The build-up to war on Russia

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 12, 2017 6:05 pm

Damn. As a poster at another board says: "This is explosive language for diplomats to use and shows how tensions are rising. Here the diplomatic veneer is cracking and falling off as the time for diplomacy ends and the next stage, force and war takes over. People should be worried, very worried."

Churkin's replacement Vladimir Safronkov to UK's Ambassador to the UN, Matthew Rycroft: "Look at me. Don't move your eyes away"
Safronkov:

"You're afraid. You're losing sleep that we might be working together with the United States, cooperating with the United States -- that is what you fear. You're doing everything to make sure this kind of cooperation is undermined.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you. Why are you looking away?

"This is precisely why you didn't say anything today about the political process. You didn't even listen to Mr. De Mistura's briefing on purpose. You make insulting demands of the guarantor of the Astana process. Well, what have you done to advance a cease-fire?

"You welcome various opposition groups in London and Paris, illegal armed groups. You certainly seemed afraid things were moving towards peace and a political solution. Basically, you support the interests of armed groups.

"Many of them have been murdering Christians and other minorities in the Middle East. They have been committing terrorist acts in churches, on palm Sunday. That's whose interests you are advancing.

"What are you doing?"

LINK 'Don't dare offend Russia anymore' http://www.stalkerzone.org/safronkov-br ... a-anymore/


Meanwhile:

REUTERS Top News
Wed Apr 12, 2017 | 4:08 PM EDT
Putin says trust erodes under Trump, Moscow icily receives Tillerson

By Yeganeh Torbati and Denis Dyomkin | MOSCOW

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday trust had eroded between the United States and Russia under President Donald Trump as Moscow delivered an unusually hostile reception to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a face-off over Syria.

[...]

As Tillerson sat down for talks with Lavrov earlier on Wednesday, a senior Russian official assailed the "primitiveness and loutishness" of U.S. rhetoric, part of a volley of statements that appeared timed to maximize the awkwardness during the first visit by a member of Trump's cabinet.

"One could say that the level of trust on a working level, especially on the military level, has not improved but has rather deteriorated," Putin said in an interview broadcast on Russian television.

[...]

Lavrov had greeted Tillerson with unusually icy remarks, denouncing the missile strike on Syria as illegal and accusing Washington of behaving unpredictably.

One of Lavrov's deputies was even more undiplomatic.

"In general, primitiveness and loutishness are very characteristic of the current rhetoric coming out of Washington," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russia's state-owned RIA news agency.


But Lavrov said some progress had been made on Syria at the meeting and that a working group would be set up to examine the poor state of U.S.-Russia ties. He also said that Putin had agreed to reactivate a U.S.-Russian air safety agreement over Syria which Moscow suspended after the U.S. missile strikes.

Tillerson noted the low level of trust between the two countries.

"The world's two foremost nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship," he said.

Moscow's hostility to Trump administration figures is a sharp change from last year, when Putin hailed Trump as a strong figure and Russian state television was consistently full of effusive praise for him.

...

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSK ... +News%2529
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 12, 2017 6:17 pm

Oh ffs... The UK's ambassador to the UN tweets:

UKUN_NewYork‏Verifizierter Account @UKUN_NewYork

Image

.@MatthewRycroft1 - the heartbreaking truth is that the plea of @AlabedBana for justice is not being heard in this Chamber. Not by #Russia.

https://twitter.com/UKUN_NewYork/status ... 5078168576


This is what counts as diplomacy. No wonder Safronkov was infuriated.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Rory » Wed Apr 12, 2017 6:25 pm

IMG_20170410_072213.jpg


Rycroft Al Southamptoni
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sat Apr 15, 2017 1:36 am

First and last lines:

Is That Armageddon Over The Horizon?
April 12, 2017

Paul Craig Roberts

The insouciance of the Western world is extraordinary. It is not only Americans who permit themselves to be brainwashed by CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and Washington Post, but also their counterparts in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, who rely on the war propaganda machine that poses as a media. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39573526

[...]

The reckless and irresponsible war talk in the US government and presstitute media and among NATO and Washington’s vassals must stop immediately. Life is in the balance.

Putin has shown amazing patience with Washington’s lies and provocations, but he cannot risk Russia by trusting Washington, whom no one can trust. Not the American people, not the Russian people, not any people.

By jumping on the Deep State’s propaganda wagon the liberal/progressive/left is complicit in the march toward Armageddon.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/04 ... e-horizon/
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Sounder » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:36 am

http://vermontrepublic.org/neoliberalis ... t-a-smirk/

Neoliberalism: Neoconservatism Without a Smirk

It has become increasingly obvious that the only difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is that the famous Bush smirk has been replaced by the Obama smile. The neoconservatism of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill O’Reilly has given way to the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, Timothy Geithner, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Matthews. The differences between neoliberalism and neoconservatism are similar to the differences between Coke and Pepsi, virtually nil.

Neoconservatism is best defined by its foreign policy agenda which includes full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, nuclear primacy, the right of pre-emptive strike, and unconditional support for the State of Israel. Although neoliberals are much less bellicose in their rhetoric than their neoconservative counterparts, they passively acquiesce to the neocon foreign policy paradigm. They do little or nothing to end the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the annihilation of Palestine carried out by our close ally Israel. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo was little short of a global call to arms couched in the language of the doctrine of “just war.” Although neocons make it abundantly clear that they are military hawks, most neoliberals are closet hawks as well.

Consider the case of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the darling of the Left, who pretends to be a socialist, which he is not. Not only does Sanders support all military appropriation bills and military aid to Israel, but he is currently promoting the opening of a satellite facility of the Sandia Corporation in Vermont. The Sandia Corporation, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Company, develops, creates, maintains, and evaluates nuclear weapons systems. Sandia’s roots go back to the Manhattan Project in World War II. Just what peace loving Vermonters need, a nuclear weapons manufacturer located in their own backyard.

Both neolibs and neocons are apologists for globalization and are steeped in the ideology that bigger, faster, and more high-tech make better. In their heart of hearts neolibs and neocons know that only the federal government can solve all of our problems, failing to realize that the federal government is the problem. Both embrace corporate socialism, socialism for the rich, and the social welfare state while pretending to be opposed to publicly financed social welfare. It’s all about people of the lie.

Neoliberals pretend to be concerned about inequities in the distribution of income and wealth. Neoconservatives make it abundantly clear that they couldn’t care less.

Both neolibs and neocons are authoritarian statists each with their own definition of political correctness. Politically correct neolibs are expected to be pro-abortion, pro-gay-lesbian, pro-affirmative action, pro-Israel, pro-gun control, anti-clerical, pro-big government, and pro-American Empire. Anyone who does not conform to this litany or who associates with those who do not, is at risk of being attacked by a left wing truth squad such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and accused of the likes of homophobia, racism, anti-semitism, religious fundamentalism, or even hate crimes. Politically correct neocons are more likely to be pro-life, anti-gay-lesbian, anti-affirmative action, pro-Israel, anti-gun control, pro-clerical, pro-big government, and pro-Empire. Both are vehemently opposed to secession.

Above all, what neoliberals and neoconservatives have in common is that they are technofascists. Benito Mussolini defined fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power.” Technofascism is the melding of corporate, state, military, and technological power by a handful of political elites which enables them to manipulate and control the population through the use of money, markets, media and the Internet.

Neoliberals and neoconservatives alike march to the beat of the same drummer – the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all time.

Ultimately the differences between neoliberalism and neoconservatism are purely cosmetic. You may either have your technofascism with a smirk or you can have it with a smile.

Imagine…Free Vermont

Thomas H. Naylor
February 16, 2010
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Rory » Fri Jun 02, 2017 2:02 pm

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/06/fr ... again.html

France Debunks "Russian Hacking" Claims - Clinton Again Loses It

In April the New York Times, published this bullshit: Russian Hackers Who Targeted Clinton Appear to Attack France’s Macron

The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report.
...
Security researchers at the cybersecurity firm, Trend Micro, said that on March 15 they spotted a hacking group they believe to be a Russian intelligence unit turn its weapons on Mr. Macron’s campaign — sending emails to campaign officials and others with links to fake websites designed to bait them into turning over passwords.

The group began registering several decoy internet addresses last month and as recently as April 15, naming one onedrive-en-marche.fr and another mail-en-marche.fr to mimic the name of Mr. Macron’s political party, En Marche.

Those websites were registered to a block of web addresses that Trend Micro’s researchers say belong to the Russian intelligence unit they refer to as Pawn Storm, but is alternatively known as Fancy Bear, APT 28 or the Sofacy Group. American and European intelligence agencies and American private security researchers determined that the group was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee last year.

The "Macron attack" was very curious. Gigabytes of campaign emails were released by "the hackers" just hours before a media silence period before the election. The campaign immediately found fakes with Cyrillic markings and blamed "Russia". None of the released emails contained anything that was even remotely scandalous. It was likely a planned Public Relations stunt, not a cyber attack.

That NYT report was complete nonsense. The "cybersecurity firm" it quoted was peddling snake oil. Phishing attacks are daily occurrences, mostly by amateurs. Phishing emails are not cyber attacks. They are simply letters which attempt to get people to reveal their passwords or other secrets. They are generally not attributable at all. Likewise APT's, "Advanced Persistent Threats", are not "groups" but collections of methods that can be copied and re-used by anyone. After their first occurrence "in the wild" they are no longer attributable.

That isn't just me saying so. It is the head of France's cyber security agency:

The head of the French government's cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron's election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack "was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone."

He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.
...
Poupard says the attack's simplicity "means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country."

If, as the NYT claims, the authors of the attack on the Macron campaign were the same as in the Clinton case then the Clinton campaign was likely not hacked by Russians.

That will of course not hinder Clinton to claim that "the Russians" were the ones who caused her to lose the election. Clinton has by now listed 24 guilty persons and organizations that caused her loss. She is not one of them.

In her latest Clinton

suggested that Russia or Trump were somehow behind a deliberate inflation of his numbers of twitter followers through the use of bots, because [Trump's] European and Middle East tour had been a flop.

'Who is behind driving up Trump's twitter followers by the millions?' she said.

'We know they're bots. Is it to make him look more popular than he is? Is it to influence others? What is the message behind this?

The Clinton claim of "driving up Trump's twitter followers by the millions" is fake news based on a hoax. Twitter Audit, where Clinton got the bot numbers from (h/t @LutWitt), says that of the current 15 million plus followers of @HillaryClinton only 48%, or 7,605,960, are real and 8,108,833 fake.

For the @realDonaldTrump account Twitter Audit finds that 51% of its 30 million+ followers are real. Not a great margin but still better than Clinton.

Clinton once famously said "We came, we saw, he died" and laughed (vid). She was talking about the murder of Muhammad Ghaddafi of Libya. She still does not understand why people might be turned off by her vile character. She should take more time to talk with her daughter. Chelsea for one does not like gags about killing presidents:


Hillary Clinton lost it (vid - see her off-the-meds rants on the election starting at 12:00 min). She needs a vacation on some lone island and a long period of silences in some remote cloister. Anything she adds now only reflects badly on her.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Rory » Sun Jun 04, 2017 12:18 am

https://exiledonline.com/russia-blog-7- ... formation/

Another in Mark Ames Excelent series on contemporary russiaphobia. This one looking at the recent past of Mother Jones and its adventure in neomccarthyite witch hunts though from the other side, as Reagan cronies slandered and smeared the publication.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Sounder » Sun Jun 04, 2017 7:11 am

Great piece from Mark Ames here Rory, thanks. It's always a pleasure to see folk show respect and need for context, and somewhat telling when others try to replace context with reactive mind emotional triggers.

Sen. East’s staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis — now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the Senate’s “Russia disinformation” witch hunt. Funny how that works — today’s #Resistance takes its core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers — from the alt-Right’s guru, Samuel Francis.

Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors. I’ll have to save John Rees for another post — he really belongs in a category by himself, proof of Schopenhauer’s maxim that this world is run by demons.

These were the people who first cooked up the “disinformation” panic. You can’t separate the Sam Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today’s panic-mongering over disinformation — you can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture’s ruling factions that brings them together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically opposed on so many other issues. I don’t think this is something as simple as hypocrisy — it’s actually quite consistent: Establishment faction wakes up to a world it doesn’t recognize and loathes and feels threatened by, and blames it not on themselves or anything domestic, but rather on the most plausible alien conspiracy they can reach for: Russian barbarians. Anti-Russian xenophobia is burned into the Establishment culture’s DNA; it’s a xenophobia that both dominant factions, liberal or conservative, view as an acceptable xenophobia. When poorer “white working class” Americans feel threatened and panic, their xenophobia tends to be aimed at other ethnics — Latinos and Muslims these days — a xenophobia that the Establishment views as completely immoral and unacceptable, completely beyond the pale. The thought never occurs to them that perhaps all forms of xenophobia are bad, all bring with them a lot of violence and danger, it just depends on who’s threatened and who’s doing the threatening…
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby conniption » Sun Jun 04, 2017 6:01 pm

RT

Clapper says Russians ‘genetically driven' to be untrustworthy — and no one even blinks


Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst. She has lived and traveled extensively in the US, Germany, Russia and Hungary. Her byline has appeared at RT, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, The BRICS Post, New Eastern Outlook, Global Independent Analytics and many others. She also works on copywriting and editing projects. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or at her website http://www.danielleryan.net.

Published time: 3 Jun, 2017

The former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper thinks Russians have some sort of biological predilection to be an untrustworthy bunch. I wish I was making that up, but sadly, I’m not.

Clapper said it during last Sunday’s episode of Meet The Press on NBC, during a response to a question about Jared Kushner’s ties to Moscow. The Russians are “typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever” — was the exact quote.


There’s great irony in that comment by Clapper, with his own record of perjury, implying that an entire ethnicity can’t be trusted. So, of course, widespread outrage followed the blatantly xenophobic comment.

Nah, I’m only joking. No one actually noticed or cared. Chuck Todd, the interviewer, let the comment slide without even acknowledging that Clapper had said something untoward.

If there was a debate about Clapper’s comment and it was deemed somehow acceptable, that would be bad enough — but it’s actually worse than that, because anti-Russian sentiment is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche, that no one even notices when a high profile figure like Clapper makes a comment about the “genetics” of Russians in an effort to brand them as inherently devious and conniving.

But it shouldn’t be surprising. Unlike any other group of people, it’s been well-established that you can say pretty much whatever you like about Russians with no repercussions or backlash of any kind, particularly if you pass it off as comedy.

Take NBC’s comedy show Saturday Night Live. Their go-to Russian character, Olya Povlatsky, played by Kate McKinnon, has regularly crossed the line from comedy into xenophobia. Even the BBC’s Shaun Walker called out one Olya skit as “veering pretty close to racism.”

The segments usually revolve around Olya telling the audience in various ways that everyone in Russia wants to be dead and that the country is a barren wasteland. Jokes involve Olya having no glass in her window frames, living with her ten sisters in one room, sleeping inside the carcass of a dog, wishing a war would come to her village and hoping she gets hit by a meteor or eaten by a bear. Asked whether she’s surprised the Olympics were coming to Russia, Olya says, “I’m surprised ANYONE is coming to Russia!”

Whenever Olya appears, you can be guaranteed SNL is about to serve up every banal stereotype about Russia in under 4 minutes.

Comedian Louis CK told an audience a few years ago that he once traveled to Russia to “see how bad life gets.” He put together a ten-minute long routine about how terrible life is in Russia and how “no one” has any money, which serves to perpetuate the ridiculous notion that Russians are all aimlessly wandering around wearing no shoes and begging for food.

It’s not difficult to imagine the reaction it would spark if a Russian comedian were to deliver the same kind of diatribe about the horrors of life in America. As journalist Dominic Basulto put it, it would “immediately be hailed as an example of the hate-filled propaganda speech filling Russian TV airwaves.”

This kind of hate-filled comedy, so pervasive in American popular culture, sets people up to not even notice when Clapper talks about Russians being genetically wired to be dishonest schemers. Replace the word 'Russians' with 'Jews' or 'Muslims' or 'Latinos' or 'African-Americans' — or any other group or ethnicity — and Clapper’s comment would sound simply outrageous. But, like I said, nothing is off limits when it comes to Russians.

Josh Barro, a Senior Editor at Business Insider is another good example. Barro regularly expresses his almost pathological hatred of Russia on Twitter.

Josh Barro

@jbarro

It's amazing how much national pride Russians have, given how little they have to be proud of.
9:24 AM - 15 Aug 2013

61 61 Retweets
71


I’m not sure whether his lowest point was when he suggested Russian national pride was a bizarre phenomenon since they have “so little to be proud of” — or when he stooped so low as to call the country a “dystopic shithole since the dawn of history”. It’s probably a tie. Then there’s CNN contributor Michael Weiss, who recently insinuated on Twitter that being married to a Russian is inherently suspicious.

Again, if Barro or Weiss were saying these things about other nationalities or ethnicities, there’s a good chance they would have faced some serious professional consequences by now. Not so when Russians are your target. Take your free pass and run with it.

Luckily, there are some journalists out there who still possess a basic sense of common decency. Freelance journalist Michael Sainato was one of the only people in American media who seemed to notice the offensive nature of Clapper’s comment.

In his piece for the Observer, Sainato wrote that the current political climate in the US, has “fostered xenophobia at the highest levels” and that Clapper’s comment goes “far beyond criticism of Putin and the Russian government."

Sainato also noted that the media had contributed to the “Russophobic rhetoric” by “irresponsibly elevating” conspiracy theorists as reliable sources on the Trump-Russia story.

Honestly, at this point, I don’t know which is worse: The casual xenophobia of a top former US official suggesting an entire ethnicity has a genetic predisposition toward lying — or the fact that no one noticed.

It reminded me of a depressing conversation I had with a Russian waitress in Saint Petersburg last year. She wanted to travel to the US, but was afraid to even apply for a visa. When I asked her why, she said she was afraid that Americans would be “suspicious” of her. I wonder how many other Russians feel just like her.

Sadly, they now have good reason to worry.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Harvey » Sun Jun 04, 2017 7:03 pm

I could be absolutely full of shit... In fact, no 'could be' about it.

Every culture has it's skills and it's knowledge. Potentially, we need them all to survive. We have no outside perspective to evaluate one way or the other. There are unique things each culture can do. Unique things each knows how to do. To imagine yours is exceptionally endowed and every other one must be destroyed and is the enemy (a bizarre pathological conflation to begin with) that's the hallmark of a culture in decline, not ascension. You all know this and yet, look how easy this whole 'Russian Thing' has been. The writing has literally been on the wall throughout the American century. Reinvent yourselves outside the culture your power centres have been breeding or follow the path of every other empire. If you are exceptional, you will embrace change. Very few individuals can. Yet fewer cultures ever do.

Transformation isn't death, it is the essence of continuance. But it feels like death. That fear of change is an anguish we probably only recognise at the moment of death. Some few get the chance to experience it before death. How could you possibly relate it to one who hasn't?
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 18, 2017 8:18 am

So much here, worth a listen.



Mark Crispin Miller: War, US Government Corporate Propaganda, The CIA & The Russian "Putin Threat"

Published on Oct 22, 2016

Mark Crispin Miller who is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University talks about US government propaganda, the corporate media, the CIA and the Russian "Putin" threat. Miller also discusses how the corporate media tried to get him fired using a NYU graduate student working for VICE owned by Rupert Murdock. He also looks at the role of the CIA and the US government in their organized effort to demonize Putin and Russia and create a US population hysteria similar to the 1950s. This interview was done during the Project Censored 40th anniversary at Sonoma State University on October 22, 2016 by Pacifica KPFA WorkWeek host Steve Zeltzer.
For more information on
Professor Mark Crispin Miller
http://markcrispinmiller.com/about/
Project Censored
http://projectcensored.org/[/quote]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzRL2tvhmqM


Vice owned by Murdoch...I did not know that. :blankstare

Edit: I should note that Crispin called it wrong when he says in this October '16 video that Trump won't/can't be elected. Surprising he'd make such a prediction, being an expert on vote theft. On the other hand, he felt certain the MIC and election riggers didn't want Trump. In any case, he missed on that one.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 18, 2017 8:30 am

if it wasn't for Mercer no one would even be talking about Russia right now


Mercer/Cambridge Analytica/Brad Parscale got trump elected...

Mercer would do ANYTHING including colluding with Russia to get the Russian mob infested trump elected...


Why Mercer bought election: "IRS demandng $7 billion..back taxes frm world’s most profitable hedge fund"

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
MAY 01, 2017 6:00 AM
Billionaire Robert Mercer did Trump a huge favor. Will he get a payback?
BY SCOTT CHRISTIANSON AND GREG GORDON
McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON
The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world’s most profitable hedge fund, whose boss’s wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House.

Suddenly, the government’s seven-year pursuit of Renaissance Technologies LLC is blanketed in political intrigue, now that the hedge fund’s reclusive, anti-establishment co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, has morphed into a political force who might be owed a big presidential favor.

With Trump in the Oval Office, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who has become his public voice, seem armed with political firepower every which way you look – and that’s even though presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, their former senior executive and political strategist, appears to have recently lost influence.

Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.

The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, also has donated millions of dollars to conservative nonprofit groups that have called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an Obama administration holdover whose five-year term expires in November.


Trump's Biggest Donors Are At Odds With Administration Team
Inform


One of them, the Heritage Foundation, received $1.5 million from the Mercer foundation from 2013 through 2015, according to its most recent public tax filings.

BOB HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY GOOD AT LEVERAGING HIS MONEY. . . . BOB’S BEEN VERY DISSATISFIED WITH U.S. POLITICS FOR MANY YEARS. . . . I REMEMBER HIM BEING VERY OUTSPOKEN ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON.
Renaissance co-founder Nick Patterson, who recruited Mercer to the hedge fund in 1993

IRS leader Koskinen has said publicly that he intends to finish his term. On his watch, the agency hasn’t been cowed by the Mercers.

The IRS recently released a little-noticed advisory stating that its top targets in future business audits will include so-called “basket options,” the instruments that Renaissance and some other hedge funds have used to convert short-term capital gains to long-term profits that have lower tax rates.

But Renaissance, with assets estimated at $97 billion on Dec. 31, 2016, has shown no signs of buckling to the IRS’s demands.

Nor has there been a hint as to whether Trump, a real estate developer who has refused to make his tax returns public, will intercede. The White House declined to respond to questions about the matter.

Richard Painter, chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said the optics surrounding the Mercers’ political connections and the IRS case “are terrible.”

“The guy’s got a big case in front of the IRS,” said Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor who is also vice chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “He’s trying to put someone in there who’s going to drop the case. Is the president of the United States going to succumb to that or is he not?”

“Are we going to have a commissioner of the IRS who aggressively enforces the law and takes good cases to Tax Court or (somebody who) just throws away tax cases so billionaires don’t have to pay their taxes and the rest of us can pay more taxes?”

The case against Renaissance was initiated before Koskinen became commissioner.

It’s illegal for the IRS to discuss ongoing tax cases, and the agency declines to comment about Renaissance. But in 2014, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a blistering report detailing Renaissance’s use of so-called “basket options” trades by its employees-only Medallion Fund to slash taxes on $34 billion in profits. The panel estimated that Renaissance’s back tax bill dating to the earliest IRS audit would be at least $6.8 billion.

Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for the Mercers, declined to comment on the case.

He pointed McClatchy to a Renaissance statement issued in 2014 in response to the Senate findings. Renaissance said then that its tax calculations were “appropriate under current law” and that it had “cooperated fully” with the IRS inquiry.

Robert Martin, a lawyer in the IRS’s chief counsel’s office who co-authored the agency’s legal notices on the issue in 2010 and 2014, said the law covering reporting of the options profits had held up for more than 75 years.

Trump has the legal authority to replace Koskinen and the IRS’s chief counsel, the other agency position requiring Senate confirmation. The latter post is occupied by an acting chief counsel.

John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who monitors the behavior of Wall Street firms, said the Mercers might win Koskinen’s ouster, but he doubts they could undermine the case.

“I don’t know they’re going to get their candidate in,” he said, “and I’m not sure many candidates are going to try to reverse the staff on something that’s already deeply advanced in either litigation or negotiation.”

Dennis Ventry, an expert in tax law policy from the University of California at Davis School of Law, said he was unaware of any instance in which a president had intervened to stop a tax audit or prosecution. So far, he said, Trump “has been remarkably restrained regarding the IRS.”

THE GUY’S GOT A BIG CASE IN FRONT OF THE IRS. HE’S TRYING TO PUT SOMEONE IN THERE WHO’S GOING TO DROP THE CASE. IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES GOING TO SUCCUMB TO THAT OR IS HE NOT?
Richard Painter, chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush

A former IBM computer scientist, Mercer has forged a web of relationships reaching high into the new administration.

At the top is Bannon, a former senior executive of Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm in which Mercer owns the largest stake. The firm, a U.S. subsidiary of a British company, is credited with playing a key role in Trump’s victory by providing his campaign with electronic dossiers shedding light on the views of 220 million Americans.

Mercer funded Bannon to produce hard-edged political films and a book attacking Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the presidential race. Mercer also invested millions of dollars to become majority owner of far-right Breitbart News with Bannon at the helm. The Mercers and Bannon helped to fuel conservatives’ anger over the IRS’s 2013 investigations challenging the tax-exempt status of right-leaning nonprofit groups, and Mercer funded a number of efforts calling for Koskinen’s impeachment.

On March 29, at least 30 conservative leaders, including a Heritage Foundation representative, converged on the White House for an off-the-record meeting with Trump aides. The groups pressed a range of agendas, especially urging Koskinen’s firing, said one attendee, President Tom Fitton of the nonprofit group Judicial Watch.

In a phone interview, Fitton said “the conservative movement is united in its belief there need to be changes at the IRS,” but he voiced frustration “that the Trump administration seems to be of two minds on whether or not to replace” Koskinen before his term expires.

Fitton declined to identify other attendees, and the Trump White House has abandoned a longtime practice of publicly releasing visitor logs.

The meeting was organized by White House aide Paul Teller, who worked with Rebekah Mercer on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s failed Republican presidential campaign – an effort that Robert Mercer backed with $13.5 million in donations to an independent, pro-Cruz super PAC freed of the usual contribution limits. Mercer gave millions of dollars more to the committee after Cruz bowed out and the super PAC threw its financial allegiance to Trump.

Other groups that have joined the anti-IRS and anti-Koskinen choruses also got money from the Mercer foundation – $600,000 to the Cato Institute in 2014 and 2015 and $250,000 to Citizens for Self-Governance in 2014.

Perhaps the biggest Mercer foundation beneficiary has been the Citizens United Foundation, which received $3.8 million from 2011 through 2015. The foundation’s advocacy arm, Citizens United, wants Koskinen to be impeached. It also spearheaded attacks on Clinton last year over her use of a personal email account to conduct official business during eight years as secretary of state. David Bossie, who is president of both Citizens United entities, and Rebekah Mercer collaborated on the super PAC that backed Trump and later as members of Trump’s transition team.

“Bob (Mercer) has always been very good at leveraging his money” in both business and politics, said Nick Patterson, a Renaissance co-founder and former intelligence code-breaker who recruited Mercer to the hedge fund in 1993. “Bob’s been very dissatisfied with U.S. politics for many years.”

Spokespeople for the Heritage Foundation, Cato, Citizens for Self-Governance and Citizens United did not respond to requests for comment.

Robert Mercer became co-CEO at Renaissance, or RenTech, in November 2009 as the federal government was cracking down on abuses that had contributed to the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Depression.

As a high-volume, high-frequency trader, RenTech’s role in the crisis attracted scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the IRS. Federal agents were alarmed by what they found.

In 2010, the IRS issued a public memorandum warning hedge funds and banks about using “basket options,” structures in which banks loaned funds for the traders to purchase derivatives, which they held in “baskets.” It didn’t mention RenTech by name.

The IRS memo said that hedge funds – not their partner banks – controlled the underlying assets and thus should pay taxes at a higher capital gains rate.

Some hedge funds and banks stopped using basket options, but RenTech persisted.

Then, in July 2014, Democratic Chairman Carl Levin of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee and its ranking Republican, Arizona Sen. John McCain, issued the report accusing Renaissance of a giant tax dodge on hundreds of millions of options trades dating to 1999.

The panel said basket-trading also had enabled RenTech to dramatically increase its leverage, meaning it could borrow up to 10 times more money against its securities portfolio.

Following the Senate investigation, the IRS issued a notice in 2015 that left no doubt basket-option contracts were taxable as ordinary income.

Without identifying the affected party, IRS attorney Martin confirmed in a phone interview that one ongoing IRS enforcement case stems from basket trades. He said such options cases came down to ensuring that financial instruments were defined for what they really were.

“If you are going to call it a derivative . . . it has to function like a derivative,” he said. “And if it functions like a brokerage account, that’s how it has to be treated.”

The Renaissance case is not yet in tax court.

In the years since the case began, the father-daughter Mercer team has set an agenda that amounts to a full-fledged assault on the established order.

Besides the IRS, targets have included former President Barack Obama, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice, various Democratic and moderate Republican members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and burdensome regulations and agencies that hinder Mercer’s energy investments.

Mercer has called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a mistake and has voiced disdain for other federal measures to protect the rights of African-Americans and other minorities.

The Mercers’ foundation gave nearly $11 million from 2011 to 2014 to the Media Research Center, an advocacy group whose “sole mission,” according to its website, “is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media.”

In a rare public statement weeks before Trump’s upset victory, the Mercers said they believe that “America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite.”

“Trump is channeling this disgust,” they said, “and those among the political elite who quake before the boom-box of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces.”

In 2010, the same year the IRS issued its memo, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling lifting restraints on how much money wealthy donors such as the Mercers may spend to influence election outcomes.

RenTech soon tripled its lobbying expenditures. Last year, it paid $300,000 to a Washington lobbyist and tax strategist, James Miller, a former high-ranking attorney in the IRS’s office of chief counsel. Miller’s public disclosures say his lobbying topics included taxes on derivatives.

And by 2014 the Mercer Family Foundation had distributed $70 million in donations, mainly to conservative nonprofit groups.

By 2016, Renaissance’s founder and chairman, Jim Simons, was one of the Democratic Party’s top backers, and Mercer was a leading Republican donor, making RenTech a leading player in national politics.

Some of Mercer’s projects sought to unseat his Republican adversaries, such as McCain, who became the target of negative ad campaigns during a primary race.

Meanwhile, Rebekah Mercer accumulated so much clout she has been credited with influencing Trump’s choices of several top appointees, including Bannon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, resigned in February after revelations that he had misled the White House about post-election discussions with Russia’s ambassador.

In January, Rebekah Mercer attended a private meeting in which she had “substantative communications” with Jay Clayton, Trump’s likely nominee to chair the SEC, Clayton later revealed in response to questions from the Senate Banking Committee in advance of his confirmation hearings. The SEC regulates hedge funds.

The Mercers’ struggle didn’t end with Trump’s election.

Bannon, the former Mercer political strategist who now speaks for the White House, seemed to capsulize it in a speech to conservative activists in February.

The goal, he said, amounts to nothing less than unfettered American capitalism and the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Christianson is a McClatchy special correspondent.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 54324.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 18, 2017 8:54 am

seemslikeadream wrote:if it wasn't for Mercer no one would even be talking about Russia right now


I repectfully disagree, as a quick search of news from 2012 through 2015 shows the MSM demonization of Putin well underway before the election campaigns got going:

https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+ ... 14&tbm=nws


Consequently I don't see the relevance of the McClatchy story to this thread; it mentions Russia one time, in a side note about Flynn.

I do agree that Mercer & co. were a very big factor in Trump's election—and thanks for bringing that out in the appropriate threads.
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 21, 2017 1:58 pm

From page 1, the very first post in this thread. Note the date on it. Then remember that it would be a full year before Trump even announced his candidacy in the 2016 circus.

MacCruiskeen » Mon Jul 28, 20149:52 am wrote:This week:
Image
"Bullet-proof"?... ffs. (And are those mushroom clouds in his shades?)

This week:
Image
Note the dog.

This week:
Image

March 2014: "Vladimir Putin - the enemy of the world. This is how dangerous he is to us." (News, Austria.)
Image

This week: "Stop Putin Now!"
Image


A coordinated international campaign of demonisation, scaremongering and warmongering, starting no later than March 2014.

What does this tell us about the current derangement?
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Re: The build-up to war on Russia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 21, 2017 7:16 pm

bump
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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