rigorousintuition.ca

If Russia-gate is the massive scandal that we are told it is by so many Important People — across the U.S. mainstream media and the political world — why do its proponents have to resort to lies and exaggerations to maintain the pillars supporting the narrative?

The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)

A new example on Thursday was The New York Times’ statement that a Russian agency “spent $100,000 on [Facebook’s] platform to influence the United States presidential election last year” – when the Times knows that statement is not true.

According to Facebook, only 44 percent of that amount appeared before the U.S. presidential election in 2016 (i.e., $44,000) and few of those ads addressed the actual election. And, we know that the Times is aware of the truth because it was acknowledged in a Times article in early October.

As part of that article, Times correspondents Mike Isaac and Scott Shane reported that the ads also covered a wide range of other topics: “There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”

As nefarious as the Times may think it is for Russians to promote a Facebook page about “adorable puppies,” the absurdity of that concern – and the dishonesty of the Times then “forgetting” what it itself reported just two months ago about the timing and contents of these “Russian-linked ads” – tells you a great deal about Russia-gate.

dada » 25 Mar 2017 02:33 wrote:

kelley » Thu Mar 23, 2017 4:04 pm wrote:http://www.e-flux.com/journal/27/67999/ ... -violence/

e-flux Journal #27 - September 2011

Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Time, Acceleration, and Violence

Enjoyed this, thanks.

I wonder if there are any answers hiding in there (in relation to the Russian Conspiracy as RI subject). I guess it depends on how 'meta' we want to get.

I'll leave behind the old Russia, the old US, the old transnational industrial capitalism and jump ahead, to a quote in the above piece, "the simple fact that in a semiocapitalist world, the main commodity becomes attention."

Let's take that as a simple fact of today's world. It's a competition for attention. Your attention, my attention. A conspiracy to monopolize attention would be the only conspiracy game left to play, Russian or otherwise.

Why conspire to monopolize your attention? Because it's the main commodity, the hot new trend. Just because.

Anyway, jumping ahead again. From the above piece

In the very first chapter of Capital, Marx explains that value is time, the accumulation of time—time objectified, time that has become things, goods. It is not the time of work, of working in time, that produces value, for it matters little whether one is lazy or efficient. The important determination of value concerns the average time needed to produce a certain good.

All of this is clear: value is time, capital is value, or accumulated time.

Stefano posted an image yesterday in the image thread:

acceleration.JPG

I appreciated that the time in the image was a few minutes later than the time stamp on the post (for me, at least).

I would like to suggest that it isn't accumulated capital, but accelerated capital that produces the image. Part of the conspiracy for your attention is to get you to believe that accumulation is necessary for image production.

When Marx speaks of relative surplus value, he’s speaking about acceleration: if you want a growth in productivity—which is also a growth in surplus value—you need to accelerate work time.

Sure.

But when the main tool for production ceases to be material labor and becomes cognitive labor, acceleration enters another phase, another dimension, because an increase in semiocapitalist productivity comes essentially from the acceleration of the info-sphere—the environment from which information arrives in your brain.

Not so sure about that. But I'll allow it, for the sake of argument.

Do not forget that your brain functions in time, and needs time in order to give attention and understanding. But attention cannot be infinitely accelerated.

Definitely not sure about that. Even if attention cannot be infinitely accelerated - which the jury is still out on - understanding can be.

I think the trap fallen into here is one of binary, and/or linear thinking. Classical "if this, and not that, then the other thing." We're not getting anywhere with that anymore. May have served us well, but we have moved into the semiocapitalist world, the attention economy. Charlie Chaplin died forty years ago now, you know.

It's the trap a lot of big thinkers, many quoted in the above article, perhaps even the author himself, have fallen into. "Time or Space," "language or the body," "the sign or the signified," "meaning or non-meaning," "violence or non-violence." It's alright to criticize big thinkers. Authorities can be wrong. "The future is over," "Truth is dead," these are mystic pronouncements, posing as logical conclusions. Might as well say "god is dead." The thinker has painted themselves into a corner.

The argument is that accumulation of capital(time, attention) becomes the image. It's like purchasing something. But what if acceleration of capital becomes image? It's an exchange between states. The image is capital, just faster.

The fear is that meaning is becoming lost in all this speed. Not so sure about that, either. Meaning is another state. Image exchanges with meaning, meaning with capital, capital with image. Who sets the exchange rate of meaning? Some know the secret of this triangular arbitrage. Keeping that knowledge from you is part of the conspiracy. I'm probably saying too much. The adept doesn't show his face. That's alright, the one who shows his face isn't an adept. So who cares what I say.

Acceleration doesn't have to be violent. That's just a romantic notion. I say more acceleration is the answer. Not amphetamine acceleration, like the author of the above piece warns against. Not futurist acceleration. Faster than all that. It's resistance that wears a system down, not acceleration. And the system is only a vehicle for getting us around, until we find a better vehicle. We don't want to break it, we want it to run smoothly. Then we sell it for more than we bought it for.

Jerky wrote: with all due humility allow me to propose that I don't think you're giving the thinkers/thoughts that you're criticizing in the paragraphs quoted below a sufficiently rigorous, serious, or academic read. Perhaps you don't have the academic background for it (and there would be no shame in it if you didn't... it's a remidiable situation).

re·me·di·a·ble
rəˈmēdēəb(ə)l/
adjective
adjective: remediable

capable of being cured; treatable.
"a remediable condition that may have serious consequences if not recognized"
synonyms: curable, treatable, operable; More
solvable, reparable, rectifiable, resolvable
"the unsafe features of the playground are all remediable"
antonyms: incurable
capable of being remedied; rectifiable.
"these grievances are remediable"

peartreed » Thu Aug 31, 2017 2:01 pm wrote:The low-brow loyalists to Trump will latch on to any alternative explanation to their president being in Putin’s pocket, including leaving Assange to be the alternative lackey left to explain other Alt-Right losers as the missing links to bypass Moscow.

Whether extreme left or right wing nuts, or merely mental extremes, it will be a stretch to blame the covert collusion with Communists by their Commander In Chief on anything but commercial greed, coupled with the compromise of complete envy of another oligarch. A white Russian Federation here would be the Wannabe Don’s wet dream, with himself shirtless upon a white stallion parting the fawning masses.

Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."

DrEvil » Mon Nov 21, 2016 8:36 pm wrote:

Playtime is over

By Charlie Stross

So I've had a week now for the outcome of last Tuesday's US election to sink in, and I've been doing some thinking and some research, and my conclusion is that either I'm wearing a tinfoil hat or things are much, much worse than most people imagine.

Nearly four years ago I wrote about the Beige Dictatorship, and predicted:

Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the "peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off" mechanism that prevents revolutions. If we're lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it'll be back to oligarchy as usual.

Well, I was optimistic. The tea party radicals have gone nuclear, but I wasn't counting on a neo-Nazi running the White House, or on the Kremlin stepping in ...

Let me explain.

A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled "Why Japan lost the Second World War". (Sorry, I can't find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren't even aware of the true size of the battleground.

I'd like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that's where we're standing today. We think we're fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they're local fronts in a global war. And we're losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is.

(NB: By "we", I mean folks who think that the Age of Enlightenment, the end of monarchism, and the evolution of Liberalism are good things. If you disagree with this, then kindly hold your breath until your head explodes. (And don't bother commenting below: I'll delete and ban you on sight.))

The logjam created by the Beige Dictatorship was global, throughout the western democracies; and now it has broken. But it didn't break by accident, and the consequences could be very bad indeed.

What happened last week is not just about America. It was one move—a very significant one, bishop-takes-queen maybe—in a long-drawn-out geopolitical chess game. It's being fought around the world: Brexit was one move, the election and massacres of Dutarte in the Philippines were another, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey is a third. The possible election of Marine Le Pen (a no-shit out-of-the-closet fascist) as President of France next year is more of this stuff. The eldritch knot of connections between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Da'esh in the wreckage of Syria is icing on top. It's happening all over and I no longer think this is a coincidence.

Part of it is about the geopolitics of climate change (and mass migration and water wars). Part of it is about the jarring transition from an oil-based economy (opposed by the factions who sell oil and sponsor denial climate change, from Exxon-Mobil to the Kremlin) to a carbon-neutral one.

Part of it is the hellbrew of racism and resentment stirred up by loss of relative advantage, by the stagnation of wages in the west and the perception that other people somewhere else are stealing all the money—Chinese factories, Wall Street bankers, the faceless Other. (17M people in the UK have less than £100 in savings; by a weird coincidence, the number of people who voted for Brexit was around 17M. People who are impoverished become desperate and angry and have little investment in the status quo—a fancy way of saying they've got nothing to lose.)

But another big part of the picture I'm trying to draw is Russia's long-drawn out revenge for the wild ride of misrule the neoconservatives inflicted on the former USSR in the 1990s.

Stripped of communism, the old guard didn't take their asset-stripping by neoliberals during the Clinton years lying down; they no more morphed into whitebread Americans than the Iraqis did during the occupation. They developed a reactionary playbook; a fellow called Alexander Dugin wrote The Foundations of Geopolitics, and it's been a set text in the Russian staff college for the past two decades. A text that proposes a broad geopolitical program for slavic (Russian) dominance over Asia, which is to be won by waging a global ideological war against people like us. "In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution. ... The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This common civilizational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic union."

I don't want to sound like a warmed-over cold warrior or a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist. However, the authoritarian faction currently ascendent in Putin's Russia seem to be running their country by this book. Their leaders remember how the KGB (newly reformed last month) handled black propaganda and disinformation, and they have people who know how new media work and who are updating the old time Moscow rules for a new century. Trump's Russian connections aren't an accident—they may be the most important thing about him, and Russia's sponsorship of extreme right neo-fascist movements throughout Europe is an alarming part of the picture. China isn't helping, either: they're backing authoritarian regimes wherever they seem useful, for the same reason the US State Department under Henry Kissinger backed fascists throughout central and south America in the 1970s—it took a generation to fix the damage from Operation Condor, and that was local (at least, confined to a single continent).

Trying to defeat this kind of attack through grass-roots action at local level ... well, it's not useless, it's brave and it's good, but it's also Quixotic. With hindsight, the period from December 26th, 1991 to September 11th, 2001, wasn't the end of history; it was the Weimar Republic repeating itself, and now we're in the dirty thirties. It's going to take more than local action if we're to climb out of the mass grave the fascists have been digging for us these past decades. It's going to take international solidarity and a coherent global movement and policies and structures I can barely envisage if we're going to rebuild the framework of shared progressive values that have been so fatally undermined.

We haven't lost yet.

But if we focus too narrowly on the local context, we will lose, because there is a de facto global fascist international at work, they've got a game plan, they're quite capable of applying the methods of Operation Condor on a global scale, and if we don't work out how to push back globally fast there will be nobody to remember our graves.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... -over.html

About the Foundations of Geopolitics by Alexander Dugin (via wikipedia, my bold):

Germany should be offered the de facto political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe. Kaliningrad oblast could be given back to Germany. The book uses the term a "Moscow-Berlin axis".[1]
France should be encouraged to form a "Franco-German bloc" with Germany. Both countries have a "firm anti-Atlanticist tradition".[1]
United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.[1]
Finland should be absorbed into Russia. Southern Finland will be combined with the Republic of Karelia and northern Finland will be "donated to Murmansk Oblast".[1]
Estonia should be given to Germany's sphere of influence.[1]
Latvia and Lithuania should be given a "special status" in the Eurasian-Russian sphere.[1]
Poland should be granted a "special status" in the Eurasian sphere.[1]
Romania, Macedonia, "Serbian Bosnia" and Greece – "orthodox collectivist East" – will unite with the "Moscow the Third Rome" and reject the "rational-individualistic West".[1]
Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "“Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible.[1]

In the Middle East and Central Asia:

The book stresses the "continental Russian-Islamic alliance" which lies "at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy". The alliance is based on the "traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization".
Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term "Moscow-Tehran axis".[1]
Armenia has a special role and will serve as a "strategic base" and it is necessary to create "the [subsidiary] axis Moscow-Erevan-Teheran". Armenians "are an Aryan people … [like] the Iranians and the Kurds".[1]
Azerbaijan could be "split up" or given to Iran.[1]
Georgia should be dismembered. Abkhazia and "United Ossetia" (which includes Georgia's South Ossetia) will be incorporated into Russia. Georgia's independent policies are unacceptable.[1]
Russia needs to create "geopolitical shocks" within Turkey. These can be achieved by employing Kurds, Armenians and other minorities.[1]
The book regards the Caucasus as a Russian territory, including "the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian (the territories of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan)" and Central Asia (mentioning Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghistan and Tajikistan).[1]

In Asia:

China, which represents a danger to Russia, "must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled". Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet-Xinjiang-Mongolia-Manchuria as a security belt.[2] Russia should offer China help "in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia" as geopolitical compensatation.[1]
Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism.[1]
Mongolia should be absorbed into Eurasia-Russia.[1]

The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."

In the United States:

Russia should use its special forces within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism. For instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."[1]

The Eurasian Project could be expanded to South and Central America.[1]

A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump

Has the bureau investigated this material?
David Corn Oct. 31, 2016 6:52 PM

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set off a political blast when he informed congressional leaders that the bureau had stumbled across emails that might be pertinent to its completed inquiry into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails when she was secretary of state. The Clinton campaign and others criticized Comey for intervening in a presidential campaign by breaking with Justice Department tradition and revealing information about an investigation—information that was vague and perhaps ultimately irrelevant—so close to Election Day. On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid upped the ante. He sent Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information."

Reid's missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the "connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign," and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. (Page has called accusations against him "garbage.") On Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chief. But Reid's recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, "Normally, we don't talk about whether we are investigating anything." But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) "It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."

This was, the former spy remarks, "an extraordinary situation." He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was "sufficiently serious" to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on "bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls."

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was "shock and horror." The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not immediately request additional material, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. "It's quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on," he says.

"This is something of huge significance, way above party politics," the former intelligence officer comments. "I think [Trump's] own party should be aware of this stuff as well."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the memos. In the past, Trump has declared, "I have nothing to do with Russia."

The FBI is certainly investigating the hacks attributed to Russia that have hit American political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's presidential campaign. But there have been few public signs of whether that probe extends to examining possible contacts between the Russian government and Trump. (In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigation detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, "We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation." In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, "The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.")

According to several national security experts, there is widespread concern in the US intelligence community that Russian intelligence, via hacks, is aiming to undermine the presidential election—to embarrass the United States and delegitimize its democratic elections. And the hacks appear to have been designed to benefit Trump. In August, Democratic members of the House committee on oversight wrote Comey to ask the FBI to investigate "whether connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian interests may have contributed to these [cyber] attacks in order to interfere with the US. presidential election." In September, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrats on, respectively, the Senate and House intelligence committees, issued a joint statement accusing Russia of underhanded meddling: "Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election. At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election." The Obama White House has declared Russia the culprit in the hacking capers, expressed outrage, and promised a "proportional" response.

There's no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy's memos. But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.

In the letter Reid sent to Comey on Sunday, he pointed out that months ago he had asked the FBI director to release information on Trump's possible Russia ties. Since then, according to a Reid spokesman, Reid has been briefed several times. The spokesman adds, "He is confident that he knows enough to be extremely alarmed."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... nald-trump

Vladimir Putin could secretly be one of the richest men in the world — an investigative reporter who spent 4 years in Russia explains
Noah Friedman, Natasha Bertrand and Lamar Salter
Nov. 18, 2017, 9:00 AM 15,883

Luke Harding, journalist and author of "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win," explains why he believes Vladimir Putin may secretly be one of the richest people in the world. Following is a transcript of the video.

Luke Harding: My name is Luke Harding. I'm a journalist and a writer, and my new book is called "Collusion," and it's about Donald Trump and Russia.

Putin and money, they're a taboo topic inside Russia. I wrote stories about this in 2007 based on sources inside his presidential administration who were saying, quietly, that he was worth about $40 billion. That was a decade ago.

The thing is Russia's a kleptocracy. It's also the world's biggest oil producer and the people at the top of the Russian state are all kind of multibillionaires. And Putin is at the head of this pyramid although officially his salary's $100 thousand a year.

Putin allegedly controls 37% of Russian oil company Surgutneftegaz

4.5% of natural gas company Gazprom.

He also has holdings in commodities trader Gunvor.

In 2012, estimates of his wealth were upped to $70 billion.

Luke Harding: Now, everyone in the Russian elite knows he's the richest guy in town by a long way, but the beauty of the system is that formally nothing belongs to him and everything is held by proxies, some of whom are now under US sanctions.

It's a kind of clever system, but of course, he's enormously rich and for Putin, the thing about money is it's kind of liquid power, and power ultimately is what interests him.
http://www.businessinsider.com/luke-har ... ny-2017-11

seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:09 pm wrote:yes one can not really be a communist when one is the richest person in the world, correct?

“Dear friends, welcome to Russia – at the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students. This forum unites the youth of our planet…. Almost 30 thousand participants … from over 180 states and all of the world’s continents have gathered here in Sochi! Young people of Russia – of our big country – from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok – are also with us! The first festival was held seven decades ago. Back then, young men and women of your age were brought together by the power of a dream. Their belief that youth, with its sincerity and kindness, could break the ice of distrust and would help to rid the world of unfairness, wars and conflicts. Indeed, there was much that your peers of that time managed to achieve. They proved that barriers were powerless in the face of genuine friendship. They showed that political, national, religious, cultural and other differences had no effect on the warmth of people-to-people relations. Our country is proud to have hosted the Global Celebration of Youth twice. In 1957, the whole of Moscow was welcoming the participants in the 6th Festival. People were standing in the streets and on rooftops. The Muscovites cordially greeted the participants in the 12th Youth Forum in the summer of 1985. Today you have the chance to experience the hospitality and the openness of our sports capital – Sochi. Sochi is the city of Olympic brotherhood and hope. The five Olympic rings – like the five petals of the festival daisy – have become the symbol of solidarity among all the continents. I am convinced that you – the youth of different countries, nationalities and faiths – share common feelings, values and ambitions. An aspiration for freedom and happiness, peace and accord on the planet. A desire to create and attain bigger goals and we’ll do our best so that you can achieve success. The energy and talent of youth have astonishing power. The young generation always gives the world innovative ideas. You have the aptitude to experiment, argue, and often – to challenge the way things are. Go for it. Create your own future. Strive to change the world and make it a better place. There is nothing you cannot do. Just don’t give up and keep going. And be assured that the festival brotherhood will help fulfill your boldest dreams and good intentions. I declare the opening of the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students! Good luck!”

Putin congratulates Russia’s Communist Party on its 17th Party Congress
Russian President’s greetings signals Communist Party’s integration into Russia’s political system
http://russiafeed.com/putin-congratulat ... -congress/