Friday, September 16, 2016

Two Beautiful Granddaughters. Campus Leftism's Roots! Mass Media Distrust. Humor.





















I have two beautiful very young granddaughters - Stella right and Dagny's new Facebook picture, left. Re-posting because, apparently,  they did not come through in a previous memo.

I also have two older granddaughters who are also beautiful - Emily and Emma, no current pictures.
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Three really important postings and commentary!

More on campus Leftism and its roots.

Nothing is more dangerous to the survival of a Republic than poor and radicalized education of its citizenry and students.  Radicals know this and that is why they have aimed at taking over America's college campuses.  They have taken their time because it requires years to radicalize professors, get them tenured so they can spew their biased and distorted  message. Students, ignorant of facts and history, are easy pickings because they know nothing and therefore have nothing by way of intellectual weaponry with which to defend attacks.

Radicals couch their efforts in positive sounding words which hide their intent and ideology - the ultimate destruction of America.

They have mostly succeeded and this is where we are now.

Seven years of Obama has also further divided our nation and made us confused, angry, poorer and more self-doubting.

The below article is drawn from The Weekly Standard, which a very dear friend and fellow memo reader was kind enough to give me a gift subscription. (See 1 and 1a below.)

The next goal of these Soros types is to destroy confidence in our Republic's Free Press and Media and they do so by seeing our communication entities are inhabited by the same type breed as our campuses. Biased reporting and the elimination of objectivity is key and this key is not to unlock minds, to inspire thoughtful discussion by disseminating facts but to fill minds with biased reporting in the hope they will eventually become closed and/or distrustful of our mass media as evidence by the posting below.  (See 1b below.)
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Just more evidence of the possibility of a little offshore illegal shenanigans by the Clinton's on behalf of their Foundation.  What's new? (See 2 below.)
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Trump dumps on the media and I hope he continues to prove he can stay on message and learn the ropes of being a leader of a nation not just of his company!

The Clinton's, on other hand, are going to do everything they can to goad him into an outburst type response and then call attention to his inability to be president. (See 3 below.)
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I march to my own drum beat and therefore I am often out of step with the sound emanating from society.  Consequently, I find it interesting that Obama's approval rating is 50.6, just as everything he accomplished is falling part. Perhaps the approval rating pertains not to him but to the popularity of the collapse of his legacy which he is campaigning to endow.
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Now For Some Humor:

A police  recruit was asked during the exam, "What would you do if you had to arrest your  own mother?"

He answered,  "Call for back  up."






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Dick
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1)

The Roots of Campus Leftism

Who are the oppressors and who the oppressed?


What exactly is the ideology that dominates American campuses today, and is increasingly influential off campus? This ideology is clearly intolerant of dissent, but what it actually affirms is so unclear that administrators, faculty, students, and outside speakers are often taken by surprise when seemingly reasonable remarks provoke frantic protests. Although our universities produce many books and articles influenced by the reigning ideology, few if any of them explain what it actually is. Unlike classical Marxism, the ideas prevalent at today’s universities have seldom been the subject of detailed and systematic arguments in books or articles. In institutions supposedly dedicated to examining ideas, these ideas have prevailed without being examined. While they constantly develop and change, the additions and subtractions are seldom explained either. The ideology even lacks a generally accepted name. "Political correctness" is a label for what the dogma demands, not a description of the dogma itself, while "progressivism," "socialism," "inclusivity," "tolerance," and "leftism" are vague and overlapping terms.


"Progressivism," the term campus leftists seem to like best, is not very helpful for defining the ideology's intellectual content. Just about all of us favor what we consider progress, but many of us disagree about what progress is. Genetically modified organisms, hydraulic fracturing, and the Keystone XL pipeline look to many like cases of technological progress, but most "progressives" oppose them. Many "progressives" are hostile to a wide range of new technologies, on the grounds that they eliminate jobs, damage the environment, increase inequality, or oppress minorities.

"Socialism," a term favored by Senator Bernie Sanders and some of his student followers, also fails to capture much of what this ideology is about. Sanders's followers scarcely ever advocate state ownership of industry, and most of them have little interest in factory workers or farmers. Small banks may or may not be better than large banks, but breaking up large private banks into smaller private banks, as Sanders advocates, is not exactly a socialist measure. Even "Medicare for all" would leave the provision of health care to private physicians and hospitals, not government. Nor is the trade protectionism advocated by Sanders and his partisans particularly socialist—or even progressive. Proposals to make college tuition or contraceptives free would increase government spending but not government ownership and tell us more about the financial pressures on college students than about their enthusiasm for statism. Most of today's "socialists" want not more state ownership but more state regulation, except of course for abortion, sexual behavior, and drugs, issues on which they are not socialists but libertarians.


The most neutral and accurate term for this ideology is probably "leftism," since it implies a general attitude rather than a doctrine supported by arguments. The absence of reasoned argument is in fact one of campus leftism's sources of strength. Refusing to supply ideological definitions leaves the impression of a viewpoint that depends not on arguments that in theory could be refuted but is instead so obvious to every decent person that it needs no support from logic or reason. The implication is that campus leftists favor a set of principles that transcend ideology, for which the appropriate name is simply "social justice" or "the truth." Campus leftism is more a matter of feeling than of thought and is based more on passion and outrage than on reasoning. Counterarguments are shouted down on the ground that they offend or discriminate against favored members of the campus community, while disfavored members of the community receive no sympathy if they claim to be offended or discriminated against.

Although it may seem pointless to look for intellectual content in campus leftism, it really is an ideology, and it has intellectual roots. Its guiding principle is the Marxist concept that people are divided into classes of oppressors and oppressed. According to classical Marxism, the oppressors are the exploiting capitalists or landowners, who represent the "class enemy"; their victims are the working classes, otherwise known as "the people," with the implication that their class enemies are less than human. The oppressors must be resisted, and the oppressed defended, by any means necessary. While Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed large numbers of supposed oppressors, less extreme Marxists believed the job could be done by limiting the oppressors' legal rights, including their right to free speech. In the case of universities, in most Communist countries people from the wrong class background were either denied admission to higher education or allowed only restricted access to it, while those from the correct class backgrounds received preference in admissions and hiring.

As it happened, the American student radicals of the late sixties, who began the movement that was to become today's campus leftism, soon discovered that American factory workers and farmers were not the sort of oppressed class that classical Marxism had in mind. The American working class was anti-Communist, socially conservative, mostly religious, not very dissatisfied, and uninterested in political or social revolution. Blacks could be more plausibly identified as an oppressed class because most of them were poorer and had been subjected to various kinds of legal and social discrimination. But they seemed to have received legal equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which also seemed to have granted legal equality to women. While most college students were so obviously privileged as to be hard to depict as economically oppressed, they were affected by the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution in ways that let them claim to be socially oppressed.

Because I was in college in the late sixties, I can attest that most college men at the time were afraid of being drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. Even if they had an exaggerated idea of their actual danger, their educational draft deferments were after all only deferments, and some of them really were drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. Before the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971, most undergraduates were ineligible to vote and could therefore claim that they had no say in the process that had started the Vietnam war and administered the draft. Many of them also argued that the war was unjust because it pitted American oppressors and their Vietnamese collaborators against oppressed Vietnamese patriots. Consequently, student protests against the war were not merely self-serving but a struggle for justice. The protesters insisted that the universities support their protests, by banning ROTC programs and military research from campuses and by sponsoring antiwar speakers and "teach-ins."

For most students in the late sixties, going to college also meant experiencing the sexual revolution in full force. Though parental disapproval had often kept them from having sex in high school, college students who lived away from home were free from parental supervision. The parietal rules set by their colleges to discourage them from having sex were more or less ineffective. Reliable contraceptives were easily available. Most students soon decided that sex before marriage was entirely moral—at least under certain conditions, which they were sure that they satisfied. Whenever their sexual relationships went badly, as sexual relationships often do, the students usually blamed their parents and religions for what they assumed would otherwise have been wholly satisfactory experiences. The students also demanded that colleges drop the rules designed to discourage sex among students, which most colleges were actually happy to do.

1a)

Fighting campus anti-Semitism is not just a good idea. It’s the law.

Hunter College Palestinian flag
A student waving a Palestinian flag at a demonstration at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York system, Nov. 12, 2015. (Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
This is the fourth and final installment in “The Climate on Campus,” a series of op-eds on how students and institutions are meeting the BDS challenge.

NEW YORK (JTA) — Last week, the chancellor of The City University of New York released a report by CUNY-hired outside counsel investigating allegations of campus anti-Semitism. The investigation was triggered by a 14-page letter from the Zionist Organization of America to CUNY’s leadership, which noted, among other incidents, how during a rally last November held by Students for Justice in Palestine and allied groups at Hunter College, protesters were heard chanting “Long live the intifada!” and calling Jewish student onlookers “racists,” “Nazis” and “supporters of genocide.”
The report confirmed that anti-Semitism is a serious problem at CUNY, causing Jewish students to feel threatened and unsafe. But it disappointingly failed to recommend how to address the problem.
Four steps are crucial — not only at CUNY, but also at the many other universities where Jewish students are being targeted.
In fact, remedial steps are required under federal law. With bipartisan congressional support, the ZOA led a successful six-year battle to ensure that Jewish students would be protected from anti-Semitic harassment and intimidation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI requires federally funded schools to provide Jewish students with a learning environment that is both physically and emotionally safe.
First, that means administrators must enforce their own rules of conduct and hold violators accountable. They don’t hesitate to do so when other groups are targeted, even when the wrongdoing is limited to hateful and offensive speech.
Morton A. Klein (Screenshot from YouTube)
Morton A. Klein (Screenshot from YouTube)
For example, at the University of Oklahoma, after members of a fraternity were caught on video chanting the “N word” and referring to lynching, the university president immediately expelled two fraternity leaders, disciplined over 20 other students and shut down the fraternity. At Yale, after fraternity members chanted “No means yes! Yes means anal!” the fraternity was suspended for five years and individual students were punished for violating university rules against harassment, intimidation and “imperiling the integrity and values of the University community.”
CUNY has similar rules. They affirm students’ right to advocate their pro-Israel views without fear of physical or verbal abuse from others who disagree. And they prohibit “any action or situation which recklessly or intentionally endangers mental or physical health.” The actions attributed to SJP in the report show that SJP violated these rules.
At the SJP-organized rally at Hunter College, for instance, protesters chanted “Jews out of CUNY” and “Death to Jews.” In recent years Jewish students at Brooklyn College have been harassed and threatened for disagreeing with SJP’s Israel-bashing views and for even refusing an SJP flier. CUNY’s SJP chapter should be suspended for its conduct, or at least be placed on supervised probation, in the same way that Northeastern University’s SJP chapter was after the ZOA alerted the president to anti-Semitism on his campus.
Second, university leaders must clearly and forcefully condemn anti-Semitism whenever it occurs on campus, and they must condemn the perpetrators by name and shame them as a disgrace to the university community. That includes anti-Semitism expressed as anti-Zionism.
The State Department provides excellent guidance on how to determine when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitism. Demonizing Israel by comparing it to Nazi Germany and denying Israel’s right to exist are examples of contemporary anti-Semitism, according to the U.S. government guidelines. University leaders should be using the government’s definition to help students – and especially SJP, which denies that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism – understand that anti-Semitism is more than a swastika or an ethnic slur, and that every form of Jew-hatred is hurtful and dangerous.
Susan Tuchman (ZOA)
Susan Tuchman (ZOA)
Northeastern’s president took such steps. After the ZOA letter alerting him to the harassment and intimidation that Jewish students were facing both in and out of the classroom, he made it crystal clear at his State of the University address before an audience of thousands that there would be “zero tolerance for anti-Semitism” on his campus. In addition, faculty were reminded in writing that students must be able to express their views without fear of reprisal.
Similarly, after the ZOA filed a Title VI action against Brooklyn College challenging how it responded when Jewish students were unjustifiably ejected by an SJP member from a 2013 anti-Israel event, the college president repaired some of the damage. She issued a public statement to the community, apologizing to the Jewish students by name, and acknowledging and explaining the wrongdoing by college employees and the SJP member, whom she also named.
Third, universities should have mandatory educational programs about anti-Semitism, using the State Department’s definition as guidance. These should not be just for students. Administrators, faculty and staff also need to appreciate what anti-Semitism is today and that on campus, it typically includes vicious attacks on Israel.
Finally, universities must investigate where student groups are getting their outside support and funding. In April, former U.S. Treasury Department terrorism analyst Jonathan Schanzer testified at a congressional briefing and documented that at least seven leaders and supporters of American Muslims for Palestine were officials of American “charities” that were implicated in funneling money to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. Schanzer described American Muslims for Palestine as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for SJP,” providing its chapters’ speakers, training and printed materials, including a so-called “Apartheid Wall” display that is the centerpiece of many SJP protests. It goes without saying that student groups must not have ties to terrorism.
CUNY’s investigative report confirmed numerous anti-Semitic incidents and SJP’s responsibility for many of them. It acknowledged that Jewish students feel threatened and are even afraid to identify openly as Jewish. Yet it made no recommendations, suggested no consequences and held no one accountable.
Let’s hope that CUNY’s recently appointed working group on these issues, and leaders at other universities, incorporate at least these four steps, which will help make them a safer and more tolerant place to learn

1b) AMERICANS' TRUST IN MASS MEDIA SINKS TO NEW LOW
By Art Swift

Story Highlights
  • 32% say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust
  • 14% of Republicans express trust, down from 32% last year
  • Confidence drops among younger and older Americans
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.
Americans' Trust in the Mass Media
Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans' trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans' trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.
Republicans Fuel Drop in Media Trust
While it is clear Americans' trust in the media has been eroding over time, the election campaign may be the reason that it has fallen so sharply this year. With many Republican leaders and conservative pundits saying Hillary Clinton has received overly positive media attention, while Donald Trump has been receiving unfair or negative attention, this may be the prime reason their relatively low trust in the media has evaporated even more. It is also possible that Republicans think less of the media as a result of Trump's sharp criticisms of the press. Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14% from 32% a year ago. This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years.
Trust in Mass Media, by Party
Democrats' and independents' trust in the media has declined only marginally, with 51% of Democrats (compared with 55% last year) and 30% of independents (versus 33% last year) expressing trust. Over the past 20 years, Democrats have generally expressed more trust than Republicans in the media, although in 2000, the two parties were most closely aligned, with 53% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans professing trust.
Trust in Mass Media Falls Across Age Groups
Older Americans are more likely than younger Americans to say they trust the media, but trust has declined among both age groups this year. Currently, 26% of those aged 18 to 49 (down from 36% last year) and 38% of those aged 50 and older (down from 45%) say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.
Trust in Mass Media, by Age
In 2001, younger Americans (55%) were more likely than older Americans (50%) to express trust and confidence in mass media. This gap emerged again in 2005 when 53% of 18- to 49-year-olds had trust and 45% of those 50 and older expressed the same sentiment. Yet in the past decade, older Americans have mostly had more confidence than younger Americans, and this year, the gap between these age groups is 12 points. And 2016 marks the first time that confidence among older Americans has dropped below 40% in polling since 2001.
Bottom Line
The divisive presidential election this year may be corroding Americans' trust and confidence in the media, particularly among Republicans who may believe the “mainstream media” are too hyperfocused on every controversial statement or policy proposal from Trump while devoting far less attention to controversies surrounding the Clinton campaign. However, the slide in media trust has been happening for the past decade. Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way. Now, only about a third of the U.S. has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.
With the explosion of the mass media in recent years, especially the prevalence of blogs, vlogs and social media, perhaps Americans decry lower standards for journalism. When opinion-driven writing becomes something like the norm, Americans may be wary of placing trust on the work of media institutions that have less rigorous reporting criteria than in the past. On the other hand, as blogs and social media “mature,” they may improve in the American public's eyes. This could, in turn, elevate Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media as a whole.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 7-11, 2016, with a random sample of 1,020 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
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2) HSBC CASE BLOWS LID OFF CLINTONS' OFFSHORE EMPIRE
By JEROME R. CORSI


NEW YORK – The arrest of the head of global foreign exchange cash trading at HSBC bank may shed new light on suspicions the Clinton Foundation has been involved in illegal offshore money-laundering operations on a massive scale.
The investigation into HSBC currency trader Mark Johnson and associate Stuart Scott for their alleged role in a “conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks” by front-running customer orders has escalated to the point where the Department of Justice is threatening to tear up a 2012 agreement to fine HSBC a historic $1.9 billion for money-laundering violations in lieu of criminal prosecutions.
At issue is whether or not HSBC has honored the 2012 deferred-prosecution agreement in which the bank agreed to establish internal review procedures to catch and punish potentially criminal activities by employees.
The bank’s failure to discipline the two currency traders will make it difficult for HSBC to convince law-enforcement authorities that the massive Hong Kong-headquartered bank has complied with the 2012 agreement. An internal investigation in 2013 cleared them of any wrongdoing regarding a $3.5 billion currency trade that U.S. prosecutors now believe was criminally fraudulent.
HSBC money trail leads to Clintons
WND broke open the HSBC money-laundering case with a series of articles beginning in February 2012. More than 1,000 pages of customer records and secret audio recordings brought to WND by whistleblower John Cruz, a former HSBC employee, showed HSBC employees in Long Island were stealing the Social Security numbers of former bank depositors to create bogus “pass-through” accounts used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars for criminal enterprises such as Mexican drug cartels and Islamic terrorists.
WND reported in February 2015 Cruz told Senate Judiciary Committee staff preparing for the Loretta Lynch confirmation hearings that he considered the $1.9 billion fine DOJ imposed on HSBC in 2012 in lieu of criminal prosecution “a joke.” Cruz argued that a $1.9 billion fine of an international bank the size of HSBC amounted to no more than “a few days operating profit.” He described it as “a cost of doing business” once HSBC had decided to launder money for international criminals.
After the HSBC currency traders were arrested, WND conducted an investigation of the bank’s connections to the Clinton Foundation, uncovering a massive offshore financial network involving tens of thousands of transactions that extend far beyond HSBC.
The transactions surfaced in database searches of leaked offshore banking documents.
On Feb. 10, 2015, the London Guardian reported $81 million from seven wealthy international donors flowed to the Clinton Foundation through controversial Swiss tax-free HSBC accounts maintained in Geneva, as revealed by leaked HSBC files obtained by French newspaper Le Monde.
The evidence has been passed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian, BBC Panorama and more than 50 other media outlets around the world.
Breitbart reported in April that key Clinton financial partners, including Canadian mining executive Frank Giustra and the Chagoury family of Nigeria, made use of the controversial Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to move assets around the world.
Breitbart noted Giustra is one of the Clinton Foundation’s largest contributors, donating more than $25 million, while the Chagoury family in Nigeria has committed $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative.
This led WND to begin an extensive investigation into the major leak of offshore banking documents, known as the “Panama Papers,” a giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records from the files of the Mossack Fonseca law firm that was archived by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The Panama Papers database contains information on some 214,000 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories. It reveals major financial institutions, including HSBC, involved in the creation of hard-to-trace companies in offshore havens that form a complex international network involved in tax evasion and money-laundering schemes.
Offshore transactions
In a series of searches of the ICIJ Panama Paper’s database of leaked documents, WND has uncovered tens of thousands of transactions that surface for Bill Clinton under his own name as well as for various shell companies he has created using his initials, WJC.
Searches of the names Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton uncovered tens of thousands of additional offshore transactions via offshore investment companies established for both.
Additionally, tens of thousands of offshore transactions are recorded in searches for the Clinton Foundation and its various subsidiaries, including the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
The surfaced transactions tied to the Clinton family begin to appear in 1989 and extend through 2015, when the ICIJ database of Panama Papers offshore leaks was published.
Transactions linked to the Clinton Global Initiative have occurred in countries such as Panama, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, British Anguilla, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Guernsey, Jersey, Malta, Luxembourg, Monaco, Gibraltar, Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Turkey, Cyprus, France, Belgium, Italy, Canada, China, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Thailand, Mauritius, Ecuador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Samoa and Vanuatu, as well as various “undisclosed” and “undetermined” locations.
“The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars,” the ICIJ writes about the Panama Papers.
Ties to foundation donors
The McClatchy Washington Bureau, an ICIJ participant, reported in April that while the Panama Papers have revealed direct connections with the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama – including ties to Marc Rich, the international fugitive pardoned by Clinton in his final days in office and to firms tied to Ng Lap Seng, the Chinese billionaire implicated in a major Democratic Party fundraising scandal while Clinton was president – the Clintons themselves do not appear as Mossack Fonseca law firm clients.
“The Clintons themselves do not appear to be in Mossack Fonseca’s database, nor does it appear that their daughter, Chelsea, or her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, who co-founded a hedge fund, are listed,” the McClatchy Washington Bureau reported.
“But Bill and Hillary Clinton’s connections to people who have used offshores is fuel for her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.”
While the transactions identified in an ICIJ database search correspond to records that detail the nature of the transactions, the ICIJ has not typically released transactional details because of concerns over privacy laws in the various jurisdictions, including the United States. So, for instance, while it’s known that WJC LLC is associated in the Panama Papers database with thousands of transactions recorded in the ICIJ database, WND is unable to determine if the transactions involved Bill Clinton personally or only associates of Bill Clinton.
  • A database search for Clinton Global Initiative reveals what appear to be Clinton-affiliated entities registered offshore, such as Clinton Development Company S.A., a company incorporated in 1996 by Mossack Fonesca in the small South Pacific island nation of Niue (deactivated Dec. 16, 1999); Clinton Investments Limited, incorporated by Mossack Fonesca in the British Virgin Islands in 1990 (deactivated May 23, 1991); Clinton Holdings Limited, incorporated by Mossack Fonesca in the British West Indies in 1989 (deactivated April 30, 1993); and Clinton, Inc., incorporated by Mossack Fonesca in the Bahamas in 1993 (deactivated Jan. 3, 2001).
  • Similarly, a database search for Chelsea Clinton Investments lists Chelsea Enterprises Limited Company, incorporated in 2001 by Mossack Fonesca in Nevada (deactivated March 20, 2009); Chelsea Resort Ltd., incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in Seychelles in 2005 (deactivated Dec. 5, 2014); Chelsea Manor Ltd., incorporated by Mossack Fonesca in Seychelles in 2005 (listed as active); Chelsea House Ltd., incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in Seychelles in 2006 (deactivated Jan. 8, 2010); Chelsea Crystal Limited, incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in Seychelles in 2006 (deactivated Nov. 9, 2010); Chelsea International Limited, incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in 2001 (deactivated Dec. 20, 2002); Chelsea Holdings Overseas S.A, incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in Panama in 2007 (deactivated Jan. 6, 2010); and Chelsea Group Ltd., incorporated by Mossack Fonseca in 1994 (deactivated Oct. 9, 2014).
For most of these Mossack Fonseca-registered corporations using the “Clinton” name, shareholders are listed simply as “bearer,” a designation that does not permit identifying with certainty whether the parties backing the formation of the corporation were the Clinton family, a Clinton family designee or an unrelated third party simply exploiting the Clinton name.
Yet, there is evidence within the ICIJ database that Clinton-formed corporations have offshore banking connections.
The Clintons or agents working on their behalf incorporated five shell companies, the Washington Free Beacon reported in April, that generate thousands of hits in the Panama Papers offshore entity database.
The corporations include WJC LLC, which Bill Clinton incorporated in 2008 as a “pass-through” for his consulting fees, as well as ZFS Holdings, incorporated in 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department, apparently as a vehicle for her publisher Simon & Schuster to pay a $5.5 million advance for her 2015 book “Hard Choices.”
The other three Clinton-formed shell companies incorporated in Delaware are:
  • The Acceso Fund LLC, a Delaware corporation that Bill Clinton formed in 2009, to be used by the Clinton Foundation, supposedly to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation’s Colombia-based private equity fund, Fondo Acceso.
  • The Acceso Worldwide Fund Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in 2013, supposedly to be used by the Clinton Foundation in working with Fondo Acceso.
  • The Haiti Development Fund LLC was registered in 2010, again as a vehicle for the Clinton Foundation to raise charitable donations supposedly targeted for the relief of the victims of the 2010 earthquake.The Delaware limited liability companies such as WJC LLC are not required to file annual statements disclosing their directors or owners, according to the Free Beacon. The Clintons registered both companies in New York after they were established.
A search of Acceso Fund LLC in the Panama Papers offshore database produces hits for 1,604 offshore entities. There are 3,436 hits for Acceso Worldwide Fund LLC and 8,719 for the Haiti Development Fund LLC
A search for ZFS Holdings LLC produces hits for 24,086 offshore entities.
Moreover, the public record shows the Clintons are no strangers to offshore banking. The Daily Caller noted Jan. 12, for instance, that Bill Clinton was a partner in Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Global Partnership, registered in the Cayman Islands, from which Bill Clinton was paid an estimated $10 million, as originally reported by the Washington Post in 2008.
WJC LLC
The Associated Press in August 2015 broke the story that Bill Clinton had created and used a shell corporation, WJC LLC, and a shell bank account to hide an undisclosed amount of money from public reporting and accountability.
The AP reported that the disclosure came in response to questions the news wire had posed regarding financial files the Clintons had released as a legal requirement for Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign. The answers were provided by Clinton officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The officials leaking the information confirmed that WJC LLC was a “pass-through” account, designed to collect fees for consulting, possibly for speeches, and conceivably to receive payment on commercial “deals” in which the Clinton had delivered services, possibly including political favors in return for payment.
WJC LLC is the type of company that gun-running and drug-dealing criminals involved in international money-laundering create and operate to avoid law-enforcement detection.
As exposed in the book “Partners in Crime: The Clintons’ Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit,” by emptying the account to zero following each payment, the Clintons avoided having to make public disclosure of the account, since the rules require candidates to declare only family assets worth $1,000 or more.
As noted in “Partners in Crime,” the existence of WJC LLC as a corporation or as a shell bank account has never been mentioned in any Clinton Foundation audited financial statements or IRS Tax Form 990 since the foundation’s inception in 1997. Because the WJC LLC bank account never showed up with a positive balance in banking records reported to bank regulators, the Clintons also avoided disclosing the existence of the account in their income tax filings.
  • A search of the ICIJ database of the Panama Papers for WJC LLC produced a list of hits that included 1,011 offshore entities, 446 officers, 72 intermediaries and 143 different addresses.
  • Among the “offshore entities” that surfaced in the search for WJC LLC was the still active WJC Investment Group Ltd., a corporation registered in the British Virgin Islands on Oct. 6, 2005, by the Singapore-based Asian wealth manager Portcullis Trustnet, that the Panama Papers list as registered in the British Virgin Island as a trust company.
  • The ICIJ reports that about a third of the offshore entities in the Panama Papers were incorporated through Portcullis Trustnet (now Portcullis) and Commonwealth Trust Limited, two offshore service providers that were made public as part of the ICIJ’s 2013 “Offshore Leaks” exposé.
The information on Portcullis Trustnet was added to what has become the Panama Papers database in June 2013, when it was produced in conjunction with the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación.
WJC Investments LLC
As exposed in Chapter 8, “The India Scam,” of “Partners in Crime,” until the Obama 2008 presidential campaign opposition research became public, the Clintons had managed to keep the existence of WJC Investments LLC completely secret.
On May 27, 2015, following the AP’s discovery that Bill Clinton used WJC LLC as a shell company, Jennifer Epstein noted in Bloomberg Politics that Bill Clinton also owns WJC International Investments GP LLC, as well as WJC International Investments LLC.
The establishment media, generally protective of the Clintons, has neglected to investigate Bill Clinton’s WJC limited liability corporate holdings, even since the Washington Post in 2014 reported the general partnership WJC International Investments GP LLC was created by Bill Clinton in 2006.
As pointed out in “Partners in Crime,” there are many legitimate reasons to create and operate LLC structures, including tax planning, an additional advantage deriving to the benefit of the Clintons is secrecy.
Unlike public corporations, the filing and disclosure requirements for LLC benefits those, such as the Clintons, who want to maximize privacy by avoiding public disclosure requirements. How many investments have the Clintons derived from connections established with donors to the Clinton Foundation and/or members of the Clinton Global Initiative?
The American public may never know. The likelihood is WJC LLC, as well as WJC International Investments LLC and WJC Investments LLC were created and maintained as limited liability corporations – with WJC LLC being nothing more than a shell corporation – precisely so that questions could never be answered.
Variations of WJC Investments LLC produced thousands of hits in the ICIJ offshore leaks database.
  • A search of the ICIJ database of the Panama Papers for WJC Investments LLC produced a list of hits that included 19,372 offshore entities, 3,396 officers, 215 intermediaries and 316 addresses. The database also produced 38,934 offshore entities associated with WJC Investments Group LLC, plus 50,407 offshore entities identified with WJC International Investments LLC, as well as 68,188 offshore entities identified with WJC International Investments Group LLC.
  • WND also searched the ICIJ database of the Panama Papers for William J. Clinton and found the name was associated with 433 offshore entities, 1,380 officers, 250 intermediaries and 363 addresses.
Hillary, Chelsea Clinton and Clinton Foundation
A search of the ICIJ database also produced thousands of hits for Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and HRC Investments LLC, as well as thousands of hits for various listings under Chelsea Clinton’s name and thousands of hits for the Clinton Foundation and its various subgroups, including the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
A search for the Clinton Global Initiative surfaced 5,505 associated offshore entities, with several in the top listings including the “Clinton” name in the offshore entity’s title.

CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE
Similarly, a search for Hillary Clinton Investments turned up hits for 18,450 offshore entities, with several in the top listings including the name “Hillary” or “Clinton.”
Again, given the nature of the ICIJ Panama Papers database, it is not possible to determine if Hillary Clinton was personally involved with the 18,450 offshore entities listed.
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3)Trump's Most Brilliant Campaign Move Yet 
By Katie Pavlich

Today at his brand new Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proved once again he is a master manipulator of media. 


This week the birther issue has come up again, as President Barack Obama gets ready to leave the White House in five months. Hillary Clinton and her allies at certain media outlets believe it's an issue on which they can yet again accuse Trump of racism, so it's been the topic of the week: When is Donald Trump finally going to admit Barack Obama was born in the United States? 
He did so today, but not before making those desperately waiting for his statement look like fools. 
First, he told the press there would be a press conference at Trump International Hotel. The press conference was then cancelled and changed to an event. Trump opened his remarks, with all networks closely covering, by reminding everyone the hotel was opening months ahead of schedule. He handed over the microphone to Medal of Honor recipients, generals and other war veterans for twenty minutes to praise him and talk about the importance of national security in an ever threatening world, making the focus on birtherism look petty and stupid. At the end of their statements, he took back the lectern and stated, "President Obama was born in the United States, period." He then thanked the veterans on stage again and left without taking questions.
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