‘He is running a cabal’: White House leaker says Steve Bannon runs ‘shadow NSC’ with no paper trail
David Edwards
31 Jan 2017 at 09:28 ET
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40339
apparently Mac missed this thread ...he should read it
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:09 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:18 pm
Morty » Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:56 pm wrote:The point is, almost certainly Bannon was picking out the one thing in the entire universe on which he and Lenin could be said to agree, and was on the strength of that calling himself a Leninist.
And what does Bannon himself say about the matter (immediately after where slad truncates her quotation of the Daily Beast article)?:I emailed Bannon last week recalling our conversation, telling him that I planned to write about it and asking him if he wanted to comment on or correct my account of it. He responded:
“I don’t remember meeting you and don’t remember the conversation. And as u can tell from the past few days I am not doing media.”
It's like, case in point - the corporate media noise machine (and its volunteer army).
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:46 pm
by crikkett » Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:52 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/business/media/breitbart-news-network-plans-global-expansion.html?_r=0
Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion
By LESLIE KAUFMANFEB. 16, 2014
It has been nearly two years since the conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart died, but the online news organization that carries his name is not only continuing to wage his political battles, it is taking the war global.
Breitbart News Network, a group of activist, conservative news sites — including Big Government, Big Hollywood and Big Journalism — said on Sunday evening that it was adding at least a dozen staff members as it opens operations based in Texas and London. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, said that those offices were the beginning of an expansion that would add a new regional site roughly every 90 days. California, Florida, Cairo and Jerusalem have already been chosen as expansion sites, he said.
Mr. Bannon said he was taking his cue from The Huffington Post, the liberal news and commentary site that has been growing rapidly overseas. He said there was an audience hungry for his brand of activist journalism. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England,” he said.
The expansion is being financed by a large pool of capital that Mr. Breitbart raised from private investors, Mr. Bannon said. Although it was always the company’s plan to add staff members and offices overseas, he said the timing had been accelerated because of a desire to influence two important political battles.
In London, Breitbart News Network hopes to support a nascent European Tea Party before parliamentary elections in May. In Texas, it is eager to combat an emerging “Turn Texas Blue” movement intended to improve the standing of the Democratic Party. “We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war,” Mr. Bannon said.
Breitbart is part of a group of online conservative news sites that have sprung up in the last five years and are reshaping political coverage of Washington. Among the more prominent ones are The Blaze, run by Glenn Beck, and The Daily Caller, founded by the former “Crossfire” host Tucker Carlson.
At times Breitbart’s attack-the-enemy approach to journalism has landed the news operations in hot water. In 2010, for example, it was criticized for editing a video to make Shirley Sherrod, a former Agriculture Department official, appear to be making racist remarks about white people. The full video showed that she did not. Last year, the company republished as news a satirical false article saying that Paul Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist and a columnist for The New York Times, had filed for personal bankruptcy.
Yet the site has gained currency among conservatives, especially after breaking the item about Anthony D. Weiner, then a member of Congress, sharing lewd photos of himself on Twitter. “Breitbart has become the go-to news outlet” for elected Tea Party Republicans, “when they want to share their ideas and information,” said Alexander Marlow, editor in chief of Breitbart News.
Breitbart is now the 49th largest global site in the news category, according to Alexa Internet, a web traffic measurement site. Alexa also puts Breitbart’s monthly traffic ahead of The Daily Caller and RedState but behind The Blaze and the granddaddy of conservative blogs, The Drudge Report.
Mr. Bannon said the operation was not quite profitable, but is lean, with only about 25 journalists, and an additional dozen or so coming on for the new sites.
The London operation will be run by James Delingpole, most recently a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, whose rants against climate change orthodoxy have been big drivers of web traffic, and by Raheem Kassam, the founder of TrendingCentral.com, a London-based conservative news site for English-speaking countries.
Mr. Bannon described them as “real hell fighters in the Breitbart tradition.”
by crikkett » Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:55 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:46 pm wrote:peace offering
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:59 pm
White House Propagandist Bannon's Gravy Train Is Secretive Radical Right-Wing Billionaire Hedge Fund Family
Every right-wing media operation needs a billionaire funder.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s elevation of Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon to chief White House strategist is prompting many to ominously predict the Trump presidency will be like the worst of the campaign. But there’s an even more disturbing power play in the works.
.....
“I don’t think it’s about Trump. Trump is just a vehicle,” a Mercer family colleague told Politico. “
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/w ... illionaire
by Elvis » Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:22 pm
crikkett wrote:What caught my eye about the article I am leaving here: significant funding in 2014 from unnamed investors; adding 12 people to the organization in 2014 would have increased it by a third. I tried to find addresses of their offices and didn't get far--looks like LA headquarters is a single-family home near Brentwood. That's just weird so that's where I stopped. Expansion to Jerusalem and Cairo....could there also be an office in Qatar?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/busi ... .html?_r=0
Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion
By LESLIE KAUFMANFEB. 16, 2014
by Morty » Wed Feb 01, 2017 2:29 am
stillrobertpaulsen wrote:Morty » Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:56 pm wrote:The point is, almost certainly Bannon was picking out the one thing in the entire universe on which he and Lenin could be said to agree, and was on the strength of that calling himself a Leninist.
And what does Bannon himself say about the matter (immediately after where slad truncates her quotation of the Daily Beast article)?:I emailed Bannon last week recalling our conversation, telling him that I planned to write about it and asking him if he wanted to comment on or correct my account of it. He responded:
“I don’t remember meeting you and don’t remember the conversation. And as u can tell from the past few days I am not doing media.”
It's like, case in point - the corporate media noise machine (and its volunteer army).
No, that is a case in point where Bannon is most likely being a lying motherfucker.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:20 am
seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:47 pm wrote:‘Why let ’em in?’ Understanding Bannon’s worldview and the policies that follow.
By Frances Stead Sellers and David A. Fahrenthold January 31 at 8:05 PM
Stephen K. Bannon walks in before a listening session with cybersecurity experts in the Roosevelt Room in the White House on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In November 2015, Stephen K. Bannon — then the executive chairman of Breitbart News — was hosting a satellite radio show. His guest was Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who opposed President Obama’s plan to resettle some Syrian refugees in the United States.
“We need to put a stop on refugees until we can vet,” Zinke said.
Bannon cut him off.
“Why even let ’em in?” he asked.
Bannon said that vetting refugees from Muslim-majority countries would cost money and time. “Can’t that money be used in the United States?” he said. “Should we just take a pause and a hiatus for a number of years on any influx from that area of the world?”
In the years before Bannon grabbed the world’s attention as President Trump’s chief White House strategist, he was developing and articulating a fiery populist vision for remaking the United States and its role in the world.
Bannon’s past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart and other conservative platforms, serve as a road map for the controversial agenda that has roiled Washington and shaken the global order during Trump’s first two weeks in office.
Now, at the center of power in the White House, Bannon is moving quickly to turn his ideas into policy, helping direct the biggest decisions of Trump’s administration. The withdrawal from a major trade pact. A ban on all visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries. And — in an echo of that conversation with Zinke, who is now Trump’s nominee for interior secretary — there was a temporary ban on all new refugees.
The result has been intense fury from Democrats, discomfort among many Republicans, and a growing sense of unease in the world that Trump intends to undermine an America-centered world that has lasted 70 years. This sense of turmoil, welcomed by many Trump supporters as proof that the new president is following through on his vow to jolt Washington, reflects the sort of transformation that Bannon has long called for.
That worldview, which Bannon laid out in interviews and speeches over the past several years, hinges largely on Bannon’s belief in American “sovereignty.” Bannon said that countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration, legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements.
At the same time, Bannon was concerned that the United States and the “Judeo-Christian West” were in a war against an expansionist Islamic ideology — but that they were losing the war by not recognizing what it was. Bannon said this fight was so important, it was worth overlooking differences and rivalries with countries like Russia.
It is not yet clear how far Bannon will be able to go to enact his agenda. His early policy moves have been marred by administrative chaos. But his worldview calls for bigger changes than those already made.
In the past, Bannon had wondered aloud whether the country was ready to follow his lead. Now, he will find out.
“Is that grit still there, that tenacity, that we’ve seen on the battlefields . . . fighting for something greater than themselves?” Bannon said in another radio interview last May, before he joined the Trump campaign.
That, said Bannon, is “one of the biggest open questions in this country.”
Bannon, 62, is a former Navy officer and Goldman Sachs banker who made a fortune after he acquired a share of the royalties from a fledgling TV show called “Seinfeld.” In the past 15 years, he shifted into entertainment and conservative media, making films about Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin and then taking a lead role at Breitbart News.
At Breitbart, Bannon cemented his role as a champion of the alt-right, the anti-globalism movement that has attracted support from white supremacists and found a home on the far-right website.
Bannon also forged a rapport with Trump, interviewing the businessman-candidate on his show and then, in August 2016, joining the campaign as chief executive.
Now, Bannon has become one of the most powerful men in America. And he’s not afraid to say so.
Stephen Bannon's White House role expands amid immigration turmoil Play Video2:53
As nationwide protests against President Trump’s immigration mandate rage on, he reshuffled the National Security Council and put chief strategist and former Breitbart News chair Stephen Bannon in an unprecedented national security role. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
In interviews with reporters since Trump’s election, Bannon has eschewed the traditional it’s-all-about-the-boss humility of presidential staffers.
“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in November, embracing the comparisons of him to those figures.
In the same interview, Bannon compared himself to a powerful aide to England’s Henry VIII — an aide who helped engineer a world-shaking move of his era, the split of the Church of England from the Catholic Church.
“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.
To explore Bannon’s worldview, The Washington Post reviewed hours of radio interviews that Bannon conducted while hosting a Breitbart radio talk show, as well as speeches and interviews he has given since 2014.
Bannon did not respond to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon.
In his public statements, Bannon espoused a basic idea that Trump would later seize as the centerpiece of his campaign.
While others saw the world rebounding from the financial crisis of 2008, Bannon just saw it becoming more divided by class.
The elites that had caused the crisis — or, at least, failed to stop it — were now rising higher. Everyone else was being left behind.
“The middle class, the working men and women in the world . . . are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos,” Bannon said in a 2014 speech to a conference at the Vatican in a recording obtained by BuzzFeed. Davos is a Swiss ski resort that hosts an annual conclave of wealthy and powerful people.
Bannon blamed both major political parties for this system and set out to force his ideas on an unwilling Republican leadership.
What he wanted, he said again and again, was “sovereignty.” Both in the United States and in its traditional allies in Western Europe.
On one of the first Breitbart Radio shows, in early November 2015, Bannon praised the growing movement in Britain to exit the European Union. He said that the British had joined the E.U. merely as a trading federation but that it had grown into a force that had stripped Britons of sovereignty “in every aspect important to their own life.”
Bannon has been supportive of similar movements in other European countries to pull out of the union. Trump has echoed those sentiments in his first few days as president. It is a remarkable shift in U.S. policy: After decades of building multinational alliances as a guarantee of peace, now the White House has indicated it may undermine them.
Bannon, in his 2014 speech at the Vatican, cast this as a return to a better past.
“I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors,” Bannon said. “And that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”
In the case of the United States, Bannon was skeptical of multinational trade pacts, saying that they ceded control. In a radio interview in November 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agreed with Bannon.
“We shouldn’t be tying ourselves down like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians with so many strings a guy can’t move,” said Sessions, who is now Trump’s nominee to become attorney general. He was referring to a scene from the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” in which the hero is tied down by a race of tiny men. “That is where we are heading, and it’s not necessary.”
One solution put forward by Bannon: the United States should pursue bilateral trade agreements — one country at a time — rather than multi-country agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership supported by Obama.
He suggested as much to Trump himself, when the candidate appeared on his show in November 2015.
“Trump brings [a deal] back to the Senate and gets his bilateral trade deal with Taiwan or with Japan approved by two-thirds of the Senate,” Bannon said. “And you have to go argue, ‘Hey, this is why it’s a good deal.’ And that’s the way the Founders wanted it.”
On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.
The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”
“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly.
“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.
In another show, Bannon had complained to Trump that so many Silicon Valley chief executives were South Asian or Asian. This was a rare time when Trump — normally receptive to Bannon’s ideas on-air — pushed back. “I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”
So far, Trump has made no changes to the high-skilled visa program. This week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the Trump administration may reexamine the program.
Even as Bannon was calling for a general retreat from multinational alliances, however, he was warning of the need for a new alliance — involving only a subset of the world’s countries.
The “Judeo-Christian West” was at war, he said, but didn’t seem to understand it yet.
“There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,” Bannon said at the Vatican in 2014, at a time when the Islamic State was gaining territory. “Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is — and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it — will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.”
Bannon has given few details about the mechanics of the war he thinks the West should fight. But he has been clear that it is urgent enough to take priority over other rivalries and worries.
In his talk at the Vatican, Bannon was asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bannon’s answer was two-sided.
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“I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand,” he said. But, Bannon said, there were bigger concerns than Russia — and there was something to admire in Putin’s call for more traditional values.
“However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put [Russia] on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first,” Bannon said.
If Bannon succeeds, Bannon’s own comparison, to England’s Thomas Cromwell, might be apt — to a point.
“The analogy — if it’s going to work — is that Bannon has his own agenda, which he will try to use Trump for, and will try to exploit the power that Trump has given him, without his master always noticing,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of history at England’s Oxford University.
But Cromwell was later executed, after Henry VIII turned against him. For a man like that, MacCulloch said, power is always tenuous: “It’s very much dependent on the favor of the king.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 3e3d245029
by Karmamatterz » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:56 am
Slad, you have completely missed the point again. It has nothing whatsoever to with "a list of acceptable sources" (!). It has everything to with basic vigilance against the bullshit fed to us by politicians and the mass media. My wackily radical position is: Not everything they tell us is true.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 8:09 am
Infowars taps Trump-friendly birther to lead Washington coverage
Jerome Corsi, author of the 2011 book "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President,"
The USA is completely fucking deranged.
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:54 pm wrote:
Uh......yeah, bud. Yep. That's a bit like saying the USA has two coasts or fifty states.
RI skews pretty heavy towards the USA, though. Ask yourself if you can make your peace with stooping to interact with us.
by Freitag » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:48 am
Can we just accept that fact that most politicians that are at this level of office ar evil?
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:54 am
Lock Him Up: Trump’s White House Is Using a Private Email Server
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/25/ ... again.html
STUDY: Evening Cable News Devoted Nearly 250 Segments To Wikileaks Emails In The 5 Weeks Before The Election
In the five weeks before the November 8 presidential election, evening cable and broadcast news, major newspapers, and the Sunday morning broadcast network political talk shows combined to flood the media landscape with coverage of hacked emails released by Wikileaks
https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/2 ... ion/215103
by divideandconquer » Wed Feb 01, 2017 12:40 pm
Karmamatterz » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:56 am wrote:Slad, you have completely missed the point again. It has nothing whatsoever to with "a list of acceptable sources" (!). It has everything to with basic vigilance against the bullshit fed to us by politicians and the mass media. My wackily radical position is: Not everything they tell us is true.
I so wish I had the time yesterday to post on page 1 of this thread when it was fresh before it went into the typical RI ideological echo chamber.
Mac can be visceral, but this thread is spot on. The noise machine is a defeating roar of hype/psyops/propaganda etc... I'm not sure why more folks on RI don't get this. Instead of a rational,discussion about the propaganda machine at work it turned into a bitch fest about personal preferences for sources and more of the same Trump is evil bullshit. Can we just accept that fact that most politicians that are at this level of office ar evil? Let's make that a default. From there recognize that EVEN IF your sources like the sacred Wapo, NYT, or whatever establishment rag it is do publish content that fits your political bent/ideal, that said source can't be full of shit?
Since when should anyone assume any organization in the media can be trusted? I could give a crap if th y support a Trump or against Trump. A true journalist would be impartial to the ideological angle. If the company he/she work d for had any integrity they wouldn't pick sides. There is a strong presence on RI that is. It using any media filters. Separwtee the nose from the real info, position or angle. How does it correlate to other sources?
The screeching hype will never end. Everyday is 100 new headlines from the establishment that are pure shit. But without a filter people inhale that crap without thinking twice. I've gotten into heated arguments with editors at my work who absolutely do not get any of this. They are literally regurgitating the shit shoveled from the machine. They do not get they are part of the establishment. No matter how well written, or if it supports your political ideals, there is no reason to ever trust the Washington Post. There might be truth in some content, but use some filters and you might be surprised how things start to look different.
Mac, dont get discouraged. But please maybe go for a walk or do some yoga to relax. The OP was solid.
Maybe she is onto something:
http://www.newslogue.com/debate/305/CaitlinJohnstone
Johnstone has a knack for seeing though some of the bullshit.
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed Feb 01, 2017 12:41 pm
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