prison population kills and maims. 80% of these men are clinically depressed. They are reduced to political tools, and they know it. Australia will never let them set foot there. The US will probably accept a few someday, the ones proven most harmless, and maybe still able to work. The UN says this is illegal, but only if it goes on and on and on.
This is another of the stories we keep seeing about human organ trafficking from war zones, using parts of refugee's bodies and dumping the rest of the body in a pit. Children's kidneys are the best business proposition. Children's bodies in mass graves are often found with surgical incisions where the kidneys once were. Israel is big in this business, still, nothing new...
As the Mediterranean becomes more and more of a critical conflict area, the US is going to set up a naval and airbase in Haifa, Israel. (Gotta' keep supporting Israel, ya'know?)
Dirty Laundry
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