"judge" CARL J. NICHOLS, Federalist Society fascist, a Trump appointee is showing how the House Committee on the January 6th putsch was wrong to place their faith in the legal process in forcing people like Steve Bannon to testify. First it was the Department of Justice dragging its foot in the process, a matter of weeks in what was an obvious case of guilt, now it's a Republican-fascist, Trump judge delaying it until the middle of next year. Somehow I have a feeling he's planning on trying the case in a way that might make the infamous judge Bruce Schroeder look like a hanging judge, by comparison. Even if he doesn't, this is part of a long pattern of judges and lawyers and the legal system allowing itself to be the vehicle of denying the public the justice it deserves by the tactic of delay.
The House Committee had better stop fooling around with the designed delays of the law and legal process if they want to do something to discourage the destruction of democracy because the law is not an ass, it's in on the fix for the insurrectionists, even when not by intent, by habit and exploitable custom. The law is a serially offending ass.
The House should start arresting those who defy their subpoenas and imprison them, as is their legal right under the Constitution. They should hold Trumpian fascists under the same conditions Trump held babies in on the border and in concentration camps elsewhere. Give Jeffrey Clark a hard floor and a mylar blanket, give Steve Bannon access to a lawyer on the basis that "judges" regularly do even the youngest of minor children.
There is no justice system in the United States, there is no justice where there is no equality, where the rich, the white the connected to Republican-fascism and the privileges of oligarchy get treatment better than the least among us, there is no justice. The courts have been packed with thugs and mob lawyers. It's time that the Democratic members of the Congress stopped pretending there is anything like a functioning justice system that can be depended on to prevent further crimes against government of, by and for The People.
"the CIA financed moral nihilism of abstract expressionism..."
ReplyDeleteThat is without question the stupidest conspiracy theory of all time.
Here's a clue, schmucko. There was no such thing, and the level of moronic gullibility necessary to believe it surpasses that necessary to believe that HIllary Clinton is running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizzeria.
Yes, the CIA was gonna funnel money to a bunch of NYC commie Jews as a way of fighting Communism. Good lord, you're a putz.
Yeah, I can see how living in Queens has been a boon for your intellectual life. A baboon might have done more with it than you have.
DeleteFrom How MoMA and the CIA Conspired to Use Unwitting Artists to Promote American Propaganda During the Cold War by Jennifer Dasal
The secrecy with which the CIA pursued Abstract Expressionism was not only integral to successfully fooling the Soviet Union but also to keeping any associated artists in the dark. In [former CIA operative Donald] Jameson’s words, “[M]ost of [the Abstract Expressionists] were people who had very little respect for the government in particular and certainly none for the CIA.” Multiple artists self-identified as anarchists, particularly Barnett Newman, who was so taken by anarchism that he would later write the foreword to the 1968 reprint of Russian author Peter Kropotkin’s 1899 Memoirs of a Revolutionist, describing the anarcho-communist’s influence upon his life and work. In other words: tell Clyfford Still or Helen Frankenthaler that you wanted to use their paintings to forward a government agenda, and the answer would most likely have been a firm no.
The CIA’s answer to these problems was something known as the long-leash policy. This solution kept CIA operatives at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists and art exhibitions—sometimes even more—so that they could not be linked to any furtive governmental bankrolling. In order to fulfill this need, they elicited the participation of arts foundations, artists groups, and, most crucially, art museums, requesting their assistance in organizing special exhibitions, events, and collections. Such activity was funneled through a new arts agency created by the CIA named the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was developed in 1950 and not revealed as a CIA project until 1966. It would always appear, then, that a museum or arts corporation was presenting and promoting Abstract Expressionism, never the government, no way! And no one was the wiser, not even the artists themselves. Especially not the artists themselves.
The museum most closely involved with the CCF’s plans for cultural domination was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, focused through the participation of Nelson Rockefeller, a politician, philanthropist, and future vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford. Rockefeller and MoMA go hand in hand, as his mother was one of the cofounders of the institution, which he called Mommy’s Museum (aaargh!). He was not unfamiliar with the intelligence world either, as the former coordinator of Inter-American Affairs for Latin America during World War II, yet another propagandistic front agency.
For the CCF, then, Rockefeller’s cooperation was ideal. He used his privileged position as the president of MoMA’s board of trustees to arrange for some of the CCF’s biggest and most successful AbEx exhibitions, including the landmark 1958‒59 showcase “The New American Painting.” The exhibition was, according to its March 11, 1958, press release, “organized in response to numerous requests [to] the Museum’s International Program,” leading one to assume that other countries were clamoring for these “advanced tendencies in American painting,” rather than being coordinated through MoMA’s personnel on the order of the CIA. Under the auspices of the MoMA brand, “The New American Painting” traveled for one year straight, visiting practically every major Western European city, including Basel, Milan, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and London. The widespread touring of the show in American-friendly countries—unlike the on-the-communist-fence locations chosen for [the State Department-funded exhibition] “Advancing American Art”—was strategic, a way to cement alliances among like-minded Cold Warriors and to promote the much-lauded cultural preeminence of the United States for the first time in history.
Continued: As with exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism in America, the responses to “The New American Painting” were mixed. The Times in London declared its showing at the Tate Gallery to be “the finest of its kind we have yet had . . . the aesthetic barometer [of] why the United States should so frequently be regarded nowadays as the challenger to, if not actually the inheritor of, the hegemony of Paris.” But art critic Georges Boudaille found the paintings to be strangely depressing and unknowable, asking in the French literary publication Les Lettres françaises, “Where does this dramatic sensation of nightmare and stain come from? What do these disturbing spatters express? What?”
DeleteThe Tate London showing of “The New American Painting” provides us with an intriguing case study on how the CCF operated its long-leash policy. After the exhibition opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne in January 1959, a delegation from the Tate attended the show and was thrilled by its contents. Upon requesting an extension of the tour’s run to accommodate a London stop, the Tate cohort learned that the steep fees associated with the show were simply too pricey to accommodate, and disappointedly accepted their art-less fate. But behold! What happened next? An art- loving American millionaire named Julius “Junkie” Fleischmann appeared, almost as if by magic, and ponied up the funds. The show, happily, then continued on to London.
A fairy godfather materializes and bankrolls a major exhibition in a foreign country simply for the love of art? How magnanimous! By now, though, we know the real story: the money provided to travel the show to the UK wasn’t actually Fleischmann’s but cash funneled through him from an organization called the Farfield Foundation—yet another secret arm of the CCF disguised as a charitable body. The Tate didn’t know. The exhibition’s visitors didn’t know. And the artists exhibited certainly didn’t know either. Such feints were rather easy to pull off too. As Tom Braden later recounted, “We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were actually trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.”
By the way, it should be noted that Julius Fleischmann, like Nelson Rockefeller, had a direct connection to MoMA: he was a member of its governing board. Many MoMA supporters seem to have been involved in similar ways. The CIA/MoMA link was never “official,” exactly—and many have disputed the partnership over the years—but as writer Louis Menand noted in a 2005 article for the New Yorker, no formal deal between the agency and the museum needed to be made because all figures were essentially on the same page. Fighting communism, varnishing the country’s image, and celebrating art? For the cultural elite at MoMA—and others in boardrooms and lounges all over New York City—it was a no-brainer.
The CIA did not buy Jackson Pollack's paintings.
ReplyDeleteYou're a blithering idiot.
Fundamentally, the CIA made Jackson Pollock rich. They made De Kooning and Rothko household names. And in doing so, they won the cold war. Not with guns, but with abstract expressionism and rock and roll.
DeleteAnd there’s something deliciously ironic about that, isn’t there? The CIA fought communism by making a communist painter wealthy (with capitalism). The abstract-expressionist movement, meant to reject ideology and politics, was used as an ideological hammer for political ends.
Michael R. McBride
You are an ignorant yahoo from Queens.
The CIA was responsible for rock and roll?
ReplyDeleteGood fucking grief, you're a crackpot.
A. No one said the CIA was "responsible for rock and roll" you made that up. B. Apparently they used it. C. You are really a lot stupider than I thought you were half an hour ago, and that's quite an achievement.
ReplyDelete‘Rockers and spies’ – how the CIA used culture to shred the iron curtain
Two memories: one, from November 1989, of a crowded bar at 3am in Berlin, not far from the wall breached just 36 hours beforehand. My brother and I are in town for the craic and biggest street party of all time. An awful band called Eurocheque strikes up a cover of the Scorpions’ Big City Nights and, inebriated, the crowd joins in. An elderly couple from the eastern sector two-steps to the beat. It’s very moving. A few months earlier, the Scorpions had played a music festival in Moscow, and were already working on their most famous song: Wind of Change.
Second memory: the less epic surroundings of Mote Park, Kent, three decades later. The Scorpions, this time for real, with bedazzling lightshow and backdrop of peace signs on a holograph of the Berlin Wall; Klaus Meine – born 1948, year of the Berlin blockade – singing Wind of Change through a chilly night. “The world is closing in/ Did you ever think/That we could be so close, like brothers … ?”
Now, it turns out, that sparkler-swaying anthem may have been contrived by US intelligence as cultural subversion of communism. An upcoming podcast series, Wind of Change, by the New Yorker’s Pat Radden Keefe, investigates whether it was – as the journalist was told a decade ago – actually a CIA-crafted confection.
The producers can be sure of an audience for Keefe’s exploration of “the dark byways of cold war history and … nearly a hundred interviews in four countries with rockers and spies”. But if the song was created by the agency, this was nothing new – indeed, it would have been a late arrival to a policy and practice almost as long-established as the Berlin Wall itself.
Ed Vulliamy: The Guardian
He mentions quite a few instances of American foreign policy using kulcha as a weapon, including Jackson Pollock.
I just read more than you do, which wouldn't be an accomplishment as you don't read much of anything. You are just proof of the post-literacy of the commercial scribbling racket in dumbed-down modern life.
Those are the most asinine conspiracy theories of all time. Here’s a clue, schmucko ….nobody in our government was smart enough to pull that shit off.
ReplyDeleteShithead, there's a difference between people who make stuff up like you do, for example the theory you promote that Marvin Gaye Ivory Jo Hunter and Martha Reeves incited the riots of the mid 1960s with a party song about dancing and documented research supported by documents and interviews. I prefer the later, you are too lazy, stupid and ignorant to have ever encountered it. Why don't you go throw this against the wall at Eschaton and we'll see how many of the "Brain Trust" (as you guys really do call Duncan's daycare for doddering duffers) are aware of the journalism done on the subject. I'm betting they're as ignorant of it as you are.
DeleteIf you believe the CIA was responsible for the Scorpions writing and recording that crappy piece of hair metal you're dumber than dirt.
ReplyDeleteApparently you think I'm writing under a different name for the Guardian. Which, by the way, I'd trust in the way of editorial responsibility than that ad flyer you wrote for.
DeleteHe wasn't the only one who reported that the CIA used pop kulcha that way, especially in Eastern Europe or that the anti-Communists in a number of places didn't embrace Western pop music, probably on the basis that the Communist gangster-dictators hated it more than the quality of the music.
I would expect that if the CIA were responsible for writing a pop song that it would be a crappy piece of metal just like the art they promoted was content free, anti-intellectual crap.
You really should have kept up with the scholarship in this area because the CIA's involvement with the promotion of abstract expressionism is quite well documented and attested to by people who would have known it. Which, by the way, was the only thing I mentioned. They probably hated Jack Levine's political, representational art which had something pop music shit and AE and pop-art don't have, moral and intellectual content.
You're getting pointlessly repetitious come up with something substantial or this is it till after the holidays.
YOu read something that's ridiculous on the face of it, but you believe it because if it's in a book it must be true.
ReplyDeleteFace it, your the Anti-Vaxxer of Cold War buffs. :-)
Like I said, Stupy, you don't know the difference between Eschaton level gossip - the real anti-vaxxer analogy - and sourced, documented journalism. And you someone who pretends to be a journalist when what you were was a peddler of the common-received BS of pop-"criticism". No wonder you and Brian Kilmead share an alma mater. You've got an equivalent education.
DeleteBefore I close this off till after the holiday, I didn't intend my remark about the CIA promoting abstract expressionism to set off my most obsessive troll but once he was set off I figured I'd provoke him so he'd post something at Duncans to see if the person who was telling me about it would do it. It's the longest period they haven't so I'm wondering if they died or just finally had the good sense and good judgement to stop going there.
DeleteNow, there's no point of this, it's time to go back to adult things.