The Hill, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigns”, 14 Feb 2017:

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has resigned, after reports he misled senior Trump White House officials about his conversations with Russia. President Trump has named retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg as acting national security adviser. Kellogg previously served as Flynn’s chief of staff on the National Security Council.

The embattled Flynn blamed his resignation late Monday on the “fast pace of events” that led him to “inadvertently” give Vice President Mike Pence and others “incomplete information” about his phone conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.

“I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president, and they have accepted my apology,” Flynn wrote in his resignation letter.

Politico, “Why Donald Trump let Michael Flynn go”, 14 Feb 2014:

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who has known Kellogg for decades, said early Tuesday that he is a “good man” who was among the earliest Trump loyalists.

But he doubted he will be a permanent replacement for Flynn.

“He won’t be the selection,” McCaffrey predicted, saying Flynn’s permanent replacement has to be “someone with the chops needed to deal with Bannon and Miller, references to two of the president’s top political advisers, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

Flynn’s decision to resign came after it became clear to him that he had lost the president’s trust, officials said.

TomDispatch: “Is President Trump Headed for a War with China?” All Options Are “On The Table” - Rajan Menon, 12 Feb 2017:

Forget those “bad hombres down there” in Mexico that U.S. troops might take out. Ignore the way National Security Adviser Michael Flynn put Iran “on notice” and the new president insisted, that, when it comes to that country, “nothing is off the table.” Instead, focus for a moment on something truly scary: the possibility that Donald Trump’s Washington might slide into an actual war with the planet’s rising superpower, China. No kidding. It could really happen.

Let’s start with silver-maned, stately Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state. Who could deny that the former ExxonMobil CEO has a foreign minister’s bearing? Trump reportedly chose him over neocon firebrand John Bolton partly for that reason. (Among other things, Bolton was mustachioed, something the new president apparently doesn’t care for.) But an august persona can only do so much; it can’t offset a lack of professional diplomatic experience.

That became all-too-apparent during Tillerson’s January 11th confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was asked for his view on the military infrastructure China has been creating on various islands in the South China Sea, the ownership of which other Asian countries, including Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei claim as well . China’s actions, he replied, were “extremely worrisome,” likening them to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, an infraction for which Russia was slapped with economic sanctions.

The then-secretary-of-state-designate — he’s since been confirmed, despite many negative votes — didn’t, however, stop there. Evidently, he wanted to communicate to the Chinese leadership in Beijing that the new administration was already irked beyond measure with them. So he added, “We’re going to have to send China’s leaders a clear signal: that, first, the island building stops and, second, your access to those islands is not going to be allowed.” Functionally, that fell little short of being an announcement of a future act of war, since not allowing “access” to those islands would clearly involve military moves. In what amounted to a there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town warning, he then doubled down yet again, insisting, slightly incoherently (in the tradition of his new boss) that “the failure of a response has allowed them to just keep pushing the envelope on this.”

All right, so maybe a novice had a bad day. Maybe the secretary-of-state-to-be simply ad-libbed and misspoke… whatever. If so, you might have expected a later clarification from him or from someone on the Trump national security team anyway.

That didn’t happen; instead, that team stuck to its guns. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made no effort to add nuance to, let alone walk back, Tillerson’s remarks. During his first official press briefing on January 23rd, Spicer declared that the United States “is going to make sure we defend our interests there” — in the South China Sea, that is — and that “if those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yes, we are going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.”

And what of Trump’s own views on the island controversy? Never one to pass up an opportunity for hyperbole, during the presidential campaign he swore that, on those tiny islands, China was building “a military fortress the likes of which the world has not seen.” As it happened, he wasn’t speaking about, say, the forces that Hitler massed for the ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, launched in June 1941 with the aim of crushing the Red Army and the Soviet Union, or those deployed for the June 1944 Normandy landing, which sealed Nazi Germany’s fate. When applied to what China has been up to in the South China Sea, his statement fell instantly into the not-yet-named category of “alternative facts.”

Candidate Trump also let it be known that he wouldn’t allow Beijing to get away with such cheekiness on his watch. Why had the Chinese engaged in military construction on the islands? Trump had a simple answer (as he invariably does): China “has no respect for our president and no respect for our country.” The implication was evident. Things would be different once he settled into the White House and made America great again. Then — it was easy enough to conclude — China had better watch out.

Standard campaign bombast? Well, Trump hasn’t changed his tune a bit since being elected. On December 4th, using (of course!) his Twitter account, he blasted Beijing for having built “a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea.” And it’s safe to assume that he signed off on Spicer’s combative comments as well.

In short, his administration has already drawn a red line — but in the way a petulant child might with a crayon. During and after the campaign he made much of his determination to regain the respect he claims the U.S. has lost in the world, notably from adversaries like China. The danger here is that, in dealing with that country, Trump could, as is typical, make it all about himself, all about “winning,” one of his most beloved words, and disaster might follow.

  Whose Islands?

 
  China claims disputed islands are ‘sacred territory’

A military clash between Trump-led America and a China led by President Xi Jinping? Understanding how it might happen requires a brief detour to the place where it’s most likely to occur: the South China Sea. Our first task: to understand China’s position on that body of water and the islands it contains, as well as the nature of Beijing’s military projects there. So brace yourself for some necessary detail.

As Marina Tsirbas, a former diplomat now at the Australian National University’s National Security College, explains, Beijing’s written and verbal statements on the South China Sea lend themselves to two different interpretations. The Chinese government’s position boils down to something like this: “We own everything — the waters, islands and reefs, marine resources, and energy and mineral deposits — within the Nine-Dash Line.” That demarcation line, which incidentally has had ten dashes, and sometimes eleven, originally appeared in 1947 maps of the Republic of China, the Nationalist government that would soon flee to the island of Taiwan leaving the Chinese Communists in charge of the mainland. When Mao Ze Dong and his associates established the People’s Republic, they retained that Nationalist map and the demarcation line that went with it, which just happened to enclose virtually all of the South China Sea, claiming sovereign rights.

This stance — think of it as Beijing’s hard line on the subject — raises instant questions about other countries’ navigation and overflight rights through that much-used region. In essence, do they have any and, if so, will Beijing alone be the one to define what those are? And will those definitions start to change as China becomes ever more powerful? These are hardly trivial concerns, given that about $5 trillion worth of goods pass through the South China Sea annually.

Then there’s what might be called Beijing’s softer line, based on rights accorded by the legal concepts of the territorial sea and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which took effect in 1994 and has been signed by 167 states (including China but not the United States), a country has sovereign control within 12 nautical miles of its coast as well as of land formations in that perimeter visible at high tide. But other countries have the right of “innocent passage.” The EEZ goes further. It provides a rightful claimant control over access to fishing, as well as seabed and subsoil natural resources , within “an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea” extending 200 nautical miles, while ensuring other states’ freedom of passage by air and sea. UNCLOS also gives a state with an EEZ control over “the establishment and use of artificial islands, installations, and structures” within that zone — an important provision at our present moment.

What makes all of this so much more complicated is that many of the islands and reefs in the South China Sea that provide the basis for defining China’s EEZ are also claimed by other countries under the terms of UNCLOS. That, of course, immediately raises questions about the legality of Beijing’s military construction projects in that watery expanse on islands, atolls, and strips of land it’s dredging into existence, as well as its claims to seabed energy resources, fishing rights, and land reclamation rights there — to say nothing about its willingness to seize some of them by force, rival claims be damned.

 
  Subi Reef, being built into an artificial island-landing strip in 2015

Moreover, figuring out which of these two positions — hard or soft — China embraces at any moment is tricky indeed. Beijing, for instance, insists that it upholds freedom of navigation and overflight rights in the Sea, but it has also said that these rights don’t apply to warships and military aircraft. In recent years its warplanes have intercepted, and at close quarters, American military aircraft flying outside Chinese territorial waters in the same region. Similarly, in 2015, Chinese aircraft and ships followed and issued warnings to an American warship off Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands, which both China and Vietnam claim in their entirety. This past December, its Navy seized, but later returned, an underwater drone the American naval ship Bowditch had been operating near the coast of the Philippines.

There were similar incidents in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2013, and 2014. In the second of these episodes, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane, which had a crew of 24 on board, less than 70 miles off Hainan island, forcing it to make an emergency landing in China and creating a tense standoff between Beijing and Washington. The Chinese detained the crew for 11 days. They disassembled the EP-3, returning it three months later in pieces.

Such muscle flexing in the South China Sea isn’t new. China has long been tough on its weaker neighbors in those waters. Back in 1974, for instance, its forces ejected South Vietnamese troops from parts of the Paracel/Xisha islands that Beijing claimed but did not yet control. China has also backed up its claim to the Spratly/Nansha islands (which Taiwan, Vietnam, and other regional countries reject) with air and naval patrols, tough talk, and more. In 1988, it forcibly occupied the Vietnamese-controlled Johnson Reef, securing control over the first of what would eventually become seven possessions in the Spratlys.

Vietnam has not been the only Southeast Asian country to receive such rough treatment. China and the Philippines both claim ownership of Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal/Huangyang Island, located 124 nautical miles off Luzon Island in the Philippines. In 2012, Beijing simply seized it, having already ejected Manila from Panganiban Reef (aka Mischief Reef), about 129 nautical miles from the Philippines’ Palawan Island, in 1995. In 2016, when an international arbitration tribunal upheld Manila’s position on Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sniffed that “the decision is invalid and has no binding force.” Chinese president Xi Jinping added for good measure that China’s claims to the South China Sea stretched back to “ancient times.”

Then there’s China’s military construction work in the area, which includes the building of full-scale artificial islands, as well as harbors, military airfields, storage facilities, and hangars reinforced to protect military aircraft. In addition, the Chinese have installed radar systems, anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-missile defense systems on some of these islands.

These , then, are the projects that the Trump administration says it will stop. But China’s conduct in the South China Sea leaves little doubt about its determination to hold onto what it has and continue its activities. The Chinese leadership has made this clear since Donald Trump’s election, and the state-run press has struck a similarly defiant note, drawing crude red lines of its own. For example, the Global Times, a nationalist newspaper, mocked Trump’s pretensions and issued a doomsday warning: “The U.S. has no absolute power to dominate the South China Sea. Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories.”

Were the administration to follow its threatening talk with military action, the Global Times added ominously, “The two sides had better prepare for a military clash.” Although the Chinese leadership hasn’t been anywhere near as bombastic, top officials have made it clear that they won’t yield an inch on the South China Sea, that disputes over territories are matters for China and its neighbors to settle, and that Washington had best butt out.

[...]

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Together back in the 80s, when Carl Icahn was showing Donald Trump the ropes of “corporate-take-over”, such as his plunder of TWA.

The Carl Icahn episode that pilfered the corporate culture of the once bustling American town—Lancaster, Ohio—is highly instructive of itself. It provides a lesson in its farther implications, however, as it set in motion transformations of that corporate culture which effected a perverse irony of its residents becoming Trump voters, seeking a return to their corporate culture as it had been - implicitly White - oblivious to the fact that they are hoping to do this through Trump, whose appointed gate-keeper is Carl Icahn - the very man who plundered Lancaster’s corporate culture and set in motion its transformative demise, with devastating impact upon the now rust-belt town and its people (nearly all White).
 
(((NPR))) doesn’t provide a transcript of portions which refer to Carl Icahn, e.g.

NPR, Glass House’ Chronicles The Sharp Decline Of An All-American Factory Town, 6 Feb 2017:

13:10: Dave Davies: “When did outside financial interests first pose a challenge to the management of Anchor Hocking, this giant of a company?

Brian Alexander: The first time was Carl Icahn.

It is meaningful that the relatively brief episode of Carl Icahn’s corporate raid on Anchor-Hocking did not merely lead to a limited financial downturn following the large (what amounts to) bribe that he levied against the company in order to get rid of him, but it had implicative force which transformed even the subsequent non-Jewish corporate culture, creating a new corporate culture - a new context, if you will. That is the kind of thing that the serious ethno-nationalist will want to examine further.

Ibid:

Brian Alexander: It’s the 1980’s, Carl Icahn has just begun his career of what became known at the time as “green mailing.”

Dave Davies: “Corporate raiding”, “corporate take-overs.”

Alexander: “Corporate raiding”, saying now I’ve just bought 5% of your stock. I want a seat on the board. You’re running your company in a lousy way; and so I’m going to come and make all sorts of trouble for you, but you know, if you want to buy me out, at a profit, at a premium, well maybe I’ll go away; and so that’s exactly what happened with Carl Icahn.

Carl Icahn bought over 5% of the stock of Anchor Hocking, agitated the board, saying you need to make some different decisions, you could be returning more share-holder value and was eventually bought off at what I calculate to be about a three million dollar profit to Carl Icahn.

That episode did not last long, but I argue that it changed Anchor Hocking forever, from then on.

Dave Davies: In what way?

Brian Alexander: It scared people…

........................................................................

NPR, Glass House’ Chronicles The Sharp Decline Of An All-American Factory Town, 6 Feb 2017:

NPR host Dave Davies: We heard a lot in the presidential campaign about anger and frustration among working class voters in America’s heartland. Today we’re going to focus on one factory town in central Ohio that was once a bustling center of industry and employment, but is now beset by low wages, unemployment and social decay.

Lancaster, Ohio isn’t just a research subject for our guest Brian Alexander, it’s his hometown.

His new book tells the story of the company that was once Lancaster’s largest employer - Anchor-Hocking Glass Company was a Fortune 500 company with its headquarters in the town. The company provided jobs, civic leadership and community pride. It’s decline Alexander argues isn’t just a product of increased competition and changing markets, he says the firm was undone by Wall Street investors who had little knowledge of the company and little interest in anything besides short-term profit.

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“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”

TRI-COLORED TREASON - by David Lane

Afflict me no more with your hypocrisy. If you insist on worshiping your executioner, then depart from me, for it is treason against the White race, against nature, against civilization, and against the Gods.

I have come under attack for articles I have written entitled The Right Wing, Cowards, Liars, Screwballs and David Lane on Religion. Also for naming one of the pro-american, anti-communists who profess to care about the continued existence of the White race. I come now to apologize for naming the specific individual and to admit my error. I will now indict them all.

You tell me you are anti-communist and you care about your White kinfolk? Well it was America who turned several million White men over to the Soviets to be outright murdered or die a slow death in slave camps in 1945. But you love America; is it delusion, cowardice, or race treason?

You tell me you are anti-communist and you care about the survival of the White race? Well, the Germans would have destroyed Communism and provided a secure base for the existence of our race in our European homeland fifty years ago if America hadn’t intervened to save the Soviet Union and destroy our racial saviors. But you love America; is it delusion, cowardice, or race treason?

You tell me you are anti-communist and you care about your fellow White kinfolk? The Soviet enslavement of two hundred million White people would have ended decades ago except for the financial support of America. But you love America; is it delusion, cowardice, or race treason?

You tell me you hate Communism for what it does to White people in the Soviet Union. But Federal judges destroy and terrorize millions of little White children with their forced busing and integration plans, untold thousands of White women are raped by Negroes every year, the White race is now overrun and mixed probably beyond the point of no return, as a policy of the American government, and you love America. Is it delusion, cowardice, or race treason?

You tell me you hate Communism for what it did or what it does to the White people of Rhodesia and South Africa. Well, it was American political and economic pressure that destroyed White Rhodesia and now destroys White South Africa. And you love America; is it delusion, cowardice, or race treason?

It’s a lot safer to talk about those mean, nasty old Communists over there, than to tangle with the head of the snake, the seat of jewish world power, the real murderer of the White race, isn’t it? You could end up dead like Robert Mathews, or in prison forever like the Brüder Schweigen. But then I guess we all choose our own priorities. For some its political, economic or religious systems, and for some it’s the biological existence of the White race, do or die. Get one thing straight all you double thinkers, self deluders, deceivers and dabblers: America is the murderer of the White race, and if we are to have any chance of resurrecting our race while there is still a gene pool to work with then we are going to face reality, discard our delusions, speak of and act on, the single greatest issue of all time, racial survival.

Oh no you say, it isn’t America that’s the head of the snake, the murderer of our race, it’s just that some bad guys grabbed the reins of “our” government a few years or decades ago. I showed you the real history of “your” government, and America’s dominant religion and you ignored me. As always happens when dogma is contradicted by fact, the believers react in the same ways. A few investigate the allegations and accept reality. Others pretend the unpleasant facts don’t exist, and still others fly into a rage directed at those with the effrontery to check belief with reason. Or perhaps you just believe that “ancient history” is of no importance or effect. So let’s discuss present day America.

You are quite correct that the entirety of the entity called America is not necessarily synonymous with the government in power. America is comprised of many interrelated parts and we will consider the most important components that make the whole: (1) Military power; (2) Police power; (3) Economic tenets; (4) Political tenets; (5) Religion; (6) News media; (7) Entertainment media; (8) Sports; (9) Demographics.

When I am through if you are still able to say the words “White American” then leave the company of sane men, for you can no more be both White and American than you can stop the motion of the planets. If you are not an implacable enemy of America, and all it has been and all it is, you are a traitor to the existence of our race. And if you support the aims or continued existence of the political entity known as America then your treason cannot be calculated in the words of mortals.

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Visigrad Post, “Central Europe Unites to Put an End to Illegal Immigration” 9 Feb 2017:

Austria, Vienna – Ministers from 15 countries gathered in Vienna on Wednesday, February 8, in order to find a common way to put an end to the illegal immigration in the Balkans and Central Europe.

Representatives from Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Greece, as well as officials of the Central European Defence Cooperation took part at the meeting.

Countries along the Balkan migration route agreed on Wednesday to seal the already hard borders and prevent a possible new surge of people trying to reach wealthy EU countries. Since the countries on the Balkans’ route already secured their borders a year ago, the number of illegal immigrants has dramatically dwindled, but hundreds of migrants still try each month to take this route.

A plan to plug the remaining gaps on the route from Greece to Austria and Germany is to be drawn up by April, defence and interior ministers from affected countries decided at a conference in Vienna.

The agreement anticipates the potential collapse of the EU‘s deal with Turkey to keep migrants and refugees.

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​

Vice News, 6 Feb 2017:

American tech companies are gearing up to protect the thousands of workers they rely on every year who aren’t U.S. citizens and don’t have green cards.

Silicon Valley has aggressively backed legislation to protect and expand the H-1B program for temporary workers, but President Trump appears to have other ideas. He is reportedly preparing to sign a new immigration-related executive order that includes an effort to overhaul the H-1B visa program, putting in place protectionist rules that would upend the way Silicon Valley recruits talent.

Tech leaders have been warning of a “brain drain” since Election Day — and now there’s talk of companies moving employees to Canada.

A leaked draft of the executive order disseminated by Vox featured vague wording, calling for plans to “alter” the H-1B visa program, although experts point out that such changes would require an act of Congress. The draft order also discusses reforming programs that allow foreign students into the U.S. — since they pay full price, they’re an important source of tuition dollars for top-flight public universities — before then entering the American workforce.

A spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said that USCIS does not comment on pending legislation or executive actions.

Designed as a temporary visa for skilled workers, the H-1B became a way for corporate America to bring in highly skilled foreigners without having to tackle the permanent resident program — i.e., green cards, which are capped by country of origin, a rule that disproportionately affects places like China and India. When the program was introduced in 1990, about 800 H-1Bs were issued. By 2014, that number had grown to more than 160,000.

Both Republicans and Democrats are now pushing for reform of the program, ostensibly in order to protect U.S. workers.

GOP opposition to the H-1B in particular has been mounting for some time, but Republican politicians have generally been wary of either stifling some of America’s most successful companies or taking on immigration reform and infuriating the party’s anti-immigration base. Not all Republican politicians, however; in 2015, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — Trump’s nominee for Attorney General — introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at curtailing the number of visas given out.

A recent bipartisan effort to tackle the issue took the form of a Senate bill introduced by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin that aimed to reform the program by creating higher salary floors for H-1B visas and making sure U.S. workers are given first dibs on potential H-1B jobs.

Two of Trump’s top advisers who reportedly crafted the refugee ban — ex-Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon and former Sessions adviser Stephen Miller — have also taken aim at Silicon Valley in the past. Earlier in January, Miller is said to have proposed both completely scrapping the lottery system used to award H-1B visas and increasing the minimum salary companies must pay visa holders in order to prevent the undercutting of more expensive American labor. Before Bannon was tapped as Trump’s campaign chief, he suggested in a 2015 interview with Trump that “when two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia,” it could undermine “civic society.”

Silicon Valley says in no uncertain terms that its success is due in part to its meritocratic embrace of anybody from anywhere who has the talent to compete. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who emigrated to the U.S. from India, told columnist Walt Mossberg, “In Silicon Valley, being an immigrant doesn’t matter. It’s the ideas that matter. We are able to build products for everyone because we attract talent from around the world.”

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“Frederick Douglass as an example of somebody who has done and amazing job
.....that is being recognized more and more, I notice.”