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The Collapse Of European Social Democracy, Part 2. The Collapse Of European Social Democracy, Part 1. Pro-Israel Lobby Caught Boasting of Its Influence in Washington. A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep.

Pro-Israel Lobby Caught Boasting of Its Influence in Washington

Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan. Omar quoted rap lyrics — “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” — to suggest McCarthy’s move was driven by the lobby’s prolific spending. Asked specifically who she was referring to, Omar responded, “AIPAC!” The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a six-month period in 2016.

The Shadow Rulers of the VA. Last February, shortly after Peter O’Rourke became chief of staff for the Department of Veterans Affairs, he received an email from Bruce Moskowitz with his input on a new mental health initiative for the VA.

The Shadow Rulers of the VA

“Received,” O’Rourke replied. “I will begin a project plan and develop a timeline for action.” O’Rourke treated the email as an order, but Moskowitz is not his boss. In fact, he is not even a government official. Moskowitz is a Palm Beach doctor who helps wealthy people obtain high-service “concierge” medical care. More to the point, he is one-third of an informal council that is exerting sweeping influence on the VA from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. Yet from a thousand miles away, they have leaned on VA officials and steered policies affecting millions of Americans. Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman declined to be interviewed and fielded questions through a crisis-communications consultant. Chicago Tribune - We are currently unavailable in your region. Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.

And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. Alternet. Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US – The Computational Propaganda Project. I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again. The end of capitalism has begun. Obama, Gospel and Verse. The Swedish ambassador’s search for answers in Trump country. Swedish Ambassador Karin Olofsdotter speaks with Fred Scheib after a public talk on the strained U.S.

The Swedish ambassador’s search for answers in Trump country

-European relationship and President Trump at the public library in Peters Township, Pa., south of Pittsburgh. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post) PETERS TOWNSHIP, Pa. — The new Swedish ambassador to the United States was wedged into the back seat of a Honda Civic headed south out of Pittsburgh in search of some true-believing, climate-change-denying, anti-free-trade, “America first” Trump voters.

On one side of Ambassador Karin Olofsdotter sat a former German defense minister and on the other a Washington think-tanker, a former Obama White House official who had organized the Trump country excursion. Olofsdotter was only a couple of months into her stint as Sweden’s ambassador and still struggling to make sense of a country that seemed as though... Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House.

On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S.

Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House

Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy.

The Public Intellectual: Henry A. Giroux. Articles by Henry A.

The Public Intellectual: Henry A. Giroux

Giroux Henry Giroux on a Politics of Cruelty Without EuphemismsThursday, July 27, 2017By Mickey Huff, Truthout | Interview Rallying Cry: Youth Must Stand Up to Defend DemocracyTuesday, July 25, 2017By Henry Giroux, The Conversation | Op-Ed. Since Trump’s Election, Increased Attention to Politics – Especially Among Women. Most find it stressful to talk politics with those who differ on Trump Survey Report Following an election that had one of the largest gender gaps in history, women are more likely than men to say they are paying increased attention to politics.

Since Trump’s Election, Increased Attention to Politics – Especially Among Women

And while far more Democrats than Republicans say they have attended a political event, rally or protest since the election, Democratic women – especially younger women and those with postgraduate degrees – are among the most likely to have participated in such a political gathering. The latest national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 27 to July 9 among 2,505 adults, finds that 52% of Americans say they are paying more attention to politics since Donald Trump’s election; 33% say they are paying about the same amount of attention, while 13% say they are paying less attention to politics.

Triumph of the Trump? Be afraid of the manic "will" While the president himself has probably never heard of Leni Riefenstahl, it’s a dead certainty that the authors of his G-20 speech have watched the Nazi propagandist director’s opus, ‘Triumph of the Will,’ scads of times.

Triumph of the Trump? Be afraid of the manic "will"

Chief Strategist Bannon has said so, admiringly. And hence it became a matter of note and worry, when POTUS’s speech used the word “will” as a meaningful noun, almost a dozen times, declaring that only great focus and assertiveness can save western civilization. Mind you, I have been hardly any less dramatic in my own declarations of determination to defend our nation, the “west,” and the great enlightenment experiment. For all its faults, the American pax led the world into its greatest-ever (by far) era of rising prosperity, knowledge, fairness, peace and … yes… early glimmerings of wisdom (through relentless self-criticism). Indeed, if they are taken at face value... and only at face value... Misinforming the Majority: A Deliberate Strategy of Right-Wing Libertarians. Milton Friedman was a kindred spirit to James McGill Buchanan in terms of a philosophy of deconstruction of the government.

Misinforming the Majority: A Deliberate Strategy of Right-Wing Libertarians

(Photo: Wikipedia) When and how were the seeds sown for the modern far-right's takeover of American politics? Nancy MacLean reveals the deep and troubling roots of this secretive political establishment -- and its decades-long plan to change the rules of democratic governance -- in her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. Get your copy by making a donation to Truthout now! The Reichstag Fire Next Time, by Masha Gessen. When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag fire.

The Reichstag Fire Next Time, by Masha Gessen

Time feels both accelerated and slowed down, and so we imagine that we have been talking about the fire for years. It is the new president’s new clothes: invisible, yet always present in our perception of him. The Reichstag fire, it goes almost without saying, will be a terrorist attack, and it will mark our sudden, obvious, and irreversible descent into autocracy.

Here is what it looks like: On a sunny morning you turn on the television as you make coffee, or the speaker in your shower streams the news, or the radio comes on when you turn the ignition key in your car. The voices of the newscasters are familiar, but their pitch is altered, and they speak with a peculiar haste. How Ex-Spies Think Putin Will Sucker ‘Sociopathic Narcissist’ Trump. Foreign ministries around the world are filled with anticipation over what will happen when Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet for the first time at the G20 summit. But veteran U.S. spies who’ve studied manipulation tactics, particularly from their Russian counterparts, are confident they know what’s going to unfold. Putin, a former KGB operations officer, will not just be practicing interpersonal diplomacy, they say. He’ll be putting his tradecraft as a spy to work.

His main asset: Trump’s massive, delicate ego. Putin’s Sending a Tough Guy as Ambassador to the U.S.—He’ll Fit Right In With Trump’s Washington. KIEV, Ukraine—In Russia it’s often said that “deputy directors” in the federation bureaucracy are the actual decision makers. If so, over the past decade the Russian military officer and diplomat Gen. Anatoly Antonov has been making a lot of very important decisions indeed. He has held positions as deputy foreign minister and deputy defense minister, as well as director of the Department of Security and Disarmament. Hate our electoral system? Here’s who could have been president under other setups - Washington Post.

America, the diminished. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York argues that those who fight Donald Trump on Donald Trump’s terms end up diminished. Trump sprays insults with abandon, mocking everything from his critics’ intelligence to their popularity to their ethics to their plastic surgery, but those who engage with the president of the United States on his own level make themselves look smaller and meaner, and they are never able to go as low for as long as Trump.

“Of course one could say that Trump is at fault,” York writes. Yes, one could. York doesn’t so much reject that possibility as rule it out as a category error. Unlike most people, whose behavior is bounded by shame and thus amenable to criticism, Trump is truly shameless, and thus criticizing his behavior is useless.

York has a point. We are diminished when our president lies, and even more so when we begin taking his habitual lying for granted. Trump & Fascism: The Basics. An extraordinary thing happened during the recently-concluded election cycle: the rise of Donald Trump inspired some in the mainstream corporate press to utter the "f" word. Not "fornicating" but "fascism. " This proved a brief flirtation; a few months later, those in the press have long since dropped this talk and have largely tried to go back to some semblance of business-as-usual while being tasked with covering a "president" who is entirely inexplicable in those terms.

Applying the word to him was hyperbolic and arguably even irresponsible but not, as some would have it, because there's any great distance between Trump and fascism. Trying to cover Trump without reference to fascism is, in fact, like trying to ignore an angry gorilla while crammed into a very small closet with it. That isn't to say Trump is a fascist, just that the matter was handled indelicately and now needs to be handled with greater care, instead of just being ignored.

How the Left Lost Its Mind - The Atlantic. Updated for clarification at 12:15 p.m. ET. Redneck Revolt Brings Anti-Racist, Anti-Capitalist Politics To Working Class Whites. In the infancy of the Trump presidency, a new community defense network is espousing anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics to build coalitions in cities, small towns, and rural areas across America. 7 Most Contentious U.S. Presidential Elections - History Lists.

James McGill Buchanan’s terrifying vision of society is the intellectual basis of the far-right. Russia's Cyberwar on Ukraine Is a Blueprint For What's to Come. The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked. “The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.” Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016. Russia's US Social Media Hacking: Inside the Information War. Trump National Security Team Blindsided by NATO Speech. Subscribe to The Global POLITICO on iTunes here. | Subscribe via Stitcher.

When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

Story Continued Below. AP FACT CHECK: Attack draws visceral Trump tweets, not facts. WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump can’t be counted on to give accurate information to Americans when violent acts are unfolding abroad. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. America Is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People. Photo Credit: Shutterstock. We-are-witnessing-first-global-alliance-far-right-parties-1930s?akid=15432.2542277. Photo Credit: Ernest Morales / Flickr. Hate Speech International. Assad’s far-right Europe corps? Um, Why Is No One Talking About Trump Wanting to Reorganize the Government? It’s Time for a Bluexit. Louise Mensch: the former British MP who scooped US media on Trump's Russian ties. President Trump's Russia Connections Will Be Exposed. Hey Bernie Supporters — Stop Forcing Democrats to Agree to the Lie that the Primary Was Rigged.

Mike Flynn, the Logan Act, and Russia's Influence on the United States - The Atlantic. Mike Flynn might be done – but Trump's nightmare has just begun. Nine young children killed: The full details of botched US raid in Yemen - The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Trump’s two-year presidency. Give Trump A Chance. Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III. New Poll Shows How Embarrassingly Ignorant Trump Supporters are About Facts. What do Trump voters think of his performance so far? Data shows a downward demographic spiral for Republicans. These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences - The Atlantic. Historian Richard Evans says Trump’s America isn’t exactly like the Third Reich—but it’s too close for comfort. A Newsweek reporter is suing the federal government to learn how it vetted Trump's advisers for security clearances — Quartz. The Two Kinds of Trump Voters. The complete list of all 33 false things Donald Trump has said as president so far.

Directly From Steve Bannon's Breitbart: The Connection Between the Alt-Right, Trump & Russia. Half a Million Romanian Protesters Push Government to Scrap Corruption Bill. Arthur Browne: The devil in Donald Trump. Could a General Strike Against Trump Actually Work? - VICE. Dangerous incompetence: Trump did not know the EO he signed put Bannon on National Security Council.

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard. The Maoism of Donald Trump. Is Donald Trump a Populist Authoritarian? - The Atlantic - The Atlantic. Paul Gottfried, the Jewish Godfather of the 'Alt-Right' Interaction between government, public has dwindled under Donald Trump. Newyorker. Eliot A. Cohen Responds to Donald Trump's First Week - The Atlantic. Adolf Hitler : "Wait Calmly" Donald Trump's Authoritarian Playbook - The Atlantic - The Atlantic. Trump Just Removed White Supremacist Groups From Terror Watch Program. Trump’s Crony Cabinet May Look Strong, But They Are Scared - BillMoyers.com. A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Nonviolence and Pacifism Part I (by Jonathan McRay) How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps. Donald Trump has assembled the worst Cabinet in American history. This election will boomerang on Trump voters. Trump's bungling cripples his national security team right out of the gate. Trump's bungling cripples his national security team right out of the gate.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats. U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget. Trump Intelligence Allegations. Blue State Voters Subsidize Southern Red State Voters, Not the Other Way Around. ELECTOR OBJECTIONS - pCloud. Trump and the Flawed Nature of US Democracy: An Interview With Noam Chomsky. Log In. Log In. Updated: Why are people surprised when a dysfunctional community votes against their self-interests? How a Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody’s iPhone from Anywhere in the World. Political Polarization in the American Public. 9 questions about the UN vote on Israeli settlements you were too embarrassed to ask.

From Afghanistan to Syria: Women’s Rights, War Propaganda and the CIA - BSNEWS. Untitled. Why People Enthusiastically Vote for Counterproductive Policies - The Atlantic. Fake-news-claims-conservatives-mainstream-media- Robert Reich: Like a Tyrant, Trump Is Deploying 7 Techniques to Control the Media. A Deeper Look at the Trump Team: More Scary and Depressing Every Day.

America Already Has More Than Enough Nuclear Missiles. Boston Mayor Says Trump's Victory Is In Part Backlash To African-American Progress. PNAC.info – Exposing the Project for the New American Century Advisors of Influence: Nine Members of the Defense Policy Board Have Ties to Defense Contractors - PNAC.info - Exposing the Project for the New American Century. Timid Liberals Blew the Election By Flinching At Hillary Clinton's Email Server.