.
Above, 1/29/19, “President
Kushner holds meetings with Koch Industries (who have vowed not to
support Trump in 2020) on how to craft an immigration deal w/ amnesty," Ryan Girdusky twitter
…………………
Comment: Since Trump isn’t going to remove Kushner, Trump will have
to be impeached. Let’s go democrats, hurry up and get Trump impeached.
..............
.
1/28/19, “Washington Post ABC News Poll, Jan. 21-24, 2019”
Poll dates: Mon.-Thurs., Jan. 21-24, random national sample of 1,001 adults. No filter for Likely Voters. 65% cell phone, 3.4 error margin.
……………….
32% Democrat
From page 10: Sample size: Adults: 1001 unweighted sample size, error margin 3.5. Registered voters: 893, error margin 4.0. It’s
not stated how “registered voter” status was determined, for example
was it self described. They don’t include a filter for Likely Voters.
Following are 3 questions from page 7: support for a border wall, political party preferred for border security, and is US doing enough to prevent illegal immigration (54% say no, US is doing too little):
Page 7, question 10: Support for border wall remains at highest level over past two years: 42 favor, 54 oppose. As
shown below, 42/54 is unchanged from two weeks ago, and is still a
high-water mark for support over the past two-plus years along with the
lowest level of opposition:
……………………………….
Page 7, question 11, part two: Republicans are favored over Democrats for handling border security, 49-39:
……………………………….
Page 7, question 12: Majority of Americans, 54%, believe US is doing too little to prevent illegal immigration to the US. Only 24% say the right amount is being done:
..............
.
Poll dates: Jan. 22-23, 2019. 42% of Likely Voters say it’s easier to enter the US (61R, 22D, 46 Ind). 46% say it’s easier to stay once you’ve gotten in illegally (66R, 28D, 47 Ind.).
Sample: Democrats +4 vs Republicans: 33R, 37D, 30 Ind.
1/28/19, “[Likely] Voters Say It’s Easier for Illegal Immigrants to Get In, Stay In the U.S.,” Rasmussen Reports
“[Likely] Voters still think it’s easier to enter and stay in the United States illegally than it is in most other countries.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 42% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it is easier to enter the United States illegally compared to most other nations in the world.
Just 19% say it’s harder, while 26% think the level of difficulty is
about the same. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure. (To see survey
question wording, click here.)
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on January 22-23, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.”
Wording of two questions:
“1* Is it harder or easier to enter the United States illegally compared to most other nations in the world? Or is the level of difficulty about the same?”
“2* Compared to most other nations in the world, is it harder or easier to stay in the United States once you’ve entered the country illegally? Or is the level of difficulty about the same?”
................
.
“Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy.” Kushner’s business “Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor.”
…………………………..
“Immigration”
was solved in Nov. 2016 election with unconditional promise of a wall,
so why is White House holding meetings about it in 2019? If Trump wants to ignore the Nov. 2016 election then that’s what The Hill should be writing about:
1/25/19, “Head of Koch-affiliated group praises Kushner after immigration reform talks,” The Hill, Julia Manchester
“The president of the Libre Initiative, on Friday, praised his meeting with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner on immigration and President Trump’s proposed southern border wall as “constructive” and “productive.”
“It was very constructive, productive. We felt Jared was an honest broker,” Daniel Garza told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”
The Libre Initiative is a conservative, Latino non-profit that is affiliated with the Koch Network.
The White House hosted the Libre Initiative, along with other Latino organizations including the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, to discuss immigration reform, in hopes a broader deal could help end the partial government shutdown which is now in its second month.
“We’re trying to get to a space where we can all find agreement,” Garza said. “Where the left gets to a win by getting their priority. Presumably, that’s their priority, the DACA kids.”
“And the right gets their priority, which is what the president is
asking for, $5.7 billion which includes infrastructure along the
border,” he said.
President Trump has demanded $5.7 billion for his long-promised
border wall, but Democratic lawmakers have refused the funding request.
Trump on Saturday proposed a deal that would have provided three years of legislative relief for about 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program recipients in exchange for funding for a steel barrier at the border. Democrats, though, rejected that proposal. ”
……………………………
Added: National Review article about wonderful Jared and Koch Brothers:
Sat., 1/26/19, “Can the Koch Network and Jared Kushner Come Up with a Big Immigration Reform Deal?” National Review, Jim Geraghty, Indian Wells, California
“This morning, the Koch Seminar Network – more often referred to as “the Koch network” or “the shadowy Koch brothers” by gravely-voiced attack ad announcers – kick off their three-day winter meeting with the government at least temporarily reopened but the landscape in Washington deeply unsettled.
Thursday, Daniel Garza, the president of one of the Koch network’s affiliate groups called the Libre Initiative, met at the White House with officials in the administration to discuss a larger deal on immigration reform. Libre Institute president Daniel Garza told HillTv hosts the meeting, which included leaders of other Latino groups, was “very constructive, productive. We felt Jared [Kushner] was an honest broker.”
Kushner has proven the network’s most valuable negotiating partner in the White House,
playing a key role in the criminal justice reform legislation passed
late last year. Ideas in that legislation, particularly anti-recidivism
programs in federal prisoners, were the centerpiece of last year’s
winter meeting.
But two of the open questions as the Koch donors gather at the luxury resort outside Palm Springs are just how much can get done in Washington with divided government [not so– entire government agrees on open borders] and the jockeying for position in 2020 starting already, and just what kind of a deal President Trump is willing to accept. [“Deal?” The deal was made in the Nov. 2016 election.] Last year Brian Hooks, president of the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, applauded the administration’s proposal of “legal certainty” for Dreamers, and indicated the network hoped the administration could go a step further for the Dreamers: “A path to citizenship
is enormous incentive to continue to contribute to this country.” This
year, the network is expected to push for a permanent solution to the
Dreamers’s current legal status.
Politics makes strange bedfellows; this will put the Koch network on the same side as many Democratic lawmakers
who have decried their allegedly sinister influence for many years.
[Which was just for show. Everyone in the Beltway is on the same “side”-open
borders]. Earlier this month, Congressional Democrats rejected the
administration’s offer of three years of legislative relief for about
700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program recipients
in exchange for $5.7 billion in steel barriers. Democrats appear
unwilling to accept a temporary reprieve for the Dreamers in exchange
for a permanent structure on the border.
Immigration is certain to come up at some point during the winter meeting, but the main focus in the coming days
will be the theme “unleash the potential in everyone,” with an emphasis
on programs, organizations and legislative proposals that address
problems such as chronic unemployment, drugs and addiction, and poverty.
The Koch network boasts, with some strong evidence, that it
has become one of the most consequential forces in American politics, with what it calls a “permanent grassroots infrastructure in 36 states.” Besides the Libre Initiative, the network includes the most visible arm, Americans for Prosperity; Generation Opportunity, which focuses on Millennials; Concerned Veterans for America, which addresses veterans’ issues; and Stand Together, which endeavors to build social capital.
But 2018 was a rough year for some of the network’s favorite political allies. Governor Scott Walker lost in Wisconsin, and Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt failed in his bid for governor. Five of Americans for Prosperity’s eight “policy champions” in the U.S. House of Representatives lost in 2018. But the Koch Industries Political Action Committee donated to most of the winning 2018 GOP candidates —
Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Kim Reynolds
of Iowa, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Greg Abbott of Texas, as well as
senators Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Braun of Indiana, Josh Hawley of
Missouri, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota (despite the network saying they
would not support his heavily-favored Senate bid because he was backing the administration’s tariffs) and Ted Cruz of Texas.
Another lawmaker who has addressed the winter meeting in past years, Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, is up for reelection this year and he appears to be in for a tough fight.”
………………………………
Added: Jared’s chosen connections:
Jared Kushner’s interests “include loans totaling at least $1 billion from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner…. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt….Deutsche Bank and RBS are among entities to whom he’s given personal guarantees.…Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor.….Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy.”…Kushner has business “ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.”…
May 3, 2017, “Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros,” Wall St. Journal, Jean Eaglesham, Juliet Chung, Lisa Schwartz
“Investments show ties to major finance and technology names.”
“Jared Kushner, the
president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is currently in business
with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and billionaires George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people familiar with the matter and securities filings.
The previously undisclosed business relationships with titans of the financial and technology worlds are through a real-estate tech startup called Cadre that Mr. Kushner cofounded and currently partly owns.
Goldman and Messrs. Soros and Thiel, as
well as other billionaires’ firms, also have stakes in the company,
which is based in a Manhattan building owned by the Kushner family’s
company, according to people close to Cadre.
The Cadre stake is one of many interests—and ties to large financial institutions—that
Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his government financial-disclosure
form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other
filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more
than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
In his disclosure form filed earlier this year, Mr. Kushner didn’t identify Cadre as among his hundreds of assets.
The Journal identified his Cadre stake through a review of securities
and other filings as well as interviews with people familiar with the
company and Mr. Kushner’s finances.
Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a
statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns, BFPS
Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported on his disclosure form, although it doesn’t mention Cadre.
Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised
version of his disclosure form that will be made public after it has
been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has
previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government
Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has “resigned from Cadre’s board, assigned
his voting rights and reduced his ownership share.”
A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn’t respond to a request to comment.
Ms. Gorelick said it is “very normal” for a
financial-disclosure form to be revised and that the form was prepared
by Mr. Kushner’s lawyers on his behalf. A White House spokeswoman
referred questions to Mr. Kushner’s lawyer.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and other ethics experts said investments such as Mr. Kushner’s ownership of Cadre typically need to be disclosed.
They said Mr. Kushner didn’t appear to violate disclosure rules by not
publicly reporting his business-related debts and guarantees. But they
said such arrangements ideally should be disclosed, in part because they
could force Mr. Kushner to recuse himself from certain issues involving
the lenders.
“Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest
should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this,”
Mr. Potter said.
Ethics experts’ concern is that Mr. Kushner’s business connections
could jeopardize his impartiality in certain areas and that, absent
disclosures, the public is in the dark about potential conflicts.
Mr. Kushner’s rapidly expanding responsibilities range from
working on a Middle East peace deal to making the federal government
operate more efficiently. As a senior federal official, he is bound by
ethics laws that require him to recuse himself from matters that would
directly affect his financial interests.
Ms. Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, said Mr. Kushner will “recuse consistent with government ethics rules.”
Mr. Kushner, the 36-year-old scion of a real-estate family, agreed with federal ethics officials to divest himself of more than 80 assets
after he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, were hired by her father,
President Donald Trump, as senior aides. White House officials have said
some of the sales were needed to avoid potential conflicts between Mr.
Kushner’s far-reaching job duties and his personal financial interests.
Mr. Kushner is retaining
more than 200 other assets, worth a total of at least $116 million,
according to his disclosures. These are mostly apartments and office
blocks around the U.S. Like his father-in-law, he has declined to put
these assets in a blind trust, which ethics experts regard as
the cleanest way to avoid conflicts of interest. Someone close to Mr.
Kushner said there are practical problems that made a blind trust not a
realistic option.
Mr. Kushner co-founded
Cadre in 2014 with his brother, Joshua Kushner, and Ryan Williams, a
29-year-old friend and former employee of Kushner Cos., the
family-controlled business that Mr. Kushner ran until recently. Cadre
markets properties to prospective investors, who can put their money
into specific buildings or into an investment fund run by Cadre, which
collects fees on each deal.
To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund
and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the
venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most prominent
supporter of the GOP president, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre’s website. Personal backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma of
a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and
real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor who Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros’s family office is also an investor in Cadre.
The investors declined or didn’t respond to requests for public comment on their backing of Cadre, but a
person familiar with Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in
Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his
presidential candidacy.
Cadre has solicited money from investors for several Kushner Cos.
real-estate projects, according to information sent to prospective
investors and reviewed by the Journal. Jared Kushner personally has stakes in some of the real-estate projects for which Cadre has raised money, according to Cadre documents and his disclosure form.
While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to “influence the [firm’s] management or policies,” according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Mr. Kushner’s company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owning 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said. [“Common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.]
Mr. Williams, chief executive of Cadre, said the company has been working with regulators to update its public filings to “reflect Jared’s nonoperational, nonmanagement relationship with the company, which has been in place since the inauguration.”
BFPS Ventures, the company that Mr. Kushner’s lawyer said holds his Cadre stake,
is shown on his financial-disclosure form as owning unspecified New
York real estate valued at more than $50 million. The form adds that “the conflicting assets of this interest have been divested.”
Beyond Cadre, some of the assets Mr. Kushner is holding on to are hard to pinpoint, partly because they are housed in entities with generic names such as “KC Dumbo Office,” according to the disclosure form.
The Journal matched many of the assets to specific real-estate
investments. An analysis of the debts on those properties, using
real-estate data services PropertyShark and Trepp LLC as well as
property records, found ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.
Lenders to Mr. Kushner, either directly or via properties he co-owns, include
Bank of America Corp. , Blackstone Group LP, Citigroup Inc., UBS Group
AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Royal Bank of Scotland didn’t respond to requests for comment; representatives of the other firms declined to comment.
Mr. Kushner will recuse himself
from matters to which Deutsche Bank or RBS are parties because he has
provided personal guarantees on their loans, said a person familiar with
his ethics arrangement.”
………………………
Added: “His [Jared’s] common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties….Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka.”
May 9, 2017, “Are Kushner family real estate assets a conflict for Jared?“ CBSNews.com, Larry Light
“It remains murky just how much Kushner has rid himself of family-related assets. In a White House briefing on March 31, officials said Kushner had resigned from more than 266 entities and “divested from most of those that may have created a conflict of interest.“ A report in Politico said his common
stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s
mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.
Nevertheless, The New York Times reported on Monday that Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka, the president’s daughter.
What’s to stop Kushner later, after he leaves the White House, from becoming a beneficiary again and rejoining Kushner Cos.? Apparently nothing,
according to Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under
President George W. Bush.
Painter, now a professor at the University of
Minnesota Law School, said the assets Kushner shipped to the trust “belong to the family,” and so he can reclaim them in the future.” …
....................
.
“The Democrats in the US want to set an Identity politics example for Canada and the rest of the world, by using Russiagate to get black and Latino youth to cultivate a hatred for Russia."-commenter
1/25/19, “Canada’s “diversity” imperialism,” Worldwide Socialist Website, Keith Jones
“Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his trade union-backed, ostensibly
“progressive” Liberal government are playing a key role in the
regime-change coup that Washington has launched against Venezuela’s
elected president, Nicolás Maduro.
Canada quickly seconded US President Donald Trump’s
announcement Wednesday recognizing Juan Guaidó, Venezuela’s
self-proclaimed “interim president,” as the country’s head of state.
The cabinet Trudeau named after winning office in October 2015 was hailed as an exemplar of diversity and inclusiveness.
With an equal number of women and men, newspaper columnists lauded
the “gender-balanced cabinet.” It boasted an indigenous Justice
Minister, an Indian-born Sikh defence minister, a former Somali refugee
as immigration minister, a gay Treasury Board president, and a
quadriplegic Veteran Affairs Minister.
There was further gushing praise from the liberal media, when Trudeau promoted Chrystia Freeland to Foreign Affairs Minister and proclaimed Canada was pursuing a “feminist foreign policy.“ Lauding these developments, Foreign Policy magazine wrote that last year Canada hosted “the first-ever meeting of female foreign ministers, as part of a package of commitments it made to prioritize women’s issues under its G-7 presidency this year.”
The meeting, Foreign Policy wrote, was “unprecedented in its display of female power on the world stage.”
“It is important—and historic—that we have a prime
minister and a government proud to proclaim themselves as feminists,”
declared Freeland. “Women’s rights are human rights.”
In reality, as underscored by Canada’s role in aiding and abetting the US-orchestrated regime-change operation in Venezuela, the only “identity” that matters is that all the members of the Trudeau cabinet are defenders of imperialism.
Trudeau has been enthusiastically promoted by the New York Times and Guardian as a poster boy of contemporary liberalism. That is a liberalism that has renounced all social reform, is pro-austerity and pro-war, and which privileges issues of racial, ethnic and gender identity, as a means of rallying the support of sections of the affluent middle class….
Ottawa’s role, however, goes far beyond trying to provide a smokescreen for yet another “made in USA” coup and obscuring the inexorable connection between Washington’s current intrigues in Venezuela and the succession of invasions, occupations and coups it has orchestrated in Latin America since 1898.
Ottawa, according to news reports, will soon host a meeting of the Lima Group, a coalition of US allies in the Americas, to plot the next steps in the “regime-change” operation against Maduro and the bourgeois nationalist regime he heads.
Since its establishment in August 2017, Canada has acted as Washington’s principal agent inside the Lima Group.
Last September, Canada was conspicuous in leading opposition to a Lima
Group “pledge” to oppose any foreign military intervention in
Venezuela—i.e. a US invasion.
Wednesday’s US-fomented coup has pushed the impoverished South American country to the brink of civil war and, with Trump demonstratively declaring “all options on the table,” brought the US to the brink of a military assault on Venezuela.
There is every reason to believe that Canada will participate in any US military action against Venezuela, reprising, albeit almost certainly on a larger and bloodier scale, its 2004 role in assisting the US in overthrowing Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Washington has spearheaded the resurgence of imperialism, waging a never-ending series of wars since 1991 in an increasingly desperate attempt to offset the decline in its global economic position. But all the imperialist and aspiring great powers, big and small, are rearming and reviving war as a vital instrument of state policy.
A major belligerent and, from an economic and strategic vantage point, beneficiary of the two imperialist world wars of the last century, Canadian imperialism is no exception. Long gone are the days when Canada’s ruling elite, with a view to politically and ideologically harnessing the working class to its rule, promoted the myth that Canada and its military have a special “peacekeeping” vocation.
Since 1991, Canada, under Liberal and Conservative governments alike, has played a leading role in one US-led war after another, including the first Gulf War, the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia, the Afghan War, the 2011 regime-change war in Libya, and the ongoing US war in the Middle East.
As in Venezuela today, Canada’s government and military have, in the
course of these wars and interventions, repeatedly aligned with extreme
right-wing and outright fascist forces. Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel involved in the bombing of Libya described themselves as “al Qaeda’s air force.” Similarly, in the Ukraine in 2014, Canada helped orchestrate, in concert with Washington, a fascist-spearheaded coup against the country’s elected president.
Canada’s longstanding and rapidly expanding military-security alliance with Washington and Wall Street enjoys all but unanimous support with the Canadian ruling class, as the best means to assert its own predatory imperialist interests and aims on the world stage.
Canada’s banks and resource companies are important players in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Canadian ruling elite shares Washington’s determination to roll back Chinese and Russian economic and geopolitical influence in the Americas.
Under Trudeau and his purported “feminist foreign policy,” Canada is playing an even more rapacious and reactionary role in world affairs than under the neoconservative and onetime Iraq war enthusiast, Stephen Harper.
Declaring that Canada must prepare for the wars of the 21st Century and play a larger role in sustaining a US-led world order,
the Trudeau government announced in June 2016 plans to hike military
spending by more than 70 percent to almost $33 billion by 2026.
Already Canada is playing a leading role in US imperialism’s
three main military-strategic offensives, any one of which could rapidly
spiral into a war between nuclear-armed powers: in the Middle East, against Russia and against China.
Canada is leading one of NATO’s four new “forward deployed” battalion-sized battlegroups on Russia’s borders; routinely deploys warplanes and battleships to patrol the Black Sea, Baltic States and Eastern Europe; and is training Ukrainian Army and National Guard personnel to, in Trudeau’s words, “liberate” Eastern Ukraine.
And long before Ottawa ordered, at Washington’s behest, the
December 1 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on trumped-up
charges, Canada was closely aligned with Washington in its escalating
confrontation with China. Building on a secret 2013 US-Canadian military agreement on coordinating operations
in the Asia-Pacific, the CAF has greatly expanded deployments in Asia.
CAF head Jonathan Vance now routinely describes the South China Sea and
Malacca Straits, key chokepoints in US war planning against China, as of vital strategic importance to Canada.
There are vital lessons to be learned from Trudeau’s role in Trump’s coup attempt in Venezuela, applicable in every country all over the world. Replacing one set of representatives of the financial oligarchy with another, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual preference, will not lead to a more “humane” outcome. The struggle against imperialism and social inequality must base itself on the social force capable of opposing capitalism and imperialist war: the working class.”
………………………………………
7 among comments to above
…………………………….
“Zalamander • 2 days ago
The Democrats in the US want to set an Identity politics example for Canada and the rest of the world, by using Russiagate to get black and Latino youth to cultivate a hatred for Russia.”
…………………………
“Charlotte Ruse • 3 days ago…
Justin Trudeau, epitomizes the thinking of the neoliberal
neoconservative warmongers that dominate both the Democratic and
Republican Party. And that explains why the Canadian Government is
playing a key role in the “regime-change coup” launched against
Venezuela by DC.”
……………………
“Maxwell • 3 days ago
“What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.”– Goebbels
Diversity=secular religion.
Diversity. Has any concept been more co-opted and corrupted in the service of capital than this one? The
gender, skin color and/or sexual orientation of a political leader
tells the voter a sum total of nothing about a candidate’s political
fiber. The sordid, ruling-class careers of Condi Rice, HRC, Barack Obama, Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright,
Marsha Blackburn, Clarence Thomas and Nikki Haley ought to tell anyone
with even half a brain all they need to know when capitalists start
yapping about “diversity.””…
…………………………
“Charlotte Ruse Maxwell • 2 days ago
Exactly– identity politics is used to confuse, disorient, and
conceal true ideological intentions. It’s like a political Trojan Horse you open the gates and subsequently realize that your worst political nightmare inhabits the artifice.”
………………………..
“Master Oroko • 3 days ago
“Diversity imperialism” sums it up quite well. As long as the people in charge are “diverse” it doesn’t matter what the cause is….I think we’re just scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point…”
…………………….
“Checkmate Somaliweyn • 2 days ago...
Does anyone remember when Trudeau the elder talked of
withdrawing from NATO? This was a few years before he decided to run for
office.”
......................
Comment: Note to US taxpayers: Get ready to turn over billions to the Venezuelan "refugees" racket.
.
“The United States is like a parent. Other countries look to it for guidance and to enforce the rules.” Jan. 15, 2019, Washington Post, Richard Cohen column. Soviet era mind set of the US permanent political class on display. For “guidance?” In doing what? The US isn’t even a country anymore, just pretends to be, has a wide open southern border which it refuses to defend. Who’d ask such a government for the time of day? “To enforce the rules?” What rules? US voters and taxpayers have never agreed to finance the creation or enforcement of global “rules.” As most normal people know, parent-child relationships are a two-way street. In the case of Richard Cohen, perhaps feeling like a global “parent” gives meaning to an otherwise empty life. If you’re the dependent child, you’re not free. If
you choose to let the US provide you with US taxpayer funded weapons or
equipment, as UK did when Obama gave them millions of dollars in free
spy equipment, you owe certain behavior in return.
1/23/19, “The End Of Russia’s “Democratic Illusions” About America,” Stephen Cohen, The Nation, via Zero Hedge, Authored by Stephen Cohen via The Nation
“How Russiagate has impacted a vital struggle in Russia…"
“For decades, Russia’s self-described “liberals” and “democrats” have touted the American political system as one their country should emulate. They have had abundant encouragement in this aspiration over the years from legions of American crusaders, who in the 1990s launched a large-scale, deeply intrusive, and ill-destined campaign to transform post-Communist Russia into a replica of American “democratic capitalism.” (See my book, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.) Some Russian liberals even favored NATO’s eastward expansion when it began in the late 1990s on the grounds that it would bring democratic values closer to Russia and protect their own political fortunes at home.
Their many opponents on Russia’s political spectrum, self-described “patriotic nationalists,” have insisted that the country must look instead to its own historical traditions for its future development and, still more, that American democracy was not a system to be so uncritically emulated. Not infrequently, they characterize Russia’s democrats as “fifth columnists” whose primary loyalties are to the West, not their own country.
Understandably,
it is a highly fraught political debate and both sides have supporters
in high places, from the Kremlin and other government offices to
military and security agencies, as well as devout media outlets.
In this regard, Russiagate allegations in the United States, which have grown from vague suspicions of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election to flat assertions that Putin’s Kremlin put Donald Trump in the White House, have seriously undermined Russian democrats and bolstered the arguments of their “patriotic” opponents. Americans, who may have been misled by their own media into thinking that Russia today is a heavily censored “autocracy” in which all information is controlled by the Kremlin, may be surprised
to learn that many Russians, especially among the educated classes but
not only, are well-informed about the Russiagate story and follow it
with great interest. They get reasonably reliable information from Russian news broadcasts and TV talk shows; from direct cable and satellite access to Western broadcasts, including CNN; from translation sites that daily render scores of Western print news reports and commentaries into Russian (inosmi.rubeing the most voluminous); and from the largely uncensored Internet.
How many Russians believe that the Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House is less clear. Widespread skepticism is often expressed sardonically:
“If Putin can put his man in the White House, why can’t he put a mayor in my town who will have the garbage picked up?”
Others, who believe the allegation, often take some pleasure, or schadenfreude, from it, having grown resentful of US “meddling” in Russian political life for so many years. (In recent history, the remembered example is the Clinton administration’s very substantial efforts on behalf of President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996.)”…[Image below, “Yanks to the Rescue,” 7/15/1996 Time cover]
But what should interest us is how
Russiagate allegations have tarnished America’s democratic reputation
in Russia and thereby undermined the pro-American arguments of Russia’s
liberal democrats, who were never a very potent political or electoral force and whose fortunes have already declined in recent years. Consider the following:
- Russian democrats argue that their country’s elections are
manipulated and unfair, including, but not only, those that put and kept
Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “Patriotic nationalists” now reply that Russiagate rests on the allegation, widely
reported and believed in the United States, that an American
presidential election was successfully manipulated on behalf of the
desired candidate and that the entire US electoral system may be vulnerable to manipulation.
- Russian democrats protest that oligarchic and other money has corrupted Russian politics.
Their opponents argue that special counsel Robert Mueller’s convictions
and other indictments – in the cases of Paul Manafort and Michael
Cohen, for example -prove that American political life is no less corrupt financially.
- Going back to Soviet times and continuing today, a major complaint of Russian democrats has been the shadowy, malevolent role played by intelligence agencies, particularly the KGB and its successor organization. Patriotic nationalists point to disclosures that their US institutional counterparts, the CIA and FBI, played a secretive and major role in the origins of Russiagate allegations against Trump as a presidential candidate and since his inauguration.
- Russian democratic dissidents have long protested, and been stifled by, varying degrees of official censorship. Their Russian opponents argue that campaigns now underway in the United States against “Russian disinformation” in the media are a form of American censorship. [Much more coming, via Newsguard.]
- Many Russians distrust their media, particularly “mainstream” state media. Their opponents retort that American mainstream media is no better, having undertaken a kind of “war” against President Trump and along the way having had to retract dozens of widely circulated stories. In this connection, we may wonder what Russian skeptics made of an astonishingly revealing statement by the media critic of The New York Times [Jim Rutenberg] [alternate link]– an authoritative newspaper in Russia as well – on January 21 [2019] that the “ultimate prize” for leading American journalists is having “helped bring down a president.”… [Referring to 1974 Nixon resignation; “But the ultimate prize…helped bring down a president alleged to have broken the law.“]
- By now, Americans may not be shocked by such a repudiation by the Times of its own professed mission and standards, but for Russian journalists, who have long looked to the paper as a model, the reaction was likely profound disillusionment.
- Putin’s Russian democratic critics often protest his “imperial” foreign policies, so imagine how they interpreted this imperial statement by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on January 15 [2019]: “Nations, like children, crave predictability. They need to know the rules. The United States is like a parent. Other countries look to it for guidance and to enforce the rules. Trump has utterly failed in that regard.” Any Russian with a medium-range memory is unlikely to miss this echo of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward the “children” it ruled. And yet, a columnist for The Washington Post – also an authoritative newspaper in Russia – emphasizes Trump’s failure to “enforce the [imperial] rules” as a Russiagate indictment.
- Perhaps most Russians who are informed about Russiagate believe that all the various allegations against Trump are actually motivated by US elite opposition to his campaign promise to “cooperate with Russia.” This means, as Russia’s “patriotic nationalists” have always argued, that Washington will never accept Russia as an equal great power in world affairs, no matter who rules Russia
or how (whether Communist or anti-Communist, as is Putin). To this,
Russia’s liberal democrats have yet to find a compelling answer.
One Russian, however, who personifies biographically both
that system’s recent democratic experiences and its nationalist
traditions, has had a mostly unambiguous reaction to Russiagate. Despite US mainstream-media claims that Russian President Putin is “happy” with the “destabilization and chaos” caused by Russiagate in the United States, such consequences are incompatible with what has been Putin’s historical mission since coming to power almost 20 years ago: to rebuild Russia socially and economically after its post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s, and to achieve this through modernizing partnerships with democratic nations – from Europe to the United States – in a stable international environment.
For this reason, Putin himself is unlikely to have plotted Russiagate
or to have taken any real satisfaction from its woeful consequences.
Which leaves us with an as-yet-unanswerable question. Eventually, Trump and Putin will leave office. But the consequences of Russiagate, both in America and in Russia, will not depart with them. What will be the subsequent, longer-term consequences for both countries and for relations between them?
From today’s perspective, nothing good.”
…………………………
Added:
12/10/18, “The Death of Global Order Was Caused by Clinton, Bush, and Obama,” Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt
…………………………
12/27/18, “NATO Partisans Started a New Cold War With Russia,” The American Conservative, Ted Galen Carpenter
………………………………
Comment: The US political class loves convicted felon George Soros,
happily gave the US to him and converted US citizens to his slaves decades ago.
He’s treated as royalty in Europe. Russian people are lucky–they’re
not Soros’ slaves. Their president, Putin, won’t let Soros continue to
bleed Russia and its people to death as Soros easily did in the 1990s when Russia
was newly independent and at its weakest. Putin is the only leader I know of who puts his country and its citizens ahead of Soros, in fact, protects them from him. I
appreciate Putin mentioning
that Soros continues to have free rein in the US State
Dept., that the Trump State Dept. refuses to question any of Soros’
aggressions around the
world or US taxpayer funding of them. I looked into this and found that
to this day criminally insane Soros does have his choice of US State
Dept. personnel in foreign
countries in which he has particular interest.
.................
.
Jared Kushner’s interests “include loans totaling at least $1 billion from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner…. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt….Deutsche Bank and RBS are among entities to whom he’s given personal guarantees.…Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor.….Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy."…Kushner has business “ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.”…
May 3, 2017, “Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros,” Wall St. Journal, Jean Eaglesham, Juliet Chung, Lisa Schwartz
“Investments show ties to major finance and technology names.”
“Jared Kushner, the
president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is currently in business
with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and billionaires George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people familiar with the matter and securities filings.
The previously undisclosed business relationships with titans of the financial and technology worlds are through a real-estate tech startup called Cadre that Mr. Kushner cofounded and currently partly owns.
Goldman and Messrs. Soros and Thiel, as
well as other billionaires’ firms, also have stakes in the company,
which is based in a Manhattan building owned by the Kushner family’s
company, according to people close to Cadre.
The Cadre stake is one of many interests—and ties to large financial institutions—that
Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his government financial-disclosure
form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other
filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
In his disclosure form filed earlier this year, Mr. Kushner didn’t identify Cadre as among his hundreds of assets.
The Journal identified his Cadre stake through a review of securities
and other filings as well as interviews with people familiar with the
company and Mr. Kushner’s finances.
Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a
statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns, BFPS
Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported on his disclosure form, although it doesn’t mention Cadre.
Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised
version of his disclosure form that will be made public after it has
been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has
previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government
Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has “resigned from Cadre’s board, assigned
his voting rights and reduced his ownership share.”
A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn’t respond to a request to comment.
Ms. Gorelick said it is “very normal” for a
financial-disclosure form to be revised and that the form was prepared
by Mr. Kushner’s lawyers on his behalf. A White House spokeswoman
referred questions to Mr. Kushner’s lawyer.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and other ethics experts said investments such as Mr. Kushner’s ownership of Cadre typically need to be disclosed.
They said Mr. Kushner didn’t appear to violate disclosure rules by not
publicly reporting his business-related debts and guarantees. But they
said such arrangements ideally should be disclosed, in part because they
could force Mr. Kushner to recuse himself from certain issues involving
the lenders.
“Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest
should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this,”
Mr. Potter said.
Ethics experts’ concern is that Mr. Kushner’s business connections
could jeopardize his impartiality in certain areas and that, absent
disclosures, the public is in the dark about potential conflicts.
Mr. Kushner’s rapidly expanding responsibilities
range from working on a Middle East peace deal to making the federal
government operate more efficiently. As a senior federal official, he is
bound by ethics laws that require him to recuse himself from matters
that would directly affect his financial interests.
Ms. Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, said Mr. Kushner will “recuse consistent with government ethics rules.”
Mr. Kushner, the 36-year-old scion of a real-estate family, agreed with federal ethics officials to divest himself of more than 80 assets
after he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, were hired by her father,
President Donald Trump, as senior aides. White House officials have said
some of the sales were needed to avoid potential conflicts between Mr.
Kushner’s far-reaching job duties and his personal financial interests.
Mr. Kushner is retaining more than 200 other assets, worth a total of at least $116 million, according to his disclosures. These are mostly apartments and office blocks around the U.S. Like his father-in-law, he has declined to put these assets in a blind trust, which
ethics experts regard as the cleanest way to avoid conflicts of
interest. Someone close to Mr. Kushner said there are practical problems
that made a blind trust not a realistic option.
Mr. Kushner co-founded
Cadre in 2014 with his brother, Joshua Kushner, and Ryan Williams, a
29-year-old friend and former employee of Kushner Cos., the
family-controlled business that Mr. Kushner ran until recently. Cadre
markets properties to prospective investors, who can put their money
into specific buildings or into an investment fund run by Cadre, which
collects fees on each deal.
To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund
and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the
venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most prominent
supporter of the GOP president, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre’s website. Personal backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma of
a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and
real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor who Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros’s family office is also an investor in Cadre.
The investors declined or didn’t respond to requests for public comment on their backing of Cadre, but a person familiar with Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy.
Cadre has solicited money from investors for several Kushner Cos.
real-estate projects, according to information sent to prospective
investors and reviewed by the Journal. Jared Kushner personally has stakes in some of the real-estate projects for which Cadre has raised money, according to Cadre documents and his disclosure form.
While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to “influence the [firm’s] management or policies,” according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Mr. Kushner’s company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owning 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said. [“Common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.]
Mr. Williams, chief executive of Cadre, said the company has been working with regulators to update its public filings to “reflect Jared’s nonoperational, nonmanagement relationship with the company, which has been in place since the inauguration.”
BFPS Ventures, the company that Mr. Kushner’s lawyer said holds his Cadre stake,
is shown on his financial-disclosure form as owning unspecified New
York real estate valued at more than $50 million. The form adds that “the conflicting assets of this interest have been divested.”
Beyond Cadre, some of the assets Mr. Kushner is holding on to are hard to pinpoint, partly because they are housed in entities with generic names such as “KC Dumbo Office,” according to the disclosure form.
The Journal matched many of the assets to specific real-estate
investments. An analysis of the debts on those properties, using
real-estate data services PropertyShark and Trepp LLC as well as
property records, found ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.
Lenders to Mr. Kushner, either directly or via properties he co-owns, include Bank of America Corp. , Blackstone Group LP, Citigroup Inc., UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Royal Bank of Scotland didn’t respond to requests for comment; representatives of the other firms declined to comment.
Mr. Kushner will recuse himself from matters to which Deutsche Bank or RBS are parties because he has provided personal guarantees on their loans, said a person familiar with his ethics arrangement.”
………………………
Added: “His common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties….Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka.”
May 9, 2017, “Are Kushner family real estate assets a conflict for Jared?“ CBSNews.com, Larry Light
“It remains murky just how much Kushner has rid himself of family-related assets. In a White House briefing on March 31, officials said Kushner had resigned from more than 266 entities and “divested from most of those that may have created a conflict of interest.“ A report in Politico said his common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.
Nevertheless, The New York Times reported on Monday that Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka, the president’s daughter.
What’s to stop Kushner later, after he leaves the White House, from becoming a beneficiary again and rejoining Kushner Cos.? Apparently nothing,
according to Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under
President George W. Bush. Painter, now a professor at the University of
Minnesota Law School, said the assets Kushner shipped to the trust “belong to the family,” and so he can reclaim them in the future.” …
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