18-22 March 2018: Could "Russiagate" Be a Red Herring to Distract from a Domestic Scandal That's Infinitely Worse?

AN EXPATRIATE NEW YORKER acutely aware (as many New Yorkers are) of the multiple connections that link organized crime (Cosa Nostra, the Irish mob, the Russian mob, etc. ad nauseam) to the construction industry, the political establishment and capitalism in general, I cannot but wonder if the so-called "Russiagate" investigation is perhaps a red herring to distract from an infinitely more disturbing story of homegrown corruption and malfeasance.

Something of this sort is indeed implied by Coleen Rowley's thought-provoking Consortiumnews.com essay "McCabe: a War on (or in) the FBI," especially her reminder that  "both presidential campaigns (were) under under serious criminal investigation in the weeks before the 2016 election."

Certainly both candidates have been linked to organized crime in ways that -- including even the Democratic (sic) Party's Geraldine Ferraro fiasco in 1984* -- have no precedent in my lifetime, which began in 1940 and includes 30 years on daily and weekly newspapers and monthly international trade journals.

For a revealing trip through a genuinely astounding number of under-reported or suppressed stories, merely Google, without the quotation marks here grammatically mandated for clarity, "trump mafia connections"; "clinton mafia connections"; and "clinton dixie mafia connections."

The Trump material contains a BillMoyers.com report by Todd Gitlin that questions why allegations of Trump's criminal connections are so often suppressed or at best downplayed. This Google anthology also includes a wealth of other damning reports.

While the Clinton material is mostly from rightist sources -- which means it should be carefully fact-checked rather than discarded out of hand -- I found three bits of gold amidst the dross. One was published by The Progressive Review on 17 December 2017, "The Clinton stories the media didn't cover" (caps and lower case as in original). The second appeared in The (NY) Daily News of 30 October 2016, "Bill and Hillary Clinton lead diabolical, influence-peddling organized crime syndicate, FBI's former NYC boss says" (caps and lc as in original). The third, a sort of overview of the Empire as a global crime syndicate, is "The Bush-Clinton Mafia," in Counterpunch on 16 March 2015.

Thus my "Russiagate" conjecture: that it is a fake scandal behind which is concealed what is perhaps the most diabolical, most terrifying, most potentially apocalyptic scandal in our species' history -- that of an entire empire become nothing more than the loot-collector (aka "bag man") for organized crime.

 
Indeed the application of Occam's Razor suggests this is the one most likely explanation of the myriad horrors that have befallen us all.

(To read the rest and see the photograph, go here.) 

Weekend Update 17/3/18: Notes on Our Epidemic of Violence

"The Republicans and Democrats alike ignore the underlying causes of school violence—unprecedented social inequality, unending war, the consequences of the militarization of society and the defunding of education and social programs—because a serious examination of the roots of this social phenomenon would expose their own role in creating the social crisis out of which it has developed." Comment: a vital, thought-provoking socio-ecomomic analysis that (correctly) blames Capitalism for USian savagery whether abroad or at home.

    

"I have never spoken with a school shooter, but I’ve talked with many teenage boys and young men who—though behaviorally nonviolent themselves—emotionally connect with the anger, alienation, and hopelessness of school shooters. Regardless of whether they received poor or excellent grades, these teenage boys and young men all tell me that high school was an oppressive experience...Cynical about virtually all societal institutions, these young people... (see) the conservatives’ religion and militarized society and liberals’ schools and shrinks (as) different faces of the same oppressive box...they have no hope that school shootings will decrease because all they hear in the news are authorities’ ideas about how better to control them."  Comment: an essay by a psychologist, vital because it that expands on and thereby authenticates the socio-economic analysis in the preceding essay. 

"While seldom acknowledged, students have a right to engage in political dissent and, more significantly, the entitlement to an education that nurtures their ability to do so." But more importantly see:  "There is no way anyone could object to something so necessary and relevant. Unless, of course, Black people do it." Comment: as noted before, the racism and class warfare implicit in the wildly varying coverage given school shootings is as revealing as the atrocities themselves.   

          

"Farm worker parents of six children die in car crash while fleeing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents...The future of the children remains uncertain."

        

"The (Denver) Post is just the most recent outlet owned by 'vulture' hedge fund Alden Global Capital to face the ax. Alden controls Digital First Media, the country’s second largest newspaper chain, which has a pattern of gutting newsrooms and selling off valuable office space to squeeze profit from the industry." Comment: given the deadliness that defines the U.S. economy, the forthcoming layoffs will send many of its victims to their graves.

"Teachers in Puerto Rico are planning a one-day strike on Monday, 19 March, to protest...

(To read the rest, go here.)