Glenn Greenwald finds a tree missing, declares no forest exists!

Glenn Greenwald made it quite clear in The Intercept, Sunday, 8 July 2018, that he is very upset that Malcolm Nance told MSNBC viewers: “Jill Stein has a show on Russia Today.” If Nance had told viewers it seemed like Jill Stein had a show on Russia Today during the 2016 campaign season, Greenwald would have had nothing to complain about. Greenwald's complaint was:

On August 20, 2016, weekend host Joy Reid asked Nance about the supposed “affinity” for Russia harbored by Jill Stein supporters. In response, Nance told MSNBC viewers: “Jill Stein has a show on Russia Today.” You can still watch the video of this claim here on MSNBC’s own website or see it here.

Greenwald went on to say:

Whatever your views might be about Stein and her third-party candidacy, there is no disputing the fact that Nance’s statement was a falsehood, a fabrication, a lie. Stein did not have a show on RT, nor did she ever host a show on RT. What Nance said was made up out of whole cloth — fabricated —

He appears to have caught Nance in a technical detail that depends on how "show" and "host" is defined, all while Greenwald ignores the organizational differences between Russia Today and RT. If Nance had instead put it the way the Moscow Project described the relationship, Greenwald's complaint would have been muted. It said [my bold]:

Stein regularly appeared on Russia's state-run television network RT, including as counterprogramming to mainstream network coverage of important events such as the general-election debates and election night itself.

Greenward is silent about the very real support and exposure this US presidential campaign did receive from RT, even though the candidate herself has said:

"We look to RT for access to the American public."

While Jill Stein, as a US presidential candidate, technically may not have had her own show on RT, she was a frequent guest on so many RT shows, and Jill Stein campaign events covered so regularly, that a casual observer might think that it was as if she had her own show.

For example, by early August 2016, about the same time as Greenwald's original complaint, US Green Party supporter Louis Proyect claimed RT.com "has published 105 articles in praise of Jill Stein." In June 2017, I wrote:

A search on YouTube for "rt america jill stein" turns up "About 5,570 results," 2,750 in the past year, and RT/America averages more than 5,700,000 views a month on YouTube alone! RT/America is just 1 of the 88 members of RussiaToday [note the parent YouTube organization has not changed its name], which in total get an average of more than 133 million monthly views on YouTube. RT is another member of this family with mostly English content, and favorable to Jill Stein, that has an average monthly viewership of more than 28 million, Ruptly TV is a third Jill Stein fan brand with more than 14 million monthly viewers.

These are all professionally produced videos, and they aren't cheap to produce, so even though YouTube pays Russia Today as much as $274,000 a year for those views on RT/America alone, sustaining the channel has to be costing the Kremlin millions, but since RT has an annual budget of over $300 million, it is still small potatoes to them.

There have been over 190,000 views in the top 10 of those 2,750 RT/America videos supporting Jill Stein's candidacy. The view totals for all those videos is likely to range into the tens of millions. Taking just this one example of RT videos for Jill Stein and extrapolating that across all RT platforms, which in the US include cable, satellite, and broadcast TV, radio and all social media, not just YouTube, but facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well, it's easy to conclude that since the Jill Stein campaign only raised $3,713,170, Putin probably spent more on the Jill Stein campaign than the campaign spent on itself. If this is true, it means that votes for a US presidential candidate supported largely by Russian resources put Donald Trump in the White House.

So while Jill Stein may not have had a regularly scheduled "show" on RT, clearly the network was spending a lot of money and "airtime" on regularly giving her a platform. Casey Michel, Daily Beast, had this to say about the cozy relationship between RT and Jill Stein:

In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. {The Steele Dossier says the Kremlin did.~Clay}  Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

And Michel added,

For her efforts in burnishing Kremlin conspiracy theories for American audiences, Stein was awarded not simply with an invitation to the 2015 RT gala, but RT even hosted her party’s 2016 presidential debate {so they hosted her show even if she never hosted a show for them.~Clay}—a move Stein hailed as a “step towards real democracy.” RT also covered “live updates” from Stein’s reactions to the debates between Clinton and Trump, a decision Stein further praised. This mutual affection is, naturally, of a piece with RT’s broader modus operandi in the U.S.

This broader modus operandi involved getting Donald Trump elected president of the United States. Those on the US white-Left who belittled Trump's racism to declare him the lesser of two evils, and this includes Glenn Greenwald, were the witting, or unwitting, tools of this successful Putin operation. Their promotion of Jill Stein to progressives, and others likely to otherwise vote for Hillary Clinton, was an indispensable part of Putin's overall strategy to get Trump elected. To accomplish that, Russia Today gave Jill Stein much more that a weekly "show" of support; it gave her more-or-less continuous coverage across all media platforms.

In return, she pushed the Putin line in her US presidential campaign. She had no chance of winning, but she could certainly do that for him. As Casey Michel pointed out in a piece for the Intersection Project:

Not only has Stein, on multiple instances, pushed links to - and her own appearances on - RT, but she has further taken the platform to espousing some of the most blinkered views on Washington-Moscow relations. To wit, in April, Stein asked: “Who exactly is NATO fighting? ...Other than enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff.” A few weeks prior, she derisively referred to Ukraine’s EuroMaidan revolution as “regime change.” Then, for good measure, she took to Twitter in July to note that “if Bill Clinton hadn't had Larry Summers destroy Russia's economy & turn democracy to oligarchy, US-Russia relations would be better.”

But it’s not simply Stein’s Twitter feed that’s allowed her to hew closely to the Kremlin’s talking points. In myriad interviews, Stein has pushed views that could have been lifted from Russian state media - and often are. For instance, in an interview with OnTheIssues, Stein claimed that the US “foment[ed] a coup” in Ukraine, allowing “ultra-nationalists and ex-Nazis [to come] to power.” Stein further insisted that the US “should encourage Ukraine to be neutral,” and that “NATO has pursued a policy of basically encircling Russia,” as if Russia remains the lone post-Soviet state with any agency. She has additionally described Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s “saber-rattling against Russia” as an “existential threat to human survival,” and that Clinton will - not may, but will - “take [the US] into an air war with Russia[.]”

Now instead we have Donald Trump demanding that NATO countries more than double their military spending. He has already started a trade war and is aching to start a nuclear war somewhere. So much for the white-Left's "Peace Candidate."

The website RT.com also played a big role in promoting the Jill Stein campaign. The eight images below represent just a tiny sample of the "About 416 results" Google finds for a search for "Jill Stein" on RT.com:

8/11/2016	8/11/2016
2/11/2016	26/10/2016
20/10/2016	4/10/2016
27/9/2016	3/9/2016

Glenn Greenwald is so full of righteous indignation because he accepts RT's contractual definition of what it means to have a "show" on RT, and he thinks that because of that he can call out Malcolm Nance and Joy Reid as lairs and MSNBC as "fake news." At the same time, anyone reading one of his diatribes on this gripe in The Intercept would have no clue just how regularly Jill Stein appeared on, or was promoted by, RT. It is entirely possible, indeed preferable, to defend a technical fact while perpetrating a gross falsification. That is what Glenn Greenwald is doing in this case.

👇🏽 READ: Glen Greenwald shows his true colors as an agent of Trump & Moscow. now we know why he helped Snowden defect, covers for Wikileaks attack on Democracy & shills for Fox News. He’s deep in the Kremlin pocket. https://t.co/GXW07PmXFo

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) July 7, 2018

my other posts correcting Glenn Greenwald:
07/17/17 Attorney Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald joins Trump defense team
01/06/17 Glenn Greenwald runs off at the mouth about Breitbart without ever mentioning racism
02/16/15 Libya: Hailed as a Model Journalist Glenn Greenwald Proves to be the Exact Opposite
10/03/14 Why did Glenn Greenwald moderated this comment off The Intercept?

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for our posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of our other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of our other blogs on Libya

Did @DrJillStein collude with Putin to elect Trump?

Jill Stein in Moscow, December 2015

Sunday, on ABC News This Week with George Stephanopoulos‎, Senator Michael Lee twice emphatically stated:

There is no evidence of collusion between Russia and any presidential campaign.

Since, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Lee has expanded the question of Russian collusion beyond the Trump campaign to all the US president campaigns, maybe they should be investigating Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to see if she coordinated with agencies controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.

This is not an insignificant question. We know that Jill Stein supporters in just three states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, put Donald Trump in the White House when they casted a symbolic vote for Jill Stein, rather that voting to stop a white nationalist Putin fanboy from coming to power.

This data is from Politico [updated 22 Nov. 2016 - PA updated 2 Dec from http://www.electionreturns.pa.gov/ ] :

Candidate	Count	%	Michigan [16]	Wisconsin [10]	Pennsylvania [20]
Donald Trump	61,201,031	47%	2,279,805	1,409,467	2,955,671
Hillary Clinton	62,523,126	48%	2,268,193	1,382,210	2,906,128
Difference			11,612	27,257	49,543
Jill Stein	802,119	0.7%	50,700	30,980	49,678

Some observers will complain that it's unfair to say Jill Stein gave the election to Donald Trump because there were so many factors that contributed to his victory: Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate, in both senses; there were the Wikileaks dumps, and James Comey's contributions. This is also true, but the bottomline is that Donald Trump only won the presidency by a hair. In point-of-fact, he lost the popular vote, and only 88,412 votes in three strategic states gave him the electoral victory, so every straw bears the weight of the camel's broken back. If Jill Stein had withdrawn her candidacy, and recommended a vote against Trump, he wouldn't be president now. If the US Greens had adopted the recommendation of European and Russian Greens, he wouldn't be president now. Remember that in the wars to come.

We know that the Jill Stein campaign received support from the Trump campaign:

Although the extent of that support is still unknown; the reason for it is clear. The Trump campaign was trying to elect Donald Trump president and they knew every vote for Jill Stein put them closer to that goal. Putin must have been thinking the same thing. He knew as well as Sean Spicer that a snowball had a better chance of surviving Hell, than Jill Stein had of becoming president, but he also knew, as did the Republican strategists, that Jill Stein was winning votes from Hillary Clinton to a far, far greater extent than she was taking them from Donald Trump.

She didn't even try to win votes from Trump, or focus much fire on him. This should surprize those with a simplistic "Left-Right" view of our politics. In fact, she generally made the argument that Trump was actually the lesser of two evils with regards to military aggression and the war danger.  This is an area in which US Green Party propaganda has been tragically misleading, with new deaths caused by US soldiers under Trump's command in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Philippines. More than a thousand civilians were killed by US actions in March alone in Iraq and Syria.

Of her 10 December 2015 meeting with Putin, the US Green Party said:

Stein attended a dinner Thursday night, sitting at the table with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "While the objective of that dinner was not to engage in serious discussions, Putin did appear to respond in his formal remarks to the call for greater dialogue and collaboration made by myself and three other political figures on the foreign policy panel earlier that day."

Putin noted, "What I would like to say, something really unexpected, when I was watching this material. When I was listening to your comments, politicians from other countries, you know what I caught myself thinking about? I agree with them, on many issues."

Of course Putin agreed with many of the speakers at the gala, but the "unexpected" part was a lie; he had paid them to be there, according to multiple sources.

Stein continued, "Tomorrow I will meet with the foreign affairs chair of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, to explore whether Russia would be receptive to a more collaborative approach to foreign policy that I have been talking about in my presidential campaign."

Some reports say the US is now killing more civilians than Russia, which is saying a lot, is that the "more collaborative approach to foreign policy" that Jill Stein was seeking?

Jill Stein at dinner with Putin and Trump campaign representative Michael Flynn

After her Moscow trip, two Russian environmental activists, Yevgenia Chirikova and Nadezhda Kutepova, criticised her visit and her support for Putin, as reported by RadioFreeEurope:

Russian Environmentalists Slam U.S. Green Party Candidate For Putin Comments
By Mike Eckel
6 September 2016
Two prominent Russian Greens have criticized the presidential candidate for the U.S. Green Party, saying her positions on President Vladimir Putin and his policies are “deeply shocking.”
...
In the letter posted to Chirikova’s Facebook page on September 6, the two activists disparaged Stein for a visit to Moscow last year in which she appeared at a forum sponsored by the state-run satellite television channel Russia Today, now known as RT.
...
A news release posted on Stein’s campaign website highlighted her attendance and her calls for more cooperation between Washington and Moscow, particularly regarding the five-year civil war in Syria. The statement closely echoes comments voiced by the Kremlin and Russian officials about U.S. policies in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. More...

On her facebook page Chirikova posted:

As environmentalists and human rights defenders, we often support Green candidates all over the world when they run for local, national or continental election. However, we are asking ourselves if we can support your candidature for the Presidency of the United States of America. We have carefully read your program and your website and we have to admit that we are deeply shocked by the position you expressed during your visit to Moscow and your meeting with Mr. Vladimir Putin.
...
After your visit to Moscow and your meeting with Vladimir Putin you said that “the world deserve[s] a new commitment to collaborative dialogue between our governments to avert disastrous wars for geopolitical domination, destruction of the climate, and cascading injustices that promote violence and terrorism.” We agree with you. But how can this new “collaborative dialogue” be possible when Mr. Putin has deliberately built a system based on corruption, injustice, falsification of elections, and violation of human rights and international law? How is it possible to have a discussion with Mr. Putin and not mention, not even once, the fate of Russian political prisoners, or the attacks against Russian journalists, artists, and environmentalists? Is it fair to speak with him about “geopolitics” and not mention new Russian laws against freedom of speech, restrictions on NGOs and activists, or the shameful law that forbids “homosexual propaganda”?

By silencing Putin’s crimes you are silencing our struggle. By shaking his hand and failing to criticize his regime you are becoming his accomplice. By forgetting what international solidarity means you are insulting the Russian environmental movement.

Dr. Stein, you still have several weeks before the elections in order to clarify your position on the anti-democratic and anti-environmental elements of Putin’s regime. We sincerely hope that our voices will be heard and that our questions will not go unanswered.

Best regards,
Evgeniya Chirikova
Nadezda Kutepova

Other European Greens also saw problems with the Stein's coziness with Putin. In an article titled Foreign Greens Think the US Green Party Needs to Ditch Jill Stein, published by Vice the day before the vote, Mike Pearl reported:

"Some of the points that Jill Stein makes are delusional, I have to say," Balthasar Glättli, a Green Party member of the Swiss National Council, told me. If he were in the US, he said, "personally, I wouldn't vote Stein. I would vote Hillary."

It is not a lie, #Jill, that you argued Hillary was worse on nuclear weapons than Donald. THAT IS COMPLETELY ABSURD! https://t.co/QqwSkKFs3q

— Reinhard Bütikofer (@bueti) November 2, 2016

European Green Party member Reinhard Bütikofer, who serves on the European Parliament from Germany, told me some of Stein's remarks that Clinton would be more likely to start a nuclear war than Trump left him feeling "really astonished." Bütikofer is a member of one of the parties that coordinate internationally with the US Greens via a loose affiliation known as the Global Greens, but he described an overall need for the American Green Party to get more sensible.

In an attempt to excuse this US Green Party support for Putin and Jill Stein's attendance at the RT 10th anniversary gala, Louis Proyect, the unrepentant Marxist and Jill Stein supporter, wrote that as of 10 August 2016:

With respect to RT.com, it has published 105 articles in praise of Jill Stein so naturally she might have accepted an invitation to their conference.

So this Green Party supporter justifies Jill Stein's support for RT as a kind of quid pro quo. Why does he think Moscow was supporting Jill Stein in the first place? They certainly didn't think she could win.

The dossier compiled by ex-spy Christopher Steele about Trump's connection to Russia mentions Jill Stein and gives us Moscow's rationale behind the dinner with Putin:

Educated US youth to be targeted as protest (against CLINTON) and swing vote in attempt to turn them over to TRUMP
....
Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn), and funding their recent visits to Moscow

Since then, Michael Flynn has been forced to admit that he was paid $45,000, plus perks, by Russia for his attendance at the RT event. The Steele dossier says that Jill Stein was also paid by Russia for her attendance, but she has so far remained silent on this subject.

In its "Details" section, the Steele dossier associates Jill Stein with two other Americans that are currently being investigated for their suspicious ties to Putin, Michael Flynn and Carter Page, and puts her in the overall context of "the Russian operation":

4. Speaking separately, also in early August 2016, a Kremlin official involved in US relations commented on aspects of the Russian operation to date. Its goals had been threefold - asking sympathetic US actors how Moscow could help them, - gathering relevant intelligence; and creating and disseminating compromising information ("kompromat"). This had involved the Kremlin supporting various US political figures, including funding indirectly their recent visits to Moscow. S/he named a delegation from Lyndon LAROUCHE; presidential candidate Jill STEIN of the Green Party; TRUMP foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE and former DIA Director Michael Flynn, in this regard and as successful in terms of perceived outcomes.

I'll bet. They got their guy in the White House.

With regards to that "asking sympathetic US actors how Moscow could help them," I wonder if they approached Democracy Now, and what Amy Goodman's response was? Or did they feel they were already getting pretty much what they wanted without the additional expenditure?

Oliver Stone says to Putin in his new fanboy "Why would he lie?" interview that if Putin expressed a preference in the US presidential campaign, that candidate would go down in the polls, as he gives the thumbs down sign and Putin nods in agreement. Just as Sean Spicer knew that he could only go so far in his open support for Jill Stein without raising eyebrows, Putin knew that his open support for Donald Trump was not likely to help their common cause. He could, however, openly support Jill Stein as the radical alternative to Hillary Clinton to the tune of tens of millions of dollars through his Russian propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik, and although a search for "Jill Stein" on the Sputnik website turns up 174 hits, Putin expressed his support for the Jill Stein assault on Hillary Clinton most directly and effectively through his main English language propaganda instruments RT and RT/America, formerly named and more generally known as Russia Today.

Mediaite says about RT:

RT, however, is not cool. Far from some quirky left-wing media company, it is fully the mouthpiece of the Russian government. Formerly just Russia Today, its outlets and subsidiaries around the world regularly spew 21st century agitprop with the express aim of advancing Russia’s strategic interests.

Sara Firth was a London based RT correspondent that decided to stop selling herself for Putin, and told the world on Twitter:

The 6 January report from Director of National Intelligence “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” when into some detail about RT:

RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties. The rapid expansion of RT's operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT's leadership point to the channel's importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest. The Kremlin has committed significant resources to expanding the channel's reach, particularly its social media footprint. A reliable UK report states that RT recently was the most-watched foreign news channel in the UK. RT America has positioned itself as a domestic US channel and has deliberately sought to obscure any legal ties to the Russian Government.

It tries to position itself as an alternative to mainstream media, as if the prefered alternative to neoliberalism is fascism.

The Kremlin staffs RT and closely supervises RT's coverage, recruiting people who can
convey Russian strategic messaging because of their ideological beliefs.

It certainly was single-minded in its support for Jill Stein in the US presidential race.

According to [RT editor-in-chief] Simonyan, the Russian Government sets rating and viewership requirements for RT and, "since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state." According to [ parent company TV-Novosti director] Nikolov, RT news stories are written and edited "to become news" exclusively in RT's Moscow office (Dozhd TV, 11 July; AKT, 4 October).

It is Putin's propaganda arm; there shouldn't be any confusion about that.

According to RT management, RT's website receives at least 500,000 unique viewers every day. Since its inception in 2005, RT videos received more than 800 million views on YouTube (1 million views per day), which is the highest among news outlets (see graphics for comparison with other news channels) (AKT, 4 October)

The Russian propagandists really excel in their use of cyberspace. Their use of python AI bots has changed the political landscape of social media.

According to Simonyan, RT uses social media to expand the reach of its political reporting and uses well-trained people to monitor public opinion in social media commentaries (Kommersant, 29 September)

According to Nikolov, RT requires its hosts to have social media accounts, in part because social media allows the distribution of content that would not be allowed on television (Newreporter.org, 11 October)

One can only wonder how much of the RT budget of 2016 went towards promoting Jill Stein? Even 1.25% of the estimated $300 million the Kremlin spent in production and distribution for RT that year would have eclipsed Jill Stein's own campaign expenditures.

The Kremlin spends $190 million a year on the distribution and dissemination of RT programming, focusing on hotels and satellite, terrestrial, and cable broadcasting.

In addition to the Internet, RT has a large TV following.

RT states on its website that it can reach more than 550 million people worldwide and 85 million people in the United States; however, it does not publicize its actual US audience numbers (RT,10 December).

While most domestic US news networks like CNN, MSNBC and FoxNews must sell advertising to pay expenses and make money, the Russian government pays for all of RT's expenses. It is the Infomercial model turned into a "news network." BBC, Al Jazeera and France24 are all similarly situated, and while they all reported on the US election, none of them so actively promoted a single US presidential candidate.

Only one other major news outlet, Fox News, was so singlemindedly dedicated to the promotion of one candidate in the last US presidential election. At least Fox News is a US media company and spoke honestly about who they wanted to win. Putin backed the same candidate as Fox News; he did it by backing a loser as a spoiler.

If, after taking into account depreciation and inflation, a picture is still worth a thousand words, this graphic from the DNI report speaks volumes about the Russian social media footprint that was put at the service of the Jill Stein campaign:

According to the report, the Russian state is trying to hide behind a mask.

RT America formally disassociates itself from the Russian Government by using a Moscow-based autonomous nonprofit organization to finance its US operations. According to RT's leadership, this structure was set up to avoid the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to facilitate licensing abroad. In addition, RT rebranded itself in 2008 to deemphasize its Russian origin.

So RT America can disguise its foreign meddling in US elections as just another US corporate play.

RT hires or makes contractual agreements with Westerners with views that fit its agenda and airs them on RT.

Full Disclosure: I entered into a lucrative license deal with RT that allowed it to broadcast my film, Vietnam: American Holocaust on virtually all media for one year. When you do a contract with RT it gets very complicated, but it also becomes clear pretty quickly that it is really the Russian government that is calling the shots; the contract is made with TV-Novosti.

A case study: RT support for the Jill Stein campaign on YouTube

A search on YouTube for "rt america jill stein" turns up "About 5,570 results," 2,750 in the past year, and RT/America averages more than 5,700,000 views a month on YouTube alone! RT/America is just 1 of the 88 members of RussiaToday [note the parent YouTube organization has not changed its name], which in total get an average of more than 133 million monthly views on YouTube. RT is another member of this family with mostly English content, and favorable to Jill Stein, that has an average monthly viewership of more than 28 million, Ruptly TV is a third Jill Stein fan brand with more than 14 million monthly viewers.

These are all professionally produced videos, and they aren't cheap to produce, so even though YouTube pays Russia Today as much as $274,000 a year for those views on RT/America alone, sustaining the channel has to be costing the Kremlin millions, but since RT has an annual budget of over $300 million, it is still small potatoes to them.

There have been over 190,000 views in the top 10 of those 2,750 RT/America videos supporting Jill Stein's candidacy. The view totals for all those videos is likely to range into the tens of millions. Taking just this one example of RT videos for Jill Stein and extrapolating that across all RT platforms, which in the US include cable, satellite, and broadcast TV, radio and all social media, not just YouTube, but facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well, it's easy to conclude that since the Jill Stein campaign only raised $3,713,170, Putin probably spent more on the Jill Stein campaign than the campaign spent on itself. If this is true, it means that votes for a US presidential candidate supported largely by Russian resources put Donald Trump in the White House.

Jill Stein admitted:

"We look to RT for access to the American public."

The website RT.com also played a big role in promoting the Jill Stein campaign. The eight images below represent just a tiny sample of the "About 416 results" Google finds for a search for "Jill Stein" on RT.com:

8/11/2016	8/11/2016
2/11/2016	26/10/2016
20/10/2016	4/10/2016
27/9/2016	3/9/2016

Post-election

Jill Stein has been as resolute as Donald Trump in not criticizing Putin, and everything she did during the election and since served Putin's strategic interests. Even her much hyped recount efforts in the three states she gave to Trump served to create doubt about the very voting systems the Russians failed to hack, while distracting our attention away from the "in your face" way that she has been an instrument of Russian influence in the US election. Her Putin promoted propaganda went a long ways towards convincing the American voters to elect the greater of the two evils.

One last question:

If Sean Spicer tweets Jill Stein, and she likes it, is that collusion?

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

How Tarqi Ali helped elect Trump

Formerly titled "Help me, Tarqi Ali"

Tarqi Ali is a well known "anti-imperialist"  British political commentator. Although Tarqi Ali is not a United States citizen, that didn't stop him from campaigning in the 2016 US presidential election, and because he is well known, and in certain quarters, well regarded, his campaigning was very beneficial to Donald Trump. In the runup to the US presidential election, Tarqi Ali argued that American voters should vote for Jill Stein or not vote at all. He even argued that with regards to US foreign military aggression, Trump was the lesser evil of the two contenders. Since this was a message directed at progressives, not Trump supporters, it had the effect of suppressing the vote for Hillary Clinton. As we have shown earlier, the vote for Jill Stein in just three states made the difference between President Trump and President Clinton. This headline, which Google finds about 147 times, meaning the piece was widely republished, makes his basic argument:

Tariq Ali considers the US election campaign and asks, is Trump is any worse than Clinton? Is this a case of electing the lesser of two evils, or is there another option?

Tarqi Ali - US 2016: Trump or Hillary? | 12 Oct 2016

Below are some excerpts I have transcribed in chronological order from this 12th of October pre-election performance, together with my comments:

People in different parts of the world increasingly feel that it will make no difference who is elected president of the United States as far as the world is concerned.

Unfortunately, it already appears that it is going to make a great deal of difference to people in many parts of the world that Donald Trump has been elected president of the US, and far from being indifferent to America's choice, they are scratching their heads in horror at it, a choice Ali encouraged.

What is annoying about the campaign is the way Trump has been completely demonized, 

This is rich! Remember the emails? Classified material on a private server! Oh the horror! Somehow, that and getting an early look at the debate questions seems like small potatoes now.

There were certainly strong undertones of racism from the Clintons when Obama was running for the presidency

While Tarqi Ali did acknowledge that Trump is "bigoted" towards Latinos, the way Nixon was towards African Americans (implying Trump isn't??), he never mentions the worldwide alt-right white nationalist movement that Trump is a part of, as is Putin and Le Pen, or his ties to Breitbart and the white supremacist leaders that he has since brought into the White House.

Politicians assume that the people have lost their memories. They think people no longer remember what was done.

This one is choice, given the context, because I certainly haven't lost mine. The whole point of this post is to remind everyone how Tarqi Ali shilled for Trump before 8 November, now that he has a new act and has brought it to Democracy Now.

Finally we get to his pitch of Trump as the lesser evil:

On the two key issues, NAFTA and war, whether we like it or not, Trump has got a slightly different position. On NAFTA, he says that under him they're going to get rid of it, and on wars he is saying he is less of a warmonger than Hillary is, and he's attacked the American military establishment, not by name but by saying these military maneuvers carried out on the Russia borders is a provocation. Well, that is something these days when the entire western media is screaming that the rogue in Eastern Europe and the periphery is Putin.

Facts are stubborn things, Tarqi. Putin is the rogue in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and also Syria. That is why the entire non-Putin press says so. As for Trump's alleged strong points, NAFTA and war, we are still in the adolescence of his presidency and we can already see how wrong Ali was. Trump has announced that NAFTA can stay "for now." As for war, we already have a lot more war, with increased activity, and new troop deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, and the use of new and more powerful weapons; With the promise of a lot more to come, with Trump's saber rattling and posturing all over the globe, especially with regards to Iran and North Korea. Clearly he wants war badly, and needs the diversion given his domestic troubles, and I'm afraid we shall soon have it. This recent piece from Military.com is a sign of the times:

New Details on Surprise Deployment as More Soldiers Head to War

U.S. soldiers board a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter in Hamam al-Alil, Iraq, Feb. 22, 2017. (U.S. Army photo/Jason Hull)

29 Mar 2017
by Matthew Cox

Amid additional announcements of Army troop deployments, the Pentagon on Wednesday released new details behind the recent surprise deployment of about 200 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to Iraq. More...

And now back to Ali:

If Hillary Clinton is elected it will be business as usual...If Trump is elected, well, we don't know what he's going to do, whether he will pull back American troops from different parts of the world, as he has promised, whether he will break the NAFTA agreements with neighboring countries. He could easily carry on in the same old way.

Or he could be much worst. That was foremost in the minds of those who voted for the lesser evil. Most knew Hillary Clinton meant "business as usual." They weren't stupid. They thought that would be better than Trump, and they were right. Right now "business as usual," meaning the past eight years, doesn't seem that bad, and I fear we ain't seen nothing yet, because it's going to prove very difficult to get these fools out of power now. The tragedy is that Trump almost certainly could have been defeated had the "Left" led by people like Ali et al, made defeating him a priority, which they didn't.

Every time there is an election in the United States the argument comes up who is the lesser evil? It's the politics of lesser-evilism that dominate American politics. I understand that in a way because people don't want the worst candidate to win, but they always forget that in voting for the candidate that you think the lesser evil doesn't quite workout that way. 

People don't want the worst candidate to win. There is good reason for that. They don't just throw away their vote because their perfect candidate isn't running, or can't win. Smart people, I'd say. Most people, anyway.

The lesser evil is actually not that different from the other evil, the worst evil, and it's exactly the same in the current situation. There is no way in which Hillary [Clinton] could be defined as being better or more progressive than Trump, on most fundamental issues. I mean Obama himself started deporting illegal migrants from the United States, more than Bush had done. Hillary would have probably carried on that way.

I agree, Clinton (Does Ali refer to her mainly by her first name because she is a woman?) would have been as bad as Obama on illegal immigration, but Trump is much, much worst. For someone that doesn't even live in the United States, Trump's immigration policies might appear "not that different," but for millions of Dreamers and other law abiding undocumented workers in the US that now feel threatened with summary deportation at any moment, it makes a world of difference. Tarqi Ali's concern for the plight of these people is not that different from his concern for the Syrian people, which is slight.

I'm opposed to the lesser evil argument. I think if you don't agree with either candidate, you don't vote for them. If there's someone in the election, one of the minority candidates, you vote for them if you agree with them, otherwise how are things to move forward? I, myself, if I were I an American citizen, would be voting for Jill Stein.

Tarqi Ali thought that progressives should vote in a "principled" way that made them feel good, if only until the election results came in, and leave the decision as to who would actually serve as Commander-in-Chief to more backwards voters. This is the result.

You keep coming back to the question: Are either of these two candidates safe? In my opinion they're not, so better to vote for the candidate you agree with, or not bother to vote at all.

The Trump presidency is barely past the hundred day mark and already it is clear that it is the most dangerous presidency in living memory. No doubt, Hillary Clinton was the safest choice, but as we have seen, just enough progressives followed Tarqi Ali's advice to make the Trump presidency something the world must now survive, because, across the board, this white nationalist regime is putting it in greater jeopardy.

This data is from Politico [updated 22 Nov. 2016 - PA updated 2 Dec from http://www.electionreturns.pa.gov/ ]  shows how Jill Stein voters made the difference:

Candidate	Count	%	Michigan [16]	Wisconsin [10]	Pennsylvania [20]
Donald Trump	61,201,031	47%	2,279,805	1,409,467	2,955,671
Hillary Clinton	62,523,126	48%	2,268,193	1,382,210	2,906,128
Difference			11,612	27,257	49,543
Jill Stein	802,119	0.7%	50,700	30,980	49,678

A week after Trump won, Tarqi Ali proclaimed "The End of Manufactured Consent," saying:

One moment of truth in all those enraged people who vote for Trump is that they nonetheless saw clearly that this traditional machine of manufacturing consent no longer works. To put it in slightly bombastic and exaggerated Marxist terms, the ruling ideology uses, mobilizes certain machinery to keep people in check. To control the excesses and so on. That machinery no longer works.

If the Trump victory showed anything it was that the racial delusions that bind many a European American worker to the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie still work quite well. Ignoring that, he heralded the death of the party that now effectively controls all three branches of the US government:

Trump nonetheless, if you are a leftist you should admire him sincerely, he almost singlehandedly destroyed the Republican party.

It's not destroyed yet, and under Trump's leadership it is becoming more reactionary than it ever was.

Tarqi Ali was on Democracy Now on Wednesday. Probably the first time since the election, which didn't mean we were going to hear anything self-critical of his earlier position. As with most of those in the "Never Hillary" camp, he isn't interested in looking back and learning anything, or openly celebrating his victory, so after Amy Goodman plays a clip of Trump in Bethlehem, they said:

AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Trump. Tariq Ali, your response?

TARIQ ALI: Well, the response is fairly straightforward, Amy, that innocents are being killed by United States policies in different parts of the world. There are seven wars going on at the moment. Trump had promised to change course, as we all know, and everyone was a bit surprised, but he’s now returned to the normal behavior of an American president. He bombed Syria. He has made friends with Saudi Arabia. It was very entertaining to see Steve Bannon, one of his advisers, you know, trapped in a collection of Arab princes and Arab diplomats in Saudi Arabia. So, it’s business as usual.

Wrong Tarqi. It's not business as usual! That's what you rejected with Hillary Clinton. She was the lesser of the two evils. This is much worst! Some of us saw this coming, and opposed Trump's power grab before the election.  Everyone wasn't a bit surprised that Trump has turned out to be a bigger warmonger and a much greater evil than Barack Obama was, or Hillary Clinton would have been. Were you being naive or disingenuous in expecting The Donald to fulfill his promises? Also some of us don't find it at all entertaining to see a well known white nationalist like Steve Bannon inside the White House and so close to the president that he goes on foreign trips with him. Nor are we entertained by the presences of Stephen Miller, the white supremacist that wrote both Trump's Muslim ban and his Saudi speech, or the whole Putin connected white nationalist cabal that you helped to win state power.

But since you were such a strong Jill Stein supporter, perhaps you can help us answer this enduring mystery: Looking at the picture below, we see two Americans dining with Russian President Vladimir Putin and friends. Both of these Americans represented US presidential candidates Putin supported. One had absolutely no chance of winning. That was Jill Stein and she represented herself. Although she had no chance of winning, Putin supported her candidacy strongly through RT.com and other media outlets he has control or influence over like Democracy Now, because she would take away votes from the candidate Putin was backing to win. Like Julian Assange, who played frontman for the Russian hacks, and made a video appearance at this event, Donald Trump couldn't make a personal appearance either. Instead we have Mike Flynn, who was there representing the Trump campaign. We now know that one of these Americans was paid big bucks to sit at this table. That was Mike Flynn. Tarqi Ali, since you were such an active Jill Stein supporter, I'm hoping you can help us find out if she was paid, and if so how much? You see, I'm wondering if I can add a charge of sexual discrimination in the payment of foreign agents to the long list of crimes I already demonize Putin for.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

Since Khan Sheikhoun: Murders holocaust enablers don't argue about

Thousands of Syrian civilians have been murdered by the Assad Regime since the sarin attack that killed 92 in Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017. While a debate has raged in the West over the responsibility for those sarin murders on that particular day, the regime and its Russian masters have continued their grisly work of suppressing the freedom struggle of the Syrian people through the application of maximum violence.

Linux Beach has been very involved in this debate around the responsibility for those 92 deaths. Even today we are introducing a new page, Linux Beach Goes Postol, to bring together our most recent posts on that subject. But also today, we would like to take a step back from the technical discussions surrounding the facts of what happened on the morning of 4 April 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun, to take in the broader picture and better explain why we call those on the other side of this debate holocaust enablers.

Leading Veterans for Peace member Ray McGovern is one such holocaust enabler. My his own account he has "been working with Russia for the past 55 years." Through the good times and bad, you might say. He also heads a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity [VIPS] which has generally been quiet on Syrian atrocities, but did come out strongly questioning Assad's responsibility for the sarin murders in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, and again for the sarin murders of 4 April 2017. Both now and then they have relied on Postol's proofs in their defense of Assad.

Before I started writing in support of the Syrian Revolution, I produced and directed a documentary film, Vietnam: American Holocaust. I even got Martin Sheen involved with the project. I got a lot of flack for calling it a holocaust. So did he. It came from those that would recognize only one holocaust, and they capitalize [on] it. I called it a holocaust because more than three million people were brutally slaughtered. With a half-million dead and counting, I call the Syrian conflict a holocaust in the making for the same reason.

I didn't call it "South Vietnamese holocaust" because I didn't buy the US government mythology that they were just helping the government of a small third world country besieged by powerful outside forces at that lawful government's invitation. I knew damn well it was America that was calling the shots, and responsible for the bulk of the killing. Moscow claimed to have all of Syria's chemical weapons under control in December 2012. For years now, they have been the most powerful military force operating in Syria, and have had command and control of all pro-Assad forces. This is Putin's holocaust. It is extremely unlikely that this most recent sarin attack, and even the ones that took place in 2013, took place without his authorization.

In the "It's a Small World Afterall" Department, below we have Ray McGovern questioning ex-General Mike Flynn in Moscow about the Ghouta attack of 21 August 2013:

VFP member Ray McGovern questions Mike Flynn in Moscow about Ghouta Attack

Published on Apr 16, 2017
Gen. Michael Flynn answering a question about Syria in December, 2015 prior to joining the Trump team.

Although this wasn't published until after the Khan Sheikhoun sarin attack, this discussion took place in December 2015. It must have been at the gala RT.com 10th Anniversary event to which saw so many connected to Putin and last years US election make an appearance. In addition to those at the table with him, apparently Ray McGovern was there. Julian Assange even made a video appearance. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting Jill Stein to run for president.



One of the things I find most interesting about Ray McGovern's and Mike Flynn's discussion is how they just referred to it as "the Ghouta attack" when they are referring exclusively to the sarin attack of 21 August 2013, as if the Damascus opposition suburb wasn't bombed before that, or since. This is central to their role as holocaust enablers. By focusing on Assad's guilt or innocence in the case of a few chemical attacks, they obscure the day-to-day barrel bombing that is doing much more of the killing, and for which Putin is decidedly responsible, or the bodies being cremated in Assad's death camps. Because if they were to speak accurately about "the Ghouta attack" as a singularity, they could only be referring to the state of siege that community has been under since 2012, and continues to this day, as the videos below makes clear, even while we continue to argue about who was responsible for the 92 deaths on 4 April by sarin:

These air strikes on Ghouta two weeks after the latest sarin massacre have not been the subject of debate with regards to causality in the US. This is the way it goes for the day to day killing carried on by the regime and Russia. Since no one in the West cares about barrel bombs, the holocaust enablers don't need to try to peddle stories about rebels setting off barrel-bombs in the street just when helicopters fly by.

Airstrikes on Harasta in Eastern Ghouta, Damascus a month ago

Published on Apr 18, 2017
bombardamenti dell'esercito siriano ai danni dei ribelli a Damasco

As this video makes clear, this community has been under siege since 2012. Many thousands have died and still the people refuse to submit to the regime:

Eastern Ghouta Under Siege الغوطة حصار الموت

Published on Apr 29, 2017
Eastern Ghouta left to die

A month after the latest sarin attack, the people attacked with sarin in 2013, are still under siege and their situation is desperate. Did those who defended Assad in the case of that chemical weapons attack, and then went silent with regards to his hundreds of conventional attacks on the same community, contribute to this slaughter?

Residents of besieged Ghouta fear it is time to flee

Published on May 4, 2017
The humanitarian situation on the outskirts of the Syrian capital is worsening. The opposition stronghold of Ghouta has been repeatedly targeted by government forces, and residents now fear they may be forced to leave. Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbara reports from Gaziantep, on the Turkey-Syrian border.

The Syrian revolutionaries in Ghouta have had to fight a war on two fronts for years now. Here they are demonstrating against the jihadists, even while the Assad regime and its western contributors claim there are no revolutionaries, only jihadists:

Large scale protests against Hayyat Tahrir al Sham in Ghouta

Published on May 8, 2017
Al-Nusra and al-Qaeda in the Levant have come among us and are intruding into the Syrian Revolution.

And like the Regime, the jihadists attack the Syrian Revolution with armed violence:

Protesters shot at during demonstration in Ghouta, Syria

Published on Apr 30, 2017
Eastern Ghouta, Syria. Jaish al-Islam did the shooting according to sources. Demonstrators were protesting recent infighting between Tahrir al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. Uploaded from Liveleak.

One problem with the Syrian Revolution has always been that although it has been a true people's revolution, there has been no central leadership. Both fighting and civil organizations have developed at the local level and the struggle for unity has been a constant one.

Homs: Syrian Opposition Calls To End The Conflict In Damascus's Ghouta

Published on May 5, 2017
Syrian opposition forces in Homs countryside read a statement and called the Syrian opposition forces in Eastern Ghouta area, Rif Dimashq province to halt the fight among its groups and unite against the Syrian regime forces

Here are a couple more blog posts we have published about the brave people of Ghouta:

01/27/2015 With Left support, Assad continues to kill in East Ghouta 10/07/2013 The Courage of Ghouta in a Craven World

Sadly, the situations under Assad's control is looking more like a holocaust everyday. The Washington Post reported yesterday:

U.S. says Syria built crematorium to handle mass prisoner killings
Karen DeYoung
15 May 2017
The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday.

Thousands of executed detainees have been dumped in mass graves in recent years, said acting assistant secretary of state Stuart Jones. “What we’re assessing is that if you have that level of production of mass murder, then ­using the crematorium would . . . allow the regime to manage that number of corpses . . . without evidence.”

“We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison,” he said in a briefing for reporters. More...

#Sednaya & the int. media: this is the satellite image from March 2, 2013 showing the crematorium is already there for 4 years pic.twitter.com/ZJo1YhG9Du

— Ruud Wedding (@RuudWedding) May 16, 2017

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya