[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.
When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last week, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4% and gross domestic product growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed’s own reasoning, it should have been raising rates.
Market pundits explained that we’re in a trade war and a currency war. Other central banks were cutting their rates, and the Fed had to follow suit in order to prevent the dollar from becoming overvalued relative to other currencies. The theory is that a cheaper dollar will make American products more attractive in foreign markets, helping our manufacturing and labor bases.
Over the weekend, President Trump followed the rate cuts by threatening to impose, on Sept. 1, a new 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese products. China responded by suspending imports of U.S. agricultural products by state-owned companies and letting the value of the yuan drop. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 770 points, its worst day in 2019. The war was on.
The problem with a currency war is that it is a war without winners. This was demonstrated in the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s, which only deepened the Great Depression. As economist Michael Hudson observed in a June interview with journalist Bonnie Faulkner, making American products cheaper abroad will do little for the American economy, because we no longer have a competitive manufacturing base or products to sell. Today’s workers are largely in the service industries—cab drivers, hospital workers, insurance agents and the like. A cheaper dollar abroad just makes consumer goods at Walmart and imported raw materials for U.S. businesses more expensive.
What is mainly devalued when a currency is devalued, Hudson says, is the price of the country’s labor and the working conditions of its laborers. The reason American workers cannot compete with foreign workers is not that the dollar is overvalued. It is due to their higher costs of housing, education, medical services and transportation. In competitor countries, these costs are typically subsidized by the government.
America’s chief competitor in the trade war is obviously China, which subsidizes not just worker costs but the costs of its businesses. The government owns 80% of the banks, which make loans on favorable terms to domestic businesses, especially state-owned businesses. If the businesses cannot repay the loans, neither the banks nor the businesses are typically put into bankruptcy, since that would mean losing jobs and factories. The nonperforming loans are just carried on the books or written off. No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government and the loans were created on the banks’ books in the first place (following standard banking practice globally). As observed by Jeff Spross in a May 2018 Reuters article titled “Chinese Banks Are Big. Too Big?”:
Because the Chinese government owns most of the banks, and it prints the currency, it can technically keep those banks alive and lending forever. …
It may sound weird to say that China’s banks will never collapse, no matter how absurd their lending positions get. But banking systems are just about the flow of money.
Spross quoted former bank CEO Richard Vague, chair of The Governor’s Woods Foundation, who explained, “China has committed itself to a high level of growth. And growth, very simply, is contingent on financing.” Beijing will “come in and fix the profitability, fix the capital, fix the bad debt, of the state-owned banks … by any number of means that you and I would not see happen in the United States.”
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 06 August 2019 20:59.
Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era
Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the U.S. from the Prohibition Era right up through the Age of Trump.
Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who now sits in jail on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors, has continued to draw media scrutiny in the weeks after his arrest on July 6. Part of the reason for this continued media interest is related to Epstein’s alleged relationship to the intelligence services and new information about the true extent of the sexual blackmail operation Epstein is believed to have run for decades.
As MintPress reported last week, Epstein was able to run this sordid operation for so long precisely because his was only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive operation that began in the 1950s and perhaps even earlier.
Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein’s is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and “fixers,” and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.
This report, Part II of this series titled “The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big To Fail,” will delve into Cohn’s close ties to the Reagan administration, which was also closely tied to the same organized crime network led by the infamous mob figure Meyer Lansky, which was discussed in Part I. Of particular importance is the “Iran Contra” network, a group of Reagan officials and associates who played key roles in the Iran Contra scandal. Though it has remained relatively unknown for years, many key figures in that same network, and several fronts for the CIA that were involved in funneling money to the Central American Contra paramilitaries, were also trafficking minors for their sexual exploitation and use in sexual blackmail rings.
Several of these rings made headlines at one point or another over the years — from the “call boy ring” run by Washington lobbyist Craig Spence, to the Franklin child-sex and murder ring run by Republican operative Larry King, to the scandal that enveloped the Catholic charity Covenant House in the late 1980s.
Yet, as this report will show, all of these rings — and more — were connected to the same network that involved key figures linked to the Reagan White House and linked to Roy Cohn — revealing the true scope of the sordid sexual blackmail operations and sex rings that involved the trafficking of children within the U.S. and even in Central America for their exploitation by dangerous and powerful pedophiles in the United States.
Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the United States from the Prohibition Era right up to the present day and the Age of Trump, a fact made increasingly clear as more and more information comes to light in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
“Roy could fix anyone in the city”
Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, the legacy of his mentor, Roy Cohn – as well as Cohn’s influence on his most famous protege — have begun to garner renewed media attention. Many of the profiles on Cohn following Trump’s rise have focused solely on certain shadowy aspects of Cohn’s history, particularly his association with major figures in New York organized crime, his corrupt dealings, and his eventual disbarment. Some of these portrayals even went so far as to label Cohn as politically impotent. While Cohn was known to deal with a sizable amount of sleaze in his career, such depictions of the man fail to note that he had created an influence machine of unrivaled power that included some of the most prominent people in media and politics as well as a cadre of celebrities.
Cohn was closely associated with numerous celebrities, famous politicians and political operatives. Many of his birthday parties over the years attracted such famous figures such as artist Andy Warhol, fashion designer Calvin Klein, and comedian Joey Adams, as well as notable political figures including former Mayor of New York Abraham Beame and then-Assemblyman from Brooklyn and future Senator Chuck Schumer, among others. In 1979 Margaret Trudeau, mother of current Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, attended Cohn’s birthday party, where she famously toppled his custom birthday cake; and of course Donald Trump, who became Cohn’s protege in the mid-1970s, was a frequent fixture at social events held in Cohn’s honor.
The politicians, journalists and celebrities invited to Cohn’s exclusive parties were said to be those who “had open accounts in Cohn’s ‘favor bank,’” his nickname for his unofficial balance sheet of political favors and debts that was surely informed and influenced by his extensive involvement in sexual blackmail operations from the 1950s well into the 1980s.
Many of Cohn’s celebrity friendships were cultivated through his relationship with and frequent appearances at the famous and famously debaucherous New York nightclub Studio 54, which was described by Vanity Fair as “the giddy epicenter of 70s hedonism, a disco hothouse of beautiful people, endless cocaine, and every kind of sex.” Cohn was the long-time lawyer of the club’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager.
Steve Rubell Roy Cohn
Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell and Roy Cohn, left, talk to reporters outside U.S. District Court in Manhattan on, Nov. 2, 1979. Photo | AP
Among Cohn’s closest friends were Barbara Walters, to whom
Cohn often referred as his “fiancee” in public, and whom he later introduced to the head of the U.S. Information Agency, Chad Wick, and other high rollers in the Reagan White House. Yet, Walters was just one of Cohn’s powerful friends in the media, a group that also included Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times; William Safire, long-time New York Times columnist and New York Magazine contributor; and George Sokolsky of The New York Herald Tribune, NBC and ABC. Sokolsky was a particularly close friend of both Cohn and former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose involvement in Cohn’s sexual blackmail operation is described in Part I of this investigative series. Sokolsky ran the American Jewish League Against Communism with Cohn for several years and the organization later named its Medal of Honor after Sokolsky.
Cohn was also the attorney and friend of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and, according to New York Magazine, “Whenever Roy wanted a story stopped, item put in, or story exploited, Roy called Murdoch;” and, after Murdoch bought the New York Post, Cohn “wielded the paper as his personal shiv.” According to the late journalist Robert Parry, the friendship between Murdoch and Cohn first began thanks to their mutual support for Israel.
Cohn also leaned on his life-long friend since high school, Si Newhouse Jr., to exert media influence. Newhouse oversaw the media empire that now includes Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, The New Yorker, and numerous local newspapers throughout the United States, as well as major interests in cable television. New York Magazine also noted that “Cohn used his influence in the early ’80s to secure favors for himself and his Mob clients in Newhouse publications.” In addition to Newhouse, Cohn’s other high school pals, Generoso Pope Jr. and Richard Berlin, later became the owners of the National Enquirer and the Hearst Corporation, respectively. Cohn was also a close friend of another media mogul, Mort Zuckerman, who – along with Rupert Murdoch – would go on to befriend Jeffrey Epstein.
Cohn’s media confidants, like journalist William Buckley of The National Review and Firing Line, often attacked Cohn’s political enemies – particularly long-time Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — in their columns, using Cohn as an anonymous source. Buckley, whom historian George Nash once called “the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure,” received the George Sokolsky medal alongside Cohn’s mob-linked client and “Supreme Commander” Lewis Rosenstiel from the Cohn-run American Jewish League Against Communism in 1966. Buckley later got a heavily discounted $65,000 loan to buy a luxury boat from a bank where Cohn held influence and whose president Cohn had hand picked, according to a 1969 article in LIFE magazine.
Buckley — along with Barbara Walters, Alan Dershowitz and Donald Trump — would later serve as character witnesses for Cohn during his 1986 disbarment hearings and all but Buckley would later draw controversy for their relationships with Jeffrey Epstein.
With connections like this, it’s no wonder that Stanley Friedman — a law partner of Cohn, who was later imprisoned over a kickback and bribery scandal while serving as New York’s deputy mayor — told journalist Marie Brenner in 1980 that “Roy could fix anyone in the city.”
Politically ubiquitous and polygamous
Roy Cohn’s “favor bank” and his unique position as a liaison between the criminal underworld, the rich and famous, and top media influencers made him a force to be reckoned with. Yet, it was his political connections to leadership figures in both the Republican and Democratic parties and his close relationship to long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, among other figures, that made him and his dark secret “untouchable” for much of his life. Though most of his political influence was forged in the 1950s, Cohn became even more powerful with the rise of Ronald Reagan.
A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination
Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009
“Events have unmistakably shown that any municipality in the country with a Negro population is susceptible to a racial outbreak.” — From an FBI report dated May 26, 1967
Since becoming a Counter-Currents writer, I’ve come to see that the mainstream historical narrative of the 1960s is unique in how incorrect the conventional understanding of it is. What I mean by backwards is this: The big issue of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, has today shrunk to insignificance. The Vietnam War did have an impact on American culture, but not nearly as much as, say, the US Civil War, or even the Spanish-American War of 1898. But what was small in the 1960s is big today. Then, the 1965 Immigration Act appeared to be an unimportant administrative adjustment; but today, immigration is the Queen of all social issues. Meanwhile, the “civil rights” revolution and the resulting backlash is the unacknowledged King of all social issues.
Officially, “civil rights” triumphed in the 1960s through “civil disobedience,” but that is a misunderstanding. “Civil rights” triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of a number of desegregation cases and Negro uplift policies. In the 1950s, whites began to resist, to the point that “civil rights” gains could only come at the point of a bayonet. And by the late 1960s, whites built new (but shakier) segregation defenses.
“Civil disobedience” in itself was a problem in that it is not really civil at all. It is a tactic of breaking small laws to achieve a political objective, similar to how terrorism is used, and it can quickly get out of hand. Essentially, blacks had a standing green light to riot throughout the 1960s, probably due to the fact that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations responded very quickly and favorably to any Martin Luther King civil disobedience stunt.
Additionally, the morality of “civil rights” is backwards. The movement had the appearance of morality to the vast majority of whites in its early days, but by 1965 black violence, basic black social pathologies, and black militancy had swept away the moral façade. In other words, the riots which followed Martin Luther King’s assassination were the last stand of the “civil rights” movement, not the painful birth of some sort of post-racial paradise. The story of these riots is told in Clay Risen’s page-turning book, A Nation on Fire.
MLK was not a genius & civil disobedience isn’t civil
A Nation on Fire is the first mainstream book on the “civil rights” movement that I’ve read that even gets close to hinting that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was not the saintly genius that the mainstream media made him out to be.[1] Risen describes King approaching his final days in Memphis thusly:
The past few years had not been kind to the civil rights leader. Since his success at Selma and the resulting passage of the Voting Rights Act in ‘65, King had been trying to broaden the scope of his movement, both in reach – out west, up north – and scope – taking on housing discrimination, poverty, and the war. But the public, the media, and the political establishment increasingly saw him in a negative light, a has-been who achieved great victories earlier in the decade but had no answers for the new issues of the day. Even Walter Fauntroy, his loyal Washington representative, called King a “spent force.”[2]
King was a spent force with no answers for newer issues because the consequences of his ethos had clearly created out-of-control problems by 1968. At the start of the 1960s, blacks dressed well, appeared to behave well in public, and honest white “civil rights” sympathizers could imagine that they and the blacks were fighting “unjust laws” with “civil disobedience.” By the end of the 60s, a considerable number of blacks were dressing like revolutionaries and impossible to appease in any way.
As a result, by the time of King’s assassination, the white public had started to sour on “civil rights.” The turning point was the Watts Riot of 1965. Watts wasn’t the first black riot of the 1960s, but it happened in a place where the economy was good and there was no long-standing history of “racism,” as in the South.[3]
As word trickled out from Memphis that King was dead on April 4, 1968, sub-Saharans began to riot on an enormous scale across the nation. Risen gives a personal account of the situation: His mother had to flee her office in Washington, DC with other whites in a packed bus. Her father, a soldier with eyesight so poor they wouldn’t send him to Vietnam, was pulled away from his desk job, given a rifle, and told to defend his base against rioting blacks.
Burning down cities they cannot build & how a riot works
Risen focuses most of his narrative on the riots in Washington, DC, but he also examines what happened in other places, such as Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. The roots of the riot were in black migration from the rural South. Washington, DC, along with all the great cities of the North, had experienced a large growth in their black populations since the First World War. The trend accelerated through the 1940s. In all cases, in those places where blacks showed up in massive numbers, jobs fled – especially after the Second World War. Risen shows the statistics regarding jobs, black migrants, and so on. From this, he draws a Tragic Dirt conclusion: That is to say, blacks were arriving in a geographical location where jobs were leaving through some sort of natural process beyond anyone’s control. It is probably more accurate to conclude rather that blacks in large numbers create an environment where an advanced economy cannot function.
But even as problems with blacks increased in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, only the radical whites seemed to notice. George Lincoln Rockwell, for example, frequently talked about what blacks were doing to DC. Nobody listened. And in the meantime, blacks began to gain control over DC’s city government. At the time of King’s assassination, DC’s mayor was a black named Walter Washington. He pioneered DC’s Africanized political ecosystem which only ended when the Bush I administration got rid of Marion Barry in an FBI sting operation in 1990.
Black management of any institution has the same effect as untreated high blood pressure on a person’s body: At first there are no symptoms, and then one’s heart explodes. In 1968, Washington, DC was beginning its slide into becoming a slum, which persisted until the end of the Clinton administration. The key thing is that black leaders – unless they are being supported by whites, and even then it’s iffy – make a series of small, bad decisions that compound over time. Mayor Washington was only part of the problem, though. The main issue was that the large black community made many small, bad decisions every day. And when word came that King was dead, blacks in general made a terrible decision regarding how to respond, and DC’s black mayor was quickly overwhelmed.
When the riot broke out, DC was unprepared. Civil servants did not know what to do, gave and received conflicting orders, and panicked. Whites simply fled. The roads became parking lots. Some drivers abandoned their vehicles and walked to the suburbs. The DC National Guard was called up, and federal troops from the “Old Guard” were deployed to protect the Federal District. The “Old Guard”’s regular duties were normally purely ceremonial, but their mission quickly shifted in the face of the scale of the violence. The Pentagon called up support troops from the other bases around DC to serve as infantry. The Marines were called in. The Maryland National Guard deployed to DC’s edge to keep blacks from burning the suburbs.
The deployment expanded from DC to other cities, especially Baltimore, involving massive troop movements. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne were rushed to cities around the nation, and the III Corps Artillery was deployed, along with brigades from the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division. Baltimore is unique in that the whites organized on their own during the riots: Armed groups of whites drove into the city and fired at rioting blacks, while white shopkeepers armed themselves.
Over the next few decades, sociologists would study the riots and offer explanations of how these riots begin and get out of hand. According to them, a social disturbance becomes a riot due to a “Schelling incident” – one in which people in a crowd realize they will be rewarded by that crowd for violence rather than punished for it. In DC, the Schelling incident occurred when the crowd saw looters break the windows of the People’s Drug Store. Soon, DC was in flames. Most of the deaths in the riot were the result of arson.
The Russian Prime Minister paid a visit to one of the four Russian-held islands which lie off Japan’s most northern region. Known as Iturup in Russian and Etorofu in Japanese, the island was occupied by the Soviet Union after World War 2. It has been a source of dispute between Moscow and Tokyo for the last three-quarters of a century – and Mr Medvedev’s visit threatens to put relations between Russia and Japan under strain.
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs pulled no punches with a strongly worded statement aimed at the Kremlin.
Officials said that Mr Medvedev’s visit was incompatible with the Japanese people’s view on the Russian-held islands.
The statement added: “We strongly urge the Russian side to take constructive measures to further advance Japan-Russia relations, including the issue of the conclusion of the peace treaty.”
Iturup is one of four islands involved in the so-called Kuril Islands dispute, also known as the Northern Territories altercation.
The Yalta agreement – a post World War 2 deal signed by the US, Britain and the Soviet Union – stated that “the Kuril Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union” after the conclusion of the war.
It was supported by the Cairo Declaration of 1943, which stated that Japan must be expelled from all territories which have been taken by violence.
Japan originally took control of the island in 1875 after Russia reportedly agreed to give up all the rights for the Kuril Islands.
The Russo-Japanese war 30 years later yielded more territory to Tokyo and became the backdrop of simmering tensions between the two nations.
Diplomatic progress has stalled in the past 20 years over the dispute.
In 2005, to Moscow’s dismay, the European Parliament recommended Russia return the islands to Japan.
Recently, Discovery of Oil and Natural Gas in Sakhalin have given Russia a Milking cow in the region. Which was earlier used as Gulags.
2011 saw the installation of weapons on the island to, according to Mr Medvedev, “ensure the security of the islands as an integral part of Russia”.
Mr Medvedev’s latest visit came just two weeks after Moscow outright refused to discuss the potential handover of two of the contested islands to Japan.
That and the following article are not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
The decades-old dispute has prevented the two countries from concluding a peace treaty to formally end World War II.
Called the Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan, a string of volcanic islands are at the heart of a feud between the two countries that has prevented them signing a formal World War II peace treaty. Talks stalled for decades due to Japan‘s claim to the four strategic islands seized by the Soviet army in the final days of the war.
Russia and Japan’s leaders meet for talks in Moscow on Tuesday over the disputed island chain.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are set to meet in Moscow on Tuesday for talks expected to be dominated by the territorial dispute, here are some key facts about the Kuril islands:
Location
The disputed islands of Iturup (Etorofu in Japanese), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan and Habomai lie at their closest point just a few kilometres off the north coast of Hokkaido in Japan.
They are the southernmost islands in a volcanic chain that separates the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean.
Indigenous people of Sakhalin Island
They are located to the southeast of the Russian island of Sakhalin and are administratively part of the same region, although Tokyo considers them part of its Hokkaido prefecture and “illegally occupied by Russia”.
Treaties
Russian Empress Catherine the Great claimed sovereignty over the Kuril islands in 1786 after her government declared they were discovered by “Russian explorers” and therefore “undoubtedly must belong to Russia”.
In the first treaty between tsarist Russia and Japan in 1855, the frontier between the two countries was drawn just north of the four islands closest to Japan.
Twenty years later in 1875, a new treaty handed Tokyo the entire chain, in exchange for Russia gaining full control of the island of Sakhalin. Japan seized back control of the southern half of Sakhalin after its crushing defeat of Moscow in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.
Soviet takeover
The Kuril islands have been back at the centre of a dispute between Moscow and Tokyo since Soviet troops invaded them in the final days of World War II.
The USSR only entered into war with Japan on August 9, 1945, just after the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The Soviet troops completed the takeover of the islands after Japan’s general surrendered later that month.
Russia argues that then-US President Franklin Roosevelt promised Soviet leader Joseph Stalin he could take back the Kurils in exchange for joining the war against Japan when they met at the Yalta conference in February 1945 at which the Allied leaders divided up the post-war world.
The Soviet capture of the islands has since prevented Moscow and Tokyo from signing a formal peace treaty to end the war, despite repeated attempts over the past 70 years to reach an agreement.
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev first offered to give Japan the two smallest islands, Shikotan and Habomai, in exchange for signing a peace treaty but dropped the idea after Tokyo struck a military alliance with Washington.
Strategic value
Strategically, control of the islands ensures Russia has year-round access to the Pacific Ocean for its Pacific Fleet of warships and submarines based in Vladivostok, as the strait between Kunashir and Iturup does not freeze over in winter.
Russia has military bases on the archipelago and has deployed missile systems on the islands.
The islands’ current population is around 20,000 people.
After numerous meetings over the past few years between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin, they have launched various economic projects on the islands in areas such as the farming of fish and shellfish, wind-generated energy, and tourism, though Moscow says investment is still meagre.
Since 2017, the two countries have also agreed on charter flights for Japanese former inhabitants to visit family graves there.
The islands are rich in hot springs and minerals and rare metals such as rhenium, which is used in the production of supersonic aircraft.
That’s not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the US government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.
Despite his “sweetheart” deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein’s arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them.
Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein’s famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s “sweetheart” deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for “intelligence.”
Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.
Claims of Epstein’s links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.
In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.” If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.
In the course of this investigation, MintPress discovered that a handful of figures who were influential in American organized crime during and after Prohibition were directly engaged in sexual blackmail operations that they used for their own, often dark, purposes.
In Part I of this exclusive investigation, MintPress will examine how a mob-linked businessman with deep ties to notorious gangster Meyer Lansky developed close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while also running a sexual blackmail operation for decades, which later became a covert part of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s led by Senator McCarthy (R-WI), himself known throughout Washington for having a habit of drunkenly groping underage teenaged girls.
Yet, it would be one of McCarthy’s closest aides who would take over the ring in later years, trafficking minors and expanding this sexual blackmail operation at the same time he expanded his own political influence, putting him in close contact with prominent figures including former President Ronald Reagan and a man who would later become president, Donald Trump.
As will be revealed in Part II, after this figure’s death, the blackmail operation continued under various successors in different cities and there is strong evidence that Jeffrey Epstein became one of them.
Samuel Bronfman and the Mob
The Prohibition Era in the United States is often used as an example of how banning recreational substances not only increases their popularity but also causes a boom in criminal activity. Indeed, it was Prohibition that greatly increased the strength of the American Mafia, as the top crime lords of the day grew rich through the clandestine trade and sale of alcohol in addition to gambling and other activities.
It is through the bootlegging trade of the 1920s and the early 1930s that this story begins, as it brought together key figures whose successors and affiliates would eventually create a series of blackmail and sex trafficking rings that would give rise to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, the “Lolita Express” and “Orgy Island.”
Samuel Bronfman never planned to become a major producer of liquor but true to his family’s last name, which means “brandy man” in Yiddish, he eventually began distributing alcohol as an extension of his family’s hotel business. During Canada’s Prohibition period, which was briefer than and preceded that of its southern neighbor, the Bronfman family business used loopholes to skirt the law and find technically legal ways to sell alcohol in the hotels and stores the family owned. The family relied on its connections with members of the American Mafia to illegally smuggle alcohol from the United States.
Soon after Prohibition ended in Canada, it began in the United States and, by the time the flow of illegal alcohol had turned the other way, the Bronfmans – whose business ventures were then being led by Sam Bronfman and his brothers — were relatively late to an already flourishing bootlegging trade.
“We were late starters in the two most lucrative markets – on the high seas and across the Detroit River. What came out of the border trade in Saskatchewan was insignificant by comparison,” Bronfman once told Canadian journalist Terence Robertson, who was then writing a biography of Bronfman. Nonetheless, “this was when we started to make our real money,” Bronfman recounted. Robertson’s biography on Bronfman was never published, as he died under mysterious circumstances soon after warning his colleagues that he had uncovered unsavory information about the Bronfman family.
Samuel Bronfman pictured in 1937 with his sons Edgar and Charles
Samuel Bronfman mob
Key to Bronfman’s success during American Prohibition were the ties his family had cultivated with organized crime during Canada’s Prohibition, ties that led many prominent members of the mob in the United States to favor Bronfman as a business partner. Bronfman liquor was purchased in massive quantities by many crime lords who still live on in American legend, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Moe Dalitz, Abner “Longy” Zwillman and Meyer Lansky.
Most of Bronfman’s mob associates during Prohibition were members of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate, which a 1950s Senate investigative body known as the Kefauver Committee described as a confederation dominated by Italian-American and Jewish-American mobs. During that investigation, some of the biggest names in the American Mafia named Bronfman as a central figure in their bootlegging operations. The widow of notorious American mob boss Meyer Lansky even recounted how Bronfman had thrown lavish dinner parties for her husband.
Years later, Samuel Bronfman’s children and grandchildren, their family’s ties to the criminal underworld intact, would go on to associate closely with Leslie Wexner, allegedly the source of much of Epstein’s mysterious wealth, and other mob-linked “philanthropists,” and some would even manage their own sexual blackmail operations, including the recently busted blackmail-based “sex cult” NXIVM. The later generations of the Bronfman family, particularly Samuel Bronfman’s sons Edgar and Charles, will be discussed in greater detail in Part II of this report.
Lewis Rosenstiel’s dark secret
Crucial to Bronfman’s Prohibition-era bootlegging operations were two middlemen, one of whom was Lewis “Lew” Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel got his start working at his uncle’s distillery in Kentucky before Prohibition. Once the law banning alcohol was in force, Rosenstiel created the Schenley Products Company, which would later become one of the largest liquor companies in North America.
Though he was a high school drop-out and not particularly well-connected socially at the time, Rosenstiel happened to have a “chance” meeting with Winston Churchill in 1922 while on vacation in the French Riviera. According to the New York Times, Churchill “advised him [Rosenstiel] to prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States.” Rosenstiel somehow managed to secure the funding of the elite and respected Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers to finance his purchase of shuttered distilleries.
Officially, Rosenstiel is said to have built his company and wealth after Prohibition, by following Churchill’s advice to prepare for Repeal. However, he was clearly involved in bootlegging operations and was even indicted for bootlegging in 1929, though he evaded conviction. Like Bronfman, Rosenstiel was close to organized crime, particularly members of the mostly Jewish-American and Italian-American mob alliance known as the National Crime Syndicate.
Subsequent New York state legislative investigations would allege that Rosenstiel “was part of a ‘consortium’ with underworld figures that bought liquor in Canada [from Samuel Bronfman]”, whose other members were “Meyer Lansky, the reputed organized crime leader; Joseph Fusco, an associate of late Chicago gangster Al Capone and Joseph Linsey, a Boston man Mr. Kelly [the congressional investigator testifying] identified as a convicted bootlegger.” Rosenstiel’s relationship with these men, particularly Lansky, would continue long after Prohibition and Bronfman, for his part, would also maintain his mob ties.
In addition to his friends in the mob, Rosenstiel also cultivated close ties with the FBI, developing a close relationship with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and making Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime assistant at the FBI, Louis Nichols, the Vice President of his Schenley empire in 1957.
Despite their similar backgrounds as bootlegger barons turned “respectable” businessmen, Bronfman’s and Rosenstiel’s personalities were drastically different and their relationship was complicated, at best. One example of the dissimilarities between North America’s top liquor barons was how they treated their staff. Bronfman was not necessarily known for being a cruel boss, whereas Rosenstiel was known for his erratic and “monstrous” behavior towards employees as well as his unusual practice of bugging his offices in order to hear what employees said about him when he wasn’t present.
Rosenstiel was connected to both the FBI and to organized crime
Such differences between Bronfman and Rosenstiel were also reflected in their personal lives. While Bronfman married only once and was loyal to his wife, Rosenstiel was married five times and was known for his relatively closeted bisexual antics, a part of his life that was well-known to many of his close associates and employees.
Though for years there were only hints to this other side of the controversial businessman, details emerged years later during a divorce proceeding brought by Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, that would back the claims. Kaufman alleged that Rosenstiel hosted extravagant parties that included “boy prostitutes” that her husband had hired “for the enjoyment” of certain guests, which included important government officials and prominent figures in America’s criminal underworld. Kaufman would later make the same claims under oath during the hearing of the New York’s State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in the early 1970s.
Not only did Rosenstiel organize these parties, but he also made sure that their venues were bugged with microphones that recorded the antics of his high-profile guests. Those audio recordings, Kaufman alleged, were then kept for the purpose of blackmail. Though Kaufman’s claims are shocking, her testimony was deemed credible and held in high regard by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro and aspects of her testimony were later corroborated by two separate witnesses who were unknown to Kaufman.
These “blackmail parties” offer a window into an operation that would later become more sophisticated and grow dramatically in the 1950s under Rosenstiel’s “field commander” (a nickname given by Rosenstiel to an individual to be named shortly in this report). Many of the people connected to Rosenstiel’s “field commander” during the 70s and 80s have again found their names in the press following the recent arrest of Jeffrey Epstein.
The “Untouchable” Mobster
Bronfman and Rosenstiel became legendary in the North American liquor business, in part due to their fight for supremacy in the industry, which the New York Times described as often erupting “into bitter personal and corporate battles.” Despite their dueling in the corporate world, the one thing that united the two businessmen more than anything else was their close connection to American organized crime, particularly renowned mobster Meyer Lansky.
Lansky is one of the most notorious gangsters in the history of American organized crime and is notable for being the only famous mobster rising to notoriety in the 1920s who managed to die an old man and never serve a day in jail.
Lansky’s long life and ability to avoid prison time was largely the result of his close relationships to powerful businessmen like Bronfman and Rosenstiel (among many others), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as his role in establishing several blackmail and extortion rings that helped him keep the law at arm’s length. Indeed, when Lansky was finally charged with a crime in the 1970s, it was the Internal Revenue Service that brought the charges, not the FBI, and he was charged with and acquitted of tax evasion.
Lansky was remarkably close to both Bronfman and Rosenstiel. Bronfman regularly threw “lavish dinner parties” in Lansky’s honor both during and after Prohibition. These parties were remembered fondly by Lansky’s wife, and Lansky in turn did favors for Bronfman, ranging from exclusive protection of his shipments during Prohibition to getting him tickets to coveted “fight of the century” boxing matches.
Rosenstiel also threw regular dinner parties honoring Lansky. Susan Kaufman, Rosenstiel’s ex-wife, claimed to have taken numerous pictures of her ex-husband and Lansky socializing and partying together, photos that were also seen by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition, Lansky, per Kaufman’s recollection, was one of the individuals that Rosenstiel sought to protect from legal scrutiny as part of his child prostitution and blackmail ring targeting high-ranking officials, and he was overheard saying that if the government “ever brings pressure against Lansky or any of us, we’ll use this [a specific recording taken at one of the ‘parties’] as blackmail.”
Lansky was known to address Rosenstiel as “Supreme Commander,” a title that would later be used to refer to Rosenstiel by another individual deeply connected to the mob and sexual blackmail operations, previously referred to in this report as Rosenstiel’s “Field Commander.”
Lansky also had close ties to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. During World War II, Lansky — along with his associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel — worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed “Operation Underworld,” an operation the existence of which the government denied for over 40 years.
Journalist and noted chronicler of CIA covert activities, Douglas Valentine, noted in his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World that the government’s cooperation with the Mafia during World War II led to its expansion after the war and set the stage for its future collaboration with U.S. intelligence.
According to Valentine:
Top government officials were also aware that the government’s Faustian pact with the Mafia during World War II had allowed the hoods to insinuate themselves into mainstream America. In return for services rendered during the war, Mafia bosses were protected from prosecution for dozens of unsolved murders. […]
The Mafia was a huge problem in 1951 [when the Kefauver Committee was convened], equivalent to terrorism today. But it was also a protected branch of the CIA, which was co-opting criminal organizations around the world and using them in its secret war against the Soviets and Red Chinese. The Mafia had collaborated with Uncle Sam and had emerged from World War II energized and empowered. They controlled cities across the country.”
Lansky outside the High Court of Israel where he sought permission to emigrate in 1972. Photo | AP
Indeed, not long after its creation, the CIA forged ties with Lansky at the behest of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. The CIA would later turn to the Lansky-linked mob in the early 1960s as part of its consistently fruitless quest to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, showing that the CIA maintained its contacts with Lansky-controlled elements of the Mafia long after the initial meeting with Lansky took place.
The CIA also had close connections to associates of Lansky, such as Edward Moss, who did public relations work for Lansky and was said to be of “interest” to the CIA by the agency’s then-inspector general J.S. Earman. Harry “Happy” Meltzer was also another Lansky associate that was a CIA asset and the CIA asked Meltzer to join an assassination team in December 1960.
In addition to the CIA, Lansky was also connected to a foreign intelligence agency through Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and high-ranking official in Israel’s Mossad, whose bank – the International Credit Bank of Geneva – laundered much of Lansky’s ill-gotten gains and recycled them into legitimate American businesses.
Despite having been correctly fired, in effect, by Theresa May for clandestine meetings with the Israelis, Priti Patel is back in as Home Secretary with Boris Johnson.
Priti Patel, previously ousted over Israel meetings, named UK home secretary
Dominic Raab to serve as new foreign secretary, Sajid Javid appointed chancellor of the exchequer, as Boris Johnson clears house on his first day as prime minister.
Priti Patel, who resigned as UK aid minister in 2017 over unauthorized meetings with senior Israeli officials, was named as home secretary by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday.
Patel quit in November 2017 after it emerged that she held a series of meetings with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, about allocating aid to the Israeli army’s Syrian relief efforts, without properly informing the government.
Patel had apologized for holding 12 separate meetings during a family holiday to Israel in August of that year without notifying the Foreign Office or Downing Street in advance.
The Jewish Chronicle reported at the time that Patel had informed 10 Downing Street of the meetings and had been advised to keep a sit-down with Israeli Foreign Ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York off the list of meetings she disclosed to save face for the Foreign Office. Downing Street denied the claims as “categorically untrue.”
Dominic Raab, who was named by Johnson on Wednesday as the UK’s new foreign secretary — the country’s top diplomat — resigned as Brexit minister in Theresa May’s government last year, saying the divorce deal she struck with Brussels offered too many compromises.
Raab is the son of a Jewish Czech father who fled the Nazis
A 45-year-old graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge and the son of a Jewish Czech father who fled the Nazis, Raab reportedly spent the summer of 1998 at a university near Ramallah and became involved early on in the Arab-Israeli conflict, working with a former Palestinian negotiator of the Oslo peace process in the West Bank.
Raab went viral on social media for admitting at a conference that he “hadn’t quite understood” the importance of the cross-Channel port in Dover to the UK economy. Dover handled 17 percent of Britain’s entire international trade last year, a figure that threatens to plummet under a no-deal Brexit scenario Raab had said he does not much fear. Making matters worse, Raab appeared to suggest that he had only recently discovered this “peculiar geographic economic entity” of his country.
Raab is replacing Jeremy Hunt, Johnson’s rival in the leadership race, who said he had “kindly” been offered a different cabinet role, Sky News reported, but decided to serve on the backbenches, where the PM “will have my full support.”
Hungary has reached an agreement with Poland and Estonia to establish a warning mechanism against the UN Global Compact on Migration which would enable the countries to “move against such pro-migration proposals in their early phases, whether they are drawn up in the UN or in Brussels”.
Peter Szijarto, Hungary’s Foreign Minister, confirmed to Hungary’s MTI that the agreement had been reached with his Polish and Estonian counterparts, About Hungary reports.
On Monday, Szijarto said, “It has once again been made clear that pro-migration forces want to make the United Nations’ global migration compact, the world’s most dangerous migration document, mandatory.”
Last December, at the UN General Assembly, 152 countries voted in favor of the Global Migration Compact while five voted against it, 13 countries abstained, and 57 didn’t vote at all.
Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, the United States, and Israel – who all rejected the document last December – were also joined by Estonia in the most recent vote. Not one of the Visegrád countries backed the compact, with Slovakia choosing not to vote in the most recent vote.
Szijarto argued that anything approved by the United Nations essentially becomes part of international law and judicial practice. He also emphasized the need to fight “pro-migration proposals.”
The Visegrád (V4) countries have recently asserted their political will in ways that they haven’t in the past. As an example, the Head of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office said last Thursday that Germany’s Ursula von der Leven couldn’t have been nominated as European Commission President without the support of the Visegrád countries.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 24 July 2019 07:06.
As Prime Minister, Boris Johnson Faces the Brexit He Championed
Boris Johnson is the new leader of the Conservative Party and is set to be Britain’s next prime minister. The former foreign secretary is a hard-line supporter of Brexit.
LONDON — Boris Johnson, Britain’s brash former foreign secretary and standard-bearer for leaving the European Union, on Tuesday won the contest to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May, with his party handing the job of resolving the country’s three-year Brexit nightmare to one of its most polarizing politicians.
Mr. Johnson beat Jeremy Hunt, his successor as foreign secretary, in the battle for the leadership of Britain’s governing Conservative Party, winning with a substantial 66 percent of the postal vote held among its membership. Although the Conservatives’ working majority in Parliament is very small, it appears to be enough to ensure that Mr. Johnson will succeed Mrs. May as prime minister on Wednesday.
He would take office at one of the most critical moments in Britain’s recent history, immediately facing the toughest challenge of his career, to manage his nation’s exit from the European Union in little more than three months. But his policy swerves, lack of attention to detail and contradictory statements leave the country guessing how things will unfold.
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Abe with Russian President Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on 26 May 2018 CCby4.0
Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Andy Wong / AP)
Recently, Discovery of Oil and Natural Gas in Sakhalin have given Russia a Milking cow in the region. Which was earlier used as Gulags.
Indigenous people of Sakhalin Island
Lewis “Lew” Rosenstiel. Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn (Graphic | Emma Fiala)
Samuel Bronfman pictured in 1937 with his sons Edgar and Charles
Rosenstiel was connected to both the FBI and to organized crime
Lansky outside the High Court of Israel where he sought permission to emigrate in 1972. Photo | AP
Raab is the son of a Jewish Czech father who fled the Nazis
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