o Re. yesterday's latest failed GOP establishment hit-squad attempt:

[url=davidstockmanscontracorner.com/mitt-romney-is-the-real-super-fraud-heres-the-proof-chapter-and-verse/]Mitt Romney Is The Real Super-Fraud: Here's The Proof, Chapter And Verse[/url] | David Stockman's Contra Corner

And invoking the wayback machine, Matt Taibbi did an epic takedown of the parasitical Romney [url=http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/on-mitt-romney-bain-capital-and-private-equity-20120829]back in the day[/url].

o [url=http://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-backed-honduran-regime-is-picking-off-indigenous-leaders/]The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders[/url] | The Nation
[quote]Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. In The Nation, Dana Frank and I covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot, and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.[/quote]
Ah yes, another example of the much-touted Clinton "foreign policy experience".

Thanks for posting the piece from The Nation. I had read it, but didn't have the energy afterward to post.

Clinton:
Exceptionalist. Interventionist. Corporatist. The veneer of more populist platitudes is a late addition to her repertoire. They ring hollow when Goldman Sachs, and others of their ilk, have major investments in her.

American Power Under Challenge
 

Here are two parts of an excerpt from a new Noam Chomsky book, "Who Rules the World?"

[URL="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176137/"]Part 1[/URL]
[QUOTE]When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world.

In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.
[/QUOTE][URL="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176138/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_what_principles_rule_the_world/"]The Costs of Violence
Masters of Mankind (Part 2)[/URL]
[QUOTE]In brief, the Global War on Terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi terror from a tiny corner of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa through the Levant and South Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited attacks in Europe and the United States. The invasion of Iraq made a substantial contribution to this process, much as intelligence agencies had predicted. Terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank estimate that the Iraq War “generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.” Other exercises have been similarly productive.

A group of major human rights organizations -- Physicians for Social Responsibility (U.S.), Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Germany) -- conducted a study that sought "to provide as realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war zones [Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan] during 12 years of ‘war on terrorism,'" including an extensive review “of the major studies and data published on the numbers of victims in these countries,” along with additional information on military actions. Their "conservative estimate" is that these wars killed about 1.3 million people, a toll that "could also be in excess of 2 million." A database search by independent researcher David Peterson in the days following the publication of the report found virtually no mention of it. Who cares?

More generally, studies carried out by the Oslo Peace Research Institute show that two-thirds of the region’s conflict fatalities were produced in originally internal disputes where outsiders imposed their solutions. In such conflicts, 98% of fatalities were produced only after outsiders had entered the domestic dispute with their military might. In Syria, the number of direct conflict fatalities more than tripled after the West initiated air strikes against the self-declared Islamic State and the CIA started its indirect military interference in the war -- interference which appears to have drawn the Russians in as advanced US antitank missiles were decimating the forces of their ally Bashar al-Assad. Early indications are that Russian bombing is having the usual consequences.
[/QUOTE]

[url]http://observer.com/2016/05/corruption-is-catching-up-to-the-clintons-and-their-associates/[/url]

[QUOTE]While a few members of Congress push to get big money out of politics—most notably Bernie Sanders—the Democratic leadership has only strengthened its ties to wealthy and corporate donors who have hijacked the party for their own interests over the progressive agenda held by voters identifying as Democrats.[/QUOTE]

• On the "corrupt and complicit media" front, NC reader 'hreik' linked this today:
[i]
Day of CA primary, MSNBC planning to declare HRC nominee at 8:00 p/m EST, 3 hours b/f CA polls close.
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGG3DJAALkw[/url]
[/i]
Reader 'Anne' comments:
[i]
If my math is correct, there are 694 pledged delegates to be had in the June 7th contests – she needs 633 of them to clinch the nomination with pledged delegates. She’s not going to get that many, given the proportional way in which the delegates are allocated.

But, the superdelegates! The superdelegates! No matter how many times the media are reminded that superdelegates don’t count until their votes are cast at the convention, they insist on including them in the total count now.

Man, they really, really want Sanders out – to the point where they are willing to be public about their efforts to corrupt the process and crowning her the nominee even before the polls close in California; nothing is going to get in the way of them having their dream contest of two of the most disliked, mistrusted candidates ever.
[/i]
File under "The MSM are completely in the tank for HRH Queen Hillary the Inevitable, episode 7641."

• [url=www.salon.com/2016/05/23/donald_trump_is_going_to_win_this_is_why_hillary_clinton_cant_defeat_what_trump_represents/]Donald Trump is going to win: This is why Hillary Clinton can't defeat what Trump represents[/url] - Salon.com
[quote]The neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.

The Trump alliance desires to remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant child.

Trump is a businessman, while Mitt Romney was a businessman too, yet I predict victory for the former while the latter obviously lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump “builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class.[/quote]
IMO the 'neofascist' opening label is inappropriate - cf. [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/links-52216.html#comment-2601148]this NC reader discussion[/url] on a similarly-asserting article - but remainder of above snip is spot-on. Rest of article is a cognitively dissonant mix of writer trying to sound really, really smart about neoliberalism, globalization and the (non)role of the nation/state in that agenda, and in some place laughably bad, e.g. the blather about "the successful two-thirds of American society."

Getting back to the Romneyesque aspect of things - Tellingly, a recent [url=https://mishtalk.com/2016/05/23/grim-election-map-for-trump-fox-analyst-vs-rcp-vs-mish/]'analysis'[/url] by Fox News pet in-house faux-progressive Juan Williams examines the electoral map by viewing Trump as Romney-with-louder-PR, but the above [i]Salon[/i] piece notes that this may well be 180 degrees wrong - in this election, it is Hillary who represents the water carrier for the transnational capitalist rentier class.

• Since becoming Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' pet paper a few years back The Washington Post op-ed pages have devolved into a DC-side-of-the-Acela-corridor neoliberal establishment propaganda festival (the NY side of the same corridor having long been held by the Grey Lady, the NYTimes), but for now they still have at least a few reporters doing quality old-fashioned investigative reporting. Here the latest such piece by 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner Eli Saslow. The snip I select highlights a dinner-table-in-flyover-country discussion of the same themes in the above Salon snip:

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/from-belief-to-resentment-in-indiana/2016/05/14/d1642222-16fa-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html]From belief to outrage: The decline of the middle class reaches the next American town[/url] - WaPo
[quote]He had made the drive enough times to already suspect what he might find. Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food. Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled.

“These jobs aren’t the solution so much as they’re part of the problem,” Lewandowski said, and now the result of so much churn was becoming evident all across Indiana and lately in Huntington, too. Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Poverty was up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up. Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her three-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.

“Despair is our business, and business is booming,” Lewandowski said. “Workers have lost all agency in their lives. They’ve based their lives on believing in something that turned out to be a lie. They work when they can, for what they can, for as long as they can until it ends.”

As second shift finished in Huntington, several of those UTEC workers gathered at an Applebee’s that displayed construction hats on the wall. Earlier in the day, an employee had been suspended for taping a “Run for the Border” bumper sticker to one of the company’s roving robots — the biggest act of rebellion yet. A few employees had been trying to popularize a boycott of United Technologies products, and others had started using their regular ­10-minute breaks to campaign for Trump in a traditionally Democratic factory. But for the most part their work was continuing unchanged, with attendance steady and factory production on the rise. They couldn’t risk losing their jobs or their UTEC severance packages, so the only way to vent was to come here, where the discussion on this night was of a country in decline.

“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”

“It’s pure greed.”

“They wanted to add another 6 feet to their yachts.”

“You’re telling me those people down there are going to be able to crank out 12 million units a year — no drop in quality, no incidents, no safety issues? Yeah. Okay. Good luck with that. There’s a reason they’re going to make $3 an hour.”

“We’re becoming like a third-world country. We’re going to have nothing left but fast food.”

“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”[/quote]

Cleveland, Ohio has arranged to free up jail space in a nearby county for 200 people to be potentially arrested at the Republican National Convention and agreed to pay more than a thousand dollars per person held.
[URL="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/281580-ohio-county-to-keep-open-200-jail-beds-for-gop-convention"]Ohio county to keep 200 jail beds open for GOP convention[/URL]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;434845]
IMO the 'neofascist' opening label is inappropriate - cf. [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/links-52216.html#comment-2601148]this NC reader discussion[/url] on a similarly-asserting article - but remainder of above snip is spot-on.[/QUOTE]This isn't really the thread to discuss Brexit but I'm not sure that "spot-on" describes the article's analysis of that phenomenon.

No time now to elaborate now, sadly, but perhaps I'll return to the theme later.

[Ed. note: I should probably merge this thread with the "Your Next Novice Supreme Commander" one - any objections?]

----------------------------------

o [url=www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/fear-and-loathing-at-saint-anselm-the-donald-gives-a-presidential-speech-on-national-security.html]Fear and Loathing at Saint Anselm: The Donald Gives a "Presidential" Speech on National Security[/url] | naked capitalism
[quote]I have a severe and painful case of cognitive dissonance from coping with the idea that anything Donald Trump says can possibly make sense. Then again, maybe there’s a reason Trump went through seventeen of his competitors for the Republican Presidential nomination like a hot knife through butter.
...
That said, it’s quite remarkable to hear the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party say that he “stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando’s LGBT Community.” I’d even go so far as to say it’s newsworthy. [url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/13/in-speech-trump-appears-to-embrace-lgbt-rights-but-gay-leaders-remain-skeptical/]WaPo[/url] did; [url=http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-13/trump-urges-immigration-ban-in-wake-of-orlando-attacks]Bloomberg[/url] did; the conservative hive mind managed to emit a [url=http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/06/13/anonymous-gay-activist-pledges-support-for-trump-in-open-letter-heres-why/]“viral” pro-Trump letter by an anonymous gay person[/url]; but Times stenographers Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, in an Op-Ed somehow misfiled as reporting, [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-speeches.html?_r=0]omit to mention this portion of the speech altogether[/url].[/quote]

While both Hillary and Trump emitted post-Orlando-gay-nightclub-massacre noises about "fighting ISIS", there are some key differences in their takes on that. First, Hillary (full transcript linked in the above NC piece; and see also [url=http://samadlerbell.com/the-spirit-of-912/]the perspective here[/url]):
[quote]The attack in Orlando makes it even more clear: we cannot contain this threat – we must defeat it.

The good news is that the coalition effort in Syria and Iraq has made real gains in recent months.

So we should keep the pressure on ramping up the air campaign, accelerating support for our friends fighting to take and hold ground, and pushing our partners in the region to do even more.[/quote]
Talk about cognitive dissonance:

[1] It has sure as hell not been the U.S. air campaign(s) which pushed ISIS back;
[2] By "our friends fighting to take and hold ground" she cannot possibly mean the Russian/Syrian coalition which is doing just that, so she must mean the same "moderate jihadists" the U.S. helped fund and arm in its criminal campaign to destabilize Syria. Presumably said Al Qaeda-affiliated groups are roughly as "moderate" as they are "accepting of LGBT rights";
[3] Our partners in the region? You mean like Saudi Arabia, a major backer of your presidential campaign, donor to the corrupt Clinton Foundation, and the world's biggest promoter of Islamist radicalism? (At least 'promoter' in the direct sense, by way of the contrast with the U.S. 'they hate us for our freedoms'-side-effect sense.)

Further, she completely ignores - for good reason in her case - the "blowback from U.S. imperial adventures in the ME and elsewhere in the Muslim world" angle. Whereas Trump is explicit about that:
[quote]America must do more – much more – to protect its citizens, especially people who are potential victims of crimes based on their backgrounds or sexual orientations.

It also means we must change our foreign policy.

The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow.

These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region.

For instance, the last major NATO mission was Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. That mission helped unleash ISIS on a new continent.[/quote]
Like Lambert ("I think the Iran deal is one of the few good things that Obama has done."), I disagree with Trump re. Iran. But there Trump and Hillary differ hardly a whit, so not a differentiator.

o More on Hillary's vast store of foreign-policy "hands-on experience":

[url=www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/10/all-hail-the-queen-of-exceptionalistan/]All Hail the Queen of Exceptionalistan[/url] | Counterpunch

o And lastly, in a similar vein as the [url=http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?p=436225#post436225]post by kladner[/url] in The Right To Be Alarmed thread, from Glenn Greenwald at [i]The Intercept[/i]:

[url=https://theintercept.com/2016/06/13/stop-exploiting-lgbt-issues-to-demonize-islam-and-justify-anti-muslim-policies/]Stop Exploiting LGBT Issues to Demonize Islam and Justify Anti-Muslim Policies[/url]

I didn't wade into the reader comments, both due to time constraints and because the friend who forwarded this warned me that there was some really toxic vileness there. Anyone here care to put their waders on and let us know what the swamp looks like?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;436245][Ed. note: I should probably merge this thread with the "Your Next Novice Supreme Commander" one - any objections?]
[/QUOTE]
I have no objection. My view has been that "guess the candidate" was too noisy to merge with this thread but the candidates are likely settled now. I defer to your judgement.

_________

Regarding an elected leader assuming control of the nuclear button, this article goes into some high level detail of what that means.

[URL="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-missiles-nukes-button-launch-foreign-policy-213955"]What Exactly Would It Mean to Have Trump’s Finger on the Nuclear Button?[/URL]
[QUOTE]On a day-to-day basis, the U.S. nuclear forces can deliver nearly 900 warheads to targets around the globe. Given a couple more days to get ready, the number of deliverable warheads would grow to nearly 2,000. In either case, these arsenals would allow for extensive strikes against opposing nuclear forces, war-supporting industries and key command posts of the opponent’s top political and military leadership.

Russia and China dominate the target list today. The following estimates the number of aim points in these and other nations, by target category:

Russia: Weapons of mass destruction (510 targets, or “aim points”), 190 leadership aim points and 250 war-supporting-industry aim points. Moscow alone would encompass 100 aim points.

China: WMD (130 aim points), 60 leadership aim points and 250 war-supporting-industry aim points.

North Korea, Iran, Syria: Each country would be covered by many dozens of warheads targeted at North Korea (50 WMD, 10 leadership and 12 war-supporting-industry aim points); Iran (40 WMD, 14 leadership and six war-supporting-industry aim points); and Syria (20 WMD, 13 leadership and 10 war-supporting-industry aim points).[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received back-to-back calls in the middle of the night informing him of the imminent nuclear destruction of the United States. The second call reported an all-out attack. Brzezinski was seconds away from waking Carter to pass on the dreadful news and convince him of the need to order retaliation without delay (within a six-minute deadline). Brzezinski was sure the end was near.

Just before he picked up the phone to call Carter, Brzezinski received a third call, this time canceling the alarm. It was a mistake caused by human and technical error. A training tape simulating an all-out Soviet attack had inadvertently slipped into the actual real-time attack early warning network. The impending nuclear holocaust was a mirage that confused the duty crew. (They were fired for taking eight minutes instead of the required three minutes to declare their degree of confidence that an attack against North America was underway.)[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]The deadlines are tight for everyone involved in nuclear operations. The duty crew inside the early warning hub in Colorado processes attack indications sent from infrared satellites that can detect the hot plumes of missiles during their fiery boost phase of flight (first several minutes) and from ground-based radars that detect the metallic body of missiles and warheads in flight throughout their trajectory from launch to impact.

This crew is expected to assess whether North America is under nuclear attack within three minutes of receiving the initial sensor input, and to promptly report their preliminary assessment up the chain of command in order to start the clock on a presidential response. The president and his or her top nuclear advisers then convene an emergency telecommunications conference to receive a briefing about the size and character of an incoming raid and the time to impact, and a briefing from the Strategic Command about the president’s response options (war plan menu) and their consequences. The press of circumstances if submarine warheads are en route may force the latter briefing to be shortened to as little as 30 seconds. Then the president has just a few minutes to decide and convey his decision to the military war rooms.

This process leaves precious little latitude for rational deliberation on the response that best serves the national security interest of the nation. Instead, the process at all levels is reduced to an enacting of a pre-prepared script. A president would have to muster enormous will and confidence to step out of his or her prescribed role and really take command of the situation, exercise independent judgment and brake a runaway train. Who in the world could be so presidential in such circumstances? Obama? Clinton? Trump? In reality, only an exceptional person would pass this test.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;436245]
[1] It has sure as hell not been the U.S. air campaign(s) which pushed ISIS back;
[2] By "our friends fighting to take and hold ground" she cannot possibly mean the Russian/Syrian coalition which is doing just that, so she must mean the same "moderate jihadists" the U.S. helped fund and arm in its criminal campaign to destabilize Syria. Presumably said Al Qaeda-affiliated groups are roughly as "moderate" as they are "accepting of LGBT rights"[/QUOTE]
Kurds?

[QUOTE=xilman;436265]Kurds?[/QUOTE]

AFAICT the Obama administration has been fence-straddling w.r.to support for the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds because of their wariness at upsetting NATO ally Turkey - cf. [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-kurds-turkey_us_56bcaeffe4b0b40245c57fcf]this HuffPo piece[/url] for a description of the various contradictory aspects in this ongoing balancing act.