GRIZZLY STEPPE: hacking of the American elections of 2016

[pbrower2a]

(08-02-2018, 12:16 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-01-2018, 08:59 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-31-2018, 09:08 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-04-2017, 05:00 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 03:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: If Russia does this in 2016... think of what China can do in 2020. Heck, even India. Don't fool yourself about India. The world's most powerful democracy might prefer having another democratic superpower in the world, one that used to be reliable and would be again if it enjoyed "a new birth of freedom".

A hint: watch for the formation of a Delhi-Jakarta-Tokyo Axis in the event that the USA loses its democracy.

As a Democrat, I do not want that sort of help in ridding us of Donald Trump and a GOP majority in 2020. We need free and fair elections even if we lose them. The essence of democracy is the willingness to lose elections.

I have yet to figure what Vladimir Putin has to gain from Donald Trump unless it is to have a 'useful idiot' as President of the United States. Acquiescence in Russian aggression first in the former Soviet Union, and then elsewhere? Lax treatment of the Russian Mafia? Splintering of NATO?

...Reagan foreign policy and Sanders economics? I'd go for that. Wouldn't you?

I sure wouldn't go that far; we don't need "evil empires," useless military buildups and phony weapons sales to our enemies to benefit terrorists. But I get your point. Putin has already played the USA for a fool in Syria under Obama; imagine what he would do with Trump. NATO is already splintering because Putin is splitting off Turkey from it. I don't know where we'll end up by 2020. Not in a good place, it seems. For certain, a major war will break out in Asia in Dec or Jan 2020-21.

I wish the tyrants good luck in trying to resolve the Syria mess. The Obama USA and its allies have failed.

For sure, Russia hacked the US election. For our part, we Americans fell for all the fake news generated from the hacking, along with the FBI interference. Ultimately, the people vote, and the people are responsible for whom they vote for.

Putin could play us for fools under Obama because Obama was no match for Putin. How much would we have to fuck around with Russia/Putin before Putin and RUSSIAN elites start having concerns for their own well beings? You're right, blue America and it's blue European allies have failed and it won't be long and you'll start seeing shit like that happening within blue America and blue Europe.

Putin could not play any fast ones with Obama. Obama did nothing to Russia, and Putin couldn't do anything to America -- which might have been the best of all possible worlds.

Trump is a foolish egoist, and Putin can play his foolishness and egoism in ways hurtful to America. Putin may have assumed certain norms of American foreign policy due to its inertia; Obama's foreign policy is little different from that of the elder Bush despite ideological differences. Trump has the absurd idea that diplomacy is like business dealings in which one sells schlock TV shows, steaks, gambling junkets, or overpriced apartments. The quid pro quo might be effective in selling policies to corrupt dictators, but it does not work with democracies in which the rule of law prevails. Think of how badly Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom; his style of person-to-person dealings in which he offered powerful people what he thought they wanted in return for concessions on German interests. This was more effective when he was Foreign Minister of the Devil's Reich, when Nazi Germany was offering things to dictatorial regimes whose leaders were interested as the Fuehrer was in dealings over things that others were to be robbed of.

...I have no love for corrupt kleptocrats. I prefer the sorts of leaders who don't put polonium-210 in the tea of escaped dissidents, who don't assassinate journalists, and who don't rob the national treasury to enrich themselves. I also prefer leaders who don't make scapegoats as excuses for personal failure, who don't stir up religious and ethnic bigotry, who don't assume the guilt of the accused, who don't lie about their electoral achievements, and who do not bait the media.

The rest of the world recognizes Donald Trump as an aberration likely to be defeated resoundingly in 2020 even if his political power isn't fully undone in November of this year. They see America in the long story; we get to endure Donald Trump in the here-and-now. I hope that we have learned our lesson.

The chances are likely that you are looking at a Red wave in 2020. We might give the Democrats a couple of years to prove beyond all doubt how worthless/pathetic the Democratic party is today as far as AMERICAN INTERESTS are concerned? I can afford a couple of worthless years watching Democrats doing nothing but being a pain in the ass as issues build and anger and resentment of blues rises. Think about it, you're associated with a party who is damn near split between European socialism and American capitalism, the serving the needs of US citizens and the needs of foreign born citizens ( refugees, illegal and/or illegal immigrants, foreign visitors and foreign entities) and so forth. How many more years til 4T?

The 2018 midterm elections have not even been held yet. I expect gridlock if the Democrats pick up one or both Houses of Congress. The President that we have has shown no capacity or willingness to compromise except on moral issues -- that is, self-indulgence.

We have a huge divide on what "American interests" are. I am well aware what the term "American interests overseas" are -- code words for American corporate interests outside the USA. Here? We have a highly-polarized society, with some people holding a nearly fascist conception of the purpose of government to make sure that the 'right people' get whatever they want and others believing that a fair shake for everyone is the ideal. There is little ideological overlap.

The last time the Democrats had the Presidency and both Houses of Congress was 2009 and 2010, and those two years were a marvelous time for major efforts to reform America while resuscitating an economy that had gone very bad very fast on a collective get-rich-quick scheme gone bad. The Master Class got rescued, and it chose to establish a neo-feudal social order in which enriching and pampering the classes who owned the assets or administered private organizations were to get full power over the economy.

If you want to go after illegal aliens as the worst people around -- we have our own rogues, born and bred here in the Good Old U.S. of A. Yes, I am sick of perverts, dopers, and child abusers. Who isn't? We can't deport them. Bad people come in all ethnic and religious origins -- and classes. On the latter -- Donald Trump is a singularly-horrible person, and that is much of the problem. Need I tell you that some of the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust in central and Balkan Europe were aristocrats who hated Jewish competition (as small business owners) to their semi-feudal big landholdings and the privileged military elite? In Hitlerland the plutocrats and executives gladly used the harshness of the economic order to exploit slave labor including that of Jews doomed to murder once those Jews had been broken down with toil to exhaustion on starvation rations.

But we have problems to work out, including the end of the nexus between material productivity and prosperity. An attempt to continue such implies material waste on an exponentially-increasing scale that implies exponential increases in the depletion of natural resources (and an obvious crash when the resources are spent). Just because I can afford to buy a new flat-screen TV (we already have one per person in our household) does not mean that I am ready to buy another one. Donald Trump suggests that greater energy use is the key to prosperity -- so drive vehicles that guzzle more fuel. That too is waste. There is hardly an easier way to save money than to avoid waste. Do you recognize thrift as an economic virtue? It's an old conservative virtue, one that liberals have adopted as environmentalism.

The solution of making sure that more income goes to owners and managers ensures that most people get to enjoy no prosperity. So living standards fail to rise as productive technologies improve. If such is so, then we might as well scrap the industrial order and go back to the peasant-and-artisan world that seems to fit human nature better than do impersonal bureaucracies better at grafting than at service and of plutocrats who inevitably give us wars for profit that will surely bring mass death and destruction. Admit it -- most people are peasants and artisans by character. The peasant may be a yeoman farmer and the artisan might be a shopkeeper or skilled worker, but he is operating on a human scale. Indeed I have my idea of where people were happiest in somewhat-modern times: early New England, where land was too rough for anything other than small-scale farming (thus no slave-owning plantations)  and too cheap for becoming a basis of an aristocratic way of life, where the climate was chilly enough to allow people to store the bounty of the harvest through the cold winter, where business could never get so big that it could develop an inhuman scale. People could not get away with idleness, but there was always a clear nexus between toil and prosperity. If you look at human lifespans... they were high by the standards of most of the world today. Stay physically and mentally active -- and socially connected -- as late as possible and you will get very old very slowly.

We now enter a post-industrial world. You cannot deny this reality: capitalism was doomed to overthrow in a proletarian revolution (as Marx predicted because he did not see what could save capitalism) unless the capitalists could give workers (Marx' proletariat) a stake in the social order. That meant that the worker was to be transformed from an object of pure exploitation into a consumer. Capitalists could stili profit off consumer goods such as furniture, appliances, electronic toys, and motor vehicles. They just wouldn't get to sweat workers as they once did.

The solution that the Hard Right offers is that people pay more through higher rental prices, loan-shark interest, and the old right-wing bugaboo of bloated government that offers dubious services. Simply add more profit to every personal activity. I see no good out of that. The Right can find plenty of ways to make the government an enforcer of the ways of the economic elites.