TBR News October 11, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. October 11, 2018:” There is a distinct difference between American conservatives and the strange lot now in power in Washington who claim to be conservatives. This country is now being run, haphazardly indeed, by people who can only be termed as ‘deranged’ as witness a situation paper being leaked in which President Trump states his determination to institute a national draft and to abolish Social Security. When, not if, these concepts are in the process of implementation and become public, there will surely be active rebellion from the bulk of the populace and this will engender a wave of official, and militant, repression. There many of us and fewer of them, will run the theme, and the results will be pockets of insurrection that will grow. This is not a matter of speculation, as found on the less sane blogs, but an historical reality based on many movements in the past. The public discontent and rebellions of the Vietnam War era would be nothing compared with an enraged middle class in America and if the military, as happened in Petrograd in 1917, refused to fire on civilians, the coin will have flipped for good or evil. ”

The Table of Contents

• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 47
• Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Rule of Pampered Princelings
• Aux Barricades Mes Enfants!
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Sinking Santa Cruz: climate change threatens famed California beach town
• Who, or what, is Sorcha Faal: A Posterboy for Mental Health: The Coming of Planet X Fraud

 

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 47

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

• Jan 9, 2018

“President Obama, when he signed the executive order (to create his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program), actually said he doesn’t have the right to do this.”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: This is a common mistake, but DACA was not created by an executive order. Rather, it was a policy change implemented through the Department of Homeland Security. Steve Doocy, one of the co-hosts of Trump’s favourite morning show, Fox and Friends, was more accurate in explaining the process last year: “It was not an executive order by President Obama. The DHS simply changed the rules.” In addition, Trump is misstating the timeline. He would be correct to note that Obama had, in the years prior to creating DACA, expressed skepticism that he had executive powers to protect unauthorized immigrants without the approval of Congress; Obama regularly noted that being president was not like being “king.” But Obama did not say, at the moment he was creating DACA in mid-2012, that he did not have the power to create this particular program.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“Yeah, I’ll beat Oprah. Oprah would be a lot of fun. I know her very well. You know I did one of her last shows. She had Donald Trump — this is before politics — her last week.”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: Winfrey’s last show was on May 25, 2011. Trump did not appear during her last week. He was on an episode on Feb. 7, 2011.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“No, I think a clean DACA bill, to me, is a DACA bill where we take care of the 800,000 people. They are actually not necessarily young people; everyone talks about young — you know, they could be 40 years old, 41 years old, but they’re also 16 years old.”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: DACA recipients could not be 40 years old or 41 years old in January 2018. To qualify for the program, recipients had to be “under the age of 31 on June 15, 2012.” That means, obviously, that they had to be under the age of 36 in June 2017.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“I looked at boats that started off at $1.5 billion, and they’re up to $18 billion, and they’re still not finished. In this case, a particular aircraft carrier. I think it’s outrageous.”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: The U.S. does not have any aircraft carriers whose price jumped so dramatically. It appears that Trump was talking about the famously over-budget USS Gerald Ford — which went from $10.5 billion to a reported final total of $12.9 billion, not $1.5 billion to $18 billion. Even if you add research and development costs to the $12.9 billion, putting the final total closer to Trump’s $18 billion figure, Trump is still billions off on the initial cost.

“And again, they’re going back to that same person (accused Manhattan terrorist Sayfullo Saipov) who came in through the lottery program. They went — they visited his neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood said, ‘Oh my God, we suffered with this man — the rudeness, the horrible way he treated us right from the beginning.’ So we don’t want the lottery system or the visa lottery system. We want it ended.”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: Speaking to news reporters, neighbours of the accused terrorist, Sayfullo Saipov, mostly said they generally saw him as a calm and friendly presence. “Neighbors’ portrait of Sayfullo Saipov: A friendly, devoted dad,” read the headline in Newsday. “Soon after he moved to Paterson this summer, Saipov’s neighbors saw him as a calming presence,” NorthJersey.com reported. Trump’s remark contains kernels of truth: one neighbour said Saipov was unfriendly because he did not respond when people said hello to him, and another neighbour told the Washington Post that he had become suspicious in the weeks before the attack because Saipov appeared to be driving an empty truck around the area. But Trump’s suggestion that neighbours generally said they “suffered” with Saipov is inaccurate.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“And the other is — cancel the lottery program. They call it ‘visa lottery,’ I just call it ‘lottery.’ But countries come in and they put names in a hopper. They’re not giving you their best names; common sense means they’re not giving you their best names. They’re giving you people that they don’t want. And then we take them out of the lottery. And when they do it by hand — where they put the hand in a bowl — they’re probably — what’s in their hand are the worst of the worst…They put people that they don’t want into a lottery and the United States takes those people. ”

Source: Televised meeting on immigration

in fact: This is a comprehensively inaccurate description of the U.S. visa lottery. “Countries” do not put people’s names in the lottery, and, thus, they do not select their worst citizens to put in the lottery. Rather, individuals who want to immigrate to the U.S. sign up on their own. Foreign countries do not conduct the lottery, much less conduct it in a dubious manner; it is conducted by the U.S. State Department.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

• Jan 10, 2018

“The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein…would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no law against what Feinstein did — release closed-door committee testimony by Glenn Simpson, co-founder of research firm Fusion GPS, which was behind the creation of the dossier compiled by an ex-spy about Trump’s alleged links to Russia. Rather, Feinstein’s decision was simply a breach of traditional Senate decorum.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“But I will say that the Paris Agreement as drawn and as we signed was very unfair to the United States. It put great penalties on us. It made it very difficult for us to deal in terms of business. It took away a lot of our asset values. We are a country rich in gas and coal and oil, and lots of other things, and there was a tremendous penalty for using it. It hurt our businesses. According to some estimates, we would have had to close businesses in order to qualify by 2025. Whereas as an example China, by 2030, they don’t kick in until 2030.”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: Trump was, again, falsely describing how the Paris agreement works. It does not impose special penalties on the U.S., nor does it give China more time than the U.S. to reduce emissions. Rather, it simply allows each nation to set its own voluntary targets. One of China’s voluntary targets is to hit peak emissions around 2030. If the U.S. thought its own voluntary targets — reducing emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent by 2025 — were too burdensome on its economy, it could simply have changed them.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“It’s a Democrat hoax that was brought up as an excuse for losing an election that, frankly, the Democrats should have won, because they have such a tremendous advantage in the Electoral College. So it was brought up for that reason.”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: Trump’s frequent claim about the Electoral College continues to be nonsensical. It is obviously false that the presidential election system is set up in a way that favours Democrats. Six of the last nine presidents, all of whom except for Gerald Ford had to win an Electoral College election, have been Republicans.

Trump has repeated this claim 17 time

“It’s a Democrat hoax that was brought up as an excuse for losing an election that, frankly, the Democrats should have won, because they have such a tremendous advantage in the Electoral College. So it was brought up for that reason.”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: Democrats, of course, did not invent the allegation of collusion with Russia as an election excuse, nor is it a “hoax.” U.S. intelligence agencies say that the Russian government interfered in the election for the purpose of helping Trump win; that Russian interference was the original story, and Democrats were talking about it well before Election Day. Perhaps Trump is correct that there was no illegal collusion, but this matter is being investigated by a special prosecutor appointed by his own deputy attorney general, not “Democrats,” and many senior Republicans believe the investigation has merit.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“Well, again, John, there has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians, or Trump and Russians, no collusion. When I watch you interviewing all of the people leaving their committees, I mean, the Democrats are all running for office and they’re trying to say this, that. But bottom line, they all say there’s no collusion.”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: Democrats leaving committee meetings do not say “there’s no collusion.” Some have said they have not yet seen evidence of collusion, but they have not nearly been as definitive as Trump suggested.

Trump has repeated this claim 18 times

“In November, we started delivering the first F-52s and F-35 fighter jets. We have a total of 52…”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: This was likely an innocent slip, but there is no such thing as an F-52.

“I’m also pleased to share that the economic ties between our two countries are robust and growing. The United States currently has a trade surplus, which is shocking. Can you believe I’m saying we have a surplus? There aren’t too many.”

Source: Joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg

in fact: Trump was highly misleading, at best, to suggest it was “shocking” for the U.S. to have a trade surplus or that “there aren’t too many.” In fact, the U.S. has surpluses with more than half of all countries in merchandise trade alone, figures from the U.S. International Trade Commission show — and merchandise trade is a measure that doesn’t count the services trade at which the U.S. excels. Major countries with which the U.S. has a surplus in merchandise trade include Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Argentina, and the United Kingdom.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found…”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump appeared to be referring, as he has in the past, to a single November CNN interview with Feinstein — in which she did not declare that there is no collusion. Feinstein was specifically asked if she had seen evidence that the Trump campaign was given Democratic emails hacked by Russia. “Not so far,” she responded. She was not asked about collusion more broadly, and her specific answer made clear that she was referring only to evidence she has personally seen to date, not issuing a sweeping final judgment.

Trump has repeated this claim 18 times

“But it (his televised meeting on immigration) got great reviews by everybody other than two networks, who were phenomenal for about two hours. Then, after that, they were called by their bosses for saying, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’ And, unfortunately, a lot of those anchors sent us letters saying that was one of the greatest meetings they’ve ever witnessed. And they were great. For about two hours, they were phenomenal. And then they went a little bit south on us, but not that bad. It was fine. They probably wish they didn’t send us those letters of congratulations. But it was good.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: The story about television anchors sending Trump “letters of congratulations” appears to be complete fiction. Asked for evidence, the White House provided none. Rather, it released a list of tweets in which a variety of reporters offered positive remarks about the meeting. The White House did not make any effort to substantiate Trump’s claim about television anchors sending letters.

“The amount of money that’s going to be brought in — we think it’s going to be close to $4 trillion because of our tax reform — will be a number that this country has never seen pour into our country.”

Source: Remarks at Cabinet meeting

in fact: Trump’s “$4 trillion” estimate for the amount of corporate profits parked overseas is unsupported by any experts. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following 12 months. An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month. “There’s no world in which it’s $4 trillion,” ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in November. “I do not know of anyone who increased the estimate so much recently,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in August. “Like many things, I assume he made this up on the fly,” said another expert on the subject, who requested anonymity, when Trump made an estimate of $5 trillion in August.

• Jan 11, 2018

“Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for ‘peanuts,’ only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Regardless of whether unhappiness about the embassy was the real reason he did not go to London — and not, say, the possibility of major protests — Trump’s claim about the embassy was comprehensively incorrect. As the embassy itself explained in an unusual statement correcting the president, the plan to move the embassy was made in 2007, during the George W. Bush presidency, not the Obama presidency. The embassy also said in the statement that the cost was $1 billion, not $1.2 billion. Further, the move was made in large part because the old location was widely seen as vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“Democrat Dianne Feinstein should never have released secret committee testimony to the public without authorization. Very disrespectful to committee members and possibly illegal.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no law against what Feinstein did — release closed-door committee testimony by Glenn Simpson, co-founder of research firm Fusion GPS, which was behind the dossier compiled by an ex-spy about Trump’s alleged links to Russia. Rather, this was simply a breach of traditional Senate decorum.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“That (NAFTA) has been a terrible agreement for us, and if we don’t make a good deal for our country — we lose $71 billion in trade deficits with Mexico.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: When trade in services is included, the 2016 U.S. trade deficit with Mexico was $56 billion. Even if you count trade in goods alone, the deficit is not as large as Trump claims: it was $64 billion in 2016, $60 billion in 2015, $55 billion in 2014 and $54 billion in 2013, according to the U.S. government’s own Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and it has not exceeded $67 billion since 2007.

Trump has repeated this claim 34 times

“We lose $17 billion with Canada.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: According to the U.S. government’s own Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. had a trade surplus of $12.5 billion with Canada last year when services trade was included. Even counting goods trade alone, the Trade Representative says the deficit was $12.1 billion, not $17 billion.

Trump has repeated this claim 15 times

“And South Korea — brilliantly makes — we have a trade deficit with South Korea of $31 billion a year.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: “The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with Korea was $17.0 billion in 2016,” says the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The deficit only approaches $30 billion — it was $28 billion — if you only count trade in goods, which Trump did not say he was doing.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“I have great feeling for DACA. I think that we should be able to do something with DACA. I think it’s foolish if we don’t, they’ve been here a long time, they’re no longer children, you know. People talk of them as children, I mean some are 41 years old and older.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: No DACA recipient is 41 years old. To qualify for the program, people had to be “under the age of 31 on June 15, 2012.” That means, obviously, that they had to be under the age of 36 in June 2017.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“But this person, who should’ve never been allowed into this country, came in through the lottery. When they interviewed his neighborhood, they say he was horrible. You’d say good morning to him and he’d start cursing at you.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Speaking to news reporters, neighbours of Saipov mostly said they generally saw him as a calm and friendly presence. “Neighbors’ portrait of Sayfullo Saipov: A friendly, devoted dad,” read the headline in Newsday. “Soon after he moved to Paterson this summer, Saipov’s neighbors saw him as a calming presence,” NorthJersey.com reported. Trump’s remark contains kernels of truth: one neighbour said Saipov was unfriendly because he did not respond when people said “good morning” to him, and another neighbour told the Washington Post that he had become suspicious in the weeks before the attack because Saipov appeared to be driving an empty truck around the area. But Trump’s suggestion that neighbours generally said Saipov was “horrible” is inaccurate.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“They didn’t want him (accused terrorist Sayfullo Saipov) so they sent him through the lottery, you know, congratulations United States.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Contrary to Trump’s frequent claim, foreign countries, such as Saipov’s native Uzbekistan, do not put their unwanted citizens in the lottery; individuals apply for themselves because they want to immigrate.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

 

“I won every debate based on the polls. You know, they do polls — seven or eight polls. Time Magazine — Time Magazine’s not a fan of mine. Drudge, Time Magazine they have seven polls. I don’t think, I may be wrong — I don’t think you’ll find one poll that I ever lost in any of the 14, 15 debates. Including the presidential debate, you know with her, the three.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Scientific polls — in other words, regular polls with scientific samples — had Trump losing all three debates with Clinton. Trump was likely referring to unscientific online polls that anyone can go and click if they chose.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“Hey, look, I got elected president. I won easily, 306 or 304, depending on your definition, to 223.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes on Election Day, not 223.

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

“I won a race that should never be won by a Republican because it’s so stacked in the Democrats’ favour. I mean, if you figure California, New York, and Illinois, you start off with losing that — you have to run the entire East Coast and every — and the entire Midwest.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Trump’s frequent claim about the Electoral College continues to be nonsensical. It is obviously false that the presidential election system is set up in a way that favours Democrats. Six of the last nine presidents, all of whom except for Gerald Ford had to win an Electoral College election, have been Republicans.

Trump has repeated this claim 17 times

“I also think that primary collusion, because there was no collusion on our side, the collusion was on the Democrat side with the Russians.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the Russia-related activities of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. This accusation is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

“I’ve been, you know, pretty successful in the courts over the years, I’ve been a very successful person, you can check — USA Today said, ‘He does great in the courts,’ OK?”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: The USA Today article to which Trump was referring did not say “He does great in the courts.” Trump did not specify this time what article he was talking about, but we know from past references that it was a 2016 feature about his history of litigation. That article reported that, of the cases in which there was a “clear resolution,” Trump “was the apparent victor in 451 and the loser in 38.” However, the article did not make a positive judgment about his use of the courts. It focused on the quantity and nature of his lawsuits, and it said: “The sheer volume of lawsuits is unprecedented for a presidential nominee. No candidate of a major party has had anything approaching the number of Trump’s courtroom entanglements… The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.”

“I mean — think of this — I hate to say it but it’s not my fault and I did not want to go into Iraq, by the way. But as of two months ago we’re into the Middle East for $7 trillion.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Trump endorsed the Iraq War in his public comments at the time. Asked by Howard Stern in 2002 if he supported an invasion, he said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” Aside from this, there is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.

Trump has repeated this claim 17 times

“I’m also hearing a lot of people are bringing money back in. You know, the $4 trillion that we’re talking about or whatever it may be. Nobody even knows what it is, but it’s a big number.”

Source: Interview with the Wall Street Journal

in fact: Trump’s “$4 trillion” estimate for the amount of corporate profits parked overseas is not being “talked about” by any experts. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following 12 months. An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month. “There’s no world in which it’s $4 trillion,” ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in November. “I do not know of anyone who increased the estimate so much recently,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in August. “Like many things, I assume he made this up on the fly,” said another expert on the subject, who requested anonymity, when Trump made an estimate of $5 trillion in August.

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

 

Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Rule of Pampered Princelings

October 10, 2018

by Naomi Klein

The Intercept

“Boring.” That was Donald Trump’s instant verdict on the New York Times’s blockbuster investigation into the rampant tax fraud and nepotism that undergirds his fortune. Sarah Huckabee Sanders heartily concurred, informing the White House press corps that she refused to “go through every line of a very boring, 14,000-word story.”

Welcome to a new political PR strategy premised on the shredding of the American mind — you don’t want to even try to read that interminable article; check out my Twitter feed instead, and this viral video of me saying rabid things.

The Times investigation, published as a standalone supplement on Sunday, is about as boring as a car accident. It shows in lavish detail that Trump’s creation myth is and always has been a work of fiction. No, he did not take a “very, very small” million-dollar loan from his father and use his deal-making acumen to parlay it into a $10-billion global empire, while paying the original loan back with interest.

Trump has been sucking on a spigot of his father’s cash nonstop since he was in diapers, becoming a millionaire by middle school. According to the Times, when all was said and done, “Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.” Moreover, “much of it was never repaid.” As for the rest of the mythology, not only was he spending his father’s money, he blew much of it on disastrous deal after disastrous deal. Only to be bailed out by his father’s millions time and time again.

Rather than bothering to deny any of this, Trump and his surrogates have simply spun a new creation myth. No longer the scrappy, self-made man, Trump is being reincarnated in real time as the chosen son, with he and his father acting as partners in wealth creation. “One thing the article did get right,” Sanders said, clearly reading from notes, “is it showed that the president’s father actually had a great deal of confidence in him. In fact, the president brought his father into a lot of deals and made a lot of money together. So much so that his father went on to say that ‘everything [Trump] touched turned to gold.’”

This shift is more significant than it first appears. After a couple of years of hobnobbing with Saudi monarchs and Queen Elizabeth II, the president appears ready to embrace his true identity as a scion of a dynasty who did not build his fortune by himself, but who is, instead, the product of an especially blessed family that passes a magic touch through the generations.

What makes the Times revelations more important is that they are a rare window into an even larger story about the growing political and economic role of inherited money in the United States — the culmination of decades in which a handful sons and daughters of bequeathed wealth waged a fierce and relentless battle of ideas against the very concept of equality and majority rule, all based on the same corrupting belief in their own inherent superiority.

Trump may be the highest profile of such heirs to wield political power, but he never would have gotten where he is without the ideological scaffolding carefully put in place by other scions of dynastic families — from the late John M. Olin and Richard Mellon Scaife in the ’80s and ’90s to Charles and David Koch and Rebekah Mercer today. These are the key figures who bankrolled the think tanks, financed the extreme free-market university programs, and funded the tea party shock troops that moved the Republican Party so far to the right that Trump could stomp in and grab it.

It was their project that created a fake consensus about the need for the radical deregulating of markets and dismantling of environmental protections, for lowering corporate taxes and eliminating the “death tax” — and paying for it all by dismantling so-called entitlements. It was an effort that always required harnessing the emotional power of racism (think “welfare queens”), as well as the parallel construction of a highly racialized system of mass incarceration to warehouse the poor (and profit from them, of course). The Trump presidency — never mind the economic populism he bellowed on the election trail— is the near-perfect embodiment of this agenda.

A great deal of excellent investigative journalism has gone into tracking the money behind this sprawling class war, most notably by Jane Mayer in her indispensable “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” Mayer showed that though figures like the Kochs are highly ideological, the policies pushed by these wealthy families also happen to directly benefit their bottom lines. Laxer regulations, lower taxes, weaker unions, and unfettered access to international markets tend to do that.

Much less attention, however, has been paid to the implications of so much of this financing coming not just from unfathomably rich people, but people born that way. And yet it is striking that the figures at the dead center of this campaign were not Chicago school economists, nor were most of them self-made business leaders who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They were, like Trump, pampered princelings whose fortunes had been handed to them by their parents.

The Koch brothers were raised in luxury and inherited Koch Industries from their father (who built his fortune constructing refineries under Stalin and Hitler). Scaife was an heir to the Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum, and Mellon Banks fortunes and grew up in an estate so lavish it was populated with pet penguins. Olin took over his father’s weapons and chemicals company.

And so it goes, right down to Betsy DeVos, who was raised by billionaire Edgar Prince and married into the Amway fortune — and who has devoted her life to dismantling public education, now from inside the Trump administration. And let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch, who inherited a chain of newspapers from his father and is in the process of handing over his media empire to his sons. Or relative newcomer Rebekah Mercer, who has chipped off a chunk of her father Robert’s hedge fund fortune to bankroll Breitbart News, among other pet projects. In short, these people are Downton Abbey lords and masters, playacting as Ayn Rand heroes.

Of course, there are some self-made billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson, who have helped bankroll the revolution on the right. But when it comes to the battle of ideas — the careful investments in pro-business academic programs at elite universities, the extreme right-wing think tanks, the strident media outlets, and now the harnessing of big data and “machine learning” in Republican political campaigns — the role of inherited wealth cannot be overstated.

Self-Made Scions

It is worth pausing over this fact, because in a country with as powerful a meritocratic mythology as the United States, the heirs to great wealth often have a rather complicated relationship with their fortunes. Some blow it on yachts and vanity projects. Some become determined to show their fathers up by expanding their empires. Some give almost all of their wealth to charity. Some hide it from everyone they know. An all-too-rare few try to use their wealth to build a fairer economy and less toxic ecology.

But what must it take to pour large parts of a fortune that came to you by accident of birth into a relentless campaign of further affirmative action for the rich?

How exactly do you rationalize being lifted up by an intricate latticework of familial and social supports (tutors, prep schools, connections at the best universities, entry-level executive jobs, capital to play with), and then setting about shredding the meager safety net available to those without your good luck? How do you convince yourself that, despite having been handed so much, you are not just right but righteous in attacking the “handouts” received by single mothers working two jobs? How, when you know your own family fortune has benefited from enormous government subsidies (cheap housing loans for the Trumps, oil subsidies for the Kochs and Scaifes, direct weapons contracts for the Olins) do you begrudge paying the same tax rate as your employees?

What is the theory, the worldview, that makes all this OK? And how has it shaped the broader “free market” revolution paid for by these men — a crusade that has just achieved a new level of impunity with the ascent of Brett Kavanaugh, a product of this same world of unchecked privilege, to the Supreme Court?

You can claim to be a wealth-creator, sure. But because you didn’t actually create the wealth yourself — you inherited it — other rationales are required for why you deserve still more, while others should get far less. That’s where uglier ideas come in, about one’s inherent superiority, about a greater deservedness that apparently flows from being a member of a particularly good family, with better values, better breeding, a better religion, or as Trump so often claims, “good genes.”

And of course the even darker side is the often unspoken conviction that the people who do not share in this kind of good fortune must possess the opposite traits — they must be defective in both body and mind. This is where the Republican Party’s increasingly savage racial and gender politics merge seamlessly with its radical wealth-stratifying economic project. Convinced that people belong where they are on the economic and social ladder, the party can keep redistributing wealth upward to the dynastic families that fund their movement, while kicking the ladder out of the way for those reaching for the lower rungs.

In this context, the “losers” (Trump’s favorite insult, aimed disproportionately at the nonwhite and non-male), can not only be stripped of food stamps and health care and left for more than a year without roofs in Puerto Rico, but are also acceptable targets for all kinds of degradations, whether having their children caged in desert internment camps, or having their experiences of sexual assault mocked in open arenas.

The latter part of this equation is what Trump is offering to his base: Their birth will never reward them with anything like the hundreds of millions showered on the Trumps. But they are being invited to share in their own, albeit more modest, birthright entitlements as white, middle-class Americans. They are being invited to be on the winning team, “taking our country back” from any and all invaders and threats, from immigrants taking “our” jobs to women bearing damaging stories against “our” sons.

That is the grand bargain: Trump gets to fully claim his inheritance as a scion of wealth and his base gets to claim their inheritance as white citizens of a Christian, patriarchal nation. Oh, and like the royal families with whom he is so enamored, Trump will reward his loyal subjects by putting on an endless stream of entertaining shows and performances. He hasn’t gotten his military parade yet, but think of Trump’s ritualistic rallies and never-off reality show as crasser versions of royal pomp and palace intrigues. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of wealth — and it looks almost exactly the same.

None of this should be surprising. Any system marked by sharp inequality and injustice requires a narrative of justification. Colonial savagery and land theft required the doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, terra nullius, and other expressions of Christian and European supremacy. The transatlantic slave trade, similarly, demanded an intellectual and legal system built on white supremacy and “scientific” racism. Patriarchy and the subjugation of women required an architecture of yet more pseudoscientific theories about female intellectual inferiority and emotionality.

Without these theories — and the lawyers, scientists, and other experts who stepped forward to give them credence — the injustices of all these systems would have been untenable. Our current system of ever more grotesque inequalities is no different. The mythology of the self-made elite once did the trick of justifying the United States’ wealth gap and threadbare safety net.

The ultrarich in the United States have long insisted that they built their empires with sweat and smarts, unlike their aristocratic brethren in Britain and France, and therefore deserve them more. Central to this story was the idea that anyone with smarts and drive could do the same, since there was no entrenched class system stopping them. (In the Trumpian version of this story, you could be just like him if you paid up for his how-to-get-rich books and fraudulent “university” while studying back episodes of “The Apprentice”).

“We like to pretend that no such thing as a ruling class has ever darkened an American shore or danced by the light of an American moon,” former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham once remarked.

This was never true. The American political system began as a protection racket for propertied white men, granting inalienable rights to a minority at the direct expense of enslaved Africans and women. Serious proposals to level the playing field — from a truly integrated public school system to fair wages for domestic work — were squashed again and again.

Meanwhile, like Trump himself, many of the hypersuccessful men who proudly wear the mantle of being “self-made” are in profound denial about how much help they received from their family and social networks. Kavanaugh, a member of the American elite, if not the ultrarich, is a case in point. During the Senate hearings, he snarled that he got into Yale Law School by “busting my tail,” insisting “I had no connections there.” No connections except that his grandfather went to Yale, which means that Kavanaugh very likely didn’t get in only because he managed to do his homework with a piercing hangover, but also because he was a prime candidate for a “legacy” admittance.

The truth is that many children of elite families enjoy all kinds of unacknowledged protections that make failure a herculean effort. In childhood, bad grades are fixed with expensive tutoring (and, if necessarily, remedial boarding or military schools.) At top Ivy League universities, rampant grade inflation is a poorly kept secret, with wealthy students frequently lodging successful grievances against professors and graduate students who dare give them anything less than an “A,” no matter how mediocre their work. In adulthood, bad business bets are backstopped with family money and connections. On Wall Street, it’s the government that steps in to bail out reckless bets since chances are that your workplace is too big to fail.

None of this is to say that the very wealthy are lazy or lead lives free of pain. Many work nonstop (as do the working poor, under unimaginably harder conditions). Moreover, elite institutions — prep schools, fraternities, secret societies — tend to build in their own brutal hazing rituals. Top corporate law firms and investment banks put new recruits through grueling hours and ruthlessly pit them against one another for bonuses and promotions.

Inside families with great fortunes at stake, siblings are similarly pitted against each other for control of the greatest prizes. So Trump fashioned himself as a “killer” to beat out his older brother Fred for his father’s favor. And, as Mayer reported, the three younger Koch brothers staged a mock trial accusing their oldest brother (also named Fred) of being gay so that he would relinquish his claim to the family fortune.

All of this is part of a time-tested process of training and indoctrination designed to toughen up the soft sons of privilege so they are ready to be as cutthroat as their fathers. But surviving such elite trials often convinces people like Donald Trump, Charles Koch, and Brett Kavanaugh that they are where they are solely because they worked their respective tails off.

Failure Is for Other People

It reminds me of a talk I once heard by Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund manager in Chicago, who at the time was in a state of distress about an Obama plan to increase taxes. Speaking to a group of elite college students about his rise to enormous wealth, he told a story about how his family had given him some capital to start a hedge fund in his Harvard dorm room (where so many rags-to-riches stories seem to begin), complete with a satellite hook-up to receive real-time market data. He confessed to the students that this first foray into trading had not gone well, that he had in fact lost a lot of other people’s money. Fortunately, however, he was entrusted with still more start-up capital, was able to start again, and that’s where he began his rise to being what he is today: the richest man in Illinois.

Asked by a student how he got through the tough times, this “self-made” billionaire replied: “America is incredibly forgiving of failure.”

What struck me most at the time was that Griffin seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying — that a country in which millions are one illness away from homelessness, and which at that time imprisoned 2.3 million people, “is incredibly forgiving of failure.” He was convinced that his personal experience of being repeatedly caught by his own personal family safety net was a universal American experience — and that let him fight to lower his tax bill and further shred the safety net with what appeared to be a clear conscience.

Chuck Collins, an heir to a family fortune who gave it up in order to fight entrenched inequality, recently wrote about the moral risks that accrue when so many powerful people, from Trump to Kavanaugh, deceive themselves about how much they were helped. “If I believe that success is based entirely on personal grit,” he wrote for CNN, “then why should I pay taxes so that someone else can have a comparable head start to mine — with early childhood education, access to quality health care and mental health services, and low-cost higher education?”

Why indeed? And why support any form of affirmative action when you are in denial about all the extra support that landed you where you are today?

There are other moral hazards that result from this denial as well — perils that put whole societies at risk when these overconfident men assume power. Because if your experience is that every time you stumble, you recover as if by magic, then you will be much more prone to upping the ante next time, convinced that you and yours will surely be alright in the end, as you have always been.

So why not refuse to regulate derivatives? The market will self-correct. Why not pour that toxic waste into a river? The solution to pollution is dilution, right? And why not invade Iraq? It will surely be a “cakewalk.” And while we’re at it, why not ignore decade after decade of warnings from climate scientists telling us that if we didn’t get emissions under control, we will run out of time? Come on, don’t be so negative, surely technology will save us, it certainly has been great for Uber.

I gave a TED talk about this mentality a decade ago called “Addicted to Risk,” and if you want to know where it all leads, have a glance at the harrowing new U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released earlier this week.

Because now the whole thing is unraveling. The reckless bets are coming due — economically and ecologically. And the self-made mythology is unraveling too. That’s why Trump isn’t bothering to defend himself — it’s all gotten too obvious to deny. Too much money is pooling at the highest economic echelons. Single families — like the Waltons and the Cargills — are hogging too many spots on the Forbes 400 list.

Back in 2012, United for a Fair Economy published a report on the role of inherited wealth on that list. It found that “40 percent of the Forbes 400 list inherited a sizable asset from a family member or spouse, and over 20 percent inherited sufficient wealth to make the list. In addition, 17 percent of the Forbes 400 have family members on the list.”

There are signs that the role of inherited wealth has only increased since then. That’s because the assets held by the already rich — in real estate, the stock market, and in direct corporate profits — are growing at a significantly higher rate than the overall economy and the salaries of working people, which are stagnating.

This was one of the key insights of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”:

Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). … Wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved.

This is compounded by the successful crusade by the scions of the ultrarich to lower corporate and income taxes and chip away at the “death tax,” which once significantly shrunk the fortunes passed from one generation to the next. And then, as Collins points out, there is the complicity and creativity of tax lawyers and accounting firms who have grown ever more adept at hiding trillions in wealth from a scandalously complicit IRS. (Collins calls it the “dynasty protection racket.”)

Under Trump, who has profited so handsomely from all of these rackets, the pots of wealth being passed down within families are set to overflow even further. Among the many handouts in Trump’s tax law, the first $22.4 million gifted from parents to children is exempt from the estate tax. (“Final Tax Bill Includes Huge Estate Tax Win for the Rich,” announced a euphoric Forbes headline last December.)

Is it any surprise that, as the economy changes — with the very idea of meritocracy under sustained assault both by the new tech monopolies that quash competition and the increasing power of dynastic wealth — those uglier stories that rationalize untenable levels of inequality are roaring to the surface?

Wealth and Destiny

These are the theories that hold that the wealthy and powerful deserve their lopsided share not primarily because of their hard work but because of their identity — the family they were born into, their (imagined) superior genetics, their supposedly elevated values, and of course, their race, religion, and gender. Inside the logic of this story, success does not come because you were showered with privileges. You were showered with privileges because you are better.

A few years back, Jamie Johnson, one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, interviewed other members of his wealthy cohort for the film “Born Rich” and its sequel, “The One Percent.” He observed that while he was struggling to understand why he deserved to be handed so much money just because he had managed to turn 21, “For some people I talked to, inequality is easy to understand. It’s preordained.”

People like Roy O. Martin III, president and CEO of the Louisiana-based Roy O. Martin Lumber Company, which was previously headed by his father and grandfather. Martin told Johnson, “If you inherit money, you feel ‘why did I get all this and somebody else is poor?’ Well, God has a reason for it. God’s never going to give you something you can’t handle.” Being rich, he went on, means that “God has given you a lot of assets to be stewards of.”

Collins told me that he has encountered these supremacist theories frequently in the moneyed circles he grew up in and in conversations around the estate tax — “and it’s happening more as we become more unequal.” In some cases, people are still genuinely convinced that they worked for all the money they have. But where this is obviously not the case, different justifications are emerging. “They responded that ‘our family is deserving. We have better values that we have passed on or a different work ethic.’” And sometimes, Collins told me, this self-justification slips into more dangerous territory. “You hear that this is all genetics. Or that ‘our health is better’ or ‘we have more energy.’”

Only ideas like these can help justify a passion to avoid taxes on a pile of wealth that has been passed through four generations. You have to believe there is something inherently superior about your family. And even if it is left unsaid, you also have to believe the corollary — that there is something inherently inferior about the people who would benefit from those taxes. Just as you deserve your unearned place at the top, so others must deserve theirs at the bottom — they are “bad hombres,” come from “shit-hole countries,” and so on.  All the easier to abuse, deport, even torture.

Indeed, if you have been raised on a narrative of your own specialness and exceptionality, you may well be prone to believe that all kinds of things are your divine right. You might believe that you have a right to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court despite never having tried a case. You might believe you have a right to become president despite having a closet full of skeletons and no history of public service.

And, in some cases, you may well feel entitled to do things to people against their will who are not in your rarefied club — whether forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she does not choose, or grabbing women’s bodies without their consent. Or to do whatever it takes to shut her up — be it a hand over her mouth or a “catch and kill” story in the National Inquirer.

Trump’s sense of entitlement to massive amounts of inherited wealth and political power is not something his mostly middle- and working-class followers have the privilege of sharing. But that misses an important point: In boiling times like ours, supremacist thinking is contagious. When elites indulge their ugliest beliefs about their divine right to keep winning, it trickles down, giving their supporters license to assume their own imagined superior status — over anyone who seems sufficiently undefended.

This is an intensely hierarchical worldview that is completely comfortable with a minority making decisions for a majority in a rigged electoral system, just as it feels no need to reconcile two totally different visions of justice — “innocent until proven guilty” when it comes to Brett Kavanaugh’s job application and, as Trump told a gathering of police chiefs on Monday, “stop and frisk” for anyone seen as a possible criminal in Chicago (obvious code for a black person walking down the street). This is not seen as a contradiction: There are simply two classes of people — us and them, winners and losers, people deserving of rights and everyone else.

By abandoning his Horatio Alger schtick and embracing his new identity as a chosen son, the one with the golden touch, Trump is signaling that he thinks his base is ready to abandon the whole idea not just of meritocracy, but equality itself — and we should definitely pay attention.

You can see the effects of this moral degeneration at work in the president’s own family: Trump at least felt some shame about his silver spoon, which is why he built his identity, however laughably, on being a self-made man. He knew his wealth would be less impressive if he admitted how much he had inherited.

But his children feel no such compunction to lie and, much like the crown princes of oil emirates and the “princeling” spawns of top Chinese party officials, they seem to revel in their status as heirs to a throne. All came to notoriety as bit players on “The Apprentice,” and all have built their reputations solely around being “a Trump,” as if the name alone bestowed some magical powers, and they were part of their father’s capacity to turn everything he touches into gold.

So Ivanka and Jared blithely take control over large parts of the U.S. government, despite having no relevant experience and never having been elected to anything. And when Eric and Don Jr. announced last year that they would be opening a chain of boutique hotels, the name they selected was telling indeed. It would be called “Scion,” a defiant celebration of the idle heirs to dynastic families if ever there was one. It seems that the trust fund set is tired of pretending that they have earned their good fortune and are instead ready to claim it openly for what it is: a birthright.

As more and more inherited wealth is passed, tax-free, from one generation to the next, we can expect to see much more of such shamelessness.

All of this was foretold. Almost two years ago, Trump held his first television interview after the 2016 elections. It was for “60 Minutes,” and he lined up the entire family on golden, throne-like chairs. That should have been our first clue that American capitalism was entering a new stage: the Age of the Pampered Princeling.

 

Aux Barricades Mes Enfants!

Time for the sans-culottes to rise up against Washington’s insanity

October 9, 2018

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

On October 21st there will be a Women’s March on the Pentagon hosted by the Global Women’s Peace Action. My wife and many of our friends will be going and even I will tag along in support in spite of my gender. We participate with some reservations as we have only demonstrated publicly twice since 9/11, once opposing the then about to start Iraq War and once against the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). All too often demonstrations morph into progressive exercises in flagellation of what are now referred to as “deplorable” values with little being accomplished either before, during or afterwards, apart from the piles of debris left behind to be cleaned up by the Park Service. And such events are rarely even covered by the media in Washington, where the Post generally adheres closely to a neocon foreign policy tactic, which means that if you ignore something distasteful it will eventually go away.

Hopefully on this occasion it will be different because the time for talking politics is rapidly being rendered irrelevant by the speed of Washington’s disengagement from reality and Americans of all political persuasions must begin to take to the streets to object to what their government is doing in their name. I am mildly optimistic that change is coming as I find it difficult to imagine that in spite of the relentless flood of mainstream media propaganda there is even a plurality of Americans that supports with any actual conviction what the United States is doing in Syria and what it intends to do in Iran. And apart from a desire to make voting in America safer and insofar as possible interference free, I also believe that most think that Russiagate is a load of hooey and would prefer to be friends with Moscow.

Why now? “Now” is a whole new ballgame, as the expression goes, because the utter insanity coming out of Washington could easily wind up killing most of us here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Specifically, in a press conference on Tuesday, Kay Bailey Hutchison, a former Senator from Texas who is currently the United States’ ambassador to NATO, declared that Washington was prepared to launch a preemptive attack on Russian military installations as a response to alleged treaty violations on the part of Moscow. Note particularly what Hutchison actually said: “At that point, we would be looking at the capability to take out a missile that could hit any of our countries. Counter measures would be to take out the missiles that are in development by Russia in violation of the treaty. They are on notice.”

And note further what she was implying, namely that Washington, acting on its own authority, has the right to attack a nuclear armed and powerful foreign country based on what are presumably negotiable definitions of what are acceptable weapons to base on one’s own soil. It would be an attack on a neighbor or competitor with whom one is not at war and which does not necessarily pose any active threat. By that standard, any country with a military capability can be described as threatening and one can attack anyone else based purely on one’s own assessment of what is acceptable or not.

It is quite remarkable how many countries in the world are now “on notice” for punishment when they do things that the United States objects to. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has warned that she will be “taking names” of those United Nations members that criticize U.S. policies in the Middle East. As increasing discomfort with U.S. initiatives there and elsewhere is a worldwide phenomenon, with only Israel, the Philippines, Nigeria and Kenya having a favorable view of Washington, Haley’s list is inevitably a long one. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, when they are not fabricating intelligence and inflating threats, have likewise warned specific countries that they are being judged by Washington and will be punished at a level proportionate to their transgressions.

Hutchison is not known as a deep thinker, so one has to suspect that her expressed views were fed to her by someone in Washington. Her specific grievance against Russia relates to Moscow’s reported deployment of new land-based missiles that have a claimed range of more than 5,000 kilometers, which is enough to hit most targets in Europe. If true, the development would be in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and would definitely pose a potential threat to the Europeans, but the more serious question has to be the rationale behind threatening a nuclear war through preemptive action over an issue that might be subject to renewed multilateral negotiation.

Hutchison and the State Department inevitably went into double-speak mode when concerns were expressed about possible preemption against Russia. She clarified her earlier comments with an almost incomprehensible “My point: Russia needs to return to INF Treaty compliance or we will need to match its capabilities to protect U.S. & NATO interests. The current situation, with Russia in blatant violation, is untenable.”

Spokesman Heather Nauert at State then chimed in “What Ambassador Hutchison was talking about was improving overall defense and deterrence posture. The United States is committed to upholding its arms control obligations and expects Russia to do the very same thing.” Both disclaimers were needed, even if lacking in clarity, but they did not dispel the ugly taste of the initial comment regarding starting a war of preemption. Russia took note of the back and forth, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman drily observing “It seems that people who make such statements do not realize the level of their responsibility and the danger of aggressive rhetoric.” Hutchison and Nauert also do not seem aware of the fact that Russia’s frequently stated defense doctrine is to use nuclear weapons if and when it is attacked by a superior force, which might well be Moscow’s assessment of the threat posed by U.S. led NATO.

The disconnect between the White House’s often expressed desire to improve relations with Russia and the bureaucracy’s tendency to send the opposite message is typical of what has been referred to as Trump’s “dual-track presidency”. Gareth Porter has recently observed how President Trump, for all his faults in so many ways, is indeed desirous of military disengagement in some areas but he is repeatedly being overruled or outmaneuvered by the permanent bureaucracies in government, most notably the Pentagon and intelligence services. Hutchison, Haley, Pompeo and Bolton speak and act for that constituency even when they appear to be agreeing with the president.

So given the danger of war based on what Washington itself says about the state of the world and America’s presumed role in it, it is time to take the gloves off and march. That a high-level official can even stand up and speak about preventive war with a major nuclear power is disgraceful. She should be fired immediately. That she has not been fired means that someone somewhere high up in the bureaucracy agrees with what she said. Nuclear war is not an option. It is an end of all options.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 11, 2018

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 publications.

Conversation No. 85

Date: Friday, May 30, 1997

Commenced:  1:11 PM CST

Concluded: 1:35 PM CST

RTC: Gregory, I’m glad you called. I wanted to warn you about some picture you are supposed to have with Mueller and Harry in it. Does this ring a bell with you?

GD: Yes it does. A U.S. Signal Corps photo of Harry, Mueller, Beetle Smith and some other type in the Oval Office. Came out of the Truman Library in Missouri some time ago and landed in my mail box. Very clear shot of Mueller, standing on the left of Harry’s desk, Harry in the middle smiling up to the right while he’s looking right at Smith. No question it’s Mueller. Picture is identified, with names,  on the reverse and has the Signal Corp stamps, dates and all that.

RTC: Ah, yes, that explains everything. Do not even admit having this, Gregory or you will have burglars visiting you the next time you go to the movies. They do not know what name Mueller used when he came to this country and until they do, they cannot cleanse the files of any reference to him.

GD: I beat them to that one, Robert. I had Zachery write off to the Army records center at Springfield and get copies, stamped copies, of the records of four general officers. One of these was Mueller. The three I tossed but I kept Heini’s file. Picture and all. That’s what the violators of deceased prostitutes are after. You told me that they didn’t know the name. What assholes. They run around bleating that I am a liar while under cover, they try to remove any proof that the head of the German Gestapo not only survived the war but lived, and worked, in Washington and even entertained the President of the United States at dinner once.

RTC: Oh, be very careful with things like that. If the left wingers or the loony Hebrews find out about that, they will wail and raise a terrible fuss. Our press people will have a good deal of extra work with that one. Naturally, they will all lie and Jim will call me up and rant for two hours. If Mr. Bender puts it into one of his books, believe me, his warehouse full of the books will have a tragic fire.

GD: I should put out the word that some vicious paranoid keeps the pictures in their home and then tip him off that bad people are going to break into his house, murder him and kill his children, or his cat, whichever.

RTC: You’ve done that sort of thing before, as I recall.

GD: I have indeed and enjoyed every minute of it. My God, Robert, these people are so stupid they couldn’t find either end of themselves in a dark room. If I had a dollar for every telephone call I got from some obscure professor of history at an academy for the chronically incontinent, telling me how much he enjoyed the Mueller book, asking me if I had any of the documents I mentioned and wondering if he and his friend Bruce can visit me and show me all of their newly discovered Mueller documents. I mean they must think I’m some kind of an idiot. Oh no, I would never let Professor Crotchrott into my house or his friend Bruce either. When you act all  pleased and start grilling the fake professor about Mueller, you find out he knows nothing at all about him. Can’t they even brief him properly? I could do a better job dead drunk. I seriously wonder what these pin heads did before they went into government service. I imagine deodorizing dead dogs or changing loaded diapers at a nursing home across the street from the tenement house they reside in, sharing a soaked mattress with two winos and a dead fat woman.

RTC: (Laughter) Gregory, you are not at all a nice person.

GD: Oh, I’ve known that for years but oddly enough, people with real character and brains like Mueller and others all seem to like me a good deal. We all have a community of interest I guess. There stand the sheep, huddled in one corner of the pens and there we stand, wondering which one of us jumps the fence first and starts munching. Leg of lamb, throat of lamb, whatever. I guess that’s why I love wolves so much. We have so much in common. I recall once when I wrote an intelligence report that took me an entire weekend to do up right. Some fucking Brigadier read it and threw it into the trash because it didn’t support his feeble-minded theories. I was right, of course, and there was terrible trouble when my thesis was proven right. I was told to keep my mouth shut but I didn’t and eventually he got transferred to Manila where he could watch the natives there eat stewed monkey. Of course we know in their case it’s a clear cut case of cannibalism but what the hell…

RTC: My God, Gregory, do not speak to me of Filipinos. I had to deal with some of them once and you are dead on. I think monkeys are smarter. I know they are better looking.

GD: And their females do not have green eye shadow and purple lipstick on their flat pans. Well, enough rude racial remarks for the day. I also have Mueller’s pilot’s license, his Virginia driver’s license, his CIA pass, all expired but all with pictures.

RTC: But do not tell Kimmel about these or for a certainty, you would have a black bag job or someone would invite you to lecture in Washington and you would never be heard from again.

GD: Ah, they would take me out on a small boat, tie an old cash register to my legs, shoot me in the head and toss me into the backwaters of the Potomac. And the alert and highly intelligent local police would call it a certain suicide.

RTC: You are making cruel references to Paisley.

GD: Actually, I am. Very perceptive. Most suicides do shoot themselves in the back of the head, Robert. I understand he was a bloated rotting mess when they found him. We used to get floaters when I was doing pathology work. They stank so badly and parts kept falling off onto the floor that we would freeze them before cutting them up. Well, my name is not Smith and I will not go to Washington. They can come to see me sometime.

RTC: Would you welcome them with open arms, Gregory?

GD: No, loaded ones, Robert.

(Concluded at 1:35 PM CST

 

Sinking Santa Cruz: climate change threatens famed California beach town

Similar challenges are sprouting up along the coast, and the golden sands and beach properties that define the state at risk

October 11, 2018

by Oliver Milman in Santa Cruz, California

The Guardian

On a recent overcast October afternoon, yet another section of West Cliff Drive, the premier seafront street in Santa Cruz, California, was roped off as workers toiled to prevent it from crumbling into the Pacific Ocean.

The erosion gnawing away at this prized road, and the famed surfing beaches it overlooks, is emblematic of the relentless threat that climate change poses to California’s coastline. As the sea level rises and storms of growing strength smash into the coast, the golden sands and beach properties that have come to define the state are at risk.

“I think with every coastal road in California, you’re going have to think about relocating it,” said Gary Griggs, an earth sciences professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

West Cliff Drive, which sits on an elevated bluff, hugs the coast near Santa Cruz’s 111-year-old boardwalk en route to a nature reserve thick with eucalyptus. The street’s beach houses and towering villas are regularly valued beyond $2m, with some vacant plots of land fetching $1m.

“Coastal property values are way inflated, factoring in all the risk involved,” Griggs said. “West Cliff Drive is the place to be now; lots of people who made money in Silicon Valley have moved there.”

Santa Cruz sits on the northern lip of Monterey Bay, which is losing several feet of beach a year. Sections of the cliffs beneath West Cliff Drive are abutted by piles of rocks, known as riprap, placed as a last-ditch attempt to stem erosion.

There is only one house on the ocean side of the road, and its owners moved in recently. “They didn’t have any idea what they were getting into,” said Griggs, who is doing consulting work for the owners amid a tussle with authorities over riprap earlier put in place without permission. “The seawater keeps rising. In the long run, the main beach in Santa Cruz will certainly be lost, if nothing is done.”

Similar challenges are sprouting up along the California coast, particularly in the south of the state. Up to two-thirds of southern California’s beaches will completely erode by the end of this century if there aren’t “large-scale human interventions”, according to a major report released by the state government in August. Around $48bn worth of property will be at risk should the swelling sea level increase beyond 4ft.

“If we continue the path we are on there will be significant loss of beaches,” said Madeline Cavalieri, a program manager at the California Coastal Commission. The response to morphing coastlines will have to involve a combination of “protection, accommodation and retreat”, she added.

This scenario is particularly painful for a place like Santa Cruz, which draws its cultural and economic strength from its beaches and pounding waves.

According to local lore, three visiting Hawaiian princes introduced surfing to the city in 1885, when they rode the waves in longboards milled from local redwood. Surfers from around the world now descend upon Santa Cruz to spots such as Steamer Lane, where a rip hurtles into a sandstone bluff that has been in retreat since the last ice age and is now guarded by an array of rocks. A former lighthouse, now a surfing museum, overlooks surfers scrambling over the rocks and into the foaming water.

“If you ask a surfer, it’s very apparent that climate change is real and is happening right before our eyes,” said Nick Muchas, who has lived and surfed in Santa Cruz for the past 15 years. Muchas frets about surfing spots that will suffer as the coasts recede, leading to overcrowding at the better areas, as well as the impacts on land.

“West Cliff Drive is our cherished road, it’s our treasure chest, and every winter we can see the whole cliff is becoming more unstable,” he said. “When the surf and spray comes over it, I’d say it’s treacherous.”

Erosion has shaped California’s coast since long before mass industrialization started pumping planet-warming gases into the atmosphere. A rock arch near the lighthouse collapsed in the late 19th century, with just a stump remaining now. A separate rock formation, known locally as “the old shoe”, is now more like the bottom of a heel.

But climate change is accelerating this process. According to a city climate plan, more than 70 Santa Cruz buildings are expected to be at risk from flooding within 12 years with 4in of sea level rise. By 2100, this grows to 390 residential and 65 commercial properties, along with seven miles of roads. This would come with “high rates of beach and coastal bluff retreat”, the document states.

“It’s really hard to say right now what that means, but we do know that tourism is a major driver of our economy here locally,” said Tiffany Wise-West, the sustainability and climate action manager for the city of Santa Cruz. “What if [residents] do have to move at some point? We already have an affordable housing crisis here in Santa Cruz.”

Along about a tenth of the California coast, the response to this threat has been to erect seawalls or dump protective rocks. While this may buy time for expensive low-lying infrastructure – waste water treatment plants, power stations, the airports at San Francisco and San Jose – the barriers can exacerbate the loss of beaches.

As the sea level rises, beaches would naturally migrate inland with the retreating coastline. But fixed points such as seawalls prevent this shift, trapping and in effect drowning the sand as the sea rises and storms take their toll.

Roads, sidewalks and buildings also provide a barrier, which presents a conundrum for cities such as Santa Cruz that want to avoid the opposing financial cataclysms of losing their beaches or having to relocate buildings and people en masse to safer ground inland.

The hard choices won’t be deferred for much longer. California’s coastal commission has been pushing Santa Cruz to come up with an erosion plan for West Cliff Drive and the city is turning to residents for feedback.

More defences may be erected; some areas may have to be abandoned. The state is keen on “green” solutions – seeding wetlands or other vegetation to slow the tides – but that is tough to do in Santa Cruz, with its steep cliffs and hefty waves.

The retreating coastline isn’t the only climate challenge Santa Cruz, like many coastal locations, is facing. Heatwaves threaten the sick and elderly, while lengthening wildfire seasons risk choking the city with smoke. The city, already unaffordable for many residents, could see a future influx of people seeking to escape from baking temperatures inland.

“I would say we are on the leading edge in terms of understanding our risks and being proactive and addressing them,” Wise-West said. “It’s a pretty daunting topic, though.”

 

Who, or what, is Sorcha Faal: A Posterboy for Mental Health: The Coming of Planet X Fraud

“Unknown Energy Surges Continue to Hit Planet, Global Weather Systems in Chaos“

October 11, 2018

by Dr. Lucille Wong, Alviso University

Sorcha Faal turns out to be a nom de plume for one David Booth, a retired computer programmer from New Hampshire who stirred up limited controversy in conspiracy circles with the promotion of his book ‘Code Red: The Coming Destruction of the United States 2004.’ Booth claimed the book originated in a  “consecutive ten day dream he alleged he experienced in 2003 in which he saw a large sized planetary body pass close to Earth causing an explosion.  This was then built up into the story about ‘Planet X’ a heretofore unknown planet in our solar system  on a very long, elliptical orbit. In May 2003, it was alleged by the lunatic fringe that the non-existent “Planet X” would pass close enough to the Earth to affect it in some way, causing it to flip over (what many call a “pole shift”) and spur many other huge disasters. The end result was solemnly predicted be the deaths of many billions of people. There are a large number of web pages, chat rooms and books about Planet X and its horrible effects on the Earth. So the question is, does this planet exist, and did it come close enough to Earth in May 2003 and cause great catastrophes? Did an atomic bomb explode over downtown Houston, Texas, on December 25th, 2004 by orders of Paul Wolfowitz? Many internet readers were breathlessly informed of this by a Canadian masquerading as the “German Guy,” a purported senior intelligence official in the German BND. Houston still stands, undamaged, and as far as the mythical ‘Planet X’ is concerned, here is a comment from the official NASA website:

From the NASA website:

“There is no known Planet X or 10th planet in our solar system. Scientists have been looking for about a hundred years. It was believed that such a planet was required to explain the orbital characteristics of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune. Many searches have been performed and, to date, no evidence of such a planet has emerged. In addition, better information about the masses of outer planets has also now shown that no other planets are necessary to explain the planetary orbits. (See our article on “Planet X” below)

There also is no Sorcha Faal in St. Petersburg, Russia or Florida. None of the Russian scientific bodies listed in the Faal accounts, specifically the Russian Academy of Science, has any record of such a person.”

The Nibiru purported collision is a supposed fatal event between the planet Earth and a large planetary object known as Nibiru or Planet X. The strange theory first appeared in 1995 from one Nancy Lieder, who founded the website ZetaTalk. Lieder claimed that she was able to receive special messages from inhabitants of the Zeta Reticuli star system because of a special implant in her brain, How this got there she does not say but she continued to tell her readers that she had been chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 (though that date was later postponed) causing Earth to undergo a physical pole shift that would destroy most of humanity.

The prediction has subsequently spread far beyond Lieder’s website and has been adopted by numerous Internet doomsday groups. In the late 2000s, it became closely associated with the 2012 phenomenon.

. Although the name “Nibiru” is derived from the works of the ancient astronaut writer Zecharia Sitchin and his interpretations of Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, he denied any connection between his work and various claims of a coming apocalypse.

A prediction by self-described “Christian numerologist” David Meade that the Nibiru cataclysm would occur on 23 September 2017 received extensive media coverage.

The idea that a planet-sized object will collide with or closely pass by Earth in the near future is not supported by any scientific evidence and has been rejected by astronomers and planetary scientists as pseudoscience and an Internet hoax.

Such an object would have destabilized the orbits of the planets to the extent that their effects would be easily observable today.