The Secret Agenda behind Trump's Election

[brekin]

There were so many Trump/Russia/Putin/CIA threads to put this in, I decided to start a new thread about the secret agenda behind Trump's election.
That seems like something even the stealthy pro trump and apologists can agree on with the anti-trumpists.
There has been a power shakeup, a reordering of sorts, unless the ptb has gotten into public displays of masochism for our amusement.

Knowles can be uneven sometimes, but I think he really hit his stride again with this post.
I dare say this is the increasingly rare "clear thinking" on the subject without championing one Spy in the Spy vs. Spy.

Spy vs Spy: The Russia (Un)Reality Show
Oh, the utter lack of self-awareness
http://secretsun.blogspot.com/2017/01/s ... -show.html

Why am I growing leery of all this "CIA coup" talk we're hearing in the media?

Exactly because we're hearing it in the media. I didn't cut my teeth on all those old issues of Covert Action Quarterly to just turn around and buy whatever narrative the media is flogging.

This all feels orchestrated and stage-managed to me. Like everything about this election and its aftermath. Some kind of game is playing out here, I just can't grasp at the contours of it. Which is a good thing, probably. For me.For some reason I can quite put my finger on, it makes perfect sense that a man known to most of the public as a reality TV star is at the center of this open-air psychodrama unfolding in front of us, this contrived Clash of the Titans, this bizarro Battle of the Billionaires.So much of this is ultimately a new media put-on, Trump battling (read: trolling) the press, shooting out tweets with his meaty fingers. The charge is being led by The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame) and The New York Times (owned and operated by Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecom magnate), and the once-mighty/now-endangered CNN bringing up the rear.

And for a guy who's the focus of a firestorm of controversy and the ostensible target of attack from some of the most powerful forces in the country, he doesn't seem to be sweating it too much. Near as I can tell, at least. Even the ultraliberal Newsweek has the headline today: "Don't Kid Yourself - Trump Is Winning."
That raises some red flags, by my reckoning. Is this just another performance for a seasoned reality TV hand? Have we finally come to this?
Think about it for a minute: why dump all this Russia stuff out when all the paperwork has been completed? The recounts didn't pan out, the Hamilton Elector campaign went nowhere, the Electoral College voted, the results were ratified by Congress. It's a done deal.
These painfully-earnest celebrity videos, the Golden Globes speeches, aren't moving the needle at all. They're just inspiring eye-rolling, resentment and hathos, even among Trump-haters. No one cares about the status anxieties of the unjustly-pampered and impossibly-rich.
Chris Rock put it best: “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.”

SUCH A THING AS PRECEDENT

I'm pretty sure I know where all this is all eventually going, I'm just not sure what exact road they're planning to take. But I guarantee that a lot of people cheering on the new McCarthyism are definitely not going to like where the bus lets off.

How do I know this, you ask?

Well, the CIA's track record isn't entirely classified is it? I mean, there's the matter of testing LSD on children as young as five, testing radiation on pregnant mothers and on the mentally-handicapped, overthrowing democratically-elected governments and setting up death squads, flooding our cities with illegal drugs...

...need I go on? I hope not.

But hey, there's an election to try to undo. So already having sold their souls (and the working and middle classes everywhere) to Wall Street, Bilderberg and Silicon Valley billionaires, the Democrats have given up their last scraps and shreds of hair, skin and sinew to the fucking CIA, of all people.
And how does the CIA apparently plan to repay them?

Well, according to this report, by installing the man who would like nothing better than to crush what is left of their party into a finely-ground powder into the Oval Office:

For these two reasons, there are people inside the CIA who would love to see the unpredictable tycoon replaced by vice-president-elect Mike Pence, a man who they feel they can work with. Of course, it is well-known that the CIA has an infamous record of plotting coups d’etats against democratically elected governments in other countries — for example, in the early-Fifties when it helped the Iranian military overthrow premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstate the Shah, and the ousting of Chile’s president Salvador Allende in 1973.

The atmosphere is currently so feverish in Washington that there are well-informed people who now believe that the CIA is contemplating a version of the same thing in America itself.Wouldn't that just be a kick in the pants? Give the Left Trump's head on a platter and put their worst fucking nightmare in the White House?
Mike Pence, an inveterate partisan warrior who would not only work night and day to gut all their favorite programs but won't lead with his chin the way Trump does. A much harder target who will come armed with an increasingly-radicalized Republican Congress (led by Ayn Rand devotee Paul Ryan) and a seriously pissed-off police force looking for payback after eight years of Obama. Not to mention a vengeful GOP voter base, who will baying for blood just in time for the midterms.

That's the CIA we all know and unlove.

But is any of this actually true? The Media has seized on Trump's tactical assent with the Russia hacking report, but that means that they are now taking the word of the CIA and Donald Trump as gospel when the only evidence presented thus far is use of Ukrainian - not Russian- malware, that hackers can obtain anywhere on the Dark Web.
Not familiar with what's going on in the Ukraine, are we? Not familiar with the "color revolution" that Obama Administration neocons engineered, that just happened to bring real-life Nazis to power? From Globalist mouthpiece Foreign Policy:

Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian Government
It's time for a frank conversation about some of the unsavory characters in Kiev.

Sound policy, however, can only be based on sound analysis of the players involved. That requires conceding the point — even when made by the Kremlin — that more than a few of the protesters who toppled Yanukovych, and of the new leaders in Kiev, are fascists.
Here's video of a mass rally of the Soros-funded Ukrainian fascists. And then there's this recent story:

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian police have unveiled a plot led by a Ukrainian armed movement to recruit Brazilian neo-Nazis with combat experience to fight pro-Russian rebels in the European country’s civil war.
A series of raids took place last month in seven cities on the homes of neo-Nazis in order to prevent possible attacks against Jews and gays in Porto Alegre, according to Brazilian police, who seized vast amounts of Nazi propaganda material and also illegal ammunition, reported the Zero Hora news portal.
Nice friends we have there. Still think the Russians shot that jet down?
Bizarro-World in the comics was funny. Not so much here.

RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA

In the middle of the New McCarthyites' New Red Scare came a blockbuster headline: Trump and Vladimir Putin to hold summit. Suddenly every newly-minted CIA-lover's worst nightmare had come true- Trump really was Putin's puppet, by gum!
Only problem was the story is not true:

The Russian embassy in London has denied that Russian president Vladimir Putin will meet President-elect Donald Trump in Iceland following his inauguration on January 20.

The Sunday Times newspaper wrote that Trump's team have told British officials that the new US leader plans to meet Putin within weeks of becoming president. But the Russian embassy in London has downplayed the report.
A spokesman for the embassy told Business Insider on Sunday that the report is "complete rubbish" and suggested that we look at the embassy's Twitter feed, where the embassy has been referring to the report as #fakenews.

Two aides to Trump also denied The Sunday Times story, according to Reuters. "The story is a fantasy," one Trump aide told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another said the report was not true.
Did anyone happen to notice that the Trump team has been running ops to smoke out leaks, by its own admission? Did the unimaginably credulous press corps, desperate to throw any negative or sensationalistic headlines they could, bother to verify this story?
These privileged pajama-boys and girls in the press are not dealing with Obama Administration whiz kids from Oberlin and Vassar anymore.
Now they're dealing with men who have killed and tortured people. A lot of men who have killed and tortured a lot of people, if you start counting all the adjutants and assistants, I'm sure. They're dealing with men who would probably like nothing more than to kill them if they can figure out a way to get away with it. Think I'm exaggerating?

How bizarre has the world you are now living in become? The liberal New Yorker is hailing Marine General James Mattis, late of Central Command, as a bulwark against the perceived authoritarianism of a New York native who spent his life in the libertine worlds of casinos, beauty pageants and network television.
I mean, where do you start?
Need I remind you this guy's nickname is "Mad Dog?" Here's a couple quotes from his time in Iraq to let you know that he earned the moniker:

“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

Some savior, New Yorker.
Now ask yourself; do you think these people are afraid of reporters?

WHAT IF?

Look, I could be wrong but the fact remains that the CIA had all the time in the world to take Trump down if that's what they were really after. They had the primaries, the elections, the Electoral College and both their hands up the ass of the entire mainstream media since at least the 1980s. All of it, from stem to stern.

This feels like something else.
What if there was a war among the intelligence hierarchy, one side lost and this is all just face-saving? This is all just brush-clearing, steam-letting, which the victors are indulging before they bring the hammer down? What if Trump is trolling in order to draw attention away from what is coming down the pike?
Maybe this Russia unreality show is just one giant "red" herring. Maybe the War in Heaven has already been fought and settled.

Why would I think this?

The news that the Clinton Global Initiative is closing down might have something to do with it. The Clintons used this mammoth cash machine as an extremely effective power base while out of office and cultivated unimaginable wealth, power and influence with it:

Since Bill Clinton launched CGI as an arm of the Clinton Foundation in 2005, its members made more than 3,550 commitments and pledged to raise $125 billion to meet them, according to a Bloomberg News calculation based on annual reports. The group says its work has affected 430 million people in 180 countries. In philanthropy circles, CGI is widely credited with creating a new framework for giving and action, convening powerful figures from government, business and charities to address global problems. Members would pay for the privilege to meet and brainstorm solutions, then make financial commitments, often multi-year plans costing tens of millions of dollars.
This closing is based on paperwork filed with the State of New York and yet no major media outlet will cover the story. Why? Mainstream site Politico reported on the mass layoffs there back in Septermber.
What's different now?

Maybe this will give you a clue.

I'm no prophet. Prediction is a tough racket, given the random variables constantly swirling around, banging into one another like protons in an atom smasher. But I can say this- the powers that be played the Global game and there was one clear, unambiguous winner: Communist China.
It's why China seems to be the odd man out at Davos this year, Monopoly board under its arm, forlornly trying to get an increasingly-reluctant world to play along again.
And after a number of years-absence, China's horrific smog problems are headline news again.
I believe there is a new Cold War coming. But collating all the stories and taking the measure of the Trump junta, I don't believe it will necessarily be with Russia.

[Fixx]

Just what these place needs, another fucking Trump thread...

[seemslikeadream]

Mr. Fixx seems to be sensitive to war with China threads

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40231&p=622962#p622962

The Coming War with China

DECEMBER 2, 2016
The Coming War on China
by JOHN PILGER


When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, “disappeared”, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an “existential threat” to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a “pivot to Asia”, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020. Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, “the perfect noose”.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled, War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the cold war when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn — “thinking the unthinkable”. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the United States: the militarists and neo-conservatives in the executive, the Pentagon, the intelligence and “national security” establishment and Congress.

The current Secretary of Defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those “who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us”.

For all the attempts to detect a departure in foreign policy, this is almost certainly the view of Donald Trump, whose abuse of China during the election campaign included that of “rapist” of the American economy. On 2 December, in a direct provocation of China, President-elect Trump spoke to the President of Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province of the mainland. Armed with American missiles, Taiwan is an enduring flashpoint between Washington and Beijing.

“The United States,” wrote Amitai Etzioni, professor of international Affairs at George Washington University, “is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.” This war would begin with a “blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers … satellite and anti-satellite weapons”.

The incalculable risk is that “deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into ‘a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma’ [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. “The United States,” it says, “has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.”

In China, a strategist told me, “We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, “for the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack … This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy … Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.”

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, “Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See I got to be tough … I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.”

I said, “This seems incredibly dangerous.”

“That’s an understatement.”

In 2015, in considerable secrecy, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB — blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a US Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and could be traced to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the US military bases closed down in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands – which lie more than 7,500 miles from the United States – a threat to US “national security” and to “freedom of navigation”.

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the US. This established five rotating US bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

The election of Rodrigo Duterte in April has unnerved Washington. Calling himself a socialist, he declared, “In our relations with the world, the Philippines will pursue an independent foreign policy” and noted that the United States had not apologized for its colonial atrocities. “I will break up with America,” he said, and promised to expel US troops. But the US remains in the Philippines; and joint military exercises continue.

In 2014, under the rubric of “information dominance” – the jargon for media manipulation, or fake news, on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion – the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to “freedom of navigation”.

CNN led the way, its “national security reporter” reporting excitedly from on board a US Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands “to see how the Chinese would react”. None of these reporters questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. “My responsibilities,” he told the New York Times, “cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.” Never was imperial domination described as pithily.

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq and much of the Middle East.

In Los Angeles in September, Harris declared he was “ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China …If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery … and all our partners with their artillery.”

These “partners” include South Korea, the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea. As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to “tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea”. The imagery was front page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious “partner”; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the media are integrated into what is known as the “alliance”. Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government “dignitary” is not uncommon. The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honour.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, “confronting China” is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. “You in Australia are with us come what may,” said one of the architects of the Vietnam war, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important US bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the CIA, it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defence spokesman of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that “operational decisions” in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington – which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup — is reflected in the record $5 trillion America has spent on aggressive wars since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The million dead in Iraq and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s “peace constitution”.

The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. “We have a choice,” she said, “silence or life.” As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi- tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared “an island of world peace”. On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has been a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, “I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons — no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.”

I flew from Jeju to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiopeng, the “man who changed China”, was the “paramount leader”. Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.

China presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today, it stands in the heart of a very capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada.

Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. “China must industrialise.” he wrote, “This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict.”

Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington “when the catatonic Cold War trance,” wrote the critic James Naremore, “held our country in its rigid grip”.

The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.

The world is inexorably shifting east; but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The “New Silk Road” is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe. The world’s leader in rail technology, China is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 kms an hour. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity and, along the way, is uniting China and Russia.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Barack Obama, evoking the fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Under the liberal Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable”.

In September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream US geopolitical thinktank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world “marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war”. The new enemies were a “resurgent” Russia and an “increasingly aggressive” China. Only heroic America can save us.

There is a demented quality about this war mongering. It is as if the “American Century” — proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine — has ended without notice and no one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/ ... -on-china/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsFfkDLRqd8&t=4s


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRhle8eHMU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti5Szv8xDlc

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40221

thanks brekin....I really do want to know what the fuck is going on

[NeonLX]

"The ultraliberal Newsweek". Hahahaha.

[American Dream]

There's a considerable element of KGB vs. CIA in this whole thing.

Which is kinda like Coke vs. Pepsi.

[seemslikeadream]

The Coming World War 3 With China


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_UlgxI8MHg

[seemslikeadream]

so what do you guys think of Alex Ansary? I don't know him ..first time listening to him


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi3NODRY24U


In total there are 105 users online :: 4 registered, 7 hidden and 94 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[brekin]

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again.



Kissinger, a longtime Putin confidant, sidles up to Trump
America's pre-eminent ex-diplomat gets back in the mix. Could he help broker a deal with Russia?
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/t ... tin-232925

Back in the 1990s, Henry Kissinger, the legendary former U.S. secretary of state-turned-global consultant, encountered an intriguing young Russian and proceeded to ask him a litany of questions about his background.
“I worked in intelligence,” Vladimir Putin finally told him, according to “First Person,” a 2000 autobiography cobbled together from hours of interviews with the then-unfamiliar Russian leader. To which Kissinger replied: “All decent people got their start in intelligence. I did, too.”

As Putin climbed the ranks in the Kremlin, eventually becoming the autocratic president he is today, he and Kissinger kept up a warm rapport even as the United States and Russia grew further apart. Kissinger is one of the few Americans to meet frequently with Putin, one former U.S. ambassador recently recalled -- along with movie star Steven Seagal and ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, the likely next secretary of state.

Now, as Donald Trump signals that he wants a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, the 93-year-old Kissinger is positioning himself as a potential intermediary — meeting with the president-elect in private and flattering him in public. Like Trump, Kissinger has also cast doubt on intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia sought to sway the election in Trump's favor, telling a recent interviewer: “They were hacking, but the use they allegedly made of this hacking eludes me.”

Some have expressed surprise that the urbane, cerebral former top diplomat would have any affinity for the brash, shoot-from-the-lip Trump. But seasoned Kissinger watchers say it’s vintage behavior for a foreign policy realist who has cozied up to all sorts of kings and presidents for decades. And in fact, Trump may wind up an ideal vessel for Kissinger -- the architect of detente with the Soviets in the 1970s -- to realize his longstanding goal of warmer ties between the two Cold War adversaries.
“Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” President-elect Donald Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe."

Trump threatens to upend U.S. nuclear weapons policy

By Madeline Conway

For years, Kissinger has argued that promoting a greater balance of power between the U.S. and Russia would improve global stability. But skeptics fear this approach will sacrifice other values and reward bad behavior by the Kremlin, including its alleged election meddling, its invasion of Ukraine and its support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. There’s also the question of how Kissinger himself would personally benefit from a new reset with Russia: Aside from the reputational boost of having easy access to two major world leaders, the former secretary of state's secretive consulting firm, Kissinger Associates Inc., could get a bump in business.

“I think Kissinger is preparing a diplomatic offensive,” said Marcel H. Van Herpen, a Russia specialist and Putin critic who directs the Cicero Foundation, a Dutch think tank. “He’s a realist. The most important thing for him is international equilibrium, and there’s no talk of human rights or democracy.”
Trump aides did not offer a comment on the president-elect’s relationship with Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. But sources familiar with the transition effort say the Manhattan real estate mogul is fascinated by Kissinger as well as other Republican elder statesmen, such as Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, to whom he has turned for advice on policy and staffing.

Kissinger and Trump have chatted on multiple occasions, including during at least one face-to-face meeting since the Nov. 8 election. And Kissinger, to the surprise of many in the broader foreign policy establishment, has spoken admiringly — albeit carefully — about the Trump phenomenon. Even after Trump spoke directly with the president of Taiwan -- a move that angered Beijing and went against the One China policy that Kissinger negotiated in the 1970s -- the former secretary of state expressed confidence Trump would uphold U.S. diplomatic traditions with the Chinese.

Associates of Kissinger also are in touch with others in the Trump orbit. One top Kissinger aide, Thomas Graham, is being floated among lower-level transition interlocutors as a potential ambassador to Russia, according to a source familiar with the conversations.

Graham met with House Foreign Affairs Committee staffers on Capitol Hill earlier this month, accompanied by other Russia observers, according to four people familiar with the session. Graham also sought meetings in the Senate. Graham appeared to be trying to identify people who shared similar outlooks on Russia and had connections to the Trump transition, three of the people said.
20161223_vladimir_putin_getty.jpg

Putin on Trump: 'Nobody believed he would win except for us'

By POLITICO Staff

Kissinger also has praised Trump's choice of Tillerson as the next secretary of state, dismissing worries that the ExxonMobil chief is too close to the Kremlin. “He would be useless at the head of Exxon if he was not friendly with Russia… I don’t hear those concerns at all," Kissinger said at an event in Manhattan. "Nobody can meet every single qualification for secretary of state. I think it’s a good appointment.”

Kissinger Associates doesn’t disclose its clients under U.S. lobbying laws. The firm once threatened to sue Congress to resist a subpoena for its client list. It has in the past advised American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Daewoo. But the firm does belong to the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a trade group that includes ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase and Pfizer.
A person familiar with the Trump team's national security planning warned against reading too much into the Trump-Kissinger relationship. The president-elect, the person said, "admires the reputation and the gravitas but isn't necessarily persuaded by the Kissingerian worldview."
That may be true when it comes to China, a frequent subject of Trump’s ire, and the need to maintain a strong NATO, whose usefulness Trump has repeatedly questioned. But Trump's desire for warmer ties with Russia has been one of the more consistent stances he's taken, and he could find alignment with Kissinger.

POLITICO's attempts to reach Kissinger did not succeed this past week. But despite his unsavory reputation among human rights advocates -- who recite a litany of moral offenses from Vietnam to Bangladesh -- presidents of both political parties have sought Kissinger's advice for the past 40 years, and he's been eager to oblige.
During the final years of the George W. Bush administration, as relations with Moscow were souring, Kissinger teamed up with Evgeny Primakov, the former Russian prime minister and head of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, to co-chair a working group focused on bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia. Putin blessed the venture. According to Kissinger, Bush, too, hoped the initiative would yield positive results, even assembling members of his national security team to learn about its work in 2008. But the payoff was modest, at best: Russia sent troops into the former Soviet state of Georgia in August 2008, angering the Bush administration, which imposed limited sanctions.

When Barack Obama took over the presidency from Bush, he sought Kissinger’s help on how to deal with Putin. A 2009 meeting between Kissinger and Putin helped lay the groundwork for a new arms-control pact as part of Obama’s effort to “reset” Russian relations. Kissinger remained involved in arms negotiations through 2010, according to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails released by the State Department. But ultimately that reset failed as well, for reasons that include Putin's frustrations over U.S. support of NATO and European Union expansion, which he believed threatened Russian influence in countries such as Ukraine.

In a February speech honoring Primakov, who died last year, Kissinger sketched out his view of the way U.S.-Russian relations should work. "The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multi-polar and globalized," he said. "Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.”
President Richard Nixon talks with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the Middle East crisis in 1973. | AP Photo

As for Ukraine, which lost its Crimea region to Russian annexation in 2014 and is still fighting Russian-backed separatists in its east, Kissinger argued that it shouldn’t be invited to join the West outright. "Ukraine needs to be embedded in the structure of European and international security architecture in such a way that it serves as a bridge between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side," he said.

In Syria, he likewise called for the U.S. to cooperate with Russia, which has used indiscriminate air power to help Assad crush rebel forces. "Compatible U.S.-Russian efforts coordinated with other major powers could create a pattern for peaceful solutions in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere,” he advised at the time.
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, noted that it's not yet clear how far Trump will go to accommodate Russia. The president-elect’s pick for defense secretary is James Mattis, a retired Marine general who views Moscow as a major threat. And Trump, who prides himself on his deal-making skills, may ultimately conclude that Russia has little to offer.“Does Trump get to a better relationship with Russia without getting something for it in terms of better behavior?" Pifer asked. "If we’re prepared to accept what they’re doing in Syria, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, we can have a better relationship, but we’ve sacrificed other interests and it’s not clear what we get for that.”

In an interview with CBS News that aired earlier this month, Kissinger spoke of both Trump and Putin in terms that suggested a sense of respect, if not necessarily awe.
Trump, Kissinger said, "has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president.” Because of perceptions that Obama weakened America's influence abroad, "one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges” out of a Trump administration," he said. "I’m not saying it will. I’m saying it’s an extraordinary opportunity.”
Putin, meanwhile, is a "character out of Dostoyevsky,” Kissinger said, a reference to the 19th-century author who chronicled the often bleak lives of Russians in novels such as "Crime and Punishment" and "The Idiot." “He is a man with a great sense of connection, an inward connection, to Russian history as he sees it,” Kissinger said of Putin.
The Kremlin took it as a compliment. “Kissinger knows our country really well, he knows our writers and our philosophers so such comparisons from him are quite positive,” a spokesman for the Russian government said, adding that Kissinger "has deep knowledge, not superficial.”

[stefano]

There were so many Trump/Russia/Putin/CIA threads to put this in, I decided to start a new thread

Can't argue with that