businessinsider | A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised US President Joe Biden on Thursday.
"Grateful to [the US], our reliable partner," the aide, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a tweet. "The @POTUS does more for [Ukraine] than any of his predecessors."
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, was impeached in
2019 and charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The
impeachment focused on Trump's efforts to strongarm Zelenskyy into
launching political investigations into the Bidens by withholding nearly
$400 million in military aid to Ukraine and dangling a White House
meeting.
The hold on the security assistance was lifted after Politico reported on Trump's actions and House Democrats launched an investigation into the matter.
At the center of the impeachment was a July 2019 phone call between
Trump and Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to
open investigations into purported corruption by Biden and his son,
Hunter, ahead of the 2020 US election.
Trump also asked Zelenskyy
to investigate the nonsense conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in
the 2016 election, and that Ukraine is in possession of a secret
Democratic email server.
Yermak, as a senior advisor to Zelenskyy,
was privy to Trump's and his aides' efforts to force Ukraine to
investigate the Bidens.
Trump, for his part, has insisted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if he was still in office.
"If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!" he said in a statement last month.
But days earlier, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification to launch the war as "genius" and "savvy."
His
comments stood in contrast to those of US officials, who warned that
Putin's recognition of two Kremlin-backed separatist regions in Ukraine
was part of an effort to create a false pretext and invade the country.
Trump
was repeatedly criticized throughout his presidency for making public
statements and policy decisions that benefited Russia and hurt Ukraine.
greenwald |One of the most successful disinformation campaigns
in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the
2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks
before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden
and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President,
wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would
again if elected president.
The backlash against this reporting
was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S.
corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies.
The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's
all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence
to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do
them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on
their experience:
We want to emphasize that we
do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we
do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
But
a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had
no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former
officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an
election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian
disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia
manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.
Very
few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials
themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to
corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count
— began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead
spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of
Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”
johnhelmer | The summit meeting of East European leaders, hosted in Kiev by
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on March 15 was fabricated by the
Polish government, with Polish secret service agents playing the part of
journalists, and fake photographs of the meeting, press briefing, and
train journey prepared by Zelensky’s press office.
The operation was designed by the Poles to promote their role in
support of the Ukraine, the Ukrainian refugees, and in defence of Europe
against Russia, and seek new European, American, and NATO alliance
funds and military equipment.
A according to the Ukrainian publicity, the operation was designed to
promote the appearance that Zelensky’s regime is in control of Kiev,
and to accelerate their application for admission to the European Union
(EU).
The Anglo-American media have reported
the meeting, as announced by Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister,
with “the aim…to express the European Union’s unequivocal support for
Ukraine and its freedom and independence,”
The result of the summit meeting, according to the Financial Times in
London, was “a show of European solidarity even as Russian shelling
continued on residential neighbourhoods in the Ukrainian capital. The
trip by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia
is the most high-profile visit to Kyiv since Russia invaded the country
on February 24.”
“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made,” the
Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced. “It is here that
freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future
of us all hangs in the balance.”
Morawiecki and the western press were lying – there was no meeting in
Kiev. Instead, the meeting was staged at the Polish rail junction town
of Przemysl, 95 kilometres west of Lvov (Lviv), and 20 kms inside the
Polish frontier with the Ukraine.
In a report published
by the Associated Press (AP) bureau in Warsaw, “the long journey over
land from Poland to Kyiv by Morawiecki, Poland’s deputy Prime Minister
Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Ministers Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic
and Janez Jansa of Slovenia sent the message that most of Ukraine still
remains in Ukrainian hands.”
The evidence gathered from sources in Warsaw and from analysis of the
videos and photographs published on the meeting proves there was no
“long journey”; no meeting in Kiev or in Lvov, the Galician region
capital, which is the operating headquarters of the Ukrainian
government. From the evidence provided by the Poles and also by the
Zelensky’s publicity staff, it is now clear that only a small part of
western Ukraine remains in Ukrainian hands. Zelensky himself is now in
Polish hands.
undark |In 2004, an
activist named Edward Hammond fired up his fax machine and sent out
letters to 390 institutional biosafety committees across the country.
His request was simple: Show me your minutes.
Few people at the time had heard of these committees, known as IBCs,
and even today, the typical American is likely unaware that they even
exist. But they’re a ubiquitous — and, experts say, crucial — tool for
overseeing potentially risky research in the United States. Since 1976,
if a scientist wants to tweak the DNA of a lab organism, and their
institution receives funding from the National Institutes of Health,
they generally need to get express safety approval from the collection
of scientists, biosafety experts, and interested community members who
sit on the relevant IBC. Given the long reach of the $46-billion NIH budget,
virtually every research university in the U.S. is required to have
such a board, as are plenty of biotechnology companies and hospitals.
The committees “are the cornerstone of institutional oversight of
recombinant DNA research,” according to the NIH, and at many institutions, their purview includes high-security labs and research on deadly pathogens.
The agency also requires these committees to maintain detailed meeting
minutes, and to supply them upon request to members of the public. But
when Hammond started requesting those minutes, he found something else.
Not only were many universities declining to share their minutes, but
some didn’t seem to have active IBCs at all. “The committees weren’t
functioning,” Hammond told Undark. “It was just an absolute joke.”
The issue has gained fresh urgency amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many
scientists, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, say it’s possible
that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, emerged accidentally
from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV — a
coronavirus research hub in China that received
grant funding from the NIH through a New York-based environmental
health nonprofit. Overseas entities receiving NIH funding are required
to form institutional biosafety committees, and while grant proposals to
the NIH obtained by
The Intercept mention an IBC at the Wuhan institution, it remains
unclear what role such a committee played there, or whether one was ever
really convened.
An NIH spokesperson, Amanda Fine, did not answer questions about
whether the Wuhan institute has had a committee registered with the
agency in the past. In an email, she referred to a roster
of currently active IBCs, which does not list WIV. Other efforts by
Undark to obtain details about meetings of the Wuhan lab’s IBC were
unsuccessful. But so, too, were initial efforts to obtain meeting
minutes from several IBCs conducting what is supposed to be both routine
and publicly transparent business on U.S. soil. Undark recently
contacted a sample of eight New York City-area institutions with
requests for copies of IBC meeting minutes and permission to attend
upcoming meetings. Most did not respond to initial queries. It took
nearly two months for any of the eight institutions to furnish minutes,
and some did not provide minutes at all, suggesting that in many cases,
the IBC system may be as opaque and inconsistently structured as when
Hammond, who eventually testified before Congress on the issue in 2007,
first began investigating.
Indeed, recent interviews with biosafety experts, scientists, and
public officials suggest that IBC oversight still varies from
institution to institution, creating a biosafety system that’s uneven,
resistant to public scrutiny, and subject to minimal enforcement from
the NIH. Hammond and other critics say these problems are baked into the
system itself: As the country’s flagship funder of biomedical research,
the NIH, these critics say, shouldn’t also be charged with overseeing
its safety.
RT | The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release
additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded
biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in
bioweapons research.
Russian military specialists in weapons of
mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of
the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily
briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.
The
official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical
Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study
under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic
in humans and to assess the damage that would result.
Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.
The
spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released
on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other
European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military
assessments of the work they detail, he said.
The Pentagon
sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is
benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections.
Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in
nature.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland
said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research
materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why
Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the
pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which
Moscow would presumably already have access to.
Some American
public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about
the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.”
Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies”
with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The
hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions
should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.
thesaker | The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the
implementation of military biological programs of the United States and
its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
The information received from various sources confirms the leading
role of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency in financing and
conducting military biological research on the territory of Ukraine.
Details of the UP-4 project became known, which was implemented with
the participation of laboratories in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa and was
designed for the period up to 2020.
Its purpose was to study the possibility of the spread of
particularly dangerous infections through migrating birds, including
highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza, the mortality rate of which reaches 50
percent for humans, as well as Newcastle disease.
Due to the fact that Ukraine has a unique geographical location where
transcontinental migration routes intersect, 145 biological species
were studied within the framework of this project. At the same time, at
least two species of migratory birds were identified, whose routes pass
mainly through the territory of Russia. At the same time, information
about migration routes passing through the countries of Eastern Europe
was summarized.
Of all the methods developed in the United States to destabilize the
epidemiological situation, this is one of the most reckless and
irresponsible, since it does not allow to control the further
development of the situation. This is confirmed by the course of the
pandemic of a new coronavirus infection, the occurrence and features of
which raise many questions.
In addition, the R-781 project is interesting, where bats are considered as carriers of potential biological weapons agents.
Among the priorities identified are the study of bacterial and viral
pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans: pathogens of
plague, leptospirosis, brucellosis, as well as coronaviruses and
filoviruses.
It is noteworthy that the research is carried out in close proximity to
the borders of Russia – in the areas of the Black Sea coast and the
Caucasus.
The project is being implemented with the involvement of not only
Ukrainian, but also Georgian biological laboratories controlled by the
Pentagon in cooperation with the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the
US Geological Survey.
The analyzed materials on the UP-8 project, aimed at studying the
Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine,
clearly refute the US public statement that only Ukrainian scientists
work in the Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine without the intervention of
American biologists. One of the documents confirms that all serious
high-risk studies are conducted under the direct supervision of
specialists from the United States.
The payroll of Ukrainian contractors clearly demonstrates how they
are financed. It has been confirmed that the US Department of Defence
paid the money for research participation directly, without the
involvement of intermediaries. The extremely modest pay, by US
standards, is noteworthy. This indicates a low estimation of the
professionalism of Ukrainian specialists and the neglect of their
American colleagues.
In addition, the studied materials contain proposals for the
expansion of the US military-biological program in Ukraine. Thus, there
was evidence of the continuation of completed biological projects UP-2,
UP-9, UP-10, aimed at studying the pathogens of anthrax and African
swine fever.
The Pentagon is also interested in insect vectors capable of
spreading dangerous infectious diseases. The analysis of the obtained
materials confirms the transfer of more than 140 containers with
ectoparasites of bats – fleas and ticks from the biolab in Kharkov
abroad.
dilyana | The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports
frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret US
military program. Internal documents, implicating US diplomats in the
transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover
were leaked to me by Georgian insiders. According to these documents,
Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and
have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and
biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in
Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.
The
Pentagon biolaboratory is heavily guarded. All passers-by within a
radius of 100 m are filmed although the military biolaboratory is
located within a residential area.
dilyana |While the US is planning to increase its
military presence in Eastern Europe to “protect its allies against
Russia”, internal documents show what American “protection” in practical
terms means.
The Pentagon has conducted biological
experiments with a potentially lethal outcome on 4,400 soldiers in
Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia. According to leaked documents,
all volunteer deaths should be reported within 24 h (in Ukraine) and 48 h
(in Georgia).
Both countries are considered the most
loyal US partners in the region with a number of Pentagon programs being
implemented in their territory. One of them is the $2.5 billion
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Biological engagement program
which includes research on bio agents, deadly viruses and
antibiotic-resistant bacteria being studied on the local population.
Project GG-21: “All volunteer deaths will be promptly reported”
The Pentagon has launched a 5-year long
project with a possible extension of up to 3 years code-named GG-21:
“Arthropod-borne and zoonotic infections among military personnel in
Georgia”. According to the project’s description, blood samples will be
obtained from 1,000 military recruits at the time of their military
registration physical exam at the Georgian military hospital located in
Gori.
unz |But
the largest feather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky
himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the
People” show that featured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President
of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian
people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his
media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal
favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin
prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and
thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western
politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this
Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.
Now,
Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough
“denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge
of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since
Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the
oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still
somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have
dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The
arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against
Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a
catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how
uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst
possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a
compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine
once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no
negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross
them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of
Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his
chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to
spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet
Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko
and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their
hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and
we enter the realm of pure speculation.
Clearly,
the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no
history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the
reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This
solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal
Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that
Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was
anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three
decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and
murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a
political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government
right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able
to follow suit and break free from the shackles as well.
mintpressnews |The Mega Group — a secretive group of
billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was formed in 1991 by Charles
Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable
media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey
Epstein. Media profiles of
the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s
wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on
“philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000
per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to
organized crime.
Mega Group members founded and/or are
closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel
organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael
Steinhardt formed
Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his
motivation in helping to found the group was to advance his own belief that devotion to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as “a substitute for [Jewish] theology.”
Other well-known groups associated
with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress — whose past
president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are
both Mega Group members — and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off
known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were
major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years.
When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said,
“Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair
of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.”
Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL
include Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher.
As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of
B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was
later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge.
In addition, Mega Group members have
also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For
instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group,
known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief
patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s
top donors.
Though the Mega Group has officially
existed only since 1991, the use of “philanthropy” to provide cover for
more unscrupulous lobbying or business activities was pioneered decades
earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members Edgar and
Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D.
Rockefeller had previously used philanthropic giving as a means of
laundering their reputations, Bronfman’s approach to philanthropy was
unique because it was focused on giving specifically to other members of
his own ethno-religious background.
Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I
of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime,
specifically Meyer Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s
private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a
respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard
to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public
reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a
leader in Canada’s Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes.
Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism
and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so
hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the
illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to
1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah.
At the same time Bronfman was
abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his associates
in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II,
close aides of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime
minister of Israel and was instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit relationships
with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen and other
Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to
establish a vast arms smuggling network between the United States and
Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming both the Haganah and the Irgun
paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the same time
these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit
paramilitaries, they were strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence
that had first been formally (though covertly) established in World War
II.
After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfmanworked with
future Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of
Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the bargain weapons
purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by
Bronfman and his wife. Many years later, Peres would go onto introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein.
The rest of the Bronfman family’s
march on “the road to respectability” was undertaken by Bronfman’s
children, who married into aristocratic families such as the European Rothschilds and the Wall Street “royalty” of the Lehmans and the Loebs.
The Bronfmans’ newfound
respectability did not mean that their association with the Lansky-led
criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams
dynasty came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their close association
with Willie “Obie” Obront, a major figure in Canadian organized crime,
whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer
Lansky of Canada.
However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman
were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and
long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed,
one of the group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael
Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his
autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets, where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a major player
in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son’s
first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in
finance.
The ties between the Mega Group and
the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there. Another prominent member
of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max Fisher,
who has been described as Wexner’s mentor and is also alleged to have worked
with Detroit’s “Purple Gang” during Prohibition and beyond. The Purple
Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada
into the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe
Bernstein, was a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to
unz |What
makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a
uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to
political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the
Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV
channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here
they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand
dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators
and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much
bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff,
mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two
articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.
These
two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of
Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose
the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben
Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act
legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List.
Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior
of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of
Israel Lobby.
LinkBookmarkBrowder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime.
Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the
scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another
Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).
Browder
began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very
crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a
Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension
fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in
the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military
Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for
years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli
whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many
years in Israeli jails.
Geoffrey Goodman
wrote Maxwell “was almost certainly being used as – and using himself
as – a two-way intelligence conduit [between East and West]. This
arrangement included passing intelligence to the Israeli secret forces
with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his life.”
After
Maxwell, Browder switched allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich
Jewish banker of Lebanese origin, who also played East vs West. Safra
provided him with working capital for his investment fund. Safra’s bank
has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of four billion dollars
to Russia had been transferred—and disappeared. The Russian authorities
say that Browder has been involved in this “crime of the century,” next
to Safra. The banker’s name has been connected to Mossad: increasingly
fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by Mossad-trained gunmen.
This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when
his villa was torched by one of the guards.
The
third Jewish oligarch on Browder’s way was Boris Berezovsky, the
king-maker of Yeltsin’s Russia. He also died in his bathroom (which
seems to be a constant feature); apparently he committed suicide.
Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported every
anti-Putin force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he
asked for permission to return to Russia, and some negotiations went on
between him and Russian authorities.
His
chief of security Sergey Sokolov came to Russia and purportedly brought
with him some documents his late master prepared for his return. These
documents allege that Browder had been an agent of Western intelligence
services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in following years. He
was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon Brothers. His
financial activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that is to
collect political and economic data on Russia, and to carry out economic
war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the Russia-1 TV channel
documentary Browder Effect,
(broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was not after money at
all, and his activities in Russia, beside being very profitable, had a
political angle.
The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow
who comes to a reasonable conclusion: “Bill Browder[‘s]… intensity and
the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no
way comparable to the behaviour of a top level international
businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at
the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an
operative of the intelligence agencies. Whatever the final verdict may
be on the documents presented by the film “The Browder Effect,” it
raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in
mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny
Popov deserves credit for highlighting those questions, even if his
documents demand further investigation before we come to definitive
answers”.
We
do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not
surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and
Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the intelligence
community.
Perhaps
he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war,
now is the time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear
disaster or rapid armaments race. This is the task we may hope will be
entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald Trump.
chesno | The financial statements from the Servant of the People indicate that the party collected 226 million hryvnias (~$8 million USD) in donations while Zelenskyy and his associates’ election accounts collected 200 million hryvnias (~$7 million USD).
These numbers themselves seem relatively unremarkable, but the sources and types of donations are much more interesting.
Chesno reported that from September 2018 to September 2019 only 94 people donated to Servant of the People. Of the 94 people, most of these were entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Most of the donations came from Kyiv, followed by donations from Odessa and Dnipro.
Chesno also found that 44 legal entities donated to the Servant of the People and Zelenskyy, with 34 of these entities donating 3 million hryvnias ($105,000 USD), which is just under the 3.3 million hryvnia ($120,000) limit placed on donations. The majority of these donations came from either Kyiv or Odessa.
More than 99% of all donations were more than 100,000 hryvnias ($3,500 USD); only two donations of less than 10,000 hryvnias ($350) were received in this time period.
To contextualize these figures, the minimum wage in Ukraine is 6,000 hryvnias per month ($220 USD) and the median salary in Ukraine is around 21,000 hryvnias ($775 USD).
This means that the majority of donations received by Zelenskyy and Servant of the People were more than what most Ukrainians make over five or six months of full-time work.
Chesno also found that some of the 94 personal donations came from questionable sources. Chesno interviewed Tetyana Staneva, who lives in a village in Odessa and has no business registered in her name. She donated 1.5 million hryvnias ($52,000 USD) to the Servant of the People party, telling Chesno, “It’s not just my money, I just sent it. This is a group of like-minded people, we did it together.” It should be noted that this is against Ukrainian law, which says that individual citizen must make financial contributions to political groups personally, and not as a collective.
Investigators identified one of the 44 entities that donated as Yaroslava Reklama, LLC, registered to a 22-year old cook named Yaroslav Kuzka who works at one of Kyiv’s restaurants. Yaroslava Reklama LLC, transferred the maximum donation of 3.3 million hryvnias ($120,000 USD) to Servant of the People. Upon investigating the address to which Yaroslava Reklama LLC was registered, journalists found that tenants in the area had never heard of the company.
Another company, Prom Import LLC, was registered to a woman named Juliana Kuku. She complained on her social media accounts that business was “not going well”, but at roughly the same time, made a 500,000 hryvnia ($16,000 USD) donation to Servant of the People.
Chesno also found that of the 44 entities that donated to Servant of the People, four of them changed their addresses within two days of one another in December 2018, leading investigators to conclude that many of the donors were likely linked.
It is perhaps remarkable to consider that although only 94 persons and 44 legal entities donated to Servant of the People, that it grew to controlling 254 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada despite not existing less than six months before.
Will the matrix allow me to peak behind the curtains of a manufactured and manipulated world staged event?
The Journey begins…
On the 3/3 I took a flight from Luton, England to Krakow, Poland.
Via Poland seemed the easiest way into the Ukraine.
Note: all the 33’s.
Evan tho unvaxxed, I entered Poland with ease on the condition I left within 24 hours.
So I wasted no time, and took a train from Krakow to Przemysl.
The only sign of WAR was the name of the cafe’
Lights, Camera….ACTION!!!
Przemysl Train Station (the Refugee movie set)
A well planned stage managed route ensures the Ukrainians arriving are
bottled necked and compressed into the ticket hall so the media can
create the illusion of ‘hell on Earth’.
Visual effects are key!
Outside the Refugee train station, police vehicles leave the lights flashing.
Every 20 minutes, the sirens turn on and vehicle does a loop around the block.
Stage Management …
The ‘Video Village’ of Przemysl.
Here we find the director and producer of the refugee movie.
All staged photos need good lighting.
I am unable to find a hostel or hotel,
full of refugees you ask?
No! All the hotels in this town are taken up by the press
Whilst these scumbags sleep in luxury, poor Ukrainians are left to sleep at the railway station.
dailybeast | Intimations of pressure on Israel to provide Ukraine military support, including from the Israeli public,
which largely identifies with Ukraine, are met with explanations about
Israel’s unique situation vis-Ã -vis Russia, and the blank wall of
realpolitik.
“Israel is stuck between its interest in ongoing
military coordination with Russia, and, on the other side, Israel is
small nation allied with the West, particularly with the United States,
to whom we owe a lot,” Professor Gideon Rahat, a Hebrew University
expert on Israeli politics and public opinion, told The Daily Beast.
“Israeli
leaders have to maneuver between those two. Of course, public opinion
is untethered from these interests. With ex-Ukrainians pretty dominant
in the public sphere, worried for their families, and when you see how
the dictator Putin is about to take over another country, most of Israel
see themselves as part of what we used to call, in Cold War days, the
free world.”
Bennett was accompanied to Moscow by Ze’ev Elkin, his Ukrainian-born minister of housing and infrastructure, whose brother fled their native city of Kharkiv,
under Russian bombardment, at the same moment the Israeli and Russian
leaders sat in Moscow discussing the war, with Elkin translating.
Israel
has also demurred from imposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs, some of
whom are dual citizens. After praising Israel's willingness to help
mediation efforts, a U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem said on Wednesday that "we would like to see our allies and partners imposing strong sanctions, Israel falls into the category of our allies and partners."
“We
didn’t invite Putin into this region,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired
Israeli army major general who served as former prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's national security adviser, alluding to the collapse of then-President Barack Obama’s
“red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, just across
Israel’s border. Israel, Amidror said, in an interview, is as vulnerable
as Ukraine is, to no less tenacious an enemy than Putin— Iran, whose
leaders regularly promise to eliminate Israel.
"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too. "There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia. "One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian."So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl. "So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right? " . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia. "And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is. " . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary. "And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right? "But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved. "And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . ."I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."
Paying higher gas prices is simply the cost of freedom – this according to elite liberals ranging from former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to actor George Takei. Both of these millionaires feel strongly that we should all – including those who AREN’T millionaires – be happy to pay more at the pump if it means keeping our petro dollars out of Vladimir Putin’s grubby Russian hands.
Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the elite consensus about how poor people need to dig deep into their wallets for freedom.
The Russian invasion may be devastating Ukraine and bringing untold harm to the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, but the crisis has nevertheless created an opportunity – an opportunity for some members of Congress to line their pockets. It appears that a number of Congressional representatives have used the “inside” information gained from their positions to trade in energy stocks just as the price of fossil fuels was about to skyrocket.
Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss just how profitable it can be to serve – and serve oneself – in Congress.
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