Saturday, July 20, 2019
It's Un-American To Be Anti-Free Speech: Protect The Right To Criticize The Government
Friday, July 19, 2019
A Bank With 49 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives Is Melting Down Right In Front Of Our Eyes
Could it be possible that we are on the verge of the next “Lehman Brothers moment”? Deutsche Bank is the most important bank in all of Europe, it has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, and most of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States have very deep financial connections to the bank. In other words, the global financial system simply cannot afford for Deutsche Bank to fail, and right now it is literally melting down right in front of our eyes. For years I have been warning that this day would come, and even though it has been hit by scandal after scandal, somehow Deutsche Bank was able to survive until now. But after what we have witnessed in recent days, many now believe that the end is near for Deutsche Bank. On July 7th, they really shook up investors all over the globe when they laid off 18,000 employees and announced that they would be completely exiting their global equities trading business…
It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.
But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.
Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.
These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much.
And as Deutsche Bank collapses, it could take a whole lot of others down with it at the same time. According to Wall Street On Parade, the bank had 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives as of the end of last year…
During 2018, the serially troubled Deutsche Bank – which still has a vast derivatives footprint in the U.S. as counterparty to some of the largest banks on Wall Street – trimmed its exposure to derivatives from a notional €48.266 trillion to a notional €43.459 trillion (49 trillion U.S. dollars) according to its 2018 annual report. A derivatives book of $49 trillion notional puts Deutsche Bank in the same league as the bank holding companies of U.S. juggernauts JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which logged in at $48 trillion, $47 trillion and $42 trillion, respectively, at the end of December 2018 according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). (See Table 2 in the Appendix at this link.)
Yes, the actual credit risk to Deutsche Bank is much, much lower than the notional value of its derivatives contracts, but we are still talking about an obscene amount of exposure.
And this is especially true when we consider the state of Deutsche Bank’s balance sheet. According to Nasdaq.com, as of the end of last year the bank had total assets of 1.541 trillion dollars and total liabilities of 1.469 trillion dollars.
In other words, there wasn’t much equity there at the end of December, and things have deteriorated rapidly since that time. In fact, it is being reported that a billion dollars a day is being pulled out of the bank at this point.
I know that most Americans don’t really care if Deutsche Bank lives or dies, but as the New York Post has pointed out, the failure of Deutsche Bank could quickly become a major crisis for the entire global financial system…
But the important fact to remember is that Deutsche Bank traded these derivatives with other financial firms. So, is this going to be another Lehman Brothers situation whereby one bank’s problems becomes other banks’ problems?
Pay close attention to this.
If the situation gets out of hand, the Federal Reserve and other central banks will have no choice but to cut interest rates even if it’s not the best thing for the world economies.
In particular, some of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States are “heavily interconnected financially” to Deutsche Bank. The following comes from Wall Street On Parade…
We know that Deutsche Bank’s derivative tentacles extend into most of the major Wall Street banks. According to a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Deutsche Bank is heavily interconnected financially to JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America as well as other mega banks in Europe. The IMF concluded that Deutsche Bank posed a greater threat to global financial stability than any other bank as a result of these interconnections – and that was when its market capitalization was tens of billions of dollars larger than it is today.
Until these mega banks are broken up, until the Fed is replaced by a competent and serious regulator of bank holding companies, and until derivatives are restricted to those that trade on a transparent exchange, the next epic financial crash is just one counterparty blowup away.
As long as I have been doing this, I have been warning my readers to watch the global derivatives market. It played a starring role during the last financial crisis, and it will play a starring role in the next one too.
The fundamental structural problems that were exposed during 2008 and 2009 were never fixed. In fact, many would argue that the global financial system is even more vulnerable today than it was back during that time.
And now it appears that the next “Lehman Brothers moment” may be playing out right in front of our eyes.
Now more than ever, keep a close eye on Deutsche Bank, because it appears that they could be the first really big domino to fall.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.
The post A Bank With 49 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives Is Melting Down Right In Front Of Our Eyes appeared first on The Economic Collapse.
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Bowling Alone: How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society And Family Life
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Emails show Obama officials called meeting over 'Russian matter'
Victoria Nuland
More information slowly is spilling out about the apparent weaponization of United States intelligence agencies by Obama officials worked to undermine the Trump campaign in 2016.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch on Thursday announced the release of more than 80 pages of documents showing senior Obama State Department officials advancing the now debunked Russia-collusion claim just before the 2016 presidential election.
Documents also showed then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer coordinating with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s national security adviser Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele.
Nuland, the documents show, according to Judicial Watch, “was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.”
The dossier of wild and unsubstantiated claims about Trump, funded partly by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was used as evidence to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Among the documents a September 2016 email exchange between Nuland and Winer discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”
An op-ed Winer wrote for the Washington Post in 2018 said that in 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.'”
Winer said he prepared a two-page summary “and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”
The documents, Judicial Watch noted, “also show that State Department officials continued to use unsecure BlackBerry devices for the transmission of classified material more than a year after Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system was revealed.”
Nuland responded to Winer’s email asking for a meeting to discuss “a Russian matter.”
“In ny face to face?” she asked.
“Yes that was (sic) be good,” Winer replied.
“The Obama State Department was central to the effort to target President Trump with the Russia smear,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These new emails further show that senior Obama State Department advanced the Russiagate hoax just before the 2016 presidential election.”
The documents also revealed Nuland “was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.”
In June, Judicial Watch revealed it was demanding insider information about fired former assistant FBI director Andrew McCabe and his new book.
He was a central figure, Judicial Watch said, in “the Deep State’s effort to spy upon and undermine President Trump. We aim to find out if McCabe’s book was properly vetted or simply rubberstamped by anti-Trump bureaucrats before being published.”
Members of the United States intelligence community, while they are allowed to write books after their service, must obtain the approval of relevant agencies to ensure ongoing work is not compromised.
The post Emails show Obama officials called meeting over 'Russian matter' appeared first on WND.
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Media Intrigue: Spying on Julian Assange
History’s scope for the absurd and tragic is infinite.
To see images of an exhausted and world-weary Julian Assange attempting to dodge the all-eye surveillance operation that he would complain about is to wade in the insensibility of it all.
But it could hardly have surprised those who have watched WikiLeaks’ battles with the Security Establishment over the years.
Assange is not merely an exceptional figure but a figure of the exception. Despite being granted asylum status by an Ecuadorean regime that would subsequently change heart with a change of brooms, he was never permitted to exercise all his freedoms associated with such a grant. There was always a sense of contingency and qualification, the impending cul-de-sac in London’s Ecuadorean embassy.
Between December 2017 and March 2018, dozens of meetings between Assange, his legal representatives, and visitors, were recorded in daily confidential reports written by an assigned security team and submitted to David Morales, formerly of special ops of the marine corps of the Spanish Navy. The very idea of legal professional privilege, a fetish in the Anglo-American legal system, was not so much deemed non-existent as ignored altogether.
The security firm tasked with this smeared-in-the-gutter mission was Spanish outfit UC Global SL, whose task became all the more urgent once Ecuador’s LenÃn Moreno came to power in May 2017. The mood had changed from the days when Rafael Correa had been accommodating, one at the crest of what was termed the Latin American Pink Tide. Under Moreno, Assange was no longer the wunderkind poking the eye of the US imperium with cheery backing. He had become, instead, a tenant of immense irritation and inconvenience, a threat to the shift in politics taking place in Ecuador. According to El PaÃs,
“The security employees at the embassy had a daily job to do: to monitor Assange’s every move, record his conversations, and take note of his moods.”
The revelations of the surveillance operation on Assange had had their natural effect on the establishment journalists who continue taking the mother’s milk of conspiracy and intrigue in libelling the publisher. CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Kay Guerrero and Arturo Torres seemed delighted in finding their éminence grise with his fingers in the pie, making the claim, with more than a whiff of patriotic self-importance, how “surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command centre and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.” Rather than seeing obsessive surveillance in breach of political asylum as a problem, they see the quarry obtained by UC Global in quite a different light. The WikiLeaks publisher had supposedly been outed.
The trio claimed to have obtained documents “exclusive” to CNN (the labours of El PaÃs, who did the lion’s share on this, are confined to the periphery) – though they have not been kind enough to share the original content with the curious. Nor do they make much of the private security materials as such, preferring to pick from the disordered larder that is the Mueller Report.
The CNN agenda is, however, clear enough. “The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy.” Suggestions, without the empirical follow-up, are made to beef up the insinuated message. “While the Republican National Convention kicked off in Cleveland, an embassy security guard broke protocol by abandoning his post to receive a package outside the embassy from a man in disguise.” The individual in question “covered his face with a mask and sunglasses and was wearing a backpack, according to surveillance images obtained by CNN.” So planned; so cheeky.
Another line in the same report also serves to highlight the less than remarkable stuff in the pudding. “After the election, the private security company prepared an assessment of Assange’s allegiances. That report, which included open-source information, concluded there was ‘no doubt that there is evidence’ that Assange had ties to Russian intelligence agencies.” Not exactly one to stop the presses.
CNN, in fact, suggests a figure demanding, unaccountable, dangerous and entirely in charge of the situation. It is the psychological profile of a brattish historical agent keen to avoid detection. (Here the journalists are keen to suggest that meeting guests “inside the women’s bathroom” in the Ecuadorean embassy was a shabby enterprise initiated by Assange; the obvious point that he was being subject to surveillance by UC Global’s “feverish, obsessive vigilance”, to use the words of El PaÃs, is turned on its head.)
He is reported to have “demanded” a high-speed internet connection. He sought a working phone service, because obviously that would be unreasonable for any grantee of political asylum. He requested regular access to his professional circle and followers. Never has such a confined person been deemed a commander, an orchestrator and master of space. “Though confined to a few rooms inside the embassy, Assange was able to wield enormous authority over his situation.”
The account offered by Txema Guijarro GarcÃa, a former advisor to Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño and an important figure dealing with the logistics of granting Assange asylum in 2012, is decidedly different. In general, “relations between him and the embassy staff were better than anyone could have expected. The staff had amazing patience and, under difficult conditions, they managed to combine their diplomatic work with the task of caring for our famous guest.”
The language from the CNN report suggests the mechanics of concerted exclusion, laying the framework for an apologia that would justify Assange’s extradition to the United States to face espionage charges rather than practising journalism. It is a salient reminder about the readiness of such outlets to accommodate, rather than buck, the state narrative on publishing national security information.
It is also distinctly out of step with the defences being made in favour of publishing leaked diplomatic cables being expressed in the Tory leadership debate in Britain. While it should be construed with care, the words of Boris Johnson in the aftermath of the publication of British cables authored by the now ex-UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, are pertinent. “It cannot conceivably be right that newspapers or any other media organisation publishing such material face prosecution”. Even Johnson can take the pulse of history accurately once in a while.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Featured image is from 21st Century Wire
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Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Chelsea Manning is Now Being Fined $1,000 a Day for Grand Jury Resistance
Daily fines against Chelsea Manning for resisting a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks increased to $1000 on July 16. On May 16, Judge Anthony Trenga held Manning in civil contempt and ordered her to be sent back to the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria. The court also imposed a fine of $500 per day after 30 days, and then a fine of $1000 per day after 60 days.
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76 Billion Opioid Pills: Bombshell Report Unmasks Who Is Responsible For Epidemic
Women’s Soccer: More Iron Horse, Less Braying
Recently, Americans were implored to pay attention to a sport most of us do not follow for reasons that have little to do with the dramatic nature of the competition. Turning on a computer brought regular reminders of this sport, with Google Doodles dedicated to each of the participating teams and news feeds filled with stories about the event, most focusing on the team everyone expected to win. When that team won, Americans were told that we needed to celebrate.
I am referring, of course, to the Women’s World Cup in soccer, recently won by the American team.
That team was seen by its media cheerleaders as advancing cherished causes such as women’s equality, sexual liberation, and internationalism. Those with doubts about the team, any of those causes, or the way the team and its advocates thought those causes should be advanced, were written off as bigoted Deplorables, even though Americans have a long record of embracing female athletes of all kinds who excel in international competition.
But unlike Peggy Fleming or Bonnie Blair or Mary Lou Retton or Katie Ledecky or Florence Griffith Joyner or any number of female Olympians widely embraced by Americans, Megan Rapinoe and her teammates and their fans didn’t even pretend that they were representing all Americans. As such, they forfeited the nationalist impulse that glues Americans to their seats every four years to cheer on athletes they had never before heard of playing sports they seldom watch.
Before the American women had won the World Cup, Megan Rapinoe declared that she wasn’t going to the “f***ing White House” for a victory celebration, thereby revealing her disdain for the half of America that supports the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the women’s soccer teams the Americans had yet to play.
Rapinoe’s disdain for Trump was soon echoed by teammate Ali Krieger, who told the media, “I refuse to respect a man that warrants no respect.”
When the American women won the championship match, numerous media outlets reported that their fans were chanting “f*** Trump.”
It is also widely speculated that Christian athlete Jaelene Hinkle didn’t make the women’s team, despite her undoubted soccer prowess, because she had voiced skepticism of gay marriage. And the supporters of the women’s team think this is entirely appropriate, since “inclusion” apparently requires the exclusion of anyone holding different views. As BuzzFeed reporter Molly Hemsley-Clancy tweeted, “Let’s take a second to think how Jaelene Hinkle might have missed out on a winning Word Cup [because] she is homophobic.”
The American women did not make up for their profanity and political grandstanding by graciousness elsewhere. They ran up the score on the hapless Thai women 13-0 and loudly celebrated even late goals. (As that score suggests, American women dominate women’s soccer for the same reason both American and Canadian women dominate women’s ice hockey: much of the rest of the world doesn’t care very much about their sport.)
When the American women won the championship game, some of them carelessly dropped the American flag on the ground and walked over it before casually picking it up. And when they went to New York City for their victory parade, several of them spewed profanity in public, including one team member who quoted a rapper and exulted, “Hide your kids! Hide your wives! And lock your f***ing doors. Because we’ve got the key to the mother****ing city and I’m coming for ya’al b****es!” Rapinoe ended her speech by proclaiming New York City “the mother****ing best.”
As commentator Matt Walsh noted, Rapinoe also lifted the World Cup trophy and a bottle of champagne while declaring “I deserve this. I deserve everything.” (Those who knew that the American women had lost five to two to a team of 14-year-old boys in Dallas in 2017 could be forgiven for wondering if the scale of Rapinoe’s accomplishment justified the extent of her self-satisfaction).
Rapinoe (@mPinoe): "I deserve this!" pic.twitter.com/gbd0M0zjF1
— Molly Prince (@mollyfprince) July 10, 2019
As the media kept insisting that I celebrate what Rapinoe and her teammates had achieved, I found myself thinking instead about an athlete one can never imagine saying “I deserve everything,” baseball’s “Iron Horse,” Lou Gehrig. By coincidence, the 80th anniversary of Gehrig’s farewell to baseball on July 4, 1939 occurred when today’s sports writers were busy toasting Rapinoe. A few Gehrig items popped up in my Facebook feed around July 4 and I was soon reading more than I ever had about the self-effacing New Yorker who used his great athletic skill and even greater character to win with dignity and even to inspire, not to draw attention to himself, whine, strike political poses, or unleash profane diatribes.
Gehrig attended Columbia on a football scholarship, but his even greater skill on the baseball diamond drew the attention of the New York Yankees. Gehrig accepted the Yankees’ $1500 signing bonus because, as he later told The New York Times, “a fellow has to eat. At the end of my sophomore year my father was taken ill and we had to have money. … So when there was no money coming in there was nothing for me to do but sign up.”
The Yankees certainly got their money’s worth. Gehrig compiled a lifetime batting average of .340, batting .361 in seven World Series and hitting 493 home runs (including 23 grand slams) and driving in 1,995 runs. Teammate Joe DiMaggio later remembered Gehrig as the finest hitter he ever saw.
Despite his prodigious talent, Gehrig did not chafe at all the attention lavished on his older teammate, Babe Ruth: “I’m not a headline guy. I know that as long as I am following Ruth to the plate I could have stood on my head and no one would have known the difference.”
Gehrig also famously played in 2,130 consecutive ball games, a streak made possible by Gehrig’s playing through 17 fractures in his hands, several concussions, and serious back pain.
That streak came to an end after Gehrig contracted the degenerative disease that robbed him first of his athletic ability, then of his mobility, and then of his life, all in a little over two years. In his final season, DiMaggio recalled, “He’d lean into me trying to get up. The man had an iron will and, yes, the heart of a lion. He dressed so slowly. He’d get up and go out and try.”
When Gehrig concluded that he was no longer helping his team, he ended the streak by benching himself, and the opposing fans witnessing this in Detroit gave a standing ovation to the man whose grit and perseverance had won the admiration of baseball fans everywhere.
That admiration only grew when Gehrig said goodbye to the game he loved. Keith Olbermann tells that remarkable story as well as anyone.
As Olbermann notes, Gehrig did not want a Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. Nor did he want to speak. But Gehrig was the consummate team player, and after his manager, Joe McCarthy, had a brief private word with him, Gehrig advanced to the microphones and gave “a muted, heartbreaking speech” about “gratitude” and “the blessings of life.”
Gehrig’s eloquent expression of gratitude in the face of an inexorable decline and death has lost none of its power. Indeed, it seems almost unbelievable in 2019, standing as it does at the opposite pole from the egotism, avarice, crudeness, and sense of entitlement and victimhood exhibited all too often by contemporary athletes, including some members of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who seem so resentful despite earning sums that Gehrig and his contemporaries could not even have imagined.
To be sure, Gehrig stood out even in 1939, which is why his number was the first ever to be retired and why he was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in a special election the same year he retired.
But Gehrig’s fellow athletes also knew that, whatever their own inclinations may have been, they could not publicly act in the way Megan Rapinoe and her teammates have done. Not only do today’s athletes know that they can swear and boast and dishonor the flag and belittle large swaths of the public at will, they know that they will be praised for what they have done, as long as the people they belittle are suitably “deplorable.”
In his speech, Gehrig gave many cogent reasons for considering himself to be “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” I’ll add another: Gehrig lived at a time when the culture believed sports should transcend politics and also demanded that athletes act with a modicum of dignity in public.
We need more Iron Horse and less braying donkey.
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[Image Credit: Public Domain, Twitter]
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Tuesday, July 16, 2019
CNN Recently Glorified ICE Facility Firebomb Attacker In Resurfaced Footage
Mainstream Media Hide Skripal's Connections To Russiagate-Trump Case
Monday, July 15, 2019
New CNN Assange Smear Piece Is Amazingly Dishonest, Even For CNN
CNN has authored an unbelievably brazen and dishonest smear piece on Julian Assange, easily the most egregious article of its kind since the notoriously bogus Assange-Manafort report by The Guardian last year. It contains none of the “exclusive” documents which it claims substantiate its smears, relying solely on vague unsubstantiated assertions and easily debunked lies to paint the WikiLeaks founder in a negative light.
And let’s be clear right off the bat, it is most certainly a smear piece. The article, titled “Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling”, admits that it exists for the sole purpose of tarnishing Assange’s reputation when it reports, with no evidence whatsoever, that while at the Ecuadorian embassy Assange once “smeared feces on the walls out of anger.” Not “reportedly”. Not “the Ecuadorian government claims.” CNN reported it as a fact, as an event that is known to have happened. This is journalistic malpractice, and it isn’t an accident.
Whenever you see any “news” report citing this claim, you are witnessing a standard smear tactic of the plutocratic media. Whenever you see them citing this claim as a concrete, verified fact, you are witnessing an especially aggressive and deliberate psyop. The Ecuadorian embassy was easily the most-surveilled building in the world during Assange’s stay there, and the Ecuadorian government has leaked photos of Assange’s living quarters to the media in an attempt to paint him as a messy houseguest in need of eviction, so if the “feces on the walls” event had ever transpired you would have seen photos of it, whether you wanted to or not. It never happened.
SCOOP: New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. w/ @kguerrerocnn https://t.co/OqC9GBsIKl
“New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” the article begins.
In its very first sentence the article invalidates all the claims which follow it, because its use of the word “potentially” means that none of the documents CNN purports to have contain any actual evidence. It’s worth noting at this time that there is to this day not one shred of publicly available evidence that any of the Democratic Party emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016 were in fact “hacked” at all, and could very well have been the result of a leak as asserted by former British ambassador Craig Murray, who claims to have inside knowledge on the matter.
The glaring plot holes in the Mueller report’s assertions about Russia being the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops have already been ripped wide open by journalist Aaron Maté’s meticulous analysis of the report’s timeline in an article accurately titled “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims”. The CNN smear piece, which claims to “add a new dimension to the Mueller report”, is entirely relying on this porous timeline for its reporting. Plot holes include the fact that Mueller claims (and CNN repeats) that the Russians transferred the emails to WikiLeaks on or around July 14, which Maté notes is “a full month after Assange publicly announced that he had them.”
CNN kicks off its smear piece with the inflammatory claim that “Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments”, mentioning both “Russians” and “hackers” in the same breath in an attempt to give the impression that the two are related. It’s not until paragraph 43 and 46, long after most people have stopped reading, that the articles authors bother to inform their readers that the “hackers” in question are German and have no established connection to the Russian government whatsoever. The “Russians” counted among Assange’s scores of visitors consist of RT staff, who have always consistently reported on WikiLeaks, and a “Russian national” about whom almost nothing is known.
@GeorgeSzamuely @CNN @RT @wikileaks That is a LIE that's been debunked over and over. We published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It's called journalism, they should try it sometime.
CNN also repeats the long-debunked lie that RT “published articles detailing the new batches of emails before WikiLeaks officially released them” during the 2016 election, citing no evidence because this never happened. RT reported on a WikiLeaks release in October 2016 after it had been published by WikiLeaks but before the WikiLeaks Twitter account had tweeted about it, and western propagandists willfully conflated WikiLeaks publications with tweets from the WikiLeaks Twitter account in order to make it look like RT had insider knowledge about the publications.
In reality, RT was simply watching the WikiLeaks site closely for new releases in order to get an early scoop before other outlets, because Podesta email leaks had been dropping regularly.
“That is a LIE that’s been debunked over and over,” tweeted RT America editor NebojÅ¡a Malić in response to the smear. “We published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It’s called journalism, they should try it sometime.”
“Yes that is fake news,” tweeted RT’s Ivor Crotty. “I was the editor on the team that monitored wikileaks and by Podesta 6 we knew they tweeted at 9am EST each day (1pm Dublin) — so we checked the database by reverse searching and discovered a new dump, tweeted about it, and the conspiracy theorists jumped.”
“RT already addressed this in 2016, convincingly if you read the sequence of events they lay out: the Podesta emails appeared on the WikiLeaks website before WikiLeaks sent a tweet about it,” Maté tweeted at CNN’s Marshall Cohen. “Ignoring that allows for the conspiracy theory you propose. It’s ridiculous to suggest that RT-Wikileaks ‘were coordinating behind the scenes’ based on the fact that RT tweeted about the Podesta emails AFTER they appeared on WL’s site, but BEFORE WL tweeted about them. You’re implicating RT in a conspiracy… for doing journalism.”
It’s not possible to research the “RT had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks drops” conspiracy theory without running across articles which debunked it at the time, so the article’s authors were likely either knowingly lying or taking dictation from someone who was.
“Spanish newspaper El Pais on July 9: ‘Spanish security company spied on Julian Assange’s meetings with lawyers’. Add little security state propaganda and 6 days later you get from CNN: ‘How Julian Assange turned an embassy into command post for election meddling’,” noted Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola in response to the CNN smear, a reminder of how a little narrative tweaking can turn a story on its head in support of the powerful.
This would be the same CNN who told its viewers that it’s against the law to read WikiLeaks, with Democratic Party prince Chris Cuomo lying “Remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents; it’s different for the media, so everything you learn about this you’re learning from us.” The same CNN which falsely reported that Assange is a pedophile not once, but twice. The same CNN which has been caught blatantly lying in its Russiagate coverage, which has had to fire journalists for misreporting Russiagate in a media environment where that almost never happens with Russia stories, which has deleted evidence of its journalistic malpractice regarding Russiagate from the internet without retraction or apology.
So this latest attempt to tarnish Julian Assange’s reputation from CNN is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that the article contains exactly zero of the “exclusive documents” which it says validate its claims and insinuations. Nor is it surprising that CNN is using invisible evidence which almost certainly came into its hands through a government intelligence agency to give weight to its smear. But the sheer volume of disinformation and deceit they were able to pack into one single article this time around was just jaw-dropping. Even for CNN.
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Sunday, July 14, 2019
The Green Old Socialism | Power Line
Sexual Predators Within America’s Power Elite: What You're Not Being Told
Politics, religion, sports, government, entertainment, business, armed forces: it doesn’t matter what arena you’re talking about, they are all riddled with the kind of seedy, sleazy, decadent, dodgy, depraved, immoral, corrupt behavior that somehow gets a free pass when it involves the wealthy and powerful elite in America.
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