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Chomsky, Cockburn and Worthington Forced To Testify Only in Writing in Assange Case

October 3, 2020

Chomsky, Cockburn and Worthington Forced To Testify Only in Writing in Assange Case

I really do not know how to report Wednesday’s events. Stunning evidence, of extreme quality and interest, was banged out in precis by the lawyers as unnoticed as bags of frozen chips coming off a production line.

The court that had listened to Clair Dobbin spend four hours cross-examining Carey Shenkman on individual phrases of first instance court decisions in tangentially relevant cases, spent four minutes as Noam Chomsky’s brilliant exegesis of the political import of this extradition case was rapidly fired into the court record, without examination, question or placing into the context of the legal arguments about political extradition.

Twenty minutes sufficed for the reading of the “gist” of the astonishing testimony of two witnesses, their identity protected as their lives may be in danger, who stated that the CIA, operating through Sheldon Adelson, planned to kidnap or poison Assange, bugged not only him but his lawyers, and burgled the offices of his Spanish lawyers Baltazar Garzon. This evidence went unchallenged and untested.

The rich and detailed evidence of Patrick Cockburn on Iraq and of Andy Worthington on Afghanistan was, in each case, well worthy of a full day of exposition. I should love at least to have seen both of them in the witness box explaining what to them were the salient points, and adding their personal insights. Instead we got perhaps a sixth of their words read rapidly into the court record. There was much more.

I have noted before, and I hope you have marked my disapproval, that some of the evidence is being edited to remove elements which the US government wish to challenge, and then entered into the court record as uncontested, with just a “gist” read out in court. The witness then does not appear in person.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How America’s Dictatorship Works

February 25, 2019

How America’s Dictatorship Works

Trump could not have become America’s President if he had not won the “vote” of his nation’s second-largest political donor in 2016, casinos-owner Sheldon Adelson.

In publicly recorded donations, as of 25 December 2018, Adelson and his wife donated$82,522,800 to Republican candidates in 2016, and this amount doesn’t include any of the secret money. Of that sum, it’s virtually impossible to find out how much went specifically to Trump’s campaign for President, but, as of 9 May 2017, the Adelsons were publicly recorded as having donated $20.4 million to Trump’s campaign.

Their impact on the Presidential contest was actually much bigger than that, however, because even the Adelsons’ non-Trump-campaign donations went to the Republican Party, and the rest went to Republican pro-Trump candidates, and the rest went to Republican PACS — and, so, a large percentage (if not all) of that approximately $60 million non-Trump-campaign political expenditure by the Adelsons was boosting Trump’s Presidential vote.

The second-largest Republican donor in 2016 was the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, at $26,114,653. It was less than a third, 31.6%, as large as the Adelsons’ contribution. Singer is the libertarian who proudly invests in weak entities that have been sucked dry by the aristocracy and who almost always extracts thereby, in the courts, far larger returns-on-investment than do other investors, who have simply settled to take a haircut on their failing high-interest-rate loans to that given weak entity.

Singer hires the rest of his family to run his asset-stripping firm, which is named after his own middle name, “Elliott Advisors,” and he despises any wealthy person who won’t (like he does) fight tooth-and-nail to extract, from any weak entity, everything that can possibly be stripped from it. His Elliott Advisors is called a “vulture fund,” but that’s an insult to vultures, who instead eat corpses. They don’t actually attack and rip apart vulnerable struggling animals, like Singer’s operation does.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Best Government Money Can Buy

October 5, 2018

Best Government Money Can Buy

Best Government Money Can Buy

Very few Americans know who Sheldon Adelson is and fewer still appreciate that, as America’s leading political donor, when he speaks the Republican Party listens. By virtue of his largesse, he has been able to direct GOP policy in the Middle East in favor of Israel, which might well be regarded as his true home while the United States exists more as a faithful friend that can be produced at intervals whenever Israel finds itself in need of a bit of cash or political cover.

Adelson’s recent successes in translating his political donations into policy favorable to Israel have included shifting the US Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting aid to Palestinians, ending the Iranian nuclear monitoring agreement and closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic office in Washington. All those Trump Administration measures were reportedly worked out privately by Adelson speaking directly with the president.

Adelson’s activities in buying politicians reflect what he believes, he reportedly having said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” Nor does his world view include much concern for the country that has sheltered him and made him wealthy. He served in the US Army in World War 2 and has said that he regrets having done so, as he would rather have worn an Israeli army uniform. He also expressed his desire that his son might become an Israeli Army sniper.

Adelson benefits from his exceptional access to the White House to the detriment of actual American interests. A New York Times article “Sheldon Adelson Sees a Lot to Like in Trump’s Washington,” states that he “enjoys a direct line to the president” and meets the president monthly “in private in-person meetings and phone conversations.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are Being Lied To About Yet Another Middle Eastern Country By Yet Another US President 

May 10, 2018

We Are Being Lied To About Yet Another Middle Eastern Country By Yet Another US President 

Do you know who the single biggest donor was to any candidate in the 2016 presidential race?

Hillary Clinton’s massive $1.2 billion losing campaign budget might make you think that it was one of the many, many powerful influencers who were looking to get on her good side prior to her anticipated coronation, but it wasn’t. The largest donor to any campaign was oligarch Sheldon Adelson, who gave $25 million to the Trump campaign, and who in 2013 said that the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.

After his election win, Adelson gave another $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest single presidential inaugural donation ever made. Newt Gingrich, another of the billionaire’s hired politicians, has said that Adelson’s “central value” is Israel.

Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Adelson lackey, made an absurd and dishonest presentation arguing in favor of the termination of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal. Today, Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal and announced aggressive new sanctions against Iran, like a good little boy. Lobelog‘s Eli Clifton has published an article on how two other pro-Israel, anti-Iran oligarchs, Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer, helped pave the way for this decision along with Adelson.

If you want to know what policies a politician will take seriously, ignore his campaign rhetoric and look at his largest sponsors.

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Statement on the Iran Nuclear Deal: https://www.pscp.tv/w/bcHoFDFvTlFsTFJub1dwUXd8MVlxS0RkRWt3RG9LVuGHoVNqHUMTOFsKvNeEtRThrkhTbwCW_TKUlteUhH3s?t=1s …

Fox News @FoxNews

LIVE: President Trump makes an announcement on the Iran deal

pscp.tv

In his statement on the decision to pull out of the deal, Trump repeated the brazen, demonstrable lie that Iran is the world’s “leading state sponsor of terrorism”, a lie again repeated on his Twitter account.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America 2016: What Happens When a Nation Gives Too Much Political Power to the Super Rich

January 3, 2016

America 2016: What Happens When a Nation Gives Too Much Political Power to the Super Rich 

    Sheldon Adelson. (East Coast Gambler / CC BY 2.0)

As the high-powered shenanigans of Las Vegas casino mogul and GOP bankroller Sheldon Adelson show, “Oligarchy, rule by the few, also tends to become rule by the monstrously self-centered,” Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times.

Krugman continues in a column published Friday:

[…] it’s obvious […] that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others. […]

Modern America is a society in which a growing share of income and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, and these people have huge political influence — in the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, around half the contributions came from fewer than 200 wealthy families. The usual concern about this march toward oligarchy is that the interests and policy preferences of the very rich are quite different from those of the population at large, and that is surely the biggest problem. […]

The most obvious illustration of the point I’ve been making is the man now leading the Republican field. Donald Trump would probably have been a blowhard and a bully whatever his social station. But his billions have insulated him from the external checks that limit most people’s ability to act out their narcissistic tendencies; nobody has ever been in a position to tell him, “You’re fired!” And the result is the face you keep seeing on your TV. […]

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