The Robert Mueller investigation which monopolized political discourse for two years has finally concluded, and his anxiously awaited report has been submitted to Attorney General William Barr. The results are in and the debate is over: those advancing the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government were wrong, and those of us voicing skepticism of this were right.
The contents of the report are still secret, but CNN’s Justice Department reporter Laura Jarrett has told us all we need to know, tweeting, “Special Counsel Mueller is not recommending ANY further indictments am told.” On top of that, William Barr said in a letter to congressional leaders that there has been no obstruction of Mueller’s investigation by Justice Department officials.
So that’s it, then. A completely unhindered investigation has failed to convict a single American of any kind of conspiracy with the Russian government, and no further indictments are coming. The political/media class which sold rank-and-file Americans on the lie that the Mueller investigation was going to bring down this presidency were liars and frauds, and none of the goalpost-moving that I am sure is already beginning to happen will change that.
Say it again: Mueller has indicted *zero* Americans for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election, which was central impetus for the Special Counsel in the first place. Anyone who denies this is an abject liar https://t.co/gRQdr01ZCv
It has been obvious from the very beginning that the Maddow Muppets were being sold a lie. In 2017 I wrote an article titled “How We Can Be Certain That Mueller Won’t Prove Trump-Russia Collusion”, saying that Mueller would continue finding evidence of corruption “since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish”, but he will not find evidence of collusion. If you care to take a scroll through the angry comments on that article, just on Medium alone, you will see a frozen snapshot of what the expectations were from mainstream liberals at the time. They had swallowed the Russiagate narrative hook, line and sinker, and they believed that the Mueller investigation was going to vindicate them. It did not.
I’ve been saying Russiagate is bullshit from the beginning, and I’ve been called a Trump shill, a Kremlin propagandist, a Nazi and a troll every day for saying so by credulous mass media-consuming dupes who drank the Kool Aid. And I’ve only taken a fraction of the flack more high profile Russiagate skeptics like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey have been getting for expressing doubt in the Gospel According to Maddow. The insane, maniacal McCarthyite feeding frenzy that these people were plunged into by nonstop mass media propaganda drowned out the important voices who tried to argue that public energy was being sucked into Russia hysteria and used to manufacture support for dangerous cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower.
Just think what we could have done with that energy over the last two years. Think how much public support could have been poured into the sweeping progressive reforms called for by the Sanders movement, for example, instead of constant demands for more sanctions and nuclear posturing against Russia. Think how much more attention could have been drawn to Trump’s actual horrific policies like his facilitation of Saudi butchery in Yemen or his regime change agendas in Iran and Venezuela, his support for ecocide and military expansionism and the barbarism of Jair Bolsonaro and Benjamin Netanyahu. Think how much more energy could have gone into beating back the Republicans in the midterms, reclaiming far more House seats and taking the Senate as well, gathering momentum for a presidential candidacy that truly threatens Trump instead of 9,000 primary candidates who will probably be selected by superdelegates after the first ballot when there’s too many of them to establish a clear majority under the new rules.
.@caitoz sums up: “Mock the Russiagaters.Mock them ruthlessly, and never, ever let them forget the horrible thing that they did. Never stop making fun of them and reminding them how stupid and crazy they acted during this humiliating period of US history.” https://t.co/rWTs9vHYPe
We must never let them forget what they did or what they cost us all. We must never let mainstream Democrats forget how crazy they got, how much time and energy they wasted, how very, very wrong they were and how very, very right we were.
Never stop reminding them of this. Never stop mocking them for it. Never stop mocking their idiotic Rachel Maddow worship. Never stop mocking the Robert Mueller prayer candles. Never stop making fun of the way they blamed all their problems on Susan Sarandon. Never stop reminding them of those stupid pink vagina hats. Never stop mocking them for elevating Louise Mensch and Eric Garland. Never stop mocking them for creating the fucking Krassenstein brothers.
Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life. Going forward, authority and credibility rests solely with those who kept clear eyes and clear heads during the mass media propaganda blitzkrieg, not with those who were stupid enough to believe what they were told about the behaviors of a noncompliant government in a post-Iraq invasion world. The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center – the “vicious left-wing attack dog” used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify “hate groups” – is unraveling.
A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims – with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism,” the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization’s legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday.
Morris Dees, Richard Cohen, Rhonda Brownstein
Cohen had been with the organization 33 years and was one of its most prominent figures.
At 5:03 p.m. Friday, Cohen sent a message to staff, with the subject line “Stepping Down,” announcing that he, too, would be leaving the organization that he and Dees had turned into a research and fundraising juggernaut.
“Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them,” Cohen wrote, while asking the staff to avoid jumping to conclusions before the board completes an internal review of the Montgomery, Ala., organization’s work culture. –LA Times
Earlier this week, the SPLC board of directors appointed Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen – who, in an unrelated matter, unsuccessfully tried to pull strings and have the Jussie Smollett case transferred from the Chicago PD to the FBI. Tchen is heading up the inquiry into the sexual misconduct claims.
Tina Tchen
Also out on Friday was Rhonda Brownstein – who had worked with the organization for nearly three decades, according to the Montgomery Advertiser‘s Melissa Brown.
Inside the SPLC “Scam”
As the Washington Examiner‘s Beckett Adams writes, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “scam,” which has taken ” no care whatsoever for the reputational and personal harm it causes by lumping Christians and anti-extremist activists with actual neo-Nazis.”
As it turns out, the SPLC is a cynical money-making scheme, according to a former staffer’s blistering tell-all, published this week in the New Yorker. The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it’s an earnest effort to combat bigotry.
The only thing worse than a snarling partisan activist is a slimy conman who merely pretends to be one. –Washington Examiner
““Outside of work,” recalls Bob Moser of his days working for the organization, “we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about … the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. ‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say.”
“[I]t was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam,” added Moser.
The way Moser tells it, the center’s chief founder, Morris Dees, who was dismissed unceremoniously last week for unspecified reasons, discovered early on that he could rake in boatloads of cash by convincing “gullible Northern liberals” that his group is doing the hard work of fighting “hate.”
But the center’s supposed mission of combating bigotry doesn’t actually matter to its top brass, Moser says. It’s just a business choice and one that has been extremely lucrative throughout the years. Moser’s article reminds readers of the time Dees actually said of the SPLC in an interview with then-Progressive magazine reporter John Egerton, “We just run our business like a business. Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.” –Washington Examiner
Moser claims that the SPLC’s business model centers entirely around keeping its precious donors in constant fear using gimmicks such as “hate maps” and “hate lists.”
“[T]he center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention,” he writes adding the group’s “central strategy” involves “taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.”
Moser adds there is an inescapable sense of “guilt” that comes with thinking about “the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”
Who knew you could make the big bucks simply by lumping Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ben Carson with actual, honest-to-God neo-Nazis? –Washington Examiner
Right wing commentator and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes is currently suing the SPLC for labeling his right-wing fraternal organization, the Proud Boys, a hate group.
The SPLC has gone from a noble institution genuinely dedicated to eradicating hate to a hate group in and of itself that pretends this country is frothing with bigots desperate to foment World War III,” McInnes said in a press release.
McInnes has raised nearly $200,000 out of a goal of $250,000 to continue his lawsuit. From his website Defendgavin.com:
I’m suing the SPLC. And it’s not just because they destroyed my career and shattered my reputation. It’s because they could do the same to you. Though this group is often cited as a credible source by the media, nobody who actually knows stuff takes them seriously.
No, being called an extremist by the SPLC does NOT mean you’re an extremist. No, being called a Hate Group by the SPLC does NOT make you a Hate Group. And no, being called a racist or an anti-Semite or an Islamophobe or a transphobe or a homophobe by the SPLC does NOT make you any of those things. -Gavin McInnes
We wonder if there will even be an SPLC left to sue by the time it reaches a courtroom.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YgiwaC Tyler Durden
French soldiers embedded with Paris police will be allowed to ‘open fire’ if lives are threatened by Yellow Vest rioters this weekend, reports the Daily Mail, citing the military governor of Paris.
“They are perfectly capable of appreciating the nature of the threat and answering it in a proportionate manner,” said General Bruno Leray in a Friday interview with Franceinfo Radio. “If their life or that of the people they defend is threatened, they can go up to opening fire.”
As we reported Wednesday, French authorities announced the deployment of counter-terror troops from Opération Sentinelle to focus on Yellow Vest related threats following the worsening protest situation of the past weekend (after a brief lull at the end of President Macron’s failed ‘great debate’ initiative which pushed town halls to air grievances), which nearly turned deadly for random civilians caught in the mayhem of rioters clashing with police
It has now been confirmed that the French Army will support some 5,000 police trying to keep order during the 19th Yellow Vest Saturday demonstration in a row in Paris at the weekend.
General Leray told Franceinfo Radio on Friday: ‘If their life or that of the people they defend is threatened, they can go up to opening fire.’ –Daily Mail
Opération Sentinelle began after the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks (the series of al-Qaeda linked terrorist acts that began with the Charlie Hebdo shooting) and resulted in some 10,000 soldiers and 4,700 police and gendarmes deployed at sensitive sites and public buildings across the country.
After a weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday, government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux pointed to the “new forms of violence” Saturday which he said justifies deploying the counter-terror forces.
“After seeing the new forms of violence Saturday, emergency measures will be taken to reinforce the reaction of the security forces,” Griveaux said. He added this is to include “the reinforced mobilization of Sentinelle to protect official building and other fixed positions in the capital.”
“Individuals have decided to attack democracy and its symbols,” Griveaux said further.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TtKVq6 Tyler Durden
After seeing Elon Musk’s demonstration of the Boring Company tunnel in person, Virginia transit officials scoffed at the idea and decided against using the company for planned infrastructure upgrades, the Virginia Mercury reported.
Bureaucrats in Virginia instead decided in favor of using traditional railways and roads. Michael McLaughlin, Virginia’s chief of rail transportation, told members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s public transit subcommittee: “It’s a very small tunnel. If one day it’s feasible, we’ll obviously come back to you.”
The board had been discussing major investments in the state’s infrastructure, including a $1.3 billion bridge between Virginia and Washington. Questions had arisen about the infrastructure investment, with board members trying to figure out if any investments could become obsolete if Musk’s Boring Company and Hyperloop ideas advanced beyond their current stages.
Despite reportedly being skeptical, transit planners in Virginia couldn’t help but notice Musk’s announced partnership with the city of Chicago and a proposed plan to link Washington DC and Baltimore, with promises of “autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour.” It was a far cry from the Model 3 with guidewheels doing 60 mph they saw during their visit.
Neither of these two projects have made any tangible progress and a Boring Company demo that Musk held earlier this year was widely mocked and ridiculed by the media and on social media.
Officials from Virginia took a drive through Musk’s demonstration tunnel in January and said that “nothing they saw would lead them to change their approach to transit in the near term”. The article instead describes Musk’s demonstration tunnel as “bumpy”, echoing the LA Times, which previously called it “so uneven in places that it felt like riding on a dirt road”.
The article also notes that Musk’s claims of saving money tunneling doesn’t include research, development, equipment and possibly even labor.
Scott Kasprowicz, a Commonwealth Transportation Board member who made the trip with McLaughlin said: “I think there’s a lot of show going on here. I don’t mean to suggest that they don’t have a serious plan in mind, but I don’t consider the steps they’ve taken to date to be substantive. They’ve purchased a used boring machine. They’ve put a bore in the neighborhood where they developed the SpaceX product, and they’ve taken a Model 3 and put guidewheels on it and they’re running it through the tunnel at 60 miles per hour.”
“None of that, I think, is really significant from a standpoint of moving this process forward,” he continued.
Kasprowicz adds to a long line of skepticism about Musk’s tunneling ideas.
“There’s no revolution here. Let’s be honest here: he’s driving a car through a sewer pipe,” Ph.D. chemist and video blogger Phil Mason said in a late December he posted to YouTube, destroying Musk’s tunnel idea. We reported on his critique of the idea in a late December post here.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CCKynD Tyler Durden
Having brushed aside complaints from Brussels and the US, who fear the already heavily indebted and economically faltering NATO member might be walking into another “debt trap”, Italian President Sergio Mattarella welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Rome on Friday. And after posing for photos, Mattarella and Xi set the table for the expected signing of a Memorandum of Understanding that will make Italy the first EU member and G7 nation to sign on to Beijing’s controversial One Belt, One Road initiative (BRI), the AP reports.
Of course, the populist Italian government, already on thin ice with the globalist powers after defying Brussels and its fiscal rules by blowing out its budget deficit, didn’t exactly smooth over European anxieties by insisting that the partnership with platitudes like insisting that the economic partnership be a “two way street”.
Xi meets Mattarella
But Rome has little incentive to cater to Brussels on this. And Beijing, too, has everything to gain. By the end of his two-day diplomatic visit to Italy, Xi will have achieved a major geopolitical victory – a key vote of confidence in one of his signature initiatives – at a time when his government is struggling with slowing economic growth and a destabilizing trade war.
While Xi and Italy’s leaders are expected to sign the memorandum on Friday, the deal is happening against a backdrop of an increasingly adversarial EU, which just last week declared China an economic rival not to be trusted, as Beijing continues to make inroads in Central and Eastern Europe. What’s more, Xi is expected to leave Rome with billions of dollars in development deals covering everything from business cooperation to soccer. That is making Washington, which has spent much of the last year warning its allies about the treachery of Chinese firms and the threat that they might open a “back door” to Beijing’s spys, even more nervous.
But even as members of Italy’s ruling coalition, not to mention the political opposition, have expressed uneasiness about the deal with China, as the Financial Times pointed out, from a purely economic perspective, closer ties with Beijing could only benefit Rome. The reason? With Italy’s economy mired in a recession – one that Europe’s central bankers have so far refused to acknowledge – the relationship with Beijing could be an economic boon, at a time when Italy’s partners in the EU have offered nothing but disdain.
As it stands, Italy’s economic ties with China are relatively week. When it comes to FDI, Italy ranks only 76th worldwide in Chinese greenfield investment.
Despite being home to the largest Chinese population in Europe, Italy lags many of its major European partners in overall Chinese investment and construction.
Exports of Italian goods to China totaled a paltry $13 billion last year, a figure that was dwarfed by Germany.
Italy isn’t well-connected to China by shipping routes, either, which is probably why Xi has cited improving connectivity and building ports as a key objective of BRI in Italy.
According to domestic polling in Italy, most Italians see the deal as an opportunity, while a few still see it as a risk.
The deadly bridge collapse in Genoa last year raised alarm about the country’s aging infrastructure. Still, infrastructure investment has stalled at roughly 40% of its pre-crisis highs.
In summary, Brussels might not approve of Italy’s deal, but they aren’t offering any alternatives to lift the Italian economy out of a recession. And with Italy’s economy expected to stagnate in 2019, the MoU is Rome’s most obvious lifeline.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JApdkR Tyler Durden
Earlier this week, a small salumeria in Nevada City, California, was forced to cancel a foie gras-themed dinner after PETA, the animal rights group, sicced the local police on the popular local retailer. The Ham Stand marketed the foie gras dinner on its Facebook page and elsewhere. The dinner menu, which I tracked down here, was to include a trio of foie gras appetizers and a seven-course foie gras tasting menu.
A PETA spokesperson says the group learned about the dinner and contacted the Nevada City police, leading to the dinner’s cancellation and a police visit to The Ham Stand. While Ham Stand owner Jason Jillson says he cancelled the event due to lack of interest and before the police showed up, PETA’s actions are nevertheless troubling.
California’s foie gras ban is abhorrent not because foie gras is tasty, writes Baylen Linnekin, but because it violates our rights.
This week the people of Crimea celebrated the fifth anniversary of joining the Russian Federation. People across Russia shared their joy. Centuries of common culture and history made the reunification more like a homecoming. Crimea’s important role in defeating Nazi Germany’s genocidal assault on Mother Russia eight decades ago gives it a cherished place in Russia’s modern history.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and several dignitaries were in attendance of the ceremonies held on the Black Sea peninsula. Two power stations were opened underlining the energy independence of Crimea and its future integral development with Russia.
Earlier this year saw the opening of a 19-kilometer road and rail bridge – the longest in Europe – across the Kerch Strait from Russia’s mainland to Crimea at a cost of nearly $4 billion.
While Russian people celebrated the landmark event this week, there was a strange absence of news on the topic in Western media outlets. There was not even much air given to pejorative Western claims against Russia for “annexing” Crimea. Yet such claims have animated official Western concerns over the past five years. Perhaps negative Western media coverage this week would have appeared bizarre and untenable – given that most of the Crimean population were rejoicing the anniversary. Better to just ignore it then, for the Western media that is.
The United States and European Union governments did, however, introduce new sanctions against Russia to coincide with the anniversary. Nevertheless, those new sanctions seem hollow and lacking in conviction.
Western policy has made itself a hostage of its own irrational position over Crimea. Washington and its European allies insist that Russia “annexed” the peninsula and that Moscow must return the territory to Ukraine. The Western powers have implemented five years of ongoing economic sanctions against Russia and have plunged relations with Moscow back into the permafrost of the erstwhile Cold War years.
But the Western rational is bereft of historical or factual appreciation. It is in denial that Crimea’s relations with Russia long predate its relationship to the state of Ukraine. Crimea, which was handed over to Kiev’s administrative control by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 for political reasons, only ended up in Ukraine as an accident of the Soviet Union’s later dissolution.
The people of Crimea are ethnically Russian and Russian-language speakers. Back in March 2014, they also held a constitutionally organized referendum on the question of joining the Russian Federation. The referendum was passed with an overwhelming majority. Russian troops were present because of a long-held arrangement allowing Moscow to station forces there. There was nothing illegal or malicious about Russian military presence in Crimea at the time of the referendum, as Western media imply.
Western governments and media rarely if ever acknowledge that background history or facts. They also completely ignore another crucial factor – that a month before Crimea’s referendum, Ukraine was violently taken over by an illegal coup d’état. That coup – glossed over in the Western media as a “pro-democracy movement” – overthrew an elected government in Kiev and ushered in a regime packed with Neo-Nazi followers of Stepan Bandera and his World War II collaborators with the Third Reich. Today, the Kiev regime is riven with corruption, gross human rights abuses and paramilitaries glorifying Nazism.
Given that horrific context of turmoil in early 2014, the people of Crimea had every right to repudiate the monstrous events in Kiev – events that the US and European Union were directly responsible in fomenting.
This is why Russia will never relinquish Crimea. The cultural bonds and comradeship are too strong. The peninsula is also a strategically vital location for Black Sea security and protection of Russia’s southern flank. One shudders to think if it had somehow come under the control of the NATO-backed, anti-Russian Kiev regime.
Western demands on Russia over Crimea are futile. Washington and its European allies have chosen to go down a path to nowhere over their spurious and duplicitous position. It is not Russia that has created the conflict over Ukraine, it is the Western powers through their unconscionable meddling. Yet, they seek to address their problem-making by continually sanctioning Russia. Don’t the Europeans in particular realize that they are only shooting themselves in the feet? The sanctions they have implemented are inflicting much greater damage on their own industries, exporters and farmers than they are on Russia’s. Indeed, all signs are that Russia’s economy has become more independent and strong as a result of Western sanctions.
Western powers need to come to their senses and drop their self-defeating charade over Crimea. They need to look in the mirror and realize that they have directly caused much of the conflict and corruption in today’s Ukraine. Russia can’t solve their own problems.
Here’s another reason why Western powers don’t have a leg to stand on over Ukraine. It is their rank hypocrisy and utter unscrupulousness.
This week, the Trump administration announced that it was going to “fully recognize” Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The US move is a blatant violation of international law and Syrian sovereignty. Unlike claims about Crimea, Washington’s complicity over Golan is a real, unabashed annexation, as testified by UN resolutions and international law. Presumably, the European allies will meekly acquiesce to the broad-daylight theft of Syria’s land, as they do with so much else their American taskmaster does.
Washington and European vassals have no authority to castigate Russia over Crimea or Ukraine more widely. They have no historical intelligence, no facts and no integrity. And, in light of the unfolding Golan scandal, they have no moral authority either.
Crimea was a landmark event. Yes, it pivoted Western relations with Russia into a fraught condition. But, more significantly, the event has manifested a point of principle on which Russia is not backing down from. Crimea, Syria, Venezuela are proof of Russia’s international principled policy. The Western powers are the ones in disrepute. And they use sanctions to give themselves a veneer of righteousness.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HCvz1e Tyler Durden
Lloyds of London runs a 330-year-old exchange for the worldwide insurance market, not unlike the New York Stock Exchange of old. Most everything at Lloyd’s, including the brokers, operates the old fashion way, using things like rubber stamps, pens and paper. In other words, Lloyd’s is keeping it old-school – but this is true in more ways than one, according to a new Bloomberg Businessweek write up.
The report suggests that a deep-seated culture of sexual harassment, inclusive of inappropriate remarks and unwanted touching – all the way to sexual assault – is still commonplace at the company. Bloomberg talked to 18 women who had more than 300 years of combined experience in the insurance market and they described Lloyd’s as an “atmosphere of near persistent harassment”.
One insider said that it is “basically a meat market”, describing an incident where a senior manager drunkenly attacked her in a pub around the corner from Lloyd’s. Her employer had convinced her subsequently not to file a complaint and she, like many other women, now simply just avoid the trading floor at Lloyd’s, which is made up of “a sea of men”.
Recent Lloyd’s CEO Inga Beale tried to push for modernization of technology, attitudes and behaviors and was said to have “met resistance at every step”. Her tenure as CEO lasted not even five years. In fact, some believe that the modest advances achieved under her term are in jeopardy and that Lloyd’s could actually be on the verge of regressing.
Beale, for example, tried to implement rules in early 2017 to stop drinking during the day. “The London market historically had a reputation for daytime drinking, but that has been changing. Drinking alcohol affects individuals differently. A zero limit is therefore simpler,” she said in a note.
As a result, complaints from inside of Lloyd’s began to echo across the industry. Some men compared it to big brother, while others sneered as though Beale was trying to act like their mothers. The ban has been “widely ignored”, according to the article.
Some anonymous critics via e-mail and paper told her to “go and die” and others told her to stop speaking openly about her bisexuality.
The men at Lloyd’s pride themselves on their well tailored dark blue and gray suits, often with stripes. Despite the bank lifting a code mandating suits, it’s clear that “almost everyone” still adheres to it. At the exchange, underwriters have been known to send brokers away from their boxes for not wearing a neck tie.
Women were banned from the Lloyd’s floor until 1973 but, like the dress code, changing the rules didn’t seem to change the culture. Women at the bank continue to be judged by their looks according to Mairi Mallon, an insurance public-relations specialist.
She wrote in 2017: “Women at Lloyd’s boxes [are] still being called a host of names including ‘totty’ and they’re rated ‘from 1-10 on ‘shagability.’ ” Traders have been known to still call women at the exchange “box bitches”.
Many of the women that Bloomberg spoke to said that going after Lloyd’s in the UK courts wasn’t a feasible option given the cost involved. They also were concerned about their reputation in the industry.
One female broker said: “Unless you have a rich father, you aren’t going to be able to afford suing. You’re also going to f—ing destroy your reputation, and you basically have to decide that you will never work in the industry again.”
All of them spoke to Bloomberg under the condition of anonymity, despite working for some of the world’s largest insurers and insurance brokers.
John Neal, Lloyd’s new CEO said in a statement: “No one should ever experience harassment of any kind at work, and it is distressing to hear that this is still happening. We take it extremely seriously and will be talking to the Lloyd’s market to ensure that we stamp out these inappropriate behaviors. Lloyd’s has worked really hard to put the broadest inclusion agenda at the center of everything we do.”
You can read Bloomberg’s full longform article here.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OmELav Tyler Durden
Violence is a spectacular weapon deployed by the ruling class to discredit movements from below and justify their repression. It is spectacular in the sense of being a great and powerful political tool for governing the masses, and keeping them in their place. In order to do this, however, the weapon of violence is spectacularin a second sense: it creates a carefully orchestrated mise en scène that seeks to render ruling class violence invisible, while simultaneously transforming acts of resistance into prodigious spectacles of criminal violence.
This is how Act 18 of the Yellow Vests is currently being presented by the mass media: at the precise moment at which the government was concluding its democratic consultation of the people via Emmanuel Macron’s “Grand Débat,” the Yellow Vests have unleashed an inordinate amount of violence that now needs to be repressed in the strongest possible terms. The president of the Champs-Elysées Committee, Jean-Noël Reinhardt, declared in an interview in which he is surrounded by the microphones of many of the major press outlets, that the movement is no longer one of the Yellow Vests, but rather of Black Vests that simply “express hatred and the will to destroy.” Proclaiming that this situation cannot be allowed to continue because of its impact on commercial and tourist activity, as well as its defamation of the global symbol of the Champs-Élysées, his statement bleeds seamlessly into the declaration made by the Prime Minster, Édouard Philippe: new measures will be put in place to prohibit protests in certain locations and allow for even more aggressive police crackdowns.
In this moment of the spectacularization of the damage caused to insured private property of the commercial and luxury industry, which is presented as the quintessence of “violence,” it is notable that the General Secretary of the Unsa police union, Philippe Capon, has publicly explained that the police received the order on Saturday to notintervene, because there was an explicit choice to “let a certain number of things be broken.” The timing could not be better because the government has its hands tied. After a few paltry concessions in December, as well as the discursive theatrics of the “Grand Débat,” the Yellow Vests have not gone home and have survived both the winter and the extreme forms of repressive state violence unleashed against them.
This current spectacle of violence thereby serves two purposes.
First and foremost, it dissimulates the structural violence of capitalism and plutocratic oligarchy, which are the primary sources of the current uprisings. Living conditions for the masses are increasingly unacceptable, and the traditional system of party politics and unions is dysfunctional. One of the protest signs that goes to the heart of matters simply states: “Violence is poverty [La violence c’est la pauvreté].” Rather than taking seriously the ubiquitous and quotidian nature of thisviolence, which is the violence of capitalist inequality, spectacular “violence” is constructed precisely in order to distract from the daily destruction of life under capitalist rule. It is understood as a temporary and disturbing interruption of the status quo, which needs to be eradicated. It is the “violence” of burning a bank, rather than that of founding one, or more generally the violence of the banking system in its daily role of securing hegemony for the global ruling class.
Secondly, the spectacle of violence orchestrated by the state and mass media functions in order to attach the scarlet letter of V for Violence to the Yellow Vest movement in order to simultaneously criminalize it and justify its brutal repression. There have been numerous cases where the police have been caught on camera damaging property in order to blame it on protestors, and many officers have been photographed and filmed carrying hammers, presumably for this purpose. At least one member of the riot police has spoken out against the violence deployed against non-violent protestors, which has been encouraged by the Minister of the Interior, as well as against the effort to foment violence in the protests.
Elite circles in France have not been completely successful in this aspect of their propaganda campaign, because even liberal institutions like the United Nations, the European Council, the European Parliamentand Amnesty International have seen through their attempt to render state violence invisible, or at the very least justified. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, prepared a memorandum on February 26ththat summarizes some of the violence, while also criticizing the lack of precision and rigor in the statistics being kept by the state and the media: “According to figures from the Ministry of the Interior 12 122 LBD rounds, 1 428 instant tear gas grenades and 4 942 hand-held sting grenades were fired or thrown between the beginning of the yellow vest movement and 4 February 2019.” Based on the calculations of an independent journalist cited in the report, there have been “38 wounds to upper limbs including 5 lost hands, 52 wounds to lower limbs, 3 wounds to the genitals and 189 head wounds including 20 people who have lost an eye.” Medics and journalists have been regularly attacked, and there have been numerous brutal assaults and a record number of protestors locked up.
Nevertheless, significant sectors of the state, the mass media and the punditocracy have gone to great lengths to cloak this systematic deployment of state violence against non-violent protestors, medics, journalists and bystanders. Emmanuel Macron has distilled the very essence of liberal ideology regarding the state by flatly proclaimingthat we cannot speak of “repression” or of “police violence” in France today because “these words are unacceptable under the rule of law [dans un état de droit].” Strictly speaking, then, there can be no such thing as “state violence” because the state stands in opposition to violence, and the latter can only come from savage and anarchic forces outside it.
Here we see the double movement of spectacular violence in full force. On the one hand, the state strives to dissimulate its spectacular exploitation through capitalist rule and its equally spectacular repression of any resistance to it. On the other hand, it seeks to incite or create spectacular “violence” in the protests in order to simultaneously discredit them and use this spectacle as cover for its own increased exploitation and repression. These are the two primary aspects of the spectacular violence unfolding in France right now.
It is imperative to identify this tactic for what it is, and to find new strategies for struggling against its extremely pernicious effects. Otherwise, we risk succumbing to the ideological inversion diagnosed so presciently by Malcolm X in a lecture given on December 13, 1964, in which he explained that the press is so powerful in its “image-making role” that “it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s a criminal.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HRBJK3 Tyler Durden
The Mueller Report, which was supposed to be about alleged “Russian collusion” with Trump, is due out, and many people in the Democrat/Media conglomerate are hoping for a rerun of Watergate, which they think of as a victory for the Rule of Law. It wasn’t, and we need to have one of those famous “conversations” about what it was, and why it mustn’t happen again.
In 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected with 520 electoral votes. He was running on winning the Vietnam War and also fighting a War on Crime. His opponent, George McGovern (17 electoral votes) was running on a plan to lose the Vietnam War, and surrender on the War on Crime.
But by August 1974, Nixon was removed from office, and in April 1975, Vietnamese Communist troops occupied Saigon. What finished off South Vietnam was the “Watergate Congress” which voted to cut off all supplies. For details see James Webb’s Peace? Defeat? What Did the Vietnam War Protesters Want?American Enterprise Institute, May/June 1997.
Who did this? Well, the Democrat-controlled Senate investigated the hell out of a break-and-enter committed by Republicans, which they never did when LBJ, JFK, Truman, and FDR engaged in similar activities. See It Didn’t Start With Watergate , [PDF]by Victor Lasky, published in 1977. On the Senate investigative staff was a young, far-Left Wellesley graduate named Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic media, which hated Nixon with the same kind of hate they now display towards Trump, did the same thing, led by the famous Woodward and Bernstein, who probably get too much “credit” for this.
Finally, in something that VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow speculated about in his 1981 Policy Review article reposted below, the secret figure of “Deep Throat” (Woodward and Bernstein’s name for an source inside the Government) turned out to Mark Felt, second in command of the FBI. [The Myth of Deep Throat | Mark Felt wasn’t out to protect American democracy and the rule of law; he was out to get a promotion, by Max Holland September 10, 2017]
Once again, the Establishment is trying, as they did during Watergate, to overturn the results of an election with the aid of a Deep State, and the “foreign policy” establishment. “Deep Throat” Felt thought Nixon was interfering with the “independence” of the FBI, which he thought should be immune to interference by the President of the United States, and apparently James Comey feels the same way.
If this coup succeeds, instead of the Republic of South Vietnam being overrun by foreign invaders and destroyed, the victim will be the Historic American Nation.
Machiavelli Redux
By Peter Brimelow, Policy Review,Winter 1981
GO QUIETLY . . . OR ELSE.By Spiro T. Agnew. (Wm. Morrow, New York, 1980)
THE TERRORS OF JUSTICE. By Maurice Stans. (New York, Everest House, 1978)
WILL: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF G. GORDON LIDDY.By G. Gordon Liddy. (St. Martins Press, New York, 1980)
Machiavelli concluded The Prince by quoting Petrarch in an attempt to inspire the rulers of Italy:
For th’ old Romane valour is not dead Nor in th’ Italians brests extinguished.
Reading these three books by survivors of the Nixon disaster brings home how totally that Administration, which more than any other in recent history would have welcomed comparisons with Machiavelli, departed from his prescription. The reason was not exactly lack of patriotism, but rather a failure to understand the humane, even idealistic spark that animated Machiavelli’s ironic realism. Indeed, the books raise the broader question of whether American society itself is going through the kind of degeneration Machiavelli decried in Italy, so that it no longer supports what might loosely be called the “Roman” or “military” virtues: courage, loyalty, and personal integrity.
These reflections may seem odd, given that all three authors fought losing bouts with the law.Spiro Agnew resigned the Vice-Presidency and entered a plea of nolo contendere to a charge that he received payments in 1967 which were not expended for political purposes and which were therefore subject to income tax. The prosecution’s statement included forty pages about Mr. Agnew’s alleged bribe-taking while he was Governor of Maryland; Mr. Agnew issued a one-page denial. The judge said, accurately, that both were irrelevant to the case before him, and fined Mr. Agnew $10,000. Maurice Stans, Nixon’s 1972 Finance Chairman, pleaded guilty to two charges of unknowingly accepting illegal contributions and three charges of reporting contributions tardily. He was fined $5,000. Previously Mr. Stans had been found innocent, along with John Mitchell, on ten counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury relating to an alleged attempt by financier Robert Vesco to buy protection from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Gordon Liddy was sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined $40,000 for the Watergate burglary, a year and a half for refusing to talk to the Watergate grand jury, and a (suspended) year for contempt of Congress.
With the exception of Mr. Liddy, who merits separate examination, it will immediately be seen that the infractions that were actually proved were basically technical. The connection between them was a hysterical illusion, and the punishments unusually harsh. This is particularly true for Maurice Stans, who was dealing with a complex law which changed in the course of the campaign, and who was also the victim of a quantum jump in public standards. Mr. Stans makes a convincing case that his CREEP stewardship was at least as respectable as the work of his contemporaries in other campaigns. They too had (less publicized) legal difficulties; Edmund Muskie’s fundraiser even volunteered to testify for Mr. Stans at the Vesco trail.
If Mr. Agnew did accept rake-offs, as the prosecutors claimed, it should be asked in all fairness whether his conduct varied substantially from accepted Maryland standards—particularly since there is no evidence that the money influenced his decisions. As always where Watergate is concerned, the real question becomes: Why did such practices excite such abnormal attention under Nixon, when Congress and press have shrugged off similar standards before and since? The many disparate Nixonian problems combined to produce a mixture that makes free-base cocaine look safe as chewing gum in comparison, under the influence of mysterious forces similar to those that produced the Grande Peur, or Salem’s witch trials. An instructive parallel might well be Britain’s 1962-63 Profumo crisis, which likewise enabled hostile opinion to l ink wildly unrelated charges, and incinerated an unpopular government.
As Mr. Agnew has repeatedly pointed out, of course, allegation is not conviction, although it has been treated as such by the media and the IRS, whose demands for back taxes on bribes Mr. Agnew denied taking caused him a cash-flow crisis from which he was rescued by the remarkable generosity of Frank Sinatra. But the irreducible fact of his resignation overshadows any attempted defense. Mr. Agnew ascribes his surrender to the impossibility of receiving a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity, overheated politics, implacably ambitious prosecutors, and impossible costs; and to his own exhaustion and bitterness at his abandonment by Nixon.
Mr. Agnew also says that Alexander Haig implied he might be killed if he did not “go quietly.” However, this may be the token sensational revelation all Watergate memoirs require, like H.R. Haldeman’ s claim of a mooted partition of China, Gordon Liddy’s contemplated assassinations of Jack Anderson and Howard Hunt, and John Dean’s insinuation that Nixon faked Alger Hiss’ typewriter. Other regular features of this new literary form are dramatic opening scenes, followed by flashbacks; and copious direct speech. On the whole, the results have compared very favorably with other native American genres like Westerns and Perry Mason.
Mr. Agnew’s story rings sincere when he writes of “the emotional reaction that made me physically ill” on reviewing the prosecutors’ files on his case (obtained years later), or of his wife’s dead faint when he told her he was capitulating. But even after that, he assured conservatives he would fight to the end, although his lawyers were already negotiating terms. This unedifying betrayal of his loyal supporters renders consideration of his guilt or innocence ultimately irrelevant.
On the other hand, Mr. Agnew had hardly been given a good example by the Nixon White House. Incredibly, President Nixon apparently hoped to induce Mr. Agnew to resign without even discussing the subject face to face. The picture of Mr. Agnew and his staff waiting in his office until 9 p.m. after Attorney General Richardson had revealed the charges to them—hoping desperately for a call from the President or a summons to Camp David (whence, it emerged, he had fled)—is infinitely pathetic. What they got was a meeting with General Haig and Bryce Harlow, who announced that they thought that the President felt that he should resign. Loyalty to Nixon was a one-way proposition. The White House staff was quick to pounce on any of their number who suffered political injury.
This cult of toughness was naive to the point of stupidity. Even elementary precautions like funding the Watergate burglars’ families were reneged on. It is hardly surprising that the front-line troops mutinied, whereupon the whole structure disintegrated. Machiavelli in a famous passage urged rulers to ensure that the interests of their lieutenants were advanced along with their own; this promoted mutual confidence. This seemingly obvious advice was never more needed. In fact, one of the Administration’s subsequent rationales for its detente policies—that Americans were too engrossed in current gratifications to finance any alternative—can probably best be explained as merely a projection of the leaders’ own short-sighted selfishness.
All three books make the point that the guarantees of equal justice, due process, and presumption of innocence—generally thought to be intrinsic to our system of justice—are simply not operative in a modern bureaucratic state. Mr. Stans spent $400,000 to defend himself against the Vesco charges. The prosecution probably spent over $1 million, but that was taxpayers’ money. That both Mr. Stans and Mr. Agnew could afford no more defense at that price is quite plausible. The IRS even threatened to have Mr. Agnew’s passport revoked if he attempted to resist their demands—an unbreakable hold on a man forced to earn his living in international business because of his Untouchable status at home. The three books also establish that there are few real checks on the legal bureaucracy once it is determined to bring home a conviction. Judge Sirica’s excesses in Mr. Liddy’s trial featured his seating of a juror who could not understand English—a mistake arising because Judge Sirica truncated the voir dire to prevent defense questions about pretrial publicity. (Judge Sirica used his powe r to seal the record about that incident, which remained a secret.) Mr. Liddy was amused: “I really had to hand it to the old goat; neither of us ever hesitated to use power.”
Less amusing were the lengths to which the prosecutors went in the Stans and Agnew cases to induce potential witnesses to co-operate. It should be a matter of some concern that Mr. Agnew was brought down by the testimony of men who themselves were guilty of serious crimes, the consequences of which seem to have been palliated by their cooperation. One witness actually had his conviction overthrown because he was able to show that his guilty plea was induced by illegal promises of leniency, which the trial judges chose to ignore. Having indicted Mr. Stans on the basis of two grand jury appearances—which he made after being assured he was not under investigation—the prosecutors launched an incredible nationwide search for evidence. They hauled President Nixon’s brother in from the West Coast ten times, for example, to “review” his testimony on the single point of whether Mr. Stans had asked for Vesco’s contribution in cash. (Answer: No.)
Worst of all were the constant leaks to the press, from Justice Department and grand jury alike. Maurice Stans found that newspapers routinely printed as fact allegations against him that had been disproved, and that major media outlets like Time refused to carry retractions even when caught in indisputable error. Mr. Stans, whose book is a model of reason and comprehensiveness, suggests thoughtfully that maybe the U.S. media should follow the British system of restricting publicity after indictment, and also that the Supreme Court’s Sullivan ruling went too far in depriving public figures of the means to protect their reputation. He even permits himself to wonder why the media should not (voluntarily) retract untruths in the same way that the Federal Trade Commission compels corporations to correct unsupported advertising claims.
This is the problem in a nutshell. All three books make it depressingly clear that, yes, there is a New Class. And that class makes its own rules in the struggle with rival powers like corporations and elected officials—of either party; previous attorney generals would not have been defeated in attempts to suppress Billygate.
Gordon Liddy’s beautifully written book adds a cultural dimension to this struggle within America, although his factual contribution to the Watergate saga appears limited. Mr. Liddy confines himself narrowly to what he personally saw. He says that he waited until the statute of limitations had expired before speaking, to protect his colleagues. (Actually, he is probably still protecting them.) Although he does reveal that the Nixon administration had CIA technical assistance in some operations, he generally supports the thesis that Watergate was after all a second-rate burglary, not a set-up, as some have speculated. The order came from above, he says, and he believes that the purpose was to find out what derogatory material the Democrats had on their opponents. This version is not likely to satisfy everyone. On closer examination, moreover, Mr. Liddy’s account does leave some questions carefully open. Some of these relate to the details of the burglary; others to the extraordinary circumstances that led to the creation of the White House “Plumbers” unit in the first place: the withdrawal (by J. Edgar Hoover) of the FBI cooperation upon which all previous administrations had relied. Mr. Liddy had been proud to be an FBI agent, and stresses his admiration for Mr. Hoover. But he also prints a memo he wrote in late 1971 urging that Mr. Hoover be removed as Director by the end of the year. Mr. Liddy notes laconically that the President praised the memo, but Mr. Hoover survived. As usual, one is left with an eerie feeling that the Watergate affair has a secret history, untold despite the millions of words.
Mr. Liddy is obviously a cultured man, but his preoccupation with matters of honor, strength, and courage—matters that have been traditional male concerns in almost every society except our own—has rendered him about as comprehensible to the average book reviewer as a Martian. Hence he is ridiculed (by Larry L. King in theNewYork Times) or ignored (by the Wall Street Journal, the leading conservative newspaper, which has not reviewed his book—or Mr. Stans’s either, for that matter). The situation is complicated because Mr. Liddy is a cultist, one of the tiny minority of conservatives (and others) who are fascinated by the Third Reich. It is hard to know how serious he is about this. Some of his hints are so blatant (he named the Plumbers group ODESSA, after “a World War II German veterans organization belonged to by some acquaintances of mine”—i.e., the Waffen SS) as to recall his celebrated hand-in-the-flame exhibitions of willpower. Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard picked up all these hints, and wrote an angry review in The New Republicasking how a card-carrying Nazi went so far in anyone’s White House. But in fact cultism often has about as much relevance to contemporary politics as transvestism, which it rather resembles. Mr. Liddy supported the liberal Republican who beat him in the New York 25th district primary in 1968, to the chagrin of the Conservative Party, which had nominated him on its own line. His White House career showed a similar pragmatism, except perhaps when his G-man instincts were engaged. And Mr. Liddy obviously liked the blacks he met in prison, finding their harsh society a satisfying substitute for the Korean War he missed through illness, and possibly a rest after the Nixon White House. He quietly but systematically supplies much other evidence of lack of prejudice.
However repellant Mr. Liddy’s code may be, it has some strengths, notably his evident pride in his handsome family. Men like Mr. Liddy are the falcons of society, to be kept hooded until needed. James E. Mahon, who became Eli Hazeev and died training his gun on the Palestinians ambushing Meir Kahane’s followers in Hebron, was reportedly another example. Both found no place in modern America. We need look no further to explain the fiasco at Desert One.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TQxUMt Tyler Durden
Earlier this week, a small salumeria in Nevada City, California, was forced to cancel a foie gras-themed dinner after PETA, the animal rights group, sicced the local police on the popular local retailer. The Ham Stand marketed the foie gras dinner on its Facebook page and elsewhere. The dinner menu, which I tracked down here, was to include a trio of foie gras appetizers and a seven-course foie gras tasting menu.
