TBR News August 5, 2016

Aug 05 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. August 5, 2016:” Having lunch with a friend who is an elevated personage in one of our alphabet agenies, I learn that the US is fed up with the growing political problems in Turkey and is going to distance herself as far as possible. Erdogan is on his was to becoming a repressive dictator, he is obviously not an honest man, he is in league with the Saudi-created IS people, he hates Kurds and is making savage war on them (and they will win in the end) and he relied too heavily on the machinations of the CIA vis a vis Russia and lost that game totally. He threatens the Germans and the US has learned that Erodgan has it in mind to sieze hydrogen bombs we have stored in his country. Unstable, dishonest and a trouble-maker, it would not be surprising if some lone wolf assassinated him. That seems to be the fate of any person who annoys the CIA or its associates. Good advice to travelers: Don’t travel to Turkey.”

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

August 5, 2016

by David Gauvey Herbert

Bloomberg Businessweek

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.

IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.

Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis.

IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression, ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.

Users and industry analysts say the addition of purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of our own data.”

When logging in to IDI and similar databases, a PI must select a permissible use for a search under U.S. privacy laws. The Federal Trade Commission oversees the industry, but PI companies are largely expected to police themselves, because a midsize outfit may run thousands of searches a month.

Dubner says most Americans have little to fear. As examples, he cites idiCORE uses such as locating a missing person and nabbing a fraud or terrorism suspect.

IDI, like much of the data-fusion industry, traces its lineage to Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and self-taught programmer who began fusing sets of public data from state and federal governments in the early 1990s. After Sept. 11, law enforcement’s interest in commercial databases grew, and more money and data began raining down, says Julia Angwin, a reporter who wrote about the industry in her 2014 book, Dragnet Nation.

Asher died suddenly in 2013, leaving behind his company, the Last One (TLO), which credit bureau TransUnion bought in bankruptcy for $154 million. Asher’s disciples, including Dubner, left TLO and eventually teamed up with Michael Brauser, a former business partner of Asher’s, and billionaire health-care investor Phillip Frost. In May 2015, after a flurry of purchases and mergers, the group rebranded its database venture as IDI.

Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll, Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent, which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.

IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.

Steve Rambam, a PI who hosts Nowhere to Hide on the Investigation Discovery channel, says marketing data remains a niche monitoring tool compared with social media, but its power can be unparalleled. “You may not know what you do on a regular basis, but I know,” Rambam says. “I know it’s Thursday, you haven’t eaten Chinese food in two weeks, and I know you’re due.”

—With Olga Kharif

Turkish foreign minister says Austria is ‘capital of radical racism’

August 5, 2016

by Tulay Karadeniz and Humeyra Pamuk

Reuters

ISTANBUL-Turkish Foreign Minster Mevlut Cavusoglu called Austria the “capital of radical racism” on Friday after Chancellor Christian Kern suggested ending European Union accession talks with Ankara.

In an interview with broadcaster TGRT Haber, Cavusoglu said Kern’s comments, spurred in part by a crackdown on suspected perpetrators of a failed coup last month, were “ugly” and that he rejected them all.

“The Austrian chancellor should first take a look at his own country. One of the trends that is an enemy of human rights and values is racism and today Austria is the capital of radical racism,” he said.

Kern said on Wednesday he would start a discussion among European heads of government to quit talks with Turkey citing democratic and economic deficits.

Talks have made only slow progress since they began in 2005, with only one of 35 “chapters” concluded.

Cavusoglu’s comments drew immediate reaction from Vienna. Austrian Freign Minister Sebastian Kurz called on Ankara to moderate its words and actions.

Kern’s Social Democrats have come under pressure from both their Conservative coalition partners and the far right Freedom Party, which has in a recent opinion poll attracted 35 percent of votes on an anti-immigrant platform, critical of Islam.

European leaders have voiced concern over Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on suspected dissidents after a failed coup attempt last month, identifying his idea of reintroducing the death penalty in Turkey as a red line barring EU accession.

Tensions between the two countries had been on the rise since last month. Austria had summoned Turkey’s ambassador on July 21 to explain Ankara’s links to demonstrations in the country in support of Erdogan.

Turkey has so far lived up to its side of the landmark deal with Brussels to stop illegal migration to Europe via its shores, in return for financial aid, the promise of visa-free travel to much of the bloc and accelerated talks on membership.

But Ankara has complained Europe is not living up to its side of the accord, a stance reiterated by Cavusoglu on Friday.

“If there is an agreement, either both sides would implement this or both would put it aside. There is no step back from this,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla in Vienna; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

 Dramatic rise in suicides among US veterans, 30% increase since 2001 – study

August 5, 2016

RT

The suicide rate among American veterans has increased dramatically over the last 35 years, with the largest government analysis ever conducted on veteran suicide saying it rose more than 30 percent since 2001 – a bigger spike than in the wider US population.

The study released by the US Veterans Affairs Department (VA) examined over 55 million veterans’ records from 1979 to 2014 from every state across the US and four territories. It found that since 2001, adult civilian suicides rose 23 percent, while veteran suicides increased 32 percent.

According to the report, an average of 20 veterans a day died from suicide in 2014 (about 7,300 in the year), compared to a previous estimate of 22 a day provided by a study of a smaller sample of 3 million records.

The most common means for suicide among veterans is said to be firearms, with an estimated 41 percent of female and 68 percent of male suicide deaths resulting from a firearm injury in 2014.

While the use of firearms as a means for suicide decreased among civilians from 2001 to 2014, it remained stable among veterans. “These results strongly suggest that firearms safety initiatives are likely an important component of an effective suicide prevention strategy for male and female veterans,” the report noted.

Among male veterans, suicide rates appeared to be highest in the younger and older years, and among female veterans in their younger years. In 2014, about 65 percent of all veterans who committed suicide were aged 50 or older.

Taking into account differences in age, the risk of suicide was 18 percent higher among male veterans, compared with US civilian adult males.

“Findings included in this report highlight the complex relationships between a history of US military service and suicide risk,” the report noted.

The study highlighted sharp differences between the suicide rates of those who used VA services compared to those who didn’t. Since 2001, the rate of suicide among veterans using VA services increased by 8.8 percent, while the suicide rate among those choosing not to use them rose more than 38 percent.

Over the same time period, the rate of suicide among female veterans using VA services increased 4.6 percent, but skyrocketed 98 percent for those who didn’t.

The authors of the report did not provide any reasons why these differences occurred.

Ordinary people can’t afford a home in San Francisco. How did it come to this?

The city by the bay has the nation’s priciest real estate, and a battle is raging over whether tech wealth, population growth, or political will is to blame

August 5, 2016

by Maria I. La Ganga

The Guardian

All you need to know about San Francisco in 2016 was on display one recent Sunday at 83 McAllister St, an office building turned into condominiums at the edge of the Tenderloin.

Prospective home buyers tromped through an open house in a fifth-floor unit: two bedrooms, 430 square feet, $599,000. Just outside the building’s front door, a couple dozen of the homeless and hard up gathered for Open Cathedral, a regularly scheduled Sunday service followed by a free lunch.

There it was, all in one place: outrageous prices for a tiny slice of a scarce commodity. Haves. Have nots. And the yawning gulf between the two.

San Francisco has the priciest real estate in the country by many metrics. It has been ranked among the 10 least affordable cities in the world. It suffers under the worst income inequality in California. The top 1% of households in the metropolitan area earned $3.6m on average in 2013, according to one recent report, or 44 times the average income of the bottom 99%.

This is the place where a 25-year-old made national news in March for paying $400 a month to live in a wooden box in a friend’s living room. Where a 99-year-old widow went to court in April to fight eviction from the flat she’d lived in since the 1940s. Where the cheapest home for sale in late July was fire-gutted, uninhabitable and still cost $228,000.

Battles rage about what the problem is – an affordability crisis? a housing shortage? lack of political will? – how to fix it, how the city got into such a mess in the first place and who to blame. The current favorite whipping boy is the tech sector, but the pain began long before the first laptop was a gleam in British designer Bill Moggridge’s eye.

“The tech boom is a clear factor”, said Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. “When you’re dealing with this total concentration of wealth and this absurd slosh of real estate money, you’re not dealing with housing that’s serving a growing population. You’re dealing with housing as a real estate commodity for speculation”.

But Cohen is quick to note that there are other culprits behind what some realtors peg as San Francisco’s $1.2m price tag for a starter home and its tops-in-the-nation $3,510 median rent for a one-bedroom apartment: population growth, income inequality, history, geography.

A history of cramped quarters

The first housing crisis on this 47 square mile peninsula exploded before San Francisco was even a city. Between January, 1848, and December, 1849, Gold Rush fortune seekers swelled the frontier town’s population from 1,000 to 25,000.

Then, like now, the question of where to put the vast new influx was answered badly.

In his 1851 memoir Golden Dreams and Waking Realities, English seaman William Shaw described “Francisco” as a rude collection of tents, wood-framed houses and “stupendous taverns, gambling-houses and other extensive edifices … From sixty to eighty thousand dollars was the rent of some taverns–houses of timber, iron, zinc or canvass”.

By the time the second world war came and went, the small city had been built out. Growth since has come via successive waves of redevelopment, because San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water and the fourth by San Mateo County. Unlike Houston, Las Vegas or Atlanta, it cannot grow out.

“You don’t have land and space to work with,” Cohen said. “You have to redevelop and recycle space that’s already been used … As a starting point, it immediately raises various kinds of tensions.”

Since Kenneth Rosen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area 42 years ago, he has counted six boom and bust housing cycles.

The primary cause for the current boom, says Rosen, chairman of UC Berkeley’s center for real estate and urban economics, is something most cities technically envy: “extraordinary job creation”, 30,000 to 40,000 jobs per year for the last five years in San Francisco alone.

Rosen figures that 70% of the new leasing and job growth springs from the tech sector. For housing costs to drop and affordability to rise substantially, he said, “we’d have to see a correction in that sector”.

‘That’s unheard of in Ohio’

Kevin Bankovich, a 29-year-old, is moving from Akron, Ohio, to San Francisco – the most expensive real estate market in America.

Bankovich, who works in financial services, just sold his Akron home – three bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a small yard – for $145,000.

One recent Sunday, while trolling open houses, he peered into the closets of a one-bedroom, 1.25 bath condominium in the South of Market neighborhood, asking price, $595,000 for 814 sq ft.

A block or so away, a top-floor studio apartment was on the market for $495,000. It is 370 sq ft, about the size of a large hotel room.

On the plus side, a Murphy bed folded out from the wall, space-saving at its most efficient. On the minus, the 11-unit building sported delicate graffiti, and the smell of urine wafted down the street on the summer breeze.

Not that there was much for him to choose from at the affordable end of the San Francisco housing market. Between the last week of January and the last week of July, only seven housing units priced at $500,000 or less sold in the entire city, according to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).

The week he searched, the MLS listed 31 homes in that price range, Zillow, 32.

Of those, seven were restricted to low-income, first-time buyers. One was available to those 55 and older. One unit could only be bid on by other owners in the tony condominium building; it was a maid’s unit on the market for $179,000. Two had been gutted by fire and could not be lived in.

After one weekend, Bankovich gave up looking for an actual house and started shopping for condos. In short order, he decided he didn’t need a garage. Or even a parking space for his motorcycle. Or a washer-dryer in the unit.

He’s sold his car. The one thing he doesn’t want to give up – at least for now – is an actual bedroom.

“I don’t want a studio”, he said. “I need to have that one bedroom at least. That would be my preference.

“There are people who live here, and it’s in their dreams to own a place”, he continued, wistful. “But they say they’ll never own here … Or they have roommates.”

“That’s unheard of in Ohio.”

Too little house building

Compounding the problem of population growth in San Francisco is the fact that the city has built far too little housing for far too many decades. Since 2010 alone, its population has grown by more than 60,000, but only 12,000 new units of housing were constructed.

On the plus side, though, San Francisco is in the middle of one of the biggest building booms in its history.

Most of the new units, however, are in flossy skyscrapers filled with high-end condos. Because, as Paragon Real Estate Group described San Francisco in a spring 2016 update, “development is not for the faint of heart or shallow of pocket.

“One cannot contemplate building virtually anything in the city without vehement opposition and sometimes a well-funded coalition in opposition”, according to the report. “For developers, the equation to be calculated out includes very high land and construction costs, increasing affordable-housing contributions required by the city, enormous hassle-factor and extended project timelines.”

But at least one faction in this famously fractious city applauds the plethora of pricey new homes, or any homes, for that matter: the San Francisco YIMBYS.

The Yes In My Back Yard faction was out in force at a recent hearing on whether San Francisco property owners should be able to build so-called accessory dwelling units – also known as granny flats or in-law units – an issue that has roiled neighborhoods like up-scale, baby-filled Noe Valley.

Noe Valley is home to multi-million-dollar Victorians, and, as Sfgate.com puts it: “Merchants who cater to those looking for handmade Guatemalan textile products, upscale beauty products, or Eileen Fisher ensembles.”

Its residents have had much to grumble about in recent years: an influx of “monster houses” built by the well-heeled who buy, tear down and rebuild on lavish scale; a gaggle of Google buses and other shuttles that take techies to and from jobs in Silicon Valley.

The possibility of granny flats, which the city says could add up to 33,000 units to already existing housing, saw YIMBYs front and center at a July hearing that brought out the worst in everyone.

Sonja Trauss is founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, which the activist describes as “the increase capacity arm of the anti-displacement movement”.

“I want to remind everybody that not building displaces people”, she said at the hearing.

“I don’t really see any downside at all,” she said, “besides the fact that some neighbors might have to let their eyes pass over a new thing that looks different and unfriendly to them. We’re talking about places that people live, and I don’t think it’s worth it to save the way a house looks to deny someplace for someone to live”.

To which Monica McFadden, a self-described “fourth generation San Franciscan” whose children are “fourth generation Noe Valleyans”, replied: “We can’t allow one-person’s greedy wants to overshadow literally the quality of life of many.”

“I mean, what do we want this city to become?” McFadden fumed “Do we want to see the end of backyard barbecues, water balloon fights, mud-pie making, home gardens and the ray of light for the elderly and housebound?

“This is not Manhattan.”

Stay Out of Libya

… and build Fortress America

August 5, 2016

by Justij Raimondo

AntiWar

We’re back in Libya, with US warplanes bombing targets in the city of Sirte, on a mission that, according to the Pentagon, has “no endpoint at this particular moment.” And that statement sums up perfectly the Sisyphean task that presented itself to US policymakers when the Terrible Triumvirate – Hillary Clinton, national security honchette Susan Rice, and UN ambassadress Samantha Power – prevailed on President Obama to overthrow the regime of Libyan despot Moammar Ghaddafi.

Take a look at what we’re getting ourselves into: with no less than three governments, lawless Libya is a perfect example of Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that “government is the problem, not the solution.” Yes, that’s right, the former domain of Ghaddafi has three rival “governments.” Go ahead and count ‘em:

  1. The General National Congress (GNC), headquartered in Tripoli, is controlled by Islamist militias and backed by Turkey, Qatar, and Sudan.

2.The Council of Deputies, located in Tobruk, is basically the instrument of Gen. Khalifa Hiftar, a known CIA asset who used to live a few miles from the Agency’s headquarters.

  1. The UN-appointed “government of national unity,” which was never elected by anyone and had to be shipped into the country by boat because the Tripoli authorities wouldn’t let their plane land.

While the ostensible reason for the US air strikes is the elimination of ISIS from the country, there is no escaping the “nation-building” aspect of Washington’s mission. For the logic of the mission means ISIS must be replaced with something, and that something is bound to be the UN-approved “government.” Yet this is likely to provoke further conflict, as the Islamists in Tripoli and the followers of Gen. Hiftar in the east are not likely to be pushed aside so easily.

The divisions that ensure a future of perpetual conflict are rooted in the history of a country that isn’t really a country at all.

The fiction that is the nation-state of “Libya” was only maintained by the brute force of Ghaddafi’s military: when that was defeated and dissolved, the “Libyans” rallied around what have always been their authentic allegiances: tribe and faith. Indeed, “Libya” has only existed since the end of World War II, when the UN moved in and forcibly joined together three regions that had no common history or culture: Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and the southern Fezzan area, a desert mostly inhabited by Tuareg and Tebu tribes. The UN was merely replicating the plan carried out by Mussolini, and his Italian predecessors, who colonized the region and sought to abolish tribal boundaries. When King Idris I, installed by the UN, protested that he didn’t want to rule over Tripolitania, and preferred to extend his domain only over Cyrenaica, he was ignored. With the fall of Ghaddafi, the country has reverted to its natural state – and now, once again, the UN is coming in the “fix” the ‘problem.”

The age-old scam of governments creating problems that they then use as an excuse to increase their powers so they can “solve” them is on full display in Libya – and Syria, and Iraq. All these countries had secular governments where not a trace of Islamist radicalism could be found. Their “liberation” by the Western powers, who launched regime change operations in the name of “democracy,” gave rise to ISIS – and created the rationale for yet more destructive intervention.

All three disasters can be properly laid at Hillary Clinton’s doorstep, but GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is no rational alternative. While rightly averring that Western meddling created the Libyan miasma in the first place, he wrongly says “We have no choice” but to intervene once again. This is arrant nonsense: we are sliding down a slippery slope in Libya, and soon will be faced with the problem of how to prevent ISIS from popping up once again. Trump says he’s against “nation-building” but you can’t just drop bombs and then fly away – once you intervene, then you own the country, like it or not.

Do we want to own Libya?

Here Trump is faced with the inevitable contradiction at the heart of his foreign policy views: he wants to appear “tough” without getting his hands dirty. This marriage of rhetorical bellicosity and instinctual anti-interventionism can only end in divorce. Instincts aren’t enough: what’s required are principles – a concept entirely alien to Trump.

Hillary, on the other hand, does have principles – the wrong ones. She’s a liberal internationalist and serial regime-changer who, once in power, will take us into conflicts ranging from North Africa to Eastern Europe and into the steppes of Central Asia. Trump may stumble into trouble – she’ll take us there by the express route.

The only candidates for President who want us to stay out of Libya are the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson. But since neither of them are going to wind up in the White House, it’s certain we’ll be sinking into the Libyan quagmire no matter which major party wins in November.

This is a recipe for disaster. As the Russians continue to pound ISIS in Syria with air strikes, and the government of Bashar al-Assad makes gains on the battlefield, the international jihadist movement will increasingly transfer its attention to Libya, where they have a real chance of establishing a “caliphate” in alliance with the very forces Mrs. Clinton enabled by overthrowing Ghaddafi. When she visited Libya to celebrate her “victory,” she infamously declared: “We came, we saw, he died” – and, with those words, sealed the fate of a nation.

We can follow the Islamists around the globe, playing whack-a-mole unto eternity: our interventions only make them stronger, and us weaker. This is what Osama bin Laden gleefully predicted when he said:

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

Terrorism is like scabies – the more you scratch it, the more it spreads. We are seeing this truism play out as terrorist attacks are now becoming a weekly occurrence in Europe. How long before the same condition afflicts us in North America?

When we invaded Iraq we opened Pandora’s box – as I warned so long ago. Now the same people who brought us that disaster have the nerve to counsel patience when the demons they unleashed are harrying us at every turn.

As the playwright Tennessee Williams put it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

“There’s nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity.”

No, we can’t undo the errors of the past: but we can ameliorate their deadly consequences. And yes, there is a solution to the problem of terrorism, albeit not a perfect one, and it is this: quarantine. As Donald Trump would put it, we have to build a wall – not on the US-Mexican border, but around those regions of the world where terrorism is rife. Nothing and no one goes in, and nothing and no one goes out. Forget invading, nation-building, etc. What we have to do is build Fortress America – an impregnable defense against radical Islamic terrorism.

Yes, this is “isolationism” – and let the internationalist do-gooders and discredited neocon warmongers make the most of it! The American people want to be isolated from terrorists, overseas wars, and foreign troubles: they’ve had it with the globalists, who have brought us to where we are today. Contra both Trump and Hillary, this is what a foreign policy of “America First” really requires.

Sheriff Raids House to Find Anonymous Blogger Who Called Him Corrupt

August 4, 2016

by Naomi LaChance

The Intercept

After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to  corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

The officer, Wayne Anderson, works for the police department of Houma, the county seat of Terrebone Parish — and according to New Orleans’ WWL-TV, formerly worked as a Terrebone Sheriff’s deputy.

Anderson was placed on paid leave about an hour and a half after the raid on his house, Jerri Smitko, one of his attorneys, told The Intercept. She said that he has not yet been officially notified about why.

Smitko said Anderson denies that he is the author of ExposeDat.

But free speech advocates say the blogger — whoever he or she is — is protected by the First Amendment.

“The law is very clear that somebody in their private capacity, on private time, on their own equipment, has a First Amendment right to post about things of public concern,” Marjorie Esman, director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told The Intercept.

Larpenter told WWL: “If you’re gonna lie about me and make it under a fictitious name, I’m gonna come after you.”

Esman said the Sheriff and his deputies were forgetting something.  “The laws that they’re sworn to uphold include the right to criticize and protest. Somehow there’s a piece in the training that leads to them missing that.”

ExposeDAT calls itself a “watchdog group,” posting articles that use public records to identify institutional corruption in the Parish. Since it launched in late June, it has accused various public officials and business owners of nepotism, tax evasion, polluting and misuse of government funds.

It promises to “introduce articles that explore the relationship between certain Public Officials and the flow of money in South Louisiana.”

The Sheriff’s office, in order to obtain the warrants, said the blog had criminally defamed the Parish’s new insurance agent, Tony Alford, WWL reported.

One ExposeDAT blog post titled “Gordon Dove and Tony Alford’s Radioactive Waste Dumping,” briefly describes the relationship between Alford and the parish’s president, who jointly own a Montana trucking company that has been cited for dumping radioactive waste in Montana. That citation was originally reported in the Missoula, Mont., newspaper The Missoulian.

In a post titled “You Scratch Mine and I’ll Scratch Yours,” the blog uses public records to call attention to the fact that Sheriff Larpenter gave Alford a parish contract despite that fact that his wife manages Alford’s office.

“When decent, law abiding citizens try to speak out on matters of public importance, they’re treated like criminals,” Smitko said. “If this is what happens to a police officer with 12 year of impeccable service what the hell kind of justice do criminals get?”

The Sheriff’s office, the police department and the district attorney’s office did not return requests for comment.

This isn’t the first time that Louisiana law enforcement officers have challenged those who criticize them. In 2012, Bobby Simmons, a former police officer, was arrested and jailed on a charge of criminal defamation for a letter he wrote to a newspaper regarding another police officer. The charge was later dropped, and Simmons filed a civil suit alleging that his civil rights were violated.

Failed coup fallout transforms Turkish politics

The fallout from the failed coup attempt that almost toppled the Turkish government last month is reshaping the landscape of Turkish politics, as Tom Stevenson reports from Istanbul.

August 5, 2016

DW

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is not a man who is used to apologizing. A plain-speaking natural orator, Erdoğan is better known for forcing his opponents into tight spots than for navigating himself out of them.

But Erdoğan expressed contrition in an address on August 3 when he discussed his own past support for the Gulenists, a secretive religious movement now believed by a majority of Turkish society and many observers to have orchestrated an attempted military coup in July.

“For a long time, we couldn’t see that this group was an instrument and cover of other goals and sinister calculations… I ask forgiveness from my god and nation for this,” Erdoğan said, in a tone two steps removed from his usual rhetoric.

Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have spoken often against the followers of the Turkish preacher Fetullah Gulen, at least since an alliance between the AKP and the Gulenists broke down in early 2013. In his speech, the president stressed that other politicians from across the spectrum had dealt with Gulen in the past

However Erdoğan asking for forgiveness is another sign of how shaken Turkey’s political chess board is since the coup attempt says Behlül Özkan, professor of politics and international relations at Istanbul’s Marmara University.

Sign of weakness?

“The coup revealed that Erdoğan and the AKP are weaker than we thought: the president felt this himself very keenly when he barely escaped being killed,” Özkan told DW. “Since the coup some signals have been coming of the possible normalisation of Turkish politics, back from the overly authoritarian trends we were seeing before.”

The pieces are still settling and the Turkish authorities are engaged in a wide scale post-coup purge against alleged followers of Gulen in public institutions which has seen more than 26,000 people detained by police.

However since the coup attempt there have been rare signs of unity between the governing AKP and opposition political parties, with frequent meetings between the AKP leader Binali Yildirim and his equivalent numbers in the opposition.

On July 25, Erdoğan hosted a meeting of political party heads at which AKP chief and prime minister Yildirim, the head of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, and the head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahceli were in attendance.

On Wednesday, Yildirim said in a statement that it was time to “turn over a fresh leaf and join together as government and opposition.”

Unprecedented consensus

At the top of Turkish political life a tentative but unprecedented moment of consensus has emerged in the wake of the coup attempt, professor Özkan told DW.

AKP member and activist Harun Armagan agrees that Turkey’s political leaders are in a new, conciliatory mood.

“I think since this coup attempt people realise that a polarized society is one that makes you more vulnerable to undemocratic attacks and the political parties, leaders, and people have understood that a united position can strengthen the system as a whole,” he told DW.

“The coup attempt was ultimately stopped by the people and many lost their lives, and it’s important for the political parties to reduce the polarization and unite and have a common narrative against the coup attempt – it’s something we can and should maintain in the long term,” Armagan said.

Professor Özkan argues that a shift toward consensus is as much in the interests of the establishment opposition parties – CHP and MHP – as it is in Erdoğan and the AKP’s, and that the opposition leaders see an opening in the present environment and are taking advantage of it.

“Pragmatically, the MHP leader needs Erdoğan’s backing against dissidents in his own party and the CHP has a long standing desire for a return to a more regulated constitutional order,” Özkan said.

Not everyone on board

But not everyone is enthusiastic to see warmer relations between AKP and two of its rival parties. The Kurdish People’s Democractic Party (HDP), which has represented a more radical opposition, has been excluded from the detente and from invitations to the presidential palace.

“Excluding HDP from politics even after the coup attempt is senseless,” a spokesperson for the party said. “It shows that they still haven’t understood the consequences of the coup.”

The ties between the AKP and the non-HDP political parties are mainly built on a shared view of the coup and dislike of the Gulenist movement, and may yet prove to be a passing phase, says Burak Kadercan, professor of Strategy and Policy at the US Navy War College.

“I wouldn’t yet say there is an alliance between these parties but I would say there’s a silencing factor in play because of the coup and because the opposition has little reason to pick an argument with the government at this moment,” he told DW.

According to Kadercan, there is still a chance that the consensus Turkey’s political parties forged in opposing the coup attempt could lead in positive directions but that will still be up to Erdoğan.

“This may be Erdogan’s last chance to turn the country back from the brink of disaster: he has the capability to do that, he could unify the country,” Kadercan told DW, “but whether he will take that chance is difficult to say.”

Germany warns Erdogan that bringing back death penalty will end Turkey’s EU hopes

August 4, 2016

by Justin Huggler,Berlin, Zia Weise, Istanbul  and Martin Banks,  Brussels

The Telegraph/UK

The German foreign minister warned Turkey on Thursday that reinstating the death penalty would end its EU membership hopes, amid deepening divisions with Ankara after Austria called for accession talks to be scrapped.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier cautioned the Turkish government against the move, which it has eyed amid sweeping purges in response to July’s coup attempt.

Earlier, Christian Kern, the Austrian chancellor, described the talks on eventual Turkish accession as a “diplomatic fiction” in the wake of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on democratic freedoms since the failed military takeover.

Mr Kern said he would seek to have the talks formally closed at a meeting of EU leaders next month.

“We know the democratic standards in Turkey are nowhere near good enough to justify a candidacy for EU membership,” Mr Kern told Austrian television. “I see Turkish accession as an impossibility for years, if not for decades.”

The Turkish government reacted furiously, accusing Mr Kern of “far-Right” rhetoric.

“It’s disturbing that his statements are similar to those of the far right,” Omer Celik, the Turkish minister for EU affairs, said. “Criticism is surely a democratic right but there has to be a difference between criticising Turkey and being against Turkey.”The latest row comes with relations already under strain. Turkey has bridled at growing criticism of the crackdown from European capitals, and has made clear it does not regard the question of the death penalty as a matter for the EU.

And just days ago it threatened to withdraw from the controversial migrant deal with the EU, potentially sending hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers to Europe, unless its citizens are granted visa-free travel to the Schengen Area by October

Speeding up accession talks is another condition of the deal.

Austria, which has been one of Mr Erdogan’s leading EU critics since the coup attempt, dismissed the threat as brinkmanship.

“We must not come before Ankara on our knees,” Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian foreign minister, told Germany’s Spiegel magazine.

“We are not supplicants before Turkey,” he said, insisting the EU has the economic upper hand in any negotiations with Turkey.

But elsewhere in Europe there is growing concern at the possibility the migrant agreement may break down. Greece said on Thursday it was not ready to deal with a new influx of asylum-seekers.

“No country in Europe is ready,” Yiannis Mouzalas, the Greek migration minister, said. The EU would be “severely tested” if Turkey withdrew from the deal, he told Greek television.

Under the agreement, personally negotiated by Angela Merkel, Turkey has undertaken to prevent migrants entering the EU across its borders, and to take back asylum-seekers deported from Greece.

In return, the EU is to pay Turkey some €6bn in aid and accept one genuine Syrian refugee for every Syrian deported under the deal.

But talks have broken down over another part of the deal, in which Turkish citizens were to be granted visa-free travel to the Schengen Area.

The EU is insisting it will only grant the visa waiver if Turkey reforms its repressive anti-terror laws, which are used to silence critics of Mr Erdogan’s regime — a reform that seems unlikely in the wake of the post-coup crackdown.

Meanwhile critics of the deal have seized on the rape and beheading of a gay Syrian refugee in Istanbul last week as evidence asylum-seekers should not be deported to the country.

Muhammed Wisam Sankari vanished after leaving his house in the neighbourhood of Aksaray on July 23. He was found dead two days later, a mile away.

“They had cut Wisam violently. So violently that two knives had broken inside him,” a flatmate named only as Gorkem, who identified his body, told the Turkish LGBT magazine KaosGL.

“They had beheaded him. His upper body was beyond recognition, his internal organs were out. We could only identify our friend from his pants.”

No suspects have been arrested in the case. Gorkem claimed it was not the first time Mr Sankari had been attacked, and said police failed to act after an earlier incident when he was kidnapped, taken to a forest outside Istanbul, beaten and raped.

The migrant agreement has come under fire for the assumption Turkey is a “safe country” for refugees. Human rights organisations like Amnesty International have warned it does not offer full protection under the UN Refugee Convention.

Gay rights activists say homosexual refugees are at particular risk in Turkey. But in June, Greece deported a gay Syrian refugee to Turkey after the Greek courts ruled Turkey was a safe country for him.

The Wailing Wall

How the Holocaust Industry Stole the Swiss Monies

by Norman Finkelstein

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id112.htm

In late August 2000 the World Jewish Congress (WJC) announced that it stood

to amass fully $9 billion in Holocaust compensation monies. (1)  They were

extracted in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” but the WJC now maintained that the monies belonged to the “Jewish people as a whole” (WJC executive

director, Elan Steinberg).  Conveniently, the WJC is the self-anointed representative of the “Jewish people as a whole.”  Meanwhile, a black-tie Holocaust  reparations banquet sponsored by WJC president Edgar Bronfman at New York’s

Pierre Hotel celebrated the creation of a “Foundation of the Jewish People” to

subsidize Jewish organizations and “Holocaust education.”  (One Jewish critic of the

“Holocaust-themed dinner” conjured this scenario: “Mass murder.  Horrible plunder.  Slave Labor.  Let’s eat.”)  The Foundation’s endowment would come from “residual” Holocaust compensation monies amounting to “probably billions of dollars” (Steinberg).  How the WJC already knew that “probably billions” would be left over when none of the compensation monies had yet been distributed to Holocaust victims was anyone’s guess.  Indeed, it was not yet even known how many would qualify.  Or, did the Holocaust industry extract compensation monies in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” knowing all along that “probably billions” would be left over?   The Holocaust industry bitterly complained that the German and Swiss settlements allotted only meager sums for survivors.  It is unclear why the “probably billions” couldn’t be used to supplement these allocations.

Predictably, Holocaust survivors reacted with rage.  (None was present at the Foundation’s creation.) “Who authorized these organizations to decide,” a survivor newsletter angrily editorialized, “that the `leftovers’ (in the billions), obtained in the name of Shoah victims, should be used for their pet projects instead of helping ALL holocaust survivors with their mounting health-care expenses?” Confronted with this barrage of negative publicity, the WJC did an abrupt about-face.  The $9 billion figure was “a bit misleading,” Steinberg subsequently protested.  He also claimed that the Foundation had “no cash and no plan for allocating funds,” and the purpose of the Holocaust banquet was not to celebrate the Foundation’s endowment from Holocaust compensation monies but rather to raise funds for it.  Elderly Jewish survivors, not consulted in advance of, let alone invited to, the “star-studded gala” at the Pierre Hotel, picketed outside.

Among those honored inside the Pierre was President Clinton, who movingly recalled that the United States stood in the forefront of “facing up to an ugly past”:  “I have been to Native American reservations and acknowledged that the treaties we signed were neither fair nor honorably kept in many cases.  I went to Africa…and acknowledged the responsibility of the United States in buying people into slavery.  This is a hard business, struggling to find our core of humanity.”  Notably absent in all these instances of  “hard business” were reparations in hard currency. (2)

On 11 September 2000 the “Special Master’s Proposed Plan of Allocation and

Distribution of Settlement Proceeds” from the Swiss banks litigation was finally released (hereafter: Gribetz Plan). (3)  Publication of the Plan –  more than two years in the making – was timed not for the “needy Holocaust victims dying everyday” but  the Holocaust gala that same night.  Burt Neuborne, lead counsel for the Holocaust industry in the Swiss banks affair and “the most vocal supporter of the distribution plan” (New York Times), praised the document as “meticulously researched … painstaking and sensitive.” (4)  Indeed, it seemed to belie pervasive fears that the monies would be misappropriated by Jewish organizations.  The Forward typically reported that “the distribution plan…proposes that more than 90% of the Swiss monies be paid directly to

survivors and their heirs.” Protesting that “the World Jewish Congress has never asked for a penny, will never take a penny and does not accept restitution funds,” Elan

Steinberg piously acclaimed the Gribetz Plan as an “extraordinarily intelligent and compassionate document.” (5)  Intelligent it surely was, but hardly compassionate.  For  hidden in the details of the Gribetz Plan is the devilish reality that probably but a small fraction of the Swiss monies will be paid directly to Holocaust survivors and their heirs.  Before considering this, however, it bears notice that the Plan conclusively, iunwittingly,

demonstrates that the Holocaust industry blackmailed Switzerland. (6)

Readers will recall that in May 1996 the Swiss banks formally consented to a comprehensive, external audit – “the most extensive audit in history” (Judge Korman) –  in order to settle all outstanding claims by Holocaust survivors and their heirs. (7)  Before the audit committee (chaired by Paul Volcker), even had an opportunity to meet, however, the Holocaust industry pressed for a financial settlement.   Two pretexts were adduced to preempt the Volcker Committee: 1. the Committee couldn’t be trusted, 2. needy Holocaust victims couldn’t wait for the Committee’s findings.  The Gribetz Plan demolishes both pretexts.

In June 1997, Burt Neuborne submitted a “Memorandum of Law” justifying

preemption of the Volcker Committee.   Against all evidence and with remarkable effrontery, Neuborne dismissed the Committee as a Swiss initiative  to deflect criticism into a “private mediation effort that is sponsored, paid for and designed by the defendants.” (8)   It bears notice that Neuborne even held against the Swiss bankers that they footed the $500 million bill for the unprecedented audit imposed on them.   In August 1998 the Holocaust industry successfully forced a non-recoupable $1.25 billion settlement on the Swiss before the Volcker Committee completed its work. (9)  Although the pretext for this settlement was that the Volcker Committee couldn’t be trusted, the Gribetz Plan heaps praise on the Committee and emphasizes that the Committee’s findings and mechanism for processing claims (“Claims Resolution Tribunal” –  “CRT”) were and continue to be of “vital significance” in distributing the Swiss monies. (10)

The Holocaust industry’s enthusiastic reliance on the Committee for distributing

the Swiss monies confutes its main pretext for preempting the Committee with a

non-recoupable settlement.

In their settlement with the Holocaust industry, the Swiss were compelled not

only to pay for  Holocaust-era dormant Jewish accounts, but also to “disgorge

the profits” they “knowingly” reaped from the Jewish assets looted, and

Jewish slave labor exploited, by the Nazis. (11)  The Gribetz Plan reveals the

flimsiness of these charges as well.  It admits that “very few if any” direct

links –  let alone direct profitable links or knowingly profitable links – could

be established between the Swiss, on the one hand, and looted Jewish assets and

Jewish slave labor, on the other.  Indeed, the Plan makes clear that the entire indictment in these classes was built on what was “likely” or “presumed” or “potentially” to be the case. (12)  Finally, Switzerland was compelled to provide restitution to Jews fleeing Nazism who were denied refuge.  The Gribetz Plan explicitly concedes – if only in a footnote –  the “questionable legal validity” of this claim. (13) Despite all these admissions, however, the Plan still approvingly quotes that “in a perfectly just world, plaintiffs should have received a far greater sum” than the $1.25 billion extracted from the Swiss. (14)

Apart from the Volcker Committee’s alleged partisanship, the Holocaust industry gestured to the mortality of Holocaust survivors to force anon-recoupable settlement on the Swiss.  Time was supposedly of the essence because “needy Holocaust victims” had only a short time left to live.  With the money in hand, however, the Holocaust industry has suddenly discovered that “needy Holocaust victims” aren’t dying so rapidly.  Citing a study commissioned by the Jewish Claims Conference, the Gribetz plan reports that “the population of Nazi victims is declining more slowly than previously believed.”  Indeed, the Plan purports that “a fairly substantial number of Jewish Nazi victims may live forat

least another 20 years and that 30-35 years from now” – that is, some ninety years after the end of World War II – “tens of thousands of Jewish Nazi victims are likely to be alive.” (15)   Given the Holocaust industry’s track record, it should surprise no one if this revelation is eventually adduced to press yet new compensation demands on Europe.  In the meantime it is already being used to slow the allocation of compensation monies.  Thus the Gribetz Plan recommends that the monies be allocated in small increments over time because “building expectations among needy survivors, only to remove the funding and thus the assistance, would be a great disservice.” (16)

During the Swiss banks affair, the Holocaust industry maintained that the average age of a survivor was 73 in Israel and 80 in the rest of the world. Life expectancy in the three countries where most Holocaust survivors currently reside ranges from 60 (former Soviet Union) to 77 (the United States and Israel). (17)  One might be excused for wondering how it is possible for “tens of thousands” of Holocaust survivors to be alive 35 years from now.  A partial answer is that the Holocaust industry has yet again revised the definition of a Holocaust survivor.  “One of the reasons for this relatively slower decline in the size of the population,” the above-mentioned Claims Conference study reports, “is the finding that, using the broad definition, there are many more relatively younger Nazi victims than previously believed.” (emphasis added) (18)   Indeed, in a Weimar-like inflation, the Gribetz Plan puts the number of living Holocaust survivors at nearly a million – a four-fold increase from the already extraordinary figure of 250,000 Holocaust survivors reported during the Swiss shakedown. (19)

To manage this actuarial and demographic feat, the Gribetz Plan now deems every Russian Jew who survived World War II to be a Holocaust survivor. (20)  Thus, Russian Jews who fled in advance of the Nazis or served in the Red Army now qualify as Holocaust survivors because they faced torture and death if captured. (21)   Even accepting for argument’s sake this truly novel definition of Holocaust survivor, it is unclear why Soviet functionaries who fled in advance of the Nazis or non-Jewish conscripts in the Red Army don’t also qualify as Holocaust survivors.  They too faced torture and death if captured.  Indeed, the Plan reports that a Jewish-American serviceman captured by the Nazis was interned in a concentration camp. (22)  Shouldn’t every Jewish-American G.I.from World War II count as a Holocaust survivor?  Possibilities abound.  Defending the Gribetz Plan mortality projections for Holocaust survivors, a senior historian for the Holocaust wing of the British Imperial War Museum explained that in a “still broader sense…second and even third generation can be considered” Holocaust victims because “they may suffer from psychiatric disturbances.”

(23)  It’s only a matter of time before the Holocaust industry restores Wilkomirski to grace as a Holocaust survivor since – to quote Yad Vashem Director Israel Gutman – his “pain is authentic.”

For the Holocaust industry, this redefinition and upward revision of the figure for Holocaust survivors serves multiple purposes.  Not only does it justify the shakedown of European countries, but it justifies the shakedown of actual Holocaust victims as well.  For years these Holocaust victims have begged the Claims Conference to allocate compensation monies for a health insurance program.  Noting this “thoughtful” proposal in a footnote, the Gribetz Plan laments that the Swiss settlement “would be insufficient” to provide medical insurance for “well over 800,000” Holocaust survivors. (24)

Apart from a trivial sum, the Gribetz Plan earmarks the Swiss monies only for Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust.  The settlement technically covered every “Victim or Target of Nazi Persecution.”  In fact, this seemingly inclusive, “politically correct” designation is a linguistic subterfuge to exclude most non-Jewish victims.  It arbitrarily defines “Victim or Target of Nazi Persecution” to include only Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and the disabled or handicapped.   For reasons never explained, other political (e.g., Communists and Socialists) and ethnic (e.g., Poles and Belorussians)

persecutees are left out.  These are numerically the larger victim groups; except for Jews, the groups designated “Victim or Target of Nazi Persecution” in the Gribetz Plan are numerically much less significant.  The practical upshot is that almost all the compensation monies will go to Jews.  Thus, the Plan covers 170,000 former Jewish slave-laborers; of fully 1,000,000 non-Jewish former slave laborers, however, only 30,000 of these are deemed to qualify as a “victim or target of Nazi persecution.” Likewise, the Plan allocates $90 million for Jewish victims of Nazi plunder but only $10 million for non-Jewish victims. This division is partly justified on the ground that prior compensation agreements used such a ratio.  Yet the Plan suggests that non-Jewish victims received a disproportionately smaller share of compensation monies in the past.  Shouldn’t a just allocation plan redress, not perpetuate, past inequities? (25)

The Gribetz Plan sets aside fully $800 million of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement to cover valid claims on Holocaust-era dormant accounts.  The Plan’s text, annexes and charts run to many hundreds of pages with well over a thousand footnotes.  The singular oddity of the Plan is that it makes no attempt to credibly justify this – the crucial – allocation.   It merely states that, “Based upon his analysis of the Volcker Report and the Final Approval Order, and upon consultation with representatives of the Volcker Committee, the Special Master estimates that the value of all bank accounts that will be repaid is within the range of $800 million.” (26)  In fact, this estimate appears wildly

inflated.  The actual sum paid out on dormant accounts will probably not come to more than a tiny fraction of the $800 million. (27)  The “residual” monies – that is, what remains of the $800 million after all legitimate claims have been processed – are supposed to be distributed either directly to Holocaust survivors or to Jewish organizations engaged in Holocaust-related activities.(28)

In fact, the residual monies will almost certainly go to Jewish organizations, not only because the Holocaust industry will have the final say, but because they won’t be distributed until many years from now, when few actual Holocaust survivors will be alive. (29)

Besides the $800 million for Holocaust-era accounts, the Gribetz Plan allocates some $400 million mainly for the “looted assets,” “slave labor,” and “refugees” classes.  The Plan enters the crucial caveat, however, that none of these monies will be released until “all appeals in this litigation have been exhausted.”  Conceding that the “proposed payments may not commence for sometime,” the Plan cites a crucial precedent in which the appeals process lasted three and a half years. (30)  For elderly Holocaust survivors this is a no-win and for the Holocaust industry a no-lose situation.  Many Holocaust survivors, appalled by the Gribetz Plan, will undoubtedly want to appeal, but doing so

means that few will be around to benefit even if an appeal is sustained.   The Holocaust industry, already the main beneficiary of the Gribetz Plan, can only gain from an appeals process in which more monies will by default flow into its coffers as survivors die out.   Once the appeals process is completed, the Gribetz Plan provides for these allocations of the $400 million:

  1. In the “looted assets” class, $90 million is earmarked not for direct payments to Holocaust survivors but for Jewish organizations servicing Holocaust communities “broadly defined.” The largest allocation will go to the Claims Conference, which the Gribetz Plan repeatedly acclaims for its “unmatched expertise in serving the needs of Nazi victims. (31)  The Plan sets aside $10 million for a “Victim List Foundation, the objective of which is to compile and make widely accessible, for research and remembrance, the names of all Victims or Targets of Nazi Persecution.”  It recommends that the Foundation start from the “irreplaceable data contained in the Initial Questionnaires” for Holocaust victims.  A typical response in this “irreplaceable data” is that fully one of every six Jewish victims (71,000/430,000) claimed title to a Swiss bank

account before World War II.  Did one in six also own a Mercedes and Swiss chalet? (32)

  1. In the “slave labor” class, each of 170,000 Jewish former slave laborers supposedly still alive will receive a token payment in two installments: $500 after the appeals process is completed, and “up to” an additional $500 after all claims on dormant accounts are processed. (33) In fact, the 170,000 figure is grossly inflated, and it is unlikely that many of the Jewish former slave laborers really still alive will yet be around to collect the first, let alone the second, token payment.  Applications will be processed by the Claims

Conference, which – as the main beneficiary of residual compensation monies – will profit from every rejection.

  1. In the “refugee” class, legitimate claimants will receive payments ranging from $250-$2500 in the same two installments as the “slave labor” class. (34) Based on the “irreplaceable data contained in the Initial Questionnaire,” some 17,000 Jews have claimed membership in this class.  It is likely that only a small fraction of these 17,000 will demonstrate a valid claim (the Conference processes applications), and that even fewer will still be around to collect the payments.

A close analysis of the Gribetz Plan thus confirms the main arguments in chapter 3 of this book.  It demonstrates that the pretexts invoked by the Holocaust industry to force a non-recoupable settlement on the Swiss banks were false, and that few actual survivors of the Nazi holocaust will directly – or, for that matter, indirectly – benefit from the Swiss monies. A comparable analysis of other Holocaust industry settlements would presumably yield comparable results.   Indeed, buried in the details of the Gribetz Plan is a nest egg for the Holocaust industry.  Most of the Swiss monies probably won’t be distributed until after all but a handful of survivors are dead.  With the survivors gone,

the monies will pour into the coffers of Jewish organizations.  Small wonder that the Holocaust industry was unanimous in its praise of the Gribetz Plan.

 

 

Norman G. Finkelstein

 

Notes

 

  1. For this and the next paragraph, see Joan Gralla, “Holocaust Foundation Set for Restitution Funds,” in Reuters (22 August 2000), Michael J. Jordan, “Spending Restitution Money Pits Survivors Against Groups,” in Jewish Telegraphic Agency (29 August 2000), NAHOS (The Newsletter of the National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors) (1 September 2000, 6 October 2000, and 6 November 2000), Marilyn Henry, “Proposed `Foundation for Jewish People’ Has No Cash,” in Jerusalem Post (8 September 2000), Joan Gralla, “Battle Brews Over Holocaust Compensation,” in Reuters (11 September 2000), Shlomo Shamir, “Government to Set Up New Fund for Holocaust Payments,” in Haaretz (12 September 2000), Yair Sheleg, “Burg Honored at Controversial NY Dinner,” in Haaretz (12 September 2000), E.J. Kessler, “Hillary the Holocaust Heroine?” in New York Post (12 September 2000), Melissa Radler, “Survivors Get Most of Cash in Shoah Fund,” in Forward (17 September 2000), “The WJC Defends Event Panned by Commentary” in Jewish Post (20 September 2000)

2.”Remarks by The President During Bronfman Gala,” Office of The Press Secretary, The White House . Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, US Department of State (http://usinfo.state.gov).

3,The plan was formulated by Judah Gribetz, past president of the Jewish

Community Relations Council of New York, and currently member of the board of

New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.  He

was appointed  “Special Master” by Judge Edward Korman of New York’s Eastern

District Court, who presided over the class-action litigation in the Swiss case.  The full plan is posted on http://www.Swissbankclaims.com.  On 22November 2000 Judge Korman issued a “memorandum and order” that “adopt[s] the Proposed Plan in its entirety.” (In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (United States District Court for Eastern District of New York: 22 November 2000), p.7))

4.Alan Feuer, “Bitter Fight Is Reignited On Splitting Of Reparations” (New York Times, 21 November 2000).  “Statement of Burt Neuborne” appended to Gribetz Plan.  Judge Korman’s “memorandum and order” (see note 3 above) points up the crucial role of Neuborne in deflecting criticism of the Plan (pp. 4, 6). As lead counsel in the Swiss litigation, Neuborne was credited with contriving the “legal theories” used by the Holocaust industry.

5.Radler, “Survivors Get Most of Cash in Shoah Fund.”

6.Significantly, Raul Hilberg, the world’s leading authority on the Nazi holocaust, has explicitly charged that the World Jewish Congress blackmailed the Swiss: “It was the first time in history that Jews made use of a weapon that can only be described as blackmail.”  In a declaration supporting the motion to approve the Swiss settlement, Burt Neuborne, clearly worried by the blackmail allegation (“certain persons may be tempted to mischaracterize legitimate settlement payments as a form of blackmail”), called on Judge Korman to repudiate it, which the Judge dutifully did. (“Holocaust Expert Says Swiss Banks Are Paying Too Much,” in Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 28 January 1999; Declaration of Burt Neuborne, Esq. (5 November 1999), para. 8; Edward R. Korman, In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (United States District Court for Eastern District of New York: 26 July 2000), pp. 23-4)

7.In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation, p. 19 (Korman).

8.Burt Neuborne, “Memorandum of Law Submitted by Plaintiffs in Response to Expert Submissions Filed By Legal Academics Retained by Defendants” (United States District Court for Eastern District of New York: 16 June 1997), p. 68 (cf. pp. 62-4).  Hereafter: Neuborne Memorandum.

9.For non-recoverability of the final settlement, see Gribetz Plan, p. 12n18: “It should be noted that no part of the $1.25 billion settlement amount will revert to the defendant banks or to any other Swiss entities.”

10.Gribetz Plan, pp. 11 (“vital significance”), 13-14, 93, 101-4.

11.Neuborne Memorandum, pp. 3, 6,-7, 11-12, 28-31, 34-5, 43, 47-8.  The memorandum concedes that the Swiss banks would be legally liable only if they

“knowingly” profited from the ill-gotten gains of the Nazis: “If one assumes

lack of notice on the part of defendant banks, defendants’ actions would not

give rise to a claim for equitable disgorgement of unjust profits” (p. 34).

12.Gribetz Plan, pp. 23, 29, 113-14, 118n345, 128-9n371, 145-8, Annex G

(“The Looted Assets Class”), pp. G-3, G-43, G-57, Annex H (“Slave Labor Class

I”), pp. H-52, H-57-8.

13.Gribetz Plan, Annex J (“The Refugee Class”), p. J-26n85.  Buried in a footnote we also learn that, according to a leading authority, Seymour J. Rubin, “Switzerland did admit many more refugees, in proportion to its population than any other nation.  This is in contrast to a United States that not only denied entry to the desperate St. Louis refugees, but systematically failed to fill even the limited immigration quota that was available” (p. J-5).  Noting that refugees barred from entering Switzerland during World War II would now receive compensation, Burt Neuborne, in a letter to the Nation magazine, regretted : “I only wish that a similar sanction could be imposed on the United

States for its identical refusal to accept desperate refugees from Nazi persecution” (5 October 2000).  Apart from hypocrisy and cowardice, what prevented the Holocaust industry’s lead counsel from pressing this claim?

14.Gribetz Plan, p. 89.  The quote is cited from Judge Korman’s Court

order granting final approval to the Settlement Agreement.

15.Gribetz Plan, Annex C (“Demographics of `Victim or Target’ Groups”), p. C-13.

16.Gribetz Plan, pp. 135-6.

17.Gribetz Plan, Annex C , p. C-12, Annex F (“Social Safety Nets”), p. F-15.

18.Ukeles Associates Inc., Paper #3 (revised), Projection of the Population of Victims of Nazi Persecution, 2000-2040 (31 May 2000).

19.Gribetz Plan, p, 9, Annex C, p. C-8, Annex E (“Holocaust Compensation”), pp. E-89 and E-90n282.   The 250,000 figure was used to distribute the monies from the “Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust” established by the Swiss in February 1997.

20.Gribetz Plan, Annex C, p. C-7, Table 3.  The Plan concedes in a footnote that “in the former Soviet Union, there are relatively few survivors of the concentration camps, ghettos, or work camps” (Annex E, p. E-56n150).

21.Gribetz Plan, pp. 122-3, 125, Annex E, p. E-138, Annex F, p. F-4n13

22.Gribetz Plan, Annex E, p. E-56.

23.Steve Paulsson, “Re: Survivor Article,” posted on http://H-Holocaust@N-Net.MSU.EDU (28 September 2000).

24.Gribetz Plan, p. 135.  It bears notice that the figure for Holocaust survivors in the original sense also undergoes a radical revision upward in the Gribetz Plan.  The plan states that in the neighborhood of 170,000 former Jewish slave-laborers currently receive pensions from Germany.  (Gribetz Plan, Annex H (“Slave Labor Class I”), pp. H-5-6)  It is estimated that only one in four former Jewish slave-laborers received a German pension.  This would put the total figure for former Jewish slave-laborers still alive today at nearly 700,000, and the total for Jewish slave laborers alive at war’s end at 2,800,000.  The standard scholarly figure for Jewish slave-laborers alive at war’s end is about 100,000, with perhaps several tens of thousands still alive.

25.Gribetz Plan, pp. 7, 25-7, 83-4, 118-19, 138-9, 149, 154, and “Summary of Major Holocaust Compensation Programs.”  Apart from precedent, the Plan tautologically justifies this distribution “by current demographics, as Jewish victims now constitute the overwhelming proportion of surviving `Victims or Targets of Nazi Persecution’ as defined under the Settlement Agreement” (p.119).  Jews only constitute the “overwhelming proportion” because of how the category “Victims or Targets…” was defined.  For Gypsy reservations to the Plan, see Romani Comments and Objections to the Special Master’s Proposed Plan of Allocation and Distribution. (Ramsey Clark et al., In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (United States District Court for Eastern District of New York: November 2000))

26.Gribetz Plan, p. 15.  The same statement is repeated verbatim on pp. 98-9.

27.The Volcker Committee recommended publication of the names of some 25,000 accounts having the highest probability of a relationship to victims of Nazi persecution.  The total “fair current value” of 10,000 of these accounts for which some information is available runs to $150-$230 million.  Projecting these estimates on the 25,000 accounts yields $375-$575 million.  To judge by the Claims Resolution Tribunal’s prior processing experience, valid claims will be filed against only one-half the 25,000 accounts and one-half the monies in these accounts for a total value of $188-$288 million.   In addition, however, the 25,000 list overwhelmingly comprises not dormant but closed accounts bearing names that match a Holocaust victim.  The Volcker Committee concluded that there is “no evidence of…concerted efforts to divert the funds of victims of Nazi persecution to improper purposes.”  Accordingly, the safe assumption is that almost all the closed accounts on the 25,000 list were properly closed by the actual account-holders, rightful heirs, or those with a legitimate and credible power of attorney, and that the CRT will validate only a few claims against these closed accounts.   The total value of validated claims against the 25,000 accounts will thus likely fall well below even the $188-$288 million estimate that assumed all the accounts were dormant and the claims on half legitimate.  (Gribetz Plan, pp. 94n298, 96-7, 105-6n326; Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks [Bern: 1999]), p. 13, para. 41(a))

28.Gribetz Plan, 12, 19-20.  The Plan states on p. 12 that the “remainder of the Settlement Fund is to be distributed among the other…settlement classes”- i.e., “looted assets,” “refugees,” and “slave laborers.” As shown below, the monies allocated for the “looted assets” class will be paid not to Holocaust survivors directly but rather to Jewish organizations involved in Holocaust work   The Plan further states on pp.19-20 that “it also may be possible to allocate a portion of the remaining Settlement Fund to some of the proposed cultural, memorial or educational projects that have been submitted to the Special Master.”

29.The Plan specifies that distribution of residuals from the $800 million cannot begin until all claims on the 25,000 accounts have been processed.   It took the CRT fully three years to process 10,000 claims on a prior, separate list of 5,600 Swiss accounts.  The Plan reports that many more than 80,000 claims will likely be filed against the list of  25,000.  In addition, the Plan provides that all claims must be checked not only against the published list of 25,000 accounts but against millions of other Swiss accounts bearing no

apparent relationship to Holocaust victims.  Thus even if the CRT process is streamlined, it will surely take many years to complete. (Gribetz Plan, pp. 91, 94n299, 105-6n126) Apart from Holocaust victims holding dormant accounts, the Plan makes only vague and narrow  provision for heirs.  (pp. 18-19, and Annex D (“Heirs”))

30.Gribetz Plan, pp. 16-17.

31.Gribetz Plan, pp. 25-6, 120-1, 119-38.

32.Gribetz Plan, pp. 18, 27, 116, Annex C, p. C-10, Exhibit 3 to Annex C, p. 1.  (The “Initial Questionnaires” were distributed to “Victims and Targets of Nazi Persecution” after Judge Korman approved the Swiss settlement.)  Dismissing the extravagant claims of the Holocaust industry against the Swiss banks, Raul Hilberg, who fled Austria as a child with his parents, recalled in a recent interview: “In the 1930s, Jews were poor.  My family belonged to the middle class, but we did not have a bank account in Austria, let alone in Switzerland.”  (Berliner Zeitung, 4 September 2000)

33.Gribetz Plan, pp. 29-31, 154-6.

34.Gribetz Plan, pp. 35-9, 172

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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