The Little Führer

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 06, 2018 9:46 pm

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Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

A leftist journalist’s bruising crusade against establishment Democrats—and their Russia obsession.

By Ian Parker

Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the 2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward; he has declared that those who claim otherwise are in denial about the ineptitude of the Democrats and of Hillary Clinton, and are sometimes prone to McCarthyite hysteria. These arguments, underpinned by a distaste for banal political opinions and a profound distrust of American institutions—including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and Rachel Maddow—have put an end to his appearances on MSNBC, where he considers himself now banned, but they have given him a place on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox News, and in Tennys Sandgren’s Twitter feed. Greenwald is also a tennis fan—and a regular, sweary player. He recently began working on a documentary about his adolescent fascination with Martina Navratilova.

...Greenwald has experienced his own share of criticism, but is not known for showing kindness to critics. Michael Hayden, the former director of the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., has written that debating him was like looking “the devil in the eye.” Leading American progressives—speaking off the record, and apologizing for what they describe as cowardice—call Greenwald a bully and a troll. One told me that “he makes everything war.” The spouse of one of Greenwald’s friends visualizes him as the angry emoji. On Twitter, he has little use for agree-to-disagree courtesies, or humor: he presses on. More than one tweet has started with “No, you idiot.” He’ll tweet “Go fuck yourself” to a user with twenty or so followers. A few years ago, Greenwald had a Twitter disagreement with Imani Gandy, a legal journalist, who tweets as @AngryBlackLady; another Twitter user, in support of Greenwald, proposed to Gandy that “Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you’d say we weren’t seeing what we were seeing.” Greenwald replied, “No—she’d say it was justified & noble—that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.”

...In the buildup to the 2016 election, Greenwald detected a conflict between actors defiantly contemptuous of American norms—the Republican Presidential nominee, WikiLeaks, Vladimir Putin—and the establishment forces that he hates, including the U.S. intelligence services, “warmonger” neoconservatives like William Kristol, and big-money Democrats. That August, in an Intercept article that used the word “smear” a dozen times, and ended with an image of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Greenwald argued that “those who question, criticize or are perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump, WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein.” He wrote that both Trump and Stein, the Green Party’s Presidential candidate, were being “vilified for advocating ways to reduce U.S./Russian tensions.” (Even though this article included Trump on the list of those being “smeared,” Greenwald told me that he had only ever invoked McCarthyism in reference to “Democrats who accused me and others like me of being Kremlin agents.”) After the election, he scorned those “screaming ‘Putin,’ over and over.” Later, on an Intercept podcast, he said that Democrats had embraced, without evidence, various “conspiracy theories” about collusion; American liberals were caught up in an “insane, insidious, xenophobic, jingoistic kind of craziness.”

In the period since then—these months of Guccifer 2.0 and Natalia Veselnitskaya and Carter Page—Greenwald has continued to portray the Trump-Russia story as, essentially, one of rotten American élites and unruly insurgents. Although he has acknowledged the failings (not to mention the indictments) of some people in the insurgent category, he has focussed his editorial energy on documenting the past infractions and continuing misjudgments of people—in the intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, Congress, and the media—who have provided apparent evidence of Russian interference and Trump-campaign collusion. Greenwald has questioned their reliability, and has disputed their evidence, to a degree that has frustrated even some colleagues at the Intercept. On Twitter, Greenwald recently described the self-identified “resistance” to Trump as “the first #Resistance in history that venerates security state agencies.” He has denounced the congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who has sought to investigate Trump-Russia in the face of Republican obstruction, as “one of the most hawkish, pro-militarism, pro-spying members of the Democratic Party.” He has tweeted, “I don’t regard the F.B.I. as an upholder of the rule of law. I regard it as a subverter of it.” Greenwald told me, “Robert Mueller was the fucking F.B.I. chief who rounded up Muslims for George Bush after 9/11, and now, if you go to hacker conferences, there are people who wear his image, like he’s Che Guevara, on their shirt.” Maddow and other liberals may show respect to the former C.I.A. director John Brennan when he accuses Trump of colluding with Russia, but Greenwald’s view is that Brennan, who sanctioned extraordinary rendition, should be shunned.

These critiques have changed Greenwald’s place in American political life. “My reach has actually expanded,” he told me. “A lot of Democrats have unfollowed me and a lot of conservatives or independent people have replaced them, which has made my readership more diverse, and more trans-ideological, in a way that’s actually increased my influence.” His audience now ranges from leftist opponents of Hillary Clinton, such as Susan Sarandon and Max Blumenthal, to right-wing figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Donald Trump, Jr.

To liberals grateful for institutional counterweights to the Trump Administration’s crookedness, cruelty, and mendacity, Greenwald has been discouraging: U.S. institutions have long been broken, he maintains, and can offer only illusory comfort. To protest the flouting of American norms is to disregard America’s perdition—from drone strikes and unwarranted surveillance to the Democratic Party’s indebtedness to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Shortly before Trump’s Inauguration, Greenwald wrote an article for the Intercept titled “The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer.” The Drudge Report promoted the article, and it went viral. This had the effect of offering the phrase “deep state”—which, until then, had been a murmur among political scientists and fringe bloggers—as a gift to Trump defenders. Roger Stone referred to the article in an interview with Alex Jones, on Infowars; Greenwald spoke of “deep-state overlords” on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” According to data from the gdelt Project, the phrase “deep state” then took off—first on Fox, then on other networks, and then in the tweets of the President and his family.

Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of the Intercept, recently told me that “Glenn has a core of incredibly passionate and dedicated followers.” But, she added, she is wary of “a kind of pale imitation of Glenn—people who may be partly inspired by him, but don’t have the nuance or intelligence that he has.” She was referring to Russia skeptics of the left, on Twitter and elsewhere, “who are so convinced that they are being lied to all the time that anything that the intelligence community says can’t possibly be true.” Reed’s view is that, at this point, “it’s not helpful to the left and to all the candidates and causes we favor to continue to doubt the existence of some kind of relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign. We know some basic contours of it now, thanks to Mueller, but I think we may learn more. And we can’t refuse to see what’s in front of us.”

...Greenwald asked me, “What evidence has ever been presented for the central claim that Putin ordered the D.N.C. and John Podesta’s e-mail to be hacked, as opposed to the hacking being done by people of Russian nationality?” Did Greenwald dispute that Guccifer 2.0, the persona responsible for distributing hacked D.N.C. e-mails to WikiLeaks and other outlets, had come into focus as an agent of Russian military intelligence? (A month before the 2016 election, Greenwald co-wrote an article, about the Clinton campaign’s handling of the press, that was based on exclusive access to material supplied by Guccifer 2.0.) We were speaking shortly before the indictments, in July, of twelve Russian intelligence officers. I mentioned a recent article in the Daily Beast, “ ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer,” which had been co-authored by Spencer Ackerman, a former Guardian colleague of Greenwald’s who had worked on the early Snowden stories. “Each story you can dissect and pick apart, right?” Greenwald said. “They’re based on anonymous sources. They’re based on evidence that you can question.”

Ackerman told me that he liked and respected Greenwald, and that “people can be interested in what they’re interested in.” But, he said, “it’s conspicuous when they’re not interested in a massive story for which the simplest explanation is that there was a Russian intelligence operation to elect Donald Trump President.” He added, “Some people are interested in reporting this out. Some people—I would include myself—are interested in reporting this out without any contradiction of the impulse that led us to report the Snowden story. Some people are not.”

Greenwald and I talked about his definition of “evidence.” In the case of Russia, he seemed to use the word to mean “proof.” His evidentiary needs in this context could be contrasted with his swift, easy arrival at certainty in many other contexts. Greenwald assured me that Tennys Sandgren “didn’t have a racist bone in his body.” He had recently tweeted that Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, was not anti-Semitic, and that suggestions otherwise were “guilt-by-association trash.” It would be truer to say that Corbyn’s record provides some evidence of anti-Semitism, and that supporting him requires a response to that.

Shortly before we met, Greenwald tweeted a link to an article about the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, in the South of England, using Novichok, a nerve agent. It was “100% clear,” Greenwald wrote, that Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Secretary, was “lying” when he told a reporter that British scientists had confirmed that the agent had originated in Russia. To be precise, the scientists had merely identified the chemical, not its origin (though the Russians invented it). Johnson’s remarks were inexact, but he almost surely wasn’t being deceitful. To show one’s skepticism about an official narrative by proclaiming that one knows the narrative to be a lie could be defended as an act of anti-authoritarian pluck. But it doesn’t tell readers “what it is that happened.” Asked about this tweet, Greenwald said, with good grace, that a British friend had made the same point to him. Perhaps he had erred. Greenwald’s offline openness to rebuttal—in contrast to his online bloodlust and sarcasm—was always a nice surprise. But he hadn’t corrected his remarks, which were retweeted several hundred times.


More: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... resistance











American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 9:11 am wrote:Glenn Greenwald Sides with the Deep State on Trump and Russia

Charles Davis
Posted on January 22, 2017


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Donald J. Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, if not the popular vote, presented a new challenge: How to continue shitting on liberals as the most problematic threat, post November 8, at a time when an unhinged billionaire is about to get the nuclear launch codes? Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept’s approach: Keep acting like the (U.S.) Deep State that couldn’t stop Trump’s win is — I’m no supporter, but — seeking to undermine the legitimacy of a democratically elected leader, as (don’t you know) it’s done many times before, abroad. In this telling, news of Russian intervention continues to be self-evidently #FakeNews pushed by a media elite with known ties to The Agency, and the take serves a dual function: validating the absurd nonsense pushed during the election by Greenwald and his quasi-left fellow travelers, from Rania Khalek to Michael Tracey, that Trump was, relative to Killary, the candidate of peace — the man who, say what you will, didn’t want to start World War III on behalf of Jabhat al-Nusra.


Continues at: https://pulsemedia.org/2017/01/22/glenn ... nd-russia/[/quote]
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 06, 2018 10:06 pm

AD, exactly what point are you making by posting those two articles together without comment?

If you are really posting to this board in good faith, then please demonstrate that good faith by answering the question, because it's a painfully obvious question.

This is a Discussion Board.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 06, 2018 10:15 pm

One and only response for Mac, who is on my ignore list, with good reason:

I was researching Greenwald due to some off-line conversations yesterday about him. He features on Democracy Now!, which I do monitor but I haven't paid as much attention to Intercept or Twitter happenings, where other controversies may be raging. I found this piece interesting and informative but I wasn't so much making a point as sharing content that may be of interest to others.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 06, 2018 11:09 pm

American Dream, thank you for openly admitting and thus demonstrating beyond doubt that your claim to have me "on ignore" is a plain untruth. Everyone can see that, just as you can. You and they are reading this post right now.

But you did not answer the question, a perfectly reasonable and relevant question which I asked politely and in good faith. You simply evaded it, as usual.

You claim to be a radical leftist and an antifascist, which presumably means (at an absolute bare minimum) that you are opposed to wars waged by capitalist nation-states, and therefore opposed to media propaganda for such wars.

So once again, and again politely: Why did you go out of your way to post those two articles here, together and without comment? Why did you think they are worth sharing, here at Rigorous Intuition? Exactly what point are you trying to make, in the current very dangerous situation, with the Trump regime's warships steaming in towards Russia in support of the Poroshenko regime?

How do you feel about that development? What do you think about it?

This is a Discussion Board.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 06, 2018 11:56 pm

Also: Why on earth did you choose to post those two articles about Greenwald and the impending war with Russia in a thread entitled "The Little Führer"?

I look forward to your replies, American Dream. I look forward to your good-faith engagement in this Discussion Board, because I am going out of my way to engage you in discussion, politely and in good faith.

Yours against war, against fascism, against the CIA, against Trump, against capitalism, against billionaires and oligarchs and spooks of any nation-state, against warmongering propaganda, and for a just and honest egalitarian human society with a (bare) chance of surviving climate collapse. I am presuming we are on the same page here.

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Dec 07, 2018 12:16 am

This is tiring. Very tiring indeed.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 07, 2018 9:00 am

This is a discussion board with an ignore feature which was put in place for a reason. It is within a member’s right to utilize it. It is a very important function. It increases board comity by decreasing unwanted exchanges. It increases courtesy and considerate behavior towards others. It’s purpose is to resolve most of the hostility. I guess it might be scary for someone to simply stop acknowledging another member’s existence but we all have our crosses to bear.


No member can demand that they be taken off another member’s ignore list thus no member can demand that another member answer a question posed to them. Members are not obligated to respond to a foe. Using the Ignore Feature more often would make the job of the one mod we have left a bit easier.

It is a good feature one that I should take advantage of more often.


....and there is no limit on the number of foes one can have......the infinite wisdom of the creator :yay
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 Little Führer

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Dec 07, 2018 3:46 pm

seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 07, 2018 8:00 am wrote:This is a discussion board with an ignore feature which was put in place for a reason. It is within a member’s right to utilize it. It is a very important function. It increases board comity by decreasing unwanted exchanges. It increases courtesy and considerate behavior towards others. It’s purpose is to resolve most of the hostility. I guess it might be scary for someone to simply stop acknowledging another member’s existence but we all have our crosses to bear.


No member can demand that they be taken off another member’s ignore list thus no member can demand that another member answer a question posed to them. Members are not obligated to respond to a foe. Using the Ignore Feature more often would make the job of the one mod we have left a bit easier.

It is a good feature one that I should take advantage of more often.


....and there is no limit on the number of foes one can have......the infinite wisdom of the creator :yay


You completely missed the point, as usual. American Dream does not have me "on ignore", as he has just demonstrated. He simply ignores (or pretends to ignore) every poster who does not agree with him, or suck up to him, or endure his propaganda barrage without demurral or dissent.

One last time:

American Dream grossly misuses this Discussion Board as his own personal set of Private Data Dumps, as do you.

And then American Dream fills those multiple Private Data Dumps with truckloads of unfiltered reactionary warmongering propaganda from any mercenary corporate-media pundit with a pulpit, as do you.

And then American Dream refuses to explain or justify a single word of the stuff he regurgitates here, as do you. ("I didn't say it, I just posted it. I'm not responsible. I don't necessarily agree with it. But I might.")

And if anyone posting to this Discussion Board in good faith persists, even politely, in questioning such incessant gross misuses of this Discussion Board, then American Dream claims, ridiculously, that he is being bullied, as do you.

In the two-and-a-half years since the Great Trump Derangement began, the two of you have very nearly succeeded in killing this Discussion Board off. You haven't succeeded. Not quite. Not yet.

Finally:

I have avoided addressing either of you for nearly the entirety of the last year, and I did not address you here. But you have made a point of addressing me here. So I am responding to you, politely, here. I have no obligation to respond to everything you say or regurgitate here (an impossible task, in any case), but I do have a right to respond, to you, or to him, or to any other poster. Because this is a Discussion Board.

And I will tell you one strong personal reason why I object very vehemently to your ongoing irresponsible antics and to American Dream's: I live a hell of a lot closer to the Russian border than either of you do or ever will. Your American Dream will be Europe's nightmare. When you finally get the hot war with Russia you and he and Keith Olbermann and the CIA have been pushing for since no later than 2016, then I and my friends and family are going to feel the actual physical effects of that hot war much sooner and much more painfully than either of you ever will. You will be "experiencing" it the same way you "experience" all of America's wars: on the telly, as a Spectacle, mediated by some mercenary corporate-media hack, such as Anderson Cooper.)

And that is to say nothing of my family in the UK, many of whom, including several young kids, live even closer (much closer) to Faslane than I do to the Russian border. That naval base will be a prime target, for very obvious reasons, should the New Cold War turn suddenly hot.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/23/snp-raises-safety-concerns-about-cuts-at-trident-naval-base#img-1



Enough.

_________

I'm going to copy and paste this post to the sticky thread "Rhetoric and the Art of Collaborative Discussion", because I have taken some time and trouble over it, I do not want it to sink without trace, and that is the right thread for it. I want it there for reference. I will not waste any more time stating and re-stating the blatantly obvious. Enough is really enough. It is also high time that this incessant disingenuous complaint of "bullying" was properly addressed and recognised for what it is. In the last few days alone, I have seen that preposterous accusation trotted out at least four times by three posters I need not name to you, because you know exactly who they are. This is not a playground. This is a Discussion Board.

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 08, 2018 9:23 pm

Felix Sater, the spy, criminal, and mafia-linked business executive tied to Trump, explained

He helped track Osama bin Laden — and secure a Trump Tower in Moscow.

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Donald Trump, Felix Sater, and others attend the Trump Soho Hotel Condominium Launch Party on September 19, 2007, in New York City.

He helped the United States hunt down Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda terrorists. He took down mobsters. He provided intelligence to stop the attempted murder of an American president.

He also participated in a large-scale Wall Street scam, went to jail for cutting a man’s face with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight, and helped Donald Trump during his presidential campaign to put his name on a tower in Moscow.

That man is Felix Sater, the Russia-born, Brooklyn-raised business executive who is back in the news after Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress last week. Sater and Cohen worked together to construct a Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 election, longer than the attorney previously disclosed.

While Cohen has been the focus of much attention in regard to allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Sater has a richer backstory. He’s a real-life international man of mystery who could be a key link to Trump’s ties with high-level Russians — including Putin.

For a man comfortable with secrets, Sater also has had no problem speaking relatively openly about his past. “I was building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night,” he told the Los Angeles Times in March 2017.

While Sater didn’t respond to repeated requests to comment on this article, it’s worth delving into who he is, what he’s done, why he’s an important figure in Trump’s orbit, and why he could be a future key source of information in Mueller’s probe.

Sater is an American spy with a criminal record
Multiple profiles of Sater make one thing jaw-droppingly clear: Sater is an important, yet intentionally unheralded, figure in US national security. Previously secret court filings — some of which were unsealed in March — helped shed light on some of his most daring exploits over roughly 10 years.

Sater’s cooperation “was of an extraordinary depth and breadth, almost unseen, at least in this United States attorney’s office,” a government lawyer, Todd Kaminsky, told a federal court in 2011.

Starting in 1998, Sater received valuable information from an Afghan officer: five satellite phone numbers belonging to one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, Osama bin Laden. That same year, he handed intelligence to American officials that Afghan leaders wanted to sell Stinger missiles, an effective weapon used to shoot down aircraft, according to BuzzFeed News.

Around the same time, according to a federal court document, he gave US law enforcement “specific information about key leaders in Al Qaeda and affiliated groups, including information that could help the United States locate those individuals.”

Four years later, Sater obtained intelligence that terrorists intended to shoot down then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s plane when it passed by them in Afghanistan. At unknown points, he helped thwart an assassination plot against former President George W. Bush and a scheme to poison his vice president, Dick Cheney.

Sater also obtained the name and photographs of a North Korean agent who aimed to acquire materials to improve his country’s nuclear program in 2004. One year later, he helped catch Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals — after the FBI gave him a fake name and background.

Sater also worked with the FBI to end Wall Street scams run by certain crime families. How did Sater know how to navigate the criminal underworld? Perhaps because he’s a convicted criminal.

He started out small. While working on Wall Street in his mid-20s, Sater got into a bar fight and ended up injuring his opponent with a broken margarita glass, New York Magazine reported. He spent a year in jail for assault and then had trouble finding work after he was released.

Sater then decided that he would start his own company called White Rock — but it did some illegal stuff. He relied on a “pump-and-dump” scheme, where his company bought really cheap stocks and tried to sell them at much higher prices to gullible bidders. He suckered investors out of around $40 million, court records show.

This is where Sater’s ties to the mafia interested law enforcement: At least five different New York City crime families were involved in the scheme. It surely formed part of the mob’s ties to the illicit stock trade around the mid-1990s. What’s more, Sater’s father — a mob boss in his own right — had connections to other criminals, and one of his associates helped protect Sater’s business.

The FBI, as part of a larger investigation named “Operation Street Cleaner,” went after Sater and those involved in his business. Sater left his organization about 18 months after he started it, but he was still a person of interest, and he eventually turned himself in and pleaded guilty to his crimes. The FBI said they would let him go as long as he continued to provide intelligence for the government, an obligation which he is still carrying out today.

In the early 2000s, knowing he could no longer work on Wall Street, Sater entered the real-estate business. With a partner, he started a company called the Bayrock Group and grabbed an office space in New York — on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, just one floor down from the Trump Organization.

Sater is at the heart of the Trump Tower Moscow effort
In 2005, Trump’s company signed a one-year deal with the Bayrock Group to push through a construction project in Moscow. As mentioned above, Sater was one of the real estate firm’s founders. Working with Russian investors, Sater found an old pencil factory he believed could be destroyed and replaced with a luxurious skyscraper.


Sater and Trump developed a rapport during that time, Sater said during sworn testimony in an unrelated libel case. He recalled keeping Trump informed about the deal’s progress.

Sater said that he handled all the negotiations, and that his interactions with Trump were “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,” he continued.

That deal never materialized, but Sater would remain in the Trump Organization’s orbit. In 2006, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump traveled with Sater in Moscow. While there, Sater took the Trump children on a tour of the Kremlin — during which Ivanka sat and spun around in Putin’s chair while the Russian president wasn’t around.

In November 2013, Trump traveled to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. It was around this time that Trump’s desire to do business in Russia reportedly grew more intense.

Months before going, Trump tweeted his hope that he and Putin would become close at the event. Because no major deal in Russia really gets done without high-level support from the Kremlin, Trump surely knew a good relationship with Putin would remove obstacles toward a final agreement.

So when Trump announced his candidacy for president in July 2015, Sater saw an opportunity.

“I figured, he’s in the news, his name is generating a lot of good press,” Sater told BuzzFeed News on May 17. “A lot of Russians weren’t willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put Donald’s name on their building. Now maybe they would be.”

Sater organized a meeting with Cohen — who at the time was representing Trump — in September 2015 to discuss having Trump license his name on a Russian-built edifice. Trump’s company wouldn’t actually construct the tower, but the Trump name would be on the structure and his company would receive a portion of the revenue it generated. The two men came to an accord: Sater would find the builder and financiers for the project, while Cohen would ensure Trump signed the final agreement.

Sater was very confident. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater emailed Cohen. “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this.”

The business executive worked his contacts, and on October 12, 2015, Sater emailed Cohen that Putin and a “top deputy” would meet with a surrogate for Sater in Moscow. What’s more, a Russian bank called VTB Bank would fund the project. (The bank’s chair, Andrey Kostin, however, denies ever meeting Sater and says that his organization was never involved in a Trump Tower plan.)

One day later, Sater sent a nonbinding letter of intent, signed by Andrey Rozov, a well-to-do Moscow developer, to Cohen. The 17-page document would allow Cohen to negotiate the licensing deal with the Russians once Trump signed it. Some of the proposals in it are striking, including that it would be 100 stories tall with a pointy top and that any spas or fitness areas be branded “The Spa by Ivanka Trump.”

Trump eventually signed the letter of intent on October 28, 2015 — the same day as the third Republican presidential debate. Cohen afterward wrote to Sater and Rozov that “we are truly looking forward to this wonderful opportunity.”

“Everything will be negotiated and discussed not with flunkies but with people who will have dinner with Putin and discuss the issues and get a go-ahead,” Sater wrote to Cohen on November 3. “My next steps are very sensitive with Putin’s very, very close people. We can pull this off.”


More: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/6/18127229/ ... moscow-spy
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 10, 2018 9:06 pm

This is good:

Jerome Corsi: RussiaGate’s ‘Little Big Man’

Bannon’s Big Mistake

ImageWhen the press hounded him mercilessly during the 2016 campaign for being registered to vote at the address of a vacant house in Miami, Steve Bannon took refuge in a beach-house in Sarasota Florida owned by Andy Badolato, his top lieutenant and one of his oldest business partners.

It was one of Bannon’s biggest mistakes.

Until then Sarasota’s Grifter Twins drifted serenely under the media’s radar.

Except… I had been gnawed by a feeling that I had heard the name of one of Andy Badolato’s partners a decade ago. It turned out I was right.

More than a decade ago, while investigating major drug busts on two American-registered planes from St. Petersburg carrying a total of ten tons of cocaine, I discovered that Jonathan Curshen had been instrumental in providing SkyWay Aircraft a ‘fig-leaf’ of a rationale for why the company, soon to go out of business, needed so badly to own not one, but two DC-9’s, for which they—manifestly—had no business need.

Image
The Chabad Lubavitch compound in San Jose, Costa Rica

Curshen issued a press release from his office in the Israeli consulate in San Jose, Costa Rica, announcing that lucky SkyWay, already under a bankruptcy watch, had just received a $7 million funding commitment from the hedge fund of a DuPont family heir. No serious reason was offered. Apparently the DuPont guy just liked the cut of SkyWay's jib.

That the DuPont heir turned out to be phony probably surprises no one today. His real name was James Rice; he was soon to go to prison in the U.K. for passing a $6 million dollar bad check in London.

But maybe this will: Three decades earlier, the same “phony DuPont” story had worked like a charm for a Miami man named Jack Birnholz who was purportedly running a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. ‘Miami Jack’ had multiple connections with U.S. intelligence. He was in business in Eastern Europe, for example, with Robert McFarland of Iran Contra fame).

Miami Jack’s bogus DuPont heir press release followed hard on the heels of his purchase for $22 million dollars of an ‘oil company” in Louisiana that drug trafficker Barry Seal used to launder drug money before his assassination in 1986.

Small world.


Read more: http://www.madcowprod.com/2018/12/10/je ... e-big-man/






American Dream » Wed Sep 05, 2018 5:27 pm wrote:A Prime Minister, a Drug Pilot, an Oligarch, & RussiaGate

BY DANIEL HOPSICKER · PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2018 · UPDATED AUGUST 29, 2018

(WARNING: A long-ass read. But worth it)

ImageRussiaGate is all about the Mob, says the current meme. Not ‘The’ Mob, or just one Mob, but a gamut of players— Russian, American, British, Israeli, Saudi—belonging to a global criminal network connecting the forces of transnational organized crime across nation-states, time-zones, and continents.

‘Transnational organized crime’ doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘The Purple Gang’ or ‘Murder Inc.’ But the Obama Administration considered it enough of a threat to national security to issue an unusual 2012 warning.

Evidence of the network can be seen in some strange and unlikely places, like Sarasota, Florida; and some strange and unlikely people as well, like Omarosa Manigaul0t-Newman, whose connection to RussiaGate players was only recently revealed.

First to Sarasota, where two local grifters plied their ‘craft:’ Jonathan Curshen, currently serving 20 years in federal prison, and Andy Badolato, currently free as a bird. Curshen is a dual British-U.S. citizen who operated out of Sarasota and Costa Rica, after serving an internship in fraud and financial crime on Vancouver Canada’s wild-and-wooly stock exchange.

Badolato, Steve Bannon’s former chief lieutenant, surfaced in the media after Bannon switched his legal residence in a panic before the 2016 election to Badolato’s beach-front pad on Casey Key in Sarasota, to avoid a vote fraud rap while his candidate was strenuously decrying…vote fraud.


The ‘players’ in RussiaGate’s Sarasota thread

ImageAndy Badolato and Jonathan Curshen participated in a number of continuing criminal conspiracies together, along with a colorful cast of co-conspirators whose importance to RussiaGate is growing all the time.

Curshen and Badolato were partners in what’s known as a “hyena pack”engaged in stock fraud and related financial crime. Each was an officer in a number of dummy front companies, supposedly independent of one another, but acting in concert with interlocking ownership.

The crew was led by a wily 30-year veteran of scams and white collar crime, a man whose name was already famous from previous scandals, Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer, long-time CIA ‘fixer’ and Iran Contra middleman.

Khashoggi, who died recently, was at the height of his powers in the early 2000’s, and pulled off an ingenious scam using a company he controlled called GenesisIntermedia to steal $300 million from investors with the help of Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank. The bank later paid a fine of $270 million to the U.S. Government. Khashoggi walked.

Rounding out the hyena pack was Khashoggi’s long-time lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi—an Iran Contra figure in his own right—and an assortment of retired CIA and DIA assets including Glen Kovar, who once claimed that he had invented ‘Smokey the Bear’ while he was ‘sheep-dipped’ as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service while really working undercover for the CIA.

Continues: http://www.madcowprod.com/2018/08/29/a- ... ussiagate/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 26, 2018 6:15 am

Yellow Vest Extremists: Two Case Studies From Edmonton and Calgary

I've been offline -- at least on the blog -- for over a week now in part due to finishing up some work-related projects (the work I'm actually paid to do), prepping for the holidays, and a long, long, LONG, drive back to the mother province to visit my family; ma has been dutifully fattening me up with cookies and nanaimo bars while pa has been providing home brewed beer at trying to engage me in discussing an activity known as "sports." Still, I have been keeping abreast of at least some of the activities the far right have been engaging in.

Last Saturday another series of Yellow Vest protests occurred. Fewer cities and towns appeared to have participated and the numbers were down in all cases while a number of venues saw an increase in the number of counter-protesters. Online the infighting and factionalism has been growing as participants sling insults at each other almost as much as they do towards the Liberal government in Ottawa and Notley government in Edmonton. Also, while there had been some effort to minimize the number of violent threats on the main Yellow Jacket Facebook pages, those efforts appear to have collapsed.

It was inevitable that this new movement would attract mainly the same faces (Steven Myatt, Ron Banerjee, Georges Massaad, Faith Goldy, Georges Hallak, etc) and groups (Soldiers of Odin, Northern Guard, Storm Alliance, La Meute, Canadian Combat Coalition, III%ers etc) I've been seeing at these protests the past number of years in addition to some newer, though still familiar, movement such as those who are associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory(s). Two of the faces associated with the Yellow Vests will be familiar to readers and include one more recent addition as well as someone who frequented the days of ARC Classic.While the initial momentum in much the rest of Canada appears to be waning as the attention span of the supporters diminishes and the weather turns colder, Alberta is still quite active.

In Edmonton the Yellow Vest protesters were outmaneuvered by the counter-protesters who showed up in larger numbers equaling or even perhaps slightly surpassing the Yellow Vest reactionaries, last week, the previous weekend saw a large number of far-right extremists show up including members of the Wolves of Odin. Now ARC readers will be familiar with this group as it used to be the Edmonton chapter of the Soldiers of Odin before they were compelled to change their name by the mother hate-group in Finland due to negative media attention. Prior to the name change the SoO were the focus of a story involving members of the hate-group hobnobbing with members of the United Conservative Party. Among those who attended the UCP event as well as the Yellow Vests protest on December 15 (where a journalist was roughed up, btw) was this fella:


Image

https://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/ ... udies.html
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby Jerky » Wed Dec 26, 2018 8:58 am

It is now all too apparent that you have no idea how the "ignore" function works on this board, Mac. What you seem to believe is definitive evidence that AD is "lying" when he says that he has you on ignore is actually nothing of the kind.

Try putting someone on ignore (say, yours truly) and then coming back and checking out a discussion thread where that someone (say, yours truly) has participated.

You will find that you will still be able to see when and where I've posted, and only the CONTENT of that post will be invisible. You will also find that you have the option of un-ignoring each individual post made by that someone (say, yours truly), and that you can even respond to it, if you so desire.

Go ahead and try it, then come back and finish reading my post to you.

I'll wait.

You're back? Good. Now you understand why you were so wrong.

And so, now that you understand how wrong you can be - and how certain you can be about things, despite your obvious wrongness - maybe you'll sit back and think a little longer and harder about things before you go harassing members who've been here just as long as you, and who offer far more interesting and valuable content than you do.

Happy Holidays to you, regardless!
Yer old pal Jerky

MacCruiskeen » 07 Dec 2018 19:46 wrote:
seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 07, 2018 8:00 am wrote:This is a discussion board with an ignore feature which was put in place for a reason. It is within a member’s right to utilize it. It is a very important function. It increases board comity by decreasing unwanted exchanges. It increases courtesy and considerate behavior towards others. It’s purpose is to resolve most of the hostility. I guess it might be scary for someone to simply stop acknowledging another member’s existence but we all have our crosses to bear.


No member can demand that they be taken off another member’s ignore list thus no member can demand that another member answer a question posed to them. Members are not obligated to respond to a foe. Using the Ignore Feature more often would make the job of the one mod we have left a bit easier.

It is a good feature one that I should take advantage of more often.


....and there is no limit on the number of foes one can have......the infinite wisdom of the creator :yay


You completely missed the point, as usual. American Dream does not have me "on ignore", as he has just demonstrated. He simply ignores (or pretends to ignore) every poster who does not agree with him, or suck up to him, or endure his propaganda barrage without demurral or dissent.

One last time:

American Dream grossly misuses this Discussion Board as his own personal set of Private Data Dumps, as do you.

And then American Dream fills those multiple Private Data Dumps with truckloads of unfiltered reactionary warmongering propaganda from any mercenary corporate-media pundit with a pulpit, as do you.

And then American Dream refuses to explain or justify a single word of the stuff he regurgitates here, as do you. ("I didn't say it, I just posted it. I'm not responsible. I don't necessarily agree with it. But I might.")

And if anyone posting to this Discussion Board in good faith persists, even politely, in questioning such incessant gross misuses of this Discussion Board, then American Dream claims, ridiculously, that he is being bullied, as do you.

In the two-and-a-half years since the Great Trump Derangement began, the two of you have very nearly succeeded in killing this Discussion Board off. You haven't succeeded. Not quite. Not yet.

Finally:

I have avoided addressing either of you for nearly the entirety of the last year, and I did not address you here. But you have made a point of addressing me here. So I am responding to you, politely, here. I have no obligation to respond to everything you say or regurgitate here (an impossible task, in any case), but I do have a right to respond, to you, or to him, or to any other poster. Because this is a Discussion Board.

And I will tell you one strong personal reason why I object very vehemently to your ongoing irresponsible antics and to American Dream's: I live a hell of a lot closer to the Russian border than either of you do or ever will. Your American Dream will be Europe's nightmare. When you finally get the hot war with Russia you and he and Keith Olbermann and the CIA have been pushing for since no later than 2016, then I and my friends and family are going to feel the actual physical effects of that hot war much sooner and much more painfully than either of you ever will. You will be "experiencing" it the same way you "experience" all of America's wars: on the telly, as a Spectacle, mediated by some mercenary corporate-media hack, such as Anderson Cooper.)

And that is to say nothing of my family in the UK, many of whom, including several young kids, live even closer (much closer) to Faslane than I do to the Russian border. That naval base will be a prime target, for very obvious reasons, should the New Cold War turn suddenly hot.

Image
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/23/snp-raises-safety-concerns-about-cuts-at-trident-naval-base#img-1



Enough.

_________

I'm going to copy and paste this post to the sticky thread "Rhetoric and the Art of Collaborative Discussion", because I have taken some time and trouble over it, I do not want it to sink without trace, and that is the right thread for it. I want it there for reference. I will not waste any more time stating and re-stating the blatantly obvious. Enough is really enough. It is also high time that this incessant disingenuous complaint of "bullying" was properly addressed and recognised for what it is. In the last few days alone, I have seen that preposterous accusation trotted out at least four times by three posters I need not name to you, because you know exactly who they are. This is not a playground. This is a Discussion Board.

Image
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/shutterstock_shutterstock_251930719.jpg
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 07, 2019 2:12 pm

Olga Lautman on the Russian Mafia

If you are on Twitter, you know that there is no one more deeply versed on the Russian mafia’s incursion into American business and politics than New York’s Olga Lautman, a freelance researcher and analyst who worked on Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin and on Malcolm Nance’s The Plot to Betray America, among other projects. Raised in Brighton Beach and fluent in Russian, Lautman was wise to the danger of Donald Trump from the start.

This is an interview you’re not going to want to miss. Lautman gives a history of the last fifty years in America that will chill you to the bone, detailing the rise of Semyon Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mafia known as “The Brainy Don,” and his organized crime network. She discusses how various actors connected to it exploited legal loopholes and committed brazen crimes in order to establish a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. Drawing on her knowledge of both Russian and U.S. dirty politics, Lautman discusses New York conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and the assortment of international businessmen and American officials that functioned as enablers for their crime spree.

Despite the grim subject matter, Lautman is a funny and lively interview subject. We enjoyed this conversation with her and plan to have her back on future episodes. The Russian mafia is one of the most underemphasized aspects of Trump’s rise, and its prevalence really makes us wonder why the FBI did nothing about it for so long. (Oh wait, they did do some things – Lautman discusses how two FBI directors went on to work for it). So grab your vodka and sit back (preferably not near an open window) for a Gaslit Nation episode you will never forget.


Listen: https://www.patreon.com/posts/olga-lautman-on-27830208
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 21, 2019 8:31 am

Impeachment, Ukraine and Syria

BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON OCTOBER 20, 2019

Image
Nancy Pelosi confronts Trump while Trump’s sycophants sit in stunned silence.

Although it came first, the Nancy Pelosi-led impeachment inquiry cannot be understood without understanding Trump’s troop withdrawal from Syria. For over a year now, mainstream capitalist commentators have been railing against Trump’s attacks on what they call the rule of law. They have continually warned that “our democracy” is at danger. These comments have not been made about previous presidents, and understanding them is essential to understanding the present political crisis.

Start from the beginning.

We have to start from the beginning, which is the fact of Trump’s having been a money launderer for the Russian mafia capitalist class for all those years. (It is an absolute disgrace that nearly the entire socialist left has ignored this fact.) Trump’s financial ties made him largely beholden to a rival capitalist class; they meant that he is not under the complete control of the US capitalist class. A wing of the US capitalist class has been willing to accept this. Some of them do because Trump’s policies have so enhanced their short term profits. Others, a few, do so for ideological reasons. These capitalists actually believe that it is possible to turn the clock back 100 years as far as workers’ rights, the rights of women and people of color and gays, etc. The Mercer family is a prime example of the latter.

View of US capitalist class mainstream

But the mainstream of the US capitalist class sees him as a massively destabilizing force at home and as a “security risk” abroad. With Trump’s ability to completely take over the Republican Party as well as a near take-over of the federal judiciary at all levels, the limitations on Trump shrank continually. It is true that the increased power of the executive branch of the government – the presidency – has been a long term process. But Trump has qualitatively stepped it up, and beyond anything that most of the capitalist class can accept. This includes not only dominating his own party, but eliminating the influence of the true representatives of the capitalist class within his own administration. In the Obama administration, for example, different individuals competed and debated over policies. That was how the different wings of the capitalist class kept a balance and ensured their overall control.


Continues: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2019/10/20 ... and-syria/
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