…I…oh, what’s the point?

On Monday all pretence had been pushed aside. Out came the op note. Nigel Farage was to make an “emergency election announcement”.

…it’s tempting to say that reform decided to twist the electoral knife in the tories’ back…but…no…it’s the other thing

🚨 NEW: Piers Morgan confronts Nigel Farage for “bottling it” and mocks him for failing in his last seven attempts to run for election @piersmorgan / #bbcqt pic.twitter.com/WJ19QeY90s

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) May 30, 2024

…it wasn’t the whitehouse correspondents dinner…but…nige got showed up…& now nige is on a ballot…it’s all so bloody stupid you’d think the UK had decided playing elder statesman requires obvious signs of full-blown political dementia

Come Monday morning, Badenoch was unleashed on to the airwaves to talk about the latest Tory promise. A change to the Equalities Act. And the unfortunate person on the receiving end was Mishal Husain on Radio 4’s Today programme.

It got combative from the start. Kemi seemingly furious that Husain had actually done her homework. Badenoch did not want to be engaged on the details of the proposed changes. She appeared not to have given them a moment’s thought. Of more interest to her was a quick soundbite in an ongoing culture war. To create a wedge with Labour. Though in reality Labour and the Tories are not so far apart on trans issues these days.

Kemi got angrier and angrier, Husain never less than polite. “You’re trying to be difficult,” Badenoch snapped. She wasn’t. She was just curious how the law was going to be enacted without any legal paperwork. Were people going to be able to determine sex solely on the basis of their personal prejudices? They were. We finished with Kemi calling Mishal “trivial and unserious”. Code for “I’m out of my depth and I can’t admit I’m wrong”. Husain sighed and ended the interview. She had taken one for the team.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/03/lights-cameras-farage-nige-just-couldnt-bear-to-be-left-out

…there’s a debate tonight…but the sheer fucking “but your lot are worse” of britain’s idea of an electoral campaign season is…well on its way to becoming a parody of a political process…& there’s a month to go…oh, & speaking of parodies of process

Ex-president urges supreme court to annul guilty verdict in hush-money case [Guardian]

…fuck subtle…nobody gives a fuck…just go ahead & chat shit

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.

According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.

The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.

…&…not that you lot need reminding…but…it is what it looks like

No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Some of this aligns with Musk’s business interests. In India, he secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries.

But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are leading a movement against democracy.

…they…don’t believe in leading from the front…if only they got embarrassed on live television…then maybe they’d all be like nige & try to get elected in fucking clacton…& people might see what a fucking asshole they are

Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab last January in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on Trump’s policies while president. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump “grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked”.

Rubbish. Under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth under Trump was slower than it’s been under Biden.

Most of the benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase and wealthy individuals like Dimon, while the costs blew a giant hole in the budget deficit. If not for those Trump tax cuts, along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions, the ratio of the federal debt to the national economy would now be declining.

…these people literally want to fuck everything up…because they think that will go better for them than everyone else

When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted (in a podcast in November): “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes … Woke mind virus is communism rebranded.”

Communism rebranded? Hello?

A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and their fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

As Thiel wrote: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.

…& I don’t mean to undermine reich’s thesis or anything…but…your boy nige…ain’t that rich…aaron banks…maybe…some potential fans & backers from…uh…foreign climes…sure…but…actually nige…that’s as close as he comes to knowing what the little guy feels like…it’s like that book…what’s it called…you know…the one with the guy that seems ostentatiously successful but is really on his uppers…what does the great gatsby have to do with it…probably nothing…but…you know…style of the times & all

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – as Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and other billionaires are now putting on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump? [Guardian]

…funny thing…when you follow the money

The far-right Epoch Times media company was at the center of a fraudulent money-laundering and cryptocurrency scam involving tens of millions of dollars, the justice department said on Monday as it announced the indictment of its chief financial officer Bill Guan.

The 61-year-old executive “conspired with others to participate in a sprawling, transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67m of illegally obtained funds”, according to a statement from the US attorney’s office of the southern district of New York.

Proceeds went to the company, it said, and for the personal enrichment of individuals including Guan, who faces up to 70 years in prison on one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of bank fraud.
[…]
Guan is accused of masterminding a scheme in which he managed the media company’s “Make Money Online” team overseas, the justice department said.

“Under Guan’s management, members of the team and others used cryptocurrency to knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds, including proceeds of fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits, that had been loaded onto tens of thousands of prepaid debit cards,” the statement said.

The proceeds were then allegedly “laundered” through a certain cryptocurrency platform and turned into digital currency at 70 to 80 cents on the dollar, prosecutors said.

Team members then used stolen personal identification information to open accounts and funnel the profits there, and subsequently into accounts held in their own names.

Guan, of Secaucus, New Jersey, lied to investigators about the source of the money when they started looking into an extraordinary 410% increase in the Epoch Times’ annual revenue from approximately $15m to about $62m, the statement further alleges.

…should have used a SPAC…or at least a PAC…split the difference & go with the S-PAC…I mean…you’re doing the thing anyway

In October of last year, NBC News reported an even larger increase in the Epoch Times revenue base, of 685% over two years. NBC’s investigation charted the company’s rise from an obscure, fringe publication into a conservative powerhouse over a relatively short period of time, to the point it was directing millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s failed 2020 re-election campaign.

A 2021 report in the Guardian featured the Epoch Times among a number of US media outlets linked to Falun Gong, a religious movement engaged in decades-long opposition to the Chinese government.

One of the company’s aims, the report suggested, was to amplify efforts by Republicans to link Joe Biden and the Democratic party to the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and harden US public opinion against China.

DoJ accuses far-right Epoch Times of being money-laundering operation [Guardian]

…apparently those make transparent scams legally opaque…or at least it’s considered bad form to call it money laundering on the legal filings that way…some stuff is still pretty clear on aggregate, though

Debunking, prebunking and factchecking; correcting lies, fake news and race hate – battling disinformation before this week’s European elections has become a high-stakes, full-time job for hundreds of staff across the continent.

EU leaders are so concerned over foreign interference in the polls, due to take place from Thursday to Sunday, that they have put rapid alert teams on notice to swing into action in the event of a serious incident. Officials say the quantity of disinformation has reached “tsunami levels” – but political leaders have been the slowest to catch on.

“It’s as if we have been put to sleep by the peace dividend,” said one senior EU official, referring to Europe after the second world war. “It is like we have been infected by this foreign interference. It is a silent killer.”

The threat is not expected to end when the polls for the European parliamentary elections across 27 nations close at 10pm on Sunday. A disinformation crisis unit, set up in April as campaigning began, has been asked to continue for weeks after the elections to deal with attacks on the legitimacy of the results.

…all’s fair in love & war…or whatever

“Ten years ago we talked about election interference, but [Donald] Trump has shown us it is a lot easier, a lot cheaper just to question things. You don’t need to manipulate the vote.”

The unit allows member states to alert the rest of the bloc to threats they are seeing on their home turf. But it has also taken on a strategic role, with senior officials in the EU saying the aim is not to deal with each instance of fake news or race hate, but to go after “those who hold the trigger”.

This has allowed them to build a bigger picture to combat low-level foreign interference, particularly from Russia. “What they are trying to do is destroy the west’s way of life. Their aim is to undermine the trust in everything,” one official said.

“If you think about it, democracy is based on a free and fair vote and the assumption that citizens are informed. If you can no longer trust the information, you do not have a free vote.”

Senior EU experts who gathered to discuss the matter earlier this year heard estimates that Russia was spending €1bn on disinformation.

A Nato assistant secretary general, Marie-Doha Besancenot, told the audience of ministers, commissioners and MEPs there was “very acute awareness” that this was “a major threat”, so much so that allies agreed “hybrid operations could reach the level of an armed attack”.

…still…even with a figurative gun to their heads…your heads of state?

The EU external services unit, EUvsdisinfo, says Russia-backed disinformation is used “to smear leaders, foment distrust, flood social media with falsehoods, turn the public against Ukraine, and avoid comparisons uncomfortable to Putin’s Russia”.

An anonymous account on X, Radio Genoa, which has more than 735,000 followers and spews a stream of provocative videos to an audience of millions suggesting people of colour and Muslims are a danger to society, is one example. An investigation by the Belgian TV channel VRT found that 84% of the account’s videos were about migration, Muslims or people of colour. Its clips reached almost 3bn views in the year to April 2024, with one tweet questioning the rescue of people in the Mediterranean – shared by X’s owner, Elon Musk – receiving over 70m page-views.

The EU’s diplomatic service is also on high alert, supporting a network of factchecking operations. Recent claims included a hoax report in Greece that Germany had decriminalised online child sexual abuse. In Slovakia, pro-Kremlin channels spread false claims that the wife of the man accused of shooting the prime minister, Robert Fico, was a refugee from Ukraine.

Officials say they believe younger voters, who have grown up with social media, are instinctively alert to the new web of narratives, even those involving AI-generated content. The slowest out of the block, they say, are political leaders.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/04/disinformation-crisis-unit-european-parliamentary-elections

…so…while we let all that sop up the oxygen in “the debate”…the status quo keeps right on ante-ing up

Netanyahu May Face a Choice Between a Truce and His Government’s Survival [NYT]

…so…you could say this stuff is…not such a literal matter of life & death

Leaked internal documents have exposed the activities of a Russian state-backed legal defence foundation that European intelligence agencies and analysts say is in fact a Kremlin influence operation active in 48 countries across Europe and around the world.

Internal documents from the Fund for Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad (Pravfond) indicate that the foundation finances propaganda websites targeted at Europeans, helped pay for the legal defence of the convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout and the assassin Vadim Krasikov, and has employed a number of former intelligence officers as the directors of its operations in European countries.

The documents show that the group has spent millions of euros to finance propaganda and legal campaigns. Public data also shows that Pravfond’s local partners have received millions in state subsidies from a number of the European states where the foundation operates local branches, raising questions about the use of public funds and national security concerns just days before elections to the European parliament.

More than 40 Pravfond documents, obtained by the Danish public broadcaster DR from a European intelligence source and shared with a consortium of European journalists including the Guardian, show that the organisation has had a number of documented former intelligence agents among its leadership. They include Vladimir Pozdorovkin, who has been identified by European intelligence sources as an agent for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and in public records as Pravfond’s curator for its operations in the Nordic and Baltic countries; and Anatoly Sorokin, who the documents show is a member of the SVR and curates Pravfond’s Middle East, Moldova, and Transnistria division.

The head of the Institute of the Russian Diaspora, which is listed on official documents as Pravfond’s “project implementer”, is Sergey Panteleyev, who has been subject to sanctions in EU countries as a member of a Russian military intelligence unit that specialises in psychological-warfare operations.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian intelligence services and co-author of The Compatriots, said Pravfond appeared to be a “classic soft-power effort” and that the ties between intelligence and compatriot organisations were “well documented”. He noted that Andrey Milyutin, the deputy head of the department of operative information of the fifth service of Russia’s security agency, the FSB, was a member of the government’s committee on “compatriots living abroad”, indicating the link between intelligence activity and outreach to the Russian diaspora.

In a 2020 national security report, the Estonian security services called Pravfond a “pseudo legal protection system” that “in reality is an influence operations fund”, and they have said the FSB uses the groups to recruit collaborators abroad, including among supporters of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, many of whom had ties to the group.

Pravfond was founded in 2012 by presidential decree and was backed by the Russian ministry of foreign affairs and the federal agency Rossotrudnichestvo, which administers foreign aid and has been described by the head of Pravfond, Alexander Udaltsov, as a “unique element of Russian soft power”. Udaltsov has been subject to sanctions by the European Union since 2023 for “supporting and implementing actions and policies which undermine and threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine”.

…I know it was great when the west won the cold war & all…but…could someone point to the time when the active measures…weren’t?

A Pravfond budget document from 2014 also showed that the organisation had provided significant sums to fund the legal defences of Bout and the convicted drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko, both of whom later returned to Russia as part of prisoner exchanges negotiated between Moscow and Washington.

The documents also indicated that Pravfond had spent hundreds of thousands of euros to maintain several websites that purported to fight against “Russophobia” and promote the “defence of the Russian language” in Europe. It has also funnelled money to a number of fringe publications throughout Europe.

Documents obtained by the consortium showed that Pravfond funded the activities of golos.eu, an online portal that operates out of a post-office box in Brussels and mainly provides a vehicle for commentators to voice criticism of the Ukrainian government, particularly the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his top aides and military advisers.

Reached for comment by the Guardian, the Golos deputy editor Yuri Andriychenko denied that the site received money from Pravfond or had any links to the Russian state. He suggested that someone else had applied for grant funding using the site’s name, writing: “We are not surprised that someone in Russia is trying to make money on our name, because it is much easier than creating your own project.”

According to the internal documents, Pravfond also funds the activities of Euromore, another online portal that focuses heavily on purported threats to Russians in Europe. Euromore was “designed to take into account the closure of international platforms” such as RT and Sputnik by the EU authorities and “create its own significant alternative”, the documents said. Those sites were largely blacklisted in the west after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/02/revealed-russian-legal-defence-foundation-pravfond-europe

…but…we still have WaPo patting itself on the back for how clever it is to juxtapose

Another Committee to Confirm Our Conspiracy Theories comes up short [WaPo]

…with

Here’s how Trump could make America great [WaPo]

…because the clicks bait themselves…&…yes…the answer behind door #2 is “withdraw from the race”…but…you’re in a staring match…& I don’t think you get who wouldn’t blink when that happened…I mean…read your own fucking paper?

…only the other day you had horseshit statistics giving it large about how joe is too old for most young voters who anyway aren’t that liberal if you tweak your questionnaire just so & then squint right

…so…you really want to put a clean skin in on the other side of that ballot?

We’re letting Trump distract us from his corrupt, anti-climate agenda [also WaPo…little farther back]

…so…what…cut the head off that snake hydra…&…that’s the solve for that?

With the world’s gaze directed elsewhere, the specter of genocide again looms over the Darfur region in western Sudan.

…but…that kicked off like a year ago

The RSF has been laying siege to El Fasher for more than a month. The city’s population is swelling with refugees from other cities and towns across Darfur trying to escape the 13-month civil war. Because of widespread violence, many of El Fasher’s permanent residents are now themselves seeking refuge in crowded camps in the area.

…& gaza’s on a fresh 7-month bid for #1 bit of hell on earth in the headlines…so…maybe next year…after the elections

Although the siege of El Fasher began in earnest only a short time ago, conditions have been desperate for much longer. In February, international observers estimated that children were dying at a rate of one every two hours in the Zamzam internal displacement camp outside El Fasher. Today, aid is no longer getting through and acute famine appears imminent.

The fall of El Fasher would give the RSF near-total control of western Sudan and a significant upper hand in its battle for control of the country. As a result, widespread genocidal violence would likely return to Darfur.

…even W managed to call the last one a genocide

Although persecution of non-Arabs in Darfur never abated entirely, the coalition achieved some modest successes. In 2004, the African Union sent peacekeepers, who would later be “rehelmeted” as a United Nations force with Security Council authorization. In 2005, the Security Council also referred the case to the International Criminal Court, which would later issue warrants for the arrest of Janjaweed leaders and Sudanese government officials who had abetted the slaughter, including head of state Omar al-Bashir. In 2006, President George W. Bush, who had publicly used the word “genocide” to describe the situation, signed a bill levying sanctions on the Janjaweed and the Bashir regime.

…so…what are the odds this time?

Today, however, the Janjaweed are poised to succeed. If El Fasher falls, they could get the opportunity to complete their genocidal project. A Human Rights Watch report last month described in gruesome detail how, when the RSF overran the city of El Geneina last year, it embarked on a campaign of torture, rape, assassination and massacres of civilians. In October, BBC reporters arrived at similar conclusions regarding the RSF conquest of Nyala. For many of Darfur’s non-Arab citizens, El Fasher is the last refuge. When it falls, it is likely to be brutalized for resisting conquest for more than 20 years.
[…]
The RSF has calculated — up to this point, accurately — that it can afford to wait because the global response has been negligible. This in itself is a tragedy. It represents an abdication of the international community’s responsibility to protect a population under threat.

The world must respond urgently, although its options are dwindling by the day. The best course now would be to negotiate a cease-fire, allowing aid to come into the city. It appears, however, that only the United Arab Emirates, known to be the RSF’s major international sponsor, could apply the needed pressure to bring about a pause in fighting. Unfortunately, an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on May 24 yielded no tangible progress on a deal.

Genocide looms again in Darfur. Will the world stop it from happening? [WaPo]

…&…I’m not saying people getting murdered at scale on a compressed timeline isn’t more urgent a concern than the euphemistically described “excess deaths” caused by not taking that kind of line when…coincidentally…the stuff that makes the UAE the moneybags in that scenario…is…killing us…but…you know…softly

Michael Cohen’s family doxed after Trump guilty verdict in porn star hush money case [NBC]

…so…I shouldn’t be harsh

https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/jun/04/the-warring-conmen-at-the-heart-of-a-5bn-carbon-credit-scam

…or…draw specious comparisons

https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/finance-budget-committees-launch-joint-investigation-into-donald-trumps-quid-pro-quo-offer-to-big-oil

…that’s not how the game is played

A juror was dismissed Monday after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.

“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”

These seven are the first of 70 defendants expected to go to trial in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million. Eighteen others have pleaded guilty, and authorities said they recovered about $50 million in one of the nation’s largest pandemic-related fraud cases. Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property.
[…]
[The judge] didn’t decide immediately whether to detain the defendants, but she did order an FBI agent to confiscate the defendants’ phones.

The aid money came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was administered by the state Department of Education. Nonprofits and other partners under the program were supposed to serve meals to kids.

Two of the groups involved, Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition, were small nonprofits before the pandemic, but in 2021 they disbursed around $200 million each. Prosecutors allege they produced invoices for meals that were never served, ran shell companies, laundered money, indulged in passport fraud and accepted kickbacks.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/juror-says-someone-left-bag-120000-cash-promise-ll-acquit