When the U.S. Justice System is Bought by Soros

Posted on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

Maybe the FBI as well given Hillary? Spooky dude and his billons have twisted the system across the country. Perhaps he reached the White House as well, given the commuted sentences of criminals where Obama used his pen to release hundreds of felons. Is Soros paying senators on the Judiciary Committee for votes on Supreme Court Justice nominations?

It is no wonder violent felons never serve out their prison terms much less do the District Attorneys bother with the cases to begin with as noted by criminals on the streets with case files that are a mile long only to offend again.

NYMag

George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system

Politico: Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.

While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”

Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.

The Florida Safety and Justice group just poured nearly $1.4 million — all of which came from Soros and his 527 group — into a previously low-budget Democratic primary for state attorney in Central Florida before Tuesday’s vote. The group is backing Aramis Ayala, a former public defender and prosecutor, in her campaign against incumbent Jeff Ashton, whose jurisdiction covers over 1.6 million people across two counties in metro Orlando.

One TV ad from Florida Safety and Justice boosts Ayala, touting her “plan to remove bias so defendants charged with the same crime receive the same treatment, no matter their background or race.” The Soros-funded group is also attacking Ashton with ads saying he “got rid of protections that helped ensure equal treatment regardless of background or race. … Take two similar traffic incidents that happened on the same night. A white man got off with a slap on the wrist, while the black man faces prison.”

Opponents of Soros’ favored candidates have laced into the billionaire, saying that his influence has wildly tipped the scales of local elections and even charging that he made residents less safe.

“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.

“I know some of his troubling opinions on social issues, especially the criminal justice system,” Thompson said. “I’ve never known him as an individual who was very strong on some of our crime and punishment issues. I felt it was very detrimental to the safety of Caddo Parish, and that’s why I took such a strong stand against him.”

A Soros representative declined to comment on his involvement in the DA races.

Progressive operatives and activists say that the recent uptick in news coverage of racial justice issues, especially police-involved deaths of African-Americans, helped sparked intense new interest in the powerful role of district attorneys, who did not indict officers in some high-profile cases. So has the longer-term reform push to shrink the U.S. prison population and promote treatment over punishment for drug users.

Reform groups have spent years advocating criminal justice policies and legislation that would reduce incarceration rates. Liberal donors have long given to policy-focused nonprofits; the Soros-chaired Open Societies Foundation, for example, works on drug policy and criminal justice reform and has supported other reform groups like the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice — which, despite its similar name, has had no involvement in district attorney races, a spokeswoman said.

Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.

“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.”

Carter’s group commissioned research in 2015 that found that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors in the U.S. are white and three-quarters overall are white men. It also highlighted a Wake Forest University study that found that a vast majority of prosecutors — 85 percent — run for reelection unopposed.

“I found that to be shocking, and I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”

Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)

“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”

Soros’ spending started on these races about a year ago, when he put over $1 million into “Safety and Justice” groups that helped elect two new district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi and reelect a third — Hinds County, Miss., DA Robert Shuler Smith — who has since been charged by the Mississippi attorney general with improperly providing information to defendants.

The other Mississippi district attorney Soros’ spending helped elect, Scott Colom, has now represented a four-county stretch of the eastern part of the state for eight months. Colom said in an interview that he has focused on prosecuting violent crime in his new position while trying not to burden local prisons with first-time, low-level drug offenders.

“I’ve expanded the charges eligible for pre-trial diversion,” Colom said, adding that the number of people in the program in his jurisdiction has doubled since he took office seven months ago. “It’s all focused on the individual person, on trying to find a plan with the best chance possible of avoiding criminal behavior.”

“I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think prison is too nice and we need to spend more on it,” Colom continued. “But it seems like a large majority of people out there get it and realize there have to be priorities. Just because a fella commits a crime doesn’t mean the best outcome is sending them to jail. … As much as possible, I want to take people from being tax burdens to taxpayers.”

After the Louisiana and Mississippi races, Soros next piled money into two of the biggest jurisdictions in the country: Houston’s Harris County (his lone losing effort so far) and Chicago’s Cook County, where he funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx defeat incumbent state’s attorney Anita Alvarez in a high-profile primary campaign dominated by the 13-month delay between the police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the indictment of the police officer involved.

In late spring, $107,000 from a Soros-funded New Mexico super PAC helped Raul Torrez win his Democratic district attorney primary by a 2-to-1 margin in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. Torrez’s Republican opponent dropped out of the general election soon after, citing the potentially exorbitant cost of opposing the Soros-backed candidate in the general election.

While Soros has spent heavily in 2015 and 2016, a broader national push into local prosecutor campaigns is expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment. A Safety and Justice group has already organized in Ohio, according to campaign finance filings there. But it has not yet disclosed raising or spending any money.

“There’s been a realization that there’s not very much we can do this year, when you’re coming up to an election,” said Steele. “You have to have the right candidates. That’s a big piece of the puzzle and why I’m part of this conversation. … A lot of the conversations I’m having are about 2017 and 2018, about looking forward to next year in Virginia and other places.”

That means more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.

Colom, the Mississippi prosecutor, says he has never met Soros — like other district attorney candidates supported by the Democratic billionaire this year. He said there was no hint that hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming to aid his campaign until advertising started pushing the same criminal-justice reform message that Colom had been touting — albeit on a much cheaper scale.

“The first I heard of it, someone told me they liked my radio ad, and I was thinking, that doesn’t sound like one of mine,” Colom said.

The Crisis of Cuba and Venezuela, Immigration Chaos

Posted on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

9 Latin nations band together to plead with U.S. over Cuba

Cuban migrants were photographed in November outside the border control building in Penas Blancas, Costa Rica, after Nicaragua closed its borders to Cuban migrants. Nine Latin American governments on Monday charged that U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants has created a humanitarian crisis for the region. Esteban Felix AP

McClatchy/WASHINGTON:Eight Latin American governments on Monday joined Costa Rica in calling on the United States to end its special treatment for Cuban migrants.

The Ecuadorean foreign minister delivered a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry signed by the foreign ministers of the eight countries and Costa Rica in expressing their “deep concern” that U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants is creating a humanitarian crisis and encouraging “a disorderly, irregular and unsafe flow of Cubans.”

“Cuban citizens risk their lives, on a daily basis, seeking to reach the United States,” the letter says, according to excerpts forwarded by Ecuador’s embassy in the United States. “These people, often facing situations of extreme vulnerability, fall victim to mafias dedicated to people trafficking, sexual exploitation and collective assaults. This situation has generated a migratory crisis that is affecting our countries.”

The letter was signed by the foreign ministers of Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

State Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This situation has generated a migratory crisis that is affecting our countries. Nine Latin American governments

The countries have been caught up in the drama of record-breaking Cuban migration. More than 46,500 Cubans were admitted to the United States without visas during the first 10 months of the 2016 fiscal year, according to the Pew Research Center. That figure compares with more than 43,000 in 2015 and just over 24,000 in 2014.

Several of the countries found themselves caring for thousands of stranded Cubans who were stuck at their borders or in the interior after running out of money to continue the journey.

Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González told McClatchy in an interview last week that the issue has cost his country millions of dollars it doesn’t have and has raised complaints from Costa Ricans about spending resources on stranded foreigners when they were needed by the nation’s own citizens.

“The difficulties between the U.S. and Cuba has a direct consequence on other countries in our region that serve as transit,” González said. “And we are, in a way, paying the consequences of that bilateral relationship.”

The difficulties between the U.S. and Cuba has a direct consequence on other countries in our region that serve as transit.

The nine signatories say the “main cause of the current situation” is the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans who reach American soil to remain in the United States, even if they arrived without legal documentation. The signatories say revising the act would be the first step toward addressing the worsening crisis.

They have called for Kerry to attend a “high-level meeting” to review the issue.

“It is time for the United States to change its outdated policy for Cuban migrants, which is undermining regular and safe migration in our continent,” said Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Guillaume Long.

John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that Kerry had received the letter and said the U.S. was continuing talks with the nine governments. He called on the countries to respect the human rights of migrants and asylum-seekers.

“Irregular migration often involves dangerous journeys that illustrate the inherent risks and uncertainties of involvement with organized crime, including human smugglers and traffickers, in attempts to reach the United States,” Kirby said.

The Obama administration has also been encouraging the countries to enforce their own immigration requirements and send undocumented Cubans back to Cuba. But Cuban activists worry that that policy will only encourage Cubans to instead flee the island on dangerous ocean voyages to reach Florida.

The number of Cubans making the sea trip has nearly doubled in the past two years, Coast Guard statistics show.

Related reading: Creating the exile pool

Normalization has so far not included an end to the Cuban Adjustment Act, which encourages Cubans to become undocumented aliens. Mexicans are told to stay home or “get in line” for a green card, but Cubans who reach US shores can be fast-tracked to citizenship. More here.

Meanwhile, there is Venezuela.

WashingtonPost: VENEZUELA’S MAN-MADE humanitarian crisis is deepening. The Associated Press reports that the typical resident of Caracas, the capital, spends 35 hours a month waiting in line to buy food, and 9 in 10 say they can’t find enough . After the government of Nicolás Maduro opened six border crossings to neighboring Colombia on Aug. 13, about 380,000 Venezuelans poured across in the first eight days, desperately seeking supplies. Sackings of food warehouses by hungry mobs have been reported; 50 animals in the Caracas zoo are said to have starved to death. Meanwhile, Mr. Maduro refuses to allow aid shipments into the country, contending they are unneeded.

The United States and most of Venezuela’s neighbors have responded to this collapse of a once-prosperous oil-producing country by doing their best to ignore it. They issue feckless statements calling for “dialogue,” overlooking the by-now obvious reality that the regime has no intention of seriously negotiating with the opposition. This week, it will become harder for the United States and others to remain apathetic. Opposition parties are seeking to organize a mass demonstration in Caracas on Thursday; last Saturday, the regime responded by transferring a top leader from house arrest to prison. The government appears intent on crushing the protest movement, rather than responding to its legitimate demands.

First among these demands is the staging of a referendum by the end of this year to recall Mr. Maduro from office. Venezuela’s constitution provides for such a process, and though its requirements are onerous, the opposition has shown it can meet them. Early this month, the government-controlled electoral authority acknowledged that the recall campaign had met an initial requirement for gathering petition signatures across the country. But it then released a timetable indicating that a referendum would not be held by the end of this year, the effective deadline for a meaningful vote. If Mr. Maduro were recalled after Jan. 10, he would be replaced by his vice president, rather than an opposition nominee.

Mr. Maduro, who polls show would win as little as 15 percent of the vote in a recall ballot, has been gloating over this obstructionism. He ordered the firing of hundreds of government employees who signed recall petitions. When a U.S. federal indictment was unsealed against a general for drug trafficking, Mr. Maduro appointed him interior minister, in charge of domestic security forces.

Prodded by the secretary general of the Organization of American States, the Obama administration and 14 other governments issued a statement on Aug. 11 calling for the referendum to be held “without delays.” On Sunday, the State Department toughened its rhetoric, condemning the imprisonment of opposition leader Daniel Ceballos as “an effort to intimidate and impede the Venezuelan people’s right to peacefully express their opinion September 1.” The administration should be prepared to act if the regime responds violently to the protest. It should quickly punish officials involved in repression and press the OAS to move against Venezuela under its democracy charter.

At the same time, the United States should begin coordinating with Colombia, Brazil and other nations about ways to respond to the humanitarian crisis. As Mr. Maduro cracks down, Venezuelans are likely to get hungrier.

Generational terror by Hamas and Islamic State

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

DailyMotion

HuffingtonPost: Five children appear to shoot prisoners to death in a new video released by the self-described Islamic State.

The video identifies the kids as British, Egyptian, Kurdish, Tunisian and Uzbek, and the location as the ISIS-controlled province of Ar-Raqqa in Syria, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence, a terrorism analysis firm.

The Huffington Post is not providing the video here to avoid promoting the extremist group’s propaganda.

The Islamic State has a well-documented history of recruiting children into its ranks and enlisting them in brutal acts. As of February, CNN reported the group had eulogized 88 child soldiers killed in battle, the vast majority of them from Syria and Iraq.

A July story in Der Spiegel details the harrowing ordeal of two adolescent Iraqi brothers captured by ISIS and placed in a juvenile military training camp. They described being trained in the use of guns and other weapons, and beaten to harden them for combat. On one occasion, a fighter at the front demonstrated beheading on a real captive.

The brothers, who escaped after one of them was brutally beaten for secretly calling his mother on a mobile phone, said they found it easier to adjust to the violent lifestyle after they took certain pills they were given. The drug might have been fenethylline (sold under the brand name Captagon), a stimulant popular with ISIS that fosters energy and feelings of strength and invincibility.

There are currently 1,500 male children serving ISIS in Iraq and Syria, according to estimates cited by Der Spiegel. In the face of a U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes, the group escalated its use of children in propaganda videos in 2015, an expert told the German news source.

Away from its home base, the Islamic State appears to be laying the groundwork for juvenile forces as well. ISIS operatives who have taken over parts of Afghanistan can be seen in a November documentary by PBS’s “Frontline” instructing young children how to use weapons and kill those they consider infidels.

Social Security Insolvency Estimates

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

Social Security’s looming $32 trillion shortfall

CNBC: You can look at the financial health of Social Security in many ways.

The official version, found in the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees’ annual report, is this:

Social Security’s total income is projected to exceed its total cost through 2019, as it has since 1982. After 2019, interest income and money taken out of reserves will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual deficits until 2034.

By then, if Congress does nothing, the federal government will collect enough in payroll taxes to pay about 75 percent of scheduled retirement benefits until 2090.

The Social Security Administration projects that unfunded obligations will reach $11.4 trillion by 2090. That’s up $700 billion from the $10.7 trillion the administration projected for its 2089 shortfall.

Infinite horizon

Despite the huge numbers, there’s even a less generous way of looking at the fiscal shortfall.

A projection, known as the “infinite horizon,” takes into account all the program’s future liabilities, even those beyond the 75-year period that Social Security actuaries typically use in their calculations.

Under the infinite horizon, Social Security will have $32.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities by 2090, $6.3 trillion more than last year’s projection. (See the chart below.)

The full chart is here. The infinite horizon calculation is the most important part of the trustees’ annual report, said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor and co-author of “Get What’s Yours,” a best-seller about how to maximize claiming Social Security retirement benefits.

“We’re not broke in 20 years to 30 years, we’re broke now,” Kotlikoff said. “All the bills have been kept off the books by Congress and presidential administrations for six decades.”

The $6.3 trillion increase in the infinite horizon projection shows that Social Security Administration actuaries are more pessimistic about economic and wage growth, Kotlikoff said.

A reduction in the interest rate used to make calculations under the infinite horizon projection from 2.9 percent to 2.7 percent was the main contributor to the rise in the unfunded obligations forecast from last year, according to the trustees’ report.

“You can’t hide the numbers under a bunch of malarkey,” said Kotlikoff, who is running for president as a write-in candidate.

Kotlikoff had an influential ally in his quest for better accounting for Social Security and other federal programs. In 2013, Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that would require the federal government to use infinite horizon calculations and so-called fiscal gap accounting, which considers the difference between the government’s projected financial obligations and the present value of all projected future tax and other revenue. The bill, which Kotlikoff championed, did not pass.

Presidential proposals

Presidential candidates from the two major political parties have yet to present detailed plans for how they will address Social Security’s shortfall.

Hillary Clinton said she won’t cut Social Security benefits and will expand the program, especially for widows and people who have left the workforce to take care of children, spouses or relatives.

She plans to ask “the highest-income Americans to pay more, including options to tax some of their income above the current Social Security cap and taxing some of their income not currently taken into account by the Social Security system,” according to her campaign website.

Currently, earnings up to $118,500 are taxed for Social Security benefits. Eliminating the cap this year would mean the trust fund reserves would be depleted in 2055 instead of 2034, according to estimates from Karen Smith, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

Clinton opposes “any attempts to gamble seniors’ retirement security on the stock market through privatization.” However, investing a portion of Social Security’s trust fund assets in stocks would likely reduce the need for higher payroll taxes without disrupting the capital markets, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Donald Trump has said he wants to preserve Social Security, saying the key to do so is to have “an economy that is robust and growing.”

Stronger economic growth may delay Social Security’s insolvency, but it would not fix its underlying fiscal problems, according to Smith’s research.

So what would have a big impact on Social Security’s fiscal standing if you don’t cut benefits? Raising payroll taxes. Smith found that increasing payroll taxes by 3 percentage points from 12.4 percent — half paid by employers and half paid by employees — to 15.4 percent would make Social Security reserves last at least 53 years longer, or until 2087.

Few politicians are proposing that fix for future generations.

Russia Helping Tehran Protect Fordow Nuclear Facility

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

This is rather old news until the actual deployment, yet John Kerry and Europe has not sanctioned Russia and Iran must be only doing peaceful activities at Fordow, which is built inside a mountain.

Iran began constructing the Fordow uranium enrichment facility in secret as early as 2006. It was publicly revealed by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in September 2009, shortly after these nations presented evidence of the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The facility appears to be a repurposed tunnel complex, with the main enrichment halls buried within a mountain in order to harden the facility against a potential military strike. Satellite imagery dates the construction of the facility to a period between June 2006 and July 2007, while Iran has told the IAEA that it began to build the facility during the second half of 2007. After the disclosure of the plant’s existence, Iran downplayed its role in its nuclear program, moving slowly to install the planned number of centrifuges at the site. In mid-2011, it announced it would install advanced centrifuges at the FFEP rather than IR-1 centrifuges. The facility is designed to hold approximately 3,000 centrifuges. It never installed advanced centrifuges in the facility, but instead deployed the IR-1 model.

The Fordow site has two enrichment halls, Units 1 and 2, each designed to hold 8 cascades of 174 centrifuges per cascade. Iran fully outfitted the facility in late 2012 – early 2013.

On June 8, 2011, Iran announced that it planned to move its production of 19.75% enriched uranium from the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) to the FFEP, and that it would enrich 3.5% low-enriched uranium produced at the Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz. Since February 2013, Iran has produced 19.75 percent enriched uranium at the FFEP using sets of tandem cascades to enrich uranium to 19.75 percent and strip the tails to natural uranium (0.711 percent). Iran claims that the 19.75 percent enriched uranium produced in this facility will be used to produce medical isotopes in the Tehran Research Reactor.

TEHRAN, Aug. 29 (MNA) – The first footage showing the deployment of S-300 missile defense system at Fordow nuclear site was aired Sunday, August 28. The footage was shown following Ayat. Khamenei’s speech in which he stressed the defensive nature of the system and the necessity for upgrading the country’s defense capabilities.

Iran deploys long-range missiles to Fordo nuclear site

Iranian students form a human chain during a protest to defend their country’s nuclear program outside the Fordo Uranium Conversion Facility in Qom in 2013 (AFP Photo/Chavosh Homavandi)

Tehran (AFP) – Tehran has deployed a recently delivered Russian-made long-range missile system to central Iran to protect its Fordo nuclear facility, state television said Sunday.

Protecting nuclear facilities is paramount “in all circumstances” General Farzad Esmaili, the commander of Iran’s air defences, told the IRIB channel.

“Today, Iran’s sky is one of the most secure in the region,” he added.

A video showed an S-300 carrier truck in Fordo, raising its missile launchers toward the sky, next to other counter-strike weaponry.

The images were aired hours after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a speech to air force commanders, including Esmaili, in which he stressed that Iranian military power was for defensive purposes only.

“Continued opposition and hype on the S-300 or the Fordo site are examples of the viciousness of the enemy,” Khamenei said.

“The S-300 system is a defence system not an assault one, but the Americans did their best for Iran not to get hold of it.”

The Fordo site, built into a mountain near the city of Qom has stopped enriching uranium since the January implementation of a nuclear deal with world powers.

Under the historic accord, Iran dismantled most of its estimated 19,000 centrifuges — giant spinning machines that enrich uranium, keeping only 5,000 active for research purposes.

Iran and the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia negotiated for more than two years before signing a historic July 2015 agreement that removed some international sanctions in return for curbs on Tehran’s controversial atomic programme.