Corruption « Aletho News

WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN SAUDI ARABIA?

Trump Says Saudi Elites Caught In Anti-Corruption Probe Were ‘Milking’ Kingdom For Years

By John Chuckman | Aletho News | November 10, 2017

This is just nonsense from Trump.

Corruption is and has been everywhere in Saudi Arabia. How else could it be with all the countless billions changing hands in a fairly closed society?

So, it is easy for a guy like the new Crown Prince to glance around and conveniently find some corruption among people he wants to discredit anyway.

It may go beyond merely discrediting them to having hundreds of billions seized by the Crown Prince. Not a bad day’s work.

What is going on is a kind of coup against the old order by the new usurper Crown Prince. His recent appointment was by a King well known for his senility, and it suddenly and surprisingly upset the established order of succession and all kinds of extended family compacts.

We likely will never know what truly happened in this secretive kingdom. But we do know the abrupt changes created lots of enemies who needed attending to, and that seems to be what is happening.

And the enemies have no friends in Washington to whom they can appeal. The old order in Saudi Arabia suffered terribly in the wake of 9/11, and despite great efforts to pacify the US with new levels of cooperation, it is now being swept out.

Now, whatever is considered good for a hyper-aggressive United States is coincidentally good for its de facto colony in the Middle East.

Trump himself has already proved to be one of Israel’s best-ever American friends. Israel has long had great influence, but it possibly never had it so good as it does now, as with a UN Ambassador who speaks as though she were a joint appointment of Trump and Netanyahu. Trump’s only competitor in this regard would be Lyndon Johnson.

The US and Israel closely embrace the usurper because he has proven his dependability with bloody projects like making illegal war on Yemen. That war is exactly like the proxy war waged by mercenaries – ISIS and Al-Nusra et al – in Syria except that in this case it is the open work of a nation-state. And now he joins Israel in making threats on Lebanon.

In all the Neocon Wars in the Mideast, great effort has been made, one way or another, not to have Israel at center stage, to avoid having Israel appear as aggressor. But, in fact, without the influence of Israel, none of these terrible wars would have happened.

Yes, the Crown Prince will be a dependable component in the years-long American-Israeli project of creating a new Middle East. The Crown Prince is essentially Israel’s man in Saudi Arabia, just as President el-Sisi is in Egypt. Israel is comfortable being surrounded by absolute governments, so long as they are absolute governments beholden to its patron, the United States.

Right now, the new Crown Prince is doing another bloody service for Israeli interests. The Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, was called to come to Riyadh in the King’s name for some business, as it turned out on false pretenses. Hariri had his plane surrounded and he was effectively arrested upon landing. Just pure modern piracy. Later, and who knows after what threats, he announced his sudden and unexpected resignation as prime minister, and he remains in Saudi Arabia.

It just so happens, in very recent time, Netanyahu and some of his officials have made some very ugly noises against Lebanon and even staged a large-scale set of war games, including calling up reservists, clearly threatening the country.

Israel just cannot stand the idea of Hezbollah being part of the Lebanese government whereas a reasonable observer would say Lebanon had achieved a peaceful balance in governing a land of many diverse political and religious groups.

After all, it hasn’t been that long ago since Israel helped catapult Lebanon into a terrible, bloody civil war, and it did so with its own bloody and unwarranted invasion of the country. Hezbollah, an organization which has never been a true terrorist group no matter what Israel goes on about, came into its own by opposing Israel’s long-term, illegal occupation of Southern Lebanon.

They were only defending what is theirs, but they made Israel look very bad, and that is an unforgivable offence. So, here we have the new Saudi Crown Prince doing more dirty work on Israel’s behalf, much as with his war in Yemen where he bombs civilians regularly, saving Israel from having to act on its own to get what it wants in someone else’s country.

You see, if Israel itself actually had to do all the ugly deeds it wants done in the region, the world would see it with blinding clarity for the pariah state that it truly is, starting wars incessantly. Proxies – whether mercenary gangs like ISIS and Al-Nusra in Syria or tyrants like the new Saudi Crown Prince in Yemen and Lebanon – are the latest fashion statement from Tel Aviv.

November 10, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Lebanon, Middle East, Saudi Arabia | Leave a comment

Trust is crucial to India-Russia defence ties

By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | November 9, 2017

The influential Russian daily Kommersant reported today on an intriguing development with ominous overtones for long-term India-Russia defence cooperation. It seems that Indian authorities gave access to a US Navy delegation of “well-trained technical specialists” to enter the top secret Russian nuclear submarine under the rubric “Project 9711″, which is on lease to Indian Navy within the framework of the so-called “special and privileged strategic partnership” between the two countries.

Apparently, the incident took place when the submarine was docked at the naval base at Vishakhapatanam while undergoing repairs. (The Indian Navy has christened the super secret Russian nuclear submarine as ‘Chakra’.) The Russian daily reported that this has been the second such serious breach of confidentiality that traditionally existed between Russia and India in defence cooperation with regard to the sharing of military technology with third parties.

In an earlier incident, a US Navy team was apparently allowed to visit the Russian-built aircraft carrier with the Indian Navy, Vikramaditya. Upon knowing about the security breach, the Russian side lodged a protest with the Indians. Obviously, that had no effect, as the latest incident involving the nuclear submarine suggests.

Unnamed Russian officials have described the Indian behavior as “outrageous.” According to Kommersant, the incident threatens to “seriously complicate negotiations both on the lease of the second nuclear submarine, and on other projects” in the field of military-technical cooperation between the two countries.

Given the high likelihood – nay, virtual certainty – that the Kommersant report is based on official Russian briefing, this must be taken as a warning from Moscow. Without going into details, Kommersant quoted Russian officials as pointing out that the incident involving the nuclear submarine is of a piece with several recent “unfriendly acts towards Russia” by the concerned Indian authorities.

It is unclear whether the paper was insinuating that such Indian behavior may be taking place without the knowledge of the political leadership in Delhi. If so, the Russian media leak could be intended to draw the attention of the Defence Ministry and the PMO. Of course, the officer corps of the Indian armed forces would have a fair share of lobbyists for American arms manufacturers. It is well-known that retired military officials have been retreading themselves at times as dalals of foreign vendors of weaponry eyeing the Indian market.

The Russian daily underscored that this whole string of incidents could have a very adverse impact on defense cooperation between the two countries, which has been successfully developing over the past five years. Interestingly, it disclosed that “specialized Russian structures are preparing retaliatory measures against their Indian partners. “Very difficult conversations are on the horizon, we have a lot of questions,” a source said. Some who spoke to Kommersant believe that, in particular, the negotiations on leasing the second nuclear submarine, which the Indian Navy planned to obtain from Russia, will be seriously complicated.”

The big question is whether the two governments are at the parting of ways as regards the sharing of cutting edge Russian military technology. At the level of the Indian political leadership, this is most certainly not the thinking. Prime Minister Modi himself is known to be a staunch believer in the raison d’etre of India-Russia strategic ties. It will be interesting to see how far India’s “natural partner” Donald Trump steps in to follow up on the US Navy team’s visit to INS Chakra. Will the Pentagon agree to lease to the Indian Navy a nuclear submarine?

There is already a cloud hanging low over the much-touted futuristic Russian-Indian collaboration to create a fifth-generation fighter aircraft. A concerted campaign has been appearing in India from time to time deliberately running down the project. (here and here.) Even foreign publications began floating the rumor that India wants to get out of the Russian deal. (National Interest, Diplomat ). The preference of lobbyists in Delhi seems to be for the American prototypes. But then, for backing out of the ‘Make in India’ venture, they must find some credible argument. Even with the best Indian ingenuity, this has not been possible so far. Funnily enough, TASS felt obliged to carry a report a few days ago (here) simply to set the record straight.

To be sure, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin’s expected visit to Delhi next month is invested with much importance. India-Russia defence cooperation has been traditionally based on great mutual trust and confidence. Therefore, the recent trends are disturbing. The Indian think-tankers and media analysts keep whining and complaining about Russian weapons going to China and Pakistan. On the other hand, some of them also happen to be lobbyists for the US interests. Testing times are ahead, for sure, as the US-Russian rivalry may also surface on the Indian strategic landscape. (See may earlier blog US strikes at India-Russia defence ties.)

November 9, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception | India, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Harvey Weinstein Hired Ex-Mossad Agents to Spy On and Intimidate Accusers

Sputnik – November 7, 2107

Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein hired a veritable army of spies, including former Mossad agents, to suppress publication of allegations that he sexually harassed and assaulted dozens of women for decades, The New Yorker magazine has uncovered.

The New Yorker, which broke the initial story, revealed the web of intrigue and deceit. It commenced in earnest in the latter months of 2016, as reporters began digging into his misconduct.

Learning of their investigations, he enlisted the help of several private security agencies to collect information on the women accusing him of sexual transgressions, and the journalists trying to expose his serial assaults.

According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort itself, firms hired by Weinstein included Kroll, one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris.

The firm offers clients the skills of a “select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specializes in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges.”

The contract Weinstein signed with Black Cube explicitly stated the agency’s mission — which it chose to accept — was to stop publication of the abuse allegations. Over the course of the next year, the firm targeted dozens of individuals to collect personal information on them, including their sexual histories, to attempt to stop them from coming forward.

Weinstein even went so far as to ask his former employees to join the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to those who received them, were of an intimidating nature.

Private Meetings

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with actress Rose McGowan, who had accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her.

One pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan — and also, using a different identity, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press.

In the latter case, the agent falsely implied she had been abused by Weinstein. Any information gleaned was then fed back directly to the shamed Hollywood mogul, and used to create psychological profiles of the victims.

McGowan was ensnared by the ruse after receiving an email in May 2017, which claimed to hail from literary agent “Diana Filip” — in actuality, a Black Cube agent. “Filip” told McGowan she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked her to speak at a gala kickoff event later in the year, for a handsome fee of U$60,000.

Over the following months, the two women met on at least four occasions across the US. The two talked at length about issues relating to women’s empowerment, and “Filip” repeatedly wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan’s production company. She also pressed McGowan for information.”Filip” also met Ben Wallace, a journalist at New York magazine pursuing the Weinstein story, on two separate occasions. Identifying herself as “Anna,” she suggested she herself had been abused, and wished to make the story public.

Personal Impeachment

The agent’s efforts with Wallace were less successful than her gaming of McGowan however, and over the course of their meetings, Wallace grew increasingly suspicious of her motives, and felt she was pushing him for information about the status and scope of his inquiry, and who he was talking to, without providing any meaningful information.

During their second meeting, “Anna” requested they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect she might be recording the exchange, and her recounted experiences felt to the reporter like “soap-opera acting.” On top of his prescience in spotting the scam, Wallace was also lucky in that his personal history was bereft of blemishes or scandal — in a series of e-mails sent in the weeks before Wallace met with the undercover agent, Kroll representatives sent Weinstein preliminary background information on Wallace and other journalists targeted by his legion of private investigators.

Much to their chagrin, the investigators could find no “adverse information” on any of the targets, such as libel and defamation cases, court judgments, outstanding debts, and the like. As such, there were no “promising avenues for personal impeachment” of the journalists.

Ultimately, despite a year of expensive, concerted effort, Weinstein’s campaign to track and silence his accusers failed. Nonetheless, several of his victims have spoken of how the use of private security agencies made speaking out even more challenging, and intimidating.

November 7, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Black Cube, United States | 2 Comments

Washington’s Wonderful World of Corruption

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 7, 2017

One of the interesting side benefits, if one might call it that, of the everlasting investigation into Russiagate is the window provided on the extreme corruption of U.S. politicians and government officials. It has become evident that anyone can seemingly buy political and media support for nearly anything as long as enough money is put on the table. And worse, the sell-out has clearly been going on for some time, with the disease disproportionately afflicting former senior officials that have been engaged in national security.

If this corruption from the top down does not constitute a crisis that directly challenges the credibility of the entire U.S. political system, it is not clear what more would be needed to make the case. And it was not carried out by the Russians or anyone else seeking to bring down our so-called democracy. We Americans appear to have done it all to ourselves through inexplicable tolerance for a combination of greed and fundamental dishonesty on the part of our elected and appointed government officials.

A recent story that received remarkably little play in the media provides some insight into how it all works, driven by a money-fueled corruption that sells out American interests by those who once had sworn to protect them.

The several articles that covered the story described how some prominent figures in the U.S. national security community actively sought a Turkish government sourced contract to use their resources to bring about the character assassination and eventual extradition of American green card holder Fetullah Gülen from Pennsylvania. Gülen is, to be sure, a controversial figure who is the founder in his native Turkey of a movement called Hizmet, which is in turn linked to hundreds of schools worldwide that claim to teach a curriculum that fuses a moderate and tolerant form of Islam with high academic achievement in traditional courses of study, including the sciences.

Critics of Gülen claim that his movement is a cult and that the schools are used to brainwash students, who continue to do Hizmet’s bidding after they obtain positions in government, the military or within the educational system. The current president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames Gülen for the attempted coup that took place last July and has sought his extradition. Erdogan has a strong motive for finding a scapegoat as he has sought to aggrandize his power in the wake of the coup, which has resulted in the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Turks while hundreds of thousands more have lost their jobs.

That Gülen is actually guilty of initiating the coup attempt has not been demonstrated by any reasonable standard. An extradition request submitted to the U.S. government by Ankara was reported to be not very convincing. There have also been suggestions, by me among others, that Erdogan knew about the coup in advance and let it happen so he could crackdown on opponents, which is certainly what has happened. Erdogan has, since the coup, frequently expressed his frustration with the U.S. Department of Justice extradition process, claiming that he has been betrayed by Washington. He has more generally speaking behaved like a madman, antagonizing all his former friends in Europe while also unnecessarily complicating relations with the United States over the two countries’ roles in Syria.

Enter former General Michael Flynn and former Bill Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey, both of whom were national security advisers to candidate Donald Trump during his campaign when they competed for contracts with Turkish businessmen linked to the Erdogan government to discredit Gülen and possibly even enable his abduction and illegal transfer to Turkey. If, as a consequence of their labors, Gülen were to be somehow returned home he would potentially be tried on treason charges, which might in the near future carry the death penalty in Turkey.

Both Flynn and Woolsey are highly controversial figures. Woolsey, in spite of having no intelligence experience, was notoriously appointed CIA Director by Bill Clinton to reward the neoconservatives for their support of his candidacy. But Woolsey never met privately with the president during his two years in office. He is regarded as an ardent neocon and Islamophobe connected to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the AIPAC affiliated Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I once debated him on NPR where he asserted that Israel does not spy on the United States, a delusional viewpoint to be sure. Former CIA Senior analyst Mel Goodman, recalling Woolsey’s tenure at the Agency, commented in 2003 that “[he] was a disaster as CIA director in the 90s and is now running around this country calling for a World War IV to deal with the Islamic problem. This is a dangerous individual…”

Flynn, is, of course, better known, and not for any good qualities that he might possess. He is, like Woolsey, an ardent hawk on Iran and other related issues but is also ready to make a buck through his company The Flynn Intel Group, where Woolsey served as an unpaid adviser. In the summer of 2016 Flynn had obtained a three-month contract for $530,000 to “research” Gülen and produce a short documentary film discrediting him, an arrangement that should have been reported under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but the big prize was a possible contract in the millions of dollars to create a negative narrative on the Hizmet founder and put pressure on the U.S. government to bring about his extradition.

Woolsey and Flynn, both Trump advisers at the time, found themselves in competition for the money. Flynn had a New York meeting at the Essex House with the businessmen accompanied by the Turkish Foreign and Energy Ministers as well as Erdogan’s son-in-law on September 19^th 2017 where, inter alia, the possibility of kidnapping Gülen and flying him to Turkey was discussed. Flynn has denied that the possibility of kidnapping was ever raised, but Woolsey, who was at the meeting for a brief time, insists that “whisking away” Gülen in the dead of night was on the agenda, though he concedes that the discussion was “hypothetical.”

On the next day, Woolsey and his wife met separately with the same two Turkish businessmen at the Peninsula Hotel in New York City and discussed with them a more general but broadly based $10 million plan of their own that would combine lobbying with public relations to discredit Gülen both in the press and in congress. Woolsey stressed that he had the kind of contacts in government and the media to make the plan work.

Woolsey did not get the $10 million contract that he sought and Flynn’s well-remunerated work for Turkey reportedly consisted of some research, a short documentary that may or may not have been produced, and a November op-ed in The Hill by Flynn that denounced Gülen as a “radical Islamist… who portrays himself as a moderate.”

But the real story about Flynn and Woolsey is the fashion in which senior ex-government employees shamelessly exploit their status to turn money from any and all comers without any regard for either the long- or short- term consequences of what they are doing. The guilt or innocence of Fetullah Gülen was never an issue for them, nor the reputation of the United States judiciary in a case which has all the hallmarks of a political witch hunt. And if a kidnapping actually was contemplated, it begs one to pause and consider what kind of people are in power in this country.

Neither Flynn nor Woolsey ever considered that their working as presidential campaign advisers while simultaneously getting embroiled in an acrimonious political dispute involving a major ally just might be seen as a serious conflict of interest, even if it was technically not-illegal. All that motivated them was the desire to exploit a situation that they cared not at all about for profit to themselves.

No one expects top rank ex-officials to retire from the world, but out of respect for their former positions, they should retain at least a modicum of decency. This is lacking across the board from the Clintons on down to the Flynns and Woolseys as Americans apparently now expect less and less from their elected officials and have even ceased to demand minimal ethical standards.

November 7, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Timeless or most popular | Turkey, United States | 2 Comments

Glencore’s secret loan for Israeli billionaire to secure Congo mining rights revealed

RT | November 6, 2017

The world’s biggest mining firm Glencore secretly loaned tens of millions of dollars to an Israeli billionaire after enlisting him to secure a controversial mining agreement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it has been revealed. The details were leaked as part of the Paradise Papers.

A trove of more than 13 million documents from the world’s leading offshore law firms, including Appleby, was released through the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Sunday. The documents lay bare the secretive multi-jurisdictional dealings of Glencore, a scandal-plagued, Anglo-Swiss multinational with mining interests across the globe.

As a friend of the Congolese President Joseph Kabila, Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler’s role has been questioned by anti-corruption campaigners since Glencore floated in London in 2011. His notoriety in the resource-rich but conflict-riven and corrupt DRC spans nearly two decades.

Gertler was cited by a 2001 UN investigation, which said that he had given Kabila $20 million to buy weapons to equip his army against rebel groups in exchange for a monopoly on the country’s diamonds. A 2013 Africa Progress Panel report said a string of mining deals struck by companies linked to him had deprived the country of more than $1.3 billion in potential revenue. Last year, he was implicated in a scheme to bribe Congolese officials on behalf of US hedge fund manager Och-Ziff Capital Management, according to Bloomberg.

According to the Guardian, the Paradise Papers confirm that several times during 2008 and 2009, Gertler was called in to negotiate with DRC authorities over the struggling Katanga copper mine in the southeast of the country, which was hampered by stalled talks to secure a joint-venture agreement with DRC’s state-run miner Gecamines.

In 2009, Glencore, through a loan offer, took effective control of Katanga, but also kept Gertler’s interest in the firm by secretly loaning his company Lora Enterprises $45 million in pledged shares for him to take part in the loan. The loan was granted with the caveat that it would be repayable in the event that an agreement was not made with DRC authorities to secure a contract for a company linked to the firm.

While the details of the loan have been previously reported, the new documents show that Gertler was required to secure certain approvals from the government in return, according to the Guardian.

Daniel Balint-Kurti of the Global Witness campaign group told The Times : “Glencore must explain to the world why it used a secret offshore company to pump millions of dollars to a controversial friend of the Congolese president linked to bribery scandals.”

In a written statement, lawyers for Gertler told the Guardian that neither he nor any company or person related to him received any loan funds directly, and any allegation that the $45 million loan was improper “demonstrates misapprehension of international finance transactions.”

“Mr Dan Gertler is a respectable businessman who contributes the vast majority of his wealth and time to the needy and to different communities, amounting to huge sums of money. He transacts business fairly and honestly, and strictly according to the law,” the statement said.

Gertler’s lawyers said there was no basis for the allegation that Katanga received “preferential terms” in its agreement with the DRC as a result of his involvement.

Glencore has dismissed any allegations of impropriety concerning the loan. The loan was made on commercial terms and “negotiated at arm’s length,” it told Bloomberg.

November 6, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception | Africa, Israel, UK | 1 Comment

How Obama and Hillary Clinton Weaponized the ‘Dossier’

By George Szamuely George Szamuely | The Duran | October 31, 2017

The disclosure that the Clinton campaign, using white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a cutout, financed the so-called Steele dossier confirms what we have known all along.

The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation’s security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn’t stop either Obama or the Clintons. Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.

We have known the basic outlines of the Steele dossier story since January. The Steele dossier, we have been told, started off as a piece of opposition research prepared by Fusion GPS and financed by a Republican rival of Trump’s or perhaps a GOP NeverTrumper. Following Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, the Democrats took over its funding. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6 who now ran his own corporate intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Using the leads Steele had developed during his years at MI6, he reported back to his paymasters his shocking discovery: The Russians had been cultivating Trump for years in preparation for his run for the presidency. So shocked was Steele by this that he rushed to alert the FBI, MI6 and even select reporters.

Most of this story is pure fiction. Neither the GOP nor a primary rival of Trump’s had any involvement with the dossier. To be sure, in October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a neo-conservative Web site funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, did hire Fusion to undertake opposition research on Trump. However, money for this undertaking dried up by May 2016.

The Steele-crafted Trump-Russia collusion story was from start to finish a Democratic Party operation. Its origins can be traced back to April 2016 and the leak of the Democratic National Committee e-mails. The DNC announced that it had been “hacked.” However, instead of reporting the matter to the proper authorities, the DNC turned to attorney Michael Sussmann, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann got in touch with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc. Now, CrowdStrike is no geeky, techno-gee-whiz firm. Its founder is Russian-born Dmitri Alperovitch, a senior fellow at the NATO-funded, intensely Russophobic Atlantic Council. “Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia,” the New York Times wrote. On June 14, CrowdStrike announced that the DNC hack perpetrators were two separate hacker groups employed by the Russian government.

Even though no one other than CrowdStrike had examined the DNC servers, U.S. intelligence agencies immediately declared that they were in agreement and that they had “high confidence” that the “Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents” from the DNC.

It was at this moment that the Clinton people made the strategic decision to tie Trump to Putin and to make the centerpiece of its campaign the idea that a vote for Trump was a vote for the Kremlin. Perkins Coie—yet again—got in touch with Fusion, which, in turn, got in touch with Christopher Steele. Steele had contacts at MI6 and, perhaps more important, contacts at the FBI. He had allegedly worked with the FBI in the takedown of FIFA.

Steele, who had many contacts at the FBI, understood what was required of him. On June 20, six days after CrowdStrike’s announcement, he filed his first report. It was exactly what the Clinton campaign was looking for: lurid, unsubstantiated but nonetheless juicy allegations. Russia had supposedly been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” Trump had hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him” at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. “Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities… with enough embarrassing material… to be able to blackmail him.”

Steele’s first memo enticed the Clinton people and they eagerly turned on the money spigots. Steele followed up with a memo revealing that the Russians were behind the DNC leak, that Putin “hated and feared” Hillary Clinton and that there existed a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump and the Russians. The recently-indicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, managed this co-operation on behalf of Trump by using “foreign policy advisor” Carter Page as an intermediary. “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S./NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”

Carter Page, whom no one had ever heard of and who had never even met Trump, featured prominently in the Steele memos and in subsequent U.S. media coverage of the campaign. A July 19 memo from Steele had Page holding a “secret meeting” with Igor Sechin, executive chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, in which the two men discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related” sanctions against Russia.

The Clinton campaign theme was set. By July 23, 2016, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, was telling ABC News on Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites. . . . It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” A couple of days later, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was to lead the post-election “Trump-Russia collusion” charge in Congress, declared:

Given Donald Trump’s well-known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the D.N.C. and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party.

In August, it was reported, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to FBI Director James Comey demanding disclosure of the contents of the dossier: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government… The public has a right to know this information.” And, of course, Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet” during their third presidential debate.

The Steele dossier was now driving the Obama administration’s scrutiny of Trump’s people as well as media coverage of the campaign. Steele, the BBC reported, “flew to Rome in August to talk to the FBI. Then in early October, he came to the US and was extensively debriefed by them, over a week. He gave the FBI the names of some of his informants, the so-called ‘key’ to the dossier.” The FBI went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and obtained an order to “monitor the communications” of Carter Page, as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.” According to the Guardian, the FISA court turned down its first application (an unusual event, if true), asking the agency to narrow its focus. Eventually, the FBI managed to convince the court that “there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” What was the basis of this probable cause? CNN reported that the FBI based its application on the claims made in the Steele dossier. That’s very serious business. If the FBI was presenting the FISA court unverified material from the dossier as if it were verified then it was clearly deceiving the court in order to obtain a politically-motivated warrant.

By September 2016, U.S. media were reporting that Carter Page had become a person of interests for the U.S. government: “U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials—including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president.” Words straight from the dossier. The same media report had “U.S. intelligence agencies” receiving reports that Page met one Igor Diveykin, who “serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” This too is almost verbatim from Steele’s July 19 memo.

The U.S. government has actually made very little pretense that it didn’t make use of the dossier. FBI Director James Comey admitted to Congress that the dossier had been “one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation.” Then, on Jan. 11, 2017, following Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s meeting with Trump during which he and Comey presented the president-elect a summary of the dossier, Clapper issued a strange statement: The intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” This was a classic non-denial denial. That he and his friends did not “rely” on the dossier doesn’t mean that they didn’t make full use of it.

Federal investigators also wiretapped Paul Manafort, both before and after the election and indeed right through to the last days of the Obama administration. According to CNN, the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014 shortly after the Feb. 22, 2014, coup d’etat in Ukraine. Manafort had worked as a political consultant work for former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. However, the “surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence.” In other words, by the time Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign in May 2016, he was no longer under FBI surveillance. The FBI resumed its surveillance at just about the time the first of Steele’s memos started arriving in Washington.

The wiretaps had nothing to do with the charges Special Counsel Robert Mueller has just brought against Manafort. Mueller’s charges involve activities that took place long before Manafort joined the Trump campaign. What the FBI was looking for was evidence that Manafort was a conduit between the Kremlin and Trump.

Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also featured prominently in the dossier. He too came under Obama administration surveillance. Indeed, Obama’s people used the wiretaps in order to get him ousted from his newly-appointed position. Obama administration holdover, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, listened in on a conversation Flynn had had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, on Dec. 29, 2016, and decided that the incoming national security adviser was susceptible to blackmail from the Russians. She never really explained on what grounds the Russians could or would blackmail Flynn. Her argument seemed to be that because Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions—a policy that would run contrary to that of the Obama administration that was still in office at the time this conversation had supposedly taken place—he had violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private individuals conducting U.S. foreign policy. No one has been prosecuted under this statute for 200 years. Why the Russians would want to invoke an obscure statute to threaten Flynn, an official well-disposed toward them, with a prosecution that could never succeed and thereby to undermine the very policy they were seeking, namely, the lifting of sanctions, was never explained. Nonetheless, armed with this nonsense, Yates rushed over to the White House demanding dismissal of Flynn. He was susceptible to blackmail and was therefore a security risk. It seemed to be a joke, but for reasons that remain baffling, the White House meekly complied with Yates’s demand.

We now know that the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump’s people reached pathological levels following the election. It is almost certain that the FBI did pay Steele to continue his work. The Washington Post reported that the bureau had “reached an agreement with [Steele] a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.” The Post claims that “Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials.” This seems highly unlikely. According to a number of news stories, the Clinton campaign stopped paying Steele sometime at the end of October. Yet Steele continued sending memos through December. Somebody had to have paid him. Steele is not the type to work pro bono.

Obama people such as Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes went on an unmasking rampage during the election and after. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has claimed that the Obama administration made “hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.” The requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed. More sinister were the activities of the Obama people after the election. Trounced by Trump, they vented their fury doing everything possible to undermine the incoming administration. The New York Times reported that during the last days of the Obama administration “White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential… across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”

A former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration official, Evelyn Farkas, revealed that she was telling her former colleagues:

Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left…. That the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.

The full extent of the Obama administration’s campaign of surveillance, espionage and sabotage has yet to be revealed. The right-wing media have excitedly latched onto the Clinton revelations in order to put out a ridiculous story of their own. Americans are still innocent victims; Russians are still villains interfering with our gloriously pristine elections. The new victim-in-chief is Trump and the new Russian colluder-in-chief is Clinton. As ever, nothing changes in Washington.

George Szamuely, PhD, author of Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia, is Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University.

November 2, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States | 1 Comment

Money Rains Over Swedish Mainstream Media to Stop ‘Fake News,’ ‘Russian Trolls’

Sputnik – 30.10.2017

The Swedish state has invested millions of kronor in its attempt to stop foreign meddling in the upcoming 2018 election. For Sweden, which is somewhat preoccupied with the fictitious “Russian threat,” Moscow’s interference almost goes without saying.

Several of Sweden’s media giants will receive SEK 13.5 million ($1.6 million) in state support from the research and development funding agency Vinnova to stop “fake news” from affecting the 2018 general election. According to Vinnova’s press release, the companies will develop a service for “fact-checking” of, among other things, viral posts on social media.

The list of grant recipients includes Swedish Radio, Swedish national broadcaster SVT, as well as media groups Bonnier (which runs the Swedish dailies Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Dagens Industri, as well as commercial TV network TV4) and Schibstedt (which runs the dailies Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet ). The idea is that together they will counteract fake news and unfounded statements from being spread to influence the Swedish election.

Given the amount of money invested and the sheer scope of collaboration involving the bulk of Sweden’s mainstream media, Vinnova called the cooperation “unique.”

According to Vinnova, the project will, among other things, highlight journalistic investigations and critically examine statements made in the political debate as well as information disseminated on social media.

“The project is aimed at developing a digital tool that automates the flow of information and the process of fact-checking in news editorial boards that can be used to raise the quality and reduce the risk of fake or irrelevant facts reaching the audience,” Vinnova said.

Previously, the very same mainstream media, as well as high-ranking officials, including Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist and Sweden’s ambassador to Russia Peter Ericsson, voiced repeated fears of Russian meddling in the upcoming election — allegations that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed as “ridiculous.”

Nevertheless, Sweden, where the “Russian threat” is a fixture on the domestic agenda, seems to persist in its delusion of “Russian meddling.” Most recently, Sydsvenskan senior columnist Per T Ohlsson argued that the risk of Russian influence was “imminent,” especially in the view of Sweden’s reinvigorated NATO cooperation, as well as Stockholm’s stance on the Ukrainian conflict.

“The Russian trolls are already here,” Per T Ohlsson wrote, reinforcing the hackneyed cliché of Russian ‘troll factories’ flooding the web with pro-Russian comments to sow discord.”

Swedish Security Police SÄPO saw “indications of Russia’s intention to influence political and decision-making and public opinion” as early as 2015, warning of “distorting, erroneous and corruptive” messages being spread on social media.

“Russia has already shown an interest in the political debate in Sweden. We have an important geographical location on the Baltic Sea and a long history towards Russia. Sweden is also a member of the EU and has a relationship with NATO,” Björn Palmertz, senior analyst at Sweden’s Defense University, told the Aftonbladet daily, arguing that Sweden was just a puzzle piece in Russia’s general foreign policy strategy to “provide fuel for fragmentation and social challenges.”

The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), which plans to receive SEK 60 million ($7 million) from the Swedish government to bolster the nation’s psychological defense, recently launched a project of its own to prevent foreign meddling.

“For a foreign force seeking to influence the Swedish election, there are great opportunities,” MSB project leader Sebastian Bay told Aftonbladet.

October 30, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | European Union, Sweden | Leave a comment

The Rise of MEK/NCRI in Washington: Pay Off The Right People and You Are No Longer A Terrorist

Maryam Rajavi- Rudy Giuliani and Senator Joe Lieberman at the free Iran Gathering – 1 July 2017. Image credit: Maryam Rajavi/ flickr)

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | October 30, 2017

If you want to change a group of terrorists who have killed Americans overseas into something that appears to be much more benign, all you have to do is pay off the right people in Washington. With enough money, you can even open a nice plush lobbying office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia, not too far from the White House and Capitol Hill.

One-time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been rightly blamed for the ill-conceived and badly bungled “regime change” in Libya in 2011 that eventually led to her mishandling of the resulting blowback in Benghazi, but one of her greatest failings just might have involved the piece of paper she signed when she removed the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK) group from the State Department list of “designated terrorist organizations” in September 2012.

How is it possible that the bad judgment demonstrated in the Libyan fiasco that created a failed state, a humanitarian disaster, a migrant crisis, armed terrorists and ultimately produced the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans compares with a signature on a piece of paper? It is because that signature put in place one of the elements that will most likely in the near future lead to a far more disastrous war for the United States than was Libya. MEK, now labeled the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has become a principal voice of the war party that is now seeking to attack Iran, a role similar to that played by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress in his disseminating of lies in the lead up to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The tale of the rehabilitation and rise of MEK/NCRI is a subset of the ongoing corruption of America’s political culture, best illustrated by the fact that even national security is now up for sale, enabling a terrorist group to transform itself into a “resistance movement” and eventually be labeled “freedom fighters.”

How did this happen as MEK was on the State Department roster of foreign terrorist organizations since the list was established in 1997? Its inclusion derived from its having killed six Americans in the 1970s, its participation in the U.S. Embassy hostage-taking and from its record of extreme violence both inside and outside Iran since that time. When I was a CIA trainee our course included a simulation of the horrific attack on U.S. Air Force Officers in Tehran in 1973 that killed two colonels.

MEK is widely regarded as a terrorist cult headed by a bizarre husband and wife team Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. Its members are required to be celibate and are subjected to extensive brainwashing, physical torture, severe beatings even unto death, and prolonged solitary confinement if they question the leadership. One scholar who has studied them describes their beliefs as a “weird combination of Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.”

With the sharp turn of the Trump Administration against Iran, NCRI is now finding an audience, telling the American public that Iran is “cheating” on the nuclear deal. It also tells us that “Iran’s nuclear weapons program has far from halted” and has claimed to identify four major sites that “with a high degree of certainty” have been involved in various aspects of the allegedly ongoing nuclear weapons project. This has led Jillian Mele of Fox News to declare, falsely, that “It appears [Iran’s nuclear] weapons program is fully operational.”

The CIA has in the past recruited MEK/NCRI agents to enter into Iran and report on nuclear facilities, but Israel’s Mossad is the group’s principal employer. Agents, recruited and trained by Israel, have killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists and officials. The group appears to have ample financial resources, places full page ads in major US newspapers, and is also known to pay hefty fees to major political figures who are willing to speak publicly on its behalf. The group claims to want regime change in Iran to restore democracy to the country, an odd assertion as it itself has no internal democracy and is loathed by nearly all Iranians.

Because MEK/NCRI is a resource being used by Tel Aviv in its clandestine war against Iran, it is perhaps inevitable that many friends of Israel in the United States actively campaigned to have the group removed from the terrorism list so that it could, ironically, have a free hand to continue to terrorize Iran. Indeed, neocons at their various think tanks and publications as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee all recommended delisting the group and continue to support it. Prominent American Jews to include Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz have been advocates for the group in spite of its record of terrorism.

Multi-million dollar contracts with Washington lobbying firms experienced at “working” congress backed up by handsome speaking fees have induced many prominent Americans to join the chorus supporting NCRI. Prior to 2012, speaking fees for the group started at $15,000 and went up from there. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell reported more than $150,000 in honoraria. Rudy Giuliani has been paid generously for years at $20,000 per appearance for brief, twenty-minute speeches. Bear in mind that MEK was a listed terrorist group at the time and accepting money from it to promote its interests should have constituted material support of terrorism.

The group’s well-connected friends have included prominent neocons like John Bolton and ex-CIA Directors James Woolsey, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss as well as former Generals Anthony Zinni, Peter Pace, Wesley Clark, and Hugh Shelton. Traditional conservatives close to the Trump Administration like Newt Gingrich, Fran Townsend and Elaine Chao are also fans of NCRI. Townsend in particular, as a national security specialist, has appeared on television to denounce Iran, calling its actions “acts of war” without indicating that she has received money from an opposition group.

The emergence of NCRI at this time is just another fool’s game with the usual Washington crowd queuing up for a bad cause because they are both lining their pockets and thinking they are helping Israel by punishing Iran. In any event it is a poor bargain for the rest of us, but that hardly seems to matter anymore.

October 30, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, Hillary Clinton, Iran, MEK, NCRI, Rudy Giuliani, United States | Leave a comment

Israel finally ends $10 billion binary options scam – or does it?

By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | October 26, 2017

Israeli lawmakers have finally passed a law they say will ban Israel’s notorious binary options industry, which has brought in $10 billion a year.

The money was made by scamming millions of people around the world. A recent Reuters article reports: “London-based lawyers said hundreds of their clients were duped out of vast sums of money by some Israeli firms. More than 100 operators are estimated to be based in Israel, a technology hub.”

The industry was officially banned in the U.S. but Israeli operators still managed to scam many Americans. An article in Finance Feeds reports: “America is still a target for these nefarious entities whose methodology stems not from the financial markets or technology sectors, but from the lowbrow depths of online gambling, lead buying and affiliate marketing in Israel.”

News stories through the years have described misery and suicides among victims. Finally, a year ago the Israeli government banned sales of binary options to Israelis, but continued to permit them to the rest of the world.

The current bill that now also outlaws sales abroad was passed when Israeli legislators became concerned that the industry was hurting Israel’s image.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports that Knesset member Rachel Azaria said in introducing the recent bill: “We worry about the BDS movement. This industry has a huge impact on how Israel is viewed throughout the world. Our government officials go to international conferences and their colleagues abroad raise their eyebrows because of this industry.”

Israel National News reports that notes on behalf of the proposed legislation warned that “Israeli binary option companies risked damaging the country’s reputation and ‘could foment anti-Semitism’.”

The Times of Israel reports that the legislation was catalyzed by the outcry “among overseas law enforcement agencies, with the FBI at the forefront, that Israel was allowing this ‘monstrous’ fraud to flourish year after year.”

For years the Israeli government did little to stop it. JTA reports that despite widespread awareness of the scam, “Only a handful of Israelis have been arrested for binary options fraud, and none have been indicted, even as international law enforcement against the industry has ramped up.”

The article reports that an Israeli police superintendent “said Israeli organized crime was being massively enriched and strengthened because of law enforcement’s failure to grasp the scope of the problem.”

The law is set to take effect in three months, but some raise questions about it, charging that it lets perpetrators off the hook without punishment, allows scammers to simply relocate, and exempts similar activities, allowing the massive profits through victimization to continue.

The Times of Israel reports: “The original text was watered down — creating loopholes through which binary options and other rogues, simply by retooling what they do, will be able to continue to prosper.”

Austin Smith, founder of a company that reclaims money for binary options victims, calls the law “total garbage” that allows perpetrators to shift into new rackets without answering for their past scams.

“It’s more a political talking point than actually something with teeth that’s going to stop more fraud from being perpetrated,” he said. “It also does nothing to help victims of fraud recover any of their money.”

JTA reports that Smith is working with attorneys around the world to track down the heads of binary options companies as they open new operations in Cyprus and elsewhere, moving into such industries as diamond sales, cryptocurrencies and predatory business loans.

The original legislation authored by the Israel Securities Authority would have also outlawed similar gambits – companies involved in the foreign exchange market, or Forex, and CFD financial instruments. Pressure from lobbyists caused these to be removed from the bill.

Also, some actions are still permissible under the new law. Finance Magnates reports that binary options agents will be allowed “to provide research and development services (in other words – to develop the trading software) and to sell trading software as a shelf product.”

The FM article points out: “It remains to be seen how the amendment will be enforced.”

In particular, the question may be “how much flexibility the Israeli Securities Authority (ISA) will show when industry players, especially technology and platform solutions providers, seek relief or exemption from the ISA by trying to establish that their services do not amount to operating a trading platform but rather are in the permitted realm of software development.”

The Times of Israel reports: “Binary options owners and investors include former senior employees of the state, well-known public figures, relatives of former senior police officers and more. Immensely wealthy, some of the key figures make substantial charity donations — which in turn give them access to political figures all the way to the very top of the Israeli hierarchy.”

Past, present, and future problems

The Times of Israel, whose investigative journalists were instrumental in raising the alarm about binary options, reports that some elements of the back story to the current bill “raise extremely disturbing questions about the power of Israel’s criminal classes, the integrity of some of our legislators, and the quality of our law enforcement authorities.”

The article describes courageous actions by many Israelis intent on ending the scam. It also describes major failures and predicts deep problems for the future.

The article by David Horovitz, Why binary options ban is only a small victory in the war on Israeli corruption, is subtitled: “MKs finally moved this week to shut down a mega fraud. But the legislative process exposed the impotence of law enforcement… and the growing intimidatory power of Israel’s crooks.”

Following are some excerpts from Horovitz’s indepth report:

“The binary options crooks were barred from targeting Israelis in March 2016, but were being allowed to continue to steal from foreigners — and still are, in fact, because Monday’s law only goes into effect three months from now.”

“it quickly emerged that the police complaints bureaucracy is set up in such a way as to make it almost impossible for overseas victims of crime hatched in Israel to so much as report the matter.”

“when a Canadian father of four named Fred Turbide took his own life after an Israeli binary options firm stole all his money, and a clear paper trail established exactly who had defrauded him, the police did not take any action against the individuals and company involved, which continued to operate.”

“The fraudulent salespeople routinely conceal where they are located, misrepresent what they are selling and use false identities. (The FBI affidavit against Elbaz goes into considerable detail to explain the fraud, in all its miserable manifestations.)”

“The crooks are still out there. Some binary options firms have closed down. Others have relocated overseas, including to Cyprus and Ukraine. Some of the prime movers and shakers have already adjusted their focus to other fraudulent fields — in the fields of diamond sales, cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings and predatory business loans.

“Top scammers are still enjoying the vast overseas bank accounts, the yachts, luxury cars, exotic holidays and other profits of their ill-gotten gains.”

“The ranks of binary options owners and investors include former senior employees of the state, well-known public figures, relatives of former senior police officers and more. Immensely wealthy, some of the key figures make substantial charity donations — which in turn give them access to political figures all the way to the very top of the Israeli hierarchy.

“They also donate to Jewish religious causes, for example Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue, again with consequent friends in high places.”

“Some of those thousands of Israelis who have been drawn into lives of crime in the industry — cynical swindlers posing as financial experts and advisers, gloating at the naivety of their victims — are extremely cunning. And many of the higher-ups — including the computer coders, the lawyers, the affiliate marketers, and the SEO experts who manipulate Google and social media to ensure the prominence of seductive content hyping the ostensible potential for profit — are despicably smart. They will not go down without a fight. Israeli law enforcement seems largely disinclined even to try to tackle them, much less capable of doing so.”

“Monday night’s passage of the law banning binary options was but a small winning battle in what, to this extremely worried Israeli, looks for now like a losing war, a war Israel is barely bothering to fight, against a toxic cocktail of corruption.”

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. Her upcoming book talks are listed here.

October 26, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception | Canada, Israel, Ukraine | 1 Comment

Single Payer and the Failure of Democrats in West Virginia

Morgan County USA | October 18, 2017

Congressman Alex Mooney is the former chair of the Republican Party in Maryland. But now he’s a congressman from the second Congressional district of West Virginia.

Talley Sergent

How did that happen? In 2014, Mooney saw that he wasn’t going to win anything in Maryland, so he crossed the bridge over the Potomac River and came on over to West Virginia.

Mooney should have been — and in 2018 should be — easily defeated. Mooney puts the interests of powerful out of state corporations over the interests of the people of his district. He is hardly ever seen in the district. (Instead, he does phone call town hall meetings.)

Aaron Scheinberg

Strike three and he should be out.

But he keeps winning.

Why?

Democrats in West Virginia are politically bankrupt.

Take for example the two declared Democratic candidates for the Mooney seat.

One is Talley Sergent. She’s a former public relations executive at Coca-Cola.

The other is Aaron Scheinberg. He has been endorsed by Congressman Seth Moulton of the New Democrat Coalition, a group that raises funds from Big Business and is seeking to move the Democratic Party to the right.

Both Sergent and Scheinberg refuse to take economic positions that would rile big business.

Both, for example, have refused to back the West Virginia Democratic Party platform’s call for a single payer, Medicare for All plan along the lines of HR 676.

HR 676 currently has 120 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives — none from West Virginia.

When asked about this, Scheinberg spokesperson Elizabeth Gale said that “Aaron believes that we have a duty to each other to ensure that all West Virginians have access to comprehensive health care.”

“As a veteran, Aaron is lucky to receive reliable, affordable health care through the VA,” Gale said. “He believes no one should to have to worry about losing or being denied health insurance. That will be a major focus of his agenda if he is elected. As far as commenting on specific bills, Aaron will wait until he can participate in the debate within Congress.”

But Margaret Flowers of Health Over Profit, said that the phrase “access to health care” is used by politicians across the spectrum to dodge the issue of single payer.

“Politicians will say that people have access to health care right now under the current system, it’s just that some people can’t afford it,” Flowers said. “Will Democrats say that a public option gives access to health care? The policies matter and candidates need to show that they understand what policies will solve the crises we face.”

“It is an unwillingness to take strong stances that is one of the reasons Democrats are doing so poorly. The majority of Democratic voters support single payer health care and it is a proven policy, so there is nothing controversial about supporting it. Voters are looking for candidates with the courage to take positions.”

While at Coca-Cola, Sergent worked to promote a Coca-Cola front group called the Global Energy Balance Network.

The message of the network? Exercise more and worry about calories less. Take the focus off of sugary drinks like Coke and put the focus on the couch potato behind the straw.

In August 2015, the New York Times exposed Coke’s front group in an article titled — Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets.

The Times reported that Coca-Cola spent $1.5 million to start the organization.

“Health experts say this message [exercise more important than diet] is misleading and part of an effort by Coke to deflect criticism about the role sugary drinks have played in the spread of obesity and Type 2 diabetes,” the Times reported. “They contend that the company is using the new group to convince the public that physical activity can offset a bad diet despite evidence that exercise has only minimal impact on weight compared with what people consume.”

“This clash over the science of obesity comes in a period of rising efforts to tax sugary drinks, remove them from schools and stop companies from marketing them to children. In the last two decades, consumption of full-calorie sodas by the average American has dropped by 25 percent.”

“Coca-Cola’s sales are slipping, and there’s this huge political and public backlash against soda, with every major city trying to do something to curb consumption,” Michele Simon, a public health lawyer, told the Times. “This is a direct response to the ways that the company is losing. They’re desperate to stop the bleeding.”

One internal Coca-Cola email shows the head of Coke’s public relations department — Clyde Tuggle — reporting that “Talley has been leading some of our health and wellness work” and that “I’d like her to be my right hand and a core part of the team on this work going forward” — referring to the Global Energy Balance Network.

Gary Ruskin of the public interest group US Right to Know, which helped expose Global Energy Balance Network and make public the internal Coca-Cola emails, said that “Talley Sergent is perhaps the least qualified person in West Virginia to serve in Congress.”

“As a Coke public relations executive, Sergent helped perpetrate a deceit so egregious that it was exploded on the front page of the New York Times. She was a Coke handler for one of its front groups, the Global Energy Balance Network, and their efforts to snooker consumers and public health leaders, and to shield Coke from accountability for its role in helping to create the global obesity epidemic.”

“Now she wants to represent West Virginia in Congress. There is already enough deceit in Congress without her.”

“Coke’s role in West Virginia has been especially destructive of late. The state is suffering from some of the worst levels of obesity in the nation. In a notable insult to public health, the founding dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health was a key Coke ally and a leader in Coke’s Global Energy Balance Network debacle. Gregory Hand left the deanship following the avalanche of negative news coverage about his role in the Coke deceit. And now comes Talley Sergent.”

Sergent now says it was a mistake for Coca-Cola to fund the Global Energy Balance Network and that after the Times article ran, she helped move Coca Cola into a new, more transparent direction.

In response to an inquiry, Sergent, a native of Huntington, West Virginia defended her work at Coca-Cola and took a barely veiled shot at Ruskin (based in Oakland, California), Scheinberg (who is originally from Cherry Hill, New Jersey) and Mooney (the former chair of the Republican Party in Maryland) as “outsiders.”

And Coca-Cola isn’t an outsider doing tremendous harm to the state?

“Isn’t West Virginia number one in obesity in the country?” Sergent was asked.

“We’re actually number two — behind Mississippi,” she said.

(Actually, according to a recent listing, West Virginia is number one — with a 37.7 percent obesity rate, with Mississippi coming in second with a 37.3 obesity rate.)

“Outsiders think they know voters here in West Virginia – shoot – we have folks from outside the state moving here just to run,” Sergent said. “But, like most West Virginians, I don’t take cues from special interests or outsiders, just the special people of my home state.”

“On my watch, the Coca-Cola Company transformed its approach to public health, owning up to its mistakes, becoming more transparent with its consumers and starting an open dialogue with the public health community. It wasn’t easy work but it was the right thing to do.”

“Now, I’m taking the same approach to Congress. We need a congresswoman who will take tough obstacles like health care head on, beginning with protecting and improving the Affordable Care Act, which will help break the cycle of opioid addiction, improve lives with preventive care and coverage for pre-existing conditions and encourage every West Virginian to live their best life. West Virginia needs a congresswoman who will stand up for the people and who welcomes an open dialogue with every West Virginian, no matter what. As congresswoman, I’ll do just that.”

But Sergent refused to commit to a public health campaign against sugary drinks or to a single payer, Medicare for All health program.

Some West Virginians aren’t giving up on Sergent or Scheinberg.

West Virginians Cathy Kunkel, Sally Roberts Wilson, and Lynn Moses Yellott, who are active members of grassroots organizations in the state advocating improved Medicare for All, have spoken with both Sergent and Scheinberg.

“We will continue to educate and push these candidates to support a single-payer Medicare for All system as the only real way to fix our broken healthcare system,” Kunkel, Wilson and Yellot said in a statement. “HR 676 is the only solution put forth that will enable the country to afford comprehensive care for everyone. We urge candidates to ask voters the question — ‘Since under expanded and improved Medicare for all, more than 95% of you will pay less through a fair tax than you now pay for premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, are you willing to convert the money you now pay for health insurance and out of pocket expenses to a fair tax so all in our country can have needed care?’ The grassroots will continue to educate and to push candidates to support National Improved Medicare for All.”

In addition to working for Coca-Cola, Sergent was the West Virginia director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for President.

And unfortunately for the people of the second Congressional district, Sergent and Scheinberg appear to be playing by the same Clinton corporate playbook that brought us President Trump — and that will re-elect Congressman Mooney.

October 19, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | New Democrat Coalition, United States | Leave a comment

Corruption permeates Israel under Netanyahu, goes back decades

Prime Minister Netanyahu faces mounting scandal, as do his wife, friends, and many colleagues. This follows scandals for previous Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, David Ben-Gurion and others for charges that range from financial corruption to sexual assault.

By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | October 19, 2017

Certainly every country has its share of shady politicians and dirty little secrets. The US has more than enough to be embarrassed about. We need to vet our elected officials’ campaign funds, study their relationships with non-government operatives, and examine our government’s spending habits.

We need to spend our money where it will have a good return, where it will be invested in ways that reflect our American ideals. And when it comes to foreign aid, we should not support governments that will be wasteful, imprudent, or treacherous toward the people they rule.

About 20% of the American foreign aid budget goes to Israel. Is that a good investment? Is this a trustworthy government?

One would expect that a nation with oodles of Nobel laureates, world-class medical facilities, cutting edge technology, a robust economy, a nation that boasts (erroneously – see embedded links for the truth) a “flourishing democracy,” the “most moral army in the world,” “an absolute reverence for life,” and ancient, deeply religious underpinnings—one would expect that such a nation might be a little cleaner than average.

Human rights violations aside, infraction of international law and disdain for United Nations resolutions notwithstanding, Israel seems to have more than its share of shenanigans.

In fact, misconduct seems to be the norm, rather than the exception in the country that receives $10 million a day from the United States. State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan commented recently that there is nothing to worry about: “A corrupt state is a state that doesn’t fight against corruption” – and Israel is fighting. But from the looks of things, it isn’t fighting nearly hard enough.

Israel is one of the world’s leading exporters of investment scams ($5-10 billion a year–read this or a few of these), with organized crime that has grown to “monstrous proportions.” That cutting edge tech sector? 25% of its revenue comes from “shady or fraudulent industries.” And that government of the people? 75% of Israel’s 120 parliamentarians live in the pockets of special interest groups and their relentless lobbyists. (To be fair, at least that percentage of American congress people live in the pockets of AIPAC.)

Israel is fighting corruption from the highest places in government, right on down to the household help. Here is just a starter list of the fine messes that Israel’s darlings have gotten themselves into.

Charges against Netanyahu

“Case 1,000” – Cigars and Pink Champagne Affair

In 2015, Bibi allegedly accepted “lavish gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars” from a number of people, including billionaire Hollywood producer (and Israeli spy) Arnon Milchan. Milchan admitted that for years he’d been giving the Netanyahus expensive gifts—champagne, jewelry, boxes of cigars—at their request. At the time as the 2015 gifts, Milchan was negotiating a media partnership which, if it had succeeded, would have given him controlling interest over Channel 2 News in Israel. According to the Times of Israel, “if Milchan had succeeded, Netanyahu would have gained valuable influence over Channel 2 News.”

The Netanyahus also reportedly received lavish gifts from Australian millionaire James Packer in exchange for special favors.

The Prime Minister maintains his innocence.

…

“Case 2,000” – the Newspaper Rivalry Affair

In 2014, Netanyahu allegedly attempted to manipulate newspaper circulation in Israel. Namely, he promised to advance legislation that would effectively reduce the circulation of Sheldon Adelson’s free newspaper, Israel Hayom, and increase Arnon Mozes’ Yedioth Ahronoth. All Mozes would need to do was give Netanyahu more favorable coverage during the election season.

The Prime Minister denies any wrongdoing.

In addition, Netanyahu’s phone records are under investigation: it seems that during the last election he placed calls to Adelson, owner of Israel Hayom. The timing of some of these calls coincided with “particularly sympathetic headlines,” which may constitute illegal campaigning. Adelson is an American citizen and a major donor to the Republican Party.

…

Previous Netanyahu allegations

During his first term as Prime Minister (1996 – 99), Benjamin Netanyahu was investigated twice for fraud and breach of trust. In both cases, the police recommended that he be charged, but prosecutors declined. Ironically, the first investigation alleged that Netanyahu attempted to influence a corruption investigation.

In both cases, he insisted he was innocent.

…

History repeats itself

Netanyahu is not the first Prime Minister to be embroiled in scandal; in reality, this has been going on for decades. It can get very distracting.

One member of Israeli parliament – from Netanyahu’s Likud party – came up with a solution to this annoying problem. In 2016, David Amsalem drafted a bill that would shield the prime minister from criminal investigation while in office. He explained on Facebook: “For the past 30 years, there hasn’t been a single prime minister who wasn’t busy with investigations. The prime minister holds the most important job in Israel… [and] can not be preoccupied by investigations practically every day.” The bill is not expected to pass into law.

What have these Prime Ministers been getting themselves into all these years?

Yitzhak Rabin (PM 1974-77, 1992-95) was involved in The Dollar Account Affair—an illegal bank account—which led to his resignation from his first stint as Prime Minister in 1977. Interestingly, he was re-elected in 1992. (Earlier, Rabin had been a member of the pre-Israel underground paramilitary group, Haganah.)

…

Shimon Peres (PM 1984-86, 1995-96) is known in the West as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Among Arabs, he is nicknamed “the butcher of Qana” and “the engineer of genocide,” referring to a 1996 attack in Lebanon that killed over 100 civilians. A Time Magazine article stated that “for Palestinians, on the receiving end of this “great” man’s policies, Peres was an integral part of a project that was anything but honorable…his whole history was devoted to establishing and then developing a state founded on dispossession and the ethnic cleansing of another people[.]” (Peres had also been a member of Haganah.)

…

Ehud Barak (PM 1999-2001) Barak was investigated several times for alleged illegal campaign financing, bribery, money laundering, and more. Those charges did not stick. In 2009, While visiting England, Barak almost faced arrest under “universal jurisdiction” as a war criminal for his actions during Operation Cast Lead. Similarly, he, along with Ehud Olmert (see below) and 12 other Israeli political officials, was charged by lawyers in Belgium for war crimes. As long as the officials stay out of Belgium, they are not at risk of arrest. (Barak served in the IDF for 35 years.)

…

Ariel Sharon: (PM 2001-2006) Sharon was investigated for a number of financial and corruption scandals during his time as Prime Minister, but is best remembered for his efforts as Defense Minister. Sharon launched the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which resulted in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The world reacted strongly against this atrocity, and in 1983 Israel set up a commission of inquiry. It determined that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre, stating, “Mr. Sharon was found responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge…as well as not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed.” Sharon was forced to resign. Nevertheless, he was later elected Prime Minister 3 times. (Sharon had also been a member of Haganah.)

…

Ehud Olmert (PM 2006-2009) Olmert was dogged by corruption investigations from the mid-1980s, leading some to believe that he was “corrupt but a master at covering his tracks,” and others to conclude that “the authorities were simply obsessed with harassing him.” Beginning in 2008, his luck changed: Olmert was convicted for accepting bribes, falsifying documents, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and breach of trust in the Talansky Affair, the Holyland Affair, the Rishon Tours Affair, and the Investment Center Case. (He tried to pin the Holyland case on his secretary, and offered her money – $10k/month – for her prison sentence. But she turned state’s witness and testified against him.) Olmert resigned, was imprisoned in February 2016, and then was granted an early release in July 2017, thanks to “impeccable” behavior, according to the parole board. Ironically, however, the recently released Olmert is now under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information while in prison.

…

Shady dealings go beyond the prime minister’s office: Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, has a few issues of her own.

Sara Netanyahu

“Mealbooking affair” – corruption

Sara Netanyahu, wife of the Prime Minister, already has a full-time chef, but she is about to be indicted for fraud and breach of trust for hiring an outside chef and having hundreds of lavish meals catered at the official residence – about $100,000 worth – paid for with public funds. (In addition, in 2011 alone, the Netanyahu residence billed Israeli taxpayers $24,000 for take-out food.) The probe alleges that Mrs. Netanyahu falsified documents. The most serious charge carries a possible sentence of five years in prison.

Previous Sara Netanyahu charges

Mrs. Netanyahu’s employees have had additional complaints. In 2015, former caretaker at the PM residence Menny Naftali won a case against her for verbal and emotional abuse. He alleged that she drank “crazy amounts” of alcohol, especially champagne, and then regularly flew into a rage, yelling at and humiliating Naftali and other employees, over 20 of whom had quit during the Netanyahus’ tenure at the residence. The court awarded Naftali compensation of about $43,000.

The Prime Minister stands by his wife, describing her on Facebook as a “courageous and honest woman who has never had any flaws in her actions.”

And the trail of corruption goes on.

Bibi’s inner circle and top powerbrokers

“Case 3,000” – the Submarine Affair, David Shimron et al

In 2013-14, in what has been described as the “gravest corruption case in Israel’s history,” David Shimron (Netanyahu’s personal attorney, former chief of staff, close friend, and 2nd cousin) allegedly attempted to push through a $480 million deal (some sources place the value at $1.7 billion) for the purchase of submarines and patrol boats from a German shipbuilding company in which he has a financial interest. Shimron stood to receive millions of dollars. The case includes allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. According to Ha’aretz, “At least ten high-powered individuals have been identified as involved in the scandal, including very close associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu,” among them a former Navy commander, a retired rear admiral, and a former deputy head of the National Security Council.

Netanyahu’s hands may or may not be clean in this affair. He has been accused of frivolously increasing the order of submarines from 5 to 6—a wasteful action that former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon claimed “jeopardizes the interests of the country.” One journalist suggested that if Netanyahu knew what was going on around him, “then this is a case of suspected offenses that violate ethical standards.” If he wasn’t aware, then he had “surrounded himself unknowingly with a bunch of allegedly corrupt people, appointing them to the highest and most sensitive positions in government.” Either way, the news is not good.

Netanyahu maintains his innocence.

(As an aside, these submarines and patrol boats were intended to protect offshore natural gas platforms—as Israel extracts natural gas that is also claimed by Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, and the Palestinians. The tangle of claims, counter-claims, and violence that surround this resource located in the Mediterranean Sea is astonishing.)

Rape conviction, 2010 – Moshe Katsav (former Israeli President)
Katsav resigned as President of Israel in June 2007 when he was charged with rape, as well as with molesting or sexually harassing two female employees. The first incident happened in the 1990s when he was cabinet minister; the second and third happened while he was president. He began his sentence in 2011 and was granted early release in 2016 after serving five years for rape.

He has repeatedly professed innocence.

…

Case 630, corruption – Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)
Top management at government owned IAI are under scrutiny for alleged bribery, fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and breach of trust. Suspects include retired IDF brigadier-general Amal Asad and many others at high levels, including executives, board directors, and board members, as well as individuals who were “supposed to be guardians of the public trust.” Police describe the allegations as “systematic criminal behavior and deep corruption seemingly commonplace in Israel Aerospace Industries.”

…

Bribery, fraud, breach of trust – Aryeh Deri
Aryeh Deri, one of the founders of the ultra-orthodox Shas party, has had his ups and down. In the 1988, at the age of 29, Deri became the youngest Interior Minister in Israel’s (short) history. In 1999 he was convicted of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, and served 22 months. In 2013 he was back at the helm of the Shas party. In January 2016, he was re-appointed Interior Minister. And by the end of March that year, he was embroiled in another scandal, suspected of tax offenses, breach of trust, and money laundering.

…

“Case 242,” corruption – Faina Kirshenbaum et al
In “one of the biggest public corruption investigations that have been uncovered in Israel,” dozens of officials have been arrested, charged, or indicted on a range of activities, including bribery, money laundering, conspiracy, extortion, tax evasion, embezzling, and breach of trust. In the middle of this mess is Faina Kirshenbaum, former Deputy Interior Minister and former director general of far-right political party Yisrael Beytenu (“Israel is our home”). Kirshenbaum is “at the center of some 10 separate corruption cases,” and in the words of her indictment, “acted willfully and intentionally, at times with great sophistication, in order to carry out a series of crimes.” She allegedly used her position as deputy minister to embezzle millions of dollars. Many of those implicated are members of Yisrael Beytenu.

…

Alleged Sexual Harassment – Gil Shefer (Netanyahu’s former chief of staff)
In December 2016, Gil Sheffer was arrested on suspicion of sexual offense that allegedly occurred during his time as Netanyahu’s chief of staff in 2012-13. This was not his first brush with the law: in 2013 allegations came to light of sexual harassment dating back 15 years, too long ago to allow investigation. Coincidentally, he resigned from office at the same time the allegations became public – both Shefer and Netanyahu insist that his departure was unrelated to the scandal. Interestingly, Shefer’s predecessor, Natan Eshel, had also quit amid a sexual harassment scandal. Shefer was also recently questioned in the Mealbooking Affair (see #9 above).

…

Case 4000 – “the Bezeq Affair”
Meet Shaul Elovitch, Chairman and owner of telecom giant, Bezeq. He may or may not be a longtime friend of PM Netanyahu. (Bibi stated once that they were “little more than acquaintances,” and later that he had been a “personal friend for 20 years.”) Elovitch himself is already under investigation, and now he is in his own version of Case 2000 (see #2 above): for the last few years, Elovitch’s internet portal, Walla, has been suspiciously pro-Netanyahu. Starting in 2015, Bibi stories were always glowingly positive; photos of Sara Netanyahu were profuse; stories like the Naftali scandal (see #X above) miraculously disappeared from the website; stories of Bibi’s son Yair and his girlfriend miraculously appeared just when rumors were flying of his being gay—and all of this at roughly the same time that Netanyahu’s office was advancing policies favorable toward Elovitch’s business. When Bibi was ordered to turn over information, he refused to comply.

…

Perach Lerner – corruption
A highly influential advisor of Netanyahu, Perach Lerner recently confessed to fraud and breach of trust. She had allowed her husband to take advantage of her position with the prime minister to help his business.

…

Under-age sex scandal: Tzion al-Grisi

Al-Grisi was not a high-level official, but he was important enough to rub elbows with some powerful people before the scandal. He behaved improperly toward a young girl, starting when she was 8 or 9 years old, which is shocking enough. He was later convicted, but the story doesn’t end there.

Al-Grisi was was a labor union delegate to Meretz, a leftist, Zionist political party, where he allegedly kept his position for months before Twitter got ahold of the news. He was also regional branch chair of Histadrut, Israel’s national trade union center. Histadrut has reportedly taken no action against Al-Grisi.

(Quick history lesson: Histadrut was founded in 1920 purportedly as a labor union, but acted as a colonizer of Palestine by assimilating immigrants in order to “carry out the conquest of the land.” It rejected Arab workers and products–essentially boycotting Arab labor and produce. David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s legendary first Prime Minister) was the organization’s first secretary-general, and added to the Arabs’ misery with wage scales that favored Jewish workers. Under Ben-Gurion, “class struggle was redefined as the struggle against Arab labor.” He also reportedly helped himself to the treasury–including for “trysts with his mistress in sundry European spas” (The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews by Norman Cantor, New York: HarperPerennial, 1995, p. 368). Histadrut also founded Haganah.)

Al-Grisi maintains innocence, claiming that the girl seduced him and that the charges were “concocted” by her mother.

Conclusion

Israel is not alone in the corruption within its government, but the magnitude of the mess is critical when considering the amount of aid it receives from the United States–over $10 million per day. Compare this to assistance to the occupied Palestinian territories–averaging $400 million per year–approximately one tenth of what Israel receives. In fact, the US Congress is trying to reduce aid to Palestinians by vilifying the compensation being paid to the families of their slain and imprisoned.

Another serious issue is the Israeli government’s way of creating distractions for the world when a serious scandal comes to light. Israeli political analyst Michel Warschawski warned that Netanyahu “desperately needs distractions from these scandals. A ready-made target is always Gaza.” He added, “The danger is that he tries to heat up things there and starts a war.”

Kathryn Shihadah is a staff writer for If Americans Knew.

October 19, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine | 1 Comment

Harvey Weinstein and the Politics of Hollywood

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | October 18, 2017

There is something truly exasperating about digesting the steady flow of horror stories relating to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In part, of course, it is because the reports that Weinstein allegedly raped and sexually assaulted women over decades are deeply disturbing. In part, it is because one can be certain that there are still young aspiring actresses desperate for a big break who are being exploited by the Hollywood system – both in “casting” sessions and in the movies they must make to get noticed.

But most of all, these stories are exasperating because the women who are speaking out – and one senses they are still just the tip of the iceberg – and the journalists who are feeding off their revelations are drawing precisely no political conclusions from these incidents.

In fact, the Weinstein story perfectly illustrates how politically disempowering identity politics can be. Certainly, there can be no doubt that Weinstein, who has admitted that he abused his position with many women, while denying many of the actual reports of sexual misconduct, exploited his power. It should hardly surprise us that a rich man who had the ability to give desperate young women a shot at stardom preyed on them. The Hollywood employment system is capitalism in microcosm, at its rawest and most naked.

The Weinstein revelations tell us much less about relations between men and women than they do about the nature of power and the ability of the strong to exploit the weak.

Under capitalism, the weak – the working class – eventually gained the consciousness and discovered the tools to assert their own form of power. As individuals they were vulnerable and exploitable. As a collective, they gained the power to bargain. That led to the trade union movements, and gradual improvements in wages and conditions.

The capitalist class has been trying to reverse those gains ever since. The new turbo-charged form we call neoliberalism has been atomising western societies since the 1970s to return us to new forms of economic dependency, culminating in zero-hours contracts and an Uber culture.

What does this have to do with Weinstein? This week Reese Witherspoon spoke out about her own sexual assault by a movie director when she was 16. She has joined a list of famous actors like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence and Gwyneth Paltrow who have cited their own experiences. One suspects that most of Hollywood’s A-list could tell similar horror stories from their early years in search of stardom.

So what is the lesson that none of them is drawing? Precisely the one that workers learnt more than a century ago. You must get organised.

One can understand why teenage actresses, as Witherspoon was at the time, are fearful of speaking out in a system dominated by predatory men who can destroy their careers. One can also understand that, at the very bottom of the Hollywood food chain, they are in no position to organise against the Hollywood mogul class. But none of that is true for the now fabulously rich and well-connected Witherspoon, Jolie, Paltrow, Lawrence, and all the others who have yet to speak out – or for the A-list men who would surely want to be seen publicly supporting them.

Why are they not organising? There are many things they can do. Here is one simple idea. They could set up a union, a sort of women’s Equity, that would allow actresses, in private, to register incidents of exploitation and sexual abuse with the union, naming those who committed the abuse and their modus operandi. By creating such a database, the union and its lawyers would be able to identify serial abusers and discover patterns of behaviour. The victims could then be encouraged to come forward in a group action, knowing that they would not be facing the Hollwood elite on their own. The union would redress, at least in part, the power of these male producers and directors. They, in turn, would grow more fearful of exposure.

That would be a political act of organised resistance to the power of Hollywood moguls. It would have much more impact than the trickle of stories from immensely successful actresses bewailing their past abuse. Creating such a union would be loose change for Jolie, Witherspoon, Lawrence, Paltrow and the other A-listers.

And yet in the degraded political culture we live in, they prefer to remain disempowered individuals rather than become part of a much stronger collectivity. They prefer their confessionals in the corporate media that exploited and abused them to independent, organised action to curb the corporate system’s excesses.

As long as these household names nurse their individual pain rather than seek to bring about change through organised action, the next generation of young actresses will face the same exploitation and the same abuse they had to endure in their younger days.

October 19, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

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Iran Delenda Est

By Stephen J. Sniegoski • Unz Review • July 25, 2019

After Carthage had been significantly weakened by Rome in the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), Cato the Elder, a leading Roman senator, is said to have ended all his speeches with the words: “Carthago delenda est!” (“Carthage must be destroyed!”). This destruction ultimately took place in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC). A somewhat similar situation exists today in the United States, where war hawks demand that Iran–which in no way could effectively attack the United States, or even conquer America’s Middle East so-called allies—be stripped of its ability to protect itself.

Of course, what makes the American situation different from ancient Rome’s is that Rome sought to eliminate Carthage for its own interests whereas the United States is largely acting to advance the military interests of Israel… continue

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By John Chuckman | Aletho News | November 10, 2017

Maryam Rajavi- Rudy Giuliani and Senator Joe Lieberman at the free Iran Gathering – 1 July 2017. Image credit: Maryam Rajavi/ flickr)

Charges against Netanyahu

History repeats itself

Sara Netanyahu

Bibi’s inner circle and top powerbrokers

Conclusion

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