IdleRich

IdleRich
It's funny how "British Petroleum" springs back to life sometimes when someone wants to make a point - no such company has existed since 1998, and while BP is still headquartered in London, it's mainly American-owned these days. Obama did the same thing after the big spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years ago.
Beyond Petroleum never quite stuck...
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Anyway, what about the National Emergency?
doesn't really matter if it sticks or not, that's not that point

or, it matters very much in a longer-term way: rule of law, defining powers of executive branch, checks and balances, etc

but immediately it's just about having the issue. he/his people don't want any kind of resolution, just an ongoing fight.

he said it himself "the only reason we're talking about this is because of the election"

the literal wall itself is so impractical, for so many reasons (geography, eminent domain of private property, etc). as well as ofc the absurd hyperbole of the invented "crisis".

Pelosi (credit where it's due) stared him down over the shutdown and he blinked first, so now we have this stupid bullshit
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the executive branch powers, checks and balances stuff is v important, I don't wanna undersell that

it's not unlike what went on under Bush II, but more grotesque, farcical, etc

it's just, that damage will be longer-term. this declaration is just the media circus.

there was a long, amusing bit where he half-heartedly tried to distance himself from the idea that Hannity, Limbaugh, etc are pulling his strings.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to explain it procedurally - the President has a good deal of leeway to order governmental departments to do or not do certain things within existing law

for example, tell ICE to focus on violent offenders and hands off sanctuary cities. or alternatively, to crack down on everyone everywhere.

but executive orders can be challenged on legal and/or constitutional etc grounds, as happened with the travel ban

Trump said he's counting on SC to uphold this, as indeed they knuckled under to the travel ban on party lines (and that was before Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy)

Barr is both an absolute body and soul Trump lackey, and a huge proponent of executive power, so the DOJ will vigorously back this nonsense declaration

whether any of it actually results in significant new construction is another matter and, again, besides the point
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
we're also seeing what happens when a President can't/won't get competent people to work for him

a mediocre yes-man at State and AG, literally no one at Defense, a non-entity as interim WH Chief of Staff, on and on

everything is a fucking mess, unelected evil motherfuckers (Miller) or feckless bag-men (Kushner) whispering in the ear

I mean, fingers crossed for 2020 the Democrats don't fuck this up (they will; you know it, I know it, they know it)

tho I still feel worse for yall, since Brexit is forever
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
There's the whole Venezuela thing too. I wouldn't be surprised if what we're seeing now is the culmination of a US-led effort to take control of the Venezuelan oil reserves.

there is no reason to doubt this. they have literally said this. does anyone still believe they give a fuck about human rights or democracy?

there's a great book about us imperialism regarding latin america called "open veins of latin america" (1971). here, eduardo galeano writes about pre-bolivarian venezuela:

VULTURES OVER LAKE MARACAIBO
Though its participation in the world market has dwindled by half in the past decade, Venezuela is still the top petroleum exporter. Almost half the profits U.S. capitalists take from Latin America come from Venezuela. One of the world's richest countries, it is also one of the poorest and most violent. It boasts of Latin America's highest per-capita income and most complete and up-to- date highway network, and no country consumes as much Scotch whiskey per inhabitant. Immediately exploitable iron, petroleum, and gas reserves in its subsoil could multiple by ten the wealth of every Venezuelan; the population of Germany or England could fit into its enormous virgin lands. In half a century, oil rigs have extracted an income double the resources of the Marshall Plan. Since the first well blew, the population has multiplied by three and the national budget by 100, but most of the people scramble for the plush minority’s leavings, still as poor as the country depended on cacao or coffee. The capital, Caracas, has grown 700 percent in thirty years: the old city of airy patios, central and silent cathedral is covered with skyscrapers as Lake Maracaibo covered with oil wells. Today it is a supersonic, deafening, air-conditioned nightmare, a center of oil culture that might pass as the capital of Texas. Caracas chews gum and loves synthetic products and canned foods; it never walks, and poisons the clear air of the valley with the fumes of its motorization; its fever to buy, consume, obtain, spend, use, get hold of everything leaves it no time to sleep. From surrounding hillside hovels made of garbage, half a million forgotten people observe the sybaritic scene. The gilded city's avenues glitter with hundreds of thousands of late-model cars, but in the consuming society not everyone consumes. According to the census, half of Venezuela's children and youths do not go to school.
Every day Venezuela produces 3 .5 million barrels of petroleum to move the capitalist world's industrial machinery, but four-fifths of the concessions owned by Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, and Texaco are untouched reserves and over half the value of the exports never returns to the country. Creole (Standard Oil) publicity brochures point with pride to the corporation's Venezuelan philanthropies much as the Royal Guipuzcoan Company proclaimed its own virtues in the eighteenth century; the profits milked from this wonderful cow, in proportion to capital invested, are only comparable with those obtained by old-time slave merchants and pirates. No country has yielded as much for world capitalism in so short a time: the wealth drained from Venezuela, according to Domingo Alberto Rangel, exceeds what the Spaniards took from Potosí or the English from India. Some estimates put the real profits of Venezuelan oil concerns at 38 percent in 1961 and 48 percent in 1962, although the profit rates announced in their balance sheets were 15 percent and 17 percent respectively. The difference is attributable to the juggling of accounts and to hidden transfers.

...

Salvador Garmendia, the novelist who reinvented the prefabricated hell of this whole conquest culture, the culture of petroleum, wrote to me in the middle of 1969:
Have you seen the apparatus that extracts crude petroleum? It looks like a big black bird whose sharp-pointed head rises and falls heavily day and night without stopping for a second: it is the only vulture that doesn't eat shit. What do we do when the characteristic sound of the sipper tells us there isn't any more oil? The grotesque overture is already beginning to be heard over Lake Maracaibo, where fabulous communities grew up overnight, with supermarkets, dance halls, a profusion of whorehouses and gambling dens-- money had no value. I recently made a trip through there and felt claws in my stomach. The smell of death and decay overpowers the smell of oil. The towns are semi-deserted, wormeaten, ulcerated, the streets deep in mud, the stores dilapidated. One of the companies' old divers goes down every day with a saw to cut lengths of abandoned pipeline which he sells as old iron. People are beginning to talk about the “companies” as if conjuring up a golden fable. They live like acrobats on a tightrope of myths about the old days, when fortunes were squandered on a turn of the dice or a week-long drinking orgy. Meanwhile, the pumps continue bobbing up and down and the rain of dollars falls on Miraflores, the government palace, to be turned into superhighways and other cement monsters. Seventy percent of the country lives a totally marginal existence. In the cities an unconcerned, well-paid middle class stuffs itself with useless objects and makes a strident cult of imbecility and bad taste. The government recently announced with great fanfare that it had exterminated illiteracy. Sequel: in the recent electoral fiesta registration lists showed a million illiterates between eighteen and fifty years of age.
 

droid

Well-known member
Russia: Arctic oil deal and weakening of NATO.
Israel: Recognition of Jerusalem and blank cheque for slaughter.
Suaids: Tacit approval of Qatar, blind eye to Khashoggi and nuclear weapons.

Quid pro quo.
 

Leo

Well-known member
it's along the lines of what's always gone on before: official advice ignored, regulations eased, laws disregarded, blatant private sector money grabs made via public projects, deals with traditional advisories, etc. the difference now is the brazen openness of it. for the most part, they don't even fucking care about hiding it, or even being discreet. trump tweets about half this shit, FFS.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
in case you weren't sure if Manafort was a sleaze bag...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article...ed-portions-of-andrea-manaforts-hacked-texts/

In 2016 or early 2017, Paul Manafort’s 32-year-old daughter Andrea’s cell phone was hacked. A database containing hundreds of thousands of her purported text messages, many in conversation with her sister Jess, was released online in February 2017. Politico confirmed the veracity of enough of the texts to enter them into the public record.

Various excerpts have been used in every subsequent profile written on Manafort — Trump’s former campaign manager, a career Republican operative, and a lobbyist to foreign dictators — who currently sits in jail for bank fraud, tax fraud, obstruction of justice, and financial conspiracy with a foreign power. These articles quote Andrea and Jess contending with their father’s corruption (“He has no moral or legal compass”), what they believe was his active role in the murder of hundreds of Ukrainian protestors (“Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that / To send those people out and get them slaughtered”), his humiliatingly public affair as a sugar daddy to a much younger woman (“He got her A PRIVATE JET AT ONE POINT”), his role on Trump’s campaign (“He is refusing payment. Bc he doesn’t want to be viewed as Trump’s employee”), and their own tormented desire to free themselves from their family complicities (“Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money.”).

Yet one cluster of texts never entered public discourse in the same way. For eight months after these texts were released online — an eon, in internet time — no one wrote about them.

The sleaziest gossip outlets, which enthusiastically published other dirty details about Manafort (including his membership in BDSM sex clubs), wouldn’t touch it. Deep transparency conspiracy theorists didn’t Tweet about it. A March 2018 Atlantic profile on Manafort by Franklin Foer only very delicately alludes to the matter, commenting that, “after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters.”

That’s a rather dainty way to refer to over a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior, in which Manafort allegedly forced his wife, vulnerable from having sustained brain damage after a near-death horseback riding accident years before, to engage in “gang bangs” with black men while he watched.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Ewww.... hopefully soon he'll get to be involved in some similar gang bangs himself. Pardon the tired cliche about prison rape but that one kinda writes itself and couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
 

Leo

Well-known member
lots of kinky shit from this crowd...

[Roger] Stone served as a senior consultant to Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for President, but that assignment ended in a characteristic conflagration. The National Enquirer, in a story headlined “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring,” reported that the Stones had apparently run personal ads in a magazine called Local Swing Fever and on a Web site that had been set up with Nydia’s credit card. “Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men,” the ad on the Web site stated. The ads sought athletes and military men, while discouraging overweight candidates, and included photographs of the Stones. At the time, Stone claimed that he had been set up by a “very sick individual,” but he was forced to resign from Dole’s campaign. Stone acknowledged to me that the ads were authentic. “When that whole thing hit the fan in 1996, the reason I gave a blanket denial was that my grandparents were still alive,” he said. “I’m not guilty of hypocrisy. I’m a libertarian and a libertine.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-dirty-trickster
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
And this of course

The Apprentice is a novel by Lewis Libby, former Chief of Staff to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, first published in hardback in 1996, reprinted in trade paperback in 2002, and reissued in mass market paperback in 2005 after Libby's indictment in the CIA leak grand jury investigation. It is set in northern Japan in winter 1903, and centers on a group of travelers stranded at a remote inn due to a smallpox epidemic. It has been described as "a thriller ... that includes references to bestiality, pedophilia and rape."It is the first and only novel that Libby has written.
Young girls having sex with bears I seem to remember.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Now that's interesting, given the context of the right wing BS regarding "Pizzagate" and the like...and since this is reaching back to the Dole times, the moral outrage regarding Clinton....
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Now that's interesting, given the context of the right wing BS regarding "Pizzagate" and the like...and since this is reaching back to the Dole times, the moral outrage regarding Clinton....

I know, right? And let's not forget that Trump is in all likelihood a serial rapist, and that one of his alleged victims was just 13 at the time. And all those parties he and his mates used to go to in 80s, with all those 'aspiring models' who were about that age, or only a year or two older.

And yet millions believe this garbage about Hillary Clinton pimping children.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Now that's interesting, given the context of the right wing BS regarding "Pizzagate" and the like...and since this is reaching back to the Dole times, the moral outrage regarding Clinton....
I guess it was always like that. The Repubs think that the Dems are financially incontinent though if you look at what actually happened historically the pattern has normally been that when you get a Dem president he manages to turn the deficit into a surplus and start paying off the debt - until the GOP get back in and reverse the process. The Reps think that Dems are soft and terror and will not guard the US properly - yet it was Bush in power on 9/11 and Obama who executed Bin Laden. In general it's quite normal psychology to accuse your opponent of being what you are (or possibly fear being). This is never clearer than with Trump who is always ranting about Crooked Hillary and Lyin' Ted when he is the biggest crook and liar in politics. He's always accusing people of doing the things he does (look at this idea of Fake News) - and why not? It's been very effective for him and for the GOP over the years.
 
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