This is one of the few articles on the Helsinki summit that delves into what Trump and Putin actually may have talked about. From Pepe Escobar at atimes.com:
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Tag Archives: Helsinki summit
A walk on the wild side as Trump meets Putin at Finland station, by Pepe Escobar
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics
Tagged Helsinki summit, President Trump, Vladimir Putin
Deep State Turns on Trump, by Bill Bonner
The Deep State rears its ugly head after Trump’s meeting with Putin. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:
We left off yesterday with a provocative question: Has Trump really gone to war with the Deep State?
Or was he just mouthing off in Helsinki… off message… and out of control?
There are a couple more hypotheses, too… but we’ll get to them in a moment.
Off the Reservation
Even some of Mr. Trump’s dearest supporters seemed to think Mr. Trump he has gone too far off the reservation. Newt Gingrich, for example, seemed to suggest that the president needed to edit his transcript:
“It is the most serious mistake of his presidency and must be corrected – immediately,” he tweeted.
And here is Dan Coats, the president’s own Director of National Intelligence, sticking to the Russians-are-bad-guys trope and referring to allegations of election interference:
These actions are persistent, they are pervasive, and they are meant to undermine America’s democracy.
From Senator John McCain:
He and Putin seemed to be reading from the same script …
And here is Indiana Representative Jim Banks:
I want President Trump’s diplomatic efforts to be successful, but I’ll take the word of a Hoosier over Vladimir Putin any day.
Who-Dunnit
The word he was taking was what U.S. intelligence agencies were putting out – that is to say, the word of Deep State operatives. Their claim was that Russia hacked into U.S. computers, specifically the systems of the Democratic National Committee, to try to influence the presidential election of 2016.
We bring the Deep State into the conversation because it may turn out to be the “who” in this “who-dunnit.”
Regular readers will remember that the Deep State is the loose collection of special interests… government insiders… and financial elites that control the country.
Remember, too, that Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto described how all governments are taken over by the “foxes” – aka the Deep State – smart, elite insiders who use the power of the state for their own purposes.
The Deep State is the major beneficiary of the Warfare State, the Welfare State, and the Police State. And if Donald J. Trump really was a threat to any of them, the insiders had a better motive than the Russians for wanting to slow him down.
To continue reading: Deep State Turns on Trump
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics
Tagged Deep State, Helsinki summit, President Trump
Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia? by Paul Craig Roberts
The first sentence is the money sentence: “The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square.” From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:
The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created between the two superpowers.
Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of years.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia because he wants to make peace: “It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the Russians have on Donald Trump—personally, politically and financially that he should behave in such a manner?” The “such a manner” Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of war.
To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the accusation as self-evident truth. Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia.
Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi’s false accusation: “Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump.” If you don’t believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are stupid beyond belief.
To continue reading: Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia?
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Media, Politics
Tagged Helsinki summit, President Trump, Vladimir Putin
Treason? Get A Life! by Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Raúl Ilargi Meijer knows how to call horseshit when he sees it. From Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
Yeah, just keep ’em coming, right, so that when the last one falls flat on its face people will have already forgotten about it and instead focus on the new one. It’s been the modus operandi of the US MSM ever since Donald Trump emerged as an actual presidential candidate, and they haven’t let go.
They realize by now that it divides the nation, it costs them a large chunk of their potential readers and viewers, and creates chaos all around, but the bottom line is it makes them money. Because those people who fall into the echo chamber trap, tumble into it fast and furious, and will gladly pay to read yet another installment of how bad the man really is.
But it is getting out of hand, guys and gals, it is becoming a real and present danger to the -formerly- United States. The anti-Russia propaganda machine far predates Trump, but manufacturing an ever closer link between the two has proven to be a masterstroke of media genius.
That Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to the US and indeed the entire western world is a narrative taken straight out of Edward Bernays’ playbook. And it works like a charm. The problem is, it is also the biggest threat to peace anywhere on the globe that we have ever seen since WWII.
Putin is a patriot who came to the fore in mostly unexplained ways, named by American puppet Boris Yeltsin as his successor, only to save his country from US-induced plundering and restore Russia as a functioning country. Far from perfect, but functioning. Don’t forget that Russian life-expectancy fell by many years in the post-Gorbachev era. And then look now.
Yes, Putin uses some hard-handed tactics from time to time. He has no choice: the US threat to Russia is an ongoing one. There’s still a huge economic threat, of which US sanctions are but a minor part, there’s an intelligence threat, there’s NATO encroaching upon Russia’s borders.
Thus far, Putin has been able to counter them all. And his popularity among Russia’s population is far higher than that of any western politician. His people understand and recognize what he’s done and why he’s done it. He refuses for his country to be overrun and sold off to the highest bidders.
To continue reading: Treason? Get A Life!
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Media, Politics
Tagged Helsinki summit, President Trump, Vladimir Putin
The Vlad and Donald Show – A Glorious Blow for Peace! by David Stockman
It always takes a day or two after the reflexive hysteria over anything significant that Donald Trump says or does, but sanity does eventually emerge. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
The Vlad and Donald show in Helsinki Monday was simply brilliant and breathtaking – we’d say even a beautiful thing to behold.
Between them, they left CNN’s nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense sounding like the shrieking monkeys they actually are. And that’s to say nothing of the fools they made out of the newly minted liberal and progressive warmongers on the Dem side of the aisle in Washington or the so-called journalists who fill 90% of the space in the so-called mainstream media with endless pro-war propaganda.
But most of all it was the single greatest blow to the War Party since it turned Imperial Washington into a colossal menace bent on global hegemony when the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.
We have said all along that Putin and Russia have been demonized because the Warfare State desperately needs an “enemy” to justify its $800 billion annual mugging of America’s taxpayers. Yet today’s spontaneous chorus by the two leaders in behalf of détente, dialogue and diplomacy puts the kibosh on that Big Lie more completely than could 100 Ted Talks or a year’s worth of pro-peace op eds in the Washington Post.
So Flyover America will have no trouble seeing the good of the Helsinki Summit. Trump and Putin just killed it on every topic where the War Party and its shills in the press wanted to drive a wedge.
That is to say, cooperation on Syria, arms control, terrorism, North Korea, Ukraine; friendly competition on supplying natural gas to Europe; an invitation to Mueller to send his legal sleuths to Russia to participate in the interrogation of the 12 GRU ham sandwiches named in the indictment; and best of all, a reciprocal notion that Russian prosecutors come here to question Deep State operatives about how they helped one of the greatest scoundrels of modern times, Bill Browder, abscond from Russia with almost $1.5 billionskimmed from its people and on which he and his posse paid zero taxes either there or here.
To continue reading: The Vlad and Donald Show – A Glorious Blow for Peace!
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics
Tagged Helsinki summit, President Trump, Vladimir Putin
Trump Calls Off Cold War II, by Patrick J. Buchanan
Trump wants to improve the US’s relationship with Russia, and his critics are left screaming “Treason!”. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.”
He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.”
It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency.
He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia, not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely on the U.S. establishment.
In a tweet prior to the meeting, Trump indicted the elites of both parties: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”
Trump thereby repudiated the records and agendas of the neocons and their liberal interventionist allies, as well as the archipelago of War Party think tanks beavering away inside the Beltway.
Looking back over the week, from Brussels to Britain to Helsinki, Trump’s message has been clear, consistent and startling.
NATO is obsolete. European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense.
And there will be no Cold War II.
We are not going to let Putin’s annexation of Crimea or aid to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine prevent us from working on a rapprochement and a partnership with him, Trump is saying. We are going to negotiate arms treaties and talk out our differences as Ronald Reagan did with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
To continue reading: Trump Calls Off Cold War II
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics
Tagged Helsinki summit, President Trump, Vladimir Putin
Saboteurs of Peace: On the Road to Helsinki, by Justin Raimondo
The recent indictment of the 12 alleged Russian GRU agents is as phony as the rest of the Russiagate “investigation.” From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
If there was ever any doubt that the Russia-gate hoax is a scheme by the War Party to salvage their bankrupt foreign policy, and depose a democratically-elected President, then Robert Mueller’s indictment of twelve alleged GRU agents for “interfering” in the 2016 election settles the matter once and for all. Are we supposed to believe it was just a coincidence that the indictment was made public just as Trump was about to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki?
An indictment of twelve individuals who will never contest the charges, and which will not have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law – to whom is it addressed? Not to any jury, but to the court of public opinion. It is, in short, pure propaganda, meant to sabotage Trump’s Helsinki peace initiative before it has even convened.
Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective. The American people aren’t stupid: to the extent that they’re paying attention to this Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller’s accusations without too much difficulty.
The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged “real time” transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC’s email system as well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller’s word for it.
What Mueller is counting on is that the defendants will never show up in court. If they did, following the example of representatives of the indicted Internet Research Agency – accused of running Facebook ads on Russia’s behalf – Mueller would have to provide real evidence of the defendant’s guilt. In that case, the indictment would have to be dropped, because the alleged evidence is classified.
Ominously, the indictment points to unnamed US individuals alleged to have collaborated with supposed Russian agents: Roger Stone has been identified as one of them, and no doubt others have been targeted by the special prosecutor’s office. Anyone who thought the anti-Russian inquisition would be content with mini-big fish Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, and the little tadpoles they’d managed to corral, is about to be proven dead wrong. This fishing expedition has barely begun.
To continue reading: Saboteurs of Peace: On the Road to Helsinki
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Media
US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference, by Joe Lauria
The Trump-Putin summit must be a smashing success—all the usual suspects are apoplectic. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:
The media’s mania over Trump’s Helsinki performance and the so-called Russia-gate scandal reached new depths on Monday, says Joe Lauria
The reaction of the U.S. establishment media and several political leaders to President Donald Trump’s press conference after his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday has been stunning.
Writing in The Atlantic, James Fallows said:
“There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.
Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.
Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.
Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions … never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people.”
As soon as the press conference ended CNN cut to its panel with these words from TV personality Anderson Cooper: “You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, surely, that I’ve ever seen.”
David Gergen, who for years has gotten away with portraying himself on TV as an impartial political sage, then told CNN viewers:
“I’ve never heard an American President talk that way buy I think it is especially true that when he’s with someone like Putin, who is a thug, a world-class thug, that he sides with him again and again against his own country’s interests of his own institutions that he runs, that he’s in charge of the federal government , he’s in charge of these intelligence agencies, and he basically dismisses them and retreats into this, we’ve heard it before, but on the international stage to talk about Hillary Clinton’s computer server …”
“It’s embarrassing,” interjected Cooper.
“It’s embarrassing,” agreed Gergen.
To continue reading: US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference
Two Big “Russia! Russia!” Stories Released Days Before Trump-Putin Summit, by Caitlin Johnstone
That the Deep State has to resort to such transparent machinations just before the Trump-Putin summit shows how weak, stupid, and desparate it is. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:
I have said it before, and I will say it again, and I will keep saying it and saying it until it becomes mainstream conventional wisdom: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.
In an article for The Nation dated July 11, the internationally renowned US-Russia relations expert Stephen F. Cohen warned of possible attempts by peace-hating beltway stalwarts to sabotage the Helsinki peace talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that is scheduled for this coming Monday.
“There is a long history of sabotaging or attempting to sabotage summits and other détente-like initiatives,” wrote Cohen. “Indeed, a few such attempts have been evident in recent months and more may lie ahead.”
And, lo and behold, right before the summit we are seeing two major news stories loudly promoting Russia hysteria blasted onto the front pages on the very same day.
An indictment of 12 Russians has finally been issued by the Robert Mueller Special Counsel on various charges of conspiracy against the United States, an action the counsel has been sitting on for months. The indictment contains no evidence and will likely never be defended in any court of law, the correct response to which, in a post-Iraq invasion world, is always to dismiss the story and file it under “Noises US government officials sometimes make with their face holes.”
The complete absence of evidence has of course failed to deter establishment propagandists and Capitol Hill war whores from loudly and aggressively advancing the galaxy-brained narrative that these new claims ought to either cancel peace talks between two nuclear superpowers, or at least make them much more hostile and contentious.
“President Trump must be willing to confront Putin from a position of strength and demonstrate that there will be a serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression towards the United States and democracies around the world,” said Senator John McCain in a statement, more determined than ever to start World War Three before he finally fucking dies. “If President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward.”
“POTUS should either publicly demand extradition of these 12 Russian officials to stand trial or call off his summit,” tweeted Congressman Joe Kennedy III. “@realDonaldTrump should not lend legitimacy to an adversary that attacks our democracy.”
To continue reading: Two Big “Russia! Russia!” Stories Released Days Before Trump-Putin Summit
Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Investigations, War
Tagged Dan Coats, Helsinki summit, Robert Mueller
The True Meaning of ‘Collusion’, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Raúl Ilargi Meijer dismisses Robert Mueller’s eminently dismissable recent indictment of twelve Russians. From Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
The indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose task it is to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and ‘Russians’, that was released yesterday by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, raises so many questions one has to be picky.
Many people have already stated that the report contains no proof of anything it claims, and that Mueller doesn’t have to prove a thing, because the 12 Russians he accuses will never show up in a US court. Many of course also have at least questioned the timing of the release, 3 days before the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki, of information Mueller and Rosenstein have allegedly been sitting on for months.
The idea that the event was not coordinated to inflict maximum damage to the summit seems indeed far-fetched. But something else struck me in the report: the role of WikiLeaks (labeled “Organization 1”). Mueller very much focuses on both Julian Assange -though he doesn’t get named and is not indicted- and his presumed links to the indicted Russians, who -allegedly- posed as Guccifer 2.0:
Use of Organization 1
47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
a. On or about June 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to “[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”
To continue reading: The True Meaning of ‘Collusion’
Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Horseshit, Investigations
Tagged Helsinki summit, Indictments, Robert Mueller
