Solomon Archives - The Automatic Earth

China has a debt problem. “Zero or negative rates monetary conditions don’t mean that debt issues and the asset bubble problem will be resolved automatically, but the opposite..”

• China Needs To Prepare For Zero Interest Rates (Global Times)

The US Federal Reserve’s (Fed) continuous interest rates cuts have triggered a race of interest rates cuts among central banks around the world, increasing excessive global liquidity even further. In this case, more countries are faced with monetary conditions of zero or negative rates. Recently, former US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan noted that “negative rates” are spreading around the world. Some financial institutions even believe the world will enter a low rates condition that hasn’t occurred in 1,000 years. Under the condition of low or zero rates, the world’s debts level keeps rising, and the bond yields continue dropping. Another phenomenon comes with low rates monetary condition is that prices go up with risk asset. The US stock prices have climbed to a new high.

For China, the demands for liquidity are growing, foreign capital keeps flowing in and the real economy continues to slow down, which all make the country seemingly approaching a zero rates monetary condition. It asks policymakers and market players to be prepared. Mounting debts and the financing problems in the real economy will promote China to a zero rate condition. In the first half of 2019, China’s overall debts accounted for 306 percent of the GDP, up 2 percentage points from the 304 percent in the first quarter, according to a report from the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The number was just around 200 percent in 2009 and 130 percent in 1999.

According to data from the National Institution for Finance and Development, China’s enterprise sector’s debts account for 155.7 percent of the nominal GDP, up 2.2 percentage points from the end of last year. It’s far beyond the government sector’s leverage ratio of 38.5 percent and the resident sector’s leverage ratio of 55.3 percent. In the enterprise sector, private companies embattled with financing problems account for 30 percent. Structurally, China’s non-financial corporate debt ratio is too high, and interest rates are too high. Considering that the repayment burden of existing debt has squeezed out the effective demand for new credit, and China is likely to become the next zero interest rate country, according to Zhu Haibin, Chief China Economist at J.P. Morgan.

Tyler’s take on the article above: “..it will only infuriate Trump who has been kicking and screaming at Jerome Powell, demanding that the Fed do just that.”

• China Will Be The Next Country To Cut Rates To Zero (ZH)

[..] an English language op-ed published today in China’s nationalist tabloid, Global Times, which for once, is surprisingly accurate, and while mostly avoiding the propaganda that Chinese media is so well known for, explains well why China may indeed be the next country to see zero rates (as a reminder, Chinese real rates are already negative due to soaring pork prices). And while we doubt that the PBOC will be able to cut enough to bring about ZIRP, or NIRP, any time soon especially due to the ongoing hyperinflation in pork prices, if and when those do stabilize the Chinese central bank may well follow in the footsteps of every other developed central bank. In doing so, it will only infuriate Trump who has been kicking and screaming at Jerome Powell, demanding that the Fed do just that.

What we find most remarkable about the op-ed is how simply, matter-of-factly and correctly, the author explains away why zero rates are coming: “Mounting debts and the financing problems in the real economy will promote China to a zero rate condition [..] Structurally, China’s non-financial corporate debt ratio is too high, and interest rates are too high. Considering that the repayment burden of existing debt has squeezed out the effective demand for new credit, and China is likely to become the next zero interest rate country”. Amusingly, the anonymous op-ed writer has managed to state in two sentences what takes financial pundits hours, days and weeks to explain on CNBC: “Another phenomenon comes with low rates monetary condition is that prices go up with risk asset. The US stock prices have climbed to a new high.”

That said, what we found most surprising about the Global Times oped is its conclusion: instead of some jingoist bullshit about how China’s negative rates would be the greatest, and most negative in the entire world, the publication takes a very measured tone, and warns that such a monetary stance may very well spell doom for China, to wit: “Zero or negative rates monetary conditions don’t mean that debt issues and the asset bubble problem will be resolved automatically, but the opposite. Growing bubbles in the global financial market in the long run will be a reminder of financial risks. In a slowing global economy, zero or even negative interest monetary conditions are a new trend that gives new risks and challenges to China and the international financial market. Awareness and responsiveness need to be revamped.”

Pro-democracy camp wins 17 out of 18 district councils, all of which were previously under pro-establishment control. Record voter turnout.

Beijing really thought its candidates would win?

• Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Candidates Win 347 of 452 Seats (SCMP)

The anti-establishment reverberations from almost six months of street protests swept through polling stations across Hong Kong on Sunday, as voters in record numbers roundly rejected pro-Beijing candidates in favour of pan-democrats. The tsunami of disaffection among voters was clear across the board, as pan-democrats rode the wave to win big in poor and rich neighbourhoods, in both protest-prone and non-protest-afflicted districts and, in downtown areas as well as the suburbs. Less immediately obvious was whether there was a generational divide in the way people voted, but ousted pro-establishment district councillors suggested that young, first-time voters had been instrumental in dislodging them from their perch.

The final election results were confirmed at 1pm on Monday when the vote count was completed at Lam Tin constituency of Kwun Tong District Council. Among the 452 seats up for grabs, the pan-democrats were victorious in 347, the independents – many of them pro-democracy – won 45, while the pro-establishment camp had to make do with 60. The pro-democracy camp now has control of 17 out of 18 district councils. It won all elected seats in Wong Tai Sin and Tai Po district councils.

The Irish Times publishes 9 articles based on “a small cache of secret documents, being called the China Cables, that were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)”.

This is from the first article: “‘The largest incarceration of a minority since the Holocaust’”. Click the link for the ‘library’.

Yves Smith: “The Irish Times did terrific additional reporting on the ICIJ docs. Must reading.”

• China Cables (Irish Times)

Dormitory doors, corridor doors, and floor doors must be double-locked, and must be locked immediately after being opened and closed.” “Strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes during class, eating periods, toilet breaks, bath time, medical treatment, family visits, etc.” The quotes are from instructions issued by a top security official in the Xinjiang province of China, where since 2017 more than a million people from Uighur and other ethnic minority groups are being kept in camps. The Chinese authorities, who at first denied the camps existed, then said they were there to provide “educational training” to “students” in centres that had a “boarding school” type of management. “It is strictly forbidden for police to enter the student zone with guns, and they must never allow escapes, never allow trouble, never allow attacks on staff, never allow abnormal deaths.”

Contained in a telegram called “New Secret 5656”, the instructions were written in 2017, when the policy of incarcerating people from ethnic minorities in Xinjiang was being put into effect on an industrial scale. The telegram is among a small cache of secret documents, being called the China Cables, that were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and have been shared with 17 media partners, including The Irish Times, the BBC, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the US TV network, NBC. The leak puts to rest attempts by the Chinese government to portray the facilities in the western province of Xinjiang as anything other than internment camps.

Adrian Zenz, a recognised authority on what is happening in Xinjiang, told the ICIJ he believes the reference in the instructions to not allowing “abnormal deaths” has to do with torture. The telegram does not mention torture, “but the fact that it mentions the avoidance of abnormal deaths, in my opinion, is an indication that [the camp system] is using forms of physical force on people that, however, is not supposed to kill them.” People are being put in chain-suits, are being made stand in certain positions, and are being beaten, said Zenz. Other harsher forms of torture are being meted out in prisons and detention centres.

In October a former detainee, Sayragul Sauytbay, a muslim of Kazakh descent who has been granted asylum in Sweden, told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that some inmates were made sit on a chair of nails. “I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.” The “special secrecy level” instructions in the telegram were issued by Zhu Hailun, the then head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Political and Legal Commission (PLC) in Xinjiang, and the senior party official then responsible for the implementation of the campaign of repression in Xinjiang.

Blair’s attacking Corbyn until he loses.

• Both UK Parties Are Peddling Fantasies – Tony Blair (R.)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn are peddling fantasies before a Dec. 12 election, former British leader Tony Blair will say on Monday, offering his support to “mainstream” politicians. At a newsmaker event at Reuters, Blair will criticise Britain’s main parties for offering voters a stark choice, wanting to win “on the basis that whatever your dislike of what they’re offering, the alternative is worse”. Held after three years of negotiations to leave the European Union since a 2016 referendum, the December election will show how far Brexit has torn traditional political allegiances apart and will test an electorate increasingly tired of voting.

Blair, who was prime minister for 10 years until 2007, will say many in Britain are “scratching their heads, changing their minds, floating and unsure” before the election. “The unifying sentiment is a desire, bordering on the febrile, to end the mess, to wake from the nightmare,” he will say, according to extracts from his speech. “This desire, though completely understandable, is in danger of leading us into a big mistake; and frankly we cannot afford another of those.” Blair will accuse both parties of offering up a fantasy to voters – the Conservatives suggesting they will get Brexit done when the reality is that they will start new talks on a future relationship which “could last for years”. Equally, he will say that Labour, under veteran socialist Corbyn, is offering a “revolution”. “The problem with revolutions is never how they begin but how they end.”

“President tries to do something. Congress opposes. President sees he has no support and backs down. It has happened many, many times with many, many presidents.”

• Why Did Trump Release Ukraine Aid? The Answer Is Simple (York)

Trump’s true reason for releasing the aid matters to the Democratic impeachment scheme. If he released the money after learning about the whistleblower — after he realized the jig was up — then that, at least to Democrats, suggests guilt. If he released it after gaining confidence in Zelensky, that does not suggest guilt. But the evidence suggests that neither explanation is correct, that there is a much simpler reason for Trump’s decision to release the aid. On the day he OK’d the aid, Trump learned that Congress was going to force his hand and spend the money anyway. He could either go along or get run over.

On Sept. 11, the White House received a draft of a continuing resolution, produced by House Democrats, that would extend funding for the federal government. Among other provisions, the bill would push the Ukraine money out the door, whether in the final days of fiscal year 2019 or in 2020, regardless of what the president did. “The draft continuing resolution … would on September 30 immediately free up the remainder of the $250 million appropriated for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative in the fiscal 2019 Defense spending law and extend its availability for another year,” Roll Call reported a little after noon on Sept. 11.

According to knowledgeable sources, the Office of Management and Budget received the draft on the morning of Sept. 11. OMB Director Russell Vought informed the president around mid-day. There was no doubt the Democratic-controlled House would pass the measure, which was needed to avoid a government shutdown. Later that afternoon, Trump — who must have already known that the Republican-controlled Senate would also support the bill — had the point emphasized to him when he received a call from Republican Sen. Rob Portman.

Portman, and Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin co-chairs the Senate Ukraine Caucus. Along with several other senators, Portman wrote to the White House on Sept. 3, imploring the president to release the aid. On Sept. 11, Portman felt the need to talk again, with the same message — only this time with the backdrop of the House preparing to pass a bill that would force Trump’s hand. At that point, the president knew he could not maintain the hold on aid in the face of bipartisan congressional action. So he gave in. By early evening on Sept. 11, the hold was lifted. It was an entirely unremarkable end to the story: President tries to do something. Congress opposes. President sees he has no support and backs down. It has happened many, many times with many, many presidents.

Video at the link. Still trying to understand why he has so suddenly come under attack. He had been writing about this for a long time.

“The message was clear: Don’t touch these people,” Solomon said. “And the State Department confirms they delivered that message. How can this be such a big factual dispute? Now we’re debating the word list. She delivered the message.”

• John Solomon: They ‘Smeared Me, Just Like Joe McCarthy Smeared People’ (Med.)

After coming under a great deal of scrutiny during the House Intelligence committee’s impeachment hearings over the past two week’s, Fox News contributor John Solomon is firing back — claiming that he was smeared. Solomon sat for an interview Thursday night with Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on The Story. The segment marked a rare appearance on a news side program for the Fox News contributor — as opposed to the opinion shows like Hannity on which he is a staple. During the interview, Solomon — a former columnist for the Hill whose controversial work on Ukraine is now being subjected to an internal review — claimed he’s being targeted because much of his reporting is favorable to President Donald Trump.

“I’m probably being punished a lot because the president’s mentioned me, he likes my reporting,” Solomon said. “But I don’t report because it makes the president happy. I report because the truth needs to get out there.” MacCallum asked Solomon about the claims made by former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch that she was the target of a smear campaign led by a former top Ukraine prosecutor and Rudy Giuliani — with Solomon and several conservative media figures circulating negative stories about her. In particular, one article in which Solomon claimed that Yovanovitch pressured Ukraine into not prosecuting a number of people. Solomon stood by his work. “The message was clear: Don’t touch these people,” Solomon said. “And the State Department confirms they delivered that message. How can this be such a big factual dispute? Now we’re debating the word list. She delivered the message.”

Adams is promoting his new book, Loserthink.

“..the two most influential politicians in the United States: [..] President Trump and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez..”

• Stop Being A Loser And Start Winning Like Trump (Scott Adams)

At the time of this writing, the two most influential politicians in the United States are a real estate developer who became president and a bartender who got elected to Congress. I’m talking about President Trump and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The most striking thing they have in common is that they did not “stay in their lanes,” and it worked out great for them. Likewise, you would not be reading this, and the “Dilbert” comic strip would not exist, if I had “stayed in my lane,” which at the time meant working in a cubicle. My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization.

The world as we know it was engineered, designed, and built by people who left their lane and tried something outside their temporary skill stack. They figured it out as they went. I’ll agree that one size doesn’t fit all, and some people probably should stick to what they do best. But I wouldn’t want society to decide that staying in one lane is some sort of obvious wisdom. In my experience, the smartest plan for life is to leave your lane as often as you can (without inviting major risk) to pick up skills that will complement your talent stack. The more skills you have, the more valuable you will be, although you won’t necessarily know in advance where it will take you.

If you happen to be one of the best in the world at some specific skill, such as sports, music, or science — and you like what you do — it might make perfect sense to “stay in your lane” and milk that situation for all it is worth. But most of us are not the best in the world, or anywhere near it, at any particular skill. If that describes you, I recommend leaving your lane often — even at the risk of embarrassment — to pick up new skills and new ways to see the world.

DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information.

• I Ditched Google For DuckDuckGo. Here’s Why You Should Too (Wired)

What was the last thing you searched for online? For me, it was ‘$120 in pounds’. Before that, I wanted to know the capital of Albania (Tirana), the Twitter handle of Liberal Democrat deputy leader Ed Davey (he’s @EdwardJDavey) and dates of bank holidays in the UK for 2019 (it’s a late Easter next year, folks). Thrilling, I’m sure you’ll agree. But something makes these searches, in internet terms, a bit unusual. Shock, horror, I didn’t use Google. I used DuckDuckGo. And, after two years in the wilderness, I’m pretty sure I’m sold on a post-Google future. It all started with a realisation: most the things I search for are easy to find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to assist me? Probably not.

So I made a simple change: I opened up Firefox on my Android phone and switched Google search for DuckDuckGo. As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema.

While I continue to use Google at work (more out of necessity as my employer runs on G-Suite), on my phone I’m all about DuckDuckGo. I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After two years of not being tracked and targeted I have slowly come to realise that this is nonsense. DuckDuckGo works in broadly the same way as any other search engine, Google included. It combines data from hundreds of sources including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Bing, with its own web crawler, to surface the most relevant results. Google does exactly the same, albeit on a somewhat larger scale. The key difference: DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information.

A letter signed by 60 medical doctors from around the world: “Medical doctors have a professional duty to report suspected torture of which they become aware, wherever it may be occurring.”

They will be ignored.

• Doctors Petition UK Home Secretary Over Julian Assange (CN)

Open Letter to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott

We write this open letter, as medical doctors, to express our serious concerns about the physical and mental health of Julian Assange. Our professional concerns follow publication recently of the harrowing eyewitness accounts of Craig Murray and John Pilger of the case management hearing on Monday 21 October 2019 at Westminster Magistrates Court. The hearing related to the upcoming February 2020 hearing of the request by the US government for Mr Assange’s extradition to the US in relation to his work as a publisher of information, including information about alleged crimes of the US government. Our concerns were further heightened by the publication on 1 November 2019 of a further report of Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in which he stated: ‘Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.’

[..] Medical doctors have a professional duty to report suspected torture of which they become aware, wherever it may be occurring. That professional duty is absolute and must be carried out regardless of risk to reporting doctors. We wish to put on record, as medical doctors, our collective serious concerns and to draw the attention of the public and the world to this grave situation. The World Health Organisation Constitution of 1946 envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being.’20 We are indebted to those who have sought to uphold this right in the case of Mr Assange.

From a medical point of view, on the evidence currently available, we have serious concerns about Mr Assange’s fitness to stand trial in February 2020. Most importantly, it is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health. Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care). Were such urgent assessment and treatment not to take place, we have real concerns, on the evidence currently available, that Mr Assange could die in prison. The medical situation is thereby urgent. There is no time to lose.

I warned about the new right-wing government.

• Aid Groups Condemn Greece Over ‘Prison’ Camps For Migrants, Refugees (G.)

Greece is poised to create “prison” island camps, say aid groups amid growing criticism of government plans to overhaul refugee reception centres on Aegean outposts facing Turkey. As the UN refugee agency’s top official, Filippo Grandi, prepared this week to fly to Lesbos, where almost 16,000 people are crammed into a single facility, Athens was criticised for adopting legislation in contravention of basic human rights. Disquiet mounted as the centre-right administration, which was elected on a tough law and order platform in July, declared that the country again at the forefront of the migration crisis had “reached its limits”. Announcing measures to tackle a significant increase in arrivals, not seen at such levels since 2015 when nearly a million Syrians entered Europe via the isles, it promised future policies would be defined by deterrence.

Under the scheme, closed installations will replace vastly overcrowded, open-air camps; land and sea borders will be reinforced with about 1,200 more guards and extra patrol vessels and deportations stepped up. “We are in the eye of the storm,” said the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, conceding that pressure on Greece to patrol its eastern frontiers had risen dramatically in the wake of Europe’s decision to seal off the nation’s northern borders against migrant flows. “The country needs a national strategy.” With the new structures, which are built to hold no more than 5,000 people, the era “of shameful scenes” spawned by the deplorable conditions of notorious island camps would, he vowed, finally be replaced “by images of modern, properly functioning installations”.

International aid groups have overwhelmingly condemned the measures. After criticising asylum legislation also passed this month, they predicted the remodelled facilities would only exacerbate the humanitarian disaster unfolding on Europe’s frontiers. Martha Roussou, senior advocacy officer for the International Rescue Committee in Greece, said: “The government’s announcements represent a blatant disregard for human rights. The creation of closed facilities will simply mean that extremely vulnerable people, including children, will be kept in prison-like conditions, without having committed any crime.”

The Greek branch of Amnesty International called the plans “outrageous”. Likening Lesbos’s infamous Moria refugee camp to a “human rights black hole”, it said: “In reality, we are talking about the creation of contemporary jails with inhumane consequences for asylum seekers, and more widely, negative consequences for the Aegean islands and their inhabitants.” About 37,000 asylum seekers are trapped on islands that since the summer have been targeted with renewed vigour by traffickers.

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Debt Rattle November 23 2019

Nov 232019

November 23, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Bill Barr, Burisma, Epstein, insects, JFK, Solomon, Ukraine, Vindman 9 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Drought hit OK farm family on way to CA Aug 1936

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)

• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)

• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)

• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)

• The Storms of December (Kunstler)

• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)

• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)

• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)

• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)

• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)

• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

There’s a new Orange Man Bad “bombshell” going around, something about Giuliani and Mike Pompeo being in cahoots about Ukraine and “dirt on Biden”. It’s trying to make John Solomon part of the “conspiracy” as well. You’ll hear a lot about it. Meanwhile, CD Media continues:

• Former Ukraine MP: Bidens Got $12M Kickback From Burisma Owner (CDM)

Update: In further clarification of information provided, CD Media can now report that the $32M referenced below was sent to London, where it was seized by British officials and criminal charges were levied against Zlochevsky. Vice President Biden actively sought to have the charges thrown out in the United Kingdom for Zlochevsky in exchange for the $12M being diverted to Hunter Biden, according to Onyshchenko. Hunter Biden was then brought onto the board of directors at Zlochevsky’s company Burisma and received further payments of $3.1M over a period of months.

KYIV — Former Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko has provided CD Media with information on a transaction in 2013 where Biden family-related companies allegedly received a $12 million illegal kickback while Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States. Onyshchenko alleges the payment was made to gain Biden’s influence in affairs of the group of companies called Burisma owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who sold a port facility in Ukraine and shifted partial proceeds of the sale to Hunter Biden. CD Media has already reported on ‘off the books’ payments to Hunter Biden by Burisma.

Onyshchenko alleges that during the sale of the port of Kherson on the Dnepr River in Ukraine in 2013 for approximately $32M, Biden received $12M of that amount illegally. Onyshchenko declared to CD Media that he is providing this information on the money flows to Biden to the U.S. Department of Justice

It wasn’t all Burisma.

• MSM Ignores Hunter Biden Buds’ $130 Million Taxpayer Cookie Jar Raid (ZH)

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner reported that an investment firm central to Hunter Biden’s financial dealings received more than $130 million in federal bailout loans while Joe Biden was vice president. Rosemont Capital – named after former Secretary of State John Kerry’s 90-acre Heinz family estate outside of Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania – was founded by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and longtime friend Devon Archer. According to the report, Rosemont was one of just 177 firms to participate in Obama’s 2009 Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which issued billions of dollars in favorable loans to investors who agreed to buy bonds from struggling banks, including college and auto loans.

“The Federal Reserve funded as much as 90% of the investments. If the bonds were profitable, the borrowers benefited. If not, the department agreed to take over the depreciated assets with no repercussions for the borrowers. Under the terms for the program, any U.S. company looking to invest in select categories of bonds was eligible to apply for the loans. However, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve maintained the “right to reject a borrower for any reason,” and the internal selection process was criticized by some lawmakers as opaque and open to corruption. One of the firms that benefited was Rosemont Capital, a company led by Hunter Biden’s business partners, Chris Heinz and Devon Archer. The firm received the loans at a crucial time for Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had stepped down from his lobbying business in late 2008, reportedly due to pressure on his father’s vice presidential campaign.” -Washington Examiner

And while the Examiner reviewed “federal banking and corporate records” for their report, the MSM is completely silent about this obvious graft. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and FOX have all been radio silent on this report.

Davis Stockman in excellent -long- form. There’s a link to part 1 in the article.

• The Ukrainian Influence-Peddling Rings, Part 2 (Stockman)

Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and Tuesday’s testimony before Adam’s Schiff Show by former NSC official Tim Morrison is just such an occasion. In spades! In his opening statement, this paranoid moron uttered the following lunacy, and it’s all you need to know about what is really going on down in the Imperial City. “I continue to believe Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. Russia is a failing power, but it is still a dangerous one. The United States aids Ukraine and her people so they can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Folks, that just plain whacko. The Trump-hating Dems are so feverishly set on a POTUS kill that they have enlisted a veritable posse of Russophobic, right-wing neocon cretins – Morrison, Taylor, Kent, Vindman, among others – to finish off the Donald. But in so doing they have made official Washington’s real beef against Trump crystal clear; and it’s not about the rule of law or abuse of presidential power or an impeachable dereliction of duty. To be sure, foolish politicians like Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Clintonista apparatus at the center of the Dem party are so overcome with inconsolable grief and anger about losing the 2016 election to Trump that their sole purpose in life is to drive the Donald from office. But that just makes them “useful idiots” or compliant handmaids of the Deep State, which has a far more encompassing and consequential motivation.

To wit, whether out of naiveté, contrariness or just plain common sense, the Donald has declined to embrace the War Party’s Russian bogeyman and demonization of Putin. He thereby threatens the Empire’s raison d’être to the very core. Indeed, that’s the real reason for the whole concerted attack on Trump from the Russian Collusion hoax, through the Mueller Investigation farce to the present UkraineGate and impeachment inquisition. The Deep State deeply and profoundly fears that if Trump remains in office – and especially if he is elected with a new mandate in 2020 – he might actually make peace with Russia and Putin. So in Part 1 we advert to the basics. Without the demonization of Russia, Ukraine would be the no count failed state and cesspool of corruption it actually is, and not a purported “front line” buffer against Russian aggression.

Likewise, it would not have been a recipient of vast US and western military and economic aid – a condition that turned it into a honeypot for the kind of Washington influence peddling which ensnared the Bidens, induced its officials to meddle in the 2016 US election, and, in return, incited Trump’s justifiable quest to get to the bottom of the malignancy that has ensued.

SUPERCUT: Media trying their best to hype "Bombshell!" "Explosive!" impeachment hearings pic.twitter.com/q3TzIFCOmu

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 22, 2019

I have no space for all 28 “primary factual elements” here. But do read them.

• Responding to Lt. Col. Vindman About My Ukraine Columns (Solomon)

I honor and applaud Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s service to his country. He’s a hero. I also respect his decision to testify at the impeachment proceedings. I suspect neither his service nor his testimony was easy. But I also know the liberties that Lt. Col. Vindman fought on the battlefield to preserve permit for a free and honest debate in America, one that can’t be muted by the color of uniform or the crushing power of the state. So I want to exercise my right to debate Lt. Col. Vindman about the testimony he gave about me. You see, under oath to Congress, he asserted all the factual elements in my columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe my grammar

Here are his exact words: “I think all the key elements were false,” Vindman testified. Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y, pressed him about what he meant. “Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements, are you referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?” “All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false…. Were there more items in there, frankly, congressman? I don’t recall. I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.” Such testimony has been injurious to my reputation, one earned during 30 years of impactful reporting for news organizations that included The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Daily Beast/Newsweek.

And so Lt. Col. Vindman, here are the 28 primary factual elements in my Ukraine columns, complete with attribution and links to sourcing. Please tell me which, if any, was factually wrong.

“The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory.”

• The Storms of December (Kunstler)

If the senate majority poohbahs were wise, they would warmly welcome a trial based on articles of impeachment, which would, of course, feature no artificial limits on the witness list, nor on questions that might be asked. The list might start with the UkraineGate “Whistleblower.” Among the many untruths uttered by Adam Schiff was the nonexistent law that gave that shadowy figure a right to anonymity. And besides, in any trial based on due process, the accused has an absolute right to face his accuser. Oddly, a month ago Mr. Schiff was avid to stick his “Whistleblower” in the witness chair, and perhaps not with a black hood over his head.

Then it was discovered that the “Whistleblower” had been consorting at least with Mr. Schiff’s staff members before blowing his fabled whistle, and that they had likely assisted in the assembly of his complaint, and in connecting him to the right lawyers in the Great Blue Okefenokee backwaters of DC lawyerdom, and, naturally, nobody from sea to shining sea over age nine who had paid attention to these antics believed that Mr. Schiff could not know who this “Whistleblower” was. Likewise, the brave Col. Vindman. Both of them deserve some time in a senate witness chair, and Mr. Schiff especially is due some sort of penalty for subjecting the country to his three years of dishonorable, seditious shenanigans — beginning with expulsion from the House and perhaps proceeding to a trial of his very own.

These UkraineGate hearings of the past two weeks raised some additional questions that have not otherwise been aired much in the public arena, chiefly, exactly how much does the US government seek to control the affairs of Ukraine? And how did we become the superintendent of this partially failed state? The parade of State Department diplomats in charge of this-and-that suggests that Ukraine is virtually an occupied territory. Do we realistically suppose that, in the natural course of things, we can shield Ukraine forever from the influence of its neighbor (and former sovereign), Russia?

Bit of a problem perhaps.

• ‘No One Out There’: The Democrats’ Lack Of Star Power (G.)

Too old. Too young. Too white. Too leftwing. Anxiety over Democrats’ failure to find a standout candidate is raising fears that, despite astounding unpopularity and potential impeachment, Donald Trump could win re-election by default. The Democratic primary’s top tier of candidates does not include a person of colour even in the biggest and most diverse field in history. The leader of national opinion polls turned 77 this week and delivered another stumbling debate performance while fending off questions about his son’s foreign business dealings. The poll leader in Iowa, which will get the first say, is the 37-year-old mayor of a small city who in some surveys is polling close to zero with African American voters.

Two more septuagenarians have seen their momentum stall amid criticism that their healthcare reforms are too radical and unaffordable. And then there are two last-minute would-be saviours: an ageing billionaire from New York and a former east coast governor who this week cancelled a campaign event when only two people showed up. Watching it all with glee are Trump and Republicans, hardly able to believe their luck that they might not have to win next year’s election so much as watch Democrats lose it, just as Hillary Clinton did by failing to motivate turnout in crucial states in 2016. This week’s debate in Atlanta showed that the party is struggling again to find a nominee as inspiring as Barack Obama. “When I ask my students, is there anyone on that debate stage tonight who you see as being presidential, most of them say no, there’s no one out there,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor, at Fordham University in New York.

“And they’re political junkies so they know as much as any of us do. ..] Indeed, Trump is showing resilience in the polls. A survey of 801 registered voters by the Marquette Law School in the all-important state of Wisconsin over 13-17 November showed only the long shot Cory Booker beating Trump in a head-to-head match up (45% to 44%). The president led Biden 47% to 44%, Sanders 48% to 45%, Warren 48% to 43% and Buttigieg 47% to 39%. John Zogby, a Democratic pollster, said: “In most polls nationwide and in the key states, the president is competitive against every one of the major candidates. The Democrats are still kind of fumbling for a message: it’s really not enough to be against Trump.

Anything that has Rachel Maddow in it is a disaster.

• The All-Women MSNBC Debate Panel Was a Right-Wing Disaster (Lazare)

The fifth Democratic presidential debate received an outpouring of praise for its all-woman cast of moderators: Rachel Maddow and Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, Ashley Parker of the Washington Post, and Kristen Welker of NBC. Writing in the Nation, Joan Walsh asserted that the event “showed us what American political life would look like if women’s concerns were routinely at the center of the conversation.” “Democratic Debate Moderator Panel Of All Women Is Celebrated By Viewers,” reads a Huffington Post headline. “Female moderators = more questions to the rights and burdens of women,” tweeted Clara Jefferey, editor in chief of Mother Jones. “When all the moderators are women, issues that affect women get more attention. Funny how that works,” said Michelangelo Signorile, host of the Michelangelo Signorile Show.

The idea that women’s representation in itself — regardless of who those women are — is a boon to women everywhere is hardly new to US political discourse. But what makes the fawning over the November 20 debate particularly tone-deaf is that the moderators’ questions were both inane and right-wing. Their inquiries were almost entirely premised on defending the benevolence of US empire, marginalizing political positions deemed too far left, and asking “gotcha” questions from the right on issues from health care to immigration. Trapped within these ideological constraints, the debate actually struck a blow against feminism — and was a blessing to the forces of chauvinism and austerity.

[..] Andrea Mitchell was responsible for another low point in the moderation when she said: “President Trump has dramatically changed America’s approach to our adversaries by holding summits with Kim Jong-un, getting out of the Iran nuclear deal, and at times embracing Vladimir Putin and other strongmen. So let’s talk about what kind of commander-in-chief you would be. Senator Harris, North Korea is now threatening to cancel any future summits if President Trump does not make concessions on nuclear weapons. If you were commander in chief, would you make concessions to Kim Jong-un in order to keep those talks going?” Mitchell has long doubled as a stenographer for the national security state, but this question was hawkish even by her standards.

Don’t fight the Deep State. It’s bad for your health.

• JFK’s Vision For The Future (Ehret)

Wall Street’s Dulles Brothers who together ran the CIA and the State Department had made several major efforts to sabotage Kennedy’s “new frontiers” initiative that gripped the imaginations of young and old alike. Kennedy’s program was driven by large scale infrastructure at home and advanced scientific and technological progress in the Developing sector abroad. Attempting to break that trajectory, Allen Dulles had prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba months before Kennedy entered the scene which was a near disaster for the world.

Just days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Allan Dulles ensured that a pro-Kennedy ally who had just recently gained power in the Congo named Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in cold blood knowing that JFK would be blamed, and every effort was made to back up the French fascists trying to stop the Algerian independence movement behind JFK’s back. Both the Cuban invasion and the assassination of Lumumba have been blamed on Kennedy to this day. In response to this treachery, JFK made the bold move of firing CIA director Allan Dulles, and two Wall Street-connected CIA directors on November 29, 1961 saying that he would soon “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Recognizing the insanity of the zero sum Cold Warriors who could only look at the world through the perversity of a Hobbesian leans of “each against all”, JFK not only stood alone against the entire array of war-hungry Joint Chiefs calling for war with Russia during the infamous “13 day showdown” and parodied by Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove, but also took the advice of Generals MacArthur, and Charles de Gaulle who warned him to avoid all entrapments of a “land war in Vietnam”. On this point, JFK introduced NSAM 263 in October 1963 to begin a full withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1197290359228944384

All these waves have been.

• The Next Wave of Debt Monetization Will Be a Disaster (Lacalle)

According to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the IIF (Institute of International finance), global debt has soared to a new record high. The level of government debt around the world has ballooned since the financial crisis, reaching levels never seen before during peacetime. This has happened in the middle of an unprecedented monetary experiment that injected more than $20 trillion in printed money into the economy and lowered interest rates to the lowest levels seen in history. The balance sheet of the major central banks rose to levels never seen before, with the Bank of Japan at 100 percent of the country’s GDP, the European Central Bank (ECB) at 40 percent, and the Federal Reserve at 20 percent.

If this monetary experiment has proven anything it’s that lower rates and higher liquidity are not tools to help deleverage debt, but to incentivize it. Furthermore, this dangerous experiment has proven that a policy that was designed as a temporary measure due to exceptional circumstances has become the new norm. The so-called normalization process of raising interest rates lasted only a few months in 2018, only for asset purchases and rate cuts to resume. Despite the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus in decades, global economic growth is weakening, and the productivity growth of leading economies is close to zero. Money velocity, a measure of economic activity relative to money supply, thus, goes down.

It’s been explained many times why this happens. Low rates and high liquidity are perverse incentives to push the crowding-out of the private sector by government; they also perpetuate overcapacity due to endless refinancing of non-productive and obsolete sectors to lower rates, and the number of zombie companies—those that cannot pay their interest expenses with operating profits—rises.

Barr is simply saying you’ll never find out. Too many “upstanding” people would be damaged goods.

• Barr Says Epstein Died By A Series Of Coincidences (CJ)

In an interview with Associated Press, US Attorney General William Barr put all conspiracy theories to rest once and for all by assuring the world that alleged sex trafficker and alleged billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s death was simply the result of a very, very, very long series of unfortunate coincidences. “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told AP on Thursday.

This perfect storm of unlucky oopsies include Epstein being taken off suicide watch not long after a previous suicide attempt and shortly before his successful suicide, suggestions that the first attempt may have actually been an assault via attempted strangulation inflicted by someone else, two security guards simultaneously falling asleep on the job when they were supposed to be checking on Epstein, one of those guards not even being an actual security guard, security footage of two cameras outside Epstein’s cell being unusable due to a mysterious technical glitch, at least eight Bureau of Prisons officials knowing Epstein wasn’t meant to be left alone in his cell and leaving him alone in his cell anyway, Epstein’s cellmate being transferred out of their shared space the day before Epstein’s death, Epstein signing a will two days before his death, unexplained injuries on Epstein’s wrists and shoulder reported by his family after the autopsy, and a forensic expert who examined Epstein’s body claiming that his injuries were more consistent with homicide than suicide.

“The attorney general also sought to dampen conspiracy theories by people who have questioned whether Epstein really took his own life, saying the evidence proves Epstein killed himself,” AP reports. “He added that he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died. Well if reporting that he’s reviewed footage which we were previously told didn’t exist isn’t enough to dampen those kooky conspiracy theories, I don’t know what is. So there you have it. The US government says that an intelligence asset with damning information on many powerful individuals did in fact kill himself due to an admittedly bizarre and wildly unlikely series of strange coincidences. I for one have no more questions. Checkmate, conspiracy theorists.

The whole world as a Christmas tree.

• Light Pollution Is Key ‘Bringer Of Insect Apocalypse’ (G.)

Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies. “We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change – is driving insect declines,” the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important – but often overlooked – bringer of the insect apocalypse.”

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. “Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately,” they said. Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: “Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting – ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives.” Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threatened to cause a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. The latest review says: “Insects around the world are rapidly declining. Their absence would have devastating consequences for life on this planet.”

A poster that was put up around Houston in the weeks before JFK visited.

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Debt Rattle November 22 2019

Nov 222019

November 22, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:17 am Finance Tagged with: CNN, Corbyn, Durham, FBI, Fiona Hill, Giuliani, Greece, Solomon, Soros, superorganism, Trump, Tulsi 16 Responses »

Dorothea Lange We’ll be in California yet. We’re not going back to Arkansas 1938

• Ex-FBI Lawyer Investigated For Altering FISA Documents in Russia Probe (CNN)

• FBIs Vetting Of Informants Like Christopher Steele Slammed By IG (Solomon)

• Ken Starr: We’re ‘Nowhere Close’ To Impeachable Offenses (Fox)

• Giuliani: “Massive Pay-For-Play” Soros-Ukraine Scheme Facilitated By US (ZH)

• Trump Welcomes Senate Impeachment Trial, Wants Bidens, Schiff To Testify (R.)

• The Civilian Government Doesn’t Owe Deference to Military Officers (McMaken)

• Democratic Establishment Reaches Boiling Point With Tulsi Gabbard (Pol.)

• Corbyn Declares War On ‘Rich And Powerful’ With Radical Manifesto (Ind.)

• Greek Coast Guard Says 400 Refugees, Migrants Rescued From Sea In Past Day (K.)

• Economics For The Future – Beyond The Superorganism (Nate Hagens)

Horowitz and Durham stir.

Comment I picked up: “It’s important to note the media source aspect because normally this type of leak would go to the Washington Post or New York Times first; ergo, it likely stems as a personal leak to one of the former allied FBI officials now working for CNN.

FBI officials are now working for the media outlet, CNN, that is providing the leaks; ie. former FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe; the spokesman for James Comey, Josh Campbell; a former FBI agent, Asha Rangappa; or the former FBI chief legal counsel, James Baker. All now work for CNN.”

• Ex-FBI Lawyer Investigated For Altering FISA Documents in Russia Probe (CNN)

An FBI official is under criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document related to 2016 surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser, several people briefed on the matter told CNN. The possibility of a substantive change to an investigative document is likely to fuel accusations from President Donald Trump and his allies that the FBI committed wrongdoing in its investigation of connections between Russian election meddling and the Trump campaign. […] Horowitz turned over evidence on the allegedly altered document to John Durham.

[…] It’s unknown how significant a role the altered document played in the FBI’s investigation of Page and whether the FISA warrant would have been approved without the document. The alterations were significant enough to have shifted the document’s meaning and came up during a part of Horowitz’s FISA review where details were classified, according to the sources. […] The identity or rank of the FBI employee under investigation isn’t yet known, and it’s not clear whether the employee still works in the federal government. No charges that could reflect the situation have been filed publicly in court.

And there’s more FBI…

Also John Solomon, on Twitter, about the Dems’ latest hero of the day: “Fiona Hill suggested my Ukraine stories were Russian propaganda. If she’s such an expert she would know my main character Yuriy Lutsenko was a political prisoner of the Russian backed Yanukovych regime and the US pleaded for his release and applauded his appointment as prosecutor”

• FBIs Vetting Of Informants Like Christopher Steele Slammed By IG (Solomon)

The most troubling revelation in the report, however, may be that some of the FBI analysts used to vet informants complained they were “discouraged from documenting conclusions and recommendations” about an informant’s credibility or reliability. One analyst, for instance, reported being told not to document a request to polygraph a suspect informant. And multiple FBI officials admitted efforts to keep the validation reports of informants void of derogatory information because FBI “field office do not want negative information documented” that could aid defense lawyers or stop informants from becoming government witnesses at trial. Such behavior “may have increased the likelihood that red flags or anomalies were omitted” about long-term informants, the 63-page report warned. Such concerns were widely held.

For instance, one member of a joint Justice Department-FBI committee known as the HSRC that approved long-term informants’ service reported being “deeply concerned that the limited scope of the long-term validation review may potentially be omitting important information or critical red flags.” The report also included one very important piece on the FBI’s reliance on informants: it showed the bureau spends an average of about $42 million a year on them. This IG report did not mention Steele, arguably the FBI’s most famous informant of recent years. But Horowitz is expected to release a massive report next month on possible failures and abuses by the FBI in the Russia collusion investigation, including efforts to use Steele’s dossier to help secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser.

The FBI’s reliance on Steele has raised significant public concerns, including that he was being paid to do his work to find dirt on Trump by the opposition research firm for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, had expressed a bias against Trump and had been leaking to the news media while working for the FBI. His source relationship was ended because of the latter concern. In addition, an FBI spreadsheet created to validate Steele’s allegations against Trump found most of the information in the dossier to be unconfirmed, debunked or simply open source information found on the Internet, sources have told me.

That seems obvious.

• Ken Starr: We’re ‘Nowhere Close’ To Impeachable Offenses (Fox)

The testimony from witnesses in the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings has come “nowhere close” to laying out impeachable offenses, former Independent Counsel Ken Starr said Thursday. Appearing on “America’s Newsroom” with host Bill Hemmer, Starr said that the witness testimony does not “reach the level of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” “My assessment of the evidence [thus] far? Nowhere close. The evidence is conflicting and ambiguous,” he told Hemmer. Starr said that European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony Wednesday falls into the same category since Sondland gave conflicting information about whether President Trump sought a quid pro quo with Ukraine involving military aid and an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

“Clearly in his opening statement, a quid pro quo. And then, he says later, ‘Well, the president said, ‘I don’t want anything. Right? President Zelensky should just do the right thing.’ [Those are] the words from the president himself,” he continued. “So, the record at the end of the day is likely to be ambiguous at best, conflicting at best … and you shouldn’t charge and you cannot convict a sitting president on the basis of conflicting and ambiguous evidence and destabilize the American government,” Starr argued. [..] “So, at least, I hope the Democrats will have that conversation about we don’t like the way foreign policy was conducted here, the delay [in providing aid] and so forth.

That’s debatable, but it is not the stuff of impeachment,” he told Hemmer. Later in the morning, after hearing testimony from David Holmes, a U.S. State Department official in Ukraine, and former National Security Council aide Fiona Hill, Starr said he does not believe a “corrupt bargain” by Trump is being proven. Starr said Hill’s testimony about Russian interference in the 2016 election was “eloquent,” particularly about the Kremlin trying to “sow seeds of discord” on both sides. He said it’s “willful blindness” for the president’s critics to dismiss allegations that Ukrainian officials were supporting Hillary Clinton.

What came out again in yesterday’s hearing is the neverending RussiaRussia topic. Which is still presented as gospel, though its was debunked by Mueller, while at the same time the role of Ukraine, never investigated, is called a conspiracy theory.

• Giuliani: “Massive Pay-For-Play” Soros-Ukraine Scheme Facilitated By US (ZH)

Rudy Giuliani claims that US diplomats have been acting to further the interests of billionaire George Soros in Ukraine in what he described as a “massive pay-for-play” scheme which included falsifying evidence against President Trump. “The anti-corruption bureau is a contradiction,” Giuliani told Glenn Beck, regarding Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), which Joe Biden helped establish when he was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine. As a bit of background, in December of 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that NABU director Artem Sytnyk “acted illegally” when he revealed the existence of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s name to Journalist and politician Serhiy Leschenko in a “black ledger” containing off-book payments to Manafort by Ukraine’s previous administration.

The ruling against Sytnyk and Leshchenko was later overturned on a technicality. In December, The Blaze obtained audio of Sytnyk bragging about helping Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election. “They took all the corruption cases away from the prosecutor general, they gave it to the anti-corruption bureau, and they got rid of all the cases that offended Soros, and they included all the cases against Soros’ enemies,” Giuliani told Beck. “One of the first cases they dismissed was a case in which his [Soros’s] NGO, AntAC, was supposed to have embezzled a lot of money, but not only that, collected dirty information on Republicans to be transmitted, gotten by Ukrainians, to be transmitted to this woman Alexandra Chalupa and other people who worked for the Democratic National Committee,” Giuliani continued.

[..] Giuliani described his reaction when he discovered the Ukrainian collusion that undermined the accusations of the Democrats made against the president. “Hallelujah! I now have what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove somebody else committed this crime!” Giuliani said. Giuliani explained to Beck that he had gone to Ukraine seeking exculpatory evidence, that which would exonerate his client, the president, in the special counsel Robert Mueller investigation. When Giuliani was asked directly about the identity of the whistleblower, he said that he could not speak about the matter publicly, and could not indicate if he knew the identity or not.

He also claimed that there were several prosecutors in Ukraine currently who were willing to testify about the collusion, but they were being blocked by the U.S. State Department. When prompted by Beck, he said he would provide for him the names of those individuals off air.

And Ciaramella the whistleblower.

• Trump Welcomes Senate Impeachment Trial, Wants Bidens, Schiff To Testify (R.)

President Donald Trump wants an impeachment trial to go forward in the U.S. Senate because he would receive due process there and he expects Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden would be among the witnesses, a White House spokesman said on Thursday. “President Trump wants to have a trial in the Senate because it’s clearly the only chamber where he can expect fairness and receive due process under the Constitution,” spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement. “We would expect to finally hear from witnesses who actually witnessed, and possibly participated in corruption – like Adam Schiff, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the so-called Whistleblower, to name a few,” Gidley said, referring to House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff, who is leading an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Major point. All the way back to the Founders.

• The Civilian Government Doesn’t Owe Deference to Military Officers (McMaken)

On Tuesday, Congressional impeachment hearings exposed an interesting facet of the current battle between Donald Trump and the so-called deep state: namely, that many government bureaucrats now fancy themselves as superior to the elected civilian government. In an exchange between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Alexander Vindman, a US Army Lt. Colonel, Vindman insisted that Nunes address him by his rank. After being addressed as “Mr. Vindman,” Vindman retorted “Ranking Member, it’s Lt. Col. Vindman, please.” Throughout social media, anti-Trump forces, who have apparently now become pro-military partisans, sang Vindman’s praises, applauding him for putting Nunes in his place.

In a properly functioning government — with a proper view of military power — however, no one would tolerate a military officer lecturing a civilian on how to address him “correctly.” It is not even clear that Nunes was trying to “dis” Vindman, given that junior officers have historically been referred to as “Mister” in a wide variety of times and place. It is true that higher-ranking offers like Vindman are rarely referred to as “Mister,” but even if Nunes was trying to insult Vindman, the question remains: so what? Military modes of address are for the use of military personnel, and no one else. Indeed, Vindman was forced to retreat on this point when later asked by Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) if he always insists on civilians calling him by his rank.

Vindman blubbered that since he was wearing his uniform (for no good reason, mind you) he figured civilians ought to refer to him by his rank. Of course, my position on this should not be construed as a demand that people give greater respect to members of Congress. If a private citizen wants to go before Congress and refer to Nunes or any other member as “hey you,” that’s perfectly fine with me. But the important issue here is we’re talking about private citizens — i.e., the people who pay the bills — and not military officers who must be held as subordinate to the civilian government at all times. After all, there’s a reason that the framers of the US Constitution went to great pains to ensure the military powers remained subject to the will of the civilian government. Eighteenth and nineteenth century Americans regarded a standing army as a threat to their freedoms. Federal military personnel were treated accordingly.

Michael Tracey: “Democratic senators anonymously trashing Tulsi because she has the audacity to debate other candidates… at a debate. “

• Democratic Establishment Reaches Boiling Point With Tulsi Gabbard (Pol.)

Tulsi Gabbard trashed the Democratic Party as “not the party that is of, by and for the people,” accused Kamala Harris of trafficking in “lies and smears and innuendo” and attacked Pete Buttigieg as naive. Her performance at Wednesday’s debate earned an attaboy from the Trump War Room. And some rank-and-file Democrats are at wit’s end with the congresswoman who Hillary Clinton called “the favorite of the Russians.” “The question is whether she seriously hopes to be the nominee or if she has another agenda … her attacks on other candidates and her positions on issues seem very personal, not so much about a set of policies or worldview,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). Bernie Sanders has “a coherent set of principles. Elizabeth Warren’s the same. I don’t perceive a fixed set of principles or worldview on her part.”

Demonstrating how divisive her campaign has become, the Trump War Room tweeted out a video clip of Gabbard attacking her own party with a “100” emoji. It received 4,500 retweets and 15,000 likes. “She sort of seems to be filling a pretty strange lane. Is there a part of the party that hates the party?” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It’s a little hard to figure out what itch she’s trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.” The Hawaii congresswoman’s presence on the debate stage is becoming a headache for the party as she uses the platform to appeal to isolationists, dissatisfied liberals and even conservatives. She has managed to secure a spot on the debate stage as more mainstream candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.) failed to meet polling and donor thresholds to participate.

I think something like this is inevitable, but I also think the timing is not quite there. Nice graph that shows it’s not really extravagant spending as is claimed.

• Corbyn Declares War On ‘Rich And Powerful’ With Radical Manifesto (Ind.)

Jeremy Corbyn declared war on the “rich and powerful” with a general election manifesto that raises £83bn in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to fund free broadband, the abolition of university tuition fees and a 5 per cent pay rise for public-sector workers. In a surprise move, the Labour leader announced an £11bn one-off windfall tax on oil and gas companies to pay for a “green industrial revolution” which he said would create a million environmental jobs and put the UK on track to achieve “the substantial majority” of necessary carbon emission reductions by 2030.

In a pugnacious address in Birmingham designed to breathe new life into Labour’s challenge for power and turn round its current deficit in the polls, Mr Corbyn said he was ready to accept “the hostility of the billionaires” in order to deliver what he termed “a manifesto of hope” for the bulk of the British people. He said Labour’s programme would bring an end to a system “rigged” in favour of big corporations and the super-rich. But Tories accused him of planning a “reckless spending spree”, while energy trade body OGUK warned that any additional taxes would “drive investors away and damage the long-term competitiveness of the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry”.

Not pretty.

• Greek Coast Guard Says 400 Refugees, Migrants Rescued From Sea In Past Day (K.)

Greece’s Coast Guard said Friday it rescued 400 refugees and migrants in the last 24 hours in 10 different incidents in the sea area near the city Alexandroupolis and the islands of Lesvos and Chios. Authorities also arrested three people believed to be migrant traffickers. Meanwhile, two ferries carrying 96 refugees and migrants from the islands of Chios, zeros and Kos arrived at the port of Piraeus on Friday morning, as part of the government’s efforts to decongest migrant camps. The new arrivals will be sent to different accommodation facilities in the mainland.

New study by my friend Nate Hagens. I haven’t been able to read the whole thing yet.

• Economics For The Future – Beyond The Superorganism (Nate Hagens)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”– E.O. Wilson

Despite decades of warnings, agreements, and activism, human energy consumption, emissions, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations all hit new records in 2018. If the global economy continues to grow at about 3.0% per year, we will consume as much energy and materials in the next ±30 years as we did cumulatively in the past 10,000. Is such a scenario inevitable? Is such a scenario possible? Simultaneously, we get daily reminders the global economy isn’t working as it used to such as rising wealth and income inequality, heavy reliance on debt and government guarantees, populist political movements, increasing apathy, tension and violence, and ecological decay. To avoid facing the consequences of our biophysical reality, we’re now obtaining growth in increasingly unsustainable ways.

The developed world is using finance to enable the extraction of things we couldn’t otherwise afford to extract to produce things we otherwise couldn’t afford to consume. With this backdrop, what sort of future economic systems are now feasible? What choreography would allow them to come about? In the fullness of the Anthropocene, what does a hard look at the relationships between ecosystems and economic systems in the broadest sense suggest about our collective future? Ecological economics was ahead of its time in recognizing the fundamental importance of nature’s services and the biophysical underpinnings of human economies. Can it now assemble a blueprint for a ‘reconstruction’ to guide a way forward?

Before articulating prescriptions, we first need a comprehensive diagnosis of the patient. In 2019, we are beyond a piecemeal listing of what’s wrong. A coherent description of the global economy requires a systems view: describing the parts, the processes, how the parts and processes interact, and what these interactions imply about future possibilities. This paper provides a brief overview of the relationships between human behavior, the economy and Earth’s environment. It articulates how a social species self-organizing around surplus has metabolically morphed into a single, mindless, energy-hungry “Superorganism.” Lastly, it provides an assessment of our constraints and opportunities, and suggests how a more sapient economic system might develop.

Today is the 56th anniversary of the murder of JFK.

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Debt Rattle November 20 2019

Nov 202019

November 20, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:10 am Finance Tagged with: Aaron Schwarz, Assange, Chelsea Manning, fascist, Hill, Hong Kong, Melzer, Solomon, Strzok, UN, Westpac 14 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Miserable poverty. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, OK 1936

• Australia’s Westpac Bank Slapped With 23 Million Money Laundering Breaches (R.)

• UN Demands ‘Full Investigation’ After Sweden Drops Assange Rape Probe (RT)

• Swedish Decision To Drop Rape Probe Comes Too Late To Help Assange (Szamuely)

• Statement For Aaron Swartz Day 2019 (Chelsea Manning )

• Massive ‘Dark-Money’ Group Boosted Democrats In 2018 (Pol.)

• Another Congresswoman Lashes Out At The Hill (Pol.)

• FBI CItes Strzok For Misconduct, ‘Exceptionally Poor Judgment’ (Solomon)

• Beijing’s Angry Reaction To High Court Mask Ruling Sparks Concern (SCMP)

• China Vows To Retaliate If Trump Signs Hong Kong Democracy Act Into Law (SCMP)

• Reclaiming Your Inner Fascist (C.J. Hopkins)

• Fossil Fuel Production On Track For Double The Safe Climate Limit (G.)

“The regulator is pursuing fines of up to A$21 million ($14 million) for every transaction Westpac failed to monitor adequately or report on time.”

How much is 23 million times $14 million?

• Australia’s Westpac Bank Slapped With 23 Million Money Laundering Breaches (R.)

Regulators accused Australia’s Westpac of 23 million breaches of anti-money laundering laws, saying the banking giant ignored red flags and for years enabled payments from convicted child sex offenders and “high risk” countries. The oversight failure at Australia’s second-largest bank led to deep systemic non-compliance with anti-money laundering laws, financial crime watchdog AUSTRAC said in a civil court filing on Wednesday. The regulator is pursuing fines of up to A$21 million ($14 million) for every transaction Westpac failed to monitor adequately or report on time.

The lawsuit dwarfs a case AUSTRAC brought against larger Commonwealth Bank of Australia which agreed last year here to pay a record A$700 million penalty after admitting to allowing 53,750 payments that violated similar protocols. It also brings fresh scrutiny to an industry still trying to rebuild community trust after a bruising Royal Commission public inquiry. “These contraventions are the result of systemic failures in its control environment, indifference by senior management and inadequate oversight by the Board,” AUSTRAC said in the court filing.

In case you forgot Melzer represents the UN. When he speaks, the UN speaks. When he is ignored, the UN is ignored.

• UN Demands ‘Full Investigation’ After Sweden Drops Assange Rape Probe (RT)

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture has called for a “full investigation” into the role Sweden played in driving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange into asylum and eventual custody, after the rape case against him was dropped. Swedish prosecutors announced on Tuesday that they would drop a dubious rape inquiry against Assange, as oral testimony against the publisher had “weakened,” and corroborating evidence was not strong enough to pursue a case. A Swedish arrest warrant was issued against assange in 2010, and a British court upheld a decision to extradite him in 2012. Threatened with what many saw as a politically motivated extradition, Assange sought refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

“Today’s collapse of Sweden’s #Assange investigation was inevitable,” rapporteur Nils Melzer tweeted on Tuesday. “Given its gross arbitrariness, there must now be a full investigation, and accountability & compensation for the harm inflicted on #JulianAssange.” Melzer had previously claimed that Assange was subjected to “psychological torture” and had his due process rights “systematically violated” by the governments of Britain and Sweden. The WikiLeaks founder is still languishing in a maximum security unit at Belmarsh prison, awaiting a hearing on extradition to the US, where he potentially faces 175 years behind bars for publishing leaked military documents. In a document tweeted by Melzer, the envoy accuses Sweden of “actively and knowingly” contributing to Assange’s torture, and accuses prosecutors there of working in tandem with Britain’s Crown Prosecutorial Service to keep the case against Assange alive in the face of exculpatory evidence.

With the rape case against him dropped, some commentators have warned that the path to extradition to the US may now be clearer. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson told supporters that their focus should now shift to the most important “threat” that Assange was “warning about for years: the belligerent prosecution of the United States and the threat it poses to the First Amendment.”

"The Swedish people should be ashamed of the way they've been played by the CIA" @CraigMurrayOrg reacts to the prosecutor dropping the rape case against Julian Assange which he believes was a 'political fit up from the start'.https://t.co/DC1pJpqcm3 pic.twitter.com/gfQsCpiVtg

— RT UK (@RTUKnews) November 19, 2019

Not the strongest piece by George Szamuely. I like this tweet of his better:

“The Ukrainian people are fighting Russia over there, so we don’t have to fight Russia over here”–thus Tim Morrison. There’s definitely a lunatic asylum in which these sick individuals dwell. I guess it’s the US national security establishment.”

• Swedish Decision To Drop Rape Probe Comes Too Late To Help Assange (Szamuely)

The Swedish prosecutors’ decision to end the investigation of Julian Assange—for the third time—confirms that the sexual-misconduct accusations were always a cynical ploy to trap the publisher in a Kafkaesque legal proceeding. Swedish prosecutors today announced they were closing their nearly 10-year-old sexual-misconduct investigation of Julian Assange. The reason? The “evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.” However, the prosecutor tendentiously added, “the complaint was credible” but that corroborating evidence was not strong enough to pursue the case.

Let’s focus on the verbiage. Note first the use of the word “investigation.” This is very important, because contrary to what innumerable media outlets have reported during the past decade, the Swedes never charged Assange with anything, least of all “rape.” Following Assange’s arrest on April 11 of this year, there was a plethora of media stories informing us that there are outstanding rape charges pending against Assange in Sweden. Human Rights Watch chimed in, saying that Assange was facing a “rape charge” in Sweden. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party feminists urged the UK government to extradite Assange to Sweden to face “rape charges.”

The Swedish case was a fraud. The prosecutors’ goal all along was to use their powerful coercive tools in order to trap Assange within a slow-moving legal proceeding from which he would be unable to escape, while the US prepared its criminal charges against him. Sadly, despite today’s announcement, the Swedes’ mission has been accomplished.

Chelsea rocks.

• Statement For Aaron Swartz Day 2019 (Chelsea Manning )

Good Evening Folks, I wish I could be there in person, but I appreciate this opportunity to summarize for you my letter to the court that ordered me to be confined, explaining why grand juries are so dangerous. I am not alone in objecting to the grand jury as a dangerous relic that has evolved in ways that increase its power without increasing its protections. I refuse to participate in a process that has clearly transformed into something that violates the spirit, if not the letter of the law. I am certainly not alone in thinking that the grand jury process, which at one time acted as an independent body of citizens along the lines of a civilian police review board, has slowly transitioned into an unbridled arm of the police and prosecution in ways that run contrary to its originally intended purpose.

Early grand juries acted independently, as investigations by citizens, ostensibly to protect citizens, not only from unjust indictments, but from unjust laws. In 2019, the federal grand jury exists as a mockery of the institution that once stood against the whims of monarchs. It guts the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process. Today’s grand juries do not safeguard such fundamental rights and are easily subject to abuse. The tradition of using grand juries to jail political dissidents and activists is long. The ability of grand juries to be abused or used for political ends is entrenched and perpetuated by the fact that jeopardy doesn’t attach with a grand jury, so prosecutors can repeatedly bring the same charges.

Despite laws that require prosecutors to show new evidence or that it is in the public interest to extend or reconvene a grand jury, this is hardly an obstacle. For instance, Thomas Jefferson had to convene three separate grand juries in order to indict Aaron Burr for sedition – but he was able to continue to convene those grand juries until he obtained his desired indictment. During the McCarthy era, when people were publicly interrogated about their beliefs and associations, the public was eventually outraged, and the McCarthy hearings are widely seen as a disgraceful episode of modern history. However, these kinds of interrogations have now returned, and happen routinely, under the modern grand jury system.

Business as usual.

• Massive ‘Dark-Money’ Group Boosted Democrats In 2018 (Pol.)

The “green wave” of campaign cash that boosted Democrats and liberal causes in 2018 included an unprecedented gusher of secret money, new documents obtained by POLITICO show. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a little-known nonprofit headquartered in Washington, spent $141 million on more than 100 left-leaning causes during the midterm election year, according to a new tax filing from the group. The money contributed to efforts ranging from fighting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees to boosting ballot measures raising the minimum wage and changing laws on voting and redistricting in numerous states. The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million.

That single donation was more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected. Most of the group’s funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require “social welfare”-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors. The group’s 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit, according to experts, who pointed to the Koch network and the Crossroads network as rare right-leaning groups that posted bigger yearly fundraising totals at the height of their powers. The Sixteen Thirty Fund’s rise last year is a sign that Democrats and allies have embraced the methods of groups they decried as “dark money” earlier this decade, when they were under attack from the money machines built by conservatives including the Kochs.

“In terms of the size of dark money networks, there are only a few that have gone into the $100 million-plus range,” said Robert Maguire, the research director for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and an expert in political nonprofits. “These kinds of totals aren’t unheard of,” Maguire added. “I do think they’re unheard of on the liberal side. I think that’s what’s so striking about this.”

@RepMikeTurner : Did he ever say to you that he was not going to allow aid with the US to go to Ukraine unless there were investigations into Burisma, the Bidens or the 2016 election?

VOLKER: No he did not.

WATCH —> Amb. Volker just took apart Democrats’ ENTIRE case. @RepMikeTurner: Did he ever say to you that he was not going to allow aid with the US to go to Ukraine unless there were investigations into Burisma, the Bidens or the 2016 election?

VOLKER: No he did not. pic.twitter.com/PA8368ExV6

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) November 20, 2019

It’s open season on John Solomon. By the way, Marie Yovanovitch has denied the existence of a Don’t Prosecute list, and all kinds of people say Lutsenko denied it too. Solomon says he did not.

• Another Congresswoman Lashes Out At The Hill (Pol.)

Florida Congresswoman Val Demings questioned Tuesday whether the The Hill is “fair and unbiased” during an exchange with a reporter from the publication, the second of such incidents in recent days. California Rep. Jackie Speier, who is also a Democrat, told a Hill reporter on Friday that it was “reprehensible” that the paper published columns by John Solomon, a conservative journalist who helped ignite the Ukraine scandal and whose work has been promoted by President Donald Trump and his allies. Demings said Tuesday she had “not heard good things recently” about The Hill in response to tech policy reporter Emily Birnbaum identifying herself before asking a question about a short-term funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, according to audio of the exchange reviewed by POLITICO.

“Recently, I have not heard good things about The Hill being fair and impartial and unbiased… and that concerns me because any story we’re telling needs to be fair and unbiased and impartial,” Demings told Birnbaum during the exchange in the speaker’s lobby, which was witnessed by other reporters. Demings answered Birnbaum’s question and agreed it was fair. Though Demings did not mention Solomon specifically, the former employee’s work has come under increasing scrutiny and has put The Hill under the media spotlight. ProPublica recently explored Solomon’s relationship with associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and CNN looked Monday night at the connection between The Hill’s owner, Jimmy Finkelstein, and Trump, Giuliani and Solomon.

Solomon’s work has come up several times during impeachment testimony. Former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on Friday denied an allegation from Ukraine’s former top prosecutor that she gave Ukraine’s then-top prosecutor a list of who not to prosecute. “Yovanovitch says John Solomon’s columns were used to push false allegations,” read a headline in The Hill. Solomon, who left The Hill in September and his now a contributor for Fox News, where he was a frequent guest this past year, has repeatedly defended his reporting. “I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote and that The Hill (both editors and lawyers) carefully vetted,” Solomon told POLITICO on Friday. “All facts in those stories are substantiated to original source documents and statements.”

So the best thing Solomon can do is do his job: report.

• FBI Cites Strzok Cited For Misconduct, ‘Exceptionally Poor Judgment’ (Solomon)

This summer, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok filed a lawsuit suggesting his firing was political retribution for having run the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into the now debunked allegations that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election. The Justice Department has responded to the lawsuit in a big way, releasing to the court presiding over the civil case Strzok’s official misconduct file that concluded the former FBI supervisor exhibited “a gross lack of professionalism and exceptionally poor judgment.” It shows the FBI substantiated that Strzok had engaged in dereliction of duty, had committed misconduct through the expression of anti-Trump bias on his official FBI phone and committed security violations by performing official government work on personal email.

The records show one official recommended termination, and another recommended suspension for 60 days without pay. The bureau leadership chose the more severe of the two penalties, terminating Strzok last year. The dereliction of duty citation involved Strzok’s failure, according to the FBI, to quickly follow up in fall 2016 after the belated discovery of a trove of Hillary Clinton emails on a laptop belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Strzok was supervising the investigation of whether Clinton’s use of personal email for classified State Department matters created a security risk, and his failure caused an unnecessary delay to evaluate the new evidence just weeks before Election Day, the FBI concluded.

The disciplinary file included testimony from one of Strzok’s colleagues, a fellow agent, about the failure to respond to the discovery of emails. “The crickets I was hearing was making me uncomfortable because something was going to come crashing down,” the agent testified. “….I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.” The agent testified he feared “somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this” discovery of new Clinton email evidence, the files show. Strzok offered a bevy of excuses for his inaction, including he was busy working the Trump-Russia case at the time. All were rejected. “The investigation reveals that there is no reasonable excuse for the FBI’s delay in following up on this matter,” the disciplinary file concluded.

Why does Hong Kong still have courts?

• Beijing’s Angry Reaction To High Court Mask Ruling Sparks Concern (SCMP)

There was a swift response from Beijing when the High Court ruled on Monday that the Hong Kong government’s anti-mask law was unconstitutional. Central government officials criticised the court for failing to support the government in its efforts to end more than five months of increasingly violent social unrest. For the first time, they suggested that the city’s courts do not have the power to declare a local law invalid by checking it against the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution. China’s top legislative affairs body argued that only the national legislature had the right to decide on issues of constitutionality.

Beijing’s reaction left its critics in Hong Kong fearing for the erosion of the city’s independent judiciary. They also feared that Beijing would decide to hand down its own interpretation of the Basic Law and overturn the court ruling. But members of the pro-establishment camp dismissed those concerns, saying Beijing was only reiterating its position. What are the key issues in the controversy over the court ruling?

Remember: Hong Kong won’t become Chinese until 2037.

• China Vows To Retaliate If Trump Signs Hong Kong Democracy Act Into Law (SCMP)

China summoned a senior United States diplomat on Wednesday as it warned it would retaliate if US President Donald Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, after the act was passed by the US Senate. In a statement, the Chinese foreign ministry said Foreign Vice-Minister Ma Zhaoxu had summoned William Klein, the US embassy’s Minister Counsellor for Political Affairs. “China will take strong opposing measures, and the US has to bear all the consequences,” the statement said, after Congress’ upper chamber passed the act – which could pave the way for diplomatic action and economic sanctions against Hong Kong’s government.

It was the second time China had summoned a US diplomat since anti-government protests in Hong Kong began five months ago, triggered by a now-withdrawn extradition bill that would have allowed the transfer of criminal suspects to mainland China’s opaque legal system. In June, Robert Forden, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy in Beijing, was summoned by Foreign Vice-Minister Le Yucheng. Klein was summoned after foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that any attempt by the US to interfere in China’s internal affairs would be in vain. “We call on the US side to take a clear look at the situation and take steps to stop the act from becoming a law, and stop meddling in the internal affairs of China and Hong Kong, to avoid setting a fire that would only burn itself,” Geng said in a statement. “If the US sticks to its course, China will surely take forceful measures to resolutely oppose it to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest.”

If the treatment of Assange shows you anything, it’s that you live in a fascist world.

• Reclaiming Your Inner Fascist (C.J. Hopkins)

OK, we need to talk about fascism. Not just any kind of fascism. A particularly insidious kind of fascism. No, not the fascism of the early 20th Century. Not Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. Not Hitler’s NSDAP. Not Francoist fascism or any other kind of organized fascist movement or party. Not even the dreaded Tiki-torch Nazis. It’s the other kind of fascism we need to talk about. The kind that doesn’t come goose-stepping up the street waving big neo-Nazi flags. The kind we don’t recognize when we’re looking right at it. It’s like that joke about the fish and the water … we don’t recognize it because we’re swimming in it. We’re surrounded by it. We are inseparable from it. From the moment we are born, we breathe it in.

We are taught it by our parents, who were taught it by their parents. We are taught it again by our teachers in school. It is reinforced on a daily basis at work, in conversations with friends, in our families and our romantic relationships. We imbibe it in books, movies, TV shows, advertisements, pop songs, the nightly news, in our cars, at the mall, the stadium, the opera … everywhere, because it is literally everywhere. It doesn’t look like fascism to us. Fascism only looks like fascism when you’re standing outside of it, or looking back at it. When you are in it, fascism just looks like “normality,” like “reality,” like “just the way it is.”

We (i.e., Americans, Brits, Europeans, and other citizens of the global capitalist empire) get up in the morning, go to work, shop, pay the interest on our debts, and otherwise obey the laws and conform to the mores of a system of power that has murdered countless millions of people in pursuit of global-hegemonic dominance. It has perpetrated numerous wars of aggression. Its military occupies most of the planet. Its Intelligence agencies (i.e., secret police) operate a worldwide surveillance apparatus that can identify, target, and eliminate anyone, anywhere, often by remote control. Its propaganda network never sleeps, nor is there any real way to escape its constant emotional and ideological conditioning.

The fact that the global capitalist empire does not call itself an empire, and instead calls itself “democracy,” doesn’t make it any less of an empire. The fact that it uses terms like “regime change” instead of “invasion” or “annexation” makes very little difference to its victims. Terms like “security,” “stability,” “intervention,” “regime change,” and so on are not meant for its victims. They are meant for us … to anesthetize us. The empire is “regime-changing” Bolivia currently. It has “regime-changed” most of Latin America at one time or another since the Second World War. It “regime-changed” Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Indonesia … the list goes on. It very much wants to “regime-change” Iran, which it “regime-changed” back in the 1950s, before the Iranians “regime-changed” it back. It would love to “regime-change” Russia and China, but their ICBMs make that somewhat impractical.

Lip service.

• Fossil Fuel Production On Track For Double The Safe Climate Limit (G.)

The world’s nations are on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas as can be burned in 2030 while restricting rise in the global temperature to 1.5C, analysis shows. The report is the first to compare countries’ stated plans for fossil fuel extraction with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which is to keep global heating well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and to aim for 1.5C. It exposes a huge gap, with fossil fuel production in 2030 heading for 50% more than is consistent with 2C, and 120% more than that for 1.5C. Scientists have warned that even the difference between 1.5C and 2C of heating will expose hundreds of millions of people to significantly higher risks of extreme heatwaves, drought, floods and poverty.

The report was produced by the UN Environment Programme and a coalition of research organisations. It complements an earlier UN analysis showing the current Paris agreement pledges to cut emissions would still lead to a catastrophic 3-4C rise. “We’re in a deep hole – and we need to stop digging,” said Måns Nilsson, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which was part of the analysis. “Despite more than two decades of climate policymaking, fossil fuel production levels are higher than ever.” Most action to tackle the climate crisis involves reducing emissions, but Inger Andersen, head of the UN Environment Programme, said a focus on fossil fuel production was long overdue.

Most of the action pledges made by countries under the Paris deal do not even mention changes to production. The UK is a “striking” example of this mismatch, said Cleo Verkuijl, at the SEI’s centre in Oxford, UK. It was the first major economy to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, she said, but also subsidises fossil fuel production at home and abroad and intends to extract “every drop of oil and gas” from its North Sea fields.

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Assange, Nitrogen, Pensions, Solomon

Nov 192019

November 19, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:09 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: Assange, CNN, hearsay, Hill, Holland, nitrogen, pensions, Schiff, Solomon, Sweden 18 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Road in Tahiti 1891

I’m getting pissed off about multiple things right now, too many to make them all separate essays. Let’s give it a combined shot:

In Holland, the talk of the town is nitrogen emissions. I’d never seen it raised as that kind of problem, but there you go. The government last week decided to lower the max speed limit on highways to 100km (66miles) , from 120-130. Their reasoning was that this would allow the building industry to build more -by now hugely overpriced- homes and apartments.

Oh, but agriculture (aka cattle) is responsible for 46% of nitrogen emissions. So they have a plan to alter cattle feed (I am still serious here). I understand that neighbors Germany and Belgium have had nitrogen policies in place for years, so their cars can keep on pedaling to the metal because they don’t have a problem. Huh?

Also in Holland, big discussions about cuts to pensions. Which of course leads to big protests, which in turn makes the government make sure that cuts this year will be minimal. Okay, but how about next year? No comment. Holland is supposed to have one of the best pension systems on the planet, but they don’t get to escape the BIG erosion either.

Aging population, fewer contributors, lower wages, it’s happening everywhere. Our pension systems are Ponzi schemes. Every single penny you give a pensioner today is taken away from one tomorrow. The entire system is broke, we just don’t want to face that simple fact.

15 years ago, pensions systems were required by law to hold only AAA-denominated assets. Look at that today. They all have 7-8% in their prospectus, and bonds pay 1%, if that. Unless you gamble. So they have all moved into equities, which look fine because central banks prop them up, but the model itself has changed like Jekyll becames Hyde.

Then, Sweden decided to drop the 2010 rape charges against Assange 9 years later. In reality, there never WERE any rape charges. But still, prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson re-opened the “investigation” in May 2019. Just so Julian could be dragged from the Ecuador embassy in London on a seemingly legit charge. Eva-Marie Persson should be in Belmarsh prison, not Julian. But she represents the law, and he does not. He has exposed its dim-witted lackeys. My comment earlier today at the Automatic Earth:

“Sweden has dropped its rape inquiry into Julian Assange. Good f%@$#ing Lord, what year is it? The f%@$#ing job is f%@$#ing done, isn’t, you f%@$#ers? How can you be a Swede and not protest this? What kind of people live in that country? No, I know, the same kind as live in the UK and US. Ignorant f%@$#s.”

Oh, and now they’re arresting Epstein’s prison guards? Come on guys, you got to recognize a joke as a joke.

Then a CNN piece about John Solomon, who was thrown out of the Hill recently though he was their best reporter. Now, he was already fired from the Hill despite being their ace reporter, but that’s not enough for CNN, they want the owner too. So for CNN, it’s a direct link from Trump to Giuliani to Solomon to Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein:

Jimmy Finkelstein, The Owner Of The Hill, Has Flown Under The Radar

James “Jimmy” Finkelstein, the owner of The Hill newspaper, is not a widely known media executive, but he is one of the era’s most consequential. Finkelstein resides at the nexus of President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and John Solomon, the now-former executive at The Hill and current Fox News contributor who pushed conspiracy theories about Ukraine into the public conversation. While Solomon has received significant media attention for his work at The Hill, Finkelstein has stayed out of the headlines, despite having himself played a crucial role in the saga.

One, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, said of one of Solomon’s stories, “I think all the key elements were false.” Pressed further on the matter by Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican, Vindman said, “I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.” [..] After CNN Business reached out to a representative for The Hill for comment, The Hill Editor-In-Chief Bob Cusack announced in a Monday morning email to staffers that Solomon’s work was under review.

“As you are aware, John Solomon left The Hill earlier in the fall, but in light of recent congressional testimony and related events, we wanted to apprise you of the steps we are taking regarding John Solomon’s opinion columns which were referenced in the impeachment inquiry,” Cusack wrote. “Because of our dedication to accurate non-partisan reporting and standards, we are reviewing, updating, annotating with any denials of witnesses, and when appropriate, correcting any opinion pieces referenced during the ongoing congressional inquiry,” Cusack added.

Now, I have followed, and quoted, Solomon for quite some time, and I think he’s thorough, well documented, and in short what a journalist should be (nothing to do with opinion). Calling him conspirational is really quite a jump. But this is CNN. They do conspiracy like no-one else. And apparently they got what they wanted, because the Hill now is this:

Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Rooted In Fear Of Biden

Why is President Trump so nervous about the 2020 race? He has a record amount of campaign cash. Russian bots are still working for him. And he still has the backing of more than 80 percent of his party. So, how do I know he’s so nervous? As Trump loves to say: Read the transcript. At the heart of the phone call that has led to impeachment hearings is Trump going out on a shaky limb to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor.” That “favor” included a request for Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. The only reason for Trump to risk asking a foreign leader for help getting political dirt on an opponent is that he feared that rival’s power.

Me personally, I’ll stick with John Solomon for now. I haven’t caught him on a lie, and not on propaganda. Which is much better than I can say about just about every other outlet out there. Yeah, Hannity is a very loose cannon, Tucker Carlson not that much, but it’s the CNN people, and Rachel Maddow, that are far worse when it comes to propaganda.

And Adam Schiff too, who gets to conduct his fake trial in which he doesn’t have to say a single true word because he’s not under oath and the “witnesses” can be 2nd-3rd-4th hearsay ones. Anyone can say anything as long as it is negative for Trump. You know, that guy the American people elected as their president 3 years ago. Let’s move this into a courtroom -like the Senate- and do away with the absurd theater.

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Debt Rattle November 19 2019

Nov 192019

November 19, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, Boeing, Burisma, Clinton, FedEx, Georgia, Hill, Hong Kong, Mueller, Schiff, Solomon, Trump, Ukraine 15 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Female bust 1943

• Adam Schiff Validated My Reporting On Ukraine (John Solomon)

• The Hill Reviewing John Solomon Articles After Ambassador Refutes Claims (ZH)

• Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Rooted In Fear Of Biden (Hill)

• Ukraine MP Says Burisma Financed Clinton Campaign With $10M Unmarked Cash (CDM)

• House Investigating Whether Trump Lied To Mueller (CNN)

• Entertaining Questions (Jim Kunstler)

• Hong Kong Anti-Mask Law Ruled Unconstitutional By High Court (SCMP)

• China Says Hong Kong Courts Have No Power To Rule On Face Mask Ban (R.)

• Emirates Orders 50 Airbus A350 Jets In A Revised Deal Worth $16 Billion (CNBC)

• Airbus Secures 120 Plane Order From Air Arabia (CNBC)

• FedEx CEO challenges NYT publisher to public debate after tax story

• Georgian Riot Police Disperse Anti-Govt Rally In Tbilisi (RT)

• The Roger Stone – Wikileaks – Russia Hoax (Craig Murray)

• The Most Spied Upon Building On Earth (Maurizi)

I guess it’s official: John Solomon is no longer at The Hill. Still don’t know why; did I miss something?

• Adam Schiff Validated My Reporting On Ukraine (John Solomon)

While the jury is still out on high crimes and misdemeanors, Schiff has managed to produce during the first few weeks of his impeachment hearings a robust body of evidence and testimony that supports all three of the main tenets of my Ukraine columns. In fact, his witnesses have done more than anyone to affirm the accuracy of my columns and to debunk the false narrative by a dishonest media and their friends inside the federal bureaucracy that my reporting was somehow false conspiracy theories. The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:

• Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
• Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
• There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.

All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified he believed the Burisma-Bidens dynamic created the appearance of a conflict of interest, and that State officials viewed Burisma as having a corrupt relationship. Kent testified State’s sentiments were so strong that he personally intervened in 2016 to stop a joint project between one of his department’s agencies and Burisma. When asked why, he answered: “Burisma had a poor reputation in the business, and I didn’t think it was appropriate for the U.S. Government to be co-sponsoring something with a company that had a bad reputation.”

The “problem” with Solomon is he’s thorough and well-documented. Look forward to him commenting on any potential edits to his articles.

• The Hill Reviewing John Solomon Articles After Ambassador Refutes Claims (ZH)

The Hill will be reviewing articles written by former contributor John Solomon after allegations by US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch that he facilitated a smear campaign. “Because of our dedication to accurate non-partisan reporting and standards, we are reviewing, updating, annotating with any denials of witnesses, and when appropriate, correcting any opinion pieces referenced during the ongoing congressional inquiry,” reads an internal email from Editor-In-Chief Bob Cusack obtained by CNN’s Oliver Darcy. Yovanovitch testified last week that the president’s allies, including Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, attacked her with false allegations that she was undermining the Trump administration’s agenda and badmouthing the president.

She claims Solomon was part of this effort – penning articles in The Hill containing the trash-talking claims as well as an allegation that she gave Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko a “do not prosecute list,” which both Yovanovitch and the State Department have pushed back on. Lutsenko changed his story, telling the New York Times there was no such list. He is currently facing allegations related to abuse of power. In response to the review, Solomon tweeted: “I welcome The Hill’s review of my Ukraine columns and suggested it myself a month ago. I believe it won’t be hard for The Hill to review these since all my source documents and original interviews are linked for all to see. Plus witnesses have affirmed much of what I wrote.”

I welcome The Hill’s review of my Ukraine columns and suggested it myself a month ago. I believe it won’t be hard for The Hill to review these since all my source documents and original interviews are linked for all to see. Plus witnesses have affirmed much of what I wrote.

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) November 18, 2019

What the Hill publishes these days is smut like this. Toeing the line of the empire. The entire inquiry rests on the assumption that Trump is afraid of Biden. Is he though? Or does he want to find out what happened in 2016?

• Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Rooted In Fear Of Biden (Hill)

Why is President Trump so nervous about the 2020 race? He has a record amount of campaign cash. Russian bots are still working for him. And he still has the backing of more than 80 percent of his party. So, how do I know he’s so nervous? As Trump loves to say: Read the transcript. At the heart of the phone call that has led to impeachment hearings is Trump going out on a shaky limb to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor.” That “favor” included a request for Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. The only reason for Trump to risk asking a foreign leader for help getting political dirt on an opponent is that he feared that rival’s power.

And that November 2020 powerhouse in Trump’s mind is Biden. Recall that in June, Trump’s anxiety was on display when he insisted his campaign fire some its pollsters after internal polls showed him losing in Michigan and Wisconsin to Biden. Trump’s shaky nerves went public again in July when a Fox News poll showed him losing to Biden — by a lot. Trump went ballistic and attacked Fox. The president still has every reason to be nervous about a possible match-up with Biden because polls continue to show the Democrat beating him badly. If Biden, a well-liked moderate, is the nominee the election becomes a referendum on Trump. With an approval rating hovering in the mid-to-low 40s, that is not good news for the president.

Well, this is what happened in 2016. Still nothing to investigate the Bidens on?

• Ukraine MP Says Burisma Financed Clinton Campaign With $10M Unmarked Cash (CDM)

CD Media has been steadily breaking news on American government and Obama Administration corruption in Ukraine as the impeachment inquiry scam heats up in Washington, D.C. Although we have provided plenty of evidence of organized crime emanating from the State Department and elsewhere in the U.S. governmental infrastructure in Kyiv, many still wonder why the Democrats are so rabid to stop Trump from having a second term. Well, now we believe we are getting closer to the answer.

[..] “In 2015, Burisma was considered a corrupt company, but a very lucrative and powerful one. Poroshenko was trying to ‘get in’ and get a piece of the action [CD Media has reported how Poroshenko also wanted Privat Bank for the same reason]. So, essentially Zlochevsky [Mykola Zlochevsky – oligarch owner] brought in Biden for protection, and the Biden family got paid of course. No one would mess with Burisma with the Vice President involved. Zlochevsky showed everyone Biden was on the board pushing his father’s name. The problem with the ‘corrupted company’ label in the United States went away quickly in about three months. It was amazing. “And of course, Burisma also helped the Clinton campaign prior to the election.”

How did they help we asked? “They paid them around $10 million.” Wouldn’t those wire transfers show up? we questioned. “This was Ukraine; everything was done with big bags of cash to the Clintons.” Onyshchenko then went on to describe how he was approached by prosecutors in the U.S. to testify in the United States on American corruption in Ukraine. He showed us a letter published below from the Department of Justice in 2016, where he says they provided him a temporary visa to come testify on the theft and money laundering of American aid to Ukraine, and on the illegal money to the Clintons. “Right before I was to leave for the U.S., I received notice that my visa had been cancelled due to the personal involvement of Vice President Joe Biden.

He made a personal phone call and the visa was cancelled. I guess he didn’t want me telling what I know so I didn’t make it to the United States to testify.” The cancellation of the visa has been confirmed by CD Media by a secondary source. Onyshchenko also reiterated that former FBI agent Karen Greenaway was pushing hard during this time for him to not talk to the press about his knowledge of the Biden scandal, holding the threat of American law enforcement action against him to do so. Greenaway has since retired from the FBI but remains in Ukraine involved with one of the Soros foundations. “She was pushing hard…for me to say nothing,” he declared. “She was running everything for the Democrats, all the coverup for the corruption.”

Blah blah WikiLeaks.

• House Investigating Whether Trump Lied To Mueller (CNN)

The House of Representatives is now investigating whether President Donald Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller in written answers he provided in the Russia investigation, the House’s general counsel said in federal court Monday. “Did the President lie? Was the President not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation?” House general counsel Douglas Letter told the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit about why the House now needs access to grand jury material Mueller collected in his investigation. The House’s arguments Monday draw new focus to whether Trump had lied to Mueller following public revelations at Roger Stone’s trial this month.

Former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates testified that Trump and Stone talked about information that was coming that could help the campaign in mid-2016, at a time when Stone was attempting to get secret details about stolen Democratic documents WikiLeaks had. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort also apparently told the Mueller grand jury what Trump’s approach to WikiLeaks had been in 2016, according to the Mueller report. But Trump told Mueller in his written statements he didn’t recall discussing WikiLeaks with Stone. The Gates testimony adds further significance to Congress’ desire to see the redacted material.

The question of whether Trump obstructed justice, including potentially lying to Mueller, has for months been a part of the House Judiciary Committee’s wider review of potential obstruction in the wake of the Mueller report. The House previously reviewed most of what Mueller had written in his final report, including parts kept from the public. But the House hasn’t been able to see what Manafort told the grand jury, which Mueller apparently described in his report. In the Mueller report, grand jury details are redacted related to a sentence describing Manafort speaking with Trump after WikiLeaks’ first release, in July 2016.

“Messers, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe, Strzok, Halper, Ms. Page, et. al — and, if real justice is on order, not a few figures lurking in the Deep State deep background — John Carlin, Bill Priestap, Dana Boente, Michael Gaeta, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and perhaps even the archangel Barack Obama..”

• Entertaining Questions (Jim Kunstler)

Mr. Barr declared unambiguously and in plain English that “in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of ‘Resistance’ against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Is any part of that unclear? The confounded might take in this more detailed lesson in recent history from the speech:

“Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called ‘the Resistance,’ and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his administration. Now, ‘resistance’ is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous — indeed incendiary — notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”

And anyone who takes in the nauseating spectacle of Congressman Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee impeachment process can see that shredding of norms on full shameless display, where the attempted defense of nakedly absurd charges against the president is thwarted by a chicane of deceitful rules outside any concept of due process, concocted by Mr. Schiff and his task force of Lawfare hustlers — no right to call witnesses, no right of cross-examination, and no right to argue that set of rules cribbed from the Stalin show trials by way of the Spanish Inquisition. They’re pouring it on this week ahead of a post-Thanksgiving cold water deluge of bad news that will detail charges against the progenitors of RussiaGate.

The roll-call may be a long one, including many actors whose turpitudes have been publicly and richly documented for many months — Messers, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe, Strzok, Halper, Ms. Page, et. al — and, if real justice is on order, not a few figures lurking in the Deep State deep background — John Carlin, Bill Priestap, Dana Boente, Michael Gaeta, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and perhaps even the archangel Barack Obama, just in time for Christmas, too. Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann deserve to be included for what amounted to a blatant, arrantly mendacious malicious prosecution, knowing that they had no case and proceeding anyway for two whole years.

I hope the roundup will extend to the very latest ploys leading to RussiaGate’s successor subterfuge, UkraineGate, namely the exploits of “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, his handlers and enablers in Mr. Schiff’s office, and the actions of his accomplice, Michael Atkinson, the current Intelligence Community Inspector General, with obvious conflicts of interests as a major player in the previous RussiaGate dodge — he was legal counsel to Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, who headed the Department of Justice’s National Security Division at the birth of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” gambit, and before that he was Robert Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI. Anything to see there, ya think? The “whistleblower” himself was, in fact, a CIA spy in the White House. You may recall that the CIA is prohibited from spying on Americans in their own country, and doing that in the White House is arguably the essence and height of lawless sedition.

Fighting for freedom.

• Hong Kong Anti-Mask Law Ruled Unconstitutional By High Court (SCMP)

A Hong Kong court has ruled in favour of pan-democrats in declaring the government’s mask ban unconstitutional in a decision that forced police to halt law enforcement while legal experts in mainland China floated the possibility of another legal interpretation by Beijing. Two High Court judges on Monday ruled that the emergency legislation that brought the ban on face coverings in public places into effect last month was “incompatible with the Basic Law” when used in times of public danger as seen in the present case. They also found the new law had imposed invalid restrictions on fundamental rights and freedoms.

The ruling by justices Anderson Chow Ka-ming and Godfrey Lam Wan-ho, in favour of the 25 pan-democrats who applied for judicial review, dealt a blow to the beleaguered government. Police announced they would stop enforcing the ban for now, while prosecutors sought adjournment “to consider the situation”. Legal experts were divided, some calling the judgment an important recognition of Hong Kong’s constitutional framework, while those on the mainland expressed concerns that the court might have sent the wrong signal to the radical protesters, floating the idea of Beijing interpreting the Basic Law again.

Hong Kong courts are trumped by Beijing. Might as well disband them then.

• China Says Hong Kong Courts Have No Power To Rule On Face Mask Ban (R.)

China’s top legislature said Hong Kong courts have no power to rule on the constitutionality of legislation under the city’s Basic Law, which includes a proposed ban on face masks, state news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday. The statement came a day after Hong Kong’s High Court ruled that a ban on wearing face masks during public demonstrations that have rocked the financial hub for more than five months was unconstitutional. “Whether the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region comply with the Basic Law of Hong Kong can only be judged and decided by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress,” Yan Tanwei, a spokesman for the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, said in a statement. “No other authority has the right to make judgments and decisions,” the statement said.

No, I don’t care much for planes. But this is part of the Boeing story.

• Emirates Orders 50 Airbus A350 Jets In A Revised Deal Worth $16 Billion (CNBC)

Emirates has ordered 50 Airbus A350 jets, the Dubai state-owned airline announced at the Dubai Air Show on Monday. The order’s list price sits at $16 billion, but a steep discount is typically negotiated by airlines. The deal was originally slated to see Emirates order 70 planes from the French manufacturer — 40 of the A350s and 30 A330-900neo jets — but all A330 orders were scrapped in favor of bringing the A350 order size to 50. Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury told a press conference that the European multinational planemaker’s flagship A380 would now have a “younger but very talented brother in the Emirates family.”

The A350 is a family of long-range, twin-engine wide-body jet airliners, while the A380 is the world’s largest passenger airliner. The 50 jets ordered by Emirates are its cornerstone A350-900 variety, accommodating between 300 and 350 passengers. “Complementing our A380s and 777s, the A350s will give us added operational flexibility in terms of capacity, range and deployment,” Emirates Chairman and Chief Executive Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum told press. “In effect, we are strengthening our business model to provide efficient and comfortable air transport services to, and through, our Dubai hub.”

A Turkish low fare airline has ordered 10 737 MAX 8’s. They must think their clients are illiterate.

• Airbus Secures 120 Plane Order From Air Arabia (CNBC)

Air Arabia has signed a firm order for 120 Airbus aircraft, the European plane-maker has announced. The deal, signed on Monday at the Dubai Airshow, consists of 73 A320neos, 27 A321neos and 20 A321XLRs. In a press statement, Airbus Chief Commercial Officer Christian Scherer said the order was a “great endorsement for the A320neo family which will allow the airline to tap into new markets.” Air Arabia Group CEO Adel Al Ali said the order, worth around $14 billion according to 2018 list prices, would support the low-cost carrier’s growth plans.

“This new milestone underpins not only our solid financial fundamentals but also the strength of our multi-hub growth strategy that we have adopted over the years while remaining focused on efficiency, performance and passenger experience,” Al Ali said in a statement. “The addition of the A320neo, A321neo and A321XLR complements our existing fleet and allows us to expand our service to farther and newer destinations while remaining loyal to our low-cost business model.” [..] U.S. rival Boeing also announced that it has received an order for an additional 10 737 Max 8 aircraft from Turkey’s SunExpress, on top of an existing fleet of 32 737 Max 8s. This marks only the second 737 Max order since the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash in March which led to the grounding of the jet worldwide.

The pot and the kettle.

• FedEx CEO Challenges NYT Publisher To Public Debate After Tax Story (R.)

FedEx Chief Executive Frederick Smith has challenged the publisher of the New York Times and the editor of the business section of the newspaper to a public debate in response to a story about the company’s tax bill. The package delivery firm’s financial filings showed it owed no taxes in the 2018 fiscal year overall due to President Donald Trump’s tax overhaul, according to the NYT story published on Sunday. Smith late on Sunday called the story here “distorted and factually incorrect” and challenged NYT’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger and the business section editor to a public debate in Washington. “FedEx’s colorful response does not challenge a single fact in our story. We’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, VP-communications at NYT, said in an email on Monday.

Riots wherever you look. Good time to be a water cannon maker.

• Georgian Riot Police Disperse Anti-Govt Rally In Tbilisi (RT)

Protesters blocking the Georgian parliament building in the center of Tbilisi have been doused with water on Monday as police wearing riot gear were deployed to clear the area and raise the blockade. Massive protests gripped the Georgian capital earlier this week as people took to the streets demanding a snap election. The unease was sparked by parliament’s failure to pass amendments to the election law. If agreed on, it would have meant a transition from a mixed majoritarian-proportional electoral system to a strictly proportional one.

During the rallies, people blocked a major city highway – Rustaveli Avenue – running through the center of Tbilisi and blocked the parliament, preventing MPs from entering the building. Some demonstrators set up tents right in front of the legislature. The parliament gates were also reportedly sealed with a chain and a padlock. Law enforcement repeatedly called on the demonstrators to disperse. The appeal was rejected by the opposition-led crowds who claimed they will leave only once their demands are met.

On Monday, large police forces and water cannons were deployed to the parliament. Officers wearing riot gear and equipped with shields and batons started to slowly push the people away from the area.

As I must have said 1000 times: “Astonishingly, in the case of Stone, he has been convicted of saying that the Mueller nonsense is true..”

• The Roger Stone – Wikileaks – Russia Hoax (Craig Murray)

As ever, the Guardian wins the prize for the most tendentious reporting of Roger Stone’s conviction. This is not quite on the scale of its massive front page lie that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But it is a lie with precisely the same intent, to deceive the public into believing there were links between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign. There were no such links. The headline “Roger Stone: Trump Adviser Found Guilty On All Charges in Trump Hacking Case” is deliberately designed to make you believe a court has found Stone was involved in “Wikileaks hacking”. In fact this is the precise opposite of the truth. Stone was found guilty of lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee by claiming to have links to Wikileaks when in fact he had none. And of threatening Randy Credico to make Credico say there were such links, when there were not.

It is also worth noting the trial was nothing to do with “hacking” and no hacking was alleged or proven. Wikileaks does not do hacking, it does “leaks”. The clue is in the name. The DNC emails were not hacked. The Guardian is fitting this utterly extraneous element into its headline to continue the ludicrous myth that the Clinton campaign was “Hacked” by “the Russians”. It is worth noting that not one of those convicted of charges arising from or in connection with the Mueller investigation – Manafort, Papadopolous, Stone – has been convicted of anything to do with Wikileaks, with anything to do with Russia or with the original thesis of the enquiry.

Astonishingly, in the case of Stone, he has been convicted of saying that the Mueller nonsense is true, and he was a Trump/Wikileaks go-between, when he was not. Yet despite the disastrous collapse of the Mueller Report, and despite the absolutely devastating judicial ruling that there was no evidence worthy even of consideration in court that Russiagate had ever happened, the Guardian and the neo-con media in the USA (inc. CNN, Washington Post, New York Times) continue to serve up an endless diet of lies to the public. Randy Credico was the chief witness for the prosecution against Roger Stone. That’s for the prosecution, not the defence. This is the state’s key evidence against Stone. And Credico is absolutely plain that Stone had no link to Wikileaks.

Laws? What laws? What I didn’t know yet: UC Global was brought in by Correa, to PROTEST Assange.

• The Most Spied Upon Building On Earth (Maurizi)

La Repubblica has had access to the video and audio recordings of the Spanish company, UC Global, which spied on the WikiLeaks founder, his team of journalists and all of us who visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy for the last seven years. Video footage and audio recordings reveal an appalling violation of privacy. All the information gathered by UC Global was sent to US intelligence.

It sounds like a James Bond movie, but it really happened. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalists and every single lawyer, reporter, politician, artist and physician who visited the founder of WikiLeaks at the Ecuadorian embassy over the last seven years was subjected to systematic espionage. Meetings and conversations were recorded and filmed, and all the information was sent to US intelligence. Sometimes the espionage operations were truly off the wall: at one point spies even planned to steal the diaper of a baby brought to visit Assange inside the embassy. The purpose? To gather the baby’s feces and perform a DNA test to establish whether the newborn was a secret son of Julian Assange.

Repubblica has had access to some of the videos, audios and photos. Meetings between the founder of WikiLeaks and his lawyers, medical examinations of Julian Assange, diplomatic encounters of the Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz, meetings between Assange and journalists. Everything was spied on. The author of this article found that she was not just filmed, but her phones were screwed open, presumably to obtain the IMEI code that allows uniquely identifying the phone in order to intercept it. Spies also had access to our USB sticks, though at this stage it is not clear if they managed to break the encryption protecting the information stored in the USB flash drives inside our backpacks. These are very serious violations of the confidentiality of journalistic sources, given that our meetings inside the embassy were entirely professional and, as frequent visitors, we were repeatedly registered as “journalists”.

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Debt Rattle September 28 2019

Sep 282019

September 28, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Greta, impeachment, Joseph WIlson, Lavrov, Schiff, Solomon, Trump, Ukraine, whistleblower 13 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Harbour scene, Dieppe 1883

• New Docs Contradict Biden Claim That Fired Ukrainian Prosecutor Was Corrupt (ZH)

• Adam Schiff Epitomizes the Total Collapse of Democratic Party Integrity (PCR)

• 10 Reasons Democrats’ Impeachment Argument Is Falling Apart (Grabien)

• Intel Community Secretly Nixed Whistleblower Demand of First-Hand Info (Fed.)

• Pompeo Subpoenaed By House Democrats In Trump Impeachment Inquiry (BBC)

• Everything the Press Gets Wrong about the Ukraine Call (Scott Adams)

• A Dumpster Fire on a Garbage Barge (Kunstler)

• Joseph Wilson, US Envoy Who Defied Bush Over Iraq, Dies Aged 69 (BBC)

• White House Deliberates Block On All US Investments In China (CNBC)

• Western Dominance Is On The Wane – Lavrov at UNGA (RT)

• Establishment & Media Sympathize With Greta. So How Is That A Protest? (RT)

• Assange Behind Bars (Felicity Ruby)

As I wrote yesterday: “John Solomon’s account is really important in the impeachment hearings.. And everything he says is documented.”

Solomon is the key figure here.

• New Docs Contradict Biden Claim That Fired Ukrainian Prosecutor Was Corrupt (ZH)

Appearing on “Hannity” Thursday night, Solomon explained “These documents show, as I report tonight for the first time, that the very day that Joe Biden managed to get that Ukraine prosecutor fired, that very day his son’s company’s lawyers, the American company lawyers helping Burisma trying to fight this investigation were trying to urgently reach the new prosecutor, the replacement prosecutor.” “In that meeting, according to the official record from the prosecutor, the lawyers for Hunter Biden’s company stated to the replacement prosecutor, we know that the information calling Mr. Shokin was corrupt and was ‘False information distributed by U.S. Government officials and other figures. We would like to make this up to you by bringing you to Washington, you are not corrupt and you instigated numerous reforms.’ That is the official record of the meeting. Ukrainian prosecutors kept.” (via the Daily Caller). According to Solomon, the memos raise troubling questions (via The Hill):

1) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?” 2) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case? What’s more, Ukrainian prosecutors attempted to get this information to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) since last summer – first unsuccessfully engaging a US attorney in New York who they say showed no interest, and then reaching out to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s attorney.

Schiff was a disgrace in the House- again.

• Adam Schiff Epitomizes the Total Collapse of Democratic Party Integrity (PCR)

US Rep. Adam Schiff, Democrat from California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had no qualms about lying through his teeth in his opening statement prior to the testimony of Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. Everyone present had read the transcript of the telephone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky, and everyone knew that what Schiff, who said he was reading from the transcript of the telephone call, was saying was not in the transcript. How can it be that the chairman of a House committee in a room full of newspersons and TV cameras has no qualms about intentionally misrepresenting the written record in order to make it conform to the lies the Democrats and their stable of corrupt presstitutes have spread about a telephone call revealed by an alleged whistleblower, a likely Democrat operative, who claimed to have heard it second hand.

When I was a member of the Congressional staff, any Representative who so dishonored a committee of the House and the House itself as Schiff has done would have been reprimanded, brought before the Ethics Committee, and forced to resign. But the Democrats have ground integrity under their heel in their fanatical determination to prevent Trump’s reelection. In his opening statement Adam Schiff further showed his total lack of integrity in his assault on the integrity and character of Joseph Maguire and made wild and irresponsible charges probably never witnessed previously in the halls of Congress.

The transcript of the telephone call shows that what the alleged whistleblower said is false. Yet in the face of the evidence Adam Schiff speaks as if the evidence does not exist and that the alleged whistleblower’s second hand statement is true. Once again we hear the Democratic Party say, “Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence.” They don’t need evidence because the presstitutes support their lies and control the explanations given to Americans. The Democrats are betting their future on their lies being shielded by their media whores and that the insouciant American people will hear nothing but false allegations against Trump repeated endlessly, as was the case with Russiagate. If the people realize that the “impeachment investigation” is another hoax like Russiagate, Schiff will have destroyed the Democrats’ chances in the next election.

Key feature: “..the Ukrainian delegation hadn’t even been made aware aid was held up until a month after the Trump call…”

• 10 Reasons Democrats’ Impeachment Argument Is Falling Apart (Grabien)

1. No quid pro quo. Despite Democrats’ initial claim, there was no quid pro quo. The call transcript shows the topic of aid only came up in reference to how well the U.S. treats Ukraine, particularly as compared to Euro nations, most specifically Germany. At no point does Trump threaten to withhold anything, as even some of Trump’s media critics conceded.

2. Ukrainians weren’t pressured. Democrats and the media have repeatedly insisted President Trump “acted like a mob boss” in applying pressure on President Volodymyr Zelensky. He, however, defended Trump, saying he felt no pressure. “ I think you read everything,” he told reporters in New York this week. “So I think you read text. I’m … I am sorry but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open, uh, hum… [..] .. elections of U.S.A. You’ve heard we had, um, I think good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things and I thought so. And I think and you read it that nobody push it, pushed me.”

3. Timeline. Politico’s Ken Vogel reported that the Ukrainian delegation hadn’t even been made aware aid was held up until a month after the Trump call. It’s hard to see they could feel they’re being “extorted,” as Democrats keep saying, if they weren’t even aware of the pressure supposedly being applied.

4. No Illicit Favors. When the White House released the call transcript, readers noticed that after some initial mutual flattery, Zeleznsky brings up buying more Javelin missiles; President Trump then asks for a favor and requests additional information into 2016 election meddling. Rep. Adam Schiff suggested Trump’s request for a “favor” actually referenced wanting dirt on Joe Biden, but Biden only comes up later in the conversation, and in a separate context. Nonetheless, the major media almost uniformly reported the “favor” line from Trump’s call in the same inaccurate fashion.

5. Whistleblower Complaint Lacks Credibility. This complaint, which Democrats for some reason insisted was more important than the call transcript itself, was basically a version of that original call that had been run through a game of telephone. The report had the basic story reasonably accurate, but then supplemented that synopsis with additional accumulated gossip. At least three key details in the complaint have since been shown to be false. As the document is itself a product of hearsay — the self-described whistleblower admits at the beginning of his report that he never witnessed anything — and the fact it contains demonstrable inaccuracies, its importance should certainly be subjugated to the call transcript itself. [..]

9. Rudy. It’s widely reported Rudy Giuliani was Trump’s go-to guy for actually carrying out this conspiracy. On his call, Trump told the Ukraine president to speak with Rudy (as well as AG Barr), about the investigation into an oil company on whose board sat Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son. But Giuliani first communicated with his Ukrainian counterparts more than a year before Biden entered the race. Yes, it’s possible they anticipated Biden eventually entering the race; but it’s also possible Trump actually thought there might be legitimate corruption worthy of investigating. Giuliani tries to prove this point by noting the State Dept. was helping coordinate his communications.

This is too much.

• Intel Community Secretly Nixed Whistleblower Demand of First-Hand Info (Fed.)

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.” The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public.

The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed. The complaint alleges that President Donald Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president. In his complaint, which was dated August 12, 2019, the complainant acknowledged he was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing he claims Trump committed. A previous version of the whistleblower complaint document, which the ICIG and DNI until recently provided to potential whistleblowers, declared that any complaint must contain only first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing and that complaints that provide only hearsay, rumor, or gossip would be rejected.

You start to feel pity for them.

• Pompeo Subpoenaed By House Democrats In Trump Impeachment Inquiry (BBC)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been ordered by Democrats to turn over documents relating to the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine. In a letter, the heads of three House committees subpoenaed Mr Pompeo to produce the documents within a week. It is the latest move in rapidly escalating impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. He is being scrutinised for allegedly pressuring Ukraine’s president to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden. In a separate development on Friday, the US special envoy for Ukraine negotiations, Kurt Volker, resigned, US media reported.

Mr Trump has denied putting any pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone call in July, when Mr Biden was leading polls to win the Democratic nomination for the White House race in 2020. Mr Trump has alleged that Mr Biden pressed for the sacking of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 to protect a business that employed his son, Hunter Biden. Mr Biden did call for the sacking of Mr Shokin, even threatening to withhold $1bn (£813m) in aid to Ukraine.

Everyone understands why the US president needs the room to move, and they’ll grant it to every single one. Except for Trump.

• Everything the Press Gets Wrong about the Ukraine Call (Scott Adams)

We give our presidents a lot of flexibility in dealing with foreign affairs because it works better to have one “boss” in these situations. Had Trump permanently withheld funds approved by Congress, that would be a system problem on our end. But temporarily putting a hold on those funds before speaking leader-to-leader is just smart presidenting. It creates the impression that the president is the only American the foreign leader needs to deal with. That’s “setting the table.” Does it matter exactly what Trump was going to discuss, negotiate, or request? Nope. If the only thing Trump did on the phone call was congratulate President Zelensky on his election victory, it would still be smart to hold the funds until then.

We want our president to go into every conversation with foreign leaders fully armed, persuasion-wise. When Trump brings the full weight of the office with him, it sets the table for the current conversations, and every one after that. When Trump withholds funds, pulls out of a deal, or otherwise transfers power from Congress to himself, it makes him a more effective negotiator. It puts him in charge. It is a strong psychological advantage. Compare that approach to sending a president out weak, dependent on Congress to wipe his nose. Those are not similar table settings. Trump knows the difference. So does everyone who read his book, The Art of the The Deal.

We’ve heard Trump say he was concerned about corruption in Ukraine, and that was why he put a hold on the funds. I’m sure that was at least a part of his concern. Probably every American has that same concern about foreign aid in general. But as I said, it doesn’t matter what reason he gives the American public. Regardless of corruption in Ukraine, it was still smart to withhold funds until after the leaders spoke, because it made Trump the only person Zelensky needs to satisfy. That’s what we want from our presidents. We want them going in strong, with the full weight of their office and influence, to every interaction with foreign leaders, every time.

“Their ongoing campaign to undo the 2016 election is igniting a civil war.”

• A Dumpster Fire on a Garbage Barge (Kunstler)

Others have pointed out that the whistleblower’s complaint was composed as a legal brief, leading to the inference that it was constructed by lawyers and perhaps a team of lawyers. The whistleblower’s lawyer is Andrew Bakaj, a former CIA employee who got his start interning for Senator Chuck Schumer and then Hillary Clinton. The Washingtonian said Bakaj “actually wrote the CIA’s internal rules on whistleblowing.” Is that so? Did he write Form 401 then? His client’s complaint states: “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.” In other words, second-hand information. Dismissed.

Everyone and his uncle remembers the infamous threat issued to Mr. Trump by Senator Schumer during the transition period in January, 2017: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Perhaps Senator Schumer should have kept his pie-hole shut on that. He made it official that the Intel Community would act as an adversary and antagonist to the President, and that appears to be exactly what has happened. One suspects that this rogue agency has captured The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and several TV cable news networks as well. And now they are metamorphosing into an enemy of the people.

The moment approaches when Mr. Trump will have to carry out a severe housecleaning of the CIA and perhaps many other agencies under the executive branch of the government. Their ongoing campaign to undo the 2016 election is igniting a civil war. Clearly a part of the whistleblower gambit was an attempt to discredit Attorney General William Barr and set up a device that would force him to recuse himself from any further inquiry into shenanigans carried out in and around Ukraine since 2014, when the CIA and the Obama State Department overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovych. Mr. Barr is a sturdy fellow. He may have seven ways from Sunday for countering their seditious monkeyshines. Wait for it.

Literally lives destroyed by the Deep State.

• Joseph Wilson, US Envoy Who Defied Bush Over Iraq, Dies Aged 69 (BBC)

The US diplomat Joseph Wilson, who defied President George W Bush over the decision to go to war with Iraq, has died aged 69. In 2003, Mr Wilson disproved allegations used by the Bush administration as grounds for invasion that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had bought uranium in Niger. Days later, his then-wife Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA agent, in what some saw as an act of political revenge. He and Ms Plame divorced in 2017. Ms Plame told the Washington Post that er ex-husband had died of organ failure in a hospice in New Mexico, where they both lived. In a career spanning three decades, Mr Wilson held numerous postings, mainly in Africa. As acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the First Gulf War in 1991, he was the last US diplomat to meet Saddam Hussein.

In 2002, by then a private citizen, Mr Wilson was sent by the CIA on a fact-finding mission to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had bought a nuclear material – uranium yellowcake. Mr Wilson concluded that the reports were false, but 11 months later they reappeared in Mr Bush’s State of the Union address. They were used as evidence that Iraq was obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and justification for the 2003 war. In July of that year, the former diplomat wrote in the New York Times: “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

May not be all that practical. How about existing investments?

• White House Deliberates Block On All US Investments In China (CNBC)

The White House is weighing some curbs on U.S. investments in China, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC. This discussion includes possibly blocking all U.S. financial investments in Chinese companies, the source said. It’s in the preliminary stages and nothing has been decided, the source said. There’s also no time frame for their implementation, the source added. Restricting financial investments in Chinese entities would be meant to protect U.S. investors from excessive risk due to lack of regulatory supervision, the source said. The deliberations come as the U.S. looks for additional levers of influence in trade talks, which resume on Oct. 10 in Washington.

Both countries slapped tariffs on billions of dollars worth of each other’s goods. The discussions also come as the Chinese government is taking steps to increase foreign access to its markets. Bloomberg News first reported earlier on Friday that Trump administration officials are considering ways to limit U.S. investors’ portfolio flows into China, including delisting Chinese companies from American stock exchanges and preventing U.S. government pension funds from investing in the Chinese market. Shares of Alibaba, Baidu and other Chinese companies plunged following the news. China’s yuan weakened to 7.15 against the dollar on the report.

‘We’re liberals hence anything is permitted to us’”

• Western Dominance Is On The Wane – Lavrov at UNGA (RT)

The West ignores reality by trying to prevent the formation of a multi-polar world by imposing its narrow “liberal” rules on others, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told the UN General Assembly. Lavrov’s speech on Friday at the UN headquarters in New York focused on global challenges but, unlike some of the speakers, he didn’t mince words, proceeding into a full-on rebuke of the Western ideal of world order. New centers of economic growth and political influence are emerging internationally, he said, but the US and its allies are trying to impede the rise of the multi-polar world. In order to achieve this, they “impose the standards of conduct based on narrow Western interpretation of liberalism on others. In short, ‘We’re liberals hence anything is permitted to us’” was how he characterized this attitude.

“It’s hard for the West to accept that its centuries-long domination is diminishing.” “The West has been increasingly forgetting about international law and more often dwell on rules-based order.”

As opposed to this counterproductive approach, lasting solutions to global challenges should be founded “on the basis of the UN Charter, through the balance of interests of all states,” the Russian FM recommended. The top Russian diplomat also expressed hope that Moscow and Washington would agree on an extension of the New Strategic Arms Treaty (New START), which is set to expire in February 2021. All the suggestions that Russia has made to establish additional communication channels to work on the issue are still “on the table,” Lavrov said, as is Moscow’s most recent proposal for NATO to impose a mutual moratorium on the deployment of short- and mid-range missiles in Europe.

Oh, jeez…: “The Guardian comparing her speech on Monday to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for its historical significance, and New York Magazine calling her “the Joan of Arc of climate change.”

• Establishment & Media Sympathize With Greta. So How Is That A Protest? (RT)

As hundreds of thousands of people – many of them schoolchildren – take to the streets in another demonstration over climate change, one must wonder: at what point does protest become the status quo? Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s solo school walkout last August was little more than a sideshow to newspaper editors and TV crews. But the teenage crusader’s ‘school strike’ snowballed, and the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement grew. Now, after an emotional speech by Thunberg at the UN Climate Action Summit on Monday, hundreds of thousands of climate strikers worldwide are packing the streets on Friday, demanding their governments declare a state of emergency, slash carbon emissions, penalize meat-eating and kill the car, to pick but a few of their proposals.

But these radicals – as they would have been called not so long ago – aren’t being met by the batons, tear gas and rubber bullets the state usually deploys to quash dissent (not that any peaceful demonstrations should be). Media outlets aren’t smearing those within their ranks as racists and downplaying attendance numbers, and the crowds occupying city streets aren’t risking injury and mutilation to do so. The very idea of ‘protest’ implies some resistance, some injustice of state to be overcome. Climate protesters would argue that not enough is being done to heal our heating earth – and that’s a debate beyond the scope of this article – but government, media, and the world’s power brokers have aided Thunberg and co’s protest movement at every step of the way.

France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ protests began in opposition to a fossil fuel tax hike, and were met with all of the violence described above on a weekly basis. Thunberg, in contrast, was invited to address the French parliament in July. Likewise with her appearances at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, her speeches before British parliament and the US Congress, and her most recent UN appearance. On every occasion, the world’s political leaders rolled out the red carpet and held the door open for her to lecture them. Media coverage of Thunberg and the climate protests has been overwhelmingly favorable – with The Guardian comparing her speech on Monday to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for its historical significance, and New York Magazine calling her “the Joan of Arc of climate change.” The Yellow Vests, to continue the comparison, were described as a rabble of anti-semites and “notorious Holocaust deniers,” based on the actions of a tiny minority of protesters.

A visit to Belmarsh maximum-security prison. Hard to get through.

• Assange Behind Bars (Felicity Ruby)

I have only ever known Julian Assange in detention. For nine years now, I have visited him in England bearing Australian news and solidarity. To Ellingham Hall I brought music and chocolate, to the Ecuadorian embassy I brought flannel shirts, Rake, Wizz Fizz and eucalyptus leaves, but to Belmarsh prison you can bring nothing—not a gift, not a book, not a piece of paper. Then I returned to Australia, a country so far away that has abandoned him in almost every respect.

Over the years I have learned to not ask, ‘How are you?’, because it’s bloody obvious how he is: detained, smeared, maligned, unfree, stuck—in ever-narrower, colder, darker and damper tunnels—pursued and punished for publishing. Over the years I’ve learned to not complain of the rain or remark on what a beautiful day it is, because he’s been inside for so long that a blizzard would be a blessing. I’ve also learned that it is not comforting but cruel to speak of sunsets, kookaburras, road trips; it’s not helpful to assure him that, like me and my dog, he will find animal tracks in the bush when he comes home, even though I think it almost every day.

It is the prolonged and intensifying nature of his confinement that hits me as I wait in the first line outside the front door of the brown-brick jail. At the visitor centre opposite I’ve been fingerprinted after showing two forms of proof of address and my passport. Sure to remove absolutely everything from my pockets, I’ve locked my bags, keeping only £20 to spend on chocolate and sandwiches. Despite the security theatre that follows, the money gets nicked at some point through no fewer than four passageways that are sealed from behind before the next door opens, a metal detector, being patted down and having my mouth and ears inspected. After putting our shoes back on, we visitors cross an outdoor area and are faced with the reality of the cage: grey steel-mesh fencing with razor wire that is about 4 metres high all around. I hurry into the next building before going into a room where thirty small tables are fixed to the floor, with one blue plastic chair facing three green plastic chairs at each.

No Quid Pro Quo Imbroglio

Sep 212019

September 21, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:12 pm Primers Tagged with: Assange, Biden, Democrats, Giuliani, Guardian, MSM, Solomon, Trump, Ukraine, Zelensky 5 Responses »

Salvador Dali Punta es Baluard de la Riba d’en Pitxot 1918-19

US Democrats and MSM are running down a blind alley, telling themselves there’s light at the end. It has become a mass delusion. For the largest part, it has been for some four years now. You would think they’d learn something along the way, but there are very few if any signs of that.

Someone comes up with a rumor, a snippet of something, and the entire crowd jumps and runs away with it. This happens a few times a week. Four years is 200 weeks. Granted, it was worse when they still had the idea they could keep Trump from the presidency, but now that idea has morphed into impeachment, and they just keep at it.

I’ve said it before, but I still don’t quite understand why so little attention is paid to their own credibility. That they continue to reside inside an echo chamber undoubtedly goes a long way towards explaining, but they must be aware that with only the echo chamber, they have no chance of winning in 2020.

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a new anti-Kavanaugh article, and apologized for it shortly afterwards because it was baseless: the woman quoted as accusing him didn’t even remember. By then, though, 100,000 other articles on the topic had been written and broadcast.

Perhaps to paper that over, though they might not care anymore after the first million nonsense stories, there’s a new tale in town: Trump and Ukraine. Do all the news outlets ‘reporting’ on it even realize how dangerous that issue is for ‘their own’ Joe Biden? Shouldn’t they be holding back? Or are they trying to cleverly sabotage Sloppy Joe’s campaign?

The Guardian provides a good example of how the ‘reporting’ goes. Get a catchy headline, create an atmosphere, throw in plenty innuendo, and hark back to some past rumors that are irrelevant today but linger in people’s minds. And…you can’t mention Mueller enough.

Ukraine Imbroglio Confirms Giuliani As Trump’s Most Off-Kilter Advocate

Cuomo: “Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?” Giuliani: “No. Actually I didn’t.” Crystal clear. Except that 83 words and about 30 seconds later, Cuomo asked the question again. Cuomo: “So, you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?” Giuliani: “Of course I did.” That Giuliani was prepared so blatantly to contradict himself on live TV in the service of the president perfectly encapsulates his transformation. “America’s Mayor”, the hero of 9/11, has metamorphosed into what the New Yorker dubbed “Trump’s clown”.

This is not the first time Giuliani has incurred ridicule and rebuke in the cause of protecting his longtime friend – no, client. In the final days of the 2016 election the lawyer was almost the only person willing to speak in favor of Trump after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape was aired. As the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in that election reached its climax, Giuliani threw lawyerly restraint to the winds and repeatedly denounced the inquiry as a witch-hunt.

That’s quite the portrait. Guess they may have thought people forgot about Rudy.

[..] But of all the scraps in which Giuliani has engaged in recent months, of all the obfuscations and verbal sleights of hand, this week’s performance could prove the most damaging, both for him and for his White House buddy. America’s Mayor has tied himself in ever-tighter knots over claims that at Trump’s behest he improperly sought to coerce Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden in the hope of dredging up damaging information.

No fewer than three House committees this week launched investigations into the Trump-Giuliani efforts in Ukraine. Though not yet on the scale of Mueller’s inquiry into whether Trump colluded with Russia, the new uproar bears chilling echoes of it.

Lovely. That’s how it’s done. Except that Giuliani did not “improperly seek to coerce Ukraine”, as we will see. Never mind, the neverending echoes still say Trump is Bad so Rudy is Bad. As for bringing up the Mueller inquiry, do they remember how that ended? Are they already fearing this narrative may end the same way?

[..] On Friday, the Wall Street Journal disclosed devastating new details of a phone conversation between Trump and Zelensky on 25 July. The paper reported that Trump pressed “about eight times” for his opposite number to look into work in the country by Biden’s son Hunter. And, the Journal wrote, Trump explicitly urged Zelensky to work with one person in forwarding the mission: Rudy Giuliani.

That Trump would be willing to attract further legal scrutiny just months after Mueller wrapped up his work, by inviting yet another foreign government to assist him in a presidential election campaign, is profoundly puzzling. After all, he partly brought the Mueller inquiry down upon his own head by inviting Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails in July 2016.

I think they’re insinuating that Trump’s campaign joke -partly- started the Muller inquiry. Wow. And to link that to an anonymous source telling someone something we don’t know because it’s been kept secret..wow again. They’re starting to sound needy.

[..] Giuliani began thumping the Ukraine theme in April, when he laid out his theory – some would say, conspiracy theory – on Fox News. He accused the former vice-president of using bribery to shield his son from legal peril relating to business activities in the eastern European country. Specifically, Giuliani alleged that Biden leant on a former Ukraine president to fire a top prosecutor who had been investigating corruption within a gas company on whose board Hunter Biden then served.

We know Biden did that. There’s video of him bragging about it. Right here:

[..] Perhaps most incendiary of all are suggestions Trump and Giuliani may have tried to encourage the Ukraine government to play ball by invoking US aid to the country. “The potentially most explosive issue here is whether the president essentially offered Ukraine a quid pro quo,” said Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University.

Trump did not offer Zelensky a quid pro quo. The WaPo said so yesterday. We have proof of Biden demanding quid pro quo, we have none of Trump even asking for it.

Anyway, some bits from the BBC:

Trump Dismisses ‘Ridiculous Story’ About Alleged Promise To Foreign Leader

President Donald Trump has dismissed a whistleblower allegation that he made a promise to a foreign leader – believed to be Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky – calling it a “ridiculous story”. He said his talks with leaders were always “totally appropriate”. Reports say Mr Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son – who was on a Ukrainian gas company board – in return for more US military support.

“If these reports are true, then there is truly no bottom to President Trump’s willingness to abuse his power and abase our country,” Mr Biden wrote in a statement. In its report on the complaint by the whistleblower, the Washington Post said the intelligence official had found Mr Trump’s comment to the foreign leader “so troubling” that they went to the department’s inspector general.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, quoted sources as saying Mr Trump had urged Mr Zelensky about eight times to work with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani on an investigation into Mr Biden’s son, but had not offered anything in return. On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that reports of the complaint raised “grave, urgent concerns” for US national security. Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky spoke by phone on 25 July. The whistleblower’s complaint is dated 12 August.

A: again, no quid pro quo, no nothing ‘in return for more US military support.’

B: Biden has guts accusing Trump of what he himself has been found guilty of. Attack is the best defense? Talk about abasing your country.

[Trump] described the complaint as “just another political hack job”. “It’s a ridiculous story. It’s a partisan whistleblower. He shouldn’t even have information. I’ve had conversations with many leaders. They’re always appropriate,” he said [..] On Thursday, Mr Trump wrote on Twitter that he knew all his phone calls to foreign leaders were listened to by US agencies.

Earlier this month, before the whistleblower’s complaint came to light, House Democrats launched an investigation into Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani’s interactions with Ukraine.

Three Democratic panel heads – Eliot Engel (foreign affairs), Adam Schiff (intelligence) and Elijah Cummings (oversight) – said Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani had attempted “to manipulate the Ukrainian justice system to benefit the president’s re-election campaign and target a possible political opponent”. They allege that Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani tried to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden.

Wait. Why were all those investigations launched? Phishing, are we?

Here’s the no quid pro quo again, as per Tyler Durden:

WaPo Reports No “Quid Pro Quo” Offered During Phone Call

[..] the Washington Post quietly reported on Friday evening that a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not contain an explicit quid pro quo if Ukraine launched an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son as initially reported. [..] “Trump did not raise the issue of American military and intelligence aid that had been pledged to Ukraine, indicating there was not an explicit quid pro quo in that call.”

[..] “The revelation that Trump pushed Zelensky to pursue the Biden probe, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, represents the most detailed account so far of the president’s conduct that prompted a U.S. intelligence official to file a whistleblower action against the president.” -Washington Post

So – the current US president asked Ukraine to conduct a legal investigation into the former US Vice President, who openly bragged about withholding $1 billion in US loan guarantees unless they fired the guy investigating his son and his son’s company – and there was no quid pro quo offered in exchange for that investigation – at least not on that phone call.

The Daily Beast found a real-life Ukraine official (or so they say). Did they slip something into the guy’s drink? He makes some strange claims.

Trump wants to take revenge for Manafort? Because of Biden? What did/does Biden have to do with Manafort? Makes little sense.

Look, Trump wouldn’t mind getting a more solid take behind the Biden video, that’s why he asked Zelensky to investigate. After already being informed that Ukraine sought contact with his government because of it (see below).

But that doesn’t mean Trump fears Biden and seeks to discredit him for that. That video is out there for everyone to see and Biden looks like he’s selling out the US. Make what you want from that.

Trump Urged Ukraine President 8 Times During Call To Investigate Biden’s Son

The Journal’s new report came as a top Ukraine official reportedly said that Trump “is looking” for Ukraine officials to investigate business dealings of Biden’s son in that country in an effort “to discredit” Biden as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination. The official, Anton Geraschenko, told The Daily Beast that Ukraine is ready to investigate Hunter Biden’s relationship with the Ukraine gas company “as soon as there is an official request.”

But, he added, “Currently there is no open investigation.” Geraschenko is a senior advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister, who would be in charge of any investigation of Hunter Biden. “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison,” Geraschenko told The Daily Beast.

And don’t think we’re done yet. John Solomon has a lot more. Turns out, Ukraine has been contacting the US, not the other way around, about handing over evidence.

Missing Piece To The Ukraine Puzzle: State Department’s Overture To Rudy Giuliani

The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country. Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal. But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened:

Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department. Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him. [..] When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.

[..] Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it? According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years .

The Ukrainians say their efforts to get their allegations to U.S. authorities were thwarted first by the U.S. embassy in Kiev, which failed to issue timely visas allowing them to visit America.

Then the Ukrainians hired a former U.S. attorney — not Giuliani — to hand-deliver the evidence of wrongdoing to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, but the federal prosecutors never responded.

The U.S. attorney, a respected American, confirmed the Ukrainians’ story to me. The allegations that Ukrainian officials wanted to pass on involved both efforts by the Democratic National Committee to pressure Ukraine to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election as well as Joe Biden’s son’s effort to make money in Ukraine while the former vice president managed U.S.-Ukraine relations, the retired U.S. attorney told me.

Eventually, Giuliani in November 2018 got wind of the Ukrainian allegations and started to investigate. [..] Ukrainian officials also are discussing privately the possibility of creating a parliamentary committee to assemble the evidence and formally send it to the U.S. Congress, after failed attempts to get the Department of Justice’s attention, my sources say.

And just like that we have an entirely different story. But everyone in the media and the Democratic party will either ignore Solomon or try to discredit him. Until their Trump-Ukraine tale fizzles out and there’s no more readerships or ads to sell on it. By then, they reckon someone will come up with the next empty shell.

I’ll keep on wondering why they always go with these false claims. Is there really nothing actually true that they can find? It is sheer laziness, are they all not all that smart, or are they secretly on Trump’s payroll?

Me, I’ll condemn Trump for what he allows to happen to Julian Assange, and Chelsea and Snowden. But I’m not going to make up narratives for that, or play along with others who do.

The Forrest Gump of All Future Democrat Losses

Aug 092018

August 9, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:33 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: Assange, Democrats, Ecuador, Forrest Gump, Gaddafi, Hillary, Mark Warner, Russia, Senate, Solomon, torture, UK, Waldman, Wikileaks 6 Responses »

René Magritte The evening gown 1954

Julian Assange has received an letter from the US Senate asking him to testify in front of them. What to make of that is not entirely clear. Far as I know, Assange offered such testimony multiple times, under the ‘right standards’. The Senate ostensibly wants this to take place behind closed doors, and it’s hard to see how that would fit Assange’s standards. But who knows?

What struck me was that the letter was signed by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA). and especially the latter runs like a red thread through everything that has to do with Assange and the US. It reminded me of what John Solomon said in his June 25 piece ‘How Comey Intervened To Kill Wikileaks’ Immunity Deal’ about Assange lawyer Adam Waldman, who according to Solomon has a ‘Forrest Gump-like penchant for showing up in major cases of intrigue’.

Mark Warner has that, too. What made me return to this is that in his piece yesterday on the Senate request, Tyler Durden, referring to Solomon’s article, wrote: After Assange’s request was run up the flag pole, Senator Warner was issued a “stand-down” order by Comey.. And I thought: I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, and not only because Comey cannot ‘order’ a US Senator to do anything.

The stand down order was not for Warner, he just passed it on to Waldman and his counterpart acting for the DOJ, David Laufman, head of Justice’s counterintelligence and export controls section. NOTE: we don’t even know if the stand down didn’t really come from Warner, or Comey AND Warner, or someone else altogether.

What we do know is that it was a very peculiar order at a very peculiar moment in time, because the intelligence community could have gotten something tangible and valuable out of the negotiations. Solomon: “..officials “understood any visibility into his thinking, any opportunity to negotiate any redactions, was in the national security interest and worth taking,” says a senior official involved at the time.”

They were well on their way to -at least potentially- save the lives of CIA operatives and assets. Negotiations had been going on for at least 2 months, and probably more like three. But then Assange offered to provide evidence that he didn’t get the DNC files from Russia. And that seems to have changed the atmosphere. Tyler has some more about this, outside of the Solomon piece:

‘Last August, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher travelled to London with journalist Charles Johnson for a meeting with Assange, after which Rohrabacher said the WikiLeaks founder offered “firsthand” information proving that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia, and which would refute the Russian hacking theory.’ After Trump denied knowledge of the potential deal, Rohrabacher raged at Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, for constructing a “wall” around President Trump by “people who do not want to expose this fraud.”

NOTE: that meeting took place 4-5 months AFTER the Comey (et al?) stand down order. So Assange was still reaching out and offering to spare individual CIA assets. He has released a lot of the CIA Vault 7 files, but not all. To my knowledge he has held back on that to this day.

I don’t know how much you still follow from the pro-Russiagate press, which is about the entire US MSM, but Rohrabacher is habitually called a traitor, a Putin puppet and worse for talking to Russians, just like he is for going to see Assange. Once you start trying to find a way out of the ever tighter woven Russia Russia web, you’re fair game. Even if that’s simply your job as a Congressman, or at least your interpretation of what the job entails.

Back to Solomon for a bit. What he describes is not some amnesty deal, but a “Queen for a Day” proffer. Which in this case was essentially a safe passage guarantee for Assange to leave the Ecuador embassy only to go talk to US government people. We don’t know all the prospective topics of the talks, and they don’t seem to have agreed on a location (London, Washington?!) before the Comey order. Solomon:

Not included in the written proffer was an additional offer from Assange: He was willing to discuss technical evidence ruling out certain parties in the controversial leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. The U.S. government believes those emails were hacked by Russia; Assange insists they did not come from Moscow.

“Mr. Assange offered to provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases,” Waldman told me. “Finally, he offered his technical expertise to the U.S. government to help address what he perceived as clear flaws in security systems that led to the loss of the U.S. cyber weapons program.”

That is just funny: Assange offered to help the CIA on its security systems. That must have pissed them off mightily, because it can only mean they really needed to strengthen security (or he wouldn’t have brought it up). But then Waldman reaches out to Warner, in what may well have been a fatal mistake. The talks with the DOJ were going well, and might have been enough. Getting politics involved in it was one took over the line:

[..] Just a few days after the negotiations opened in mid-February, Waldman reached out to Sen. Warner; the lawyer wanted to see if Senate Intelligence Committee staff wanted any contact with Assange, to ask about Russia or other issues. Warner engaged with Waldman over encrypted text messages, then reached out to Comey. A few days later, Warner contacted Waldman with an unexpected plea.

“He told me he had just talked with Comey and that, while the government was appreciative of my efforts, my instructions were to stand down, to end the discussions with Assange,” Waldman told me. Waldman offered contemporaneous documents to show he memorialized Warner’s exact words.

Waldman couldn’t believe a U.S. senator and the FBI chief were sending a different signal, so he went back to Laufman, who assured him the negotiations were still on. “What Laufman said to me after he heard I was told to ‘stand down’ by Warner and Comey was, ‘That’s bullshit. You are not standing down and neither am I,’” Waldman recalled.

A source familiar with Warner’s interactions says the senator’s contact on the Assange matter was limited and was shared with Senate Intelligence chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). But the source acknowledges that Warner consulted Comey and passed along the “stand down” instructions to Waldman: “That did happen.”

Okay, so we have Warner very much in the thick of the DOJ negotiations with Assange. Fast forward to late June 2018, when his name pops up again in a list of 10 Democratic Senators who asked Vice President Mike Pence to, on a visit to Ecuador, ask new president Lenin Moreno, to revoke Assange’s asylum on the London embassy.

Warner is there, along with such fine human beings as Dianne Feinstein, and the two Dicks Durbin and Blumenthal. Wikileaks, which posted the list, suggested: “Remember them”. Looks like an idea. Why would the Democratic party want Assange delivered to the lions? Oh, right, Russia Russia, the entirely unproven allegations which they are so desperate to tie Assange into.

They can’t prove any of the many allegations of Russian meddling, let alone their role in Hillary’s election loss, and they can’t prove any allegation against Julian Assange, at least none that he could be charged for/with, but tie Russia and WikiLeaks together and they feel they no longer have to prove anything at all, that mere allegations are strong enough.

If there is no crime Assange can be accused of, you just label him a terrorist, and all your legal problems disappear. Because terrorism can be anything, and because of national security reasons, any evidence, whether it exists or not, must be treated in secret. What reason, what grounds, do these Senators have to ask Ecuador to revoke Assange’s asylum? What legal grounds could possibly exist? We have no way of knowing, and because they label Julian a terrorist, we have no right to, either. Or so they claim.

This is called abomination of justice. In the same way that America and Britain’s treatment of him is called torture. And no, that is not too strong a term. A man who has never been charged with a crime by anyone, in any country, is being tortured. Julian has severe, painful, dental problems, he has developed a condition that makes his legs swell, and his bone density is dropping fast due to extended lack of sunlight.

These people have simply decided to wait it out, so they don’t have to go through elaborate legal procedures that they may well lose, to wait until Assange has no choice but to walk out of the embassy, or be carried out on a stretcher or in a coffin. It’s not even possible to list all the British, American, Ecuadorian and international laws his treatment violates.

Someone should give it a try, though. Just like someone should investigate Mark Warner’s role in all of this. Warner was pivotal in killing off the Assange legal teams’ talks with the DOJ, he asked Ecuador to stop Assange’s asylum (which is so illegal you don’t even want to go there), and now he requests for Assange to appear before the US Senate.

Someone investigate that guy. If I can say one last thing, it would be that Warner exemplifies all that is wrong with the US Democratic Party. He’s the Forrest Gump of all their future election losses. The Democrats should be standing up to protect people like Assange, but instead they follow the example of Hillary, who said about Assange “can’t we drone this guy?”.

Yeah, the very guy who’s never been charged with a single crime. She undoubtedly said it in the same tone of voice as her insane cackle of “We came, we saw, he died” about Gaddafi. Looked at Libya lately?

The essence of this is that we will be better people, and better societies, with Julian Assange around to help us be better. Without him, things look a whole lot darker. We need to be able to hold politicians, corporations and secret services to account. And the more they resist this, often in illegal ways, the more we must insist.

The idea was never that we must answer to them. They must answer to us, and we must be able to throw them out when they cross legal and moral lines. It’s beyond the pale that that has to be explained once again. And trying to explain that, with examples, is all that Julian Assange has ever done.

Julian Assange and the Dying of the Light

Jul 242018

July 24, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:25 pm Primers Tagged with: allegations, Assange, Comey, Correa, Ecuador, evidence, light, Moreno, Mueller, night, Russia, Solomon 5 Responses »

Jacques-Louis David Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus’ Disease 1774

One thing that’s not receiving enough attention in the respective Assange and Russia coverage is to what extent both protagonists are needed in each other’s narratives to keep each of these alive. Without explicitly linking Assange to Russia, allegations against him lose a lot, if not most, of their credibility. Likewise, if Assange is not put straight in the middle of the Russia story, it too loses much. Linking them is the gift that keeps on giving for the US intelligence community and the Democratic party.

In that light, as the shameful/shameless treatment of Julian Assange continues and is on the verge of even worse developments, I was wondering about some dates and timelines in the whole sordid affair. And about how crucial it is for those wanting to ‘capture’ him, to tie him to Russia in any form and shape they can come up with and make halfway credible.

10 days ago in The True Meaning of ‘Collusion’ I mentioned how Robert Mueller in his indictment of 12 Russians -but not Assange-, released on the eve of the Trump-Putin summit, strongly insinuated that WikiLeaks had actively sought information from Russians posing as Guccifer 2.0, that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. I also said that Assange was an easy target because, being closed off from all communication, he cannot defend himself. From the indictment:

a. On or about June 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to “[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

Now, the indictment itself has been blown to shreds by Adam Carter, while the narrative that the Russians hacked DNC servers and provided what they stole to WikiLeaks, has always categorically been denied by Assange, while the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and others have concluded that the speed at which the info was downloaded from the servers means it couldn’t have been a hack.

Oh, and Carter left little standing of Mueller et al’s portrait of Guccifer 2.0 as being of Russian origin. Plus, as several voices have pointed out, Assange had said on British TV on June 12 2016, ten days before the date the indictment indicates, that WikiLeaks was sitting on a batch of material pertaining to Hillary Clinton. An indictment full of allegations, not evidence, that in the end reads like Swiss cheese.

But it does serve to keep alive, and blow new fire into, the “The Russians Did It” narrative. And obviously, it also rekindles the allegation that Assange was working with the Russians to make Trump win and Hillary lose. Allegations, not evidence, against which neither Assange nor “the Russians” are in a position to defend themselves. Very convenient.

In his June 25 article How Comey Intervened To Kill Wikileaks’ Immunity Deal, The Hill’s John Solomon details how negotiations in early 2017 between legal representatives for Julian Assange and the US Justice Department were suddenly halted when James Comey, then FBI director, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) suddenly and entirely unexpectedly told Adam Waldman, Assange’s attorney, and David Laufman, then head of Justice’s counterintelligence and export controls section, who had been picked to lead the talks, to stand down.

This happened when Waldman reached out to Warner, who informed Comey, among other things, about Assange’s offer to provide evidence that he did not get the DNC files from the Russians. That would have dealt a huge blow to the Russia-Did-It allegation, and it would also have destroyed the narrative of Assange working with Russia. And lest we forget: it would have made Mueller’s indictment worth less than the paper it’s written on.

That Comey’s order for Waldman and Laufman to stand down risked the lives and safety of CIA operatives receives surprisingly(?) little attention, but apparently it was worth it for Comey to keep the narrative(s) alive. What do the operatives themselves think about it, though?

It’s not fully clear from Solomon’s article when exactly the stand down order was given, and/or when the talks broke down entirely. Going through the dates, we know it’s sometime between March 28 2017, when we know talks were still ongoing, and April 7 2017, when Assange “released documents with the specifics of some of the CIA malware used for cyber attacks.” After that, then CIA director Mike Pompeo labeld WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.”

Why is the date interesting? For one thing because present Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno was elected to his job on April 2 2017 (he took office on May 24). And it’s Moreno who now holds Assange’s fate in his hands. It was Moreno, also, who cut off Assange completely from the outside world last March.

Moreno’s about-face since becoming president is something to behold. He had been vice-president, trustee and friend to his predecessor Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013. Moreno, who’s wheelchair bound after being shot in a burglary in 1998, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts for the disabled in Ecuador.

What made him turn? Or should we perhaps ask: when did the Americans get to him? And what do they have on him? Is it bribe or blackmail? There’s talk of new and generous IMF loans as we speak. What’s clear is that Moreno is in London this week, and it’s unlikely that Assange’s situation doesn’t come up in talks at all, even if that’s what Moreno’s people want to make us believe. It’s way more likely that discussions are happening about how to put Assange out on to the street and then in a British or even US jail.

But Assange’s case may not be as hopeless as we think. First, all the British have on him is a charge of jumping bail. That carries three months and a fine. It’s not labeled a serious charge, that goes for offences that carry three years and more. New UK Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt misspoke seriously when he said Assange faced serious charges. He doesn’t. And Britain still has a court system, and Assange still has lawyers.

More important, perhaps, is that Moreno will come under a lot of pressure, and probably already is, to not hand over Assange. The UN has been very clear about what it thinks about Assange’s treatment. It violates more international laws than we can count. But who cares about the UN anymore these days, right?

Even more outspoken has been the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. I know, I had never heard of them either. But they’re a serious body, most South American nations are members, and many Caribbean ones. Here’s what the court said on July 13:

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled on Friday the right to seek asylum in embassies and other diplomatic compounds. The ruling includes a mandatory safe process, and the obligation of states to provide safe passage to those granted asylum. Without naming Julian Assange, the ruling was deemed a huge victory for the WikiLeaks founder who has been held up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012.

The court released a public statement, which said that it had “interpreted the reach of the protection given under Article 22 (7) of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article XXVII of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, which recognize the right to seek and receive asylum in a foreign territory.”

“In particular, the Court declared upon the relative issue of whether this human right protects both territorial asylum and diplomatic asylum. Similarly, the Court determined the human rights obligations of the Member States of the Organization of American States regarding the host country and, in this case, for third States, in virtue of the risk that persons seeking international protection could suffer, which was the reason for the principle of non-refoulement.

This court is not some hobby club. Wiki: “The Organization of American States established the Court in 1979 to enforce and interpret the provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights. Its two main functions are thus adjudicatory and advisory. Under the former, it hears and rules on the specific cases of human rights violations referred to it. Under the latter, it issues opinions on matters of legal interpretation brought to its attention by other OAS bodies or member states.”

The court is also very clear in its ruling. Note: “the obligation of states to provide safe passage to those granted asylum”. Moreno may want to think twice before he surrenders Assange and goes against the ruling. The consequences could be far-reaching. Nobody wants to start a fight with ALL of their neighbors all at the same time. Violating the ruling would make the court obsolete.

The ideal solution would be if Australia would offer Julian Assange safe passage back home. Another country could do the same. Assange has never been charged with anything, other than the UK’s bail-skipping charge, a minor offence.

Julian Assange is a journalist, and a damn good one at that. The silence in the Anglo -and international- media about his case is shameful and deafening. So is the smear campaign that’s been going on for over a decade. How many women have been turned against the man by the false Swedish rape charges? Condemning someone to isolation without access to daylight or medical care goes way beyond shameful.

It’s time to end this horror show, not prolong or deepen it. But the power of international intelligence services is at stake, and they’re going to go to great lengths to impose that power. The US has already even claimed that freedom of speech, i.e. its entire Constitution, does not apply to non-Americans.

That’s quite the claim when you think about it. That also tells us how much is at stake for ourselves. The mainstream media are already captives to the system, lock, stock and barrel. But if Assange can be silenced this way, what are Jim Kunstler, the Automatic Earth and Zero Hedge going to do? Are we all going to shut up?

We need to rage against the dying of the light more than ever. Because the light, indeed, is dying. We should not go gentle into that night without ever being heard from again. We owe that to ourselves, our children, and to Julian. It’s all the same thing. Not standing up for Assange means not standing up for your children. Are you sure you’re okay with that?

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