Israeli Parliament Passes Netanyahu Criminal Protection Law

The Knesset has passed a law designed specifically to protect Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from corruption charges. A member of his own party, Likud, put it forward.

 The new law blocks the Israeli police from revealing incriminating information about politicians prior to a formal indictment by the prosecutor's office. Over the years, the police have had to pressure the prosecutor to indict criminal politicians by publicizing the evidence they assembled. Israeli prosecutors are as much politicians as law enforcers, a situation one finds in many nations (including the U.S.). Netanyahu has greater sway over the prosecution office than over the police.

Typical of rightwing fanatics, Netanyahu (and his son) is corrupt as well as repressive. He is the subject of two criminal investigation, involving taking gifts from wealthy businessmen, and his interference in the media business.

Of course, while Israeli politicians move to increase their own rights and protections under Israeli law, Palestinians have no rights. Subject to arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, and fake "trials" in kangaroo military "courts" (with a zero acquittal rate), this highlights the dual nature of Israeli "law" and "justice." Even Palestinian children are subject to vicious abuse by the Israeli "authorities."

Enough of this exposure of my corruption. Let's put an end to busybody police. Instead of busting my chops, they should be cracking Palestinian heads!

 

See? I told you the Bitcoin Bubble Would Burst

Five days ago the make-believe currency Bitcoin hit $20,000. Today it crashed to $10,000, a plunge of 50%, before recovering to $12,000 (that's a 20% rise). Bitcoin has gone through repeated bouts of bubbles and bursting bubbles over its existence. A chart of its history looks like a roller-coaster.
Bitcoin is fetishized by Libertarian types who are into digital technology. They have fantasies of liberation from government control through technology and a neo-laissez-faire capitalism. This is magical thinking.

With every sharp rise in the price (NOT the value- it has no value) of Bitcoin, speculators pile in, driving the price up more. As in every market mania, there are shills who confidently assert the price will go much higher. (Some jackass insisted a few days ago that Bitcoin would go to $300,000.)

It's the same in other markets. A capitalist polemicist and a pseudo-economist came out with a book in 1999, "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market." That would have been a fourfold increase, and they predicted it would be by 2002 or 2004. Guess what? Shortly thereafter stocks went into a major decline. And that was followed by the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the stock market to collapse.

Another fool, a "certified financial advisor," pushed a book, "Dow, 30,000 by 2008- Why It's Different This Time."

Yet another shill came out with a tome in 1999, "Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting from the Greatest Bull Market in History."

You can still buy this crap on Amazon, amazingly enough. Why anyone would want to buy very wrong, very bad predictions from the past is a puzzle.

For an explanation of what is genuinely destructive about Bitcoin, see "The Great Bitcoin Con Game and How It's Harming Everyone On Earth." (It contributes to global warming.)
https://taboo-truths.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-great-bitcoin-con-game-and-how-its.html

How The Media Acted As Accomplices to the Sex Crimes of Harvey Weinstein (and of many others)

The American Media is Like the Germans: Either At Your Feet or At Your Throat.

One aspect of American (and not only American) media is starkly illustrated [1] by the Harvey Weinstein affair, and that is its tendency to either be fawning sycophants or a lynch mob. That is, a former darling can be turned on suddenly and ferociously. The target can be the same person previously adored, or a foreign nation or ruler when the "interests" of the attacking media's nation warrant a reversal of attitude. Examples of this are the reversal of political polarity from positive to negative when the Shah of Iran was toppled and the Shiite theocrats took over; when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; and the Soviet Union, which went from enemy from 1917 to 1942, when it became friend, then back to enemy from 1945 until 1989 when Gorbachev surrendered the client states of Eastern Europe. (The S.U. ultimately shattered into pieces in 1991.)

This is not to say Weinstein doesn't deserve strong condemnation. It SHOULD raise questions about the media's former sycophancy towards him. Indeed, it aided and abetted his abuses of and attacks on women. And even though that is obvious, the media has managed to totally ignore that aspect of the issue. Here's just some of the proof of media complicity in Weinstein's crimes:

Buried in a long New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow about Weinstein's sexual assaults and coercive behavior was evidence of media complicity in aiding and abetting his crimes. How witting or clueless his media enablers were has not been revealed by the media.  Here are excerpts with key words highlighted by me in bold:

Virtually all of the people I spoke with told me that they were frightened of retaliation. “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” one former employee told me. Many said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted. Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them. Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages.

“This wasn’t a one-off. This wasn’t a period of time,” an executive who worked for Weinstein for many years told me. “This was ongoing predatory behavior towards women—whether they consented or not.”

And:  

“Textbook sexual harassment” was how Nestor [a young female employee] described Weinstein’s behavior to me. “It’s a pretty clear case of sexual harassment when your superior, the C.E.O., asks one of their inferiors, a temp, to have sex with them, essentially in exchange for mentorship.” She recalled refusing his advances at least a dozen times. “ ‘No’ did not mean ‘no’ to him,” she said. “I was very aware of how inappropriate it was. But I felt trapped.”

Throughout the breakfast, she said, Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, enraged over a spat that Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie “Big Eyes,” was having in the press. Afterward, Weinstein told Nestor to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor. Later in the day, there were indeed negative news items about his opponents, and Weinstein stopped by Nestor’s desk to be sure that she’d seen them.

By that point, Nestor recalled, “I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well connected he was."

Notice that Farrow and The New Yorker protect the identities of the media organs that willingly, probably eagerly, ran whatever malicious propaganda Weinstein chose to plant with them. Media people stick together. They are a tightknit fraternity (except when it came to Michael Hastings, for one, who was ostracized for reporting the contemptuous attitude of General Stanley McCrystal, and the horrible example he set for his staff, towards his commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, and the rest of the civilian leadership, the alleged superiors to the military, and who have been accessories after the fact in Hastings assassination by refusing to report the obvious facts, much less investigate it), who in general have an all-around non-aggression pact with each other (excepting Murdoch's minions, who gleefully attack other major media organs, because like all fascists, they consider themselves the only legitimate pretenders to power). There is also the desire not to close the doors to potential future employers on the part of the reporters and commentators. They are all careerists who rely on friendly relations to gain exposure for themselves. So both institutional and personal factors create a system of media self-protection. Once in awhile these media actors put on a show of self-reflection, self-analysis, self-pseudo-criticism, which are invariably acts of self-protection, justification, exoneration, sprinkled with what the CIA dubs limited hang-outs, that ism, dribbling out seeming "revelations" while keeping the most damaging facts and truths well-hidden.

Despite the efforts of The New Yorker to protect the guilty, we know from other sources (in this case the WNYC radio program On The Media, October 13, 2017) that in the most egregious case, the attack on    the woman who instigated the New York City police criminal investigation of Weinstein, to discredit her, Weinstein's media accomplices were Murdoch's minions at his reactionary rag New York Post "news"paper, specifically Page Six, a tawdry "gossip" and political attack column. Fitting that it should be so. Murdoch has long been an employer of sexual predators, including but not limited to Roger Ailes, the evil, Mephistophelian founder of Murdoch's vile agitpropaganda pseudo-news channel, Fox "News," and the former top on-air propagandist on that network, Bill "SHUT UP!" O'Reilly. Among his numerous major crimes, Ailes organized the rehabilitation of the image of the loathsome Richard Nixon in 1968, helping elect Nixon president, from which position Nixon rained bombs down on Vietnam and destroyed democracy in Chile with a CIA-Pentagon coup, among numerous other crimes against humanity, domestic and foreign. To be sure, the CIA played the crucial role in electing Nixon, first by assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, prompting justified rioting by blacks which played straight into Nixon's racist "law and order" campaign theme (code for "repress the blacks") but especially in June by murdering Robert Kennedy, who would have defeated Nixon in the November election had the CIA not eliminated him. (As it was, Nixon barely edged the ultimate Democratic candidate by less than a percentage point, the loathsome Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson's vice president, who discredited himself with liberal voters by his sycophantic support for Johnson's Vietnam war.)

Just to return to the relatively trivial matter of a disgusting movie industry poohbah abusing his power, and the major corporate media protecting him: NBC refused to run Ronan Farrow's story about Weinstein, so he took it to The New Yorker.

1] Illustrated, but ignored by that same media, of course.

2] "From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories: Multiple women share harrowing accounts of sexual assault and harassment by the film executive," By Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker magazine, October 10, 2017

Sex criminals Weinstein, O'Reilly, Roger Ailes- beneath their politics, birds of a feather.

"HEY! Who's molesting who!" Hillary Clinton just can't keep her hands off Harvey Weinstein. (Hint: She loves his money. I mean, his "donations" because he "supports what she stands for" and "the values of the Democratic Party." Yeah, right.)

"Stupid bitch, here's how you give a blowjob!" Victim of multiple misunderstandings Bill O'Reilly was merely conducting one-on-one sex ed lessons.

Who could resist sexy Roger Ailes! We sure do miss Rupert Murdoch's propaganda master, the man who invented the "new Nixon" of 1968. (Meet the New Nixon, same as the Old Nixon.)

And give credit where credit is due: The Man who empowered the sex fiends and spreaders of socially destructive reactionary agitprop Ailes and O'Reilly, the Global Master Propagandist himself, Rupert Murdoch, the Ageless One.

The Great Bitcoin Con Game and How It's Harming Everyone On Earth

First of all, what is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is fake money. That is, you can't actually shop with it. [1]

And unlike gold, another "alternative" currency, it has no tangible physical existence and no uses (gold has manufacturing uses, also in dentistry, and as jewelry).

The current Bitcoin Bubble is madder than the Dutch tulip frenzy. A year ago, this make-believe money was trading for $700 per Bitcoin- and even that was absurd for something with no actual value whatsoever. Yet it's risen over 2000 percent.

Some U.S. futures exchanges just jumped in to get in on the action. In the first day of trading, the Bitcoin contract closed up 20%, to $18,545. [2]

Unlike other speculative manias, this one is based on absolutely nothing. Even the tulip mania had a physical basis- flowers. Likewise stock market frenzies have actual companies at base. Futures markets trade currencies and commodities like metals and agricultural products. Other exotic speculative instruments were founded on U.S. Government Treasury obligations or aggregated home mortgages.

Bitcoin is based on absolutely nothing, and is backed by no government or central bank. It is a notional pseudo-currency.

The only physical reality of it is the computers doing massive mathematical calculations that is the game that "creates" the non-existent "currency," the Bitcoins.

It turns out that those computers use more electricity than the nation of Ireland (population 4.7 million people). [3]

Power plants have to generate that electricity. It turns out that at least half of the computing done to keep this speculative bubble of nothing inflated occurs in China. China burns coal for most of its electricity. Coal is highly polluting, and releases large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, warming the planet. 

Thus we have a perfect expression of pure capitalist parasitism helping to wreak havoc on the climate, creating more and fiercer hurricanes, ultimately leading to sea level rises that will flood the coastal regions (and cities) of the continents and create drought and massive famines. In California the Governor has cites global warming as a cause of the massive forest fires that is burning large swaths of that state.

The insane bubble in Bitcoin will inevitably end in tears for some unlucky speculators. (Others with lucky timing will make a killing.) But the real lasting damage is to the planet we live on.  A planet unfortunately at the mercy of greedy parasites.

1]  Only a very few merchants are accepting Bitcoin as payment for purchases. Out of the hundreds of millions of sellers on the planet. And Bitcoin is used for some criminal activities. And computer ransomware extortionists are starting to demand payment in Bitcoins.

2]  Bitcoin started trading on the Chicago Futures and Options Exchanges. On Monday, December 18, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is going to jump in on the hot action.

3]  BBC, December 12, 2017, morning broadcast.

Another Example of the Democratic Party Treating Their "Base" Like Dirt

Here's a brief item (four paragraphs in total) from the Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire" column under the heading "Government Ethics," titled "IRS Scrutiny Hooks Left-Leaning Groups." I have annotated it with facts omitted from the piece, and with the larger political context. [1]

Some nonprofit groups received scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service through the use of screening terms that would single out left-leaning groups, according to an inspector general's report released Thursday. [October 5.]

What happened to those groups from 2004 to 2013 [i.e under both Bush the Younger and Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama] was similar to the treatment that tea-party groups received from 2010 to 2012. [Except that the tea-party groups were only targeted by a Democratic regime, and only for no more than three years- and there was a huge political brouhaha over it, and calls for criminal prosecutions of IRS officials, and forced resignations, whereas there was no reaction at all to the persecution of "leftists" for nine to ten years, and just a little article years later in a business paper.] A report from the same inspector general about conservative groups in 2013 led to the resignation of then-acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. [And of IRS official Lois Lerner, who had to hire criminal defense lawyers to deal with the threat of indictment as Republican politicians and the rightwing media mob were demanding.]

"Democrats should be outraged," said Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, about the new report. "The IRS targeted Americans based on their political beliefs, both parties."

Some Democrats have said the report shows that there wasn't political bias or targeting at the IRS. They said the problem was poor management and unclear rules about how to define political activity and how much is acceptable for different types of nonprofits. [End.]

Notice the essential unity of the two corporate imperialist parties that form a political cartel, both persecuting "leftists" whether it's a Democratic or Republican regime. Of course, throughout U.S. history, progressives of all stripes have been systematically surveiled, harassed, persecuted, subjected to various "dirty tricks" like thefts and sabotage of every stripe, imprisoned, and murdered by state agents and institutions, while reactionaries have had almost entirely free rein, including to commit thousands of acts of terrorism. (Examples: the Ku Klux Klan, the lynchings of thousands of blacks, the reign of terror against the civil rights movement in the 1950's and '60's, the thousands of attacks on abortion clinics, assassinations of anti-establishment activists by rightwing terrorists the secret police use as cut-outs, and more.)

Whether it's anti-abortion fanatics, Christian fundamentalists, gun fetishists, or people who want to shrink government down small enough to drown it in a bathtub, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) always obsequiously panders to its base, at least in rhetoric. And it serves most of those groups' interests, passing laws (especially on the state level) making abortions relentlessly more onerous to obtain, loosening gun laws to the point that the Texas state government has forced universities in that state to allow students to carry guns on campus, against the objections of those institutions allegedly dedicated to education and free thought. And in league with the Democrats, passing draconian laws that in practice target blacks and Hispanics for imprisonment, and tax laws that grossly favor the rich and large corporations.

1] Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2017, page A5.

Nobel Committee Awards Peace Prize to The International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Forgoing Giving Obama a Second Peace Prize

Remember 2009? Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama had only been in office a matter of months, and the European bourgeoisie were so overjoyed with this allegedly new-model president replacing the execrable George W. Bush that the Swedish Nobel Committee got carried away and giddily awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the newly-minted "good" U.S. president for accomplishing.... absolutely nothing to advance World Peace. [1]


Obama even sprinkled a bit of cold water on the Swedish Nobel poohbahs in his acceptance speech, cautioning that he might have to fight some wars- Good Wars, of course, wars of necessity. (What other kind is there? Throughout history empires have "needed" to conquer and subjugate to add to their wealth, for example. The Third Reich needed to defend "Western Civilization" from the Jewish-Slavic-Bolshevik hordes from the East- they actually said this, and citizens from all over Western Europe and Scandinavia rallied to the cause, joining the Waffen-SS, and helping round up Jewish vermin for extermination in their home countries. War is always "necessary.")

In what in hindsight looks like preordained irony, the 1999 Prize went to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), whose hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Obama would later bomb as president, murdering medical staff and patients. After MSF complained about it, Obama sent a tank crashing through its gates. Yes, Obama did it. First, he is Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces, as specified in the U.S. Constitution. Thus under the doctrine of command responsibility, he is ultimately responsible. Second, he granted the armed forces the leeway to commit such war crimes and atrocities. And they certainly wouldn't have engaged in the second attack days later without the okay from Obama. Thirdly, it is quite possible that such a crime was either initiated by Obama or the Pentagon ran it by him first. MSF had repeatedly given the U.S. military the precise GPS coordinates of its hospital location, so as to avoid any "accidental" attacks. The same foolish thing that Al-Jazeera does, which has facilitated repeated U.S. attacks on its offices. (British Prime Minister and smarmy criminal Tony Blair had to talk then-president George Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's headquarter in Qatar, where it is based!) [2] 

Other U.S. presidents have had the noble Nobel bestowed upon them. Jimmy Carter in 2002, 22 years after he left office, for the vague reason of "his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." And the very militaristic and rabidly war-mongering Theodore Roosevelt, in 2006, who at least arguably did something involving creating some actual peace, namely brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese war.


The problem with the Nobel Peace Prizes is that giving them out to so many execrable scumbags (there's a long list, but each one would require an explanation) devalues the legitimate recipients, and there certainly are some of those. In addition to prestige, the prize isn't a mere medal, but comes with 9 million Swedish kroner, about $1,110,000 U.S. at today's exchange rate.

Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Prize in 1964. The FBI tried to blackmail him into committing suicide before accepting it, using surreptitiously-made recordings of his sexual dalliances. By 1968 the U.S. power structure had had enough of him (the Washington Post and New York Times, major organs of and soapboxes for elite opinion, both excoriated him for his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his involvement in labor struggles also marked him as a threat) so the CIA murdered him, with the help of the Memphis police, the FBI playing its usual role of cover-up disguised as "investigation," and the entire U.S. establishment media and power system acting as accomplices to this day.

In fact, there is a lot of history that can be mined by going through the role of Peace Prize recipients. But this essay will be too brief to do that. Basically the recipients can be grouped into two categories: people with some meritorious claim to such a prize, and a rogues' gallery of major criminals and international phonies with fraudulent reputations (such as Elie Wiesel and "Mother" Teresa). I mean, Henry Kissinger? Are you trying to make people nauseous?

The Nobel Committee did find an anti-nuclear weapons group prize-worthy on a previous occasion: 1985, when the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won it. I wonder where they are today?

1]  According to the Nobel Committee, Obama was worthy of the Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." I can't even imagine what they were referring to after Obama had only been in office a few months. After eight years of Obamaism, there's still nothing that fits such an extravagant description.

2]  I covered the MSF atrocity in detail in earlier essays. See the articles under http://jasonzenith.blogspot.com/search?q=doctors+without+borders

"Oooh, that feels so GOOD to get an undeserved award! (And a million bucks in prize money too!")

Democrats Clean House of Sexual Miscreants To Better Throw Stones At GOP Glass House

That pretty much sums up the action by Congressional Democrats in forcing Representative John Conyers and Senator Al Franken to resign from Congress. The main motive is to be able to more freely attack the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) for the sexual crimes and misbehavior of the likes of Roy Moore, their candidate for U.S. Senate from Alabama, who as a local District Attorney spent his middle age seducing teenage girls, or for that matter the Republican president of the U.S., who happily bragged about his approach to women as consisting of forcible kissing and "grabbing them by the pussy." The Democrats needed to deprive the Republicans of ammunition to use in retaliation, so Conyers and Franken had to go. Both men resisted pressure from their fellow Democratic lawmakers for weeks before finally giving way. (Although the Democrats still have the albatross of known rapist and philanderer William Jefferson Clinton around their necks. During the presidential campaign the demagogue Trump managed to neutralize the Access Hollywood video of himself boasting of his sexual assaults by bringing along to the next debate women who were wronged by Clinton.)

Conyers, age 88, has clung like a barnacle to his seat for decades. He represents a black district of Detroit, Michigan. He is designated a "civil rights icon" by the "liberal" wing of the power establishment and by the black elite.  As a Representative, he has been one of these Big Talk Liberals who doesn't really challenge the corrupt and oppressive power system but makes his career comfortably within it. He used taxpayer funds to buy the silence of at least one victim of his sexual depredations.

As a final arrogant act, he has designated his son, named after him, as his successor, like a King would do. (His son cut up his girlfriend with a knife. He got away with it, unsurprisingly, as even "unimportant" men get away with such "domestic dispute" violence in America.)

Franken, U.S. Senator from Minnesota, put the accusations against him into two categories: ones that were "simply not true," and others that he "remembers differently" from the women he groped or forcibly kissed, which was his "right as an entertainer," he explained to one woman he attempted to assault. In his Senate speech announcing his resignation (under pressure- 30 Democratic Senators demanded he resign his post) he made the pertinent comparison to his fate with that of Trump, elected president and in power, and Roy Moore, seemingly about to be elected to the Senate from the primitive, benighted state of Alabama. This led to media tongue-clucking against Franken. [1]

Trump has given his full-throated endorsement to the erstwhile cradle-robbing Moore, and the GOP has fallen into line behind Trump, as they invariably do, opening the Party's money spigots to shower Moore with funds.

Franken made a carefully parsed statement in his resignation speech: "Nothing I have done as a Senator, nothing, has brought dishonor on this institution" [his emphasis]. In other words, all his molestations occurred in his former capacity as a comedian. Molestations he did not acknowledge. (Which leaves a mystery in his version of things: why are you resigning?)

Most of the recently-outed sexual predators have been men of power in politics or the entertainment/media industries. Franken thus is a two-fer: former minor entertainment biz star, now also a former politician.

I shed no tear for Franken. Aside from the fact that as a pro-human, I resolutely oppose the two-party political cartel that monopolizes political power in the U.S. and that relentlessly promotes U.S. imperialism and corporate oligarchy, there is much to dislike about Franken in particular. I listened to hours of his radio show on the now-defunct Air America radio. He was a tub-thumping nationalist and military groupie, and often made reactionary pronouncements. His kind only looks good in comparison to the primitive reactionaries of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). There is no salvation through the Democratic Party, contrary to the undying, naive hopes placed in it by putative progressives.

Normal humans should take pleasure in any difficulties experienced by our rulers. Sit back and enjoy the show!

 A comedy genius in action: Al Franken grabs sleeping woman's breasts.

John Conyers: His Congressional career tragically cut short at just age 88. 

1]  Minnesota has a Democratic governor, who will appoint a temporary successor to Franken. Then there will be a contested election for the seat in November 2018, and a regular reelection again in November 2020. The Democratic Party's hold on Minnesota is somewhat tenuous. By contrast, Conyers Congressional district in Detroit is safely Democratic, as U.S. blacks vote by better than 90% for Democrats.

The U.S. Senate consists of 100 Senators, two from each of the 50 states. It is the least representative elected legislative body on the earth. The 20 least populous U.S. states have the same population as California, yet get 20 times the power in the Senate, having 40 senators to California's 2. (Most of these states are reactionary hotbeds. This is yet another way in which rightwing politics is structurally baked into the U.S. power system.) Senators serve 6 year terms. Every two years, a third of the Senate is up for election.

The House of Representatives has 435 seats, which are very roughly apportioned by population. The entire House is up for election every two years.

Trump Loves To Create Sensation- Media and Politicians Still Don't Get That

They keep looking for a "strategy" and parsing his words to divine "what he means." He's just jerking your chains, you dupes.

It's natural to try to read the intentions of the president of the U.S., a position with far too much power for the good of humanity. But Trump is mercurial and capricious, so trying to predict his future actions is a fool's errand. What needs to be done is to put barriers in the way of his taking destructive actions, such as launching a military attack on North Korea.

Trump dropped one of his mini-bombshells regarding North Korea on October 5th, saying this is "the calm before the storm." What could he have possibly meant by that cryptic, ominous statement?

He had just publicly rebuked his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, for "wasting time" trying to arrange negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, thus torpedoing that option for a resolution of the issue that avoids war. (Unless the U.S. simply accepts North Korea's new capabilities, which is almost unthinkable, given the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism.) Asked what he meant by "the calm before the storm," Trump replied in typical high-handed fashion, "You'll see."

The next day, Trump's reliably sycophantic press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, (spawn of one of the most loathsome U.S. politicians, Mike Huckabee), when asked by reporters desperate to learn the meaning of Trump's taunting tease, replied dismissively, "We're never going to say in advance what the President is going to do. You'll just have to wait and see," she lectured the roomful of reporters like a teacher talking down to a class of children.

Oh, great. So the "policy" of the Trump regime is to keep everyone guessing, always. That fits a Trump lifelong existential modus operandi, keeping other people psychologically off-balance. That in turn is part and parcel of his hyper-aggressive, solipsistic personality.

It's not an accident that Trump's allies have been gangsters (including Russian ones) and political gangsters like Roy Cohn, one of the most malign creatures who ever existed in the interstices of the U.S. power structure. From his work as a key henchman of Senator Joseph McCarthy, to his role in the murderous inquisition against the Rosenbergs, scapegoated for "causing" the Korean War (according to the judge who sentenced them to death, Irving Kaufman, whom the New York Times spent years running puff pieces on, slathering on thick layers of treacly propaganda to create a false reputation in a smarmy attempt to rescue the judge from deserved opprobrium) to his operations as a political fixer and obstructer of justice in New York courts, Roy Cohn left a trail of social wreckage and slime behind him. A raving homophobe in public, he was a homosexual libertine in private who ultimately died, ironically and perhaps with poetic justice, of AIDS, apparently acquired sexually.

There is a saying: Birds of a feather flock together. Likewise, pathological personalities clump together, forming nodes and knots of social pathology within a society, to destructive effect.

But since when are the politics of an empire founded on the twin pillars of slavery and genocide ever not anti-human? At least with Trump, there isn't the mask of benignity, as with his predecessor, The Drone Assassin and Perfecter of the Surveillance State. Ogres like Trump are perfect grist for the Democratic Party's "we're the lesser of two evils" mill, that political extortion racket they use to "force" progressives and decent people to vote for them. So the two-party political cartel continues its malign monopoly of power, preventing any real reform of the vicious U.S. system. (They won't even convict a single cop for murdering an African-American citizen, no matter how egregious the circumstances. THAT is a country that is incorrigible! And after a mass murderer gunned down 58 people and wounded or caused injuries to another nearly 500 in Las Vegas, the topic of gun control can only be broached gingerly.)

There is supposedly a Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Well we sure do.

THE UNTOUCHABLES: Known Sexual Predators With Immunity

George H.W. Bush, ex-president of the U.S. Spends his retirement grabbing women's asses and making the same bad joke every time to his victims. ("My favorite magician is David Copafeel." Hilarious.)

Clarence "Silent Cal" Thomas, Supreme Court Justice for life. Complained about imaginary pubic hair on his coke, among numerous other harassing comments. After a list of the porn videos he rented was made public, Congress leapt into action, passing a law banning release of people's video rental history. Politicians, protect thyselves.
 
The president who nominated Thomas for the highest court in the U.S.? George H. W. Bush! Nice!

Donald J. "Jackass" Trump, President of the United States of America. Rapist, molester, boastful grabber of women's private parts. Now is pretending video of his boasting of his crimes wasn't him.

Hurricane Harvey Weinstein Continues to Blow Powerful Men Off Their High-Status Pedestals

Matt Lauer- grossly overpaid (over $20 million per year) morning TV entertainer. Fired by NBC after years of covering up his sexual abuse, including at least one rape, just as Variety and the New York Times were about to expose him.

Charlie Rose- smarmy chatster of U.S. imperialist apparatchiks and nomenklatura members.
Creep pretends his gross sexual harassment was welcomed by his victims, claims "shared feelings." Canned by PBS, CBS, Bloomberg News. Finally, relief from his unctuous propaganda!

John Conyers- superannuated Democratic Party hack and "progressive" burlesque performer. (He's 88 years old and as of this writing is belligerently refusing to resign, despite calls to do so by his party "leader," House Minority Leader and multimillionaire Nancy Pelosi, and by the Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan.)

Russell Simmons- music biz mogul who like all music biz moguls is a capitalist super-exploiter. (How do you think they get so rich?) Stepping down from his company after second rape victim names him.

Mark Halperin- hack "political analyst" who indoctrinates the public with corporate political outlook. Purveyor or garbage "election analyses" that ignore reality of voter suppression, crooked voting machines, etc. Discarded by media and disgraced for now. Spawn of Kissinger accomplice Morton Halperin.

Michael Orestes- former reactionary propagandist at New York Times, then propaganda overseer at NPR. After being protected for years by fellow male bosses, forced out.

The "A Prairie Home Companion" guy, what's his name. NPR dumps his shtick. (Oh yeah, Garrison Keillor. Weird name, hard to remember. Shouldn't that be Garrison Fort?)

Oh, too much schadenfreude for one day! I'm overdosing!

Still untouched: known rapist and groper, the second Teflon President, Donald J. "Jackass" Trump. Remarkable.

BONUS CONTRIBUTION TO "THE CONVERSATION" ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT: Nobody needs to be "trained" to not rape, grab people's breasts/asses/vaginas, forcibly kiss, expose oneself, etc. They already know it's wrong- that's why they do it in secret, lie about it, intimidate and threaten victims into silence and pay them hush money ("settlements" with "non-disclosure agreements") etc. Instead here's a simple therapy treatment that is quick and immediately effective: