organization:democratic national committee

  • Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking : #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
    https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
    La pensée unique aux États Unis de plus en plus sectaire et pesante

    Jackson Lears

    American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

    A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

    The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.

    Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

    It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.

    It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.

    Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.

    Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ He also said in July 2016 that ‘even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, ‪#XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times, but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.

    Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.

    So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.

    Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.

    The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.

    Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.

    The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

    The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

    For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

    that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.

    Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.

    Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.

    The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.

    I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.

    The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.

    Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.

    We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.

    It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.

    On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’

    Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

    This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –

    was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

    #USA #cuture #politique

  • Socialism is surging on college campuses this fall – VICE News
    https://news.vice.com/story/socialism-is-surging-on-college-campuses-this-fall

    “This is only a good thing for the Democratic Party,” said Sabrina Singh, the deputy communications director at the Democratic National Committee, said of the rise of YDSA [Young Democratic Socialists of America]. “There is incredible enthusiasm on college campuses across the country, and we’ve seen a number of groups rise to bring about progressive change and get involved in Democratic politics.”

    But eight YDSA organizers at colleges across the country said that helping the Democrats is not their goal. Instead, they want to remain distinct and offer a more progressive alternative to the Democratic Party. “Democrats have more moderation, but it’s the same policy of class war as the Republicans,” Chance Walker, the co-chair of the new YDSA chapter at University of Texas San Antonio, told VICE News.

    At UT San Antonio — where half of the student body is Hispanic, a key constituency for Democrats — there is now only a socialists club and not a Democratic one. The College Dems club at UT San Antonio went kaput in 2016, according to the university, and Walker helped start a YDSA chapter this past fall.

    #etats-unis #socialisme

  • Out of Control
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/out-of-control

    Democrats’ Russia Narrative Spiraling Out Of Control

    Democrat politicians and pundits are quickly losing control of the story surrounding Russian influence efforts within the United States.

    The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias hired Fusion GPS on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said Tuesday that Elias had “vigorously” denied being involved with the dossier, which is said to have relied upon Russian sources. Another NYT reporter, Maggie Haberman, similarly indicated that Democrats had repeatedly lied to reporters about their involvement with the dossier.

    Prominent Democrats are now scrambling to distance themselves from the revelations. The DNC released a carefully-worded (...)

  • Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country | Août 2017

    ...for the ’crime’ of journalism

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/julian-assange-a-man-without-a-country

    [...]

    II

    For some time, Assange has adopted the media habits of the powerful, restricting his appearances to brief, high-profile television interviews, conversations with friendly interlocutors, managed press events, and Twitter. On November 5th, days before the election, in a TV interview with one of his fiercest defenders, he declared, “We can say that the Russian government is not the source” of the election e-mails—a denial that did nothing to quell a growing suspicion, even among close supporters, that he was not being honest. “He says they’re not Russians,” one of them told me. “Well, he can’t know that. It could be his source was a front for the Russians. I think the truth is important, however it’s acquired, but if he knew it was the Russians, and didn’t declare it, that would be a problem for me.”

    The problem was obvious. WikiLeaks, like many journalistic organizations, has long insisted on keeping its sources secret. However, Assange was not merely maintaining silence; he was actively pushing a narrative about his sourcing, in which Russia was not involved. He once told me, “WikiLeaks is providing a reference set to undeniably true information about the world.” But what if, in the interest of source protection, he was advancing a falsehood that was more significant than the reference set itself? Arguably, his election publications only underscored what was known about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. His denials, meanwhile, potentially obfuscated an act of information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers.

    That the stakes were so high was a potent indication of the immense power that WikiLeaks has acquired since it was founded, in 2006. Assange projects an image of his organization as small and embattled—as if it had not changed much since the days when he and a few friends were the only people involved. But today, he told me, the WikiLeaks annual budget runs in the millions of dollars, supplied partly by donations that are funnelled through N.G.O.s. In 2016 alone, WikiLeaks raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors in the United States. “He has money in tax havens,” one colleague told me. “They have so much money in bitcoin it’s ridiculous—meanwhile, there are all these poor people who are chipping in money who feel like he is not getting enough support to eat.” In Assange’s view, the donations provide a level of editorial independence that few mainstream competitors have.

    Assange has increasingly used the money to offer rewards for information: fifty thousand dollars for footage of a hospital bombed in Afghanistan; a hundred and twenty thousand for documents about international trade negotiations. When Trump implied that he had taped his White House meetings with James Comey, Assange tweeted, “WikiLeaks offers US $100K for the Trump-Comey tapes.” At one stroke, he appeared to endorse Trump’s bogus claim about the tapes and also implied that WikiLeaks was politically agnostic by seeking them. More significantly, he used the occasion to encourage supporters to donate, so that he could purchase the tapes—which, unsurprisingly, proved not to exist.

    The idea that WikiLeaks has problems with accountability sends Assange into angry fits. “Look at all the accountability that is thrown at us!” he told me in the Embassy one evening, nodding at the walls to indicate hidden surveillance devices. “Every second of every day!” He cited the government scrutiny, and relentless journalists, always ready to pounce when he makes a misstep. Raising his voice, he said, “WikiLeaks is probably the most held-to-account organization on earth!”

    [...]

    via https://diasp.eu/posts/5915092

    #Assange #journalisme #Wikileaks #London #surveillance #bitcoin #Russie #Équateur #Suède

  • Let Us Mourn, Then Organize
    Peter Dreier
    http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/let-us-mourn-then-organize

    We need new Democratic Party leadership. We need a progressive like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Dick Durbin, or Congressman John Lewis as the next head of the Democratic National Committee.

    This is no time for liberals and progressives, Bernie Sanders supporters and Clinton followers, to point fingers. This is a time for cooperation and strategizing. Unions, Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, community organizing groups, LGBT activists, and wealthy progressives must collaborate. Progressives must raise the money—hundreds of millions of dollars—to send an army of paid organizers to key swing states and House districts now. We can’t just parachute organizers into swing states a few months before the next election. We need to build on and expand the base by organizing ordinary people around local and national issues. We need to ramp up protest and engage in civil disobedience to stop Donald Trump’s initiatives. And we need to register voters, so they’ll be “fired up and ready to go” for the midterm elections in two years and the presidential race in 2020. 

    We need to lay the foundation for Democrats to take back the Congress in 2018, and then elect Elizabeth Warren president in 2020.

    Mourn our losses. Then organize.

  • How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West’s Secrets - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-julian-assange-russia.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

    Notably absent from Mr. Assange’s analysis, however, was criticism of another world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly lived up to WikiLeaks’ ideal of transparency. Mr. Putin’s government has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control over the news media and internet. If Mr. #Assange appreciated the irony of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today, the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not readily apparent.

    Now, Mr. Assange and #WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.

    In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to undermine her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Assange — who has been openly critical of Mrs. Clinton — has promised further disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a “pristine” set of cyberspying codes.

  • The House of Cards d’Hillary
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/the-house-of-cards-dhillary

    The House of Cards d’Hillary

    On sait que Francis “Frank” Underwood, héros ambiguë de la série The House of Cards, devient, dans le récit, président des États-Unis après une carrière où on le voit, notamment, assassiner une personne gênante (une journaliste). D’une certaine façon, on pourrait penser qu’Hillary Clinton a pris la bonne voie, si Assange suggère vrai. Le fondateur de WikiLeaks et locataire pour l’instant perpétuel de l’ambassade d’Equateur à Londres a donné une interview télévisée à un réseau TV néerlandais, Neuwsuur. Il y affirme que la source qui a transféré le fonds d’une vingtaine de milliers d’e-mails du Democratic National Committee (DNC) à WikiLeaks ne se situe nullement en Russie, comme il a été aussitôt affirmé, mais à Washington même, dans le chef d’un membre de l’équipe du DNC, Seth Rich. (...)

    • « Julian Assange just dropped a bombshell. While on the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur, Assange seemed to suggest (very explicitly), that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks DNC email cache leak that Hillary Clinton was quick to blame Russia for. Seth Rich was killed shortly after the DNC email scandal. Was Rich murdered for this leak that may have cost Hillary the Presidency of the United States?

      (...)

      » Julian Assange: “Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27 year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.”

      » Reporter: “That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?”

      » Julian Assange: “No. There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.”

  • Le Parti démocrate voit la main de la Russie derrière la publication d’e-mails par WikiLeaks
    http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2016/07/25/le-parti-democrate-voit-la-main-de-la-russie-derriere-la-publication-d-e-mai

    A quelques heures de l’ouverture de la convention du Parti démocrate à Philadelphie (Pennsylvanie), lundi 25 juillet, qui va officiellement désigner Hillary Clinton comme sa candidate à la présidentielle du 8 novembre, l’affaire dite des e-mails du Democratic national committee, (DNC, la plus haute instance du parti) continue de rebondir. La publication de milliers de courriels internes du DNC par le site WikiLeaks, qui montrent notamment que les élites du parti ont favorisé l’ancienne secrétaire d’Etat par rapport à son adversaire Bernie Sanders, avait déjà fait une victime majeure : Debbie Wasserman Schultz, la présidente du DNC, qui a annoncé sa démission dimanche.

    Mais l’affaire a aussi pris de faux airs de guerre froide : dimanche matin, lors de l’émission « This Week » de la chaîne ABC, le responsable de la campagne de Mme Clinton, Robby Mook, a accusé WikiLeaks d’avoir publié des documents « fournis par les Russes pour aider Donald Trump ». Une thèse largement défendue par l’entourage et les partisans de Mme Clinton, qui s’appuient sur plusieurs rapports d’experts ayant travaillé sur des piratages qui ont ciblé le DNC cette année.

    Selon la société spécialisée Crowdstrike, embauchée par le DNC pour mener l’enquête sur les piratages, au moins deux groupes sont parvenus à s’introduire dans les serveurs du parti. Et selon l’entreprise, les deux groupes seraient liés à d’autres piratages d’ampleur visant des ministères et des administrations américaines, et considérés comme proches du pouvoir russe.

    • Les infos communiquées par #Crowdstrike (le 15 juin 2016, pour des attaques en mai)

      Bears in the Midst : Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee »
      https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee

      CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR. We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well. In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis. Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.

      #COZY_BEAR (also referred to in some industry reports as CozyDuke or APT 29) is the adversary group that last year successfully infiltrated the unclassified networks of the White House, State Department, and US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In addition to the US government, they have targeted organizations across the Defense, Energy, Extractive, Financial, Insurance, Legal, Manufacturing Media, Think Tanks, Pharmaceutical, Research and Technology industries, along with Universities. Victims have also been observed in Western Europe, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey and Central Asian countries. COZY BEAR’s preferred intrusion method is a broadly targeted spearphish campaign that typically includes web links to a malicious dropper. Once executed on the machine, the code will deliver one of a number of sophisticated Remote Access Tools (RATs), including AdobeARM, ATI-Agent, and MiniDionis. On many occasions, both the dropper and the payload will contain a range of techniques to ensure the sample is not being analyzed on a virtual machine, using a debugger, or located within a sandbox. They have extensive checks for the various security software that is installed on the system and their specific configurations. When specific versions are discovered that may cause issues for the RAT, it promptly exits. These actions demonstrate a well-resourced adversary with a thorough implant-testing regime that is highly attuned to slight configuration issues that may result in their detection, and which would cause them to deploy a different tool instead. The implants are highly configurable via encrypted configuration files, which allow the adversary to customize various components, including C2 servers, the list of initial tasks to carry out, persistence mechanisms, encryption keys and others. An HTTP protocol with encrypted payload is used for the Command & Control communication.

      #FANCY_BEAR (also known as Sofacy or APT 28) is a separate Russian-based threat actor, which has been active since mid 2000s, and has been responsible for targeted intrusion campaigns against the Aerospace, Defense, Energy, Government and Media sectors. Their victims have been identified in the United States, Western Europe, Brazil, Canada, China, Georgia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea. Extensive targeting of defense ministries and other military victims has been observed, the profile of which closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government, and may indicate affiliation with Главное Разведывательное Управление (Main Intelligence Department) or #GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service. This adversary has a wide range of implants at their disposal, which have been developed over the course of many years and include Sofacy, X-Agent, X-Tunnel, WinIDS, Foozer and DownRange droppers, and even malware for Linux, OSX, IOS, Android and Windows Phones. This group is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target. Afterwards, they establish phishing sites on these domains that spoof the look and feel of the victim’s web-based email services in order to steal their credentials. FANCY BEAR has also been linked publicly to intrusions into the German Bundestag and France’s TV5 Monde TV station in April 2015.

      At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016. We have identified no collaboration between the two actors, or even an awareness of one by the other. Instead, we observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials

    • GRU ou pas, le contenu de ce qui a fui n’est pas bidonné.

      Quoiqu’il en soit, le Parti démocrate a présenté lundi, à l’ouverture de la convention, ses excuses à Bernie Sanders. « Nous voulons présenter nos excuses sincères au sénateur Sanders, à ses soutiens et au Parti démocrate dans son ensemble pour les remarques inexcusables » contenues dans les emails internes publiés par Wikileaks, indiquent les responsables du parti dans un communiqué. Ils ont souligné que certains propos ne reflètent pas l’engagement de « neutralité » auxquels ils sont attachés.

      (mise à jour de cette nuit, 26/07 à 0h37, me semble-t-il)

    • Le Kremlin dément toute implication dans le piratage des emails du Parti démocrate américain
      http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2016/07/26/le-kremlin-dement-toute-implication-dans-le-piratage-des-emails-du-parti-dem

      Des « informations absurdes » et des « tentatives maniaques d’utiliser la Russie dans la campagne électorale aux Etats-Unis » : le porte-parole du Kremlin, Dmitri Peskov, a vivement démenti les accusations du Parti démocrate américain, selon lesquelles Moscou a fourni à WikiLeaks les emails internes du parti que le site a publiés.

      … au passage…

      Mais les deux piratages, détectés ce printemps, semblent ne pas avoir de lien avec les emails que s’est procurés WikiLeaks – une partie de ces derniers ont été envoyés après que les deux piratages aient été découverts. Le site, qui affirme d’ordinaire ne pas connaître l’identité de ses sources, affirme que les documents ne proviennent pas de ces deux piratages.

      Mais, c’est pas grave, de toutes façons #c'est_Poutine

  • Leaked DNC email: Sanders’ attempt to moderate Israel stance “disturbing,” Clinton campaign used it to “marginalize Bernie” - Salon.com
    http://www.salon.com/2016/07/22/leaked_dnc_email_sanders_attempt_to_moderate_israel_stance_disturbing_clinton

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, [..] called the attempt by the Bernie Sanders campaign to moderate the party’s stance on Israel “disturbing.”

    A top DNC official also noted that the Hillary Clinton campaign used Israel “to marginalize Bernie.”

    This is according to an email released by Wikileaks. The whistleblowing journalism organization released approximately 20,000 DNC emails on Friday.

  • Guccifer 2.0 DNC’s servers hacked by a lone hacker – GUCCIFER 2.0
    https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/dnc

    Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.

    I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.

    Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.

    Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?

    Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.

    #trump #Democratic_Party #narrative #clinton

  • Sanders Inspires Debate on Democrats’s Language on Israel

    Discussions about whether to include Palestinian rights and Israeli occupation in the platform were more robust than ever before in party history, a development J Street has advocated.
    The Forward and Nathan Guttman Jun 11, 2016 12:23 AM
    http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.724381

    Washington – The Democratic Party’s first round of platform committee hearings had something for everyone, from AIPAC to J Street.

    Discussions about whether to include Palestinian rights and Israeli occupation in the platform were more robust than ever before in party history, a development J Street has advocated.

    For AIPAC, the meeting sent a clear message that despite the concerted effort by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, the platform is not going to change.

    “What everybody tends to forget, with all due respect, is that there was a winner of the Democratic primaries and her name is Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton has a long established, decades-long policy regarding Israel,” said former Florida congressman Robert Wexler after delivering his forceful pro-Israel testimony to the platform committee. “It is Hillary Clinton’s view that won out.”

    But as committee members argued under the watchful eyes of the lobbyists in the audience, the debate’s direction became more clear. Supporters of changing the platform, backed by Sanders and by J Street, have succeeded in raising new issues and grabbing the headlines. But Democratic establishment members will have the last word, win the majority of votes and preserve the current AIPAC-supported language.

    Wexler represents the thinking of many in the Democratic National Committee who believe it is best to leave the plank on Israel untouched, with a possible addition of a clause denouncing efforts to boycott and delegitimize Israel. That means preserving language that focuses on the rights and needs of Israel, couching support for a two-state solution as an Israeli interest and continuing to omit the word “occupation.”

    Others who testified that day pushed to include it.

    “The word occupation is not a pejorative, it is a legal category and the situation in the Palestinian territories clearly meets it,” said Matt Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, in an interview outside the committee room. Duss, in his testimony to the platform committee, tried to make the case for including the term in the plank and adjusting the language in a way that would recognize Palestinian rights as well as those of Israelis, a point Sanders and his supporters have been stressing for months.

    “These two things, supporting the rights of the Palestinians and the rights of Israelis, are entirely consistent with each other,” Duss said.

    But the idea of adopting the term occupation into the platform is a non-starter for Wexler.

    “If there are minor modifications that allow people to coalesce around language, sure, everyone should be amenable to hearing other people’s views,” said Wexler in response, “but adding language such as occupation is not a minor change.”

    Scholar and activist Cornel West, a Sanders representative, delivered the most vocal defense of the candidate’s wish to change the party’s discourse on Israel.

    West, known for his outspoken criticism of Israel, as well as that of mainstream Democrats and of President Obama, called Israeli officials, especially newly-appointed defense minister Avigdor Lieberman “Trump-like figures in Israeli life.” West asked his fellow committee members to explain why they are so quick to criticize the Republican presumptive nominee for his racist comments, but are hesitant to speak out when it comes to Israeli politicians. “Why can we focus on xenophobes here, and seem to be so reluctant to call out xenophobes in Israel and other places?” West asked.

    As Wexler tried to convince members of the committee that current pro-Israel platform language should be adopted, West pushed for denouncing the Israeli occupation in the party’s official document. “If there were a Palestinian occupation of Jewish brothers and sisters would we respond the same way?” he asked. West also turned to committee members and posed an even tougher question: Could they agree “that life of Palestinian baby is just as valuable as Jewish baby.” America’s commitment to its allies, he added, “can never be predicated on occupation.”

    West is one of five members appointed by Sanders to the 15-member Democratic platform drafting committee. At least two of Sanders’ other picks, James Zogby who is the president of the Arab American Institute, and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress, believe the Democratic Party should adjust its position to include greater recognition of Palestinian rights.

    But they are a minority within the party and its institutions. A polite, but forceful, pushback from other committee members made it clear that while the party mainstream will continue to support a two-state solution, they are unwilling to consider taking any deliberate step to address concerns of pro-Palestinian activists in their formal platform.

    Clinton’s delegates to the committee also alluded to political concerns.

    “We should make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States,” Berman said, “and I think of our responsibility of this platform in terms of what can bring us together,” said committee member Howard Berman, a former California congressman and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    In a written testimony provided to the committee, J Street’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami sought to dispel this notion, which he described as an “erroneous understanding of American Jewish opinion.”

    According to Ben-Ami, Jewish Democratic voters are, in fact, much more progressive when it comes to Israel than the party gives them credit for. ”In Congress, in Jewish communities and at the ballot box, this gap is now closing,” Ben-Ami wrote. “The drafting committee has an opportunity to close the same gap in their platform.”

    Cornel West made the same argument in a blunter way: The Democratic Party, he said, has been “beholden to AIPAC for too long.”

    In the coming weeks, the platform drafting committee will hold another public hearing and then move to voting on the language. Sanders’s and his supporters’s best hope right now is for a large enough dissenting minority to get the question of Israel and the Palestinians to a floor debate at the party’s convention in Philadelphia.

  • Survey: One-third of Americans Support Boycotting Israel
    But 62 percent of Americans and 50 percent of Brits think BDS is a modern form of anti-Semitism, Ipsos poll shows.

    Haaretz May 30, 2016 6:50 PM
    read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.722327
    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.722327

    One-third of Americans support the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, as do 40 percent of Britons, states a survey conducted by the Ipsos global market research and public opinion firm, Channel 2 News reported on Monday.
    At the same time, a larger number of people - 62 percent of Americans and half of Britons - consider the BDS movement to be a modern form of anti-Semitism.
    The poll sampled 1,100 people in the United States on their views about Israel, and a similar poll was conducted in Britain.
    The poll implies that the BDS movement, on campuses in particular and elsewhere, is having a real effect on public opinion.
    The Democratic Party may now be on the verge of a major fight on the issue too. Last week, U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appointed three critics of Israel to help draft the party’s platform ahead of the convention in Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz appointed supporters of Israel to the committee drafting the Democratic platform.

  • Hillary Clinton Tells Israeli Billionaire and Mega-Donor She Will Support Israel, Fight Palestinian Movement | Alternet
    http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillary-clinton-tells-israeli-billionaire-and-mega-donor-she-will-support-

    Israeli-American Haim Saban is one of America’s richest men, the owner of numerous media and entertainment outlets — and a big Democratic donor. When the Democratic National Committee needed a new building, he coughed up $7 million to fund it, “one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party.”

    What does Saban want for all that money? “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” he said.

    In order to pursue this objective, Saban has been pouring money into Hillary Clinton’s super PAC, $2 million by one estimate. This week, Hillary returned the favor. She wrote a long letter to Saban praising Israel and pledging to fight the Palestinian-led boycott movement, which seeks to use economic pressures to end the occupation of their territories.


    #bds #corruption