Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

[blindpig]

Both Trumpism And Anti-Trumpism Are Fake, Decoy Revolutions

Trump has been made the central figure in US politics around whom everything revolves, and whether the election is won by those who support him or those who oppose him, the imperial status quo is guaranteed to remain unchanged.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 26, 2024


There’s a fuzzbrained narrative going around “MAGA” circles right now that if re-elected, Donald Trump is going to appoint Robert F Kennedy Jr to the position of CIA director. This narrative has been extrapolated from some very vague comments made by Donald Trump Jr on a conservative podcast last week.

It’s hilarious that anyone thinks this will happen, and it says so much about how perpetually gullible and confused Trump supporters are. Trump’s CIA directors have been Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo and torture fetishist “Bloody Gina” Haspel, and these dopes think he’s going to suddenly give the job to RFK Jr? Come on. Trump isn’t going to drain the swamp. Trump is the swamp.

To this day, even after watching four years of evidence to the contrary, Trump supporters still believe he’s going to end the wars, drain the swamp, and take the fight to the Deep State. They believe he’ll be fighting the Deep State even after he imprisoned Assange. They believe he’ll be ending the wars even after he ramped up cold war aggressions against Russia, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from US-backed genocide, worked to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, came inches from starting a full-scale war with Iran with by assassinating General Qassem Soleimani, occupied Syrian oil fields with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes. They believe he’ll drain the swamp after he packed his cabinet full of neocon swamp monsters like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams.

Trump supporters are the most gullible people on earth. They’ll stare right at you as you look them in the eye and prove you lied to them in broad daylight, and then they’ll sign right up to let you do it again.


Rightists who are discontented with the American political status quo have been herded into supporting a politician who embodies that status quo as much as any other president, wrongly thinking they are waging a battle against the establishment by doing so. And this is mirrored on the other side of the imaginary partisan divide in US politics, with people making entire identities out of despising Donald Trump and acting like this makes them brave revolutionaries.

When Trump was first elected I had hope that the Democrats who’d fallen asleep at the wheel under Obama would become politically engaged again and start criticizing the evils of the US empire like they did during the Bush years. But what actually happened was that while Democrats did start paying attention to politics again, they were corralled like livestock by the mass media into opposing things that had no relation to the actual realities of the US empire and how it functions in the world.

Instead of focusing on Trump’s many depravities listed above, Democrats wound up spending years shrieking about a completely fake conspiracy theory that the executive branch of the US government had been taken over by the Kremlin, only to lose interest and pretend nothing happened after the Mueller investigation failed to indict a single American over any involvement with Russia. They spent all their political energy freaking out about Trump’s mean tweets and how rude he was to members of the press, while ignoring or even praising his administration’s reckless warmongering and tyranny around the world.

So Trump has been made the central figure in US politics around whom everything revolves, and whether the election is won by those who support him or those who oppose him, the imperial status quo is guaranteed to remain unchanged. As Americans become more and more discontented with the abusive nature of their nation’s government, a man has shown up who leads both Democrats and Republicans to believe that the best way to stick it to the man is to take a highly emotional position either for him or against him. When really whether he wins or loses couldn’t matter less to those with real power.

Trump sucks all the oxygen out of the room for real discourse about real things. Under Biden at least we’ve been seeing some real opposition to real things like the US-backed atrocities in Gaza, but under Trump it was four years of both mainstream political factions screaming about made-up nonsense under the delusion that they were fighting the power.



And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.

Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.

As Gore Vidal once said:

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”

That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied. It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.


From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire. Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression. You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire. The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare. Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire. A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.



The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel. The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, national strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions. There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws. Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.

What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/08 ... volutions/

[blindpig]

The congressman Higgins and the Trump assassin yellow story

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

September 1, 2024

Trump wants no trouble with the FBI and has sent his trusted Higgins to tell the world so.

Almost two months have now passed since the episode that has gone down in history as the ‘assassination attempt on Donald Trump’, during his election campaign in Pennsylvania, and there are still doubts and shadows surrounding the truth of the facts. And now, at the opening of the month of September, which is expected to be heated due to the most challenging phase of the run-up to the elections and with the dollar plummeting on the international currency market, the accusation by Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican, appears, pointing the finger at the work of the FBI.

Too many elements that don’t add up

Let us jog our memories to recall what happened. It is 13 July 2024, we are at the Meridian Agricultural Fair, western suburb of Butler, Pennsylvania. Former President Donald Trump is holding a campaign rally in front of the crowd. Suddenly gunshots are heard. Trump makes slavering movements, then collapses on the stage as security officers and some armed soldiers throw themselves on him to protect him. Trump emerges from the throng with outstretched arm, clenched fist and proud look: he is alive, victory! An ear wound, caused by a bullet that grazed the cartilage. A protester, Corey Comperatore, 50, former fire chief, dies while protecting his daughter with his body. It’s OK.

Or not.

No because from the outset the dynamics of what happened are unclear.

Immediately the analysis of the event began, which has become iconic and definitely prophetic for what will be in the future. In perfect American style: a beautiful media scenography, colours, weapons, shouts, victory gestures, applause. Beyond the authenticity of the event, about which I fear we will not know the truth for a long time to come, it can certainly be said that we have seen the perfect American patriotic film. But back to our analysis.

What does not add up in all this?

Some ideas.

Number 1) It was a real event with a real shooter using real bullets, which will naturally be evidenced in the findings of real victims and real bullet holes in the impact points around the president’s podium. The story is a shooter climbed onto a roof and fired several shots with the rifle at President Trump barely missing him, whizzing past and nicking his ear.

In the process of this assassination attempt the shooter has unified and inspired and emboldened the Republican conservative, moderate patriot voting block in America to stand with Trump and to villainise and demonise all those politicians and media and other groups that dislike him or vilify him.

It will also make Donald Trump a kind of superhero, a man of steel recovering from an apparent ‘head, wound’ (biblically significant) with an infectious courage as people tearfully watch his aggressively pumping fist in the air symbolising defiance against democrat tyranny as the words ‘fight fight,’ roar from his lips to the audience. Quite a dramatic image.

It’s strangely interesting that the Secret Service agents had arranged a very photogenic posture as Trump arose from the ground. Trump resembled the classic statue in Washington DC of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

There was even an American flag directly over his head as well. Surprisingly dramatic.

Then Trump was hustled off the stage into a black SUV and driven off and the rest is now seeping out.

Number 2) Of course the other possibility which we must always consider in this chaotic time of great deceptions and kabuki theatre is that the shooting was not real, but a false flag event and faked for political theatre. And that as a fake event It was designed to have an emotional impact to affect the nation and manipulate people and also distract from other issues in the world – such as the implosion of the U.S. economy, the Ukrainian defeat the Israeli collapse of the Netanyahu government; as well as the general rising of BRICS as an economic and political powerhouse.

of course this should be no surprise since there have been numerous occasions in history within the United States were shootings and bombings were later proven to be false and engineered for political purposes.

In this case There are some strong indicators, which would support this theory of it being artificial, faked or dramatized, specifically, the lack of physical impact that a bullet would have if it struck a person’s ear going faster than the speed of sound; and the shock that would’ve naturally adrenalised and traumatised Trump’s body and the shock which follows bullets.

Additionally, the Secret Service were remarkably – if not suspiciously – slow in their protecting of the president, similar to how they were slow in protecting president John F Kennedy, when he was shot in Texas. Most suspicious was that in the case of Trump, the Secret Service did not respond to reports of a shooter crawling with a gun on the roof nearby as eye witnesses have reported. Very strange. (Watch these reports disappear from Twitter very soon.)

In summary: is it possible that Trump participated in a fake assassination and smacked the side of his head to burst a small blood bag and give the impression of being nicked? Of course it is. To say he’s not would be the words of a fool or a liar. It can only help Trump, and will put down any other shooting attempts in the future.

Also possible is that a ‘Patsy’ was set up and then taken out in order to assume the blame, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination.

Many hypotheses have been formulated and many experts involved, so we will not dwell on the details now. Particularly interesting is what happened AFTER the event, both from a media and political point of view, and in the continuation of the ‘facts’. Let us discuss this second aspect together.

Higgins’ accusation

After the widely publicised assassination attempt on Donald Trump, many were quick to predict his victory, believing that it couldn’t get any better: a candidate fighting for the great future of the country, whom the cursed Democratic opponents even tried to shoot, but by God’s grace, he narrowly escaped death, as his destiny is to fulfil a historic mission to ‘make America great again.’

It might seem like a done deal, but there’s still time before the November elections, and the Democrats have changed their strategy by replacing the frail Biden with Kamala Harris. While she doesn’t have great achievements under her belt, she is, first of all, a woman, and secondly, not white.

In her case, the focus will clearly be on the female electorate (and by the way, there are 170 million women in the U.S.), plus African Americans and Latinos.

‘If you wouldn’t trust him with your child, then why would you trust him with your country? This is the message to American women in the Democrats’ new campaign ad.

It will be interesting to see what Trump’s new communication strategy will be since his main argument before this was Biden’s incapacity.

Higgins’ accusation came at a very peculiar time, as it stands at the intersection of a number of political factors:

Kamala Harris was again disavowed of her American origin and risks further electoral compromise
Political infowar on social media is raging with the help of AI, which makes it possible to create everything and the opposite of everything
The Ukrainian issue and the Israeli issue divide voters and reshape preferences
Christian religious authorities, of the various denominations in America, influence the Neocon front and smeared Democratic votes
New scandals – in perfect American style – emerge, such as those linked to JFK and… the problem of Thomas Matthew Crooks, identified as a Trump bomber.
Higgins is the inside job man for all of Trump’s Republican dirty dealings and has already been at the centre of borderline scandalous affairs in the past, drawing attention at just the right time, giving Reps a chance to get less breathing space from the media.

In the case of the assassination attempt on Trump, Higgins heavily criticised the FBI for cremating the body immediately after the assassination attempt, thus preventing proper investigation. The FBI, therefore, could have somehow destroyed valuable clues. Thus the bipartisan committee set up to investigate the security failures surrounding the incident. Most worryingly, no one had been notified of the cremation of Crooks’ body, neither the governor, nor the sheriff, nor the armed forces; only the FBI, whose mandate was directly entrusted by the U.S. Secret Service. The report released by the County Coroner does not convince anyone.

The already major crisis of the FBI

The attack on the Federal Bureau should be framed within a broader framework, namely the FBI crisis, on which Trump already in 2016 and then in 2018 had based part of his political campaign.

Many see Trump’s attacks as self-exculpatory: he called the famous agency a ‘disgrace to our country’ and its investigations into his business and political dealings a ‘witch hunt’. But as much as the FBI’s 14,000 or so special agents want to ignore the news, internal and external reports have found flaws throughout the agency, and long-time observers, beyond the partisan haze, see a worrying picture: there is indeed something wrong with the FBI.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has been busy as early as 2019 making a much-anticipated assessment of allegations by Democrats and Republicans of interference by FBI officials in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Also famous is the case of former director James Comey, when Clinton misused the agency’s email servers during the campaign in 2016, or even the harassment of former deputy director Andrew McCabe, who deliberately leaked information about the Clinton Foundation two weeks before the election. There have also been other painful and public failures: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings beyond the much-publicised missed warnings in the Parkland, Florida, school murders; an agonising delay in the sexual harassment investigation of Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are still facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material.

Also not to be forgotten is the most ‘imaginative’ charge: the FBI was accused of failing to detect the ‘Russian operation’ of influence in the 2016 presidential election. This failure would have put it in grave danger, so much so that in Congress, in the Republican area, there were rumours about the proposed suppression of the federal agency.

Some wondered whether the FBI had become too big and was being asked to do too many things. After 9/11, then-FBI director Robert Mueller, later special counsel to head the Russiagate investigation, made massive new investments in counterterrorism and intelligence, shifting resources and investigative focus away from white-collar crime and bank robberies. A power that grew, but did not run in time with the administration.

Many of the bureau’s problems developed during Comey’s three and a half years: critics argue that Comey’s penchant for high-profile moral battles has, ironically, undermined the bureau’s reputation. Trump himself has used this line of argument to challenge the FBI.

Democrats have also questioned the integrity of the bureau, with Clinton and her aides claiming that Comey and the FBI helped Trump win the election, who has continually attacked the integrity of the institution and its leaders, alleging not only incompetence but also bad faith in the administration of justice.

Considering this framework, Higgins’ attack clearly reads not only as an alleged “moral issue” about the assassination attempt on Trump and the investigation into Crooks: it seems, rather, to be a further attack on the agency, aimed at shuffling the cards, with a very clear political purpose. The elections are approaching and the interference of the Secret Service looms as a risk for Trump’s entourage (and not only) and, even more so, this attack seeks to clarify balances of power that escape the observation of most citizens.

Trump wants no trouble with the FBI and has sent his trusted Higgins to tell the world so.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... low-story/

I said there was something fishy about that little drama right from the start, it could have been opera. The most important question is 'who benefits?'

[blindpig]

Trump says he had "every right to" interfere with presidential election
From CNN's Kate Sullivan


Former President Donald Trump arrives for a town hall campaign event on August 29 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump, in an interview aired Sunday, said he had “every right to” interfere with a presidential election, as he faces an updated indictment in the federal election interference case against him.

“It’s so crazy that my poll numbers go up. Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it. You get indicted and your poll numbers go up,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment last week in his investigation into the former president’s and his allies’ alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The new indictment slims the allegations against the 2024 Republican presidential nominee in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, though none of the four charges have been dropped.

Trump said of Vice President Kamala Harris:

“She’s a nasty person. The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible.”

Pence, who served as Trump’s vice president, has been critical of Trump after the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has said he won’t endorse Trump for president. Pence was targeted that day by a mob of pro-Trump supporters — including some chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — who were trying to stop the election results from being certified. Trump continues to falsely claim that Pence had the power to stop the certification of the results.

Trump, who is set to debate Harris next week, referenced the viral moment where she said to Pence, “I’m speaking,” when he was interrupting her during their vice presidential debate in 2020.

Trump was initially talking about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Harris was a part of as a senator from California, and said Harris was “vicious” during the hearing.

“She was vicious, oh she was the most vicious. She was going after them. Just like with Mike Pence, where she said, you’re interrupting me, I want to talk. And that’s why, look, ABC is probably the worst in terms of fairness,” Trump said.

https://us.cnn.com/politics/live-news/t ... index.html

He certainly ain't the first prez to think it, Richard Nixon comes to mind, but I'm sure he's the first to arrogantly proclaim it. Who does he think he is, the DNC? Call it chutzpah, megalomania or solipsism, this is naked ruling class behavior. Most of his peers would never bare their souls like that unless drunk.

That this guy is a former prez and going for a repeat is testimony to 3/4 a century of lies and betrayal of the working class by the Democratic Party. Without the treacherous Dems he's just be the slumlord he was born to be.

[blindpig]

Fred Weir: Donald Trump for president? This time, Russia says, ‘No thanks.’
September 4, 2024 natyliesb
By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 8/23/24

Russian foreign policy experts express zero enthusiasm for another Donald Trump presidency, should he win the upcoming election. There’s a simple reason why.

They’ve already experienced one term of Mr. Trump in the White House, and it was the worst four years of their lives.

“Even if we assume that Trump genuinely wanted to improve relations with Moscow when he came in the first time, what he achieved was the exact opposite,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “There was chaos in Washington. There was a storm around Trump that affected anything to do with Russia, and it destroyed even the most modest efforts to start a dialogue.”

Russians remain fascinated with U.S. politics. The official media has covered each dramatic turn of the 2024 presidential race over the past couple of months with a mixture of excitement, bafflement, and dark schadenfreude. But gone is any expectation that the winner is likely even to slow the relentless downward spiral of U.S.-Russia relations, much less find the new level of mutual understanding, perhaps a U.S.-Russia compact, that they once hoped for.

Most Russian analysts seem to view Kamala Harris as a continuation of the Joe Biden administration, which has solidly backed Ukraine and hit Russia with the most intense blizzard of sanctions in history. As for Mr. Trump, even his pledge to end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours” is seen as empty verbiage at best or, more likely, a cynical effort to tap into the war-weariness of the U.S. electorate.

“The Russian media coverage of the upcoming U.S. elections seems rather objective to me,” says Lev Lurye, a St. Petersburg-based historian. “The general idea is that either Trump or any candidate from the Democratic Party will be equally bad for Russia.”

Frustration with Trump’s leadership

When it was announced that Mr. Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton back in November 2016 to become president, the entire State Duma – Russia’s lower house of parliament – rose to their feet and delivered a noisy, sustained standing ovation.

Such were the hopes aroused, not only among officials but ordinary Russians as well, by Mr. Trump’s expressions of admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and promises during his first presidential campaign that he would find ways to “get along with Russia.”

But they quickly were dashed once he entered office.

Many Russians were bemused by the #Russiagate scandal, which saw Mr. Trump mired in accusations that he had colluded with the Kremlin in unsavory ways for years, that he was profiting from lucrative business deals in Moscow, and that Russian internet trolls had helped to secure his election by manipulating social media in the U.S. Most of those accusations turned out to be false or greatly exaggerated, but at the time they dogged any conversation about Mr. Trump’s Russia policy and seemed to make any progress impossible.

It all came to a head at the July 2018 Helsinki summit, where Mr. Putin tried to press Russia’s agenda on issues like the war in Syria and nuclear arms control. But the summit was quickly overshadowed by Mr. Trump’s unusually deferential stance toward the Russian leader, which triggered a strong critical response among U.S. media and officials.

“The main thing that struck me, watching that show in Helsinki, was the total mismatch between the substantive issues that two leaders were supposed to be discussing, and the utter lack of interest in any of those things that was displayed at the press conference,” says Mr. Lukyanov. “Nobody wanted to hear anything about the actual agenda. They were only interested in some supposed secret relationship between Trump and Putin.”

“We thought that Trump was different”

The widespread view in Moscow now seems to be that U.S. hostility to Russia is hardwired, and unlikely to change regardless of whoever becomes president.

“Much of the Russian political elite thinks that the U.S. deep state is in charge, directing events, and no political actors can change anything,” says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Information, a Moscow think tank. “We thought that Trump was different, but now it looks like he’s just another agent of the deep state.”

But some watch the electoral turbulence, the deep polarization, and the somewhat disorderly changes at the top with a bit of satisfaction. The way the former Soviet Union tried to reform itself with a younger leader, and then collapsed, is a staple analogy in Russian news commentaries.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, says Russia is less interested in U.S. political developments and more concerned about the shifting global order, in which Russians perceive the U.S. steadily losing ground. New faces such as Ms. Harris aren’t likely to reverse the underlying dynamics of decay, he argues.

“All that’s happening in the U.S. is just what we’ve been saying for some time,” he says.

“Some Russians are enjoying the spectacle of chaos in American politics, because they think that the more disruption in the U.S., the better things will be for us,” says Mr. Markov. “I think we should be careful what we wish for. This is a very dangerous time, and there is a possibility that expanding crises can lead to a real world war. That would be catastrophic.”

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/fre ... no-thanks/

******

Trump advisor pushes to divert Palestine aid funds for Israeli annexation of West Bank

Hebrew reports recently said that the widow of late US businessman Sheldon Adelson has heavily funded Trump’s campaign in exchange for supporting Israeli annexation plans

News Desk

SEP 3, 2024


Former US ambassador to Israel and Trump advisor David Friedman visiting the Western Wall in occupied east Jerusalem. 15 May, 2017. (Photo credit: Menahem Kahana /AFP/Getty Images)

Former US ambassador to Israel and advisor to Donald Trump, David Friedman, proposed in his new book that Congress should redirect $1 billion allocated for Palestinian aid to support Israeli plans for an annexation of the occupied West Bank.

“Israel will need financial assistance to assert and maintain its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” Friedman wrote in his new book, using the biblical term used by Israel to refer to the West Bank.

Friedman writes in his book, titled One Jewish State: The Last and Best Hope for Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, that the US could divert $1 billion in current aid to the Palestinians – which includes funds for Palestinian Authority (PA) security services – to fund the Israeli annexation plan.

“The easiest bucket to exploit and reposition is the United States bucket,” Friedman added.

Friedman also compares Palestinians living under Israeli occupation to Puerto Ricans, who live on an island considered US territory.

“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections. Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they do not conflict with those of Israel,” he wrote.

Friedman said he has not yet shared his idea for funding the annexation with Trump. “I hope to share it with him at the appropriate time.”

The book is set to be released on 3 September.

Hebrew newspaper Haaretz reported in June that Trump received a pledge from the widow of late US businessman Sheldon Adelson to support his presidential campaign with millions of dollars. The report adds that Miriam Adelson seeks, in exchange, US support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank and recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied territory.

Her late husband, who was strongly behind the decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and move the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem, had also funded Trump’s previous campaign.

In 2019, the US under Trump recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which was illegally occupied by Israel in 1967. One year earlier, Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in a move highly satisfactory to Israel. In 2017, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy to the occupied city.

Trump has been described as among the most staunchly pro-Israel presidents in US history.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been actively pursuing an annexation of the West Bank since its inauguration in 2022.

In a move aimed at accelerating the annexation, the Israeli military in late May handed over significant legal powers in the West Bank to pro-settler civil servants working for Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The transfer will allow Smotrich and his civilian appointees from his religious settler movement to further remove domestic legal obstacles to the theft of Palestinian land for Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

A significant portion of the West Bank’s administration had already been handed over to Smotrich last year.

As part of the annexation project, Netanyahu’s government has been significantly expanding illegal West Bank settlements.

https://thecradle.co/articles/trump-adv ... -west-bank

[blindpig]

Good Lord!

Is this for real?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said that he was “very offended” when Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke in support of his election rival, US Vice President Kamala Harris. Asked during an international economic forum in Vladivostok on Thursday if he had “a favorite” in the US election, Putin said that he will follow Biden’s endorsement of Harris and “will support her as well.” Putin also said that “Trump imposed more sanctions on Russia than any president who came before him,” and suggested that Harris “would maybe refrain from such actions.” Speaking at a campaign rally in the city of Mosinee, Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump slammed the White House for what he said was a false claim of Russian meddling in the election. “Oh no, it’s Russia, Russia, Russia all over again,” Trump said, insisting that the conflict in Ukraine would never have happened if he was a president at the time. “I knew Putin. I knew him well. And you know, he endorsed – I don’t know if you saw the other day – he endorsed Kamala,” Trump continued. “I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Kamala.” He described Putin as “a chess player” and said he was wondering if he had spoken about Harris “with a smile.”

By endorsing Harris Putin greatly improved Trump's chances for the White House. I have to repeat it)))



And no, Trump never knew Putin. He merely met him.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/09/good-lord.html

Pathetic, thin-skinned and dumb. Too arrogant and dim to keep it to himself. Our foreign friends who favor this guy gotta get past their version of 'lesser evil'. Ain't no such thing in the American duopoly.

And no, Putin's trolling will not make any difference, it will wash if anything.

[blindpig]

Rainbow Flag Genocide Vs MAGA Hat Genocide

Caitlin Johnstone
September 9, 2024

❖

Kamala Harris has enthusiastically accepted the endorsement of Dick Cheney.

The degree of comfort US liberals have with men like Cheney is more evidence that they don’t view people in the global south as fully human. If they did, his endorsement would be rejected with the same revulsion they’d show endorsements from NAMBLA or neo-Nazis. The emotional comfort they receive from all this warm cozy talk about “unity” between Democrats and Bush-era war criminals matters more to them than the lives of millions of Iraqis.

Any political worldview that’s worth a damn necessarily includes a deep and visceral hatred of Dick Cheney, and an abhorrence toward any ideology which sympathizes with him.

❖

American democracy means getting to choose between genocide wearing a MAGA hat and genocide waving a rainbow flag.


❖

Mark my words: the same people telling you Harris is the better vote to save Gaza will make all kinds of excuses for her when she becomes president and you point out that she isn’t saving Gaza. Happened with Trump, happened with Obama. Same schtick over and over again.

❖

New rule: I’m just going to ignore anyone who tries to tell me Trump will do things if re-elected that he didn’t do the first time he was president. If you say he’s going to End The Wars and fight the Deep State, I’m ignoring that. If you say he’s going to turn America into a Nazi dictatorship where LGBT people are kept in concentration camps, I’m ignoring that. If he was going to do those things he would have done them.

Trump said a lot of offensive things and received a lot of incendiary coverage, but in terms of actual policy and governance he was a standard shitty Republican. His actual administration was very similar to that of his predecessors, and was evil not in some new way but in all the same ways those prior administrations were evil. If you need to concoct some weird fantasy that goes against all the evidence of his previous term in office to defend your position, your position is too weak to deserve attention.

❖

I talk about the US election not because I think it matters but to stress the fact that it doesn’t. This fake charade that consumes all political oxygen every four years will result in no meaningful changes to the behavior of the globe-spanning empire centralized around Washington.

So long as Americans are looking to their electoral system to address the murderousness, tyranny and injustice of their government, that murderousness, tyranny and injustice will continue. The first step to escaping from a burning building is to stop pushing on the fake fire exit that’s been painted on the wall. These fake elections are there to keep you trapped in the burning building. The real exit lies elsewhere.

❖

Next month will mark the one-year anniversary October 7th, that terrible day when more than a thousand people were brutally massacred in southern Israel by Israeli helicopters and Israeli tanks and also by Hamas a bit.

❖

A new poll says 70 percent of Jewish Israelis think it should be forbidden to express any sympathy for civilians in Gaza on social media platforms. Israelis will murder, oppress and steal from an ethnic group they’ve designated as less than human for 75 years, cry victim when that group retaliates, commit genocide in response to the retaliation, and then say you should be forcefully banned from criticizing them for this.

❖

Can’t wait til things calm down in the middle east so I can stop getting accused of being an antisemite and go back to the old wholesome accusations of being a Russian agent.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/09 ... -genocide/

Italics added for emphasis.

[blindpig]

Trump promoting the deep state’s “Iran assassination plot” lie indicates new strategy in the hybrid war on BRICS

by Rainer Shea
October 3, 2024

Why did Donald Trump repeat the deep state’s “Iran is plotting assassinations” lie around the same time when the Lebanon pager attack happened, the Zionist state carried out the strike that killed Nasrallah, and Netanyahu more broadly intensified his atrocities against Lebanon? How come Trump amplified such strategically important anti-Iran propaganda at a moment when the U.S. empire brought these unprecedented escalations with Iran? It’s not because Trump is the favored candidate among our ruling class; Harris has the support from monopoly capital’s dominant wing. Rather it’s because the monopolists and their intelligence forces are using MAGA as a tool for controlled opposition, acting to steer the discourse away from anti-imperialist ideas. This psyop advances both the hybrid war against BRICS, and the counterinsurgency against domestic dissent, which must succeed in order for the empire’s next war plans to be feasible.

By getting Trump to run cover for the same intelligence agencies that tried to assassinate him, and shift his base’s anger towards a key geopolitical target country, the deep state has ensured its continued domination over the U.S. government. It’s guaranteed that MAGA’s future role will be to further the anti-woke psyop, and to deflect the conservative base’s focus towards hating certain countries. This is part of the broader narrative manipulations targeting the right, where sentiments promoting the “Jewish question” have been boosted on Elon Musk’s Twitter.

The goal is to divert conservatives with proto anti-imperialist consciousness towards blaming ethnic and social scapegoats, weakening the right’s interest in an antiwar movement. And because Trump has let this psyop influence MAGA, the Harris wing of our ruling class is in a better place to win. The Trump campaign’s embrace of anti-woke rhetorical tactics and CIA talking points has taken away its populist appeal, making Trump a weaker opponent. If the efforts of the discourse managers fully succeed, Harris will be installed a month from now, letting the preferred post-election plan be implemented.

The handlers behind Harris aim to instigate violent protests, activating federal agent provocateurs on both the right and the left. They’ll use these new January 6-type events to justify raiding and arresting many more dissident figures, from journalists to organizers to lower-level figures within the ruling class. This power grab is what’s needed for making Washington ready to launch a new big war, and a series of color revolutions targeting the BRICS countries.

(More..)

https://newswiththeory.com/trump-promot ... -on-brics/

[blindpig]

A perfect storm of disinformation in the U.S. but there is truth in the eye

October 11, 2024

An appropriate political action by American citizens against their corrupt system would be a welcome October Surprise and perfect storm.

The extreme weather ravaging the southeastern United States could be the proverbial October Surprise to impact the presidential election, which is only three weeks away.

Political observers often speculate on a wild card event that upends the race to the White House. Usually, it is a debacle over a sudden political scandal involving one of the candidates, or a foreign policy setback such as the failure in 1980 to release American hostages held in Iran, believed to have cost Jimmy Carter that election to Ronald Reagan.

With fears of a looming war between Israel and Iran embroiling the Biden administration, that event might seem a likely risk to damage the chances of the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her Republican rival, Donald Trump, would no doubt make plenty of political hay over the Democrats “getting us into another endless war” – at a time when American voters are weary of foreign military misadventures.

However, the annual hurricane season has wrought unprecedented destruction to multiple states in the U.S. along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The political repercussions are piling up. As the Associated Press reported this week: “Back-to-back hurricanes are shaping the 2024 election.”

Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed into the U.S. – less than two weeks apart – and have wreaked apocalyptic devastation. Hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds more are still missing. Winds and tidal surges have destroyed millions of homes. It is estimated that the cost of infrastructure damage alone could reach $100 billion and quite possibly much more. Ominously, there are several weeks left before the hurricane season ends.

Compounding the chaos is a storm of political recrimination and disinformation. This election was already supercharged with divisive tensions and bitter polarization. The political atmosphere in the U.S. is as ugly as hell, generating fears of a civil crisis, whatever the outcome on November 7. Trump’s bid for election is based on his incendiary claims that Biden and the Democrats stole the last one in 2020. If he loses this time, there are real concerns that the constitutional order of the U.S. may go into meltdown. Even if he wins, the system faces a crisis from deep-seated opposition to another Trump administration.

Trump may have coined the phrase “fake news” – and with some validity given the systematic disinformation churned out by the mainstream media in the U.S. (and Europe). But the Republican candidate and his GOP base are also peddlers of gross distortions and lies.

In the past week, for example, Trump claimed that during his presidency (2016-2020), he came close to persuading Russia and China to give up their nuclear arsenals. Trump also claimed that the unsustainable $36 trillion U.S. national debt was the fault of China “raping” American workers and consumers with unfair trade practices.

On the hurricane disasters, Trump and his acolytes have been poisoning the political waters with outlandish lies that nevertheless have gained credence among millions of voters. One such claim is that the federal government has been “geo-engineering” extreme weather to hit Republican states. Another toxic lie is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is diverting aid from storm-ravaged Americans to the pockets of illegal migrants.

Amid a natural disaster, Trump and his followers have found a perfect storm for disinformation. In this endeavor, he is shamelessly aided and abetted by Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the X social media platform. Musk’s platform is an engine of storm disinformation that has led to death threats being posted against FEMA workers and even meteorologists who are accused of “treason”. It is no coincidence that Musk is a major donor to the Trump campaign and is angling for a cabinet post if Trump is elected.

It can be anticipated if Trump loses in November, he will push a new narrative that the election was lost because the Democrats wiped out Republican voting centers with “weaponized hurricanes”.

Laughably, American intelligence agencies and the political establishment often accuse Russia and China of interfering in U.S. politics with disinformation campaigns.

Evidently, the Americans are quite capable of disinforming and destabilizing their own people, whether they be Republicans or Democrats. A culture of media lies and manipulation is as American as apple pie. How else have so many criminal wars been waged by the U.S. since the Second World War? For democracy? Human rights? Preventing weapons of mass destruction? How absurd. Only a massive system of media disinformation could make such criminality possible.

Nonetheless, there is a damning truth in the recent eye of the storm, which many ordinary Americans can see.

It is shockingly clear that the Biden administration has prioritized war and overseas military destruction over the basic needs of American citizens. The FEMA budget is around $30 billion – nowhere near adequate to salvage the horrendous impact on communities across the United States from these latest storms. Many members of Trump’s Republican Party voted against increasing the budget.

Meanwhile, the Biden White House, along with the bipartisan Congress, have spent upwards of $300 billion – tenfold – on supporting a futile and fraudulent proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and fueling a non-stop, year-long genocide in Gaza by Israel.

The priorities of the U.S. federal government are perverse and despicable. And this goes way beyond the incumbent Democrats. For decades, that despicable dysfunction of supposedly “democratic governments” has been true – under Democrats and Republicans. Wars, destruction, mayhem and mass murder are the “normal” conduct of the United States. Trump accuses China of raping America. The truth is the U.S. has been raping the entire planet and Trump would continue the criminal empire with little difference to Harris or any other figure in the White House.

It is no surprise to witness millions of Americans struggling to cope with the latest extreme weather events, while their political rulers and oligarchs fund the misery and destruction of human beings in other parts of the world. They are integral facets of the same odious system.

A mass realization of that truth and appropriate political action by American citizens against their corrupt system – now that would be a welcome October Surprise and perfect storm.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... th-in-eye/

(Bolding added.)

******

Peter Thiel: Donald Trump’s Favorite “Kiwi” Billionaire
By Murray Horton - October 10, 2024 1


Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. [Source: theguardian.com]

Peter Thiel needs no introduction to readers of CovertAction Magazine or to Americans in general. I refer you to Jeremy Kuzmarov’s “Sugar Daddy of Trump’s VP Pick Has Deep Ties to CIA.” I am going to assume all that material as read and deal with another chapter in the Thiel saga that may not be so familiar to Americans (or, indeed, totally unknown).

Jeremy Kuzmarov’s article was prompted by Thiel’s latest move, namely his bankrolling of J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick as his Republican vice-presidential running mate. The clue is the headline of an article about the same subject in The New Zealand Herald, New Zealand’s biggest newspaper—“Kiwi billionaire Peter Thiel’s money links to J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate.”

Secretly Given New Zealand Citizenship
“Kiwi billionaire”? That’s right, Peter Thiel is a New Zealander, although a distinctly lapsed one. He was given New Zealand citizenship, something he kept secret for years until outed by the New Zealand media. And true to form, he is a controversial figure among his “fellow New Zealanders.” It is a fascinating story of power, money and influence.

The story broke in 2017, when New Zealand media questioned why his company’s purchase of an $NZ13.5 million life-style block in Wānaka (in the South Island) did not require any involvement by New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office (OIO), which is tasked with approving (or, very rarely, declining) applications from foreigners to buy New Zealand rural land. The reason given by the OIO was simple—Thiel is not a foreigner; he is a New Zealand citizen. That was the first anyone had heard of it.

What’s more, he was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011, so it had been kept secret for six years. Bill English, the National Party Prime Minister in 2017, said that Thiel had been given citizenship under the heading of “exceptional circumstances” for those who did not meet residency rules (Thiel had been granted residency in 2006).

“Peter Thiel went on a public relations blitz where he gave public appearances and donated money ahead of being granted New Zealand citizenship. The timing of his $NZ1 million Canterbury rebuild effort became clearer—It was in April 2011 and he was granted citizenship in June that year” [Canterbury province, and Christchurch, its biggest city, were devastated by thousands of earthquakes in 2010-11, causing 185 deaths and billions of dollars in damage. MH].

“He also invested in New Zealand technology companies, visited for a conference, and talked up the country in press interviews. Thiel called New Zealand a ‘utopia’ in a January 2011 Business Insider article. Thiel also made a January 2011 investment of an undisclosed amount into Pacific Fibre, a failed attempt to build a second undersea internet cable” (The Press, January 27, 2017, “PM defends billionaire’s citizenship”).


Peter Thiel [Source: seattletimes.com]

Major Media Interest
The New Zealand media started to take a keen interest in Thiel. The Christchurch Press headlined the front page of its January 25, 2017, issue with “Super-rich buying up NZ boltholes,” with a front-page box titled “Trump’s billionaire buddy a Kiwi citizen,” illustrated by a photo of Trump and Thiel together. And The Press filled the first two pages of its January 26, 2017 issue about him. The front-page banner headline read: “Money Talks: NZ Havens For Sale?” (This was from the days when the Press was a broadsheet; now it is a tabloid, except on Saturdays.)

The article itemized Thiel’s New Zealand properties—a house in Auckland (North Island, New Zealand’s biggest city); a property nicknamed “the plasma house,” in Queenstown (South Island), plus the already-mentioned life-style block in Wānaka (also South Island). It was accompanied that same day with an editorial headed “Stop stonewalling on Thiel questions,” the main one being how did he acquire New Zealand citizenship under “exceptional circumstances”? He did not even have to come to New Zealand to pick up his citizenship—it was granted to him at a private ceremony at the New Zealand Consulate in Santa Monica, California.


Property Thiel owns in New Zealand. [Source: loveproperty.com]

And the New Zealand media started digging into Thiel’s core business: “New Zealand spy agencies and our elite Special Air Service soldiers have long-standing commercial links with a controversial big-data company founded by surprise Kiwi Peter Thiel, the Herald can reveal. An investigation into Thiel’s links to New Zealand has found his firm Palantir Technologies has counted the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau as clients with contracts dating back to at least 2012.”


[Source: wsj.com]

Unique
The surprises kept coming: “The circumstances of Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship were so exceptional they have not been repeated, [Department of] Internal Affairs figures show. Thiel was made a Kiwi by then-Internal Affairs Minister Nathan Guy in June 2011 under a rarely-used ‘exceptional circumstances’ clause of the Citizenship Act, allowing the technology investor and libertarian to sidestep requirements to have lived—and intend to live—in New Zealand.”

“Internal Affairs, following requests under the Official Information Act, provided figures to the Herald of the number of cases where a Minister had granted citizenship under the exceptional circumstances clause where prior and future residence requirements were not met. The results appear to show Citizen Thiel is unique.”

How to Only Need 12 Days to Gain Citizenship
The real bombshell revelation came in June 2017, conveyed in this Press headline: “Thiel’s 12-day citizenship shortcut” (June 30, 2017). Potential New Zealand citizens have to spend at least 1,350 days in the country over a five-year period before being eligible. Thiel spent just 12 days, spread out over four trips during the five years before he was granted citizenship. “Exceptional circumstances” indeed! The politician who, as Minister of Immigration, granted Thiel’s citizenship in 2011, defended his decision when it was exposed in 2017. The same Government was still in power in 2017 but with a different Minister of Immigration—interestingly, he said he would not have given citizenship to Thiel.

Art Exhibition Devoted to Thiel
The most quirky manifestation of New Zealanders’ sudden interest in “our fellow citizen” and the scandal surrounding how he came to be one was that there was an art exhibition devoted to Thiel in 2017, which went on to tour the country in following years (I saw it at the Christchurch Art Gallery). This was Simon Denny’s “The Founder’s Paradox.” Denny is an interesting and very political artist. He represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale with “Secret Power.”


[Source: simondenny.net]

This “simultaneously looked at the graphic design culture of America’s National Security Agency and New Zealand’s place within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance” (Bulletin 194, December 2018, Christchurch Art Gallery, Anthony Byrt). Nicky Hager went to Venice with that exhibition, named after his 1996 book which first exposed the world of the Waihopai spy base, the agency that runs it—the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau—and the Five Eyes spy alliance, of which Waihopai and the GCSB are integral parts. I refer you to my recent CovertAction Magazine article.

Denny’s exhibition was about Thiel’s decidedly strange world view, which is one typical of extreme libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires. In his case, it also incorporated his obsession with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (his spy software is named Palantir after a magical artifact in the books, an upmarket crystal ball). The exhibition was designed as an elaborately detailed game, illustrating the world view of Thiel and his mates.

For instance, he appears in it in a giant portrait as an “Immortal” prepared to do battle with the dragon of Democracy and all the other scary monsters that keep the One Percenters tossing and turning in their boltholes. Thiel is an irony-free zone—he made one of his rare visits to his land of citizenship-of-convenience to see the exhibition for himself when it was on in Auckland in 2017.

I am the Organizer for the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA. Aotearoa is the Indigenous Māori name for New Zealand). So, what caught my attention, from a CAFCA perspective, was this quote from the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Bulletin (cited above): “…What we didn’t anticipate were the New Zealand-connected rabbit-holes we’d quickly end up down: Thiel’s deep fixation with The Lord of the Rings, for example, or his links to the life-extension scientist and biotech venture capitalist Laura Deming—an expat New Zealander.”

“Then there was the strange story of Wharekauhau Lodge. In the mid-1990s, a group of investors—many of them prominent libertarians—participated in a property deal for a large farm station and luxury lodge in the Wairarapa (lower North Island).


Wharekauhau Lodge. [Source: swaindestinations.com]


[Source: iberlbro.com]

Among them were former New Zealand Finance Minister Roger Douglas and the extreme-libertarian authors of one of Thiel’s favorite books, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, the American James Dale Davidson, and the late British peer Lord William Rees-Mogg (whose son Jacob is a key player in pro-Brexit British politics).”


Roger Douglas [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

The individuals behind Wharekauhau Lodge (Roger Douglas, et al.) were the subjects of CAFCA’s first ever “not of good character” complaint, back in the late 1990s, under the provisions of the Overseas Investment Act, to what was then called the Overseas Investment Commission [OIC, now the Overseas Investment Office (OIO); and it needs to be pointed out that none of those people is still involved with Wharekauhau Lodge]. To cut a long story short, our complaint was not upheld.

The best mainstream New Zealand media article on Thiel’s New Zealand connection (he is the prime example of a “boltholer,” having purchased here what is referred to by the 1% as “billionaire’s apocalypse insurance”) is Matt Nippert’s “Citizen Thiel” in the New Zealand Herald, February 2018.

He Has Ghosted the Country Ever Since
The irony is that, once Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011, he essentially ghosted the country. By the time the story broke in 2017, it was all very much in the slipstream of his private jet. American writer Max Chafkin wrote a fascinating 2021 book entitled The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. It offers some insights into Thiel and New Zealand.

Chafkin writes:

“The New Zealand house, as well as a roughly five-hundred-acre parcel of farmland some forty miles north that he later acquired, wasn’t about partying; as the panic room suggested, it was an escape plan. Like many within his network, Thiel was a bit of a prepper—a term used to describe people who believed that the end of the world, or civilization at least, would take place within their lifetime, as they stockpiled gold and firearms, sometimes in underground safe rooms.”

“This was, in other words, another kind of hedge, and New Zealand—remote, English-speaking and with a Right-leaning Government then led by a wealthy former foreign exchange trader, John Key—was an attractive destination for a conservative billionaire with a paranoid streak. Thiel was looking for more than a bunker; he wanted a backup country.”

Chafkin continues:

“… The giant plot of farmland remained untouched and undeveloped. There was no bunker—and Matt Nippert, the Herald reporter who’d broken the news of Thiel’s citizenship, had begun to suspect that Thiel had given up on the idea shortly after Trump’s election. ‘It was a hedge’, he told me [Chafkin]. Thiel, he concluded, was worried about Democrats changing U.S. tax policy. But after Trump won—and New Zealand’s Rightwing National Party government was replaced by the country’s Leftwing Labour Party under Jacinda Ardern in 2017—he lost interest.”


[Source: kjzz.org]

Refused Permission to Build Luxury Lodge
But Thiel has not completely severed his ties to New Zealand. He set about spending several years trying to get permission to build a luxury lodge on his Wānaka land. That did not end well for him. He ran into a foe more formidable than he was used to encountering—New Zealand bureaucracy. “American billionaire Peter Thiel appears to have abandoned his plans for a luxury lodge in Wānaka. The lodge, on the shore of Lake Wānaka, was designed by architect Kengo Kuma and Associates, a company known for designing the Tokyo Olympic Stadium. It includes three interconnected lodge buildings, and two standalone buildings with 11 visitor accommodation suites, housing up to 30 guests.”


Site of Thiel’s proposed luxury lodge. [Source: newshub.co.nz]

“But the Otago Daily Times has reported that the Environment Court confirmed Thiel’s company, Second Star Ltd, had not lodged an appeal to the High Court, after an earlier appeal was declined. In June [2024], Stuff reported that Second Star Ltd appealed a Queenstown Lakes District Council independent panel’s decision to decline consent for the visitor accommodation at Damper Bay to the Environment Court. In a decision from May [2024] Judge Prudence Steven and Commissioner Mark Mabin declined the appeal, largely due to the visibility of the proposed lodge on an Outstanding Natural Landscape site.”

“‘We acknowledge that the design of the proposal is attractive and responsive to its setting,’ Judge Steven said. ‘However, the buildings stretch across the site for some 190m which…is nearly the length of two football fields.’ [In the New Zealand context, football means rugby union, the country’s most internationally high-profile team sport. MH.] Curved roof elements would not significantly mitigate the horizontal effect of the lengthy building and 35m of glazed windows, Stuff earlier reported” (Stuff, July 28, 2024).

Thiel’s project was thwarted by a combination of the local Queenstown Lakes District Council (it did not comply with their planning rules) and local environmentalists. The latter definitely did not like Thiel or his well-publicized opinions. A spokesman for the Upper Clutha Environmental Society was quoted as saying: “I suggest that the applicant leave his anti-democratic ideas in the United States when he comes to New Zealand” (The Press, May 25, 2022, “Council planner unmoved by benefits of luxury lodge”).

The question must be asked: What was the attraction of New Zealand to Thiel? Well, as already mentioned, he is a Lord of the Rings nerd, to the nth degree (although I doubt that he sees himself as a hobbit; more of a lord or, preferably, a king). And this is the country that has built a very lucrative niche tourism industry out of the fact that New Zealander Peter Jackson made his blockbuster Lord of the Rings movie trilogy in this country at the turn of the century.

“Billionaire’s Apocalypse Insurance”
That is a real thing—there has been plenty of international and local media coverage about foreign billionaires wanting to hedge their bets with some prime New Zealand real estate. There is plenty of evidence of “boltholers” (Thiel is not alone) but no credible evidence has ever been found of the bunkers that these people are rumored to have had installed on their New Zealand properties. It is an endless source of fascination—during New Zealand’s extremely strict 2020 Covid 19 lockdown, I was interviewed by phone from Denmark on the subject of billionaires, boltholes and bunkers (that remains my only ever appearance in the Danish media—in Danish, too).

Actually the “insurance” turned out not to be worth much when the apocalypse really did come knocking. In 2020 the Jacinda Ardern Labour government declared a state of national emergency, and immediately slammed the border shut indefinitely, locking out virtually everyone from overseas—including New Zealand citizens who were living abroad or out of the country when it happened. No exceptions were made for the likes of Citizen Thiel. It was a very hard job for citizens to get back into the country.

I know, because it affected my immediate family. My wife became stuck overseas and only got back courtesy of a repatriation flight organized by the New Zealand government (which was at very short notice and very expensive). Upon arrival, everybody on that plane was compulsorily isolated for two weeks in one of the country’s otherwise closed and deserted hotels, under military guard, as were all other arrivals in that period.

Was that a popular policy? Later in 2020, New Zealand held its scheduled general election and the Ardern government won by one of the biggest landslides in New Zealand history—reflecting gratitude at its draconian measures keeping NZ’s 2020 lockdown death toll to 26 (and zero cases of flu or other respiratory illnesses that winter).

What of “Kiwi” Thiel Now?
He is still hedging his bets. In 2022 it was reported that he had applied to buy Maltese citizenship—that country sells passports. And he may not be finished with New Zealand. In August 2024 he told U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan that he was thinking of moving to New Zealand, blaming California’s “confiscatory taxation….‘The extreme thing I keep saying is I can’t decide whether to leave the state or the country,’ Thiel said, adding it was ‘tough’ to choose a new home because much of the world was ‘doing so much worse’ than the United States.”

And there is one final irony in this: Thiel is said to have lost interest in New Zealand when Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government won the 2017 election. She shocked the country in early 2023 by resigning as prime minister and retiring from politics (dooming her Government, which was heavily defeated in the 2023 election).


Jacinda Ardern—Peter Thiel’s nemesis. [Source: theguardian.com]

Where is she now? Living in the U.S., where she has celebrity star power among the “liberal elite”—in 2024 she has made a public appearance at the Democratic National Convention and been quoted in a Time cover story on Melinda French Gates.[1]

Most recently, in September, she was given an award at a glitzy ceremony in Venice hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Those are the circles she moves in now. With his nemesis now in the U.S. and the Government now in power in New Zealand being much more billionaire-friendly, it is possible that Thiel may deign to spend more than 12 days in his country of citizenship. But very few New Zealanders will be heartbroken if he doesn’t.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... llionaire/

[blindpig]

(For those who pin their hopes for peace in Ukraine on The Donald...)

<snip>

As for Trump - he was president before, and it was under him that the US first began sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. Mike Pompeo, supposedly one of Trump’s favorites, recently penned a very ‘pro-Ukraine’ think-piece, praised by liberal nationalist Ukrainian media in a subsequent English language interview on the topic. Pompeo raged at insufficient US military aid to Ukraine. And beyond that, Trump is older than he was before, and even then he was neither able, nor, it seems to me, particularly willing to reverse the collective desire of the US foreign policy establishment.

Is he really going to be willing to ‘capitulate to Putin’ by excluding Ukraine from any potential partnership or entry into NATO? With republicans and democrats alike yelling at him about ‘a bigger show of US weakness than Afghanistan’? I doubt it. (More...)

https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/ ... the-corner

[blindpig]

Ah, Yes.

Trump, the military strategist.

Бывший президент Дональд Трамп сообщил, что угрожал российскому президенту Владимиру Путину нанести удар по Москве, он сделал это заявление в интервью The Wall Street Journal. «Я сказал: «Владимир, если ты будешь гоняться за Украиной, я нанесу тебе такой сильный удар, что ты даже не поверишь. Я нанесу тебе удар прямо в центр гребаной Москвы». Я сказал: «Мы друзья. Я не хочу этого делать, но у меня нет выбора», — утверждает Трамп.

Translation: Former President Donald Trump said he threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin to strike Moscow, he told The Wall Street Journal. "I said, 'Vladimir, if you go after Ukraine, I'm going to strike you so hard you won't believe it. I'm going to strike you right in the middle of fucking Moscow.' I said, 'We're friends. I don't want to do it, but I have no choice,'" Trump said.

Yep, that's Trump, alright. In fact, classic Trump who cannot live without self-aggrandizing and BSing for a minute. Not that the cackling idiotress is any better, in fact she, or rather those who are behind her, is much worse, but that is how US "options" look like today. That's statesmanship, or what passes for it in today's US. Sad picture, really...

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/10/ah-yes.html

Yes, Kamala will toe the imperialist line, as she is doing on campaign. Yet Russia does seem to prefer her despite the trolling due to the predictability factor. On this the US and Russian ruling classes overall agree.