Steve's Politics Blog

Consortium News has the article The Kissinger Backchannel to Moscow.

This history of Kissinger’s Soviet backchannel in 1968 reveals Brennan’s breathless alarm about Russian “suborning” Flynn or using the backchannel to manipulate Kushner as unworthy of a serious intelligence professional.
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Demonstrating the intensity of the anti-Trump attitudes among many Obama officials – both those who have left the government and those who remain as holdovers – someone with access to the secret report was so determined to expose the Kushner backchannel as to reveal to the Russians what must be one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence secrets of all – the U.S. capability to intercept Russia’s diplomatic messages.

I do not publish news of this kind to prove that Trump is good, or wise, or honest. I do not believe he is any of those things. I do it, to make sure people know how duplicitous the anti-Trump forces are being. Just because one side seems to be lying to us, we shouldn’t fall into the automatic trap of believing the other side is telling us the truth.

When you know both sides are lying to you, that should put you on guard to wondering what each side has against the other that does not benefit any of us.

The Real News Network has an interview titled Blaming Russia Goes Deeper Than Hillary Clinton & the Democrats.

I mean these are the things people should be concerned about. Do we actually have civilian control of government? You know you have the President Obama reaching an agreement with Putin only to have the military undermine it. This happens over and over and I think what’s happening with Trump, again while I disagree with him on most issues, I actually agree with his policies of wanting peace with Russia. That seems to be the policy amongst all others that is totally unacceptable to parts of the US government, the FBI, the CIA for example and the liberal establishment and the Democratic Party. That is the thing, and you mentioned Rachel Maddow, that is the thing that is upsetting people, more than anything, when in fact it seems to me we should be welcoming at least an attempt to have a peaceful relationship with that country.

The bias against Russia is so deeply implanted in our psyches, it is hard to turn it off long enough to even listen to another point of view. Try as he might, you can see that the interviewer is struggling and failing to get over it. He repeatedly misstates the subtitle of the book. The author is probably so used to people doing this, that he doesn’t even bother to correct him.

Does your memory go way back to the ancient history of 2014? If not let me refresh your mind. I did a search on this blog of posts about Victoria Nuland.

Here are a couple of snippets from the first two results.

The first is from the post Trump’s Possible Path Out of Ukraine Crisis.

Exclusive: The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 sparked a New Cold War with Russia, but a President Trump could roll back tensions with a creative strategy for resolving the Ukraine standoff, writes Jonathan Marshall.

The second one is from the post US Pretends to be Shocked at Our Own Claim That Russia is Hacking Our Elections.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

Do you think the Russians laugh up their sleeves whenever we claim to be so upset that we think they meddled in our recent election? Might they think it is poetic justice?

Naked Capitalism has the article Mark Ames: When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation.

PutinTrump was a project set up last fall by tech plutocrat Rob Glaser, CEO and founder of RealNetworks, to scare voters into believing that voting for Trump is treason. God knows I can’t stand Trump or his politics, but of all the inane campaign ideas to run on — this?

It is starting to frighten me to see many of my former political allies falling for this anti-Russia campaign hook, line, and sinker.

Naked Capitalism has the article The “Market Forces” Behind the Obamas’ Record-Setting Book Deal.

While the Obamas’ deal is unique for the amount of money involved, outsized book contracts between politicians and industries they’ve benefitted has precedent. In a recent report issued by the Roosevelt Institute, the study’s authors, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, argue that the mainstream approach to money in politics fails to recognize major sources of political spending. Among the least appreciated avenues for political money, they argue, are payments to political figures in the form of director’s fees, speaking fees, and book contracts.

It was nice of them to explain how the Obama’s have reached their goal of cashing in on the Presidency. They have already made one-third of the amount of money that the Clinton’s have “earned” since Bill’s term was over. Of course, a lot of the money the Clinton’s “earned” came from bribes for Hillary’s term as Secretary of State.

Truthout has Richard Wolff’s article The New Socialism: Moving Beyond Concentrated State Power.

One emerging and promising new socialism for the 21st century focuses on worker co-ops.

I post this on this blog for future reference. This is not an endorsement of the idea. Instead, this is meant to be a record of an idea that should be included in discussions and debates about how our economic system should evolve to a better alternative to the “capitalist” system we have now.

Democracy Now has the video Scahill & Greenwald: What If All Victims of War Received the Media Attention of Manchester Victims?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, we all do media criticism of various types, and I know, over the years, I’ve voiced all kinds of critiques of U.S. media coverage. But if I had the power to just, overnight, remedy one of them, this discrepancy is the one that I would choose, because think about how powerful it is, just the effect that it has on us as human beings. Even just randomly when it pops into our Twitter timeline or onto our Facebook page, you see the name and the story and the grieving relatives of someone who was killed at this concert in Manchester. No matter how rational you are, you feel anger, you feel empathy, you feel so emotionally moved by the horror of the violence that was perpetrated.

So, imagine if there was any kind of balance whatsoever, where we knew the names of any of the victims of the indiscriminate violence of our own government, let alone the comprehensive coverage of the victims that is devoted when we are the victims of violence, how much that would affect the perception that we have of the violence that our own government perpetrates. We keep it so abstract. We usually just hear 14 people died. The Pentagon claims that it’s militants and terrorists. It’s left at that. At best, we hear they finally acknowledge four civilians are killed, but it’s kept very ethereal, very distant and abstract. We never learn their names, as you said. We never hear from their families. We never hear their life aspirations extinguished. And if there was just some attention paid to telling the stories of the victims of our own government’s violence, I think there would be a radical shift in how we perceive of ourselves, the role we play in the world and who bears blame in this conflict.

This is a point that I think needed to be made, but I felt intimidated in even raising it. I was sure it would be misunderstood by the majority of the people in the west. I think that Democracy Now, and Greenwald, and Scahill have made the point in the most reasonable way possible, but I know that most westerners will still not find it acceptable. The reaction that I expect will be a demonstration of the depths we have allowed ourselves to be dragged down to. Of course, real media professionals have been working for decades on dragging us down, so I guess there is some reason forgive the people taken in by this effort to promote war.

Robert Reich has commented on the MarketWatch article Saudi Arabia’s $20 Billion wager with Blackstone is record-sized bet on U.S. infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia just joined the parade of investors into U.S. public works by pledging a record $20 billion investment with Blackstone Group’s new infrastructure fund.

It’s the latest push around the world by large investors to buy up U.S. airports, roads, bridges, water systems, and other public projects.

Rather than taxing the wealthy and then using the money to fix our dangerously outdated infrastructure, the states and the federal government increasingly are giving rich investors tax credits to encourage them to do it.

The investors then charge tolls and user fees, and earn big profits.

I was wondering when we would find out why on earth a foreign country would want to invest in our infrastructure. I suspected we might be paying tolls to Saudi Arabia to use highways in our own country. What could possibly go wrong with that idea?

Naked Capitalism has reprinted the article Notes From an Emergency: Tech Feudalism By Maciej Cegłowski, a painter and computer guy who lives in San Francisco.

It is always hard to find the best and tersest excerpt of an article to convey its value for why you should read the article. Here is my feeble attempt.

After Communism collapsed in Poland, I started visiting the country every eight months or so. Even in the darkest period of the 1990’s, it was striking to see people’s material standard of living improve. Suddenly people had cars, phones, appliances. These gains were uneven but broad. Even farmers and retirees, though they were the hardest hit, had access to consumer goods that weren’t available before. You could see the change in homes and in public spaces. It was no longer necessary for office workers in Kraków to change their shirts at lunchtime because of soot in the air. The tap water in Warsaw went from light brown to a pleasant pale yellow.

For all the looting, corruption, and inefficiency of privatization, enough of the new wealth got through that the overall standard of living went up. Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990.

In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up.

In rereading the above excerpt, I remember why it is that broad living standard improvement can occur in developing countries like Poland, India, and China, to name a few, but not in countries like the USA. When you start from a low enough base of economic development, it is possible for the oligarchs to reap obscenely huge rewards and still allow amazing improvements for vast numbers of ordinary citizens. In countries with large enough middle classes already in existence, there is too much wealth already in the hands of the middle class to allow the oligarchs ignore the need to plunder it. This does not bode well for the rest of the world if it fails to take up the challenge posed by Maciej Cegłowski.

The Real News Network has the interview Wilkerson on North Korea Crisis: U.S. Should Stop the Threats & Own Up to its Role

So, if you want the bottom line, there isn’t anybody in the world today, after seeing us invade Iraq, after seeing us bomb Syria, after seeing us do –- we’re at war with seven or eight countries right now in terms of drones. We’re flying across their borders and killing people inside their territory.

So, if I were anyone in the world who thought my regime was in trouble, I’d think the trouble came from the United States, and I’d want a nuclear weapon too. That’s not at all to say I condone the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I’m simply stating the obvious. I’m stating the rational obvious.

I don’t have the teeniest tiniest amount of knowledge that Colonel Wilkerson has, but I have been able to figure this out years ago.