[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
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.
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.
New UK PM Boris Johnson paves the way for an amnesty for 500,000 illegal immigrants – insists the Government will “look at it”
Speaking in the Commons, Boris Johnson said he had raised the idea of an amnesty when he served under Theresa May, “and it did not receive an overwhelming endorsement”.
He said the Windrush scandal had shown the difficulties that can be caused by a mass expulsion of people who “may have been living and working here for many, many years without being involved in any criminal activity at all”.
In the Windrush scandal it emerged that 161,000 asylum seekers – part of a huge backlog of almost half a million cases discovered in Home Office files – had been allowed to stay in the UK because they had been in the country so long it “would breach their right to a family life to remove them”.
“We should look at it”, Johnson said. “And the truth is the law already basically allows them an effective amnesty.”
He separately confirmed that Theresa May’s net migration target of 100,000 a year would go.
The PM’s official spokesman said he “wasn’t interested in a numbers game”.
Campaigners immediately warned an amnesty could fuel an explosion in migrants crossing the Channel from France in a desperate bid to reach the UK.
Alp Mehmet, chairman of the Migration Watch think tank, said: “The idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants is a non-starter”. “Such a scheme will reward people with no right to be here, encourage future illegality and will be costly.” “It is absurd to link this with the Windrush debacle which was about a Home Office cock-up that led to people with every right to be in the UK being wrongly targeted.”
“Windrushers were not illegal immigrants.”
Boris Johnson called for an “earned amnesty” for as many as 400,000 illegal immigrants when he was Mayor of London.
He said that anyone who had been living in the capital for more than five years could show their “commitment to this society” and be given the right to stay – so they could then pay taxes.
Announcing the controversial move in 2008, he agreed it would be better if illegal immigrants were “taken and sent back to their place of origin” but added “it is just not going to happen”.
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.”
Even if we can survive the manichean devils (interpersonal and intergroup trickery of other peoples), our survival will ultimately depend upon our capacity to solve Augustinian devils (natural challenges and affliction) - e.g., the ability to track asteroids and devise a way to intervene with them when they would otherwise crash into the earth and cause mass extinction as in the case of the dinosaurs.
No, an Asteroid Won’t Hit Earth on Sept. 9 and Here’s Why
Astronomers ruled out the asteroid’s chance of impact with Earth after they were not able to spot it within the area of its predicted collision course, making it the first time an asteroid impact was ruled out based on “non-detection.”
The asteroid, named 2006 QV89, was discovered on Aug. 29, 2006 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona. It measures between 70 to 160 feet (20 to 50 meters) in diameter, or somewhere between the length of a bowling alley and the width of a football field. Observations suggested that it had a one-in-7,000 chance of impacting Earth on Sept. 9, 2019.
After its discovery in 20016, the asteroid was observed for 10 days before disappearing from the astronomers’ sight, according to a statement by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). As the date for the potential collision approached, astronomers could only predict the location of the asteroid with very low accuracy, which made it difficult to locate with a telescope.
In order to confirm whether or not the asteroid was still headed for collision with Earth, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) and ESO took a different approach. Rather than trying to observe the asteroid itself, astronomers observed where it should have been if it were, in fact, heading toward Earth.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they captured deep images of the area where it would have been if it were on track to collide with our planet, ESO officials said in the statement. Following observations of the area on July 4-5, astronomers could not find the asteroid and therefore concluded that it would not be impacting Earth.
Even if the asteroid is smaller than initially believed, it would have been spotted by the telescope, ESO said in the statement. And if it were any smaller than that — too small for the telescope to detect — it would pose no threat to Earth, as it would burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.
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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
Raab is the son of a Jewish Czech father who fled the Nazis
The area in the sky where astronomers would have spotted the asteroid 2006 QV89 if it was on a collision course with Earth, with the three crosses marking the specific locations. (Image: © ESO)_07.jpg){kind=link}