Group items tagged

Of course, nobody knows if Trump will follow through on these promises if elected. Once in Washington, he could very well become just another lying politician. But right now, the last thing Yellen and her New World Order cronies want to do is take a chance on President Trump.They want to keep their unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air… to build and pop one financial bubble after another… all to redistribute from the little people to the elites… and destroy free-market capitalism in the name of state-manipulated Ponzi finance.We know that won’t change under Clinton. And maybe it won’t change under Trump. But you can bet central bankers don’t trust that business as usual will continue with Trump.So come the next Fed meeting in mid-September, expect a lot of sophisticated talk from Yellen about this or that economic item, assorted indecipherable mumblings and an army of TV talking heads lapping it all up as if an economic god had spoken.Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a rate hike… no matter what the economy’s doing.

I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.

Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”

Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.

A poll of registered voters from the end of the year shows that on the issue of the UN Security Council resolution against settlements of December 23, there are sharp splits between Democrats and Republicans and between Jews and African-Americans/Hispanics. There’s a huge partisan divide in the data released by Politico/Morning Consult. Democrats support the UN resolution, by 47 to 16 percent. Among Republicans, it’s the opposite: 43-24 percent against. And the Democratic Party is divided between traditional blocs: Jews were against the resolution by 47-42 percent. But Hispanics are 44-17 percent for the resolution. And African Americans are 39-18 percent for the resolution. Religious nones/atheists are also strongly for the resolution.

Registered voters support the resolution, overall, 35-28 percent. Good news for those who oppose settlements: the voters have the politicians’ backs. Break out whites, they support the resolution: 34-31 percent. Though bear in mind, in each of those categories, there are large numbers who are indifferent. Jews and Protestants stand out as being against the resolution. Jews: 47 oppose, 42 support. Only 12 percent don’t know. That’s the indifference quota, very low. Evangelicals: 36-27 percent oppose it. But 37 percent don’t know. Protestants oppose the resolution, 41-28. But Catholics support, it 39-30. Here’s the big kahuna in the poll: Atheists/Agnostics/Nones: 43-16 percent support the UN Resolution. That’s whopping. Notice that the Nones/Agnostics/Atheists now make up 478 of the sample of 2000 — nearly a quarter. Jews are only 63. Talk about punching above your weight! Those Nones are what gave Bernie Sanders his oomph on this issue. More of the partisanship. Clinton voters: 49-14 percent support the resolution. But Trump voters: 46-23 percent oppose it.

Young people don’t buy the security argument. From ages 18-44, the numbers are about 30-20 percent saying that the settlements are illegal. Between 45 and 55, it’s even. The numbers only start going the other way, for the settlements as a security measure, above age 55. The religious difference is even more pronounced when you ask whether settlements are a security measure or illegal. Jews go 52-32 percent for them being a security measure, with 16 percent having no opinion. And while evangelicals line up more or less with Jews, by 35-19 saying it’s a security measure, 47 percent don’t know/have no opinion. So much for the fervor of the evangelicals. Again: Jews know about settlements. Only 16 percent of Jews don’t know or have no opinion. But among other religions the no opinion numbers are all 39 or higher. Nones/Agnostics/Atheists say they’re illegal, 35-18. But 47 percent have no opinion. This is important because it shows that while Jews are just 3 percent of the sample, they care more than any other group. They know the story. And they’re conservative on the question.

Mises, the modern day creator of the Classical Liberal movement (today also called libertarianism) destroyed the intellectual arguments of socialism by proving that it was impossible to allocate scarce resources effectively without private property and free-market prices. He showed that the more the state limited economic incentives to individuals, the greater the harm to low-income people and the general population.

The US National Security Agency may have accessed computers within the Indian embassy in Washington and mission at the United Nations in New York as part of a huge clandestine effort to mine electronic data held by its south Asian ally.Documents released by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden also reveal the extent and aggressive nature of other NSA datamining exercises targeting India as recently as March of this year.The latest revelations – published in the Hindu newspaper – came as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, flew to Europe on his way to the US, where he will meet President Barack Obama.The NSA operation targeting India used two datamining tools, Boundless Informant and Prism, a system allowing the agency easy access to the personal information of non-US nationals from the databases of some of the world's biggest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

The largest amount of intelligence was gathered from Iran, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.

According to one document obtained by the Hindu, the US agency used the Prism programme to gather information on India's domestic politics and the country's strategic and commercial interests, specifically categories designated as nuclear, space and politics.

It’s a Myth that the U.S. Has Never Defaulted On Its Debt Some people argue that countries can’t default.  But that’s false. It is widely stated that the U.S. government has never defaulted.  However, that is also a myth.

One hundred years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federal Reserve banks opened for operation on November 16, 1914.   On the surface, the preamble to the Act, which summarized the purpose of the new government-created institution, seemed fairly innocuous:   “An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”

France's biggest bank BNP Paribas is facing a record-breaking $8.9bn (£5.2bn) fine from US authorities for allegedly transferring billions of dollars on behalf of Sudan and other countries blacklisted by the US."I want to be clear, we will be punished severely," Jean-Laurent Bonnafe, BNP chief executive, wrote in a memo to staff that emerged this weekend.The US Justice Department is expected to announce the fine and a potential ban from clearing dollar trades for one year at a Manhattan court later on Monday.Details of the US investigation are expected to show BNP Paribas hid the names of clients from blacklisted countries when processing $30bn in transactions through America. Most of the transfers involved Sudanese clients between 2002-2009, but some potentially illegal activity was happening as recently as 2012 while the US investigation was ongoing. The bank is expected to plead guilty.

The $8.9bn fine would be the largest penalty levied by US authorities against a foreign bank, far outstripping the $1.97bn HSBC paid out in 2012 after a US Senate investigation into the bank's role in money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and helping blacklisted clients evade US sanctions. However, BNP Paribas could be seen as getting off relatively lightly: calculations by the Wall Street Journal show that BNP fine equates to 27-30 cents for every dollar of potentially illegal activity, compared with $3.13 per dollar paid out by RBS in 2013 for sanctions busting.On top of the fine, BNP is likely to be banned from clearing US dollar transactions for one year, a damaging blow to its international business.

BNP Paribas earned €39bn in 2013, but profits fell sharply in the final quarter when it reported that it had set aside $1.1bn to pay a fine over US sanctions.

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.

By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.

Bank of America has agreed to a legal settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to avoid prosecution for the hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage loans that it and its subsidiaries sold to unwitting investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to multiple new reports. The total on-paper cost of the deal is reportedly at least $16 billion and perhaps as high as $17 billion, which makes it the largest corporate legal settlement with the government in U.S. history. But that record price tag is deceptive. The deal is unlikely to cost Bank of America anywhere close to that amount.

the government’s decision to pursue civil settlements rather than criminal cases against banks that inflated the toxic mortgage bubble means that shareholders pay the price while executives who oversaw the misconduct earn large bonuses.

“If you let a thief buy his way out of jail, you should really make sure the check doesn’t bounce,” HDL national campaign director Kevin Whelan said in an email. “Even a record $17 billion settlement is a small fraction of the damage done by B of A and Countrywide. But it could do real good for a lot of families,” Whelan said. “The fact that the JP Morgan Chase settlement has not delivered any noticeable relief to families makes us skeptical.”

All the pro-Israel anti-Iran groups engage in pressure tactics on Capitol Hill and have been effective in dominating the political debate. Of thirty-six outside witnesses brought in to testify at seven Senate hearings on Iran since 2012 only one might be characterized as sensitive to Iranian concerns. The enormous lobbying effort enables the anti-Iran groups to define the actual policies, move their drafts of legislation through congress, and eventually see their bills pass with overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate. It is democracy in action if one accepts that popular rule ought to be guided by money and pressure groups rather than by national interests. Less well known is United Against Nuclear Iran, which has a budget just shy of $2 million. UANI is involved in the New York lawsuit. The group, which has somehow obtained a 501[c]3 “educational” tax status that inter alia allows it to conceal its donors, has offices in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is active on Capitol Hill providing “expert testimony” on Iran for congressional committees, to include “help” in drafting legislation. At a July Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iran all three outside witnesses were from UANI. It is also active in the media but is perhaps best known for its “name and shame” initiatives in which it exposes companies that it claims are doing business with Tehran in violation of US sanctions.

UANI is being sued by a Greek billionaire Victor Restis whom it had outed in 2013. Restis, claiming the exposure was fraudulent and carried out to damage his business, has filed suit demanding that UANI and billionaire Thomas Kaplan turn over documents and details of relationships regarding UANI donors who it is claimed are linked to the case. Kaplan, a New York City resident, made his initial fortune on energy exploration and development. More recently he has been involved in commodities trading in precious metals. His wife Daphne is Israeli and his involvement in various Jewish philanthropies both in the US and in Israel have invited comparison with controversial deceased commodities trader Marc Rich, who reportedly worked closely with the Israeli government on a number of projects. The Justice department would like to the see the UANI lawsuit go away as it is aware that what is being described as “law enforcement” documents would include both privileged and classified Treasury Department work product relating to individuals and companies that it has investigated for sanctions busting. Passing either intelligence related or law enforcement documents to a private organization is illegal but the Justice Department’s only apparent concern is that the activity might be exposed. There is no indication that it would go after UANI for having acquired the information and it perhaps should be presumed that the source of the leak is the Treasury Department itself.

Who or what provided the documents to a private advocacy group that is also a tax exempt foundation supported by prominent businessmen with interests in the Middle East is consequently not completely clear but Restis is assuming that the truth will out if he can get hold of the evidence. The lawsuit claims that UANI intimidates its targets by defaming their business practices as well as by demanding both examination of their books and an audit carried out by one of its own accountants followed by review from an “independent counsel.” Kaplan is named in the suit as he appears to be the gray eminence behind UANI. He once boasted “we’ve (UANI) done more to bring Iran to heel than any other private sector initiative.” Kaplan also employs as a director or officer in six of his companies the Executive Director of UANI Mark Wallace and reportedly arranged the awarding of the Executive Director position at Harvard’s Belfer Center to its President Gary Samore. Kaplan is a business competitor to Restis, whose lawyers are apparently seeking to demonstrate two things: first, that the US government has been feeding sometimes only partially vetted information to UANI to help in its “name and shame” program and second, that UANI is itself supported by partisan business interests like Kaplan as well as by foreign sources, which apparently is meant to imply Israel. Or even the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Meir Dagan, former head of Mossad, is on the UANI advisory board, which also includes ex-Senator Joseph Lieberman and former Senior Diplomat Dennis Ross, both of whom have frequently been accused of favoring Israeli interests and both of whom might well have easy access to US government generated information.

(Bloomberg) -- Help can’t come fast enough for Ukraine. Conditions are deteriorating so quickly that the International Monetary Fund’s $17.5 billion bailout, pledged less than two weeks ago, may no longer be sufficient. While Ukraine waits for the IMF loan, central bank Governor Valeriya Gontareva is tightening the amount of foreign currencies available to importers and banning banks from lending money for clients to buy currencies other than the hryvnia. More restrictions may follow as the country’s economy contracts amid a deadly conflict with pro-Russian rebels in the country’s east, Gontareva said Monday.

With its foreign reserves dropping 61 percent to $6.4 billion in the four months through January, the “cupboard is basically bare,” said Timothy Ash, Standard Bank Group Plc’s London-based chief economist for emerging markets. The hryvnia has fallen 71 percent against the dollar over the past year. Despite the IMF pledge, Ukraine hasn’t received a major injection of cash since a $1.4 billion IMF disbursement on Sept. 3, the lender’s website shows. Lawmakers in Kiev have yet to pass amendments to the budget needed to allow the new IMF program to begin. Disbursements could start a few weeks after the fund’s board approves the facility, which may take place this week or next, according to Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko.

Ukraine’s $2.6 billion of 9.25 percent bonds due in July 2017, the sovereign’s benchmark security for foreign investors, fell 0.07 cent to a record 41.47 cents on the dollar by 11:30 a.m. in Kiev, taking its eight-day decline to 15 cents. The hryvnia weakened to an all-time low 32 per dollar, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “The way things are going, the central bank may need to declare a moratorium on money leaving the country, perhaps through an interruption in debt servicing as Argentina did,” Richard Segal, head of emerging-markets credit strategy at Jefferies International Ltd. in London, said by phone Monday.

NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation. It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies. Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this. In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.

Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes: The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral “Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping” online discourse Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda

Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs. We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media. One of America’s top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”. *** The implications seem to be profound for the information environment. *** The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.

The $8 billion upgrade to the US B61 nuclear bomb has been widely condemned as an awful lot of money to spend on an obsolete weapon. As an old fashioned ‘dumb’ bomb it has no role in US or NATO nuclear doctrine, but the upgrade has gone ahead anyway, in large part as a result of lobbying by the nuclear weapons laboratories. In non-proliferation terms however the only thing worse than a useless bomb is a ‘usable’ bomb. Apart from the stratospheric price, the most controversial element of the B61 upgrade is the replacement of the existing rigid tail with one that has moving fins that will make the bomb smarter and allow it to be guided more accurately to a target. Furthermore, the yield can be adjusted before launch, according to the target. The modifications are at the centre of a row between anti-proliferation advocates and the government over whether the new improved B61-12 bomb is in fact a new weapon, and therefore a violation of President Obama’s undertaking not to make new nuclear weapons. His administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review said life extension upgrades to the US arsenal would “not support new military missions or provide for new military capabilities.”

The issue has a particular significance for Europe where a stockpile of 180 B61’s is held in six bases in five countries. If there is no change in that deployment by the time the upgraded B61-12’s enter the stockpile in 2024, many of them will be flown out to the bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey. The row has had a semantic tone, revolving on what the definition of ‘new’ is, but arguably the only definition that counts is whether the generals and officials responsible for dropping bombs, view its role in a different light as a result of its refurbishment. Referring to the B61-12’s enhanced accuracy on a recent PBS Newshour television programme, the former head of US Strategic Command, General James Cartwright, made this striking remark: If I can drive down the yield, drive down, therefore, the likelihood of fallout, etc, does that make it more usable in the eyes of some — some president or national security decision-making process? And the answer is, it likely could be more usable.

In general, it is not a good thing to see the words ‘nuclear bomb’ and ‘usable’ anywhere near each other. Yet they seem to share space in the minds of some of America’s military leaders, as Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, points out. Cartwright’s confirmation follows General Norton Schwartz, the former U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, who in 2014 assessed that the increased accuracy would have implications for how the military thinks about using the B61. “Without a doubt. Improved accuracy and lower yield is a desired military capability. Without a question,” he said. The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe.

A French court has ordered IMF boss Christine Lagarde to face trial over the part she played in the Tapie Affair, regarding a €400m (£291m, $433m) transfer to French business tycoon and entrepreneur Bernard Tapie.In September, France's main prosecutor recommended magistrates at the Cour de Justice de la Republique, which deals with crime allegations against government officials, drop the investigation. The magistrates were probing Lagarde's alleged negligence in regards to the affair when she was finance minister of the country.Why advertise with usIn 2008, when Lagarde served under Nicolas Sarkozy's government, she approved a three member arbitration panel that awarded the payment from the taxpayers' pockets. Lagarde and Sarkozy have both been under fire since then for approving the panel.The payment followed Tapie's accusation that French bank Credit Lyonnais defrauded him when it handled the businessman's sale of his majority stake in German sports retailer Adidas in 1993. Tapie alleged the bank of deliberately undervaluing the company after it sold the stake for a higher sum.

Because the now bust Credit Lyonnais was partly state owned, at least some of the money came from French taxpayers. Tapie sold his Adidas shares to become a cabinet minister. He backed and supported Sarkozy in his bid for presidency in 2007.

The case has been brought up numerous times throughout the years, but some have accused current president Francois Hollande of playing politics. While others say that Lagarde and Sarkozy approved the payment because the influential Tapie backed their government.Tapie used to be popular among the French, as an entrepreneur and 'rags to riches' success story. Apart from Adidas, he has owned cycling team and Tour de France winner La Vie Claire and French football club Olympique Marseille.

Trump is dirty, he’s fully compromised, but not in the way most of his critics assume. Both Trump and Bill Clinton were frequent fliers aboard the Lolita Express with Jeffery Epstein. Epstein is the billionaire pedophile who got busted running an elite child prostitution ring. Victims testified that Epstein had them sleep with rich and powerful men from around the world. They also said that he directed them to collect information on these men. He referred to this as “investing in people”.

f this deal: Prosecutors agreed not to bring far more serious federal charges against Epstein, and not to charge “potential co-conspirators”, including four named individuals. From the Guardian Trump’s name came up several times in this case, and in a separate criminal complaint which accused both Epstein and Trump of raping a minor.

The judge that let Epstein off with a slap on the wrist and protected the other predators was a man named Alexander Acosta. That would be the same Alexander Acosta that Trump nominated as Labor Secretary. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Trump has tried to pretend that he hardly knew Epstein, but he made the following quote in an interview in 2002: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Trump in 2002