Investigating the Other Collusion Case

Posted on June 23, 2017June 23, 2017 by Denise Simon

Seems it at least began in 2015, long before Donald Trump was campaigning for the Oval Office.

Also, as an aside, John Podesta is testifying before the House Intelligence Committee next week. He too has financial ties to Moscow operations.

The Vnesheconombank is Russian owned and has been under a sanctions architecture due to the annexing of Crimea. In Russia, by law, the bank’s board chairman is the Prime Minister of Russia. Vladimir Putin increased leading when he became the bank’s chairman in 2008. Now precisely why is Russia investing at all in the United States in the first place? Well soft power and doing business with the Export Import Bank, an agency that is corrupt to the core. Further, Sergei Gorkov is head of the bank and is is/was a Russian spy.

Image result for Vnesheconombank ABC

BusinessInsider:The U.S. Treasury has added a bunch of entities to its Russia sanctions list, including a sovereign wealth fund that used to be connected to some pretty high-profile U.S. billionaires.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assistance Control on Thursday added The Russian Direct Investment Fund to the list, along with a number of entities linked to RDIF parent Vnesheconombank and energy giant Rosneft.

Vnesheconombank was first sanctioned last year, but RDIF hadn’t been explicitly targeted until the announcement on Thursday.

Private equity moguls Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management all served as board members for RDIF when it was established in 2011, according to a press release at the time.

At some point, those names were removed from the RDIF website.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the investors’ names had disappeared from the site in September 2014, but said that they still served on the board at that time. There are currently no names listed on the international advisory board on RDIF’s website.

Back in 2011, each board member issued statements about joining the board. Here are some highlights:

“We believe there are many attractive investment opportunities in Russia — the RDIF will provide the strong and experienced local partnership needed for investors to realize those opportunities.” — David Bonderman

“Russia has strong fundamentals that will continue to fuel its growth trajectory and offer attractive investment opportunities. We believe the Russia Direct Investment Fund will help further align U.S. and Russian objectives in terms of identifying paths toward partnership in the private sector.” — Leon Black

“It’s always good to have friends when you are going to a place that you are not as familiar with.” — Stephen Schwarzman

Bonderman has spoken publicly about investing in the country in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Global Conference this year that the Russian market remains attractive, according to a report by CNN Money.

He is quoted as saying: “Sanctions are perfectly set up not to work at all but to make a political statement.”

Spokespeople for Blackstone and TPG declined to comment. Apollo could not be reached for comment.

A spokesperson for the Russian Direct Investment Fund said: “For Vnesheconombank subsidiaries the new clarification by the US Department of the Treasury is essentially a technical repetition of sanctions imposed a year ago, which targeted a number of Russian companies including Vnesheconombank and its subsidiaries.

“Given the nature of the Fund’s activity, RDIF has never attracted financing in the USA, it invests its own funds. Since the introduction of sanctions last year RDIF has continued to invest into the Russian economy and build new international partnerships.”

So what you ask?

Image result for sergei gorkov Sergei Gorkov

Well due to sanctions, those on the Trump campaign team, transition team and now in the White House may have violated sanctions. If so, the reason would be why, to what end and how many may be involved? It should also be added that many Republicans have ties to Russians and oligarchs, not all is as it seems. We can only hope, while not knowing details, the Senate is also investigating Hillary Clinton in much the same condition. Yet as Secretary of State, Hillary and Obama had the ability to sign waivers to finesse sanctions. This was likely the case between Hillary and the Kremlin regarding Skolkovo.

Remember, don’t shoot the messenger. Furthermore, it seems some on the Senate committee are leaking too.

Senate investigators are examining the activities of a little-known $10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration, a congressional source told CNN.

The source said the Senate intelligence committee is investigating the Russian fund in connection with its examination of discussions between White House adviser Jared Kushner and the head of a prominent Russian bank. The bank, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, oversees the fund, which has ties to several Trump advisers. Both the bank and the fund have been covered since 2014 by sanctions restricting U.S. business dealings.

Separately, Steve Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary, said in a January letter that he would look into the Jan. 16 meeting between the fund’s chief executive and Anthony Scaramucci, a member of the transition team’s executive committee and a fundraiser and adviser for Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, Mnuchin had not yet been confirmed as Treasury Secretary. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for an update.

Two Democratic senators had asked Treasury to investigate whether Scaramucci promised to lift sanctions — a policy shift that would help the fund attract more international investment to Russia.

The questions draw attention to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a government investment arm that has helped top U.S. private-equity firms invest in Russia and that was advised by Stephen Schwarzman, who is now chairman of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, an advisory group of business leaders.

Schwarzman, chief executive officer of Blackstone Group, was named in 2011 to the fund’s International Advisory Board along with other leaders of major equity companies and sovereigh-wealth funds who reviewed the fund’s operations, plans and potential investments. Schwarzman declined to comment. A source close to him said Schwarzman has not spoken to anyone on the fund “for some time.”

The fund also worked with Goldman Sachs, whose former president Gary Cohn is Trump’s chief economic adviser and where Kirill Dmitriev, the fund’s chief executive, worked as an investment banker in the 1990s. Goldman was part of a consortium created in 2012 to invest in large Russian businesses preparing to go public, and was hired in 2013 to burnish Russia’s investment image. The company declined to comment.

‘I would reach out to people to help him”

Senate and House investigators are looking into various Russian entities to determine whether anyone connected to the Trump campaign helped Russians as they meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and whether Trump associates discussed sanctions with Russian officials.

The congressional inquiries, along with a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller, have shadowed the Trump administration. Trump has denied any connection to Russia’s election-meddling, calling the criminal probe “a witch hunt.”

Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, minimized his January meeting with Dmitriev in the resort town of Davos, Switzerland, at the celebrated annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. Scaramucci had met Dmitriev at previous Davos meetings, although at the gathering in January, Scaramucci was expecting to be named White House liaison to the business community.

Dmitriev “came over to say hello in a restaurant, and I was cordial,” Scaramucci said in a recent email to CNN. “There is nothing there.”

The day after the meeting, Scaramucci told Bloomberg TV that he had “as a private citizen” been working with Dmitriev on bringing a delegation of executives to Russia.

“What I said to him last night, in my capacity inside the administration, I would certainly reach out to some people to help him,” Scaramucci said before describing a thicket of ethical clearances he would face. “The idea was many months ago to have more outreach with Russia but also other countries, not just Russia. China, other countries.”

Scaramucci’s comments alarmed Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ben Cardin of Maryland, who asked Mnuchin investigate whether Scaramucci sought to “facilitate prohibited transactions” or promised to waive or lift sanctions against Russia.

In a reply Jan. 30, before he was sworn in, Mnuchin said he would “ensure the appropriate Department components assess whether further investigation of this matter is warranted.”

A spokeswoman for the Russian fund said the two men did not discuss sanctions, and that the discussion itself did not violate sanctions that U.S. imposed in 2014 after Russia annexed part of neighboring Ukraine. The spokeswoman declined to describe the conversation, saying, “We do not comment on private meetings.”

An advocate for lifting sanctions

Since Trump’s election, Dmitriev has been one of Russia’s most vocal officials in calling for an end to U.S. sanctions and arguing that joint U.S.-Russia projects can create jobs in the United States.

The fund hired two U.S. lobbying firms in September 2014, after sanctions were imposed, paying them a combined $150,000 over two months for public relations work. The fund has not hired any lobbyists since then.

With a history of helping U.S. manufacturers and asset management companies invest in Russia, the fund is a logical starting point for Russia’s push to lift U.S. sanctions, former State Department chief economist Rodney Ludema said.

“If you’re going to get your nose under the tent, that’s a good place to start,” said Ludema, a Georgetown University economics professor. “I’m sure their objective is to get rid of all the sanctions against the financial institutions. But RDIF is one [sanctioned organizations] where a number of prominent U.S. investors have been involved.”

Scaramucci also questioned U.S. sanctions while he was in Davos and echoed Trump’s statements about improving relations with Russia.

Two weeks after the meeting between Scaramucci and Dmitriev, when President Trump spoke by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the fund announced it would open an office in New York in May.

No New York office has been opened but the fund “still expects to open a representative office in the US this year,” the spokeswoman said.

Cyber Spy Weapons Software Used Against Activists and Journalists

Posted on June 22, 2017June 22, 2017 by Denise Simon

Mexico ranks 9th in journalists deaths. Find the list here by country.

Geek.com

Mexican Government was spying on Journalists and Activists with Pegasus Surveillance software

Journalists and activists in Mexico accused the government of spying on them with the powerful surveillance software Pegasus developed by the NSO Group.

Journalists and activists in Mexico accused the government of spying on them with a powerful surveillance software. According to the journalists, the authorities used an Israeli spyware to hack their mobile devices. The surveillance software is the questionable Pegasus that is developed by the Israeli surveillance NSO Group and sold exclusively to the governments and law enforcement agencies.

NSO Group is owned by US private equity firm Francisco Partners Management. it made the headlines after the investigation conducted by The New York Times.

People familiar with the NSO Group confirmed that the company has an internal ethics committee that monitors the sales and potential customers verifying that the software will not be abused to violate human rights.

Officially the sale of surveillance software is limited to authorized governments to support investigation of agencies on criminal organizations and terrorist groups.

Unfortunately, its software is known to have been abused to spy on journalists and human rights activists.

“There’s no check on this,” said Bill Marczak, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “Once NSO’s systems are sold, governments can essentially use them however they want. NSO can say they’re trying to make the world a safer place, but they are also making the world a more surveilled place.”

The discovery is the result of an investigation conducted by Mexican NGOs and the CitizenLab organization.

R3D, SocialTic, Article 19 and CitizenLab published a report that details the surveillance illegally operated by the Mexican government through the spyware.

Authorities have been sending malicious links to individuals’ phones, in order to trick victims into opening the messages they were specifically crafted and in some cases, the attack involved also family members if the victims were not compromised.

“The targets received SMS messages that included links to NSO exploits paired with troubling personal and sexual taunts, messages impersonating official communications by the Embassy of the United States in Mexico, fake AMBER Alerts, warnings of kidnappings, and other threats.” states the report. “The operation also included more mundane tactics, such as messages sending fake bills for phone services and sex-lines. Some targets only received a handful of texts, while others were barraged with dozens of messages over more than one and a half years. A majority of the infection attempts, however, took place during two periods: August 2015 and April-July 2016″.

The Pegasus spyware leverages zero-day exploits to compromise both iOS and Android devices.

The government targeted individuals that exposed evidence on government corruption and activists who revealed human rights violations by the Mexican Government.

The researchers observed at least two periods of intense targeting:

Period 1 (August 2015) when the Mexican President was officially exonerated for his role in the “Casa Blanca” scandal on which Carmen Aristegui, a well-known reporter, had first reported, and Carlos Loret de Mola was questioning the government’s role in extrajudicial killings. Aristegui revealed that President Enrique Pena Nieto’s wife had bought a $7 million Mexico City mansion from a government contractor.

Period 2 (April- July 2016) when revelations of government involvement in human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings were made public.

According to the New York Times report, at least three Mexican federal agencies have purchased some $80 million of spyware from NSO Group since 2011.

Companies like the NSO Group operate in the dark, in a sort of “legal gray area,” despite the Israeli government exercises strict control of the export of such kind of software, surveillance applications could be abused by threat actors and authoritarian regimes worldwide.

Let me close with Key Findings of the report

Over 76 messages with links to NSO Group’s exploit framework were sent to Mexican journalists, lawyers, and a minor child (NSO Group is a self-described “cyber warfare” company that sells government-exclusive spyware).

The targets were working on a range of issues that include investigations of corruption by the Mexican President, and the participation of Mexico’s Federal authorities in human rights abuses.

Some of the messages impersonated the Embassy of the United States of America to Mexico, others masqueraded as emergency AMBER Alerts about abducted children.

At least one target, the minor child of a target, was sent infection attempts, including a communication impersonating the United States Government, while physically located in the United States.

***

Then comes former National Security Council advisor for President Trump Michael Flynn.

Cyberweapons Group Sold Spyware Used Against Political Dissidents

He earned nearly $1.5 million last year as a consultant, adviser, board member, or speaker for more than three dozen companies and individuals, according to financial disclosure forms released earlier this year.

Two of those entities are directly linked to NSO Group, a secretive Israeli cyberweapons dealer founded by Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio, who are rumored to have served in Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the National Security Agency.

Flynn received $40,280 last year as an advisory board member for OSY Technologies, an NSO Group offshoot based in Luxembourg, a favorite tax haven for major corporations. OSY Technologies is part of a corporate structure that runs from Israel, where NSO Group is located, through Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S.

Flynn also worked as a consultant last year for Francisco Partners, a U.S.-based private equity firm that owns NSO Group, but he did not disclose how much he was paid. At least two Francisco Partners executives have sat on OSY’s board.

Flynn’s financial disclosure forms do not specify the work he did for companies linked to NSO Group, and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Former colleagues at Flynn’s consulting firm declined to discuss Flynn’s work with NSO Group. Executives at Francisco Partners who also sit on the OSY Technologies board did not respond to emails. Lavie, the NSO Group co-founder, told HuffPost he is “not interested in speaking to the press” and referred questions to a spokesman, who did not respond to queries.

Many government and military officials have moved through the revolving door between government agencies and private cybersecurity companies. The major players in the cybersecurity contracting world ― SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI Federal and KeyW Corporation ― all have former top government officials in leadership roles or on their boards, or have former top executives working in government.

But it’s less common for former U.S. intelligence officials to work with foreign cybersecurity outfits. “There is a lot of opportunity in the U.S. to do this kind of work,” said Ben Johnson, a former NSA employee and the co-founder of Obsidian Security. “It’s a little bit unexpected going overseas, especially when you combine that with the fact that they’re doing things that might end up in hands of enemies of the U.S. government. It does seem questionable.”

What is clear is that during the time Flynn was working for NSO’s Luxembourg affiliate, one of the company’s main products — a spy software sold exclusively to governments and marketed as a tool for law enforcement officials to monitor suspected criminals and terrorists — was being used to surveil political dissidents, reporters, activists, and government officials. The software, called Pegasus, allowed users to remotely break into a target’s cellular phone if the target responded to a text message.

Last year, several people targeted by the spyware contacted Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research team based out of the University of Toronto. With the help of experts at the computer security firm Lookout, Citizen Lab researchers were able to trace the spyware hidden in the texts back to NSO Group spyware. After Citizen Lab publicized its findings, Apple introduced patches to fix the vulnerability. It is not known how many activists in other countries were targeted and failed to report it to experts.

NSO Group told Forbes in a statement last year that it complies with strict export control laws and only sells to authorized government agencies. “The company does NOT operate any of its systems; it is strictly a technology company,” NSO Group told Forbes.

But once a sale is complete, foreign governments are free to do what they like with the technology. Read more here.

Kushner in Israel, with ‘Allen Plan’ in Hand?

Posted on June 21, 2017June 21, 2017 by Denise Simon

President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner meets with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hoping for a breakthrough on peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. After this session, Kushner goes to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. This is the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Mideast war where Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

One of the big issues with the Palestinians is the construction of ‘settlements’ which this site takes extreme exception to that term. The other term used by the Palestinians which should never be accepted is ‘occupation’.

So, as the title of the article includes the ‘Allen Plan’….exactly what is that?

It refers to General Allen and 1967 lines, proposed during Obama’s term as president. Israel is always prepared for these types of meetings and had already formally rejected any re-proposal for The Allen Plan.

Does this look like Israel can defend itself reverting to 1967 lines? Further, that proposal demands Israel to relinquish the most sacred historical territory.

Image result for israel 1967 lines map

Image result for general john allen john kerry

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Trump White House is currently reexamining the Allen Plan, an Obama-era proposal that calls for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders with no IDF presence whatsoever. This plan is dangerous. If it is implemented, Israel will have to rely on foreign forces for its security, a situation that has not worked in the past. More than that, it is antithetical to the Israeli ethos of self-defense and self-preservation in the Jewish homeland.

Col. Kris Bauman’s appointment as Israel adviser to the US National Security Council is a noteworthy event. He assisted Gen. John Allen in formulating recommendations for security arrangements for Israel in the context of a permanent settlement, to which then-Secretary of State John Kerry aspired. This set of recommendations came to be known as the Allen Plan.

Gen. Allen’s vision was detailed in a comprehensive document prepared at a US research institute by two Israelis and two Americans: Gen. (res.) Gadi Shamni and Nimrod Novik, along with Ilan Goldenberg and Col. Kris Bauman.

The plan envisages a Palestinian state with full sovereignty inside the 1967 borders, its capital in east Jerusalem, with minor modifications for settlement blocs. The plan is based on complete acceptance of the Palestinian demand for full sovereignty. This means no IDF soldiers anywhere in their state, which would extend from the Jordan River to the 1967 line.

In lieu of Israel’s demands regarding defensible borders, which include an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley to ensure the Palestinian state’s demilitarization, the plan proposes a varied and complex security solution. One element would be a US military force that would operate in the Jordan Valley. As the document’s Executive Summary states,

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that well-thought-through security measures in the context of the two-state solution can provide Israelis and Palestinians with a degree of security equal or greater to that provided today by Israel’s deployment into the West Bank…

The basic problem is the notion that Israel will rely for its security on foreign forces. Not only is it difficult to ensure that such forces would fulfill their duty successfully, but it is uncertain whether or not they would stay in place – particularly after they have suffered casualties like those they have suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.

Recall that during the waiting period before the Six-Day War, the security guarantee given by President Eisenhower to Ben-Gurion after the 1956 Sinai Campaign evaporated. When he demanded that Israel withdraw unconditionally from the Sinai Peninsula, Eisenhower promised that if the Straits of Tiran were ever again closed to Israeli shipping, the US would intervene. Yet when Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban came to Washington in May 1967, President Johnson candidly explained to him that Eisenhower’s promise – however estimable – was no longer a practical proposition. With his army bogged down in Vietnam, Johnson apparently could not have gained the nation’s or Congress’s support for an intervention in the Straits of Tiran even if he had wanted to.

The main concern is that the existence of the Greater Tel Aviv area – indeed, the daily routine of the State of Israel – will come to be dependent on the goodwill of foreign forces. That is the heart of the matter. Do we want Israel to be no more than a haven for persecuted Jews where they can subsist under foreign protection? Or do we want Israel to be a place of freedom, a homeland, in which we alone are responsible for our own security and sovereignty?

The authors of the Allen document emphasize that Israel’s security would continue to be based on the IDF’s power. But it is hard to imagine under what circumstances Israel would attain the international legitimacy to pursue an offensive deep within the Palestinian state, should the need arise. Regarding the conditions that could justify an IDF operation in Palestinian territory, the document says:

The Palestinians will never agree to an Israeli right of re-entry, but there could be a side agreement between Israel and the United States on the conditions under which the United States would support unilateral Israeli action. Ultimately, Israel is a sovereign state that enjoys the right of self-defense. Thus, it can unilaterally violate the sovereignty of another state, but with the attendant risks that would have to be weighed by Israeli leadership.

Should the IDF evacuate the territories completely, as envisaged by this plan, the Palestinians would certainly employ their carefully honed tactical and strategic talent for nonaccountability and ambiguity. They would take care to ensure that the Palestinian state cannot be defined as a hostile entity against which a “just war” can be declared. Whether deliberately or not, they would be able to let “rogue,” non-state forces do their work for them, and avoid taking responsibility. What then?

There is also good reason to doubt whether conditions for demilitarization can be maintained. In an era of global arms proliferation, and of forms of smuggling that elude surveillance (as in the flow of weapons to Hamas in Gaza and to Hezbollah in Lebanon), along with increasingly sophisticated local arms manufacture, there is no way to guarantee real demilitarization without a constant effort to keep the territory fully isolated and to operate within it.

We must also take into account the possibility that war could erupt in more than one arena at at a time. If war were to break out with the state of Palestine in the West Bank, it could happen simultaneously in Lebanon, Gaza, and so on. The IDF would be unable to concentrate its efforts in the West Bank arena – which, because of its geographic proximity to Israel’s population centers, could inflict a heavy blow. Under the new conditions of war, which are fundamentally different from those that prevailed in June 1967, reconquering the territory would be incomparably more difficult.

And what of the document’s validity under changing conditions? The security solution the document proposes must be weighed in terms of the time dimension, and in circumstantial contexts that are subject to change. If a solution is responsible and workable, what time span is envisaged? Who knows under what evolving circumstances the solution will be required to provide protection to a state of Israel that has been trimmed down to the coastal plain? Is there not also a need for responsible risk management regarding contingencies that are still beyond the horizon?

We must ask to what extent we ourselves, with the excessive emphasis we have placed on security concerns in recent decades as a key criterion by which to assess any prospective solution, have laid the groundwork for Gen. Allen’s plan. His security document is, after all, intended expressly to offer a technical solution to all the familiar security issues. It would leave the Israeli leadership without the faintest possibility of invoking a security pretext to ward off the “peace solution.”

In describing Kerry’s efforts, Thomas Friedman asserted (The New York Times, February 17, 2013) that in light of Gen. Allen’s solution for Israel’s security concerns, the Israeli government had reached a juncture where it would have to choose between peace and ideology.

Perhaps we have forgotten that protecting the national existence, in terms of how the IDF defines national security, does not pertain solely to ensuring the physical existence of the citizens of the country but also to safeguarding national interests. A national interest – such as the sovereignty of the people of Israel in their capital, Jerusalem – can go far beyond the technical contents of a plan for security arrangements, however worthy. Security is only a means, not an end in itself.

From a practical, professional standpoint, Gen. Allen’s plan leaves much to be desired. But on a deeper level, it completely ignores the possibility that the people of Israel, in renewing their life in their homeland, are motivated by something much greater than the need for a technical solution to security concerns.

Illinois is Broke, Don’t Bother with a Lottery Ticket

Posted on June 20, 2017June 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

No wonder the Obama’s chose not to move back….seems that community organizing resulted in a financial collapse…Rahm? You have a call holding on line 3.

Illinois careens into financial meltdown – and not even the lottery is safe

Illinois is grappling with a full-fledged financial crisis and not even the lottery is safe – with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner warning the state is entering “banana republic” territory.

Facing billions in unpaid bills and pension obligations, the state is hitting a cash crunch that is rare even by Illinois standards.

A top financial official just warned 100 percent of the state’s monthly revenue will be eaten up by court-ordered payments. Rauner is calling a special session of the Democrat-led General Assembly in a bid to pass what he hopes will be the first full budget package in almost three years.

And Illinois will – literally – lose the lottery if the budget fails.

The state lotto requires a payment from the legislature each year. The current appropriation expires June 30, meaning no authority to pay prizes. In anticipation of a budget deadlock, the state already is planning to halt Powerball and Mega Millions sales.

“It is disappointing that the legislature’s inability to pass a budget has led to this development and will result in Illinois lottery players being denied the opportunity to play these popular games,” Illinois Lottery Acting Director Greg Smith told Fox News.

“We’re like a banana republic,” Rauner said earlier this month, after the General Assembly failed, yet again, to pass a budget package by the regular session deadline. “We can’t manage our money.”

The governor has called for a special session starting Wednesday. The state so far is operating on a series of stopgap spending packages.

But the problems are years in the making, caused in large in part by the state’s poorly funded pension system— which led Moody’s Investors Services to downgrade the credit rating to the lowest of any state. The state currently has $130 billion in unfunded pension obligations, and a backlog of unpaid bills worth $13 billion.

Reports have suggested the state could be the first to attempt to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy — but under the law, that’s impossible unless Congress gets involved.

“Nobody here in Illinois is considering bankruptcy—first of all, it’s not allowed,” said Steve Brown, press secretary for Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. “Second of all, it would damage the reputation of the state and it’s just not necessary.”

U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats from Illinois, declined to respond to Fox News’ request for comment on whether they would consider getting involved in introducing a measure allowing state bankruptcy.

“Illinois is the fiscal model of what not to do,” Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., told Fox News, while not commenting on the bankruptcy question. “This avoidance in behavior toward dealing with our challenges is what leads to the devastating impacts we are seeing today.”

Just last week, the Illinois comptroller, who is responsible for paying the state’s bills, warned the office would be paying out 100 percent of Illinois’ monthly revenue, leaving negative funds for “discretionary spending. ”

But Rauner claims the Republicans have a new plan that could remedy the state’s crippling financial situation.

“Republicans in the General Assembly have laid out a compromise budget that I can sign,” Rauner said, calling it a “true compromise.”

The plan incorporates reforms like property tax relief, term limits, and spending caps, which have caused an “ongoing confrontation” between Madigan and the governor, one Republican leader told Fox News, adding that the two have been in a “stalemate” since Rauner took office two years ago.

“Gov. Rauner inherited this financial mess when he took office, and his proposals have been met by resentment from the speaker,” Deputy House Republican Leader Dan Brady said.

Brady added, “we are asking that the speaker allow for a date and a vote before June 30.”

But Brown told Fox News the governor isn’t making enough concessions.

“He’s not walking many back—the financial issues are serious enough, and he’s forcing things that have nothing to do with state government,” Brown said. “The biggest problem here is that the governor keeps associating a lot of things that do not have anything to do with the budget.”

Rauner has pushed for structural reforms, government consolidation and pension reform—some components that were able to pass on the Senate side.

“The people and businesses of Illinois deserve stability, not this ongoing chaos,” Senate President John J. Cullerton, a Democrat, told Fox News. The Illinois State Senate approved a balanced budget before the initial May 31 deadline that “matches” the governor’s spending proposal.

If the General Assembly fails to pass a budget package, they do have an option to pass another stopgap package, which lawmakers say is an option, but “not a good one.”

“We have a very real deadline looming,” Senate Republican Leader Christine Radogno told Fox News. “The alternative to not finding a compromise will be devastating to Illinois.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Slow Death of Britain and Europe

Posted on June 20, 2017June 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

There have been a number of terror attacks in recent weeks in Britain and across Europe. No one is willing to discuss the causes for fear of retribution by migrant groups, religious organizations and government leaders.

The most recent attack occurred when Darren Osbourne, originally from Whales rented a van and ran into several people outside the Finsbury Park mosque killing one and injuring several others. He is being charged with terror activities. Islamists have been waiting for this reckoning and the powder keg continues to smolder.

The Finsbury Park mosque has a nasty history.

*** Moving on to yet another secret in Britain…

Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400 Rotherham Children? Political Correctness

A story of rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police—is emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country. Its origins, however, lie in something quite ordinary: what one Labour MP called “not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

Imagine the following case. A fourteen-year old girl is taken into care by the social services unit of the town where she lives, because her parents are drug-addicted, and she has been neglected and is not turning up in school. She is one of many, for that is the way in Britain today. And local government entities—Councils—can be ordered by the courts to stand in for parents of neglected children. The Council places the girl in a home, where she is kept with others under supervision from the social services department. The home is regularly visited by young men who try to entice the girls into their cars, so as to give them drugs and alcohol, and then coerce them into sex.

***

The girl, who is lonely and uncared for, meets a man outside the home, who promises a trip to the cinema and a party with children of her age. She falls into the trap. After she has been raped by a group of five men she is told that, if she says a word to anyone, she will be taken from the home and beaten. When, after the episode is repeated, she threatens to go to the police, she is taken into the countryside, doused in petrol, and told that she is going to be set alight, unless she promises to tell no one of the ordeal.

Social workers tell girls they cannot help them

Meanwhile she must accept weekly abuse, in return for drugs and alcohol. Soon she finds herself being taken to other towns in the area, and hired out for sexual purposes to other men. She is distraught and depressed, and at the point when she can stand it no longer, she goes to the police. She can only stutter a few words, and cannot bring herself to accuse anyone in particular. Her complaint is dismissed on the grounds that any sex involved must have been consensual. The social worker in charge of her case listens to her complaint, but tells her that she cannot act unless the girl identifies her abusers. But when the girl describes them the social worker switches off with a shrug and says that she can do nothing. Her father, his drug habit notwithstanding, has tried to keep contact with his daughter and suspects what is happening. But when he goes to the police, he is arrested for obstruction and charged with wasting police time.

Over the two years of her ordeal the girl makes several attempts on her own life, and eventually ends up abandoned and homeless, without an education and with no prospect of a normal life.

Impossible, you will say, that such a thing could happen in Britain. In fact it is only one of over 1,400 cases, all arising during the course of the last fifteen years in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, all involving vulnerable girls either in Council care or inadequately protected by their families from gangs of sexual predators. Almost no arrests have been made, no social workers or police officers have been reprimanded, and until recently the matter was dismissed by all those responsible as a matter of no real significance. Increasing public awareness of the problem, however, led to complaints, triggering a series of official reports. The latest report, from Professor Alexis Jay, former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, gives the truth for the first time, in 153 disturbing pages. One fact stands out above all the horrors detailed in the document, which is that the girl victims were white, and their abusers Pakistani.

***

Sociologists convinced government that the police are racist

Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge. The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report accused the police – not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country – of ‘institutionalised racism’. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.

However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of ‘institutionalised racism’, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.

Police more concerned with political correctness than crime

The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of ‘Islamophobia’. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.

Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.

Rotherham Town Hall, Wikipedia

No One Will Be Fired

This would matter less if fear had no consequences. Unfortunately political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists. The intention of the activists is to disrupt and dismantle the old forms of social order. They believe that our society is not just racist, but far too comfortable, far too unequal, far too bound up with fuddy-duddy old ways that are experienced by people at the bottom of society – the working classes, the immigrants, the homeless, the illegals – as oppressive and demeaning. They enthusiastically propagate the doctrines of political correctness as a way of taking revenge on a social order from which they feel alienated.

Ordinary people are so intimidated by this that they repeat the doctrines, like religious mantras which they hope will keep them safe in hostile territory. Hence people in Britain have accepted without resistance the huge transformations that have been inflicted on them over the last thirty years, largely by activists working through the Labour Party. They have accepted immigration policies that have filled our cities with disaffected Muslims, many of whom have now gone to fight against us in Syria and Iraq. They have accepted the growth of Islamic schools in which children are taught to prepare themselves for jihad against the surrounding social order. They have accepted the constant denigration of their country, its institutions and its inherited religion, for the simple reason that these things are theirs and therefore tainted with forbidden loyalties.

And when the truth is expressed at last, nobody is fired, no arrests are made, and the elected Police and Communities Commissioner for Rotherham, although forced to resign from the Labour Party, refuses to resign from his job. After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume.

The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth-rates, mass immigration and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive change as a society. This book is not only an analysis of demographic and political realities, but also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them. Told from this first-hand perspective, and backed with impressive research and evidence, the book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. In each chapter he also takes a step back to look at the bigger issues which lie behind a continent’s death-wish, answering the question of why anyone, let alone an entire civilisation, would do this to themselves? He ends with two visions of Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-strange-death-of-europe-9781472942241/#sthash.LFXH2Clt.dpuf