Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
THE FACT THAT political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs - making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision - is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington.
Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn't reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can't even agree to investigate obvious crimes.
But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton's staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.
INDIANAPOLIS (October 18, 2016) - Hoosier voters have contacted the Secretary of State's office after discovering the date of birth or first name on their voter registration is incorrect. This causes the voter to believe they are not registered because they cannot locate their information on Indianavoters.com.
"We ran a report in the Statewide Voter Registration System and found thousands of dates of births and first names were changed," said Secretary of State Connie Lawson. "These records were changed on paper forms, at the BMV and online. At this time, my office is not sure why these records were changed, but we have evaluated the Statewide Voter Registration System and have found no indication it has been compromised. We believe this may be a case of voter fraud and have turned our findings over to the State Police, who are currently conducting an investigation into alleged voter fraud.
This was also reported here.
The grotesque caricature of the Democratic candidate appeared outside the
Bowling Green station during morning rush hour on Tuesday and shows
Clinton with hoofed feet and a Wall Street banker resting his head on her
bare breasts.
The statue was up for less than three hours before an enraged woman toppled it over and started yelling at the statue's creator.
Players on Wall Street are preparing to minimize the impact of the so-called "skin in the game" rule by setting up affiliated companies to satisfy requirements on risk-sharing, according to The Wall Street Journal. The legal framework, which was finalized by the Obama administration in 2014, is set to take effect on Christmas Eve.
The regulations require those who sell Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) to hold onto 5 percent of the instruments they create -- to increase the chances that financial firms care about the long-term health of assets that underpin their own products.
But private equity firm Blackstone Group and HPS Investment Partners, a JP Morgan subsidiary, will establish companies to create workarounds to those guidelines.
"Dodd-Frank is a sham that hasn't restrained the banksters a bit. In fact all it's really done is something that's really bad for We the People: It changed the priority of creditors in the event a bank becomes insolvent. Before Dodd-Frank, the No. 1 creditor class was the depositors, who would get first call on any assets left. Now it's the counterparties to the bank's derivatives/gambling instruments like credit-default swaps. That means the next time the banksters crash the economy, they get to take their bank's commercial deposits (ordinary checking and savings accounts, aka our money!) and pay off their gambling partners instead. 'Bail-ins', in other words:
"The reason this is such a gift to the banksters is that it's already written into law. They know well that We the People hate them and aren't going to voluntarily go for any more bailouts, yet they also know well that they'll likely need one soon. So they got this back-door bailout already set into place, via ordinary people's checking and savings money--all the while pretending it's a 'reform' of the system that 'restrains bad behavior'."
Only privileged people with some attachment to the system believe the
major-party candidates are the best the United States can offer, says the
Green Party nominee. The disenfranchised-immigrants, people of color and
young people locked into debt-are demanding real change.
As Facebook gives the Israeli government more access to posts deemed as "incitement," occupation forces have been raiding the homes of Palestinians children and detaining them for months over posts on the social media site, a report by the Defense for Children International-Palestine said Monday.
The group spoke with several Palestinian minors who were arrested for their Facebook posts, interrogated for hours and then kept in prison for months without charges under the Israeli policy of "administrative detention."
When the ruling class is in panic, their first reaction is to hide the panic.
They react out of cynicism: when their masks are revealed, instead of running around naked, they usually point the finger at the mask they wear. These days the whole world could witness a postmodern version of the infamous quote "Let them eat cake", attributed to Marie-Antoinette, queen of France during the French Revolution.
As a reaction to WikiLeaks publishing his emails, John Podesta, the man behind Hillary Clinton's campaign, posted a photo of a dinner preparation, saying "I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy".
A similar version of vulgar cynicism emerged earlier this month when Hillary Clinton reacted to the claim that she reportedly wanted to "drone" WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ("Can't we just drone this guy?") when she was the US Secretary of State. Instead of denying her comments, Clinton said that she doesn't recall any such joke, "It would have been a joke if it had been said, but I don't recall that".
One doesn't have to read between the lines to understand that if Hillary Clinton had said that, she would have considered it a joke. But when emperors joke, it usually has dire consequences for those who are the objects of their "humor."
Cyber-war Not with Russia…but WikiLeaks
During the last few months I have visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several times and each time I came out of the Embassy, where he is spending his fifth year in political asylum under legitimate fear he might be extradited to the US, my thought was the following one: although he lives, without his family, in a postmodern version of solitary confinement (even prisoners are allowed to walk for up to one hour a day), although he has no access to fresh air or sunlight for more than 2000 days, although the UK government recently denied him safe passage to a hospital for an MRI scan, if his access to the internet would be cut off this would be the most severe attack on his physical and mental freedom.
The last time I saw him, which was only two weeks ago, he expressed the fear that, because he had already published leaks concerning US elections and with more to come, the US might find various ways to silence him, including pressuring Ecuador or even shutting down the internet.
What seemed a distant possibility only two weeks ago, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When the Obama administration recently announced that it is, as John Biden said, planing an "unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia", the first victim was not Putin, but precisely Julian Assange whose internet was cut off just a day after Biden's self-contradictory proclamation.
No wonder Edward Snowden reacted immediately by saying that "nobody told Joen Biden what 'covert operation' means.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert operation is "an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor."
It is no secret anymore that the Ecuadorian government has come under extreme pressure since Assange leaked the Democratic National Committee email database. We don't know yet whether the US pressured Ecuador to shut down the internet, but it is clear that the present US government and the government to come is fighting a war with WikiLeaks which is all but "covert". Is it really a coincidence that Julian Assange's internet access was cut off shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speeches?
If at the beginning we still had a "soft" version of postmodern McCarthyism, with Hillary calling everyone opposed to her campaign a Russian spy (not only Assange, but also Donald Trump and Jill Stein), then with Obama's recent intervention it became more serious.
With Obama's threat of a cyber-war, the "soft" McCarthyism didn't only acquire geopolitical significance, but at the same time a new mask was revealed: Obama is obviously trying to cement the public debate and make the Russian threat "real", or at least to use it as a weapon in order to help Clinton to get elected. Moreover, this new twist in something that has already become much more than only US elections (US elections are never only US elections!), shows not only how Obama is ready to strengthen Hillary's campaign, but it also reveals that a cyberwar is already in the making.
It is not a cyber war with Russia, but with WikiLeaks.
And it is not the first time.
What would Clausewitz say? [EDITOR'S NOTE: Use the link above and read the whole article!]
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