During one of the debates Trump asked Biden how he came to own three very expensive homes. Trump made a sarcastic face and said something like “it makes no sense”, but then he let it go. I think he could’ve won the election with that issue alone. That is the populace tact that could win - Dem or GOP. Nancy how did you become rich? Hammer on that. Mitch can’t help but notice you’re a millionnaire. What are the politicians tax returns say, how much did they earn and does that equate to 3 homes.
And their wealth is just the grease on the rails that moved the big money. Trump was already rich and was immune to the trap. It was fun to watch a incorruptable patroit swinging like Iron Mike against the tide of slime. Hope he gets in the ring again, but he's earned a retirememt imo.
Trump came from a family fortune based on being a slumlord, not paying your bills and solving problems by suing people. He is not a patriot, he is a grifter.
Slowly, very slowly, I feel like there is a convergence between left and right developing in Matt's comments page, on at least some key issues. It's one of the main reasons I'm here. Not everyone is feeling the love, but some perceptible and gratifying connections are being made.
That said, someone will be here shortly to complain about something like Trump charging the Secret Service for staying in his hotels when they accompanied him and point to this as evidence of corruption. (They will not know, or will ignore, that Biden charges the Secret Service to stay at his guest house, and of course they are not displacing other paying guests, as they would be at the Trump hotels.)
But here's an undeniable fact: Public service has made Trump poorer, but it has made the Bidens, Obamas, and Clintons much, much richer.
I agree. But the media spent four years being shocked, shocked at supposedly unprecedented outrages from Trump, while ignoring similar behavior from Democrats. It got old, and it drove some credulous people into hysteria.
Oh, I definitely agree with you there. I just don’t want to see people who feel alienated by Democratic corruption race into the GOP’s arms. I wish we could all lock arms under the flag of “fuck both parties” and figure out how to right this ship without the monstrosity of electoral politics.
Yeah...The Dems all took his campaign donations when he was a democrat. He was just as much of misogynistic pagan back then but the Clintons loved him. Pelosi took his dough and I'm sure Chucky S did as well.
No, Fox news was gushing about him the whole time. 5 years ago, Fox was shocked about everything Obama did, while the liberal side gushed. Both sides have their own propaganda and they both tell everyone else that they are the real enemies of America.
If there was no CCP Virus, we would be rocking now. We were on a roll 2017-2019.
Say we find China created COVID. Would the next question be on purpose. And we all know Fauci financed part of the study. There are a lot of implications there.
What I can't understand is why the Democrats wanted to blame the US for COVID????
Democrats are simply playing their assigned role. You should know the game by now. The parties confer on their discrete narratives and continue working together to serve their mutual interests. None of them care where/how Covid originated, only how the story serves their present needs and preserves the illusion of warring ideologies in the legislative branch (which is false; they all serve the same masters).
Nonsense. It's made him (and his family far richer) just as it has with the others you named. Notably you left out Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush....hmmmm. There's no president alive who doesn't emerge from that office far better off than they were when they entered, Trump being no exception.
Note that this article says nothing about the Secret Service or anything about Russiagate.
Weak tea my man. Super weak. You reference a Newsweek (!) article written 5 months after Trump was inaugurated, a low effort hit piece. And an inscrutable unreferenced chart of nothing.
Or the rank corruption of Biden withholding aid to Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who stood in the way of Hunter's installation on the board of Burisma. https://youtu.be/rtO1OigwfVs
Turn off CNN and do some research. You will find many more examples, but only if you want to learn the truth. Biden family is pure graft, and part and parcel of the Deep State for decades. FBI has Hunters' laptop for like 2 years now, yet no prosecution at all, in spite of reported lurid interactions with minor relatives. Anyone in possession of Hunters' laptop possesses child pornography. Pretty good disincentive for getting involved there, especially in the current milieu of selective enforcement.
Or how he was never prosecuted for falsifying a firearm application, a felony. Discharged from armed services for drugs, but a couple years later no history of drug use on his firearm application... works if your name is Biden.
Inescapable conclusion is the Bidens are favored members of the Deep State, and the IC and MSM wings are doing their best to protect them. OTOH Trump is sworn enemy to IC and MSM because he is outside their control. He already had money, and he loves America.
To those of us who paid attention for the last 5 years this is obvious. To those who devoured the fear porn of CNN for the last 5 years, might as well be written in Linear A.
1) Just stating things as though they are iron clad truths and then waving your hands isn't a valid form of argument. Who cares if the Newsweek article was 5 weeks or 5 years after the inauguration? Do you dispute ANY of the ways they claim he set himself and his family up to enrich themselves (ex. NOT putting business holdings in a blind trust)?
2) The Pro-Publica chart has all kinds of references. I'm sorry if you lack reading comprehension skills or if you're viewing the page from your Samsung Galaxy S6 from 12 years ago, but there are links for "Download all data" and "View data sources." Once again, if you disagree with any of them, please lay it out here.
3) RTDS = Reverse Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't GAF about Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush I, Bush II - OR - Trump's corruption. They're ALL corrupt. But you RTDS folks seem to think that Trump was some unicorn perfect President who didn't monetize his White House tenure. He may have fallen a few dozen spots on the Forbes list (not that his wealth was ever liquid or actually verifiable), but he made over a billion while he was President. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-made-at-least-16-billion-while-us-president-2021-2?op=1
4) I don't disagree one iota that Biden is the favorite of the deep state, but that didn't stop Trump from hiring swamp creatures like Michael Bolton and other current and former members of the deep state. I don't GAF about Biden's son's laptop, but I can tell you that the allegations of child pron are most likely bogus. You have any good links to back up that assertion? Trump is on record talking about how he likes 'em young, hung out plenty with Epstein, and has bragged about how he'd go back in the dressing room at his pageants for Miss USA and Miss Universe. I quote (from his interview with Howard Stern):
"Well, I'll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed, and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm inspecting it. You know, I'm inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.
"You know, the dresses. 'Is everyone okay?' You know, they're standing there with no clothes. 'Is everybody okay?' And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that. But no, I've been very good."
In the exchange, Stern asks Trump if, in the years he owned Miss Universe and Miss USA, there were times he had sex with the contestants, all of whom are over age 18.
Trump first answers, "I never comment on things like that."
Again, Biden loves sniffing girls' hair and Trump likes to "grab 'em by the pussy" - so both are old pervs.
P.S. - Do you REALLY think that the 'deep state' would let ANYONE actually get elected in the first place if they didn't control or approve of the candidate?
P.P.S. - Stop watching OAN and Newsmax; they're frying your brain. I never watch CNN or MSNBC - or ANY cable news/website. Your idiotic assumption that I do is based purely on your RTDS.
I feel like if a politician did that, they would probably be universally despised by all the establishment figures in DC and the press. In my more paranoid moments, I can even imagine them being framed by the intelligence agencies, to destroy any chance of having a successful Presidency.
That's the reason this dead horse keeps getting beaten. If you don't want politicians to get rich, I don't know what to tell you. Even the people running the Soviet Union got rich, at least comparatively.
«Even the people running the Soviet Union got rich, at least comparatively.»
That "comparatively" is a wild exaggeration, for example, here someone who was Minister for Science and Energy in the 1960 in the UK describes an official visit to the UK, from his diary, 1963-06-14:
“In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. Madame Santalova was the interpreter. I had been told by the Ambassador that Russian Ministers never invite British Ministers to their flats or homes and he was absolutely amazed when this invitation came in but it was, of course, because I had asked Kirillin to my home in London. It was lovely. We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child live. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together, then he showed us home movies of his trip to England and having snowballs thrown at him by the children.”
And he was an Academician, a category that still today in Russia enjoys the greatest prestige (in a poll more people said that their dream was to be an academician than an oligarch).
Skeptic says: "...That said, someone will be here shortly to complain about something like Trump charging the Secret Service for staying in his hotels when they accompanied him and point to this as evidence of corruption. (They will not know, or will ignore, that Biden charges the Secret Service to stay at his guest house, and of course they are not displacing other paying guests, as they would be at the Trump hotels.)"
First off, the Secret Service does not "charge" or bill presidents for their work. The government, a.k.a. the taxpayers, pick up the tab.
And from BusinessInsider:
"Even when Trump's golf club in Bedminster, N.J. was closed up earlier in the coronavirus pandemic, the documents obtained in the lawsuit show the Secret Service still got hit with a $21,800 charge for a cottage rental and other room fees....The usual rate for agents to stay at a Trump property — even when there's no indication he will stop by — is $567 per night, according to the Post....That's a far cry from the mere "50 bucks" per room Eric Trump claimed the taxpayers dish out when defending the practice back in October 2016."
Perhaps it's an accounting error with the travel ledgers. Junior miscatalogued the $50 bucks for, you know, maybe a discount hooker down on her luck---something like that, but for goodness sake who knows with those boys....
Donald Trump’s adult children reportedly cost taxpayers $140,000 in Secret Service security in the month after the clan’s patriarch left the White House in January.
Ordinarily, family members of a president lose their security detail when they leave office. But in the case of the four Trump siblings and two of their spouses, the former president issued a directive to extend post-presidency protections by six months.
The costs, obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics, do not include security protections at Trump properties in New Jersey, Palm Beach and Briarcliff, New York. With those factored in, the total would likely be far higher, according to the group.
According to the watchdog, records reveal that the Trump children maintained a “breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service”.
Transport costs alone amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totaled at least $88,678.39.The watchdog found that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went from their jobs at the White House to a 10-day vacation in Utah, racking up hotel costs of $62,599. After a month in Miami, they stayed at Trump’s Bedminster golf property for three days in late February.
Eric and Lara Trump spent much of February at Trump’s Briarcliff property, interspersed with trips to New York, Miami and Palm Beach, at a cost of $12,742.
Donald Trump Jr also spent time in New York City, on Long Island, and in upstate New York, racking up bills of $13,337.
But Citizens for Ethics said the Secret Service did not provide records of spending at Trump businesses.
“While it may be tempting to put the story of the Trump family’s profiteering in the past, we cannot until they have actually stopped directing taxpayer money into their own bank accounts,” the group said.
Ah, the Trumps: the family that drifts together....grifts together.
Yep. Secret Service costs. You've made an ironclad case for corruption.
I'm sure you also have them tabulated to the penny for the Obamas and Clintons for comparison.
By the way, people on the right used to do this exact same thing for Obama's Secret Service costs for trips to Hawaii, a big trip to France for Michelle and the daughters, etc. etc. It was stupid then, and it's stupid now.
Why would Trump people even think they need Secret Service Protection? Just paranoid, right? Quoting Maxine Waters: "“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”
Yes. Why would they even think they needed protection? After all, none less that Maxine Waters threatened them, and called for the general population to do the same? Why might they feel threatened? Must be paranoia?
Interesting. Out of the blocks with the gratuitous assumption that I'm defending the Obamas. Was I defending the Obamas? I don't believe I was defending the Obamas. But I must say it was a rather clumsy pivot away from the issue at hand, which is, quite simply, your categorical irresponsible posting (and intellectual laziness), and propensity for churning out third-rate propaganda in lieu of fact stating. But you get a gold star for chivalry, even if it is second-hand chivalry, for advocating for continued secret service protection for the "kids" from the intrepid Maxine Waters. Personally, I myself would feel a lot more comfortable with the 101st Airborne between me and "Mad Max." And Skeptic, if it's any consolation to you, the last person to call me a democrat got punched in the face....
Well, I can personally attest to the expenses of U.S. taxpayer contributions to Mr. Dick Cheney's dry cleaning bills? I happened to live in the area of Jackson WY during Mr. Cheney's reign. It wasn't entirely without notice.
Dick seemed to have a proclivity for disrupting the lives of his neighbors to the extent we'd avoid even being in the same area as he was, which was difficult in a place that only had 10,000 people in it to start with? On the upside, it was pretty easy to notice his presence by looking for black towncars in the parking lot.
The gullibles don't realize that in the USA (and in the world) it is real estate mobsters who bribe or blackmail politicians, not vice-versa. Trump probably could have been convicted many times over of bribery, but that issue was never brought up because the vast majority of the politicians he bribed must have been from the Democratic party (in NYC and NJ, likely to get building permits and other favourable decisions).
His attitude to Republicans instead was different: he was one of their biggest campaign donors ever (probably to get even more favourable tax rules for real estate).
"Incorruptible" is going too far. But he did have a certain degree of immunity that occasionally produced interesting remarks. Roughly along these lines was my favorite, his declaration that he loved the "poorly educated." It was really kind of brilliant.
RJF, Trump didn't want to explain how he got so "rich". Especially when his tax information was almost released. That would have been a disaster for him.
That is just one of the many baseless smears about Trump.
He is very rich, if only because he inherited a lot of NYC real estate decades ago, and NYC has ballooned in price over the decades.
Also the tax return is pointless, we all know that thanks to various loopholes he did not pay tax, but he has give a far more useful document. A previous commenter has summyrized well:
“Tax returns tell you nothing of substance. Check out Biden's from 2017, for example. [...] The real picture - the best view - is in the required financial disclosures. Then you see assets and other income sources not available in a return. Trump's are available too. He IS fabulously wealthy and has impressive assets. The point is, tax returns are a distraction - they are in no way a meaningful look at someone's finances. This is especially true when multiple corporations and corporations within corporations complicate the view.”
I've heard this argument before, but never quite understood how it jibed with Trump and his family machine's tooth-and-nail fight to prevent any recent tax documents from seeing the light of day.
Obviously tax returns aren't going to tell a complete story, but boy did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye.
«did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye»
Obviously because he did not pay any tax despite being very wealthy and having a huge real income. Most likely he and the other real estate moghuls did not want publicity for the enormous loopholes that he (and them) purchased over the decades from Congress. Only the little people pay taxes...
But that is a completely different issue from how wealthy and successful in business he has been. His hiding the tax return was not because he is actually poor and needs to be bribed by russian politicians with a few hotel bills, like the roaring buffoons arguing about the "Emoluments Clause" were implying.
On the surface that would make sense, but he made frequent statements to the effect that it was a *good* thing that he didn't actually pay taxes because he was smart and a "good businessman" - and his base lapped it up. It wasn't a perception problem among his supporters that he may not have paid taxes due to loopholes, after all Bernie Sanders has 3 houses and what not.
Clearly the Russian bribe thing is cooked up nonsense or something would have surfaced by now, but I think there's more merit to the notion that he's actually not very rich than you do. For one thing, he has a lot of creditors and the extent of them isn't fully known, nor is it totally understood how leveraged his properties are or whether he's inflating the values of certain assets.
«there's more merit to the notion that he's actually not very rich than you do. For one thing, he has a lot of creditors and the extent of them isn't fully known, nor is it totally understood how leveraged his properties are or whether he's inflating the values of certain assets.»
The real estate business is very different from normal businesses (in many respects it is a supercharged version of "private equity"), it is all about leverage, loopholes, bankruptcies, weird accounting, carry forward tax losses, all totally legal because the loopholes have been purchased. If you don't know how it works you can't just handwave. Nothing new, for an example here is a quote from A deTocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1834:
“Consequently, in the United States the law favors those classes that elsewhere are most interested in evading it. [...] In America there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies, not because they are few, but because they are many. The dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt is greater in the minds of the majority than the fear of being ruined by the bankruptcy of others; and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience to an offense which everyone condemns in his individual capacity.”
Mar 14, 2017The official added that Trump “paid $38m even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150m, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally published return proves just that”.
He's on record stating he counts loan money as assets so please tell me how if no one can possibly know how rich he is you know he is very wealthy and has a huge income..........
I used to believe that too. Honestly. But as I aged, experienced more of the tax code and how it applied tome and others, I found the loopholes to be mostly nonexistent. There was a year back in the early 2000's I grossed over $3 million and I paid enough in taxes I felt snubbed because no one named a U.S. Aircraft carrier for me. :)
But generally I think you'll find a conspicous lack of loopholes, and I really mean that. It's almost the golden fleece of American Dreams, that after you achieve some level of income the tax code simply disappears; it stops being a problem. That isn't so, and there are many folks around to attest to it.
Now I find the code much more lenient. I don't make much money in my old age and my guess is I actually take in more government funding than I pay. In the past ten or so years I haven't paid any taxes at all?
«It's almost the golden fleece of American Dreams, that after you achieve some level of income the tax code simply disappears»
Personal income enjoys few loopholes, but there are large discounts for capital taxes, significant loopholes for corporate taxes, and the sky is the limit for offshore corporate tax loopholes. So the key techniques are to capitalize income, launder it through a corporate shell, and ideally an offshore corporate shell managed by nominees.
This is most convenient for the owners of businesses (Warren Buffet pointed out he paid a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary), but even the CEOs and CFOs of many corporates are not "John Smith", the person, but "JS Management Services, postbox 666, Dubai City, UAE".
An example from a comment on an english newspaper from the owner of a London cleaning business:
«London is indeed full of oligarchs from the USA to Outer Mongolia, hell bent of out spending and out doing their neighbours, if they even bother to turn up. Running a small cleaning company in the magic areas over the last few years has been insane. The demand for our cleaning services is high and we are able to turn down the so called oligarchs who whine about price but never about the quality, of course it won’t last
Many of our payments are coming from North African based banks within the Spanish territories, Morocco, Algeria and most unusual Mali, who seems to issue a huge number of loaded debit cards for payment of services. In very recent years,many of the houses we clean, have been mortgaged to once again Mali based banks, although they have very familiar names, eg Santander.»
Mar 14, 2017The official added that Trump "paid $38m even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150m, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in...
«did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye»
Obviously because he did not pay any tax despite being very wealthy and having a huge real income. Most likely he and the other real estate moghuls did not want publicity for the enormous loopholes that he (and them) purchased over the decades from Congress. Only the little people pay taxes...
But that is a completely different issue from how wealthy and successful in business he has been. His hiding the tax return was not because he is actually poor and needs to be bribed by russian politicians with a few hotel bills, like the roaring buffoons arguing about the "Emoluments Clause" were implying.
Maybe he isn't as rich as he wanted people to think he was. If, as this article proposes, the US is a plutocracy. Then, Trump has to maintain his Master of the Universe illusion.
applaud? No Sir I do not. He wasn't the first blatant liar President, nor the last. He did however, mostly by accident, I think, reveal what's actually behind the curtain
Wouldn't know if they were breaking the law? Hahahahahahaha -- laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes. A guy who owed how much in unpaid taxes, Tim Geitner, who was head of the NY Fed leading up to 2008 financial disaster, was confirmed as Obama's Treasury Secretary. Sharpton, who may still (allegedly) owe thousands to NY and/or other taxing bodies, was Obama's racial affairs guru and frequent White House guest --- a role model for us all. So funny.
It's pretty much safe to say that we all expect you to like your own posts, so why is it you keep doing it? OK. You like your own posts. Put that thing back in your shorts and let it heal?
I think the IRS would be the first to catch them. If there is no outstanding evidence, you're just fishing which is what the democrats do with their many Conspiracy Investigations.
Once again, if you don't know how much Trump owes then you CANNOT speculate upon how wealthy he is.
He's on public record stating that he counts loans as assets. If I get to define the standards and definition of wealth, I too could be fabulously wealthy.
Which means he already knew how the game was played. He built in NYC, one would have to be an expert in precisely the corruption the article describes. In fact, that may have been his secret sauce and why the establishment feared him.
This is hilarious. Confirmation that Hunter Thompson was right. A decent chunk of the US liked Nixon for being a clever crook. An even larger group likes Trump for the same.
I think Thompson was right about quite a few things. Ever heard of Brad Marchand? Hockey player for Boston. He's a total dick but holy mackinaw can that guy play hockey. Dirty, mean, vicious Hockey. The fans love him. He wins a lot too.
The comments today are bananas!! BlueRocket, a game of hockey may be a decent metaphor for US politics and economy. If I shout loud enough, buy expensive seats, and enough hot dogs maybe the fucking players will score some goals. Maybe the facilities staff will look into why the ice is melting too.
They didn't fear him very much they just couldn't do much to him because they're all complicit in war crimes and massive fraud. What reforms did Trump make ?
Yeah I missed your point. You’re saying if Trump made a big deal of it -Joe’s wealth -it would have blown up in his face because his tax return would show all kinds of unflattering stuff. You are right.
Your point was not "Joe's wealth", but how he got it. He was a "public servant" (God, that makes me puke) for 44 years. being a government employee does not enable wealth. THAT is the point that Trump could have focused on, the abuse of the people's trust. The Orange man got whatever he has in the world of business - whether honest or not, not from the people.
«The Orange man got whatever he has in the world of business - whether honest or not, not from the people.»
He still got most of his wealth from the people, through the "free markets", it is the people who ultimately pay the price of higher real estate rents and prices that make developers rich. Just like as Kucinich's book described, making money through jacked up utility prices etc. is paid for by the people.
Both the "free markets" and the state can be vehicles for extractive enrichment, and as to that the "free markets" enable far more extraction than the government.
Ha! No they don't... Real estate - how many people were arrested because of NINJA loans? Casinos - regulated by the NGC. Crookedness inherent - are you saying "people" are ok with this? People did like Nixon too, but people also fired him.
Perhaps if tax burdens were equitably distributed among all U.S. citizens, the tax code made fair once again, these sorts of talk show gotchas, this never ending fixation on the peculiarly acquired wealth of a small but not insubstantial subset of parasitic citizenry, we could move on to, say, solving other problems...
This is exciting: a book I would actually read by and about a politician whose only flaws have been remarkable prescience and integrity. I recently tweeted at Kucinich a few times urging him to run for the open Ohio Senate seat. With the book out of the way (and now on my reading list), maybe he will give that idea some serious thought.
Oooh...that word, that word. I was thinking while I read the article "He might as well have a scarlet "I" tattooed on his forehead, so all the elected apparatchiks and brokers could avoid him. "INTEGRITY". I wonder if the brains of people like Pelosi and McConnell can actually process it, or if so, with the beginning provision "A trait exhibited by people *not yourself or your political allies*, which involves adherence to moral and ethical principles; etc."
I'm on the right, but I was always skeptical of the Iraq War.
I'll never forget when Kucinich was on some Sunday morning chat show in around 2004, and a Bush apologist was flaunting photos of old chemical weapons receptacles that were found in Iraq, arguing that there really were WMD.
Kucinich politely asked if he could have the photos, the hack agreed, and Kucinich asked the cameraman to zoom in on one. It showed a long, rusted out metal canister, looking like something you'd see in a scrap metal yard.
Kucinich asked, just slightly raising his voice, "We went to war--over this?"
The Bushee started stuttering and hemming and hawing and otherwise showing what a direct hit it was.
Saddam Hussein was between a rock and a hard place. He didn't have a nuclear program after 1981 aside from a pile of yellowcake and some high level wastes at Osirak, surrounded by a huge dirt berm you can see on a Google Maps satellite shot. He had a small bioweapons program. He had chemical weapons. But he had UN inspectors breathing down his neck on one side and Iran on the other. He feared a loss of deterrence vis a vis Iran if he came clean about what little he actually had. So he prevaricated. When actually invaded, he made drug deals with the most likely leaders - strangely enough the Iranians and the Syrians. Most of the chemical weapons left (mostly artillery shells) after the wars and his internal use of it went to Syria, and most of that was either used or destroyed by now. The remnants of his nuclear program were removed from Iraq by the US in 2008 or so. The bioweapons program I know nothing about where it went, but it wasn't huge and basically amounted to weaponized anthrax. Not that that is nothing, but it's not the world-ending threat we once thought it was.
Kucinich's political stuff in 2004 might have seemed poignant but it was pretty ill informed.
I understood Kucinich's point to be that there was not a sufficient national security reason to invade. It sounds like you might agree with that, but only in hindsight.
But there were quite a few savvy players (including people on the right like Bob Novak) who smelled a rat and tried to raise the alarm before the invasion.
Any chemical weapons program that Saddam had were in some way either financed or allowed to happen by the United States in our own attempt to foment and keep the war with Iran running (likely with strong Israeli influence).
There's no legitimate documentation that any viable chemical weapons or other "WMDs" were sent to Syria prior to or after the invasion despite the prevalence of this myth among the neocons who wanted to sell that war to to the American people and then being embarrassed after the invasion when it was shown to the world that no such (current/viable) programs existed (as pointed out by Kucinich and others).
Nobody with any actual intelligence on the matter (or common sense) ever thought Saddam posed a "world-ending threat", ever.
As far as the remnants of his alleged nuclear program being removed from Iraq by the US in 2008, I'd have to see some sort of documentation. That rings hollow without backing evidence.
OK, so I mis-read your post regarding Saddam's "nuclear program" - I though you were implying it was a nuclear *weapons* program, when in fact I was aware that a lot of low-grade uranium from previous civilian nuclear program was removed during Obama's presidency, IIRC. Maybe at one point he had a small nuclear weapons program, but that wasn't the intended use for the vast majority of the yellow cake in question. You are correct, he had abandoned the weapons program way back in 1981, assuming it was ever really in earnest or just 'prevarication' or tough talk with the aim of deterrence.
FYI the removal happened under Bush, they gave out pretty unit citations to everyone involved telling us that we were responsible, and I quote, for "removing Saddam Hussein's nuclear program from Iraq". Someone was trying to airbrush history, but it's true with a lot of asterisks and caveats. They handed out the unit citations a week or two before Obama was inaugurated.
Ah, OK. I knew it was close to Obama's taking office and guess I was going on your original guesstimate of "2008 or so"....didn't know for sure if it happened under Bush or Obama.
The Osirak reactor was fueled with HEU and set up to produce plutonium at the time it was hit. The Iraqis bought a separation rig in 1979. The conclusion is obvious. That wasn't a reactor intended for civilian uses. The Israelis hit it in 1981 and blew it to smithereens. That's what McCall got out of there, at least within the limits of moon suits and the like. I imagine the reactor itself is still hot, too hot for that
To his "credit", Saddam never restarted the program. Truthfully, that might not be by choice, but it's true nonetheless. They took bulldozers and put up a several hundred foot high berm around the reactor and called it a day. I was there; I have pictures. You can see the fortifications atop the berm from the satellite shots, it looks rather pathetic now. A lot of human remains in the area at the time. About a mile east from the Tigris, ~15 klicks SE of central Baghdad. Google names it "Atomic Energy Organization", can't miss it.
Iraq had been working on a civilian nuclear power program since the 1960s. Osirak was a French model that was intended to be a 70mW unit (with a smaller one nearby). That said, at the time the Israelis destroyed the reactor, it wasn't even stocked with uranium, so they knew there was no risk to any nuclear fallout.
Regardless, I have yet to see any documentation (pre- or post-invasion) that proves Osirak was intended to produce anything other than electricity and other nuclear materials for civilian/medicinal use. There's plenty of Israeli-derived propaganda to the contrary, and of course the Western media and military establishment have long run with that narrative. And sure, as I mentioned, Saddam could very well have wanted to present the image of a nuclear deterrent, but I've seen no proof that Osirak was going to produce weapons grade fissile materia.
Personally never cared about the whole Iraq weapons canard. I always saw it as a casus belli. I wanted to take down two countries hard. THEN LEAVE!! The mistake as I see it was staying around to make those two shit hole countries (classic Trump) into electoral paradises. Only idiot DC swamp rats could believe that. It did make a lot of people rich though.
The WMDs were a canard and a bogus casus belli. Why would you want to take down Iraq and leave? They never attacked us (and frankly neither did Afghanistan - it was the Saudis). But what you're describing is exactly what Obama did to Libya. Look what happened there. Do you support the "taking down of Libya hard" and leaving (and stealing their gold) like we did?
You're right about people getting rich, but that's ANY war throughout history. The USA just seems to have found a way to get away with fomenting endless profitable wars....for now.
After 911 I felt the most expeditious effective way to “fight terrorism”(terrorism being a technique not an ideology) was to hammer two countries. Then leave. Then make it policy(unofficial) that if your country shielded terrorists or financed terrorists something very bad would happen to you, your family, or your country. Possibly all three. That was my preferred policy. Unpleasant but effective.
Hammering innocent (or at least uninvolved) countries (like Iraq) has the opposite effect. It causes more terrorism. Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet. We began aiding the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the mid 70s (if not sooner) and it took until 2001 for that blowback to finally happen. So for the past 20 years we've been training "terrorist" forces exactly how to fight the American military to a standstill. You don't think that the chickens will one day come home to roost?
Nevermind the fact that we're still up to our old tricks with funding/arming/training and supporting radical Islamists in Syria (while it's Iran and Russia who are fighting them).
Screw spending tax dollars to hammer third world countries with no proven involvement in attacks on the US (I'm still convinced 9/11 was a joint Israeli/Saudi operation). It will only breed more terror in the world.
In 1920, almost no standing Army, 9 prisons for the entire country focused on the most violent criminals and the image of America abroad was missionaries helping provide medical care to the Chinese during the boxer rebellion from a couple decades prior.
One hundred years later in 2020, 2.5 million citizens held in over 1000 prisons of filthy state cages for a range of crimes to include being mentally ill. An endless supply of military grade weapons supporting an internal paramilitary army supplied through the 1033 program. The American image abroad is a drone smashing into a wedding party.
You can't declare war abroad without it leading to a war on your own people. Violence isn't just messy, it's a fire impossible to isolate, or control.
"Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet."
Gulf War I vet Tim McVeigh conducted the OKC bombing in 1995.
When you teach and train people that violence is an effective problem-solving tool -- through both military and cultural indoctrination, as the US does -- don't be surprised when they use violence to solve problems. The chickens have roosted and will be roosting for some time.
Funny how the main source of both terrorists and their financing - then and now (Saudi Arabia) was not on that list. It is like as if after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor US decided to invade and occupy Portugal for example.
Very fair and cogent analysis of the situation. The Iraq fiasco was an extraordinarily stupid move by Bush, but everyone who screamed “No blood for oil” was completely missing the point-Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran-they will sell oil to the dude who pissed on their collective grandmas graves if the price is right.
The reality is more likely that after installing Saddam's regime in 1978, Rumsfeld, Cheney and HW Bush and their pals decided to attack their own puppet government -just to have a show and spend those sweet, sweet defense dollars.
Nothing more than a banana republic that was used for a couple of decades to pressure Iran, Syria, Yemen, and whoever was nearby and at odds with US policy. I'm looking at you, Turkey. The primary goal though was oil fields to drain.
When you factor in that it was a US-controlled dictatorship since 1978, the Iraq Wars equate to genocide for profit. I don't judge servicemen and women who served in that theater, and know quite a few. Most of them agree that it wasn't necessary or justified.
Just another act in a play the US Dept. of State was putting on involving a wave of grabs to consolidate resources and power. Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan and they halted briefly at Syria because of Russia's pipeline plans. So they "partnered up" to "destroy ISIS/ISIL", taking turns dropping expensive ordinance all over the place.
«Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply.»
I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever...
As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough. Consider the Nordstream 2 case:
* Germany has built both a terminal terminal for gas transported from the USA and Qatar by USA ships, and a terminal for gas pipelined from Russia, so it has a backup for either option.
* The USA government objects to that because it says having terminal for both american and russian gas *reduces the security of Germany* over the option of depending only on american supplied gas.
* The obvious real reasoning is that if the german government ever steps out of line, and they have only a terminal for gas transported by american controlled ships, the USA government can reroute the ships to other countries, and 20-30% of german industry is wiped out, and many millions of houses freeze in winter.
"I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever..."
Ghaddafi's eagnerness to 'whatever' certainly didn't spare him, though, did it? I can't blame Iran for wanting nuclear deterrent based on that analysis for why the USA (and Israel) goes to war, can you?
The plans (I assume you're referring to PNAC as well as the infamous interview with Wesley Clark) was to take down 7 "rogue" countries' leadership in 5 years.
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Note that this list of countries doesn't include any of the Gulf Monarchies/Saudi Arabia. In addition to being perceived as hostile to Israel, these countries were targeted - as China and Russia now are - because they represented a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar in the minds of the neocons and they had demonstrated that they'd be willing to operate outside the US/EU framework, each in their own way. For example, Libya - leaked emails tell us that Ghaddafi was flouting the French Franc dominated currency of Africa and had plans to issue a pan-African currency. Hence the USA and France led the way on that operation. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/declassified-emails-reveal-nato-killed-gaddafi-stop-libyan-creation-gold-backed-currency/
"As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough."
Again, I think you're partially right, but you're missing the role of the petrodollar. That's why Venezuela was added to this ever evolving list of "rogue" or "hostile" foreign powers.
"The U.S. found that commodity in 1973 during the Saudi-imposed oil embargo. Saudi Arabia was infuriated by U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War and imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. as punishment. Henry Kissinger led the diplomatic effort to end the embargo. In 1974, a deal was struck to end the Saudi embargo and bring U.S.-Saudi relations to previously unseen heights. John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman and former economic hitman himself, summarized the deal aptly:
In the early 70s, OPEC didn’t like what we were doing in Israel, same old story. So they cut off our oil supplies. So some of you will remember these long lines at the gas stations and we feared, we were gonna have another depression like the 1929 depression. So the U.S. Treasury Department came to me and other economic hitmen and said, ‘Listen, you know, we can’t allow OPEC to blackmail us anymore. You guys gotta come up with a plan so this doesn’t happen again.’
We knew this plan had to involve Saudi Arabia because it had more oil than anybody else and it also, the House of Saud, was corrupt and corruptible. The long version is explained in the book but the short version of what we did, the deal we finally struck with the House of Saud, was a deal whereby they would return almost all the money they made from selling to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities.
The U.S. Treasury Department would use the interest from those securities, which over the years amounted to trillions of dollars, to hire us companies to westernize Saudi Arabia. Build petrochemical complexes, desalination plants, whole cities out of the desert, McDonalds and all the other things that go along with our western culture. The House of Saud would also agree to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to the oil companies, possibly not acceptable to you and me, but acceptable to the oil companies.
And, this is very very important. They agree that they will never ever sell oil for anything other than U.S. dollars. This happened in the early 70’s right after we had went off the gold standard because we were bankrupt. Because we could not pay our debts to the European countries in gold, Nixon took us off the gold standard. And then we were stuck with the situation ‘why would anyone in the world use U.S. dollars?’ So then we came up with this plan, which in essence, put the dollar on the oil standard.
You cannot buy oil on the world market for anything other than dollars. And that’s very important for corporatocracy. We, our part of the bargain was we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, in control. It was an amazing deal, the deal of the century. It was history-making, incredibly powerful deal that we struck with Saudi Arabia and it’s held.”
Crude oil is the most traded commodity in the world; every country needs it. The petrodollar system requires every country to have U.S. dollars on hand to buy oil. It keeps demand for the U.S. dollar as high as it was when the dollar was the only currency that could buy gold. If a country needs oil, it will have to manufacture and export a tangible good of value, like a car or a refrigerator, to the United States, while the U.S. can simply print or borrow paper dollars to use as immediate payment."
Now, as far as Nordstream 2 goes - that's not oil it's liquid natural gas, but you're correct about the logistics, and that the USA wants sole leverage over Germany's energy in addition to depriving Russia of markets in which to profit from its own LNG. The USA wants the dying uni-polar world order to hang around despite its inevitable end, and is doing whatever it can to prolong it. Antagonizing Russia, Iran and China, and issuing sanctions (given our unique control over the SWIFT system), is happening because those are regional powers with unique geographic advantages and strategic locations and not coincidentally all of them seek to stop using the USD/petrodollar just like Venezuela (2nd largest deposit of oil in the world IIRC).
Back to the whole thing about 7 countries in 5 years, each of them also was looking to buck the US/UK/Wall Street/City of London dominated uni-polar order.
This is a great overview. Thanks for talking the time to write it. I have two questions:
1. The Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of WWII with Europe in 1944 established the US dollar as the world currency for all commodities, so why would we need an agreement from the Saudi's in the 1970's to "only buy oil is dollars" when that was already the only acceptable unit of exchange at the time? Given the enormous profits the Saudi's were making from oil in the 1970's combined with their lack of infrastructure, only the US had financial markets deep enough to hold the value from their oil wealth in the form of treasuries. They found themselves in the same situation as the Japanese in the 1980's and the Chinese now. They may not like it or us, but we are the only country in the world with reserves large enough to store trillions in a form that can later be converted back to usable currency.
2. You mentioned Nixon took us off the Gold Standard because we could not pay our debts to Europe, but inflation was running at such a high rate our debt was essentially being erased without us paying hardly a cent. Gold, however, was trading at over $2000 an ounce due to this inflation, so Nixon was forced to take us off the Gold Standard because it was simply unaffordably to store gold at that cost and to do so would have only caused the price to go higher. The world begged him to exit the gold standard for their own sake since some were pegged to the dollar and all of them handled all exchanges in US currency (back to the Brenton Woods agreement mentioned above).
Exactly right. Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela have all borne witness to countless US broken promises/accords, color revolutions, regime change operations, invasions, sanctions, coups, assassinations, etc. and Putin is 100% correct when he says "The USA is not agreement capable." Every single one of those things has been conducted against left-leaning governments and/or countries with resources who refuse to give US interests full and unfettered access to them. Why would anyone trust Uncle Scam?
The common narrative is that Bush lied as a pretext to invade Iraq. The truth is more difficult to find and understand. Saddam refused to prove the WMD reports false. In a Western court of law it is not incumbent upon the accused to prove his innocence. The arena was one not at all understood in the West, and Saddam proved to be grand master in his game.
Saddam ran the most successful deception operation since the XX Committee in World War II. He believed that unless Iran concluded he had WMD it would invade and conquer Iraq. For Iran to come to that conclusion, everybody had to come to that conclusion. It could not succeed if even one country's intelligence service could prove the contention wrong.
He was assured by senior members of government in both France and Russia, paid agents, that Bush was a fool and they could easily control Bush to protect Iran. Oops.
This is documented by an FBI Agent's debriefing of Saddam; the agent's story was documented by a major US Network (ABC, IIRC). The entire deception operation is documented and in storage at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. How it has escaped a demand for public release is puzzling.
The Network never again broadcast the agent's story, and not a single other news source has carried the story. That one is neither puzzling nor mysterious.
Otherwise, I, too, have been a Kucinich fan for years. He makes his decisions based on principles, not short-term personal or partisan gains. His positions were less important to me than his decision-making process.
I think the revulsion over the 2nd Gulf War can't be understood purely in terms of the WMDs.
Many people now forget the anthrax scare that followed soon after the Twin Towers attack. What people do remember is that a group opportunists that always wanted a war with Iraq and always wanted something like the Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland security and mass surveillance of the American people leveraged our fear into their standing wish list of authoritarian resolutions we are all now stuck with. It's a repeat of the American people discovering after WWI that the British were actually using the Lusitania to transport weapons at the time the Germans attacked it. People felt duped because they were.
I think that's why many people aren't very interested in the true history of the WMD's. When they say the WMD were a lie, they are actually referring to a series of lies more nebulous that never sat quite right with them.
People like DK at the time are a proxy for those who stood against all of that whether people realize it or not.
Being actually part of WMD cleanup in Iraq, I agree with you. I never thought the things I found there were somehow a justification for what was done over the prior (at the time) 6 or 7 years.
At a high level, of course, everything is a lie. There are always caveats and counterexamples one could bring up to everything that bubbles to the surface in government or media. I'm reminded of Voltaire, "History is the lie commonly agreed upon". Large narratives are never the objective truth.
I was against it (and Afghanistan) from the very beginning but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right.
Have voted straight party line Republican my whole life*, but not because I agree with very much the party is for. It just tends to screw things up more to vote that way, and especially in the age of Trump.
* Except for that one youthful indiscretion of voting for Clinton in '92. Sue me. Bush was puking on the Japanese prime minister and Perot sounded like he was nuts.
That's the entire US experience in a nut shell. Anyone wanting to do anything that disturbs the socioeconomic pecking order is made to sound like a nut via the branch of the CIA we call the press.
Who knew voting could be made into blackmail where you just vote for the least damaging tyrant to your demographic knowing all the while you're merely choosing whose friends and family we're going to make rich this cycle while they rubber stamp the pre-approved agenda from the DAVOS crowd.
Perot was kind of a nut though. Very easy to caricature. The thing that did him in for me was leaving the campaign and then reentering late in the summer. Absent that, he would have gotten my vote.
He was dodging the heat that the press was hurling at him. Not a very well thought out tactic at all.
The thing is it takes a nut to not cave into the pressure of the cabal.
I think it's pretty irrelevant now though.
We're just along for the ride now and when you see this level of ineptitude you arrive at a point where you just have to admit you live in the same kind of banana republic the empire has set up everywhere else around the world.
Why wouldn't they use the same secret sauce at home that they do everywhere else ?
Look at how our foreign policy is now domestic policy....
I think we've gone beyond individual countries and are well into setting up corporate industrial zones within a one world government and single currency.
I think that was the globalist intent. There are a fair number of countries who are not interested in baking in the current pecking order. Some have nuclear arsenals. This doesn't sound like a winning hand for the globalists.
Realistically though, how do you get money out of politics? Serious question. Even avowedly anti-capitalistic regimes end up making their leadership rich.
You force the corporate TV and radio stations to give equal blocks of free airtime to all candidates who qualify for ballot status in enough states to have a statistical chance of winning. Why then would you need gobs of campaign cash? It’s the monopolist broadcasting corporations that rake in all that dark campaign money. The public airwaves have been hijacked to corrupt our own election system. We need to take them back.
Who decides who qualifies as a candidate ? These "parties" are in complete control of who advances and what script they must follow in order to stay on the gravy train.
"....but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right."
At the time of the 2001 attack I was just out of my second college program (engineering) and the economy had crashed with the dot com and telecom bubbles having just exploded - so I couldn't find a good private sector job. I actually called a USAF recruiting office and left a voicemail, but luckily never heard back.
My question to you is how much did you consider NOT going over there given your stated opposition to both wars and why didn't you look into options like being a conscientious objector?
I, personally, called the National Guard office and was asked what military training I had. I told the Lt. Col. who answered my exprience was with NASA, not any of the armed forces and was very politely declined and asked not to call back. This man's army doesn't need computer programmers with over 600 hours experience crewing high altitude aircraft.
I am not a conscientious objector by any standard that I consider appropriate. It would be an insult to conscientious objectors of faith for me to claim so.
I did what I did because it was for people I knew and cared for, not because it was for patriotism or some national goal. Just like most everyone else. My story was a female CW3 who had already done three tours in SWA who was going to be sent back for a fourth unless I would cover for her under orders. I did it. She separated and got a nice job with the FAA.
What I want to know is what did Obama do to Kucinich on Air Force One at the end of the Healthcase debate to turn Kucinich into a sellout from that moment forward? Obamacare, as Nader put it, was "A blowjob for the insurance industry."
Thank you! I was and still am baffled by how many liberals got on board with Obamacare when it seemed to me that all it did was put more power in the hands of the special interests. I saw it as a big step *away* from a single payer option, not a step toward it.
Exactly. Our government officials would NEVER vote in a true single payer system because that would mean an end to Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, and most importantly, their own gold-plated health benefits. In a true single payer system, everyone gets the same benefits.
...and the base level "lifeline" for poor people was shitty and overpriced insurance that only doctors an hour's drive would take patients on the ACA plans.
I suspect that if you believe that only a wholly government-run healthcare system is acceptable, then anything else is a crass giveaway. So maybe Kucinich has a more nuanced perspective than Nader. As a reporter who covered both the Clinton health effort and Obama’s, and who used Obama’s, ACÁ is a lifeline for many. I’d remind you that Nader’s 2000 campaign in effect elected Bush, who Nader maintained was tweedle-Dee to Gore’s tweedle-dum. Bush = Gore. Only if you stand so far to the side that you view life through a telescope that makes everything look side-by-side.
Sure it is, pal. Have you ever tried to sign up for that sweet ACA health care?
I have... and after having to pay more than I would have previously, I was being referred to doctor's offices 15 miles away who were just processing as many cheap-ass visits as they could because the ACA only paid *so much*. Most practices just never bothered to associate or provide for ACA plan holders.
It jacked the price of insurance premiums up 400% and didn't give the truly needy anything more than an option to BUY insurance; not "get healthcare". Medicare and Medicaid actually paid claims. This was not healthcare; it was insurance -and shitty, overpriced insurance at that.
Nader is right, of course.
The ACA became a lifeline for padding insurance aristocrats' pockets -not for poor people.
It's actually quite a good hustle since it got more people paying and those already paying to pay more while not paying anyone but the insurance companies.
That's Wall Street level on both ingenuity and the balls it took to propose it.
There's really not a two car parade anywhere on earth that our elite can't fuck up is there ?
"It's actually quite a good hustle since it got more people paying"
Some people just quit paying -- "quit paying" is hyperbole, they still had to pay the fine -- and opted to die instead, because they can't afford garbage privatized healthcare. That's where we're at.
Obama was the spokesmodel for a program he didn't promulgate, understand, or negotiate. The ACA was designed by children and brought to us by Rahm and a cohort of shysters in thick with private equity. Folks arguing for and imagining the ACA is a health care program are horribly mistaken,
You could say that about Oshama's entire presidency. The man was a highly educated shill with a wonderful speaking voice who mostly propounded platitudes, that when examined, really said nothing at all.
People talk about TDS, and its real, but no more real than ODS, where cons saw this man as some sort of socialist radical and libs saw him as the embodiment of all that is virtuous, as meanwhile his 8 years were nothing but a continuation of the same old same old, but done in a style that infuriated cons and delighted libs.
The man is as fake as the thirst he had in Flint Michigan, and a total Manchurian Candidate for the status quo.
Wait, wait, wait... He wasn't even a "politician out of Chicago". I'm from Chicago and he isn't crooked enough to be a Chicago pol. He wasn't even sure he was going to put is fucking Prez Library here, until it became obvious everyone would recognize what neophyte he actually was so he had to act like he was from here. He dabbled in academia, law, community organizing, politics, state senator then Federal, for a few months each, then parlayed his ability to package banality into commentary that seemed magical, and on to the White House. He was the ultimate iteration of the political animal; amorphous and shape shifting as a way of life.
Why is so little said about the younger Bushes' efforts to portray themselves as "from Texas" rather than "from Connecticut?" HW was all folly -- Garry Trudeau did a great bit in "Doonesbury" back in the '80s about "Poppy" getting sentimental over his residence of record, a Houston hotel room -- but much of the US public seemed completely sold on the idea of W. as a brush-clearin' Texan.
While I'm on this topic, the HW campaign against Dukakis in 1988 is the first time I remember the "East Coast Intellectual Liberal" thing being slammed around for political points -- even though HW could easily have been hoist by his own petard -- but he got away with it.
Thing is the insurance companies lost massive amounts of money from the ACA the same time as premiums tripled. Doctors also lost money. If it was wall street greed that undid ACA it was a very particularly incompetent greed.
The hatred still directed at Nader by party-line Dems over 20 years later is an awe-inspiring Jacobean-style grudge.
I don't think W's two terms were anything but disastrous; however, my understanding of democracy says that you vote for the candidate whose positions you like the best. But I am a simpleton citizen and not a brilliant "strategic" party hack.
That's one thing I give the GOP credit for. Libertarians had a lot more to do with Trump losing than Greens did with Gore losing, but we don't get this endless screeching from the GOP how we're to blame for Sleepy Joe being in the WH. The GOP doesn't believe they own us the way the Dems secretly believe they own the Greens.
I don't vote like that. I listen to their positions, then i look at their previous record and their donors. Rarely do they sync. (Looking at you, Obama and Biden. For starters.) I go for the one who has at least tried their best to walk the walk in line with their talk.
My health insurance premiums TRIPLED under ACA. The post-fiasco spin put on by the Dems was that the small increase in people coverage was the goal all along, but if you actually look back at Obama's election he was literally promising that everyone's premiums would drop by $1000 per year. I don't think this was due to handouts to insurance companies, because my county went from having 7 to having one provider as soon as Obamacare was implemented and we felt damn lucky that that final one didn't pull out. Rather it's that Democrats have this image of themselves as being smart technocrats but really they don't understand what they're doing, and the policies they think they want they have no idea what the consequences will be because they simply do not understand what reality is. Just about everyone lost from the ACA except for poor people who got increased subsidies. And that could have been done just by slightly increasing funding to Medicaid.
"Just about everyone lost from the ACA except for poor people who got increased subsidies."
I know this is already a dogpile on ACA -- I might be the last dog, and certainly the mangiest -- but try being an unemployed person or a marginally employed (i.e. working, but still poor) person and see what it does for you.
I paid the government a fine last year for the crime of not paying for privatized health insurance. It tells you who is the boss around here.
As weak as the assumption that everybody who voted for Jill Stein or the Libertarians or who wrote somebody in or stayed on the couch would gave voted for Hillary.
God knows I don't want to pick favorites, but is it just me or do the Dems seem to be be far more obsessed with this "YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED FOR MUH GUY, STOOPID THIRD PARTIER" thing than the Reps? Like, clearly Trump was not the institutional GOP's preferred choice, but once he got in they shrugged their shoulders and ran with it. DNC Brain wants to relitigate elections that were over years or decades ago and hector everyone who did not vote in the correct way.
I may move in the wrong circles, but never once have i heard a Republican (and they're most of my family to boot) throw a hissy about Libertarian voters.
They do the same thing on the right, by the way, to argue that the libertarian vote costs Republicans elections. It's stupid for the same reason: you can't assume that a libertarian voter would go Republican if the libertarian weren't on the ticket.
No one is arguing that people should be denied health care. Of course they should have health care. The argument is Obamacare was a blowjob for the insurance industry. Which it was. They also left out the blow job for private equity, which was a very, very satisfying blow job.
How do you arbitrate lifesaving care vs stuff that is not absolutely necessary?
Attaching actual price tags to things would certainly help. If we knew that extending prenatal care to all people would cost X billion, funding that would be much better than relying on volunteer obstetricians (yes that is a thing) and unpaid bills to "fund" this. But no one really knows.
If I had a point, I think you're missing it. What the ACA did for any self employed person (me) was to double the rate and halve the service, with a $6,784 deductible. That is not health care. I was arbitrated out of the system, and so were all my tradespeople friends and associates.
What the ACA did for private equity was lock in their stranglehold on big Pharma (drug costs) and clinical services (they own the clinics and hospitals). I'm discussing the locked in nature of all the worst things about health care. You're discussing moral and ethical issues, which I understand. The ACA does not get us to where we are able to make moral or ethical choices; our options are delineated by big insurance and private equity. The ACA is not a health care policy; it's a locked in revenue stream and massive profit center for insurance and private equity.
As I recall, the only "concession" Obama got for the ACA was to eliminate the "donut hole" on Part D drug prescriptions left there by Bush, with the no negotiations on drug prices still intact.
Once they heard his proposal, the drug companies couldn't believe that was all he wanted in return.
Good old fashioned Dem triangulating, begun by Bubba and perfected under Obama, culminating in Trump's election.
It would also require the long-needed balls to graduate the value of "estimated year of life saved" differently for 20-year-olds and 95-year-olds. -
Such balls are not in evidence, not in the media, government, the insurance industry, nor academia. (I know, insurance people can and do make such calculations, they're just never used and almost never admitted.)
That is, of course, the slippery slope to end all slippery slopes.
Actuarial data is similar to what you are talking about. I know it is in use bc my dad used to use it in his role supervising BI lit back 40 years ago.
I still think the Democrats made a huge tactical mistake letting Clinton get away with his perjury. Replacing him with Gore would have made Gore a shoo-in in 2000. I can't imagine his response to 9/11 would have been worse than what actually happened.
But he had trouble keeping his human mask on over his reptilian face. He had to go. When the glued his mask on tight, it didn't move enough to be convincing...
Especially as he made the campaign promise that he wouldn't sign a health care bill without it. Stupid me, i voted for him based on that, pretty much. I haven't voted Dem top of the ticket ever since.
I knew some first time voters who were SHOCKED when Obama, after his election, was presented with a poll showing marijuana legalization was the big issue on the minds of college students, and asked about it, and 'answered' "Heh heheh."
Some young voters were probably shocked when they heard Harris claim to support legal weed. Weird prosecutorial record for one who supported it, nevermind alledgedly to toking to Tupac.
Going to read this book. It is funny that my fellow liberals don’t get why I don’t think Trump supporters are automatically dirtbags. The poor ones are getting fucked over like I was. We just came to different ways to protest the political dirtbags in office and professional class media enablers for both teams.
Like I said before, I'll never vote Republican because of the belief in a superior white social hierarchy that underlies all their policies. I was the same social class as the poor whites so I get why they like it, pisses off the upper class when they don't use their stupid ass pronouns or some asshole tells a drywaller to code(which I did by the way, but they don't acknowledge the huge class barrier and discrimination against the poor). Hell, I laughed at shit Trump said even though I knew he was a piece of shit that stiffed contractors. My old co-workers would spout some stupid half-formed, bullshit opinions due to their lack of rigorous education to challenge their bullshit. But if I needed help moving, doing a flooring project, etc. they would show up with a six pack and tools. My current co-workers understand macro economics and can talk circles around me, but no way in hell would they help put cabinets up in my kitchen. I don't know what the fuck I am talking about, but there are a lot of decent Trump supporters with dumbass opinions.
«never vote Republican because of the belief in a superior white social hierarchy that underlies all their policies»
That is not quite right, that is too influenced by Corey Robin and similar propaganda about what is means to be "reactionary".
Actually the Republican Party has no such belief about a "superior white social hierarchy", they are merely the instrument of those who have a position of incumbency and want to protect and further it. Whatever the color of the incumbents and whether their incumbency is about a social hierarchy or not. In particular many republicans are "whigs" like the most of the Democratic Party, that is they are socially liberal, and the incumbency they protect and further is that of power in the markets, not social hierachy. It is the "tory" side of the Republicans that is about "social hierarchy", the "tradcons", and it is the "dixie" side that cares about color.
This sounds like a long read but now I'm very interested in checking it out. Since 2004 was the first election I was old enough to vote in, I've always thought of Kucinich as the first (and last) hope of a major political party candidate whom I could consider to at least be anti-war adjacent. Since I am very firmly anti-war, everybody else in the Dem & Rep camps has been a pretty easy "Pass" from me (I'll always regret being duped into believing even for a second that Obama was a worthwhile vote from an anti-war perspective). That also means that I'm pretty used to both parties and their adherents shitting on me left & right (pun intended) as being unpatriotic or a Nazi sympathizer or whatever, so I certainly sympathize a lot with guys like Kucinich when I see them getting shit on by the Left & the Right in an alternating fashion.
"He understands the catastrophe of default, but he can’t sell; he’s worried about the city, but also his soul."
This is the kind of dilemma that hits me hard, too, and I feel like it's an argument that's gone by the wayside between two competing materialist philosophies (Capitalism vs. Socialism/Marxism is probably the easiest shorthand for it) that have gained such hegemony over the years that any discussion of a "soul" or things outside the narrow materialist view get instantly discarded. I'm a long-since renounced Evangelical, but some of those things still stick with me since there's still a lot to learn from things like the Sermon on the Mount and even Talmudic Law from the early "Old Testament" writings.
I think it was Vonnegut who I read once described himself as a "Christ-loving Atheist" and I thought that was a good way of putting it. Especially as a musician/artist, the idea of selling my soul has always been there -- you see artists sell out to make a bunch of drivel to pad their pockets, and they never get their souls back, the thing that made them so beautiful to begin with. In fact, they rarely want it back because they have all these material possessions and their kids go to fancy schools, so why would they care about something like a soul? Maybe it's just because my name is Matthew so I've always leaned in to that book in the Bible, but even 15 years after quitting the faith and splitting from churches, I still remember Matthew 19:26 (my paraphrase): "For what would it profit a man, to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?" For all my lefty principles and such, I could never truly feel like a part of the Left these days with how much they focus on materialistic needs, and I'm considered a person who "fetishizes poverty" when I fondly remember stories from my Grandma about how poor her family was, but the idea that "we may not have much money, but we've always got each other" really MEANS something. Lots of people have covered this song (I absolutely love the Jeff Buckley version), and these lines have always stood out to me from Satisfied Mind:
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind
Thanks for the review Matt, I'll have to look into this book when I've got the appetite for a 700-pager, haha.
Do you know if you are unauthorized /Foreign and want to become a citizen all you need is a doctors signature that you were born in a Hospital in the US and or you can use a Baptism paper?
«the first (and last) hope of a major political party candidate whom I could consider to at least be anti-war adjacent. Since I am very firmly anti-war»
I voted for Kucinich in the Democratic primaries in DC in both 2004 and 2008. He won the DC primary in 2004. Then, for reasons that were never explained to the public, the Democratic establishment decided on a do-over. So, we had a second primary, and John Kerry won. Again, no explanation and virtually no press coverage. Anyone I talked to about my vote described Kucinich as “weird.” One supposedly progressive commentator even remarked on the weird way Kucinich ate noodles. So we got polished and corrupt instead of honest, smart and unconventional. We can’t say we’ve never had choices.
You touched on a live wire there, Nancy. No one talks about the rigged primaries where the losing party actually challenges the prevailing narrative. Instead, our attention is deflected to the general election where both parties stack the odds in their dominant constituency.
The was politics works in the USA and several other "Washington Consensus" places has been described "you can vote for any candidate you want as long as we nominate the candidates we want".
"Then, for reasons that were never explained to the public, the Democratic establishment decided on a do-over."
The Democratic establishment used to consume wearisome amounts of time and effort on the "do-over," but has recently moved to the more effective and efficient "pre-over." Progress!
"We can’t say we’ve never had choices."
Democratic primary voters aren't allowed to have nice things.
Thanks Matt. This kind of reporting is keeping the spotlight where it should be, not so much Dems vs Republicans, but on the "riggers" and the "riggees" (so to speak. )
I never could understand why Trump was supposedly a pariah from the day he came down the escalator. It was precisely his pie-in-the-face behavior to the riggers that scared everybody to death. I think he was caught off guard by the extent to which those in his own party (and administration) were entrenched in the rigged system. He was a real threat, and I think he was getting close to the core of the problem so he had to be gotten rid of. It's the riggers vs the riggees.
True. Unfortunately Trump did not understand the depth or intensity of his Machiavellian opposition. He should have fired 50% of the Federal beuracracy. An empty chair is better then an avid enemy
Yup-Trump nominated Andy Puzder, the CEO or Hardee’s as SecLabor-a smart nomination-the man understands the real labor market-but he got whacked by the DC-PC complex.....
I'm not Trump supporter, but his early strategy of surrounding himself with Generals was a really bad strategy. No one obtains that rank without being an absolute snake in the grass. If he thought they would simply follow his orders he understood the military even less than I already assumed.
Good point. Trump had to be maximally attacked and removed because he was already wealthy and powerful, and he could therefore focus on what mattered to him, ie, America's "greatness". The trough feeders could not control him through the usual channels, and he knew all about how they stayed in power. He had to go.
«I never could understand why Trump was supposedly a pariah from the day he came down the escalator.»
My main theory, looking at the type of people most affected by TDS, and their unthinking, gut feeling of revulsion at Trump, and the often ridiculous arguments against him they come up, ignoring far more realistic ones, is that they object to him as a person, because he is "lowbrow", a vulgar performer, and they hate the idea of being ruled by someone they see as an inferior, an Orange Baboon. They want their boss to look the part. NN Taleb has written appositely:
“What did we learn from the failed TRUMP experiment? (cont) Someone in office, like a High Priest of Baal, a Patriarch, a doge, a judge, or a mafia don, must observe a certain decorum & a certain ornamental deportment. This holds even more true in a secular democracy. #Lindy”
It is somewhat like the revulsion that many from the other side felt at the presidency of BH Obama, even if he was a suave reganist elitist, because they also hated the idea of being ruled by someone they considered an inferior.
My first impression of Kucinich was not great, but in the following years I have found him to be an honest and forthright man. Based on this very fine article, I can now presume my first impressions were based on false reporting AKA: Fake News. It's more than clear to me today that what we have is a somewhat hidden group of criminals masquerading as politicians, news media, and corrupt corporations, where the bottom line is to gain wealth for themselves at the expense of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Add to that a federal government that supports the activity, as long as someone form within it gains as well.
«what we have is a somewhat hidden group of criminals masquerading as politicians, news media, and corrupt corporations, where the bottom line is to gain wealth for themselves at the expense of their neighbors and fellow citizens.»
Isn't that the American Dream? Isn't "get a little of that ice cream" without too many scruples the dream of the Great American Middle Class? If so many voters are corrupt don't they deserve representation too? I have a quote here from famous historian Newt Gingrich, part of a speech in which he argued that it is futile to try to do environmental regulation in the USA:
"If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter. The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.”
It's a good question, but Gingrich is a politicians, so he does see things differently than an enlightened human. I believe it was Socrates that said...The unexamined life is not worth living.
Excellent comment. I am occasionally tempted to admire Gingrich based upon his occasional, flippant candor about the way things actually work in Washington, but then I remember that he's The Thing from John Carpenter's THE THING (1982).
Great article. Glad you wrote it. But I was able to answer this question off the top of my head without reading any further:
"By 2020 most all of Kucinich’s positions were orthodoxy among Democratic voters, yet he remains an outcast to Democrats nationally. In fact, he’s been frozen out of blue-state media for the better part of a decade, and welcomed during the same time to a five-year stint as a Fox News contributor. What gives?"
What gives is the key word "most." Those positions held by Kucinich that *AREN'T* orthodoxy among Democrat voters (or the DNC / corporate media hydra) are exactly why he's been frozen out. Allow me to list them:
1. Anti-war (see: Tulsi Gabbard for another example)
2. Pro Medicare for All (or an equivalent UHC system)
3. Tuition free college
4. Anti "intelligence" community / surveillance state
Those four things, or any combination of them - including just #1 - will keep anyone frozen out of the corporate media and unable to utilize the corporate DNC's party machine to get elected to any meaningful position of power. That simple.
"welcomed during the same time to a five-year stint as a Fox News contributor. What gives?"
I don't watch cable news (and so am speaking -- as usual -- out of my ass), but based on its inclusion of Greenwald and Kucinich I infer that FOX is becoming somewhat more heterodox and interesting, if one must pick a propaganda channel.
I was immediately impressed by Dennis Kucinich when he was one of the few (if any at that time) Croatian-Americans in Congress, and he nobly, on principle, opposed US military action against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Dennis could have easily earned strong support from nationalistic Croatian-Americans, including many in his district, by backing such moves. Instead, he risked their strong enmity by opposing those acts of war, publicly. After that, I contributed to all his presidential campaigns.
We need people of integrity. Otherwise, any system can and will be gamed.
There were Croatians (or Serbs, different side, same mentality) from Independence or Strongsville who were sending their teenage kids over to the battle zone on summer break in the early 90s, where they were set up w/sniper rifles in fairly safe positions and basically told “Shoot at anything that moves beyond point X”
There's probably a novel to be written about regional loyalties in Ohio during that period in the late '90s when Serbs were the designated US Official Enemy.
The Dayton Accords were the biggest story in town since the Wright Bro’s. started buzzing around-you can still get a ride in one of their original Wright B flyers.
Matt, thank you SO much for doing the interview and writing the book review. I almost feel you’ve vindicated him on so many levels, and I thank you for that too. I voted for the man in 2004 and was ready to do it again in 2008 before he pulled out of the race. I remember the first time I heard him speak (I was a transplant from Puerto Rico at the time) and my jaw fell to the floor; who is this man, I wondered. Well, he turned out to be THE most “unelectable” candidate from that time. I miss him.
We probably need more tell-all stories about the powers that be - starting with General Smedley Butler's uncovering a fascist plot to take over the government in the 30s, to Henry Wallace's being pushed out of the democratic party, to Kennedy's fights with intelligence and JCOS inside the administration, to Nixon's decision to open up relations with China to get the inside skinny on the military industrial reaction. Ford was a placeholder for the intelligence community and just about everyone after that played ball with the neoliberal establishment to some extent.
We need more institutional exposure of how the hidden state plays ball - beyond assassinations, dirty wars, coup d'etats, and rigging elections.
Here's a hot flash for you, mcelroyj. There is no hidden state. There's no reason to hide the state. Because the folks who run the state own everything and everybody worth owning. It's right in front of your eyes and my eyes. They're not shy anymore. And they're operating from the assumption that there's not a damn thing we can do about it. They may be right! No need for hide and seek. It's the difference between building a ballpark in San Diego And Toronto. You need a dome in Toronto, but not San Diego. The boys and girls of the State these days play in San Diego. We know where the keep the Beluga, we just can't get at it.
"We need more institutional exposure of how the hidden state plays ball - beyond assassinations, dirty wars, coup d'etats, and rigging elections...."
Sounds as though you're volunteering for the project you've outlined above. Careful. Last person to undertake that sort of challenge, Ed Snowden, was reduced to renting a cold water flat in Vologda from Boris Feldsparovich. All that stuff you list above is low-hanging fruit plucked long ago. Here's some reading for you. Keep us posted on how deep that deep state really is....cheers...
Smedley Butler: “War is a Racket”: Smed’s a bit of a nut. But he’s got heart and his head is in the right place. Read this 25 years ago. War is definitely a racket, but that’s been self-evident for, say, 6,000 years. Available now in audio version and might be fun listening after a handful of psilocybin-based snacks.
John Nichols, “The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” Nice , recently published updated overview of Wallace’s quixotic ‘48 presidential campaign on the progressive ticket. Also gives succinct account of the concerted---and successful---effort to jettison Wallace from the ‘44 ticket. This was handled by some of the reactionary elements within the democratic party. Wallace was perceived as a sort of radical poindexter, a tolerated eccentric during the early days of the new deal, a compromise choice in 1940, but wholly unacceptable as a potential president given Roosevelt’s rapidly failing health.
The ‘44 demo nominating convention was a mere formality. In collusion with the machinations of the legislators, Roosevelt hustled Wallace off to a two-month fact finding trip to Siberia and never spoke to him about the ‘44 ticket until he was for all practical purposes a dead candidate. Despite failing health, FDR evidently retained his sense of humor.
The ‘44 demo nominating convention was a mere formality. “Conspiracy of the pure in heart” indeed. By the way, Wallace was never kicked out of the democratic party. He merely left it when he surmised there was no place for him in a party drifting to the right in response to political pressures of the cold war. Have always been a Wallace fan.
But for my money, Dwight Macdonald’s biography offers the best delineation of Wallace’s idiosyncratic personality and wide-ranging curiosity across disciplines as a policy polymath. And it’s Macdonald, always worth the time no matter the subject. Unfortunately, it’s out of print.
As for Nixon and China, there are a forest-full of books detailing extensively Nixon’s possible motives for going to China. Only the serpent knows. Here I like the conventional wisdom: Watergate was getting warm, and the calaboose closer.
Books too numerous to showcase, though I’d start with Kissinger’s memoirs and Margaret Macmillan’s “Nixon in China,” pretty much the scholarly gold standard for this subject. Garry Wills’ “Nixon Agonistes” is worth a view---a great work detailing Nixon’s ambition and shrewd calculations in all things statecraft and prepares one for the lizard mind that will eventually navigate simultaneously the rapprochement with China and the brewing circus of Watergate.
My rule of thumb: show me a conspiracy and I’ll show you human frailty and unmitigated dunderheadedness. But then you’re not alone. Most of the commenters on Taibbi’s site are awash in conspiracy theories. One supposes it’s the scholarly equivalent of an Alex Jones rant.
I remember Dennis Kucinich running for president. He was never once allowed to be front and center...that spot was reserved for Clinton and Obama. He was shoved to the far side of the stage, but every time he got a chance to say something, what he said made sense, was realistic, rang of sincerity and made me always say, this is the guy I want for president. The others, by comparison, were, well, stupid, including the two who were front and center, though Obama fooled a lot of people. I have wondered often what kind of a world we would live in if we were allowed to have a decent president, such as Kucinich, Stein, Gabbard. That won't happen in my lifetime....or ever, I expect. I loved the guy for the way he was and missed him when he fell out of sight. Look forward to his book. Thanks, Matt, for this.
«if we were allowed to have a decent president, such as Kucinich, Stein, Gabbard»
There is a yuuuge difference as Trump discovered between being in office and being in power, they are not quite the same thing. Some presidents had actual power because they had what is called a "power base", that is backers who trusted them and helped them, and a lot of minions whose careers they had nurtured and who trusted them and helped them, and lots of experience working the actual levers of power. Basically powerful presidents had to be "machine politicians", the leaders of their own faction, a faction that mattered.
I strongly suspect that there was a switch from machine politician candidates to primaries to select candidates because the powerful finance and business lobbies realized that machine politicians thought of themselves as principals, having their own power base, instead of as representatives of their sponsors. Primaries tend to require a lot of money, giving more power to the sponsors over candidates, and they tend to select "popular", "looks good" politicians, who rarely have their own power base.
Trump (and Sanders, and Corbyn in England) was an exception to that, because he was bankrolled by his own fortune, and was a corrupter, instead of being corrupted, but he still did not have any political power base, no knowledge of how to make the mere office of president gain some actual power, including no knowledge of the administrative machine. He probably thought that he could solve all problems with permanent campaign mode on one side, and just doing his usual as a real estate mobster does on the other side, but on the other side he fought with people as rich as himself, and far more experienced in driving national policies, with other principals, with other "sponsors".
Though, my hunch is that Trump and Jeff Zucker were tapped to recreate a presidential reality show to manufacture consent for some truly evil "solutions" to a truly evil sounding boogeyman.
Thanks, I understand the way it works. You're right. What I was talking about, that won't happen in my lifetime, if ever, is a genuinely honest president with a cabinet of the same and a Congress who have integrity, so that all work for the governed. In other words, where people after power, money and control don't run anything. As I said, won't happen.
Kucinich's loss in 08 was America's loss. Instead we got obie, the transformational president that bombed brown people every single day of his Nobel Peace Prize presidency, gave us nearly $11TRILLION in new debt, waged culture wars and race wars and spied on every single American for Amazon (giving Bezos the $600M CIA contract that let him buy the WaPo and your privacy), all while leaving office some $20million richer.
I look forward to The Division of Light and Power, primarily because the U.S. media no longer reports on government corruption - after all, fiction, aspersions, and witch hunts are much more fun and much more lucrative than bearing the burden of the 4th Estate and actually investigating wrong doing by the people we've elected to govern us.
One might ask Kucinich how he managed to navigate power for so long while remaining unscathed (other than his national political brand). So many of his ideas had and do have merit, but I guess I find myself in the middle of being gobsmacked by his audacity/will to challenge power and his sheer luck of not being ruined more than just his reputation in Washington temporarily. There are worse outcomes and fates than his.
Another way to say this is that if WaPo is singing his praises now (decades after the fact), then he must have been an easy threat to dismantle. Someone like Philip Agee or Julian Assange seems to rankle the deep state and their whorish brethren congress much more Kucinich. These benign caricatures like Adlai Stephenson, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders seem to get walked upon and bullied more than they lead people to a new path.
There is a great deal to admire in DK, no doubt - but if he was the best opportunity for a sane Presidential choice in the last 40 years, we are clearly fucked.
"Someone like Philip Agee or Julian Assange seems to rankle the deep state and their whorish brethren congress much more [than] Kucinich."
Brutal, mcelroyj, but fair.
A digression closer to my own l'il hidey-hole; if corruption is utterly endemic to a political entity such as the City Council of Cleveland, OH, do we imagine that the federal security/intelligence services are clean as the driven snow?
I think that's the point - the anti-communist 50's was the test case for how the tripartite nature of power works (the state or the face of democracy, the corporatocracy including financial/media domination to manufacture consent and socialize loss, and then the hidden state where surveillance, military expansion, drug-running financed dirty tricks in bed with the mob at home and abroad).
20 years younger, prefer longer sentences if you haven't noticed by now, and his name has 2 L's where mine has one. As far as the comparison, I'm an amateur in brutal pessimism and have never spent more than a week in California. My hideouts in include the states of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and the confines of Kansas City, Bethesda and Madison. Have more in common with Thomas Frank than I do James Ellroy (then again his childhood is stark).
My background is in academia/teaching, coaching, and family finance/investing but history and podcasting are current passions.
During one of the debates Trump asked Biden how he came to own three very expensive homes. Trump made a sarcastic face and said something like “it makes no sense”, but then he let it go. I think he could’ve won the election with that issue alone. That is the populace tact that could win - Dem or GOP. Nancy how did you become rich? Hammer on that. Mitch can’t help but notice you’re a millionnaire. What are the politicians tax returns say, how much did they earn and does that equate to 3 homes.
And their wealth is just the grease on the rails that moved the big money. Trump was already rich and was immune to the trap. It was fun to watch a incorruptable patroit swinging like Iron Mike against the tide of slime. Hope he gets in the ring again, but he's earned a retirememt imo.
Incorruptible patriot! Oh man, I just laughed so hard my tits shot off my chest and murked the mailman.
Not a bad way to go...
Trump came from a family fortune based on being a slumlord, not paying your bills and solving problems by suing people. He is not a patriot, he is a grifter.
Trump was immune to the trap ? Ha ! That's fucking hilarious !
Holy shit. I needed a laugh today. I agree that Trump may have at some point bitten off a human ear like Mike Tyson.
Love Iron Mike. He too could fight
I'm a fan of Mike Tyson. Especially because of who he is now.
Tyson is a bright and insightful man when he is sober. I’m definitely a fan of his, in and out of the ring.
He could at least be a House Representative...
Dude you just called Trump incorruptible. Matt’s audience is not gonna like that.
Slowly, very slowly, I feel like there is a convergence between left and right developing in Matt's comments page, on at least some key issues. It's one of the main reasons I'm here. Not everyone is feeling the love, but some perceptible and gratifying connections are being made.
That said, someone will be here shortly to complain about something like Trump charging the Secret Service for staying in his hotels when they accompanied him and point to this as evidence of corruption. (They will not know, or will ignore, that Biden charges the Secret Service to stay at his guest house, and of course they are not displacing other paying guests, as they would be at the Trump hotels.)
But here's an undeniable fact: Public service has made Trump poorer, but it has made the Bidens, Obamas, and Clintons much, much richer.
Listing Biden’s shitty behavior is not a valid response to Trump’s shitty behavior. They’re both doddering, unfit sleazebags.
I agree. But the media spent four years being shocked, shocked at supposedly unprecedented outrages from Trump, while ignoring similar behavior from Democrats. It got old, and it drove some credulous people into hysteria.
Oh, I definitely agree with you there. I just don’t want to see people who feel alienated by Democratic corruption race into the GOP’s arms. I wish we could all lock arms under the flag of “fuck both parties” and figure out how to right this ship without the monstrosity of electoral politics.
Yeah...The Dems all took his campaign donations when he was a democrat. He was just as much of misogynistic pagan back then but the Clintons loved him. Pelosi took his dough and I'm sure Chucky S did as well.
No, Fox news was gushing about him the whole time. 5 years ago, Fox was shocked about everything Obama did, while the liberal side gushed. Both sides have their own propaganda and they both tell everyone else that they are the real enemies of America.
If there was no CCP Virus, we would be rocking now. We were on a roll 2017-2019.
Say we find China created COVID. Would the next question be on purpose. And we all know Fauci financed part of the study. There are a lot of implications there.
What I can't understand is why the Democrats wanted to blame the US for COVID????
They blame the US for everything. They don’t like America
Democrats are simply playing their assigned role. You should know the game by now. The parties confer on their discrete narratives and continue working together to serve their mutual interests. None of them care where/how Covid originated, only how the story serves their present needs and preserves the illusion of warring ideologies in the legislative branch (which is false; they all serve the same masters).
"Public service has made Trump poorer...."
Nonsense. It's made him (and his family far richer) just as it has with the others you named. Notably you left out Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush....hmmmm. There's no president alive who doesn't emerge from that office far better off than they were when they entered, Trump being no exception.
Note that this article says nothing about the Secret Service or anything about Russiagate.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-family-profiting-presidency-books-deals-business-696244
This one might mention the Secret Service staying at his hotels, but if so it's a tiny, tiny exception to the rest of the information.
https://projects.propublica.org/paying-the-president/
Weak tea my man. Super weak. You reference a Newsweek (!) article written 5 months after Trump was inaugurated, a low effort hit piece. And an inscrutable unreferenced chart of nothing.
Compare that to "plus 10 mil for the big guy" https://youtu.be/LcpJu_MJrjc
Or the rank corruption of Biden withholding aid to Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who stood in the way of Hunter's installation on the board of Burisma. https://youtu.be/rtO1OigwfVs
Turn off CNN and do some research. You will find many more examples, but only if you want to learn the truth. Biden family is pure graft, and part and parcel of the Deep State for decades. FBI has Hunters' laptop for like 2 years now, yet no prosecution at all, in spite of reported lurid interactions with minor relatives. Anyone in possession of Hunters' laptop possesses child pornography. Pretty good disincentive for getting involved there, especially in the current milieu of selective enforcement.
Or debauchery with chinese hookers is 100% A-OK for a Presidents son? https://gtv.org/video/id=5f977cf9384a485bd9603541
Or how he was never prosecuted for falsifying a firearm application, a felony. Discharged from armed services for drugs, but a couple years later no history of drug use on his firearm application... works if your name is Biden.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/29/hunter-biden-should-be-charged-for-lying-on-gun-application/
Inescapable conclusion is the Bidens are favored members of the Deep State, and the IC and MSM wings are doing their best to protect them. OTOH Trump is sworn enemy to IC and MSM because he is outside their control. He already had money, and he loves America.
To those of us who paid attention for the last 5 years this is obvious. To those who devoured the fear porn of CNN for the last 5 years, might as well be written in Linear A.
Duuuude, you RTDS jokers always crack me up.
1) Just stating things as though they are iron clad truths and then waving your hands isn't a valid form of argument. Who cares if the Newsweek article was 5 weeks or 5 years after the inauguration? Do you dispute ANY of the ways they claim he set himself and his family up to enrich themselves (ex. NOT putting business holdings in a blind trust)?
2) The Pro-Publica chart has all kinds of references. I'm sorry if you lack reading comprehension skills or if you're viewing the page from your Samsung Galaxy S6 from 12 years ago, but there are links for "Download all data" and "View data sources." Once again, if you disagree with any of them, please lay it out here.
3) RTDS = Reverse Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't GAF about Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush I, Bush II - OR - Trump's corruption. They're ALL corrupt. But you RTDS folks seem to think that Trump was some unicorn perfect President who didn't monetize his White House tenure. He may have fallen a few dozen spots on the Forbes list (not that his wealth was ever liquid or actually verifiable), but he made over a billion while he was President. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-made-at-least-16-billion-while-us-president-2021-2?op=1
4) I don't disagree one iota that Biden is the favorite of the deep state, but that didn't stop Trump from hiring swamp creatures like Michael Bolton and other current and former members of the deep state. I don't GAF about Biden's son's laptop, but I can tell you that the allegations of child pron are most likely bogus. You have any good links to back up that assertion? Trump is on record talking about how he likes 'em young, hung out plenty with Epstein, and has bragged about how he'd go back in the dressing room at his pageants for Miss USA and Miss Universe. I quote (from his interview with Howard Stern):
"Well, I'll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed, and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm inspecting it. You know, I'm inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.
"You know, the dresses. 'Is everyone okay?' You know, they're standing there with no clothes. 'Is everybody okay?' And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that. But no, I've been very good."
In the exchange, Stern asks Trump if, in the years he owned Miss Universe and Miss USA, there were times he had sex with the contestants, all of whom are over age 18.
Trump first answers, "I never comment on things like that."
Again, Biden loves sniffing girls' hair and Trump likes to "grab 'em by the pussy" - so both are old pervs.
P.S. - Do you REALLY think that the 'deep state' would let ANYONE actually get elected in the first place if they didn't control or approve of the candidate?
P.P.S. - Stop watching OAN and Newsmax; they're frying your brain. I never watch CNN or MSNBC - or ANY cable news/website. Your idiotic assumption that I do is based purely on your RTDS.
Wrong. Trump lost money. Never took a salary.
DJT is supposedly a billionaire and your barometer of whether he gained or lost wealth over 4 years is whether or not he took a 400k salary...?
What does a salary have to do with not making money ?? Holy cow man think !
Good, and true point
Could a politician on either side ride this line of thinking - lambasting all Pols - to the White House? Glenn Greenwald as campaign chair.
I feel like if a politician did that, they would probably be universally despised by all the establishment figures in DC and the press. In my more paranoid moments, I can even imagine them being framed by the intelligence agencies, to destroy any chance of having a successful Presidency.
Oh, that could never happen! Not even if the candidate were a faux populist blowhard who tweeted like a 12-year-old edgelord.
Sublime summation my man!
There's too much money to be made.
That's the reason this dead horse keeps getting beaten. If you don't want politicians to get rich, I don't know what to tell you. Even the people running the Soviet Union got rich, at least comparatively.
Stop donating money to their campaigns for starters.
«Even the people running the Soviet Union got rich, at least comparatively.»
That "comparatively" is a wild exaggeration, for example, here someone who was Minister for Science and Energy in the 1960 in the UK describes an official visit to the UK, from his diary, 1963-06-14:
“In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. Madame Santalova was the interpreter. I had been told by the Ambassador that Russian Ministers never invite British Ministers to their flats or homes and he was absolutely amazed when this invitation came in but it was, of course, because I had asked Kirillin to my home in London. It was lovely. We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child live. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together, then he showed us home movies of his trip to England and having snowballs thrown at him by the children.”
And he was an Academician, a category that still today in Russia enjoys the greatest prestige (in a poll more people said that their dream was to be an academician than an oligarch).
That's pretty much what Trump did. He just became what he lambasted along the way.
Wow you read Matt's mind on his June 3 essay!
Please list the first 7 numbers between 1 an 53 that come to mind. 😃
Skeptic says: "...That said, someone will be here shortly to complain about something like Trump charging the Secret Service for staying in his hotels when they accompanied him and point to this as evidence of corruption. (They will not know, or will ignore, that Biden charges the Secret Service to stay at his guest house, and of course they are not displacing other paying guests, as they would be at the Trump hotels.)"
First off, the Secret Service does not "charge" or bill presidents for their work. The government, a.k.a. the taxpayers, pick up the tab.
And from BusinessInsider:
"Even when Trump's golf club in Bedminster, N.J. was closed up earlier in the coronavirus pandemic, the documents obtained in the lawsuit show the Secret Service still got hit with a $21,800 charge for a cottage rental and other room fees....The usual rate for agents to stay at a Trump property — even when there's no indication he will stop by — is $567 per night, according to the Post....That's a far cry from the mere "50 bucks" per room Eric Trump claimed the taxpayers dish out when defending the practice back in October 2016."
Perhaps it's an accounting error with the travel ledgers. Junior miscatalogued the $50 bucks for, you know, maybe a discount hooker down on her luck---something like that, but for goodness sake who knows with those boys....
https://www.businessinsider.com/secret-service-billed-1-million-trump-properties-rooms-wapo-2020-9
And Skeptic, don't think of this as a "complaint," merely a friendly reprimand....
Hey Skeptic,
Why doncha introduce yourself to Google and basic internet research, and layoff the sloppy propaganda---or stick to UFO and crypto sites.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/08/trump-secret-service-detail-children-post-white-house
Donald Trump’s adult children reportedly cost taxpayers $140,000 in Secret Service security in the month after the clan’s patriarch left the White House in January.
Ordinarily, family members of a president lose their security detail when they leave office. But in the case of the four Trump siblings and two of their spouses, the former president issued a directive to extend post-presidency protections by six months.
The costs, obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics, do not include security protections at Trump properties in New Jersey, Palm Beach and Briarcliff, New York. With those factored in, the total would likely be far higher, according to the group.
According to the watchdog, records reveal that the Trump children maintained a “breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service”.
Transport costs alone amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totaled at least $88,678.39.The watchdog found that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went from their jobs at the White House to a 10-day vacation in Utah, racking up hotel costs of $62,599. After a month in Miami, they stayed at Trump’s Bedminster golf property for three days in late February.
Eric and Lara Trump spent much of February at Trump’s Briarcliff property, interspersed with trips to New York, Miami and Palm Beach, at a cost of $12,742.
Donald Trump Jr also spent time in New York City, on Long Island, and in upstate New York, racking up bills of $13,337.
But Citizens for Ethics said the Secret Service did not provide records of spending at Trump businesses.
“While it may be tempting to put the story of the Trump family’s profiteering in the past, we cannot until they have actually stopped directing taxpayer money into their own bank accounts,” the group said.
Ah, the Trumps: the family that drifts together....grifts together.
Yep. Secret Service costs. You've made an ironclad case for corruption.
I'm sure you also have them tabulated to the penny for the Obamas and Clintons for comparison.
By the way, people on the right used to do this exact same thing for Obama's Secret Service costs for trips to Hawaii, a big trip to France for Michelle and the daughters, etc. etc. It was stupid then, and it's stupid now.
Why would Trump people even think they need Secret Service Protection? Just paranoid, right? Quoting Maxine Waters: "“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”
Yes. Why would they even think they needed protection? After all, none less that Maxine Waters threatened them, and called for the general population to do the same? Why might they feel threatened? Must be paranoia?
Interesting. Out of the blocks with the gratuitous assumption that I'm defending the Obamas. Was I defending the Obamas? I don't believe I was defending the Obamas. But I must say it was a rather clumsy pivot away from the issue at hand, which is, quite simply, your categorical irresponsible posting (and intellectual laziness), and propensity for churning out third-rate propaganda in lieu of fact stating. But you get a gold star for chivalry, even if it is second-hand chivalry, for advocating for continued secret service protection for the "kids" from the intrepid Maxine Waters. Personally, I myself would feel a lot more comfortable with the 101st Airborne between me and "Mad Max." And Skeptic, if it's any consolation to you, the last person to call me a democrat got punched in the face....
Well, I can personally attest to the expenses of U.S. taxpayer contributions to Mr. Dick Cheney's dry cleaning bills? I happened to live in the area of Jackson WY during Mr. Cheney's reign. It wasn't entirely without notice.
Dick seemed to have a proclivity for disrupting the lives of his neighbors to the extent we'd avoid even being in the same area as he was, which was difficult in a place that only had 10,000 people in it to start with? On the upside, it was pretty easy to notice his presence by looking for black towncars in the parking lot.
There's no solution to this problem I can see?
«Dude you just called Trump incorruptible»
The gullibles don't realize that in the USA (and in the world) it is real estate mobsters who bribe or blackmail politicians, not vice-versa. Trump probably could have been convicted many times over of bribery, but that issue was never brought up because the vast majority of the politicians he bribed must have been from the Democratic party (in NYC and NJ, likely to get building permits and other favourable decisions).
His attitude to Republicans instead was different: he was one of their biggest campaign donors ever (probably to get even more favourable tax rules for real estate).
The correct term is "pre-corrupted"
"Incorruptible" is going too far. But he did have a certain degree of immunity that occasionally produced interesting remarks. Roughly along these lines was my favorite, his declaration that he loved the "poorly educated." It was really kind of brilliant.
Totally agree. We should be going after pols on both sides on this issue. It’s disgusting
RJF, Trump didn't want to explain how he got so "rich". Especially when his tax information was almost released. That would have been a disaster for him.
That is just one of the many baseless smears about Trump.
He is very rich, if only because he inherited a lot of NYC real estate decades ago, and NYC has ballooned in price over the decades.
Also the tax return is pointless, we all know that thanks to various loopholes he did not pay tax, but he has give a far more useful document. A previous commenter has summyrized well:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/which-is-the-real-working-class-party/comments#comment-707998
“Tax returns tell you nothing of substance. Check out Biden's from 2017, for example. [...] The real picture - the best view - is in the required financial disclosures. Then you see assets and other income sources not available in a return. Trump's are available too. He IS fabulously wealthy and has impressive assets. The point is, tax returns are a distraction - they are in no way a meaningful look at someone's finances. This is especially true when multiple corporations and corporations within corporations complicate the view.”
I've heard this argument before, but never quite understood how it jibed with Trump and his family machine's tooth-and-nail fight to prevent any recent tax documents from seeing the light of day.
Obviously tax returns aren't going to tell a complete story, but boy did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye.
«did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye»
Obviously because he did not pay any tax despite being very wealthy and having a huge real income. Most likely he and the other real estate moghuls did not want publicity for the enormous loopholes that he (and them) purchased over the decades from Congress. Only the little people pay taxes...
But that is a completely different issue from how wealthy and successful in business he has been. His hiding the tax return was not because he is actually poor and needs to be bribed by russian politicians with a few hotel bills, like the roaring buffoons arguing about the "Emoluments Clause" were implying.
On the surface that would make sense, but he made frequent statements to the effect that it was a *good* thing that he didn't actually pay taxes because he was smart and a "good businessman" - and his base lapped it up. It wasn't a perception problem among his supporters that he may not have paid taxes due to loopholes, after all Bernie Sanders has 3 houses and what not.
Clearly the Russian bribe thing is cooked up nonsense or something would have surfaced by now, but I think there's more merit to the notion that he's actually not very rich than you do. For one thing, he has a lot of creditors and the extent of them isn't fully known, nor is it totally understood how leveraged his properties are or whether he's inflating the values of certain assets.
«there's more merit to the notion that he's actually not very rich than you do. For one thing, he has a lot of creditors and the extent of them isn't fully known, nor is it totally understood how leveraged his properties are or whether he's inflating the values of certain assets.»
The real estate business is very different from normal businesses (in many respects it is a supercharged version of "private equity"), it is all about leverage, loopholes, bankruptcies, weird accounting, carry forward tax losses, all totally legal because the loopholes have been purchased. If you don't know how it works you can't just handwave. Nothing new, for an example here is a quote from A deTocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1834:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch13.htm
“Consequently, in the United States the law favors those classes that elsewhere are most interested in evading it. [...] In America there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies, not because they are few, but because they are many. The dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt is greater in the minds of the majority than the fear of being ruined by the bankruptcy of others; and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience to an offense which everyone condemns in his individual capacity.”
Trump tax returns: president had to pay millions due to ...
Search domain theguardian.comhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/14/donald-trump-tax-return-leaked-alternative-minimum
Mar 14, 2017The official added that Trump “paid $38m even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150m, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally published return proves just that”.
He's on record stating he counts loan money as assets so please tell me how if no one can possibly know how rich he is you know he is very wealthy and has a huge income..........
Do you know how much he owes ??
I used to believe that too. Honestly. But as I aged, experienced more of the tax code and how it applied tome and others, I found the loopholes to be mostly nonexistent. There was a year back in the early 2000's I grossed over $3 million and I paid enough in taxes I felt snubbed because no one named a U.S. Aircraft carrier for me. :)
But generally I think you'll find a conspicous lack of loopholes, and I really mean that. It's almost the golden fleece of American Dreams, that after you achieve some level of income the tax code simply disappears; it stops being a problem. That isn't so, and there are many folks around to attest to it.
Now I find the code much more lenient. I don't make much money in my old age and my guess is I actually take in more government funding than I pay. In the past ten or so years I haven't paid any taxes at all?
«It's almost the golden fleece of American Dreams, that after you achieve some level of income the tax code simply disappears»
Personal income enjoys few loopholes, but there are large discounts for capital taxes, significant loopholes for corporate taxes, and the sky is the limit for offshore corporate tax loopholes. So the key techniques are to capitalize income, launder it through a corporate shell, and ideally an offshore corporate shell managed by nominees.
This is most convenient for the owners of businesses (Warren Buffet pointed out he paid a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary), but even the CEOs and CFOs of many corporates are not "John Smith", the person, but "JS Management Services, postbox 666, Dubai City, UAE".
An example from a comment on an english newspaper from the owner of a London cleaning business:
«London is indeed full of oligarchs from the USA to Outer Mongolia, hell bent of out spending and out doing their neighbours, if they even bother to turn up. Running a small cleaning company in the magic areas over the last few years has been insane. The demand for our cleaning services is high and we are able to turn down the so called oligarchs who whine about price but never about the quality, of course it won’t last
Many of our payments are coming from North African based banks within the Spanish territories, Morocco, Algeria and most unusual Mali, who seems to issue a huge number of loaded debit cards for payment of services. In very recent years,many of the houses we clean, have been mortgaged to once again Mali based banks, although they have very familiar names, eg Santander.»
Do you think wealthy people not paying taxes is a good thing?
87% of the taxes are paid by the top 20%.
Do you think we should import ONLY people who suck up more services than the contribute in revenue?
Sure, if they're doing it legally. The real threat is government coercion.
Absolutely, if they're doing it legally.
Trump tax returns: president had to pay millions due to ...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/14/donald-trump-tax-return-leaked-alternative-minimum
Mar 14, 2017The official added that Trump "paid $38m even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150m, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in...
He had to pay them in order to get his mail order bride into the country remember ?
this was pertaining to 2005. I'm sure his people found plenty of loopholes in the 16 years since.
«did he try his damnedest to keep them away from the public eye»
Obviously because he did not pay any tax despite being very wealthy and having a huge real income. Most likely he and the other real estate moghuls did not want publicity for the enormous loopholes that he (and them) purchased over the decades from Congress. Only the little people pay taxes...
But that is a completely different issue from how wealthy and successful in business he has been. His hiding the tax return was not because he is actually poor and needs to be bribed by russian politicians with a few hotel bills, like the roaring buffoons arguing about the "Emoluments Clause" were implying.
You still need to tell us how you know he's actually rich when you have no clue how much he owes.
Like the quip goes.
If you owe the bank $30,000 and can't pay, you have a problem.
If you owe the bank $30 million and can't pay, the bank has a problem.
You aren't curious about a wealthy persons finances and how they became so wealthy? It's amazing how many people applaud the rich for being crooked.
Maybe he isn't as rich as he wanted people to think he was. If, as this article proposes, the US is a plutocracy. Then, Trump has to maintain his Master of the Universe illusion.
Why do you applaud this? Let's say you're right. Then a blatant liar was elected as US President. This is like like chat-russian-roulette.
applaud? No Sir I do not. He wasn't the first blatant liar President, nor the last. He did however, mostly by accident, I think, reveal what's actually behind the curtain
We knew more about what he was doing just by reading his tweets 3AM. Biden is underhanded as Obama.
The NYT, WA PO, lied more than Trump. You'll find out he sold you down the river after he leaves, like Obama.
Peoples finances should be a personal matter if they're not breaking the law. Why are you only concerned with this one set of citizens?
If they're a personal matter you'd never know if they were breaking the law now would you ?
Wouldn't know if they were breaking the law? Hahahahahahaha -- laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes. A guy who owed how much in unpaid taxes, Tim Geitner, who was head of the NY Fed leading up to 2008 financial disaster, was confirmed as Obama's Treasury Secretary. Sharpton, who may still (allegedly) owe thousands to NY and/or other taxing bodies, was Obama's racial affairs guru and frequent White House guest --- a role model for us all. So funny.
It's pretty much safe to say that we all expect you to like your own posts, so why is it you keep doing it? OK. You like your own posts. Put that thing back in your shorts and let it heal?
I think the IRS would be the first to catch them. If there is no outstanding evidence, you're just fishing which is what the democrats do with their many Conspiracy Investigations.
You seem obsessed with people that are successful. Not sure why you and so many others have so much contempt for this one group of citizens.
BORDERLAND is a lobbyist.
Most are not crooked as they provide most of the jobs we have:
Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB)
Search domain census.govhttps://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb.html
The 2017 Statistics of U.S. Businesses counted employment of 128.6M, of which 68.0M worked for enterprises 500+ in size and 60.5M for those under 500.
Horse shit. The economy is crooked so they have no choice but to be crooked. All the honest ones went out of business decades ago.
The facts are in your face. Fess up!
Once again, if you don't know how much Trump owes then you CANNOT speculate upon how wealthy he is.
He's on public record stating that he counts loans as assets. If I get to define the standards and definition of wealth, I too could be fabulously wealthy.
Which means he already knew how the game was played. He built in NYC, one would have to be an expert in precisely the corruption the article describes. In fact, that may have been his secret sauce and why the establishment feared him.
This is hilarious. Confirmation that Hunter Thompson was right. A decent chunk of the US liked Nixon for being a clever crook. An even larger group likes Trump for the same.
I think Thompson was right about quite a few things. Ever heard of Brad Marchand? Hockey player for Boston. He's a total dick but holy mackinaw can that guy play hockey. Dirty, mean, vicious Hockey. The fans love him. He wins a lot too.
The comments today are bananas!! BlueRocket, a game of hockey may be a decent metaphor for US politics and economy. If I shout loud enough, buy expensive seats, and enough hot dogs maybe the fucking players will score some goals. Maybe the facilities staff will look into why the ice is melting too.
and I'll jump and shout when Marchand spears a guy in the neck. Especially if the Refs miss it. Yup, solid metaphor.
They didn't fear him very much they just couldn't do much to him because they're all complicit in war crimes and massive fraud. What reforms did Trump make ?
I have accidentally outed myself as a Trump supporter
Whatever. You can be anything you want. I was just explaining why that strategy for Trump would have been a disaster.
Yeah I missed your point. You’re saying if Trump made a big deal of it -Joe’s wealth -it would have blown up in his face because his tax return would show all kinds of unflattering stuff. You are right.
Your point was not "Joe's wealth", but how he got it. He was a "public servant" (God, that makes me puke) for 44 years. being a government employee does not enable wealth. THAT is the point that Trump could have focused on, the abuse of the people's trust. The Orange man got whatever he has in the world of business - whether honest or not, not from the people.
«The Orange man got whatever he has in the world of business - whether honest or not, not from the people.»
He still got most of his wealth from the people, through the "free markets", it is the people who ultimately pay the price of higher real estate rents and prices that make developers rich. Just like as Kucinich's book described, making money through jacked up utility prices etc. is paid for by the people.
Both the "free markets" and the state can be vehicles for extractive enrichment, and as to that the "free markets" enable far more extraction than the government.
Well said
Wait...were you being sarcastic in your OG post? If so, mastermind.
I was not being sarcastic. Too bad i’ve never been called a mastermind before
No it wouldn’t-people understand A-how real estate developers and casino owners make $$, and B-the crookedness inherent in those endeavors.
Ha! No they don't... Real estate - how many people were arrested because of NINJA loans? Casinos - regulated by the NGC. Crookedness inherent - are you saying "people" are ok with this? People did like Nixon too, but people also fired him.
Absolutely.
Perhaps if tax burdens were equitably distributed among all U.S. citizens, the tax code made fair once again, these sorts of talk show gotchas, this never ending fixation on the peculiarly acquired wealth of a small but not insubstantial subset of parasitic citizenry, we could move on to, say, solving other problems...
This is exciting: a book I would actually read by and about a politician whose only flaws have been remarkable prescience and integrity. I recently tweeted at Kucinich a few times urging him to run for the open Ohio Senate seat. With the book out of the way (and now on my reading list), maybe he will give that idea some serious thought.
Thanks, Matt!
Stay tuned
As a Dem? If so, he must be a glutton for punishment ...
Oooh...that word, that word. I was thinking while I read the article "He might as well have a scarlet "I" tattooed on his forehead, so all the elected apparatchiks and brokers could avoid him. "INTEGRITY". I wonder if the brains of people like Pelosi and McConnell can actually process it, or if so, with the beginning provision "A trait exhibited by people *not yourself or your political allies*, which involves adherence to moral and ethical principles; etc."
I'm on the right, but I was always skeptical of the Iraq War.
I'll never forget when Kucinich was on some Sunday morning chat show in around 2004, and a Bush apologist was flaunting photos of old chemical weapons receptacles that were found in Iraq, arguing that there really were WMD.
Kucinich politely asked if he could have the photos, the hack agreed, and Kucinich asked the cameraman to zoom in on one. It showed a long, rusted out metal canister, looking like something you'd see in a scrap metal yard.
Kucinich asked, just slightly raising his voice, "We went to war--over this?"
The Bushee started stuttering and hemming and hawing and otherwise showing what a direct hit it was.
Damn, I was impressed.
Saddam Hussein was between a rock and a hard place. He didn't have a nuclear program after 1981 aside from a pile of yellowcake and some high level wastes at Osirak, surrounded by a huge dirt berm you can see on a Google Maps satellite shot. He had a small bioweapons program. He had chemical weapons. But he had UN inspectors breathing down his neck on one side and Iran on the other. He feared a loss of deterrence vis a vis Iran if he came clean about what little he actually had. So he prevaricated. When actually invaded, he made drug deals with the most likely leaders - strangely enough the Iranians and the Syrians. Most of the chemical weapons left (mostly artillery shells) after the wars and his internal use of it went to Syria, and most of that was either used or destroyed by now. The remnants of his nuclear program were removed from Iraq by the US in 2008 or so. The bioweapons program I know nothing about where it went, but it wasn't huge and basically amounted to weaponized anthrax. Not that that is nothing, but it's not the world-ending threat we once thought it was.
Kucinich's political stuff in 2004 might have seemed poignant but it was pretty ill informed.
I understood Kucinich's point to be that there was not a sufficient national security reason to invade. It sounds like you might agree with that, but only in hindsight.
But there were quite a few savvy players (including people on the right like Bob Novak) who smelled a rat and tried to raise the alarm before the invasion.
Any chemical weapons program that Saddam had were in some way either financed or allowed to happen by the United States in our own attempt to foment and keep the war with Iran running (likely with strong Israeli influence).
There's no legitimate documentation that any viable chemical weapons or other "WMDs" were sent to Syria prior to or after the invasion despite the prevalence of this myth among the neocons who wanted to sell that war to to the American people and then being embarrassed after the invasion when it was shown to the world that no such (current/viable) programs existed (as pointed out by Kucinich and others).
Nobody with any actual intelligence on the matter (or common sense) ever thought Saddam posed a "world-ending threat", ever.
As far as the remnants of his alleged nuclear program being removed from Iraq by the US in 2008, I'd have to see some sort of documentation. That rings hollow without backing evidence.
I could document this and the rest but I choose not to. Do your own research. Hint, "Operation McCall".
Not my fault you are ill-informed.
OK, so I mis-read your post regarding Saddam's "nuclear program" - I though you were implying it was a nuclear *weapons* program, when in fact I was aware that a lot of low-grade uranium from previous civilian nuclear program was removed during Obama's presidency, IIRC. Maybe at one point he had a small nuclear weapons program, but that wasn't the intended use for the vast majority of the yellow cake in question. You are correct, he had abandoned the weapons program way back in 1981, assuming it was ever really in earnest or just 'prevarication' or tough talk with the aim of deterrence.
FYI the removal happened under Bush, they gave out pretty unit citations to everyone involved telling us that we were responsible, and I quote, for "removing Saddam Hussein's nuclear program from Iraq". Someone was trying to airbrush history, but it's true with a lot of asterisks and caveats. They handed out the unit citations a week or two before Obama was inaugurated.
Ah, OK. I knew it was close to Obama's taking office and guess I was going on your original guesstimate of "2008 or so"....didn't know for sure if it happened under Bush or Obama.
The Osirak reactor was fueled with HEU and set up to produce plutonium at the time it was hit. The Iraqis bought a separation rig in 1979. The conclusion is obvious. That wasn't a reactor intended for civilian uses. The Israelis hit it in 1981 and blew it to smithereens. That's what McCall got out of there, at least within the limits of moon suits and the like. I imagine the reactor itself is still hot, too hot for that
To his "credit", Saddam never restarted the program. Truthfully, that might not be by choice, but it's true nonetheless. They took bulldozers and put up a several hundred foot high berm around the reactor and called it a day. I was there; I have pictures. You can see the fortifications atop the berm from the satellite shots, it looks rather pathetic now. A lot of human remains in the area at the time. About a mile east from the Tigris, ~15 klicks SE of central Baghdad. Google names it "Atomic Energy Organization", can't miss it.
Iraq had been working on a civilian nuclear power program since the 1960s. Osirak was a French model that was intended to be a 70mW unit (with a smaller one nearby). That said, at the time the Israelis destroyed the reactor, it wasn't even stocked with uranium, so they knew there was no risk to any nuclear fallout.
Regardless, I have yet to see any documentation (pre- or post-invasion) that proves Osirak was intended to produce anything other than electricity and other nuclear materials for civilian/medicinal use. There's plenty of Israeli-derived propaganda to the contrary, and of course the Western media and military establishment have long run with that narrative. And sure, as I mentioned, Saddam could very well have wanted to present the image of a nuclear deterrent, but I've seen no proof that Osirak was going to produce weapons grade fissile materia.
Personally never cared about the whole Iraq weapons canard. I always saw it as a casus belli. I wanted to take down two countries hard. THEN LEAVE!! The mistake as I see it was staying around to make those two shit hole countries (classic Trump) into electoral paradises. Only idiot DC swamp rats could believe that. It did make a lot of people rich though.
The WMDs were a canard and a bogus casus belli. Why would you want to take down Iraq and leave? They never attacked us (and frankly neither did Afghanistan - it was the Saudis). But what you're describing is exactly what Obama did to Libya. Look what happened there. Do you support the "taking down of Libya hard" and leaving (and stealing their gold) like we did?
You're right about people getting rich, but that's ANY war throughout history. The USA just seems to have found a way to get away with fomenting endless profitable wars....for now.
After 911 I felt the most expeditious effective way to “fight terrorism”(terrorism being a technique not an ideology) was to hammer two countries. Then leave. Then make it policy(unofficial) that if your country shielded terrorists or financed terrorists something very bad would happen to you, your family, or your country. Possibly all three. That was my preferred policy. Unpleasant but effective.
Hammering innocent (or at least uninvolved) countries (like Iraq) has the opposite effect. It causes more terrorism. Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet. We began aiding the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the mid 70s (if not sooner) and it took until 2001 for that blowback to finally happen. So for the past 20 years we've been training "terrorist" forces exactly how to fight the American military to a standstill. You don't think that the chickens will one day come home to roost?
Nevermind the fact that we're still up to our old tricks with funding/arming/training and supporting radical Islamists in Syria (while it's Iran and Russia who are fighting them).
Screw spending tax dollars to hammer third world countries with no proven involvement in attacks on the US (I'm still convinced 9/11 was a joint Israeli/Saudi operation). It will only breed more terror in the world.
In 1920, almost no standing Army, 9 prisons for the entire country focused on the most violent criminals and the image of America abroad was missionaries helping provide medical care to the Chinese during the boxer rebellion from a couple decades prior.
One hundred years later in 2020, 2.5 million citizens held in over 1000 prisons of filthy state cages for a range of crimes to include being mentally ill. An endless supply of military grade weapons supporting an internal paramilitary army supplied through the 1033 program. The American image abroad is a drone smashing into a wedding party.
You can't declare war abroad without it leading to a war on your own people. Violence isn't just messy, it's a fire impossible to isolate, or control.
"Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet."
Gulf War I vet Tim McVeigh conducted the OKC bombing in 1995.
When you teach and train people that violence is an effective problem-solving tool -- through both military and cultural indoctrination, as the US does -- don't be surprised when they use violence to solve problems. The chickens have roosted and will be roosting for some time.
So you wanted the US to “hammer” Saudi Arabia, then leave the region? Would have been better policy, at least.
Funny how the main source of both terrorists and their financing - then and now (Saudi Arabia) was not on that list. It is like as if after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor US decided to invade and occupy Portugal for example.
Very good point. Not sure why we treat SA with kid gloves other then need for oil. In addition any attack on Mecca might inflame millions of Muslims
Very fair and cogent analysis of the situation. The Iraq fiasco was an extraordinarily stupid move by Bush, but everyone who screamed “No blood for oil” was completely missing the point-Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran-they will sell oil to the dude who pissed on their collective grandmas graves if the price is right.
The reality is more likely that after installing Saddam's regime in 1978, Rumsfeld, Cheney and HW Bush and their pals decided to attack their own puppet government -just to have a show and spend those sweet, sweet defense dollars.
Nothing more than a banana republic that was used for a couple of decades to pressure Iran, Syria, Yemen, and whoever was nearby and at odds with US policy. I'm looking at you, Turkey. The primary goal though was oil fields to drain.
When you factor in that it was a US-controlled dictatorship since 1978, the Iraq Wars equate to genocide for profit. I don't judge servicemen and women who served in that theater, and know quite a few. Most of them agree that it wasn't necessary or justified.
Just another act in a play the US Dept. of State was putting on involving a wave of grabs to consolidate resources and power. Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan and they halted briefly at Syria because of Russia's pipeline plans. So they "partnered up" to "destroy ISIS/ISIL", taking turns dropping expensive ordinance all over the place.
The show goes on, of course.
«Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply.»
I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever...
As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough. Consider the Nordstream 2 case:
* Germany has built both a terminal terminal for gas transported from the USA and Qatar by USA ships, and a terminal for gas pipelined from Russia, so it has a backup for either option.
* The USA government objects to that because it says having terminal for both american and russian gas *reduces the security of Germany* over the option of depending only on american supplied gas.
* The obvious real reasoning is that if the german government ever steps out of line, and they have only a terminal for gas transported by american controlled ships, the USA government can reroute the ships to other countries, and 20-30% of german industry is wiped out, and many millions of houses freeze in winter.
You're partly right.
"I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever..."
Ghaddafi's eagnerness to 'whatever' certainly didn't spare him, though, did it? I can't blame Iran for wanting nuclear deterrent based on that analysis for why the USA (and Israel) goes to war, can you?
The plans (I assume you're referring to PNAC as well as the infamous interview with Wesley Clark) was to take down 7 "rogue" countries' leadership in 5 years.
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Note that this list of countries doesn't include any of the Gulf Monarchies/Saudi Arabia. In addition to being perceived as hostile to Israel, these countries were targeted - as China and Russia now are - because they represented a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar in the minds of the neocons and they had demonstrated that they'd be willing to operate outside the US/EU framework, each in their own way. For example, Libya - leaked emails tell us that Ghaddafi was flouting the French Franc dominated currency of Africa and had plans to issue a pan-African currency. Hence the USA and France led the way on that operation. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/declassified-emails-reveal-nato-killed-gaddafi-stop-libyan-creation-gold-backed-currency/
"As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough."
Again, I think you're partially right, but you're missing the role of the petrodollar. That's why Venezuela was added to this ever evolving list of "rogue" or "hostile" foreign powers.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/petrodollar-warfare-the-common-thread-linking-venezuela-and-iran/255123/
"The U.S. found that commodity in 1973 during the Saudi-imposed oil embargo. Saudi Arabia was infuriated by U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War and imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. as punishment. Henry Kissinger led the diplomatic effort to end the embargo. In 1974, a deal was struck to end the Saudi embargo and bring U.S.-Saudi relations to previously unseen heights. John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman and former economic hitman himself, summarized the deal aptly:
In the early 70s, OPEC didn’t like what we were doing in Israel, same old story. So they cut off our oil supplies. So some of you will remember these long lines at the gas stations and we feared, we were gonna have another depression like the 1929 depression. So the U.S. Treasury Department came to me and other economic hitmen and said, ‘Listen, you know, we can’t allow OPEC to blackmail us anymore. You guys gotta come up with a plan so this doesn’t happen again.’
We knew this plan had to involve Saudi Arabia because it had more oil than anybody else and it also, the House of Saud, was corrupt and corruptible. The long version is explained in the book but the short version of what we did, the deal we finally struck with the House of Saud, was a deal whereby they would return almost all the money they made from selling to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities.
The U.S. Treasury Department would use the interest from those securities, which over the years amounted to trillions of dollars, to hire us companies to westernize Saudi Arabia. Build petrochemical complexes, desalination plants, whole cities out of the desert, McDonalds and all the other things that go along with our western culture. The House of Saud would also agree to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to the oil companies, possibly not acceptable to you and me, but acceptable to the oil companies.
And, this is very very important. They agree that they will never ever sell oil for anything other than U.S. dollars. This happened in the early 70’s right after we had went off the gold standard because we were bankrupt. Because we could not pay our debts to the European countries in gold, Nixon took us off the gold standard. And then we were stuck with the situation ‘why would anyone in the world use U.S. dollars?’ So then we came up with this plan, which in essence, put the dollar on the oil standard.
You cannot buy oil on the world market for anything other than dollars. And that’s very important for corporatocracy. We, our part of the bargain was we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, in control. It was an amazing deal, the deal of the century. It was history-making, incredibly powerful deal that we struck with Saudi Arabia and it’s held.”
Crude oil is the most traded commodity in the world; every country needs it. The petrodollar system requires every country to have U.S. dollars on hand to buy oil. It keeps demand for the U.S. dollar as high as it was when the dollar was the only currency that could buy gold. If a country needs oil, it will have to manufacture and export a tangible good of value, like a car or a refrigerator, to the United States, while the U.S. can simply print or borrow paper dollars to use as immediate payment."
Now, as far as Nordstream 2 goes - that's not oil it's liquid natural gas, but you're correct about the logistics, and that the USA wants sole leverage over Germany's energy in addition to depriving Russia of markets in which to profit from its own LNG. The USA wants the dying uni-polar world order to hang around despite its inevitable end, and is doing whatever it can to prolong it. Antagonizing Russia, Iran and China, and issuing sanctions (given our unique control over the SWIFT system), is happening because those are regional powers with unique geographic advantages and strategic locations and not coincidentally all of them seek to stop using the USD/petrodollar just like Venezuela (2nd largest deposit of oil in the world IIRC).
Back to the whole thing about 7 countries in 5 years, each of them also was looking to buck the US/UK/Wall Street/City of London dominated uni-polar order.
This is a great overview. Thanks for talking the time to write it. I have two questions:
1. The Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of WWII with Europe in 1944 established the US dollar as the world currency for all commodities, so why would we need an agreement from the Saudi's in the 1970's to "only buy oil is dollars" when that was already the only acceptable unit of exchange at the time? Given the enormous profits the Saudi's were making from oil in the 1970's combined with their lack of infrastructure, only the US had financial markets deep enough to hold the value from their oil wealth in the form of treasuries. They found themselves in the same situation as the Japanese in the 1980's and the Chinese now. They may not like it or us, but we are the only country in the world with reserves large enough to store trillions in a form that can later be converted back to usable currency.
2. You mentioned Nixon took us off the Gold Standard because we could not pay our debts to Europe, but inflation was running at such a high rate our debt was essentially being erased without us paying hardly a cent. Gold, however, was trading at over $2000 an ounce due to this inflation, so Nixon was forced to take us off the Gold Standard because it was simply unaffordably to store gold at that cost and to do so would have only caused the price to go higher. The world begged him to exit the gold standard for their own sake since some were pegged to the dollar and all of them handled all exchanges in US currency (back to the Brenton Woods agreement mentioned above).
"After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever..."
For all the good that did him the end.
I think Bashar looked at the end-game of Saddam's and Muammar's careers and was like, "Nah, the US can keep its ball. Not playing."
Exactly right. Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela have all borne witness to countless US broken promises/accords, color revolutions, regime change operations, invasions, sanctions, coups, assassinations, etc. and Putin is 100% correct when he says "The USA is not agreement capable." Every single one of those things has been conducted against left-leaning governments and/or countries with resources who refuse to give US interests full and unfettered access to them. Why would anyone trust Uncle Scam?
Just ask the Native Americans - every single treaty with them has been broken by US government. An absolutely incredible record. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-broken-treaties
The common narrative is that Bush lied as a pretext to invade Iraq. The truth is more difficult to find and understand. Saddam refused to prove the WMD reports false. In a Western court of law it is not incumbent upon the accused to prove his innocence. The arena was one not at all understood in the West, and Saddam proved to be grand master in his game.
Saddam ran the most successful deception operation since the XX Committee in World War II. He believed that unless Iran concluded he had WMD it would invade and conquer Iraq. For Iran to come to that conclusion, everybody had to come to that conclusion. It could not succeed if even one country's intelligence service could prove the contention wrong.
He was assured by senior members of government in both France and Russia, paid agents, that Bush was a fool and they could easily control Bush to protect Iran. Oops.
This is documented by an FBI Agent's debriefing of Saddam; the agent's story was documented by a major US Network (ABC, IIRC). The entire deception operation is documented and in storage at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. How it has escaped a demand for public release is puzzling.
The Network never again broadcast the agent's story, and not a single other news source has carried the story. That one is neither puzzling nor mysterious.
Otherwise, I, too, have been a Kucinich fan for years. He makes his decisions based on principles, not short-term personal or partisan gains. His positions were less important to me than his decision-making process.
Areslentjust now
I think the revulsion over the 2nd Gulf War can't be understood purely in terms of the WMDs.
Many people now forget the anthrax scare that followed soon after the Twin Towers attack. What people do remember is that a group opportunists that always wanted a war with Iraq and always wanted something like the Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland security and mass surveillance of the American people leveraged our fear into their standing wish list of authoritarian resolutions we are all now stuck with. It's a repeat of the American people discovering after WWI that the British were actually using the Lusitania to transport weapons at the time the Germans attacked it. People felt duped because they were.
I think that's why many people aren't very interested in the true history of the WMD's. When they say the WMD were a lie, they are actually referring to a series of lies more nebulous that never sat quite right with them.
People like DK at the time are a proxy for those who stood against all of that whether people realize it or not.
Being actually part of WMD cleanup in Iraq, I agree with you. I never thought the things I found there were somehow a justification for what was done over the prior (at the time) 6 or 7 years.
At a high level, of course, everything is a lie. There are always caveats and counterexamples one could bring up to everything that bubbles to the surface in government or media. I'm reminded of Voltaire, "History is the lie commonly agreed upon". Large narratives are never the objective truth.
Now that's a lie - it commonly agreed that Napoleon said that :-)
Heh. Napoleon was a great man and I admire a lot of what he said, but even if he did, it was taken from Voltaire, which he would have read.
I was against it (and Afghanistan) from the very beginning but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right.
Have voted straight party line Republican my whole life*, but not because I agree with very much the party is for. It just tends to screw things up more to vote that way, and especially in the age of Trump.
* Except for that one youthful indiscretion of voting for Clinton in '92. Sue me. Bush was puking on the Japanese prime minister and Perot sounded like he was nuts.
That's the entire US experience in a nut shell. Anyone wanting to do anything that disturbs the socioeconomic pecking order is made to sound like a nut via the branch of the CIA we call the press.
Who knew voting could be made into blackmail where you just vote for the least damaging tyrant to your demographic knowing all the while you're merely choosing whose friends and family we're going to make rich this cycle while they rubber stamp the pre-approved agenda from the DAVOS crowd.
Perot was kind of a nut though. Very easy to caricature. The thing that did him in for me was leaving the campaign and then reentering late in the summer. Absent that, he would have gotten my vote.
He was dodging the heat that the press was hurling at him. Not a very well thought out tactic at all.
The thing is it takes a nut to not cave into the pressure of the cabal.
I think it's pretty irrelevant now though.
We're just along for the ride now and when you see this level of ineptitude you arrive at a point where you just have to admit you live in the same kind of banana republic the empire has set up everywhere else around the world.
Why wouldn't they use the same secret sauce at home that they do everywhere else ?
Look at how our foreign policy is now domestic policy....
I think we've gone beyond individual countries and are well into setting up corporate industrial zones within a one world government and single currency.
How about you ?
I think that was the globalist intent. There are a fair number of countries who are not interested in baking in the current pecking order. Some have nuclear arsenals. This doesn't sound like a winning hand for the globalists.
Realistically though, how do you get money out of politics? Serious question. Even avowedly anti-capitalistic regimes end up making their leadership rich.
You force the corporate TV and radio stations to give equal blocks of free airtime to all candidates who qualify for ballot status in enough states to have a statistical chance of winning. Why then would you need gobs of campaign cash? It’s the monopolist broadcasting corporations that rake in all that dark campaign money. The public airwaves have been hijacked to corrupt our own election system. We need to take them back.
Who decides who qualifies as a candidate ? These "parties" are in complete control of who advances and what script they must follow in order to stay on the gravy train.
Ahh!...but therein lies the rub! How can they qualify without equitable media exposure?
"....but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right."
At the time of the 2001 attack I was just out of my second college program (engineering) and the economy had crashed with the dot com and telecom bubbles having just exploded - so I couldn't find a good private sector job. I actually called a USAF recruiting office and left a voicemail, but luckily never heard back.
My question to you is how much did you consider NOT going over there given your stated opposition to both wars and why didn't you look into options like being a conscientious objector?
I, personally, called the National Guard office and was asked what military training I had. I told the Lt. Col. who answered my exprience was with NASA, not any of the armed forces and was very politely declined and asked not to call back. This man's army doesn't need computer programmers with over 600 hours experience crewing high altitude aircraft.
So they let me off. I wasn't grateful.
I am not a conscientious objector by any standard that I consider appropriate. It would be an insult to conscientious objectors of faith for me to claim so.
I did what I did because it was for people I knew and cared for, not because it was for patriotism or some national goal. Just like most everyone else. My story was a female CW3 who had already done three tours in SWA who was going to be sent back for a fourth unless I would cover for her under orders. I did it. She separated and got a nice job with the FAA.
Interesting. Glad you made it back in one piece and that she didn't have to do a 4th tour.
What I want to know is what did Obama do to Kucinich on Air Force One at the end of the Healthcase debate to turn Kucinich into a sellout from that moment forward? Obamacare, as Nader put it, was "A blowjob for the insurance industry."
Thank you! I was and still am baffled by how many liberals got on board with Obamacare when it seemed to me that all it did was put more power in the hands of the special interests. I saw it as a big step *away* from a single payer option, not a step toward it.
Exactly. Our government officials would NEVER vote in a true single payer system because that would mean an end to Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, and most importantly, their own gold-plated health benefits. In a true single payer system, everyone gets the same benefits.
No shit-requiring every US citizen to forcibly purchase an industry’s product or face the IRS-Al Capone and Pablo Escobar are green with jealousy.
...and the base level "lifeline" for poor people was shitty and overpriced insurance that only doctors an hour's drive would take patients on the ACA plans.
Total trash; should have been aborted.
A BJ and they swallowed, licking their lips.
I suspect that if you believe that only a wholly government-run healthcare system is acceptable, then anything else is a crass giveaway. So maybe Kucinich has a more nuanced perspective than Nader. As a reporter who covered both the Clinton health effort and Obama’s, and who used Obama’s, ACÁ is a lifeline for many. I’d remind you that Nader’s 2000 campaign in effect elected Bush, who Nader maintained was tweedle-Dee to Gore’s tweedle-dum. Bush = Gore. Only if you stand so far to the side that you view life through a telescope that makes everything look side-by-side.
Sure it is, pal. Have you ever tried to sign up for that sweet ACA health care?
I have... and after having to pay more than I would have previously, I was being referred to doctor's offices 15 miles away who were just processing as many cheap-ass visits as they could because the ACA only paid *so much*. Most practices just never bothered to associate or provide for ACA plan holders.
It jacked the price of insurance premiums up 400% and didn't give the truly needy anything more than an option to BUY insurance; not "get healthcare". Medicare and Medicaid actually paid claims. This was not healthcare; it was insurance -and shitty, overpriced insurance at that.
Nader is right, of course.
The ACA became a lifeline for padding insurance aristocrats' pockets -not for poor people.
It's actually quite a good hustle since it got more people paying and those already paying to pay more while not paying anyone but the insurance companies.
That's Wall Street level on both ingenuity and the balls it took to propose it.
There's really not a two car parade anywhere on earth that our elite can't fuck up is there ?
"It's actually quite a good hustle since it got more people paying"
Some people just quit paying -- "quit paying" is hyperbole, they still had to pay the fine -- and opted to die instead, because they can't afford garbage privatized healthcare. That's where we're at.
Earn more money and make friends at City Hall!
Obama was the spokesmodel for a program he didn't promulgate, understand, or negotiate. The ACA was designed by children and brought to us by Rahm and a cohort of shysters in thick with private equity. Folks arguing for and imagining the ACA is a health care program are horribly mistaken,
You could say that about Oshama's entire presidency. The man was a highly educated shill with a wonderful speaking voice who mostly propounded platitudes, that when examined, really said nothing at all.
People talk about TDS, and its real, but no more real than ODS, where cons saw this man as some sort of socialist radical and libs saw him as the embodiment of all that is virtuous, as meanwhile his 8 years were nothing but a continuation of the same old same old, but done in a style that infuriated cons and delighted libs.
The man is as fake as the thirst he had in Flint Michigan, and a total Manchurian Candidate for the status quo.
Wait...are you implying that a politician out of Chicago, Illinois might be other than what he presented himself to be? I am disappoint.
Also, good point about the speaking voice, esp. as contrasted with Bush who was an incredibly bad public speaker, voice, vocabulary and presentation.
Wait, wait, wait... He wasn't even a "politician out of Chicago". I'm from Chicago and he isn't crooked enough to be a Chicago pol. He wasn't even sure he was going to put is fucking Prez Library here, until it became obvious everyone would recognize what neophyte he actually was so he had to act like he was from here. He dabbled in academia, law, community organizing, politics, state senator then Federal, for a few months each, then parlayed his ability to package banality into commentary that seemed magical, and on to the White House. He was the ultimate iteration of the political animal; amorphous and shape shifting as a way of life.
Why is so little said about the younger Bushes' efforts to portray themselves as "from Texas" rather than "from Connecticut?" HW was all folly -- Garry Trudeau did a great bit in "Doonesbury" back in the '80s about "Poppy" getting sentimental over his residence of record, a Houston hotel room -- but much of the US public seemed completely sold on the idea of W. as a brush-clearin' Texan.
While I'm on this topic, the HW campaign against Dukakis in 1988 is the first time I remember the "East Coast Intellectual Liberal" thing being slammed around for political points -- even though HW could easily have been hoist by his own petard -- but he got away with it.
Yup.
Thing is the insurance companies lost massive amounts of money from the ACA the same time as premiums tripled. Doctors also lost money. If it was wall street greed that undid ACA it was a very particularly incompetent greed.
"If it was wall street greed that undid ACA it was a very particularly incompetent greed."
Wall Street (collectively) seems to specialize in this.
It's almost as if these finance people are not actually competent in matters that they claim to be particularly competent in.
Maybe, but finance people aren't the ones who pushed the idea of messing with the insurance system.
Nader is always right.
The hatred still directed at Nader by party-line Dems over 20 years later is an awe-inspiring Jacobean-style grudge.
I don't think W's two terms were anything but disastrous; however, my understanding of democracy says that you vote for the candidate whose positions you like the best. But I am a simpleton citizen and not a brilliant "strategic" party hack.
That's one thing I give the GOP credit for. Libertarians had a lot more to do with Trump losing than Greens did with Gore losing, but we don't get this endless screeching from the GOP how we're to blame for Sleepy Joe being in the WH. The GOP doesn't believe they own us the way the Dems secretly believe they own the Greens.
I don't vote like that. I listen to their positions, then i look at their previous record and their donors. Rarely do they sync. (Looking at you, Obama and Biden. For starters.) I go for the one who has at least tried their best to walk the walk in line with their talk.
My health insurance premiums TRIPLED under ACA. The post-fiasco spin put on by the Dems was that the small increase in people coverage was the goal all along, but if you actually look back at Obama's election he was literally promising that everyone's premiums would drop by $1000 per year. I don't think this was due to handouts to insurance companies, because my county went from having 7 to having one provider as soon as Obamacare was implemented and we felt damn lucky that that final one didn't pull out. Rather it's that Democrats have this image of themselves as being smart technocrats but really they don't understand what they're doing, and the policies they think they want they have no idea what the consequences will be because they simply do not understand what reality is. Just about everyone lost from the ACA except for poor people who got increased subsidies. And that could have been done just by slightly increasing funding to Medicaid.
"Just about everyone lost from the ACA except for poor people who got increased subsidies."
I know this is already a dogpile on ACA -- I might be the last dog, and certainly the mangiest -- but try being an unemployed person or a marginally employed (i.e. working, but still poor) person and see what it does for you.
I paid the government a fine last year for the crime of not paying for privatized health insurance. It tells you who is the boss around here.
No surprise there since it was almost identical to a plan proposed by American Heritage, a conservative think tank.
Wrong, Nader didn't elect Bush and this old trope is a media invention sold off for access by hacks.
The numbers show a totally different story and only the Clinton mafia keep this trope alive to threaten anyone that doesn't fall in line with the DNC.
Presuming everyone who showed up to vote for Nader would have pulled a lever (or punched a chad) for Gore is the weak link in that theory.
As weak as the assumption that everybody who voted for Jill Stein or the Libertarians or who wrote somebody in or stayed on the couch would gave voted for Hillary.
God knows I don't want to pick favorites, but is it just me or do the Dems seem to be be far more obsessed with this "YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED FOR MUH GUY, STOOPID THIRD PARTIER" thing than the Reps? Like, clearly Trump was not the institutional GOP's preferred choice, but once he got in they shrugged their shoulders and ran with it. DNC Brain wants to relitigate elections that were over years or decades ago and hector everyone who did not vote in the correct way.
I may move in the wrong circles, but never once have i heard a Republican (and they're most of my family to boot) throw a hissy about Libertarian voters.
They do the same thing on the right, by the way, to argue that the libertarian vote costs Republicans elections. It's stupid for the same reason: you can't assume that a libertarian voter would go Republican if the libertarian weren't on the ticket.
No one is arguing that people should be denied health care. Of course they should have health care. The argument is Obamacare was a blowjob for the insurance industry. Which it was. They also left out the blow job for private equity, which was a very, very satisfying blow job.
How do you arbitrate lifesaving care vs stuff that is not absolutely necessary?
Attaching actual price tags to things would certainly help. If we knew that extending prenatal care to all people would cost X billion, funding that would be much better than relying on volunteer obstetricians (yes that is a thing) and unpaid bills to "fund" this. But no one really knows.
If I had a point, I think you're missing it. What the ACA did for any self employed person (me) was to double the rate and halve the service, with a $6,784 deductible. That is not health care. I was arbitrated out of the system, and so were all my tradespeople friends and associates.
What the ACA did for private equity was lock in their stranglehold on big Pharma (drug costs) and clinical services (they own the clinics and hospitals). I'm discussing the locked in nature of all the worst things about health care. You're discussing moral and ethical issues, which I understand. The ACA does not get us to where we are able to make moral or ethical choices; our options are delineated by big insurance and private equity. The ACA is not a health care policy; it's a locked in revenue stream and massive profit center for insurance and private equity.
As I recall, the only "concession" Obama got for the ACA was to eliminate the "donut hole" on Part D drug prescriptions left there by Bush, with the no negotiations on drug prices still intact.
Once they heard his proposal, the drug companies couldn't believe that was all he wanted in return.
Good old fashioned Dem triangulating, begun by Bubba and perfected under Obama, culminating in Trump's election.
It would also require the long-needed balls to graduate the value of "estimated year of life saved" differently for 20-year-olds and 95-year-olds. -
Such balls are not in evidence, not in the media, government, the insurance industry, nor academia. (I know, insurance people can and do make such calculations, they're just never used and almost never admitted.)
That is, of course, the slippery slope to end all slippery slopes.
Actuarial data is similar to what you are talking about. I know it is in use bc my dad used to use it in his role supervising BI lit back 40 years ago.
I still think the Democrats made a huge tactical mistake letting Clinton get away with his perjury. Replacing him with Gore would have made Gore a shoo-in in 2000. I can't imagine his response to 9/11 would have been worse than what actually happened.
It more than likely would have been the same due to the fact he was owned by roughly the same people.
But he had trouble keeping his human mask on over his reptilian face. He had to go. When the glued his mask on tight, it didn't move enough to be convincing...
At least Al Gore would have sounded less dumb saying nuclear.
"Ya don't have to be nukulur scientist to know how to pronounce "foilage", Lisa."
"Oh shit, Monica... I'm bout ta go NUKE YU LAR!!!"
There's little difference between Al Gore and GWB. Gore would have used 9-11 to attack Iraq just like Bush did. He even admitted in campaign speeches.
Gore won, remember. Oh, yes, it was the Supreme Court who won.
Especially as he made the campaign promise that he wouldn't sign a health care bill without it. Stupid me, i voted for him based on that, pretty much. I haven't voted Dem top of the ticket ever since.
I knew some first time voters who were SHOCKED when Obama, after his election, was presented with a poll showing marijuana legalization was the big issue on the minds of college students, and asked about it, and 'answered' "Heh heheh."
Some young voters were probably shocked when they heard Harris claim to support legal weed. Weird prosecutorial record for one who supported it, nevermind alledgedly to toking to Tupac.
Good question
Going to read this book. It is funny that my fellow liberals don’t get why I don’t think Trump supporters are automatically dirtbags. The poor ones are getting fucked over like I was. We just came to different ways to protest the political dirtbags in office and professional class media enablers for both teams.
Forgot to add, he reminds me of Michael Moore. Laughed at, but now everyone knows he was right. I am still keeping score.
Art,
Actually, Dennis Kucinich is smarter than Michael Moore, I've noticed.
Join the crowd...
Much smarter.
Good work Art! Vilifying Trump supporters is bigotry.
Like I said before, I'll never vote Republican because of the belief in a superior white social hierarchy that underlies all their policies. I was the same social class as the poor whites so I get why they like it, pisses off the upper class when they don't use their stupid ass pronouns or some asshole tells a drywaller to code(which I did by the way, but they don't acknowledge the huge class barrier and discrimination against the poor). Hell, I laughed at shit Trump said even though I knew he was a piece of shit that stiffed contractors. My old co-workers would spout some stupid half-formed, bullshit opinions due to their lack of rigorous education to challenge their bullshit. But if I needed help moving, doing a flooring project, etc. they would show up with a six pack and tools. My current co-workers understand macro economics and can talk circles around me, but no way in hell would they help put cabinets up in my kitchen. I don't know what the fuck I am talking about, but there are a lot of decent Trump supporters with dumbass opinions.
this comment rules.
«never vote Republican because of the belief in a superior white social hierarchy that underlies all their policies»
That is not quite right, that is too influenced by Corey Robin and similar propaganda about what is means to be "reactionary".
Actually the Republican Party has no such belief about a "superior white social hierarchy", they are merely the instrument of those who have a position of incumbency and want to protect and further it. Whatever the color of the incumbents and whether their incumbency is about a social hierarchy or not. In particular many republicans are "whigs" like the most of the Democratic Party, that is they are socially liberal, and the incumbency they protect and further is that of power in the markets, not social hierachy. It is the "tory" side of the Republicans that is about "social hierarchy", the "tradcons", and it is the "dixie" side that cares about color.
This sounds like a long read but now I'm very interested in checking it out. Since 2004 was the first election I was old enough to vote in, I've always thought of Kucinich as the first (and last) hope of a major political party candidate whom I could consider to at least be anti-war adjacent. Since I am very firmly anti-war, everybody else in the Dem & Rep camps has been a pretty easy "Pass" from me (I'll always regret being duped into believing even for a second that Obama was a worthwhile vote from an anti-war perspective). That also means that I'm pretty used to both parties and their adherents shitting on me left & right (pun intended) as being unpatriotic or a Nazi sympathizer or whatever, so I certainly sympathize a lot with guys like Kucinich when I see them getting shit on by the Left & the Right in an alternating fashion.
"He understands the catastrophe of default, but he can’t sell; he’s worried about the city, but also his soul."
This is the kind of dilemma that hits me hard, too, and I feel like it's an argument that's gone by the wayside between two competing materialist philosophies (Capitalism vs. Socialism/Marxism is probably the easiest shorthand for it) that have gained such hegemony over the years that any discussion of a "soul" or things outside the narrow materialist view get instantly discarded. I'm a long-since renounced Evangelical, but some of those things still stick with me since there's still a lot to learn from things like the Sermon on the Mount and even Talmudic Law from the early "Old Testament" writings.
I think it was Vonnegut who I read once described himself as a "Christ-loving Atheist" and I thought that was a good way of putting it. Especially as a musician/artist, the idea of selling my soul has always been there -- you see artists sell out to make a bunch of drivel to pad their pockets, and they never get their souls back, the thing that made them so beautiful to begin with. In fact, they rarely want it back because they have all these material possessions and their kids go to fancy schools, so why would they care about something like a soul? Maybe it's just because my name is Matthew so I've always leaned in to that book in the Bible, but even 15 years after quitting the faith and splitting from churches, I still remember Matthew 19:26 (my paraphrase): "For what would it profit a man, to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?" For all my lefty principles and such, I could never truly feel like a part of the Left these days with how much they focus on materialistic needs, and I'm considered a person who "fetishizes poverty" when I fondly remember stories from my Grandma about how poor her family was, but the idea that "we may not have much money, but we've always got each other" really MEANS something. Lots of people have covered this song (I absolutely love the Jeff Buckley version), and these lines have always stood out to me from Satisfied Mind:
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind
Thanks for the review Matt, I'll have to look into this book when I've got the appetite for a 700-pager, haha.
My Ukrainian grandma’s theology (she got 4 kids illegally baptized in the USSR-my dad was born in Germany after WWIl) “Do 3 shots for the Trinity!!!”
Do you know if you are unauthorized /Foreign and want to become a citizen all you need is a doctors signature that you were born in a Hospital in the US and or you can use a Baptism paper?
Converting unauthorized into CITIZENS:
Baptismal certificate
Hospital birth certificate
Census record
Early school record
Family Bible record
Doctor's record of postnatal care
https://www.thoughtco.com/proof-of-u-s-citizenship-3321592
«the first (and last) hope of a major political party candidate whom I could consider to at least be anti-war adjacent. Since I am very firmly anti-war»
But that is... COMMUNISM! :-)
I know you're up to it, Matthew. You don't shy away from writing a long comment.
I voted for Kucinich in the Democratic primaries in DC in both 2004 and 2008. He won the DC primary in 2004. Then, for reasons that were never explained to the public, the Democratic establishment decided on a do-over. So, we had a second primary, and John Kerry won. Again, no explanation and virtually no press coverage. Anyone I talked to about my vote described Kucinich as “weird.” One supposedly progressive commentator even remarked on the weird way Kucinich ate noodles. So we got polished and corrupt instead of honest, smart and unconventional. We can’t say we’ve never had choices.
You touched on a live wire there, Nancy. No one talks about the rigged primaries where the losing party actually challenges the prevailing narrative. Instead, our attention is deflected to the general election where both parties stack the odds in their dominant constituency.
«No one talks about the rigged primaries»
The was politics works in the USA and several other "Washington Consensus" places has been described "you can vote for any candidate you want as long as we nominate the candidates we want".
"Then, for reasons that were never explained to the public, the Democratic establishment decided on a do-over."
The Democratic establishment used to consume wearisome amounts of time and effort on the "do-over," but has recently moved to the more effective and efficient "pre-over." Progress!
"We can’t say we’ve never had choices."
Democratic primary voters aren't allowed to have nice things.
Thanks Matt. This kind of reporting is keeping the spotlight where it should be, not so much Dems vs Republicans, but on the "riggers" and the "riggees" (so to speak. )
I never could understand why Trump was supposedly a pariah from the day he came down the escalator. It was precisely his pie-in-the-face behavior to the riggers that scared everybody to death. I think he was caught off guard by the extent to which those in his own party (and administration) were entrenched in the rigged system. He was a real threat, and I think he was getting close to the core of the problem so he had to be gotten rid of. It's the riggers vs the riggees.
True. Unfortunately Trump did not understand the depth or intensity of his Machiavellian opposition. He should have fired 50% of the Federal beuracracy. An empty chair is better then an avid enemy
It is so hard to fire those dweebs, though. And getting replacements that aren't already part of the same broken system is nigh-impossible.
Yup-Trump nominated Andy Puzder, the CEO or Hardee’s as SecLabor-a smart nomination-the man understands the real labor market-but he got whacked by the DC-PC complex.....
I'm not Trump supporter, but his early strategy of surrounding himself with Generals was a really bad strategy. No one obtains that rank without being an absolute snake in the grass. If he thought they would simply follow his orders he understood the military even less than I already assumed.
His own DOJ tried to impeach him. The DOJ supported the Dossier as fact and went after everyone.
Correct
Good point. Trump had to be maximally attacked and removed because he was already wealthy and powerful, and he could therefore focus on what mattered to him, ie, America's "greatness". The trough feeders could not control him through the usual channels, and he knew all about how they stayed in power. He had to go.
«I never could understand why Trump was supposedly a pariah from the day he came down the escalator.»
My main theory, looking at the type of people most affected by TDS, and their unthinking, gut feeling of revulsion at Trump, and the often ridiculous arguments against him they come up, ignoring far more realistic ones, is that they object to him as a person, because he is "lowbrow", a vulgar performer, and they hate the idea of being ruled by someone they see as an inferior, an Orange Baboon. They want their boss to look the part. NN Taleb has written appositely:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1351145008506798084
“What did we learn from the failed TRUMP experiment? (cont) Someone in office, like a High Priest of Baal, a Patriarch, a doge, a judge, or a mafia don, must observe a certain decorum & a certain ornamental deportment. This holds even more true in a secular democracy. #Lindy”
It is somewhat like the revulsion that many from the other side felt at the presidency of BH Obama, even if he was a suave reganist elitist, because they also hated the idea of being ruled by someone they considered an inferior.
My first impression of Kucinich was not great, but in the following years I have found him to be an honest and forthright man. Based on this very fine article, I can now presume my first impressions were based on false reporting AKA: Fake News. It's more than clear to me today that what we have is a somewhat hidden group of criminals masquerading as politicians, news media, and corrupt corporations, where the bottom line is to gain wealth for themselves at the expense of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Add to that a federal government that supports the activity, as long as someone form within it gains as well.
«what we have is a somewhat hidden group of criminals masquerading as politicians, news media, and corrupt corporations, where the bottom line is to gain wealth for themselves at the expense of their neighbors and fellow citizens.»
Isn't that the American Dream? Isn't "get a little of that ice cream" without too many scruples the dream of the Great American Middle Class? If so many voters are corrupt don't they deserve representation too? I have a quote here from famous historian Newt Gingrich, part of a speech in which he argued that it is futile to try to do environmental regulation in the USA:
"If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter. The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.”
It's a good question, but Gingrich is a politicians, so he does see things differently than an enlightened human. I believe it was Socrates that said...The unexamined life is not worth living.
Excellent comment. I am occasionally tempted to admire Gingrich based upon his occasional, flippant candor about the way things actually work in Washington, but then I remember that he's The Thing from John Carpenter's THE THING (1982).
https://youtu.be/El389qn8dZs
Great article. Glad you wrote it. But I was able to answer this question off the top of my head without reading any further:
"By 2020 most all of Kucinich’s positions were orthodoxy among Democratic voters, yet he remains an outcast to Democrats nationally. In fact, he’s been frozen out of blue-state media for the better part of a decade, and welcomed during the same time to a five-year stint as a Fox News contributor. What gives?"
What gives is the key word "most." Those positions held by Kucinich that *AREN'T* orthodoxy among Democrat voters (or the DNC / corporate media hydra) are exactly why he's been frozen out. Allow me to list them:
1. Anti-war (see: Tulsi Gabbard for another example)
2. Pro Medicare for All (or an equivalent UHC system)
3. Tuition free college
4. Anti "intelligence" community / surveillance state
Those four things, or any combination of them - including just #1 - will keep anyone frozen out of the corporate media and unable to utilize the corporate DNC's party machine to get elected to any meaningful position of power. That simple.
"welcomed during the same time to a five-year stint as a Fox News contributor. What gives?"
I don't watch cable news (and so am speaking -- as usual -- out of my ass), but based on its inclusion of Greenwald and Kucinich I infer that FOX is becoming somewhat more heterodox and interesting, if one must pick a propaganda channel.
I was immediately impressed by Dennis Kucinich when he was one of the few (if any at that time) Croatian-Americans in Congress, and he nobly, on principle, opposed US military action against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Dennis could have easily earned strong support from nationalistic Croatian-Americans, including many in his district, by backing such moves. Instead, he risked their strong enmity by opposing those acts of war, publicly. After that, I contributed to all his presidential campaigns.
We need people of integrity. Otherwise, any system can and will be gamed.
There were Croatians (or Serbs, different side, same mentality) from Independence or Strongsville who were sending their teenage kids over to the battle zone on summer break in the early 90s, where they were set up w/sniper rifles in fairly safe positions and basically told “Shoot at anything that moves beyond point X”
There's probably a novel to be written about regional loyalties in Ohio during that period in the late '90s when Serbs were the designated US Official Enemy.
The Dayton Accords were the biggest story in town since the Wright Bro’s. started buzzing around-you can still get a ride in one of their original Wright B flyers.
Matt, thank you SO much for doing the interview and writing the book review. I almost feel you’ve vindicated him on so many levels, and I thank you for that too. I voted for the man in 2004 and was ready to do it again in 2008 before he pulled out of the race. I remember the first time I heard him speak (I was a transplant from Puerto Rico at the time) and my jaw fell to the floor; who is this man, I wondered. Well, he turned out to be THE most “unelectable” candidate from that time. I miss him.
We probably need more tell-all stories about the powers that be - starting with General Smedley Butler's uncovering a fascist plot to take over the government in the 30s, to Henry Wallace's being pushed out of the democratic party, to Kennedy's fights with intelligence and JCOS inside the administration, to Nixon's decision to open up relations with China to get the inside skinny on the military industrial reaction. Ford was a placeholder for the intelligence community and just about everyone after that played ball with the neoliberal establishment to some extent.
We need more institutional exposure of how the hidden state plays ball - beyond assassinations, dirty wars, coup d'etats, and rigging elections.
Here's a hot flash for you, mcelroyj. There is no hidden state. There's no reason to hide the state. Because the folks who run the state own everything and everybody worth owning. It's right in front of your eyes and my eyes. They're not shy anymore. And they're operating from the assumption that there's not a damn thing we can do about it. They may be right! No need for hide and seek. It's the difference between building a ballpark in San Diego And Toronto. You need a dome in Toronto, but not San Diego. The boys and girls of the State these days play in San Diego. We know where the keep the Beluga, we just can't get at it.
Mind numbingly infantile post, while trying to appear edgy. Read more post less.
mcrlroyj, have not forgotten about you.
"We need more institutional exposure of how the hidden state plays ball - beyond assassinations, dirty wars, coup d'etats, and rigging elections...."
Sounds as though you're volunteering for the project you've outlined above. Careful. Last person to undertake that sort of challenge, Ed Snowden, was reduced to renting a cold water flat in Vologda from Boris Feldsparovich. All that stuff you list above is low-hanging fruit plucked long ago. Here's some reading for you. Keep us posted on how deep that deep state really is....cheers...
Smedley Butler: “War is a Racket”: Smed’s a bit of a nut. But he’s got heart and his head is in the right place. Read this 25 years ago. War is definitely a racket, but that’s been self-evident for, say, 6,000 years. Available now in audio version and might be fun listening after a handful of psilocybin-based snacks.
John Nichols, “The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” Nice , recently published updated overview of Wallace’s quixotic ‘48 presidential campaign on the progressive ticket. Also gives succinct account of the concerted---and successful---effort to jettison Wallace from the ‘44 ticket. This was handled by some of the reactionary elements within the democratic party. Wallace was perceived as a sort of radical poindexter, a tolerated eccentric during the early days of the new deal, a compromise choice in 1940, but wholly unacceptable as a potential president given Roosevelt’s rapidly failing health.
The ‘44 demo nominating convention was a mere formality. In collusion with the machinations of the legislators, Roosevelt hustled Wallace off to a two-month fact finding trip to Siberia and never spoke to him about the ‘44 ticket until he was for all practical purposes a dead candidate. Despite failing health, FDR evidently retained his sense of humor.
The ‘44 demo nominating convention was a mere formality. “Conspiracy of the pure in heart” indeed. By the way, Wallace was never kicked out of the democratic party. He merely left it when he surmised there was no place for him in a party drifting to the right in response to political pressures of the cold war. Have always been a Wallace fan.
But for my money, Dwight Macdonald’s biography offers the best delineation of Wallace’s idiosyncratic personality and wide-ranging curiosity across disciplines as a policy polymath. And it’s Macdonald, always worth the time no matter the subject. Unfortunately, it’s out of print.
As for Nixon and China, there are a forest-full of books detailing extensively Nixon’s possible motives for going to China. Only the serpent knows. Here I like the conventional wisdom: Watergate was getting warm, and the calaboose closer.
Books too numerous to showcase, though I’d start with Kissinger’s memoirs and Margaret Macmillan’s “Nixon in China,” pretty much the scholarly gold standard for this subject. Garry Wills’ “Nixon Agonistes” is worth a view---a great work detailing Nixon’s ambition and shrewd calculations in all things statecraft and prepares one for the lizard mind that will eventually navigate simultaneously the rapprochement with China and the brewing circus of Watergate.
My rule of thumb: show me a conspiracy and I’ll show you human frailty and unmitigated dunderheadedness. But then you’re not alone. Most of the commenters on Taibbi’s site are awash in conspiracy theories. One supposes it’s the scholarly equivalent of an Alex Jones rant.
I remember Dennis Kucinich running for president. He was never once allowed to be front and center...that spot was reserved for Clinton and Obama. He was shoved to the far side of the stage, but every time he got a chance to say something, what he said made sense, was realistic, rang of sincerity and made me always say, this is the guy I want for president. The others, by comparison, were, well, stupid, including the two who were front and center, though Obama fooled a lot of people. I have wondered often what kind of a world we would live in if we were allowed to have a decent president, such as Kucinich, Stein, Gabbard. That won't happen in my lifetime....or ever, I expect. I loved the guy for the way he was and missed him when he fell out of sight. Look forward to his book. Thanks, Matt, for this.
«if we were allowed to have a decent president, such as Kucinich, Stein, Gabbard»
There is a yuuuge difference as Trump discovered between being in office and being in power, they are not quite the same thing. Some presidents had actual power because they had what is called a "power base", that is backers who trusted them and helped them, and a lot of minions whose careers they had nurtured and who trusted them and helped them, and lots of experience working the actual levers of power. Basically powerful presidents had to be "machine politicians", the leaders of their own faction, a faction that mattered.
I strongly suspect that there was a switch from machine politician candidates to primaries to select candidates because the powerful finance and business lobbies realized that machine politicians thought of themselves as principals, having their own power base, instead of as representatives of their sponsors. Primaries tend to require a lot of money, giving more power to the sponsors over candidates, and they tend to select "popular", "looks good" politicians, who rarely have their own power base.
Trump (and Sanders, and Corbyn in England) was an exception to that, because he was bankrolled by his own fortune, and was a corrupter, instead of being corrupted, but he still did not have any political power base, no knowledge of how to make the mere office of president gain some actual power, including no knowledge of the administrative machine. He probably thought that he could solve all problems with permanent campaign mode on one side, and just doing his usual as a real estate mobster does on the other side, but on the other side he fought with people as rich as himself, and far more experienced in driving national policies, with other principals, with other "sponsors".
Excellent summary.
Though, my hunch is that Trump and Jeff Zucker were tapped to recreate a presidential reality show to manufacture consent for some truly evil "solutions" to a truly evil sounding boogeyman.
Thanks, I understand the way it works. You're right. What I was talking about, that won't happen in my lifetime, if ever, is a genuinely honest president with a cabinet of the same and a Congress who have integrity, so that all work for the governed. In other words, where people after power, money and control don't run anything. As I said, won't happen.
Kucinich's loss in 08 was America's loss. Instead we got obie, the transformational president that bombed brown people every single day of his Nobel Peace Prize presidency, gave us nearly $11TRILLION in new debt, waged culture wars and race wars and spied on every single American for Amazon (giving Bezos the $600M CIA contract that let him buy the WaPo and your privacy), all while leaving office some $20million richer.
I look forward to The Division of Light and Power, primarily because the U.S. media no longer reports on government corruption - after all, fiction, aspersions, and witch hunts are much more fun and much more lucrative than bearing the burden of the 4th Estate and actually investigating wrong doing by the people we've elected to govern us.
One might ask Kucinich how he managed to navigate power for so long while remaining unscathed (other than his national political brand). So many of his ideas had and do have merit, but I guess I find myself in the middle of being gobsmacked by his audacity/will to challenge power and his sheer luck of not being ruined more than just his reputation in Washington temporarily. There are worse outcomes and fates than his.
Another way to say this is that if WaPo is singing his praises now (decades after the fact), then he must have been an easy threat to dismantle. Someone like Philip Agee or Julian Assange seems to rankle the deep state and their whorish brethren congress much more Kucinich. These benign caricatures like Adlai Stephenson, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders seem to get walked upon and bullied more than they lead people to a new path.
There is a great deal to admire in DK, no doubt - but if he was the best opportunity for a sane Presidential choice in the last 40 years, we are clearly fucked.
"Someone like Philip Agee or Julian Assange seems to rankle the deep state and their whorish brethren congress much more [than] Kucinich."
Brutal, mcelroyj, but fair.
A digression closer to my own l'il hidey-hole; if corruption is utterly endemic to a political entity such as the City Council of Cleveland, OH, do we imagine that the federal security/intelligence services are clean as the driven snow?
I think that's the point - the anti-communist 50's was the test case for how the tripartite nature of power works (the state or the face of democracy, the corporatocracy including financial/media domination to manufacture consent and socialize loss, and then the hidden state where surveillance, military expansion, drug-running financed dirty tricks in bed with the mob at home and abroad).
Are you James Ellroy posting under a thinly veiled pseudonym? If so, I enjoyed your AMERICAN trilogy. Good work.
20 years younger, prefer longer sentences if you haven't noticed by now, and his name has 2 L's where mine has one. As far as the comparison, I'm an amateur in brutal pessimism and have never spent more than a week in California. My hideouts in include the states of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and the confines of Kansas City, Bethesda and Madison. Have more in common with Thomas Frank than I do James Ellroy (then again his childhood is stark).
My background is in academia/teaching, coaching, and family finance/investing but history and podcasting are current passions.
I would pay money to watch a movie in which James Ellroy and Thomas Frank play bickering buddy cops.
I do not understand why I am not a highly-paid Hollywood producer on the strength of my ideas alone.