Australia Spied On Japanese Companies To Help Its Industries Negotiate Trade Deals
By Glyn Moody | Techdirt | November 12, 2013
As more information comes to light about the global snooping being conducted by the NSA and GCHQ, it is becoming clearer that much of it had little to do with combating terrorism, as a recent EFF article makes plain. But most damaging to the idea that massive surveillance was justified, because it was to protect people from extreme threats, is the revelation that commercial espionage was also being conducted. So far, the chief example of that is in Brazil, but The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) now has information about large-scale industrial spying on Japanese companies carried out by Australian secret services:
BHP [BHP Billton — the world’s largest mining company] was among the companies helped by Australian spy agencies as they negotiated trade deals with Japan, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer says.
A former diplomat has also confirmed Australian intelligence agencies have long targeted Japanese companies. Writing in The Japan Times, Professor Gregory Clark said Australian companies were beneficiaries of intelligence operations.
“In Australia, favoured firms getting spy material on Japanese contract policies and other business negotiations used to joke how [it had] ‘fallen off the back of a truck’,” Professor Clark wrote.
The article has more details, but doesn’t reveal how the materials were obtained. However, since Australia is part of the “Five Eyes” inner circle of snooping countries that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, it seems likely that information of interest from those partners also found its way to Australian companies. SMH quotes Clark as saying:
Business information is a main target for [intelligence] agencies
It will be interesting to see if later releases from Snowden’s hoard of documents show any evidence of this Australian use of NSA materials for industrial espionage.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Related article
What an Al-Monitor Analyst Gets Wrong about Arak
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | November 11, 2013
In a new piece over at Al-Monitor, Iranian-born Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar commends the blocking of a preliminary nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius over the issue of Iran’s continuing construction of the Qatran Complex, a heavy water facility near Arak, a city southwest of Tehran.
But it is riddled with the factual errors and decontextualized conjecture that have long been a hallmark of Mr. Javedanfar’s analysis.
This time around, it appears Mr. Javedanfar is a bit confused as to the difference between Iran’s two facilities at Arak. One is the IR-40 heavy water research reactor, the other is a heavy water production plant. The half-built reactor is under IAEA safeguards and is visited regularly by inspectors; the production plant is not under safeguards and thus not legally subject to inspections.
When Mr. Javedanfar, writing clearly about the IR-40 reactor and not the production plant, claims that “the Iranian regime has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the site since 2011” and that the “IAEA has since had to rely on satellite images to assess developments regarding the site,” he is simply wrong. That he then states that this “reinforces concern and urgency” demonstrates a distinct lack of clarity on his part as to what risks actually exist or do not exist.
Here’s why:
What Mr. Javedanfar is actually referring to (though he doesn’t seem to know it) is the production plant at Arak, not the reactor. Iran voluntarily allowed IAEA access to the production plant in 2011. According to the most recent safeguards report, the Arak reactor however was visited by IAEA monitors on August 7, 2013. Another report will be issued soon, which means inspectors have also been there since.
The reactor, which Mr. Javedanfar never mentions is not operational and may not be for another year, is not in itself a proliferation risk. Plutonium is produced as a byproduct of running the reactor, and must be separated out from irradiated fuel and reprocessed to weapons-grade material before it poses any actual danger.
Still, Mr. Javedanfar writes that the “Arak heavy water reactor… could produce plutonium to make a bomb while the talks continue,” which is misleading and wholly speculative at best, intimating as he does that once the Arak reactor is switched on, weapons-grade plutonium pops out.
First, talks are not expected to continue for years to come. With the reactor not yet up and running (it’s projected to come online in mid-2014, but will most likely be delayed as it has in the past), the timeframe on Arak is an important factor in determining the potential (and, at this stage, totally hypothetical) risk it poses.
As Daryl G. Kimball and Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association explained this past summer:
[T]he reactor at Arak would need to be operational for perhaps up to a year before the plutonium could be extracted. Even then, Iran does not have a reprocessing facility for separating the plutonium to produce weapons-usable material, having revised its declaration to the IAEA regarding the Arak site in 2004. The revision eliminated plans for a reprocessing facility at the site. Tehran maintains that it does not intend to build a plant to separate plutonium from the irradiated fuel that the reactor will produce.
By this measure, taken with Mr. Javedanfar’s claim, talks would need to continue without progress for at least another year and half, perhaps two years, for Iran to even begin extracting plutonium from spent fuel. That’s mid-2015 at the earliest.
Plus, Iran can’t even reprocess that extracted plutonium into weapons-grade material because it doesn’t have the facilities to do so.
This past weekend, Kimball told The Guardian that, if anything, “Arak represents a long-term proliferation risk not a near-term risk and it can be addressed in the final phase of negotiations,” adding, “France and the other… powers would be making a mistake if they hold up an interim deal that addresses more urgent proliferation risks over the final arrangements regarding Arak.”
Yet Mr. Javedanfar calls the blocking of a preliminary deal by the French “fair and logical.”
Perhaps if he had a better grasp on the facts about Arak, he would come to a different conclusion. Then again, maybe not. After all, a TIME magazine headline from last month says it all: “If Iran Can Get This Reactor Online, Israel May Not Be Able to Bomb It“.
That, it would appear, is the real risk for Israel and its analysts.
*****
UPDATE:
Following a meeting in Tehran between IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano and President of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi, it was agreed that Iran would provide “relevant information and managed access to the Heavy Water Production Plant” at Arak.
This is a voluntary, confidence-building measure taken by Iran in an effort “to strengthen their cooperation and dialogue aimed at ensuring the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme through the resolution of all outstanding issues that have not already been resolved by the IAEA.”
Related articles
- The New York Times continues to exemplify everything that’s wrong about Iran news coverage (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Iran permits monitoring of Arak heavy-water reactor and Gechin uranium mine (en.trend.az)
US Lawmakers Lobby for Right-wing and US Intervention in Honduran, Salvadoran Elections
CISPES | November 8, 2013
On Saturday, October 16, US Congressmen Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and Albio Sires (D-NJ) from the House’s Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere subcommittee wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry using vague, fear-mongering rhetoric to delegitimize a potential left-wing victory in the upcoming presidential elections in Honduras and El Salvador, where the left candidates are leading in the polls. Explicitly denigrating two of the three leading Salvadoran candidates, Salmon and Sires exposed themselves as mouthpieces for the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, which has mounted an escalating smear campaign against its opposition in both El Salvador and the US.
In the letter—which was then republished in El Salvador—the congressional duo question the “democratic credentials” of both Honduran presidential candidate Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, wife of former President Manuel Zelaya ousted in the 2009 US-backed coup d’état, and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the leftist candidate for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, accusing them of being allies of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. The congressmen also call out Salvadoran right-wing UNITY coalition candidate Tony Saca as corrupt, clearly demonstrating their preference for ARENA—the only other leading party in the race. In a particularly troubling gesture, they call for “heightened security to ensure that all candidates abide by the democratic rules of the game,” and tacitly request greater participation of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI)— US institutions notorious for undermining democratic elections in the region.
This is not the duo’s first effort to intervene in the democratic process in El Salvador. In April, Salmon and Sires published a letter implying—falsely—that $300 million in US development aid from the Millennium Challenge Corporation was at risk because the US-backed Public-Private Partnership Law had not yet been approved by the Salvadoran legislature. Now, in questioning the democratic legitimacy of both Xiomara Castro and Sánchez Cerén, Sires and Salmon are setting the stage to delegitimize any leftist electoral victory from the US, and throwing their weight behind the ARENA party in El Salvador.
This is the same tactic recently employed by ultra-conservative lobbyist Otto Reich in his public comments against the FMLN, and was promptly followed by the November 4 publication of an article in the Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald interviewing several ARENA party leaders claiming that Saca had made an agreement with the FMLN to divide the right-wing and bring socialism to El Salvador. The stakes are high in the upcoming presidential elections in Honduras and El Salvador, and ARENA and its allies are hard at work prevent any electoral outcome that conflicts with their vast economic interests in the region.
Related article
… The electoral contest takes place in the context of a Salvadoran social movement to end the impunity of war criminals who have thus far escaped justice due to a 1993 amnesty law whose constitutionality is now under examination by the Supreme Court of El Salvador. The issue has become especially intense since October 1, 2013, when the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador shut down the most important human rights archives in the country, Tutela Legal, and dismissed the employees, placing the very documents that would be used in war crimes tribunals at risk of being compromised. [3] These actions have provoked international solidarity with the thousands of Salvadorans, including those in the Salvadoran diaspora, who are at work recuperating the historical memory of the country and seeking justice for the more than 70,000 citizens killed during the war as well as the survivors of torture and other war crimes. …
The Shady Ties Between de Blasio and the Clintons
The New Democrats, Same as the Old
By RICHARD KREITNER | October 25, 2013
Last Monday, Hillary Clinton headlined a fundraiser at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan for Bill de Blasio, the man who managed her successful 2000 Senate campaign and last month declared himself “proud to come from the Clinton family.” Topping the list of co-chairs for the event—those who have promised to bundle $25,000 for de Blasio—was one Paul Adler, a Democratic power-broker in Rockland County, and a convicted felon.
Adler has long been a devoted supporter of de Blasio, whom he first met in 1996 when de Blasio ran the president’s re-election operation in New York. When Clinton named de Blasio her campaign manager in 1999, Adler told the Associated Press she would “benefit enormously” from such “a hands-on professional.”
In 2000, Rockland County was one of the most heavily contested swing districts in New York State, and Clinton faced tough opposition in former Rep. Rick Lazio, a social conservative well-liked by leaders in the ultra-Orthodox community. As chairman of the Rockland County Democratic Party, Adler was valuable enough to the Clintons that he was invited to spend a night at the White House, which he reciprocated by hosting Hillary at his home during her listening tours of the state. Serving as a delegate to Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in August 2000, Adler was profiled by CNN as one of the “the folks who are the heart and soul of American politics.” He proudly told the camera:
My Rolodex is my most prized possession. It is a 25-year work in progress. It is the tool that enables me to do what I need to do: to get somebody at an embassy to get a donor who allows me to get the superintendent of highways. If the building was on fire, I would run in to get that first.
His main task was cultivating Jewish support in the county, especially among the various Hasidic sects, which often deliver votes in blocs on the strong recommendation of rabbinic leadership. Adler was especially close to New Square, a Skverer Hasidic village of about 7,000 people that may have the most political power per capita of any community in the United States. Its leader, Rabbi David Twersky is seen as infallible by his followers: on Shabbat, hundreds or even thousands of worshippers watch the rabbi eat precisely specified portions of food—so much whitefish, so much egg salad—and eagerly await the honor of consuming his leftovers. The village was most recently in the news in 2011 when a young goon allied with Twersky—the nephew of his top political aide, Deputy Mayor Israel Spitzer—set fire to a 43-year old plumber and father-of-four named Aron Rottenberg, who had dared attend services at an outside shul.
In the 2000 Senate election, New Square voted 1400-12 in favor of Clinton, while nearby communities voted just as overwhelmingly for the pro-life Lazio. In December of that year, the senator-elect welcomed Twersky and other New Square leaders to the White House, where they asked the president to review the case of four Skverers who had been convicted two years earlier of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from federal education and housing programs. On his last day of office in January 2001, President Clinton commuted the sentences of the four men. The appearance of a possibly illegal quid pro quo involving New Square’s votes, as well as other suspicious Clinton pardons, prompted the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White (now head of the SEC), to launch an investigation the following month.
A March 2001 article in the New York Times about the case noted the government would have to prove that New Square’s votes represented a “thing of value” which could be traded illegally for commutations. Otherwise, however unseemly the appearance of a deal, nothing illegal could be proven to have occurred. That line would only have been crossed, experts said, had a monetary donation been specifically tied to a certain promised outcome, and no New Square leaders had contributed financially to Clinton’s campaign.
By the time the commutations were granted, de Blasio was already running for a spot on the New York City Council. On December 7th, 2000, just a month after Hillary’s election and two weeks before his and Twersky’s White House visit, New Square Deputy Mayor Israel Spitzer—the rebbe’s political liason to outsiders—attended a fundraiser in Manhattan for de Blasio’s council race, donating $2,500, the legal limit at the time. In August 2001, when the Village Voice asked de Blasio whether he had been questioned in White’s pardons investigation, he refused to say yes or no, only adding, “I’m waiting to hear what’s going to happen with that.”
Whether or not de Blasio ever did, the public never has. But given his leadership of Clinton’s campaign (with a specific portfolio, as one former Clinton aide recently told The Times, of soothing “many of the prickly political factions in New York State,” not a reference to cabdrivers), the timely Spitzer donation, and his relationship with Adler, it is almost impossible to conceive of the possibility that de Blasio did not at least know about New Square’s strategy for obtaining presidential pardons by showering Clinton with symbolically significant Jewish support—or, at most, participate in that strategy by helping procure for Twersky and Spitzer a much-desired visit to the White House to plead their case. Spitzer’s and, more recently and more extensively, Adler’s continued patronage of de Blasio’s political career at least gives the impression that the central figures of the New Square pardons episode remain deeply grateful toward Clinton’s former campaign manager, as they are towards this year’s Democratic candidate for Rockland County Executive, David Fried, another former Clinton aide who helped orchestrate the relationship between the village and the campaign at the time and has been endorsed by the ex-president. Either Spitzer and Adler are rewarding Fried and de Blasio for services rendered or they just happen to be supporting, financially and otherwise, the candidates who thirteen years ago were perfectly positioned to have helped them accomplish what was then their most urgent political—and for the New Square leaders, religious—goal.
In response to a series of questions about New Square and Paul Adler, de Blasio campaign spokesman Dan Levitan wrote: “Bill is proud of his time working for the Clinton Administration and on Hillary’s Senate campaign. The facts clearly show he had no involvement in this matter.”
***
In 1997, when four Skverers—three from New Square and one from Brooklyn—were arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud the federal government, the village refused to participate in the investigation. At one point a mob surrounded federal agents trying to serve subpoenas. Three other men, including a founder of the village and the mayor’s son, fled to Israel, though those two were later caught and convicted. According to the Talmud, “pidyon shvuyim”—releasing Jewish captives held by gentiles—is one of the most important mitzvahs in Jewish law, and by the summer of 2000, the Skverer community was desperate to spring the men from prison.
Meanwhile, Clinton was struggling in her race against Lazio, having a hard time defeating the “carpet-bagger” label in her newly adopted home state, as well as a general Clinton fatigue. Worse, the Jewish community was apoplectic over the news that the First Lady embraced and kissed Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, just after she slurred Israel, and a new book was out claiming that as a 26-year-old, Clinton had allegedly yelled “You fucking Jew bastard!” at the manager of her then-boyfriend Bill’s unsuccessful 1974 congressional campaign in Arkansas. It became de Blasio’s job to make sure Jewish leaders like Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a longtime Brooklyn macher, at the very least didn’t publicly endorse Lazio.
But for Rockland County there was Adler, who knew the soft spot in the ordinarily Republican-voting Hasidic front. On August 8th, Adler coordinated the candidate’s visit to New Square. Clinton, wearing a head covering and a long black skirt, met with Twersky, Spitzer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and assorted Rockland County leaders at the rabbi’s home. The community “embraced her with a warmth that surprised and delighted her campaign team,” The Daily News reported the following year.
As Clinton’s efforts to woo Twersky intensified, the rabbi hatched a strategy to achieve his one goal: winning the release of his four followers from prison. On August 25th, two weeks after Clinton’s visit, a Manhattan appeals court rejected a motion to overturn the convictions. With Adler, Clinton visited New Square again in mid-September, and according to two different accounts, one given to the News and one to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it was either that month or the next when Twersky told Nathan Lewin, the Orthodox Washington lawyer representing the convicted villagers, of his plan to deliver overwhelming support in New Square for Clinton’s Senate bid in order to convince her husband to grant pardons—or at least commutations—to the four men. “I thought he was out of his mind,” Lewin recalled to the News at the time. (In a phone call, Lewin denied having had any knowledge of the rabbi’s plan.)
But sure enough, commutations of the men’s sentences were among the nearly 177 pardons and other remissions Bill Clinton granted during his final days in office. Newly installed as a senator, Hillary Clinton denied reports that she had attended a meeting before the election at which Twersky’s request for pardons was discussed. “Sen. Clinton doesn’t recall ever being present during any discussion of clemency for the New Square people prior to December 2000,” Clinton’s lawyer in the case, David Kendall, told the Daily News. In March 2001, FBI investigators visited the New Square Village Hall and Israel Spitzer’s home. Silver, several Rockland officials, and numerous Clinton staffers—some of whom launched legal defense funds for themselves—testified before a grand jury with lawyers provided and paid for by an unidentified source. But White’s successor as U.S. Attorney, James Comey (now head of the FBI), closed the investigation in 2002, without filing any charges, after 9/11 prompted a redistribution of resources and George W. Bush decided it was bad karma to go after his predecessor.
***
Meanwhile, on September 12th, 2000, just a day after being mentioned by The New York Post’s Fred Dicker as a possible replacement for the outgoing state party chair, Adler had been arrested and charged with embezzling at least $375,000 in corrupt real estate deals through bribery, extortion, and mail fraud, including $135,500 for “public relations consulting work” from the developer of the massive Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, which he then funneled through a shell company. According to the complaint, Adler told associates, “If you can’t help your friends, then why get into some of these positions?’” He added that he had not become chairman of the county party to “lose money.” The schemes were similar to the one that in 1987 led to charges against Adler and two associates of bribery and conspiracy to defraud the state government of $20 million in a complicated real estate deal involving a business partner of Governor Mario Cuomo’s son, Andrew; Adler was acquitted on all charges. This time, he was represented by the Bronx-based lawyer Murray Richman, who has made an illustrious career of defending mobsters. (In 2009, Richman bragged to filmmaker Errol Morris: “I had a trial in which my client stabbed the guy in the back four times—uh, no, uh, seven times—and my defense was he kept backing into the knife. And the jury bought it!”)
Responding to demands from Lazio that Clinton return Adler’s donations, a spokeswoman for the First Lady said, “Hillary knows that this is a difficult time for Paul and his family and she wishes them well.” Though the two inquiries were kept separate, as part of the Southern District investigation into Clinton’s pardons the FBI seized two boxes of documents from the Rockland County Democratic Party headquarters, dated 1996-2000: the exact years of Adler’s term as party chair. He faced up to 60 years in prison, but was sentenced to only 19 months in medium-security Otisville penitentiary in a plea bargain his lawyers were careful to assure the Times did not include cooperation with the pardons investigation. In the Post Jack Newfield reported that it was the non-Orthodox Adler who, on that Shabbat morning in January, delivered the news about the commutations to New Square, which Adler’s lawyer denied.
It isn’t clear how much of the New Square portfolio fell to de Blasio in Adler’s absence during the final months of Clinton’s Senate campaign. But it was clearly de Blasio who benefited most from the financial largesse of the community, when Twersky’s aide Spitzer donated $2,500 to what was widely seen as a long-shot run for an open City Council seat in Brooklyn. The district—Brooklyn’s 39th—straddled Park Slope and Borough Park, the urban stronghold of ultra-Orthodox leaders. But the Skverers represent a vanishingly small part of the Borough Park community, and participate almost not at all in its power structure. While Spitzer’s father, Avraham Chaim Spitzer, is a rabbi whose shul is in Borough Park, the synagogue is not in de Blasio’s district. Besides his $2,500 donation to de Blasio’s 2001 council race; a $250 donation to de Blasio’s 2005 re-election bid; and a $3,850 donation to his 2009 public advocate campaign, Spitzer has never before or since donated to a New York City political candidate. Not in Borough Park, not anywhere, not ever: Spitzer’s financial interest in city politics is wholly restricted to de Blasio’s career.
If you are Israel Spitzer, why donate to the nascent, long-shot bid for city council—a city, of course, which you don’t live in—by the guy who just ran the Senate campaign of a woman whose husband is President of the United States and therefore has the unilateral power to grant your most dire political wish? Was he buying access to the Clintons through de Blasio?
“There is no connection whatsoever,” Spitzer said when reached by phone last week. “My relationship to Bill de Blasio is as a councilman and public advocate. We have institutions all over, in Borough Park, in Williamsburg. New Square is not just New Square.”
Did you meet de Blasio when he was working on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign?
“It has nothing to do with the Senate campaign or Hillary. We know him through various activities over the years.”
Your first donation to de Blasio came just a month after the end of Hillary’s campaign, and two weeks before your meeting at the White House with the Clintons.
“I was introduced to him when he decided to run for office, and I thought he was the right candidate.”
“What people may see is obvious,” says Alexander Rapoport, a de Blasio supporter who runs Masbia, a network of kosher soup kitchens that cater to the ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. “Obviously, they did vote for her and they were pardoned. They don’t need for explanation. The eye sees what it sees.”
***
“We are supporting him 100%,” Spitzer says of de Blasio’s current campaign. “Not with financial support, but with access support, other support. We’re helping get communities to endorse him.”
Indeed, though he has given $2,500 to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 re-election bid, Spitzer has not yet contributed money to de Blasio’s mayoral race.
But Paul Adler has.
For a while after his release, in 2004, Adler kept a low-profile, but as the Rockland County Times noted in March, he has been staging a major comeback in the past three years, winning awards for philanthropy from the Rockland Development Council and for service to the Rockland Business Association, and serving on the boards of several Jewish community organizations. Adler has also regained his real estate license—impossible for a convicted felon in many states—and was hired in 2010 as a vice-president of Rockland-based Rand Commercial, where he tends to blend economic and political boosterism in equal parts. While Adler’s interests may be tangled, they rarely seem to conflict.
Rand Commercial is the leading firm invested in properties adjacent to the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement—Gov. Cuomo’s signature infrastructure project—and Adler has served as chief promoter for the project in local media. “It is pretty clear that when we build it, they will come,” Adler has said—a revealing use of the personal plural. “Business creates more business.” Rand has an entire website devoted to the new bridge, listing newly valuable properties for lease near the site, trumpeting Cuomo’s declarations of its necessity, and promising an economic windfall for adjacent communities. Any information Adler may have been privy to related to the bridge’s construction could have been easily and lucratively parlayed into business for Rand Commercial, but perhaps it is only attributable to coincidence or a keen sense for timing that Adler brokered the deal that will move the state police and New York State Thruway Authority facilities to a vacant warehouse owned by a Rand client in West Nyack.
Adler has also championed a projected desalination plant on the Hudson River proposed by United Water, serving the company as an advocate, pressing Rockland officials and community groups like the NAACP to support the plant over the objections of environmentalists, while encouraging the Cuomo administration to approve it. He was also recently admitted to the bar, which requires letters of recommendation vouching that the candidate possesses “the necessary character to justify the trust and confidence that clients, the public and the legal system will place in them.” Bar applications are sealed and confidential under state law.
This summer, when former state senator Nicholas Spano—who worked at Rand before being convicted of tax fraud in 2012—sought a judge’s permission to communicate with his fellow ex-con, a local paper quoted Adler advising Spano to think of redemption as “really a journey, not a destination.”
Adler’s journey has included a sharp spike in political fundraising activities—an activity the Adlers never seem to have taken much interest in before his arrest, and is perhaps an attempt to buy back the influence he lost. Since 2005, the Adler household has sprinkled more than $50,000 among dozens of local, state, and federal campaigns—including to Andrew Cuomo. He has held events at his home for Rep. Nita Lowey, a Westchester Democrat, and earlier this month hosted a major fundraiser for David Fried, the Democratic candidate for Rockland County Executive and a former White House advance aide for the Clintons who grew up in nearby Spring Valley, adjacent to New Square. A person who was involved in Rockland politics at the time said that in the fall of 2000, with Adler in prison, Fried pressed those who controlled the president’s schedule to fit in a visit to New Square, just across the Hudson from Chappaqua, where the Clintons had bought a home to facilitate Hillary’s Senate bid. According to the person, who is backing Fried in his current campaign, Fried was on the phone with Spitzer constantly at the time. Bill Clinton endorsed Fried earlier this year, saying he “worked closely” with the advance aide, and in the September primary New Square took the extraordinary step of splitting their usual bloc vote, throwing enough votes to Fried to defeat his opponent Ilan Schoenberger, the village’s long-time political patron who also attended the August 2000 meeting with Hillary Clinton.
The Facebook page for last Sunday’s “Democratic Unity Event” for Fried at Adler’s palatial home in New City, a secular community a few minutes’ drive from New Square, said “Everyone is welcome,” and the open door on a drizzly Sunday morning seemed to emphasize the point. In her rousing speech (“We need someone who’s gonna take us out of this darkness and into the light!”), Kristen Stavisky, Adler’s successor as Democratic county chair, named and drew applause for all the “electeds” in the room—all the public officials, that is, including sitting judges, willing to attend a fundraiser in a disgraced ex-convict’s home: David Carlucci, state senator; James Skoufis, assemblyman; Ellen Jaffee, assemblywoman; Christopher St. Lawrence, Mayor of Ramapo (whose town hall was raided in May by the FBI, investigating the construction of a widely-scorned baseball stadium midwifed, according to Skriloff and others, by Adler); Louis Falco, Rockland County Sherriff; and many more. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sent a staffer. When Adler took the floor he especially called out New Square’s Spitzer, standing just to the side, for recognition. I can tell you that I’ve personally spoken with the governor,” Adler told a captivated room. “The governor will be in to campaign on this. Senator Schumer will be in. Senator Gillibrand will be in. The entire state delegation is going to be down here.”
“I don’t think candidates for political office should actively seek and obtain support, including financial, from a convicted federal felon,” says Michael Bongiorno, who as Rockland County District Attorney in 2000 helped put Adler behind bars. “I think it shows extremely poor judgment on the part of anyone who does so.”
“He is very involved with the community,” Fried says, explaining his willingness to accept Adler’s support. “He was recently admitted as an attorney, which required passage of the ‘Character and Fitness’ test. He is one of the largest donors to community programs and agencies including the JCC, and he is very involved with numerous organizations that are important to me.”
Last week, as Hillary Clinton hosted the Roosevelt Hotel event for de Blasio, her husband attended a fundraiser for Fried. Despite his $25,000 co-chairmanship of the de Blasio fundraiser, rumor has it Adler attended Fried’s. Through a spokesman, Fried declined a follow-up request for comment about his role in obtaining the New Square commutations.
“Adler is part of a small cabal that controls Rockland County,” says Robert Rhodes, a self-described left-wing Democrat who is president of the anti-developers group Preserve Ramapo, which has endorsed Fried’s Republican opponent Ed Day in the county executive race. “He’s a guy who goes to prison, then comes back here raising money for the county Democratic machine.”
***
And not only for the county machine.
Last January, the day before formally declaring his candidacy for the mayoral race, de Blasio wrote on Facebook, “My family is making a very important announcement at our home in Park Slope tomorrow.” Adler’s comment, the very first on the page, was simple: “Good luck.”
But Adler knew it would take more than luck to elect the long-shot de Blasio, having already hosted a Rockland County meet-and-greet for the candidate at his home and, along with Clinton alum Harold Ickes, co-chaired a high-dollar fundraiser for de Blasio at the Waldorf Astoria in 2010, widely seen as the first public hint of de Blasio’s mayoral aspirations and of Clintonian support. Adler has donated $1,500 so far to the mayoral campaign, while his wife Mary and son Samuel, who both also happen to work for Rand Commercial, have donated $4,950 and $250 to de Blasio, respectively, and their daughter, who was hired by Gov. Cuomo as a press officer for the state’s economic development agency, has donated $425. Adler attended de Blasio’s victory party in Gowanus on primary night last month.
Written by Adler and graced with his visage, the official Twitter feed of Rand Commercial—which does not handle city-based properties—spends a lot of time concerned with the New York City mayoral campaign:
A man of the people @deBlasioNYC pic.twitter.com/708AWTXBOh
— Rand Commercial (@randcommercial) October 9, 2013
Chirlane is my hero & an inspiration 4 NYC! @deblasionyc-Once Alienated & Now a Force in Her Husband’s Bid for Mayor http://t.co/l8GY7Kwi0Z
— Rand Commercial (@randcommercial) October 2, 2013
Obama loves Dante de Blasio’s afro http://t.co/v3raUCYtB6 via @POLITICO
— Rand Commercial (@randcommercial) Septe
mber 25, 2013
Reached by phone, Adler praised de Blasio’s “very progressive mindset” and declared his belief that “the winds are blowing for change.” When asked whether de Blasio played any role in the New Square pardons, Adler said Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager “didn’t have anything to do with that, he had nothing to do with anything.” Asked whether he recalled de Blasio attending any meetings between Clinton and the village leaders, Adler said no, called this reporter “sleazebag” twice, and hung up.
The response de Blasio spokesman Dan Levitan e-mailed did not address questions concerning Paul Adler—including whether the candidate has ever discussed New Square with him. A subsequent request for comment has not been returned.
But on Monday, when Adler sent his announcement about chairing the Clinton/de Blasio fundraiser—from his Rand Commercial e-mail account—he wrote:
We are all inextricably linked together, so let’s be active participants in making history once again.
I know I am always asking to you to support this cause or that candidate, but, we always seem to in the right place at the right time, and this time is no exception.
Richard Kreitner is a writer and researcher in New York City. He is on Twitter at @richardkreitner and can be reached at richard.kreitner [at] gmail.com.
The Withering of Big Pharma?
By Martha Rosenberg | Dissident Voice | November 7, 2013
It used to be when a drug company settled illegal marketing charges that millions took its drugs under false pretenses, the news would be released on a Friday afternoon when no one would notice. That was then. Now almost all the drug companies have joined the Off label/Kickback club and the public doesn’t seem to notice or care.
On the surface, Johnson & Johnson’s $2.2 billion settlement this week for illegally marketing drugs to the elderly, children and the mentally disabled looks like a victory. J&J’s subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, will plead guilty to illegally promoting the antipsychotic Risperdal for “controlling aggression and anxiety in elderly dementia patients and treating behavioral disturbances in children and in individuals with disabilities,” reports Reuters. The promotions included a brazen kickback scheme to Omnicare Inc, a pharmacy supplying nursing homes, exposed by a whistleblower.
At least 15,000 elderly people in nursing homes die a year from drugs like Risperdal said FDA drug reviewer David Graham in Congressional testimony a few years ago. Eli Lilly who makes the similar drug Zyprexa and AstraZeneca who makes Seroquel have also settled charges that they churned the elderly drug market at the price of Grandma and Grandpa’s lives.
But it is not a victory. J&J made $24.2 billion off Risperdal from 2003 to 2010 and shareholders won’t even notice this week’s nano loss. J&J milked Risperdal for all it was worth and the patent had already run out by the time it was charged with illegal schemes. Other drug giants charged with illegal marketing schemes–Abbott for Depakote, Pfizer for Bextra, Eli Lilly for Zyprexa, AstraZeneca for Seroquel, GlaxoSmithKline for Paxil and Merck for Vioxx–also got their money’s worth before the trivial nuisance of suit. Many, like Pfizer who illegally marketed its seizure drug Neurontin while under probation for illegal Lipitor activities–are brazen and shameless repeat offenders.
Many say the only justice that will get Big Pharma’s attention is frog marching the CEOs off to prison and/or cutting them off from their lucrative public trough of Medicare, Medicaid and military health programs.
Still, Big Pharma’s audacious business plan of asking forgiveness not permission is winding down. Not because Pharma, prescribers, consumers, regulators and health officials have seen the light but because there are no more big drugs to pimp. An estimated 100,000 workers will be losing their jobs at Pfizer, Sanofi, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Merck reported Yahoo finance last month.
Only two new drug campaigns seem to be brewing and they require a major suspension of reality on the part of doctors and patients. One tries to convince people with low back pain they actually suffer from ankylosing spondylitis an arthritis-like condition that causes chronic inflammation of the spine. If your spine is stiff when you wake up in the morning you can take an immune suppressor like Humira which puts you at risk of tuberculosis and lethal viral, fungal and bacterial infections while costing you $12,000 to $17,000 a year. Line forms to the left.
The other, even more brazen campaign, tries to convince people with insomnia, tiredness during the day, moodiness and relationship problems that they actually suffer from Non-24-Hour Sleep–Wake Disorder, a disorder that affects mostly blind people. You don’t have to be blind to have the disorder, says the new Pharma message even though there have been fewer than 100 cases of sighted people with non-24 reported in the scientific literature. It sounds like a stretch but so did convincing people with job, money and marriage problems they really had depression or bipolar disorder.
Still it is obvious the bloom has fallen off the Big Pharma rose and it is now paying the piper for the high-flying party with drug settlements like Johnson & Johnson’s this week. But that doesn’t mean shady marketing, hidden risks, kickbacks and outrageous prices are gone from the medical field. They have just moved to the Medical Device industry.
~
Martha Rosenberg is a columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. Her first book, titled Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, has just been released by Prometheus Books. She can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net.
Related article
How Can the New York Times Endorse an Agreement the Public Can’t Read?
By Maira Sutton | EFF | November 7, 2013
The New York Times’ editorial board has made a disappointing endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even as the actual text of the agreement remains secret. That raises two distressing possibilities: either in an act of extraordinary subservience, the Times has endorsed an agreement that neither the public nor its editors have the ability to read. Or, in an act of extraordinary cowardice, it has obtained a copy of the secret text and hasn’t yet fulfilled its duty to the public interest to publish it.
Without a publicly available agreement, readers are forced into the uncomfortable position of taking official government statements at face value. That’s reflected in the endorsement, which fails to note the myriad ways in which TPP has been negotiated undemocratically, shutting out public oversight while permitting corporate interests to drive the agenda. Given these glaring issues, it is disconcerting that the Times would take such a supportive stance on an agreement that is likely to threaten innovation and users’ digital rights well into the 21st century.
That situation leaves unanswered questions. Does the editorial board, for example, support the TPP provisions that would give private corporations new tools to undermine national sovereignty and democratic processes? Because “investor-state dispute settlement,” slated for inclusion in both the TPP and the EU-US trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), would give multinational companies the power to sue countries over laws that might cut into expected future profits. This could allow corporations to unravel any policy designed to protect users against violations of their right to privacy or free speech online. The paper’s endorsement notes that copyright enforcement could be expanded to suit legacy media companies, but provides no explanation of why a trade agreement is an acceptable venue for deciding such issues.
Does the New York Times also endorse an initiative to scrap democratic oversight of TPP by elected lawmakers? After all, Senate Finance committee leaders, Sen. Max Baucus and Sen. Orrin Hatch have renewed their call to pass fast-track, which would hand over Congress’ constitutional mandate over US trade policy to the Obama administration. Fast-track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority, would restrict lawmakers from having any proper hearings on its provisions, limiting them to an up-or-down vote on the entire 29 chapter treaty.
The paper’s statement emphasizes how the Obama administration strives to make TPP’s policies “an example for the rest of the world to follow.” But if that’s the case, then it’s all the more important that the agreement be published immediately. Such a significant body of international law regulating digital policy must not be negotiated without proper, informed public debate. The secrecy of the process itself ensures that only some private interests will be represented at the expense of others. In addition, the U.S. Trade Representative’s history of pushing forth extreme copyright enforcement policies through other trade agreements gives little assurance that users’ rights will be considered in the TPP.
Trade representatives are working to finalize TPP negotiations by the end of the year. Negotiators are scheduled to meet in Salt Lake City next week to negotiate outstanding issues in this agreement, including provisions on liability for Internet Service Providers and anti-circumvention measures over DRM. Following that, trade delegates are seeking to finalize and sign this agreement in December in a ministerial meeting in Singapore.
It’s unfortunate that news outlets are giving little coverage to TPP, when media attention could have a major impact on how the US and the other 11 nations draft digital policy. But public media coverage is precisely the sort of accountability that official secrecy thwarts. Instead of endorsing an agreement the public can’t read, a responsible paper would condemn the secrecy involved. And if the Times has seen the text and knows what’s contained in the TPP, then they have a responsibility to publish the text immediately and expose the US government’s back room dealings.
In either case, it is deeply disappointing that the New York Times would even support the TPP when the public remains in the dark. An endorsement of TPP at this stage is an endorsement of opaque, corporate-driven policymaking.
~
We need to demand that our lawmakers oppose fast track, ask them to call for a hearing, and exercise their authority to oversee the U.S. trade office’s secret copyright agenda.
Related articles
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership: We Won’t Be Fooled by Rigged Corporate Trade Agreements (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Congress Must Not Fast Track TPP to Ratification (eff.org)
Iranian channels targeted 66 times in 3 years: IRIB
Press TV – November 7, 2013
The head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) says Iranian channels have been taken off air from 27 satellites 66 times over the past three years by those claiming to be the advocates of freedom of speech.
Ezzatollah Zarghami made the remarks in an interview with Iran’s Young Journalists’ Club (YJC) on Thursday.
Zarghami noted that in addition to this, the channels have been repeatedly blocked or distorted through jamming of their transponders.
“This is while the Islamic Republic of Iran has been falsely accused of jamming [foreign radio and TV broadcasts] and sometimes it is claimed that the source [of the jamming] is outside Iran,” he stated.
The head of the IRIB said that in the modern world the free flow of information and enlightenment by independent media cannot be blocked.
He noted that the move against the Iranian channels by those who claim to be the advocates of freedom of speech and free flow of information comes as thousands of TV and satellite channels are currently broadcasting their programs onto the Iranian territory.
Iranian channels have come under an unprecedented wave of attacks by European governments and satellite companies since January 2012.
They have been taken off the air in several Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
European companies say they are abiding by the US-engineered sanctions against Iran. However, Michael Mann, the EU foreign policy chief’s spokesman, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.
In June, in another illegal act against Iranian alternative channels, Intelsat said that it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including Press TV.
Press TV later learned that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) — an agency of the US Treasury Department — was behind the pressure on Intelsat.
Media activists call the attacks on Iranian channels a campaign against free speech launched by the same European governments that preach freedom of expression.
Related articles
Senate committee approves funding for NSA, witch-hunt on leakers
RT | November 6, 2013
Congress has taken the first step towards expanding the abilities of the United States intelligence community by advancing a draft bill that will ensure the government’s spy budget stays intact into next year.
A Senate commitee approved the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act during a closed door session on Tuesday, a bill that if signed into law will allow the US National Security Agency and other departments to keep receiving funding amid an international scandal that has caused calls for reform and even abolishment of the NSA both in the US and abroad in recent months.
Notwithstanding the backlash brought on by an array of secret NSA documents disclosed to the media by contractor-turned-leaked Edward Snowden since June, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the draft bill by a 13-2 vote. Next, the full chamber will weigh in on the matter before it is reconciled with a sister act by way of the House of Representatives and sent to President Barack Obama to be signed into law.
If approved with all of its current provisions in place, the law will let the government continue to fund programs operated for purposes of counterterrorism and nuclear weapon proliferation prevention, authorizing initiatives within more than a dozen federal departments, including the NSA and others that deal in covert, intelligence-gathering operations.
In a press release issued Tuesday by the committee, however, its members also acknowledged that the bill expands certain intelligence community operations, including in particular the very programs enacted to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
The bill, the committee wrote, “includes important provisions to enhance the conduct, accountability and oversight of the intelligence activities of the United States,” such as one intended “to protect against insider threats by adding necessary funds to deploy information technology detection systems across the intelligence community.”
The bill would also empower the Director of National Intelligence to “improve the government’s process to investigate . . . individuals with security clearances to access classified information,” while at same time “Instituting new statutory protections that protect the ability of legitimate whistleblowers to bring concerns directly to the attention of lawmakers, inspectors general and intelligence community leaders.”
Since the identity of the NSA leaker was revealed to be 30-year-old Edward Snowden, opponents of his actions have suggested that alternative, legal routes to questions the intelligence community’s tactics could have been taken, such as appealing to an inspector general. History, however, suggests that recent whistleblowers before him had a nearly impossible time doing as much, including Thomas Drake, a former senior NSA executive who was charged under the Espionage Act after he attempted to draw attention to waste, fraud and abuse within his agency years earlier. Speaking at an anti-NSA rally in Washington last month, Drake told a crowd of a couple thousand, “Any domestic surveillance legislation must include whistleblower protection for the credibility and enforcement of any reform effort, otherwise secrecy enforced by repression will turn into a faux reform passed into simply an honor system” for the NSA.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Committee Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia said, “This year’s intelligence authorization bill achieves both objectives by providing clear guidance and appropriate resources to the intelligence community, while enhancing the committee’s oversight of vital intelligence activities.”
If signed into law, the act will allow for funding to continue with regards to a number of intelligence-gathering operations conducted not just by the likes of the NSA, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Energy and Justice, among others.
Featured Video
Trump asks Iran not to retaliate after he strikes Pickaxe Mountain
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review & Summary
Calling of an Angel: The True Story of Rene Caisse and an Indian Herbal Medicine Called Essiac (1988)
Dr. Gary L. Glum – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | October 17, 2026
On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Trump asks Iran not to retaliate after he strikes Pickaxe Mountain – w/ Prof. Marandi
- Vice President J.D. Vance’s Deceptive ‘Antiwar’ Campaign Speech
- Iran: Palestinians’ rights must not be compromised in Gaza’s future; US, Israel to blame for Hormuz situation
- Ongoing tales of Syrian chemical weapons
- Moscow blasts UN for ignoring torture of Russian POWs
- Millions of Books Could Have Been Destroyed in Lebanon During Israeli Bombings
- Moscow warns of ‘hunt for Russians’
- Calling of an Angel: The True Story of Rene Caisse and an Indian Herbal Medicine Called Essiac (1988)
- South Korean Assistance to the U.S. in the War with Iran: Between Allied Duty and National Interests
- Pharma- and Gates-Funded GAVI Seeks to Assure Parents
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli soldiers debunk Israel’s talking points
- In West Bank, Israeli settlers are totally out of control – Daily Update
- NPR investigation finds evidence of widespread fraud at mall kiosks tied to Israeli skincare brand
- Tucker Carlson exposes Israeli Lies about the Oct 7th attack, Charlie Kirk, and the U.S.
- Israel has detained thousands of Palestinian children since Oct 7th – over half spent time in solitary, many uncharged
- Israeli Analysis: Is Netanyahu Planning an ‘October Surprise’ Attack Before Israel’s Election?
- Israeli settlers brutally attack Palestinians and Washington Post female photographer, 65
- Words Have Changed, Occupation Continues: The Reality of the Gaza Ceasefire
- Gaza’s child amputees are growing faster than their prosthetics allow
- Israel keeps Palestinians struggling just to survive–Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
