The year is 43 AD. A Roman outpost on the banks of the Thames River, called Londinium, is rapidly expanding. Roman builders use trash to support the docks of the new port — today that trash reveals fascinating details of daily life in the ancient city. London prospers, and the constant struggle with trash generates huge public projects that alter the shape of the city and affect the lives of every Londoner. An Englishman invents the world’s first toilet. Trash helps Britain win two World Wars but leads to the tragic deaths of thousands, by smog. Today, London continues to experiment with new ways of converting trash to energy, such as the construction of the world’s largest trash incinerator.
When the Dutch buy Manhattan, the island is a swampy marsh. But trash, and enormous mounds of giant oyster shells, help build the New Amsterdam Seaport into the most profitable port in the New World. Garbage and recycling becomes big business — controlled by crooked politicians, and New York’s most ruthless gangsters. A Civil War Hero creates the city’s Department of Sanitation, and takes New York’s trash back from the crooks. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers die a gruesome death from cholera, spread by waste contaminated drinking water. Urban planner Robert Moses uses trash to build New York City’s expressways, bridges, and parks. Organized crime extorts millions from businesses. The activist Freegans eat trash thrown out by the supermarkets. An artist stuffs trash into small plastic boxes and sells them as art. A 50 million dollar project in Brooklyn uses a new kind of trash to build a park on the shores of the East River.
When the walls of the city’s largest cemetery collapse, decomposing bodies tumble out – and six thousand corpses are moved into the tunnels of the catacombs. Terrified by ancient beliefs, Parisians refuse to bathe – and develop the art of perfume to mask their body odors. The Chief of Police orders the streets to be paved, and streetlights to be installed. A Baron vows to rid Paris of its filth, and demolishes slums, creates the grand avenues of Paris, and builds hundreds of miles of new sewers. A Parisian invents the garbage can. 60,000 ragpickers create the world’s most famous flea market. A band of modern day activists refuse to throw anything away, and turn trash into sculpture, and dead batteries and wine bottle corks into cash.
Roman Emperors reflect the power and the glory of the Empire in their monuments, temples, fountains and aqueducts. Demons lurk below the public toilets. Slaves build the greatest sewer in the world. The Visigoths storm the walls and a millennium of darkness and despair decimates the population from one million to less than fifty thousand. The Roman Catholic Church regains the glory of ancient Rome by rebuilding the aqueducts, restoring the fountains, and passing new trash laws. A zealous Pope “cleanses” the Jewish population, exiling thousands to a ghetto within the city walls – and restricting their occupations to trash collecting. Mussolini lusts for immortality – and attempts to associate his rule with the ancient Emperors by championing vast public works, and using slave labor. Modern day sanitation experts excavate Rome’s oldest landfill. Rome’s ruins compete for space with traffic circles and luxury hotels, and a new kind of visual trash begins to obscure the glory and beauty.
Cairo’s Zabaleen – the traditional garbage people – collect the city’s trash by hand and haul it home on donkey drawn carts. Vast slums in the heart of the city are filled with mountains of stinking garbage, and in the alleys and roof tops, Zabaleen women and children sort trash for recycling. 300,000 pigs raised by the Zabaleen eat what can’t be re-sold, a practice that began in the days of King Tut. Following the Romans, a tribe of slave warriors called the Mamelukes defeat the Christian Crusaders. Under Islamic rule, Cairo flourishes with strict laws regulating the disposal of trash, and public sanitation. Napoleon invades, and a large section of Cairo is rebuilt – inspired by the architects and engineers who rescued Paris from its own sewage and trash. Today, Cairo awards sanitation contracts to multinational corporations, and the Zablaeen take to the streets and begin a desperate fight to protect their livelihood.
Mexico City is sinking. The sewers are overflowing, the landfills are closing, and mountains of Trash from iconic celebrations like the Day of the Dead have nowhere to go. But the city is fighting back.
Angelenos dumped their Trash into the river, the studios trashed film stock and movie sets in the desert – and no one dreamt what horrors the future might bring.
Bonner was a director of MoneyWeek from 2003 to 2009.[4]
Works
Bonner co-authored Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century and Empire of Debt with Addison Wiggin. He also co-authored Mobs, Messiahs and Marketswith Lila Rajiva. The latter publication won the GetAbstract International Book Award for 2008.[5] He has previously co-authored two short pamphlets with British media historian, John Campbell, and with The Times former editor, Lord William Rees-Mogg, and has co-edited a book of essays with intellectual historian, Pierre Lemieux.[6]
In his two financial books, as well as in The Daily Reckoning, Bonner has argued that the financial future of the United States is in peril because of various economic and demographic trends, not the least of which is America’s large trade deficit. He claims that America’s foreign policy exploits are tantamount to the establishment of an empire, and that the cost of maintaining such an empire could accelerate America’s eventual decline. Bonner argues in his latest book that mob and mass delusions are part of the human condition.[citation needed]
Bonner warned in 2015 that the credit system, which has been the essential basis of the US economy since the 1950s, will inevitably fail, leading to catastrophic failure of the banking system.[7][8]
In June 2016, Bill Bonner, via his company Agora, paid for an advertisement on Reuters describing a new law that would not allow Americans to take money out of their own USA accounts. The ad reads: “New Law Cracks Down on Right to Use Cash. Americans are reporting problems taking their own money out of US banks.” The advertisement does not cite the law (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act or FATCA[9]) to which it refers.
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Is China secretly selling oil to Kim Jong-un? US satellites ‘have spotted Beijing tankers transferring fuel to North Korean ships 30 times in three months’ despite UN trade embargo
Satellite images ‘show Chinese and North Korean ships tied together off China’
South Korea claims there have been 30 such transactions in just three months
Such trades are banned under a UN resolution adopted in September this year
By Julian Robinson for MailOnline
PUBLISHED: 05:06 EST, 27 December 2017 | UPDATED: 03:37 EST, 28 December 2017
US satellites have spotted Chinese tankers transferring oil to North Korean ships 30 times in three months – despite strict UN trade embargoes, it has been claimed.
Overhead images appear to show ships from the two countries shackled together for a fuel transfer in the West Sea off China.
Such ship-to-ship trades are banned under a UN Security Council resolution adopted in September.
But according to South Korean government sources, American satellites have pictured large vessels from both China and North Korea illegally trading in a stretch of the West Sea on multiple occasions.
US satellites have spotted Chinese tankers transferring oil to North Korean ships 30 times in three months – despite strict UN trade embargoes, it has been claimed. One picture (above), reportedly taken on October 19, shows a ship called Ryesonggang 1 connected to a Chinese vessel in the West Sea off China
One picture, reportedly taken on October 19, shows a ship called Ryesonggang 1 connected to a Chinese vessel, The Chosun Ilbo reports.
The US Treasury Department later placed six North Korean shipping and trading companies and 20 of their vessels on sanctions list.
It said the activity appeared to show attempts to bypass sanctions, though it has not been suggested that Chinese authorities were aware of the transactions.
Cai Jian, an expert on North Korea at Fudan University in Shanghai, said: ‘This is a natural outcome of the tightening of the various sanctions against North Korea.
The tightening ‘reflects China’s stance’, he said.
Professor of political science at the Pusan National University in South Korea told the Telegraph the reports were easily believable.
He said: ‘There is a lot of under-the-radar on the Chinese side. Beijing does not police the border strictly or enforce the sanctions toughly. This could be that.’
It comes a day after Chinese customs data was revealed claiming Beijing exported no oil products to North Korea in November.
The figures apparently go above and beyond sanctions imposed earlier this year by the United Nations in a bid to limit petroleum shipments to the isolated country.
Tensions have flared anew over North Korea’s ongoing nuclear and missile programmes, pursued in defiance of years of U.N. resolutions. Last week, the U.N. Security Council imposed new caps on trade with North Korea, including limiting oil product shipments to just 500,000 barrels a year.
Beijing also imported no iron ore, coal or lead from North Korea in November, the second full month of the latest trade sanctions imposed by U.N.
China, the main source of North Korea’s fuel, did not export any gasoline, jet fuel, diesel or fuel oil to its isolated neighbour last month, data from the General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday.
Sanctions have been placed on Kim Jong-un’s secretive nation after he accelerated his nuclear and missile programmes
November was the second straight month China exported no diesel or gasoline to North Korea. The last time China’s jet fuel shipments to Pyongyang were at zero was in February 2015.
‘This is a natural outcome of the tightening of the various sanctions against North Korea,’ said Cai Jian, an expert on North Korea at Fudan University in Shanghai.
The tightening ‘reflects China’s stance’, he said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she didn’t know any details about the oil products export situation.
‘As a principle, China has consistently fully, correctly, conscientiously and strictly enforced relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea. We have already established a set of effective operating mechanisms and methods,’ she said at a regular briefing on Tuesday, without elaborating.
Since June, state-run China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) has suspended sales of gasoline and diesel to North Korea, concerned that it would not get paid for its goods, Reuters previously reported.
Beijing’s move to turn off the taps completely is rare.
In March 2003, China suspended oil supplies to North Korea for three days after Pyongyang fired a missile into waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
It is unknown if China still sells crude oil to Pyongyang. Beijing has not disclosed its crude exports to North Korea for several years.
Industry sources say China still supplies about 520,000 tonnes, or 3.8 million barrels, of crude a year to North Korea via an aging pipeline. That is a little more than 10,000 barrels a day, and worth about $200 million a year at current prices.
North Korea also sources some of its oil from Russia.
Chinese exports of corn to North Korean in November also slumped, down 82 percent from a year earlier to 100 tonnes, the lowest since January. Exports of rice plunged 64 percent to 672 tonnes, the lowest since March.
Trade between North Korea and China has slowed through the year, particularly after China banned coal purchases in February. In November, China’s trade with North Korea totalled $388 million, one of the lowest monthly volumes this year.
China has renewed its call on all countries to make constructive efforts to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, urging the use of peaceful means to resolve issues.
But tensions flared again after North Korea on Nov. 29 said it had tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that put the U.S. mainland within range of its nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile Chinese exports of liquefied petroleum gas to North Korea, used for cooking, rose 58 percent in November from a year earlier to 99 tonnes. Exports of ethanol, which can be turned into a biofuel, gained 82 percent to 3,428 cubic metres.
Where The North Korean Crisis Meets The Iran Nuclear Deal
Stratfor , CONTRIBUTOROpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
This article was originally published at Stratfor.com.
By Reva Goujon
By virtue of its military might, the United States has the unique ability to quickly — and credibly — place its most intractable adversaries under existential threat. Command over the world’s most powerful military gives a country options, and the option of regime change can be a tempting one for Washington as it tries to work through some of its more maddening foreign policy dilemmas.
A government living under the constant, lurking threat of decapitation does not particularly enjoy stewing in its own paranoia over what social fissures its enemies can exploit, which allies they can turn and what chain of events could finally push the United States into action. That’s why a nuclear deterrent is such an alluring prospect: What better way to kill your adversaries’ fantasy of regime change than to stand with them as near-equals on a nuclear plane?
This is North Korea’s rationale as the country closes in on demonstrating that it has a fully functional nuclear weapon and delivery arsenal. But Washington’s nuclear dilemma doesn’t end with Pyongyang. Whether Tehran attempts to return to its treacherous path toward nuclear armament rests in large part on just how seriously the White House entertains and attempts to execute a policy of regime change.
Preventing Another North Korea
North Korea is set to prove to the world that it has attained a nuclear deterrent. With the Nov. 29 test of its longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile yet — and plenty more demonstrations to come in the months ahead — the country is on track to show that it could field a reliable, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and that it has the arsenal necessary to weather a first strike. The window to launch a preventive strike on North Korea is rapidly closing. And in turn, the odds are growing that the United States, along with the countries in and around the Korean Peninsula, will have to accept the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea and prepare instead for a pre-emptive strike in case Pyongyang decides to launch an attack.
The result will be a new and unstable pattern of nuclear deterrence in the 21st century, one in which the unique challenges of communicating with the North Korean government will leave the door open to potential miscalculations. More Cold War-era arms agreements that rest on reliable communication among nuclear peers will come under threat. China and Russia, after all, fear that the irreversible buildup of the United States’ ballistic missile defense network will undermine their own strategic deterrents and will have less incentive to abide by obsolete arms pacts as a result. Despite continued calls for diplomacy to bring Pyongyang to the table and somehow prevent North Korea from crossing the nuclear Rubicon, the chances are slim that Kim Jong Un’s administration will trust a last-ditch negotiation. No amount of security guarantees from the United States will persuade Pyongyang that Washington, its allies or even Beijing has wholly abandoned their designs for regime change. Furthermore, Kim has commissioned an assassination campaign with global reach to ensure that any potential alternatives to his rule are eliminated early on. With its survival on the line, North Korea has an existential commitment to achieve its nuclear objectives.
The United States is weighing the risks of carrying out a preventive military campaign to avoid entering the dangerous new global order. But the associated costs of starting a war in Northeast Asia and plunging the world into recession make this scenario less likely. Even though he inherited a near-impossible timeline to neutralize the threat, U.S. President Donald Trump won’t take kindly to North Korea fulfilling its nuclear ambitions on his watch. When the time comes to reckon with this reality, his administration will probably reframe the issue as the product of decades of negligent and ineffective policy. The president will then set his sights on Iran, vowing to avoid a repeat of such a colossal failure in U.S. foreign policy.
In fact, the effort to shift attention from North Korea to Iran has been underway for some time. Trump has made clear that he sees the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the deal his predecessor, along with four other countries, made with Iran to deter it from pursuing nuclear capabilities — as flimsy and wholly insufficient. The U.S. administration, moreover, has expressed its frustration that the deal’s terms inhibit the imposition of economic sanctions in response to other threats from Iran. By decertifyng the JCPOA, Trump meant to send the message that he was serious about confronting the Islamic republic. To strike a deal in the first place, the previous administration and the JCPOA’s other signatories had to focus negotiations solely on Iran’s nuclear program, setting aside broader problems, such as Tehran’s covert support for militant proxies, its development of ballistic missiles and its alleged human rights abuses. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the JCPOA’s other parties affirm that Iran is upholding its end of the agreement. Yet the current occupants of the White House have used infractions unrelated to the deal, such as ballistic missile testing, to blur the JCPOA’s terms and justify reintroducing sanctions.
Iran Recalculates
Consequently, Iran will have much to contemplate in the coming year as it weighs the pros and cons of abiding by the JCPOA. Compared with North Korea, Iran sees a nuclear deterrent as more of a luxury than a strict necessity. Iran’s reliance on global energy trade, its heavy exposure to intelligence oversight from hawkish neighbors like Israel and its people’s ability to channel economic discontent into political change make its pursuit of nuclear arms more perilous. At the same time, the country’s layered political structure, formidable security apparatus, challenging terrain and ability to disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz offer it useful insulation against its adversaries’ attempts to bring down the clerical government. In addition, Iran’s influence across the Middle East gives it leverage with the United States. Either by helping U.S. interests, for example in the fight against the Islamic State, or by hindering them — through threatening maritime vessels or backing militant proxies against U.S. allies — Tehran can influence its dealings with Washington. These factors led Iran to conclude that it could strike a bargain with the United States over its nuclear program to get economic reprieve from sanctions and reduce the potential for a military conflict in the Persian Gulf.
But the JCPOA wasn’t just about the nuclear program. Implicit in the framework was a deeper understanding between Washington and Tehran. Both sides understood there would remain a number of points of contention between them as they competed in proxy battlegrounds across the region. Still, in signing the deal, the United States was downgrading the potential for conflict in the Gulf region, thereby signaling to Tehran that it was taking any earlier plans for regime change off the table.
Now, in trying to directly discredit the JCPOA, the Trump administration risks stripping away those security guarantees and putting Iran back in an existential mindset that could push it onto the nuclear path once more.
A spate of leaks and acknowledgments from the U.S. president himself over the past year have revealed Trump’s disdain for anyone trying to block his Iran agenda and his respect for hawks on Iran policy. (The former group includes Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, while the latter category includes U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton, who has been rumored to be next in line to head the CIA should Trump decide to replace Tillerson with Pompeo.) The more frustrated he becomes with the North Korean dilemma, the more energy the U.S. president has put into lining up loyalists to try to limit interference in his agenda for Iran. Two key figures in the Middle East have exerted heavy influence over that agenda: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders, in fact, are so eager for the opportunity to shape a more aggressive U.S. policy toward Iran that they are downplaying their animosity for each other and collaborating in the open.
Iran’s leaders will now have to assess how far the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli triumvirate will go in trying to contain their country. Iran still has the benefit of a strong European defense for the JCPOA. The White House would risk a major confrontation with the Continent’s powers were it to attempt to unilaterally end sanctions waivers and reinstate secondary sanctions on foreign firms doing business with Iran. And enforcing additional sanctions would be difficult without buy-in from Iran’s main trading partners. With that in mind, Tehran will probably take care in the coming months to avoid blatantly violating the JCPOA and driving the Europeans back to the United States’ side on sanctions — even as a growing competition with Washington emboldens Iran’s hard-line politicians. At the same time, Tehran will look for ways to strengthen its burgeoning relationship with Russia to counterbalance the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli alliance.
Even if the framework of the JCPOA survives, however tenuously, Iran will still be on alert for other aggressive U.S.-backed efforts to destabilize its political system. After all, if the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia believe that the nuclear deal is fundamentally flawed and that they must compel Tehran back to the negotiating table, they’ll need to find ways to credibly threaten the Iranian government’s continued existence. Iran will be on the lookout for a range of threats, from a concerted military campaign against its Lebanese proxy militia, Hezbollah, to a cyberattack on its critical infrastructure to covert efforts to sow sedition in the Islamic republic. And even if the United States could coerce Iran to renegotiate the nuclear deal, Washington’s reputation for honoring that kind of pact is already deep in question. Agreeing to abandon the quest for nuclear weapons didn’t save Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, as Pyongyang and Tehran well know.
Overturning the JCPOA will compound the challenges the United States faces in finding diplomatic solutions to nuclear-sized problems. Moreover, a nuclear-armed North Korea would only complicate matters further. The cash-strapped country may find its coveted deterrent to be a lucrative asset in a pinch. And should the United States convince Iran of the JCPOA’s impending demise, Pyongyang may have a willing customer in Tehran.
The Luxury of Distance
Trump’s more assertive stance toward Iran isn’t an anomaly in U.S. foreign policy. Since the JCPOA took effect — a milestone that was arguably necessary to reduce the threat of military conflict in the Persian Gulf and to freeze Iran’s nuclear program — the Islamic republic’s economic recovery and re-engagement with the West has threatened to upset the balance of power in the Middle East. Iran, free from the fetters of sanctions, suddenly had more energy and resources to throw into its proxy battles in the region, at the expense of critical Sunni powers. The United States, in turn, was bound to shore up support for its Sunni allies and seek out new ways to keep Iran contained, regardless of who was conducting policy in the White House.
Even so, there is such thing as an overcorrection in policymaking. Trump’s willingness to wholeheartedly endorse the Saudi plan for cutting Iran back down to size sets him apart from his political contemporaries and predecessors. Along with trying to discredit the JCPOA, the U.S. administration has backed Riyadh’s short-sighted campaigns to isolate Qatar and to try to force a Saudi agenda down the Lebanese government’s throat. These moves, all sorely lacking in subtlety, at times suggest an ideological bent to target Iran at any cost.
But the United States doesn’t have to shoulder the historical baggage and the centuries of animosity that drive competition in the Middle East. It has the luxury of distance, from which it can manipulate the balance of power at will. In other words, while Israel and Saudi Arabia perceive Iran to be an existential threat, the same may not be true for the United States. Its removal from the situation gives Washington the space to manage Iran through a more assertive policy of strategic containment that stops short of reintroducing the menace of regime change and thus keeps the country from having to resort to more extreme measures. Therein lies the difference between strategic and ideological policymaking. As the North Korea conundrum gives rise to a more precarious age of nuclear deterrence, that difference will matter all the more.
This article was originally published by Stratfor Worldview, a leading geopolitical intelligence platform and advisory firm based in Austin, Texas.
Scoop: U.S. and Israel reach joint plan to counter Iran
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after delivering a speech during a visit to the Israel Museum on May 23, 2017 in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo: Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images
The U.S. and Israel have reached a joint strategic work plan to counter Iranian activity in the Middle East. U.S. and Israeli officials said the joint understandings were reached in a secret meeting between senior Israeli and U.S. delegations at the White House on December 12th.
What it means: A senior U.S. official said that after two days of talks the U.S. and Israel reached at a joint document which included understandings on countering Iranian actions in the region. The U.S. official said the document goal’s was to translate President Trump’s Iran speech to joint U.S.-Israeli strategic goals regarding Iran and to set up a joint work plan.
At the table: The Israeli team was headed by national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat and included senior representatives of the Israeli military, Ministry of Defense, Foreign Ministry and intelligence community. The U.S. side was headed by national security adviser H.R. McMaster and included senior representatives from the National Security Council, State Department, Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
As part of the understandings that were reached the U.S. and Israel decided to form several working groups according to the joint goals:
Covert and diplomatic action to block Iran’s path to nuclear weapons – according to the U.S. official this working group will deal with diplomatic steps that can be taken as part of the Iran nuclear deal to further monitor and verify that Iran is not violating the deal. It also includes diplomatic steps outside of the nuclear deal to put more pressure on Iran. The working group will deal with possible covert steps against the Iranian nuclear program.
Countering Iranian activity in the region, especially the Iranian entrenchment efforts in Syria and the Iranian support for Hezbollah and other terror groups. This working group will also deal with drafting U.S.-Israeli policy regarding the “day after” in the Syrian civil war.
Countering Iranian ballistic missiles development and the Iranian “precision project” aimed at manufacturing precision guided missiles in Syria and Lebanon for Hezbollah to be used against Israel in a future war.
Joint U.S.-Israeli preparation for different escalation scenarios in the region concerning Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Senior Israeli officials confirmed that the U.S. and Israel have arrived at strategic understandings regarding Iran that would strengthen the cooperation in countering regional challenges.
The Israeli officials said:
“[T]he U.S. and Israel see eye to eye the different developments in the region and especially those that are connected to Iran. We reached at understandings regarding the strategy and the policy needed to counter Iran. Our understandings deal with the overall strategy but also with concrete goals, way of action and the means which need to be used to get obtain those goals.”
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Part 2 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —
Part 1 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —
Story 2: Revised Second Estimate of Real GDP Growth in Second Quarter of 2017 Is 3 Percent — Videos
Story 1: Houston Under Water — Rain In Houston Area Should End Tuesday With Record Rainfall Exceeding 50 Inches In Many Areas From Hurricane/Tropical Story Harvey — Flooding and Rescues Continue — Videos —
Story 2: 12 Oil Refineries in a Houston Closed Due To Flooding As Gasoline Prices Rise By 20 Cents or More Per Gallon — Video —
Story 3: President Trump and First Lady Visit Texas — Videos —
Story 1: The Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey — Catastrophic Unprecedented Massive Flooding — Bring A Boat — First Responders Searching and Rescuing Those Trapped In Homes By High Water Levels — Mopping Up After Hurricane Now Tropical Storm Harvey — Flooding Will Continue Into Wednesday — Public Health Emergency — Have you ever seen the rain? — Who Will Stop The Rain — Videos —
Story 2: President Trump Will Visit Texas Tuesday — Fortunate Son — Lookin’ Out My Back Door — Videos —
Story 3: Antifa (Anti-Capitalism) Communist Thugs Violently Attack Again In Berkeley — Where Were The Berkeley Police? Standing Down Once Again — Unmask and Arrest Communist Antifa Thugs — Bad Moon Rising — Videos
Weather Warning — Part 2 of 2 — Story 1: Hurricane Harvey Messes With Texas and Louisiana — Upgraded To Category 4 Hurricane — A Real Disaster — Up to 40 To 60 Inches of Rain Possible and Wind Speeds From 131 – 155 Miles Per Hour Winds — Flood Surges 13-18 Feet — Will Hit Friday Evening or Early Saturday Morning — Damages Extreme — Rain For Next Four Days — Gas Prices Will Rise If Refineries Closed/Flooded — 20 Cent Plus Spike Per Gallon in Gasoline Prices — Videos
Pat Buchanan: The establishment is in a panic over Trump
Pat Buchanan on Whites in America (2010 / 2013 / 2016)
Pat Buchanan in 1992: “Make America first again”
Pat Buchanan “Cultural War” speech
BookTV: In Depth: Pat Buchanan
BookTV: After Words: Patrick Buchanan, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
Pat Buchanan Talks “The Greatest Comeback”
Pat Buchanan “The Greatest Comeback”
Suicide of a Superpower: Pat Buchanan on the Death of Western Civilization
Published on Apr 25, 2012
Peter Robinson sits with author, journalist and former presidential candidate, Patrick J Buchanan. From declining birth rates, to shifting values, to the decline of Christianity, Buchanan thinks Western civilization is falling apart. Buchanan is worried that the American melting pot has stopped assimilating immigrants the way it once did. Is America dying? Are you a racist if you think America is breaking apart? Find out.
Pat Buchanan: Biography, Apartheid, Culture War, Foreign Policy, Free Trade, Interview (1988)
Story 1: First The CIA Director Now The State Department Contradict Obama’s Islamic State, Syria and Iraq Policies — The Hillary Clinton Support Network Of Lying Lunatic Leftists Throws Obama Under The Bus — Work Place Violence — Hate Crime — Terrorist Act — Radical Islam — Radical Islamic Terrorist — Radical Islamic Terrorist Jihadists — Face Reality and Stopping Lying Obama — Radical Islamists Are A Majority of The World’s 1,600+ Million Muslims And Want Sharia Law — Ban All Radical Islamists From United States Permanently — Videos
Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology
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The rise of ISIS, explained in 6 minutes
The Basics of Islam 8: Robert Spencer on The Meaning of the Word “Jihad”
Robert Spencer Moment: Trump Was Right.
Robert Spencer on Hannity on the Orlando jihad massacre
The Basics of Islam 1: Robert Spencer on “Islamophobia”
What Does Jihad Really Mean? | For the Record
CIA Director Grave Warning: ISLAMIC STATE Dangerous As Ever
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CIA CHIEF CONTRADICTS PRESIDENT OBAMA ON ISIS
Robert Spencer speaks on the Syrian refugee crisis and the Islamic idea of hijrah
State Department diplomats slam Obama’s Syria policy
Diplomats slam Obama’s Syria policy
Dozens of State Department officials just revolted against Obama’s Syria policy
How will Trump react to the diplomats’ memo on Syrian war?
Syria’s war: Who is fighting and why
The war in Syria explained in five minutes | Guardian Animations
State Department dissent memo critical of Obama policy on Syria and Assad
State Department Demands Policy Shift In Syria | MSNBC
DHS Whistleblower Phil Haney exposes Obama administration during Press Conference
DHS Whistleblower Exposes Government’s Submission To Jihad (FULL Press Conference)
Government Insider BLOWS WHISTLE on Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Policy
State Dept Under Fire For Including Syria In Top Foreign Policy Moments – America’s Newsroom
Ben Shapiro: The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority
Obama gives speech in Orlando
Obama goes on tirade against Trump over ‘dangerous’ Muslim ban, ‘radical Islam’
Obama on ‘Radical Islam’
Speech by President Barack Obama After Counter-ISIL Meeting
President Obama On Orlando Shooting
Top Ex-CIA Agent Has ‘Chilling Warning’ About Obama’s Plans for Islamic State!
CIA Director on Islamic State
CIA Director John Brennan on ISIS and Global Threats at CSIS
CIA Chief Warns Islamic State Isn’t Finished Yet
CIA’S Brennan: Islamic State’s Momentum Blunted in Syria, Iraq
Shariamerica: Islam, Obama, and the Establishment Clause
Full Event: Donald Trump Rally in Dallas, TX (6-16-16)
An ’embarrassing’ break: Dozens of State Department officials just revolted against Obama’s Syria policy
At least 51 “mid-to-high-level State Department officials” have signed a dissent channel cable breaking with President Barack Obama’s policy on Syria and calling for US airstrikes on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh, even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield,” the cable reads, according to The Journal.
Daesh is an alternate name for ISIS, aka the Islamic State or ISIL.
“We are aware of a dissent channel cable written by a group of State Department employees regarding the situation in Syria,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told The Wall Street Journal.
“We are reviewing the cable now, which came up very recently, and I am not going to comment on the contents,” he said.
The officials who signed the document “range from a Syria desk officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to a former deputy to the American ambassador in Damascus,” and have all been involved in formulating or carrying out the administration’s Syria policy.
That policy has largely emphasized defeating the Islamic State over bolstering Syria’s anti-Assad rebel groups.
According to the American Foreign Service Association, the dissent channel is “a serious policy channel reserved only for consideration of responsible dissenting and alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues that cannot be communicated in a full and timely manner through regular operating channels and procedures.”
It is available to all “regular or re-employed annuitant employees” of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development.
The number of officials – at least 50 – who have signed the internal document calling for military action against Assad is unusual, a former State Department official who worked on Middle East policy told The Journal.
“It’s embarrassing for the administration to have so many rank-and-file members break on Syria,” they said.
Fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces sit in a lookout position in the western rural area of Manbij.Thomson Reuters
The cable calls for the Obama administration to place more emphasis on defeating Assad – whose brutality is seen by many experts as the driver of Syria’s jihadist problem – by arming and regaining the trust of Syria’s moderate opposition.
That, in turn, will “turn the tide of the conflict against the regime [to] increase the chances for peace by sending a clear signal to the regime and its backers that there will be no military solution to the conflict,” the cable reportedly says.
The CIA-backed factions of the Free Syrian Army – the majority of which are Arab and battling forces loyal to Assad – have at times clashed with Pentagon-trained fighters associated with the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are predominantly Kurdish and focused on defeating the Islamic State.
Their divergent military objectives and ethnicities have bred mistrust and fighting that is ultimately counterproductive to the cause of the revolution.
Several high-ranking government officials, moreover – including Robert S. Ford, a former ambassador to Syria, and Obama’s former defense secretary, Chuck Hagel – have left their positions over Obama’s failure to act decisively against Assad, whose brutality continues to fuel a bloody revolution that has left over 400,000 people dead and millions displaced.
“Many people working on Syria for the State Department have long urged a tougher policy with the Assad government as a means of facilitating arrival at a negotiated political deal to set up a new Syrian government,” Ford told The New York Times on Thursday.
Protesters carry Free Syrian Army flags and chant slogans during an antigovernment protest in the town of Marat Numan in Idlib Province, Syria, on March 4.REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
“The moral rationale for taking steps to end the deaths and suffering in Syria, after five years of brutal war, is evident and unquestionable,” the cable said. ” The status quo in Syria will continue to present increasingly dire, if not disastrous, humanitarian, diplomatic and terrorism-related challenges.”
Assad crossed Obama’s now infamous “red line” for airstrikes in 2013, when he used chemical weapons to kill more than 1,000 people in the eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Obama backed away from that red line when Assad agreed to a Russia-brokered deal to destroy his chemical-weapons stockpile.
Some experts say, however, that the entire stockpile has not been destroyed as promised.
“The US’ Syria policy has always been in the head of one man, and one man only: Barack Obama. No one else has ever really had a say in what happens in Syria,” Tony Badran, a Middle East expert and researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insiderin a previous interview.
“Obama has owned it since day one – and from day one, he never intended to remove Assad,” he said.
The cable addresses Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria as well, asserting that Moscow and Assad have not taken past ceasefires and “consequential negotiations” seriously.
Russia entered the war in late September 2015 on behalf of Assad under the guise of fighting ISIS. Russian warplanes have primarily targeted non-jihadist, anti-Assad rebel groups, however, many of which are backed by the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
Government warplanes bombarded the besieged Syrian town of Darayya with barrel bombs last weekend, shortly after food aid was delivered to the town for the first time in nearly four years.
Chart: Obama Admin. On Pace to Issue One Million Green Cards to Migrants from Majority-Muslim Countries
SWEN PFOERTNER/AFP/Getty Images
by CAROLINE MAY
The Obama Administration is on pace to issue more than a million green cards to migrants from majority-Muslim countries, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security data.
A chart released by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest Friday details the surge in immigration to the U.S. from majority-Muslim countries since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Specifically, in the first six fiscal years of Obama’s presidency (FY2009 – FY2014), his administration issued 832,014 green cards to migrants majority-Muslim countries, the most of which were issued to migrants from Pakistan (102,000), Iraq (102,000), Bangladesh (90,000), Iran (85,000), Egypt (56,000), and Somalia (37,000).
The total 832,014 new permanent residents do not include migrants on temporary, nonimmigrant visas — which allow foreign nationals to come to the U.S. temporarily for work, study, tourism and the like. As the subcommittee notes, the number also does not include those migrants who overstayed the terms of their visas.
Regardless, as the subcommittee explained in its analysis, the U.S. is playing host to immigrants from majority Muslim countries at an increasing pace.
Between FY 2013 and FY 2014, the number of green cards issued to migrants from Muslim-majority countries increased dramatically – from 117,423 in FY 2013, to 148,810 in FY 2014, a nearly 27 percent increase. Throughout the Obama Administration’s tenure, the United States has issued green cards to an average of 138,669 migrants from Muslim-majority countries per year, meaning that it is nearly certain the United States will have issued green cards to at least 1.1 million migrants from Muslim-majority countries on the President’s watch. It has also been reported that migration from Muslim-majority countries represents the fastest growing class of migrants.
Green cards, or Lawful Permanent Residency, puts immigrants on the path to citizenship and allows for lifetime residency, federal benefits, and work authorization. Included in the totals are refugees, who are required to apply for a green card after one year of residency in the U.S. Unlike other types of immigrants, refugees are immediately eligible for welfare benefits including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid.
A report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) indicated that in FY 2013, 91.4 percent of Middle Eastern refugees (accepted to the U.S. between 2008-2013) received food stamps, 73.1 percent were on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance and 68.3 percent were on cash welfare.
Green Card Totals, FY09-FY14:
Pakistan (102K), Iraq (102K), Bangladesh (90K), Iran (85K), Egypt (56K), Somalia (37K), Uzbekistan (30K), Turkey (26K), Morocco (25K), Jordan (25K), Albania (24K), Afghanistan (21K), Lebanon (20K), Yemen (20K), Syria (18K), Indonesia (17K), Sudan (15K), Sierra Leone (12K), Guinea (9K), Senegal (8K), Saudi Arabia (9K), Algeria (8K), Kazakhstan (8K), Kuwait (6K), Gambia (6K), United Arab Emirates (5K), Azerbaijan (4K), Mali (4K), Burkina Faso (3K), Kyrgyzstan (3K), Kosovo (3K), Mauritania (3K), Tunisia (2K), Tajikistan (2K), Libya (2K), Turkmenistan (1K), Qatar (1K), Chad (1K)
51% of U.S. Muslims want Sharia; 60% of young Muslims more loyal to Islam than to U.S.
OCTOBER 15, 2015 3:43 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER
Really, what did you expect? A considerable portion of U.S. domestic and foreign policy is based on the assumption that Islam in the U.S. will be different: that Muslims here believe differently from those elsewhere, and do not accept the doctrines of violence against and subjugation of unbelievers that have characterized Islam throughout its history. But on what is that assumption based? Nothing but wishful thinking. And future generations of non-Muslims will pay the price.
“Meanwhile, An Islamic Fifth Column Builds Inside America,” by Paul Sperry, IBD, October 1, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller)
In berating GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson for suggesting a loyalty test for Muslims seeking high office, CNN host Jake Tapper maintained that he doesn’t know a single observant Muslim-American who wants to Islamize America.
“I just don’t know any Muslim-Americans — and I know plenty — who feel that way, even if they are observant Muslims,” he scowled.
Tapper doesn’t get out much. If he did, chances are he’d run into some of the 51% of Muslims living in the U.S. who just this June told Polling Co. they preferred having “the choice of being governed according to Shariah,” or Islamic law. Or the 60% of Muslim-Americans under 30 who told Pew Research they’re more loyal to Islam than America.
Maybe they’re all heretics, so let’s see what the enlightened Muslims think.
If Tapper did a little independent research he’d quickly find that America’s most respected Islamic leaders and scholars also want theocracy, not democracy, and even advocate trading the Constitution for the Quran.
These aren’t fringe players. These are the top officials representing the Muslim establishment in America today.
Hopefully none of them ever runs for president, because here’s what he’d have to say about the U.S. system of government:
• Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of both the Fiqh Council of North America, which dispenses Islamic rulings, and the North American Islamic Trust, which owns most of the mosques in the U.S.: “As Muslims, we should participate in the system to safeguard our interests and try to bring gradual change, (but) we must not forget that Allah’s rules have to be established in all lands, and all our efforts should lead to that direction.”
• Omar Ahmad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the top Muslim lobby group in Washington: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
• CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”
• Imam Siraj Wahhaj, director of the Muslim Alliance in North America: “In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”
• Imam Zaid Shakir, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif.: “If we put a nationwide infrastructure in place and marshaled our resources, we’d take over this country in a very short time. . . . What a great victory it will be for Islam to have this country in the fold and ranks of the Muslims.”…
John Owen Brennan (born September 22, 1955)[1][2] is an American government official who is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He has served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; his title was Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.[1][3][4] His responsibilities included overseeing plans to protect the country from terrorism and respond to natural disasters, and he met with the President daily.[5][6]Previously, he advised President Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during the 2008 presidential campaign and transition.[7] Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the first Obama administration over concerns about his support for transferring terror suspects to countries where they may be tortured while serving under President George W. Bush.[3][5] Instead, Brennan was appointed Deputy National Security Advisor, a position which did not require Senate confirmation.[3][5][8]
President Barack Obama nominated Brennan as his next director of the CIA on January 7, 2013.[11][12][13] The ACLU called for the Senate not to proceed with the appointment until it confirms that “all of his conduct was within the law” at the CIA and White House.[14] John Brennan was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 5, 2013 to succeedDavid Petraeus as the Director of the CIA by a vote of 12 to 3.[15]
While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said the CIA was recruiting, and he felt a CIA career would be a good match for his “wanderlust” and his desire to do public service.[5] He received a B.A. in political science from Fordham in 1977.[3] His studies included a junior year abroad learning Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses at the American University in Cairo.[3][5] He also received a Master of Arts in government with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.[5] He speaks Arabic fluently.[9]
Brennan is married to Kathy Pokluda Brennan, with whom he has had one son and two daughters.[2][3][16]
Brennan began his CIA career as an analyst, presumably in the Washington D.C. area, and spent 25 years with the agency.[1][5][17] At one point in his career, he was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton.[5] In 1996 he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen.[5] In 1999 he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA.[3][5] Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001.[3] He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush’s daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities.[18] One of the controversies in his career involves the distribution of intelligence to the Bush White House that helped lead to an “Orange Terror Alert“, over Christmas 2003. The intelligence, which purported to list terror targets, was highly controversial within the CIA and was later discredited. An Obama administration official does not dispute that Brennan distributed the intelligence during the Bush era but said Brennan passed it along because that was his job.[19] His last post within the Intelligence Community was as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and 2005, which incorporated information on terrorist activities across U.S. agencies.[3][20]
Brennan then left government service for a few years, becoming Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC). He continued to lead TAC after its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007 and its growth as the Global Intelligence Solutions division of Global’s North American technology business GTEC, before returning to government service with the Obama administration as Homeland Security Advisor on January 20, 2009.[10]
On January 7, 2013, Brennan was nominated by President Barack Obama to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.[21]
Counterterrorism advisor to President Obama
In late 2008 Brennan was the reported choice for Director of the CIA in the incoming Obama administration. Brennan withdrew his name from consideration because of opposition to his CIA service under President George W. Bush and past public statements he had made in support of enhanced interrogation and the transfer of terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured (extraordinary rendition).[3][5][22] President Obama then appointed him to be his chief counterterrorism advisor, a position that did not require Senate confirmation.[3][5][8]
Brennan and President Barack Obama at a meeting of the Homeland Security Council, May 2009
In August 2009, Brennan criticized some Bush-administration anti-terror policies, saying that waterboarding had threatened national security by increasing the recruitment of terrorists and decreasing the willingness of other nations to cooperate with the U.S.[23] He also described the Obama administration’s focus as being on “extremists” and not “jihadists“. He said that using the second term, which means one who is struggling for a holy goal, gives “these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek” and suggests the US is at war with the religion of Islam.[23]
In an early December 2009 interview with the Bergen Record Brennan remarked, “the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities have to bat 1.000 every day. The terrorists are trying to be successful just once”.[5] At a press conferences days after the failed Christmas Day bomb attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Brennan said U.S. intelligence agencies did not miss any signs that could have prevented the attempt but later said he had let the President down by underestimating a small group of Yemeni terrorists and not connecting them to the attempted bomber.[1][24] Within two weeks after the incident, however, he produced a report highly critical of the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies, concluding that their focus on terrorist attempts aimed at U.S. soil was inadequate.[17] In February 2010, he claimed on Meet the Press that he was tired of Republican lawmakers using national security issues as political footballs, and making allegations where they did not know the facts.[25]
Drone program
In April 2012 Brennan was the first Obama administration official to publicly acknowledge CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In his speech he argued for the legality, morality, and effectiveness of the program.[26][27][28] The ACLU and other organizations disagreed. In 2011/2012 he also helped reorganize the process, under the aegis of the Disposition Matrix database, by which people outside of war zones were put on the list of drone targets. According to an Associated Press story, the reorganization helped “concentrate power” over the process inside the White House administration.[29][30][31]
In June 2011, Brennan claimed that US counter-terrorism operations had not resulted in “a single collateral death” in the past year because of the “precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”[32][33] Nine months later, Brennan claimed he had said “we had no information” about any civilian, noncombatant deaths during the timeframe in question.[33][34] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism disagreed with Brennan, citing their own research[35] that initially led them to believe that 45 to 56 civilians, including six children, had been killed by ten US drone strikes during the year-long period in question.[33] Additional research led the Bureau to raise their estimate to 76 deaths, including eight children and two women.[33] According to the Bureau, Brennan’s claims “do not appear to bear scrutiny.”[33]The Atlantic has been harsher in its criticism, saying that “Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities.”[36]
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Brennan’s comments about collateral death are perhaps explained by a counting method that treats all military-aged males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit information to prove them innocent.[33][37]
CIA Director (2013–present)
Nomination
Brennan being sworn in as CIA Director, March 8, 2013
Morris Davis, a former Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Military Commissions compared Brennan to Canadian Omar Khadr, who was convicted of “committing murder in violation of the law of war”.[38] He suggested that Brennan’s role in targeting individuals for CIA missile strikes was no more authorized than the throwing of the grenade Khadr was accused of.
On February 27, 2013, the Senate Intelligence Committee postponed a vote, expected to be taken the next day on the confirmation of Brennan until the following week. On March 5, the Intelligence Committee approved the nomination 12–3. The Senate was set to vote on Brennan’s nomination on March 6, 2013. However, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul began a talking Senate filibuster of the vote, citing President Barack Obama and his administration’s use of combat drones, stating “No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything that we fundamentally believe in our country.”[39][40] Paul’s filibuster continued for 13 hours, after which Brennan was confirmed by a vote of 63–34.
Brennan was sworn into the office of CIA Director on March 8, 2013.[41]
Donal Cruise O’Brien (by Christine Foster)
Fedelma Cruise O’Brien (by Christine Foster) Kate Cruise O’Brien(by Christine Foster)
Patrick Cruise O’Brien (adopted with Máire Mhac an tSaoi)
Margaret Cruise O’Brien(adopted with Máire Mhac an tSaoi)
Conor Cruise O’Brien (3 November 1917 – 18 December 2008)[1] often nicknamed “The Cruiser”,[2] was an Irish politician, writer, historian and academic. His opinion on the role of Britain in Ireland and in Northern Ireland changed during the 1970s in response to the outbreak of ‘the Troubles’ after 1968. He saw opposing nationalist and unionist traditions as irreconcilable and switched from a nationalist to a unionist view of Irish politics and history. O’Brien’s outlook was always radical and the positions he took were seldom orthodox. He summarised his position as, “I intend to administer an electric shock to the Irish psyche“.[3] Internationally, he opposed in person the African National Congress’s academic boycott of the apartheid regime in South Africa.[4] These views contrasted with those espoused during the 1950s and 1960s.
During his career as a civil servant O’Brien worked on the government’s anti-partition campaign. At the 1969 general election, he was elected to Ireland’s parliament as a Labour PartyTD for Dublin North-East becoming a Minister from 1973–77.[5] He was also the Labour Party’s Northern Ireland spokesman during those years. He was later known primarily as an author and as a columnist for the Irish Independent.
O’Brien’s father (who died in 1927) wanted Conor educated non-denominationally, a wish that Kathleen honoured. O’Brien followed his cousin Owen into Sandford Park School that had a predominantly Protestant ethos,[9] despite objections from Catholic clergy.[10] O’Brien subsequently attended Trinity College Dublin which played the British national anthem until 1939, though O’Brien and Sheehy-Skeffington sat in protest on such occasions.[11] He was elected a scholar in Modern Languages at Trinity in 1937. O’Brien was editor of Trinity’s weekly, TCD: A College Miscellany. His first wife, Christine Foster, came from a BelfastPresbyterian family and was, like her father, a member of the Gaelic League. Her parents, Alexander (Alec) Roulston Foster and Mary Lynd, were Irish republicans and supporters of Irish reunification. Alec Foster was headmaster at the time of Belfast Royal Academy and was later a founding member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and also a strong supporter of the Irish Anti-Apartheid movement.[12] He was a former Ulster, Ireland and British & Irish Lions rugby player, having captained Ireland three times between 1912–1914. O’Brien and Christine Foster were married in a registry office in 1939. The couple had three children – Donal, Fedelma, and Kathleen (Kate), who died in 1998. The marriage ended in divorce after 20 years. In 1962, O’Brien married the Irish-language writer and poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi in a Roman Catholic church. O’Brien’s divorce, contrary to Roman Catholic teaching, was not an issue since that church did not recognise the validity of O’Brien’s 1939 civil wedding in the first place. O’Brien referred to this action, which in effect formally de-recognised the legitimacy of his former wife and children, as “hypocritical … and otherwise distasteful, but I took it, as preferable to the alternatives.”[13] Mac an tSaoi was five years his junior, and the daughter of Seán MacEntee, who was Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) at the time. They subsequently adopted two Congolese children, a son (Patrick) and a daughter (Margaret).
O’Brien’s university education led to a career in the public service, most notably in the Department of External (now Foreign) Affairs. He achieved distinction as managing director of the state run Irish News Agency and later as part of the fledgling Irish delegation to the United Nations. O’Brien later claimed he was something of an anomalous iconoclast in post-1922 Irish politics, particularly in the context of Fianna Fáilgovernments under Éamon de Valera. He considered that those who did not conform to traditional Roman Catholic mores were generally ill-suited to the public service,[14] though that does not appear to have impeded his ascent through it that ended officially at ambassadorial level. He observed,
There was nothing unusual even then about not believing in Catholicism. What was unusual then was to acknowledge publicly that you did not believe in Catholicism…. It is interesting that this did absolutely no harm to my public career around the mid-century – a time when the authority of a triumphant Catholic Church appeared to be overwhelmingly strong, in the media and in public life. But I think many educated people – including many in the public service – already resented that authority and, while being discreet about this themselves, had some respect for a person who publicly rejected it altogether.[15]
In the Department of External Affairs during the 1949–52 inter-party government, O’Brien served under former IRA Chief of Staff republican, Seán MacBride, the 1974 Nobel PeaceLaureate, son of John MacBride and Maud Gonne. O’Brien was particularly vocal in opposition to partition during the 1940s and 1950s, as part of his official duties.
International postings
In 1961 O’Brien came to world prominence after secondment from Ireland’s UN delegation as a special representative to Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations in theKatanga region of the newly independent Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). As per his understanding of his mission, O’Brien initiated military action to prevent the mineral rich region from seceding by expelling French and other western backed mercenaries. Western powers had been attempting to provoke secession, in particular Britain and the adjoining white ruled Rhodesia.[16] A UN crisis ensued and O’Brien was forced to step down from his UN position and also simultaneously from the Irish diplomatic service in late 1961. Michael Ignatieff asserted that Hammarskjöld, who was killed in Katanga prior to O’Brien’s departure in a suspicious plane crash, had misjudged O’Brien’s abilities as U.N. representative. He further observed that O’Brien’s use of military force provided the Soviets and the US with ammunition in their campaign against the U.N. Secretary General and UN action opposed to the interests of the big powers.[17] O’Brien wrote immediately about his experiences in The Observer (London) and in the New York Times on 10, 17 December 1961, and later in To Katanga and Back(1962), considered a classic of both modern African history and of the inner workings of the United Nations. In 1962, in response to an invitation from the Chancellor of the University of Ghana, and the country’s leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, O’Brien accepted a position as Vice-Chancellor of the University. However, his interpretation of academic freedom later differed from that of Dr. Nkrumah, and he subsequently resigned in 1965.[18] Following this he was the first Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University from 1965 to 1969. During the 1960s O’Brien opposed western, in particular US, imperialism and protested against US participation in the Vietnam War. in 1965 O’Brien declared himself “a liberal, incurably … profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom… of speech and of the press”[19]
O’Brien also supported the right of oppressed people to use violence. In a debate involving Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and others in 1967, he asserted,
The question has also been raised here about the terror used by the National Liberation Front [in Vietnam], and by other revolutionary movements. I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make.[20]
During this period, after the outbreak of armed conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969, O’Brien developed a deep hostility to militant Irish republicanism and to Irish nationalists generally in Northern Ireland, reversing views articulated at the outset of unrest.[23] He also reversed his opposition to broadcasting censorship imposed by the previous government, by extending and vigorously enforcing censorship of Radio Teilefís Éireann (RTÉ) under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. In 1976 he specifically banned spokespersons for Sinn Féin and the Provisional Irish Republican Army from RTÉ.[23] At the same time, he attempted unsuccessfully to get Britain’s BBC 1 television channel broadcast on Ireland’s proposed second television channel, instead of allowing RTÉ to run it.[24][25]
Two additional notable incidents affected O’Brien’s career as minister, besides support for broadcasting censorship.
In August 1976 Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post interviewed O’Brien regarding the passage of an Emergency Powers Bill. During the course of the interview O’Brien revealed an intention to extend censorship beyond broadcasting. He wished to “cleanse the culture” of republicanism and would like the bill to be used against teachers who allegedly glorified Irish revolutionaries. He also wanted it used against newspaper editors who published pro-republican or anti-British readers’ letters.[26] O’Brien mentioned the Irish Press as a newspaper which in particular he hoped to use the legislation against and produced a file of Irish Press letters to the editor to which he took exception. Nossiter immediately informed Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan of O’Brien’s intentions. Coogan printed Nossiter’s report (as did the Irish TImes), republished the letters to which O’Brien objected, and ran a number of strong editorials attacking O’Brien and the proposed legislation. The interview caused huge controversy, resulting in modification of the measure appearing to target newspapers.[27]
O’Brien also supported Garda brutality in this 1973–77 period, though this was not revealed by O’Brien until 1998 in his Memoir.[28] In Memoir: My Life and Themes, O’Brien recalled a conversation with a detective who told him how the Gardaí had found out – from a suspect – the location of businessman Tiede Herrema, who had been kidnapped by group of maverick republicans in October 1975: “[T]he escort started asking him questions and when at first he refused to answer, they beat the shit out of him. Then he told them where Herrema was.” O’Brien explained, “I refrained from telling this story to [ministerial colleagues] Garret [FitzGerald] or Justin [Keating], because I thought it would worry them. It didn’t worry me.”[29] Elements of the Garda Síochána that engaged in beating false confessions out of suspects quickly became known as the “Heavy Gang”.[30][31]
O’Brien’s Dublin North-East constituency was abolished as part of a government inspired redrawing of boundaries. In the 1977 general election he stood in Dublin Clontarf and was one of three ministers defeated in a general rout of the outgoing administration.[32] He was, however, subsequently elected to Seanad Éireann in 1977 from the Trinity College Dublin constituency, though he resigned his seat in 1979 due to new commitments as editor-in-chief of the London Observer newspaper.
Editor in Chief at the Observer
Between 1978 and 1981 O’Brien was editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper in Britain. In 1979 he controversially pulped an Observer magazine with an article by Mary Holland, The Observer’s Ireland correspondent. Holland, whose reporting won her a Journalist of the Year award, had been one of the first journalists to explain discrimination in Northern Ireland to a British audience. The article was a profile of Mary Nellis of Derry and dealt with her radicalisation as a result of the conflict. O’Brien objected and sent Holland a memo stating that the “killing strain” of Irish republicanism, “has a very high propensity to run in families and the mother is most often the carrier”.[11] The memo continued, “It is a very serious weakness of your coverage of Irish affairs that you are a very poor judge of Irish Catholics. That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world and I believe you have been conned.[33] Holland was forced out of the newspaper by O’Brien. She later joined the Irish Times as a columnist. She also rejoined The Observer after O’Brien’s departure in 1981.[34]
Unionism
In 1985, O’Brien supported unionist objections to the inter governmental Anglo-Irish Agreement. In 1996 he joined Robert McCartney‘s United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP) and was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum. In 1997, a successful libel action was brought against him by relatives of Bloody Sunday victims for alleging in a Sunday Independent article in 1997 that the marchers were “Sinn Féin activists operating for the IRA”.[35] O’Brien opposed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and opposed allowing Sinn Féin into government in Northern Ireland. He later resigned from the UKUP after his book Memoir: My Life and Themes called on Unionists to consider the benefits of a united Ireland to thwart Sinn Féin. In 2005 he rejoined the Labour Party. O’Brien defended his harsh attitudes and actions towards Irish republicans, saying “We do right to condemn all violence but we have a special duty to condemn the violence which is committed in our name”.[36]
Writings
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s many books include: States of Ireland (1972), where he first indicated his revised view of Irish nationalism, The Great Melody (1992), his unorthodox biography ofEdmund Burke, and his autobiography Memoir: My Life and Themes (1999). He also published a collection of essays, Passion and Cunning (1988), which includes a substantial piece on the literary work of William Butler Yeats and some challenging views on the subject of terrorism, and The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986), a history of Zionism and the State of Israel. His books, particularly those on Irish issues, tend to be personalised, for example States of Ireland, where he made the link between the political success of the republican Easter Rising and the consequent demise of his Home Rule family’s position in society. His private papers have been deposited in the University College Dublin Archives.
He was a longtime columnist for the Irish Independent. His articles were distinguished by hostility to the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland, regular predictions of civil war involving the Republic of Ireland, and a pro-Unionist stance. O’Brien also abused the Irish tax exemption for works of literary merit by claiming this exemption for his newspaper column.
O’Brien held visiting professorships and lectureships throughout the world, particularly in the United States, and controversially in apartheid South Africa, openly breaking the academic boycott. A persistent critic of Charles Haughey, O’Brien coined the acronym GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented), based on a statement by Charles Haughey, who was then Taoiseach, commenting on the discovery of a murder suspect, Malcolm MacArthur, in the apartment of the Fianna Fáil Attorney GeneralPatrick Connolly.[38] Until 1994, O’Brien was a Pro-Chancellor of the University of Dublin.
Works
Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (as Donat O’Donnell) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952) OCLC 7884093
Story 1: Republican Party Establishment Suicide Watch — The Delegate Fix To Eliminate Both Trump and Cruz on The Fourth Ballot — Cheating Lying Cruz Establishment Puppet Trojan Horse? — Establishment Ticket: Romney/Ryan — Two Time Losers — American People Walk Out of Both Republican and Democratic Parties — Neither Republican Nor Democratic — Two Party Tyranny — Videos
The Green Papers
2016 Presidential Primaries, Caucuses, and Conventions
Colorado Republican Presidential Nominating Process Precinct Caucuses: Tuesday 1 March 2016 County Assemblies: Tuesday 1 March – Saturday 26 March 2016 District Conventions: CDs 1,6: Saturday 2 April 2016 District Convention: CDs 7: Thursday 7 April 2016 District Conventions: CDs 2,3,4,5: Friday 8 April 2016 State Convention: Saturday 9 April 2016
Republican Convention Presidential Nominating Process Debate – Fox – Cleveland, Ohio: Thursday 6 August 2015 Debate – CNN – Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California: Wednesday 16 September 2015 Debate – CNBC – Boulder, Colorado: Wednesday 28 October 2015 Debate – Fox Business News – Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Tuesday 10 November 2015 Debate – CNN – Las Vegas, Nevada: Tuesday 15 December 2015 Debate – Fox Business Channel, Charleston, South Carolina: Thursday 14 January 2016 Debate – Fox – Iowa: Thursday 28 January 2016 Debate – CBS – South Carolina: February 2016 (presumably) Debate – NBC/Telemundo – Texas: Friday 26 February 2016 Debate – CNN – TBD: March 2016 (presumably) Debate – Salt Lake City, Utah (announced 20 February 2016): Monday 21 March 2016 41st Republican National Convention: Monday 18 July – Thursday 21 July 2016
A day after being trounced by Sen. Ted Cruz in Colorado, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump blasted the state party’s process for selecting national delegates and called into question the results.
“The people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!” Trump posted on Twitter on Sunday evening.
Moments earlier, he posted a tweet that asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger — totally unfair!”
The Cruz campaign ran the table in Colorado, capturing all 34 delegates at a series of seven congressional district meetings this month and the state party convention Saturday in Colorado Springs.
Colorado GOP leaders canceled the party’s presidential straw pollin August to avoid binding its delegates to a candidate who may not survive until the Republican National Convention in July.
Instead, Republicans selected national delegates through the caucus process, a move that put the election of national delegates in the hands of party insiders and activists — leaving roughly 90 percent of the more than 1 million Republican voters on the sidelines.
The decision sparked significant controversy at the time and removed Colorado from the Republican primary map in the early stages of the campaign. But Cruz supporters worked quietly behind the scenes to build an organization to get like-minded Republicans to the March 1 precinct caucuses and capitalized on the Trump campaign’s failure to adapt to the system.
Trump’s campaign didn’t put a visible paid staffer on the ground in Colorado until last week, when it hired Patrick Davis, a Colorado Springs political consultant, to organize national delegate candidates at the 7th Congressional District convention in Arvada. By then, Cruz had won the first six delegates.
Even then, the energy behind Trump’s campaign didn’t materialize in support. He managed to win only seven alternate delegates.
The Trump campaign’s list of preferred national delegates distributed at the state convention on Saturday was riddled with errors and misspellings that only further hurt its chances.
The problems with Trump’s ballots — and the candidate’s comments — raise questions about whether Colorado will figure prominently into a challenge at the national convention about the state’s delegates.
Ahead of the state convention, a Trump campaign strategist said it made the strategic decision not to compete in Colorado because the caucus system favored party insiders.
Trump skipped the state party convention, where Cruz gave a rousing speech that galvanized his supporters.
In an interview at the event, Cruz said Trump was “scared” to attend because he “doesn’t handle losing well.”
Powered at first by volunteer organizers, the Cruz campaign began working to win delegates months ago and amplified the efforts in January when it brought U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Windsor, on board as state chairman. The campaign also teamed with controversial conservative organizations, such as the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, Gun Owners of America and religious liberty groups, to rally support.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump visits a caucus site Feb. 23, 2016, in Las Vegas. (Jae C. Hong, Associated Press file)
A second after the tweet, a state party spokesman came running into the press box at the convention and shouted “it wasn’t us!”
The party quickly deleted the tweet and posted: “The last tweet was the result of unauthorized access to our account and in no way represents the opinion of the party. We are investigating.”
The party’s spokesman, Kyle Kohli, said Sunday evening the investigation is ongoing and the party is examining its IP login history.
The party declined to comment on Trump’s tweets about the process.
Former CO GOP Chair: Message We’re Sending Is “Your Vote Doesn’t Matter And Your Voice Doesn’t Count”
By Ian Schwartz
Former Colorado state Republican party chairman Ryan Call talked to Laura Ingraham today to explain the delegation-selection process works and how it “cuts out any semblance of democracy or the popular will.” Call said the statewide convention that chooses the delegates reinforces all the worst stereotypes of the party.
“The very time we should be opening up our doors and being more open and transparent, and welcoming people into our Party, we’ve essentially made the decision to close it off and make it more cumbersome and more difficult. And, to prevent the ability of people to have their voice heard in this process. You’re reinforcing all of the very worst stereotypes about the Party and I, frankly, am very concerned about the way voters are going to feel,” Call told Ingraham.
Transcript, via Laura Ingraham Show:
Ingraham: The August 25th announcement that they would no longer do the presidential preference poll at their caucus, my spidey-senses went up when that happened. Was I correct to, at the time, note that this was a sign that they were not going to be bound by the people of Colorado selecting Trump. If that was a risk, they wanted to cut that off at the pass in August. Am I correct in stating that?
Call: That’s exactly right. While the caucus votes we’ve held in previous elections in 2008 and 2012 were always straw polls, they didn’t bind or allocate the delegations. They at least were a snapshot into where voter sentiment is in the state of Colorado, and the decision by the state Republican Party to cancel that vote taken in connection with the caucus really did cut out any semblance of democracy or the popular will in connection with the delegate election event. It became an entire party insiders game with getting delegates to go to county assemblies in the state convention. While Colorado has over a million registered Republican voters, the only votes that really counted were that of the 3,900 delegates that gathered down in Colorado Springs.
Ingraham: How do you become a delegate in Colorado? Does it tend to be more people who are activists within the Party? Is there a Tea Party element? How does that play out?
Call: So, Colorado has a lot of different elements. Tea Party elements, strong second amendment and pro-life supporters, it’s a very diverse coalition. And, lots of factions are involved in the Party. But, the process to become a delegate, to be able to have your voice heard in the process, is admittedly cumbersome, convoluted, complicated, and not friendly to folks that are political novices or are new at this process. You would have had to show up at your local neighborhood caucuses back in March, March 1st, and sit through two or three hour meetings, get elected from among your neighbors at the local neighborhood precinct caucus to go attend a county assembly. Then, from the county assembly, you had to convince the few hundred or a thousand of delegates at the county assembly to move you on to attend the congressional district, or state convention process. Then, you had to show up at the state convention and, as has been widely reported, you had ten seconds to make your pitch to the 3,900 delegates at the state assembly of why they should elect you to go to Cleveland.
Ingraham: At a time where the Republicans are so fractured, and it really is for the most part an anti-Establishment mood within the Party, that’s why Rubio went down in flames, that’s why Jeb couldn’t get any traction, that’s why Kasich is still lower in delegate count than Rubio. These outsiders as they’re called are still managing to capture the imagination and the spirit of the people, but if at the end of all this people just have an overall sense that, if you’re a Republican voter and you vote it doesn’t matter that much, how much damage do you think that will do to the Republican brand or reputation going forward?
Call: That is a great observation, and it’s a concern I feel overwhelmingly as well. The very time we should be opening up our doors and being more open and transparent, and welcoming people into our Party, we’ve essentially made the decision to close it off and make it more cumbersome and more difficult. And, to prevent the ability of people to have their voice heard in this process. You’re reinforcing all of the very worst stereotypes about the Party and I, frankly, am very concerned about the way voters are going to feel. In a swing state like Colorado, for example, even if Ted Cruz or Donald Trump ultimately become the nominee for President, while we’ve been able to make our pitch to the 3,900 delegates at the state convention, there’s million registered Republicans that haven’t been talked to and there’s almost a million and a half unaffiliated voters, independent voters, that are key to deciding the contest in the battleground state and we haven’t done any work in a state like Colorado to build the campaign infrastructure to engage them or allow their voices to be heard. So, the message we’re sending to voters broadly the way this process is going is that your vote doesn’t matter and your voice doesn’t count.
Colorado will not vote for a Republican candidate for president at its 2016 caucus after party leaders approved a little-noticed shift that may diminish the state’s clout in the most open nomination contest in the modern era.
The GOP executive committee has voted to cancel the traditional presidential preference poll after the national party changed its rules to require a state’s delegates to support the candidate who wins the caucus vote.
The move makes Colorado the only state so far to forfeit a role in the early nomination process, according to political experts, but other caucus states are still considering how to adapt to the new rule.
“It takes Colorado completely off the map” in the primary season, said Ryan Call, a former state GOP chairman.
Republicans still will hold precinct caucus meetings in early 2016 to begin the process of selecting delegates for the national convention — but the 37 delegates are not pledged to any specific candidate.
The Democratic Party still will hold a presidential straw poll March 1 — a Super Tuesday vote in a key swing state that is attracting attention from top-tier candidates.
For Republicans, no declared winner means the caucus will lack much of its hype. The presidential campaigns still may try to win delegate slots for their supporters, but experts say the move makes it less likely that candidates will visit Colorado to court voters.
The Colorado system often favors anti-establishment candidates who draw a dedicated following among activists — as evidenced by Rick Santorum’s victory in 2012 caucus. So the party’s movemay hurt GOP contenders such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Rand Paul, who would have received a boost if they won the state.
State Republican Party Chairman Steve House said the party’s 24-member executive committee made the unanimous decision Friday — six members were absent — to skip the preference poll.
The move, he said, would give Colorado delegates the freedom to support any candidate eligible at the Cleveland convention in July. Republican National Committee officials confirmed that the change complies with party rules.
“If we do a binding presidential preference poll, we would then pledge our delegates … and the candidates we bind them to may not be in the race by the time we get to the convention,” House said in an interview Tuesday.
The caucus is likely to occur in February, but party officials will meet next month to finalize the date.
In 2008 and 2012, die-hard Republican voters gathered at caucus meetings to begin the delegate-selection process of selecting delegates to the national convention and voice support for presidential candidates in a straw poll.
The votes, however, didn’t require Colorado delegates to support any particular candidate at the national conventions. This allowed for delegates that supported a losing candidate to vote for the nominee and demonstrate party unity at the convention.
But the freedom also opened the door for political mischief, as Colorado saw in 2012 when Ron Paul supporters managed to win a significant portion of the delegate slots, even though Paul finished far behind other candidates in the Colorado caucuses.
The RNC tightened the rules in 2012 to eliminate nonbinding straw polls and help prevent similar stunts in the future, forcing Colorado Republicans to re-evaluate their process. An effort earlier this year to switch to a presidential primary system failed amid party infighting.
“It’s an odd scenario,” said Josh Putnam, a political science lecturer at the University of Georgia who runs a popular blog on the presidential nominating process. “It’s not to say the campaigns won’t be there. … But you won’t have a good reflection of support at the caucuses, much less Colorado Republicans as a whole.”
Other caucus states are grappling with the rule change in different ways as they finalize their plans before the deadline at the end of September, Putnam said, but he is not aware of any state that has abandoned the presidential caucus vote.
With the change, the only way Colorado Republican delegates would remain relevant is the remote chance that no candidate emerges as a clear winner in the primary contest. In this case, the state’s unbound delegates would receive significant attention and may hold the key to victory in a floor fight.
“If there’s the potential for a brokered convention in any way, the unaffiliated delegates become extremely important,” said Joy Hoffman, the Arapahoe County GOP chairwoman who attended the party meeting. “If there is someone who becomes a front-runner, … then nobody’s important. So I think the view became that if we were not bound, it’s not the worse thing that could happen.”
EXCLUSIVE: Border Patrol Agents Demand GOP Provide ‘Free, Fair and Open Elections in America’
The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the organization that represents nearly 17,000 of the Border Patrol agents who risk their lives to secure U.S. borders, is challenging the Colorado GOP for not holding a state primary and instead slating delegates mostly favorable to Trump’s rival
In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, the National Border Patrol Council wrote:
In our March 30th endorsement statement of Donald J. Trump, we, the National Border Patrol Council called upon the American people to stand with border agents in support of Mr. Trump and his pledge to end illegal immigration. We fully expected that the will of the American electorate, whatever they decided in this primary, would be upheld. It is now clear that voters are being disenfranchised in order to protect established interests.
By cancelling the election in Colorado, the Republican Party has found a brand new way to disenfranchise voters who want secure borders and safe communities. Once again, the will of the public – who have pleaded for immigration enforcement – is being overridden by special interests with agendas. We see the same thing happening across the country, where delegates won by Mr. Trump – through a popular recorded vote – have made secret arrangements to support other candidates, thwarting the will of the millions of voters they collectively are supposed to represent. This is insidious.
I am calling today on the Republican Party to promise free, fair and open elections in America. All candidates should join in this demand. Elections should mean that the people – not party insiders – choose the nominee. We will never secure our immigration system unless the raw will of the American people is imposed through the ballot box. Clearly, politicians and special interests will continue to betray America’s interests if they are left to their own devices.
Over the past weekend, the Colorado Republican Party held its state convention, where at least 30 of the 37 Colorado delegates selected to attend the Republican National Convention and cast a vote for the 2016 nominee favor Cruz.
Following Cruz’s sweep, the Colorado GOP sent out a tweet from its official Twitter account, reading, “We did it! #NeverTrump.”
The tweet was subsequently deleted, but the occurrence is fueling backlash from voters who believe the establishment is obstructing the will of the people.
Trump also weighed in on Twitter about the people of Colorado not having their vote count:
******
(Disclosure: Breitbart Texas sponsored the Green Line podcast for the NBPC in an effort to provide a platform for agents to inform the public about the realities on the border and what Border Patrol agents face. Director Brandon Darby received an award from the Laredo chapter of the NBPC for his work in helping to defend and bring a voice to Border Patrol agents. Breitbart News assisted in covering funeral costs for a slain Border Patrol agent previously. Darby and Breitbart senior management have directly stated and shown that helping to bring a voice to the expressed needs and interests of Border Patrol agents is a top priority–personally, individually and together through Breitbart News.)
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Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why
Thomas Frank
When he isn’t spewing insults, the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims
Linda Gore stands in the crowd as she waits for the arrival of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks ahead of a campaign stop at the Signature Flight Hangar at Port-Columbus International Airport, Tuesday, March 1, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
‘Working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers … but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers’ Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?
I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.
When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.
Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini. This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.
Trump on Michigan and Mississippi wins: ‘Only I did well tonight’
All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers. And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”
Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.
* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of “bad”. The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things. But at least Trump is saying this stuff.
All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?
Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.
To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.
As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.
Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.
* * *
Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.
But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.
It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.
Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy”.
“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”
“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”
Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.
What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.”
Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.
Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, published 15 March by Metropolitan Books
This article was amended on 9 March 2016 to reflect the fact that Nafta stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement. An earlier version of this article referred to it as North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement.
Dr. Donald Miller (donaldwmiller@gmail.com) and I (wblock@loyno.edu) are starting up a new group to be called Libertarians for Trump.
LFT has its work cut out for it in mobilizing massive support for Donald Trump within the libertarian community. For there are some libertarians who oppose supporting any politician for political office, even a 99% pure one such as Dr. Ron Paul. However, I dedicated this book to refuting arguments of that sort: Block, Walter E. 2012. Yes to Ron Paul and Liberty. New York: Ishi Press. (By the way, the foreward to that book – not written by me — contains, in my opinion, the single best short essay ever written about Dr. Paul).
Let me just say that there is nothing, nothing at all, incompatible between libertarianism and voting, or supporting political candidates. Both Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard can be considered political junkies, and you won’t find too many better libertarians than those two.
Suppose we were all slaves, and the master said we could have a democratic election; we could vote for overseer Baddie, who would whip us unmercifully once per day, or overseer Goodie, who would do exactly the same thing, but only once per month. We all voted for the latter. Is this incompatible with libertarianism? Would this make us worse libertarians? Anyone who thinks so does not really understand this philosophy. For a remedial course, read this book: Rothbard, Murray N. 1998 [1982]. The Ethics of Liberty, New York: New York University Press.
There are several issues upon which libertarians do not and cannot support Donald Trump. For example, protectionism. But, typically, regarding the issues where Mr. Trump deviates from libertarianism, so do the other candidates.
And, also, we readily admit that the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party (unless they nominate someone like, ugh, Bob Barr) will very likely have views much closer to ours than those of Mr. Trump.
But, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It is our goal to throw our weight behind the candidate who has a reasonable chance of actually becoming President of the United States whose views are CLOSEST to libertarianism.
When put in this way, it is clear that The Donald is the most congruent with our perspective. This is true, mainly because of foreign policy. And, of the three, foreign policy, economic policy and person liberties, the former is the most important. As Murray Rothbard and Bob Higgs have demonstrated over and over again, US foreign policy determines what occurs in economics and in the field of personal liberties. Foreign policy is the dog that wags the other two tails.
We readily concede Mr. Donald Trump is no Ron Paul on foreign policy or anything else for that matter. However, compared to his Republican alternatives, the Donald stands head and shoulders above them. He has said, time and time again, things like “Look at what we did in Iraq. It’s a mess. Look at what we did in Libya. It’s a mess there too. And we’re going to repeat our mistakes in Syria? Not on my watch.” Would Cruz or Rubio ever say anything like that? To ask this question is to answer it. And, very importantly, who is the one candidate who went out of his way so as to not antagonize Russia and Premier Putin? It is the Donald, that is who. Do we really want to fight World War III with Russia? With Mr. Trump at the helm, we minimize the chances of this catastrophe occurring. (See Donald Miller’s brilliant article on this issue, mentioned below). Yes, future President Trump wants a strong military, but with only a few exceptions, fewer than the other Republican candidates, only to defend our country
Here are some positive things written about Mr. Donald Trump:
Please consider joining our new group, LFT. There are no dues or fees. All you need to do is give me your name, email address (which we will not use) and affiliation (professional and/or just mention the city and state you live in). We will release the list of names of LFT members once we reach 100 participants. I ask that you do this not because in this way we may have some effect on a Trump Administration although there is an outside chance we might (he is now beset upon from so many sides, and so unfairly, that he might well appreciate the relatively small support we can give him). I ask you to do this, rather, because it is the right thing to do; he is, of all the major candidates for the office of President of the United States, the one most closely, albeit very far from perfectly, aligned with our beloved libertarian philosophy. If you know of other essays written in support of Mr. Trump, either by a libertarian, or, emphasizing the fact that his views are more aligned with our own than those of other major candidates, send them to us so that we can add them to our bibliography of such literature.
Pronk Palisades 
The Pronk Pops Show — Week in Review — August 26-31, 2017 — Videos
Posted on September 5, 2017. Filed under: Airplanes, American History, Articles, Autos, Banking, Blogroll, College, Communications, Documentary, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Federal Government, Federal Government Budget, Fiscal Policy, Freedom, Friends, government spending, history, Illegal, Immigration, Inflation, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), IRS, Law, Legal, liberty, Life, Links, Literacy, Love, Macroeconomics, media, Monetary Policy, Money, Newspapers, People, Philosophy, Photos, Politics, Press, Radio, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Speech, Success, Talk Radio, Tax Policy, Taxation, Taxes, Television, Trade, Transportation, Unemployment, Video, Water, Wealth, Weather, Welfare, Wisdom, Work, Writing | Tags: Commentary, Damages, Flooding, Houston Texas, Hurricane Harvey, News, Opinions, President Donald J. Trump, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Tax Reform, The Pronk Pops Show, Videos, Week in review |
The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 956, August 31, 2017
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The Pronk Pop Show 956
August 31, 2017
Part 2 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —
For additional information and videos:
https://pronkpops.wordpress.com/2017/09/01/the-pronk-pops-show-956-august-31-2017-part-2-of-2-story-1-president-trumps-tax-speech-very-light-on-specifics-let-congress-fill-in-the-details-formula-for-failure-tax-rate-cuts-are/
The Pronk Pops Show 955
August 30, 2017
Part 1 of 2, Story 1: President Trump’s Tax Speech — Very Light On Specifics — Let Congress Fill in The Details — Formula For Failure — Tax Rate Cuts Are Not Fundamental Tax Reform — A Broad Based Consumption Tax Such as The FairTax or Fair Tax Less Not Even Mentioned — What Good Is Dreaming It If You don’t actually do it! — Videos —
Story 2: Revised Second Estimate of Real GDP Growth in Second Quarter of 2017 Is 3 Percent — Videos
For additional information and videos:
https://pronkpops.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/the-pronk-pops-show-755-story-1-president-trumps-tax-speech-very-light-on-specifics-let-congress-fill-in-the-details-formula-for-failure-tax-rate-cuts-are-not-fundamental-tax-reform/
The Pronk Pops Show 954
August 30, 2017
Story 1: Houston Under Water — Rain In Houston Area Should End Tuesday With Record Rainfall Exceeding 50 Inches In Many Areas From Hurricane/Tropical Story Harvey — Flooding and Rescues Continue — Videos —
Story 2: 12 Oil Refineries in a Houston Closed Due To Flooding As Gasoline Prices Rise By 20 Cents or More Per Gallon — Video —
Story 3: President Trump and First Lady Visit Texas — Videos —
For additional information and videos:
https://pronkpops.wordpress.com/2017/08/30/the-pronk-pops-show-954-august-29-2017-story-1-houston-under-water-rain-in-houston-area-should-end-tuesday-with-record-rain-fall-exceeding-50-inches-in-many-areas-from-hurricanetropical-story/
The Pronk Pops Show 953
August 28, 2017
Story 1: The Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey — Catastrophic Unprecedented Massive Flooding — Bring A Boat — First Responders Searching and Rescuing Those Trapped In Homes By High Water Levels — Mopping Up After Hurricane Now Tropical Storm Harvey — Flooding Will Continue Into Wednesday — Public Health Emergency — Have you ever seen the rain? — Who Will Stop The Rain — Videos —
Story 2: President Trump Will Visit Texas Tuesday — Fortunate Son — Lookin’ Out My Back Door — Videos —
Story 3: Antifa (Anti-Capitalism) Communist Thugs Violently Attack Again In Berkeley — Where Were The Berkeley Police? Standing Down Once Again — Unmask and Arrest Communist Antifa Thugs — Bad Moon Rising — Videos
For additional information and videos:
https://pronkpops.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/the-pronk-pops-show-953-august-28-2017-story-1-the-aftermath-of-hurricane-harvey-catastrophic-unprecedented-massive-flooding-bring-a-boat-first-responders-searching-and-rescuing-those-t/
The Pronk Pops Show 952
August 25, 2017
Weather Warning — Part 2 of 2 — Story 1: Hurricane Harvey Messes With Texas and Louisiana — Upgraded To Category 4 Hurricane — A Real Disaster — Up to 40 To 60 Inches of Rain Possible and Wind Speeds From 131 – 155 Miles Per Hour Winds — Flood Surges 13-18 Feet — Will Hit Friday Evening or Early Saturday Morning — Damages Extreme — Rain For Next Four Days — Gas Prices Will Rise If Refineries Closed/Flooded — 20 Cent Plus Spike Per Gallon in Gasoline Prices — Videos
For additional information and videos:
https://pronkpops.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/the-pronk-pops-show-952-august-25-2017-weather-warning-part-2-of-2-story-1-hurricane-harvey-messes-with-texas-and-louisiana-upgraded-to-category-4-hurricane-a-real-disaster/
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