Watch Turkish Troops & Tanks Travel Into Syria As US Backs Away
Just like the Kurds warned, Turkish troops have started crossing into northeastern Syria as the country begins a military offensive that President Erdogan has insisted is vital for Turkey’s security. As of early Wednesday morning in New York, a small group of Turkish forces had already entered the country, and reinforcements of troops and artillery were preparing to take up positions,Bloomberg reports.
One video that has been circulating on Twitter showed Turkish troops crossing the border, as journalists warned that “a new phase of this bloody regional war could be about to begin.”
🎥 The latest from the #Turkey / #Syria border as Turkish troops and artillery take up positions. Despite international calls for Turkey to hold back, a new phase of this bloody regional war could be about to begin. @SkyNewspic.twitter.com/w9kf6JDdC2
Even BBG is reporting that the goal of the Turkish operation is to “force back Kurdish militants controlling the border area.” Turkish troops entered Syria at two points along the border near the Syrian towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.
Bloomberg said there was “no immediate comment from Kurdish-led forces” though it noted that the YPG had earlier vowed to defend themselves against any Turkish attack.
Turkish markets were treading water on Wednesday after President Trump insisted that the US wouldn’t stand in Turkey’s way, but that Ankara had promised him that Washington’s allies in the area – i.e. the Kurds – would be safe, with Trump threatening to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Turkish forces attack the wrong people.
In what has been described as a “dramatic” reversal in US foreign policy, Trump signaled earlier in the week that the US would turn over thousands of ISIS members to Turkey (after their home countries overwhelmingly refused to take them back), and allow the Turkish military to cross into northeastern Syria as the US pulls out. However, Trump’s move is in line with his insistence that other NATO members shoulder more of the responsibility for their defense. Turkey is a NATO member.
Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar told state-run TRT TV that “deployments and work is still underway regarding the operation,” indicating that more Turkish forces will move across the border.
Turkey wants to eliminate the YPG because of its ties to the separatist PKK, a Kurdish party inside Turkey that has been battling against Ankara for decades to try and achieve sovereignty for the country’s Kurds. Ironically, though it was Washington’s closest ally on the ground in Syria, the YPG is considered a terrorist organization.
In a statement, Turkey’s chief of communications warned that Kurds have two options: “They can defect, or we will stop them from disrupting our counter-ISIS efforts.”
We imagine the Kurds will find that very convincing.
As for where Turkey goes from here, one journalist has a breakdown:
How will Turkey conduct the operation in Syria?
• First phase: 120km area between Tal Abyad/Rasulayn, where US troops withdrew
• Airforce, drones/jets and howitzers will pound YPG targets
• Then Turkish Special Forces and Syrian National Army will enter
Stocks Rally As Beijing “May Be Open” To “Partial” Trade Deal
With algos showing they’re still firmly in control of the market, another optimistic trade headline has managed to drive Dow futures more than 100 points higher.
The report this time is that Beijing “may be open” to a “partial” US trade deal despite Washington’s decision to add several Chinese tech firms to the Commerce Department’s ‘blacklist’. Yesterday, Beijing warned that investors should “stay tuned” for its “retaliation’ against the blacklisting. So, at a time when the market was bracing for more aggressive rhetoric, Beijing has instead surprised us with another vaguely bullish trade headline, to which the market has once again enthusiastically glommed on.
CHINA WILL BE OPEN TO PARTIAL U.S. TRADE DEAL DESPITE TECH BLACKLIST
S&P futures were up more than 25 points.
It wasn’t just the US, of course. Global markets rallied on the first sign in days that negotiations haven’t already been undermined by Washington’s latest tactics.
Over the past couple of weeks, algos have proven incredibly sensitive to trade headlines. And after so much aggression out of Washington, any sign that Beijing might look past tensions over Hong Kong, Taiwan and the NBA, as well as the tech blacklistings, would inevitably drive markets higher – even though President Trump and some of his top economic advisors have insisted that he wants a “grand” trade deal, and won’t accept a “partial” agreement.
According to a new survey, almost a quarter of Swedish women are afraid to leave their homes over fears they will be attacked or sexually assaulted.
“15.3 percent of people aged 16 or older stated that they did not want to go out in the evening out of concern about being assaulted or threatened. Among women, the proportion was almost 25 percent,” reports Statistics Sweden.
As we reported back in August, sales of pepper spray in some areas of Sweden have surged as much as 90 per cent amidst concerns over the country’s rape problem.
After a string of four sexual assaults and rapes in the span of five nights, Swedish police in numerous cities advised women to not walk alone at night and to go home early.
Figures released last year found that 58 per cent of convicted rapists and 85 per cent of all convicted assault rapists in Sweden were born outside of Europe.
In cases where the victim did not know the attacker, the proportion of foreign offenders was more than 80 per cent. Nearly 40 per cent of the convicted rapists are from the Middle East or from Africa, areas of the world from which Sweden has accepted large numbers of migrants in recent years.
A study by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet found that 88 per cent of gang rapists in the Scandinavian country over the last six years have had a migrant background.
Other figures show that migrants from Muslim-majority nations commit 84 per cent of “very violent” rapes in Sweden.
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Turkey Joins Russia’s Ruble-Based Alternative To SWIFT
After repeated warnings over the past couple of years, Turkey and Russia have signed a pact to increase use of the ruble and lira in cross-border payments, with Turkey signing on to Russia’s alternative to SWIFT, the international telecommunications protocol used by banks and central banks the world over.
Though SWIFT is an international cooperative owned by its members, with more than 10,000 banks worldwide relying on its system for handling sizable inter-bank transactions, the safety of the network was brought into question after a series of cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 resulted in the theft of $101 million from the Central Bank of Bangladesh.
For the first time since SWIFT’s laucnh, the hacks stoked doubts about the system’s safety, and prompted many US rivals, including Russia, to ramp up work on their alternatives to SWIFT.
Erdogan and Putin
In addition to Turkey, China and Russia have signed agreements to bolster trade between the two countries, including settling a larger percentage of their bilateral trade in rubles and renminbi. For China, bilateral trade with Russia grew from $69.6 billion in 2016 to $107.1 billion last year. China is Russia’s biggest partner for imports and exports.
There has also been talk about India joining Russia’s SWIFT alternative as Washington continues to threaten New Delhi with sanctions over its decision to purchase Russian-made missile-defense systems.
According to Reuters, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov signed the agreement with Ankara on Tuesday. The agreement, signed on Oct. 4, will encourage the two countries to start using Russia’s system in mutual settlements.
The agreement envisions Turkish banks and companies becoming connected to the Russian version of the SWIFT payment system, while enhancing the infrastructure in Turkey to allow Russian MIR cards, designed by Moscow as alternative to MasterCard and VISA, to work.
Though President Trump on Tuesday reiterated his love and respect for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s worth remembering President Putin’s warning about the potential ramifications of American sanctions,which risk undermining the dollar’s dominance of the global financial system by driving more countries to use alternatives to SWIFT.
For example, President Trump’s sanctions against Iran prompted Washington’s European Union allies to try and launch their own SWIFT alternative to make payments to Iran.
As Putin warned, American sanctions against Russia are a “colossal strategic mistake” and eventually risk undermining the dollar-based hegemony of the global financial system.
There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election.
The same or different types of “deep state” involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d’état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates.
2016 was the year of the unexpected outcome — twice. Against all the odds — and against the wishes of the biased mainstream media — Britain voted to leave the European Union, and in the United States, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. Both events took the “establishment” by surprise, if not horror. Both events have been the subject of continuous attempts to overturn those results by any means possible, no matter how odious or even undemocratic.
The similarities are legion: These attempted coups were the first time that the results of a legitimate American presidential election and a British democratic referendum have been the subjected to concerted bids to upend them. In both instances, an establishment instigated attempted coups d’état, neither of which would look out of place in a third world dictatorship.
The good news is that it is wholly unlikely that either of the “two coups” will succeed. The increasingly transparent nature of the opposition’s underhanded tricks to reverse the outcome, will in fact, be their undoing. Perhaps the general public — American or British — are not actually as stupid as their establishments apparently wish they were — or contemptuously assume that they are.
Each time another obstacle is placed in their way, whether a hysterical charge of “Russian collusion” or — the Democrats have not even yet defined their charge; they are probably still looking for one — “Ukrainian pressure” against Trump, or the desperate attempt to charge Boris Johnson with dishonesty in his suspending Parliament, the public grow ever more wary of dubious nature of the seditious machinations in progress. They can see for themselves what is happening. When the establishment does not get its way and contravenes the will of the people, is the only outcome pandemonium? Who needs a democracy like that?
“Why is this [Brexit] important for us Americans?’ Donald Trump Jr has asked.
“Because Brexit is an example of how the establishment elites try to subvert the will of the people when they’re given the chance. When my father beat the Washington establishment in a historic outcome in 2016, just a few months after the Brexit vote, we mistakenly presumed there would be a peaceful and respectful transition of power from the Democrats to the Republicans, just as there has always been in this country.”
So too did citizens of the UK presume there would be a peaceful, respectful – and timely exit from clutches of the untransparent and unaccountable European Union.
Unfortunately, the presumption was an optimistic one. “Instead”, Trump Jr continues, “the Democrats and deep-state operatives in our justice system have been colluding to subvert the will of the American people, with high-level officials even discussing a scheme to try to remove him from office using the 25th Amendment of our constitution.”
The description of the “scheme to remove [Trump] from office” eerily mirrors the political manoeuvring that has taken place since the original Brexit vote, three years ago. Since then, with two Prime Ministers down — and counting — with one attempt after another being made to “subvert the will of the people,” the excuses for the “delay” are becoming increasingly irrational. Looking at the allegations that the Brexit campaign “deceived the public” into voting “leave,” to the latest coup attempt in claiming the Prime Minister “lied” to the Queen about his motives for suspending Parliament, one cannot help asking oneself what kind of spurious trick will they will try next.
The US President and the British Prime Minister, meanwhile, remain unbowed in their determination to deliver to the public what they voted for.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid has insisted that the government has a plan to bypass any “Remainer” legislation thrown at Number 10. “It is still possible to honour [the PM’s] ‘do or die’ vow to secure Brexit by October 31”. If he is correct, the PM will not be forced to do as the opposition propose — to “beg” the EU for an extension to the deadline, if no deal is reached by October 19.
President Trump, meanwhile, embroiled in the latest sequel, “Son of Witch Hunt”, remains defiant in the face of the Democrats’ weasely posturing, including a totally false “parody” of Trump’s phone call, and insists he did “nothing wrong” — as the non-verbatim transcript of the phone call between the US President and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attests:
The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible. [Page 3; emphasis added.]
The only reference to former Vice President Joseph Biden or his son occurs later in the call:
The President: The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me. [Page 4; emphasis added]
That’s it.
This text was followed a few days later by the release of a text from the US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, stating:
“Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s [sic] of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.”
The president was requesting that Zelensky cooperate with the US Attorney General in investigating possible crime and corruption from 2016. It is the president’s job as the Chief Executive to investigate such matters, as well as required by the Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed September 30, 1999. No outcome was recommended.
Furthermore, if one is going to unseat a democratically elected president based on the word “though”, does such an ambiguity actually rise to the Constitutional level required of “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — and what sort of precedent would adopting it set? [Emphasis added]
There are now apparently claims in the US by “multiple whistleblowers”; yet here is the text of the phone call. As Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the late “Blind Sheikh,” recently observed, “Remember your elementary math, though: Zero is still zero even when multiplied…..”
Testimony this week from US envoy to the Ukraine, Amb. Kurt Volker, has further corroborated these findings.
Moreover, in the US, there have been calls for impeaching the president virtually since he took office. Representative Jerrold Nadler was overheard on a train planning an impeachment already in November 2018. US Attorney General William Barr is approaching Australia and Italy to ask about their help to former US President Barack Obama in his campaign against then-candidate Trump, and the Ukraine and the UK will soon likely be under investigation. Basically, claims that President Trump “violated the constitution” and acted “improperly” during a call with the Ukrainian president are clearly fabricated. In fact, it looks as if this entire US escapade was initiated to prevent the real crimes that were committed before Trump was elected from becoming exposed. As Stephen Miller noted, “Trump is the real whistleblower” — against a possibly criminal “Deep State,” which the president has been referring to as “The Swamp.”
Information is expected to come out shortly, possibly exposing the real crimes that may have been committed by the possibly terrified State leadership of the previous administration. There are also allegations that the entire attempted coup to unseat President Trump is actually an effort to head off the exposure of widespread criminality in the previous administration. If anything in President Trump’s phone call was untoward, what, then, does it say — as just one tiny example — about the boast by former Vice President Joe Biden that he threatened to withhold a billion dollar loan-guarantee unless a Ukrainian prosecutor, investigating alleged corruption in a firm, Burisma, paying Biden’s son $83,000 a month, unless the prosecutor was fired within six hours? The prosecutor was duly dispatched.
The opponents of both Brexit and the US president are treading on thin ice — apparently indifferent to the anger and division they are causing, or are even encouraging.
Like spoilt children who do not get the present they want, it seems they would rather throw a tantrum and see if any of the dirt they throw might stick than protect the institutions they so sanctimoniously claim to uphold. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Democrats to “focus on the Constitution,” when in fact she called for impeaching the president before she could even have known what was in the phone call, the report of which was only released later. This is the same Nancy Pelosi, incidentally, who said about former President Barack Obama’s 2,700-page proposed healthcare bill, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reminded the House of Representatives that while the US Constitution does not explicitly require a vote by the entire House to begin an impeachment enquiry, neither does it support one “by a unilateral decree of the Speaker.” The Democrat-controlled House has so far tabled McCarthy’s resolution — twice. And in the traditionally “wrong” Congressional committee — Intelligence rather than Judiciary — to boot.
Meanwhile, the citizens of both the UK and USA, who are wading apprehensively into their third year of obfuscation and obstruction, must still be staring baffled at the underhanded tactics of the Left, who seek to deny them their rightful claim to victory. Like villagers under siege, these two trampled sets of citizens have learned to toughen up and rely on their inner resolve to see this through. The public sorely need their faith restored: that their rights as voters, along with fair play, will ultimately win out.
Refugee Explosion “Even Greater” Than 2015 To Hit Europe, German Minister Warns
The German government is warning that a number of indicators suggest Europe could be on the brink of witnessing a new refugee crisis explode on its borders.
Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said early this week that refugees and migrants are set to flood Europe on a scale even bigger that the peak of the 2015 crisis. “We must do more to help our European partners with controls on the EU external borders. We have left them alone for too long,” he toldGermany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper after returning from a visit to Greece and Turkey, where he inspected the renewed refugee crisis first hand.
“If we do not do that we will once again face a refugee wave like in 2015 or maybe even greater,” Seehofer warned ominously.
Refugees arriving at the the Greek Island of Lesbos in 2015. Image source: Antonio Masiello via “6 Degrees”
Seehofer further said that if the EU doesn’t unite to find “strength to solve this problem problem” it faces total “loss of control” if and when the next major crisis hits.
At the height of the crisis three years ago, which was driven by the vastly destabilizing wars in Syria and Libya, and by the turmoil left in the wake of the Islamic State caliphate in western Iraq, there were near weekly mass drownings and accidents involving migrants attempting to traverse the Mediterranean, as well as fires and unrest at makeshift refugee camps in France and Greece. It further created turmoil in the domestic politics of multiple EU countries, with a number of right-wing populist figures and parties coming to power on anti-illegal immigration platforms.
And now, with Turkey on the brink of a major military incursion into northeast Syria, the Middle East is about to witness a major new conflagration resulting in potentially millions of new refugees being pushed out of the Turkey-Syria border region.
Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, left, via Deutsche Welle
Coupled with that, Turkey’s President Erdogan recently threatened to release one million refugees on Europe if he can’t have his so-called ‘safe zone’ which is to reach some 30km deep (19 miles) inside Syrian territory. He threatened early last month: “We will be forced to open the gates. We cannot be forced to handle the burden alone,”while demanding that European countries give political support to the controversial plan that would end in annexing UN member Syria’s sovereign territory.
It was the 2015 crisis that saw precisely around a million refugees and migrants flood Europe, crossing by land through the Balkans, as well as making the more dangerous Mediterranean route.
It appears Interior Minister Seehofer is convinced Erdogan is not bluffing, and is warning Europe to be prepared for the chaos to come. Indeed recent figures published by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), reveal that numbers of migrants crossing by sea from Turkey to Greece are shooting up over the past nine months, compared to the year prior.
Seehofer said of Turkey’s current situation, which is now openly declaring it stands ready to “correct the demographics” of northern Syria by forcibly removing its Kurdish inhabitants, and then move some 2 million Arab Syrian refugees into the ‘safe zone’, that“it is clear that we cannot manage the future with the resources of the past.” This in reference to a prior EU deal with Ankara to take back refugees from Greece for €6 billion in aid.
The main migrant routes to Europe at the opening of 2015 which saw a million flood Europe in a short span, something which some are warning is set to be repeated in the coming year.
One thing is for certain, should “all out war” — as the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have promised — be the result of the expected imminent Turkish invasion of Syria, there will be a new refugee explosion out of northern Syria and possibly Iraq, given Iraq’s Kurdistan region is precisely where many Syrian Kurdish as well as Christian civilians fleeing Turkish tanks would end up.
This is in addition to a renewed grinding multi-party civil war in Libya unfolding as Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s forces continue their push to wrest the capital of Tripoli from the UN-backed Government of National Accord.
To the undiscerning, the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) perform different roles in the international arena. Yet both organisations have a common aim – the promotion of foreign intervention. While the UN promotes its humanitarian façade, NATO provides the militarisation of the UN’s purported human rights agenda.
NATO’s participation at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly in September provided an overview of the current collaboration the organisation has with the UN. Jens Stoltelberg, NATO’s Secretary-General, mentioned the organisations’ collaboration in “working closely to support Afghanistan and Iraq”.
Since the 1990s, the UN and NATO cooperation was based on a framework which included decision-making and strategy on “crisis management and in the fight against terrorism.” In 2001, US President George W Bush launched his ‘War on Terror’ which eventually expanded to leave the Middle East and North Africa in perpetual turmoil, as the coined euphemism morphed into the so-called Arab Spring.
While the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were led by the US, it is worth remembering that the absence of the organisation at that time is not tantamount to the exclusion of warfare from NATO member states. Notably, the US invasion of Afghanistan invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which stipulates that an attack on a NATO member state constitutes an attack on all member states.
“For NATO-UN cooperation and dialogue to remain meaningful, it must continue to evolve.” The statement on NATO’s website is a bureaucratic approach which detaches itself from the human rights violations created and maintained by both parties, which form the premise of such collaboration.
UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), upon which NATO based its collaboration with the UN, reaffirms, “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence as recognised by the Charter of the United Nations.” The resolution provides impunity for member-states and other collaborators with the UN, including NATO, to define what constitutes terrorism while eliminating foreign intervention as a terror act, despite the ramifications which last long after the aggression has been terminated or minimised.
The UN-NATO duplicity is exposed in Stoltenberg’s speech when he states, “NATO has also contributed to developing UN disposal standards to counter improvised explosive devices, which remain one of the greatest threats to peacekeepers.”
Why are the UN and NATO selecting rudimentary forms of warfare over precision bombing which has killed thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror or bringing democracy?
In 2011, the UNSC’s arms embargo was supposed to prevent the proliferation of weapons to the rebels in Libya – a contradiction given the UNSC’s authorisation for NATO to bomb Libya. France, however, defied the resolution by publicly declaring its proliferation of weapons to rebels in Libya, on the pretext of their necessity to protect Libyan civilians. NATO denied its involvement as an organisation in providing arms to the rebels, despite the fact that action was taken by a NATO member. With the UN endorsing foreign intervention and NATO implementing the atrocities, the UN can fall back on its alleged peace-building and humanitarian roles, of which there is never a decline due to the irreparable damage both organisations have wreaked upon exploited, colonised and ravaged countries. The cooperation lauded by NATO does not rest on a division of roles but rather on blurring the differentiation between war and humanitarianism, in order to generate both as a duplicitous agenda.
NATO maintains that the UNSC holds “primary responsibility” for maintaining international peace and security. What the statement evades is the individual interest of each member, as well as their collective framework as NATO members. To satisfy the UNSC, individual interests and NATO membership, a common denominator is imperative. For the perpetrators of foreign intervention, war constitutes the binding legacy.
The moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected the first Jesuit Roman Catholic pontiff in papal history, the political long knives aimed at Pope Francis I came out of the shadows of the Vatican.
From the outset of his papacy, Francis found himself dealing with his right-wing predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI – a rarity in papal history – who insisted on remaining domiciled in an apartment on Vatican grounds. Benedict has not remained in quiet retirement but has conspired with Francis’s politically influential enemies in the Vatican, Italy, the United States, and other countries.
Donald Trump, who has publicly criticized Francis, has not interfered as his surrogates, who include former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis; Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States; and others have conspired with the powerful fascist-oriented Opus Dei sect of the church to undermine Francis’s authority. Trump’s eyes and ears inside the Vatican – US ambassador to the Holy See Callista Bisek Gingrich – is the wife of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a convert to Catholicism, and a major Trump political ally.
Francis, a former bar bouncer in a tough working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, has not been a shrinking violet when it comes to fighting back against his right-wing enemies. Francis’s Italian parents were escaping Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule when they emigrated to Argentina. For Francis, defending the church against the fascist Opus Dei and its allies is a battle worth fighting.
Francis’s enemies have taken a page from the Trump political book. Francis vowed to clean up the church of pedophile priests but he has been charged by his right-wing enemies, including Vigano, Burke, Bannon, Opus Dei, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and from behind the scenes – Benedict – of tolerating pedophiles and homosexuals in the church. This is the same sort of gaslighting to which Americans have become all-too-accustomed under Trump.
In order to limit Cardinal Burke’s international reach, Francis suspended him from the post of patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), an autonomous international charity entity in Rome that issues its own passports and maintains diplomatic relations with 107 countries and maintains permanent observer status at the United Nations. In 2017, Francis came to the assistance of the Grand Chancellor of the SMOM, Albrecht von Boeselager, after discovering that Burke and Opus Dei were conspiring to oust Boeselager, a member of a German royal house, as Grand Chancellor. Burke and the rightists wanted to sack Boeselager for distributing condoms to people in Myanmar. Francis suspended Burke and appointed Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu as the Pope’s special envoy to the SMOM. Francis is now assured that with Boeselager and Becciu as his eyes and ears inside the SMOM, the rightists and Opus Dei are checkmated when it comes to using the diplomatic offices of the SMOM for their own purposes. Francis also banned the right-wing Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from conducting public masses in Latin. As far as limiting the power of the rightists inside the Vatican City State, Francis appointed Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga from Honduras as his enforcer to rid the Vatican hierarchy of the pro-Benedict faction, as well as pedophile enablers and financial fraudsters, money launderers, and embezzlers.
Francis told the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” that Roman Catholic officials have often been “narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers,” adding, “the court [the Vatican curia] is the leprosy of the papacy.”
On October 1, 2019, Francis ordered Vatican police to seize documents, computers, and portable electronic devices from the Vatican Secretary of State and the Financial Information Authority, the latter the financial watchdog of the Vatican. In addition to these two offices, Francis has also placed the Institute of Religious Works (IOR), the so-called “Vatican Bank,” under increased supervision and control. The IOR has been misused in the past for a number of covert operations, including the funding of several right-wing Central Intelligence Agency-linked terrorist groups and death squads in Latin America, particularly the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA), or “Triple A.”
Francis was also instrumental in denying to Bannon and Burke the use of a 13th century monastery, the Certosa di Trisulti in Collepardo in central Italy, as a training academy for neo-fascist political operatives from around the world. Bannon’s Brussels-based international “neo-fascisti” grouping, called “The Movement,” had made a deal with a group connected to Burke, the Institute of Human Dignity, or Dignitatis Humana Institute, to lease the 800-room monastery for political training. Burke is the president of the institute’s board of advisers, which provides a direct link between Burke and Bannon. Eleven Cardinals, all opponents of Francis, are on the board of advisers, including Walter Brandmuller; Edwin O’Brien, former Archbishop for the US Military Services and a proponent of the “Just War”; Robert Sarah, the former Archbishop of Conakry, Guinea and an opponent of large scale immigration; Peter Turkson of Ghana; Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo, Sri Lanka; including US military intervention in Syria; and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a former Bishop of Kong Kong and leading opponent of China’s policies. Benjamin Harnwell, a noted conservative British Catholic, is the President of the Institute’s Board of Trustees. Bannon is both a member of the Board of Trustees and a patron of the institute.
Bannon called the proposed school the Academy for the Judaeo-Christian West. The Institute of Human Dignity and its British connections has led many to believe that it is also politically connected to the increasingly powerful Catholic wing of the British Conservative Party. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was baptized Catholic and the Speaker of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is affiliated with right-wing Catholic circles.
From the outset, Francis understood that the Bannon training academy would not only be targeting progressive forces around the world but also his papacy. It was fortuitous for Francis that Nicola Zingaretti, the president of the Lazio region, in which the monastery is located, condemned the lease by Bannon’s group. Zingaretti is a member of the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party, which includes former Christian Democrats and Socialists.
The coup de grace against the fascist academy came in May of this year when it was discovered that the 19-year lease guarantor, a person purporting to be an official of the Jyske Bank of Gibraltar, had forged the lease guarantee letter. On May 31, 2019, the Italian Ministry of Heritage annulled the lease. The forged letter and the financial fraud concerns that led Francis to order files seized from the IOR and the Vatican Secretariat of State are indications that the Catholic right-wing, including Opus Dei, are not conceding defeat but are doubling down using any means necessary, even if they are illegal.
There is little doubt in Rome that Pope Francis and his allies were working as hard as they could to ensure that after the fall of the coalition government of the far-right League or “Lega” and the populist Five Star Movement, Lega leader and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini would not be able to form a new government. Instead, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement formed a center-left coalition and Salvini was relegated to the opposition. It has been reported in Rome that Francis appointed Cardinal Pietro Parolin as a special envoy to combat the influences of the neo-fascists in Italy and throughout the European Union. And Francis has picked up an important ally in Forza Italia, the party of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, now a member of the European Parliament.
Bannon, Burke, and their allies gambled on winning control of an ancient monastery, the SMOM, and the Italian government. Pope Francis saw their bid and raised it. Francis’s royal flush has sent the neo-fascisti forces of Opus Dei, Bannon, and Salvini into a much-weakened opposition. The moral of the story for the fascisti is to never underestimate a one-time bar bouncer. Francis has been as effective in ousting the far-right from their perches of power in Rome as he once was in ejecting unruly drunks from bars in Buenos Aires.
The Surge In “Surprise” Medical Bills Bankrupting Americans Can Be Blamed On Private Equity
Surging “surprise” medical bills in the U.S. are private equity’s fault, a new FT opinion piece claims.
These “surprise” medical bills continue to be a major talking point in the U.S. and are likely to be a key issue during the upcoming 2020 Presidential race. The term refers to invoices that are generated after a patient is admitted to the hospital and treated, without their knowledge, by someone not in their insurance plan.
And a recent Stanford study shows that these “surprise” bills continue to become more ubiquitous. They are up from about 33% of visits in 2010 to almost 43% in 2016. For inpatient stays, the number is even more alarming: the jump goes from 26% to 42%, with the average cost per patient rising from $804 to $2,040. It’s an issue that only adds to the overwhelming debt bubble we have again created in the U.S.
The opinion piece notes that these rising costs come not from hospitals, but rather from the “backwaters of the financial markets”:
The prices of junk bonds issued by “physician services companies” have been sliding in the past month as their owners weigh the possibility and costs of political intervention. These point to the real source of the problem: private equity’s silent colonisation of parts of the healthcare profession.
A recent paper by two US academics highlights how private equity activity has driven up the price of healthcare for American consumers. The problem is a result of “the interplay of buyout strategies (which pile leverage on to companies and emphasise financial returns) and the business of treating people, where sick patients have no power to shop around and outcomes come first,” the piece notes.
Private equity has acted as a consolidator in healthcare services, building giant physician services groups like Envision, HealthTeam and AirMedical Group.
Envision was a company that was flipped between public and private ownership since 2005. It employs 70,000 staff and spans services like emergency rooms, radiology and anaesthesiology. The businesses are perfect for what private equity is looking for. The academic paper states:
“Emergency medical services are a perfect buyout target because demand is inelastic, that is it does not decline when prices go up.”
And in addition to being inelastic, demand is robust: about 50% of medical care comes from emergency room visits.
The deals that physician service groups work out with hospitals are rarely transparent to the public. And this is probably for good reason:
But a study by Yale University of the billing practices of EmCare, Envision’s physician staffing arm, showed that when it took over the management of emergency rooms, it nearly doubled patient charges compared with those levied by previous physician organisations.
Which raises the question why hospitals go along with these arrangements. Well, some have struck joint-venture deals with physician companies, splitting the extra revenues these entities stick on patients. But for many, they don’t have the resources or the industry clout to combat surprise billing on their own.
As a result, congress is now considering legislation to curb “surprise” billing in healthcare. The larger debate, as the U.S. will certainly be subjected to leading up to 2020, is whether or not private equity companies belong in the healthcare sector to begin with. Their tactics have done nothing but “give more credence to the arguments of Elizabeth Warren and others,” the piece concludes.
Days before the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh last year, a former FBI assistant director appeared on MSNBC to suggest the Supreme Court nominee had a major credibility problem.
“This is not…an investigation about the sexual allegations, I think it really has moved toward credibility,” Shawn Henry, an NBC News analyst, told Nicolle Wallace on October 1, 2018.
“At this point now, there are very clear allegations, and subsequent to the judge’s testimony, people have come out who appear to be credible who…appear to be contradicting his testimony sworn before the United States Senate.”
Henry, clearly reciting Democratic talking points to imply Kavanaugh perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September showdown with Christine Blasey Ford, also referred to Ford as a “victim” and claimed that the FBI’s investigation into Kavanaugh’s testimony had “fallen short.”
Henry was presented to viewers as the channel’s “national security analyst,” but there was one title the network overlooked: Shawn Henry is a top executive for CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the infamous hack of its email system in early 2016.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the firm determined that the Russians were behind the intrusion.
CrowdStrike’s June 2016 assessment remains the sole source of evidence to supply the pretext of the government’s Russian election interference claim; later, it would help bolster the Trump-Russia collusion fable.
The president, according to a transcript released by the White House, mentioned CrowdStrike during a phone call with the new Ukranian president over the summer. Now, the California-based company is facing renewed scrutiny both about the handling of the DNC email hack and the firm’s political affiliations. Last month, in response to questions about the firm’s clear connections to Democrats, CrowdStrike rejected accusations of bias in an FAQ posted on its website:
“CrowdStrike is not affiliated with any political party. We are a public cybersecurity company, and are non-partisan. We have done cybersecurity work for, and currently protect, both Republican and Democratic political organizations at the state, local, and federal level.”
That may be true in the most technical sense, but there are plenty of reasons to suspect that CrowdStrike is far from a disinterested player in the impeachment drama engulfing official Washington and gaslighting the American public. And since CrowdStrike produced the single piece of evidence used in the endless feedback loop to convince Americans that the Russians breached the DNC’s email system—the party refused to surrender its email devices to the FBI—reassessing the firm’s credibility in light of new information is warranted; in fact, it’s vital.
Henry, the president of CrowdStrike’s Washington operation, is a regular contributor to both MSNBC and NBC News programs. (His affiliation with CrowdStrike, however, is never mentioned.) Although he hasn’t worked for the FBI since 2012, Henry often weighs in as an FBI “expert,” opining on a variety of political issues from government shutdowns to the Kavanaugh debacle. Curiously, his views always come down on the side opposite of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
In March 2017, Henry—who worked for Robert Mueller’s FBI during Barack Obama’s first term—participated in a post-inauguration forum to discuss the implications of Russia’s “hacking” the 2016 presidential election. The panel also featured former Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and Marc Elias, the general partner at Perkins Coie, a politically-influential law firm based in D.C..
It was a symbolic trio. Perkins Coie hired CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016 on behalf of the DNC. Instead of going directly to the FBI or other law enforcement agency about the breach, Democratic party leaders, working through Perkins Coie, retained CrowdStrike to find the culprits. Very cozy.
But that wasn’t Perkins Coie’s only involvement in the Russia-hacked-the-election plotline. The law firm also hired Fusion GPS—who in turn hired British political operative Christopher Steele to author his infamous dossier—on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC around the same time Perkins retained CrowdStrike. According to disclosure reports, the DNC paid Perkins Coie $7.2 million during the 2016 election cycle: The PAC also paid CrowdStrike more than $400,000 during the same time period. (The DNC has paid CrowdStrike nearly $80,000 so far this year.)
And while CrowdStrike was working for the DNC in 2016, the firm also collaborated with key officials in the Obama Justice Department as it was ramping up its investigation into Trump’s presidential campaign. During a technology conference in March 2016, CrowdStrike hosted a cyber “war game” with Obama administration officials: “Four teams of ten people met for two hours to play the game,” according to an October 2016 profile in Esquire. “[National Security Division chief] John Carlin; Chris Painter…at the State Department; and Chris Inglis, the former deputy director of the NSA, were all part of the government team. A former member of GCHQ, the British intelligence organization, was on the international team. Ash Carter, the defense secretary, arrived halfway through and asked to play, but the game was already under way.”
Before Obama’s intelligence officials released a statement on October 7 that blamed the Russians for the DNC email breach, according to the Esquire article, Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, was given a heads-up.
“Alperovitch got a phone call from a senior government official alerting him that a statement identifying Russia as the sponsor of the DNC attack would soon be released. Once again, Alperovitch was thanked for pushing the government along.”
The statement, issued by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper one month before Election Day, lifted some of the wording from CrowdStrike’s report on the DNC breach. (Again, it’s important to note that no federal agency was allowed access to the DNC email servers; all evidence of Russian hacking came directly from CrowdStrike.)
Further, according to reporting by Michael Tracey, CrowdStrike had a contract with the FBI for $150,000 between July 2015 and July 2016 for unknown services.
Interesting.
So, to summarize, at the same time Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS to dig up Russia-related dirt on Donald Trump, it hired CrowdStrike to investigate the hack of the DNC email systems. CrowdStrike, also at the same time, was working with the Obama Justice Department as the agency began investigating Trump campaign aides for suspected “collusion” with the Kremlin.
Even if one accepts those connections as standard Washington operating procedure, Henry’s political commentary should be enough to give more fair-minded observers pause about his company’s objectivity. In August, Henry appeared on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show to push for stricter gun control in the aftermath of the El Paso mass shooting. “There’s a whole host of things that need to be done to change the climate, background investigations, background checks, will keep guns out of the hands of bad people,” Henry said on August 8. “But there’s a lot more that needs to be done in order to successfully mitigate what we’ve seen here over the past few years.” Yes, because mass shootings only started happening after Bad Orange Man was elected.
Last January, during the government shutdown, Henry warned that the move was affecting the “morale” of the FBI and threatened national security. “These operations are being impacted and that is a risk to the American public, it’s a risk to this country and it is absolutely a national security challenge,” Henry told MSNBC’s Brian Williams on January 23.
Henry also lamented the climate at the FBI after the arrest of the so-called package bomber Casar Sayoc last year. “What the FBI has gone through has been some morale issues of course with a lot of the language that’s been out there,” Henry said on the “Today” show on October 27, 2018. The language, it’s safe to assume, was criticism by President Trump, congressional Republicans and conservative media about the FBI’s activities in 2016 and 2017.
Trump foes dismiss any scrutiny of CrowdStrike as part of a “conspiracy theory.” But the tangled web between CrowdStrike, Democratic operatives, the Trump-hating media and the Obama Justice Department isn’t a theory, it is fact. And since the firm played a critical early role in planting the Russia collusion hoax, Trump and his allies are right to raise more questions.
