[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 December 2019 17:10.
Backgrounding: Boris Johnson tells the coal burner to keep her vote for Brexit on the hush and he will look the other way from her more fundamental betrayal of the nation.
The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students. Indeed, one can peruse any undergraduate or post-graduate British university prospectus and rarely find a module in a Politics degree on the British Empire let alone a dedicated degree or Masters degree. Of course if the European led imperialist carnage in the four years between 1914 – 1918 tickles your cerebral cells then it’s not too difficult to find an appropriate institution to teach this subject, but if you would like to delve into how and why the British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four hundred years you’re practically on your own in this endeavour. One must admit, that from the British establishment’s perspective, this is a formidable and remarkable achievement.
Few nations manage to balance their books. They spend more than they collect in taxes and rely on bond sales and borrowing to bridge the gap. When the Labour government came to power in 1997 they inherited a balanced budget but within four years Gordon Brown had turned it into a deficit of £170 billion. The Tories tried to reduce the deficit by cutting public spending but that led to failing schools, understaffed hospitals and rising crime.
The Bank of England’s promise to “pay the bearer on demand” can’t be taken seriously. It has reserves of gold, foreign currencies and government bonds but it issues many times more money than it has on deposit. The BOE also supervises the commercial banks that handle our accounts. This arrangement gives us some protection from a predatory government that has raided our pension funds and would love to gain access to our savings. If they nationalized the banks, our money would become their money.
Perhaps we will devise a better monetary system in the future but in the meantime we should demand strict banking controls and reasonable interest rates. The Thatcher-Reagan banking reforms ended in the crash of 2008. Free from regulation, the banks lent money that they never had to people who could never pay it back. The result was that banks crashed, like Lehman Brothers, or were bailed out by the taxpayers, like the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Chinese are looking into Social Credit. It’s not exactly the system devised by CH Douglas (pictured) but, like him, they envisage a social wage, or dividend, funded by their booming economy. The ‘unemployed’ would spend their time studying or caring for the elderly. The trouble is that those working would resent those who were not. But economic reforms will have to be made before we sink under the sheer weight of debt.
People with financial problems should only pay what they can reasonably afford, and we need a limit on interest rates. If a borrower has repaid the original loan he should be excused any outstanding interest. That would upset the bankers but they squeezed more than enough out of the system, and many of them were rescued by their tax-paying customers in the crash of 2008.
The London Bridge attacker was a student and personal friend of Anjem Choudary, the notorious Islamist hate preacher.
Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist released less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence for a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange, had Anjem Choudary’s private mobile phone number stored on his phone at the time of his initial arrest, the Henry Jackson Society has found.
Khan was one of a series of Al-Muhajiroun connected terrorists to be released over a six-month period beginning in the Autumn of 2018. He was known to have attended a series of Al-Muhajiroun protests and street stalls in the Midlands area prior to his arrest.
Before his conviction for the LSE terror plot, police had previously raided his home in Tunstall over concerns about his links to Choudary.
Anjem Choudary
Dr Paul Stott a research fellow at the Centre on Radicalisation and Terrorism at Henry Jackson Society, said that “all these years later, and Anjem Choudary’s one-time acolytes are still butchering members of the public on our streets”.
“Usman Khan was a loyal and integral member of Choudary’s inner-circle and we know him to have been highly regarded by Choudary.”
During the ‘16 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s involvement with Russia. Their new book is Crime in Progress.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. After Donald Trump was elected but before he was inaugurated, BuzzFeed published a leaked document that became known as the Steele dossier - a series of memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele suggesting Russia had been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump and that, according to several sources, Russia had compromising information that could be used to blackmail Trump.
This dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a private research company providing research for law firms and corporations as well as opposition research for political candidates. Fusion was first hired to investigate Trump during the primary by the Republican news site The Washington Free Beacon. After Trump won the primary, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee started funding Fusion’s research into Trump.
My guests are the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. They’re former Wall Street Journal reporters. Some of the Russians who surfaced in the Trump investigation were people Simpson and Fritsch had reported on at The Wall Street Journal while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime. Simpson and Fritsch have written a new book called “Crime In Progress” about their investigation into Trump, its impact and Republican attempts to discredit Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.
Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, welcome to FRESH AIR. What were some of the findings in your report and in the Steele dossier that you consider to be the most important early warnings of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia?
PETER FRITSCH: The truth is Chris Steele came into this project about nine months in. We started looking at Donald Trump and his relationship to Russia as part of a much broader project, which was looking at Donald Trump’s business career. As has been reported, we first started working for Republicans. About nine months in, we started working with Chris Steele. Now, we saw a lot in the early going that caused us to have concerns about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.
First, we saw his relationship with Felix Sater. Felix Sater is a Russian emigre to the U.S. who was working with Donald Trump and, importantly, worked with him in the FL-Group, which developed, among other properties, the Trump Soho. You know, this is an individual who was - went to prison for slicing someone’s face open with a margarita glass, who then was convicted of stock fraud - this is all in the ‘90s. So that caught our attention, to see him with a business card - occupying an office in Trump Tower and carrying a business card with Donald Trump’s company name on it.
Then, we found a number of properties inside Trump Tower itself that were occupied by convicted and alleged organized crime figures from Russia. You know, we also just saw a pattern of investments coming into Donald Trump’s properties, and to Donald Trump personally. The other sort of interesting data point in the early going was the transaction in Palm Beach involving a Russian oligarch by the name of Dmitry Rybolovlev - pardon my pronunciation. He is a potash magnate - it’s a fertilizer - sort of king of Russia. He bought Donald Trump’s mansion in the mid-2000s for about $95 million when it was on the market for $45 million. That was a really suspicious transaction to us. So anyway, the sum of that and just the sum of our research regarding his business led us to want to know more about Russia, which is how we started working with Christopher Steele.
Usman Khan, 28, killed a man and woman in knife rampage on Friday afternoon and injured three other people, who are being treated in hospital
Our Russia dossier wasn’t dodgy. Donald Trump is compromised. Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Photo by STEPHEN VOSS
Anjem Choudary
