Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,090]

24 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

''40 Beheaded babies''....''In Springfield they're eating the dogs''....CIA feeding journos lies...

they all learned from Josef Goebbels - ''you can tell the most ridiculous lies, as long as you repeat it often enough they will believe you''

This is good

 

Operation Mockingbird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. According to author Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed when an April 1967 Ramparts article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In 1975, Church Committee Congressional investigations revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.

snip

In the early years of the Cold War, efforts were made by the United States Government to use mass media to influence public opinion internationally. After the United States Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 uncovered domestic surveillance abuses directed by the Executive branch of the United States government and The New York Times in 1974 published an article by Seymour Hersh claiming the CIA had violated its charter by spying on anti-war activists, former CIA officials and some lawmakers called for a congressional inquiry that became known as the Church Committee. Published in 1976, the committee's report confirmed some earlier stories that charged that the CIA had cultivated relationships with private institutions, including the press.

Without identifying individuals by name, the Church Committee stated that it found fifty journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA. In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee's report and wrote that more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time Magazine. Bernstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the "eyes and ears" of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.

[Vesper 30,090]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-11-too-many-americans-see-democrats-as-hostile-elite/

The ACLU had a full-page ad in The New York Times last Friday announcing that it’s going to go after every one of the incoming Trump administration’s violations of individuals’ rights, whoever those individuals may be. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said he’ll convene a special session of the newly elected and still overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in December to protect safeguards for California residents against the coming Trump onslaught on immigrants, on clean-air standards and climate mitigation laws, for women who come to California for abortions, and so on.

These are all crucially important and necessary endeavors. However, they can’t be the primary image of the Democratic Party going forward. If the Democrats are to win back the voters who swung into Trump’s column last week, they have to become once more the party that advances the interests of the American working class—and they have to be seen that way by that working class, as they demonstrably have not succeeded in doing.

That means the primary focus of their elected officials at all levels needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security (both creating coverage in areas like dental care that Medicare doesn’t currently cover, and significantly increasing the level of Social Security benefits), reducing the cost of prescription drugs, greater funding of child care and senior care, greater funding of apprenticeship programs and trade schools for blue-collar occupations, and increasing investment in infrastructure and housing construction, both as a way to make housing more affordable and to create more jobs in construction. They need to push for the abolition of noncompete agreements. They need to introduce windfall profits tax legislation when profits’ share of revenues rise, and (my pet cause) create a sliding scale on corporate tax rates based on the ratio between CEO and median employee pay (the higher the multiple, the higher the tax).

None of these causes will become federal law over the next four years, but the challenge for the Democrats is to become identified with these and kindred causes. The Democrats’ congressional caucuses aren’t accustomed to taking unified stands on specific legislation, much less legislation that Republican congressional leaders won’t even allow to come to the floor for a vote. Despite that, caucus unanimity on bills that would make such changes, and constant party agitation for them, would be the least the party could do to reposition itself as a party that puts a premium on bread-and-butter issues.

The primary focus of elected officials needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security.

Putting all of those proposals together in a defining platform would certainly help. Getting every union and pro-Democratic organization to promote that platform would help, too. So would setting up some kind of communication apparatus to get that platform in front of voters and counter the vast right-wing propaganda machine, instead of relying on campaigns that do that, extremely inefficiently, every couple of years.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to get the Democrats to do a better job of affirming and advancing working-class interests. The harder part is to get them not to run afoul of some prevalent working-class values, which can tilt to cultural traditionalism, keeping in mind that a lot of cultural traditions are intolerant of deviations and outsiders. This challenge is all the harder because the Republicans and right-wing media (both mass and social) define the Democrats, on a daily basis, as cultural radicals. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown was unseated by the huckster the Republicans set against him last week despite that fact that no politician of any party has more constantly, effectively, and volubly advanced workers’ interests throughout his career. Nonetheless, Brown lost because Republicans preposterously depicted him as the standard-bearer for transgender surgery, and because cryptocurrency speculators spent tens of millions of dollars against him—funding ads, however, that said nothing about Brown’s record of support for oversight of financial speculation, and focused rather on the danger he allegedly posed to gender definitions.

If that kind of characterization can take down Sherrod Brown, it can, over time, take down other Democrats in numbers that could keep the Democrats out of power for a very long time. This may require the Democrats to redefine themselves somewhat in the image of Dan Osborn, the union activist who ran as an independent against an incumbent Republican senator in Nebraska, and came close to unseating her. Osborn was a clear progressive on economics, and railed against our corporate overlords in the manner of Bernie Sanders. He also supported what is Americans’ common sense on our highest-profile cultural issue by favoring women’s right to an abortion. He did not, however, claim common cause with the Democrats’ positions—either actual or those invented by the Democrats’ enemies—on a host of other issues that, for better or worse, ran afoul of some cultural traditions or roused xenophobic hackles. To be sure, Osborn was running in one of the most Republican states in the nation, but his campaign offers Democrats a host of lessons, some of which they may conclude to be prudent courses of action. Clearly, the Democrats need to oppose mass deportations, but maintaining the current numerical quota (or something close to it) at our borders is a political necessity in the coming period.

What’s clear is that Democrats need to hone their self-definition if they’re to retake power. As they seek to limit the era of MAGA ascendency to Trump’s second term (ideally, to the first two years of Trump’s second term), that needs to be the work they are about.

[Fulham Broadway 17,300]

12 minutes ago, Vesper said:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-11-too-many-americans-see-democrats-as-hostile-elite/

The ACLU had a full-page ad in The New York Times last Friday announcing that it’s going to go after every one of the incoming Trump administration’s violations of individuals’ rights, whoever those individuals may be. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said he’ll convene a special session of the newly elected and still overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in December to protect safeguards for California residents against the coming Trump onslaught on immigrants, on clean-air standards and climate mitigation laws, for women who come to California for abortions, and so on.

These are all crucially important and necessary endeavors. However, they can’t be the primary image of the Democratic Party going forward. If the Democrats are to win back the voters who swung into Trump’s column last week, they have to become once more the party that advances the interests of the American working class—and they have to be seen that way by that working class, as they demonstrably have not succeeded in doing.

That means the primary focus of their elected officials at all levels needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security (both creating coverage in areas like dental care that Medicare doesn’t currently cover, and significantly increasing the level of Social Security benefits), reducing the cost of prescription drugs, greater funding of child care and senior care, greater funding of apprenticeship programs and trade schools for blue-collar occupations, and increasing investment in infrastructure and housing construction, both as a way to make housing more affordable and to create more jobs in construction. They need to push for the abolition of noncompete agreements. They need to introduce windfall profits tax legislation when profits’ share of revenues rise, and (my pet cause) create a sliding scale on corporate tax rates based on the ratio between CEO and median employee pay (the higher the multiple, the higher the tax).

None of these causes will become federal law over the next four years, but the challenge for the Democrats is to become identified with these and kindred causes. The Democrats’ congressional caucuses aren’t accustomed to taking unified stands on specific legislation, much less legislation that Republican congressional leaders won’t even allow to come to the floor for a vote. Despite that, caucus unanimity on bills that would make such changes, and constant party agitation for them, would be the least the party could do to reposition itself as a party that puts a premium on bread-and-butter issues.

The primary focus of elected officials needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security.

Putting all of those proposals together in a defining platform would certainly help. Getting every union and pro-Democratic organization to promote that platform would help, too. So would setting up some kind of communication apparatus to get that platform in front of voters and counter the vast right-wing propaganda machine, instead of relying on campaigns that do that, extremely inefficiently, every couple of years.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to get the Democrats to do a better job of affirming and advancing working-class interests. The harder part is to get them not to run afoul of some prevalent working-class values, which can tilt to cultural traditionalism, keeping in mind that a lot of cultural traditions are intolerant of deviations and outsiders. This challenge is all the harder because the Republicans and right-wing media (both mass and social) define the Democrats, on a daily basis, as cultural radicals. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown was unseated by the huckster the Republicans set against him last week despite that fact that no politician of any party has more constantly, effectively, and volubly advanced workers’ interests throughout his career. Nonetheless, Brown lost because Republicans preposterously depicted him as the standard-bearer for transgender surgery, and because cryptocurrency speculators spent tens of millions of dollars against him—funding ads, however, that said nothing about Brown’s record of support for oversight of financial speculation, and focused rather on the danger he allegedly posed to gender definitions.

If that kind of characterization can take down Sherrod Brown, it can, over time, take down other Democrats in numbers that could keep the Democrats out of power for a very long time. This may require the Democrats to redefine themselves somewhat in the image of Dan Osborn, the union activist who ran as an independent against an incumbent Republican senator in Nebraska, and came close to unseating her. Osborn was a clear progressive on economics, and railed against our corporate overlords in the manner of Bernie Sanders. He also supported what is Americans’ common sense on our highest-profile cultural issue by favoring women’s right to an abortion. He did not, however, claim common cause with the Democrats’ positions—either actual or those invented by the Democrats’ enemies—on a host of other issues that, for better or worse, ran afoul of some cultural traditions or roused xenophobic hackles. To be sure, Osborn was running in one of the most Republican states in the nation, but his campaign offers Democrats a host of lessons, some of which they may conclude to be prudent courses of action. Clearly, the Democrats need to oppose mass deportations, but maintaining the current numerical quota (or something close to it) at our borders is a political necessity in the coming period.

What’s clear is that Democrats need to hone their self-definition if they’re to retake power. As they seek to limit the era of MAGA ascendency to Trump’s second term (ideally, to the first two years of Trump’s second term), that needs to be the work they are about.

Think theres truths there.

Guaranteed if there was a class demographic of who voted Trump/Harris more Working Class peeps would have voted for Trump.

They see preachy Dems as right up there own Harrises.

 

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

5 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

so many on there just blindly follow anything the establishment Dems do and how they frame the limits of action/debate

Unfortunately CBS, NBC, ABC as well. 

This was possible over 8 years ago but not since then. When he won in 2016 it's like they put him on black list. And even tho I'm liberal and watch these shows, I don't like it. Trump gives great material, make fun of him all you want but polarization is too big. Add CNN and others... it's remarkable that he won despite all these networks being against him. In fact, maybe all played part to piss off people even more idk... And now tables have turned. His interview with Rogan has more views than all these shows combined share.

Also they never made fun of Biden until it was clear he would get replaced. All started on the same time a little bit before he stepped down. Like someone gave them signal they can do it...

 

Edited November 12, 2024 by NikkiCFC

[Vesper 30,090]

well damn

the Republicans likely have control of all branches of the US government now

looks like they somewhat likely end up with 221 seast in the House to the Dem's 214

 

[KEVINAA 129]

 

 

Edited November 12, 2024 by KEVINAA

[Vesper 30,090]

10 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

 

 

 

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

Democratic downfall started with blocking Bernie Sanders campaign to push Hillary. It was completely unreasonable. There was huge buzz around his movement while she was never popular. Like he is saying even now working class cannot connect with Democrats. They are delusional, who cares about Beyonce or Taylor Swift? Only teenagers. He was speaking about things 8,9 years ago that decided this elections. But they never listened. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

Democratic downfall started with blocking Bernie Sanders campaign to push Hillary. It was completely unreasonable. There was huge buzz around his movement while she was never popular. Like he is saying even now working class cannot connect with Democrats. They are delusional, who cares about Beyonce or Taylor Swift? Only teenagers. He was speaking about things 8,9 years ago that decided this elections. But they never listened. 

Imaginary 2024 election: Bernie 19%, Trump 81%.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Where Trump will fail without hesitation-repetition or deviation is in his "money exists" promise.
The Americans will be eating old pairs of sneakers in a while.

[cosmicway 1,333]

PUTIN'S PLANS TO CONQUER THE WORLD AND THE GREEK MYSTERY
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It would be nice if Putin started life with all of the USSR and the Warsaw pact in place.
De-communistized by Gorbatchev but in place.
He could n't have that but he felt he had to take back Ukraine, to exploit its economic potential it is understood.
In the end he has n't done that either. He has captured a small part of Ukrainian territory not all of it, unless something dramatic happens and he actually does succeed to take the entire country.
But what about world conquest plans ?
Certainly the commies before him had such plans. Under Stalin - Krustchev and Brezhnev they tried, to the extent they could do it of course.
Putin ?
I don't think he is going to strike further west in Europe.
To gain influence through political proxies yes, but strike no.
He knows he will find himself infront of a very hard wall this time and it won't be easy.
Use of nukes will be very much against him as also against the enemy.

The obvious answer is go south.
The soft underbelly.
He already has the Iranians and the Hamash, the Hezbollah and the Huthis.
Then Turkey is unstable, Greece is somewhat unstable.
Can he not work out something there ?

Some historians maintain that the south is beyond the reach of the Russians and they don't like it.
They like the European plains but they don't like the warm waters.
But can that hold true forever ?

The Greek mystery is this:
In 2015 the left wing Syriza government offered him Greece.
Everyone knew it - everyone admits it now,
Putin said no.
The price he had to pay was some 500 billion euros and he said no.
Syriza then offered Greece to the Chinese who also said no.
But for the Chinese it is understandable. Too far and a similar venture they tried with Albania back in the seventies proved useless and they abandoned it.
To me 500 billion looks like cheap for an entire country, from which you could deploy your fleet and control the east med.
With the Turks he reached a better understanding but it's not as if Erdogan offered him the entire country as a base.
In Greece now he has his proxies but they are not so strong politically -not yet- plus another factor is we don't speak the language.
The old communist party leaders certainly did speak Russian but I wonder what is the case with the more recent ones, ms Paparigas (the Kleb lookalike) and mr. Koutsoumbas.
Ms Paparigas used to be an IKA national security employee. Where did she learn Russian and did she ?

So how is Putin going to conquer the world ?
We know the Russians are scrooges.
Back in the days of communism they were constantly declining Bulgarian pleas for economic assistance.
In 1948 instead of helping Jugoslavia they wanted Tito to give them all of the Jugoslav cereal produce (!) and this is what caused the rift.
That was when at the same time the Americans had started the Marshal plan for the west of Europe.
So, given that Trump is now a good ally, how is he going to do it ?

 

Edited November 12, 2024 by cosmicway

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

3 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Imaginary 2024 election: Bernie 19%, Trump 81%.

Even republicans that don't like Trump (there are many) would vote for BS. Don't know about 2024 he is too old now but in 2016 it should have been him. But let me guess. He is commie?

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, NikkiCFC said:

But let me guess. He is commie?

I don't know but in USA left wing socialists nobody likes.

[cosmicway 1,333]

14 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Even republicans that don't like Trump (there are many) would vote for BS. Don't know about 2024 he is too old now but in 2016 it should have been him. But let me guess. He is commie?

This socialist - further woke turn for the dems talk is nosense.
Always assuming that there will be new elections in America, the obvious target is the never Trump crowd (and they will multiply).

The other possibility is Trump making a Calligula type turn.
You know of course that emperor Calligula decided to change his ways and become a progressive president of the people.
Only he did n't have time because they hit him with an arrow.

Edited November 12, 2024 by cosmicway

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

So, given that Trump is now a good ally, how is he going to do it ?

Is Trump really a good ally or is it all because of pee pee tape? 🤔