Clinton-Trump, their scandals and second debate

This video from the USA says about itself:

The Second Presidential Debate | The Young Turks SUMMARY

10 October 2016

Who do you think won the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz, Michael Shure and Jimmy Dore, hosts of The Young Turks, summarize the second presidential debate.

In what was dubbed by numerous commentators as a nearly unbearable spectacle to witness—with Politico describing it as the “ugliest debate ever” and Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi declaring that “having a railroad spike driven through my foot would be more enjoyable than watching this”—Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump debated in a town hall-style event Sunday night: here.

Donald Trump’s brooding, angry performance — filled with insults and threats to jail his political opponent and mean-spirited asides about the moderators — might not have won him many new fans, but it thrilled those already on his side, including Fox News analysts: here.

From Business Insider in the USA today:

NBC News is suspending “Today” show host Billy Bush in the wake of a leaked video of Bush and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump making vulgar comments about women.

“Let me be clear – there is simply no excuse for Billy’s language and behavior on that tape,” NBC executive Noah Oppenheim said in a memo to staff members, according to multiple news outlets.

Billy Bush is a scion of the Bush political dynasty of ex-President George W Bush.

Top Democratic operatives have offered to pay millions of dollars for unaired footage of Donald Trump on the set of “The Apprentice,” hoping to unearth another unscripted moment like the one that surfaced Friday from 2005, when Trump said he would grab women “by the pussy”: here.

Donald Trump Counts on Scamming Others to Make His Money: here.

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

The Trump scandal and the US gutter election

10 October 2016

The generally degraded state of American politics entered a new low this weekend. The entire media and political establishment was consumed with the scandal that erupted in the wake of the release of video of Republican candidate Donald Trump boasting in 2005 of his ability to use his position of wealth and celebrity to assault women with impunity.

Dozens of Republican office-holders and candidates have announced they will not vote for Trump or called for his replacement as the party’s nominee—a practical impossibility, given the widespread distribution of ballots for early, absentee or mail-in voting. Democrats jumped at the chance to denounce Trump. Media commentators, who never fail to cheer on every war launched by the American military, expressed their horrified indignation at Trump’s treatment of women.

As far as Trump’s comments are concerned, there was nothing that would surprise or shock any serious observer of the appalling decay in the political culture of the Republican Party and the capitalist two-party system as a whole. Trump in his persona embodies the backwardness of the American ruling class, a product of the sordid nexus of the New York City real estate market, Atlantic City casinos, Las Vegas and the entertainment industry.

More significant than the comments themselves are the uses to which they are being put. It is clear that a significant section of the ruling class has decided that a Trump presidency cannot be accepted. The scandal is a mechanism for fighting out differences while concealing any discussion of the extremely reactionary character of the Clinton campaign. …

Sex scandals have become a standard mechanism employed by the US ruling class to regulate its conflicts without alerting the great mass of the population to what the real issues are. Such methods have long been a feature of American politics—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover notoriously kept folders full of such personal scandals in his desk, for use in blackmailing congressmen, executive branch officials and presidents.

There is little doubt that the video from the Access Hollywood program on NBC was located and set aside for use at a time when it would do the maximum damage, only 30 days before the election. There is also little doubt that if this particular salvo fails to finally sink the Trump campaign, more torpedoes are in the water.

What the real issues are came out to some extent in Sunday night’s Town Hall debate. Behind the mudslinging and name-calling, Clinton’s agenda was expressed in the limited discussion over foreign policy, during which she repeatedly denounced “Russian aggression” and called for a major military escalation in Syria.

Responding to a question about a leak from WikiLeaks that included excerpts of her speeches to Wall Street banks—including one in which she said that it was necessary to have a “public” and a “private” position on political issues—Clinton quickly shifted to an attack on Russia, charging that it was seeking to influence the elections in favor of Trump. “Our intelligence community has just come out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks [i.e., the exposure of DNC emails], the hacking of American accounts to influence our election. And WikiLeaks is part of that.”

Clinton later added that she supports a “no-fly” zone in Syria—which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford said last month would mean war with Russia—in order to establish “leverage.” …

This is what the American ruling class is planning, and indeed already implementing. Clinton was not asked by debate moderators Anderson Cooper or Martha Raddatz how many people she was prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of this policy.

The American media expresses consternation over Trump’s sexual predations, but does not bat an eyelash over the appetites of an imperialist predator who threatens the lives of thousands, if not millions. There has been no equivalent media furor over Clinton’s television interview where she chortled over the murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died.” …

Clinton had no real answer to the right-wing demagogy of Trump, who denounced her as a “liar,” whose words have no relationship to her actions.

The exposure of Trump’s backwardness is obviously revealing, but it points to the illegitimate and fraudulent character of the two-party system and the electoral process as a whole. …

Out of a country of 325 million people, the two candidates are the most hated in modern US history, and deservedly so.

The installation of Hillary Clinton in the White House would only insure that the polices that represent the consensus in the American ruling elite—a more aggressive and interventionist foreign policy, directed above all against China and Russia, and a crackdown against democratic rights and working class living standards at home—will be pursued by an experienced and trusted representative of big business, rather than by an erratic billionaire who has served his purpose in pushing the political system further to the right and encouraging the development of extreme-right and fascistic forces.

German government urges tougher action against Russia and Syria: here.

By Tom Carter in the USA:

Secret Clinton speeches and emails reveal systematic corruption

10 October 2016

In a secret speech at securities law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd in San Diego on September 4, 2014, Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton bragged that she “represented and worked with” so many on Wall Street and “did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper.”

In another secret speech, Clinton admitted that the policy she advocated with respect to Syria would involve mass killings of civilians. “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians,” she stated.

Secret documents and emails containing these and other revelations were published by Wikileaks and The Intercept in recent days. The latter remarks were revealed as the United States threatens to escalate its military intervention in Syria under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.

In one remarkably Machiavellian speech, Clinton frankly admitted that she has “both a public and private position” on certain policy issues, and that she only reveals the “private position” when she is engaging in “back room discussions.” In other words, she consciously lies to and deceives the public, pursuing an entirely different agenda in secret negotiations within the American establishment.

“If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,” Clinton said.

Perhaps one example of this distinction is provided by Clinton’s public and private positions with respect to Syria. While the US State Department uses the pretext of civilian casualties in Syria to ratchet up tensions with Russia, Clinton’s “private position” acknowledges that her own plan will “kill a lot of Syrians.”

Other emails confirm the corrupt ties between the Clinton campaign and the media, which involve undisclosed payments to pundits appearing on cable news programs. An internal list of contemptuously-labeled media “surrogates” contains those media personalities that could be relied upon to produce favorable coverage of the campaign.

The list of the “surrogates” deemed “reliable” by the Clinton campaign includes Maureen Dowd, Wolf Blitzer, David Brooks, Gail Collins, Rachel Maddow, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopolous and others. A similarly incriminating list of “progressive helpers” includes Judd Legum of ThinkProgress and the “Correct The Record” Super PAC run by David Brock.

Other documents published by The Intercept reveal secret “off-the-record” cocktail parties held by the Clinton campaign that were attended by journalists from ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, the Daily Beast, GPG, Huffington Post, MSNBC, NBC, The New Yorker, the New York Times, People, Politico, Vice and Vox.

Invitees of these cocktail parties, where the reporters were briefed on how to present the Clinton campaign to the population in the most favorable light, apparently included Diane Sawyer (ABC), George Stephanopolous (ABC), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Gail Collins (New York Times), among many others. The publication of these documents by The Intercept should forever reduce the credibility of these “news organizations” and “journalists” to zero.

The Clinton campaign responded to these revelations with its standard answer to all exposures of corruption and criminality on the part of the Democratic Party or Clinton personally—blame it on Russia. Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin declared that the revelations “removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy.”

…

During the Democratic Party primary elections, Sanders made an issue of the millions of dollars in “speaking fees” Hillary and Bill Clinton had accumulated, which currently totals around $153 million. …

Of course, only the very naive could believe for a moment that the enormous “speaking fees” accumulated by Clinton and her husband were paid for the speeches themselves. Instead, the designation of these sums as “speaking fees” more probably represents what is known in the criminal underworld as money-laundering. In other words, the corrupt flow of cash to the Clintons for services dutifully rendered to the financial aristocracy was disguised as “speaking fees” for taxation and accounting purposes.

In one secret Wall Street speech, Clinton candidly admitted that she is “far removed” from the middle-class interests that she has sought to rally behind her campaign, reassuring her rich patrons that her lifestyle and social outlook more closely mirror theirs.

Clinton stated that she is “kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

In a secret speech at Goldman Sachs on October 24, 2013, Clinton brushed off the conception that rampant corruption, speculation and criminality at Wall Street had led to the economic crash of 2008. Defending Wall Street, Clinton claimed that all this was a “misunderstanding.”

Speaking as though she was an attorney retained to confidentially advise all billionaires regarding their interests, Clinton pointed with concern to the perception “that somehow the game is rigged” as well as the way that hatred of Wall Street was becoming “politicized.”

In the same secret speech to Deutsche Bank on October 7, 2014, Clinton pointed to popular hostility to Wall Street as “a problem for all of us”—using the word “us” to refer to financial aristocrats and their political servants. She reassured the bankers in attendance that any measures or regulations implemented by Congress or the Obama administration would be designed to restore “public trust” in the financial system. In other words, they would be toothless and they would leave the privileges and prerogatives of the financial elite intact.

In her secret speeches, Clinton also reiterated her support for the Obama administration’s policy that the banks would continue to be allowed to “regulate” themselves. In a secret speech to the Goldman Sachs Alternative Investments Symposium on October 24, 2013, Clinton declared: “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” Translation: “The Obama administration and I will do nothing to halt your illegal practices or impede the flow of the world’s money into your pockets.”

Behind closed doors, Clinton also spoke frankly of her need for vast sums of money to fund her campaign. “I think I raised $250 million or some such enormous amount,” she said, describing her previous presidential bid, “and in the last campaign President Obama raised $1.1 billion.” In that speech, made to General Electric’s Global Leadership Meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on January 6, 2014, Clinton admitted that the US Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision ushered in a “wild west” period of unlimited corporate bribes in elections.

Documents released by The Intercept on Saturday detail the corrupt relations between sections of the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with reporters jostling each other to present themselves as the most loyal and reliable outlets for a calculated “leak” of exclusive information. “One January 2015 strategy document,” reported The Intercept, “singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a ‘friendly journalist’ who has ‘teed up’ stories for them in the past and ‘never disappointed’ them.”

The emails released over recent days appear to bolster allegations in a lawsuit filed Thursday by the campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, which claims that the Clinton campaign flouted federal election law by coordinating activity with a “super PAC” run by David Brock, which contributed $6 million to the Clinton campaign. The allegations are serious and have the potential to trigger criminal prosecutions.

In an internal Clinton campaign email released by Wikileaks, Research Director Tony Carrk urged staff to “give an extra scrub” to the transcripts of Wall Street speeches before any portions could be publicly released.

Clinton, Trump and the environment: here.

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