Hollywood Actress Admits to Manipulating Women Into Becoming Sex Slaves for Cult Leader

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themindunleashed.com / Zero Hedge

April 8, 2019

Former Smallville actress Allison Mack wept in a Brooklyn federal courtroom on Monday as she pleaded guilty to charges that she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves for the leader of a purported self-help group tied to the Clintons.

Allison Mack

The 36-year-old Mack apologized to the women who prosecutors say were exploited by the group’s leader, Keith Raniere, within the “inner sanctum” of his NXIVM self-help business known as “dominus obsequious sororium” – Latin for “master over the slave women.”

Mack arrived for her bail hearing in Brooklyn on May 4. According to one of her alleged sex slaves, Mack threatened that if she refused sex with Raniere she would be destroyed.

Mack allegedly occupied the second-most-senior position in the group.

“I believed Keith Raniere’s intentions were to help people, and I was wrong,” Mack told the judge as she pleaded guilty to racketeering charges. “I know I can and will be a better person,” she added. Her sentencing was set for September 11.

Keith Raniere

Mack allegedly procured women for Raniere – who required that prospective “slaves” upload compromising collateral into a Dropbox account. One such recruit-turned-coach was India Oxenberg – daughter of Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg, who met with prosecutors in New York in late 2017 to present evidence against Raniere. 

Mack’s guilty plea will mean she doesn’t have to stand trial with Raniere, wealthy Seagram’s heiress Clare Bronfman, and another NXIVM inner circle member, Kathy Russell – all of whom have pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Most recently, Raniere was accused of having sex with children and producing kiddie porn, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Raniere, 58, is accused of having a child “engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing one or more visual depictions of such conduct, which visual depictions were produced and transmitted,” reads a new indictment released Wednesday.

Raniere’s co-defendants, “Smallville” actress Allison Mack, Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman, Lauren Salzman and Kathy Russell were allegedly aware of his predilection for predation, and even facilitated it, according to prosecutors, who have now charged them for that conduct under a racketeering count.

His co-defendants “were aware of and facilitated Raniere’s sexual relationships with two underage victims: (1) a fifteen-year-old girl who was employed by Nancy Salzman and who – ten years later – became Raniere’s first-line ‘slave’ in DOS,” the filing reads. –New York Post

Both Mack and Bromfman sought a separate trial in the wake of the pedophilia charges.

A 2009 photo of Raniere in Albany, New York, where Mack bought a house to be closer to the Nxivm founder.

After being run out of Arkansas in the early ’90s by then-Governor Bill Clinton’s attorney general on charges of fraud and business deception, Raniere and NXIVM executives emerged a decade later only to donate $29,900 to Hillary Clinton’s 2006 presidential campaign a decade later. At least three NXIVM officials are (or were) “invitation-only” members of the Clinton Global Initiative, according to the New York Post.

As we noted in late March, while NXIVM describes itself as a self-help business that has helped thousands of people “reach their potential” through various courses, the women’s-only “inner sanctum” led by Raniere is known as ‘DOS’, which whistleblower Frank Parlato said stands for “dominus obsequious sororium” – Latin for “master over the slave women”. Once they are a member – or “slave” – they are allegedly encouraged to recruit new women into their “slave pods”, stop dating, and be on call 24 hours a day after being branded with Raniere’s initials below the hip using a cauterizing iron. 

According to a 2010 Vanity Fair report, Clare and her sister Sara Bronfman, who joined NXIVM in 2002, contributed approximately $150 million of their trust fund to NXIVM, while Claire bought 80% of Wakaya island off the coast of Fiji for $47 million in 2016.

[I]n the last six years as much as $150 million was taken out of the Bronfmans’ trusts and bank accounts, including $66 million allegedly used to cover Raniere’s failed bets in the commodities market, $30 million to buy real estate in Los Angeles and around Albany, $11 million for a 22-seat, two-engine Canadair CL-600 jet, and millions more to support a barrage of lawsuits across the country against nxivm’s enemies. Much of it was spent, according to court filings, as Sara and Clare Bronfman allegedly worked to conceal the extent of their spending from their 81-year-old father and the Bronfman-family trustees. –Vanity Fair

Edgar Bronfman Sr. receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1999.

The 39-year-old Clare – daughter of late Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman (whose funeral Hillary Clinton spoke at) pleaded not guilty last July to charges of racketeering, money laundering and identity theft for NXIVM – fainted in court last month in response to being asked if she’d secretly retained lawyer Michael Avenatti.

Michael Avenatti and Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman.

Emily Saul@Emily_Saul_

BREAKING: Seagrams heiress Clare Bronfman faints in court after judge seems to suggest that Michael Avenatti was secretly representing her, trying to negotiate deal with US attorney’s office in NXIVM case. An ambulance has been called.

1:02 PM – Mar 27, 2019

Now that Mack has pleaded guilty, we wonder what the future holds for her co-defendants. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The jury questionnaire covers several topics, including asking candidates for their opinions about “rich individuals” and people who “engage in relationships with multiple sexual partners” and whether they “believe that people under the age of 17 should be able to consent to sex with adults.“”

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By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge

“It’s Not The Economy, Stupid… It’s The State!”

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http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

by Tyler Durden

Sat, 04/06/2019

The number one problem of all public debate about politics and economics is the failure to name the state. If this would change, so would public opinion.

There is no shortage of examples. People talk about health care for all, solving climate change, providing security in old age, universal educational access, boosting wages, ending discrimination, and you can add to the list without end.

That’s one side.

The other speaks of national identity, protecting jobs, making us more moral, forming cultural cohesion, providing security against the foreign enemy, and so on.

Obfuscation

All of this, no matter how fancy the language, is obfuscation. What all of this really means is: put the state in charge. What’s strange is the unwillingness to say it outright. This is for a reason. The plans the politicians have for our lives would come across as far less compelling if they admitted the following brutal truth.

There really are only two ways to allocate goods and services in society: the markets (which rely on individual choice) and the state (which runs on compulsion). No one has ever found a third way. You can mix the two — some markets and some state-run operations — but there always is and always will be a toggling between the two. If you replace markets, the result will be more force via the state, which means bureaucratic administration and rule by force. If you reduce the role of the state, you rely more on markets. This is the logic of political choice, and there is no escaping it.

The above paragraph is the great truth of political economy. I’ve never seen any evidence to dispute it. And yet it is the great unsayable truth. Seasons of political rhetoric fly by with no frank discussion of what precisely this or that proposal would require of the state and how that will affect our lives, much less a serious analysis of the risks of making a problem worse by replacing market forces.

Diversity in Markets

To be sure, when I say markets, I don’t only mean the money-exchange economy in which prices and accounting govern choices. Markets include philanthropy, familial organization, houses of religion, volunteering to work without pay, and everything else in the social order that relies on human volition. There are infinite varieties in the way markets instantiate themselves in human lives. The variations are contingent on culture, norms, traditions, and so on. There can be more or less voluntary ways the market expresses itself just like there can be more or less coercive forms of statism.

But let us not deny that the choice is real. If this is correct, it is strange how much people complain about markets and how little the only alternative is discussed, studied, evaluated, and finally judged. This is because the statist means will also come up short.

Depending on the state to deliver some social good depends on using the threat of violence to compel people to do what they otherwise would not choose to do. There is also no clean path to doing so; the bureaucracy always ends up as the everyday mediator between the individual and the point of a gun.

You Don’t Like Government

The reason we hear so little frank talk on this subject is that hardly anyone has ever really enjoyed their dealings with a state bureaucracy when it is imposed upon them. You think that the local DMV experience is subpar; wait until you face your first federal audit or FBI investigation, or seek benefits from some agency. Or perhaps you have a relative who is mixed up in the criminal-justice system. Whatever it is, no experience in the private sector can compare.

It means unpredictable wait times. You aren’t really a customer; you are a bother — at best. Objecting to any aspect of the service is mostly pointless. Step out of line and you are in trouble. You are a subject, and the sullen faces and dreary postures of your fellow citizens in line underscores the point.

The truth is that no one relishes dealing with the government at any level. Where would you rather be: the driver’s license bureau or McDonald’s? The school district office or a local bar? A military base or a car plant? The courthouse or the shopping mall? Want to deal with a government cop or a private security guard?

There’s a pattern here. It’s a hugely important one. The relationship between the individual and the state, vs. the same individual and the market, is fundamentally different. We all know this intuitively.

I personally know no one who relishes dealing with government. And yet I know plenty of people who support letting government take over ever more aspects of our lives, especially when they don’t understand that their favorite program means exactly that.

How can we make sense of this paradox? Well, most expansions of government power are pushed without overt public approval, with plenty of deception, and with the unfair advantage that government itself has in the political process. In other words, it is not necessary that people actively favor government expansion for government to continue its imperial march through society. It only requires a certain level of passive compliance.

The TSA

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security — and the TSA as the centerpiece — is a great example. I was talking with Edward Lopez, economics professor at Western Carolina University, about how this came about. We were both around at the time and we compared notes.

How did it happen? Government took advantage of public fear and panic following 9-11 to impose what government had always wanted. There was private lobbying too: plenty of contractors have gotten rich, so their lobbying has paid off. The airlines might have played a role too in offloading security liabilities.

Anyone who knew the nature of government could have predicted the results. There have been exploding costs. Individual rights have been violated. Our privacy and constitutional protections have been shredded. Inefficiencies have ballooned. And what for? No credible terrorist threats have really been stopped.

Somehow, at the time this gigantic government apparatus was created, many people imagined that this time would be different, that government would magically do a better job at securing us than the private sector could or would do. Of course this time is never actually different. The bureaucracy gets created, and then people shake their fists at it. But, by then, it is actually too late.

A bureaucracy created tends not to go away. It gets worse even as it expands and takes on a life of its own. The abuses, wastes, and inefficiencies mount, and no one can do anything about it.

What I conclude from this is that the average person lives with a complete mental disconnect when it comes to government. We don’t like dealing with it. We know the truth in our hearts. And yet we keep suspending our incredulity on the belief that government must be doing some wonderful thing somewhere even if we don’t experience it ourselves.

Government promises always fall short. Even worse, government wrecks what it touches. Wars increase violence. Moral crusades produce opposite results. Cultural planning backfires. Welfare programs break and fail to serve. Monetary policy from the Fed yields massive financial distortions. Government efforts to protect industry lead to inefficiency, shutdowns, and stagnation. Government security makes us less secure and subjects us to scary regiments of spooks and thugs.

In other areas of life, we are seeing the rise of massive innovation in the private sector that shows the failure of government. Large companies are generating their own power. Global digital money is making new inroads. Local zoning laws and taxi monopolies are being strained by private initiative. And the daily excitement about private communication systems is breaking down the capacity of political elites to control the conversation.

The tendency toward loss of political control has inspired new, more extreme, and more obscurantist forms of selling state control to us. As the dynamics of public vs. private continue to shift, we can look forward to ever more obfuscation about the reality of displacing market forces. But once you see what’s going on you, can’t unsee it. The most effective path toward helping others see too is simple: name the state.

The bitter truth about most public policies being sold by the political class is that they give them more power to control our lives. If you favor some of these policies, be honest with the rest of us about what you mean, so that we can make more clear-headed judgments about the kind of society we want to live in.

Why Ukrainians want to elect a comedian as president

The Ukrainian electorate has run out of patience.

“A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report found that some 60 percent of Ukrainians were living below the poverty line in 2016, as Ukraine remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. Meanwhile, its oligarchs continue to grow richer; in 2018 local media reported that the combined wealth of the country’s 100 richest people has jumped by 43 percent to $37bn in just one year.”

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian actor and candidate in the upcoming presidential election, hosts a comedy show at a concert hall in Kiev on February 22, 2019 [File: Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko]

 

Source link

http://www.aljazeera.com

by Katya Gorchinskaya

31 Mar 2019

Ukraine is on the verge of yet another revolt. This time, however, Ukrainians will not take their anger out onto the streets in another revolution; rather, it looks like they are getting ready to quietly rebel against the political elite and their corruption in the polling booths, as they vote for the next president on March 31.

The ballot is a whopper, with the names of record-breaking 39 candidates on it. Even better, the leader in the race is the most unlikely candidate of them all: Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian with no political experience or governance expertise.

Days before the vote, Zelensky is leading in the polls between eight and 15 percent ahead of the runner-up, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. The two are likely to meet in a runoff vote, which will take place on April 21.

Zelensky’s most famous role is in a TV series called Servant of the People. He plays a poor, honest teacher who becomes president by chance. The comedian likes to say he “shares the values” of his character.

And just like in his TV series, Zelensky took Ukraine’s politics by storm. He was propelled to the very top by a popular TV channel owned by one of Ukraine’s top oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky, who currently lives between Switzerland and Israel.

The channel gives ample airtime to both Zelensky, the candidate, and Zelensky, the actor. The actor even gets to shine in a whole raft of TV programmes and documentaries on the eve of the election, when campaigning is banned by law.

Both Kolomoisky and Zelensky deny a political connection, despite the fact that the oligarch’s lawyer is part of the comedian’s election campaign team, and his guard is accompanying him on the campaign trail.

Pollsters say Zelensky’s popularity is the result of the high name recognition he enjoys, and Ukrainians’ deep disappointment and disillusionment with their ruling elite. Voters are ready for a new face, even when they know it belongs to a man who has next to no competence in politics.

Deep disillusionment

A recent Gallup survey showed that Ukraine holds the world record in low trust in the government for the second year straight: Just nine percent have confidence in it, way below the regional median for former Soviet states of 48 percent, and the global average of 56 percent.

This is the price the political elite is paying for failing to live up to the promises of Ukraine’s 2013 Revolution of Dignity for economic growth, rule of law, transparency and higher standards of living.

More than five years on, unemployment and underemployment have pushed an estimated 3.2 million Ukrainians (about one in 10 adults) to seek work abroad on a permanent basis, while many others take up temporary jobs outside the country every year. Poverty rates are high, and so is inequality.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report found that some 60 percent of Ukrainians were living below the poverty line in 2016, as Ukraine remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. Meanwhile, its oligarchs continue to grow richer; in 2018 local media reported that the combined wealth of the country’s 100 richest people has jumped by 43 percent to $37bn in just one year.

Competitive Ukrainian business has also taken a hit.

“In my worst nightmares I couldn’t imagine this is where we would be now,” Yevgeniy Utkin, an entrepreneur and pioneer of the IT industry in Ukraine, told me recently.

He is not upset because his IT business has been raided a few times by masked law enforcement agents, searching for proof of financial crimes (and not making any charges afterwards) – a common occurrence in today’s Ukraine which has come to be known as “maski show”. Nor is he upset about the loss of most of his Russian assets after Moscow annexed Crimea and started the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Like many others in the business sector, Utkin has simply lost hope over time.

He told me of one incident in particular that made him disillusioned early on. In the summer of 2014, soon after Poroshenko was inaugurated, Utkin approached him with an idea for a hi-tech solution for army radio communications. He was referred to a senior administration official and fellow multimillionaire, who was more interested in inviting Utkin to join him on a yachting trip to Sardinia. Utkin gasped – and declined.

Just a few weeks later, in August, one of the fiercest battles of the war took place in the eastern Ukrainian city of Ilovaisk. At least 366 Ukrainian soldiers died, 429 were injured and hundreds captured in an ambush. There were many factors that led to this tragedy, including a significant presence of Russian troops, the government later found. But Utkin was struck by the major role that poor communication played in this tragedy, and it was exactly the problem he had wanted to fix.

Broken promises

Poroshenko surfed into the presidency on the wave of revolution and war, and on the promise of change. He said he would end the war within days, come after the mighty oligarchs and “personally oversee” the fight against corruption.

Four years later, Poroshenko had to apologise for making a hasty and arrogant declaration about ending the war

He had much more leverage to fulfil his other promises – fighting oligarchy and corruption, but did equally poorly on both of them.

Oligarchs still control massive areas of the economy: energy, agriculture, media and access to state-owned monopolies and natural resources. They are difficult to rein in because the rule of law is hard to come by in Ukraine.

The European Business Association, which conducts a regular survey of CEOs to gauge Ukraine’s investment climate, found that 78 percent of its respondents were critically dissatisfied with the level of corruption in the country, 74 percent distrusted the judiciary, and 65 percent complained about the shadow economy

Less than a month ago, a series of journalistic investigations revealed that Oleh Hladkovsky, deputy head of the National Security and Defense Council and Poroshenko’s friend and former business partner, and his son, were allegedly involved in corruption related to defense procurement deals.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the Ukrainian president vouched to make corrupt officials “bring back every kopeck they had stolen with their teeth”.

That is terribly unlikely given that Ukraine’s judicial reform is failing.

In a recent illustration of this spectacular failure, a special commission in charge of appointing judges to the High Court of Ukraine gave positions to a number of judges with questionable track records, including some who have let dozens of drink-and-drive offenders walk free, are holding two passports (which is illegal in Ukraine), and have covered up for other corrupt judges – among other things. At the same time, Ukrainian judge Pavlo Parkhomenko, who has accumulated much recognition domestically and internationally for his human rights work, was the sole candidate to be rejected.

Pressure for change from outside

To be completely fair, there has been some change in Ukraine since 2013. Its gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 3.3 percent last year, the highest level since 2011. The Ukrainian banking sector was mostly cleaned up, with over 100 suspect banks closed and the National Bank completely reformed.

The state-owned gas holding Naftogaz underwent a near-miraculous transformation and went from a net loss of 18 billion hryvnia ($2.2bn at the time) in 2013 to a record profit of 39.4 billion hryvnia ($1.5bn) in 2017.

A national electronic procurement system Prozorro was launched to ensure that all public money is spent efficiently and transparently. It has saved an estimated $2.76bn in less than five years and won scores of international awards for innovation and excellence.

Significant reforms have started in the healthcare and education sectors, too.

And most importantly, for the average Ukrainian, the country now has a visa-free regime with its European Union neighbours.

But most of these reforms were made possible by pressure mounted by the Ukrainian civil society (which has very much been supported by the West) and international donors and partners, such as the United States, the European Union, Canada and others.

Each of these reforms also took a kamikaze-style leader, typically hailing from outside the existing system, who temporarily came in from the business sector or other walks of life to push through a specific cause.

After accomplishing the task, many of them left or were pushed out; others are lasting it out until the election, and still, others were sabotaged, and their efforts often reversed by the more politically shrewd players who fill senior government offices.

Thus, over the years, Ukraine’s political elite has proven in a multitude of ways that on its own it is incapable to bring about change of the scale and depth expected by its electorate.

In one episode of Servant of the People, Zelensky’s character tells the parliament that “the society has changed, and it’s no longer going to wait and forgive”. He then goes on to shoot all the parliament members with an automatic weapon.

The Ukrainian society has indeed changed and it clearly doesn’t want to wait and forgive any more. On March 31, it will most likely “shoot down” its failed political elite through the ballot box. Afterwards, what shape or form its growing anger will take is anyone’s guess.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katya Gorchinskaya

Katya Gorchinskaya is a Ukrainian journalist, media manager and former CEO of Hromadske Television.

Why There’ll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

The notion that Russia interfered in the US elections – even without Trump’s collusion – has become an article of faith among the American political and media establishment.

“Russia under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin has presented a somewhat shocking quandary for the US ruling class. It found that Russia was no longer in the servile business of rolling over to pander to Washington’s tyranny in international relations. Under Putin, Russia shook off the vassal status that it had unfortunately acquired under the feckless presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991-99).”

“The fundamental issue for Washington is that Russia is not a vassal for American imperialism. That’s why there will be no reset. There will only be reset when American imperialism is replaced by a law-abiding, genuinely democratic US government. Until then, expect more US hostility, confrontation and even war towards Russia.”

Source: Why There’ll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

28.03.2019

Why There’ll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

President Donald Trump and his White House team may have been cleared of collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election. That startling conclusion by Special Counsel Robert Mueller after nearly two years of investigation, might be viewed by some as giving Trump freedom to now get on with normalizing relations with Moscow. Don’t bet on it.

Mueller’s report, and US attorney general William Barr’s appraisal of it, only partially vindicate Trump’s long-held claims that the whole so-called “Russiagate” story is a “hoax”.

Yes, Mueller and Barr conclude that neither Trump nor his campaign team “conspired” with Russia to win the presidential race. But Democrat opponents are now dredging up the possibility that Trump “unwittingly” facilitated Kremlin cyber operations to damage his 2016 rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton.

In his summary of Mueller’s report, Barr unquestioningly accepts as fact the otherwise contentious claim that Russia interfered in the US election. Democrats and the anti-Trump US news media have not been deterred from pursuing their fantasy that the Kremlin allegedly meddled in US democracy. Trump has been cleared, but Russia has certainly not. It very much continues to have the smear of interference slapped all over its image.

At the heart of this narrative – bolstered by Mueller and Barr – is the false claim that Russian cyber agents hacked into the Democrat party computer system during 2016 and released emails compromising Clinton to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. That whole claim has been reliably debunked by former NSA technical expert William Binney and other former US intelligence officials who have shown indisputably that the information was not hacked from outside, but rather was released by an insider in the Democrat party, presumably based on indignation over the party’s corruption concerning the stitch-up against Clinton’s rival nomination for the presidential ticket, Bernie Sanders.

That is real scandal crying out to be investigated, as well as the Obama administration’s decision to unleash FBI illegal wiretapping and dirty tricks against Trump as being a “Russian stooge”. The Russian collusion charade was always a distraction from the really big serious crimes carried out by the Obama White House, the FBI and the Democrat party.

In any case, the notion that Russia interfered in the US elections – even without Trump’s collusion – has become an article of faith among the American political and media establishment.

That lie will continue to poison US-Russia relations and be used to justify more economic sanctions being imposed against Moscow. Trump may be cleared of being a “Kremlin stooge”. But he will find no political freedom to pursue a normalization in bilateral relations because of the predictable mantra about Russia interfering in American democracy.

But there is a deeper reason why there will be no reset in US-Russia relations. And it has nothing to do with whether Trump is in the White House. The problem is a strategic one, meaning it relates to underlying geopolitical confrontation between America’s desired global hegemony and Russia’s rightful aspiration to be an independent foreign power not beholden to Washington’s dictate.

Russia under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin has presented a somewhat shocking quandary for the US ruling class. It found that Russia was no longer in the servile business of rolling over to pander to Washington’s tyranny in international relations. Under Putin, Russia shook off the vassal status that it had unfortunately acquired under the feckless presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991-99).

Putin’s landmark speech in Munich in 2007 was certainly a watershed moment in geopolitical relations whereby the Russian leader condemned US rampaging across the Middle East with criminal wars.

Then there was the failed attempt in 2008 by the US and NATO to over-run Georgia, failed because of a decisive military intervention by Russia in support of neighboring South Ossetia.

The return of the Cold War in US-Russia relations under former President GW Bush was due to the realization in Washington that Putin and Russia were no longer subordinates that could be pushed around for the gratification of American imperialism.

The Americans then tried another tack. Public relations and inveigling.

When Barack Obama took over the White House in 2009, there was the famous “reset policy” initiated by Washington towards Moscow. In March 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Geneva with a jokey “reset button”, purportedly to demonstrate a willingness in Washington for a new beginning in bilateral relations.

Ominously, Clinton’s State Department mislabelled the button with the Russian word for “overload” not “reset”. Her inane cackling to ingratiate herself with the skeptical Lavrov was also a giveaway of a phony reset.

Look how hollow such ostensible claims for “reset” by Washington have since manifested.

Admittedly, there was a significant gain in Obama’s negotiation of substantial nuclear arms reductions with the New START treaty in 2010.

However, it didn’t take long until Washington was back to its usual business of subversions and covert wars for regime change against foreign states that didn’t kowtow to its dictates. We saw this with ample evidence in the overthrow of Libya’s government in 2011, the attempted ouster in Syria beginning the same year, and the even more daring American intervention in Ukraine in early 2014 when it installed a rabidly anti-Russian regime through an illegal coup d’état.

We are also presently seeing this criminal American imperialism being conducted brazenly towards Venezuela, where Washington wants to overthrow a socialist president in order to get its corporate hands on the South American country’s vast oil wealth.

All the while, Russia has become ever more resolute its defiance of Washington’s global gangsterism. Moscow’s military defense of Syria from US-led regime change was certainly a pivotal moment in defining the limits of Moscow’s tolerance, as was Russia’s defense of Crimea.

For these reasons, Washington in its chagrin has moved to abandon the other major arms control treaty, the INF, which could allow it to install short and medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, thus aggravating threats and tensions with Russia. The future of the much-vaunted New START treaty is also in doubt because of American vacillation. So much for Obama’s “reset”.

These are the structural, strategic factors in why Washington is set on a course of hostility towards Moscow. It has got very little to do with President Trump being in the White House or whether he has been cleared of “collusion” with Moscow.

The fundamental issue for Washington is that Russia is not a vassal for American imperialism. That’s why there will be no reset. There will only be reset when American imperialism is replaced by a law-abiding, genuinely democratic US government. Until then, expect more US hostility, confrontation and even war towards Russia.

 

Trudeau’s Cabinet Tempest

On a global scale, the current events within Canada’s Justin Trudeau cabinet are not much more than the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

“For true justice, corporate citizenship should be annulled and the managers and shareholders be held responsible for criminal actions and other damages created by the company…”

Source: Trudeau’s Cabinet Tempest – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

http://www.globalresearch.ca

On a global scale, the current events within Canada’s Justin Trudeau cabinet are not much more than the proverbial tempest in a teapot. While receiving saturation coverage on Canada’s CBC and some national newspapers, it is not totally noteworthy with global significance, other than some slipping and tarnishing of Trudeau’s halo with foreign media.

Having said that the problem’s within the Trudeau government do demonstrate a few political truths common to many governments and government parties. Concurrently it also reveals some problems deep – but not too deep – within Canada’s governance. Superficially it is a squabble internally within the Trudeau cabinet but it has threads and connections that incorporate much of what is wrong with Canadian governance.

It started innocently enough, at least on the surface, with the resignation of a cabinet minister for straightforward reasons. Positions were reassigned and shortly thereafter another resignation occurred, setting the current problems into motion – which is another way of saying the problems surfaced into the public sphere, old problems and new problems.

Canada’s Minister of Justice and the Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould was reassigned to a new position as Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, an assignment many considered was a demotion. MS Wilson-Raybould appeared to accept the change with equanimity. However, shortly thereafter, she resigned from that position, keeping her position guarded behind the inability to speak as per the legalities of client confidentiality and cabinet confidentiality.

It quickly became understood that the problem concerned her decision to allow the prosecution of a Canadian multinational corporation, SNC Lavalin, to proceed. Trudeau attempted to appease the situation but considering the strong character of Ms Wilson-Raybould and his own shifting explanations the media ran with the story, creating a significant impact across the country.

I watched Ms Wilson-Raybould’s presentation to the House of Commons Justice Committee, followed by presentations from Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s best friend and right hand man in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and from Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the more powerful positions in the bureaucracy. Butts testimony seemed vague, more because he was not in attendance at many of the conversations discussed. Wernick was abrasive and abrupt, arrogant, and quite comfortable being so. He struck me as being someone who would be a partisan supporter of either the Liberals or the Conservatives, whoever was in power, as long as they followed the neoliberal agenda.

What I took away from all this so far are ramifications that spread throughout the Canadian political and business community, and indeed into the international community.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

The original problem stemmed from charges against SNC Lavalin for bribery of foreign officials that the Prosecutor’s Office were proceeding with. It quickly became mixed up with a hastily thought up and recently passed bill creating the possibility within the judicial system of a “deferred prosecution agreement” (DPA). Trudeau and the PMO argued publicly that a DPA would save many jobs, directly, and indirectly through service providers to SNC Lavalin. Ms Wilson-Raybould stood fast in Committee to her position that the prosecution should proceed.

There was no argument about the innocence of SNC Lavalin. The argument presented by the government concerned the usual political mantra used by all parties – “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Wernick argued that it was in the “public interest” while the overall testimony seemed to indicate it was purely political interest carrying the argument.

From my perspective it is not at all about jobs, and many good arguments were made in Committee indicating that employment and the economy were not the issue, at least not in the usual usage of the language. What struck me was that the PDA is another means by which corporations, their managers, and their shareholders, can escape responsibility for actions undertaken by the legality known as the “corporation.”

It is what corporations are designed for: to escape personal responsibility for errors, mistakes, illegal actions et al, and to maximize profits. The PDA, while excused as being something other countries have (which does not necessarily make it a good thing), is simply another layer to protect the managers and shareholders of SNC Lavalin from prosecution and responsibility for damages. With the PDA, a slap on the wrist, some form of promises and conditionalities to meet and then business will proceed as usual.

For true justice, corporate citizenship should be annulled and the managers and shareholders be held responsible for criminal actions and other damages created by the company. Certainly that creates problems on the shareholder side as many citizens are shareholders simply through the practice of pension and other investment pools being involved with the markets. I won’t sort that out here. SNC Lavalin’s directors, whichever one offered the bribe, should be held criminally responsible.

Neocolonialism and Canada’s Indian Act

Ms Wilson-Raybould has an undergraduate degree in political science and history, and a graduate law degree. She has served as B.C. Crown Prosecutor, a Treaty Commissioner, and a Regional Chief for the B.C. Assembly of First Nations. She speaks with the authority of a person well versed in European based law and well versed in First Nations traditions and governance. That introduces another broad thread to the story.

As a First Nation leader, Ms. Wilson-Raybould has consistently spoken against Canada’s Indian Act (1876), still in force with amendments. When the cabinet shuffle occurred, Trudeau offered her the position of Minister of Indigenous Affairs, a position she declined for obvious reasons of not wanting to be the ‘enforcer’ of an act she abhorred. In short, the Indian Act is one of the larger means to continue with Canada’s unstated political acts of maintaining the First Nations as subjugated people, a unilaterally imposed set of rules theoretically dealing with the various treaties made as European ‘civilization’ spread across the continent. Ms Wilson-Raybould does come from British Columbia, a province where the vast majority of the land has never been ceded by treaty.

Underneath Trudeau’s attempts at reconciliation for all the colonial depredations imposed on the indigenous people of Canada – land theft, imposition of reservations, many legal limitations, ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide – Canada remains a racist state. It is not overt and obvious to many, but it rests beneath the surface of Canadian civility. The Indian Act needs to be repealed and the federal government needs to negotiate with the First Nations in order to honour the treaties across Canada, and not impose unilateral regulations. Reconciliation should proceed to reparations – financial and territorial.

Resolution

How this affair resolves itself is an unknown. Beside the legal affairs of SNC Lavalin and the reconciliatory pretenses of the Trudeau government, there is also the factor of Trudeau’s avowed feminism. After MS Wilson-Raybould’s departure, another high level and highly respected cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, resigned over the handling of the SNC Lavalin affair.

So far, both women are staying in caucus and are indicating they will run again in the approaching general election, October 21, 2019. Polls indicate Trudeau’s ratings have dropped considerably, while the Liberal party itself has already rebounded somewhat from an initial drop. With a weak opposition – a divided Conservative camp, and a wandering NDP, there may yet be time to straighten the halo, albeit with some tarnish.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Jim Miles, Global Research, 2019

Is Tulsi Gabbard for Real? America Is Ready for a Genuine Peace Candidate

Americans have heard much of the same before, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years.

Source: Is Tulsi Gabbard for Real? America Is Ready for a Genuine Peace Candidate

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Philip M. GIRALDI

14.02.2019

The lineup of Democrats who have already declared themselves as candidates for their party’s presidential nomination in 2020 is remarkable, if only for the fact that so many wannabes have thrown their hats in the ring so early in the process. In terms of electability, however, one might well call the seekers after the highest office in the land the nine dwarfs. Four of the would-be candidates – Marianne Williamson a writer, Andrew Yang an entrepreneur, Julian Castro a former Obama official, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Congressman John Delaney – have no national profiles at all and few among the Democratic Party rank-and-file would be able to detail who they are, where they come from and what their positions on key issues might be.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a national following but she also has considerable baggage. The recent revelation that she falsely described herself as “American Indian” back in 1986 for purposes of career advancement, which comes on top of similar reports of more of the same as well as other resume-enhancements that surfaced when she first became involved in national politics, prompted Donald Trump to refer to her as “Pocahontas.” Warren, who is largely progressive on social and domestic issues, has been confronted numerous times regarding her views on Israel/Palestine and beyond declaring that she favors a “two state solution” has been somewhat reticent. She should be described as pro-Israel for the usual reasons and is not reliably anti-war. She comes across as a rather more liberal version of Hillary Clinton.

And then there is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, being touted as the “new Obama,” presumably because he is both black and progressive. His record as Mayor of Newark New Jersey, which launched his career on the national stage, has both high and low points and it has to be questioned if America is ready for another smooth-talking black politician whose actual record of accomplishments is on the thin side. One unfortunately recalls the devious Obama’s totally bogus Nobel Peace Prize and his Tuesday morning meetings with John Brennan to work on the list of Americans who were to be assassinated.

Booker has carefully cultivated the Jewish community in his political career, to include a close relationship with the stomach-churning “America’s Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach, but has recently become more independent of those ties, supporting the Obama deal with Iran and voting against anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) legislation in the Senate. On the negative side, the New York Times likes Booker, which means that he will turn most other Americans off. He is also 49 years old and unmarried, which apparently bothers some in the punditry.

California Senator Kamala Harris is a formidable entrant into the crowded field due to her resume, nominally progressive on most issues, but with a work history that has attracted critics concerned by her hard-line law-and-order enforcement policies when she was District Attorney General for San Francisco and Attorney General for California. She has also spoken at AIPAC, is anti-BDS, and is considered to be reliably pro-Israel, which would rule her out for some, though she might be appealing to middle of the road Democrats like the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi who have increasingly become war advocates. She will have a tough time convincing the antiwar crowd that she is worth supporting and there are reports that she will likely split the black women’s vote even though she is black herself, perhaps linked to her affair with California powerbroker Willie Brown when she was 29 and Brown was 61. Brown was married, though separated, to a black woman at the time. Harris is taking heat because she clearly used the relationship to advance her career while also acquiring several patronage sinecures on state commissions that netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

Tulsi’s own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged “focus on the issue of war and peace” to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.

Not afraid of challenging establishment politics, she called for an end to the “illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government,” also observing that “the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world.” She then backed up her words with action by secretly arranging for a personal trip to Damascus in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was important to meet adversaries “if you are serious about pursuing peace.” She made her own assessment of the situation in Syria and now favors pulling US troops out of the country as well as ending American interventions for “regime change” in the region.

In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran and more recently has criticized President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting “unarmed protesters” in Gaza, but one presumes that, like nearly all American politicians, she also has to make sure that she does not have the Israel Lobby on her back. Gabbard has spoken at a conference of Christians United for Israel, which has defended Israel’s settlement enterprise; has backed legislation that slashes funding to the Palestinians; and has cultivated ties with Boteach as well as with major GOP donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. She also attended the controversial address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2015, which many progressive Democrats boycotted.

Nevertheless, Tulsi supported Bernie Sanders’ antiwar candidacy in 2016 and appears to be completely onboard and fearless in promoting her antiwar sentiments. Yes, Americans have heard much of the same before, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years.

What Tulsi Gabbard is accomplishing might be measured by the enemies that are already gathering and are out to get her. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept describes how NBC news published a widely distributed story on February 1^st, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the expert cited by NBC turned out to be a firm New Knowledge, which was exposed by no less than The New York Times for falsifying Russian troll accounts for the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to suggest that the Kremlin was interfering in that election. According to Greenwald, the group ultimately behind this attack on Gabbard is The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which sponsors a tool called Hamilton 68, a news “intelligence net checker” that claims to track Russian efforts to disseminate disinformation. The ASD website advises that “Securing Democracy is a Global Necessity.”

ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation.

For the moment, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the “real thing,” a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of American who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to “spread democracy” and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States. We the people can always hope.

 

Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup

Source: Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

http://www.globalresearch.ca

A letter was sent today to the Science for Peace list-serve in response to the Science for Peace Statement on the Government of Canada’s ongoing campaign to overturn the elected government of Venezuela.

Science for Peace is based in the Dept of Physics of the University of Toronto.

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What is most welcome in this statement is its expeditious issue and wide-lensed comprehension of the hypocritically self-serving role of Canada’s state, major mining corporations and banks in the plundering of Latin American societies and interference in their internal affairs to ensure that it can continue on and grow against elected governments seeking self-determination.  (now for the first time our foreign minister mendaciously publicly leading the alliance of the externally orchestrated oppression, exploitation and coup in Venezuela).

This exact passage deserves verbatim support:

“Canada has, in recent years, supported the replacement of elected governments in Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti and now in Venezuela, and its relations with Latin America are problematical in broader terms.

Canada provides a financial and legal haven for businesses that exploit labour and decimate the forests, agriculture, and watersheds in these countries. Canadian banks mire these countries in debt and buy up public utilities.

Protests against Canadian mining companies in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala are met with police and military brutality. In addition, Canada needs to maintain a distance from the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Bolsonaro, among other policies, threatens our common future by opening up the Amazon, the lungs of the planet, to deforestation for profit.”

I would like to add, however, that it is not only or primarily “the Trudeau government” that is “shaping its interventionist stance toward Venezuela”. It is, more specifically, Foreign Minister Freeland who also leads Canada and NATO towards massive militaristic operations on Russia’s borders, as well as warlike policies of the violent-coup established government of Ukraine with, as the right-wing states of Latin America, a chilling fondness for fascist military rule of the past.

But to be fair, this is just as much the policy of the now Conservative opposition whose leader stands full-square for this illegal interference in Venezuela, and whose admired Harper predecessor was the most militaristic regime in Canada’s history with its bombers leading NATO’s near eco-genocide of Libya. The Conservatives not the Liberals signed the still fulfilled contract “to sell military hardware to Saudi Arabia” that helps to starve and destroy Yemen society today. Only the NDP has advised against Canada’s US-like interference in Venezuela’s government, but the media have bayed against its leader for saying so.

The excellent Sandbrook/Science for Peace statement also points out the hypocrisy of Canada still selling armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia (as it murders its critic and bombs poverty-stricken neighbour Yemen into mass starvation), while at the same time “condemning the Maduro regime for lesser crimes”.

But the question arises even here, what are “Maduro’s crimes“ under law?  Everywhere in the mass media and government statements Maduro is accused of them – from ‘massive corruption’ to ‘fraudulent elections’. But internet search cannot find any evidence of abuse of public power for private gain – the definition of corruption.

Moreover, the pervasive claim of ‘fraudulent elections’ is plainly refuted by the international evidence of nearly 100 professional journalists and others from around the world whose June 26 report on the 2018 May election was unanimous in declaring the Venezuela’s electoral system as “fraud proof”, and by President Jimmy Carter’s earlier report on Venezuela’s electoral system as “the most excellent I have known”.

There is no testimony from any direct observer to the contrary. But then none of Minster Freeland’s foreign allies now ganging up on Venezuela had any known observers at the election which some of then-fractured opposition boycotted (the sole irregularity).

What is most shocking about Canada’s fomenting of a right-wing led uprising against Venezuela’s elected government is the long line of official lies of its government and the corporate media at collective and individual levels.

They completely suppress the cause of Venezuela’s economic and civil collapse by ever more US-led financial embargoes on all its lifeline of support – from its international credit to food and medical imports to recent seizure of banked assets in the US to externally orchestrated mobs in the street over 20 years.

Led by Canada’s Foreign Minister (right) embracing all fellow conspirators to Bolsonaro’s man most warmly, she claims and all echo in variations that this externally-wrought coup in violation of international law is “the rule of law” and “according to the Constitution” for “free and fair elections” to end the “illegitimate Maduro dictatorship”.  

 

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John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Prof. John McMurtry, Global Research, 2019