A Saudi attack on a Yemen funeral was found to be funded by the United States amid growing concern about U.S. contributions to Saudi Arabia
The Obama administration, in its last few months of office, has been criticized by both human rights activists and members of the United Nations for supporting the Saudi military airstrike campaign (otherwise known as “war”) against the country of Yemen. The reasoning for the military support, the U.S. claims, is due to the rise of Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, who recently fired missiles at a U.S. warship, the USS Mason, off the coast of Yemen on the 9th and 12th of October this past week. In response to the funeral attack, the Houthi rebels fired again at the warship on Saturday.
The funeral attack was reportedly due to false information given to the Saudi-led coalition who performed the attack. They’ve also been accused of not following the proper procedure for rules of engagement in military combat, as outlined by the United Nations, which seems to be a problem the coalition has. Just over a year ago, the same Saudi-led coalition accidentally attacked another funeral killing 20 people.
A senior Houthi official, Mohammed Atbukhaiti, explained that the figures reported by the United Nations (roughly 150 dead from the funeral attack) showed how the coalition is “disorganized and reckless” and treats “the lives of the Yemeni people in a careless and disrespectful manner. This has not been the first incident where the Sandi-led coalition has targeted civil gatherings, killing and injuring large numbers of civilians,” he said.
Meanwhile, not only is the U.S. sending money to Saudi Arabia every year for anti-terrorism efforts and nation building, but the middle eastern country owns about $117 billion of American debt, ranking #13 on the list of countries storing their money in U.S. treasuries, which they had threatened to sell off in April this year, which would have tanked the U.S. securities market, though it appears to be an empty threat as it would also do irreparable harm to Saudi Arabia’s market as well.
Yemen is widely known as the Middle East’s poorest country, ranking 140 out of 182 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index in 2009, with an estimated 42% of the population living in poverty and 20% of the population being malnourished and starving. Under a president Hillary Clinton, Yemen may see an even higher poverty rate as tensions continue to rise between the four countries involved in the conflict. It was Clinton, as Secretary of State under Obama’s first term in office, who got the world to stop buying oil from Iran in response to their non-compliance with UN weapons inspections just a few years ago. This caused Iran’s economy to implode after a decade-long trend of decreasing poverty since oil exports are the country’s chief source of income. When Iran finally agreed to allow weapons inspectors in (who found nothing), Clinton said she wasn’t satisfied and threatened more oil sanctions, despite the effect these sanctions had on Iran’s economy.
The construction of an oil pipeline across North Dakota’s Native American tribal land of Lake Oahe “will not go forward at this time”, according to a press release from the Department of Justice, Department of the Army and Department of Interior.
In a joint statement between the Department of Justice, Department of the Army and Department of Interior on Friday, the three offices of the United States government intervened in the Dakota Access pipeline fiasco. One federal judge had already failed to appeased the community, only upholding the decision to construct. However, the federal government said that it needs to evaluate “previous decisions” regarding the construction and that, in the meantime, all construction will be halted.
This hails as a victory for the scores of protesters who visited the site to show their support of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota, whose lawsuit against the Corps of Engineers is responsible for today’s decision to halt construction. The tribe says that the Corps of Engineers failed to adequately consult it before granting permits that allowed construction of the pipeline that began earlier this summer about a half mile north of the tribe’s reservation in North Dakota. What’s more is that the pipeline could actually hurt the drinking water supply, yet the Dakota Access company said that it followed standard procedure and no harm has been intended.
The statement from the federal government explains that the three departments fully intend to include all Native American tribes in discussions regarding changes to the country’s infrastructure moving forward:
“This case has highlighted the need for a serious discussion on whether there should be nationwide reform with respect to considering tribes’ views on these types of infrastructure projects. Therefore, this fall, we will invite tribes to formal, government-to-government consultations on two questions: (1) within the existing statutory framework, what should the federal government do to better ensure meaningful tribal input into infrastructure-related reviews and decisions and the protection of tribal lands, resources, and treaty rights; and (2) should new legislation be proposed to Congress to alter that statutory framework and promote those goals.”
One of the main issues regarding constructions like Dakota Access is that the corporations responsible for the constructions are using the often slow legal process to their advantage, continuing construction while lawsuits are in play, until ordered by a judge to cease construction either temporarily or permanently. This gives the corporation an advantage, where so much construction could have already taken place. At the same time, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a moral question at hand that is being ignored by corporate greed.
From white noise machines to isolated black outs and more, reporter and activist Melissa Dykes reviews all the madness of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia this summer
People have long suspected the Democratic Party of being corrupt and not really “of the people”, but reporter/activist Melissa Dykes didn’t expect to see the length to which the Democratic establishment would go to suppress supporters of Bernie Sanders. Of course, the DNC emails had been leaked by Wikileaks the Friday prior to the convention, but to see the suppression in action was something else altogether. As Dykes points out in her video, it’s almost surreal to see the extent to which the establishment insisted on shutting down democracy at their own convention.
Watch the video below from Dykes’ Youtube channel Truth Stream Media:
Complaints about funding Sanders’ new organization with billionaire money led to key staffers quitting before the much anticipated launch this week
Early this morning, multiple mainstream media sources reported that digital director Kenneth Pennington and at least four others from a team of 15 had quit the new Our Revolution organization led by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The main reason given by an unnamed staffer was that Jeff Weaver, the top aid to the Sanders presidential campaign, was not heeding to the cries of the younger generation within the campaign to stay away from billionaire and corporate money. Weaver is said to have caused quite the dissent by younger staffers throughout the presidential campaign as well by acting dismissive and curt for months. Jane Sanders had reportedly asked Weaver to take on a greater role in Our Revolution last Friday, which began the turmoil the organization is now seeing.
The unnamed staffer told Politico that they had joined Our Revolution with a promise from Bernie and Jane Sanders, and executive director Shannon Jackson, that Jeff Weaver would not be in charge of the organization.
Staffer Claire Sandberg, who had been the digital organizing director of the campaign as well as being the organizing director of the Our Revolution organization, said her entire department of four left:
“A majority of the staff quit as a result of Jeff joining. It’s about both the fundraising and the spending: Jeff would like to take big money from rich people including billionaires and spend it on ads. That’s the opposite of what this campaign and this movement are supposed to be about and after being very firm and raising alarm the staff felt that we had no choice but to quit.”
The taking of billionaire and corporate money is arguably the worst move the organization could make due to the fact that Sanders’ entire presidential campaign was built on small donor contributions and condemning corporate contributions to Hillary’s campaign via super PACs with the help of the controversial Citizens United law.
If you look up election fraud in any search engine, you’ll see numerous articles from mainstream media regarding voter fraud instead, making it difficult for the general public to understand the difference.
Election rigging, as I’ve stated in a previous article, is as old as democracy itself. Today, a major part of the problem with discussing the issue is the confusion the general public in the distinction between voter fraud and election fraud, and the mainstream media really doesn’t help.
From the New York Times to Politico to even PBS, the first results you see in Google for “election fraud” related queries are all from mainstream news sources referring primarily to “voter fraud” in the current 2016 presidential election and how it’s “rare” — and I’m inclined to agree. That’s because voter fraud isn’t primarily how the elections are being rigged. And the reason why it happens so rarely is because it’s easy to catch, so people don’t do it. But before we get into this in depth, let’s first go over the difference between voter fraud and election fraud.
The distinction is easily missed because voter fraud is a type of election fraud. Election fraud encompasses quite a few acts of election rigging. For example, voter suppression can be election fraud, such as the case of the 120,000 voters mysteriously purged from Brooklyn, NY this year, to which the New York Board of Elections said was “an accident”. Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Elections’ chief clerk, was suspended without pay for the supposed mishap, but the voters who couldn’t vote were not satisfied because it was such an obvious disenfranchisement stunt that it really should have been investigated as election fraud. Another form of voter suppression that caused disenfranchisement within the Democratic party this year was switching people’s party affiliation to independent or republican, some cases even involving forged signatures on the registration application. Again, this is a form of election fraud, but is not voter fraud, yet mainstream news continues to use the terms interchangeably.
Voter fraud is when votes are faked. An example would be, as Fox News’ Eric Shawn pointed out, absentee ballots being filled out by the same person on behalf of multiple people. In Shawn’s report, he actually spoke to people whose votes had been robbed and they explained on camera that it’s not their handwriting and that they did not fill out the ballots — this isn’t voter fraud, it’s . He also reported on vote bribery and unauthorized proxy voting. (see video below)
The most shocking form of election fraud also is not voter fraud: voting software that is rigged for a predetermined winner, otherwise known as electronic election fraud. And it’s become a major method of rigging both primaries and general elections.
In my interview with Ohio election fraud lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, he explained that there was a 25-33% difference between the exit polls and the machine totals. To make matters worse, the data that he and Bob Fitrakis, another lawyer from Ohio, had requested from the exit poll takers hasn’t yet been delivered. With only a couple months left before the general election, it’ll be surprising if their RICO lawsuit actually comes through in time.
What’s worse, however, is the latest anti-trump campaign that we’ve seen from Democrats all the way through the White House, with President Obama stating that election rigging is a conspiracy theory, an obvious attempt to discredit Trump as a kook. The fact that there’s a 100-page report proving all the forms of election fraud that happened this primary season shows that even the POTUS will lie to the press on behalf of his party, ultimately becoming a propagandist himself. This was in retaliation for Trump’s statements made recently that Democrats would exploit “weak identification laws” in order to rig the general election for Hillary Clinton. This may actually be true, considering all the evidence we have of a rigged primary, but it isn’t even the real issue we should be talking about, which is electronic election fraud.
I used to have a love/hate relationship with the mainstream media’s coverage of election fraud, but it’s recently turned to only hate. The Washington Post, for example, can give us an important piece about election fraud that is well written — that’s only 150 words long. Really, guys? A RICO lawsuit in the works regarding electronic election fraud and you can only come up with 150 words about it? They then bury it deep within the site, don’t promote the article, and focus more energy on writing articles about how voter fraud rarely happens and Trump needs to shut up about it. It also doesn’t promote an article like the one I’m writing here today to help readers understand the difference between the terms. I’m not even sure the outlet knows or cares, and what we’re left with is a fundamental lack of understanding that while voter fraud itself is rare, election fraud is running rampant and has been for quite some time. Our elections, based on the evidence we have since the 2000 Presidential Election, are getting increasingly worse in terms of election fraud.
Perhaps the worst aspect about this confusion is the fact that people keep saying election fraud doesn’t happen and then point to studies proving voter fraud is rare. This fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between election fraud and voter fraud is what continues the propaganda we hear from the Democratic party, who pushes for lax laws regarding voter identification at every turn. Lax laws, they argue, are to reduce racist voter suppression, but for some odd reason they never seem to want to talk about all the other forms of election fraud for which there is so much evidence of. At the end of the day, both the Republican and Democratic parties seem to engage in extremely dirty, dishonest politics in order to win, win, win, and all it does is allow criminals to become decision makers on behalf of the rest of us.
Zachary Paul
Zachary Paul is an independent investigative journalist living in New York City.
U.S. Justice Department’s Sally Yates announced today that it plans to end its use of private prisons after DOJ officials concluded such facilities are less safe and effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General, gave the announcement earlier today through a memo that tells officials to decline to renew expired private prison contracts, or to reduce the overall scope of the contracts. Yates wrote that the ultimate goal here is ending the use of private prisons for good. Reports the Guardian,
“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote in her memo to Tom Kane, acting director of the federal prisons bureau, which had been published on the DOJ’s website earlier today before Yates tweeted that the “time has come” to “end the DOJ’s use of private prisons” from her twitter account.
The time has come to reduce & ultimately end DOJ’s use of private prisons. Read my memo to BOP Acting Director: https://t.co/AOt4EOaKfy
This announcement comes as an answer to the cries of millions of citizens around the United States whose families have been torn apart by long prison sentences for non-violent crimes, a result of the profit motive behind privatized prisons in America. The subject had been a topic of debate throughout the Democratic primary and a point of contention with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who had helped to build up the private prison industry through her advocation of the bill that allowed the line between federal and private prison management in the 1990s.
Private prisons make a profit by offering a monthly cost to the government to hold each prisoner in their facilities. That cost comes out of a budget established by the DOJ that taxpayers pay into every year. Yates explained that the amount being paid to private facilities is simply too much for what society gets in return. It’s been argued for decades that people do not get rehabilitated in prison and often end their sentence only to receive another after being released as a more hardened criminal.
Over a million people tuned into mainstream media live on Facebook and Youtube today to see a young man climbing Trump Tower with suction cups who says he did it to get Trump’s attention because he has “an important matter” to talk to Trump about
The young man, known as “Steve from Virginia”, apparently posted a video explaining why he climbed Trump Tower today, a stunt which prompted first-responders to corner him by removing windows from the inside, eventually grabbing and pulling the man inside the building around the 21st floor.
Speculation was already abound regarding the purpose of this stunt, but a video surfaced from a youtube account posted yesterday, August 9th, which shows what appears to be the same young man saying he is trying to request a meeting with Donald Trump regarding an “important matter” and that this was the only way to get his attention.
While everyone was distracted by the Democratic Convention last week, 64 Republican congressmen’s request that the IRS investigate the Clinton Foundation was granted.
The IRS, a non-partisan government organization tasked with collecting taxes from U.S. citizens, has a special office for exempt operations like the Clinton Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) who touts itself as the premier charity to the world. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen had referred congressional charges of corruption by 64 House Republicans on Tuesday, July 26th during the Democratic National Convention, which was too busy dealing with Bernie-or-Bust protesters and the Wikileaks dump of DNC emails the weekend prior to the convention. Clinton Foundation “pay-to-play” activities, a form of indirect bribery, seem to be the ultimate charge.
The request to investigate the Clinton Foundation on charges of “public corruption” was originally made in a letter to the FBI, FTC and IRS on July 15th this year, but only the IRS picked up the investigation. This could prove particularly difficult for the Clinton campaign for presidency after already dealing with an FBI investigation regarding Hillary’s email server for which she illegitimately used to handle classified information. The initiative is being driven by Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn (R) who serves as vice chairwoman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which happens to oversee the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC also happens to regulate public charities with the help of the IRS. The IRS investigation could be the first step in getting to the truth about whether or not the Clinton Foundation is as corrupt as Hillary’s opponents have been asserting for years.
In the letter to the IRS, the congressmen charged that,
“The [Clinton] Foundation’s filings with the IRS for 501(c)(3) status appear to prohibit much of its current activity. The Foundation submitted its application to the IRS on December 23 1997. The description of its ‘activities and operational information’ notes that it would construct a library, maintain a historical site with records, and engage in study and research. No mention is made of conducting activities outside of the United States, which is one of the codes included in the IRS ‘Application for Recognition of Exemption’ in effect at the time (See activity code 910). As a result the Foundation’s global initiatives appear to be unlawful persuant to IRS guidance.”
Blackburn recently told Fox News, “There sure is a lot of money going through there and it seems the contributions would touch on Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It is a hub of some kind of activity and let’s leave it to the IRS, the FBI and the FTC to discern exactly what that is.”
However, as Western Journalism has pointed out, the letter gives a solid starting point for investigation, beginning with Laureate International Universities, who paid former President Bill Clinton an estimated $16.5 million dollars over a five-year term to be Laureate’s “honorary chancellor” while USAID gave over $55 million in grants to the International Youth Foundation, a separate entity run by Laureate’s chairman, Douglas Becker, during the years od 2010 – 2012, while Hillary was Secretary of State (2008 – 2012). Bill Clinton recently resigned from his position at Laureate International Universities.
What may be even more damning of the Clinton’s crony capitalism at work is the Clinton Foundation’s connection to a Russian uranium company named Uranium One, the letter says. Uranium One donated several amounts of money adding up to around $23 million, according to an article by the New York Times’ Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, yet the Clinton Foundation never reported the donations.
But it doesn’t stop there..
Most recently, the Justice Department had indicted congresswoman Corrine Brown (D) of Florida for using over $800,000 in donations as a “personal slush fund”. Brown is also a super delegate who supports Hillary Clinton in Clinton’s bid for presidency and has been a member of the Hillary Clinton Leadership Council of Florida for some time now, and the House Republicans involved in this letter are using Brown as an example of someone who was rightfully indicted for misuse of charitable funds (it also doesn’t help that she had close ties to Hillary Clinton). In a parallel, but perhaps more largely scaled comparison, the Clinton Foundation received a reported $337 million in 2014 alone, most of which was received by foreign donors while weapons deals from the State department took place under Hillary Clinton.
A recent report from Election Justice USA shows as many as 184 delegates were stolen from Bernie Sanders due to election fraud in the Democratic Primary
While it’s unclear whether the super delegates would have voted for Sanders, the EJUSA report does make one thing clear: Bernie Sanders won the majority of pledged delegates in the Democratic Primary at 2030 to Hillary Clinton’s 2021.
These numbers were arrived at by EJUSA’s intensive research and verification into claims of voter suppression, unintended party affiliation changes, heavy voter purging, and registrations never being honored by the Board of Elections in various counties throughout the U.S. during the Democratic Primary. In some cases, signatures were even forged on party affiliation documents and evidence of computer hacking being involved has come to light.
In the following excerpt from the executive summary of the report, EJUSA explains how as many as 184 delegates should have gone to Sanders:
Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud. Adding these delegates to Senator Sanders’ pledged delegate total and subtracting the same number from Hillary Clinton’s total would more than erase the 359 pledged delegate gap between the two candidates. EJUSA established the upper estimate through exit polling data, statistical analysis by precinct size, and attention to the details of Democratic proportional awarding of national delegates. Even small changes in vote shares in critical states like Massachusetts and New York could have substantially changed the media narrative surrounding the primaries in ways that would likely have had far reaching consequences for Senator Sanders’ campaign.
For the executive summary and the full report, please visit Election Justice USA’s Facebook page regarding the issue. For posterity, we made a backup of the report as well. The original location of the report is on google drive.
Progressive Journalist Abby Martin was arrest today at the Democratic National Convention today for apparently no reason at all
Member of the Ring of Fire network, and investigative journalist for teleSUR, Abby Martin, and her “Empire Files” producer Mike Prysner, were peacefully walking down a Philadelphia street when Martin was suddenly arrested for “disorderly conduct” during the Democratic convention, according to The Ring Of Fire’s website.
Prysner tweeted pics of the event, and a photo of Martin right after being released, seemingly in a taxi.
“Martin and Prysner were attempting to comply with officers and leave the scene when Martin was forcibly grabbed by police, her dress ripped in in the process, handcuffed, and arrested.”
The story is still unfolding, so not much is currently known. TROFire.com reports that, according to legal advocates for the protesters, around 28 people have been arrested today and are being held in an undisclosed location.
