Re: [blind-democracy] Re: More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda

Election after election American citizens have shuffled off to the
polls, picking one or the other of the two Political Parties offerings
in our vaunted "Free Choice", carefully regulated election System.
And election after election Americans are greeted with pretty much the
"same old, same old", especially as it effects their daily grind.
During political campaigns promises are a dime a dozen, floating like
butterflies among the television and radio networks, telling voters of
the wonders awaiting them. And following election results? Business
as usual. Old politicians, safe for another span of years, or new
ones settling in, rolling up their sleeves and going about the task of
pleasing their Masters.
And one fine day the People simply got fed up with it all. They
smirked, they held their noses, they closed their eyes and ears, they
said, "What the Hell, it don't matter anyway", and they voted for the
"Jester". Mister Reality TV. Master of deception. skilled
manipulator who turns Fiction into Fact and Fact into Fiction. The
man who stands before his mirror and asks, "Who's the Fairest of them
all?"
And as he enters the second half of his first year in office, he is
creating change, if you call opening the veins of the Working Class
and allowing the dollars to freely flow upward into the coffers of the
bloated rich, change.
And all the while, the Jester moves about the Land seemingly immune to
those laws governing ordinary citizens. The Jester makes the Wizard
of Oz appear to be a Country Bumpkin. And unlike Nero, he is not
fiddling around while he tears down the lofty American Empire. For
that is what is happening. The Billionaire Club, those CEO's of the
giant international corporations, are drooling as they jockey to get
their greedy fingers on everything. American voters have turned the
Jester loose in the Land, and there is no Batman and Robin to save the
nation.
For the first time in our nation's drive to conquer the Land, from sea
to shining sea, for the first time the working class is not needed.
We are as disposable as the many cats and dogs we turn out into our
streets, as useless as the children we spawn and neglect until they,
too run to the streets. We are nothing to the fat corporations, aside
from serving as cannon fodder in the Corporation's Eternal War on
Everybody.
But as history shows, the day of the American Empire is coming to a
close. The People, tricked over and over, have been deceived to the
point that they have no recourse other than to rise up and be done
with their Masters. Why not? When you have watched all of your
efforts to play the game according to the Rules of the Ruling Class,
only to find out that those Rules are theirs, not ours, then we turn
on our self serving, greed driven Wealthy, shouting that we no longer
look to them for solutions to our needs. And we set them aside and
take what we can from their ill gotten wealth. And the cycle starts
all over again. Years from now, if we still exist, folks will wonder
how it was that such a Golden Opportunity was missed. With such power
in numbers, why didn't the Masses set up a new government that really
was a government of the people, instead of allowing a new Ruling Class
to set up housekeeping, and begin the same old process all over.
There are many little components that go into creating conditions for
a mass upheaval. But if there is no plan, no direction, no
understanding of what is happening, then we will simply be set up to
repeat history. Over and over, and over again.

Carl Jarvis




On 8/30/17, Miriam Vieni <`miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> I suppose that what you should be concerned about is a political system that
> doesn't impeach Trump for crimes that he has clearly committed, (and I've
> seen at least 10 of them clearly listed), and instead, chooses to mislead
> the public with innuendos about Russian interference with his election.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 12:42 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda
>
> Let me see, should I be more concerned with the great influence of Putin in
> America's politics? or should I be more concerned with Donald Trump and his
> billionaire Cabinet? Hmm...
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
>
> On 8/29/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> Consortiumnews
>>
>> Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
>>
>> More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda
>>
>> August 29, 2017
>>
>> Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media is touting a big break in
>> Russia-gate, emails showing an effort by Donald Trump's associates to
>> construct a building in Moscow. But the evidence actually undercuts the
>> "scandal,"
>> reports Robert Parry.
>>
>> By Robert Parry
>>
>> There is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by
>> "confirmation bias" when they want something to be true so badly that
>> even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist the
>> revelation to fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington Post,
>> The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media are
>> reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald Trump's
>> team having little or no influence in Moscow.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> President Trump discusses his meeting with Russian President Vladimir
>> Putin at G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017. (Screenshot
>> from
>> Whitehouse.gov)
>>
>> On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article
>> designed to advance the Russia-gate narrative, stating: "A business
>> associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real
>> estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V.
>> Putin, that he said would help Mr.
>> Trump win the presidency."
>>
>> Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying
>> together the loose and scattered threads of the
>> Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election
>> story. Here you have a supposed business deal in which Putin was to
>> help Trump both make money and get elected. That is surely how a
>> casual reader or a Russia-gate true believer would read it - and was
>> meant to read it. But the lede is misleading.
>>
>> The reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story,
>> is that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a
>> Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump's international business
>> prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the incident
>> really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no pull in
>> Russia as Putin's government apparently didn't lift a finger to
>> salvage this stillborn building project.
>>
>> But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times' endless
>> promotion of Russia-gate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep
>> in the story, after a reprise of the "scandal" and the Times hyping
>> the significance of Sater's emails from 2015 and early 2016. For good
>> measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of the Ukraine
>> crisis.
>>
>> The Times reported: "Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined
>> up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank
>> that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow's efforts
>> to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater
>> envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. 'I will get Putin on
>> this program and we will get Donald elected,' Mr. Sater wrote."
>>
>> But the idea that Russia acted "to undermine democracy in Ukraine" is
>> another example of the Times' descent into outright propaganda. The
>> reality is that the U.S. government supported - and indeed encouraged
>> - a coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the democratically elected
>> Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even after he offered to move up
>> scheduled elections so he could be voted out of office through a
>> democratic process.
>>
>> After Yanukovych's violent ouster and after the coup regime dispatched
>> military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly ethnic
>> Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent their
>> destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme
>> Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the Times'
>> preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow trying
>> "to undermine democracy in Ukraine."
>>
>> Empty Boasts
>>
>> However, leaving aside the Times' propagandistic approach to Ukraine,
>> there is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater's
>> boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the
>> lack of useful connections between Trump's people and the Kremlin. One
>> of Trump's lawyers, Michael Cohen, even used a general press email
>> address in a plea for assistance from Putin's personal spokesman.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The New York Times' connect-the-dots graphic showing the Kremlin
>> sitting atop the White House.
>>
>> Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts: "There
>> is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises,
>> and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In
>> January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S.
>> Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had
>> stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov's direct
>> email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries."
>>
>> The Times added: "The project never got government permits or
>> financing, and died weeks later. . The emails obtained by The Times
>> make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton's
>> campaign or the hacking of Democrats' emails."
>>
>> In other words, the Russia-gate narrative - that somehow Putin foresaw
>> Trump's election (although almost no one else did) and sought to curry
>> favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump's pockets with
>> lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help
>> Trump win - is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by
>> them.
>>
>> Instead of clearing the way for Trump to construct the building and
>> thus - in Sater's view - boost Trump's election chances, Putin and his
>> government wouldn't even approve permits or assist in the financing.
>>
>> And, this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in
>> Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan
>> died apparently because Trump would not - or could not - put up
>> adequate financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump
>> brand. But one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to
>> be its Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money
>> would have been no obstacle.
>>
>> Along the same lines, there's the relative pittance that RT paid Gen.
>> Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network's tenth anniversary in Moscow
>> in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn netting
>> $33,750 after his speakers' bureau took its cut. Democrats and the
>> U.S. mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence of
>> Russia buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House, since
>> Flynn was both a campaign adviser and briefly national security adviser.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Green Party leader Jill Stein and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn
>> attending a dinner marking the RT network's 10-year anniversary in
>> Moscow, December 2015, sitting at the same table as Russian President
>> Vladimir Putin.
>>
>> But the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides
>> Flynn's relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT
>> negotiated Flynn's rate downward, a fact that The Washington Post
>> buried deep inside an article on Flynn's Russia-connected payments.
>> The Post wrote, "RT balked at paying Flynn's original asking price.
>> 'Sorry it took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that
>> the speaking fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the
>> moment,' Alina Mikhaleva, RT's head of marketing, wrote a Flynn
>> associate about a month before the event."
>>
>> Yet, if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray
>> their country, it makes no sense that Putin's supposed flunkies at RT
>> would be quibbling with Flynn over a relatively modest speaking fee;
>> they'd be falling over themselves to pay him more.
>>
>> So, what the evidence really indicates is that Putin, like almost
>> everybody else in the world, didn't anticipate Trump's ascendance to
>> the White House, at least not in the time frame of these events - and
>> thus was doing nothing to buy influence with his entourage or boost
>> his election chances by helping him construct a glittering Trump Tower
>> in Moscow.
>>
>> But that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved story
>> of Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are
>> downplayed or ignored - all the better to deceive Americans who are
>> dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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