Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Hunter Biden Criminal Probe Bolsters a Chinese Scholar’s Claim About Beijing’s Influence With the Bidens

Professor Di Dongsheng says China’s close ties to Wall Street and its dealings with Hunter could enable it to exert more power than under Trump

By Glenn Greenwald | December 9, 2020

Hunter Biden acknowledged today that he has been notified of an active criminal investigation into his tax affairs by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware. Among the numerous prongs of the inquiry, CNN reports, investigators are examining “whether Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.”

Documents relating to Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s name to enrich himself and other relatives through deals with China were among the cache published in the week before the election by The New York Post — revelations censored by Twitter and Facebook and steadfastly ignored by most mainstream news outlets. That concerted repression effort by media outlets and Silicon Valley left it to right-wing outlets such as Fox News and The Daily Caller to report, which in turn meant that millions of Americans were kept in the dark before voting.

But the just-revealed federal criminal investigation in Delaware is focused on exactly the questions which corporate media outlets refused to examine for fear that doing so would help Trump: namely, whether Hunter Biden engaged in illicit behavior in China and what impact that might have on his father’s presidency.

The allegations at the heart of this investigation compel an examination of a fascinating and at-times disturbing speech at a major financial event held last week in Shanghai. In that speech, a Chinese scholar of political science and international finance, Di Donghseng, insisted that Beijing will have far more influence in Washington under a Biden administration than it did with the Trump administration.

The reason, Di said, is that China’s ability to get its way in Washington has long depended upon its numerous powerful Wall Street allies. But those allies, he said, had difficulty controlling Trump, but will exert virtually unfettered power over Biden. That China cultivated extensive financial ties to Hunter Biden, Di explained, will be crucial for bolstering Beijing’s influence even further.

Di, who in addition to his teaching positions is also Vice Dean of Beijing’s Renmin University’s School of International Relations, delivered his remarks alongside three other Chinese banking and development experts. Di’s speech at the event, entitled “Will China’s Opening up of its Financial Sector Attract Wall Street?,” was translated and posted by Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese Communist Party critic who left China years ago, citing religious persecution, and now lives in the U.S. A source fluent in Mandarin confirmed the accuracy of the translation.

The centerpiece of Di’s speech was the history he set forth of how Beijing has long successfully managed to protect its interests in the halls of American power: namely, by relying on “friends” in Wall Street and other U.S. ruling class sectors — which worked efficiently until the Trump presidency.

Referring to the Trump-era trade war between the two countries, Di posed this question: “Why did China and the U.S. use to be able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 [when Clinton became President] and 2016 [when Obama’s left office]?” He then provided this answer:

No matter what kind of crises we encountered — be it the Yinhe incident [when the U.S. interdicted a Chinese ship in the mistaken belief it carried chemical weapons for Iran], the bombing of the embassy [the 1992 bombing by the U.S. of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade], or the crashing of the plane [the 2001 crashing of a U.S. military spy plane into a Chinese fighter jet] — things were all solved in no time, like a couple do with their quarrels starting at the bedhead but ending at the bed end. We fixed everything in two months. What is the reason? I’m going to throw out something maybe a little bit explosive here.

It’s just because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.

Who are these “old friends” of China’s “who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence” and have ensured that, in his words, “for the past 30 years, 40 years, we have been utilizing the core power of the United States”? Di provided the answer: Wall Street, with whom the Chinese Community Party and Chinese industry maintain a close, multi-pronged and inter-dependent relationship.

“Since the 1970s, Wall Street had a very strong influence on the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States,” Di observed. Thus, “we had a channel to rely on.”

To illustrate the point of how helpful Wall Street has been to Chinese interests in the U.S., Di recounted a colorful story, albeit one fused with anti-Semitic tropes, of his unsuccessful efforts in 2015 to secure the preferred venue in Washington for the debut of President Xi Jinping’s book about China. No matter how much he cajoled the owner of the iconic D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose, or what he offered him, Di was told it was unavailable, already promised to a different author. So he conveyed his failure to Party leadership.

But at the last minute, Di recounts, he was told that venue had suddenly changed its mind and agreed to host Xi’s book event. This was the work, he said, of someone to whom Party leaders introduced him: “She is from a famous, leading global financial institution on Wall Street,” Di said, “the president of the Asia region of a top-level financial institution,” who speaks perfect Mandarin and has a sprawling home in Beijing.

The point — that China’s close relationship with Wall Street has given it very powerful friends in the U.S. — was so clear that it sufficed for him to coyly laugh with the audience: “Do you understand what I mean? If you do, put your hands together!” They knowingly applauded.

All of that provoked an obvious question: why did this close relationship with Wall Street not enable China to exert the same influence during the Trump years, including avoiding a costly trade war? Di explained that — aside from Wall Street’s reduced standing due to the 2008 financial crisis — everything changed when Trump ascended to the presidency; specifically, Wall Street could not control him the way it had previous presidents because of Trump’s prior conflicts with Wall Street:

But the problem is that after 2008, the status of Wall Street has declined, and more importantly, after 2016, Wall Street can’t fix Trump. It’s very awkward. Why? Trump had a previous soft default issue with Wall Street, so there was a conflict between them, but I won’t go into details, I may not have enough time.

So during the US-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the US side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t do much.

But as Di shifted to his discussion of the new incoming administration, his tone palpably changed, becoming far more animated, excited and optimistic. That’s because a Biden presidency means a restoration of the old order, where Wall Street exerts great influence with the White House and can thus do China’s bidding: “But now we’re seeing Biden was elected, the traditional elite, the political elite, the establishment, they’re very close to Wall Street, so you see that, right?”

And Di specifically referenced the work Beijing did to cultivate Hunter:

Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that?

Who helped [Biden’s son] build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals inside all these.

Some excerpts of Di’s speech can be seen below, and the translated transcript of it here.

The claims in his speech can be seen in a new light given today’s revelations that the U.S. Attorney has resumed its active criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and whether he accounted to the I.R.S. for the income (CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz says that “at least one of the matters investigators have examined is a 2017 gift of a 2.8-carat diamond that Hunter Biden received from CEFC [China Energy’]’s founder and former chairman Ye Jianming after a Miami business meeting.”

The pronouncements of this University Professor and administrator should not be taken as gospel, but there is substantial independent confirmation for much of what he claimed. That is even more true after today’s news about Hunter Biden.

That Hunter Biden received large sums of money from Chinese entities is not in dispute. A report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs earlier this year, while finding no wrongdoing by Joe Biden, documented millions in cash flow between Hunter and his relatives and Chinese interests.

Nor can it be reasonably disputed that Wall Street exerts significant influence in Democratic Party politics generally and in the world of Joe Biden specifically. Citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics, CNBC reported in the weeks before the election:

People in the securities and investment industry will finish the 2020 election cycle contributing over $74 million to back Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, a much larger sum than what President Donald Trump raised from Wall Street.

They added: “Biden also received a ton of financial support from leaders on Wall Street in the third quarter.” At the same time, said CNN, “professionals on Wall Street are shunning Trump and funneling staggering amounts of money to his opponent.” Wall Street executives, CNBC reported, specially celebrated Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, noting that her own short-lived presidential campaign was deluged with “contributions from executives in a wide range of industries, including film, TV, real estate and finance.”

Moreover, Biden’s top appointees thus far overwhelmingly have massive ties to Wall Street and the industries which spend the most to control the U.S. government. As but one egregious example, Pine Island Investment Corp. — an investment firm in which key Biden appointees including Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief nominee Gen. Lloyd Austin have been centrally involved — “is seeing a surge in support from Wall Street players after pitching access to investors.”

Prior to the formal selection of Blinken and Austin for key Cabinet posts, The Daily Poster reported that “two former government officials who may now run President-elect Joe Biden’s national security team have been partners at a private equity firm now promising investors big profits off government business because of its ties to those officials.” The New York Times last week said “the Biden team’s links to these entities are presenting the incoming administration with its first test of transparency and ethics” and that Pine Island is an example “of how former officials leverage their expertise, connections and access on behalf of corporations and other interests, without in some cases disclosing details about their work, including the names of the clients or what they are paid.”

That China and Wall Street have an extremely close relationship has been documented for years. Financial Times — under the headline “Beijing and Wall Street deepen ties despite geopolitical rivalry” — last month reported that “Wall Street groups including BlackRock, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase have each been given approval to expand their businesses in China over recent months.”

A major Wall Street Journal story from last week, bearing the headline “China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street,” echoed Di’s speech by noting that “Chinese leaders have time and again turned to Wall Street for assistance in periods of trouble.” That WSJ article particularly emphasized the growing ties between China and the asset-manager giant BlackRock, a firm that already has outsized influence in the Biden administration. And Michael Bloomberg’s ties to China have been so crucial that he has regularly heaped praise on Beijing even when doing so was politically deleterious.

Even the smaller details of Di’s speech — including his anecdote about the book event he tried to arrange for Xi — check out. Contemporaneous news accounts show that exactly the book event he described was held at Politics and Prose in 2015, just as he recalled.

None of this means that Trump was some sort of stalwart enemy of Wall Street. From massive corporate tax cuts to rollbacks of regulations in numerous industries and many of their own in key positions, the financial sector benefited in all sorts of ways from the Trump presidency.

But all of their behavior indicates that they view a Biden/Harris administration as far more beneficial to their interests, and far more susceptible to their control. And that, in turn, makes Beijing far more confident that they will wield significantly more influence in Washington than they could over the last four years.

That confidence is due, says Professor Di, to Beijing’s close ties to a newly empowered Wall Street as well as their efforts to cultivate Hunter Biden, efforts we are likely to learn much more about now that Hunter’s activities in China are under active criminal investigation in Delaware. We should and could have learned about these transactions prior to the election had the bulk of the media not corruptly decided to ignore any incriminating reporting on Biden, but learning about them now is, one might say, a case of better late than never.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails

By Caitlin Johnstone | October 14, 2020

Mainstream media and social media platforms are actively blacking out an October surprise published by The New York Post which purports to show “smoking gun” emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Both Twitter and Facebook have censored the story on their platforms, the first time we’ve seen the powerful social media giants deplatform a mainstream news media article, both citing concerns about the origins of the emails and an uncertainty about the veracity of the claims.

“Facebook was limiting distribution of the story while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the story’s claims, spokesman Andy Stone said,” reports NPR, adding that “Twitter said it decided to block the story because it couldn’t be sure about the origins of the emails.”

Twitter claims it found the emails to be in violation of its policies banning content which contained private information and its rules against “hacked materials”, both of which would have forbidden all articles sharing the contents of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops if those rules had existed back then. As I warned could happen back in August, these rules have set the stage for the cross-platform censorship of a 2020 October surprise.

There’s a good thread going around Twitter compiling posts that mainstream media reporters have been making in objection to the circulation of Hunter Biden’s emails alongside posts made by those same reporters promoting far more ridiculous and insubstantial allegations, like MSNBC’s virulent Russia conspiracy theorist Kyle Griffin saying nobody should link to the New York Post report because if they do they’ll be “amplifying disinformation”.

A new Reason article discusses how the mass media are not just avoiding the story but actively discouraging it:

On Wednesday, The New York Post published an attention-catching original report: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” In the previously unreleased email, which was allegedly sent on April 17, 2015, an executive with Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, thanks Hunter Biden for “giving an opportunity” to meet Joe Biden, according to The NY Post.

It’s a story that merits the attention of other journalists, political operatives, national security experts, and also the public at large — not least of all because there are serious questions about its accuracy, reliability, and sourcing. And yet many in the media are choosing not just to ignore the story, but to actively encourage others to suppress any discussion of it.

Indeed, two mainstream reporters who acknowledged (and criticized) the Post’s scoop — The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Politico’s Jake Sherman — faced thunderous denunciation on Twitter from Democratic partisans simply for discussing the story. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden accused Haberman of promoting disinformation, and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg told Sherman that he was helping nefarious conservative activists “launder this bullshit into the news cycle.” Historian Kevin Kruse asked why they were “amplifying” the story.

Indeed a scroll through today’s mainstream news reporting does appear to show some consensus among most news media that the topic of the emails should be avoided, with most MSM articles on the matter covering the after-effects of the New York Post release or explaining why readers should be dubious about its contents. A new Washington Post article titled “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: an explainer” takes great pains to outline how important it is to be very, very certain that this story is everything it purports to be before investing any credulity in it.

“How do we know the email is authentic? We do not,” WaPo tells us. “The New York Post posted PDF print-outs of several emails allegedly from the laptop, but for the ‘smoking gun’ email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures, a book on disinformation. ‘There is no header information, no metadata.’ The Washington Post has been unable to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted.”

This would be the same Washington Post that has been circulating disinformation about Russia for years due to its disinterest in verifying information before reporting, and has alongside the rest of the mass media been promoting the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election based solely on unproven assertions promoted by government agencies despite many gaping plot holes in that narrative. Where was the journalistic concern for seeing the data and inspecting the hard drives then?

In and of itself there is no problem at all with mainstream news media applying high evidentiary standards to its reporting and making sure readers are aware when political manipulators could be pulling the wool over their eyes. In and of itself this would be a good thing. The problem is that all this emphasis on verification and truth only comes up when it is politically convenient for these plutocratic media outlets, because only favoring truth when it’s convenient is the same as lying constantly.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when The Guardian reported without evidence and against all common sense that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been having secret meetings with Trump lackey Paul Manafort? That evidence never came out, because the story was ridiculous bullshit from the beginning, yet mass media outlets everywhere parroted it to their audiences like it was a fact. You can still post that bogus Guardian story on Twitter and Facebook to this very day without so much as a warning.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when Politico published the idiotic, nonsensical story that Iran was plotting to assassinate the American ambassador to South Africa? The report sparked many news reports and Twitter threats from the president, but when it was dismissed by the South African government itself there was barely a whisper about it. You are still free to share this bogus Politico article anywhere online you like.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when leaks by anonymous spooks dominated headlines for days with their evidence-free allegation that the Russian government had been paying Taliban-linked fighters bounties on western occupying forces? We now know that story was completely baseless and would have been dismissed by news reporters who were actually doing their due diligence, yet it’s still being cited as fact on Twitter by sitting US senators and in a recent vice presidential debate by Kamala Harris. If news reporters had spent anywhere near as much energy cautioning their audiences to be skeptical about this story and educating them about its plot holes as they’re spending on Hunter Biden’s emails, this would not be happening.

The problem is not that there are high evidentiary standards for Hunter Biden’s emails, the problem is that there are virtually no evidentiary standards when the plutocratic media want to sell the world on a narrative which benefits the establishment upon which the media-owning class has built its kingdom. News reports will be waved through on a vague assertion by some anonymous government operative if they are damaging to Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Syria or any other US-targeted nation, and they are on a pretty much daily basis to greater or lesser degrees.

If a news report facilitates the national security state, all journalistic protocol goes out the window and nobody knows the meaning of the word evidence. As soon as a report becomes inconvenient for a friend of the national security state like Joe Biden, suddenly strict evidentiary standards and warnings against potential disinformation are of paramount importance. This is the same as lying all the time.

They lie because the mass media within the US-centralized empire are the propaganda engine for that empire. The drivers of empire understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they ensure that all points of narrative influence are tightly controlled by them.

A world where all news stories are held to the same evidentiary standards as Hunter Biden’s emails are currently being held would be a world without empire. People would never consent to the insanity of imperialism and endless war if their consent wasn’t manufactured, and depriving them of the information that is inconvenient for that empire is essential in that manufacturing.

October 15, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | 2 Comments

Pro-Israel Kamala Harris pledges not to condition US aid to Israel on human rights

MEMO | August 27, 2020

Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has eased the concerns of pro-Israel Jewish donors to her party, by pledging not to condition aid to Israel on its human rights record if Joe Biden is elected President.

“Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” Harris is reported saying in a virtual event held with Jewish donors by the Jerusalem Post.

“As vice president, Joe Biden helped ensure unwavering support for Israel’s security,” she continued. “During the Obama-Biden administration, he was a key advocate in securing support for life-saving technologies, which I have seen.”

Vowing to put Israel first, Harris added: “I pledge to you the Biden-Harris administration will sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security, including the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation pioneered during the Obama-Biden administration and the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”

The threat of conditioning aid to Israel was suggested by a number of Democrat lawmakers. In July the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders signed a letter calling for the $3.8 billion annual aid given to Israel to be made conditional on the Zionist state ending its violation of Palestinian human rights.

August 27, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Narrative control tightens as panicked anti-Trump aristocrats crank up media gaslight machines

By Mitchell Feierstein | RT | August 17, 2020

Orange Man Bad. It’s a narrative that is being made harder to question every day, even as Democrat-controlled cities descend into chaos and Americans are being fed the same old status quo from the Obama and Clinton era.

The middle and lower classes have been eviscerated, and America’s big cities have been decimated and destroyed by the mob. And who is the mob? They are Antifa, BLM, ideologues (aka Democratic elites) and their multi-million-dollar-a-year media propaganda mouthpieces. The mob and its supporters are creating extreme tribalism that is ripping America apart.

Disgracefully, Democratic Party members of the US Congress are actively calling for “unrest in the streets” and the Democratic Party’s presidential dream team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris condone this anarchy, chaos and violence by their silence, as they dance to the mob’s tune saying and doing anything to grab power through instilling more fear, terror and uncertainty amongst the voters. Democrats have not denounced the surge in murders, looting, and violence infecting America’s biggest cities, but many are instead actively working to defund the police during a massive crime wave. People have to “shoplift some bread,” as New York City’s member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains.

The Democratic cabal headed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from California and New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, have actively denied the murders, arson, looting, and violent crime as buildings burn and jobs disappear (here). It’s all because of America’s systemic racism and white privilege – but don’t believe me, just ask the intelligentsia.

To throw petrol on the arsonists’ blaze, the media have whipped up more unnecessary fear and panic by disproportionately sensationalizing everything as being part of Covid even if their ‘fake facts’ directly contradict the science. This falls perfectly in line with the psyops alleged in the scandalous Millie Weaver documentary ‘Shadowgate’, and before that in Patrick Bergy’s book ‘Victim of the Swamp’ – a fear-based narrative control operation called Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA. It’s your call to what extent you want to believe them, but the expedience with which Shadowgate was censored online (for ‘hate speech’ of all things) and Weaver reportedly got arrested certainly is telling.

Last week, project fear version 2.0 for election 2020 was kicked off by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris demanding that all “patriotic” Americans wear masks for the next three months, claiming it will save 40,000 lives. Biden and Harris refused to cite even a scintilla of scientific evidence or answer any questions. Their policy? Just shut up and obey.

I have discussed at length and how Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Netflix and YouTube could manipulate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The US two-party system looks content to sit silently and allow the Wall Street-financed Silicon Valley oligarchs to rig the 2020 election and implement a cancel culture with fear and obedience as its main features. Freedom of speech, democracy and liberty will be vaporized. Congratulations, Wall Street – Biden/Harris are ready to do whatever you command.

The rule of law has already been cast aside, along with statues and history, as a ‘racist relic’ created by old white men. In the minds of the mob, the United States is being transformed into a virtue-signaling utopia, which, in reality, has become a lawless banana republic run by a small shrieking violent minority of coastal elites funded by plutocrats with IIA to solidify their rule. Welcome to Wokeistan and its cult-like indoctrination run by omnipotent ‘diversity trainers’.

New York’s ‘Gray Lady’ the New York Times is a prime example, having now morphed into a liberal left echo chamber that tells its readers what to think. It has dropped all journalistic neutrality and has ‘evolved’ into a biased editorial paper that displaces critical analysis, reason, logic and facts. The Times now claims a monopoly on ‘progressive thought’ that is veering sharply from any journalistic integrity and heading down a dark path of ‘woke ideologies’ that distort the truth and include insane platforms such as censorship-based ‘cancel culture’ and ‘abolishing the police’. In conjunction with Hollywood billionaire Oprah Winfrey’s production company Lionsgate, the ‘Narrative Lady’ seeks to put a dishonest spin on history and cancel anyone who dares resist. Why is America’s broken judicial system allowing a dialogue that will enable ANYONE to criticize, discriminate or attack people for the way they were born? Discrimination law is clear – it is illegal to treat people differently based upon their immutable characteristics of skin color, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political inclination.

The overthrow began 30 years ago when the Clintons came into power and academics became more interested in indoctrination than in education. Education has been overrun by cultural Marxism. As George Orwell warned: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Today’s mantra is ‘Diversity is our strength’. If you dispute this, you are racist, sexist, homophobic and a despicable person who the mob will ensure is censored, fired, humiliated, shunned from society and permanently canceled for not subscribing to the dictates.

The left demanded that Joe Biden’s VP pick be a woman of color – not the most qualified person for the job, but a woman of color because of Biden’s Senate record and history on race. In advance of Biden’s capitulation, left-leaning groups crafted and sent all major news outlets 32 pages of guidelines with veiled threats of cancelation if anyone dared question the narrative. If you step over the line, you will be considered racist, sexist and a slew of ‘ists’ too many to name.

Following Harris’s nomination, there was even more magical thinking from coastal academic elites and purveyors of fake news. The New York Times was widely mocked for its rebirth of Kamala Harris and for its revisionist history when it called Kamala Harris a pragmatic moderate. GovTrack rated Harris as the fourth most liberal US senator in the 115th Congress. Harris’ track record as a California prosecutor shows her to be anything but a progressive prosecutor. Harris did not protect victims of sexual predators. Harris failed to prosecute alleged pedophile priests. However, Harris did accept a $50,950 campaign contribution from “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members,” as well as lucrative pay-to-play board appointments. Nothing to see here, look away.

Senator Kamala Harris will do or say anything in her quest for power. Before determining any factual basis for Jussie Smollett’s fake ‘hate crime’, Harris had no problem posting the divisive, inflammatory race-baiting tweet below.

When overwhelming evidence revealed how Jussie Smollett faked this ‘hate crime’, Harris refused to retract her statements and remove this incendiary tweet. Is that leadership? Where is the condemnation? Is Harris someone we want a heartbeat away from the presidency?

This presidential election will be the most consequential for the survival of the republic.

The US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media propagandists and the coastal elites demand regime and societal change as well as a cultural shift. Let the book burning begin! Is this what the majority of America wants? Does either political party care about the people they represent?

‘Orange man bad’ is the totality of the Biden/Harris ticket. No questions allowed and any debates are unlikely. Forget the facts that Democrat-controlled cities are currently infested with crime and are borderline uninhabitable, that the wealth inequality gap has never been wider, that tens of thousands of Americans die yearly from opioid addiction, that about 40 million Americans are unemployed and that the Federal Reserve keeps bailing out bankers with a debt tsunami while the bread and circuses of the empire in decline hits a fever pitch. These are minor details because: ORANGE MAN BAD! Rinse, repeat ORANGE MAN BAD!

A Biden/Harris ticket ensures the oligarchy’s agenda will be accelerated, the rich will get richer and everyone else will get screwed – again.

Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of ‘Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.’ He spends his time between London and Manhattan. Join Mitch on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – @Planetponzi

August 17, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Kamala Harris Dons Progressive Mantle in Public, Strips it Off in Private as She Courts Israel Lobby

By Whitney Webb | Mint Press News | January 21, 2019

Confirming long-held speculation, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has announced that she will be running for president in 2020, pitting her against other Democratic senators such as Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as well as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). Harris’ announcement has generated some buzz but surprised few, as she has been considered a likely 2020 contender for the Democratic nomination since early 2017. Harris first tweeted on Monday morning out her plans to run for president along with the Clinton-esque slogan “Let’s do this together.”

She then repeated her announcement on ABC’s Good Morning America, stating that “I am running for president of the United States. I’m very excited about it.” Harris, who decided to launch her campaign on the federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., later added, “I love my country. And this is a moment in time that I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are.”

However, despite the long-promoted “inevitability” of Harris’ campaign, she has failed to garner much enthusiasm from progressive voters, owing to her history of supporting neoliberal policies as well as her pro-Zionist leanings, which she has attempted to keep from public view.

Though hardly “progressive,” Harris – much like another 2020 hopeful, Elizabeth Warren – has sought to cast herself as such in recent years in an effort to unite a fractured Democratic party by publicly catering to progressives while also privately catering to special interests, including the Israel lobby.

In this two-part series, MintPress News will examine how Harris is set to emulate much of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign — particularly the distinction between her “private” and “public” positions — while using identity politics to her advantage. This has already begun, with Harris having courted past Hillary campaign staffers and millionaire donors alike. In addition, top establishment liberals like Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and Clinton advisor Neera Tanden are claiming that legitimate criticism of, and a lack of enthusiasm for, a Harris presidential run on the part of progressives stem from “racism” and “sexism” among left-leaning Americans — reviving the Clinton campaign’s “Bernie bros” narrative that characterizes Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive voters as “all-white” and “all-male.”

One of the clearest examples of Harris’ practice of courting special interests in private while painting a different picture in public is her position on the Israel/Palestine conflict. While Harris once, in 2012 while serving as California’s attorney general, stood up to Israeli government pressure to persecute activists working with the pro-Palestinian rights movement Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS), she made a concerted effort to court pro-Israel interests as she began to pursue her higher political ambitions, namely when she kicked off her 2016 campaign for the Senate.

Since then, Harris has sought to keep a public persona of neutrality on the divisive issue by evasively responding to questions on the issue or avoiding them altogether. At the same time, Harris has been privately pandering to Israel lobby groups in “off-the-record” speeches and during trips to Israel that she and her staff chose not to publicize. This clearly reflects the image that Harris seeks to build of herself as a “progressive centrist” candidate, meaning one who cultivates a public persona of progressivism while also supporting many of the hallmark policies of establishment “centrist” Democrats and courting the mega-donors of the Democratic Party.

A quiet courtship

Once her 2016 Senate campaign was underway, Harris made it clear that she was willing to “look the other way” when it comes to the human-rights abuses regularly inflicted on Palestinians by the state of Israel. That year, in a questionnaire from Jewish News of Northern California, Harris asserted that “Lasting peace [between Israel and Palestine] can only be found through bilateral negotiations that protect Israel’s identity, ensure security for all people and include the recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state” — i.e., a Jewish ethnostate that gives other ethnoreligious backgrounds an “inferior” status.

In that same questionnaire, Harris also praised Israel’s Supreme Court, which has helped to enshrine apartheid and also legalized the targeted assassinations of hundreds of Palestinians during intifadas (uprisings), as “a beautiful home to democracy and justice in a region where radicalism and authoritarianism all too often shape government.”

Harris went on to resoundingly reject the non-violent BDS movement, stating:

The BDS movement seeks to weaken Israel but it will only isolate the nation and steer Israelis against prerequisite compromises for peace. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise – especially in Europe – and the Middle East is growing increasingly unstable, I believe we should not isolate Israel, the only democracy in the region.”

In 2017, a few months after winning her Senate seat, Harris gave her first public address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in which she stated:

I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue, and as long as I’m a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”

Several months later, Harris quietly visited Israel, a trip that she did not post on her website or social media accounts but that was instead announced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another Israeli politician, Yair Lapid, via social media. During the trip, Harris also briefly visited 10 female students at Al-Quds University in the occupied West Bank, where she asked the students whether Israel’s massive separation wall posed “a real barrier” to their movement.

Though her trip to Israel and photo-op with Netanyahu raised some concern, Harris’ decision to court pro-Israel interests has since grown substantially. Much as with her Israel trip though, the California senator has sought to court these interests just out of public view. For instance, in March of last year, Harris spoke to the Israel lobby organization AIPAC at an event called “A Conversation with Senator Kamala Harris.” The event was not listed on the AIPAC conference’s program or website, nor was it promoted by Harris herself. AIPAC Director of Communications Beth Robbins later confirmed to the Intercept that Senator Harris’ remarks were part of “an off-the-record session.”

Though the transcript of her remarks was never made public, one anecdote shared by a participant in the session recounted how Harris had, as a child, helped fundraise for the Jewish National Fund (JNF) “to plant trees in Israel” as opposed to selling Girl Scout cookies or something similar. However, it’s unlikely that Harris mentioned at this gathering that JNF pine plantations are largely used to cover and effectively erase the bulldozed remnants of Palestinian villages that were destroyed by the state of Israel soon after its founding.

In addition to her AIPAC conferences and speeches, Harris’ national security adviser up until May 2018 was Halie Soifer, a long-time advocate for Israel who was also the Obama campaign’s Jewish outreach liaison in Florida in 2008 and a former advisor to former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Soifer was also previously a speechwriter for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and was a “Next Generation National Security Fellow” with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is headed by Victoria Nuland, of the neo-conservative “Kagan clan,” and Richard Fontaine, former foreign policy advisor to John McCain.

Soifer is now the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, an Israel lobby organization that “actively promotes foreign and domestic policies consistent with socially progressive, pro-Israel, Jewish community values.”

Having it both ways

While being a pro-Israel senator is hardly uncommon in American politics, what stands out about Kamala Harris is that she has sought to obfuscate her courting of Israel lobby organizations and Israeli politicians. This shows that Harris is not only seeking to make inroads with the powerful pro-Israel lobby and win its support but is also seeking to construct a public persona that courts progressive voters.

However, if Clinton’s 2016 campaign is any indication, separating one’s “public” and “private” positions in order to win votes, while privately courting special interests, is a recipe for disaster — one that assumes progressive voters are easily duped and can be silenced by identity politics.

As the second part of this series will show, Harris’ Clintonesque construction of both a “private” and “public” platform is hardly a coincidence, since she has surrounded herself for much of her young Senate career with numerous Clinton campaign staffers and Obama administration officials and has been zealously courting Hillary Clinton’s former political patrons.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

January 21, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Rebranding MLK: How the Establishment Blackened His Dream and Whitewashed His Legacy

By Teodrose Fikre | The Ghion Journal | January 19, 2019

First, the ruling class kill messengers and then co-opt their messages. It’s a ploy that dates back to biblical times; Pharisees dispatch prophets and then whitewash their legacies in a concerted campaign to appropriate their movements. Truth tellers are twice victimized, once by assassins and the second time around by propaganda. Their likeness and their teachings are then cunningly marketed by the same powers they spoke against to reinforce the status quo.

This same playbook—which has been used to silence dissenters throughout the ages—was unleashed with ruthless efficiency against Martin Luther King Jr. Lost in the chorus of politicians, pundits and media personalities who are praising MLK is the core message that he was pushing before he was felled on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. King evolved in his thinking; instead of seeking Civil Rights for “African-Americans”, he made the fatal decision to fight for economic justice for all.

King realized that the infringements against “black” folks in America were interconnected to the injustices felt by marginalized people throughout the world. That awakening is the reason he traveled to Memphis, by standing up for striking sanitation workers, he was hoping to form a bridge between poor folks irrespective of their skin color. The establishment love people who lead sectional movements—those who seek exclusive justice are doing the work of the status quo—what they will not abide are those who try to unify the oppressed and inspire collective actions.

King paid with his life for having the courage to pursue inclusive justice. After he was murdered, institutions of power—from government, academia to mainstream media and beyond—kicked in, stealthily erased King’s legacy and replaced it with disinformation. What has taken place over the past fifty years is a systematic and coordinated effort to blacken his narrative and dilute the power of his message.

I must pause here and explain what I mean by blackening Martin Luther King. What MLK fought for, and ultimately died on behalf of, was for equality and fairness for all. By narrowing the scope of his cause and containing his sacrifice to only as a struggle for “black” people, opinion leaders successfully ghettoized him in an effort to lessen his appeal to a broader constituency.

This is one of the main reasons why I reject racial labels and disavow constructs that were imposed by the very racists who shattered humanity. When you see me using quote marks around “black” and “white” in describing people, it’s because I know the true intentions behind these designations. Terms that we have come to embrace are actually insidious conventions used to dehumanize people, reduce us into abstractions and induce tribalism. As I make clear in this video below, it is vital for us to understand where these epithets come from and why bigots imposed these insidious labels on us to begin with.

Labels are insidious forms of reductionism, they are so subtle that most of us don’t understand how malicious they are. Martin Luther King is described as a “black leader” or an “African-American hero”, the adjectives in front of the title being used to depreciate the worth of the people they are describing. Nobody ever says Mozart was a European pianist or that Michelangelo was an Italian painter, yet when it comes to “black” folk, that descriptor is always attached to them—like a Scarlet letter used to insinuate that we are 3/5th human. Martin Luther King is not a black hero, he is a hero who spoke on behalf of all oppressed people.

To hide this truth and marginalize King, instigators and impostors are being propagated by mainstream media and moneyed interests. The profound message behind Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is continually transmuted by opportunists who use identity politics to advance their own agendas. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” These words were eloquently spoken by King in order to free us from the shackles of imposed identities. We are creeping further and further away from MLK’s dream as we let demagogues lead us into the wasteland of sectarianism.

“One unfortunate thing about [the slogan] Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan ‘Power for Poor People’ would be much more appropriate than the slogan ‘Black Power.’”

This was a quote from King in August of 1967, eight months before he was executed. After spearheading the Civil Rights movement from the 50’s into the early 60’s, it dawned upon King that the struggle for equality was greater than being able to sit at lunch counters and riding at the front of buses. He realized that the only way to overcome oppression was to stitch together the pains felt by the proletariat in ways that would attract anyone who felt disenfranchised.

King articulated his apprehension about the movement he organized and expressed how he might have unwittingly directed his people into a quagmire. During a conversation he shared with Harry Belafonte and his inner-circle, King detailed the flaws of fighting racism’s symptoms without addressing the system that gives rise to inequalities.

“I’ve come upon something that disturbs me deeply. We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America has lost the moral vision she may have had, and I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears the soul of this nation. I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.”

Martin Luther King was not disregarding the plight of “black” folks, nor was he giving short shrift to the struggles faced by “African-Americans”. What he recognized is that the struggles being borne by “minorities” would never be alleviated unless a majority of humanity formed a broad coalition to defend their common interests. Martin Luther King was not alone in this realization; Malcolm X came around to this same viewpoint once he visited Mecca and saw that the only way to attain justice was through mass-movements. Do you think it was an accident that both met the same gruesome fate?

Gone are the days of moral giants like Malcolm and Martin, we are firmly entrenched in the era of charlatans who profit from our disunion. What is truly sad is that so many hypocrites readily praise Martin Luther King while they get paid by the same powers that he was speaking against. Proving that treachery is truly bipartisan, on the day Martin Luther King is being celebrated, the King Center is commemorating warmonger emeritus John McCain. What better way to remember Dr. King than by praising the man who vehemently fought against honoring him and as the King Center dismantles his memory.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, California’s junior Senator—who was one of the biggest proponents of the prison-industrial complex—is expected to announce her presidential campaign on Martin Luther King Day. This is the same Kamala Harris whose office argued against early release of inmates on the grounds that it would hurt the labor supply [slave workers] of for-profit prisons. It is truly an affront that someone who reserved draconian measures for poor and working Californians— while giving a pass to banking executives like Steven Mnuchin—is going to use Martin Luther King day to hide the fact that she made a name for herself by being a staunch advocate of penal plantations. Kamala Harris 2020: chains you can believe in!

As always, the way to unravel conspiracies is to follow the money. Martin Luther King was sent to his grave because he connected the dots between wars overseas and economic inequalities in America. The hundreds of billions of dollars that were being spent to perpetuate the Vietnam War and conflicts around the world prevented investments in programs that could have alleviated suffering and lifted millions of people out of crushing poverty. That’s why King decided to come out against the Vietnam War, this brave stance made MLK radioactive and shortly led to his assassination.

What is lost in all the pageantry and the pomp surrounding King’s holiday is the fact that he was once savagely attacked by the very establishment that is now lionizing him. Not only was his character maligned by opinion leaders, the FBI targeted him and terrorized King and his family to such an extent that they drove him into a period of deep depression. COINTELPRO was a program launched by J. Edgar Hoover to identify and neutralize, by any means necessary, the Civil Rights icons who dared speak truth to power. A generation later, the same power structure that extinguished their flames is now lighting candles on their behalf while annulling their true stories—they’ve turned a martyr into a merchandise.

As hard as the “elites” try to commandeer King’s narrative to suit their purposes, the harsh truth is that King was murdered because he threatened the hustle of capital gangsters. If this sounds very familiar, that is because currency traders have a way of exterminating anyone who speaks against their pyramid schemes. As noted earlier, those who defy profiteers are given death sentences only for their memories to be raised to further the very greed they crusaded against. King died standing against wars and economic inequalities; notice how these themes are rarely mentioned by politicians, pundits and media personalities who cry crocodile tears for him. #RebrandingMLK Click To Tweet

There is a biblical poetry to it all, the same way Jesus was sold out by his own people, crucified by imperial enforcers and had his teachings inverted to advance the evils he died fighting against, these modern day Judases are embracing King while working for the very institutions he courageously took on. Goes to show, change agents will never be found amidst supposed activists who cast their lot with the same powers they pretend to speak against. True revolutionaries are either ignored by the establishment or silenced by bullets.

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing concealed that will not be known and brought into the light.” ~ Luke 8:17

Teodrose Fikre is the editor and founder of the Ghion Journal. A published author and prolific writer, a once defense consultant was profoundly changed by a two year journey of hardship and struggle.

January 21, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment