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Monday, December 19, 2016

Bana Alabed has been evacuated from Aleppo

Bana Alabed, the seven-year-old girl who has been tweeting from eastern Aleppo, has been safely evacuated. She was among the first groups out after evacuations resumed from Aleppo late on Sunday.
BBC News is reporting:
Bana Alabed, Aleppo's tweeting girl, safely evacuated

19 December 2016

Bana and her family - mother Fatemah, father and two younger brothers - were airlifted to Turkey on Monday afternoon, the BBC has been told.

The little girl joined Twitter in September, tweeting about her life in the besieged part of the city. It captured everything from the death of her friends to her attempts to live a normal life.

Along the way, she has picked up more than 325,000 followers, including JK Rowling, who sent her an electronic copy of Harry Potter to read.

'Thank you'

However, as pro-government forces began to close in on rebel-held east Aleppo, the family began to fear for their safety.

In recent days, the Twitter account had appealed for rescue.

The last tweet signed by Bana read simply: "Please save us now." More...



Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai's statement on Aleppo:
Today I feel as though I’m watching the worst of our past repeat itself.

When I look at Syria, I see the Rwandan genocide. When I read the desperate words of Bana Alabed in Aleppo, I see Anne Frank in Amsterdam.

History shows us the same children suffering, the ones we always say we surely would have helped, if only we had been there. But history does not fall from the sky, it is us who make it.

To the children under siege in Aleppo, I pray that you will get out safely. I pray that you will grow up strong, go to school and see peace in your country some day.

But prayers are not enough. We must act. The international community must do everything they can to end to this inhumane war. The Syrian regime must give safe passage to people who want to leave and allow aid workers into Aleppo to save as many lives as they can.

May God be with the children of Aleppo, even if our world leaders are not.

BBC News did an extensive piece about her in October before her life was completely destroyed:
Meet the seven-year-old girl tweeting from Aleppo

2 October 2016
By David Molloy

Seven-year-old Bana Alabed tweeted a photo a week ago, sitting at a desk with a book, her doll in the background. "Good afternoon from Aleppo," the caption read. "I'm reading to forget the war."

Aleppo, Syria's second city, has been split in two during the country's long conflict. Daily life has become a struggle for those still living there, caught in the fight between rebel and government forces.

Bana's tweets in English - helped by her mother, a teacher - are bringing fresh attention to the struggles they face in rebel-held eastern Aleppo.

In one, Bana appears with her brothers - five-year-old Mohamed, and Noor, three - with the message "drawing with the brothers before the planes come. We need peace to draw."

A short video shows the three together in a bedroom. "We will live forever together," Bana says, before laughing and hugging her brothers. More...

Bellingcat has a good piece debunking the vicious pro-Assad campaign against Bana:
Finding Bana – Proving the Existence of a 7-Year-Old Girl in Eastern Aleppo

14 December 2016
By Nick Waters
This article was written collaboratively with Bellingcat contributor Timmi Allen.

Bana Alabed is a 7 year-old girl who lives in East Aleppo. Through her broken English and simple messages alternating between fear and hope, she has become a representation of the suffering that children face every day within Syria. She is also a star on Twitter. In the three months Bana Alabed’s account has been active it has amassed 284,000 followers, including J. K. Rowling, multiple news reports and over 580 tweets. She also posted multiple videos on Periscope which show her daily life, as well as the bombing that E. Aleppo has endured. Her rapid rise to prominence has resulted in questions from some about the veracity of Bana Alabed, her account and the subject matter she covers. This report will examine the media she has posted, the context in which it is posted, and its probable veracity. Due to the possibility of Bana’s account being deleted, all the tweets we have linked to are screenshots from cached pages. More...
Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
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Sunday, December 18, 2016

General Wesley Clark & the Bruce Tanner Standard of Evidence

My Monday blog post, Save the civilians of East Aleppo, started a long email debate with one reader, Bruce Tanner about the Syrian conflict. Readers of this blog are already familiar with my POV on this question. Bruce's is decidedly different. For example, on Tuesday he wrote me:
If the Syrian government has been so savage against the people of the country, how can you explain the massive turnout for the presidential election in 2014, documented by international observers, under attacks by salafi terrorists who were doing truly indiscriminate bombardment with mortars, hell-cannon bombs, grad missiles, etc., to vote overwhelmingly for the continued administration of Assad?
Needless to say, the debate proceeded along familiar lines leading nowhere. After having denied any claim that I made in favor of the revolution, including refusing all citations from Al Jazeera simply because its from Qatar, Bruce began his last letter to me by saying what standard of proof he might be inclined to accept:
I abhor any violence against innocent civilians done by anyone, anytime. For instance, that against the civilians in Yemen currently being attacked indiscriminately with U.S. bombs while the American Air Force refuels the Saudi planes in the air.

If you have any actual evidence of deliberate attacks against Syrian civilians by their government (not including mistakes made in the course of the necessary combating of the invasion of the country by foreign-sponsored militias), I will be interested to see it. But only real, vetted evidence from sources that can be proven to exist. And of course, if there have been any such attacks, I certainly denounce them.
A half million Syrians dead and Bruce Tanner still doubts if the Assad regime has carried out any deliberate attacks against civilians! Then he goes on to repeat, at some length, his view that a legitimate Syrian government is the victim of a US regime change plot - and that's all there is to it:
Can you entertain the possibility that a decision was made, long in advance of the phony "Arab Spring" in Syria, to destabilize the country so that a puppet regime amenable to U.S./NATO/Israeli interests could be put into place? (as evidenced by this:
And the evidence that meets Bruce Tanner's high standard is that tired old 2007 Democracy Now interview in which General Wesley Clark, the fired four-star general who was the supreme allied commander of NATO during the Kosovo War, says that in 2001 an unnamed friend at the Pentagon told him he had a memo, which Wesley Clark says he never saw himself, which outlined a plan for regime change in seven countries, "starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran" in five years:


Here's a transcript:
About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don’t know." He said, "I guess they don’t know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He said—he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper, and he said, "I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the secretary of defense’s office, "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don’t show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!"
Accordings to Bruce Tanner, the Arab revolts of 2011 and the resulting revolutions in Libya and Syria didn't come from the people's struggles against their oppression but instead had their origins in a five-sided building outside of Washington, DC, and Wesley Clark has given us the evidence. For many in the fakeLeft this interview is like a talisman they can wave at anyone calling upon them to support the revolutionary struggles of the people of the Middle East and Africa. It's their ultimate proof that those people aren't even masters of their own fate, white people in the Pentagon are. If I had a dollar for every time it has been waved at me over the past five years, I could have a much richer holiday season. There must be thousands of US Leftists that think they can disprove everything we have written about MENA in hundreds of posts since 2011 simply by offering these words of Wesley Clark as their "evidence."

I really can't believe that people are still sending me this video when it's almost 2017 and about a half-million Syrians have been killed, 95% by Assad and his Russian and Iranian supporters. With all the leaks from Wikileaks, Snowden, and others since 2001, this memo which Wesley Clark was only told about, has never surfaced, and the five year plan it was alleged to have laid out was almost over in 2007 when he revealed it, nevertheless it still is being promoted as some sort of ultimate truth that justifies how the US Left has letting down the people of Libya and Syria. In listening to this video and especially in reading the transcript, one would expect that it should have discredited itself in the eyes of any thinking person long ago, but some will always find it easy to believe what makes them feel good, so I guess the job of cleaning the stables is never done.

But before we get into that, just for the purposes of review, here is the people's agency those on the fakeLeft and altRight are intent on denying, as thousands turned out to demonstrate their support for the Syrian Revolution this week, even after all they've been through to this point:

Thousands rally in Turkey over east Aleppo | 17 Dec 2016



Hero of Homs Abdel Basset Sarout Leads Protests in Idlib | 16 Dec 2016


Taking Wesley Clark's statement at face value, the claim is that in early October 2001, an unnamed general at the Pentagon showed Wesley Clark "a piece of paper," and said it was a plan to carry out regime change in seven specific Middle East and African countries in five years. Because it was classified, Clark said he refused to look at it, although he apparently didn't admonished his friend for revealing it, so Wesley Clark has never even been in a position to testify that this memo actually existed. That rests entirely on the word of one unnamed general who Wesley Clark is vouching for. He really should have looked at it for himself, classified status be damned, if he was going to talk about it in open court.

Now consider this: Of all the hackers and leakers that have rocked our world since 9/11, none have had as great an impact, or paid as great a price, as Chelsea Manning. It is said that while she had access to Pentagon and State Department files, she gave us 482,832 documents on the Iraq War, 91,000 documents on the Afghan War, and 251,287 classified State Department cables, but not the one page memo that has been reported to be the master plan of all this that followed. If one believes Wesley Clark, that piece of paper has got to be the Holy Grail of all government documents, and yet in 15 years, not a trace of it has been leaked or hacked. WikiLeaks hasn't found it, Anonymous hasn't found it, Richard Snowden doesn't have it, and yet Bruce Tanner can promote it as the evidence that the deaths happening in Aleppo today were planned by the Pentagon 15 years ago! Such utter nonsense would be laughable if conditions in the world weren't so tragic.

There is also the question of how well this alleged plan actually correlates with reality. Wesley Clark supporters say that is the point, it explains what has been happening with the Arab Spring and in Libya and Syria. But that is such a stretch. It was a five year plan "starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and back to Iran." So if it kicked off in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by over 300,000 coalition troops, we should have seen a serious effort to overthrow Assad, second on Clark's list in the next year or so, if this bold plan to carry out seven regime change operations, consecutively by 2008, was to stay on track. Obviously that is not what happened. The post 2011 events this revelation is generally proffered to explain, took place after this plan was suppose to have ended and it was the government of Libya that fell second when it was fourth on Clark's friend's list. If he was a betting tout, a lot of clients would be asking for their money back and looking elsewhere for advise.

No doubt, supporters of the conspiracy theory would explain these discrepancies, together with the fact that this five year plan in now apparently going into fourteenth year, by necessary real world revisions forced on the Pentagon. If that were the case, we could expect to have found documentation of those revisions and at least references to the original memo Wesley Clark has made famous. Where are they?

The bottom line is that there isn't anything like a shred of evidence that this memo ever existed, let alone the grand plan it is reported to have outlined. This whole story, which has gained a life of its own, rests on the words of one man. So who is Wesley Clark? This is what Murtaza Hussain said about him in The Intercept, 20 July 2015 after Wesley Clark shocked his liberal supporters by calling for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism:
The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”

In a memoir written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This image of Wesley Clark as the progressive anti-war general is of a more recent vintage. Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn give us a pre-9/11 perspective on him in Gen. Wesley Clark Fights On and On, CounterPunch, 12 Nov 1999:
At the beginning of the Kosovo conflict, CounterPunch delved into the military career of General Wesley Clark and discovered that his meteoric rise through the ranks derived from the successful manipulation of appearances: faking the results of combat exercises, greasing to superiors and other practices common to the general officer corps.
In their further discussion of him, phrases like "gross distortion of the truth" and "sleight of hand" are employed enough to let us know that these authors didn't see him as a man that should be taken at his word.

We also know he had a history of bragging about his inside knowledge. On 11 September 2001, Clark, spoke as if he saw this coming, he told CNN:
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former supreme NATO commander, said the aircraft appeared to hit the southwestern side, or the Army side of the building, the area responsible for planning and logistics. "We've known for some time that some group has been planning this," he said, adding that "obviously, we didn't do enough" to prepare for such an attack.
After General Wesley Clark was "forced into retirement," he reinvented himself as the anti-war general and the liberal peace candidate, but his bombing campaign in the Kosovo War is said to have been brutal, Human Rights Watch put the number of civilians killed at between 488 and 627. It was also poorly executed, as in when he accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy. The CounterPunch authors continued:
Despite such embarrassments, Clark can take heart from the fact that his influence on warfare already transcends the Balkans. Since Operation Allied Force laid waste to the Serbian civilian infrastructure, the targeting of such infrastructure has become routine and acceptable. The Israelis, who have for years shown relative care in avoiding the Lebanese infrastructure in their raids, were quick to change tactics, citing the Balkan operation as a legitimizing precedent. More recently the gangsters in the Kremlin have used the same justification for their terror-bombing of Chechnya.
But they wrote that in 1999, so we are obliged to add the attacks on civilian infrastructure that characterized the US Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Qaddafi's war against Libya, Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen, and especially the current war in Syria to that list of modern diseases for which Wesley Clark's War was Patient Zero.

I deeply regret having to write any of this. It seems so ridiculous that so many should claim these very questionable comments from a war criminal with a history of fraud and deception, explain anything about our modern world.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
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Monday, December 12, 2016

Save the civilians of East #Aleppo #SaveAleppo #AleppoIsBurning

People are being massacred in large numbers in conquered East Aleppo, while tens of thousands still trapped in an area of about one square mile are being annihilated by Russian and Syrian warplanes. We are hearing stories of the summary executions in the streets, including women and children. While you are sleeping tonight, Syrian children are being murdered by Vladmir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
What it's like to be 7-year-old in Aleppo



Syria is the 1st Holocaust of the 21st Century!

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Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Jill Stein & US Green's make the Left look like a clown act

Its outrageous that this authoritarian will soon be the President of the United States, but there are many forces that came together to cause this, so those looking for blame have a very long list. Even a short list would include the Democrat's poor choice for an opposition candidate, early Big Media profiteering off The Donald, the GOP's Operation CrossCheck which removed thousands of minority voters from the rolls, Wikileaks' dissemination of the stolen emails of only one side, and the FBI director's announced and then aborted new Clinton investigation.

Still, it's a tragedy that the Left had the power to stop this from happening, and it didn't. If Jill Stein voters in three swing states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania had instead voted strategically against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton would have won, white nationalist leader Steve Bannon wouldn't be the incoming White House chief strategist and senior counselor, white supremacist Senator Jeff Sessions wouldn't be picked for the new Attorney General, and Maddog "It’s fun to shoot some people" Mattis wouldn't be picked for Defense Secretary.
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
Unfortunately, much of the US Left refused the common sense that it was in the interest of working people and people of color to rally around the lesser of the two evils in this binary election 2016 to insure that this anti-democratic white nationalist regime did not win state power. Leading forces in the US Left argued that progressives should refuse to choose between Clinton and Trump by either making a symbolic vote or not voting at all. The result was that the remaining pool of less progressive voters was barely enough to put Donald Trump over the top. In spite of all of the other factors, the election was so close that the US Left, as rallied around the Green Party, held the balance of power.

Instead of fighting this fascist takeover, the US Left joined the #NeverHillary movement that elected Trump. Many supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein and generally argued along these lines:

1.) Clinton doesn't deserve our vote so its better to refuse to vote for "the lesser evil."
2.) The Left needs to focus on building a 3rd party in this way even if it means Trump wins.
3.) They're just using Trump to scare us into voting for Clinton. The fix is in for her.
4.) Trump doesn't really stand a chance of being elected. Its safe not to worry about that.

Most also had a strong, petty-bourgeois, personal revulsion at the thought of doing what was necessary to defeat Trump and refused to "get their hands dirty." As Andrew Levine put it in his post-election defense of these positions, Must We Now Rethink the Hillary Question? Absolutely, Not, counterpunch, 2 Dec 2016:
I would have rather bathed in vomit than voted for Hillary Clinton.
The Left has a very big problem with rethinking anything. It is doubly tragic to hear Left voices raised in opposition to self-criticism and re-assessment after such a colossal failure to provide progressive leadership, or even comprehend what was happening and why.

In many ways the Left acted like narcissistic children of the Democratic Party. That's why they could blame Hillary Clinton for not being good enough, and probably why they thought they could beat up on her to their heart's delight and not inflict a fatal wound. They were wrong. They thought, even with all the damage they were doing, she could never lose. They were wrong. The Green Party thought they could run an explicitly anti-Clinton campaign with their "Jill Not Hill" election slogan and not create a Trump presidency. They were wrong.

First, Jill Stein campaigned hard against Clinton in the three key battleground states, and after she spoiled the election by taking just enough progressive votes away from Clinton in those same three states to put Donald Trump in the White House, she raises millions for a recount, but only in the states she spoiled, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; because she expected Hillary Clinton to win those states. We know this because she told the Alan Colmes Show:
They went the opposite way of what was expected...
Now Jill Stein thinks Hillary Clinton should have gotten more votes. Bill Palmer reported, 5 December 2016:
We reported last week that according to official tallies as many as 87,810 voters in Michigan had ballots which cast a vote for some downticket race but not for president.
...
Stein is now focused on these “undervote” ballots as well, which she pointed out during today’s press conference
...
Wayne County went heavily for Hillary Clinton, but not at the level expected, suggesting, some of Clinton’s votes may have indeed been scuttled.
Maybe they were scuttled by Green Party negative campaigning against Clinton? Jill Stein or her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, made no less than five personal appearances in Wayne County, MI in which they campaigned against Hillary Clinton. Does she now hope a recount will fix things, or is she just cashing in?

Andrew Levine expected Clinton to win too:
Along with nearly everyone else, I thought that Hillary would win. The pollsters said so, and they seemed to know what they were talking about; they certainly had enough data. Common sense said so too – this side of a real revolution, how could someone backed by the entire power structure lose?
The answer, Andrew, is that all of these Left assumptions were wrong, but don't trouble yourself to rethink anything. You're willing to say "I was wrong," about the election outcome because that has been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, but you still think you are right about everything else? You worked hard, and even misled people to create this new reality:
In trying to persuade people, liberals especially, not to vote for Hillary, I did use the argument that it was pointless to pile on votes for her because she was bound to win anyway, so why not send her a message?
What he was doing is known as negative campaign by proxy and was key to Trump's victory. Trump's negatives were so high, his only chance of winning was to raise Clinton's negatives, but he was ill-suited to do that directly because 1) as her opponent, his bashing of her would be discounted, and 2) he's not creditable, his negatives are even higher. So the key to his victory lay in the proxy negative campaigns of the more credible members of the Never Hillary crowd, including FBI Directory Comey, WikiLeaks, and especially the Greens. Andrew and his fellow Greens got enough progressives not to vote for Clinton to put Trump in the White House. This was the net result of the Left's year long campaign against voting for the lesser of two evils, and even though the results were unexpected, this counterpunch author tells us:
Now is not the time to go back over the case for and against lesser evil voting.
Like I said, this Left doesn't do self-criticism. It is too arrogant for it. Besides, in truth, Levine really thinks Donald Trump is the lesser of two evils:
Neither is there much point in debating which of the two, Clinton or Trump, actually was the lesser evil.

For most liberals, the answer is obvious: Hillary was. I disagreed – mainly, but not only, because I thought that she was the more likely of the two to unleash a Third World War. I still do; and that trumps all.

[Hillary] favors “regime change” whenever and wherever neocons and “humanitarian” interveners deem it in the empire’s best interests.
This view is very common in the pro-Trump Left but it is doubly based on chauvinism, which is to say that it reflects the white chauvinist outlook of a certain segment of the white Left from two quite independent, if intersecting, perspectives:

1) They apply a false white chauvinist perspective on the revolutionary struggles in Libya and Syria that sees the Arabs thuwar (revolutionaries) as proxies of Washington "regime change" operations rather than agents of their own destinies. A fascist government is slaughtering its own civilians by the thousands from the air, and they label Hillary Clinton a "warmonger" for just calling for a no-fly zone to protect them, while they can't use the word humanitarian without putting quotes around it, and excuse Assad his sarin and barrel bomb attacks.. Here is an example of how Jill Stein campaigned [video @ 55:30] against Clinton in Detroit, 3 September 2016:
Yes, Donald Trump is very blunt and he says things in an extremely horrifying way, but I have to say about Hillary's track record, although she speaks much nicer, but when you look at what she's done, its absolutely terrifying, the war in Libya should not be the prototype of our foreign policy, and Hillary wants to start an air war over Syria, that's what a no-fly zone is, its an air war with Russia...
What Jill Stein calls Hillary Clinton's War in Libya, the Libyans call their Revolution!
Libyan Revolution 2011
Misrata post-Gaddafi
Libyan House of Representatives (مجلس النواب الليبي)
Ferchichi, Libya | June 15, 2012
With great courage and sacrifice, the Libyan people got rid of a 40 year fascist dictatorship that many on the Left fancied. Rebuilding has been slow and the struggle against counter-revolution daunting, but just Monday the UN-backed Libyan government announced that they have finally kicked ISIS out of its, and not co-incidentally Gaddafi's former, stronghold of Sirte, The so-called Islamic State at one time controlled 150 miles of the Libyan coastline, and may still be hanging on in Iraq and Syria, but their dreams of a caliphate in North Africa are now over.

A Libyan fighter allied with the United Nations-backed government waved the country’s flag from the ruins of a house in Surt after militias said they had driven out the Islamic State 12/05/16.   Credit Hani Amara/Reuters

While the Libyan freedom struggle could not take place without meddling and influence coming from the Clinton State Department and many other foreign quarters, it has always been, first and foremost, their revolution. They can't be removed from the picture by Jill Stein and the other "anti-imperialists" by labeling it Clinton's War for the purposes of the 2016 US elections.

2) In service of their "don't vote for the lesser evil" thesis, not only have they worked to make Hillary Clinton look more dangerous, they have been tireless in the efforts to make Donald Trump look less dangerous. This has meant downplaying or ignoring the racist foundations of the Trump campaign. Levine does that in his piece. How else could he conclude Clinton is the greater evil. Remembering Trump's promises to kick Mexicans and Muslims out while subjecting black communities to a national stop and frisk program, few people of color were buying what the Green Party was selling.

Apparently, the Green Party didn't care that their fundamentally pro-Trump role in this election was only further alienating this overwhelmingly white party from peoples of color.  They didn't do much to win new support in other quarters either. People will remember for a long time how they gave the election of Donald Trump, what Jill Stein is doing now makes the Left look like a clown act.

The one thing I think the Green's are right about is that bourgeois democracy, which they refer to in its current stage as "neo-liberalist", does trend toward fascist in the period of imperialist decay. It can be fairly argued that WWII was more than just a worldwide conflict between imperialist powers over the division of the world as WWI was, it was also the first worldwide fascist assault on bourgeois democracy and socialism. Fortunately this first assault was beaten back by a worldwide coalition of socialists and "neo-liberals."

We are currently witnessing the second worldwide fascist assault on bourgeois democracy and socialism such as it still exists. It already holds state power in Russia, has developed its barbaric practices in Syria, and is now making concerted efforts to win state power in the West, initially by non-violent means.

My other recent posts relating to this unique election cycle:
@DrJillStein now officially 'the Ralph Nader of 2016'
Where #NoDAPL covers for mass murder
Did Wikileaks call this election 10 years ago?
Did @DemocracyNow help elect President Trump?
Did the Green Party's @DrJillStein help Trump win?
How Green Party's Jill Stein tells two lies at once
Donald Trump wants to be the Last US President
Trump/Stein -- Stronger Together
Will Wikileaks "salt" the Clinton-Podesta emails before the election?
Trump Super Predator behavior is Workplace Sexual Harassment writ large
Is US Green Party's Jill Stein a holocaust denier?
Jill Stein now claiming Donald Trump is less of two evils
Did Dishonest Jill Stein change her Syria statement on the sly?
Republican support for Green Party @DrJillStein is emerging
Why "Jill not Hill" is a pro-Trump slogan
Donald Trump can only win if Jill Stein stays in
Does Donald Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS involve using nukes?
Why doesn't "What's the Triad?" trump "What is Aleppo?"
Green Party Jill Stein's campaign in context
What should the Green Party do?
Greens could give White House to Trump as poll numbers even
Why Green Party's Jill Stein should drop her presidential bid
Amy Goodman should address this extremely important statement by her guest
How Jill Stein Tweets for Trump
HuffPost item shows how @JillStein campaign whitewashes @realDonaldTrump
Trump tells his '2nd Amendment people election will be stolen to prepare for insurrection
Trump didn't threaten Hillary, he threatened violent insurrection
Meet Green Party's Jill Stein, Putin sock-puppet & Assad apologist


Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
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Friday, December 2, 2016

@DrJillStein now officially 'the Ralph Nader of 2016'

Although Democrat Hillary Clinton beat white nationalist Donald Trump by several million popular votes, the weird geometry of the slavery-compromised electoral college made Trump the new president. The electoral college math meant that less than 80,000 votes spread between three states made the difference between Hillary Clinton winning and what happened. Those three states are Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those are the same three states Green Party ex-candidate Jill Stein is now fundraising for a recount in, and they are the same three battleground states that then candidate Jill Stein campaigned hard against Hillary Clinton in.
Jill Stein to visit Wisconsin Thursday, October 27
Stein, Green Party running mate to campaign in Michigan
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to visit Penn State on Wednesday
In an earlier post-election post we showed that votes for Jill Stein in two key states, Wisconsin and Michigan, were greater that the margin by which Trump beat Clinton, and in Pennsylvania they would have brought Clinton to within less than 20,000 votes of victory. At that time we speculated that Jill Stein's "JillNotHill" campaign of trashing Clinton and painting Trump as the lesser evil when she clearly had no chance of winning herself, could have easily discouraged that many PA progressives from voting at all.

Now the final vote tally is in and speculation is no longer needed. When the final count for Philadelphia was tallied, Hillary Clinton gained about 24,000 more votes, bringing her to within 49,543 votes of beating Trump in PA where 49,678 progressive voters opted out of the presidential contest by voting for Jill Stein.
This story has been on Tweeter for days but Linux Beach waited until the results were posted on the PA Department of State website this morning before declaring that what we warned about for months, that Donald Trump can only win if Jill Stein stays in has been proven by these results.

Jill Stein voters were enough to elect Hillary Clinton all by themselves, no stay-at-home voters were needed. It was Jill Stein voters, who apparently lacked the common sense to choose the lesser of two evils in a binary election, that allowed a less progressive pool of voters to hand state power in the most powerful country on the globe to a white supremacist regime.

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

The Independent is reporting:
Jill Stein 'handed Donald Trump the presidency' by splitting support for Hillary Clinton
Labelled 'the Ralph Nader of 2016', after Green Party nominee who split the left-of-centre vote in 2000, helping George W Bush narrowly defeat Al Gore

Charlotte England
2 December 2016
The total number of votes for the Green Party has exceeded Donald Trump’s narrow lead over Hillary Clinton in several US states, leading some commentators to suggest Jill Stein handed the Republicancandidate the presidency.

In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Ms Stein got 51,463, 49,678, and 31,006 votes respectively, whereas Mr Trump won by a margin of 10,704, 46,765, and 22,177 in the same states, new figures show.

Most people who voted for Ms Stein would otherwise have been more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, analysts have said, particularly in this election where Mr Trump's denial of climate change and far-right policy proposals were the antithesis of many Green Party values.

Ms Stein has been compared on social media to Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate who is widely believed to have split the left-of-centre vote in 2000, helping Republican candidate George W Bush narrowly defeat the Democrat candidate Al Gore. More...
Now we will have to struggle under much tougher conditions and this is all the more reason why we must learn from our mistakes and not just shine them on as many in the Left are now doing.

 My other recent posts relating to this unique election cycle:
Where #NoDAPL covers for mass murder
Did Wikileaks call this election 10 years ago?
Did @DemocracyNow help elect President Trump?
Did the Green Party's @DrJillStein help Trump win?
How Green Party's Jill Stein tells two lies at once
Donald Trump wants to be the Last US President
Trump/Stein -- Stronger Together
Will Wikileaks "salt" the Clinton-Podesta emails before the election?
Trump Super Predator behavior is Workplace Sexual Harassment writ large
Is US Green Party's Jill Stein a holocaust denier?
Jill Stein now claiming Donald Trump is less of two evils
Did Dishonest Jill Stein change her Syria statement on the sly?
Republican support for Green Party @DrJillStein is emerging
Why "Jill not Hill" is a pro-Trump slogan
Donald Trump can only win if Jill Stein stays in
Does Donald Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS involve using nukes?
Why doesn't "What's the Triad?" trump "What is Aleppo?"
Green Party Jill Stein's campaign in context
What should the Green Party do?
Greens could give White House to Trump as poll numbers even
Why Green Party's Jill Stein should drop her presidential bid
Amy Goodman should address this extremely important statement by her guest
How Jill Stein Tweets for Trump
HuffPost item shows how @JillStein campaign whitewashes @realDonaldTrump
Trump tells his '2nd Amendment people election will be stolen to prepare for insurrection
Trump didn't threaten Hillary, he threatened violent insurrection
Meet Green Party's Jill Stein, Putin sock-puppet & Assad apologist

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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