TBR News June 10, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., June 10, 2017: “MERS = Mortgage Electronic Registration Inc.holds approximately 60 million Amerrican mortgages and is a Delaware corporation whose sole shareholder is Mers Corp. MersCorp and its specified members have agreed to include the MERS corporate name on any mortgage that was executed in conjunction with any mortgage loan made by any member of MersCorp. Thus in place of the original lender being named as the mortgagee on the mortgage that is supposed to secure their loan, MERS is named as the “nominee” for the lender who actually loaned the money to the borrower. In other words MERS is really nothing more than a name that is used on the mortgage instrument in place of the actual lender. MERS’ primary function, therefore, is to act as a document custodian. MERS was created solely to simplify the process of transferring mortgages by avoiding the need to re-record liens – and pay county recorder filing fees – each time a loan is assigned. Instead, servicers record loans only once and MERS’ electronic system monitors transfers and facilitates the trading of notes. It has very conserbatively estimated that as of February, 2010, over half of all new residential mortgage loans in the United States are registered with MERS and recorded in county recording offices in MERS’ name

MersCorp was the created in the early 1990’s by the former C.E.O.’s of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Indy Mac, Countrywide, Stewart Title Insurance and the American Land Title Association. The executives of these companies lined their pockets with billions of dollars of unearned bonuses and free stock by creating so-called mortgage backed securities using bogus mortgage loans to unqualified borrowers thereby creating a huge false demand for residential homes and thereby falsely inflating the value of those homes. MERS marketing claims that its “paperless systems fit within the legal framework of the laws of all fifty states” are now being vetted by courts and legal commentators throughout the country.

The MERS paperless system is the type of crooked rip-off scheme that is has been seen for generations past in the crooked financial world. In this present case, MERS was created in the boardrooms of the most powerful and controlling members of the American financial institutions. This gigantic scheme completely ignored long standing law of commerce relating to mortgage lending and did so for its own prsonal gain. That the inevitable collapse of the crooked mortgage swindles would lead to terrible national reprecussions was a matter of little or no interest to the upper levels of America’s banking and financial world because the only interest of these entities was to grab the money of suckers, keep it in the form of ficticious bonuses, real estate and very large accounts in foreign banks.. The effect of this system has led to catastrophic metldown on both the American and global economy.

MERS, it has clearly been proven in many civil cases, does not hold any promissory notes of any kind.. A party must have possession of a promissory note in order to have standing to enforce and/or otherwise collect a debt that is owed to another party. Given this clear-cut legal definition,  MERS does not have legal standing to enforce or collect on the over 60 million mortgages it controls and no member of MERS has any standing in an American civil court.

MERS has been taken to civil courts across the country and charged with a lack of standing in reprossion issues. When the mortgage debacle initially, and invevitably, began, MERS always rotinely broght actions against defauilting mortgage holders purporting to represent the owners of the defaulted mortgages but once the courts discovered that MERS was only a front organization that did not hold any deed nor was aware of who or what agencies might hold a deed, they have been routinely been denied in their attempts to force foreclosure.  In the past, persons alleging they were officials of MERS in foreclosure motions, purported to be the holders of the mortgage, when, in fact, they nor only were not the holder of the mortgage but, under a court order, could not produce the identity of the actual holder. These so-called MERS officers have usually been just employees of entities who are servicing the loan for the actual lender. MERS, it is now widely acknowledged by the courty, has no legal right to foreclose or otherwise collect debt which are evidenced by promissory notes held by someone else.

The American media routinely identifies MERS as a mortgage lender, creditor, and mortgage company, when in point of fact MERS has never loaned so much as a dollar to anyone, is not a creditor and is not a mortgage company. MERS is merely a name that is printed on mortgages, purporting to give MERS some sort of legal status, in the matter of a loan made by a completely different and almost always, a totally unknown enitity.”

Table of Contents

• The Worst of Donald Trump’s Toxic Agenda Is Lying in Wait – A Major U.S. Crisis Will Unleash It
• Donald Trump survived Comey’s testimony, but the fallout could be fatal
• Far-right group aims to stop informal migration to Europe
• Sweden is the gateway to the alt-right anti-immigrant agenda in Europe
• Muslim Mayor of London says there’s no money to monitor returning Muslim jihadists…because police are too busy chasing after alleged anti-Muslim hate incidents –
• Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Sensation
• London Bridge attackers had tried to hire 8.3 ton truck: police
• CrowdStrike, The DNC’s Security Firm, Was Under Contract With The FBI

The Worst of Donald Trump’s Toxic Agenda Is Lying in Wait – A Major U.S. Crisis Will Unleash It

June 10 2017

by Naomi Klein

The Intercept

During the presidential campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Donald Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. But in his first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. Fortunately, the response was immediate: the marches and rallies at airports, the impromptu taxi strikes, the lawyers and local politicians intervening, the judges ruling the bans illegal.

The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. Some have even concluded that this early slap down chastened Trump, and that he is now committed to a more reasonable, conventional course.

That is a dangerous illusion.

It is true that many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be realized. But make no mistake, the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. And there is one thing that could unleash it all: a large-scale crisis.

Large-scale shocks are frequently harnessed to ram through despised pro-corporate and anti-democratic policies that would never have been feasible in normal times. It’s a phenomenon I have previously called the “Shock Doctrine,” and we have seen it happen again and again over the decades, from Chile in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s coup to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

And we have seen it happen recently, well before Trump, in U.S. cities including Detroit and Flint, where looming municipal bankruptcy became the pretext for dissolving local democracy and appointing “emergency managers” who waged war on public services and public education. It is unfolding right now in Puerto Rico, where the ongoing debt crisis has been used to install the unaccountable “Financial Oversight and Management Board,” an enforcement mechanism for harsh austerity measures, including cuts to pensions and waves of school closures. This tactic is being deployed in Brazil, where the highly questionable impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was followed by the installation of an unelected, zealously pro-business regime that has frozen public spending for the next 20 years, imposed punishing austerity, and begun selling off airports, power stations, and other public assets in a frenzy of privatization.

As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly anti-democratic ideas.

Now, as many have observed, the pattern is repeating under Trump. On the campaign trail, he did not tell his adoring crowds that he would cut funds for meals-on-wheels, or admit that he was going to try to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, or that he planned to grant every item on Goldman Sachs’ wish list. He said the very opposite.

Since taking office, however, Donald Trump has never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up. Some of the chaos, like the Russia investigations, has been foisted upon him or is simply the result of incompetence, but much appears to be deliberately created. Either way, while we are distracted by (and addicted to) the Trump Show, clicking on and gasping at marital hand-slaps and mysterious orbs, the quiet, methodical work of redistributing wealth upward proceeds apace.

This is also aided by the sheer velocity of change. Witnessing the tsunami of executive orders during Trump’s first 100 days, it rapidly became clear his advisers were following Machiavelli’s advice in “The Prince”: “Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.” The logic is straightforward enough. People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine.

But here’s the thing. All of this is shock doctrine lite; it’s the most that Trump can pull off under cover of the shocks he is generating himself. And as much as this needs to be exposed and resisted, we also need to focus on what this administration will do when they have a real external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Maybe a natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist attack like the Manchester bombing. Any one such crisis could trigger a very rapid shift in political conditions, making what currently seems unlikely suddenly appear inevitable.

So let’s consider a few categories of possible shocks, and how they might be harnessed to start ticking off items on Trump’s toxic to-do list.

A Terror Shock

Recent terror attacks in London, Manchester, and Paris provide some broad hints about how the administration would try to exploit a large-scale attack that took place on U.S. soil or against U.S. infrastructure abroad. After the horrific Manchester bombing last month, the governing Conservatives launched a fierce campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for suggesting that the failed “war on terror” is part of what is fueling such acts, calling any such suggestion “monstrous” (a clear echo of the “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric that descended after September 11, 2001). For his part, Trump rushed to link the attack to the “thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries” — never mind that the bomber, Salman Abedi, was born in the U.K.

Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be “completely unacceptable.” And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms “to ask them to work with us” on providing backdoor access to these platforms. She made an even stronger call to crack down on internet privacy after the London Bridge attack.

More worrying, in 2015, after the coordinated attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the government of François Hollande declared a “state of emergency” that banned political protests. I was in France a week after those horrific events and it was striking that, although the attackers had targeted a concert, a football stadium, restaurants, and other emblems of daily Parisian life, it was only outdoor political activity that was not permitted. Large concerts, Christmas markets, and sporting events — the sorts of places that were likely targets for further attacks — were all free to carry on as usual. In the months that followed, the state-of-emergency decree was extended again and again until it had been in place for well over a year. It is currently set to remain in effect until at least July 2017. In France, state-of-emergency is the new normal.

This took place under a center-left government in a country with a long tradition of disruptive strikes and protests. One would have to be naive to imagine that Donald Trump and Mike Pence wouldn’t immediately seize on any attack in the United States to go much further down that same road. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports (the kind that responded to the Muslim travel ban) a threat to “national security.” Protest organizers would be targeted with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment.

Indeed we should be prepared for security shocks to be exploited as excuses to increase the rounding up and incarceration of large numbers of people from the communities this administration is already targeting: Latino immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers, climate activists, investigative journalists. It’s all possible. And in the name of freeing the hands of law enforcement to fight terrorism, Attorney General Jeff Sessions would have the excuse he’d been looking for to do away with federal oversight of state and local police, especially those that have been accused of systemic racial abuses.

And there is no doubt that the president would seize on any domestic terrorist attack to blame the courts. He made this perfectly clear when he tweeted, after his first travel ban was struck down: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.” And on the night of the London Bridge attack, he went even further, tweeting: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” In a context of public hysteria and recrimination that would surely follow an attack in the U.S., the kind of courage we witnessed from the courts in response to Trump’s travel bans might well be in shorter supply.

The Shock of War

The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war (or two). It doesn’t necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.

Trump’s likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they include (but are by no means limited to) Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, there’s North Korea, where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declared that “all options are on the table,” pointedly refusing to rule out a pre-emptive military strike.

There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly those who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. Trump’s April 2017 missile strike on Syria — ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts — won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia.

But there’s another, less discussed reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: There is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with the supply of oil to the world market This would be great news for oil giants like Exxon Mobil, which have seen their profits drop dramatically as a result of the depressed price of oil — and Exxon, of course, is fortunate enough to have its former CEO, Tillerson, currently serving as secretary of state. (Not only was Tillerson at Exxon for 41 years, his entire working life, but Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay him a retirement package worth a staggering $180 million.)

Other than Exxon, perhaps the only entity that would have more to gain from an oil price hike fueled by global instability is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and the second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia). When the price was high, this was great news for Putin: Prior to 2014, fully 50 percent of Russia’s budget revenues came from oil and gas.

But when prices plummeted, the government was suddenly short hundreds of billions of dollars, an economic catastrophe with tremendous human costs. According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; the Russian ruble depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.

We’ve also heard a lot about that massive deal between Exxon Mobil and the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil in the Arctic (Putin bragged that it was worth half a trillion dollars). That deal was derailed by U.S. sanctions against Russia and despite the posturing on both sides over Syria, it is still entirely possible that Trump will decide to lift the sanctions and clear the way for that deal to go ahead, which would quickly boost Exxon Mobil’s flagging fortunes.

But even if the sanctions are lifted, there is another factor standing in the way of the project moving forward: the depressed price of oil. Tillerson made the deal with Rosneft in 2011, when the price of oil was soaring at around $110 a barrel. Their first commitment was to explore for oil in the sea north of Siberia, under tough-to-extract, icy conditions. The break-even price for Arctic drilling is estimated to be around $100 a barrel, if not more. So even if sanctions are lifted under Trump, it won’t make sense for Exxon and Rosneft to move ahead with their project unless oil prices are high enough. Which is yet another reason why parties might embrace the kind of instability that would send oil prices shooting back up.

If the price of oil rises to $80 or more a barrel, then the scramble to dig up and burn the dirtiest fossil fuels, including those under melting ice, will be back on. A price rebound would unleash a global frenzy in new high-risk, high-carbon fossil fuel extraction, from the Arctic to the tar sands. And if that is allowed to happen, it really would rob us of our last chance of averting catastrophic climate change.

So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.

Economic Shocks

A centerpiece of Trump’s economic project so far has been a flurry of financial deregulation that makes economic shocks and disasters distinctly more likely. Trump has announced plans to dismantle Dodd-Frank, the most substantive piece of legislation introduced after the 2008 banking collapse. Dodd-Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.

Trump and his team are not unaware of this, they are simply unconcerned — the profits from those market bubbles are too tantalizing. Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008. (In fact, Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the specific part of Dodd-Frank designed to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill for another such bailout — an ominous sign, especially with so many former Goldman executives making White House policy.)

Some members of the administration surely also see a few coveted policy options opening up in the wake of a good market shock or two. During the campaign, Trump courted voters by promising not to touch Social Security or Medicare. But that may well be untenable, given the deep tax cuts on the way (and the fictional math beneath the claims that they will pay for themselves). His proposed budget already begins the attack on Social Security and an economic crisis would give Trump a handy excuse to abandon those promises altogether. In the midst of a moment being sold to the public as economic Armageddon, Betsy DeVos might even have a shot at realizing her dream of replacing public schools with a system based on vouchers and charters.

Trump’s gang has a long wish list of policies that do not lend themselves to normal times. In the early days of the new administration, for instance, Mike Pence met with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to hear how the governor had managed to strip public sector unions of their right to collective bargaining in 2011. (Hint: He used the cover of the state’s fiscal crisis, prompting New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to declare that in Wisconsin “the shock doctrine is on full display.”)

Taken together, the picture is clear. We will very likely not see this administration’s full economic barbarism in the first year. That will only reveal itself later, after the inevitable budget crises and market shocks kick in. Then, in the name of rescuing the government and perhaps the entire economy, the White House will start checking off the more challenging items on the corporate wish list.

Weather Shocks

Just as Trump’s national security and economic policies are sure to generate and deepen crises, the administration’s moves to ramp up fossil fuel production, dismantle large parts of the country’s environmental laws, and trash the Paris climate accord all pave the way for more large-scale industrial accidents — not to mention future climate disasters. There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming, so the very worst climatic effects of the administration’s policies won’t likely be felt until they’re out of office.

That said, we’ve already locked in so much warming that no president can complete a term without facing major weather-related disasters. In fact, Trump wasn’t even two months on the job before he was confronted with overwhelming wildfires on the Great Plains, which led to so many cattle deaths that one rancher described the event as “our Hurricane Katrina.”

Trump showed no great interest in the fires, not even sparing them a tweet. But when the first superstorm hits a coast, we should expect a very different reaction from a president who knows the value of oceanfront property, has open contempt for the poor, and has only ever been interested in building for the 1 percent. The worry, of course, is a repeat of Katrina’s attacks on public housing and public schools, as well as the contractor free for all that followed the disaster, especially given the central role played by Mike Pence in shaping post-Katrina policy.

The biggest Trump-era escalation, however, will most likely be in disaster response services marketed specifically toward the wealthy. When I was writing “The Shock Doctrine,” this industry was still in its infancy, and several early companies didn’t make it. I wrote, for instance, about a short-lived airline called Help Jet, based in Trump’s beloved West Palm Beach. While it lasted, Help Jet offered an array of gold-plated rescue services in exchange for a membership fee.

When a hurricane was on its way, Help Jet dispatched limousines to pick up members, booked them into five-star golf resorts and spas somewhere safe, then whisked them away on private jets. “No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first-class experience that turns a problem into a vacation,” read the company’s marketing materials. “Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems Help Jet, far from misjudging the market for these services, was simply ahead of its time. These days, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there.

What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income — precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina.

And this two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their exclusive clients: When wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in re-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.

California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves a billion dollars a year through this program — a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.

A World of Green Zones and Red Zones

The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.

So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: What everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion on higher ground.

This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their own minds) liberates the rich not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability. What we are hurtling toward is a world demarcated into fortified Green Zones for the super-rich, Red Zones for everyone else — and black sites for whoever doesn’t cooperate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.

In fact, if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now — from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq — what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth. It takes very little to push these regions into drought and famine, which frequently acts as an accelerant to conflict, which of course drives migration.

And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones in places like Yemen and Somalia, is now being trained on the people in the boats  — casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. This is the context in which well over 13,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores since 2014, many of them children, toddlers, and babies. It is the context in which the Australian government has sought to normalize the incarceration of refugees in island detention camps on Nauru and Manus, under conditions that numerous humanitarian organizations have described as tantamount to torture. This is also the context in which the massive, recently demolished migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle” — an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized in right-wing media as “animals.”

The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from these larger geopolitical and ecological trends. The only way to justify such barbaric forms of exclusion is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for “Canadian values,” or successive Australian prime ministers justifying those sinister island detention camps as a “humanitarian” alternative to death at sea.

This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes — countries that have insisted slavery and indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation — of cotillions in the master’s house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen indigenous land on which North America’s wealth was built. And now the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are surging to the surface as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.

A Crisis of Imagination

It seems relevant that the walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from “The Hunger Games,” with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to “Elysium,” with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean and a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them.

Because the point of all that dystopian art was never to act as a temporal GPS, showing us where we are inevitably headed. The point was to warn us, to wake us — so that, seeing where this perilous road leads, we can decide to swerve.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” So said Thomas Paine many years ago, neatly summarizing the dream of escaping the past that is at the heart of both the colonial project and the American Dream. The truth, however, is that we do not have this godlike power of reinvention, nor did we ever. We must live with the messes and mistakes we have made, as well as within the limits of what our planet can sustain.

But we do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. It’s this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance.

Donald Trump survived Comey’s testimony, but the fallout could be fatal

The former FBI director threw out a trail of clues for the special counsel to follow in the Trump-Russia investigation, which looks set to shadow his presidency

June 10, 2017

by David Smith

The Guardian

Washington-At 10.20pm, Kellyanne Conway wandered in from the landscaped gardens of the British ambassador’s residence, built in the 1920s and resembling an English country house in the heart of Washington. An Andy Warhol portrait of the Queen watched from above the ornate fireplace as results of the British election flashed up on a giant TV screen.

Conway, a senior adviser at the White House, could not quite escape questions about former FBI director James Comey’s testimony earlier in the day. Donald Trump had “never intended to tweet” during the session, she told the Guardian, with a dismissive air that implied he had much better things to do.

But the president, who broke his Twitter silence less than eight hours later, may be in a similar position to Theresa May. He survived for sure, but with a self-inflicted wound that could yet prove mortal. Comey threw out a trail of clues for special counsel Robert Mueller to follow in his investigation of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, which looks set to shadow his presidency for years.

“History will remember it as a significant inflection point,” said Norm Eisen, former ethics czar under Barack Obama. “We’ve had leaked and hearsay evidence before but now, for the first time, we had direct evidence of obstruction of justice. It was a giant step forward towards accountability for Trump, but there will be many more giant steps necessary.”

What Comey did not say may ultimately prove as telling as what he did during his blockbuster questioning by members of the Senate intelligence committee. Although he declined to describe Trump’s plea on behalf of Michael Flynn as obstruction of justice, Comey made the first public suggestion that Mueller will investigate the president himself. “That’s a conclusion that I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that’s an offence,” he said

Republicans seized on Comey’s remark that Trump is not “literally” under a counterintelligence investigation and was content for his “satellites” to be scrutinised if necessary. But when the ex-FBI director was asked if the direction of the investigation could include the president, he carefully replied: “As I explained, the concern of one of my senior leader colleagues was, if you’re looking at potential coordination between the campaign and Russia, the person at the head of the campaign is the candidate. So, logically, this person argued, the candidate’s knowledge, understanding, will logically become a part of your inquiry if it proceeds.”

As for those satellites, Comey implied that Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, may have more links to Russia than have already been established. Sessions announced his recusal from the investigation in March, under pressure from revelations of previously undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“Our judgment, as I recall, was that he was very close and inevitably going to recuse himself for a variety of reasons,” Comey said. “We were also aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic.”

Sessions, already rumoured to be at odds with his boss, is due to appear at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, and Democrats have said they will use it as an opportunity to grill him about Russian contacts.

Comey also told the hearing that he had explained to Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein, “my serious concern about the way in which the president is interacting, especially with the FBI”. Only days later, Rosenstein wrote a controversial memo providing Trump with reasons to fire Comey.

The former director gave Mueller another lead in his recollection of a dinner at the White House in January where Trump demanded his loyalty. “I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what’s going on here is that he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job,” he said.

And intriguingly, Comey refused to answer a question about Vnesheconombank (Veb), a Russian government-owned development bank associated with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met last year with Veb executives.

Then there was a seemingly trivial but telling detail: Trump’s chronic incuriosity about Russia’s attack on American democracy. Comey could not recall the president asking about it but gave a dire, heartfelt warning of Moscow’s aggressive intentions. David Axelrod, former campaign manager for Barack Obama, tweeted: “Apart from obstruction issue, the most troubling aspect of Comey’s testimony was @POTUS evident lack of interest in Russian cyber attack.”

And with a sense of political theatre, Comey also dangled the Nixonian prospect of secret tape recordings for Mueller to go after. “I’ve seen the tweet about tapes,” he said. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”

In all, Comey put down some tantalising dots for Mueller to join. But rightwing media were quick to make their own patterns. They contended that Trump is not under investigation, there is no obstruction of justice and there is still no proof of Russian collusion. They seized on Comey’s disclosure that he indirectly passed on his memos about private conversations to the media. Trump himself tweeted, “WOW, Comey is a leaker!” and his legal team began preparing a legal complaint against him.

It was a classic Trump tactic practised throughout his business career, throwing sand into the gears of his opponents to deflect and divert from his own troubles. Comey’s words were weaponised by both sides and that works to his advantage.

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant and pollster, reflected: “It was worse than it needed to be [for Trump] but not as bad as it could have been. There’s a line in the Simon and Garfunkel song The Boxer: “A man hears what he wants to hear/ And disregards the rest.”

“If you’re a Trump fan, you think Comey broke the law by leaking documents. If you’re a Trump foe, you think there’s enough to impeach the president. There’s something here for everyone and that means everyone is hurt. It’s so bad for American democracy.”

Clearly, there is a long way to go and impeachment remains a remote prospect in a Republican controlled House. Lisa Kern Griffin, a law professor at Duke University, said: “It is an enormously complex investigation. A case of this type – even without the national security dimensions, the international financial evidence, and the context of electoral politics – would ordinarily take years for federal agents to investigate.

“There is some urgency to this, and no doubt the special counsel and his team will move as quickly as possible, but they also have to be especially careful. It will be months or even years before they reach any definitive conclusions.”

Far-right group aims to stop informal migration to Europe

After crowdfunding 73,000 euros a new far-right, pan-European movement is campaigning to stop informal migration to Europe, drawing concern from humanitarian and leftist groups. Diego Cupolo reports from Catania, Sicily.

June 9, 2017

by Diego Cupolo

DW

The far-right group Identitarian Generation was unknown in mainstream media before obstructing a humanitarian vessel transporting migrants rescued at sea last month.

In a scene reminiscent of Greenpeace activists blocking whaling ships with inflatable boats, members of IG’s Italian and Austrian factions,accompanied by Canadian alt-right journalist Lauren Southern, temporarily stopped a SOS Mediterranee rescue ship from entering the port of Catania before being intercepted by the Italian Coast Guard.

Since the action, Italian IG leader Lorenzo Fiato (pictured at top) said his group has crowdfunded 73,000 euros ($82,000) and recruited more than 150 members throughout the country. The funds will be used towards future actions aimed at ending “massive” informal migration to Europe, mostly by targeting humanitarian search and rescue missions like those run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which some have accused of acting as a “taxi service” for migrants.

On Friday afternoon, IG launched its first Italian tour in Catania to spread its message and recruit members. Though attendance was light, the group’s quick ascent has raised concerns among humanitarian and leftist circles, who fear a new breed of disruptive, right-wing activism might be taking shape in Europe.

Borrowing the Greek lambda as its logo, a reference to the Spartan shields used against the Persian Empire, IG presents itself as a movement against “the Islamic invasion of Europe” while dismissing nationalist labels placed on comparable groups. In an interview with DW, Fiato said he was a “Europeanist” at heart and spoke proudly of initial comparisons to Greenpeace.

“It’s fascinating, really, because we were able to use the tactics of the left to advance the causes of the right, and we’re astounded by the support we’ve gotten,” Fiato said. “We’ve struck a chord with the public. People are disillusioned, thinking they must accept things as they are, but with this small boat, we were able to demonstrate what we are capable of. That change is possible.”

‘Integration is a lie’

While informal migration via the “Balkan Route” has largely stopped since the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement, migrants have been arriving in Italy via Libya in record numbers, with a 23 percent increase in the first five months of the year in comparison to the same period in 2016, according to the Italian Ministry of the Interior. The route remains dangerous, causing about 2,500 deaths so far in 2017, with roughly 60,000 migrants arriving in Italy.

In Fiato’s view, uncontrolled inflows of migrants from “vastly different” backgrounds threaten EU social and cultural structures, and informal migration must be stopped before foreigners displace native Europeans.

“Integration is a lie,” Fiato said. “[EU leaders] keep saying people should help integrate the migrants and to accept their cultural backgrounds, but in many ways, our cultures are unbridgeable.”

Fiato told DW he was not against Islam in the Middle East, but he was “against Islam in Europe.” He also said migrants from “more similar cultures,” such as Eastern Europe, were less threatening and more adaptable to Western European social structures than migrants of other backgrounds.

Fiato, a 23-year-old political science student from Milan, said he helped establish IG in 2012 to mirror anti-immigration movements in France. As far as ideology, he cited inspiration from right-wing French authors such as Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus and Dominique Venner.

When asked if he supported the creation of humanitarian corridors, in which those seeking asylum could bypass perilous boat trips by applying for international protection from their home countries, Fiato said no.

Instead, he backed the repatriation of migrants and increased collaboration between the EU and North African nations to close smuggling routes, though he was unsure if the 6 billion euro EU-Turkey agreement should be replicated elsewhere.

“In my view, the best solution is [migrants] work to improve their own countries,” Fiato said.

Interaction not integration

Observing IG’s growth from a distance, long-time activist Alfonso Di Stefano, of the Anti-Racist Network of Catania, said the group was based on ignorance and a “lack of understanding of the root causes behind migration.”

“If they read what was being said about Italians moving to the US in the early 1900s, they would find the same accusations being made about us back then that they are repeating today towards migrants,” Di Stefano told DW.

“We also don’t like the word ‘integration,'” Di Stefano continued. “We want to advance the idea of interaction between cultures, which is critical to the success of a multicultural Europe.”

While Di Stefano criticized IG, he acknowledged the shortcomings of the political left in fostering open dialogues on migration, with members often shutting down opponents as racists. He also noted right-wing groups were increasingly using Marxist themes, posing elites against the people, which has led to populist victories at the voting booth in both The UK and the US.

Lucia Borghi, a migration monitor from Borderline Sicilia, faulted Italian mass media in mishandling topics related to immigration by using terms like ”

“These movements are built over time and their ideas have been planted in fertile grounds,” Borghi told DW. “The group spawned from anger, from rage, from the stomach, really … to combat it is a daily undertaking in how we frame the complex discussion on migration.”

In the coming weeks, Fiato will campaign in northern Italy, and said he’s designing a phone application for IG members. Tentatively called ‘Patriot Peer,’ the app will help like-minded individuals find each other through geolocation services and help foster networks throughout Europe.

 

 

Sweden is the gateway to the alt-right anti-immigrant agenda in Europe

Fake news is their method for attracting followers to the cause

June 2, 2017

by Nina Mast

Salon

Sweden is known as a bastion of progressive values and policies, but underneath the dominant ideology, there is a motivated, well-connected nativist movement that has existed for decades and is now re-emerging, armed with fake news.

With a population of just under 10 million, Sweden is a small, historically ethnically homogenous country that in recent years has accepted the largest number of asylum seekers per capita of any European nation. Sweden’s white nationalists, once relegated to the fringe, have been re-energized by a global so-called populist movement and a relatively progressive immigration policy that is anathema to their agenda. And there are signs that they may be succeeding in their efforts. Xenophobic hate crimes are up, stricter immigration policies have been imposed, and Sweden Democrats, the far-right political party, with ties to neo-Nazism is, for the first time ever, polling as the second most popular party in the country. To top it off, there is evidence that the media discourse on immigration has taken a dark turn to portray migrants “as a problem,” and fake news is on the rise.

Enter the Swedish “alt-right,” a movement that sees progressivism as having been imported into Swedish society as an experiment in cultural Marxism and views Sweden’s relatively small size and homogeneity as having contributed to a sort of “unitarian zeitgeist” of liberal thought.* The members of this movement see it as a fight to “diversify” the Swedish media landscape while promoting a decidedly racist agenda. Together, these attributes have created an environment ripe for the spread of “alt-right” ideas, and the most well-known white nationalist of the American “alt-right” has taken notice.

Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist “think tank” the National Policy Institute (NPI), after having been recently alienated from a movement he named, is looking for legitimacy in a country he has dubbed “the most alt-right.” According to BuzzFeed, Spencer recently began a partnership with two Swedish “alt-right” outlets, Arktos Media, a publishing house that prints white nationalist literature in English, and Red Ice, a Swedish white nationalist video and podcast platform that often features international guests. The partnership, the AltRight Corporation, which has been called an attempt at a “more ideological Breitbart,” also has its own website and, until May 23, also had its own podcast, AltRight Radio. Soundcloud has since banned the podcast for violating its hate speech policy. But this movement is not confined to the internet. For the past nineyears, Sweden has hosted an “alt-right conference” which is attended by members and sympathizers from all over the world. One prominent American “alt-right” figure (whose name was not divulged) told AltRight.com’s Daniel Friberg that Sweden’s annual alt-right conference was the most “well-attended” he’d been to and, notably, the “most radical,” too.*

Migrant crime is a favorite topic of the “alt-right” in Sweden, in part because the outlets that promote this content know they’re speaking to an audience favorable to their ideological agenda, not facts. (Media Matters previously documented Breitbart’s use of a racist meme to categorize stories about migrant crime in Sweden, most of which also had little basis in reality). Journalists know this is happening but remain ill-equipped to respond to it. A recent study found that eight out of 10 Swedes believe fake news is altering their “perception of basic facts.” Sweden has acknowledged the rise of “inaccurate information” and, in March, the country’s prime minister announced a plan to combat fake news ahead of Sweden’s 2018 general election. Yet, Sweden remains vulnerable to fake news and, as the education minister admits, there is “some naivety when it comes to the information society.” Often the flow of misinformation looks something like this: A Swedish or British tabloid reports on a study or crime with a sensational headline and few details or context; “alt-right” or far-right outlets cite the original source but add new details to further sensationalize the story; these outlets promote each other to amplify the story; and eventually the story makes its way to a more mainstream news outlet. Sometimes, the news that a story is false makes its way back to Swedish media, but by then, the damage is already done.

Last year, American film producer Ami Horowitz made a deceptively edited film rife with false claims about migrant crime in Sweden. In February of this year, after having been promoted by U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail and conspiracy theorist website Infowars, he was invited for an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, not oncebut twice, and one of the segments was later cited by President Trump as the impetus for his fact-free suggestion that something “was happening last night” in Sweden, which he couched amid discussion of terror-hit cities. The interview received so much attention that the Swedish police and embassy pushed back, one Swedish newspaper responded by fact-checking each of Horowitz’s assertions, and another criticizedTrump’s complicity in the “Sweden-bashing by the hard-core American right.” But how equipped is Sweden to deal with xenophobic fake news that doesn’t reach the pedestal of the president of the United States, and, thus, does not grab international attention?

In another, more recent example, Swedish tabloid Dagens Nyheter published a study titled, “Young Men Who Commit Shootings Often Have A Foreign Background,” which found that 90 out of 100 shooting suspects had at least one foreign-born parent. Of course, these findings are concerning, but a closer look illustrates problems that are not unique to Sweden: Unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, and mental illness were all identified by experts as important contributing factors to gun violence. It is also worth noting that almost half of the individuals counted in this study were merely suspected, not convicted, of perpetrating these crimes. Of course, this context was missing from the misleadingly titled article that notorious Islamophobe Virginia Hale later wrote for Breitbart. Alex Jones’ Infowars also engaged with the story, citing the Swedish fake newspurveyor and “alt-right” outlet Fria Tider (which has been called the “Breitbart of Sweden”*) in its report, with an even more misleading headline: “SWEDEN: MIGRANTS RESPONSIBLE FOR 90% OF SHOOTINGS.” Both articles used the opportunity to push debunked claims about crime in Sweden.

Though they’re false, these claims are repeated so often that they begin to exist as facts. For example, the fact-checking website Snopes has debunked many stories on Sweden and even issued a three-part seriesdebunking the most common misleading narratives on Swedish migrant crime. But the narratives persist. There are a few reasons for this. It’s now widely known that sensational headlines get more clicks, and the effect is especially heightened when they play on a person’s deep-seated emotions like anger and anxiety. Sweden has not become the “rape capital of Europe,” but real or imagined, Sweden’s historically liberal refugee admissions policy has created enough tension to make people vulnerable to fake news about the population. Another universal reason for the rise of fake news, as it relates to Sweden, is disaffection from mainstream outlets and increasing preference for alternative sources. A 2016 study in Sweden found half of media consumers get their news from sources other than Sweden’s traditional news sources and around 20 percent have “no confidence” in them.

There are uniquely Swedish reasons for why the country is susceptible to fake news. These include the well-intentioned ways crime is defined and reported and the language barriers to understanding Swedish news. For instance, according to a late 2015 internal memo, Swedish police were instructed not to report externally the ethnic or national origin of suspected criminals in order not to appear racist. The decision, while admirable and also not unique to Sweden, has raised suspicion. Many far-right outlets perceived the move as an attempted cover-up, and the controversy became so big that the Swedish government responded to the contention. Another Swedish practice that has unintentionally created the illusion of increased crime is the way Sweden defines and categorizes crime and the culture around crime reporting. For example, Sweden defines sexual assault much more broadly than the U.S. and other European countries do, and records every single offense as a separate crime, even if they are committed by the same perpetrator. The country has also created a culture in which victims are encouraged to report crimes rather than stigmatized. Sweden’s open and progressive crime reporting practices, when viewed comparatively, allow fake news purveyors to speculate on a suspected criminal’s ethnic background with impunity, as well as manufacture an inflated perception of criminality.

From the reader’s perspective, the fact that most “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors link to Swedish language news stories in order to validate their claims forces even the most critical reader to either know Swedish or rely on rough translations to discern the validity of the source. Knowing this, outlets can wrongly attribute or incorrectly paraphrase quotations from Swedish sources that advance their narrative without fear of retribution.

The intersection of fake news and the “alt-right” is a particularly troubling one. It is ever-shifting, beholden neither to facts nor ideology and, in the realm of the internet, almost totally unaccountable. What we do know is that its adherents are white men who are targeting everyone else, that it’s not going away, and that we must remain vigilant. Sweden is the favorite target of the American “alt-right” as it expands to Europe, desperately looking for legitimacy, and armed with total lies.

Muslim Mayor of London says there’s no money to monitor returning Muslim jihadists…because police are too busy chasing after alleged anti-Muslim hate incidents –

June 8, 2017

IWB

The Metropolitan Police have arrested 25 people since Saturday’s terror attacks, using hate crime legislation to crack down on words and actions deemed either offensive, or which target Muslims “because of their religion.

Breitbart  (h/t Emma) “Community Engagement” for the Metropolitan Police, said:

Since Saturday evening’s attacks, we have increased the number of officers on the streets and in communities to reassure local people that they are able to go about their daily lives in peace and without fear of harassment or intimidation. Dedicated ward officers have also made contact with their local places of worship to encourage them to report hate crimes and to reassure those who congregate there that the police will take these crimes seriously. The Metropolitan Police has made 25 arrests for hate crime offences since Saturday. -He said in an interview Wednesday morning: “I can’t follow 400 people… the Met Police budget, roughly 15-20 per cent comes from me, the Mayor. The rest is funded by central government. If the Met Police budget is being shrunk and reduced, they’ve got to prioritise and use their resources in a sensible, savvy way.”

Now, however, it seems we are learning of the Met’s priorities. The force boasted on Thursday of the large amount of resources they dedicate to policing hate crime. A statement from the police said:

All hate crimes are reviewed by a Detective Inspector and the MPS has also increased specialist investigators within the 32 London borough community safety units by 30 per cent, with more than 900 specialist members of staff dedicated to investigating all hate crime and domestic abuse crimes.

The force also noted in its statement that it regards TellMAMA — a group which lost government funding after it was found they were artificially inflating hate crime numbers — as a reliable go-to for hate crime reporting.

In 2014, TellMAMA lost its case with the Press Complaints Commission, when it objected to the original Telegraph reporting which revealed its dodgy figures.

The Telegraph reported that many of their hate crime claims were exaggerations at best, and that out of the 212 “Islamophobic incidents” reported by Tell Mama, 57 per cent happened only online, with a further 16 per cent of incidents not being verified. Only eight per cent of incidents involved physical targeting, and no attacks were serious enough to require medical treatment. –

The Met Police statement adds: “We have increased the number of hate crime liaison officers who are a single point of contact for all those who need support after reporting a hate crime and we have introduced an Online Hate Crime Hub to tackle hate crime on social media.”

The news comes as London Mayor Sadiq Khan told Piers Morgan in an interview that London’s police did not have enough resources to monitor the jihadists returning to the United Kingdom from Syria and Iraq.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Sensation

Even more astonishing than Theresa May’s poor showing in this week’s British election was the resurrection of Labour — especially after Jeremy Corbyn’s party seemed to do all it could to get badly defeated.

June 10, 2017

by Jörg Schindler in London

Spiegel

When it was clear that the British prime minister, and not he, had emerged humiliated from the election, Jeremy Corbyn allowed himself to relish a sliver of satisfaction. “I would think that’s enough, to go, actually, and make way for a government that will be truly representative of all of the people of this country,” the Labour leader said in front of his home in the London district of Islington. Then the 68-year-old held up both thumbs for the cameras, a seemingly uncontrolled outburst of emotion coming from a man like him.

No one, perhaps aside from Corbyn himself, would have dared to predict even 12 hours earlier that the Labour Party would reap roughly 40 percent of the vote nationwide. But instead of receiving the poorest Labour result in postwar history, as many had predicted, Corbyn achieved the party’s best result since 2005, when a certain Tony Blair won with an absolute majority. That in and of itself is remarkable — yet given the circumstances, it’s sensational.

Ever since Corbyn, a socialist, managed through a series of lucky breaks to seize the party leadership two years ago, he has been fighting a lonely struggle. During the eight-week election campaign, the competition used every opportunity to mock the pacifist and anti-nuclear activist as a doddering political dinosaur. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ridiculed Corbyn as a “mutton-headed old mugwump,” to the great amusement of many. Company executives predicted that the British economy would collapse if Corbyn were to gain power with his ideas of renationalizing the railways, the postal service and the power utilities, raising taxes for the rich and scrapping tuition fees. Nearly the entire media in the country portrayed the Labour leader as a security risk because he rules out ever using nuclear weapons and is allegedly on good terms with terrorist groups scattered halfway around the globe.

A Tireless Effort

But most damning of all was that the majority of the Labour MPs in the lower house of parliament, the House of Commons, left no doubt as to how much admiration they had for their leader, namely none whatsoever. Right from the get-go, his left-wing agenda did not fit with the Labour Party, which had moved to the right under Blair. Many MPs campaigned in their electoral districts for voters to support Labour, not because of Corbyn, but despite him. And since the leader stubbornly refused to take even a single step toward his rivals in the party, two Labour parties, bound by a deep sense of mutual loathing, effectively took part in the election campaign. It was essentially a hopeless endeavor.

But Corbyn — who calls himself “Monsieur Zen” — didn’t let this faze him and did what he had already done during his campaign for the Labour leadership: He sidestepped the media that was hostile toward him and directly wooed his greatest fan base, young British voters, on social networks. Furthermore, he tirelessly toured the country to personally explain his political agenda to as many people as possible, in stark contrast to Prime Minister May, who strung together platitudes as she addressed hand-picked crowds of elated British voters.

By contrast, Corbyn condemned throughout the country the harsh austerity policies that have meant that some British have had to wait for months for medical treatment, even in urgent cases. He described the consequences of the millions slashed from the budgets for schools, daycare centers and the nursing care system. He promised affordable housing for young families and higher corporate taxes. How exactly he intended to raise the billions and billions needed to finance his socialist program remained in many respects a mystery, but two out of three British voters didn’t mind. Corbyn spoke their language.

By all appearances the anti-politician has let a genie out of the bottle, also in Britain, that was long thought to be firmly corked up and stored in some faraway cellar. Like Bernie Sanders in the United States and, more recently, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, he has countered market radicalism with the utopia of a caring society. Some would call this nostalgic dreaming. Or populism.

But when 40 percent of voters respond positively to this message, it should at least give the embattled social democratic parties in the rest of Europe some food for thought.

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

London Bridge attackers had tried to hire 8.3 ton truck: police

June 10, 2017

by Michael Holden

Reuters

LONDON-The three Islamists who killed eight people after driving a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then attacking nearby revelers had initially tried to hire a 7.5 tonne (8.3 ton) truck, the head of the UK capital’s counter-terrorism unit said on Friday.

Commander Dean Haydon also revealed that the men had a stockpile of petrol bombs in the back of their van and carried out their deadly attack with pink ceramic knives. Officers also discovered a Koran in their safe house, opened at a page on martyrdom.

The discoveries, especially of the plan to hire a truck, suggested more could have been killed.

“Getting hold of a 7.5 tonne lorry – the effects could have been even worse,” Haydon told reporters.

Although Islamic State militants have claimed responsibility for the attack, Haydon said there was no evidence the attackers – Pakistani-born Briton Khuram Butt, Italian Youssef Zaghba and Rachid Redouane who had links to Libya, Morocco and Ireland – were directed by anyone else, either in Britain or abroad.

“We’re not looking for a wider network,” said Haydon, head of London’s Counter Terrorism Command, adding that officers were still trying to piece together how the three men had met. “How did they know each other? They are a diverse bunch,” he said.

Haydon provided unusually extensive details of last Saturday’s attack, the deadliest in London since suicide bombers killed 52 people on the city’s transport network in 2005.

RINGLEADER

On Saturday morning, Butt, who Haydon said was believed to be the ringleader, tried to rent a 7.5 tonne truck but did not provided payment details.

It was not clear why he could not pay, or if he lacked the necessary license to drive such a vehicle. But his attempt echoed last July’s attack in Nice, France, when a 19-tonne truck was driven into crowds, killing 86 people.

Shortly before 1700 GMT, Butt received a text message confirming his hire of a Renault van instead.

At about 1730 GMT, the men drove to pick up the van before heading to Zaghba’s home in east London. At 1838 GMT they left and two hours later the van reached London Bridge which they drove along twice before targeting pedestrians on the sidewalk on their third run.

Three people on the bridge were struck and killed by the van, believed to have been driven by Butt, before the men abandoned the vehicle and began to attack people in bars and restaurants in the nearby bustling Borough Market area.

The men were armed with identical 12-inch (30cm) pink ceramic knives, strapped to their wrists with leather bound around the handle. They were also wearing fake suicide belts – plastic water bottles wrapped in duct tape.

Eight minutes after police were alerted, armed officers arrived at the scene and fired 46 rounds, killing all three men. Their victims were three French nationals, two Australians, a Canadian, a Spaniard and a Briton.

In the attackers’ van detectives found 13 wine bottles, filled with lighter fuel with rags wrapped round them to make Molotov cocktail petrol bombs. There were also two blow torches which Haydon thought could have been used to light the homemade bombs as part of a possible secondary attack.

“They were still fairly close to the van. There is a possibility that they could have come back,” Haydon said.

There were also office chairs, a suitcase and two bags of gravel which Haydon said might have been to add weight or to act as a cover story for their activities to friends and family.

He said Redouane’s home, an apartment in Barking, east London, was the men’s safe house where they put their plot together and prepared the attack.

There they found an English-language copy of the Koran which had been left open on a page describing martyrdom, along with other items linked to their attack.

Haydon said since last Saturday they had taken 262 statements from people from 19 different countries and numerous international inquiries were ongoing relating to the attackers and the victims.

CRITICISM

British police and security services were criticized after it emerged that they had known about Butt, who featured in a TV documentary entitled “Jihadis Next Door”, in which he joined a group unfurling an Islamic State (IS) flag in a park.

Haydon acknowledged that Butt had links to al Muhajiroun, a banned group headed by cleric Anjem Choudary. He was jailed last year for encouraging support of IS, which has been linked to numerous militant plots in Britain and abroad.

Butt was also arrested for fraud last October but was about to be told by prosecutors he would face no further action.

“We will be looking at intelligence and our processes, and asking ourselves the question: ‘Could we have prevented such an attack?’,” Haydon said. “There is nothing that I’m seeing at the moment that suggested that we got that wrong.”

Police have installed security barriers running alongside the sidewalks at eight bridges across the River Thames, and Haydon said similar protection was being considered at other locations.

Police were also reviewing security at “iconic sites”, crowded places and major events, and refreshing advice to theaters, bars, shopping centers and sports venues.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

 CrowdStrike, The DNC’s Security Firm, Was Under Contract With The FBI

June 7, 2017

by Michael Tracy

Medium

Claims of “Russian interference” have been ubiquitous in U.S. political discourse for almost a full year now; these often amount to a melange of allegations ranging from “hacking” to “influence campaigns” to “online trolls” sent by the Kremlin to harangue unsuspecting Midwestern voters. “Hacking,” however, remains the centerpiece of the narrative — the idea that Russian state actors “hacked” the Democratic National Committee and exfiltrated emails is routinely cited as the centerpiece of the overall “interference” thesis. After the alleged hacking, the DNC retained a private security firm — CrowdStrike — which made the determination that the Russian government was responsible, setting into motion a chain of Russia-related events that continue to unfold even now.

TYT can report that at the same time CrowdStrike was working on behalf of the DNC, the company was also under contract with the FBI for unspecified technical services. According to a US federal government spending database, CrowdStrike’s “period of performance” on behalf of the FBI was between July 2015 and July 2016. CrowdStrike’s findings regarding the DNC server breach — which continue to this day to be cited as authoritative by everyone from former FBI Director James Comey, to NBC anchor Megyn Kelly — were issued in June 2016, when the contract was still active.

Last week at a forum with Vladimir Putin, Kelly listed all the authoritative American entities which she claimed have corroborated the conclusion that Russian state actors “interfered” in the 2016 presidential election. (Notwithstanding its vagueness and imprecision, the term “interference” has come to be the standard term American media personalities invoke when seeking to describe how “Russians” maliciously undermined the sanctity of the 2016 US election process.) Querying Putin, Kelly repeated the canard that “17 intelligence agencies” had all independently concluded that Russia indeed “interfered” — whatever that means, exactly. She then continued: “Even private, non-partisan security firms say the same… that Russia interfered with the US election.”

The most prominent “private, non-partisan security firm” is CrowdStrike, and despite Kelly’s use of the term “non-partisan” to describe the firm, its fiduciary relationship with the DNC suggests otherwise. As the journalist Yasha Levine wrote in The Baffler,

Far from establishing an airtight case for Russian espionage, CrowdStrike made a point of telling its DNC clients what it already knew they wanted to hear: after a cursory probe, it pronounced the Russians the culprits. Mainstream press outlets, primed for any faint whiff of great-power scandal and poorly versed in online threat detection, likewise treated the CrowdStrike report as all but incontrovertible.

In April 2016, two months before the June report was issued, former President Barack Obama appointed Steven Chabinsky, “general counsel and Chief Risk officer” for CrowdStrike, to a presidential “Commission for Enhancing Cybersecurity,” further demonstrating CrowdStrike’s intermingling with powerful Democratic Party factions.

Neither the FBI nor CrowdStrike responded to requests for comment on the nature of the services provided. As of yet, the only entity known to receive primary access to the DNC servers is CrowdStrike. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in January, Comey testified that the FBI had been denied access to the servers by the DNC after repeated requests. And unnamed FBI officials told reporters, “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated.”

Comey’s long-awaited Congressional testimony on Thursday may provide additional insight into the FBI’s reliance on the firm.

Effectively, information that is now central to massively consequential geopolitical disputes has been “privatized“ and held exclusively by a profit-seeking entity. CrowdStrike’s findings continue to be repeated by journalists and politicians with unflinching certainty — despite the fact that it was forced to retract a central element of another report involving related malware attribution, raising doubts about the reliability of its DNC conclusions. As Jeffrey Carr, a security researcher who has been critical of CrowdStrike’s methods, told me: “The foundation of placing the blame on Russia was false.”

Power to determine world events is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of self-proclaimed “experts” who aren’t accountable to the public, but to clients and investors. CrowdStrike, evidently benefitting from the surge in PR, announced last month that it had been valued at one billion dollars.