Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:39 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:47 pm
ELECTION 2016
6 Manufactured News Scandals Produced and Promoted by Breitbart News and New Trump Campaign Chief Bannon
Viral lies destroy lives, and Breitbart and Bannon are masters of this disgusting trade.
By Adele M. Stan / AlterNet August 19, 2016
Since its inception, the aim of Breitbart News has been to taint liberals and the left with the stench of scandal, by any means necessary. Most often, the favored means involves manufacturing scandal, sometimes through innuendo and misconstruance, and most effectively through the posting of misleadingly edited video.
Now Breitbart News CEO Stephen K. Bannon brings those same fact-free, mud-slinging values to yet another reboot of Donald J. Trump’s flagging presidential campaign. On Wednesday, Trump named Bannon as his new campaign chief, replacing Paul Manafort, who resigned today under a cloud of scandal concerning his consulting work for the deposed Ukrainian former president Victor Yanukovych, widely viewed as a tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Here we offer a brief overview of six scandals manufactured by Breitbart News, both under Bannon’s leadership and that of Andrew Breitbart.
1. Louisiana flooding and Obama. Nowhere in the Breitbart News coverage of the federal response to the ongoing flooding disaster in Louisiana will you see a quote from Gov. John Bel Edwards suggesting that now would not be a good time for President Barack Obama to visit his state because of the logistical nightmare it would impose on first responders. Instead, what you’ll find is invective against the president for being on vacation, and a characterization of his absence from the scene as something negligent.
Yet, here’s what Edwards has had to say about it, according to the Times-Picayune:
Edwards said a presidential visit could cause additional problems for flood recovery efforts. Obama's motorcade requires many roadways to be shutdown—and many local streets are still closed because of the flooding. Also, a presidential visit puts a strain on law enforcement. First responders shouldn't be pulled away to deal with Obama, when they are needed for search and rescue missions still, Edwards said.
The Breitbart slam on Obama was published alongside a report that Donald Trump and running-mate Mike Pence headed today to Louisiana. Not that they’d want to exploit the disaster for political purposes or anything.
2. Benghazi! Bannon is part of a cabal that demanded the Republican Congress pursue endless investigations of the State Department response to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. If you’re wondering why Congress has so far spent $6.7 million investigating the tragedy, it’s partly over the fear that Breitbart News will marshal its resources to push members of the relevant congressional committees out of office if they don’t come up with a viable scandal to hang around the neck of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state when the incident happened. (Breitbart News is credited with having forced the resignation of former House Speaker John Boehner.)
In 2013, Mother Jones exposed the agenda of Groundswell, a weekly planning meeting convened by the right-wing group Judicial Watch. Bannon’s name was on the guest list for a May 8, 2013 meeting, and Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle and the late editor Mike Flynn were active on its listserv and participants in the messaging strategies on a range of issues at the time of the Mother Jones report. Others in the group, according to Mother Jones:
One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women's Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
In one email message to the group, Boyle assures Groundswell members:
“I’m saying we can get pieces out fast on Breitbart. Whenever you have an idea, email or call me with a pitch and I'll do my best to get the story out there. Keep us on offense, them on defense. Even if the idea isn't perfect, I can help massage it to get there.”
Audio of one of the group’s meetings obtained by Karoli Kuns of Crooks and Liars reveals Boykin of the Family Research Council pushing the false Benghazi narrative of a State Department coverup, suggesting that the message be conveyed to Boehner and Rep. Darryll Issa (R-Calif.), then chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that nothing short of the appointment of a special committee on the Benghazi matter would do. Conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and birther Frank Gaffney is heard saying that in a meeting the previous night, he impressed upon the speaker and the committee chair that “there’s a lot of restiveness on the part of folks like us, and some of their donors as a matter of fact.” In May 2014, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was appointed to lead the newly formed Select Committee on Benghazi.
Breitbart News stepped up to spin every small revelation into a false narrative of a gargantuan scandal.
3. False 'sting' on Planned Parenthood. Breitbart News was the big player in disseminating the demonstrably false narrative that Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted fetuses for profit. No matter that it’s not true: The story, however many times it’s been debunked, has been used as a bludgeon in Congress and state legislatures across the nation as a reason to withhold government funding of Planned Parenthood’s health-care services to poor and working-class women.
In a series of videos concocted by Daniel Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, interviews with Planned Parenthood employees are misleadingly edited to confirm the false narrative. (The true story is that if a woman having an abortion at a Planned Parenthood opts to donate the fetal remains for medical and scientific research, Planned Parenthood facilitates the donation, sometimes charging the recipient to cover the costs of preparation and transportation of the aborted fetus.)
In March of this year, Florida was the 12th state to defund Planned Parenthood’s health care, and Republicans in Congress attempted to withhold federal funds in a bill that was vetoed by President Obama. Parts of the Florida law were struck down on Thursday by a federal judge, but in other states, similar laws remain in effect.
While in Florida, the defunding legislation has been rolled back by a federal court, the false narrative has stuck. In November 2015, gunman Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. shot and killed three people and wounded nine, using the phrase “no more baby parts” to explain his actions to police.
4. The smearing of Shirley Sherrod. Bannon may have been a talented maker of propaganda before he met Andrew Breitbart, who honed his skills at the Drudge Report, but under the latter’s tutelage, he learned the art of the smear. According to Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek, Bannon “marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.”
Yet one of Breitbart’s most famous smear campaigns actually got him in trouble with the right—once it splashed back all over the movement.
In July 2010, Breitbart’s BigGovernment site posted an explosive video of Shirley Sherrod, a black official of Obama’s Department of Agriculture appearing to say, in a speech to the NAACP, that she would not provide help to a white farmer who was on the verge of losing his farm. Breitbart’s posting of the video appeared to be in retribution for a July 16 vote taken at the annual meeting of the NAACP in which delegates unanimously condemned racist elements in the Tea Party. The Obama administration promptly fired Sherrod, and Ben Jealous, then leader of the venerable civil rights organization, called Sherrod’s remarks “appalling.” The right exploded in celebration. It was to be short-lived.
The NAACP searched its video archives and unearthed the full video of the speech, which showed Sherrod making exactly the opposite point of that depicted in the highly edited version posted on Breitbart. In fact she said that, in setting aside any race-based judgment she might have made about the farmer, Roger Spooner, she learned that the real enemy was poverty.
Spooner stepped into the media limelight to defend Sherrod. “If it hadn't been for her, we would've never known who to see or what to do," he told CNN. "She led us right to our success."
Still, the life of Shirley Sherrod—whose father was shot to death by a white farmer in a dispute over livestock—was forever changed. President Obama called her to not quite apologize, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered her another position, which she declined. She brought a lawsuit against Breitbart News, which was settled in October 2015 (terms undisclosed).
Fox News, which heavily promoted Breitbart’s false Sherrod narrative, was for a time banned from appearing on the channel’s shows.
5. The destruction of ACORN. In 2009, Breitbart protégé James O’Keefe and sidekick Hannah Giles set out to conduct a “sting” on ACORN, the community organizing group that, in addition to its advocacy work on housing for poor people, conducted a get-out-the-vote operation among the nation’s poor (who, when they vote, tend to vote for Democrats). The two posed as pimps, or pimp-and-sex-worker, visiting several ACORN offices to ask for assistance with smuggling underage undocumented immigrants into the U.S. for sex work. One wore a hidden camera.
After their field work was done, they created a series of deceptively edited videos that appeared to show ACORN employees to be willingly complicit in the scheme. Later it was shown that many simply played along in the moment, not knowing quite what to do. Juan Carlos Vera, an ACORN employee in San Bernardino, lost his job when Fox News aired a video posted on Breitbart News that showed him interacting with O’Keefe and Giles. In fact, Vera said he played along in order to collect as much information from the pair as possible, and then he called the police.
In order to make ACORN employees—mostly people of color—look as stupid as possible, O’Keefe filmed set-up shots of himself and Giles dressed as cartoon versions of pimp and sex-worker—loud suit and outrageous glasses for him; minimal clothing on her—leaving the impression that they dressed that way while wielding the hidden camera. In fact, they arrived in ACORN offices dressed like staffers on Capitol Hill.
As a result of the O’Keefe videos, congressional hearings were held and Congress voted to defund ACORN, which had received around $2.5 million a year in federal funds for the community services it provided. In 2010, on the verge of bankruptcy, the group disbanded.
An investigation by the Congressional Research Service found that ACORN had appropriately managed funds it received from the government, and criminal investigations yielded no evidence of criminal activity by the organization.
Juan Carlos Vera won a $100,000 settlement and a weak apology from James O’Keefe.
6. Snookering National Public Radio. In 2011, NPR development director Betsy Liley thought she was talking with a potential donor to the non-profit radio network. The man called himself Ibrahim Kasaam, and said he represented an organization called the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC); the organization wanted to make a $5 million anonymous donation to NPR, he said. The man’s real name was Simon Templar, and the non-profit he worked for was James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Liley was unaware that she was being audiotaped.
Once that sound file was posted to Breitbart.com, all hell broke loose. According to CNN’s account:
“It sounded like you were saying that NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit. Is that correct?" the man asks.
NPR Senior Director of Institutional Development Betsy Liley responds: "I think that is the case, especially if you were anonymous, and I can inquire about that.”
However, that wasn’t everything Liley said, though you wouldn’t know it from the ensuing uproar. Again, from CNN:
But in the recording, Liley also advises the man that NPR executives would investigate the giver before accepting any large donation, examining tax records, looking it up on a foundation database and checking out other organizations that have received donations from the giver.
Liley also raises the possibility of NPR turning down substantial gifts and stresses the "firewall" between the revenue-generating part of NPR and its news operation.
Two days before Liley's quotes were posted, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller had resigned when Breitbart posted video from a meeting with Templar in his MEAC guise, in which she referred to the Tea Party as “racist” and “scary.”
O’Keefe later explained his motivation for the NPR video as retribution for the firing of news analyst Juan Williams for having made comments during a Fox News appearance that were regarded as anti-Muslim.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/6 ... -new-trump
by MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:51 pm
MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 6:01 pm wrote:
Serious question: Has anyone actually proved that any part of O'Keefe's video* was in any way faked or manipulated? If so, please post the link. All I've seen so far is people saying "It can't be real because O'Keefe's a jerk, therefore everyone should ignore it." Which is decidedly dodgy reasoning.
*I mean the latest one, of course, the one in the news right now. I haven't watched it yet (or any of his videos), I'm pushed for time. I'd like to know if it's worth watching.
by MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 8:07 pm
by IanEye » Tue Oct 18, 2016 8:10 pm
The Consul » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:33 pm wrote:
It's all in the editing, Lucy!
MacCruiskeen » Wed May 27, 2015 1:28 pm wrote:Wombaticus Rex » Wed May 27, 2015 12:16 pm wrote:MacCruiskeen » Wed May 27, 2015 12:12 pm wrote:By contrast: The legal consequence of your fascinating opinion that Dzokhar Tsarnaev is a shitbag is that he will be either a) fried soon or b) left to rot in solitary for decades.
I think your claim that Ian is part of the US Judiciary might not have standing.
I'll leave it to him to verify, but I'm pretty sure he didn't preside over this case, and is only offering his opinion as a citizen observer.
That's a perfect example of that there (tendentious) editing stuff I went on to mention very shortly after your cut.
IanEye » Sun Jan 27, 2013 10:59 pm wrote:*The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern Scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.
by MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 8:13 pm
by 8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:10 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:14 am
James O’Keefe is a professional liar.
He just isn’t very good at it.
THE POLITICAL SCENE MAY 30, 2016 ISSUE
STING OF MYSELF
Amateurish spies like James O’Keefe III attempt to sway the 2016 campaign.
By Jane Mayer
O’Keefe’s signature method is to entrap targets into breaking the law.
As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid. Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by secretly funding what it called a “rent-a-mob.” Geraghty, who is twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several messages when she noticed that one of them was extraordinarily long. “Who leaves a seven-minute voice mail?” Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on it.
“Hey, Dana,” a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American male. “My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American who represents a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for, um, European values.” He asked Geraghty for the name of someone he could talk to “about supporting you guys and coördinating with you on some of your efforts.” Requesting a callback, he left a phone number with a 914 area code—Westchester County.
She heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice. The person who had introduced himself as Kesh said, “Don’t say anything . . . before I hang up the phone.”
“That piqued my interest,” Geraghty recalls. Other aspects of the message puzzled her: “Who says they’re with a foundation without saying which one? He sounded scattered. And usually people call to get funding, not to offer it.” Victor Kesh, she suspected, was “someone passing as someone else.”
She continued to listen, and the man’s voice suddenly took on a more commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. “What needs to happen,” he said, is for “someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that”—to Soros, to his employees, and to the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this year’s campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Soros offices an “undercover” agent who could “talk the talk” with Open Society executives. Kesh’s goal wasn’t fully spelled out on the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could penetrate Soros’s operation and make secret videos that exposed embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has “thousands of organizations” on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of his project was Discover the Networks.
The money that would be offered, Kesh said, couldn’t come from “offshore British Virgin Island companies,” because “Soros’s people don’t want to take money from a group like that.” He claimed that “Bill Clinton would” take suspect cash, “and Hillary Clinton would, and Chelsea would.”
One member of the team suggested to Kesh that he knew someone who could infiltrate the Soros network: an English orthopedic surgeon with “a real heavy British accent,” who was in the U.S. and was “more than happy to do anything he can do for us.” The surgeon was sophisticated about technology and would not “have any problem with the cameras.” The team member said, “He’s a very talented guy, so, I mean, he’ll be able to pull it off.” As Kesh mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only person he was stinging was himself.
The accidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announced that he was opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page on his computer. He planned to check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros “octopus.” Kesh said, “She’s probably going to call me back, and if she doesn’t I can create other points of entry.” Suddenly, Kesh realized that by opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealed his own LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who has looked at their pages.) “Whoa!” an accomplice warned. “Log out!” The men anxiously reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn account anyway. “It was a little chilling to hear this group of men talking about me as a ‘point of entry,’ ” Geraghty says. “But—not to sound ageist—it was clear that these people were not used to the technology.”
Geraghty forwarded the voice-mail recording to Chris Stone, the president of the Open Society Foundations. “The Watergate burglars look good compared to these guys,” Stone told me last month. “These guys can’t even figure out how to use an Internet browser, let alone conduct an undercover operation. You read the transcript and you can’t help but laugh.” He went on, “But the issues here aren’t funny. There’s some kind of dirty-tricks operation in play against us.”
In the Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, a street-level office has reflective glass doors and windows that make it impossible to see inside. This is the headquarters of James O’Keefe III—the conservative activist who placed the phony phone call pretending to be Victor Kesh. As he showed me around, in late April, O’Keefe, who is thirty-one, told me that he is not a dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a leading practitioner of modern political warfare. “We’ve got this guerrilla army, and it’s coming to fruition soon,” he said. “This is our base of operations.” Waving his hand around seven thousand square feet of empty office space, he said, “This is our norad. It’s our field operation.”
The back wall of the office, he explained, would soon be hung with an enormous corkboard covered with maps. Affixed to each map would be a card with the location and the assumed name of every undercover political operative working for his nonprofit, Project Veritas. Created in 2010 as a charity that could accept tax-deductible contributions, Project Veritas says on its Web site that it is dedicated to exposing “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct.”
O’Keefe graduated from Rutgers University in 2006. He says that a professor there, David Knowlton, urged him to follow Saul Alinsky’s rule book, which advised radicals to use their enemies’ rules against them. On St. Patrick’s Day in 2005, O’Keefe lampooned campus political correctness by demanding that the dining hall ban Lucky Charms cereal. The box’s depiction of a leprechaun, he proclaimed, perpetuated “offensive” stereotypes about Irish-Americans. He videotaped a confrontation that he’d had with a school administrator and posted the footage on YouTube, launching his career as a political stunt artist. The Lucky Charms prank remains “a crowd favorite,” O’Keefe told me.
In 2014, his organization became more directly involved in electoral politics, sprouting a “social welfare” limb called the Project Veritas Action Fund. Such organizations, referred to in the tax code as 501c4 groups, have proliferated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case essentially legalized unlimited corporate and individual spending on politics. Unlike ordinary charities, 501c4 groups can accept unlimited contributions from secret donors and spend the cash directly on campaigns. They just need to make a plausible case that they promote social welfare and that politics is not their primary purpose. O’Keefe says that the new group “allows us to literally put someone undercover in a campaign.”
In the era of “dark money,” as anonymous political donations are often described, Project Veritas has been thriving. According to its federal tax filings, between 2013 and 2014 its budget doubled, from $1.2 million to $2.4 million. O’Keefe told me that he has “about a dozen undercover operations ongoing at any given time.” One of these, he said, involves “someone working for Hillary Clinton full time, as a paid staffer.” This “embedded” operative, he said, “is employed in the campaign in the highest echelons.” (He declined to be more specific.) Every day, the operative sends “video to us over our own server.” He added, “Just like Hillary Clinton, we have our own Internet server in Westchester County!” He went on, “We see everything. We have thousands of hours of video. You’ll see infighting, plans, strategy.” O’Keefe said that he has been compiling a feature film from the operative’s footage, but won’t release it until the late summer or fall, when it will have maximum impact. In the meantime, he has posted teasers online; several of the clips end with the words “Stay tuned, Hillary, and check your e-mail.”
O’Keefe promised that footage he has acquired through his various operatives “will force people to resign.” He later added that he had video of “top, top, top-ranking officials discussing how and why they commit” voter fraud “to sway races.”
Given O’Keefe’s track record, it would be a mistake to take his grand statements too seriously. He first gained wide notoriety in 2009, when he released a series of undercover videos attacking the liberal community-organizing group acorn. The videos had an immediate effect, but raised serious questions about his methods and ethics—questions that have trailed him ever since. He secretly filmed encounters in which he and a female colleague showed up at acorn offices in various cities, claiming to be a pimp and an underage prostitute who wanted advice on how to make prostitution look like a legal business. acorn officials appeared to oblige them, in one instance advising them to make sure that the immigrants O’Keefe claimed he was going to prostitute actually went to school as exchange students. After O’Keefe began releasing his exposés of acorn, the House of Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the group, which soon collapsed. But an acorn official filmed in California, who was fired because he seemed to embrace the proposed scheme, successfully settled a lawsuit against O’Keefe for a hundred thousand dollars. He argued that he had not consented to be videotaped, as is required in California, and that after learning about the prostitution idea he had called the police. O’Keefe hadn’t bothered to contact the employee before airing the damning footage.
In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana. (O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.
In 2011, O’Keefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices, pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about Islam. After O’Keefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the air, and criticizing the Republican Party as “not just Islamophobic but really xenophobic,” two top NPR officials, including its chief executive, Vivian Schiller, resigned.
Many O’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems like most of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt—a petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.”
O’Keefe’s unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives, including Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard Nixon’s operative Donald Segretti infamously called “ratfucking.”
The use of deception and other subversive tactics to undermine voter choice is as old as the American republic. Thomas Jefferson enlisted surrogates to publish attacks on Alexander Hamilton, who responded with anonymous ripostes. In the eighteen-seventies, cities were infamous for using ballots printed on multi-ply tissue paper in order to multiply candidates’ votes. In 1972, Segretti published a phony letter that he claimed had been written by one of Nixon’s rivals, the Democratic Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. The letter slurred Canadians as “Canucks,” and the resulting furor sent Muskie’s campaign into a tailspin.
With cash streaming into dark-money groups, negative campaigning is a growth industry. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of “Dirty Politics” (1992), told me, “Dirty tricks have always been covert operations. But more money means it’s more possible to cover your tracks in ways that make it insidious.” Over the years, Jamieson says, opposing campaigns have attempted to sabotage one another by planting scandalous material, releasing doctored photographs, and undertaking sting operations. In 2008, a “citizen journalist” attended a private San Francisco fund-raiser and posted a video of President Barack Obama making a maladroit reference to embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” Four years later, a bartender working at a private fund-raiser for Mitt Romney recorded him dismissing forty-seven per cent of the electorate as freeloaders “dependent upon government.” Afterward, Romney could not shake the perception that he was élitist.
According to Jamieson, the ability to download videos from smartphones directly onto the Internet has normalized what used to be shadowy practices. “In the past, you were the uncredited hero who got the candidate elected,” she says. “Now the brazenness of the process is such that you will admit it and put it on your résumé!”
The expected contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is likely to be one of the nastiest in history, with putatively independent “opposition research” operations fuelling both parties. Meanwhile, negative campaigns funded by private donors and private interests are aiming at targets far beyond conventional candidates—among them intellectuals who have no official role.
O’Keefe declined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But Matthew Tyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publicly declared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is a thirty-five-year-old Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Poland’s right-wing nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he wrote that the “recent protest movement” was “rumored to be funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations” in order to “undermine and destabilize the new government.”
Tyrmand deflected numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached him by phone, he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his way to the Cannes Film Festival for the première of “Clinton Cash,” a film adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves by giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help Trump’s campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.
The first time I asked O’Keefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment on what he called “investigations, real or imagined.” But, after learning that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soros’s group, he tried to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand, and a cameraman showed up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations, saying that they were conducting a serious investigation. O’Keefe phoned Dana Geraghty again, admitting that he had previously called her “posing as Victor,” and said that he had some “follow-up questions” about whether the Foundations were as transparent as they claim to be about the activities they fund. With the camera rolling, O’Keefe and his team stood outside the lobby and buttonholed people, asking them if Soros was funding Polish street protests.
Laura Silber, the chief communications officer for the Open Society Foundations, told me, “We were asked if we fund the Polish opposition—we don’t, directly or indirectly. We do support groups that advance the rule of law and human rights, which are under threat in Poland today.”
O’Keefe portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to furthering “a more ethical and transparent society.” He refuses, however, to be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax records obtained by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by the Center for Media and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Project Veritas have come through a fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust, which specializes in hiding the money trails of conservative philanthropists. In its promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it will “keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” The records obtained by PRWatch.org also show that one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin, contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertook a sting of one of his political enemies—a state senator.
O’Keefe, when asked if donors to his group can pay for him to investigate particular people or groups, answered, “It depends.” He will pursue a requested target “if it’s an idea I want to do, or if it advances our mission.” But he added, “Not many people can tell me what to do, because they don’t know how we do it.”
As O’Keefe’s budget has grown, so has his ambition. “I want to expand to every state,” he told me. “I want to be everywhere.” If uncovering the truth requires deception, fake names, disguises, and other subterfuge, he makes no apology. The signature O’Keefe method is to try to entrap his subjects into breaking the law—a strategy that most political operatives consider a step too far.
He showed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafina water bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPod Shuffle. A device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology, could relay live audio to his control room. He argued, “What I do is the truest form of journalism there is. We hit the record button and show people what we found.”
The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately funded super pacs and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were eviscerated in the 2010 midterm elections—the first congressional campaigns after the Citizens United decision—an independently funded group named American Bridge 21st Century began supplying opposition research to Democratic groups and candidates. The network was founded by David Brock, a self-described former “conservative hit man” who became notorious in the early nineties for having described Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic Party—in part because he found the Republican Party homophobic—bringing with him an insider’s expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes American Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a political “utility” for progressives.
The American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, and Correct the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defending Hillary Clinton. Brock’s group also oversees political action committees, dark-money nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video “trackers,” who hound Republican candidates in the hope of recording politically damaging moments. Video trackers have been mainstays of campaigns since 2006, when a Democratic volunteer upended George Allen, the Republican senatorial* candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video of him uttering a racist slur. In 2012, one of the trackers with Brock’s organization captured Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican running for the Senate, defending “legitimate rape.” With American Bridge’s success has come funding, largely from labor unions and wealthy liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George Soros—which may help explain why he was the object of an O’Keefe sting.
After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservative operatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independent negative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew America Rising—the unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the Republican Party—which was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head of Romney’s campaign. Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from Brock’s network in one crucial respect: It is a limited-liability corporation. Instead of relying on charitable and political donations, America Rising serves as a for-profit vender to conservative clients, who pay it to conduct customized negative research.
Rhoades and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I stopped by America Rising’s headquarters, on May 18th, the office was filled with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were decorated with photographs of conservative icons (though Trump’s portrait seemed to be missing). An office door was covered with bull’s-eye targets, and a sign reminded staffers of the “Research Checklist: Nexis, Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter.”
Brock told me that his group had rejected the vender model. “We didn’t want to be under clients’ thumbs,” he said. “If you work for them, you’re subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive infrastructure.” Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail the Koch brothers, but Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a huge amount of oppo research on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes that tracking private citizens is unethical. He claims that he has also rejected the use of subterfuge. “We’re not in that game,” he says.
By contrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoades’s group, America Rising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to target leading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmental causes and candidates. The campaign’s initial budget was a hundred thousand dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive use of video trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill, the campaign would subject environmentalists to “the same level of scrutiny . . . that opposition research firms apply to presidential candidates.” America Rising Squared’s executive director, Brian Rogers, told The Hill that his group planned to hold “the Environmentalist Left accountable for their epic hypocrisy and extreme positions which threaten America’s future prosperity.”
Almost simultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch of an affiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, called Definers Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-style negative campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed private clients, including corporations. According to its Web site, Definers will “create dossiers” on opponents, monitor them from a “full-service war room,” and build both “grassroots” alliances and “a paid online presence.” This raises the possibility that undisclosed business interests are paying to choose the targets they want Republican operatives to attack.
Soon after the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in Vermont, got an alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben had contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a “global grassroots climate movement.” For many years, he was a staff writer for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political thinker, but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign operative.
The Texas librarian, Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at the archive and requested copies of all his papers—fifty-four boxes of documents. The man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked for Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibben’s archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man aimed a video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet of footage appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and then turning away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song “Show Me That Smile.” The video, which was titled “Bill McKibben: Ready for His Closeup,” was posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.
The site is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an app called Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideological enemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to ask at public events, such as “Will you drop out of the Presidential race if you are indicted?” Within days, another contentless video snippet of McKibben popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was clear: wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.
Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
McKibben told me, “I have no fear of debating these people on the issues, but this is just intimidation.” He added, “It’s bad enough to do this to anyone who runs for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?”
Tom Steyer, the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, is another target of America Rising Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical, because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising Squared has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as he has substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is “complete and utter nonsense,” because his investments are held by trusts and structured in a way that any profits are transferred to charity. “They have to know they’re lying,” Steyer said. “It’s completely dishonest, unethical, and pitiful. And it’s creepy.” He says that the anonymously funded attacks won’t stop him, but he worries that such campaigns may deter others from engaging in activism. As he puts it, they “are another reason people are reluctant to get involved in politics.”
It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so devious—including an attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissue—that the campaign backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the sting’s perpetrators, and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted the C.M.P. In Presidential politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock notes, “In the year of Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.”
O’Keefe promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in the Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on Breitbart News, he confessed that he had “been forced to abandon an ambitious undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.” O’Keefe acknowledged that he “forgot to hang up” the phone, but declined to be more specific about the operation, saying, “I don’t like to reveal the tactics of what we do.” He apologized to his supporters and promised that his many other investigations had not been compromised. “Unfortunately, I’m burned on this particular investigation,” he said, adding that he was “very disappointed,” because he believes that the influence of billionaires such as Soros is “the most important topic undermining democracy.” But he concluded, “If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... gs-himself
This fraudster tried to steal my vote! (Sort of)
Brian Dickerson , Detroit Free Press Columnist 5:04 p.m. EDT August 3, 2016James O’Keefe is a professional liar.
He just isn’t very good at it.
For the last four years, O’Keefe has been on a crusade to convince Americans that voter fraud poses a mortal threat to their democracy.
This week, the 32-year old conservative activist brought his social media circus to Southeast Michigan, where, in a whirlwind day of political theater, he and a female associate attempted to obtain primary ballots while posing consecutively as Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Wayne State University Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson, and three members of the Free Press editorial board, including yours truly.
I wish I could muster some righteous indignation over this outrage. But the thing is, O'Keefe didn't get very far.
And as it turns out, he never does.
Still, in a YouTube posting a few hours later, the millennial reprobate boasted that he had come this close to passing himself off as a newspaper columnist who is 1) old enough to be his father and 2) a helluva a lot better looking (or, at the very least, somewhat better-groomed.)
O’Keefe also claimed that a video in which he surreptitiously documented his ruse demonstrated the need for stricter voter identification laws.
Except that he didn’t, and it doesn’t.
Wrong precinct, wrong town
The video, which you can watch here, shows O’Keefe approaching Cindy Rose, a veteran poll worker at the Birmingham elementary school where I typically cast my ballot, about 9 a.m. on Election Day.
Rose and I know each other pretty well. I see her every time I vote, and far more frequently in the nearby park where I walk my dog.
And it’s not just me; Rose has been a volunteer in my precinct for nine years running, and she recognizes most of the voters she encounters every Election Day.
(Lesson 1: If you’re looking to commit voter fraud, do it someplace other than Mayberry.)
So when O’Keefe introduced himself to Rose as Brian Dickerson, gave her my address, and identified himself as a newcomer to the neighborhood, she was, let us say, on heightened alert.
“Are you his son?” she asks on O'Keefe's video.
“No,” he replies. “I’m Brian.”
The smoking gun
This might be a good time to review the language of Michigan statute 168.932, which states, among other things:
A person who does any of the following is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 4 years or a fine of not more than $2,000.00, or both:
(a) A person shall not, at an election, falsely impersonate another person, or vote or attempt to vote under the name of another person . . .
Now, back to the video:
When O’Keefe explains that he recently lost his driver’s license on a hunting trip "up in the North" and asks if there is any other way he can establish his bona fides and cast a vote, Rose tells him (correctly) that state law permits forgetful voters such as himself to cast a provisional vote by signing an affidavit in which they swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are who they claim to be.
O’Keefe asks for and obtains a blank affidavit. But he declines to sign it. Which is smart, because by this time Rose has called the Birmingham city clerk’s office, where another acquaintance of mine, Deputy Clerk Cheryl Arft, informs her that she accepted an absentee ballot from the real Brian Dickerson a day earlier.
In the video, Rose chooses not to share this intelligence with the intrepid impostor, curious to see how far he will press his scheme.
A fraud aborted
But instead of forging the affidavit — a felony punishable by imprisonment — O’Keefe aborts and heads to Birmingham City Hall, where he confronts City Clerk Laura Pierce (on camera, of course) with the somewhat exaggerated claim that one of her volunteer poll workers has just offered him my ballot in return for a forged signature.
Then he posts the video of his conversations with Rose and Pierce on YouTube, tweeting: “I could have voted as Brian Dickerson!” The video is dutifully broadcast by the Drudge Report and other conservative websites, doubtless mystifying the vast majority of right-wing conspiracy theorists who have never heard of me.
And of course, O’Keefe could have voted as Brian Dickerson, in the same sense that he could walk into a Ford dealership (with no identification whatsoever) and steal a new Taurus.
What’s dubious is his assertion that the crime would have gone unnoticed or unpunished.
Even if O'Keefe had followed through by signing a fraudulent affidavit, the poll workers knew that the person in whose name he sought to vote had already cast a ballot.
And if I had attempted to vote after O'Keefe's had fraudulently pre-empted me?
"We would have asked you for identification," Pierce says, "and, after establishing that you were who you said you were, we would have called the police."
O’Keefe’s premise is that he could have easily stolen my vote by signing my name. But he could more easily have ended up in handcuffs.
And although he and others have been advocating for tougher voter I.D. laws for years on the grounds that fraud is rampant, none has identified a single instance in which a U.S. election turned on counterfeit votes.
Birmingham police opened an investigation (on their own initiative) on the theory that O’Keefe might have committed a crime simply by making an oral representation that he was me, although the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office seemed to have concluded, as this column went to press, that it had bigger fish to fry. And what sane person could argue?
Demagogues vs. democracy
But by now you must be wondering, as I did: Why me?
I mean, Mike Duggan is the mayor of Detroit. Benson is a law school dean who has argued that the stricter voter identification laws O’Keefe and his alarmist confederates want to enact are really designed to discourage minority voters from exercising their rights.
All my Free Press colleagues Stephen Henderson and Nancy Kaffer and I have done is argue, in our respective columns, that the millions of Americans who don’t vote pose a greater threat to democracy than miscreants like O’Keefe do.
I still believe that. Our democracy is stronger when we make it easier for everybody to vote, not harder for those who find it difficult to stand in line on Election Day or too expensive to obtain a driver’s license.
It's hardly news that the world abounds with liars and con artists. There's even one running for president.
But I’d rather trust the judgment of people like Cindy Rose than surrender to the paranoia of provocateurs like James O’Keefe.
And if someone wants me to sign an affidavit testifying to all of the above, I will
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/colu ... /87993508/
seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 17, 2016 4:06 pm wrote:James O'Keefe Brings His Dishonest, Doctored Videos To The World Of Political Campaigns
Blog ››› October 6, 2014 1:11 PM EDT ››› OLIVER WILLIS
James O'Keefe
James O'Keefe has recently launched a political advocacy group, Project Veritas Action Fund, but journalists should be aware that O'Keefe has a long history of lies and deceptively edited videos filmed under false pretenses.
Project Veritas Action Fund has so far released videos about Kentucky's U.S. Senate race and Texas' gubernatorial contest. O'Keefe's venture is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization, which allows direct involvement in political campaigns. O'Keefe's existing group, Project Veritas, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, which is not allowed to be involved in political campaigning.
O'Keefe released a video that accused the progressive group Battleground Texas of using "potentially illegal methods to change elections" in their efforts to register voters before Texas' election this year. Special prosecutors in Texas were appointed to investigate O'Keefe's claims and they recommended the case be dismissed and criticized the Project Veritas video as "little more than a canard and political disinformation."
The group's latest video attacks Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes (D). Titled "The Lying Game," Project Veritas claims they went "undercover in multiple Grimes campaign offices to determine if her opposition to the core principles of her own political party is genuine or an intentional deception." But as Bloomberg's Dave Weigel explains, "There's no criminal activity alleged here. Instead, there's a succession of cheerful activists insisting that Grimes is on their side, and is participating in a 'lying game' when she says she'll fight for the coal industry."
This is a continuation of O'Keefe's deceptive video release strategy, which has often worked in concert with Fox News.
In a series of videos, O'Keefe targeted the low-income advocacy group ACORN. O'Keefe falsely claimed the videos showed a "nationwide ACORN child prostitution investigation" that implicated ACORN employees. But the videos were deceptive and heavily edited. Three separate investigations cleared employees of criminal wrongdoing and law enforcement officials called O'Keefe's videos a "highly selective editing of reality" from "partisan zealots." Despite this, the U.S. House voted to defund ACORN (and did so over a dozen more times) and the group was dissolved. A lawsuit from a former ACORN employee against O'Keefe for illegally taping a conversation at an ACORN office resulted in a $100,000 settlement.
O'Keefe was then arrested when he attempted to enter the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) in another attempted sting operation. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.
Later in 2010, O'Keefe tried to lure then-CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and record the encounter surreptitiously. The plan, described by O'Keefe as a "CNN Caper," was disrupted when an O'Keefe confidante warned off the reporter.
Attacking unions, an O'Keefe video purported to show union officials promising to "secure funding" for a company that did nothing but dig holes in the ground. But the unedited video actually showed that the officials were skeptical of the entire scheme.
O'Keefe was caught using two minutes out of a forty-five minute interview to falsely accuse a state office of assisting Medicaid fraud.
An O'Keefe video promoted by Fox News took an NPR executive out of context, leaving the impression that he had disparaged the tea party movement and said NPR was "better off" without federal funding. The full video showed that the Project Veritas video had been edited to leave a false impression, removing the context of the conversation.
In the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, an O'Keefe video alleged voter fraud from the Obama re-election campaign, but the doctored videos failed to demonstrate any real criminal activity. Another election year video from Project Veritas said "we found ballots being offered out in the name of the dead" but the ballot in question in the unedited video was for someone who was actually alive. O'Keefe's organization released several more videos alleging voter fraud that year, but they were all based on false interpretations of voter ID laws.
An O'Keefe video accused Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) of "excluding whites" from protection under his proposal for a new Voting Rights Amendment Act, but this claim is a complete misreading of the bill, which would include all races in its protection of voting rights.
James O'Keefe
In concert with the release of his book, O'Keefe pushed a video that purported to show widespread problems with the federal Lifeline program, which provides phones to low-income Americans. However, the video was edited to make it appear as if government employees had encouraged illegal activity, and the raw video showed this was untrue.
In May, O'Keefe released a video called "Hollywood's War On U.S. Energy," which attempted to connect opposition to fracking to funding from Middle Eastern oil tycoons. The video chopped up dialogue to deceive viewers into believing environmental groups would accept oil industry money.
Earlier this year, O'Keefe dressed in an Osama Bin Laden costume and crossed the Rio Grande River in a ham-fisted attempt to prove that the southern U.S. border is insecure. The stunt was so outlandish that Fox's Eric Bolling said O'Keefe should "give it a rest."
But he hasn't. O'Keefe continues to produce videos that don't hold up under even light scrutiny, and now his pivot to more direct involvement in electoral campaigns should be a warning signal to reporters to be extremely skeptical of his claims.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/10/06 ... ide/201026
by IanEye » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:44 am
MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 8:13 pm wrote:What?
IanEye » Tue Jun 02, 2015 1:37 pm wrote:
MacCruiskeen, your behavior in this and other instances is called, "acting like a shitbag".
We have all seen what happens to shitbags.
That is called, "acting like a shitbag".
We have all seen what happens to shitbags.
For as long as the moderators let you, you will continue to act like a shitbag on this thread.
This truth is self evident.
.
by IanEye » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:53 am
by IanEye » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:44 am
8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:10 am wrote:Hillary shills response: The Russians are behind the hacks!
IanEye » Wed Dec 30, 2009 3:55 pm wrote:
8bit, eye think what you are taking note of is real, but i think Corporate Power structure wants to shed the fear based domestic politics of the Bush/Cheney era.
I think Corporate interests will consider it a real feather in their cap if they can assume more and more control throughout the 21st century, without relying on racism.
The TeaBaggers represent a faction of White America that want nothing more than to return to the Corporate model of the 60's era show "Mad Men'. But guess what? That is not going to happen.
The Corporation I work for doesn't need a white male foreman sitting at a desk, whose only job is to take credit for the work of black men and white women. They have computers to fill that role now. White men in corporations have to realize they have to work just as hard as everyone else now or they are out the door. The computers don't let anyone slack, they don't let you shift the blame. The computers care about profit.
Alberto realizes this.
Barack realizes this.
Condi realizes this.
Sonia realizes this.
Glenn realizes this too, and he is making as much money off of these dumb fucking crackers as he can before they wake up.
Remember the Monex lady of the Bush era? She would assure you in a nice calm voice that, 'there is never been a better time to invest in gold', and she was right. You were way better off if you invested in gold then as opposed to now.
Now the gold hawker is a sweaty pin eyed white guy who is talking right to the freaked out TeaBagger.
Too late TeaBagger! if you are just getting into the game now, you are fucked.
honestly 8bit, the only thing i can't figure out yet is whether Obama is Black Reagan, or Black Wilson.
The entire 2 party dichotomy is being played out in Hegelistic fashion within the Democratic Party right now, with the GOP as a bizzaro side show.
This can't last forever, but I think it will last for awhile longer. It is too soon to burn the angry white core of the GOP off of the crucible. But it will happen eventually, and then you will see young Republicans who look more like Jeb Bush's kids than Jenna or Barbara. But Michael Steele is a joke right now and that is all he is meant to be.
When Reagan said 'it's morning in America', it really wasn't for a lot of people.
But a lot of people wanted to believe it. Corporate America wants things to stabilize as quickly as possible. They want Obama to have his 'morning in America' moment.
"Don't push me 'cause I am close to the edge / I'm trying not to lose my head" -Grandmaster Flash
In the early 80's any number of people could relate to these lyrics, but in truth, few actually heard 'The Message' on their radios, but they all saw the Cosby Show on their TV sets.
Media itself is going through it's own throes right now, so it is kind of hard to find the perfect analogy, but I think MSNBC is far and away a better indicator of the Corporate talking points than Fox News. And keep in mind that this is the Comcast MSNBC we are talking about, not the GE NBC of old.8bitagent wrote:Remember those fad like early 1990's "3d posters", where you have to squint and unfocus your eyes to "See it". To "get it".
At this point, I don't know if I want to "get it"...as frankly it's a look scary.
The only way to understand Deep Politics is with Deep Focus.
Study the election of 1916.
Imagine Mitt Romney as Charles Evans Hughes and imagine Sarah Palin as TeaBagger/BullMoose Teddy. She'll probably bow out too, but it will be too late.
The Corporate goal isn't to restore White America. The Corporate goal is to get Latinos to like Corporatism.
All of the racism you quite rightly point out that you see in the M$M is too broad brush, it alienates Latinos as well as African-Americans. It's presence serves to draw out the racist white people and further isolate them.
The goal for America is a united corporate state that in the end is no more powerful than any other nation. The iconography of the future is corporate logos, not the flags of nations.
Very soon you will see a multi-colored peacock on your screen with no letters (NBC) branding it. Because to commit to letters is to commit to a language, and to commit to a language is to commit to a flag.
And there is no need for flags in the future, only logos.
A League of Logos.
by Iamwhomiam » Wed Oct 19, 2016 11:22 am
8bit, that video is utter bullshit, something artificial but believable to those who cannot comprehend they are being led to a conclusion that in fact is untrue.
by MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 11:56 am
Iamwhomiam » Wed Oct 19, 2016 10:22 am wrote:Worth repeating, considering some do not yet understand:8bit, that video is utter bullshit, something artificial but believable to those who cannot comprehend they are being led to a conclusion that in fact is untrue.
8bit, that video is utter bullshit
utter bullshit
something artificial
something artificial but believable to those who cannot comprehend they are being led to a conclusion that in fact is untrue.
Worth repeating, considering some do not yet understand:
by MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:24 pm
by 82_28 » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:35 pm
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