As expected, the corporate media’s coverage of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment process is disappointingly superficial. While there’s no doubt sexual harassment is a pressing issue in modern-day America, left-leaning establishment outlets and individuals alike are mired in these accusations, as well as partisan political divides as they fail to recognize Kavanaugh’s very troublesome record of court rulings—rulings that show his verifiable proclivity toward using the government to very literally harass the American people and the rest of the world.
While Congress and the people bicker over their disagreements with Kavanaugh as he testifies, few are discussing what he has in common with both factions of the American ruling class....The article makes one wonder, is Kavanaugh a proto-fascist, as the US appears to be sliding down the slippery slope since 9/11?
Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: THE PUBLIC CHOICE OF PUBLIC CHOICE: “Now this… ‘financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation… [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence…Busted.
Pompeo — who was recently nominated by Trump to be Secretary of State — failed to disclose his business’ ties to a Chinese government oil and gas company in the questionnaire he was required to fill out to be confirmed as CIA director by the Senate.The Hill
The president-elect's control over conventional economic policy could be worth more money than any conflict of interest.…
Along with the many unprecedented problems they create, Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest, as with so many other things, illustrate in striking fashion an existing flaw in American democracy. The problem is corruption: the potential for elected officials to take actions that benefit themselves, their family, their friends, or their business associates rather than the country as a whole.…James Kwak's complaint is essentially that Donald Trump and his appointment of billionaires to his cabinet has eliminated the middleman in the graft that has enveloped US politics through campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door.
Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.
Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.The Intercept
WikiLeaks’ dump of messages to and from Clinton’s campaign chief offer an unprecedented view into the workings of the elite, and how it looks after itself.But, but, but, Putin!
Emphasis in lede.
- 'I have nothing to say about Wikileaks, other than I think we should all be concerned about what the Russians are trying to do to our election'
- Democratic nominee was responding to a question posed by DailyMail.com during a question and answer session on her plane
- Trump went on offense over the 'pay for play' agreement at a rally Friday
- Emial from Huma Abedin revealed how Clinton got King of Morocco to underwrite $12m Clinton Foundation summit
- Abedin revealed: 'The condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation.'
- She backed out of Marrakesh event amid a human rights storm after Abedin wrote: 'She created this mess and she knows it'
Hillary Clinton’s right hand women, Huma Abedin is now the central focus in the latest Hillary Clinton scandal.
New emails leaked from Judicial Watch show that Hillary Clinton was indeed dishing out favors as US Secretary of State to “important” donors of the Clinton Foundation.
Running interference in the Clinton pay-to-play scheme was Huma Abedin.
In the last eight months of Clinton’s tenure as US Secretary of State, Huma Abedin worked for both The Clinton Foundation, and as a “special government employee” at The State Department.
Bloomberg reports that Abedin’s two unique jobs places, into clear focus, Hillary Clinton’s conflict of interest while US Secretary of State…The Duran
Melchior Wathelet (lead image, left), the Advocate-General of the European Court in Luxembourg, publicly recommended on May 31 that the court should dismiss a challenge to the legality of European Union sanctions by the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Wathelet has a history of secret operations against Moscow. That history ought to have disqualified Wathelet from participating in the Rosneft case, lawyers at the court say.
“He should have done so voluntarily,” one of the lawyers adds. “Instead, Wathelet, along with the Belgian President of the Court, Koen Lenaerts, have kept the past secret, allowing a serious conflict of interest to influence the outcome of the case.”
As the minister of justice in his native Belgium, Wathelet supervised the Belgian state security service, and officially participated himself over several years in NATO spying, military operations and propaganda schemes against Russia and the Soviet Union.
Details of Wathelet’s involvement in NATO’s Operation Gladio were not known to Rosneft when Wathelet was assigned to the case. Rosneft’s Anglo-American law firm did not investigate Wathelet’s bacckgournd. Also, the law firm, Hage Joseph Aaronson, has kept from Rosneft the knowledge that one of their own lawyers was a long-serving officer in the US Defence Intelligence Agency.
Lawyers engaged in European Court cases in Luxembourg say they are astonished by the conflict of interest. “This case is hugely important,” said one source engaged in a parallel sanctions proceeding. “If Rosneft were to win, the legality of sanctions would collapse”. A London lawyer adds he is surprised that Rosneft management and its lawyers in Luxembourg failed to challenge Wathelet’s participation in the case.It gets worse:
Wathelet is not denying the information about his past involvement in NATO operations. He won’t explain why he and the presiding judge, Court President Koen Lenaerts, acted together to arrange his assessment of the Rosneft legal papers.…
Wathelet was forced out of the Belgian government in 1995. His exit followed charges of interference from the justice ministry in the faulty prosecution and early release from prison of members of a pedophile ring; they has been convicted of pandering to the sexual tastes of high Belgian officials. Wathelet was also accused of involvement in the ring himself, but no allegations came to court, and Wathelet has not been charged with wrongdoing. The challenge by the European parliament to his fitness as a European Court judge failed in 1997; read more.Helmer's post are generally longish and detailed, as this one is. Reading through it, one would conclude that the European enterprise is hopelessly compromised and "fixed." It should be completely dismantled. If internationalists wish to pursue it, they should start afresh, disqualifying all present participants and thoroughly vetting all new participants in an atmosphere of complete transparency to regain credibility.
Before the pedophile scandal led to Wathelet’s outing from Belgium and his promotion to the bench in Luxembourg, his involvement in Operation Gladio also came under official scrutiny by the Belgian senate in 1991. The Belgian investigation was triggered by disclosures in France and Italy, indicating that the US and British secret services had set up a NATO operation for recruiting, arming, training and operating groups of men in the NATO member states. Their mission to start with, according to the Belgium senate record, was to “stay behind” after invasion, and prepare resistance to occupation by enemy forces. Although Belgium has twice been occupied by German troops, and then by the British and American armies, the only enemy in the Gladio plan was to come from Moscow.
In practice, Gladio agents and their commanders were fanatical ideologues, German collaborators, haters of both Russia and communism, who organized violence against domestic left-wing organizations, as well as terrorist attacks against the general population. The Brabant killings in Belgium, which occurred between 1983 and 1985, have never been solved, but some investigations have believed Gladio operatives were involved.For details, click.…
It appears that the civilian commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States thinks that it is proper for him to endorse a candidate to succeed him while she is under scrutiny in a "criminal investigation" conducted by the FBI and DoJ. Both these agencies are, of course, fully under his command.I suspect that Trump is going to have a field day with this, as he should.
Guy Verhofstadt, the senior MEP who lambasted Alexis Tsipras in Brussels last week, is on the Board of two companies due to gain from Greek energy privatisation…and is paid €190,000 a year by billionaire Nicolas Boël to lobby to that end. He has also been hawkishly anti-Putin over the Ukraine issue, where the Boël dynasty plotted régime change as a means of gaining valuable fracking contracts.…
Many of you will doubtless have seen this Youtube vitriol aimed at Tsipras by Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt:
He’s a pretty unpleasant and vindictively sarcastic bloke who wants régime change in Greece more than most. But Verhofstadt’s vomit-inducing mélange of acrimony and sanctimony left out one rather important element: a declaration by this corrupt bombast that he has a personal financial interest in hounding Syriza from office.…It gets worse, much worse.
Members of Congress are chosen by the American people to faithfully represent them. Our constituents don't send us to Washington to audition for a job with a special interest group. Unfortunately, growing numbers of these public servants are leveraging their constituents’ trust for cold, hard cash after leaving Capitol Hill.
It wasn’t always this way. In 1974, only 3 percent of members of Congress became lobbyists after leaving office. But today that figure has jumped dramatically – 50 percent of Senators and 42 percent of House members become lobbyists after they leave Congress. In fact, the Center for Responsive Politics found there are now 28 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress.
The Center for Responsive Politics also found that over one third (27 out of 75) of members of Congress who left during or at the end of the 113th Congress have already taken up lobbying as a career. Over half of the former members of the 112th Congress are currently engaged in lobbying contracts.
It’s not hard to see why - a study by Republic Report found that, on average, lawmakers who became lobbyists boosted their salary by 1,452 percent, with many exchanging their public careers for seven-figure salaries.
As former representatives and senators move through the revolving door to K Street, they continue to earn pensions paid for by you, the American taxpayer, as they rake in huge salaries to lobby current federal legislators.Operationally, Rep. Loebsack is incorrect about taxpayers funding the federal government but practically speaking he is technically correct under the current rules of PAYGO.
