Mar 21

Today’s News 21st March 2019

  • China’s New Silk Road To Extend To Russia's Crimea

    Russian state sources and officials have confirmed closer cooperation between Beijing and the Crimean peninsula on major Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, citing Chinese diplomats, which represents a continued significant shift in Moscow’s priorities which have historically pit Russia in economic competition with China. Any future BRI projects involving Crimea would further solidify and fully integrate the peninsula into Russia’s hold after its annexation from Ukraine following the 2014 referendum.

    During a ceremony at the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Monday, the head of the association of Chinese compatriots on the peninsula, Ge Zhili, made the following formal statements: “Our organization is bolstering cooperation ties, exchanges and friendly contacts with the Crimean society.” Not incidentally the event marked the “fifth anniversary of Crimea’s reunification with Russia.”

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    The bridge across the Heilong River (an early BRI cooperative project) will connect Tongjiang city in Heilongjiang province with Nizhneleninskoye in Russia. Image source: Russia Business Today

    Speaking also of increased cultural along with economic contacts, Ge continued to explain the goal “To help people understand what Crimea is, start cooperation with it, establish reliable relations with the peninsula, develop friendly contacts with it and implement joint private projects under the Belt and Road Initiative” — China’s ultra-ambitious development and investment project potentially involving over 150 countries on five continents.

    Chinese statements at the ceremony underscored establishing and deepening “reliable partner ties” at a moment when Moscow is believed to no longer be pursuing closer European integration following US sanctions as well as the unraveling of the INF, and increased NATO expansion.

    It’s also a moment that both Beijing and Moscow are rumored to be contemplating a potential bigger geopolitical alliance just as Washington has continued to hit Chinese exports with tariffs. Russian leaders have been described as more enthusiastically seeking closer cooperation while Beijing has signaled patience.

    However, greater BRI cooperation, especially into the geopolitically sensitive Crimean region would constitute a significant  step in this direction. 

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    Though little has been publicized regarding new potential specific joint BRI projects, other than ongoing projects such as the first cross-river railway bridge connecting China and Russia at Tongjiang, in Heilongjiang province, source RT presented the following: 

    There are also plans to renew cooperation between Crimea and southern China’s Hainan province, as well as between such cities as Yalta and Sanya, Sevastopol and Dalian, Sudak and Heihe.

    Last year Russian President Putin declared himself a firm supporter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, telling broadcaster CGTN, “President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative incorporates concepts of the economy and humanity. The essence of the Initiative is to develop both the economy and infrastructure.” 

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    Crimean bridge at night, via most.life/RT

    Concerning warming ties with Beijing, Putin had stressed at the time the BRI held the potential as “a significant step for further eliminating restrictions on economic development and cooperation.”

    Any major future cooperation in Crimea itself will be sure to raise eyebrows in Kiev and among Ukraine’s western allies, especially after last November’s dangerous incident in the Kerch Strait and subsequent threats of military escalation. 

  • Turkey: Tens Of Thousands Prosecuted For "Insulting" Erdoğan

    Authored by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,

    • Since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2014 election, there have been 66,691 “insult investigations” launched, resulting in 12,305 trials thus far, and the “numbers are increasing.” – Yaman Akdeniz, professor of law, Istanbul Bilgi University.

    • Ahmet Sever, a spokesperson for Turkey’s former president, Abdullah Gül, authored a book in which he wrote: “We [are] faced with a government or, more precisely, with one man, who considers books to be more dangerous than bombs.”

    • Meanwhile, as Erdoğan continues playing a double game with the West, as part of his decades-long bid to become a member of the European Union. That plan may well be why his justice minister announced in December that he would be unveiling a new strategy for judicial reform. The EU should not fall for this transparent ploy. Instead, it should be demanding that the Turkish government cease prosecuting innocent people — including those whose only “crime” is criticizing Erdoğan.

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    “Insulting the president” is a crime in Turkey. If convicted, violators face up to four years in prison — and longer, when the insult is public. According to Istanbul Bilgi University professor of law, Yaman Akdeniz, since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2014 election, there have been 66,691 “insult investigations” launched, resulting in 12,305 trials thus far, and the “numbers are increasing.” Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a rally in Istanbul, Turkey on May 18, 2018. (Photo by Getty Images)

    The criminalization in Turkey of “insulting the president” reached a new low in early March, when a father and daughter in Ankara accused one another of engaging in the punishable offense, as part of an internal family feud.

    According to Istanbul Bilgi University professor of law, Yaman Akdeniz, since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2014 election, there have been 66,691 “insult investigations” launched, resulting in 12,305 trials thus far, and the “numbers are increasing.”

    Özgür Aktütün, chairman of the Sociology Alumni Association, told the independent Turkish daily BirGün that although Turkey has been “a society of informants” since the Ottoman Empire, “what is striking in recent times is the [rampant] use of [whistleblowing] on every issue.”

    “Insulting the president” is a crime according to Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code, adopted in 1926. If convicted, violators face up to four years in prison — and longer, when the insult is public.

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) decries this practice. In October 2018, Benjamin Ward, HRW acting director for Europe and Central Asia said:

    “Turkish courts have convicted thousands of people in the past four years simply for speaking out against the president. The government should stop this mockery of human rights and respect people in Turkey’s right to peaceful free expression.”

    This was not the first time that HRW called on the Erdoğan government to cease prosecuting people for insulting the president. In a 2015 article on the topic, HRW wrote:

    “Turkish government figures regularly contend that insulting words are not free speech. Bodies including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and human rights groups in Turkey and internationally have repeatedly criticized this position and Turkey’s regular restriction of freedom of expression. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has repeatedly issued rulings on Turkey, finding violations of freedom of expression protected under article 10 of the European Convention…

    “Since the end of 2014 the authorities have pursued a spate of such cases with the justice minister’s permission, including against children, and several have entailed short periods of pretrial detention… Some cases have involved oral statements; others were for criticism on social media. In no case has the accused used or incited violence.”

    It is sadly ironic that “insulting the president” is one of the few issues about which there is no governmental discrimination along socioeconomic, gender or ethnic lines in Turkey. Indeed, people of all walks of life have been subject to investigations or prosecutions over this alleged offense, including high school students. Two teenagers were briefly detained and brought to court in 2015, for instance, after “insulting the president” in their speeches and slogans during an event in Konya.

    The head of the main opposition party, CHP, in Turkey’s parliament, the CEO of bank HSBC Turkey, Turkey’s Fox News anchor, two famous actors, a former judgeand a 78-year-old citizen are all examples of people who have been investigated, prosecuted, sued or jailed for “insulting Erdoğan.”

    Others who have been penalized for the offense are the former co-chair of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), who is serving an 18-month prison sentence; another HDP member, who was stripped of his parliamentary seat last year; and Ahmet Sever, a spokesperson for Turkey’s former president, Abdullah Gül, who authored a book in which he wrote: “We [are] faced with a government or, more precisely, with one man, who considers books to be more dangerous than bombs.”

    Erdoğan’s use of Article 299 as an intimidation tactic may be highly effective: if such prominent figures as Sever end up in court for daring to criticize the government, what chance do average citizens have to stand up for their right to express themselves? However, if Erdoğan believes that silencing his people is a way of keeping a stranglehold on his near absolute power, he may not be taking into account the fact that increasing numbers of Turks are frustrated and angry.

    Meanwhile, as Erdoğan continues to imprison anyone who opposes his rule, he is playing a double game with the West, as part of his decades-long bid to become a member of the European Union. That plan may well be why his justice minister announced in December that he would be unveiling a new strategy for judicial reform. The EU should not fall for this transparent ploy. Instead, it should be demanding that the Turkish government cease prosecuting innocent people — including those whose only “crime” is criticizing Erdoğan.

  • Sucking Liberals Into A New Cold War

    Authored by William Blum via ConsortiumNews.com,

    Out of fury against President Trump, many liberals have enlisted in the ranks of the New Cold War against Russia, seeming to have forgotten the costs to rationality and lives from the first Cold War…

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    Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity.

    Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid.

    “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.” – President Trump re Russian President Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam. [Washington Post, Nov.e 12, 2017]

    Putin later added that he knew “absolutely nothing” about Russian contacts with Trump campaign officials. “They can do what they want, looking for some sensation. But there are no sensations.”

    Numerous U.S. intelligence agencies have said otherwise. Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, responded to Trump’s remarks by declaring: “The president was given clear and indisputable evidence that Russia interfered in the election.”

    As we’ll see below, there isn’t too much of the “clear and indisputable” stuff. And this of course is the same James Clapper who made an admittedly false statement to Congress in March 2013, when he responded, “No, sir” and “not wittingly” to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans. Lies don’t usually come in any size larger than that.

    Virtually every member of Congress who has publicly stated a position on the issue has criticized Russia for interfering in the 2016 American presidential election. And it would be very difficult to find a member of the mainstream media who has questioned this thesis.

    What is the poor consumer of news to make of these gross contradictions? Here are some things to keep in mind:

    How do we know that the tweets and advertisements “sent by Russians” -– those presented as attempts to sway the vote – were actually sent by Russians? The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), composed of National Security Agency and CIA veterans, recently declared that the CIA knows how to disguise the origin of emails and tweets. The Washington Post has as well reported that Twitter “makes it easy for users to hide their true identities.” [Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2017]

    Russians! Russians! Russians!

    Even if these communications were actually sent from Russia, how do we know that they came from the Russian government, and not from any of the other 144.3 million residents of Russia?

    Even if they were sent by the Russian government, we have to ask: Why would they do that? Do the Russians think the United States is a Third World, under-developed, backward Banana Republic easily influenced and moved by a bunch of simple condemnations of the plight of blacks in America and the Clinton “dynasty”? Or clichéd statements about other controversial issues, such as gun rights and immigration? If so, many Democratic and Republican officials would love to know the secret of the Russians’ method. Consider also that Facebook has stated that 90 percent of the alleged-Russian-bought content that ran on its network did not even mention Trump or Clinton. [Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2017]

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    On top of all this is the complete absence of even the charge, much less with any supporting evidence, of Russian interference in the actual voting or counting of votes.

    After his remark suggesting he believed Putin’s assertion that there had been no Russian meddling in the election, Trump – of course, as usual – attempted to backtrack and distance himself from his words after drawing criticism at home; while James Clapper declared: “The fact the president of the United States would take Putin at his word over that of the intelligence community is quite simply unconscionable.” [Reuters, Nov. 12, 2017]

    Given Clapper’s large-size lie referred to above, can Trump be faulted for being skeptical of the intelligence community’s Holy Writ? Purposeful lies of the intelligence community during the first Cold War were legendary, many hailed as brilliant tactics when later revealed. The CIA, for example, had phony articles and editorials planted in foreign newspapers (real Fake News), made sex films of target subjects caught in flagrante delicto who had been lured to Agency safe houses by female agents, had Communist embassy personnel expelled because of phony CIA documents, and much more.

    The Post recently published an article entitled “How did Russian trolls get into your Facebook feed? Silicon Valley made it easy.” In the midst of this “exposé,” The Post stated: “There’s no way to tell if you personally saw a Russian post or tweet.” [Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2017]

    A Case or Not?

    So… Do the Cold Warriors have a case to make or do they not? Or do they just want us to remember that the Russkis are bad? So it goes.

    An organization in Czechoslovakia with the self-appointed name of European Values has produced a lengthy report entitled “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West: An Overview of RT’s Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact.” It includes a long list of people who have appeared on the Russian-owned TV station RT (formerly Russia Today), which can be seen in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries. Those who’ve been guests on RT are the “idiots” useful to Moscow. (The list is not complete. I’ve been on RT about five times, but I’m not listed. Where is my Idiot Badge?)

    RT’s YouTube channel has more than two million followers and claims to be the “most-watched news network” on the video site. Its Facebook page has more than 4 million likes and followers. Can this explain why the powers-that-be forget about a thing called freedom-of-speech and treat the station like an enemy? The U.S. government recently forced RT America to register as a foreign agent and has cut off the station’s Congressional press credentials.

    The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically:

    “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

    Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”

    So let’s see what other brilliance the New Cold War brings us… Ah yes, another headline in the Post(Nov. 18, 2017): “British alarm rising over possible Russian meddling in Brexit.” Of course, why else would the British people have voted to leave the European Union? But wait a moment, again, one of the British researchers behind the report “said that the accounts they analyzed – which claimed Russian as their language when they were set up but tweeted in English – posted a mixture of pro-‘leave’ and pro-‘remain’ messages regarding Brexit. Commentators have said that the goal may simply have been to sow discord and division in society.”

    Was there ever a time when the Post would have been embarrassed to be so openly, amateurishly biased about Russia? Perhaps during the few years between the two Cold Wars.

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    In case you don’t remember how stupid Cold War Number One was…

    • 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of other lists of “communists,” published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments.

    • Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet, “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.” This included information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean: ?Q: What would happen to my insurance?? A: It would go to the Communists.? Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?? A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.

    • 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

    • As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: “Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new [communist] regime.” One person wrote to Kerr: “I am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the street as being ‘perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.’ Or what would you think of a physician who tells you to take ‘perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonsful of a remedy’?”

    • Throughout the cold war, traffic in phony Lenin quotes was brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years. Here’s S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: “Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war. Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists. ?“First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.” This Lenin “quotation” had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in 1962. This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress and the United States Information Agency failed to find its origin.

    • A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States. Here’s a small sample:? Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in 1953: “We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City.”? Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1964, interviewed in the American Legion Magazine: Interviewer: “I’ve been told that the communists are trying to flood our country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is that true?”? Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it’s true. There’s a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China… There’s no question that in that particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese. It should be apparent that if you could addict a population you would degrade a nation’s moral fiber.”? Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist, 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin – marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin – are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country. Several Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”? We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine America’s spirit was fluoridation of the water.

    • Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions of his anti-communist thriller mysteries. Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in “One Lonely Night,” boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets. After a night of carnage, the triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. … They were Commies. … Pretty soon what’s left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won’t be worth mentioning and I’m glad because I had a part in the killing. God, but it was fun!”

    • 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) because it was tainted with “atheism and communism,” and was “subversive” because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the U.S. Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship.” There was also opposition to UNESCO’s association with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.

    • 1955: A U.S. Army 6-page pamphlet, “How to Spot a Communist,” informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and peace. Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for such give-away terms as “chauvinism,” “book-burning,” “colonialism,” “demagogy,” “witch hunt,” “reactionary,” “progressive,” and “exploitation.” Another “distinguishing mark” of “Communist language” was a “preference for long sentences.” After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.

    • 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of my innocent youth) observed on the radio that the lack of interest in “big time” football at New York University, City College of New York, Chicago, and Harvard “is due to the widespread acceptance of Communism at the universities.”

    • 1960: U.S. General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a first strike by the U.S.: “The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” The response from one of those present was: “Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.”

    • 1966: The Boys Club of America is of course wholesome and patriotic. Imagine their horror when they were confused with the Dubois Clubs. (W.E.B. Du Bois had been a very prominent civil rights activist.) When the Justice Department required the DuBois Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew what to do. They called up the Boys Club to announce that they would no longer contribute any money, or to threaten violence against them; and sure enough an explosion damaged the national headquarters of the youth group in San Francisco. Then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the Boys Club, declared: “This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity. The ‘DuBois Clubs’ are not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens.”

    • 1966: “Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music, The Communist Master Music Plan,” by David A. Noebel, published by Christian Crusade Publications, (expanded version of 1965 pamphlet: “Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles”). Some chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare … Nature of Red Record Companies … Destructive Nature of Beatle Music … Communist Subversion of Folk Music … Folk Music and the Negro Revolution … Folk Music and the College Revolution

    • 1968: William Calley, U.S. Army Lieutenant, charged with overseeing the massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai in 1968, said some years later: “In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to kill ideology carried by – I don’t know – pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of old people, men, women, children, babies.”

    • 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth’s protective ozone layer was being damaged by synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. The manufacturers and users of CFCs were not happy. They made life difficult for the lead scientist. The president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of CFCs was “orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB.”

    • 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra anti-communist John Birch Society: Five hours each day of lectures on communism, Americanism and “The Conspiracy”; campers learned that the Soviet government had created a famine and spread a virus to kill a large number of citizens and make the rest of them more manageable; the famine led starving adults to eat their children; communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children’s ears, piercing their eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists; the theme is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you can’t find a dictionary now that isn’t under communist influence; the communists are also taking over the Bibles.

    • The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan – the so-called “yellow rain” – and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The “yellow rain,” it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.

    • 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army, General John Crosby stated that the Army doesn’t care about soldiers’ social lives – “The basic purpose of the United States Army is to kill Russians,” he said.

    • 1983: The U.S. invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban ambassador is damaged and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is written “AA,” symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division; beside it the message: “Eat shit, commie faggot.” … “I want to fuck communism out of this little island,” says a marine, “and fuck it right back to Moscow.”

    • 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast, President Reagan spoke these words into the microphone: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia, forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” His words were picked up by at least two radio networks.

    • 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked about the differences he saw between the U.S. and Russia, the President replied: “I’m no linguist, but I’ve been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” (The word is “svoboda.”)

    • 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized Rambo-like American films as an expression of “anti-Russian phobia even more pathological than in the days of McCarthyism.” Russian filmmaker Stanislav Rostofsky claimed that on one visit to an American school “a young girl trembled with fury when she heard I was from the Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians.”

    • 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety in the 1950s as an assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly of AIDS. Cohn, though homosexual, had denied that he was and had denounced such rumors as communist smears.

    • 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow for “spying” and held in custody for two weeks, New York Mayor Edward Koch sent a group of 10 visiting Soviet students storming out of City Hall in fury. “The Soviet government is the pits,” said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from 10 to 18 years. One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared: “I don’t want to stay in this house. I want to go to the bus and go far away from this place. The mayor is very rude. We never had a worse welcome anywhere.” As matters turned out, it appeared that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his newsgathering.

    • 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in Tiananmen Square in June, the U.S. news media was replete with reports that the governments of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their support of the Chinese leadership. Said the Wall Street Journal: “Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted the only countries in the world to approve the Chinese Communists’ slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square.” But it was all someone’s fabrication; no such support had been expressed by any of the three governments. At that time, as now, there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA which could manipulate major Western media in such a manner. [Sources for almost all of this section can be found in William Blum, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (2005), chapter 12; or the author can be queried at bblum6@aol.com].

    NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of anti-communism were not those discussed above. The worst consequences, the ultra-criminal consequences, were the abominable death, destruction, and violation of human rights that we know under various names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.

    *  *  *

    Originally published on Dec. 6, 2017.

  • Hollywood Is Making Jobs Great Again, Employs More People Than Energy Sector

    Hollywood supports 2.6 million jobs, dishes out $177 billion in wages and directly employs more people across the country than the commodities and energy industries, said the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in a report published Monday.

    Jobs directly related to producing, marketing, and manufacturing motion pictures, television shows, and video content, employs more people in 34 states than industrial jobs in mining, oil & natural gas extraction, crop production, utility system construction, and rental & leasing services.

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    Bloomberg says MPAA’s report shows how broadly the U.S. entertainment industry has expanded beyond California. Direct wages in television and film account for $76 billion, with salaries that are 47% higher than the national average. The industry also supports 93,000 small business in total, located in every state in the country.

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    The industry has a trade surplus of $10.3 billion, 4% of the country’s total surplus in services, the report showed. The industry exports more than telecommunications, transportation, mining, legal insurance, information, and health-related services, the MPAA said.

    “The impact of the U.S. film and television industry reaches far beyond well-known creative hubs, such as Los Angeles, New York City and Atlanta,” said MPAA chair Charles Rivkin. “This industry supports jobs and businesses in all 50 states and is also highly competitive globally – generating $17.2 billion in exports and a positive balance of trade in every major market in the world.”

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    The use of taxpayer funds has been widely used throughout California to support the industry. Some states have removed or recently revised these tax incentive programs. Meanwhile, California re-upped its subsidies for film and television to draw back film production to the state.

    Besides directly employing 927,000 people, the industry has made $44 billion in payments to local businesses, supporting an additional 2.6 million indirect jobs, a move that has Hollywood making jobs great again.

  • America's Generals Have Learned Nothing From Our Failed Wars

    Authored by William Astore via TomDispatch.com,

    The senior officials responsible for our military failures are guiding us to more of the same.

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    “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” boasted Julius Caesar, one of history’s great military captains. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

    Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when summing up the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 — with a small alteration. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said with a laugh about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s autocratic leader. Note what she left out, though: the “vici” or victory part. And how right she was to do so, since Washington’s invasions, occupations, and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere in this century have never produced anything faintly like a single decisive and lasting victory.

    “Failure is not an option” was the stirring 1995 movie catchphrase for the dramatic 1970 rescue of the Apollo 13 moon mission and crew, but were such a movie to be made about America’s wars and their less-than-vici-esque results today, the phrase would have to be corrected in Clintonian fashion to read “We came, we saw, we failed.”

    Wars are risky, destructive, unpredictable endeavors, so it would hardly be surprising if America’s military and civilian leaders failed occasionally in their endless martial endeavors, despite the overwhelming superiority in firepower of “the world’s greatest military.” Here’s the question, though: Why have all the American wars of this century gone down in flames and what in the world have those leaders learned from such repetitive failures?

    The evidence before our eyes suggests that, when it comes to our senior military leaders at least, the answer would be: nothing at all.

    Let’s begin with General David Petraeus, he of “the surge” fame in the Iraq War. Of course, he would briefly fall from grace in 2012, while director of the CIA, thanks to an affair with his biographer with whom he inappropriately shared highly classified information. When riding high in Iraq in 2007, however, “King David” (as he was then dubbed) was widely considered an example of America’s best and brightest. He was a soldier-scholar with a doctorate from Princeton, an “insurgent” general with the perfect way — a revival of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency techniques — to stabilize invaded and occupied Iraq. He was the man to snatch victory from the jaws of looming defeat. (Talk about a fable not worthy of Aesop!)

    Though retired from the military since 2011, Petraeus somehow remains a bellwether for conventional thinking about America’s wars at the Pentagon, as well as inside the Washington Beltway. And despite the quagmire in Afghanistan (that he had a significant hand in deepening), despite the widespread destruction in Iraq (for which he would hold some responsibility), despite the failed-state chaos in Libya, he continues to relentlessly plug the idea of pursuing a “sustainable” forever war against global terrorism; in other words, yet more of the same.

    Here’s how he typically put it in a recent interview:

    “I would contend that the fight against Islamist extremists is not one that we’re going to see the end of in our lifetimes probably. I think this is a generational struggle, which requires you to have a sustained commitment. But of course you can only sustain it if it’s sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.”

    His comment brings to mind a World War II quip about General George S. Patton, also known as “old blood and guts.” Some of his troops responded to that nickname this way: yes, his guts, but our blood. When men like Petraeus measure the supposed sustainability of their wars in terms of blood and treasure, the first question should be: Whose blood, whose treasure?

    When it comes to Washington’s Afghan War, now in its 18th year and looking ever more like a demoralizing defeat, Petraeus admits that U.S. forces “never had an exit strategy.” What they did have, he claims, “was a strategy to allow us to continue to achieve our objectives… with the reduced expenditure in blood and treasure.”

    Think of this formulation as an upside-down version of the notorious “body count” of the Vietnam War. Instead of attempting to maximize enemy dead, as General William Westmoreland sought to do from 1965 to 1968, Petraeus is suggesting that the U.S. seek to keep the American body count to a minimum (translating into minimal attention back home), while minimizing the “treasure” spent. By keeping American bucks and body bags down (Afghans be damned), the war, he insists, can be sustained not just for a few more years but generationally. (He cites 70-year troop commitments to NATO and South Korea as reasonable models.)

    Talk about lacking an exit strategy! And he also speaks of a persistent “industrial-strength” Afghan insurgency without noting that U.S. military actions, including drone strikes and an increasing reliance on air power, result in ever more dead civilians, which only feed that same insurgency. For him, Afghanistan is little more than a “platform” for regional counterterror operations and so anything must be done to prevent the greatest horror of all: withdrawing American troops too quickly.

    In fact, he suggests that American-trained and supplied Iraqi forces collapsed in 2014, when attacked by relatively small groups of ISIS militants, exactly because U.S. troops had been withdrawn too quickly. The same, he has no doubt, will happen if President Trump repeats this “mistake” in Afghanistan. (Poor showings by U.S.-trained forces are never, of course, evidence of a bankrupt approach in Washington, but of the need to “stay the course.”)

    Petraeus’s critique is, in fact, a subtle version of the stab-in-the-back myth. Its underlying premise: that the U.S. military is always on the generational cusp of success, whether in Vietnam in 1971, Iraq in 2011, or Afghanistan in 2019, if only the rug weren’t pulled out from under the U.S. military by irresolute commanders-in-chief.

    Of course, this is all nonsense. Commanded by none other than General David Petraeus, the Afghan surge of 2009-2010 proved a dismal failure as, in the end, had his Iraq surge of 2007. U.S. efforts to train reliable indigenous forces (no matter where in the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa) have also consistently failed. Yet Petraeus’s answer is always more of the same: more U.S. troops and advisers, training, bombing, and killing, all to be repeated at “sustainable” levels for generations to come.

    The alternative, he suggests, is too awful to contemplate:

    “You have to do something about [Islamic extremism] because otherwise they’re going to spew violence, extremism, instability, and a tsunami of refugees not just into neighboring countries but… into our western European allies, undermining their domestic political situations.”

    No mention here of how the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq spread destruction and, in the end, a “tsunami of refugees” throughout the region. No mention of how U.S. interventions and bombing in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere help “spew” violence and generate a series of failed states.

    And amazingly enough, despite his lack of “vici” moments, the American media still sees King David as the go-to guy for advice on how to fight and win the wars he’s had such a hand in losing. And just in case you want to start worrying a little, he’s now offering such advice on even more dangerous matters. He’s started to comment on the new “cold war” that now has Washington abuzz, a coming era — as he puts it— of “renewed great power rivalries” with China and Russia, an era, in fact, of “multi-domain warfare” that could prove far more challenging than “the asymmetric abilities of the terrorists and extremists and insurgents that we’ve countered in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and a variety of other places, particularly since 9/11.”

    For Petraeus, even if Islamic terrorism disappeared tomorrow and not generations from now, the U.S. military would still be engaged with the supercharged threat of China and Russia. I can already hear Pentagon cash registers going ka-ching!

    And here, in the end, is what’s most striking about Petraeus’s war lessons: no concept of peace even exists in his version of the future. Instead, whether via Islamic terrorism or rival great powers, America faces intractable threats into a distant future. Give him credit for one thing: if adopted, his vision could keep the national security state funded in the staggering fashion it’s come to expect for generations, or at least until the money runs out and the U.S. empire collapses.

    TWO SENIOR GENERALS DRAW LESSONS FROM THE IRAQ WAR

    David Petraeus remains America’s best-known general of this century. His thinking, though, is anything but unique. Take two other senior U.S. Army generals, Mark Milley and Ray Odierno, both of whom recently contributed forewords to the Army’s official history of the Iraq War that tell you what you need to know about Pentagon thinking these days.

    Published this January, the Army’s history of Operation Iraqi Freedom is detailed and controversial. Completed in June 2016, its publication was pushed back due to internal disagreements. As the Wall Street Journal put itin October 2018: “Senior [Army] brass fretted over the impact the study’s criticisms might have on prominent officers’ reputations and on congressional support for the service.” With those worries apparently resolved, the study is now available at the Army War College website.

    The Iraq War witnessed the overthrow of autocrat (and former U.S. ally) Saddam Hussein, a speedy declaration of “mission accomplished” by President George W. Bush, and that country’s subsequent descent into occupation, insurgency, civil war, and chaos. What should the Army have learned from all this? General Milley, now Army chief of staff and President Trump’s nominee to serve as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is explicit on its lessons:

    “OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] is a sober reminder that technological advantages and standoff weapons alone cannot render a decision; that the promise of short wars is often elusive; that the ends, ways, and means must be in balance; that our Army must understand the type of war we are engaged with in order to adapt as necessary; that decisions in war occur on the ground in the mud and dirt; and that timeless factors such as human agency, chance, and an enemy’s conviction, all shape a war’s outcome.”

    These aren’t, in fact, lessons. They’re military banalities. The side with the best weapons doesn’t always win. Short wars can turn into long ones. The enemy has a say in how the war is fought. What they lack is any sense of Army responsibility for mismanaging the Iraq War so spectacularly. In other words, mission accomplished for General Milley.

    General Odierno, who commissioned the study and served in Iraq for 55 months, spills yet more ink in arguing, like Milley, that the Army has learned from its mistakes and adapted, becoming even more agile and lethal. Here’s my summary of his “lessons”:

    * Superior technology doesn’t guarantee victory. Skill and warcraft remain vital.

    * To win a war of occupation, soldiers need to know the environment, including “the local political and social consequences of our actions… When conditions on the ground change, we must be willing to reexamine the assumptions that underpin our strategy and plans and change course if necessary, no matter how painful it may be,” while developing better “strategic leaders.”

    * The Army needs to be enlarged further because “landpower” is so vital and America’s troops were “overtaxed by the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the decision to limit our troop levels in both theaters had severe operational consequences.”

    * The Iraq War showcased an Army with an “astonishing” capacity “to learn and adapt in the midst of a war that the United States was well on its way to losing.”

    The gist of Odierno’s “lessons”: the Army learned, adapted, and overcame. Therefore, it deserves America’s thanks and yet more of everything, including the money and resources to pursue future wars even more successfully. There would, however, be another way to read those lessons of his: that the Army overvalued technology, that combat skills were lacking, that efforts to work with allies and Iraqi forces regularly failed, that Army leadership lacked the skills needed to win, and that it was folly to get into a global war on terror in the first place.

    On those failings, neither Milley nor Odierno has anything of value to say, since their focus is purely on how to make the Army prevail in future versions of just such wars. Their limited critique, in short, does little to prevent future disasters. Much like Petraeus’s reflections, they cannot envision an end point to the process — no victory to be celebrated, no return to America being “a normal country in a normal time.” There is only war and more war in their (and so our) future.

    THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

    Talk of such future wars — of, that is, more of the same — reminded me of the sixth Star Trek movie, The Undiscovered Country. In that space opera, which appeared in 1991 just as the Soviet Union was imploding, peace finally breaks out between the quasi-democratic Federation (think: the USA) and the warmongering Klingon Empire (think: the USSR). Even the Federation’s implacable warrior-captain, James T. Kirk, grudgingly learns to bury the phaser with the Klingon “bastards” who murdered his son.

    Back then, I was a young captain in the U.S. Air Force and, with the apparent end of the Cold War, my colleagues and I dared talk about, if not eternal peace, at least “peace” as our own — and not just Star Trek’s — undiscovered country. Like many at the time, even we in the military were looking forward to what was then called a “peace dividend.”

    But that unknown land, which Americans then glimpsed ever so briefly, remains unexplored to this day. The reason why is simple enough. As Andrew Bacevich put it in his book Breach of Trust, “For the Pentagon [in 1991], peace posed a concrete and imminent threat” — which meant that new threats, “rogue states” of every sort, had to be found. And found they were.

    It comes as no surprise, then, that America’s generals have learned so little of real value from their twenty-first-century losses. They continue to see a state of “infinite war” as necessary and are blind to the ways in which endless war and the ever-developing war state in Washington are the enemies of democracy.

    The question isn’t why they think the way they do. The question is why so many Americans share their vision. The future is now. Isn’t it time that the U.S. sought to invade and occupy a different “land” entirely: an undiscovered country — a future — defined by peace?

  • Man Gets 6 Months In Prison After Cashing Dead Mom's Social Security Checks…For 37 Years

    A Detroit man has been sentenced to six months in prison (plus three years on probation) for cashing 37 years’ worth of his dead mother’s social security checks – accruing more than $280,000 in benefits to which he wasn’t entitled.

    Though his neighbor, Reginald Carpenter, said he tried to do the right thing by notifying the authorities (“but the checks just kept coming”), 76-year-old Walter Terrell had cashed his mother’s checks, despite the fact that she had been dead since 1981.

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    The scheme was uncovered after Medicare tried to contact his mother to ask why her benefits hadn’t been used. Though Terrell tried to keep them at bay by telling them that his mother was away or on vacation when they called or tried to check on her, he was eventually found out, according to Fox 10.

    Despite Terrell’s neighbors’ insistence that he tried to do the right thing, US Attorney Matthew Schneider didn’t see it that way.

    “Every single time you write the false name on the check, you sign somebody’s name that is not yours, that is a crime,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider. “Eventually this was direct deposited into his account. So the defendent had to lie to get the direct deposit into his account.”

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    “It was 37 years of fraud. Thirty-seven years of stealing the government’s money,” said Schneider.

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    “And if you’re not entitled to those benefits, what you should expect is prison time.”

    Carpenter claims he spent the money on medical expenses, and that he recently had back surgery (though, presumably, he would also be covered by Medicare).

    While it’s unclear what that money was getting spent on, Carpenter claims it was going toward medical expenses, like the back surgery that Terrell had just underwent.

    All in all, Carpenter was only sentenced to six months in prison for stealing nearly $300,000 from the federal government. We’re no lawyers, but we’d venture a guess that he’ll maybe serve half of that with good behavior. Which begs the question: Would you spend a month in jail for $100,000 (minus a few thousand for lawyers’ fees?)

    Watch the local Fox affiliate’s report on the case below:

  • After Multiple Reports About New Zealanders Turning In Guns, Guess How Many Actually Did It? 

    Following reports that a flood of New Zealand gun owners have been voluntarily surrending their firearms in the wake of last Friday’s Christchurch mosque attack that left 50 dead, the numbers are in on how many Kiwis actually handed over their weapons. 

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    Out of an estimated 1.2 million registered guns, New Zealand police report that as of Tuesday night, 37 firearms have been surrendered nationwide, according to BuzzFeed. 

    No accounting was provided of how many people owned those guns, the types of firearms, or where they were surrendered.

    The reports of citizens disarming themselves came after a Monday announcement by Prime minister Jacinda Ardern that several “in principle decisions” on gun control have been made by Cabinet ministers, while praising residents who have surrendered their guns to police. 

    So far, we know of four people who have; Green Party member John Hart and longtime gun owner “@SirWB” – who each turned in a rifle, a grandmother who goes by the Twitter handle “@FeyHag” who said she requested for her family’s guns to be handed in for destruction, and former New Zealand Army soldier Pete Breidahl – who said he warned local police of extremists at a local rifle club where he said he suspected the shooter was a member. 

    “All I want is to go back to my horses, say goodbye to firearms and the bullshit shooting community and its drama and let the police and government sort this one out,” wrote Breidahl in a Facebook post. “I don’t NEED, want or care about guns. I can happily live my life without them.”

    Most reports cited three tweets, including that of John Hart, a farmer and Green Party member from Wairarapa, who told BuzzFeed News he surrendered his semiautomatic rifle two days after the attack.

    He tweeted a photo of the form he signed to hand over his rifle to the police to be destroyed, saying, “We don’t need these in our country. We have to make sure it’s #NeverAgain.” –BuzzFeed

    Ardern asked residents to surrender their weapons on Monday. 

    “To make our community safer, the time to act is now,” she said. “I want to remind people, you can surrender your gun to the police at any time. In fact I have seen reports that people are in fact already doing this. I applaud that effort, and if you are thinking about surrendering your weapon, I would encourage you to do so.“

    Looks like that was wishful thinking on the part of the Prime Minister.

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    National Rifle Association of New Zealand president Malcolm Dodson (ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF)

  • Student Debt Is Crushing Net Worth Of Couples In Their 20s

    Young people in their 20s are starting their careers with a negative net worth as a direct result of student loans. With student loan debt burdening a growing number of Americans, a new profile in the Seattle Times recently highlighted one couple’s struggle with having a negative net worth to start their careers, despite both having degrees from prestigious universities and reliable work.

    Today, about 15% of households nationwide have a net worth of zero or less according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. Take, for example, Jenni and Sean Gritters. They recently moved to the Seattle area, where Jenni grew up, after earning both bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees in Boston. Combined, her and her husband owe about $125,000 on student loans, which has plunged their net worth to negative $93,500. The most expensive loan they had was Sean’s $56,000 loan at 6.49% that he used to get a second bachelor’s degree in nursing.

    The difference-maker for their net worth being in the red, versus the black? Student loans. Without them, the couple’s net worth would be in the black by $31,500, which would be above the national median for their age bracket.

    The debt has weighed on them as a couple. Sean described their student loans posing obstacles to their other financial goals as “scary”. He is 28 years old and a nurse in Seattle, earning about $71,000 a year. Jenni is a freelance writer and an editor for various outlets, mainly specializing in health and the outdoors. Her income can vary between $1000 and $12,000 a month.

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    She expects to earn about $100,000 a year before taxes based on her pre-tax payments so far this year. The couple has a really simple balance sheet. They have checking account balances of about $7,500 and savings of about $19,000. They have both taken advantage of retirement plans and, combined, they have about $21,000 in 401(k)s. Jenny has even opened a Roth IRA which has a balance of about $5300. They owe about $15,000 on their car and that represents the only debt they have remaining in addition to their student loans.

    When they settled in Seattle, Jenni thought “It was time to talk to someone about a good plan going forward.”

    They then applied for free financial advice and, working with the Seattle Times, they started to plan a way to come up with a $50,000 emergency fund while adding more to their savings. The $523 a month they were paying on Sean’s $56,000 loan had them thinking that the debt would “forever be a ball and chain” for them. Since then, they have upped those payments to $1000 a month to try and pay off that loan more aggressively, while still making the minimum payments on the other loans.

    Sean is now maxing out his employer’s 401(k) match and Jenni is now contributing the maximum she can to her Roth IRA. At the end of every month, the couple now reviews their finances together. They are still waiting to see how these increased contributions effect their monthly cashflow. “It’s a big financial impact,” Sean said about trying to get aggressive about saving.

    But for now, the young couple feels more empowered and is making progress together. “We’re on the same page,” Jenni concluded. 

  • Did Jeff Bezos Invent A Trump-Saudi Collusion Hoax To Deflect From His Dick-Pic Betrayal?

    Authored by Jordan Satchell via ConservativeReview.com,

    The beginning of February was a rough stretch for Jeff Bezos. The National Enquirer obtained evidence that he was engaged in a long-running extramarital affair, and he knew the paper was moments away from publishing exclusive details from the hugely embarrassing saga. Bezos had a decision to make. He could do the decent thing and apologize for his wrongdoing. Instead, he chose a different path — the warpath.

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    Far from owning up to his misdeeds, the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post went on offense. In a Medium post published February 4, Bezos concocted a mind-blowing conspiracy involving the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, and international espionage. He claimed that President Trump and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were attempting an extensive “extortion and blackmail” campaign against him. He proposed that his ownership of the Washington Post put a target on his back. As owner of the Post, Bezos claimed that he was on Trump’s enemies list. He also insisted that it was no coincidence that President Trump and David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, had a professional working relationship. Moreover, Bezos claimed that Saudi Arabia must be targeting him due to the Washington Post’s “unrelenting coverage” of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

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    “For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve,” Bezos added.

    Team Bezos then launched a campaign in the media, going so far as to accuse the government — on orders from President Trump — of stealing his information. It seemed that Bezos was trafficking the Trump-Saudi-Pecker conspiracy directly through his own reporters at the Washington Post.

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    The seriousness of the Bezos allegation set off a media firestorm. A who’s who of legacy media and NeverTrump personalities, without evidence, began accusing the president, Saudi Arabia, and David Pecker of colluding, sometimes through extrajudicial means, to bring down Mr. Bezos.

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    Evidence never surfaced that the accused entities engaged in an anti-Bezos conspiracy. President Trump and Saudi Arabia have legitimate grievances with the Washington Post’s extremely biased coverage. The Post has been at the forefront of pushing the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory since day one of the Trump administration..

    As for Saudi Arabia, the Washington Post has used the death of its columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, to continue to take shots at Riyadh. I explained their nonstop campaign against the Saudi monarchy in a February 12 column for Conservative Review:

    The Washington Post has taken to extreme measures in publishing unrelentingly negative stories against Saudi Arabia. Following Khashoggi’s death, The Post became weaponized into an open forum for foreign governments and radical Islamist and jihadi groups opposed to Saudi Arabia’s role in the Middle East. The Post routinely falsely categorized its deceased Islamist columnist Khashoggi as a democracy advocate, a journalist, and a voice for reform, none of which is even remotely true.

    As the campaign continued, Bezos never provided any evidence to support his grand conspiracy theory involving hacking, spying, and revenge. Moreover, all of the parties accused of wrongdoing unequivocally denied that they were behind anything having to do with Bezos.

    On Monday evening, the Wall Street Journal cleared up all remaining doubt in what some have come to label Peckergate. The Journal found that there was no grand conspiracy involving President Trump, foreign entities, or Pecker. There was no evidence that Bezos’ information was stolen or that he was hacked.

    “The reality is simpler: Michael Sanchez, the brother of Mr. Bezos’ lover, sold the billionaire’s secrets for $200,000 to the Enquirer’s publisher, said people familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported. This added to other media reports, which also pointed to Sanchez as the man who fed the story to the Enquirer. They were published about one week after Mr. Bezos published his Medium post.

    By all accounts, Jeff Bezos invented a Trump-Pecker-Saudi collusion conspiracy theory out of thin air. Not even the world’s richest man should be allowed to get away with spreading incriminating hoaxes. After all, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

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