Majorityrights News > Category: Jewish Diaspora

McClatchyDC.com, “Steve Bannon’s already murky Middle East ties deepen”, 23 Oct 2017:

Former presidential aide Steve Bannon appears to be fostering ties to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, countries that have cut off ties with Qatar and have been encouraging the United States to act against the nation as well - though it is home to largest American base in the Middle East. Brynn Anderson AP

White House

WASHINGTON

Shortly after Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon left the White House, a company with close ties to him was hired by the United Arab Emirates to launch a social media campaign against its Arab neighbor, Qatar.

It was part of a multimillion-dollar effort by several Middle Eastern nations to isolate Qatar that received a boost when Trump criticized the country that for years had been a critical regional ally.

The UAE is paying $330,000 to a firm with the same parent company as Cambridge Analytica, the business Trump employed to reach voters with hyper-targeted online messaging during the campaign, to blast Qatar on Facebook and Twitter, among other sites, according to federal records.

Bannon, who remains one of Trump’s closest advisers, has long had an interest in the region. He has huddled with UAE officials behind closed doors, visited the country as recently as last month and pushed for a group of Middle Eastern nations, including the UAE, in their bitter dispute with Qatar.

On Monday, Bannon is scheduled to speak at a day-long conference in Washington organized by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and paid for by multiple donors, entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The speech follows Bannon’s September meeting in the UAE with its crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The two weren’t strangers: Bannon, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn met with the crown prince at Trump Tower during the presidential transition in December. That meeting triggered controversy, as the UAE hadn’t notified the outgoing Obama administration about the visit as is customary.

The UAE also helped broker a meeting in January between a Bannon friend, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin to try to establish a back-channel line of communication to Moscow for Trump just days before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Washington Post; Prince met with the Russian in the Seychelle islands off East Africa.

Prince lives in the UAE and had a multimillion dollar contract with that government to assemble a mercenary security force there. His firm also does security work in Africa, much of it for Chinese interests. But Bannon has encouraged Prince to move back to the U.S. and run for office, and in recent weeks, Prince has begun to publicly consider a primary challenge to Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt cut off all ties with Qatar in June, supposedly in response to its alleged support of terrorism and ties to Iran, and mounted a blockade against the nation. Trump abruptly began accusing Qatar of funding terrorism despite its importance as host to al Udeid, the largest American military base in the Middle East, home to nearly 10,000 troops.

The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level, and in the wake of that conference, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior.
            - President Donald Trump

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Voice of Europe, “Seven bombings in twelve days in Sweden, what is happening? We ask it Swedish journalist “PeterSweden”, 23 Oct 2017:

PeterSweden, real name Peter Imanuelsen, is a Swedish journalist, a YouTuber and a political commentator reporting on news from Sweden. Follow him on Twitter here and subscribe to his YouTube here

Peter, seven bombings in twelve days, what is going on in Sweden?

That is the question I’ve been asking myself. This is probably the worst I have seen in Sweden so far. Previously we “only” had perhaps 3 bombings a month in Sweden, but now it has really been ramped up. According to Swedish police they think some of these bombings have to do with work they have been doing in “certain” areas. As we all know these “certain” areas are the many no-go zones that now exist in Sweden.

Who do you think are behind these bombings?

Most of these bombings seem to be related to migrant criminal gangs that operate and run the no-go zones in Sweden. But there is evidence to suggest the latest attack against a bar where one person was injured could be terrorist related. The reason for this is that the attacker had religious texts in his backpack and according to a witness he had what appeared to be a suicide belt on him (which police later said was not dangerous).

Any ideas about how the Swedish authorities can stop this epidemic?

In my opinion the obvious solution to stop this epidemic is for the Swedish government to deploy the military into the no go-zones and clear them from these migrant criminal gangs. I very much doubt we will see that happen, at least not now. But the Moderate party, which is one of the opposition parties in Sweden, has actually suggested they want to deploy the military in the suburbs as they call them. At least this is a positive step forward, and a glimmer of hope for Sweden.

How does it feel for you to see your home country in this state?

It makes me incredibly sad. I remember Sweden as it was just 10 years ago. Peaceful. Quiet. Low crime rate. The worst things you had to deal with back then were young kids driving around loudly on mopeds. Today there are bombings on a regular basis. Not to mention the soaring rape statistics and gun crime.

Would you consider going back?

Sweden seems to be turning more and more into a war zone every day, and if you think about it, that’s is probably how these gangs feel about it too. They see this as a war in which they are trying to conquer Sweden. I wouldn’t advise women to go to Sweden, but you have to remember to never loose hope. The globalist elite want you to lose hope. That’s how they win. Never loose hope.

Peter’s YouTube video commentary on Sweden’s bombing epidemic.

SBDL, “Pittsburgh Is 64.8 Percent White And 26 Percent Black… Between 2010 - 2016, 87 Percent Of Known Homicide Suspects Were Nonwhite”, 17 Oct 2017:

This data was compiled by the Allegheny County Department of Human Services.

Between 2010 - 2016, 87% of known homicide suspects were nonwhite (84% black, 3 percent Hispanic or Asian).

In a 65% white city, 87% of homicides between 2010 - 2016 had a nonwhite perpetrator (84% were black).

Not much more to say. Pittsburgh Is 64.8 percent white and 26 percent black.

And not much more you’d better say according to the powers that be. A media gag order on blacks as a source of crime has been in effect for decades. Long time Pittsburgh TV News reporter Wendy Bell tried to buck the convention and report the facts on her Facebook page. She was imparting information that the public needs to know for their safety, but she got fired for not being obedient to black bio power and the YKW who wield it against us.

WTAE fired Wendy Bell because of her Facebook post. (Photo: WTAE)

Yahoo News, “Pittsburgh station fires newswoman over black-on-black crime Facebook post”, 1 Aug 2016:

A Pittsburgh TV station cut ties with one of its longtime anchorwomen on Wednesday over a controversial Facebook post that many consider racist.

Wendy Bell, who had been with WTAE for 18 years, had speculated about the likely profiles of the gunmen who killed five adults and an unborn baby at a barbeque in Wilkinsburg, Pa., on March 9.

“You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday. I will tell you they live within 5 miles of Franklin Avenue and Ardmore Boulevard and have been hiding out since in a home likely much closer to that backyard patio than anyone thinks,” she wrote on Facebook. “They are young black men, likely teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested.”

The Facebook post from March 21 has since been taken down, but is preserved in its entirety on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s website and elsewhere.

A spokesman for WTAE’s parent company, Hearst Television, emailed the following statement to Yahoo News but declined to comment further:

“WTAE has ended its relationship with anchor Wendy Bell. Wendy’s recent comments on a WTAE Facebook page were inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards.”

Many people were offended by the Emmy-winning newswoman’s post, and characterized the views she expressed as racist and condescending. Her employer agreed.

On March 24, WTAE officially apologized for her words and sympathized with the viewers who took offense to them.

“Wendy has since apologized for what she wrote and acknowledged it was insensitive. Wendy is sorry for the words she chose, and so are we. It was an egregious lack of judgment,” WTAE President and General Manager Charles W. Welfertz III said on behalf of the editorial board. “WTAE regrets it happened and is committed to making sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

He said WTAE would take appropriate action after a comprehensive examination of the incident.

Wendy Bell @WendyBellPgh

I have removed a post that I initially placed here on Monday. I sincerely apologize for that post about the… http://fb.me/7M9ztMXiQ
11:54 PM - Mar 23, 2016

On the day of her dismissal, Bell told the Associated Press that she did not get a “fair shake” and that the story was about “African-Americans being killed by other African-Americans” — it was not about her.

“What matters is what’s going on in America, and it is the death of black people in this country,” she said to the wire service. “I live next to three war-torn communities in the city of Pittsburgh, that I love dearly. My stories, they struck a nerve. They touched people, but it’s not enough. More needs to be done. The problem needs to be addressed.”

Authorities have not made any arrests or publicly identified any suspects in the shooting.

Bell’s WTAE Facebook page has been deleted, and her bio has been removed from the station’s website.

According to her now-deleted bio, Bell is originally from Calabasas, Calif., has a master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia and had worked for WTAE since September 1998.

Pence owes his position to doing the dirty bidding of the Koch brother’s interests, starting with lobbying against carbon tax, an initiative that wound up putting oil man Scott Pruitt in charge of EPA - the proverbial fox in charge of the hen house. That’s not the half of Pence’s classic story of right wing corruption.

NPR, “Understanding Mike Pence And His Relationship To Trump: ‘His Public Role Is Fawning”, 18 Oct 2017:

Though President Trump ran as an outsider, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer describes his vice president as “the connective tissue” between Trump and the billionaire donors in the Republican party.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Many of President Trump’s critics are hoping he won’t serve his full term, but what kind of president would Mike Pence make? That’s one of the questions Jane Mayer sets out to answer in her new article about Pence titled “The President Pence Delusion.” It’s published in the current issue of The New Yorker.

She writes about how Pence became an evangelical Christian and how he became a favored candidate of billionaire backers, most especially the Koch brothers. She traces how religion and money shaped his ideology. She investigates how Pence became Trump’s running mate and how much power he has in the White House and how he’s used it.

Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She’s also the author of the bestseller about the Koch Brothers titled “Dark Money: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right.” Last March in The New Yorker, she profiled another billionaire funder of right-wing causes, Robert Mercer, who she says has become a major force behind the Trump presidency.

Jane Mayer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So I feel like I don’t see Mike Pence very much, and I often wonder if he’s a power behind the scenes or if he really doesn’t matter that much within the Trump administration. So what’s your impression?

JANE MAYER: Well, it’s really hard to tell. He is - as Joel Goldstein, a specialist in the vice presidency, told me, he calls him the sycophant in chief because when you do see him, he’s usually acting as an emcee to Trump or kind of echoing Trump and praising Trump. So his public role is really fawning. Behind the scenes, though, according to Newt Gingrich, he’s 1 of the 3 people who have the most power in the Trump administration along with the chief of staff, John Kelly, and Trump himself.

GROSS: What are the signs that he’s that powerful?

MAYER: Well, (laughter) that’s a good question - because I think he acts as the connective tissue between the Trump administration and Congress, between the Trump administration and the - kind of the socially conservative base of the party. And most importantly, he is the connector between the Trump administration and the billionaire donors in the Republican Party. He is the guy who does most of the fundraising and outreach to the money.

GROSS: And the money includes the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer.

MAYER: It does. And one of the interesting things to me in writing about Pence is it poses such a juxtaposition between the way that Trump ran, which was as a populist outsider who was attacking the big-money forces in the Republican Party as corrupt and saying that they were puppeteers trying to control the candidates as puppets. And Trump made a huge point of saying, I’m my own man; I’m so rich; no one controls me. Yet as his vice president, he chose Mike Pence. And you could hardly find a candidate in the American political scene who has closer ties to the big donors and particularly the Koch brothers. He’s been sponsored by them for years.

GROSS: So how do the Kochs first start backing Mike Pence?

MAYER: So this was when Pence was in Congress in 2009. He really did the Kochs a big favor. There was legislation pending that might have put a tax on carbon pollution, and it would have been terrible for Koch Industries. And Pence took up the cause and tried to help defeat that legislation and specifically carried around a pledge that the Kochs had created, trying to get people to sign it. And after he was successful in that, the Kochs invited him to come to their secret donor summits. And at that point on, they started showering him in money. So it was - it’s really became a working relationship then. And I hadn’t realized that until recently.

GROSS: One of the things you say Mike Pence is responsible for is bringing the Kochs and Donald Trump together. The Kochs didn’t support Trump’s candidacy. Charles Koch described the choice between Trump and Hillary as one between cancer or a heart attack. (Laughter) So what did Pence do to bring the Kochs and Trump together?

MAYER: Well, so this is what was interesting to me - is that Pence has been very close with the Kochs, and they have just showered money on his campaigns. And he’s kind of act as a peacemaker between the Kochs and Trump. And but in that process, what interested me most was that I really do think that Trump ran as a different kind of Republican. He ran against the big-donors orthodoxy and kind of libertarian vision of people like the Kochs. He said he was going to deliver something for the little guys and build infrastructure all across the country and use the government in various ways that the Kochs disapprove of.

And what you’ve seen with Pence is that in many ways, Pence has brought in a ton of people who are allied with the Kochs into the government, and he’s brought a lot of their policies in - so whether it’s on environmental issues or tax policy now where the Kochs are working very closely with the Trump White House on the Trump tax plan. And it is a tax plan that the Kochs love, and it’s a tax plan that’s going to help the super-rich according to many nonpartisan analyses and not do very much for the middle class. So you’re beginning to kind of see the government moving in the direction of the Kochs.

GROSS: You say 16 high-ranking officials in the Trump White House have ties to the Koch brothers.

MAYER: Well, and that’s according to a study by a group called the Checks And Balances Program. And you can count them. You can see it online. They’re - that’s in the White House. There are also many, many people who’ve worked for the Kochs in the government at large, in the cabinet, in the other departments. And a tremendous number of people who work with and for Pence have gone in and out of working for the Kochs to the point that you had Politico saying - they quoted a Republican operative saying that the Koch operation really was the shadow campaign for Pence for president.

And chief among them really has been Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, who went - after working for Pence in Congress, he went to run the Koch’s political operation, Freedom Partners. And then when Pence was chosen as vice president on the ticket, Marc Short came back, worked with Pence in the campaign and is now the head of Congressional Liaison in the Trump White House. So the man that actually ran the Koch’s political operation is a key player inside the Trump White House.

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“I got the phone call Nov. 12 at 2:39 in the afternoon,” Tina Snyder recalled. Her 24-year-old son, Lee Winder, had been found in a shopping center parking lot near his car outside a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Winder had become addicted to pain pills and died of a heroin overdose.

Washington Post, “Amid a targeted lobbying effort, Congress weakened the DEA’s ability to go after drug distributors, even as opioid-related deaths continue to rise, a Washington Post and ‘60 Minutes’ investigation finds”, 15 Oct 2017:

In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.

By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.

A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.

The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.

The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.

For years, some drug distributors were fined for repeatedly ignoring warnings from the DEA to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of millions of pills, while they racked up billions of dollars in sales.

The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street.

Political action committees representing the industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill, including nearly $100,000 to Marino and $177,000 to Hatch. Overall, the drug industry spent $102 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016, according to lobbying reports.

[TUESDAY UPDATE: Trump announces drug czar Marino will withdraw]

“The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before,” said Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s division responsible for regulating the drug industry and led a decade-long campaign of aggressive enforcement until he was forced out of the agency in 2015. “I mean, to get Congress to pass a bill to protect their interests in the height of an opioid epidemic just shows me how much influence they have.”

Besides the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have. It sailed through Congress and was passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. The White House was equally unaware of the bill’s import when President Barack Obama signed it into law, according to interviews with former senior administration officials.

Top officials at the White House and the Justice Department have declined to discuss how the bill came to pass.

Michael Botticelli, who led the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the time, said neither Justice nor the DEA objected to the bill, removing a major obstacle to the president’s approval.

“We deferred to DEA, as is common practice,” he said.

The bill also was reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“Neither the DEA nor the Justice Department informed OMB about the policy change in the bill,” a former senior OMB official with knowledge of the issue said recently. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal White House deliberations.

The DEA’s top official at the time, acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg, declined repeated requests for interviews. A senior DEA official said the agency fought the bill for years in the face of growing pressure from key members of Congress and industry lobbyists. But the DEA lost the battle and eventually was forced to accept a deal it did not want.

[...]

Deeply involved in the effort to help the industry was the DEA’s former associate chief counsel, D. Linden Barber. While at the DEA, he helped design and carry out the early stages of the agency’s tough enforcement campaign, which targeted drug companies that were failing to report suspicious orders of narcotics.

When Barber went to work for the drug industry in 2011, he brought an intimate knowledge of the DEA’s strategy and how it could be attacked to protect the companies. He was one of dozens of DEA officials recruited by the drug industry during the past decade.

Barber played a key role in early version of the legislation that would eventually curtail the DEA’s power, according to an internal email written by a Justice Department official to a colleague. “He wrote the Marino bill,” the official wrote in 2014.

Barber declined repeated requests for an interview.

With a few words, the new law changed four decades of DEA practice. Previously, the DEA could freeze drug shipments that posed an “imminent danger” to the community, giving the agency broad authority. Now, the DEA must demonstrate that a company’s actions represent “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat,” a much higher bar.

[...]

Today, Rannazzisi is a consultant for a team of lawyers suing the opioid industry. Separately, 41 state attorneys general have banded together to investigate the industry. Hundreds of counties, cities and towns also are suing.

“This is an industry that’s out of control. If they don’t follow the law in drug supply, and diversion occurs, people die. That’s just it, people die,” he said. “And what they’re saying is, ‘The heck with your compliance. We’ll just get the law changed.’ ”

[...]

‘Drug dealers in lab coats’

2006: 52,277 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.

Joe Rannazzisi came to DEA headquarters as an outsider with an attitude. He worked as an agent in Detroit, where he watched prescription drugs flood small towns and cities in the Midwest.

Hundreds of millions of pain pills, such as Vicodin and oxycodone, ended up in the hands of dealers and illegal users.

Rogue doctors wrote fraudulent prescriptions for enormous numbers of pills, and complicit pharmacists filled them without question, often for cash. Internet pharmacies, supplied by drug distribution companies, allowed users to obtain drugs without seeing a doctor.

“There were just too many bad practitioners, too many bad pharmacies, and too many bad wholesalers and distributors,” Rannazzisi recalled.

[...]

Rannazzisi brought an aggressive approach to the diversion control office.

The year he took over, Linden Barber was promoted to run diversion control’s litigation office, which crafted the legal arguments that supported the team. He was a former Army lawyer who served in Iraq. The cadre of attorneys who worked for him saw him as a tough litigator unafraid of an influential industry.

Barber and Rannazzisi formed a powerful combination that the drug companies would learn to fear. “Early on he did really good work,” Rannazzisi said. “He jumped into the Internet cases when he first came here.”

After shutting down the Internet pharmacies, Rannazzisi and Barber pursued the pain management clinics that replaced them and soon became as ubiquitous in South Florida as the golden arches of McDonald’s. To get there, drug dealers and users would take the “Oxy Express” down Interstate 75.

“Lines of customers coming in and going out,” said Matthew Murphy, a veteran DEA supervisor in Boston whom Rannazzisi hired to be chief of pharmaceutical investigations. “Armed guards. Vanloads of people from the Appalachia region driving down to Florida to get a prescription from a pain clinic and then get the prescription filled, going back to wherever they’re from.”

Back home, each 30-pill vial of oxycodone was worth $900.

DEA officials realized they needed a new strategy to confront this new kind of drug dealer.

“They weren’t slinging crack on the corner,” Rannazzisi said. “These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats.”

Rather than focusing on bad doctors and pharmacists, Rannazzisi and Barber decided to target the companies feeding the pill mills: the wholesale drug distributors, some of them massive multinational corporations.

[...]

“They definitely didn’t like Joe Rannazzisi,” Murphy said. “Not at all. He wasn’t viewed as a person that they could work with. And maybe that was appropriate. He didn’t want to work with industry much.”

Rannazzisi was unmoved by their complaints.

“We’re worried about their feelings being hurt because we were doing our job?” he said. “We were making them comply. We were holding their feet to the fire.”

Murphy recalled a telling meeting with drug company representatives.

He said the president of one of the drug companies sat on the other side of the table, put his hands up and said, “ ‘You got us. What can we do to make this right?’ ” Murphy recalled.

Murphy said he had heard the same thing from drug dealers.

There was an important difference, Murphy noted.

“You know,” he said, “the heroin and cocaine traffickers didn’t have a class ring on their finger from a prestigious university.”

‘This is war’

2011: 121,468 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.

In 2011, Linden Barber left the DEA to join the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Quarles & Brady. He started a practice representing drug companies. “If you have a DEA compliance issue or you’re facing a government investigation,” he said in a promotional video for the firm, “I’d be happy to hear from you.”

Barber’s move turned out to be a key moment in the struggle between drug companies and the government, but it was far from the only one. Dozens of top officials from the DEA and Justice Department have stepped through Washington’s revolving door to work for drug companies.

[...]

‘it was bad’

2013: 149,853 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.

The field generals in the DEA’s war on opioids are men and women such as Jim Geldhof, a 43-year agency veteran who managed the diversion control program in the Detroit field office. He witnessed firsthand the heartbreak pain pills were causing across the Midwest.

One night, at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, Ohio, Geldhof sat quietly as the Portsmouth High School gym fell dark and a large screen flickered with photographs.

Geldhof was in tears.

“Sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters in graduation pictures,” he recalled. “Some were wearing football jerseys. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and then they were gone.”

[...]

Geldhof, the DEA program manager in Detroit, was investigating a midsize Ohio-based drug distributor. Between 2007 and 2012, Miami-Luken had shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia. About 11 million wound up in one county, Mingo, population 25,000.

Despite the rising death rate in West Virginia — the highest in the nation — Geldhof said his pleas in 2013 to halt Miami-Luken’s operations were ignored by the legal office at headquarters.

“First we got blown off by the company,” he said, “and then we got blown off by our own lawyers.”

Novak suspected another reason for the slowdown.

At times, he said, some of his colleagues appeared more concerned with pleasing the industry than working on behalf of the public. Some of the lawyers had simply given up fighting the industry and seemed to be preparing for a future working with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, he said.

“It was not just one person who left the office; everyone started to leave. That’s your payout. You do your time, and more and more people were auditioning for the industry. It stopped us from doing our jobs.”

The departures gave the industry an unfair advantage, Novak said.

“There was a fear,” he said. “It comes from seeing that some of the best and brightest former DEA attorneys are now on the other side and know all of the weak points. Their fingerprints are on memos and policy and emails.”

[...]

Epilogue

2016: 197,713 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.

John Mulrooney, the chief DEA administrative law judge, has been documenting the falling number of immediate suspension orders against doctors, pharmacies and drug companies. That number has dropped from 65 in fiscal year 2011 to six so far this fiscal year, according to the DEA. Not a single order has targeted a distributor or manufacturer since late 2015, according to Mulrooney’s reports, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mulrooney said in his reports that the judges under him were handling so few cases at the DEA that they began hearing the cases of other federal agencies.

Mingo County, West Virginia, racial makeup 97.1% White

[...]

A spokesman for Whitehouse said that the DEA could have expressed its opposition at any time.

“The fact that it passed the entire Senate without hearing any sort of communication that would have triggered concern of at least one senator doesn’t really pass the smell test,” the spokesman said.

Jim Geldhof, the DEA program manager in Detroit, retired from the agency at the end of 2015 after 43 years on the job. He said the companies were fully aware of their responsibilities under the law.

“When you’re selling half a million pills to some pharmacy and you’re telling me that you don’t know what the rules are for a suspicious order?” said Geldhof, who is now working as a consultant to lawyers suing the industry. “All we were looking for is a good-faith effort by these companies to do the right thing, and there was no good-faith effort. Greed always trumped compliance. It did every time. It was about money, and it’s as simple as that.”

Just before Geldhof left, his two-year quest to persuade the DEA to take action against Miami-Luken finally paid off. In November 2015, the DEA accused the company of multiple violations of the law for allegedly failing to report orders for tens of millions of pain pills from pharmacies, most of them in West Virginia. That case — the most recent one to target a distributor — is pending.

Of the millions of pills sent to Mingo County, many went to one pharmacy in Williamson, the county seat, population 2,924. In one month alone, Miami-Luken shipped 258,000 hydrocodone pills to the pharmacy, more than 10 times the typical amount for a West Virginia pharmacy.

The mayor of Williamson has since filed a lawsuit against Miami-Luken and other drug distributors, accusing them of flooding the city with pain pills and permitting them to saturate the black market.

“Like sharks circling their prey, multi-billion dollar companies descended upon Appalachia for the sole purpose of profiting off of the prescription drug-fueled feeding frenzy,” the lawsuit says.

...West Virginia was not alone among poor White areas targeted, but provides a graphic example of how much big pharma, big business, big money and the government care for disadvantaged Whites, as West Virginia is markedly the poorest and Whitest state in America.

Almost heaven, West Virginia, the corporations can’t lay off - Massey corp. strip mines its mountains, poisons its water and big pharma preys on the despair of the first casualties of cultural Marxism.

Luke Ford, “Alt Right Jews”, 15 Oct 2017 by Luke Ford

The Z Blog posts:

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

The Z Man, “Alt-Jew”, 29 Aug 2017:

Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

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Chapo Trap House on How Richard Spencer Plays the Liberal Media, 14 June 2017:

Matt Christman

Angela Nagle (7:53): They think (also) that women making the completely voluntary choice to have children with a non-White man is White genocide (laughs) you know, it’s just so ridiculous, I mean…

Matt Christman (8:05): interjecting sarcastically: Ah, excuse me, but, “cultural Marxism” much? Frankfurt School?

Angela Nagle (8:10): Laughs uproariously

Matt Christman (8:14): “It’s not of their own volition.”

Angela Nagle (8:14): laughing

Matt Christman (8:15): Porn! Jewish produced porn has brainwashed them into thinking that big dicks are more pleasurable to have sex with.

Angela Nagle (8:22): Continues to laugh in approval of the sarcasm.

Matt Christman (8:24): They literally believe that by the way.

It has always been theoretically uncomfortable when White advocates white knight or try to counter “the misogyny” of White advocacy regarding White mudsharks by suggesting that they are sheerly brainwashed by cultural Marxsim.

I have tended to lay off these arguments as I believe there is truth to cultural coercion and veritable psy-ops of cultural Marxism and demoralization through Jewish porn; and it is a help to take a step away from completely deterministic, objectivist arguments; better still, as opposed to the White genders blaming one another, to look critically at Jews, who have been egregiously critical of us and divisive of White men and women. These angles are true enough to consider along with being helpful to take the pressure off of gender antipathy and to put the social realm and culture (by which I mean rule structured practices) into play.

However, the cultural Marxism angle has always been insufficiently explanatory when dealing with “voluntary” miscegenation and White genocide. The little discourse above provides occasion for correction.

Angela Nagle might believe that outbreeding is not killing European genotypes; here White advocates haven’t done that bad in showing that it (coercion that suppresses breeding of a race) can meet with the UN definition of genocide.

Matt Christman might think that all White advocates believe miscegenation and outbreeding is only a result of brainwashing; and maybe some do. But his and Angela Nagle’s mockery exposes a puerility and weakness of their own argument, which calls for exploitation through the added sophistication of the hermeneutic circle.

White females, as any females, do have base drives that can incite genetic competition, miscegenation, incline toward strong black men with big weenies (though even I, in my distaste and disrespect for blacks on the whole, would not reduce miscegenation to only these causes), an inclination that can be activated under certain circumstances - particularly by pandering to them in atavistic circumstances such as the disorder of modernity. However, for a self proclaimed leftist, Nagle is making a surprisingly reductionist, liberal, right wing argument in saying “it’s completely voluntary.” There are definitely cultural rule structures that are encouraging and promoting it; even more significantly, there are heavy taboos against criticizing it; literal laws against taking critical and opposing stances against it. These are cultural/ political violations of even the most reasonable and natural extent for mature White men (and women) to protect their kind.

This would be a part of the pleasure pain matrix that Matt Christman invokes. As White men overcome their right wing reactionary position and adopt the reality of social construction and the hermeneutic circle, they will not have to accept the “way it is-ness” of Matt Christman’s “white knighting” on behalf of mudsharks (likely overcompensating pandering for the fact that he is ugly - about as ugly as the typical black woman - and desperate to be in the good graces of Jews, if not part Jewish himself).

As we step into hermeneutics, we move beyond the tropism of the high contrast porn episode of the gargantuan black weenie and the White woman. But first, porn does some corrective favor in the sense that it is compelled to show that we White men can be quite well hung - so, if that’s what a woman feels she needs… Finally, porn does not tend to reveal the fact that blacks are not necessarily heavy hung; I don’t need to belabor this point here, except for the fact that their Not having a big weenie does not suddenly make them OK to intermarry with by our estimation. And as a very fundamental point, we are not discriminating against White guys with big Weenies.

Our kind was averse to blacks as children, before sexuality was even an issue, let alone weenies. After that it was the presumtuousness, arrogance, hyper-assertiveness, aggression, brutal antagonism and violence against Whites. Things that the puerile might find titillating, perhaps puerile girls, but not us. Along the way, we noticed subtleties of our female co-evolutionaries which we found compelling; and the physicality of blacks generally displeasing by contrast, let alone their behavior and fall-out of their way of life.

We did not expect that we would be blamed for everything and told we owe them everything - including those we might hope to be our wives and daughters. We never could have imagined that we would be expected to accept this in servitude. We thought others would naturally think as we do, and though some naive adults thought it was a good idea to integrate us with blacks, when we got old enough, that we would join the rest of normal Whites who want to get away from them and be with Whites.

That didn’t happen in any articulate way. And we have to confront not only the fact of cultural Marxism, but that our enemies are playing the objectivist angle where it works against us - heavily now that they’ve hoodwinked the Alt Right and other large tracts of popular culture to argue against PC and “the left.”

We have to confront the fact of thrownness, that our group co-evolutionaries can miscegenate, but by the same token, thrownness, we are thereupon able to invoke and collaborate on cultural rule structures; it is not something that we have to accept as just the way it is, merely a voluntary choice that owes nothing to the tens of thousands of years of evolutionary struggle that went into our differentiation; along with its hundreds and thousands of years of social capital.

Even if they argue that some black guy might provide a more pleasurable moment and episode than some White guy, might be more confident (and coherent of identity, in part as a Jewish backed thug coalition) in the Jewish provoked disorder of modernity, where the rule structure of our guard and classificatory boundary is down, we can easily rebut that plenty of us White guys will provide not only quite fine moments, but as we rebuild our full class, a far more pleasurable and satisfying way of life than the blacks manage.

With that, rather than mocking and laughing at the servitude of black interests that has been imposed upon White men, we will be having the last laugh as we send miscegenators and their half cast broods to live with blacks and the way of life that they create. They will either accept that or the recognition that they are indeed the supremacists and slave masters who need to be overturned by any means necessary. Do you know Angela and Matt, a White guy might not want to be a slave, paying for the babies of the mudsharks who destroy the genome bestowed them through tens of thousand of years of struggle, might just find a White woman’s face and skin color more appealing, a European’s way of life more pleasurable?

Angela Nagle claims to be open to talking to people who are dealing in topics forbidden by PC. We have offered to talk to her and that remains a standing invitation.