Banksters

Trump Keeps Swamp Full of Goldman Sachs Scum

‘The swamp is Goldman Sachs’: how the bank is rewarded for putting profits over people

Sarah Jaffe
The Guardian : January 18, 2017

In a persistent drizzle on 17 January, a group of protesters swathed in green ponchos unfurled tarps and sleeping bags on the sidewalk in front of Goldman Sachs’ high-rise building on the West Side highway in New York City. A few of them wore handmade swamp creature masks; others bore signs with the swamp creatures on them. A light-board sign declared the bank “Government Sachs”.

The protest was the beginning of a multi-day camp-out aiming to stay on the sidewalk outside the investment bank until the inauguration of Donald Trump, and to bring people affected by the bank’s policies to the doorstep of some of the world’s richest people – some of whom will belong to the Trump administration.

“It’s about highlighting the lie that was told to millions of people in this country, the lie that Trump was draining the swamp. If we really want the swamp to be drained, we have to do it ourselves and we’re doing it by going to Goldman Sachs,” says Nelini Stamp of the Working Families party.

As the crowd of about 100 people set up camp, the police erected barricades around them but mostly held off as the crowd moved from chanting “The swamp is getting deeper! The swamp is Goldman Sachs!” to a series of speak-outs from the crowd about the bank’s connection to payday lending, the economic crisis in Puerto Rico, foreclosures and more.

For Jean Sassine, who lost his job and nearly lost his home during the 2008 financial crisis, fighting the influence of the big banks in Washington is personal. He became a member of community organization New York Communities for Change (NYCC) six years ago as a way to fight back, and for him the Goldman action “means trying to wake people up that these are the people who were part of the big crisis in 2008, that Steven Mnuchin was called Mr Foreclosure at OneWest and Goldman Sachs. Do you want Mr Foreclosure to be secretary of the treasury?”

The organizers targeted Goldman Sachs because, as Stamp explains, the bank “is a pipeline to government”. Through Democratic and Republican administrations, she notes, Goldman Sachs in particular has fed its bankers into high-ranking government positions – if Mnuchin is confirmed as treasury secretary, Trump will be the third of the past four presidents to have hired for that job from Goldman’s ranks. To Stamp, particularly in the post-financial crisis era, this means the bank is being rewarded for its involvement in subprime mortgages and the financial instruments created to profit from them.

On that front, says Renata Pumerol of NYCC, it is important to confront the power brokers directly as well as the elected officials who work with them. Calling them “Government Sachs” is a way to highlight the level to which they have captured Washington and influence policy that benefits themselves.

As for the occupation itself, the tactic obviously brings echoes of Occupy Wall Street, but Pumerol says that this demonstration differs in its specific demands – to halt the appointment of Mnuchin as well as fellow Goldmanites Gary Cohn, Anthony Scaramucci, Dina Powell and Steve Bannon. Also, she notes, this action is led by people of color and people who have been directly affected by Goldman’s actions.

“It’s an interesting circle of life for someone like myself, who was involved with Occupy,” Stamp adds, “to see this fake crony populism of ‘draining the swamp’ while the swamp is actually continuing to be filled.”

For many of the people involved in the Government Sachs action, it seemed obvious that Trump’s promises to drain the swamp were less than genuine. But for Richard Robinson, they resonated and led him to vote for the president-elect.

The 60-year-old veteran and truck driver from Utah lives on social security after a work accident nearly killed him and pushed him into medical retirement. Out of work, he says, he found himself “sitting at home feeling worthless, didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything”. A friend suggested he get a hobby, and, he laughs: “I became an activist, I guess.”

Robinson lives in a manufactured home community, and through forming a group called MH Action to deal with the issues that he and his neighbors faced, he began to get in touch with other people working on similar issues around the country.

Robinson’s community is owned by a multistate corporation that also owns apartment complexes in New York and Chicago, which helped him get in touch with NYCC. “These companies are buying communities, buying apartment complexes and their business model is not acceptable to me. It’s to raise rents as quickly as possible and decrease maintenance of the communities, and that’s not a good business model for America,” he says.

His vote for Trump, he says, was based on the assumption that because the president-elect was not a career politician, “maybe things would be run differently in Washington”. But the number of Wall Streeters and ultra-wealthy in the administration has him frustrated, and brought him to New York in protest. “He actually hit Hillary Clinton over meeting behind closed doors with [Goldman Sachs] and now I believe he was meeting with them at the same time. He’s appointed them so quickly that I’ve got to believe at the same time he was campaigning hard on Hillary Clinton for meeting with them behind closed doors, I believe he was doing the same thing.”

Nomi Prins, former managing director at Goldman Sachs turned journalist and author of All the President’s Bankers, says that rather than make sincere promises Trump simply attacked weaknesses, taking advantage of widespread anger at Wall Street to score points against first his Republican opponents and then Clinton. Mnuchin, she points out, was his finance adviser the whole time. “There were more apparent Wall Street connections through Hillary Clinton because of the foundation, the speeches and because of Bill Clinton that were real,” she says, “but these are bipartisan relationships; Wall Street is a bipartisan opportunist.” (That relationship is visible in New York City, where Alicia Glen, formerly of Goldman Sachs, serves as deputy mayor to Bill de Blasio.)

That bipartisan relationship, and the bipartisan anger at the power of finance, is what makes it so important to target the banks and lay groundwork for white working-class communities to come together with communities of color to fight, Pumerol says. Adds Sassine: “It is clear that they are ready to raid the American people as opposed to benefiting. Government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people, whether you believe in small government, big government, it’s supposed to be for the benefit of the people.”

(read the full article at the guardian

Geopolitics/War

Canadians Won’t Forget Trudeau’s Broken Promise on Electoral Reform

Claudia Chwalisz
The Tyee: February 3, 2017

In his mandate letter to the new Minister of Democratic Institutions, Karina Gould, Justin Trudeau told the nation that he was breaking one of his key election promises: “Changing the electoral system will not be in your mandate.”

Blaming a lack of consensus on reform despite extensive consultations, Trudeau claimed that it would be harmful to Canada’s stability to pursue reform or a referendum on the issue. In question period, he added, “I’m not going to do something that is wrong for Canadians just to tick off a box on an electoral platform.”

His other comments implied that now that Canadians had a government with which they were happy, they were less interested in changing the system. But Trudeau’s remarks fly in the face of the truth.

The All-Party Parliamentary Committee which was tasked with recommending a way forward on reform said that “overwhelming majority” of submissions by almost 200 electoral experts and by thousands of Canadians were in favour of proportional representation. The committee itself recommended the government design a new system of proportional representation and gauge public support through a referendum.

In terms of wider public opinion, a recent Ekos poll found that 43 per cent of Canadians said proportional representation would be the best option for Canada (higher than for any other option) and 33 per cent said it would be second best. The same survey found that 59 per cent of people think the Liberals should deliver on their promise.

Why would the Liberals abandon their promise in the face of such stark evidence? They must feel they can get away with it electorally. They are riding high in the polls. Only one in five Canadians appeared to be engaged with the consultation process. They’re betting that most people don’t care. That gamble may come back to haunt them.

First, neither of the main opposition parties has a leader at the moment, so it is not surprising that they’re faring worse in the polls. It’s not guaranteed that either party will come back strongly with new leadership, but their public profiles and their ability to scrutinize the government will both be stronger when they are no longer concentrating on internal party politics.

Second, while the Liberals may be reassured by the fact that such a small percentage of Canadians was highly engaged in the electoral reform debate, it would make sense to assume that many of those engaged voters were current or former Green or New Democratic Party supporters. Both parties have been advocates of proportional representation for a long time. In the context of the “Anybody But Harper” election, some of them cast strategic votes for the Liberals at the expense of their beliefs, thinking the next time around the electoral system wouldn’t force them into this situation. Tactical voters will be less likely to believe the Liberals a second time.

Third, while the Liberals are probably banking on most people forgetting the issue by the time 2019 rolls around, there is no way that Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, will forget, and neither will the NDP after its extensive involvement in the all-party committee. Expect both parties to campaign heavily on the issue, with the added bonus of being able to repeat that Trudeau failed to deliver “real change.” Even the Conservatives are jumping on the opportunity to call Trudeau a liar despite their stance against reform.

(read the full article at The Tyee

Health/Environment

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Levels Reach Record Highs As Hole In Reactor Discovered

Zero Hedge: February 4, 2017

With just 3 years left until the 2020 Olympics, Japan is likely desperate to reassure the world’s athletes that all is well, but an admission from TEPCO – the Fukushima nuclear plant operator – that they discovered a hole at least one square meter in size beneath the reactor’s pressure vessel, and lethal record-high radiation levels have been detected, will not likely reassure anyone.

Radiation levels of up to 530 Sieverts per hour were detected inside an inactive Reactor 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex damaged during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami catastrophe, Japanese media reported on Thursday citing the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). A dose of about 8 Sieverts is considered incurable and fatal.

As RT reports, a hole of no less than one square meter in size has also been discovered beneath the reactor’s pressure vessel, TEPCO said. According to researchers, the apparent opening in the metal grating of one of three reactors that had melted down in 2011, is believed to be have been caused by melted nuclear fuel that fell through the vessel.

The iron scaffolding has a melting point of 1500 degrees, TEPCO said, explaining that there is a possibility the fuel debris has fallen onto it and burnt the hole. Such fuel debris have been discovered on equipment at the bottom of the pressure vessel just above the hole, it added.

The latest findings were released after a recent camera probe inside the reactor, TEPCO said. Using a remote-controlled camera fitted on a long pipe, scientists managed to get images of hard-to-reach places where residual nuclear material remained. The substance there is so toxic that even specially-made robots designed to probe the underwater depths beneath the power plant have previously crumbled and shut down.

However, TEPCO still plans to launch further more detailed assessments at the damaged nuclear facility with the help of self-propelled robots.

TEPCO confirmed a black lump in the space beneath the pressure vessel. There is a possibility of nuclear fuel melting down (fuel debris).

(read the full article at zero hedge)

RELATED:
Fukushima cover-up admitted by TEPCO president (July 2016)

Elevated Radiation Consistently Found in Fukushima Areas Authorities Claim Decontaminated (April 2016)

Peer Reviewed Research Exposes Fukushima Cover-up By Japan’s Nuclear Safety Authority (January 2016)

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Leaks Have Spiked Sharply (December 2015)

Declassified Documents Show US Government Misled Public About Severity Of Fukushima Radiation (December 2015)

Fukushima scientists say radiation continues to wash into Pacific Ocean (November 2015)

Radiation Impact Studies – Chernobyl and Fukushima (September 2015)

Report says 70 to 100 percent of nuclear fuel in Fukushima No. 2 has melted (September 2015)

Fukushima Report Dangerously Downplays Ongoing Health Risks (September 2015)

Radioactive cesium from Fukushima detected in North America at highest levels yet (August 2015)

Fukushima Fallout? Whales are dying in Pacific Ocean (August 2015)

Radioactive isotope Strontium-90 spikes at Fukushima; highest reading ever(July 2015)

Japan delays nuclear fuel removal schedule for Fukushima plant(June 2015)

Fukushima: Record Levels of Radioactivity Detected in Seawater — Spiked “More than 200 Times” at Sampling Location(June 2015)

Fukushima’s “Caldrons of Hell”: More than 300 Tons of Highly Radioactive Water Generated Daily(May 2015)

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Is Leaking Again – Over 600x ‘Safe’ Radiation Levels(May 2015)

Fresh leak at Fukushima nuclear plant sees 70-fold radiation spike(February 2015)

Geopolitics/War

Congresswoman Who Says U.S. Funds ISIS Just Got Back from Syria: Here’s What She Found

Darius Shahtahmasebi
Anti-Media : January 31, 2017

Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the lawmaker who accused the U.S. government of funding and arming ISIS and introduced a bill to prevent it from happening in future, recently disclosed that she met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during her recent trip to Syria. The move has reportedly angered many of her fellow congressmen and women.

Upon returning from the war-stricken nation, Gabbard released the following statement in the form of a press release:

“My visit to Syria has made it abundantly clear: Our counterproductive regime change war does not serve America’s interest, and it certainly isn’t in the interest of the Syrian people.

“As I visited with people from across the country, and heard heartbreaking stories of how this war has devastated their lives, I was asked, ‘Why is the United States and its allies helping al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups try to take over Syria? Syria did not attack the United States. Al-Qaeda did.’ I had no answer.”

According to the press release, Gabbard met with refugees, Syrian opposition leaders who led protesters in 2011, widows and family members who fight alongside al-Qaeda groups, pro-Assad troops, humanitarian workers, and students, to name a few. Gabbard also met with high-ranking officials such as Lebanon’s newly-elected President Aon and Prime Minister Hariri, as well as U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard, Syrian President Assad, Grand Mufti Hassoun, and Archbishop Denys Antoine Chahda of the Syrian Catholic Church of Aleppo.

Initially, Gabbard allegedly had no intention of meeting Assad, as she stated in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” she told Tapper.

The meeting with Assad is incredibly controversial because of numerous allegations by the U.N. that Assad has committed crimes against humanity.

“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” she added. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him.”

Not surprisingly, the media has hyped up this visit as outrageous but has omitted some very glaring hypocrisies that arise as a result of Gabbard’s trip to Syria.

First, the Obama administration and Bush administration both drew serious allegations of war crimes, but if Gabbard had met with either of those former presidents, it’s doubtful anyone would have batted an eyelid.

Second, former Secretary of State John Kerry met with Assad in 2009, even though, after nine years in office, Assad was clearly responsible for all of the things western media has been relentlessly accusing him of doing since 2011.

Third, Gabbard’s meeting symbolizes the ridiculousness of America’s foreign policy decision-making system. A few hundred old men and women who have never been to Syria — nor care to go — sit in a room and deliberate a piece of paper deciding whether or not to drop million dollar tomahawk missiles on a relatively poor country. Even when these decision-makers are well aware of the horror their edicts will unleash, they are never required to visit the country, talk to its people, or understand the situation and better educate themselves. In the case of Syria, Congress wasn’t even required to approve the air campaign that began in 2014, as Obama authorized airstrikes without their approval anyway.

Gabbard’s move should be applauded — not ridiculed. Singling Assad out as some sort of mass-murdering psychopath while foreign leaders routinely meet with alleged war criminals such as Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s leadership, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few, is the epitome of U.S.-NATO arrogance.

Gabbard may have met with a mass murderer, but she also met with numerous people on the ground — the people who matter most. After doing so, she concluded:

“I return to Washington, DC with even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government. I call upon Congress and the new Administration to answer the pleas of the Syrian people immediately and support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. We must stop directly and indirectly supporting terrorists—directly by providing weapons, training and logistical support to rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS; and indirectly through Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey, who, in turn, support these terrorist groups. We must end our war to overthrow the Syrian government and focus our attention on defeating al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

No one can criticize her strategy because, for the last six years, no one has even attempted it.

source: The Anti-Media) (republished this article under a Creative Commons license)

Privacy, Tyranny

US Government Can Legally Access Your Facebook Data — and Now We Know How

Alice Salles
The Anti-Media : December 26, 2016

The end of the year is approaching, and data concerning government abuses of power has begun pouring in.

According to Facebook’s Global Government Requests Report, government’s requests for Facebook account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016.

Facebook’s official announcement explained that requests for user data went from 46,710 in the last half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016. At least 56 percent of these requests, Facebook added, “contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user.”

Law enforcement agencies from across the globe, Facebook continued, often send restriction requests demanding Facebook remove content from its forums. Fortunately, these requests dropped substantially this year, from 55,827 in the last half of 2015 to 9,663 in 2016 — an 87 percent drop. Most of the 2015 requests revolved around “French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks.”

Additionally, Facebook used its report to disclose for the first time what the company does when law enforcement agencies request “snapshots” of a user account that might be relevant to law enforcement for undisclosed reasons.

These “preservation requests,” as they are known, are requests to “preserve data pending receipt of formal legal process.” They are often processed by the social media website as snapshots, which are preserved temporarily. According to Facebook, the company does not “disclose any of the preserved records unless and until we receive formal and valid legal process.” In the first half of 2016, Facebook received 38,675 preservation requests regarding 67,129 accounts, a staggering number of requests.




Further, Facebook insisted it does not give law enforcement any “back doors” to user information. Adding that requests are only fulfilled if they meet legal requirements or “legal sufficiency,” as Facebook puts it, they claim to “apply a rigorous approach to every government request [they] receive to protect the information of the people who use [their] services,” the company added. But this rigorous approach is not rigorous enough if “reforms” designed to avoid privacy overreach in America simply don’t go far enough.

Take the USA Freedom Act, for instance. The 2015 law was once supported by libertarian-leaning congressmen like Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI). Later, however, Amash criticized the bill after changes giving government more power were adopted.

Mentioning the new rule by name, Facebook added that “as a result of transparency reforms introduced this year by the USA Freedom Act, our report also contains additional information concerning National Security Letters (NSLs).” NSLs are “extraordinary search procedures” that give the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the power to “compel the disclosure of customer records held by banks, telephone companies, Internet Service Providers, and others.” They are extraordinary because detailed information can be surrendered without proper oversight, an issue that has led to countless cases of abuse.

While NSLs are still being implemented, the gag order related to the procedure has changed. Now, “the government goes to court to justify the gag order only if an NSL recipient notifies the FBI of its desire for judicial review in the first place.” While the government bears “the burden of immediately going to court and proving its necessity,” NSLs give the FBI the power to bypass this important step.

Explaining that “the government lifted a gag requirement on one NSL issued in the second half of 2015,” the company decided to publish it. It’s unclear sure how many other NSLs Facebook has received.

Facebook may promise to “apply a rigorous approach to every government request” that comes its way, but rigor may only be practiced within the boundaries of U.S. law. If the law fails to protect the user’s privacy by allowing agencies to use “extraordinary” procedures, your data is never protected, no matter how well-meaning companies like Facebook claim to be.

According to Facebook, other government requests concerning “imminent risk of serious injury or death” are also granted on a regular basis. At least 3,016 of these requests were made in the first half of 2016. They targeted 4,192 accounts.

Search warrants were produced in only 13,742 cases of request for data while only 781 others were backed by court orders.

This article (US Government Can Legally Access Your Facebook Data — and Now We Know How) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org.

Geopolitics/War

Getting Real News From Aleppo – With Vanessa Beeley

Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity
Daniel McAdams : December 15, 2016

As the liberation of Aleppo has destroyed the mainstream media’s narrative, with on-the-ground interviews from east Aleppo residents showing that they were in fact being held captive for four years by an al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization. The mainstream fake news purveyors are in a panic. While virtually none of them are actually on the ground in Syria, they have been strangely uniform in their “reporting.” Why is that? Because they all use the same tainted sources — US funded “NGOs” like the “White Helmets.” What’s the truth in Aleppo? Today’s Liberty Report features one of the very few western journalists brave enough to spend time there. Her well-documented findings expose the lies of the interventionists and their enabling friends in the mainstream media. Today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report is joined live from Syria by Vanessa Beeley:

Source: The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War

Newt Gingrich Admits – Donald Trump No Longer Wants to ‘Drain the Swamp’

Michael Krieger
liberty blitzkrieg : December 21, 2016

Not that he ever wanted to, but here’s Newt Gingrich admitting what many of us already knew regarding Donald Trump’s fake populism.

Politico reports:

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington of corruption, but now that he’s preparing to move into the White House, Newt Gingrich said the Manhattan real estate mogul is looking to distance himself from that message.

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore,” the former House Speaker and close Trump adviser said of the “drain the swamp” message in an NPR interview published Wednesday morning. 

Trump’s Cabinet and other high-level appointments seem to have deviated somewhat from his “drain the swamp” message. After attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton regularly throughout the campaign for being too close to Wall Street banks, Trump has put three former Goldman Sachs executives in prominent White House positions, including Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary, Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist and Gary Cohn as the director of the National Economic Council.

As I highlighted in the recent post, The Election Never Ended:

As Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager and top adviser to Trump, as well as a former Goldman Sachs banker himself, put it Thursday: “I think the cabal against the bankers is over.” 

Indeed, as we all know, U.S. government economic policy has been essentially handed over to Goldman Sachs during this transition period. Must be a reward for its most recent settlement for rigging yet another market.

Reuters reports:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc will pay a $120 million penalty to resolve civil charges that it attempted to manipulate a global benchmark for interest rate products known on Wall Street as “ISDAFIX,” U.S. derivatives regulators said Wednesday.

The case against Goldman Sachs, brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was the latest in a series of broad investigations into manipulation by big banks of a variety of global benchmark rates.

To date, the CFTC has imposed penalties of over $5.2 billion stemming from these probes, which include Libor and Euribor, foreign exchange benchmarks, and the U.S. Dollar International Swaps and Derivatives Association Fix, or USD ISDAFIX.

A number of banks have also resolved parallel criminal charges related to the manipulation of various global benchmarks.

Goldman Sachs, which was also accused by the CFTC of making false reports on the benchmark rate, will settle the case without admitting or denying the charges.

Penalties don’t change the behavior of white collar criminals. Jail sentences would, but we don’t see any of that when it comes to bank execs.

(full article at liberty blitzkrieg)

UPDATE: Trump is still using the phrase, denies that he was ever going to stop… but the swamp has certainly not been drained.

Geopolitics/War, MSM

Former UK Ambassador has “met the person who leaked” emails & says “simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims”

Craig Murray
December 12, 2016

“I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”

The CIA’s Absence of Conviction

I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.

 

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

 

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

 

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

 

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?

Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.

Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.

In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.

The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.

craigmurray.org.uk
…

Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, and was the Rector of the University of Dundee

Corporate Welfare

Canadian National Railway: The Great Railroad Construction Robbery

Roddy Boyd
Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation : December 12, 2016

For much of the past two decades Canadian National Railway Co. has been credited with revolutionizing the North American railroad industry.

The company’s former chief executive E. Hunter Harrison’s theory of “precision railroading” — a data-driven focus on charging customers a premium for superior on-time performance — made him an industry icon and his shareholders very happy.

But in railroading, as in life, how you get there matters.

Acting on a tip, the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation began investigating Canadian National in the fall of 2014. Here’s what our reporting uncovered:

  • For over 15 years Canadian National earned hundreds of millions of dollars in profit by marking up rail construction costs up more than 900 percent to a public-sector client.
  • Canadian National regularly engaged in questionable business practices like charging internal capital maintenance and expansion projects to the same taxpayer-funded client and billing millions of dollars for work that was never done.
  • A just-released auditor general investigation suggested a series of reforms designed to reduce these profits.
  • For years, train yard personnel, under intense pressure from management, have intentionally misreported on-time performance, helping the company boost revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars.

—————

On the evening of Dec. 6, 2004, two longtime Canadian National railroad employees, track construction supervisor Scott Holmes and his boss, railroad construction chief engineer Daryl Barnett, were in an elevator at the Deerhurst Resort a few hours by car north of Toronto and on their way to their unit’s Christmas party when Barnett got a call from Manny Loureiro, his supervisor and then head of engineering for the eastern region.

Taking the call on speakerphone, Loureiro told Barnett that he was in a bind because the fiscal year was drawing to a close and his division’s budget was $12 million over what his then boss, Keith Creel, the eastern region director, had set.     Missing his budget bogey would be a major blot on his performance review; it would also eliminate his eligibility for a six-figure year-end bonus. (Editor’s note: All dollar values expressed are Canadian dollars.)

To avoid this, Loureiro told Barnett to transfer $12 million to his unit’s account from a $28 million advance payment that a customer had recently made to purchase signal equipment.

Barnett tried to object but was overruled.

After the weekend when they were back at the office, Barnett told Holmes that Loureiro had requested a transfer of $2 million in addition to the $12 million.

A week later during a conference call that included most of Canadian National’s senior management, CEO Hunter Harrison singled out Loureiro for commendation, singing his praises for having obtained such a large payment from a key customer so late in the year.

Barnett and Holmes concluded that Loureiro must have met the requirements for the maximum bonus.

The customer was GO Transit, Metro Toronto’s commuter rail system, which merged five years later with Metrolinx, Ontario’s taxpayer-funded public transportation agency. The required signal equipment was installed but the $14 million was not returned to Metrolinx’s construction project’s account, according to a former unit executive.

(Loureiro has retired from Canadian National and did not return a message left at his residence. Barnett, who left Canadian National in 2008, is now Metrolinx’s director of railway corridor infrastructure. He did not return an email and a phone call requesting comment.)

On Nov. 30 of this year when the office of Ontario’s auditor general publicly released its 2016 annual report, a 38-page chapter detailed Metrolinx’s billing and rail-construction project-management practices over the previous five years. The auditor general’s staff concluded that both of Canada’s major railroads, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, profited from Metrolinx’s lack of internal financial controls by marking up construction charges well above industry norms.

A reader doesn’t have to parse the report too closely, however, to see that the auditor general took a keen interest in Canadian National’s work for Metrolinx. Put bluntly, the auditor general laid out a case that Canadian National saw Metrolinx coming a mile away and sought to harvest every last taxpayer dollar.

The auditor general’s investigation concluded that Canadian National had billed Metrolinx for new rail products but installed recycled ones from other tracks, that Canadian National’s labor prices were 130 percent above the industry average and that Metrolinx had been charged for projects that had nothing to do with commuter rail lines.

The money involved is real enough: The report stated that Metrolinx paid Canadian National and Canadian Pacific $725 million over the past five years and Canadian National’s projects were singled out as examples of bad news for Ontario’s taxpayers. On one project Metrolinx was charged an astounding $95 million for nine miles of track constructed on the Lakeshore West line.

Christine Pedias, a spokeswoman for the auditor general’s office, declined to specify how much each railroad was paid. It’s fair to assume, though, that the majority of Metrolinx’s construction payments went to Canadian National since most of Toronto’s commuter trains run on railroad tracks it owns or sold to Metrolinx.

Anne Marie Aikins, a Metrolinx spokeswoman, provided via email a statement from the agency’s president, Bruce McCuaig, “The Auditor’s report focuses on a small sample out of the many hundreds of projects Metrolinx is currently working on or has completed between 2011 and 2016.” Additionally, Metrolinx is “proud of its record” and taking steps to address the issues raised.

For its part, Canadian National spokesman Patrick Waldron reiterated the statement it made to news organizations on Nov. 30 about the auditor general’s report, “CN is dedicated to transparency, fairness and accountability in all its contracts and projects with Metrolinx and Go Transit. Projects we have partnered on utilize rigorous construction management processes covering project specifications and budgets to deliver quality work with strict oversight.”

The auditor general also made a series of reform recommendations for Metrolinx that, if implemented, would save Ontario taxpayers money and thus hit Canadian National squarely in the wallet. These included carefully assessing labor and equipment estimates for “reasonableness” using industry standards as a benchmark prior to a contract’s approval, regularly auditing a project underway and assigning an inspector to monitor progress at construction sites.

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Long before the Ontario auditor general’s office began its investigation, Canadian National was using Metrolinx as an automated teller machine, albeit one with no deposits required. Over 15 years executive teams have come and gone at Canadian National but the one constant has been the river of profit that its Toronto construction unit has been able to reliably wring from Metrolinx.

Determining how much Canadian National billed Metrolinx over the past two decades is difficult but considering since 2010 four separate land sales, Lakeshore West construction and ongoing maintenance contracts, it’s at least $1.1 billion, the majority of which likely went to operating income. In other words, Metrolinx’s long-running failure to properly scrutinize Canadian National emboldened it to charge prices so high that many of the construction and maintenance contracts amounted to almost pure profit.

The most audacious episode occurred from 2004 to 2008 when Canadian National’s construction managers developed a billing scheme that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and benefits through wildly inflating the cost of construction, according to documents obtained by the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation and attached to ongoing litigation.

The project involved a track expansion project that Canadian National performed for Metrolinx’s Lakeshore West line, on a route that stretched about 40 miles from Hamilton, Ontario, to Toronto’s Union Station. The work was completed in 2012.

Windfall profits and bonus payouts weren’t the half of it. In numerous instances Canadian National billed Metrolinx for work that Canadian National did for its own capital maintenance and expansion projects, saving itself many millions of dollars in expenses.

From 2004 to 2008, Canadian National did track construction work for Metrolinx on a 4.5-mile stretch between the Burlington and Hamilton stations, referred to by Canadian National as Lakeshore West/West. On a separate stretch of the same track in late 2009, crews began adding track to the 9.1-mile stretch from the Port Credit station to Kerr Street, or the Lakeshore West/East line. (The Ontario auditor general’s annual report discussed an unnamed 9-mile track extension that cost $95 million to construct “on the Lakeshore West corridor” but did not identify the project’s location or its date of completion.)

The Lakeshore West/West project’s cost is unclear.

According to an email, Metrolinx had originally approved a construction price tag of $45 million, but in short order the project’s chief engineer, Daryl Barnett, in a bid to reduce costs, noted that the price tag had quickly ballooned past $70 million. Metrolinx’s spokeswoman Aikins did not answer repeated questions on the matter but the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation obtained an April 2015 internal audit Metrolinx conducted at the auditor general’s request that put the final tab for Canadian National’s 2004 to 2008 work on that stretch at “over $200 million.”

What cost “over $200 million?” Three Canadian National railway construction unit staffers (including current and former employees) said the only project underway on Lakeshore West at that time was the Lakeshore West/West and that commuter trains were fully operational on that stretch by the spring of 2006.

(The audit document itself is highly unusual: Metrolinx’s internal auditors asked Canadian National to reauthorize their expired “audit rights” in order to properly document the project’s cost in terms of the labor and material provided. But the railroad refused, forcing the auditors to analyze the billing using only Metrolinx’s documents. The report concluded that the Lakeshore West project had no payment irregularities.)

Interviews with former Canadian National construction employees suggest that much of the Lakeshore West cost run-up can be attributed to Canadian National’s billing Metrolinx for an extensive series of upgrades around Canadian National’s Aldershot train yard. This was work of little apparent benefit to a commuter rail service like Metrolinx. From 2006 to 2007, Canadian National added a mile of mainline quality track enabling newly assembled freight trains to be switched onto another track when exiting the yard so they could rapidly increase speed.

How did they do this? The crew built switches or “turnouts,” which are mechanical installations that guide a train from one track onto another.

Improving access to and from the Aldershot yard solved twin logistical headaches for Canadian National that were its greatest challenges in the Toronto region. Previously trains exiting the Aldershot yard traveled 15 miles per hour and had to switch onto the main tracks at that speed, thus slowing the trains behind them. Now they can reach 25 mph. After improvements at Bayview Junction, Canadian National trains can reach 40 mph when traversing through those switches, sharply lessening the frequency of backlog-inducing stalls during a trip up Dundas Mountain.

Those improvements, according to former construction unit executives, appear to have been charged to Metrolinx.

The picture, below, taken from the Snake Road overpass in Burlington, Ontario, shows a few of the switches that were in the area around Canadian National’s Snake Road facility when a reporter visited the bridge in October. About nine were apparent. This is sharply more than a mere commuter train could ever plausibly need but helpful to long freight trains arriving from Toronto (such as those of Canadian National). Documents suggest that costs mounted rapidly for Metrolinx at least partly because of Canadian National’s order for at least 25 switches: The cost to install them was about $1 million apiece.

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Canadian National’s documents indicate that building track is a remarkably profitable business and that doing so for Metrolinx has generated the type of margins usually enjoyed by  the developers of a breakthrough medicine.

According to a March 2006 Canadian National internal pricing spreadsheet obtained by the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, Canadian National could build a mile of track for a little over $1.12 million: This included a “track labor surcharge” of 138.4 percent and a 69.1 percent “track material surcharge.” (These surcharges, according to the Ontario auditor general’s report, were sharply above industry norms.)

But by charging Metrolinx $10 million to construct a mile of track, Canadian National was able to reap a profit of almost 900 percent.

(Not every customer was charged this way, however. In 2008 Canadian National built track for the federally owned Via Rail for $3 million a mile — without any bridges or switches — in Kingston, 150 miles away from Toronto.)

Nonetheless, Metrolinx had clear oversight provisions to safeguard taxpayers that were built into its Lakeshore West contracts with Canadian National, including a requirement for audit committees, frequent inspections and even aerial photographs, according to copies of the contracts obtained by the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation. The problem is that all these measures stayed on paper and none appear to have been followed, according to interviews with former employees.

To profit from Metrolinx work, Canadian National used accounting practices that would ordinarily never have publicly surfaced. Unfortunately for Canadian National, though, former construction manager Scott Holmes, who has been fighting his termination from his construction supervisor job since 2009, has claimed that he was let go, in part, because he observed — and complained about — improper billing practices.

In late October of this year Holmes’ legal team submitted a pair of exhibit-heavy filings in response to a sworn affidavit from Gary Poplyansky, a former Canadian National finance official. (Holmes declined to expand on his filings, given the ongoing litigation.)

One of the more profitable accounting gambits that Holmes has claimed to have observed is best described as “over budgeting.” Having agreed in advance to pay annual maintenance and service charges, Metrolinx paid for scheduled work that Canadian National charged it but never performed. A November 2005 email from Canadian National’s Edmonton, Alberta-based capital-projects finance officer, Joe Vanderhelm, to James Lam, then finance chief for the railroad construction group, asked if a total of $3.66 million in capital improvement and labor costs already budgeted for would be incurred by the end of the year. They were not, according to a former construction unit official.

Metrolinx officials apparently did not suspect anything was amiss and the $3.66 million was paid. At Canadian National these funds became a “betterment,” a catchphrase for revenue in excess of the managers’ year-end objectives and often the basis for a performance bonus.

Time after time, with a few keystrokes, Canadian National’s railway construction managers made almost any financial concern vanish by assigning the costs to Metrolinx and its seemingly endless pool of construction cash.

(read the full article at Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation

Geopolitics/War, MSM

Top US Spy Agency Refuses To Endorse CIA’s Russian Hacking Assessment Due To “Lack Of Evidence”

Zero Hedge : December 12, 2016

When the WaPo posted last Friday’s story about a “secret” CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, the readers of the Bezos-owned publication took it as gospel, despite, as we promptly noted, there being no evidence provided by the CIA, and as we learned today, the FBI openly resisting the CIA’s assessment. It now appears that once again the WaPo may have been engaging in “partial fake news”, as it did with its Nov. 24 story about “Russian propaganda fake media.”

According to Reuters, the so-called overseers of the U.S. intelligence community as it supervises the 17 agency-strong U.S. intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), while not disputing the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations – something which would be unprecedented for the US spy industry and would telegraph just how partisan and broken the country’s intelligence apparatus has become – has refused to endorse the CIA’s assessment “because of a lack of conclusive evidence” that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

As Reuters conveniently notes, the ODNI position could give Trump fresh ammunition to dispute the CIA assessment, which he rejected as “ridiculous” in weekend remarks, and press his assertion that no evidence implicates Russia in the cyber attacks. The ODNI’s position confirms that Trump was once again, you guessed it, right.

“ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent,” said one of the three U.S. officials.

As reported earlier, the FBI, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, likewise declined to accept the CIA’s analysis – a deductive assessment of the available intelligence – for the same reason, the three officials said.

The ODNI, headed by James Clapper, was established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the recommendation of the commission that investigated the attacks. The commission, which identified major intelligence failures, recommended the office’s creation to improve coordination among U.S. intelligence agencies.

As a reminder, the first hint that the US would scapegoat Russia for an “unexpected election outcome” took place on October 7, when the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against American political organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. Back then, president Barack Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks. Reports of the assessment by the CIA, which has not publicly disclosed its findings, have prompted congressional leaders to call for an investigation.

The narrative escalated rapidly last week, when outgoing president Obama ordered intelligence agencies to review the cyber attacks and foreign intervention in the presidential election and to deliver a report before he turns power over to Trump on Jan. 20.

So how did the CIA come to its conclusion?

According to Reuters, the agency assessed after the election that the attacks on political organizations were aimed at swaying the vote for Trump because the targeting of Republican organizations diminished toward the end of the summer and focused on Democratic groups, a senior U.S. official told Reuters on Friday. Moreover, only materials filched from Democratic groups – such as emails stolen from John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman – were made public via WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, and other outlets, U.S. officials said.

The CIA conclusion – one of induction and no supporting evidence – was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday. “(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.

Earlier Monday, Senator John McCain said on Monday also confronted the CIA’s assessment, saying there was “no information” that Russian hacking of American political organizations was aimed at swaying the outcome of the election. “It’s obvious that the Russians hacked into our campaigns,” McCain said. “But there is no information that they were intending to affect the outcome of our election and that’s why we need a congressional investigation,” he told Reuters.

(read the full article at zero hedge)

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