Trump reveals America’s ‘real face’, says Iran’s Khamenei
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Feb. 7 that he was grateful to U.S. President Donald Trump for revealing “the real face of America.”
“We are thankful to this gentleman... he showed the real face of America,” Khamenei said in a speech to military officers in Tehran.
“What we have said for more than 30 years - that there is political, economic, moral and social corruption in the ruling system of the U.S. - this gentleman came and brought it out into the open in the election and after the election.”
He referred to the case of a young Iranian boy who was pictured in handcuffs at a U.S. airport following Trump’s ban on visas for seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran.
“By what he does - handcuffing a five-year-old child - he shows the true meaning of American human rights,” Khamenei said.
The U.S. government on Feb. 6 defended Trump’s travel ban as a “lawful exercise” of his authority, and urged an appeals court to reinstate the suspended measure in the interests of national security.
Khamenei also responded to Trump’s tweet of Feb. 3, when the U.S. president said: “Iran is playing with fire - they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ [former U.S.] President Obama was to them.”
Khamenei ridiculed the idea of being grateful to Obama, saying he was the one who placed “paralyzing sanctions” on Iran and helped create the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) through his destabilizing actions in Iraq and Syria.
Earlier, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that with Trump in the White House, Tehran faced “difficult days ahead” regarding its nuclear deal with Washington and other major powers.
“I believe Trump may try to renegotiate” the deal, but “clearly, neither Iran, nor the Europeans or the international community will accept new negotiations,” Zarif told Ettelaat newspaper in an interview published on Feb. 7.
On Feb. 6, Trump pledged that America and its allies would defeat the “forces of death” and keep radical jihadists from gaining a foothold on U.S. soil.
“Today we deliver a message in one very unified voice to these forces of death and destruction - America and its allies will defeat you,” Trump said as he visited U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which plays a key role in the U.S.-led mission to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria.
“We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism. And we will not allow it to take root in our country,” he said.
As a response to Trump’s remarks, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Trump’s prioritization was promising although it was too early to expect any practical steps, state news agency SANA reported on Feb. 7.
Trump has indicated he might cut U.S. support for Syrian rebels and might help Syria in the fight against ISIL.
He has made defeating ISIL a core goal of his presidency and signed an executive order asking the Pentagon, the joint chiefs of staff and other agencies to submit a preliminary plan on how to proceed within 30 days.
Assad was quoted by SANA as telling a group of Belgian reporters: “I believe this is promising but we have to wait and it’s too early to expect anything practical.”
In a tweet on Feb. 6, Trump said: “The threat from radical Islamic terrorism is very real, just look at what is happening in Europe and the Middle-East. Courts must act fast!”
February/07/2017
'....Let’s summarize: The sanctions will remain, the tanks are on the border, the commitment to NATO has been reinforced, and Dunford is going to explain Washington’s strategic objectives to his Russian counterpart in clear, unambiguous language. There will be no room for Tillerson, who is on friendly terms with Putin, to change the existing policy or to normalize relations; Dunford, Haley, and Defense Secretary James Mattis will make sure of that.
As for Trump, it’s clear by the Crimea tweet, the sacking of Flynn and the (prospective) appointment of Harward, that he’s running scared and is doing everything in his power to get out of the hole he’s dug for himself. There’s no way of knowing whether he’ll be allowed to carry on as before or if he’ll be forced to throw other allies, like Bannon or Conway, under the bus. I would expect the purge to continue and to eventually include Trump himself. But that’s just a guess.
The hope that Trump would bring an element of sanity to US foreign policy has now been extinguished. The so called “Trump Revolution” has fizzled out before it ever began.
In contrast, the military buildup along Russia’s western flank continues apace.' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
The real crime here, however, is not that the incoming national security adviser spoke with a Russian diplomat seeking guidance on the future president’s thinking. The real crime is the criminal conspiracy inside the deep state to transcribe the private conversation of a U.S. citizen and leak it to press collaborators to destroy a political career.
“This is what police states do,” writes Lake.
But the deep state is after larger game than General Flynn. It is out to bring down President Trump and abort any move to effect the sort of rapprochement with Russia that Ronald Reagan achieved.
For the deep state is deeply committed to Cold War II.
Hence, suddenly, we read reports of a Russian spy ship off the Connecticut, Delaware and Virginia coasts, of Russian jets buzzing a U.S. warship in the Black Sea, and Russian violations of Reagan’s INF treaty outlawing intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
Purpose: Stampede the White House into abandoning any idea of a detente with Russia. And it appears to be working. At a White House briefing Tuesday, Sean Spicer said, “President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to … return Crimea.”
Is the White House serious?
Putin could no more survive returning Crimea to Ukraine than Bibi Netanyahu could survive giving East Jerusalem back to Jordan.
How does the deep state go about its work? We have seen a classic example with Flynn. The intelligence and investigative arms of the regime dig up dirt, and then move it to their Fourth Estate collaborators, who enjoy First Amendment immunity to get it out.
For violating their oaths and breaking the law, bureaucratic saboteurs are hailed as “whistleblowers” while the journalists who receive the fruits of their felonies put in for Pulitzers.....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
A proposal by the administration of US President Donald Trump to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps a “terrorist organization” underscores that the White House is dominated by the Jewish Zionist lobby, says a political analyst.
The proposal against the IRGC has reportedly stalled over warnings from US defense and intelligence officials that the move could "backfire," Reuters reported Friday, citing US and European officials familiar with the matter.
The proposal was temporarily halted amid an internal debate arguing that the measure could undermine the fight against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group and complicate the enforcement of Iran’s nuclear deal, the unnamed sources said.
“The internal discussion at the Trump administration to declare the Revolutionary Guards in Iran as a terrorist organization further shows that the Trump administration is dominated by Jewish Zionist influences, neocons that are in the mold of that those dominated the George W. Bush administration on matters of foreign policy and equally dominated the administration of Barack Obama to a certain extent,”said Rodney Martin, a former congressional staffer based in Los Angeles.
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon (R), Donald Trump (L) and his son-in law Jared Kushner
Martin told Press TV on Saturday that Trump has so far “shown to be a terrible neocon on all matters relating to Iran; and during the campaign, he made his position quite clear that he was going to adopt the position now.”
The political analyst also named some senior advisors in Trump’s administration, who according to him, had been behind the plan. He believes that it was desire of former national security advisor Michael Flynn “to label the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.”
Martin also said that “more is coming from Steve Bannon [Trump advisor] who is highly questionable in dubious character.”
"The other influential advisor in the administration, I believe that is Jared Kushner; his terrible Jewish Zionist son-in-law, also has his imprint on this extremist, extremist anti-Iranian, pro-Jewish Zionist agenda,” he added.
The analyst also argued that “the world community is going to push back on this attempt” because they understand quite well “who has been supporting terrorism and ISIL [Daesh] and who has been fighting it.”
BBC, CNN and the New York Times and others are all fake news and the enemy of the people. This is according to US President Donald Trump. Representatives of these organizations were barred from entering a White House press briefing. The New York Times has called this an insult to democratic ideals. What do you think? Stay with us.
Guests:
- Columnist, The Hill, Brent Budowsky (WAHSINGTON).
- Investigative Journalist, Tony Gosling (BRISTOL).
'...But Trump said a lot of things when he was bidding for the presidency in 2016: He made big promises about jobs and infrastructure, delivering more and better health care, protecting Social Security and Medicare. He portrayed himself as a critic of the war in Iraq, a skeptic about new military adventures, and a critic of “the fraud and abuse and everything else” in bloated Department of Defense budgets. “I’m gonna build a military that’s gonna be much stronger than it is right now,” he announced on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2015. “It’s gonna be so strong, nobody’s gonna mess with us,” he promised. “But you know what? We can do it for a lot less.” ....'
'....Conservatives like to say “there is no free lunch,” and that is true enough when it comes to budgeting. It is not possible to move tens of billions of dollars out of domestic programs that have already in many cases been squeezed to austerity levels and into a military budget so vast, the National Priorities Project reports, that “U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.”
On a planet where Americans account for 4.34 percent of the population, US military spending accounts for 37 percent of the global total. And Trump—with Mulvaney’s assistance—appears to be determined to move the latter percentage upward.....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'..“The Democrats cynically see the impending disaster as an opportunity to position themselves for the 2018 and 2020 elections.”
At the end of last month, Donald Trump unveiled his military budget, obscenely inflated by $54 billion dollars -- a 10 percent increase that will be paid for with cuts to social programs. There was no organized denunciation from the Democrats, and a few days later, when former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear gave the Democratic Party response to Trump’s speech before the Congress, he had not a word of criticism for Trump’s military budget, but instead charged that the president was “ignoring serious threats to our national security from Russia.”
Russia, Russia, Russia. It is the great diversion, by which the Democrats pretend to lead a resistance to Trumpism, but present no serious opposition to Trump and his fellow Republicans’ gutting of poor and working people’s programs in the service of militarism.
The Democrats are putting up no real fight against Trump’s domestic austerity agenda. Like Barack Obama, they would welcome a Grand Bargain with the Republicans that freezes or shrinks the social side of the budget while continuing to fund multiple wars all over the planet. Indeed, their principal problem with Trump was that he wasn’t bellicose enough; they feared that he might not be eager to play nuclear chicken with the Russians. They are implacable in their battle with Trump, the man, but put up only the most pro forma resistance to Trump’s people-crushing budget proposals.
Do not expect the Democrats to wage an honest fight for the people’s health care interests, either. The Republican plan to replace Obamacare is, as expected, an unmitigated disaster. While Obamacare was festering in its own contradictions, the Republican replacement will likely result in 10 million more uninsured Americans and total chaos at every level of health care infrastructure, resulting in an almost instantaneous social and medical crisis -- and not just for poor people....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has emerged as a significant influence within the policy-making apparatus of the White House. After a rather public imbroglio with Trump’s strategic policy adviser Stephen Bannon over the U.S. cruise missile attack on the Shayrat airbase in Syria, Kushner is «in», as they often say in Washington, and Bannon is «out». In any case, the anti-globalist faction, which is led by Bannon, has received verbal «thumbs down» on several fronts from Trump.
Trump’s adoption of Clintonesque Democratic Party policies of opposing the Syrian government, confronting Russia, supporting NATO, backing the U.S. Export-Import (EXIM) Bank, and militarily confronting North Korea and China in East Asia have neo-conservatives and globalists cheering but many within Trump’s political base of «America First» nationalists and libertarians crying foul......'
'....The narrow gap of separation between Jared Kushner and some of Israel’s top gangsters is cause for alarm. This situation became especially acute after it was revealed that Kushner failed to provide all the requested information on his national security questionnaire forms concerning his contacts with foreign persons and interests, and has led to congressional calls for his security clearance to be suspended.
The feud between Jared Kushner and Bannon is not the first personality conflict Kushner has had with members of the Trump team. The first demonstration of Kushner’s powerful influence over Trump was evidenced in his firing of Trump transition team chairman New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and his loyalists, who included former U.S. Representative Mike Rogers and Matthew Freedman. For Kushner, the firings were an ultimate payback for Christie. While the U.S. Attorney for Northern New Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner’s father for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. Christie wanted a three-year prison sentence for the elder Kushner but he ended up serving a year at a federal penitentiary in Alabama.
Christie’s federal law enforcement investigation discovered that Charles Kushner tried to lure his brother-in-law and employee, William Schulder, into a prostitution honey trap at the Red Bull Inn motel in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The elder Kushner paid $10,000 to a high-end prostitute, who reportedly worked for a Manhattan escort agency linked to the Mossad, to lure Schulder into a trap, complete with a videotape system, designed to prevent him from testifying on behalf of Christie at Kushner’s trial. After Schulder’s wife was sent a videotape of the tryst at the motel, Christie managed to not only ensure that an embarrassed but angered Schulder remained a star witness but also got the prostitute to testify against Kushner. Another witness for the prosecutors, Robert Yontef, Kushner’s chief bookkeeper, was also subjected to a Kushner prostitution trap and a «smoking gun» videotape arranged by another call girl hired by Kushner.
Charles Kushner also managed to get New Jersey Democratic Governor Jim McGreevey to appoint him to the New York-New Jersey Port Authority Commission, which owned the World Trade Center, a plum position on 9/11 for a suspected asset of Israel’s Mossad. Hudson County and Jersey City law enforcement authorities were well-aware that Mossad elements were involved in many of the intelligence activities surrounding and in support of the 9/11 event in the months leading up to the attack in 2001.
The Kushner family appears to relish in the politics of revenge and blackmail as McGreevey discovered the hard way.....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
The annual gathering of government and industry elites will include a ‘progress report’ on the Trump administration. Will it get a passing grade?
Several members of Donald Trump’s administration are headed to the Bilderberg conference, which will include a ‘progress report’ on the White House.
Charlie Skelton in Chantilly, Virginia
Thursday 1 June 2017 08.00 BST Last modified on Thursday 1 June 2017 11.59 BST
The storm around Donald Trump is about to shift a few miles west of the White House, to a conference centre in Chantilly, Virginia, where the embattled president will be getting his end-of-term grades from the people whose opinion really matters: Bilderberg.
The secretive three-day summit of the political and economic elite kicks off on Thursday in heavily guarded seclusion at the Westfields Marriot, a luxury hotel a short distance from the Oval Office. The hotel was already on lockdown on Wednesday, and an army of landscapers have been busy planting fir trees around the perimeter, to try protect coy billionaires and bashful bank bosses from any prying lenses.
Perched ominously at the top of the conference agenda this year are these words: “The Trump Administration: A progress report”. Is the president going to be put in detention for tweeting in class? Held back a year? Or told to empty his locker and leave? If ever there’s a place where a president could hear the words “you’re fired!”, it’s Bilderberg.
The White House is taking no chances, sending along some big hitters from Team Trump to defend their boss: the national security adviser, HR McMaster; the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross; and Trump’s new strategist, Chris Liddell. Could the president himself show up to receive his report card in person?
Henry Kissinger, the gravel-throated kingpin of Bilderberg, visited the White House a few weeks ago to discuss “Russia and other things”, and certainly, the Bilderberg conference would be the perfect opportunity for the most powerful man in the world to discuss important global issues with Trump.
The US president’s extraordinary chiding of Nato leaders in Brussels is sure to be chewed over at Bilderberg, which takes its name from the hotel in the Netherlands where its conference first met in 1954. The Bilderbergers have summoned the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, to give feedback. Stoltenberg will leading the snappily titled session on “The Trans-Atlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks”. He’ll be joined by the Dutch minister of defence and a clutch of senior European politicians and party leaders, all hoping to reset the traumatised transatlantic relationship after Trump’s galumphing visit.
The invitation list for this year’s conference is a veritable covfefe of big-hitters from geopolitics, from the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, to the king of Holland, but perhaps the most significant name on the list is Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the US.
According to the meeting’s agenda, “China” will be discussed at a summit attended by the Chinese ambassador, the US commerce secretary, the US national security adviser, two US senators, the governor of Virginia, two former CIA chiefs – and any number of giant US investors in the country, including the heads of the financial services firms the Carlyle Group and KKR. Oh, and the boss of Google.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s holding company, has just come back from a trip to Beijing, where he was overseeing Google AI’s latest game of Go against puny humans. He declared it “a pleasure to be back in China, a country that I admire a great deal”. It’s possible three days spent chatting to the Chinese ambassador could even be good for business.
All this is the kind of thing that should be headline news, but with the president of Turner International attending, we can be fairly sure Bilderberg won’t make many ripples at CNN. And British readers should not expect much coverage at the London Evening Standard either: their new editor and longtime Bilderberg attendee George Osborne is on the list, despite a general election looming in a week’s time.
You could of course complain about a lack of press coverage of Bilderberg in the UK, but with the head of the media watchdog Ofcom at the conference, you may not get an immediate reply.
In his first interview shortly after the White House announced that it was parting ways with Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon told the Weekly Standard on Friday afternoon that "the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over." After confirming his departure Bannon said that “we still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
In his interview with the conservative publication, Bannon predicted that in the wake of his departure, Trump's administration would "be much more conventional" as his absence from the White House would make it “much harder” for Trump to pave a way forward on issues like “economic nationalism and immigration.” He also predicted that republicans would "moderate" Trump:
“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”
In Bannon’s view, his departure is not a defeat for him personally but for the ideology he’d urged upon the president, as reflected in Trump’s provocative inaugural address in which he spoke of self-dealing Washington politicians, and their policies that led to the shuttered factories and broken lives of what he called “American carnage.” Bannon co-authored that speech (and privately complained that it had been toned down by West Wing moderates like Ivanka and Jared).
“Now, it’s gonna be Trump,” Bannon said. “The path forward on things like economic nationalism and immigration, and his ability to kind of move freely . . . I just think his ability to get anything done—particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just gonna be that much harder.”
He also warned that things are about to get worse for Trump as even more people depart his side, warning of a 'jailbreak' of moderate Republicans.
“There’s about to be a jailbreak of these moderate guys on the Hill”—a stream of Republican dissent, which could become a flood. Bannon also said that he once confidently believed in the prospect of success for that version of the Trump presidency he now says is over.
Asked what the turning point was, he says, “It’s the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment has no interest in Trump’s success on this. They’re not populists, they’re not nationalists, they had no interest in his program. Zero. It was a half-hearted attempt at Obamacare reform, it was no interest really on the infrastructure, they’ll do a very standard Republican version of taxes.
"What Trump ran on- border wall, where is the funding for the border wall, one of his central tenets, where have they been? Have they rallied around the Perdue-Cotton immigration bill? On what element of Trump's program, besides tax cuts-which is going to be the standard marginal tax cut-where have they rallied to Trump's cause? They haven't."
As for what happens next, as reported late on Friday, Bannon said that he is eager to get back to Breitbart and lead the opposition from there.
"Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons," he said. "Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f-cking machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”
Specifically, the target of his attacks will be the 'globalists' and liberals he believes have taken over the White House. They include National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, advisor Gary Cohn, Trump's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
* * *
With Bannon's departure conceding control of Trump's inner circle to the so-called "Goldman globalists", the question is how Trump's message will evolve in the coming days with the "nationalist" element purged. With Trump having been granted the option of sounding like a more centrist President, will he continue with his usual rhetoric. Bloomberg is convinced that the answer is "more of the same" especially since Trump won't risk losing his core base, although that may no longer be in his control, especially if Bannon is about to unleash a stinging attack on Trump's inner circle.
IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL
President Donald Trump blasted Iran on Twitter on Saturday for carrying out a ballistic missile test, but officials have now said the footage of the launch aired on Iranian state TV was fake.
According to Fox News, the video released by the Iranian government was more than seven months old. Two unnamed officials told the news channel the footage dated back to a failed launch in late January during which the missile exploded shortly after take-off.
Related: Iran Drone No Match For U.S. Patriot Missile As Israel Blows Hezbollah Aircraft Out Of The Sky
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Tehran had claimed that it had successfully launched a new type of medium-range missile, hours after the projectile was displayed during a military parade in the Iranian capital.
Trump responded to the Iranian claims, saying the 2015 nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic was “not much of an agreement.”
“Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel. They are also working with North Korea. Not much of an agreement we have,” the president wrote on Twitter late on Saturday.
Last week during his maiden speech at the U.N., Trump blasted Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs. He singled out Tehran as a sponsor of international terror and said Iran was a threat to its neighbors and the United States.
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Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have!
10:59 PM - Sep 23, 2017
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Just as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in New York, Trump announced he’d decided on whether or not he would scrap the nuclear deal.
Iran responded to the rhetoric from the White House saying it would not tolerate threats. In his own address to the U.N., Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called Trump’s speech “ignorant, absurd and hateful.”
The fake footage Iran aired showed an attempt to launch a new Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile for the first time. According to U.S. officials at the time, it flew 600 miles before exploding.
Iran’s medium-range missile is based on North Korea’s design. If Iran successfully copies Pyongyang’s BM-25 Musudan ballistic missile, U.S. forces in the Middle East and Israel would be within range.
The White House must announce in October whether to certify that Iran is complying with the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. If it does not, Congress has 60 days to decide whether to reimpose sanctions waived under the deal.
He couldn't get elected dogcatcher in New York, his hometown
Garrison Keillor 7 hours ago
Sean Hannity just referred to Hillary Clinton as 'President Clinton'
Film crew reveals abandoned Fukushima ghost towns
When his old campaign manager was indicted Monday, Mr Trump called me on the phone, crying like a baby, and begged me to endorse him. I said, “You're already President, Mr President. You were elected.” He said, “I'd still like your endorsement.” I have a recording of the phone call. It's so sad. Donald Trump is done. He couldn't get elected dogcatcher in New York, his hometown. I was very very nice about it. Very nice. But New Yorkers love dogs and he does not. There are 14 recorded instances of him kicking small dogs, and I have documentary proof of all but two of them.
Plus many other instances of him running around grabbing women's cats. Knocked on the door, grabbed the cat, walked away. Just to show that a famous rich guy could get away with it. Where is the apology? No, the man couldn't even get a job as a school crossing guard in New York. Look at him leading his grandchildren toward the helicopter - thank God there's a Marine there to keep them from walking into the rotor.
He's very wary of children, afraid they'll pull off the wig. It's from La Bouffant on 8th & 45th, 3rd floor. Horsehair. Palomino filly. I have receipts.
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Mueller indicts three members of Trump's campaign in day of rare drama
Trump shot a man on Fifth Avenue last year just to see if he could get away with it and he did. His base said, “Well, some people just need to be shot, that's all. As a warning to the others.” Why is he so hung up on virility? Because the Army rejected him on account of bone spurs that you get from wearing high heels. Everybody knows that.
Just look at how he salutes the Marine honour guard - TOTAL DISASTER - it's not a salute, it's a little yoo-hoo. Uniforms are a huge turn-on for him. And when he salutes the flag, he doesn't even look at it. Total disrespect for the flag. And the salute is very weak in the wrists. Know why there's ABSOLUTELY NO video of him hitting a golf ball? Because (pardon me for being politically incorrect) he swings like a girl. And when he slices it into the parking lot, he tees up another ball. Mr Mulligan. Mr Multi-Mulligan.
He sits at that ridiculous little desk in the Oval Office and signs a presidential proclamation as if he's Kim Jong-un or something and he holds it up like a kid holding up his school project that his mama wrote for him. The man can barely read, that's why he hates TelePrompter. Total lightweight.
He is NOT A NICE PERSON and so the name Trump is as popular as herpes these days. Trumpet players have taken up the cornet. Card players refer to the lead suit as the jump suit. Tramps prefer to be called hoboes, town dumps are now refuse heaps, and girls named Dawn are becoming Cheryls. To residents of his crummy building on Fifth Avenue, it's now known as Chump Tower because it's caused so much grief and tragedy for people. It wasn't constructed - it was fabricated. FABRICATED. Plywood modules shipped down from Canada and installed by minimum-wage temps from Hoboken. I can prove this. I have documentation. The wind whistles through the tower at night, roaches the size of rats. Ask anybody.
People who voted for him are humiliated. So his ratings have tanked. The same people who admire him tend to drive Dodge Darts and wear sweatshirts from schools they didn't attend. Nobody stays in his hotels except foreign CEOs and their tootsies. He is weak. Weak on #s, weak on 1st Amendment, worst President in history. Failed @ real estate and now @ politics. His record = BAD. First President in my lifetime who DOES NOT KNOW the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The lips are not even moving.
Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far...
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He quit holding rallies in stadiums because nobody wants to go hear a loser brag about his manliness for an hour, you can hear that in any barroom. Only places he can draw a crowd are rural areas where billboards are riddled with bullet holes, shot by men angry because they can't read. He is so over. Totally irrelevant, exhausted, flamed out. The sleepytime eyes and la-di-da hair and the tweet-tweet-tweet say it all. Real men don't tweet. Ask anybody. We bark, we protest, we thunder, condemn, denounce, we give 'em hell, sometimes we post. Wimps tweet. And now the perps are going to start walking and talking. And the fat lady is waiting in the wings. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin - blocked by the US bureaucracy from having a proper meeting with each other at the APEC summit in Vietnam - have instead had the detailed discussion they wanted with each other by telephone.
That is the conclusion one must draw from the unusually detailed summary of this conversation which has been provided by the Kremlin's website.
"As agreed in advance, Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Donald Trump."
"Current Syrian issues, in view of the military operation to destroy terrorists in Syria which is winding down, were thoroughly discussed. Vladimir Putin stressed Russia's willingness to actively facilitate a durable political settlement in that country on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and in keeping with the agreements reached as part of the Astana meetings and the provisions of the Joint Statement approved by the presidents of Russia and the United States on November 11 at the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Vietnam. It was noted, in particular, that this statement met with a positive reaction in the Middle East.
There was discussion of the need to preserve the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria, and to achieve a political settlement on the basis of principles that must be worked out as a result of the broadest possible intra-Syrian negotiation process. This is precisely the aim of Russia's initiative to hold the National Dialogue Conference in Sochi soon.
Vladimir Putin informed Donald Trump about the main outcomes of the November 20 meeting with Bashar al-Assad, where the Syrian leader reaffirmed his commitment to the political process, constitutional reform, and presidential and parliamentary elections. In addition, emphasis was placed on the upcoming trilateral talks in Sochi on November 22 with the participation of the presidents of Russia, Iran and Turkey, during which steps to further normalise the situation in Syria and various aspects of the political settlement process are to be coordinated.
More broadly, the President of Russia once again spoke in favour of joint antiterrorist efforts with the United States, noting the practical importance of coordinating efforts between the special services of both countries. The US President was supportive of this idea.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump also exchanged views on the current state of affairs on the Korean Peninsula, emphasising that it would be advisable to find a negotiated solution to the problem by diplomatic means.
Regarding the crisis in southeast Ukraine, the President of Russia pointed to the lack of a real alternative to unconditional compliance with the Minsk agreements of February 12, 2015.
The two leaders touched on the situation in Afghanistan, which is of concern due to the growing terrorist and drug trafficking threats.
The situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear programme was also discussed. Russia's commitment to full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was noted, as it is an essential factor in ensuring regional stability and overcoming the challenge of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Both sides expressed satisfaction with the businesslike and substantive conversation."
The Kremlin says the conversation was "agreed in advance". One would like to know when and by whom?
My guess is that Trump and Putin agreed to it during one of their short encounters at the APEC summit, when they realised that a proper summit between them was being blocked. If so then the conversation is the fruit of their encounters at the APEC summit.
The conversation covered an unusually wide range of issues:
Syria
This was unquestionably the most important topic discussed, and the one which would have taken up the most time.
The Russians are very much at the forefront of the Syrian negotiations, having together with the Iranians effectively won the war in Syria for President Assad.
That has put the Russians in a position of great strength, which they could in theory use to dictate the terms of the settlement at the forthcoming negotiations whilst seeking to exclude the US.
Had positions been reversed, and had the US found itself in such a position of advantage, it is a certainty that it would be not be involving the Russians in the negotiations. The US after all did not involve the Russians in the negotiations which followed the US "victories" in the 2003 Iraqi war and the 2011 Libyan war.
The Russian approach is the diametric opposite. Instead of seeking to exclude the US from the negotiations Putin briefed Trump fully on his discussions with President Assad - someone who remains persona non grata for the US and for Donald Trump himself - and set out for Trump the Russian approach to the negotiations.
In doing so Putin followed the classic Russian approach of carefully setting out for Trump the list of international agreements the Russians have negotiated and which they are using as the building blocks of the negotiations.
"UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and in keeping with the agreements reached as part of the Astana meetings and the provisions of the Joint Statement approved by the presidents of Russia and the United States on November 11 at the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Vietnam."
Of these the most important for Trump is the Joint Statement he made with Putin at the APEC summit in Vietnam.
Trump was not involved in the earlier agreements, but will feel that he has ownership of the Joint Statement, and by agreeing to it at the APEC summit and by referring to it in his telephone conversation with Trump, Putin is giving Trump a reason to feel that he is an actual participant in the negotiations and is not just a bystander.
In reality the most important of the agreements Putin referred to during the conversation is UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which was passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on 18th December 2015 following lengthy negotiations between Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and US Secretary of State Kerry.
The full text of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 can be found here.
Why is it so important to Putin and the Russians to involve Trump in the negotiations? The clue to that can be found in the topics which were discussed. For example Putin used the conversation to reaffirm to Trump "the need to preserve the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria."
This language is taken directly from the preamble of UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which reads as follows: "Reaffirming [the UN Security Council's] strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic."
What lies behind this is Russian concern about what I recently called the US's Plan C: the attempt by some in the US to maintain US influence in Syria by carving out a quasi independent Kurdish statelet in northern Syria.
Plan C is already in serious trouble as a result of the defeat of the Kurds in Kirkuk by the Iraqi army. However Putin used the telephone conversation to remind Trump that Plan C - because it threatens Syria's territorial integrity - is incompatible with the commitments the US previously took on itself when it negotiated and voted for UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
Putin also used the conversation with Trump to remind Trump of his longstanding proposal - made most famously in his September 2015 UN General Assembly Speech - for a joint struggle by the US and Russia against Jihadi terrorism.
Trump has been consistently receptive to this idea - the Kremlin's summary says he was "supportive of this idea" - but it has been consistently blocked by the US bureaucracy including especially the Pentagon.
For Putin the attraction of this proposal is not just that such a joint struggle will facilitate the global struggle against terrorism - something Putin cares about as much as Trump does - but because such a joint struggle might provide a tie between the US and Russia which might reverse the downward spiral in US-Russian relations.
Whilst Trump is "supportive of the idea" it remains to be seen whether the resistance to in Washington can be overcome.
In summary, Putin is keeping Trump informed of Russia's Syrian diplomacy in order to limit as far as possible the danger of the US acting as a spoiler. The idea is to get Trump to think that the US has some ownership over the eventual outcome, so that it does not act to wreck it.
At the same time Putin hopes to use this as a bridge towards improving relations.
Whether given the pathological hostility to Russia in the US these efforts can be successful is another matter. However Putin doubtless feels that by trying he is doing his job.
Korea
The Kremlin's summary tells us little about the discussion on the Korean issue, which suggests that this part of the conversation may have been brief.
It is quite likely that it was Trump who initiated this part of the conversation since he has made achieving a settlement of the North Korean issue the central focus of his foreign policy.
Putin will no doubt have sought an explanation from Trump of Trump's recent decision to put North Korea back on the list of states sponsoring terrorism, and he will also have sought reassurances from Trump that the recent US fleet and troop movements near North Korea are not intended to set the scene for US military action.
Putin will also have briefed Trump about Russia's recent negotiations with the North Korean diplomat Choe Son Hui, and he will no doubt have reminded Trump of the Chinese-Russian proposal for a double-freeze.
Trump for his part will no doubt have sought - and received - reassurances from Putin that Russia will enforce the sanctions the UN Security Council has recently imposed on North Korea following that country's intercontinental ballistic missile and hydrogen bomb tests.
Ukraine
Donald Trump hinted during the 2016 election campaign that for him the conflict in Ukraine came close to the bottom of his list of foreign policy priorities. However he has encountered fierce resistance from his bureaucracy, which continues to be committed to Ukraine, and which continues to use the conflict there to mobilise opposition to Russia in Europe.
Recently hardliners in the US have been floating proposals to send weapons - notably Javelin anti-tank missiles - to Ukraine, whilst an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that some US officials were trying to pressure the Russians into agreeing to a force of 20,000 "peacekeepers" to restore the Donbass to Ukrainian control.
Needless to say the Russians have emphatically rejected both proposals, and Putin followed this up by taking the unprecedented step of telephoning Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky - the leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics - and having details of this call posted on the Kremlin's website in what was clearly intended as a show of support.
The proposals to flood the Donbass with 'peacekeepers' and to send arms to Ukraine are actually inconsistent with the February 2015 Minsk Agreement as the Russians never tire of pointing out, and the Kremlin's summary of Putin's conversation with Trump shows that Putin used the opportunity provided by the call to point this out to him.
"Regarding the crisis in southeast Ukraine, the President of Russia pointed to the lack of a real alternative to unconditional compliance with the Minsk agreements of February 12, 2015."
My impression is that Trump is not interested in the conflict in Ukraine, in which he rightly sees no national or security interest for the US. Left to himself he would probably gladly walk away from it, as would many of those who supported him in the 2016 election.
With the Russiagate affair still ongoing, that is politically impossible.
What that means in practical terms is that Trump will have listened to what Putin had to say and will have taken note of it, but this will have no immediate effect on US policy.
If Trump is one day able to put Russiagate behind him and consolidate his position in Washington that may change. However that is not the situation now.
Afghanistan
The last few months have witnessed a drumbeat of accusations in the US that the Russians are covertly assisting the Taliban by sending arms and economic aid to them. The Russians categorically deny these accusations, though they admit to holding talks with the Taliban who they are gradually coming to see as a bulwark against the spread of ISIS to Afghanistan.
The Kremlin's summary suggests that the part of the telephone conversation between Trump and Putin which touched on Afghanistan was brief, and that these accusations were not discussed in any detail if they were discussed at all.
"The two leaders touched on the situation in Afghanistan, which is of concern due to the growing terrorist and drug trafficking threats."
The reference to "drug trafficking threats" possibly refers to the longstanding Russian complaint that the US is not doing enough to suppress heroin production and trafficking in Afghanistan. A large part of this heroin is transported across Russia to Europe, causing a serious heroin problem in Russia, and the Russians have been placing the blame for this on the blind eye that they say that the US has been turning to heroin production in Afghanistan.
It is quite likely that Putin raised this issue with Trump whilst repeating Russia's concern that ISIS, as it is being driven out of Syria and Iraq, is now starting to gain a foothold in Afghanistan.
Though these are concerns Trump is known to share, the terse part of the Kremlin's summary of this section of their conversation makes it impossible to say what his reaction was.
It is not impossible that the reason this part of the summary is so terse is because there were disagreements, which the Kremlin does not want to publicise.
Iran
On the subject of Iran, Trump and Putin have diametrically opposite views.
Trump sees Iran as a hotbed of terrorism; Putin sees Iran as Russia's strategic partner and ally in the struggle against terrorism.
Trump considers the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ("JCPOA") which placed limits on Iran's nuclear programme a "bad deal", and has recently decertified Iran because of its supposed breaches of it.
Putin unequivocally supports the JCPOA and denies that Iran has committed any breaches of it.
The Kremlin's summary makes no effort to hide the disagreement.
"Russia's commitment to full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was noted, as it is an essential factor in ensuring regional stability and overcoming the challenge of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
No word is said here of what opinions Trump expressed, though it is a certainty they were the opposite of the ones held by Putin and Russia. Doubtless Trump and Putin had a forthright exchange of opinions on this issue.
General
Unusually, the Kremlin website tells us something of the atmosphere of the call.
"Both sides expressed satisfaction with the businesslike and substantive conversation."
It is a commonplace in the US and Europe that Donald Trump is terrible at diplomacy.
In reality his interactions with world leaders during his recent Asia tour and his conversations with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping tell a different story.
Though Trump is extremely inexperienced and many of his ideas about foreign policy are frankly amateur, he nonetheless comes across as warm and approachable in a way that his cold and aloof predecessor Barack Obama never did.
The result is that other world leaders - especially those outside Europe - like him in a way that they never liked Barack Obama, and are prepared to cut him slack, even when they disagree with him.
That suggests that if the US bureaucracy was prepared to work with Trump and not against him, and instead of seeking to undermine him at every turn sought to help him gain the experience and understanding of world affairs he needs to do his job, then he could in time become an extremely effective foreign policy President.
Trump's interactions with Xi Jinping and Putin are cases in point. As the leaders of the two other Great Powers they are the two most important individuals in the world with whom the US and its President must deal.
Trump seems to understand this, and despite a catalogue of misunderstandings he seems to be gradually edging towards a better understanding of the Chinese leader. As for Putin, Trump's few interactions with him at a personal level have always gone well. The "businesslike and substantive" telephone conversation he has just had with Putin is a case in point.
As for Putin, his conversation with Trump was just part of a day's work. That day was extremely busy. As well as the conversation with Trump, Putin had meetings with President Assad of Syria and President Zeman of the Czech Republic, and also had telephone conversations with President Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel. Today (22nd November 2017) he will be meeting President Erdogan of Turkey and President Rouhani of Iran.
by Terry Melanson · November 24, 2017
By Will Banyan (21 November 2017)
“I am self funding and will hire the best people, not the biggest donors!”
Donald J. Trump, Facebook Post, April 3, 2016.
“[Trump] does not want a globalist, he does not want someone who belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations, he does not want someone who is part of the Washington-New York elite.”
‘Former’ Trump Advisor Roger Stone, WIOD Radio, July 14, 2016
“My father values talent. He recognizes real knowledge and skill when he finds it… He hires the best person for the job, period.”
Ivanka Trump, Speech at GOP National Convention, July 21, 2016
“I think one thing my father will do — it’s going to be a different regime. It’s going to be different people…These aren’t going to be the Washington insiders who have been there for a hundred years and are the very reason why the system in Washington is very broken”
Eric Trump, ‘The Cats Roundtable’ Radio Program, July 30, 2016
During the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump claimed he was “fighting for real change” against the “powerful”; he also pledged that he would “drain the swamp” and, critically, “give new voices a chance to go into government service.” This messaging clearly worked with an exit poll on Election Day reporting that 83 per cent of voters believed that Trump would “bring needed change”, compared to just 14 per cent for Hillary Clinton. Interviews by the Los Angeles Times with Trump voters across the country soon after the election revealed that most saw him as “an outsider unbeholden to a corrupt and rotten political system.” “People voted for Trump because they felt they have not had representation in Washington for a long time”, argued one Trump voter (LA Times, Nov. 13, 2016).
During the transition process, however, it quickly became apparent that “draining the swamp” and excluding the “Washington insiders” was no longer a priority. As CNN (Dec. 10, 2016) reported, Trump’s selection process did not seem to follow any blueprint or plan, instead the President-elect appeared to be “relying on instincts and personal relationships.” In fact:
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His campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” — or keep the familiar Washington, DC, insiders outside the halls of federal power — has gone largely unfulfilled as wealthy, connected donors and bankers grab up influential positions in the new administration.
Not only was his transition team “staffed with long-time Washington experts and lobbyists from K Street, think tanks and political offices” (CNN) he had previously attacked, but for Trump “loyalty was the golden ticket” (New York Magazine) into his administration; demonstrated fealty to him was something he clearly “prized…above all else” (Washington Post). The result was a strange cabinet, populated by a mix of “wealthy Washington outsiders, Republican insiders and former military officers who have been critical of the Obama administration” (New York Times, Dec. 15, 2016).
To many commentators it has been obvious that Trump has seriously failed to live up to his pledge. Jesse Heitz, an opinion contributor for The Hill (Feb. 20, 2017), accused Trump of making “swamp-dwelling a matter of course” in his presidency. In fact:
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Trump had emphatically sold his supporters on the need to overthrow the tenured elites, yet the upper-echelon of his administration is loaded with individuals long plugged into the Washington political and economic machine.
Mainstream commentator Michael Cooper described Trump’s presidency as a “reality TV show of betrayal”:
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Instead of draining the swamp, Trump surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs and Anthony Scaramucci and he put his son-in-law in charge of the opioid crisis and bringing peace to the Middle East (US News & World Report, Aug. 3, 2017).
In May, New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat complained that despite his anti-elitist rhetoric “Trump is not actually governing as a populist or revolutionary”; indeed his “promised war with the establishment has been fizzling almost from day one” because he is “too lazy to figure out what policies he should champion and too incompetent and self-absorbed to fight for them.” Conor Friersdorf in The Atlantic (Sep. 21, 2017) listed 16 instances where Trump “flagrantly” “violated the letter of his promise” to “drain the swamp”, including numerous conflicts of interest involving the Trump Organization, the appointment of lobbyists, profiting from government agencies using his properties, and Cabinet members using government jets for private purposes. Ryan Bourne from the libertarian Cato Institute, found “little momentum behind [Trump’s] pledge to overhaul the relationship between big vested interests and the US government.” Indeed, Trump’s “arbitrary conduct risks exacerbating crony capitalism in future” (CapX, Aug 3, 2017). In commentary marking a year since Trump’s election victory, Senator Bernie Sanders accused Trump of having “repeatedly reneged on his promises by supporting the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working families” (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 5, 2017).
A more immediate concern for Trump’s myriad supporters was that make-up of his administration was threatening his “America First” agenda. Pro-Trump gadfly Mike Cernovich, for instance, noted with alarm that when it came to appointments, “Never Trumper’s and GOP Establishment have been favored over [Trump’s] base…” James Corbett, of The Corbett Report (Feb. 04, 2017), also expressed concern that Trump had “filled his swamp” with more “swamp-dwellers”:
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With promises to “drain the swamp!” still ringing in our ears, we have watched Trump appoint nothing but Goldman banksters, Soros stooges, neocon war hawks and police state zealots to head his cabinet.
These fears seemed to have been progressively realized starting with firing of National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn in February, the purge of “America First” advocates from the National Security Council (NSC), and then the departure in August of Trump’s Chief Strategist, Stephen Bannon, and presidential adviser Sebastian Gorka, both of whom had been repeatedly pilloried in the mainstream media as supporters of the racist “alt-right”. Bannon and Gorka both portrayed their exits as a sign that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) agenda had been undermined and abandoned. In his resignation letter Gorka complained that MAGA opponents were “for now—ascendant within the White House” while MAGA supporters had been “internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.” In his comments to the neo-conservative Weekly Standard (Aug. 18, 2017), Bannon was just as pessimistic:
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“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
Bannon’s explusion from the NSC in April had already prompted jubilant claims that the “globalists” were in the ascendency. Not surprisingly Bannon’s total ejection from the White House was seen as evidence the “globalists” had finally triumphed (Figure 1). The Gateway Pundit, for instance, lamented that with Bannon gone, “President Trump has surrounded himself with globalists…”; Bannon’s expulsion was a “clear win for the globalists” observed The Guardian’s Washington correspondent; Bannon’s “downfall” also meant that his “crusade against globalism is on the verge of total failure”, argued Zack Beauchamp in Vox; and it would most likely “[t]ip the trade policy scales in favor of the Trump administration’s ‘globalist’ faction…” claimed Reuters.
Figure 1: The Fall of Steve Bannon and the Triumph of the Globalists
While the excitement about the ascendency of the “globalists” may have been premature, Trump’s failure to live up to his basic promise of excluding entrenched interests, whether from the ill-defined “swamp”, industry lobbyists, Wall Street interests or the Establishment is indisputable. Not only has Trump appointed nearly 100 former corporate lobbyists to key positions in various agencies—including energy lobbyists to the Environmental Protection Agency; defense industry lobbyists to the Pentagon; and nominating Alex Azar, who spent 10 years working in senior roles in the US division of pharmaceutical manufacturer Elli Lilly and was involved in lobbying for “Big Pharma”, as the next Secretary for Health and Human Services—but he has also appointed numerous people with strong Establishment qualifications. Despite its populist nationalist façade, the Trump Administration is increasingly dominated by the elitist globalist power centres it was supposed to exclude.
The Enemy Within
Trump’s indifference to the Establishment affiliations has been obvious since the transition period, when he considered nominees involved with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group and other think-tanks and secret fraternities considered as synonymous with the “Deep State”. The reaction from pro-Trump observers was mixed. Concerns were raised about a few of the early proposed appointments. In December, for example, Trump briefly considered appointing CFR Director Richard N. Haass as Deputy Secretary of State, prompting a rebuke from Breitbart warning that the “economic-nationalist wing of the Trump base…do not like the thought of seeing anyone from the [CFR] assuming a high-profile job in the Trump administration, much less its longtime president.”[*] Alex Newman, writing in The New American (Dec. 08, 2016), had also expressed concern over some of the names Trump was considering for Secretary of State as most of them were “well-known establishment globalists…” This had apparently “sparked confusion and even outrage among many of his closest and fiercest supporters…”
But at least initially, many anti-globalists were optimistic about Trump’s emerging administration. An effusive Trump confidante Roger Stone, for example, told Alex Jones the appointments of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser signalled the “beginnings of a team of nationalists…A team of men and women who will put America, not the globalist agenda, first.” In January, Israeli analyst Baruch Kogan, argued the presence of only two CFR members in Trump’s Cabinet – Elaine Chao (Secretary of Transportation) and Robert Lighthizer (US Trade Representative) – was evidence of a “quiet revolution against the American Deep State” (Medium, Jan. 13, 2017).
A month later, however, following the firing of Flynn, some analysts at the John Birch Society’s The New American, were troubled by additional appointments of former CFR members Lt. Gen. Herbert R. McMaster as his replacement, and the nomination of Judge Neil Gorusch to the Supreme Court. McMaster’ CFR membership was a “disturbing indication that he is very much at home among internationalists”, wrote Warren Mass. That McMaster was endorsed by “interventionist, neoconservative member” Senator John McCain should also “raise suspicion” (The New American, Feb. 21, 2017). The appointments of McMaster and Gorusch seemed to suggest that Trump’s “winning spree against the powerful forces that opposed him”, wrote Alex Newman, “appears to be slowing down.”
These four appointments alone, however, did not tell the full story. A closer look at the rest of Trump’s White House and other senior appointments reveal a more persistent pattern where “Washington insider”, Wall Street or “Establishment” affiliations have proved to be absolutely no obstacle to being selected. For example, Trump’s Secretary of Defense retired General (and former Hoover Institution Fellow) James Mattis was a participant at the 2015 Bilderberg Meeting in Telfs-Buchen, Austria. Secretary of Energy, former Texas Governor Rick Perry was a participant at the 2007 Bilderberg Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, which later earned him the calculated smear “Bilderberg-approved” from the now pro-Trump Infowars.
Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin – who has “long been a member of the financial elite” and the first hedge fund manager to head Treasury according to the New York Times (Dec. 19, 2016) – was “tapped into Skull and Bones”, a secret fraternity at Yale that has long been the subject of conspiratorial speculation. Mnuchin has also had professional associations with billionaire investor George Soros, a constant target of the alt-right (though not of Trump) because of his financial support for the Democrats. From 2003 to 2004 Mnuchin was chief executive of SFM Capital Management, a firm that was reportedly backed by Soros, and he also worked as an Investment Professional at Soros Fund Management LLC.
Finally, “billionaire”[†] Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who had worked for Rothschild Inc. in the US from 1976 to 2000 before setting up his own company, had a number of interesting Establishment qualifications. Before joining Trump he had been Chairman of the Japan Society (a New York-based organization, founded in 1907 and devoted to improving US-Japan relations, that had been revived by John D. Rockefeller III in the 1950s) since 2010 and member of its Board of Directors since 2005. He was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution in 2013. And in 2012 Ross was identified as the leader or “Grand Swipe” of the Wall Street “secret society” Kappa Beta Phi, which holds an annual private dinner where “around 200 of the biggest names in finance carry on like fraternity kids…”
On May 1, 2015, Ross was a signatory to a letter from the Partnership for New York City (which has its origins in David Rockefeller’s 1979 creation of the New York City Partnership) to members of the New York State Congressional Delegation, urging them to support the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 so as to “allow negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement to move forward.” The letter cited the view of “Trade experts and economists” that the TPP would be “a catalyst for creating new jobs in the United States, attracting more foreign investment to this country, and benefitting American workers in a broad range of industries.” Ross was an Executive Committee member of the Partnership.
Moreover, Trump seriously considered appointing four-time Bilderberg participant (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016) and former CIA Director David Petraeus as Secretary of State. Trump eventually chose Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson after his name was put to Pence by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley (CNN, Dec. 13, 2016) – (incidentally Rice, Gates and Hadley ran a consulting firm that had Exxon as a client). Though not a CFR member, Tillerson had addressed the Council about energy issues in 2007 and again in 2012. In his 2007 speech Tillerson said he “felt at home” at the CFR because it was “founded on a number of beliefs I share…and that is the belief in the promise of international engagement and in the potential of global approaches to meeting this nation’s challenges.”
The Establishment was also well-represented among the NSC staff. In addition to Trump’s new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, being a CFR member, the following senior NSC staff members also have Establishment credentials:
Dina Powell – Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy – CFR member.
Nadia Schadlow – Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy – senior program officer at Smith Richardson Foundation and CFR member – reportedly with “impeccable neocon credentials” and author of a book on nation building.
Tom Bossert – Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor – Zurich Cyber Risk Fellow with the Atlantic Council.
Christopher Ashley Ford – Senior Director for Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Issues (recently nominated as Assistant Secretary of State, International Security and Non-Proliferation) – a former Rhodes Scholar and member of the CFR.
Joel Rayburn – Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf States – CFR member and member of Atlantic Council Task Force on Iraq.
Matthew Pottinger – Senior Director for Asia – former CFR fellow.
Also with an interesting resume is Kenneth Juster, up until recently Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic International Economic Affairs and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council (NEC), and now slated to be the US Ambassador to India. Besides being a member of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, Juster was also a Partner with the global investment firm Warburg Pincus. His “reassignment” to India from the NSC and NEC marked him out as a casualty in the battles between “globalist” and “nationalist” factions; though CFR President Haass praised Juster’s new appointment as “inspired”. Perhaps the only CFR member clearly in the “America First” camp was Kathleen T. McFarland, Deputy National Security Advisor and confidante to the short-lived Flynn, but she was later cashiered from the NSC and geographically sidelined as the nominee for US Ambassador to Singapore as part of the purge of the populists.
The strong Establishment affiliations of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, were also seemingly no obstacle to his appointment as Ambassador to Russia. A former member of the CFR, Huntsman was also recently the Chairman of the pro-NATO policy-planning group, the Atlantic Council, and had openly supported the TPP. Similarly, Robert Wood Johnson IV, newly appointed US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, had no trouble being appointed, despite his prior membership of President George H.W. Bush’s pro-NAFTA Export Council or the fact he had been a member of the CFR since 1993. The Financial Times (Apr. 29, 2017) had praised Johnson’s “globalist sympathies” and “internationalist instincts”, also noting he was “steeped in traditional Republican Party thinking” and had earned “a reputation for working behind the scenes.”
Other appointees and nominees with Establishment connections of note include:
Mira Radielovic Ricardel appointed as Under Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration – CFR member.
Robert P. Kadlec appointed as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response – CFR member.
Jeffrey Kessler nominee for Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Enforcement and Compliance – CFR term member.
Randall G. Schriver nominee for Assistant Secretary of Defense, Asian and Pacific Affairs – founding partner of consulting firm Armitage International LLC (founded by former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) and member of the Board of Advisors for the “bipartisan” security think-tank the Center for a New American Security.
Brian Hook Senior Policy Adviser and Director of Policy Planning at the State Department – co-founder of the so-called “John Hay Initiative” (JHI) established in 2013 to keep Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team together, but also to counter “neo-isolationist” thinking while promoting “conservative internationalism.” Hook co-authored a chapter in the JHI book Choosing to Lead, arguing that a “strong United States is essential to the maintenance of the open global order”; this “international order” was based on a commitment to “free trade” and a strong alliance system, including NATO.
And just this month the White House announced the appointment of Federal Reserve Governor Jerome H. Powell to replace Janet Yellen as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Powell’s appointment was celebrated in the financial press as “wise decision” that would bring “continuity and predictability” (Bloomberg) and represented “a rejection of calls for radical change among conservative Republicans in favour of stability at the US central bank” (Financial Times). Not mentioned in the official announcement was Powell’s role as a partner in the controversial Carlyle Group from 1997 to 2005; his $20-55 million fortune making him “one of the wealthiest people to ever lead the Fed” (Forbes); and his membership of the Council on Foreign Relations.
More noteworthy is that such contacts have not been terminated with their ascension to the Trump Administration. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, for example, was a speaker at the Trilateral Commission’s 2017 Plenary Meeting, held earlier this year in Washington DC (Figure 2). While four Trump Administration officials – Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, National Security Advisor McMaster, Deputy National Security Advisor Nadia Schadlow and Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives Christopher Liddell (the New Zealand-born businessman is also a CFR member) – were all participants at this year’s Bilderberg meeting, held in Chantilly, Virginia.
Figure 2: Treasury Secretary Mnuchin listed as a speaker at the Trilateral Commission’s 2017 Plenary Meeting
Mnuchin’s Trilateral Commission performance seems to have been ignored by the pro-Trump alt-media, but the Bilderberg participation of Ross, McMaster, Schadlow and Liddell generated some tortured responses as Trump supporters tried to reconcile the participation of these officials with their belief in Trump’s anti-globalism. Infowars (Jun. 01, 2017) opted for the more charitable explanation that the “reason three [sic] members of the Trump administration…have been invited…is that Bilderberg thinks there is still a chance to put pressure on Trump to force him to back down on his America-first agenda.” Infowars tried to encourage its readers to attend what it billed as a “historic” rally at Chantilly to support Trump and “show the globalists America won’t back down”, although “only a couple dozen Trump loyalists…bothered to show up.” Some of those supporters then argued fruitlessly with each other on the fringes of the meeting about whether or not Trump could be trusted.
The Goldman Exception
Perhaps even more remarkable were the number of Goldman Sachs alumni that had joined the Trump Administration in many pivotal positions. Remarkable because unlike the CFR, Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Atlantic Council or other such Establishment outfits, who were never mentioned by the GOP candidate,[‡] Trump had repeatedly attacked Goldman Sachs by name throughout his campaign. Trump had denounced both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton as puppets of Goldman Sachs. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs.” Trump said in February last year, “They have total, total control over [Ted Cruz]. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” He had even invoked the spectre of Goldman Sachs when sniping at Bernie Sanders for endorsing Hillary (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Trump Snipes at Goldman Sachs
More controversially Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman, was briefly shown in a Trump campaign ad (Figure 4) that warned of “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Figure 4: Two Seconds of Infamy for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein
And yet, for all his invective, Trump seemed unperturbed by the number of his appointees with Goldman Sachs in the resumes. Noting that Trump had surrounded himself with a number of the bank’s former employees, Politico (Nov. 30, 2016) claimed that Goldman Sachs was “dominating the early days of the incoming Trump administration” in a “stunning reversal of fortune.” This included his Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who had “spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs” rising to Partner and Chief Information Officer at Goldman early in his banking career; his campaign chair and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who had worked at Goldman Sachs from 1985 to 1989; and Andrew Scaramucci, a key fundraiser and economic advisor to Trump during the campaign, a member of executive committee of Trump’s transition team and recently appointed Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at the US Export-Import Bank and for just ten eventful days White House Communications Director, had worked at Goldman from 1989 to 1996.
The Director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, had been Chief Operating Officer and President of Goldman Sachs before he resigned last year to join the Trump Administration. Dina Powell, originally appointed in January as Assistant to the President and Senior Counsellor for Economic Initiatives and subsequently elevated to Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, was President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation and head of Goldman’s Impact Investment business and Environmental Markets Group. Despite fears there were “too many ‘Goldman Guys’” in Trump’s Administration, yet more Goldman alumni have been added: in March it was announced that Goldman Managing Director Jim Donovan had been nominated to the position of Deputy Treasury Secretary (he later withdrew from the process); in April Politico reported that Ivanka had hired as her chief of staff, Julie Radford, a consultant for Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses initiative; and in June Trump nominated as Under Secretary of State (Management) Eric Ueland, a former vice-president of the Duberstein Group which had lobbied for Goldman Sachs and Owen West, a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, former Marine and CFR member, as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.
In July The Intercept reported that Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an attorney who had advised Goldman Sachs “during the bailouts of 2008”, had brought with him a team of “former Goldman Sachs attorneys.” Then in August, Elizabeth Erin Walsh, a CFR member and former Executive Director at Goldman Sachs in the Asia Pacific, was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Global Markets. Then in November, Goldman CEO Blankfein, was reportedly the “only executive of a major financial company” represented in the 29-strong business delegation that accompanied Secretary Ross during his visit to China, that coincided with Trump’s visit.
These Goldman Sachs appointments have been greeted by Trump’s supporters with bewilderment and dismay. In March long-time nationalist provocateur, Patrick Buchanan, warned on the Laura Ingraham radio show that it would be “fatal for the Trump presidency” if he “abandons” the economic nationalists in his administration and takes the “Goldman Sachs route.” The Goldman Sachs people, he observed, were “the Globalists”:
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The Goldman Sachs people are interested in the globe; these are the Davos people. These are the folks that cost the Republican Party and cost the country and destroyed manufacturing.
The John Birch Society’s William F. Jasper (TNA, Mar. 16, 2017) complained that when it came to the issue of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs “Candidate Trump and President Trump appear to be two very different individuals.” Noting that at least seven people working close to Trump had Goldman Sachs experience or ties, Jasper was despondent: “the new Trump administration is looking more and more like yet another replay of ‘Government Sachs’…”
Consulting with the “Kingpin”
Another manifestation of Trump’s anti-Establishment hypocrisy has been his eagerness to consult repeatedly with Establishment stalwart, Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford, Henry Kissinger. A highly controversial figure in any case, Kissinger has long been the bête noire of anti-New World Order activists and researchers due to his closeness to Nelson and David Rockefeller and his long-time association with and membership of the CFR, Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. At the height of his power in the 1970s Kissinger was denounced at length by the late Gary Allen as a “wilful agent of a conspiratorial apparatus working for a New World Order” and an “outright Rockefeller agent” (Gary Allen, Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State, 1976, pp.10 & 22). More recent critics have described Kissinger as the: “Bilderberg kingpin” (Infowars); “New World Order kingpin” (Personal Liberty); “the quintessential establishment insider” (The New American); and a “globalist henchman” (We Are Change).
And yet, as Trump’s transition team announced last year, the president-elect and Kissinger “have known each other for years.” Their first private meeting during the campaign was on May 18 last year at Kissinger’s home. That meeting had followed “weeks of phone conversations between Trump and Kissinger”, according to the Washington Post (May 16, 2016). Details of these discussions were not divulged, but Trump later boasted that Kissinger had supported his unconventional approach to foreign relations; a claim Kissinger later disputed. But Kissinger, displaying his lifelong talent for cultivating the powerful, issued a statement with former Secretary of State George Shultz that declined to endorse either Clinton or Trump; instead they pledged to support a “bipartisan foreign policy.”
This calculated fence-sitting soon paid off with Kissinger summonsed to Trump Tower on November 17, where they “discussed China, Russia, Iran, the EU and other events and issues around the world”, according to a statement from the transition team. Trump had also reaffirmed his “tremendous respect for Dr. Kissinger” and appreciation for “sharing his thoughts with me” (The Hill, Nov. 17, 2016). In his assessment of the meeting Kissinger argued that Trump should not be held to his campaign promises. As he told CNN: “One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign.”
Trump and Kissinger had another meeting on December 6, after Kissinger had dashed off to China to reputedly sooth Chinese sensibilities after the President-elect had accepted a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. There was no public read-out from this third meeting, but C. Mitchell Shaw from The New American (Dec. 07, 2016) was naturally suspicious and clearly alarmed at Trump’s admiration for the wily “statesman”:
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That Trump would either ask for or agree to a sit-down to discuss foreign policy with a man who has spent his life and built his career selling America out to build the “New World Order” is curious. That this is at least the third such meeting is concerning. That Trump has “tremendous respect for Dr. Kissinger” and “appreciates him sharing his thoughts” on matters related to “China, Russia, Iran, the EU and other events and issues around the world” is disturbing.
During the transition period there were reports that Kissinger was “positioning himself as a potential intermediary” between Trump and Putin, and had “chatted” with Trump “on multiple occasions”, according to Politico (Dec. 12, 2016). The managing director of Kissinger Associates Inc. (and a Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs), Thomas Graham, was reportedly considered by Trump as a potential Ambassador to Russia. Kissinger, meanwhile, had praised Trump’s appointment of Tillerson; “I think it’s a good appointment.” Kissinger also reportedly acted as an unofficial link between the Trump transition team and China; helping to “connect Chinese politicians with the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner” ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese President. There were also suspicions that Kissinger had performed a similar role with Russia.
On May 10, Trump had met privately with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russia’s Ambassador to the US. This was followed shortly thereafter with an “unscheduled meeting” with Kissinger – their fourth – to discuss “Russia and various other matters.” Trump said it was “an honour” to speak with Kissinger because “he’s been a friend of mine for a long time” (see Figure 5). Then, ahead of the Trump-Putin meeting at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Kissinger had visited Moscow for a “strictly private” meeting with Putin.
Figure 5: Hello Again – Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump presser after their fourth private meeting, May 10, 2017
A fifth meeting occurred on October 10, where Kissinger again appeared, slumped in a chair beside Trump in the Oval Office after they had a private discussion according to a White House official, about North Korea and China. Trump praised the cunning diplomat as a “man of immense, talent, experience and knowledge” and boasted of his relationship:
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“Henry Kissinger has been a friend of mine. I’ve liked him. I’ve respected him. But we’ve been friends for a long time, long before my emergence into the world of politics, which has not been too long” (UPI, Oct 10, 2017)
Kissinger has also cultivated a relationship with Trump’s son-in-law and now Assistant to the President, Jared Kushner. In his statement to the Congressional committees investigating the Trump campaign’s link to Russia, for example, Kushner casually name-dropped “Dr. Henry Kissinger” as an example of those “people with deep experience” he had called on for policy advice when engaging with foreign representatives. And yet, Kissinger’s two paragraph profile extolling Kushner for Time magazine’s 100 most influential people issue, was widely interpreted as having damned the would-be-dauphin with the faintest of praise. Kissinger admitted to having “sporadically exchanged views” with Kushner, but struggled to find merit in someone who owed his position solely to his marriage to Ivanka Trump, who had a “broad education” but no relevant foreign policy experience or qualifications, but who was sure to find “success” in his “daunting role of flying close to the sun.”
Unremarked by some of Trump’s supporters, alarmed at his continuing contacts with Kissinger, is that his much-maligned predecessor had never sought the private counsel of this “self-avowed globalist”. As Kissinger’s slavish biographer Professor Niall Ferguson had noted with some dismay in the pages of Foreign Affairs (Sep/Oct 2015): “…Barack Obama is unusual. He is the first U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower not to seek Kissinger’s advice.” With five private meetings to date Trump appears to be making up for this oversight.
To be concluded in Part Five
[*] In April Trump finally nominated lawyer and former Deputy Secretary of Commerce John J. Sullivan, who has no Establishment affiliations or diplomatic experience, to the position.
[†] After examining his financial disclosure forms and other data, Forbes (Nov. 7, 2017) recently found that Wilbur Ross is not billionaire, as he had previously claimed, but worth a more modest US$700 million. The reason for the discrepancy: Ross had been counting money from investors in his firm as though it was part of his personal fortune. Forbes quoted two former Ross associates who observed that he “doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth” and had “lied to a lot of people.”
This is the same Trump whose first instinct in the aftermath of Charlottesville in August was to suggest that both those participating in a white supremacist rally in the city and those gathered there to protest against it were equally to blame for the violence that ensued
David Usborne New York @dusborne Wednesday 29 November 2017 17:00 GMT145 comments
The charitable way of looking at Donald Trump retweeting three anti-Muslim videos originally posted by the deputy leader of Britain First is to suggest he is simply ignorant of what that group stands for. It would also be a cop-out, because in fact his motivations were surely more sinister.
Let’s begin with the first, most obvious question. What was going on in Trump’s head that he thought recycling hate-mongering clips originally posted by Jayda Fransen was more important than discussing, say, the fast-approaching tax-cutting vote in the US Senate or the threat posed by North Korea’s new intercontinental missile able potentially to reach the Eastern Seaboard?
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If only it was merely a case of scattered-brain syndrome, although there might be a bit of that. He also got distracted on Wednesday morning by the latest churn of the sexual-abuse scandals, which admittedly had drawn the attention of the entire country – the firing of veteran anchor Matt Lauer by NBC. For millions of Americans, mornings without Lauer will be like cornflakes without milk.
But there is far more purpose than that to Trump’s love of Twitter. He grabs for it like a rubber ring in a tempest, equally to attack his foes and bolster his own agenda. Thus the demise of Lauer over alleged sexual misconduct gave him the chance to lash out at the anchor’s employers. It was they who should be “fired for putting out so much Fake News,” he said.
Fake, fake, fake. No single word in the lexicon has served Trump better. He is even, we now hear, trying to attach it to the Access Hollywood tape that almost sank him last year; the one that had him boasting that his celebrity status allowed him to “grab” women “by the pussy”. He acknowledged spewing those words at the time but now suggests the tape was doctored. Or faked. Moi?
So how dare he give credence to the three clips originally sent spinning into the twittersphere by Fransen, convicted in Britain of religiously aggravated harassment? Who’s to say if they are genuine or staged? Where is the context for them? What are the sources for them? Who is the darker-skinned youth kicking the lighter-skinned youth on crutches? Was he even Muslim? Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokesperson, admitted the President didn’t care about the provenance of the videos. “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real and that is what the President is talking about,” she said. Jaws dropped in our newsroom at that one.
But again, the hypocrisy over who is the biggest faker – Trump or CNN, Trump or The Washington Post – is a minor concern. Instead, we should focus on what really motivates him when discussing the tumble dryer of religious faiths that most Western societies have become. He doesn’t care for it. In his mind, religious tolerance, cultural assimilation, the peaceful coexistence of faiths in our cultures – if not actually bad things – are mythical, rose-tinted things.
In other words, he doesn’t just see the posts by Fransen and think, let’s retweet those because they are useful to me politically. Certainly, he hopes that by sharing them, he is somehow strengthening his case for building the wall along the US-Mexico border, his crackdown on refugee numbers entering the US and the travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries.
He does it because he precisely understands what Britain First stands for and it appeals to him, if not as a human being – again, we can at least try to be charitable – then certainly as a politician and a very successful one at that. The notion that Britain’s “indigenous culture”, whatever that may be, has been sacrificed to liberal instincts of political correctness and, more specifically, to years of open-border policies, precisely mirrors the messaging of his campaign last year. Britain First... America First. Fransen believes she is making Britain Great Again.
This is the same Trump whose first instinct in the aftermath of Charlottesville in August was to suggest that both those participating in a white supremacist rally in the city and those gathered there to protest against it were equally to blame for the violence that ensued. The only decent response was to condemn the former group in the clearest terms possible. Even setting aside the detail that the one fatality was a woman counter-protester, mown down by a car driven by a white supremacist sympathiser, the far-right agitators who converged on Charlottesville bring shame on America, a land founded on the principles of tolerance and equality of opportunity.
Under pressure from his own advisers, Trump moderated his tone a day later, but his original thought process was clear: he would not take what he saw as the “politically correct” course and condemn only the hate group that had incited the violence in the first place. In that way, he seemed also to be dropping the hint that in his mind the alt-right or white supremacists, however you prefer to label them, have a point. And he did so in the full knowledge that one constituency in America would applaud him for it – his base. He is doing precisely the same favour for Britain First: they have a point when they try to sabotage, multicultural, multi-faith Britain.
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No wonder Fransen was so ecstatic in seeing the Trump retweets. All-capital-letters ecstatic. “TRUMP HIMSELF HAS RETWEETED THESE VIDEOS AND HAS AROUND 44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA!” she declared.
So let’s be clear. Trump knows exactly what he is doing when he uses Twitter to flatter Britain First. And we should be clear in return. It is a disgrace that should mar his legacy for ever. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013. robertvbridge@yahoo.com
Published time: 2 Dec, 2017 - Get short URL
Who Is Jared Kushner: Trump loyalist or Kissinger protege?
Never before in the annals of US politics has a top presidential adviser had more of an inside track for influencing the White House than Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Will this turn out to be a problem for Trump in the future?
Name any major event over the course of Trump's first year in office and you will undoubtedly find the doleful face of Jared Kushner lurking somewhere in the crowd, gazing on with rapt attention (or is it somber satisfaction?), a bit like an apprentice trapped in the floodlights of ultimate power.
Beyond the question of Jared's omnipresence is his apparent knack for political survival. Although Trump tends to go through officials as rapidly as tweets, Jared has managed thus far to ride out the storm. Yet firing Jared – husband of Trump's daughter, Ivanka – would be more than your average political decision, which is probably why Trump should never have dabbled in nepotism to begin with. Or perhaps Jared Kushner remains in his top-level position not because he is the son-in-law of Donald Trump, or because he is so politically astute (thus far it would seem he is not), but precisely because some high-ranking people in the establishment want him there.
Whatever the case may be, it is notable that while Trump's main allies – guys like Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus (all of whom were loathed by the establishment folks, incidentally) – fell to the wayside one after another, Kushner is one of the only top officials left over from the original Trump lineup. And his popularity among the establishment elite appears untarnished.
Reminiscent of the day when Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize without ever negotiating a single peace deal, Time magazine recently named Jared Kushner among its '100 Most Influential People'. And it was none other than Henry Kissinger, 94, the fiercely criticized former US statesman, who penned the blurb that accompanied Jared's honorable mention.
Kissinger, expert practitioner of the "strategic lie", says he first met Kushner "about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given." The very next line suggests that Kissinger is lurking in the shadows of the Trump administration. "We have sporadically exchanged views since."
Really? That brief comment should have triggered some alarms. What exactly does Kissinger mean by "sporadically," and what is it that he and Jared chat about? Somehow I doubt the weather. And is Trump aware of the content of these "sporadic" conversations, or is he content to get the Cliff Notes courtesy of Kushner?
13 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller
Posted on November 1, 2017 by WashingtonsBlog
Talking heads act like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is fair, impartial and unbiased.
[Mueller] is also known for leading the probe into the 1991 collapse of the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
William Safire wrote in the New York Times:
The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system.
For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of purposes — while lawmen and regulators slept.
Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice Department.
Justice’s Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.
Mueller’s handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized. As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:
Over the past two years, the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry; the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Dexter Lehtinen.
Typical editorials criticized Justice’s prosecution of BCCI as “sluggish,” “conspicuously slow,” “inattentive,” and “lethargic.” Several editorials noted that there had been “poor cooperation” by Justice with other agencies. One stated that “the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on” to regulators and others. Another that “the Justice Department’s secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered.
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Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both
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Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US Attorney, “indicated to me that I was directed not to return the indictment.”
The Senate Report also noted:
While the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation.
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In going after BCCI, Morgenthau’s office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI’s multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI’s accountants, BCCI’s shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Squashing Warning Signs that May Have Stopped 9/11
Larry Klayman writes:
Robert Mueller first hit my radar … just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
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I came to meet and later represent FBI Special Agents Robert Wright and John Vincent, of the agency’s Chicago Counter-Terrorism Field Office. During our meeting, both Special Agents Wright and Vincent revealed to me that they had been conducting a counterterrorism investigation of Saudi money laundering into and in the United States, and they both believed that a massive terrorist attack was imminent.
In the course of this investigation, both special agents had asked a fellow FBI agent who was undercover, one of Muslim descent, to be wired to turn up further evidence of this terrorist operation. The Muslim agent refused, indignantly telling both Wright and Vincent that Muslims don’t spy and rat on other Muslims. In shock, my soon-to-be clients reported this to their supervisors at the FBI, but no action was taken. To make matters worse, Wright’s and Vincent’s FBI supervisors quashed their investigation. They both believed that the order to kill the investigation came from the highest reaches of the FBI, and, upset it not outraged by this cover-up, Wright then decided to write a book detailing this breach of FBI honor.
The only way I could explain this cover-up was that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was sensitive to the ties between the family of President George W. Bush and the Saudi royal family.
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Director Mueller, along with his “yes men” supervisors at the agency, not only quashed my clients’ investigation and ignored the disloyalty of the Muslim undercover agent, but then missed the warning signs leading up to September 11 – the biggest intelligence failure in American history, even surpassing Pearl Harbor.
But shamelessly, despite this historic intelligence failure and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks that ensued, Mueller later led an effort to drum both Special Agents Wright and Vincent out of the FBI, in part by attempting to remove their security clearances, as a “reward” for their candor.
FBI special agent – and a 2002 Time Person of the Year – Colleen Rowley points out:
The FBI and all the other officials claimed that there were no clues, that they had no warning [about 9/11] etc., and that was not the case. There had been all kinds of memos and intelligence coming in.
But overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was foreseeable. Indeed, Al Qaeda crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was itself foreseeable. Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.
Mueller was one of the people who dropped the ball and let 9/11 happen.
Allowing Escape of Saudi Persons Connected to Bin Laden
Right after 9/11, American airspace was closed down. Yet Mueller was one of the people who allowed relatives of Bin Laden and other persons of interest fly back to Saudi Arabia.
Entrapping Innocent People for P.R. Purposes
After dropping the ball, Mueller then went on to entrap innocent people for P.R. purposes.
And Rowley notes:
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.
9/11 Cover Up
Rowley says:
TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11.
In addition, Rowley says that the FBI sent Soviet-style “minders” to her interviews with the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11, to make sure that she didn’t say anything the FBI didn’t like. The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 confirmed that government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).
Mueller’s FBI also obstructed the 9/11 investigation in many other ways. For example, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location. See this and this.
Harper’s notes:
Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.
Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details …
***
Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location ‘for his own safety.’
Graham also wrote that the FBI also “insisted that we could not, even in the most sanitized manner, tell the American people that an FBI informant had a relationship with two of the hijackers.”
And Kristen Breitweiser – one of the four 9/11 widows instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks – points out:
Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry’s investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.
Iraq War
Mueller helped sell the Iraq War:
He wrote to Congress:
The seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea—remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans.
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Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq’s WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion. We are also concerned about terrorist organizations with direct ties to Iraq—such as the Iranian dissident group, Mujahidin-e Khalq, and the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization.
***
Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material before or during a war with the US to avenge the fall of his regime.
Rowley notes:
When you had the lead-up to the Iraq War … Mueller and, of course, the CIA and all the other directors, saluted smartly and went along with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up the intelligence to make a pretext for the Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the FBI, they actually had a receipt, and other documentary proof, that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet those directors more or less kept quiet. That included … CIA, FBI, Mueller, and it included also the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey.
Torture
Rowley also points out:
Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.
Anthrax Frame-Up
Mueller also presided over the incredibly flawed anthrax investigation.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office says the FBI’s investigation was “flawed and inaccurate”. The investigation was so bogus that a senator called for an “independent review and assessment of how the FBI handled its investigation in the anthrax case.”
The head of the FBI’s anthrax investigation says the whole thing was a sham. He says that the FBI higher-ups “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation”, that there were “politically motivated communication embargoes from FBI Headquarters”.
The FBI’s anthrax investigation head said that the FBI framed scientist Bruce Ivins. On July 6, 2006, he filed a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303, which noted:
(j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.
Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.
In other words, Mueller presided over the attempt to frame an innocent man (and see this).
Unsure If Government Can Assassinate U.S. Citizens Living On U.S. Soil
Rather than saying “of course not!”, Mueller said that he wasn’t sure whether Obama had the right to assassinate Americans living on American soil.
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley commented at the time:
One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.
***
He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”
Crippled Investigations of Financial Fraud … Helping to Allow the Great Recession
In a 2013 piece entitled “Mueller: I Crippled FBI Effort v. White-Collar Crime“, the country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri – wrote:
The FBI never developed “an intelligence operation” “to analyze threats” of even epidemic fraud.
***
White-collar crime investigations and prosecutions are massive money makers that reduce the deficit, but Mueller, Holder, and Obama refuse to make these points and refuse to prosecute the elite bank fraudsters. On substantive and political grounds their actions are either inexplicable or all too explicable and support my readers’ belief that the FBI leadership no longer wants to investigate and prosecute the elite bank frauds.
This is important because:
Fraud CAUSED the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis
Numerous Nobel prize winning economists say that we need to prosecute fraud, or else the economy will never truly stabilize
After the Great Depression, the government cracked down on Wall Street fraud. But Mueller and other Bush and Obama administration officials let it slide
(There are a lot of people more responsible for the Great Recession – and for lack of reform afterwards – than Mueller. For example, Mueller’s boss the Attorney General – the FBI is a part of the Department of Justice – made it more or less official policy not to prosecute financial fraud. But this is another example of Mueller dropping the ball.)
Spying on Americans
Mueller participated in one of the greatest expansions of mass surveillance in human history.
As we noted in 2013:
NBC News reports:
NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.
On March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee:
We have put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.
Remember, the FBI – unlike the CIA – deals with internal matters within the borders of the United States.
On May 1st of this year, former FBI agent Tim Clemente told CNN’s Erin Burnett that all present and past phone calls were recorded:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone fcompanies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the ainvestigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
The next day, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
NSA whistleblowers say that this means that the NSA collects “word for word” all of our communications.
Colleen Rowley writes:
Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
Covering Up for Turkish Terrorists
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups, who the ACLU described as “The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America”, and who famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”, says that Mueller covered up a Turkish terror network.
Gagging Whistleblowers
Edmonds also said that Mueller gagged her and other whistleblowers.
Conclusion
Rather than being “above the fray”, Mueller is an authoritarian and water-carrier for the status quo and the powers-that-be.
As Coleen Rowley puts it:
Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.
Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”
And:
It’s sad that political partisanship is so blinding and that so few people remember the actual sordid history.
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ICFubar
Mueller is a deep state operative appointed by a deep state agency, the DOJ, under the auspices of a deep state presidency. That presidency and executive administration having been turned into a full spectrum psyop to keep the public looking in the wrong direction while the deep state goes about its business of consolidating its power domestically and advancing its globalist agenda internationally. “The state exists to enforce the dominance of elites, all the rest being propaganda, misdirection and obfuscation.” It is Mueller’s job to see that the state’s raison d’ etre is not outed by any truths about its existence becoming widely known by the sleeping majority of the population. A few sacrificial lambs will be offered up in hope that this absurd ‘Russian collusion’ meme can be buried, after everything of use is wrung from this operation, and a new distraction implemented. Meanwhile NAFTA will be renegotiated as the TPP reborn. The US Senate passes into law a bill making it almost impossible for citizens to sue the big banks. The Trade Investment Services Agreement (TISA) looms on the horizon (sovereignty rights for the financial cabal) with a North American Union, a la the EU, waiting in the pipeline to totally subjugate the American, Canadian and Mexican constitutions to the NAU’s political structure behind which the financial and corporate will direct everything. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
13 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller
Posted on November 1, 2017 by WashingtonsBlog
Talking heads act like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is fair, impartial and unbiased.
[Mueller] is also known for leading the probe into the 1991 collapse of the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
William Safire wrote in the New York Times:
The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system.
For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of purposes — while lawmen and regulators slept.
Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice Department.
Justice’s Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.
Mueller’s handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized. As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:
Over the past two years, the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry; the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Dexter Lehtinen.
Typical editorials criticized Justice’s prosecution of BCCI as “sluggish,” “conspicuously slow,” “inattentive,” and “lethargic.” Several editorials noted that there had been “poor cooperation” by Justice with other agencies. One stated that “the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on” to regulators and others. Another that “the Justice Department’s secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered.
***
Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both
***
Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US Attorney, “indicated to me that I was directed not to return the indictment.”
The Senate Report also noted:
While the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation.
***
In going after BCCI, Morgenthau’s office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI’s multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI’s accountants, BCCI’s shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Squashing Warning Signs that May Have Stopped 9/11
Larry Klayman writes:
Robert Mueller first hit my radar … just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
***
I came to meet and later represent FBI Special Agents Robert Wright and John Vincent, of the agency’s Chicago Counter-Terrorism Field Office. During our meeting, both Special Agents Wright and Vincent revealed to me that they had been conducting a counterterrorism investigation of Saudi money laundering into and in the United States, and they both believed that a massive terrorist attack was imminent.
In the course of this investigation, both special agents had asked a fellow FBI agent who was undercover, one of Muslim descent, to be wired to turn up further evidence of this terrorist operation. The Muslim agent refused, indignantly telling both Wright and Vincent that Muslims don’t spy and rat on other Muslims. In shock, my soon-to-be clients reported this to their supervisors at the FBI, but no action was taken. To make matters worse, Wright’s and Vincent’s FBI supervisors quashed their investigation. They both believed that the order to kill the investigation came from the highest reaches of the FBI, and, upset it not outraged by this cover-up, Wright then decided to write a book detailing this breach of FBI honor.
The only way I could explain this cover-up was that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was sensitive to the ties between the family of President George W. Bush and the Saudi royal family.
***
Director Mueller, along with his “yes men” supervisors at the agency, not only quashed my clients’ investigation and ignored the disloyalty of the Muslim undercover agent, but then missed the warning signs leading up to September 11 – the biggest intelligence failure in American history, even surpassing Pearl Harbor.
But shamelessly, despite this historic intelligence failure and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks that ensued, Mueller later led an effort to drum both Special Agents Wright and Vincent out of the FBI, in part by attempting to remove their security clearances, as a “reward” for their candor.
FBI special agent – and a 2002 Time Person of the Year – Colleen Rowley points out:
The FBI and all the other officials claimed that there were no clues, that they had no warning [about 9/11] etc., and that was not the case. There had been all kinds of memos and intelligence coming in.
But overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was foreseeable. Indeed, Al Qaeda crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was itself foreseeable. Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.
Mueller was one of the people who dropped the ball and let 9/11 happen.
Allowing Escape of Saudi Persons Connected to Bin Laden
Right after 9/11, American airspace was closed down. Yet Mueller was one of the people who allowed relatives of Bin Laden and other persons of interest fly back to Saudi Arabia.
Entrapping Innocent People for P.R. Purposes
After dropping the ball, Mueller then went on to entrap innocent people for P.R. purposes.
And Rowley notes:
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.
9/11 Cover Up
Rowley says:
TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11.
In addition, Rowley says that the FBI sent Soviet-style “minders” to her interviews with the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11, to make sure that she didn’t say anything the FBI didn’t like. The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 confirmed that government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).
Mueller’s FBI also obstructed the 9/11 investigation in many other ways. For example, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location. See this and this.
Harper’s notes:
Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.
Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details …
***
Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location ‘for his own safety.’
Graham also wrote that the FBI also “insisted that we could not, even in the most sanitized manner, tell the American people that an FBI informant had a relationship with two of the hijackers.”
And Kristen Breitweiser – one of the four 9/11 widows instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks – points out:
Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry’s investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.
Iraq War
Mueller helped sell the Iraq War:
He wrote to Congress:
The seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea—remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans.
***
Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq’s WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion. We are also concerned about terrorist organizations with direct ties to Iraq—such as the Iranian dissident group, Mujahidin-e Khalq, and the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization.
***
Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material before or during a war with the US to avenge the fall of his regime.
Rowley notes:
When you had the lead-up to the Iraq War … Mueller and, of course, the CIA and all the other directors, saluted smartly and went along with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up the intelligence to make a pretext for the Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the FBI, they actually had a receipt, and other documentary proof, that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet those directors more or less kept quiet. That included … CIA, FBI, Mueller, and it included also the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey.
Torture
Rowley also points out:
Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.
Anthrax Frame-Up
Mueller also presided over the incredibly flawed anthrax investigation.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office says the FBI’s investigation was “flawed and inaccurate”. The investigation was so bogus that a senator called for an “independent review and assessment of how the FBI handled its investigation in the anthrax case.”
The head of the FBI’s anthrax investigation says the whole thing was a sham. He says that the FBI higher-ups “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation”, that there were “politically motivated communication embargoes from FBI Headquarters”.
The FBI’s anthrax investigation head said that the FBI framed scientist Bruce Ivins. On July 6, 2006, he filed a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303, which noted:
(j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.
Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.
In other words, Mueller presided over the attempt to frame an innocent man (and see this).
Unsure If Government Can Assassinate U.S. Citizens Living On U.S. Soil
Rather than saying “of course not!”, Mueller said that he wasn’t sure whether Obama had the right to assassinate Americans living on American soil.
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley commented at the time:
One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.
***
He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”
Crippled Investigations of Financial Fraud … Helping to Allow the Great Recession
In a 2013 piece entitled “Mueller: I Crippled FBI Effort v. White-Collar Crime“, the country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri – wrote:
The FBI never developed “an intelligence operation” “to analyze threats” of even epidemic fraud.
***
White-collar crime investigations and prosecutions are massive money makers that reduce the deficit, but Mueller, Holder, and Obama refuse to make these points and refuse to prosecute the elite bank fraudsters. On substantive and political grounds their actions are either inexplicable or all too explicable and support my readers’ belief that the FBI leadership no longer wants to investigate and prosecute the elite bank frauds.
This is important because:
Fraud CAUSED the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis
Numerous Nobel prize winning economists say that we need to prosecute fraud, or else the economy will never truly stabilize
After the Great Depression, the government cracked down on Wall Street fraud. But Mueller and other Bush and Obama administration officials let it slide
(There are a lot of people more responsible for the Great Recession – and for lack of reform afterwards – than Mueller. For example, Mueller’s boss the Attorney General – the FBI is a part of the Department of Justice – made it more or less official policy not to prosecute financial fraud. But this is another example of Mueller dropping the ball.)
Spying on Americans
Mueller participated in one of the greatest expansions of mass surveillance in human history.
As we noted in 2013:
NBC News reports:
NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.
On March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee:
We have put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.
Remember, the FBI – unlike the CIA – deals with internal matters within the borders of the United States.
On May 1st of this year, former FBI agent Tim Clemente told CNN’s Erin Burnett that all present and past phone calls were recorded:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone fcompanies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the ainvestigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
The next day, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
NSA whistleblowers say that this means that the NSA collects “word for word” all of our communications.
Colleen Rowley writes:
Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
Covering Up for Turkish Terrorists
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups, who the ACLU described as “The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America”, and who famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”, says that Mueller covered up a Turkish terror network.
Gagging Whistleblowers
Edmonds also said that Mueller gagged her and other whistleblowers.
Conclusion
Rather than being “above the fray”, Mueller is an authoritarian and water-carrier for the status quo and the powers-that-be.
As Coleen Rowley puts it:
Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.
Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”
And:
It’s sad that political partisanship is so blinding and that so few people remember the actual sordid history.
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← Oh Canada, Why Can’t You Shelter War Resisters?What’s Driving Social Discord: Russian Social Media Meddling or Soaring Wealth/Power Inequality? →
ICFubar
Mueller is a deep state operative appointed by a deep state agency, the DOJ, under the auspices of a deep state presidency. That presidency and executive administration having been turned into a full spectrum psyop to keep the public looking in the wrong direction while the deep state goes about its business of consolidating its power domestically and advancing its globalist agenda internationally. “The state exists to enforce the dominance of elites, all the rest being propaganda, misdirection and obfuscation.” It is Mueller’s job to see that the state’s raison d’ etre is not outed by any truths about its existence becoming widely known by the sleeping majority of the population. A few sacrificial lambs will be offered up in hope that this absurd ‘Russian collusion’ meme can be buried, after everything of use is wrung from this operation, and a new distraction implemented. Meanwhile NAFTA will be renegotiated as the TPP reborn. The US Senate passes into law a bill making it almost impossible for citizens to sue the big banks. The Trade Investment Services Agreement (TISA) looms on the horizon (sovereignty rights for the financial cabal) with a North American Union, a la the EU, waiting in the pipeline to totally subjugate the American, Canadian and Mexican constitutions to the NAU’s political structure behind which the financial and corporate will direct everything. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Kissinger has said it's an all-out war between Steve Bannon and the Kushners
Michael Wolff makes the claim in 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House'
Bannon and Kushner allegedly became combative over their pro-Israel stances
When Trump chose Kushner's pick over Bannon's for economic adviser, the rift began to grow
Some analysts say the clash is between a Jewish-inflected moderate wing and a culturally non-Jewish hard core
By MARY KEKATOS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 20:00, 6 January 2018 | UPDATED: 12:28, 8 January 2018
Henry Kissinger has said it's an all-out war in the White House of President Donald Trump.
'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews,' Kissinger, the former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, told Michael Wolff for his book 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House'.
It appears that the remark was an attempt to characterize the clash between former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon on one side, and Jewish Trump family members Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the other.
Henry Kissinger (pictured, December 2017) has said it's an all out-war in the White House of President Donald Trump. 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews,' he told Michael Wolff +6
Henry Kissinger (pictured, December 2017) has said it's an all out-war in the White House of President Donald Trump. 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews,' he told Michael Wolff
It appears that the remark was an attempt to characterize the clash between former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon on one side, and Jewish Trump family members Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the other (Pictured, Jared and Ivanka walk with Bannon, second from right, and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, right, February 2017 +6
It appears that the remark was an attempt to characterize the clash between former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon on one side, and Jewish Trump family members Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the other (Pictured, Jared and Ivanka walk with Bannon, second from right, and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, right, February 2017
According to Wolff, Trump seemingly pushed Kushner into a role as 'Israel’s great protector', a role he was not familiar with playing so Bannon began pushing back to grab the 'stronger-on-Israel' label (Pictured left to right: Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, January 2017)
According to Wolff, Trump seemingly pushed Kushner into a role as 'Israel’s great protector', a role he was not familiar with playing.
'For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the president was singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling him with an impossible hurdle for being Jewish - and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping belief in the negotiating powers of Jews,' Wolff wrote.
Trump considered son-in-law Jared Kushner for Secretary of...
However, Bannon did not like this and intended to grab the 'stronger-on-Israel' label, which was embraced by Trump. The Breitbart editor seemed determined to make Kushner appear weak and inadequate, according to Wolff.
In turn, Kushner brought on former president of Goldman Sachs Gary Cohn and pushed for him to be the president's top economic adviser.
Bannon’s choice had been CNBC’s conservative anchor and commentator Larry Kudlow. For Trump, the clout of having a former Goldman Sachs head was more impressive than even a television personality.
Cohn started to describe a soon-to-be White House that would be business focused and committed to advancing center-right to moderate positions. In this new configuration, Bannon would be marginalized.
In turn, Kushner brought on former president of Goldman Sachs Gary Cohn and pushed for him to the president's top economic adviser, edging out Bannon’s choice of CNBC conservative anchor and commentator Larry Kudlow (Pictured, Bannon and Kushner, June 2017)
Cohn started to describe a soon-to-be White House that would be business focused and committed to advancing center-right to moderate positions. In this new configuration, Bannon (pictured, December 2017) would be marginalized
Jonathan Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, told Forward that Kissinger maybe saw the battle of a Jewish-inflected moderate wing and a culturally non-Jewish hard core (Pictured, left to right: Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, June 2017)
Jonathan Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, told Forward that Kissinger maybe saw the battle of a Jewish-inflected moderate wing and a culturally non-Jewish hard core.
'Jewish Republicans have been different from the kind of paleoconservative Republicans, and that battle goes back a long way,' Sarna said.
'What none of us know is whether the neoconservatives will come back to the Republican party if there's a different man at the top.'
The two sides continued to remain at odds until Bannon exited in August 2017.
'Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution,' Wolff wrote.
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.
This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.
Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.
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Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.
But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright among them, are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.
The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access, committed cultural suicide. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows, keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued to a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the decline.
All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”
An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.
However, the next financial crash, as Prins points out in her book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last one. This is because, as she says, “there is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.
And so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?
We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”
As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
In Mar-A-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace, by Laurence Leamer, Donald Trump is quoted as saying: 'I'm the king of Palm Beach. They all kiss my ass'.
Trump claimed that Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Wagner, Elizabeth Taylor, Denzel Washington and Steven Spielberg were members of his club at Mar-A-Lago.
'But it was not true.'
How Donald Trump used Mar-a-Lago
Michael Jackson with Donald Trump's children at Donald Trump's hotel Mar A Lago in Palm Beach.
Mar-a-Lago was the type of place where 'its guests could party as wildly as they wished'.
At Mar-a-Lago, 'couples had sex out on the grounds'.
"Trump pushed elite model, Kelly Hyler into the pool after her date, personal trainer Jimmy Franzo jumped in nude.
"Helping her out, Trump suggested she change.
"She and Trump disappeared, the National Enquirer reported: 'I don't know what that guy has, but it worked,' she supposedly said."
How Donald Trump used Mar-a-Lago
Trump and Epstein.
Virginia Roberts, an alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein, "was recruited to perform a massage for Epstein while working as a $9-per-hour locker room attendant at Mar-A-Lago."
In West Palm Beach, 'Sixty-three Russians bought luxury condos in seven Trump branded buildings along the ocean front.'
Mar-A-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace, by Laurence Leamer.
Two of the buyers were indicted later for alleged membership in the Russian-Jewish Mafia.
James Safechuck (right)
A lawsuit claims that Michael Jackson plied James Safechuck and his parents with cash, gifts and first-class travel.
Michael Jackson flew the parents of James Safechuck to New York, and put them up in Trump Tower.
Michael Jackson operated child sex syndicate
"James ... went to stay in Jackson's room with him."
mjfacts
Michael Jackson's home in Trump Tower.
In 1984, Michael Jackson "rented a four-bedroom condo on Trump Tower's 63rd floor just a few floors down from Trump's $100m Manhattan penthouse."
dailymail.
Trump told CNN: 'Michael Jackson lived in Trump Tower.
"He lives in various of my buildings. He sort of follows me around ...
"He likes what I have.'
dailymail.
Michael Jackson with Donald Trump's children at Donald Trump's hotel Mar A Lago in Palm Beach.
Donald Trump remembers his "good friend" Michael Jackson, offering what he calls "the real story" of Jackson.
"He recalled how Jackson lived at the Trump Tower, even getting hitched at one of his VIP clubs, the Mar-a-Lago."
Donald Trump: 'I Know The Real Story of Michael Jackson'
James Safechuck was "married to Michael Jackson, at Neverland."
mjfacts
In 1990, Donald Trump opened the Taj Mahal, a hotel casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Michael Jackson was there to assist Donald Trump at the opening.
Jackson stayed in a suite at the hotel.
Trump then flew with Jackson, in a private jet, to Indianapolis, in order to visit a 'sick child'.
The Donald, Jacko and me | Spectator Life.
...
Wade Robson, at the controversial Johnny Young Talent School in Australia. Child singer Jamie Redfern, from Young Talent Time, toured the USA with gay singer Liberace, a friend of Donald Trump. YOUNG TALENT TIME
Wade Robson was five years old when he first met Michal Jackson through a dance competition in Australia
Robson says he was sexually abused by Michael Jackson from the age of seven.
Robson says Michael Jackson's companies MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures were fronts for the "most sophisticated public child sexual abuse procurement and facilitation organisation the world has known".
Michael Jackson allegedly ran child sex abuse operation.
James Safechuck, New York, 1988.
In 1987, James Safechuck appeared in a Pepsi advert featuring Michael Jackson.
In 1984, Michael Jackson had been badly burned during the making of a Pepsi commercial, and may have been replaced by a body double.
James Safechuck (centre), Hawaii, 1988.
James now alleges that Michael Jackson sexually abused him for years.
Michael Jackson Hit With New Abuse Claim
James Safechuck, Los Angeles, 1989.
James has joined a lawsuit against Jackson's estate, originally filed by Wade Robson in 2013.
James's complaint claims that Jackson groomed him and molested him, beginning when he was 10 years old.
James in London 1988.
In 1988, James was with Michael Jackson in Hawaii, New York, the UK and France.
In Jackson's 2005 criminal trial, court documents quoted various employees from Jackson’s Neverland Ranch saying James was sexually molested by Jackson.
Michael Jackson Hit With New Abuse Claim
Jordie Chandler
In 1993, Evan Chandler (Charmatz), the father of Jordie Chandler, accused Jackson of molesting Jordie.
In 2009, Evan Chandler died in mysterious circumstances.
In 2016, Jordy Chandler disappeared!
1993
In 1994, La Toya Jackson told the TV interviewer Geraldo Rivera that she and her mother found a canceled check she said Michael had written for $1 million, made payable to the father of one of Michael’s boys.
"The father, supposedly, is a garbage collector," La Toya said.
Jimmy Safechuck’s father is in the rubbish disposal business.
Jackson Spent $34 Million to Silence Alleged Victims .
Michael Jackson worked for AmeriCares, reported to be a front for the CIA, and reported to have links to pedophile rings.
The complainants in the 2016 lawsuit include:
1. James Safechuck
2. Jason Francia, the son of one of Jackson’s longtime maids, Blanca Francia.
3. Gavin Arvizo, a young cancer survivor named Gavin Arvizo.
Wade Robson (right)
4. Wade Robson, who says he was brainwashed by Jackson.
Michael Jackson Hit With New Abuse Claim
Michael Jackson worked for a 'CIA-front organisation with links to child abuse'.
MICHAEL JACKSON WORKED FOR A CIA FRONT COMPANY
..
Donald Trump's mentor and 'father figure' was Roy Cohn, who was totally gay, and who was said to run child abuse rings for the CIA.
During the July 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, boy sex workers reported a huge increase in demand.
Some male prostitutes claimed to have earned six times more than normal.
Female sex workers said that business had been slower.
Republicans!
Glenn Murphy Jr. is an antigay advocate and former president of the Young Republican National Federation. He was sentenced to six years in prison after he was found guilty of having sex with an unwilling male after a private party for Republican supporters in Indiana. 16 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay
During the July 2016 Republican Convention, Craigslist saw a huge increase in ads offering gay sex, specifically aimed at Republican attendees, according to The Daily Dot.
Indiana state Rep. Phillip Hinkle voted for an anti-marriage equality amendment to Indiana’s constitution. He was caught in a sex scandal when he answered an ad on Craigslist from an 18-year-old named Kameryn Gibson, who was looking for a 'sugga daddy.'
During the July 2016 Convention, Republicans employed lots of male escorts, according to the New York Post, which spoke with a number of rent boys working in Cleveland.
They described the typical Republican client as married and aged between 40 and 50.
Male escorts are making crazy money at the RNC | New York Post / RNC So Gay: Male Escorts Rake It In
Madonna.
Reportedly, the married Donald Trump has frequently been in touch with Madonna, actress Kim Basinger and Carla Bruni.
dailymail
At the Republican Convention, "Donald grabbed his wife's arms in what appears to be an effort to keep her at a distance."
Body Language Expert Weighs In on Donald Trump.
Reportedly, Trump's close friend Roger Stone likes sleeping with men.
...
"A Huffington Post article reported on an unconfirmed rumour that Trump allegedly 'paid off' a gay lover to prevent their affair from breaking out into a public scandal."
Donald Trump
..
In 2011, a group of gay conservatives, called GOProud, invited Donald Trump to Washington.
In Washington, GOProud got Trump to give his first big political speech as a potential Republican presidential candidate.
This speech was made to the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference.
Gay conservatives who helped kickstart Trump's GOP career.
16 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi. / The Right-Wing's 20 Biggest Sex Hypocrites
Donald Trump's close friend Roger Stone is a GOProud supporter.
GOProud's leaders, Christopher Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia, got Roger Stone to get Donald Trump to the conference.
Gay conservatives who helped kickstart Trump's GOP career.
Roger Stone and Roy Cohn.
Roger Stone was a close friend of the gay Roy Cohn.
Roger Stone has placed swinger's ads for "exceptional muscular…single men."
Swinger's Club ...
...
GOP = Group of Perverts.
GOProud was financed primarily by Jewish billionaire 'vulture capitalist' Paul Singer of Elliott Management Corporation.
Paul Singer gives large sums of money to Jewish causes.[13]
In 2007, Singer was one of Rudolph Giuliani's most important fundraisers in Giuliani's bid for the Republican presidential nomination.[60][13]
In 2012, GOProud organised a party at the Republican National Convention.
"Guests will dance the night away after the evening convention session at The Honey Pot night-club in Tampa's Ybor City neighborhood."
Special guests included:
David Keene, Former Chair of the American Conservative Union and Vice-Chair of CPAC
Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform
Mary Matalin, author, CNN contributor and long-time GOP operative
Richard Grenell, former U.S. Spokesman at the United Nations
Amy Kremer, Chair of the Tea Party Express
Mike Flynn, Editor, Breitbart.com, BigGovernment.com
Dana Loesch, contributor to Breitbart.com, radio host and CNN contributor
Margaret Hoover, former FOX News contributor, author and current CNN contributor
Larry O’Connor, Editor of Breitbart.tv and radio host
S.E. Cupp, author and co-host of MSNBC’s “The Cycle”
Will Cain, analyst for The Blaze and CNN contributor
Donald Trump's friend Roger Stone is Jewish.
"Donald Trump is a radical Zionist", said Roger Stone on The Steve Malzberg Show.
Stone does not blame Jews for the JF Kennedy assassination.
Trump does not blame Jews for 9 11.
And, Trump Henchman Roger Stone Denies That Donald Trump Is Homosexual.
Gay Republicans?
Sheriff Paul Babeu (above) stepped down as a co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign in Arizona after a newspaper published accusations that he threatened to deport a former boyfriend, who was from Mexico, when the man refused to keep quiet about their relationship.
Babeu made national headlines for his tough stance on illegal immigration. He was running for Congress in Arizona’s Fourth District.
William Pryor Jr. is an eleventh-circuit judge and former Attorney General of Alabama.
Donald Trump said he was considering Pryor for the Supreme Court.
Pryor reportedly featured in nude porn photographs in the 1990s.
The man in the porn picture is identified as 'Bill Pryor.'
Various unnamed officials have identified the photo as authentic.
Trump donated to a group that promotes homosexuality to 5 year-olds.
Trump gave a $20,000 grant to an organization that:
3. Stated its mission is "promoting homosexuality" in the public schools to children as early as kindergarten.
Donald Trump's New York. Stephen Shames Photographer
Donald Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn.
They used to party together.
Donald Trump, New York Mayor Ed Koch and Roy Cohn
Roy Cohn was the lawyer for the top Mafia families of New York and Canada.
Roy Cohn got Trump linked to key people.
Bronx Kids - Runaway Kids and Teenage Prostitution
"Cohn was a good friend of Craig Spence and together with top CIA and Army men, as well as politicians and businessmen, he once threw his birthday party at Spence's house.
"Spence was later investigated for running a CIA-sanctioned homosexual and pedophile entrapment ring at his house with operations going straight up to the White House...
"Cohn 'ran the the little boys' with the purpose of blackmailing high officials...
Bronx Boys. Stephen Shames Photographer—Stephen Shames
"According to a 1954 news report, Cohn and his aide David Schine had met up with Spanish members of an international underground Nazi network while on a spy-hunting trip in Europe.
"Some of the leading members of this network, according to the newspaper, were Col. Otto Skorzeny, Hjalmar Schacht and Werner Naumann."
"Cohn was a board member of the notorious Permindex firm.
"This company brought together an international group of shady intelligence-connected men ...Board members had connections to the CIA, FBI, and Mossad, not to mention the mafia."
isgp.nl/Beyond_Dutroux / Trump dossier
Roger Stone.
Trump's close friend Roger Stone worked with Roy Cohn.
'I was introduced to Trump by Roy Cohn', says Roger Stone.
Stone remains a "Trump confidante."[48][49]
shermsays.blogspot. / nationalreview.com
Father Bruce Ritter, founder of the charity Covenant House, mixing with the teenage boy prostitutes of New York. According to the former Nebraska senator John DeCamp, Ritter's charity Covenant House has been used to acquire children for the purposes of child abuse. Allegedly, Father Ritter's Covenant House, Americares, and Sandusky's Notre Dame child charity all have links to CIA pedophile rings.
"The Roy Cohn clique (which is intimately connected to Trump) is responsible for the Franklin scandal, the DC callboy ring, Dutroux, the Jeff Epstein ring, the Tevfrik Arif Turkish sex ring, the Northern Marianas sex trafficking...see where I'm going with this?
"And through the Council for National Policy, it seems to include the Vatican sex rings as well...
"I was also surprised to find Arif and Bayrock connected to Fethullah Gulen, who I started researching after the Boston Marathon bombing because of his connection to Graham Fuller."
Trump dossier / Boston bombers' uncle married daughter of top CIA official / The Deep Politics of God Revisited
Alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein.
"Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother, testified in 2009 that Trump flew on Jeffrey's private jet at least once," reports VICE News.
"Message pads from Epstein's Palm Beach mansion that were seized by investigators and obtained by VICE News indicate that Trump called Epstein twice in November of 2004."
7 Things You Need To Know About Trump And Sex Slave Island ...
In 2010, Epstein admitted to 'socializing' with Trump.
When a lawyer representing a child victim asked if Epstein has "ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18," Epstein pled the Fifth
At least one of Epstein's underage sex victims was recruited from Trump's Mar-a-Lago - which Epstein frequented often.
Virginia Roberts, an alleged victim of Epstein’s, "was recruited to perform a massage for Epstein while working as a $9-per-hour locker room attendant at Mar-A-Lago."
Trump was subpoenaed in 2009 for his connection to Epstein's under-age sex slave rings.
In 2009, Trump was subpoenaed in a case against Epstein concerning victim Virginia Roberts.
Michael Jackson with Donald Trump's children at Donald Trump's hotel Mar A Lago in Palm Beach.
Trump's friend Michael Jackson has been linked to CIA mind control.
Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion.
Donald Trump 'partied at the Playboy Mansion'
Donald Trump 'partied at the Playboy Mansion with playmate Holly ...
According to Ex CIA operative Laurel Aston, in his book Fighting Child and Human Trafficking and Slavery:
"I knew Hugh Hefner. He is connected to the CIA.
"Hefner is a CIA programmer, CIA sex slave handler and pimp.
"Hefner was also a part of running MK ULTRA super assassins and ops."
Laurel Aston Ex. C.I.A. Whistle Blower.
Barron Trump
In 1953, Hugh Hefner set up Playboy, "which was eventually revealed to be banked by the CIA."
playboy mansion . / TRUMP; HEFNER INDUSTRY PIMPS; PLAYBOY MANSION
Victoria Zdrok is a Ukranian-born former Playboy Playmate and Penthouse Pet who says that she went out with Donald Trump.
Trump said of Zdrok: "she looks like a * third-rate hooker... She's full of *."
'F**king Third-Rate Hooker
Trump (left) Charles Kushner (right) DownWithTyranny!.
Ivanka Trump is married to Jared Kushner.
Jared's father, Charles Kushner, "hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, secretly recorded the encounter and sent the tape to his sister as part of a blackmail scheme."
Charles Kushner "served 16 months after guilty pleas to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations."
Finally, Somebody Came Up With a New Trump-Clinton Angle
The name Trump has been linked to prostitution.
The Trump family empire was built on the backs of prostitutes.
"Trump Escorts was apparently a high end escort service whose website featured the Trump International logo."
"The address of Trump Escorts was/is 180 Riverside Drive, Upper West Side New York, New York 10024, USA, which is ... the address of Trump Place in Manhattan."
Pimping the Donald - Trump Escorts .
Trump and Felix Sater
The Miami Herald reported that the CIA helped Felix Sater conceal his conviction for securities fraud while using him as a spy in his native Russia.
Trump's friend Felix Sater launched the Fort Lauderdale Trump Tower.
courthousenews
Trump's close friend Billy Graham, chatting up a young boy.
Donald Trump
President Donald Trump has used U.S. bankruptcy laws to restructure debt for some of his casinos. Daniel J. Barry / WireImages / Getty Images
by
Tom Murse
Updated January 19, 2018
Donald Trump has portrayed himself as a successful businessman who has amassed a net worth of as much as $10 billion. But he has also led some of his companies into bankruptcy, maneuvers he says were designed to restructure their massive debt.
Critics have cited the Trump corporate bankruptcies as examples of his recklessness and inability to manage, but the real-estate developer, casino operator and former reality-television star says his use of federal law to protect his interests illustrates his sharp business acumen.
"I have used the laws of this country just like the greatest people that you read about every day in business have used the laws of this country, the chapter laws, to do a great job for my company, my employees, myself and my family,” Trump said in August 2015.
The New York Times, which conducted an analysis of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings, found otherwise, however. It reported in 2016 that Trump "put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments."
"The burden of his failures," according to the newspaper, "fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen."
6 Corporate Bankruptcies
Trump has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his companies six times. Three of the casino bankruptcies came during the recession of the early 1990s and the Gulf War, both of which contributed to hard times in Atlantic City, New Jersey's gambling facilities. He also entered a Manhattan hotel and two casino holding companies into bankruptcy.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows companies to restructure or wipe away much of their debt to other companies, creditors, and shareholders while remaining in business but under the supervision of a bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 is often called "reorganization" because it allows the business to emerge from the process more efficient and on good terms with its creditors.
One point of clarification: Trump has never filed personal bankruptcy, only corporate bankruptcy related to his casinos in Atlantic City. “I have never gone bankrupt,” Trump has said.
Here is a look at the six Trump corporate bankruptcies. The details are a matter of public record and have been widely published by the news media and even discussed by the president himself.
01
of 06
1991: Trump Taj Mahal
The Trump Taj Mahal
The Trump Taj Mahal sought bankruptcy protection in 1991. Craig Allen / Getty Images
Trump opened the $1.2 billion Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City in April 1990. One year later, in the summer of 1991, it sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because it was unable to generate enough gambling revenue to cover the massive costs of building the facility, particularly amid a recession.
Trump was forced to relinquish half of his ownership in the casino and sell off his yacht and his airline. The bondholders were awarded lower interest payments.
Trump's Taj Mahal was described as the eighth wonder of the world and the largest casino in the world. The casino covered 4.2 million square feet on 17 acres of land. Its operations were said to have cannibalized the revenue of Trump's Plaza and Castle casinos.
"Your wish is our command. ... Our wish is that your experience here be filled with magic and enchantment," the resort staff promised at the time. More than 60,000 people a day visited the Taj Mahal in its opening days.
The Taj Mahal emerged from bankruptcy within weeks of its filing but was later closed.
Continue Reading Below
02
of 06
1992: Trump Castle Hotel & Casino
Trump Castle Casino
This is a bed in the 'High Rollers Suite' at Trump's Castle Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images Contributor
The Castle Hotel & Casino entered bankruptcy in March 1992 and had the most difficulty of Trump's Atlantic City properties in covering its operational costs. The Trump Organization relinquished half of its holdings in the Castle to the bondholders. Trump opened the Castle in 1985. The casino remains in operation under new ownership and a new name, the Golden Nugget.
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03
of 06
1992: Trump Plaza Casino
Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino
The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino filed bankruptcy in March 1992. Craig Allen/Getty Images
The Plaza Casino was one of two Trump casinos in Atlantic City to enter bankruptcy in March 1992. The other was the Castle Hotel & Casino. The 39-story, 612-room Plaza opened on the Atlantic City boardwalk in May 1984 after Trump struck a deal to build the casino with Harrah’s Entertainment. Trump Plaza closed in September 2014, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.
04
of 06
1992: Trump Plaza Hotel
The Trump Plaza Hotel
The Trump Plaza Hotel in Manhattan sought bankruptcy protection in 1992, about four years after Donald Trump bought it. Paweł Marynowski / Wikimedia Commons
Trump's Plaza Hotel was more than $550 million in debt when it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992. Trump gave up a 49 percent stake in the company to lenders, as well as his salary and his day-to-day role in its operations.
The hotel, overlooking Central Park in Manhattan from its location on Fifth Avenue, entered bankruptcy because it could not pay its annual debt service payments. Trump bought the hotel for about $407 million in 1988. He later sold a controlling stake in the property, which remains in operation.
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05
of 06
2004: Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts
Trump Marina
The Trump Marina in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Craig Allen/Getty Images
Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, a holding company for Trump's three casinos, entered Chapter 11 in November 2004 as part of a deal with bondholders to restructure $1.8 billion of debt.
Earlier that year, the holding company posted a first quarter loss of $48 million, double its losses for the same quarter the previous year. The company said its gambling take was down nearly $11 million across all three casinos.
The holding company emerged from bankruptcy less than a year later, in May 2005, with a new name: Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. The Chapter 11 restructuring reduced the company's debt by about $600 million and cut interest payments by $102 million annually. Trump relinquished the majority control to bondholders and gave up his title of chief executive officer, according to The Press of Atlantic City newspaper.
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Donald Trump flies in a personal helicopter to view some of his properties in New York City and New Jersey. Joe McNally/Getty Images
Trump Entertainment Resorts, the casino holding company, entered Chapter 11 in February 2009 amid The Great Recession. Atlantic City casinos were also hurting, according to published reports, because of new competition from across the state line in Pennsylvania, where slot machines had come online and were drawing gamblers.
The holding company emerged from bankruptcy in February 2016 and became a subsidiary of investor Carl Icahn's Icahn Enterprises. Icahn took over the Taj Mahal then sold it in 2017 to Hard Rock International, which said it was planning to renovate, rebrand, and reopen the property in 2018.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:35 pm Post subject:
Christopher Steele Worked For Sanctioned Russian Oligarch While Composing Sham Dossier: Solomon
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-29/christopher-steele-worked-sa nctioned-russian-oligarch-while-composing-sham-dossier
Wed, 08/29/2018 - 15:06
Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele - the author of the largely unverified "Steele Dossier," worked as a subcontractor for Russian billionaire and aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska at the same time he was pontificating that Donald Trump's alleged (and still unproven) ties to Russia amounted to treason, according to The Hill's John Solomon.
Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by a law firm working for Deripaska in 2012, marking the beginning of a relationship which extended at least throughout 2016 according to Solomon. Steele was tasked with researching a business rival of Deripaska, however Steele's work for the Russian billionaire evolved to the point where the former British spy was interfacing with the Obama administration on his behalf.
To that end, Steele and twice-demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr communicated extensively about the Russian Oligarch as recently as February 2016, which included efforts to obtain a Visa for Deripaska to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting int he US.
Deripaska is now banned from the United States as one of several Russians sanctioned in April in response to alleged 2016 election meddling.
Ohr, meanwhile, was demoted twice after the DOJ's Inspector General discovered that he lied about his involvement with opposition research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson - who employed Steele. Ohr's CIA-linked wife, Nellie, was also employed by Fusion as part of the firm's anti-Trump efforts, and had ongoing communications with the ex-UK spy, Christopher Steele as well.
What's more, Ohr met with Deripaska according to Solomon.
By 2015, Steele’s work had left him friendly with one of Deripaska’s lawyers, according to my sources. And when Ohr, then the associate deputy attorney general and a longtime acquaintance of Steele, sought help getting to meet Deripaska, Steele obliged.
Deripaska, who frequently has appeared alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at high-profile meetings, never really dealt with Steele, but he followed his lawyer’s recommendations and met with Ohr, my sources say. -The Hill
The September 2015 meeting between Ohr, Deripaska and several FBI agents in New York sought the Russian billionaire's assistance regarding organized crime investigations. That meeting was facilitated by Steele.
To recap: Bruce Ohr = the #4 official at the DOJ, met with a billionaire friend of Vladimir Putin, in a sit-down arranged by Christopher Steele. Steele and the DOJ, meanwhile, were accusing Donald Trump of collusion with Putin - while the Obama administration used Steele's dodgy dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Emails Show Christopher Steele Lobbied DOJ Official On Behalf Of Russian Oligarch
Steele was in close contact with Bruce Ohr
dailycaller.com
Chuck Ross
@ChuckRossDC
Steele asked Ohr, the #4 official at DOJ, to "monitor" any developments in Deripaska's visa case. Ohr said he would. Was Steele working for Deripaska? His attorney, Adam Waldman, registered under FARA for his work in lobbying for Deripaska's visa. http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/09/christopher-steele-deripaska-bruce-o hr/ … pic.twitter.com/AkIAxoRltg
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Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch's behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier. The emails show Steele and Ohr were in frequent contact, that they intermingled talk about Steele's research and the oligarch's affairs, and that Glenn Simpson, head of the dirt-digging group Fusion GPS that hired Steele to compile the dossier, was also part of the ongoing conversation. -Washington Examiner
Dossier author Christopher Steele was likely working for Putin-linked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska at the exact same time he was telling Hillary and the press that Trump’s alleged ties to Russia were treason. https://t.co/jEXY2NM5hg
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 9, 2018
Deripaska has denied any involvement with the Steele dossier, telling The Hill's Solomon in a statement: "The latest reckless media chatter proposes that I had some unspecified involvement in the so-called dossier. Like most of the absurd fantasies and smears that ricochet across the internet, it is utterly false. I had absolutely nothing to do with this project, and I never had any knowledge of it until it was reported in the media and I certainly wasn’t involved in any activity related to it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJW5A7ruLM _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
In order to understand why Ukraine’s President Voldomyr Zelensky doesn’t want the dirt about Joe Biden to become public, one needs to know that Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings was, at least partly, Zelensky’s boss and benefactor until Zelensky became Ukraine’s President, and that revealing this would open up a can of worms which could place that former boss and benefactor of both men into prison at lots of places.
First, the falsehoods in the press have to be documented here, since this article will go up against virtually all U.S.-and-allied reporting on these events. And, in order to do such a thing, the bona fides of my main sources need to be presented:
Naked Capitalism is, as the article about it at Wikipedia, says, the blog of Susan Webber, pen-named “Yves Smith,” who “graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She had 20 years of experience in the financial services industry with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank.[3] She has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute.[4][5]” “The site has had over 60 million visitors since 2007, and was cited as among CNBC’s 2012 top 25 ‘Best Alternative Financial Blogs’, calling Smith ‘a harsh critic of Wall Street who believes that fraud was at the center of the financial crisis’.[2]” “The New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson cited Naked Capitalism as one of the ‘must-read financial blogs’ she reads regularly.[9]”
Her blog is widely respected amongst both scholars and experts in the field of finance, and is among the top go-to sites for trustworthy investigative news reporting in their highly complex field. So as to be able to achieve this high degree of respect, day in and day out, for decades, she carefully selects and relies upon the expertise of a small team of investigators, one of whom is Richard Smith, who has done around 200 articles for her site. One of these was dated 21 May 2014 and headlined “R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings”, and it reported that the U.S. Vice President’s son had become “a new member of the board” and that this “Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.” Since these men were being paid by the corporation’s owner, Mr. Smith researched extensively to find out who that was, or they were. He reported “what one careful Ukrainian journalist dug up in 2012”:
“Burisma changed owners last year [in 2011]: instead of Zlochevsky and Lisin, the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari and Esko-Pivnich” and a “third company was already waiting for them in the same building – the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya,” and “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group,” which “is a conglomerate controlled by the ferocious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,” who “is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine,” and who “is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with Kolomoisky might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by ‘fascists’.” Those quotations are from Mr. Smith’s article, but the following is not. Examining the documents myself, I note especially that at their end is the conclusion: “Thus, Ihor Kolomoisky managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.” This was the conclusion of the “careful Ukrainian journalist,” which was actually not one but a team of three, who were employed at a Ukrainian non-profit, the Anticorruption Action Centre, which specialized in tracking down the actual persons who controlled corporations and which had a particular focus on finding “Offshore fronts for Yanukovych.” Yanukovych was the democratically elected Ukrainian President, who took office on 25 February 2010. So: this non-profit was an anti-Yanukovych organization, writing more than two years into his Presidency, on 28 August 2012.
A certain historical background is essential here; and this, too, goes up against American ‘news’-reporting and will therefore be linked to articles that, in turn, link to ultimate sources that are of unquestioned reliability on each of the particulars that are in question: There was a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which is portrayed in the West as being a democratic revolution (but was actually a coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations, and that was entirely illegal), and it replaced the democratically elected President by a ruler who was selected by Victoria Nuland, whose boss was Secretary of State John Kerry, whose boss was Barack Obama. Nuland had been originally a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, and then of Kerry’s immediate predecessor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama assigned Nuland to carry out his plan for Ukraine, which plan was to turn its government away from being friendly toward its next-door neighbor Russia to becoming instead a satellite of the United States against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor. Consequently, fascists, and even outright racist-fascists (nazis), people who came from the groups that had supported Hitler against Stalin during World War II, were installed into this new government, such as the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy. (The CIA instructed that Party, which was Ukraine’s main nazi party, to change its name to “Freedom Party” — Svoboda — so as to become acceptable to Americans; and Paribuy and his colleagues did it, in order to help the U.S. Government to fool the American people about what the U.S. was doing in Ukraine.)
At least until Zelensky was elected, Ukraine’s Government remained fascist. And so is Kolomoysky himself, as I had reported about him on 18 May 2014. As I reported there,
On 12 May 2014, Burisma Holdings announced, “Hunter Biden Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,” and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations.”
Promptly, Burisma’s website started presenting Burisma as if if were a Ukrainian-American if not outright American corporation. Devon Archer, shown there, was a business-partner of Hunter Biden. As the Washington Examiner reported, on 27 August 2019:
At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of 2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid Biden and Archer’s companies over $3 million.
Subsequently, both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were removed from Burisma’s board and replaced by a four-person board, which mysteriously had included ever since May 2013 (which still was after Zlochevsky no longer controlled the company) Alan Apter, of Sullivan & Cromwell, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Renaissance Capital. Apter now became the “Chairman of the Board of Directors”. Here are the other three Directors: Aleksander Kwaśniewski was the President of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 when it was being taken over by America, and when Kwaśniewski was also a member of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s PR arm), and of the Bilderberg Group. Joseph Cofer Black was the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004), while President George W. Bush was lying America into invading Iraq, and Black subsequently became the Vice Chairman at Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi), which the Bush Government hired to train and arm mercenaries to help conquer Iraq. (Blackwater/Academi is owned by Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune, who is the Trump Secretary of Education, and Prince also is a personal friend of Trump. Obama’s Government also hired Blackwater/Academi to kill independence fighters in the Dnieper Donets Basin, where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas.) And the fourth Director is Karina Zlochevska, whom the site identifies hardly at all, but is actually the daughter of Mykola Zlochevsky. In other words: Zlochevsky probably does remain as a minority owner of the company, and she represents his interests there.
Virtually all of the Western press simply alleges that Mykola Zlochevsky owns Burisma Holdings and brought Biden on board and was his boss; however, I have never seen from any of those ‘news’-reports any evidence or documentation that it’s true — nothing like the sources that Richard Smith relied upon and linked to documenting that this was Kolomoysky’s company. Nothing, at all.
This is important — is it Zlochevsky or Kolomoysky? — because Zlochevsky was associated with the prior Government of Ukraine and its President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the U.S. Government had overthrown in an operation that started in 2011 and that ended very successfully in February 2014 with the American Government’s Victoria Nuland on 27 January 2014 telling the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine to get “Yats” Yatsenyuk appointed to run the country as soon as Yanukovych becomes successfully overthrown — which happened less than a month later, during February 20-22 — and Yatsenyuk then received the appointment on February 26th to run the country, just as Obama’s agent Nuland had instructed. Zlochevsky fled the country, because he had been politically allied with Yanukovych, who also fled the country. Obama’s Government constantly tried to get Zlochevsky prosecuted for alleged corruption, but Zlochevsky had sold the company to Kolomoysky even before Obama took over Ukraine. It’s not at all clear that Hunter Biden had ever so much as just met Zlochevsky.
Joseph Biden, as is well reported in the press, instructed the new Ukrainian Government to fire and replace the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who had failed to prosecute Zlochevsky, and this action by Joe is reported as indicating that the senior Biden granted his son’s employer no favor but instead the opposite — that Joe insisted upon Hunter’s boss’s prosecution.
For example, James Risen, of The Intercept, which is owned by one of the financial backers of the overthrow of Yanukovych, Pierre Omidyar (see this and this and this and this and this and this), headlined on September 25th, “I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.”, and Risen reported that:
The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.
Risen reported there that V.P. Biden’s “anti-corruption message might be undermined by the association of his son Hunter with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
However, none of that press says Kolomoysky owned the company and was its boss. The presumption there is always that Zlochevsky needed to be prosecuted — not that Kolomoysky did. Kolomoysky is simply being written out of the picture altogether — whited-out from it
Also as is typical, the New York Times reported, on 1 May 2019, that Mykola Zlochevsky is the “owner of Burisma Holdings” and that “Mr. Lutsenko initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office. The prosecutor general reversed himself and reopened an investigation into Burisma this year. Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration.” For some mysterious reason, that article not only says that the replacement Prosecutor tried and failed and now tried again to prosecute Zlochevsky but that “Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration,” though, actually, it was the Obama Administration that had been pressing Ukraine’s Government to prosecute Zlochevsky, who wasn’t Hunter Biden’s boss and didn’t control Burisma and was associated not with the 2014 Obama-installed Government of Ukraine but instead with the Government that had preceded it and was the last of all Ukraine’s democratic Governments, having been democratically elected by all of Ukraine including the two regions (Crimea and Donbass) that broke away from Ukraine when Obama in February 2014 overthrew the Government that those two now-breakaway regions had voted for, by over 75% in that 2010 election.
And here is from Wikipedia’s article on “Viktor Shokin”:
The Biden connection[edit]
Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the oil and natural gas company Burisma Holdings, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.[15] In 2014, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings.[16] In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as “an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts”.[17] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[15]
In March 2016, Joe Biden threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that if he did not fire Shokin, that the US would hold back its $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”[18] Shokin was dismissed by Parliament later that month.
Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings.[19][20][21][22] However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.[23] Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma Holdings was criticized as a conflict of interest in a New York Times editorial, though Amos Hochstein has claimed to have never seen coordination between Joe Biden and his son on the matter.[24][25]
And here is from Wikipedia’s Article on “Burisma Holdings”:
History[edit]
Burisma Group was founded in 2002 by Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevsky and Nikolay Lysin [uk]. Now it is owned by Mykola Zlochevskyi [uk], who was minister of natural resources under Viktor Yanukovych.[2] Zlochevsky returned to Ukraine in February 2018 after the corruption investigations into his Burisma Holdings had been completed in December 2017 with no charges filed against him.[3]
So, the myth that Zlochevsky was Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma isn’t only in the ‘news’-media that are controlled by U.S. Deep State that controls the CIA, which controls America’s major ‘news’-media, but it is also in the Web’s main encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is not only edited by the CIA, but also, to some extent, written by the CIA.
Furthermore, the CIA was the ‘whistleblower’ that made the impeachment-charge to the Democratic Party head of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff, who is the lead proponent of impeaching Donald Trump so that Trump can then become tried in the U.S. Senate, which then would possess the power to replace Trump and make President the current Vice President, Mike Pence, which Democrats, for some unexplained reason, seem to hope will happen. As Reuters reported on September 26th, “The whistleblower is a CIA officer and was assigned at one point to work at the White House, two sources familiar with the probe into his complaint said. The New York Times first identified the whistleblower as a CIA officer, which Reuters confirmed.” That report also asserted:
The call occurred after Trump had ordered a freeze of nearly $400 million in American aid to Ukraine, which was only later released. Before the call, Ukraine’s government was told that interaction between Zelenskiy and Trump depended on whether the Ukrainian leader would “play ball,” the whistleblower said.
The report said Trump acted to advance his personal political interests, risking national security.
“I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute ‘a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order,’” the whistleblower complaint, dated Aug. 12, said.
The same CIA whose lies had ‘justified’ America’s invading Iraq in 2003, and invading Libya in 2011, and invading Syria starting in 2012 (and extending there up till at least 2018), is now ‘justifying’ congressional Democrats to replace Trump by Pence if they possibly can.
And Kolomoysky might be one of the world’s biggest thieves. On 19 April 2019, Graham Stack reported for OCCRP, a U.S.-and-allied-funded nonprofit anti-corruption investigatory organization that
“‘Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank [PrivatBank] shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,’ [Valeria] Hontareva [former chair of Ukranie’s central bank] said in March 2018. ‘This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.’ … By the time regulators took over PrivatBank, the $5.5 billion had already been transferred to banks in Austria, Luxembourg, and Latvia. From there, the trail goes cold. … This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report … is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP. … Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers with a $5.9 billion bailout.”
There’s nothing that Zlochevsky was even accused of which exceeded tens of millions of dollars in losses. In Ukraine, that’s tiny.
Furthermore, the estimable and reliably accurate Moscow investigative journalist John Helmer reported on 19 February 2015 that “In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky.” Obama’s people (there via the U.S. regime’s lap-dog UK) were targeting Zlochevsky, certainly not Kolomoysky, who was instead on their team.
Zelensky, prior to becoming Ukraine’s President, had been the star of a popular comedy series on Ukrainian television that was telecast by Ihor Kolomoysky’s 1+1 Media group. On 19 May 2014, Forbes published a shockingly honest article, by Vladimir Golstein, “Why Everything You’ve Read About Ukraine Is Wrong”, which mentioned, about Kolomoysky, that,
His business holdings include the largest Ukrainian media group, “1+1 Media,” the news agency “Unian,” as well as various internet sites, which enable him to whip public opinion into an anti-Putin frenzy. Andrew Higgins of The New York Times published a story with the headline, “Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry is Putin, Not Pogroms,” which praises Kolomoisky for adorning Dnepropetrovsk with “the world’s biggest Jewish community center” along with “a high tech Holocaust museum.” Higgins notes, however, that the museum “skirts the delicate issue of how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with Nazis.
Kolomoysky himself had become installed by the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian agents as the Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine where his approximately $5 billion financial empire was based, and which in its north extends into the Dnieper Donets Basin where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas. As this last link indicates, that Basin “is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked shale gas in place.” That article, from the investment-oriented website Zero Hedge, sums up:
In a nutshell, Ukraine (or rather its puppetmasters) has decided to let no crisis (staged or otherwise) or rather civil war, go to waste, and while the fighting rages all around, Ukrainian troopers are helping to install shale gas production equipment near the east Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, which was bombed and shelled [by the Obama-installed Government] for the three preceding months, according to local residents cited by Itar Tass. The reason for the scramble? Under peacetime, the process was expected to take many years, during which Europe would be under the energy dictatorship of Putin. But throw in some civil war and few will notice let alone care that a process which was expected to take nearly a decade if not longer while dealing with broad popular objections to fracking, may instead be completed in months!
Ukraine’s bombing of that region (for examples, this and this and this) was in order to clear the land for a massive fracking operation. However, it turned out that not only Kolomoysky’s operation with Shell in the Dnieper Donets Basin in Ukraine’s far east, but also the Ukrainian Government’s own gas-exploration operation with Chevron in western Ukraine’s Olesska field, were uneconomic; or, as I headlined about them on 16 December 2014, “Ukraine’s Two Big Gas Deals Are Now Both Dry”. It seems that if Hunter Biden is to become a billionaire, it won’t come from Ukrainian gas. (Nor, of course will it have come from Zlochevsky, which the news-media would have it to be.)
As was reported on 20 May 2014 by Israel Shamir at the website of Paul Craig Roberts, under the headline “The Ukraine in Turmoil” (and his article there was the first comprehensive and accurate summary of what had recently happened to Ukraine):
These people had brought Ukraine to its present abject state. In 1991, the Ukraine was richer than Russia, today it is three times poorer because of these people’s mismanagement and theft. Now they plan an old trick: to take loans in Ukraine’s name, pocket the cash and leave the country indebted. They sell state assets to Western companies and ask for NATO to come in and protect the investment.
They play a hard game, brass knuckles and all. The Black Guard, a new SS-like armed force of the neo-nazi Right Sector, prowls the land. They arrest or kill dissidents, activists, journalists. Hundreds of American soldiers, belonging to the “private” company Academi (formerly Blackwater) are spread out in Novorossia [Donbass, the far-eastern region that became independent after Obama’s coup], the pro-Russian provinces in the East and South-East. IMF–dictated reforms slashed pensions by half and doubled the housing rents. In the market, US Army rations took the place of local food.
The new Kiev regime had dropped the last pretence of democracy by expelling the Communists from the parliament. This should endear them to the US even more. Expel Communists, apply for NATO, condemn Russia, arrange a gay parade and you may do anything at all, even fry dozens of citizens alive. And so they did.
The harshest repressions were unleashed on industrial Novorossia, as its working class loathes the whole lot of oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. After the blazing inferno of Odessa and a wanton shooting on the streets of Melitopol the two rebellious provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk took up arms and declared their independence from the Kiev regime.
And then, to top it off, there is the brilliant pewreport blogger, who, on 27 July 2014, headlined “USAID to Help Young Biden: The Burisma File”, and that anonymous person succinctly laid out the use of the U.S. Government to enable the families of some of its top officials to join America’s aristocracy, the billionaire class. It’s something that Trump himself is intimately involved with and exploits, but if America’s national and international police-agencies such as the FBI and CIA are trying (first with Russiagate, and now with Ukrainegate) to replace him by Pence in order to enable another friend of Obama to become installed (like Hillary was supposed to have been) as President and Commander-in-Chief, then this struggle between the agents of America’s Democratic Party billionaires versus those of its Republican Party billionaires could end up having consequences that no one is predicting.
It’s also important to point out here that Zelensky’s predecessor, Poroshenko, was not Obama’s first choice to win the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian election that followed the February 2014 coup and installation of Yatsenyuk to run the country on an interim basis. Yatsenyuk was supposed to run it until that election (after which Yatsenyuk still continued long in office, and Obama pushed as hard as possible for President Poroshenko to continue Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s policies). Obama’s first choice — and the planned winner — in the 25 May 2014 election, was an intense hater of Russia, Yulia Tymoshenko. Yatsenyuk had actually been her agent. Kolomoysky was perhaps her main financial backer. But she lost the election to Obama’s second choice, Poroshenko. Kolomoysky was enough of a supporter of Tymoshenko so that even after he returned to Ukraine on 16 May 2019 just prior to the latest Presidential election, he backed her even above Zelensky. But above all, he opposed Poroshenko, because Poroshenko had been forced by the main lenders to his Government to fire Kolomoysky as governor of Dnipropetrovsk and to nationalize his bankrupt PrivatBank due to Kolomoysky’s having been looting from Ukraine’s Government too much money via his bank and via his minority ownership of the Government’s gas company. Obama had wanted that money to go toward the war against Donbass, not into Kolomoysky’s pockets. (However, America’s Democratic-Party propaganda ‘non-profit’ Public Radio International gave a positive spin to Obama-team-member Kolomoysky even at the time of his firing by Poroshenko on 28 March 2015, saying of him, “He offered $10,000 bounties for captured pro-Russian insurgents. ‘People understand that this person came here to ensure stability,’ said Stanislav Zholudev, a local political analyst.” The euphemism “captured pro-Russian insurgents” was actually referring to their corpses — Kolomoysky was paying only for their corpses. Maybe for Obama-ites that’s “stability.” Kolomoysky was already paying the nazi Azov Battalion more than that per pro-Russian corpse, and now the Trump Administration wants Kolomoysky to be prosecuted for financial crimes instead of Zlochevsky to be prosecuted, and so Zelensky is being pushed one way by Democrats, and the opposite way by Republicans.) Kolomoysky has many enemies. The main holders of Ukraine’s debt are unknown, but besides Russia which had lent to the pre-coup Government (and were thus trying to get their senior money that’s owing from Ukraine to be paid to Russia before the newer creditors get theirs), they were said to be the IMF, America’s Franklin Templeton Fund, and Blackstone Group, the World Bank, and a group of mainly American billionaires “and private Eurobond holders” who are represented by the law firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges. The U.S. Government and EU countries were also said to be indirectly such holders via their ownership shares in the IMF and World Bank, but also perhaps more directly. (If Trump were a decent President, he’d be publicly pressing for the exact numbers on all of this.) Kolomoysky’s siphonings from Ukraine’s Government were at the expense of all of them. The pressures upon Poroshenko to halt it were mounting. And, so, Kolomoysky was fired; and, now, to the extent that Zelensky has to satisfy Kolomoysky, Zelensky (who publicly said of Kolomoysky “He is my business partner”) needs to resist some of the demands of the U.S. regime and of many other billionaires. Without their continued support, Ukraine’s Government will collapse in the short term instead of only (which is inevitable) in the long term. It’s no longer just a question of the Ukrainian regime’s war against Donbass. The change that Obama wrought is permanent, and Trump dithers back and forth about how to deal with it. He apparently has no strategy on that.
Zelensky might fear that if he complies with Trump’s request, then his own major benefactor, Kolomoysky, could end up in prison somewhere; and Trump might fear that if he presses Zelensky on that (as he did not do but Democrats say he did), then the entire Deep State — not only Democratic Party billionaires, but also now Republican ones — will become Trump’s enemies, and his 2020 re-election chances will therefore go to zero. Consequently: Trump will probably abandon the matter, and the till-now-unsupported and maybe unsupportable mere assumption, that Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian benefactor was Zlochevsky instead of Kolomoysky, will continue to be asserted virtually everywhere throughout the U.S. empire, for as long a time as the matter continues to remain in the ‘news’. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, then Joe Biden will continue to be portrayed in this matter as having been a crusader against corruption in Ukraine, instead of as having been the aspiring founder of yet another billionaire American dynasty.
Basically, the new Russiagate charges to replace Trump by Pence, Ukrainegate (as those charges were presented by the CIA ‘whistleblower’ on August 12th and published on September 26th), represent all of the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and many of the Republican Party’s ones, as well. It’s the pinnacle of the Obama-versus-Trump feud, because it represents the Democratic Party’s position on what was Obama’s top international achievement — his conquest (via a coup) against Ukraine. Trump refuses to condemn Obama’s coup against Ukraine, but if he cared about the truth, he would, and the worst that could happen to him then would be that, for once in his life, he’d be fighting for truth, and not just for himself. Apparently, that’s too big a leap for him to take.
What’s especially pathetic in all of this is that whenever the U.S. Government overthrows and destroys a country, it’s trumpeted as reflecting America’s standing-up for rule-of-law and opposition to corruption, and for support of democracy and protection of human rights; but whenever Russia or a nation that’s friendly toward Russia resists control by the U.S. and its allies, it’s portrayed as being a dictatorship and an opponent of democracy and of human rights. So, go figure.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2020 12:02 pm Post subject:
Trump administration ousts almost all of Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
By Lia EustachewichNovember 27, 2020 | 12:20pm | Updated
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Eleven members of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board have been abruptly booted by the outgoing Trump administration, according to a new report.
Pentagon liaison Joshua Whitehouse sent the directive Wednesday afternoon, multiple sources told Foreign Policy.
Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright; retired Adm. Gary Roughead; onetime ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Jane Harman; and Rudy De Leon, a former chief operating officer at the Pentagon were all removed, effective immediately.
Also ousted were former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and former Treasury Department undersecretary David McCormick, former deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick; chief US nuclear negotiator Robert Joseph; former Deputy National Security Advisor JD Crouch II; and former top defense official Franklin Miller.
The status of the other two members on the board was unclear.
Enlarge ImageDonald Trump
Donald Trump
Getty Images
The Defense Policy Board provides top-ranking Pentagon officials with independent, informed advice and and opinion on matters of defense policy.
The Defense Department confirmed the move in a statement to Foreign Policy.
Enlarge ImageFormer House Majority Leader Eric Cantor
Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor
EPA
“As part of long-considered changes, we can confirm that several members of the Department’s Defense Policy Board have been removed,” an official said. “We are extremely grateful for their dedicated service, commitment, and contributions to our national security. Future announcements for new members of the board will be made soon.”
The Trump administration had sought to appoint members loyal to the president to the board but got pushback from former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson.
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