Under the Weather

Get well soon Ian!

Here’s to a fast and thorough recovery.

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about the 1917 Russian Revolution. As you know this year marks the centenary of that remarkable event that irremediably changed the face of the earth. The centenary would seem like a good time to make a new cool-headed appraisal of that revolution or, as the French say, “faire le bilan”. Alas, since the mainstream media have chosen to ignore that fateful anniversary, it befalls us, simple readers of the blogosphere, to undertake, in our of course modest capacity, that thankless task.

Let us say it right away. The negatives are huge, immense, mind-numbing. But I will not talk about the negatives here, since, living in western countries, we have heard about the negatives pretty much since we were born. If you want the negatives, just open any history book printed in the west or read the NYT: Stalin, blah blah. No, my friends, what I would like to do here, is to modestly outline the positives, of which we hear so little in the West. In the following, I will argue that the positives, and they were huge too, mostly benefitted people outside the Soviet Union. Without any pretension to exhaustivity I will classify the positives into 3 main categories.

1) Fast modernization of Russia. Before the 1917 Revolution, Russia was a retarded mostly unindustrialized backwater at the edge of Europe. Fast forward a few decades and the Soviet Union is an industrial powerhouse, one that even out-produces Germany in terms of tanks and other armaments. It is thanks to that extraordinary productive capacity and the ultimate sacrifice of 30 million people that the Soviet Union crushed Germany during WW2. The Wehrmacht suffered 80 to 90% of its casualties on the eastern front.

2) Postwar social advances in the West. After the war, the working and middle classes saw unprecedented gains in their living conditions. That was the time when universal health systems were built all over western Europe. I submit that it would not have happened without the threat of communism in the east. The prestige of the Soviet Union was at its highest just after the war. The communists won the first election held in France after the war. And, sure enough, as soon as communism fell, the welfare was state was dismantled in the west and triumphant neoliberalism imposed TINA upon us.

3) Last but not least, I would submit that the greatest of all Soviet achievements was the decolonization of the 3rd world. Wherever where was a fight for independence, the Soviets were there to help. Ask yourself where the Algerian national liberation front got its guns from in its fight against France. Communist revolutions were also often national anti-colonial revolutions like in Vietnam, Cuba or even China. Therefore, the Soviet Union helped liberate billions of people in the 3rd world from western colonialism.

Therefore, for all those reasons, I conclude that for the real friends of humanity, the friends of the oppressed, the 1917 Russian Revolution can only have a very special place in their hearts.

Me, too…. 😉

What ever happened to competent moderation, which targets corrupt concentrations of power?

Long after Manafort had proven himself a shady character who lobbies for shady characters, Trump hired him anyways to manage his presidential campaign. And Papadopeoulus too. Maybe did so because that’s what outsider street cred looks like to Trump. I’d throw the Mooch in there too but he’s long gone. Mueller was hired by the Trump-slamming Dubya, and may have watched one too many videos of Ray Rice punching that girl in the elevator. Hmm. Somewhere in all that is a sinister Red Queen connection. Where’s RC?

Ché Pasa
November 1, 2017

Indeed.

How does one overcome guilt and seek to make amends?

My random comment was a sad attempt at humor pointed at Peter’s sad attempt at discussion. My apologies. They always eventually involve red queens and snowflakes and the fake media… apparently these are some of his favorite things (cue Julie).

Integrity, wise morality, social intelligence, unification, cohesion of informed opinion, greatest generation stuff… I’m trying to get at the exact word or phrase so early in the morning… is what corrupt power players hate when the masses have it. It’s like kryptonite. Or water on witches…

They love chaos, confusion, division, desperation, the stress induced cognitive closure folly stuff that Arie Kruglanski talks about… It’s where we’re at now. They say “Yes you’re job is going away. But hooo!, look over there! A terrorist attack!”

I just want the problems the people cannot solve for themselves, to be solved in a timely manner.

So, the Russian Revolution and the Russia-gate indictments in the same thread. Yes, because they’re related. When capitalism’s mask slips, a good red scare is the first prescription for a rejuvenated beauty treatment.

Otherwise, I find these investigations bizarre. We routinely honor ex-presidents who conspired with foreign entities for electoral advantage, from undermining the peace process with the North Vietnamese through secret overtures to the Iranians to continue holding the hostages and then Iran-contra. And those are actual treason, not just running some ads or “fake news” campaigns. We make it law that you can’t limit campaign contributions, refuse any requirements on communications firms that would allow cheap campaigning, and set up legal means for massive amounts of dark money to flow into campaigns. And we celebrate our aid to other countries’ elections so that they make the right choice by electing pro-American governments. Then our experts are surprised when we receive similar aid from other countries in our elections? And call it criminal?

I think it will take some really strange interpretations to get Trump on election law, but it should be really easy to get him on financial fraud. It’s looking like some powerful interests have decided he has to go or be tamed, so we may get an actual indictment for fraud, as they decide to remove the legal immunity that they have granted themselves for the past twenty to twenty-five years.

Meanwhile, OMG the Commies are back to destroy our country!!!!

@Bill H, Trump hired Manafort because he was the only person who could / would help with a contested convention. You may remember that the GOP were plotting some convention shenanigans where they would deny Trump the nomination even if he had the required number of delegates.

Smokin’ the good stuff ’round here, aeh. What is that, Siberian Thunderfuck? Heyzeus Herbert Hoover Keyricest on peanut butter toast, the thoroughy documented problem we have is that the right, the reich, are crypto-religious jihadists whose only connection to the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire is their media induced simple minded self-perception of martyrdom.

Anyone else notice how dramatically Peter’s writing skills have improved ore the past couple of weeks?

The response when I poke a little fun here is so much more delightful than at Democratic Underground. They have no sense of humor whatever over there, but here we seem not to take ourselves anywhere near so seriously.

When I said, however, that this is an interesting discussion, I was entirely serious. It is always interesting here. Has to do, I think with open minds.

@Peter
I’m astounded that there are actually rules for the special investigator. The anti-trump forces seem to be unaware of any such thing. Actually, it seems that Mueller is unaware if it as well.

\”the open borders extremists have been effectively countered and they are furious.\”

Say, how\’s that wall coming along?

Given that the Democratic claim that Russians corrupted the election to a degree that Trump’s position in office is invalid, and the long-held liberal position the Citizens United has corrupted our elections beyond redemption, how do Democrats win an election next year and claim that their victory is valid?

i haven’t kept up with the mueller investigations on the whole, although i did try to retain a bloomberg cheat sheet that assange (or wikileaks) had tweeted. but i’ve seen these facebook, twitter ads hysterically talked about on librul (read: clintonista) websites and was freaking amazed. i’d also rather lazily clicked into a “LIVE” broadcast of the hearings, and had seen freakin’ frankin pounding the desk (though noot with his shoe, thankfully) demanding to know from the facebook freak attorney why the fuck they couldn’t discern that they were rooosians offering to pay in Rubles!’

but here’s where it’s seriously going beyond tax fraud and whatnot:

‘US congressional hearings on “extremist content” prepare assault on free speech’, wsws.org, 31 October 2017

“Over the past three months, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, Mark Warner and Adam Schiff, in conjunction with the US intelligence agencies and the media, have concocted an absurd narrative that some $100,000 in Russian social media advertisements, mostly placed after November, helped swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

Having forced the technology companies to compile lists of “Russia-linked” accounts, the lawmakers will now turn their focus on their real target: What they call “organic content,” or, to put it more plainly, political speech on the Internet.” [snip]

“In prepared testimony obtained by news outlets Monday evening, Facebook expanded its list of “Russia-linked” online activity to include such “organic content,” declaring that tens of thousands of “inflammatory” posts by “fake” accounts connected to Russia reached 126 million US Facebook users.”

“In another extraordinary development, on Friday, Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Twitter’s CEO demanding that the company hand over personally identifying information related to “organic content” posted by Twitter users. The letter specifically requests all “organic content posted by Russia-connected users and targeted to any part of the United States, regardless of whether the individual or entity violated any Twitter policy.” Its definition of “Russia-connected users” is extremely broad, including any “person or entity that may be connected in some way to Russia.”
The letter demands that for all “organic content described above, Twitter provide all subscriber information,” and “IP address information.” This means that the company is being asked to hand over full names, phone numbers, email addresses and IP addresses, which can be used to determine physical location.

Equally troubling is the fact that the letter requests “All content of each [private] Direct Message” between an undisclosed list of attached Twitter accounts and accounts belonging to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler. Kunstler, according to her official biography, has represented “WikiLeaks and Bradley [Chelsea] Manning supporters in connection with grand jury subpoenas, encounters with the FBI…and governmental suppression.”

IOW, DiFi’s HUAC. me, i feel the worst for assange; emptywheel and her commentariat are (ahem)…not fans. i.am.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/31/pers-o31.html

The Russian Revolution undercut the central premise of Marx that proletarian revolutions would begin in industrial countries, that is a development of capital and capitalism which only they could give was necessary to produce the requisite conditions for revolutions.

When the USSR was coming apart, the US had the rare opportunity to ease the transition of the successor states, principally Russia, from command economies to mixed ones and to bring Russia into Europe and the Western fold. Instead US leaders, I think GWH Bush was President at the time, embarked on a strategy to so weaken Russia that it would never again be capable of challenging the US or its allies or of being a significant player on the world stage. The result was Putinism. How did that work out for all you Cold Warriors and neocons?

What never gets mentioned is that the country which most interferes in US national elections is Israel. This is not to say that Putin didn’t meddle too. And there is also clearly a really strange dynamic going on between Trump and anything Russian.

Papadopoulus was both an foreign policy advisor in the Trump campaign and had connections to the Russians. He pled guilty to lying to the FBI about those connections. Manafort is a sleaze and a crook. He had lots of Russian/Kremlin connections from his time in anything-goes Ukraine. His multiple passports and foreign bank accounts are major red flags. And of course he did not report those accounts as required under US tax laws. Among these, the ones running through Cyprus are really big tells because Russian oligarchs use Cyprus which uses English banking law for transactions they can’t trust the Russian banking system with. The Trump sons have said that most of their and their father’s money came from Russia. So it is hardly surprising that Trump had people with their own Russia connections around him, like Manafort and Flynn. Nor that people in the Trump campaign continued to work their Russian connections during the eleciton. Nor that people in the Trump businesses sought to draft off the Trump campaign to further Trump’s Russian business ventures –the Moscow Trump Tower effort. The entire top tiers of Trump’s campaign were shot through with dubious Russian dealings from the Veselnitskaya meeting and the multiple revised versions of it from Don Junior to Sessions multiple revisions of his list of meetings with Russians to Kushner’s multiple, multiple revisions of his list of meetings with Russians and other foreigners. There is a very large and troubling picture here and Mueller’s recent indictments are just the first salvos in what promises to be a very long series.

There are a lot of crimes circling out there to be investigated: conspiracy, obstruction of justice, money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent, receiving and/or seeking aid from a foreign government in a US election, lying to the FBI, perjury, and tax evasion. And lots of targets, from almost everyone in the Trump family to almost everyone in the campaign. My advice is to go long popcorn futures and short Trump re-election posters.

“The wall funding is being blocked by republican swamp creatures”

Wait, I thought Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall?

“I thought that was just a rhetorical challenge by Trump to put the Mexicans on notice that they couldn’t freely use the US as a dumping grounds for their excess population.”

Oh, okay, it was just a rhetorical challenge. Right. It’s not like he said specifically, over and over, during the campaign that Mexico was going to pay for the wall or anything.

Hey, are there any other promises Trump made that we should disregard because they were just “rhetorical challenges?” It wouldn’t happen to be “all of them,” would it?

@NR

I know it’s painful for snowflakes to watch as Trump keeps his campaign promises or doesn’t discard them if they are difficult to acomplish. It must also be painful watching his illegal alien policy producing results even with the social justice warriors and their criminal alien protecting sanctuary cities joining the resistance. He’s even willing to bargan with the Clintonites and offer legal status for the Dreamers if they support paying for the wall.

The reconquest of the US by Mexicans isn’t going to happen now and the Clintonites won’t be able to expand their party numbers with illegal voting immigrants so the snowflakes have bigger issues to worry about than when or how the wall is built.

Ian Welsh,

A couple years ago, I was discovered to be running a vitamin D deficiency while being checked for something else. So I was prescribed to take some vitamin D each day. Starting a few months after beginning that, I have noticed that I fewer colds than before and they last less long, usually.

Oooh! Oooh!

Here’s another tasty morsel for any Jonestown Clintists we have among the readers here. It is from Naked Capitalism. It is an interview with Tulsi Gabbard about recent book-preview revelations from Donna Brazile about what Clinton did to Sanders and the Democratic Party.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/rep-tulsi-gabbard-donna-braziles-dnc-bombshell.html

And here is a telling little bit from the comments thread.

“David
November 3, 2017 at 6:52 am
She says that of $82 million that was raised in state fundraisers, less than half of 1%, half of 1% got to go to the state parties, and said the rest went back to Brooklyn for the Clinton campaign.

Note that among the state parties that signed up to the Hillary Victory Fund,

Florida – Trump +1%
Michigan – Trump +0.3%
Pennsylvania – Trump +0.7%
Wisconsin – Trump +0.7%
and Puerto Rico

Reply ↓
Emorej a Hong Kong
November 3, 2017 at 7:39 am
Great dot-connecting. Incredible irony that HRC’s diversion of funds from swing states to her high-spending campaign was one of the proximate causes of her losing the electoral college.

Reply ↓
fresno dan
November 3, 2017 at 8:04 am
David
November 3, 2017 at 6:52 am

excellent insight!

Reply ↓”

Oh the irony . . . . . .

‘Crooked Hillary’ told us everything we needed to know about the Red Queen and these displays of back-stabbing just show how liberals roll. These operatives remain Clintonites even as they try to put distance between themselves and their former leader.

Even though the Clintonite royal barge has run aground these opportunists will turn to political cannabalism to take control of the snowflakes in the galley.

@DC

If what you say is true about Clinton pushing the expansion of NATO then Reagan and Bush kept their personal guarantees about not expanding NATO. They had no power to project their promises onto a future president and the Russians surely knew this.

I think the Harvard Gang went to Russia to help with the transition to a market economy with basic rule of law and other acceptable performance standards. The Russians did the corrupt privatizing and looting on their own and many western investors were burned by these kleptos. The Harvard gang may have earned fees for their expertise but their guidance was ignored and Russian oligarchs still dominate the Russian economy.