Beyond Cambridge Analytica and Facebook

All of a sudden people all around the wold have woken up to the fact that we are living in a surveillance state of our own making today . . . This time though, the culprit is not called Big Brother. No, this time the culprit is known as Social Media, with Zuck’s business at the forefront, apparently. Facebook has become a constant and usually unacknowledged presence in most of our lives, most if not all of the time . . . particularly, through the medium of the smartphone or iPhone. These devices have turned into men’s best friend, replacing dogs and cats, and arguably also spouses, lovers, and casual acquaintances. But now, Carole Cadwalladr has revealed that the rabbit hole goes way deeper, and that unscrupulous businessmen eagerly exploit voluntarily proferred personal information, colloquially referred to as data these days, which become Big Data when compiled, collated and aggregated: “Cadwalladr told BBC Radio 4’s Media Show [that the] resulting Observer scoop took more than a year to bring together”.¹ The PressGazette‘s Charlotte Tobitt summarises neatly that the “investigation, which was first published in Sunday’s paper (18 March 2018), exposed Cambridge Analytica’s alleged harvesting of the data of 50m Facebook users to influence the US presidential elections. Cadwalladr said the Observer took the decision to share the scoop with Channel 4 News and the New York Times prior to publishing. She [furthermore] told the BBC that Facebook had made a ‘series of missteps’ in responding to the revelations and said it had issued legal threats to deter publication”.² As a result, now the whole world is talking about the once obscure company called Cambridge Analytica (CA). In fact, already last year, Cadwalladr had broken the story about CA’s involvement in the Brexit vote. In her piece, she took the story back to the year 2013, when “London . . . was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. [And t]he world had not yet turned”.³ At the time, her source, ‘a former Cambridge Analytica employee’ whom she called ‘Paul’ told her the following: 2013, “[t]hat was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump . . . It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm”.⁴

In the course of her research, Cadwalladr spoke to Professor Jonathan Albright, from Elon University, North Carolina. Cadwalladr explains that Professor Albright “was the first person to map and uncover an entire ‘alt-right’ news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica. He called the company a central point in the right’s ‘propaganda machine’, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist [, a position he held till he was dismissed on 18 August 2017], were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda”.⁵ As such, Professor Albright had also penned a piece about his concerns in December 2016.⁶ But all that is neither here nor there. And already in 2015, the ‘writer/researcher’ Harry Davies had published a piece on the Cruz campaign and its links with CA: “Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal. A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey. As part of an aggressive new voter-targeting operation, Cambridge Analytica – financially supported by reclusive hedge fund magnate and leading Republican donor Robert Mercer – is now using so-called “psychographic profiles” of US citizens in order to help win Cruz votes, despite earlier concerns and red flags from potential survey-takers”.^*

Back to Cadwalladr and Brexit: in February 2017, the journalist wrote that she “ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director” in the second half of February 2017.⁷ Wigmore let Cadwalladr know that “Facebook was the key to the entire campaign” . . . explaining that a Facebook ‘like’ is a “potent weapon”. Wigmore then went on: “[b]ecause using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring . . . It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school”.⁸ As for CA’s relationship with the Brexit vote and the Leave.EU campaign, Wigmore simply said that “[t]hey [meaning Cambridge Analytica] were happy to help”. And they were happy to help “[b]ecause Nigel [Farage] is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?”.⁹

Right from the horse’s mouth, as it were . . . Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, the Brexit vote and the Trump victory, they are all interconnected. Or, the real culprit is Facebook, or is it?!?!? Has Facebook become the proverbial Big Brother that has turned its awesome archive of social data into a lucrative commodity for the highest bidder available?!?!? Vladimir Duthier states that “Facebook has been named in a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing it of negligence and it has lost nearly $50 billion in market value. A movement to encourage users to delete their accounts, called #DeleteFacebook, has [also] received lots of attention”.¹⁰

Now that the antics of Cambridge Analytica on Facebook have grabbed everyone’s attention, the intrepid journalist Greg Palast is here to remind us that there is more afoot than the mere monies wielded by the Mercers: “[i]n fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by . . . the Brothers Koch. Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it . . . “They know the last time you downloaded porn and whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.” Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: “I think that’s creepy.” The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture”.¹¹

i360 is a data analytics company that maintains “a database of over 250 million 18+ adults, including the 190 million who are registered to vote” sourced from “multiple consumer data compilers”.¹²

“The Data Trust serves to continually develop a Republican and conservative data ecosystem through voter file collection, development, and enhancement while lowering the cost and barriers to access the data”.¹³

Palast explains that the “Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats). I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon”.¹⁴

1 Charlotte Tobitt, “Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr: I became a ‘news slave’ in pursuing Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scoop” PressGazette (22 March 2018).

2 Charlotte Tobitt, “Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr: I became a ‘news slave’ in pursuing Cambridge Analytica data”.

3 Carole Cadwalladr, “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked” The Guardian (07 May 2017). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy.

4 Carole Cadwalladr, “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked”.

5 Carole Cadwalladr, “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked”.

6 Jonathan Albright, “Stop worrying about fake news. What comes next will be much worse” The Guardian ( 09 December 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/09/fake-news-technology-filters.

* Harry Davies, “Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users” The Guardian (11 December 2015). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data.

7 Carole Cadwalladr, “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media” The Observer (27 Feb 2017). https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage.

8 Carole Cadwalladr, “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media”.

9 Carole Cadwalladr, “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media”.

10 Vladimir Duthie, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits ‘misthttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-mark-zuckerberg-ceo-statement-today-2018-03-30/akes’ in Cambridge Analytica scandal” CBS News (21 March 2018). .

11 Greg Palast, “Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin: Look Out For i360 and DataTrust” Greg Palast (19 March 2018). http://www.gregpalast.com/cambridge-analytica-aint-nuthin-look-i360-datatrust/.

12 i360. http://www.i-360.com/.

13 Data Trust. http://thedatatrust.com/.

14 Greg Palast, “Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin: Look Out For i360 and DataTrust” .

The Mandalay Bay Massacre: Multiple Shooters and Mandatory Metal Detectors

The sociology instructor Ed Curtin (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts or MCLA)^* says that “[t]he he mainstream media’s (MSM) ongoing narrative of the massacre in Las Vegas is clearly deceptive . . . [w]hat the media do not say is that there is video and witness evidence that there were at least two more shooters, maybe more, one from a lower floor and another at the Bellagio Hotel that was locked down. This means that there was a conspiracy involved. They don’t mention this so that someone like me can do so and be branded a “conspiracy theorist,” the term created by the CIA to besmirch anyone questioning the official narrative of the JFK assassination . . . Why would the MSM push this narrative of the lonely crazed gunman? . . . People need to realize that they must be immediately skeptical of such official narratives and do their own research, and they will learn that there are excellent alternative websites that are doing real journalism and are seeking truth for truth’s sake”.¹

And, as it is, Collective Evolution‘s Joe Martino “came across a post on Facebook from a girl named Rikki Raulerson who was in Las Vegas the night of the shooting”. . . and Miss Raulerson subsequently seems to have told Martino that ‘[t]he security guard at the Cosmopolitan exact words were “I know about as much as you do. I have heard 7 confirmed shooters at multiple hotels including the Bellagio.” I do not have any idea how he knew this info, but this is the time they were locking down the hotel. There were a few metro police officers alongside security guards outside our hotel Vdara, and as they were checking our credentials we asked are there really multiple shooters, what’s going on? And the police officer confirmed yes multiple shooters at multiple hotels including Aria next door. He did not say 7 however he just said multiple. I assume he heard this over the radio, bc he was a metro officer . . . We did not hear any shots from our hotel room. However while running from Cosmo we did hear shots, but they weren’t loud enough for me to think they were right next to us. The Bellagio is quite far from the Vdara on one side, and the Mandalay is about 1.7 miles on the other side. I don’t believe the shots we heard were coming from Mandalay however, because quickly after we got to the room they had released that he was dead. I could be wrong however. It was all happening so fast.”.² On Facebook, California native and resident Rachel Monroy posted that she “KNOW[s] for sure that the first reports stated MULTIPLE shooters, including a shooter at Bellagio. People listening to police scanners heard ‘multiple shooters’. The people who were THERE have said there were multiple shooters. But yeah, just ignore the witnesses, if media says ‘lone shooter’ it must be true. MSM never lies. 🙄Nothing to see here. I read a lengthy, detailed account of one guy’s experience. He said people were being shot as they tried to escape. They were running from one shooter, towards another shooter. This guy and his girlfriend escaped and ended up hiding in a dumpster for HOURS because they didn’t know how many shooters were out there”.³

As a result, it really seems that eyewitnesses on the ground ‘heard’ multiple shooters, which does not necessarily denote the actual presence of multiple shooters . . . but, as they say, there it is. And the below screen shot, provided by my Facebook friend Paula Densnow, might give an insight into a possible additional reasoning behind the occurrence of the Mandalay Bay Massacre.⁴

Moreover, the Drumpf met with Sheldon Adelson on Monday, 2 October 2017: “[t]he [Monday] afternoon meeting had been scheduled before the shooting attack and was aimed at discussing policy, the Las Vegas Review–Journal reported on Tuesday [, 3 October 2017], citing a representative from the Sheldon’s Las Vegas Sands casino and resort company. Adelson, who owns the Review-Journal, was one of Trump’s biggest financial backers during his successful 2016 presidential election campaign, donating millions to the Republican candidate’s cause. The two men both own casinos in Las Vegas. Adelson is also a major backer of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owns the widely circulated Israel Hayom free daily”, as related by Stuart Winer in the Times of Israel.⁵

1 Edward Curtin, “A Provocation to Investigate the Las Vegas Massacre” The Greanville Post (05 Oct 2017). http://www.greanvillepost.com/2017/10/05/a-provocation-to-investigate-the-las-vegas-massacre/.

2 Joe Martino, “EYE WITNESS AT LAS VEGAS SHOOTING STATES ‘THERE WERE 7 CONFIRMED SHOOTERS’” Collective Evolution (04 Oct 2017). http://www.collective-evolution.com/2017/10/04/eye-witness-at-las-vegas-shooting-states-there-were-7-confirmed-shooters/.

3 Rachel Monroy on Facebook (Yesterday [05 Oct 2017] at 12:01am ). https://www.facebook.com/rachel.monroy.3/posts/10208117984026899.

4 Paula Densnow on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/paula.whowantstoknow/posts/1736037193087033.

5 Stuart Winer, “Casino mogul Adelson met with Trump hours after Las Vegas shooting” The Times of Israel (04 Oct 2017). https://www.timesofisrael.com/casino-mogul-adelson-met-with-trump-hours-after-las-vegas-shooting/.

Heineken’s Europe: The Balkanization of a Continent

Back in 2009, Joshua Keating shared his musings about an “intriguing theoretical map of Europe designed by Dutch beer tycoon Freddy Heineken. A dedicated Europhile, Heineken believed that smaller nations within a larger European framework would be more manageable in the post-Cold War era. In 1992, he coauthored a pamhplet titled The United States of Europe (a Eurotopia?), which included the above proposal for a new Europe comprised of small territories of roughly equal, ethnically homogernous populations”.¹ This 18-page tract was published by De Amsterdamse Stichting voor de Historische Wetenschap, a seemingly reputable publisher which is in fact a vanity project financed by the beer magnate himself: ‘Alfred Henry “Freddy” Heineken (4 November 1923 – 3 January 2002) was a Dutch businessman for Heineken International, the brewing company bought in 1864 by his grandfather Gerard Adriaan Heineken in Amsterdam. He served as Chairman of the Board of directors and CEO from 1971 until 1989. After his retirement as chairman and CEO, Heineken continued to sit on the board of directors until his death and served as chairman of the Supervisory board from 1989 till 1995. At the time of his death, Heineken was one of the richest people in the Netherlands, with a net worth of 9.5 billion guilders’.² Or, a bored rich Dutchman looking for rhyme and reason, who, in the Nineties fell upon the idea of turning the whole of Europe into a giant continent-wide Balkan peninsula for the benefit of the corporatocracy . . . And now, let’s leave the field to the eminent map specialist Frank Jacobs: “Heineken collaborated with two historians to produce a booklet entitled The United States of Europe1, A Eurotopia? The idea was timely, for two reasons. Eastern Europe was experiencing a period of turmoil, following the collapse of [C]ommunism. The resulting wave of nationalism led to the re-emergence of several nation-states (i.e. the Baltics) and the break-up of several others (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). And in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty would transform an initially mainly economic ‘European Community’ into a more political ‘European Union’. Heineken’s proposal would lead to the creation of dozens of new European states, which would have a comparably small population size (mostly between 5 and 10 million), some basis in history, and for the most part would be ethnically homogenous. The theory behind Heineken’s idea is that a larger number of smaller member-states would be easier to govern within a single European framework than a combination of larger states competing for dominance. Heineken might have been inspired by the work of Leopold Kohr”,³ . . . and continuing in another entry, Jacobs explains that Kohr (1909-94) was “an Austrian philosopher influenced by Anarchism and influential on the Green movement”,⁴ whose most influential work is a book entitled The Breakdown of Nations . . . in which he apparently expanded upon the notion that small is beautiful . . . Jacobs continues that for Kohr the “main question for society, therefore, [was] ‘not to grow, but to stop growing. The answer: not union but division.’ Not something you often hear advocated by politicians. Kohr wrote about half a dozen other books in all, also wrote one titled ‘Is Wales Viable? – a question that has still not been answered satisfactorily . . . As Kohr saw it, the problem with Europe’s geopolitical makeup was the fact that its states were not equal in size, allowing the ‘big ones’ to dominate the rest. Or at least try to, hence the endless series of wars in Europe. One way to solve this, would be to chop up the continent into rectangular chunks of territory, disregarding most existing cultural, religious, linguistic and natural boundaries”.⁵

Heineken took Kohr’s ideas and ran with them . . . Jacobs explains what Kohr’s plans were really all about: “Eire, Portugal, all 5 Scandinavian countries, the 3 Baltic countries . . . the Netherlands and Belgium . . . Austria, Hungary, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Switzerland” are all small enough to pesist, but “[t]he UK is [to be] disestablished in favour of its constituent nations: England, Scotland, Wales, (Northern) Ireland. Spain disintegrates into Asturia, Castillia, Andalusia, Catalonia and Aragón. France falls apart into Aquitaine, Brittany, Normandy, Isle de France, Alsace-Lorraine, Burgundy, Languedoc, the Midi and Corsica. Italy is replaced by successor states Savoy, Lombardy, Tuscany, the Papal States (!), Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. Yugoslavia breaks up into Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia. Romania becomes Transylvania and Wallachia. Czechoslovakia is divided among Bohemia and Slovakia. Germany, the pivotal power in Central Europe . . . disintegrates into Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, the Rhineland, Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Prussia, Silesia and one more state the name of which I can’t quite make out – but which would have to be Mecklenburg” and “Poland becomes Posen, Galicia and Warsaw”.⁶

The Irish journalist Gearóid Ó Colmáin explains matter-of-factly that “Kohr’s ideas have become extremely influential in European Union policy circles. Trans-national financial elites want to make the European Union into the political representation of their power.A federal Europe of micro-states whose policies are determined by global elites would make it impossible for Europe’s citizens to unite against the trans-national financial ruling class; it is the reason why Heineken’s map is now becoming a grim reality – all over Europe”.⁷

1Joshua Keating, “Tuesday Map: Heineken’s “Eurotopia’” Foreign Policy (2009). http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/05/26/tuesday-map-heinekens-eurotopia/.

2“Freddy Heineken” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_Heineken.

3Frank Jacobs, “My Kingdom for a Beer? Heineken’s Eurotopia” Big Think (2016). http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/386-my-kingdom-for-a-beer-heinekens-eurotopia.

4Frank Jacobs, “Want World Peace? Divide the World in Enough Small States” Big Think (2016). http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/18-the-world-a-la-leopold-kohr.

5Frank Jacobs, “Want World Peace? Divide the World in Enough Small States”.

6Frank Jacobs, “Want World Peace? Divide the World in Enough Small States”. .

7Gearóid Ó Colmáin, “Catalan ‘independence’: a tool of capital against labour” (03 Oct 2017). http://www.gearoidocolmain.org/catalan-independence-tool-capital-labour/.

Grenfell Tower Disaster: Diane Abbott and a Woman called Donna

Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and shadow Home Secretary, has now come out to say that “Grenfell Tower is not just an accident; Grenfell Tower is not just an unfortunate incident. Those hundreds of people that died are a direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing . . . The Tories think people in social housing are second-class citizens. And, as we have seen from Grenfell House, they are offering them second-class standards of safety. So, a direct consequence of that. A direct consequence of outsourcing . . . and a direct consequence of deregulation”.⁽¹⁾ In contrast, the official narrative of the disaster holds that its death toll is limited to 79 . . . As Abbot points out though, “I think we are going to find that the numbers of people that have died will be in triple figures, just because it’s a 23-storey [sic] block”.⁽²⁾

Adding insult to injury, as noted by the Independent‘s Greg Wilford, a “wealthy Kensington resident claimed she would leave her luxury block of flats if victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy were given shelter there, telling a radio host the accommodation ‘shouldn’t be given for free’. The woman, called Donna, asked LBC listeners to ‘stand in my shoes’ as she complained that her council tax bill might increase if people were re-housed in her building, which she said has a £15,500 annual service charge. She told radio host Shelagh Fogart she would be ‘resentful’ if those who lost their homes in the recent fire were allowed to move in because she has worked ‘very hard’ to afford her property”.⁽³⁾ Trying not to appear like the heartless bitch that she is, the woman called Donna explained that her “service charge bill, and this is a low one this year, is £15,500, and I would feel really resentful if someone got the same thing for free. I feel sorry for those people, but my husband and I work very hard to be able to afford this”.⁽⁴⁾

In a clear effort to convince the world that even moderately rich people are scum of the earth, the woman called Donna next went to great lenghts explicating her lack of humanity on the radio: “And for someone to get it free . . . I would move. Our council tax bill is very, very high, our service charge bill is very, very high, so why should someone get it for free? I know it sounds harsh, believe me I feel sorry for those people, but I work very, very hard and so does my husband . . . I’m not hard-hearted, but When I’m paying that kind of money and someone else is getting it for free, if you stand in my shoes you can say that because you’re not. It’s like paying a rent to stay in your house, £15,500 a year”.⁽⁵⁾

(1) Shehab Khan, “‘Hundreds’ died in Grenfell Tower fire, says shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott” The Independent (24 June 2017). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/grenfell-tower-fire-diane-abbott-victims-number-hundreds-labour-shadow-home-secretary-a7806106.html.

(2) Shehab Khan, “‘Hundreds’ died in Grenfell Tower fire, says shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott”.

(3) Greg Wilford, “Wealthy Kensington resident says Grenfell Tower victims shouldn’t be given shelter in luxury flats” The Independent (24 June 2017). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tower-fire-victims-kensington-row-rehoused-lbc-luxury-flats-a7806026.html.

(4) Greg Wilford, “Wealthy Kensington resident says Grenfell Tower victims shouldn’t be given shelter in luxury flats”.

(5) Greg Wilford, “Wealthy Kensington resident says Grenfell Tower victims shouldn’t be given shelter in luxury flats”.

The New Turkey: Captal Flight

Bloomberg’s Tiago Ramos Alfaro and Ercan Ersoy noted a couple of days ago that “[m]embers of the families that own Turkey’s two biggest groups of companies sold a combined total of about $575 million in shares in their respective groups, as the benchmark Turkish stock index closed at a record high on Wednesday [, 24 May 2017]. The Koç family, which runs the most valuable company on the Borsa Istanbul, sold 107 million shares for about $475 million in Koç Holding AŞ, according to a term sheet seen by Bloomberg News. In a separate deal, some members of the Sabancı family sold about $100 million in shares in Sabancı Holding, bookrunner Ünlü & Co. told Bloomberg”.⁽¹⁾

Alfaro and Ersoy added that “[s]pokesmen for the two companies didn’t immediately respond on Wednesday to questions about their motivations for the sales”.⁽²⁾

RİNDLERİN AKŞAMI

Dönülmez akşamın ufkundayız.Vakit çok geç;

Bu son fasıldır ey ömrüm nasıl geçersen geç!

Cihana bir daha gelmek hayal edilse bile,

Avunmak istemeyiz öyle bir teselliyle.

Geniş kanatları boşlukta simsiyah açılan

Ve arkasında güneş doğmayan büyük kapıdan

Geçince başlayacak bitmeyen sükunlu gece.

Guruba karşı bu son bahçelerde, keyfince,

Ya şevk içinde harab ol, ya aşk içinde gönül!

Ya lale açmalıdır göğsümüzde yahud gül.

Yahya Kemal BEYATLI

(1) Tiago Ramos Alfaro and Ercan Ersoy , “Turkey’s Richest Families Sell Almost $600 Million in Shares” Bloomberg News (24 May 2017). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-24/koc-family-to-sell-490-million-in-turkey-s-most-valuable-firm?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social.

(2) Tiago Ramos Alfaro and Ercan Ersoy , “Turkey’s Richest Families Sell Almost $600 Million in Shares”.

Drumpfian Leaks: The Washington Post

Posting on his Facebook page, on 18 May 2017, the intrepid Pepe Escobar appears to reveal some inside knowledge hidden from view:

THE WAR ON TRUMP

My source “X” is furious:

“The major question is who in Trump’s inner circle is the traitor leaking to the Washington Post? The Washington Post is conducting a campaign against Trump led by Trotskyite elements. The key national interest for the US is a rapprochement with Russia to avoid a nuclear war that the Russians are ready for. Trump is also trying to stop the attack on the American wage level by the .1% Trotskyite element on Wall St. who is stealing the nation’s wealth through their cash settlement manipulations, and other acts of pickpocketing. Trump must stick to his guns.”

That’s not far from the credible narrative put together by old school intel ops not totally controlled by the War Party; “The issue is not necessarily what Trump has done or said. It is that Trump cannot trust even his inner circle of advisers. Whoever leaked the information was either in the room or had access to the minutes of the meeting. That means that someone with fairly robust access was willing to risk not just his or her own career but also the effectiveness of U.S.-Russia moves against the Islamic State, as well as U.S. credibility in the world and with allies that share intelligence. It makes Trump look bad, it makes the United States look worse, and it damages U.S. credibility for as long as the Trump administration is in power”.¹

As “X” says, “The issue is not necessarily what Trump has done or said”, but rather as expressed by the well-known conservative political and cultural commentator David Brooks now more than a month ago, “Trump’s greatest achievements are in the field of ignorance”, elaborating in the next instance that “Trump’s ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull”.² Brooks really explains the Drumpf in living colours: the “normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it”.³

But these insights should not surprise us . . . Tony Schwartz, the actual author of the Art of the Deal, has been warning people ever since the Drumpf decided to run for president.⁴ And, the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston has been doing the same for years now, as he knows the man that is the Drumpf up close.⁵

1 https://www.facebook.com/pepe.escobar.77377?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf.

2 David Brooks, “The Coming Incompetence Crisis” New York Times (07 April 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/opinion/the-coming-incompetence-crisis.html.

3 David Brooks, “The Coming Incompetence Crisis”.

4 “Tony Schwartz: The Truth About Trump” The Erimtan Angle. (s.d.). http://apob.tumblr.com/post/160224262702/tony-schwartz-the-truth-about-trump.

5‘ ‘David Cay Johnston: “The Making of Donald Trump” The Erimtan Angle. (s.d.). http://apob.tumblr.com/post/160129875497/david-cay-johnston-the-making-of-donald-trump.

Brexit means Brexit

The British PM’s quite infamous words have now come back to haunt her . . . as Berlin Bureau Chief at The Economist Jeremy Cliffe laid bare on his twitter feed: “Today’s FAZ report on May’s disastrous dinner with Juncker [on 25 April 2017] – briefed by senior Commission sources – is absolutely damning” . . . and here it is,ⁱ in 30 tweets:

1) May had said she wanted to talk not just Brexit but also world problems; but in practice it fell to Juncker to propose one to discuss.

2) May has made clear to the Commission that she fully expects to be reelected as PM.

3) It is thought [in the Commission] that May wants to frustrate the daily business of the EU27, to improve her own negotiating position.

4) May seemed pissed off at Davis for regaling her dinner guests of his ECJ case against her data retention measures – three times.

5) EU side were astonished at May’s suggestion that EU/UK expats issue could be sorted at EU Council meeting at the end of June.

6) Juncker objected to this timetable as way too optimistic given complexities, eg on rights to health care.

7) Juncker pulled two piles of paper from his bag: Croatia’s EU entry deal, Canada’s free trade deal. His point: Brexit will be v v complex.

8) May wanted to work through the Brexit talks in monthly, 4-day blocks; all confidential until the end of the process.

9) Commission said impossible to reconcile this with need to square off member states & European Parliament, so documents must be published.

10) EU side felt May was seeing whole thing through rose-tinted-glasses. “Let us make Brexit a success” she told them.

11) Juncker countered that Britain will now be a third state, not even (like Turkey) in the customs union: “Brexit cannot be a success”.

12) May seemed surprised by this and seemed to the EU side not to have been fully briefed.

13) She cited her own JHA opt-out negotiations as home sec as a model: a mutually useful agreement meaning lots on paper, little in reality.

14) May’s reference to the JHA (justice and home affairs) opt-outs set off alarm signals for the EU side. This was what they had feared.

15) ie as home sec May opted out of EU measures (playing to UK audience) then opted back in, and wrongly thinks she can do same with Brexit

16) “The more I hear, the more sceptical I become” said Juncker (this was only half way through the dinner)

17) May then insisted to Juncker et al that UK owes EU no money because there is nothing to that effect in the treaties.

18) Her guests then informed her that the EU is not a golf club

19) Davis then objected that EU could not force a post-Brexit, post-ECJ UK to pay the bill. OK, said Juncker, then no trade deal.

20) …leaving EU27 with UK’s unpaid bills will involve national parliaments in process (a point that Berlin had made *repeatedly* before).

21) “I leave Downing St ten times as sceptical as I was before” Juncker told May as he left

22) Next morning at c7am Juncker called Merkel on her mobile, said May living in another galaxy & totally deluding herself

23) Merkel quickly reworked her speech to Bundestag to include her now-famous “some in Britain still have illusions” comment

24) FAZ concludes: May in election mode & playing to crowd, but what use is a big majority won by nurturing delusions of Brexit hardliners?

25) Juncker’s team now think it more likely than not that Brexit talks will collapse & hope Brits wake up to harsh realities in time.

26) What to make of it all? Obviously this leak is a highly tactical move by Commission. But contents deeply worrying for UK nonetheless.

27) The report points to major communications/briefing problems. Important messages from Berlin & Brussels seem not to be getting through.

28) Presumably as a result, May seems to be labouring under some really rather fundamental misconceptions about Brexit & the EU27.

29) Also clear that (as some of us have been warning for a while…) No 10 should expect every detail of the Brexit talks to leak.

30/30) Sorry for the long thread. And a reminder: full credit for all the above reporting on the May/Juncker dinner goes to the FAZ.

In case you were wondering about FAZ and what it means, FAZ stands for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Forbes‘ Frances Coppola explains furthermore that “[r]eleasing details of the dinner to a German newspaper for printing in German only is a slap in the face for May and her team. The Commission, it seems, is very angry indeed. Jeremy Cliffe, The Economist’s Berlin bureau chief, tweeted the salient points from the FAZ article. They are absolutely damning. No wonder the Commission is angry”.ⁱⁱ

i https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/858810953353367552.

ii Frances Coppola , “The UK Government Is Completely Deluded About Brexit” Forbes (30 April 2017). https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2017/04/30/the-uk-government-is-completely-deluded-about-brexit/#60db7b714f04.

Climate Change is a Hoax: World Meteorological Organization Report

The insurance expert Joe Ryan matter-of-factly declares that “[u]nusually warm weather in the Arctic is helping shift weather patterns this year from North America to the Middle East, after global warming shattered records in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Rising ocean temperatures that are melting polar ice sheets, killing marine life and flooding coastal communities may have increased more than previously reported last year, the WMO said in a report Tuesday [, 21 March 2017]”.ⁱ

The WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2016 puts it like this: “Warming continued in 2016, setting a new temperature record of approximately 1.1 °C above the pre-industrial period, and 0.06 °C above the previous highest value set in 2015. Carbon dioxide (CO2) reached new highs at 400.0 ± 0.1 ppm in the atmosphere at the end of 2015. Global sea-ice extent dropped more than 4 million km2 below average – an unprecedented anomaly – in November. Global sea levels rose strongly during the 2015/2016 El Niño, with the early 2016 values making new records. The powerful 2015/2016 El Niño event exerted a strong influence on the climate and societies against a background of long-term climate change. Severe droughts affected agriculture and yield production in many parts of the world, particularly in southern and eastern Africa and parts of Central America, where several million people experienced food insecurity and hundreds of thousands were displaced internally, according to reports from the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)”.ⁱⁱ

The Executive summary contiues as follows: “Hurricane Matthew in the North Atlantic led to the most damaging meteorological disaster, with Haiti sustaining the heaviest casualties. There were also major economic losses in the United States and elsewhere in the region. Flooding severely affected eastern and southern Asia with hundreds of lives lost, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and severe economic damage. Wet conditions led to good crop production in many parts of the Sahel, with record yields reported in Mali, Niger and Senegal. Detection and attribution studies have demonstrated that human influence on the climate has been a main driver behind the unequivocal warming of the global climate system observed since the 1950s, according to the Fifth Assessment Report of IPCC. Human influence has also led to significant regional temperature increases at the continental and subcontinental levels. Shifts of the temperature distribution to warmer regimes are expected to bring about increases in the frequency and intensity of extremely warm events”.ⁱⁱⁱ

World Climate Research Program Director David Carlson did not mince his words in a statement: “We are now in truly uncharted territory”.^iv For his part, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas added that “[t]his report confirms that the year 2016 was the warmest on record – a remarkable 1.1 °C above the pre-industrial period, which is 0.06 °C above the previous record set in 2015. This increase in global temperature is consistent with other changes occurring in the climate system . . . Globally averaged sea surface temperatures were also the warmest on record, global sea levels continued to rise, and Arctic sea-ice extent was well below average for most of the year. With levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere consistently breaking new records, the influence of human activities on the climate system has become more and more evident”.^v In contrast, “U.S. President Donald Trump [now] pushes to dismantle programs to combat climate change. Last week, the Republican called for relaxing fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks, which along with other vehicles are the U.S.’s largest source of greenhouse gases. Trump also released a budget with sweeping cuts to climate change research and grants for clean energy development”, as stated by Joe Ryan.^vi

i Joe Ryan, “Higher Arctic Temperatures Likely to Shift Global Weather in 2017: WMO” Insurance Journal (22 March 2017). http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2017/03/22/445278.htm.

ii “Executive summary . WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2016” WMO (21 March 2017). http://library.wmo.int/opac/doc_num.php?explnum_id=3414.

iii “Executive summary . WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2016” .

iv Joe Ryan, “Higher Arctic Temperatures Likely to Shift Global Weather in 2017: WMO”.

v “Climate breaks multiple records in 2016, with global impacts.” WMO (21 March 2017). https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/climate-breaks-multiple-records-2016-global-impacts.

vi Joe Ryan, “Higher Arctic Temperatures Likely to Shift Global Weather in 2017: WMO”.

Forging an Absolute Presidency: Moving towards a Referendum

The whole world at present is experiencing a shift towards authoritarianism, with Donald Trump’s formal inauguration as the 45^th U.S. President arguably acting as an ominous portent of things to come. Trump, or the Drumpf, as I like to call him in reference to his “grandfather Friedrich Drumpf [who] came to the United States in 1885”,¹ has a clear counterpart in the figure of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s first popularly elected President, whom I like to refer to as the Prez.² Since about the year 2010, Erdoğan has been arguing that Turkey’s parliamentary system should be replaced by a presidential one and the day following the Drumpf’s inauguration, on Saturday, 21 January 2017, he seems to have overcome yet another hurdle blocking the way: Turkey’s “parliament voted 339-142 to make the president the head of the executive and abolish the job of prime minister, triggering a referendum on the proposal and putting Erdogan one step away from building a power center unrivaled since the days of parliamentary founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In Turkey’s system, amendments to the constitution need to be approved by 367 of 550 members to become law. Proposals that receive between 330 and 367 votes can be referred to a plebescite”.³

In the wake of this momentous parliamentary vote, Tayyip Erdoğan gave another televised speech: “It’s still early to call a referendum date, we will share it when we pick up some momentum . . . We see that our people favour a constitutional referendum and a president with party ties. We wouldn’t attempt this otherwise”.⁴ Ever since he emerged on Turkey’s political scene in the early 1990s, it has been Erdoğan‘s fervent desire to stifle and eventually obliterate the seeming secularization of society and the personality cult surrounding the figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And his favoured line of reasoning in this respect has always been referencing the fact that the Turkish population-at-large had been largely left untouched by Atatürk‘s reforms that had transformed the religion of Islam into the state’s obedient handmaiden via the Directorate of Religious Affairs (or Diyanet, in Turkish) and propagated a lenient and permissive attititude towards the Prophet’s many rules, regulations and restrictions. As I wrote in 2014, “Tayyip Erdogan is . . . determined to re-introduce an overt Islamic discourse into the country’s public and political life . . . Turkey’s original 1924 Constitution also contained the phrase that that ‘Islam‘ constitutes the ‘religion of the state’ (Article 2), which was subsequently removed four years later and might very well be set to return now that the AKP is ruling the land” and Tayyip Erdogan is set to become the nation’s first Absolute President. After all, “Erdogan also appears determined to fashion his own personality cult”.⁵ His ultimate goal thus appears to be replacing the figure of Atatürk in the hearts and minds of the Turkish citizenry.

Bloomberg’s Hacaoglu and Kozok explain that “even before Saturday’s vote, Erdogan had already arrogated to himself powers unusual for his ceremonial post [of President of the Republic]. He’s led sessions of the policy-making cabinet, and forced out the previous prime minister, [his erstwhile advisor and mentor] Ahmet Davutoglu, after he tried to assert his authority as head of the executive branch. While the AK Party [or AKP] lacks enough seats to carry parliament alone, the package was approved with backing from the nationalist opposition MHP. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Jan. 17 that his party was making the changes together with the nationalist MHP . . . If the legislative package is approved in a referendum, Erdogan’s ties to the ruling AK Party will be immediately restored while most of the measures, including powers granted to Erdogan to call elections or declare a state of emergency, will go into effect when the presidential and parliamentary elections are held Nov. 3, 2019. The legislative package, meanwhile, limits the parliament’s oversight over the executive branch and allows the president’s office to issue decrees with the force of law . . . Bulent Turan, a [parliamentary] whip from the Islamist-rooted [AKP], which Erdogan co-founded, rejected opposition claims that the amendments would create an elected dictatorship, saying they sought to allow for greater government oversight and to speed up decision making”.⁶ Turan also told the Anadolu Ajansı that “parliament has fulfilled its task. Now it’s the people’s turn. Whatever decision our people take, we will all accept that decision“.⁷

In contrast, the scholar of constitutional law Prof. Dr. İbrahim Özden Kaboğlu opines matter-of-factly that the proposed amendment effectively “phases out the parliament and takes power away from the hands of the government. The president moves to the center of executive power, reshaping the country’s regime around one man”.⁸

1 “Make Donald Drumpf Again, #2” The Erimtan Angle (08 March 2016). https://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/make-donald-drumpf-again-2/.

2 C. Erimtan, “The Gezi anniversary and Turkey’s future under ‘President’ Erdogan” RT Op-Edge (04 June 2014). https://www.rt.com/op-edge/163620-turkey-future-gezi-anniversary/.

3 Selcan Hacaoglu and Firat Kozok, “Turkey Parliament Triggers Referendum on Presidential System” Bloomberg (21 Jan 2017). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-21/turkey-parliament-triggers-referendum-on-presidential-system-iy6kd8n6.

4 Selcan Hacaoglu and Firat Kozok, “Turkey Parliament Triggers Referendum on Presidential System”.

5 C. Erimtan, “The Gezi anniversary and Turkey’s future under ‘President’ Erdogan” .

6 Selcan Hacaoglu and Firat Kozok, “Turkey Parliament Triggers Referendum on Presidential System”.

7 Hatice Özdemir, “AK Parti Grup Başkanvekili Turan: Milletimiz ne karar verirse hepimiz o karara razı olacağız”AA (21 Jan 2017). http://aa.com.tr/tr/politika/ak-parti-grup-baskanvekili-turan-milletimiz-ne-karar-verirse-hepimiz-o-karara-razi-olacagiz/732157.

8  Selcan Hacaoglu and Firat Kozok, “Turkey Parliament Triggers Referendum on Presidential System”.

The Drumpf, the Prez and Fethullah: A Shady Game of Dubious Connections

The quite renowned periodical Newsweek has now published an interesting piece predicting how business interests and concomitant profits appear set to dominate U.S. foreign (as well as domestic) policy under the aegis of Donald J. Trump . . . the not-so surprise winner of the recent U.S. presidential elections. The journalist Kurt Eichenwald namely posits that “Donald Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet, but he is already making decisions and issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from American foreign policy, all to the benefit of his family’s corporate empire”.[2]  Eichenwald details how Trump’s business deals with the Philippines and Taiwan could very well compromise U.S. foreign policy, but most ominous seems his assertion that the “conflicts between the commercial interests of the Trump family and U.S. foreign policy extend beyond the many financial benefits for the next president and his children. Already, there is a situation in which the president of the United States could be blackmailed by a foreign power through pressure related to his family’s business entanglements”.[3]  Specifically, Eichenwald is here thinking about Turkey . . . and Turkey’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez) and his Justice and Develpoment Party (or AKP).

Eichenwald explains in the following manner: in “2008, the Trump Organization struck a multimillion-dollar branding deal with the Dogan Group, a large corporation named after its influential family, for a two-tower complex in Istanbul. In 2012, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan presided over the opening ceremonies and met with Trump. But in June of this year, Erdogan called for the Trump name to be removed from the complex because of his anti-Muslim rhetoric; the Turkish president also said presiding over the dedication had been a terrible mistake. Erdogan later told associates he intended to impede America’s use of a critical Air Force base in Turkey should Trump win the presidency, a Middle Eastern financier with contacts inside the Turkish government told Newsweek. The financier spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing relations with his official contacts. In July, members of the Turkish military attempted a coup. Erdogan crushed the plotters, and his government has arrested more than 36,000 suspected participants and shut down 17 media outlets. The primary culprit, Erdogan declared almost immediately, was Fethullah Gülen, a 77-year-old Muslim spiritual leader who has lived in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region for many years. Erdogan demanded that the Obama administration extradite Gülen to face charges related to the coup”.[4]  But during his phone call, the Drumpf made the tactical error or heaping praise on Aydın Doğan’s son-in-law, Mehmet Ali Yalcındağ.

Eichenwald goes on to say that “[a]ccording to [a] Middle Eastern financier with contacts in the Erdogan administration, Trump’s casual praise of a member of the Dogan family prompted Erdogan to believe this relationship might give him leverage over the president-elect. In the past, Erdogan has placed enormous pressure on the Dogan Group, which owns media operations that have been critical of him, by imposing a $2.5 billion tax fine and calling for supporters to boycott its newspapers and television stations. Then, just weeks after hearing Trump’s kind words about his Dogan business partner, Erdogan lashed out at the Turkish company again. On December 1, authorities detained Barbaros [Muratoğlu], a 28-year veteran of Dogan who was the company’s representative to Ankara. His alleged crime? Maintaining links to the movement led by Gülen, thus connecting the Dogan executive to the attempted coup. In response, Dogan shares fell 8.6 percent. (The purported evidence against [Muratoğlu]: public accusations from an editor at a newspaper owned by a company that competes with Dogan.) Once again, follow the dominoes as they tip over. Erdogan is frustrated in his efforts to grab Gülen; Trump praises a Turkish executive who works with his business partner there, Dogan. A few weeks later, a senior Dogan executive is detained on threadbare allegations. If Erdogan’s government puts more pressure on the company that’s paying millions of dollars to Trump and his children, revenue flowing from the tower complex in Istanbul could be cut off. That means Erdogan has leverage with Trump, who will soon have the power to get Gülen extradited. The financier with contacts in the Turkish government explained the dynamic to Newsweek: “Erdogan has something he believes Trump wants, and Trump has someone Erdogan desperately wants.” . . . With U.S. security and foreign policy already jeopardized by the president-elect’s conflicts, a few horrifying instances of potential corruption and abuse of power seem quaint by comparison”.[5]

[2] Kurt Eichenwald, “How Donald Trump’s Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interest” Newsweek (13 Dec 2016). http://europe.newsweek.com/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-jeopardize-us-531140?rm=eu.

[3] Kurt Eichenwald, “How Donald Trump’s Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interest”.

[4] Kurt Eichenwald, “How Donald Trump’s Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interest”.

[5] Kurt Eichenwald, “How Donald Trump’s Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interest”.