More than just "Locker Room Talk"

It caused jaws to drop when, just before the 2016 presidential election, an audio tape was released in which the Republican candidate bragged to a TV host named Bush that being a celebrity meant he could just kiss women and "grab them by the pussy."

Trump was quick to deny he'd ever done anything of the sort, dismissing it as "locker room talk." Christo-fascist evangelical preachers uttered a sigh of relief heard across the American  south.

Now there's a new book out - "All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator." The book, it is said, chronicles 43 instances of Trump being Trump and women being left with bruised nether regions.

The except doesn’t dig into all of those allegations, but it does detail a story by Karen Johnson, a woman who says she attended a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida club. At the time of the New Year’s Eve party, Trump was reportedly dating Melania Knauss, who he would later marry, and engaging in what the book called “a wave of allegedly unwanted touching.” 

After midnight, Johnson said she was preparing to return home with her ailing husband and a relative. She went to the bathroom, and as she walked out, she said that Trump pulled her behind a tapestry.

“I’m a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he’s strong, and he just kissed me,” she told the authors of the book, Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy. “I was so scared because of who he was... I don’t even know where it came from. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”

After the alleged incident, Trump repeatedly called Johnson, offering to fly her to New York for the day. She kept turning him down, and eventually, the calls stopped. Johnson told her relative about the incident, as well as a friend; the authors of the book corroborated Johnson’s account with her friend.

She was afraid to tell anybody what had happened, for fear of being told that she must have “asked for it” in some way. But when she heard the “Access Hollywood tape,” Johnson said she was shocked.
“When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the pussy,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me — he grabbed me there in my front and pulled me in,” she said.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road - Climate Migration - Central America

Imagine Central America empty. Not exactly empty but heavily depopulated. Think of it as climate change for the Americas.

It's been coming for a while, several years in fact. A variety of plagues from gang violence to devastating severe weather events and food shortages has resulted in Central Americans in their hundreds trying to find refuge in the United States.

Heat waves, droughts, crop failures and worse have left Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua particularly hard hit. Governments in those countries have urged their people to fight famine by eating iguanas, creatures that are sometimes the family pet. That was four years ago. Recent reports indicate even the iguana are now depleted.

What to do, what to do? Central America is one region expected to be among the first to be hit by "climate departure."

2020 - 2023 that's the predicted arrival date of what's being called "climate departure." Think of it as the abrupt transition from "old climate" - the climate you've known all your life - into a "new climate." One of the hallmarks of this new climate is that every year of the new climate will be hotter than the hottest year ever experienced in the old climate. There won't be any cool years, only very hot years.

Climate departure is supposed to set in first in areas such as the Caribbean, Central America and in equatorial regions elsewhere. Insufferable heat will be one problem but heat brings any number of knock-on effects - severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; disease and pest problems; disruption of freshwater resources, on and on and on. If you haven't been following conditions across Central America you should know that they're already on the ropes, have been for years. Here, here, and here.

Recently The Guardian reported that environmental degradation is pushing Central American migrants to Donald Trump's border.

The average temperature in Central America has increased by 0.5C since 1950; it is projected to rise another 1-2 degrees before 2050. This has a dramatic impact on weather patterns, on rainfall, on soil quality, on crops’ susceptibility to disease, and thus on farmers and local economies. Meanwhile, incidences of storms, floods and droughts on are the rise in the region. In coming years, according to the US Agency for International Development, countries in the northern triangle will see decreased rainfall and prolonged drought, writ large. In Honduras, rainfall will be sparse in areas where it is needed, yet in other areas, floods will increase by 60%. In Guatemala, the arid regions will creep further and further into current agricultural areas, leaving farmers out to dry. And El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?

...Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration. An unstable planet and ecosystem lends itself to an unstable society, to divisions, to economic insecurity, to human brutality. When someone’s home becomes less and less livable, they move elsewhere. Wouldn’t each and every one of us do the same? 

This week, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer published a series of pieces about the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands, where farmers are struggling to grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.” A few years ago, I reported from Guatemala’s dry corridor, several hours away from where Blitzer was reporting, where persistent drought had decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which roughly 90% of local farmers relied. It was a wildly different landscape from the one Blitzer described, but it faced the same problem: if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave? 

Camilo Mora, who heads the climate science team at the University of Hawaii that formulated the "climate departure" theory, understands from first-hand experience the link between hunger and violence. Born in Columbia he lived through it.

In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world.And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

Donald Trump, as is his bent, is determined to worsen the plight of these climate migrants and those who haven't yet fled their homelands. His knee-jerk response to the flood of asylum seekers at the US border is to cut humanitarian aid to the countries these refugees were compelled, for the sake of survival, to flee. What do we expect them to do, stay at home and watch their kids die? Who would do that? Would you? I wouldn't.

What makes this all the more outrageous is the behaviour of the petro-states to the catastrophe that greenhouse gases are inflicting on these "little brown people" who, to us, don't matter.  Their lives are already precarious, even hellish, but we, in pursuit of ever more carbon fuel revenue can and will make it fiendishly worse.   Fiendish - that's a fitting appellation for Rachel and Jason; Ford, Moe and Horgan, and the leaders of all three major federal parties.

This migration could reach a breaking point by the early to mid-2020s as climate departure hits the stay-behind Hondurans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans.

UPDATE: Canada closes door on asylum seekers.

It those Central Americans are looking for asylum in Canada, they had better invest in airline tickets. The federal government is changing Canadian asylum law to disqualify migrants who have already applied for asylum in another country. If you somehow make it into the States and claim asylum, you won't be able to travel to Canada for a better shot at being allowed to stay.

How Is This Even Possible? Trump Picks a Fox For the Nation's Hen House.

A new chapter in the "Donald J. Trump Book of Malevolence."

Trump has recently turned his attention to health care so who does he choose as his new healthcare czar? You can't make this stuff up. He goes for Rick Scott, the guy behind the largest medicare fraud in his nation's history.

This is the same Rick Scott who, as governor of Florida, absolutely denied the existence of climate change even as the Sunshine State was battered by one massive hurricane after another.

If the Trump administration has a domestic policy doctrine at this point, it could be described as the following practice: the appointment of industry insiders to Cabinet-level positions in order to deregulate or otherwise surgically dismantle the protections of a given department. 

In this spirit comes the announcement that Florida Senator Rick Scott intends to deliver on President Trump’s promise that the GOP “will soon be known as the party of health care.” On Thursday, Trump told reporters that Scott, and fellow Republican Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, will lead the party’s push on health-care reform. 

“They are going to come up with something really spectacular,” the president said.

If by spectacular, he means a candidate who was at the helm of a company that pleaded guilty to historic efforts to defraud Medicare, the president has found his man. In the 1990s, Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA, a company that, under his direction, owned more than 340 hospitals, 135 surgery centers, and 550 home-health locations by the time Scott resigned in 1997. That year, federal agents announced an investigation into whether or not the company defrauded Medicare and Medicaid on a massive scale. Turns out, they did: According to Politifact’s summary of the settlement Columbia/HCA made with the Justice Department, the company took the following actions while Scott was CEO:

Columbia billed Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs for tests that were not necessary or ordered by physicians; 

The company attached false diagnosis codes to patient records to increase reimbursement to the hospitals; 

The company illegally claimed non-reimbursable marketing and advertising costs as community education; 

Columbia billed the government for home health-care visits for patients who did not qualify to receive them.

In corporation-friendly America, scofflaws walk. No jail time. Just fines. Columbia paid $1.7 billion in fines and other costs and penalties but no one went to jail (sound familiar?).

Scott left the company in disgrace and with oodles of money.  How much? Who knows but it was more than enough to buy him, a medicare scofflaw, a ticket to the Governor's Mansion.

In 2010, Scott spent $75 million of his own fortune to become the governor of Florida; after vowing he wouldn’t do that again, Scott then spent $12.8 million of his family’s money to propel his 2014 reelection campaign. To make it something of an exorbitant tradition, Scott self-financed his 2018 campaign to the tune of $63.6 million.

Hmm, I wonder if Scott and Conrad Black are pals. They were both resident in Florida around the same time only, for part of it, Conrad's abode was a penitentiary cell.

Jennifer Rubin - Trump Is Losing It.

She's a conservative pundit. That said, she writes for the Washington Post. She gets her paycheque from Bezos, the guy Trump routinely targets. Still, Jennifer Rubin makes some the arguments that Donald Trump is coming unglued.

In the past 24 hours, Trump - who will be 74 in November 2020 and is "tired," according to aides - has: 

Falsely declared multiple times that his father was born in Germany. (Fred Trump was born in New York.) 

Declared that wind turbines cause cancer. 

Confused "origins" and "oranges" in asking reporters to look into the "oranges of the Mueller report." 

Told Republicans to be more "paranoid" about vote-counting.

...I don't presume to diagnose him or to render judgment on his health. All of us, however, should evaluate his words and actions. 

If you had a relative who spoke this way, you would urge him to get checked out or advise him to slow down (although Trump's schedule, with its hours of "executive time," is already lighter than the schedules of many retirees). Remember that this guy is the commander in chief, holder of the nuclear codes. 

...Collectively, we need to stop treating his conduct as normal. Politicians should start saying aloud what we all intuitively understand: Trump is unravelling before our eyes. 

There is reason to be concerned about how he'll make it through the rest of his term. Giving him another four years is unimaginable.

Cambridge Analytica - "In the Beginning"

It began as a means to thwart Islamist recruitment. But then...

Here is Chris Wylie describing how they built the technology that came to be diverted into the effort to skew Brexit and the 2016 American elections.

What many don’t know is that Cambridge Analytica has its origins in another company, SCL Group. It is a British military contractor, and when I first started working there CA did not exist as a structure at all. Our task when I joined was to map out and predict the spread of radical Islamic narratives online and to analyze how recruiters are radicalizing young men and coercing them to do terrible things. We would then build systems and tools to act as early warning signals, so that a military or civil agency could interfere with recruiting and radicalization operations in different parts of the world. It all changed as soon as Steve Bannon sat at the helm of the company. All the technologies that were designed to interfere with the effectiveness and cohesiveness of terrorist organizations got fully inverted. With a few tweaks, they were now used against voters in the American elections – we started looking at ordinary Americans the same way the military was looking at radicals, and the dirty game of disinformation began to unravel.

Initially our algorithms easily identified parts of the American population that were more narcissistic, neurotic and conspiratorial. They were then targeted with messaging that encouraged more conspiratorial and neurotic thinking and lured them into forums, chat rooms and Facebook groups with people who shared the same thinking – or oftentimes bots that were parroting the same narratives. Once these groups grew to include a couple of thousand members, local events would be set up. At that point, even if only 5 percent of users actually showed up to those events, that would be enough to form a tangible community where conspiratorial thinking was completely normalized. What started as a digital fantasy had become their reality. The exact same techniques that the military would use to undermine a narcotics or terrorist operation were being used reversely, to essentially create an American insurgency that then became what we now know as the alt-right.

Wylie believes that, but for Cambridge Analytica's brainwashing techniques, the Brexit Leave victory and the US election of Donald J. Trump would not have occurred.

It is absolutely reasonable to make that assertion, especially if we look at how narrow the margins were for Donald Trump and Brexit – both results were within a couple of percentage points. In Brexit we are talking about less than 2 percent of the vote. You see, because elections are a zero-sum game, you essentially only need one more vote to be the absolute winner. Even if Cambridge Analytica only added a margin to the effectiveness of the campaigns – and we know that it actually targeted millions of people – the Trump and Brexit campaigns wouldn’t need much more. I have few doubts that the outcome would have been different if these shady techniques were not used.

Chris Wylie Resurfaces.

There's nothing we do quite so well as to "lose the plot." We lose our ability to understand or cope with things that are then flushed down the memory hole. We do that a lot on things that are challenging or frightening such as climate change. Someone releases a credible report that, over 30 years, we have caused the loss of half the planet's wild life. A few days later it's down the memory hole, forgotten and then erased.

It's the same story when it comes to technological threats. Remember Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ, shady billionaire Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, the election of Donald Trump, Brexit? It's all largely forgotten now, in some cases swept under the carpet, safely down the memory hole.

So it's timely, a year on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that the journalist who broke the story, Carole Cadwalladr, got together with the boy wonder from Victoria, B.C., Chris Wylie to rehash what happened and how little it achieved.

Wylie is perplexed how the Tory government in Britain simply ignored the whole thing.

“I was asked by a journalist to sum up the story in a minute,” he says, “and I was like: ‘No’. It goes from Trump to Brexit to Russian espionage to military operations in Afghanistan to hacking the president of Nigeria. Where do you even begin?” 

He’s referring to the fact that Cambridge Analytica was part of a much bigger company, SCL, which had worked as a defence contractor for governments and militaries around the world, then branched into elections in developing countries, and, only in its final iteration, entered western politics. That’s one of the things, he says, that “frustrates me about how dominant the Facebook angle of the story was, when there’s so much fucked-up shit that Cambridge Analytica were doing in different parts of the world. But if you go to a developing country and do grossly unethical things, that’s not ‘newsworthy’.”

...If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny to Wylie that one of the biggest takeaways of the story – which was generating 34,000 news stories a day at its height and cost one of the biggest companies on Earth billions – is how it failed. The Brexit angle of the Cambridge Analytica Files, the explosive revelations of a second whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni, fell inexplicably flat. Sanni revealed in the Observer how Vote Leave deliberately broke the law in the way it funnelled money to the data firm AggregateIQ, an associate company of Cambridge Analytica. It’s believed to be the biggest breach of electoral law in a century, but it was given minimal coverage by the BBC and all but ignored by Britain’s political class. The law-breaking was confirmed by the electoral commission in July, and it has now been referred to the police.

“The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.” 

Perhaps what the scandal has really revealed is a situation that is too embarrassing, too disastrous to acknowledge. We know that Facebook has been used to undermine elections all across the world, including our own. But we’re in this strange historical moment where we’ve realised it, but we don’t have the power, currently, to do anything about it.

It is to me, utterly mind-boggling, to hear Theresa May say she's only giving effect to the will of the British public in pursuing Brexit when she knows, everyone knows, the whole Leave campaign was corrupt. Yet in all the hours of debates over Brexit in Westminster I've followed I have not heard a single mention of it. It's as though none of it ever happened.

Russian Spy Poisoned, Steele Dossier, Donald Trump., Russian President Former KGB Commander - Sounds Like a Hollywood Movie

He was a former Russian intelligence officer nabbed in Moscow in 2004 for having betrayed his country to Britain's MI6 in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was a colonel when he retired in 1999, moving on to work for the Russian Foreign Ministry. Tried and convicted of high treason, Sergei Skripal was handed over to the Brits in the "illegals programme" spy swap of 2010.

Days ago Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious on a park bench, the victims of a nerve agent. For a while it sounded like shades of defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with a cup of tea laced with polonium in London in 2006, a murder at the time widely attributed to Vladimir Putin.

Only this time there are other characters on the periphery - Christopher Steele, author of the controversial "dossier" that suggests the Russians have something on Donald Trump.

Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were in critical but stable condition in intensive care after the attack in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon, UK time. There are reportedly fears that Skripal was unlikely to recover, though his daughter has a better chance.

Skripal was convicted of treason and imprisoned in 2006 in Russia for passing intelligence to MI6. In 2010 he was pardoned and sent to the UK as part of a spy swap deal.

The London Telegraph reported that he moved to Salisbury and became close to a security consultant employed by Christopher Steele, a former spy who founded an investigative research firm called Orbis Business Intelligence.

The consultant, who is based in Salisbury, listed work with Orbis on his LinkedIn account, the Telegraph said.

...

The Telegraph said a “hit squad” was dispatched by the Kremlin to assassinate Skripal, to send a message that traitors were not tolerated.

UK intelligence services suspect the attack was delayed by the snowstorm that enveloped Britain last week, which kept Skripal and his daughters indoors and made the assassination squad’s escape from the country more problematic.

“By Sunday afternoon, with Miss Skripal on the brink of returning to Moscow, the assassination squad had little room for manoeuvre and were forced into action in broad daylight in the middle of a busy shopping precinct,” the Telegraph reported.

The Trump dossier – a series of memoranda sent by Steele to his contractor in the US - alleged the Russian secret services possessed compromising material that could be used to blackmail Trump, such as a video of him engaging in “perverted sexual acts” in a Russian hotel.

The sources were described in a report in The New Yorker as hotel staff, a close Trump associate, and a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.

...

Steele redacted his sources from the dossier, fearing exposure would be a death sentence.

In 2016 he briefed some US reporters about the contents of the dossier. In early 2017 Buzzfeed published the dossier in full.

Last year a lawyer for Glenn Simpson, head of the company that commissioned Steele’s investigation of Trump, told the US Senate Judiciary Committee that “somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier”.

Media speculated this was Oleg Erovinkin, a former Russian intelligence officer and chief of staff to the president of oil giant Rosneft. Erovinkin was found dead in his car in December 2016, and it was later claimed he died of a heart attack.

Why would anyone set out to murder Skripal? Whatever Trump did in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant happened in 2013, three years after Skripal was handed over to the Brits. If Skripal contributed anything material to Steele's Trump dossier he would have had to get it from some confidante still at large in Putin's Russia. Maybe that's the answer. Perhaps the Russians attacked Skripal pour encourager les autres, a warning to any leakers in Moscow.

The Whiny Man Baby President Goes After Theresa May

With a skin as thin as Donald Trump's it is not surprising that the Great Orange Bloat took to twitter to fire back at Theresa May for her stiff rebuke this morning. The British prime minister took Trump to task for retweeting three videos put out by the racist, anti-Muslim group, "Britain First."

A statement from No 10 said: “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.

“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right which is the antithesis of the values this country represents, decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the president to have done this.”

Decency, tolerance and respect, why the nerve of that Limey.

Donald Trump has publicly rebuked Theresa May over her criticism of anti-Muslim propaganda, opening an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the transatlantic allies.

“Theresa @theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted on Wednesday evening. “We are doing just fine!”

The angry tirade, crowning one of the most wayward days yet of Trump’s presidency, earned a swift putdown from the US senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who met May at Downing Street last week to discuss terrorism threats to both countries. He tweeted: “PM @theresa_may is one of the great world leaders, I have incredible love and respect for her and for the way she leads the United Kingdom, especially in the face of turbulence.”

Pile On

The Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described the retweets as “abhorrent, dangerous and a threat to our society.” He and several other members of parliament called for the state visit to be cancelled.

The Labour MP David Lammy posted: “Trump sharing Britain First. Let that sink in. The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours. @realDonaldTrump you are not welcome in my country and my city.”

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, urged Trump to remove the retweets. And Brendan Cox, widow of Jo Cox, an MP murdered last year by a man reportedly shouting “Britain first” as she shot and stabbed her, told CNN: “I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order.

“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of an organization that is a hate-driven organization on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics. This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”

Trump does indeed seem to be in some free fall mental meltdown. The guy is unhinged. When you couple his mental instability with his astonishing ignorance and impulsiveness, we, the world, have got a very dangerous loose cannon on the deck.

Trump, Russia and Cambridge Analytica (Maybe the Crew From Victoria Too?)

The plot thickens. The world was awakened to how votes could be hacked, voters brainwashed, by sophisticated software, social networks, and targeted messaging in the upset "leave" vote for Brexit. Fingered in that was a small company from Victoria, B.C., Aggregate IQ, and a shadowy young man from Western Canada, Chris Wylie.

Aggregate IQ and Wylie are believed to have links to American rightwing billionaire, Robert Mercer, his cohort, Steve Bannon, and his Aggregate IQ clone, Cambridge Analytica.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who is Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved."

Now Cambridge Analytica has shown up on the radar of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They want to know if Cambridge Analytica colluded with Russian interests to hack the election and catapult Donald Trump into the White House.  Go figure.

The company is in the process of turning over documents to HPSCI, according to a source familiar with the committee’s work. Another source close to the investigation said that the probe’s focus on Cambridge Analytica is “fruitful.”

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had holdings in Cambridge Analytica worth between $1 million and $5 million as recently as April of this year, Bloomberg reported. Bannon, now back as the chairman of the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, hasn’t been publicly mentioned as a potential witness for or target of Russia investigators. He previously sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica.

Another key Cambridge Analytica investor is Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire who also generously backed Trump’s presidential campaign. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah introduced several top officials to Trump’s campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Bannon. The Mercers also are partial owners of Breitbart—among their many, many investment in far-right media outlets, think tanks, and political campaigns.

A recent Vanity Fair piece highlighted speculation among Washington Democrats that the Trump campaign’s data operation could point to collusion between Trump and Russia.

Cambridge purports to go beyond the typical voter targeting—relying on online clues like Facebook Likes to give a hint at a user’s political leanings and construct a picture of a voter’s mental state. The “psychographic” picture Cambridge ostensibly provides to a campaign is the ability to tailor a specific message based on personality type – angry, fearful, optimistic and so forth – rather than simply aiming ads at voters from likely convivial candidates.

Russian propaganda on Facebook and other social-media platforms passed itself off as authentic American voices; targeting refugees, posing as an American Muslim groupand backing an Atlanta-based duo supporting Black Lives Matter. Depending on which cohort was being targeted, the efforts encouraged pro-Trump voters to intensify political participation, black voters to abandon Hillary Clinton for Trump, and Muslim voters to consider Clinton an Islamophobe.

The Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda efforts on Facebook have evinced a level of sophistication surprising for a foreign entity, prompting speculation that Russians may have received some kind of targeting help. Such targeting reached voters in states where Clinton enjoyed a traditional advantage but went for Trump, including Michigan and Wisconsin, CNN reported.

In May, the Guardian’s Sunday Observer reported that Cambridge Analytica and its UK affiliate SCL––which owns 10 percent of Cambridge Analytica to Mercer’s 90 percent––have worked in Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova.

“Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities,” the Observer reported.

Meanwhile, where in hell is Chris Wylie?

We Need to Have This Figured Out by 2019. That Is a Huge Challenge. On It Rests Our Democracy.

If we don't get it figured out, you can pretty much kiss goodbye any hope of exercising your "democratic franchise" when you go to the polls to elect our next federal government. Today, money is all that's needed to buy elections, even in Canada.

It bought the Brexit vote. It can do the same thing here.

The money man is American Robert Mercer and he's out to overwhelm democracy with money to create a new conservative order.


In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

...

On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.”

Who’s her father?

“Eric Schmidt.”

Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google?

“Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.”
...

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.

...

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

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Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.


How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved."

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The Military Connection

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

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Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

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Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”
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Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.

David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were with Trinidad’s national security council.”

The security work was to be the prize for the political work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.

“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.

These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for “military and homeland security work”.

In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state?

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Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model that Mercer was buying into. And it brought together all the players: the Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington. 

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Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.

Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.

“He believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And Britain was key to that. He thought that where Britain led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important to him.”

On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as “persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days.

I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.

“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer. Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights. They approached us.”

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Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states. “Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a battle of policy between two parties.”

This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.

Note: This story has been kicking around, slowly emerging, for the past four months. I posted on it in February. This latest article from The Observer connects all the major dots and adds a couple of critical points to the earlier work. Most importantly it links Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Cambridge
Analytica, AggregateIQ to this incredible, democratic suppression machine used to manipulate elections and skew results. Here are a couple of salient passages from my previous posts.


“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous." 

Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. ...with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves.”

The Donald Cashes In His Chips

Donald Trump has parted company with his flagship casinos, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort and Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, paving the way for them to be placed into bankruptcy.

Trump Entertainment Resorts is no stranger to US bankruptcy laws. This'll be the company's third dip into the fiscal car wash. In fact, TER just emerged from bankruptcy in 2005.

Trump stepped down as CEO on Friday after failing to dissuade RET's bondholders from demanding the company be placed into bankruptcy.

"Almost every company is in serious financial trouble," he added. "Despite this, I will be watching closely and at some point in the future, I hope to return."