Just since yesterday morning, the Intercept has come out with three good articles about Hillary.

Hillary and Fracking

Behind closed doors on the paid speaking circuit, Hillary Clinton was far more candid than she has been in public about her prominent role as Secretary of State in exporting American-style hydraulic fracturing — the controversial, environmentally damaging technique best known as fracking — to countries all over the world.
“I’ve promoted fracking in other places around the world,” she declared during a 2013 paid talk to Deutsche Bank, adding that she launched a new wing of the State Department devoted to the initiative.
During a paid speech in Canada the following year, Clinton touted her role in “accelerating” natural gas development in Europe, calling attention to Poland’s embrace of fracking as a positive step.
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Earlier this year, we obtained emails from Clinton aides discussing plans to make Poland a “laboratory for testing whether U.S. success in developing shale gas can be repeated in a different country.” The emails also revealed efforts to partner with energy companies such as Chevron and Marathon Oil.
Starting early in her tenure as Secretary of State, Clinton traveled the globe encouraging foreign countries to adopt fracking technology. Clinton has both publicly and privately explained that she views fracking, under the right circumstances, as the most environmentally sound method of transitioning away from other fossil fuels such as oil and coal. She has also said that fracking can make the U.S. and other nations energy independent, a foreign policy goal that may weaken gas exporting countries such as Russia.
But in private, Clinton also asserted that there is a conspiracy of Russian-funded groups attempting to suppress fracking development. During a speech to a group in Canada called tinePublic, Clinton claimed that there are “phony environmental groups” that are “funded by the Russians to stand against” fracking.

Corporations pay too much in taxes

In public, top Hillary Clinton surrogate Neera Tanden said at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that there’s no need to cut the federal corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent.
But in private, Clinton says something quite different to corporations and trade groups.
An 80-page report compiled by Clinton’s own campaign of potentially damaging remarks she made behind closed doors was published by Wikileaks on Friday. It includes extensive comments on tax policy.
During an October 13, 2014, speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Clinton told the audience that “A number of business leaders have been talking to my husband and me about an idea that would allow the repatriation of the couple trillion dollars that are out there. And you would get a lower rate — a really low rate — if you were willing to invest a percentage in an infrastructure bank.”
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This has allowed Corporate America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving multinationals a special new tax rate.
This strategy has already paid off once, in 2004, when multinationals got Congress to let them bring back $312 billion in profits at a one-time rate of about 5 percent. The legislation required that the cash be used to hire Americans or conduct research and development. Corporations ignored these provisions and instead used the money to enrich their executives and stockholders, while cutting U.S. jobs.

The Russian Boogyman

But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. — more so than ever — and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions or opposes those leaders is a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow.
To see how extreme and damaging this behavior has become, let’s just quickly examine two utterly false claims that Democrats over the past four days — led by party-loyal journalists — have disseminated and induced thousands of people, if not more, to believe. On Friday, WikiLeaks published its first installment of emails obtained from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Despite WikiLeaks’ perfect, long-standing record of only publishing authentic documents, MSNBC’s favorite ex-intelligence official, Malcolm Nance, within hours of the archive’s release, posted a tweet claiming — with zero evidence and without citation to a single document in the WikiLeaks archive — that it was compromised with fakes:

Official Warning: #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done. https://t.co/UuJZrurHAA
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) October 7, 2016

As you can see, more than 4,000 people have re-tweeted this “Official Warning.” That includes not only random Clinton fans but also high-profile Clinton-supporting journalists, who by spreading it around gave this claim their stamp of approval, intentionally leading huge numbers of people to assume the WikiLeaks archive must be full of fakes, and its contents should therefore simply be ignored. Clinton’s campaign officials spent the day fueling these insinuations, strongly implying that the documents were unreliable and should thus be ignored. Poof: Just like that, unpleasant facts about Hillary Clinton just disappeared, like a fairy protecting frightened children by waving her magic wand and sprinkling fairy dust over a demon and causing it to scatter away.
Except the only fraud here was Nance’s claim, not any of the documents published by WikiLeaks. Those were all real.
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Literally none of that happened. Or at least there is zero evidence that it did. These are smart, rational people falling for a scam. Why? It’s in part because Twitter fosters this group-think and lack of critical thought — you just click a button and, with little effort, you’ve spread whatever you want people to believe — but it’s also because they’re so convinced of the righteousness of their cause (electing Clinton/defeating Trump) that they have cast all limits and constraints to the side, believing that any narrative or accusation or smear, no matter how false or conspiratorial, is justified in pursuit of it.
But while Donald Trump’s candidacy poses grave dangers, so does group-think righteousness, particularly when it engulfs those with the greatest influence. The problem is that none of this is going to vanish after the election. This election-year machine that has been constructed based on elite unity in support of Clinton — casually dismissing inconvenient facts as fraudulent to make them disappear, branding critics and adversaries as tools or agents of an Enemy Power bent on destroying America — is a powerful one. As is seen here, it is capable of implanting any narrative, no matter how false; demonizing any critic, no matter how baseless; and riling up people to believe they’re under attack.
For a long time, liberals heralded themselves as part of the “reality-based community” and derided conservatives as faith-based victims of “epistemic closure.” The dynamics seen here are anything but byproducts of reason.

China's banks in bad shape

Rising debt levels will worsen the credit profiles of China's top 200 companies this year, requiring the country's banks to raise $1.7 trillion in capital to cover a likely surge in bad loans, S&P Global said in reports published on Tuesday.
The study sees little scope for improvement in 2017 amid worsening leverage and substantial excess capacity in almost all sectors. Seventy percent of the companies surveyed were state owned, comprising 90 percent of the sample companies' debt.

Black people aren't paranoid after all

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.
We are pleased that after we reported our findings to the companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook has cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts. Twitter has also taken some recent steps to rein in Geofeedia though it has not ended the data relationship.

What makes aterrorist? Bombing people

A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of “homegrown” terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to “radicalization,” concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.
The study, reviewed by The Intercept, was conducted in 2012 by a unit in the FBI’s counterterrorism division and surveyed intelligence analysts and FBI special agents across the United States who were responsible for nearly 200 cases, both open and closed, involving “homegrown violent extremists.” The survey responses reinforced the FBI’s conclusion that such individuals “frequently believe the U.S. military is committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thereby justifying their violent aspirations.”
Online relationships and exposure to English-language militant propaganda and “ideologues” like Anwar al-Awlaki are also cited as “key factors” driving extremism. But grievances over U.S. military action ranked far above any other factor, turning up in 18 percent of all cases, with additional cases citing a “perceived war against Islam,” “perceived discrimination,” or other more specific incidents. The report notes that between 2009 and 2012, 10 out of 16 attempted or successful terrorist attacks in the United States targeted military facilities or personnel.