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Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

The US Is Starting To Feel Like A "Banana Republic"

Ex-Trump Aide Comes Forward… Says There’s Second Spy, Second Intel Agency

Ex-Trump Aide Comes Forward... Says There's Second Spy, Second Intel Agency
 
BY CILLIAN ZEAL 
MAY 22, 2018 AT 7:27AM
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One of President Donald Trump’s most explosive claims about the 2016 election — one that was dismissed out of hand until recently — was that his campaign was the subject of extensive surveillance.
Now, a former Trump aide is saying something even more explosive: There wasn’t just a mole inside the Trump campaign, there was a second spy and intelligence agency.
Michael Caputo is pretty much the definition of a political lifer. A media strategist, he worked with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and various other Republicans. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he began doing work with the Russians.
This didn’t get the attention of too many people until he started working for Trump. Much like Carter Page, the low-level Trump campaign staffer whose ties to Russia became the subject of a million conspiracy theories, Caputo’s ties to the Russians became of intense interest to the overzealous FBI people charged with finding some sort of evidence that Trump was the Siberian Candidate.
Caputo appeared on Fox News just hours after Axios reported “President Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, recommended appointing Stefan Halper, an academic and suspected FBI informant on the Trump campaign, to a senior role in the Trump administration.”
That’s bad. According to Caputo, things were even worse.
“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, this informant, this person that they planted, that they tried to plant into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios — he’s not the only person that came into the campaign!” Caputo said.
“And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came into the campaign,” he added.

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“I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning and I’ll tell you, when we finally find out the truth about this, Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna be wearing some orange suits.”
Orange suits are an unlikely outcome, but Caputo’s statement indicates that Obama-era surveillance of the Trump campaign — once dismissed as tinfoil-hattery — might actually be very real.
Of course, Caputo may have a reason to prevaricate about such things. Kimberley Strassel doesn’t. She’s the Wall Street Journal writer whose reporting has indicated that she believes there was an FBI mole inside the campaign.
“The Bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe,” she wrote in an article earlier this month.
“When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.
RELATED: Newt: Obama and Valerie Jarrett Behind Spying, Trying To Frame Trump
“This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting,” she added. “It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough.”
During and after the campaign, Trump’s claims that he was surveilled (and that the surveillance was politically-motivated) were dismissed as baseless fantasies, yet another sign this was an unbalanced person who shouldn’t be normalized or believed.
And yet, here we are, weeks away from the inspector general’s report on the Clinton investigation, which doesn’t sound like it’s going to simply be the pro forma postmortem it normally would be, considering it involved a losing campaign. The report is expected to detail a whole host of tactics by the “deep state” that could easily be construed as being in service of the Clinton campaign and to the detriment of the Trump campaign.
If Caputo is telling the truth, this means there’s a whole host of issues here. Who was involved? The DOJ and FBI, obviously, but the CIA too? Other agencies under the aegis of the ODNI?
I can predict just one thing: Things are about to get very interesting for everyone who called Trump crazy when he talked about surveillance.
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Sunday, May 20, 2018

Did Texas Shooter Telegraph His Intentions


Were the warning signs missed? Classmates, social media reveal dark details about Santa Fe killer

May 19, 2018 6:41 pm
Were the warning signs missed? Classmates, social media reveal dark details about Santa Fe killer
Were warning signs missed? Social media, classmates help provide answers. (DANIEL KRAMER/AFP/Getty Images)
After another tragic massacre, this time at Santa Fe High School in Texas, left eight students and two teachers dead, many are once again left wondering: Were the warning signs missed?
Now, social media posts and those who know the 17-year-old alleged killer responsible for the crime are answering that very question.

What does the suspect’s online presence reveal?

As multiple outlets have reported, social media pages for one of the young men charged with the massacre reveal a dark and troubled teenager who had an obsession with guns and knives.
According to the Daily Caller, one of the notable images on the suspect’s Facebook page, prior to Facebook removing the page, was of a trench coat with regalia from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union pinned to it. In addition, another image was of a shirt with the caption “born to kill” adorned on the front.
One of the other images garnering much attention was a picture of a handgun and knives on a bed. The image’s caption said: “Hi f**kers.” The image was posted to an Instagram account believed to be associated with the suspect three weeks prior to Friday’s tragedy.
However, Facebook, which owns Instagram, told NBC News it was unable to confirm if the Instagram account was associated with the suspect.
More from NBC News:
While posts could provide clues to [the killer’s] interests and state of mind before he allegedly barged into a classroom and started shooting, not all of them were so darkly themed.
In one selfie from May 2, [the killer] wore a backwards baseball cap adorned with a pink and purple striped pin that is associated with bisexual pride, according to dozens of online retailers. In his profile photo, he wore a black hat with a white peace sign on the front.

What did classmates say?

One student told KPRC-TV that the alleged killer was a known target of bullying, who apparently just “snapped.”
“He’s been picked on by coaches before for smelling bad and stuff like that and he doesn’t really talk to very many people, either — he keeps to himself. He wears a trench coat every day and it’s like 90 degrees out here,” the unnamed student said. “I heard that he wore a shirt today and it said ‘born to kill,’ the shirt he was wearing, I don’t even know how the school can allow that.”
The student further lamented over the alleged bullying and the fact the suspect had few friends.
“I think it’s stupid, the coaches can’t talk to students like that and make fun of them. That’s their fault, and strictly their fault. Not the kid’s fault, but their fault, no one has talked to him or tried to be nice to him,” he said.

What did officials say?

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said the warning signs were not present with this incident like they were for the Parkland, Florida, massacre in February.
“The red-flag warnings were either nonexistent or very imperceptible,” Abbott said Friday, according to KPRC. The governor further revealed the killer had no previous arrest record or confrontations with law enforcement.
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Sunday, August 13, 2017

So Is The New York Times Suggesting A Return To Communism?


Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism

Kristen R. Ghodsee
RED CENTURY 
A woman working at a collective farm near Moscow in 1955. Mark Redkin/FotoSoyuz, via Getty Images
When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story.
Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.
A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.
How to account for this facet of life behind the Iron Curtain?
Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria, who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.
“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” she said. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.”
Ms. Durcheva was a single mother for many years, but she insisted that her life before 1989 was more gratifying than the stressful existence of her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s.
“All she does is work and work,” Ms. Durcheva told me in 2013, “and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband. But it doesn’t matter, because he is tired, too. They sit together in front of the television like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.”
Last year in Jena, a university town in the former East Germany, I spoke with a recently married 30-something named Daniela Gruber. Her own mother — born and raised under the Communist system — was putting pressure on Ms. Gruber to have a baby.
“She doesn’t understand how much harder it is now — it was so easy for women before the Wall fell,” she told me, referring to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “They had kindergartens and crèches, and they could take maternity leave and have their jobs held for them. I work contract to contract, and don’t have time to get pregnant.”
This generational divide between daughters and mothers who reached adulthood on either side of 1989 supports the idea that women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era. And they owed this quality of life, in part, to the fact that these regimes saw women’s emancipation as central to advanced “scientific socialist” societies, as they saw themselves.
Although East European Communist states needed women’s labor to realize their programs for rapid industrialization after World War II, the ideological foundation for women’s equality with men was laid by August Bebel and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. After the Bolshevik takeover, Vladimir Lenin and Aleksandra Kollontai enabled a sexual revolution in the early years of the Soviet Union, with Kollontai arguing that love should be freed from economic considerations.
The Soviets extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did. The Bolsheviks also liberalized divorce laws, guaranteed reproductive rights and attempted to socialize domestic labor by investing in public laundries and people’s canteens. Women were mobilized into the labor force and became financially untethered from men.
In Central Asia in the 1920s, Russian women crusaded for the liberation of Muslim women. This top-down campaign met a violent backlash from local patriarchs not keen to see their sisters, wives and daughters freed from the shackles of tradition.
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin reversed much of the Soviet Union’s early progress in women’s rights — outlawing abortion and promoting the nuclear family. However, the acute male labor shortages that followed World War II spurred other Communist governments to push forward with various programs for women’s emancipation, including state-sponsored research on the mysteries of female sexuality. Most Eastern European women could not travel to the West or read a free press, but scientific socialism did come with some benefits.
“As early as 1952, Czechoslovak sexologists started doing research on the female orgasm, and in 1961 they held a conference solely devoted to the topic,” Katerina Liskova, a professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told me. “They focused on the importance of the equality between men and women as a core component of female pleasure. Some even argued that men need to share housework and child rearing, otherwise there would be no good sex.”
Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.”
In all the Warsaw Pact countries, the imposition of one-party rule precipitated a sweeping overhaul of laws regarding the family. Communists invested major resources in the education and training of women and in guaranteeing their employment. State-run women’s committees sought to re-educate boys to accept girls as full comrades, and they attempted to convince their compatriots that male chauvinism was a remnant of the pre-socialist past.
Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money. The socialist state met their basic needs and countries such as Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany committed extra resources to support single mothers, divorcées and widows. With the noted exceptions of Romania, Albania and Stalin’s Soviet Union, most Eastern European countries guaranteed access to sex education and abortion. This reduced the social costs of accidental pregnancy and lowered the opportunity costs of becoming a mother.
Some liberal feminists in the West grudgingly acknowledged those accomplishments but were critical of the achievements of state socialism because they did not emerge from independent women’s movements, but represented a type of emancipation from above. Many academic feminists today celebrate choice but also embrace a cultural relativism dictated by the imperatives of intersectionality. Any top-down political program that seeks to impose a universalist set of values like equal rights for women is seriously out of fashion.
The result, unfortunately, has been that many of the advances of women’s liberation in the former Warsaw Pact countries have been lost or reversed. Ms. Durcheva’s adult daughter and the younger Ms. Gruber now struggle to resolve the work-life problems that Communist governments had once solved for their mothers.
“The Republic gave me my freedom,” Ms. Durcheva once told me, referring to the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. “Democracy took some of that freedom away.”
As for Ms. Gruber, she has no illusions about the brutalities of East German Communism; she just wishes “things weren’t so much harder now.”
Because they championed sexual equality — at work, at home and in the bedroom — and were willing to enforce it, Communist women who occupied positions in the state apparatus could be called cultural imperialists. But the liberation they imposed radically transformed millions of lives across the globe, including those of many women who still walk among us as the mothers and grandmothers of adults in the now democratic member states of the European Union. Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of numerous books on European Communism and its aftermath, including, most recently, “Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th-Century Communism.”
This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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