NYPost | Squatters are ruining entire neighborhoods in Atlanta and police
response to evict is so slow, some homeowners have resorted to paying
nuisances to leave.
“I’d be terrified in Atlanta to lease out one of my properties,” Matt Urbanski, who manages a local home-cleaning company, told Bloomberg.
Urbanski’s company cleans out homes for corporate landlords, and in some cases has to remove squatters’ possessions.
Recently one of his employees was shot after attempting to remove intruders from a property.Simon
Frost, CEO of large-scale landlord Tiber Capital Group, said there have
been incidents of unlawful occupants brandishing weapons and
threatening neighbors, which affects the safety of neighborhoods and
other residents, according to Bloomberg.
Evicting squatters in Atlanta is tough, involving negotiating court backlogs and strained police resources.
Meanwhile, online listings and virtual real estate agents make it
easy for squatters to identify vacant properties to break into.
Simon Frost, CEO of large-scale landlord Tiber Capital Group, said
there have been incidents of unlawful occupants brandishing weapons and
threatening neighbors, which affects the safety of neighborhoods and
other residents, according to Bloomberg.
Evicting squatters in Atlanta is tough, involving negotiating court backlogs and strained police resources.
Meanwhile, online listings and virtual real estate agents make it
easy for squatters to identify vacant properties to break into.
In October, an Atlanta neighborhood found itself at the center of a
scandal involving squatters who transformed a home into an illegal strip
club, complete with weekend parties and even live horses on the
property.
The drama unfolded in the South Fulton area, where four individuals —
DeAnthony Maddox, Jeremy Wheat, Kelvin Hall and Tarahsjay Forde — took
up residence without permission. Little did the neighbors know that the
4,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home with three bathrooms would become a
den of illicit activity.
The squatters ran the clandestine strip club, held noisy parties and
even organized car races in the street, ruining the neighborhood for
others, according to local reports.
KCUR | You know how holiday stuff is expensive when you most want to buy it, but cheaper after the holidays?
The same dynamic will soon apply to what you pay for electricity on the Missouri side of the Kansas City area.
All
of Evergy’s Missouri customers will see a steep price hike for the
electricity they burn during the peak demand hours of late afternoon and
early evening.
It’s called time-of-use pricing and Jim Busch, the director of
industry analysis at the Missouri Public Service Commission, said it
makes sense.
“When you look at the overall benefits to the
consumers and the company and society as a whole,” he said, “it’s a
better path to go down.”
Evergy's change to the time-sensitive model comes with particularly dramatic upticks.
Electricity
costs more to generate at peak times, like summer evenings when
everyone’s running their air conditioners. Companies have to fire up
auxiliary generators to meet that demand.
That means burning
natural gas. Cranking up those gas plants costs more to kick out the
same power than coal, solar, wind and nuclear.
Time-of-use rates
reflect that added cost. Customers pay something closer to the actual
cost to produce power at a given time — and have an incentive to use
less electricity when it costs the most to produce.
Power
companies already send out bills based on time-of-use rates in much of
the western U.S. Evergy has allowed customers in both Missouri and
Kansas to voluntarily opt-in to variable price billing for years. And
the method is catching on, Busch.
But there’s something different about the time-of-use billing schedule for Missouri that Evergy customers will see this fall.
Typically,
the price of electricity varies only slightly over the course of the
day. Rates may go up or down one or two cents per kilowatt hour.
Some
Missouri Evergy customers, on the other hand, will see rates fluctuate
dramatically. Under the default plan, customers will be charged 9 cents a
kilowatt hour most of the time. But the rate vaults up to 38 cents
between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. on summer evenings. That’s a 322% spike.
“That is a huge increase,” said Daniel Zimny-Schmitt at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “There’s no way around that.”
He
said 38 cents a kilowatt hour, the top rate under Evergy’s default
plan, would mark one of the most expensive residential electricity rates
in the country outside of California.
The default plan —Evergy
brands it “Standard Peak Saver" — is one of four options that Missouri
Evergy customers can choose from by October. If you don’t do anything to
your Evergy account, that’s the billing structure you’ll have.
public |Last May, Oakland police arrested nine teenagers for a string
of almost three dozen robberies throughout the East Bay. In one of the
robberies, the juveniles brutally attacked
a 63-year-old woman in a busy upscale Oakland shopping district,
beating her in the head and dragging her by her hair across the
sidewalk. Then, they attacked a bystander who tried to intervene.
Within days, the perpetrators were set free with no charges.
When
you share stories like this one on social media, by far the most common
refrain you hear is, “They voted for this.” And that’s true: Last year,
Pamela Price, the far-left District Attorney for Alameda County, won
her election by a decisive 53%. Sheng Thao, the current Mayor of
Oakland, who once called to defund the police, won by a sliver.
But
even the most ardent criminal justice reform voters never imagined they
were voting for what Oakland has become. Crime has become a fixture of
daily life in the East Bay, and nowhere more than in Oakland. In the
most recent crime report
available, crime was up 28% in the city over the same week last year,
which was itself a huge crime year. Violent crime has increased by 19%,
robbery is up 30%, burglary by 44%, and auto theft by 52%. Oakland has
had 10,000 car burglaries so far this year, which is about one for every 43 residents.
Now,
the explosion of crime, which has impacted just about every Oakland
resident’s day-to-day life, is transforming the politics of this
famously ultra-progressive city.
“She is on the criminals’ side,”
an Oakland resident said of the District Attorney at a town hall meeting
on public safety. “To any of you who voted for her: Shame on you, and
elections have consequences. She told us what she was going to do, and
somehow, the majority of people in this town voted for her anyway.”
The room exploded in applause.
Price
ran on a decarceration platform. She defends her policies as the right
thing to do and says she is being unfairly blamed for rising crime. At a
recent community meeting, Price said she had let the kids who committed
the robbery spree go free because the youths were masked, and her
office could not discern which of the thieves was responsible for which
of the attacks.
She went on: “All counties across the state have
been asked to decriminalize young people. And so our county has adopted
that as a policy.”
The line was not a crowd-pleaser. A friend of
the 63-year-old victim, who had witnessed the crime, described putting
her friend in an ambulance and sending her to the emergency department.
“I just want to say that there must be consequences,” she told Price.
The audience clapped and cheered.
WSJ | You may
have heard that a mob of teenagers looted stores in downtown
Philadelphia on Tuesday night, and Target said the same day it is
closing nine stores in four states because of rampant crime. Rack up
more victories for progressive prosecutors.
The mobs in Philly hit Apple, Lululemon and Foot Locker stores in Center City, which ought to be a safe space
for civilized commerce. The Foot Locker store was “ransacked in a
coordinated attack,” said police. Police have made more than 50 arrests
and are investigating property damage and theft elsewhere in the city.
Some 76 incidents have been reported.
Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford
said police are looking into whether “there was possibly a caravan of a
number of different vehicles that were going from location to
location.” He added, “Everyone in the city should be angry.”
Anger is justified in particular toward District Attorney Larry Krasner, who waves away property crime. His office reports
424 retail theft charges so far in 2023—compared to more than 1,500 by
the same date in 2017, the year before he took office. Reports of retail
theft in Philly have increased by more than 30%—to 13,330—compared to a
year ago, according to the city’s latest weekly crime report.
Retail theft is a nationwide epidemic, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey
released Tuesday. For the 2022 fiscal year, retailers reported a
“shrink” rate of 1.6%, mostly from theft, which as a percentage of all
retail sales would be a $112.1 billion loss for the industry, says NRF.
“We
cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized
retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and
contributing to unsustainable business performance,” Target said in
explaining its decision to close two stores in Seattle, three in
Portland, Ore., three in San Francisco and Oakland, and one in New York.
Target said the closures are despite efforts to prevent theft by
“adding more security team members, using third-party guard services,
and implementing theft-deterrent tools across our business.” CEO Brian Cornell said in May that Target could lose $500 million from shrink.
More
than a quarter of retailers in the NRF survey reported closing stores
because of violence and crime, and 45% reduced operating hours. Of the
cities in Target’s closure list, all but Portland make the NRF survey’s
top-10 cities for organized retail crime in 2022.
George Soros
and the progressive DAs he finances claim to be helping the poor and
minorities, but those communities are the main victim of rampaging
theft. The Target store shutting down in New York is in Harlem, which
staged a renaissance during the Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg mayoralties. It is now sliding back into crime and disorder.
thephiladelphiacitizen | In the post-mortem press conference of Tuesday night’s looting
throughout the city, Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford went to
great pains to make clear that those who broke into stores to steal and
destroy property had nothing to do with the protest that preceded the
marauding mob. That was a peaceful gathering in reaction to Judge Wendy Pew’s mystifying dismissal of all charges for the shooting and killing of Eddie Irizzary
by police officer Mark Dial. What followed, Stanford said, was
committed by “criminal opportunists” who were “taking advantage of a
situation” and trying “to destroy our city … This had nothing to do with
the protests.”
He’s no doubt right, on one level. But on another, his analysis begs
some deeper context. Judging by the social media chatter, it wasanger over the judge’s ruling that at least prompted some chatter about an anti-social response: “WHAT TIME WE GOING SHOPPING?” read one post.
But let’s widen our lens even further. There’s plenty of evidence,
which we’ll get to, that civic disorder is viral in nature. Citizenship
is, after all, a social compact. We live together voluntarily, and when
messages get sent time and again that our once agreed-upon rules no
longer apply, or that they only apply to some, we know what happens: The
compact breaks. We get anarchy. We get nihilism. We get streets that feel unsafe, even if crime rates are coming down.
We are in a crisis of disorder
Make no mistake: Philadelphia, like other cities, finds itself in a
crisis of disorder — the bigger picture Stanford didn’t touch on. Think
about the messages Philadelphia sends out every day: Shoplifting under
$500 is all but legal now. ATVs can menacingly roar through city streets with impunity, despite a law signed by former Mayor Michael Nutter banning the same. So-called drag racing “meet-ups” are hijacking city roads and highways in the dead of night. In Kensington, police practice a policy of containment
when it comes to perhaps the most dystopian scene in the nation. And
now, a municipal court judge extends a special privilege and lets a
police officer walk for an act that certainly warranted a full hearing
in a court of law.
“Our clients never get to argue a justification defense at a
preliminary hearing,” Keisha Hudson of the Defender Association of
Philadelphia wrote in a statement after Pew’s stunning dismissal of the
charges against Dial. “Instead, our clients — all of whom are poor and
almost exclusively Black and Brown people — have their cases held for
trial, and they sit in jail for months awaiting their day in court.”
Obviously, this is no excuse for looting and rioting and other
antisocial acts. But how many times do we have to see that law-breaking
is contagious when laws are not enforced? Which brings us back to the
broken windows theory of policing, which I’ve written about before.
“We found that when
people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate
rule, they are more likely to violate even other norms or rules, which
causes disorder to spread.” — researchers in a Science study.
Oh, no, he didn’t. Isn’t broken windows discredited? No. A Northeastern University study — which was essentially a study of studies — tried to debunk it, but unwittingly validated it.
(“Disorder does not encourage crime, but makes it easier to commit
crimes” essentially parrots the theory.) But wasn’t broken windows
racist? Hells, no. In the popular debate, broken windows has often
erroneously gotten lumped in with stop-and-frisk tactics — and the concomitant legitimate concerns of racial profiling.
Broken windows, which legendary former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton employed to turn around crime rates in both New York and
Los Angeles, is a theory of policing that mitigates against the virus
of disorder. That’s much needed in a city where a judge refuses to hold a
cop accountable, where kids are drag racing at 2am, where shots ring
out on crowded streets, and where shoplifters are effectively playing The Price Is Right in retail outlets every day.
Broken windows grew out of an Atlantic magazine article
written in 1982 by Harvard’s James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, a
criminal justice professor at Rutgers University. At a time when
policing was mostly reactive, they argued that small things matter in
communities, and that when nothing is done about the small things, they
grow to become big things. Prior to his passing a few years ago, Kelling
explained in Politico:
We expressed this in a metaphor. Just
as a broken window left untended in a building is a sign that nobody
cares, leading typically to more broken windows — more damage — so
disorderly conditions and behaviors left untended in a community are
signs that nobody cares and lead to fear of crime, more serious crime,
and urban decay. Good broken windows policing seeks partners to address
it: social workers, city code enforcers, business improvement district
staff, teachers, medical personnel, clergy, and others. Arrest of an
offender is supposed to be a last resort — not the first.
Here’s what’s critical: They came to this conclusion by actually
listening to those in poor, mostly minority, communities who were most
proximate to the problem. Even in neighborhoods with high murder rates,
residents would list comparatively minor transgressions like graffiti,
teens drinking beer in public parks, and subway turnstile jumping as
their top concerns. Why? Because they’d seen the degree to which, once
those conditions ran rampant, gun violence was not far behind. Add drag racing and judges who make up the rules as they go along to that list, right?
endoftheamericandream | It can be difficult to believe that the wild scenes that we are
witnessing on the streets of America are actually real. Earlier this
week, I wrote an article entitled “What Life Is Really Like In America’s Hellish Inner Cities”.
I wrote that article before the widespread looting that just erupted in
Philadelphia. Just when I think that conditions in our core urban
areas have reached a low point, they seem to find a way to get even
worse. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of this crisis. As
economic conditions continue to deteriorate,
countless numbers of people will become very desperate. And when
countless numbers of people become very desperate, our society will
descend into a permanent state of chaos.
On Tuesday night, dozens of young people went on a rampage in the city of Philadelphia.
Dozens of people faced criminal charges Wednesday after a
night of social media-fueled mayhem in which groups of thieves,
apparently working together, smashed their way into stores in several
areas of Philadelphia, stuffing plastic bags with merchandise and
fleeing, authorities said.
A total of 52 arrests have been made so far, police said Wednesday.
Burglary, theft and other counts have been filed so far against at
least 30 people, all but three of them adults, according to Jane Roh,
spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.
he largest group consisted of approximately 100 young people, and
there was violence when the police finally confronted that group outside of a Lululemon store…
Police in the city said that a large group of around 100 juveniles kept moving from store to store and looting them.
Videos shared on social media show officers attempting to grab
thieves, some of whom are wearing Halloween masks, as they run riot
through a Lululemon store.
One officer manages to hit one of the looters with a punch after tackling them to the ground.
Many on social media seem to be quite entertained by videos of the
looting, but the truth is that this footage should break all of our
hearts.
First, there appears to be evidence that Joe
Biden lied to the public for years in denying knowledge of his son’s
business dealings. Hunter Biden’s ex-business associate, Tony
Bobulinski, has said repeatedly that he discussed some dealings directly
with Joe Biden. Devon Archer, Hunter’s close friend and partner,
described the president’s denials of knowledge as “categorically false.”
Second, we know that more than $20 million was
paid to the Bidens by foreign sources, including figures in China,
Ukraine, Russia and Romania. There is no apparent reason for the
multilayers of accounts and companies other than to hide these
transfers. Some of these foreign figures have allegedly told others they
were buying influence with Joe Biden, and Hunter himself repeatedly invoked his father’s name — including a text exchange with a Chinese businessman in
which he said his father was sitting next to him as Hunter demanded
millions in payment. While some Democrats now admit that Hunter was selling the “illusion” of influence and access to
his father, these figures clearly believed they were getting more than
an illusion. That includes one Ukrainian businessman who reportedly
described Hunter as dumber than his dog.
Third, specific demands were made on Hunter,
including dealing with the threat of a Ukrainian prosecutor to the
Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter was given a lucrative
board position. Five days later,
Joe Biden forced the Ukrainians to fire the prosecutor, even though
State Department and intelligence reports suggested that progress was
being made on corruption. Likewise, despite warnings from State
Department officials that Hunter was undermining anti-corruption efforts
in Ukraine, he continued to receive high-level meetings with then-Secretary of State John Kerry and other State Department officials.
Fourth, Hunter repeatedly stated in emails that he paid his father as much as half of
what he earned. There also are references to deals that included free
office space and other perks for Joe Biden and his wife; other emails
reference how Joe and Hunter Biden would use the same accounts and credit cards. Beyond those alleged direct benefits, Joe Biden clearly benefited from money going to his extended family.
Fifth, there is evidence of alleged criminal conduct by Hunter that could be linked to covering up these payments, from the failure to pay taxes to the failure to register as a foreign lobbyist.
What is not established is the assumption by many that Joe Biden was
fully aware of both the business dealings and any efforts to conceal
them.
The White House is reportedly involved in
marshaling the media to swat down any further investigation. In a letter
drafted by the White House Counsel’s office, according to a CNN report media
executives were told they need to “ramp up their scrutiny” of House
Republicans “for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.” It is a
dangerous erosion of separation between the White House and the
president’s personal legal team. Yet, many in the media have previously
followed such directions from the Biden team — from emphasizing the
story that the laptop might be “Russian disinformation” to an
unquestioning acceptance of the president’s denial of any knowledge of
his son’s dealings.
Notably, despite the vast majority of media echoing different defenses for
the Bidens for years, the American public is not buying it. Polls show
that most Americans view the Justice Department as compromised and
Hunter Biden as getting special treatment for his alleged criminal
conduct. According to a recent CNN poll, 61% of Americans believe Joe
Biden was involved in his family’s business deals with China and
Ukraine; only 1% say he was involved but did nothing wrong.
Hawaii is unique. The islands and what was the Kingdom of Hawaii have been victims of colonialism. The Hawaiian people’s fear of a land grab is real, and based on historic actions of both Britain and the United States. The 1993 Appology Resolution from US Congress on this was a small step in the right direction. There is still a strong sovereignty movement in Hawaii who seek sovereignty from the US. This issue ties in with that. No different than the history of Continental North America, and even presently, Indiginous peoples are always faced with others trying to take their land for monetary gain. Hawaiians are not recognized as “Native Americans”, but the historic facts would support that the Hawaiian people do hold Indiginous title/Aboriginal title/Native title to the islands.
It is kind of like banning Indian names for football teams while taking away their land and keeping them on a reservation. The government will probably ban the word "aloha" and use of leis while taking away their land. Uncle Ben and Aunt Jamaima scenario, we cannot have anything that reminds us how the Democrats oppressed people outside of their hate groups. Be ready for any reminder of Maui being take off the shelves.
I am not surprised that liberals do not realize that negating cultural appropriation is the epitome or embodiment of racism. Telling people to stay in their own lane, or race that is, is what people in the klan used to always say. Dumbing down people in public schools was entirely effective.
npr | Hawaii's governor vowed "to keep the land in local people's hands"
when Maui rebuilds from a deadly wildfire that incinerated a historic
island community, as local schools began reopening.
Gov. Josh
Green said Wednesday that he had instructed the state attorney general
to work toward a moratorium on land transactions in Lahaina. He
acknowledged the move will likely face legal challenges.
"My
intention from start to finish is to make sure that no one is victimized
from a land grab," Green said at a news conference. "People are right
now traumatized. Please do not approach them with an offer to buy their
land. Do not approach their families saying they'll be much better off
if they make a deal. Because we're not going to allow it."
Also Wednesday, the number of dead reached 111, and Maui police said
nine victims had been identified, and the families of five had been
notified. A mobile morgue unit with additional coroners arrived Tuesday
to help process and identify remains.
The cause of the
wildfires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, is under
investigation. Hawaii is increasingly at risk from disasters, with
wildfire rising fastest, according to an Associated Press analysis of
FEMA records.
Since flames consumed much of Lahaina about a
week ago, locals have feared that a rebuilt town could be even more
oriented toward wealthy visitors, Lahaina native Richy Palalay said
Saturday at a shelter for evacuees.
Hotels and condos "that we can't afford to live in — that's what we're afraid of," he said.
Many
in Lahaina were struggling to afford life in Hawaii before the fire.
Statewide, a typical starter home costs over $1 million, while the
average renter pays 42% of their income for housing, according to a
Forbes Housing analysis, the highest ratio in the country by a wide
margin.
theeconomiccollapseblog | In order for a civilized society to function, most people have to
willingly follow the rules of that society. If that happens, law
enforcement authorities can deal with the few that choose to be
lawless. For generations, that is how things worked in America. There
was a high standard of morality among the general population, and so the
police were able to successfully handle the few bad apples that
insisted on breaking the law. But now everything has changed. As a
result of decades of extreme moral decay, lawlessness is rampant and
there are vast multitudes of young people that openly flaunt the rules
of our society. In fact, there are already some areas of the country
that are literally on the verge of being ungovernable.
A perfect example of what I am talking about happened in southern California on Saturday.
Shoppers at the Westfield Topanga mall in Canoga Park
were in for quite a shock when dozens of thieves ransacked the Nordstrom
inside the mall on Saturday, Aug. 12, smashing displays and stealing an
estimated $60,000- $100,000 worth of merchandise, authorities said.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded to the mall at around 4
p.m. after hearing reports that between 20 and 50 people ran through the
Nordstrom grabbing merchandise, leaving some on the ground and taking
armfuls with them.
When I was growing up, this sort of thing simply did not happen.
But now we are seeing mobs of looters go haywire all over the nation on a regular basis.
Apparently these young people are not exactly languishing in poverty, because a BMW and a Lexus were among the getaway vehicles that they used…
After grabbing between $60,000 and $100,000 worth of
goods, the crew fled in several cars including a BMW and a Lexus, cops
said.
At least one guard was doused with bear spray — which causes violent
eye and respiratory irritation in humans. The guard was treated by
paramedics.
How are we supposed to respond to this?
As I stated earlier, we are seeing robberies of this nature so often now.
Several days earlier, dozens of young people looted the Yves Saint Laurent store in Glendale…
Earlier this week a high-end designer store in Glendale,
California was looted by dozens of people in another flash mob burglary
on Tuesday.
At least 30 suspects “flooded” the Yves Saint Laurent store in The
Americana at Brand Tuesday afternoon and stole clothing and other
merchandise before fleeing on foot and leaving the location in numerous
vehicles, said police in a statement.
The total loss is estimated to be approximately $300,000.
Some people attempt to downplay the severity of these crimes by
saying that these big corporate retailers can afford the losses they are
experiencing.
No, they can’t.
Overall, U.S. retailers will lose more than 100 billion dollars due to theft this year alone.
This has become a major national crisis, and as J. Lee Grady has aptly pointed out, we truly have become “the land of the free-for-all”…
It
came as British travellers were warned about the risk of curfews and
travel restrictions due to the spiralling upheaval and vandalism around
France.
A
domestic intelligence note seen by Le Monde has warned riots could
become increasingly “widespread” and go on for “the coming nights”.
The
French government announced on Friday that all major public gatherings
that could “pose a risk to public order” would be banned. Various rock
concerts have been pulled. Some 45,000 police were deployed.
The
Interior Ministry said 994 arrests were made during Friday night, with
more than 2,500 fires. The night before, 917 people were arrested
nationwide, 500 buildings targeted, 2,000 vehicles burned and dozens of
stores ransacked.
While
the number of overnight arrests was the highest yet, there were fewer
fires, cars burned and police stations attacked around France than the
previous night, according to the Interior Ministry. Gerald Darmanin,
France’s interior minister, claimed the violence was of “much less
intensity”.
Hundreds
of police and firefighters have been injured, including 79 overnight,
but authorities have not released injury tallies for protesters.
Protests
have continued into a fourth night, with rioters in Paris on Saturday
night setting fire to a bus and clashing with police. Unrest has also
spread to Lyon and Grenoble.
Meanwhile, security will be beefed up during the upcoming Tour de France bike race, which is due to start in Spain on Saturday.
In
updated travel advice, the Foreign Office said: “Locations and timing
of riots are unpredictable. You should monitor the media, and avoid
areas where riots are taking place.”
The New York Times had run a story on one of his shady deals with the
Chinese and his father, then vice president, was pulled into the
vortex.
It appears that Hunter was in a free fall and his uncle Jim Biden reportedly reached out in newly discovered messages to offer him a “safe harbor.”
The exchange is an insight into a train wreck of a life of the scion of one of the most powerful families in the country.
However, it is also insight into a world of influence peddling where
millions simply evaporated in the coffers of the Biden family.
On their face, the messages seem to contradict public statements from President Biden on the foreign-influence peddling that was used to fund Hunter’s drug-infused, self-destructive lifestyle.
The Times story caused a panic in the Biden family.
Despite a largely supportive media, the Bidens have long been known for influence peddling.
Jim Biden has been repeatedly criticized for marketing his access to his brother in pitches to clients.
Hunter knew that the Times story was only the tip of an iceberg.
As revealed recently by the House Oversight Committee, the Bidens
constructed a labyrinth of corporations and accounts to transfer
millions from these deals to a variety of Biden family members,
including grandchildren.
The laptop includes pictures and appointments of Hunter’s foreign business associates with Joe Biden.
It also includes a recording concerning a Times report on Dec. 12,
2018, detailing Hunter’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the head of CEFC
China Energy Company.
Ye would later be arrested for corruption.
As Biden associates pushed the Times to change aspects of the story, Joe Biden called to report on the results.
In his message, Biden ends his call to Hunter with the statement “I
think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance, give me a call, I
love you.”
The new messages indicate that the Bidens were worried that Hunter
was in a free fall as these dealings were becoming known and revenue was
declining.
Jim Biden appears to be rushing to get Hunter to work the problem with the family.
He assures him that they can find him “a safe harbor” and that “I can work with you[r] father alone!”
Hunter previously complained that he was giving as much as half of
his proceeds to his father and was now facing towering financial
demands.
He appears to have cut off the family.
That is a dangerous development for a man who had a long struggle with drugs and alcohol.
counterfire | It is not surprising that Marx’s concept of class is unpopular in the
mainstream. Marx’s picture of a brutally divided society with organised
robbery at its heart amounts to a devastating moral condemnation of
capitalism. It also directly contradicts the various ways in which the
establishment want us to understand the world we live in. Their
preferred model of society is a giant market in which individuals
interact freely and equally. In reality, of course, individuals are born
into society with drastically different levels of wealth. Marx stressed
however that it is the way production is organised that more than anything shapes society. ‘The arrangement of distribution’ he says in Capital,
‘is entirely dependent on the arrangement of production’. What people
consume, even what people regard as needs, depends in the first instance
on what is produced in any given society. The way the goods are
distributed depends on the distribution of wealth, itself determined by
one’s position in the productive process.
Politicians also like to tell us ‘we are all in it together.’ This
illusion can only gain traction because the economy appears to operate
independently of human will and control. The idea can’t survive contact
with an understanding that the whole system is driven by a tiny minority
forcing profit from the labour of the many. We are also told that
capitalist investors are ‘wealth creators’. Looked at from the point of
view of class, the capital that an investor brings to the table has been
extracted – stolen – from past labour. The investor is simply recycling
the spoils to make still more money.
Marxism also challenges the idea that capitalism will ‘lift up’ the
poor over time. Capitalism has produced unimaginable wealth, but as Marx
predicted, its drive to keep wages down means that for most of its
existence the distribution of that wealth has become more and more
unequal. Forty years of neoliberal capitalism has brought us to the
extraordinary point at which just eight men are worth as much as half
the world’s population. Marx’s analysis leads to the devastating
conclusion that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Generalised poverty and inequality are a necessary outcome of a system based on competition for profit.
The most radical aspect of all of Marx’s class analysis is however
that it shows that in the process of conquering the world and achieving
by far the highest levels of exploitation in history, capitalism has
created its own nemesis, its own ‘grave digger’ in the working class.
Marx believed workers had the potential to overthrow existing conditions
for a number of reasons. The first was directly economic. The fact that
workers are denied the material benefits of a more and more productive
society gave them an immediate interest in resistance. The second was
that the degradation experienced by most of humanity under capitalism
was concentrated in the working class. The denial of human
self-fulfilment, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’, was most
acutely experienced in exploitation and its attendant alienation.
Workers have through their experience the most acute consciousness of
the immensely destructive and degrading capacities of capitalist
accumulation.
Secondly, as well as having an interest in change, workers have the
means to make it happen. Just as workers rely entirely on capitalists
for their livelihood, capitalists are completely dependent on workers
for their profits. Powerless as individuals, collectively, workers have
immense potential power. As Marx put it, ‘of all the instruments of
production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class
itself’. By forcing huge numbers of workers together at the point of
production, capitalism creates a counter-power. Struggles over pay and
conditions have the capacity to generalise into a political conflict
between different class organisations:
Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people
unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the
maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their
boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination…
If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages,
combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as
the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and
in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association
becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…In this struggle – a
veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle
unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a
political character.
Turley | This week, Blinken was implicated in a political coverup that
could well have made the difference in the 2020 election. According to
the sworn testimony of former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell,
Blinken – then a high-ranking Biden campaign official – was “the
impetus” of the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop
story was really Russian disinformation. Morrell then organized dozens
of ex-national security officials to sign the letter claiming that the
Hunter laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian
information operation.”
Morrell further admitted that the Biden campaign “helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.”
Finally, he admitted that one of his goals was not just to warn about
Russian influence but “to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate
and to assist him in winning the election.”
Help it did. Biden claimed in a presidential debate that the laptop story was “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan.” Biden used the letter to say “nobody believes” that the laptop is real.
In reality, the letter was part of a political plan with the direct
involvement of his campaign, but Biden never revealed their involvement.
Indeed, over years of controversy surrounding this debunked letter, no
one in the Biden campaign or White House (including Blinken) revealed
their involvement.
Of course, the letter was all the media needed. Discussion of the
laptop was blocked on social media, and virtually every major media
outlet dismissed the story before the election.
That was also all Biden needed to win a close election. The
allegations that the Biden family had cashed in millions through
influence peddling could have made the difference. It never happened, in
part because of Blinken’s work.
Once in power, Blinken was given one of the top Cabinet positions. He was now one of the “made” men of the administration.
He was not alone. The 2016 election was marred by false allegations
of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Unlike the influence
peddling allegations made against Biden, the media ran with those
stories for years. It later turned out that the funding and
distribution of the infamous Steele dossier originated with the Clinton
campaign. The campaign, however, reportedly lied in denying any such
funding until after the election. It was later sanctioned for hiding the
funding as legal expenses.
Those
involved in spreading this false story were rewarded handsomely. For
example, the second collusion story planted in the media by the
campaign concerned the Russian Alfa Bank. The campaign used key Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who went public with the entirely false claim of a secret back channel between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
Sullivan was also a “made” man who was later made Biden’s national
security adviser. Others who were implicated in either the Steele
dossier or Alfa Bank hoaxes also later found jobs in the administration.
The Brookings Institution proved a virtual turnstile for these political operatives.
Many signatories on the Russian disinformation letter continue to flourish. MSNBC analyst Jeremy Bash signed
the letter and was put on the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
As with Sullivan, it did not seem to matter that Bash had gotten one of
the most important intelligence stories of the election wrong.
Former CIA head James Clapper was referenced by Biden on the letter
and was also a spreader of the Russian collusion claims. Despite those
scandals and a claim of perjury, CNN gave him a media contract.
They are all “made” men in the Beltway, but they could not have succeeded without a “made” media.
The murder of Seth Rich occurred on July 10, 2016, at 4:20
a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Rich died
about an hour and a half after being shot twice in the back. The
perpetrators were never apprehended; police suspected he had been the
victim of an attempted robbery.
The 27-year-old Rich was an employee of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC), and his murder spawned several right-wing conspiracy
theories, including the false claim, contradicted by the law enforcement
branches that investigated the murder, that Rich had been involved with
the leaked DNC emails in 2016. It was also contradicted by the July
2018 indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents for hacking
the e-mail accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials and by
the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion the leaked DNC emails were
part of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Fact-checking websites like PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org stated
that the theories were false and unfounded. The New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times and The Washington Post wrote that the promotion of these
conspiracy theories was an example of fake news.
Well, that is not what really had happened.
Yes, Seth Rich worked as IT administrator for the Democratic National
Committee. He was a fan of Bernie Sanders. During the 2016 primaries
DNC functionaries did their best to work against Bernie Sanders and for
Hillary Clinton. To make that public Seth Rich collected an archive of
all DNC emails, copied it onto an USB stick and looked for someone who
would publish them.
UPDATE 20:00 UTC
The former British ambassador Craig Murray said that he was given the USB stick by an intermediary of a disgusted Democratic whistleblower and brought it from Washington DC to Wikileaks
which eventually published the emails. The data involved were not only
from the DNC but also from Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta:
WikiLeaks made the DNC messages public in July and the
incriminating emails from Podesta were published in October. The
messages predominantly showed that DNC officials were bent on sabotaging
the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary
Clinton. Murray insisted that the information was leaked and not hacked
by Russia.
“Neither of the leaks came from the Russians. The source had legal
access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not
hacks…leakers were motivated by disgust at the corruption of the Clinton
Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field
against Bernie Sanders.”
/End Update/
Craig Murray did not mention Seth Rich. Up to last week we did not know if Seth Rich really made contact with Wikileaks.
But we did know that the DNC was never 'hacked' by anything Russia.
The date/timestamps of the leaked files were consistent with local
copying and inconsistent with an internet transfer. The company
Crowdstrike which was hired to protect the DNC's networks and which did
an investigation into the case never observed an actual 'Russian' hack
or any data exfiltration from the DNC network. As ITwirewrote in May 2020:
The controversial American security firm CrowdStrike, which
was called in to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in
2016, had no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated
despite public assertions that this had occurred, according to the
transcript of an interview released by the US Government a few days ago.
The transcript was from an interview conducted with CrowdStrike's
president of services and chief security officer Shawn Henry by the US
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, but
only released to the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller who conducted a
two-year inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential
poll.
While the exfiltration of emails from the DNC server has been
accepted as a proven fact, Henry's answers to queries from committee
members make it clear that this was definitely not the case.
In one typical exchange, Henry was asked, "What about the emails that
everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators
that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were
exfiltrated?" To this Henry responded, "There's not evidence that they
were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence - but no
evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."
PolitiFact, Snopes and FactCheck.org are, unsurprisingly, wrong with their assertions.
fox4kc | Eight days after five people were shot at a Kansas City, Missouri gas station, video of that shooting is circulating and community leaders are voicing their concern.
One of the victims was under five years old. A new video shows the chilling moments when that gunman starts shooting.
“Fear, anger, concern, it’s very terrifying and the fact that
residents and neighborhoods are plagued with this kind of violence. It’s
unacceptable and we have to do something about it,” Darren Faulkner,
the program manager with KC Common Good said.
The owner of the gas station told FOX4 he has seen a 50 percent decline in business since last Friday’s shooting.
“Historically in Kansas City, gun violence goes up during the summer
months June, July and August and we’ve seen such a spike—it seems
like—already,” Faulkner said.
Because of that shooting and the ones that followed near the area of
35th and Prospect, the Kansas City Missouri Police Department had to increase patrols in the area.
Darren Faulkner says the problem is getting worse and there needs to be action that addresses the root causes.
“These are issues that are deeply rooted in the lack of something;
the lack of knowledge, the lack of education, the lack of resources, the
lack of finances, the lack of whatever. This is deeply rooted in the
lack of.”
If you have any information that can help the police, you’re asked to reach out to the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.
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