Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.

Allegation Arron Banks as a Russian Stooge - Propaganda

by Oui Mon Jun 11th, 2018 at 02:00:04 PM EST

[The diary in full has been posted earlier @BooMan and is more fitting for American politics - some parts do cross the pond for your interest - Oui]

Nothing new under the sun, a concerted force behind a renewed surge of McCarthyism that hit America under the Bush, Obama administrations and firmly established itself under progressives [?] after the Clinton loss in 2016 - Putin did it. As it rumbles on, the Amerian Red States population are riding high with their Hollywood candidate of the extreme right-wing of conservative policy. The Brexit vote in the UK was initiated by the Tory Conservatives. The Tory Conservatives have a strong allegiance to Israel and the Middle East. The Tory Conservatives founded Cambridge Analytica and formed an alliance with Mark Zuckerberg''s Facebook to tilt the American vote by some 15 percentage points towards candidate Donald Trump.

Europe is facing up to a New America under Trump as was displayed at the G6 plus 1 summit in La Malbaie, Quebec.

The G7 summit looked like it was going okay. Then Trump got mad on Twitter.
Mis-Chief In the White House - A Debacle
'Special place in hell': Trump advisers blast Trudeau for comments at G7 summit

The irony of it all, seeking to blame America's deep structured faults on foreign agents ... as old as the battles in Greece before Western "civilization" took root. The rot is from within as history shows when the empire fails. It will take decades, if not beyond the "New American Century."

More below the fold ...


Like kids eating candy out of the hands of authoritarian parents ...

The Kremlin Trojan Horses | The Atlantic Council |

By Alina Polyakova, Marlene Laruelle, Stefan Meister, and Neil Barnett

Foreword:
The Hon. Radosław Sikorski
Distinguished Statesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Former Foreign Minister of Poland

Prior to this fp story, no one has mentioned Arron Banks beyond this diary and a few comments ...

Mercer's Attachment to Leave.EU Questioned; Trump's Donor by Oui @BooMan on March 2, 2017

Electoral Commission urged to investigate Farage's Brexit campaign | The Guardian |

The Electoral Commission has been urged to investigate whether Nigel Farage's Brexit campaign broke election law by not declaring the role of a firm of "psychographic" social media strategists used by Donald Trump.

Ahead of the EU referendum, Leave.EU was advised by Cambridge Analytica (CA), a company hired by Trump which uses artificial intelligence to personalise political messages according to the things voters say and "like" on Facebook. But Leave.EU, which was largely funded by UKIP donor Arron Banks, did not declare CA's role to the Electoral Commission, according to filings for the campaign published last week.

Stephen Kinnock, a pro-remain Labour MP, has asked the UK's elections and referendums regulator to urgently "investigate whether it breached provisions in the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000".

...
CA is backed by Robert Mercer, a billionaire Trump donor, whose daughter Rebekah [Mercer] was part of the White House transition team. He reportedly invested $10m in the rightwing news website Breitbart.

Kinnock questioned Leave.EU's involvement in "a set of arrangements with a company that seems to be backed by a foreign billionaire and with contributions being made that are not being declared."

Brexit: Putin Did It!

In Martin Longman's piece, spokesperson Andy Wigmore is referenced ... so did I mention him earlier in a diary. Except the link is NOT with Russians but with Steve Bannon, SCL Group , parent of Cambridge Analytica. So we have Tory Conservatives linked to the Breitbart right-wing arm of US Republicans, with the Jewish State of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Steve Bannon on Cambridge Analytica - SCL Group

Facebook scandal takes new twist with SCL campaigners Hitler comment | The National - UAE |

He has been dubbed the 007 of data analytics and once was pictured in the society pages as the boyfriend of Queen Elizabeth's cousin.

Nigel Oakes has a track record of working in politics, psychological operations and media campaigns that stretches from post-Asian financial crisis Indonesia to conflict zones to African democracies and the last US presidential election.

Registrations with the British corporate register at Companies House list, Mr Oakes as based in the United Arab Emirates from where he has given addresses for subsidiaries of the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) enterprises that he founded.

The manner in which he was trust into the spotlight added a new twist to the running saga of Cambridge Analytica, an SCL venture, which is alleged to have used Facebook data to assist the astonishingly effective campaign of Donald Trump to win the US presidency.

Mr Wigmore, who was one of the so-called "Bad boys of Brexit" along with the insurance salesman Arron Banks and Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip, and others, also brought up the topic.

"The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance - you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff - it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did," he said. "In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery."

Damian Collins, the chair of the committee said the messaging was "extreme" around immigration. "These statements will raise concerns that data analytics was used to target voters who were concerned about this issue, and to frighten them with messaging designed to create 'an artificial enemy' for them to act against," he said.  

SCL military contracts for "weapons-grade" communication tactics ...

How often was Arron Banks referenced @EuroTrib? From the archives ...

Irony: still dead? By Bernhard in 2016 -  Ukip-backed Brexit campaign employs EU migrants to rally support .

One more comment ...

Two rootless, soulless parties have cleared the way for Ukip by Helen @EuroTrib - Oct. 12, 2014

In conclusion while I'm at it, one more source of the scourge of inequality and the wealthiest in support of us deplorables, the weak and the poor ...

Populist Billionaires - The face of right-wing anti-elitism is surprisingly elite

Arron Banks talks a good populist game, complaining to The New York Times about the UK's obscene levels of wealth inequality. But he's also already started using the database of a million voters the campaign built up to hawk insurance.

Banks was introduced to Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP and the face of the Leave.EU campaign, by another millionaire, Jim Mellon, who made his wealth from uranium mining in Russia in the nineties and doesn't even live in the United Kingdom. Mellon also donated around £100,000 to Leave.EU.

These aren't outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign.

...
Another big-money-backed, right-wing organization that came to Wilders in a time of need was the Middle East Forum, which paid a large sum into Wilders's legal defense fund when he was being prosecuted for hate speech. The forum gets money from the Bradley Foundation, the Koch-funded Donors Capital Fund, and numerous others.

Ukip donor has links to Belize and mining in southern Africa | The Guardian - Oct. 2014 |

See the pattern? Wealth meets political corruption in Western Civilization ...

All of this write-up is nice, but the basic reason for the rise of political populism in Europe and America - Western Civilization - is the hate for foreigners, also called refugees or immigrants in the 21st century.

I have written extensively about the ties between America's War on Terror and the spread of terror across the globe. OBL's attack on America has lasting blow-back due to the stupidity of Bush/Cheney and the pro-Israel cabal. The support given directly by the Jewish State of Israel to Islamophobes in Western Civilization has caused this extreme rise in right-wing populist parties. The UKIP and Geert Wilders are gaining the political fruits of European policy to accept the refugees fleeing the wars in the Middle East and North Africa. The natural disaster in the offing due to Climate Change causing drought and famine, will lead to more hardship in underdeveloped nations. The children of these human beings will seek a better life by traveling to the well developed and rich nations. Building walls between peoples of the planet, how very short-sighted an evil can one become. It is what it is. Politics is just like the weather, everyone talks about it, but no one can change the course of history.

See also the effort on the border of the Thames by the oligarchs who profited from the Russian people during the Goldman Sachs Yeltsin years of the 1990s. Those days will not return to the Russian Federation.

Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society (UK)
US/UK Point Man in Anti-Russia Campaign Speaks Up
Laundering a Russian Oligarch through Israeli Citizenship

Display:
Senate Judiciary & Commrce Committees Joint Hearing, "Facebook Data Use", 10 April, 2018 (C-SPAN transcript)
CANTWELL: During the 2016 campaign Cambridge Analytica worked with the Trump campaign to refine tactics, and were Facebook employees involved in that?
ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I don't know that our employees were involved with Cambridge Analytica although I know that we did help out with the Trump campaign over all in sales support in the same way that we do with other campaigns.
CANTWELL: So they may have been involved and all working together during that time period. Maybe that's something your investigation will find out?
ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I can certainly have my team get back to you on any specifics there that I don't know sitting here today.
June 2018
Facebook "embeds," Russia and the Trump campaign's secret weapon
Brad Parscale: Yeah, Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices.
Lesley Stahl: Whoa, wait a minute. Facebook employees showed up at the Trump headquarters --
Brad Parscale: Google employees, and Twitter employees.
Lesley Stahl: They were embedded in your campaign?
Brad Parscale: I mean, like, they were there multiple days a week, three, four days a week, two days week, five days a week --
Lesley Stahl: What were they doing inside? I mean --
Brad Parscale: Helping teach us how to use their platform. I wanna get --
Facebook's new political ad policy is already sweeping up non-campaign posts
Facebook has put in place an unusually broad view of what counts as a political ad. The company's policy on political advertising applies not just to candidate based ads, but "any national legislative issue of public importance in any place where the ad is being run." A separate page lists the broader categories expected to require authorization, which includes hot-button issues like "abortion" and "guns" alongside broader concepts like "health," "environment," and "values."
[...]
n Guillory's case, the authorization process was enough to scare him off entirely. Wary of giving Facebook his passport number, he decided not to put any money behind the new podcast episode. But he still isn't happy about it, particularly as more salacious Russia stories crowd out legitimate scholarship. "It's harder for people who have expertise about Russia to promote that expertise," Guillory says. "I wouldn't call it censorship, It's just unfortunate and kind of stupid."
venal and stupid
I live in a nation populate by semi-literate "social media consumers" who, according to polling, neither trust the accuracy of the US press corpse nor the benefit of "tech company" mediation but rely on both types of media to formulate their opinions of "democratic processes" and promote them in an "echosystem" for a fee.

At this point I certain the time required to "unmask" every agent in the system of "manufactured consent" will exceed the time allocated for promotion of the next four elections of uniparty candidates. And to no avail.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

by Cat on Mon Jun 11th, 2018 at 04:02:32 PM EST
h/t ATinNM @EuroTrib

WWII - The Segregated US Armed Forces  

In the First World War the Black Battalions of the US Army fought under French command ...

"A Double Victory?" Revisiting the Black Struggle for Equality during World War Two

n his 1944 landmark study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal predicted that "there is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro's status in America as a result of this war" (Myrdal 997). Historians have largely agreed with this assessment, considering the Second World War not only as a major turning point in the long African American struggle for justice and equality, but also as the starting point of the modern civil rights movement (see Dalfiume; Polenberg; Dittmer; Biondi). Such an interpretation of the heritage of the war can still be found today in some of the country's most commonly used textbooks (see in particular Brinkley). There are, to be sure, a number of facts to support such an interpretation. Pressed to answer increasing calls from black leaders for equal treatment and determined to maintain peaceful race relations in the name of keeping the war production industries running at full capacity, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 8802 on June 25, 1941, ordering an end to discrimination in defense industry jobs and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) as an enforcement agency. This constituted the federal government's first substantive act in support of the cause of racial equality since Reconstruction.

African Americans In World War II: A Legacy Of Patriotism And Valor (1997)



'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Fri Jun 15th, 2018 at 07:13:50 PM EST


Display:
Go to: [ European Tribune Homepage : Top of page : Top of comments ]