WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denies the Russian government was the source of leaked emails about Hillary Clinton and says her “neo-McCarthy” Russia-bashing is just part of a cover-up, in an interview with John Pilger.
By John Pilger
This interview was filmed in the Embassy of Ecuador in London – where Julian Assange is a political refugee – and broadcast on Nov. 5, 2016
John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (Photo credit: Espen Moe)
Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half. Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover-up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.
John Pilger: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.
Julian Assange: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.
John Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
Julian Assange: And twelve million dollars from Morocco …
John Pilger: Twelve million from Morocco yeah.
Julian Assange: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].
John Pilger: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Julian Assange: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.
John Pilger: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
Julian Assange: Yes.
John Pilger: That’s extraordinary.
Julian Assange: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralizing cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.
She’s the centralizer that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. This is quite amazing.
John Pilger: Didn’t Citibank supply a list …. ?
Julian Assange: Yes.
John Pilger: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.
Julian Assange: Yes.
John Pilger: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?
Julian Assange: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests.
Julian Assange: So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.
![U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on March 30, 2012. [State Department photo]](https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/6884183372_b0227798b7_b.jpg)
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on March 30, 2012. [State Department photo]
Julian Assange: Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favored agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.
So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.
Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe,’ and this is exactly what happened.
John Pilger: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the White House?’
Julian Assange: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies … big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.
John Pilger: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’
Julian Assange: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia] documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.
John Pilger: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Julian Assange: [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper-middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.
John Pilger: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the Internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?
Julian Assange: Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of 16 million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.
WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organization; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa.
John Pilger: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
Julian Assange: I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last 15 years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].
John Pilger: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.
Julian Assange: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalized — this [the embassy] is the world … it’s visually the world [for me].
John Pilger: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?
Julian Assange: It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.
John Pilger: Yes.
Julian Assange: So, yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.
John Pilger: Do you worry about them?
Julian Assange: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.
John Pilger: Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’
Julian Assange: The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent 18 months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. versus Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognize his asylum.’ [And here is] Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognize the UN ruling],’ so leaving open their ability to extradite.
I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publicly in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
Julian Assange: Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?
John Pilger: Yes, it’s different.
Julian Assange: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.
[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. To support Julian Assange, go to: https://justice4assange.com/donate.html
Ok, apart from all the Hillary and Assange personal stuff:
one question was: John Pilger: Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya?
For some strange reason (or was it just silly editing?) the answer seems to be cut out.
Assange describes the mess in Libya, but fails to answer the question: WHY was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about it?
Missed opportunity, Mr Pilger!
especially in the context of Mrs. Clinton’s future policies in Syria.
As Assange said of Hillary..
”She’s a centralizing cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.
She’s the centralizer that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus”
Hillary is the Perfection of a Corrupt System:
“Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of a corrupt political system won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption.
Let’s set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes.
The corruption of pay-to-play and the commingling of public and private influence is not the failing of an individual–it is the logical conclusion of a thoroughly corrupt political system.
Given the incentives built into politics as usual, public/private pay-to-play doesn’t just make sense–it is the only possible maximization of the political system.
Cobble together a multi-million dollar private foundation, millions of dollars in speaking fees from big-money contributors, conflicts of interest, the secrecy of private email servers, pay-to-play schemes and corrupted loyalists planted in the Department of Justice, and the inevitable result is a politics as usual money-harvesting machine that lays waste to the nation, supporters and critics alike.
All the Clintons did is assemble the parts more effectively than anyone else. Now that the machine has scooped up hundreds of millions of dollars in “contributions” and other loot, vested interests and corrupted loyalists within the federal government will do anything to protect the machine and its vast flow of funds.
The nation’s political system needs a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of politics as usual won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption.
That will require rooting out the incentives that made the Clintons’ perfection of corruption both logical and inevitable.”
http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov16/corrupt-system11-16.html
Nothing Good Can Come of This Election”–and That’s Good:
“Because ridding the nation of its political corruption will require hitting bottom.
Just as an alcoholic or drug addict is incapable of making any truly positive changes until he/she hits absolute bottom, so it is with our tolerance of a corrupt political system that is poisoning the nation, one injection of corrupt cash, collusion and pay-to-play at a time.
If our rotten-to-the-core politics as usual is indeed flying off the cliff to complete destruction, that is an unalloyed good.
Just as alcoholics continue down their self-destructive path with the aid of enablers, so too has the corrupt political order expanded with the aid of the Mainstream Media, insiders in the Department of Justice, K Street lobbyists and a veritable army of well-paid lackeys, pundits, academics, apparatchiks and assorted toadies in the organs of governance and in the big-money private sector and philanthro-capitalist dynasties of pay-to-play foundations.
The only way anything will truly change in the political order is if every Establishment insider politico loses every election, from the presidency to dogcatcher. Nothing will change until the mere existence of a private foundation like the Clinton Foundation triggers a landslide loss for the politico with ties to such corruption.
Nothing will change until the collusion of the mainstream media (supplying the insider candidate with debate questions, etc.) alone causes the colluding candidate to lose by a landslide.
Nothing will change until candidates who refuse to accept any donation larger than $100 from anyone or any entity beat the Goldman Sachs/Saudi prince-funded insider candidates by a landslide.
Nothing will change until candidates who fund costly negative TV advertising campaigns with millions in pay-to-play “contributions” from Goldman Sachs et al. lose by a landslide.
It’s easy to blame lax campaign laws or the corrupted candidates and their insider toadies, but ultimately we’re responsible for enabling corruption, collusion, pay-for-play and a political and financial Elite that’s above the law.
This mass rejection of the politics as usual of corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites is the highest possible good.”
http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov16/bad-good11-16.html
Well said.
This may be a tad off-topic but I have noted a number of articles about Huma and her extraordinary influence over Hillary. These articles link Huma to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia, which may explain a lot of things. I have read rumors about Muslim brotherhood links to the US govt but have tended to discount them in the past, primarily because they have been propagated by wackos. Now, with the revelations in recent days with Huma and her estranged husband’s computer,it might be said that “we may have a situation here.”
A recent article published after the recent bizarre Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin kerfuffle indicated that Huma had been relegated from right-hand woman to “one of Hillary’s aides.”
I would be more concerned about her pervert husband’s Israel-First position and his access to those emails than her connections.
Sometimes I dream of Julian Assange walking free, Edward Snowden coming home, and Chelsey Manning getting out. It’s a nice dream while it lasts. Hopefully a change of government will allow this to happen. That these people are prisoners is a disgrace.
Interesting how Assange says Trump supporters are portrayed as being “white trash”, deplorable, irredeemable. These people know trash, as that’s where they’ve been thrown – in the trash. Unions were busted, jobs shipped overseas, but of course the U.S. multinationals who took the jobs overseas still expected the American white trash to pull their weight and buy their products. Instead of paying a decent wage and foregoing SOME of their profits, the multinational corporations took jobs overseas, hired cheap labor, and kept nearly ALL of the profits to themselves. Nice win for them.
These people are not perpetual entitlement people (subsidized housing, free medical/cellphones, food stamps) who always vote for the Democrats, and they are not part of the elite. And they are not stupid. It really isn’t hard to see what’s been going on. I mean, inequality is staring them in the face on a daily basis, and they don’t like it. Add in the corruption scandals, insider trading, revolving door between government and corporations, bailouts for the insolvent banks, cover-ups, Citizens United, a porous southern border, wars everywhere, lies, the pandering to Israel, whistle blowers being condemned, politicians who don’t listen to the people, healthcare costs rising, rents increasing, food costs escalating. These people are losing jobs and are being squeezed.
And yet they are called “racists” because they want the few jobs available to go to their sons and daughters instead of an illegal immigrant. Go figure! And when they argue against free trade, they’re also called “racists” because apparently they don’t want to help the Third World. Go figure again!
I hope they come out in large numbers, these so-called “trashy” people, and smash the pumpkin against the wall, smash it into a million pieces. The government is supposed to be run for the people, not for the elite.
I agree with your critique of the cynical moniker “white trash” – and I think, reading between the lines that Assange understands that these people are being demonized for political reasons. It was shameful for Clinton to diss Trump supporters and ignore the burden that the Neoliberal and Neoconservative alliance in Washington foisted on these people who have had the New Deal snatched out from under them.
Bernie pointed out the truth on this I think. He said that Trump was using scapegoating to distract people from who was really doing them in.
Bernie would have beaten Trump in a landslide.
Trump was the only Republican candidate who Clinton could actually beat because she has been a lynchpin in the problems facing these people.
These people are not perpetual entitlement people (subsidized housing, free medical/cellphones, food stamps) who always vote for the Democrats, and they are not part of the elite.
Their problem and the nation’s problem is that they and we have been lied to from the time they/we could understand the spoken word and the vast majority of people don’t know fact from fiction or fiction from fact. From one angle they will be fortunate if Donald Trump is not elected. They will therefor be spared another betrayal. Trump is just using them for his own ends. Instead, the odds are that all those people who are so credulous as to believe Hillary is “working for us” are the suckers who will be betrayed.
“These people are not perpetual entitlement people (subsidized housing, free medical/cellphones, food stamps) who always vote for the Democrats, and they are not part of the elite.”
That’s code for black people.
Actually more white people receive food stamps according to u.s. department of agriculture and welfare. U.S. federal income tax does not pay for government cellphone assistance. Cellphone users pay a usf fee on their cellphone bill that pays for this mandated by the telecommunications act of 1996. The poorest counties in the us are predominantly white.
But conservatives use this “welfare queen” propaganda to give these “used people”, angry white guys, etc. to vote against their own interests. TO give the oligarchy corporations tax breaks and subsidize their wars and too big too fail ventures with your tax dollars. I laugh when I hear conservatives say things like “republicans lower taxes” and “smaller government”.
As for the so called left (actually Rockefeller republicans) assange lays it out beautifully above.
It’s a one party system. The business party.
Like mussolini said
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
To all the commenters here; it’s very likely that Dr. Stein and the Greens will be on your ballot… repeat…on YOUR Ballot, staring back at you, in your face. The Greens are on the ballot in 45 states, a write-in option in 3 more states (the Libertarians are on all fifty ballots). You’re quite right, Bill. Trump will betray you in one way, as a narcissistic user of people (that’s how billionaires become billionaires, as behind every great fortune lies a great crime). And Hillary will betray you because she is the very embodiment of The Establishment, who are busily engaged in reviving Empire in modern corporate-fascist clothes, to erase any concept of We the People, the 99%, the white trash AND the non-whites. Why piss around with betrayers like that? Stein will be on YOUR ballot, staring you right in the face. MAKE the Establishment have to lie and hack. On november 9th, send a ten dollar donation to the Green Party U.S. (or the Libertarian Party if that was your choice), as a screaming refutation of the Big Lie perpetrated upon us through the voting machines. If it’s a paltry number of checks, then the people have chosen otherwise, and will rightly suffer the consequences of their choice.
I donated to the Greens but was forced to vote for the lesser evil. Both DemRep candidates are utter disasters, but voting otherwise is based on an assumption that
1. the vote count is used to direct future party platforms (so that a Trump vote drives the Dems right, when in fact platform planners use less ambiguous polling to decide the planks supported), or
2. increased independent vote will strengthen them (but there have to be enough to matter).
But there aren’t enough independent voters this year, because
1. The oligarchy mass media control the stupidest third of voters, and
2. Many women are fooled by the female card to vote for policies they oppose.
So a green/no-vote/write-in achieves nothing and subtracts your vote from the lesser-evil contest candidate of your (very reluctant) choice.
The choice is between foreign wars based upon zionist bribes, or domestic class wars. The latter is less irresponsible to those elsewhere, and more likely to result in a domestic regime change away from the DemRep oligarchy.
Like I say, there is technically no reason why Trump and Clinton cannot be driven into 3rd and 4th place, as up to 90% of the electorate will have other choices than Imperial wars or domestic class wars. Ignorance will not excuse the consequences of piss-poor judgement and choice, however much we wish that it would. The choice is ours to make tomorrow, and, like you, I too, and my children and grandchildren, will go down with the ship, if piss-poor judgement prevails tomorrow. I’m reassuring my Nov 8th vote will register with the Greens, by sending a Nov. 9th $10 check to Green Party U.S. If others get the same idea, and 20 million checks flood the post office for Green Party U.S. that’ll be like a shot heard ’round the World. The election is just the beginning, not the end.
Unfortunately, your attempt at voting strategically indicates a ignorance of strategy.
If the Greens get a mere 5% this election, that would give them both federal matching funds in the next 4 years of elections, but also would give them guaranteed ballot access in all states nationwide for the next 4 years.
In other words, the Greens only need 5% to win the future.
Voting for the corporate party, rather than against it, makes you an enabler of all that they do.
Also, honestly, what is a lesser evil this year? Is provoking world war 3 with Russia better or worse than claiming climate change is a hoax?
Well, John, you didn’t answer my strategy notes, so you cannot claim less “ignorance.”
The difficulty of finding a lesser evil is noted in my comment, and you did not answer that.
Voting the lesser evil is bad, but throwing away a vote is worse; I noted that an independent vote is OK is a non-swing state, but mine was a swing state.
I noted that I gave generously to the Greens, and hoped that they would get their five percent, or do in the future. I noted that there must be enough independent support to chance a win.
So you are using vituperation rather than reason, which does not make your point.
Assange had been questioned in Sweden after the accusations of sexual harassment and rape in 2010 (Assange has denied the allegations), but he was released. After that he travelled to UK. Later on the Swedish prosecutor realized that they need an additional interview with him and he was asked to return to Sweden for questioning. He suspected, quite rightly, that if he returned, he might be turned over to US authorities. He proposed to be interviewed in London instead, the Swedes never accepted this.
In February, a UN Working Group found that Sweden and the UK were violating Assange’s rights by detaining him without charge, and called for his release and compensation. Both Sweden and UK ignored this resolution and claimed that it changes nothing.
Now, after lengthy and complicated negotiations, the questioning has been agreed to be held at the Equadorian Embassy on Nov. 14th., by a prosecutor from Equador, the Swedish prosecutor being present as well. After that, the Swedish prosecution will decide whether to pursue the investigation further.
So when the US election is over, there is one more crucial date to observe.
Here’s a link to: Clinton Email Investigation Timeline
I found the link in a comment on another web site – The Progressive Wing – which some of us Bernie supporters enjoy .
This one is a credible sounding quote from the cyber security expert’s advise to Podesta on the risk from the private server:
http://www.thompsontimeline.com/tag/2016-10-31-addenda/
IMO it makes the SOS and her staff sound clueless about their responsibilities.
How could people with so little awareness of the world they live in and the consequences of their actions have such power to wreak such havoc in the world.
And of course, those of us who pay taxes are paying for all this.
Great link, Evelyn. Thank you.
It’s noteworthy that the Clinton Foundation and the Islamic State are beholden to state sponsors of terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Quatar; that the use of mercenary terrorists in Libya towards the destruction of the Libyan state and the staging of a dirty war on Syria was in Secretary Clinton’s wheelhouse; that Wall Street (Citigroup) picked Obama’s Cabinet; that the neo-McCarthyite bashing of Russia is diversionary.
That we Americans have locked up Chelsie Manning, and want to do the same to Julian Assange, both for the crime of telling the truth, is despicable to put it mildly.
I’ll second that.
No question about that, Mr. Merwood!
Our government, is apparently, very weak -namely unable to stand up for the principles that would be perceived by most people as honorable – and apparently, instead, controlled by the MIC as Eisenhower warned us it would be.
And anyone who tries to tell the truth about it is perceived as dangerous and subject to being silenced or discredited.
1984 comes to mind.
It’s sick.
RootsAction has published petitions on behalf of the courageous and persecuted Chelsea Manning.
Chelsea was not the first either.
Leonard Peliter…
Mumia Abu Jamal
All the imprisoned Panthers
It goes back at least as far as the Haymarket Martyrs
Arguably back to our Genocidal Founding Fathers, or back to that slave trader and child rapist who still gets a federal holiday and matress sales (the Italian-American community should lobby for Al Capone day to replace Columbus Day, as Al was far less reprehensible.)