TBR News June 1, 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. June 1, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for June 1 :”Working where I do you get to read papers, listen to gossip and so on and from this, I have come to the opinion that the present administration is run by, and is full of, nasty, crooked and vicious sociopaths who would be better off in a jail cell than the White House. This will happen, true, but before it does, the warped ones will do terrible damage to the image of the United States and its many honest citizens. The sooner these creepos depart the scene, the better.”

 

The Table of Contents

• ‘No idea too lunatic’: how Trump’s shock troops attack US democracy
• Round Robin letter to right wing Trump American support groups
• Iran and the Coalition of the Weird
• Trump’s Tariff Threat Sends Mexico, Lawmakers and Businesses Scrambling 
• U.S. won’t ‘tiptoe’ around China with Asia stability at threat: defense chief
• U.S. won’t ‘tiptoe’ around China with Asia stability at threat: defense chief
• Donald Trump’s Russian Connections
• Encyclopedia of American Loons
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

‘No idea too lunatic’: how Trump’s shock troops attack US democracy

An army of supporters amplify the president’s wildest claims, encouraging his conspiracy-minded tendencies

June 1, 2019

by David Smith in Washington

The Guardian

Donald Trump once declared: “I alone can fix it.” He never made the claim: “I alone can break it.” When it comes to softening up institutions, eroding norms and chipping away at the foundations of democracy, it takes a village.

While the president has led the way in stirring outrage, he is aided and abetted by an entire ecosystem of activists, officials, politicians, pundits and social media stars. Far from being a lone voice screaming into the void, Trump can be confident that every baseless conspiracy theory he generates will be echoed, endorsed and enlarged – whatever the cost to the rule of law.

“There’s no idea too lunatic or extreme that Trump cannot find someone to amplify them for him,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative broadcaster and journalist. “This is the new political normal. It’s no wonder that Trump is not deterred from saying crazy things, because he knows there will always be someone willing to go out there and repeat them.”

A case in point is the fallout from the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump has spent two years throwing out words like “coup”, “deep state”, “hoax”, “treason” and “witch-hunt” with unnerving insouciance. When Mueller’s report emerged last month, Trump falsely claimed it totally cleared him of collusion and obstructing justice. There duly came a chorus of support, from Republicans in Congress to the extreme fringes of the web.

Emboldened, Trump is going further. He alleges without evidence that the FBI committed treason, spied on his election campaign and tried to rob him of victory. Last week, he gave the attorney general, William Barr, authority to declassify information about the origins of the investigation. Again, there is enthusiastic backing from cheerleaders who holler “investigate the investigators” and suggest that Barack Obama, not Trump, should be on trial.

Among them is Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser turned rightwing pundit. “The Kraken has been unleashed,” he declared in a beyond-parody video. “Watch, in the next two days, the rats, the hyenas, start to eat each other. Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, even Obama. The fun and games have begun!”

Among the targets of the backlash is Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who helped lead the investigation and exchanged anti-Trump text messages during the 2016 election with the FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was in a relationship. Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team following the discovery of the texts and later fired from the FBI. Page also left the bureau.

On the same night Gorka hailed the Kraken, the former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski went on Fox Business. He sought to blame the investigation on the former vice-president Joe Biden, who may be Trump’s opponent at the polls next year. He also predicted that in March or April next year Strzok and Page, along with the former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, “will be on trial for the crimes they committed against the fourth amendment and against this president”.

Two days later, this far-out narrative went mainstream. Liz Cheney, a member of the House Republican leadership, appeared on ABC, one of America’s major TV networks.

“I think what is really crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Page, who were in charge of launching this investigation, and they were saying things like: ‘We must stop this president, we need an insurance policy against this president,’” she said.

“That, in my view, when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason.”

When a clip of Cheney’s comments went viral, Gorka was among those to eagerly retweet it.

It was just one example of the way in which, critics say, Trump’s allies recycle his most outlandish claims, spread conspiracy theories and slowly but surely wear down institutions so he can one day shatter them. The reward is publicity, pundit work and presidential attention and retweets. The result for the country could yet prove to be an “imperial presidency”.

Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “Liz Cheney is a member of the House leadership, a daughter of the former vice-president, and for her to be using the word ‘treason’ about FBI investigators is stunning – and yet in the new climate it was just shrugged off.

“You have this new level of rhetoric talking about political opponents as ‘traitors’ who, in theory, would deserve the death penalty. The president of the United States has pushed this line. Who knows what are the long-term consequences of this, because it certainly ramps up the coarsening of our political culture.”

‘A failed Democrat coup’

The constellations of Trump amplifiers are mutually reinforcing as they turn TV studios and social media into echo chambers. Within the president’s own family, Donald Trump Jr is a prolific interviewee and tweeter, constantly championing his father, deriding Democrats and trafficking in incendiary gossip about Mueller, Comey, Strzok and Page.

Within the White House, the counselor Kellyanne Conway, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and press secretary Sarah Sanders are reliable defenders. Within Congress, they are ably backed by Cheney, Congressman Matt Gaetz – “Comey, Clapper, and Brennan all are in jeopardy” – Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and Senator Lindsey Graham, who this month suggested that Trump Jr should ignore a congressional subpoena.

Elsewhere in the forest, Trump can count on the vocal support of rightwing pressure groups such as the American Conservative Union, National Rifle Association and Turning Point USA, whose founder and president, Charlie Kirk, tweeted on Friday: “BOOM!/ Despite constant fake news/ The two year Russia investigation/ And a failed Democrat coup/ President Trump’s approval rating just hit its highest point in two years!”

Judicial Watch, which claims to be a “conservative non-partisan educational foundation promoting transparency, accountability, & integrity in government”, is fighting Trump’s corner ferociously. It pumps out a constant stream of damning claims about Obama and Hillary Clinton, promising to “expose Obama’s cover ups of Clinton’s crimes”. This week its president, Tom Fitton, described the Mueller investigation as an “abuse of power” and called for the special counsel himself to be investigated. On Friday he tweeted: “AG Barr’s truth-telling on Spygate abuses of @RealDonaldTrump and its threat to our republican form of government is essential reading.”

There are also outspoken Christian evangelical backers such as Jerry Falwell Jr and Franklin Graham, the social media personalities Diamond and Silk and the actors James Woods and Jon Voight, the latter of whom who urged last week: “Let us stand up for this truth: that President Trump is the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”

None of this would gain much traction without willing media outlets. Trump is a regular viewer of and interviewee on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The line between the White House and the network has become increasingly blurred.

When Mueller broke a two-year silence this week to deliver a statement, highlighting that he had not cleared Trump of a crime, Fox News’ opinion hosts got to work. Tucker Carlson described the special counsel as “sleazy and dishonest”, Sean Hannity said “he’s basically full of crap” and Laura Ingraham insisted: “The deep state set Candidate Trump up after it became obvious he was going to win the nomination.”

There is ample backup from Breitbart News, the Federalist – “Lawsuit Exposes How The Media And Deep State Hatched The Russiagate Hoax” – the One America News Network and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, along with media figures such as Lou Dobbs, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. But none has the power of Fox News, the top-rated cable network, where Don Jr, the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, the ex-White House press secretary Sean Spicer and others sell the president’s message to millions of viewers.

Kurt Bardella, a former House oversight committee and Breitbart spokesman, said: “People who worked for [Trump] or are making money off him go out and say something on Fox News. The president will watch it and regurgitate it. They will then get to say, ‘Like the president said …’ If you took Fox out of the equation, you’d go back to the old media ecosystem.”

‘A delicate counter-offensive’

It does not take much for a wild idea to hop from the dark reaches of the internet to Fox News to Capitol Hill to the White House and back again. Today’s fringe rumour is tomorrow’s Republican conventional wisdom. Some argue that paves the way for a constitutional crisis.

Bardella added: “Trump’s congressional enablers talk about these conspiracy theories and legitimise them. Apparently the attorney general sees himself as Trump protector rather than the defender of justice. There’s nothing to stop them trying to chase down these conspiracy theories and using all the official tools at their disposal to do so.”

However, the Trump presidency has met resistance from activists, Democrats and institutions.

Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, suggested that the Trump ecosystem would not have everything its own way.

“There are wealthy Republicans who are uncomfortable with Sebastian Gorka and the like,” she said. “The Republican establishment will push back through Fox, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. The titans of the economy will put up with stuff only so long.”

Even Fox News is not as monolithic as many assume and contains critical voices. This week the host Shep Smith told viewers: “The president attacking the investigator, true to pattern.”

Schiller added: “Fox has let Chris Wallace, Brit Hume and Shep Smith off the range. They’ve done town halls with Democrats. There’s a delicate counter-offensive against the power of the president.”

 

Round Robin letter to right wing Trump American support groups

June 1, 2019

by Robert Johnson

America was founded in 1620 by Religious Dissenters, True Christians, who fled from secular persecutions in England. They set up a religious community in Plymouth Bay and flourished greatly.

But in subsequent years, America drifted away from her True Christian origins and became a nest of Secularism. Americans have turned away from the One True God to worship Mammon and materialism! Self-indulgence has replaced self-discipline and the cell phone has replaced Our Lord Jesus Christ in daily importance!

But rejoice in your hearts because the True Disciples of Christ have organized to save America from Secular Humanism and hedonism and we are now at the very gates of the True Kingdom of Heaven on earth! The True Disciples have begun their Sacred Mission by gaining virtual control over the Republican Party in almost every state in the Union, have elected a President of our One True Faith, have filled the halls of Congress with Representatives of both the people and Christ the Lord! We are well on our way to reestablish the True Christian nation, under God Almighty, that was founded in 1620.

After years of suffering the watering down of American society by the uni-sex, uni-race forces, America finally has a President who recognizes the vital importance of a white, Christian society and whose aim of cleansing America of alien elements is the true aim of true Americans.

An army of former, imported black slaves, an even larger army of dark-skinned rejects from Central America have flooded America, bringing drugs and a lower standard of living with them. The imported slaves have become the foundation of a degenerate society, devoted to producing an army of welfare children with the brains of chickens.

Donald Trump was elected by the white, and concerned, citizens of this country to cleanse the national stables of impacted filth and return America to her rightful position as leader of the Free World.

Forced integration, gay rights, civil rights, feminism, minorities, taxes, and other issues can be viewed as the result of the American Republic jumping the tracks during the Civil War and being out of control.

Now, with the advent of a True Christian as a President of the United States, we Christians stand closer now to establishing a truly Christian-based government in this country since 1620!

By faith and determination, we have placed many of our people into the ranks of the Republican Party; have organized local elections to put our members on vital school boards where they can, and have, successfully supplanted the false Darwinism with the Divinely Inspired Biblical Creationism.

We have elected members to serve in Congress who are sensitive to our needs and wishes but we need far more in order to establish a firm majority.

Since 2016 dozens of True Christians, by Presidential order have been placed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress.

The earlier God-sent Bush Administration established one of the most righteous sexual health agendas in the Western world.

But the reawakening of America is being blocked by the enemies of the True State who are fearful that our President and his supporters will ruin their plans for global integration so their answer to this is to fight our President and his legion of the righteous, to block, and eventually destroy his goal to make America great again. But his enemies do not realize the growing control and spiritual influence of True Christians in establishing strict control of the American political and educational realms.

Now danger appears and the enemies of white America are working under cover to control and destroy the actions of our President. Rumors in a lying press, many devious plots being launched and plans drawn up to break the President, return to globalism and open our borders to a flood of criminals and degenerates who detest the American system and bring with them disease and drugs. What is to be done?

The true Americans and the loyal supporters of our President must unite and fight against the common enemies of white Americans.

Unite and organize so that by your strength, and your weapons, you can show the enemies of the True State that the armies of True America, by the same force of arms that made America a great country under George Washington, can once again drive out the alien trash and reestablish America as the true leader of the world.

What a man cannot say in words, his gun can say in action.

The bullets of the Lord will cleanse this country of the Liberal Democrats, sexual degenerates and racial trash that have brought America to the brink of destruction.

Copies of this call to arms are sent to the following activist organizations in the United States.

• 3 Percenters
• ACT for America
• Advent Christian General Conference
• All White America-Florida
• Alliance Defending Freedom
• Alternative Right-Alabama
• Alternative Right-Georgia
• Alternative Right-Illinois
• AltRight Corporation-Virginia
• America First
• America First Committee-Illinois
• America’s Promise Ministries
• American Border Patrol/American Patrol
• American Camp Guards Society
• American Family Association
• American Freedom Party
• American Freedom Party- Texas
• American Freedom Party- New York
• American Freedom Party- Indiana
• American Freedom Party- Montana
• American Freedom Party- New York
• American Freedom Party- North Dakota
• American Freedom Party- California
• American Freedom Union- Pennsylvania
• American Militia Alliance
• American Nazi Party- California
• American Nazi Party- Michigan
• American Renaissance
• American Renaissance/New Century Foundation Virginia
• Arizona Border Recon
• Aryan Brotherhood
• Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
• Aryan Nations
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC- Illinois
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC-Missouri
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC- Ohio
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC- Oklahoma
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC- Tennessee
• Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC- Wisconsin
• Aryan Nations Worldwide- Georgia
• Aryan Renaissance Society- New York
• Aryan Renaissance Society-Texas
• Atomwaffen Division-Florida
• Back to Africa Movement
• Blood & Honor
• Brotherhood of Klans
• Center for Security Policy
• Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• Confederate SS Movement
• Conservative Citizens Foundation, Inc.-Missouri
• Council of Conservative Citizens-Maryland
• Council of Conservative Citizens-Missouri
• Fund-Pennsylvania
• Counter-Currents Publishing-New York
• Counter-Currents Publishing-Washington
• Counter-Currents Publishing-California
• Creativity Movement- South Dakota
• Creativity Movement- Illinois
• Creativity Movement- Michigan
• Creativity Movement-Ohio
• Faith and Heritage-Texas
• Forza Nuova- Arizona
• Forza Nuova-New Jersey
• Free American-Arizona
• Gays Must Die Association
• Germania International
• Golden Dawn-New York
• Idaho Light Foot Militia
• Identity Evropa- Georgia
• Identity Evropa-North Carolina
• Identity Evropa-Boulder, Colorado
• Identity Evropa-California
• Identity Evropa-Arizona
• Identity Evropa-Florida
• Identity Evropa-Maryland
• Identity Evropa-Michigan
• Identity Evropa-Minnesota
• Identity Evropa-New Jersey
• Identity Evropa-New York
• Identity Evropa-Oregon
• Identity Evropa-Pennsylvania
• Identity Evropa-Tennessee
• Identity Evropa-Virginia
• Immigrants Out-Alabama
• Immigrants Out-Mississippi
• Immigants Out-Texas
• Immigrants Out-Wyoming
• Liberty University- Lynchburg, Va
• Michigan Militia
• Militia of Montana
• Missouri Citizens Militia
• Missouri Militia
• National Alliance
• National Alliance-West Virginia
• National Alliance-Tennessee
• National Alliance-New Hampshire
• National Alliance-Nevada
• Natonal Association for the Deportion of Aliens
• National Boarderguards
• National Coalition for Immigration Reform
• National Policy Institute- Virginia
• National Vanguard
• Nationalist Women’s Front-California
• New Albion-Maine
• New Order-Wisconsin
• New York Light Foot Militia
• Noble Breed Kindred-California
• Northwest Front-Washington
• NS Publications-Michigan
• Oath Keepers
• Occidental Dissent-Alabama
• Occidental Observer- California
• Ohio Defense Force
• Operation Homeland-Virginia
• Patriot Front- Illinois
• Patriot Fron-California
• Patriot Front-Washington
• Patriot Front-Texas
• Patriotic Flags-South Carolina
• Pennsylvania Military Reserve
• Pioneer Little Europe Kalispell Montana
• PzG Inc.-South Dakota
• Racial Nationalist Party of America-New York
• Radix Journal-Montana
• Real Republic of Florida-Florida
• Rise Above Movement-California
• RootBocks-Indiana
• Sons of the South-Georgia
• Stormfront-Florida
• Texas Light Foot Militia
• The Army of God
• The Aryan Terror Brigade
• The Concerned Christians
• The Creativity Movement
• The Daily Stormer-Alabama
• The Daily Stormer-Alaska
• The Daily Stormer-Arizona
• The Daily Stormer-California
• The Daily Stormer-Colorado
• The Daily Stormer-Connecticut
• The Daily Stormer-Florida
• The Daily Stormer-Georgia
• The Daily Stormer-Illinois
• The Daily Stormer-Indiana
• The Daily Stormer-Iowa
• The Daily Stormer-Kansas
• The Daily Stormer-Kentucky
• The Daily Stormer-Massachusetts
• The Daily Stormer-Michigan
• The Daily Stormer-Minnesota
• The Daily Stormer-Missouri
• The Daily Stormer-Montana
• The Daily Stormer-Nebraska
• The Daily Stormer-Nevada
• The Daily Stormer-New Jersey
• The Daily Stormer-New York
• The Daily Stormer-North Carolina
• The Daily Stormer -Oregon
• The Daily Stormer-Pennsylvania
• The Daily Stormer-South Carolina
• The Daily Stormer-Texas
• The Daily Stormer-Utah
• The Daily Stormer-Vermont
• The Daily Stormer-Virginia
• The Daily Stormer-Washington
• The Daily Stormer-Ohio
• The Dominonist Movement of America
• The Family
• The Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation-Virginia
• The neo-Confederate League of the South
• The New Byzantium Project-Virginia
• The Phineas Priesthood
• The Political Cesspool-Tennessee
• The Racial Purity Association of Texas
• The Right Stuff-Georgia
• The Right Stuff-Texas
• The Right Stuff-Maryland
• The Right Stuff-Texas
• The Right Stuff-Nevada
• The Right Stuff-New York
• The Right Stuff-Nebraska
• The Right Stuff-Pennsylvania
• The Right Stuff- Minnesota
• The Right Stuff-Arizona
• The Right Stuff-California
• The Right Stuff-Florida
• The Right Stuff-Indiana
• The Right Stuff-Michigan
• The Right Stuff-Oregon
• The Right Stuff-Texas
• The Right Stuff-Vermont
• The Right Stuff-Virginia
• The Right Stuff-Washington
• The Right Stuff-District of Columbia
• The Right Stuff-New York
• The Social Contract Press-Michigan
• The Sovereign Citizen Movement of the US and Canada
• Traditionalist Worker Party
• Traditionalist Worker Party- Alabama
• Traditionalist Worker Party- North Carolina
• Traditionalist Worker Party- Ohio
• Traditionalist Worker Party-Rhode Island
• Traditionalist Worker Party-Tennessee
• Traditionalist Worker Party-Texas
• Traditionalist Worker Party-Virginia
• Traditionalist Worker Party-Indiana
• Traditionalist Youth Network-Indiana
• True Cascadia-Alaska
• True Cascadia-Idaho
• True Cascadia-Oregon
• True Cascadia-Washington
• Trump Society of Alabama
• Trump Society of Alaska
• Trump Society of Arizona
• Trump Society of Arkansas
• Trump Society of California
• Trump Society of Colorado
• Trump Society of Connecticut
• Trump Society of Delaware
• Trump Society of Florida
• Trump Society of Georgia
• Trump Society of Hawaii
• Trump Society of Idaho
• Trump Society of Illinois
• Trump Society of Indiana
• Trump Society of Iowa
• Trump Society of Kansas
• Trump Society of Kentucky
• Trump Society of Louisiana
• Trump Society of Maine
• Trump Society of Maryland
• Trump Society of Massachusetts
• Trump Society of Michigan
• Trump Society of Minnesota
• Trump Society of Mississippi
• Trump Society of Missouri
• Trump Society of Montana
• Trump Society of Nebraska
• Trump Society of Nevada
• Trump Society of New Hampshire
• Trump Society of New Jersey
• Trump Society of New Mexico
• Trump Society of New York
• Trump Society of North Carolina
• Trump Society of North Dakota
• Trump Society of Ohio
• Trump Society of Oklahoma
• Trump Society of Oregon
• Trump Society of Pennsylvania
• Trump Society of Rhode Island
• Trump Society of South Carolina
• Trump Society of South Dakota
• Trump Society of Tennessee
• Trump Society of Texas
• Trump Society of Utah
• Trump Society of Vermont
• Trump Society of Virginia
• Trump Society of Washington
• Trump Society of West Virginia
• Trump Society of Wisconsin
• Trump Society of Wyoming
• Tyr 1 Security-Virginia
• Vanguard America-Connecticut
• Vanguard America-Florida
• Vanguard America-Georgia
• Vanguard America-Illinois
• Vanguard America-Louisiana
• Vanguard America-Maryland
• Vanguard America-Massachusetts
• Vanguard America-Michigan
• Vanguard America-Nebraska
• Vanguard America-Nevada
• Vanguard America-New Hampshire
• Vanguard America-New Jersey
• Vanguard America-New York
• Vanguard America-North Carolina
• Vanguard America- Ohio
• Vanguard America-Oklahoma
• Vanguard America- Oregon
• Vanguard America-Pennsylvania
• Vanguard America-Rhode Island
• Vanguard America-Texas
• Vanguard America-Virginia
• Vanguard America-Washington
• Vanguard America-West Virginia
• Vanguard America-Wyoming
• Vanguard America-Indiana
• VDARE Foundation-Virginia
• White Aryan Resistance-California
• White Boy Society-Illinois
• White Devil Social Club-Wisconsin
• White Rabbit Radio-Michigan
• White Revolution
• Women for Aryan Unity-Ohio
• White America-District of Columbia
• Women for Aryan Unity- Wisconsin
• Anglican Mission in the Americas
• Assemblies of God USA
• Brethren Church, The
• Brethren in Christ Church
• Christian and Missionary Alliance
• Christian Reformed Church in North America
• Christian Union
• Church of God
• Church of the Nazarene
• Conservative Congregational Christian Conference
• Converge Worldwide
• ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians
• Elim Fellowship
• Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches
• Evangelical Church, The
• Evangelical Congregational Church
• Evangelical Free Church of America
• Evangelical Friends Church International
• Evangelical Presbyterian Church
• Every Nation Churches
• Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches
• Fellowship of Evangelical Churches
• Foursquare Church, The
• Free Methodist Church of North America
• Grace Communion International Worldwide Church of God
• Great Commission Churches
• International Pentecostal Church of Christ
• International Pentecostal Holiness Church
• Missionary Church, Inc.
• Open Bible Church
• Presbyterian Church in America
• Primitive Methodist Church USA
• Royalhouse Chapel International
• Transformation Ministries
• United Brethren in Christ
• The Vineyard USA,

 

Iran and the Coalition of the Weird

Attacking another Middle Eastern country: what could possibly go wrong?

May 18, 2019

by Mike Lofgren

Common Dreams

Ordinarily I am out of sympathy with the sort of disappointed right-winger who makes excuses for Trump because the complete fascist program hasn’t (yet) been instituted. Poor Liddle Donnie, or so goes their dirge, is an involuntary captive of the Washington Swamp, the Deep State, or whatever their nonce term for “pushback by relatively sane people” is. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops in the Oval Office, and the people thwarting Trump are frequently his own appointees. I used to think there was no crying in right-wing zealotry.

However, just this once they may be on to something. Apparently, the current war scare with Iran is mainly the work of Trump’s chickenhawk advisers like John Bolton (who avoided Vietnam for the highly principled reason that he had no desire to die), and the president, for once, is the moderating force trying to rein them in (I never thought I would write that last clause). How is this affair likely to develop?

Unfortunately, we have a template for U.S. policy in the Middle East that goes back half a century. Trump’s newfound moderation will likely last as long as it takes for Benjamin Netanyahu, or Sheldon Adelson, or maybe Mohammed bin Salman, to phone the White House. After all, much of the tension was ramped up by an alleged Israeli intercept of alleged Iranian skullduggery helpfully passed on to Washington. (Looking back on my career in national security, I recall that ever since the late 1980s, Israel was estimating Iran was six months away from developing an atomic bomb; they managed to be six months away for a couple of decades.)

It is almost superfluous to say that igniting a war with Iran will be a colossal catastrophe, given that catastrophe has been the invariable outcome of our past misadventures in that region. Demographically, topographically, and militarily, Iraq was a pushover compared to what Iran would be, yet our “victory” in that country was the very definition of Pyrrhic. But any intelligent person knows that.

When we calculate the potential effects here at home it gets even dicier, for there is an extremely volatile mixture of conflicting interests in the electoral coalition to which Trump panders. Not only could this kindle an intra-party feud in the GOP that would make the Democrats’ split over Vietnam look like a polite disagreement, it could threaten to tip the country (many of whose citizens I have argued before are not in the best of mental health) into something approaching civil war.

The GOP sub-groups with the most direct stake in Iran are what I call the Coalition of the Weird.

It may be objected that the following analysis of these groups is harshly derisive, and the possible outcome I project fancifully pessimistic. But over the last several years, keepers of the conventional wisdom consistently have underplayed the political and social meltdown in the United States, and their sugarcoating of the motives and methods of various interest groups has served neither truth nor social utility. As militaries claim to do (although they rarely do it), we might profit from positing worst-case scenarios.

• Zionist Jewish groups. While a distinct minority within the American Jewish community, hardline Zionists of the AIPAC type along with ultra-Orthodox Jews are influential in the Republican Party generally and for Trump in particular (see: Adelson, Sheldon, and his fellow billionaires). Trump’s stunt of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem has increased their loyalty to him, but that loyalty comes with strings attached that are not reconcilable with Trump’s alleged instincts to stay out of foreign military adventures.

AIPAC worked hand-in-glove with the Likud Party to try to strangle the Iran denuclearization agreement at its inception in the Obama administration. During the Trump administration, the cold logic behind their successful effort to scuttle a deal Iran was complying with has been to provoke that country into a confrontation, while maintaining the cover story that applying maximum pressure on Iran, to include saber rattling, would force it to unconditional capitulation (a theory proven false everywhere it has been applied, from Cuba to North Korea to Venezuela).

• Zionist Christians. The heart and soul of American Christian fundamentalism (which itself is the heart and soul of the Republican base) are the Christian Zionists. While many of them could not find the Middle East on a map, it dominates their dream world as a reification of the Bible stories that fundamentalist preachers impart to their flocks while fleecing them. All manner of blessed things, they say, will happen once Armageddon arrives, but that outcome is dependent on modern Israel rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem (too bad it’s slated for real estate claimed by Muslims, but enough of pesky details).

The interesting wrinkle in the Christian Zionists’ Israelotry is that Jews who do not accept Jesus at the blast of Gideon’s trumpet (i.e., renounce their Judaism) will be condemned to everlasting fire. So far, AIPAC and similar groups have overlooked this embarrassing little feature because the Christian Zionists hew to the AIPAC line more than any other religious group—including Jewish Americans.

But things might not progress as planned. Say, an unlucky hit on an aircraft carrier in the congested waters of the Persian Gulf causes a catastrophic explosion of the hundreds of tons of on-board munitions, leading to a breach of the nuclear reactors and contamination that closes the Gulf, potentially for years. In that event, Christian Zionists having to pump $10 a gallon gas into their SUVs in order to drive to their mega-churches would risk losing their sense of childlike wonder about their previous Middle East fantasies and the people they formerly idolized.

• Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters, neo-reactionaries, and whatnot. It is not a state secret that those guys in the polo shirts hoisting Tikki torches are anti-Semitic. It is also no secret that Trump goes out of his way to avoid condemning them, because, just like hardline AIPAC supporters, they are part of his base. The shooters in the Pittsburgh and San Diego synagogue atrocities certainly fit the profile of Trump supporters riled up by his stochastic incitement against minorities.

There is no question what these people think about our involvement in the Middle East, and there is equally no question who they will blame in the event of a disaster. The only question is, how violent could they get?

• Joe Lunchbucket. Joe is your average working-class to middle-class Republican male. He may not have a dog in the Middle East fight, but he thinks that unlimited quantities of dirt-cheap gasoline are his God-given right. In the big square states, Joe might be a farmer already reeling from the trade war with China; 10 buck diesel for his tractor might penetrate his otherwise impenetrable noggin that Making America Great Again ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. And any time an American’s personal fortunes sink, he typically seeks a scapegoat. This being America, likely as not he’s also armed.

We can only hope that Trump’s feral sense of self-preservation causes him to realize that attacking Iran would not only be a grade one disaster in the Middle East, it could easily bust up his jerry-built electoral coalition in spectacular (and even violent) fashion. While the dismantlement of the Republican Party is something to be wished for, the accompanying fallout on our society could be horrifying.

For all the casualties we have suffered while inflicting mayhem on foreign shores, the combined death toll of all those wars does not equal the one time both sides happened to be red-blooded Americans. On that occasion, the standard weapons were single-shot percussion-lock rifles, not AR-15s that can discharge 20 to 30 rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger.

 

 

Trump’s Tariff Threat Sends Mexico, Lawmakers and Businesses Scrambling 

May 31, 2019

by Ana Swanson

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s threat to punish Mexico with tariffs until it restrains the flow of migrants rattled financial markets on Friday, and the Mexican government, American businesses and Republican lawmakers pressed Mr. Trump to back down.

The president has made frequent use of tariffs to try to force trade concessions from other governments, including Mexico, Canada, China and Europe. But he escalated his aggressive approach by threatening to hit a United States ally and its largest trading partner with tariffs over concerns about immigration.

Some Republican lawmakers, who rarely challenge the president, objected to the move, saying tariffs were the wrong tool to address illegal immigration. Two of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers, including his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, have also raised concerns about the tariffs, people familiar with the situation said.

Mr. Trump, who said he was invoking emergency powers to impose tariffs of up to 25 percent on all Mexican goods, showed no signs of relenting. He said that he would proceed with an initial 5 percent tariff on June 10, which could hurt American consumers and some of its biggest companies, including automakers, agricultural companies and retailers.

“Mexico makes a FORTUNE from the U.S., have for decades, they can easily fix this problem,” the president said on Twitter.

Stock prices slid on Friday, continuing a monthlong retreat, with the S&P 500 down nearly 6 percent this month and the bond market flashing worrying signs of a global recession. Shares in General Motors fell by more than 4 percent, while shares of Ford were down 2 percent.

Mexico quickly dispatched its foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, to Washington to try to dissuade the president from imposing the levies, and he is expected to meet on Wednesday with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington.

In a measured letter to his American counterpart, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that he did not want confrontation and that Mexico was doing as much as possible to stem the flow of migrants “without violating human rights.”

Officials with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business group, said they were exploring the grounds on which they might mount a legal challenge. “Given the gravity of the situation we have to explore all our options,” said Neil Bradley, the chief policy officer at the chamber.

The move capped a furious month of cross-border tariff threats that have rattled investors and raised economists’ concerns about a slowdown in global growth. Only three weeks ago, Mr. Trump increased tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and started the process of taxing nearly everything China sends into the United States. The president has also threatened auto tariffs on Europe and Japan, setting a six-month deadline for those governments to reach a trade agreement with the United States.

On Friday night, the Trump administration announced that on June 5, it would strip India of a special status that exempts billions of dollars of its products from American tariffs, raising new trade tensions with the world’s second-most populous country. The move was taken as retaliation for what Mr. Trump said was India’s failure to provide “equitable and reasonable access to its markets.”

Most economists have warned that large and sustained tariff increases, along with likely retaliation against American farmers and other exporters, will dampen global trade and drag on growth in the United States.

“We don’t know what straw will break the camel’s back here, but Trump is looking like he wants to try to find out,” Timothy Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon, wrote in a blog post on Friday.

Imposing tariffs on Mexican products would be particularly damaging given the tight integration of businesses across North America. Companies like General Motors, Ford and others have built their supply chains around the North American Free Trade Agreement, with borderless operations stretching across Canada, Mexico and the United States.

The United States imported about $347 billion of goods  from Mexico last year, covering items like cars, dishwashers, avocados and mangoes. If tariffs are fully put in place at 25 percent, it would be the equivalent of an $87 billion annual tax increase.

“The White House will need to pass out neck braces if this trade policy whiplash continues for much longer,” said Kip Eideberg, a vice president at the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, which represents companies like Caterpillar and John Deere.

Mr. Trump’s latest move could also effectively kill one of his primary policy goals — getting Congress to pass a revised North American trade pact, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Democrats have already resisted Mr. Trump’s entreaties to pass the agreement, and the new threat could be its death knell

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, warned that following through with the tariffs “would seriously jeopardize passage of U.S.M.C.A., a central campaign pledge of President Trump’s and what could be a big victory for the country.”

“I urge the president to consider other options,” he said.

The new threat of levies against Mexico comes less than two weeks after the administration agreed to lift its tariffs on Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminum, which both the administration and lawmakers greeted as a major step toward passing the revised pact into law.

At the White House, Mr. Lighthizer has been particularly worried about the effect on the trade pact he has spent the last year and a half negotiating, and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, also raised concerns.

But Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, publicly pushed back on the argument, saying the new tariffs should not have any impact.

“These are not tariffs as part of a trade dispute. These are tariffs as part of an immigration problem,” Mr. Mulvaney said in a call with reporters Thursday night. He added that passage of the trade deal was “absolutely not linked” to the tariffs threat.

“The U.S.M.C.A. is a trade matter and completely separate,” Mr. Mulvaney said.

However, Peter Navarro, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, suggested the issue was a matter of trade, saying on CNBC that the tariffs would punish Mexico’s “export” of “illegal immigrants.”

In some ways, the Democrats’ resistance to approving the revised trade pact may have given the president more leeway to act against Mexico. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who plays an outsize role in determining whether the deal gets a House vote, has resisted pressure from the administration to move quickly on the new pact.

In deciding to impose tariffs, the president appears to have taken a calculated risk that Democrats were a bigger impediment to his signature trade deal than tariffs and that threatening Mexico could help him achieve his other big goal: curbing illegal immigration.

Mr. Trump has grown increasingly frustrated by the flood of migrants into the United States — most of them Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence — and the Mexican government’s inability to stop the flow.

In April, Customs and Border Protection officials encountered 109,144 migrants at the southwestern border, the highest total since 2007. The acting secretary of homeland security, Kevin McAleenan, said on Thursday that the total figure for May was on pace to break that record “significantly.”

On Wednesday, a day before the president announced the tariffs, a group of 1,036 migrants, many of them families, surrendered to Border Patrol agents in El Paso, the largest group ever apprehended at the border, Mr. McAleenan said.

Mr. Trump’s fury over the border crossings has grown since January, when congressional Democrats refused his request for billions of dollars of funding for a long-promised border wall.

In March, Mr. Trump moved to cut off all foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and threatened to close the border entirely, but was talked down by advisers who said the disruption in the flow of goods and people could have severe consequences for the economy. In April, he threatened a 25 percent tariff on cars imported from Mexico if it did not take bigger steps to stop the border crossings.

Under a two-year agreement signed this week with Guatemala, the Department of Homeland Security will assign about 80 agents there to help train and advise local authorities.

That figure includes dozens of Border Patrol agents, who will help Guatemalan law enforcement officers build checkpoints and make sure incoming migrants from Honduras or El Salvador are carrying legal immigration documents. The American agents will be deployed from their current stations along the United States’ northern and southwestern borders.

Additionally, Homeland Security investigators will advise the local police and provide investigative tools, like wiretaps, to stop human trafficking in Guatemala.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said that if lawmakers had concerns about the president’s threat, they should fund the border wall.

“Frankly, Congress should actually fix the laws and we wouldn’t have this problem,” she said. “Mexico should engage with us and we wouldn’t have to take any additional steps.”

Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision could further complicate his ability to win a trade deal with other nations. Europe, Japan, China and other countries are contemplating entering into agreements with the United States and could view the move as a warning sign that Mr. Trump may not honor them and could impose tariffs over anything he deems problematic for the United States, including areas outside of trade policy.

“It’s hard to imagine every single country in the world is not paying attention to this,” said Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s former ambassador to China and a former consul general of Mexico to the United States. The revised trade pact “was an example of how to reach an agreement with the United States, and it’s just been undone over something that has nothing to do with trade.”

Even some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress seemed perplexed by the move, though it was unclear whether they would take any action to stop it.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said that there was “a serious humanitarian crisis” at the southwestern border but added that a healthy economic relationship with Mexico was vital to American prosperity. “Any proposal that impacts this relationship deserves serious examination,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Alan Rappeport, Jim Tankersley and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from

Comment: Although the New York Times claim their paid circulation is “surging ahead as never before” in actuality, the paper is slowly sinking into the mire of oblivion with over half the staff fired along with most of the editors. The proof of the pudding is that one is only allowed to download one free article a month and after that one can pay only 18 cents a day…for the first day and after that,subscriber’s credit cards are charged a great deal more per month. The American print media is dead but, in the words of the old music hall song, it won’t lie down.

 

U.S. won’t ‘tiptoe’ around China with Asia stability at threat: defense chief

May 31, 2019

by Idrees Ali

Reuters

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The United States will no longer “tiptoe” around Chinese behavior in Asia, with stability in the region threatened on issues ranging from the South China Sea to Taiwan, acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said on Saturday.

Shanahan did not directly name China when making accusations of “actors” destabilizing the region, but went on to say the United States would not ignore Chinese behavior, the latest in the exchange of acerbic remarks between the world’s two biggest economies. He added, however, he was keen to foster a military relationship with Beijing.

“Perhaps the greatest long-term threat to the vital interests of states across this region comes from actors who seek to undermine, rather than uphold, the rules-based international order,” Shanahan said at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s biggest security gathering.

“If the trends in these behaviors continue, artificial features in the global commons could become tollbooths, sovereignty could become the purview of the powerful.”

Shanahan’s first major speech since taking over as acting defense secretary in January came as the United States and China remain locked in an escalating trade war and at odds over a range of security issues in Asia.

His reference to artificial features was a swipe at islands built by China in the disputed South China Sea, a strategic waterway claimed almost wholly by Beijing.

“We’re not going to ignore Chinese behavior and I think in the past people have kind of tiptoed around that,” Shanahan said later in answer to a question.

A senior Chinese military official responded to Shanahan’s comments by saying that the United States’ actions on Taiwan and the South China Sea were hardly conducive to maintaining stability in the region.

Shanahan said it was in Beijing’s interests to have a constructive relationship with the United States.

But he added: “Behavior that erodes other nations’ sovereignty and sows distrust of China’s intentions must end.”

“Until it does, we stand against a myopic, narrow, and parochial vision of the future, and we stand for the free and open order that has benefited us all – including China.”

U.S. lawmakers said Shanahan’s speech was impressive.

“I was very impressed and I certainly am looking much more positively on potentially voting for him when his confirmation happens,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth told reporters.

The White House said last month that it plans to nominate Shanahan as defense secretary, a job he has been doing in an acting capacity since January, the longest in Pentagon history. His nomination, if and when it comes, will have to be confirmed by the Senate.

“The way he laid out the facts and the United States’ position in a firm way, but very upfront, impressed me tremendously,” Duckworth added.

Senator Angus King, a political independent from Maine and on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Shanahan had “distinguished” himself and was hopeful the confirmation hearing would take place within about a month.

TRADE WAR

Shanahan said that he did not see the current trade dispute between China and the United States as a trade war, but rather just part of trade negotiations.

An increase in Chinese tariffs on most U.S. imports on a $60 billion target list took effect as planned on Saturday, after Washington’s own tariff increases.

Shanahan also became the latest senior U.S. official to call out Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, saying in his speech that it was too close to the Chinese government.

The United States has accused Huawei of espionage, breaching trade sanctions against Iran and intellectual property theft. Huawei disputes all allegations.

China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe is due to address Asia’s marquee security summit on Sunday when he is expected to criticize the United States over its implied support for a democratic Taiwan.

On Friday, Shanahan held talks with Wei that both sides called “constructive”, although their teams later reverted to type with critical comments on each other’s defense strategies.

Along with the expected warnings aimed at China, Shanahan referred to cooperation between the two countries in areas like military-to-military exchanges, counter-piracy and joint efforts to reduce the “extraordinary threat” posed by North Korea’s military ambitions.

“I am confident that we’ll solve problems,” Shanahan said.

Shanahan also called on U.S. allies to contribute more to their own defense. Burden-sharing, from Asia to Europe, has long been a demand of President Donald Trump’s administration.

“We need you to invest in ways that take more control over your sovereignty and your own ability to exercise sovereign choices.”

Reporting by Idrees Ali; additional reporting by Joe Brock, Lee Chyen Yee and Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Alex Richardson

 

Donald Trump’s Russian Connections

by Christian Jürs

Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination. He has a long record of bankruptcies, business failures, very dubious business practices and extraordinarily negative behavior to staff and other employees. To catalogue the full sweep of a flood of patently dishonest business allegations against Donald Trump would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial, the blatently criminal with the truly scandalous.

Certainly, the psychological personal profile of Donald Trump could hardly be better tailored to being easily turned by a hostile intelligence agency.

The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.

Russian intelligence agencies are known to have highly compromising and often bizarre sexual material on him going back more than 30 years and they have used Trump and his elaborate network of business entites as a funnel for laundering dirty money from the Russian mafia and from post-Soviet oligarchs. The Russians are well-known to have more than enough compromising material on Trump to bend him to their will.

Trump has constantly been engaged in bribings and manipulations and has donethis through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his recently convicted campaign manager, during the election.

Following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed very large sums of operating capital from Russian sources. He also obtained large loans from the Deutsche Bank (over 640 million dollars)

Other big banks, domestic and foreign, have long refused to lend to him, coining the term “the Donald risk” to refer to his repeated bankruptcies and failures to repay loans. However, Deutsche Bank, whose real-estate division continued to lend him hundreds of millions of dollars to finance his projects, seemed to have a greater risk appetite. There is a solid connection and on-going business between this bank and two Russian-based banks.

1,300 Trump condominiums have been sold to Russian-connected buyers. Even a cheap Trump condo costs over a million dollars, so there over 1,300 condos that meet all the criteria for what is normally called money laundering. Russian intelligence is using Trump real estate to launder money

In 2008 his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.

Trump and his entourage have made a significant number of trips to Russia in the past (a list of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with can easily be found on Google), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country

Russian intelligence owns Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, ‘Podesta papers’ concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in coordinated agreement with the Trump people. This did serious damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election to the presidency.

Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, and Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico. Also, the tariffs suggested by Trump against China would result in retaliation by that country and many retail outlets in the United States would be forced to close because they would be unable to purchase Chinese-made goods, the bulk of their stock.

Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian, Chinese and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States. This is only to the benefit of Putin’s Russia, not the United States.

Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the American public.

Trump’s politically foolish but calculated support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry. Further, his aggressive support of Israel is resulting in increasing antisemitism in the United States.

The Middle East areas where Russia now has growing influence, have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandising source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by-products.

By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.

When he is caught at this, and it is common knowledge that the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either the American public will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack. Vice-President Pence, a Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.

Trump is very well aware of the ongoing and growing official investigation into his denied but completely genuine Russian connections and is certainly also well aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he initially fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole foreign and domestic intelligence agency. He, and his Russian intelligence handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power to the benefit of Putin’s Russia.

There was a full page ad that he took out in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post in 1988, putting forth foreign policy points that could have been dictated by Vladimir Putin. It was an assault against NATO, and the European Union, both anathema to Russia

In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies in France and Germany began picking up solid evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic States shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly was known to be bugged

Throughout his career, Trump has always felt comfortable operating at or beyond the ethical boundaries that constrain typical businesses. In the 1980s, he worked with La Cosa Nostra, which controlled the New York cement trade, and later employed Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, both of whom have links to the Russian Mafia. Trump habitually refused to pay his counter parties, and if the people he burned (or any journalists) got in his way, he bullied them with threats. He also used LLCs which he created for the purpose of swindling firm who, for example, laid new carpet in one of his hotels. The vendor billed the LLC which promptly went bankrupt. This has been a favorite gambit of Trump.

Trump continually acts like a man with a great deal to hide: declining to testify to anything under oath, dangling  Presidential pardons to keep potential witnesses and former employees from incriminating him, publicly chastising his attorney general for not quashing the whole Russian investigation, and endorsing Russia’s claims that it had nothing to do with the election. (“Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” he tweeted last month, contradicting the conclusion of every U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence agency.) Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.

When, and not if, it becomes public knowledge that the President of the US is an agent of a foreign power, it would be the worst scandal in American history, far surpassing Tea Pot Dome or Watergate.

In conclusion, it is clearly obvious that President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence and that he is currently engaged in efforts to carry out their political global programs which, if allowed to continue, will wreak economic and political havoc on the American government, business community and public.

And consider that the United States has been harassing Vladimir Putin’s Russia economically and causing considerable problems for that country. Mr. Putin’s reactive countermeasures aganst the United States are certainly in response to these actions and in the long view, far more effective than sanctions and hysterical threats.

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Mark Amaru Pinkham

It is sometimes a bit unclear whether some of the pseudohistory concocted by the denizens of the more deranged corners of the Internet devoted to New Age stuff, UFOs, pastel fluff and unicorns, is intended as, well, alternative history or just intuition-based explorations of the authors’ own deranged minds, and the incoherent ramblings of Mark Amaru Pinkham certainly raise that question. Chakras, ley lines, ancient astronauts and orientalism are indiscriminately thrown into a blender and the results published both online and in weird books by obscure publishers. Pinkham, for instance, is the author of e.g. Sedona: City of Star People – Court of the King of the World, which, according to the introduction, is a “chronology of events that transpired in my life between February 1987 and May 2015.” That is an odd way to introduce what is ostensibly a history book, but apparently Pinkham came, during this period, to realize that Sedona “sits upon the foundations of a very ancient lost city of the Star People” and, moreover, that these star people from UFOs “taught the Hopis the mysteries of the cosmos and the rituals they continue to observe today.” The evidence all points to this conclusion once you reject the distinction between fantasy and reality, which seems to have been Pinkham’s primary methodological strategy. Chapters include “The one million year history of Sedona”, “Sedona, Root Chakra of Earth”, “The Sedona Grid and Chakra Points” and “The Yezidis know Masau’u as their Peacock Angel and visit his court in Sedona” (they most certainly do not).

Pinkham is currently Grand Prior of The International Order of Gnostic Templars (in fact, he is “Grand PriorSir Mark Amaru Pinkham” – our emphasis – though we suspect that the Queen was not involved in bestowing that title upon him), which is ostensibly “a modern day spiritual knight templar order dedicated to the revival of gnostic wisdom & the goddess tradition of the original templars” (those would not be identical to the people historians refer to by “knights templar”), which seems even less impressive once you see their website and the picture of Pinkham in his ceremonial garb (do check it out here). He is apparently also the founder and director – with his wife Andrea Mikana-Pinkham, a “reiki master” – of the Djedhi School of Ancient Wisdom, where you may enroll to “achieve Gnostic Wisdom and Mastery of the Force”. (Yes, it may very well be; who knows.) You will also “be given a blue robe to wear during ceremony.”

His other books include The Return of The Serpents of Wisdom, Conversations with The Goddess, The Truth Behind the Christ Myth, Guardians of the Holy Grail: The Knights Templar, John the Baptist and the Water of Life, and World Gnosis: The Coming Gnostic Civilization. Apparently all of them “reveal startling information which, until now, has been concealed or has been taught solely to advanced spiritual seekers and mystery school students.” We admit to you probably didn’t learn this information in school or at the university. Pinkham is also “a professional Astrologer with over twenty-five years of experience.” Of course, “professional” means something slightly different in these circles.

Diagnosis: Yes, he is very spiritual, and probably rather harmless to the real world. We wonder if we ought to feel a bit bad about making fun of him.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

June 1, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No. 83

Date: Tuesday, May 6, 1997

Commenced: 8:30 AM CST

Concluded: 8:55 AM CST

 

GD: What’s up, Robert?

RTC: At my age, Gregory, not a great deal. Yourself?

GD: My sheep are happy, Robert. Listen, I got a leaflet in the mail about the POWs and MIAs in Vietnam and your agency was purported to have proof that there were hundreds of poor Americans still locked up in hidden Vietnam camps. True or not?

RTC: Not. The Cong did have captives and they either died in captivity or we did get them back. After we pulled out and they said they won, relations got back to relative normalcy. No, the stories are basically just that, stories. But in this case, there are organizations interested and when organizations are interested, there are charity drives, requests for money and so on. If there were any number, say over ten, Americans still captive, we would know about it. Most of this is just self-serving hype and I would not believe any of it.

GD: Well, we know the Soviets had some American airmen under lock and key during the Stalin time.

RTC: Stalin was a crazy old man later in life. Mind you, very intelligent, ruthless and very clever but mad as a hatter. While he was slowly dying of hardening of the arteries, he got crazier and crazier. He was paranoid and fearful. Assassins were everywhere and once Joe got it into his head that some group, like the Soviet Jews, were plotting against him, he schemed and planned to kill them all off. Never in public but out in the camps although quite a few were shot in the head in various basements and dumped into pits along with quicklime. Stalin was in some sense, a great man, but typically Russian, or Georgian as you wish. Peter the Great was at one time, a great visionary and at the same time, a paranoid creep. It must have something to do with the water.

GD: But you can say authoritatively that to your first hand knowledge there are no large numbers of Americans still held in prison in Vietnam?

RTC: You don’t quote me, of course, but yes, that is true. And what about the voluntary stay-behinds? There were a few in Korea and a few in Vietnam. And as to the missing in action, most of these are men killed when a chopper full of troops crashed into a quagmire of a rice paddy complex and the bits and pieces scattered all over the place and soon covered with mud. No, leave the dead alone, Gregory. Maybe in the future, some bones or a dog tag will show up and another missing man will be at least partially found.

GD: I felt that this was just another professional money machine.

RTC: Yes, just like the Jews howling about everyone giving them money because they suffered as no one else ever had. Entire families wiped out in some camp, including the pet cat, but then where did the survivors come from? Some ash heap somewhere? No, that business is for political gain and money, pure and simple. It never got started until well after the war because it wasn’t true and got invented about ’48. Now, it’s a huge money machine and they use it as an excuse for butchering Arabs, and a reason for attacking their perceived enemies by calling them Nazis and moaning about new holocausts being planned in some underground Nazi bunker in Des Moines. Only problem is that Americans don’t really care about such things and they get pushed aside by other, more interesting, schemes of enrichment. Oh, even the Irish have their weeping machines but nowhere as huge and sophisticated…and politically powerful as our Hebrew friends. And when one of them starts moaning about our eternal debt to them, I remind them of the Liberty. I suppose I brand myself as a Jew-hater but no one likes the truth. No, as far as I know, there are very few Americans missing that possibly could still be imprisoned by the Vietnamese or Koreans.

GD: How about the Japanese still holding enormous compounds of prisoners deep in the jungles of Borneo?

RTC: Gregory, we both know that is pure crap but please do not say such things, even in jest because some clever person will take it up and have a Freedom for American Prisoners of Imperial Japan foundation with a retired Marine Corps general as honorary chairman.

GD: The truth at last from the mouth of the great one.

RTC: And the Red Cross is the worst of all, Gregory.

GD: Oh tell me. We had a small flood in our town when a clogged creek backed up and poured water in one part of town. The Red Cross came into town, got the schools to open their gyms and local restaurants to donate free meals, all to people with six figure incomes and seven figure houses. Ah, but after the victims went back to their damp living rooms a day later, they were sent huge bills by the Red Cross. Know about this first hand. But the United Crusade is worse. I worked for Catholic Charities once and I can tell you that they do a great job. The Salvation Army, too, is good. Anyway, thanks for the input on the MIA business. I probably won’t write about it anyway because the people who run the business, will view me as an interloper who might be after some of their money so they would trash me. They’ll get some Medal of Honor winner to point at me and call me a crook when actually, he is the tool of crooks. Actually, Robert, most people are overweight mentally deficient twits who haven’t seen their dicks or even their feet for ten years and will soon die of heart attacks. They cremated one really huge fatty recently and he melted and the river of fat caught on fire and destroyed the building. Well, if Malthus was right and we overgraze our ranges, we can put the fatties into pens and use them to feed our people, our skinny people that is.

RTC: I don’t think eating all that greasy fat is good for people.

GD: Well, we could flense them and use the blubber to make a kind of whale oil for our lamps. The flame of the statue of Liberty run on human fat.

RTC: Now, be careful of that, Gregory, or the Jews will start to howl. They are sensitive about rending people.

GD: I once went to a military show and commented to a Jewish attendee who was pointing at some military badge with an evil swastika on it and moaning about the great suffering. I had seen a pile of soap bars on a table and I pointed it out to him. I told him he should check it out and that he might find a relative there.

RTC: (Laughter) Bad boy.

GD: Oh, I thought you said bad goy.  When I come to see you, Robert, I will give you a lampshade made of human skin with a tattoo of a ship on it.

 

(Concluded 8:55 AM CST)

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