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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">capt 319 2/22</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see vlad tag</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">neglected/ see nodes, esp collusion, torshin etc</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russian-witness-thrown-from-a-window-after-his-name-was-exposed-by-trump-tower-lobbyist-emails" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russian-witness-thrown-from-a-window-after-his-name-was-exposed-by-trump-tower-lobbyist-emails</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian witness thrown from a window after his name was exposed by Trump Tower lobbyist: emails</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 4, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to a report from the Daily Beast, a witness who was taking part in a U.S. trial aimed at Russian corruption — and who fell from a window to his death — reportedly had his name exposed in emails connected to alleged pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign operative Natalia Veselnitskaya.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Emails uncovered by the Beast point the finger directly at Veselnitskaya, who met with Don Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2016 that became a major part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian involvement in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Noting the death of Nikolai Gorokhov,&nbsp;who was reportedly thrown from the window of a hotel in Moscow</b> prior to appearing in a corruption trial, the Beast reports, “A cache of emails obtained by the Dossier Center, which is a Russian opposition organization based in London, exposes the depth of foreign asset entanglement in Trump’s America at the precise moment that the president’s dealings with Ukrainian officials threaten to pull the Department of Justice and State Department into an unseemly impeachment fight.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The report goes on to state that “The cache of emails that detail Veselnitskaya’s legal campaign and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., were shared with The Daily Beast by the Dossier Center, which is&nbsp;<b>funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky,</b></span><b>&nbsp;one of Putin’s most prominent exiled critics</b>, ” before adding, “The emails cannot be independently verified by The Daily Beast via a digital signature but elements contained within them including cell phone numbers, bank details, planning, email addresses, and hearing dates can be confirmed by cross-checking with subsequent court papers, lobbyist filings and other reporting.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“New emails from the same cache, which includes messages from and to Veselnitskya and her aide and translator Murat Glashev, shed light on Veselnitskaya’s lobbying and legal campaign against the Magnitsky Act and appear to suggest that it may have been carried out in breach of another U.S. law and court orders,” the report continues. “Some of the emails suggest the breaking of an order put in place by a New York court to protect the identity of Gorokhov, a Russian witness who testified in a sealed deposition. His evidence was hidden amid fears of reprisals back home.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can read more here.</font></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/heres-how-putin-suckered-trump-into-becoming-his-easily-manipulated-pawn/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/heres-how-putin-suckered-trump-into-becoming-his-easily-manipulated-pawn/</a></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Law enforcement officers and prosecutors have a saying, that when it comes to crime, there are no coincidences. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin taught us during the last presidential election that these days, there are no coincidences in politics either.</font></p><div class="p1_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">This article&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/03/09/donald-trump-admired-the-russian-badasss-macho-posturing-putin-was-happy-to-have-the-attention/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">first appeared in Salon</a>.]</font></span></p><div class="p2_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/03/06/chase-donald-trumps-russia-scandal-way-back-to-a-beauty-pageant-and-it-starts-to-make-real-sense/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">When last we gathered to have a look back at how the 2016 election was stolen</a>, we were discussing a day when that lesson was driven home with a vengeance. On March 6, 2014, when President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, he was doing what every president in the modern era had done before him. We express our condemnation of transgressions by foreign powers we disapprove of all the time. We sanctioned Iran for its nuclear program. We sanctioned Syria for its support of terrorism and human rights abuses. We have sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear and missile programs and against Venezuela for its anti-democratic and human rights violations.</font></p><div class="p3_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Obama did not know, and we did not know on March 6, 2014, was that he was setting the stage for how the presidential election of 2016 would not only be fought between two American political parties, but interfered with by a hostile foreign power, aided and abetted by then candidate Donald Trump.</font></p><div class="p4_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">What Trump did later on the same day Obama sanctioned Russia should have given us a hint of what was to come. He went to the CPAC convention, took the stage, and once again praised the autocratic leader of the nation that had pissed us off enough by its seizure of Crimea that we imposed sanctions on a passel of Russian oligarchs, Putin pals, and financial institutions and industries.</font></p><div class="p5_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A month later, Trump was on Fox News telling viewers who only two years hence would become known as the “Trump Base” that he thought Putin was “very strong,” and that he “played Obama like a fiddle.”</font></p><div class="p6_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A month after that, he was standing on a stage in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club telling the assembled pixel-wrought wretches that he had been in Moscow, where he “spoke indirectly and directly with<b> President Putin who could not have been nicer. And we had a tremendous success.”</b></font></p><div class="p7_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Three weeks later, on June 20, he gave an interview to the conservative<b> American Spectator </b>and basically endorsed remarks Putin had made criticizing the idea that America was exceptional. “</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And I understand that,” Trump said. “You know, he [Putin] said, ‘Why are they exceptional? They have killings in the streets. Look at what’s going on in Chicago and different places. They have all of this turmoil, all of the things that are happening in there.’”</span></font></p><div class="p8_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Almost exactly one month later, a Buk surface to air missile from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade was used by pro-Russia insurgents in eastern Ukraine to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing all 283 passengers and 15 members of the crew onboard. The Buk missile battery was hurriedly moved back across the Ukrainian border into Russia and hidden after the civilian airliner was shot down. The Russian government began a campaign of denial that its occupation of Ukrainian land and support of Ukrainian insurgents had anything to do with the shoot-down.</font></p><div class="p9_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What the hell was Trump doing back in 2014, running around the country telling anyone who would listen what a fantastic leader Vladimir Putin was, how he was “strong,” while our own president was weak? Here was an autocratic leader of a hostile foreign nation that had just invaded another country, seized its territory, and supplied the weapon used to commit one of the largest civilian aircraft atrocities in history. And&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">this guy</i>&nbsp;was the national leader Trump looked up to?</font></p><div class="p10_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WTF was going on with Trump and his love affair with Vladimir Putin?</font></p><div class="p11_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Recent revelations that Trump was pursuing a deal to build a Trump Tower in the center of Moscow</b> during the campaign of 2016 raised suspicions that Trump was flattering Putin to get the Russian leader to approve the deal. But I think it’s way, way deeper than that. I think Trump looked at Putin, and he said to himself,&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">that’s</i>&nbsp;the kind of leader I admire. He runs his country with a strong hand. He gets things done. Trump actually admired the guy. Putin ran Russia by fiat, and Obama was “weak” because he adhered to democratic rules and norms.</font></p><div class="p12_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I don’t think Trump had to know much more about Putin than what he saw on cable news, but that was enough. He was a tough guy. He took a country that was, if not a real democracy, something close to it, and he transformed it into an autocracy. In 2014, when Putin saw Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych forced from power right next door by a popular uprising that was driven in part by social media, he decided the influence of the west was getting too close for comfort and moved to destabilize Ukraine with his invasion and seizure of Crimea.</font></p><div class="p13_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When Obama cracked down with sanctions, Putin started making moves to infiltrate and destabilize the United States political system.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> He started up the Internet Research Agency and empaneled its “Translator Project” and sent at least two Russian agents into this country armed with dollars and technical expertise they would use to <b>establish propaganda outlets on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.</b> He called in the top officials of his intelligence agency the GRU, and he said, you guys start looking around for some way to fuck things up over there in the United States for me, okay? We’re not going to take this sanctions shit lying down.</span></font></p><div class="p14_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And Putin started looking around and asking himself, gee, who can I cozy up to over there who might be susceptible to lifting those goddamned sanctions?</font></p><div class="p15_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See, “sanctions” aren’t just pieces of paper presidents of the United States sign to needle foreign leaders and try to bring them back in line. Sanctions are a powerful tool used to project power because of where they come from: the USA. You start telling officials of a foreign government like, say, Russia that they can’t travel to the United States, they can’t facilitate deals here on behalf of corporations from that country, and most importantly, they can’t move millions and billions they’ve skimmed off their economy through American financial institutions . . . well, that fucking hurts, and hurts badly.</font></p><div class="p16_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">You start telling foreign companies in Russia like the oil and gas giant PJSC Roseneft Oil Company that they can’t make deals with American companies like ExxonMobil Corporation to drill for difficult-to-get oil in the far reaches of the icy Russian north, and that fucking hurts.</font></p><div class="p17_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And when you deny Russian state-owned banks and other financial institutions the ability to make big international deals that have to use the nexus of banking and investment headquartered in New York, that fucking hurts.</font></p><div class="p18_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>So the sanctions Obama imposed in March of 2014 weren’t some little pain in the ass for Putin. They were a major threat to his power. </b>They cut deeply into the Russian economy. They caused financial pain to billionaire allies and business partners he needed to maintain his political power inside Russia. Putin’s sitting there in Moscow, and he’s looking at a nearby leader unnervingly similar to him, Yanukovych, another crook who’s running his government like a personal piggy bank, and he’s watching Yanukovych get thrown out, and he’s thinking, this could happen to me.</font></p><div class="p19_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How to survive as an autocratic leader is in Putin’s blood. In 1989, he was a KGB agent serving in the city of Dresden in East Germany when almost overnight, the autocratic government of that Russian satellite nation fell. Putin stayed up all night burning KGB and Stasi secret records when the wall came down. He returned to Russia convinced, as he said later, that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest catastrophe of the [20th] century.” In short order, he began a campaign to rise to power in Russia and make certain the same fate would never befall him.</font></p><div class="p20_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump probably didn’t know Putin’s history. He didn’t have to. All he had to do was watch Putin in action. When Putin wanted a political opponent prosecuted, it happened. When he wanted to shut down a pesky news outlet that was opposing him, it happened. When he wanted private media companies nationalized and made organs of the state, it happened. And when he wanted somebody dead, that happened, too.</font></p><div class="p21_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s why Trump was running around during 2013, 2014, and 2015 singing Putin’s praises. He wanted to be just like him.</font></p><div class="p22_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One year after Obama imposed sanctions on Russia, Trump descended the escalators in Trump Tower and announced he was running for president. And only a few weeks after that,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Trump was in Las Vegas taking questions at something called “FreedomFest,” and a young woman stood up and asked him if he was elected president, would he continue the sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia.</span></font></p><div class="p23_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>“Putin has no respect for President Obama. Big problem. Big problem,”&nbsp;Trump said, waving his arms, making that now-familiar circle with his forefinger and thumb. “I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, okay? And I mean where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”</b></font></p><div class="p24_26" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The young woman was a Russian citizen by the name of Maria Butina. She is at this moment sitting in a Washington D.C. lock-up, occasionally venturing forth to visit with FBI agents and federal prosecutors as a cooperating witness for Robert Mueller in his investigation of the connections between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the Russian government. Maria Butina, at last report, was still drawing breaths of District of Columbia air.</font></p><div class="p25_26" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump, it appears, still has some things to learn from his BFF, Vladimir&nbsp;</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/former-us-ambassador-to-russia-warns-putins-rise-would-bring-the-end-of-the-liberal-international-order/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/former-us-ambassador-to-russia-warns-putins-rise-would-bring-the-end-of-the-liberal-international-order/</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bkgd on animus</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...<span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.</span></font></p><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Image</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian Olympic athletes this year in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Mr. Putin had blamed the United States for pushing to investigate the doping scandal that had engulfed the team.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times]</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties.&nbsp;<b>A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.</b></font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What in the universe&nbsp;could be&nbsp;more powerful than the Force? Government cyberwarfare groups’ trolls, as it turns out.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An academic paper published by researcher</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Morten Bay of the University of Southern California, entitled “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizing_the_haters_The_Last_Jedi_and_the_strategic_politicization_of_pop_culture_through_social_media_manipulation" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Weaponizing the Haters: ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Strategic Politicization of Pop Culture through Social Media Manipulation</a>,”&nbsp;analyzed the pattern of tweets from online trolls that organized an ongoing campaign to polarize public opinion over the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“The study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,”</b> Bay writes. “ The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict<b>, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”[cf chris hedges ANOMIE]</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The findings specifically concluded:</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Among the 967 tweets analyzed, 206 expressed a negative sentiment towards the film and its director, which is 21.9% or a little more than one in five fans. This number includes all negative tweets analyzed, i.e. also those who came from the 44 accounts identified as bots, sock puppet accounts and trolls. It also includes 61 users who showed clear political agendas in their tweets against the film. Thus, the number of fans whose tweets are purely motivated by a negative stance towards the film is 101 or 10.5%.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively was likely politically motivated or not even human.”</b></font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These findings corroborate ongoing suspicions that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/04/05/russian-trolls-used-my-tumblr-to-spread-election-propaganda-heres-my-story_partner/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">organized trolls</a>&nbsp;who&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/08/05/how-the-russian-gov-used-disinformation-and-cyber-warfare-in-2016-election-ethical-hacker-explains_partner/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election</a>&nbsp;weren’t trying specifically to elect Trump, but rather to further divide the country by perpetuating politically polarized views and opinions. Perpetuating such divisions can, over time, fracture the social fabric of a country and sow political and cultural discord; while Russia has been prominently&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/08/05/how-the-russian-gov-used-disinformation-and-cyber-warfare-in-2016-election-ethical-hacker-explains_partner/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">singled out</a>&nbsp;as perpetuating this brand of cyberwarfare, the&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">U.S. government actively uses</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2013/05/22/cyber_war_poses_significant_threat_to_national_security_partner/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">similar cyberwarfare campaigns</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/02/10/nsa-iran-developing-sophisticated-cyber-attacks-learning-attacks/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">meddle in the political affairs</a>&nbsp;of many different sovereign nations, in an attempt to prop up American interests.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Russian cyberwarfare campaign that seized on “The Last Jedi” vitriol had a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/05/10/now-you-can-view-thousands-of-russian-linked-facebook-ads/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">common thread</a>&nbsp;with Russia’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/05/10/now-you-can-view-thousands-of-russian-linked-facebook-ads/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">earlier Facebook&nbsp;disinformation&nbsp;campaigns</a>, initiated during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Some [trolls] were less focused on politics of party or specific issues and more on identity politics, posting anti-feminist or anti-homosexuality messages, and tweets of a racist nature were also frequent among the accounts in this category,” the study explains.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Not too long after “The Last Jedi” hit the silver screen in December 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, one of the saga’s new breakout stars, suffered an ongoing online harassment crusade that eventually compelled her to terminate her social media accounts.</b> Likewise, racist anti–“Last Jedi” trolls of similar motivation emerged from hiding to throw virtual tantrums on the wiki website FANDOM,&nbsp;defacing Tran’s character’s page with racial slurs.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The abuse wasn’t exclusive to FANDOM’s wiki or Tran’s personal social media pages; vitriol about “The Last Jedi,” mainly complaints that it was overly politically correct and represented a threat to hegemony, pervaded all manner of social media; to this day, there are numerous Twitter accounts with&nbsp;display names&nbsp;like “Star Wars Lives Matter” and "LastJediAwful" devoted entirely to denigrating the movie for the aforementioned sociopolitical reasons. After Tran quit social media, she wrote about&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/08/23/lessons-from-kelly-marie-trans-instagram-exit/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">how the harassment impacted her in the New York Times.</a></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Bay’s paper does not specify how many of the government–sponsored troll tweets were directed specifically toward Tran, Bay notes that both the institutional and organic&nbsp;harassment had the same political repercussions.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Whether the criticism comes from a Russian troll/bot or from a fan who feels increasingly distant from the values presented in the new Star Wars films, the objective of their actions is a political one,” the paper states. “Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change, while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Perhaps it should not be a surprise, the study says, given the political undertone the “Stars Wars” franchise has always had.</b> As the paper continues:</font></p><blockquote style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The Star Wars franchise is an interesting object of study in this regard. Even though it was originally targeted towards cinema-goers who were too young to vote, Star Wars was always double-coded, with layers oriented towards adults, often involving subjective critiques of contemporary politics. Star Wars movies, books, video games, tv shows and comics have consistently attempted to convey left-leaning values. For years, the franchise’s creator, George Lucas, has explained the series’ impetus as partially being a comment on the Vietnam war, which ended just as Lucas started work on the first Star Wars film.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the&nbsp;<a href="https://cyberbullying.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Cyberbullying Research Center</a>&nbsp;and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, told Salon that Russian trolls championing cyber-harassment is troubling.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I think it is cause for concern because social media platforms would not want a specific side or party to dictate their goals of open, impartial conversation and interaction (because if they allow it indirectly or directly, they alienate a massive swath of their user base),” he told Salon in an email. “Based on our conversations with tech companies, they are aware of the role of bots and are devoting more resources towards attenuating their influence — first in the area of online harassment, and next when it comes to political discourse."</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hinduja said he is “cautiously optimistic” progress will be made in this area.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Unfortunately, bots are here to stay, bot creators seem to remain one step ahead with their cloaking and replicating efforts, and machine learning is not yet where it needs to be to perfectly identify and quarantine/block malicious automated scripts,” he added.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">unger&nbsp;<span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="font-weight: bold; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;</span>House of Trump, House of Putin</span></font></p><p><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">judo coach&nbsp; mafia? sparring partners all rich (olig) now, weaponized the mafia (killed journalists and pol opponents</font></span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-23-2018/">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-23-2018/</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wapo</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Unger sees the Kremlin’s intervention in the 2016 presidential election, which U.S. intelligence officials have said was ordered by Putin himself, as the latest manipulation of Trump by Russia, and the most consequential. Again, readers will find no evidence that Trump knew of or participated in the Russian campaign, which every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded aimed to help Trump win.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But Unger is convinced that the Russians succeeded in their goal because they had a willing target, who seized on false news stories, propaganda and unflattering Democratic emails that Russia disseminated. Trump weaponized Russian disinformation without ever questioning its provenance. He even asked for more when he publicly told Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s personal emails.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Given Trump’s narrow victory in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — states that were predicted to vote Democratic but were won by Trump with a margin of less than 1 percent, and which put him over the top in the electoral college, it is more than likely that the Russian interference made the difference,” Unger writes.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">If that’s true, then Trump the politician has replicated his business model with profound results: Both he and Putin have come out winners.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HOUSE OF TRUMP,&nbsp;<span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">HOUSE OF PUTIN</span></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-reveals-white-houses-bizarre-machinations-concealing-putins"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-reveals-white-houses-bizarre-machinations-concealing-putins</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">a key point in President Donald Trump's press conference with Vladimir Putin in</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Helsinki last week, a reporter asked the Russian president if he had wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. For the first time, Putin admitted that he did.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But according to the White House's official records, that didn't happen, as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow reported Tuesday night.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other outlets have noted that in the&nbsp;<b>White House's transcript of the press conference, the reporter's question about whether Putin had wanted Trump to win was suspiciously left out. And even after news outlets picked up the story, the transcript wasn't corrected....</b></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/who-hell-bill-browder-and-why-does-putin-want-get-his-paws-him-so-badly">https://www.alternet.org/who-hell-bill-browder-and-why-does-putin-want-get-his-paws-him-so-badly</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Amid the wailing and rending of garments that filled the air after President Trump’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/team-trump-in-chaos-helsinki-wasnt-enough-now-vladimir-putins-coming-to-the-white-house/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">bizarre press conference with Vladimir Putin</a>&nbsp;in Helsinki last Monday, one mysterious name lingered in the air. Who the hell is&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Bill Browder,</a>&nbsp;and why does Putin want to get his paws on him so badly?</font></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At one point in Putin’s remarks in Helsinki, he appeared to extend a peculiar offer to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller — while standing next to the man Mueller is investigating, of course. Mueller and his team would be allowed to visit Russia and observe the interrogation of 12 military intelligence officers who were indicted last week for their alleged involvement in the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In exchange, Russian investigators would get access to various people living overseas “who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia,” in the inelegant phrasing of Putin’s real-time interpreter.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It turned out later that one of the people Putin was interested in grilling was Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. (McFaul&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/salon-interview-michael-mcfaul-and-bill-browder-vladimir-putins-most-wanted-men/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">spoke to Salon's Matthew Rozsa</a>&nbsp;later in the week.) Even by contemporary norm-busting standards that was an extraordinary breach of protocol — although not as astounding as the fact that the White House briefly seemed to entertain the idea. (An “incredible offer,” said our president.) But at the time Putin only mentioned one individual by name: William F. Browder, a 54-year-old investor and financier, originally from Chicago, who reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Wild West marketplace of post-Soviet Russia.</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anyone who has intermittently tried to follow the shadowplay narrative of Russian history and politics during the Putin era heard alarm bells going off, and perhaps felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. This was a plot twist that requires some explication, in a story that quite likely no one will ever fully understand.</font></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several major publications supplied obligatory “Who is this guy?” articles almost immediately, and Browder himself&nbsp;<a href="https://time.com/5340545/bill-browder-vladimir-putin-magnitsky-act-donald-trump/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">wrote a piece for Time magazine</a>, offering his own highly truncated version of his history with Putin. None of it was untrue, exactly, but for my money those accounts largely served to obscure the deeper historical currents that flow beneath this implausible tale. Neither man is likely to mention that they were once close allies; Browder was described as among Putin’s “most vocal cheerleaders” in a 2006 Economist article (which has become remarkably difficult to find). Furthermore, Browder becomes slightly more difficult to cast as an American hero once you notice that he renounced his U.S. citizenship 20 years ago, for reasons he has never adequately explained.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I imagine both Browder and Putin would say that their shared connection to the pre-Putin past of Soviet Communism is irrelevant to their present-tense dispute. I’m not so sure: Russia has some of the same mythic qualities as William Faulkner’s Deep South, where the past is not dead and isn’t even past.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin was of course a KGB officer during the later years of the Soviet Union, who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall from his post in East Germany. Bill Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was perhaps the most famous American Communist during the decades before World War II. An all-American boy from a farm family in Kansas, Earl Browder became a socialist as a teenager, spent several years in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and&nbsp;was leader of the Communist Party USA for 15 years, even running for president as the party’s nominee in 1936 and 1940. He was also almost certainly a Soviet spy and recruiter, meaning that he worked for the same organization that would educate and employ the young Vladimir Putin some years later.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I should probably explain my personal connection to this story: My mother was a member of the Communist Party, both under Earl Browder and under William Z. Foster, his comrade, rival and successor. I may be deluding myself here, but I always feel some identification with the psychological mechanisms — evasion, secrecy, storytelling — employed by those whose family histories were shaped by American Communism. I call it the legacy of the Red Seed. ..., Earl’s son and Bill’s father, who was not a Communist or a Soviet spy. Instead, Felix was a math prodigy who earned his Ph.D. from Princeton at age 20, chaired the mathematics department at the University of Chicago and become a world-renowned scholar in the field of nonlinear functional analysis, which I will not pretend to understand. (Felix’s two brothers were prominent mathematicians too, while Bill’s brother, Tom Browder, entered college at 15 and is now a particle physicist.) That has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin, but I guess it makes clear that we’re talking about an unusual American family.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Browder went to Moscow in 1996, 75 years or so after his grandfather met his Russian Jewish grandmother there at the apex of post-revolutionary fervor. The younger Browder -- indeed, he was only 32 at the time -- had a $25 million stake largely supplied by the New York banker Edmond Safra, which he multiplied many times over, building enormous&nbsp;wealth for himself and his investors. At first, he did so with the apparent friendship or at least toleration of Vladimir Putin, who during that same period was rising rapidly from regional obscurity to unquestioned domination of the entire country.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to most accounts, Putin moved to Moscow from his home city of St. Petersburg in the same year Browder arrived. (It is admittedly difficult to feel certain about any aspect of the Russian president's biography.) His first job in the Russian capital was as deputy chief of something called the Presidential Property Management Department, which was responsible for transferring the former assets of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party to the newly organized government of the Russian Federation. Browder's firm, Hermitage Capital Management, became a major investor in many of the semi-privatized companies. Did they do business together at the time? I can find no evidence that they did, but it seems inconceivable that they did not meet.[cpde] Putin's upward trajectory after that was even more startling: In 1998, the year of a major financial crisis in Russia that wiped out a great deal of foreign investment -- and also the year when Bill Browder renounced his U.S. citizenship -- Putin was appointed to head the FSB, the "intelligence and security organization" that succeeded the Soviet-era KGB. By August of the following year, he was acting prime minister of the Russian Federation, and after President Boris Yeltsin's abrupt resignation on the last day of 1999 -- another detail that's slightly too strange for fiction -- Putin became acting president as well. The rest, you might say, is history.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><a href="https://goo.gl/FAVt8c" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">READ MORE: Donald Trump, Brexit and the Russians: A dangerous turning point in "World War IV"</font></a></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I not proposing any grand theory on how these circumstances fit together. In fact, I think the more you pull this story apart, the more tangled it becomes. In various respects, both Putin and Browder seem more like fictional characters than real people. In the most authoritative English-language account of Putin’s life and career, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy’s “<a href="https://amzn.to/2JBZ1kt" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin</a>,” the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/10/03/trump_and_putins_crazy_bromance_two_guys_too_weird_for_fiction_who_long_to_rule_the_world/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Russian leader is compared to Oleg Komarov</a>, a “pseudo-colorful” Russian émigré in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel “<a href="https://amzn.to/2NxrdHC" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Pnin</a>” who holds an incoherent blend of reactionary, religious, ultra-nationalist and pro-Communist views.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the risk of derailing a story that is already full of weird tangents even further, here’s another one: Fiona Hill, co-author of that book, is now one of Trump’s principal advisers on relations with Russia. In an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/trump-russia-policy/507587/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">extensive interview with the Atlantic</a>&nbsp;during the presidential transition (but before she joined the new administration), Hill predicted that the Trump-Putin bromance wouldn’t last long, adding that since the incoming president wasn’t “exactly the most diplomatic of people,” he was likely to “fall out with his new friend Vladimir pretty quickly.” She also predicted that Trump might pull out of the conflict in Syria, recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and pretty much allow Putin to do as he pleased. Are those things now happening (sort of)&nbsp;<em>because she said that?</em>&nbsp;I told you we were in a work of fiction.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anyway, Bill Browder comes from another kind of novel altogether. Considering everything we know and don’t know about him, he’s like a character in a John le Carré spy thriller, who seems to be one thing and then turns out to be something entirely different — and then, at the end of the story, turns out to have been driven by personal considerations no one had even noticed.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are almost too many reasons for Putin and Browder to hate each other’s guts: They have been embroiled in a bitter public feud ever since Hermitage Capital Management, Browder's investment firm, became the target of systematic Russian government harassment beginning around 2005. Browder himself was abruptly barred from entering Russia, forcing him to move to London full-time. His employees and associates in Moscow were subjected to a series of violent assaults and quasi-legal police raids. One of them was a lawyer and accountant named Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in November 2009. He had been arrested after investigating an alleged tax-fraud scheme in which corrupt Russian officials siphoned off $230 million from either Hermitage or the Russian state or both. (Good luck figuring that one out.)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After that, Browder became the principal impetus for the financial sanctions imposed by the United States under the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/07/keep-an-eye-on-the-magnitsky-act/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Magnitsky Act</a>, which were meant to punish the Russian oligarchy for its involvement in Magnitsky’s death and similar human rights abuses. Vladimir Putin really, really does not like the Magnitsky Act. Those sanctions were specifically what Natalia Veselnitskaya wanted to talk to Donald Trump Jr. about, in their now-legendary Trump Tower meeting of June 2016. They are not the same sanctions that incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn apparently discussed with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition (in a conversation that Flynn then lied to the FBI about), but those later sanctions could be described as successors to or amplifications of the Magnitsky sanctions.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?431852-1/william-browder-overturning-magnitsky-act-putins-top-priority" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Browder told the Senate Judiciary Committee</a>&nbsp;in his testimony last July that he believes Putin has amassed an illicit personal fortune of perhaps $200 billion during his years in power — several times more than even a high-end estimate of Donald Trump’s wealth — but that most of it is invested in the West.&nbsp;That means Putin is “potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation,” Browder said, and “has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Putin is apoplectic about my success getting Magnitsky Acts passed in seven countries around the world,"&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/salon-interview-michael-mcfaul-and-bill-browder-vladimir-putins-most-wanted-men/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Browder told Salon's Matthew Rozsa</a>&nbsp;this week. "This puts his entire offshore fortune, which is gigantic, at risk."</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s all highly plausible, although we are not likely to find the receipts. Until recently, Putin’s counter-charges against Browder have pretty much been complaints about the change under the sofa (at least by comparison). Browder has twice been convicted in absentia on tax-evasion charges by Russian courts, and was sentenced to nine years in prison both times. (In one of those cases, his co-defendant was Sergei Magnitsky, who had been dead for several years. Even for Russian jurisprudence, that was breaking new ground.) Russian authorities have repeatedly&nbsp;tried to get other countries to arrest and extradite Browder. Spanish police briefly detained Browder when he visited Madrid in May, but were told by Interpol to disregard the Russian arrest warrant.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This week Putin upped the ante considerably, claiming at the Helsinki press conference that Browder’s “business associates” had somehow spirited $1.5 billion out of Russia without paying taxes and then “sent huge amounts of money, $400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.” Maybe this was meant to refer to Michael McFaul, who says he knows Browder but has never done business with him. At any rate, it's such a Trumpian allegation — a wild falsehood, supposedly supported by specific but completely invented statistics — that one wonders if it’s something Trump told him to say, or a laddish troll-move they cooked up together.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So we have established that Bill Browder and Vladimir Putin are not pals, and that healing and hugs seem deeply unlikely. From the Western media’s perspective, the story looks clear enough: One of them is a crusader against corruption and abuse, the other is a foreign despot with a trail of bodies. OK, fine: Except that the story was quite a bit different once upon a time. As with Putin and Donald Trump — as with almost everything about Putin, in fact — the past is full of unanswered questions.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">why djt loves putin real estate</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-russia-weaponizing-international-students-new-cold-war">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-russia-weaponizing-international-students-new-cold-war</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/how-the-religious-rights-love-for-lion-of-christianity-putin-is-helping-to-shield-trump">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/how-the-religious-rights-love-for-lion-of-christianity-putin-is-helping-to-shield-trump</a></font></p><div class="mce-content-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Friday, The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/putin-trump-conservatives.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">explored</a>&nbsp;how the <b>conservative movement’s widespread “veneration” of President Vladimir Putin of Russia has provided cover for President Trump as he faces allegations of collusion with Russia</b> in his presidential campaign.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Peters writes:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; hyphens: none; background: rgb(239, 243, 243); padding: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0.75em 2em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Mr. Putin is no arch-villain in this understanding of America-Russian relations. Rather, he <b>personifies many of the qualities and attitudes that conservatives have desired in a president: a respect for traditional Christian values, a swelling nationalist pride and an aggressive posture toward foreign adversaries.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><b>In this view, the Russian president is a brilliant tactician, a slayer of murderous Islamic extremists — and not incidentally, a leader who outmaneuvered and emasculated President Barack Obama on the world stage. And because of that, almost any other transgression seems forgivable.</b></font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Peters focused on comments from conservative commentators like <b>Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, it is the Religious Right that has in large part&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-religious-right-shares-trumps-putin-crush/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">helped bring admiration for Putin into the conservative mainstream</a>.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s no coincidence that as Trump faced the most damaging revelations yet about his campaign’s interactions with people connected with the Russian government, he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/as-scandal-unfolds-trump-invites-friendly-religious-right-audience-to-oval-office/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">invited a group of adoring Religious Right leaders to pray over him in the Oval Office</a>&nbsp;and then sat down for a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-tells-pat-robertson-he-gets-along-very-very-well-with-putin/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">softball interview with Pat Robertson</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As journalist Casey Michel&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/the-rise-of-the-traditionalist-international-how-the-american-right-learned-to-love-moscow-in-the-era-of-trump/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">noted</a>&nbsp;in a report for Right Wing Watch earlier this year, “Since he returned to the presidency in 2012, Putin has made a concerted effort to establish his country&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/russia-orthodox-church.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">as a center</a>&nbsp;for religious,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/28/whos-godless-now-russia-says-its-us/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">especially Christian</a>, conservatives throughout the world, most notably for those who oppose any legal or public support for same-sex relationships.”&nbsp;The Religious Right in the U.S. took notice,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/globalizing-homophobia-how-the-american-right-supports-and-defends-russias-anti-gay-crackdown/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">especially as <b>Putin began to crack down on LGBT rights</b></a><b>,</b> including imposing a ban on gay “propaganda.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-hero-vladimir-putin-okays-polygamy-sharia-law/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">summed up</a>&nbsp;some of the praise a couple of years ago:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; hyphens: none; background: rgb(239, 243, 243); padding: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0.75em 2em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Evangelist Franklin Graham&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/franklin-graham-endorses-vladimir-putins-anti-gay-crackdown" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">hailed Putin as a hero</a>&nbsp;</b>for taking “a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda” even as “America’s own morality has fallen so far on this issue”; Bryan Fischer called Putin a “<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-praises-putin-calls-him-lion-christianity" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">lion of Christianity</a>” and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-russias-anti-gay-law-exactly-sort-public-policy-weve-been-advocating" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">called</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-its-inexcusable-america-does-not-have-russian-style-anti-gay-laws" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">upon</a>&nbsp;U.S. lawmakers to adopt similar speech prohibitions; Matt Barber marveled that Putin was able to “<a href="http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/americas-chief-export-immorality/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">out-Christian our once-Christian nation</a>”; Sam Rohrer called Putin “<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rohrer-russia-now-moral-leader-world-cracking-down-homosexuality" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">the moral leader of the world</a>”; Scott Lively&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/russian-anti-lgbt-crackdown-exporting-homophobic-violence-throughout-region-experts-warn" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">lavished</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scott-lively-urges-conservatives-stand-putin-against-new-world-order" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">praise</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lively-gay-people-behind-anti-gay-violence-russia" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">on</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lively-defends-anti-gay-criminalization-laws-gay-movement-has-brought-themselves" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Putin</a>&nbsp;for “<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lively-obama-antichrist-working-satanic-gays-bring-about-apocalypse" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">championing traditional marriage and Christian values</a>”; and Rush Limbaugh&nbsp;<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/07/rush-says-russias-ban-on-gay-olympians-is-key-e/195273" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">applauded Putin</a>&nbsp;for stopping “a full-frontal assault on what has always been considered normalcy.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Officials with the World Congress of Families&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/globalizing-homophobia-how-american-right-supports-and-defends-russia-s-anti-gay-crackd?_ga=1.16797049.1329198218.1438013386#worldcongress" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">have lauded Putin as a savior&nbsp;</a>of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/world-congress-families-spokesman-russia-hope-world-right-now" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">the entire world</a>. The group&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cancelled-world-congress-families-kremlin-conference-begins-today-possibly-special-guest-sta" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">&nbsp;organized a meeting for conservative activists&nbsp;</a>at the Kremlin, which also played host to Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage, who traveled to Russia to defend the country’s anti-LGBT crackdown in face of a Western “<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/brian-brown-tells-moscow-conference-americans-reject-new-and-false-vision-family" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">attempts to silence those of us who stand for the truth of marriage</a>.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brown’s new International Organization for the Family is also&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/anti-equality-activists-from-around-globe-help-brian-brown-launch-new-group/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">relying</a>&nbsp;on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/a-leading-us-social-conservative-just-launched-a-mission-to?utm_term=.gpon4N65r#.htbKZDJw3" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">support</a>&nbsp;of Putin-allied funders and legislators in Russia.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These activists, perhaps blinded by their admiration for Putin’s anti-LGBT policies and rhetoric, have been&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-religious-right-shares-trumps-putin-crush/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">conspicuously quiet</a>&nbsp;about the Russian leader’s attacks on religious freedom,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-hero-vladimir-putin-cracks-down-on-religious-liberty-in-russia/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">including that of evangelicals</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The Religious Right played a key role in cultivating an image of Putin as a pious and manly anti-Obama; already inclined to turn a blind eye to the president’s shortcomings, these activists are unlikely to see a cozy relationship with Putin and his representatives as a cause for concern.</font></p></div></div><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="tags" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; border-top: 5px solid rgb(239, 243, 243); margin-bottom: 2em; padding-top: 1em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear;">Tags:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/brian-brown/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Brian Brown</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/bryan-fischer/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Bryan Fischer</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/donald-trump/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Donald Trump</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/donald-trump-jr/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Donald Trump Jr.</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/franklin-graham/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Franklin Graham</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/matt-barber/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Matt Barber</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/pat-buchanan/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Pat Buchanan</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/rush-limbaugh/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Rush Limbaugh</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/sam-rohrer/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Sam Rohrer</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/scott-lively/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Scott Lively</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/anti-lgbt/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Anti-LGBT</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/russia/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Russia</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/russia-investigation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Russia Investigation</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/american-family-association/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">American Family Association</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/american-pastors-network/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">American Pastors Network</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/international-organization-for-the-family/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">International Organization for the Family</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/national-organization-for-marriage/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">National Organization for Marriage</a><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/world-congress-of-families/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">World Congress of Families</a></font></p></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Putin Can’t Stop</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;David Brooks</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Brooks MARCH 3, 2014</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even cynics like to feel moral. Even hard-eyed men who play power politics need to feel that their efforts are part of a great historic mission. So as he has been throwing his weight around the world, Vladimir Putin has been careful to quote Russian philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries like Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin doesn’t only quote these guys; he wants others to read them. As Maria Snegovaya pointed out recently in The Washington Post, the Kremlin recently assigned three philosophic books to regional governors: Berdyaev’s “The Philosophy of Inequality,” Solovyov’s “Justification of the Good” and Ilyin’s “Our Tasks.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin was personally involved in getting Ilyin’s remains re-buried back in Russian soil. In 2009, Putin went to consecrate the grave himself. The event sent him into a nationalistic fervor. “It’s a crime when someone only begins talking about the separation of Russia and the Ukraine,” he said on that day.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To enter into the world of Putin’s favorite philosophers is to enter a world full of melodrama, mysticism and grandiose eschatological visions. “We trust and are confident that the hour will come when Russia will rise from disintegration and humiliation and begin an epoch of new development and greatness,” Ilyin wrote.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Continue reading the main story</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Brooks</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politics, culture and the social sciences.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Crisis of Western Civ</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 21</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How to Leave a Mark on People</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 18</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Cuomo College Fiasco</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 14</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This Age of Wonkery</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 11</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Coming Incompetence Crisis</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 7</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See More »</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Three great ideas run through this work. The first is Russian exceptionalism: the idea that Russia has its own unique spiritual status and purpose. The second is devotion to the Orthodox faith. The third is belief in autocracy. Mashed together, these philosophers point to a Russia that is a quasi-theocratic nationalist autocracy destined to play a culminating role on the world stage.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These philosophers often argued that the rationalistic, materialistic West was corrupting the organic spiritual purity of Russia. “The West exported this anti-Christian virus to Russia,” Ilyin wrote, “Having lost our bond with God and the Christian tradition, mankind has been morally blinded, gripped by materialism, irrationalism and nihilism.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can hear echoes of this moralistic strain in Putin’s own speeches, especially when he defends his regime’s attitude toward gays and the role of women. Citing Berdyaev, he talks about defending traditional values to ward off moral chaos. He says he is defending the distinction between good and evil, which has been lost in the outside world.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most important, these philosophers had epic visions of Russia’s role in the world. Solovyov argued that because Russia is located between the Catholic West and the non-Christian East, it has a historic mission to lead the way to human unification. Russia would transcend secularism and atheism and create a unified spiritual kingdom. “The Russian messianic conception,” Berdyaev wrote, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russia is frequently seen as a besieged fortress. The West is thought to be rotten to the core and weak yet so powerful that it can be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Russia has immeasurable spiritual potential yet is forever plagued by a lack of self-respect, lack of self-assertion and unmet potential.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his 1948 essay, “What Dismemberment of Russia Entails for the World,” Ilyin describes the Russian people as the “core of everything European-Asian and, therefore, of universal equilibrium.” Yet the West, he argues, is trying to “divide the united Russian broom into twigs to break these twigs one by one.” The West is driven by “a plan of hatred and lust for power.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of this adds up to a highly charged and assertive messianic ideology. If Putin took it all literally, he’d be a Russian ayatollah. Up until now, he hasn’t taken it literally. His regime has used this nationalism to mobilize public opinion and to explain itself to itself. But it has tamped down every time this nationalistic ideology threatens to upend the status quo.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The danger is that Russia is now involved in a dispute in Ukraine that touches and activates the very core of this touchy messianism. The tiger of quasi-religious nationalism, which Putin has been riding, may now take control. That would make it very hard for Putin to stop in this conflict where rational calculus would tell him to stop. Up until now, we have not been in a Huntingtonian conflict of civilizations with Russia. But with passions aroused and philosophic zealotry at full boil, it may temporarily appear that we are.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The implication for Western policymakers is that we may not be dealing with a “normal” regime, which can be manipulated by economic and diplomatic carrots and sticks. Threatening to take away inclusion in the Group of 8 or freeze some assets may become irrelevant because the Russian regime will have moved up to a different level. The Russian nation may be motivated by a deep, creedal ideology that has been wafting through the culture for centuries and has now found an unlikely, cynical and cold-eyed host.The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin Can’t Stop</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;David Brooks</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Brooks MARCH 3, 2014</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Continue reading the main storyShare This Page</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Share</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tweet</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Email</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Save</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">371</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even cynics like to feel moral. Even hard-eyed men who play power politics need to feel that their efforts are part of a great historic mission. So as he has been throwing his weight around the world, Vladimir Putin has been careful to quote Russian philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries like Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin doesn’t only quote these guys; he wants others to read them. As Maria Snegovaya pointed out recently in The Washington Post, the Kremlin recently assigned three philosophic books to regional governors: Berdyaev’s “The Philosophy of Inequality,” Solovyov’s “Justification of the Good” and Ilyin’s “Our Tasks.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Putin was personally involved in getting Ilyin’s remains re-buried back in Russian soil. In 2009, Putin went to consecrate the grave himself. The event sent him into a nationalistic fervor. “It’s a crime when someone only begins talking about the separation of Russia and the Ukraine,” he said on that day.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To enter into the world of Putin’s favorite philosophers is to enter a world full of melodrama, mysticism and grandiose eschatological visions. “We trust and are confident that the hour will come when Russia will rise from disintegration and humiliation and begin an epoch of new development and greatness,” Ilyin wrote.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Continue reading the main story</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Brooks</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politics, culture and the social sciences.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Crisis of Western Civ</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 21</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How to Leave a Mark on People</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 18</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Cuomo College Fiasco</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 14</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This Age of Wonkery</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 11</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Coming Incompetence Crisis</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APR 7</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See More »</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ADVERTISEMENT</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Continue reading the main story</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Three great ideas run through this work.</b> The first is <b>Russian exceptionalism: t</b>he idea that Russia has its own unique spiritual status and purpose. The second is devotion to the <b>Orthodox faith. The third is belief in autocracy</b>. Mashed together, these philosophers point to a Russia that is a quasi-theocratic nationalist autocracy destined to play a culminating role on the world stage.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These philosophers often argued that the rationalistic, materialistic West was corrupting the organic spiritual purity of Russia. “The West exported this anti-Christian virus to Russia,” Ilyin wrote, “Having lost our bond with God and the Christian tradition, mankind has been morally blinded, gripped by materialism, irrationalism and nihilism.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can hear echoes of this moralistic strain in Putin’s own speeches, especially when he defends his regime’s attitude toward gays and the role of women. Citing Berdyaev, he talks about defending traditional values to ward off moral chaos. He says he is defending the distinction between good and evil, which has been lost in the outside world.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most important, these philosophers had epic visions of Russia’s role in the world. Solovyov argued that because Russia is located between the Catholic West and the non-Christian East, it has a historic mission to lead the way to human unification. Russia would transcend secularism and atheism and create a unified spiritual kingdom. “The Russian messianic conception,” Berdyaev wrote, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Russia is frequently seen as a besieged fortress.</span> The West is thought to be rotten to the core and weak yet so powerful that it can be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Russia has immeasurable spiritual potential yet is forever plagued by a lack of self-respect, lack of self-assertion and unmet potential.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his 1948 essay, “What Dismemberment of Russia Entails for the World,” Ilyin describes the Russian people as the “core of everything European-Asian and, therefore, of universal equilibrium.” Yet the West, he argues, is trying to “divide the united Russian broom into twigs to break these twigs one by one.” The West is driven by “a plan of hatred and lust for power.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of this adds up to a highly charged and assertive messianic ideology. If Putin took it all literally, he’d be a Russian ayatollah. Up until now, he hasn’t taken it literally. His regime has used this nationalism to mobilize public opinion and to explain itself to itself. But it has tamped down every time this nationalistic ideology threatens to upend the status quo.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The danger is that Russia is now involved in a dispute in Ukraine that touches and activates the very core of this touchy messianism. The tiger of quasi-religious nationalism, which Putin has been riding, may now take control. That would make it very hard for Putin to stop in this conflict where rational calculus would tell him to stop. Up until now, we have not been in a Huntingtonian conflict of civilizations with Russia. But with passions aroused and philosophic zealotry at full boil, it may temporarily appear that we are.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The implication for Western policymakers is that we may not be dealing with a “normal” regime, which can be manipulated by economic and diplomatic carrots and sticks. Threatening to take away inclusion in the Group of 8 or freeze some assets may become irrelevant because the Russian regime will have moved up to a different level. The Russian nation may be motivated by a deep, creedal ideology that has been wafting through the culture for centuries and has now found an unlikely, cynical and cold-eyed host.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Putin's Ties to the Keystone XL Pipeline</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Feb. 14, 2017 01:32PM EST</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp; DeSmogBlog</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">By Steve Horn and Itai Vardi</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Believe it or not, there's a key connection to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, in the fight over North America's controversial Keystone XL pipeline.</b></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">One of President Donald Trump's first actions in office was to sign an executive order on Jan. 24 expediting the approval of the Keystone XL. Owned by TransCanada, this tar sands oil pipeline was halted by former President Barack Obama in November 2015.<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>Trump signed another order on Jan. 24, calling for steel for U.S. pipelines to be made in the U.S. to the "maximum extent possible" and two days later TransCanada filed a new presidential permit application for Keystone XL with the U.S. Department of State.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Critics, such as John Kemp of Reuters, pounced on the caveat language in Trump's steel order and noted that it appears "designed to preserve lots of wiggle-room." In fact, a DeSmog investigation reveals that much of the steel for Keystone XL has already been manufactured and is sitting in a field in rural North Dakota.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeSmog has uncovered that 40 percent of the steel created so far was manufactured in Canada by a subsidiary of Evraz, a company partly owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is a close ally of Putin and a Trump family friend. Evraz has also actively lobbied against provisions which would mandate that Keystone XL's steel be made in the U.S.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramovich is described in the 2004 book Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere by British journalists Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins as "one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the only political party that was prepared to offer its undiluted support to Putin when he fought his first presidential election in late 1999. When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Evraz describes itself as "among the top steel producers in the world based on crude steel production of 14.3 million tonnes in 2015."</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">DeSmog's findings comes as Trump is under scrutiny from Congress, U.S. intelligence agencies and others for his personal and presidential campaign team's ties to Russia. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded in January that Russian state-sponsored actors had hacked into the email databases of both the Democratic National Committee and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign in order to influence the election in favor of Trump.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Meet Roman Abramovich</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">After helping launch Putin's presidency in Russia, Abramovich also was instrumental in the vetting and picking of Putin's cabinet, according to Midgley and Hutchins in their book. They also reveal that Abramovich was instrumental in the creation of Putin's political party, Unity.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramovich bought a 41 percent stake in the steel producer Evraz in 2006. Prior to that, he owned a 72 percent stake in the Russian state-owned oil company Sibneft, which was eventually purchased for $13 billion by the state-owned company Gazprom and became known as Gazprom Neft.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Before this, however, Sibneft merged in 2003 with the company Yukos, then owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in an attempt to create what was envisioned as a competitor to the likes of ExxonMobil. Had it materialized, the resulting company, called Yukos-Sibneft, would have been at that point the fourth largest oil producer in the world.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Under pressure from Putin, however, and with what was reported as the helping hand of Abramovich, the deal was called off and Khodorkovsky ended up arrested and then jailed for eight years for alleged tax evasion and fraud. Abramovich's personal wealth doubled as a result of the later Sibneft-Gazprom merger.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Telegraph reported that Abramovich met with Putin before the Yukos-Sibneft deal was tossed to the curb.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"The revelation of the meeting will fuel suggestions that the Kremlin is closely involved with the fate of the two companies," The Telegraph wrote at the time. "Many industry commentators saw [the] decision to halt the merger as a government-backed effort to further weaken Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of Yukos and its largest shareholder."</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Abramovich's influence would continue in the years ahead. The 2010 book The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession, written by Richard Sakwa, further describes Abramovich as someone "whose wealth in the Putin years increased at least tenfold and he remained one of Putin's closest confidants" while Putin carried out his first term as president.</font>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313108-declassified-report-putin-ordered-election-interference-to-help</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 01/06/17 03:59 PM EST &nbsp;16,308</font></div>

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<div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump</font></b></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a widespread influence campaign intended to help elect Donald Trump, the intelligence community said in a declassified report released Friday afternoon.&nbsp;</font></span></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report reads.&nbsp;</font></span></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”</font></span></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bombshell document details the intelligence community's findings but provides little in the way of forensic evidence backing up its assessment, citing the need to protect sources and methods.&nbsp;</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“While the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods,” the report reads.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The document is made up of publicly available information, painting a portrait of Moscow as making a shrewd decision to back a candidate it saw as friendlier to its interests.</font></div>

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<div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the document, Putin “most likely” wanted to discredit Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, because “he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”</font></b></div>

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<div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the former KGB agent saw Trump as having “Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine” and approved of his stated policy to work with Russia.&nbsp;</font></b></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moscow also reportedly saw the election of Trump as “a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition” against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Officials note that Putin publicly contrasted the president-elect’s approach to Russia with Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric” — but the report offers no previously unknown information.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is some level of minor disagreement among intelligence agencies as to the strength of its judgment that Russia intended to help Trump.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CIA and FBI have high confidence in the judgment, while the National Security Agency has moderate confidence, the report acknowledges.&nbsp;</font></span></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report — devoid of a “smoking gun” — is unlikely to silence skeptics who are unconvinced that the intelligence community can prove Russia’s motivations.&nbsp;</font></span></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the community's conclusions and has treated its assessment as an attack on the legitimacy of his presidency.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president-elect has instead focused on the intelligence community's long-public assessment that no physical voting machines were impacted by the Russian campaign.</font></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After receiving a briefing from senior intelligence officials earlier on Friday, Trump issued a statement claiming that the hacks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”</font></span></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prominent Republicans echoed the approach following the release of the report.</font></span></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We must also be clear that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or balloting process,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian intelligence did obtain access to multiple state and local electoral boards, according to the report, but the Department of Homeland Security assessed that none of the systems the hackers targeted or compromised were involved in vote tallying.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democrats immediately pushed back on the assertion that the campaign had no impact on the election.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It is one thing to say that there was no tampering with vote tallying — which is true — it is another thing to say that the daily dumping of documents disparaging to Secretary Clinton that was made possible by Russian cyber operations had no effect on the campaigns,” said&nbsp;<b>Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.</b>), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Whether [Russia] had a decisive impact on the outcome will never be known and was certainly not the subject of the intelligence community's analysis, but that they were of great consequence is undeniable."</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Russian campaign involved more than just hacking. According to the report, it also included propaganda campaigns in the media and a “troll campaign” on social media.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian state-run outlets Sputnik and RT both amped up campaigns to delegitimize the Clinton campaign, including English-language videos like one headlined “Clinton and ISIS Funded with the Same Money,” and promoted the idea that WikiLeaks had an email that would “put Clinton in Prison.”</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems,” said the report, which describes Clinton’s health as a focal point of the campaign.&nbsp;</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russia’s “Internet Research Agency,” a paid army of social media “trolls,” also got in on the act. Accounts once devoted to supporting Russian annexation of the Ukraine flipped to support Trump.&nbsp;</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to officials and lawmakers who have seen both, the report is identical to the classified version of the document prepared for President Obama.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The so-called Gang of Eight — House and Senate leaders and the heads of the two Intelligence committees — reviewed the complete document earlier on Friday.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday morning lamented that more of the document would not be made public, perhaps hinting at frustration that the Obama administration hasn’t done more to silence doubters.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I would hope that we could get more," she said Friday morning. "I know we have to respect sources and methods. But I think that even Congress has the right to know more than they want to disclose to Congress, beyond the Gang of Eight."</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"So this will be interesting in terms of what the disclosure is, of this report," she added. "But suffice to say, it's stunning in its conclusions, and you'll see some of it."</font></div>

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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-king-putin-allows-freedom-dissent-because-he-hasnt-murdered-garry-kasparov-new-york" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-king-putin-allows-freedom-dissent-because-he-hasnt-murdered-garry-kasparov-new-york</font></a>

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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">ARTER PAGE,&nbsp;BRIEFLY</span>&nbsp;a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?_r=0" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">reportedly</a>&nbsp;one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page provided the lengthy letter to The Intercept when asked whether he would support President Trump using his&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/15/trump-has-the-power-to-declassify-whatever-he-wants-including-the-russian-intercepts/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">power as president</a>&nbsp;to declassify any government material to disclose any intercepted conversations between Page and Russian officials. He did not say. Instead he forwarded the&nbsp;letter, which is well-formatted, heavily footnoted, grammatically correct and has no spelling mistakes. However, its content is bizarre.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To begin with, it is addressed to the voting section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/how-file-complaint#nine" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">charged exclusively</a>&nbsp;with enforcing federal laws that protect the right to vote.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It then makes&nbsp;the grandiose claim that “the actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in U.S. history since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was similarly targeted for his anti-war views in the 1960’s.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page repeatedly describes as “outrageous” the news coverage claiming that he has significant connections to Russian officials and what he says was the Clinton campaign’s hidden hand behind it.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Clinton campaign, says Page, engaged in “human rights violations,” “illegal activities,” “unlawful deceptions,” “Obstruction of Justice — the charge upon which President Nixon was impeached,” spreading “False Evidence,” and “an obviously illegal attempt to silence me on an important issue of national and international consequence in violation of my Constitutional rights.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page also states that he was targeted by the Clinton campaign because he is Catholic, a military veteran, and a man.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to the letter, Page included three appendices: A July 2016 speech he delivered at the New Economic School in Moscow; a response to the director of national intelligence’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">report</a>&nbsp;claiming that Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to intervene in the 2016 election to help Trump; and a September 15 letter to FBI Director James Comey asking him to close any inquiry into Page.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his&nbsp;response to the DNI report, Page addresses the report’s statement that “Putin’s chief&nbsp;propagandist Dmitriy&nbsp;Kiselev used his flagship&nbsp;weekly newsmagazine&nbsp;program this fall to cast&nbsp;President-elect Trump as&nbsp;an outsider victimized by&nbsp;a corrupt political&nbsp;establishment.”</font>

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page writes that&nbsp;“Both as a world-class journalist and as a human being, [Kiselev] is an exceptionally competent, kind and fair individual with the highest level of personal integrity,” whose broadcast views “closely align with the perspectives held by tens of millions of hard-working, patriotic Americans.”</font></span>

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition being a television host, Kiselev is head of the Russian government news agency Rossia Segodnya. He is notorious for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10240762/Russian-journalist-Dmitry-Kiselyov-defends-homophobic-comments-in-TV-debate.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">saying on air in 2012</a>: “I think banning gays from distributing propaganda to children is not enough. … I think they should be banned from donating blood or sperm, and if they die in a car crash, their hearts should be burnt or buried in the ground as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”</font></span>

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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">PAGE WAS ESSENTIALLY</span>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/the-mystery-of-trumps-man-in-moscow-214283" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">unknown in political and foreign policy circles</a>&nbsp;until Trump listed him as one of five people slated for his foreign policy team in an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/?utm_term=.3153c8c6096a" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">interview</a>&nbsp;with the Washington Post in March 2016.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/politics/harry-reid-russia-tampering-election-fbi.html?_r=0" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">In August</a>, then-Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey&nbsp;calling for an investigation of evidence he said suggested that Russia might try to manipulate voting results — and referred to the speech delivered&nbsp;by Page the previous month in Moscow, in which he criticized American sanctions policy toward Russia.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yahoo News in September&nbsp;<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-officials-probe-ties-between-trump-adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">reported</a>&nbsp;that intelligence officials were specifically looking into whether Page had&nbsp;private communications with senior Russian officials about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if Trump became president. Precisely that kind of conversation — between former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. — led to Flynn’s resignation.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/09/26/trumps-russia-adviser-speaks-out-calls-accusations-complete-garbage/?utm_term=.8c52a8cb409f" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">interview</a>&nbsp;with the Washington Post, Page responded to the Yahoo story, saying, “All of these accusations are just complete garbage.” But he announced he was taking a leave of absence from his work with the Trump campaign due to the controversy.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s press secretary&nbsp;<a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/the-mystery-of-trumps-man-in-moscow-214283" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">said</a>&nbsp;in September that Page had “no formal role”&nbsp;in the campaign, and during a January 2017 news conference before Trump took office, Trump spokesperson&nbsp;Sean Spicer stated that “Carter Page&nbsp;is an individual who the president-elect does not know and was put on notice months ago by the campaign.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page himself said Wednesday night on the PBS NewsHour: “I was a junior member of the campaign’s foreign policy advisory group … compared to other people that had much more direct interaction with Mr. Trump, who I never actually briefed or was in any small meetings with. I went to many rallies with him, but never any direct meetings.”</font>

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Page worked in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office between 2004 and 2007, where he was involved in trades involving Russian state-run energy companies, and rose to the level of vice president.</font></span>

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2008, Page founded an investment firm called Global Energy Capital, together with Sergei Yatsenko, a former manager at the Russian state-run oil firm, Gazprom. He is now a managing partner there. The company,&nbsp;<a href="http://globalenergycapital.com/about_us.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">according to its website</a>, “invests growth capital in private energy services companies.”</font></span>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After The Intercept asked Page by email how anything the Clinton campaign had done could be considered a hate crime, Page responded, “<span class="s1" style=" box-sizing: border-box;">It all seems to be pretty textbook definition to me (and my lawyers).” He added: “I’ve been harassed non-stop for the last year, based on these and other lies originated by the Clinton campaign.”</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter and appendices Page provided to The Intercept can be read below.</font></p>

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</font><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/new-poll-finds-republicans-have-growing-fondness-russia-vladimir-putin-and-wikileaks"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/new-poll-finds-republicans-have-growing-fondness-russia-vladimir-putin-and-wikileaks</font></a></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style=" font-family: ;">One other factor has to be added into this witch’s brew: magical thinking.&nbsp; Like so many leaders of recent times, he seems to equate mastery over oil in particular, and fossil fuels in general, with mastery over the world.&nbsp; In this, he shares a common outlook with&nbsp;President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/08/putins-thesis-raw-text/212739/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">wrote</a>&nbsp;his Ph.D. dissertation on harnessing Russia’s oil and gas reserves in order to restore the country’s global power,&nbsp;and with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, said to be Trump’s&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/politics/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-state-exxon-donald-trump.html" target="blank" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" text-decoration="text-decoration" none="none" style=" font-family: ;">top choice</a><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style=" font-family: ;">&nbsp;for Secretary of State and a long-term business partner of the Putin regime.&nbsp; For these and other politicians and tycoons -- and, of course, we’re talking almost exclusively about men here -- the possession of giant oil reserves is thought to bestow a kind of manly vigor.&nbsp; Think of it as the national equivalent of Viagra.</span></font></div>

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</font><p><em><a href="http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/19/exxon-climate-change-crime/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read page 1</font></a></em>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate and in any event entirely manageable. His&nbsp;<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/06/rex-tillerson-thinks-youre-all-overreacting-climate-change" target="_blank">language</a>&nbsp;was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Add to that gem of a comment&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cfr.org/world/ceo-speaker-series-conversation-rex-w-tillerson/p35286" target="_blank">this one</a>: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S., when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah and just before <a href="http://ecowatch.com/water-news/hurricane-sandy/">Hurricane Sandy</a>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/exxonmobil-ceo-makes-fun-of-clean-energy-we-choose-not-to-lose-money-on-pur" target="_blank">said</a>&nbsp;that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has&nbsp;<a href="http://climatecrocks.com/2014/11/14/big-business-gears-ready-for-carbon-pricing/" target="_blank">discussed</a>&nbsp;supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend—somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton—wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon—which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website&nbsp;<a href="http://dirtyenergymoney.org/" target="blank">Dirty Energy Money</a>, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.atr.org/about-the-pledge" target="blank">present</a>, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself&nbsp;<a href="https://www.atr.org/atr-supports-rep-scalises-resolution-opposing-carbon-tax" target="blank">wrote</a>&nbsp;Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/stop-dreaming-republicans-wont-back-carbon-tax" target="blank">told</a>&nbsp;a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax and since he’s been&nbsp;<a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/former-sen-alan-simpson-grover-norquist-most-powerful-man-america" target="_blank">called</a>&nbsp;“the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who&nbsp;<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/03/3665618/oil-companies-want-carbon-price/" target="blank">made</a>&nbsp;a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite and lost no time in&nbsp;<a href="http://congress.freedomworks.org/legislators/bill-cassidy" target="blank">co-sponsoring a bill</a>&nbsp;opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a <a href="http://ecowatch.com/?s=shell">Shell</a> game. Except it’s Exxon.</font>

<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Never-Ending Big Dig</font></strong>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even that’s not the deepest problem.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company&nbsp;<a href="http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/19/exxon-climate-change-crime/2/#uri=http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil-adds-new-production-continues-long-term-capital-focus-and-investment-discip" target="blank">spends huge amounts</a>&nbsp;of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in <a href="http://ecowatch.com/?s=oil+prices">oil prices</a>, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f83e3ca0-c9b8-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3zoKVYlUF" target="blank">another</a>&nbsp;25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was&nbsp;<a href="http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil-adds-new-production-continues-long-term-capital-focus-and-investment-discip" target="_blank">spending</a>&nbsp;$63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons—$4 million a day, every day.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola and Nigeria. “The&nbsp;<a href="http://careers.exxonmobil.com/en/about-us/Our-employees" target="blank">strength</a>&nbsp;of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance<b>, Rex Tillerson has an&nbsp;<a href="http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140827/deepening-ties-between-exxon-and-russia-run-counter-us-efforts-punish-putin" target="blank">Order of Friendship</a>&nbsp;medal from one Vladimir <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Putin.</span> </b>All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet—an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf" target="blank">identified</a>&nbsp;at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf" target="blank">about</a>&nbsp;another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/29/carbon/" target="_blank">less than 20 years</a>.</font></p>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://grist.org/article/russia-takes-a-skeptical-approach-to-climate-change-thanks-to-putin/</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">w<span style="line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ith its proximity to the Arctic, Russia is&nbsp;especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But that doesn’t mean they’re doing anything about it. Climate-change denial may&nbsp;be going the way of the permafrost here in the United States (unless you’re a Republican running for president), but it’s still alive and well in Russia, and the blame for this sits&nbsp;at the very top.</span></font></div>

<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russian citizens know little about climate change because Vladimir Putin wants it that way.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/29/us-climatechange-summit-russia-media-idUSKCN0SN1GI20151029" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent;">Reuters reports:</a></font></p>

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<p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russia’s official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians “spend less on fur coats” while “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president believes that “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. “That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general.”</font></p>

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<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just this year,&nbsp;Russia experienced massive wildfires that killed more than 29 people and left 6,000 homeless.&nbsp;Here in the West, the media looked at the epic North American wildfire season in connection to increasing temperatures due to climate change, but in the Russian media, “the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out,” writes&nbsp;Reuters.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis,” Galina Timchenko, who runs the popular Russian news site Meduza, told Reuters.&nbsp;“Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It should be. But Putin’s climate denial has set the tone for the rest of the nation. The leader visited the Russian Arctic in 2010, and after seeing retreating ice caps, he acknowledged that the climate is changing but denied human responsibility.&nbsp;His&nbsp;attitude about the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Paris could be described as lukewarm at best. He has offered little in the way of promises, including one to cut carbon emissions to 70 to 75 percent of 1990 levels — which is actually an&nbsp;<em style=" box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">increase&nbsp;</em>from 2012 levels.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So why the denial, Putin? It could be that the man is just plain delusional, but here’s an alternate theory: money, money, money. While climate change and extreme weather could potentially slow Russia’s economy by 1&nbsp;to 2&nbsp;percent a year, retreating polar ice also opens up new areas for oil exploration, and Russia is the world’s largest producer of oil. Not convinced? The other possibility is that Putin just really likes to go topless.</font></p>

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