802 Why Trump & Sanders are Winning: American Free Trade Policy - Eamonn Fingleton

Why Trump & Sanders are Winning: American Free Trade Policy - Eamonn
Fingleton

Newsletter published on 20 February 2016

(1) Trump holding Elite responsible for destroying US economy - Fingleton
(2) Disastrous China Trade Policy drove Trump & Sanders wins - Eamonn
Fingleton
(3) Why Trump Is Winning: American Trade Policy - Eamonn Fingleton
(4) Trump says influx of Muslim migrants will lead to the "end of Europe"
(5) Pat Buchanan predicted Trump nationalist reaction against Globalist
Elites
(6) Pat Buchanan says Donald Trump is the Future of the Republican Party
(7) Beck: Trump’s Use of Nationalism, Populism ‘Dangerous Combination,’
‘Makings of Adolf Hitler’
(8) Barrie Zwicker: Trump not just a fascist, but a NAZI!?
(9) Memo To My Fellow Jews: Immigration Restriction Is NOT Nazism
(10) Former Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett is quietly advising
Trump’s top aides
(11) Soros buys Hillary (12) Trump irks Jewish donors - "less
subservient" on Foreign Policy
(13) Trump irks Jewish Donors with comments on Mideast Peace. "I don’t
want your money"
(14) America is being Destroyed by Problems that are Unaddressed - Paul
Craig Roberts

(1) Trump holding Elite responsible for destroying US economy - Fingleton
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2015/12/27/why-trump-is-winning-the-strange-case-of-americas-russian-made-rockets/

Dec 27, 2015 @ 10:50 AM

Why Trump Is Winning: The Strange Case of America's Russian-Made Rocket
Engines

Eamonn Fingleton

What is driving Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s stunning success?
The answer can be summed up in four words: "Make America Great Again!"

The slogan is emblazoned on every lectern he speaks from. It adorns
millions of tee-shirts, baseball caps, and bumper stickers. And it
resonates with virtually every American voter.

For establishment Republicans and Democrats, it’s Game Over. They can no
longer hide the reality that their globalist policies have made a pig’s
ear of what was once the greatest economy in world history. A stunning
illustration of how low the United States has sunk (and how incompetent
the mass media are in providing timely information on the reality of
American decline) emerged the other day with news that the U.S. space
program has now become heavily dependent on Russia for rocket engines.
Click here for details.

There could hardly be a clearer illustration of the contradictions of
American policy. Russia, after all, is supposed to be a U.S. adversary,
and the United States is supposed to be the world leader in advanced
technology. So why does the world leader in advanced technology have to
go abroad at all, let alone to an adversary, for sophisticated products
that are so closely bound up with national security? The answer, of
course, is the United States is no longer a world leader in advanced
technology and hasn’t been for decades.

Silicon Valley is no substitute. Most companies there merely create
internet applications and related software – products and services that
are easy for foreign rivals such as China’s Alibaba and Japan’s Softbank
to reverse engineer. Silicon Valley moreover employs only a relative
handful of workers – a tiny fraction of the number of Americans engaged
in advanced manufacturing half a century ago.

The United States has been losing altitude in advanced technology for
decades. The process began as far back as the 1950s. In those days,
corporate America led the world in virtually every significant
manufacturing technology. Equipped with both the best machinery and the
best production knowhow, American workers were by far the world’s most
productive – three to five times as productive as their counterparts in
Western Europe and Japan. Recommended by Forbes

Then, with the strong encouragement of the U.S. government, American
corporations began transferring their most advanced production
technologies abroad. The earliest big beneficiary was Japan. Soon South
Korea and Taiwan joined the party, and the Europeans, particularly the
Germans, also benefited.

Increasingly as American corporations began to have second thoughts
about the trend, they were subjected to coercion. In order to sell in
Japan, for instance, they were told that they had to manufacture there
and bring their best production technologies. IBM was the most visible
victim. The aggression with which Japanese officials pursued their
technology acquisition program made a mockery of assurances that Japan
was "America’s closest ally bar none." Japanese policies also stood in
blatant breach of numerous trade agreements under which Japan was
supposed to open its markets to American exports on a reciprocal basis.
Washington rarely tried to enforce such agreements and virtually never
succeeded.  One result is that nearly half a century after Japan began
promising to open its car market, that market remains virtually entirely
closed (not only to American-made cars, which were once the world
leaders, but to European-made cars as well).

Let’s get back to America’s Russian-made rockets. How come the Russians
are so far ahead?  The answer is they aren’t – not particularly, anyway.
Although they no doubt know a lot about rocketry, they rely heavily on
other nations for key inputs. Who their suppliers are is not public but
we can make some inferences. Most of the electronic components in
rockets these days come from Japan or, in descending order of
sophistication, from South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Then there are such
vital materials as titanium and carbon fiber, which are highly prized in
the aerospace industry because they are not only remarkably light but
remarkably strong. Japan is the dominant supplier of both (the wings of
Boeing’s 787, the world’s most advanced passenger jet, are made in Japan
using Japanese carbon-fiber). The betting is that the Russians have been
increasing their sourcing of both materials from Japan. Meanwhile China
plays a leading role in mining so-called rare earths, which are needed
in a host of high-technology applications (an iconic example is
neodymium which is the key metal in many ultra-strong, often tiny
magnets used in countless high-technology applications). The U.S. used
to dominate all aspects of the rare earths business but, under policies
initiated by the Reagan administration, rapidly lost the lead — to the
point where today it is an also-ran behind not only China but Japan,
Korea, and Germany (these latter nations are where many key rare-earth
processing plants are located).

Let’s sum up. The average Trump supporter may not have a detailed
understanding of how America’s technological lead was lost. But he or
she knows that America today is a shadow of what it was even thirty
years ago, let alone at the peak of American technological leadership in
the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The reason America lost its lead was no fault of ordinary workers.
Rather the blame lies entirely with a small elite that Trump now so
insistently — to the glee of countless ordinary voters — is holding to
account.

(2) Disastrous China Trade Policy drove Trump & Sanders wins - Eamonn
Fingleton
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2016/02/10/even-martians-know-what-the-press-wont-say-dysfunctional-china-trade-drove-trumpsanders-victories/

Feb 10, 2016 @ 06:18 AM 930 views

Even Martians Know What The Press Won't Say: Disastrous China Trade
Policy Drove Trump/Sanders Wins

Eamonn Fingleton

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. Donald Trump is a
multibillionaire capitalist. They don’t have much in common,  but on one
thing you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between them: China trade.

Sanders has denounced trade deals with China as "designed to protect the
interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of
workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American
democracy."

Trump puts it this way: "Since China joined the World Trade
Organization, Americans have witnessed the closure of more than 50,000
factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs. It was not a good
deal for America then and it’s a bad deal now. It is a typical example
of how politicians in Washington have failed our country."

In the circumstances even a Martian can probably see why these otherwise
very different men did so well in yesterday’s primary. China’s impact on
the New Hampshire job base has been the single most important factor
behind both their victories. This elephant in the room has not, however,
so far come to the press’s attention.  My searches this morning have not
turned up a single mention of China trade policy in mainstream American
press post-mortems on the primary.

To say that the press has suppressed discussion of the China factor is
probably an exaggeration. In reality, when it comes to trade policy, the
press tends – almost entirely unconsciously – to get its thinking from
Wall Street. And Wall Street, of course, is too busy making money off
American decline to have any interest in publicizing China’s role in
that trend.

New Hampshire residents are all too aware of how profoundly their lives
have been impacted by dysfunctional Washington trade policies. The
chickens have now come to roost for several establishment Republican
presidential candidates, most notably Carly Fiorina, who as chief
executive of Hewlett Packard, presided over major job cuts in both New
Hampshire and neighboring Massachusetts. Meanwhile New Hampshire’s once
powerful shoemaking industry has largely disappeared as employers like
VF have moved operations to China.

In a study a few years ago, Robert E. Scott, an economist at the
Economic Policy Institute, found that New Hampshire had suffered more on
a percentage basis than any other state from the loss of jobs to China.
His analysis can be read here. He calculated that jobs lost to China in
the ten years to 2011 totaled 20,400. That’s a big number for a small
state and it represented 2.94 percent of the state’s total workforce.

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's
Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 2008).

(3) Why Trump Is Winning: American Trade Policy - Eamonn Fingleton

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2016/02/01/why-trump-is-winning-the-hypocrisy-and-disaster-of-american-trade-policy/

Feb 1, 2016 @ 09:34 AM

Why Trump Is Winning: The Hypocrisy -- And Disaster -- Of American Trade
Policy

Eamonn Fingleton

Factory workers in the old Soviet Union had a cynical joke: "We pretend
to work. They [the bosses] pretend to pay us." Similar logic applies in
the world trading system. Washington pretends to write the rules; other
nations pretend to obey them.

For two generations already, increasingly pathetic American trade
officials have turned a blind eye to the blatant barriers facing
American exports in key foreign markets. The result has been a tragic
roll-call of factory closures in the American heartland.

As today is the day of the Iowa caucuses, it is worth recalling that in
Iowa alone – and Iowa is one of America’s less populous states –
hundreds of thousands of jobs have been sacrificed on the altar of a
doctrinaire free trade theory that overlooks the reality of how other
nations run their economies.

Iowa’s employment numbers tell the story. In the 1940s, 31 percent of
Iowa’s workforce was engaged in manufacturing. The ratio had declined to
20 percent by the early 1990s and as of last year languished below 10
percent. Hundreds of major factories have closed, many of them producing
goods that in their day were considered America’s – and in many cases
the world’s – best: Sheaffer pens, Maytag washing machines, Rubbermaid
food containers…. Meanwhile the workers who once earned good money in
these factories are now in far too many cases washed up among the
long-term unemployed.

The problem with free trade is not just that other countries cheat but
that they see no reason not to cheat. As Donald Trump has pointed out,
the enforcers in Washington who are supposed to hold cheaters to account
are cream puffs. Meanwhile cheating confers several key benefits that
American officials and commentators consistently sweep under the rug:
just the most obvious is that it forces the transfer of American
production technology. Consider how China has manipulated General
Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. They have been told that to sell in China
they must manufacture there. Not only that, they must bring their best
production technology, which then promptly leaks to Chinese competitors.
The result is that China’s productivity soars and in the longer run
countless American jobs that were formerly sustained by such technology
are wiped out as yet another emergent Chinese industry starts exporting
to the United States (the Chinese auto industry is already exporting to
other parts of the world and can be expected within a decade to target
the U.S. market).

Until not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that
nations that cheat harm themselves. Now finally after Donald Trump’s
apotheosis, Americans are beginning to learn the truth.

Perhaps the single Washington agency that bears greatest responsibility
for America’s trade fiasco is the United States International Trade
Commission (USITC). Its job is to investigate other nations’ trade
cheating, yet it has rarely landed a serious punch on any of the key
trade cheaters.

Its role in relation to the Japanese auto industry has been particularly
notable. When did you last see the USITC castigating Japan’s auto
industry trade barriers? As someone who has followed the story since the
1980s, I can’t remember a single instance. You might conclude from this
that the Japanese market is essentially open. The numbers tell a
different story. For most of the last fifty years total imports — from
all nations — have been kept to a mere 4 percent of the Japanese auto
market. This has applied whether the yen is high or low, and whether the
Japanese economy has been booming or stagnating. Of course, if you
believe Japan’s excuses (as conveyed via, for instance, the pages of the
Economist or the Wall Street Journal), the problem is that the Detroit
companies don’t make cars with the steering wheel on the correct side
for Japan’s drive-on-the-left roads. This is obvious nonsense. Not only
has Detroit long made some of its models in the Japanese configuration
but the Detroit companies’ European subsidiaries make whole ranges of
competitive cars configured to Japanese expectations. Perhaps the most
telling evidence of how formidably the Japanese car market is protected
has been the performance of the Korean auto industry. At last count the
Koreans had less than 0.02 percent of the Japanese car market. Yet
almost everywhere else in the world they hold their own against Japanese
competition. The Koreans’ performance is particularly significant in
that they enjoy a captive market in Japan among ethnic Koreans, who form
by far Japan’s largest ethnic minority and in many cases are outspokenly
loyal to their ancestral home. Perhaps the single most startling figure
in the entire Japanese story is that Hyundai, Korea’s largest auto
maker, sold a mere 1,700 cars a year in Japan in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Repeated efforts to surmount Japanese trade
barriers yielded so little that in 2009 Hyundai shut down its Japanese
car sales division.

It was a development that did not seem to catch the USITC’s eye. Nor for
that matter did it figure in the pages of the Economist or the Wall
Street Journal. At all costs the story of the essential openness of the
Japanese market had to be preserved. Otherwise, God forbid, Americans
might wake to the dread realization that all the talk of opening foreign
markets was just talk.

(4) Trump says influx of Muslim migrants will lead to the "end of Europe"

http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/trump-warns-migrants-will-bring-end-of-europe/

Trump gets backing on 'end of Europe' warning

Islam expert: GOP front-runner 'grasps big picture' on threat from migrants

Published: 02/11/2016 at 8:53 PM

Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump is predicting
the influx of Muslim migrants will lead to the "end of Europe" in an
explosive interview with the conservative French magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

"France is not what it used to be, and neither is Paris," Trump is
quoted as saying.

Trump also bemoaned the existence of "no-go zones" avoided by police
that have been created by mass Islamic immigration.

WND reported in January 2015 the French government listed 751 "Sensitive
Urban Zones" the government does not fully control.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming Muslim migrants
into Germany is a "tragic mistake," Trump said, predicting disaster
unless there is a change in policy.

The ‘Stop Hillary’ campaign is on fire! Join the surging response to
this theme: ‘Clinton for prosecution, not president’

"If you don’t treat the situation competently and firmly, yes, it’s the
end of Europe," Trump reportedly stated.

He also speculated that European nations could face "real revolutions"
in response to the crisis.

In interviews with American media, Trump has blasted Merkel’s permissive
immigration policy as "insane" and warned Islamic migration could be a
"Trojan Horse" enabling future terrorist attacks.

Trump read the lyrics from the song "The Snake" at a campaign rally in
January to illustrate the dangers of admitting millions of Muslim migrants.

The song describes a foolish woman who saves the life of a poisonous
snake, only to be bitten and killed for her trouble.

G.M. Davis, an expert on Islam who directed the feature documentary
"Islam: What the West Needs to Know" and authored "House of War: Islam’s
Jihad Against the World," praised the Republican front-runner’s strong
stand against the Islamic invasion of Europe.

"At present, only Donald Trump seems willing to address the seriousness
of the issues confronting the United States and Europe and the full
implications of Islamic immigration into non-Islamic countries," Davis
told WND. "Whatever one makes of his delivery and tendency to
personalize his criticisms, there is little denying that he grasps the
big picture in a way that the other candidates do not or are too afraid
to express.

"His recent comments to the European press over the dire situation in
Europe where centers of Islamic power continue to send down roots and
multiply, as well as the hysterical reaction on the part of much of
Europe to his views, testifies both to Mr. Trump’s competence on the
issue as well as the inability of the European establishment to come to
grips with reality."

Davis warned Americans they will not be spared from the crisis.

"All of what we are witnessing in Europe is in store for America if she
does not adopt more sensible and restrictive immigration policies," said
Davis. "She must also realize her overseas campaigns to bring democracy
to Islamic lands are futile and counter-productive. The only principle
on which any sensible Western policy toward Islam can be based is one of
containment, of realizing that Western and Islamic civilizations are
best kept apart as much as possible."

In response to reports of sexual assaults and other crimes by Muslim
migrants, European governments, especially Germany, have cracked down on
their own people rather than restricting immigration.

The German government is also working with American companies such as
Facebook, Google and Twitter to eliminate any online speech criticizing
the government’s refugee policy or refugees themselves that "crosses the
line."

"European governments are desperate to cover up criticism of Islam and
the crimes of Muslim immigrants because they cut at the heart of their
open-door policies," said Davis. "The multicultural assumptions
underpinning modern Europe are disintegrating before our eyes. To face
facts would require them to rethink decades of self-destructive
immigration laws as well as to confront the truly alarming reality of a
growing, increasingly hostile Islamic minority in their midst, which
they are entirely unequipped to handle."

Davis predicted progressives will never turn against mass Islamic
immigration, even though the resulting demographic changes will doom
their own supposed values regarding issues such as homosexual rights and
feminism.

"The true left-wingers cannot face the reality that Islam cares nothing
for their blandishments about tolerance and acceptance, which they have
used, of course, one-sidedly to denigrate and destroy traditional,
Christian European culture," Davis charged. "By insisting on
‘tolerating’ the growth of Islam in their cities, they have permitted a
violent, intolerant and very political ideology to take root. Should it
ever get the opportunity, it will utterly eradicate the easy-going moral
atmosphere now prevalent in European society."

In "Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the
Resistance," renowned activist Pamela Geller provides the answer,
offering proven, practical guidance on how freedom lovers can stop
jihadist initiatives in local communities. [...]

(5) Pat Buchanan predicted Trump nationalist reaction against Globalist
Elites

http://theweek.com/articles/599577/how-obscure-adviser-pat-buchanan-predicted-wild-trump-campaign-1996

How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign
in 1996

Michael Brendan Dougherty

January 19, 2016

     [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country
into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic
pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our
own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or
diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist
reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form
when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better… [Samuel Francis in
Chronicles]

Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What
if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised
to make America great again?

What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free
market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American
jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and
Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver
better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly
talking about restoring the place of religion in society — something
that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America — you simply
promised to restore the Middle American core — the economic and cultural
losers of globalization — to their rightful place in America? What if
you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American
state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating
the economy or negotiating trade deals?

That's pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat
Buchanan in a 1996 essay, "From Household to Nation," in Chronicles
magazine. Samuel Francis was a paleo-conservative intellectual who died
in 2005. Earlier in his career he helped Senator East of North Carolina
oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. He wrote a white paper
recommending the Reagan White House use its law enforcement powers to
break up and harass left-wing groups. He was an intellectual disciple of
James Burnham's political realism, and Francis' political analysis
always had a residue of Burnham's Marxist sociology about it. He argued
that the political right needed to stop playing defense — the globalist
left won the political and cultural war a long time ago — and should
instead adopt the insurgent strategy of communist intellectual Antonio
Gramsci. Francis eventually turned into a something resembling an
all-out white nationalist, penning his most racist material under a pen
name. Buchanan didn't take Francis' advice in 1996, not entirely. But 20
years later, "From Household to Nation," reads like a political
manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs.

To simplify Francis' theory: There are a number of Americans who are
losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a
transnational global elite. These Middle Americans see jobs disappearing
to Asia and increased competition from immigrants. Most of them feel
threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees Middle
Americans as loathsome white bigots. But they are also threatened by
conservatives who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social
Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their
unemployment too.

     Middle American forces, emerging from the ruins of the old
independent middle and working classes, found conservative, libertarian,
and pro-business Republican ideology and rhetoric irrelevant,
distasteful, and even threatening to their own socio-economic interests.
The post World War II middle class was in reality an affluent
proletariat, economically dependent on the federal government through
labor codes, housing loans, educational programs, defense contracts, and
health and unemployment benefits. All variations of conservative
doctrine rejected these…

     Yet, at the same time, the Ruling Class proved unable to uproot the
social cultural, and national identities and loyalties of the Middle
American proletariat, and Middle Americans found themselves increasingly
alienated from the political left and its embrace of anti-national
policies, and counter-cultural manners and morals. [Chronicles]

For decades, people have been warning that a set of policies that really
has enriched Americans on the top, and likely has improved the overall
quality of life (through cheap consumables) on the bottom, has hollowed
out the middle.

Chinese competition really did hammer the Rust Belt and parts of the
great Appalachian ghetto. It made the life prospects for men — in
marriage and in their careers — much dimmer than those of their fathers.
Libertarian economists, standing giddily behind Republican politicians,
celebrate this as creative destruction even as the collateral damage
claims millions of formerly-secure livelihoods, and — almost as
crucially — overall trust and respect in the nation's governing class.
Immigration really does change the calculus for native-born workers too.
As David Frum points out last year:

     [T]he Center for Immigration Studies released its latest jobs
study. CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight
immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the
collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are
working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle.
Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are
two million more immigrants — legal and illegal — working in the United
States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since
November 2007 have gone to immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of
native-born Americans, especially men, have abandoned the job market
altogether. [The Atlantic]

The political left treats this as a made-up problem, a scapegoating by
Applebee's-eating, megachurch rubes who think they are losing their
"jerbs." Remember, Republicans and Democrats have still been getting
elected all this time.

But the response of the predominantly-white class that Francis was
writing about has mostly been one of personal despair. And thus we see
them dying in middle age of drug overdose, alcoholism, or obesity at
rates that now outpace those of even poorer blacks and Hispanics. Their
rate of suicide is sky high too. Living in Washington D.C., however,
with an endless two decade real-estate boom, and a free-lunch economy
paid for by special interests, most of the people in the conservative
movement hardly know that some Americans think America needs to be made
great again.

In speeches, Trump mostly implies that the ruling class conducts trade
deals or the business of government stupidly and weakly, not
villainously or out of personal pecuniary motives. But the message of
his campaign is that America's interests have been betrayed by fools.

The huge infrastructure of the conservative movement in Washington D.C.
is aghast at Trump, and calls him an economic illiterate for threatening
China with tariffs. They can't understand that this is not primarily an
economic measure, but a nationalist one. It's a signal to voters that
one man is here to fight for them, not to school-marmishly tell them
that capitalism is helping them when in fact it manifestly helps others
a lot more. Trump has attracted his coalition of supporters among those
who are the most-weakly attached to the Republican Party as an institution.

Plenty of others have noticed the parallels between Pat Buchanan and
Donald Trump. Some have seen that Trump is attracting the "radical
middle" social base and taking on the Caesarist, almost Latin
American-style populism that Francis recommended. Buchanan was recently
asked about why Trump was having all the success that he did not enjoy,
when he is running on so many of the issues Buchanan did 20 years ago.
Buchanan said that it was because the returns are in on the policies he
criticized 20 years ago. All of this is true.

The Trump phenomenon does seem to be sui generis. There are not
squadrons of Trumpistas in the Republican Congress. And his celebrity
persona, his extremely unusual and independent financial power, his
felicity for not just recognizing but channeling the grievances of his
supporters is unmatched. It's hard to imagine anyone else rebuilding his
coalition of Middle American radicals and fringier, race-obsessed
"alt-right" nationalists.

The Republican party is incredibly powerful as an institution. It will
have the power to recover and return things to a sense of normality
someday, even if Trump wins the nomination.

But the Trump phenomenon also seems global and inevitable. America's
elite class belongs to a truly global class of elites. And everywhere in
Europe that global class is being challenged by anti-immigrant,
occasionally-protectionist parties who do not parrot free-market
economic policies, but instead promise to use the levers of the state to
protect native interests. In Russia, Putin's populist nationalism has
taken over a major state apparatus, precisely to avenge itself on the
paladins of the free-market.

What is so crucial to Trump's success, even within the Republican Party,
is his almost total ditching of conservatism as a governing philosophy.
He is doing the very thing Pat Buchanan could not, and would not do. And
in this, he is following the advice of Sam Francis to a degree almost
unthinkable. Here's the concluding flourish of Francis' 1996 essay:

     I told [Buchanan] privately that he would be better off without all
the hangers-on, direct-mail artists, fund-raising whiz kids, marketing
and PR czars, and the rest of the crew that today constitutes the
backbone of all that remains of the famous "Conservative Movement" and
who never fail to show up on the campaign doorstep to guzzle someone
else's liquor and pocket other people's money. "These people are
defunct," I told him. "You don't need them, and you're better off
without them. Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a
nationalist, an America Firster, but don't even use the word
'conservative.' It doesn't mean anything any more."

     Pat listened, but I can't say he took my advice. By making his bed
with the Republicans, then and today, he opens himself to charges that
he's not a "true" party man or a "true" conservative, constrains his
chances for victory by the need to massage trunk-waving Republicans
whose highest goal is to win elections, and only dilutes and deflects
the radicalism of the message he and his Middle American Revolution have
to offer. The sooner we hear that message loudly and clearly, without
distractions from Conservatism, Inc., the Stupid Party, and their
managerial elite, the sooner Middle America will be able to speak with
an authentic and united voice, and the sooner we can get on with
conserving the nation from the powers that are destroying it. [Chronicles]

Trump embodies this in nearly every letter. He doesn't have people from
the traditional Republican power structure advising him. He doesn't say
he'll direct the existing members of the managerial class to make a
little tweak here or there; he says he'll send his friend Carl Icahn and
threaten China with a tariff wall that could repel a tsunami of cheap goods.

What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump's success is
that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His
campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party
doesn't need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise.
It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and
conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made
you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books
conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are
defunct. You don't need them, and you're better off without them.

And the most frightening thing of all — as Francis' advice shows — is
that the underlying trend has been around for at least 20 years, just
waiting for the right man to come along and take advantage.

(6) Pat Buchanan says Donald Trump is the Future of the Republican Party
http://buchanan.org/blog/124610-124610

Thursday - January 14, 2016 at 10:53 pm

By Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post

As I’ve watched and listened to Donald Trump’s campaign pitch over the
past few months, I am regularly reminded of the Republican presidential
primary campaigns that Pat Buchanan ran in the 1990s. Buchanan ran as a
"pitchfork populist" in those elections, an outsider fed up with the way
both parties did their business in Washington. He also championed
slowing immigration into the United States and voiced skepticism about
international trade deals. Sound familiar? I reached out to Buchanan to
talk about Trump’s similarities and differences with him and the broader
state of the Republican Party. Our conversation, conducted via email and
edited only for grammar, is below.

FIX: Is Donald Trump the logical heir, issues-wise and tonally, to your
presidential campaigns? Why or why not?

Buchanan: Trump is sui generis, unlike any candidate of recent times.
And his success is attributable not only to his stance on issues, but to
his persona, his defiance of political correctness, his relish of
political combat with all comers, his "damn the torpedos" charging in
frontally where others refuse to tread, as in that full retaliatory
response to Hillary Clinton’s stab at him for having a "penchant for
sexism." Trump shut her down. These clashes have elated a party base
that is sick unto death of politicians who never fight.

On building a fence to secure the border with Mexico, an end to trade
deals like NAFTA, GATT, and [most favored nation status] for China, and
staying out of unwise and unnecessary wars, these are the issues I ran
on in 1992 and 1996 in the Republican primaries and as Reform Party
candidate in 2000.

What Trump has today is conclusive evidence to prove that what some of
us warned about in the 1990s has come to pass. From 2000 to 2010, the
U.S. lost 55,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs.

What Trump has in hand now to prosecute his case against the Bush
Republicans and Clinton Democrats is hard proof these trade deals have
de-industrialized America. If the GOP wants to know why it lost the
Reagan Democrats, it is because the GOP exported their jobs to Mexico
and China. The returns are in. And testifying to that truth is not only
Trump’s attacks on those trade deals but the lack of a vigorous defense
of them by Clinton Democrats or the GOP establishment. Who today
celebrates NAFTA, as John McCain went to Canada to do in 2008?

FIX: What’s different about today’s political environment from the ones
you ran for president in? Are people angrier now?

Buchanan: When I campaigned in North Carolina in 1992, I recall a fellow
coming up to me at the airport, saying, "What are you doing in North
Carolina, Pat? This is the State of Satisfaction." Undeniably, there was
a true depression in New Hampshire in 1992, and a real sense on the part
of conservatives that President Bush had abandoned us and the Reagan
legacy and Reagan agenda to cut deals with Congress to raise taxes,
spend more on "kinder, gentler" programs, impose quotas, and declare
America’s goal to become the creator of a "New World Order."

What’s different today is that the returns are in, the results are
known. Everyone sees clearly now the de-industrialization of America,
the cost in blood and treasure from decade-long wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and the pervasive presence of illegal immigrants. What I saw at
the San Diego border 25 years ago, everyone sees now on cable TV. And
not just a few communities but almost every community is experiencing
the social impact.

The anger and alienation that were building then have reached critical
mass now, when you see Bernie Sanders running neck and neck with Hillary
Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire and Trump and Ted Cruz with a majority
of Republican voters. Not to put too fine a point on it, the revolution
is at hand.

FIX: You told the New York Times over the weekend that "the party is
going to shift against trade and interventionism, and become more
nationalist and tribal and more about protecting the border." Do you
think the party establishment will be part of that shift? And, if so, do
they embrace the language and rhetoric of Trump?

Buchanan: There is a reason why President Obama and a Republican
Congress are not taking up the Trans-Pacific Partnership this session.
Trump and Sanders would lead the fight to kill it. And they would
succeed, though, in the 1990s, we — Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, the AFL-CIO
— failed to stop NAFTA. Then, not enough Americans saw the link between
those trade deals, America’s surging trade deficits and the loss of
manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

In both parties, people are coming to recognize that the interests of
transnational corporations collide and conflict with U.S. national
interest and the interests of working Americans. What is good for
General Motors is not good for America if General Motors is moving
production out of the United States. As history shows, free trade is an
ideology that is embraced by the intelligentsia of declining nations.
Rising nations — Great Britain before 1850, America from 1860 to 1912,
Bismarck’s Germany, postwar Japan, China today — practice economic
nationalism.

The past is prologue here. While the country was divided both on Desert
Storm to put the emir of Kuwait back on his throne and on invading Iraq
and converting it into a model democracy for the Middle East, both Bush
41 and Bush 43, when the wars first began, rose to near 90 percent approval.

However, his victory in 1991 did not save President Bush in 1992, when
he got only 37 percent. And when the fruits of America’s victory in
Operation Iraqi Freedom turned sour, Republicans lost both houses of
Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 — to an anti-war Democrat.

If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American
people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did
it. But America’s appetite for intervention, for nation building, for
democracy crusades, is fully sated. Goodbye to all that.

Americans did not want to get involved in Georgia, Crimea or Ukraine.
They do not want to send an army back to Iraq or into Syria. And Trump,
in his emphasis on building up America, and letting these folks solve
their problems, is in line with national thinking. The hour of the
liberal interventionists like Hillary Clinton in Libya, like the
neocons’ hour of power in the GOP, is over.

Yet Trump recognizes the inner hawk in Republicans, dating to the Cold
War, when he says, about ISIS: "I will bomb the [expletive] out of them."

Politically, he has this about right.

Will the Republican establishment walk on a Trump nomination, should he
win? If it does, let it walk, as it did in 1964. What the Trump
phenomenon represents, whether the Washington establishment is appalled
or not, is the future. Take a look at Europe. Ethno-nationalism from
Scotland to Catalonia to Flanders, and nationalism in the form of
parties like the UKIP [U.K. Independence Party] in Britain and FN
[National Front] in France, new governments in Warsaw and Budapest —
this looks more like the future than Angela Merkel or the E.U.

A party will not survive that yields to an establishment ultimatum that
— either you accept our choice, or we walk. The answer to that is: Go
ahead and walk!

FIX: You are Kelly Ayotte, a Republican senator running for reelection
in the swing state of New Hampshire in November. How do you deal with
Trump as your party’s nominee? Run from him? To him? Ignore him?

Buchanan: If Trump wins the New Hampshire primary, Kelly Ayotte should
congratulate him. And, if Trump wins the nomination, Ayotte should
endorse him. If she does not, she will have no future in the national party.

Governors Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Bill Scranton, who
refused to endorse [Barry] Goldwater in 1964, were ever after dead as
national nominees. When Ronald Reagan rose to challenge Gerald Ford,
President Ford had to put his appointed Vice President Rockefeller over
the side to survive. The party base does not forgive or forget
desertions under fire.

How closely should Ayotte campaign with Trump? She should wait until
after the nomination to decide, if Trump were nominated. But if she has
national ambitions, Ayotte will endorse the nominee.

FIX: Can Donald Trump win the presidency as the Republican nominee? If
so, how? Be specific.

Buchanan: Demographically and electorally, the Democratic Party has the
stronger hand. For Trump to win, I would hammer the illegal immigration
issue, securing the border, renegotiating trade deals that have cost us
factories, jobs and rising wages, and after securing the party base, go
for victory in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, by
campaigning against the Clinton trade policies that de-industrialized
Middle America and on a new Trump trade agenda to re-industrialize America.

Bring the jobs back!

With Obama not running, there is no reason Trump, a builder and job
creator, could not win more of the African American vote than McCain who
lost it 24-1. There is no reason Trump cannot win more Hispanics, who
respond to strong leaders and job creators. Romney lost over 70 percent
of the Hispanic vote.

Given the situation in the country and the world, the issues for Trump
are backing up the men in blue, building a wall to secure the border
against illegal immigrants, cracking down on corporations that hire
illegals rather than Americans, making America the strongest nation on
Earth, but staying out of wars that are none of our business. And paying
back 10 times over those who attack us — the Jacksonian stance.

Lastly, as Democrats and a hostile media will seek to make Trump the
issue, the Republicans should, if she is nominated, make Hillary the
issue. Do we really want to go back through all that again, or roll the
dice on a better, brighter and surely more exciting future?

Chris Cillizza writes "The Fix," a politics blog for the Washington
Post. He also covers the White House.

(7) Beck: Trump’s Use of Nationalism, Populism ‘Dangerous Combination,’
‘Makings of Adolf Hitler’

by Jeff Poor22 Jan 2016022 Jan, 2016 22 Jan, 2016
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/01/22/beck-trumps-use-of-nationalism-populism-dangerous-combination-makings-of-adolf-hitler/

On his Thursday radio program, Glenn Beck offered his thoughts on
remarks made by Rush Limbaugh two days earlier declaring nationalism and
populism had overtaken conservatism, in particular regarding Republican
presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s ascendency in the 2016
presidential race.

According to Beck, if Limbaugh’s analysis is accurate it spells doom for
the "republic."

"I want you to listen carefully to what he is saying," Beck said. "I
hope he is wrong on this because this is the biggest warning about the
end of the republic I think I have ever heard coming from Rush Limbaugh."

Beck argued that those components of nationalism and populism were "the
makings of Adolf Hitler," which he called "a dangerous combination."

"This means anyone who will wrap themselves in the flag, not on their
principles — anyone who will say, ‘I’m just like you and I’ll fix it,’
will overtake the principles," Beck said. "Now I don’t know if he is
saying this in a good way or a bad way, but this is a very bad thing."

"That’s why you should be freaking out," he added. "Look, we have
nothing against Donald Trump as a man. We don’t. It’s just this is a
very dangerous combination and I have been warning against it since Fox.
I said keep your eyes open because it will come. The pendulum will swing
the other way and it will be bad. The only other thing you have to add
to that — he’s talking about populism and nationalism. If you add
socialism — populism, nationalism and socialism, you have the makings of
Adolf Hitler. You don’t somebody who is a nationalist, a populist and
has any kind of socialist or nationalizing the banks kind of ideas. Not
a good idea, not a good idea."

(8) Barrie Zwicker: Trump not just a fascist, but a NAZI!?

Subject: Barrie Zwicker: Trump not just a fascist, but a NAZI!? From:
Kevin Barrett <truthjihad@gmail.com> Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2016 23:45:52 –0600

https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/is-Trump-a-fascist-its-much-worse/

Is Trump a fascist? It’s much worse. Followers are morphing into Nazis
in the still-emerging fourth reich

(9) Memo To My Fellow Jews: Immigration Restriction Is NOT Nazism
From: Denis McC <wizard_of_aus@hotmail.com> Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2016
05:11:04 +0000

http://www.vdare.com/articles/memo-to-my-fellow-jews-immigration-restriction-is-not-nazism

Charles Bloch

January 4, 2016, 8:47 pm

Donald Trump has released his first campaign ad repeating his call for
halting immigration by illegals and Muslims, and sure enough, he’s being
called xenophobic and racist [Donald Trump’s new TV ad: Make America
great by keeping the darkies out, by Greg Sargent, Washington Post,
January 4, 2016]. Of course, ever since Trump first called for a Muslim
moratorium, he’s been openly compared to fascists and Nazis. Memo to my
fellow Jews (among many others): immigration restriction is NOT Nazism.

For example:

   Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter accused Trump of "taking a page
from the playbook of Hitler."

   Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman said that "If you
go and look at your history and you read your history in the lead-up to
the Second World War this is the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to
move forward" [Donald Trump compared to Adolf Hitler after ‘complete
shutdown of Muslims’ comments, Alexandra Sims, Independent, December 10,
2015].

   Even before Trump’s modest proposal on Muslims, John Kasich ran an ad
comparing Trump’s supposed oppression of illegal aliens, Muslims,
Univision journalists, and Black Lives Matters protesters to Hitler’s
creeping totalitarianism.

This same political class is trying to compare any limits on the influx
of Syrian and Islamic refugees to the supposedly shameful episode where
Americans turned away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Thus the
Holocaust Museum, while not allowed to opine on public policy, opined
"Nobody can reasonably argue that the response from the international
community has been enough. As an institution we have a mandate to be the
voice that the Jews of the 1930s did not have" [Holocaust Museum Sees a
U.S. Duty to Syrian Refugees, by Josh Rogin, Bloomberg View, November
17, 2015]

Literally dozens more articles have appeared with headlines like:

   Yes, It’s Fair to Compare the Plight of the Syrians to the Plight of
the Jews. Here’s Why [by Josh Zeitz, Politico, November 22, 2015]

   How America’s rejection of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany haunts our
refugee policy today [by Dara Lind, Vox, November 19, 2015]

   Never Again: A Jewish Take On Anti-Syrian Refugee Sentiment [by Josh
Orstroff, Huffington Post, November 17, 2015]

   As Syrian refugee debate continues, a US duty to remember Holocaust
[by Josh Rogin, News and Observer, November 17, 2015]

   Syrian refugee debate draws comparison to Holocaust [by David Ng, LA
Times, November 19, 2015]

A question: if our immigration policy must be determined by nightmares
about Jews being forcibly sent to Nazi Germany, why do journalists want
refugees to come a country where Hitler Reincarnated may be the next
President?

A small number of conservatives are pushing back against the
Trump=Hitler, Syrian Refugees=Jews in Nazi Germany meme. But most do
still accept that the US was in the wrong for not accepting Jewish
refugees in the 1930s. For example, Jonathan S. Tobin noted in
Commentary that "the refusal of the United States to take more than a
token number of those Jews fleeing was a death sentence for those stuck
in the Nazi empire of death" [Why Syria is not the Holocaust, November
20, 2015]. Breitbart contrasted the security concerns over Muslim
immigrants to the supposedly racist concerns of Americans in the past:
"One of the main reasons immigration laws restricted Jewish entry into
the U.S. was to promote the racial, i.e. genetic, superiority of the
national ‘stock.’ (Such eugenicist ideas were widespread, far beyond
Nazi Germany.)" [Why Syrian Refugees are not like Jewish Refugees in
WWII, by Joel Pollack, November 17, 2015]

But this assumption of American guilt about the death of Jews is simply
a collection of tropes, easily disproved. Let’s examine them in turn.

   The 1924 Act’s preference for Nordic Europeans prevented German Jews
from immigrating to America.

Even accepting for the purposes of argument that Nordicism,
anti-Semitism, and/or eugenics influenced the 1924 Act, it had no racial
or ethnic test. Rather it set "nation of origin" quotas. Under the quota
system, Germany had the highest allotment of quotas. Between 1933 and
1939, 95,000 German and Austrian Jews immigrated to the United States,
making them proportionally more likely to immigrate than any other
ethnic group.

   Anti-Semitism led Americans to reject Jewish refugees.

Even a Washington Post story that tried to shame America into accepting
Syrian refugees acknowledged "To be sure, the United States was emerging
from the Great Depression, hardly a climate in which ordinary folks
would welcome immigrants and economic competition." [What Americans
thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II, by Ishaan
Tharoor, November 17, 2015]

Indeed, the WaPo story noted "Support for accepting refugees was
slightly lower" [when refugees were described in generic terms] "than
when they were described as mostly Jewish."

Furthermore, after Kristallnacht in 1938 support for accepting a limited
number of refugees increased.

Americans were sympathetic to the Jewish persecution, but they were not
willing to undermine their immigration policies when Americans were
suffering.

   The Jewish refugees had nowhere else to go and were sent straight
back to Nazi Germany.

To the contrary, the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust discusses the efforts
of the Joint Distribution Committee, the major Jewish organization that
sought to resettle German and Austrian Jews, and reports:

JDC tried actively to find safe havens for refugees in Latin America. In
1938, in response to an offer to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees in his
country, the JDC founded the Dominican Republic Settlement Association,
which brought several hundred refugees to the experimental farm of
Sosua. . . In 1939, when 907 passengers on the ship St. Louis were
denied permission to land in Cuba despite the JDC’s efforts, the JDC
arranged for the passengers to be accepted to England, Holland, Belgium,
and France so they would not be returned to Germany. [page 368]

In 1933, there were 716,000 Jews in Germany and Austria. The vast
majority of them fled, as the US Holocaust Museum notes that "by October
1941, when Jewish emigration was officially forbidden, the number . .
.had declined to 163,000 from 716,000 in 1933," the majority of whom
were elderly. In other words, almost the Jews who wanted to leave
Germany, left. Hundreds of thousands ended up in the United States,
Palestine, the United Kingdom, however, many ended up fleeing to
neighboring countries of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. With the exclusion of Switzerland, all
these countries ended up under Nazi control.

   Americans should have known the Holocaust was imminent.

By most accounts, the Nazis conceived of the "Final Solution" at the
Wannsee Conference in 1942. In 1941, Nazi Germany banned Jewish
emigration, so the issue of accepting German refugees became moot.

Thus, in order to attribute blame to Americans over the Holocaust,
Americans must be credited with clairvoyance in the 1930s—to foresee
that Germany would both take over much of Europe and then begin
systematic killings of Jews.

But if we are to go by what economists call revealed preferences, even
the majority of European Jews did not have this fear. As noted above,
the JDC arranged for Jews, including those on the now infamous M.S. St.
Louis, which ultimately returned to Europe, to settle in the Dominican
Republic. Yet the Jews chose to return to other European countries,
which weren’t Nazi-occupied at the time.

By the time the time Hitler began his Final Solution, almost all of
Europe was engulfed in total war. The fate of millions of European Jews
during the war was tragic, but a total of fifty million people died in
that war, many of them civilians. U.S. immigration policy cannot begin
to solve the world’s humanitarian problems.

VDARE,com Editor Peter Brimelow famously began his 1995 book Alien
Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster by calling
American immigration policy Hitler’s posthumous revenge—because it led
the American elite, "passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all
taints of racism or xenophobia," to go overboard on the other side. In
other words, our Ruling Class began to see Hitler in any attempt to
protect America’s ethnic integrity. Hence the current attacks on Donald
Trump.

In the same way, refugee policy has become part of Hitler’s Revenge.
Every group suddenly becomes oppressed Jews, and denying them entry
equivalent to the Holocaust.

This misconception is just as dangerous as any amount of indifference.
It is a libel and we must fight it.

After all, if mass immigration continues without limits, it will be
Americans themselves who will be needing asylum.

Charles Bloch (email him) considers himself an unhyphenated American.

(10) Former Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett is quietly advising
Trump’s top aides
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/22/former-carson-campaign-manager-barry-bennett-is-quietly-advising-trumps-top-aides/

By Robert Costa

January 22 at 11:22 AM

Barry Bennett, the longtime Republican strategist who until recently was
Ben Carson’s campaign manager, is now serving as an informal adviser to
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Bennett and Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, confirmed the
relationship Friday.

Bennett described his unpaid role as one of counselor and resource to
Trump’s top aides as they begin to prepare for a possible
general-election campaign.

The Trump campaign’s alliance with a former rival was finalized last
week during a private meeting at the billionaire’s headquarters at Trump
Tower where Bennett offered to assist with planning.

[Past coverage: Ben Carson’s campaign manager has resigned. He once
called Carson ‘the smartest man I have ever met.’]

"I believe Trump is going to win and it’s important that his campaign is
ready for everything that is coming," Bennett said in an interview. "I’m
here to do what is needed. I’m not being paid and I’m going to be mostly
focused on getting my business back up and running."

A former adviser to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and a campaign veteran,
Bennett said he believes Trump has the chance to fundamentally shift
American politics, as along as he does not trip up along the way.

"When I was at Trump Tower, I went over six or seven things they had to
be worried about, in terms of the mechanics, party organization, and the
convention. It wasn’t about strategy," Bennett said. "My goal is to help
them think through it."

Bennett noted that after he departed Carson’s campaign after growing
frustrated with the candidate, he connected with several other GOP
campaigns, including with advisers to former Florida governor Jeb Bush
and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. But Trump’s campaign was the best fit, he said.

Lewandowski and Bennett have known each other for years, going back to
their days in Ohio politics.

"We appreciate the support of so many people who’ve been involved in the
process and volunteers who have a wide diversity of backgrounds. We’re
honored by Barry’s support," Lewandowski said in a statement.

(11) Soros buys Hillary
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-01/george-soros-regrets-supporting-obama-eagerly-awaits-president-hillary

George Soros Regrets Supporting Obama, Eagerly Awaits President Hillary

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/01/2016 11:30 –0500

Several weeks ago, we presented a list of CEOs and corporations who have
had the highest number of direct visits to the White House and, by
implication, president Obama. As we said, these are the corporations
(and CEOs) who own the White House, and the US presidency.

One name oddly missing was that of George Soros: the billionaire liberal
donor whose fundraising efforts have been critical for the Democratic
party in recent years. Which is surprising considering the substantial
backing, mostly financial, Soros provided in 2007 and 2008 to a then
largely unknown Senator from Illinois.

Or perhaps it is not surprising: a 2012 New Yorker profile of the
relationship between the US president and one of the left's most
generous donors reveals stormy clouds:

"although he still supports Obama, Soros has been disappointed by him,
both politically and personally. Small slights can loom large with
wealthy donors. When Soros wanted to meet with Obama in Washington to
discuss global economic problems, Obama’s staff failed to respond.
Eventually, they arranged not a White House interview but, rather, a
low-profile, private meeting in New York, when the President was in town
for other business. Soros found this back-door treatment confounding.
"He feels hurt," a Democratic donor says."

Fast forward to December 31, when in the pre-New Year's lull, the State
Department released its latest dump of Hillary Clinton emails, amounting
to some 5,500 pages, a move Trump promptly slammed.

And while it will take the media a few days to parse through all the
emails, one already stands out: one revealing not only the relationship
between Soros and Obama, but more importantly, Soros and the person who
will likely be America's next president.

As the following excerpt reveals, the abovementioned George Soros told a
close Hillary Clinton ally in 2012 that he regretted supporting Barack
Obama over her in the 2008 primaries and praised Clinton for giving him
an open door to discuss policy, according to emails released Thursday by
the State Department.

As first reported by Politico, in an email to Clinton, Neera Tanden,
head of the Center for American Progress, recounted a conversation she
had while seated next to Soros at a dinner sponsored by the liberal
major donor club called Democracy Alliance.

After Tanden informed Soros that she had worked for Clinton during her
bitter 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination against Obama, Tanden
wrote that Soros "said he's been impressed that he can always call/meet
with you on an issue of policy and said he hasn't met with the President
ever (though I thought he had). He then said he regretted his decision
in the primary - he likes to admit mistakes when he makes them and that
was one of them. He then extolled his work with you from your time as
First Lady on."

The full email below:

Going back to the NY Mag 2012 article, it added that according to a
source, although "Soros might have contributed far more money to Obama
if the Administration had engaged with him more intently, he said, "Part
of me respects Obama for not spending more time with him. This President
doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with donors. You have to admire that.""

Actually he does, as the chart up top shows it. However, for some odd
reason Obama simply did not want to spend a lot of time with George Soros.

The time of snubbing Soros, however, is at an end, as Hillary is
well-known for having no qualms about spending "a lot of time with
donors", especially since virtually every entity on Wall Street is a
donor either directly or to the Clinton Foundation.

Which means that as Obama's time in the White House runs out, and as
Hillary prepares to take over the throne (barring some Republican
miracle), Soros is about to rectify his mistake from 8 years ago and
make sure that the special interest puppet in charge of the U.S., is
precisely the one he wanted all along. […]

(12) Trump irks Jewish donors - "less subservient" on Foreign Policy

Trump: "Not having to sell himself body and soul, he appears ... less
abjectly subservient"

From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics and Engineering Physics)"
<sadanand@ccsu.edu> Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2015 09:57:17 -0500 Subject: Trump
irks Jewish donors

Comment by John Whitbeck:

Unlike all his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination,
Donald Trump occasionally says something intelligent. Notably, he has
said that the world would be a better place if the United States and its
friends had never attacked Iraq and Libya and overthrown Saddam Hussein
and Muammar Qaddafi – a blindingly self-evident truth which no other
presidential candidate, Republican or Democratic, has had the courage to
admit grasping.

Yesterday, according to the Associated Press report transmitted below,
Trump went before the Republican Jewish Coalition, the largest grouping
of his party’s wealthy Jewish donors, and, buoyed by his own vast wealth
and to the astonishment of the assembled throng anticipating a
unanimous, non-nuanced group grovel, did NOT tell them precisely what
they wanted to hear.

Notwithstanding Trump’s being a whacky and tasteless showman who spouts
a great deal of stream-of-consciousness nonsense, I have to admit that I
find him less frightening than  his three truly terrifying principal
competitors for the Republican nomination – Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and
Ted Cruz.

Not having to sell himself body and soul, he appears, on the whole, less
abjectly subservient to the three pillars of the Permanent Government
(the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance-homeland-security
complex, the uniformed military and the Israel-First Lobby) and less
gung-ho to disburse even more of America’s financial, moral and
reputational capital on unnecessary and unwinnable wars (both current
and additional) than his fellow Republican candidates or Hillary Clinton.

It is even conceivable that, if elected, he would put American interests
ahead of Israeli desires – a revolutionary change in American governance.

As an American who has lived abroad for almost 40 years, my principal
concern in American presidential contests has always been, as it would
be for anyone else who does not live in the United States, American
"foreign (now mostly military) policy" – i.e., what America does in and
to the rest of the world. Still, it is a sad commentary on the appalling
state of American politics and politicians that I could seriously
contemplate Donald Trump as potentially the least awful and scary choice
in November 2016.

(13) Trump irks Jewish Donors with comments on Mideast Peace. "I don’t
want your money"

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/192abb107c0844f5bf4c956c17a86684/casino-magnate-adelson-draws-gop-field-jewish-conference

http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stories/366030/trump-irks-jewish-donors-with-comments-on-mideast-peace.html

Trump Irks Jewish Donors With Comments On Mideast Peace

by JULIE BYKOWICZ and STEVE PEOPLES

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015 11:00 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Jewish donors gathered Thursday had two demands of
the Republican presidential candidates who’d come to speak to them:
unambiguous support for Israel and respect.

Donald Trump seemed to fail at both.

The party’s 2016 front-runner openly questioned Israel’s commitment to
the Mideast peace process in his remarks to the Republican Jewish
Coalition, echoing comments he made the night before in an interview
with The Associated Press. He drew boos after refusing to endorse
Jerusalem as the nation’s undivided capital. And he suggested to the
influential group simply wanted to install a puppet in the White House.

"You’re not going to support me even though you know I’m the best thing
that could happen to Israel," Trump said. "I know why you’re not going
to support me — because I don’t want your money. You want to control
your own politician."

It was an extraordinary speech to a group used to deferential treatment.
And Trump’s comments on Israel — particularly the billionaire
businessman’s repeated questioning of its commitment to making a peace
deal with the Palestinians — sparked an aggressive backlash from his
Republican rivals.

"Some in our own party — in the news today — have actually questioned
Israel’s commitment to peace," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told the crowd.
"Some in our own party actually call for more sacrifice from the Israeli
people. They are dead wrong, and they don’t understand the enduring bond
between Israel and America."

The primary benefactor of the Republican Jewish Coalition is casino
magnate Sheldon Adelson, who spent more on the 2012 federal elections
than any other donor. Adelson’s willingness to make a huge political
investment helps explain why his signature group attracted all of the
major GOP presidential candidates to its forum in Washington — even
though the man himself wasn’t among the hundreds in attendance.

On the eve of the event, Trump weighed in on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict in an interview with The Associated Press. He questioned for
the first time both sides’ commitment to peace, adding that he would
know within six months of being elected president whether he could
broker an elusive peace accord.

He doubled down on those comments Thursday in an auditorium packed with
Israel’s most loyal supporters.

"I don’t know that Israel has the commitment to make it, and I don’t
know the other side has the commitment to make it," Trump said.

The comment drew murmurs of disapproval. Later, a smattering of boos
broke out after he refused to say whether Jerusalem should serve as the
undivided capital of Israel, a priority for many in America’s pro-Israel
lobby.

Trump shrugged off the criticism. "Do me a favor, just relax," he told
one of the people booing. Perhaps more than any other candidate, he can
afford to.

The billionaire frequently calls himself a "self-funded" candidate.
Compared to his rivals, he has raised — and spent — dramatically less,
depending largely on free publicity to drive his campaign. He began his
candidacy by loaning his campaign almost $2 million and has suggested a
willingness to spend much more of his own money.

Yet he hasn’t ignored donors altogether. Fundraising records show that
supporters have handed over $4 million, enough to cover his presidential
efforts in recent months.

Regardless of his relationship with donors, Trump’s comments mark a
sharp contrast from his Republican rivals who pledged unconditional
allegiance to Israel. Several candidates blasted him from the stage.

"This is not a real estate deal with two sides arguing over money" Rubio
said. "It’s a struggle to safeguard the future of Israel."

Said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, "We need a president who will stand
unapologetically with the nation of Israel."

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee seemed to target Trump when he
mentioned that some in his party support the "head-scratching" proposal
that Mideast peace is possible only if Israel and the Palestinians both
come to the table.

"I want to say where have you been for the last 70 years?" Huckabee charged.

Trump’s comments also fell flat among many Thursday’s crowd.

Michael Leventoff, a New York businessman and member of the Republican
Jewish Coalition, said Trump questioning Israel’s commitment to the
peace process is another example of him "just getting it wrong."

"There’s plenty of evidence of Israel’s repeated attempts at peace," he
said. "This is exactly why Trump is what I like to call a brilliant
idiot. He should know better, and probably does."

Trump told RJC members that while he doesn’t want their money, he does
want their support. He noted he has won several awards from Jewish
groups and recently said he has "a very good relationship" with Adelson.

The casino magnate has yet to make up his mind how who he’ll support in
the GOP primary, said Adelson’s political adviser, Andy Abboud.

Each of the candidates is strong on the issues that concern Adelson the
most, chief among them protection of Israel, he said. "The Adelsons are
generally pleased with all of the Republican candidates and feel that
the primary process will work its way out."

(14) America is being Destroyed by Problems that are Unaddressed - Paul
Craig Roberts

From: Paul de Burgh-Day <pdeburgh@lorinna.net> Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2016
21:52:55 +1100

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/12/30/america-is-being-destroyed-by-problems-that-are-unaddressed-paul-craig-roberts

America Is Being Destroyed By Problems That Are Unaddressed

Paul Craig Roberts

December 30, 2015

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was
ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of
soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed
wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A
reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow
Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try
to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.

The fresh Amerian machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German
position, and an armistance was agreed. The Germans were promised no
territorial losses and no reparations if they laid down their arms,
which they did only to be betrayed at Versailles. The injustice and
stupidity of the Versailles Treaty produced the German hyperinflation,
the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hitler.

Hitler’s demands that Germany be put back together from the pieces
handed out to France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and
Poland, comprising 13 percent of Germany’s European territory and
one-tenth of her population, and a repeat of French and British
stupidity that had sired the Great War finished off the remnants of
European civilization in World War II.

The United States benefitted greatly from this death. The economy of the
United States was left untouched by both world wars, but economies
elsewhere were destroyed. This left Washington and the New York banks
the arbiters of the world economy. The US dollar replaced British
sterling as the world reserve currency and became the foundation of US
domination in the second half of the 20th century, a domination limited
in its reach only by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 removed this constraint from Washington. The
result was a burst of American arrogance and hubris that wiped away in
over-reach the leadership power that had been handed to the United
States. Since the Clinton regime, Washington’s wars have eroded American
leadership and replaced stability in the Middle East and North Africa
with chaos.

Washington moved in the wrong direction both in the economic and
political arenas. In place of diplomacy, Washington used threats and
coercion. "Do as you are told or we will bomb you into the stone age,"
as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told President Musharraf
of Pakistan. Not content to bully weak countries, Washington threatens
poweful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with economic
sanctions and military actions. Consequently, much of the non-Western
world is abandoning the US dollar as world currency, and a number of
countries are organizing a payments system, World Bank, and IMF of their
own. Some NATO members are rethinking their membership in an
organization that Washington is herding into conflict with Russia.

China’s unexpectedly rapid rise to power owes much to the greed of
American capitalism. Pushed by Wall Street and the lure of "performance
bonuses," US corporate executives brought a halt to rising US living
standards by sending high productivity, high value-added jobs abroad
where comparable work is paid less. With the jobs went the technology
and business knowhow. American capability was given to China. Apple
Computer, for example, has not only offshored the jobs but also
outsourced its production. Apple does not own the Chinese factories that
produce its products.

The savings in US labor costs became corporate profits, executive
renumeration, and shareholder capital gains. One consequence was the
worsening of the US income distribution and the concentration of income
and wealth in few hands. A middle class democracy was transformed into
an oligarchy. As former President Jimmy Carter recently said, the US is
no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy.

In exchange for short-term profits and in order to avoid Wall Street
threats of takeovers, capitalists gave away the American economy. As
manufacturing and tradeable professional skill jobs flowed out of
America, real family incomes ceased to grow and declined. The US labor
force participation rate fell even as economic recovery was proclaimed.
Job gains were limited to lowly paid domestic services, such as retail
clerks, waitresses, and bartenders, and part-time jobs replaced
full-time jobs. Young people entering the work force find it
increasingly difficult to establish an independent existance, with 50
percent of 25-year old Americans living at home with parents.

In an economy driven by consumer and investment spending, the absence of
growth in real consumer income means an economy without economic growth.
Led by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve in the first years of the
21st century substituted a growth in consumer debt for the missing
growth in consumer income in order to keep the economy moving. This
could only be a short-term palliative, because the growth of consumer
debt is limited by the growth of consumer income.

Another serious mistake was the repeal of financial regulation that had
made capitalism functional. The New York Banks were behind this
egregious error, and they used their bought-and-paid-for Texas US
Senator, whom they rewarded with a 7-figure salary and bank vice
chairmanship to open the floodgates to amazing debt leverage and
financial fraud with the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall destroyed the separation of commercial from
investment banking. One result was the concentration of banking. Five
mega-banks now dominate the American financial scene. Another result was
the power that the mega-banks gained over the government of the United
States. Today the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve serve only the
interests of the mega-banks.

In the United States savers have had no interest on their savings in
eight years. Those who saved for their retirement in order to make
paltry Social Security benefits liveable have had to draw down their
capital, leaving less inheritance for hard-pressed sons, grandsons,
daughters and granddaughters.

Washington’s financial policy is forcing families to gradually
extinguish themselves. This is "freedom and democracy " America today.

Among the capitalist themselves and their shills among the libertarian
ideologues, who are correct about the abuse of government power but less
concerned with the abuse of private power, the capitalist greed that is
destroying families and the economy is regarded as the road to progress.
By distrusting government regulators of private misbehavior,
libertarians provided the cover for the repeal of the financial
regulation that made American capitalism functional. Today dysfunctional
capitalism rules, thanks to greed and libertarian ideology.

With the demise of the American middle class, which becomes more obvious
each day as another ladder of upward mobility is dismantled, the United
States becomes a bipolar country consisting of the rich and the poor.
The most obvious conclusion is that the failure of American political
ledership means instability, leading to a conflict between the haves—the
one percent—and the dispossessed—the 99 percent.

The failure of leadership in the United States is not limited to the
political arena but is across the board. The time horizon operating in
American institutions is very short term. Just as US manufacturers have
harmed US demand for their products by moving abroad American jobs and
the consumer income associated with the jobs, university administrations
are destroying universities. As much as 75 percent of university budgets
is devoted to administration. There is a proliferation of provosts,
assistant provosts, deans, assistant deans, and czars for every
designated infraction of political correctness.

Tenure-track jobs, the bedrock of academic freedom, are disappearing as
university administrators turn to adjuncts to teach courses for a few
thousand dollars. The decline in tenure-track jobs heralds a decline in
enrollments in Ph.D. programs. University enrollments overall are likely
to decline. The university experience is eroding at the same time that
the financial return to a university education is eroding. Increasingly
students graduate into an employment environment that does not produce
sufficient income to service their student loans or to form independent
households.

Increasingly university research is funded by the Defense Department and
by commercial interests and serves those interests. Universities are
losing their role as sources of societal critics and reformers. Truth
itself is becoming commercialized.

The banking system, which formerly financed business, is increasingly
focused on converting as much of the economy as possible into leveraged
debt instruments. Even consumer spending is reduced with high credit
card interest rate charges. Indebtedness is rising faster than the real
production in the economy.

Historically, capitalism was justified on the grounds that it guaranteed
the efficient use of society’s resources. Profits were a sign that
resources were being used to maximize social welfare, and losses were a
sign of inefficient resource use, which was corrected by the firm going
out of business. This is no longer the case when the economic policy of
a counry serves to protect financial institutions that are "too big to
fail" and when profits reflect the relocation abroad of US GDP as a
result of jobs offshoring. Clearly, American capitalism no longer serves
society, and the worsening distribution of income and wealth prove it.

None of these serious problems will be addressed by the presidential
candidates, and no party’s platform will consist of a rescue plan for
America. Unbridled greed, short-term in nature, will continue to drive
America into the ground.

-

801 Roger Waters of Pink Floyd: musicians who oppose Israel are labelled Nazi & anti-Semite, their careers destroyed

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd: musicians who oppose Israel are labelled
Nazi & anti-Semite, their careers destroyed

Newsletter published on 20 February 2016

(1) Roger Waters of Pink Floyd: musicians who oppose Israel are labelled
Nazi & anti-Semite, their careers destroyed
(2) No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen (2013)
(3) Marine Le Pen sparks protest on Cambridge visit (2013)
(4) Ex-aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen: ‘Zionists, Freemasons’ control French
media
(5) Marine Le Pen crowned  ‘Liar of the year’ by French journalists,
over migrant comments
(6) Marine Le Pen's Party asks Russia for €27 Million loan to finance
election campaign

(1) Roger Waters of Pink Floyd: musicians who oppose Israel are labelled
Nazi & anti-Semite, their careers destroyed

From: "Ken Freeland diogenesquest@gmail.com [shamireaders]" Date: Sat,
20 Feb 2016 14:49:30 -0600

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/roger-waters-pink-floyd-israel-boycott-ban-palestine-a6884971.html

Roger Waters: Pink Floyd star on why his fellow musicians are terrified
to speak out against Israel

Exclusive: 'If they say something they will no longer have a career – I
have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite'

Paul Gallagher

Saturday 20 February 2016 16:18 BST

American musicians who support boycotting Israel over the issue of
Palestinian rights are terrified to speak out for fear their careers
will be destroyed, according to Roger Waters.

The Pink Floyd star – a prominent supporter of the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel since its inception 10 years
ago – said the experience of seeing himself constantly labelled a Nazi
and anti-Semite had scared people into silence.

"The only response to BDS is that it is anti-Semitic," Waters told The
Independent, in his first major UK interview about his commitment to
Israeli activism. "I know this because I have been accused of being a
Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years.

"My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice
[against Israel]. There’s me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street
Preachers, one or two others, but there’s nobody in the United States
where I live. I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared s***less.

"If they say something in public they will no longer have a career. They
will be destroyed. I’m hoping to encourage some of them to stop being
frightened and to stand up and be counted, because we need them. We need
them desperately in this conversation in the same way we needed
musicians to join protesters over Vietnam."

Waters likened Israeli treatment of Palestinians to apartheid South
Africa. "The way apartheid South Africa treated its black population,
pretending they had some kind of autonomy, was a lie," he said.

"Just as it is a lie now that there is any possibility under the current
status quo of Palestinians achieving self-determination and achieving,
at least, a rule of law where they can live and raise their children and
start their own industries. This is an ancient, brilliant, artistic and
very humane civilisation that is being destroyed in front of our eyes."

A trip to Israel in 2006, where Waters had planned to play a gig in Tel
Aviv and the end of the European leg of his Dark Side of the Moon Live
tour, transformed his view of the Middle East.

After speaking to Palestinian artists as well as Israeli anti-government
protesters, who called on him to use the gig as a platform to speak out
against Israeli foreign policy, he switched the concert from Hayarkon
Park to Neve Shalom, an Arab/Israeli peace village. But as the tickets
had already been sold, the audience was still entirely Jewish Israeli.

Waters said: "It was very strange performing to a completely segregated
audience because there were no Palestinians there. There were just
60,000 Jewish Israelis, who could not have been more welcoming, nice and
loyal to Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, it left an uncomfortable feeling."

He travelled around the West Bank towns of Jenin, Ramallah and Nablus,
seeing how the two communities were segregated – and also visited the
security barrier separating Israel from the Occupied Territories
spraying a signed message from his seminal work "Another Brick in the
Wall", which read: "We don’t need no thought control".

Waters soon joined the BDS movement, inviting opprobrium and
condemnation for daring to do what so few musicians are prepared to.
"I’m glad I did it," he says, as people in Israeli are "treated very
unequally depending on their ethnicity. So Palestinian Israeli citizens
and the Bedouin are treated completely different from Jewish citizens.
There are 40 to 50 different laws depending on whether you are or you
are not Jewish."

Waters expected to be shouted down by critics, but it is the Nazi
accusations that he considers the most absurd, especially given that his
father, Lt Eric Waters of the 8th Royal Fusilliers, died aged 31
fighting the Nazis at Anzio, Italy, in early 1944. His body was never
found but his name is commemorated at the Commonwealth War Graves
cemetery at Monte Cassino.

(2) No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen (2013)
http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-devils-granddaughter-20130728-2qthd.html

The devil's granddaughter?

     August 3, 2013

Welcome to the new, glamorous face of fascism. Jane Wheatley meets
Marion Le Pen and her aunt Marine, part of a far-right dynasty intent on
reshaping French politics.

I am due to meet France’s youngest MP in her office at the country’s
National Assembly but am prevented by a cordon of police and barricades
holding back thousands of protestors. The Assembly is voting this
afternoon on a bill legalising same sex-marriage and demonstrators on
both sides of the debate are out in force. I call her press assistant,
who comes out to get me. "The French love their demonstrations," he
says, as a policeman waves us through the barriers.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, of the far right Front National (FN) party, sits
at her desk by an open window with a view through the leaves of a plane
tree onto a small square below. There is a faint smell of cigarettes in
the room and I think that, like so many young women in France, Marion is
probably a smoker.

     Marine is, in fact, far more dangerous than her father ever was.

Dressed in black pants and fitted jacket over a crisp, white shirt with
a small gold chain at her throat, Marion talks fast and fluently, though
perhaps a little too much and too eagerly – like a student who has done
her homework and wants you to know it.

Here she is on globalisation: "A form of protectionism should be
enforced at national level, at least on strategic areas such as
agriculture."

And on membership of the European Union: "Choosing Europe is suicidal,
even more so with intra- as well as extra-Europe competition."

On social policy: "French people should be prioritised; clandestine
immigrants get 100 per cent refund on healthcare while two-thirds of
French people can’t afford medical help. Charity begins at home."

How did she vote in today’s debate on same-sex marriage? The FN is
radically opposed, she says: "It is not homophobia; it is because
[same-sex marriage] opens the door to adoption. Love is important but
not always enough. I think it is egotistical for people to knowingly
deprive a child of having both a mother and a father just because they
want a child."

What about single-parent families? "Generally it’s a way for homosexuals
to adopt."

Would she like to have children herself? "Well," she smiles, "I need to
find my soul mate first. The life of a female politician makes it hard
to combine personal life and work, but I think it is almost a patriotic
duty to have children."

Marion belongs to a political dynasty. Her grandfather is Jean-Marie Le
Pen, the 84-year-old father of France’s extreme right: founder of the
Front National, bruiser, patriot and, in the eyes of the country’s bien
pensant middle classes, devil incarnate. Marion’s aunt is Marine Le Pen,
who at 44, after doing the hard yards in municipal politics, was elected
– some might say anointed – president of the FN when her father retired
in 2010 and is an MEP in the European Parliament. In the first round of
the 2012 presidential elections, Marine won almost a fifth of the vote
behind Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. The same year, her niece
Marion became a deputy (MP) in the National Assembly, at 22 the youngest
in the history of the republic.

Thanks to Marine and Marion, the FN has increased its support among
women and young people – 30 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for
Marine in the presidential elections – and Marion says she is proud to
represent patriotic youth: "Being so young is an asset, people see it as
a kind of purity – it’s hard to imagine someone as young as me being
corrupted already!"

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s parliamentary seat is Carpentras, in the
Vaucluse region of the rural south. A bus takes me from the former papal
seat of Avignon, past the stout city walls and past several posters of
Marine Le Pen’s face bearing the legend, "Oui, la France".

Carpentras was once a thriving market town surrounded by fertile fields
and orchards. "It was known as the bread basket of France," local hotel
manager Frédéric Van Orshoven tells me. "Then the trucks came from
Spain, straight up the new motorway to Paris, and Carpentras began to
collapse."

Thirty years ago the region imported labour from North Africa –
Tunisians and Moroccans, known as Magrebs – to work in the fields and
processing plants.

"We needed them," explains Van Orshoven. "But now the next generation
are unemployed, hanging about in gangs, dealing drugs. Their women wear
the veil [frowned on in aggressively secular France] and we have two
mosques, one of them fundamentalist."

Can the town’s new deputy do anything useful? He shrugs: "What can she
do – throw them away? They are French after all." In the market the next
morning I find two elderly woman gossiping: what do they think of Marion?

"She is very pretty, very agreeable, always smiling, but what she
proposes is impossible," says one, prodding me gently in the chest.
"Return France to the French? It is too late for that. There are Magreb
women here of my age, they have children and grandchildren."

In a playground in one of the squares, two well-dressed women, mother
and daughter, are watching a toddler on the swings. "This Le Pen girl is
parachuted in," says one. "You can see why people voted for her." She
nods meaningfully towards a young woman wearing a niqab. A Senegalese
woman in a colourful turban tells me: "Patriotism is good, I love my own
country, but sometimes it feels dangerous to be from somewhere else."

I walk out of town to the brand new FN office where Marion holds her
weekly meetings with constituents. Builders are hammering and drilling
while she sits at an enormous table in an otherwise empty room,
listening to problems. One woman explains she is worried for her
children’s safety because of gangs of older boys roaming the streets and
torching cars, seemingly out of reach of the police and courts.

Marion is sympathetic and attentive; she doesn’t have any ready
solutions but the woman relaxes, feeling listened to. It’s an impressive
and, I think, genuine performance from the 23-year-old.

As I leave them still chatting and smiling, I study the posters in the
foyer: several of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marion’s grandfather, in his
younger days, looking generally virile and heroic – one of him holding
Marion as an angelic, curly headed baby – and more of her aunt Marine
during her presidential campaign.

While the junior member of the family has made a good debut and Le Pen
père trades on past glories, there is little doubt that Marine is the
big hitter just now.

These two women – blonde, statuesque Marine with something of her
father’s physicality, and Marion, slim and strikingly pretty with long,
fair hair – are the new faces of the far right.

Both are intent on what Marine has termed the de-demonisation of the
party, carefully distancing themselves from some of Jean-Marie’s more
notorious rhetoric – xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic – and from the
thuggish, skinhead elements in the party. One member, captured on film
giving a Nazi salute, was summarily dismissed by Marine.

Instead, they have appeared to modernise without abandoning a right-wing
discourse: not pro-abortion but pro a woman’s right to choose; not
anti-gay but against gay marriage; not overtly racist but in favour of
draconian curbs on immigration. When Marion used her one chance, as a
new deputy, to speak in the full Assembly, she chose to protest at the
influx to French cities of poverty-stricken Romanians and Bulgarians –
known colloquially as "les Roms" – and was applauded by the House.

And the current dire economic downturn has played to the party’s
strengths: themes of anti-globalisation, protectionism and immigration
control resonating with communities struggling with 10 per cent
unemployment and the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs.

Marion grew up in the family house with her siblings and cousins and is
close to Jean-Marie. "Though he always had a busy schedule, he is not
the classic grandfather sitting with the grandchildren on his lap," she
says.

Practically everyone in the Le Pen family, including spouses and
partners, are paid-up party members and yet Marion insists they came to
their political views independently. "We don’t talk about politics
around the dinner table; there was no brainwashing. My grandparents’
passion for France was conveyed, naturally, but the FN wasn’t the
obvious route for me at first."

In fact, Marion flirted with Sarkozy’s centre-right Union for a Popular
Movement (UMP) party before joining the FN. "I didn’t support him as
such," she says, "But his character seduced me and I thought, ‘Why not?’
He galvanised people and he was a lawyer, not from high administration,
so it was a change from other politicians. My interest drifted, though,
when I saw discordance between his words and actions: he aligned too
much with the United States; he disappointed people on fiscal matters,
competition, sovereignty and especially on security. There was more
immigration under Sarkozy than under Jospin!" (Socialist Lionel Jospin
was prime minister of France from 1997 to 2002.)

Yet for all her talk of independence, the widespread and sometimes
violent antipathy towards Jean-Marie’s political extremism created a
siege mentality within the family. Marion’s mother and aunts were
children when the family apartment was bombed by anti-FN activists, and
they had a hard time from pupils and staff at the state schools chosen
for them by Jean-Marie. "He told them, ‘You will have to face the knocks
as they will last your whole life,’ " explains Marion. She, too, was
sent to a state school but changed to the private system after
experiencing similar discrimination: "Because my name, Le Pen, is
heavily charged, it unleashed a lot of passion."

Yet she chose to keep the name, along with her father’s, Maréchal. "Yes,
because despite the discrimination I’m very proud of the Le Pen name. It
is part of my political heritage."

Though Marine is now leader of the FN, Jean-Marie’s staff still refer to
him as "Monsieur le President". In the leafy confines of the family home
in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud at least, JM is still clearly le
grand fromage. During my afternoon with him, he confided that Marion was
at first reluctant to stand for election to the Assembly. "She said,
‘But grandpapa, I have my law exams.’ I told her, ‘How can we expect
young people to be involved in politics if we don’t set the example?’ So
she won her election and straight afterwards she passed her exams!"

Today, Marine Le Pen is on the cover of the weekly news and current
affairs magazine L’Express, her head thrown back, laughing, and
underneath in large type, two words: "Elle monte!" Inside, five pages
analysing the rise and rise of "the devil’s daughter", and how she has
brought the FN in from the cold, from outside the pale into mainstream
French politics.

In the 2012 presidential election, Marine stole centre-right voters from
Nicolas Sarkozy, pushing him into second place behind Francois Hollande.
The Socialist Party leader went on to win the presidency but has made a
sad fist of it, losing popularity at a cracking pace. A recent poll
concluded that in a straight race between Hollande and Le Pen, Marine
would win. Another poll revealed that 65 per cent of French people think
Marine is "courageous".

How did the woman who is, as several political commentators have warned,
a wolf in sheep’s clothing, gain so much credibility?

"Her feminine softness makes what was aggressive in the father
relatively admissible in the daughter," says Pascal Perrineau, professor
at Paris’s elite Institute for Political Studies. Commenting ahead of
the 2012 presidential race, Alain Duhamel of the left-wing Libération
newspaper went further: "She is, unfortunately, a very intelligent
woman: combative, highly polished … extremely sure of herself and her
intuitions and gifted with an incomparable aplomb. She is, in fact, far
more dangerous than her father ever was."

Last month, the European Parliament voted to strip Marine Le Pen of
diplomatic immunity, leaving the way clear for French authorities to
prosecute her for inciting racial hatred by comparing Muslim prayers in
the street to the Nazi occupation of France.

At a 2010 rally in Lyon, she told party members, "For those who like to
talk about World War II, to talk about occupation, we could talk about,
for once, the occupation of our territory. There are no armoured
vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it
weighs on people."

After the overwhelming vote against her, an unrepentant Le Pen attacked
her fellow MEPs for violating her right to freedom of expression.

Earlier this year, on a blustery spring day in England, knots of
protesters were assembling outside the Cambridge University Union,
unfurling banners in readiness for the arrival of Marine Le Pen. "No to
racism, fascism and Islamaphobia" read one, "No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen"
another.

The ancient university’s debating chamber prides itself on inviting
controversial speakers to address members. A placard reading, "Union,
you [heart sign] rapists and fascists", referred both to Le Pen and to
the recent visit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the
International Monetary Fund, accused of raping a chambermaid in a New
York hotel.

By the time Marine Le Pen’s black BMW swings into the street at the rear
of the Union building, the crowd has swelled to several hundred and
police lines are in position. She could have been smuggled in via a
secret underground passage but chooses instead to walk to the entrance
in full view of protestors, as her father had done 10 years earlier.

A queue of ticket holders snakes around the building waiting to be
frisked by security. I ask a third-year law student why he has come.
"She got 20 per cent of the [presidential] vote," he says, "so she’s
obviously a force in French life and I think we should hear what she has
to say. Nazis didn’t come to power because people listened to them –
rather because people didn’t listen."

Every seat in the chamber is taken, there are overflow rooms packed with
people and as reporters squeeze onto a bench in the upper gallery Le Pen
makes her entrance, wearing tailored pants and a black jacket over a
low-cut blouse.

Using her hands for emphasis, blonde bob swinging, she is straight into
familiar themes: the "re-armament" of France to reclaim sovereignty from
a domineering eurocracy, the need for market regulation, the "poison" of
mass immigration, the "insult" of women in burqas and Muslim prayers in
the streets of France, and the 21st-century "totalitarianisms" of
globalisation and Islam.

By the time she and I sit down together in a room upstairs, she has
talked for an hour, faced a battery of universally hostile questions and
her deep, powerful voice is croaking a little. Her minder tells me we
can have only 10 minutes. So, we must rattle through some questions.

Why did she come?

Because, she says, the Front National has been caricatured, mainly in
the minds of the elite: "If I can show them our true face, what we
really stand for, then it is worthwhile coming here." Her party is
conflated with the extreme right National Front in Britain, she says,
when actually it is closer to the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP).

She would like to reduce immigration to France to 10,000 a year from its
current level of 250,000. How?

She would put a stop to family reunions and cut back on the right to
asylum, "which has been heavily abused". She sees no reason to welcome
nationals from former French colonies: "Having won their independence,
why should they be allowed in the country of their former colonial masters?"

Who would she let in?

She would allow a small number of "really deserving people" seeking
asylum from persecution, otherwise only those whose skills and talents
could contribute something to France.

If she were in power, what would she do for working women with families?

She would increase child-care provision but also offer a "parent salary"
to those who choose to stay home to raise children. Why does she
continue to reside in the Le Pen family home?

"We all have heavy work schedules and this way we can keep the family
links going strong. And my mother is kept very busy caring for her
grandchildren; I couldn’t do all I do without her."

When I ask about her niece, Marion, her face softens visibly: "She is
really like my own daughter," she says, "I am so proud of her."

Can these two Le Pen women alone reshape the Front National to be the
third force in French politics? Not without more MPs – although the
party achieved more than 13 per cent of the vote in the 2012 national
legislative elections, there are currently only two FN MPs in the
Assembly. But the crisis with the euro and the economic recession
gripping Europe are grist to their mill. And the FN’s anti-European
Union stance finds echoes across the channel, where the UKIP is making
inroads among Conservative Party voters.

The FN’s emphasis on protectionism, regulation of financial markets and
what Pascal Perrineau calls "welfare-state chauvinism" chime with the
rhetoric of the French left while also appealing to beleaguered
conservative voters. Writing in left-leaning US magazine The Nation
ahead of the presidential election, the French journalist Agnès Poirier
noted: "[Marine] Le Pen has cunningly surfed on the euro crisis and
blurred traditional and ideological boundaries … She [is] hunting on
everybody’s grounds, stealing from all in the most unpredictable way."

Will the UMP be forced to consider a coalition with the FN? Not at a
national level, says Gilles Ivaldi, head of research at think tank, the
National Centre for Scientific Research. "Leaders of the mainstream
right have unambiguously rejected alliance with the FN," he says.
"Coalitions between the right and extreme right are more likely to take
place at the local level, particularly in the southern regions, like
Vaucluse, where the local UMP has traditionally had closer links with
the FN."

And Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Ivaldi says, is already set to lead the FN
municipal campaign in the south next year. I recall that in Carpentras,
hotel manager Frédéric Van Orshoven had told me that he could see Marion
as a town mayor – a position that is important in provincial France,
much more than ceremonial. It seemed such an odd idea, this slender,
educated Parisienne, chief among the stolid burghers, but he was quite
serious.

I ask Ivaldi, could Marine Le Pen be president one day? Unlikely in the
near future, he says. "The FN is still stigmatised by a majority of
voters and the party remains isolated in French politics, where there is
little space available to third parties outside of an alliance with one
of the dominant actors of the left and the right."

In the elegant upstairs room of his luxury home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the
family patriarch, sits in a silk upholstered armchair considering the
future for his golden girls.

Le Pavillon de l’Ecuyer – the Squire’s Pavilion – is an imposing
red-brick manor screened by tall horse-chestnut trees, their creamy
candles just in flower, and set on a hill in the private, gated grounds
of Montretout Park in the affluent suburb of Saint-Cloud. From the wide,
balustraded stone terraces on ground and first floors, it seems the
whole of Paris is spread at our feet: in the distance the tower of
Montparnasse, the gold dome of Les Invalides, the roofs of Montmartre
and – if you peer round the pink froth of a splendid Japanese cherry –
the Eiffel Tower.

Through the open French windows with their pigeon-grey wooden shutters,
there are the sounds of birdsong and children’s voices – several of Le
Pen’s nine grandchildren are playing in the grounds with friends.

Of his three daughters, two still live here with their children: the
middle one, Yann, occupies converted servants’ quarters on the top floor
and the youngest, Marine, has an apartment over the former stable block.
Their mother, Le Pen’s first wife Pierette, lives in a Hansel and
Gretel-style chalet in the grounds.

After their very public split in 1987, Pierette posed for Playboy
magazine, naked save for an apron, wielding a broom in protest at her
husband’s suggestion that if she lacked money she should work cleaning
houses. There had presumably been a rapprochement at some stage? "Why,
yes," says Le Pen expansively. "I could not deprive les petites of their
grandmother."

He believes that Marion might be more talented than her aunt: "She has
started young," he says, "so will have many years to gain experience,
whereas Marine began in politics much later."

He once called Marine "une petite bourgeoise" and now explains: "It was
in comparison with my upbringing. I was born in a house with no floor.
Marine is a woman of her time, she’s had a middle-class education, she
has three children, she’s been divorced twice, women recognise
themselves in her. And men are becoming more feminine, too."

I look around the resolutely masculine room with its rows of
leather-bound books, model ships, shelves of tiny lead soldiers and
statuettes of Joan of Arc, long ago claimed by the FN as its nationalist
figurehead. What on earth does this burly former parachute officer, the
son of a Breton fisherman, make of a world in which men find their inner
female and the movement he created is now headed by a woman?

"I approve of the way Marine is leading the party," says her father,
"and the direction in which she is bringing it – she’s very capable. Our
‘man’ today is actually a woman, Jeanne d’Arc!"

(3) Marine Le Pen sparks protest on Cambridge visit (2013)

http://www.france24.com/en/20130219-marine-le-pen-protest-cambridge-union-french

Text by Sophie PILGRIM

Latest update : 2013-02-19

Hundreds of students gathered outside Cambridge University’s prestigious
debating society on Tuesday to protest a speech by French far-right
leader Marine Le Pen, whose visit sparked an outcry among anti-fascist
groups in the country.

France’s far-right darling Marine Le Pen paid a visit to the historic UK
city of Cambridge on Tuesday when she was invited to speak at the
university’s famed debating society.

Some 200 students turned out to protest the arrival of the National
Front (FN) leader, waving banners reading "No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen"
and "No platform for fascists".

The protesters were referring to comments made by Le Pen in 2010 when
she compared Muslim prayers in the streets of France with the Nazi
occupation. "For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if
it's about occupation, then we could also talk about [Muslim prayers in
the streets]," she said. "There may not be any tanks or soldiers, but it
is nevertheless an occupation."

     The protest was supported by the university's Black and Minority
Ethnic Campaign, the Cambridge Universities Labour Club, the NUS Black
Students’ Officer and the Socialist Worker movement. Posted on yfrog by
@Fio_edwards.

The demonstration against her visit on Tuesday was organised by the
Unite Against Fascism (UAF) association, which described Le Pen and her
national Front party as "deeply racist".

"Fascist organisations across Europe are attempting to take advantage of
the economic crisis and the impact of austerity, to build support," the
group said in an online statement. "Like her father, Marine Le Pen seeks
to organize a capacity for extra-parliamentary activity through rallies,
street demonstrations and links to openly ‘revolutionary nationalist’
groups," it said.

The protest was supported by the university's Black and Minority Ethnic
Campaign (BME SC), the Cambridge Universities Labour Club, the NUS Black
Students’ Officer and the Socialist Worker movement. Members of the
Cambridge University's Student Union were also in attendance.

The FN dismissed the UAF and its allies as "radical minority,
communitarian groups" and argued that Le Pen was widely respected in the
UK. "These fringe groups are bound to make noise," FN Vice President
Florian Philippot told French TV channel i-Tele on Thursday. "But the
majority of British people are very happy to welcome Marine Le Pen. They
are pleased to see that there is still a free spirit in France."

‘Don’t even know who she is’

France’s National Front party has become a popular force in French
politics since it was formed in 1972. Marine’s 2011 takeover from her
aged her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is thought to have softened the
reputation of the party. The raspy-voiced leader, who is considered
almost charming in comparison with her short-tempered father, gained an
easy third place in last year’s president election with 17.8% of the vote.

But the 44-year-old leader remains relatively unknown in the UK, where
far-right groups are gradually gaining speed but have yet to match the
electoral achievements of the FN in France.

"Up till two days ago, I did not know who Marine Le Pen was," Cambridge
law undergraduate Jinho Clement admitted in a blog on HuffPost Students.
Clement, who is also chair of Cambridge University Students’ Union,
supported Le Pen’s invitation. "For the sake of people like me who don't
know much about people like Le Pen, it makes a lot of sense to invite
her to Cambridge," he said. "Free speech ensures that societies like the
union can provide a forum for discussions like these."

The Cambridge Union Society, which prides itself on its "political
independence", is known for raising hackles both within the university
and in society at large with its choice of guests.

Le Pen joins a list of controversial figures in addressing the
prestigious university union. Dominique Strauss-Kahn paid a visit in
March 2012 and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an appearance via
video link in November. The union has also hosted Holocaust denier David
Irving and, infamously, former fascist leader Oswald Mosley in the 1970s.

(4) Ex-aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen: ‘Zionists, Freemasons’ control French
media

http://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-aide-to-jean-marie-le-pen-zionists-freemasons-control-french-media/

Saturday, February 20, 2016 Adar I 11, 5776 10:06 pm IST

Ex-aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen: ‘Zionists, Freemasons’ control French media

Former National Front party adviser Elie Hatem once ran for mayor of
Paris district for nearly defunct monarchist movement

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF  February 19, 2016, 2:59 am

Elie Hatem, a political adviser to former French National Front party
leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, accused "Zionists and Freemasons" of
controlling "public opinion" and the media in France.

Le Pen was removed from leading the party he founded in 2011, and the
reins were taken by his daughter Marine.

"We know that Marine Le Pen got closer to some movements that control
public opinion in France," Hatem, a Maronite Christian of Lebanese
descent, told Al Arabiya TV last week. A transcript of the interview was
translated from Arabic by MEMRI.

"She did so in order to whitewash the National Front. These movement
include Zionist movements and Freemasonry which control the press and
the government in France," Hatem said.

The Al Arabiya interviewer interrupted Hatem, saying it was up to the
French authorities responsible for the media to answer the allegations.

Hatem replied: "Even some Zionists say so, this is well known in France,
that is why everybody is afraid to talk about this. This is a sort of
dictatorship."

Hatem said he was a member of the French national movement L’action
Francaise, "a royalist movement founded by Charles Maurras."

"I am against the idea of secularism espoused by Marine Le Pen, as I
told her on several occasions," Hatem said.

"The Freemasons were behind the secularism and they founded the French
republic government on the three principles defended by Freemasonry:
liberty, equality and fraternity," he said.

In 2014, Hatem was the National Front’s candidate for mayor of the 4th
arrondissement of Paris. He was a curiosity of sorts at the time, being
the first Action Francaise member to stand for election in any capacity
in 20 years.

Action Francaise is a far-right monarchist movement established in 1899
in reaction against the support of left-wing intellectuals of Jewish
French army officer Alfred Dreyfus.

Maurras, mentioned by Hatem, became the movement’s ideologue and steered
it in a Catholicist, anti-secularist direction. Maurras called for the
reversal of the principles of the French Revolution.

Maurras was imprisoned after World War II and the movement’s popularity
waned. Its ideas, however, remain influential in some circles of the
French far right.

When Hatem ran for election, his colleagues in the National Front tried
to play down his ties to Action Francaise, presenting the movement as a
stream with the National Front more than a political entity in its own
right.

(5) Marine Le Pen crowned  ‘Liar of the year’ by French journalists,
over migrant comments
http://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-is-liar-of-the-year-french-national-front/

Marine Le Pen is ‘Liar of the year’

French journalists pick FN for dubious honor.By

SOFIA MELO

2/5/16, 6:44 PM CET

Updated 2/6/16, 6:15 AM CET

PARIS — Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right National Front,
was crowned "political liar of 2015" by a panel of journalists for
making false claims about migrants.

Among the comments that earned the FN leader the prize was a false claim
about the number of migrants headed towards Europe. In June, Le Pen said
around 4,500 migrants were arriving in Europe "every day" in an
interview with French channel iTélé.

Le Pen was slammed for making claims that bore little relation to
official figures from Frontex, Europe’s border agency. Frontex figures
from April 2015 showed that migrants had actually been arriving in
Europe at a rate of around 330 per day since December 2015.

The majority of Le Pen’s claims were made during French regional
elections in December, in which the FN rode a wave of anti-migrant
sentiment in the aftermath of the November 13 terror attacks.

The prize was set up in 2015 by political scientist Thomas Guénolé as a
way of holding politicians accountable. The first winner of the prize
was former President Nicolas Sarkozy, which, according to the rules,
meant he couldn’t win this year’s award.

Among those on the panel were journalists from French dailies Le Monde
and Libération.

(6) Marine Le Pen's Party asks Russia for €27 Million loan to finance
election campaign
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/marine-le-pens-party-asks-russia-for-27-million-loan/560066.html

Marine Le Pen's Party Asks Russia for €27 Million Loan

The Moscow Times

Feb. 19 2016 15:39

Last edited 15:39

Pascal Rossignol / Reuters

France's far-right National Front party has asked Russia for a
27-million-euro ($30 million) loan, claiming that the party needs it to
finance its election campaigns in 2017, The Times newspaper reported
Friday, citing the party’s treasurer.

Le Pen's party received a loan of 11 million euro from a bank with ties
to Russia in 2014. At that time, French politicians and media claimed
that the loan bought the party's public support of Russia's actions in
Ukraine, the Meduza news agency reported.

Le Pen's party claimed that the results of the Crimea referendum in
2014, followed by the annexation of the peninsula by Russia, were
legitimate, and also criticized the implementation of European Union's
sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.

The CIA has opened an investigation into Russian influence on European
political movements over the last 10 years, according to an announcement
made in January, Meduza reported.