Tag: news

The burgeoning feud between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders that has helped to divide America’s newly resurgent far-left just escalated to absurd new heights.

After the conclusion of last night’s debate, Sanders approached Warren and extended his hand for a handshake. Instead of taking his hand in friendship, Warren brushed it aside, walked up to Sanders and, with her hands clenched, said something to him that wasn’t picked up on the debate mics, which had already been turned off.

After they spoke, Sanders seemingly threw up his hands in frustration.

The feud has been a major political story this week, thanks to Warren’s assertion – which first appeared in a CNN report – that Sanders told her during a meeting back in 2018 that he felt a women couldn’t win the presidency of the US. Sanders has vehemently denied this, and his campaign has released a video from 30 years ago where he tells an interviewer that he does believe a woman could be president.

“In my view a woman could be elected president of the United States.” — Bernie Sanders, 1988 pic.twitter.com/WJd847DdmA

— Meagan Day (@meaganmday) January 13, 2020

Though, as late-night comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah joked, for all we know, this video could have been shot yesterday since Sanders looks the same as he did in 1988.

In a tweet highlighted yesterday by the NYT, one left-wing activist compared the feud to “mom and dad” fighting.

mom and dad are fighting and all I wanna do is go to my room and put my headphones on.

— Varshini Prakash 🌅 (@VarshPrakash) January 14, 2020

Unsurprisingly, Sanders’ fanatical supporters laid into Warren.

There’s no “appears” about it…

I sincerely hope @SenSanders never refers to her as his “friend Elizabeth Warren” ever again after her disgusting behavior the past few days.

Wow. https://t.co/uv0AtrRdWV

— Hindsight is 2020. (@MemberBernie) January 15, 2020

Warren:

– stands and claps for Donald Trump

– snubs Bernie Sanders’ offered hand

— emily ní chonchúir (@Psyche1226) January 15, 2020

While others found an opportunity for some light political humor.

Bernie overcomes accusations of bigotry by offering to shake hands with a Red Indian. https://t.co/m4KqCe4xGz

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) January 15, 2020

CNN’s Van Jones, one of the many progressive commentators on the network, described the debate as “dispiriting” and lamented the feud between the two.

Sadly, the only person who knows what was said between them is Tom Steyer, who was awkwardly standing near the two candidates during the snub.

With Sanders’ now surging in the polls three weeks before Iowa, will Warren resort to more low blows and “he said, she said” claimws to try and trip up his momentum?

Update: O’Keefe has posted more footage of Jurek discussing the murder of political enemies.

BREAKING: “Do you want to fight against the revolution? You’re gonna die for it motherf**ker.” – Kyle Jurek, @BernieSanders Campaign Field Organizer #Expose2020 pic.twitter.com/qwupRenWat

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 14, 2020

***

An undercover operative for Project Veritas has filmed a rabid Bernie Sanders field organizer who claims that “cities will burn” if President Trump is reelected this year, and that Trump supporters will need to be reeducated in literal gulags, similar to what Germany did to ‘Nazified’ Germans after World War II.

“Do you even think, that some of these, like, MAGA people could be “re-educated?” asks the Veritas journalist in a preview of Tuesday’s exposé (set for full release at Noon, ET).

“We gotta try, so like, in Nazi Germany after the fall of the Nazi party, there was a shit-ton of the populace that was fucking Nazi-fied,” said field organizer Kyle Jurek.

“Germany had to spend billions of dollars re-educating their fucking people to not be nazis. Like, we’re probably going to have to do the same thing here,” he added. “That’s kind of what all Bernie’s whole fucking like “Hey, free education for everybody – because we’re going to have to teach you not to be a fucking Nazi”“

Jurek went on to explain “there’s a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags,” adding “And actually, gulags were a lot better than what the CIA has told us that they were. Like, people were actually paid a living wage in gulags, they had conjugal visits in gulags, gulags were actually menat for like re-education.”

The Sanders organizer also predicts violence if Bernie doesn’t get the Democratic nomination, and that “Milwaukee will burn.”

Watch:

BREAKING: @BernieSanders “free education” policies to “teach you how to not be a f**king nazi.”; ‘There is a reason Stalin had Gulags’; ‘Expect violent reaction’ for speech. If Bernie doesn’t get nomination “Milwaukee will burn”

Stay tuned: https://t.co/BFGnoCeJE7#Expose2020 pic.twitter.com/Koh6UTibbe

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 14, 2020

Full video here :

Who knew that “feel the Bern” meant what you felt after a 20 hour day of forced labor inside of a gulag?

— Rising serpent (@rising_serpent) January 14, 2020

Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the U.S.S.R at the height of the Cold War. https://t.co/xovzUP70YE

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 14, 2020

Authored by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,

According to the latest report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Turkey fell below its ranking as the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the first time in four years — dropping behind even China. That rating is not exactly indicative of an improvement in Ankara’s stance towards the media. On the contrary, as CPJ revealed on December 11:

“[T]he fall to 47 journalists in jail from 68 [in 2018] reflects the successful efforts by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stamp out independent reporting and criticism by closing down more than 100 news outlets and lodging terror-related charges against many of their staff.”

CPJ also pointed out that Ankara’s October 24 legislative package — granting certain convicted journalists the right to re-appeal their cases, and others a shorter pre-trial detention period – has not alleviated the situation of the “scores of journalists in exile, jobless, or cowed into self-censorship.”

In addition, CPJ exposed,

“Dozens of journalists not currently jailed in Turkey are still facing trial or appeal and could yet be sentenced to prison, while others have been sentenced in absentia and face arrest if they return to the country.”

The above findings echo those of a report — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate” — released jointly by CPJ, the International Press Institute, ARTICLE 19, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, Reporters without Borders, the European Federation of Journalists, Norwegian PEN and PEN International.

Turkish police arrest 69-year-old journalist Ahmet Altan (center) in Istanbul on November 12, 2019, just a few days after he was released from prison, having serving more than three years of a life sentence for allegedly spreading “subliminal messages announcing a military coup” on television in 2016.

According to that report, the fruit of a two-day fact-finding mission to Turkey in September:

“The press freedom environment in the country has not improved since the lifting of the state of emergency in July 2018. Scores of journalists remain behind bars or under travel bans as a consequence of an extended, politically motivated crackdown against the media.

“A subsequent wide-ranging capture of the judiciary has progressively and severely damaged the rule of law and the public’s right to access information…

“In the months following the failed military coup of July 2016 and the launch of the state of emergency the crackdown against journalists and media was widespread and merciless. Within weeks over 160 journalists were behind bars, hundreds more facing prosecution, over 170 media had been closed and over 3,000 journalists were out of work…

“Pre-trial detention for hundreds of journalists has lasted for months and sometimes years before investigations are completed and the trials can begin. The state of emergency enabled judges to hold defendants without sufficient justification. The appeals process for individual cases has been exceedingly slow, with the Constitutional Court taking years to eventually take up and rule on individual cases…

“Anti-terrorism legislation is for the most part poorly defined, leaving room for prosecutors to conflate criticism of government with terrorist propaganda. Moreover, there is no defined threshold of evidence that needs to be obtained in order for the courts to first launch prosecutions and then for judges to assess when a terrorist act has been committed. Evidence presented in journalist cases has invariably been based on the defendants’ professional work, revealing perhaps inadvertently the desire to silence journalism as the true motivation for the prosecution…”

Putting Ankara’s persecution of the press in a wider context, Scott Griffen, deputy director of the International Press Institute, stated:

“The plight of Turkey’s journalists is but the tip of the iceberg of a much broader issue of systemic human rights abuse. European institutions must insist on substantial reform and not allow the Turkish authorities to gloss over the abuse with promises of superficial change while hundreds continue to pay the price of this abuse with the loss of their liberty.”

It goes without saying that the Iran nuclear deal is on its last legs and will likely die following declarations of Tehran leaders to no longer be beholden to uranium enrichment limits (in a Jan.6 statement) after the prior US pullout from the deal, but especially following the assassination of IRGC Quds Force Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Days after Soleimani’s death German foreign minister Heiko Maas warned the writing is on the wall as it marked the “first step towards the end” of the nuclear deal.

And now the deal’s final unraveling has just hit another crucial indicative milestone as on Tuesday France, Britain and Germany formally triggered the dispute resolution mechanism regulating conformity to the deal, seen as the harshest measure taken thus far by the European signatories. It essentially means the European powers officially see Iran as in breach of the deal; EU punitive sanctions are now on the table. 

“The European powers said they were acting to avoid a crisis over nuclear proliferation adding to an escalating confrontation in the Middle East. Russia, another signatory to the pact, said it saw no grounds to trigger the mechanism,” Reuters reports. 

However in taking the dire action, a joint statement underscored this should not be interpreted as meaning they’ve joined Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign, but are attempting to stave off an additional crisis of potential nuclear proliferation. 

The chief concern, however reluctant they may have been to trigger the mechanism, is described by a senior official’s quote to The Guardian:

Concern was most acute that Iran will be learning about centrifuge enrichment in an irreversible way. “The concern is they are going to learn something that it is not possible for them to unlearn,” one senior official said.

“We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPoA,” the European signatories to the JCPOA said. “Our three countries are not joining a campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran. Our hope is to bring Iran back into full compliance with its commitments under the JCPoA,” they said.

The mechanism was triggered upon the individual European states formally notifying the agreement’s guarantor, the European Union.

“To trigger the mechanism, the European states notified the European Union, which acts as guarantor of the agreement,” Reuters notes. “EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell said the aim was not to reimpose sanctions but to ensure compliance.” But we highly doubt the Iranians will see the measure the same way. 

Tehran has for more than the past year leveled accusations that the Europeans are ‘too little too late’ with half-hearted measures to provide relief to Iran’s economy decimated by US sanctions, such as the ‘SWIFT-alternative’ special purpose financial vehicle INSTEX.

Meanwhile, seizing on the nuclear’s deal’s apparent unraveling in progress, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said something else that certainly won’t be taken warmly in Tehran: “If we’re going to get rid of it, let’s replace it and let’s replace it with the Trump deal.”

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

When Washington imposed sanctions on companies, the move drew criticism not just from Russia but from Germany as well. The sanctions, targeting firms building the pipeline that will increase Gazprom’s export capacity for Europe, were seen as interference in Germany’s internal affairs while the legislators who approved them saw them as a tool for deterring Russia’s energy influence in Europe. For some, however, the reason for the sanctions was the U.S.’s own energy plans for Europe.

The Trump administration is following an agenda of energy dominance, and this dominance has to include Europe, which is one of the biggest markets for natural gas and, what’s more relevant to the U.S., liquefied natural gas. However, lessons from history, and that’s a history of Gazprom, would suggest that the energy dominance approach won’t work – not in Europe.

Bloomberg’s Liam Denning recently reviewed a book by an IHS Markit expert on Russian energy, Thane Gustafson, titled The Bridge. The Bridge, according to Denning, contains, among other things, a cautionary tale for U.S. gas ambitions in Europe. The gist of it is that the European gas market is a lot more open and transparent than it used to be, and while this has served to reduce the influence of Gazprom on the continent, it has also served to deter anyone else that might want to try to take Gazprom’s place.

The truth is that today, Europe has developed a continental gas network, and that network features LNG terminals. This means that many European countries are today a lot more flexible in their gas imports than they were 30 years ago, when Russia and Norway dominated the market. There is just one catch: the LNG has to be cheap enough to beat alternative supplies.

Poland is already buying U.S. liquefied natural gas. The country is ready and willing to pay more if it has to, in order to reduce its dependence on Russian gas for a number of historical reasons. Yet last year Bulgaria, too, bought two cargos of U.S. LNG from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass liquefaction plant. According to the head of the state gas operator, the cargos were priced at the level of local benchmark prices.

Even so, Poland and Bulgaria are small potatoes. Germany is the biggest gas market in Europe and it will become even bigger as the country aims to shut down all its remaining nuclear power plants by 2022. This is why Gazprom is building Nord Stream 2 with Angela Merkel’s blessing, after all. And this is why the U.S. is sanctioning it if we leave aside the ideology that every government uses to advance its purely pragmatic agenda.

Germany imported $14.6 billion worth of natural gas in the first half of 2019. That was 14.8 percent higher than a year earlier, but the increase in volume terms was even greater: these came in at 2.66 million terajoules, which was 20 percent higher than the year-earlier period. Historically, most of the imported gas has come from Russia, followed by Norway and the Netherlands. Now that the Netherlands is shutting down its flagship Groningen field ahead of schedule, Germany will need more gas from Russia and Norway. It could import U.S. LNG as per a EU promise to President Trump, as long as the price is right, as the EU Energy Commissioner said last year.

Yet because of the open and transparent nature of Europe’s gas market, Germany is also buying LNG from Russia. Just last month Novatek opened its first LNG fueling station in Germany. It is the first LNG station of the Russian company in Europe and could mark the start of a network.

This is why energy dominance is a challenging goal in Europe’s gas market. The fact that Germany and others are building new LNG terminals does not obligate them to use these terminals for U.S. LNG. Qatar is right around the corner, so to speak, and so are Nigeria and Algeria – both large LNG producers. Competition is intense and it’s out in the open. The victory that EU competition watchdogs achieved in their fight with Gazprom’s long-term contracts paved the way to the current competitive environment that leaves both Gazprom and U.S. LNG producers at the mercy of market forces.

The start of approximately 400,000 job losses in the German automotive industry is already underway as the industry shifts towards electric vehicles, reported the Financial Times. 

Germany’s workforce is likely to contract by 1% in the next ten years as carmakers such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Porsche transition to electric car sales. 

The shift from a combustion engine to electric, and the resulting factor it might lead to job losses is merely a cover, or a narrative by the German press, likely created by the government, to shield the public’s view from collapsing car production in the country. 

Why frighten consumers and tell them German car production has crashed to 23-year lows when narrative creation in the press can assure everyone that the slump is because carmakers are doing away with dirty fossil fuel engines for a greener future. 

The German government expects carmakers to produce 10 million electric cars by 2030. With the addition of automation and artificial intelligence in factories, the need for humans will continue to wane and displace even more. 

The automotive industry in the country supports 800,000 jobs and indirectly supports 3 million more. 

“It is the joint responsibility of industry, trade unions, and politics to promote reskilling so that negative effects on the labor market can be kept to a minimum,” said Kurt-Christian Scheel, the VDA’s managing director that represents Germany’s carmakers.

Volkswagen’s Zwickau factory and Porsche’s Zuffenhausen assembly line have so far been converted to electric vehicle production without significant job losses, thanks to the bargaining power of unions. 

It’s time the German press and government stop blaming electric cars for the massive job losses that could soon hit the industry in the coming quarters and years and prepare for a financial storm as car production has already crashed to several decade lows. 

 

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Never reluctant to poke its nose into regions where it has no commitments or relevance, the Nato military alliance is stumbling round in Iraq, the crucible of Middle Eastern disruption. Following the U.S. drone-strike killing of Iranian General Soleimani and the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Nato’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, came out predictably with expressions of support for the assassinations.

Nobody in the West (and probably precious few elsewhere, other than Iran, if numbers could be independently ascertained) could in any way be supportive of Soleimani and the barbarous forays he directed that resulted in the deaths of so many innocent people. He deserved to be brought to justice — which does not mean that it was morally defensible or legally permissible to kill him.

And please take a moment to think about the driver of the car he was in, who was also blasted to bits. What possible justification could there have been for killing him? It couldn’t be claimed by even Pompeo or Trump that he had been planning to attack America or Americans. This pawn on the board of revenge was killed by a missile fired by a U.S. attack drone. And he will pass out of memory as quickly as the flash of the explosion that blew him apart. But in terms of morality and international law he is just as important as any general, and responsibility for his death lies firmly at the door of the White House.

The obvious course of action in the case of Soleimani would have been to institute proceedings for an alleged international criminal to be brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), but we can forget that, because the United States “is not a party to the ICC’s Rome Statute and has consistently voiced its unequivocal objections to any attempts to assert ICC jurisdiction over U.S. personnel.” The fact that the ICC “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression” is objectionable to the Washington Establishment because it is possible that U.S. citizens could be investigated.

But Stoltenberg, a supposed internationalist, ignores the ICC (which is recognised by only 14 of Nato’s 29 members), and all that he could come up with after the killings was the absurd adjuration that “Iran must refrain from further violence and provocations.”

The violence was a U.S. drone strike. The provocation was a U.S. drone strike. And the fact that Iranian and Iraqi citizens were butchered in Iraq by a drone-fired missile on the orders of a Nato member country appears to mean nothing to the head of that alliance.

Stoltenberg probably doesn’t remember that, as pointed out by a perceptive analyst, “NATO is the only organization in modern history that has had significant involvement in the arrest of people indicted by an international criminal tribunal; NATO was instrumental in assisting with arrests for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” which in the 1990s was a major development. Unfortunately, Nato has moved further and further away from international conventions and legal requirements — as abundantly demonstrated by its catastrophic war against Libya in 2011 — and has been drawn ever closer to the go-it-alone interventionist style of its most powerful member state.

And now President Trump is calling the shots around the world, which includes demanding that Nato become more deeply involved in the festering quagmire of destruction and despair that the U.S. has created in the Middle East.

Following a telephone call between Trump and Stoltenberg on January 8, Nato issued a statement that “The President asked the Secretary General for NATO to become more involved in the Middle East. They agreed that NATO could contribute more to regional stability and the fight against international terrorism. They also agreed to stay in close contact on the issue. NATO plays a key role in the fight against international terrorism, including through training missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.”

What exactly does Trump mean by “more” involved in the shambles he has expanded in the Middle East? More troops? More drones? More extermination of innocent people who happen to be earning their living by driving a car?

Trump’s emphasis became clearer the day after he spoke with Stoltenberg, when he told reporters at the White House that “I think that NATO should be expanded and we should include the Middle East, absolutely. We can come home, largely come home and use NATO. We caught ISIS, we did Europe a big favour.” In addition to the staggering irony that, as noted by Reuters, the murdered Soleimani “played a major role in the fight against Islamic State militants in the region”, Trump “joked that the organisation could be called NATO-ME, or NATO plus the Middle East. He said he floated the possible name to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.”

Nato headquarters made no mention of the cretinous “NATO-ME” attempt at humour (if indeed it was that) which is not surprising because some Nato countries were taking action to secure the safety of their troops who Trump’s assassination strike had placed in greater jeopardy of their lives — without informing Nato or any individual member with troops in the region that there was about to be a major escalation in violence in the Middle East.

On January 7 it was reported that some Nato countries were withdrawing and relocating troops, with Germany moving 30 of its 130 personnel out of the country and Romania “relocating” all of its 14 soldiers. Of Croatia’s 21 troops, 14 were moved to Kuwait and seven returned home. Latvia and Denmark sent their troops to Kuwait, but Britain, with Nato’s largest non-US contingent, of some 400, did not announce any action to safeguard its personnel, and prime minister Boris Johnson unconditionally supported the killing of Soleimani, saying “we will not lament his death.”

Nobody expected Johnson or any other western politician to say they regretted Soleimani’s killing, and it was a typical Johnson comment — but there are reasons why Johnson constantly supports Trump, not the least of which is the British economy. (Morality and international law are irrelevant.)

When Britain leaves the European Union it will have to negotiate trade arrangements with many blocs and countries, not the least being the United States. There is therefore no possibility that Johnson would boldly go where many have gone before, and annoy Trump by contradicting him, because the petulant spiteful Trump would immediately refuse to engage in trade discussions.

Nato is on the UK’s back burner, and if supporting Trump’s policies about the Middle East and Nato is politically necessary, then so be it. Johnson agrees with Stoltenberg’s statement that “For me it’s no surprise that the United States is calling for Nato to do more, because that has actually been the message from the United States for a long time. . . We are looking into what more we can do.” But it is most unlikely there could be a Nato consensus about continuing a presence in Iraq, and if Trump demands additional military commitment by Nato countries, as seems apparent from his statement that “We can come home, largely come home and use NATO” in the Middle East he will put Stoltenberg and Nato nations’ leaders in an impossible situation.

Nato is floundering in the Middle East, and the best thing it could do would be to withdraw its military forces from the region. They have achieved nothing, and the future is bleak, to put it mildly. Get out now.