Hola amigos, es conspiración semana!

Dots connected by The Atlantic (long article; cliff notes ) ->

The Plot Against America
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

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This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a political partner eager to dismantle it—which generated unprecedented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim to know the new administration better than anyone. During its transition to power, he had run the Office of Personnel Management, which meant that he’d stacked the incoming government with his people. Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black, Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Trans World Airlines.

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Foreign lobbying had certainly existed before the ’80s, but it was limited in scale and operated under a penumbra of suspicion. Just before World War II, Congress had passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, largely in response to the campaigns orchestrated by Ivy Lee, an American publicist hired by the German Dye Trust to soften the image of the Third Reich. Congress hadn’t outlawed influence peddling on behalf of foreign interests, but the practice sat on the far fringes of K Street.

Paul Manafort helped change that. The Reagan administration had remade the contours of the Cold War, stepping up the fight against communism worldwide by funding and training guerrilla armies and right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of military outsourcing—the Reagan Doctrine—aimed to overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it couldn’t sustain.

All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington.

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In 2003, Rick Davis, a partner in Manafort’s new firm, was invited to the office of a hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. The summons didn’t reveal the name of the man requesting his presence. When Davis arrived, he found himself pumping the hand of the Honorable Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the British-born financier known as Nat. Throughout his young career, Nat had fascinated the London press with his love interests, his residences, and his shrewd investments. For his 40th birthday, he threw himself a legendary party in the Balkan state of Montenegro, which reportedly cost well over $1 million—a three-day festival of hedonism, with palm trees imported from Uruguay.
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Russian oligarchs were drawn to Rothschild, whose name connoted power—and he to them. “He likes this wild world,” Anders Åslund, a friend of Rothschild’s, told me. Rothschild invested heavily in post-communist economies and became a primary adviser (and a friend) to the young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
Rothschild and Deripaska fed off each other’s grand ambitions. Like a pair of old imperialists, they imagined new, sympathetic governments across eastern Europe that would accommodate and protect their investments. Their project required the type of expertise that Manafort had spent years accumulating. In 2004, Rothschild hired Manafort’s new firm to resurrect the influence of an exiled Georgian politician, a former KGB operative and friend of Deripaska’s then living in Moscow. This made for a heavy lift because the operative had recently been accused in court as a central plotter in a conspiracy to assassinate the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze. (He denied involvement.) The rehabilitation scheme never fully developed, but a few years later, Rick Davis triumphantly managed a referendum campaign that resulted in the independence of Montenegro—an effort that Deripaska funded with the hope of capturing the country’s aluminum industry.
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Hmmm, aluminum and money laundering. What could a remote aluminum smelter have to do with DJT? How do you screw with an oligarch, letting them know you have some leverage? Rothschild is what you would expect, a Rothschild.

Did WikiLeaks prove the Illuminati exists? SECRET US Government Rockefeller talks revealed
WIKILEAKS has released a cable showing the US Government had secret talks with a member of the Rockefeller family over where to hide the family of the disposed shah after the Iranian revolution.

The release, which details top-secret dealings between then Secretery of State Henry Kissinger, and business tycoon David Rockefeller, is likely to fuel one of the longest running conspiracy theories - that the US Government is actually run from behind the scenes by a secretive global elite known as the Illuminati.
The Rockefellers is an American industrial, political, and banking family that made one of the globe's biggest fortunes in oil from the late 19th century.
John D Rockefeller and brother William Rockefeller made this primarily through Standard Oil.

The family went on to control Chase Manhattan Bank and is considered the most powerful familiy ever in the US.

Conspiracy theory websites list the Rockefeller family as one of 13 top Illuminati dynasties and claim they are attempting to install a New World Order upon the Earth, which would ultimately be one global Government controlled by them.

Politics Kleptocracy makes strange bedfellows.

REVEALED: Inside the 5 secret societies that REALLY control the world…
SOME conspiracy theories are absolutely absurd - but genuine secret societies that exert a mysterious influence on the world have existed for centuries.

Here is Express.co.uk’s list of the top five most famous and powerful secret societies who carry out bizarre rituals and conduct their business behind closed doors.
1. Skulls and Bones ...

Koch Bromance with Russia Needs Investigating; Koch Funding Behind Nunes-Gowdy Attempts to Scuttle Russia Investigation?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?425087-1/fbi-director-says-hes-investigati...
Representatives Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy who appear to want to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation by the House Intelligence Committee are recipients of Koch money. From 2006 to 2010 Devin Nunes got $45,000 from Koch related PACs: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Koch-Ind-Still-.... His entire career he has gotten $56,500 from Koch Industries: https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&cid=N00...
Trey Gowdy got $8000 from Koch PAC(s) for the last election alone: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_candidates,_2016 Trey Gowdy got at least $35,000 from the Kochs over his career (2009-16). https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cycle=Career&type=I&.... This, of course, pales compared to the $300,000 or more which David Koch has given VP Mike Pence: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/07/25/following-the-money-behind-mik.... However, some sell-out on the cheap.
In 1929 to 1931 Fred Koch, father to the Koch brothers, was in the Soviet Union building oil refineries for Stalin. He built refineries for Nazi Germany, too, prior to World War II. He returned to Russian in 1956 with a group of business people. He was in Iraq in 1958, just prior to the Iraq Coup/Revolution. Prior to working in the Soviet Union, he worked in England. See FBI documents embedded here: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/30/koch-brothers-fatherpoli... and here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1237279/fred-c-koch-fbi.pdf

Where is the evidence that he ever stopped doing business in Russia? It has been noted that it was only after this last trip that he became vocally anti-communist. Why? Or was it a cover for continued dealings with Russia? He was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Trump mentor, Roy Cohn, through whom he met Roger Stone (and apparently Paul Manafort) was also a member of the John Birch Society. In 2002, a Koch company imported petroleum from TNK to sell to the US government for its strategic reserve. It probably still imports Russian petroleum products – a lot is still imported. Did the Koch family ever stop working in Russia? Someone was already importing petroleum in the mid 90s. Who imported it? Are THE Kochs related to the Fred C. Koch, journalist, who was of Volga German ancestry, from Kolb, Russia? Putin kingmaker, Roman Abramovich, was born in Saratov, along the Volga river in Russia.

Why do congressional conservatives act like they do? Is there a group of marionettes?

Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza
How Mitt and Ann made millions—and Mitt’s hedge fund donors made billions—from the auto-industry rescue that he condemned.

Mitt Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney’s November 2008 New York Times op-ed, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout—and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical—more than 3,000 percent on their investment.

It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM’s production lines. No bailout of GM—or Chrysler, for that matter—could have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or indirectly, more than $12.9 billion to Delphi—and to the hedge funds that had gained control over it.

One of the hedge funds profiting from that bailout— $1.28 billion so far—is Elliott Management, directed by Paul Singer. According to The Wall Street Journal, Singer has given more to support GOP candidates—$2.3 million—than anyone else on Wall Street this election season. His personal giving is matched by that of his colleagues at Elliott; collectively, they have donated $3.4 million to help elect Republicans this season, while giving only $1,650 to Democrats. And Singer is influential with the GOP presidential candidate; he’s not only an informal adviser but, according to the Journal, his support was critical in helping push Representative Paul Ryan onto the ticket.

Extortion plain and simple.

Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs, suing governments and seizing their navy’s ships

Hedge fund managers are rarely the quiet, retiring type, but few are as boldly bare-knuckled as Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Management.
Singer, who took home $400 million last year, makes his fortune through activist investing. While other investors are content to buy shares or bonds, and wait for them to accumulate value, Elliott Management, which oversees almost $33 billion, specializes in taking stakes in companies or institutions where it can shape the outcome. That can include agitating for changes in leadership, or spending years and million of dollars in court pursuing its interests.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott—unlike most of the bonds’ owners—refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer’s fund received $2.4 billion, almost four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for corruption.

Floating assets: The Argentinian navy’s training vessel (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
Most recently, Elliott drew attention for its campaign against the management of Arconic, a manufacturer of auto and aerospace components. While waging a proxy battle to control the board, Elliott took aim at CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, calling him ineffective and a wasteful spender. After months of attacks, Kleinfeld responded in April with a bizarre letter that appeared to be an attempt to extort Singer by hinting at embarrassing behavior that took place at the 2006 World Cup in Germany (Kleinfeld enclosed a soccer ball with the letter). Once the letter was made public, Arconic’s board fired Kleinfeld and, not longer after, reached a settlement (paywall) that gave Elliott much of what it wanted.

More extortion. Paul Singer, uber rich and more powerful than Argentina.

So there you have it, a secret society of the uber wealthy are pulling the strings. The "state actor" stuff is for the masses. No doubt, the uber wealthy utilize intelligence services, and purchase politicians, but it is all about the money. The only difference between Russia and the USA is that congress acts as a middle man. Their allegiances are to themselves and amassing wealth, not a nation state, mystical sky being, nor humanity.

Get the dark money out of governance! The lesson of the Trump presidency should be to overturn Citizen's United, and tax extreme wealth down to living very comfortably. After all if you have hundreds of millions to buy politicians, you don't need the money for your business, or sustenance.

So deplorables, unwashed masses, shitholers, libtards or whatever label the secret society propaganda machine pins on you, do not pick a side because political parties, religion and nation states are just a veneer. The politicians are either part of the uber wealthy secret society or have been subjugated using their greed and lust for power, to do the uber wealthy's bidding.

Note to Devin Nunes: See how easy it is to construct a conspiracy theory, numb nuts. You should have stayed on the farm. When your usefulness is used up, what you know will bury you. You may not fear the legal system, but the puppet masters will take you out.

On to immigration reform, so I can sprinkle in a few more songs, featuring one of my favorites, Carlos Santana.

I am sure rational minds will prevail.

Have a great weekend!

The thread is OPEN.