TBR News December 9, 2016

Dec 09 2016

 

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C.  December 9, 2016:”The following article, by Justin Raimondo, appeared today on the AntiWar website. It is a brilliant analysis of political and economic problems in the PRC and is very well worth the read.”

Taiwan, and the Chinese Paper Tiger

Did the President-elect just upend our “one China” policy?

December 9, 2016

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The media and the foreign policy “experts” went ballistic recently over President-elect Donald Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. With one brief call, which the Trump team says was only a congratulatory call initiated by Ms. Ing-wen, Trump blew up our longstanding “One China” policy and precipitated a dangerous collision with Beijing.

While this reaction was somewhat overwrought – not surprising, given the media’s adversarial relationship with the PEOTUS – there is indeed good reason to find this worrying.

I say this because Trump’s view of China, and especially the stance taken by Peter Navarro, one of his economic advisors, is dangerously wrong. While it is true that China has flooded our markets with cheap goods that easily out-compete US products, in reality China is an economic disaster waiting to implode on itself – and the regime’s hold on the populace is increasingly precarious.

Navarro, a professor of economics at the University of California at Irvine, is a protectionist whose view of China as a rising military power is based on nothing but scare-mongering. His most recent book, Crouching Tiger, is a compendium of myths and pseudo-facts which posit that Chinese “militarism” is a real threat to the US – a nonsensical idea with no basis in reality. China spends about 2% of its GDP on the military, while the US spends almost double that. China’s army consists mostly of conscripts, and exists largely to control the borders and put down internal strife. The last time China was involved in a major foreign conflict was its brief albeit bloody war with Vietnam, in 1979, and it was a disaster for Beijing, which was driven out of northern Vietnam with its tail between its legs in less than a few months.

Next to the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea, China is the most “isolationist” state in the world. Even in the heyday of militant Maoism, the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to export their brand of Marxism-Leninism was minimal. Apart from some parsimonious aid to Maoist forces in the Philippines, which soon ended, their commitment to “internationalism” was almost nil. And now that the near total abandonment of Communist ideology has emptied the official party line of its Marxist content, the focus of the leadership is completely on the country’s internal development.

Much is being made of China’s claim to most of the South China Sea, but even a cursory look at the map shows the objective observer that their concern is defensive. After all, we consider the Caribbean an American lake, with any foreign incursion – say, the construction of a Russian base on Cuban soil – an intolerable breach inviting instant retaliation. A different standard is applied to China, however, which is labeled an “aggressor” if it pursues roughly the same policy.

The preoccupation of the Communist Party of China continues to be with maintaining its increasingly precarious hold on power: from their perspective, the main danger to the status quo comes from within, rather than from any external threat. However, Donald Trump could change that mindset, with ominous consequences for all concerned.

Taiwan is a sore point left over from the cold war era that could not only spark a conflict between the US and China, but could also cause an internal eruption in China itself – which is why Beijing is none too eager to make an issue of their breakaway province. As long as the formality of “One China” is preserved, the official fiction is enough to tamp down nationalist fervor on the mainland. However, any challenge to that arrangement is bound to have major consequences for the Chinese leadership internally, and therein lies the source of a potential conflict.

The death of communism as an ideology presented the Chinese Communist Party with a conundrum: they were rid of their chief rival, the Moscow branch of the communist movement, but this left a gaping hole in the rationale that had granted them power in the first place. What were they going to replace Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with?

Their answer was “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” i.e. a form of “market socialism” that emphasized the market over the socialism. After the ultra-leftist nightmare of the “Cultural Revolution,” which ground Chinese industry and the educational system to a halt, a new era of modernization and industrialization was introduced by the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, succinctly summed up in an aphorism attributed to him: “To get rich is glorious!”

This forced march into modernity produced great changes in Chinese society, and along with creating a rising middle class with high expectations, it also gave rise to a host of festering problems that, today, threaten the unity of the nation. Growing inequality, the creation of a large population of unemployed transients, the end of the “iron rice bowl,” increasing official corruption, a growing number of strikes – thousands every year – and resentment of the Party’s monopoly on power – all these factors are combining to produce the equivalent of seething seismic activity just beneath the supposedly tranquil surface of a totalitarian society. In short, the Chinese leadership is sitting atop a volcano.

So far, the leadership has kept a lid on all this social tension, but the one thing that could unleash the storms that have wrecked Chinese society in the past is increased pressure by the West. If the Trump administration presses the Taiwan issue, the sleeping tiger of Chinese nationalism could be awakened – and this is the possibility that the Communist leadership fears the most.

The reason for this lies in China’s history, which is a chronicle of long periods of stability punctuated by episodes of what can only be described as pure madness. The Cultural Revolution was one such episode: the Boxer Rebellion was another. The 1850 Taiping civil war pitted a millenarian sect known as the “God-Worshipping Society” against the authorities: the war lasted for over 15 years, and was the bloodiest civil conflict in world history. Twenty million to 70 million perished. This history keeps the Beijing leadership constantly on guard against “cults” that threaten the ideological hegemony of the Communist Party, and is one reason for their hostility to the Falun Gong movement.

Although the Cultural Revolution is seen in the West as a ‘leftist” movement, the reality is that it was infused with a radical xenophobia: in the months before the phenomenon took on a mass character, Chinese students rioted in major cities over the presence of foreign students, mainly from Africa, who were getting better accommodations than native Chinese. Several foreigners were injured, and some were killed, until the authorities moved in. Nationalism was always a major strain in the ideological fulminations of the “Gang of Four,” who led the Cultural Revolution until their downfall after Mao’s death. Soviet influence was denounced as “foreign domination,” and the “foreign devils” who had picked at the old China’s decaying carcass were revived as hate objects.

This strain of ultra-nationalism has only grown more powerful now that no one believes in the old Leninist ideology anymore: indeed, it is implicit in the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Those students who initiated the Cultural Revolution – and the Tiananmen Square rebellion – haunt the nightmares of the Chinese leadership: a crisis with the West over Taiwan could bring them back into the streets. And that is what China’s rulers – who prize stability above all else – want to avoid at all costs.

Add to this the economic disaster waiting to happen, and we have the ingredients of a massive implosion that could make the fall of the Soviet system look like a soft landing. As David Stockman points out, the Chinese economy is the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all:

“China is on the cusp of the greatest margin call in history. Once asset values start falling, its pyramids of debt will stand exposed to withering performance failures and melt-downs. Undoubtedly the regime will struggle to keep its printing press prosperity alive for another month or quarter, but the fractures are now gathering everywhere because the credit rampage has been too extreme and hideous.”

In short, China is a paper tiger that is likely to go up in the flames of its own overheated export-driven inflationary boom. Its present course is unsustainable, and the Chinese leaders know it. It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes ka-blooie.

Economic chaos – including the bursting of a real estate bubble that makes ours look like a minor matter– the rise of ultra-nationalism, and a renewed crisis in the straits of Taiwan – these are the elements that, added together, spell trouble ahead, not only for China but also for the US.

Which brings us back to our original question: can a single phone call from the President of Taiwan to Donald Trump upset the delicate balance of power in Eastasia?  The answer is clearly yes.

The “realist” school of international relations, exemplified by the views of John Mearsheimer, are relatively pacific compared to its rivals – the neocons, and the liberal internationalists – who have dominated policymaking in the recent past. This appears to be where the Trump administration stands. When it comes to Europe, relations with Russia, and our policy in the Middle East, they are, roughly, noninterventionist. But when it comes to China, the old “Asialationist” syndrome takes over: the America First “isolationists” of yesteryear, like the “realists” of today, looked on Eastasia as the site of rising “revisionist” powers that might pose a threat to the US.

They are wrong because their analysis fails to take into account the internal dynamics of the Chinese system, and the historical weaknesses that are baked into current Chinese power relations. Of course, none of these “realists” realized that the Soviet Union, too, was a paper tiger, doomed to self-destruct due to its inner contradictions.

There is nothing inevitable about a Sino-US confrontation: the problem is that the military buildup – and accompanying trade war – proposed by the Sinophobes would create the conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The current regime in Beijing is inward-looking, relatively pacific, and poses no real threat to our legitimate national interests: however, an ultra-nationalist replacement, one that comes to power due, in part, to our poking at the Chinese tiger’s soft underbelly, would be quite a different story.

Polar vortex redux? U.S. forecasters say it could hit next week

December 8, 2016

by Timothy Mclaughlin

Reuters

CHICAGO-Forecasters are sending chills down some spines with a prediction that much of the northern half of the United States could see frigid weather next week similar to life-threatening lows the polar vortex brought to parts of the country in 2014.

Anticipation of a freezing blast began to build this week when weather maps and forecast models showed similarities between next week’s system and one that developed in January 2014.

“Upper-level atmosphere configuration very similar in scale & magnitude as infamous Jan 2014 #PolarVortex popularized by me and @afreedma,” meteorologist Ryan Maue said on Twitter on Tuesday alongside maps comparing the two weather systems.

The southward shift in the polar vortex in 2014 brought the Midwest some of its coldest weather in two decades. Icy conditions snarled travel and thousands of flights were canceled or delayed.

Frigid temperatures combined with gusting winds to create life-threatening wind chills as low as 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero (minus 51 Celsius) that killed at least nine people.

The coldest weather next week is expected in the Midwest and Northeastern starting around Tuesday, according to forecasts that show temperatures in the single digits in some cities.

“The air mass on the way for the middle of December is likely to be substantially colder when compared to that of this past week and this weekend,” AccuWeather meteorologist Paul Pastelok wrote on Thursday.

Temperatures from the Northern and Central plains to wide swathes of the Midwest are likely to drop by between 5 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit compared to temperatures this week, according to AccuWeather.

It is unclear how far south the cold air will be felt, according to Pastelok.

Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest, is bracing for temperatures in the teens next week, according to an AccuWeather forecast, which showed a low of 17 Fahrenheit (minus 8 Celsius) for Wednesday and Thursday.

Further north in Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul NBC affiliate KARE forecasted temperatures dropping to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 12 Celsius) on Tuesday of next week, then 8 degrees (minus 13 Celsius) on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Timothy McLaughlin in Chicago; Editing by James Dalgleish)

 Crippled Atlantic currents triggered ice age climate change

June 30, 2016

by Eric Hand

Science Magazine

The last ice age wasn’t one long big chill. Dozens of times temperatures abruptly rose or fell, causing all manner of ecological change. Mysteriously, ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show that these sudden shifts—which occurred every 1500 years or so—were out of sync in the two hemispheres: When it got cold in the north, it grew warm in the south, and vice versa. Now, scientists have implicated the culprit behind those seesaws—changes to a conveyor belt of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

These currents, which today drive the Gulf Stream, bring warm surface waters north and send cold, deeper waters south. But they weakened suddenly and drastically, nearly to the point of stopping, just before several periods of abrupt climate change, researchers report today in Science. In a matter of decades, temperatures plummeted in the north, as the currents brought less warmth in that direction. Meanwhile, the backlog of warm, southern waters allowed the Southern Hemisphere to heat up.

AMOC slowdowns have long been suspected as the cause of the climate swings during the last ice age, which lasted from 110,000 to 15,000 years ago, but never definitively shown. The new study “is the best demonstration that this indeed happened,” says Jerry McManus, a paleo-oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and a study author. “It is very convincing evidence,” adds Andreas Schmittner, a climate scientist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “We did not know that the circulation changed during these shorter intervals.”

To assess the strength of ancient ocean currents over the course of 35,000 years in the middle of the ice age, McManus and his colleagues examined a 10-meter section of a 38-meter sediment core drilled from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The core came from an elevated patch of sea floor known as the Bermuda Rise, where sediments accumulate abnormally fast. The thick layer allows for a more detailed reading of chemical changes within the sediments when they were buried.

Circulation slowdown

The researchers measured the ratio of two products of radioactive decay: protactinium-231 and thorium-230. These daughter isotopes come from trace amounts of uranium that are dissolved everywhere in seawater. If the ocean were as still as a bathtub, the two daughter isotopes would bind to sediment particles, settle downward, and become buried at a constant ratio. But thorium gloms on to particles more readily than protactinium. It is therefore buried more readily, whereas protactinium tends to be carried away by ocean currents for burial elsewhere. At places like the Bermuda Rise, where the Atlantic conveyor belt is typically strong, little protactinium ends up in the sediments—except for four instances when the ratio to thorium rose sharply in a matter of decades to centuries, indicating the AMOC’s sudden weakening.

A 2014 study of the AMOC, based on a core from a nearby spot on the Bermuda Rise, found that the currents maintained much of their strength throughout the last glacial period. But because that team took fewer samples from the core and missed the sharp swings in strength. “Now these [new] guys have increased incredibly the data resolution,” says Jörg Lippold, a paleo-oceanographer at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the leader of the 2014 study. “They found the peaks we missed.”

Still unclear is what triggered the AMOC’s sudden slowdowns. Many of the drops correspond to so-called Heinrich events: rapid releases of icebergs from Canada’s ice sheet. These iceberg armadas often chugged through the Hudson Strait of Canada and may have discharged more ice into the Atlantic Ocean than contained in the entire ice cap of Greenland, raising ancient sea levels by 10 meters. The meltwater brought incredible amounts of freshwater to the North Atlantic, precisely where ocean currents cool off and sink. Because freshwater is less dense than saltwater, it can plug up the AMOC, preventing the overturning and deep water formation the fuels the circulation’s engine. The slowdowns persisted for 1500 years or so, then the AMOC would suddenly regain strength as freshwater melt dissipated and the currents reached a certain threshold, McManus says.

But weak AMOCs are not always accompanied by a Heinrich event, and the timing is fuzzy—some Heinrich events seem to occur after the AMOC already began to weaken. “The Heinrich events may be a response to the change in the overturning circulation rather than a cause,” Schmittner says.

Another question is whether the AMOC—currently known to be in decline—could drop off suddenly today, as depicted in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, causing temperatures to plummet across northwestern Europe. Schmittner says the past provides an eye-opener. “It’s evidence that this really did happen in the past, on short time scales.” But McManus says that studies looking deeper into the ice ages have found that the 1500-year climate oscillations tend not to be nearly as strong during interglacial periods. “It would suggest that this kind of thing isn’t so likely to happen today,” he says. On the other hand, he adds, “In most interglacials, Greenland didn’t melt … and Greenland is currently melting.”

France’s Le Pen pledges no schooling for illegal migrants

The National Front leader has proposed that children of illegal immigrants should be refused access to public education. Le Pen’s proposals are part of a platform to restrict migrants from accessing social services.

December 8, 2016

DW

Outlining her hardline proposal, Marine Le Pen told a conference in Paris Thursday: “I’ve got nothing against foreigners but I say to them: if you come to our country, don’t expect that you will be taken care of, treated [by the health system] and that your children will be educated for free.”

“That’s finished now, it’s the end of playtime,” she said, adding that France’s free schooling lured immigrants “like a suction.”

The FN leader’s comments provoked outrage from the Socialist government. France’s Socialist education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, denounced Le Pen’s stance as shameful and said it ran against the values of the French Republic.

“This declaration damages the image of our country and reminds all those who seem to have forgotten that Madame Le Pen refuses to be part of the Republican framework that forges the history and strength of our nation,” Vallaud-Belkacem said. “I remind you that it’s a matter of honor for the French republic to guarantee to children, to all children, the right to an education — in other words, the right to a future,”

A move to prevent children from accessing education would currently be in breach of French law, which guarantees schooling for all children in the country.

Restrictions on public service access

Le Pen’s comments were coupled with further proposals that migrants with legal status should go through a “waiting period” before benefitting from the country’s social services, including free schooling for children.

“I think there is a certain amount of time for taxes from them before getting access to all the public services, like education, social security,” she said during her annual visit to the Christmas market on the Champs-Elysees Avenue.

Le Pen has long advocated for the expulsion of illegal migrants and called for much tighter controls on asylum applications. She is also pushing for France’s withdrawal from the European Union and eurozone.

The party sees itself as part of the global revolt against immigration, established political parties and globalization – a movement encapsulated by Donald Trump’s election to US President in November and June’s Brexit vote. The FN is hoping to carry that momentum into next May’s national French elections. Le Pen has been tipped to qualify for the second round where she is forecast to face – and lose to – Republican candidate Francois Fillon.

While few analysts envisage the FN taking power, France’s slow-moving economy and immigration remain key issues to voters.

Fillon has also adopted a tougher stance on newcomers. The Republican candidate has promised to reduce the influx to a “strict minimum.” He has also rejected the idea of “multiculturalism,” insisting that France must defend its traditions, language and identity.

Former Prime MinisterManuals Vals announced this week that he will try to capture the nomination for the Socialists in January’s primary after unpopular President Francois Hollande said he would not seek a second term.

Hillary the Gonif

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

 

Hillary Clinton’s recent email scandal is a reprise of her identical problems in the 1990 time frame. At that time, there was the criminal issue of Casa Grande and the Rose law firm.

In the 1980s, Hillary Clinton was a partner at the Arkansas-based Rose law firm. Because she was also the wife of the governor, she served on various state commissions, but did minimal work on any of them. Like most big law firms, Rose law firm had no problem with her state obligations as long as she brought in business for other firm members. But Hillary Clinton wasn’t bringing profitable clients to the law firm commensurate with her status as the governor’s wife.

Under pressure to bring in more business, Hillary persuaded her husband. Bill to stir up more business for her and her firm.

Governor Clinton then approached one Jim McDougal, the major stock holder of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association and a partner in the Whitewater Development Company. The governor then persuaded McDougal to send some profitable business to his wife and the Rose law firm.

As a result of the meeting, McDougal retained the Rose law firm act as his attorneys and to work on the Castle Grande project.

The firm worked on this project in 1985 and 1986.

In addition to Madison Guaranty, Rose also represented one Seth Ward, an employee of Madison and the father-in-law of Webster Hubbell. Hubbell was Hillary’s law partner and friend, and after her husband was elevated to the Presidency, the associate attorney general of the United States..  Mr. Hubbell worked with Hillary Clinton on the Castle Grande project.

The Castle Grande project was a scheme to commit a fraud through real estate loans. It was, in essence, a Ponzi-like pyramid scheme that used a series of manipulated loans to enrich Madison insiders. Madison was, in effect, McDougal’s personal cash cow.

The land in question for the Castle Grande scheme was a scrub pine forest that had failed as an industrial development project. The sale price of the property in question was $1.75 million.

State regulations prohibited McDougal from investing more than 6 percent of Madison’s S&L assets in any project. McDougal was able then to put up $600,000 of Madison’s funds and Seth Ward put up the remaining $1.15 million.

Ward borrowed the money from Madison on a no-recourse, no personal obligation to repay basis. If federal regulators ever found out about this circumvention, Madison could be shut down.

The land appraiser for the property inflated his appraisals to support loans to purchasers, including future Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker who bought a water and sewer system for the Castle Grande project. The appraiser later pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges.

David Hale, head of a firm licensed to provide lendings to minorities and the economically disadvantaged, conspired with McDougal and Tucker to use his operation as a cover to generate additional loans from Madison.

A friend and business associate of Hale’s borrowed $825,000 from Madison to buy three properties from Hale, but never used the money himself. Instead, it went to Hale, who used it to recapitalize his company with matching funds from the Small Business Administration.

Hale loaned a $150,000 down payment to Tucker who bought out a portion of Ward’s Castle Grande holdings for $1.2 million.

Tucker borrowed the additional $1.05 million from Madison.

McDougal loaned former Senator William Fulbright, a long-time friend, $700,000 to buy out the remainder of Ward’s holdings. The net effect was to remove Ward’s non-recourse loan from the Madison books and generate substantial sales profits and commissions for Madison.

Through various “cross-loans,” McDougal hoped to prevent regulators from discovering Ward’s true role, and thus Madison’s full investment, in Castle Grande. But federal regulators weren’t deceived. In 1986, they removed McDougal from Madison Guaranty.

Eventually, the FBI became involved and Federal prosecutors ultimately convicted fourteen  individuals, including McDougal and Tucker (by then the sitting governor of Arkansas).

By 1991, Bill Clinton was running for president. Like his other Democratic rivals, he campaigned against the “decade of greed” that had brought us the S&L scandals.

Fortunately for his campaign, Hillary’s involvement in the Madison scandal had remained unnoticed. In fact, when the Resolution Trust Corporation, a temporary federal agency created to resolve the S&L crisis, wanted to sue the accounting firm that had handled Castle Grande, it hired Rose (in the person of Hubbell) to bring the lawsuit. Hubbell never disclosed the obvious conflict that stemmed from his firm’s work on Castle Grande; nor did he reveal the fact that Rose performed work on this matter in 1985 and 1986.

Castle Grande seemed far removed from both Hillary and Hubbell when a New York Times reporter named Jeff Gerth arrived in Little Rock and started asking questions. Some of his questions pertained to Hillary’s involvement with McDougal.

By this time, the Clinton campaign already believed it had two strikes against it: The extra marital Gennifer Flowers affair and Bill’s revealed draft dodging. Hillary Clinton’s significant involvement in the S&L scandal appeared to be strike three.

Hillary contacted Mr. Vince Foster who had not been involved in the Castle Grandeaffair, but he was Hillary’ mentor and trusted adviser — so trusted that he would eventually come with the Clintons to Washington and served as second in command in the Office of White Counsel.

Foster and Hubbell at once worked on the potentially devastating issue.To mask the condemning facts they removed all billing records pertaining to Castle Grande from the Rose law firm files. Foster and Hubbell also collected any and all other iles pertaining to the law firm’s activities in this business and Hillary Clinton’s time sheets pertaining to this also disappeared.

And any and all of the electronic versions of the billing records were erased from the law firm’s computer system.For these reasons the FBI’s forensic investigative team was unable to reconstruct them.

Hillary told Gerth that a Rose associate, Rick Massey, had done all of the work on the McDougal project. With the billing records and time sheets gone, she could feel comfortable telling this lie, which she would repeat to others in the media.

This appeared to close the explosive issue.

Castle Grande/Whitewater then became a non-issue in the 1992 presidential campaign.

Federal prosecutors remained on the trail, however, and eventually, and  over Hillary’s objections, the administration agreed to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate what was then called “Whitewater.”

In 1994, the Castle Grande billing records were subpoenaed but they were not produced at that time.

A year and a half later, Carolyn Huber, a White House employee, found the billing records in the private quarters of the first family, in a container located outside of Mrs. Clinton’s private office. Huber later stated, that not knowing what they were, she packed them up and took them to her own office. Only later, in early 1996, did she realize that these were the famous billing records that prosecutors were after.

The billing records were then produced, two years late. And Hillary’s fingerprints were discovered on all of them.

The records show that Hillary Clinton billed time for work on Castle Grande, and was the billing partner for this representation. More than that, they show that she and Hubbell performed legal services — described, for example, as “conference with Seth Ward” or just “Seth Ward” — on every day in which federal prosecutors had found that McDougal and his crime partners had committed  acts in furtherance of their unlawful conspiracy e.g., backdating documents and making false loans.

In effect, the billing records very clearly placed Hillary Clinton and Hubbell at the scene of the crime, and in fact, co-conspirators in a criminal venture.

The special counsel subsequently indicted Hubbell for fraud against federal regulators.. The fraud consisted of concealing from federal agents and investigators the true role of Hubbell, the Rose law firm, and Hillary Clinton in Castle Grande.

Out of concern for the White House, the indictment referred to Hillary only as “Rose’s 1985-86 billing partner.” As such, Hillary appears throughout the indictment. She is referred to approximately three dozen times.

Hillary Clinton was slated to be called as a witness at Hubbell’s trial.

Her attorney met with lawyers from the special counsel’s office to try to persuade them that the charges had nothing to do with Hillary. This absurd claim was rejected. The very next morning, Hubbell’s lawyer informed the special counsel that he would plead guilty.

Throughout the Whitewater/Castle Grande scandal, Hillary Clinton’s actions were to stonewall and deceive. She lied about her role in the swindle, personally removed and destroyed pertinent documents, and vigorously opposed the appointment of a special investigative counsel.

The recent email scandal isn’t just a reprise of the Castle Grande document theft and destruction but is a logical outgrowth of it.

She did it once and she did it again.

What illegal behavior could Hillary Clinton’s instincts have produced is if she had been elected president?

And after leaving the White House, Hillary was forced to return White House china, furniture and artwork that she had stolen

After this issue was aired in the Washington Post, the Clintons announced that they would pay the government nearly $86,000 for items that were actually government property. A few days after that, they also returned about $48,000 worth of furniture and other valuable objects that they had improperly taken.

Did the Russians put Hillary and her husband up to this?

Only time, and the Washington Post, will tell.

 

A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs

December 9 2016

by Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

That the emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked – and thus should be disregarded – was classic Fake News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign, anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with claims that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.

The most damaging such claim came from MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance. As I documented on October 11, he tweeted what he – for some bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.” That tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested with added credibility by Clinton-supporting journalists like Reid and Frum (“expert to take seriously”).

All of that, in turn, led to an article in something called “The Daily News Bin” with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton.” This classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others – was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.

From the start, it was obvious that it was this accusation from Clinton supporters – not the WikiLeaks documents – that was a complete fraud, perpetrated on the public as deliberate disinformation. With regard to the claim about the Podesta emails, now we know exactly who created it in the first instance: a hard-core Clinton fanatic.

When Nance – MSNBC’s “intelligence analyst” – issued his “Official Warning,” he linked to a tweet that warned: “Please be skeptical of alleged #PodestaEmails. Trumpists are dirtying docs.” That tweet, in turn, linked to a tweet from an anonymous account calling itself “The Omnivore,” which had posted an obviously fake transcript purporting to be a Hillary Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs. Even though that fake document was never published by WikiLeaks, that was the entire basis for the MSNBC-inspired claim that some of the WikiLeaks documents were doctored.

But the person who created that forged Goldman Sachs transcript was not a “Trumpist” at all; he was a devoted supporter of Hillary Clinton. In the Daily Beast, the person behind the anonymous “The Omnivore” account unmasks himself as “Marco Chacon,” a self-professed creator of “viral fake news” whose targets were Sanders and Trump supporters (he specialized in blatantly fake anti-Clinton frauds with the goal of tricking her opponents into citing them, so that they would be discredited). When he wasn’t posting fabricated news accounts designed to make Clintons’ opponents look bad, his account looked like any other standard pro-Clinton account: numerous negative items about Sanders and then Trump, with links to many Clinton-defending articles.

In his Daily Beast article, published on November 21, Chacon describes how he manufactured the forged Goldman Sachs speech transcript. He says he did it prior to learning that the WikiLeaks releases of Podesta emails contained actual Clinton speech excerpts to Wall Street banks. But once he realized WikiLeaks had published actual Clinton transcripts, Chacon began trying to lure people he disliked – Clinton critics – into believing that his forged speeches were real, so that he could prove they were gullible and dumb.

Sadly for Chacon, however, the people who ended up getting fooled by his Fake News items were the nation’s most prominent Clinton supporters, including supposed experts and journalists from MSNBC who used his obvious fakes to try to convince the world that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and thus should be ignored. That it was pro-Clinton journalists who spread his Fake News as real now horrifies even Chacon:

The tweet went super-viral. It started an almost trending—but still going today—hashtag #bucketoflosers. A tweet declaring it a bad forgery was picked up by Malcolm Nance, an intelligence analyst for MSNBC among others, who tweeted to be wary of the WikiLeaks release. . .

That did not stop Nance, who with a firm intelligence background should have been able to easily spot the fake with “(chaos)” actually written in the side bar and “((makes air quotes))” written before the “bucket of losers” piece in the completely comical so-called transcript, from referencing the document and saying: “Official Warning: #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done” . . . .

At the end of the day, did this change anything? I don’t know. I think I inadvertently hurt WikiLeaks, which I’m not proud of—but I’m not too sorry about either. I suspect that some people came to realize that they were believing in fake things.

That last sentence – that as a result of his fraud, “some people came to realize that they were believing in fake things” – is false, at least insofar as it applies to people like Eichenwald, Frum, Nance and Reid. Even though it was clear from the start to any rational and honest person that there was zero evidence that any of the WikiLeaks documents were doctored, and even though (as Chacon himself says) nobody minimally informed (let alone supposed “intelligence experts”) should have been fooled by his blatant Fake News, none of the journalists who lied to the public about these WikiLeaks documents have even once acknowledged what they did.

Their Fake News tweets – warning people to view the WikiLeaks documents as fake – remain posted, with no subsequent retraction or acknowledgment of the falsehoods that they spread about the WikiLeaks archive. That includes MSNBC segments which spread this accusation.

Indeed, not only should it have been blatantly obvious that Chacon’s anonymously posted document did not impugn the WikiLeaks archive, but also the slightest research would have revealed that the person who manufactured the forgery was a Clinton supporter, not a “Trumpist” or a Kremlin operative. Indeed, one of the Clinton-criticizing journalists who Chacon tried to trick, Michael Tracey, said exactly this at the time. But because his facts contradicted the MSNBC/Newsweek political agenda, they were ignored in favor of the lie that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and doctored.

I will be shocked if any of them now acknowledge this even with Chacon’s confession. That’s because MSNBC has repeatedly proven that it tolerates Fake News and outright lies from its personalities as long as those lies are in service of the right candidate (when Democrats were smearing Jill Stein as a Kremlin stooge, Reid’s program aired Nance’s lie to MSNBC viewers that Stein had previously hosted her own show on RT: an utter fabrication that MSNBC, to this day, has never corrected or even acknowledged despite multiple requests from FAIR).

Every day, literally, you can turn on MSNBC and hear various people so righteously lamenting the spread of “Fake News.” Yet MSNBC itself not only spreads Fake News but refuses to correct it when it is exposed. How do they have any credibility to denounce Fake News? They do not.That journalists and “experts” outright lied to the public this way in order to help their favorite candidate is obviously dangerous. This was most powerfully pointed out – ironically – by Marty Baron, Executive Editor of the Washington Post, who told The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg: “If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”

Exactly: if you have prominent journalists telling the public to trust an anonymous group with a false McCarthyite blacklist, or telling it to ignore informative documents on the grounds that they are fake when there is zero reason to believe that they are fake, that is a direct threat to democracy. In the case of the Podesta emails, these lies were perpetrated by the very factions that have taken to most loudly victimizing themselves over the spread of Fake News.

But the problem here goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.

Note: the article was lightly edited to reflect the correct date of the Daily Beast article: November 21.

Washington Post Appends Editor’s Note to Russian Propaganda Story

December 7, 2016

by Andrew Beaujon

The Washingtonian

A lengthy editor’s note appeared Wednesday atop Craig Timberg‘s November 24 Washington Post story claiming that a Russian propaganda campaign aided the spread of “fake news” in the 2016 presidential election. The note lays some interesting distance between the newspaper and the work its article draws from.

“Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.”

The note follows intense criticism of the article. It was “rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations,” Intercept reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton wrote, calling PropOrNot, one of the groups whose research was cited in Timberg’s piece, “anonymous cowards.” One of the sites PropOrNot cited as Russian-influenced was the Drudge Report.

The piece’s description of some sharers of bogus news as “useful idiots” could “theoretically include anyone on any social-media platform who shares news based on a click-bait headline,” Mathew Ingram wrote for Fortune.

But perhaps the biggest issue was PropOrNot. As Adrian Chen wrote for the New Yorker, its methods were really messy, and verification of its work was nearly impossible. While “fake news” worked to Trump’s advantage, and email hacks of Clinton staffers pointed to Russian bad hombres, Chen writes, “the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier.”

Islamic Terrorism and the United States

December 9, 2016

by Harry von Johnson, PhD

In early January of 2016, Radical Islamic (IS) leaders in Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Afghanistan and the Sudan proclaimed a holy war, (or jihad) against selected Christian nations.

Primary amongst their enemies was the United States, mainly because of its unquestioning support for the state of Israel.

Targets of opportunity are to be American financial interests throughout the world, American political and military personalities, (both inside and outside of the United States),in Washington and the following projected areas of American strategic, political and sociological significance:

1st Special Forces Group (Airborne)

2nd Vice Presidential DC Area Bunker

63 US-based Nuclear Power Plants

  • Arkansas Nuclear
  • Beaver Valley
  • Braidwood
  • Browns Ferry
  • Brunswick
  • Byron
  • Callaway
  • Calvert Cliffs
  • Catawba
  • Clinton
  • Columbia
  • Comanche Peak
  • Cooper Station
  • Crystal River
  • Davis-Besse
  • Diablo Canyon
  • Donald C. Cook
  • Dresden
  • Duane Arnold
  • Enrico Fermi
  • Joseph Farley
  • Fitzpatrick
  • Fort Calhoun
  • Grand Gulf
  • B. Robinson
  • Edwin Hatch
  • Hope Creek
  • Indian Point
  • Kewaunee
  • LaSalle County
  • Limerick
  • McGuire
  • Millstone
  • Monticello
  • Nine Mile Point
  • North Anna
  • Oconee
  • Oyster Creek
  • Palo Verde
  • Peach Bottom
  • Perry
  • Pilgrim
  • Point Beach
  • Prairie Island
  • Quad Cities
  • River Bend
  • Robert E Ginna
  • Salem
  • San Onofre
  • Seabrook
  • Lucie
  • Sequoyah
  • Shearon Harris
  • South Texas Project
  • Virgil C. Summer
  • Surry
  • Susquehanna
  • Three Mile Island
  • Turkey Point
  • Vermont Yankee
  • Vogtle
  • Waterford
  • Watts Bar
  • Wolf Creek

AF New Boston Sat Tracking Station

Air Force Satellite Control Network

American Type Culture Collection

American controlled oil pipelines in:

Alaska, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Georgia

Anniston Chemical Depot

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory-West

AU Defence Signals Directorate

Barksdale Air Force Base WSA

Beale Air Force Base

Big Hole Communications Bunker

Bremerton Submarine facilities

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Bunker on White Rock Road

Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant

Camp David Presidential Retreat

Capenhurst Phone-Tap Tower

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters at Langley, VA

Charleston Naval Weapons Station

Chesepeake Car Tunnel, Norfolk, VA

Chevron Refinery, Pascagoula, MS

Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center

CIA Main Headquarters, Langley, VA

CIA Office of Special Technology

CIA Special Training Center

CIA/NSA Special Collection Service

Cudjoe Key Air Force Station

Defense Nuclear Weapons School

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

DIRNSA Residence

Dixon/Stockton Naval Radio Facilities

DoD WMD Contractors

Downtown Manhattan Telephone Hubs

Drug Enforcement Administration

Edwards AFB/NASA Dryden Flight Center

Fairchild Air Force Base WSA

FBI Academy

FBI CALEA Wiretap Homes

Former NSA Rosman Station

Ft. Meade SIGINT Operations Center

GCHQ

Ft. Huachuca Intelligence Center, AZ

Grand Coolie Dam system

Grand Forks Air Force Base

Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Hoover Dam and associated power grid

Horizon-Backscatter Radar

HQ of the Homeland Security Dept.

Indian Point Nuclear Generating Sta.

Janet Airlines Terminal

Jim Creek Naval Radio Station

Kennedy Space Center

Kirtland Nuclear Storage Complex

Lake Kickapoo Space Surveillance Station.

Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Pleasanton, CA

Letterkenny Army Depot

MacDill AFB and Central Command

Marfa v. Chinati Foundation

Marshall Space Flight Center

McGregor Naval Weapons Industrial. Reserve

Medina Regional SIGINT Center

Millstone Nuclear Power Plant

Minot Air Force Base

Mississippi River Bridges

Moyock Naval SIGINT Station

National Air Intelligence Center

National Football League Stadiums

National Reconnaissance Office

National Reconnaissance Office HQ

National Security Agency , Ft. Meade, MD

Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek

Naval Intelliggence Group, Washington, DC

Naval Maritime Intelligence Center

Naval Missile Range Facility

Naval Radio Station Driver

Naval Security Group at Winter Harbor

Naval Security Group San Diego

Naval Security Group Skaggs Island

Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Naval Station Norfolk, VA

Naval Submarine Base Bangor

Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay

Naval Submarine Base New London/NSGA Groton

Naval Surface Warfare Center

Naval War College

Naval Weapons Station Earle

Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach

Naval/Marine Intel Training Center

Nellis Nuclear Weapons Storage Area

Nevada Nuclear Test Site

New York City Water Reservoirs

Newport Chemical Depot

North Island Naval Air Station WSA

NRO at Moffett Field

NSA Bad Aibling DE Echelon Station

NSA Friendship Annex

NSA Geraldton AU Echelon Station

NSA Kent Island Research Facility

NSA Leitrim CA Echelon Station

NSA Menwith Hill UK Echelon Station

NSA Misawa JP Echelon Station

NSA Neighborhood

NSA Pine Gap AU Echelon Station

NSA Sugar Grove US Echelon Station

NSA Waihopai NZ Echelon Station

NSA Yakima US Echelon Station

NSGA at North Island NAS, San Diego

Nuclear Device Assembly Facilities

NYPD Ammunition Depot

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Panama Canal locks

Pantex Nuclear Warhead Plant

Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant

Presidential Homes in Texas and Maine (Bush Administration)

Pueblo Chemical Weapons Depot

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard

Radio Station Cutler

Ready Reserve Force

San Nicolas Isle Missile Test Center

Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant

Site R – Raven Rock Governmental Bunker

Statue of Liberty

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Sugar Grove Echelon Station

Tooele and Deseret Chemical Depots

Twenty-eight US Commercial  Airports

  • Chicago (Ohare and Midway)
  • Denver
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle
  • Los Angeles
  • Miami
  • Washington, D.C. (Dulles and Reagan)
  • Boston
  • Houston
  • Oakland
  • Sacramento
  • San Diego
  • Atlanta
  • Albuquerque
  • Phoenix
  • Tucson
  • Wichita
  • Philadelphia
  • Newark
  • Columbus
  • Klamath Falls
  • Lauderdale
  • Orlando
  • Anchorage
  • Harrisburg
  • Detroit

Two Rock Ranch Communications Station.

  1. Army Intelligence Center, Ft. Huachuca, AZ

US Army Chemical Center, Ft. Detrick, MD

US Bullion Depositories

US Nuclear Weapons Storage Areas

US Secret Service Training Facility

US Transatlantic Cable Landings

US Transpacific Cable Landings

US Vice Presidential Official Residence, Washington, DC (Naval Observatory)

Warren Air Force Base

Warrenton Training Center Site D, Warrenton, VA

White House, Washington, D.C.

Whiteman Air Force Base WSA

Wilson Blvd Tech Centers, Arlington, VA

WIPP Nuclear Waste Target

Yakima Echelon Station

Yorktown Naval Weapons Station

Yucca Mountain Project

 

Note: This information is from a German intelligence source and is considered reliable.Further,it is reported that radical Muslims have obtained a small quantity of verola virus (smallpox) and are considering its use in a massive terror campaign.

 Turkey’s Erdogan cements his power

The Turkish government has presented plans to parliament that, if approved, would change the constitution and see the country adopt a presidential system, expanding Erdogan’s powers. Tom Stevenson reports from Istanbul.

December 9, 2016

DW

The plans envision a radical shake up of Turkey’s existing parliamentary system, enhancing the constitutional power of the president and allowing the establishment of a formal link between Turkey’s president and a political party.

The government claims that under the new constitution a presidential system will avoid potential conflict between the president and prime minister, produce a better environment for economic development, and is more suited to Turkey’s culture and history.

The draft constitutional changes were agreed earlier this month by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the right-wing nationalist movement party (MHP).

To pass into law, the 12-article amendment will now need to be passed by a two-thirds majority in parliament and then ratified in a national referendum. According to the AKP’s constitutional commission chairman, Mustafa Şentop, the draft is likely to pass parliament and the referendum could be held next April. A senior government official contacted by DW said that Turkey had experienced a lot of problems in the past due to weak coalition governments. “The average coalition government survived for 15 months and people from across the political spectrum believe that the country needs a mechanism that will produce a united executive,” he told DW.

Questionable motives

However, some are skeptical of the government’s motives.

“The whole thing will have enormous effects, it’s not just change to the system, it’s a total change to the whole national regime,” said one Turkish judge, a former justice of the European Court of Human Rights and former member of Turkey’s constitutional committee.

“The purpose of this appears to be simply to give more powers to the president. But we already have enough power concentration in the hands of one man as it is. What Turkish democracy needs is for power to be shared more widely, not more concentration of power.”

Under the current rules, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is legally prevented from maintaining ties to a political party such as the AKP although opponents claim these rules have been flaunted for years.

“It’s clear that the current president will also become chairman of the ruling party and with that he will be able to control the parliament, because the majority party will be the chairman of that majority too,” the judge, who wished to remain anonymous, told DW.

“The whole idea of a parliamentary system is to curb the powers of a president so as not to lead to authoritarianism and dictatorship. But under these plans, the president will be able to directly control the judges and the legislative branch.”

The judge also claimed that contrary to the government’s claims, the history of Turkish democracy has been based on a parliamentary system that goes back to 1876.

“We do need a new constitution because the current one is a post-coup constitution from the 1980s, it is designed to protect the state against the people and of course that should be the other way around,” he said. “But this is not how you write a new constitution. You need a democratic method for writing it: wide consultation with all segments of society.”

Greater presidential powers

Turkey is currently ruled under a state of emergency laws instituted following a failed military coup in July that has resulted in large scale crackdowns on government opponents – a bad time, critics say, for democratic consultations on a new constitution.

“What I don’t understand is why we are going through this process while there is a state of emergency in place, is it really necessary to do this right now when we can’t all follow the process?” said Zeynep Deniz, a civil servant working in Istanbul.

“It seems like we are going through a period where political power is becoming personified in the president, and this is creating more and more polarization between government supporters and opponents,” she told DW.

According to Karabekir Akkoyunlu, assistant professor at the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, the new plans may allow Erdogan to extend his period in office well beyond the current term limit.

“The draft plan calls for an election in 2019. Since this would be a constitutional change, Erdogan can start afresh under the new system, and run as if it’s the first time. Then he can stand for re-election in 2024, meaning he can stay in power until 2029 without having the bend the rules,” Akkoyunlu told DW.

“The new powers would effectively complete Turkey’s regime change; its transition into a super-executive presidential system.”

A new Turkey?

Akkoyunlu argues that until now Erdogan has been relying on his charisma, the AKP’s parliamentary majority, and the state of emergency to govern the country, however under the existing rules he could theoretically be taken to court for violating the constitution due to his close relationship with AKP.

“This is partly why he is suppressing all potential challengers to his authority within politics and the state bureaucracy, while simultaneously pushing to change the constitution; so that the new system is established before he can be brought down and tried,” Akkoyunulu said.

In his view, the plans for a new constitution are yet another stage in the AKP’s attempt to forge a new Turkey in a symbolic break from the secular military order imposed by the governments of the pre-AKP days.

“Driven by a personality cult, the new regime is illiberal, majoritarian, anti-western, nationalist and Islamist in character; at least that’s how it’s meant to be. Ironically, despite its historical opposition of the secular ‘old Turkey,’ the consolidation of the ‘new Turkey’ also uses a lot of the same top-down methods of its nemesis.Trump,

 

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