Secret Policeman Mueller Reinforces Hoax of Russian Threat To U.S. "Democracy," Tells Democrats Don't Bother Getting Him to Testify

Those were the two points he hammered home in a political theater performance, a show to which he summoned the media to attend as his audience, and just as audiences do not participate in the performance, Mueller barred them from questioning him. Just be stenographers, you propagandists. Or political theater reviewers.

Just as he did when helping justify aggression against Iraq by the Bush regime, by falsely testifying to Congress, pretending to know that Iraq had prohibited weapons plus ties to Al-Qaeda, once again Mueller spewed lies designed to further a covert yet obvious political agenda. Back then it was furthering the campaign to create the warlike atmosphere to enable the invasion of Iraq. This time it's perpetuating the Big Lie that Russia mounted a major assault on U.S. democracy. (Leave aside the fact that the existence of U.S. "democracy" is itself a myth. The U.S. is a corporate oligarchy, a bourgeois class dictatorship, with a secret police state that is more powerful than the legislature, a legislature that exists to do the bidding of big corporations and rich plutocrats, and that is monopolized by a two-party political cartel.) [1]

Mueller had it both ways about Trump's guilt. Playing it coy, he claimed the reason he didn't accuse Trump of any crimes was because Department of "Justice" policy (set by fiat by itself) is that a sitting president of the U.S. cannot be indicted. (Which flies directly in the face of the oft-repeated political slogan that "no one is above the law, including the president," but that contradiction is NEVER mentions by ANY corporate media propagandist, establishment politician, or state apparatchik, so you're not supposed to THINK the most obvious thing, once again.) Talking out of the other side of his mouth, he pointedly said that wasn't an exoneration either. So guilty as NOT charged, I guess. He was miffed that Trump's hand-picked Attorney General, William "Maximum Authoritarianism" Barr, spun the Mueller report as exoneration of Trump. But the U.S. Constitution does not bar indictment of a president. It provides the mechanism of impeachment on the obvious presumption that a president would be able to block his own prosecution by the executive branch he controls. And Kenneth Starr, another special prosecutor and a GOP hitman, had no problem accusing President Bill Clinton of crimes in his report, which he turned over to Congress where the GOP-controlled House of Representatives duly impeached Clinton. (The Senate fell short of the 2/3rds majority needed to convict and remove Clinton from office.)

Mueller disingenuously said it would be "unfair" to Trump to accuse him of crimes without Trump having the option to legally clear himself. As if the report was an indictment, which it is NOT. He would have been perfectly free to accuse Trump of crimes in a report that isn't an indictment without violating DO"J" absurd Can't Indict A President policy. As for Trump somehow being unable to "clear" himself, perhaps it has escaped Mueller's notice, but Trump has the biggest bully pulpit in the nation (indeed in the world) and uses Twitter several times a day as a mega-bullhorn, the noise of which is amplified daily by U.S. media quoting it. So Trump is hardly prevented from replying to anything in the Mueller report.

Speaking of people who will never have a chance to clear themselves, and how unfair that is, what about the Russian spam farm people Mueller indicted? Seeing how adept U.S. courts are in political frame-ups, and seeing the legal crucifixions of Viktor Bout and Maria Buttina, it is obvious that the U.S. can convict anyone it targets (Julian Assange is next!) so that the Russian defendants have no choice but to stay in Russia instead of subjecting themselves to a U.S.kangaroo  political court with a foregone conclusion. By the way, Mueller dropped that indictment like a bomb on the eve of Trump meeting with Putin, with obvious political intent to affect the meeting. But "Bob" Mueller is a "straight arrow!" Just ask anyone in the power elite!

Mueller could have written that Trump broke the law, or there was evidence of crimes, but he was barred by DO"J" policy from indicting the president. Instead he's playing to both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats. Both are taking what they want from the Mueller report and from Mueller's stunt performance. And both have a real basis for doing so, thanks to Mueller's deliberately mealy-mouthed evasions and obliqueness. He didn't accuse Trump of any crimes, even though the point of the two-year-long exercise was to determine that one way or the other. On the other hand, he says he didn't exonerate Trump. Instead he persecuted a couple of dozen marginal figures who had brief ties to Trump, destroyed Paul Manafort, and most consequentially bolstered the Big Lie of "massive Russian election meddling."

EVERYONE in the U.S. political establishment agrees that there was MASSIVE Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, a whopping Big Lie that rivals any Big Lie in world history. This lie will continue to mold U.S. policy towards Russia for years, perhaps decades to come. And only ill will come of the U.S. pretending to be victimized by Russia. The reality is the reverse, of course, with the U.S. constantly punishing Russia with more and more sanctions, and waging economic warfare, for example by trying to sabotage Germany's agreement with Russia for a gas pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Europe.

What Mueller did was rather craven but perfectly reflects the political crosscurrents. He positioned his "report" and himself to protect himself from attack by either faction of the two-party political cartel, and artfully gave each faction, Republican and Democratic, something they could seize on. Mueller, who rose to the top of the Deep State apparatus as FBI secret police chief, is a consummate political animal. [2]

Numerous U.S. presidents have broken U.S. laws countless times. And forget about international law. The U.S. has contempt for that. except when it can cynically use it to beat an adversary nation over the head with it. So U.S. presidents are not merely "above" the law, they are virtually immune, with only rare exceptions.

Just a few examples of outrageous presidential criminality: Trump's "favorite president," Andrew Jackson, ignored a Supreme Court ruling upholding the treaty rights of Native Americans in the Southeast and sent 16,000 men, women, and children on a death march, killing 4,000 of them on the so-called Trail of Tears, as they were forced to walk from Florida and Georgia to Oklahoma, a trek of about 1,500 miles. And the second president, John Adams, had laws, the Alien and Sedition acts, which turned the Bill of Rights into useless verbiage, imprisoning publishers of newspapers who criticized him. 

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (and John Kennedy too) waged undeclared war on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia, which were "secretly" bombed- i.e. U.S., but not foreign media, refused to report it- thus "secret" from the duped American public who get their "news" from corporate propaganda organs.

Ronald Reagan and his henchmen broke various laws in the Iran-Contra scheme, by which they funded international terrorism against Nicaragua.

There are too many more examples to cite.

Mueller's other big theme was making it clear he would add nothing to what was already in the report and that therefore the Democrats shouldn't bother getting him to testify to House Committees. Everything he has to say was already in the report, he insisted. Which is ridiculous. Of COURSE there are questions to ask! Like how he arrived at his various decisions. And the evidentiary basis for the reports "findings." Trump's handpicked Attorney General William Barr refuses to provide Congress with an uncensored version of the report and the supporting documentation. (They hate saying "censored," so they say "redacted," just an evasive way of saying "censored," like "enhanced interrogation technique" obfuscates "torture.")

The Democrats, instead of focusing on the awful policies of Trump, instead are still angling to unseat him in the 2020 election with this ginned up "Russian collusion" campaign. One irony is that Clinton paid for the "Steele Dossier," a fantastical piece of disinformation by a former MI6 British secret policeman which cites as sources Kremlin officials! So WHO got help from Russia! And this dossier was fraudulently used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to start a so-called foreign counterintelligence investigation targeting Trump campaign people like Carter Page. The secret police dripped factoids to undermine Trump in the media. And despite their proven hostility and adversarial posture towards Trump, media propagandists and Democratic political hacks regularly attack him for "siding with Putin" (or others) "against his own intelligence agencies." 

They are hardly "his own" agencies. They're his enemies! Not to defend Trump: a pox on ALL their venal houses!

The reason the Democrats DON'T criticize Trump for his actual evil policies (excepting the persecution of Hispanic migrant issue, which the Democrats are using ONLY to curry favor with Hispanic voters- Trump's policies are merely an intensification of Obama's, and the Democrats haven't made much of the murders of migrant children by medical neglect and indifference), is that they FAVOR those policies. They don't really mind gargantuan tax cuts for corporations and the rich, who are their real constituents. They are enthusiastically beating the drums for the U.S. coup effort in Venezuela. They are indifferent to the destructiveness of Trump's anti-environment policies. However on foreign policy they want him to be even more hostile to Russia- apparently words matter more than actions to the Democrats. The fact is that Trump's actions have been highly hostile to Russia. I already cited the matter of the gas pipeline project with Germany, which Trump's ambassador has been aggressively trying to kill. There was the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. The ratcheting up of sanctions. Sending lethal military aid to the Kiev cabal in Ukraine, something Obama refrained from doing. Supporting opposite sites in the Syrian civil war. And now on opposite sides in Venezuela. Trump has actually done nothing FOR Russia, except be verbally polite to Putin and accept Putin's denial of election "meddling." (The "meddling" was so inconsequential as to not be worth mentioning. But the U.S. politico-media system has inflated a nothingburger into a gigantic propaganda balloon. The universe hasn't seen such a huge expansion from nothingness since the Big Bang that created the universe!)

Like this guy below, who insists that the fabricated Russian "hack" of the DNC server was JUST LIKE THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR! He's Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a "liberal" from New York City (a fanatical enemy of the Palestinian people, by the way). You'll read more about him in the footnotes below.

Nadler interpreted Mueller's little speech thusly: "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system."  And that "Trump welcomed it." "The president is lying about Mueller's conclusions" of no collusion or obstruction. [No he's not. Mueller didn't SAY Trump obstructed "justice," and he definitively concluded the Trump campaign did NOT conspire with Russia or Russians.] Nadler went on to take a swipe at lifelong GOP apparatchik William Barr: "The Attorney General is lying about that too."

Well Jerry, I got news for you. You, your party, the "intelligence community," and the GOP are all FULL OF IT. The Great Russiagate Hoax is just that. Once in a blue moon Trump is right about something. 

This is one of those rare times. 

Self-Styled Grand Inquisitor Jerrold Nadler

Donald J. Trump. He's so innocent, says he! (And his stooges, flunkies, and flacks all agree!)

1] I don't want to go off on too long of a tangent, so for now I'll just briefly illustrate how exiguous the Russian "effort" to "elect Trump" was. It consisted of the false claim that they gave damning Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, exposing Hillary Clinton's mendacity by revealing just what she said in her secret speech to Goldman Sachs that she had refused to release, and how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under the control of Clinton agent Debbie Wasserman Schultz, used underhanded methods to tilt the primaries for Clinton and against Senator Bernard Sanders. Those emails made the American electorate better informed! So far from being an "attack on our democracy," it made for BETTER democracy, such as it even exists in the U.S. Unless you understand "our democracy" in the way "La Cosa Nostra" is understood, "Our Thing." "Our democracy" means the criminal system of power in which a two-party political cartel maintains monopoly political power for the benefit of themselves, their corporate masters, the military-industrial complex, and the Deep State secret police agencies. But career NSA technical experts (now retired) William Binney and Kurt Wiebe have proven that the DNC emails were NOT downloaded over the Internet, but were copied to a flash drive. Nor has any evidence at all ever been presented by the "intelligence community," establishment politicians, or the pseudo-journalists who act as conduits for secret police disinformation and Democratic Party propaganda to substantiate their CLAIM that this occurred. Instead it is assumed a priori as a fact, and anyone who so much as asks for evidence is smeared as a Russian agent, pawn, or stooge.

As for the effect of those emails on the outcome, they apparently had none. They were released in July 2016. In October 2016 Clinton was ahead in the polls by a comfortable 14%. Then in late October, then-FBI secret police chief James Comey announced that the investigation into the Clinton private server scandal was alive again because the FBI found more State Department emails, this time on a device belonging to officially disgraced and ridiculed former Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York City. (Weiner had an irresistible compulsion to send women photos of his genitalia via the Internet.) The emails turned out to be mere copies of previously examined ones, but the effect on Clinton's poll numbers was startling- dropping her to a lead of only 3.5% (same as the typical polling margin of error) to dead even with Trump. On Election Day ten days later in November, she won by 2.9 million votes, but lost because of the absurd and archaic U.S. electoral college. (There is good evidence the GOP stole the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.) 

Instead of blaming Comey, the Electoral College, GOP voter suppression and cheating, the Democrats decided to falsely blame the Russians. The GOP has obvious reasons to go along with this. And the corporate propaganda, which also wants to preserve the reactionary Electoral College system and hide GOP election malfeasance, is happy to scapegoat Russia. 

The other evidence that can be adduced to claim extensive Russian "meddling" in sacred U.S. "democracy" was $50,000 spent on Facebook ads before the election, and $4,700 spent on all Google platform, including youtube. This according to the testimony of Google's CEO to Nadler's Judiciary Committee, when Nadler himself asked. So that's something. When weighed against the combined $1 BILLION ($1,000,000,000) spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, plus additional gargantuan sums spent by other U.S. persons and entities, plus the estimates $2 BILLION worth of free air time that "the" media bestowed on Trump, so fascinating did and do they find him, it is extremely risible to be squealing about "massive" Russian "interference." 

In light of all this, you can see how cynical, farcical, and just plain demented is the insistence that Russia is "undermining our democracy." It would be a bad joke if they weren't so serious and persistent in perpetuating this Big Lie.

2] Trump and his lackeys reiterated the "no collusion no conspiracy" theme. Trump himself said no charge equals innocence. (If he'd been acquitted at trial- or if the Democrats impeach him and the Senate doesn't convict, and it is impossible to imagine the necessary two/thirds of Senators voting to convict, especially with a Republican majority in the Senate- that would be a verdict of "not guilty." Whether "not guilty" equals "innocent" is a semi-Talmudic question.

The Democrats continued to interpret this latest manifestation of Muellerism their way, both in regards to Trump and the frame-up of Russia as guilty of "attacking" so-called "American democracy." For example, one of the worst Russiagaters, who has said the mythical Russian "hack" of the DNC computer server was the same thing as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor (!), the screwball political hack Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York City, who now sits as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, hysterically opined after The Mueller Show that "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system." 

I'll tell you a country attacking another nation's political system: the U.S. attacking the Venezuelan government, trying to overturn the result of the last election there by force, violence, and economic warfare. Oh, and the U.S. does that sort of thing all the time. With Nadler's full-throated support.

Political Barnacle Theresa May Finally Being Pried Off Prime Minister's Office

The awful shrewish reactionary Theresa May has finally lost her tenacious grip on power. Having failed four, or five, or six,  or however many times it was, to get the British Parliament to approve the agreement she negotiated with the European Union on the exit of Britain from that Union (so-called Brexit, short for British exit), she has finally reached a political dead end. Her party, the vicious "Conservative" Party, known as the Tories, will pick a new leader, and since they have control of Parliament (in alliance with a small ultra-reactionary party from Northern Ireland) that leader will be the next Prime Minister.

May announced that she will officially resign on June 7. However she won't be gone until late July, when the new PM is settled on.

May, in her brief farewell address, played the faux feminist card, noting that she was the second female PM, and avowing she won't be the last. As if she and her female predecessor, the fascist-loving Margaret Thatcher, have a right to lay claim to progressive credentials, which is what feminism is about.

Thatcher raised a ruckus when the murderous fascist military dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was briefly detained in Britain on a Spanish arrest warrant for the Spanish citizens he murdered. The UK ultimately refused to honor the arrest warrant from fellow EU member Spain. Thatcher posed for photos with the blood-soaked dictator, beaming warmly at him.

As for May, in her previous power job as so-called Home Secretary, she worked assiduously to make Britain an even more repressive secret police state than it already is, including by pushing oppressive "anti-terrorist" (read: anti-dissident) legislation. Her slashing of firemen contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire massacre, along with the Tories' anti-poor policies which led to flammable aluminum siding used on the Tower, creating a potential torch. 79 people died. But they were poor and "non-white," so no big deal. Then Prime Minister May never bothered meeting with the survivors.

In her brief resignation speech, May almost broke into tears at the end, that's how sorry she felt for herself just because she can't be Prime Minister for life. She ran inside to do her blubbering out of public view.

Next she'll have a permanent seat in the House of "Lords," that decrepit relic of British aristocracy, a persistent feature of a quasi-Medieval class system in that benighted land of privilege that absurdly advertises itself as the epitome of democracy. (They don't even have a constitution!)

Now that May's power-greedy fingers have finally been pried loose from the PM's office- she was nothing if not tenacious about clinging to power- the next PM will be in the same impossible position vis a vis Brexit. The politicians in Parliament of both major parties (Conservative and Labour) are internally divided about leaving the EU, despite the public referendum that voted to leave several years ago. And those who want to honor the vote of the public are split between those who want a "hard" Brexit, that is, just leave without any agreements on border controls, trade, and more, and those who want a "soft" one, that is, some arrangements with the EU to soften the economic blow that the "hard" Brexiteers are oblivious to. May spent two years negotiating the best deal the EU would agree to, and the EU's current position is that there will not a renegotiation- another illusion of unrealistic politicians and opinionators who refuse to accept reality. In particular, they are allergic to the part of the exit agreement May reached that provides for modified border controls between Ireland, an EU member, and the chunk of the island that is Ireland that is the British territory of Northern Ireland. Instituting full-blown customs checks on that border has major negative economic and social ramifications for both Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Anyway, here's a foul farewell to Theresa May, Wicked Witch of Downing Street.

Oh suck it up, Crybaby!

Trump Is To Democrats As Lucy Is To Charlie Brown.

In the comic strip "Peanuts," the child character Lucy lures Charlie Brown into practicing a football kickoff by holding it upright on the ground and then pulling it away just as he takes a running kick, landing flat on his back.

A running theme over the years of the strip (which was also a TV show and numerous products over the years) is Lucy repeating the same cruel trick on Charlie over and over. Even though he resists and should know better, he still lets himself be talked into trying to kick the ball, and invariably Lucy yanks it away at the last moment and Charlie Brown lands flat on his back.

Like So.

Trump does the same thing with the Democratic Congressional leadership, periodically luring them into "negotiating" with him, and then pulling the rug out from under them. He even does it to the politicians of his own party in Congress. For example, Republicans in Congress have more than once been misled to believe he agreed to something, only to have them land flat on their backs when he double-crossed them. (This is one of his techniques for establishing interpersonal dominance. He insults, abuses, disrespects people and makes them eat it. Then he'll switch to feeding them superlative compliments, which only puts them in a state of anxious fear of displeasing him. He treats people like abused dogs, and it works.)

Trump just did it again to the Democratic Congressional poohbahs, suckering them into a meeting allegedly to strike a deal to fund "infrastructure," tempting bait to Democratic politicians. (Perhaps irresistible bait.) This even though Trump has previously floated bogus "infrastructure" deals. The last time he used that con man teaser in his carnival barker mode he kept yelling $1.7 TRILLION!" Only it was really only $200 billion in imaginary Federal spending and the rest magically coughed up by the states and private businesses. Absurd. And I'm sure HE knew it was absurd.

So the Democrats were doubly foolish to take the bait. But they did, duly trooping over to the White House at King Trump's invitation to be his duped stooges once again.

And what happened? Trump stomped out of the meeting after only 5 (or 3, accounts vary) minutes. Trump demanded an end to "these phony investigations" or else no deals with the Democrats, ever. He spoke those words in a display of pique in front of the media that he staged immediately after he stormed out of the meeting in a snit. The media was summoned to the Rose Garden of the White House while Trump was in the "meeting." A podium had already been prepared in the Garden, with a sign announcing "No Collusion," a slogan Trump has repeated hundreds of times in denial of secretly working with Russia to win election. 

Extortionate tactics and psychologically disorienting maneuvers are standard operating procedures for Trump.

And just what "investigations" did he mean? All of them, of course. But that includes not just the investigations by the various House of Representative committees (now controlled by Democrats), but also New York State investigations (again, by Democratic politicians) and various investigations by U.S. attorneys as mentioned in the Mueller Report. Those aren't under Democratic Party control.

Trump has been defying House oversight by refusing to allow any executive branch officials to testify or turn over documents. There are currently tug-of-war battles going on between the House and the Trump regime to get Robert Mueller to testify, to get Trump's former lawyer Don McGahn to testify, to get the IRS to turn over Trump's tax returns, and more.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has barred the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, the tax-collecting arm of the U.S. government) from turning over Trump's tax returns. This despite the face that even the IRS's own legal staff says it is illegal for the IRS to refuse to hand over Trump's tax returns to Congress as has been demanded by the House Ways and Means Committee. Mnuchin uses as his excuse to defy the plain language of the law giving Congress this authority that the Congress has no "legitimate legislative interest." (The IRS is part of Treasury.)

The law is quite clear. Congress can obtain any tax returns it requests. It's not up to the Treasury Secretary to decide on the "legitimacy" of the requests.

Oh, and you should know: Mnuchin is an unconvicted felon who is only where he is thanks to Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, who currently wants to be president. Mnuchin controlled a California bank, OneWest, when Harris was California state Attorney General. Her office's staff uncovered 1,000 cases of mortgage foreclosure FRAUD by Mnuchin's bank, and estimated another 1,000 cases existed. She ignored their findings and brought no charges whatsoever. (Entirely coincidentally, Mnuchin donated money to her political campaign committee.) 

So in terms of corruption, ethics, and moral standards, once again we see that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between these two competing factions of the ruling political elite. Think of them as rival criminal gangs, which is fundamentally what they are.

King Trump. There is indeed Method to His Madness.

Trump Proves People Are Cretins By How Easily He Manipulates Them

Donald Trump is transparently venal, corrupt, narcissistic, and one of the world's most obvious liars. Nobody lies more blatantly than he.

And yet, tens of millions of people loyally hang on his every absurd statement, ignoring the contradictions from one breath to the next, as if they're playing Simon Says with him and the object is to just follow along with every silly movement.

Even when Trump directly attacks their own self-interests, these people are benumbed to that fact by the narcotic effect Trump's outré personality has on them.

All he has to do is tweet some balderdash or bloviate some bullshit, and they remain loyal to him, even adoring.

Two examples of this phenomenon were evident on May 14th, 2019.

This morning on the U.S.-Government-created ratio network NPR, the morning "news" show, "Morning Edition, had on the Republican governor of Nebraska, who defended Trump's instigation of a trade war with China, even though it has badly damaged the economic interests of farmers in his state. He said "we" had to hang tough and see it through and he had total faith in Trump.

Now, he wouldn't be taking this position if the voters in his state had turned against Trump. This guy wants to keep getting elected to his cushy job with great medical insurance and pension benefits, which he can use as a springboard to run for the U.S. senate, or hop to a well-paid job as a lobbyist making sure state laws are written for the benefit of specific business interests.

Agriculture is the bread and butter of Nebraska. Apparently the majority of voters there are willing to suffer at Trump's hands, rather like sitting passively in the dentist's chair and enduring the pain.

These are the same people who hate Democrats for trying to give them social programs that would benefit them.


However it must be mentioned that Trump handed farmers affected by the trade war with China a government handout on top of the handouts they already get. (For some reason this isn't "welfare.") Soybean farmers were targeted for handouts.

Nebraska Governor Peter Ricketts, A Proud Trump Supporter

The second example today was the behavior of the speculators and traders to cause the daily gyrations of the stock market (they're mislabeled "investors" in the capitalist media, even though investing is not what they do).

Last week U.S. stock markets gyrated and couldn't seem to decide whether to take seriously the Trump threat to impose 25% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to the U.S., on top of the previous 10% duty on other goods. On some days stocks would plunge and then recoup the losses on the same day. When the tariffs were imposed as stated they would be, overnight Thursday-Friday, stocks fell on Friday but not too much. Apparently the speculators were waiting to see if Trump would pull a rabbit out of his hat or if a trade deal would magically materialize over the weekend despite the impasse over fundamental issues dividing China and the U.S. that clearly won't be resolved quickly. (Especially since the reason for the new tariffs was the U.S. claim that China had backtracked on already agreed to measures.)


The new week started with China imposing retaliatory tariffs, throwing the speculators into a tizzy.
So the stock traders went into a panic on Monday May 13, and market averages fell by 2.4% to 3.4%, their worst decline in four months.

Tuesday morning (May 14), Trump blasted out a flurry of tweets designed to turn around the psychology of the speculators. And he made this pronouncement: The trade war with China was a mere bagatelle, just "we're having a little squabble with China because we've been treated very unfairly" and "we're winning it." (Of course. Trump always wins, remember? The four time bankrupt who's lost billions and had to settle suits over his fraudulent "university" for $25 million is always a winner.)

Well that did the trick. U.S. stocks zoomed up on the open and closed with significant gains of about 1%, although they didn't hold the highs of the day which were up about 1.5%.

So all Trump had to do was call a trade war between the world's two largest economies "a little squabble" and that was enough to reignite giddy optimism.


You see what I mean by "cretins"?

Wednesday May 15 stock markets in Europe and the U.S. weren't sure which way to go so they went both ways, down AND up during trading hours.

Given the manic-depressive nature of those who create the daily swings in stocks, there's no predicting what their collective mood will be tomorrow.

                                     The Irresistible Pied-Piper!

 He who knows how to manipulate cretins, knows how to rule.

Saudi Arabia Cooks Up Gulf Of Tonkin-Style Incident To Incite War With Iran

Here we go. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia claim their oil tankers were attacked in some unspecified way in the Strait of Hormuz. This is reminiscent of the imaginary attack on U.S. Navy ships off the coast of Vietnam that U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson used to get Congress to pass a resolution authorizing the U.S. military to "defend" itself, which Johnson used to send an army to Vietnam ultimately totally 550,000 men and wage a massive aerial bombardment campaign against Vietnam carried out by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy carriers, and U.S. Army helicopters.

Whatever happened- if anything- to those tankers this time, it's doubtful that Iran did it. The last thing Iran wants is war with the U.S.

The timing is quite interesting. A year ago Trump trashed the nuclear agreement that had been painstakingly hammered out over years by the Obama regime, Russia, China, France, Germany, and Britain on one side, with Iran on the other, which put Iran's nuclear enrichment program in mothballs for 15 years and required it to dispose of its 20% enriched uranium and heavy water. The Trump regime has been systematically wrecking the Iranian economy with strangling sanctions. Pompeo has repeatedly declared the goal of reducing Iran's oil exports to zero.

Recently the sanctions have been tightened more, with the U.S. declaring that no other nation would be allowed to import Iranian oil, under penalty of U.S. punishment. This applied even to China.
Europe has made empty promises to allow Iran to trade and import normally, but in practice has knuckled under to U.S. sanctions. Because the U.S. controls the world financial system, there is currently no way to conduct international trade that the U.S. bans.

Iran agreed to the deal in return for the lifting of sanctions. Instead the sanctions have gotten worse, while Iran has been fully compliant with the agreement, as verified by 14 inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran finally ran out of patience this month, after a year of this crap, and told the Europeans that they had 60 days to fulfill their promises to find a way for Iran to import good and export oil. The Europeans arrogantly rejected what they called Iran's "ultimatum." Stooges of the U.S. as always. Iran said it would begin by ceasing sale of its enriched uranium and heavy water, and retain them in country.

Saudi Arabia, it's Arabian peninsula lackey oil sheikdoms, and Israel have been trying for years to finagle the U.S. into going to war against Iran and overthrowing the regime. But Iran is not Iraq. It has three times the population, is much larger in land area, and unlike Iraq it has an intact military. It also has allies in the region, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, which can make problems for Israel.

Just days ago, Israel slipped the U.S. an "intelligence assessment" beating the drum about the Iranian "threat." John Bolton, the fanatical, rabid imperialist whom Trump anointed "National Security Adviser," (who heads the "National Security Council," which brings together the aggressive arms of the U.S. Imperialist state to plot attacks around the world- the Pentagon, CIA, State and Treasury Departments), immediately announced that a carrier battle group and B-52 bombers (giant 8-engine jets that were used to ravage Vietnam) were being sent to counter Iranian "threats." Trump's Secretary of State, the thuggish, vulgar liar Michael Pompeo, also blustered that Iran would pay if it attacked "American interests" (undefined as always) or "our allies." (Guess who? Saudi Arabia and Israel.)

And now we have this "attack" on tankers. Iran immediately issued a statement expressing worry about the alleged incident.

It's such an obvious set-up.

Joe Biden In Pictures: The Race for 2020!

And what a racy race it is, if you catch my drift!

Everybody wants Joe to be the Democrats' nominee for president. ("Everybody" meaning anybody who's anybody living in the reinforced titanium bubble for the elite and protected by the world's most powerful military and secret police machinery.) Joe's a pillar of the political establishment who can be counted on to protect corporate oligarchy and U.S. imperialism.

And Joe Biden is a really gregarious, personable, downright likable guy, as this photo essay will show you!

Joe is renowned as quite the Ladies' Man Around Town. The Town being the Most Important Town In The World, Capital City of The Greatest Empire In Human History. Innumerable women from both high and not-so-high stations in society can attest to his winning ways with women.

DAMN you smell good Girl! -Biden follows diplomatic protocol with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseuf, the lucky recipient of Joe's attentions on the occasion of a state visit. Sure beats being tortured in a fascist dungeon under a military dictatorship set up by the U.S.! Let's call it our way of making it up to you, Dilma!

You're never too young to be the lucky recipient of Joe's "affection." He's just a loviin' guy with a "hands on" approach to life! (Oh, all those draconian "crime" laws he played the lead role in passing that doubled the prison population in a decade? Hey, everybody makes mistakes! And sure, he wrote the PATRIOT ACT, but everybody else voted for it! C'mon, gimme a break! Don't judge me by my political actions! Judge me by how I make people feel!)

Gimme a kiss, Loverboy! -Joe don't discriminate by gender! Easy to see why he came out for gay rights before that stuffed shirt Obama! (He's so "progressive"!)

Don't Believe The Children! -Senator Chris Coons swears his daughter was enjoying this! See? Just look at her face! She's lovin' it!! (Leaning away is avoidance behavior, you say? Naw, she was just playing hard to get!)

Bikers not cool with Biden messin' with their woman, but what can you do? Can't kick his ass 'cause, 

you know, Secret Service and all...

Up against the wall, bitch! -Petty Anita Hill still holds a grudge just because Biden didn't believe her testimony about Clarence Thomas in 1991 (and told the other Senators not to believe her, and blocked other witnesses from testifying, and let his Republican colleague "friends" publicly ream her out as a tramp and a hysteric and a fabricator), but Biden is so understanding that he's almost apologized to her, just 'cause he's running for president now. And hey, we got a great Supreme Court Justice thanks to Joe!

He may look Black, but don't be fooled! Underneath the skin is a white segregationist. (He hates affirmative action, for one thing!)

Submit to My Touch, All Ye Comely Lasses Who Come Before Me! Joseph R. Biden, Jr., magnanimously announces that he is Available to Be Our President in 2020. Rejoice!

I've got my eye on YOU! You're NEXT! -Looks like SOMEBODY'S gonna get poked! Might even be YOU! (Or ALL of us!)

When you're powerful, they let you do it! You can get away with anything! 

Biden 2020!

   The corporate oligarchic power establishment that rules the U.S. is trying to set up a contest for presidential power between a pussy-grabber and a man who grabs just about anything else. Trump, who in his own words, "grabs women by the pussy" because, as he explained to a cackling Billy Bush (yes, one of those Bushes, the dynastic ruling class criminal clan) "when you're a star they let you do it . You can do anything. Grab then by the pussy. You can do anything." And Biden, who had NO IDEA it wasn't perfectly within social norms to stroke, caress, sniff, and kiss strange women and children. I mean, all of a sudden that became unacceptable! Who knew you weren't supposed to do that? Why EVERYONE USED to do it! 

   Biden NOW claims he "gets it," even though it's obvious by all the verbiage he's crafted and said or had issued for him, definitely does NOT get it. Including making a joke out of it with his appearance before a friendly audience by using children as stage props and announcing that the child "gave permission" for him to hug him. As if a young child wouldn't be cowed and intimidated by a powerful adult "asking" if he could hug him. Not too many children acculturated in this authoritarian culture would say "No." The message was clearly, Oh you people are making a big deal out of nothing.

  Well, it certainly is less of a big deal than the career he's made out of passing repressive laws, exploding the prison population, voting for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, his racist alliances with the likes of Strom Thurmond, his vociferous opposition to school integration, and a lot of other vileness that has made the U.S. more oppressive and even more of an imperialist scourge around the world.

What's In Store For Julian Assange

Julian Assange will be forced to "confess" falsely that Russia gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails in return for "leniency." Read on:

The U.S. and its foreign government stooges have victimized Julian Assange for the past decade. But their hunger to punish Assange is nowhere near sated yet.

With the seizure of Assange by the British police, the U.S.' clutches are inexorably closing around him. The smarmy and dishonest president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, who duped his predecessor Rafael Correa into helping him become president (Moreno has repaid the favor by bringing bogus criminal charges against Correa, forcing him into exile) made a corrupt bargain with the U.S. to obtain loans from the International Monetary Fund (which his poor population will have to pay back, with interest) and other secret favors to turn on Assange (who Correa granted asylum and Ecuadorean citizenship to), denouncing Assange publicly and calling in the British police to haul him into British captivity. (A yearlong campaign by the Moreno regime to make Assange's life as miserable as possible inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Assange has been trapped by the British on orders of their U.S. masters for the last 7 years, failed to induce Assange to turn himself over to the tender mercies of the U.S.)

Thus the years-long nefarious scheme by the U.S. to dig its claws into Assange is reaching its goal. Who says the U.S. can't be patient?

Now, what does the U.S. want from Julian Assange? Besides silencing him and stopping the revelation of U.S. crimes by WikiLeaks? What does Assange have to "trade" to the U.S. in return for "leniency?"

"Cooperation." But what form would such "cooperation" take?

It is now established dogma in U.S. mythology that Russia "hacked" the computer of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and engaged in "massive" "interference" with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a sacrilege against Holy American Democracy. This is contemptibly laughable on numerous grounds, as well as factually false. The U.S. is a corporate oligarchy and bourgeois class dictatorship. The Congress is bought and paid for by these dominant economic players, and the Congress enacts laws to serve the interests of the very rich and large corporations. The elections themselves involve a lot of vote stealing and voter suppression and all manner of dirty tricks. The U.S. media and election officials connive to ensure that candidates from parties outside the two-party political cartel are marginalized to the maximum degree.  Billions were spent on manipulating the minds of the American people by the two oligarchical political parties and various shadowy organizations set up by rich plutocrats. Trump got billions in free air time from "the" media.

Other ways in which this canard is repulsive in its cynicism is the fact that the U.S. has intervened in other nations' elections AT LEAST 81 times since 1945- and in ways that were effective, unlike what Russia is said to have done. (Not to mention U.S. invasions, coups, and other forms of subversion to change governments it didn't like.) 

The DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks in July, 2016. In OCTOBER 2016, Clinton was ahead of Trump in the polls by 14%. In late October, FBI chief James Comey announced that emails related to the investigation of the private server Clinton used as Secretary of State under President Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama were found on a device belonging to disgraced penis-texter Anthony Weiner. (It turned out they were merely copies of already-discovered emails, a big nothing.) That caused a big change in the polls, to between dead even and a 3.5% lead for Clinton (within the polling margin of error). Ultimately Clinton won by 2.9 million votes, so Trump became president because of the Electoral College. That's how it works in the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Democracy.

Thus did Russian steal the election for Trump.

But I did leave a few things out.  Russia spent $4,700 on all Google's platform's, including Youtube, according to the Congressional testimony of Google's CEO. And there was some drop-in-the-ocean Facebook activity by Russia, like pictures of Satan arm-wresting Jesus, and an anti-masturbation meme. This span and clickbait from a Russian troll farm was elevated into a devastatingly effective Russian election meddling operation by the unholy alliance of the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the anti-Trump elements of the Deep State.

As to the factual basis for what has become a "fact" taken for granted- that Russia "hacked the DNC computer," there is none. There is only the assertion by the FBI and CIA that it did. There has never been any evidence provided. And in fact there is evidence conclusively proving that the assertion is false.

The DNC refused to allow any government agency to examine their computer. The FBI just took the DNC's word for it that "Russia hacked" it. Considering the accusation that a "hostile foreign power" committed a computer crime and "meddled" in a U.S. election, this is amazing. What kind of "investigation" is this? 

Tellingly, the NSA doesn't assert that Russia hacked it. The NSA is the only agency that, absent examining the computer server, could determine if Russia had intruded and downloaded data, because the NSA captures and stores all Internet traffic in the U.S. and most of that outside it.

Two retired career NSA veterans with years of technical expertise, William Binney and Kurt Wiebe, then analyzed the speed at which the DNC emails were downloaded, and found it would have been impossible to transfer them over the Internet at anywhere near the speed they were downloaded at. Rather it was the speed copying the emails to a flash drive plugged into the computer system.

Case closed. But there's even more. There's a likely person who did it.

Seth Rich was a young man who worked for the DNC. He was murdered in Washington, D.C. in what the police say was a "botched robbery." "Botched" because nothing was stolen from him. Not his cellphone, not his wallet, not his watch.

Two men shot him in the back a few steps from his home. No arrests have been made.

WikiLeaks put out a $25,000 reward on the case. Out of all the murders in the U.S., in the whole world, they offered a reward in just this one murder case. And in a Dutch television interview, Assange walked right up to the line of saying that Rich was the source of the DNC emails.

But you want me to believe, indeed demand I believe, that "Russia hacked the DNC's computer." And if I refuse to swallow your propaganda and go along with your hoax, that makes me a Russian agent and/or a kook.

Sorry, no sale. Go ahead and slander me.

Now, what about What's In Store For Julian Assange?

Julian Assange has repeatedly denied that WikiLeaks got the DNC emails from Russia. The "Mueller Report" repeats without evidence the FBI-CIA ASSERTION that Russia "hacked" the DNC server, and states that Assange LIED in denying this. Those are now Official Facts. Totally false, but unchallengeable "facts."

Here's something that surprised me, something that in days of blather now that the (censored) report has been released hasn't even been mentioned in "the" media:

The title of the "Mueller Report" is "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election."

Nothing about Trump or his campaign in that. So what has ended up as the target here?

Russia. As the table of contents, and the mass of Russian individuals named in the report, makes clear.

So it's obvious that both rival wings of the two-party political cartel, the Deep State, and most of the major media all agree on a Big Lie, "Russian election meddling." Something for which there is virtually no evidence.

Thus "evidence" would certainly be useful to them.

Given this political context, and the demented viciousness and relentless fanaticism of the U.S. power system, here's what I predict they're going to do to Julian Assange. They're going to offer him a choice. "Cooperate," and get a "light" sentence of "only" twenty years for the numerous charges they're gonna heap on his shoulders under draconian, repressive U.S. "law," or die in a U.S. "Supermax" prison, a psychological torture center designed to isolate political prisoners from the world.

"Cooperation" means not just betraying WikiLeaks internal structure and methods in detail, but most important politically, it means "confessing" to a lie, the Big Lie, that WikiLeaks got "hacked" emails "from Russia." And furthermore, we're gonna drag you into Grand Jury star chamber proceedings and Congressional hearings and maybe criminal trials and you're gonna degrade and humiliate yourself and lose the respect of your admirers and colleagues (you won't have any self-respect left) and make you lie and lie and lie about Russia and WikiLeaks, discredit the very organization you worked so hard to nurture, disgrace yourself and turn your back on your life's mission of speaking truth to power, in return we'll only make you live in a tiny cell by yourself, cut off from the world, for twenty years instead of for the rest of your life. (If you even survive longer than twenty years.)

What a choice.

Abandoned by the new, venal Ecuadorean government, by his homeland Australia, a lickspittle of a nation that can't get its tongue far enough up the asshole of the U.S. (or arsehole, if you prefer), an object of opprobrium in "Western" propaganda media, and target of relentless hatred by the U.S. imperialist power establishment, Assange's only allies are scattered dissidents, a handful of lawyers, and compromised "civil liberties" organizations that so far only weakly mewl tepid objections to this vicious repression.  (This means you, ACLU.) Absent an unexpected change in the correlation of forces (a useful term despite its "Marxist" "taint"), Assange's fate looks grim.

Assange helped reveal numerous crimes against humanity and corruption by numerous governments. It is a revealing commentary on the state of so-called "civilization" that the result isn't accolades, awards, and support for him and for WikiLeaks but an all-out attempt to crush him completely, silence him for life, and to destroy WikiLeaks.

I'm imagining the agony Julian's loving mother is going through right now. She made the "mistake" of raising an ethical son. That's something very dangerous to do in the "Free World."

Possibly the last photo we'll be allowed to see of Julian Assange for quite a while.

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good synopsis on Julian Assange, at least as of this writing before secret police agents sabotage it again. Just click on this bold text.

Notre-Dame Fire a Great Gift for Neoliberal French President Macron

This couldn't be better for Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, he of the pretentious rich person's two middle names.

For five months now, the Yellow Vest street protest movement has been pressuring Macron and his regime, ripping the facade off his political scam, exposing deep fissures in French society, and revealing the simmering discontent under his neoliberal rule.

Now the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, an iconic symbol of the French nation, will at least temporarily silence the protests as the nation unites as one. Rulers like nothing better than a populace in lockstep conformity. All dissent is for the time being squelched, something months of police violence, including blinding and maiming protesters and killing an elderly woman in her apartment from a supposedly errant police projectile, was unable to achieve. All will now "come together" in common cause, worshipping an old cathedral and watching the repair effort, an effort that will be led rhetorically and mediawise by- guess who?

So just as, in the immortal words of serial sex offender Leslie Moonves, Trump may be bad for America but he's great for CBS, so the cathedral fire may be bad for an old church and French pride, but it's great for one Macron.

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, President of the French Republic. 

Vive la Ruling Neoliberal Elite!

Trump's Flip-Flops on WikiLeaks

First he wanted Julian Assange to be executed. Then during his presidential campaign, after WikiLeaks published emails from the Democratic National Committee showing how the DNC rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders (all the while pretending to be neutral), and the text of the revealing secret  speech Clinton gave to a Goldman Sachs conference in which she told them in effect Ignore what I tell the dumb rube voters, I'm really on your side. And high finance knows best how to be regulated, Trump publicly proclaimed "WikiLeaks! I love Wikileaks!" 141 times. [1]

Now that the U.S. has bribed the weak and corrupt Ecuadorean president Lenin "The Treacherous Weasel" Moreno to hand Assange over to the British for extradition to the U.S., Trump feigns ignorance of WikiLeaks.  "II  know nothing," he says, as if channeling Sergeant Hans Schultz from the old TV comedy Hogan's Heroes. [2]

Trump's fans are the same kind of cretins who enjoy Wrestlemania, a crude and vulgar theater of the absurd which Trump played himself in. His presidency is a Wrestlemania presidency, a regime of the most outlandish, outrageous  behavior. As in Wrestlemania, rules exist only to be violated in the most brazen and blatant ways.

Unfortunately politics and power is real life, not fantasy, and the Trump regime has been incredibly destructive and meted out misery to many. His loyal followers indeed are "deplorable," in fact they are despicable. They are fully morally responsible for his actions. His nature and plans were plain to see during a lengthy presidential campaign, during which he constantly directed racist vituperations at Hispanics, contradicted himself repeatedly, and told obvious, even ridiculous lies nonstop. Leftists should stop making excuses for those who voted for him. Contrary to their analysis, they had a progressive alternative if progressive policies were there goal- the Green Party. Which only got 2% of the popular vote. That truly is deplorable.

"No matter what I do or say, I always come up smelling like roses."

1] 141 times according to NPR correspondent Mara Liasson on the Brian Lehrer radio show, April 15, 2019.

2] Trump feigns ignorance of WikiLeaks. [video]

British Parliament Continues Its Two-Year Brexit Tantrum

After years of pressure led by nationalistic Tories, the reactionary British tabloids, and the so-called United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the British government of then prime minister David Cameron, a Conservative (Tory) member, felt compelled to finally allow the public to vote in 2016 on a referendum on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union (EU), or leave, so-called "Brexit," short for British Exit.

Much to the surprise and chagrin of much of the bourgeois establishment in Britain, Europe, and the U.S., Brexit won with 51.9% of the vote. [1]

I won't go into the whys and wherefors here as that's off the topic a bit.

Under EU law, Britain had two years to formally leave the EU. Now the deadline has arrived.

The British Parliament has in the past couple of weeks formally voted to reject remaining in the European Union, has voted to reject leaving the EU without an exit deal, AND has voted to reject the deal that took two years to negotiate and renegotiate.

In other words, the Members of Parliament (MPs) reject everything. They in effect reject BOTH leaving and remaining.

Why do I say the British MPs are having a tantrum over Brexit? Because, like two-year-olds, they are demanding something they obviously can't have, and won't stop demanding it. Namely, that Britain can have a better deal outside of the EU than as a member!

That is completely, totally unrealistic.

But they refuse to accept that.

The British Brexiteers want all the benefits of EU membership with none of the responsibilities or obligations or costs. It would be suicidal for the EU to agree to such a ridiculous demand, as it would create a cascade of other member states demanding the same treatment for themselves.

The Tantrumeers believe that, contrary to the old saw, that they CAN "have your cake and eat it too," as one of the main leaders of the Brexit movement, the Tory buffoon and dodgy former "journalist" Boris "Bojo The Clown" Johnson actually asserted.

Perhaps they imagine they are still a globally dominant power that can force others to accede to their unreasonable demands.

I have an idea. They've beaten the French and the Germans in past wars (with a LOT of help in the case of the Germans)- why not try THAT again?

Maybe that's what former Tory prime minister David Cameron meant when he threatened in the campaign leading up to the referendum on Brexit that voting to leave the EU would lead to "World War III."

Or maybe he was just being demagogic, like the pro-Brexit camp, which was even worse.

The EU leaders, whose exasperation has started to show, granted the British an extension to exit the Union, which by treaty was supposed to occur in two years, in March just ended, so the new deadline is in April. With the demand that since Britain is still in the Union, it must elect members to the toothless show legislature, the so-called "European Parliament." (In the past, the British members elected to that body were dominated by haters of that body, members of UKIP, led by the articulate and clever rascal Nigel Farage, the Trump-loving reactionary head of UKIP , who was their spokesman in the European Parliament in which role he delighted in making speeches on the floor insulting the body and the various EU poohbahs while they sat there taking it.

The current Tory prime minister, Theresa May, has proven to be a rigid and politically inept, indeed tone-deaf, politician. But the problem here isn't her incompetence. It is the total unrealism of Brexiteers, plus the fact that the Parliament is divided within itself in various ways, and both major parties, Labour and Conservative, are divided internally between pro-Brexiteers and Remainers, and within those subgroups in each party, those willing to take the deal on offer and those not, those wanting a "hard" exit with no deal and those who think that Britain can somehow extort a more favorable deal out of the EU at this late date,and among Remainers, those who favor a "do-over" of the referendum, and those who do not.

It's a mess, but those who will pay most of the cost are the British, as major corporations are already announcing plans to pick up and move to the continent. The imposition of border controls adds friction and costs to cross-border commerce, increasing prices.

Being able to keep out workers from the continent, and freedom from EU rules on health, safety, labor rights, pollution, product standards, etc., in the name of "independence," won't really help the main supporters of Brexit, workers left behind by neoliberalism. Interdependence isn't necessarily bad.

Ironically, if Britain had a social welfare state more like some of those in Europe rather than a Thatcherite model, the referendum vote may have come out differently. People who are kicked to the curb sometimes find a way to upset the apple cart, or at least knock some of the apples off.

Theresa May, architect of the Grenfell Tower fire massacre.

Bojo The Clown

Nigel Farage. (Rhymes with "garage.") Happy now, huh asshole?

1] A detailed breakdown of the referendum vote is at the BBC here.

Joseph Biden, Closet Pedophile

There's a lot that any normal human being would despise about "Joe" Biden. Let's bulletpoint them:

• He's spent his entire political career in the U.S. Senate and as Vice President of the U.S. working to increase repression in America. Examples are numerous. He was behind a number of draconian "crime" bills. He created what became the PATRIOT ACT, the architecture for a more complete police state. He's anything but "nice." The compulsive, giddy smile is a Big Lie in itself, a cynical politician's gimmick to dupe the easily duped.
• 
  
• He's a lifelong racist. Two of his closest allies and "friends" in the Senate were the arch-Segregationists and fascists Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, with whom he pushed repressive "bipartisan" legislation. His speeches attacking "busing" for school integration, and demands that "predators" (black muggers) be locked up sounded like George Wallace.
• 
  
• Of course he's an imperialist. Imperialism is criminal behavior on a national scale. It is all about subjugating other people and taking their resources and exploiting their labor, by force and violence. "Modern" imperialism, or neo-imperialism, works by the installation of client or puppet regimes that are subcontracted to do the dirty work of repression, their "security services" trained by the CIA and U.S. military and funded and armed by the U.S. (In the case of oil states, the client regimes pay for the U.S. "aid" in subjugating their own populations.)
• 
  
• He's an aggressive political agent of the banking and credit card industries. His state, Delaware, is where many of these businesses are based. One of his crimes against the citizens as part of his service to his masters was passage of "bankruptcy reform" that tightened the screws on average people seeking bankruptcy protection, and making it impossible to discharge student loans through bankruptcy, making former students indentured servants. These industries lavishly fund his canpaigns, and if this evil creep ever "retires" from politics, he will be rewards with millions of dollars in corporate board seats, no-show "jobs," and grossly inflated "honoraria" to drone through banal, platitudinous speeches.

But now there's even more. At least, more that I just discovered. Not that it was never reported by "the" media. Just that it has received nowhere near the attention it should have, so it is not common knowledge.

Joseph Biden is apparently a closet pedophile.

Sounds crazy? Of course it does. You've been subjected to years of propaganda promoting "Joe" Biden, Regular Guy, by the corporate oligarchy's media, because Biden is beholden to the corporate oligarchy and loyally serves their interests inside the outside the U.S.

So you need to watch a video compilation of his startling behavior molesting children, in public. Just watch. [1]

"The" media (the propaganda bullhorns of the corporate interests Biden fronts for) has been energetically promoting this tired old warhorse of imperial capitalism for president. They have even pushed the preposterous notion that he is "more popular" among "progressives" than Bernie Sanders! Excuse me: Sanders had and has a huge popular following. He has done extraordinarily well raising funds from average people to run for president in 2016 and now 2020 Biden, on the other hand, ran for that office twice, in 1988 and 2008, and both times his campaigns crashed and burned almost at the beginning of the process. (For instance, he came in fifth in Iowa in 1988 I think it was, and Iowa is the "first hurdle" the bourgeois media erects for candidates. Iowa and New Hampshire, both small, lily white, and very reactionary states, are set as the first bars to overcome to ensure that candidates for president have to be rightwing.)

So this is a fine time to take stock of who this creature really is, behind the affable "regular Joe" mask.

"Joe" Likes 'Em Young!

And it looks like he swings BOTH WAYS!

1] The video is: "Joseph Biden's Pedophiliac Impulses."  And read the essay there, which goes into the complicity of the parents of the children and what it says about the moral corruption of the U.S. power system. There are also links to articles on Biden's propensities to molest children, and adults too, including from the Washington Post. The Post article was written as an imaginary intervention called to try to get Biden to stop molesting women. which is "meta" since the article, published in 2015, seemed to have exactly the same purpose as the fantasy intervention- to warn Biden he better stop pawing women and a girls and sniffing their hair and rubbing their faces.

Mueller Lays a Goose Egg. Predictably. (And Predicted.)

There is so much to debunk, and that has BEEN debunked, about the gigantic pile of horse manure agitpropaganda that "the media" has heaped on our heads these past 2+ years, that my brief remarks here can only touch on a few points.

We witnessed absurd conspiracy theories, with every ill in the Western world being blamed on Russian online memes that "divide us." The rise of rightwing populism in Europe is blamed on Russia (not discontent with those in power!). Chuck Todd, the Dumbest Man On Television, speculated that the terror bombs that turned out to have been mailed by a pro-Trump zealot, Cesar Sayoc, were sent by Russia.

Russian clickbait and spam from a troll farm was equated with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by political demagogues of the Democratic Party. Congressman Adam Schiff made a name for himself as the worst political mountebank in the nation, against stiff competition.

Much was made of the "lies" that tripped up Trump's erstwhile minions. (People Trump threw overboard at the first sign of trouble.)

And what were the lies Mueller obtained convictions for? Inconsequential things. Except for Michael Flynn's lies. Flynn conspired with Turkey to kidnap Fethullah Gulen from the U.S. to hand over to the Erdogan regime. And what were the consequences? Flynn got off easiest, with no jail time, as recommended by Mueller's prosecutors. He was even praised by the judge for his murderous military record. (He served U.S. imperialism in a high position, so he gets privileged treatment.)

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's main lie was to Congress, when he claimed attempts to do a deal for a hotel in Moscow ended a few months sooner than they actually did.

The severest penalties were meted out to Paul Manafort, for things totally unrelated to Trump and his presidential campaign. Mainly hiding his money from the IRS (which the attempt to do made him guilty of money "laundering" as well as tax evasion), bank "fraud" (he put false information on applications for bank loans- something Trump himself has done with impunity, in fact overstating his assets by $2 BILLION to obtain a loan from Deutsche Bank), and failing to register as a foreign agent. (Because he worked in Ukraine, NOT in the U.S. representing Ukraine, trying to steer the president the U.S. later overthrew, Yanukovych, into pro-EU pro-U.S. actions. He wasn't repping the Ukraine in the U.S., so how could he be guilty of that? At the same time, Flynn got away with not registering as an agent of Turkey, and AIPAC, the AJC, the Congress of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Zionist Organization of America, et al, act as agents of Israel, take directions fron Israeli government officials in frequent meetings with them, and are NOT prosecuted for refusing to register. U.S. justice certainly is blind. Or rather, it looks the other way for those with special privileges and power.)

Manafort made the stupid mistake of not throwing in with Mueller, relying instead on Trump to protect him! What a dumb grifter. Trump is only loyal to himself,  and to his family who are psychologically extensions of himself.

So what, finally, did Mueller "discover" about Trump's "collusion" with "a hostile foreign power to interfere with our election and subvert Our Democracy"?

Nothing. But the Democrats are twisting this to say Mueller didn't DISPROVE it!

Talk about diehards.

Aaron Maté of the The Nation magazine and formerly at democracynow.org summed up the more than two year saga of a full court press propaganda campaign by most of the major U.S. media and elements of the secret police and Department of "Justice" to paint the president of the United States, Donald Trump, as beholden to Russian president Vladimir Putin and a co-conspirator with him in "stealing" the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. 

Maté  put it succinctly and accurately thus: "This entire affair is journalistic malpractice." [1]

As for the result of over 2 years of investigating by a large prosecution team with all the "tools" of "law enforcement" (including secret ones) at their disposal, with a howling pack of media dogs sniffing out every factoid to "connect the dots" into a picture of criminal culpability, what did it all add up to? Maté did the arithmatic:

"In terms of the substance of this issue, which is whether or not there is a conspiracy between Trump and Russia, we arrive at zero."

So with the buried treasure chest of the Mueller report turning out to contain only sand, what are the Democrats going to do now?

The Democratic Party's poohbahs STILL intend to press on with it, thus undercutting their own presidential candidates for 2020.

Good luck with THAT.

"Sorry about that." Not the Democratic Party's Saviour After All. Square-jawed former FBI secret police chief and U.S. Marine Invader of Vietnam Robert S. Mueller III. Exit right from the Stage of History, Bob.

1] "Aaron Maté sums up the denouément of the Mueller investigation on the Jimmy Dore Show."