Saturday, May 07, 2016
Thursday, May 05, 2016
Screwing You
Donald Trump Is What Happens When You Screw the Middle Class
May 4, 2016
Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s non-endorsement of Donald Trump last week was about a lot more than resolving the 2016 GOP nomination.
“I particularly want to commend Donald Trump,” said Pence, “who I think has given voice to the frustration of millions of working Americans with the lack of progress in Washington D.C. and I am also particularly grateful that Donald Trump has taken a strong stand for Hoosier jobs when we saw jobs in the Carrier Company abruptly announce leaving Indiana, not for another state, but for Mexico.”
Taken along with Senator Bernie Sanders win over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Indiana Tuesday night, and Main Street is roaring back against Congress’s bi-partisan embrace of global free trade that for decades has put multinational corporate profits over the well being of their own constituents.
For decades now, irrespective of which political party was in power, this bi-partisan agreement molded our nation to fit the demands of globalization, which we were told was powered by bareknuckled competition between the world’s leading nations. It was just a matter of basic survival, went the argument. Let free and unfettered capital sail around the earth, looking for the most profitable place to land and watch the wave of wealth and wellbeing swell to embrace all of humanity, the boosters promised. To stand in its way would be to impede its genius.
This was a mega-trend that was as undeniably real as gravity itself, said the promoters like Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. If we chose to ignore it, we would be banished from prosperity, left cold and naked, in a sort of continent-wide fetal position. “Get with it, or be condemned to a world of want and deprivation,” went the free-trade mantra.
So it was that a nation that birthed itself into being in the 18th century by revolting against the tyranny of the British Empire would, three centuries later, willingly surrender its sovereignty to World Trade Organization tribunals, so as to insure our big corporations got their global market share, for surely their fate was ours.
For all these years, we have dutifully passed one free-trade bill after another, as our leaders cracked the whip and got paid-off to keep us in line. We chased an era of prosperity and abundance that was always just around the corner. We bet the farm on a multilateral arrangement that improved the profitability of our multinationals at the expense of the survival of our Main Streets, reckoning that we would prosper longer term as these corporations played for global domination.
Would we not all be winners?
To buy into this we would have to ignore the increasing wealth concentration at the top, the erosion of benefits, and our own growing household debt that papered over the deflation of our wages. We were told that the closing of tens of thousands of our factories was just a necessary sacrifice at the altar of a brighter tomorrow. Yes, went this logic, there would be local pain and suffering, but we would prosper in the aggregate and democracy would flourish.
And so now, all these years after NAFTA, and an alphabet soup of subsequent trade deals, our biggest corporations are global players. They have no national loyalty, having bought off the elites of both political parties, and have mastered ways to reduce their U.S. tax liability, shifting it back to America’s Main Streets, which are increasingly falling into disrepair.
In the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street meltdown, Washington spent billions of taxpayers dollars to bail out the multi-national car industry, branded as “Detroit,” while it allowed the actual City of Detroit, which had launched the industry, to fall into bankruptcy. Tomorrow has come in a 21st century America, where once-mighty industrial cities like Flint are now sad shadows of their former selves, where the public water is not fit to drink.
But this mad rush for globalization, and reckless lust for profits above all else, did not just hollow out much of our urban base, it led to the massive environmental contamination of places like China, which global capital decided should become the world’s factory.
The most recent comprehensive air-quality mapping done by Berkeley Earth, a scientific research nonprofit, documents that China’s air pollution is so toxic that it is responsible for 4,000 deaths a day —roughly 17 percent of the nation’s mortality rate.
In 2014, Chinese officials disclosed that close to two‐thirds of their sub‐surface waters were contaminated. In 2011, testing data documented that more than half of the nation’s lakes and reservoirs were so contaminated that their water was unsuitable for human consumption. Roughly half of all Chinese living in rural communities have no access to potable water.
Over the last 50 years, China lost almost a quarter of its freshwater swamplands and more than half of its coastal wetlands. This loss of water storage and recharge capacity and the wholesale short‐circuiting of the natural water cycle has increased the incidence of catastrophic flooding and chemical contamination.
Much of this industrial expansion in China, and in so-called emerging-market nations, was funded with hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate and public debt. Last year, the IMF warned that as a consequence, a $18 trillion debt bubble was now looming on the horizon, no doubt also a consequence of the Federal Reserve’s years of zero percent interest rates, meant to re-float Wall Street.
What did the world get for all that borrowing? 553 million tons in excess global steel making capacity, equal to the weight of 11,000 Montana class battleships. So much for the ability of that all-knowing and unfettered capital to set our collective agenda.
Decades into this free-market global free-for-all, what we have is a planet worse for the wear, with grotesque wealth inequality and increasing geopolitical insecurity that has produced millions of displaced persons and refugees.
According to a 2015 report from Oxfam.
On this side of the 21st century, it looks like global free trade was nothing more than a pyramid scheme retread.
Robert Hennelly is an award-winning investigative journalist, broadcast and print reporter with more than 30 years of experience covering federal, state and local politics, public policy, the environment, public utilities, land use, law enforcement and national security.
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Guccfied
ROMANIAN HACKER GUCCIFER - "I BREACHED CLINTON SERVER, IT WAS EASY"
Romanian hacker 'Guccifer' says it was 'easy' to infiltrate Hillary Clinton's personal emails from his small village
A Romanian hacker known as 'Guccifer,' who posted unofficial emails sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Internet, has revealed that he 'easily' penetrated the Democratic frontrunner's emails and explained how.
In jailhouse interviews with Fox News from where he’s being held on cyber-crime charges in Alexandria, Virginia, Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, told the media outlet that it was simple for him to figure out how to break into Clinton's personal email server, and he did it twice in 2013.
'For me, it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody,' he bragged to the news outlet.
Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar (above), 44, was extradited to the U.S. from Romania last month - he accused of cyber crimes - he himself claims he has hacked into Hillary Clinton’s email
He said he first went into journalist and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s email account by doing extensive research on him and then correctly guessing his security question.
He said Blumenthal's emails were 'interesting' and he was talking about 'the Middle East and what they were doing there.' It's unclear who he was talking to.
Lazar said he then would see emails from political operatives, such as Clinton, and was able to trace their IP addresses and use ‘IP scanner' software to see if ports were open and email addresses 'alive.'
He claims he compromised Clinton’s emails 'like twice' and said the contents 'were not interesting.'
'I was not paying attention. For me, it was not like the Hillary Clinton server, it was like an email server she and others were using with political voting stuff,' he said.
Lazar, who goes by the cyber handle ‘Guccifer' says it was 'easy' for him to break into Clinton's personal email but that her emails weren't 'interesting'
Fox News said it could not independently confirm Lazar’s claim, but spoke to security experts who said it seems plausible.
'This sounds like the classic attack of the late 1990s. A smart individual who knows the tools and the technology and is looking for glaring weaknesses in Internet-connected devices,’ Bob Gourley, a former chief technology officer (CTO) for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said.
Lazar says he is self trained and did most of his hacking from his small village in Romania.
'Cybersecurity expert Morgan Wright told the outlet, 'The Blumenthal account gave [Lazar] a road map to get to the Clinton server. You get a foothold in one system. You get intelligence from that system, and then you start to move.'
Clinton and her camp deny that her personal email server was compromised by any foreign hackers
Lazar's victims aren't named in his nine-count indictment, but they reportedly include Colin Powell, Sydney Blumenthal and a Bush family member
Hillary Clinton answers questions on her email server in April But Gourley also warned that ‘Unfortunately, in this community, a lot people make up stories and it’s hard to tell what's really true until you get into the forensics information and get hard facts.'
For her part, Clinton denies her personal email server had been compromised by foreign hackers, saying ‘No, not at all' when asked by MSNBC.
'There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell,' Clinton's national press secretary, Brian Fallon, told NBC News. 'In addition to the fact that he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton's server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims.’
He added that her server shows no trace of foreign hacking.
Clinton’s private server contained nearly 2,200 emails containing information now deemed classified, and another 22 at the 'Top Secret' level.
The government has publicly posted about 45,000 pages, with roughly 7600 still left to be released at the end of February, according to NBC News.
Lazar is also accused of hacking into the personal accounts of Colin Powell and a Bush family member, two former U.S. presidents, a former U.S. Cabinet member, a former member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former presidential advisor.
He had pleaded not guilty to nine counts of hacking and his trial is set in the Eastern District of Virginia for September 12.
A Bad Tuesday for The Neocons
Trump Wins Indiana and Cruz Drops Out, While Sanders Scores Upset Win Against Clinton
May 3, 2016
Donald Trump swept away the final obstacles to the 2016 Republican nomination in Indiana on Tuesday, trouncing Ted Cruz in a one-on-one contest that the “stop Trump” movement saw as their last chance to keep Trump from the presidential nomination.
Cruz, who finished double-digits behindTrump, suspended his presidential campaign, telling stunned supporters in Indianapolis that his path to the nomination had been “ foreclosed," but pledged to continue his crusade against "the tyranny of political correctness at home."
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders upset Hillary Clinton, beating her 53 percent to 47 percent. That gives Sanders the showing he needs to keep campaigning, although his victory does not alter the dynamics of that party’s nominating contest where Clinton is ahead. That’s because they will proportionately split Indiana’s 92 delegates, moving Clinton closer to the nomination while keeping Sanders from substantially gaining on her. (He needed to get 65 percent of the vote in Indiana and every remaining state to do that.)
Trump the Nominee
But the night’s biggest news was on the GOP side, where Trump, who is still 200-plus delegates short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination, now has a clear path to that threshold—especially as Cruz has suspended his campaign and nine states have yet to vote. Before Tuesday's vote, polls found that Trump was far ahead of Cruz in delegate-rich California.
The Republican National Committee chairman called Trump the "presumptive nominee" and called for all Republicans to unite behind him. While some Republicans could still try to deny him the nomination at their convention in Cleveland, that scenario becomes much harder as he keeps winning state after state. The only other candidate still in the race, John Katich has only won his home state.
Trump topped 50 percent of the vote in Indiana, garnering its 57 Republican delegates. On the Democratic side, the state held an open primary, which allows independents to vote–unlike the recent New York State primary. That factor undeniably helped Sanders score a symbolic upset, and he will keep making the case the party’s Democratic contest is still in play—even if the delegate math is not in his favor. Speaking at a Kentucky rally on Tuesday, Sanders said, “If we have large voter turnout, we win.”
The Surprising Republican Finish
Like the finish line flag at the state’s famous speedways, Indiana’s vote on Tuesday signaled the end of the nominating season for the Republican Party. The GOP presented 17 candidates, including governors, U.S. senators and the son and brother of a past president. For a party that bragged about its deep talent pool and a nominating process designed to boost establishment insiders—whether ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush or current Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—it now is facing a nominee whose profile and stature only seemed to grow as its establishment’s power has withered and shrunk.
Time will tell if the 2016 race marks the end of the Republican Party as it’s been known in recent decades. But one thing is clear, the party of Trump is not the same party of the Bushes and even the last entertainer to be nominated—Ronald Reagan. Whether or not Trump’s unlikely coalition of less-educated and older white voters, women who do not mind his misogyny, and others drawn to his strongman posturing can win nationwide in the fall remains to be seen.
Only 30 percent of the expected November electorate took part in this year’s nominating contests, according to the Pew Research Center. But Trump’s ability to reach untraditional voters has introduced an unpredictable element into the General Election campaign.
Cruz’s Sudden Surprising Collapse
Indiana’s primary vote brought the race to an unexpectedly hasty conclusion. It ended Cruz’s presidential prospects in 2016, thwarted the Stop-Trump forces that lined up behind him, further marginalized John Kasich—the only other remaining GOP candidate—and forced the party to realize that their top political talent was badly beaten by an outsider who their establishment had derided and dismissed, yet apparently understands their base better than they do.
The Indiana race was hard-fought by Cruz, but everything he tried either flopped or was too little too late. He entered the state with a non-compete agreement with Kasich, who did not campaign there—a neighboring state—because Cruz was ahead of him in the polls. Cruz then announced he would pick former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his running mate—who dutifully campaigned with him, and accidentally fell from a stage after she introduced him and he did not immediately come over to help her.
For his part, Trump fired back, repeatedly calling Cruz “lyin' Ted” and a tool of the GOP establishment (even as he is arguably the most reviled Republican senator), and referring to a vague report in the National Enquirer that Cruz’s father was seen in Dallas with President John F. Kennedy’s killer shortly before the assassination.
Cruz let loose on Trump Tuesday, telling reporters “what I really think of Donald Trump.” He called Trump “a pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” “terrified by strong women,” “a narcissist,” and a “serial philanderer” who had venereal diseases.
All of this would be as ludicrous as it is entertaining in a supermarket tabloid way—were it not for the fact that Trump is now a step closer to the presidency. But after Indiana, Trump has a clear path to the 2016 presidential nomination and it appears unlikely there will be a contested convention or a third-party run.
Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).
Monday, May 02, 2016
Hillary Clinton pulled in a whopping $21.7 million in speaking fees for a two-year period. Of this amount, $3,260,000 for 14 speeches delivered directly to financial-sector interests, including Goldman, which remitted $675,000 for three
Keeping Wall Street Speeches Secret Speaks Volumes About Hillary Clinton
It’s been roughly three months since Hillary Clinton promised, during her Feb. 4 debate with Bernie Sanders on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, to “look into” releasing the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment houses.
If you’re a stickler for details and would like to know precisely how long Clinton has delayed on fulfilling her pledge or exactly how much cash she has raked in for her speaking gigs and from whom, you don’t have to spend hours scouring the Internet. You can simply log onto two sites created by a 40-year-old Sanders supporter and web developer named Jed McChesney of Olathe, Kan.
The first site— iwilllookintoit.com—is a computerized digital clock that ticks off the elapsed time in bold red print, listing the number of days, hours and seconds. The other offers a searchable chart, published at citizenuprising.com, of 91 paid, private talks given by the Democratic front-runner from April 2013 to March 2015.
All told, according to McChesney’s meticulous research, Clinton pulled in a whopping $21.7 million in speaking fees for the two-year period. Of this amount, $3,260,000 came from 14 speeches delivered directly to financial-sector interests, including Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and, above all, Goldman, which remitted a tidy $675,000 for no less than three chin-wags.
“I was watching the debate … when she said she would look into [releasing the speeches],” McChesney told me in an interview I conducted with him last week via email, as his phone was down as a result of a north Kansas thunderstorm. “I just knew it was a complete blow-off answer.
“I find it to be completely disqualifying,” he continued, regarding Clinton’s presidential bid. “It says a lot about our system when such brazen bribery is wholly accepted. So about … an hour or so after the debate, it just hit me to start a clock to hold her accountable.”
In terms of web traffic, the venture was an immediate success. On Feb. 19, after the Sanders campaign got wind of McChesney’s clock and tweeted out the URL to some 1.5 million followers, the website was featured on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show. Within 20 minutes, the site drew 160,000 visitors, causing it to crash and forcing McChesney to switch to a larger server. Since then, he estimates, the page views have numbered in the millions.
Holding Clinton accountable, however, has proven elusive. Like countless rank-and-file Bernie backers across the country, McChesney is irate and disappointed—but by no means surprised—that she continues to keep a lid on her talks. “This wouldn’t be acceptable behavior in a banana republic,” he wrote me, “and the fact that the media and Democrats turn a blind eye is astounding.”
It may indeed be too late for accountability or, for that matter, to derail Clinton’s march to the Democratic nomination. But it’s never too late to tell the truth. The fact is that instead of producing the transcripts, Clinton and her surrogates have unleashed a cascade of excuses, obfuscations, false equivalents and evasions to justify her intransigence.
I lack McChesney’s computer and math skills, but I know how to spot slipshod arguments when I see them. To date, the Clinton camp has failed to put forward a single convincing defense of its refusal to release the Wall Street speeches, much less of the wisdom of delivering the speeches in the first place. And as the minutes and seconds on McChesney’s clock continue to tick away, the defenses have only grown more dubious.
Among the first excuses was one floated not by Clinton herself but by reporter Rachel Stockman, the daughter of Reagan-era budget director David Stockman. In a post published on the New York website LawNewz.com just one week after Clinton made her look-into-it pledge, Stockman quoted financial “industry insiders”who said that high-profile corporate speakers like Clinton are often barred from revealing the content of their speeches by nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements.
If accurate, the nondisclosure defense would mean “game over” for anyone seeking transparency from Clinton. Trouble is, Clinton has never voiced support for the defense, and for good reason: It isn’t viable.
Even before Clinton uttered her look-into-it promise, word had leaked that her standard speaking appearance contracts, negotiated by the prestigious Harry Walker Agency, include provisions that prohibit all press coverage of her talks, as well as audio- or videotaping. However, other typical provisions, some of which were reproduced in a Feb. 7 BuzzFeed article, require that stenographic transcripts be made and that Clinton be accorded sole ownership and control of the transcripts. The decision to release the speeches apparently is hers and hers alone.
Much the same can be said of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s initial claim, made in a televised February town hall moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that in 2013, when she began her speaking tour after resigning as secretary of state, she “didn’t know” she would be running for president in 2016. Because she had no firm ambitions for high office, she told Cooper, she saw no conflicts in accepting whatever Goldman and the other firms offered to pay her.
While it’s true that Clinton did not formally announce her candidacy until April 2015—after the long line of engagements chronicled by McChesney had ended—she had been publicly mulling a second presidential run as long as two years earlier.
As a Yale-educated lawyer, a skilled litigator and polished politician, surely she knew that her Wall Street confabs would at a minimum create the appearance of impropriety if she once again threw her hat in the ring. Any contention to the contrary is the stuff of “Saturday Night Live” comedy that can’t pass the straight-face test.
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Equally unpersuasive are Clinton’s three other basic excuses: that she did nothing more than other former high-ranking government officials have done in signing lucrative speaking deals; that she should be held to the same standard as other presidential candidates and will release her speech transcripts only when they do; and that there is no “quid pro quo” proof she ever has been influenced by Wall Street money.
The first claim is eerily reminiscent of the smokescreen Clinton concocted in defense of her use of a private email server during her stint as secretary of state—namely, that her immediate predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, also conducted official business by means of private email.
Neither Powell nor Rice, however, went so far as to set up their own personal Internet systems in their homes, free from government oversight and beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. Additionally, while Powell, Rice and other former officials may have cashed in on the motivational speaking gravy train, they’re not running for president. Clinton is. Any claim of equivalence rings hollow.
False equivalence also undermines Clinton’s plea that she be held to the same standard as other candidates. Sanders, her only remaining Democratic rival, has no Wall Street speeches to divulge. And Donald Trump, her narcissistic, racist and misogynist GOP counterpart, offers no standards she should seek to emulate under any circumstances.
As the editorial board of The New York Times—normally, a strong Clinton ally—admonished in an op-ed published Feb. 25: “Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public — not the candidate — who decides how much disclosure is enough. By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs. Clinton plays into the hands of those who say she’s not trustworthy and makes her own rules.”
But of all the excuses Clinton and her acolytes have concocted, none approaches her “quid pro quo” contention for sheer chutzpah and duplicity. The stunted idea that the only form of political corruption lies in outright quid-pro-quo bribery—campaign contributions in exchange for votes or executive actions—lies at the heart of the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United decision, which gutted existing campaign finance law and paved the way for the corrosive emergence of super PACs.
In reality, of course, political corruption extends beyond the crass exchange of money for votes and favors. It embraces, as Harvard Law School professor and erstwhile presidential hopeful Lawrence Lessig has instructed, “an economy of influence that leads any sane soul to the fair belief that private influence has affected public policy.”
Even if there is no smoking quid-pro-quo gun in Hillary’s history, there is plenty to suggest Lessig’s economy of influence. From her lackluster record in the Senate as an advocate of the poor and middle class to her intervention in 2009 as secretary of state to stave off criminal prosecution of the Swiss banking giant UBS, the fundraising shenanigans of her family foundation that has netted $2 billion in donations from American corporations and foreign governments, and the millions raised by her super PACs in the current election cycle, Clinton has fostered the widespread perception that she’s become part of the oligarchy that is destroying American democracy.
Producing the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches could transform that perception into certainty. It’s easy to understand, therefore, why Clinton is stalling on her look-into-it promise.
Still, the longer Clinton waits, the greater the risk she incurs of permanently alienating a critical mass of Sanders voters, including McChesney, whose backing she will sorely need as November approaches. As McChesney put it in our interview, “If she can’t show her real constituents simply what she said … she will never get my vote. Ever.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
Trump’s Anti-Neocon Foreign Policy——-In Line With Ike, Nixon And Reagan
Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America.
The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back.
Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured by his five-state sweep Tuesday, confirms it, as does his foreign policy address on Wednesday.
Two minutes into his speech before the Center for the National Interest, Trump declared that the “major and overriding theme” of his administration will be — “America first.” Right down the smokestack!
Gutsy and brazen it was to use that phrase, considering the demonization of the great anti-war movement of 1940-41, which was backed by the young patriots John F. Kennedy and his brother Joe, Gerald Ford and Sargent Shriver, and President Hoover and Alice Roosevelt.
Whether the issue is a trade, immigration or foreign policy, says Trump, “we are putting the American people first again.” U.S. policy will be dictated by U.S. national interests.
By what he castigated, and what he promised, Trump is repudiating both the fruits of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy and the legacy of Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism.
When Ronald Reagan went home, says Trump, “our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which ended in one foreign policy disaster after another.”
He lists the results of 15 years of Bush-Obama wars in the Middle East: civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans killed, trillions of dollars lost, a vacuum created that ISIS has filled.
Is he wrong here? How have all of these wars availed us? Where is the “New World Order” of which Bush I rhapsodized at the U.N.?
Can anyone argue that our interventions to overthrow regimes and erect democratic states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen have succeeded and been worth the price we have paid in blood and treasure, and the devastation we have left in our wake?
George W. Bush declared that America’s goal would become “to end tyranny in our world.” An utterly utopian delusion, to which Trump retorts by recalling John Quincy Adams’ views on America: “She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
To the neocons’ worldwide crusade for democracy, Trump’s retort is that it was always a “dangerous idea” to think “we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming Western democracies.”
We are “overextended,” he declared, “We must rebuild our military.” Our NATO allies have been freeloading for half a century. NAFTA was a lousy deal. In running up $4 trillion in trade surpluses since Bush I, the Chinese have been eating our lunch.
This may be the rankest heresy to America’s elites, but Trump outlines a foreign policy past generations would have recognized as common sense: Look out for your own country and your own people first.
Instead of calling President Putin names, Trump says he would talk to the Russians to “end the cycle of hostility,” if he can.
“Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave,” sputtered Sen. Lindsey Graham, who quit the race to avoid a thrashing by the Donald in his home state of South Carolina.
But this writer served in Reagan’s White House, and the Gipper was always seeking a way to get the Russians to negotiate. He leapt at the chance for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik.
“Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war,” says Trump, “unlike other candidates, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.”
Is that not an old and good Republican tradition?
Dwight Eisenhower ended the war in Korea and kept us out of any other. Richard Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, negotiated arms agreements with Moscow, and made a historic journey to open up Mao’s China.
Reagan used force three times in eight years. He put Marines in Lebanon, liberated Grenada and sent FB-111s over Tripoli to pay Col. Gadhafi back for bombing a Berlin discotheque full of U.S. troops.
Reagan later believed putting those Marines in Lebanon, where 241 were massacred, to be the worst mistake of his presidency.
Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation-building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition. It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East.
The New York Times headline declared that Trump’s speech was full of “Paradoxes,” adding, “Calls to Fortify Military and to Use It Less.”
But isn’t that what Reagan did? Conduct the greatest military buildup since Ike, then, from a position of strength, negotiate with Moscow a radical reduction in nuclear arms?
“We’re getting out of the nation-building business,” says Trump.
“The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” No more surrenders of sovereignty on the altars of “globalism.”
Is that not a definition of a patriotism that too many among our arrogant elites believe belongs to yesterday?
Sunday, May 01, 2016
Iraq is a Failed State, a Failed Government, a Failed Nation: Mission Accomplished
CHAOS:
BIDEN ON THE SCENE:
1991, CORRECT 1991- THE LIES:
FINAL WORD:
BIDEN ON THE SCENE:
1991, CORRECT 1991- THE LIES:
FINAL WORD:
Spotlight: Outcome in Iraq would have been different had Hillary Clinton, others voted against war: UK expert
by Larry Neild
LONDON, April 26 (Xinhua) -- A leading British academic has said that the outcome may have been different if Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton and other U.S. politicians had voted against an invasion of Iraq.
“Things would have turned out differently in the Middle East if the decision to go into Iraq had not been made," Paul Rogers, professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in Northern England, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Rogers, who is also a global security consultant to the Oxford Research Group, was referring to the U.S. presidential hopeful's remarks last Thursday saying that voting for U.S. troops to go into Iraq was the biggest mistake she has made.
All started with former U.S. President George W. Bush’s "Axis of Evil" speech in 2002, which pointed a finger of blame at former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks, Rogers said.
The overthrow of Saddam may have seemed a good idea at the time, but it also unleashed a new reign of terror, he added.
The Islamic State (IS) extremist group, now one of the biggest threats to world peace, may never had emerged at all, Rogers said.
"Once there was the occupation of Iraq, it made it easier for Islamic extremists. To them it was proof that Islam itself was under attack," he said. “If we had not had that, we would not have had the development of IS, which arose because of the occupation of the country."
There had been, he said, a lot of support for action in Afghanistan, but when this was extended to Iraq things were different, even though Italy backed the campaign along with Britain’s Tony Blair.
Although the losses among the U.S. military in Iraq were less than those in Vietnam, it did not sit comfortably with a lot of Americans, said Rogers. “It became a running sore in the States."
In the campaign that led to the election of President Barack Obama, Clinton was his main rival for the Democratic candidacy. Obama and his team, said Rogers, recognized the mood of the people.
However, despite Clinton’s original support for the Iraq invasion, Rogers does not think the issue will harm her chances of winning the Democratic nomination and possibly the presidency.
Things have moved on and Clinton, as a seasoned politician, is aware of what the future may have in store, he said.
Another British expert echoed Rogers' words. Dr. Michael Hopkins, a senior lecturer in American Foreign Policy at the University of Liverpool, believes that Clinton’s past vote for the Iraq invasion will not return to haunt her during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Clinton was seen as one of the hawks at the time, said Hopkins. She was one of the 29 Democrat senators voting with the Republicans to sanction the invasion. While only one Republican senator voted no, a total of 21 Democrats voiced their opposition. The vote gave President Bush the authorization he needed to use military force against Iraq.
Five years later Clinton stuck to her guns, refusing to admit that her October 2002 Iraq War Resolution vote was a mistake, or to apologize for it, as anti-war Democrats had demanded.
Nine years on, Clinton told Good Morning America of the ABC News in an interview that her support for the invasion was her “greatest regret," admitting that it was a mistake.
Her change of stance, said Hopkins, shows how opinions change.
“She is a politician and it's highly unlikely she will lose the nomination," he said, adding that he doubted her support for the 2003 invasion did not cost her the presidency in 2008.
"I am not sure it was a decisive factor at all. Obama was idealistic and presented new hope to Democratic Americans. He presented a more exciting prospect to the American people, and he opposed the Iraq war,” he said.
In 2016, the Iraq war has disappeared into the background, he said, replaced by a lot of dissatisfied blue collar-type workers. Support for Republican front-runner Donald Trump is almost a vote of anger, possibly attracting some traditional Democrats, he added.
On Clinton's regret, Hopkins said "She would not be much of a politician if she didn't allow herself to change her views. She read the signs and she’s a highly organized politician."
Meanwhile professor Rogers this week gave his update on the current situation in Iraq and Syria.
His latest Monthly Global Security Briefing, published in the Oxford Research Group website, says IS is in retreat, but the campaign against them is far from over.
"While IS is under substantial pressure in Syria and Iraq, primarily because of an intense if largely unreported air war, it has retained considerable resilience and competence. What is more significant, though, is that the conflict is extending outwards, not just with developments in North Africa but, even more significantly, towards Western Europe."
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