Schumer Making Threats Again "Fund Ukraine Or You'll Be Sorry!"

WSJ  |  Democratic and Republican congressional leaders struck an optimistic tone that they would avert a government shutdown this weekend after a White House meeting in which lawmakers also stepped up pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to allow a long-stalled vote on Ukraine aid to go forward. 

Johnson is expected to put forward legislation in coming days that would keep the government fully open, but the details remained uncertain. The Congress has until Saturday at 12:01 a.m. to fund the departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Agriculture, Energy and several other agencies that have been operating on temporary extensions since Sept. 30. The funding for the rest of the federal government expires after March 8.

The main holdup has been in the Republican-led House, where Johnson is managing a rowdy GOP conference that has taken a hard line on spending and is increasingly skeptical of foreign aid, even as the Democratic-controlled Senate has been ready for months to move forward.

Emerging from the meeting, Johnson said he was “very optimistic” about government- funding talks. Leaders think “we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown,” he said. He didn’t take questions. 

The other congressional leaders at the sit-down—Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D., N.Y.), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.)—also sounded upbeat about avoiding a shutdown. 

“We are making good progress,” said Schumer, adding there was some “back and forth on some issues that different people want.” But he said, “I don’t think those are insurmountable.” He indicated that the most likely path was a short-term spending patch to give negotiators more time to complete the full fiscal-year bills. 

McConnell said everyone was on the same page regarding the need to keep the government funded. “I think we can stop that drama right now before it emerges,” he said.

The leaders sat down in the Oval Office, with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris positioned in armchairs near a crackling fire. Congressional leaders sat on sofas arranged around a coffee table.

Those gathered for the meeting, including McConnell, pressed Johnson to allow a House vote on a Ukraine aid package. Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns gave a presentation laying out the difficult conditions for Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, with troops running out of munitions. 

The Senate passed a $95.3 billion package this month that contained a fresh round of aid for Ukraine and funds for Israel and Taiwan. Johnson has declined to put it on the House floor. House Republicans are divided on Ukraine aid, with a little more than half on the record opposing it in the past, including Johnson before he became speaker. The Senate bill would need significant Democratic support to pass.

Schumer said the discussion on Ukraine was “the most intense I have ever encountered in my many meetings in the Oval Office.” He said he told Johnson he would “regret it for the rest of his life” if he blocked assistance for Kyiv.  

Johnson “said he wanted to get Ukraine done, and he had to figure out the best way to do it,” Schumer recalled.

In the meeting, McConnell, a strong advocate for Kyiv, told Johnson the House’s best path forward on Ukraine is to pass the Senate bill, because making any changes would further delay the aid. “We have a time problem here,” he told reporters. 

Johnson said he continued to insist on steps to secure the southern U.S. border before passing any foreign-aid package. The House “is actively pursuing and investigating all the various options” on the Ukraine package, he said, but “the first priority of the country is our border.” Earlier this year, Republicans blocked a bipartisan Senate deal linking aid to Ukraine with changes at the border, saying it wasn’t tough enough.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), speaking with reporters after meeting with President Biden and other congressional leaders, said he thought a government shutdown could be averted. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The White House meeting started shortly before noon and lasted about an hour. Johnson briefly spoke one-on-one with the president after the meeting ended. White House officials declined to say what the two men discussed, other than explaining that the conversation wasn’t scheduled in advance. 

Afterward, Biden told reporters a “bipartisan solution” was needed to fund the government. Regarding Ukraine, he said “the need is urgent” for additional funds. “I think the consequences of inaction in Ukraine are dire,” Biden said.

Such White House summits are high-profile opportunities for both sides to show they are fighting for their parties’ priorities, rather than nitty-gritty policy negotiations. But the moment was particularly challenging for Johnson, a formerly little-known conservative who leapfrogged from the lower ranks of House Republican leadership to assume the speakership in October, after a group of GOP dissidents ousted his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

Unlike other senior leaders on Capitol Hill, Johnson has almost no pre-existing relationship with Biden.

For months, the Republican House and Democratic Senate have deferred on Congress’s responsibility to set new spending levels and priorities for the federal government for fiscal year 2024, instead passing a series of stopgap measures by repeatedly extending spending levels set back in December 2022.

Johnson has a number of options. none of which will satisfy all House Republicans. He could seal a deal with congressional Democrats and try to pass fresh full-year spending legislation at a two-thirds threshold, bypassing Republican holdouts. Johnson could put it off a few days or weeks with a short-term patch—again with Democrats’ help. Or he could try to rely on his narrow Republican majority to pass another stopgap bill through September, triggering automatic across-the-board spending cuts; such a move would be almost certain to lead to a shutdown because any such measure would be dead on arrival in the Senate.

Beneath the surface of the spending fight, a tug of war is playing out inside the House Republican conference between military hawks and conservatives opposed to further spending, with Johnson caught in the middle. The military hawks want to avoid the defense cuts that would be triggered if Congress fails to enact new full-year spending measures by April 30. The critics of more spending benefit from congressional inaction, because it brings them closer to the date when across-the-board cuts would be activated under a provision in last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act.

Some GOP lawmakers have said in recent days they wouldn’t mind a shutdown, while other figures including McConnell have warned that shutdowns are bad policy—and bad politics.

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Is Congress doing enough to avoid a partial government shutdown? Join the conversation below.

People familiar with the negotiations between Johnson and Democrats said that a key sticking point is how much money to appropriate for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. Democrats are asking for $7.03 billion, more than the $6.3 billion previously sought by the Senate and requested in Biden’s budget. But the GOP-led House passed a measure including $6 billion for the program, which provides food and health assistance.

Another obstacle, these people said, is a provision to block the VA from reporting the names of veterans who need help managing their benefits to a national background-check system used to screen gun purchases. Democrats want the language to be stripped out.

Even if those issues get resolved, Johnson must sell the deal to his factious conference after House lawmakers return Wednesday to Washington. A House Republican meeting is scheduled for Thursday.

A Friday conference call for GOP lawmakers did little to assuage raw feelings as Johnson sought for an hour to manage the expectations of his conference, fielding more than a dozen questions. The speaker told lawmakers not to expect a home run or grand slams in the spending bills, but instead singles or doubles, according to people on the call. Johnson said such expectations reflected the reality of divided government, and that some Republicans’ willingness to block routine procedural votes—essentially paralyzing the floor—had hurt Republicans’ leverage in talks with Democrats.

Some Republicans complained that he had offered little information about the substance of any of the spending bills, raising fears that Johnson was setting the stage for another episode in which he would rely on Democratic votes to clear must-pass legislation through the House.

So far, Johnson has passed five major bills at a two-thirds threshold with the help of Democrats: two previous stopgap spending bills; the annual defense-policy bill; a temporary reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration; and a bipartisan tax bill.

McCarthy’s willingness to pass a stopgap bill with Democratic votes in September triggered the rebellion that led to his removal. The same fate could await Johnson if at least three House Republicans were willing to vote with all Democrats to fire him from the speakership, given the narrow majority in the House.

The FBI Has Possession Of The Epstein Sex Tapes

twitter  |  The Epstein Files. Today a tranche of documents were released in a case involving Jeffrey Epstein. There’s no revelations. Jeffrey Epstein’s case was covered up. I can explain why.

In 2017, my lawyer Marc Randazza found a wonky freedom of the press case. There was a defamation case, and although Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t named as a defendant, the case was central to some “conspiracy theories.” Marc asked me if I wanted to file a motion to intervene. We expected it to be a simple matter.

Media interest was almost zero. No one in the “free press” cared. Then Trump nominated Alexander Acosta to the Secretary of Labor. Acosta had handled the original Epstein criminal case, and said Epstein was given kid gloves treatments due to protection from the intelligence community.

Epstein was an asset of the FBI. What his exact relation was remains sealed.

By 2019 the case I sought to intervene in had an ORANGE MAN BAD angle because Acota was Trump’s Labor Secretary. Even if the motives were impure, at least we were on to the races.

Hundreds-of-thousands of dollars later, a trip to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and a lot of fighting, we had a batch of documents ready to be unsealed.

The weekend before the documents were made public, SDNY arrested Epstein quietly when he landed his private jet on an airport from a trip he took in France. No perp walk for Epstein.

In 2019 I wrote the following after a press conference was held re: Epstein’s arrest:

" Why didn’t the SNDY charge Jeffrey Epstein under the Mann Act? Under the Mann Act, it’s unlawful to transport an underage girl through interstate travel, including on an airplane."

"In a widely-publicized press conference the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced sex trafficking charges against Jeff Epstein."

"Epstein was charged for paying minors for massages from 2002 to 2005. Yet what was more newsworthy was the what the indictment left out."

"The indictment against Epstein does not charge anyone except Epstein, and there’s nothing to indicate that anyone who flew to Epstein’s private island has faced scrutiny."

"The SDNY’s actions have all of the telltale signs of containment. Because the Miami Herald and Cernovich won a civil lawsuit, leading to over 2,000 records being unsealed, it’s simply impossible for the same Feds who gave Epstein a pass years ago to continue to cover up."

"The SDNY could have charged Epstein in 2002, 2003, 2004, or at anytime until today. Yet they did not file charges until the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that previously sealed records involving Jeff Epstein would become public record.Thus they are charging him without implicating anyone else who assisted with his operation."

You know what happened next. Epstein committed suicide.

Because SDNY charged the lowest level offenses possible, they “lacked jurisdiction” to raid Epstein’s island in Little St James, as well as his New Mexico and Paris properties. Those houses were left unattended for a couple of weeks.

During that time, a safe went missing. During the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, it was reported:

Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein's safe 'went missing' after FBI raid.

What was in the safe? We’ll never know for certain. We do know that the FBI has Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail files.

The real Jeffrey Epstein files are the blackmail material.

Very powerful forces have made sure we will never see it.

CD's in Epstein's safe labeled: "Young [Name] + [Name]"

That looks an awful lot like they found the blackmail tapes https://t.co/4tR9Mya7lL

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 8, 2019

DOJ Letting Up On SBF To Protect DNC Recipients Of Ill-Gotten Largesse

NYPost  |  The decision to avoid a second trial charging Sam Bankman-Fried with a conspiracy to make unlawful political donations and bribery of foreign officials has many conservatives up in arms.

Federal prosecutors said Friday that they do not plan to proceed with a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, citing public interest in a speedy resolution of the case that has seemingly irritated those who were hoping to see the disgraced FTX founder prosecuted to the fullest extent.

In a Friday letter filed in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said they do “not plan to proceed with a second trial” as “much of the evidence that would be offered in a second trial was already offered in the first trial and can be considered by the Court at the defendant’s March 2024 sentencing.”

“Given that practical reality, and the strong public interest in a prompt resolution of this matter, the Government intends to proceed to sentencing on the counts for which the defendant was convicted at trial,” the prosecutors added.

The decision by prosecutors not to hold a second trial against Bankman-Fried quickly drew backlash from those who had followed the case.

“So we won’t know which politicians he bribed or who’s campaigns he influenced? That collective sigh of relief you are hearing is from the DEEP STATE,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., wrote in a Friday night post to X.

Conservative commentator John Cardillo also weighed in on the announcement from prosecutors, accusing the Department of Justice of shielding Democrats from being named as recipients of Bankman-Fried donations.

“Sam Bankman-Fried will not face second trial,” Cardillo wrote in an X post. “DOJ is protecting his Dem donation recipients.”

CryptoLaw founder John Deaton, who has consistently commented on Bankman-Fried’s case, slammed the decision by prosecutors as a “disgrace.”

“The DOJ has shown again, that it is NOT an independent agency,” Deaton said on X. “Who is the Attorney General protecting?”

 

Huntergate's IC Letter WAS Conspicuously Obvious Election Interference

thecrimson  |  Former President Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud and enthusiasm for his re-election drove supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

In the most comprehensive study to date of what motivated the Trump supporters to attack the Capitol, Shorenstein Center researchers found that 20.6 percent of the rioters, a plurality, were motivated to take part in the riot because they supported Trump. Another 20.6 percent of the rioters cited Trump’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged as their primary reason for participating in the Jan. 6 riot.

The authors of the study — Joan Donovan, Kaylee Fagan, and Frances E. Lee — wrote that their analysis found that the largest proportion of defendants “were motivated, in part, to invade the US Capitol Building by Donald Trump.”

The third most common reason for attacking the Capitol: a desire to start a civil war or an armed revolution, according to the study. Almost 8 percent of defendants indicated it was their main motivation.

In an interview, Fagan said she was surprised by how frequently support for Trump and concerns about the election were cited as primary motivations for joining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“I don’t think I expected the result to be this stark,” Fagan said. “I also certainly didn’t expect those two motivations to come up nearly exactly as often as they both did.”

Though more than 800 have been federally prosecuted for their participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the study focused on 417 defendants charged with federal crimes in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The study, which was released as a working paper because it has not been peer-reviewed, analyzed 469 court documents from the 417 defendants to determine why the rioters decided to join the Jan. 6 attack in Washington.

“The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger,” the study said. “This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to DC from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.”

Bought And Paid For By The CIA: International Fascism And Anglo-American Foreign Policy

cynthiachung  |  [This is a chapter from my newly released book ‘The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy.’ For further details on different formats and how to purchase click here.] The audio version of this chapter is available here.

Read full story

However, this is not the only blunder that the Canadian government has made recently and has blamed “ze Russians” for.

On February 27, 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland held a scarf bearing the slogan “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to Ukraine,” with the “Blood and Soil” colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and massacred Jews and Poles).

According to Freeland’s press secretary, this was just another case of a “classic KGB disinformation smear… accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis,” which is a confusing statement on multiple levels.

It is not clear how this was a case of “Russian disinformation,” since the picture is indeed authentic, Freeland did not deny this. And she was indeed holding a “Blood and Soil” emblem, which originated with the Nazis, clear for everyone to see. Lastly, it is confusing as to why the Canadian government seems to be unaware that the KGB no longer exists. Are they also under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists?

Not irrelevant in all of this is the fact that Freeland’s grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper during WWII in Galicia and that she is indeed aware of this and apparently unapologetic. Whenever she is questioned about this, she does not deny anything, but simply blames such a focus of inquiry on Russian disinformation with the intent to “destabilize Western democracies.”

Interestingly, it was the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” who reported this story, titled “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” thus, not a Russian publication last time I checked. And upon whom did they base such information? None other than Freeland’s own uncle, John-Paul Himka, who was at the time professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.

 

Obama's Sugar Mama Appointed "Chief Commercial Officer" For The Ukraine..,

WaPo  |  President Biden will appoint a former commerce secretary, Penny Pritzker, to be special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery, a new position that signals the Biden administration’s concern about the country’s long-term economic survival even as its war with Russia grinds on.

In a statement, Mr. Biden said that Ms. Pritzker “will drive the United States’ efforts to help rebuild the Ukrainian economy” by working with Ukraine’s government along with U.S. allies, international financial institutions and the private sector.

Ms. Pritzker, 64, will encourage pro-investment strategies in Ukraine while also drumming up public and private investment from other nations, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the appointment was not yet official. She plans to travel to the country in the coming weeks to begin assessing the state of its economy and to meet with political and business leaders.

The White House will announce the appointment on Thursday. Ms. Pritzker will work from the State Department, reporting to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

The appointment comes as attention in the United States and Europe increasingly turns toward Ukraine’s survival in economic as well as military terms. A report in March by the World Bank found that rebuilding the country’s badly damaged infrastructure and gutted urban areas could cost more than $400 billion over a decade. Group of 7 member nations have just begun sketching out how that undertaking might work, especially with Russian forces occupying large portions of Ukraine.

Mr. Blinken added in a statement that Ms. Pritzker would be central to the effort to ensure “that Ukraine not only survives but thrives, standing on its own.” He said the goal was to turn the country into “a prosperous, secure, European democracy.”

Ms. Pritzker hails from a prominent Chicago family known for its business empire and longtime influence within the Democratic Party. Her brother, J.B. Pritzker, is the Democratic governor of Illinois. Their father, Donald, was a co-founder of the Hyatt hotel company.

Ms. Pritzker started several business ventures of her own, and as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary from 2013-17, she was known for her close relationships with business leaders across the United States. She is also on the board of Microsoft and a former chairwoman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

She played an important role in Mr. Obama’s rise through Illinois and national politics, using her contacts to help raise hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaigns. In a January 2020 endorsement of Mr. Biden’s presidential candidacy, she noted that she had known Mr. Biden for more than 20 years.

 

 

 

Turning Over That Pritzker Family Log To See What Comes Scurrying Out From Underneath...,

wikipedia  |   The Superior Bank FSB was a Hinsdale, Illinois-based savings and loan association that collapsed in July 2001^[1] with some $2.3b in assets.^[2] It was co-owned by the Pritzker family of Chicago.

Synopsis

Superior opened in 1988 under conditions created by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which made generous arrangements for the takeover of several failed thrifts. The bank was a 50-50 partnership between the Pritzkers (the elder Jay, Penny and Thomas) and real estate investor Alvin Dworman, who ran Superior from his New York office after Jay Pritzker's death in 1997. The Pritzkers and Dworman bought the failed Lyons Federal for the relatively modest price of $42.5 million, with each using a shell corporation to control half of Coast-to-Coast Financial Corporation (CCFC), a holding company created to own Superior.

In July 2001, Superior was seized by federal banking regulators after the Pritzkers reneged on a recapitalization program. The Pritzker family entered into a $460 million, 15 year, interest-free settlement in December 2001 to protect the family's business reputation and avoid civil forfeiture and litigation. At the time, Superior Bank was the largest bank failure in more than a decade. As of March 2012, former Superior Bank depositors are still owed over $10 million.

July 2001 collapse

According to a press release from the Office of Thrift Supervision,

Superior Bank suffered as a result of its former high-risk business strategy, which was focused on the generation of significant volumes of subprime mortgage and automobile loans for securitization and sale in the secondary market. OTS found that the bank also suffered from poor lending practices, improper record keeping and accounting, and ineffective board and management supervision.^[1]

George Kaufman, a finance professor at Loyola University Chicago called Superior's failure "a tale of gross mismanagement," adding that "[Superior] was engaged in relatively unethical practices, fancy-footwork accounting, playing it very close to the edge."^[3]

Kaufman says many share in the blame for the mess-the bank's managers, directors, and auditors, as well as banking regulators-but he also wonders how the Pritzkers, as co-owners, could have allowed it to happen. "One of the great mysteries to me is what the Pritzkers were up to, why they took these chances," he said. "It makes no sense given their wealth and visibility."^[3]

Settlement by the Pritzkers

In December 2001, the Pritzkers agreed to pay a record $460 million to the federal government to avoid being punished for the failure of Superior Bank FSB.^[4] It was a 15-year, interest-free settlement that granted the Pritzkers a share of the government's settlement with the bank's former accountants. In June 2012, news reports revealed that the Pritzker family received a discount in 2011 on the 2001 settlement.

According to The Washington Times, "But after paying $316 million of the interest-free debt, the family quietly struck a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) in June 2011 to discount the balance in return for paying off the debt early. Ms. Sweet and Mr. Courtney are among 1,400 depositors still owed $10.3 million at the end of March, records show. The FDIC Insurance Fund is still out $296 million after paying off Superior’s insured depositors. It is highly unlikely the remaining depositors or the FDIC will receive much more money since nearly all of the settlement funds have been paid out, according to records and interviews."^[5]

“'The depositors got nicked coming, going and after the fact,'” said Clinton Krislov, a lawyer who represents depositors whose accounts exceeded the $100,000 covered by FDIC insurance. “'The depositors have gotten all they will from the Pritzkers.'”

RICO lawsuit

In 2002 uninsured depositors filed federal class-action charges under the RICO Act against one-time board chairwoman Penny Pritzker, her cousin Thomas Pritzker, Dworman, other bank principals and Ernst & Young. Plaintiffs’ attorney Clint Krislov claimed that those who controlled Superior induced depositors to put money in the bank, “corruptly” funneling money out of the bank to “fraudulently” profit the owners. ^[6] The lawsuit, Courtney v. Hallerin was initially filed under a district court which dismissed the claims;^[7] the appeal was argued before the 7th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals on September 25, 2006. In her May 7, 2007 opinion, Judge Wood affirmed the lower court's decision.

Do You Believe That These Special Access Programs Are Answerable To Elected Officials?

intelligence.senate.gov  |  What ever happened to the folks from the Senate Intelligence Committee? The House yokels are not nearly as important as Rubio, Gillibrand etc.

So, I went looking, and if you look at their calendar, you'll see they have a classified closed briefing the same day as the Burchett hearing. Which makes sense because you don't invite witnesses to Congress and then waste their time. So when the hearing ends, you'll know what is happening at 2pm. 

Tin foil hat time:

https//web.archive.org/web/20230708115954/https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/

It wasn't on the calendar on the 11th. The date came out just a couple days ago. Was it scheduled after the date was announced? https

More fuel for the fire.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/

Google's cache, from July 18 also had nothing scheduled. So, that just got scheduled like today I think.

Google cache header with date of cache

Calendar of that cache

https://www.congress.gov/event/118th-congress/senate-event/333869?s=1&r=16

That is the meeting on their schedule.

"Closed business meeting to consider pending intelligence matters; to be immediately followed by a closed briefing on certain intelligence matters."

Click "Read More" To Understand Just How Far Atomic Energy Act Secrecy Extended...,

Schumer: "Legislation is necessary because credible evidence and testimony indicate that US GOV UAP records exist that have not been declassified or subject to Atomic Energy Act of 1954". Dulles to JFK in 1961: "Can't tell you about MJ-12 because of Atomic Energy Act 1954". Some Majestic docs = real
by u/Harry_is_white_hot in UFOB

You Noticed THEY Went In On My Man Like His Name Was Kanye Or Kyrie

mronline  |  Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As one Council member famously explained, the goal has indeed been to establish an “empire”, albeit a “benevolent” one.

Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group(covering the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.

In a column titled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.

Harwood continued: “The membership of these journalists in the Council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it.… They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views.”

However, media personalities constitute only a small part of the comprehensive CFR network. As the following illustration shows, key members of the Council on Foreign Relations have included:

• several U.S. Presidents and Vice Presidents of both parties;
• almost all Secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury;
• many high-ranking commanders of the U.S. military and NATO;
• almost all National Security Advisors, CIA Directors, Ambassadors to the U.N., Chairs of the Federal Reserve, Presidents of the World Bank, and Directors of the National Economic Council;
• some of the most influential Members of Congress (notably in foreign & security policy matters);
• many top jounalists, media executives, and entertainment industry directors;
• many prominent academics, especially in key fields such as Economics, International Relations, Political Science, History and Journalism;
• many top executives of Wall Street, policy think tanks, universities, and NGOs;
• as well as the key members of both the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission (JFK)

 

Interesting How Robert Kagan's Revisionist Bloviations Run For 3 Days In The WaPo...,

WaPo  |  How quickly do times of apparent peace become times of conflict; seemingly stable world orders come crashing down; the hopes of many for improvement of the human condition are dashed and replaced by fear and despair.

For the first dozen years after World War I, the three powerful democracies — the United States, Britain and France — were in substantial control of world affairs, economically, politically and militarily. They established the terms of the peace settlement, redrew the borders of Europe, summoned new nations into being, distributed pieces of defunct empires, erected security arrangements, determined who owed what to whom, and how and when debts should be paid. They called together the conferences that determined the levels of armaments the major nations could possess.

All this was possible because they had won the war; because the United States and Britain controlled the banks and the seas; because France wielded predominant military power on the European continent. With this power, the three Western democracies sought to establish and consolidate a world system favorable to their interests and preferences. They argued over how best to do this, and they became increasingly estranged from each other in these years. But they all wanted a stable, prosperous and peaceful Europe. They all sought to preserve their global empires, or, in the United States’ case, its hemispheric hegemony. They all sought to defend the liberal, capitalist economic system that enriched and protected them and in which they believed. None doubted the rightness of their vision of international order or much questioned the justice of imposing it.

And there had been successes, certainly from their point of view. By the second half of the 1920s, the world had grown less violent and marginally less miserable. In Europe especially, economies were recovering, living standards were rising, general violence was down from the immediate postwar years, and the dangers of war and aggression seemed as low as they had been in decades. Internationally, trade had risen by more than 20 percent, despite growing protectionism, driven largely by the American economic boom. Nations spent more time discussing measures for peace than preparing for war. The League of Nations had come into its own. Germany seemed to be on a moderate, democratic course. In general, the threat of a return to autocracy and militarism seemed low. Democracy seemed to be ascendant.

Even those who openly defied the new order had to move cautiously. The Soviets promoted their revolution abroad but not so aggressively as to challenge the dominant powers, and they wound up settling for “socialism in one country.” Benito Mussolini, ruling an Italy surrounded in the Mediterranean by British and French naval power and dependent on the United States for financial support, thought it best to play the responsible European statesman. The 1920s were his “decade of good behavior.”

Adolf Hitler, too, proceeded with caution as he ascended to power in the early ’30s. Impressed by the United States as “a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities” and by Anglo-American domination of the global economy, and well aware of the role it had played in selecting Germany’s past governments, he worked at first to soften Washington’s opposition to his rise. He reached out to the U.S. ambassador, gave numerous interviews to prominent American media figures, including William Randolph Hearst, in the hope of making “the personality of Adolf Hitler more accessible to the American people.” He promised to pay Germany’s “private debts” to American bankers and went out of his way to assure the English-speaking world that his national socialist movement would gain power only in a “purely legal way” in accordance with the “present constitution.” After taking power, he told the press and his own officials to play down the campaigns of antisemitism that began immediately. He sought to keep German rearmament under wraps in what he called the “perilous interval” during which the “whole world” was “against us.” Until the economy recovered and German rearmament was further along, he feared that the national socialist revolution could be crushed at any time by the superior power of the democracies.

It was remarkable how quickly the winds were shifting, though. An American journalist identified the moment when history pivoted. “In the first five years after the World War,” he wrote, “the nations of Europe, on their backs and seeking American aid, took all pains to avoid offending us and therefore appeared to give careful and weighty consideration to our altruistic advice. The succeeding five years have changed that.”

One indicator of the shifting trends was the declining fortunes of democracy throughout Europe. It was inevitable that some of the new democracies, implanted in lands that had never known such a form of government, would not survive. The rise of dictatorship in various forms in Hungary (1920), Italy (1925), Lithuania, Poland and Portugal (1926), Yugoslavia (1929), Romania (1930), Germany and Austria (1933), Bulgaria and Latvia (1934), and Greece (1935) had many internal and external causes, including the global depression that began around 1930. But the overall decline of European democracy from the second half of the 1920s onward, and the turn away from democracy in Japan, also reflected the declining influence and appeal of the great-power democracies and their order.

Liberal democracy was not just losing ground. It faced a potent challenge from a vibrant and revolutionary anti-liberal doctrine that attracted followers and imitators throughout Europe and beyond. Americans, British and French during World War I and for decades afterward assumed that Bolshevism posed the greatest threat to liberal democracy. But Bolshevism proved less easily exported than both its proponents and its opponents believed. Ostracized by the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union turned inward to wrestle with the transformation of its society. When democracies fell in the 1920s and ’30s, they fell to the Right, not the Left.

 

The Nuland-Kagan Plan To Kill The Minsk II Peace Agreement

 21stcenturywire |  There is a small but highly influential and powerful faction embedded throughout Washington’s top political institutions and policy think tanks, who’s primary objective is the promotion of region and global military conflicts.

They will not rest unless the world is on fire, and the share prices of ‘defense’ corporations like General Electric, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Blackstone Group, and Carlyle Group – are hitting record highs. To do this they must also keep Israel relevant, if not the center of attention, regarding US foreign policy.

They want war, and they want it often and they will do anything to see it happen…

Vaska
Off-Guardian.org

From US-Russia.org – Here‘s what Robert Parry, the American investigative journalist who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has to tell us about the Robert Kagan-Victoria-Nuland couple and their hold on Obama, whose foreign policy seems to be outsourced to these two Washington ideologue-opportunists.

According to Parry, the couple’s latest project is to sink Minsk-2 and lay the ground for further U.S. military-industrial-complex profiteering at the expense of the EU, of the U.S. national security itself, and of peace in Europe.

The Background
Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats. [….]

Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.

Yet it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist. A neocon holdover who advised Vice President Dick Cheney, Nuland gained promotions under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and received backing, too, from current Secretary of State John Kerry.

Confirmed to her present job in September 2013, Nuland soon undertook an extraordinary effort to promote “regime change” in Ukraine. She personally urged on business leaders and political activists to challenge elected President Viktor Yanukovych. She reminded corporate executives that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” and she literally passed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square.

Working with other key neocons, including National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and Sen. John McCain, Nuland made clear that the United States would back a “regime change” against Yanukovych, which grew more likely as neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias poured into Kiev from western Ukraine.

In early February 2014, Nuland discussed U.S.-desired changes with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (himself a veteran of a “regime change” operation at the International Atomic Energy Agency, helping to install U.S. yes man Yukiya Amano as the director-general in 2009).

Nuland treated her proposed new line-up of Ukrainian officials as if she were trading baseball cards, casting aside some while valuing others. “Yats is the guy,” she said of her favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Disparaging the less aggressive European Union, she uttered “Fuck the EU” – and brainstormed how she would “glue this thing” as Pyatt pondered how to “mid-wife this thing.” Their unsecure phone call was intercepted and leaked.[….]

Though there was no evidence that Putin had instigated the Ukraine crisis – and indeed all the evidence indicated the opposite – the State Department peddled a propaganda theme to the credulous mainstream U.S. news media about Putin having somehow orchestrated the situation in Ukraine so he could begin invading Europe. Former Secretary of State Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. [….]

Amid the barrage of “information warfare” aimed at both the U.S. and world publics, a new Cold War took shape. Prominent neocons, including Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century which masterminded the Iraq War, hammered home the domestic theme that Obama had shown himself to be “weak,” thus inviting Putin’s “aggression.”

In May 2014, Kagan published a lengthy essay in The New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” in which Kagan castigated Obama for failing to sustain American dominance in the world and demanding a more muscular U.S. posture toward adversaries.

According to a New York Times article about how the essay took shape and its aftermath, writer Jason Horowitz reported that Kagan and Nuland shared a common world view as well as professional ambitions, with Nuland editing Kagan’s articles, including the one tearing down her ostensible boss.

Though Nuland wouldn’t comment specifically on her husband’s attack on Obama, she indicated that she held similar views. “But suffice to say,” Nuland said, “that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”

Horowitz reported that Obama was so concerned about Kagan’s assault that the President revised his commencement speech at West Point to deflect some of the criticism and invited Kagan to lunch at the White House, where one source told me that it was like “a meeting of equals.” [See “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]

How to sink Minsk-2

And, whenever peace threatens to break out in Ukraine, Nuland jumps in to make sure that the interests of war are protected. Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande hammered out a plan for a cease-fire and a political settlement, known as Minsk-2, prompting Nuland to engage in more behind-the-scenes maneuvering to sabotage the deal.

In another overheard conversation — in Munich, Germany — Nuland mocked the peace agreement as “Merkel’s Moscow thing,” according to the German newspaper Bild, citing unnamed sources, likely from the German government which may have bugged the conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel and then leaked the details.

Picking up on Nuland’s contempt for Merkel, another U.S. official called the Minsk-2 deal the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit.”

Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the practical impact of the Ukraine war on Europe: “They’re afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia.” According to the Bild story, Nuland also laid out a strategy for countering Merkel’s diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis.

“We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them,” Nuland reportedly said.

NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons to the Ukrainian government would “raise the battlefield cost for Putin.” Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”

Nuland sounded determined to sink the Merkel-Hollande peace initiative even though it was arranged by two major U.S. allies and was blessed by President Obama. And, this week, the deal seems indeed to have been blown apart by Nuland’s hand-picked Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, who inserted a poison pill into the legislation to implement the Minsk-2 political settlement.

The Ukrainian parliament in Kiev added a clause that, in effect, requires the rebels to first surrender and let the Ukrainian government organize elections before a federalized structure is determined. Minsk-2 had called for dialogue with the representatives of these rebellious eastern territories en route to elections and establishment of broad autonomy for the region.

Instead, reflecting Nuland’s hard-line position, Kiev refused to talks with rebel leaders and insisted on establishing control over these territories before the process can move forward. If the legislation stands, the result will almost surely be a resumption of war between military forces backed by nuclear-armed Russia and the United States, a very dangerous development for the world. [See “Ukraine’s Poison Pill for Peace Talks.” ]

The Nepotistic Incestuous Blob At The Core Of U.S. Foreign Policy

uprootedpalestinians |  It’s interesting to take a look at the word “kagan” in terms of its etymology. Is the word perhaps derived from another language? Did its use originate in another country?

The answer to that is yes on both counts. The words comes from Khazaria, a kingdom which once existed in what is today Ukraine and which underwent a mass conversion to Judaism in about the 8th or 9th century AD. Ashkenazi Jews today are descendents of the Khazars, and as I discussed in an article I wrote last year, the leader or head of state of the Khazar kingdom was not referred to as a “king”, but rather as the “kagan.”

It’s just a little something I thought might interest readers.

In the post I put up yesterday, I mentioned that Robert Kagan was one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century, a group of neocons who organized themselves in 1997 and who are probably most famous today for having composed a report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” That document envisioned a “new Pearl Harbor” befalling the United States, and was released in September of 2000. One year later 9/11 happened.

Kagan and William Kristol were the two co-founders of PNAC. You can go here to see a list of others who have been involved with the organization. Nuland’s husband is the only “Kagan” but other names on the list are “Abrams,” “Cohen,” “Decter,” “Gaffney,” “Podhoretz,” and “Wolfowitz”–all Jewish. That’s not to say there weren’t a few Gentiles in the merry little klan. Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney are there as well.

Like Nuland, Elliot Abrams also seems to be cheer leading for war with Russia, as do Kristol, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, and Frank Gaffney. These and others collectively are building a momentum toward war with Russia, and President Obama seems for the most part to be going with the flow.

It does seem very much as if America has a ruling class of “Kagans.” And equally, it seems Obama either can’t or won’t stand up to them. But then after all, they’re “kagans” and he’s only a “president.”

Below is an interesting little piece written by Kevin MacDonald and posted last year on February 9, less than two weeks before Viktor Yanukovych, the legitimate, democratically elected president of Ukraine, was ousted from power.

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Victoria Nuland’s Family Ties: The Permanent Government in Action

By Kevin MacDonald

Intertwined Jewish power families are an important aspect of Jewish history, cementing business relationships by creating networks of close relatives who married only among themselves—e.g., the Court Jews of 17th- and 18th-century Europe (see here, pp 150-152).  We see echoes of that in the contemporary world, as among the neocons.

As with the other Jewish intellectual movements I have studied, neoconservatives have a history of mutual admiration, close, mutually supportive personal, professional, and familial relationships, and focused cooperation in pursuit of common goals. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist. Norman Podhoretz is also the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (a neoconservative think tank) and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, recently published a hagiographic biography of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith. Perle is a fellow at the AEI. He originally helped Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973. In 1982, Perle, as Deputy Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, hired Feith for a position as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain an appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. “Neoconservatism as a Jewish movement” (p. 32)

Ethnic networking and ties cemented by marriage are on display in the flapover Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. As VDARE’s Steve Sailer puts it, Nuland is a member of

a talented, energetic [Jewish] family that is part of the Permanent Government of the United States. It doesn’t really matter who wins the Presidential election: some Kagan-Nuland will be doing something somewhere in your name and on your dime.

The Kagan connection is via her husband, Robert Kagan. As noted by Your Lying Eyes, “Robert and brother Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed at AEI.”

So we have another Jewish neocon family tree, beginning with Donald Kagan, a Yale historian whose history of the Peloponnesia War has been used by neocons as a rationale for invasions of countries Israel doesn’t like (see Sailer). Donald Kagan was also a signatory to a 2002 letter to George W. Bush put out by Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) equating threats to Israel (Iran, Syria, Iraq) with threats to the U.S.

The next generation, Fred Kagan (American Enterprise Institute) and Robert Kagan (Brookings) are neocon stalwarts as well. (E.g., Donald, Robert and Frederick are all signatories to the neocon manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000), put out by PNAC.)   They and their wives, are all graduates of elite universities and well entrenched in the neocon thinktank/government infrastructure. Fred’s wife Kimberly (nee Kessler) is the head of the Institute for the Study of War and holds typical neocon positions.

And although U.S. policy toward Ukraine likely stems from other issues besides the neocon hostility toward Russia (the latter due to issues such as Putin’s crackdown on the oligarchs and Russia’s support of Israel’s enemies, Iran and Syria), there be little doubt that Nuland’s energetic support of the pro-EU opposition to the Yanukovych government dovetails with the attitudes of her neocon network. Our Permanent Government at work.