coffin_dodger » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:53 am wrote:We need out-thinking skills, fast.
There's something to be said for going outside. And not thinking about it for awhile.
My gardening is more important than my writing or research ever will be.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:26 pm
coffin_dodger » Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:53 am wrote:We need out-thinking skills, fast.
by coffin_dodger » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:43 pm
by The Consul » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:44 pm
by The Consul » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:55 pm
by Nordic » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:56 pm
Party politics is pure nepotism, corruption, glad handing boot licking back stabbing self promoting careerist illusionism the top members of which rarley give two shits about any constitution or right or plight of anyone or anything. It's the beauty of capitalist democracy in a corporatist state. It's a stupid play put on for morons in a buidling that is slowly catching fire and the doors are locked from the outside.
by stefano » Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:26 pm
brekin » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:44 pm wrote:Ha, is this really such strange conspiracy fruit? For people who sure like to beat the drum about nation-less global elites all in a cahooty cabal why the reticence in regards to lil Duce Trump the Oligarch in bed with Putin? Oh, because he exposes some of the dirt of American politicians, talks conspiracies, and plays like he doesn't have any skin in the game? Geez, that actually sounds like a RT newscaster. Maybe if the American people decide to dump him in Nov. to stay sovereign a little bit longer he can have a Trump Factor type show on RT as consolation prize for his service as Vladimir's Apprentice.
by Nordic » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:13 pm
by JackRiddler » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:03 pm
The first, most easy to spot one, is the use of “)))” instead of a standard smile emoticon in the Guccifer 2.0 blog post. Using a single or multiple “)” instead the usual “:)” is very common for Russians, given the awkward way one needs to type the colon in a Russian keyboard.
That’s not all though.
The leaked documents contain metadata indicating they’ve been opened and processes on multiple virtual machines, as the independent cybersecurity researcher known as Pwn All The Things pointed out on Twitter on Wednesday. Some of these machines had different configurations, including one with the Cyrillic language setting and the username of “Iron Felix,” referencing Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Soviet intelligence services.
by brekin » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:06 pm
What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.
There was, for example, Felix Sater, a senior Trump advisor and son of a reputed Russian mobster, whom Trump kept on long after he was convicted in a mob-connected stock swindle.
A Russian-born fraudster who Donald Trump has claimed he would not recognise was a key player in several of the billionaire's business ventures, the Telegraph can disclose.
Mr Trump signed off on paperwork which made clear that Felix Sater was one of the figures in “control” of Bayrock Group, the property firm building three developments using his name, an investigation has found.The findings appear to contradict statements by the would-be president and his lawyer, distancing him from Sater, who was convicted for helping to lead a $40 million mafia-linked stock fraud scheme.
Mr Sater also spent time in jail for stabbing someone in the face with the stem of a margarita glass.
The disclosures come as Mr Trump faced criticism after the Telegraph revealed that he signed off on a $50 million business deal involving Bayrock that was designed to deprive the US government of tens of millions of dollars in tax.
In response, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said Mr Trump’s aim was “to enrich himself at the expense of the American people”.
Sater joined Bayrock in around 2002 and in a 2010 deposition said he had been “probably number two” at the company. Mr Trump started working with Bayrock in 2004.However, Alan Garten, Mr Trump’s general counsel, told ABC News in December 2015 that “[in the] long term there was very little involvement” by Sater in the projects that carried the billionaire’s name, including his prized Trump SoHo hotel in New York.
He suggested that Sater was just one of many employees, saying: “When you go into business with another company, you're going to vet that company certainly, but you're not going to vet every employee, it’s just not appropriate."
But documents seen by the Telegraph show that Mr Trump signed off on papers in 2007 which made Sater’s influential position at Bayrock clear.
In May 2007 Mr Trump signed a consent letter for the $50 million deal between Bayrock and FL, and Icelandic company. It asked him to “indicate your consent to the Transaction as evidenced by the Transaction Documents by counterexecuting and returning to the undersigned a copy of this letter”.
The main enclosed document was the loan agreement, which explicitly listed Sater - who used the spelling Satter while at Bayrock – as a “manager” whose departure at any point during the time frame of the deal could put it at risk.
It said that FL’s "election to participate in the transaction contemplated by this Agreement is predicated in part upon Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater, Jody Kriss and Julius Schwarz ... remaining associated with Bayrock with substantially similar or greater duties as such Bayrock Manager has of the Effective Date, until the Completion Date."
Mr Garten has said that the first Mr Trump discovered of his convictions was in December 2007.
It then emerged that in 2010 Sater was brought back in to worked in Trump Tower and been given a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump”.
Mr Garten said Mr Sater was not working for Mr Trump, and that he had only been used to “source business deals”.
Mr Trump’s empire is built in large part on reputation, with the presidential candidate lending his name to buildings around the globe.
Mr Garten appeared to struggle to answer why Mr Trump had continued to work with a person with a mafia-linked and criminal past. He said Mr Trump wanted to give Mr Sater an “opportunity”.
Mr Trump appeared to have valued Mr Sater’s past involvement in Bayrock. A source in the room at the 2007 party to launch Trump SoHo told this newspaper that Mr Trump had “picked Sater out of the crowd of guests”.
“He told him to come up on stage, and that he deserved some of the limelight,” the source said.
The account of the party and the disclosure of Sater’s work at Trump Tower make all the more surprising Mr Trump’s claim in a 2013 deposition that “if he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like.”
In an interview last week Mr Garten said of Sater’s involvement with Bayrock: “He was involved. No one disputes his involvement at the early stages. But after early 2008 he was no longer affiliated with the company.”
He added: “We did do due diligence and we did do background checks on the owners of the company. He was not an owner of the company.”
He claimed of the FL deal that Mr Trump “had nothing to do with that transaction” and by signing the letters was simply acknowledging the deal as a “limited partner”.
“He was not signing off on the deal,” he insisted.
Analysis: what effect could revelations have on Trump's presidential campaign?Play! 01:23
Last week Robert Woolf, Sater’s lawyer, said his client had provided extraordinary assistance” to the US government since his fraud conviction, having agreed to cooperate with the authorities.
Sater refused to comment “about either Donald Trump or Bayrock.”
Bayrock has described the allegations about the FL deal as “baseless”.
On the 24th floor of Trump Tower, in an office two floors below Donald Trump, Felix Sater was trying to revive his career. The Russian-born businessman had already done a stint in prison for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass, and he was now awaiting sentencing for his role in a Mafia-orchestrated stock fraud scheme — all the while serving as a government informant on the mob and mysterious matters of national security.But Sater and his business partners had an idea: They would build Trump towers in U.S. cities and across the former Soviet bloc. Sater pitched it to Trump, who gave Sater’s company rights to explore projects in Moscow as well as in Florida and New York.
“Anybody can come in and build a tower,” Sater told potential investors, according to testimony in a 2008 court case. “I can build a Trump Tower, because of my relationship with Trump.”Sater’s “Trump card,” as he called it, didn’t work everywhere. The Moscow deal fell apart. But their relationship continued — though just how close they were is now in dispute.Trump has repeatedly said he barely remembers Sater. In sworn testimony in 2013, Trump said he wouldn’t recognize Sater if they were sitting in the same room. In an interview last year with the Associated Press, he said, “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it.”
Sater, in previously unreported sworn testimony reviewed by The Washington Post, described a closer relationship.
Sater said he popped into Trump’s office frequently over a six-year period to talk business. He recalled flying to Colorado with Trump and said that Trump once asked him to escort his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka around Moscow.
Sater’s account, which came during a deposition in a libel case Trump brought against a book author, offers new insights into Trump’s relationship with a complicated figure.Sater has both been accused by former business associates of threatening to kill them and praised by top government officials for information that has led to numerous mob convictions and national security gains.
His relationship with Trump has created unwanted attention for the real-estate-mogul-turned-presidential-candidate as Sater and his onetime company have endured legal disputes with former business associates and investors who lost money in failed Trump-branded projects.Sater arrived in Trump’s orbit as the mogul was shifting his business model. Seizing on the success of his television reality show, “The Apprentice,” he focused on licensing his name to developers constructing high-rise hotels and condominium projects.
Trump and his lawyers have said that he was not aware of Sater’s criminal past when he first signed on to do business with Sater’s firm, Bayrock Group. Sater’s involvement in the stock fraud was kept secret for years by federal prosecutors because of his role as an informant.
But even after elements of Sater’s background were disclosed in a 2007 New York Times article, he remained in close proximity to Trump — at one point using Trump Organization office space and business cards.
Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not dispute Sater’s account of the two men’s relationship but said it differed from Trump’s perception of events. He said Trump holds hundreds of meetings a year with people for whom the interactions are often more memorable than for the celebrity tycoon.
“I can see how the relationship may have been viewed differently from one person’s side of the relationship from the other,” he said, adding: “There was no relationship with Mr. Sater. The relationship was a business relationship with Bayrock.”
Sater, through his lawyer, declined to comment. He has addressed his past conduct on his website, writing that he made “some poor and regrettable judgment calls in business” but that he had admitted his wrongdoing and pleaded guilty before assisting the government with “numerous issues of national security, including thwarting terrorist attacks against our country.”The lawyer, Robert S. Wolf, did not address Sater’s relationship with Trump but stressed Sater’s work for the government, saying he saved lives, including by providing “significant intelligence with respect to nuclear weapons in a major country openly hostile to the United States.”
Sater, 50, emigrated from the Soviet Union, arriving in Brooklyn when he was 8. He has said his family, which is Jewish, left to escape persecution.
Sater pursued a career as a stockbroker. But he lost his trading license after the margarita glass incident that occurred during a 1991 bar fight and led to a year in prison.Broke and with a young wife and child to support, Sater has said he hooked up with a boyhood friend who was operating a Mafia-linked brokerage firm. He pleaded guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering as part of a $40 million stock fraud in which Wall Street brokers artificially inflated the price of stocks.
The scheme relied on members of the La Cosa Nostra crime families for extortion and to resolve disputes, federal authorities alleged, part of a concerted effort by organized crime to make inroads on Wall Street.He was spared prison time in recognition of what an FBI agent later called “extraordinary” cooperation as a witness in unnamed national security cases.During that period, Sater turned his attention to real estate. Around 2001, he joined Bayrock, which had its offices in Trump Tower. Sater has testified that he met Trump and started to pitch him on business ideas soon thereafter.
The two developed a rapport, Sater testified.
He described the relationship as “friendly,” saying he had met one-on-one with Trump “numerous times” in Trump’s office to discuss various projects. In Phoenix, Sater testified, he met with local officials alongside Trump’s son, Donald Jr. In New York, Sater said he met with Trump and Trump’s staff “on a constant basis” to discuss possible deals in places such as Los Angeles, Ukraine and China.
Documents show that Trump in 2005 extended Bayrock a one-year deal to develop a project in the Russian capital. Sater said he had located a group of interested Russian investors, as well as a possible site for a luxury high-rise — a shuttered pencil factory that had been named for American radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of murder and executed during the “red scare” that swept the United States after World War I.
“I handled all of the negotiations,” Sater said of the Russia deal, which did not come to fruition. Asked whether there was paperwork drawn up on the deal, he responded: “It was more of verbal updates when I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right.’ ”
“I showed him photos, I showed him the site, showed him the view from the site. It’s pretty spectacular,” Sater said.
When Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka were planning a trip to Moscow in 2006, Sater said that Trump asked him to squire them around the city.
“They were on their way by themselves, and he was all concerned,” Sater said. “He asked if I wouldn’t mind joining them and looking after them while they were in Moscow.”Garten, Trump’s lawyer, said that Trump’s adult children and Sater happened to be there at the same time. “There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” Garten said.Sater said he also attended social events where Trump had been present and had visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., though not at Trump’s invitation.Sater attended a glitzy launch party with Trump in 2007 celebrating Trump Soho, a 46-story Manhattan project that Bayrock helped develop.
When the New York Times first linked Sater to the mob stock and money laundering scheme later that year, Trump expressed surprise.
“We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well,” Trump told the Times, adding that he dealt primarily with other Bayrock executives.
Garten told The Post that, prior to the 2007 article, Trump’s company knew “none” of Sater’s criminal past and “would have had no reason to inquire.”
The disclosure led to problems for Bayrock and Trump.
When one of the firm’s most ambitious projects, the oceanfront Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., became embroiled in disputes after construction stalled in 2009, aggrieved condo buyers filed suit, claiming, among other things, that Trump and others had failed to tell them about the criminal past of a key member of the development team.
Trump walked away from the failing project, saying he held no responsibility since he had merely licensed his name to the effort.
He claimed in sworn testimony in 2013 as part of the dispute that he barely knew Sater.
“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said, adding that he had spoken with Sater “not many” times.
Sater, however, was memorable to others associated with Bayrock and its projects.
One former Bayrock employee alleged in a lawsuit that Sater once told him during a dispute to “shut up or risk being killed.” Another lawsuit filed in Arizona in 2007 alleged that Sater had threatened a local project partner named Ernest Mennes.According to the lawsuit, Sater called Mennes in 2006 and threatened that his cousin “would electrically shock Mr. Mennes’ testicles, cut off Mr. Mennes’ legs, and leave Mr. Mennes dead in the trunk of his car” if Mennes revealed his criminal past.Mennes said he was barred by a legal settlement from discussing the matter. “I wish Mr. Sater well,” he said, adding that he is now supporting Trump for president.Wolf, Sater’s lawyer, said the claim that Sater had threatened violence was “an outright fabrication” made in the course of lawsuits that have included “baseless and highly defamatory” accusations designed to win money from Bayrock.
As Sater became a more controversial figure, Trump did not cut ties.
In 2008, Trump’s lawyers asked Sater to testify in Trump’s libel suit against journalist Tim O’Brien, arguing that O’Brien’s book, “Trump Nation,” damaged his reputation and cost him projects that Bayrock and others had been pursuing. The suit was dismissed.At the time, Sater testified he was in the process of leaving Bayrock because of the publicity around his past.During his 2009 sentencing, which had been delayed because of his work as a government witness, Sater bemoaned leaving Bayrock, a company he said he “had built with my own two hands.”“Here I am trying to rehabilitate myself and keep getting the rug pulled out from under me,” Sater told the judge.
After Sater left Bayrock, he was given Trump Organization business cards and office space so he could continue searching for deals for the company, Garten said. The cards, first reported by the Associated Press, identified Sater as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump.”
Garten said Sater was never a Trump Organization employee and was paid nothing during the brief 2010 arrangement. “Nothing came of it, and they went their separate ways,” Garten said.
According to his website, Sater has continued to work in real estate and finance for a number of international companies. His site touts his work on Trump projects and his extensive philanthropy. He is an active member of Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish sect, and, in 2014, was named Man of the Year by Chabad of Port Washington, N.Y.
His background emerged again last year during Loretta E. Lynch’s confirmation hearings to become attorney general. Lynch, who was U.S. attorney in the office that prosecuted the stock fraud, was asked to respond to allegations that Sater had been let off too easily and the government should not have hidden his conviction from public view.
Lynch told senators that Sater had “provided valuable and sensitive information” for more than 10 years and that his work had been “crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”
Sater has generally declined to comment about his relationship with Trump. But earlier this month, he tweeted his support for Trump’s presidential run, congratulating Trump on appearing to clinch the GOP nomination. “He will make the greatest President of our century,” Sater wrote.
by 82_28 » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:36 pm
by Rory » Tue Jul 26, 2016 6:50 pm
With DNC Leaks, Former ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Is Now True––and No Big Deal
By Adam Johnson
For months, Bernie Sanders supporters and surrogates have complained about unfair treatment from the Democratic National Committee—only to have these concerns dismissed by media observers as petulance and conspiracy-mongering:
The Sanders campaign, by propagating these DNC conspiracy theories, doesn’t encourage voters to be vigilant. They’re encouraging paranoia.
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) December 26, 2015
Mediaite: Bernie Sanders Fans’ DNC ‘Collusion’ Conspiracy Theory Is Embarrassing Garbage
LA Times: ‘Hillary Clinton Is Not Winning Because of a Conspiracy’
Daily Kos: ‘There Was the General Conspiracy Theory That Everyone at the DNC Was Out to Get Him’
This weekend, Wikileaks revealed thousands of hacked emails from within the DNC that showed what the New York Times described as “hostility” and “derision” towards the Sanders campaign from top party officials.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
Revelations that the Democratic National Committee was working behind the scenes to undermine Bernie Sanders led to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
While it’s impossible to know whether systemic pro-Hillary Clinton bias at the DNC was decisive in the 2016 Democratic primary race, we now know beyond any doubt that such a bias not only existed, but was endemic and widespread. DNC officials worked to plant pro-Clinton stories, floated the idea of using Sanders’ secular Judaism against him in the South, and routinely ran PR spin for Clinton, even as the DNC claimed over and over it was neutral in the primary. The evidence in the leaks was so clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned her role as DNC chair—after her speaking role at the Democratic National Convention this week was scrapped—while DNC co-chair Donna Brazile, who is replacing Wasserman Schultz in the top role, has apologized to the Sanders camp.
Pro-Clinton pundits were quick to dismiss what was literally a conspiracy to railroad the Sanders campaign as nothing more than a yawn:
If you are shocked by the Wikileaks DNC emails, you probably have never worked in politics
Most surprising thing is how tame they are…
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 23, 2016
Whole thing seems a bit silly. Emails come from period where Sanders camp was attacking DNC daily. Surprising, no? https://t.co/Cz6c8GA6zq
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 23, 2016
So what was once dismissed out of hand—that the DNC was actively working against the Sanders campaign—is now obviously true, but not a big deal. This is a textbook PR spin pattern seen time and time again, what might be called the Snowden Cycle: X is a flaky conspiracy theory → X is revealed to be true → X is totally obvious and not newsworthy.
Instead, Clinton partisans decided to focus on the alleged Russian links behind the DNC hack. Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall (7/23/16) released a rather paranoid rundown the day of the leaks on how Putin was conspiring with Trump (a fairly good debunking of which can be found here), soon after dismissing the substance of the leaks as Russian propaganda white noise. Many soon followed suit: The DNC leaks as Russian spy operation was the preferred talking point of the day, omitting or glossing over what the leaks actually entailed.
The actual culpability of Russia for those leaks, it’s worth noting, is still unproven. The only three parties that have audited the hack are contractors for the US government, and the DNC’s initial story has since changed considerably. At first the DNC (and by extension their security firm CrowdStrike) said ”no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken,” but this later turned out not to be true at all.
Six weeks since the hack was first revealed by the Washington Post (6/14/16), no one in the US government, including the FBI and White House (who have reportedly reviewed the situation in detail), have implicated or even suggested Russian involvement in the leak–neither on the record nor anonymously. Thus far, all suggestions to this effect have taken place outside the organs of the United States government — a common and deliberate conflation that even led to this correction in the Vox recap of the situation (7/23/16):
Correction: I misread the Washington Post‘s story on last month’s DNC hack and misattributed the Russia link to the US government rather than independent security researchers.
Thus far, the Obama administration has avoided any such claims. Indeed, if one reads carefully, so have the security firms in question. Buried in the followup report by the Washington Post (6/20/16) alleging “confirmation” of Russian involvement is the admission by the three firms (the “experts” Clinton’s camp refers to) that they cannot be sure WikiLeaks’ alleged source Guccifer 2.0 is Russian, let alone an agent of “Putin”:
Analysts suspect but don’t have hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 is, in fact, part of one of the Russian groups who hacked the DNC….
It is also possible, researchers said, that someone else besides the Russians were inside the DNC’s network and had access to the same documents.
The evidence typically cited to counter this discrepancy is from an alleged chat Guccifer 2.0 had with Vice (6/16/16) showing fingerprints of a Russian plot. But the two pieces of evidence in question–that Russian metadata was left on the files and the person in question couldn’t speak native Romanian–raise more questions than they answer. If this was such a high-level FSB plot, why couldn’t the once legendary “KGB” scrub routine metadata, or find someone who speaks native Romanian? Either Russia is an omnipotent threat wielding its influence over the US and Europe’s otherwise pristine body politic, or they’re a bunch of incompetent bumbling idiots. Meanwhile, actual evidence for Russia’s involvement, as Vox notes, remains elusive.
The DNC’s interest in painting this as a Russian plot also bears mentioning. Around the same time this was going down, Bloomberg (6/22/16) suggested the DNC itself was looking to play up the Russian espionage angle as a means of obfuscating what they knew would be “embarrassing revelations”:
A spokesman for Baker & McKenzie didn’t respond to requests for comment. DNC spokesman Luis Miranda said the party worked only with CrowdStrike and the law firm Perkins Coie.
If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the party’s thinking said.
This strategy, as explained by a DNC insider a month ago, is now playing out exactly as predicted: The “outrage” over Russia’s “hidden hand” is being used to outweigh the damning substance of the leak itself. Parlay this with the recent uptick in “Trump as Putin puppet” conspiracy takes, and what you have is a clear picture of a partisan media that would rather float pitches for a Manchurian Candidate reboot than confront the repeated attempts by an ostensibly neutral DNC to undermine one candidate in favor of another.
Fact-Checking That “Trump & Putin” Thing
Josh Marshall asked me to substantiate my criticism on Twitter of his use of facts in his TalkingPointsMemo.com article “Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really A Thing”.
As background, Josh published the above mentioned post. Mark Cuban called him out for jumping to conclusions. Josh replied that he stuck narrowly to the facts. I disagreed w/ Josh and gave a few reasons why. Josh asked me for specifics.
What follows are seven statements from the TPM article which Josh has claimed are facts. He only got two out of seven correct.
“All the other discussions of Trump’s finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.”
The increase in Trump’s debt load came from a Bloomberg estimate. An estimate is what’s done when accurate data isn’t available. So while Josh accurately quoted an estimate (not a fact), it’s also important to note that the Trump Organization disputed it according to Bloomberg. Josh failed to note that.
There’s no evidence that Trump has been blackballed. There is evidence that some big U.S. banks don’t want to work with him, but Deutsche Bank has lent him $300 million since 2012.
“Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin.”
As a luxury real estate developer, Trump sells to Russian and Chinese ultra-high net worth individuals because that’s who has been buying expensive real estate. In 2014, however, Russian investment money started drying up and Chinese investors filled the void.
One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump’s largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan.
Here’s a fact that Josh got right — Trump will take money from anyone including Russian criminals.
Then there’s Paul Manafort, Trump’s nominal ‘campaign chair’ who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump’s campaign.
Paul Manafort‘s DC lobbying firm has taken so much money from so many despots, dictators, and human rights abusers ($900,000/yr from Ferdinand Marcos alone) that it’s been named as a top five firm in The Torturer’s Lobby (.pdf). He was paid $700,000 in an ISI operation (Pakistan’s Intelligence service) during the 90’s. And yes, Manafort was one of many political campaign advisors to deposed Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych from 2004–2010, and made at least $63,750 during a six-month period.
Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom…. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.
Josh focused exclusively on Page’s relatively brief tenure advising Gazprom and completely excluded his connection with Ukraine’s billionaire philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. It was his friendship with Pinchuk that got him the Merrill Lynch appointment to Moscow in the first place. Why exclude it? Because unlike Gazprom, there’s no connection between Pinchuk and Putin that Josh could exploit.
Josh’s claim that “Those ties allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time” is a mystery to me because Page left Gazprom in 2007 and has made very little money from Russia ever since; especially after sanctions hit in 2014.
Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump.
The article Josh used to source that “fact” only mentioned RT (Russia Today). This editorial in the Moscow Times hoped for a Clinton presidency: “The Moscow-Washington relationship promises to remain a rocky one and its management will require a steady hand, which a President Clinton is more likely to provide than a President Rubio, or, God forbid, a President Trump.”
And just a few days ago, the Kremlin criticized Trump’s statement on NATO and Russia via TASS.
As TPM’s Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there’s a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform…. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform.
Totally indifferent? Not according to the very same Tierney Sneed article that Josh used as a source. Sneed wrote “the Trump campaign had representatives at the platform meetings who were in communication with the delegates on the committee. They were very much aware of and involved in the process in the sense that they were talking to the delegates, Kobach said.”
But total indifference was what Josh needed in order to make the leap to his “One Big Exception” — Ukraine. Trump wanted to soften the wording on providing military assistance to Ukraine to providing “appropriate assistance”. Standing on its own, that’s actually a responsible change which is in agreement with a lot of other policy makers.
CONCLUSION
A fact is defined as a “true piece of information”. How many of Josh’s facts were true?
Trump’s debt load was a Bloomberg estimate, not a fact.
Trump is highly reliant upon money from Russia. Open to interpretation, not a fact.
Trump Soho took investment money from Russian criminals. Fact.
Trump’s campaign manager used to work for Viktor Yanukovych when he was running for Prime Minister of Ukraine. Fact.
Putin could put Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, out of business at any time. Not only not a fact, but untrue and ridiculous on its face.
Putin has aligned all state-controlled media behind Trump. False.
The Trump Camp only cared about softening the platform on arming Ukraine. False.
For the record, I despise Donald Trump. I can’t imagine a worse candidate for President and I’m shocked and appalled that he is the Republican nominee. However, there’s no need to invent Russian conspiracies to make the Trump boogeyman appear worse than he is.
As Hillary Clinton puts together what she hopes will be a winning coalition in November, many progressives remain wary — but she has the war hawks firmly behind her.
“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”
As the co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, Kagan played a leading role in pushing for America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq and insisted for years afterward that it had turned out great.
Despite the catastrophic effects of that war, Kagan insisted at last week’s fundraiser that U.S. foreign policy over the last 25 years has been “an extraordinary success.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s know-nothing isolationism has led many neocons to flee the Republican ticket. And some, like Kagan, are actively helping Clinton, whose hawkishness in many ways resembles their own.
The event raised $25,000 for Clinton. Two rising stars in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Amanda Sloat and Julianne Smith, also spoke.
The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East, and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention.
Sloat, the former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, boasted that Clinton will be “more interventionist and forward-leaning than Obama’s been” in Syria. She also applauded Clinton for doing intervention the right way, through coalitions instead of the unilateral aggression that defined the Bush years.
“Nothing that [Clinton] did was more clear than the NATO coalition that she built to defend civilians in Libya,” said Sloat, referencing the Obama administration’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That policy, spearheaded by Clinton, has transformed a once-stable state into a lawless haven for extremist groups from across the region, including ISIS.
Kagan has advocated for muscular American intervention in Syria; Clinton’s likely pick for Pentagon chief, Michelle Flournoy, has similarly agitated for redirecting U.S. airstrikes in Syria toward ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Smith told the audience that unlike Trump, Clinton “understands the importance of deterring Russian aggression,” which is why “I’ll sleep better with her in the chair.” She is a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.
Smith left the government to become senior vice president of Beacon Global Strategies, a high-powered bipartisan consulting group founded by former high-ranking national security officials.
When Robbie Martin, a filmmaker who recently produced a three-part documentary on the neoconservative movement, asked how Clinton plans to deal with Ukraine, Kagan responded enthusiastically.
“I know Hillary cares more about Ukraine than the current president does,” Kagan replied. “[Obama] said to me [that he wouldn’t arm Ukraine because] he doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia,” he added, rolling his eyes dismissively. “I don’t think Obama cares about Putin anymore at all. I think he’s hopeless.”
Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements those weapons would empower.
Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.
Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.
“It’s not just Donald Trump,” Kagan said. “I think you can find in both parties a very strong sense that we don’t need to be out there anymore.”
“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” he said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”
Sloat agreed, arguing that “it’s dangerous” for people to draw anti-interventionist lessons from Libya and Iraq.
The Clinton-neocon partnership was solidified by Trump becoming the Republican nominee. But their affinity for each other has grown steadily over time.
The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”
But the fundraiser was perhaps the most outward manifestation yet of the convergence between the Democratic foreign policy establishment and the neoconservative movement.
Hannah Morris of the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group J Street celebrated this bipartisanship as a “momentous occasion.”
“We could not be more proud to have [Kagan] here today,” she said.
by Rory » Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:01 pm
The Trump-Putin Fallacy
Masha Gessen
In the earlier months of the Donald Trump campaign, many people I knew asked me to comment on the similarities between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Recently I have been asked to comment on direct connections between Trump and Putin. And now, with the release of nearly 20,000 emails apparently stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s email server by Russian hackers, has come the suggestion that Putin may actually be interfering in the US election to help get Trump elected. These ideas—that Trump is like Putin and that he is Putin’s agent—are deeply flawed.
Imagine that your teenage child has built a bomb and has just set it off in your house. The house is falling down all around you—and you are blaming the neighbor’s kid, who threw a pebble at your window. That’s what the recent Putin fixation is like—a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.
Though no direct connection to Putin, let alone Trump, has yet been shown, the hacked DNC emails have played into a growing theory in the American media that Trump is an instrument of Putin. In recent days and weeks there has been a series of articles that seek to link Trump to the Russian leader. In Slate, Franklin Foer described Trump as Putin’s “plan for destroying the West” and listed all available evidence of Trump’s ties to Russia: he has pursued a series of aborted construction projects there; he has attracted dirty Russian money; and two of his operatives, campaign manager Paul Manafort and adviser Carter Page, have connections to Russia (Page has business interests there and Manafort has worked for the ousted pro-Moscow Ukrainian president). Foer did not claim to show that Putin actually has a hand in Trump’s campaign: he was merely listing the connections that align with Putin’s evident interest in seeing Trump become president. But if one looks at these connections within the overall activities of Trump and his advisers, activities that would include all of Trump’s other unsavory partners and Manafort’s other unsavory clients, it would look like a mere subsection of a tycoon’s checkered international business career.
In The Washington Post, first Josh Rogin and then Anne Applebaum wrote about the Manafort and Page connections and noted that Trump’s people have apparently been indifferent to the party platform but focused on exactly one point: blocking an amendment that would pledge weapons to Ukraine. Arguing that the issue was of supreme importance to the Kremlin, Applebaum called Trump a “Manchurian candidate.” But this theory ignores the fact that the same passage in the platform contains the following sentence: “We support maintaining and, if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored.” That just happens to be the plank that Russians had hoped to see gone. In fact, earlier this month Page was in Moscow giving a lecture that was publicized by Putin’s press secretary and attended by journalists who asked Page to promise to advise Trump to lift sanctions; in what was clearly a rehearsed performance, Page in response pulled out a Putin quote and read it in broken Russian: it said that countries should not interfere in one another’s affairs. With this in mind, the incident with the blocked amendment begins to look like Page’s attempt to curry favor with his business partners in Moscow by giving them what he can, which isn’t what they asked for.
In The New York Times, Paul Krugman called Trump the “Siberian candidate” and, rehearsing all the known connections, wondered if Trump was more than just a sincere admirer of Putin: if there is “some specific channel of influence.” Finally, Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, weighed in with a piece called “Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing.” To the usual list, Marshall added that Trump’s
most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin’s positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump’s suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.
This is precisely what makes the Trump-as-Putin’s-agent line of reasoning so unhelpful. Trump’s foreign policy statements are perfectly consistent with his character and thinking. The man is uninterested in anything he doesn’t understand. He is incapable of strategic planning, and he has a particular distaste for paying debts. Of course he doesn’t see any reason for the United States to fulfill its obligations to other countries and organizations—just as Trump personally wouldn’t fulfill his obligations to other people, or to organizations. Yes, that happens to be exactly what Putin would want him to say. But the idea that Putin is somehow making or even encouraging him to say these things is a work-around for the inability to imagine that the Republican Party’s nominee is saying them of his own accord.
Trump is not a foreign agent. This gets me to the second common trope: that Trump is like Putin. Yes, he is. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Trump seems to want to be Putin: “Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.” That may well flatter Putin. More to the point, Putin is on record as hating Hillary Clinton and blaming her for much of what ails Russia, so there is little reason to doubt that he would prefer to see Trump win the election. But that tells us nothing about his actual ability to influence the election or Trump himself. Trump is also like Mussolini and Hitler. All of them are fascist demagogues who emerged from their own cultures and catered to them. In fact, Trump is less like Putin, whose charisma is largely a function of the post to which he was accidentally appointed, than he is Mussolini or Hitler.
In the middle of the last century, a number of thinkers whose imaginations had been trained in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany tried to tell Americans that it can happen here. In such different books as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Theodor Adorno and his group’s The Authoritarian Personality, and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, the great European exiles warned that modern capitalist society creates the preconditions for the rise of fascism. America doesn’t need Putin for that.
Not that there are no lessons to be learned from Putin’s reign: there are, and these lessons concern the imagination. I have spent a good third of my professional life working to convince the readers—and often editors—of both Russian and American publications that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the world as we know it. I was not alone in this, of course: the task was taken up first by a few journalists and academics, then by a few more. Making the case was easy: in his speeches, decrees, and, most of all, in his actions, Putin provided ample and easily obtained evidence. And yet for years—while Putin started two wars, took over the media, canceled elections, seized and appropriated assets, amassed a fortune, sent his most prominent critic to jail, and had at least one person killed (and this was just the uncontested evidence against him)—many readers found this case unconvincing. To get from evidence to conclusion and understanding, one needs more than logic: one needs imagination. Both Russians and Westerners simply could not imagine that Putin was as bad as all that. He had to prove it over and over again.
Lack of imagination is one of our greatest handicaps as humans and as citizens. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest men in the world, could not imagine that Putin would put him in jail, and this was one of the reasons he ignored repeated warnings and stayed in Russia. Then he spent ten years in a Russian prison. David Cameron could not imagine that his fellow citizens would vote to secede from the European Union, so he called for a referendum. Soon after the vote last month, pundits in both the UK and the US regrouped and started reassuring themselves and their audiences that the UK will not really leave the EU—because they can’t imagine it. I have spent much of this year arguing with my American friends about Donald Trump. Even after Trump had won enough delegates to lock up the Republican nomination, reasonable, well-informed people insisted that some Republican savior would swoop in and reclaim that party. There was little, if any, evidence in favor of that kind of outcome, but for a brief moment many Americans seemed to believe in the unlikely rather than the obvious. Why?
“I just can’t imagine Trump becoming the nominee,” many said at the time. But a lack of imagination is not an argument: it’s a limitation. It is essential to recognize this limitation and try to overcome it. That is a difficult and often painful thing to do.
Now that Trump has become the Republican nominee—and has pulled even or even slightly ahead of Clinton in the most recent polls—it is time to force ourselves to imagine the unimaginable. Forget Putin. Let us try to imagine Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.
The day after the election, the stock market will crash. Then, there will be a lull. For one thing, Trump will not have taken office yet. But life will seem conspicuously unchanged. The stock market will recover some. On inauguration day, there will be large anti-Trump protests in some American cities. But in some others, including Washington, there will be large celebrations that will make your skin crawl. On the other hand, they will not be wearing black shirts, and that will make what has happened seem a little less real. In some cities, there will be clashes. The police will do their jobs, and this will be reassuring.
After all, you will think, the American presidency is a strangely limited institution. It doesn’t give Trump that many ways to radically alter the everyday lives of Americans. But that is exactly the problem. President Trump will have to begin destroying the institutions of American democracy—not because they get in the way of anything specific he wants to do, like build the wall (though he will probably have moved on to something else by that point), but because they are an obstacle to the way he wants to do them. A fascist leader needs mobilization. The slow and deliberative passage of even the most heinous legislation is unlikely to supply that. Wars do, and there will be wars. These wars will occur both abroad and at home. They will make us wish that Trump really were Putin’s agent: at least then there would be no threat of nuclear war.
There is no way to tell who will be targeted by the wars at home. Muslims and immigrants are, of course, prime candidates, but any group of people will do—including a group that is not currently constituted as a group. Notwithstanding the awkward outreach in Trump’s convention speech last week, my money is actually on the LGBT community because its acceptance is the most clear and drastic social change in America of the last decade, so an antigay campaign would capture the desire to return to a time in which Trump’s constituency felt comfortable. But there are also Jews, bicyclists, people who studied a foreign language in college—the possibilities are limitless.
Trump will pose an impossible dilemma for the institutions of democracy: because they are too slow and complicated for him, he will seek to bypass them. Still, there are many limits the American system imposes on executive power: Congress, regulatory agencies, the Supreme Court. And don’t forget the national news media. But imagine what will happen to it. First, Trump will ban The Washington Post from the White House pool. That will be ridiculous and even invigorating at first, but in a little while, once he has kicked out every media outlet that he perceives as critical, we will learn that there is no good way to cover a presidency that is a black box.
Still, it is unlikely (or I simply cannot imagine) that Trump will do enough damage to democracy in the course of four years to secure a second term. After he is defeated, institutions will begin to recover. Culture, however, will sustain much more lasting damage. Our failure to understand this—and our effort to find foreign explanations for Trump’s rise—may be blinding us to the real threat he poses.
by 82_28 » Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:07 pm
by justdrew » Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:19 pm
by Nordic » Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:28 pm
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