person:hillary clinton

  • Pompeo, Big Oil and the attack on Iran Deal | Informed Comment
    https://www.juancole.com/2018/03/pompeo-attack-iran.html

    By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
    All you need to know about Mike Pompeo, the four-term congressman from Kansas who is actually from California, is that most of his life he has been in business with the Koch brothers. His appointment as Secretary of State puts a seal on Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords.
    More dangerously, Trump was straightforward that he put Pompeo in to replace Rex Tillerson in order to destroy the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty between the United Nations Security Council and Iran.
    Pompeo, despite his obvious brilliance, appears to be driven by profound currents of anger, resentment and vindictiveness, and to be unable to feel remorse for purveying falsehoods. His shameful performance at the circus he ran attempting to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the 2011 Benghazi attack and its aftermath demonstrated a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts and an inquisitorial, McCarthyite mindset.
    His lack of a moral compass makes his connection to the Kochs especially dangerous.
    Charles and David Koch, the notorious billionaires gnawing like termites at the foundations of American democracy, are all about petroleum. They fund phony climate denialism with a Potemkin village of foundations and expert frauds, to make sure oil keeps its value for as long as possible (even at the cost of visiting catastrophes on our children and grandchildren, since burning oil is causing catastrophic global heating).

  • “Make Russia Great Again”...
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/make-russia-great-again

    “Make Russia Great Again”...

    Après un an et demi de silence, accompagné de beaucoup de bruit médiatique, autour de l’enquête de Mueller sur la collusion de Trump le Terrible avec les Russes (et leur seigneur et maître, Vladimir Poutine le pirate) afin de voler l’élection à la jeune et innocente Hillary Clinton « la scintillante », Mueller a finalement pondu un œuf. Il a inculpé 13 Russes pour vol d’identité et fraude sur le net. Il allègue qu’ils ont acheté des informations personnelles volées (numéros de sécurité sociale, noms, dates de naissance, etc.) sur Internet, les ont utilisés pour créer des comptes PayPal et Facebook, puis les ont utilisés pour acheter des publicités sur Facebook dans le but de miner la foi des Américains dans la bonté salutaire de leur démocratie.

    Il n’y a (...)

  • Aux avant-postes du «  mur  » trumpien

    http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/02/10/aux-avant-postes-du-mur-trumpien_5254797_3234.html

    Le président républicain entend bâtir une «  barrière physique  » à la frontière avec le Mexique. Pour l’heure, celle-ci se résume à huit monolithes, symboles de la division entre pro- et anti-immigration.


    Les huit prototypes du « mur » voulu par le président Donald Trump à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, en octobre 2017.

    Le « grand et beau mur » promis par Donald Trump à ses concitoyens tient pour l’instant en huit panneaux géants installés à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, au sud de San Diego, en Californie. Huit monolithes de neuf mètres de haut et autant de large, postes avancés de la forteresse America First prônée par le président républicain.

    Du côté américain, il est impossible d’approcher. Les prototypes sont situés sur un terrain appartenant au gouvernement. La Border Police (police des frontières) a suspendu ses visites guidées, dans l’attente de celle de Donald Trump. Le président a promis de se déplacer pour inspecter lui-même les éléments précurseurs de « l’imposante barrière physique » qu’il espère laisser au pays. Mais sa venue, plusieurs fois annoncée, n’est toujours pas confirmée.

    Du côté mexicain, il faut franchir la frontière au poste d’Otay Mesa, à 20 km à l’est de Tijuana, puis prendre le boulevard Garita et la calle 12. On traverse les maquiladoras, ces vastes ateliers d’assemblage menacés par la renégociation de l’Accord de libre-échange nord-américain (Alena) entré en vigueur en 1994. Près de 700 multinationales, dont Sony, Samsung et General Motors, y sont installées. Les pièces arrivent d’Asie, débarquent au port de Los Angeles, traversent la frontière en duty free (sans taxe) et sont montées à Tijuana. Les produits finis sont réexportés vers les Etats-Unis.

    Des projets pilotes

    Depuis vingt ans, les soutiers de la mondialisation viennent s’entasser pour des salaires de misère (deux dollars par heure, soit cinq fois moins qu’aux Etats-Unis) dans ce faubourg poussiéreux de Las Torres, traversé par les semi-remorques rutilants, les poules et les chiens errants. Beaucoup ont fait le mur, et les narcotrafiquants ont construit des tunnels à la faveur de la prolifération des maquiladoras. Depuis 2006, une quinzaine de ces tunnels ont été mis au jour à Tijuana, certains longs de plus de 500 mètres.

    Les huit prototypes dépassent de six mètres la barrière de tôle couleur rouille héritée de Bill Clinton, qui sert de ligne de démarcation. La police des frontières leur a attribué des numéros. A la suite d’un appel d’offres lancé par le département de la sécurité intérieure, six compagnies ont été retenues pour construire des projets pilotes.

    W.G. Yates & Sons, du Mississippi, a érigé un mur de métal de couleur sable pour 458 000 dollars (payés par le contribuable américain), soit environ 375 000 euros ; Fisher Sand & Gravel, de l’Arizona, un pan de béton minimaliste (365 000 dollars). KWR, également de l’Arizona, a ajouté un tube métallique au sommet afin d’empêcher les échelles de s’accrocher. Le numéro 3 se distingue par sa couleur bleue : c’est le projet de l’ELTA, un sous-traitant des forces armées israéliennes.

    Prouesses de l’armée américaine

    De la fenêtre sans vitre de son abri, à l’ombre d’un demi-palmier, Alexis Franco Santana, 22 ans, a vue sur le prototype numéro 6, celui est surmonté d’un grillage de barbelés. Devant la masure s’empilent les déchets de plastique livrés par les camionnettes de recyclage. Le jeune homme est chargé du triage, moyennant 50 dollars par semaine. Casquette retournée, short extra-large de basketteur, il a tout d’un jeune Américain, jusqu’à l’accent, mais il se plaint de son peu de vocabulaire.

    Les prototypes n’ont pas eu raison de sa bonne humeur. « C’est comme un jeu, s’esclaffe-t-il. On dirait que Trump est allé à Toys’R’Us et qu’il s’est acheté des Lego. » Pour cinq dollars, le jeune homme loue aux touristes une échelle que lui a laissée un visiteur de passage. Au cas où Donald Trump confirmerait son arrivée, une télévision américaine a pris une option sur le gruyère de planches qui lui sert de toit.

    Le jeune Mexicain a assisté tout le mois de janvier aux prouesses de l’armée américaine. Pendant trois semaines, des éléments des forces spéciales venus de Floride et les unités paramilitaires de la police des frontières ont pris d’assaut les prototypes hauts de trois étages, à coups de « pioche », de « marteau-piqueur », de « burin », de « cric de voiture » et de « chalumeau », selon la liste dressée par la Border Police. Un seul des militaires est parvenu à se hisser au sommet. Fin janvier, les Américains ont été informés que les prototypes avaient passé avec succès le test de résistance aux envahisseurs. Alexis hausse les épaules. « Il faut qu’on traverse de toute façon. Que ça soit avec des cordes ou des tunnels. Pour nous, c’est une nécessité. »

    Craintes de manifestations et d’incidents

    Un mirador a dû être construit pour surveiller les prototypes. Coût pour le comté de San Diego : près d’un million de dollars, ce qui fait grimacer jusqu’aux républicains. Les autorités locales craignaient les manifestations et les incidents. Du côté de l’extrême droite, un groupe se réclamant de « l’identité européenne » est venu faire des selfies. Et le cercle des bordertown patriots y a relancé son bon vieux slogan de campagne : « Build the wall ! » (« construisez le mur ! »). « C’est dissuasif, explique Tom, un militant de ce groupe anti-immigration, qui préfère conserver l’anonymat. On sait bien que ça ne va pas totalement arrêter les clandestins. » Il garde toute confiance en Trump. « En un an, il a déjà réussi à construire les prototypes. Il suffit que chaque foyer paie 200 dollars et, en huit ans, le mur pourra être fini. » Sinon, prévoit-il, « les Etats-Unis ne seront plus les Etats-Unis ».

    Les défenseurs des immigrants, eux, ne se sont pas dérangés. « Pour Trump, c’est un outil de propagande. Nous n’avons pas de temps à perdre à aller crier devant ces prototypes », déclare Christian Ramirez, de l’ONG Alliance San Diego. Ce militant a été arrêté le 11 décembre à Washington, au cours d’un sit-in au Congrès. « Notre combat, ce n’est pas le mur, souligne-t-il. C’est la régularisation des “Dreamers” » (les jeunes amenés aux Etats-Unis par leurs parents avant l’âge de 16 ans). Donald Trump a mis leur sort dans la balance dans son épreuve de force avec les démocrates : 800 000 « Dreamers » – il a même poussé jusqu’à 1,6 million de bénéficiaires –, contre 25 milliards de dollars pour le mur. Les responsables latinos sont opposés à un tel marchandage. Pas question que les « Dreamers » soient « utilisés comme monnaie d’échange pour faire adopter des mesures anti-immigrants », s’insurge Christian Ramirez.

    Le « mur » a une longue histoire mais, jusqu’ici, il n’a pas survécu aux aléas politiques. En 2006, grâce à la loi votée au Congrès – y compris par Barack Obama et Hillary Clinton –, George W. Bush a lancé les travaux. Quand Barack Obama a été élu à la Maison Blanche, ils ont été suspendus, « hormis quelques routes et travaux de consolidation ici ou là », précise M. Ramirez. Janet Napolitano, ex-secrétaire à la sécurité intérieure et ancienne gouverneure de l’Arizona, a remplacé le projet de béton par un « mur électronique » : des capteurs, des drones et des patrouilles renforcées. Aujourd’hui, après plus de deux milliards d’investissement, 560 km de parois empêchent le passage des piétons et 480 km d’obstacles antivéhicule, celui des voitures. Soit 1 040 km de frontière marqués par une barrière, sur un parcours total de 3 218 km entre les deux pays.

    « Plus aucun recours légal »

    Jusqu’à présent, les ONG ont réussi à retarder la construction du mur, en exploitant les dispositions réglementaires : l’obligation de procéder à des études d’impact sur l’environnement et les espèces menacées, par exemple, mais aussi la consultation des tribus indiennes ou celle des ranchers qui, au Texas, ont porté plainte contre le gouvernement qui les a expropriés, en l’accusant de minorer leurs indemnités. Cette fois, elles redoutent que Trump ne passe outre, comme une loi de 2005 – validée par la Cour suprême – l’y autorise si la sécurité nationale est en jeu.

    Ses prédécesseurs n’avaient pas abusé des dérogations (cinq tout de même pour l’administration Bush). Mais le 45e président des Etats-Unis n’a pas l’intention de s’embarrasser de délicatesses. Fin janvier, les premières dérogations ont été publiées. Elles concernent un tronçon de 20 km près de Santa Teresa, dans le désert de Chihuahua, au Nouveau-Mexique. Les bulldozers ne sont pas loin. « Nous n’avons plus aucun recours légal. Nous sommes à la merci de l’administration Trump », déplore Christian Ramirez, qui est spécialiste des droits humains dans les communautés frontalières.

    Une fois les projets sélectionnés, les entreprises devront soumettre un nouvel appel d’offres. Lequel devra être suivi d’une période de commentaires publics. Les prototypes n’ont pas fini d’attirer la curiosité et la créativité. Les artistes de la Light Brigade de San Diego sont venus projeter une échelle lumineuse sur les monolithes, comme pour souligner l’illusion du mur tant que les déséquilibres économiques n’auront pas été corrigés. A l’instigation du plasticien helvéto-islandais Christoph Büchel, un collectif a aussi lancé une pétition pour faire des huit prototypes un « monument national ». Une « sorte de Stonehenge [site mégalithique de Grande-Bretagne] », avance Michael Diers, historien de l’art versé dans l’iconographie politique et porte-parole de l’initiative. Un monument qui témoignerait pour la postérité de la tentation de repli de l’Amérique au temps de Donald Trump.

  • ’Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth | Technology | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

    There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.

    Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works – an academic paper that sketches the algorithm’s deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them – YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”.

    Lewd and violent videos have been algorithmically served up to toddlers watching YouTube Kids, a dedicated app for children. One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”

    During the three years he worked at Google, he was placed for several months with a team of YouTube engineers working on the recommendation system. The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.

    “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”

    Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.

    The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”

    The software Chaslot wrote was designed to provide the world’s first window into YouTube’s opaque recommendation engine. The program simulates the behaviour of a user who starts on one video and then follows the chain of recommended videos – much as I did after watching the Logan Paul video – tracking data along the way.

    It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.

    Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias in YouTube content promoted during the French, British and German elections, global warming and mass shootings, and published his findings on his website, Algotransparency.com. Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.

    It was not a comprehensive set of videos and it may not have been a perfectly representative sample. But it was, Chaslot said, a previously unseen dataset of what YouTube was recommending to people interested in content about the candidates – one snapshot, in other words, of the algorithm’s preferences.

    Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who reviewed the code used by Chaslot, says it is a relatively straightforward piece of software and a reputable methodology. “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”

    I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.

    Some of the videos YouTube was recommending were the sort we had expected to see: broadcasts of presidential debates, TV news clips, Saturday Night Live sketches. There were also videos of speeches by the two candidates – although, we found, the database contained far more YouTube-recommended speeches by Trump than Clinton.

    But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.

    Tufekci, the sociologist who several months ago warned about the impact YouTube may have had on the election, tells me YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”

    Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”

    But why would a bias toward ever more weird or divisive videos benefit one candidate over another? That depends on the candidates. Trump’s campaign was nothing if not weird and divisive. Tufekci points to studies showing that “field of misinformation” largely tilted anti-Clinton before the election. “Fake news providers,” she says, “found that fake anti-Clinton material played much better with the pro-Trump base than did fake anti-Trump material with the pro-Clinton base.”

    She adds: “The question before us is the ethics of leading people down hateful rabbit holes full of misinformation and lies at scale just because it works to increase the time people spend on the site – and it does work.”

    About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks.

    I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.

    The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.

    Franchi is a professional who makes a living from his channel, but many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.

    In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column.

    #YouTube #Algorithme_recommendation #Politique_USA #Elections #Fake_news

  • ’Fiction is outperforming reality’ : how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

    An ex-YouTube insider reveals how its recommendation algorithm promotes divisive clips and conspiracy videos. Did they harm Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency ? It was one of January’s most viral videos. Logan Paul, a YouTube celebrity, stumbles across a dead man hanging from a tree. The 22-year-old, who is in a Japanese forest famous as a suicide spot, is visibly shocked, then amused. “Dude, his hands are purple,” he says, before turning to his friends and giggling. “You never stand (...)

    #YouTube #algorithme #manipulation

  • Skid Row Downtown Los Angeles Christmas Day 2017
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8fsfwo6R-Y


    Une balade dans les rues de L.A. avec des entretiens peu communs

    Downtown Los Angeles - by car
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7HozzSGakA


    Une visite du même quartier qui montre davantage de rues avec leurs SDF.

    California Homeless Problem - by bike
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCGtxeknSg

    Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America ? - LA Times
    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-california-poverty-20180114-story.html
    http://www.trbimg.com/img-5a5d2722/turbine/la-oe-jackson-california-poverty-20180114

    Hillary Clinton in Estonia - Trumpland (2016) Michael Moore
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TjReC37TWI


    Enfin un discours de Michael Moore qui explique comment 20 millions d’américains sont morts des conséquences de la politique de santé dans son pays.

    #USA #pauvreté #santé #SDF #Californie #Los_Angeles

  • Oprah 2020? Democrats Swing From Giddy to Skeptical at the Prospect - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/us/politics/oprah-president-2020.html

    Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist from the party’s progressive wing, said it would be a mistake for Democrats to rush toward a magnetic personality rather than hashing out a compelling agenda for the midterm elections and beyond.

    “Beating Trump isn’t just about finding the right candidate — we have to show what we stand for,” Ms. Katz said. “Other than ‘we all get a car,’ what will an Oprah presidency look like?” she added, referring to when Ms. Winfrey famously gave a car to every audience member at her show.

    Ms. Winfrey’s sudden prominence in the nation’s political imagination speaks, in some respects, to the merging of politics and entertainment in the American mind. She has occupied a singular role in the television industry, parlaying roles as a local news anchor and a talk-show host in Chicago into a media empire that includes her own cable network and a fortune estimated at close to $3 billion. Gallup polling regularly finds Ms. Winfrey among the country’s most admired women, alongside Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.

    Alixandria Lapp, a strategist helping lead Democrats’ effort to retake the House, said the profile of a media mogul outsider would be an uncomfortable match for the party.

    “I think it’s highly unlikely that Democrats will ever nominate our own version of Donald Trump — a celebrity with no government experience — because our party tends to respect government and governing experience,” Ms. Lapp said.

    #Politique #USA #Spectacle

  • Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department
    http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-departme

    Hillary Clinton’s willingness to allow those with business before the State Department to finance her foundation heightens concerns about how she would manage such relationships as president, said Lawrence Lessig, the director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics.

    “These continuing revelations raise a fundamental question of judgment,” Lessig told IBTimes. “Can it really be that the Clintons didn’t recognize the questions these transactions would raise? And if they did, what does that say about their sense of the appropriate relationship between private gain and public good?”

    National security experts assert that the overlap between the list of #Clinton Foundation donors and those with business before the the State Department presents a troubling conflict of interest.

  • 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

  • Why is the West praising Malala, but ignoring Ahed?

    When 15-year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a member of Tehrik-e-Taliban, the reaction was starkly different. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, issued a petition entitled “I am Malala.” The UNESCO launched “Stand Up For Malala.”

    Malala was invited to meet then President Barack Obama, as well as the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and addressed the UN General Assembly. She received numerous accolades from being named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine and Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine to being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013, and again in 2014 when she won.

    State representatives such as Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard as well as prominent journalists such as Nicholas Kristof spoke up in support of her. There is even a Malala Day!

    But we see no #IamAhed or #StandUpForAhed campaigns making headlines. None of the usual feminist and rights groups or political figures has issued statements supporting her or reprimanding the Israeli state. No one has declared an Ahed Day. In fact, the US in the past has even denied her a visa for a speaking tour.

    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/west-praising-malala-ignoring-ahed-171227194606359.html

  • Aux #Etats-Unis, les démocrates reprennent espoir
    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/181217/aux-etats-unis-les-democrates-reprennent-espoir

    Rassurés par de récentes victoires, certains démocrates américains rêvent de reprendre le Congrès d’ici un an en surfant sur le rejet de Donald Trump. Mais le parti, qui compte aussi peu d’élus que dans les années 1920, commence tout juste à se remettre du coup de massue de la défaite d’Hillary Clinton et reste divisé.

    #International #Bernie_Sanders #Hillary_Clinton #Parti_démocrate

  • The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages : Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
    https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-

    Non, un email envoyé à Trump et à son fils ne prouve pas qu’il y a eu collusion avec la Russie
    http://www.20minutes.fr/monde/2184603-20171208-non-email-envoye-trump-fils-prouve-collusion-russie

    Donald Trump va pouvoir crier « #fake_news », mais cette fois il aura sans doute raison. Un article de CNN affirmait ce vendredi que le président américain, son fils et plusieurs cadres de la campagne ont reçu un email le 4 septembre 2016 offrant un accès à des documents de WikiLeaks avant leur publication, ce qui serait une preuve potentielle de collusion. Mais la chaîne, qui a publié un correctif, s’est trompée de date, et ça change tout.

    Selon le Washington Post, l’email a été envoyé dix jours plus tard, le 14 septembre. Il s’agissait d’une archive d’emails piratés du parti démocrate publiés la veille par WikiLeaks, et pas des emails d’Hillary Clinton, eux publiés trois semaines plus tard, début octobre.

    « Les articles de CNN + CBS à propos de WikiLeaks sont 100 % des fake news. Qui va être viré ? », a réagi son fondateur, Julian Assange, sur Twitter.

    #MSM

  • Un documental para entender lo que está pasando en Honduras - Edición General
    https://www.elsaltodiario.com/el-baul-de-kubrick/un-documental-para-entender-lo-que-pasa-en-honduras
    /uploads/fotos/h1000/e466f4fa/mani_honduras.jpg?v=63679362327

    El 28 de junio de 2009 el presidente del Gobierno de Honduras Manuel Zelaya, veía desde la ventana de su habitación cómo un grupo de paramilitares entraba a tiros en su casa para llevárselo fuera del país. Roberto Michelleti ocuparía su lugar y el presidente electo nunca más volvería a su cargo. El documental Quién dijo miedo cuenta esa historia, las horas posteriores y los intentos de Zelaya de volver al país sin que eso desencadenase ríos de sangre.

    Actualmente, tras unas elecciones presidenciales sobre las que otea el riesgo de fraude, se activó el toque de queda para reprimir revueltas civiles. La situación es tan sensible como la vivida en 2009, en la que ya se han empezado a contabilizar víctimas mortales.

    Aquel golpe de Estado, del que se dice que Hillary Clinton dirigió durante su etapa como secretaria de Estado del gobierno de Obama, fue interpretado como un mensaje para todos aquellos países que buscaran aliarse con los gobiernos progresistas ya afianzados en el sur del continente.

    #honduras
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0BR_fcLfic

    Le film est sous-titré en anglais.

  • Foreign Lobbyists Contributed More Than $4.5 Million to Candidates in 2016 Elections
    http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/foreign-lobbyists-contributed-more-45-million-candidates-2016-elections-262

    Because the donations come from foreign governments’ U.S.-based lobbyists, they effectively circumvent American laws designed to bar direct foreign donations. Under federal law, foreign nationals are prohibited from donating to any federal, state, or local campaigns, or political parties. But foreign governments frequently hire U.S. citizens to represent their interests, and those people face no such contribution ban.

    [...]

    Top recipients of foreign lobbyist money
    Hillary Clinton (D)
    [...]

    [...]

    Few foreign governments wield as much influence in Washington as Saudi Arabia. The Gulf monarchy employed about 20 lobbying firms during 2016 cycle. Employees of four of those firms — the Podesta Group, BGR Government Affairs, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, and the Glover Park Group — gave more than $580,000 to federal candidates.

    #lobbying #démocratie #états-unis #entourloupes

  • Purge anti-globaliste par inadvertance
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/purge-anti-globaliste-par-inadvertance

    Purge anti-globaliste par inadvertance

    Voici une thèse intéressante sur la Grande Purge saoudienne, avec adjonction de la crise Clinton-Brazile à “D.C.-la-folle”. Elle est développée par Jamie Wright, de Infowars.com et sans doute largement substantivée à partir d’informations et d’analyses de Roger Stone, un lobbyiste, stratège de tendance républicaine et homme d’influence de Washington qui s’est placé proche de Trump contre les démocrates. Stone, qui est cité une fois directement dans l’article de Wright, a sans aucun doute, en plus de son expérience des intrigues et des corruptions internes à “D.C.-la-folle”, une excellente connaissance des liens de corruption entre certains groupes et familles/“maisons” de l’establishment avec la maison des Saoud, notamment la maison des Clinton et la maison des Bush. (...)

    • L’article mêle la crise interne du parti démocrate, avec la rébellion de Donna Brazile contre les Clinton, et la crise en cours en Arabie, avec l’énorme purge anti-corruption lancée par le fils du roi, Prince Mohamed Ben Salman (on dit désormais MBS), frappant une belle brochette de Princes et autres dirigeants. L’article présente le comportement de Brazile ainsi que son livre qui sort ces jours-ci et dont des extraits ont été publiés dans Politico.com et dans le Washington Post, comme l’avant-garde d’une manœuvre approuvée par l’establishment démocrate pour éliminer les Clinton et leur clique dont les turpitudes plombent affreusement le parti. En attendant, Brazile est seule au charbon et elle est violemment mise en cause par l’équipe de campagne d’Hillary Clinton, agissant par communiqué sur consigne de la patronne. Elle n’en poursuit pas moins.

      Pour le côté saoudien, le même angle d’appréciation est choisi. On sait que l’interprétation générale est que cette Grande Purge, présentée comme une opération anti-corruption, a aussi sinon d’abord comme but d’affirmer et de verrouiller le pouvoir de MBS, qui est quasiment de direction centrale en raison de l’état de santé de son père, le roi Salman. L’appréciation est alors de constater que cette Grande Purge touche les relais et contacts saoudiens les plus “fidèles” des Clinton, et aussi des Bush qui sont dans le même circuit, avec le train de corruption extraordinaire qui suit. On en vient même à rappeler l’épisode de l’“exfiltration” des officiels saoudiens des USA juste après 9/11, “Prince Bandar”, dit “Bandar Bush” en tête... (Et, du coup, l’élimination de “Bandar Bush”, autour de 2013, apparaît, – sans qu’on l’ait voulu nécessairement et précisément dans ce sens mais soit, – comme un premier pas d’une élimination de toute une génération de corrupteurs-corrompus, autant du côté saoudien que du côté US.)

  • La fête au marais | Le Vilain Petit Canard
    https://levilainpetitcanard.be/articles/ailleurs/la-fete-au-marais_1809684270

    Ce que l’Amérique pourrait vouloir savoir maintenant est : comment se fait-il que Hillary Clinton n’ait aucun problème juridique ? Pourquoi les enquêteurs du DOJ n’examinent-ils pas les dossiers financiers de la Fondation Clinton ? Vous penseriez que quelqu’un voudrait savoir comment plus de 120 millions de dollars de « dons de charité » russes ont atterri sur ses registres au moment où la secrétaire d’État a approuvé l’affaire Uranium One, sans compter le paiement de 500 000 dollars à Bill Clinton pour avoir tenu un discours à la même époque, ce qui ressemble furieusement à un pot de vin.

  • These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016 - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-election-facebook.html

    They made for a wildly varied slide show, designed by Russia to exploit divisions in American society and to tip the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump and against Hillary Clinton. The House Intelligence Committee provided on Wednesday the biggest public platform to date for a sample of the Facebook ads and pages that were linked by a trail of ruble payments to a Russian company with Kremlin ties.

    #Facebook #Publicité_russe

  • “They never learn”
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/they-never-learn

    “They never learn”

    30 octobre 2017 – C’est, si vous voulez, un “tourbillon crisique“ à l’intérieur de “tourbillon crisique”, ou comment, en quelques jours d’avalanche de nouvelles toutes plus croustillantes les unes que les autres bien qu’elles eussent été déjà fortement documentées dans la presse antiSystème et ne doivent étonner nul honnête homme, Poutine & la Russie sont devenu les “vrais faux-amis” d’Hillary Clinton pendant la campagne, pour mieux frapper au cœur de l’Amérique. Première conclusion immanquable : plus que jamais, la Russie-Poutine est l’ennemie du genre humain, c’est-à-dire de la “nation exceptionnelle”... Comprenne qui pourra, même après la courageuse tentative d’explication à laquelle je me suis livré...

    On ne s’est guère intéressé au fantastique retournement opéré dans le “bruit de fond“ de (...)

  • 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 (...)

  • Qui est Ronan Farrow, le « tombeur » d’Harvey Weinstein ?

    http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2017/10/13/ronan-farrow-le-tombeur-d-harvey-weinstein_5200274_3476.html

    Fils de Woody Allen et Mia Farrow, le journaliste et juriste a recueilli des témoignages de victimes du producteur hollywoodien.

    Ronan Farrow, qui a publié dans le New Yorker les ­révélations qui ont fait un paria du producteur Harvey Weinstein, l’un des hommes les plus puissants d’Hollywood, n’est pas tout à fait un journaliste ordinaire. A 29 ans, il a déjà eu plusieurs carrières : diplomate, militant, avocat. Il est aussi fils de stars. Son père est Woody Allen. Sa mère Mia Farrow. Un couple orageux, dont la rupture, en 1992, lorsque le cinéaste est tombé amoureux de Soon-Yi, la fille adoptive de l’actrice, a fait les délices de la presse new-yorkaise à scandales.

    Ronan Farrow n’a jamais pardonné à son père ce qu’il a qualifié de « transgression morale », au point d’abandonner le prénom que le réalisateur lui avait choisi à la naissance – Satchel, comme son joueur de base-ball favori Satchel Paige. Depuis des années, le jeune homme n’a cessé de défendre ­Dylan, une autre de ses sœurs adoptives, qui a accusé Woody ­Allen de l’avoir agressée sexuel­lement alors qu’elle avait 7 ans. Avec leur mère Mia Farrow, la tribu fait corps à chaque fois que le réalisateur d’Annie Hall est invité pour un hommage. En 2015, lorsque son père a présenté son film L’Homme irrationnel à Cannes, Ronan Farrow a signé un texte dans le Hollywood Reporter qui expose son analyse de la couverture – ou la non-couverture – par la presse des accusations d’agressions sexuelles contre les puissants.

    Surdoué

    Quand Ronan-Satchel est né, en décembre 1987, à New York, la famille baignait dans un mélange de bohème multiethnique et de snobisme de l’Upper East Side. A la maternelle, l’enfant avait déjà un psychiatre. Très jeune, il était familier des gros titres et des paparazzis. Ses grands-parents étaient l’actrice irlandaise Maureen O’Sullivan, la Jane du Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller, et le réalisateur australien John Farrow, autre couple en dysfonctionnement chronique. Le fils de stars a toujours été surdoué. A 15 ans, il sortait de l’université Barnard, à New York, le plus jeune diplômé (en biologie et philosophie) de l’histoire de l’institution. A 16 ans, il était admis à la faculté de droit de Yale. A 21 ans, il passait le barreau de New York, tout en travaillant comme chargé du droit humanitaire à la commission des affaires étrangères de la Chambre des représentants. « Je brûlais de faire mes preuves », a-t-il dit au magazine Esquire. Loin de « l’ombre imposante de parents célèbres ». A 23 ans, il rédigeait les discours de Richard Holbrooke, l’envoyé spécial de Barack Obama pour l’Afghanistan. Après la mort du diplomate, il est devenu le conseiller à la jeunesse de la secrétaire d’Etat Hillary Clinton.

    Ronan Farrow n’avait que 5 ans quand il a été pris dans le tumulte du divorce de ses parents. Mia Farrow, l’héroïne du Rosemary’s Baby de Polanski, a toujours mené une vie hors du commun. A 21 ans, elle a épousé Frank Sinatra, qui en avait trente de plus. En deuxième mariage, le compositeur et chef d’orchestre André Previn. Woody Allen l’a fait tourner dans treize de ses films, de Zelig à La Rose pourpre du Caire. Ils sont restés douze ans ensemble, mais ils ne se sont jamais mariés. Militante passionnée, courant d’expéditions humanitaires en séjours au Darfour, Mia Farrow a adopté 11 enfants, parmi les plus déshérités de la terre. En 1992, la tribu – et l’industrie cinématographique – a été secouée par un tremblement de terre lorsque Mia Farrow a découvert chez Woody Allen des photos d’une de ses filles adoptives, nue. Soon-Yi Previn, 21 ans, avait été adoptée en ­Corée à l’âge de 8 ans par Mia et André Previn. Elle a trente-cinq ans de moins que le cinéaste. La liaison a fait scandale.

    Une enquête de dix mois

    Dylan, 7 ans, n’a plus voulu voir son père adoptif. Le traumatisme n’a jamais disparu. Pour la Fête des pères, en 2012, Ronan a publié un Tweet sardonique. « Bonne Fête des pères. Ou, comme on dit dans ma famille, bonne fête des beaux-frères. »

    En 2013, après le département d’Etat, Ronan Farrow a été recruté par MSNBC, la chaîne câblée, pour une émission de l’après-midi censée s’adresser aux « millenials ». Il était trop sérieux. L’émission n’a duré qu’un an. Depuis 2015, il reste sous contrat avec NBC pour des grands sujets d’investigation. L’enquête sur les agressions sexuelles dont est accusé Harvey Weinstein lui a pris dix mois. Il y dénonce un système de couverture des agressions sexuelles à Hollywood, par la presse, les agents, les intermédiaires chargés des relations publiques, aboutissant à une « culture d’acquiescement ». Pourquoi a-t-il choisi de publier son scoop dans le New Yorker plutôt que sur la chaîne qui l’emploie ? Mercredi 11 octobre, les responsables de NBC ont nié avoir refusé son enquête par crainte de nuire à un homme aussi influent qu’Harvey Weinstein. L’enquête n’était « pas publiable en l’état », ont-ils affirmé. Interrogé – sur la même chaîne MSNBC –, Ronan Farrow a réfuté cette explication, soulignant que le New Yorker avait immédiatement accepté le dossier. Il s’est néanmoins gardé d’accuser directement la chaîne d’avoir cédé à des pressions.

    Dans son texte de 2015 au Hollywood Reporter, Ronan Farrow estime que la presse ne saurait s’exonérer de l’écoute des victimes au motif qu’il n’y a pas de plainte. « Notre rôle est encore plus important quand le système légal ne remplit pas sa mission auprès des vulnérables confrontés aux puissants, écrit-il. Souvent les femmes ne peuvent pas ou ne veulent pas porter plainte. Le rôle d’un reporter est celui de porteur d’eau pour elles. » Selon lui, une nouvelle génération de médias, « libérés des années de journalisme d’accès », commence à enquêter sur les agressions sexuelles commises par les « moguls » d’Hollywood ou d’ailleurs. « Les choses changent », assure-t-il.

  • Les États-Unis ont un problème d’empathie qui nourrit leur culture de la violence à l’étranger, l’ignorance chez eux et la tragédie partout. | Réseau International
    http://reseauinternational.net/les-etats-unis-ont-un-probleme-dempathie-qui-nourrit-leur-cultu

    Elle a été l’architecte des plus dévastatrices de toutes les guerres post-11 septembre dirigées par les États-Unis contre des pays étrangers. L’ « enfant chéri » personnel de Hillary Clinton a été la guerre de Libye, qui a fait d’un des pays les plus riches dans l’histoire de l’Afrique ­ – où les gens étaient logés et nourris gratuitement, et où l’éducation et les vocations étaient largement subventionnés – un État ruiné de fond en comble et noyé dans son sang. La Libye, qui avait été laïque et indépendante, est maintenant le plus vaste camp d’entraînement terroriste du monde, où plusieurs factions politiques se combattent et où groupes terroristes et factions pirates se disputent les ressources qu’ils volent tous de concert à la Libye. Alors que la Syrie est en train de gagner la guerre contre le terrorisme et que l’Irak même commence à se remettre lentement, avec l’aide de l’Iran et d’autres, la Libye montre peu de signes d’un changement quel qu’il soit de son statu quo post-2011, dont Hillary Clinton est directement responsable.

  • Le gendre et conseiller de Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, a utilisé un serveur d’e-mails privé à la Maison blanche
    http://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/usa/presidentielle/donald-trump/le-gendre-et-conseiller-de-donald-trump-jared-kushner-a-utilise-un-serv

    Pendant toute la campagne présidentielle de 2016, la candidate démocrate Hillary Clinton a été accusée d’avoir utilisé une boîte de messagerie privée pour des correspondances officielles, et parfois confidentielles, alors qu’elle était secrétaire d’Etat de Barack Obama.

    Ça pourrait être drôlatique s’il était condamné et mis en prison, pour ces faits. Il n’y aurait plus qu’à faire de même pour Clinton, qui avait un vrai poste officiel dans l’administration, avec un vrai titre, et qui a échangé de vrais mails officiels, vraiment confidentiels.

  • The Killing of History
    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history

    I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”

    The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

    There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.

    “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

    All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

    What ‘Decency’ and ‘Good Faith’?