If you saw the piece I did yesterday on Konstantin Rykov and you have any interest in Donald Trump, prostitutes and pee tapes, you might want to take a look at this:
Dosug (досуг, translated as Leisure) is a Russian online brothel centered in Moscow but with operations all around Europe. It can be found on both the anonymous dark net as well as the normal internet, where the website is always trying to stay two steps ahead of Russia’s notoriously vigorous cyber censors.
At over a decade old, Dosug serves as Russia’s biggest catalog of sex workers. Its existence means buying anything from a massage to sex is nearly as easy as ordering up a taxi on your phone. Dosug’s map of nearby available prostitutes looks an awful lot like Uber‘s map of available drivers.
Okay, so there’s an Uber for prostitutes in Moscow. Who created this thing?
Dosug was created by Konstantin Rykov, a 37-year-old Russian internet entrepreneur and politician who, until 2011, served as a legislative deputy in President Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia party and worked in the Duma Committee on Science and High Technologies.
What are the chances?
Starting in the 1990s, Rykov built a kingdom of popular websites beginning with fuck.ru, an obscenity-laced website that flaunted Russia’s rules while he operated under the psuedonym Jason Foris. He expanded into website design, advertising networks, book publishing, television, and eventually hundreds of other internet projects, according to his own count.
Among other news websites, Rykov runs Взгляд (Sight), referred to around the Western world as a mouthpiece of Putin’s Kremlin. He dubbed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as the “Russian Spring.”
Yeah, Russia is weird. You can simultaneously be Putin’s best friend and key online propagandist and yet have to take your prostitution ring to the dark net to avoid having it shut down by the government.
This is the same guy who got in touch with Trump on election night in 2012, a year before the supposed pee tapes were made during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. He’s the same guy who says he worked with Trump tirelessly for “four years and two days” to “get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality” so Trump could be elected president.
By the way, it looks like someone tried to figure out how many women are available on Dosung in Moscow who will pee on command (rather than allow someone to pee on them) and came up with the number one hundred and eighty six. So, no shortage, in other words.
It also looks like others have been on this trail long before me, tying Konstantin Rykov and Artem Klyushin together as Twitter buddies for example, and then quite obviously noting disturbing connections between Klyushin, Trump, and the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
I’m sure this is all just fake news, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.
Waiting for our stalwart defender of all things Russian to come in and start hand-waving away.
Guy could power a windmill all by hisself.
Most places that is the behavior of a mobster close to his local politician.
I wonder who’s been Trump’s friend in New York all these years, or any of the other venues in which Trump operates hotels and casinos. That’s the other angle. The “ordinary” business under which illegal businesses can operate. Have to guess that the sex workers at Trump’s places are not employees and are not independent contractors either. And that there are some deals with the venue. Your earlier article about New York’s Russian mafia and Trump seems spot on.
You can be forgiven for not knowing the outlines of how deep folk like Rykov dug in during the transition economy under Yeltsin and the shock therapy policy. For all its conscious self-interest, the Marshall plan of victory was a much wiser policy. We squandered our Cold War victory with the creation of robber barons in both the US and Russia. And in creating a survival of the fittest reactionary society in Russia, you see who was fittest and why: most corrupt and most willing to play hardball. Guess who that privileged? The most opportunist guys in the Soviet system. And the least influenced by Communist indoctrination. They met their partner in Trump.
This will be difficult to roll back to status quo ante November 2016 and will also be difficult to turn around without a new vision of politics and policy. In 15 years, we will be preparing (hopefully we can) for the centennial of the New Deal. That can provide the opportunity for assessing what reactionary modern conservatism has failed to roll back and what turned out to be bad policy. And 15 years after that the centennial of the National Security Act, which established the permanent military industrial complex and intelligence agencies (now hydra-headed to 17) in the intelligence community. Some long reads preparing for that are more than distractions from the very difficult task of taking back Congress. They will create more sanity than more intended purges or forced loyalty statements.
Reflecting the Russian antipathy based on how our propaganda led them to believe that adopting free markets would be and having a knee-jerk anti-Hitler-Stalin response to fear of the past and not concern for where Putin is actually manuevering again the interests of US voters likely is counter-productive. Accurately identifying Putin’s direction in aligning with right-wing parties (mostly in NATO) is more useful. What is the dog going to do when he actually catches the car? The reality is that Trump is just another one of the pack on the street.
Google Translate is a treasure:
Key:
June 14th, 2009:
Fascinating stuff you’ve come on. A frame for making it all make sense over a year ago would have allowed some sort of popular narrative that might have made sense had the Clinton campaign not been so visible with the deep state veterans appalled at Trump. Not me, but enough got very squeamish with the advocacy of Michael Hayden to progressive voters. I guess no one calculated the number of people that got the heeby-jeebies from that source of endorsement. I guess no one noticed that, as it turned out, the deep state was divided and in the end Clinton got the information war shiv.
The chilling words from Roberto Maroni,
Substitute KKK for Blackshirts (and after Charlottesville we can probably add Blackshirts or Silver Shirts and you have the Bannon alliance’s cover. We just want citizens to participate — like they did in the anti-immigration actions and lynchings of the 1920s.
Why is it important for citizens to participate? Then you have a politicized popular army independent of the military and police forces (or popularly aligned with them depending on the popular sentiment). They can be commanded to extend the military or oppose the military depending on the military’s relationship with with the autocrat. If opposed, the military will then be in a de facto state of mutiny. It is how the ruler secures his power from all potential opponents. Sarah Kendzior was correct last November; the prudent action was to as much as possible oppose the juggernaut hidden under the sheets of the transition and force its visibility even as politics struggled to raise the political will to investigate.
Finally we are getting some arguable facts that are clear rather tan ambiguous, presentable to a court rather than powerless to subpoena, and potentially arguable to even Trump voters (that participation of citizens that Trump’s strategists want to see).
As this goes down, we need not lose sight of the fact that Russia is a peer nuclear power with the US and should not get tempted into using provacative (and ultimately powerless rhetoric about what Russia has done). What exactly is the price for removing the sanctions against the oligarchs? Has anyone said? You know already that Russian withdrawal from Crimea will not go down well in Eastern Ukraine and could trigger the restarting of the civil war.
Another thing that can be found in that longer piece:
The number one talking point used to convince Greeks, Italians and Spaniards to oppose sanctions and support closer economic ties to Putin’s Russia is the prospect of nuclear war. This talking point is the Kremlin’s favorite.
It’s also the one you’ve been using for more than a year.
It’s the point on which the neo-cons have always pled just trust us.
And I picked up on it because of the way the the US media did not understand the strategic relation of Sebastapol when the US botched what it was doing right in Syria by going off on Ukraine, even sending to warships toward Seabastapol. More than a year is correct.
The threat of nuclear war between any nuclear nations is a huge issue. And it is the propensity of the American public these days to beat the drums to nuke any nation that does not snap to to American whims. Likely US actions made that case easy to make. And given the austerity that pan-European organizations had created after the Great Recession, it is easy to see how that would be attractive to Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards. That was a Euopean bankers’ self-goal. That should be pretty straightforward.
link:
Here are the objective realities of the US situation.
George W. Bush took the US military into two wars of choice after 9/11. The only objective driver to war on 9/12 was the anger of the American domestic public. Clinton had successfully handled the first attack on the World Trade Center through sentencing the perpetrators to long terms in high-security jails.
The intelligence community under Clinton seems to have keep precautions that prevented an attack for the remainder of his term with minimal invasion of the privacy of US citizens. The US by the end of the Clinton term was not placing military assets close enough to the Russian border to be seen as offensive encroachment, despite neo-con pressure to do so.
Bush’s taking the US military to war in two theaters put sufficient stress on a military that was seeking to prove that the strategy in Vietnam would have eventually been a winner that by 2005 anyone could see that the US was not the sole superpower that it claimed and moreover had become unpredictable an dangerous in its extension of a global war on terror based on sometimes questionable intelligence. (Saddam supportive of al Quaeda; Saddam hiding WMD programs. MEK not being a terrorist organization.) Hopefully these ae still the objective facts they were in 2003 to 2012.
Global estimates of US capabilities likely began being lowered as we exhausted more and more of our ordnance in Iraq, Afghanistan, then Somalia, and other places. All of the bad effects of the strategy in Vietnam were repeated.
Solid analysis about 2010 began talking about “after America” or how does the disapperance of the sole superpower mystique not degenerate into international chaos and greater risk of war. The expectations were that the world order would be bipolar again as it was in the Cold War, only now between the US and China. US strategists responded almost in echo to the strategists of the Truman administration in their architecture of the “pivot to Asia” in a reactive instead of creative strategy. Seeking to overpower instead of stabilize. Giving China and, in retrospect, Russia more reason to see a threat and more reason to see US weakness. And Victoria Nuland’s management of diplomacy in Europe and Eurasia wound up increasing the perception of US threat needlessly by baiting Russia in the Black Sea and Baltic. Obama’s preference for Presidential signaling (what Trump does as chest-beating) and sanctions for Kerry’s diplomacy signalled disagreements within US foreign policy establishment that could be exploited. And the Republican policy of party over country quickly weakened US international diplomatic power. The Netanyahu stunt was a deliberate weakening of US power.
Anything to do with Ukraine and the Baltic states has to be looked at in balance with US use of power in Central America and South America. The domestic consequence for the local populations tend to be similar.
Obama did stabilize US national security to the extent that the Republican Congress would let him. Trump has been very destructive of American soft power and not convincing in his use of the US military. Just more a repeat of “all hat and no cattle”. There is no sense at all what he could use an alliance with Putin for with respect to global stability and American insterests. One would hope that the US and Russia, for example have a national interest in reducing military budgets and the the threat of nuclear war through joint efforts with other powers. The US used to have some modest accomplishments in this area that cynically have been swept aside by US politics.
If you are still pressing the point that my views are of a “useful idiot”, what is the motive for purging idiots, useful or otherwise from the comment section of a blog? Is there only one right way to think of foreign policy? Is putting oneself in the shoes of other states a forbidden intellectual exercise. I find the anxiety around these issues that cropped up here with some new commenters somewhat disturbing.
In politics, political actors weaken themselve most with self-inflicted weaknesses as Cheney’s disastrous policies in service to the fossil fuel industry did to the United States.
If, I, for the sake of argument present the Saker or another rather transparent spokesperson for Russian policy, regardless of their relation to the Russian government it is so one can interpret Russian propaganda arguments directly rather than sifted through US propaganda arguments. Any careful reading of Cold War history makes clear why that is a useful collision of information. For someone like Pablo Escobar, who mostly presents facts on the ground from withing Eurasia, the importance is what seems important from within Eurasia. The Belt-Road Initiative is a different kind of competition that extends Chinese power without military force (unless they get hardnose about local cost-sharing of the infrastructure that the are building with the cash lifted of of witless US businessmen longing for globalization of market access. The Belt-Road Initiative also has the potential to sucker US militarism in more infrastructure destruction in the name of putting away a threat.
The neither war nor peace state of international relations right now is difficult and tends to provoke the US to attempts to have clarifying military action. While personally satisfying to what has become a warrior culture, it winds up neither satisfying, stabilizing, or clarifying. The conventional thinking represented by the Paul Nitze study and this Atlantic Council one is more of the same. Would that they would bring the stabilization that they seek. They can’t because they view other nation’s (and not just Russia’s assertions of sovereignty and power as inherently illegitimate if they are contrary of those assertions of sovereignty and power of the US and its international objectives. Countries still have common interests that form the bulk (actually) of their international relations. Cults of personality can distract from this and devolve into merely a “great game”,
Most Presidents up to Trump have sought to negotiate around those personality cults to find those common interests that can be worked. For all his egotism, Putin seems to know this drill. Trump does not. Congress will have to get smarter (some are pretty sharp on various parts of this but lack public visibility) on how to move in the reality that has changed since the Chinese Belt-Road Initiative in 2013 and the Trump temporary realignment with Russia (whatever it actually turns out to be, it is a realignment) put into play in the 2016 election. We are not going back to Obama’s world of assumed indispensibility of American participation in anything. We are not going back to Bush’s world of the assumption of the US as the sole superpower or hyperpuissance. We are not going back to the world in which the UN had an agreed-upon role in stability; the Republican Party will not allow that; yet, the rest of the world will continue to give the UN a role.
The first Democratic foreign policy wonk who can capture the US interest in a vision of a new global international system (other than the 200 nation anarchy that Trump envisions) and can say how that will allow the US to draw down its troop levels and reduce its miltary budget deficits and have credibility might get a realignment in the public response.
A first foray into this new world would be to have the intellectual experiment of (in the context of the debt extension discussion) stating how to run the US national security agencies on a total of $300 billion a year and deliver the same degree of national security by not providing other nations with the excuse for their larger-than-needed militaries. Move the jobs programs elsewhere.
This is a cusp moment in international relations and, yes, we have a huge anvil strung to our national neck. We need to start focusing on the first part of that and do an end-run of the second. Nuance about other nations and awareness of the opportunities that other nations are presenting for increased global stability.
Sorry for the length of this. I’ve been thinking about this topic for over five decades. Likely ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis which was one decision by a Russian submariner of being a catastrophe. (We only learned that after the Cold War was over and historians could look at the secret documents.) In fact what we learned was the Soviets were more wise at critical moments and more reckless in how they thought they could pursue the Cold War and the US national security apparatus was more cynical than they appeared and more reckless in their strategies and tactics and more thoroughly subverted their own democratic values. Such that we have lost how many US troops, how many foreign civilians, over how many foreign troops off of their own soil, for what gain? I lost some good friends and talented acquaintances in Vietnam and the story of that war still has not been told straight despite Ken Burns’s valiant attempt. I went to a very expensive undergraduate school, in fact the one that hosts Nitze SAIS in DC. I learned a whole lot of useful technical stuff there. But I also learned that in 1966-1968 there was no course seeking to explain to undergraduates, some of whom were seeking military and foreign service careers, what history, strategy, and prospects were in Vietnam. In 1965, most prominent schools had teach-ins to remedy this planned(?) failure of curriculum. Ultimately I decided that being in the national security establishment had nothing to offer me in terms of participating in resolving national security issues or finding a way toward one of the moral imperatives of our time – peace. Sadly, it seems that that is still true. Only the idea that there are moral imperatives (was that a liberal conceit? really?) has disappeared.
Some more about the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and sanctions.
The US sanctions were against particular oligarchs, which is why Putin is so eager to see them end. Had they been the old style Madeleine Albright sanctions, they could have been easily transferred so that the people of Russia would feel the pain instead of the named oligarchs. I thought at the time and still think that that was an interesting test of actions short of war. Dropping another 1000 warheads might be a good bargain for the US ending these sanctions. A good intelligence service can figure out as these were identified some critical financial points of hurt. Heads of state like Bill Clinton in his first term are not so vulnerable.
I don’t think that Putin won his argument even with parties in power that were mildly sympathetic to him on other issues. That seems to be why the Hail Mary of support for Trump in the year 2016. The polling throughout the year of Clinton’s weakness in blowing Trump right away encouraged Putin to take a huge risk. Or had it become personal between Putin and Clinton–a huge risk for diplomacy and international relations. Trump talks wildly about nuclear war and could be imagined as “pushing the boom-boom” and tweeting about it. Clinton is known to promote wars that haven’t been thought out for their consequences. I was very wrong on Libya because I trusted the Obama-Clinton team to wisely use the Arab Spring to bring stability to the Middle East (and wrote so at the time). I trusted Al Jazeera to be reporting in depth news when US media wouldn’t touch it. I was wrong in my trust in both places.
Right now I’m trusting Mueller’s team to (1) find the truth about the relationship between Trump, Russians, and the stealing of the e-mails from the Clinton campaign and the DNC (and now, any involvement in the Republican setup through the Benghazi investigation for the release of the Clinton emails. Frankly, I would like to see the mainstream media get some egg on their face for the way they advocated against Clinton and empowered Gowdy. I also would like to see confirmed that Giuliani used his friends in the NYPD to pull off the Anthony Wiener computer seizure to reignite the email charge right before the election. That’s been rumored; if it is true, I would like some charge against Giuliani.
And then I would like competent enough prosecutors and honest enough judges to convict the guilty.
Trump knows the best Russians. The BEST.
. . . all this . . .
The irony of Trump being impeached with a litany of lying, including “I did not have sex with that Russian woman’ will be a sweet moment.
…with those Russian women….
no one suggested that he did.
Those who have been coming to this community to imperiously express their unwillingness to deal with the factual record of what happened during the 2016 election campaign are the same community members who attempt to agitate against the Democratic Party and its leaders most aggressively.
It’s striking. It’s worth thinking about.
Their comments in these threads are fewer and fewer, although some of them still like to write stand-alone diaries.
If Putin, Rykov would have used their talents in favor of Hillary Clinton, would we ever complain?
If Grandma had wheels, she would be a trolley.
Try something more plausible – if the Germans, or Canadians, or Mexicans interfered pro Clinton, would we complain?
I think yes. YMMV.
Try something more plausible – if the Germans, or Canadians, or Mexicans interfered pro Clinton, would we complain?
Remember when Netanyahu was publicly, adamantly pro-Romney in 2012? I do. Yet hardly anything was said about it.
Tacky and inappropriate and it really antagonized me.
But = Bibi was not funneling money in illegally or conducting covert cyberwarfare or helping Romney target his get out the vote efforts by sharing propriatory information.
It’s not interference per se that I have a problem with. Although it depends what we mean when it comes to “interference”. For me, it’s the white supremacist ideology and the return of international fascist movements united together. It’s who he is targeting worldwide, and why.
And then you’d have to ask: why are they interfering on Clinton’s behalf, what do they expect in return?
I’m an internationalist, so I want peoples of the world to join together in opposing authoritarianism and oligarchy. Ideology matters.
For me, it’s the white supremacist ideology and the return of international fascist movements united together. It’s who he is targeting worldwide, and why.
That who is targeting? Putin? Do people ever stop and think about why the CEO class hasn’t abandoned Trump? And if they have, it’s only because Trump uses an airhorn instead of a dog whistle.
As usual of Phil, it turns to whataboutism (see above with Netanyahu, as if expressing support for a candidate is the same thing as what Putin is accused of doing, or as if I am silent about that), or completely changes the topic.
Why yes, Phil, the thought of international oligarchics conspiring together against their own people has occurred to me, thanks for asking.
Phil is a total POS. And he spreads his bullshit all over internet comments. Doesn’t the asshole have a job?
Does not rise to ad hominem.
Just pure insult.
Better off never written at all.
Restrain yourself. You’ll actually start dealing with your anxiety.
This bunch?
My guess is that most would. After all, that is the argument that the Trump campaign and its enablers were making with the Clinton Foundation scandal. And they did not succeed, but if there was there there (rarely the case in most Clinton “scandals”), they would hold Clinton’s accountable. After all, some of the “Resistance(tm)” is calling for post-political accountability of Clinton for his sexual infractions. Asking him to take Al Franken’s approach. Not exactly the same but close in similarly of degree of infraction of political norms.
Legatum: the Brexiteers’ Favorite Think Tank: Who is Behind Them?
Funded by a billionaire from Dubai. Primary expert on Brexit formerly worked for think tank closely tied to Republika Srpska (currently under US sanctions and the spawn of Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic). The regime in the Serb half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was the main war in the Clinton administration. The casus belli was the potential to shatter the European Union. Russia supported Serbia diplomatically in the UN during this period and this was pre-Putin and during Putin’s rise.
I think that this is another case in which Putin, a conservative party, and a growing faction of billionaires are on the same page, regardless of whether that is with respect to a common interest. My view is that the economic interests of the billionaires and conservatives can be seduced to serve the economic interests of Russian oligarchs and the political interests of Putin. As this unwinds, I think that BooMan has presented enough evidence to posit that Putin did not originate this line of events. In a blundering way Trump presented himself as a useful idiot and opportunists like Rykov started networking the relationship until the political facts in the US provided a significant opportunity to undo sanctions.
I think that seabe is right in his disagreement with Phil Perspective. Increasingly to me it makes the difference between fascism and nazism and makes white (racial) Russian nationalism a significant part of the mix that is easily overlooked because of past attitudes toward ethnic/religious minorities in the Russian Federation, even when it was a state in the Soviet Union. Empires are fragile exactly because they tend to me multi-ethnic with ethnic (and often racial) lines of fracture. Class structures often privilege the dominant ethnic/racial group but do allow limited mobility for minorities. Times of economic stress cause the ethnic dominant in the powers that be to want to exclude (or eliminate) minorities thought to be most competitive (economically or culturally) with their political base. Thus the Jews with Nazism and and Hispanics and Muslims with Trumpism.
In my opinion, that focus on identity, which make no mistake is coming from the supremacists, not the progressive or reactionary (reacting to the supremacists) forces, are what give this form of reactionary conservatism their racist-xenophobic character. And it is immigration that most frequently but not always triggers this direction of populist movements.
seabe is right. both.
It would be nice not to have ad hominem statement (insults not even arguments). It would also be nice not to assume that one is in an ad hominem environment because often one isn’t. Don’t let your anger at Republican betray drive you to believe there is minor betrayal when there is only disagreement or infelicitous writing or reading. Now that we are beginning to get clarity on what we were never supposed to know we can reduce the extent that that tactic prompted progressives to tear themselves apart (a easily discernible propensity for someone who wants progressive politics to just disappear).
Masha Gessen, The Atlantic: A Mafia State Within a Totalitarian Society
Apparently the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have interfered in US elections before, but the antibodies that our political process should have worked those times. Republican expediency allowed this time to have consequences. And the corruption of American media seduced into cult politics shut down those antibodies. Putin just got lucky to the extent that the US political order was already rotten.
There’s no wonder why Trump and Putin think they are sympatico.
You surely know this but just to note my takes:
UKIP lost but UK Conservatives seek to weaken European institutions while maintaining the driver of fascism — austerity. You might as well put UK Conservatives in this list.
Slavoj Zizek has the idiotic idea that a coalition of the left and the right can take down the austerity-driving establishment. The presence of both The Left Party (nostalgia for the old USSR) and AfD (the Bannonite Axis) clearly are independent actors that may align with United Russia, foolish for the Left Party, natural for AfD
National Front – one againt defeated but still strong. The bigoted right.
Podemos – When given power they voted for more austerity. There will be another populist uprising (beyond the Catalonian separatists)
Northern League – known corrupt and right wing party
5 Star movement – recent movement to supplant Northern League — not surprised to see it move fascist
Golden Dawn – neo-nazi
Syriza- like Podemos, sacrificed its base
Greece sees Russia as weight for Greek Cypriots in Cyprus tensions; Russia sees eastern Mediterranean base — objective power interest is warm-water port that allows them to have a navy; watch for move toward agreement after Tartus in Syria is stablized through end-of-war negotiations over Syria. IMHO these are to Russia like the bases on Okinawa are to the US and less sensitive than Sebastapol and Kaliningrad (and Vladivostok)