How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election

The Gang Of Plunderers has been stealing elections for at least 20 years now. While the Democratic Party sleeps.

Well, not exactly. What the Democrats DO is turn a blind eye to the theft of elections and instead scream bloody murder at Ralph Nader (2000) and Vladimir Putin (2016)! Scapegoating irrelevant targets on which they unleash their wrath. They're afraid of the Republicans!

It's cowardly, and makes them accomplices to a rotten and corrupt and fraudulent system of pseudo-democracy. They would rather preserve the increasingly shabby and threadbare illusion of a fair electoral process then actually HAVE one! This makes them accomplices in their own victimization, as well as enemies of democracy.

But since the so-called Democrats are a front group for corporate oligarchy and global imperialism, why would they even care about democracy? Of course they wouldn't. And they don't. Democracy means power in the hands of the people, the precise opposite of corporate oligarchy and imperialism.

Aaron Maté of The Real News Network interviewed investigative journalist Greg Palast in August 2018 on some of the evil machinations of Kansas Republican Secretary of State and nominee for Governor Kris Kobach, and the theft of the 2016 presidential election. That makes three presidential elections stolen by GOP skulduggery- 2000, 2004, 2016. [1]

Seems they can't win anymore except by cheating.

Kobach has devoted his career to election theft. He has taken his underhanded methods of skulduggery national, as this video explains.

Palast describes systematic disenfranchising of tens of thousands of voters in "swing" states. The Democrats response? As in Florida in 2000, they don't defend the right of "minorities" to vote, Instead they gnash their teeth at the Green Party for daring to run in elections and "steal" the Democrats "votes," on the spurious assumption that every single voter for the Greens would be voting for Democrats instead. The other villain in the Democrats version of reality is that Internet memes spread by Russians induced people to vote for Trump who otherwise wouldn't have.

And according to Democratic Party astronomers, the moon is made out of green cheese.

The Republican apparatchiks who sit on the Supreme Court as the highest judges in the land have played their part in the election-stealing conspiracies of the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP), most infamously in 2000 when they banned Florida from conducting an accurate vote count, and by aiding and abetting Kobach's schemes. One method of covert disenfranchisement invented and spread by Kobach to the two-thirds of U.S. states the Republicans control, which these GOP operatives-in-judicial-robes have "legalized," is pretending that people with common black, Hispanic, and Asian-American last names living in different states are the same person, and if they fail to respond to a postcard mailed to them by election officials are automatically removed from the voter registration rolls without further notice to them. (As if people carefully read and comprehend every bit of seemingly insignificant mail, and mail never gets lost or misdelivered or stolen. And the phone hasn't been invented yet, so there's no way to call people.)

Here let me remind you that if it wasn't for Democratic Senators, these extremely partisan Justices would never have made it onto the Supreme Court. For the story of that betrayal, see footnote [2].

People who vote twice are subject to imprisonment for five years. Kris Kobach, who has conspired to deprive millions of the right to vote, should at least get life in prison. As a destroyer of democracy, he is subversive to the proclaimed values of America. Like a termite, he bores in secret, eating away at the foundational legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system.

The Man With the Crocodile Grin: Kris Kobach, anti-democratic reactionary 

white supremacist, GOP go-to guy for election-stealing.

1]  Watch "How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election."

2]  For how the Democrats helped create a reactionary Supreme Court, see "How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights."

Corporate Oligarch Leslie Moonves Rewarded For Multiple Sexual Assaults With $100 Million

Nice work if you can get it.

CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves is negotiating a payout of $100 million as his price for leaving CBS after The New Yorker magazine has published a second expose of his sexual misconduct, assaults, and vengeful career-wrecking of women who spurn his crude advances. This time there are six more women describing forced fellatio, physical violence, and threats of retaliation for failure to satisfy The Great Man's sexual urges. [1]

This is the man who did so much to make Donald Trump president, boasting to an audience of rich creeps that "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." [2]

The CBS corporate board of directors has mooted the possibility of donating $20 million- one fifth of Moonves expected sack of loot- to the #MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement. They plan to hire an outside law firm to "investigate" the "allegations," and supposedly might pay Moonves nothing.
Corporate media has been reporting that even if Moonves gets no "severance" package, he has still extracted during his time at CBS one BILLION dollars! But the greed of such plutocrats is insatiable, so Moonves has been in a tug of war with the CBS board for weeks to try and extract every additional dollar he can.

Here's how dishonest CBS "News" is. In reporting the story as the first item on the 8 am (EST)  national broadcast on September 10, their radio network omitted the fact that CBS is hiring the outside law firm to investigate not just Moonves, but the environment of sexual harassment at CBS and at CBS "News."

The board issued the standard boilerplate bullshit about how they don't tolerate a hostile work environment and value their female employees and blah blah blah- a pack of lies. They're pretending not to know the reality inside CBS.

Moonves, for his part, is showing his stripes as a conscienceless, amoral goon, denying the allegations. But it is too many people making too many detailed claims for Moonves to have any credibility. He has also been trying to parry the truth with the smarmy line that he maybe made some women uncomfortable and for that he has regrets.

Oh shove it, you predator.

Moonves penchant for meting out punishment to women wasn't limited to those who failed to satisfy him sexually. After Janet Jackson's breast was accidentally exposed for nine-sixteenths of a second during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, Moonves was inexplicably enraged and proceeded to wreck her career. He used his control over the music video channels MTV and VH1 to ban her videos, wrecking sales of her current album. Her career never recovered. Justin Timberlake, who had torn her outfit, was held blameless by Moonves. Jackson's apology didn't mollify the suddenly hyper-prudish and ultra-Puritanical sex offender Moonves. This in a society drenched in sexual imagery, in which a mountain of hardcore pornography is readily available to anyone with an Internet connection or cable TV subscription. Truly the man is pathological. [3]

During the current scandal du jour, "the" media has been telling us how "brilliant" Moonves is. The evidence? CBS rose in the ratings from last to first. But as there are only four networks that matter, and the ratings differences between them are actually small, this is not so impressive. They generally run neck-in-neck, and often shift in position. It's a big deal to the corporations because they are hyper-competitive. (Even while being practically indistinguishable in their content.) Even the BBC fed its listeners the line about Moonves' "genius" as a "programmer."

This is standard for the BBC. The BBC is slavishly sycophantic in its parroting of the lines of the U.S. power establishment. The BBC must have no self-respect. (The BBC- British Broadcasting Corporation- is the official propaganda arm of the British government. It broadcasts around the world in various languages, especially to "Commonwealth" nations- that is, former British colonies.)

The End. (Is that okay, to end like that? I mean, it is the end!)

1]  "As Leslie Moonves Negotiates His Exit from CBS, Six Women Raise New Assault and Harassment Claims," New Yorker, September 9, 2018.

2]  "Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: 'It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS,'" The Hollywood Reporter, February 29, 2016.  At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, Moonves enthused, "I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going." Moonves also giddily said, "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun."

And now we get to see the EPA wrecked, which will despoil the environment and give thousands more people cancer. And thousands of immigrant children kidnapped by ICE. Fun.

What a fucker.

3]  "Exclusive: Les Moonves Was Obsessed With Ruining Janet Jackson’s Career, Sources Say," Huffington Post, September 6, 2018.

                           Utterly selfish billionaire creep Leslie Moonves.

The Myth of Trump's "Uniqueness"

Or let's just say his uniqueness and alleged unprecedentedness for a U.S. president is exaggerated.

Lawless? What about Andrew Jackson, who ignored a Supreme Court decision and forced an entire Native American tribe on a death march.

Or George Bush, who violated U.S. law and the anti-torture treaty the U.S. was obligated to obey, and waged illegal aggressive war on Iraq?

Or Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, who flouted his oath of office by failing to faithfully execute the laws of the land and uphold the U.S. Constitution by NOT prosecuting U.S. torturers, or financiers who committed fraud.

Or how about Ronald Reagan, who violated the Boland Amendment, a U.S. law forbidding aid to the contra terrorists committing atrocities in Nicaragua?

Or how about hundreds of other examples from U.S. history?

Here's how the "liberal" and very bourgeois New Yorker magazine describes Donald Trump:

"Amazingly, it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful." [1]

Just like Nixon. Or Ford. Or Reagan. Or both Bushes. It's "amazing" if you just arrived here from another planet.

But only some of those adjectives apply to other presidents. We can't call Obama, Clinton, or Carter, "ignorant," for example. They knew plenty.

Trump is the same, just more so.

The real establishment problem with Trump isn't any of those negative qualities- which except for ignorance are assets in the head manager of a global empire. The beef is his refusal to respect the established norms of U.S. imperialist strategy. Attacking trading partners, undermining the NATO military "alliance," publicly insulting allied heads of state, is harmful to U.S. power, at least potentially. Trump slashes aimlessly at reality, without a strategy. His existential modus operandi, which he has brought into the White House, is to bully and bluster, alternated with blatant flattery, pushing others off-balance psychologically in order to con them or just flat-out rip them off. He's currently conducting trade "policy" with an eye to shoving one-sided trade deals down the throats of Mexico, Canada, Europe, and China. This seems to have succeeded with Mexico, and probably will with Canada, which will probably end up extorted into sacrificing its dairy farmers, who are currently protected, and maybe its commercial mass  culture industry too. Europe and China will be tougher nuts to crack, but the U.S. has the upper hand with them too.

But while the New Yorker missed the mark, Trump is different in some ways.

Personality: Trump is a blatant narcissist. All presidents have narcissistic tendencies, or they wouldn't think they should be president. But Trump is clinically narcissistic. Trump also is extremely impulsive. And he habitually humiliates people- but so did Nixon, for example. Trump's difference here is one of degree, not kind.

Then there is lying. Of course all presidents lie, but Trump's lies are stupid, blatant, and insulting to our intelligence. Also much more frequent. Or maybe not much more. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, Obama all lied a hell of a lot. But there lies could be overlooked by the establishment media, even affirmed as truths, so it was okay as far as the power structure was concerned, They were lies backed by the system, unlike most of Trump's.

Besides personality, Trump is very different in that he is in open conflict with the Deep State, the real power, the secret police agencies including parts of the military, especially the National Security Agency, (NSA), the super-surveillance of everyone and everything arm of U.S. imperialism. That is more significant than Trump's outré personality.

A big reason most of the establishment media exaggerates the uniqueness is Trump is its need to obfuscate the reality of the existence of U.S. imperialism. As always, they cover the true nature of the U.S. system of corporate oligarchy and empire with a heavy blanket of gaslighting propaganda. To perceive reality under this system is to feel like one is losing one's mind, that either one must be crazy or "everyone else" is crazy. Perceiving reality while retaining one's sanity is a struggle in a system where horrendous crimes, such as the deliberate destruction of three skyscrapers under cover of allowing two jets to crash into two of them, is carried out openly and blatantly lied about by every media source, including "alternative" ones, for years thereafter. That happened on September 11, 2001. What happened next made the motives clear: invasion of Iraq, the first of the planned invasion of seven Middle East countries to "remake" the region more to the liking of imperialists drunk on power, and the permanent erasure of the already weak personal rights against state power in the U.S. The latter is a bipartisan project, which Barack "The Drone Assassin" enthusiastically and sneakily continued, for example with the insertion into the military budget of a law empowering the Federal government to declare any U.S. citizen a "terrorist" and imprison that person indefinitely in military gulag without charges or recourse to any legal process whatsoever.

Ah, "liberalism!" In some ways indistinguishable from "conservatism." Now that's "bipartisanship"!

1]  "Crazytown: A Bob Woodward Book, an Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed, and a Growing Crisis for the Trump Presidency- The Republican 'resistance' goes public (sort of), and everyone freaks out," New Yorker, September 6, 2018, third paragraph, last sentence.

With Genocidal Campaign Against Uighurs, China Surpasses U.S. For Title of World's Largest Prison Population

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination says China has imprisoned one million Uighurs in "reeducation" centers, employing the degradation and brainwashing techniques they perfected under the cult dictator Mao Zedong to wipe out the ethnic identities of the victims. Add that to the "official" number of prisoners China admits to having, two million, and you get a total of three million. This surpasses the nominal U.S. total of 2.2 million inmates, so China takes the lead in the Mass Incarceration Tournament.

That's just in the Uighur "autonomous region," an Orwellian designation for a region under the boot heel of a "Communist" party overlord that is being overrun by Han Chinese, and where the Uighurs are under tight police repression. As China is seeking to eliminate the Uighurs as a distinct population group with their own identity, China is in the process of committing genocide against the Uighurs.

The UN committee also said that perhaps another 2 million Uighurs in the Xinjiang "autonomous region" were being dragooned into Maoist-style "political camps for indoctrination." The Uighur prisoners are forced to renounce their Muslim religion and swear fealty to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

So China has more than the "official" number of 2 million prisoners. It is actually 3 or 4 million.

China's UN ambassador in Geneva, where the committee met, Yu Jianhua, spouted cynical rhetoric claiming China was taking steps to achieve equality and solidarity between all ethnic groups. Yeah, right. And the Holocaust is a myth.

Human rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, submitted reports to the UN body documenting the repression.

But don't count the U.S. out in the competition for the title of World's Most Punitive Nation. The U.S. also has many uncounted prisoners- uncounted in official tallies. There are thousands of immigrants in "detention," their asylum claims brusquely brushed aside. There are people accused of crimes and held in jail pending trial, either denied bail or unable to afford it. And it's not clear to me whether the many thousands of people serving sentences of less than a year in city and county jails are counted. Nevertheless, China, with an estimated one million Uighur political prisoners in brainwashing/torture centers added to the official two million prisoners, is now Number One in gross total prisoners.

And as a percentage of the adult population imprisoned, the U.S. is still stands tall and proud in First Place. And in proportion to national population, the U.S. has China beat by a country mile, with only a fourth of China's population (about 330 million vs. China's 1.3 billion people) but with over one-half to two-thirds China's tally of prisoners.

So the U.S. is still very, very competitive in this yardstick of repression, And in terms of an omniscient surveillance state, the U.S. has the lead, thanks mainly to the NSA, but also to the promiscuous use of "national security letters" by the FBI, about 50,000 issued per year in the name of "fighting terrorism," where demands are made for personal financial, medical, library, school, and all manner of other records, with the record-holders forced to provide the information and threatened to tell no one, on pain of severe criminal penalties. Who knew there were so many "terrorists" in the U.S.?

China, like numerous nations around the globe, has eagerly followed in the U.S.' footsteps and adopted the political and propaganda strategy the U.S. pioneered in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 arranged demolitions of three skyscrapers in Manhattan and the U.S. government-sent anthrax letters, claiming to be "fighting terrorism" by the mass imprisonment and brainwashing of Uighurs. Bashar al-Assad similarly adopted the "fighting terrorism" story in his war against the Syrian people, ongoing for seven years now and near its depressing and horrific climax.

Keep on eye on Syria in the imprisonment sweepstakes. With the monstrous Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies about the finally snuff out the popular uprising against the dictatorship, expect many tens of thousands to be imprisoned, and tortured. Many will end up being murdered, as per the standard practice of the Assad regime. (The number would be even higher except for the fact that after Assad and his allies finish barrel-bombing Idlib province, the last stand of the uprising, and conquer it, there wil be thousands of summary executions.)

Thank you, Obama, Trump, and "anti-imperialists" and "peace activists" for allowing Assad to remain in power by destroying "his" country in order to "save" it.

 Leaders in Repression: Xi Jinping and Bashar al-Assad

Democrats Put On An Empty Show of "Resistance" To Kavanaugh Supreme Court Nomination

You have to hand it to Democratic Party politicians: they are indefatigable con artists.

Their latest con, from just yesterday, was trying to stop the wheels of the Republican-controlled Senate from inevitably placing the extreme, anti-human reactionary ideologue Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

Trump's presidential predecessor, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, nominated Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy left by the departure of Justice Anthony Kennedy in mid-March of 2016. That was TEN MONTHS before the end of Obama's term. The Republicans in the Senate, led by their fuhrer, I mean leader, Senator Mitch "Coalbrain" McConnell, refused to hold necessary hearings to consider the nomination.

What did the Democrats do? Did they scream bloody murder? Did Obama use the bully pulpit of the presidency to denounce this travesty, this usurpation of his presidential prerogative, daily or at least weekly? Did the Democrats launch an unrelenting media campaign to force the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP) to end the obstructionism of normal Constitutional process?

They did not. They just rolled over and played dead. Yet another despicable act by that reactoinary party of con artists and the execrable Obama.

Imagine if the situation was reversed. What do you think the Republicans would have done if a Democratic-controlled Senate snuffed a nominee of a Republican president like that? They'd threaten a civil war if they had to.

But then, the Democrats let the GOP steal at least three presidential elections from them -2000, 2004,
and 2016.

The truth is, the Democrats WANT a reactionary Supreme Court. They smarmily disguise the fact with political gamesmanship.

Antonin Scalia, one of the most extreme reactionaries ever elevated to the high court, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0! That means every Democratic Senator voted for that vile creature. And Clarence Thomas would never have made it if not for Senator Joe Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committed in the then-Democratic-majority Senate. He told the other Democrats to discount the damning testimony of Anita Hill about Thomas' gross sexual misconduct. [1]

EVERY rightwing horrible who got to wear the robes of ultimate judicial power got there with the crucial votes of Democratic Senators. The Democrats merely POSE as "liberals." They are in fact pro-repression, pro-corporate tyranny in their actions.

So on Tuesday morning, during the opening of the sham "confirmation hearings" for rightwing GOP apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh by the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by a fossilized reactionary Senator from Iowa, Charles Grassley, we were treated to stunts by Democratic Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, and others, trying to raise points of order with the authoritarian Grassley, who ignored them, talked over them like he was deaf, and repeatedly banged his gavel to try and silence them. To be sure, the Democrats objections were valid- such as the fact that the Trump regime dumped 40,000 documents on the Committee the day before, leaving no time to read and evaluate them, and refuses to release another 100,000 dealing with Kavanaugh's crimes when he was a henchman to President George W. Bush in the White House. These documents probably contain proof that Kavanaugh lied during his previous Senate confirmation hearings, when he was made a Federal Appeals Court judge by Bush. He swore then he'd had nothing to do with torture policy. There is evidence this was a lie. (By the way, Booker is a reactionary, as Glen Ford has documented, and Kamala Harris quashed an investigation into Steve Mnuchin, whose bank was found by her staff when she was California state attorney general to have committed at LEAST 1,000 cases of mortgage foreclosure fraud, stealing people's homes. So to see people like that posturing as Brave Liberal Warriors is particularly nauseating.) Mnuchin is now Trump's Treasury Secretary, thanks to Harris aiding and abetting his mountain of felonies. [2]

But what if the Democrats manage to stall the confirmation process past the upcoming midterm election in November? Say they manage to retake the Senate? That's a long shot, and if it happened they would have only a bare majority. They'll have to stall until the new Senate is seated next January. And then what? RIGHTWING DEMOCRATS FROM PRO-TRUMP STATES ARE GOING TO VOTE TO CONFIRM KAVANAUGH! So this whole "opposition" show is just to snooker people into thinking the Democrats are "fighting" the Kavanaugh nomination.

They should have done their fighting during the ten months McConnell and his wrecking crew bottled up the nomination of Merrick Garland. Not that Garland was any prize. He's a rightwinger, just not an extreme one like the despicable Kavanaugh. [3]

1]  Biden's despicable role is documented in the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by two establishment journalists (one of which went on to become the first woman to become top editor at the New York Times, Jill Abramson).

2]  To discover the real Booker behind the mask, see: "Glen Ford Speaks about the Black 'Mis-Leadership' Class," October 18, 2013; "Cory Booker is No Progressive: The Countless Reasons Why He Will Not Be a Good Senator," The Majority Report with Sam Seder, August 12, 2013; and "Glen Ford: Corporate Assault on Public Education," May 9, 2012, all on youtube.com

3]  For what an anti-human interest scumbag Kavanaugh is, see "Report Finds Judge Kavanaugh Ruled Against Public Interest in Almost All of His District Court Cases," Democracy Now!, September 5, 2018.

The Catholic Church Is A Global Pedophilia Cult. It's Well Past Time To Label It As Such.

The latest "shocking revelation" about Catholic priests sexually preying on children under their control, with the institutional protection of their powerful organization, the Roman Catholic Church, comes from the state of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

A state Grand Jury has issued an 884 page report detailing 70 years of criminal sexual acts perpetrated by Catholic priests in that state against children. 301 priests- 301!- were identified as perpetrators, and over 1000 children were their victims. They would take nude photos of boys and pass them around (a violation of draconian Federal child pornography laws). The report characterized the priests' activities as a "child porn ring."

The Pennsylvania state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said "the Church protected the perpetrators at all costs." He described a "playbook" for how to hide the crimes of their priests that the Church bosses used. In other words, they committed criminal conspiracy, and aided and abetted the thousands of sex crimes.

Among the atrocities the Catholic Church committed against children in their clutches in Pennsylvania are these:

-A 9 year old boy forced to perform fellatio, then his mouth washed out with "Holy" water. (That must sanctify the sin, right?)

-Five girls in the same family were used for sex.

-A 7 year old girl was raped in the hospital after her tonsils were removed.

-An 18 month old baby was sexually assaulted. (Hey, I have a motto for this cult: "The Catholic Church: Plumbing the Depths of Depravity in God's Name.")

As in all the Catholic Church pedophilia and other sexual abuse scandals, the same pattern of the hierarchy- the church bosses- covering up and indeed protecting the sexual criminals in their employ. When things get hot, they merely transfer the perpetrator. They never so much as expel the offender, much less go to the police. This protection racket of course runs right up to the top, at the Vatican and the various "Popes" who run this racketeering enterprise with absolute authority, (Funny, the U.S. doesn't bring charges against the CC under the RICO statutes, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. They only bring such charges against Mafioso and progressive activists. Reactionary power institutions have each others' backs.)

The Pennsylvania state attorney general, in announcing the Grand Jury's report, said he believes there were even more pedophile priests, and more victims, that they couldn't identify. The investigation relied on the Church's written records, and on victims coming forward. He assumed the Church didn't keep thorough written records, and that not all victims have come forward. Those are good assumptions.

This is just the latest news of rampant sexual crimes by priests preying on children. In states all over the U.S., it has been the same story.

And it's the same story in numerous countries around the world, from Latin America, to Europe, to Asia, to Australia. Always the same thing. Always going to the top of the hierarchy. Unending criminal behavior under cover of "holy" religion, always kept secret, the victims further victimized by this mind control cult with threats and guilt-tripping.

It is long past time to recognize the Catholic Church for what it is- a global pedophilia criminal conspiracy. It should be shut down under the racketeering laws.

Of course it won't be. Not just because it's so "powerful." But also because it is an ally of governments. It conditions people in its grip to be obedient authoritarians. It serves a vital function for the secular rulers.

Not by accident are so many police and secret police in many countries, including the U.S., Catholics. There's an irony for you!

Any parent who would put their child in the clutches of these known criminals is irresponsible.

Is Paul Manafort Banking on a Trump Pardon? He Better Be.

What he's doing makes no sense otherwise.

First, he went to trial in Federal court. U.S. Federal courts are like Chinese courts- both have a conviction rate around 98%. The laws, procedures, and court rules are constructed to virtually guarantee convictions. And the judges are mostly pro-prosecution; many actually ARE former prosecutors. I have yet to read of a judge with a background as a defense attorney, much less a Legal Aid lawyer, etc.

Second, Manafort is obviously "guilty" under U.S. law of the charges heaped on his head, "tax fraud" and "bank fraud."  U.S. law is very repressive. (Manafort faces possible life in prison on the current charges!) But applying U.S. law, Manafort is guilty. He apparently didn't report all his income to the tax authorities (the IRS, Internal Revenue Service), which is being labeled tax fraud, a crime. (The vast majority of incidents of unreported income are treated as civil matters in the U.S. and the IRS applies penalties and interest, so every criminal prosecution for tax evasion is in a sense selective prosecution.)

The bank fraud charge is another legal curve ball. A bank president hankered after an appointment in the Trump regime, so he approved a loan for Manafort over the objections of his underlings. In other words, he bribed Manafort with a dicey loan. Manafort's paperwork for the loan was inaccurate, but the application was really pro forma, since the bank president made the decision without regard to Manafort's creditworthiness. Yet the false paperwork is the basis for claiming that Manafort "defrauded" the bank- even though the head of the bank was well-aware of what was going on.

In the U.S., the rich are glorified by the media on a daily basis. Filthy rich billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and others are feted as figures of admiration. But in this trial, the government prosecutors used a common tactic, stoking class envy and resentment. Their opening gambit was harping on expensive clothes Manafort bought (the media in the U.S. had a great time ridiculing the items of clothing- since they are devoted to bringing down Trump, naturally they are hostile to Manafort). I find it hypocritical for a government that is the handmaiden of the super-rich to do an ideological somersault and play that populist, resent-the-rich card in court.

 In this case obviously Manafort was never going to be prosecuted if he hadn't been involved with Trump and thus provides a target for the special prosecutor, former FBI secret police chief Robert S. Mueller III, to use as a vector to get at Trump by forcing Manafort to "cooperate" in the Get Trump campaign of the secret police, most of the major media, and the Democratic Party. The FBI had long known about what Manafort was up to, having interrogated him and his former henchman Rick Gates, an admitted adulterer and crook who embezzled from Manafort (now turned states' evidence) in 2014. At that time the Department of "Justice" didn't see any reason to bring charges, even though they were questioning him about his work for the since-overthrown president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Now however, Mueller is charging him for failing to register as an agent of a foreign power- that charge to be tried in an upcoming, separate trial. And of course the CIA and NSA knew all about his activities, as Manafort was advising the former president of Ukraine when he was in office, retroactively deemed a hostile act since the U.S. subsequently arranged the overthrow of that president. The FBI, DEA, CIA, and other agencies have free access to the NSA's massive databases. All Paul Manafort's telephone calls (the content, not just the metadata, as the mendacious U.S. media keeps lying), emails, websearches, bank transfers, and more are in the NSA's possession, and a search of "Paul Manafort" would instantly pull up all that data, (All your data is in the NSA's paws too.) [1]

So the government knew all about everything Manafort was doing that Mueller has suddenly decided is criminal and merits prosecution.

By the way, Manafort isn't the only person doing what he did. Other political hustlers "advise" foreign "leaders" and don't necessarily register. In Britain, Tony Blair has made millions as an image adviser to tyrants- but UK law isn't U.S. law. In the U.S., Israel has an entire cadre of agents of influence, in and out of the U.S. government, who don't register as their agents.

But the U.S. "justice" system has nothing to do with justice. It is political from start to finish.

Manafort's lawyers didn't call any defense witnesses. Their efforts in the trial were limited to cross-examining the government's witnesses, and making opening and closing arguments. In U.S. trials, prosecutors get to speak last to the jury before the jurors retire to deliberate on a verdict- yet another advantage for the government, as they're making the final impression and can rebut whatever the defense said without contradiction and make any and all manner of prejudicial assertions and slip in distorted or even false facts.

Manafort's defense team tried to blame everything on Rick Gates, the government's "star" witness. I rather doubt a conviction will be avoided. They'll be lucky to even get a hung jury (when the jurors can't agree on a unanimous verdict), in which case Manafort can and will be retried, unless he caves and offers Mueller something incriminating on Trump.

One defense "strategy" seems to be relying on a guilty verdict being overturned on appeal. Seems to me Manafort's lawyers are taking him for a ride, one very profitable for them. (Manafort had five very expensive lawyers in court for the trial.)




I can only guess that Manafort expects Trump to ultimately pardon him (after Manafort has been drained of hundreds of thousands of dollars by his lawyers). If that is what Manafort is counting on, he's a fool. He probably doesn't have any genuine information that could convict Trump of anything. Because it is obvious there was no conspiracy between Trump or anyone else and the Russians to hack computers or somehow fix the election. So Trump has no incentive to pardon Manafort.

 You handsome devil, you! (What, no $15,000 ostrich jacket?)

1]  "Manafort Asks Federal Judge in Virginia to Dismiss Fraud Case," Bloomberg, March 27, 2018. Manafort's lawyers filed a pre-trial motion, which Bloomberg News described thusly:


In his filing, Manafort [that is, Manafort's lawyers] refers to Justice Department interest in his activities that preceded his work as [Trump's] campaign chairman. In July 2014, he met with U.S. prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to discuss his offshore consulting activities, the filing said.

“The DOJ had thus already investigated Mr. Manafort’s tax filings for the time period covered by the indictment” and chose not to charge him, according to the filing. “The Special Counsel was obviously the driving force behind the decision to charge Mr. Manafort.”


 

Leslie Moonves, Suffering From MSS, Clearly Needs Help and Compassion, Not Condemnation

Leslie Moonves, the Big Boss of CBS Corporation, who gloated about helping elevate Donald Trump to the presidency ("it's bad for America but it's good for CBS," he said, meaning saturation "coverage" of Trump running for president was a ratings and profit bonanza for CBS, the good of the nation be damned) has been exposed as sexually attacking, attempting to rape, and wrecking the careers of six women in the Hollywood industry ecosystem. (No doubt there have been many more.)

But in the rush to heap opprobrium on Moonves, sight has been lost on a crucial fact: Women are not the only victims here. Moonves is also a victim. A victim of a dread disease.

You see, Leslie has Male Superiority Syndrome. This little understood malady affects men of all social strata and in all walks of life. It affects men in positions of great power and men with little power, but with power over some women or even over a single woman.

Just as brain tumors and Alzheimer's Disease can alter behavior, so too does MSS cause bizarre and anti-social behavioral changes in those it strikes, changes that can impact the lives of not only the sufferer, but of those around him.

Like drug addicts, those with MSS are misunderstood. MSS sufferers need help and compassion, not condemnation and rejection as pariahs.

But there is hope. Social scientists have learned much about this condition, and even now are racing for answers. Yet there is so much more to do. You can be part of the solution.

Won't you help us find a cure for this awful affliction? Please donate generously to FECUND, the Fund for Eliminating and Countering Unwanted Nasty Domination. Together we can someday stop men from harassing, assaulting, and raping women, and destroying their careers. When that day arrives, we will all be better off.

[This message has been sponsored by FECUND, dedicated to ending male domination of women.]

Won't you contribute to help Leslie Moonves?

 

"Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct," 

New Yorker, August 6 & 13, 2018 issue.

How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultra-Reactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights

It's long past time to call out the Democratic Party of the U.S. on one of its major con games. The one in which they claim to be the sole bulwark protecting America from a right-wing "takeover" of the Supreme Court. The one in which they claim that they are the guardians of abortion rights, rights in permanent peril from unnamed right wingers.

Before I continue, I want to bullet-point the critical facts you need to take away with you:

• Extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans. Scalia was later one of five GOP apparatchiks on the high court who stole the 2000 presidential election for George Bush (Bush the Younger). [1]

• Democratic Senator Joe Biden (later  vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama) functioning as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in putting known sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Thomas, like Scalia, voted to steal the 2000 presidential election for the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). [2]

• EVERY reactionary elevated to the top court, with its immense power, has gotten there with the support of Democratic Party senators. Even the ones who vote against confirming them soft-pedal how awful and evil the nominees are.

• In the last year of the presidency of Hit Man Obama, a vacancy opened up on the Supereme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell (a venal coal industry stooge from Kentucky) announced that Obama would not be allowed to fill that vacancy. And Democratic response was- some grumbling under their breath and acceptance. Obama himself didn't give any evidence of even caring! (Yet there are still morons who think he is a "progressive" who was somehow thwarted by forces beyond his control. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Democratic-controlled Senate denied a GOP president the right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy! There would be DAILY howls of outrage, even calls for a military coup "to restore the Constitutional order." That's because the Republicans are like rabid wolverines and are serious about power. That's how, with a minority of the populace behind them, they have taken over the presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and two-thirds of the state legislatures and governorships. (They have long dominated and controlled the military and secret police apparatus.) They have used their control of state legislatures to draw districts that allow them to elect the majority of Representatives to the national House of Representatives with a minority of overall voters. The Democrats are mainly a party of grifters, unserious about power, just looking for profitable sinecures for themselves.

Okay, that last bulletpoint was a long one, but essential. Now on to the body of the essay, which will illustrate the utter cynicism of the Democrats in manipulating people who are duped into relying on them to protect the few hard-won rights we have.

Every election "cycle," which is to say, every two years [3], Democratic political hacks running for office send out tons of political junk mail to citizens, hoping to woo their votes. One of the perennial themes of this propaganda bombardment is how the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, and the need to protect the right to abortion, which was only granted to women by a divided Supreme Court in the Roe vs. Wade decision. That decision was made under pressure from the women's movement, and only granted a limited right, in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the government was deemed to have an "interest" in interfering in personal and medical decisions and exerting control over people's bodies.

In the years since, the organized reactionaries of the U.S., including the Republican Party (GOP), rightwing religious zealots, the Catholic Church bosses, and assorted rightwing media and political cadres, have relentlessly attacked abortion. The terrorist arm of this novement has assassinated doctors and clinic workers with bombs and guns, committed thousands of arson and other attacks on abortion clinics, blockaded clinics and much else. The legal offensive has been even more devastating, with states controlled by the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) virtually eliminating abortion clinics by various legislative encumbrances that in effect persecute the clinics. Some states have functionally outlawed abortion drugs, which in early pregnancy are the cheapest and easiest way to terminate a pregnancy. (By the way, these same creeps who care so much about "unborn children" are the same ones who deport children fleeing gang and state violence south of the U.S. border back to their deaths, who destroy water containers left in the desert for them, who rip children and infants away from their refugee parents and separate them by thousands of miles. They have historically supported the murder of children by fascist death squads in the U.S. empire, and bombing cities and villages in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere that kill large numbers of children, babies, and mothers. So I have a sneaking suspicion that reverence for the sanctity of life isn't their actual motive.)
There IS no abortion provider in almost every town in the U.S. Over 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion facility. Abortion has been stigmatized and isolated, banished from the body of the medical profession. The cowardly medical schools don't even teach their students how to perform abortions,

And what has the Democratic Party been doing all the while the assault on abortion rights has continued unabated for 44 years?

Every election they yell at their voters that the right to abortion is under assault and therefore you must vote for them. And that's pretty much it.

And they ensure that the Supreme Court has a hard rightwing majority, They do this to have a scare tactic to run in elections on, and they do this because they too are fundamentally reactionaries. They serve the corporate oligarchy, which of course wants a reactionary judiciary. They believe in state power over citizens- as the repressive legislation pushed into law by their presidents Truman, Clinton, and Obama proves. Obama gave the government the power to indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in military gulags without charges or legal representation, by government fiat. The government need only label the victims "terrorists." That is now law because of Obama.

Let's dispose of another myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

1]  In a bit of ironically poetic justice, the Democratic candidate who along with his party let the GOP steal the 2000 election, Albert Gore, was one of the Senators who voted to put Scalia on the Supreme Court.

2]  Biden made sure Thomas, an arch-reactionary black man who is an enemy of African-Americans in many ways, including his attacks on affirmative action, made it through the confirmation process by stifling witnesses who would have buttressed Anita Hill's testimony about Thomas' vulgar sexual harassment of his underlings, and more critically Biden privately assured his Democratic Senate colleagues not to believe Hill. The story of  Biden's treachery is told in the book "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. The authors were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time the book was written. Mayer went on to be a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she is today. Abramson became the very first female to ascend to the top editor post at the oh-so-august New York Times.

Abramson's tenure as top editor was short. She accidentally discovered that the publisher and chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has long owned the paper and its other properties and who inherited his job from his Daddy, was chiseling her on her pay, paying her less than her male predecessors. Sulzberger was miffed when Abramson confronted him about this, proceeded to fire her, and then engaged in a campaign of character assassination against her.

So "liberal" of him!

This sexist asshole also hired the scandalous former BBC boss Mark Thompson. After notorious pedophile and BBC star Jimmy Savile died, the BBC had an expose ready to air. That was killed, and in its place a tribute to Savile was aired. Thompson claimed to know nothing about any of this, despite being in charge. Sulzberger thinks this guy is worth paying millions for.
The result so far has been a discrimination suit against Thompson for the toxic environment he's helped create (or perpetuate) at the NY Times. Two black female employees allege in their lawsuit that Thompson introduced an "environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender." It further links his behavior to similar actions by him during his BBC tenure. ["New York Times chief executive accused of discrimination," BBC News, 29 April, 2016.]


3]  In the U.S., one chamber of the national legislature, the "House of Representatives" of the U.S. Congress, stands for election every two years. There are 435 Congressional districts, thus 435 representatives covering all the 50 states. Congressional districts are proportioned roughly by population.

The other chamber of Congress, the U.S. Senate, has 100 Senators, two Senator for each state. This gives grossly disproportional weight and power to sparsely populated states hard rightwing states, and greatly weakens the political weight of populous states. So California has two Senators, and the 20 least populous states, whose total population equals that of California, have 40 Senators. So arch-reactionary states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the two Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and so on, are a powerful structural and institutional factor in making the U.S. a rightwing nation, even though only a minority of the population is rightwing in this putative "democracy."

Senators are elected for six year terms. Every two years, one third of the Senate stands for reelection.
U.S. presidents serve 4 year terms. The years that aren't presidential election years are called "off-year elections."

The terms of Congresspeople and presidents is set out in the Constitution. The Republicans passed a Constitutional amendment in the 1950's limiting the president to two elected terms. This was done in reaction to the fact that the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president four times in a row starting in 1932. Ironically, Republican Dwight David Eisenhower, elected in 1952 and 1956, may well have won a third term if not for this amendment.

The Sham "Suspense" Over Trump's Second Supreme Court Nominee

U.S. corporate propaganda systems (aka "the media," as if it's the one and only media) and politicians are pretending there is something to wonder about which awful, fanatically reactionary ideologue in a judicial robe president Trump will nominate to replace the "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy who announced his retirement from the high court. But it doesn't matter, since Trump long ago announced that ALL his Supreme Court picks will come from a list of career reactionaries approved  by a cabal of conspirators called "The Federalist Society." They are all the same!

Trump has repeatedly announced that when he packs the high court with reactionaries, Roe vs. Wade, the 1974 Supreme Court decision that decreed that women had a limited right to abort pregnancies, would be "automatically" overturned.

What the U.S. corporate media REFUSES to report is the ultra-reactionary nature of the so-called "Federalist Society." As always with reactionary organizations, "the" media disguises their actual political nature and presents them as legitimate and respectable. ("The" media does the same with criminal state arms like the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement, et al.)

Meanwhile, politicians, mainly Democrats, but also one or two "moderate" Republican Senators claim they're going to "protect" Roe v. Wade by... oh, I don't know, it's so vague what they say. They'll urge Trump to appoint someone who won't overturn it. (That's a joke. They're pretending to be divorced from reality when they say that.) Or they'll closely question the nominee about it. (All nominees these days refuse to answer such questions during their confirmation hearings. And the Senators know it.)

The phoniness of these political hacks is unbearable.

Here's Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, speaking July 1st on the NBC Sunday morning political propaganda show "Meet The Press:"

"Well, we, well I would love President Trump to pick somebody in the mainstream of American views who are going to hold up years, and years and years of precedent. The one great thing about our nation is an independent judiciary. In times of intense political debate, the fact that we have that independent judiciary that will uphold the law is key to what is so great about our country. We're a 51/49 Senate. And if he wants to throw an extreme conservative who basically says, "I'm not going to follow precedent -- "

What mealy-mouthed gibberish.

While we're demystifying ruling class rubbish, let's dispose of a myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."