Failing to Halt the Destruction of the Earth's Ecosystems

 

More than 80% of countries have failed to submit plans to meet a UN agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, new analysis has found.

Nearly two years ago, the world struck a once-in-a-decade deal in Montreal, Canada, that included targets to protect 30% of land and sea for nature, reform billions of dollars on environmentally harmful subsidies and slash pesticide usage. Countries committed to submit their plans for meeting the agreement before the biodiversity Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which begins this month – but only 25 countries have done so.

The other 170 countries have failed to meet the deadline. The world has never yet met a single target set in the history of UN biodiversity agreements, and there had been a major push to make sure this decade was different.

Analysis by Carbon Brief and the Guardian shows that some of the most important ecosystems on the planet are not covered by National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs).

Only five of the 17 megadiverse countries, home to about 70% of the world’s biodiversity, produced NBSAPs: Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. Suriname was the only Amazon rainforest nation to submit a plan, and no Congo basin nations had produced NBSAPs by the deadline. Canada, Italy, France and Japan were the only G7 nations to meet the deadline. The UK has submitted a technical document to the UN convention on biological diversity but is not expected to publish its plan until the beginning of 2025, citing the change of government.

Crystal Davis, global director for the Food, Land and Water Program at the World Resources Institute, said: “Nature is facing a crisis, largely driven by humanity’s use of the land and ocean … at Cop16, it’s time for all countries to step up and turn a landmark global agreement to protect and restore nature into action.”

Colombia, despite hosting the summit, also failed to meet the deadline, but said it would present its plan during the meeting. Brazil, which failed to meet the deadline, said it was formulating a plan that would last until the middle of the century and had been delayed due to the scale of what it was trying to achieve. Other countries are expected to present NBSAPs at Cop16 but it was unclear how many would be unveiled, the UN said.

“More NBSAPs would be better, that’s clear,” said UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker. “We expect more to be announced at Cop16 – including some of the big ones like India, who want to have the ministerial announcement at Cop16 and give it a lot of profile.

Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian ministry of environment who is responsible for the NBSAP process, said he expected his country would publish a plan in early 2025.

“We are working on a new NBSAP extending till 2050. Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity, with a large population with a complex governance,” he said.

Dr V Rajagopalan, chair of India’s working group tasked with reviewing the country’s national biodiversity plan, told Carbon Brief that the goals of the global nature deal must be adapted to local contexts.

“Our situation is different from the west: what can be done there, cannot be done here,” he said. “For example, subsidies are a challenge for us – similarly, pesticides – because of our agricultural status and food security requirements. But, still, we have kept our targets very ambitious.”

-Patrick Greenfield & Daisy Dunne, The Guardian

How Trump and the GOP Are Planning to Steal the Election

 

Donald Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now, including California, Colorado, and New York. It has pundits scratching their heads: is it just all about his ego? Is he crazy? Or crazy like a fox? I’d argue the latter: that this is part of a strategy to legally seize the White House after he’s lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, much like Republican Rutherford B. Hayes did in the election of 1876.

Eight months before the 2020 election, I wrote a largely-ridiculed article for Alternet.org predicting that Trump would lose the election but would then use multiple phony slates of swing-state electors to try to get the Electoral College count thrown to the House of Representatives where, under the 12th Amendment, the Republican majority would crown him president. I noted that I’d first heard of the plan that month from a Republican insider I knew from my days living and doing my radio/TV program from Washington, DC. And, as we all now know, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

Fortunately, Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi stopped Trump and his merry band of corrupt lawyers and lawmakers (including Mike Johnson, who led the effort in the House) from executing the plan, but not before five civilians and three police officers lay dead because Trump incited a violent attack on the Capitol in his final, desperate attempt to pull it off.

Last Friday, my SiriusXM colleague Michelangelo Signoreli mentioned to me (on his program) that a prominent rightwing hate radio host had claimed Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now so he can help out down-ballot House members in those states. According to that host, it’s all about holding the House so when the time comes for the election to be certified Republicans will be able to deny that still-necessary certification and vote Trump in themselves.

Which is giving me a terrible sense of déjà vu. At the risk of again playing the reluctant role of Cassandra, here are some examples of how Trump and the GOP could try to steal the White House this winter, regardless of how the vote turns out. And how Republicans are today telegraphing this very outcome.

Article II (the Executive Branch), Section I, Clause 2 of the Constitution (and the 12th Amendment, which revises it) gives solely to the legislatures of the states the power to control the electors who will decide the presidential election.

It does not say — and there is no federal law that says — that the people of the states shall vote for their choice of president and then that vote shall be reflected in the states’ electoral votes. It’s entirely up to each state’s legislature (without any input from the governor).

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” is how it appears in Article II of the Constitution.

As Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in the 2000 Bush v Gore decision when the US Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount that would have given the election to Al Gore: 

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States… [T]he state legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by state legislatures in several States for many years after the framing of our Constitution.”

Every state’s legislature generally directs all their electors to vote for the candidate who won the majority in the state (Maine and Nebraska are the exception, allowing for split decisions), a system we call “winner takes all,” but, as Rehnquist noted, a state’s legislature (its combined house or assembly and senate) can, by simple majority vote, direct its electors to vote for any candidate they want, even over the objection of their governor.

In the 2000 election, for example, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount of the vote for president in that state, Jeb Bush and his Republicans knew that a full, statewide recount would give Al Gore the presidency. (It would have discovered the additional 45,599 votes for Al Gore that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris arbitrarily and illegally chose not to count, as The New York Times noted a year later.)

In other words, had the U.S. Supreme Court not intervened to stop the Florida recount, the Republicans in the Florida legislature were fully prepared to hand the entire Florida electoral college vote — and, thus, the White House — to George W. Bush, even if a recount showed that Al Gore actually won the state. It was, after all, their constitutional right, as Rehnquist later noted in Bush v Gore.

As David Barstow and Somini Sengupta wrote for the New York Times on November 28, 2000, just before the Supreme Court intervened: “The president of Florida’s Senate said today that Gov. Jeb Bush had indicated his willingness to sign special legislation intended to award Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes to his brother Gov. George W. Bush of Texas even as the election results were being contested.”

“But,” some say, “Kamala Harris is the Vice President, so she won’t refuse to accept the Electoral College votes like Trump wanted Pence to do!” That’s true, but irrelevant.

While the updated Electoral Count Act explicitly redefines the Vice President’s role as purely ceremonial, it does not — and could not without a constitutional amendment —alter the power of individual Republican-controlled swing states to send Trump electors (claiming that the Harris-winning results in their states are the result of voter fraud) to DC.

Regardless of how transparently dishonest such an effort would be, its primary result would be to throw to the Supreme Court the decision over which electors to count. Multiple Court observers have noted how light the Court’s docket is this fall because, they speculate, Roberts is fully expecting to play a role in the election similar to what five Republicans on the Court did in 2000 when they stopped the Florida recount, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

The Court could then declare the election flawed because of the alleged voter fraud — Republicans across the country, as well as Trump and Vance, are already preparing the ground for this claim — and, citing the 12th Amendment, throw it to the House of Representatives. 

Under that scenario, each state’s House delegation has one single vote for president (the Senate is not involved under the 12th Amendment) and right now there are 26 states controlled by Republicans: the 26-24 vote would put Trump and Vance in the White House for the next four years. That strategy would require one or more individual states to either refuse to certify their vote, delay certifying their vote, or submit multiple slates of electors.

And we’re already hearing from both local elections officials and state legislators’ rumblings that this is exactly what they intend to do.

Another option to produce the same result would be for a majority vote in the House to refuse to certify a Harris win.

Which brings us back to Trump campaigning in Blue states. As Ed Kilgore wrote for The New Yorker: “As it happens, there are ten highly competitive House races in California and New York, and a Trump appearance nearby could goose GOP turnout and promote party-organizing efforts in ways that could make a difference in those contests.” This brings us back to the scenario Michelangelo shared with me. The new, 2025-2026 House is sworn in on January 3rd, whereas the presidential vote is certified on January 6th.

If Democrats win the House in November and are sworn in on January 3rd, it’s unlikely that Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would go along with Trump’s scheme on January 6th, and Republicans wouldn’t have the necessary majority in any case.

But if Republicans can hold the House, there’s a good chance that Speaker Mike Johnson would happily hold the vote to declare Harris’ win as “fraudulent.” After all, he’s the guy who corralled fully 147 votes against certifying the 2020 election in the House; his being the ringleader of that effort is the main reason he’s the speaker right now.

There are multiple razor-tight House races in California, Colorado, and New York. Trump and his co-conspirators may well believe that his holding rallies in those states represents the best bet for helping Republicans win those races, thus ensuring Johnson is in charge of the House so they can refuse certification and throw the case to themselves via the Supreme Court.

Seizing control of the Senate would be the icing on the cake for this scheme, as it’s also sworn in on January 3rd and also votes to certify the Electoral College vote, but a deadlock is only necessary in one of the two legislative bodies, and if the 12th Amendment is invoked by six Republicans on the Supreme Court because of that deadlock only the House votes for president.

Keep in mind, JD Vance is still refusing to say that Trump lost the 2020 election, most recently stonewalling the question five times in a podcast interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times last week. Donald Trump is also still asserting that he won, and is already signaling that he intends to declare victory in November regardless of the “official” outcome.

And, unlike in 2020, there are no longer Mitt Romneys, Adam Kinzingers, or Liz Cheneys in Congress who could gum up the works. The GOP is today unified in its assertion that voter fraud handed Joe Biden the 2020 presidency: this is the perfect setup for the scenarios I’m describing, and Republicans know it. They created it, in fact.

The most likely scenario, though, would involve local election officials gumming up the works by slow-walking counts, challenging counts, or outright refusing to certify counts at the state level long enough that several individual state votes can’t be certified by January 6th, very much like in the election of 1876.

That would provide an easy excuse for the six Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, invoke the 12th Amendment, and throwing the election to the House, guaranteeing Trump’s victory. As Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti recently wrote for The New York Times:

“The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump. …

“Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”

The updated Electoral Count Act sets a hard date of December 11th for states to certify the vote but doesn’t detail any consequences or outcomes if states fail to meet that date. Thus, in the case of conflict, confusion, or multiple lawsuits the case would, again, end up before the six Republicans who control the Supreme Court.

As the Times’ Rutenberg and Corasaniti note:

“For his part, Mr. Whatley, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, was noncommittal when reporters recently asked him if his party would seek to block certification in any states this fall.

“‘We’re not going to cross any of those bridges right now,’ he said.” Gee, ya think? They couldn’t be telegraphing their plans any more clearly if they were skywriting them.

I wrapped up my March 2020 article predicting the GOP’s upcoming fake elector strategy by imploring Democrats and the media to ring the alarm before they tried to pull it off: “Get it into the media and repeat it over and over again: The GOP plans to claim Democratic voter fraud in this election to steal the election for themselves, and they’re already getting people primed for it!”

It’s worth repeating today. Pass it along.

-Thom Hartmann

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my daily work to rescue our democratic republic, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

The Huge Web of Propaganda and Mind Control

 

Thanks to Ronald Reagan and your GOP, the working class was not only robbed of their opportunities for economic advancement with 'trickledown" economics that does not trickle down, they were also robbed of the right to unbiased news coverage in 1981 deregulations that allowed the ultra-wealthy to control a lot of stations under a single entity, in 1984 when allowed cable networks to broadcast "entertaining" news that catered to the beliefs of their audiences, and in 1987 when the requirement that news be fair and balanced was dropped.

Many Americans are under-educated and unable to distinguish fact from fiction, fact from opinion. Therefore, the eighties made sure these entities could easily control the minds of the peasants. The poor half-educated and superstitious people don't have a chance to think for themselves. The wealthy have brainwashed them to believe women, liberals, gays, and immigrants are stealing their opportunities and ruining their way of life, when, in fact, the wealthy are robbing them blind. 

If you think the Taliban in Afghanistan is bad, read below. No wonder the USA (and much of the world) is in such bad shape. How can people start thinking for themselves with groups who want to wipe out the planet for profit and take us back to the Dark Ages controlling the narrative?

The Huge Web of Propaganda and Mind Control:

Media Companies

Below find a list of very destructive media companies and other organizations that purposely either cherry-pick and exaggerate news stories or outright spread disinformation about minorities, immigrants, liberal women, LGBTQ people, climate scientists and other scientists, and non-Christian religions to divide the country and fan the flames of the culture wars that they and their owners and the powerful people create.

They spread false information and even made-up graphs sparking fear that the economy is failing when the economy of the USA has recovered faster and is faring better than any country in the world, fear of rises in immigrant and black violent crime in New York and Chicago when it is, in fact, higher per capita in rural America, fear of out-of-control illegal immigration carrying on about big caravans heading that way.

When easily duped "patriots" went to the border to help out, they were surprised to find nothing. These media outlets fuel right-winged ugliness, Nationalism, fascism, uncontrolled consumption, and xenophobia throughout the world. The world would be better off if Murdoch, the Barclays, and Steve Bannon, and the people associated with them did not exist.

There is a growing interest in the USA toward cybersecurity and the use of the military to monitor and prevent harmful hacking. Everyone's worried about cyber threats, but media organizations and other entities below have hacked into people's feelings of insecurity to instill fear and intolerance for political gain and profit for decades and they continue to do so.

Their hate spreads throughout the world. If there were a hell, they would be burning there. If your hands-tied government and superheroes don't protect you, you must protect yourself. Therefore, always check their information wherever it appears using objective fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact, Snopes, and Media Bias/Fact Check.

United States:

As you can see below, huge amounts of money and effort is spent to keep people ignorant and misinformed.

1. Fox News

FoxCorporation: Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch

2, Breitbart News

BreitbartNews Network, LLC: Larry Solov, Steve Bannon

3. Newsmax

NewsmaxMedia, Inc.: Christopher Ruddy

4. One America News Network (OANN)

HerringNetworks, Inc.: Robert Herring Sr.

5. The Daily Caller

Tucker Carlson, Neil Patel

6. The Blaze

Blaz Media: Glenn Beck, Tyler Cardon, Gaston Mooney, and CRTV

7. Infowars

Free Speech Systems: Alex Jones (sued to death)

8. Gateway Pundit

Jim Hoft

9. The Federalist

FDRLST Media, LLC: Ben Domenech, Sean Davis

10. The Epoch Times

EpochMedia Group; Falun Gong; John Tang

11. The Daily Mail

the Rothermere Family and Jonathan Harmsworth

12. The Daily Wire

Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing

13.The Daily Express

These big money companies--Royal London Asset Management, Aberforth Partners LLP, BlackRock, Schroders, Artemis, and Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM)

14. Real Clear Politics

John McIntyre and Tom Bevan and Forbes

15. Washington Examiner

Philip Anschutz, Clarity Media Group including Colorado Springs Gazette

16.. The Washington Times

The Unification Church, News World Communications, The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification

17. The American Spectator

R Emmett Tyrrell Jr, Wladyslaw, Pleszczynski, American Spectator Foundation.

18. CBN

Pat Robertson, 700 Club, Also promoted by Trinity Broadcasting, Cornerstone Television, FamilyNet, LeSEA Broadcasting, TCT and even Middle East Television

19. The Independent Journal Review (especially commentary)

Alex Skatell., Camden Stuebe, and Shushanna Walshe

20. The National Review (opinion)

Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru. Disseminators of climate falsities trying to help the fossil fuel industries and promote xenophobia, including the Obama birth certificate fiasco.

21. Washington Free Beacon

Financially backed by Paul Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor.

 [...]

"He cannot be President of the United States"

 

We learned from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it. To be clear, this equipment was not the swabs we now use at home, but appears to be what at the time was a new point-of-care machine from Abbott Laboratories that claimed to be the fastest way to test for Covid-19. 

Journalist Karly Kingsley points out that at the time, central lab testing to diagnose Covid-19 infections took a long time, causing infections to spread. Machines like Abbott’s were hard to get. Trump chose to send them to Putin—not to charge him for them, or to negotiate for the release of Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration, but to give them to him—rather than keeping them for Americans.

It’s hard to overstate just what an astonishing story this is. In 2016, Republicans stood firm against Putin and backed the arming of Ukraine to stand against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. But that summer, at Trump’s urging, the party changed its platform to weaken its support of Ukraine.

In 2020, it appears, Trump chose to give lifesaving equipment to Putin rather than use it for Americans. And in 2024, Trump’s willingness to undermine the United States to cozy up to an adversary his own party stood against less than a decade ago does not appear to be a deal breaker for Republicans.

As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it: “What has this country come to if the revelation that Trump secretly sent COVID testing machines to Putin while thousands of Americans were dying, in part because of a shortage of testing machines here, doesn't disqualify him to be President?” He continued: “Donald Trump helped keep Putin alive during the pandemic and let Americans die. This revelation is damning. It's disqualifying. He cannot be President of the United States.” 

Increasingly, Trump’s behavior seems to parrot the dictators he appears to admire. 

After 60 Minutes called him out for breaking a fifty-year tradition of both candidates talking to 60 Minutes and backing out of an interview to which he had agreed, Trump today accused the producers of 60 Minutes of cutting Vice President Kamala Harris’s answers to make her look good.

He suggested that such cuts were “illegal” and possibly “a major Campaign Finance violation” that “must be investigated, starting today!” “The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY!” he wrote. Trump is trying to cover for his own failure by attacking CBS in an echo of dictators determined to control the media.

In a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to have declined to appear at another presidential debate with Vice President Harris. After declaring he had won the previous debate with Harris and rehashing many of his grievances, he wrote: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!”

As Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post recounted yesterday, a report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Trump White House prevented a real investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

More than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh sent to the FBI tip line went directly to the White House, where they were never investigated, and the FBI was told not to pursue corroborating evidence of the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez although lawyers for the women presented the names of dozens of people who could testify to the truth of their allegations.  

A number of senators said the lack of corroborating evidence convinced them to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Steve Benen of MSNBC recalled, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said at the time that it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation,” while the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the 2018 FBI report “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”

After he left office, Trump told author Michael Wolff that he had gone to bat for Kavanaugh, saying: “I…fought like hell for Kavanaugh—and I saved his life, and I saved his career.” Kavanaugh was the crucial vote for Trump’s right-wing agenda, including ending the federal recognition of abortion rights by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Ken Bensinger reported in the New York Times today that Trump’s team has refused to participate in preparations for a transition to a potential Trump presidency. Normally, the nonpartisan transition process, dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has candidates setting up teams as much as six months before the election to begin vetting and hiring political appointees and working with the administration in office to make sure the agencies continue to run smoothly. 

With the election less than a month away, Trump has neither signed the required agreements nor signed the transition’s ethics plan that would require him to disclose private donors to the transition and limit them to contributions of no more than $5,000. Without that agreement, there are no limits to the money the Trump transition can take. Trump has also refused to sign an agreement with the White House requiring that anyone receiving classified information have a security clearance. Currently, his aides cannot review federal records.

Trump ignored the traditional transition period in 2016, cutting off communications with President Barack Obama’s team. He refused to allow incoming president Joe Biden access to federal agencies in 2020, hampering Biden’s ability to get his administration in place in a timely fashion. Now it’s possible that Trump sees no need for a normal transition because Project 2025, on which he appears to be relying, has been working on one for many months. 

It calls for him to fire most federal employees, reinstating the policy he started at the end of his term. To fill their positions, the Heritage Foundation has been vetting loyalists now for months, preparing a list of job candidates to put in place a new, right-wing agenda.  

Yesterday, on California’s KFI radio station, Trump told host John Kobylt that Tom Homan of Project 2025, who as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversaw the family separation policy at the southern border, will be “coming on board” a new Trump administration. 

This afternoon, Trump told an audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he expects to put former rival Vivek Ramaswamy into an important position in his administration. On October 7, 2024, Ramaswamy suggested on social media that he wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.

He wrote: “Shut down the entitlement state & you solve most of the immigration problem right there. We need to man up & fix the root cause that draws migrants here in the first place: the welfare state. But no one seems to want to say that part out loud, because too many native-born Americans are addicted to it themselves.”

Trump has expressed frustration with the independence of the Federal Reserve, expressing a desire to make it answer to the president. In an interview with Barron’s, one of his advisors, Scott Bessent, has floated the idea of creating a shadow Fed chair until the term of the current chair, Jerome Powell, ends, thus undercutting him without facing a fight over firing the Fed chair. 

This agenda is not a popular one in the U.S., but Trump is getting a boost as Russian operatives work to swing down ballot races toward the Republicans. In a briefing on Monday, October 7, experts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told reporters that China and Iran are trying to influence the upcoming election and that “Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians.

Russian influence actors have planned, and likely created and disseminated, content, particularly over social media, intended to encourage the election of congressional candidates that Moscow assesses will oppose aid to Ukraine.”  

Russia, an ODNI spokesperson said, uses “influence-for-hire firms, or commercial firms with expertise in these type[s] of activities.” It also coopts “witting and unwitting Americans to work on Russia’s behalf,” to “launder their influence narratives through what are perceived as more authentic U.S. voices.” 

Not all of Trump’s supporters appear eager to stick around to see if Trump will win another term. Today news broke that Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive officer of OverStock, who became a fervent advocate of the idea that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election, has left the country, apparently permanently, to live in Dubai.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne, as is President Biden’s son Hunter. The younger Biden sued Byrne for defamation last November after Byrne claimed Hunter Biden sought a bribe from Iran. 

In September, Biden’s lawyers were trying to schedule a date for Byrne’s deposition when his lawyer abruptly “claimed for the first time that Defendant has moved his residence to Dubai and if Plaintiff wanted to take his in-person deposition counsel would have to fly to Dubai to do so, to which Plaintiff responded with various related inquiries to try to resolve this matter and defense counsel stated Defendant would not be returning to the United States for the foreseeable future.” 

Byrne claimed to have fled the U.S. because the Venezuelan government has put a bounty on him, but as Biden’s lawyers note, “the Defendant’s truthfulness is directly at issue.” 

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-03-27-Abbott-Launches-Molecular-Point-of-Care-Test-to-Detect-Novel-Coronavirus-in-as-Little-as-Five-Minutes

https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/2024-elections-fpc/30-day-election-security-update-from-intelligence-community

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/us/politics/trump-presidential-transition.html

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2024/07/project-25-and-your-federal-job-better-read-up-on-this-one/

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-project-2025-author-coming-onboard-if-elected-1966334

https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-fed-chair-powell-fire-4b79079f

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/kavanaugh-trump-white-house-fbi-report/

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/justice-kavanaugh-becomes-latest-target-trump-s-ire-n1273851

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/new-allegations-kavanaughs-fbi-probe-spark-awkward-questions-rcna174652

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-sues-overstock-ceo-patrick-byrne-defamation-joe-biden/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.904869/gov.uscourts.cacd.904869.67.2.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/republican-president-2024-heritage-foundation.html

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Five Key Revelations from Bob Woodward’s New Book

 

Bob Woodward’s “War,” set to be released next week, is the author and Washington Post associate editor’s fourth book since Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

The new book opens the aperture to reveal how a years-long political contest between Trump and President Joe Biden — and now Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — has unfolded against the backdrop of cascading global crisis, from the coronavirus pandemic, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed proxies in the Middle East. At the book’s end, Woodward concludes that Biden, mistakes notwithstanding, has exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership,” while Trump has displayed recklessness and self-interest making him, in Woodward’s estimation, “unfit to lead the country.”

That determination is based on a series of key revelations. Below are some of the book’s main findings. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign issued a statement attacking the book and saying, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”

1. Trump sent American-made coronavirus tests to Putin

When Trump was president in 2020, he sent coveted tests for the disease to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a crippling shortage in the United States and around the world.

As the book explains, Putin was petrified of contracting the deadly illness. He accepted the supplies but cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had shared them, concerned for the political fallout that the U.S. president would suffer.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.

Woodward reports that Trump’s reply was: “I don’t care. Fine.”

“War” also suggests that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021. On one occasion, this year, Trump sent an unnamed aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago Club so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin, according to the book.

A campaign official, Jason Miller, was evasive when Woodward asked him about the contact, eventually offering, “I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that.”

2. Biden’s profanity-laced outbursts about Putin and Netanyahu

“War” portrays Biden as a careful and deliberate commander in chief, but combustible in private about intractable foreign leaders — especially Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden called Putin the “epitome of evil” and remarked to his advisers, about his Russian counterpart, “That f---ing Putin.”

The intelligence community believed racial animus — namely the idea that Ukrainians were a lesser people than the Russians — was a significant factor in Putin’s designs on Ukraine, as “War” explains. The book quotes Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, saying of Putin, “He is one of the most racist leaders that we have.”

Biden’s anger toward Netanyahu boiled over in the spring of 2024, Woodward reports, as Biden concluded that the Israeli prime minister’s interest was not actually in defeating Hamas but in protecting himself. “That son of a b----, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f---ing guy!” Biden reportedly told advisers.

3. Harris’s two-track approach with Netanyahu

Harris delivered high-profile remarks after a July face-to-face meeting with Netanyahu, shortly after she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She seemed to separate herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza by speaking forcefully about the costs of the military campaign and pledging to “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering.

Her public tone surprised, and infuriated, Netanyahu because it marked a contrast with her more amicable approach during the private conversation the two had shared, Woodward reports. The book quotes the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Herzog, saying: “She wants to be tough in public. But she wasn’t as tough privately.”

The episode is one of several in the book about Harris, who appears as a loyal No. 2 to Biden but hardly influential in major foreign policy decisions.

4. Frantic de-escalation in the face of possible Russian nuclear use

Woodward details some of the stunning intelligence capabilities that allowed Washington to foresee Russian plans for an all-out war against Ukraine in early 2022, including a human source inside the Kremlin.

This insight, however, got the Biden administration only so far as it sought to foreclose Russia’s nuclear option. In the fall of 2022, that option seemed like a live one, as U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Putin was seriously weighing use of a tactical nuclear weapon — at one point, assessing the likelihood at 50 percent.

An especially frantic quest to bring Moscow back from the brink came in October of that year, when Russia appeared to be laying the groundwork for escalation by accusing Ukraine of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flatly denied Russia’s accusations in a phone call with the Kremlin’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, instructed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team to summon the International Atomic Energy Agency to absolve themselves immediately. And Biden called out Russia’s apparent scheme publicly while privately leaning on Chinese President Xi Jinping to emphasize to Putin the dire consequences of nuclear use.

5. The pervasive influence of the Saudi crown prince

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS, is not a major figure in the book but looms large at critical junctures, with key assessments of him delivered by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Mohammed, currently the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, matters greatly as the de facto ruler of the Arab world’s wealthiest country. He cultivated close ties to Trump, who made Riyadh his first foreign stop as president. So, too, he has been crucial to matters of significant interest to Biden, especially oil supplies and the prospects of normalized relations with Israel.

Woodward summarized Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s perception of the crown prince this way: “MBS was nothing more than a spoiled child.”

One of the Saudi royal’s important interlocutors has been Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.). The Republican senator kept Biden’s aides apprised of Mohammed’s perspective on the possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to Woodward, and also kept the gulf leader in communication with Trump. During a March visit to Saudi Arabia recounted in the book, Graham proposes to the crown prince that they call the Republican presidential candidate. Mohammed proceeds to conduct the conversation over speakerphone.

On an earlier trip, Graham had asked the crown prince to contact Sullivan, so the senator could inform them both about a discussion with Netanyahu.

“Hey, I’m here with Lindsey,” the Saudi royal reportedly announced to Sullivan over the phone.

 -Isaac Stanley-Becker, Washington Post

Trump's Dark Money

 

“The evil man is a source of fascination; ordinary persons wonder what impels such extremes of conduct. A lust for wealth? A common motive, undoubtedly. A craving for power? Revenge against society? Let us grant these as well. But when wealth has been gained, power achieved and society brought down to a state of groveling submission, what then? Why does he continue? The response must be: the love of evil for its own sake.”
— Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

Donald Trump has been found by a jury of his peers to have raped a woman. He’s a traitor who’s embraced foreign dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing a democratic American ally. He’s a convicted criminal who stole money from a children’s cancer charity and scammed students out of millions of dollars. He tried to end American democracy by force. Like Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are genetically inferior. And he’s a whisker away from the presidency.

How is this even possible?

You can trace it all back to dark money.

Ever since Citizens United legalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from January 2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion was raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money — $5.6 billion — running through PACs.

Nine years ago, President Jimmy Carter said on my program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. …  So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

He's right. But it’s even worse than Carter imagined. Dark money — billions from the morbidly rich and giant corporations, often untraceable — has taken over the entire GOP and is the main weapon being used today against members of the Democratic Party.

It’s also badly distorting public policy.

For example, remember when Donald Trump was outspoken about banning TikTok from America because the app is owned by Chinese billionaires beholden to that nation’s communist government? In August of 2020, he signed an Executive Order that said, in part:

“This data collection [by TikTok] threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Proving the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, Trump was right about TikTok and its owner, ByteDance. Federal lawsuits blocked his ban, so it never went into effect, but in the meantime a fellow most Americans have never heard of — Jeffrey Yass — either flew down to Mar-a-Lago and spent time with Trump or met him backstage at an Elon Musk event (media reports conflict).

Yass — the world’s 64th richest person worth an estimated $40 billion — owns Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that owned large blocks of stock in both ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the company that merged back in March with Trump Media & Technology Group just as that company was desperately running out of cash.

Reportedly, the merger not only prevented Trump’s Truth Social app from going bankrupt but also let Trump take the combined company public, putting an estimated 3 billion dollars in his own personal pocket.

Even more interesting, given Yass’ holding $15 billion in ByteDance stock — the largest holding outside China, representing 7% of the company’s stock — after the Trump/Yass meeting the former President suddenly reversed his opposition to TikTok.  As ABC News reported at the time:

“[T]he former president has been rebuilding his relationship with a GOP megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular social media platform.”

And that megadonor has been busy.

While Pennsylvania-based Yass’ entire donation portfolio to Republican politicians was reported as a mere $78,000 in 2012, this year he’s the nation’s second largest political donor, reportedly having dropped more than $80,000,000 in support of Republicans over the past few months. He’s spent more in Pennsylvania than the top 10 corporate PACs combined, according to the All Eyes on Yass campaign.

You and I have one vote each and are limited to giving a maximum of $3,300 to any one political candidate. Pretty much every penny after that falls into the simple category of dark money, or potential dark money.

And America’s billionaires and corporations are pouring billions of that dark money into PACs and SuperPACs that are, right now, flooding the nation’s airways with attack ads against Democrats.

How did it come to this?

In 2010, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it super easy for billionaires to give lavish gifts and support to Supreme Court justices and members of Congress. Their Citizens United decision blew open the doors to a bizarre new era of dark money-driven oligarchy in America.

A report from Americans for Tax Fairness details the damage these democracy-destroying decisions, made by SCOTUS members who, themselves, were at the time being groomed by billionaires, have done to our political system.

This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote brought America when the Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention in elections by corporations and billionaires.

Prior to Thomas’ vote on that decision, Harlan Crow — who helped finance the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 — and other billionaires had lavished millions on him and his family.

Crow gave the group that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, started a half million dollars; he bought Thomas’ mother’s home and others in the neighborhood so she could live rent-free for the rest of her life; he put Thomas’ nephew through an expensive prep school. Another billionaire bought Thomas a quarter-million-dollar luxury RV.

It was a remarkably successful investment for Crow, his family, and his billionaire buddies. Just his own family’s political contributions went from an average of a few hundred thousand dollars a year during the decade preceding 2010 to multiple millions every year after Thomas’ vote. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated it at an 862% increase just for the Crow family.

In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in American politics.

That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections, and over $600 million for both 2016 and 2018.

The dark money blowout came in 2020, when Trump was running for re-election and there was a very real chance the billionaires could seize complete control of our federal government. They spent a total of $2,362,000,000 in that election, with $1.2 billion of it going to elect conventional politicians who would then be beholden to their patrons.

As Americans for Tax Fairness notes:

“The report finds that almost 40% of all billionaire campaign contributions made since 1990 occurred during the 2020 season. Billionaires had a lot more money to give politicians and political causes in 2020 as their collective wealth jumped by nearly a third, or over $900 billion, to $3.9 trillion between the March beginning of the pandemic and a month before Election Day.

“Billionaire fortunes have continued to climb since: as of October 2021, billionaires were worth $5.1 trillion, more than a 20-fold increase in their collective fortune since 1990, when it stood at $240 billion, adjusted for inflation.

“These campaign donations are a profitable investment: they buy access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save tycoons billions of dollars. While that $1.2 billion ‘investment’ in 2020 was massive, it totaled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending.”

And this year will be far worse, once the dark money numbers come in this winter. As NBC News tells us:

“Political ad spending is projected to reach new heights by the end of the 2024 election cycle, eclipsing $10 billion in what would amount to the most expensive two years in political history.”

While Thomas Jefferson was still the US envoy to France and living in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote him on December 6, 1778, arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people corrupting American politics:

“You are afraid of the one — I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect Representation. — You are Apprehensive of Monarchy; I, of Aristocracy.”

Today, if Trump is reelected, we will have both.

Kamala Harris has made it clear that if she’s elected her first order of business will be to pass the For The People Act, which will overturn large parts of Citizens United and again regulate dark money in politics.

That’s probably why our airwaves are currently saturated with hit-piece ads against Harris and other Democrats — paid for by shady dark money PACs — that make GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ads seem tame.

Rightwing billionaires are nearly in control of our government — and easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress — but now they want all of it. And they sure as hell don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.

This election may be America’s last stand against this country becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich. But, to paraphrase Jim Morrison’s 60’s protest anthem: They got the money, but we got the numbers.

And now we must turn out those numbers if our democracy is to survive this all-out assault by a handful of obscenely rich people who think, as does billionaire-funded Curtis Yarvin (JD Vance’s favorite philosopher) that we should just all “get over” our “dictator phobia.”

Vote!  

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-Thom Hartmann