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Ukraine’s Top Prosecutor Yurii Lutsenko told Hill.tv in an interview that his office has opened an investigation into claims from a Ukrainian member of parliament that officials in Kiev had colluded with the Clinton campaign in the 2016 U.S. election. As reported in The Hill on March 20th:

Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

The leak of the so-called black ledger files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years.

Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian’s release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton’s campaign.

The parliamentarian also secured a court ruling that the leak amounted to “an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko said the tape recording is a serious enough allegation to warrant opening a probe, and one of his concerns is that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency involved had frequent contact with the Obama administration’s U.S. Embassy in Kiev at the time.  

To read the full article and watch the interview with Lutsenko, go here.

For the second year in a row, Ukrainians have the lowest confidence in their national government in the world at 9%, according to a recent Gallup poll. The median percentage in the former Soviet states is 48%.

Tomorrow Ukrainians will go to the polls where they can choose their next leader from among the current president Petro Poroshenko (17.4%), Volodymyr Zelensky – a comedian who is the front-runner (24.9%), or Yulia Tymoshenko (18.8%) – a right-wing populist who is notorious for her own corruption as a former prime minister.

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On March 18th, President Putin signed into law two bills that will limit freedom of speech on the internet, informally referred to as the laws on “fake news”and disrespect of society, public officials and institutions. According to the OSCE:

According to the first law, the dissemination of deliberately untrue information through the media or online can result in fines of up to 1.5 million roubles (approximately 20,500 euros) and the blocking of the information resource if it does not “immediately” delete this information at the request of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

The second law imposes a penalty of up to 300,000 roubles (approximately 4,100 euros) or up to 15 days’ detention for the online dissemination, in an insulting way, of expression that disrespects society, the state, official symbols, the Constitution, and public bodies.

It’s not unusual in Russia for officials to think that an issue needs to be addressed so they write a law addressing the issue, but it will be poorly written or overbroad. This can make the law in question hard to enforce or ripe for abuse by those lower down the food chain who must implement it. Certain aspects of such laws may also turn out to be unpopular. Within a few years, the Duma (lower body of Russian parliament) will realize that the law needs to be amended or revised.

This is what happened with the foreign agents law which was eventually amended to exclude charities. I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar happens with this law down the road.

The Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Qaddafi’s Rape Militias, Russiagate. One has to ask how many times can the establishment media demonstrate its lack of professionalism, objectivity and due diligence and still have anyone with a functioning brain take it seriously?

Robert Mueller has finally concluded his 2 and 1/2 year $25 million investigation into whether Donald Trump or anyone associated with his presidential campaign or administration colluded with Russia to win the presidency – or more precisely steal it from the entitled Hillary Clinton.

The conclusion as summarized in a statement by Attorney General William Barr and reported by Reuters, the New York Times and other scions of establishment media, is that Mueller found no evidence for such an allegation. There are no further indictments – either openly or under seal.

Skeptics and those who still conduct real journalism, such as Aaron Mate and Glenn Greenwald, are taking some well-deserved victory laps on social media while the die-hard true believers refuse to admit defeat, moving the goal posts and pinning their hopes on more investigations from Congress, as though there is something that Congress might magically find that Mueller with subpoena power, a whole team of experienced investigators and tens of millions of dollars at his disposal didn’t find. Possible, but highly unlikely.

The NYT comments section is flabbergasted at this outcome after being fed a constant diet of sloppy and biased reporting from the newspaper of record, along with CNN and MSNBC. They are clucking about having the full report made available – which it should be – claiming that the summary must be dishonest, even though neither Mueller nor anyone on his staff has come out and complained that their report has been distorted or misrepresented by Barr.

As investigative journalist Matt Taibbi said in a recent article:

Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”

After citing Barr’s kudos to Mueller that he and his team remained professional throughout the investigation, Taibbi asks if the same can be said of the media.

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

Taibbi goes on to list and link to numerous claims made by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and other “respectable” establishment media outlets regarding this story that turned out to be garbage. He then points out that “None of this has been walked back.” He also observes that it likely never will be walked back. There never is the reckoning that’s needed for those media that have fed Americans lie after lie that has had deadly consequences for millions throughout the world. This time, the lies have greatly contributed to ratcheting up tensions to the highest point in decades between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. It doesn’t get much more irresponsible than that.

We now have millions of people whom the media and the Clinton wing of the Democratic party have hooked with the narcotic of a fairy tale story that a greedy, vulgar, inexperienced and inept president is the result of treason with the Kremlin rather than profound problems with the Democratic Party (and the larger system it operates in) and its failure to address seriously mounting problems among the American people.

Now these millions of people must either cling to that fairy tale to avoid cognitive dissonance or they will have to start asking hard questions about the pathetic state of their political system and their media.

An example of that choice is reflected in the debate held Monday on Democracy Now! between Glenn Greenwald and David Cay Johnston in which Johnston is clearly bristling at his credulousness on the Russiagate story as pointed out to him by Greenwald. He walks back a couple of items, such as his opinion stated on a previous episode of Democracy Now! that he believed Trump was a Russian agent. But he also goes on to falsely conflate what the actual objective of the Mueller investigation was with other issues, goes off on tangents, etc. He doesn’t want to let go of the position that he has invested so much in over the past 2-3 years.

As for some of the people and organizations that have facilitated the Russiagate conspiracy theory, namely keeping it alive every day in the media, Real Clear News Investigations has just published an expose about how powerful Democratic Party operatives, private investigators and their wealthy backers were behind pushing sensational stories to reporters on a near-daily basis that were bogus or lacking in substantive evidence:

The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.

TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.

The project’s work has been largely shrouded in mystery. But a months-long examination by RealClearInvestigations, drawn from documents and more than a dozen interviews, found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia collusion theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin.

The project also used tactics similar to the stove-piping method employed by Neocons in the run-up to the Iraq war by giving information to one institution (e.g. the media) and then using the published reports that it was the source for as “independent” confirmation of its claims.

The group also feeds information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then tells reporters that authorities are investigating those leads. The tactic adds credibility to TDIP’s pitches, luring big media outlets to bite on stories. It mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media to bolster their wiretap requests.

Five days a week, TDIP  emails a newsletter to influential Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading “TDIP Research” – which summarizes the latest “collusion” news, and offers “points of interest” to inspire fresh stories regarding President Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.

Read the full article here.

Increasingly, the “news” products being pushed by the establishment media and passed off as news are comparable to pink slime being passed off as meat.

With the corpse of INF Treaty with Russia barely cold, the Pentagon is now publicly admitting that they will soon begin construction of a missile that it has been researching since 2017 that falls outside of the treaty’s limits.

This seems to indicate that Washington used the unproved accusations against Russia that it was violating the treaty as well as complaints about China (which was never a party to the treaty) as pretexts to abrogate it in order to pursue its own desire to create weapons outside of the treaty’s parameters.

On March 11th The Hill reported:

The Pentagon will start work on making parts for ground-launched cruise missile systems that would fall within the limits of a treaty President Trump suspended compliance with last month, a spokeswoman said Monday.

The Pentagon “will commence fabrication activities on components to support developmental testing of these systems – activities that until February 2 would have been inconsistent with our obligations under the treaty,” Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza said in a statement.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neocons and members of the national security state have been trashing agreements that they see as preventing them from doing whatever they want since the Bush II administration with its unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty. Hyper-neocon John Bolton was no doubt influential in this decision.

But a public admission like this with its implications seems pretty brazen, especially this soon.

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Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard spoke to a standing room only crowd last Saturday morning at USF. Her speech followed by a short Q&A is below. The part of the speech covering foreign policy, including the new Cold War and arms race, starts at approximately 13 minutes in. Watch and decide what you think of Tulsi’s comments.

If you’d like Tulsi Gabbard to be able to bring a substantive discussion of foreign policy to the Democratic Party debates in June, make a small donation to her campaign so she can meet the 65,000 donors threshold.

By 1895, Lenin had been exiled to Siberia for a year but was afforded enough freedom to continue his research and writing on revolution and even communication with other revolutionaries.  Upon his release, he visited Europe where he made many significant contacts but most importantly, he met G.V. Plekhanov (Krausz 2015).

Plekhanov was a former Populist who became one of the most well-known Marxists in Russia.  He made considerable headway in getting Marxist socialism accepted as a meaningful alternative to Populism.  He advocated land redistribution and opposed the tactics of Narodnaya Volya, arguing that terrorism served as a pointless catalyst toward increased government repression (Billington 1970). 

Instead of issuing invectives at his philosophical opponents in the revolutionary movement, as was the common practice of the time, Plekhanov relied on the art of persuasion.  He acknowledged the Populists’ desire to mix with the masses and work on behalf of their hoped-for political awakening, while explaining the practical shortcomings of this approach. 

As a Marxist, Plekhanov was a strict materialist who believed in the possibility of “absolute objectivity.”  This undeniable objectivity would supposedly resolve the perennial tendency within the revolutionary movement toward splintering.  Furthermore, unlike many other theorists, by 1884 Plekhanov was arguing that Russia was already in a condition of capitalism, albeit in the form of state capitalism. He saw this as evidence of the inevitability of a revolutionary clash between the social classes within Russia and the eventual triumph of the proletariat (Billington 1970).  

By this time, Plekhanov saw the peasant commune, held up as proof of a socialist legacy in Russia and a foundation for socialist revolution by the Populists, as falling apart.  As it turns out, Russia was not so unique that it could bypass the industrial capitalist stage on its road to socialist revolution.  He saw an emerging bourgeois class as playing a major role in revolution and advocated fighting alongside the liberal bourgeois and opposing them after the revolution, if necessary (Deutsch 1964). 

Plekhanov would go on to have a complicated relationship with Lenin, whom he saw as a protégé and one who could ultimately execute his ideas (Deutscher 1964).  It was later generally recognized that Lenin’s overarching talent was indeed his ability to marry revolutionary political theory and practice.

To be continued

References:

1. Krausz, Tamas. Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography. Monthly Review Press. New York, NY. 2015.
2. Billington, James. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. Vintage Books. New York, NY. 1970.
3. “The Mensheviks:  George Plekhanov” by Isaac Deutscher.  The Listener.  4/30/1964. 

Though never publicly lauded by Lenin, Pyotr Tkachev is seen as the philosophical bridge between the Chernyshevksy-inspired Populists and the Bolsheviks. 

Tkachev was a radical journalist and agitator who served more than one stint in prison for his activities. He described himself as a Jacobin and briefly collaborated with Nachaev from 1868-1869. Although he’s one of the few colleagues who apparently didn’t fall under Nachaev’s sinister spell, he also never repudiated Nachaev even after he fell out of favor when his killing of I.I. Ivanov was exposed.    

Tkachev was one of the early Russian Marxists.  He believed in historical determinism with economics as the prime factor, but strikingly he departed from Marxism regarding how revolution in Russia could realistically be achieved.  He advocated the need for a secret “conspiratorial organization that would seize power by means of a coup d’etat” (Szamuely 1974).   

Unlike Bakhunin and other anarchists, Tkachev didn’t believe that a spontaneous peasant rebellion would happen.  Nor did he believe – like some other Populists – that “an isolated coup” was plausible. 

Tkachev laid out three central ideas necessary for achieving a revolution in Russia:  1) it would have to be established through an intellectually and morally developed revolutionary minority since the masses didn’t understand their own interests and wouldn’t be able to advance them – if they could, he argued, it would represent gradual evolution and would preclude the need for revolution, 2) the revolution was to be carried out as soon as possible as conditions would become less favorable the more entrenched the capitalist system became in Russia, and 3) a revolutionary party was needed to execute the revolution.

That party would engage in organizing a unified and disciplined entity to carry out the revolution, the dissemination of propaganda using its own journal as the primary means, and incitement of the revolution itself (Szamuely 1974). 

Tkachev spelled out his blueprint for revolution in a pamphlet called “The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia.”  He engaged in a lengthy public and hostile debate with Pyotr Lavrov who argued that revolution could only legitimately come from the masses themselves and emphasis must therefore be placed on educating the masses toward this goal.  Lavrov’s approach would be largely discredited after his Going to the People campaign fizzled in the mid-1870’s. 

Tkachev reiterated to Lavrov and other critics, including Europeans such as Friedrich Engels, that since Russia had no well-developed industrial proletariat or representative bodies and no consistently free press, there was no way to win over the masses to a revolution in the foreseeable future.  In Russia’s conditions, in which all the power was vested in the state with no meaningful independent classes or institutions, the state was also vulnerable in terms of the universal resentment it elicited by its oppression and control of all.  This, Tkachev argued, made the Russian state ripe for a “tight-knit, highly disciplined conspiratorial organization” to facilitate its overthrow (Szamuely 1974).

Once power was seized by the revolutionary minority, it would rule as a dictatorship over the course of time needed to implement economic, social and legal changes required by a socialist system (Szamuely 1974).  Some of Lenin’s writings would echo and build upon Tkachev’s ideas and tactics, even using titles for his pieces that were strikingly similar to Tkachev’s (Szamuely 1974).

To be continued