Majorityrights News > Category: U.S. Politics

QZ, “Trump just gave China what it wanted for its new Silk Road: a credibility boost from the US”, 15 May 2017:

China’s “new Silk Road” initiative aims to link the economies of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—but Beijing would really like the US to get on board.

Also called “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR), the initiative involves expensive infrastructure projects—led by Chinese state-owned companies—in dozens of nations. The US has much to offer, and as part of a trade deal (paywall) with China announced last week, the Trump administration agreed to send one of its top Asia experts, Matthew Pottinger, a National Security Council official, to a two-day OBOR summit just completed in Beijing.

His presence amounted to a nod from the US. Recent pieces in China’s state-controlled media hint at why that’s so important to Beijing:

“Under the current international framework, the US is leading international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund,” read a commentary (link in Chinese) in Xiakedao, a WeChat account run by the People’s Daily. “This is like a date, when a girl says yes to dinner and a movie—there will be further development possibilities.”

It goes on:

“It’s estimated that $1.7 trillion would be required for annual infrastructure investments on nations involved in OBOR, but the three [funding] institutions involved—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, and the Silk Road Fund—only have capital totaling $240 billion. The US can help advocate OBOR in key fundraising areas.”

The US can also help deal with “security and geopolitical challenges” in the implementation of OBOR, noted a commentary in the Global Times. For instance, India has some issues with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, an OBOR land-corridor project (with a $46 billion investment from China) that partially runs through contested territory in Kashmir.

The commentary said:

“Washington’s participation in the Belt and Road initiative will have knock-on effects, encouraging its allies to see the initiative from a more rational and objective perspective, and thus help win Beijing and its infrastructure projects more international understanding and influence.”

The US economy will also benefit from OBOR, suggested Chinese state media.

The US should be “a stakeholder in the initiative,” read a column in the Global Times, as joining it would “deliver benefits to American companies and help increase job opportunities within the country.”

America “has a lot to gain by participating in the Belt and Road,” said an opinion piece in the People’s Daily. It should “embrace China’s progress in regional integration and seize the opportunity.”

The presence of Pottinger no doubt cheered Beijing, which had difficulty luring top leaders to the summit—of the 64 OBOR nations that could have sent their heads of state, only 20 chose to do so.

Read next: Your guide to understanding OBOR, China’s new Silk Road plan

The impending failure of the Iran deal is being disingenuously blamed on the very moderate Iranians that ethno-nationalists would hope to empower in and of the deal - that failure being blamed on them, as opposed to who actually deserves the blame: primarily the Trump administration and its friends.

Daily Telegraph, “Iran presidential candidates lay blame for ‘failed’ nuclear deal on reformer Rouhani”, 13 May 2017:

President Hassan Rouhani faced accusations of a failed nuclear deal which has not benefitted the Iranian people, during the final televised debate with his rivals before the country’s presidential election next week.

The vote is being seen as largely a referendum on reformer Mr Rouhani’s outreach to the rest of the world following a landmark accord with global powers, which ended sanctions but bitterly divided the country.

The president is believed to be the frontrunner in the May 19 election but the failure of the 2015 accord to bring economic gains for the public has brought an opening that his main competitors, powerful conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi and hardline Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, have sought to exploit.

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Konbini, 11 May 2017: “Coverup? FBI Director Comey’s Firing Ignites Trump-Russia Suspicions.”

There are so many questions that need to be answered about the bombshell breaking news that shook Washington D.C. to its core on Tuesday. President Trump summarily dismissed FBI Director James Comey at the same time that Comey was leading an investigation into the Trump campaign’s shady connections (and possible collusion with) the Russian government’s meddling in the U.S. elections.

What are we to make of all the comparisons to the Watergate scandal? What does this all mean for the ongoing FBI, Congressional and Senate investigations into Trump-Russia? What does this mean for the functioning of the United States government - are we officially in a constitutional crisis?

If so, does America have the institutional integrity and fortitude to survive it?

No one is buying the official reasoning from the White House that FBI Director James Comey was dismissed by President Trump because of his “unfair” treatment of candidate Hillary Clinton last summer. No one is buying the implication that Comey simply had to be removed because the FBI was getting “too political” in recent months.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly and vocally praised Comey’s actions in making disclosures about the investigation into Clinton’s email scandal. In October, then-Senator Jeff Sessions (now the Attorney General who wrote a letter recommending Comey’s firing) claimed Comey had “no choice” but to reignite the controversy surrounding Clinton’s emails just days before the election.

Based on the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s reporting, it seems Trump had a set outcome in mind, and tasked his attorney general with digging up some justifications for it:

Michael S. Schmidt
✔
@nytmike

WH and DOJ had been working on firing Comey since at least last week. Sessions had been working to come up with reasons.
12:28 AM - 10 May 2017

This is exactly the kind of dissembling, smoke screening and naked dishonesty that has churned up such distrust of this administration only 110 days into Trump’s presidency. If Sessions and Trump were so utterly appalled by Comey’s toe-dipping into the political arena, they could - and should - have fired him way back in January.

Oh, by the way, didn’t Attorney General Sessions recuse himself from all questions involving the Trump-Russia investigation..?

Here we are in May, with the FBI suddenly decapitated and with no replacement lined up ready to step in. As suspicion mounts that Trump is simply trying to make the FBI’s Russian meddling investigation go away, the comparisons to Watergate are growing louder by the second.

But are Richard Nixon’s actions during Watergate really the most apt comparison to shed light on current events? Or is this an entirely different political animal?

Vice, “Jared Kushner’s sister courted Chinese investors with a controversial visa program Trump just extended”, 8 May 2017:

Jared Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer, right

The $1.2 trillion spending bill President Donald Trump signed Friday extended the controversial EB-5 program, which grants U.S. visas to foreigners, mostly from China, who invest at least $500,000 in a domestic development project.

A day later, Jared Kushner’s sister stood at the Beijing Ritz-Carlton pitching the program to a ballroom-full of at least 100 wealthy Chinese investors. “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States,” a brochure for the event read, according to the Washington Post. The family business, Kushner Cos. LLC, needed $150 million in financing for a housing development in Jersey City, New Jersey, the New York Times reported.

While Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser at the White House, promised to fully divest from his family’s multibillion-dollar real estate empire, the presentation Saturday highlighted clear conflicts between his lingering business interests and policy decisions. Kushner has become a key diplomat in increasingly tense U.S.-China relations, among his many roles with the administration.

During the presentation, Nicole Kushner Meyer didn’t hold back linking Kushner Cos. to the current U.S. administration. She:

- mentioned that her brother left the company to work for Trump, according to the Post

- showed a slide that pictured Trump as the “key decision-maker” on the fate of the EB-5 visa, according to the Times

- encouraged attendees to invest early before the Trump administration decides to roll back the program — as Congress is pushing for, according to the Post.

Footage of U.S. President Donald Trump is shown on a video screen as workers wait for investors at a reception desk for a presentation at a Shanghai hotel. The event promoted EB-5 investment in a Kushner Companies development in the U.S., Sunday, May 7, 2017.

“It’s incredibly stupid and highly inappropriate,” Richard Painter, former White House ethics counsel for President George W. Bush, told the Post. “They clearly imply that the Kushners are going to make sure you get your visa. . . . They’re [Chinese applicants] not going to take a chance. Of course they’re going to want to invest.”

This isn’t the first family’s first ethically questionable brush with Chinese investors and the EB-5 program. Kushner Cos. could earn as much as $500 million in a planned real estate deal, which relies on the EB-5 program for funding, with a Chinese company that has close connections to the Chinese government. And loans obtained through the EB-5 program funded about one-quarter of a Trump Tower in New Jersey.

Kusher Cos. apologized “if that mention of [Meyer’s] brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors,” in a statement emailed to NPR.

NPR,“A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America”, 3 May 2017:

Federal housing policies created after the Depression ensured that African-Americans and other people of color were left out of new suburban communities - and pushed instead into urban housing projects, such as Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass towers. Paul Sancya/AP

In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America’s housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”

Race: Historian Says Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos

Code Switch: Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says

The government’s efforts were “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families,” he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.

Rothstein’s new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as “redlining.” At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.

Rothstein says these decades-old housing policies have had a lasting effect on American society. “The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they’re living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent,” he says. “If we want greater equality in this society, if we want lowering of hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate.”

Interview Highlights

On how the Federal Housing Administration justified discrimination

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - by Richard Rothstein

The Federal Housing Administration’s justification was that if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline. And therefore their loans would be at risk.

There was no basis for this claim on the part of the Federal Housing Administration. In fact, when African-Americans tried to buy homes in all-white neighborhoods or in mostly white neighborhoods, property values rose because African-Americans were more willing to pay more for properties than whites were, simply because their housing supply was so restricted and they had so many fewer choices. So the rationale that the Federal Housing Administration used was never based on any kind of study. It was never based on any reality.

On how federal agencies used redlining to segregate African-Americans

The term “redlining” comes from a development by the New Deal, by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color-coded by first the Home Owners Loan Corp. and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages.

On the FHA manual that explicitly laid out segregationist policies

The Two-Way: Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America’s History Of Discrimination

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We should be more eager to suspect Jewish deep state insiders who wanted Trump to win.

‘It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump.’

Indeed, and that is why it looks like she may have gotten some “gentle encouragement” (read, subtle bum steer - part of ‘a lot of work’ from (((insiders)))) to not bother addressing typical White Americans - she would have won if she could have been at all bothered to treat them like normal human beings with legitimate concerns; rather than placing herself exclusively on the side and among an entourage of blacks, liberal feminists, married gay couples, etc. - anything to be in-the-face of Whites about the new, “tolerant”, America; i.e., basically anything to represent a cartoon of the political correctness that is totally intolerant of, and eager to ignore the concerns of White Americans; demonstrating more of the same, not giving a fig about them, as they’ve experienced for decades.

The Hill, “Axelrod on Clinton: ‘It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump”, 3 May 2017:

Democratic strategist David Axelrod says Hillary Clinton would be well served to move on from last year’s presidential election and stop talking about it.

“It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump,” Axelrod told CNN on Wednesday. “Let me tell you, he was the least popular presidential candidate to win in the history of polling.”

Clinton on Tuesday said she takes responsibility for her 2016 presidential election loss, but added she would have won if not for FBI Director James Comey, Russian hackers and WikiLeaks.

“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your president,” she told CNN at a Women for Women event in New York on Tuesday, referencing Comey’s letter informing Congress that the FBI had discovered new emails that appeared pertinent to an investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material.

“It wasn’t a perfect campaign - there is no such thing - but I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.”

Axelrod called the 2016 race a “miserable slog” and said nobody in America wants to relive it “except the combatants who keep going back to it.”

“She has a legitimate beef because Comey’s letter was instrumental I think in her defeat, so in a narrow sense she is right about it,” Axelrod said.

“But Jim Comey didn’t tell her not to campaign in Wisconsin after the convention. Jim Comey didn’t say don’t put any resources into Michigan until the final week of the campaign,” he continued.

“And one of the things that hindered her in the campaign was a sense that she never fully was willing to take responsibility for her mistakes, particularly that server.”

Axelrod then offered a piece of advice for Clinton.

“If I were her, if I were advising her, I would say, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t go back and appear as if you’re shifting responsibility.’ ... She said the words ‘I’m responsible,’ but the — everything else suggested that she doesn’t really feel that way,” he said.

“And I don’t think that helps her in the long run, so if I were her I would move on.”

Axelrod was chief strategist for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and worked in the Obama White House as a senior adviser.

Wall Street Journal, “Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros”, 3 May 2017

Investments show ties to major finance and technology names

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, didn’t identify on his government financial disclosure form that he is currently a part-owner of a real-estate finance startup and has a number of loans from banks on properties he co-owns, according to securities filings.

Mr. Kushner’s stake in Cadre—a tech startup that pairs investors with big real-estate projects—means the senior White House official is currently a business partner of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.GS 0.47%▲ and billionaires including George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people close to the company.

The Cadre stake is one of many interests—and ties to large financial institutions—that Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.

Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns called BFPS Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported in his financial-disclosure form, although it doesn’t mention Cadre.

Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised version of his financial-disclosure form that will be made public after it has been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has “resigned from Cadre’s board, assigned his voting rights, and reduced his ownership share.” A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Gorelick added that it is “very normal” for a financial disclosure form to be revised and that the form was prepared by Mr. Kushner’s lawyers on his behalf.

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Hiramic Brotherhood, “America’s Arrogant, Apocalyptic Assaults Against The Rest Of Humanity Are Self-Destructive”, by William Hanna, 27 April 2017:

“. . . The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favour, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work.

The Lord, after all, surely would not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to work His will. German soldiers in the First World War wore belt buckles imprinted with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ [‘God with us’]. It was approximately under this kind of infatuation — an exaggerated sense of power and an imaginary sense of mission — that the Athenians attacked Syracuse and Napoleon and that Hitler invaded Russia. In plain words, they overextended their commitments and they came to grief.” - Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) in The Arrogance of Power, 1966.

As a result of being obsessively preoccupied with the dangerous delusion of “American exceptionalism” that maintains the U.S. is qualitatively different, arguably superior to all other nations, and deserving of being the dominant world power — a hegemonic tendency that has caused untold death and destruction starting with the 1893 overthrow of the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands — the American people have consequently failed to notice the gradual apocalyptic erosion of their own accursed society: a society whose precariously perched position on the edge of a crumbling precipice was recently confirmed by the inauguration of President Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump: a barely literate, bigot, sexist, racist, and con artist whom psychologists and psychiatrists have diagnosed as having all the classic symptoms of mental illness.

With its “exaggerated sense of power” and “imaginary sense of mission,” America has with delusional self-righteousness embarked on a series of invasions, interventions, regime changes, and “Wars on Terror” whose imperial overreach is inevitably accelerating its own global decline. Despite a brief hiatus of soul-searching and aversion to overseas military incursions following the humiliating and costly debacle in Vietnam, America soon resumed — egged on by Jewish “American” neocons — its contemptuous military adventurism including a more recent unilateral decision to “take out” seven predominantly Muslim countries in five years, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz5fZziMWEE) a decision which incidentally happened to be in line with Israel’s “Yinon Plan” of causing the target countries to “fall apart along sectarian and ethnic lines” with the resulting fragmentation compelling each one to be “hostile” to its “neighbours.”

“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East”

In the still ongoing process of “taking out” oil-rich Iraq, the U.S. has dehumanised millions of civilians and according to a report from Physicians For Social Responsibility (PSR), a U.S.-based medical and public health organisation, the U.S. military has between 1991 and 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis and a further one million have been killed from 2003 to the present time by U.S.-led military interventions. The PSR study also found that four million Muslims have been killed in countries ranging from Iraq to Pakistan. Though the situation in Iraq had alone mobilised some anti-war activism, not enough people had been spurred into action because of the alleged global “War on Terror” which had the Bush administration, the British government, and other Western allies describing Muslim civilians casualties as “collateral damage” — and all armed factions fighting the U.S.-led occupation as barbarians — thereby denying Iraqis any semblance of humanity. This is not “collateral damage,” but premeditated murder akin to a deliberate and barbaric genocide.

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the world — bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts.” - Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) American journalist and author.

In order to facilitate its global warfare against those it perceives as being either enemies or simply obstacles to its hegemonic aspirations, the U.S. maintains some 200,000 active troops in 800 bases spread over 177 countries at an annual cost of $100 billion. With some 54 percent (about $600 billion) of all U.S. discretionary spending being for the military, the U.S. has the capability of continuing to commit its historic crimes against humanity either as and when it pleases, or in accordance with the wishes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which exercises complete control over Congress. This is despite the fact that 46 percent of Americans in 2016 supported punitive action against Israel in response to its settlement policies, representing a nine percent increase over the previous year.

The inherent nature of American “exceptionalism” — akin to the racist concepts of a Jewish “God Chosen People,” and the Nazi Lebensborn Program for the creation of a blond, blue-eyed “Master Race” — demands a diabolical disregard for the inalienable human rights of others as declared in Article 2 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the U.S. — along with its “greatest ally” and “only democracy in the Middle East,” Israel — has hypocritically signed and continues to violate with with arrogant impunity:

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