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March 11, 2018
Democrats Are Considering Dropping Superdelegates Altogether
Democratic officials are considering a new proposal to effectively eliminate all superdelegates, a move to end the deeply corrupt process that awarded the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, despite Bernie Sanders winning more votes.
The measure would go a step beyond the Clinton-Sanders Unity Commission proposals to change the superdelegate system. An “absurd and undemocratic idea,” one DNC member said in a memo to party leaders.
Democratic officials are considering a new proposal to effectively eliminate all superdelegates, a move that would go beyond recommendations put forward late last year by the commission tasked with making the party’s presidential nominating process more fair.
Under the current system for choosing a Democratic nominee, around 700 people called “superdelegates” are entitled to their own delegate to award to the candidate of their choosing, regardless of votes cast — making up about 30% of the 2,382 delegates needed to clinch the party’s nomination. These superdelegates include members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic elected officials, and “distinguished” party leaders like former presidents and vice presidents. Superdelegates were a major point of contention during the 2016 primary —…
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Proton Battery Uses Cheap Carbon Instead of Lithium
A big challenge for the EV and renewable energy revolution is that the much-needed batteries are made from lithium, a relatively rare and pricey metal. Rather than focusing on other metals like magnesium, a team of scientists from RMIT University in Melbourne have figured it out to build rechargeable “proton” batteries from abundant carbon and water. If commercialized, the technology could allow for cheaper Powerwall-type home or grid storage to back up solar panels or windmills. . .
March 10, 2018
The Elephant In The Room – Did Russian or UK Intelligence Murder Skripal?
Nerve agents including Sarin and VX are manufactured by the British Government in Porton Down, just 8 miles from where Sergei Skripal was attacked. The official British government story is that these nerve agents are only manufactured “To help develop effective medical countermeasures and to test systems”.
The UK media universally accepted that the production of polonium by Russia was conclusive evidence that Vladimir Putin was personally responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. In the case of Skripal, po-faced articles like this hilarious one in the Guardian speculate about where the nerve agent could possibly have come from – while totally failing to mention the fact that incident took place only eight miles from the largest stock of nerve agent in western Europe.
The investigation comprises multiple strands. Among them is whether there is any more of the nerve agent in the UK, and where it came from.
Chemical weapons experts said it was almost impossible to make nerve agents without training. “This needs expertise and a special place to make it or you will kill yourself. It’s only a small amount, but you don’t make this in your kitchen,” one said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer at the UK’s chemical, biological and nuclear regiment, said: “This is pretty significant. Nerve agents such as sarin and VX need to be made in a laboratory. It is not an insufficient task. Not even the so-called Islamic State could do it.”
Falling over themselves in the rush to ramp up the Russophobia, the Guardian quotes
“One former senior Foreign Office adviser suggested the Kremlin was taking advantage of the UK’s lack of allies in the US and EU. He said the British government was in a “weaker position” than in 2006 when two Kremlin assassins poisoned the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive cup of tea.
The adviser said the use of nerve agent suggested a state operation…”
It certainly does. But the elephant in the room is – which state?
Analyst Sheds Some Light on Mysterious Russian Ex-Spy Poisoning Story
The former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia remain in critical, but stable condition after having been exposed to an unnamed ‘nerve agent’. Tom Secker is a Sputnik contributor and author of the SpyCulture website – he explains his take on the situation.
Sputnik: If this incident were at the hands of the Russians — why now, with the upcoming elections and the world cup on the way? Where is the logic there?
Tom Secker: There doesn’t seem to be much logic there. We never really know what the intelligence services are getting up to. So it’s certainly not something we can rule out. The only logic I can see is that this would have been some kind of revenge move, or potentially a warning to other people who might do the same thing, you know, cross over to the other side — sell out their colleagues, coworkers, and the other people that they might know. Even with that scenario, you’d have to wonder, why now?
Sputnik: It would be very easy to make a death ‘untraceable’ — in fact the CIA assassination manual explains exactly how to make a homicide look like suicide. Why would that not have been the case here?
Tom Secker: I guess the question is what is the primary motive here? If the primary motive is simply to kill the guy then no, you wouldn’t do it this way. You’d kill him any way you like, and then make sure no one ever found the body. If the point was to send a message, again, you wouldn’t necessarily do it in this way. You would make it appear as though it was an accident, suicide or accidental overdose or something like that. The message would still be sent, because the people watching would still understand what had happened in reality, but it would make it so that it could never be chased back to you in a legal sense.
This sounds like something that was a rush job, it sounds like something that was carried out possibly on the fly, with fear of being caught. And that’s why it was at least somewhat botched.
Sputnik: How often do these sorts of cover-up homicides occur?
Tom Secker: If you think of cover-ups in a broader sense, there are a lot of examples. Back in 2010, a bunch of Israeli Government Agents, (we assume Mossad), went to Dubai and killed that senior Hamas figure in a Dubai hotel. They did the whole thing travelling on forged British passports and as far as we know, the British Government hasn’t done anything about this. Which begs the question, how many secret agents are there? Running around with fake British passports, and our government is just letting this happen. So in that sense, while it seems that Israel never really denied that they carried out this assassination, the British Government, to some extent participated in a cover-up of exactly how that was done- by not pursuing this passport issue. So honestly, cover-ups are kind of standard.
Sputnik: The blame has quickly jumped to Russia — despite Amber Rudd asking people not to jump to conclusions before the evidence is out- what’s happened there?
Tom Secker: Well on the one hand you have the Home Secretary saying that in public, but you also seem to have quite a number of officials anonymously briefing the media — saying that they think it was Russia, and they keep being quoted. So there is clearly the official stance, which is ‘Oh no, we’re not making any assumptions until we have the evidence in hand’, and then there is the quiet, unofficial stance of ‘Yes this was Russia, put out the story that it was Russia’.
Sputnik: And is there any evidence to suggest that Russia did it?
Tom Secker: Why use such an exotic poison — unless the aim is to try and remind everyone of the Litven Yenko murder. Which obviously, most people believe was carried out by the Russian State. That is the obvious connection that everyone is making. So why would Russia do it like that? Why would they do something that would instantly bring to mind this previous murder that had been pinned on them? The only reason to use such an exotic poison would be to remind everyone of that, and therefore plant the seed of ‘oh this is the Russian State killing one of their own’. Whereas, if you look at this guy’s biography, at least what we know of it, there are all sorts of people who’d have a motive for killing him. He betrayed quite a lot of people, and not just in terms of governments, not just in terms of government agents or intelligence agencies, but potentially private criminal organizations. They too could have a motive for trying to pin the whole thing on Russia.
Let’s not forget- and this is a detail I haven’t yet seen anywhere, at least in the mainstream media coverage — this guy was found only a few miles from Porton Down. That is the British ministry of Defenses lab for developing exotic weaponry — bio and chemical weapons. Why has no one drawn attention to this? I mean literally, we are talking eight to ten miles down the road. That’s a fact you would have thought was worth mentioning at the very least. Even if it’s some crack-pot rogue scientist from that lab, who smuggled something out, or sold it to someone, who then carried out the hit. Even if it would be a scenario like that, it’s worth exploring. It’s certainly a lot more worth exploring than waving a big flag saying ‘Russia did it.’
via Analyst Sheds Some Light on Mysterious Russian Ex-Spy Poisoning Story
Trump’s “Spontaneous” Decision to Meet Kim Jong-un, Or was it the CIA’s Decision?
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
According to the US media (in chorus) it was president Trump who took the decision (without prior consultation with his Cabinet, national security and intelligence advisors) to meet face to face North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at a US-DPRK Summit.
According to reports, this decision was taken spontaneously by president Trump following discussions in the Oval Office with a South Korean delegation headed by ROK National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong on March 8:
In a stunning turn of events, Trump personally intervened in a security briefing intended for his top deputies, inviting the South Korean officials into the Oval Office, where he agreed on the spot to a historic but exceedingly risky summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. (WP, March 9, 2018)
Trump announced his decision on the driveway outside the West Wing of the White House to the media, which was immediately broadcast live on TV networks Worldwide.
Sanctions would remain in place. The underlying focus would be to demand that the DPRK abandon its nuclear weapons program. According to White House sources, President Trump would require “concrete steps and concrete actions” by North Korea prior to the conduct of the proposed summit.
On Friday March 9, Trump announced that a deal with North Korea was “very much in the making”. In the words of Rex Tillerson, it was Trump that took the decision:
“In terms of the decision to engage with President Trump and Kim Jong Un, that’s a decision the president took himself, ... He’s expressed it openly before about his willingness to meet with Kim Jong Un, so now I think it’s a question of agreeing on the timing of that first meeting between the two of them and a location.” (quoted in the WSJ, March 9, 2018)
The Inter-Korean Peace Talks
North-South inter-Korean peace talks were initiated on January 9th, pursued throughout the Winter Olympics. What was revealed were the public statements of South Korea’s president Moon, the major events surrounding the Olympics including the inauguration ceremonies pointing to ties of friendship and solidarity between the two Koreas.
Several media described the inter-Korean dialogue as a “slap in the face” to Washington, which had attempted to sabotage the North-South talks. In what was described as US-led “War against the Peace”, the Pentagon responded by threatening a “Bloody Nose” operation using tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea. US threats emanating from the White House were also directed against the South Korean government of President Moon, intimating that restrictions on bilateral trade and investment against the ROK were being contemplated.
What was no revealed to the public were the discussions (of an entirely different nature) behind closed doors between North and South Korean national security officials as well as the “behind the scenes” role of US intelligence in these negotiations.
The CIA has a close and overlapping working relationship with its ROK counterpart The Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) (now referred to as The National Intelligence Service). The KCIA created in 1961 during the US sponsored military regime of President Park Chung-hee, has consistently acted as a de facto subsidiary of the CIA, largely acting on behalf of US intelligence.
In turn, in consultation with and on behalf of the CIA, the KCIA has developed over the years an unofficial bilateral “working relationship” with its North Korean intelligence counterparts.
Prior and in the course of the Winter Olympics, several key bilateral meetings were held between key national security and intelligence officials of North and South Korea.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s National security adviser Chung Eui-yong was put in charge of the negotiations in Pyongyang, officially acting on behalf of South Korea, but also (indirectly) on behalf of the United States.
On March 6, (local time), Chung Eui-yong, together with four other senior ROK officials met up with the DPRK leadership in Pyongyang. The delegation was also received at a State dinner with Kim Jong-un.
The ROK delegation also included Suh Hoon, head of the ROK’s National Intelligence Service (KCIA), who was appointed by President Moon in May 2017. His appointment had been approved by Washington.
While KCIA Chief Suh Hoon had previously worked on a mandate geared towards dialogue and peace on behalf of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, and now on behalf of President Moon, he nonetheless has routine consultations with CIA director Mike Pompeo. In relation to the Pyongyang talks, it is highly unlikely that Suh Hoon and Chung Eui-yong would have acted without consulting their counterparts in Washington, namely CIA Director Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster. . .
Source: Trump’s “Spontaneous” Decision to Meet Kim Jong-un, Or was it the CIA’s Decision?
Deep Blue State: Democrats fielding unprecedented number of ex-CIA candidates
Democrats are running a surprising number of former spies in competitive districts in the US 2018 midterms. If successful, as many as half of all new congressional Democrats could come from the national security apparatus.
One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House of Representative districts have intelligence, State Department or National Security Council backgrounds. This is the revelation of an analysis conducted by the World Socialist Web Site, which reviewed Federal Election Commission reports filed by all the Democratic candidates in 102 competitive House districts. The report reviewed the campaign websites of challengers, which provided their biographical details.
The mere presence of CIA alumni among the Democratic candidates is not news per se: the Washington Post praised it back in October 2017, saying that CIA Democrats were “alarmed by President Trump and galvanized by Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
The sheer number of candidates with a national security background is new, however. Of the 102 primary elections to choose the Democratic nominees in these competitive districts, 44 involve candidates with a “military-intelligence” or State Department background, with 11 districts having two such candidates, and one district having three. The WSWS analysis revealed that 57 candidates claim to have been national security operatives, compared to the 45 who were state and local government officials or the 35 lawyers.
Democrats believe fielding ex-intelligence personnel in tight congressional races will project an impression of pragmatism and efficiency which could sweep up GOP votes, the analysis says.
The report takes a ‘military-intelligence’ background to mean those who formerly had an operational role in the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council or State Department.
Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative and Iraq director for the National Security Council, is one such Democrat hopeful. At the Pentagon she oversaw drone warfare, homeland defense and cyber warfare but is now setting her sights on the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, a Republican-held seat that the Democrats hope will swing blue in 2018.
Another spook-turned-politico is Jeff Beals, who spent four years as a CIA intelligence officer before moving to the State Department to work on the Middle East in 2002. He’s hoping to oust Republican Rep. John Faso in New York’s Hudson Valley.
He’s not the only spy in that particular race, however. Also hoping to scoop the Democratic nomination for Hudson Valley is Patrick Ryan, who served two combat tours in Iraq and acted as lead intelligence officer for an infantry battalion in Iraq.
Regionally, the Northeast has the highest proportion of military-intelligence candidates seeking Democratic nominations, with 21 of the 31 seats targeted. In the majority of races, the military-intelligence candidates are well placed to win the Democratic nomination, say WSWS.
Democrats have long accused President Donald Trump of being “at war” with the US intelligence community, after he refused to unquestioningly accept the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) accusing Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential election, but offering no evidence for the claim.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) went so far as to warn Trump that he should not cross the spies.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in January 2017. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
During the 2016 election, the so-called NeverTrump wing of the Republican party actually ran an ex-CIA spy Evan McMullin as a spoiler candidate. In the end, he received 700,000 votes nationwide and placed third in Utah.
via Deep Blue State: Democrats fielding unprecedented number of ex-CIA candidates
How the US Recycles Child Soldiers as Paid Mercenaries
Child Soldiers Reloaded: The Privatisation of War
Al Jazeera (2017)
Film Review
This documentary explores the hidden history of the private mercenaries (aka “contractors”) who have been fighting the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Bush invaded Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003), unbeknownst to the American public, he deployed nearly as many private mercenaries as enlisted troops. Although they cost at least ten times as much as GIs, using private mercenaries was far more palatable to taxpayers. For several reasons.
When the media reports “boots on the ground” in any given conflict, they never include private mercenaries. Likewise, deaths and injuries of mercenaries are never reported in casualty figures.
Besides the enormous expense of using mercenaries to fight US wars, an even bigger drawback is their failure to engage in “hearts and minds” operations that are essential in winning civilian support for US military occupation. For the post part, US-funded mercenaries are despised in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their arrogance, recklessness and lack of accountability for civilian deaths. The filmmakers depict this cocksure flamboyant swaggering quite brilliantly.
Initially a second major drawback was a total absence of coordination between number private companies providing mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon “solved” this problem by hiring yet another private company, the London-based firm Aegis, to coordinate all the other private companies.
When Bush finally withdrew US troops from Iraq in 2007-2008, the private mercenaries remained. However owing to the massive unpopularity of the war, the Defense Department significantly reduced their budget. Whereas mercenaries from the US and other developed countries are paid $1,000 a day, Peruvian and Columbia mercenaries are paid $1,000 a month (see America’s $33 Mercenaries).
Initially Aegis cut costs by switching to Ugandan mercenaries they paid $800 a month. Then they hit pay direct in Sierra Leon, with former child soldiers willing to fight in Iraq for $250 a month.
All the former child soldiers kidnapped to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991-2002) have been deeply traumatized. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars western countries have pumped into rehabilitating them, many remain too impulsive and aggressive to integrate into society. There are no jobs for them in Sierra Leone: thus their willingness to fight and die in Iraq for $8.30 a day.
The Pentagon keeps no official record of the number of mercenaries it deploys in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the number killed there, nor the number who are former child soldiers.
March 9, 2018
Amazon Sets Off to Become America’s Biggest Mortgage Lender
Source: ZeroHedge
First it monopolized the online retail space; then it made a dramatic appearance in the bricks and mortar grocery sector with its acquisition of Whole Foods, and lately it has been preparing to take on both the pharmaceutical & healthcare sector, and even banking.
And it’s only just starting, because as Housing Wire notes, Amazon is now looking to get into the mortgage lending business. The company for which barriers to entry simply do not exist, was first reportedly planning on starting with offering checking programs first, then move into the debt product space after. And now, Housing Wire confirms that Amazon is currently looking to hire someone to lead their newly-formed mortgage lending division.
Here, a humorous aside from the report author, who refuses to provide the identity of the mortgage lender firm that Amazon has targeted:
Due to non-disclosure agreements, we probably shouldn’t reveal their identities. After all, with Amazon planning a move into mortgage lending, it’s best we work with them and not against them. Am I right?
… but gives the following hint:
We can say that if you look at the top 10 HMDA lenders and pick out the nonbanks, that’s where Amazon is recruiting their talent.
… and adds that “one person we spoke to turned down the job, but couldn’t say why.”
We are confident, however, that the next person Jeff Bezos speaks about the role of starting up Amazon’s mortgage lending division, will be delighted to accept.
The timing of Amazon’s entrance into the highly competitive sector is hardly coincidental: last month we reported that America’s formerly largest mortgage lender, Wells Fargo, just lost its title to Quicken:
Quicken revealed that it originated $25 billion in home loans during the quarter, compared with Wells Fargo’s $23 billion in home mortgages. Wells is the country’s leading bank in home mortgages; Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase & Co. reported $13 billion and $11 billion that quarter, respectively.
In other words, as of this moment, an “online” service is the most popular provider of mortgage loans in the US. It is this niche that Bezos has realized provides a major opportunity for Amazon, and he is not shy of making it clear that in just a few years, your mortgage lender will be none other than Jeff Bezos as Amazon continues on its unstoppable crusade of intergalatic domination.
via Amazon Sets Off To Become America’s Biggest Mortgage Lender
Facebook Sees 24% Drop In Average Time Spent On Site
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook insiders are dumping their shares.
While Facebook grapples with an explosion in overhead, expensive regulations in Europe (and possibly soon in the U.S.), a staggering decline in traffic, backlash over conservative purging and pedo questionnaires, and a former executive who went public in December with his “tremendous guilt” over helping to hook people on the “internet crack” that is social media – the Silicon Valley behemoth is facing a new challenge; a 24% drop in the average time spent on the site.
Now new numbers have been released that go through December, and the problem only seems to be getting worse. The updated data shows that Facebook’s core platform lost 18% in time spent, which is a huge change from the month before. This, says Pivotal, reflects a 24% decline in time spent per person.” Instagram, too, saw some poor engagement numbers. Though aggregated consumption went up, the user base went…
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Establishment Alarmed as Trump Threatens to Gut US “Democracy Promotion” Racket
The foreign policy establishment in Washington is crying foul after the Trump administration proposed to cut funding for organizations responsible for “promoting democracy abroad,” often in the guise of color revolutions.
The 2019 State Department budget request cuts the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) budget and separates it from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Funding for the institutes would be moved to the State Department, where NDI and IRI would have to compete with private contractors, according to the Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who described the proposal as “an assault not only on their organizations but also on the pro-democracy mission they are dedicated to.”
“If implemented, the proposal would gut the program, force crippling layoffs and the symbolic meaning would also be shattering, sending a signal far and wide that the United States is turning its back on supporting brave people who share our values,” NED President Carl Gershman told Rogin.
“The work our government does to promote democratic values abroad is at the heart of who we are as a country,” Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), chairman of the IRI’s board of directors, told Rogin. The NDI board is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
McCain actually wrote a letter protesting the proposal to the Office of Management and Budget in December. It was signed by four other senators, including McCain’s close ally Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida).
Trump’s people “just don’t believe it’s America’s business to push democracy abroad,” Rogin concluded.
His article quickly made the rounds of the Washington establishment circles, where it received praise from former CIA agent and failed presidential candidate Evan McMullin and New Republic columnist Jeet Heer. Nicholas Burns, who served as State Department spokesman under Albright, said the revelations will “make your blood boil” . . . .
via Establishment alarmed as Trump threatens to gut US ‘democracy promotion’ racket
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