Bharat Rakshak

UlanBatori wrote:hkji: Give it a rest and kindly refrain from posting infantile trash, this is an adult forum. Some minimal IQ is assumed.

Former President George H.W. Bush said Monday that he will vote for Hillary Clinton in November, according to sources close to the 41st President -- an extraordinary rebuke of his own party's nominee.

The sources said this was not the first time Bush had disclosed his intention to vote for Clinton.

Summers still supports trade agreements, including nafta. The problem, he said, is that few people understand the benefits: the jobs created by exporting goods; trade’s role in strengthening other economies, thereby reducing immigration flows from countries like Mexico. The “popularization of politics,” he said, keeps leaders from pursuing controversial but important policies. If the Marshall Plan had been focus-grouped, it never would have happened. Globalization creates what Summers called a “trilemma” among global integration, public goods like environmental protection or high wages, and national sovereignty. It’s become clear that Democratic élites, including him, underestimated the power of nationalism, because they didn’t feel it strongly themselves.

Summers described the current Democratic Party as “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The Republicans, he went on, combined “social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people.” These alignments left neither party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie: “All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country—they feel like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.” In 2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” He used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts.

Two decades ago, the conservative social scientist Charles Murray co-wrote “The Bell Curve,” which argued that inherited I.Q., ethnicity, and professional success are strongly connected, thereby dooming government efforts to educate poor Americans into the middle class. The book generated great controversy, including charges of racism, and some of its methodology was exposed as flawed. In a more recent book, “Coming Apart,” Murray focusses on the widening divide between a self-segregated white upper class and an emerging white lower class. He concludes that “the trends signify damage to the heart of American community and the way in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.”

Murray lives in Burkittsville, Maryland, an hour and a quarter’s drive from Washington, D.C. It’s a virtually all-white town where elements of the working class have fallen on hard times. “The energy coming out of the new lower class really only needed a voice, because they are so pissed off at people like you and me,” he said. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them—‘flyover country.’ The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan. And you can also talk about evangelical Christians in the most disparaging terms—you will get no pushback from that. They’re aware of this kind of condescension. And they also haven’t been doing real well.”


The moral superiority of élites comes cheap. Recently, Murray has done demographic research on “Super Zips”—the Zip Codes of the most privileged residents of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. “Super Zips are integrated in only one way—Asians,” he said. “Blacks and Latinos are about as scarce in the Super Zips as they were in the nineteen-fifties.” Multiethnic America, with its tensions and resentments, poses no problem for élites, who can buy their way out. “This translates into a whole variety of liberal positions”—Murray mentioned being pro-immigration and anti-school choice—“in which the élite has not borne any of the costs.”

Perhaps the first cosmopolitan élite in American history was Alexander Hamilton: an immigrant, an urbanite, a friend of the rich, at home in political, financial, and journalistic circles of power. Hamilton created the American system of public and private banking, and for two centuries he was a hero to conservatives, while his archrival Thomas Jefferson—founder of the Democratic Party—was taken as the champion of the common man. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” Jefferson once wrote. “The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” But Democrats now embrace Hamilton for his immigrant background and his modern ideas of activist government. Meanwhile, the name of the slave-owning, states’-rights champion Jefferson has been removed from Democratic fund-raising dinners. The Hamilton who distrusted popular democracy is now overlooked or accepted—after all, today’s cosmopolitan élites similarly distrust the passions of their less educated compatriots.

If there’s one creative work that epitomizes the Obama Presidency, it’s the hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” whose opening song was débuted by Lin-Manuel Miranda in the East Room of the White House, in 2009, with the Obamas in attendance. The show has been universally praised—Michelle Obama called it the greatest work of art she’d ever seen, and Dick Cheney is a fan. It succeeds on every level: the score playing in your mind when you wake up; the brilliance of its lyrics; its boldness in giving eighteenth-century history contemporary form and in casting people of color who, during Hamilton’s time, were in bondage or invisible. Miranda’s “Hamilton” suggests that the real heirs to the American Revolution are not Tea Partiers waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags but black and Latino Americans and immigrants.

Miranda’s triumph is itself a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity. The Hamilton that theatregoers are paying scalpers’ prices to see is a progressive, not the father of Wall Street. Meanwhile, far from Broadway, Jefferson’s ploughmen are lining up at Trump rallies.

“Hamilton” coincided with an important turn in American politics. Occupy Wall Street had come and gone, and while the ninety-nine and the one per cent didn’t disappear, black and white came to the fore. There was a growing recognition that a historic President had cleared barriers at the top but not at the bottom—that the Obama years had brought little change in the systemic inequities facing the black and the poor. This disappointment, along with shocking videos of police killings of unarmed black men, produced a new level of activism not seen in American streets and popular culture since the late sixties.

Nelini Stamp, a New Yorker in her twenties, of black and Latino parentage, was an organizer at Occupy. In 2012, the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin jolted her consciousness, and the acquittal of his killer outraged her. She grew up on Staten Island, just a few blocks from where, in 2014, Eric Garner was suffocated by a police officer. “We have to talk about black folks,” Stamp told me. “Class will always be at the center of my politics, but if I’m not centering black folks at the same time then I’m not going to get free. We’re not going to change things. We can have this populist argument all we want, but if we don’t repair the sins of the past—we could have a bunch of reforms, but if we’re still being killed it’s going to become white economic populism if we don’t have the race stuff together.”

Stamp is both a millennial and a student of the nineteen-thirties—a “Hamilton” fan who works with the labor movement. Her ideal, she said, would be to see “white working-class people standing beside black folks, saying, ‘Your struggle is my struggle.’ That’s my dream!”

This year, Stamp’s dream seems as distant as ever, with Trump inciting his working-class followers to use violence against black protesters, and with students on élite campuses issuing sweeping denunciations of white privilege. All whites are unequal, but some are more unequal than others. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” J. D. Vance writes, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the wasps of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”

For Democrats, the politics of race and class are fraught. If you focus insistently on class, as Bernie Sanders did at the start of the campaign, you risk seeming to be concerned only with whites. Focus insistently on race, and the Party risks being seen as a factional coalition without universal appeal—the fate of the Democratic Party in the seventies and eighties. The new racial politics puts Democrats like Clinton in the middle of this dilemma.

The voices of black protest today challenge the optimistic narrative of the civil-rights movement—the idea, widespread at the time of Obama’s election, of incremental progress and expanding opportunity in an increasingly multiracial society. (“Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run so we can all fly.”) Many activists are turning back to earlier history for explanations—thus the outpouring of films, novels, essays, poetry, pop music, and scholarly work about slavery and Jim Crow, as if to say, “Not so fast.” The Black Lives Matter movement reflects this mood. It has achieved reforms, but it was conceived not as a reformist movement but as a collective expression of grief and anger, a demand for restitution of wrongs that go back centuries and whose effects remain ubiquitous. It tends to see American society not as increasingly mixed and fluid but as a set of permanent hierarchies, like a caste system.

A new consensus has replaced the more sanguine civil-rights view. It’s attuned to deep structures and symbols, rather than to policies and progress. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-selling and much praised book, “Between the World and Me,” is now required reading for many college freshmen. His idea of history is static, and deeply pessimistic: “The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.” Coates’s writing in “Between the World and Me” has a stance and a rhetorical sweep that make the give-and-take of politics seem almost impossible. Somewhere between this jeremiad and the naïve idea of inevitable progress lies the complicated truth.

If racial injustice is considered to be monolithic and unchanging—omitting the context of individual actions, white and black—the political response tends to be equally rigid: genuflection or rejection. Clinton’s constituency surely includes many voters who would welcome a nuanced discussion of race—one that addresses, for example, both drug-sentencing reform and urban crime. But identity politics breaks down the distinction between an idea and the person articulating it, so that before speaking up one has to ask: Does my identity give me the right to say this? Could my identity be the focus of a Twitter backlash? This atmosphere makes honest conversation very hard, and gives a demagogue like Trump the aura of being a truthteller. The “authenticity” that his followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive. But when people of good will are afraid to air legitimate arguments the illegitimate kind gains power.

I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said. “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,” Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”

Loury pointed out that the new racial politics actually asks little of sympathetic whites: a confession, a reading assignment. Last August, Black Lives Matter activists met with Hillary Clinton backstage at a town hall on drug abuse, in New Hampshire. In a rare moment of candor and passion, Clinton made the case for pragmatism and, above all, legislation. As a camera filmed the exchange, one activist, Julius Jones, spoke of “the anti-blackness current that is America’s first drug,” adding, “America’s first drug is free black labor and turning black bodies into profit.” Jones told Clinton that America’s fundamental problems can’t be solved until someone in her position tells white Americans the truth about the country’s founding sins. The activists wanted Clinton to apologize.

She replied, “There has to be a reckoning—I agree with that. But I also think there has to be some positive vision and plan that you can move people toward.” She asked Black Lives Matter for a policy agenda, along the lines of the civil-rights movement.

Jones wasn’t buying it: “If you don’t tell black people what we need to do, then we won’t tell you all what you need to do.”

“I’m not telling you,” Clinton said. “I’m just telling you to tell me.”

Jones replied, “What I mean to say is that this is, and always has been, a white problem of violence. It’s not—there’s not much that we can do to stop the violence against us.”

As the conversation ended, Clinton said, “Yeah, well, respectfully, if that is your position, then I will talk only to white people about how we are going to deal with the very real problems. . . . I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart.”

When I asked Clinton about the politics of race and class, she said, “It can’t be either-or.” She listed recent advances made by locked-out groups, including black people but also women, gays, and transgender people. “But we also need to have an economic message”—her tone said, Come on, folks!—“with an economic set of policies that we can repeatedly talk about and make the case that they will improve the lives of Americans.” It was important to speak to people’s anxieties about identity, to address “systemic racism,” Clinton said. “But it’s also the case that a vast group of Americans have economic anxiety, and if they think we are only talking about issues that they are not personally connected to, then it’s understandable that they would say, ‘There’s nothing there for me.’ ”

While the Democrats were becoming the party of rising professionals and diversity, the Republicans were finding fruitful hunting grounds elsewhere. The Southern states turned Republican after 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. West Virginia, however—with a smaller black population than the Deep South, and heavy unionization—retained a strong Democratic character into the nineties. But West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate since Bill Clinton, in 1996. Al Gore’s surprising failure there in 2000 was an overlooked factor in his narrow Electoral College loss, and a harbinger of the future. Something changed that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race. Culturally, the Republican Party was getting closer to the working class.

To some liberal analysts, this crossover practically violated a law of nature—why did less affluent white Americans keep voting against their own interests? During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama spoke to an audience of donors in San Francisco, and analyzed the phenomenon as a reaction to economic decline: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s hard to remember that, in 2008, the key constituents of his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, were working-class whites; indeed, her only hope of winning the nomination lay in such states as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. Clinton pounced on Obama’s speech, calling it “élitist.”

She was right. Obama was expressing a widespread liberal attitude toward Republican-voting workers—that is, he didn’t take them seriously. Guns and religion, as much as jobs and incomes, are the authentic interest of millions of Americans. Trade and immigration have failed to make their lives better, and, arguably, left them worse off. And if the Democratic Party was no longer on their side—if government programs kept failing to improve their lives—why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously?

Thomas Frank told me recently, “When the traditional party of working-class concerns walks away from those concerns, even when they just do it rhetorically, it provides an enormous opening for the Republicans to address those concerns, even if they do it rhetorically, too.” The culture wars became class wars, with Republicans in the novel position of speaking for the have-nots who were white. The fact that Democrats remained the party of activist government no longer won them automatic loyalty. As communities in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and rural America declined, attitudes toward government programs grew more hostile. J. D. Vance describes working, at seventeen, as a cashier in an Ohio grocery store. Some of his poor white customers gamed their food stamps to buy beer and wine, while talking on cell phones that Vance couldn’t afford. “Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” he writes. “A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s.”

In 2009, during the debate over the health-care bill, one protester at a town-hall meeting shouted, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” In 2012, the Times posted an interactive map of the country’s “geography of government benefits.” The graphic showed that the areas with the highest levels of welfare spending coincided with deep-red America. During the Great Depression, the hard-pressed became the base of support for the New Deal. Now many Americans who resent government most are those who depend on it most, or who live and work among those who do.

Since the eighties, the Republican Party has been an unlikely coalition of downscale whites (many of them evangelical Christians) and business interests, united by a common dislike of the federal government. To conservative thinkers, this alliance was more than a political convenience; it filled a moral requirement. Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism, was an early apostle of supply-side economics, but he also wrote numerous essays about the need for a revival of religious faith, as a way of regulating moral conduct in a liberal, secular world. For ordinary Americans, traditional religion was a bulwark against the moral relativism of the modern age. Kristol’s pieces in the Wall Street Journal officiated at the unlikely wedding of business executives and evangelical Christians in the church of conservatism—a role that perhaps only a Jewish ex-Trotskyist could take on.

The Republicans, long the boring party of Babbitt—Mailer’s druggists and retired doctors—were infused with a powerful populist energy. Kristol welcomed it. “This new populism is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government,” he wrote, in 1985. “It is rather an effort to bring our governing élites to their senses. That is why so many people—and I include myself—who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

It was a fateful marriage. The new conservative populism did not possess an “orderly heart.” It was riven with destructive impulses. It fed on rage and the spectacle of pop culture. But intellectuals like Kristol didn’t worry when media demagogues—Limbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, Coulter, Hannity—came on the scene with all the viciousness of the nineteen-thirties radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin. They didn’t worry when Republican officeholders deployed every available weapon—investigation, impeachment, Supreme Court majority, filibuster, government shutdown, conspiracy theories, implied threats of violence—to destroy their political enemies.

Being a Wasilla Walmart Mom had become a qualification for high office—for some, the main one. Palin even had a pregnant, unwed teen-age daughter. Her campaign appearances turned working-class whiteness into identity politics: she strutted onstage to the beat of Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the “establishment,” Palin was John the Baptist to the coming of Trump.

The conservative marriage survived the embarrassment of Palin’s campaign, which exposed her as someone more interested in getting on TV than in governing. It rode the nihilistic anger of the Tea Party and the paranoid rants of Glenn Beck. It benefitted from heavy spending by the Koch brothers and ignored the barely disguised racism that some Republican voters directed at the black family now occupying the White House. When Trump and others began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, Party élites turned a blind eye; the rank and file, for their part, fell in behind Mitt Romney, a Harvard-educated investor. The persistence of this coalition required an immense amount of self-deception on both sides. Romney, who belonged to a class that greatly benefitted from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be outraged by the presence of undocumented workers. Lower-middle-class Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the fact that the representatives they kept electing, like Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits like Kristol kept demanding new ones—but their shared contempt for liberal élites kept them from noticing the Republican Party’s internal conflicts. In this way, red states and blue states—the color-coding scheme enshrined by the networks on the night of the 2000 Presidential election—continued to define the country’s polarization into mutually hateful camps.

e inadequacy of this picture became clear to me in Obama’s first term. During the Great Recession, I visited many hard-hit small towns, exurbs, rural areas, and old industrial cities, and kept meeting Americans who didn’t match the red-blue scheme. They might be white Southern country people, but they hated corporations and big-box stores as well as the federal government. They might have a law practice, but that didn’t stop them from entertaining apocalyptic visions of armed citizens turning to political violence. They followed the Tea Party, but, in their hostility toward big banks, they sounded a little like Occupy Wall Street, or vice versa. They were loose molecules unattached to party hierarchies—more individualistic than the Democrats, more antibusiness than the Republicans. What united them was a distrust of distant leaders and institutions. They believed that the game was rigged for the powerful and the connected, and that they and their children were screwed.

The left-versus-right division wasn’t entirely mistaken, but one could draw a new chart that explained things differently and perhaps more accurately: up versus down. Looked at this way, the élites on each side of the partisan divide have more in common with one another than they do with voters down below. A network-systems administrator, an oil-and-gas-company vice-president, a journalist, and a dermatologist hire nannies from the same countries, dine at the same Thai restaurants, travel abroad on the same frequent-flier miles, and invest in the same emerging-markets index funds. They might have different political views, but they share a common interest in the existing global order. As Thomas Frank put it, “The leadership of the two parties represents two classes. The G.O.P. is a business élite; Democrats are a status élite, the professional class. They fight over sectors important for the national future—Wall Street, Big Pharma, energy, Silicon Valley. That is the contested terrain of American politics. What about the vast majority of people?”

The political upheaval of the past year has clarified that there are class divides in both parties. Bernie Sanders posed a serious insurgent challenge to Clinton, thundering in front of tens of thousands of ardent supporters—all the while sounding like an aging academic who’d have been lucky to attract a dozen listeners at the Socialist Scholars Conference twenty-five years ago. Sanders spoke for different groups of Americans who felt disenfranchised: young people with heavy college debt and lousy career prospects, blue-collar workers who retained their Democratic identity, progressives (many of them professionals) who found Obama and Clinton too moderate. It was a limited and unwieldy coalition, but it had far more energy than Clinton’s constituency.

Initially, Clinton was caught off guard by the public’s anger at the political establishment. She casually proposed her husband as a jobs czar in a second Clinton Presidency, as if globalization hadn’t lost its shine. One of her advisers told me that Hillary’s years in the State Department had insulated her and her staff from the mood of ordinary Americans. So, one could add, did her customary life of socializing with, giving paid speeches to, and raising money from the ultra-rich, whose ranks the Clinton family joined as private citizens. (From 2007 to last year, Bill and Hillary earned a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars; in 2010, their daughter, Chelsea, married a hedge-fund manager.) In 2014, in a speech to the investment firms Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, Hillary Clinton described her solid middle-class upbringing and then admitted, “Now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed, because of the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

Clinton was saying in private what she can’t or won’t in public. The e-mails hacked from the account of her campaign manager, John Podesta, and released by WikiLeaks, show her staff worrying over passages from her paid speeches that, if made public, could allow her to be portrayed as two-faced and overly friendly with corporate America. But when Clinton told one audience, “You need both a public and a private position,” she was describing what used to be considered normal politics—deploying different strategies to get groups with varying interests behind a policy. Before what Lawrence Summers called “the popularization of politics,” Lyndon Johnson required a degree of deception to pass civil-rights legislation. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually get where we need to be,” Clinton told her audience. “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least.” Clinton would be comfortable and productive governing in back rooms—she was known for her quiet bipartisan efforts in the Senate. But Americans today, especially on the Trump right and the Sanders left, won’t give politicians anything close to that kind of trust. Radical transparency occasionally brings corruption to light, but it can also make good governance harder.

Indefatigable and protean, Clinton read the disaffected landscape and adapted in her characteristic style—with a policy agenda. She endorsed profit-sharing for employees and declared opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She demanded stricter enforcement of trade rules that protect workers, and called for more infrastructure spending and trust-busting. She underscored her commitment to equal pay for women. Publicly, she attacked the bloated salaries of the C.E.O.s with whom she privately socializes and raises money.

I asked Clinton if Obama had made a mistake in not prosecuting any Wall Street executives after the financial crisis. She replied, “I think the failure to be able to bring criminal cases, to hold people responsible, was one of the contributing factors to a lot of the real frustration and anger that a lot of voters feel. There is just nobody to blame. So if we can’t blame Company X or C.E.O. Y, let’s blame immigrants. Right? We’ve got to blame somebody—that’s human nature. We need a catharsis.” F.D.R. had done it by denouncing bankers and other “economic royalists,” Clinton said, her voice rising. “And by doing so he told a story.” She went on, “If you don’t tell people what’s happening to them—not every story has villains, but this story did—at least you could act the way that you know the people in the country felt.”

After defeating Sanders, Clinton tried to win over his supporters by letting them write the Democratic Party platform. It is the farthest left of any in recent memory—it effectively called for a new Glass-Steagall Act. The internal class divide is less severe on the Democratic side. Even Lawrence Summers embraces government activism to reverse inequality, including infrastructure spending and progressive reform of the tax code. But Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway. Those voters, especially men, have become the Republican base, and the Republican Party has experienced the 2016 election as an agonizing schism, a hostile takeover by its own rank and file. Conservative leaders had taken the base for granted for so long that, when Trump burst into the race, in the summer of 2015, they were confounded. Some scoffed at him, others patronized him, but for months they didn’t take him seriously. He didn’t sound like a conservative at all.

Charles Murray is a small-government conservative and no Trump supporter (“He’s just unfit to be President”), but some of his neighbors and friends are. “My own personal political world has crumbled around me,” he said. “The number of people who care about the things I care about is way smaller than I thought a year ago. I had not really seen the great truth that the Trump campaign revealed, that should have been obvious but wasn’t.”

The great truth was that large numbers of Republican voters, especially less educated ones, weren’t constitutional originalists, libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They actually wanted government to do more things that benefitted them (as opposed to benefitting people they saw as undeserving). “The Republicans held on to a very large part of this electorate for years and years, even though those voters increasingly wonder whether Republicans are doing anything for them,” Murray said. “So Trump comes along, and people who were never ideologically committed to the things I’m committed to splinter off.”

Party leaders should have anticipated Trump’s rise—after all, he was created in their laboratory, before he broke free and began to smash everything in sight. The Republican Party hasn’t been truly conservative for decades. Its most energized elements are not trying to restore stability or preserve the status quo. Rather, they are driven by a sense of violent opposition: against changes in color and culture that appear to be sweeping away the country they once knew; against globalization, which is as revolutionary and threatening as the political programs of the Jacobins and the anarchists once were.

“Reactionaries are not conservatives,” the political essayist Mark Lilla writes in his new book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.” “They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.” This is the meaning of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Though the phrase invoked nostalgia for an imagined past, it had nothing to do with tradition. It was a call to sweep away the ruling order, including the Republican leadership. “The betrayal of élites is the linchpin of every reactionary story,” Lilla writes.

The Trump phenomenon, which has onlookers in Europe and elsewhere agog at the latest American folly, isn’t really exceptional at all. American politics in 2016 has taken a big step toward politics in the rest of the world. The ebbing tide of the white working and middle classes in America joins its counterpart in Great Britain, the Brexit vote; Marine Le Pen’s Front National, in France; and the Alternative für Deutschland party, which has begun to threaten Angela Merkel’s centrist coalition in Germany. To Russians, Trump sounds like his role model, President Vladimir Putin; to Indians, Trump echoes the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even the radical nostalgia of Islamists around the Muslim world bears more than a passing resemblance to the longing of Trump supporters for an America purified and restored to an imagined glory. One way or another, they all represent a reaction against modernity, with its ceaseless anxiety and churn.

A generation ago, a Presidential contender like Trump wasn’t conceivable. Jimmy Carter brought smiling populism to the White House, and Ronald Reagan was derided as a Hollywood cowboy, but both of them had governing experience and substantive ideas that they’d worked out during lengthy public careers. But, as public trust in institutions eroded, celebrities took their place, and the line between politics and entertainment began to disappear. It shouldn’t be surprising that the most famous person in politics is the former star of a reality TV show.

There’s an ongoing battle among Trump’s opponents to define his supporters. Are they having a hard time economically, or are they just racists? Do they need to be listened to, or should they be condemned and written off? Clinton, addressing a fund-raising dinner on Wall Street in September, placed “half” of Trump’s supporters in what she called “the basket of deplorables”—bigots of various types. The other half, she said, are struggling and deserve empathy. Under criticism, she half-apologized, saying that she had counted too many supporters as “deplorables.” Accurate or not, her remarks rivalled Obama’s “guns and religion” and Romney’s “forty-seven per cent” for unwise campaign condescension. All three politicians thought that they were speaking among friends—that is, in front of wealthy donors, the only setting on the campaign trail where truth comes out.

In March, the Washington Post reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and more racially biased than supporters of other Republican candidates. But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released survey results that complicated the picture. Those voters with favorable views of Trump are not, by and large, the poorest Americans; nor are they personally affected by trade deals or cross-border immigration. But they tend to be less educated, in poorer health, and less confident in their children’s prospects—and they’re often residents of nearly all-white neighborhoods. They’re more deficient in social capital than in economic capital. The Gallup poll doesn’t indicate how many Trump supporters are racists. Of course, there’s no way to disentangle economic and cultural motives, to draw a clear map of the stresses and resentments that animate the psyches of tens of millions of people. Some Americans have shown themselves to be implacably bigoted, but bias is not a fixed quality in most of us; it’s subject to manipulation, and it can wax and wane with circumstances. A sense of isolation and siege is unlikely to make anyone more tolerant.

In one way, these calculations don’t matter. Anyone who votes for Trump—including the Dartmouth-educated moderate Republican financial adviser who wouldn’t dream of using racial code words but just can’t stand Hillary Clinton—will have tried to put a dangerous and despicable man in charge of the country. Trump is a national threat like no one else who has come close to the Presidency. Win or lose, he has already defined politics so far down that a shocking degree of hatred, ignorance, and lies is becoming normal.


At the same time, it isn’t possible to wait around for demography to turn millions of disenchanted Americans into relics and expect to live in a decent country. This election has told us that many Americans feel their way of life is disappearing. Perhaps their lament is futile—the world is inexorably becoming Thomas Friedman’s. Perhaps their nostalgia is misguided—multicultural America is more free and equal than the republic of Hamilton and Jefferson. Perhaps their feeling is immoral, implying ugly biases. But it shouldn’t be dismissed. If nearly half of your compatriots feel deeply at odds with the drift of things, it’s a matter of self-interest to try to understand why. Nationalism is a force that élites always underestimate—that’s been a lesson of the year’s seismic political events, here and in Europe. It can be turned to good or ill, but it never completely goes away. It’s as real and abiding as an attachment to family or to home. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” Trump declared in his convention speech. In his hands, nationalism is a loaded gun, aimed not just at foreigners but also at Americans who don’t make the cut.

In his hands, nationalism is a loaded gun, aimed not just at foreigners but also at Americans who don’t make the cut.

Her campaign appearances turned working-class whiteness into identity politics: she strutted onstage to the beat of Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the “establishment,” Palin was John the Baptist to the coming of Trump.

Her campaign appearances turned lower & working-class Hinduness into identity politics: she strutted onstage to the beat of Bowdlerised kitsch TV Melodrama of "Traditional Woman” In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the “establishment,” Smriti Irani...

habal wrote:What we see today in USA are Zionists (entire wars for Israel group) and Zionist enablers (gentiles who are facilitators for the former and belong to closed groups and these include Bush family, Romney, Clinton family, McCain & family and a whole lot of other shady families).

This group is being opposed by the Nationalists (Abe Lincoln types) who are fed up of the 3 decades of trash served up by the zionist and zionist enabler groups starting with GWB Sr. The nationalists have found a representative in Donald Trump and his nomination. This group is against homosexuality, more rights for queers, transgenders etc and want to preserve conservative ideals.

The first group want to open USA to Syrian immigrants, mainly their ISIS acolytes, who will come in and perhaps form death squads or mercenary gangs or guns for hire. This will give excuse for the first group and help them control the population even further.

Al Qaeda & ISIS are just brand names used by CIA to cloak mercenary terrorist armies. It is a database of CIA mercenaries.
This was mainly handiwork of Bush Sr as CIA chief. You can see how this agenda has been seamlessly followed through since then.

This election is more or less the last gasp of the nationalists & conservatives. If they lose this, they have infinitesimal chances of making it back and taking back their country.

UlanBatori wrote: As an "oldtimer" you should have figured out these basic items of etiquette b4 coming here to preach to us....

Singha wrote:interestingly qatar+uae+KSA are more or less together in destroying Yemen.
but in libya it is egypt+qatar which seems to be funding khalifa haftar against another saudi backed formation.

HKumar wrote:
Have you ever read The Geeta or Ramanyana or any book on Sanatana Dhrama ...

Hitesh wrote:That is the first sensible thing you have said. Now go follow your own advice kindly, sir!

"Classified" doesn't mean an advertisement in Creative Loafing, pls kindly don't spread it to the ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Clinton's Amateur-Hour Performance as SoS

FBI Clinton Foundation probe finds 'avalanche' of corruption evidence against her - but agents fear Justice Department will stop her going on trial

Clintons are accused of running a pay-for-play operation out of State that favored donors to their charity - a charge they have denied
Feds are 'actively and aggressively pursuing' a case, Fox's Brit Hume said Wednesday, and they have an 'avalanche' of evidence
FBI's pursuit of the case is rooted in recordings of a suspect in a different corruption case who spoke about foundation's alleged dirty dealings
The FBI, under the leadership of director James Comey, believed those conversations were enough to move forward with the probe
Justice Department prosecutors disagreed because the source was not an employee of the Clinton Foundation
The law enforcement agency has at least four other investigations open that involve the Clintons and their close friends, as well


An FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment unless the Justice Department interferes, two sources familiar with the probe told Fox News.

The Clintons are accused of running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department that favored donors to their charity - a charge they have denied.

But the feds are 'actively and aggressively pursuing this case,' Fox's Brit Hume said Wednesday, and they have an 'avalanche' of evidence.

A Wall Street Journal report says the FBI's pursuit of the case is rooted in recordings of a suspect in a different corruption case who spoke about the Clinton Foundation's alleged dirty dealings.

The FBI, under the leadership of director James Comey, believed those conversations were enough to move forward with the probe, the Journal says. Justice Department prosecutors disagreed because the source was not an employee of the Clinton Foundation.

They considered the talk to be hearsay and did not think it would be enough to sway a grand jury.

Fox is now reporting that federal investigators have collected 'a lot of' evidence, including Wikileaks emails to and foundation officials.

The law enforcement agency has at least four other investigations open that involve the Clintons and their close friends, as well.

The FBI's probe into the foundation is much larger than has previously been reported, the network says. Some witnesses are being interviewed for a third time.

An indictment is likely to be handed down in the case, Fox says, unless investigators are obstructed by the DOJ's prosecutors.

The Journal says that as recently as August 12 the FBI was told to stand down by DOJ in a terse phone call.

'Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?’ the FBI's deputy director Andrew McCabe reportedly replied. The Justice Department official on the other end of the line said, 'Of course not.'

That was before Wikileaks began publishing hacked emails from Clinton confidante John Podesta's account ripping the lid off foundation operations.

McCabe's wife's Virginia senate campaign was backed heavily by a political action committee belonging to the Clintons' close friend Terry McAuliffe. Hillary Clinton headlined a fundraiser for the PAC, Common Good VA, a month before it started donating to the FBI official's spouse.

The McAuliffe PAC gave Jill McCabe $467,000 for her losing bid. The Virginia Democratic Party donated another $207,788 to her. All told, McCabe received $675,000 from the two entities.


Andrew McCabe was promoted to his current position at the FBI in February, around the time the bureau and DOJ began to butt heads over the Clinton Foundation.

Republicans have suggested McCabe went too soft on Clinton in her email investigation, which ended last summer without an indictment but restarted last week as new messages were uncovered, because of their personal connection.

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz reportedly asked McCabe to recuse himself from the case.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting indicates that the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, is holding up the Clinton Foundation probe.

In February, the FBI presented its case to DOJ public-integrity prosecutors. Lawyers at the Justice Department thought the case against the Clinton Foundation was too weak.

'The message was, "We’re done here," ' a Journal source said.

Donald Trump predicted Thursday that President Barack Obama's administration would ultimately decline to prosecute the former cabinet secretary.

'The system is rigged. Just remember that,' he said Thursday in Jacksonville, Florida. 'Reports also show the political leadership at the Department of Justice is trying to protect Hillary Clinton, and is interfering with the FBI's criminal investigation.'

Trump accused Clinton of engaging in 'massive, far-reaching criminal conduct, and equally far-reaching cover-up.'

'She engaged in corrupt pay-for-play at the State Department for personal enrichment. She lied to the FBI and she lied to the American people many, many times,' he said.

The attorney general came under scrutiny over the summer as the FBI finished its review of Hillary Clinton's emails and home brew server for allowing Bill Clinton to board her plane in Phoenix, Arizona.

She says the department's inspection of Mrs. Clinton did not come up during their tarmac talk. The perception of impropriety was enough for her to back away from the Clinton case and say she would accept the FBI's final recommendation at face value.

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) believes there's more to the story and is suing for more information about her June 27 meeting with Bill at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International airport.

Another DOJ official with longstanding ties to Podesta - he was the former Bill Clinton chief of staff's lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal - was caught in Wikileaks emails giving his friend a 'heads up' on a congressional hearing on Clinton's server.

'There is a HJC [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today,' Peter Kadzik wrote in 2015, 'where the head of our Civil Division will testify.'

The assistant attorney general told Podesta the DOJ lawyer testifying was 'likely to get questions on State Department emails.

'Another filing in the FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.'

Podesta copied another senior campaign staffer on a response email that said the hearing would provide 'additional chances for mischief.'

Kadzick was the same DOJ official who provided lawmakers with a statement this week on the FBI's examination of the new Clinton emails.

South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House's Benghazi committee, told Fox he has 'many differences' with the Justice Department official, but he isn't worried about a conflict of interest.

'Peter Kadzik is not a decision maker, he is a messenger,' Gowdy assessed.

The FBI's investigation into the Clinton Foundation is just one of five its pursuing that directly or indirectly involves former President Bill Clinton and his wife, the Democratic nominee for the White House.

A probe of Anthony Weiner's sexts to a 15-year-old led the FBI to stumble upon new emails from his estranged wife Huma Abedin's account that linked back to the original, Clinton classified information review. Comey said last week that he authorized agents to reconsider that case as it reviews the recently discovered emails.

The FBI is also looking at a $120,000 donation that ex-Clinton aide and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe received from a Chinese businessman who has given to the Clinton Foundation in the past.

Lobbyist Tony Podesta, co-founder of the Podesta Group, a shop he started with his brother John, the chairman of Clinton's presidential campaign, is caught up in an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian politician his firm advised.

Tony Podesta is also a bundler for the Clinton campaign.

The progress of the Clinton Foundation investigation and the one into McAuliffe were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The FBI does not generally comment on investigations, so it is possible there are more under way.

Almost all of Clinton's inner circle - the cast of advisers known as Clintonworld - and many of their family are caught up in an FBI dragnet.

The scale of investigations under way is unprecedented in electoral history.

There are five separate investigations:

The handling of classified information on the Clinton email server
Whether the Foundation was used to peddle influence
Whether illegal Chinese donations were taken by a Clinton intimate
Whether John Podesta's brother acted as a front for illegal lobbying
Anthony Weiner's sexting relationship with a 15-year-old.

Here we examine who is caught up and how.

What does she know: Huma Abedin has been Clinton's shadow for 20 years but now finds herself off the campaign trail and facing new FBI interest
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What does she know: Huma Abedin has been Clinton's shadow for 20 years but now finds herself off the campaign trail and facing new FBI interest

Huma Abedin: secrets and access - and perjury?

Probes: Clinton emails; Clinton Foundation

Who is she: Currently vice-chair of the Clinton campaign she was has worked with Clinton for 21 years, since she was 19, as among other things, intern, 'body woman', chief of staff and senior adviser.

Huma Abedin is now represented by attorneys as the FBI begins the lengthy process of examining a laptop seized in the inquiry into her estranged husband's sexting relationship with a 15-year-old.

It is the most recent stage in the Clinton emails investigation in which the FBI has looked into whether Clinton and her staff broke strict laws on the handling of classified material while she was Secretary of State through their use of the now notorious Clintonemail.com server.

The case appeared to be closed in July when James Comey, the FBI director announced that Clinton would not be prosecuted. It was later made clear there would be no other prosecutions.

However last week's bombshell announcement that new emails were being examined put the focus squarely on 40-year-old Abedin.

Although the decision had been made not to prosecute, that was on the basis of the existing evidence at the time. But if the search finds new evidence of breaking laws about the handling of classified material, there is nothing to stop a prosecution of Abedin - or anyone else.

That, however, is not the only potential for a brush with the law for Abedin.

The FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation also drags her into the spotlight.

The probe, the Wall Street Journal reported, is into whether the Foundation was involved in financial crimes or influence-peddling.

That would directly draw in Abedin. Her overlapping series of roles while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State has been unmasked by emails published either as a result of lawsuits against the State Department, or hacked from John Podesta's account.

She was at various times Clinton's White House deputy chief of staff; her senior adviser; a consultant for Teneo Holdings; working for the Clinton Foundation.

It was also revealed that while she was at the State Department where she was Clinton's gatekeeper, Abedin received emails from Doug Band - Bill Clinton's right-hand man at the Clinton Foundation - asking for help and access for 'friends' or 'friend of ours'.

And finally there is the possibility of a federal perjury case.

The discovery of a laptop during the Anthony Weiner sexting investigation by the FBI appears at odds with testimony she gave under oath as part of a deposition in a federal case that she had passed on all relevant devices to the FBI.
Best of friends: Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe with Hillary Clinton as she headlined a fundraiser for the PAC he controls. It then gave $500,000 to the wife of the now FBI deputy director for her own political ambitions
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Best of friends: Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe with Hillary Clinton as she headlined a fundraiser for the PAC he controls. It then gave $500,000 to the wife of the now FBI deputy director for her own political ambitions

Terry McAuliffe: Clinton cash from China

Probes: Clinton Foundation; links to foreign donations

Who is he: Currently Democratic governor of Virginia. Has previously been prolific Clinton fundraiser and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and chairman of Hillary's failed 2008 run for the White House.

McAuliffe was a board member of the Clinton Foundation from at least 2004, so he will surely be caught up in investigations conducted by the FBI's Washington DC field office into whether it was used as a front for influence-peddling.

But the overlaps between him and the Foundation go further than that and into his own campaign for governor and related campaigning.

The Washington Post reported in 2015 how he and the foundation had 120 overlapping donors, who had given him, his campaign or his political action committee $13.8 million.

That political action committee then went on to fund another campaign - that of Dr Jill McCabe, whose husband Mark is currently the deputy director of the FBI. He was the assistant FBI director when Jill McCabe was running for state senator in Virginia.

The PAC controlled by McAuliffe, which had received money from Clinton Foundation donors, gave Jill McCabe more than $500,000, prompting her husband to stand back from the Clinton Foundation investigation.
Chinese government front? Wang Wenliang, the billionaire McAuliffe at first claimed he had never met, filmed entering a fundraiser attended by the governor at Clinton's home
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Chinese government front? Wang Wenliang, the billionaire McAuliffe at first claimed he had never met, filmed entering a fundraiser attended by the governor at Clinton's home

Part of the $13.8 million is, however, involved in a second FBI investigation which focuses on McAuliffe personally regarding donations of $120,000 from a Chinese man called Wang Wenliang.

The FBI is investigating whether donations made were in breach of a ban on foreign governments influencing US elections. Wenliang, a billionaire according to Forbes, is a member of the one-party state's parliament - as well as a donor to the Clinton Foundation.

He is also a US permanent resident and his donations came through a US firm.

This weekend's tidal wave of revelations also shed new light on an FBI investigation into the donations.

McAuliffe's attorney was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have said that the investigation focused on whether he had previously failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity.

In May, when the revelation of the FBI foreign donations probe emerged, McAuliffe denied ever meeting Wenliang. Then he backtracked - saying 'I did not deals' - when told by his staff that there were 'likely' several meetings.

DailyMail.com revealed footage of him going to a fundraiser also attended by Wengliang.

The venue was Hillary Clinton's Washington DC home and the attendees included Huma Abedin.

The governor's lawyer told the Wall Street Journal the probe is focused on 'whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity'.

Cheryl Mills: Woman at center of Clintonworld
Cut a deal: Cheryl Mills gained partial immunity from the FBI in return for opening her laptop
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Cut a deal: Cheryl Mills gained partial immunity from the FBI in return for opening her laptop

Probes: Clinton Foundation; Clinton emails

Who is she: Long-term Clinton lawyer who advised Bill during impeachment then Hillary over emails; Foundation director; State Department chief of staff.

Cheryl Mills is unusual among Clinton insiders; she has already cut a deal with the FBI.

She exchanged partial immunity from prosecution in return for opening her laptop to FBI review during the Clinton email investigation.

Mills was chief of staff under Clinton at the State Department and communicated extensively on the Clintonemail.com private server.

The deal with the Justice Department - headed by Attorney-General Loretta Lynch - was hugely advantageous as it also limited the search to no later than January 31, 2015, the point at which the server's existence became known to a Congressional committee.

In March backups of Clinton's emails were destroyed by a technician, a move which could have been seen as illegal destruction of evidence.

And the deal allowed for the destruction of Mills' laptop. Heather Samuleson, another more junior aide, cut the same deal.

Mills went on to sit in with Clinton on her FBI interview in early July as her attorney, an unusual arrangement given that she had previously been a focus of the investigation.

However the renewed move by the FBI to examine the Huma Abedin emails on the Weiner laptop could set the immunity aside.

If they find new emails, those could open the way for prosecution. Equally, if they examine emails already seen on her laptop and conclude that they represent a case for prosecution over the handling of classified material, that too would be unlikely to be covered by the immunity deal.
Foundation role: Cheryl Mills was deeply involved in the Clinton family charity during a war between Chelsea and Doug Band, her father's right-hand man

Foundation role: Cheryl Mills was deeply involved in the Clinton family charity during a war between Chelsea and Doug Band, her father's right-hand man

In fact, any part of Mills' role in setting up the server could now be back in play. She was clearly identified in one of the Wikileaks emails as part of the reason for secrecy around Clinton.

That is only one of Mills' roles in Clintonworld which the FBI are concerned with.

The other is her role as director of the Clinton Foundation for two periods, 2004 to 2009 and then from 2013 on.

The influence-peddling investigation has not been the subject of public commentary by the FBI but would involve anyone who held a high-level role.

Mills was heavily involved in the Foundation not just as a director, but while she was working at the State Department.

During that time it was at the center of a fierce battle between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band, in which Band was effectively forced out.

Mills drew up a new structure for all of Bill Clinton's operations - at the time it was the William J. Clinton Foundation - and, Wikileaks publication of John Podesta's email shows - took part in a number of exchanges about it.

The State Department has previously said that Mills paid her own way to go to Clinton Foundation meetings in New York.

But neither the department nor the Clintons have addressed whether the FBI is looking at whether the Clinton Foundation monetized access to the Secretary of State through the overlapping roles of, among others, Mills and Abedin.
At her side: Phillipe Reines was effectively Hillary Clinton's chief spin doctor when she was Secretary of State - the point at which the email and Foundation probes center on
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At her side: Phillipe Reines was effectively Hillary Clinton's chief spin doctor when she was Secretary of State - the point at which the email and Foundation probes center on

Phillipe Reines: What does he know of emails and access?

Probes: Clinton emails; Clinton Foundation

Who is he: Hillary Clinton press secretary when she was senator; press secretary to failed 2008 presidential campaign and spokesman for Chelsea during it; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Hillary; played Donald Trump in debate prep.

As one of her inner circle at the State Department, Phillipe Reines was one of those - he told the FBI - who Clinton turned to for help with her IT issues.

He also bought her an iPad in June 2010, when the technology was new.

Clinton was to go on to claim she only had 'one device'. Reines meanwhile used both his state.gov email and his personal gmail for government business while in office.

Reines was also deeply involved in responding to the Benghazi committee's demands for information about the server and the public relations response to it, Wikileaks emails from John Podesta's gmail have revealed.

However the other Clinton Foundation probe could also drag in Reines.

Reines was a key member of the inner circle when Clinton was Secretary of State.

His official title was 'deputy assistant undersecretary' for strategy, effectively her most powerful public affairs adviser.

That means that any knowledge he has of how the Clinton machine in the State Department interacted with the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton Inc machines in Manhattan would be crucial to the FBI investigation

Key role at center of the Clinton web: John Podesta, whose leaked emails were leaked. He took the helm of the Clinton Foundation, which is being probed on whether it peddled access
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Key role at center of the Clinton web: John Podesta, whose leaked emails were leaked. He took the helm of the Clinton Foundation, which is being probed on whether it peddled access

John Podesta: 'Dean' of Clintonworld

Probes: Clinton Foundation

Who is he: Bill Clinton's first White House deputy chief of staff and later chief of staff; founder of DC lobbying firm Podesta & Podesta, now the Podesta Group; took charge of the Clinton Foundation in 2011 ; now Hillary campaign chairman; at 67, often seen as the 'dean' of the Clinton political machine.

The leaks from John Podesta's emails revealed by Wikileaks have shown how he was a key player in the Clinton Foundation - at precisely the time that the focus of the FBI influence-peddling investigation is likely to be.

At the time Clinton was Secretary of State and Doug Band, who had effectively run the foundation, wrote a memo which emerged in Podesta's leaked emails.

In it, Band detailed the overlap between the commercial activities of Bill Clinton and the charitable fundraising of the William J. Clinton Foundation (now the Clinton Foundation) - material which is likely to be pertinent to the influence-peddling case.

Podesta's role at Foundation lasted into 2012, so his knowledge of how it interacted with Hillary Clinton's aides - particularly Cheryl Mills, with whom he was in frequent contact, according to the emails - would be relevant to the FBI probe.
Lobbyist: Tony Podesta is the brother of Clintonworld 'dean' John Podesta but is being investigated by the FBI over taking a contract from a firm which may have been a front for corrupt cash from Ukraine's deposed president Viktor Yanukovych - an ally of Vladimir Putin
Lobbyist: Tony Podesta is the brother of Clintonworld 'dean' John Podesta but is being investigated by the FBI over taking a contract from a firm which may have been a front for corrupt cash from Ukraine's deposed president Viktor Yanukovych - an ally of Vladimir Putin

Lobbyist: Tony Podesta is the brother of Clintonworld 'dean' John Podesta but is being investigated by the FBI over taking a contract from a firm which may have been a front for corrupt cash from Ukraine's deposed president Viktor Yanukovych - an ally of Vladimir Putin

Tony Podesta: Dined with Hillary, lobbied for Putin's ally?

Probe: Undeclared lobbying for foreign government

Who is he: Older brother of John Podesta, with whom he founded what is now The Podesta Group of which he is chairman; social acquaintance of the Clintons; Democratic fundraiser

The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating possible ties to alleged corruption involving the former president of Ukraine - and Podesta's firm is one of those targeted.

Perhaps surprisingly, the investigation also lapped at the Trump campaign, as its then chairman Paul Manafort stepped down in August when it was revealed that his company was also being investigated.

The broad-based investigation is looking into whether U.S. companies and the financial system were used to enable corruption by the party of former pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, CNN reported.

The Podesta Group hired an independent legal firm to investigate whether it had been misled by the Center for a Modern Ukraine, a not-for-profit group linked to the ousted Ukrainian government, a spokeswoman for the group said in a statement to Reuters in August.

The key to the FBI investigation is that Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates may have been paid by the Yanukovych government to push its case in Washington without declaring that the money came from abroad.

One of the firms Gates appears to have hired to help push the Center for a Modern Ukraine was The Podesta Group.

The FBI will therefore look at whether Podesta knowingly or negligently breached laws requiring all foreign attempts to influence U.S. politics to be registered.

Yanukovych was ousted as Ukranie's leader in 2014 - and is exiled in southern Russia, after long-term accusations that he was a friend of Vladimir Putin.

The older Podesta, his brother's emails disclosed, remains extremely close to John, sharing the use of an apartment in New York until earlier this year. Official records also show he is a 'bundler' for Clinton who had raised $62,000 by the end of June.

It is a long-standing relationship. One email forced out of the State Department showed how in 2012 the Clinton Foundation used the then Secretary of State to host a dinner at her home where attendees included donors - and Podesta.
Body man: Doug Band was Bill Clinton's personal aide at the White House but went on to effectively run the Foundation - then boasted in a leaked memo of making the ex-president rich
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Body man: Doug Band was Bill Clinton's personal aide at the White House but went on to effectively run the Foundation - then boasted in a leaked memo of making the ex-president rich

Doug Band: Man who made Bill rich

Probe: Clinton Foundation

Who is he: Bill Clinton's 'body man' in the White House; his chief aide after leaving office until 2011; CEO of Teneo Holdings.

The FBI investigation into whether the Clinton Foundation committed financial crimes or was involved in influence-peddling will inevitably focus on one man in particular: Band.

Band was at Bill Clinton's side to the same extent as Huma Abedin was at his wife's, starting as his 'body man' in the White House, putting himself through law school in the evenings, and then running Bill Clinton's post-presidency life.

His emails to Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin which have emerged in lawsuits forcing publication by the State Department show how he sent messages asking for meetings for people described as 'friend' or 'good friend of ours'.

Any influence-peddling or financial crimes committed by the Foundation appear to have some connection to them, if they were to exist.

His explosive memo detailing the project to make Bill Clinton rich which he sent to John Podesta made clear how involved he was in 2011 in the Clintons' lives and finances.

'Independent of our fundraising and decision-making activities on behalf of the Foundation, we have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities – including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements,' he wrote.

'In that context, we have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals.'

It also put a figure on Bill Clinton's personal gains via Band.

'Since 2001, President Clinton’s business arrangements have yielded more than $30 million for him personally, with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years should he choose to continue with the current engagements,' it said.

His current exact status in the Clinton inner circle appears unclear. On the one hand he has not been pictured with the Clintons in many years or listed at their events.

On the other hand, he continues to donate to the Clinton cause and to those of its allies - he was one of the donors to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe's PAC which was used to pay $500,000 to the FBI assistant director's wife for her failed campaign bid.

And in 2013 he asked John Podesta to help remove any stain on his reputation with a glowing letter of reference. Podesta obliged by redrafting it for him.
Inner circle: Justin Cooper set up the Clinton email server and edited Bill's autobiography - but the FBI is also looking into the Foundation he was involved in
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Inner circle: Justin Cooper set up the Clinton email server and edited Bill's autobiography - but the FBI is also looking into the Foundation he was involved in

Justin Cooper: Smashed BlackBerry with a hammer

Probes: Clinton Email; Clinton Foundation

Who is he: Staff assistant for Oval Office operations in Bill's White House; Doug Band's right-hand man; edited Bill's memoir My Life; registered the notorious Clintonemail.com server; now works for Teneo with Band.

Justin Cooper's role in the Clintonemail.com secret server started at the very beginning of its operation: he registered its existence.

At the time he was being paid by the Clintons as a family aide and through the Clinton Foundation.

He told one Congressional Committee - the Oversight and Government Reform Committee - that he had no security clearance.

However as the man with complete control over the server, he had unlimited access to its contents. He also destroyed devices which had been linked to the server, including a BlackBerry smashed with a hammer.

He was not prosecuted under the initial inquiry but if the Huma Abedin-Anthony Weiner record leads to new evidence, such a deal would be off the table.

He was also at the very center of the Foundation's operations during much of the time Hillary Clinton was in office.

He frequently appears in the leaked John Podesta emails as '[email protected]' and is involved in a series of key meetings.

That would make him a key focus for the other investigation into the foundation he was so intimately involved in was a front for influence-peddling or financial crimes.
Unhappy together: Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner were seen on the day DailyMail.com revealed he had sexted a 15-year-old girl, setting off the explosive chain of events leading to the renewed FBI probe
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Unhappy together: Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner were seen on the day DailyMail.com revealed he had sexted a 15-year-old girl, setting off the explosive chain of events leading to the renewed FBI probe

Anthony Weiner: Sexual sleaze

Probe: Sexting 15-year-old girl

Who is he: Former New York congressman when Clinton was senator; estranged husband of her key aide Huma Abedin; notorious serial sexter.

The FBI probe into Anthony Weiner is unlike any of the other Clinton associates and their family members.

Weiner is being investigated after DailyMail.com revealed how he had had a sexting 'relationship' with a 15-year-old girl who told him he was underage.
Notorious image: This is the picture Weiner sent a girl, 15, which was part of the DailyMail.com bombshell which prompted the FBI probe
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Notorious image: This is the picture Weiner sent a girl, 15, which was part of the DailyMail.com bombshell which prompted the FBI probe

The girl told DailyMail.com that Weiner spoke about rape fantasies with her. She showed messages in which he spoke about being 'hard' and how he 'would bust that tight p****'.

The revelations came a month after Abedin had announced that her six-year-old marriage to him was over when he was caught sexting a woman in her 40s to whom he sent a picture of himself in bed, apparently aroused, with his son by Clinton's chief aide sleeping by his side.

The FBI moved on Weiner in the wake of the DailyMail.com revelations and seized all his mobile and electronic devices.

It was on a laptop he had used that they found emails 'relevant' to the discontinued Clinton email server investigation - setting off a bomb under the presidential election.

Weiner's computer was apparently being searched for child ***** at the time of the discovery.

The FBI now have a fresh search warrant which will allow them to examine the material found on the laptop which had apparently been stored by Huma Abedin.

The material could impact almost every one of the investigations listed by DailyMail.com.

Gagan wrote:Meanwhile
News reports talk of all FBI agents being asked to report to DC offices for an inpending raid / arrests tomorrow/tonight

Remember to set ur clocks back 1 hour on Sunday morning. And to not set ur country back by 1200 years on Tuesday

vina wrote: "Woman” In her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the “establishment,” Smriti Irani[

(CNN)A sexist tradition has cost the Harvard men's soccer team the rest of the season.
Harvard University canceled the remainder of the 2016 men's soccer season following an investigation into reports of a custom of ranking woman's soccer players' physical attributes in the lewdest of terms, university officials said.

The "scouting report" evaluated freshmen women soccer players on their looks and sex appeal with numerical scores and offensive descriptions, according to a Harvard Crimson report about the discovery of such a document from 2012.
But the "appalling actions" were not isolated to 2012, Harvard President Drew Faust said.
The report prompted a university investigation which found that the practice was "widespread across the team" and continued into the 2016 season, Harvard Athletics Director Bob Scalise said in an email to student athletes.
Current students "were not immediately forthcoming about their involvement," he added, leading to the decision to forfeit remaining games.
Harvard has 'zero tolerance' for such behavior
Harvard was scheduled to play two more regular season games. The team now will forfeit them and "decline any opportunity to achieve an Ivy League championship or to participate in the NCAA Tournament this year," Scalise wrote.
"We strongly believe that this immediate and significant action is absolutely necessary if we are to create an environment of mutual support, respect, and trust among our students and our teams," he added.
Going forward, Harvard Athletics will partner with the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response and other Harvard College resources to educate all student-athletes on "the seriousness of these behaviors and the general standard of respect and conduct that is expected," he said.
"Harvard Athletics has zero tolerance for this type of behavior."
Faust said in a statement that she fully supported the decision to end the season.
"The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard's view that both the team's behavior and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community," she wrote.
'Locker room talk' no excuse {er... CNN wouldn't be hinting at anything political, would they? Nah! Too far-fetched, they have such E-THICKS!}
Some of the women described in the 2012 report broke their silence in a Crimson op-ed. Kelsey Clayman, Brooke Dickens, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela and Haley Washburn said they were "beyond hurt" to learn that men they considered close friends treated them in such a way -- but, ultimately, not surprised.
"The sad reality is that we have come to expect this kind of behavior from so many men, that it is so 'normal' to us we often decide it is not worth our time or effort to dwell on," they wrote.
"In all, we do not pity ourselves, nor do we ache most because of the personal nature of this attack. More than anything, we are frustrated that this is a reality that all women have faced in the past and will continue to face throughout their lives. We feel hopeless because men who are supposed to be our brothers degrade us like this."
They said they had seen the documents but knew better than to let "the judgment of a few men" determine their worth -- thanks in large part to their training at Harvard.
"We know what it's like to get knocked down. To lose a few battles. To sweat, to cry, to bleed. To fight so hard, yet no matter what we do, the game is still out of our hands. And, even still, we keep fighting; for ourselves, yes, but above all for our teammates. This document might have stung any other group of women you chose to target, but not us," they wrote.
"'Locker room talk'" is not an excuse because this is not limited to athletic teams. The whole world is the locker room. Yet in it we feel blessed to know many men who do not and would never participate in this behavior out of respect for us—out of respect for women. To them we are grateful, and with them we strive to share a mutual respect through our own actions and words."
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Harvard President Drew Faust as a man.

Georgie Porgie Pudding & Pie

Kissed the girls and made them cry

Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker.[3] His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare.[7] He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.[8]

In 1974, Pieczenik joined the United States Department of State as a consultant to help in the restructuring of its Office for the Prevention of Terrorism.[2]

In 1976, Pieczenik was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for management

Pieczenik is a Harvard University-trained psychiatrist and has a doctorate in international relations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

In 2001, Pieczenik operated as chief executive officer of Strategic Intelligence Associates, a consulting firm.[18]

Pieczenik has been affiliated in a professional capacity as a psychiatrist with the National Institute of Mental Health.[19]

Pieczenik has consulted with the United States Institute of Peace and the RAND Corporation.[20]

As recently as October 6, 2012, Pieczenik was listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[21] According to Internet Archive, his name was removed from the CFR roster sometime between October 6 and November 18, 2012.[22] Publicly, Pieczenik no longer appears as a member of the CFR.[23]

Pieczenik is fluent in five languages, including Russian, Spanish and French.[2][3][4]

Pieczenik has lectured at the National Defense University

UlanBatori wrote:
I think the Harvard story means another 50,000 votes for DT. You see that Orwell was 16 years too early in his prediction, but otherwise accurate.