Election Interference

The whole notion of a foreign government “interfering” in elections is bizarre, so much so that I don’t even understand the concept. Once upon a time the U.S. was proud of its “Voice of America” broadcasting the truth to the oppressed people living in commie hell behind the Iron Curtain. And now another government’s releasing truth to Americans is “interference”? The U.S. has adopted a lot of the governing principles of the old Soviet Union.

As long as the U.S. judiciary defines money as speech and allows dark money where givers can shield their identities, stopping the influence of any entity with money is impossible. Unless we recognize the difference between the persuasive power of free speech and the coercive power of money, we allow national democracy to be compromised. Anyone should be able to speak to the issues and candidates, but only citizens should be able to participate actively in the electoral process.

There has been zero evidence produced to verify the Russians did anything during our election so why use the ‘at most’ qualifier to describe this manufactured fake news. This seems to be succumbing to the assimilation of the Borg who use repetition to embed these falsehoods into the collective.

Obama’s sanctions on Russia were a weak petty attack on Trump and his plans for improved relations with Putin floated on the back of fake news.

Next, Peter, you’re going to tell me that fluoridation wasn’t a Russian conspiracy. You ever see a Russian drink a glass of water?

Well said. Most U. S. citizens, including especially liberals, progressives, Democrats, and especially Hillary, Obama, et al don’t get this. Most citizens of foreign countries do. We’re about making America great in our own minds. Trump didn’t invent this, he just recognized and took advantage of it.

The USG did not think it would matter… Bad idea. The democrats play dirty when need be.

The scandal if/when it truly breaks, won’t be the hacking and the release of information, nor the false news, neither of which tipped the election. The scandal will be the foreign money funneled to Trump and his cronies. Yeah, the USA does it, too. Our hands aren’t clean at all. But Americans do prefer that their politicians be bought and owned by domestic oligarchs.

Apologies, it should read “The key to class war, as practised by the rich and elites, is to get us to draw those lines to set the rest of us against each other.”

and

“So if you want to fight them, our true enemies, then reverse these things.”

Who’s sending the hate Ian?

I’m not surprised about the hate mail. People I generally respect seem outraged by the Russian hacking ( real or not–I don’t much care). The funny thing is that objectively they have to know you are right– assuming the Russians did the hacking it is utterly trivial compared to the stuff we do. And nothing they have done in Syria is worse than the crap we support in Yemen.

I don’t completely understand people sometimes.

Humpty-Dumpty remains the timeless authority on this type of blatant hypocrisy:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

@Ian

Think this thru a little.

At most Russian interference in the US election involved selective release of real, true, information.

The rest of the world wishes American interference stayed at that level.

Very concise, and very true. I’m not however even remotely surprised you’re getting hate mail. That’s the nature of the beast. Americans are so used to the idea that “peace” means everyone else submitting to them however unwillingly that any real opposition results in hysteria amongst a large proportion of them. I’ve found that this tendency of theirs is getting worse.

Point out to them that if it was the Russian Government that hacked the DNC email server (and no actionable intelligence to that effect has ever been produced) that what they were doing is espionage an activity in which all governments engage. Point out to them moreover that the DNC is a private sector organisation and they go completely bananas.

@ Some Guy

Thanks for the belly laugh–I’ve been pushing that exact set of quotes to my friends this past couple of weeks.

Seems to really sum up where we are. 🙁

When I encounter the “Two wrongs don’t make a right” line from Democrats, I challenge it. None of them thought it was wrong in the first place for the US to interfere in other countries’ elections or government. Such interference has often been celebrated here. So, if Russia did interfere in our elections, that’s two rights. What do two rights make?

@Tom

The Flint crisis was whipped into another hysterical/political frenzy. According the the last news I read Dr Hanna-Attisha has treated two children for extreme high levels of lead from drinking Flint water from the affected area. Some of the other children, at most a thousand or so received a relatively low level of exposure for some time but most people avoided the cloudy-rusty water long before the lead discovery. About 25% of Flint homes have or had lead piping connection them to the city mains which means that 75% of Flint’s residents had lead free cloudy-rusty water.

The three administrators who made the decision, and then tried to cover it up, that left the anti-corrosion chemicals out of the Flint River water are being prosecuted for their cover-up crimes. Leaving the chemicals out of the water is a misdemeanor.

Snyder may be an obnoxious politician but all he did was help to break the monopoly that Detroit held over Flint’s water supply while state and local players failed to do their job. The EPA should be held responsible for allowing the water to be consumed for 6 months after they knew there was high contamination levels yet failed to put out a warning.

@Hugh

Snyder’s and other republican’s political careers are probably over because of this crisis and their screw ups after the contamination was discovered. There hasn’t been any evidence produced that shows any of them intentionally allowing this to happen or them directing the switching of water supplies for personal gain. The demands for jailing them are partisan political gamesmanship unrelated to any crimes that were committed. Remember if the anti-corrosion additive was used there would have been no or little lead problem beyond what already existed so the water source switch policy was sound even with the temporary use of Flint River water.

The bogeymen City Managers were used by both democrat and republican Mich governors because the elected officials failed to perform their responsibilities. The CM system allowed the state to continue bailing out Flint and other cities while forcing the necessary cuts and restrictions. The last two CM’s are being charged with some crime so they may have done something wrong after the crisis but we may be seeing a new attempt to make normal governing decisions criminal.

I’ve followed this story from before the lead problems when Detroit was trying to use legal force to maintain their monopoly and inflated prices supplying Flint’s water. That’s where this story started but it ended in a tinfoil hat parade led by Mikey Moore.

“At most Russian interference in the US election involved selective release of real, true, information.”

Yes. And let us also note that this true information from ALLEGED Russian interference in the democratic process revealed REAL interference in the democratic process by the Democratic Party itself.

Funny how less is made of this.

Notable as well is Chinese and other nations’ interference in the democratic process through David Brock’s lavishly funded Shareblue operation favoring Democrats:

http://disobedientmedia.com/democrat-propaganda-group-shareblue-has-ties-to-chinese-government-host-of-foreign-special-interests/

Funny that this doesn’t get much attention either, especially since China on any given day does more damage to the US than Russia, Al Qaeda and Isis combined over the past decade.

This point seems so self-evidently obvious, and yet it is really a sterling example of the success of propaganda.** I guess much of this blog is that way. This just stands out to me for some reason, particularly since near as I can tell, as otherwise criminal as Putin and Lavrov may or may not be, as best I can tell, their exercise of soft diplomatic power seems to have kept us out of a potentially very bad escalation of conflict thus far. Sort of danced circles around Kerry and Clinton, though of course, the problem remains that eventually the US could just as likely make up another Gulf of Tonkin and strike anyway.

**In, I think, metanoia films “The Power Principle” there is a lovely antidote about a brief thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations post Stalin, when Russian apparatchniks came to the US and were given more or less free license to explore the country. On return to DC, they met with the State Department, and perturbed their hosts with a single question to the following effect: “How are you so successful at getting everyone to believe the same thing. The uniformity is amazing; everywhere we go. We haven’t been able to achieve anything near like what you’ve done here.”
On that question, for what it’s worth, I first came aware when I stopped buying things, cut the cable cord, and started to feel very disconnected. BBC’s “Century of the Self” offers interesting thoughts on that, although metanoia also has a doc on the same subject, which in both cases really seems par for the course decent University media studies stuff, but both docs present well (BBC’s somewhat better put together).

@Tony Wikrent,

If you are reading this thread, Naked Capitalism has posted a post and thread which are so exactly right-up-your-alley that you might want to consider going over there and commenting where a large number of people will read what you write.

Here is the link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/free-trade-vs-protectionism-weapon-mass-distraction.html

Peter, as I recall when Hannah Arendt wrote about Eichmann and as an aside coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, she was describing the pettiness of the bureaucratic mind. Most evil isn’t “intentional”. It is the natural outcome of a lot of small minded people making small minded choices. If they would just look at the big picture for a second, the evil that flows from their choices would be obvious, but they don’t.

All this ties in with the point a try to make about the essence of bad faith. Bad faith is not knowing somthing is evil and acting anyway. It is about what we would expect anyone, and especially someone in a particular position of authority and responsbility, to know, and judging their actions accordingly. As the rich and elites justify their wealth, privileges, and power on the basis of their knowing more and better than we do, it makes the hoocoodanode argument almost impossible for them to use. Their bad faith comes from their intentionally not knowing what they should have known and not asking the questions they should have.

Peter, they were building a water system which poisoned children. They were more interested in cutting budgets and scoring political points than in safeguarding children. In a bygone age, the saying was “Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence.” In our times, the reverse is true. With our powers that be they would love us to think it was just incompetence or honest mistakes. But as I said, their whole claim to power, wealth, and privilege rests on their supposed competence and ability to see and avoid mistakes.

Our ruling classes, our rich and elites, have done great violence to us, but the violence they do is never called violence. It’s budget cuts, downsizing, the economy, etc. But suggest using violence to end their violence and they go into hysterics. The same is true here. We need to stop giving this thieves and murderers the benefit of the doubt. We need to stop saying, “Oh, he/she is going to do terrible things, but it is just because they are stupid.” Things have gone on too long and have gone way too far. It’s not stupidity. It’s malice. You can’t have a class being “stupid” for 40 years, and yet somehow despite all their “incompetence” still always win while the rest of us just happen to lose each and every time.

But the good ole lawd has a plan!

@peter,
what you say about painting synder as a republican boogey man reminds me of the subject / discipline/ theory known as psychohistory.

i think malcom x was a good example of applied psychohistory ” It is easier to simplify and create bogymen with bloody hands and nefarious agendas than to look at the facts “ the guy ‘s chronic early childhood trauman, continuing into his adolescence disabled him for life of every being to do the routine work of earning an hourly wage driven income. his injuries hyper-sensitize him to injustise. his working the organizing experience of life resulted in him seeing most social interaction in terms of master/slave. really just seeing the truth of all collectives organized and operating on the principle of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and biomimicing the wolfpak, with its rungs of the social ladder, the first rung the lowly omega personality and the top rung the imposer alpha personality.

malcom found it easier to preach the vision of a separate black nation, with the u.s. supplying the land whereever for such nation. reality? in the 60’s a small group of blacks expatriated to ghana with such intent. maya angelou being one of the members. and malcom x visited them. 10 years later of thereabouts, maya returned to the u.s. a guy named dr. robert e. lee stayed and lived his entire life hands on paying his own way for the benefit of the collective, rather than taking the easy way out of spouting his vision, or , as you put it, creat[ing] bogymen with bloody hands and nefarious agendas .

now folks, who do you think had a healthier childhood, dr lee or malcom x? a short lesson in psychohistory. see cesar tort’s writing for lots more discussion on the subject.

Peter, politicians always claim a mandate. More people voted against Trump than voted for him and he’s still acting like he has one. Of course, what Trump is going to give his supporters with that “mandate” is vastly different than what they think. But that is the essence of class warfare. Give the rubes a false choice, Hillary or the Donald. The rich and elites win either way. We rubes lose either way. And what’s really rich is that whoever wins can claim a mandate because the rubes voted for him/her.

So the people of Michigan were given an election with a couple of shit candidates. And one of them happened to be Snyder. This is why voting for the lesser of two evils or either evil at all is so destructive, –because it is used to validate their evil. Snyder didn’t have to have a plan to poison children in Flint. All he had to do was not give a shit, spout bullshit lines about cutting waste, choose like minded people, fail to do due diligence, and children get poisoned in Flint. Hoocoodanode?

@RC

You might be right about describing what happened in Mich state government after the lead contamination was discovered as reckless or negligent but those are criminal accusations. I think, and there has been no evidence produced to back them. There is plenty of evidence of incompetence, miscommunication, sloppiness and ass-covering but those are at most political offensives that Snyder and the rest will probably pay for. The three people who’s actions are documented and appear to be reckless and negligent are being charged with a cover-up.

The circus that grew around this crisis was political with the theme of great evil involved in all of the events leading up to the lead crisis. The accusations and fake news stories came almost daily warning this was a plot to take over the Detroit water system, favor friendly contractors and it was mostly a plan to supply oil companies with the deadly fracking water. Then the rumors started of secret directives coming down from above that caused the lead problem but never explained the reasons nor produced any record of directives.

With Mike Moore trying to push the Flint residents into open revolt against the governor by terrorizing the families there what could go wrong? Someone got a rope on that raging bull and hauled him off to the funny farm for treatment for what they called ‘exhaustion’.

Arguably far more important right now than any of the fake news or Russia tropes are powerful monied right wing interests wreaking havoc on recent Western politics (Brexit and Trump) in the form of Weaponised AI propaganda. This is being heavily under-reported in MSM

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media – https://t.co/IW7vWIQTDL

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

https://medium.com/join-scout/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine-86dac61668b#.rcmh6lg3p

@ Peter

Thanks, Peter. I think we are alike in the fury we feel when people use arguments that do not comport with logic or the known facts.

I have not gotten deep into the facts on the Flint situation, just the general outline, so I just have a general sense that nothing like that should ever have happened, and the people who were in charge must take the responsibility. But I don’t intend to invest energy into litigating that fiasco.

I am more focused on the general trends we see, where the interests of regular people are constantly sacrificed to the interests of the corporate oligarchy, and our elected reps and their employees continually betray us.

I was curious about your work background, as I was puzzled to see your uncritical take on the mortgage crisis, and also your seemingly uncritical view about the concept of capitalism; I see some problems, but still like much about capitalism, but when I read some of your comments re that, I am reminded of the time 50 years ago when I was very much taken with the writings of Ayn Rand. I’ve been thru a lot of changes since then, and have found the journey fascinating. I have found many of your comments to be very good and interesting, and so have become curious to know a bit about your journey. If you are comfortable to share a bit, amigo.

@ NRG

Yes, you are.

Also revealing yourself as a Clinton cultite.

Most of us here believe that chronic election manipulators should have enough class not to pee their pants when someone else tries to do some manipulating.

@RC

The people responsible for the Flint crisis are being held responsible both criminally and politically. People driving the circus were seeking more than that, they wanted all their other partisan grievances aired and judgment day declared with themselves wearing the robes. Some children may have been injured but there is no reason to think it’s permanent. Flint is now on the federal dole receiving tens of millions for new water infrastructure to supply a gutted crime riddled city that burns crack houses to generate electricity with good clean water from their new pipeline system. The city council is back in control with no more EM usurping their democracy so they can return to spending money they don’t have.

I’ve worked for wages mostly moving into high tech after returning to school in the late 80’s. I chose the most challenging wizardry available at the technician level and studies lasers, electro optics, atomic physics and light, everything from death rays to laser spying I worked with students after graduating cum laud and did some lecturing and instruction. The last field I studied was big science, particle beam accelerators for fusion research tickling the smallest bits of reality with a very big hammer. This was interesting but too close to the military and even the CIA so I went to work for Intel building something useful. I worked on the machine beasts that spat out billions of dollars worth of tiny glass and metal calculating cities know as chips that were constructed on the scale of 1/50 of the diameter of a human hair.

You jump to conclusions when you say I am uncritical of capitalism but not recognizing the fact that it rules is just ignoring reality, there is no viable alternative, yet. My attack on the hysteria over the robo-signers was partially aimed the humor of seeing people clinging to almost meaningless pieces of paper in the digital age. This paper with proof of evil scribbled on it became a fetish with people led to believe it held the power to bring down some of the dreaded bankster/capitalists. I don’t see this mentality as being much different than the ploys being used against Trump. When some of the people behind this diversion started to claim that they could not only lock up the fraudsters but restore lost homes even free and clear I knew they had opened the asylums.

No one has answered my questions about what they thought would have happened if this fantasy had become reality and I doubt they will. The economy was being frozen and crumbling because money had stopped flowing and the foreclosed but not processed home loans were a major cause of that condition. This contagion spread throughout the economy but the bad mortgage paper had to be addressed quickly so loans for home sales could resume along with everything else.

@ Peter

Thanks, Peter, for sharing that background info.

I think I understand you a little better now.

I think we differ at the point where you accept the pragmatic need to deal with present reality as it is (a position I can certainly respect, as I have had to have that attitude in business, as a litigator, and as a futures trader) , but I also think it is very important to make judgments and speak out against all the things that are being allowed to be wrong in the present reality, in hopes that we can make a change in the ameliorative direction.

For example, I think capitalism is as good a system as any, and better than many, but the current rampant corruption and rule-breaking spoils it, and should be addressed and rooted out to the greatest extent possible. So I am concerned to point out all the violation of process and fairness that come to light.

Thanks.