#secretary mnuchin

[kp777]

Oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t just hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself

Excerpt:

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.

Read more.

[avelera]

I've been talking with a few people irl about the TikTok ban and I was wondering if I could get your take on it? (iirc you work in election security). Mainly I'd like to know why TikTok/China is *uniquely* bad wrt dating mining/potential election interference when we've seen other companies/governments do the same thing (thinking of the Russian psyops here on Tumblr in 2016). It feels like the scope is so narrow that it doesn't come close to targeting the root problem (user privacy and data mining as a whole), leading me to think it's only point is "ooh China Scary". Thoughts? (No worries if you'd rather not get into it, I just thought of you as someone who might have more insight/informed opinions on the matter).

So I'm not really familiar with all the details of the case and certainly not all the details of the bill. But I will give my perspective:

TikTok as a particular threat to users' data and privacy has been known for some time in the cybersecurity world. US government employees and contractors have been straight-up forbidden to have it on their phones for some time now. I, for example, have never had it on my phone because of these security concerns. (Worth noting, I'm not a government employee or contractor, it was just a known-to-be dangerous app in the cybersecurity world so I avoided it.)

This is because the parent company, as I understand, has known connections to the Chinese government that have been exploited in the past. For example, to target journalists.

Worth noting, another app that would potentially be on the chopping block is WeChat, which also has close ties to (or is outright owned by?) the Chinese government. This is just speculation on my part but it's based on the fact that all the concerns around TikTok are there for WeChat too and it has also been banned on government devices in some states, so I imagine it would be next if the bill passes.

I think this is important to note because I've seen some hot takes here on Tumblr have said that the entire case against TikTok is made up and there is no security threat. That is simply not true. The concerns have been there for a while.

However, the question of what to do about it is a thorny one.

The determination seems to be that so long as TikTok is still owned by its parent company with its direct ties to the Chinese government, there really is no way to guarantee that it's safe to use. From that angle, demanding that the company sever ties and set up some form of local ownership makes sense.

I am not a lawyer, but, that being said, forcing them to sell their local operations to a locally-based buyer is a pretty invasive and unusual step for legislators to take against a private company, even in a clear case of spying. I'm sure TikTok's widespread popularity is a big part of the threat it poses, which lends to the argument used to justify such an extreme step. (Because it is on so many phones, it really could be a danger to national security.)

That said, at one point young activists on TikTok embarrassed Trump (lots of good context in this article) while he was campaigning in 2020, and there was some talk then about shutting it down which seemed pretty clearly linked to how it was used as a platform to organize against him. I'm sure there's at least some right wing antipathy towards the app that has a political basis going back to this event. Trump signed an executive order banning it, the ban going into effect got bogged down in the courts, and then Biden rescinded that executive order when he got into office, pending an investigation into the threat it posed.

Those investigations seem to have further confirmed that the Chinese government is getting access to US user data through the app, and further confirmed it as a security threat.

Now, to muddy the waters further, there's several dodgy investment funds including one owned by former Secretary of the Treasury to Trump Steven Mnuchin that are circling with an interest to buy TikTok if it does sell. That's very concerning.

Funds like Mnuchin's interest in purchasing TikTok (even though they do invest in other technologies too, so it is in their portfolio) definitely makes the motivations behind the sale look pretty damning as momentum builds, that it could be some sort of money grab here in the US.

China has also pointed out that forcing the sale of a company because of spying concerns like this opens a whole can of worms. If China thinks that, say, Microsoft is spying on their citizens, could they force the US company to sell its operations in China to a Chinese investor? Could they force Google? Could they even further polarize the internet in general between "free" and "not free" (as in, behind the great Chinese or Russian firewall, as examples) if this precedent is set, so that no Western companies can operate in authoritarian states without selling their local operations there to a government-controlled organization, and thus be unable protect their users there? Or, if you don't have so rosy a view of Western companies, could it effectively deal a blow to international trade in general by saying you have to have to sell any overseas arms of a company to someone who is from there? Again, I'm not a lawyer, but this is a hell of a can of worms to open.

But again, this is muddy because China absolutely is spying on TikTok users. The security reason for all of this is real. What to do about it is the really muddled part that has a ton of consequences, and from that angle I agree with people who are against this bill. Tons of bad faith consequences could come out of it. But the concerns kicking off the bill are real.

[kaelio]

the incredibly fucked up thing im about to tell you is steve mnuchin was actually by far the best member of trump's cabinet. i think trump hired him because he looked like an evil monopoly man and his wife looked like a bondage-themed villainess from a Spy Kids movie , but steve. was actually ok. like not great but he was ok. at his job as secretary of the treasury. like he was a piece of garbage but he generally wanted america's economy to work so that he could continue to make money and not scrounge for beans in a nuclear apocalypse. its insane that this was the "good one". look at that guy. also he managed to stay the entire time. genuinely incredible.

[trexalicious]

Interesting that Rachel kind of confirms the rumor about her and then Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin in this interview...🤔

[odinsblog]

No one loves Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman more than America’s elite. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders, investors, and celebrities hold out a Saudi exception to human rights in the service of a blurry concept of national interests that requires the U.S. to constantly compromise its values in service of an autocrat. And so MBS has been welcomed back into the establishment fold, and he won over Washington. And now he’s taking a victory lap.

When Saudi Arabia convened a 2018 summit in Riyadh, businesspeople shielded their name tags from view, sheepish about seeking MBS’s money just days after journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. But the stigma has apparently worn off, and big names in finance, tech, media, and entertainment showed up at the Miami edition of Davos in the Desert.

The entire conceit of the conference is that Saudi Arabia can be abstracted from MBS, who is hardly ever mentioned yet remains the unspoken force behind the events. The host, the Future Investment Initiative Institute, a mouthful, is essentially the crown prince’s personal think tank. Session after session offered platitudes and ruminations on the least controversial ideas ever—AI is going to change the world! Climate is important! Sports bring people together! The two-day gathering was titled “On the Edge of a New Frontier,” itself a sort of redundant name. (Isn’t a frontier an edge?)

Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of a major sovereign wealth fund that’s currently under Senate investigation, led the proceedings. The Public Investment Fund that Al-Rumayyan runs is the conference’s founding partner and powers its lavish events. That Al-Rumayyan has $70 billion in annual investments to dole out is enough to draw out financial titans, curious entrepreneurs, and former Trump officials.

Jared Kushner, who had grown a beard, was talking about his theory of investing, without noting that MBS’s sovereign wealth funds had reportedly contributed $2 billion to his Affinity Partners. Steve Mnuchin, who similarly snared $1 billion of Saudi funds for his Liberty Strategic Capital, wore a suit and dress sneakers and talked about Israel as a tech hub. Mike Pompeo, in a tie, said that U.S. leadership in the world requires a “stability model” that involves working with “like-minded nations,” though “they’re not all going to be democracies.” Little wonder he rushed U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia as secretary of state as part of an end run around Congress.

Doing business with Saudi Arabia has become so normalized that the CEOs of major corporations and investment firms showed up in droves. There was Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby. David Rubenstein—the billionaire who has played host to President Joe Biden at his Nantucket estate—spoke alongside his daughter Gabrielle. (This year, the Biden administration didn’t send an emissary, but the deputy commerce secretary, Donald Graves, attended in 2021.)

Journalists have kept a distance from Saudi Arabia after the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, but in Miami the moderators included CNN’s Bianna Golodryga, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Bloomberg’s Manus Cranny, and The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker.

MBS has especially used boldfaced names to rehabilitate his standing post-Khashoggi, his crackdown on women activists, and the destructive Yemen war. In Miami, there was a fireside chat with failed Senate candidate Dr. Oz. “Saudi Arabia is, I think, doing some wise investing and shifting mindsets by trying to leapfrog, in some cases, where the West is,” Oz said.

For Gwyneth Paltrow, it was just another fun public event. She spoke about how Goop had “built meaning” for its fans, in conversation with entrepreneur Moj Mahdara, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton. It was particularly incongruous when Paltrow discussed bringing more women to the cap table to fight the patriarchy.

Rob Lowe had some advice for Riyadh’s efforts to break into Hollywood and create its own film industry. “My view is there’s no reason that Saudi shouldn’t be the leader in IP in the same way they’re attempting to be the leader in sports and everything else,” Lowe said. “You need to have someone who can communicate: Why Saudi, why now.”

For all of the glitzy stage management and slick social media branding, at many moments there were fewer than 50 people watching the livestream on YouTube. But what mattered more were the opinion leaders, financiers, and tycoons in the room.

Big Tech was there, too, with Google’s Caroline Yap and Dell’s Michael Dell. Nothing was quite as obsequious as last year’s gathering in Miami when Adam Neumann, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz—all beneficiaries of Saudi Arabia’s financial largesse—gushed about how MBS is like a “founder,” except “you call him, ‘His Royal Highness.’”

(continue reading)

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

“allegedly Meghan and Matt Lauer had a meet-and-greet in his office...if you catch my drift...” Do you remember back in 2019 or so when the last president went to the UK for a visit and there was a reception for him and Meghan refused to go? Well I was reading different news sites about the visit and one of the commenters based in LA said the real reason Meghan didn’t want to go to the reception wasn’t just about politics, it was because the former Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was going to be there with his wife. Before his appointment, he was a Hollywood producer and the commenter alleges that Meghan and him have met personally before…if you catch my drift…allegedly of course. It was one of those comments that was just random enough to be true because Mnuchin wasn’t a focus of the article, Meghan and the former president were the focus.

I'm aware of that. I don't think it's true. Specifically, I believe the 'Meghan-declined-the-state-visit-because-Mnuchin' part isn't true.

Meghan didn't go to the reception because she wasn't invited because she was on maternity leave. She spun it as being her choice and an act of political protest (eye roll) but The Queen and the palace wouldn't have let her turn it into a political thing. If The Queen can host and be cordial with literal dictators and Camilla, Meghan can swallow her politics and go to lunch.

Quick bit of background. State visits begin with a formal welcoming/arrival ceremony and following that, there's a big luncheon with a small reception to view a small curated display of items from or about the guest's nation that the BRF has in the royal collection. Most members of the BRF (definitely all working ones, and I feel like I've seen photos of Beatrice and Eugenie there, but I may be getting mixed up) are invited to the luncheon/reception as part of the unofficial charm offensive. This is different from the state banquet, which only senior working royals attend.

So kind of looping back to the rumor that Charles may be tapping Beatrice for the upcoming Japan state visit, it's entirely possible that she may be attending the luncheon/reception, since more of the royal family attends that event, and not the actual state dinner but we'll see. Not long to wait.

(And also if you're like me and all 'wtf luncheon, can't you just say lunch' well, I did google it once and luncheon is a formal meal served midday, like a 2-course plated sit-down meal with coffee and tea service, and lunch is when it is a lighter, more casual meal, like sandwiches.)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich at Substack:

Friends, Elon Musk and entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on his X platform. According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about President Biden at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden's age to his policies on heath and immigration, calling Biden "a tragic front for a far left political machine.” The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases Trump now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias. This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.

No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India's Narendra Modi, Argentina's Javier Milei, and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.  Some of this helps Musk’s business interests. In India, he has secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he has opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he has solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries. Musk has slammed Biden for his decisions on electric vehicle promotion and subsidies, most of which have favored unionized U.S. auto manufacturers. Musk and his Tesla are viciously anti-union. But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and their cronies are backing a movement against democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, has written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

@Robert Reich nails it with this piece: Oligarchs are joining up with the anti-democracy MAGA movement to look out for themselves and aid the collapse of freedom.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

You wanna know what really fucking bugs me? The only Secretary of the Treasury whose name I know is Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump's corrupt little toady. I know this because every single dollar bill has the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury on it, and while most signatures are illegible caligraphic scrawls, Steve printed his name in block letters like a child. Nine out of ten bills I get as change have his name on them, clear as day, so I am consistently reminded of the nazi regime that destroyed us. I don't know George W. Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, I don't know Barrack Obama's, I don't know Joe Biden's, but I know trump's, and I can't even ignore it when I see it.

These bills will circulate for decades. People are going to collect them in the future. Someone is going to frame one and hang it on their wall as the first dollar they ever earned. It makes me so irrationally angry I could spit.

STeVen T: MNUChin with random capitalization as if he had to sound it out one letter at a time, fuckin ay...

[mariacallous]

A potential bidding war to buy TikTok has begun, less than a month after President Joe Biden signed legislation that would force the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest, or face a ban in the United States within a year.

The latest suitor to emerge is the real estate billionaire Frank McCourt, who announced this week he’s assembling a group of investors to acquire TikTok and has brought on financial advisers from Guggenheim Securities and the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to help. The app could be worth $100 billion, according to some estimates, though McCourt said it’s too early to discuss potential valuations.

What exactly McCourt would do with TikTok remains unclear, but in an interview with Time Magazine, he said that “the user experience wouldn’t change much.” He was not deterred by the prospect of the Chinese government preventing him from buying TikTok’s core algorithm, which is responsible for determining what content users see on the app.

“Of course, TikTok isn't worth as much without the algorithm. I get that. That’s pretty plain,” McCourt said. “But we’re talking about a different design, which requires people to move on from the mindset and the paradigm we’re in now.”

McCourt, who was previously the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, says he has already poured $500 million into an existing social media and technology initiative called Project Liberty, which aims to reduce the power that Silicon Valley giants like Meta and Google have over the internet. One of its main focuses has been building and deploying a blockchain-based protocol that Project Liberty claims will give people more control over their data online.

McCourt also previously invested in another social network called MeWe, a privacy-focused platform that became popular with far-right users after Facebook and Twitter deactivated many of their accounts in the wake of the US Capitol riot on January 6. In 2022, MeWe announced it was migrating its entire platform over to Project Liberty’s decentralized social networking protocol, and it’s possible McCourt could do the same thing with TikTok.

Anna Feagan, a spokesperson for Project Liberty, says McCourt and his team are currently focused on putting together their bid for TikTok, but are committed to finding the right technological solutions for the platform. She adds that so far, they have not been in contact with ByteDance.

New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, a leading voice of the movement arguing that smartphones and social media are causing grave harm to children, says he supports McCourt’s plan for TikTok. “What a creative approach to changing social media: Assemble a consortium to buy TikTok and make it better, on an architecture that respects users' rights,” he said in a post on X.

TikTok, however, has made it clear that it does not want to sell its US operations, and is fighting the legality of the new divest-or-ban law in court. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment about the acquisition plans announced by McCourt and other investors.

This has done little to deter a growing list of other business moguls who have also expressed interest in acquiring the app, which has been under government scrutiny in the US for four years over alleged national security concerns stemming from its Chinese ownership. One of them is former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said earlier this week he too was assembling a group of investors to make a bid for TikTok. He first hinted about the plan in March before the divestiture bill passed into law.

Mnuchin told Bloomberg he understands that the Chinese government is unlikely to allow ByteDance to sell TikTok’s algorithm, but he planned to “rebuild the technology.” That would be quite a lofty endeavor, especially given that TikTok competitors like YouTube and Meta have been trying to copy its product for years with only mixed success.

There’s at least one existing business connection between Mnuchin and TikTok: They are both backed by Japan’s SoftBank, which has stakes in ByteDance and in Liberty Strategic Capital, the private equity firm Mnuchin set up after he left office. A representative from Liberty Strategic Capital did not immediately return a request for comment about Mnuchin’s TikTok acquisition strategy.

Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has reportedly considered buying TikTok as well. He even floated the idea to Zhang Yiming, the former CEO of ByteDance who retains a roughly 20 percent stake in the company, the Wall Street Journal reported in March. Around the same time, Canadian businessman and Shark Tank judge Kevin O'Leary told Fox News that the app is “not going to get banned, ’cause I’m gonna buy it.”

O’Leary did not immediately return a request for comment about whether he was seriously interested in TikTok. Kotick could not be reached for comment.

All of TikTok’s potential suitors would be facing an uphill battle to close a deal. The first challenge will be raising enough money. Only a small number of the world’s largest companies likely have enough cash on hand to acquire the app outright, and so far, they haven’t publicly voiced an interest in the platform. That’s a big change from four years ago when then-president Donald Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok. At the time, Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart were among the most promising buyers for the app.

But the even bigger problem that investors face is the fact that TikTok doesn’t seem to think a sale would even be possible, let alone desirable. In a lawsuit it filed against the US government last week, TikTok argued the divestiture bill violated the First Amendment and claimed severing its American operations from ByteDance was “not commercially, technologically, or legally feasible.”

TikTok noted that the Chinese government has “made clear” that it would not permit the company to sell its recommendation algorithm to a foreign buyer, citing regulations that Beijing introduced after Trump first targeted TikTok in 2020. The measures put limits on the export of certain technologies such as “personal interactive data algorithms.”

Even if a sale were politically possible, TikTok argued the move would “disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community” on the platform, in possibly the same way that the Chinese version of the app is restricted only to people in China. TikTok added that it would take a team of new engineers years to sift through its source code and “gain sufficient familiarity” with it to run the app effectively.

A group of TikTok creators filed a separate lawsuit against the federal government earlier this week arguing that the divest bill violated their free speech rights. (TikTok is paying their legal fees.) Separating TikTok from ByteDance, they said, “is infeasible, as the company has stated and as the publicly available record confirms.”

[collapsedsquid]

Lighthizer “frequently” brought up currency devaluation during Trump’s first term, said one former administration official with knowledge of the discussions, as did Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro. But they faced opposition from Wall Street-aligned officials like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former National Economic Council Chair Gary Cohn, and the idea never got off the ground. Trump even reportedly squashed a dollar devaluation proposal from Navarro during a White House meeting, POLITICO reported in 2019. “Lighthizer brought that up all the time becauvse he felt like tariffs weren’t enough to achieve the objective” of rebalancing trade with the rest of the world, said one of the former Trump administration officials. “Mnuchin didn’t want to do it.” Mnuchin is not alone. Wall Street banks and large U.S. retailers would also oppose efforts to weaken the U.S. dollar, arguing it would hurt U.S. consumers and drive up already problematic inflation. Other corporate actors worry about the ripple effects if the U.S. government moves into currency markets aggressively, concerned it could spark a global trade conflict.

Folks there are some people in our government, very bad people who says "The dollar is worth too much, we need to make it worth less." Not me though, I know the dollar should be worth more, and if you elect me president the dollar will be worth more than ever before. Some people don't think it's possible, they say "you can't do that" but I know, I know that the dollar can be worth more, much more.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against EUROPE

In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked. After the Foreign and Commonwealth office rejected Anne Sacoolas request for diplomatic immunity, Anne fled the UK on a US Air Force plane. Both the US and UK governments lied to the Dunn family, saying that she was a US diplomat, and hid the fact that she had fled for months. In October, the Dunn family visited the White House and met with Donald Trump. According to Seiger, Trump tried to buy off the couple, promising them that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was “standing by ready to write a check.” Trump reportedly blindsided the Dunns, telling them that Sacoolas was in the other room waiting to meet with them. The couple refused the offer, demanding her extradition. Sacoolas’s lawyers have stated, “Anne will not return voluntarily to the United Kingdom to face a potential jail sentence for what was a terrible but unintentional accident.” As of February 2020, the extradition request is at an impasse, while at the same time the UK is complying with Julian Assange’s extradition to the US. RAF Croughton base houses agents from the NSA and CIA, and is famous for being exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for forwarding information from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone to the CIA. On march 2021, the US admitted that sacoolas was a CIA agent.

In 2003, the CIA kidnapped Italian milanese Imam Abu Omar, took him to Egypt, then tortured, including rape, genital electro-shock, and resulted in him becoming deaf in one ear, in the Imam Rapito Affair. On 23 December 2005, a judge issued a European arrest warrant against 22 CIA agents, but the US hasn’t responded.

In 2002, GW Bush signed into law the “Hague invasion act”, IE the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which gives the US: “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”.

In 2001, due to the passing of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the US was forced to disclose the full extent of its collaboration and protection of nazi war criminals.

From March to June of 1999, After Serbs refused to acquiesce in the break-up of their republic, the US and NATO began bombing Yugoslavia killing ~500 civilians, leaving thousands homeless, destroying bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, private businesses, as well as barracks and military installations.

In February, 1998, A US marine core plane flying wrecklessly below regulations, cut a cable supporting aerial cable cars at a ski resort near Cavalese, Italy, killing 20 people, in the Cavalese Cable Car Disaster / Massacre of Cermis. The pilots destroyed the plane’s tape, and were found not guilty. Italian prosecutors were outraged that the US refused to forgoe the NATO treaty that gives all jurisduction to US military courts. By February 1999, the victims’ families had received USD $65,000 per victim as immediate help by the Italian government, which was reimbursed by the U.S. government. In May 1999, the U.S. Congress rejected a bill that would have set up a $40 million compensation fund for the victims. In December 1999, the Italian legislature approved a monetary compensation plan for the families ($1.9 million per victim). NATO treaties obligated the U.S. government to pay 75% of this compensation, which it did.

In 1995, the US conducted a campaign of airstrikes called Operation Deliberate Force, as part of an intervention in the Bosnian civil war.

From the 1950s-90s, the CIA and NATO ran a series of clandestine networks, headquartered in Rome, Italy called Operation Gladio. Its purpose was supplying aid (primarily money and weaponry) to right wing paramilitaries to attack left-wing movements, and carry out assassinations and bombings, as well as funnel money to centrist political parties. It had operations in Belgium, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. In Italy, the group had 600+ members, and carried out car bombings during Italy’s years of lead. In Germany, it included former Nazi SS members—Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman, Lt. Col. Hans Rues, and Lt. Col. Walter Kopp. CIA weapons caches are still being discovered in all the countries above.

Throughout the 1980-90s, the US, with the aid of the IMF and NATO, actively destabilized and aided in the breakup of Yugoslavia, with the goal of weakening and destroying the last surviving socialist bloc in Europe. These include stirring up ethnic tensions between the member countries, economic warfare, and military intervention. The Reagan administration in a 1982 secret memo, advocated “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist governments and parties,” while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market-oriented economy. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support, demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any future aid. In 1991, Yugoslav Army chief Veljko Kadijević stated: “An insidious plan has been drawn up to destroy Yugoslavia. Stage one is civil war. Stage two is foreign intervention. Then puppet regimes will be set up throughout Yugoslavia.”

In 1967 in Greece, the CIA installed Georgios Papadopoulos in a military coup, a CIA agent and former nazi collaborator, as the military ruler of Greece. He’s seen today as an relic of authoritarianism , xenophobia, and anti-communism. 1 Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the “Regime of the Colonels” (1967–1974), complaining that it represented “a rape of democracy”—to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered, “How can you rape a whore?

From the 1940s - 60s, the CIA provided an average of $5 million annually in covert aid towards financially supporting centrist Italian governments and using the awarding of contracts to weaken the Italian Communist Party’s hold on labor unions. It was also involved in bombings and assassinations as a part of Operation Gladio.

In 1956, Radio Free Europe (a CIA funded propaganda outlet) broadcasts Khruschev’s Secret Speech, which played a role in the Hungarian revolution, and also hinted that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. The US fails to provide any military aid to Hungary in their ensuing conflict with the Soviet Union.

From 1948 onwards, the CIA under Allen Dulles developed a program of media manipulation called Project Mockingbird, having major influence over the media, including >25 newspapers. The usual method was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to cooperating or unwitting reporters, or employing media directly as American assets.

In 1948, the CIA corrupts the elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. The communists are defeated.

From 1948 onward, the CIA implements Operation Bloodstone, similar to Operation Paperclip, where the CIA actively sought out nazis and collaborators living in Soviet controlled territories, to work as spies in the USSR, US, Canada, and Latin America. Many of those who were hired as part of Bloodstone were high-ranking Nazi intelligence agents who had committed war crimes.

In 1947, in Greek civil war and ensuing right wing military junta of 1967-74, Truman and the CIA provided money, 74,000 tons of military equipment, and advisors to support anti-communist Greek dictators with deplorable human rights records. Support for right-wing dictatorships in Greece and Turkey were funded and sold under the Truman Doctrine, an anti-soviet foreign policy platform, despite the fact that it was Yugoslavia who provided support to the Greek labor movement rebels, and not the Soviet Union.

In the post-war period, while the USSR carried out de-nazification in East Germany, in West Germany many Nazis were kept in power. One study revealed that more than half of the leadership of the West German Justice Ministry were former members of the Nazi party, including dozens of former paramilitary SA members. Several former Nazi Generals, including Adolf Heusinger, and Hans Speidel, went on to become generals in West Germany, and then NATO.

During the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, eight unarmed Italian civilians, including an eleven year old girl, were killed by U.S. troops.

US soldiers killed 73 unarmed Italian and German prisoners of war in Santo Pietro, Italy on July 1943. The survivors were then shot at close range, directly through the heart.

The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 US prison camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War, holding between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel. Prisoners held in the camps were designated Disarmed Enemy Forces and not POWs, to avoid international treaty regulations. Throughout the summer of 1945, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting prisoners in any of the Allies’ Rheinwiesenlager. Visits were only started in the autumn of 1945, at a time when most camps had closed or were closing. During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made.” Between 3,000 to 10,000 died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds.

A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II. It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.

In 1952, the CIA recruited nazi scientist Emil Augsburg, who was involved in an SS think for planning the final solution, and protected him from war crimes accusations.

In July, 1945, the predecessor to the CIA, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under the name Operation Paperclip, rescued and recruited 1,500 Nazi scientists, engineers, and spies. These included Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union, SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”, who was used by the US to further anti-communist efforts in europe), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s). The policy of collaboration with nazi spies was deemed necessary to counter the threat from the USSR.

In February 1945, 527 airplanes of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden, Germany, killing ~25,000 civilians.

In the summer of 1942, the US turned away a series of ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

Ben Urwand revealed how the Nazis’ man in Hollywood Georg Gyssling censored and rewrote film scripts to remove scenes and dialogue that criticised the Nazi regime. He also repeatedly removed references to the suffering of Jews in post-WW1 Germany. The DOD continued this policy after the war, helping rehabilitate Germany’s image and cover up for anti-semitism. Before 1939, Los Angeles authorities were impeding antifascist Jewish groups while letting Fascists in Hollywood run amok. 

In 1926, the House of Representatives and Senate, at the request of Fascist Italy, voted to forgive 80.4% of Italy’s WWI war debt.

The US maintained a policy of neutrality during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, discounting the rise of anti-semitism and European fascism. It was not Hitler’s attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, any more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861. Italy’s attack on Ethiopia, Hitler’s invasion of Austria, his takeover of Czechoslovakia, his attack on Poland-none of those events caused the United States to enter the war, although Roosevelt did begin to give important aid to England. What brought the United States fully into the war was the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

In the 1936-39 Spanish civil war, the Roosevelt administration sponsored a neutrality act that had the effect of shutting off help to the Spanish government while Hitler and Mussolini gave critical aid to Franco, aiding yet another fascist victory in Europe. American President Richard Nixon later toasted Franco’s “firmness and fairness”, and, after Franco’s death, he stated: “General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States.

[thoughtportal]

There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.

[naturalrights-retard]

Since last week, the only real news on the market front is what the Fed will say Wednesday about the future path of interest rates.

Indeed, cheap money is The Street’s main concern. The cheaper the money, the easier it is to borrow and gamble.

What is barely making the news and is quickly brushed aside is the coming banking crisis.

Today, CNBC reported that Klaros Group found that 282 banks “with high levels of commercial real estate exposure and large unrealized losses from the rate surge face great risks.” 

Yes, high risks which equals our Banks Go Bust Top Trend for 2024.

The Klaros study was “based on regulatory filings known as call reports, screened for two factors: Banks where commercial real estate loans made up over 300% of capital, and firms where unrealized losses on bonds and loans pushed capital levels below 4%.”

CNBC noted:

“Klaros declined to name the institutions in its analysis out of fear of inciting deposit runs. “But there’s only one company with more than $100 billion in assets found in this analysis, and, given the factors of the study, it’s not hard to determine: New York Community Bank, the real estate lender that avoided disaster earlier this month with a $1.1 billion capital injection from private equity investors led by ex-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.  “Most of the banks deemed to be potentially challenged are community lenders with less than $10 billion in assets. Just 16 companies are in the next size bracket that includes regional banks—between $10 billion and $100 billion in assets—though they collectively hold more assets than the 265 community banks combined.”

Again, we had forecast this would happen some three years ago, when politicians launched the COVID War and forced people to work from home with the result being an Office Building Bust. Now, the facts are becoming harder for The Street to hide.

[cmesinic]

They’ll screw it up like Musk did to Twitter. Rich MAGAts are not here to save the day.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The quest for Donald Trump’s taxes is finally over and whatever secrets Trump fought for years to conceal will soon be revealed for all to see. But one fact is already clear: The IRS botched its job.

The IRS is required to conduct audits of the President and Vice President while they are in office. This requirement arose in 1997, likely in response to concerns over President Nixon’s tax troubles. But the policy–enshrined in the IRS manual, Section 4.8.4.2.4–was not followed during Trump’s term in office. During his four-year term, the agency opened only one audit–of this 2016 return–which only commenced in 2019 after Chairman Richard Neal of the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to the IRS seeking Trump’s returns and tax information. That audit is still not finished.

As the Committee characterized it, the IRS presidential audit program was “dormant” during Trump’s term.

Perhaps this should not have been surprising given that Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was the first Treasury Secretary to refuse to turn over tax information in response to a congressional request and when Congress sued to obtain compliance a Trump-appointed Judge–Trevor McFadden–delayed ruling on the case until after Trump had left office.

But it surely must be stunning to most Americans that among the reasons cited by IRS officials for their failure to follow policy was that they were apparently intimidated by the complexities of Trump’s taxes. In an internal memo, the agency seemed to whine about the return having “about 400 flow-through returns… and since some of these are tiered… a total of 500 flow-through returns”—which meant that to “do a thorough review of these returns we would need a team much larger than the current team.”

A “flow-through” entity is one in which the income that comes into the business passes onto the owner and is commonly used to reduce taxation.

In sum, the IRS rewarded Trump’s complex business structures by throwing their hands up at the prospect of having to dig into all those hundreds of records. Excuse me, but I thought that was what IRS agents liked to do?

Note that the agency had no concerns about following its policies when it came to auditing for President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden.

The recent disclosure that, during the Trump administration, the President regularly asked for audits of those he considered his political enemies—and invasive audits of former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did occur—should raise deep concerns and trigger increased scrutiny. Such scrutiny could be undertaken by the agency’s Office of Inspector General or the the Justice Department’s Tax Division—not to mention Congress—although further work by the House of Representatives on the issue is highly unlikely given that the Republicans are about to take control of the House.

Chairman Neal and the present Ways and Means Committee have fought the good fight and put a lie to repeated claims that their investigation lacked legitimate purpose. All along, Neal stated that their purpose was to perform oversight on the effectiveness of the presidential audit program and “on behalf of the American people… determine if that policy is being followed.”

We the people have our answer now, and it isn’t pretty.