Saturday, May 20, 2017

The Gaping Holes of Russia-Gate



Consortiumnews.com
MAY 20, 2017


The real reason he fired Comey, and why we should be more afraid of the Deep State than Trump;

Between Russia-gate and President Trump’s potential impeachment, Washington is blending the thrill of McCarthyism and the excitement of Watergate, as ex-U.S. intelligence officials Ray McGovern and William Binney explain.

By Ray McGovern and William Binney

Official Washington got to relive the excitement of Watergate in a “gotcha” moment after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. There were fond recollections of how righteous the major newspapers felt when condemning President Nixon over his “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Former FBI Director James Comey

But the overriding question from “this Russia thing, with Trump and Russia” — as President Trump calls it — is whether there is any there there. The President labeled it a “made-up story” and, by all appearances from what is known at this time, he is mostly correct.

A few days before Comey’s firing, the FBI Director reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear for supposedly “interfering” with last year’s election to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. And so the firing allowed the Watergate-recalling news outlets to trot out the old trope that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.”
But can that argument bear close scrutiny, or is it the “phony narrative” that Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas claims it to be? Cornyn quipped that, if impeding the investigation was Trump’s aim, “This strikes me as a lousy way to do it. All it does is heighten the attention given to the issue.”
Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm toward investigating actual, provable crimes related to “Russia-gate” — like the flood of sensitive national security leaks, such as the highly sensitive intercepted communications used to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn.....[READ MORE]




Monday, April 10, 2017

The Situation In Syria Is NOT Complicated — Here’s What You Need To Know

Caitlin Johnstone, April 10, 2017


“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”


The popular quote above has at times been attributed to Henry Ford, though it’s most likely a paraphrase of his actual words authored by Congressman Charles G. Binderup in 1938. In any case, it points to the self-evident fact that our economic system is so vastly complex that there are multiple contradictory schools of thought on how it works and how best to approach it. It’s so vastly complex that the few people who understand it are able to manipulate it to their advantage, and to the disadvantage of the overwhelming majority of people who don’t. There are a lot of shadows in all that complexity for the mechanisms of deception and exploitation to hide, and that’s exactly what happens; people get ripped off by a system they don’t understand....


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Thursday, April 6, 2017

Beneath All This Surveillance Controversy Is The Unexamined Notion Of American Supremacy


Caitlin Johnstone/Newslogue/April 7, 2017



"This is all made possible by the unquestioned notion that it’s both acceptable and necessary to surveil other countries, even at the expense of American democracy. This notion of American supremacy, that it’s okay for America to do stuff like this but not other countries, really needs to be examined because it’s hurting Americans worst of all."

Another Dangerous Rush to Judgement in Syria


ConsortiumNews/April 5, 2017

"With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths."

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. 

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The Sleazy Origins of Russia-Gate

ConsortiumNews.com / March 29, 2017

By Robert Parry



"An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp’s contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it was Hillary Clinton’s." READ MORE


Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazonand barnesandnoble.com).




Tuesday, March 28, 2017


Dana Schutz's painting in the Whitney Museum Biennial, is based on a 1955 photo of 14-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated body, published in JetMagazine and credited with inspiring support for the civil rights movement. Till, an African-American from Chicago, was killed in Mississippi by two white men who were acquitted, although later admitted to the crime. In 2008, at age 82, the woman who had accused him of making advances recanted her story.


What the current art world controversy around Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till tells me, is that a preponderance of white artists, who think of themselves as liberal, have no awareness of their (overused term alert!) privilege and unconscious racism. Exclaiming in droves on Facebook and elsewhere that they know better how black people should respond, their righteous arrogance is mind-boggling—perhaps not a surprise to blacks, but to me, because these are people I know.  

This also happened a couple of years ago when issues about Kara Walker came up on my blog, with comments on Facebook. Walker, a black artist whose work is collected primarily by whites, often features blacks being abused by whites, as well as Jim Crow imagery, which many blacks find degrading. But when black artists and academics expressed this on my FB page, white artists had no qualms about telling them they were “ignorant” and “anti-art.” One even said that Michele Wallace, who had written a negative essay about Walker, “didn’t understand art”— obviously unaware that Wallace is the daughter of venerable black artist Faith Ringgold.

Now the black activists protesting the Schutz painting are being called “poseurs” and “panic merchants,” “a niche group” whose responses are “ridiculous” “nit-wit shit,” and “about some people assuming they have the exclusive right to certain aspects of American history.”

The most frequent cry from whites is that of “censorship”— a term I associate with attempts of authoritarian governments to control the masses, rather than the struggle of the downtrodden to keep their experience from being co-opted and mischaracterized by their oppressors.  One art editor on FB called it a “whiff of the Cultural Revolution,” while a socialist columnist, addressing the “foul attempt to censor and suppress” the painting, wrote, “The arguments being used are worthy of the Nazi officials who banned Jewish artists from playing or conducting classical music on the grounds of their ‘un-German’ spirit” – to which a commenter replied, “Bringing up Nazis in this issue is like a Nazi painting a picture of the camps and blaming the Jews for being too sensitive.”

I think of a friend who once worked in a dentist’s office that was decorated with pastoral prints. One showed a group of good ol' boys sitting under a tree, and hanging from one of the branches, barely perceptible, was a noose. The white patients who crowded the office never noticed it, nor did the white dentist who chose it, but it gave my black friend chills. At her request, the dentist took it down. Censorship? Political correctness? No, simply consideration for his employee. And a reminder that not only may we not see things as others do, we might not see them at all.

I once asked a white collector why he bought a Kara Walker work on paper. “I liked the way it was drawn,” he said. And the imagery? “Oh, I didn’t care about that.”  

Another white artist friend calls the controversy “trivial” because, he says, it has nothing to do with the day-to-day struggle of poor blacks. In fact, a number of white artists were maintaining that art is unimportant in the scheme of life, or in the face of our current political miasma—a curious stance for those who have devoted their lives to it. But when the protestors call for the destruction of the painting, they turn around and argue for its intrinsic value as if it were a sacred object.

While it’s true that many economically disadvantaged blacks, survival on their minds, may never know about this issue and, if they did, might not care what happens at the Whitney, the arts are important in shaping the culture and the perceptions of those who make decisions about our lives. Do we hold our judgment and listen? Or continue to send the message that the white establishment couldn't care less?

Beyond the question of the subject matter, a big problem with Open Casket, as Aruna D’Souza and Ann Landi have also pointed out, is that it’s not a great painting, and one wonders if the result would have been different if it were. Instead Open Casket is a Dana Schutz before anything else, with the result that it trivializes and makes a decorative cartoon of a horrific event. As one commenter said, “I'm not sure that 'rubber stamping' a style on a loaded subject is a good strategy for a successful painting”.

Adding insult to injury is Schutz’s statement that she was empathizing as a mother, if not a black mother, which indicates she must have missed the conversation around the distinction between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter,” at the top of the news the last several years.

If I were King of the Whitney, I’d leave the painting up and make the dialogue around it part of the exhibition, posting the dissenting remarks and holding symposia with an eye to giving black voices a platform—because, in the end, the conversation is much more consequential than the painting.





Sunday, March 19, 2017

The Scariest Thing About Trump Is That We’ve Still Got No Way Of Replacing Him In 2020





Caitlin Johnstone
March 20, 2017

"It’s time to start turning around and facing your captors, progressives. The ruling elites of your party don’t fear Trump, they fear you. They fear you discovering your true power and coming together to demand that they start working for you instead of the oligarchs. A true progressive takeover of American politics would transform the entire world into something sane and beautiful and bring health and harmony to all of humanity. We can have this. There are people whose job it is to keep you from seeing this, but we can. Stop placing your trust in the ruling Democratic elites who’ve been exploiting your for money and votes, stop listening to their corporate media mouthpieces who get paid millions of dollars a year to lie to you, and stop accepting anything other than complete and total loyalty to you and your wellbeing from the people who have the great privilege of governing your nation."

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