Mutually Assured Blackmail

There's a TV series from Belgium called "Salamander" about a Belgium Private Bank and its influence on Belgian politics.  It's in Flemish (Dutch language) on Amazon Prime, with English subtitles.  The first season in 12 parts which build gradually to flesh out a nefarious network of compromised individuals. 

Here's the plot synopsis from Wikipedia: 

Jonkhere, a small private bank in Brussels, is robbed and 66 safe deposit boxes belonging to a number of the most prominent public figures in Belgium are cleaned out. The owners want to keep the thefts under wraps, presumably to avoid scandal. Police Inspector Paul Gerardi (Filip Peeters) carries out the investigation. He discovers the connection; that the victims are members of a secret organisation called Salamander. This is a cabal of the country's industrial, financial, judicial and political elite; the safe-deposit boxes contained secrets as far back as World War II. Gerardi becomes the target of both the criminals and the authorities.

In the last 10 years I have become familiar with some of the control mechanisms exerted on industry and government leaders, usually at the pivot points, but often also the person behind the face of power. 

For example promising law students are lured into parties by their professors where compromising situations are set up for recording, to be used and levers later on.   The BAR association is also a control point in that they control the liability insurance of a BAR registered attorney, and the very exams they take.   Those with large student loans are even more vulnerable, because if they don't submit they lose their income to payback those loans and the very job they took those loans out for.  So next time you hear people bitching about forgiving student loans, the control systems don't want that control point tether removed.   Under current US Law you can't be free of a student loan if you no longer have the income to service it. Most corruption occurs for two things, to pay off a mortgage or finance a retirement. It's often that banal at the lower levels. 

We all learned a lot about the black mail operation ostensibly run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  No clients have been arrested and their identities begrudgingly released by the judicial system. But we are also lead to believe this is some kind of one off system dreamed by these two deviants, with hints of trails to the CIA and/or the Mossad.   

I do remember the high flying financier Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, from the time I lived in England and his mysterious death on his yacht.   At the time Maxwell was a rival of Rupert Murdock, who is still around operating newspapers and TV news networks like SKY.   I don't mean to imply Murdock was involved in Maxwell's demise, I don't think he was, merely they operated in that same niche of finances in the UK. 

This video interviewing Eric Weinstein points out how Jeffrey Epstein was more of construct, a cut out,  than a human being who made his wealth on Wall Street (although that is likely how we got his bribe money).  When you ask the average person mostly what they remember is that Jeffrey purportedly had an egg shaped penis, and owned Little St James Island in the Virgin Islands.

Here's the trailer for the TV Series Salamander. 66 Safe deposit boxes (nice illuminati number) are broken into by an unknown 3rd party, they take the blackmail material, jewels and gold, but not the stocks or bonds.  Its available for free on Amazon Prime video.

Each safety deposit box has kompromat that the others have on that individual, this is what binds the 66 into silence about its activities to undermine Belgian politics and industry. It's a control mechanism.   And I just love watching the Belgian politicians talk about how they will protect their democracy!  Where have we heard that before?

They all go into panic when they realize ALL their secrets are out and they control none of it. This addresses the silence that Eric Weinstein mentions above.  

I had an "Aha!" moment.  A moment of clarity among a deluge of confusing data. Think of Hunter Biden and his laptop of compromising information on his father.   A neglected son crying for help?  Think of Anthony Weiner and his laptop of protection from the Clintons.  Think of how long it took the FBI before both were released. Think of how the transsexual J Edgar Hoover blackmailed most of Washington DC.  Presidents feared J Edgar Hoover!  Has anything really changed at the FBI?  They hit the mother load on those two laptops.  You will see numerous similarities in this series to our FBI. 

Nobody trusts anyone in our government, without having leverage on them.  This is the currency of these space pirate descended controllers.  They trade information for power over the people.  This is as old as Sumer and Egypt.  It predates Rome. Its infected the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.   

It all starts to make a bit more sense now doesn't?  And it seems obvious that Jeffrey Epstein was just one operator of this sort of black mail operations, there could be hundreds of them.  Jeffery is just the one we know about.   

We may abhor what they have done, but these humans are of little courage.  They are truly all slaves. They wanted the short cut rather than long road to self mastery.  It is said that for any martial artists, skilled artisan, artist musician to gain mastery over their skills it  takes 10,000 hours of training.  That's 5 years of work every day. 

The Thirty Tyrants

The Thirty Tyrants

The deal that the American elite chose to make with China 

has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta

BY LEE SMITH

FEBRUARY 03, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.

What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.

Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him.

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S. - China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.

Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”

But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.

HATJ: "...there is no prejudice in corruption..."

From: TUCCI-JARRAF, HEATHER ANN
Subject: RE: Sydney Powell and Trump
Date: Nov 23, 2020 at 6:35 PM

...there is no prejudice in corruption...in fact, corruption's very existence DEPENDS on not being prejudiced and to not utilize any specific and particular "limit" in order to apply, perpetuate, and flow corruption.

Interesting, yes?...that when allegations that corruption, in any form, was perpetrated by those of a specific and particular political leaning other than democrat... let alone a purported republican... of course, a republican party would distance immediately, especially when the republican party is still poised at fighting for seats in the senate.  Lamar Alexander case in point.  However, I have stated repeatedly that the cleanup relied on the predictable factors of ego and greed, and I am completely grateful (and compassionate) for those beings being predictable!

Corruption has no prejudice when it comes to the tools it uses to exist and flow...all pun intended  :)  The exposures flow quickly, decisively, obviously, with permanent results.

In and with Humor, Love, Gratitude, Heartitude, and Compassion.

-----Terran on 11/23/2020 1:06 AM wrote:

Terran: I'm not sure what's going on here, but here it is...  There is a situation that Trump needs the governors for the electoral votes, maybe this is about that?   Politics is a strange strange world.....

NY TIMES

President Trump's campaign on Sunday disavowed Sidney Powell, one of his lawyers, after she made wild accusations of Republican governors being involved in a payoff scheme to manipulate voting machines.

Ms. Powell, who had appeared with the Trump campaign at a news conference just last week about his efforts to overturn the results of the election, had been embraced by many of his allies.

The disavowal came a day after a Pennsylvania judge eviscerated arguments that other members of Mr.. Trump's legal team had made in court that millions of votes in the state should be invalidated, potentially disenfranchising huge numbers of voters. The president was said to be furious about the judge's decision.

The extraordinary statement from Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, two lawyers for Mr. Trump, about a third person who had been involved in their efforts was released Sunday evening.

"Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own," the statement said. "She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity."

Ms. Powell, who stood with Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Ellis at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday, was described as a member of the legal team's "elite strike force" as she laid out an elaborate conspiracy theory about efforts by the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, to essentially rig elections in the United States by using voting machines made by Dominion.

Appearing on the conservative network Newsmax on Saturday night, Ms. Powell further pushed the conspiracy theory, saying that two top Republicans in Georgia   Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger   were taking payoffs as part of the scheme. Two runoff elections in the state on Jan. 5 could determine which party controls the Senate, and Republicans have grown anxious about the Trump campaign's legal efforts there possibly affecting those races, which are likely to have low voter turnout.

Ms. Powell's claims were widely derided, including by some Trump allies. Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey and a Trump ally, said on ABC's "This Week" that the legal team had become a "national embarrassment." Most of the president's other lawyers have declined to become involved in his efforts to delay certification of votes in states by alleging fraud in public statements.

Maggie Haberman