Misogyny Among White Married Women Helped Elect Trump

Married white women in large numbers went along with their men and rejected Hillary Clinton. The why of this has been hard to determine because it’s difficult to look inside people’s minds. Most of the white women who voted for the Russian backed serial bankrupt assaulter of women and insulter of all races and ethnicities said they did so because they admired him and honestly believed she was a crook and a liar and unpatriotic. (Hillary has often remained seated on the sofa while the national anthem played during the TV broadcast of NFL games.)

My own belief, based on nothing, and roundly rejected by everyone I spoke with, was that women whose husbands or partners loved Trump and hated Hillary simply didn’t want to spend four or eight years being subjected to abuse and ridicule and blame if the first woman president ever did anything wrong. And women are likelier than men to understand that leaders sometimes make mistakes. Maybe some of them or a lot of them trusted the polls and believed Hillary would win anyway, and if bad stuff happened their partners would abuse Hillary but wouldn’t abuse them. Possible? It would be hard to get a woman to admit it.

It was very hard on white male egos to have eight years of embarrassment under a white male Republican president followed by eight non-catastrophic years under a black male president who didn’t blow the budget with a trillion dollar unnecessary and disastrous war and trigger a massive economic crisis. (It was extra humiliating that the black guy rescued the economy from what the white guy fucked up.) But to follow the very competent and cool black guy with a woman was simply too too humiliating for white men. They couldn’t bear it. I am sure their spouses and partners could tell that it would set them off in unpleasant directions for the next four, possibly eight, years. Violence against people of color rose dramatically during the Obama presidency. Would violence against women skyrocket during the first female presidency? And you can bet, just as Republicans swore to block everything Obama tried to accomplish, and the faithful in thousands of white superchristian churches prayed fervently for him to fail, that all the Republicans would do their damnedest to make sure Hillary failed. Because she made every Republican man and lots of Democratic men feel like a failure. Not only had a black man jumped the queue but now a woman had. The natural order of things was being upset. It upset people, especially white people, especially white people with dicks, but also the women who were married to them. So white women joined the Dickish Party. (It didn't hurt Trump's electability that thousands of Russian trolls and bots were pushing this same misogyny and race-worry at white voters in swing states.)

This new study doesn’t make this point but it does explain the pressure, both economic and political, that shaped the Trump vote among white married women. Deference is an old-fashioned idea some women still subscribe to. Maybe it's out of self-defense. Self interest is pretty human; people vote their pocket book. This study combines the two because it says deference to the man’s income shaped the vote of married white women; they voted against women’s economic interests to support their subservience to the man’s economic interests.

The study is reported on in the Guardian.

It’s worth looking at the unfairness at the root of all this. There is a double standard. Women are required to be perfect and at the same time deferential to their male counterparts even if those males are far less perfect than the women. Because failing to be deferential makes the males feel diminished. Some probably feel a greater need for male enhancement products if they are compared unfavorably with a woman, and that male dysfunction is contagious: when one man experiences it all men start to go flaccid and angry. Women may love their men in spite of their faults but men tend to feel uncomfortable around women who outperform them. A ultra competent woman is less attractive than a man who fucks up.

But her emails!

Last fall Newsweek published a story about how many emails George W Bush and Dick Cheney managed to lose to avoid having their Iraq War motives scrutinized. W lost 22 million emails, but nobody minded.

"According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.”

W and his boss Cheney spent trillions on an unnecessary war based on phony reasoning and what we would today call “fake news” and they covered up their machinations by “losing” 22 million emails. That’s million with an M, almost a thousand times more emails than Hillary allegedly lost. (Full disclosure: I delete emails every month, which I suppose makes me a suspicious character.)

The Russians Have Always Preferred American Presidents Who Are Corrupt

One of Alistair Cooke's BBC letters from America has this interesting paragraph, written in 1973, about Watergate. During that earlier scandal, Nixon (like Trump) had a defender in Moscow, who said the charges against the American president were a conspiracy and a hoax cooked up by "reactionary” liberal elements.

Russian Money May Explain Republican Attack on Americans' Access to Affordable Healthcare

1. REPUBLICANS TOOK IN MILLIONS FROM MOSCOW

From that very Texan and very middle American newspaper, the Dallas Morning News...

"Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
"During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org."


SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BOUGHT REPUBLICANS DURING 2015 AND 2016. TOTAL RUSSIAN INVESTMENT (THAT WE KNOW ABOUT): $7.35 MILLION.

(This is separate from the millions which were paid by the Russians to Trump’s campaign manager and national security advisor and millions more laundered through his Commerce Secretary’s Cypriot bank.)

2. RUSSIANS ARE INVESTING MILLIONS IN AMERICAN HEALTHCARE CORPORATIONS

Bloomberg is reporting that Russian billionaire oligarchs (and there are no oligarchs in Russia who are not close to Putin) have invested heavily in corporate healthcare and Big Pharma in the U.S.

(Essentially, Russians are confident that for-profit healthcare and Big Pharma will very soon see a big growth in profits. How do they know this? Maybe they have the Republican Congress and the Republican White House in their pocket.)

SUMMARY: THE RUSSIANS BACKING THE REPUBLICANS ARE BETTING THEY WILL REWEAPONIZE AMERICAN HEALTHCARE

3. REPUBLICANS DO WHAT THEIR BILLIONAIRE BACKERS TELL THEM TO DO

The Russians who gave this big money will expect their Republican congressmen and senators to deliver, why else would they have given them the money? The Guardian is reporting that the Koch Brothers who give millions to Republicans every election cycle have signaled that the money will dry up if the Republicans don’t repeal Obamacare and cut billionaires’ taxes. Republicans are listening because they are afraid. They do what their billionaire donors tell them.

SUMMARY: THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ISN’T AN AMERICAN PARTY, IT IS A MONEY PARTY.

IT ALSO LOOKS AND SOUNDS AND ACTS VERY MUCH LIKE IT’S A RUSSIAN PARTY.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

FOLLOW THE RUBLES.

Republicans Again Targeting The Poor And The Sick On Healthcare Access

Lawrence O’Donnell played the Kimmel monologue a bit early last night so prime time audiences could hear Kimmel tell how Cassidy (of Graham-Cassidy) "lied right to my face.” Kimmel then urges everyone to phone Republicans in the Senate to tell them how evil this bill is.

202 224 3121

Again, the swing Republicans on this issue are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine. Try to explain to them why this bill is so hard on the most vulnerable Americans, and why it is so damned unfair and cruel. Because they have a hard time comprehending it.

Earlier, Cassidy went on Kimmel’s show and smiled and promised his Obamacare repeal would not target the poor and the sick. It does target the poor and the sick. It cuts funding for the poor and the sick more aggressively than the previous Republican bills did.

Republican Senator Cassidy quickly responded to Kimmel's charges by saying Kimmel "just doesn't understand..." Saying his plan does indeed cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Reported in The Hill newspaper

Sure it does––but it allows insurers to jack their premiums sky high to punish them for being sick. What a cynical liar. Just as all Americans have the right to live in million dollar homes all Americans do have the right to buy decent health insurance––but they can’t afford it. Obamacare forced health insurers to stop offering junk coverage and also forced them to stop penalizing the people with preexisting conditions. The Republicans keep trying to push the poor back onto junk coverage that doesn’t really cover anything serious, and their plans keep punishing the sick for being sick.

The Republicans are rich. The Republicans represent the rich. The Republicans, like all members of Congress, have paid guaranteed Cadillac healthcare coverage for life and don’t give a damn about anyone else because they don’t comprehend what everyone else faces.

Here is President Trump’s healthcare advisor’s reasoning on the issue (via John Harwood): Trump adviser Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “People want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ "

Which misses the entire point of health insurance, that the many who are healthy help support the few who are sick or in fear of their life. The Republican excuse is similar to their refusal to vote for hurricane relief because their districts weren't hit by the hurricane. (Until they were hit and then they demanded it.) The whole reason for covering everyone is the cost advantage of economies of scale.

It’s the familiar Republican refrain “I got mine. Fuck you.” Which they usually phrase more delicately.

So we need to flood the Senate with phone calls again: 202 224 3121

Because as long as they control the Congress they will keep trying to screw the poor and the sick.

It seems more likely the Republicans will kill our much improved healthcare system this time because they are being bribed/blackmailed by the giant money teats, the Koch Brothers, who have threatened to withhold cash from Republican candidates in 2018 unless they deliver on healthcare (removing millions from it) and tax “reform” (tax cuts for billionaires).

Koch blackmail on healthcare vote reported in The Guardian

Here is a discussion with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut earlier on Ari Melber's program

The Republicans are also attacking access to healthcare in another way, by drastically defunding the assistance poor Americans need to afford it: Analysis of how the GOP Reinsurance Plan would end up screwing the poor and the sick, from the StarTribune

Need more evidence that there’s something sinister about the Republicans’ healthcare strategy? News that a Russian oligarch (read mobster and Putin ally) is working with Washington insiders to invest millions of rubles in American healthcare.

Russian mob money targeting American healthcare reported by Bloomberg

Why? Because Republican healthcare is what’s known as a Killer Business Model.

The Republicans want to re-weaponize our healthcare system against us for profit.

The GOP Has Begun To Act Like A Criminal Syndicate

The style and concern demonstrated by the law enforcement pros going after the Russian election began looking like a RICO investigation quite a while ago. There has been an historic deference toward major political parties and politicians because there were accepted norms, but the norms were violated decades ago. It’s been Republican administrations who have violated the law, and they’ve done it in broad and aggressive ways; look at Watergate; look at Iran Contra.

Perhaps the deference remained so long because so many law enforcement professionals are registered Republicans or at least express conservative values. That deference has been insulted for decades. So many of the FBI’s and other law enforcement investigations have been directed at the major financial crimes enabled by the legal latitudes given to major financial criminals by Republican legislation; these professionals have to feel insulted and demoralized that the Republicans not only ensure that violent criminals have easy access to more weapons but also that major financial crooks have easy ways of evading justice. Not only have the Republicans enabled major crime but they and their allies and operatives have begun to resemble major criminal organizations. Which may be why we are hearing more discussion of RICO strategies being used by the various investigations into the Russian election hack to put Trump in office. (Trump has been cozy with criminal gangs his whole career. No doubt he feels very much at home.)

Now the efforts to neutralize criminal investigations is being pushed and directed by White House appointees. This is one of the abuses of power that forced Nixon from office: his willingness to handicap our national security and investigative agencies in order to keep himself in power.

Has the White House neutered our counterintelligence agencies to protect Putin and Trump and the Republican Party? Is there more concern for their own Republican security than National Security? (Note NYMag story below on how the GOP keeps redirecting investigations away from Russia and Trump.)

This from Lawfareblog:

"Pompeo is not the first politician to lead the CIA, but his relentless brand of politics and close ties to Trump have led to fears that he cannot remain impartial about the Russia probe. In particular, critics worry that he will inhibit the work of the Agency’s Mission Center for Counterintelligence, which may possess damaging information about Russia’s role in last year’s election. The Center is the Agency’s hub for tracking foreign intelligence efforts in the United States, and according to the Post, a conduit to the FBI. Pompeo reportedly ordered the Center to report to him directly, which makes sense given his commitment to track down leakers and the sensitivity of the issue. But some within the Agency worry that he could use his position to discourage it from pursuing the investigation at all.”

Did the White House settle a big Russia case in NY to protect Putin and Trump? Is this why they decided to fire Preet Bharara?

This reported by BusinessInsider:

"Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected attorney in an attempt to obtain information 'that would incriminate Hillary,'" the Democrats wrote, citing the emails he published. "Earlier this year, on May 12, 2017, the Department of Justice made an abrupt decision to settle a money laundering case being handled by that same attorney in the Southern District of New York.

"We write with some concern that the two events may be connected — and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts."

The Prevezon case garnered high-profile attention, given its ties to a $230 million Russian tax-fraud scheme and the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose suspicious death aroused international media attention and spurred the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Denis Katsyv and Veselnitskaya have become the face of Moscow's lobbying efforts against the Magnitsky Act in recent years.

Democrats now want to know whether Veselnitskaya was "involved at any point in the settlement negotiations," and they have asked Sessions to provide the committee "with the prosecution files and any other explanatory materials related to the settlement."


It appears Facebook created a huge and powerful weapon and made it available for use by the Russians––or anyone who wanted to corrupt our democracy. The only thing FB cared about was whether the trolls and bots and foreign spies and domestic fascists and racists paid for everything they wanted FB to do.

This, again, from BusinessInsider:

FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly obtained a search warrant for records of the "inauthentic" accounts Facebook shut down earlier this month and the targeted ads these accounts purchased during the 2016 election.

The warrant was first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on Friday night and the news was later confirmed by CNN.

Legal experts say the revelation has enormous implications for the trajectory of Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference, and whether Moscow had any help from President Donald Trump's campaign team.

"This is big news — and potentially bad news for the Russian election interference 'deniers,'" said Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to aim law enforcement back at the people who reported the crime and putting our counterintelligence agencies to work protecting and assisting the Russian spy agencies. Remember when Trump announced a plan to team up with Russia to find out the truth? It begins to appear the entire Republican apparatus is with the Russians.

From NYMagazine

Donald Trump’s Republican allies have always sought to discredit the Russia investigation by going on offense. (It’s impossible to defend a president who’s constantly beset by written emails by his associates accepting invitations from Russians offering election help and cackling “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” and other comically incriminating revelations.) Their first attempt at offense focused on Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, who Republicans spent days attacking as a sinister “unmasker,” until the charges against Rice quietly collapsed earlier this month.

They have found a new target: the famous dossier on Donald Trump compiled by British intelligence agent turned private investigator Christopher Steele, which they hope to use to discredit former FBI director James Comey.


If Trump is removed from office, Pence becomes president. Mike Pence, Trump’s wingman. Mike Pence, Trump’s solid defender and helpful liar. Pence has his own Russia problems, beginning with his saying last summer that Putin is “inarguably a better leader than Obama.” For Pence, the Russian dictator is “inarguably” preferable to an elected U.S. president of the other party (and a different race.)

From Bill Moyers: a timeline of Pence's culpability

Newsweek describes VP Pence's adjacence to worst things Trump people are alleged to have done.

While Pence and his office keep evading questions, his only defense appears to be cluelessness. That appears unlikely.

Are Our Laptops And Smartphones Spying On Us? Why? And For Whom?

Beginning a few years ago we began to feel like our laptops could read our mind. We'd be on social media and something we'd talked about recently would pop up in our newsfeed, as if someone creating that newsfeed had been listening in.

Our laptops gave us the tool we needed to investigate this bizarre suspicion and we found articles about it at ComputerWorld, the BBC, and WebProNews. Funny, though, articles relating to this conversation did not begin appearing in our newsfeed. There are some theories and investigations the gods of the internet do not want circulated.

How does our Facebook feed know what we’ve been thinking? It collects all our clicks and our likes and feeds them into computers to create algorithms that organize how the newsfeed works, but it seemed like someone was listening to our conversations too.

Thinking and behavior are the products that Facebook sells to its paying customers. (We are not FB’s paying customers, we are the product FB sells.) Facebook sells their product widely, not just to clothing stores and car dealers and treatment centers and plastic surgery clinics. They sell it to whoever has money to buy that information. How raw is that data? Is it fully targeted? Are that data and the algorithms that sort that data user friendly enough that a 400 lb. man on his bed in Macedonia or Hungary or Belarus or Russia can climb inside the heads of millions of Americans from halfway around the globe? What other players helped Russia and the Trump campaign weaponize our personal computers against our democracy?

Facebook might not be the main spy. They might be the main evidence that spying is going on. Which is the tail and which is the dog? Facebook might only be the weapon the manipulators are using. How firm a hold does Facebook have on how its algorithms are used? The only real criterion it seems to focus on before enabling a manipulation of the newsfeed is this: has the manipulator paid to use the Facebook algorithm; if so they get permission to go ahead.

When Trump happened it seemed creepily possible that a new force was abroad in the world upsetting the usual ways consensus is created and public decisions are made. Surprising upsets had exploded key western alliances. In the months since it became evident that those upsets had been engineered in very cynical, undemocratic ways. Russia had helped hack the Democratic Party in this country, but there were other operators involved.

Multiple bad actors working toward one goal = Conspiracy.

The multinational Big Data corporation Cambridge Analytica began to pop up in news stories from The Guardian, the DailyKos and others. There was concern and speculation about their manipulations of their Big Data because of what was known about the man who owned the company.

Since Brexit and Trump, Russian meddling was evident in the Netherlands and in France, failing in both elections. Then, this summer, the BBC reported Cambridge Analytica has been busy in the Kenyan election.

Cambridge Analytica is just one of the companies devoted to reading our minds and manipulating our behavior for profit. CA is owned by right wing libertarian/authoritarian Robert Mercer, one of the biggest supporters of Trump, a Bannon patron and mentor, a backer of Breitbart, America’s leading purveyor of right wing memes and falsehood. The president’s son-in-law Jared was Trump’s deputy for this kind of online mischief during the campaign. (He may be more puppet than tech wizard, but a puppet is more useful to the Russians than a wizard would be.)

Late this week Vanity Fair reported a story that tried to sort out the relationships between Kushner and Mercer and Russia and how our election was manipulated.

We have big data companies messing with our minds via our laptops which are weaponized to spy on us. What do we do to keep ourselves safe? We buy software from cybersecurity companies. The dominant player in this field is located where?

The world’s leading cybersecurity software company, Kaspersky Labs, is located in Russia, founded and built into a global software giant by a Russian computer wiz. Kaspersky Labs is also cozy with the Russian government’s spy agencies. (No one becomes a billionaire in Russia today without being cozy with Putin and his spy agencies.)

This article from Bloomberg explains some of the worries about the Kaspersky/Putin relationship which Kaspersky says does not exist.

Before we jump to too many conclusions (half of the conclusions would be enough to worry about if they are correct) this article in Wired says it wouldn’t have been necessary for the Russians to have American collaboration to hack our election, but they say they still may have had that collaboration. And a U.S. citizen acting as a co-conspirator is just as culpable if he is only a puppet.

Targeting has been the keyword as the Russian election hack has been reported. For Trump to run the table on an election that every poll said he had no chance of winning required some incredible luck, incredible assistance from bad actors, or else incredible sophistication in operation and targeting, and the best description of the Trump campaign was “seat of the pants” and “ad hoc.” The candidate’s message was undisciplined and bizarre. There were none of the traditional deployments, none of the usual planning, none of the kinds of organization and structure that successful campaigns need to win. This was why the result smelled so fishy. Maybe it required a crib––having all the answers beforehand. The how and by whom part of this story has been unfolding all summer. We know the Russians hacked computers and flooded the voters with falsified news stories, lurid rumors, and counterfeit reporting. But how was it targeted. The targeting required deep understanding of how Americans think and behave and how to manipulate that thinking and behavior.

This is how the picture was coming together in July:

Newsweek: Did Russia use Kushner's data operation to target Democratic voters?

Philadelphia Inquirer: to understand the Russian hacking of our election follow the data

The National Memo reports some of the details of how Trump and Russian election strategies were aligned

I get angry to think that the useful public utility developed with our tax-funded research and launched to make it easier for everyone to participate on a level basis (see Net Neutrality) with quick and easy and fair access has been turned against us, turned into a tool to manipulate us and subvert our democracy, weaponized against us. And that this has happened with the willing and profitable cooperation of our new president and his allies foreign and domestic.

The Three Card Monte of Republican Tax "Reform"

Republican tax reform [sic] always means tax cuts, first of all.

Tax cuts means tax cuts for the rich, not for working people or the middle class, at least not significantly, and certainly not guaranteed.

So the Republicans negotiate a "Tax Reform" bill with Democrats, who demand that it contain some benefits for working people and the middle class, things that will help restore the economic balance, fixing the imbalances caused by the top-favoring of 35 years of Republican tax and labor policies.

After the bill is passed, if it is passed, there are mechanisms in the bill, put there by “strict budget disciplinarians” to claw back any benefits that are judged "unaffordable." (Insincere Sad Face)

These middle class benefits in the tax reform [sic] bill will be judged unaffordable when, quelle surprise, it turns out tax cuts do not actually result in revenue increases. So obligations to working people are always unaffordable and promises made to working people are always contingent and easily backed out of. Benefits to rich people are always sacred and guaranteed. This became true in the years since 1980 when Reaganomics became an American religion, a fake promise.

This fake promising is similar to the way back-end participation works in Hollywood: you are promised profit participation on the profits of a blockbuster film but these profits are carefully wiped out by the payouts distributed to the producers further up the food chain, after which there is seldom any left. (Insincere Sad Face)

It is also similar to the way Donald Trump’s many many independent contractors were left unpaid by Trump Inc. “Sorry. None left. Sue me.” (Trump doesn't pretend to be sad he can't pay, he just smiles.)

When this kind of scheme enables the Republicans in government to screw the working people and pay off the rich it has twin benefits (for Republicans): it makes the rich clientele very happy and likelier to share their booty in the form of campaign donations and lucrative jobs on retirement, while making working people hate government, which is the second most important objective of the Republicans, who hate government.

There is the phrase Republicans once used to demonize Democratic tax policy: the Two Santa Clauses. The Democratic Santa offers government help to the less fortunate. The Republican Santa offers tax cuts to the more fortunate, but also to the middle classes who feel the tax burden and buy the idea that lower taxes raise dividends.

But the Republicans have turned this on its head. They do deliver like Santa to the rich, but they also benefit by turning the Democratic Santa into a Democratic villain who demands taxes, who gouges the middle classes via taxes, and whose payout to the middle class and working people is unaffordable because the Republicans have already paid it out to their clients. And the Republicans make damn sure the taxes on Democrats rise every year as the taxes on Republicans go down, or at on least rich Republicans. When Republicans see their taxes go up they ALWAYS blame Democrats.

So the benefits of tax cuts and easy evasions and wonderful tax subsidies to the rich are ironclad and eternal whether the federal budget is fully funded or short of cash. Cuts are sacred and guaranteed.

Meanwhile the benefits to the people who work for a living are contingent upon how well the budgets balance out, similar to the way Trump screws his contractors and film companies screw the less preferred classes of producers and profit participants. The phrase “Sorry, but we can’t afford it” is often used. And the middle class being screwed understands the phrase. It's too familiar. It's a part of the game.

The rich are entitled to their tax free ride because their entitlement is figured out first. Once they’ve eaten their fill the leftovers are counted out for the less rich and there is seldom enough left to fulfill those obligations.

Again. Rich entitlements are sacred and guaranteed. Payouts always begin at the top.

Working class entitlements are contingent and often reneged on. The way Trump screws the people he hires. The way the rich have screwed working people for centuries.

Promise and fail to deliver. This is done in a planned and deliberate way.

This ritual doesn’t stain the rich who ate all the working class entitlements (who demanded to eat those entitlements, who demonized those entitlements in careful ways over recent decades) it stains the government, helping to teach generations of working people that government is not to be trusted., that government is a thief, that government is the enemy.

After all, it was the government who stepped in and began passing laws to hoist the workers out of permanent poverty. That is how the rich learned to hate government: because it was a better Santa Claus than the rich employers were who tossed out niggling scraps at Christmastime but screwed the poor the rest of the year. The rich needed to make their benefits immune from workers’ hatred and opposition and needed to kill the liberal/progressive Santa Claus of government, who was more than a gift giver, he was also a Superman, a hero, a protector, a guarantor of fair play in the economy. Fair play was and is anathema to the rich and their Republican agents.

Follow The Rubles, Follow The Lies

Follow the Money. The key to what the Russians wanted might be found in the firing of Preet Bharara and the quick settlement of the Prevezon case after the firing, on Russia’s terms. (Their words.) The motivation supplied to Trump came in over a decade of many millions of rubles pouring into Trump Inc.

A VOX interview with a Russia Expert who says the answer is in the money that changed hands. Russian money kept Trump from being a business failure.

Follow the Kompramat: apparently much of the Steel Dossier Republicans are trying to discredit has already been corroborated.

The article on SLATE

(By the way, it wasn’t created at the request of or by Democrats. It was commissioned by Republicans, created by a respected former MI6 professional and handed to the FBI by a top Republican, John McCain.)

The Facebook aspect of Russian spying, explained by POLITICO.

Non-Linear Warfare and the Russians:

A short video on Vladislav Surkov, Putin's magician

The inventor of non-linear warfare––Vladislav Surkov, a profile in The Atlantic.

If a foreign enemy wanted to destroy the U.S. this is how they might do it. Worst case scenario laid out in The Atlantic. And in fact, it is a worst case scenario. Install a presidency whose intention is to degrade and destroy all of our democratic systems, all of our safeguards, all of our laws, all of our public trust, all of our global standing. Mission Accomplished!

If Putin or anyone wanted to destroy faith in our president they couldn’t pick a better liar to install than Donald Trump, liar par excellence. He’s been lying for decades about his Russian connections and his Russian money flow.

From David Corn at Mother Jones

"R" Is For Russian. "R" is for Republican

Important reporting from Reuters shows a strategy of coverup by the Republicans

According to the latest reporting by Reuters, Devin Nunes (the recused chair of the House Intel Committee) is still very unrecusedly busy trying to derail any and all investigations into the ways Russia hacked our election. His approach is very Republican: if he can make sure Americans don’t learn about what happened that will mean nothing happened. Nunes’ strategy is to project blame onto officials in the Obama administration who correctly and in line with standing protocols and procedures, asked a special panel for the names of the Americans who were discovered talking with Russian agents during the campaign. They sought to know because it was their job to protect American democracy and they followed the rules in doing so.

Nunes’ theory is simple and simpleminded: Until it becomes known that Americans were colluding with a foreign enemy Nunes believes he can insist no Americans were colluding. Until the colluding Americans are known by name, Nunes can say they don’t exist and the conversations never took place. And how dare these professionals in the Obama administration seek to learn who those people were! In Nunes’ mind it isn’t criminal to collude with a foreign enemy, but it is criminal to investigate that collusion.

The Republican idea is that wrongdoing isn’t the problem, Americans knowing about the wrongdoing is the problem.

What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

Republicans look back at all previous Republican White House scandals in a different way than most of us do: the faked criteria for the Iraq War; the outing of CIA agent because her husband disclosed the truth; Iran Contra, where the Reagan White House illegally traded weapons with Islamic terrorists to arm our own terrorists in Central America; all the way back to Watergate. They all have one main idea: keeping Americans in the dark.

They see Watergate not as a broad criminal conspiracy and a stain on American democracy; Republicans see Watergate as a failed coverup. If it had been properly covered up there would have been no problem. Undiscovered crimes are not crimes just as covering up industrial causes of climate change means that those causes do not exist. Serious problems are not serious or even problems as long as Americans do not know about them. This is called whitewashing. This is coverup pure and simple.

On the day after 9/11 we need to understand that America is again under attack. Not by terrorists in airliners but by Russians and their American proxies trying to destroy our democracy.

Politico describes what's known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, the Russian attack plan which put Trump into the White House.

"In 2013 General Valery Gerasimov—Russia’s chief of the General Staff, comparable to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare—one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. He wrote: “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. … All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.””

The Daily Beast explains how Trump's and Russia' Facebook strategy had such a powerful cascading effect on the election.

"On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, revealed that Russia had “likely” used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans. It was Facebook’s first public acknowledgment of the role it unwittingly played in the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaign. Stamos’ statement was also conspicuous by what it omitted: Facebook has refused to release the ads. More significant, it hasn’t said what kind of reach Russia attained with its ad buy.
"There may be a reason for that. On the surface, $100,000 is small change in contemporary national politics, and 3,000 ads sounds like a drop in the pond when Facebook boasts 2 billion monthly users. But it turns out $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times.

"But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters, too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break. Finally, there are network effects, which can vastly multiply the number of users who see a promoted Facebook post."


What makes this especially interesting is the striking similarity between Russia’s strategy of relying on Facebook and Trump’s own strategy. Trump’s campaign used ONLY ads on Facebook. Russia and Trump shared that strategic focus.

The question now is: Were Russia’s Facebook attacks guided by Trump’s own intel. Or were they both directed by intel and analysis from another player in the Trump fold? (Was it, perhaps Cambridge Analytica?)

Further analysis from Medium on how the Facebook strategy weaponized social media for the Russians and the Republicans

"There may be some fake news on Facebook, but the power of the Facebook advertising platform to influence voters is very real. This is the story of how the Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.

"Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald J. Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.

“With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners."

More analysis from WIRED. Both of these articles came right on the heels of the election when it became clear how the gambit had succeeded but details remained unclear or were undisclosed because they were part of ongoing intelligence investigations.

Fascists And Republicans Have Colluded Before––Are They The Same?

I keep asking: when are the stories about the Russian attack on our election and infiltration of our politics going to make the necessary comparison with the German American Bund, a fascist infiltration run by and from a foreign enemy, designed to turn America into a lesser power unlikely to challenge the Nazis' global ambitions?

The Nazis organized the Bund to neutralize America’s traditional friendship with Britain and other European democracies, to make America neutral and isolationist. Russia used Trump to neutralize and isolate American power in the world, to split up the western alliance, NATO, and similar alliances we had around the world, to bust up trade agreements, to sow discord within the United States itself. They achieved this goal far beyond any rational expectation. Trump, by his appointments to key posts and non-appointments, has also achieved a overall degradation of our democratic institutions and systems of government: the State Department, the EPA, the FCC (the agency that is supposed to keep foreign bots and trolls from dominating our public communications), the various bureaus and departments tasked with making our systems function properly and fairly. The Trump/Putin win in this election has also turned the Department of Justice from a department focused on protecting Americans’ rights into a tool for white supremacy and white minority rule, a deportation machine, a device for making America less attractive and less admired in the world.

The German goals with the Bund dovetailed neatly with Republican goals in the 1930s, so there were two machines working to derail FDR’s New Deal and America’s alliance with Europe’s democracies. As this short BBC documentary describes, in 1933 and 34, just after FDR began his first term, groups funded by Wall Street began organizing a coup. The coup failed, but the movement continued, calling itself The Liberty League, championing corporate power and opposing workers’ rights and efforts to rebuild our infrastructure by putting Americans back to work with government spending. So this neat alliance between foreign fascists and American Republicans is not new.

The new Russian strategy sold via bots and trolls and agent provocateurs fits neatly with decades-old Republican strategies of divide and rule. Divide white workers from black and Latino workers. Divide men from women. Divide by religious belief. Divide the religious from the non-religious. Divide regions against each other (note how Republicans opposed relief after Hurricane Sandy…of course they now demand relief for their own disasters.) The motives and sentiments expressed by the Russians in their global mischief probably appeared very familiar to Republicans who were targeted. So familiar it didn’t seem foreign or wrong. It fit previous Republican instructions. Ingredients in the Russian playbook include race resentment, global grievances and feelings of unjust decline in status, hatred of more successful and prosperous countries and groups, fierce religious prejudices, and overall an almost medieval tribalism. So it may be hard to sort the con game from a free choice made by Republicans and independents susceptible to the Russian/Republican pitches.

Bill Moyers has this helpful, factual, timeline of the Trump/Putin relationship and how the Republicans were cool with it.

This reporting from McClatchy and the New York Times explores how the Russians did it and might help explain why Republicans were so comfortable going along with it.

The Steele Dossier, which is being proven out in many of its concerns and suspicions, reminds us of how the Russians also used political blackmail to enforce Trump's compliance with their plan.

If a majority chooses fascism in an election is it still democracy? Remember: Hitler was elected in a democracy, which enabled him to close it down and install a fascist autocracy.

Were Republicans duped or were they willing collaborators? You might point out that the Russians were spreading lies and fake news. It was a trick. The Trump answer to that is to say the news networks were fake news too. When it’s all lies the public tends to choose sides, revert to tribal loyalties.

There has been another Republican defense that says “All politicians lie.” This is a vast expansion of the fact that no politician is ever able to fulfill all of his or her promises. And political oppositions force compromises to achieve anything. Are compromises a lie? This is another familiar totalitarian smear against democracies, but Republicans have run on it for decades. The goal among antidemocratic politicians has been to degrade confidence in our system and our democratic norms, to degrade our institutions to make Americans frustrated and distrustful of them, to make Americans long for a strong man, a dictator. Dictators are so much more efficient because they order something and it gets done. The problem is totalitarians make decisions that benefit themselves, letting lesser benefits trickle down… and that pathetic promise is also familiar. It counts on Americans being so busy fighting amongst themselves for the diminished benefits that they don’t organize against the power that has diminished, actually stolen, those benefits.

In our recent fight over “entitlements” and prosperity the Republican strategy has been to say “some other group” has stolen your prosperity or feels falsely entitled to what you are legitimately entitled to, while the Republican machinery has actually been taking that prosperity and redistributing it upward. They’ve also distributed the tax burden downward, off of the wealthy classes and onto the working class. The enemy isn’t taxes, which pay for roads and schools and hospitals, it’s their redistribution. The dysfunction this unfair redistribution has caused has dried up the revenue that keeps our infrastructure functioning. There is another similarity here between Russia (a kleptocracy) and the Republican juggernaut. In Russia wealthy tax evaders have been laundering their stolen wealth abroad, apparently through people like Donald Trump and Paul Manafort and others, impoverishing their country, hollowing it out, lowering its GDP disastrously and lowering life expectancy dramatically. Will similar kleptocratic behaviors by the Republicans and their clients do the same here?

When the news becomes bad nobody wants to believe it. People tend to blame it on others. When systems fail we blame the people who have tried to keep those systems working, we don’t tend to blame the political party that degraded the tax revenue that kept the systems operative, that updated safeguards and installed backups. For three decades, if you listen to the Republican rhetoric, you can see how much they agree with the Russians: they want to hollow out America the same way Russia’s leadership and oligarchy has hollowed out Russia. The Republicans want a lower paid, obedient, servile working class, which is a basic fascist goal. They know this is unattractive, but they know that when things stop functioning that Americans will long for a strongman to make it run again, doing so by good old corporate dictatorial powers.

Strong men get into power by promising what they have no intention of delivering. Democrats, both small-d and capital-D, actually mean to deliver on their promises, sometimes they fail or succeed only partially. An unfulfilled promise is not a lie when the politician persists in trying to achieve what he or she promised. In a democracy, compromises are not lies, they are how democracy works. I suppose you could also say Trump was telling the truth when he promised to do harm to millions of Americans; he meant to do these things and will still try to do them if he can. He promised to shut down whole departments of government. Not a lie: he has installed department heads dedicated to making poisons flow into our water and air again, to re-accelerate climate change, to put the internet firmly into the hands of corporations and restrict its use by the rest of us, to keep poverty wages below the poverty line, to re-accelerate health insurance rate hikes and make it harder for sick people to get care. He’s honest about the things he plans to do, but he lies about how those things will affect us. He promises we will get tired of winning when he intends to restrict the winning to himself and his class of rich people, powerful people, the kinds of people his prosperity gospel preachers say are blessed by God because they are rich. Is that a lie? Most con games are lies sold with partial truths. The way the Nazis “persuaded" the German people. The way Putin manipulated his way into dictatorship. It’s a con game and one political party in America seems very adept at it and very comfortable with it. It’s exactly what the Republicans want. It's a con game. This is why they nominated a con man to run it for them.

No political party or movement or figure has lied so massively and so constantly as this Republican president and this Republican Party. It’s as if the Russians had grafted their fascist DNA onto the Republican Party, along with their aggressive use of lies and wholehearted willingness to believe lies and rationalize them. As Republican Duncan Hunter said about Trump: “He’s an asshole but he’s our asshole.” This is tribalism. This is an absence of values. This is what Orwell wrote about in 1984, a system turned upside down and inside out. This is what Sinclair Lewis wrote about in It Can’t Happen Here. It didn’t happen in the 1930s, but it appears to have succeeded in this decade.

Rex Tillerson––ExxonMobil––Climate Science Coverup––Houston––Hurricane Harvey

To The United States Senate and House of Representatives:

As we assess the colossal human and infrastructure costs of Harvey, the destructive power and sheer volume of which shocked even the climate scientists who warned this might happen...

…are you planning to investigate and interview Rex Tillerson about ExxonMobil’s decades of coverup on climate science?

As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson was the head of a massive coverup conspiracy…

…possibly the largest and most consequential coverup in human history…

...a deliberate denial of top climate science by Exxon's own scientists that warned of the dangers of carbon driven climate change to which Exxon was a major driving force.

And now Tillerson is the #3 in this administration that has reversed eight years of climate policy…

...apparently to continue the coverup of climate change science…

...and continue maximizing profits in the oil/gas/coal industry, of which Tillerson’s company was the largest company.

I am hoping we don’t see the slackness and indifference we saw at the time of the Iraq War when VP Cheney’s former company, which Cheney had walked to the precipice of bankruptcy, received a huge set of contracts to manage and follow up the war…

…contracts which turned Halliburton from a basket case into a profitable juggernaut––just before its HQ was transferred to a mideast country where its records could be kept secret.

I am sure Mr. Cheney’s extremely deluxe retirement on Chesapeake Bay was enabled by the war decisions he drove through…

...on a war that was a massive and costly failure for the rest of us.

American taxpayers (by which I mean the regular working people who pay the taxes, not the corporations and higher earners who evade them) have been left on the hook for one massive politically driven disaster which was launched for personal financial reasons, the Iraq War. Thousands of our military personnel have died for that war and many thousands more suffered irreparable wounds from it. But Halliburton reaped huge rewards, from which we can assume VP Cheney’s retirement income and properties have flowed.

American taxpayers will cover the cost of hurricane repair in Texas. (Despite Texas’s own congresspeople opposing any such repair in NY and NJ a few years ago, this repair will happen.)

That hurricane has a forensic trail that leads back to climate science from recent decades, and warnings clearly sent, but there are also warnings clearly hidden and silenced by ExxonMobil.

We also have an entire administration built upon the idea that government is a profit opportunity, a president who rails against that kind of corruption while personally engaging in it on a scale we’ve never seen before.

Will you be asking Rex Tillerson the key questions about what Exxon knew and when Exxon knew it?

Will you follow the money?

Disaster Capitalism is the Republican Plan

Disaster Capitalism = Predatory Capitalism = The Republican Plan.

This is the Republican ideal. It’s their goal. It’s the reason they like government to “get out of the way”. So their friends in the private sector can loot the vulnerable. This isn’t to say private business is all predatory, but lack of oversight and the chaos of unpreparedness tends to declare open season on victims of disaster.

This long read from Naomi Klein is worth sharing

The Right loves unpreparedness because it strips the vulnerable of all defenses and sets them up for profiteers to prey on.The Right, the GOP, and Wall Street see disasters as a profit opportunity. That’s why they see government as the enemy.

The Intercept describes how Houston was intentionally left unprepared

Republicans––not all of Republicans but certainly the leadership and the dominant wing of the party––see problems as an opportunity to exploit the vulnerable for profit.

There are also disasters that unfold more slowly and broadly and don’t need a giant storm to monetize. Our unfair system of housing in this country is a disaster that’s been in place for a hundred years. It was put in place by Jim Crow laws in the South, and by Jim Crow members of Congress who dominated federal rules and regulations. The racists used to dominate the Democratic Party until Humphrey and LBJ drove them out in the 50s and 60s. Those racists were welcomed with open arms by Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and the Republican Party has been White Folks Central ever since… with the occasional person of color included for decoration.

Predatory mortgage contracts designed to fleece people of color have come back because of bigotry in this Republican Congress and Republican dominated state legislatures:

Chuck Collins writes about how unfair housing enriches the few Loan sharking is back, thanks to this Republican president and this Republican congress.