- Barclays Slashes Banker Bonuses As Activist Showdown Looms
Jes Staley’s battle to save one of Europe’s last bulge-bracket investment banks from a marauding activist who is hoping to force his way onto the bank’s board during Barclay’s May 2 GAM has necessitated an abrupt about-face: After a year where Barclays poured resources into the investment bank to beef up its international presence, the bank is now following in the footsteps of several of its even more troubled European peers and slashing bonuses for its bankers.
According to the FT, Britain’s last remaining global investment bank is planning to cut bonuses for its investment bankers as part of a cost-cutting drive after a first quarter that UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti described as “one of the worst” first quarters for investment banks in recent memory. After US banks reported a rocky start to the year, largely thanks to steep declines in trading revenue, banking analysts have downgraded their expectations for their struggling European peers. Analysts at Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and JPM are all forecasting double-digit declines in Q1 revenues, thanks to a drop in equities-trading revenue, per the FT.
The bonus cuts come at a precarious time for Barclays. As the Guardian reported, activist investor Edward Bramson, who owns 5.5% of Barclays via his Sherborne Investors vehicle, saw his campaign to gain a seat on Barclays’ board bolstered over the weekend when Pirc, an institutional advisory firm, declined to give a recommendation one way or the other for 2019, and hinted that it might advise shareholders to vote in favor of Bramson’s proposal next year. Though that might not sound like much, it’s a sign that some of the big institutional advisory firms are beginning to come around to Bramson’s way of thinking. His plans for revitalizing Barclays include steep cuts to the investment bank, something that Staley, Barclay’s CEO, has vowed to resist.
With Bramson breathing down his neck, Staley has been forced to shift his focus back to cost-cutting for the investment bank. Two sources told FT that the measures will extend beyond cuts to bonuses, and include lower pay for recruits and a pause on promotions.
Two people briefed on the plans said the bank was also planning to adopt a tougher line on promotions, with fewer bankers progressing from director to managing director. Last year, 85 bankers were promoted in Barclays International compared to 74 in 2017. “It will be reflected in a really tough MD promotion round this year,” said one. “It will be only a rare and special person who makes it over the line.”
They added that Barclays would also be more disciplined on pay when signing up new recruits.
The cuts come just weeks after the bank’s former head of investment banking, Tim Throsby, was ousted after pushing back against Staley’s “sacrosanct” profitability targets. Throsby had resisted a policy adopted in 2016 to tie bonuses more closely to profitability, and had succeeded and securing bonuses for his bankers even in business lines where revenues had lagged.
Going forward, bankers hoping to bring home big bonuses must abide by Staley’s return on tangible equity targets of more than 9% this year and more than 10% in 2020, goals that have been described as “sacrosanct”. And depending on what the bank reveals on Thursday when it reports Q1 earnings, this might not be the last round of cuts to Barclay’s investment bank.
- The Hubris Of Brexit: Short On Solutions & High On Hope
“Platforms don’t look like how they work and don’t work like how they look.” – Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
Complex systems by their very nature are, of course, complex. As Sayama’s diagram at the opening of this post demonstrates…
An elementary definition of a complex system is one that is constituted of multifarious units (often simple), interacting with each other in abstruse patterns, which in turn, makes them inherently difficult to model. This difficulty in the modelling process is due to properties that such systems manifest, including emergence, cybernetic feedback loops, adaptation, non-linearity and self-organization. Some common examples include transport networks, biological systems and power grids.
Trans-Continental, technomic, complex systems that encompass nested technomic systems as constituent parts, obviously are recursively complex themselves. From the smallest economic system, recursively building upon themselves we see the emergence of the networks that underlay a socioeconomic structure such as the EU. In other words, the complex systems we see at the state level, manifest at the trans-state level. Take your country’s power grid and scale it up across a continent.
From 1950 onward numerous treaties were signed among European governments, giving birth to the EEC, EEA, Schengen and ultimately the EU. Each set of agreements allowed for evermore emergent properties to manifest. Each overlapping treaty, in turn, allowed for a convergence of networks. Consequently, existing systems became further embedded in a fashion that is difficult to discern until attempting to pry them apart.
And there lies the fundamental problem, with the understanding that many Brexit supporting politicians have of the EU.
To me, Brexit is easy – Nigel Farage, 20 September 2016
Very often the platform does not look like how it works. In the case of the EU, it may appear as simply a group of trade treaties binding together a set of sovereign nation states.
Now, of course, this certainly an aspect of it. What can’t be perceived by simply looking at the platform i.e. the aggregate of treaties and agreements, is the emergent and self-organizing qualities of the European project.
The EU and related interconnecting bodies have become an astonishingly complex interplay of elements that have fed off the evolution of human society, its scientific discoveries, engineering marvels and social transformations.
Power to the people
One such example is the synchronous grid of Continental Europe also known by the acronym CSA (Continental Synchronous Area). Supplying over 400 million customers across 24 EU member states, and running at a phase-locked 50 Hz mains frequency, it forms the largest synchronous electricity grid on earth. It’s formed part of a push towards an internal European energy network and market and also aimed to harmonize with grids located outside of Europe, including those located in North Africa.
This is a concrete realization of the concept of the energy-information networks that underpin the Earth layer of Benjamin Bratton’s Stack.
“… energy-information networks … are central to how the Earth layer functions within The Stack — Benjamin Bratton. The Stack | On Software and Sovereignty”
The CSA which encompasses elements of this layer forms the precursor to the European super grid, which would include not just the various grids in Europe, but those in the mentioned neighbouring areas too.
The UK is not currently apart of the CSA directly but connects to it via the HVDC Cross-Channel link and BritNed (a submarine cable from Kent to Massvlakte). This is known as an electricity island network and has counterparts with Nordic regional group and Baltic regional group.
The body behind the CSA is the ENTSO-E or European Network of Transmission System Operators. This currently represents 36 nation states across Europe (some of which lay outside the EU’s borders). ENTSO-E was established and given a legal mandate by the EU itself, via the Third Package for the Internal Energy market in 2009, but is self-funded by member states. The United Kingdom is represented at ENTSO-E by the National Grid, SONI, SHETransmission and SPTransmission.
So what will be the relationship between ENTSO-E and the UK post-Brexit? Well, it appears nobody actually knows yet. Here is Montel News discussing the subject in August of 2018:
Brexit could overhaul energy relations between the UK and the EU, derailing plans to increase market coupling with the UK and boost investment in interconnectors. — TSOs ready for no-deal Brexit — Entso-E, Montel.
How would the UK remain a part of this body?
Analysts believe the UK can remain a part of the internal energy market as a third country if the British government accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. — TSOs ready for no-deal Brexit — Entso-E, Montel.
And thus the double-bind. The half-cyborg-half-human, British Prime Minister, known as Theresa May by some and the Maybot by others, has already ruled this out. In a paper published in 2017 May’s government had stated the jurisdiction of the ECJ will come to an end with Brexit.
In leaving the European Union, we will bring about an end to the direct jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). — Enforcement and dispute resolution, A Future Partnership Paper — HM Government
As the Montel News article notes, the former Tory politician Tim Yeo told said news agency that leaving the EU internal energy market would force the UK government to complete Hinkley Point nuclear power plant.
But this path leads us into yet another conundrum — Euratom.
The European Atomic Energy Community, better known as Euratom, has its origins in the late 1950s. Its goal was to create an internal market for nuclear power and to then trade any excess to non-market members. Since then it has gone on to concern itself with providing a basis for regulating civil nuclear material and also controlling the supply of fissile materials within the EU.
While Euratom is closely linked to the EU including governance by some of the EU’s institutions it sits outside of the control of the European Parliament and is a legally distinct entity. Thus leaving the EU does not mean one has to leave Euratom.
Adam Vaughan writing for the Guardian in 2017 discussed the problematic situation of the UK leaving this agency, which it intends to do as part of the exiting process:
Failure to put in place alternative arrangements to replace the existing European nuclear treaty, Euratom, which the UK is quitting as part of the article 50 process, would have a “dramatic impact” on Hinkley Point C and other new power stations around the country, the industry said. — Adam Vaughan
It was not until after the referendum the impact of leaving the institution was assessed in the Common Briefing papers CBP-8036.
As of November 2018, exiting still seemed to be in the works and the draft treaty spells out as much. A December 2018 joint statement fleshed out commitments on the behalf of the UK to align its nuclear safeguards with that of Euratom. The devil as ever will be in the detail here. And if May’s deal is rejected? Well….
Many shrewdly will be asking, why exactly is the UK leaving Euratom anyway regardless of what deal is struck?
“It is simply bonkers to leave Euratom,” says Steven Cowley, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford who until last year was director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, which hosts JET. — Nature.com
Bonkers indeed.
In addition to Hinkley Point C, the mentioned JET project centred on Nuclear Fusion experiments, and based in Oxfordshire had no idea if its EU funding (which forms the bulk) would be replaced by equal UK funding. And truth be told, it’s still not concrete.
Following the impact and confusion Brexit is having on such a fundamental part of the UK’s infrastructure, one has to wonder if anyone in the UK government had actually thought about this prior to triggering article 50?
* * *
And there we have it, even with May’s deal, confusion reigns supreme. Yet according to the Prime Minister, the commons should vote to support her deal, which relies on promises of alignment and funding for Nuclear operations but mentioned nothing of ENTSO-E. Or to quote her retort to Ian Blackford MP:
“He should vote for a deal — simples.” – May aide won bet with Pm’s ‘simple’ comment:report. Politico
It is doubtful that there is a single soul in Europe who can grok the complexity of the EU now, let alone any British politician advocating for exiting it. Pelle Neroth captures the complexity pointedly in this quote:
The EU is a consequence of the complexity of society, a kind of receptacle if you will. Don’t blame the Eurocrats. The EU is not some fictitious them but us: our companies, our NGOs, our trade unions, our scientists. They are in Brussels due to the enormous amount of legislation required to cope with the complicated social and technological interactions that result when all low hanging fruit has been picked. — Pelle Neroth
Instead of facing this truth (and at times it is admittedly, not pretty), Brexiteer politicians and their tribe have created a simulacrum of a mythical EUSSR, from which they are trying to escape. Paradoxically, we find them voting forthe tentacles they argue strangle them.
Fake news whether domestically generated, the intervention of a Surkovianintelligence agency, or the repacking of age-old conspiratorial tropes, cements the anti-EU, post-modernist nightmare, that Brexiteers have constructed for themselves.
Evidence of Leave politicians woeful misunderstanding of the entity they are fighting to exit has been demonstrated over the course of the preceding three years in ample measure.
Euratom suddenly appeared on the radars of the general public post triggering article 50, yet was barely considered during the Referendum campaign. And what of ENTSO-E? When has there been a public discussion regarding this?
Oh and you ask, what about the other complexities that have arisen over the past 60 years? The ones that silently govern our day to day lives? Freight agreements, data transfer, mobile roaming, satellite infrastructure, joint procurement agreements, gas pipelines, medical supplies, food, financial instruments, tourists, conferences, insurance provision … this list goes on and on. And frighteningly this only scratches the surface.
The progression of treaties and accords have paved the way for a rhizomic system to grow from the bottom up organically, and intersect with the molar top-down implementations oftentimes associated with the treaties.
It’s these bottom-up organic developments that are invisible from merely looking at a set of signed agreements.
Networks are often complex
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Wikipedia
For those of you coming from a background in tech, we’ll use a little analogy.
Imagine if society were modelled as one giant switched network. Billions of devices connected through it, sending traffic back and forth. A network administrator may understand the complex cabling and switching equipment in place. But could he be expected to understand every protocol that passes across it, especially at Layer 7?
There are assuredly tools to help and the security analysts in place to monitor the network. But even with the best technology and tools, 100% visibility is improbable. Now scale that network up a billion fold and predict to keep adding nodes Infinitum. Introduce new protocols that none of the networking team understands, or can analyze. Many of these protocols will also be emergent, there’s no standard let alone documentation.
Welcome to how the other layers of Bratton’s Stack have realised themselves in Europe over the course of 60 years and will continue into the future.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work — Kevin Kelly
As Kelly has noted, complex systems that work are often built from simpler building blocks. And this is certainly true of the EU. From the phone call, a florist in England makes to a Dutch flower distributor, to the Irish farmer sending produce to Belfast from Wexford, each act is small and seemingly simple in itself. There are myriad tiny events like this that take place, all predicated on the network existing to allow event X to happen, or item D to get from point N to A. Now scale this up. The complexity is simply impossible to disentangle.
If you imagined globalization and JIT (Just In Time) lead to complexity, you’d be accurate and the EU is an integral part of this process.
What the EU does, for a member state, is eliminate a layer of barriers, allowing the system to become more complex in its interior interconnections, and less complex at the barrier level.
In the EU’s single market (sometimes also called the internal market) people , goods , services , and money can move around the EU as freely as within a single country. Mutual recognition plays a central role in getting rid of barriers to trade. — One market without borders. European Union
You can think of barriers as like firewalls. Within the EU the traffic between nation states is freer flowing, and the firewall rules looser, allowing the complexity to evolve inside the network, rather than at the point of connecting networks, which in the old model was nation-to-nation agreements.
This translates into the real world of not needing to invest effort and time into vast amounts of customs paperwork, visas for travel, roaming charges or work permits.
So now we are presented with a situation where a set of politicians want to yank all the cables from the switches and do a hard reset, disable the wireless access points and start from scratch.
Applications that were running across this network, which our politicians had no concept of are now no longer communicating. All the complex rules for routing traffic, gone!
Our poor network administrators and network users (read civil service, businesses and every person on the street) are now trying to figure out how to rebuild all this, and hope that their applications still run.
And this is basically where the UK finds itself, short on solutions and high on hope.
What next?
This week parliament votes yet again on May’s deal. If it passes, a host of issues will likely come to fore, ones that the public has had little to no visibility on up until now. For example, figuring out what happens with the UK’s relationship with ENTSO-E.
Get used to hearing about all sorts of agencies you never knew existed, and why, after all, they were rather important to the mundane running of day-to-day business.
If we leave without a deal — all bets are off. The headache we will have with May’s deal will turn into a nightmare under none. The gargantuan task of trying to recreate all the network connection we once had, will take years if not decades. The quality of those connections will likely be inferior in many regards. Britain can expect to see its leverage and power projection weakened substantially. The benefits of its soft power tarnished.
And all this because some politicians thought to leave the EU was simple.
Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy — the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation. — John Redwood MP
Therefore as much as it might hurt these MPs to know, the most complexdecision is to stay, and that would be better for everyone, whether they’d like to admit it or not.
So, perhaps if politicians studied complexity more, they’d propose unfeasible simple options less. Subsequently, events like the EU referendum would be thrown into the dustbin when proposed, which is exactly where they belong.
- Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina's Family Targeted In Sri Lanka Blasts
One of the grandsons of Awami League Presidium member Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim – the cousin of current Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Zayan Chowdhury has been killed in one of the bomb blasts in Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019.
Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina’s Family Targeted In Sri Lanka Blasts
Sheikh Selim, is a Bangladeshi member of parliament and a member of the standing committee of Bangladesh Awami League party. Selim is the nephew of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, former President of Bangladesh and a cousin of current Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Zayan’s father Mashiul Haque Chowdhury was also injured in the blast and later admitted to a local hospital. British MP Tulip Siddiq on Monday said she has lost a relative in the series of blasts which rocked Sri Lanka on Sunday. She did not reveal the identity of the relative. Tulip Siddiq is the niece of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
I lost a relative today in the Sri Lanka attacks. It’s all so devastating. Hope everyone is keeping safe. Solidarity with the people of Sri Lanka.
— Tulip Siddiq (@TulipSiddiq) April 21, 2019
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Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina herself also confirmed that the family members of her cousin Sheikh Selim’s daughter Zohan were among the victims of the bomb blasts as reported by Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star. The same has also been confirmed by the Dhaka Tribune.
Initially it was reported that the family was injured with some members missing in the blasts and were taken to a hospital. Later, the news has been confirmed by multiple persons related to the Awami League and PM Sheikh Hasina.
Sheikh Selim’s daughter Sheikh Amena Sultana Sonia, Mashiul and their sons Zayan and Zohan were staying at hotel in Colombo, where one of the bombs exploded. The family was there on holidays. Sonia and Zohan were in their room on the hotel’s sixth floor while Mashiul and Zayan were eating at a restaurant on the ground floor.
2016 Plot To Overthrow Bangladeshi Government
In 2016, a plot to overthrow the Bangladeshi Awami League government was uncovered. Authorities in Bangladesh arrested a member of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the country’s opposition party in connection with allegations that the party official, Aslam Chowhury, had purportedly made contact with Israel’s Secret Service Mossad in an effort to overthrow the Bangladeshi government.
The Israeli who met with Chowhury was Mendi Safadi, who was identified as “a leader” of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party.
DelAviv, an Indo-Israel relationship platform, and Mendi N Safadi Center for International Diplomacy and Public Relations, posted the photos. The reports sparked uproar in Bangladeshi media and political circles.
On 26th January 2016, the Jerusalem Online reported that Mendi Safadi, the head of the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy and Advocacy, “is working in order to topple the present government within Bangladesh in favor of a new government that supports establishing full diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.”
“Soon, the gates of Bangladesh will open up to Israelis in all aspects and this is not an impossible wish,” Safadi explained.
2014 Plot To Assassinate Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheik Hasina
Prime Minister of Bangladeshi Sheikh Hasina
Two years earlier to this coup d’etat attempt, a plot for the assassination of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was also uncovered by Indian agencies.
In 2014 India’s top counter-terrorism agency had uncovered a suspected plot to assassinate the prime minister of Bangladesh and carry out a coup. The alleged conspiracy was discovered after two members of the group were killed in an explosion while building homemade bombs at a house in West Bengal in eastern India.
The militants were Bangladeshis and were using India as a safe haven to plan the attacks. “The strategy was to hit the political leaders of the country and demolish the democratic infrastructure of Bangladesh,” said a senior Indian Home (interior) Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This was all being planned on Indian soil and we could have been blamed if there was an attack.”
- How CIA & Allies Helped Jihadists In Syria: French Covert Ops Expert Exposes New Details
Authored and submitted by GlobalGeoNews.com
Maxime Chaix, an expert on clandestine operations, intelligence and US foreign policy, is a journalist and regular contributor to GlobalGeoNews.com. He has written La guerre de l’ombre en Syrie (The Shadow War in Syria, published in French by Éditions Erick Bonnier), a shocker of a book in which he reveals insightful information on the support which several Western intelligence services provided to jihadist militias in Syria, starting with the CIA. His investigation reveals a multi-faceted state scandal and points out the murky game played by the Western powers and their Middle Eastern allies in the Levant.
An exclusive interview by Emmanuel Razavi (founder and editor of GlobalGeoNews.com):
* * *
Emmanuel Razavi: First of all, please refresh our memories about what operation Timber Sycamore is.
Maxime Chaix: Timber Sycamore is the codename of a covert operation officially authorized by Obama in June 2013 to train and equip the anti-Assad rebellion, but which actually started in October 2011, when the CIA was operating via Britain’s MI6 to avoid having to notify Congressthat it was arming the rebels in Syria. Originally, the CIA and MI6 (the British foreign intelligence service) set up a rebel arms supply network in Syria from Libya — a plan that involved the Saudi, Qatari and Turkish intelligence services.
In 2012, probably in spring, Obama reluctantly signed a top-secret executive order, of which little is known other than that it authorized the CIA to provide “non-lethal support” to the rebels in Syria. In concrete terms, then, what the CIA did was to link up its Qatari and Saudi allies with a number of arms manufacturers in the Balkans (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, etc.). With the backing of NATO, which controls arms exports from the Balkans via EUFOR, Qatari and Saudi secret services began buying up weapons and ammunition from these countries to illegally equip anti-Assad rebels.
A few months later, in October 2012, the New York Times revealed that this vast CIA-sponsored arms trafficking was mainly going to support jihadist groups in Syria, while arms exports by air were growing, with weapons being injected into Syrian territory from “operation rooms” in Turkey and Jordan, through the FSA (“Free Syria Army”) and local arms traffickers.
Finally, it turned out that these “operation rooms” were cobbled together by fifteen Western and Middle Eastern intelligence services, including the DGSE(French foreign intelligence service) and MI6, although the we do not yet know exactly what role these various agencies played in this secret war. What is clear — and what I demonstrate in my book with irrefutable evidence —is that tens of thousands of tons of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition were brought into the Syrian theater of war by this operation. It is also proven that these armaments mostly went to equip jihadist groups, including the terrorist militia which proclaimed itself “Islamic State” in June 2014.
Ultimately, Donald Trump decided to phase out this operation in early summer 2017. This was a major setback for the CIA, as the US President was thereby conceding the defeat of the United States and its partners in the war against Syria and its Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies.
* * *
ER: What concrete evidence do you have to show that US intelligence services have provided support to jihadist militias in Syria?
MC: The coordination role that the Agency signed off on in the fall of 2011 is now a proven fact, as we know that it was belatedly confirmed in June 2018 by Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief adviser from 2009 to 2017. During the interview in question, Rhodes argued that the blacklisting of al-Nusra Front on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in December 2012 was a “schizophrenic” move, since it was obvious that the jihadist militia was a “big chunk” of the anti-Assad opposition, as he put it in his own words. During that interview, journalist Mehdi Hasan not only elicited from him that the CIA had played a coordinating role in this vast arms trade, but also that US involvement in this shadow war had been much greater than we thought.
According to the Washington Post, it was one of the CIA’s “largest covert operations” in its history. In January 2016, the New York Times confirmed this, noting that the CIA’s maneuvers to overthrow Assad were part of a multinational campaign involving billions of petrodollars from the Gulf states, mainly spent by Saudi Arabia.
It must be understood that this secret war ushered in, between 2011 and 2017, close cooperation between Western secret services and their Turkish and Middle Eastern counterparts. Thus, many experts and journalists were making a mistake by analyzing the operations of the various Middle Eastern powers in isolation from those of the Western governments. On the contrary, as the former Qatari Prime Minister admitted in 2017, it was a joint and coordinated operation involving all of those intelligence services.
Due to the record number of public and private funders backing this campaign, and the tens of thousands of anti-Assad mujaheddin who were directly or indirectly aided by the CIA and its allies, I believe this could be the most massive clandestine operation in the history of the Agency. However, I have not been able to determine that with certainty due to the secrecy of this shadow war, which prevents access to archives and severely limits the quantity of leaks to the press.
The fact remains, however, that I was able to assemble in my book hundreds of undisputed sources which combine to corroborate my writing. In this book, internationally renowned researchers such as Joshua Landis and Christopher Davidsonsupport my arguments, which I developed after a long investigation that I launched in 2014. Once again, I invite your readers to consult the evidence cited in my book, as it is overwhelming. I would take this opportunity to point out that Bashar al-Assad and his allies have committed major abuses against Syrian civilians, and that my book is not intended to excuse what they are responsible for.
Nevertheless, and to date, the Western media have focused mainly on the crimes of Assad and his supporters, while suppressing or downplaying the vast shadow war launched by the CIA and its partners in the fall of 2011.
* * *
ER: What role did France play in these jihadist militias in Syria? Did it unambiguously support members of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda?
MC: Operation Timber Sycamore is a clandestine operation, and such campaigns are not owned up to by those sponsoring them — at least, not typically. In this case, however, the operation has become one of such magnitude over time that Western powers have had to communicate something about it, albeit misleadingly. That is to say, succor to jihadist groups has long been described by Western government spokesmen as “non-lethal support” for so-called “moderate” rebels, yet the reality on the ground is that the “moderate rebel force” that is the Free Syria Army (FSA) has served as a pool of fighters, weapons and ammunition for the anti-Assad jihadist nebula, whose tacticians and militiamen were much more effective than the FSA itself.
As I explain in my book, the FSA has been dependent on jihadist groups, first and foremost al-Nusra Front, and vice versa. Other factions of the FSA were completely put out of action by the jihadists, their arsenals being looted by the Islamist militias, including the Islamic Front in December 2013. At the very least, it is clear that the FSA as a disunited and complex bundle of anti-Assad armed groups was supported by Western powers as it fought shoulder to shoulder with jihadist groups, including with what later became Daesh, until the winter of 2013-2014.
In January 2014, the first major fighting erupted between Daesh and other rebel groups, including al-Nusra Front. It must be emphasized that, until their split in April 2013, al-Nusra Front and the soon-to-be-called “Islamic State” formed a single entity. More specifically, the founder of al-Nusra was sent to Syria in August 2011 by the leader of the future Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to fight Assad’s troops.
However, between 2012 and 2014, it is beyond question that al-Nusra was the driving force of the rebellion in Syria, its tacticians developing major operations that allowed the conquest of various territories by the “Islamic State”, such as Camp Yarmouk south of Damascus, Raqqa, or Deir ez-Zor. In summary, the combined operations of the FSA and al-Nusra enabled the nascent Daesh to then establish itself in many Syrian cities following the split between al-Nusra and the “Islamic State”.
It should be noted that, through the FSA, al-Nusra had been enjoying CIA and MI6 support since early 2012, but it is unclear precisely when the French DGSE started becoming involved in this operation. According to François Hollande, the “moderate rebels” of the FSA were in receipt of French lethal support from the end of 2012, in violation of the EU arms embargo on Syria, which was only lifted in May 2013. That same year, Colonel Oqaidi, the commander of the FSA, said to camera that his relationship with Daesh was “good, and even brotherly”… And, as revealed during my investigation, Obama’s then ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, telephoned Colonel Oqaidi to condemn the FSA’s persistent collaboration with al-Nusra.
At the time, and since at least the fall of 2012, the French intelligence services were alerting their government to the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist groups such as al-Nusra were the driving forces of the anti-Assad rebellion. Despite these alarming surges in theater, Paris, London and Washington resolved to persist in their support for the anti-Assad rebellion, secure in the assurances being given them by their allies in the Gulf that Assad would be toppled quickly and that these groups would not be a problem after the fall of the Syrian government. Both these predictions turned out to be wrong, and the most brutal jihadist group in the Levant struck France directly on November 13th, 2015.
* * *
ER: To be clear: In your opinion, France abetted a clandestine operation by supporting entities that then organized attacks in France?
MC: As I explain in my book, the French state and its key Western allies did not directly support Daesh, but they oversaw a system that massively fueled what I call the anti-Assad jihadist nebula, of which the haplessly-named “Islamic State” on Syrian territory was an outgrowth and a driving force. I do not think that the French state or its allies, in carrying out this operation, ever imagined that Daesh would end up attacking Paris on November 13th, 2015.
On the other hand, it is clear that our government and its British, American and Israeli allies were consciously arming jihadist groups. In France, some parliamentarians of the PS, LR and LS parties confirmed to me that the DGSE was involved in supporting groups that were not as “moderate” as they were being presented to us in the media. I would go even further, and this is one of the main arguments that I develop in my book: by arming and supporting the FSA in various ways, the Western powers encouraged the rise of what then became the “Islamic State”, which fought “hand in glove” with the FSA from the beginning of 2012 to the winter of 2013–2014. From the time of the break between the FSA and Islamic State in January 2014 onward, the FSA and al-Nusra maintained a fusional relationship, both against the Assad forces and against Daesh.
Yet in August 2014, François Hollande acknowledged that French support for the FSA was continuing. Was he unaware of the close ties between the FSA and al-Nusra? If so, such a level of misinformation at the top of the government would be alarming. Nevertheless, in view of the available evidence, it is more likely that French leaders under the Hollande presidency were fully aware of the fact that al-Nusra was inextricably linked to the FSA.
Moreover, in a book that was never contested in litigation by the then French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot claimed that the head of our diplomacy knew full well that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were infiltrating into al-Nusra’s private funding networks “paid agents, professional trainers, known to DGSE officers”. Despite this, according to Chesnot and Malbrunot, Fabius was complaining that the Syrian state and its armed forces were not being “hit hard enough [and] not strongly enough”.
ER: Speaking of Laurent Fabius, why does his name feature in the Lafarge affair? Is there any evidence that he endorsed a financial agreement between that French company and Daesh?
MC: Given his active stance on the Syria dossier, it is inevitable that his name pops up in the Lafarge affair. What’s more, there are even acronyms in it familiar to the French: DGSI (the Directorate General for Internal Security), DRM (French Military Intelligence Directorate), DGSE, and so on.
Let’s be clear: the Jalabiya cement factory, constructed by Lafarge in 2010, was transformed during the war into a “bridgehead” for the French intelligence services: that is to say, for the Élysée [President’s office], the Quai d’Orsay [French Foreign Ministry] and all the other ministries concerned. Indeed, as journalist Guillaume Dasquié has proved, “the documents in the case, the testimonies of the few insiders and the documents to which the JDD [the Journal du Dimanche Sunday paper] had access reconstruct a different story [than that put forward by the French authorities.] […] This directly implicates the command in charge of counter-terrorism, the DGSI, the Quai d’Orsay, and the external intelligence services of the DGSE. It spells out for us an improbable war-zone game of chess between industrialists, spies and diplomats, with everyone taking advantage of the presence of the others to advance his pawns, at a time when the Islamic State had not yet committed an attack on French soil.”
Nearly half of European jihadists in Syria, Iraq are French: report http://t.co/lzNf84VkCn pic.twitter.com/FKJP0D2c9l
— FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) April 8, 2015
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Laurent Fabius said in front of the investigative magistrates that he had not been aware of Lafarge’s actions in paying out cash to various local jihadist groups, including the ineptly-named “Islamic State” — an explanation that failed to convince some experts on the issue, including Georges Malbrunot. This is all the more eyebrow-raising since it has now become apparent that the French Military Intelligence Directorate was monitoring transactions between Lafarge and the various armed groups in the field.
So I return to my previous explanation: a clandestine operation is mounted in such a way that its sponsors have deniability of all knowledge of, as well as their role in, any maneuver of this type. It is now clear that the DGSE has been involved since at least 2012 in supporting the nebula of armed groups opposing Bashar al-Assad.
As we also know, Laurent Fabius was the most active of Hollande’s ministers on the Syria dossier, acting in the interests of a fickle “Sunni diplomacy” that put our trade relations with Saudi Arabia first — the main state funder of Timber Sycamore. Consequently, it is impossible that the Quai d’Orsay could have been unaware of Lafarge’s actions in Syria, which were part of several intelligence or destabilization operations carried out by the French secret services in that country. Renowned researcher Fabrice Balanche is of the same opinion on this as Guillaume Dasquié or Georges Malbrunot.
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ER: On account of what interests might Laurent Fabius have allowed the DGSE to support islamists? Was he acting on behalf of the Saudis, as this same Georges Malbrunot and his co-author Christian Chesnot suggest in their book, Nos très chers émirs [Our Dearest Emirs]?
MC: First of all, it should be pointed out that the French President is supposed to be the one who sponsors, as a last resort, a clandestine operation. However, he enjoys legal impunity in the exercise of his mandate, which is not the case for any of his ministers.
During the Hollande presidency, we witnessed a blatant tendency for the French state to support and protect its Gulf allies. This policy materialized not only in Fabius’ hard line against Iran in the nuclear deal negotiations, but also, and much more seriously, in the shifty operations that aimed to shore up the disastrous interventions of the Saudis and their partners in Yemen and in Syria. This approach favorable to the Saudi monarchy was maintained under the Macron presidency, yet with a pro-Qatar instinct which became evident in the aftermath of the Gulf crisis that has set that emirate against Riyadh and Abu Dhabi since 2017.
But until then, Saudi Arabia was expressly supported by the French state, owing to the economic and strategic interdependencies that are at stake between Paris and Riyadh. Consequently, and in the interests of this notorious “Sunni diplomacy”, the French state has not only turned a blind eye to the suspicious deeds of Saudi Arabia in Syria and Yemen; it has directly supported Saudi campaigns, in the most discreet way possible.
These maneuvers have led to a literally schizophrenic political stance, whereby in fact the French state trumpets its operations against terrorism whenever it can, but further down at the level of the directorate and the intelligence services, strategies that have the specific effect of bolstering jihadist groups are being illegally imposed on some countries, such as Syria, Yemen or Libya.
In the case of that latter Libyan operation, an anonymous DGSE officer revealed to our colleagues at Canal+ TV station that he had been ordered, in February 2011, to destabilize Benghazi in coordination with the Qatari intelligence services, notorious supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who at that time were dominating the Libyan jihadist nebula.
According to the reporter François de Labarre, this policy was then challenged by the French Ministry of Defense under Jean-Yves Le Drian, who used the DGSE to support General Haftar against Islamist armed groups. However, it is difficult to explain why the Quai d’Orsay [French Foreign Ministry] continued to support Abdelhakim Belhadj, one of the founders of al-Qaeda in Libya, who was appointed military commander of Tripoli in August 2011.
It should be noted that Belhadj is Qatar’s man in Libya, and that he is one of the most influential figures of the Muslim Brotherhood in that country. According to François de Labarre, President Hollande was unable to decide between the Defense Ministry’s pro-Haftar line and the pro-Belhadj policy — that is, pro-Qatar and pro-Muslim Brotherhood — which the Quai d’Orsay was adhering to. One is left wondering, therefore, whether François Hollande was able to arbitrate France’s foreign policy. In any case, one can be worried about the schizophrenia that this implies. Indeed, this can lead to operations against jihadist groups initially backed by our intelligence services and their allies – operations that are deadly in effect upon civilians.
In October 2018, Paris Match magazine co-editor Régis Le Sommier interviewed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. On that occasion, Lavrov revealed a shocking conversation between Laurent Fabius and himself: “Some time after the bombings of Libya, Laurent Fabius, [then] Minister of Foreign Affairs, had called me. According to [the Malian capital] Bamako, mujaheddin from northern Mali were nearing the French contingent’s positions. France intended to stop them by gaining the approval of the Security Council, and I was in favor. I told Laurent Fabius: ‘You surely understand that you are now going to face the same guys you armed in Libya.’ He chuckled and said to me, ‘C’est la vie’.” Lavrov’s comments were not denied by Laurent Fabius, so this type of flippancy in the face of the consequences of French foreign policy towards terrorist groups — and thus of the populations they threaten — is alarming.
The same is true of the Syrian dossier, which led our leaders to support for nearly five years a Free Syrian Army of which they could not ignore its close ties with al-Nusra since 2012, including when that Syrian branch of al-Qaeda and the ineptly-named “Islamic State” were a single entity.
ER: Should an investigation into this be opened by the counter-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor’s office?
MC: Initially, I became interested in France’s clandestine actions in Syria in the spring of 2014. At the time, parliamentarian and former counter-terrorist judge Alain Marsaud was claiming in the media that our government had previously supported and infiltrated the al-Nusra Front.
The following year, he revealed to me that the president-supporting majority under François Hollande had refused any parliamentary inquiry on this issue so as not to “uncover such collaboration with a terrorist group”, to quote his remarks. It should be noted again that several parliamentarians, including Claude Goasguen (LR party), Jacques Myard (LR) and Gérard Bapt (PS party), have leveled similar accusations at the French government. On LCP [French parliamentary TV], Mr. Goasguen declared in June 2015 that the French state was helping “al-Qaeda in Syria”, then the following year Gérard Bapt confirmed me the “clandestine support by the French state of the various islamist movements in Syria, in view of the porosity and proximity of these allied groups in the field”. He added that “French support for rebels in Syria, and more generally Western support for them, continued even after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and [the French Jewish supermarket]Hyper Cacher, though these were claimed by al-Qaeda”.
I must say that this explanation by Gérard Bapt seems to me the most accurate: according to him, the French state has supported militias evolving within a nebula of armed groups which was in constant flux, but which indisputably had al-Nusra Front among its driving forces — as Obama’s close adviser Ben Rhodes himself acknowledged.
Let’s not forget, either, that Claude Goasguen had frequently warned the French state on LCP against this policy of support for anti-Assad factions. Put simply, it is a safe bet that our government will oppose by all means the opening of parliamentary and judicial investigations around the clandestine actions of the French state in Syria.
But we are looking here at a case obviously much graver than the botched DGSE operation against the Rainbow Warrior, during François Mitterrand’s first term. Let us be clear: if several of our parliamentarians have publicly risen to declaim French state support of al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, it is inconceivable that they did so without having specific information to back their accusations — which were never officially denied by the government.
As taxpayers and as citizens, we should be refusing to accept that our authorities can carry out such dangerous and misguided policies on our behalf and with our tax money, but without our consent — and without our even being aware of it at the outset.
Therefore, and as I explain in my book, several legal and factual arguments could justify at least the setting-up of a parliamentary committee of inquiry, though it seems unlikely to me that investigative magistrates will ever want to launch investigations into such a sensitive subject. Indeed, this clandestine operation is part of the state privilege and conduct of France’s foreign policy — an area in which the Executive has powers so exorbitant that it is able to support Islamist groups abroad that are officially considered enemies within our own borders.
Authors’s note: if you think this interview was interesting, you can support GlobalGeoNews.com by clicking here.
- Mapping The Countries With The Most Oil Reserves
There’s little doubt that renewable energy sources will play a strategic role in powering the global economy of the future.
But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, for now, crude oil is still the undisputed heavyweight champion of the energy world.
In 2018, we consumed more oil than any prior year in history – about 99.3 million barrels per day on a global basis. This number is projected to rise again in 2019 to 100.8 million barrels per day.
The Most Oil Reserves by Country
Given that oil will continue to be dominant in the energy mix for the short and medium term, which countries hold the most oil reserves?
Today’s map comes from HowMuch.net and it uses data from the CIA World Factbook to resize countries based on the amount of oil reserves they hold.
Here’s the data for the top 15 countries below:
Venezuela tops the list with 300.9 billion barrels of oil in reserve – but even this vast wealth in natural resources has not been enough to save the country from its recent economic and humanitarian crisis.
Saudi Arabia, a country known for its oil dominance, takes the #2 spot with 266.5 billion barrels of oil. Meanwhile, Canada and the U.S. are found at the #3 (169.7 billion bbls) and the #11 (36.5 billion bbls) spots respectively.
The Cost of Production
While having an endowment of billions of barrels of oil within your borders can be a strategic gift from mother nature, it’s worth mentioning that reserves are just one factor in assessing the potential value of this crucial resource.
In Saudi Arabia, for example, the production cost of oil is roughly $3.00 per barrel, which makes black gold strategic to produce at almost any possible price.
Other countries are not so lucky:
*Total cost (bbl) includes production cost (also shown), capital spending, gross taxes, and admin/transport costs.
Even if a country is blessed with some of the most oil reserves in the world, it may not be able to produce and sell that oil to maximize the potential benefit.
Countries like Canada and Venezuela are hindered by geology – in these places, the majority of oil is extra heavy crude or bitumen (oil sands), and these types of oil are simply more difficult and costly to extract.
In other places, obstacles are are self-imposed. In some countries, like Brazil and the U.S., there are higher taxes on oil production, which raises the total cost per barrel.
- The Trump Administration's Iran Policy Will Hasten Imperial Decline
Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
There was a postwar order, but was it liberal? Like most political orders, it looked much better on paper than it did in practice and to the core members of the order than those on the margins…
Liberal values were only remotely attached to the postwar institutions. Sovereign equality did not translate into a liberal world order. The postwar institutions were run by the most powerful countries, with middle and lesser powers either shunted to the back of the room or locked out altogether…Third World now comprised most of the world’s states, but it was on the outside looking in. Western states enjoyed democracy and the rule of law, but the U.S. and the former colonial masters undermined rather than supported democracy and human rights elsewhere. Some Western states and analysts presumed that the global order must have some legitimacy because there were no great (or at least successful) revolts by the Third World, but they mistook coercion and the lack of alternative for consent…
The suggestion, then, is that if the international order is having greater difficulty creating rule-based governance, it might have less to do with the weakening of liberalism and more to do with the fact that the rules that have been in place for decades were overdue for an overhaul, and especially given a shift in power from the West to the East.
– From Michael N. Barnett’s piece: The End of a Liberal International Order That Never Existed
A primary focus of my writing of late centers around the idea that the policies of the Trump administration, and the neocons in control of it, will hasten the decline of U.S. imperial power and more rapidly usher in a multi-polar (and possibly bifurcated) world. Today’s news regarding the elimination of waivers on Iranian oil imports provides another perfect example.
Specifically, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier today that waivers which allowed eight countries to import Iranian crude oil without being subject to U.S. sanctions would expire on May 2 without extension. The eight countries included are China, India, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Greece, Italy and Taiwan.
This move is an extraordinarily foolish and reckless act which illustrates the extreme hubris and short-sightedness of those running American foreign policy under Trump. What the U.S. is decreeing to the entire world with this action is that the U.S., and the U.S. alone, decides who gets to trade with who. The U.S. is telling China, the second largest economy in the world and home to over one billion people, that it lacks the sovereign authority to buy oil from Iran if it so desires. If the U.S. can unilaterally play boss on the trade decisions of foreign countries, national sovereignty does not exist in practice anywhere on the planet. There is only empire.
As such, this goes beyond aggressive foreign policy. It’s more or less an assertion by the Trump administration that the world is in fact a global dictatorship run by a single nation (empire) that has granted itself the authority to arbitrarily decide which countries get to participate in global trade, and which ones do not. Now that the true nature of U.S. power is so completely out in the open, countries will have to decide to either bend the knee or resist, which seems to be the point. What do you think China’s going to do?
One thing people seem to miss when making geopolitical observations is an analysis of the role played by internal politics. It’s not all about military or economic might, popular opinion on the ground and the domestic internal mood also matter when it comes to foreign policy success or failure. It’s from this perspective that China appears to hold a better hand than the U.S.
Political power is largely about perception and narrative control, which is why the U.S. move here is so fundamentally irresponsible. Chinese leadership can play the victim game and sell their perspective easily to the public. Look at rising oil prices they’ll say, noting that this is the result of the Americans not allowing anyone to buy oil from Iran. Why shouldn’t the great nation of China be able to buy oil from whomever they want, they’ll say.
The U.S. will look like a global bully meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation, and this narrative will resonate with the population there. China’s leadership can call this an unprovoked attack on the Chinese people and their national sovereignty. China will not bend the knee to the U.S. for many reasons, but an overlooked factor relates to the fact that the public would not find such subjugation acceptable. If public opinion didn’t matter, governments wouldn’t spend so much time propagandizing and actively keeping their citizens uninformed.
The U.S. finds itself in the exact opposite scenario. While compulsive liars like Pompeo can endlessly repeat nonsense such as “Iran is the number one state-sponsor of terrorism,” nobody but the most brainwashed Trump diehards actually believe this. As such, the masses of people here in the U.S. won’t get riled up and excited about another pointless Middle East conflict, particularly as oil prices continue to march higher. Unlike China, U.S. leadership can’t reasonably expect to convince the American public the Trump administration is simply playing defense with its aggressive action against Iran. It’s crystal clear the move is nothing more than a power-play designed to consolidate, and possibly even expand, American imperial dominance. Importantly, wars for empire are not particularly popular domestically, and getting less so with each passing day.
Lots of Americans are sick of wars, which is why every recent president (including Trump) pretends to be against them in order to win. https://t.co/Y8KH48neCS
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) April 17, 2019
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What I’m trying to say is Chinese leadership can expect to have the public on its side if it decides to resist U.S. diktats on who it can purchase oil from. China standing up for its right to buy oil from any country it desires is an easily defensible position, representing the only position any truly sovereign state can have. On the other hand, a single country unilaterally deciding trade for everyone else on earth is not a defensible or reasonable position. As mentioned earlier, it’s not just about military and economic might, geopolitics is also impacted by the internal dynamics of various populations, and on this front the U.S. is positioned poorly.
The American public has become increasingly sick of wars and empire for simple economic and societal reasons, if not for ethical ones. People can look around and see their towns and infrastructure crumbling as trillions are spent overseas. Empire isn’t good for the average American citizen in the long-run, it merely provides lucrative money-making opportunities for our depraved elites. People are finally starting to pick up on this. While national defense is of the utmost importance, national offense is evil, stupid and wasteful.
Once again, from Michael Barnett’s piece, The End of a Liberal International Order That Never Existed:
The West has lived with the myth of a liberal international order for many decades. Myths are powerful and hard to surrender because they serve important functions. They helped the West maintain a solidarity and sense of purpose. They acted as an ideology and helped the powerful feel as if might makes right. It is not clear that those outside the Western club ever bought into the myth, but they had little success posing a viable alternative.
U.S. elites appear more focused than ever on imperial ambitions at the exact moment the general population tires of it. This isn’t a recipe for success, it’s a roadmap to collapse.
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- Leader Of Border Militia Boasted Of Plans To Assassinate Obama, Clinton, Soros: FBI
The leader of the militia group which we profiled over the weekend for its detention of migrant families at the US border, was arrested and charged of plotting the assassination of former President Barack Obama, George Soros and various other key Democratic Party figures, the FBI said in court papers.
While militia leader Larry Hopkins, 69, was arrested on Saturday for a weapons charge said to be unrelated to his activities on the border, the FBI now claims Hopkins bragged about his fellow militia members “training to assassinate” former President Barack Obama, Trump’s nemesis in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party’s most generous billionaire donor, George Soros.
To be sure, Hopkins had been a busy man – if what the Feds say is to be believed (which these days is a stretch) – for a long time, and before the F.B.I. arrested the militia leader, he’d had so many run-ins with the law that his police record stretched across much of the United States. Oregon police arrested him in 2006 on charges of impersonating a police officer and a felony weapons offense. They had found him showing guns to teenagers in a gas-station parking lot while wearing a police-style uniform and a badge emblazoned with the words “Special Agent” according to the NYT.
“Hopkins stated that he worked for the federal government directly under George Bush,” Officer Jack Daniel of the sheriff’s office in Klamath County, Ore., wrote in his report. Hopkins, the report said, claimed variously to be investigating a meth lab, hunting fugitives and undertaking unspecified “operations” in Afghanistan.
Over a decade later, Hopkins finally came under the scrutiny of federal authorities in 2017, after the FBI received reports that his group was “training” to assassinate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros, according to documents unsealed Monday in federal court.
Hopkins appeared in Federal District Court on Monday after his arrest over the weekend on yet another charge, this time of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition.
Hopkins’ group, the United Constitutional Patriots profiled here, claims to have helped the US Border Patrol to detain over 5,600 immigrants in the previous two months. The ACLU has condemned the group as a “fascist militia” and called its members vigilantes. In photos showcasing its actions, the group shows men in camouflage circling and detaining hundreds of migrants in the desert near Sunland Park, N.M., and then handing the migrants over to Border Patrol.
The heavily armed militia’s actions have ignited debate over whether its members broke kidnapping laws and effectively acted as a paramilitary force supporting the Border Patrol. Militia members argue that they were assisting the authorities to patrol remote areas of the border and carrying out “verbal citizen’s arrests.”
“We cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum,” the ACLU said in a letter to New Mexico Governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham and Attorney General Hector Balderas.
United Constitutional Patriots Hopkins’ attorney, Kelly O’Connell, said the militia group leader planned to plead not guilty. The militia’s spokesman told local media that he’s “confident” Hopkins will “get through this.” He also claimed that the New Mexico, Hector Balderas, “has declared war on American citizens at the order of the ACLU” by pushing to prevent private citizens “from assisting and documenting a crisis on the border.”
In an affidavit, FBI special agent David S. Gabriel, said the bureau was made aware of the activities of Hopkins after receiving reports in October 2017 of “alleged militia extremist activity” in northwestern New Mexico. Gabriel said that the following month, two F.B.I. agents went to a trailer park in Flora Vista, N.M., where Hopkins was living at the time. With Mr. Hopkins’s consent, the agents entered the home and saw about 10 firearms in plain view, in what Mr. Hopkins referred to as his office.
Hopkins, who has also used the name Johnny Horton Jr., told the agents that the guns belonged to Fay Sanders Murphy, whom he described to agents as his common-law wife, according to the affidavit. The agents collected at least nine firearms from the home as evidence, including a 12-gauge shotgun and various handguns.
According to the NYT, the court affidavit gave few details about the report the F.B.I. received stating that the United Constitutional Patriots “were training to assassinate George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama because of these individuals’ support of Antifa.”
Hopkins’s lawyer, Kelly O’Connell, disputed the reports about assassination plans. “My client told me that is not true,” Mr. O’Connell said. He also questioned the timing of the arrest. “My question is, why now?” O’Connell said. He suggested that pressure from prominent Democrats in New Mexico may have prompted the F.B.I. to take action.
- Paul Craig Roberts Warns The Orchestration Of Russophobia Is The Prelude To War
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Russiagate has three purposes.
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One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.
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Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is “to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign,” by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction.
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The third is to obstruct Trump’s campaign and distract him from his agenda when he won the election.
Despite the inability of Mueller to find any evidence that Trump or Trump officials colluded with Russia to steal the US presidential election, and the inability of Mueller to find evidence with which to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, Russiagate has achieved all of its purposes.
Trump has been locked into a hostile relationship with Russia. Neoconservatives have succeeded in worsening this hostile relationship by manipulating Trump into a blatant criminal attempt to overthrow in broad daylight the Venezuelan government.
The Russian Embassy in Washington has prepared an accurate 121-page report in response to Mueller’s report: THE RUSSIAGATE HYSTERIA: A CASE OF SEVERE RUSSOPHOBIA.
Everyone should read this report. It documents the fake news, lies, violations of diplomatic standards and international law, and gratuitous aggressive actions taken against Russia during the period beginning May 18, 2016 and continuing through the issuance of the Mueller Report.
Without explicitly saying so, the report shows that neither the US government nor the American media has a nanoparticle of integrity. Both are criminal organizations that are willing to risk war with Russia in their pursuit of narrow policitized agendas.
This is important information for Americans and the rest of the world to have. Every person, every government and every private organization that supports Washington’s Russophobic policies is contributing to the growing threat of nuclear war.
One hopes also that the entirety of the Russian government, media, and population also read the report as it has equally powerful messages for Russia. The messages are no doubt unintended, but they nevertheless emerge from the embassy’s report.
The Russian government should marvel at its naivete in trusting Washington, US institutions such as Citibank, and US adherence to international law. For 121 pages the report lists transgression against Russia followed by transgression and lie followed by lie; yet the Russian government continued to send diplomatic notes that are never answered, requests for meetings that are never answered, requests for evidence that are never answered. One would think that month after month of abuse would have caused the Russian government to wonder where was the intelligence, “cooperative spirit,” reason, and “common interest in global security” that Russia’s responses to Washington assumed were present in Russia’s “partner.”
The Russian government’s naive and gullible response to Washington played into Washington’s hands. By responding to Washington’s orchestrated Russophobia as if it were some kind of mistake based on bad information, the Russian government allowed Washington to keep the process of demonization alive and thereby contributed to the ongoing demonization of Russia. If, instead, the Russian government had denounced the demonization of Russia as Washington’s act of preparing Americans for war with Russia and had taken a belligerant rather than a complaining stance, the realization that Washington’s policy had serious cost would have spread throughout the US and Europe and voices would have arisen against Washington’s dangerous and reckless policy. Today in place of the uniformity of voice against Russia, there would be dissent opposing Washington’s irresponsible provocations.
The danger of Russian self-delusion is not over. The embassy’s report expresses the hope that now that the Mueller report has concluded that the much heralded collusion has no basis in fact, relations between Washington and Russia can be normalized and cooperation achieved.
There is no such possibility. The Democrats are screaming “coverup” and demanding the resignation of attorney general Barr and Trump’s impeachment. The presstitutes are claiming that the Mueller report vindicates their reporting. Trump continues to use US foreign policy to commit criminal acts. He has declared that the president of Venezuela is the person he picked, not the one Venezuelans elected. He has given to Israel part of Syria as if Syrian territory is his to give. He threatens Iran with war as Israel requires. In other words, American arrogance rises to ever higher heights.
At some point the Russian government and Russian people are going to have to accept the fact that to reach an understanding with Washington Russia must either surrender her sovereignty or become as belligerent as Washington and replace Russia’s useless refutations of Washington’s accusations with accusations of her own. Otherwise, Washington is going to keep pushing until war is the only possible outcome.
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- Don't Tell Bernie: Medicare's Hospital Fund Will Run Out Of Money In Seven Years
Ever now and then we get a vivid reminder that America’s biggest threat are not a handful of Facebook ads bought by the KGB, nor Iran’s already brittle regime, nor Venezuela’s hyperinflating basket case of an economy, but over $100 trillion in unfunded future liabilities. Today was one such day, because that’s when the board of trustees for Social Security and Medicare reported that Medicare’s hospital insurance fund – also known as Medicare Part A – will be depleted in 2026, while Social Security program costs would exceed total income in 2020, for the first time since 1982.
Additionally, and in line with previous forecasts, the report also projected that Social Security funds could be fully depleted by 2035, leading to a devastating hit on expected payouts to retirees and other beneficiaries (read none), unless a comprehensive overhaul of the entire program is implemented in the coming years.
As a reminder, the Medicare trust fund comprises two separate funds: The hospital insurance trust fund is financed mainly through payroll taxes on earnings and income taxes on Social Security benefits. The Supplemental Medical Insurance trust fund is financed by general tax revenue and the premiums enrollees pay.
With uncertainty around possible cost-cutting solutions already weighing on healthcare stocks this year, US healthcare costs are expected to be a hot topic during the 2020 presidential campaign; most provocative of all is Bernie Sanders’ proposal of “Medicare-for-All” – a plan that would eliminate private insurance and shift all Americans to a public healthcare plan.
It now appears, that Bernie’s socialist healthcare vision is at best a pipe dream that will last about 6 more years, in line with Republicans’ complains that the Vermont socialist’s proposal is impractical and too expensive.
“At a time when some are calling for a complete government takeover of the American health car system, the Medicare Trustees have delivered a dose of reality in reminding us that the program’s main trust fund for hospital services can only pay full benefits for seven more years,” Seema Verma, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), said.
Here’s the reason: as the number of Medicare beneficiaries increases from about 58.4 million in 2017 to nearly 80 million by 2030, the number of workers per beneficiary will decline from 3.1 to 2.4. The cost of health care has increased rapidly as well putting further pressure on program costs. HI trust expenditures exceeded taxes for several years up to 2016, and though these outflows and inflows will roughly stabilize for a few years, the fund is projected to be exhausted by 2027. These pressures now and in the future will force lawmakers to find ways to finance promised benefits or cut services or provider payment rates.
Separately, the report said costs associated with the Medicare Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI) trust fund, which covers drug costs in Part B and D in the program for seniors, are likely to grow steadily from 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2018 to about 3.7% of GDP in 2038, given the aging U.S. population and rising costs.
There was a sliver of good news, and one may have to thank Trump for it: cost projections for Part D drug spending, which covers pharmacy prescription medicines, are actually lower than in last year’s report because of slower price growth and a trend of increasing manufacturer rebates, CMS said.
Some more good news: unlike Medicare Part A, the trustees projected that the SMI fund for Part B and Part D will remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law provides financing from general revenues and beneficiary premiums each year to meet the next year’s expected costs.
Finally, in an unexpected twist, the trustees predicted that the Social Security program’s will extend for one more year than projected last year. Which means that instead of being exhausted in 2034, Social Security funding will hit zero in 2035, or as the LA Times put it, “the trust funds’ exhaustion last year was 16 years away; this year it’s still 16 years away.”
That said, the costs of running Social Security will exceed the revenue next year; in 2018 income of $1.003 trillion only barely exceeded the costs of $1 trillion. The program received $885 million from the payroll tax, $83 million in interest and $35 million from taxing benefits, while it spent $988.6 million on benefit payments, $6.7 million on administrative expenses and $4.9 million on railroad retirement expenses.
Costs haven’t exceeded revenues since 1982, but are projected to do so in 2020. After that, costs will then remain higher throughout the 75-year projection period, according to the forecast.The rising costs are a sign of America’s increasing aging population.
Finally, for those eager to save Social Security it could be donw… it will just cost an additional 2.7% from every paycheck. Specifically, the cost of making Social Security fully solvent would require an immediate increase in the payroll tax of nearly 2.7% points, bringing the tax to 15.1% (shared by employers and employees), up from the current 12.4%. Whether or not any Americans will be thrilled with having nearly 3% of each and every paycheck be paid down to fund healthcare for others is a different matter entirely.
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