The world risks plunging into recession as Donald Trump appears to have “lost control” of the Iran war, a City bank has warned.
Major economies face a “real risk of an inflationary recession” if the conflict in the Middle East drags on, according to Peel Hunt, which said it could not rule out higher rates.
Even a swift end to the conflict now would fail to end economic disruption for at least another two weeks, it warned.
The investment bank said a quick resolution to the war had become harder for the US president to achieve. This “increases the risk that the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked even once fighting ends”, it added.
Mr Trump was considering ending the war without a deal to reopen the waterway, according to the Wall Street Journal, despite its importance as a shipping route for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports.
On Tuesday, the US president told Britain and other countries to “go get your own oil” and to take the Strait of Hormuz for themselves to fix the energy crisis triggered by its closure.
Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, said: “Donald Trump may have lost control of the situation, which makes a quick (unilateral) resolution harder and increases the risk that the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked even once fighting ends.”
He said the energy shock from the war “appears to be spreading from West to East – with shutdowns already in place in parts of Asia and Australia”.
“If Europe is next, this will amplify global recession fears,” he said.
Eurozone inflation jumped from 1.9pc to 2.5pc in March, its steepest rise since 2022, as energy prices surged by 4.9pc off the back of the Iran war, official figures released on Tuesday showed.
The consultancy Capital Economics the risks of a global recession would increase further in the event of attacks by Houthis on shipping in the Red Sea. The Iran backed group joined the war for the first time at the weekend as they fired rockets at Israel.
Mr Pickering warned: “If the war drags on, there is a real risk of an inflationary recession unfolding in major economies, with central banks struggling to ease policy until inflation risks fade. Rate hikes could not be ruled out.”
Sir Keir Starmer urged businesses to help the Government protect households from soaring prices on Monday. In a Downing Street meeting, he told bosses that “the Government can’t do it on its own”.
Editor: Blair is an itergral part of the Zionist Cadre! There is no doubt to his toxic loyalty to that entity! Reader pay careful attention to this companion article that posits an alterative view of the ambulance attack!
Reader also note that this article was first published by ‘The Free Press’ !
Headline: Iran ‘may have hired useful idiots’ for Jewish ambulance attack
Sub-headline: Police say the instigators could have mimicked a Russian model of attack which involves paying recruits with cryptocurrency
Three men were seen on CCTV walking towards an ambulance before it was set on fire
Police investigating the arson attack on Jewish ambulances in north London are examining whether it may have been directed by Iran using proxy operatives recruited online, sources said.
Investigators believe that those behind the attack may have followed a model used by Russia, recruiting so-called “useful idiots” through online criminal networks and paying them in cryptocurrency.
Iran has made use of proxies to launch attacks across Europe, including by Chechen and Turkish gangsters, and is also suspected of deploying Iranian expatriates to conduct surveillance on dissidents in the UK.
The claim of responsibility by a new Iran-supporting online group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya — the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand — is also being taken seriously.
Detectives have not ruled out that the attack could have been conducted by far-right extremists or far-left anti-war activists, but sources say that the “leading hypothesis” is that it was directed by Iran.
One source said that investigators are focusing on tracking down the individuals who conducted the arson and added: “Until then, we will not know for sure what their motive was.”
It is understood the two British men, aged 45 and 47, who were arrested on Wednesday were not suspected of setting the fires. They were released on police bail on Thursday until April.
Four ambulances from Hatzola, a volunteer-led ambulance service operating in the Golders Green area of north London, were set on fire at about 1.35am on Monday.
Commander Helen Flanagan, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing London which is leading the investigation, said: “Although the two men have been released from police custody, there are strict bail conditions in place while we continue to investigate their suspected involvement in this incident.
“I can reassure the public that we will be closely monitoring these while we carry out further inquiries.
“We continue to work to try and identify all of those involved in this appalling attack and the investigation team is working around the clock to do this.
“I’d like to thank the public and particularly the local Jewish community in the area for their continued support and reiterate our appeal to anyone who might have information that could assist with the investigation to get in touch with us.”
An off-duty Metropolitan Police officer has been referred to the Department of Professional Standards after he was allegedly involved in an altercation with journalists reporting on the attack.
It was alleged that Special Constable David Soffer, 34, was filmed confronting an Al Jazeera camera crew on Monday. A crowd of locals and members of the Jewish community was near the police cordon when a team from the media group based in Qatar was surrounded. Residents told the film crew they were “terrorist sympathisers” and accused them of peddling “terrorist propaganda”.
Police officers advised a female reporter to leave for her own safety. A video of the incident shared on social media showed Soffer shouting at the camera crew to “go home” and calling a reporter a “donkey” and “dog” in English and Arabic.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed that an off-duty police officer was among the residents involved in the dispute and that it would be reviewing footage to determine whether “any offences were committed”. The force added: “Freedom of the press is important and journalists must be able to do their job without being subject to intimidation or harassment.”
Sub-headline: The Russian president has curtailed his schedule, and Moscow has virtually no cell service. The official explanation is about Ukrainian drones, but Putin is clearly spooked by the attacks on his old ally.
Trump’s war on Iran is having all kinds of unexpected ripple effects: In London, an Iran-linked group has taken responsibility for torching four Jewish charity ambulances, and two men were arrested for spying on the city’s Jewish community. The war has choked off the global supplies of helium, much of which is made in Qatar and is a critical component in manufacturing A.I. chips. Oil prices have gone haywire. (Okay, just kidding, all of that was totally predictable.) Meanwhile, in Russia, a different sort of political psychosis has taken hold.
Vladimir Putin is, according to the chatter, completely spooked by the U.S.-Israeli war against Russia’s old ally, particularly the reports that Israel targeted the ayatollah by hacking traffic cameras in Tehran. Earlier this month, the Russian president stopped going to the Kremlin and all his public events vanished from the calendar. Now, Moscow has virtually no cell service and it’s become impossible to message, call, or surf the web in large parts of the city. Even V.P.N.s have been affected: One friend told me he needed to try three different services to see the videos I was sending him.
The Kremlin has experimented with shutting off cell service in other, smaller cities, but to do this in the nation’s capital—a city of 13 million people, where so many of the country’s businesses are headquartered—is shocking. The official explanation is that Moscow is protecting itself from Ukrainian drones, but even pro-Kremlin propagandists are speculating that this has more to do with the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine. (One rumor, via the right-wing Tsargrad TV network, posits that the new ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, is in Moscow for medical treatment after being wounded in an Israeli attack, though the Iranian government has denied this.)
Regardless, it’s clear that Putin—who has taken extreme measures to protect himself from everything from Covid infection to political assassination—is very concerned about his personal safety. The public and quite humiliating 2011 death of Muammar Qaddafi, another ally, made a huge impression on Putin, who is said to have repeatedly watched the footage of his final hours; in many ways, that event marked the beginning of his hard-right, revanchist turn. Now, Putin’s already sky-high paranoia appears to be kicking into still-higher gear.
Brussels Forum Session: Night Owl: The Future of Russia- Potential Scenarios and Their Implications for International Security
Julia Ioffe is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. Previously, Ioffe was a US politics, national security, and foreign policy reporter for The Atlantic. Prior to 2017, she was a contributing writer at Politico magazine, where she covered the 2016 election, a contributor at Huffington Post’s Highline, and a columnist at Foreign Policy. She was a senior editor at The New Republic from 2012 to 2014, and a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and the New Yorker. Ioffe has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award : for a 2013 profile of Senator Rand Paul and a 2011 piece on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In 2009, she received a Fulbright scholarship to live and work in Russia
The law, passed Monday by the Israeli parliament, tramples on the ideal that Israel long claimed to embody, of a nation committed to values forged by a history of persecution and mass crimes.
A single detail can sum up a shift. That was the case with the noose worn proudly, as an emblem, by some Israeli lawmakers on their clothing during the Knesset debate on the bill establishing the automatic application of the death penalty to Palestinians accused of murder committed in the context of “terrorist” actions. This bill was championed by the supremacist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who represents a political faction long banned in Israel due to its extremism. It was adopted on Monday, March 30, by a clear majority of 62 votes to 48. It received the support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. An appeal has been filed before the Supreme Court.
The law states that any person causing the death of another “with the aim of harming an Israeli citizen or resident out of an intention to put an end to the existence of the State of Israel shall be sentenced to death or life imprisonment.” The death penalty will be the default penalty for Palestinians in the West Bank for acts deemed as terrorism by the military courts. The death penalty has existed in Israeli law since its founding, but has only been pronounced and carried out once, in 1962, against a Nazi war criminal for his central role in the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.
At a time when Israeli terrorism has spread in the occupied Palestinian territories – alarming even the army, which has regularly been complicit in increasingly uninhibited abuses and violence – the passage of this legislation represents a grave error and a betrayal. The discrimination it institutes isolates Israel from the countries with which it once identified. This law tramples the ideal Israel long claimed to represent: that of a nation mindful of values forged through a history of persecution and mass crimes.
A quarter-century ago, the rise of extrajudicial assassinations targeting Palestinians accused of violence fueled heated debates within Israeli society, both over the principle and the number of acceptable collateral victims resulting from these eliminations. The cycle of war triggered by the October 7, 2023, massacres carried out by Hamas, and the terrifying number of Palestinian civilians killed by strikes officially targeting armed militants, have shown that these debates are no longer taking place.
Israel is moving away from the state that long boasted of being the only democracy in the Middle East, forgetting that it has already subjected millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to the arbitrariness of occupation. The administrative detention of Palestinian men and women by the military authorities, without charge or trial, for an unknown and indefinitely renewable period, remains a prime example of this practice.
On the eve of the vote, Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom warned Israeli lawmakers against the “adoption of this bill,” which “would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.” Their warning went unheeded and now leaves these countries facing a choice: to remain faithful to these principles, which obliges them to take action in response to this vote, or to accept their own powerlessness.
Editor: Reader begin with these paragraphs of Stephens political refractions!
Most Americans probably don’t look back at March 2012 — if they remember it at all — and think of terrifyingly high gas prices. In the month when “The Hunger Games” ruled the box office and President Barack Obama was on his way to a comfortable re-election, the price of Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. That would be about $175 a barrel in today’s dollars.
As of Tuesday, despite Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors’ energy facilities, it’s hovering around $100, slightly higher than the average inflation-adjusted price since January 2001, roughly $95.
That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East. To hear the critics’ version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”
Editor: Stephens begins his potted history via his ‘Under the rubric of ‘Really? Let’s take a tour of some of the recent history’ Reader I will selectively offer to forshorten this Historical pastisch!
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During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein,…
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The U.S. air and land campaign in that operation lasted a full six weeks….
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In the 1989-90 invasion of Panama, whose military phase lasted a few days, the United States lost 23 soldiers, with 325 more wounded.
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During the Persian Gulf crisis that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the U.S. economy went into recession and the Dow fell by about 13 percent before the allied air war began.
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At the outset of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States made a failed decapitation strike against Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership, some of whom became leaders of the insurgency.
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Between 1987 and 1988, in the final stages of the so-called tanker war, the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and had the U.S. Navy escort them out of the Strait of Hormuz.
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In 1991, Iraq fired roughly 40 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there.
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In the months leading up to the second Iraq war, the George W. Bush administration made a case based on erroneous information that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
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One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by U.S. administrators to remake societies in both countries — well-intended efforts with some noble results that nonetheless were beyond our grasp.
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The Bush administration had little support from Arab nations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
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In hindsight, the single biggest error of the gulf war was to end it too soon, before Saddam Hussein’s forces were thoroughly routed.
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Editor: Stephens knows nothing about War! except his unslakable desires to chatter at full volume, as if he possesed comething akin to combat expiernce, as imagined in his fictional account of himself!
The Bank of London has received a £2mn fine for misleading regulators about its capital position over a three-year period, including by providing fabricated documents that sought to conceal its financial health.
The Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority found that TBOL and its parent company, Oplyse Holdings, had breached more than a dozen rules in their attempt to mislead regulators about its capital position.
Former senior managers of the British fintech, which launched with a “unicorn” $1bn valuation in 2021, were found to have knowingly misled the regulator over its true capital position.
It is both the first time the PRA has fined a company for “failing to conduct its business with integrity” and taken enforcement measures against a parent financial holding group, the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday.
The PRA said on Tuesday that the breaches occurred between October 2021 and May 2024. The bank was at the time run by its founder Anthony Watson, a former Barclays executive.
The fintech’s holding company also had former Goldman Sachs heavyweight Harvey Schwartz and Lord Peter Mandelson on its board during the period. The PRA did not accuse the two men of wrongdoing.
They both stepped down in October 2024 after TBOL was thrust into the spotlight in September by a winding-up order from UK tax authorities over unpaid debt, which was subsequently withdrawn. Watson also stepped down in September 2024.
Watson told the FT that he “noted” the PRA’s action. He added: “The enforcement action announced today is against The Bank of London Group Limited and Oplyse Holdings Limited. I was not given any advance notice of it, nor was I a party to that settlement.”
Lord Mandelson and a spokesperson for Schwartz both declined to comment.
The PRA said it would have fined TBOL £12mn but that such a fine would have resulted in serious financial hardship for the fintech, and so the penalty was reduced to £2mn.
The fine threatens to derail the bank’s attempted turnaround, which has involved a major restructuring and a clear-out of the group’s leadership. The fintech’s parent company was renamed from Bank of London Group Holdings to “Oplyse Holdings” — a Danish word meaning to enlighten.
TBOL said in a statement: “The matters described in the notice relate to a period when the Bank was under previous ownership and management.
“The Bank, its new management and its investors remain committed to an open, transparent and constructive relationship with the PRA and FCA. The Board and leadership team are confident that, with these legacy matters settled and with the backing of its investors, the Bank will continue to enhance trust and be able to return to growth in 2026.”
TBOL launched in late 2021 with a $1.1bn unicorn valuation that it said would help the start-up clearing bank compete with the likes of Barclays and NatWest.
Watson cultivated close ties to Labour, donating almost £500,000 to the party and its politicians, and boasted a life of luxury on social media, including attendance to lavish parties and trips on private jet.
The PRA on Tuesday said the firm had failed to notify the regulator of a capital shortfall and repeatedly reported that capital qualified towards its common equity tier one (CET1) capital when they knew it to be false.
“Most seriously, a then senior manager falsified a series of documents in order to mislead the PRA as to the true capital position,” the PRA wrote in its final notice.
Former members of TBOL’s senior management, whom the PRA did not name, also “intentionally misled the PRA as to the true capital position” both at group and firm level.
“This included submitting to the PRA a false account of the consolidated and solo capital position in a report of the firm’s capital requested by the PRA,” according to the regulator.
The notice also pointed out that the relationship between the fintech and its parent company was not appropriately disclosed.
The PRA also concluded that TBOL leadership failed to tell regulators about ‘Project Rainbow’, the code name given to crisis talks held to prepare the bank for insolvency in 2024 amid a cash crunch. Those involved in discussing the group’s cash shortage were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
“The PRA was never informed of Project Rainbow or any concerns with Group or the Firm’s solvency,” the notice states. “Neither was the PRA informed the Firm’s runway for operating cash lasted only until 1 May 2024.”
Headline: Do not let company founders hide from accountability
Sub-headline: Lyft’s dual class structure will prevent shareholders from having reasonable input
Recall Mr. Singer as the purchaser of Argentina’s bad debt? and the fact that Macri paid the ransom for re-admittance into the Free Market Club? as I recall 1.3 billion was the price tag! And less that a year and a half, with the peso in free fall, Macri applied and got an IMF bailout for his failing Austerity Lite: de Kirchner is waiting in the wings: the definition of ‘success’? That bit of inconvenient ‘Economic History’ puts Mr. Singer’s plea for ‘shareholder accountability’ garnished with self-congratulation where? Examples here:
My firm, Elliott Management, frequently encounters technology companies where founders or longtime managers created remarkable innovations but then struggled with the challenges of maturing products, expanding organisations or slowing growth.
They often respond by aggressively seeking new sources of growth, paying richly for acquisitions that do not fit with their business models or allocating capital towards peripheral activities that fail to generate returns. Worse, such efforts often damage the core businesses that brought success in the first place.
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Many companies are able to pull off these transitions without active shareholder involvement. But even at the most successful tech groups, allegations of privacy violations and other abuses have been most acute at companies such as Facebook and Google where dual-class structures are in place.
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Those with the insight and daring to found a business deserve our respect. But once they sell the vast majority of the company to the public, they should not be allowed to run it forever without any shareholder input. Public ownership must mean public accountability.
My selection of quotations is self-serving, but not anymore self-serving than Mr. Singer’s whole argument,that Capitalism, and its companies need investors like himself to keep them ‘honest’! Public Ownership and Public Accountability under the leadership of Vulture Capitalists like Singer is the sine qua non of Capitalist Virtue.
I have yet to read Robin Wigglesworth’s essay/news report, but I have read Mr. Edward. N. Littwak’s essay Hidden Costs at the Times Literary Supplement, August 19,2016 A review of The Panama Papers, that for it’s cast of characters, that includes Mr. Singer as a seeker after the his pound of flesh, President Macri of Argentina, and Cristina de Kirchner as clients of Mossack Fonseka. What was Argentina’s Neo-Liberal White Knight Mercri doing business where embezzler de Kirchner also did business? The Argentine Melodrama never ends, but there are more names of the politically respectable bourgeois politicians, and other civic actors…
Stayed tuned,
StephenKMackSD
2)
Poor Mr. Singer! The goose that laid the golden egg is kaput? Mr. Singer and his ilk produce nothing. He is not like the notorious Henry Ford, who at the least, paid his workers enough to buy the cars they produced on the assembly line! Ford produced a product that people bought, and provided jobs that enabled generations of Americans to purchase a home, to save for retirement, and put their children through school and even college. No matter Mr. Ford’s egregious beliefs, he did something that Mr. Singer and his investors cannot do, provide those jobs that built America and got us through two World Wars.
But times are now tough for the Vultures, as Capitalism, in it’s Neo-Liberal iteration, has collapsed, and what is on offer from the Elites, that the dread Populists are rebelling against, is the Utopianism of the TTP and the TTIP. Yet we as readers can see that this class of Capitalists relies on the ever shrinking detritus of a system mired in it’s own collapse. The Panama Papers demonstrates that both the Capitalists and their apologists in the Press, in Politics and Academia are wholly corrupt, or put bluntly, just on the take. So Mr. Singer’s dire warnings about an Economic ‘brokenness’ of the Bond Market: while we in America witness daily, the Sideshow of Clinton vs. Trump i.e. of two utterly loathsome self-seeking egoists vying to rule the ‘West’ garnished by the usual ‘the lesser of two evils’ bunk is just more bad news. Mr. Singer who makes Henry Ford look like a paragon of Capitalist Virtue, bemoans his lot: quelle dommage! In the vision of Ayn Rand the world is dived into producers and drones, so one might ask, what category does Mr. Singer fit into? Or to frame it in a way utterly antithetical to Rand, what tangible good does he produce? to frame it a language alien to the ‘Objectivism’ of Rand. The notion of ‘Objectivism’ being a stand in for greed. Perhaps we can turn to Hayek for the comforting news that the Market is the only really viable form of knowledge?
A few months ago, ThinkProgress launched a series of investigations into relationship of the right flank of the Supreme Court — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia — with corporate donors and Republican operatives. In October, we revealed, through a document obtained from Koch Industries, that Scalia and Thomas had attended secret right-wing fundraisers organized by Charles Koch to coordinate political strategy. ThinkProgress has now discovered more events attended by conservative Supreme Court justices.
The Manhattan Institute, funded by major corporations like CIGNA, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, is a conservative think tank in New York that produces right-wing policy papers as well as sponsoring speeches for judges and Republican politicians. In 2008, Justice Thomas headlined the Manhattan Institute’s Wriston Lecture; last October, Justice Alito was the headline speaker for the same event. According to the Manhattan Institute’s website, an individual must contribute between $5,000 to $25,000 to attend the Wriston Lecture. “To be invited to the Wriston Lecture,” Debbie Ezzard, a development official at the Manhattan Institute told ThinkProgress, “you have to give $5,000.”
During the question and answer period of the Wriston Lecture, Roger Hertog, a major neoconservative donor, asked Alito if he would attend the 2011 State of the Union. Ironically, Alito — while speaking at a political fundraiser filled with powerful conservative donors — said he would avoid the event because it has “become very political”:
HERTOG: My question has nothing to do with judicial philosophy. It’s a more mundane question. It’s a calendar question. Will you attend the State of the Union this year?
ALITO: I said in my talk that judges learn primarily from experience, and I’ve found the example of those with greater experience. For many years, the more senior members of the Supreme Court — Justice Stevens before he retired, Justice Scalia — stopped the practice of attending State of the Union addresses because they have become very political events and they’re very awkward for the justices. We have to sit there like the proverbial plotted plant most of the time and we’re not allowed to applaud or those of us who are more disciplined refrain from manifesting any emotion or opinion whatsoever.
Watch it:
Scalia, Thomas, and Alito ultimately refused to attend the SOTU last night. At the end of his question and answer period during the Wriston Lecture, Thomas pledged to the room of donors to meet with them on a more informal basis whenever they visit Washington, DC.
Notably, both Thomas and Alito were introduced at the Manhattan Institute by its chairman, Paul Singer. Singer is the manager of one of the nation’s largest hedge funds, Elliott Management, and has been one of the largest contributors to the Republican Party and conservative causes in recent years. An opponent of financial regulations, Singer’s hedge fund contributed 96% of Rep. Scott Garrett’s (R-NJ) campaign committee. Garrett is the new subcommittee chairman overseeing hedge funds, including regulations passed by Democrats last year which will affect Singer’s firm.
Singer is also a “seven figure” contributor to Crossroads GPS, a front group managed by Karl Rove that has taken advantage of the new campaign finance landscape post-Citizens United. As ThinkProgress has reported, it’s not the first time Alito or Thomas has headlined a political fundraiser with corporate donors:
– In November, shortly after his Manhattan Institute fundraising appearance, ThinkProgress interviewed Justice Alito as he entered the annual fundraising gala for the American Spectator, attended by then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele and top Republican donors. Alito told us that his attendance to the fundraiser was “not important.” However, as we noted, Alito was the main draw for donors when he headlined the same event in 2008. The American Spectator is nominally a magazine; in the 90s, it served as a slush fund for wealthy donors to pay opponents of President Clinton, and recently, it organized a lobby group called the “Conservative Action Project” to orchestrate opposition to President Obama.
– In 2009, while the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the Citizens United case, Justice Thomas was featured at the annual fundraiser for the Heritage Foundation — and sat at a table for donors with investment banker Thomas Saunders and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). After the Citizens United decision, Heritage created a new nonprofit called “Heritage Action” to run attack ads against Democrats.
– In 2009, while the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the Citizens United case, Justice Alito headlined a fundraiser for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) — the same corporate front that funded the rise of Republican dirty trickster James O’Keefe and anti-masturbation activist Christine O’Donnell. According to the sponsorship levels for the event, Alito helped ISI raise $70,000 or more from law firms like Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, LLP. ISI is run partially by lobbyist James Burnley, who also is on the board of FreedomWorks.
– Last year, Justice Thomas helped headline a fundraiser for the National Association of Broadcasters, a lobby group representing News Corp, Cox Media Group, and other media companies. The event raised hundreds of thousands for NAB’s charity from a host of corporate sponsors, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, PhRMA, and CBS Corp.
Pursuant to our reporting, the good government group Common Cause found that Thomas had also failed to report more than $686,000 in income from his wife on his ethics disclosure forms. Monday evening, Thomas filed letters with the Supreme Court amending the gap in disclosure.
Yesterday ProPublica reported that Paul “The Vulture” Singer flew Justice Samuel Alito on a private jet to Alaska for a luxury fishing vacation in early 2008 (which Alito failed to disclose). Singer subsequently had multiple cases before the Supreme Court — including a 15-year long dispute with Argentina.
I’ve been hunting Singer The Vulture for BBC TV since 2007, when he pocketed the money meant to aid those affected by the cholera epidemic in the Republic of Congo. And my 2012 cover story for The Nation, “Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza”, revealed how Singer secretly set up Romney to make $100 million off Obama’s auto bailout.
Singer was the number one donor for the Republican Party in New York. He even helped Alberto Fujimori escape murder charges in Perú. The story of Paul Singer is featured in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which I’m making available as a FREE download.
Here’s the real story of Singer’s vulture attack on Argentina, which resulted in a $4.65 billion cash settlement forcing the nation into default, from my book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
A call came in from New York to my bosses at BBC Television Centre, London. It was from one of the knuckle-draggers on the payroll of billionaire Paul Singer, Number One funder for the Republican Party in New York, million-dollar donor to the Mitt Romney super-PAC, and top money-giver to the GOP Senate campaign fund. But better known to us as Singer The Vulture.
“We have a file on Greg Palast.”
Well, of course they do.
And I have a file on them.
I had just returned from traveling up the Congo River for BBC and the Guardian. Singer’s enforcer indicated that Mr. Singer would prefer BBC not run a story about him — especially not with film of his suffering prey: children, cholera victims.
A call came in from New York to my bosses at BBC Television Centre, London. It was from one of the knuckle-draggers on the payroll of billionaire Paul Singer, Number One funder for the Republican Party in New York, million-dollar donor to the Mitt Romney super-PAC, and top money-giver to the GOP Senate campaign fund. But better known to us as Singer The Vulture.
“We have a file on Greg Palast.”
Well, of course they do.
And I have a file on them.
I had just returned from traveling up the Congo River for BBC and the Guardian. Singer’s enforcer indicated that Mr. Singer would prefer BBC not run a story about him — especially not with film of his suffering prey: children, cholera victims.
The mythos of the hedge fund manager is defined by a perceived mastery over market forces. Commentators often ascribe supernatural powers that hedge fund managers supposedly have over the market. Titles like “Hedge Fund Market Wizards” and “Money Mavericks” are typical. Paul Singer is decidedly not a master of the markets. Paul Singer is just an opportunistic lawyer who has found a niche doing something that most people couldn’t stomach—suing some of the poorest nations in the world. Singer is the pioneer of a strategy called debt vulturism, which does not require a savvy understanding of the markets. Indeed, Singer’s fund has been swindled by a fraudster selling fictitious securities. [1]
A hedge fund billionaire who calls income inequality “a wedge issue”
Paul Singer is a hedge fund billionaire and prominent New York-based philanthropist. Singer’s net worth is worth $1.92 billion, according to Forbes—easily making him one of the wealthiest New Yorkers. [2] Singer is the founder and CEO of hedge fund Elliott Management Corporation, controlling over $23 billion in assets. A leading Republican donor, Singer has contributed heavily to GOP candidates including to former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. [3] Singer’s fund, Elliott Management, was the top ranked contributor to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s campaign committee and PAC in the 2012 cycle, contributing $40,000. [4]
Trump could always walk away and leave others to clean up. As Richard Haass, a senior official in past Republican administrations, noted, that would amount to a “we broke it, you own it” inversion of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule. But that would be a Pyrrhic exit. Iran could continue to hold global energy hostage until it is satisfied that Trump will not resume hostilities. Of course, he could promise not to start bombing again. But would Iran trust him?
It is too soon to capture the extent of the damage done to American power. But we can be sure that Gulf war III will intensify the global arms race, especially among America’s confidence-shaken allies. We are likewise at the start of an alternative energy boom. Nuclear power, solar panels and windmills do need critical minerals. But there is currently no Strait of Hormuz choking off green energy supplies.
What remains to be seen is how Trump will find a way out of this morass. He wanted to bring down Iran’s regime. Now he is lifting sanctions on Iran so that it can sell more oil. Amid the torrent of feints, hype, invention and bluster, Trump’s goal is now to set the clock back. With planning like this, who needs chaos?
Who can forget Mr. Luce’s ‘interview with Kissinger in 2018? My comment:
‘While babies in Vietnam are still being born with catastrophic birth defects from the effects of Agent Orange, decades after the end of the American Anti-Communists crusade or just call it mass slaughter, The Great Man is treated to lunch by a pundit who disingenuously call him consigliere, as the-in-order-too of not sounding too much like what he is, a sycophant to The Great Man. Did Luce even mention his book ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ ? Isn’t there some kind of obligation, on the part of the guest to know something of your host’s latest accomplishment? Or is the aged Great Man above that kind of social obligation?
The essay unfolds in an almost comic mode with Luce planning to waylay The Great Man into ‘spilling the beans’ on the Know-Nothing Trump. The dramatic tension is non existent, as this 95 year old is more interested in having an audience who simply listens, in awe, to his estimation and opinions about the wider historical scope of his intelligence: his specialty is Foreign Policy Metaphysics. The Great Man doesn’t disappoint himself .
Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he helped to construct it: Russian revanchism, the end of the ‘rules based order’ meaning the erosion of NATO, in sum the ‘decline of American Power’. Or rather, the fact that Europe is no longer in need of American tutelage. The burning question is TRUMP and his chaotic practice politics and his disturbing propinquity for another political monster Putin.
This little melodrama ends with Luce helping The Great Man to his car in the rain, and the ‘server’ speaks to Luce with some pertinent information: “Dr Kissinger has been looking forward to this lunch for days,”
Political Observer
Lunch with the FT: Henry Kissinger ‘We are in a very, very grave period’
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