Retired Standing Army Brass Urge Congress to Neuter Militia with Infringements

“Potentially dangerous” is now a disqualifier? And if Gen. McChrystal is really concerned about training, why isn’t he reminding Congress of its duties in that regard? (Giffords/Twitter)

“Sixteen of the nation’s top retired military commanders are urging Congress to pass gun control legislation, arguing that there are many steps that can be taken to curb gun deaths that do not violate the Second Amendment,” The Washington Post parroted Saturday.

That’s a neat trick. It evokes nothing so much as a paraphrasing of Bill Clinton:

It depends upon what the meaning of the word “infringe” is.

Here’s the letter, being sent to Republican and Democrat Senate and House leadership under the banner of “Giffords,” formerly the Orwellian-named “Americans for Responsible Solutions.” That’s unsurprising because, as we’ve seen in past attempts at Second Amendment subversion, the Gungrabby Gabby Group has capitalized in the past by getting a high profile “Veteran’s Coalition” to sign on to its citizen disarmament agenda, including David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal and others.

“As former military leaders, we took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and developed considerable expertise in the use of firearms,” the letter begins.  It then proceeds to ignore everything the Constitution has to say about the Second Amendment and devolves into narrative talking points that sound more like they were put together by Madison Avenue types than by fighting men who know what it would take for Congress to obey its mandate and ensure the people are armed and prepared to fulfill their duties as members of the Militia.

“[A]s members of the Giffords Veterans Coalition, we believe that there is much Congress can do to reduce gun violence without violating the Second Amendment — which we explicitly support,” they lie. Nowhere do they make good on their meaningless words and unequivocally explain how that can be done. Nor do they define what they believe the Second Amendment actually says and means.

So exactly what is it they “explicitly support”? Notice they don’t (and won’t) say.

Instead they write of “credible polling,” presuming subject matter competence from those whose knowledge of the right to keep and bear arms consists of what the ignorant/deceptive agenda media feeds them. And they follow with a litany of lies and misdirection to mask that what they’re really talking about is imposing prior restraints, enabling registration, denying to civilians non-sporting weaponry, funding anti-gun propaganda, enforcing existing Intolerable Acts and denying  due a fundamental right without process.

That’s after Nancy Pelosi ‘fessed up to a “slippery slope” where no concessions will be enough. Hell, the people they’re joining forces with just called for restrictions on muzzleloaders and even on shutting down websites.

These are the names of those who have chosen to take sides against your rights and with those who would take them from you:

Admiral Thad Allen, USCG (Ret.)

General Peter W. Chiarelli, USA (Ret.)

General Wesley Clark, USA (Ret.)

General Michael V. Hayden, USA (Ret.)

General James T. Hill, USA (Ret.)

Admiral James M. Loy, USCG (Ret.)

General Stanley A. McChrystal, USA (Ret.)

Admiral Eric T. Olson, USN (Ret.)

General David H. Petraeus, USA (Ret.)

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.)

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, USA (Ret.)

Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, USA (Ret.)

Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.)

Lieutenant General Norman R. Seip, USAF (Ret.)

Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, USMC (Ret.)

Rear Admiral James Barnett Jr., USN (Ret.)

That the prominent military leaders signing the letter willingly lend their names and reputations to advance a naked power grab agenda speaks of loyalty going first to the establishment they serve. It ought to make all consider the fears the Founders had of a standing army.

Unlike Oath Keepers, the 16 generals and admirals on the list would obey orders to disarm the American people. Noting the subversive blather they have lent their names to, it’s fair to conclude they would happily issue them, especially if it meant even more personal advancement within the establishment.

—–

If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please make a donation to support our work.  You can donate HERE.

—–

David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”

The post Retired Standing Army Brass Urge Congress to Neuter Militia with Infringements appeared first on Oath Keepers.

Trump Pentagon Health System Pick’s Opinion on Guns Shows He is Unsuitable for Position

Gun owners turned out in a big way for Trump. Why should we take his appointing a gun-grabber to an important post over military health care without letting him know that’s wrong — and why? (Dean Winslow at confirmation hearing–US Senate)

“I’d also like to, and I may get in trouble with other members of the committee, just say how insane it is that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semi-automatic assault rifle like an AR-15, which apparently was the weapon that was used,” retired Air Force Colonel Dean Winslow, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the military’s health care system, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during confirmation hearings Tuesday, The Washington Examiner reports.

“Winslow, a professor at Stanford University, offered up the assessment, seemingly unprompted, amid questions from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., about the military’s treatment of domestic violence convictions during his nomination hearing to be assistant secretary of defense for health affairs,” the report elaborates.

Somebody should tell this insulated functionary the weapon the citizen hero who stopped the killer used.

It would be bad enough had Winslow responded that way to a direct question. It’s also pretty obvious he’s trying to cover for the Air Force blowing it with required reporting on the Texas church shooter’s past.  To volunteer it out of the blue shows a predisposition to “progressive” academic elitism that makes it fair to question what he had in mind when he swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

It also reflects a troubling political mindset of some top military personnel exemplified by standing army standard bearers including retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus and retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and others who have teamed up with career military elites to lend their names to “The Veterans Coalition for Common Sense.” That’s a wholly-owned enterprise of the Mark Kelly/Gabby Giffords fundraising and propaganda machine designed to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

And it’s not like such oath-breaking is new. We’ve talked before about the late Rhode Island Sen.  John Chaffee, a Republican and a bona fide USMC hero of World War II and Korea, who even went farther and introduced a bill to ban handguns.  Other prominent military gun-grabbers include retired general and former presidential candidate  Wesley Clark, who called for a host of infringements including banning so-called “assault weapons,” arrogantly declaring “people who like [them] should join the … Army.”

And retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and former Secretary of State Colin Powell showed his sentiments, heavily couched in globalist weaselspeak to appear “reasonable” to “Meet the Press” viewers:

Unfortunately, but perhaps reflective of the political realities needed to get to the top ranks in the armed services (the late Col. David Hackworth called them “perfumed princes”), warriors of equivalent political clout have not stepped forward to champion the truth to the American people, that:

• The founders, fearful of a standing army, envisioned “a well regulated militia” of “the whole people” that Congress and the states have been deliberately indifferent to establishing.


• That this was what they deemed “necessary to the security of a free State.”


• That the right of the people, from which the militia could be drawn, “to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”


• That the people are entitled as a birthright, not as a government grant, to “every terrible implement of the soldier,” that is, to “ordinary military equipment” —  “in common use at the time” — intended to be taken into “common defense” battles.

For now, there’s not a lot we can do about gun-grab generals who see the way to further their interests is to further foreign and domestic interests in disarming Americans – aside from noting and exposing whose side they’re on to those within our spheres of influence.  But there is something we can do about President Trump’s wholly-unsuitable assistant secretary pick:

Tell him why his core constituency will rightly view that as a bad idea. You might start with the crappy way the health system for veterans has treated them so poorly, including as it pertains to their never-ending right to keep and bear arms. Putting a gun-grabber in a top slot is another slap in their faces.

The post Trump Pentagon Health System Pick’s Opinion on Guns Shows He is Unsuitable for Position appeared first on Oath Keepers.

Ron Paul To Trump: Toss Your Generals' War Escalation Plans In The Trash

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

By the end of this month, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor HR McMaster will deliver to President Trump their plans for military escalations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. President Trump would be wise to rip the plans up and send his national security team back to the drawing board – or replace them.

There is no way another “surge” in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus a new one in Syria) puts America first. There is no way doing the same thing over again will succeed any better than it did the last time.

Near the tenth anniversary of the US war on Afghanistan – seven years ago – I went to the Floor of Congress to point out that the war makes no sense.

The original authorization had little to do with eliminating the Taliban. It was a resolution to retaliate against those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. From what we know now, the government of Saudi Arabia had far more to do with the financing and planning of 9/11 than did the Taliban. But we’re still pumping money into that lost cause. We are still killing Afghanis and in so doing creating the next generation of terrorists.

The war against ISIS will not end with its defeat in Mosul and Raqqa. We will not pack up and go home. Instead, the Pentagon and State Department have both said that US troops would remain in Iraq after ISIS is defeated. The continued presence of US troops in Iraq will provide all the recruiting needed for more ISIS or ISIS-like resistance groups to arise, which will in turn lead to a permanent US occupation of Iraq. The US “experts” have completely misdiagnosed the problem so it no surprise that their solutions will not work. They have claimed that al-Qaeda and ISIS arose in Iraq because we left, when actually they arose because we invaded in the first place.

General David Petraeus is said to have a lot of influence over HR McMaster, and in Syria he is pushing for the kind of US troop “surge” that he still believes was successful in Iraq. The two are said to favor thousands of US troops to fight ISIS in eastern Syria instead of relying on the US-sponsored and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to do the job. This “surge” into Syria would also lead to a lengthy US occupation of a large part of that country, as it is unlikely that the US would return the territory to the Syrian government. Would it remain an outpost of armed rebels that could be unleashed on Assad at the US President’s will? It’s hard to know from week to week whether “regime change” in Syria is a US priority or not. But we do know that a long-term US occupation of half of Syria would be illegal, dangerous, and enormously expensive.

President Trump’s Generals all seem to be pushing for a major US military escalation in the Middle East and south Asia. The President goes back and forth, one minute saying “we’re not going into Syria,” while the next seeming to favor another surge. He has given the military much decision-making latitude and may be persuaded by his Generals that the only solution is to go in big. If he follows such advice, it is likely his presidency itself will be buried in that graveyard of empires.

Everyone is Doing it: Injecting Micro-Chips is Cool!

Via The Daily Bell

The government isn’t quite ready to force microchip injections on citizens. But if you want to do it on your own, it just makes tracking you and your data that much easier!

You can be just like the cool kids who are having microchips injected in their hands in order to open locked doors and store payment information. A wave of the hand is all it will take to start your car, buy a latte, or share all your data with governments and corporations.

“I’m turning the internet of things into the internet of us,” said Jowan Osterlund in an interview with Recode. Osterlund is the founder of Biohax, a Swedish company that specializes in injecting small microchips, about the size of a grain of rice, under people’s skin.

The microchips, says Osterlund, can be programmed to speak to other networked devices, like coffee makers, speakers or doors with electronic locks. The idea is that it’s more convenient to wave your hand in front of the door than use a key card.

Inserted by a syringe into the skin between the thumb and the index finger, the chips communicate with other devices using Near Field Communication. It’s a wireless way of linking devices in close proximity to each other, similar to the way Bluetooth works. Contactless payment systems, like Apple Pay, also use NFC.

Last year, Microsoft invited Biohax to its TechDays conference in Sweden to implant some of the speakers at the conference, as well as a few Microsoft executives in attendance, according to Osterlund.

See it’s not scary or weird! Even hip Microsoft executives have it done. And they are on the front lines of technology! If they are doing it, maybe we all should.

The CIA Likes This Plan

And how could becoming a part of the internet of things ever pose any risks? When he was the Director of the CIA, General Petraeus was pretty excited about spying on you “through your dishwasher.”

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said

Now the CIA might just get the opportunity to spy on you through the microchip embedded in the fleshy part of the hand between the thumb and index finger.

Right now, the chips going into employees only work in one direction, to send information, not receive it. And they do have to be scanned just inches away in order to give off any information, meaning they aren’t quite GPS chips just yet.

But while all RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips may look similar, they are not created equal. The CIA has actually invested in multiple companies which make RFID microchips, some significantly more advanced than the ones used to buy snacks and get into the building.

[The CIA] also likes companies that are working on making smaller batteries, like Qynergy, a New Mexico-based company working on radioisotope batteries, and Infinite Power Solutions, a Colorado developer of thin-film batteries that can power RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tracking chips.

Speaking of RFID, In-Q-Tel seems to see potential there. In 2008 it invested in Massachusetts-based ThingMagic, a company that makes RFID chips that can “track anything.” The Florida State Attorney’s Office for West Palm Beach uses them to track felony case files, and Ford offered them up as an additional feature for pickup trucks. A contractor can put the tags on all of his tools, so that a quick scan of the truck bed with an RFID scanner will reveal everything in there. ThingMagic was acquired last month by GPS device maker Trimble Navigation for an undisclosed amount. In-Q-Tel has also invested in GainSpan, a company finding ways to make everything wi-fi-enabled, from refrigerators to health monitoring devices, for richer information on something than just its location.

And now we start seeing stories pop up in the media touting the benefits, convenience, and coolness factor of becoming micro-chipped. Dystopian images of the government forcing citizens to become implanted with microchips may, in fact, be overblown. People will do it to themselves, without coercion, just with a little mainstream media promotion.

But Micro-chipping is Convenient So…

A company in Sweden promotes the trend because it makes opening doors and buying smoothies so easy and convenient, and your coworkers will even throw a party for you once you take the plunge to become a cyborg.

The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.

“The biggest benefit I think is convenience,” said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and CEO of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door by merely waving near it. “It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.”

And that is all great, but your company will also be able to see when you get to work when you leave, how often you use the bathroom, what types of snacks you buy and at what time; basically any location or use data involved with the chip. And of course there are other corporations to think about; mining data is a huge industry.

Since most people are attached to their phones anyway, cell phone data can give a pretty good play by play of what people are doing. Microchips take that one step further so that literally every move you make could be tracked by your employer, other companies, and government agencies. They can map out your movements and activities with such precision and accuracy that they will know more about your habits than you do.

It is actually too bad that we don’t get to enjoy any cool technology because we know the government is just going to exploit it to spy on us. There are clearly benefits to RFID microchips, such as the ease of unlocking doors, starting cars, paying for things and so on.

But while the CIA has its hands in the venture, we, unfortunately, cannot trust that the data gathered from the use of embedded chips won’t be put to nefarious use.

Obama Bequeaths A More Dangerous World

Submitted by Robert Parry via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Any fair judgment about Barack Obama’s presidency must start with the recognition that he inherited a dismal situation from George W. Bush: the U.S. economy was in free-fall and U.S. troops were bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly, these intertwined economic and foreign policy crises colored how Obama viewed his options, realizing that one false step could tip the world into the abyss.

President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, attends a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Dec. 12, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

It’s also true that his Republican rivals behaved as if they had no responsibility for the messes that Obama had to clean up. From the start, they set out to trip him up rather than lend a hand. Plus, the mainstream media blamed Obama for this failure of bipartisanship, rewarding the Republicans for their nihilistic obstructionism.

That said, however, it is also true that Obama – an inexperienced manager – made huge mistakes from the outset and failed to rectify them in a timely fashion. For instance, he bought into the romantic notion of a “Team of Rivals” with his White House trumpeting the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln (although some of Lincoln’s inclusion of rivals actually resulted from deals made at the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago to gain Lincoln the nomination).

In the real world of modern Washington, Obama’s choice of hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State and Republican apparatchik Robert Gates to remain as Secretary of Defense – along with keeping Bush’s high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus – guaranteed that he would achieve little real foreign policy change.

Indeed, in 2009, this triumvirate collaborated to lock Obama into a futile counterinsurgency escalation in Afghanistan that did little more than get another 1,000 or so U.S. soldiers killed along with many more Afghans. In his memoir Duty, Gates said he and Clinton could push their joint views – favoring more militaristic strategies – in the face of White House opposition because “we were both seen as ‘un-fireable.’”

Seasoned Operatives

So, Obama’s rookie management mistake of surrounding himself with seasoned Washington operatives with a hawkish agenda doomed his early presidency to maneuvering at the edges of change rather than engineering a major – and necessary – overhaul of how the United States deals with the world.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on May 1, 2011, watching developments in the Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Neither played a particularly prominent role in the operation. (White House photo by Pete Souza)

Obama may have thought he could persuade these experienced players with his intellect and charm but that is not how power works. At moments when Obama was inclined to move in a less warlike direction, Clinton, Gates and Petraeus could easily leak damaging comments about his “weakness” to friendly journalists at mainstream publications. Obama found himself consistently under pressure and he lacked the backbone to prove Gates wrong by firing Gates and Clinton.

Thus, Obama was frequently outmaneuvered. Besides the ill-fated counterinsurgency surge in Afghanistan, there was his attempt in 2009-10 to get Brazil and Turkey to broker a deal with Iran in which it would surrender much of its enriched uranium. But Israel and the neocons wanted a “regime change” bombing strategy against Iran, leading Secretary Clinton to personally torpedo the Brazil-Turkey initiative (with the strong support of The New York Times’ editorial page) as Obama silently acquiesced to her insubordination.

In 2011, Obama also gave in to pressure from Clinton and one of his key advisers, “humanitarian” warmonger Samantha Power, to support another “regime change” in Libya. That U.S.-facilitated air war devastated the Libyan military and ended with Islamic militants sodomizing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with a knife and then murdering him, a grisly outcome that Clinton celebrated with a chirpy rephrase of Julius Caesar’s famous boast about a conquest, as she said: “We came, we saw, he died.”

Clinton was less upbeat a year later when Islamic militants in Benghazi, Libya, killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel, launching a scandal that led to the exposure of her private email server and reverberated through to the final days of her failed presidential campaign in 2016.

Second-Term Indecision

Even after Clinton, Gates and Petraeus were gone by the start of Obama’s second term, he continued to acquiesce to most of the demands of the neocons and liberal interventionists. Rather than act as a decisive U.S. president, Obama often behaved more like the sullen teen-ager complaining from the backseat about not wanting to go on a family trip. Obama grumbled about some of the neocon/liberal-hawk policies but he mostly went along, albeit half-heartedly at times.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House on Nov. 9, 2015. (Photo credit: Raphael Ahren/Times of Israel)

For instance, although he recognized that the idea of “moderate” Syrian rebels being successful in ousting President Bashar al-Assad was a “fantasy,” he nevertheless approved covert shipments of weapons, which often ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists and their  allies. But he balked at a full-scale U.S. military intervention.

Obama’s mixed-signal Syrian strategy not only violated international law – by committing aggression against a sovereign state – but also contributed to the horrific bloodshed that ripped apart Syria and created a massive flow of refugees into Turkey and Europe. By the end of his presidency, the United States found itself largely sidelined as Russia and regional powers, Turkey and Iran, took the lead in trying to resolve the conflict.

But one of the apparent reasons for Obama’s susceptibility to such fruitless undertakings was that he seemed terrified of Israel and its pugnacious Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who made clear his disdain for Obama by essentially endorsing Obama’s 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Although Obama may have bristled at Netanyahu’s arrogance – displayed even during meetings in the Oval Office – the President always sought to mollify the tempestuous Prime Minister. At the peak of Obama’s power – after he vanquished Romney despite Netanyahu’s electoral interference – Obama chose to grovel before Netanyahu with an obsequious three-day visit to Israel.

Despite that trip, Netanyahu treated Obama with disdain, setting a new standard for chutzpah by accepting a Republican invitation to appear before a joint session of Congress in 2015 and urge U.S. senators and representatives to side with Israel against their own president over Obama’s negotiated agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu and the neocons wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.

However, the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu failed to derail, may have been Obama’s most significant diplomatic achievement. (In his passive-aggressive way, Obama gave Netanyahu some measure of payback by abstaining on a December 2016 motion before the United Nations Security Council condemning Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands. Obama neither vetoed it nor voted for it, but let it pass.)

Obama also defied Washington’s hardliners when he moved to normalize relations with Cuba, although – by 2016 – the passionate feelings about the Caribbean island had faded as a geopolitical issue, making the Cuban sanctions more a relic of the old Cold War than a hot-button issue.

Obama’s Dubious Legacy

Yet, Obama’s fear of standing up consistently to Official Washington’s  neocons and cowering before the Israeli-Saudi tandem in the Middle East did much to define his foreign policy legacy. While Obama did drag his heels on some of their more extreme demands by resisting their calls to bomb the Syrian government in 2013 and by choosing diplomacy over war with Iran in 2014, Obama repeatedly circled back to ingratiating himself to the neocons and America’s demanding Israeli-Saudi “allies.”

King Salman greets the President and First Lady during a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Instead of getting tough with Israel over its continued abuse of the Palestinians, Obama gave Netanyahu’s regime the most sophisticated weapons from the U.S. arsenal. Instead of calling out the Saudis as the principal state sponsor of terrorism – for their support for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State – Obama continued the fiction that Iran was the lead villain on terrorism and cooperated when the Saudis launched a brutal air war against their impoverished neighbors in Yemen.

Obama personally acknowledged authorizing military strikes in seven countries, mostly through his aggressive use of drones, an approach toward push-button warfare that has spread animosity against the United States to the seven corners of the earth.

However, perhaps Obama’s most dangerous legacy is the New Cold War with Russia, which began in earnest when Washington’s neocons struck back against Moscow for its cooperation with Obama in getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons (which short-circuited neocon hopes to bomb the Syrian military) and in persuading Iran to accept tight limits on its nuclear program (another obstacle to a neocon bombing plan).

In both cases, the neocons were bent on “regime change,” or at least a destructive bombing operation in line with Israeli and Saudi hostility toward Syria and Iran. But the biggest challenge to these schemes was the positive relationship that had developed between Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. So, that relationship had to be shattered and the wedge that the neocons found handy was Ukraine.

By September 2013, Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, had identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and a steppingstone toward the ultimate goal of ousting Putin. By late fall 2013 and winter 2014, neocons inside the U.S. government, including Sen. John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, were actively agitating for a “regime change” in Ukraine, a putsch against elected President Viktor Yanukovych that was carried out on Feb. 22, 2014.

This operation on Russia’s border provoked an immediate reaction from the Kremlin, which then supported ethnic-Russian Ukrainians who had voted heavily for Yanukovych and who objected to the coup regime in Kiev. The neocon-dominated U.S. mainstream media, of course, portrayed  the Ukrainian conflict as a simple case of “Russian aggression,” and Obama fell in line with this propaganda narrative.

After his relationship with Putin had deteriorated over the ensuring two-plus years, Obama chose to escalate the New Cold War in his final weeks in  office by having U.S. intelligence agencies leak unsubstantiated claims that Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election by hacking and publicizing Democratic emails that helped Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Smearing Trump

The CIA also put in play salacious rumors about the Kremlin blackmailing Trump over a supposed video of him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. counterintelligence agents investigated communications between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, and Russian officials. In the New McCarthyism that now surrounds the New Cold War, any conversation with Russians apparently puts an American under suspicion for treason.

President Barack Obama meets with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on the sidelines of the G20 Summit at Regnum Carya Resort in Antalya, Turkey, Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice listens at left. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The anti-Russian frenzy also pulled in The New York Times, The Washington Post and virtually the entire mainstream media, which now treat any dissent from the official U.S. narratives condemning Moscow as prima facie evidence that you are part of a Russian propaganda apparatus. Even some “progressive” publications have joined this stampede because they so despise Trump that they will tout any accusation to damage his presidency.

Besides raising serious concerns about civil liberties and freedom of association, Obama’s end-of-term anti-Russian hysteria may be leading the Democratic Party into supplanting the Republicans as America’s leading pro-war party allied with neocons, liberal hawks, the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex – in opposition to President Trump’s less belligerent approach toward Russia.

This “trading places” moment over which party is the bigger warmonger could be another profound part of Obama’s legacy, presenting a crisis for pro-peace Democrats as the Trump presidency unfolds.

The Real Obama

Yet, one of the mysteries of Obama is whether he was always a closet hawk who just let his true colors show over the course of his eight years in office or whether he was a weak executive who desperately wanted to belong to the Washington establishment and underwent a gradual submission to achieve that acceptance.

I know some Obama watchers favor the first answer, that he simply bamboozled people into thinking that he was an agent for foreign policy change when he was always a stealth warmonger. But I tend to take the second position. To me, Obama was a person who – despite his intelligence, eloquence and accomplishments – was never accepted by America’s predominantly white establishment.

Because he was a black male raised in a white family and in a white-dominated society, Obama understood that he never really belonged. But Obama desperately wanted to be part of that power structure of well-dressed, well-schooled and well-connected elites who moved with such confidence within the economic-political system.

An instructive moment came in 2014 when Obama was under sustained criticism for his refusal to bomb the Syrian military after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus that was initially blamed on the government though later evidence suggested that it was a provocation committed by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.

Despite the uncertainty about who was responsible, the neocons and liberal hawks deemed Obama “weak” for not ordering the bombing strike to enforce his “red line” against chemical weapons use.

In a 2016 article in The Atlantic, Obama cited his sarin decision as a moment when he resisted the Washington “playbook” that usually favors a military response. The article also reported that Obama had been informed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that there was no “slam dunk” evidence pinning the attack on the Syrian military. Yet, still Obama came under intense pressure to strike.

A leader of this pressure campaign was neocon ideologue Robert Kagan, an architect of the Iraq War and the husband of Assistant Secretary of State Nuland. Kagan penned a long essay in The New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.” A subsequent New York Times article observed that Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence.”

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)

Kagan “called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention,” the Times article read.

Obama was so sensitive to this criticism that he modified his speech to the West Point graduation and “even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views,” the Times reported. A source familiar with that conversation described it to me as a “meeting of equals.”

So, Obama’s subservience to the neocons and liberal hawks may have begun as a case of an inexperienced president getting outmaneuvered by rivals whom he had foolishly empowered. But Obama’s descent into a full-scale New Cold Warrior by the end of his second term suggests that he was no longer an overpowered naïf but someone who had become a committed convert.

How Obama reached that point may be less significant than the fact that he did. Thus, the world that President Obama bequeaths to President Trump may not have all the same dangers that Bush left to Obama but the post-Obama world has hazards that Obama did more to create than to resolve — and some of the new risks may be even scarier.

Gen. Mattis: "Russia Is The Principal Threat To US Security"

The cold war is officially back.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is currently hearing the testimony of retired Marine General James Mattis, picked by Donald Trump to take over the Department of Defense.

Mattis retired from the US Marine Corps in 2013 after serving as the 11th commander of US Central Command, replacing General David Petraeus as the overseer of US operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. His appointment requires a congressional waiver because federal law states that service members must wait seven years after retiring from active duty before they can hold senior civilian defense positions.

As the WSJ notes, "so far, there is no sign that he will face any resistance on for his Senate confirmation. He"s winning a fair amount of praise from Democrats. It this continues to hold, he could have one of the smoothest confirmation votes of any Trump administration nominee."

“Our Armed Forces must remain the best led, best equipped, and most ready force in the world,” Mattis told the Senate.  “We must also embrace our international alliances and security partnerships. History is clear: nations with strong allies thrive and those without them wither.”

“My watchwords will be solvency and security in providing for the protection of our people and the survival of our freedoms,” Mattis said. “America has two fundamental powers. One is intimidation,” Mattis told Senator Gary Peters (D-Michigan). “The other power, which we’ve used less in the last 20 years, is the power of inspiration.” The US should not be turning to military power as the answer to all of its concerns around the world, the retired Marine general added.

Here are some of the key highlights so far:

Russia Is "Principal Threat" To US Security

While much of the hearing has so far been without controveries, in the most striking moment so far, Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia stands as the "principal threat" to the United States"s security. He said this is because of its actions and efforts to "intimidate" other countries.

Senator John McCain questioned Mattis to get his opinion on how much of a threat Russia represents. Mattis response was that "the world order is “under biggest attacks since WW2, from Russia, terrorist groups, and China’s actions in the South China Sea,”, agreeing with the neocon senator that Russia is trying to break up NATO.

“I’m all for engagement” with Russia, “but we also have to recognize the reality of what Russia is up to,” Mattis told Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island).

Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) questioned if Mattis would stand up to generals, citing the Cuban missile crisis and bringing up the general’s moniker of ‘Mad Dog.’ “That nickname was given to me by the press,” Mattis said, adding his approach would be “Peace through strength” established by the first US president, George Washington – and often invoked by Trump.

Asked by Heinrich to list the principal threats to the US, Mattis said he “would start with Russia,” and continue with aggressive states and terrorist groups.

* * *

Defense Spending And the F-35

Mattis was probed on issues of defense budget cuts due to the legislation introduced by President Barack Obama in 2011. “I don’t have a solution for… the self-inflicted wound of the Budget Control Act,” Mattis told Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), but promised he would spend the Pentagon’s budget on what it should be spent on.

“If I can’t make an argument to you for why we need a military program, I am willing to lose it,” Mattis told Senator Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), explaining that the sequester takes away that decision from the Congress and mandates across-the-board cuts.

Mattis also defended the construction of F-35 fighter jet that Trump criticized as expensive and ineffective.“Many of our allies have bet their air superiority on the F-35 program,” Mattis acknowledged to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut). 

Trump’s tweets about military acquisitions “show he’s serious” about getting the best value for the defense dollars spent, Mattis said, disagreeing with Hirono that such actions were inappropriate. He also backed the president-elect’s position about US allies needing to contribute their fair share. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) brought up her prior military service to criticize “outdated small arms and ammunition,” singling out the M9 pistol and the M-16 assault rifle.

As the WSJ adds, Mattis throws his support behind President-elect Donald Trump"s approach to chastising defense contractors about their costs. Gen. Mattis says this shows Mr. Trump is "serious about getting the best bang for the dollar when it comes to defense dollars."

* * *

US Friends and Allies

First and foremost, Mattis listed Israel as one of US" top allies:  “Israel is a fellow democracy and I think Israel’s security is very important to the US,” Mattis told Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi).

“Are there any other democracies in the Middle East?” Wicker asked. “No,” Mattis said.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) asked about the US troops in Poland in the context of US “reassuring” NATO allies. “NATO is the most successful military alliance probably in modern world history, maybe ever,” Mattis said, but mistakenly argued that “the first time NATO went into combat” was after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“The Pacific theatre remains a priority in my mind,” the retired Marine general reassured Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). “We have worldwide responsibilities and certainly the Pacific looms large in that.”

* * *

On the US National Debt

In one of the more notable exchanges, Sen. David Perdue asked Mattis to weigh in on the national debt, and Gen. Mattis says the debt is the primary challenge facing the United States. "We cannot solve this debt problems on the backs of our military alone," Gen. Mattis said. He said Congress must "prioritize where this money is being spent." He said there should not be a transfer "of a debt of this size to our children."

* * *

Did Trump Con Everyone?

Donald Trump spent his entire campaign railing against the establishment and promising to “drain the swamp.” But now that he has begun announcing his cabinet choices, many liberty-loving people are getting increasingly uncomfortable with the Wall-Street-studded, war-loving picks. Instead of draining the swamp, it seems like he may be repopulating the swamp with bigger predators than before.

In the following article, Aaron Dykes provides some startling information about the new cabinet members, including their net worth.

I really hope the President-Elect proves me wrong, but we have a responsibility to speak the truth, regardless of how unpleasant it is. The question has to be asked…did Donald Trump just run the biggest confidence game in history by telling us all what we wanted to hear?

~ Daisy

Hedge Funds “Gleeful” That Trump “Conned His Supporters” and Appointed Wall Street to His Cabinet

by Aaron Dykes of Truthstream Media

It seems apparent now that Trump supporters – believing they were electing an outsider and populist reformer – got conned.

President-elect Trump may or may not go on to keep some of this campaign promises; then again, he may not. What he has done is invite the elite of the elite into his cabinet, and it is absolutely not a good sign for things to come under a Donald J. Trump presidency.

For better or worse, Trump can’t effectively be held accountable for four more years. Until then, he has something like a blank check – and that should worry everyone because he has already proven to be very duplicitous and he hasn’t even officially been sworn in yet.

People ignored the warning signs – like having War on Terror-monger Rudy Giuliani as one of his closest allies – because voters, fed up with the status quo, tend to project their own values, hopes, and dreams upon the often vague or empty promises made by candidates.

That isn’t specific to Trump, but ubiquitous to most all politicians, but this guy is different, I promise.

Now Wall Street is laughing at Trump supporters.

Via Bloomberg:

Hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson was feeling happy Wednesday morning.

After Donald Trump ridiculed Wall Street on the campaign trail, the President-elect tapped former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Steven Mnuchin to be his Treasury secretary and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross to lead the Commerce Department. Trump even met with Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn inside Trump Tower.

It would suit Tilson just fine if voters who backed Trump because he promised to rein in Wall Street are furious now that he’s surrounding himself with bankers and billionaires.

“I can take glee in that — I think Donald Trump conned them,” said Tilson, who runs Kase Capital Management. “I worried that he was going to do crazy things that would blow the system up. So the fact that he’s appointing people from within the system is a good thing.”

It is indeed time for Trump supporters to suck it up and face the facts – they have been conned. Period.

Stop trying to rationalize it. Get ready to fight a new front in the war against elite domination. It is not over because Hillary (who was obviously a very dangerous and loathsome choice) lost.

While Trump has not finalized most of his picks, and all will still have to face confirmation, the list is pretty overwhelmingly packed with Wall Street and big bank insiders, establishment creatures, and neocon war hawks, etc.

Trump’s Admin to be will be run by the big banks – here’s just a few of his many cabinet, appointee, and advisor picks:

* Steven Bannon, Chief Political Strategist (net worth $10 million) – Breitbart publisher, ex-Goldman Sachs exec, and film producer

* Elaine Chao, Transportation Secretary (net worth $22-25 million) – Wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell, Bank of America executive; Labor Secretary under Geroge W. Bush; member of CFR; father was a shipping magnate

* Steven Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary (net worth $40 million) – Second generation Goldman Sachs partner/executive; previously worked for Soros group; at Yale, he allegedly ‘passed’ on Skull and Bones membership after being tapped

* Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce (net worth $2.9 billion) – Billionaire investor; senior managing director at Rothschild, Inc.; Yale, Harvard Business alumni. and board of advisors of Yale School of Management; and, to top it all off as Kurt Nimmo recently reported,

Ross “also worked as New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s privatization advisor and was a member of the Wall Street secret society Kappa Beta Phi made up of high-ranking financial executives. Robert Rubin, Jon Corzine, and John C. Whitehead, the former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Rockefeller confidant, and Goldman Sachs chairman are also members. Ross is the “Grand Swipe” or leader of the group.”

* Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education (net worth “billionaire”; husband Dick DeVos has Amway fortune) – Windquest Group energy/renewables; Father built up auto parts fortune; Brother is Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater/Xe/Academi; Prince is, in turn, featured on Breitbart frequently

* Gen. David Petraeus, possible Secretary of State (net worth $2 million) – After serving as commander of CENTCOM and other miiltary positions, he was director of the CIA, before being forced to step down after pleading guilty to the misuse of classified information, which he reportedly shared with his mistress and biographer (*he would make a hypocritical Secretary of State choice given the scandal surrounding Sec. Clinton’s misuse of classified info); Petraeus went to head KKR Global (Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts) and became a frequent Bilderberg attendee; member of CFR

• Mitt Romney, possible Secretary of State (net worth: $250 million) – Former Massachusetts Governor; former GOP nominee for president; former Vice President and senior partner at Bain Capitol, private equity/venture capital fund; father was former governor of Michigan; Romney is already well known as an establishment lackey, so there is no need to go on…

* Peter Thiel, potential position unknown, possibly informal (net worth $2.7 billion) – Co-founder of Facebook, PayPal, Palantir Technologies (NSA’s data mining partner), and many other firms; Silicon Valley tycoon known for initiating the so-called “PayPal Mafia”; Bilderberg steering committee member who has brought many technology leaders to the power group’s table

Notably, Peter Thiel and Donald Trump have been working closely together on a plan to “open libel laws” to, apparently, facilitate lawsuits and new forms of legal action against defamation and certain types of reporting – a la Thiel’s controversial role in funding lawsuits against Gawker, which caused its bankruptcy.

There are many other potential appointees and advisors worth paying attention to, but it is labor intensive, many have yet to be selected, and this is already enough to make the point anyway.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Nearly eight years ago, I had the honor and distinction of being an associate editor and second hand in general to the production of “The Obama Deception” – a film which rightly blasted the myth of Barack Obama’s divine anti-establishment, hope-and-change rope-a-dope routine.

We now know that play, and we should not let ourselves get fooled again.

In 2008, Despite campaigning as a fresh face who would end wars, corruption and the ways of Washington politics, President Obama quickly appointed Wall Street insiders, CFR and Trilateral Commission members, Bilderberg attendees, and some of the very neocons who had defined the Bush Administration that so many had come to reject and loathe.

Obama remains cool and popular on the surface and in press conferences, but behind the scenes he helped the big banks secure their bailout after the collapse. He gave cover for what became the greatest looting ever of the American people. Millennials, in particular, were oblivious to the deception, despite our effort to warn them.

Today, in 2016, Donald Trump is already showing himself to be the new face of that same deception; only this time, lots of well meaning liberty activists, truthers, libertarians, constitutionalists, populists and paleo-conservatives were the victims.

Helping Trump gain office on the idea that he would destroy NAFTA, stop the TPP, curb illegal immigration and bring good jobs back to America, these people were betrayed within days and weeks of Trump’s election victory as his elitist appointments became clear.

As Michael Krieger wrote:

If you give cover to Trump to appoint swamp creatures to his cabinet, you have no right to criticize Obama for having done the same. Let’s grow up and start rallying around ideas, not cheerleading political figures.

[…]

What allowed Obama to do all the bad things he did, was the fact that his supporters made endless excuses for him. Don’t make excuses for Trump. If you do, your life will get a lot worse and this country will decay far more into an authoritarian oligarchy than it already has. It is up to you to make sure he doesn’t become the Wall Street puppet I always feared he would be.

In hindsight, Trump made his fortune, and stayed out of trouble, by operating in the heart of Manhattan, just a short distance from Wall Street, the World Trade Center, Rockefeller Center, the Council on Foreign Relations and other exclusive white glove, bow tie clubs and business centers… So it isn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination that he would pack his cabinet full of these same creatures.

There is no shame in having supported one candidate to oppose another, or to be misled by someone you thought would make a difference. But the question is, will those who supported Trump the most admit that he has indeed “conned” and “betrayed” the base that got him elected – or will they keep on making excuses for him for the next four years, while Washington and Wall Street accelerate their operations?

Mark Twain, himself a member of the elitist Bohemian Grove back in his day, made two succinct and relevant observations about our political system which seem more fitting now than ever:

“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” – Mark Twain

and

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain