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I do not care about Israel. Period.

There are a few things I’m fairly sure of. Yes, of course. Death and taxes (except for the rich). Another thing I’ve become increasingly certain of is that every time I post something about Bernie Sanders, I get some sort of comment or snarky remark about Bernie Sanders and his position/support/love of/visit to (and any other such nonsense related to) Israel. Seriously? Continue reading I do not…

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Hey, fossil fuel industry, just go kill yourself (and bring your own body bag)

Hey, fossil fuel industry, just go kill yourself please and bring your own body bag

When you read this excellent article which appeared in The Guardian and your blood pressure starts going up, I’m going to ask you to just try and feel at least a little sorry for these fossil fuel companies. HA HA! I’m kidding. If I EVER imply that fossil fuel companies deserve sympathy of any kind, please assume that I’ve been kidnapped or my computer has been hacked. But seriously, the…

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Isabel dos Santos: The most cold-hearted bitch on Earth (Part I)

Isabel dos Santos: The most cold-hearted bitch on Earth (Part I)

Some people are just really easy to dislike. Maybe you find them distasteful to look at, but then you learn about the rotten things they’ve done, and you might even grow to hate them. (more…)

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Bias is a disease

Bias is a disease

The most important subject which can and should be taught in schools, starting in kindergarten, is critical thinking. The existence of rudimentary and mandatory coursework directed at working against our confirmation biases would solve SO many problems in America. Just think about this: if people were able, or even marginally WILLING to distinguish fact-based claims from propaganda in stories…

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Bernie Sanders surges ahead of Hillary Clinton in NH (of course!) Here is a link to the article in The Hill, by the way.

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Unions and loyalty? Fugget about it!

Unions and loyalty? Fugget about it!

I’m very familiar with old adages like politics makes strange bedfellows, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and politics have no relation to morals, but I have to admit that the foot dragging by American labor unions about whether or not to endorse Bernie Sanders for President really pisses me off.

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Hillary Clinton and the Friday News Dump

Hillary Clinton and the Friday News Dump

So Hillary Clinton has announced that she would support lifting the ban on the export of crude oil IF she got “concessions” from the oil and gas industry. How ridiculous is that? It’s not even savvy enough to be political doublespeak. Basically, it means nothing. And, of course, that old game of dump the bad news on a Friday (when no one is looking) doesn’t actually work the way it used to. It’s…

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Bernie Sanders is totally getting the shaft

Bernie Sanders is totally getting the shaft

That awkward moment when the monsters hiding in your closet at night are real…

I keep hearing and reading (in the mainstream media) about how Hillary Clinton “won” the Democratic Debate this week. What inevitably follows are phone calls, tweets and listener comments flatly rebuking that statement. It’s like “wash – rinse – repeat,” with Bernie Sanders supporters stepping up to defend his…

[schatziesearthproject]

Bernie Sanders is slated to win the nomination and presidency

Bernie Sanders is slated to win the nomination and presidency

. . .

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How To Save Yourself (If You Happen To Be Super Rich)

How To Save Yourself (If You Happen To Be Super Rich)

I’ve recently been reading in the media that we have 12 years to save ourselves before climate change really kicks in and leads to a Hothouse Earth (think: Venus). This is both a pathetically misleading and laughable notion. I hate to say it aloud, but that ship has left the harbor perhaps several dozen years ago.

Much like if you ask a physicist if humans really have “free will,” and they…

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In order to find LOST and FOUND pets due to the California wildfires, use hashtags for the pet's name (always put #thepetsname at beginning of post)

In order to find LOST and FOUND pets due to the California wildfires, use hashtags for the pet’s name (always put #thepetsname at beginning of post)

It occurs to me that when searching and trying to find your pet, or when hospitals, shelters, vets are posting about a pet that has become displaced from its owner due to the North Bay wildfires, the only way to SEARCH, across all social media platforms, is to use # (hashtags). So, for example, if you are searching for your lost pet on Twitter and your pet is named Fido, you put #FIDO in the…

[schatziesearthproject]

What can you do TODAY to fight injustice? Sign 4 petitions and leave one comment

What can you do TODAY to fight injustice? Sign 4 petitions and leave one comment

And this will take less than 5 minutes. 7 minutes TOPS. (more…)

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"We ARE drilling all over the place, right now" - Barack Obama, 2012

“We ARE drilling all over the place, right now” – Barack Obama, 2012

Chances are that THIS Barack Obama, the one who was campaigning for re-election in 2012, will seem like the hideously grotesque ugly twin to the Barack Obama we see on TV most days. (more…)

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Evidence is coming to light that Angolan banks and financial institutions have (as crazy as this sounds), run out of money. 

Angola Rising reporter Mr. A.M. (his identity is being protected) has learned that banks and other financial institutions in the Angolan capital of Luanda are unable to fulfill requests for money transfers into Angola.  In other words, if money is transferred into Angola (via Western union, MoneyGram, etc.) which should be contractually available for pick up in Luanda, banks and other companies contractually obligated to fulfill the transfer request are unable to complete the transaction. They don’t have the cash on hand. Conversely, if someone in Angola wishes to send OUT money abroad, those same banks and companies are able to send the money out, via wire transfer. So they can take money in, but haven’t got any money to give out (dispense).

Additionally, Mr. A.M. has learned that many, if not most, government employees have not been paid for their work for the month of October. No word on how payroll will proceed for November, but it’s not looking good.

In a call this morning to the Angolan Embassy in Washington, D.C., I (Schatzie) confirmed with the Embassy that there was, indeed, a banking “problem.” The Embassy employee said that, “No one knows what’s going on. If we want to send money back home, we send it with someone who is going there.”

The dictatorship government of Jose Eduard dos Santos may claim that the “cash crunch” is being caused by low oil prices, but that would be very, very far from the truth. In reality, the dos Santos family has been embezzling billions of dollars of money, literally siphoning it off, from the Angolan economy for decades.

Just recently, as was reported on November 10th by the website Maka Angola (click here for English version and click here for the Portuguese version), Standard Charter Bank declined a suspicious attempt to transfer out $300,000 from the state owned (run by Isabel dos Santos) oil company, Sonangol to a Maltese shell company named “Wise Intelligence Solutions” which is owned by Isabel dos Santos. Standard Charter Bank suspected the $300,000 payment from Angola’s Sonangol to Isabel dos Santos for “consultancy services” was basically money laundering, and declined the transfer.

To be filed under, “Knowing No Shame,” Isabel dos Santos continues to travel the globe, partying and playing in the most glamorous of settings, even participating in a Dolce and Gabanna Fashion Show, as can be seen in the screenshot from her own Instagram account (below – Isabel dos Santos is the woman in the black halter top on the right. You can watch her dance on the runway here):

She and her husband, Congolese “art collector” Sindika Dokolo, don’t seem to have a care in the world – other than trying to find ways to squander the last bits of Angola’s natural resource wealth.

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And those Instagram photos above are just some of her latest photos. For more of their pillaging of Angola’s money, please see my post from a few months ago HERE.

Why should the West care about Angolan banks being emptied out by the dos Santos family? As Maka Angola also recently reported, Sonangol has acquired enormous (and seemingly unpayable) debts to major oil companies, such as BP (Sonangol owes them over $135 million):

Eni (Sonangol owes them over $125 million):

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And, in fact, as Maka Angola reported on November 20, 2016, Sonangol seems to only be servicing debt to companies owned by the dos Santos family, leaving outstanding debt owed to Western oil companies pegged at roughly $1 billion dollars.

Angolan oil company Sonangol owes:

$380+ million to Chevron $360+ million to Total SA $135+ million to BP $125+ million to Eni

Again, make no mistake about it: the dos Santos family has been money laundering Angola’s natural resource wealth for years. Those same oil companies listed above were, and are, fully aware of what they’ve gotten themselves (and their shareholders) into. No one knows exactly how many billions of dollars the dos Santos family has taken out of the country. Some accounts put the amount at tens of billions of dollars.   

A few years ago, the IMF went searching for the lost money ($32 billion dollars), and essentially just threw it’s organizational “hands up.” But that is no excuse for what’s been happening on the ground in Angola, one of the most oil-rich countries in Africa, and yet, one of the poorest and most corrupt nations on Earth.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have Isabel dos Santos lauded as the richest woman in Africa (seemingly out of nowhere) at $3.8 billion dollars, and her father, Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos “worth” $20 billion dollars (!) AND have a country where people live on less than $2 a day.

Angola (whose GDP was $85 billion dollars in 2010), according to Transparency International, has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, at 97.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births (compare that to 66.4 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Sudan), and one of the lowest life expectancy rates of 50 years (compare that to 61 years in Sudan).

The dos Santos family has just about stolen and squandered every last bit of Angola’s natural resource wealth, to the detriment of its population. Once they’ve finished, they’ll no doubt try to find some corner of the world that will tolerate their stench. My guess would be someplace in China or the former Soviet Union (Isabel dos Santos’ mother is Russian). Meanwhile, Western oil companies will further plunder Angola in hopes of getting their money back, and, if they can’t, shareholders will suffer. I don’t give the slightest bit of a damn about the Western oil companies, who are entirely complicit in this charade. I especially don’t care about the common thieves who are the dos Santos family.

[By the way, WAY TO GO New York Times, for “allowing” Sonangol to pay you to be a Sponsor in this ridiculous conference called “Oil and Money,” which cost the Angolan people somewhere between $25,000-$150,000 just to have their name on some useless placard. Who will be sponsoring next year’s conference? ISIS? They’ve got a lot of oil revenue, too.]

The real losers in this whole mess are the people of Angola.

Their banks and financial institutions may very well have been gutted by the dos Santos family, but I’d bet that the average Angolan would gladly turn their backs on the $32+ billion dollars of lost revenue just to be rid of those scoundrels.

… Further reading: “How Isabel dos Santos took the short route to become Africa’s richest woman,” Forbes, August 14, 2013

Have Isabel dos Santos and her family finally emptied out Angola’s banks? Evidence is coming to light that Angolan banks and financial institutions have (as crazy as this sounds), …

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Deception, manipulation, and the manufacturing of hysteria around anti-Trump protests

Deception, manipulation, and the manufacturing of hysteria around anti-Trump protests

There have been demonstrations across the United States since the day after the November 8th election protesting an impending Trump presidency. I hadn’t initially noticed the ruckus until my daughter, who is a college student at NYU, told me that a glass bottle had been thrown at a group she was marching with from (apparently) a Trump supporter. As any parent can imagine, that definitely caught…

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Buyer beware: Hillary Clinton's definition of the word "infrastructure" is bad news for Native Americans (and the planet)

Buyer beware: Hillary Clinton’s definition of the word “infrastructure” is bad news for Native Americans (and the planet)

If Hillary Clinton is going to be the next POTUS, we all need to recalibrate our understanding of basic English because she’s going to be using different words meaning entirely different things that should be red flags for most of us. For example, if you hear “Public Private Partnerships,” or P3, that’s a bad thing. That means that she’s doling out power and control to those she owes favors to,…

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Is Hillary Clinton using a green screen to fake her public appearances?

Is Hillary Clinton using a green screen to fake her public appearances?

This question was posed by one of my daughters a few weeks ago. She showed me YouTube videos of one of Clinton’s speeches which definitely looked strange since it kept flitting in and out, and was not properly aligned with the background. The phones being held up by the people at the rally also did not match up with what they should have been seeing. It had quite a few “Matrix-looking” glitches…