TBR News November 11, 2016

Nov 11 2016

A Compendium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”- Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

 

“Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen”. – Huey Long

 

“I fired [General MacArthur] because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail “- Harry S Truman

 

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” -Thomas Jefferson.

 

“Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage”

– H.L. Mencken

 

 “For a quarter of a century the CIA has been repeatedly wrong about every major political and economic question entrusted to its analysis.” 

-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The New York Times, 1991.

 

Don’t tell a lie! Some men I’ve known
Commit the most appalling acts,
Because they happen to be prone
To an economy of facts;
And if to lie is bad, no doubt
’Tis even worse to get found out!

 

My children, never, never steal!
To know their offspring is a thief
Will often make a father feel
Annoyed and cause a mother grief;
So never steal, but, when you do,
Be sure there’s no one watching you.

 

The Wicked flourish like the bay,
At Cards or Love they always win,
Good Fortune dogs their steps all day,
They fatten while the Good grow thin.
The Righteous Man has much to bear;

 The Bad becomes a Bullionaire!

 The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C.  November 11, 2016: “We will be reading endless post mortems about the last Presidential election for months. The reality is that business entities who embraced Clinton are making efforts at friendly contact with the new president and the elitist press, egocentric as they come, are trying to find an escape route from their incessant and intense public detestation of Trump and equally intense praise of Clinton. The great mass of the voting public, whose taxes support the establishment, are generally treated with benign contempt by that same establishment until presidential elections when bizarre compliments are paid to the masses in the hopes of successful election results. The great mass has grown tired of the manipulations, lies, and corruption and have spoken. Screaming lesbians demanding a recount, the left wing press wringing its hands in shock and greif have about as much control over the public as a dog does barking at nothing in the night.”

It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump

November 9, 2016

by Naomi Klein

The Guardian

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together. Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.

That is the task ahead. The Democratic Party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.

Why Trump Won: The Foreign Policy Factor

He pledged to put America first – but will he? Can he?

November 11, 2016

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The media – and by that I mean a horde of Clinton surrogates masquerading as “journalists” – is in full-bore self-examination mode, strenuously trying to figure out how to “explain” the victory of Donald J. Trump – as if they are doctors who must diagnose the nature and cause of a disease. Congruent with this is the bafflement of the pollsters, whose prognostications the media mandarins depended on to confirm their own biases. Only two or three major pollsters got this one right.

So certain were they that Hillary Clinton was going to be the 45th President of these United States that both New York magazine and Newsweek ran covers proclaiming Her Majesty the winner before the votes were counted: these are now fated to become collectors’ items.

And now the anguished cry goes up from the press gallery: How could we have been so wrong?

All sorts of explanations are being bruited about. There’s the America-is-racist-xenophobic-anti-gay mantra of the far left, which is so mired in identity politics that they’re effectively cut off from anything remotely resembling reality. The fact that Trump scored better than Romney in all these demographics – and that Clinton failed to mobilize the minority vote – doesn’t impinge on this narrative. After all, if Trump is really the reincarnation of Hitler-Mussolini, then why did minorities fail to respond to Hillary’s call to arms against the dreaded “alt-right”?

Then there’s the Forgotten Man/Woman trope: poor whites in the “Rust Belt” who feel excluded from the concerns of the Beltway elites rose up in record numbers and voted for their man. Immiserated by what Trump denounced as the “bad deals” of NAFTA, TPP, etc., living in the shadow of deserted factories, and addicted to opiods, these downtrodden semi-rural folks harkened to Trump’s message of economic nationalism and gloried in the promise that he would make them great again – or, at least, not quite so poor.

While there is some truth to this, the attribution of purely economic motives to these voters – in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as throughout the Midwest and South – is another version of the same condescending attitude that led the media to ignore their plight in the first place. To the Beltway bravo who makes a good salary and never gets his or her hands dirty, the denizens of Flyover Country are merely stomachs only tenuously attached to brains. They are supposedly incapable of having motives unattached to their desire to pay the rent, consume more fast food, and drink themselves to death at the local speakeasy.

What these earnest and often learned analyses of Trumpism leave out is that the sons and daughters of the Forgotten Men (and Women) are the War Party’s cannon fodder. What future is there for someone born in one of these half-deserted husks of what used to be America’s industrial heartland? Very often they find a way out by joining the military. And how has our military been engaged in the past fifteen-plus years? They’ve been fighting wars in the Middle East, futile grinding conflicts that have not ended well – and, indeed, have not ended at all.

The one factor conspicuously missing from these expositions on the electorate’s romance with Trump is the attraction of his “America First” foreign policy stance. Indeed, Trump’s view that the US footprint abroad is too large and his vow to make it much smaller is what enraged the Washington, D.C. elites the most about his candidacy: a bevy of GOP foreign policy “experts” sent out at least two “open letters” excoriating Trump for his “isolationism” – the cardinal sin, according to neoconservative orthodoxy. This was the core of the Republican “Never Trump” faction’s complaint. And the Clintonites added their voices to this chorus, gladly welcoming the neoconservatives into their ranks.

Yet the common assumption is that ordinary voters – precisely the sort of voters who turned out for Trump – don’t care about foreign policy, presumably because they’re too parochial and ignorant to even have the faintest inkling of anything that goes on beyond their immediate ken.

This, of course, is one big reason why the media, the pollsters, and the pundits missed the biggest story of the last half century: they just didn’t get that Trump’s campaign against globalism meant a repudiation of America’s role as the world’s policeman – and that Trump’s supporters, after a decade and a half of constant warfare, fully understood and agreed with his “isolationism.”

How many young people, born in the devastated towns and cities of the Rust Belt and the rural Midwest communities where Trumpism triumphed, have come back home from foreign wars minus a leg, an arm, or in a body bag? The media missed this aspect of the election for the simple reason that it isn’t their sons and daughters who go off to fight and die for the hubristic dreams of Beltway policy wonks.

During the GOP presidential primaries, when a smirking John Dickerson asked Trump if he still thought George W. Bush should’ve been impeached over his launching of the Iraq war, this exchange followed:

“George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

DICKERSON: “But so I’m going to – so you still think he should be impeached?

TRUMP: “You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

The audience – made up of Lindsey Graham supporters and GOP donors – booed, but out in the American heartland the people cheered. And Trump, whose political instincts are fine-tuned, seemed to hear those distant cheers as he stood there, defiant, and said “Go ahead and boo.” He knew this would pay big political dividends down the road, and the payoff came when he won the GOP nomination, beating a baker’s dozen of wannabes, and finally took the prize this November.

The trade issue is but one aspect of Trump’s overarching anti-globalist vision, which encompasses a devastating critique of the “international order” that our foreign policy “wise men” have upheld since the Allies defeated the Axis powers and the cold war with the Soviet Union set in. Why are we paying for the defense of Europe when the Soviet threat has long since ceased to exist? Why are we defending the Saudis, when jihadists inspired by their Wahabist ideology are attacking us – including on September 11, 2001? Both South Korea and Japan are rich countries, whose industries are out-competing us and hollowing out the factory towns that were once the heart and soul of America: why, then, are we risking war and emptying our pockets in order to defend them from threats both real and imagined?

These are the questions Trump asked, and that gave his message resonance in Flyover County. The irony is that they used to be “left-wing” talking points, ones that Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern once raised. Today’s leftists, however, are so mired in identity politics that they don’t care one whit for the antiwar slogans of yesteryear: indeed, these same people are whinging and whining that it’s our “moral duty” to “do something” on behalf of the jihadists now besieging Syria. And it didn’t bother them in the least when Hillary Clinton revived the worst aspects of cold war liberalism and campaigned against Trump as a supposed “Russian puppet.”

Indeed, the warlike Washington policy wonks and their journalistic amen corner were eagerly anticipating the arrival of Hillary Clinton and the First Husband in the White House: they’ve been straining at the bit to intervene on behalf of our “moderate” jihadists in Syria, and they saw their chance when the media was trumpeting her imminent victory. That prospect has, thankfully, been cut short by the biggest upset in American political history – but the War Party doesn’t give up so easily.

The pressure on President Trump to compromise and even reverse his anti-interventionist instincts is already apparent and growing. And precisely because they are instincts, and not thought-out principles, the danger of this occurring is very great. The neocons are already trying to sneak into his administration, and what with the open hostility to Trump by leading “realists,” it’s almost inevitable that a sheer lack of qualified personnel will ensure that their infiltration is successful.

That’s why it’s vitally important for Trump’s supporters – the movement he created, and that he puts so much store in – to be vigilant, and make their voices heard. President Trump is facing not only opposition from the Democrats, but from the people in his own party – neoconservatives and GOP “moderates” – who abhor his foreign policy stance. They hate the very idea of “America First,” and will do anything and everything to sabotage the translation of Trump’s campaign promises into policy. The War Party is on the move, as is the so-called Deep State – the permanent national security bureaucracy with a material and ideological interest in internationalism. They are determined to derail the Trump train.

We can’t let that happen.

How can we stop them? By raising our voices, by protesting and appealing directly to the President himself – by doing what Trumpists do best, i.e. making noise, and lots of it. And by supporting this web site, which, almost alone, gave Trump a fair shake.

Let us put the new President and his enemies on notice: we are watching you. And at the first sign of a betrayal, we will come after you hammer and tongs. We will not be silenced – and we will not be fooled.

The battle to put America first is far from over: indeed, it has hardly begun. The next four years is going to be hand-to-hand combat. Let us enter the fray with no illusions.

Trump win spells doom for European Atlanticists

November 11, 2016

by Finian Cunningham

RT

Political establishments in Washington and Europe are in shock over Donald Trump’s US presidential win. And it’s far from over. Europe is bracing itself as elections loom in several member states.

Germany and France could be next big shocks. If their pro-EU governments should fall, then the European bloc as we know it is over.

The era of popular revolt is upon us. Disaffected and defiant, the mass of citizens are fed up with unresponsive, unrepresentative governments, on both sides of the Atlantic,that seem to only serve an unelected oligarchy.

First we had the Brexit vote to leave the European Union earlier this year. Now, we have the election of the “anti-politician” business tycoon Donald Trump who becomes the 45th president of the US with no prior experience of elected office.

Britain’s Daily Express called his election this week a “Trump Tsunami” – a monumental wave now heading across the Atlantic to the shores of Europe. “EU braces for ‘revolution’ amid Austria, Italy, France and German elections,” reports the Express.

Trump’s stunning victory – which overturned all mainstream media predictions – was greeted with jubilation by populist parties across Europe. Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit campaign for the United Kingdom Independence Party, said he was gratefully “passing on the mantle” to Trump.

There were similar ecstatic congratulations from France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, and from a raft of other populist leaders in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia. Le Pen hailed Trump’s victory as proof that “anything is possible for the people”. While Hungary’s premier Viktor Orban called it a “great day for democracy”.

The glee among populist parties was in sharp contrast to the sombre response from the two incumbent governments that might be viewed as the pillars of the European Union – Germany and France.

Trump’s breakthrough election came as a complete shock to Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Francois Hollande.

France’s ambassador the United Nations Gerard Araud expressed it most succinctly when the tweeted on news of the result: “A world is collapsing before our eyes.” The diplomat quickly deleted the post, probably realizing he would later reap recriminations. But the sense of trepidation in his brief words was palpable.

While other European leaders, such as European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk, kept to polite protocol of offering perfunctory congratulations to President-elect Trump, Merkel and Hollande adopted a bizarre condescending sniffiness.

Merkel said she would work with the new president provided he “adhered to the values of democracy and equality”. Hollande said he respected the choice of the American people but that he would be “vigilant” in future relations with a Trump administration. The French president called for a “united Europe of values” to challenge Trump.

The conceited European view of the Trump election was echoed by foreign affairs commissioner Federica Mogherini, who said that the EU must now be a “superpower for peace”, standing up for democratic principles.

Critics would riposte that the EU hasn’t done much standing up for democratic values in its supine dealings with Turkish autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his latest crackdown against his country’s independent media. Nor has the EU been a beacon of virtue in its support for US-led regime-change machinations across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as indulging the Saudi and other Gulf Arab dictatorships with copious arms exports.

What is really unnerving the German and French leaders is that the Trump victory lends momentum to similar populist opposition parties within their borders. Both countries are holding national elections over the next year. Already, in regional elections during the past year, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) and National Front have made major inroads against the governing parties.

In the wake of Trump’s breakthrough, it is now being reported that Marine Le Pen may even win the French presidency – a result that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. With Socialist president Hollande’s public approval rating languishing at record lows, few people would exclude a shock upset.

Merkel’s fourth bid for the chancellery as head of the Christian Democratic Union might be a little more secure, but in the coming months the “Trump Effect” – as her advisers are warning of – might translate into another landmark defeat.

Merkel and Hollande’s pious reaction to Trump’s presidential win shows that these two leaders and their ruling circles still don’t get it. The implicit moralistic tone deprecating Trump’s supporters as “right-wing rabble” shows that the incumbent European rulers are missing the plot of what is happening.

True, elements of support for Trump and populist parties across Europe are tinged with reactionary racist and xenophobic views. But it is a grave mistake to simply dismiss them. The rise in opposition to economic globalization that has enriched the few while impoverishing the masses is correlated with opposition to rampant immigration of cheap labor. Economic globalization as ordained by the oligarchy is also correlated with illegal wars overseas for elite-driven regime change, which, in turn, has fed into an influx of refugees from war-torn countries.

To be anti-immigrant is not necessarily an expression of racism or xenophobia. It is more fundamentally a legitimate opposition to political and economic disenfranchisement that has been imposed on societies by a self-serving, self-enriching elite who control political parties like puppets.

The European Union has for years been subservient to Washington’s “Atlanticism” whereby supposedly sovereign European states have become nothing more than vassals to US hegemony. Washington dictates neoliberal capitalist globalization, Europe obeys. Washington dictates criminal regime-change wars in the Middle East, Europe obeys. Washington dictates reckless NATO expansion and hostility towards Russia, Europe obeys.

The popular revolts sweeping the US and Europe are thus far amorphous and characterized in the establishment media as “right-wing”. But what is underway is perhaps best understood as a pent-up revenge by the masses against pampered and decadent elites who for too long have denied people a fair livelihood. The elites are only too willing to wage wars in foreign countries allegedly for “democracy and human rights” while depriving their own people a modicum of living.

Donald Trump has tapped into that groundswell of popular discontent. He may not deliver on his promises of economic renewal for the masses, but what he gets right is that ideologically driven hostility against Russia and “liberal crusades” for democracy in the Middle East have become repugnant to a Western public oppressed by an effete oligarchy.

Trump promises a radical new beginning in Washington. One which no longer pushes Atlanticist projects of economic globalization, wars and NATO expansionism.

In this new global outlook, Atlanticist politicians in Europe like Germany’s Merkel and France’s Hollande are suddenly left without geopolitical moorings. The tide of history is changing and they are being left high and dry.

With Brexit and Trump there seems to be a long overdue renewal of democracy – albeit reactionary in some forms to date.

The old order with its pretensions of “liberal values” is being assailed. And Merkel, Hollande and their Atlanticist ilk sound uncannily like the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.

Why the Elite Wanted Trump To Lose

November 9, 2016

by Daniel McCarthy

The National Interest

Elections pose a basic problem. Should the direction of a government be set by amateurs, by a majority or plurality mass of people who know nothing about policy detail, or should the best and brightest, the educated elite, make informed decisions for the good of everyone? Last night, the amateurs chose a new leader and a new direction for the country. Donald Trump is now president-elect. The elite thinkers of the media and policy realms are appalled. They spent months insisting that Trump was an ignorant bigot, a dangerously unstable fellow who could not be trusted with the kind of power that only they were fit to wield. The elite in both parties, among “conservative” journalists as well as “mainstream” ones, wanted Donald Trump to lose, and they confidently predicted he would. They were wrong.

Trump does not have the conventional resume of a presidential aspirant. He has never held elected office. He has never served in the armed forces, either. Instead, he has been a high-profile businessman and television celebrity. His name is a brand. How does that prepare anyone to occupy the Oval Office?

Trump is prone to making off-the-cuff remarks and articulating his policy themes in sometimes shockingly blunt language. This plain-spokenness and tendency toward hyperbole is perhaps as objectionable to educated elites as his policies: a good, well-educated technocrat, a polished politician, simply doesn’t use that kind of rhetoric. He has violated “norms,” and those norms—the etiquette of the elite—are sacrosanct.

If this is as far as one’s analysis goes, it seems obvious that the voters are wrong to make Donald Trump president. But maybe some things are more important than credentials or elite norms: perhaps, it’s worth considering, policy results also matter—and matter rather more.

Judged by the standard of her policies and their results, Hillary Clinton was evidently unfit to to be president. She voted for a Republican president’s unnecessary and wholly catastrophic war in Iraq. She urged a Democratic president to effect regime change in Libya. She has been a staunch friend to institutions of high finance that bear a large degree of responsibility for the financial crisis of 2007/8 and Great Recession. And she subscribes straight down the line to a progressive social agenda that Americans have never been willing to support when given a direct say in the matter. Gun control? Abortion? Clinton was considerably to the left on such questions. She has long been a peculiar mixture of centrist and leftist, combining many of the worst elements of each.

Yet she had credentials. She followed the prescribed etiquette. And many of her screw-ups, however lethal they proved to be, were screw-ups in which other leaders in both parties shared responsibility. What Republican could criticize Clinton for her Iraq vote? How different was Clinton’s involvement with, say, Goldman Sachs from that of other politicians? Clinton’s policy faults were not faults at all in the eyes of her fellow educated elites.

Indeed, as anyone who’s spent a bit of time in Washington, DC discovers, it’s professionally better to be wrong in a crowd than to be right by yourself. Clinton did not stick out. She did not make others of her class uncomfortable. George Will could have tea with her.

America’s educated elite—in the academy, the media, government, and the para-governmental world of think tanks and pressure groups—has been systematically and collectively wrong about some of the biggest questions in foreign policy, economics, psychology, sociology, and culture. The best and brightest have assumed for twenty years that what every man and woman on earth most deeply desires is to become a liberal democrat. Steel workers in Pittsburgh and goat-herders in Afghanistan really in their heart of hearts yearn to be more like Washington Post op-ed columnists. What could be a higher human aspiration?

The belief that comfortable, sexually satisfied consumerism, wedded to gauzy notions universal brotherhood (or sisterhood, or gender-nonspecific siblinghood), is all people want out of life has fueled the drive to integrate world markets, merge populations across borders, and dissolve the sovereignty of any state that falls short of the liberal-democratic ideal. Anyone who rejects this anthropology is irrational—much as Donald Trump is irrational—and requires education, if not medication. So bizarre and incompatible with historical humanity is this vision that all the wealth and prestige at liberalism’s disposal have not been enough to keep even Americans from demanding something else. The alternatives Trump offers are the nation-state and a vague idea of greatness—which, vague though it might be, is still rather more than what liberalism is selling.

The voters who elected Trump don’t subscribe to the complex ideological formulae of Beltway apparatchiks. But they know how they feel, and they know what’s happening in their own lives. They know that being an American doesn’t seem to mean as much or promise as much as it once did. And so they want to make America great again, and Trump is the instrument at hand. They know from experience things that a Brookings scholar’s flowcharts can never reveal.

A false anthropology undergirds the terrible errors that our educated leaders have made in foreign policy, economics, and governing in general. A different anthropology—hardly a completely correct one, but a more realistic one—is what informs the Trump vote, however inchoately. The amateurs know more than the experts. Donald Trump figured that out, and it’s won him the White House.

The reasons for Trump were also the reasons for Brexit

November 10, 2016

by John Harris

The Guardian

In May this year, as the Indiana primary saw Donald Trump clinch the Republican party’s presidential nomination, I was following his campaign in the same state. In Sungate, a neat-looking residential development on the outskirts of Indianapolis, I chatted to people killing time in their driveways. As evidenced by the empty homes and long grass, whatever aspirational dream had been sold to the people here had long since curdled. “We had a bad crash a couple of years ago, houses got foreclosed, factories closing, loss of jobs,” one man explained, as his dog yelped loudly at our camera.

I wondered: how did he feel about the election? “I’m thinking about it pretty strong right now,” he said. “I want to keep the American jobs here, try getting a lot of jobs overseas back.” This sounded like an endorsement of the Republican frontrunner. “I’m not saying right now. I like some of his views, some of his views I don’t like,” he said, with what seemed to be a giveaway smile: as far as I could tell, he was on the way to becoming a Trump man.

Besides complaints about local youths openly dealing drugs and houses being bought en masse by private landlords, the people living in Sungate had one huge grievance: the fate of a local factory that made furnaces for air-conditioning units, which was soon to close. Thanks to the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) it was moving its operations to Mexico, where the average hourly rate would be $3, as against the current $20. It was owned by a corporation called Carrier, which had become one of Trump’s favourite rhetorical targets.

Among the Carrier workers I met was a man called Brad Stepp. I now know that he was one of this election’s most crucial voters: the millions of people who had once voted for Barack Obama but now favoured Trump. “We need somebody that’s tough, you know?” he told me. “I was all for Obama the first time round, and he let me down. I felt he was a pushover … Trump just shows toughness, and I love that.”

On Wednesday morning, it was these people I instantly pictured: victims and malcontents of the 21st century’s callous model of capitalism. I’d repeatedly spent time with them closer to home in post-industrial places such as Stoke on Trent, Merthyr Tydfil, Middlesbrough and the countless other areas that recently made all the difference in the Brexit referendum. In the States, their counterparts are spread across the country but particularly concentrated in the Midwest.

They clearly backed Trump in Ohio, and made all the difference to his prospects in such superficially unlikely territories as Michigan – a Democratic stronghold since the late 1980s – and Wisconsin, which had backed the Democratic candidate in the last seven presidential elections.

As these states’ backing for Trump became more and more clear, I thought not just of Indiana, but also the book ‘Caught in the Middle’ by a Chicago-based academic called Richard C Longworth, published in 2009 and full of auguries of the great political shock to come. “About a decade ago, globalisation arrived and changed the Midwest for ever,” Longworth wrote. Economic decline had already blighted millions of lives, but this was something else again. “Traditional family farms vanished. Steel mills closed and auto factories shrunk. ‘Downsizing’ and ‘outsourcing’ enriched our vocabularies and frightened our workforce. Some big cities, such as Chicago, coped. Others, like Detroit, rotted. Small industrial cities fought to stay alive. ‘Rural’ became a synonym for ‘poor’. Immigrants, mostly Mexicans but Africans and Asians too, moved into towns and regions that were all European, and northern European at that. Self-sufficient places … became bedroom suburbs if they were lucky enough to lie within commuting distance of bigger cities. Those beyond this range, or too far from the interstate, shrivelled.”

Such places make up what we ought to now think of as Trumpland. For sure, some of the support for Trump is doubtless down to an appetite for base prejudice, and in some cases an antediluvian aversion to the idea of a woman president. But their overall predicament is deep and complex.

As with every rightwing populist from Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen, Trump obviously has no credible answers. Yet in America, economic malaise fatally highlighted the shortcomings of Hillary Clinton. Nafta may have been brought into being by George Bush Sr, but it became law in late 1993, with enthusiastic backing from Bill Clinton – who believed, according to one aide, that the agreement’s vision of “a more open regime and international trade were in the long-term interest of the United States”. Three years later, Hillary was claiming that “everybody is in favour of free and fair trade, and I think that Nafta is proving its worth”. Two decades on, as Trump – and Bernie Sanders – loudly decried the agreement’s effects and she tried to follow suit, it all rang far too hollow.

More generally, Clinton and her people were seemingly so estranged from the places at free trade’s blunt end that they left glaring openings for a man who would probably not know one end of a production line from the other.

The same problem, moreover, afflicted the pundits and pollsters who were defeated by Trump just as soundly as Clinton. During my time in Indiana and elsewhere, I would run into bloggers and supposed journalists at post-primary “watch parties”, where they tapped away at their laptops and tried to figure out whether this or that pollster had been on the money.

But that is not journalism; it is an essentially pointless pastime, equal parts maths and cash-free gambling, and it is part of the great mess of misapprehension and false expectation that defined this election. One New York Times hack confessed that he and his colleagues “expected Trump to fizzle [out] because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough”. Quite so. But making up for that fault will require not just a few more trips out of state and a bit less attention paid to the latest polling, but an entire culture change.

Everything surely has to be transformed now: the methods and policy substance of American progressive politics, its understanding of globalisation, the kind of figures it appoints to its front rank (no more dynasties, please), and the way that it talks to people it once thought of as its natural supporters. So too does something that afflicts politicians and media people in equal measure: a fatal detachment from the places where politics is actually played out.

Obviously, this is exactly the same basic detachment that formed such a large part of the story of Brexit. Politicians and their aides fret over arcane categories of voter and data that, more often than not, turn out to be incorrect; the journalists who might alert them to where they are going wrong seem to have no more clue than the people they report on.

And meanwhile, in towns full of derelict factories and foreclosed houses, the conversation speeds on, away from anything halfway progressive, towards the terrifying politics that has just scored a truly historic win. In some ways this is the central political problem of our age. And if it is not answered soon, Trump’s victory and Britain’s sudden rightward lurch may be just two more awful milestones on the road to God knows where.

Trump’s Election Triggers Deep Concern in Europe

Trump in the White House, Putin in the Kremlin and Erdogan in Ankara, not to mention right-wing populists at home: The EU is running out of international partners — at a time when the union itself is facing a historic crisis.

November 10, 2016

by Markus Becker

Spiegel

The European Union is facing what the Americans like to call a “perfect storm.” Russian President Vladimir Putin is pursuing expansionism on the back of violence and propaganda, Turkey is transforming into a dictatorship and populists are driving Britain out of the EU and have risen to power in Poland and Hungary — and may soon take the reins elsewhere as well.

And now, Donald Trump.

Two days after the US election, Europe finds itself gripped by a mixture of disbelief and desperation, only imperfectly masked by formulaic messages of congratulations sent to Washington. Chancellor Angela Merkel even made her cooperation with Trump dependent on his adherence to fundamental values. A German head of government admonishing a newly elected US president to uphold freedom, democracy, the rule of law and human dignity? Normally such a thing would be the height of impudence.

But almost nothing seems normal these days — neither in European relations with the US nor elsewhere. Current events in Turkey, for example, would likely be the top issue of concern for the EU if it weren’t for Trump’s election. With the civil war still raging in Syria, Turkey plays a key role in European security, but the NATO country is sliding toward a dictatorship and the refugee deal with the EU is threatening to collapse. Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing booming business with Putin and even hopes to discuss buying a missile defense system with the Russian president.

Now, another Putin admirer is moving into the White House. The president-elect has praised the Kremlin autocrat several times for the strength of his leadership and has sought to allay suspicions that Putin tried to influence the outcome of US elections — despite US intelligence agencies’ conviction that he did. The fact that Trump has indicated he will demand that European NATO allies pay more for US military protection, and has even called America’s own loyalty to the alliance into question, has triggered widespread concern, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Will Trump Reunify Europe?

If European politicians are of a mind to find any kind of silver lining in the election of Donald Trump, then it is the following: Trump could contribute to European unity, even if unwittingly. The problem, after all, isn’t just what Trump said during the campaign; at least as concerning is what he didn’t say. Thus far, the US president-elect hasn’t presented anything that could even remotely be called a coherent foreign policy agenda.

“You’re going to see a lot of fear among America’s allies,” James Goldgeier, a political scientist with American University’s School of International Service, told the New York Times. “And in some cases they may try to do something about it.” Eastern European countries under threat from Russia, he says, may not be able to wait until Trump presents more precise plans, if indeed he ever does. During the campaign, after all, Trump repeatedly emphasized that unpredictability in foreign and security policy was advantageous.

“Josef Stalin was the first unifier of Europe,” says Elmar Brok, a member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the European Parliament. “In a certain sense, Trump has the opportunity to be the second.” Brok emphasized that Trump couldn’t be compared to a mass-murderer like Stalin. “But fear can lead to unity, and in this case, the fear is that America may no longer be there.”

For European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, that concern has already become reality. “The Americans will not see to Europe’s security forever. We have to do it ourselves,” he said in a Wednesday evening speech in Berlin. Former US Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum was even more outspoken in an essay published by the German journalism consortium RND. “The American umbrella over Europe is gone forever. Trump’s election marks the end of the postwar order.”

Juncker is now demanding a “new attempt to implement a European defense union including the goal of establishing a European army.” Brok, too, expressed support for the rapid implementation of a French proposal aiming at a defense union.

Daniela Schwarzer of the German Council on Foreign Relations expressed a similar view. Even if Trump won’t be able to implement everything that he promised during the campaign, “Germany and Europe can no longer rely as usual on the trans-Atlantic partnership,” says Schwarzer. “They must stand up for Western values on their own.”

Fear of the Populists

That would be difficult enough even if the European Union were in better shape. But with Britain’s departure, the EU is losing its second-largest economy and a country with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Europe’s economy remains unstable and right-wing populists are on the rise in France, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany — and they are already in power in Poland and Hungary. The European Commission believes the same values Merkel admonished Trump to respect are under threat in Poland.

Many in Brussels are concerned that the EU is facing the same fate as the US — namely that Front National leader Marine Le Pen could end up being elected president in France and that Frauke Petry, head of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany, could even take over the German Chancellery. Such a thing might seem unimaginable, but many thought that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections was unimaginable too.

The anger that many voters feel against government institutions and the establishment, the anger that propelled Trump to the presidency, is also widely present in Europe. But nobody has yet found an answer for how to oppose it. “I don’t know whether it will be possible to confront the distrust of Brussels,” says Rebecca Harms, floor leader for the Green Party in European Parliament. The skepticism, she adds, isn’t just fueled by concerns about having been left behind by globalization, but also by the desire to return to nationalist identity. Left-wing and right-wing ideology is becoming mixed, she says. “At the moment, I am unnerved.”

The Death Penalty Won Big on Election Day, But the Devil Is In the Details

November 11 2016

by Liliana Segura

The Intercept

As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump was about to win the presidency on Tuesday night, mental health staff were on call at San Quentin Prison and at the Central California Women’s Facility, where anxiety was running high over a separate election result. By the next day the men and women on death row would know whether Californians had voted to spare their lives — by passing Proposition 62, abolishing the death penalty — or hasten their deaths, by passing Proposition 66, aimed to quicken executions. “They are understandably concerned,” California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terry Thornton told me earlier that day, pointing out that many are already under treatment for mental illness. The results to the ballot initiatives “could be destabilizing.”

It’s hard to imagine a place more heavily monitored than California’s death row, where isolation, strip-searches, and suicide watch are a fact of life. Yet CDCR counts 25 suicides among the condemned since 1978, the year a ballot initiative dramatically expanded the crimes punishable by execution in California. With the same people responsible for that initiative now campaigning against the death penalty, no one had more at stake in their success on election day than the nearly 750 people facing execution in California.

The outcome was as bad as they feared. Prop. 62 failed, with Yes votes reaching just 46.1 percent, versus 53.9 percent voting No. Meanwhile, the pro-death penalty Prop. 66 got barely enough support to pass, 50.9/49.1. The razor thin margin technically means that Prop. 66 remains a “close contest,” as designated by the California Secretary of State; the outcome could change as provisional and vote-by-mail ballots are tallied. But the votes required make the prospect unlikely. A spokesperson for the secretary of state declined to discuss it. “We will certify the election results on December 16,” he said on Wednesday.

Anti-death penalty activists conceded defeat on Wednesday, reiterating the flawed provisions of Prop. 66. “Poorly written initiatives often end up mired in costly and protracted litigation in California,” wrote ACLU lawyer Ana Zamora, who led the No on 66 campaign. In fact, multiple legal challenges have already been filed to block the measure. A lawsuit brought Wednesday by former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs — whose father led the fight to pass the state’s 1978 death penalty law —  called on the California Supreme Court to nullify Prop 66, arguing that it “illegally interferes with the jurisdiction of California’s state courts,” while undermining the habeas rights of the condemned. Indeed, as many have long argued about Prop. 66, for all its promises to speed up the death penalty, it is unlikely to lead to executions anytime soon. With its myriad, confusing provisions,  the initiative will face lawsuits for months and even years. In its post-election-day email, the Yes on 62 campaign assured supporters that Prop. 66 “presents constitutional and practical questions that make its implementation uncertain.”

Grim Results in Nebraska and Oklahoma

The vote in California was a harsh blow for anti-death penalty activists, the second time in four years they have failed to pass a ballot measure to abolish capital punishment. Prop. 62 fared worse, in fact, than Prop 34, a similar measure defeated in 2012. As polls suggested, it is possible some Californians voted for both Prop. 62 and Prop 66, either out of confusion or to express a common sentiment: that the dormant, costly death penalty must be fixed or abolished. Yet California was not the only state to vote in favor of the death penalty on election day. Even as the country moves steadily away from capital punishment year after year — with executions and new death sentences consistently dropping — two other states had the issue on the ballot on election day — and in both of those states, death won.

In Nebraska, thanks to the deep pockets of its pro-death penalty governor, voters overturned a historic ban on capital punishment – a painful defeat for activists, legislators, and relatives of murder victims who fought hard to pass the legislation just last year. The law marked a significant victory for abolitionists in the deep red state, surviving a veto by Governor Pete Ricketts. Indeed, it would likely have remained intact were it not for Ricketts: No sooner did the law pass than the governor immediately poured his own money into a ballot initiative to overturn the abolition law. With capital punishment consistently enjoying popular support even in non-death penalty states, it came as little surprise that Nebraskans would take the chance to bring it back. The breakdown in the end: 59.6 in favor of repealing the abolition law.

Less high-stakes — if somewhat more mind-boggling — was a measure that passed in Oklahoma, a state has become synonymous with death penalty dysfunction in recent years. Despite flimsy convictions, botched executions, and shocking levels of incompetence and deceit among officials carrying out capital punishment, Oklahomans still overwhelmingly passed State Question 776, which enshrines the death penalty in their state constitution. The new amendment explicitly states that, regardless of execution method, death penalty itself “shall not be deemed to be or constitute the infliction of cruel or unusual punishment” in Oklahoma. The practical reach of such language is limited, since it has no power where federal courts are concerned. In fact, the Tulsa World, whose editorial board pushed the execution of the likely innocent Richard Glossip, called on voters to reject the measure, calling it a “dang right!” proposition that merely reiterated powers state lawmakers already have. Nevertheless, voters eagerly passed SQ 776.

As in California, the measures in Nebraska and Oklahoma do not necessarily mean an imminent return to executions. Both states have notoriously struggled to find execution drugs, a problem that persists nationwide. Still, the pro-death penalty votes on election day were incomprehensible to Crystal Martinez, who lives in Modesto, California, and who calls Richard Glossip a friend. Martinez was at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary last year, ready to witness his execution, when he received his eleventh-hour stay upon the discovery that the state had the wrong drugs on hand. More recently, Martinez campaigned for abolition at home. “I was really optimistic for Prop. 62 to abolish the death penalty in California,” she said, “but as long as Prop. 66 failed, I would have considered it a victory. For people to vote to not only to keep but to streamline the death penalty — I never expected that in California.” The continued appetite for executions in Oklahoma struck her as disturbing too, having been so close to a case that embodies the death penalty’s most dangerous flaws. “Richard represents Oklahoma’s death penalty now,” she said. “It is absolutely shocking that anybody is voting in favor of it.”

A Few Bright Spots

It may seem fitting that the same election that delivered a demagogue to the White House would be marked by enthusiasm for executions. As the controversy over the Central Park Five reminded us, Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric exploited the same racist fears that have kept the death penalty alive for generations. Yet the ballot results favoring capital punishment stood in sharp contrast to a slew of different victories for criminal justice reform  – including in some of the same states that upheld the death penalty. In California, for example, voters decriminalized marijuana – one of several successful initiatives to relax policies around pot – while also passing Proposition 57 by a wide margin – a big victory for parole reform as well as for juvenile defendants. More jarring still, Oklahoma voters passed a measure to reduce several low-level felonies to misdemeanors, while also voting to use the money saved by the state as a result to fund drug and mental health treatment. Several other states across the country saw much good news for criminal justice reform.

There are a number of potential explanations for why abolition might have failed where other reforms succeeded. In the broad realm of criminal justice policy, Americans’ feelings on the issue are uniquely emotional and complex. Yet while November 8 was certainly a good day for the death penalty, there was not a total disconnect between the reforms that passed and the stubborn support for executions in California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Election day saw a wave of critical victories among prosecutors who promised reform – a trend that should make abolitionists optimistic. In Texas, Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson lost reelection  to such a candidate – the first Democrat to be elected DA in almost 40 years. As my colleague, Jordan Smith, points out, Anderson attracted controversy for conduct in some high-profile capital cases: “She refused to grant a new punishment hearing to Duane Buck, whose death penalty trial was tainted by racially-biased testimony, and declined to do anything to address prosecutorial misconduct in the wrongful conviction of another death penalty defendant.”

There were similar results in other jurisdictions – and not just on election day. In Jacksonville, Florida, notorious DA Angela Corey was ousted in the primary, having been widely criticized for such callous actions as insisting on seeking a death sentence in a case where victims’ relatives adamantly opposed it. Writing on his Twitter account, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunhum, cited several other election day races in which prosecutors were “perceived as too aggressively pursuing the death penalty.”

As ballots continued to be counted in California on Friday, death row remained under watch by nurses and counselors. Although the CDCR’s Thornton reported no reported incidents on death row following the victory of Prop. 66, she said there was “an increased presence of mental health staff,” which would continue through the weekend. As for the new tasks demanded by Prop. 66 – including possibly transferring people from death row to other state facilities – Thornton said no changes are underway as of yet. “If it is certified as being passed, the department will comply with the requirements,” she said.

Whatever the future for the death penalty in California, for now it is alive, if not well. On January 17 — just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration — the state will mark its eleventh year without an execution. With the legal fight over Prop. 66 bound to last a long time, California’s death row population will remain old and infirm, an increasingly accurate picture of what one judge has relabeled capital punishment in California: “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Saudi Arabia owes billions to private firms after collapse in oil revenues

Finance minister admits that thousands of mainly construction workers from overseas have gone without pay for months

November 10, 2016

AFP

Saudi Arabia has admiited that it owes billions of dollars to private firms and foreign workers after oil revenues collapsed, the kingdom’s new finance minister said.

The arrears have left tens of thousands of foreign workers, chiefly in the construction sector, struggling for months while they await back pay.

“I don’t recall the exact amount now but its billions of dollars,” Mohammed Aljadaan told reporters on Thursday.

The ministry is now every day seeking to make thousands of payment orders,” he said.

The country’s council of economic affairs and development, headed by powerful deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, said on Monday the kingdom would pay the outstanding amount by next month.

Payments were delayed because of “the sharp decline in oil revenue and the measures taken by the kingdom to reduce spending on a number of projects,” the official Saudi press agency reported.

In October, the kingdom raised $17.5bn (£14bn) from its first foray into the global bond markets as it sought to repair the damage to its public finances.

Saudia, the world’s biggest oil producer, helped to push down the price by flooding the markets with cheap crude in a failed attempt to kill off the US shale gas boom. The price of a barrel of Brent crude is currently $45.84. Only two years ago it was more than $110.

Aljadaan spoke after the prince chaired the first meeting of another economic body, which aims to tighten economic cooperation in the six-nation GCC grappling with lower oil revenues.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, is projecting a budget deficit of $87bn in 2016.

Aljadaan, who led the country’s stock market regulator, was appointed on 1 November to replace Ibrahim al-Assaf who oversaw a series of austerity measures including subsidy cuts, reductions in cabinet ministers’ salaries and delays in major projects.

Early last month the construction group Saudi Binladin said the government had transferred “some payment” in the previous two weeks, allowing it to cover some back pay to its remaining staff.

The company had already finished payments to around 70,000 laid-off workers.

Tens of thousands of employees of another construction firm, Saudi Oger, have gone unpaid for months. The company is led by Lebanon’s newly nominated premier, Saad Hariri.

A New Study of Modern Bigotry

Different…but the same!

November 11, 2016

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

I should like to draw strong parallels between the Evangelical Christians and the Holocaust Jewish religious/political movements.

And these parallels are most certainly there.

Both are oriented to gaining political and economic power.

Both have made extensive use of fictional writings. In the case of the Evangelical Christians, the Rapture and the Battle of Armageddon  which are recent inventions (ca 1910) by a Charles Parham Fox and are not in the Bible. Parham Fox was a convicted thief and child molester.

Also, note that none of the Gospels were contemporary with the purported career of Jesus and in the ensuing centuries, have been constantly rewritten to suit current political needs. Further, the mainstay of Evangelical Christians is the so-called ‘Book of Revelations’ purported to have been written by John the Devine, Jesus’ most intimate friend. This was certainly not written by someone living at the time of Jesus’ alleged ministry but over fifty years later. The actual author was one John of Patmos who was resident at the Roman lunatic colony located on the island of Patmos. This particular work is beloved of Evangelicals because it is so muddled, obscure and bizarre that any meaning can, and is, attributed to it.

I refer the reader to “Foundations of Christianity” by Karl Kautsky (a Jewish German early Communist and secretary to Engels)

The nationalistic Zionist movement does not have a great body of historical supportive material so, like the early Christians, they have simply invented it. These fictions include, but certainly are not limited to, “The Painted Bird” by Kosinski, (later admitted by its author to be an invented fraud before his suicide, ) and “Fragments” by “Binjimin Wilkomersky” ( A Swiss Protestant named Bruno Dossecker who was born in 1944) that is mostly copied from the Kosinski book and consists of ‘recovered memory,’ and of course the highly-propagandized favorite “Anne Frank Diary” which was proven, beyond a doubt, by the German BKA(Bundes Kriminal Amt, an official German forensic agency) as a forgery, made circa 1949 (ball point ink was used on paper made after 1948 and the handwriting completely different from the original Frank girl’s school papers still extant) All of these frauds have been, and still are,  considered as seminal truths by the Holocaust supporters and the discovery of fakery loudly denied by them, and questioners accused of being ‘Nazis.’  This closely parallels the same anger expressed by the Evangelicals when their stories about the Rapture or the Battle of Armageddon are questioned by anyone. Here, doubters are accused of being ‘Satanists’ and ‘Secular Humanists.’

I refer the reader to “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish academic and the son of genuine survivors of the German Concentration Camp system.

When confronted with period and very authentic evidence that the death toll among Jewish prisoners never approached even a million, or that there were no gas chambers in use at any prison camp, the standard, and badly flawed counter argument is that while the accuracy of the period German documents is not in question, as everyone knows that 6 millions of Jews perished, therefore the names are on so-called ‘secret lists.’

When asked where a researcher could view these documents (the actual German SS records, complete, are located in the Russian Central Archives in Moscow) the ludicrous response is that because these lists are secret, no one has ever seen them! This rationale does not even bear comment.

The Christians have their Passion of the Christ, which may or may not have happened, (it was in direct opposition to Roman law which governed Judea at the time,) and the Jews have their long agony of  the Holocaust, which is an elaborate and fictional construction based on fragmentary facts. A Jewish supporter, Deborah Lipstadt ( a well-known academic) has said repeatedly that the word holocaust must be capitalized and can only be used to discuss the enormous suffering of the Jewish people. The huge genocidal programs practiced by the Turks against Armenian Christians in 1916 and the even larger massacres by Pol Pot in Southeast Asia may never be likened to the absolutely unique Jewish suffering, according to current Zionist-Holocaust Jewish dogma.

Both stress the suffering and death of their icons, in the former case, the leader of their cult, which initially consisted entirely of very poor Jews, and in the second, an entire people. Both sides have enormous public relations machinery in place which is used constantly to promulgate both faiths and both are hysterically opposed to any questioning or debate on any aspects of their faith.

The issues of suffering, death and prosecution are both used to fortify their positions in society and render it difficult for anyone to attack them. These issues are also used to gain political power (for the Evangelicals) and money (for the Zionist-Holocausters)

Both of these groups seek a high moral ground from which to attack any questioning of their faith and because many of the adherents to both beliefs are aware that their houses are based on sand, fight fiercely lest a storm arise, beat upon both houses and thereby cause a great fall (to be Biblical in expression.)

 

 

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