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davidmalcolm · 3 years

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AMERICAN ATTITUDE TO WAR

Whilst it is true that George Washington counselled (1) the American people not to engage in conflict with the rest of the world, it is not counsel that the leaders of this country took on board in the long run.

The pressure to involve the American government in World War I began with a question deliberated by one of its Committees, supposedly committed to searching for ways to promote international peace, namely if it is 'desirable to alter the life of an entire people, is there any means more efficient than war?' The answer they came up with was 'there are no means more efficient than war.'

In a situation not unlike that in the Ukraine conflict, where Italian aid workers refused to load transports with aid which also included munitions to be sent to the Ukranian government, Cunard gave one of their liners, the Lusitania (pictured above (2)), to the British Government, thereby making it a naval vessel. The ship was sent to New York where it was loaded with six million rounds of ammunition, owned by J.P. Morgan & Co, to be sold to the UK and France to aid their war against Germany. American banking interests and some US politicians were very keen for America to enter the war, eyeing the large profits to be made from such a move. Seemingly advertisements were taken out by the German government warning potential American passengers taking the the voyage on the Lusitania from New York to England that they would be sailing into a war zone and should consider it a perilous journey. And what happened is just that. The Lusitania was sunk on May 7 1915 after reports that First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill ordered the Lusitania's escort ship, the Juno, to return to port, leaving the Lusitania to be sunk with the loss of 1201 souls. It is quote probable that the cargo of ammunition exploded causing more death and destruction than would have happened with a torpedo strike. The Los Angeles Times concluded, on the basis of material in a book by Colin SImpson (The Lusitania), that the British Government had connived to 'arrange' the sinking of the Lusitania to lure America into the war.

As it was, the plan did not work and it wasn't until April 6 1917 that America entered 'the war to end all wars.' This was largely due the interception of an encoded telegram from the German Foreign Office to the Mexican government. Called the 'Zimmermann Telegram' after Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Secretary, it proposed a military alliance between Mexico and Germany which might help Mexico recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico from the United States. The telegram was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence and this, together with the threat to attack American shipping to disrupt them supplying Britain and its allies with war materials.

It's at the end of World War I that we hear the term 'new world order'. The idea was to create a League of Nations whose job it was to 'Enforce Peace' and 'make the world safe for democracy.' The Treaty of Versailles which pushed Germay into an impossible situation by producing hyperinflation, destroying the German middle class and encouraging the promotion of someone who could bring the country back from the brink and control inflation. That someone was, in the end, Adolf Hitler. So, to paraphrase what Lord Curzon said of the Treaty of Versailles, it did not bring peace, simply a twenty year truce.

The key structures of the West’s post-war strategy were the central financial institutions of the United States and Great Britain – the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System – coupled with financial-industrial organisations, who set out to establish absolute control over the financial system in Germany to manage the politics of Central Europe. The implementation of this strategy included the following steps: 1st: 1919-1924 – Preparing the grounds for massive American financial investments in the German economy. To that end, Germany was granted $200 million in loans, half of which were provided by Morgan’s banks. By August 1924, the old German mark had been made anew, the financial situation in Germany stabilised, and, as researcher G.D. Preparta wrote, the Weimar Republic was prepared for “the most striking economic aid in history, followed by the most bitter harvest in world history. 2nd: 1924-1929 – Establishing control over the financial system and funding the National-Socialist movement. 3rd: 1929-1933 – Inciting and unleashing a deep economic crisis ensuring the Nazis would rise to power. 4th: 1933-1939 – Financial cooperation with the Nazi government and support for its expansionist foreign policy, aimed at preparing and unleashing the new world war.

The unfortunate and sad truth, at least for the majority, is that both the first and second world wars made huge profits for the already super rich at the expense of the public purse, in turn funded by the ordinary citizen and taxpayer. The UK Government alone had a huge 'Lend-Lease' debt to pay off that was only redeemed, over sixty years later, under Gordon Brown. This is another plank of the new world order, that the US will supply, outside of cash terms, but not free of charge, weaponry to countries it judges to be acting in their interests as part of a 'League of nations' against oppression, aggression and supporting democracy and freedom.

When crimes are committed, the weak and poor, whether guilty or innocent, are brought to justice but the strong and rich have justice bought. As John Adam said, "Power always thinks it has a great soul and has vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.'

The difficulties for Europe which may well arise out of the various political and economic actions that the US/Europe are taking in the light of the conflict in Ukraine have still to be realised but essentially, I would say that the UK/Europe will be seen by the rest of the world as the puppet of the USA. The Euro and the US Dollar will be declined as global currencies given the sanctions being applied to force countries away from any form of trust in those currencies being used as reserves and for international payments. The stance taken by China, India and a number of other countries to resist American demands for condemnation of Russia show that they are unwilling to accept America, Europe and NATO as the 'Pax Americana' global masters having seen the effects of actions by them on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, many South American countries and now Ukraine. Ukraine's economy was in trouble and now is all but totally wrecked.

The refugee situation, as well as being tragic, is putting enormous ongoing strains on the asylum hosts, especially Poland. It is also highlighting some unsavoury refugee 'choices' being exercised by different countries.

The negative effects of sanctions and blockades on energy, food and goods distribution is gaining momentum.

The concept of the sanctity of private property and financial resource has suffered a massive failure of trust.

As in all conflicts, the reliability of internationally reported information is losing or has already lost credibility as events which have happened are not reported but fabricated stories are being pushed in government sponsored western-centric and Russio-phobic media as well as Moscow-led military-led information creation.

We seem to be living in some kind of illusion that this regional conflict will not degenerate into something much, much bigger.

For us in the UK, quite aside from the prospect of much higher energy and food prices for consumers, national debt may well force further cuts to public services, the way in which the less well off have suffered most under the previous years of austerity, will spread to affect the middle classes and may well, some are predicting, destroy the middle class in Europe, leaving only the super wealthy and indentured classes.

(1) "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world... Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?"

(2) This picture is of a memorial plaque made to mark the sinking of the Lusitania. It is a family piece which, after seeing a similar example described on the programme 'Flog It', now understand it was made and sold to raise money for a disaster relief fund for victims' families. It is painted on glass with mother-of-pearl inlay. Both my great grandfather and grandfather worked for John Brown shipyard and helped build the Lusitania. There was a feeling within the family that Winston Churchill had something to do with the sinking. They referred to him as the 'war monger.' It seems a Royal Navy vessel was ordered back to port rather than perform escort duties for The Lusitania. Churchill being Lord of The Admiralty at that time might well have been responsible for vetting this order. It's quite possible that the torpedo strike set of ammunitions being transported on the Lusitania, thereby causing much greater damage and causing the Lusitania to sink more quickly, thereby contributing to the very high loss of life.

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keywestlou · 3 years

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THE CARNAGE CONTINUES

THE CARNAGE CONTINUES - https://keywestlou.com/the-carnage-continues/What Putin is doing to the Ukraine is pure unadulterated carnage. Brutality at its worst. The free nations must come up with a solution. Soon! Putin has difficulty keeping his word about anything and everything. The most recent "human corridors" so Ukrainians wishing to leave can move on to a county where there is no war. Yesterday, Putin agreed to two corridors. Roadways in effect from one city to the borders of other countries. In this instance, Poland. Each corridor had a several hour life. Neither could even make it through the first hour. The Russians bombarded the corridors, effectively closing them. No notice to those trying to leave. Those moving on to Poland primarily women and children. This morning, another corridor was agreed to. Certain conditions imposed by Putin and agreed to by the Ukraines did not last one hour either. Putin claiming the "rules" were not being followed. Yesterday, a humanitarian group attempting to aid Ukraines advised 500,000 Ukraines were without food. Primarily women and children. Starving. I have not in my lifetime seen a group of people as brave as Ukranians. Yesterday, an unarmed group were walking in mass down a city street. Confronting them were armed Russian soldiers. The soldiers told them to stop and disperse. They continued on. The soldiers shot into the crowd. The Ukrainians continued. Not one turned and ran. Initially Putin was attacking Ukrainian military. His attention has been redirected. He is now attacking communities. Bombarding them hopefully into submission. He assumes this will cause them to give up their noble fight. The man has no mercy. In death, he will sit at the right hand of Hitler. Movie star Sean Penn was in the Ukraine for a few days this week shooting a documentary. It was time to leave. He and his group rented a car to drive to the Polish border. He describes the event as a "startling experience." He said afterwards, "Our soul as America is lost" if we let Ukraine fight alone. There were miles to travel. Cars and people inching forward. Finally the car line was not moving because of so many people. Penn and his team abandoned their car on the side of the road and walked miles shoulder to shoulder with Ukrainians to the Polish border. The walk was many miles and took hours. Those on foot were primarily women and children. He observed they had no luggage. Appeared as if they intended to return. Actually there probably was no luggage because the Ukrainians had to move swiftly to save their lives. Penn made it. He was in the U.S. yesterday. I suspect Penn will be an advocate for the Ukraine big time from this point forward. A growing number of Americans are in the process of going to the Ukraine to help in the fight. Presently 16,000 strong and growing. None have to go. They want to go. Must go. Reminds me of the Americans before the U.S. entry into World War I who joined the forces of the British and French. And the Americans who joined British forces to fight Hitler before the U.S. got into World War II. Great Britain forgets the assistance the U.S. provided in the early days of World War II. At a time before the U.S.' entry into the war. In addition to Americans joining British forces, there was lend lease. Boris Johnson fails to recall how people help one another. When sanctions by the U.S. and certain countries were announced, he came on like Donald Trump with a bravado indicating Britain was going to do its share big time. Turned out the sanctions Britain intended to impose were a step short of nothing. Now comes who is going to take Ukrainians into their countries. Those escaping Putin's tyranny. Johnson announced insignificant numbers would be permitted. Based on already existing laws re Ukrainian immigration. These are unusual times. Existing rules get thrown out the window. Open hearts and generosity become the order of the day. Discrimination is popping up everywhere. Many seeking to leave the Ukraine are persons of color. Primarily Africans studying in the Ukraine. They are being harassed on the buses transporting people to the Polish border. They are required to stand and not sit. The seats are for Ukrainian citizens. When the Polish border is reached, Polish authorities are giving them a hard time as they seek asylum. Paperwork, etc. A lot of major corporations world wide are socking it to Putin. I do not see how the Russian people can handle the deprivations and hurt such will bring upon them. The ruble is shot. Worth next to nothing. Now Visa and Mastercard have announced they are suspending services going in and out of Russia. Imagine, the ruble is no good and now your credit card is no good. Panic has to follow. Sufficient to bring Putin down? Enjoy your Sunday!

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vinayv224 · 5 years

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Vox Sentences: Move over, Russia?

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Trump admits to talking to Ukraine about the dealings of Joe Biden’s son; the world’s oldest travel company leaves thousands stranded.

Whistles from the Oval Office

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

President Trump admitted to discussing the family of former Vice President Joe Biden during a July phone call with Ukraine’s president, an incident believed to be at the center of a whistleblower’s complaint about alleged abuse of power within the White House. [Vox / Anya van Wagtendonk]

The complaint reportedly involved Trump attempting eight times to pressure Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into Biden’s son, Hunter, and his business activities in the eastern European nation. Intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined the complaint to be credible — meaning there is corroboration beyond the one source — and labeled it a matter of “urgent concern.” [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]

Trump’s alleged pressure campaign has prompted scrutiny of US and Ukraine ties. Some say the delayed release of $250 million in foreign aid to Ukraine was mobilized by mounting White House efforts to instigate a probe into the Bidens. A separate investigation into the matter is being conducted in Washington. [WSJ / Alan Cullison, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Dustin Volz]

Republicans have stood by Trump as new details emerge, calling for an actual inquiry into Biden and his 2016 request to Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor who had investigated a gas company linked to his son. Democrats, on the other hand, are once again pushing for Trump’s impeachment. [Vox / Anya van Wagtendonk]

There’s no evidence Joe Biden acted in his son’s interest in the 2016 request or in dealing with Ukraine as vice president. Biden criticized Trump for seeming to cross the line himself, and urged him to release a transcript of his call with Zelensky. [The Hill / Jesse Byrnes]

Biden continues to lead the polls in the run-up to the 2020 primaries, and is largely considered to be one of few Democratic candidates who can match up against the sitting president in next fall’s elections. [RealClearPolitics]

Whatever the resolution of the event, it’s an early predictor of how dirty the US elections will get. [Guardian / Richard Wolffe]

150,000 travelers stranded abroad

The financial collapse of Thomas Cook — the oldest travel company in the world — in the early hours of Monday has left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded in their holiday destinations, further affecting the daily operations of booking websites, credit card companies and other travel firms. [Reuters / Kate Holton]

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had said the UK government would not intervene to save Thomas Cook through a bailout package, though he pledged Monday to help travelers return home in the nation’s biggest ever peacetime repatriation operation. Most vacation packages sold by British companies have government protections. [NYT / Michael Wolgelenter]

The firm, which has operated since 1841, has further put some 21,000 jobs at risk. [FT / Philip Georgiadis, Myles McCormick, and Adam Samson]

Thomas Cook CEO Peter Fankhauser issued a statement saying that the collapse is a matter of profound regret. He cited insurmountable challenges in the final weeks of negotiations with creditors. [CNN / Bianca Britton, Jessie Yeung, and Sherisse Pham]

Miscellaneous

Chanel Miller, the woman who was sexually assaulted while unconscious by Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, speaks out for the first time on NBC’s 60 Minutes. [NBC News / Yuliya Talmazan]

The Television Academy bid farewell to some record-breaking drama and comedy series on Sunday night, with awards show favorites like Game of Thrones and Veep having their last run at the Emmys. See who won big at the ceremony. [Vox / Emily Todd VanDerWerff and Alissa Wilkinson]

A runway model protested Gucci’s use of straightjackets and other outfits alluding to mental health patients during the fashion house’s show at Milan Fashion Week, calling the decision “vulgar, unimaginative and offensive.” [CNN / Amy Woodyatt]

Cats may not be as aloof as you think. A new study suggests felines form attachment styles to their caregivers similar to human babies and dogs. [Vice / Jordan Pearson]

Verbatim

“I want people to realize you’re never too broken to be fixed.” [Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness opens up about past sexual abuse and his HIV status in a New York Times profile]

Watch this: Glad You Asked

Ever wonder what “the cloud,” a.k.a. the internet, actually looks like? Or why memes look the way they do? The first season of Glad You Asked premieres October 8. [Youtube]

We want to bring you more videos and ambitious series with the hosts you love. Join the Vox Video Lab today to support our work on YouTube.

6 Native leaders on what it would look like if the US kept its promises

US-North Korea nuclear talks are sputtering. South Korea is furious.

It turns out money can kind of buy happiness after all

The bare minimum America could do to expand health coverage

Democrats are stuck in a doom loop of premature polling

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ileneca7 · 6 years

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Technical Tuesday & If I Were A Russian Agent...

Courtesy of Phil of Phil’s Stock World

Well, we’re making no progress.

On Friday we looked at our bounce levels and we were encouraged that we’d improved enough to be a bit more confident into the weekend but the ongoing Government shutdown by the President is making us more and more concerned every day – especially with the mounting evidence that President Trump may be a Russian Agent who’s actual intent is to weaken this country. Still, the entire GOP is going along with this insanity and they can’t all be in Putin’s pocket – can they?

Even if Trump isn’t destroying America on behalf of Vladimir Putin, he’s still destroying America, so we added some hedges to our Short-Term Portfolio yesterday in our Live Member Chat Room in order to lock in our recent profits as well as to protect ourselves from the next Twitter rampage coming out of the oval office.

Trump is meeting with Congress this morning and, hopefully, it will go better than Friday’s meeting, where he threw a tantrum and walked out because Nancy Pelosi said no to his wall – even after he offered her candy. Meanwhile, you can see the Brits debating Brexit all day and all night in their Parliament because, when something important is affecting your Government – a real Government tends to focus on the problem.

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That’s a live feed – how cool is that?

Don’t even try to compare that to CSpan – it will make you cry. British Parliament is based on debate and consensus so any MP is a skilled orator – it’s basically a job requirement. Most of our Congresspeople can’t put two coherent sentences together without their entire staff working overtime to prep them and God forbid our Congresspeople get interrupted – that’s game over for them but that’s the entire game in the UK – a much better way to discuss the issues.

With about an hour to go before the markets open, the Futures are down a bit and that may not seem bad but the Dow (/YM) Futures were up 200 points around midnight and have since collapsed back to where we were at yesterday’s close. The big boost came from an announcement out of China that they would implement more stimulus such as a cut in VAT rates as well as tax rebates and go-forward tax reductions to “Make China great again!”

We’ll hear more doveish comments from Kashkari (11:30am), Kaplan and George (1pm) as the Brexit vote is expected to fail and the Fed will look to offset our own market turmoil so it will be a wild day. This morning we got very bad news as the Empire State Manufacturing Index dropped 66.6% to 3.9 vs 10.75 expected by leading Economorons. I always find it very disturbing when the “great” economic minds that are consulted by Bloomberg et al are completely missing economic deterioration that is going on right under their noses.

How many other things are they getting wrong and who is relying on these morons to make policy? Also a surprise is a 0.2% DROP in the December Producer Price Index, so now we have DEflation and even the core PPI (ex-food & energy) is down 0.1% – for the Fed, that’s much, much worse than inflation so it is starting to look like their December rate increase may have been a mistake after all.

It is estimated now that we are losing 0.1% of our GDP for each week the Government remains shut down and, as noted yesterday, estimates are now 2.2% vs 3.1% pre-shutdown so we’re looking at dipping below 2% by next week if this thing isn’t resolved and keep in mind we’ll be hearing warnings from many of the corporations that will be reporting over the next few weeks – not a recipe for a bull market by any means!

As with many things, the Republicans think if they can’t see the effect at their local Mercedes dealership, then it isn’t real – no matter how much data you present them with and it makes you wonder how many of those “Leading Economorons” are Republicans but I think most of them, since it’s exactly those kinds of clueless, fact-ignoring idiots that the GOP likes to employ in order to make their completely unrealistic economic policies sound better to the American people.

Unfortunately that means, when you really need good economic forecasting – there’s little to be found and certainly none for those that advise our President most closely (Kudlow, Laffer….. say no more!). Of course, if I were a Russian Agent looking to destroy the US economy, I would want to surround myself with the dumbest economists I could find so – mission accomplished – I guess…

If I were a Russian Agent, I might have collected $109M in cash from Russians – Trump did. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.”

If I were a Russian Agent, Russia might interfere in an election to put me into office – Russia did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I might direct Russian spies to hack the computers of my opponents – Trump did and Russia did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d have a lot of contacts with Russian operatives along with my team – Trump and his team have 101 documented contacts with Russia, so far.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d hire a campaign manager who was also an agent who would feed data to the Russian hackers in order to better coordinate election-rigging – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d fire the head of the FBI who was looking into the “Russia thing” if I could – Trump did. He also bragged about it to the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Minister while sharing top-secret information with them – hardly the worst of his crimes…

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d seek to undermine the credibility of US Intelligence and even my own Justice Department – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d take Vladimir Putin’s word over my own experts on Russia’s role in election hacking – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d try to get the US out of NATO and encourage other Members to quit the alliance – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d support pro-Russian leaders in Europe like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France – Trump did and does.

If I were a Russian Agent, I would praise Putin as “a strong leader” while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of Allied Nations. I would even praise Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats and, notwithstanding written instructions from my own aides saying “DO NOT CONGRATULATE”, I would congratulate Putin on winning his own rigged reelection – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d burn the notes about my meeting with Putin – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d defend Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan – along with anything else Putin cares to do – Trump did and does.

If I were a Russian Agent, I’d pull our troops out of Syria, handing control of the country over to Russia – Trump did.

If I were a Russian Agent, I would not respond to Russian attacks on Ukranian ships in International Waters nor would I look into Russia’s poisoning of various strategic agents around the World – Trump did not.

These are just some of the FACTS that just happen to be very consistent with the thesis that Donald Trump is a Russian Agent that was placed in power to undermine the United States of America and irreparably divide our country along with a massive disinformation campaign aimed to destabilize our entire Democracy. You may, of course, form your own opinion from these facts – it’s a free country – for now…

Technical Tuesday & If I Were A Russian Agent… was originally published on MarketShadows

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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as Trump attacks impeachment as ‘deep state’ conspiracy

By David Nakamura | Published October 08 at 7:05 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 9, 2019 9:20 AM ET |

The debate over President Trump’s fitness for office amid the House-led impeachment inquiry has put renewed scrutiny on national security officials who served in his administration to speak out, even as the president ramps up efforts to discredit the investigation as a “deep state” plot to destroy him.

Over the past week, several former officials have spoken critically of Trump’s conduct and his foreign policy, lending weight to the picture of a president motivated by political interests with little regard for policy expertise, legal boundaries or institutional restraints.

Although the critiques have not all directly addressed the focus of the House investigation — Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden — they have added to the case being made by the president’s critics that he is putting U.S. security at risk.

Recent remarks by former national security adviser John Bolton and former State Department presidential envoy Brett McGurk — along with an open letter from a large group of national security figures including some who served under Trump — represent the latest clash between the president and the experts charged with keeping the nation safe.

Trump has feuded with the national security community since many in the Republican establishment opposed his candidacy in 2016. And throughout the investigation into Russian interference in that election, the president sought to disparage U.S. intelligence agencies as a part of a politically motivated campaign to sabotage his presidency and sought to target some who spoke against him as partisan foils.

Those who have come forward since the Ukraine impeachment inquiry was announced said they are determined to make clear that Trump’s conduct falls well outside the institutional boundaries of the presidency.

“What is happening currently is not normal,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as a U.S. intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasia before stepping down in 2018. “This represents a deviation from the way that these institutions regularly function. And when the institutions don’t work, that is a national security threat.”

She was among 90 national security veterans who signed an open letter published Sunday in support of the anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint that Trump had acted improperly in asking the Ukranian president to investigate Biden in a July phone call.

Trump has attempted to intimidate other government officials into not cooperating by casting those who offered information to the whistleblower as “close to spies.” The open letter emphasized that the whistleblower “is protected from certain egregious forms of retaliation.”

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s critics have seized on criticism from ex-officials as evidence that Democrats have more than enough material to justify the impeachment proceedings against him and to try to remove him from office.

McGurk, the former special envoy charged with coordinating the global campaign against the Islamic State, issued a scathing series of tweets Monday calling Trump “not a Commander-in-Chief” for his abrupt decision to order U.S. troops out of northern Syria. The move could put Kurdish forces, longtime partners in the fight against ISIS, in jeopardy.

Trump makes “impulsive decisions with no knowledge or deliberation,” said McGurk, who registered similar concerns in December when he resigned in protest.

His critique was met with widespread approval on social media, garnering nearly 50,000 likes, as prominent anti-Trump voices called on other former administration officials — most prominently former defense secretary Jim Mattis — to speak out in a similar vein.

Mattis also resigned in December in protest of Trump’s policy on Afghanistan and Syria, but he has refrained from presenting an unvarnished public critique despite publishing a book in August on his Pentagon service.

“Where is General Mattis?” Joe Lockhart, who served as White House press secretary during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings , wrote on Twitter. Nicolle Wallace, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, wrote that consensus among GOP national security experts and elected officials is that the country would be severely damaged by a second Trump term.

“This would be the moment to say that out loud,” she urged.

Some former officials have been reluctant to weigh in part over fears it could muddy public perception of the national security institutions.

“In some ways, doing that reinforces the narrative of some hostile deep state and people just point to that by saying, ‘You see? We told you. They were there all along,’ ” said a former high-ranking State Department official who left the agency last year. This person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, felt conflicted about speaking out broadly against Trump after having served inside the administration.

But the former official acknowledged that Trump’s attacks on government agencies are unprecedented and expressed dismay over remarks last weekend from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a prominent Trump ally, that he does not trust the FBI or CIA.

Roberta Jacobsen, who stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 2018, conceded that ex-career officials publicly opposing Trump could contribute to a broader perception of partisanship. But she signed onto the open letter because Trump’s conduct “so violates the rules that you were brought up on and because you think it’s just dangerous for the United States.”

Trump’s efforts to impugn the whistleblower are part of his long-standing playbook to degrade the credibility of those who criticize him. He ripped Mattis — asking “what has he done for me?” — and said he had never met McGurk. He trashed former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as “dumb as a rock” for saying in May that an unprepared Trump was outwitted by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a global summit in 2017.

Last month, Trump forced the resignation of Bolton over broad policy disagreements, then aligned himself publicly with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un over his dislike for the former White House aide. At a Washington think tank last week, Bolton eviscerated Trump’s North Korea strategy as naive and dangerous, suggesting the president was preoccupied with summit-meeting photo ops with Kim. He stopped short of personally criticizing Trump.

And Trump suggested last year that some in the administration were committing treason after an anonymous senior official wrote in the New York Times that aides were quietly working to protect the country against his reckless tendencies.

Amid the impeachment inquiry, Trump has sought to close ranks, ordering a sizable reduction in the staff of the National Security Council, according to Bloomberg News. White House officials said it was an attempt to streamline decision-making.

But others interpreted the move as more evidence that a president distrustful of the government he oversees is determined to rely on his own judgment almost exclusively. As if to underscore that concern, Trump boasted Monday of his “great and unmatched wisdom” in defending his Syria decision.

Bryan McGrath, a retired naval officer who helped organize the first “Never Trump” letter in 2016, said GOP national security veterans are deliberating over how to “reengage in a big way” ahead of the 2020 election.

During his time in the Navy, he was trained that his commander “was to be obeyed,” and current officers have a similar responsibility, he said. But now out of uniform, McGrath said he feels compelled to speak out.

“This is a unique, deep and long-lasting threat,” he said.

Impeachment is the latest chapter in the battle between democracy and white supremacy

By Carol Anderson | Published October 09 at 6:00 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 9, 2019 9:20 AM ET |

President Trump has called the impeachment inquiry facing him “bullshit” and tweeted furiously that it is nothing less than a coup. He has even warned of a civil war. These claims are as incendiary as his demonization of immigrants, his barely veiled anti-Semitism and his embrace by and of white supremacists, all of which have already led to violence, hate crimes and slaughter.

That is the threat he holds over our heads: to “tear our country apart” if Congress holds him accountable, a threat militia groups, including those with ties to white power organizing, are taking seriously. Yet if we bow down to his threats, it will once again be the United States capitulating to extortion, something made possible by Trump’s commitment to a raft of racist policies he promises his base in return for unchecked power.

When it comes to a nation held hostage to racism, we have been here before.

During the Revolutionary War, the British occupied New York City, ran George Washington’s Continental Army nearly ragged and went in for the kill as they attacked the rebellion’s soft underbelly — the South. Georgia and South Carolina were not ready for the onslaught. They simply could not find enough white men willing to take up arms to fend off the oncoming assault on Charleston and Savannah. As the British got closer and closer to Charleston, the Continental Congress rushed a representative to South Carolina with a plan. There were men available, the representative from Congress pleaded, they just were not white. It was time, he said, to arm the enslaved.

The South Carolina government recoiled in “horror” at the suggestion. This war for liberty did not and could not include those of African descent.

Despite the looming peril, South Carolina’s answer to the Continental Congress was simple: It would rather surrender to the British than arm the enslaved. These southern colonists would rather die for white supremacy than live in a nation where the revolutionary language of equality could become the actual reality.

The same choice of white supremacy versus a nation committed to democracy and equality threatened to derail the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Articles of Confederation had exposed the economic and political incoherence of the new nation. With individual states printing their own money and making foreign policy independent of the federal government — often blindsiding it with their actions — the European powers were eagerly exploiting the United States’ weaknesses and were poised to pick clean the bones of a nation that seemed to be dying before it even really began.

The Constitutional Convention was to be the antidote to that systemic illness by creating a governing structure that would be coherent enough to thrive and strong enough to fend off the nation’s enemies.

South Carolina and Georgia, however, had other plans and held a weakened nation’s very survival hostage to their priority: slavery. Their representatives threatened to walk away from the convention if a series of measures, from the three-fifths clause to the Fugitive Slave provision to a continuation of the Atlantic slave trade for another 20 years, were not embedded in the nation’s founding document.

They won, and the nation lost.

By emboldening and strengthening slavery, the Constitution allowed white supremacy to trump the nation’s founding ideas. The Faustian deal cut in 1787, though, could not ensure national unity.

The South’s insistence on spreading slavery throughout the increasing territorial breadth of the United States, which was land that had been seized from the indigenous people and redistributed to whites, eventually proved to be too much. When Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency on a platform explicitly opposed to the expansion of slavery, 11 states rejected the nation’s choice, seceded and attacked the United States. They fought a war for slavery and white supremacy that would leave more than 1.1 million dead and wounded.

But even the bloody Civil War did not end this battle. Nearly 100 years later, white supremacy would again hold the country’s national security hostage.

In 1957, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched a satellite, Sputnik, into space. That technological prowess sent shock waves through the national security bureaucracy. It meant the U.S.S.R. had capabilities the intelligence agencies had underestimated and, even more important, that the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were no longer major barriers between the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal and targets in the United States.

Technological heft had to meet technological heft. America needed more scientists and engineers. President Dwight Eisenhower, therefore, insisted the nation could no longer afford to willingly leave so many of its people undereducated. He proposed a bill to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for colleges and universities to create the brainpower to fight the Cold War.

That effort to defend the nation, however, ran headlong into massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Southern Democrats, who controlled many key committees in Congress, were determined to use every legislative lever to undermine the court’s landmark ruling to end Jim Crow in the schools.

Rep. Carl Elliott (D-Ala.) and Sen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) insisted the National Defense Education Act would pass only if they received assurances from the Eisenhower administration that whites-only schools could continue to defy the Brown decision, deny African Americans admission, yet still receive millions of dollars in federal funding to build up their labs, faculty and curriculum. The Eisenhower administration agreed, choosing to concede to these Southern demands rather than recognizing that capitulation undermined Brown and the rule of law and severely hampered the nation’s ability to create the full cadre of scientists and engineers needed to fend off the Soviets’ challenge.

In other words, even when faced with the potential of nuclear annihilation, protecting Jim Crow trumped protecting the nation.

That same destructive pattern defines the United States today as it sits at another crossroads: Are we going to defend American democracy, equal rights and the rule of law or bow down to protect Trump and the white supremacist state he is attempting to rebuild?

Following in the path of slaveholders, Trump has popularized racist rhetoric and policies that clearly violate the professed ideals of equality and freedom for which the country claims to stand. Trump has called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” reportedly suggested asylum seekers from Central America be shot, made clear he preferred immigration from Scandinavia rather than from those “shithole countries” in Africa. He has removed “a nation of immigrants” from the mission of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and, instead, targeted Muslim, Asian, Haitian and Latino immigrants for bans, deportation and family separation.

Just as segregationists did before him, he has worked to limit voting rights of minorities, amplifying the lie of voter fraud to enable his state-level allies to pursue discriminatory policies such as voter ID laws, voter roll purges and poll closures, all to keep as many African American, Hispanic, Native American and Asian American voters from the ballot box. He has nominated and the GOP-majority Senate has confirmed more than 150 right-wing judges on the federal bench to solidify these gains.

From the very beginning then, Trump has staked his presidency on a 21st-century version of white supremacy, emerging around the globe. It is in the service of both white nationalism and his own interests that Trump has repeatedly abused his office and American power and, in the process, threatened U.S. national security. All of this should have triggered the constitutional guardrails to protect the Republic. It didn’t.

Why? Because Trump remains in high standing with predominantly white Republican base voters who have been vocal about their fears of diversity. A Pew Research Center study showed 46 percent of white adults believe “a majority nonwhite population will weaken American culture.” A New Jersey police chief blatantly expressed his belief that Trump is the “last hope for white people.” It is Trump’s policies that valorize such views and so endear him to Republicans, which, in turn, protects him from accountability.

Until now.

It took a Democratic House of Representatives and his attempt to shake down the Ukrainian president to get dirt on a political opponent to finally launch an impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s response to the impeachment investigation is revealing: He has encouraged the well-armed and unregulated right-wing militia to go to war if he is held accountable for violating his oath of office and betraying the United States. Just as Southerners did on the eve of the Civil War, historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted, “when Trump threatens civil war, he is not just talking about saving his own hide; he is calling for his supporters to rally around race and gender so they protect the oligarchy that has been gathering power for a generation or more.”

Since the nation’s founding, the refusal to believe in democracy and follow through on the nation’s ideals — equality and freedom — has been the nation’s consistent enemy. Time and time again, white supremacists have sacrificed these principles to advance their own interests and that of their white supporters. Trump has followed suit, adding the disregard for the rule of law to the list. When challenged, he has also invoked the strategy white supremacist leaders have also mastered: threats of violence and extortion.

Unfortunately, Trump’s threats seem to be working. Although “democracy is fighting for its life,” some have contended that regardless of how well justified impeaching him is, it would be perilous for the nation to follow the constitutional mandate for accountability and the rule of law. It would be “dragging America into new and stormy seas.” But that sentiment is the same Damocles’ sword that has hung over the United States since the Revolutionary War.

It is time we have to call white supremacy’s bluff.

It is not a belief in democracy that could tear this nation apart. Rather, it is not believing in it that has been this nation’s consistent enemy.

U.S. judge balks at Justice Dept. bid to deny House access to Mueller grand jury materials

By Spencer S. Hsu | Published October 08 at 8:40 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 9, 2019 9:20 AM ET |

Justice Department lawyers urged a federal judge Tuesday to deny a House Judiciary Committee request for grand-jury materials from former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, arguing that despite legal rulings during the impeachment inquiry into President Richard M. Nixon, in hindsight courts in 1974 should not have given Congress materials from the Watergate grand jury.

“Wow, okay,” Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington responded, sounding unpersuaded. “As I said, the department is taking extraordinary positions in this case.”

Howell called the stance one of several “extreme” arguments presented by Trump administration lawyers in opposing the House request for Mueller grand-jury materials, part of a widening impeachment investigation of President Trump.

Over a two-hour hearing, Howell voiced strong skepticism of Justice Department arguments against granting the House petition, presented in a lawsuit that predated Congress’s current impeachment inquiry surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine.

Howell, a 2010 appointee of President Barack Obama, pressed veteran Justice Department civil division litigator Elizabeth J. Shapiro on whether the department now viewed as “wrongly decided” a landmark ruling by then-Chief U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica that transferred a sealed report and grand-jury evidence to House investigators, who prepared Nixon’s articles of impeachment.

The grand-jury materials, colloquially known as the “Sirica road map,” gave Congress evidence in the legal case against Nixon for the burglary — and subsequent coverup — of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex. Nixon resigned as the 37th president before he was formally impeached.

“If that same case were heard today, a different result would obtain,” Shapiro said, saying Sirica relied on an “ambiguous” interpretation of law that no longer is valid.

The courtroom debate Tuesday turned on a 1974 federal appeals court decision in Haldeman v. Sirica that upheld that congressional impeachment proceedings are excepted from normal grand-jury secrecy rules.

The decision found that a House impeachment investigation and Senate trial qualify under an exemption that permits prosecutors to share information “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.”

In the request before Howell, the Judiciary Committee and House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter are asking her to order the release to Congress of redacted portions of Mueller’s 448-page final report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, grand-jury materials cited by the report and grand-jury witness statements subject to the “judicial proceeding” exception.

In court Tuesday, the Justice Department argued that in a decision this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit tightened grand-jury secrecy requirements in a way that would exclude impeachment inquiries.

The circuit, in April in McKeever v. Barr, struck down one factor relied on by Sirica, finding that contrary to his 1974 ruling, judges have no “inherent authority” to release such grand-jury materials when the public interest outweighs the need for secrecy. However, the circuit court in a footnote agreed with Sirica that congressional impeachment still qualifies as a “judicial proceeding.”

Howell did not say how or when she would rule but ordered Justice Department attorneys to explain by Friday why prosecutors are not sharing the information under another exception that allows prosecutors to give federal or foreign officials information about “grave hostile acts of a foreign power” or “clandestine intelligence gathering.” Howell also ordered the department to disclose how many — and which — FBI witness interview reports that it pledged to give the committee have been turned over so far and how many it plans to turn over, as well as the legal basis for withholding FBI interview reports of witnesses who never went before the grand jury.

In an evening filing, the Justice Department said it had provided the committee access to FBI reports for 17 of 33 individuals it requested, although those of senior Trump advisers Uttam Dhillon and Rob Porter were mostly redacted to protect conversations with the president. The department said it expects to make the remaining individuals’ reports available “so long as they do not adversely impact ongoing investigations and cases” and are redacted “to protect Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”

The remaining individuals include former White House counsel Donald McGahn and two of his deputies, John Eisenberg and Annie Donaldson; former top Trump advisers Stephen K. Bannon, Hope Hicks and Reince Priebus; and senior Justice Department officials Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Burnham and Dana Boente, a former acting attorney general and now FBI counsel.

The House lawsuit preceded Congress’s impeachment inquiry. It started about two weeks ago, after disclosure of Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian government officials to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 campaign rival, and Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

That inquiry focuses on an intelligence community whistleblower’s complaint that Trump abused the powers of his office and that the White House allegedly tried to cover up the matter, including the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military aid from Ukraine.

Letter, in court, said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in announcing the official impeachment inquiry, did not limit it to Ukraine but included an “umbrella” of pending investigations by six House committees.

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Ready for another crazy day at the U.N.?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/ready-for-another-crazy-day-at-the-u-n/

Ready for another crazy day at the U.N.?

What. A. Day. Get ready for another crazy one.

THE ZIP CODE 10017might be the only in the Western world where news of a presidential impeachment inquiry in the United States didn’t cause an immediate stir.

It’s not that U.N.-world doesn’t care:It’s that special forces of gravity apply here. In the words of one senior U.N. official, “Being here brings all these leaders down a peg. They all look a little bit lost, because for once they are not the center of attention.” In this environment of endless motorcades, security lines and preplanned lectures, Twitter and cable news are not the dominant forces of conversation.

Rest assured, U.N.-world caught up with normal world by Tuesday dinner. Playbook’s UNGA Tuesday evening was spent surrounded by former presidents and prime ministers in their sixties who couldn’t hold a table conversation — because they spent most of the meal glued to their phones searching for Donald Trump updates. If that sounds weird, remember that Greta Thunberg doesn’t act like a regular teenager, so there’s no reason the politicians should live up to their stereotypes either.

Hello again from New York City,where POLITICO’s delegation to the U.N. General Assembly is as breathless as everyone else trying to keep up with the blur of political news. There’s everything from sledgehammers against multilateralism to sidewalk diplomacy, stunning British court cases to jaw-dropping Ukranian bullying allegations.

While President Trump argues that the U.S is doing better than ever, and that any impeachment proceedings will be politically positive for him, you can still expect today to be total chaos. Inside Trump’s world, there’s a clash between public defiance and private anxiety, writes Nancy Cook.

MEETING OF THE YEAR:One source of the chaos will be Trump’s plan to meet this afternoon — around 2:15 p.m. Eastern — with UkrainianPresident Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the man he’s accused of bullying into investigating the family of Joe Biden, under threat of losing U.S. financial assistance. Ukraine adviser Kurt Volker, American Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Mike Pompeo are also slated to attend the sensitive Ukraine meeting.

Impeachment backstory:Trump withdrawing aid to Ukraine on July 25 was the last step in a “months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani,” WaPo reported. No word on whether Rudy will attend today’s bilat with Zelenskiy.

The rest of Trump’s dance card:Trump is also set to hold a press conference (4 p.m. Eastern), meet with other leaders to discuss Venezuela, and with Japan’s Shinzō Abe — hopefully to announce a mini-trade deal.

Today sees a swing back toward the big non-politician names at UNGA, with the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers conference and Bloomberg’s business forum. But the corridor chatter will be all Trump and Iran.

IRAN AND MACRON’S SHUFFLE DIPLOMACY:An energetic burst of Emmanuel Macron’s brand of diplomacy couldn’t overcome the enmity between Washington and Tehran that has been building since, er, the French president was born in the late 1970s.

Macron spent Tuesday scurrying from U.N. headquarters to nearby hotels and back, hoping to pull a diplomatic rabbit out of a hat by convincing Trump and his counterpart, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, to meet face-to-face and begin talks.

Macron bumped into Boris Johnson at the Millennium Hilton, across from U.N. headquarters, where the Frenchman had managed to slip in to see Rouhani just before the British PM’s scheduled bilateral meeting. Macron told Johnson that failure to arrange a meeting “is a lost opportunity,” observers said. “Because he will not come back in a few months. And President Trump will not go to Tehran. So they have to meet now.” Johnson then told Rouhani, “I think I agree with Emmanuel … you need to be on the side of the swimming pool and jump at the same time.

Even with the assist of an impromptu Angela Merkel-Rouhani meeting, that didn’t happen before Macron took off for Paris shortly before midnight. Macron did, however, convince Johnson that Trump and Rouhani should meet this week.

Iran deal parties meeting this morning:The remaining parties to the Iran nuclear deal are meeting this morning with a press conference expected at 9.30 a.m., a fact EU foreign policy honcho Federica Mogherini announced at a cocktail reception hosted on Tuesday evening by the EU representation to the U.N. She called the meeting “the best proof” that the “deal is still in place,” though it comes on the back of France, Germany and the U.K. attributing to responsibility to Iran for the Sept. 14 drone strikes on Saudi oil assets.

Trump wants Iran to make deeper commitments related to controls on its nuclear program and to curtail its role in regional military conflicts. The Iranians first want Trump to lift economic sanctions that he re-imposed when he pulled out of the nuclear accord. Read more on how Trump can escape his Iran jam.

VENEZUELA:While Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is in Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump will meet with Latin American leaders to discuss the situation in Caracas.

Catch up on how it happened here: POLITICO’s team of six reporters covering the U.N. provided live analysis here.

GLOBALISTS VERSUS PATRIOTS:We saw our first glimpse of low-energy President Trump Tuesday. The U.S. president stuck to his teleprompter and got zero reaction from his audience, putting some of them to sleep. What Trump did manage to do was draw a clear line across our collective political consciousness, the one that suggests you must choose between being a globalist and being a patriot. “If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. If you want peace, love your nation,” he said, urging every country to put their own first. “The future does not belong to globalists, it belongs to patriots.”

Leaving aside Trump’s global business portfolio,U.N. officials scoffed at what they see as Trump’s artificial choice: they say they’re running an organization made up of national government members, with little budget and power, not a cabal of self-appointed world leaders. More on the clash between U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and Trump’s vision’s here.

— Other leaders including Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern pushed back against the idea of marginalizing the United Nations in their speeches.

Read this:Realists Not Globalists: What U.S. Critics Get Wrong About the U.N, by Richard Gowan.

Ben Chang, Princeton University’s spokesperson and a former U.S. diplomat to the U.N., writes that there are two United Nations: the one that hosted the climate summit at which Greta Thunberg starred, and the U.N. made up of dues-paying members — including the U.S. — whose leaders question climate change and whose policies Greta seeks to change.

Also read:Don’t cede the U.N. to China, by House Foreign Affairs Lead Republican Michael McCaul.

MACRON’S TALKING POINTS:The French president urged the U.S. and Iran to resume negotiations, and for the world to help save the Amazon. Macron — a strong believer in markets — said today’s “capitalism is dysfunctional” because of “a level of inequalities that is unprecedented.”

BOLSONARO’S BACKLASH:Journalists and pundits panned Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro over the Amazon fires. He wore the clothes of a great environmentalist, while at the same time rejecting new protections and new help for the Amazon and its indigenous people.

Idea of the day:Foreign governments and philanthropists directly paying indigenous people from the Amazon region to keep minerals in the ground, trees in the soil, and to manage the overall resource. The source of the idea: a CEO of a global company, who asked to remain anonymous, responding to Bolsonaro’s speech.

BORIS AND BREXIT BRIEF:British PM Boris Johnson arrives back in London this morning to face a growing constitutional crisis (never mind the new travel and public funds scandal). While Johnson has been found in stunning breach of Britain’s unwritten constitution for his suspension of parliament, that doesn’t automatically mean he’ll lose his job or that Brexit will be delayed beyond October 31.

Why? The opposition Labour party remains hopelessly divided on Brexit, and Johnson has much better net approval ratings than Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, putting him in a good position to run a “People vs. Parliament and Courts” campaign when the inevitable election is finally called.

Team Boris is also still insisting their UNGA trip was a big success, based on his climate and Iran interventions.

Read this:Everything you need to know about the U.K. court ruling, by POLITICO’s Annabelle Dickson, Emilio Casalicchio and Charlie Cooper.

And this:How long can Boris Johnson cling onto power for? by Luke McGee

Back in 2015, U.N. members agreed on 17 goals that would serve as a blueprint for their efforts to secure a peaceful, sustainable future. The deadline is 2030.

WHY GLOBAL GOALS MATTER:As the U.N. Development Programme puts it, using language lifted directly from anti-poverty campaign kits, “26 people on Earth own the same wealth as 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.”

Status update:The U.N. has tended to paint a rosier picture than outsiders about how well the world is doing in meeting its development goals. Secretary General Antonio Guterres changed that Tuesday evening: “The Global Goals are our blueprint for a fair globalization. But we are far from where we need to be. We are off track.”

What others say:

The Goalkeepers Report from the Gates Foundationargues for a greater focus on extreme poverty, and says that gender and geography are the biggest factors in stacking the deck for or against a person’s chances in life.

43 years behind schedule: The Social Progress Imperative assessed 149 different countries, across 51 different indicators related to the goals. They say the world will be 43 years behind schedule in reaching the U.N. 2030 targets, and that the U.S. has gone backwards since 2014.

GOING LOCAL:There’s a big push this year for localized implementation of the U.N. global goals. Such as this “Making Global Goals Local Business” campaign. Meeting the global goals will depend on hundreds of partnerships across the world, such as these new initiatives below.

Using data to save lives:The Rockefeller Foundation is allocating $100 million for a “Precision Public Health Initiative.” The goal is to prevent 6 million deaths by 2030 by using large datasets, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to reduce preventable maternal and child deaths. Partners include UNICEF, WHO, The Global Fund, the Global Financing Facility and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

$300 million global industry alliance to end plastic waste and clean up oceans:The Minderoo Foundation this afternoon launches “Sea the Future,” which aims to make plastics a cashable commodity. That’s code for an already common (but not widespread) idea: paying customers for returning plastic bottles for recycling. Backers include Conservation International, Walmart, Unilever and The Coca Cola Company.

Breathe freely:TheClean Air Fund and the World Economic Forum are partnering to tackle air pollution. More detailshere.

HELLO (AMBASSADOR) KITTY:Hello Kitty has been rehabilitated. The world-famous “anthropomorphic cat girl” from Japan — last seen receiving a €6.2 million EU antitrust fine — is now a U.N. ambassador, promoting sustainable development goals. U.N. officials unveiled a series of videos, featuring Kitty White explaining the value of equal education opportunities, fighting climate change and expanding health coverage. A human-size Hello Kitty, perhaps an imposter, made an appearance at U.N. headquarters Tuesday.

The Orb is back!

Trolling Trump 1—Greta Thunberg:The teenage climate activist changed her Twitter bio to Trump’s taunting description of her: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” The U.S. president tweeted the remark apparently mocking her alongside a video of Thunberg’s fiery plea for more action from world leaders during Monday’s climate summit.

Trolling Trump 2— Venezeulan bookworm: During Trump’s speech, a Venezuelan delegate strategically chose to read up on Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan military and political leader who helped Latin American countries achieve independence from Spain in the early 1800s. On Twitter, she called Trump’s rhetoric “xenophobic and imperialistic.”

“If we can land a man on the moon, surely we can protect a woman in childbirth.” — Jenni Lee, UN Foundation.

“Why did he want to buy Greenland then? Because he knows it’s going to melt and underneath is all the things he wants to get his greedy little hands on.” — Former Irish President Mary Robinson, on whether Trump is a climate change denier.

“Everything about Brexit makes me want to slit my wrists.” — British CEO speaking to Playbook in the wake of Supreme Court ruling against Johnson’s government.

GLOBAL ENERGY INVESTMENTS REMAIN CARBON-HEAVY:2018 data shows little indication that the world’s current trajectory of energy investment will meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, reports the Internationale Energy Agency.

View the full DataPoint graphic here. Want to add DataPoint to your POLITICO Pro account? Learn more.

THE PEOPLE APPROVE:A Pew study shows that the majority of people around the world have a favorable view of the U.N., including by a wide margin among Americans and two-thirds of Europeans surveyed.

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD CURTIS:The director, producer and screenwriter behind hits ranging from “Mr. Bean” to “Bridget Jones” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” is now dedicating his skills to helping people connect emotionally with the U.N. Curtis once joked that he’d had the published version of an interview cut down to 11 seconds. Ensuring interview justice is served, you can listen to Playbook’s full conversation with Curtis in this podcast

Highlights below.

Why do you think the U.N. struggles to make itself known? “If you’ve negotiated the Sustainable Development Goals for three years and you finally get round to issuing it, it’s quite easy for people who’ve done that not to realize this is the public’s first encounter.”

So what’s the solution?“Make it as accessible, as appealing, as noisy, as populist as you can. The people who make the posters and trailers of my movies: I hate them. Because they reduce the incredible hard work of my movie to one picture that doesn’t even come from the movie. But I know it’s necessary.”

Did the climate strikers take your message of simplicity to heart with their concentrated demands?“I’m incredibly inspired by these movements. [And] what’s happening this week at UNGA, you know that couldn’t really be done by anyone except the U.N … what I’ve tried to do is make the relationship between the U.N. and all these outside forces more vibrant.”

CLASH OF THE RECEPTIONS:The U.S. and EU missions to the U.N. conducted parallel receptions Tuesday night, raising eyebrows at the American end. According to Playbook’s European sources, the Europeans were completely aware of the scheduling clash (and very happy with their turnout, see here).

The EU bash morphed into a kind of farewell reception for the bloc’s chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, who confirmed to the crowd that she would be staying on in Brussels after her term ends November 1. She isn’t easing up between now and then: Mogherini announced the Iran nuclear deal is alive and well to cheers from the crowd, before offering a compliment to Charles Michel (incoming European Council president and outgoing Belgian prime minister), who was present: “The Council will be in excellent hands. I don’t know about Belgium.”

Also spotted at the EU reception:Leo Varadkar, Frans Timmermans, Helga Schmid, Gordon Sondland, Christos Stylianides, Werner Hoyer, Jeppe Kofod, Simon Coveney, Udo Bullmann, Maja Kocijančič, Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, Emma Navarro, Ambroise Fayolle, Shirin Wheeler and Hugo Sobral.

GEN X TIES:European Council President-elect Charles Michel is working to hit the reset button on transatlantic relations that Trump officials say they want. Michel had dinner with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at their private apartment in Manhattan. Playbook’s insiders say the dinner stretched for hours. Michel, who is 43, is about five years older than Javanka, as the U.S. president’s daughter and son-in-law are known in the tabloids. The strategy: Keep your friends close, and your Trumps closer.

MEDIA MELTDOWN:Did you notice an uptick in negative media stories midday Tuesday? It might be because the internet and the coffee evaporated simultaneously at 11 a.m. in the U.N. HQ media tent.

HOW TO BE A GOOD AMBASSADOR IN THE PLATFORM AGE:Diplomacy used to be about listening, clever language and well-deployed cocktails. In this megaphone and digital age where everyone is a self-appointed savior, it’s more complicated. Playbook spoke to a handful of U.N. ambassadors for their take on how to succeed in 2019.

League of their own:“It’s all about relationships,” said one ambassador from a G7 country. In other words: don’t nerd out on your policy brief when you could be taking tea. In the U.N. system, it’s also important to know what league you are playing in. The top of the U.N. pyramid are the “P5” — the ambassadors of the permanent Security Council members: U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France. But the P5 play in what amounts to a “Champions League” and the cast of other teams in that league rotates depending on several factors: how big the country is, the reputation of the country’s leader, whether it’s a temporary Security Council member, and the personal skills of the ambassador.

Germany is a case in point here:Berlin has a very well connected ambassador(Christoph Heusgen)anda respected national leader in Angela Merkel, helping it make up for its lack of P5 status. The European Union is an interesting hybrid: It’s not a U.N. member but it does coordinate weekly meetings of all EU ambassadors, making the U.N. its most tightly organized diplomatic operation outside of Brussels.

UN-TRADITIONAL:One tradition we’d love to skip: the weird photo pose moment before each leader speaks. They sit on a chair that resembles the chairs allocated to Santa characters at shopping malls at Christmas time.

SPOTTED:Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad chatting at the NY Palace.

GOAL!Bill and Melinda Gates hosted their annual Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards Tuesday night at Lincoln Center. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the big global award for progress India is making in improving sanitation. A “Changemaker Award” was presented to youth activist Payal Jangid for her fight against child labor and child marriage in India. A “Progress Award” was presented to Gregory Rockson, co-founder and CEO of mPharma in Africa.

SPOTTEDon Tuesday night at the Concordia Summit’s closing BUILD Act reception at the Ricketts residence at the Residences at the Mandarin Oriental in Columbus Circle: David Bohigian, Matthew Swift, Ray Washburne, Brian Baker, Sylvie Légère Ricketts, Lisa Spies, Elizabeth Littlefield, Heather Nauert, Tony Sayegh, James A. Walsh, James L. Richardson, Steven Olikara, Derek Gianino, John Zimmerebner …

… David Campbell, Robert Mosbacher, Jr., Steven J. Brooks, Menelao Mora de la Lastra, Haitian Ambassador to the U.S. Hervé Denis, David John Frenkel, Nancy Brinker, Becca Glover, Teresa Davis, Anita McBride, Jon Harrison, Brian Morgenstern and Lauren Kirshner.

SPOTTEDon Tuesday night at the Verizon “Green” Cocktails at BUILD studio in the East Village: Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan, Julie Hyman, Henrik Henriksen, Mariana Agathoklis, Rose Stuckey Kirk, Jim Gowen, Jo Lambert, Kyle Dropp and Russell Grant.

All day:U.N. Sustainable Development Goals Summit

Bloomberg Global Business Forum:Keynote to be delivered by Narendra Modi, also featuring Jacinda Ardern, Pedro Sánchez, Sauli Niinistö, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jamie Dimon, Bob Iger, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Daniel Kablan Duncan, Hage Geingob, Danilo Medina, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Scott Morrison, and Carlos Alvarado Quesada.

All day:Gates Foundation Goalkeepers Event

Business Council for International Understandingis running aseries of eventsthrough the rest of the week.

IPCC ocean report release:The report warns that climate change is having dire effects on the world’s seas: “The ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive. Melting glaciers and ice sheets are causing sea level rise, and coastal extreme events are becoming more severe,” according to the release.

Data for Now:Accelerating SDG progress through timely data,8-10 a.m.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-chaspeaks at the Asia Society, 725 Park Ave,9:30 a.m.

Women’s rights:Advancing Women’s Meaningful Participation to Resolve Conflict and Build Peace in Afghanistan, ECOSOC Chamber, UNHQ,12:30-2:30 p.m.

A Conversation with Sheikh Hasina,prime minister of Bangladesh. Afsaneh Beschloss presiding. Council on Foreign Relations, 58 East 68 Street,3:30-4:30 p.m.

The George W. Bush Institute’s partnership with UNAIDS and Merck,aiming to end cervical cancer among HIV-positive women in sub-Saharan Africa, will announce the results from the first year of the partnership this afternoon.

Project Everyone 2020 campaign launchat UN HQ,5:30-6:30 p.m.

Swedish Sustainable Leaders reception,Swedish Residence, featuring leaders of IKEA, Ericsson, Scania, Skanska, Hybrit and others,6-8 p.m.

Future Island Nation:President of Maldives and Parley’s CEO will be hosting an event announcing a “Future Island Nation” program at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum,from 7 p.m.

#crazy #Foreign #Politics #ready

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unwilling-ships-surgeon · 5 years

Text

marcellus notes

is 24 in 1705

is 34 in 1715

born in 1681

mother’s family expulsed from portugal in 1496

both sides of family expulsed from poland in 1648 by cossack uprising, remaining family wiped out in the rebellion and the deluge

mother’s family in izmir by 1650

father’s family in london by 1656

father’s family victim of repeated attacks in 1656-1658 during the debates on the readmission of the jews

grandfather arrested in 1673 on charge of rioting when attending services in duke’s place

father left for ottoman izmir in 1679

born in on synagogue street in izmir in 1681, 5 years after the messianic business

father’s parents and brothers killed in london in 1687 by EITC traders who had been trying to collect protection payments from a different jewish family, 3 years after the EITC declared all jews alien infidels and perpetual enemies of the crown

father moved the family back to deal with their affairs, only to find their belongings given to their murderers

moved in with relatives of their izmiri neighbors, sephardi New Christians

at age 8 in 1689 he dresses in boy’s clothes for the first time and runs away, moving in with an english ashkenazi surgeon who allows him to be his apprentice when he says he’s orphaned. he’s assumed dead.

the ashkenazi surgeon was an actor during the era of jacobean and elizabethan plays, so marcellus learns english out of the plays, including shakespeare. he previously spoke only “vulgar” (low-class) turkish, “yahudice” (ladino), and lithuanian yiddish.

aside from yiddish, which the surgeon speaks the ukranian form of and not often, he stops using the other two languages, except for turkish, which he writes his journals in. the surgeon chides him constantly, and drills him on pronunciation and grammar, drilling him on latin and greek as well as masculine mannerisms. marcellus, who has picked the name marcellus for himself from the plays he’s read, spends all the time he’s not in lessons as the accidental doctor to a troupe of young boys who he smuggles food, clothes, and medicine out to constantly. the surgeon doesn’t notice, until he does.

at age 12 he gets his period for the first time, and the surgeon, realizing that he’s trans, kicks him out of his house. the boys take him in, and one or two who are trans like him teach him how to take care of himself.

at 14 he does his first top surgery, after one of the boys bullies, bothers, and bribes him into trying it. the books he stole from the surgeon and has been stealing ever since teach him roughly how to do it, and he remembers the precedent from a pamphlet on muslim medicine he had read when he was young and that had always stayed with him bc trans. he manages it, and word spreads fast.

within two years they’ve created a space for him to work, and he not only does mastectomies, he’s the doctor to come to when gay-bashings happen, and when the space above him learns that he’s a jew, and not only that but a turkish jew, the New Christians let him use their back rooms as a halfway house. in return he has two of his friends help out around their house, one of them eventually joining their employ

he becomes a doctor of some note, people in the aristocracy who want things clandestinely cared for start coming to him, and when he tries to use this to kill a lord who’d poisoned a community member while he’d been his lover that’s how he ends up impressed into naval service as a “barber surgeon” of some repute, unable to contest it because, under the vagrancy laws, there was no protection for jews from this and the lord wanted him gone, not dead. he’s 19 when impressed, and is released from service by a superior when he’s found fucking one of the men, and discovered to be trans. the other man is executed for buggery, and marcellus is marooned because the superior believes it’s bad luck to have a woman on a ship. it takes marcellus eight months, but he makes it back to london, finds that the community has kept the doors open while he’s been gone, but that the apprentice he’d had while he was there had been killed on the pillory for sodomy, she’d been a molly and had been stoned to death. he closes the surgery, although not the halfway house, for three days over rosh hashana while he grieves and resets everything, and tries to find out who from the navy that he’d known is still in london, and then he reopens the surgery, and is flooded with people who need top surgery, people who want to try transfeminine bottom surgery, illnesses, gaybashings, treatments of people imprisoned or coming down from the pillory, and he doubles down, and in the process falls in love several times, staying close friends with several after the romance fades. he treats sti’s, and in a few memorable circumstances where community members don’t want to go to rabbis, acts as a mohel. he holds services in his surgery once, but never again after it’s too much and there’s an antisemitic occurrence. things continue for a while, and three years later, and he continues to accumulate languages (namely arabic, spanish, and cornish) and when marcellus is 24, he gets contacted by an earl to tend to his son, who’s been institutionalized in bedlam for being a high-profile sodomite and possible catholic sympathizer.

marcellus handles that illness, and the next, and when the son is disappeared and said to have died of an illness marcellus knows he didn’t have, marcellus goes to the earl's home to press him, because he cared for the earl’s son and because he’s never again likely going to be able to spit in an earl’s face. he tells no one he’s doing this, leaving only brief instructions to his two apprentices (he has since written instructions for how to train people to replace him in case something were to happen to himself or anyone else), and he never even gets the satisfaction of spitting in the earl’s face. the second he sets foot in his house he becomes aware just how massively and all-encompassingly able to crush him the lord is, and when he doubles down and confronts him about his son, the earl tells him little more than that it’s none of his concern, but when marcellus starts laying out the evidence he has, the earl starts listening, furious, then tells marcellus he has until dawn to get out of city or else he and everyone else in the “hebraic den of iniquity” would be burned to the ground. he stands his ground, saying that he’ll find the earl’s son, then, if he does leave, and the earl has him arrested, and nearly re-impressed into naval service. marcellus is lucky enough that one of the men arresting him knows him, so he’s able to escape, but when he sees one of the earl’s spies as he enters his surgery, he can only grab his bag for travelling on doctor business, the backpack he keeps if he needs to run, because by the jewish measure it’s already dawn (it’s an hour before sunrise), and he makes eye contact with the spy as he leaves, goes to the docks, and gets onto a spanish ship saying he’s a barber surgeon of some repute and he’s looking for passage to the west indes, because he’s a doctor who can speak spanish, they take him, and that’s the last time he sets foot in london.

it’s his first transatlantic voyage, and he nearly gets outed as gay or trans multiple times. he does get outed as a jew when his spanish slips into ladino and is called el judio for the rest of the crossing, finding salt pork in his bed multiple times. he journals extensively, gets someone to teach him to use a knife well, picks the surname orestes for himself, changing it from hippocrates, which he had used while impressed, and starts writing his journals in ladino, writing poetry and gay shit in turkish and arabic.

he spends two years in spanish florida in a small shack where he sells medicines to spanish naval men, and tries to get books on native plants, which don’t exist. he moves to st augustine after a hurricane destroys the city he lives in, and ends up doing a lot of first aid for communities of formerly enslaved people, many of whom had escaped from british colonies and converted to catholicism so they wouldn’t be returned. he has to overcome the impulse to speak turkish, since the last time he lived in a place with a significant black population it was in ottoman turkey. he learns a lot as he apprentices to local midwives, both about ways to care for wounds and promote healing and handle fever and about how being enslaved in the british colonies is not too dissimilar from being a New Christian when it comes to how hidden stories are told. it is the first time in his life he is not surrounded by young people, and learns, truly learns how to have humility towards his elders. he picks fights with members of the british navy, and when scotland is annexed in 1707 he gets drunk on behalf of a scottish friend he had once loved, goes looking for trade, and gets arrested for sodomy and pilloried by the very christian spaniards he’s been working for for years. the two women he apprentices under send their son to collect him, and for the first time in his life he awakes from unconsciousness feeling less damaged than he felt before it. in exchange, because he doesn’t know how to accept that he can be cared for by someone who doesn’t want to fuck him, he starts giving lessons in speaking and writing in spanish and english when the two midwives, who, after two years marcellus is beginning to understand are as good as wed, can spare him. their son is an avid polyglot, already speaking french, spanish, english, and ibo at age 11, and marcellus becomes fiercely proud of him, creating space for him to apprentice in his language lessons, never so overtly that he would be offended by the implication he need learn to do anything, but enough that when marcellus needs to step away to help his mothers as they begin to age, he steps into the stewardship of the language school effortlessly. marcellus doesn’t realize that he’s been reading the books that marcellus has laying around until he confronts marcellus with a book of his own poetry, written in turkish, and asks him what the script is. it takes everything marcellus has not to panic over being confronted with it, but he tells him that it’s arabic script, but also that it’s personal. he asks marcellus if he uses a language no one understands to write like he does, and that’s how marcellus learns that the kid has been a prolific poet and songwriter for years. he finds ways to gift the kid blank paper and writing implements as often as he can after that, and when, at 13, the kid realizes he likes men, marcellus is the third one to know, after his mothers. marcellus and he have a more candid conversation about the importance of code and hidden languages then, but as the young man is now fully independently head of a language school independent enough to have its own building, it’s mostly just marcellus, dead-serious, assuring him that if ever he needs marcellus, marcellus will be there. one year the midwives give him as close to a gift of hrt as would be possible at the time. because they treated him after his pillorying, they know he’s trans, and when they encounter a merchant trying to offload what’s essentially testosterone pills that they had gotten from a trader who’d gotten them from china, they buy it from him because he’s essentially selling it for the price of the crate, and they gift it to him. and he starts taking them, and when several other people find out that this exists, he gladly lets himself be the test subject on whom its effects are seen. within a month his voice begins to drop, then his cycle stops, and by the time the handful of other people begin to take their daily supplements, marcellus is finding that for the first time in his life he can grow a beard. the kid can grow a better one than he can, but it’s there and marcellus is almost entirely rendered awestruck. he thanks the midwives so much, and now that his transness is known to the community, he starts doing gender confirmation work again. that lasts barely a year before the spaniards find out what he’s doing. no longer the beautific, unaging marcellus the jew, he is once again a tangible, arrestable thing, and he finds himself imprisoned three times in a year. the family that he’s lived with now for almost five years is threatened, and it’s with the deepest fury towards spanish florida that he prepares once again to leave. it’s been almost two years since the enormous box of tiny pills became the largest thing in his room, and his life, but as he thanks how the beard he can now grow makes him unrecognizeable, he laments so utterly, and so suddenly, that once again he has to leave. the older of the midwives, whose hands have curled into themselves in the years he’s known her and whose tenderness has been unmatched in anyone he’s ever known, sits with him and talks long into the night about where he could go, about how they might have him stay, a hundred stories and examples of how the gods she still remembers would handle the threat of merely a few dozen men, until he can make his breathing less ragged and reach out and take her hand and force the words to thank her out of his mouth, and her wife, who also stayed up but to watch for trouble, can tell him that the sun is rising and he can fail to tell her all the ways that he’s loved them both more than anyone he’s ever known, and their son and his lover arrive to walk him down to the docks and marcellus realizes that he’ll never have what he had in the building in london but that the kid is building something that’s almost the same here, and he walks with them with his vastly diminished medical kit and what little he has to his name, the box full of pills still in his room for those who need it more than he does, and they help him stow away on a ship that none of them know where is headed, and he whisper-shouts to them that he left the books of poetry for them, that they can smudge them out and write over them, and the kid says to him in yiddish “we’ll keep them for you” and he lays down in the hull of the ship and sobs lowly and silently, alone, where no one can hear him over the roar of the sea.

it’s a ship south, and within two days he’s discovered. stealthiness had come back to him like it had never left, but he’s a bit taller than he was, and it’s an english ship, with all its regimentation and accounting, that he’s on, so he’s discovered quickly. he’s not recognized, thankfully, but his equiptment is assumed to be stolen. a bag that he’s owned longer than anything else he’s ever had is tossed aside one its contents are empty, and marcellus watches as it slips into the sea, equally numb and outraged. they beat him when he won’t talk, and lock him in away when he chooses to speak to them in french. days pass, and he isn’t fed or given anything to drink, and he tries not to think but there’s nothing else to do and he realizes and feels how deeply he misses london, how much he has loved those he’s lived with, and how much longer than he’d ever dreamed he would he has lived. he realizes, on his third day without water, how desperately he wants to live. it hits him like a shock of cold water, a realization he’s been waiting for for too long. he begs for water in english, only to realize the nearest crewmember speaks spanish, and he begs in that language too. amused by his linguistic prowess, he’s given something to drink, which he barely tastes with how fast it’s gone, and brought to the captain. he’s on his fifth language demonstration when the sails and flag are spotted. he’s completely ignored until the ship is boarded. so he runs, and grabs a bag of something, and empties it, and goes to the ship’s surgery, which has been vacated as cannonfire rips through the ship, and marcellus finds everything that is his, and then begins grabbing everything that he can think he could have a use for. there is garbage enough, but as he stuffs a spare shirt into the bag along with the bandages, he realizes that the cannonfire has stopped, and he finds something to tie off the bag by the time they find him. and when they ask, he says he’s the ship’s surgeon. they pull him onto the main deck, and when the crew calls him ’the polyglot’ and tells them he’s a stowaway, the pirate, who seems to be the quartermaster, gives him a second glance and marcellus says, very simply, ‘i want to live, and leave here. i am a surgeon, just not a ship’s one.’ the quartermaster looks at him, and asks, ‘what’s a surgeon doing as a stowaway? can’t surgeons afford their passage?’ marcellus takes a chance on honesty. ’not known sodomites. there’s very little we can afford.’ the pirate quirks a half-grin, and says to him, ‘we’ll find a use for you. sodomites get an equal share in piracy.’ and if marcellus’s grin is surprised and genuine as he follows, away from what he’s ever known, that’s his own business.

it’s 1711, marcellus is 29, and he’s becoming, for the first time, a pirate.

#this took so many hours to write #ref #me? debating whether to write a book about marcellus separate from black sails?#it's more likely than you think

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 7 years

Text

Sean Moon are you howling with laughter now the same way you did when this family stole the White House with the help of the Russians? Will you howl with laughter when this family is thrown out of the WH? Please take photos when it happens and post them so we can see you laughing raucously.

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

1 / 25

The New York Times

By MATT APUZZO, JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN1 hr ago

WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government attempted to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.

”In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he said to The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

© Ethan Miller/Getty Images Emin Agalarov, right, spoke alongside Donald J. Trump and Erin Brady, Miss USA, in Las Vegas in 2013.It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been given to him by others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald J. Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.

In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he did what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — to hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting weren’t in conflict.

“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”

The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother Eric.

On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Goldstone represents Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Don Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

In the interview, he said that it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.

Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump released in response to a Times story on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said that the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the media.

But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya only offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up at all. She said she never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that the Russian president did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.

Ms. Sanders said at a press briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently but declined to discuss details.

The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 story published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukranian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.

News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting.

The president learned from his aides about the existence of the 2016 meeting at the tail end of the trip, according to one White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.

The president was aggravated by the news of the meeting, according to one person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the media cycle.

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artsy-hobbitses · 3 years

Note

What Are The Nationalities Of The TTB Characters?

There are some who haven’t been included yet, including Blurr, Swerve and the Dinobots who I’m still working on, but here’s the current tally!

AUTOBOTS

Optimus Prime/Omar Parvez (Iranian Kurdish)

Ironhide/Ian Hart (American)

Minimus Ambus/Mahendra Addepali (Indian)

Ratchet/Ronan Chase (Irish)

Prowl/Preston Wan (Chinese)

Jazz/Jace Zayden (African-American)

Blaster/Brandon Shen (Hong Kong)

Ramhorn/Raminah Hamdan (Malaysian)

Steeljaw/Salim Jafari (Kenyan)

Bumblebee/Benjamin Bane (American)

Chromia/Carina Morales (Camien: African American-Latinx)

Wheeljack/Wheedon Jake (Jamaican)

Hound/Hale Donovan (Scottish)

Trailbreaker/Tariq Bukhari (Malaysian)

Hot Rod/Hanley Riordan (Irish)

Springer/Spencer Richards (???)

Arcee/Ai Xia (Chinese)

Drift/Dai Takahiro (Japanese)

Kup/Kopisha Prasad (Nepali)

Mirage/Meirion Rodric (Welsh)

Perceptor: Praveen Satvinder (Sri Lankan)

Nautica/Anita ‘Nita’ Carlos (Mexican Sephardic)

First Aid/Fatima Adnan (Emirati)

Windblade/Wariko Baisho (Camien: Japanese)

Sideswipe & Sunstreaker/Sergio & Serafino Saverio (Italian American)

Skids/Aleksandr ‘Sasha’ Kolyanov (Russian)

Hotspot/Hassan Shandrel (American)

Blades/Beltran Lucero (Mexican Sephardic)

Groove/Guiren Zhao (Taiwanese)

Streetwise/Shamar Wesley (African-American)

Roadbuster/Rafael Badalyan (Armenian Ashkenazi)

Ironfist/Ilya Fedorov (Russian)

Broadside/Berker Sirhan (Turkish)

Strongarm/Stella Armstrong (British)

Whirl/Wille Ruddeli (Swiss)

Impactor: Izem Patterson (British)

DECEPTICONS

Megatron/Morgan Trayton (British)

Starscream: Stefan Scavarro (Italian)

Shockwave/Sharifuddin Waseem (Pakistani)

Soundwave/Suraya Widodo (Indonesian)

Barricade/Barrin Caidel (American Ashkenazi)

Thundercracker/Teo Cortes (Spanish)

Skywarp/Skandar Wahid (Saudi Arabian)

Ravage/Ramiro Vasquez (Mestizo Colombian)

Laserbeak/Lara Soelberg (Norwegian)

Glit/Gan Go-eun (Korean)

Buzzsaw/Bastien Saville (French)

Rumble & Frenzy/Ramsey & Friedel (None, born on Messatine)

Tarn/Tagan (Ukranian)

Helex/Halburg Larsen(Danish)

Vos/Voltaire Saint-Pierre (French-Algerian)

Kaon/Killian O’Connor (Irish)

Nickel/Niccola Constanzo (Italian Ashkenazi)

Tesarus/Tavaris (Spanish)

NON-ALIGNED

Elita 1/Alisa Ivanova (Russian)

Terminus (British)

#inbox #nationalities #Humanformers AU

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 7 years

Photo

There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.

The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.

Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.

“In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.

In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.

Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.

Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump issued in response to a Times article on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but he added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the news media.

Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. His decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.

But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.

Ms. Sanders said at a news briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently, but she declined to discuss details.

The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 article published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukranian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.

The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the end of the trip, according to a White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.

The president was frustrated by the news of the meeting, according to a person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the news cycle.

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