The Little Führer

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:24 am

Trump asked Russia to find Clinton’s emails. Within 24 hours, Russians attacked her accounts.

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July 27, 2016. Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Indictment: That evening, Russian operatives targeted Hillary Clinton campaign emails “for the first time.”


https://boingboing.net/2018/07/13/remem ... -russ.html
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 21, 2018 6:13 am

https://www.nationalmemo.com/house-trum ... ian-mafia/

House Of Trump, House Of Putin: The Untold Story Of Donald Trump And The Russian Mafia
August 16, 2018

Long before the American president’s disgraceful groveling before his Russian counterpart at the Helsinki summit, millions wondered: Just what does Vladimir Putin have on Donald Trump? Now author and journalist Craig Unger reveals decades of hidden history to answer that question in his new book House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia — which examines Trump’s many connections to the Russian mob, and how those financial dealings resulted in an American presidency that is a Kremlin asset. Below we excerpt the book’s first chapter in full.


CHAPTER ONE: (VIRTUAL) WORLD WAR III
At approximately 9:32 a.m. Moscow time on November 9, 2016, Deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov of the pro‐Putin United Russia Party stepped up to the microphone in the Russian State Duma, the Russian equivalent of the House of Representatives, to make a highly unusual announcement.

The grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov—the coolly ruthless Stalinist of Molotov cocktail fame—Nikonov had been involved in Soviet and Russian politics for roughly forty years, including serving a stint on Vladimir Putin’s staff. Now, he was about to make a rather simple, understated announcement, that in its way was as historic and incendiary as anything his grandfather had ever done.

“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America and I congratulate you on this.”

Even though Nikonov did not add what many in the Kremlin already knew, his brief statement was greeted by enthusiastic applause. Donald J. Trump had just become Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House.

This book tells the story of one of the greatest intelligence operations in history, an undertaking decades in the making, through which Russian Mafia and Russian intelligence operatives successfully targeted, compromised, and implanted either a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House as the most powerful man on earth. In doing so, without firing a shot, the Russians helped pu in power a man who would immediately begin to undermine the Western Alliance, which has been the foundation of American national security for more than seventy years; who would start massive trade wars with America’s longtime allies; fuel right‐wing anti‐immigrant popuism; and assault the rule of law in the United States.

In short, at a time at which the United States was confronted with a new form of warfare—hybrid war consisting of cyber warfare, hacking, disinformation, and the like—the United States would have at its helma man who would leave the country all but defenseless, and otherwise inadvertently do the bidding of the Kremlin.

It is a story that is difficult to tell even though, in many ways, Donald Trump’s ties to Russia over the last four decades have been an open secret, hiding in plain sight. One reason they went largely unnoticed for so long may be that aspects of them are so unsettling, so transgressive, that Americans are loath to acknowledge the dark realities staring them in the face.

As a result, the exact words for what happened often give way to fierce semantic disputes. Whatever Russia did with regard to the 2016 presidential campaign, was it an assault on America’s sovereignty, or merely meddling? Was it an act of war? Did Russian interference change the results of the 2016 presidential election? Was it treason? Is Donald Trump a traitor? A Russian agent? Or merely a so‐called useful idiotwho somehow, through willful blindness or colossal ignorance, does not even know how he has been compromised by Russia?

President Donald Trump, of course, has denied having anything to do with Russia, having tweeted, ten days before his inauguration, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA ‐ NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

But as this book will show, over the last four decades, President Donald Trump and his associates have had significant ties to at least 59 people who facilitated business between Trump and the Russians, including relationships with dozens who have alleged ties to the Russian Mafia.

It will show that President Trump has allowed Trump‐branded real estate to be used as a vehicle that likely served to launder enormous amounts of money—perhaps billions of dollars—for the Russian Mafia for more than three decades.

It will show that President Trump provided an operational home for oligarchs close to the Kremlin and some of the most powerful figures in the Russian Mafia in Trump Tower—his personal and professional home, the crown jewel of his real estate empire—and other Trump buildings on and off for much of that period.

It will show that during this period the Russian Mafia has likely been a de facto state actor serving the Russian Federation in much the same way that American intelligence services serve the United States, and that many of the people connected to Trump had strong ties to the Russian FSB, the state security service that is the successor to the feared KGB.

It will show that President Trump has been a person of interest to Soviet and Russian intelligence for more than forty years and was likely the subject of one or more operations that produced kompromat (com‐ promising materials) on him regarding sexual activities.

It will show that for decades, Russian operatives, including key fig‐ ures in the Russian Mafia, studiously examined the weak spots in America’s pay‐for‐play political culture—from gasoline distribution to Wall Street, from campaign finance to how the K Street lobbyists of Washington ply their trade—and, having done so, hired powerful white‐shoe lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and real estate developers by the score, in an effort to compromise America’s electoral system, legal process, and financial institutions.

It will show that President Trump, far from being the only potential “asset” targeted by the Russians, was one of dozens of politicians—most of them Republicans, but some Democrats as well—and businessmen who became indebted to Russia, and that millions of dollars have been flowing from individuals and companies from, or with ties to, Russia to GOP politicians, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, for more than 20 years.

It will show that the most powerful figures in America’s national security—including two FBI directors, William Sessions and Louis Freeh, and special counsel to the CIA Mitchell Rogovin—ended up working with Russians who had been deemed serious threats to the United States.

It will show that President Trump was $4 billion in debt when Russian money came to his rescue and bailed him out, and, as a result, he was and remains deeply indebted to them for reviving his business career and launching his new life in politics.

It will show that President Trump partnered with a convicted felon named Felix Sater who allegedly had ties to the Russian mob, and that Trump did not disclose the fact Sater was a criminal and profited from that relationship.

And it will show that, now that he is commander in chief of the United States, President Trump, as former director of national intelligence James Clapper put it, is, in effect, an intelligence “asset” serving Russian president Vladimir Putin, or, even worse, as Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer, told Newsweek, “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.” Then again, maybe James Comey put it best. In January 2017, just a week after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the president invited then– director Comey to the White House for a private dinner. Characterizing Trump as “unethical, and untethered to truth,” likening his behavior to that of a Mafia boss, Comey writes in A Higher Loyalty thatTrump told him: “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”

The demand reminded Comey of a Cosa Nostra induction ceremony, with Trump in the role of the Mafia family boss. “The encounter left meshaken,” he writes. “I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us‐versus‐them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.”

Comey writes as if the Mafia conceit is a metaphor. But in a way it is more than that. What follows is the story of Trump’s four‐decade‐long relationship with the Russian Mafia, and the Russian intelligence operation that helped put him into the White House.



On June 23, 2017, six months after his inauguration, President Donald Trump tweeted that his predecessor Barack Obama “knew far in advance” about Russia’s meddling in the American election. The tweet was unusual in that it represented a rare acknowledgment by the president that Russia may have interfered in the 2016 election, but it was accompanied by Trump’s denunciation of any investigation into the matter as a “witch hunt.”

At the time, Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was en route to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia had annexed in 2014 from Ukraine, had reason to be grateful for any cover provided by his American friend. His stopover was not a popular one, rekindling as it did animosity in Ukraine, whose foreign ministry issued a statement saying that Kiev “consider[ed] this visit . . . to be a gross violation of the sovereignty of the State and the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” It was an issue that loomed large in the shadow play between the two men: Putin’s apparent support of Trump seemingly went hand in hand with the latter’s acquiescence on Russian aggression in Ukraine.

While Putin and Trump hogged the headlines, however, something took place in Devens, Massachusetts, that seemed light‐years removed from the Trump‐Russia scandal, but in fact was closely tied to its origins. John “Sonny” Franzese, the oldest federal prisoner in the United States, was discharged from the Federal Medical Center, after serving an eight‐year sentence for extortion.

Thanks to his age—Franzese had just celebrated his one-hundredth birthday—his release was duly noted all over the world, from Der Spiegel to the New York Post, which dutifully called forth Franzese’s glory days hanging out with Frank Sinatra and boxing champ Jake LaMotta at the Copacabana. An underboss in the feared Colombo crime family, Franzese had repeatedly dodged murder charges because he was likely so good at making bodies disappear. But after one acquittal he was caught on tape explaining how he’d disposed of the bodies of the dozens of people he had killed: “Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.”

Franzese was old‐school Mafia, a relic from the mid‐20th century era of the Cosa Nostra’s Five Families, the same warring tribes depicted in The Godfather, and his return to Brooklyn evoked that powerful, mythic saga that has been so deeply imprinted in the American consciousness. Yet somehow the most enduring part of his legacy, one that will forever have its place in American history, is virtually unknown today. Through his son Michael, Sonny Franzese supervised a gasoline‐tax‐evasion scam that turned into a billion‐dollar enterprise lasting for six years, until the FBI broke it up in the mid-80s. The scandal also had far‐reaching geopolitical consequences in that it gave the newly arrived Russian Mafia its first major score in America and positioned it to play a vital role in Donald Trump’s rise to power, such a vital role that it is fair to say that without the Russian Mafia’s move into New York, Donald Trump would not have become president of the United States.

Born in Naples in 1917, Sonny Franzese had immigrated to the United States with his family as a child, and in his youth rode shotgun on hifather’s bakery truck in Brooklyn. As recounted in Michael Franzese’s Blood Covenant, he began his ascent back when Mafia nightlife meant dining at the Stork Club on West 58th Street in Manhattan, Sherman Billingsley’s swanky refuge for café society, where Sonny courted and married the coat‐check girl, and spent his evenings hanging out with the likes of Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Damon Runyon, and Walter Winchell. Before long, the Franzeses became an integral part of the storied Colombo crime family, the youngest and perhaps the most violent of the Five Families of organized crime, which were locked in an epic and ongoing internecine war.

When it came to bringing in revenue for the Colombo family, Sonny handled bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution, shakedowns, and tax cheating. A thuggish, bull‐necked man known for his boxer’s flattened nose—he was said to resemble boxer Rocky Graziano—over time, he became a lean, meticulously groomed don sporting all the requisite sartorial flourishes of his profession—crisp fedora, diamond pinkie ring, pointed black shoes, bespoke suits, and a beautifully tailored overcoat. Meanwhile, he commanded half a dozen lieutenants, each of whom had as many as 30 soldiers in their organizations, and carved out a reputation as a ferocious enforcer. “He swam in the biggest ocean and was the biggest, meanest, most terrifying shark in that ocean,” said Phil Steinberg, a close friend of Sonny’s who was a major figure in the music industry. “He was an enforcer, and he did what he did better than anyone.” As his son Michael put it, Sonny “could paralyze the most fearless hit man with a stare.”

Sometimes he went significantly further than that. In 1974, a Colombo soldier who had been a bit too attentive to Sonny’s wife was found buried in a cellar with a garrote around his neck. According to Vanity Fair, the man’s genitals had been stuffed in his mouth, an act that authorities characterized as “an apparent signal of Sonny’s displeasure.”

As underboss, Sonny was in line to run the entire Colombo organization, and, with Michael under his tutelage, the Franzeses sought opportunities in new sectors of the burgeoning entertainment industry that were opening up to the mob. They financed Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace’s infamous porno film. They backed Phil Steinberg’s Kama Sutra/Buddah Records, which provided opportunities for money laundering and payola—not to mention hits by the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Shangri‐Las, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, among others.

Before long, Michael had become a Colombo caporegime like his father, the youngest person on Fortune magazine’s “50 Biggest Mafia Bosses” list, and one of the biggest earners in the Mafia since Al Capone. By the early 80s, however, organized crime in New York was undergoing a paradigmatic shift for a reason that was not yet widely known: The Russians were coming. In fact, Russians had begun collaborating with Italian mobsters as early as 1980, when the two crime organizations partnered in one of the most lucrative government rip‐offs in American history.

At the time, Michael Franzese, then in his early thirties, was already providing protection to a mobster named Lawrence Iorizzo, who owned or supplied 300 gas stations in and around Long Island and New Jersey, and was making a fortune by skimming tax revenue from gasoline sales. This scam was possible thanks to the sluggishness with which laggardly government officials collected gas taxes. Together, federal, state, and local authorities demanded on average 27 cents out of every gallon that was sold, but they took their time in collecting—sometimes as much as a year,

Having registered dozens of shell companies in Panama as owners of the gas stations, all Iorizzo had to do was to close down each of hisgas stations before the tax man came, and then reopen under new management with a different shell company. By the time the tax men came looking for their money, much of it was in Iorizzo’s pocket. When the FBI later investigated the scam, which had spread to six states, they called the investigation Operation Red Daisy.

Iorizzo’s scheme was going swimmingly except for one thing: A group of men—Michael Franzese described them as “small‐fry associates of another family”—were trying to muscle in on Iorizzo’s operation. According to Franzese, the six‐foot‐four, 450‐pound Iorizzo “ate pizzas the way most people eat Ritz crackers” and didn’t exactly look like he needed protection. Nevertheless, he had gone to Franzese for help with these small‐time hoods who were trying to shake him down and move in on his territory.

Without missing a beat, Franzese figured out a mutually acceptable solution, and a highly lucrative partnership was born. Soon, so muchmoney was pouring in that Franzese was promoted to caporegime in the Cosa Nostra. Then in 1984, three alleged Russian gangsters, David Bogatin, Michael Markowitz, and Lev Persits, approached him with a proposition that was very similar to Iorizzo’s. Like Iorizzo, they had their own gas tax scam going on, and like Iorizzo, they needed protection.

Franzese instantly saw the opportunity for another huge score, but he sized up the Russians with a mixture of respect and scorn. Bogatin, with his receding hairline and steel‐rimmed glasses, looked more like a white‐collar professional than a Russian mobster. His father had spent eighteen years in prison in Siberia because he had been “caught” hang‐ ing the key to the office door so that it accidentally covered a portrait of Joseph Stalin—thereby defacing the image of the Soviet dictator.23 In 1966, Bogatin joined the Soviet Army and served in a North Viet‐ namese antiaircraft unit, where he helped shoot down American pi‐ lots.24 Then, in the mid‐1970s, after leaving the army, he began working as a printer but was fired because he was printing outlawed material for Jewish dissidents.

After being blacklisted by the KGB, in 1977, Bogatin clawed his way out of Russia, came to New York, and worked in a factory. He bought a car, mastered English, and began to run a private cab service. That led to a gas station, then a fuel distributorship, all while he made acquaintances among the Russian diaspora.

Having grown up under communism, Bogatin took to capitalism like a duck to water—which won Franzese’s respect. The Russians had been among the pioneers of this spectacularly lucrative scam, and they had about 200 members working under them. They wanted “to flex their muscles,” Franzese said, in testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 1996, “and would not hesitate to resort to violence when they felt it was necessary to do so.”

Franzese had a harder time taking Bogatin’s partner seriously— thanks largely to his attire. Michael Markowitz wore gaudy jewelry, heavy gold chains, and showy wide‐collared shirts unbuttoned to the navel. As Franzese saw it, Markowitz aspired to be John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, but instead called to mind the shimmying “wild and crazy guys” played by Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. The dapper Franzese couldn’t stop laughing at him. Markowitz “looked like a rug salesman who had just hit the lottery.” Was this really his competition?

In the end, however, money trumped fashion, and so, on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1980, Michael Franzese sat down with Bogatin, Persits, and Markowitz at a gas station in Brooklyn. “These Russians were having trouble collecting money owed them,” Franzese recalled.“They were also having problems obtaining and holding on to the licenses they needed to keep the gas tax scam going.”

Franzese could help on both counts. One of his soldiers was a guy named Vinnie, and as Franzese put it, “Vinnie’s job was to say, ‘Pay the money, or I’ll break your legs.’”

Vinnie was persuasive—so persuasive that the Colombo family had become famous for getting people to pay their debts. That wasn’t all. Franzese also had operatives inside the state government who could provide the Russians with the wholesale licenses they needed to defraud the government.

The Russians desperately needed Franzese, and he knew just how to play them. “We agreed to share the illegal proceeds, 75 percent my end, 25 percent their end,” he said. “The deal was put on record with all five crime families, and I took care of the Colombo family share of the illegal proceeds out of my end.”

Soon, the money came pouring in—$5 million to more than $8 million a week. As the operation expanded, profits soared to $100 million amonth, more than a billion a year. The Italians were the big winners, but Markowitz and Bogatin were well on their way to lucrative criminal careers.

Thus, in 1984, at the peak of his success, David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. Even though he was a juniorpartner with Franzese, after seven years in New York, Bogatin had stashed away enough money to buy real estate anywhere he wanted. For roughly a decade, thousands of Russian Jews like him had been pouring into Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. But Bogatin had his eyes on something more prestigious.

So instead of shopping for a home in Brighton Beach, Bogatin became fixated on a garish 58‐story edifice in midtown Manhattan, with mirrors and brass and gold‐plated fixtures everywhere. A monument to conspicuous consumption, it had an atrium covered with pink, white‐veined marble near the entrance and a 60‐foot waterfall overlooking a suspended walkway, luxury shops, and cafés. The AIA Guide to New York City described it as “fantasyland for the affluent shopper,” but hastened to add that the design was more like a generic “malt liquor” than posh champagne.

The New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it “monumentally undistinguished,” while another Times writer dismissed it as “preposterously lavish” and “showy, even pretentious.”The developer’s love of excess was such that he purposely overstated the number of floors in the building. That way, he could say he lived on the sixty‐ eighth floor—even though it was a fifty‐eight‐story building. Its address was 721 Fifth Avenue, and it was known as Trump Tower.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 21, 2018 5:05 pm

Trump Money Launderer

BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST


Capitalist restoration in Russia

It goes all the way back to the restoration of capitalism in Russia.

This process involved something like the lawless building of capitalism in the American West. An oligarchic mafiosa arose from which the “capo-di-tutti- capo” – Vladimir Putin – took power. One single telling fact about Putin and the society over which he presides is that by some estimates http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir- ... chest-man/ he’s the richest man in the world. But the oligarchs he leads had to have somewhere to stash their profits, preferably in dollars.

Enter Donald Trump.

Enter Donald Trump

As early as the mid-1980s, the Russians were making contact with Trump. Then, after his series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump was having trouble getting US financing for his real estate ventures. So he started looking elsewhere. He found it in the Russian oligarchs. The online journal whowhatwhy.org was one of the first to report on his links with these oligarchs – back in March of 2017. In that article they detailed Trump’s connections.

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“Yaponchik” Ivankov (left) and “Boss of Bosses” Semion Mogilevich.
They are connected to Trump.


They explain how one Semion Mogilevich, known as “the boss of bosses” in Russia, prevailed on a Russian judge to release a lifetime criminal, Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov, who came to the US in 1992 and moved into Trump Tower. When the FBI came looking, Ivankov disappeared, only to turn up in Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. As Whowhatwhy writes, “Right from the earliest days of Trump Tower, in 1983, some of the choicest condominiums, including those in the 10 floors immediately below the future president’s own triplex apartment, went to a rogues gallery of criminals and their associates.”

One of Trump’s associates during those years was Felix Sater, who was born in Russia and was connected with the Russian oligarchs. Sater was a stock broker who got barred for stabbing a fellow stock broker in the neck. He then joined White Rock investment group, which was run by Ivankov, and in 2001 he joined Bayrock investment company, also founded by Ivankov. He had “senior advisor to Donald Trump” and “The Trump Organization” printed on his business card. He is also pictured standing with trump in some of the latter’s publicity pictures.

Whowhatwhy details much much more. These facts were barely covered by the mainstream capitalist media.


Read more: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/08/20 ... launderer/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 28, 2018 11:03 pm

Emails Link Former Homeland Security Official To White Nationalists

The emails show Ian M. Smith, who has resigned his position, to be connected to an incognito social scene that included white nationalist activists.

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Several emails obtained by The Atlantic show Smith included on threads including people associated with white nationalism such as Marcus Epstein, a former Tom Tancredo aide who entered an Alford plea in 2009 for assaulting a black woman in Washington in 2007, and Devin Saucier, an editor (under a pseudonym) at American Renaissance. Epstein declined to comment; Saucier did not respond to a request for comment.

On June 3, 2016, Epstein emailed a group including Smith, Saucier, Taylor and others to invite them to an “Alt-Right Toastmasters” event. “We are having our much delayed follow up meeting on Monday June 6 at 7:00 PM. A couple of out of town guests will be there. Please RSVP and if you want to invite anyone else, please check with me,” Epstein wrote. “I'm going to give a short presentation on ‘The Pros and Cons of Anonymity’ at 8:00 followed by discussion.” In a previous email on the subject, Epstein had said he was timing the event for a visit from Wayne Lutton, who is the editor of the white nationalist publication The Social Contract. According to a source who was there who spoke on condition of anonymity, Smith attended this event.

On December 17, 2015, Saucier and Epstein emailed a YouTube link, which is now defunct, to a group of addresses including Smith’s and Spencer’s. Reached by phone, Spencer said “to my knowledge, I’ve never met Ian Smith. I get roped in to all sorts of email conversations, I receive too many emails every day for me to respond to.”

Though the emails don’t show Smith and Spencer interacting, some of the messages indicate a familiarity on Smith’s part with Spencer’s projects. In another email sent on March 7, 2015, Smith refers to an event held by “NPI,” the acronym for the National Policy Institute, Spencer’s white nationalist non-profit, saying he had missed it because he was out of town. And in another on May 9, 2016, Smith recommended someone for a job at prominent, Trump-supporting media outlet, saying that the person was “currently working in development at LI” (the conservative training group the Leadership Institute) “writes for Radix, Amren, VDare and Chronicles under a pseudonym.” The word "Amren" refers to American Renaissance; Radix is Spencer's publication. Chronicles appears to refer to Chronicles Magazine, another publication associated with this movement, which has published Lutton and Sam Francis, the late editor of the Council of Conservative Citizens’ newsletter. Smith also wrote that the person he had recommended “helps Richard and JT with their websites,” appearing to refer to Spencer and Jared Taylor.

In one email exchange at the end of October 2015, Ben Zapp, a real estate agent who has in the past been photographed with members of this scene, invited a group including Smith, Saucier; Epstein; Tim Dionisopoulos, a Media Research Center staffer, and Kevin DeAnna, the former Youth for Western Civilization president, to his apartment for dinner, stating that he wasn’t going to that weekend’s NPI conference. (The 2016 conference of NPI is where Spencer was caught on video leading a “Hail Trump” chant while audience members gave Nazi salutes.) Zapp, Dionisopoulos and DeAnna did not respond to requests for comment.

Epstein replied to the thread saying he wasn’t going to NPI either but was planning to socialize with people who were, and that “I can't speak for everyone, but this is probably not the best time.” Zapp responded, “It's a dinner, not a party—thus the having to get out by 9:30 or 10 at the latest. I would imagine this would start on the early side, like 7:00 or even earlier. So it's settled—we know my home shall remain judenfrei.” Judenfrei is a German word meaning “free of Jews,” which the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been expelled or killed.

Smith responded to the group: “They don't call it Freitag for nothing…” using the German word for "Friday," and added, “I was planning to hit the bar during the dinner hours and talk to people like Matt Parrot, etc. I should have time to pop by though.” Matt Parrott is the former spokesman for the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, which flamed out earlier this year after its leader Matthew Heimbach had an affair with Parrott’s wife, leading to the two falling out.

And in an email from 2014, Smith jokingly calls “spooning dibs” on Jack Donovan during a visit from Donovan, a “masculinist” writer who has ties to members of the alt-right and is heavily involved in Wolves of Vinland, a neo-pagan group entwined with the white nationalist movement. Saucier had emailed several people to discuss sleeping arrangements for Donovan, telling them that, “There was some misunderstanding about how Jack Donovan would arrive down in Lynchburg for festivities this weekend”; the Wolves of Vinland are based outside of Lynchburg.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ts/568843/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 4:38 pm

Michael Cohen, Lanny Davis and the Russian Mafia

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Lanny Davis

Something most people don’t know about Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, is that he’s also currently representing a Ukrainian oligarch whose name is often linked to one of the most powerful mobsters in the world.

For the past four years, Davis — a 72-year-old former special counsel to former President Bill Clinton — has served as a registered foreign agent for Dmitry Firtash, who has been fighting to avoid extradition to Chicago, where he faces charges of international racketeering and money laundering. In registering with the Justice Department as Firtash’s foreign agent, Davis said his firm was being paid $80,000 a month — or about a million dollars a year — by a man described by prosecutors as an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. The case against Firtash “seeks to protect this country, its commerce and its citizens from the corrupting influence and withering effects of international organized crime,” prosecutors wrote last year.

Firtash has acknowledged ties to Semion Mogilevich, although the exact nature of their relationship is unknown outside of a classified space. A chain-smoking, hulking Ukrainian-born gangster, Mogilevich appeared on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list during Robert Mueller’s tenure as the bureau’s director. A 1996 FBI report on Mogilevich’s organization said he was involved in prostitution, weapons trafficking, smuggling of nuclear materials, drug trafficking and money laundering. Mogilevich was indicted on racketeering charges in Pennsylvania in 2002 for his role in a publicly-traded magnet company later exposed as a money-laundering front. Several sources, including Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer turned whistleblower who was murdered in London, said that Mogilevich had a relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mogilevich lives in Moscow, where some suspect he’s being protected by Russian intelligence.

“Mr. Firtash has denied any business or personal involvement with organized crime, in Russia or elsewhere,” Davis tells Rolling Stone. “Moreover, reports of such involvement have relied on innuendo and words such as ‘linked to’ or ‘associated with,’ not facts, or false allegations in a lawsuit filed many years ago in New York City that was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds and never re-filed.”

Davis is not exactly advertising the fact that he represents Firtash. Although Davis lists his past controversial clients in Africa and Honduras on his website, Firtash’s name is noticeably absent. Davis hardly ever talks about Firtash, at least not on the record, even though Justice Department filings make it clear that he and his colleagues at Davis, Goldberg & Galper frequently contact D.C. journalists about Firtash to pitch stories, issue statements and press releases, or to respond to questions.

Likewise, Firtash wasn’t mentioned in the flurry of coverage that Davis received after Cohen pleaded guilty last week to eight criminal charges, including campaign finance violations. In recent pieces, The Washington Post called Davis the “ultimate Clinton loyalist;” Esquire called him the “da Vinci of spin.” Davis referred to himself a “renowned legal crisis management expert,” but another way to describe his lucrative line of work is representing bad guys and telling us how good they are, something he’s been doing quite effectively with Cohen, Trump’s former fixer. In 2010, Davis was paid a million dollars a year to represent the brutally repressive dictatorship of oil-soaked Equatorial Guinea, and $100,000 a month to represent Ivory Coast, then on the brink of a civil war. “I took on a couple bad-guy countries that I thought I could make into good-guy countries,” Davis told the Post.


Continues: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... ia-716413/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 30, 2018 11:11 am

Fragments of a Defunct State

Stephen Holmes

Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia by Luke Harding
Guardian, 310 pp, £20.00, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 85265 247 3


The Putin system has nothing to do with the ‘authoritarian DNA’ invoked by Sovietologists to explain the recurrent suppression of liberal developments. The singularity of Putin’s Russia is a consequence of the bureaucratic fragmentation that followed the break-up of the Party in 1991, the siphoning into foreign bank accounts of money from the state treasury and state-controlled firms by rival bureaucratic and business factions, the continuing absence of socially legitimate owners of what were once state properties, the corruption of officialdom at all levels, the gap between rich and poor, the anaemic sense of national identity among the country’s political and economic elite.

The most common misapprehension about post-Communist Russia, accepted by both the regime’s supporters and its critics, is that Putin has created a military-style structure of command. In fact, he has had neither the capacity nor the ambition to rebuild a Soviet-style hierarchy. Harding writes of the transition ‘from the chaos but relative freedoms of the Yeltsin years to the “managed democracy” of the vertical Putin epoch’ and cites Valter Litvinenko, Aleksandr Litvinenko’s father: ‘Russia is a vertical system. It’s like the Soviet Union. Only Putin can decide these questions, just like Stalin. Without Putin’s approval it’ – his son’s poisoning – ‘could not have happened.’ But although it’s undeniable that ‘state irritants are murdered as a direct result of their professional activities,’ it’s far from clear that the killing of journalists and lawyers with a social conscience requires Putin’s initiative.

That the much publicised vertical power structure is a ‘fiction’, as it was called by Aleksei Navalny, one of the instigators of the massive anti-regime demonstrations that took place on 10 December, is evident from the corruption which, according to Harding, ‘has increased sixfold under Putin’s rule’. Escaping the draft, registering a company, buying an apartment, getting into school, passing an exam, being acquitted of criminal charges, trumped up or valid, receiving medical treatment may all require the bribery of public officials. The kickback plague is endemic, inflating by as much as 50 per cent the cost to the state of everything from weapons to highway construction. That the principal players in ‘the greatest corruption story in human history’, as the economist Anders Aslund puts it, include the fabled siloviki – the ‘heavies’: the army, the intelligence agencies etc – is the strongest sign of the absence of a hierarchy. In a hierarchy, local officials would answer to their Moscow superiors: but they don’t.

If there is a vertical in Putin’s Russia, it is a vertical of impunity. If you are an officer in the FSB moonlighting as a hired hitman you can kill someone and nothing will happen. The routine failure to solve homicide cases and prosecute murderers, far from signalling overwhelming state power, reveals quite the opposite. ‘Putin’s system of loyalty is highly dependent on the ability of his army of bureaucrats to embezzle and take bribes,’ says the editor of the Moscow Times, quoted by Harding. Putin can’t compel public sector employees to stop embezzling and extorting, any more than he can force government officials to put their departmental responsibilities before their personal cupidity and commit themselves to their community’s well-being.

As one of the authors of the Guardian’s book on the WikiLeaks trove, Harding was nicely positioned to cull material about ‘the corrupt nexus at the heart of the Russian state’. He cites a report by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own individual purposes, not as part of a common project. The leaked cables also include the allegation that ‘the government operates more as a kleptocracy than a government.’ As Harding summarises it, the Kremlin is ‘a private-sector money-making business in which stealing is a pathological habit’, standing at the head of ‘a dysfunctional political system … in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organised crime’. The FSB is described as ‘in essence, a criminal organisation, offering protection to gangsters and extorting bribes from large businesses’.

None of this is entirely wrong, but the historically unprecedented nature of the Putin system comes into focus only when we remember, as Harding himself urges us to, that ‘the Soviet-era KGB was subordinate to the political will of the Communist Party.’ When the CPSU collapsed, it left behind not only the FSB and its associated agencies but a constellation of other ‘orphans’, highly developed and now essentially autonomous fragments of a defunct state. In a desperate but ultimately successful endeavour to survive in an unforgiving environment, various former subsidiaries went in search of new sponsors. Soviet psychiatric facilities, for example, that were once used to torment dissidents, now receive cash-filled envelopes from younger Russians eager to dislodge elderly in-laws from desirable apartments. More significant politically are entities like Gazprom, the former Soviet Ministry of Gas, now a huge non-transparent corporation in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, and the Procuracy, which retains its formal prosecutorial functions but no longer has to answer to a ranking organisation – appropriate payment by private parties can be enough to initiate or suspend a prosecution.

Despite his own many unpleasant encounters with the FSB, Harding doubts that ‘the security and law enforcement services belong in Putin’s domain’ or ‘that they follow his orders’ – ‘they enjoy near total autonomy.’ That several autonomous agencies will trip over one another’s feet is only natural. The Foreign Ministry was embarrassed by the FSB’s surprise decision to expel Harding because it was announced on the eve of a visit to London by the Russian foreign minister. ‘These are the kind of things,’ Harding writes, ‘that are supposed to have disappeared from Putin’s rational, vertical, Prussian-style state.’ That they have not disappeared is evidence that there is no rational, vertical, Prussian-style state.

From multiple sources, including personal observation, Harding infers that across Moscow ‘FSB agents are actively picking locks, hiding bugs, skulking in stairwells, and using the flats of patriotic neighbours to spy on targets.’ But who is telling them to? And to what end? The most plausible answer is that Big Brother has lost his bearings. Plagued by ‘incompetence, muddle and disorder’, the organisation’s street-level operatives mindlessly apply textbook tactics without strategic guidance from above. Peeking into the FSB’s cabinet of cloaks and daggers, Harding discovers hapless spooks who seem to have strayed off the set of a Cold War play that, unknown to them, was mothballed two decades ago. They certainly aren’t on a mission to preserve the Kremlin’s domination of the country: they have simply inherited ‘tradecraft’ and have no clue what else to do. The quality of new recruits is abysmally low. Senior officers were apparently ‘unimpressed’ by the ‘messy’ way Litvinenko’s assassination was carried out. The KGB had done these things ‘more efficiently and tidily under Yuri Andropov’. The FSB’s record at fighting terrorism is equally poor – perhaps because they’re too busy extorting money from big business.

A similar story of disarray was revealed in 2010 by the arrest of the ten ‘spies’ deployed in the US by the Foreign Intelligence Service, a spin-off from the KGB: ‘The 55-page FBI dossier reveals in humiliating detail the frequently amateurish and bungling behaviour of Moscow’s agents in America,’ Harding wrote at the time. Here was post-Communist Russia in a nutshell: the operation that deployed the would-be femme fatale Anna Chapman as a clandestine operative ‘looked’, Harding writes, ‘like a job-creation exercise for the well-connected offspring of Russia’s elite. (Chapman’s father is a high-ranking “foreign service” official.)’

Examples of this sort suggest that as institutional loyalties recede kin loyalties naturally replace them. The privatisation of estates in the exclusive Rublyovka district west of Moscow is another illustration of the pattern. ‘In Soviet times,’ Harding writes, ‘KGB generals were allocated properties in the area, but had to vacate them when they retired from the service.’ The FSB generals who received land free from the state in 2003 and 2004 received it in their own names and so were able to bequeath it to their biological heirs rather than having to surrender it to successors recruited, with minimal regard to kinship, by an impersonal government bureaucracy. The pervasive role of nepotism in the distribution of both public property and financially exploitable positions in government and state-controlled enterprises is a sign of the institutional corrosion of the system.

The chronic power struggle within the Kremlin should also be understood in this context. In October 2007, the FSB arrested General Aleksandr Bulbov, the deputy head of the Federal Drugs Agency: Harding describes ‘a surreal standoff between his personal bodyguards and FSB agents, who waggle their machine guns at each other’. But what are such potentially deadly squabbles about? They boil down to bureaucratic-business clans attempting to wrest lucrative assets from one another. Behind the mask of an authoritarian restoration, we find the reality of intra-elite raiderstvo, a lawless feeding frenzy in which the various groups fight to grab their portion of massive cash flows. That the principal battle within the governing elite today pits liberal reformers against hardline siloviki is a misperception. The fabled bulldogs fighting under the carpet are not principled liberals at odds with rapacious strongmen. There aren’t two factions but more than a dozen, and their differences have nothing to do with ideology. ‘There are certainly no liberals or siloviki,’ Belkovsky assures Harding. ‘It isn’t a liberal/siloviki conflict. It’s about money and security, and providing security for their money. Nothing more. They are business competitors with the same purposes and goals.’

If such accounts are correct, libido habendi explains Moscow’s behaviour over the past decade much better than libido dominandi. The ‘neo-Soviet image’ projected onto Putin’s Russia casually skips over the biographical detail that Putin himself is a ‘classic post-Soviet businessman’ whose outlook was shaped while working in the mayor of St Petersburg’s office in the mafia-and-crime-ridden early 1990s. Formulated in more general terms, the Party of Cash has ingested the Party of Blood.

Blood continues to flow in the North Caucasus. But this is hardly proof of the Kremlin’s steely grip on the country. So we are left with the various killings that have earned Putin’s Russia a reputation for brutality. What we need to ask is whether the brazen homicides of meddlesome citizens reflect a hierarchy of power or its absence. Aleksandr Litvinenko could have been murdered by a group of former or serving FSB agents, Harding writes, ‘acting on their own initiative to get rid of a troublesome traitor’. Sergei Magnitsky was certainly done to death by the ‘same officials’ he had exposed for committing tax fraud. Even if FSB agents were involved in the broad-daylight killing of the human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, they may well have been hiring themselves out after hours, perhaps to friends of Colonel Yuri Budanov, the Russian nationalist idol convicted of strangling an 18-year-old Chechen girl. (In his last press conference, Markelov announced that he was appealing the decision to give Budanov parole.) And so on. About his own harassment at the hands of the FSB, Harding says: ‘It’s possible that a billionaire individual unhappy with something I’d written about his business affairs may simply have paid the FSB to chuck me out.’

But doesn’t state control of national television, at least, provide evidence of Putin’s authoritarian ambitions? Much could be said about the not entirely democratic role of privately owned television in the oligarch wars of the 1990s and the self-serving attempt by magnates like Vladimir Gusinsky to paint themselves as defenders of liberty against authoritarianism. But the purposes of censorship under Putin are different from those of the Soviet regime. The journalists who get into trouble are those writing ‘about the links between the FSB and the mafia, and publishing stories about Putin and his team and the money of his team’. So long as you stay away from ‘sensitive issues, such as corruption among top officials’, you will probably be left alone, although outright mockery of top officials on national television is also forbidden.

Broadcast clips of an inebriated Yeltsin in the 1990s suggested that his government was too weak to intimidate its critics into respectful self-censorship. Because ‘never show weakness’ is the most pressing imperative of any chronically insecure regime, the Putin government decided to do what took minimal effort: seize control of the principal platform on which the government’s many shortcomings could be displayed. The Kremlin has monopolised nationwide television news not in order to impose a party line or because it hopes to persuade a cynical and disillusioned public to swallow the official version of events, but because it fears what might follow if the regime’s critics are seen to get away with disclosing the criminality and ridiculing the folly of the country’s ruling circles on national TV. The role played by the internet and social media in the aftermath of the 4 December elections, however, suggests that total control of TV broadcasts can no longer insulate the regime from mockery and the mobilising effects of anti-corruption exposés.

The potted neo-Soviet storyline also distracts attention from what is most crucial about contemporary Russia: the stark divisions between the haves and the have-nots. The instability and squalor of ‘a rich country full of poor people’ are papered over by upbeat statistics about per capita GDP and household consumption which notoriously omit any reference to inequality, mortality, morbidity, environmental degradation or the wasting away of public infrastructure and public services. Putin’s system, Harding writes, has created ‘the most unequal society in Russia’s history’.

To keep the have-nots at arm’s length, the wealthiest Russians live in exclusive, walled-off residential compounds like those along the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Road outside Moscow. But since the highest fliers among Russia’s nouveaux riches lead an essentially borderless existence, their most prized gated communities are located in the West. Those who own real estate abroad include numerous public officials and civil servants: ‘Russian bureaucrats have their houses and families in London, and their children are going to Cambridge and Oxford.’ The reason this ‘very strange political class’ craves an extraterritorial foothold is illuminating: ‘They keep their money outside Russia because none of them believes in Russia and none of them believes in official stability. All of them know that this stability could be finished any day.’ They don’t believe in official stability because, as the ones responsible for guaranteeing it, they are aware of their own limitations. For all their talk about ‘the restoration of Russia’s superpower status’, Russia’s senior political officials have an astonishingly ‘primitive mission’, which is to ‘take this money outside Russia, buy houses outside Russia and give their children a future abroad’. Russia’s affluent classes are irresistibly drawn to relocate their assets to countries where there appears to be a future. Their lack of confidence doesn’t reflect a fear that the government they work for is too strong and may one day initiate mass confiscations. Their worry, on the contrary, is that their government isn’t stable enough to protect their investments.

Such feelings of insecurity have grown over the past few months. Well before the December events, local observers told Harding that the Kremlin had been ‘badly spooked’ by the Arab Spring. Indeed, given the absence of any connective tissue between the haves and the have-nots, Russia’s elite was ‘deeply fearful that a similar popular uprising could take place at home’. Certainly no one can claim that vybori bez vybora (‘elections without a choice’) are meant to simulate democracy. Russians citizens know perfectly well that periodic electoral rituals give them no leverage over their rulers. So what do fraudulent elections achieve? In Russia (but not only in Russia), potential rulers don’t necessarily accede to power because they are popular. Some of the time, at least, rulers become fleetingly popular because they are believed to wield power. From the predictable tendency of opportunistic citizens to flock obsequiously to the power-wielders of the day it follows that an incumbent who seems to be losing power may see his poll-tested ‘popularity’ vanish overnight.

This is the nightmare now faced by Putin’s team. Keen to avoid any appearance of weakness, they are well aware that public support can be artificially inflated by the illusion of power. They have long depended on theatrical displays which, however easy to stage, gave spectators an outsize sense of what the government could achieve. This was the purpose of the widely disseminated photos of Putin the action hero winging to the rescue in a firefighting plane, flooring judo opponents, revving a Harley-Davidson, fly-fishing bare-chested, diving into the Sea of Azov to ‘discover’ a sixth-century Greek urn, immobilising tigers with a tranquilliser rifle and shooting a grey whale with a crossbow, all put together by a PR staff in order to embellish what an American diplomat called Putin’s ‘alpha dog’ image.


https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n01/stephen-h ... unct-state
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 15, 2018 7:30 am

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 24, 2018 6:49 pm

Days after guilty plea, Matthew Heimbach re-emerges in new alliance with National Socialist Movement

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September 24, 2018

Brett Barrouquere


Just days after pleading guilty to beating his former financial backer, Matthew Heimbach has re-emerged in public, this time as the community outreach director for the National Socialist Movement (NSM).

Over the weekend, Heimbach signed on to be the director of Community Outreach for the Detroit, Michigan-based neo-Nazi group. It’s a role that, according to Heimbach, will put him in a position to meet with a variety of groups — including “communities of color” and prisoners — and form committees to discuss the environment and other issues.

“The goal is to move beyond mere rallies and connect with the public, both White folks and POC (people of color) in an engaged manner,” Heimbach told Hatewatch in an exchange of text messages on Monday.

The new position comes just days after Heimbach pleaded guilty in Indiana to beating Matt Parrott, his one-time father-in-law, financial patron and second-in-command of the Traditionalist Worker Party.

The guilty plea, entered September 18, stemmed from Heimbach’s arrest in March, when he was charged with attacking Parrott in Paoli, Indiana. Police said Heimbach was having an affair with Parrott’s wife and the attack started after Parrott and Heimbach’s wife discovered the tryst.

The arrest made Heimbach something of a pariah in far-right circles, with some groups disavowing him and others openly mocking Heimbach after the arrest.

A judge in Indiana gave Heimbach a suspended sentence of 287 days in jail, ordered him to pay $446 in court costs and have no contact with his estranged wife, except through ongoing divorce proceedings.

The suspended sentence comes on the heels of Heimbach having spent 38 days in the Louisville, Kentucky, jail, for violating the terms of a suspended sentence in that state.

In that case, Heimbach assaulted a protester at a Donald Trump rally during the 2016 presidential campaign. A Kentucky judge concluded that his arrest in Indiana violated the terms of that sentence and ordered him to spend part of the summer in jail.

Heimbach is also a defendant in a federal civil lawsuit stemming from the incident.

The Indiana arrest triggered the dissolution of the Traditionalist Worker Party. Parrott, who served as the group’s webmaster, pulled down the group’s site and announced he was leaving the movement.

Since then, Heimbach has been dealing with legal issues and, until the NSM announcement, had stayed quiet. It proved to be quick downfall for someone once seen as one of the most charismatic and energetic figures on the far right.

In the text exchange with Hatewatch and on the Russian social media site VK.com, Heimbach talked about moving away from trolling and into politically and socially organizing.

On VK, Heimbach cited George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, as the inspiration for the strategy and objectives of the National Socialist Movement.

“The mission of the NSM over the next 12 months is to continue this exciting leap forward for National Socialism in America, and fulfill the dream of Commander Rockwell,” Heimbach wrote on VK.com.

In announcing the appointment, NSM chief Jeff Schoep said Heimbach will work with the group’s public relations and international relations departments, as well as other outreach arms of NSM.

“Uniting the best and brightest minds together under the NSM banner will bring about victory instead of disarray and infighting. Now is the time to show the enemies of our people the strength of a united front,” Schoep wrote in a statement. “A new era of National Socialism has been unleashed upon the United States.”

The recruitment of Heimbach comes a month after a split among far-right groups. League of the South left the Nationalist Front in August. The group was a loose alliance of the League of the South, Traditionalist Worker Party and Vanguard America. With the dissolution of TWP and League of the South Pulling out, that left the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America standing alone. And, Vanguard America has been quiet about it’s intentions since the split.

Schoep has long been seen as a hypocrite by some on the far-right, including his ex-wife, for allowing a wanted sex offender to be part of the organization and his alleged threats to his ex-wife.

Heimbach’s first public appearance in his new role will likely be at a rally on November 10 in Little Rock, Arkansas. The NSM describes the rally an event to “raise awareness about the cultural and ethnic genocide of our fellow Europeans in South Africa.” That’s code for the “white genocide” in South Africa, an ongoing and popular myth among the far-right and conspiracy theorists.

Heimbach told Hatewatch that he will organize a fundraiser for the “Charlottesville POWS” — a group of people who pleaded guilty to or were convicted of violence during the Unite the Right rally in Virginia in August 2017 and are now in prison or going through court proceedings — as well as trying to start conversations with various groups about the National Socialist Movement.

“Hopefully this will be the beginning of a far stronger cross-racial struggle against capitalism and imperialism, all while continuing to maintain and advocate for our distinct ethnic communities, traditions and identities,” Heimbach said.

While doing community outreach may be a comedown for someone once seen as potentially the new face of American racism, it appears Heimbach’s public comeback is off and running.


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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 26, 2018 12:47 pm

Trump Speaks at UN General Assembly
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

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Trump reacting when UN delegates laughed at his bragging

The world’s working class movement, and socialists as part of it, has some lessons to learn from Trump’s UN speech this morning.

China: Trump pledged a continued trade war with China. His comments on the old Monroe Doctrine should be understood in that light. That was the position put forward by President Monroe (1817-25) that South and Central America are the US playground and that all other imperialists must keep out. Presently, Chinese imperialism is making major inroads into that region. For example, they are the ones who are planning to finance a new Central American canal through Nicaragua. Overall investment of Chinese imperialism into Latin America equals about $225 billion. The conflict between US and Chinese imperialism will continue to increase.

Syria: Trump mouthed the usual platitudes about “de-escalation of military conflict” and a “political solution” in Syria, but saved his strongest language for the real opponents. First was the “bloodthirsty killers known as ISIS” which he bragged has been “driven out of Syria and Iraq”. The other denunciation was for Iran.

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The Putin/Assad attack on the Syrian people.
Trump saved his strongest denunciations for ISIS and Iran.


Iran: Even the brutality of the Assad regime was simply blamed on Iran (but not Russia, about which there was no mention). “Iran’s leaders sew chaos, death and disruption,” Trump said. While he saluted those Iranians who oppose the regime, the reality is that he no more supports striking workers in Iran than he does those in the US (including possible strikers at US Steel). A very real possibility will be a US military attack on Iran after the November elections.

Venezuela: When the crisis first burst out in the open in Venezuela, Trump advocated a US invasion of that country. His military advisors convinced him otherwise. He and his administration then looked into backing a coup there. The problem was that they couldn’t find any credible coup leaders. That is still a very real possibility, though. (Note: Oaklandsocialist is working on translating a report from Venezuela, which we will have up in the next few days.)

Trump then went on to use the crisis in Venezuela to shore up his base at home (and abroad). He followed this up with a world vision that should give us pause.

“Socialism”
Trump claimed that the crisis in Venezuela is due to that country’s having adopted socialism. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the use of the term by Maduro (and Chavez before him) has muddied the waters. “Virtually everywhere, socialism or communism has been tried,” Trump said. “It is produced suffering, corruption, and decay. Socialism’s thirst for power leads to expansion, incursion, and oppression. All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone.”


Continues: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/09/25 ... -assembly/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 09, 2018 11:04 am

The Year the Clock Broke

How the world we live in already happened in 1992

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The end of history will be a very sad time.
Francis Fukuyama

AS 1992 DREW CLOSER, A SPECTER HAUNTED the Republican Party establishment—the white-robed specter of David Duke. The former grand wizard of the national Ku Klux Klan had literally gotten a facelift for the television cameras and managed to make a credible run for the governorship of Louisiana. Even though he was soundly trounced in the state’s November 1991 runoff, which delivered the office to the comically corrupt former Democratic governor Edwin Edwards, who dodged a racketeering conviction in his previous term, Duke was still out there lurking on the fringes of the American right, threatening to primary George Bush.

“We’ve been sending a message,” Duke said in his concession speech. “Next year, you’ll have the message being expanded all over the nation.” In Washington, D.C., a group of disaffected hardline right-wing political operatives heard his message loud and clear. They saw in David Duke the path to reshape America, formulating the brand of backlash populism that would finally come of age in the era of Trump.

The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1991 was indeed a fight over that great floating signifier of American political life—populism. But in Louisiana populism was not just a vague label; it was institutionalized, both in style and substance. The remnants of Governor Huey P. Long’s “Share Our Wealth” redistribution program from the 1930s remained on the books. Edwards was certainly closer kin to Long’s rollicking, drawling bonhomie. He was still a “laissez les bon temps rouler” guy in the laissez-faire world of Reaganomic austerity.

Both candidates had legitimate claims to the legacy of Long’s populism. After Long’s assassination in 1935, “The Share Our Wealth” banner was taken up by America Firster anti-Semites like Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith. While Duke railed against welfare that he said mostly benefitted blacks at white expense, he defended a cornerstone of Louisiana’s populist policy regime, the Homestead Exemption, which made the first $75,000 worth of property tax free. The exemption was the material foundation of the largely white, small property-owning lower middle class—those hardy, self-reliant people of American populist lore.

My Tribe, Your Klan

Duke’s protest candidacies created a problem for the leaders of the national Republican Party—not because he was so extreme, but because he hugged so closely to their own proven playbook. As liberals were quick to point out, his racial appeals were largely couched in the language of Reaganism: he lambasted taxes, “welfare dependency,” affirmative action “quotas”; “reverse discrimination”; he talked about a “welfare underclass,” and fixated on black crime. This was really nothing you couldn’t find in the conservative columns of any newspaper or in the speeches of any old GOP retail politician. In 1989, he told ABC’s Sam Donaldson, “I do believe that there is a difference between whites and blacks. I think that there is an I.Q. difference. But I think the way to determine a person’s quality and qualifications is in the marketplace of ideas. . . .” That same year the center-right think tank the American Enterprise Institute started to support Charles Murray’s research on race that would culminate in the publication of the The Bell Curve in 1994.

Bush had vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, calling it a “quota-bill.” The Senate had tried to override his veto—and failed by one vote. Duke was lurking in the gallery for the vote; afterward, he crowed to the news cameras outside the Capitol that he had killed the bill. A series of Supreme Court decisions in the late eighties had made it harder for women and minorities to sue for discrimination, and the 1990 bill was supposed to remedy this. Conservatives said it would force employers to hire quotas of minority workers to avoid lawsuits, hurting qualified whites. In 1991, a compromise version of the bill was up for consideration and by late October, as Duke had captured a strong plurality in the initial Louisiana primary, the Bush administration decided to act. A senior administration official told reporters that in reviving the measure, the White House “wanted to refute the charge that David Duke is related to Republican positions.”

To the GOP’s right flank, this was Bush’s second great betrayal. Bush’s midterm decision to raise taxes after his “read my lips” speech had already infuriated the conservatives. Syndicated columnist and National Review senior editor Joe Sobran was making threats. “The first law of politics is that you punish anyone who double-crosses you,” he wrote. “So conservatives may deem a Bush defeat not only a desideratum but a necessity if they are ever to control the Republican Party again.” Taxes may have seemed like a bigger deal politically—after all, tax cuts were the heart of the entire Reaganite movement—but the rage unleashed by the Civil Rights Act was of a special quality.

Life After the Crack-Up

In Washington, the conservative movement was foundering on the shoals of fuck-all-to-do. By the end of the 1980s, listlessness and infighting began to set in. In some corners of the American right the Reagan years were regarded as a failure. In 1987, The American Spectator had a forum on “The Coming Conservative Crack-Up.” Its editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell, author of The Liberal Crack-Up, put the splintering movement’s existential plight to readers forlornly: “As the Administration loses steam, we ask: Was it foreordained? Will life sour still more for conservatives?”

The sudden end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union made everything worse. Militant anticommunism long provided the great fixative that bound the factions of the right together. The loss of the USSR was so traumatic that the John Birch Society went into full-blown denial: Birch officials insisted the breakup of the Soviet Union was a K.G.B. ploy to get the West to drop its guard.

Who was the main enemy now? On the right, the answer increasingly was one another. In the 1980s, the conservative movement split into two warring factions—neoconservatives and paleo conservatives. The two sects fought over ideas, but also resources: comfortable think tank positions and administrative posts; grant money and the allegiance of the idle army of increasingly ideologically restive conservative activists who could scare up campaign contributions and votes.

The tribes huddled around their magazines, from whose pages they launched their slings and arrows. The capital of neoconland was Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary; major outposts were Tyrrell’s The American Spectator and Irving Kristol’s National Interest. Podhoretz and Kristol’s sons went into the family business. In the paleo mind, the Podhoretzes and Kristols were like two great feudal dynasties that would shower fellowship money on loyal retainers. The prominence of these two Jewish families in the conservative movement fed darker fantasies, too. Hawk-eyed for signs of the anti-Semitism, even self-identified neoconservatives—who by no means were all Jewish—came to regard the epithet “neocon” as a code word for “Jew.” And sometimes it certainly was.

The paleos, as they were the first to point out, were not so well-endowed as their rivals. This fed an already considerable bitterness. They had one little think tank, The Rockford Institute, which produced one little magazine, Chronicles. The publication’s Southern Catholic editor, Thomas Fleming, had founded The Southern Partisan Quarterly Review—a slick organ of neo-Confederate nostalgia—in the late seventies. While the paleos may have been poorer in funding, they did have one big bruiser in their corner: Pat Buchanan. By the dawn of the nineties, Buchanan was America’s most prominent conservative, a veteran of the Reagan and Nixon White Houses, and a panelist on the McLaughlin Group, with his own nationally syndicated column and CNN show.


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Continues: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-year- ... broke-ganz






American Dream » Tue Dec 27, 2016 8:00 am wrote: https://antifascistnews.net/2016/12/24/ ... e-fascist/

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TRUMP THE FASCIST

by Alexander Reid Ross


The White Power Candidate?


By opposing the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump represents the nefarious tradition of Northern Republicans who split with the Reconstruction-era movement to spread equal rights to all citizens of the US. These industrialists sided with Southern racists to undermine Reconstruction through extreme violence, sparking the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. Agreeing with Southern Democrats that those who believed in public education and abolition democracy were mere “carpetbaggers” and “scalliwags,” these Northern industrialists turned their backs on Southern black voters and the project of Reconstruction, which ended finally in 1876 when Rutherfurd B Hayes won the election by agreeing to withdraw US troops from the South and allow “states rights” governance. As historian Leonard Zeskind explains in Blood and Politics, the history of resistance against Reconstruction marks an important tradition for white supremacists, from the anti-civil rights movement to Humphrey Ireland (also known as Wilmot Robertson and Sam Dickson) to David Duke, who would have won the race for Governor of Louisiana but for the black vote. A former Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Klan, Duke supports Trump for president, saying “he’s certainly the best of the lot,” and he “understands the real sentiment of America.”
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 13, 2018 8:05 pm

Two-Track Fascism: Notes on the Collusion of Far-Right Demagogues Like Trump with Street-Level Fascists
Posted on October 29, 2018 by stevedarcy


Some Key Aspects of the Left Response

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Anti-fascist feminists mobilize against the DFLA

The response of anti-fascists to the present situation should be to navigate a course between the danger of complacency on the on hand, and the danger of panic on the other. Fascists are actually still relatively marginal, and most people reject their politics out of hand. But the roots of fascist upsurge in the legitimation crisis provoked by the neoliberal policy convergence of the extreme centre isn’t going away. As long as the anti-neoliberal, authentically anti-establishment far left cannot yet mount a credible alternative to the neoliberal centre (Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, et al.), the far right will try to fill the vacuum with the kind of fake-populist white-supremacist politics that fuels Trump’s ascendancy and energizes his street-level fascist collaborators. The main strategic implications of this analysis seem clear. I will highlight three points.

First, it is necessary for anti-fascists to mobilize always and everywhere to try to deny the street-level fascists access to public space, making it effectively impossible for them to hold events in public. By driving them out of public space, we can isolate their core activists from the periphery of bigots that they want to recruit, demoralizing them and driving them back to the internet chat rooms and websites where they were largely confined before Trump’s election gave them a new confidence to organize openly. Realistically, we know that the police will always try to defend them and criminalize anti-fascist activity, and this makes our task more difficult. But with solidarity, militancy and determination we have shown that we can defeat them in the streets, more often than not.

Second, since the strength of two-track fascism depends crucially on Trump’s alliance, at the level of policy, with Wall Street neoliberalism (mediated by Trump’s cooperation with the GOP establishment), it is necessary for anti-fascists to find ways to raise the costs of this alliance for Wall Street forces and the GOP itself. How to do so is a tactical question, which depends on the context. But generally speaking, anti-fascists have to expose the alliance and ensure that those who fund Trump or lend support to any aspect of two-track fascism are ‘tarred with the brush’ of fascist sympathies and are held accountable for the violence of the street-level fascists and the anti-democratic and white-supremacist features of Trump’s program and ideological posture. Trump’s funders, collaborators, and enablers all have to be exposed and held accountable. Brand-sensitive targets, such as corporations and politicians, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of pressure.

Third, the far left has to work toward developing the capacity to hegemonize (gain leadership over and draw support from) the popular mood of revulsion against the hated neoliberal consensus of the extreme centre. In the US, it is obvious that the Democratic Party is hopelessly incapable of appealing to this sentiment, or rather it is completely uninterested in doing so because it is itself so deeply committed to the political project of upholding neoliberalism. By contrast, the Democratic Socialists of America, and before that the Sanders campaign, have tried to tap into the anti-neoliberal sentiment on the basis of some kind of left critique, with some degree of success. Whether the DSA (or Sanders) have the politics needed to follow through on these opportunities and develop a real challenge to both the neoliberal extreme centre and the far-right phenomenon of two-track fascism, is debatable, but this question is beyond the scope of the present discussion. What is crucial is just to be clear that defeating two-track fascism will remain a futile “labour of Sisyphus” unless the left can build itself up as a pole of attraction drawing energy and popular support from working-class revulsion against neoliberalism. Until our side develops that capacity, the right will continually benefit from anti-establishment anger that ought instead to be the main engine of left radicalization and anti-capitalist revolt.


Read more: https://publicautonomy.org/2018/10/29/t ... k-fascism/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:58 am

Matt Heimbach Makes His National Socialist Movement Debut at Little Rock Rally

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In Sherwood, Arkansas, fewer than two dozen men, some bearing swastika tattoos, gathered in the parking lot of a Kohl’s department store to prepare for a trip into Little Rock, where they planned to make a public display of their banners and their sidearms, and to inveigh against what they said was a “white genocide” being conducted against South African landowners of European descent, not to mention white people nearly everywhere.

Before departing the parking lot, NSM members, wearing their black neo-Nazi getups, darted into the store for a last-chance bathroom stop before they convoyed through the town.

Amid the gaggle of black-clad men, most of them middle-aged or older, one in particular stood out: the 27-year-old Matthew Heimbach, the recently appointed director of community outreach for the National Socialist Movement (NSM), one of America’s oldest and largest neo-Nazi groups, currently based in Detroit, Michigan. The foundation of NSM was formed in the 1960s by two chief lieutenants of the American Nazi Party (ANP) after ANP leader George Rockwell was murdered by one of his followers. In 1994, leadership of NSM was handed to Jeff Schoep, who has served as the group’s “commander” for the last 24 years.

NSM members openly fetishize Adolf Hitler and, until relatively recently, wore Nazi symbols on their outfits. Heimbach, it seems, was brought on to help make the Third Reich ideology more palatable to young white nationalists and even radical socialists. He apparently hopes to do for neo-Nazis what the briefly famous Richard Spencer failed to do for white separatists: smooth out the rough edges of NSM’s public profile in order to grow the movement.

But if you were looking for an image-fixer for your authoritarian movement, Heimbach might seem an odd choice. The founder of the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, Heimbach first splashed into mainstream media for a second when he assaulted an African American woman who was protesting at a Trump rally. He was scheduled to speak at the 2017 Unite the Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was disbanded by police before it got started, leading to an unleashing of violence by far-right demonstrators in the streets of the historic town. Heimbach has since referred to James Fields–who drove his car into a march of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more–as a “prisoner of war.” (After the Charlottesville melee, he had a star turn before the cameras of the PBS NewsHour, where he declined to express remorse for Heyer’s death.)

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NSM Member

In March, Heimbach was shown in news photos attacking anti-fascist protesters outside a Michigan State University venue where Spencer, the white nationalist, was speaking. Days later, Heimbach was arrested on domestic violence and other assault charges stemming from a rather complicated love-triangle situation involving his father-in-law, David Parrott, and Parrott’s wife, which led to the dissolution of the Traditionalist Worker Party.

Since Heimbach’s arrival at NSM, the group has undergone another public rebranding in hopes of appealing to radical-left activists, as well as the white nationalists more typically viewed as being part of the right. Heimbach, who is adamant that he is a socialist, briefly attempted to infiltrate Democratic political circles in Southeastern Tennessee.

Right Wing Watch asked Heimbach how he expected to garner the favor of the American left while at the same time attaching himself to a group whose members are notorious for covering themselves in swastikas and Nazi icons. His answer was vague, citing the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, an alliance in the 1960s and 70s that unified social justice groups of different ethnicities in a push for social justice efforts.

However, when the press is not around and Heimbach is speaking candidly with other members of the white nationalist movement, his agenda is much clearer. On a podcast hosted by fellow movement members, Heimbach argued that killing Jews is was “the only way to do it,” and he has professed contempt for blacks, Muslims and LGBTQ people. In chat logs, Heimbach has been chummy with a neo-Nazi in Atomwaffen Division, three of whose members have been charged with five murders done in the name of their cause.


Continues: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/nsm- ... ttle-rock/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 02, 2018 9:06 pm

https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/201 ... 8-mrr-427/

Rightward and downward: “What’s Left?” December 2018, MRR #427

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My wife, my friends, everybody I know is pissed that I’m not more pissed off about that horrible, horrible man Donald Trump. That I seem pretty sanguine about the hurricane of political, social, and human destruction Trump and the GOP have wrought in such a short period of time or the damage they will continue to inflict for decades to come through, for instance, the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. So, why am I not more freaked out about Trump?

The answer is that, in my lifetime, I’ve seen this nation’s relatively liberal politics go consistently downhill and rightward to the present. I first became aware of American politics writ large when I was 8 years old, when John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960. My parents had been Democrats and Adlai Stevenson supporters, so my frame of reference started from a liberal “Golden Age,” the “one brief shining moment” that was the myth of JFK and Camelot. But unlike many people who believe the fifty-eight years that followed have witnessed ups and downs, good times and bad, pendulum swings left and right, and are therefore upset, desperate, and obsessed with the rise of Trump, I see those years all of a piece, a steady right wing devolution as we go straight to hell in a handbasket.

The relatively lean, muscular structure of the American state prior to 1929 permitted the nation to create an empire—by conquering the native populations, expanding its rule from coast to coast under Manifest Destiny, and asserting its power across the western hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in confronting the challenges first of the Great Depression and then the second World War, radically transformed American government in riding a wave of socialist/communist militancy. FDR crafted the modern warfare/welfare/corporatist state that attempted to democratically sidestep the excesses of Soviet Communism and European Fascism while outflanking the Old Left’s upsurge domestically. Considered the height of American Liberalism, the New Deal has been disingenuously celebrated by that same Old Left even after a smooth political transition to the rabid anti-communism of the Eisenhower era. The guns-and-butter Kennedy/Johnson years continued the anti-communist military intervention and domestic social welfare expansion permitted by First World economic affluence, as New Left* activism and organizing surged. It must be remembered that Nixon arguably was the last liberal president.

These two prolonged separate Leftist periods were when progressive coalitions mobilized to move the Democratic party and American politics dramatically to the left. Four briefer, distinct occasions when ultra-conservative coalitions mobilized to purposefully move the Republican party and American politics profoundly to the right need also be noted: McCarthyism and the era of “Father Knows Best” morality; the prefiguring Goldwater presidential campaign; the rise of the New Right presaging Reagan’s presidential bid in a new age of austerity; and the Tea Party movement that anticipated the rise of Donald Trump and independent Trumpism. Yet Democratic party governance after 1975 was not a reversal or even a holding pattern so much as a more gradual rightward descent: Carter with economic deregulation and Cold War escalation; Clinton in slashing welfare and promoting free trade; and Obama as the drone-bombing-deporter-in-chief and TPP champion.

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I’ve summarized this country’s inexorable political slide to the right over the last half century. The changeover from Keynesian affluence to neoliberal austerity however hints at something more fundamental underlying American politics whether you see those politics as a swinging pendulum or, like me, as a steady flush down the porcelain highway. American capitalism made the switch from making profits out of industrial productivity to financial speculation somewhere around 1975, accounting for both the decline of the 60s New Leftist surge and the defeat of the 70s labor upsurge. In commercial capitalism profit is extracted almost exclusively from circulation, from trade, from the buying and selling of commodities. Under industrial capitalism profit is extracted not just from circulation but also from the labor process in which factory workers are paid less than the value they produce from their labor—from surplus value. Surplus value is then used to construct more factories and to hire more workers for wages in an ever-expanding cycle of profit-making.

But capitalism suffers from a tendency for the rate of profit to fall (in the interpretation of Marx I favor), which not only results in the boom-and-bust economic cycle we’re all familiar with but also in an increasing inability to sustain industrial production. In my lifetime we’ve seen industrial production become so unprofitable that US industrial labor has been outsourced and factories moved to the Third World, resulting in America’s overall deindustrialization and conversion to a service economy. More and more, capitalism in the US is based on extracting profit from financial transactions and speculation, a far less profitable form of capitalism then even the trade in commodities of commercial capitalism. Capitalism worldwide also suffers from the same declining rate of profit, meaning that in China, Vietnam, and other Third World nations industrial production is contracting, meaning that industrial capitalism is slumping internationally and being replaced by finance capitalism. Finance capitalism is not merely a capitalism in decline, it is capitalism heading for the mother of all crises.

Some students of the 1929 Great Depression have contended that, in liberal democracies, deep economic depressions as suffered by the interwar US are conducive to the growth of socialist movements whereas runaway inflations as experienced by Weimar Germany are favorable to the rise of fascist movements. During depressions, people who have no money or work are screwed but for those who do, money has value, work has meaning, and society has integrity, giving the edge to socialism which values labor. During inflations, it doesn’t matter whether people have money or work because money has no value, work has no meaning, and society is crumbling, giving the advantage to fascism which values power.

A similar dynamic can be seen in the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in liberal democracies. In industrial capitalist societies, work and capital are intrinsically productive and so leftist movements and ideologies are widespread. Government spending and services grow, welfare programs and economic regulation expand, and the public realm and labor unions are endorsed. In finance capitalist societies, work and capital are mostly unproductive and so rightist movements and ideologies are prevalent. The economy is deregulated and financialized, the welfare state is rolled back, labor unions are crushed, the public realm is privatized, and government spending and services are cut back. About all they have in common is an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. Marxists consider industrial capitalism in terms of constant vs variable capital while consigning finance capitalism to the category of fictitious capital.

Whether Keynesian or neoliberal, democratic or authoritarian, the state serves as the monopoly of legitimate violence, the bulwark for the existing social order, and the lynchpin for the nation and economy. The state functions the same whether under affluent industrial capitalism or austere finance capitalism, so why does society exhibit leftist unrest in the former and rightist agitation in the latter? A staid principle developed in the 1950s was that of the revolution of rising expectations in which “rising expectations embodied the twentieth century’s ‘real’ revolution insofar as it represented for the vast majority of the world’s population a break from centuries of stagnation, fatalism, and exploitation.” The growing affluence from 1945 to 1975 caused expectations to rise in the population at large all over the world, which in turn lead to civil unrest, insurgencies, and revolutions according to the theory. But did persistent austerity after 1975 cause the opposite: widespread social reaction, stagnation, and obedience? The results are dubious either way the theory cuts. The inconclusive empirical evidence, methodological constraints, and conceptual criticisms of the whole revolution of rising expectations thesis makes it useless.

I’m of the Marxist mindset that the social superstructure follows the economic base much as form follows function in the principle enunciated by modernist architecture and industrial design. It also means, in a Gramscian sense, that social superstructure can gain autonomy to act back on the economic base, but the starting point is crucial. We make our own history, but we don’t make it as we please; we don’t make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

I just snuck in another Marx quote.


*New Left in this case does not refer to the politics that grew up around organizations like Students for a Democratic Society but to Leftist organizing and movements that flourished from the Civil Rights movement beginning in 1955 to the collapse of the anti-Vietnam war movement in 1975.

SIGNIFICANT DATE RANGES: Old Left: 1930-50; New Left: 1955-75; Keynesian industrial affluence: 1945-75; neoliberal finance austerity: 1975 onward; McCarthyism/Eisenhower era: 1950-1960; Goldwater campaign: 1963-64; New Right: 1980-88; Tea Party/independent Trumpism: 2009 onward.










American Dream » Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:40 am wrote:
The New Faces of Populism
Posted on January 25, 2016 by edmundberger

Consider the following quotes:

… despite the academic consensus that free trade is win-win for all, free trade is not free.

Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1 percent and many among our top 10 percent. As U.S. manufacturers shut down scores of thousands of U.S. factories to finance new plants in Asia, their production costs plummeted. Wages and benefits for Asians were, and are still, but a fraction of those of American workers.

After having shifted production overseas and dramatically lowered costs, U.S. transnationals saw a surge in profits. These were used to push corporate salaries into the stratosphere, increase dividends to shareholders, and keep the Washington lobbyists working the Hill day and night for fast track and free trade. And the lifestyle of our corporate elites changed. Where their fathers walked sooty factory floors in smokestack towns in World War II, these masters of the universe fly Gulfstream Vs to Davos and Dubai to dine with titled Europeans, Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires.


These may sound like they come from the pages of Mother Jones, The Nation, or Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and they may sound like something you’d hear at a Sanders’ rally. Quite the contrary: they’re from a 2014 article published in The American Conservative, written by Pat Buchanan.

For the unfamiliar, Buchanan (who recently declared that “Trump is the future of America”) ran for president under the mantle of the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996, before departing the Republicans to run again as the candidate for the Reform Party of the United States. The Reform Party, which had been founded in 1995 by Ross Perot (who had rocketed to the political limelight a few years prior for his opposition to the NAFTA free trade deal), went through considerations for several other candidates before landing on Buchanan – including Ron Paul and Donald Trump. In 2004, the Reform Party candidate would Ralph Nader, a clear illustration of the deviation from the traditionally-held political coordinates by this coterie of individuals.

Buchanan’s positions are very similar to those we see today espoused by Trump and his followers: a strong suspicion towards free trade, calls for a more isolationist foreign policy, anti-immigration, shades of racism (he fell under fire, for example, by flirting with Holocaust denial), and more general social conservatism. While these might sound contradictory and scattered across the left-right political compass, they all in fact sit quite cozily together under the rubric of paleoconservatism. In the contemporary era, paleoconservatism’s most stalwart defender – and primary theorist – was Samuel T. Francis, himself known for his opposition to neoliberal capitalism, extreme nationalist, an unrepentant racism (in one instance going so far as to castigate humanist philosophy as a “war against the white race”). Here is he on Buchanan’s 1992 president campaign:

[Buchanan] appealed to a particular identity, embodied in the concepts of America as a nation with discrete national political and economic interests and of the Middle American stratum as the political, economic, and cultural core of the nation. In adopting such themes, Mr. Buchanan decisively broke with the universalist and cosmopolitan ideology that has been masquerading as conservatism and which has marched up and down the land armed with a variety of universalist slogans and standards: natural rights; equality as a conservative principle; the export of global democracy as the primary goal of American foreign policy; unqualified support for much of the civil rights agenda, unlimited immigration, and free trade; the defense of one version or another of “one-worldism”; enthusiastic worship of an abstract “opportunity” and unrestricted economic growth through acquisitive individualism; and the adulation of the purported patron saints of all these causes in the persons of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.


This “particular identity” that he refers to is what he calls the “Middle American Radicals”, a class of disaffected middle class Americans who adhere to traditionalist values, oppose ‘big government’, and reject the forces of big business. Today this concept is very much alive, and is being rearticulated by Trump as the “Silent Majority” who are “fed up with what’s going on.”

https://deterritorialinvestigations.wor ... -populism/
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