U.N. Experts: Americans' Right to Protest Is in Danger Under Trump

Posted on Apr 2, 2017

By Common Dreams staff

Demonstrators against the Dakota Access pipeline project face police in Bismarck, N.D., in late 2016. Throughout the United States, anti-protest bills are being passed, raising an alarm among human rights experts. (Donald Kaufman / Truthdig)

At least 19 U.S. states have introduced bills that attack the right to protest since Donald Trump's election as president, an "alarming and undemocratic" trend, U.N. human rights investigators said this week.
Maina Kiai and David Kaye, independent U.N. experts on freedom of peaceful assembly and expression respectively, are calling on lawmakers in the United States to stop the "alarming" trend of "undemocratic" anti-protest bills designed to criminalize or impede the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression.
"The trend also threatens to jeopardize one of the United States' constitutional pillars: free speech," they said in a statement, calling for action to reverse such legislation.
"From the Black Lives Matter movement, to the environmental and Native American movements in opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and the Women's Marches, individuals and organizations across society have mobilized in peaceful protests, as it is their right under international human rights law and US law," Kiai and Kaye said.● The Arizona State Senate in February voted to expand racketeering laws to allow police to arrest anyone involved in a protest and seize their assets, treating demonstrators like organized criminals. ::darthvader::
● Portland, Oregon activists organizing against police killings of Black men, white nationalist politicians, and the countless systems of racism throughout our local, state, and federal governments are now considered "domestic terrorists" by Department of Homeland Security. ::facepalm:: ::darthvader::
● In January, North Dakota Republicans proposed legislation to legalize running over protesters if they are blocking roadways. (The legislation failed, for now.) ::facepalm::
● Missouri lawmakers want to make it illegal to wear a robe, mask or disguise (remarkably, a hoodie would count) to a protest.
● In Minnesota, following the police shooting death of Philando Castile, protests caused part of a highway to shut down. Then, at the beginning of the state legislative session, Minnesota legislators drafted bills that would punish highway protestors with heavy fines and prison time and would make protesters liable for the policing costs of an entire protest if they individually were convicted of unlawful assembly or public nuisance.
● Republicans in Washington state have proposed a plan to reclassify as a felony civil disobedience protests that are deemed "economic terrorism."
● Lawmakers in North Carolina want to make it a crime to heckle lawmakers. ::facepalm::
● In Indiana, conservatives want to allow police to use "any means necessary" to remove activists from a roadway. ::dictator::
● Colorado lawmakers are considering a big increase in penalties for environmental protesters. Activists who tamper with oil or gas equipment could be, under the measure, face felony charges and be punished with up to 18 months behind bars and a fine of up to $100,000.
● A bill before the Virginia state legislature would dramatically increase punishment for people who "unlawfully" assemble after "having been lawfully warned to disperse." Those who do so could face a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
The experts took particular issue with the characterization in some bills of protests being "unlawful" or "violent".
"There can be no such thing in law as a violent protest," the experts said. "There are violent protesters, who should be dealt with individually and appropriately by law enforcement. One person's decision to resort to violence does not strip other protesters of their right to freedom of peaceful assembly. This right is not a collective right; it is held by each of us individually," the experts stressed.
"Peaceful assembly," they added, "is a fundamental right, not a privilege, and the government has no business imposing a general requirement that people get permission before exercising that right."
The experts also emphasized that legislators should be mindful of the important role that the right to freedom of peaceful assembly has played in the history of American democracy and the fight for civil rights.
"We call on the U.S. authorities, at the federal and state level, to refrain from enacting legislation that would impinge on the exercise of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, expression and opinion," they concluded.

April 5, 2017 | Russ Baker and C. Collins http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/05/felix-s...mp-forgot/

More About Felix Sater the Problematical Friend Trump Forgot

FBI Informant at the Heart of Trump-Russia Story

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Emilio Labrador / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), and Boing Boing CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Note to Readers: Our recent 6,500-word exclusive on Donald Trump and Russia was, admittedly, long. But based on the tremendous response, you liked it a lot. We still weren't able to fit in everything important, so in the coming days we'll be publishing supplementary pieces with noteworthy material and additional reporting and analysis. Here is one such piece.
WhoWhatWhy's March 27 exclusive on Donald Trump, the FBI, Russia, and the mob focused on several key figures. One was Felix Sater, a Trump associate and prized FBI informant. We delved into his criminal past, his company, Bayrock, and its work with the Trump Organization.
Sater was even more intimately involved with Trump and his fortunes than we initially realized. According to a sworn 2008 deposition in a suit Trump filed against the author Timothy O'Brien, the developer gave Sater's company, Bayrock, an exclusive on all development deals in Russia.
Sater expanded on the point of how central their relationship was.
"It's highly unlikely I've had conversations prior to the end of 2005 with almost any developer where I didn't use my Trump card' my Trump card' was what is my value added, my competitive advantage. My competitive advantage is anybody can come in and build a tower. [But] I can build a Trump Tower, because of my relationship with Trump."
Sater had even proposed to take the Mar-a-Lago brand global, to pitch a "high-end resort situation." He was going around the world selling Trump's name while playing to Trump's megalomaniacal instincts.
Because of his close relationship with Trump, understanding more about Sater may prove illuminating as the story continues to unfold. Let's go back to the beginning for some background as well as previously unreported information on figures at Sater's first employer who later showed up in the recent Trump political orbit.

"The Shabby Side of the Street"

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Felix Sater was born in 1966 in what was then the Soviet Union. Sater's father, who had been born in Kiev, Ukraine then a republic of the Soviet Union moved the family to Israel when Sater was a child. In the 1970s, the Saters emigrated to the United States and joined the expanding enclave of Russian-speaking immigrants in Brooklyn.
Sater took some classes at Pace University, and from about the age of 20 he went to work at a series of brokerages, eventually landing at Gruntal & Co. in 1988.
By the 1980s, the once-staid Gruntal was known for its "anything goes" atmosphere on the "shabby side of the street," where the emphasis was on volume of sales rather than profits for customers, and punctuated by charges of racial and sexual harassment an "Island of Misfit Toys" where no one seemed in control.
Regulators nearly shut it down in 1995. "The culture at Gruntal was to push as much product as possible, whether the client makes money or not," notes an unnamed former executive quoted in a 2003 Fortune profile of Gruntal by Richard Behar.
Despite its less-than-sterling reputation, a number of future well-known financiers cycled through Gruntal. The future billionaire "activist investor" Carl Icahn (now President Trump's special adviser on regulatory reform) created the options department at the firm in the late 1960s before its reputation took a turn for the worse in the 1970s.

Another Fox in the Hen House

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Here's another Sater contemporary: Steven A. Cohen. He went to work for Gruntal straight out of college in 1978; Cohen became part of the options arbitrage department and was managing his own pool of funds by 1984, when he bragged about making $100,000 a day.
Cohen who is invariably described as "secretive" finally left Gruntal in 1993 to found SAC Capital Management, going on to run what again was referred to as "a highly secretive and stupendously successful" group of hedge funds worth $4 billion by 2003. He became one of the wealthiest men on Wall Street, despite a later years-long effort by US Attorney Preet Bharara to make a case against him for alleged criminal insider trading. He was never charged with a crime, though SAC agreed to pay $1.8 billion in fines.
We were intrigued by the connections between Kevin J. O'Connor and Cohen. Trump brought O'Connor, formerly Number 3 in George W. Bush's Department of Justice (DOJ), onto his transition team to help oversee DOJ picks. He had worked for Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani's law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, and then, in 2015, began serving as Cohen's own general counsel a position he continued to hold during his transition advisory role about DOJ.
With Cohen having cut a deal in 2013 with the DOJ, and with Trump bringing in Cohen's guy for advice on picking prosecutors and then firing Cohen's nemesis Bharara, it seems clear who has thus far won.

Stephen Feinberg, Also in Trump's Ear

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Another previously unreported connection between Sater and Trump World is Gruntal alum Stephen Feinberg, who also worked at the firm at the same time as Sater. Feinberg joined Gruntal in 1985 and left in 1992, when he co-founded Cerberus Capital Management. This extremely successful private equity firm is deeply involved with outside contracts in military and intelligence work. As Bloomberg noted, "Feinberg has bought companies that refuel spy planes, train Green Berets, make sniper rifles and watch America's foes from space."
By 2017, Feinberg was worth about $1.2 billion, according to Forbes, and Cerberus managed over $30 billion in assets. Feinberg, one of Trump's largest campaign contributors, was a member of the economic advisory team during the transition, and early on he was tapped by Trump to lead a review of intelligence agencies, with the backing of advisors Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, it was reported. That plan was later walked back; no reporting on the topic mentioned a possible connection to Felix Sater.
(Neither Cohen nor Feinberg could immediately be found in the broker-listing database maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA], at Gruntal or elsewhere; standard biographies indicate that both Cohen and Feinberg "managed" funds at Gruntal, thus precluding their need to be registered as brokers. However, in a 2003 Bloomberg Businessweek profile, a former boss notes that Cohen made $8,000 profit there "his very first day.")

A Cutting Remark

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Late in 1991, Sater was at a chic upper East Side restaurant-bar with Salvatore Lauria, a friend from Gruntal, celebrating Lauria's success at passing the brokerage exam. (Lauria had been trading quite successfully, but illegally, before he passed his exam, apparently a not-uncommon practice at Gruntal, according to The Scorpion and the Frog, by Lauria and journalist David S. Barry.)
Photo credit: documentcloud.org

According to Lauria, Sater flew into a sudden rage at comments made by a man at the bar about a woman, in a scene to which he would remain forever tied. He smashed a martini glass on the bar and shoved its stem into the man's face, severing a nerve, resulting in injuries that required more than 100 stitches.
For that crime, Sater not only spent a year in jail, but the National Association of Securities Dealers barred him for life from working as a broker or otherwise associating with firms that sell securities to the public.
Yet by 1994, Sater, Lauria, Gennady Klotsman, and another Gruntal trader controlled the brokerage White Rock Partners and Company, which in 1995 changed its name to State Street Capital Markets Corporation. They brought in a number of traders who had worked at Gruntal as well as other, mobbed-up brokerages, including members and associates of four of the five major New York City organized crime families, such as the nephew of mobster Carmine "the Snake" Persico and the brother-in-law of Gambino hit man Sammy "the Bull" Gravano. Klotsman, like Sater, had been born in the Soviet Union and was connected to the Russian mob.
White Rock existed only to defraud its customers. For the few years it was in existence, its illegal profits reached an astounding $40 million to $60 million and it fleeced thousands (some of whom were Holocaust survivors). The scams centered around "pump and dump" schemes: artificially inflating the price of stocks, selling them to unsophisticated, often elderly, buyers usually through cold calls and using high-pressure tactics and then walking away with the commission.
It did so by gaining control of certain "house stocks" and then hiking their prices through various illegal schemes, including paying off complicit brokerages to sell them, and then aggressively selling those stocks. There were also phony investment opportunities in companies whose shares White Rock insiders and other associates secretly controlled. Barred, unregistered, and non-compliant brokers, and brokers with long histories of complaints also found a home at White Rock. The principals then laundered the funds.
One of White Rock/State Street's scams was a phony investment scheme for a casino in Colorado near Black Hawk, about an hour west of Denver, associated with Country World Casinos, an over-the-counter stock based in Pennsylvania. State Street and affiliated brokerages touted the stock, while complicated shell companies shuffled the funds back to the principals.
In 1999, Country World roped in Max Baer, Jr., who played "Jethro" on "The Beverly Hillbillies," in an agreement to create "Jethro's Beverly Hillbillies Mansion and Casino;" Baer had long nurtured hopes of founding a chain of casinos after he had secured a licence to use the Beverly Hillbillies name. The casino never happened, of course.
Another company, Holly Products, bought a small electronics manufacturer and moved it to a Navajo reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico; tribal officials contributed the collateral so that the company could obtain a loan to renovate a manufacturing site there. The tribe lost the collateral $600,000 when the factory closed. Frank Coppa Sr., identified by the government as a captain of the Bonanno organized crime family, owned Holly Products.
Alleged Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich.
Photo credit: Mark Nilstein / Getty Images

White Rock's rise very much coincides with the arrival in the US in 1992 of Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov, an associate of Russian boss Semion Mogilevich. Ivankov promptly went to work brutally organizing the Russian mob in the US. Soon he launched a number of complicated large-scale money laundering operations. When the Feds finally tracked Ivankov down (after he skipped out of his Trump Tower pad and abandoned his haunts at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City), the Feds arrested him in an early morning raid in Brooklyn in 1995.
By 1996, the Feds had begun to close in on State Street. According to court documents, State Street stopped operating that year, and Sater and Lauria left the country. Eventually, Sater, Lauria, and Klotsman signed agreements to serve as "cooperating witnesses" against the 19 other defendants; Sater signed his agreement in December 1998.
Sater never served any time, nor was he forced to pay any restitution to his victims, as his cooperation agreement mandated: $60 million. Just a few years later, Sater was working at the real estate firm Bayrock, in Trump Tower, a floor below the Trump Organization, making deals with Donald Trump himself.
A request to Sater's attorney for an interview received no reply by publication time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Friday, the stock price of the military contractor Raytheon briefly surged after the U.S. attack on a Syrian airbase, which used 59 of the company's Tomahawk missiles, estimated to cost $1.4 million apiece. While the stock surge was brief, it called attention to the fact that President Trump himself has held personallyhas been personally invested in Raytheon in the past. A 2015 Federal Election [Commission] disclosure, filed when Trump launched his presidential bid, reveals that he held Raytheon stocks worth $1,000 to $15,000 in value.
AMY GOODMAN: While the value is low, the revelations have raised additional questions about the lack of transparency in Trump's financial holdings and the fact that he could potentially benefit from almost any military decision he makes as president. Overall, the stocks of military contractors, such as Boeing and General Dynamics, have increased since Trump's election, further fueled by his promise of an "historic" tens of billions of dollars' increase in U.S. military spending.
For more, we're joined by Bill Hartung. He's the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
William Hartung, welcome back to Democracy Now!
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us, as those Tomahawk cruise missiles were pummeling this base, though not enough to take it outit was immediately in use againhow did President Trump profit personally?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, as far as we know, he may still have shares in Raytheon, as reported in his financial disclosure. Of course, as with all things Trump, there's a black box here, because he's not reporting his tax returns, he hasn't done a blind trust. As you said, virtually anything he does, not just in the military sphere, could benefit him, his family, his inner circle financially. And the only way to deal with that is release the tax returns, that people have demanded, and have a true blind trust that's not run by his family. But it'sno question, it's an outrage to have the commander-in-chief profiting from a military contract in the middle of a conflict, however small the amount may be. And the fact that he's not willing to disclose his current position, in some ways, makes it even worse.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you, in terms of thisthe emphasis on military action that's emerging in the first few weeks of the Trump administrationyou wrote a piece for TomDispatch titled "Could War with Iran Be on Washington's Agenda?" Could you talk about that?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Sure. Well, there's this sort of notion that, you know, the adults in the room are Mattis and McFarlandrather, McMaster, who are, you know, military people, they'll be careful, they know the costs of war. But they're also among the most hawkish generals of their generation. Mattis himself wanted to attack Iran during the Iraq War, which is one of the reasons
AMY GOODMAN: This is "Mad Dog" Mattis, self-described.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, exactly, is his self-described moniker. And he, you know, in the middle of that war, actually left the administration, because he wanted to attack them at the very same time they were negotiating to limit Iran's nuclear options. So, they've already stepped up in Yemenmore special forces, more airstrikes. They're still arming the Saudis, who are killing thousands with civilian bombings. So, they see that as a strike against Iran. Of course, Iran is not the problem there, but their worldview says it is. And now the step up in Syria, of course, Iran is allies with Assad, so it's another kind of potential strike at Iranian concerns. Now the question is: Will they go further? And I think there, you know, Iran would have many ways to respondthrough nonstate actors, through missile strikes. It's not a small country. You know, invading Iran would make the Iraq War look like a walk in the park. So, how are these military people going to address this? But there's certainly a danger of some sort of military action. And, of course, they're not going to telegraph it. I mean, Trump apparently decided this on rather short notice, if we're to believe the accounts. He saw something on TV, and he got exercised.
AMY GOODMAN: You've got the advertisements on television, and then the news being an advertisement, as well, for these weapons contractors. Let's turn to MSNBC's Brian Williams the night of the Tomahawk cruise missile attack. AMY GOODMAN: I daresay Leonard Cohen might be rolling over in his grave and not rock 'n' rollin'.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: No question.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you know, obviously, it's obscene to worship weaponry, whoever it's targeted at. And on Raytheon's webpage, where they're advertising the cruise missile, they have exactly the same kind of pictures. So, to have them on MSNBC and CNN is all the publicity money could buy and more. And, of course, this has happened before in wartime, and even in the first Persian Gulf War under Bush the elder, where these kinds of displays have upped the images of these companies and almost made the weapons seem benign. There's all these things about how accurate they are and how they're not going to hit civilians, which has been disproved almost uniformly in the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. So there's that. And also it's a question of how it's going to affect Trump's push for his military buildup, because he's going to sort of posture as the wartime president. You know, as Fareed Zakaria said, much to his detriment, he's now the president; he's proved he's the president, because he can launch a military strikewhich, again, to me, is not what this country should stand for.

Cliff Varnell Wrote:

Trump has a new bromance.

Putin out, Xi in.

With an eye on mega-fortune for Trump, Inc.

While the MSM won't mention it, Eric Prince is the brother of DeVoss and has long been a hidden adviser to Trumpf.

U.S. Drops Mother of All Bombs' in Afghanistan

Posted on Apr 13, 2017


A Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon is prepared for testing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in 2003. (Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. military announced on Thursday that it dropped a 21,600-pound non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), nicknamed the "mother of all bombs," was developed in 2003 but never used on a battlefield.CNN reported: According to the online news site Heavy, the Achin district has a population of around 95,000 people.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in a subsequent press conference that the U.S. "took all precautions necessary to prevent civilian casualties."
"The United States takes the fight against ISIS very seriously and in order to defeat the group we must deny them operational space," he added.
Pressed by reporters for more information on the use of MOAB, Spicer responded, "Please refer to Department of Defense for specifics."
According to CNN, the military is still "assessing the damage" from MOAB.
A 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times explained the massive bomb's effect: According to The Fiscal Times, MOAB "took $314 million to develop and has a unit cost of $16 million." Below, watch a video of a test drop of MOAB:

Some very interesting analysis and history from John Pilger on Trump and current political hotspots.

US has quietly dropped "Free Tibet"...