brexit

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primary 1/17 on mercer

farage claims role in trump win

carole cadwalladr legal suppression

capt 817

same as ukip?

russia cyber?

see climate refugee

xeno

see atlantic bridge: --> alt rt EUR

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WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BUT FOR GT RECSSION, JUST AS WEIMER COLLAPSE --> HITLER WW2 the men who stole the world prime/11 23

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:{:{Anthony Barnett wrote in the blog of The New York Review of Books about Cadwalladr's articles in The Observer, which reported malpractice by campaigners for Brexit, and the illicit funding of Vote Leave, in the 2016 EU membership referendum.}:

She has also reported on alleged links between Nigel Farage, the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that has been investigated in the United States.^[10] Regarding the Trump presidential campaign allegation, although the full report remains unpublished, the Mueller investigation "identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign".^[11]

Before Cambridge Analytica closed operations in 2018, the company took legal action against The Observer for the claims made in Cadwalladr's articles.^[12]}:

:{:{In April 2019, Cadwalladr gave a 15-minute TED talk about the links between Facebook and Brexit, entitled "Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy".^[13] It was one of the opening talks of TED's 2019 conference and Cadwalladr called out the 'Gods of Silicon Valley – Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Jack Dorsey' by name. She accused Facebook of "breaking" democracy, a moment described as a 'truth bomb'.^[14]}:

TED's curator Chris Anderson invited Mark Zuckerberg to come and give his response, an offer he declined. Anderson later listed the talk as one of the best ones of 2019.^[15] According to Cadwalladr, the founders of Facebook and Google were sponsoring the conference and the co-founder of Twitter was speaking at it.^[16] She summarized her speech in an article in The Observer: "As things stood, I didn't think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken. And they had broken it." The speech was applauded.^[17][18] Some of the "tech giants" criticized the talk for "factual inaccuracies", but when invited to specify them, they did not respond.^[16][18]}:

Cadwalladr criticised the takeover of The Observer by Tortoise Media. In February 2025, the Press Gazette reported that Tortoise Media had declined to renew her freelance contract, despite its agreement with the National Union of Journalists that all freelance contracts would be renewed for at least one year.^[19]

Banks v Cadwalladr libel case

Arron Banks initiated a libel action against Cadwalladr on 12 July 2019.

:{:{Banks had objected to her claim, notably in her TED talk,^[20] that he had lied about "his relationship with the Russian government}:".^[21] According to The Guardian, "Banks's lawyers argued this meant there were strong grounds to believe he would assist the interests of the Russian government, against those of the British government, in exchange for that money." Cadwalladr's lawyers had argued this meant there were reasonable grounds to investigate. However, the judge concluded that, in context, the TED talk and the related tweet meant that "on more than one occasion Mr Banks told untruths about a secret relationship he had with the Russian government in relation to acceptance of foreign funding of electoral campaigns in breach of the law on such funding".^[22]

The judge had earlier cautioned that "broadcasts and public speeches should not be interpreted as though they were formal written texts",^[23] and "emphasised that the ordinary reader or listener would not minutely analyse possible interpretations of words like a libel lawyer".^[22] Cadwalladr said of the judge's "meaning" that she had never said the words and not claimed in any article that Banks had accepted funding.: “These are not words I have ever said. On the contrary, I’ve always been very clear that there is no evidence that Banks accepted Russian funding”.^[24] She described the experience of having to defend the meaning of words she'd never said, as "kafkaesque": ^[25]}:

Press Gazette, the UK journalism industry paper, said "That she had to face this battle alone for four years reflects poorly on the two publishers involved in the case: Guardian News and Media and TED, a non-profit organisation in the US that is dedicated to the spread of ideas." ^[26]

In a High Court ruling on 13 June 2022, Banks' case was dismissed: the judge concluded that Cadwalladr had a reasonable belief that her comments were in the public interest.^[27] Press freedom groups had expressed alarm at the lawsuit,^[28] describing the case as a SLAPP suit “intended to silence Cadwalladr's courageous investigative journalism”;^[28] however, the judge said that it was neither fair nor apt to describe it as such, because Cadwalladr had “no defence of truth”, and her defence of public interest had “succeeded only in part”.^[29] On 24 June 2022, the High Court granted Banks leave to appeal on a question of law relating to the "serious harm" test.^[30]

In February 2023, the Court of Appeal rejected two of Banks’ challenges, but ruled in his favour that continuing publication of the April 2019 TED Talk, after the Electoral Commission published a report on 29 April 2020 that found no evidence of Banks breaking the law in relation to campaign donations, had caused "serious harm" to Banks' reputation. The Court ordered that damages should be assessed for the harm incurred between 29 April 2020 and the date of the High Court ruling in June 2022.^[31][32]

Press Gazette, the trade industry paper, said: "It has all been a huge price to pay for a freelance journalist who has been attacked over a statement that stemmed from investigative journalism into the activities of the biggest political donor in UK political history. And it is a judgment that means Banks, and others like him, will be protected in future by a sort of cloak of invisibility. When the risks are so high, most publishers will choose less risky targets for their investigations." It urged the newspaper industry to support her because of the chilling effects of the ruling: "And it is now beholden on all news publishers to support Cadwalladr in any future appeal to the Supreme Court because the judgment against her threatens to gag us all."^[33]

On 28 April 2023, Cadwalladr was ordered by the court to pay Banks £35,000 in damages by 12 May 2023.^[34] She was further ordered to pay more than £1m in costs.^[35] In May 2023 Cadwalladr unsuccessfully sought permission to appeal to the Supreme Court against the costs order.^[36][37] In November 2023, Cadwalladr's lawyers announced that they would be taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.^[38]

Other

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Arron Banks - Wikipedia

In 2016, the leaked Panama Papers indicated Banks along with Elizabeth Bilney were shareholders of British Virgin Islands company PRI Holdings Limited, which was the sole shareholder of African Strategic Resources Limited.^[29] However, a spokesperson for Banks has denied any links to the lawyer named and denies that Banks was involved with the Papers.^[30] Banks has stated that he has a controlling interest in a diamond mine in Kimberley, South Africa, and a licence to mine in Lesotho.^[23][31] In July 2018, Banks denied that money paid to a government minister in Lesotho was a bribe; it had been paid to guarantee diamond mining rights in Lesotho. In 2013, Banks paid £65,000 into the private bank account of Thesele Maseribane, then the Basotho minister for women's equality. Banks subsequently covered the £350,000 costs of a political campaign for Maseribane, in 2014, following a military coup in Lesotho.^[32]

In January 2015, one estimate of his wealth was £100 million.^[23] In November 2017, an estimate of £250 million was mentioned.^[33]

...

Banks was previously a Conservative Party donor but in October 2014 decided to donate £100,000 to UKIP. In response to comments from William Hague that Banks had not been a major Conservative donor in past years, and that Hague had never heard of Banks, Banks increased his donation to £1 million to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), directly referencing Hague's interview as his reasoning. Banks said that he had changed party allegiance because he agreed with UKIP's policies and its view that the European Union "is holding the UK back" because it's a "closed shop for bankrupt countries".^[37][21][38] Banks has been described as the "leading figure" behind the anti-EU Grassroots Out and Leave.EU campaigns.^[39]

...

Relationship with Eurosceptic organisations

In October 2014, Banks donated £1 million to the UK Independence Party^[1][51] and has since raised the equivalent of $11 million for the party. Conservative MP William Hague had called Banks "somebody we haven't heard of" following his defection to UKIP.^[1] In response, Banks increased his donation from £100,000 to £1 million, saying: "I woke up this morning intending to give £100,000 to UKIP – then I heard Mr Hague's comment about me being a Mr Nobody. So in light of that I have decided to give £1 million."^[38] This donation was one of the largest sums of money ever received by UKIP.^[34] Banks also funded Leave.EU by the equivalent of $5 million, and has been seen as the financial backer of the Brexit campaign.^[52]

Banks threatened Douglas Carswell with deselection in September 2015 when it emerged that Carswell supported Vote Leave, as opposed to the Leave.EU campaign funded by Banks,^[53] describing Carswell as "borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in", according to The Huffington Post.^[54]

In April 2016, Private Eye reported that Leave.EU "is registered at Companies House as Better for the Country Ltd. and controlled by major UKIP donor Arron Banks, after Gibraltar company STM Fidecs Nominees Ltd. transferred its interest to him in August."^[55] Banks, along with property investor Richard Tice and media guru Andrew Wigmore, donated £4.3m to the group.^[55]

Banks credits the success of Leave.EU to their hiring of Goddard Gunster and their subsequent adoption of "an American-style media approach."^[56]

Possibility of "right-wing Momentum"

...

Links to Russian officials and Donald Trump campaign

From September 2015, Banks, along with Andy Wigmore, had multiple meetings with Russian officials posted at the Russian embassy in London.^[8] In November 2015, Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador, introduced Banks to a Russian businessman, which was followed by other business proposals on the part of Russians.^[7][80] Banks was offered a chance to invest in Russian-owned gold or diamond mines; the deal involved funding from a Russian state-owned bank, and was announced 12 days after the Brexit referendum.^[8][7] It is not clear if Banks invested.

For two years, Banks said his only contacts with the Russian government consisted of one "boozy lunch" with the ambassador. After The Observer reported that he had had multiple meetings at which he had been offered lucrative business deals, Banks told a parliamentary inquiry into fake news he had had "two or three" meetings. In July 2018 when pressed by The New York Times, he said there had been a fourth meeting. The Observer has seen evidence that suggests his Leave.EU campaign team met with Russian embassy officials as many as 11 times in the run-up to the EU referendum and in the two months beyond.^[6]

It has been reported that on 12 November 2016, Banks had a meeting with president-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower and that upon return to London, Banks had lunch with the Russian ambassador where they discussed the Trump visit.^[8]

In a defamation claim against the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Banks was awarded £35,000 in damages and 60% of his costs.^[81] Banks said he was defamed after comments Cadwalladr made about his relationship with the Russian state.^[82] Banks initially lost his case in the High Court but succeeded in the Court of Appeal. The Appeal Judges ruled he was due damages for a TED Talk given by Cadwalladr. While covered by a public interest defence when it was originally given, that defence fell away on 29 April 2020 when the Electoral Commission issued a statement that Banks did not commit any criminal offence. The Court of Appeal found views of the TED Talk after this date caused Banks serious harm, hence the damages. All other points of the appeal by Banks were dismissed.^[83] In 2023, following Banks' partial success in an appeal, Cadwalladr was ordered to pay about £1.2 million in legal costs; she set up a crowdfunding site to help pay these costs.^[84][85]

This legal action carried out by Banks was considered by 19 press freedom organisations to be a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) and abuse of law.^[86]

Greta Thunberg

In August 2019 Banks was criticised by Labour MPs Tonia Antoniazzi and David Lammy after a tweet about the climate change activist Greta Thunberg as she set off on a two-week voyage in a zero carbon yacht. Banks tweeted: "Freak yachting accidents do happen in August". Tanja Bueltmann, founder of the EU Citizens' Champion campaign, also strongly criticised the tweet. Banks responded that he produced the tweet because he enjoys watching outrage,^[87] later stating: "Obviously I don't hope she encounters a freak yachting accident. I just enjoy watching the ludicrous tweeter mob following the next outrage."^[87][88]

Websites

LibLabCon.com

Banks gave significant funds to LibLabCon.com, a satirical website dedicated to attacking the three major parties. The website included jokes about the treatment of religious people by the Conservatives, claimed Chuka Umunna is "Labour's chief spokesman for tokenism" and described Amnesty International as an organisation which supports "loudmouth idiots chained to a radiator".^[89]

Westmonster

On 19 January 2017 (one day before Donald Trump's inauguration as the 45th President of the United States) Banks launched Westmonster alongside Michael Heaver, former press adviser to Nigel Farage.^[90][91] It is modelled on the right-wing US websites Breitbart News and the Drudge Report and claims to be "pro-Brexit, pro-Farage, pro-Trump, anti-establishment, anti-open borders, anti-corporatism".^[92][93] In the morning of 19 January, Westmonster's Twitter account had gained more than 2,500 followers.^[94]

...

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no lnx $

Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about

Thom Hartmann

August 22, 2023

The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.

The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.

The fall of that year sawunusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.

On December 17 of that year a street vendor inTunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.

The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.

Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.

Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.

Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt [ALSO DROUGHT]— that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:

“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”

This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.

The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.

When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:

“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …

“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.

But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.

It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.

That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.

We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.

To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.

But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.

We are quite literally out of time.

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Eco-fascism: White nationalists' extreme solution to the coming environmental apocalypse ›

Ukip and The Brexit Party - United Kingdom

Ukip has for long attracted climate science deniers into its ranks. And earlier this year, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, launched The Brexit Party to contest the European elections.

As DeSmog previously reported, the Brexit Party includes a number of opponents to measures to tackle climate change. including Ann Widdecombe, one of five MPs to oppose the Climate Change Act in the UK. Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who advocated investments in the Canadian tar sands and sister of climate science denying Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is also a marquee candidate. She joins chairman of Turning Point UK George Farmer and Welsh MEP Nathan Gill, both of whom have questioned mainstream climate science and the need for action..

In the meantime, Ukip’s candidates are continuing the party’s climate science denial tradition.

Ukip MEPs were among a small band of right-wing members to vote against the ratification by the European Parliament of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The party’s current manifesto calls for the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act to be scrapped, and promotes measures to rejuvenate the UK’s coal industry.

Ukip leader Gerard Batten, also a candidate, has defended Ukip’s policy, suggesting there was no need for “a man-made climate change policy”. Candidate Alan Graves Senior likewise confirmed the party’s policy tweeting: “It is not a case of denying climate change it is more that we do not accept it is all man-made”.

And Ukip MEP **Stuart Agnew** previously described global warming as “a scam” and used a series of cold winters to justify his belief that global warming is not happening.

Other candidates in the elections, including Paul Oakley, Richard Braine, and Richard Elvin have also touted climate science denial.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/handmaidens-to-authoritarianism-watch-this-heroic-guardian-report-call-out-the-gods-of-silicon-valley-for-destroying-democracy/

no lnx guk https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla

Guardian and Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr captivated the crowd yesterday at the TED talks. Speaking directly to the ‘Gods Of Silicon Valley’, she accused them of being responsible for the destruction of democracy.

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy

“My question to you is, is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism?”

Watch as @carolecadwalla calls out the “gods of Silicon Valley” for being on the wrong side of history: https://t.co/SrTKzCbPSV #TED2019 pic.twitter.com/ETaXSdgWUq

— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 16, 2019

Cadwalladr is the journalist responsible for the amazing Cambridge Analytica whistleblower exposé: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower. What she learned in her year long research into Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the ‘dark forces’ undermining our democratic system of government will leave you breathless.

Our democracy is broken, our laws don’t work anymore, and it’s not me saying this, it’s our parliament published a report saying this. This technology that you have invented has been amazing. But now, it’s a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future. Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth.

…

And what you don’t seem to understand is that this is bigger than you. And it’s bigger than any of us. And it is not about left or right or “Leave” or “Remain” or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. Because as it stands, I don’t think it is.

…

And so my question to you is, is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you: as the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? Because you set out to connect people. And you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.

…

And my question to everybody else is, is this what we want: to let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones, as this darkness falls?

Watch her entire extraordinary fifteen minute presentation here: Facebook’s role in Brexit and the treat to democracy

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/mueller-subpoenas-director-of-controversial-data-firm-cambridge-analytica-in-russia-probe/

Brittany Kaiser, a director of data company Cambridge Analytica, has been subpoenaed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, the Guardian reports.

A spokesman for Kaiser confirmed she is fully cooperating with Mueller, according to the Guardian, and that she is working with separate “US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities.”

Kaiser is the second person from Cambridge Analytica who has been subpoenaed by Mueller. As the Guardian notes:

“In August, :{Sam Patten:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad, struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.”

Patten worked with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who Mueller on Friday recommended spend up to 24 years in prison for “serious, longstanding, and bold” financial crimes,” and with Russian oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik, a subject of Mueller’s probe.

“Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the :{Brexit:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller,” the Guardian reports.

...

guk

monbiot dis csp'l

part of me wants to smash it all up. I want to see the British bubble burst: the imperial nostalgia, the groundless belief in the inherent greatness of this nation; the casual dishonesty of those who govern us; the xenophobia; the intolerance; the denial; the complacency. I want those who have caused the coming disaster to own it, so that nobody ever believes them again. No-deal Brexit? Bring it on.

Such dark thoughts do not last long. It will be the poor who get hurt, first and worst. The rich leavers demanding the hardest of possible Brexits, with their offshore accounts, homes abroad and lavish pensions, will be all right. I remember the eerie silence of the City of London. While the bosses of companies producing goods and tangible services write anxious letters to the papers, the financial sector has stayed largely shtum. Shorting sterling is just the first of its possible gains.

Green New Deal: Ocasio-Cortez unveils bold plan to fight climate change

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, caused by the International Monetary Fund’s insistence that countries removed their capital controls, began with an attack by foreign speculators on Thailand’s baht. As currencies tanked and nations raised their interest rates, indebted companies went down like flies. Foreign corporations, particularly from the US, swept in and bought the most lucrative assets for a fraction of their value. Though the causes are different, it’s not hard to see something similar happening here. If it does, the City will clean up.

But this is not the end of it. A no-deal Brexit might offer the regulatory vacuum the Brextremists fantasise about. The public protections people have fought so hard for, that we obtained only through British membership of the EU – preventing water companies from pouring raw sewage into our rivers, power stations from spraying acid rain across the land, chemical companies from contaminating our food – are suddenly at risk.

In theory there are safeguards. The environment department has been frantically trying to fill the regulatory chasm. It has published more statutory instruments than any other ministry and has drafted an environment bill with plans for a watchdog to hold the government to account. But a series of massive questions remain, and none of them have easy answers.

The environment bill will not be placed before parliament until after the Queen’s speech (probably in May). It won’t be passed until autumn, at the earliest. The green watchdog (the Office for Environmental Protection) will not materialise until 2021. During that time there will be no body equivalent to the European court of justice to ensure that the government upholds the law. Instead there will be a “holding arrangement” – with an undefined “mechanism” to receive reports of environmental lawbreaking, which the watchdog might be inclined to investigate when it eventually materialises.

Replacing just one of the EU’s environmental functions – registering new chemicals – requires, before 29 March, a new IT system, new specialist evaluators, new monitoring and enforcement across several agencies; and new government offices, filled with competent staff to oversee the system, in the four nations of the UK. All this must happen while the government attends to scores of transformations on a similar scale. If the shops run out of food, hospitals can’t get medicine and the Good Friday agreement falls apart, how much attention will it pay to breaches of environmental law?

2:55

'I want you to panic': 16-year-old issues climate warning at Davos – video

Already we are witnessing comprehensive regulatory collapse in the agencies, such as Natural England, charged with defending the living world, due to funding cuts. If they can’t do their job before we crash out, what chance do they have when the workload explodes, just as government budgets are likely to slump?

The government’s nomination of Tony Juniper as Natural England’s new chair is a hopeful sign, though the general astonishment that an environmental regulator will be chaired by an environmental champion shows just how bad things have become (since 2009, it has been run by people whose interests and attitudes were starkly at odds with their public duties). But the underlying problem Natural England faces will also hobble the green watchdog. Unlike the European court of justice, the Office for Environmental Protection will be funded and controlled by the government it seeks to hold to account.

Last week the Guardian reported panic within government about the likely pile-up of waste that Britain sends to the EU, in the event of no deal. The combination of a rubbish crisis, administrative chaos and mass distraction could be horrible: expect widespread fly-tipping and pollution. So much for the extremists’ euphemism for no deal: “clean Brexit”.

The government’s commitment to upholding environmental standards relies to a remarkable extent on one man: the environment secretary, Michael Gove, who has so far doggedly resisted the demands of his fellow leavers. Had any one of his grisly predecessors been in post – Owen Paterson, Liz Truss, Andrea Leadsom – we wouldn’t have even the theoretical protections Gove has commissioned. Boris Johnson has suggested that leaving the EU will allow us to dismantle green standards for electrical goods and environmental impact assessments. Iain Duncan Smith has pressed for the removal after Brexit of the carbon floor price, which has more or less stopped coal-burning in the UK.

UK worst offender in Europe for electronic waste exports – report

With Liam Fox in charge of trade policy, and the US demanding the destruction of food and environmental standards as the price of the trade deal he desperately seeks, nothing is safe. A joint trade review by the British and Indian governments contemplates reducing standards on pesticide residues in food, and hormone-disrupting chemicals in the plastics used in toys. This must be heartening for Jacob Rees-Mogg (known in some circles as Re-smog), who has proposed that we might accept “emission standards from India”, one of the most polluted nations on Earth. “We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here.”

There is no guarantee that Gove, the unlikely champion of public protection, will stay in his post after Brexit. If we crash out of Europe, the dark money that helped to buy Brexit will strive to use this opportunity to tear down our regulations: this, after all, was the point of the exercise. The tantalising prospect for the world’s pollutocrats is that the UK might become a giant export-processing zone, exempt from the laws that govern other rich nations. It’s a huge potential prize, which could begin to reconfigure the global relationship between capital and governments. They will fight as hard and dirty to achieve it as they did to win the vote.

A combination of economic rupture, sudden shifts in ownership, an urgent desire to strike new trade deals and a possible regulatory abyss presents a golden opportunity for disaster capitalism. Our first task is to see it coming. Our second is to stop it.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/07/23/mapped-whistleblower-accuses-nine-organisations-colluding-over-hard-brexit

map

Nine right-wing organisations including think tanks pushing disinformation about climate change have been accused of mounting a coordinated campaign to push for a hard Brexit, according to court documents.

Whistleblower Shahmir Sanni, formerly of youth campaign group BeLeave, claims that think tanks and campaign groups held regular meeting at 55 Tufton Street — an office close to Westminster and home to the climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation — to “agree on a single set of right-wing talking points” and “securing more exposure to the public”.

Some of the topics discussed allegedly included “new policy announcement by the Labour Party, developments in the Brexit negotiations, or any other political news story”.

The accusations were made in documents from an employment tribunal setting out Sanni’s case against pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which he has accused of unfair dismissal after he spoke out about illegal behaviour at Vote Leave, the official pro-Brexit campaign group.

According to Sanni’s claim, the organisations involved in this right-wing campaign for media coverage include the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the officer of Peter Whittle, the former deputy leader of UKIP, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Leave Means Leave, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Brexit Central, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute for Economic Affairs.

As DeSmog UK previously reported, these organisations have strong ties with Tory MPs and Cabinet members and are working together to advocate for deregulation and a hard-Brexit.

Sanni filed a lawsuit against the TaxPayers’ Alliance the day after the Electoral Commission published findings that Vote Leave had broke electoral spending laws during the EU referendum by funneling money to BeLeave.

Responding to the suit, the Taxpayers’ Alliance told the Guardian that it “acted at all times in a fair and correct manner and we reject (and will be defending) the claims Mr Sanni has made”. The group declined to comment further because of the ongoing legal proceedings.

Revolving Doors

Sanni’s claim also emphasised how the organisations based around 55 Tufton Street had revolving doors between the groups for employees.

Matthew Elliott, the former head of the Vote Leave campaign group, which was based at 55 Tufton Street, is also the co-founder and former CEO of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and now works as the editor-at-large of Brexit Central, both organisations which work out of 55 Tufton Street.

Elliott is also a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, another free-market think tank which has been described as “the most influential think tank in the country” providing extensive advice to the government on Brexit issues.

The Legatum Institute’s key lobbyist Shanker Singham, now director of international trade at the Institute for Economic Affairs, has strong ties to the US climate science denial lobby, and has slotted neatly into a network of transatlantic climate science deniers pushing for a hard Brexit.

Sanni’s claim states that although he was employed with the TaxPayers’ Alliance, he had initially applied for a job with Brexit Central for the role of deputy editor. While Elliott and Brexit Central editor Jonathan Isaby interviewed Sanni, he was offered a role with the TaxPayers’ Alliance for which, at the time, neither Elliott nor Isaby were officially working.

A number of staff from the Vote Leave campaign have also gone on to work for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, including former development director of Vote Leave, John O’Connell, now CEO of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Chloe Westley a senior team member of Vote Leave is now the group’s campaign manager and Vote Leave’s Operation manager Tom Banks is now the groups’ grassroots campaign manager.

Climate science deniers

Included in this network of organisations pushing for a hard Brexit is the UK’s premier climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Founded by prominent climate science denier Nigel Lawson, the group aims to fight back against what it describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.

Despite disputing the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate science, the GWPF still has a voice in Parliament.

Both Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton Graham Stringer and Tory MP for North Shropshire Owen Paterson have strong ties with the GWPF as well as three Tory members of the House of Lords including Peter Lilley, Matt Ridley and Nigel Vinson.

Lilley’s also sits on “a committee of experts” closely advising international trade secretary Liam Fox, DeSmog UKpreviously revealed.

Lilley is a supporter of the European Research Group (ERG). Led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ERG is lobbying for a hard Brexit and has been described by Buzzfeed as “an aggressive, disciplined, and highly organised parliamentary and media operation”. Former Brexit minister, Steve Baker, is a past chair of the group.

Hard Brexit

The ERG has grabbed media attention over the last few months over its influence on the Brexit negotiations and for crushing Theresa May’s short-lived soft Brexit plan agreed by her cabinet during a meeting at Chequers earlier this month.

Following the vote, leading pro-EU Tory Anna Soubry warned May that she was “no longer in charge” and that Rees-Mogg and the ERG were “running the country”.

Some of the group’s most influential supporters include prominent members of May’s cabinet.

Newly appointed Brexit minister Dominic Raab and environment secretary Michael Gove were active supporters of the group before being promoted to cabinet roles while international trade secretary Liam Fox has also used the ERG to gather support among MPs.

Tory MP John Redwood, former environment secretary Owen Paterson and new peer Peter Lilley are also members of the ERG and notable climate science deniers.

Cabinet ministers

The influence of the 55 Tufton Street network reaches all the way into May’s cabinet.

Brexit minister Raab, and newly appointed health secretary Matt Hancock both are connected to the Tufton Street network through the Institute for Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank that pushes for deregulation and refuses to reveal where its funding comes from.

Environmental secretary Gove also has strong ties to the Tufton Street hub through his involvement with the Vote Leave campaign and think tank the New Culture Forum, while International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has been a strong supporter of Grassroot Outs, a pro-Brexit campaign group that sprung out of infighting between Vote Leave and Nigel Farage and Arron Banks’ Leave.EU.

Grassroots Out was also supported by DUP MP and climate science denier, Sammy Wilson. The Conservatives and DUPsigned a ‘supply and confidence’ pact to provide Theresa May’s government with additional votes on key issues.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/top-brexit-backer-passed-trump-team-info-to-russians.html

no linx

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION JUNE 10, 2018

Top Brexit Backer Passed Trump Transition Team Info to Russians

By Chas Danner

Leave.EU donor Arron Banks at a press conference in November 2015.

Concerns about Russia’s election meddling — in the U.K. — reached new heights on Saturday after leaked emails revealed extensive links between one of the top backers of a pro-Brexit campaign and Russian officials. The Observer and Sunday Times of London obtained the some 40,000 emails sent by millionaire businessman Arron Banks, the chief financial backer of U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s director of communications.

The emails show show that Banks had previously undisclosed meetings with Russia’s U.K. ambassador (which were set up by an alleged Russian spy), and had made a previously undisclosed visit to Moscow at the peak of the Brexit campaign. Banks and Wigmore were also offered, at one point, a business deal involving several Russian goldmines that could have been worth a fortune for the men, according to the documents. There is a Trump connection, as the Sunday Times reports that Banks admitted that, months after the Brexit referendum, “he handed over phone numbers for members of Trump’s transition team to Russian officials”— though it’s not yet clear whose info he handed over, or what became of it.

Carole Cadwalladr

@carolecadwalla

Replying to @carolecadwalla

Who's @Arron_banks? He's the Bad Boy of Brexit seen here to left of Trump. In depth interview here. "Not a single penny of money has been put into Brexit," he told me. Though I never actually asked him that..https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/02/arron-banks-interview-brexit-ukip-far-right-trump-putin-russia …

4:02 PM - Jun 9, 2018

370

226 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Banks has donated £1.3 million to the UKIP since 2014, and contributed £6 million to Leave.EU. Both he and Wigmore have denied they played any role in helping Russia influence the Brexit referendum, or that Russia was even trying to do so. Yet starting in 2015, Russia’s ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, worked to develop a relationship with Banks and his associate, successfully inviting them to multiple events as the Brexit campaign was underway. At one meeting, they were introduced to Russian mining magnate Siman Povarenkin in regard to the potential goldmine deal. Another meeting may have happened just three days after Banks, Wigmore, and Farage became the first Britons to meet with President-elect Trump on November 12, 2016. That was hardly their first foray into Trump World, either, as noted by the Observer:

[Yakovenko’s] invitations continued after the [Brexit] referendum during the time in which Banks, Wigmore and Farage began travelling regularly to America to support Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, according to the documents.

Ambassador Yakovenko met Wigmore and Banks on 19 August, the day Steve Bannon became Trump’s campaign manager. It was days before they travelled to Mississippi with Nigel Farage for a rally on 25 August at which Donald Trump introduced him to the crowds as “Mr Brexit”. He said a Trump presidency would be “Brexit plus”.

Per the Sunday Times, Wigmore said the third meeting with Yakovenko “came three days after the meeting with Trump, but this has not been confirmed,” and that “Yakovenko is said to have asked Banks for contact details for Trump’s transition team, and was given a number.”

Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump, left, listens to United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage speak during a campaign rally at the Mississippi Coliseum on August 24, 2016 in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

Farage, the UKIP and Leave.EU leader who used Trump-like tactics to drum up populist support for Brexit, has said that he admires Russian President Vladimir Putin more than any other world leader, but it’s not clear if he was aware of Banks and Wigmore’s Kremlin ties. Banks — whose wife is from Russia — has been defiant in response to the leaked emails, telling the Sunday Times, “I had two boozy lunches with the Russian ambassador and another cup of tea with him. Bite me.” Though he and Wigmore reportedly invited Yakovenko to the results-watching party at Leave.EU’s headquarters after the referendum (he declined), Banks also echoed President Trump in dismissing any notion of collusion, claiming that, “It’s a convenient political witch-hunt, both over Brexit and Trump.”

But as Russia expert and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum pointed out in a Twitter thread on Sunday, the leaked documents offer good demonstration of how the Kremlin tries to support European political movements that are aligned with its interests:

Russians don’t usually give direct funding, [with] the exception being Marine Le Pen’s National Front [in France]. Instead, they offer lucrative business deals to high-ranking members of the movement. There is some evidence of this in the case of the Austrian Freedom Party, and also the Italian Northern League. Important point: It’s not illegal, or not necessarily. It doesn’t break laws on foreign funding for political parties, if they exist. Russian offers of lucrative private deals could be used to make politicians ‘pro-Russian,’ even if those deals somehow don’t work out. That may have been the point of that Trump Tower Moscow negotiation, though we don’t know enough about it. Of course, if the deals come through, then the money can be used to finance a political campaign — legally.

Banks and Wigmore will now face questions from a parliamentary committee starting on Tuesday, where more of Leave.EU’s shadows may start to receive some sunlight, as the Guardian notes:

MPs on the digital, culture, media and sport committee, who have the protection of parliamentary privilege, had been expected to focus on Banks’s links to Russia, including the provenance of his wealth. He is also subject to an Electoral Commission inquiry into the “true source” of his donations. Leave.EU has been fined £70,000 for accounting irregularities. The organisation’s chief executive, Liz Bilney, another Banks associate, is under police investigation.

Whatever happens next, the leaked emails reveal more evidence of Russia’s efforts to drive political upheaval in the U.K. and U.S., as well as how influential figures on both sides of the Atlantic have hardly spurned their advances.

Thursday 19 July 2018

Open warfare broke out over Brexit this week. The Leave sergeants may have shuffled backwards on the benches, but that position is all the better to lob hard Brexit grenades at the government, and take cover from the Electoral Commission's sniper fire.

On Tuesday, the Electoral Commission fined associates of Vote Leave £61,000 for cheating at democracy.

And how did the Brexiteers in chief respond? By claiming it wasn't a fair hearing as they weren't consulted (because they refused to cooperate), and generally giving a massive shrug, holding their noses, and yeling NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH, WE STILL WON from the safety of the House of Commons' Row Z.

That might be something to do with the fact the penalty is less than any ordinary person can be fined for touting football tickets, or making a false statement on a benefits claim (as Adam Ramsay points out over at OpenDemocracy). Or, as these extraordinary people call it, pocket change.

And it's not just Vote Leave and its high profile cheerleaders - Boris, Gove, et al - that are implicated. Today, Brexit whistleblower Shahmir Sanni announced he was suing the Taxpayers' Alliance for wrongful dismissal. In the particulars of the case, he states that nine groups "all based out of or with links to the same London address" met regularly to strategise on how to push the Brexit message.

That address is 55 Tufton Street — the Zorin Blimp of free-market zealotry and climate science denial. Because of course it is. It always is. It's the same people, again and again.

ref

Vote Leave fined and referred to the police for breaking electoral law

Published: 17 Jul 2018

The Electoral Commission has today published the conclusions of its investigation into the campaign spending of Vote Leave and a number of other campaigners, and has found Vote Leave and Darren Grimes broke electoral law.

The Commission’s investigation found significant evidence of joint working between the lead campaigner, Vote Leave and another campaign group BeLeave.

Evidence shows that BeLeave spent more than £675,000 with Aggregate IQ under a common plan with Vote Leave. This spending should have been declared by Vote Leave. It means Vote Leave exceeded its legal spending limit of £7 million by almost £500,000.

Vote Leave also returned an incomplete and inaccurate spending report, with nearly £234,501 reported incorrectly, and invoices missing for £12,849.99 of spending.

Darren Grimes, the founder of the BeLeave campaign group, was found to have committed two offences and has been fined £20,000. Mr Grimes spent more than £675,000 on behalf of BeLeave, a non-registered campaigner that had a spending limit of £10,000. Further, he wrongly reported that same spending as his own.

The Commission has now referred both Mr David Halsall the responsible person for Vote Leave, and Mr Grimes to the Metropolitan Police in relation to false declarations of campaign spending.

It has also shared its investigation files with the Metropolitan Police in relation to whether any persons have committed related offences which lie outside the Commission’s regulatory remit.

...

boris j quits

https://www.alternet.org/brexit-plan-could-bring-down-british-government-explained

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/evidence-mounts-russia-covertly-swayed-brexit-just-us-election

There were so many extraordinary occurrences that took place with respect to the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and the United States presidential election, that taken as a whole, simply cannot be coincidences. First and foremost both events ultimately were determined in a manner which was advantageous to Vladimir Putin. Second, both Brexit and the U.S. election featured Cambridge Analytica and its founders Robert and Rebekah Mercer as key players. Cambridge Analytica harvested over 50 million Facebook files and interfaced with members of the Trump campaign and Russian bots that showed up in crucial rust belt states masquerading as politically aware next door neighbors. Now yet another piece in the puzzle of Russian dominion over the two elections is fitting into place. UK financier Aaron Banks financed Brexit with the largest donation in British history after he just happened to have been offered a “sweetheart” deal on Russian gold and diamond mining projects which were only offered to a “restricted number of investors.”New York Magazine:

In both countries, the right-wing pro-Russian populists indignantly insist there is no more incriminating information to be found beyond what was known at any given moment, even as the bounds of what is known at any moment continues to expand. In Britain, billionaire businessman Arron Banks financed the Brexit referendum with the largest donation in British history. Initially, he copped to having one meeting with Russian officials. After the Guardian obtained secret documents blowing up this claim, he admitted there were actually three meetings. Now the Times has even more information, and Banks concedes the number of covert meetings has grown to four. [...]

Banks’s defense of his behavior to the Times is so absurdly suspicious it almost reads like a winking, dada joke: “The idea that things were dangled as some sort of carrots for me to be involved with the Russians is very far-fetched,” he said. “I wonder what the Russians wanted from me?” What they wanted was perfectly obvious: Banks funded a political referendum in which Russia had a strong interest in passing. Russia could not directly finance the referendum, but Banks could. Therefore, what they would want is for him to use some of the money they were dangling before him to support Brexit, which he did. At this point, it seems virtually certain that Russia did use Banks, perhaps in conjunction with Mellon, as a pass through to covertly finance the Brexit referendum.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, Donald Trump and many members of his inner circle have a long trail of financial ties to Russia. The overt behavior looks remarkably similar. Trump and his cronies refuse to disclose their precise financial connections (by, for instance, following the established norm of a presidential candidate publishing his tax returns.) They continuously lie about the number and nature of their covert contacts with Russian officials, then keep insisting with each new disclosure that there is no more to disclose and the whole question is a witch hunt. Meanwhile, they continue to deliver a policy outcome payoff to Putin.

There’s an old aphorism, first time is happenstance, second time is coincidence, third time is enemy action. There is no happenstance or coincidence with Vladimir Putin. He cuts straight to the chase all the time, every time. With respect to both Brexit and the US election, Occam’s Razor is the only tool you need. What is your gut reaction to hearing that Aaron Banks has a Russian-born wife and a vanity license plate, “X MI5 SPY,” a reference to the British intelligence agency, MI5? Or this:

On Nov. 12, 2016, Mr. Banks met President-elect Trump in Trump Tower. Upon his return to London, Mr. Banks had another lunch with the Russian ambassador where they discussed the Trump visit.

“From what we’ve seen, the parallels between the Russian intervention in Brexit and the Russian intervention in the Trump campaign appear to be extraordinary,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee....

Mapped: The UK's Brexit Climate Denier Network

https://littlesis.org/maps/1552-updated-brexit-climate-deniers-the-wider-network

https://littlesis.org/org/228856/The_New_Culture_Forum

https://littlesis.org/org/228846/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation

https://littlesis.org/person/229006/Viscount_Matt_Ridley

Prime Minister Theresa May has been in office for less than two days and already the impacts of the Brexit climate denierconnection are being felt.

The Cabinet reshuffle dealt a series of surprises, from Boris Johnson becoming Foreign Secretary to the offices of the now former Department for Energy and Climate Change set to be occupied by the new ‘Brexit Department’.

One thing that remained consistent, however, was the presence of the close-knit 55 Tufton Street network of neoliberal think tanks and climate science deniers.

To highlight these changes, DeSmog UK has expanded its ‘Brexit climate denier’ map to include new connections which have come to light since the 23 June vote to leave the European Union.

As this new map shows, those within the network have been elevated to powerful positions within May’s new government.

Andrea Leadsom has, for instance, been promoted to Environment Secretary, and new additions to the web David Davis and Liam Fox have been appointed the Minister for leaving the EU and International Trade Secretary respectively.

In June, DeSmog UK first mapped the deep-rooted connections between those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union and those who deny the science on climate change. DeSmogUK showed the many overlapping relationships between those working in the same Westminster building, just a stone’s throw from Parliament.

This updated map not only includes further links between the original members of the web – including donations and neighbouring Tufton street residents – but also branches out to include members of the new Conservative Government.

https://littlesis.org/org/228848/Vote_Leave

Grassroots Out A group formed out of Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaign groups

• offshoot

Leadership & Staff

Showing 1-10 of 13 :: see all

Nigel Lawson Former UK Chancellor and Founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation

• Campaign committee member ('16→?)

Matthew Elliott Founder and former Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, Chief Executive of Vote Leave campaign

• Chief Executive and Campaign committee member

Douglas Carswell UKIP MP for Clacton

• Parliamentary Planning Committee member (Oct 8 '15→?)

Graham Stringer Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton

• Board member, Campaign Committee

Daniel Hannan British politician, Conservative MEP for South East England

• Campaign committee member

Owen Paterson MP for North Shropshire

• Parliamentary Planning Committee member (Oct 8 '15→?)

Viscount Matt Ridley Author and Conservative member of the House of Lords

• Vice-President (?→'16)

Boris Johnson UK Foreign Secretary, Former Mayor of London, Conservative politician

• Campaign committee member (core group)

Andrea Leadsom Conservative Secretary of State for Defra, former energy minister, MP for South Northamptonshire,

• Campaign committee member

Michael Gove MP for Surrey Heath, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

• Campaign committee member (Co-convener, core group)

Donation/Grant Recipients

Labour Leave UK Labour Party's Leave Campaign for the UK-EU Referendum

• Donation · $21,859 (Feb 1 '16)

Donors

Patrick Barbour Politically active Eurosceptic donor

• Donation · $723,175 (Apr 1 '16)

Michael Hintze From Australia, hedge fund billionaire working in England

• Donation/Grant · $146,000 (Jun 22 '16)

JC Bamford Excavators Construction Equipment Company

• Donation/Grant · $100,000

Lord Stanley Kalms Conservative Party donor, life president and former chairman of Dixons Retail

• Donation · $53,213 ('15→'16)

Services/Transactions

Democratic Unionist Party - D.U.P. UK Political Party

• paying for campaign adverts

BeLeave Brexit campaign group

• ofshoot

Aggregate IQ Data analytics company

• client

Other Affiliations

55 Tufton Street Whitehall building where climate science deniers and those who support Brexit work

• Affiliation

interlocks

Global Warming Policy Foundation	Viscount Matt Ridley, Nigel Lawson, Graham Stringer
Business for Britain	Daniel Hodson, Viscount Matt Ridley, Matthew Elliott
The European Foundation	Matthew Elliott, Owen Paterson
The New Culture Forum	Matthew Elliott, Michael Gove
The Telegraph	Daniel Hannan, Boris Johnson
UK2020	Owen Paterson, Viscount Matt Ridley
Post-Brexit Tory Cabinet	Boris Johnson, Andrea Leadsom
The Atlantic Bridge	Boris Johnson, Michael Gove
Legatum Institute	Matthew Elliott, Daniel Hodson
Margaret Thatcher	Nigel Lawson
Theresa May	Boris Johnson
House of Commons	Nigel Lawson
House of Lords	Nigel Lawson
TaxPayers' Alliance	Matthew Elliott
Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT)	Matthew Elliott
Global Vision	Matthew Elliott
Big Brother Watch	Matthew Elliott
The Times	Viscount Matt Ridley
Fresh Start Project	Andrea Leadsom
Institute for Free Trade	Daniel Hannan

3/18 bannon on eur alt rt tour

desmog

ExxonMobil’s former CEO is Rex Tillerson, who was until recently the US Secretary of State. He was appointed by Donald Trump, who Cambridge Analytica were influential in getting elected.

Big Coal

Cambridge Analytica also has ties to the world’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy.

The link there is through Christian Patrick Teroerde, who was a director of SCL Elections - a subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group.

Teroerde is also a director of Hanson Asset Management, which bought a major stake in Peabody in the 1990s, when it was the world’s largest coal company.

Peabody filed for bankruptcy in 2016 as coal prices crashed. Since Donald Trump got elected, Peabody has bounced back, big time.

Brexit and Climate Science Denial

Hanson Asset Management also links to DeSmog UK’s previous map that tied Cambridge Analytica to Brexit and climate science denial.

The company was built on the wealth of Lord James Hanson, who was a big Euro-sceptic. He founded the anti-EU campaign group Business for Sterling, whose Head of Research was Dominic Cummins.

Cummins went on to be the campaign director for the official Brexit campaign group, Vote Leave. One of the whistleblowers in the Guardian claimed Cambridge Analytica was working for Vote Leave via a youth campaign organisation called BeLeave and the company’s Canadian spin-off, Aggregate IQ.

Vote Leave was supported by two members of the Conservative party with climate science denial links: North Shropshire MPOwen Paterson and hereditary peer Matt Ridley. Both are well-known allies of the the UK’s most prominent climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Electoral Commission is currently investigating the unofficial Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, which Cambridge Analytica is also thought to have worked with,though the company denies this.

Leave.EU was bankrolled by climate science denier Arron Banks and was fronted by another climate science denier, former UKIP-leader Nigel Farage. Both were famously photographed in a golden elevator with Donald Trump.

Both Vote Leave and Leave.EU also have ties to the party currently propping up the government, the Democratic Unionist Party, through another Brexit campaign group - Grassroots Out. DUP MP and climate science denier Sammy Wilson was a key player in Grassroots Out.

Here’s an interactive map of how it all fits together:

https://www.desmog.uk/2018/03/28/it-s-very-male-dominated-space-welcome-sexist-world-brexit-and-climate-science-denial

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/one-type-voter-was-uniquely-vulnerable-donald-trump-and-brexit-study

A new Social Psychological and Personality Science study published Thursday found that “neurotic traits positively predicted” shares of voters who opted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election or to “leave” in the Brexit vote that same year.

According to University of Austin psychology professor Sam Gosling—one of the study’s co-authors—of the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), ”regions highest on neuroticism are particularly receptive to political campaigns that emphasize danger and loss and that previous campaigns have not tapped into these themes as strongly as we saw in 2016.”

The study, spearheaded by Queensland University of Technology psychologist Martin Obschonka, analyzed personality data from 17,217 Britons and over 3 million U.S. participants, testing for “regional prevalence of neurotic personality traits”—including anxiety, and depression.

The researchers them compared those traits with models previously used to predict voting behavior, namely openness and conscientious. As ZMEscience notes, “past studies have shown that low openness and high conscientiousness are good indicators of conservative political views.”

“The models traditionally used for predicting and explaining political behavior did not capture an essential factor that influenced people’s voting decisions in 2016,” Obschonka said.

Researchers found higher levels of anxiety in regions that voted for Trump and Brexit, and Science Daily reports those traits were even stronger “when considering Trump gains since the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate.”

In England, rural areas “and the industrialized centers have higher neurotic traits, and higher Brexit votes,” the report notes. “Trump gains (over Romney’s level of support) and higher neurotic traits overlap. The ‘rust belt’ shows a concentration of both neuroticism and Trump gains.”

The researchers say Trump’s gains on Romney in these regions “underscores our initial assumption” that neurotic individuals were drawn to Trump’s “Make American Great Again” message.

Obschonka’s team said their findings are “consistent with the idea that populist campaigns played on the fears of the voters,” adding “campaigns that draw on fear should be particularly compelling to people already prone to being anxious.”

But why did neuroticism win out in these regions, as opposed to openness and conscientiousness—the Big Five personality traits more frequently associated with voter behavior?

“We propose a kind of ‘sleeper effect,’” Obschonka said. “Under normal conditions these traits have no influence, but in certain circumstances, widespread anxiety and fear in a region have the potential to profoundly impact the geopolitical landscape.”

“Both campaigns traded on themes of fear, lost pride and loss aversion which tap into fear-prone personalities; a construct not previous associated with the behavior of voters,” the researched added. Obschonka described this voting behavior as “irrational” because “it was not predictable by means of rational models.”

“So the campaigns of fear worked,” Obschonka said.

https://www.alternet.org/world/theres-specific-ideology-unites-trump-worlds-other-majoritarians

The Road to Somewhere

David Goodhart, founder and former editor of Prospect magazine, talked about his book,The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, about the “values divide” in England that led to Brexit

https://www.c-span.org/video/?430708-2/road-somewhere

guard uk no links (many)

gXardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Carole Cadwalladr

Sunday 26 February 2017

This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited.

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl;a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about howGoogle’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website,Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

It sounds creepy, I say.

“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us.He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist,found that 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,” says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone,Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

“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.

“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.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’sSCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week thatSCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did.Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors,Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”

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Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

ref

XXXguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

no lnx

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Sunday 26 February 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 5 April 2017 05.53 EDT

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that 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,” says Kosinski.

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image,says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words.We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call itbio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is theGovernment Accountability Institute.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned intoa film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you canpredict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, AMP FDBK such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote byMarshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

guard

“It’s an information war,” says Albright. “That’s what I keep coming back to.”

But it’s where it goes from here that’s truly frightening. I ask him how it can be stopped. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it can be. It’s a network. It’s far more powerful than any one actor.”

So, it’s almost got a life of its own?“Yes, and it’s learning. Every day, it’s getting stronger.”

The more people who search for information about Jews, the more people will see links to hate sites, and the more they click on those links (very few people click on to the second page of results) the more traffic the sites will get, the more links they will accrue and the more authoritative they will appear. This is an entirely circular knowledge economy that has only one outcome: an amplification of the message. Jews are evil. Women are evil. Islam must be destroyed. Hitler was one of the good guys.

[Analysis Fake news and a 400-year-old problem: we need to resolve the ‘post-truth’ crisis

The internet echo chamber satiates our appetite for pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods and has become the defining challenge of the 21st century

Heritage Foundation Ties

The Heritage Foundation has campaigned for Brexit over the past few years and hosted climate denying Brexit campaigners Nigel Farage and Owen Paterson during the lead up to the June vote.

Fox’s relationship with the think tank dates back to his time as UK Defence Secretary.

During that time and up until 2011,Fox was the founder and UK chairman of Atlantic Bridge – a think tank that brought together right-wing libertarians from both sides of the pond. Among the group’s membership was Jim DeMint, a former Tea Partier and the Heritage Foundation’s current president. Fox’sformer special advisor, Luke Coffey, now works at the think tank.

Upon hearing that Liam Fox was appointed as the UK’s International Trade Secretary on July 14, climate sceptic UKIP MEPRoger Helmertweeted: “Liam Fox has good contacts in the USA. It’s quite possible that the UK will have a US free trade deal before the EU does.”

Negotiating a unique trade deal between the UK and US remains a top priority for Brexit Britain. But the path forward is not clear. Last month the EU conceded that the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will not be passed during Obama’s final months as president.

International mega-trade deals like TTIP are all about reducing “barriers to trade” – in other words, “harmonising” regulations between all parties which raises concerns that there will be a race to the bottom, with important regulations related to health and the environment watered down.

Among the criticisms of TTIP is that it is disconnected from the urgency of climate change and the Paris Agreement, and that it will allow for lax regulations, loopholes, and an easier flow of trade in fossil fuels, particularly shale gas from the US.

Recently in Britain, US climate denying think tanks the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Heartland Institutespoke at the Conservative Party Conference and called for greater coordination between Britain and America. The CEI also have a voice on the international stage, with representatives currently attending the Marrakech climate conference.

Donald Trump has also named the director of CEI's Center for Energy and Environment, the climate science denying Myron Ebell, the as the man in charge of theUS Environmental Protection Agency's transition under the president-elect.

Trade Talk

Among the other topics discussed in the Heritage Foundation meeting in July were “foreign and defence policy, the challenges posed by ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] to UK defence industry collaboration and appetite to push for improvements to operation of the UK-US defence cooperation treaty.”

Concerns about EU food standards were also raised during the lunch meeting. Specifically, the issue of chlorine-washed chicken currently banned in Europe due to health concerns was raised, with participants arguing that the long-standing restriction “is without scientific basis”.

In a follow up letter on 23 August, Fox wrote to DeMint: “[Redacted]. I look forward to working with you as the new UKgovernment develops its trade policy priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as defence.” (The Department for International Trade operates theDefence and Security Organisation which helps British security and defence industries export their products).

In responding to a request for comment on the relationship between Fox and the Heritage Foundation, a spokesperson for the Department for International Trade said: “We will work with our trade and business partners to do everything we can to help UK businesses grow and take advantage of trade inward and outbound investment as well as the global appetite for British goods and services.”

“The Heritage Foundation is a think tank that focuses on the principles of free trade amongst others,” they explained. “Ministers meet with a variety of stakeholders and the International Trade Secretary and other UK government Ministers including the Prime Minister has spoken at length about the UK as a champion of global free trade.”

In other meetings held between Fox and trade lawyers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the US Trade Representative, ambassador Mike Froman, concerns were raised over the future prospects of bilateral trade deals.

Notes from a roundtable with US trade experts show former US ambassador to the EU, Stuart Eizenstat, “noted Trump’s suggestion of withdrawal from the WTO as an especially bad omen. He lamented the current US political discourse on trade.

“A bilateral UK-US deal was politically attractive, but he questioned USTR [US Trade Representative] negotiating bandwidth.”

http://www.desmog.uk/brexit-climate-deniers several artls

On 23 June 2016 the UK will vote in the EU referendum on whether Britain should remain part of the European Union. The 'Brexit' vote comes after Prime Minister David Cameron promised in his 2015 Conservative Party election manifesto to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU before the end of 2017.

Since then, the link between climate science deniers and Eurosceptics has become more pronounced. In February 2016, it was revealed that Lord Lawson's climate denying Global Warming Policy Foundation had moved its headquarters into the same building as Brexit campaign groups 'Business for Britain' and 'Vote Leave', along with a slew of other right wing organisations including the TaxPayers' Alliance.

The Brexit-climate denier overlap stems from a common neoliberal ideology that fears top-down state interventions and regulations which are perceived as threatening values of individual freedom, economic (market) freedom, or the sovereignty of national governments. Under this logic, we must reject both the European Union and most climate policy.

And the influence of this small group extends beyond the walls of their 55 Tufton Street address - just a stone's throw from the Houses of Parliament - to include prominent politicians and traditional British media outlets. It begs the question: If the climate-euro sceptic bubble is successful on Brexit, what will then happen to British climate change policy?

texit

ref

Not shy about claiming the spotlight, Texas secessionists are reporting interest in their group from European independence organizations.

According to the Texas Nationalist Movement's Facebook page, the group's executive director, Nate Smith, is taking "Texit" to Europe this week.

"Texit" is a play on the term "Brexit," which became prominent earlier this year in discussions of the United Kingdom's June referendum to separate from the European Union.

The group's president, Daniel Miller, said Thursday afternoon that Smith was either in Paris or on his way from England, where he met with U.K. Independence Party representative George Konstantinidis.

aug 2016? driver? paris?

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/Texit-on-tour-Texas-secessionist-invited-to-9969125.php

Imagine this scenario: a group of Texas secessionists travel to Europe to spread the word of ‘Texit’.

This is what happened last week. The Texas Nationalist Movement visited England and France to “offer advice and perspective on the right of self-determination and peaceful independence”.

As the group’s website reads: “TNM greatly appreciates that our opinion is valued by our liberty-minded friends in Europe.”

Spurred on by the successful Brexit vote this past summer, the Texit movement — championed by climate science denier Christopher Monckton — now hopes to inspire and advise similar movements in France, Greece, and Spain.

This cross-Atlantic cooperation highlights the growing network between British and American euro-climate sceptics.

From Monckton leading the ‘Texit’ charge and UKIP’s Brexit champion and climate science denier Nigel Farage appearing at Donald Trump’s rally, to prominent UK ‘Leave’ campaigners courting American climate denial think tanks ahead of the EUreferendum (the same think tanks that attended the Conservative Party Conference earlier this month), they are all united in their free-market belief in limited government intervention.

This often manifests into a disdain for climate change policy and environmental regulations.

And yes, there have even been calls for a ‘clexit’ by climate deniers including Monckton and US-based Marc Morano.

While it’s not entirely clear exactly how one would ‘exit’ the climate, among the group’s many demands are that nations refuse to ratify the United Nations Paris Agreement — a position shared by Republican US Presidential candidate Donald Trump (the candidate most supported by Texit-eers). So far, the clexit movement hasn't seen much success with the Paris climate deal set to come into effect next month.

Texit’s Euro-tour

Dubbed the “Euro-trip for independence”, the self-styled “foreign minister” for Texas, Nathan Smith, met with UKIP’s eastern countries chairman George Konstantinidis to discuss “the success of the Brexit vote, progress made towards UKindependence since then, and also new efforts to lead Greece out of the EU.”

Smith then attended a forum at the Abbaye de Reigny, in France, with the country’s far-right Eurosceptic Union Populaire Republicaine (UPR) where, according to the TNM website, a roundtable discussion on a possible ‘Frexit’ took place.

Brian Denny of Britain’s far-left Trade Unionists Against the EU group was in attendance along with Anthony Coughlan, secretary of the Irish Eurosceptic lobby group, the National Platform for EU Research and Information Centre, and Pierre Levy, a French cultural theorist and media scholar, who currently works at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

This isn’t the first time TNM’s Smith has travelled abroad in an effort to drum up support for secession campaigns.

In March 2015 he appeared at a St. Petersburg conference where ‘the fringe of the fringe’ gathered: the International Russian Conservative Forum hosted by a pro-Kremlin ultranationalist party.

Then again last month, Smith joined other separatist hopefuls from California, Europe and the Middle East at a Kremlin-funded conference organised by Russia’s Anti-Globalist Movement group.

UKIP brexit nigel farage

Roger Helmer MEP has organised a special screening of the highly-acclaimed film Climate Hustle. He said: "The film takes apart the case for 'catastrophic global warming' and exposes the lies, exaggerations and misinterpretations which underlie the new religion of 'warmism'."

http://www.desmog.uk/2016/08/11/newly-appointed-government-special-advisers-linked-brexit-climate-denier-network

The names of those who have been appointed as special advisers in Prime Minister Theresa May’s new cabinet have been steadily trickling out these past few weeks.

Among these newly announced special advisors, or SpAds, are Nick Timothy – the man credited with the demise of the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) – and Rob Oxley of Vote Leave and the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Meanwhile several others have previously worked on campaigns for Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s London mayoral candidacy, and many more of them formed part of Vote Leave’s core campaign staff.

Here we take a look at some of those who have been appointed so far and their links to the Brexit Climate Deniers:

Theresa May

Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill will join the new prime minister as her joint-chiefs of staff – both have previously worked for May as SpAds in her role in the Home Office and are known to be fiercely loyal to her.

Hill for the past few years has been working for lobby and PR firm Lexington Communications, which counts fracking firm Cuadrilla among its clients.

Timothy, described as “hugely influential” on May’s work, is credited in the Telegraph with being the man behind the scrapping of DECC. And according to the Financial Times, he’s not a fan of green taxes either.

This past April, Timothy called the Climate Change Act a “monstrous act of self-harm”, echoing a favourite line used by those in the climate science denying Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

John Godfrey is May’s new director of policy. Most recently he’s worked as director of corporate affairs at Legal & General – which this week offered millions towards building a new Gatwick runway – and prior to that he was a director of communications at Lehman Brothers. In the late 1980s Godfrey was also special advisor to Minister of State John Patten and then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.

May’s new communications director is Katie Perrior, former senior media advisor to David Davis when he was shadow Home Secretary. Perrior also helped run the PR campaign for Boris Johnson’s 2008 campaign for mayor, as well as his 2012 bid for a second term. Perrior’s own PR firm, iNHouse Clients, counted Centrica among its clients up until November 2015.

Lizzie Loudon will become May’s new press secretary. A former special advisor to Iain Duncan Smith when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Loudon most recently worked on communications for the Vote Leave campaign.

Finally, May’s head of features is Liz Sanderson, who’s worked with May since 2014 after leaving her job at the Mail on Sunday.

Priti Patel

One of Patel’s new SpAds at the Department for International Development (DFID) will be Robert Oxley, a vocal critic of theUK’s aid spending target. As the former head of media for Vote Leave and previous campaign director at the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), his appointment was welcomed by Matt Ridley on twitter, who wrote: “great news, let me know how to contact you there if poss. [sic]”

On climate finance – something which, along with climate adaptation, DFID has been involved in – Oxley, in his role at theTPA, was once quoted alongside the GWPF’s Lord Lawson, saying: “Ministers should be focusing on how they spend every penny rather than increasing the already sizeable budget that we send abroad.

“International aid is there to help the poorest but that does not mean that taxpayers cannot demand value for money. People will find it bizarre that we are spending even more money propping up governments abroad.”

The appointment has raised further concerns about Patel’s commitment to the Department’s objectives (she’s beenpreviously quoted that DFID should be scrapped). Labour MP Stephen Doughty, member of the international development select committee, has called it a “deeply worrying appointment.”

Liam Fox

David Goss has been Fox’s SpAd since October 2014, prior to which he worked as a press officer to the Conservative Party for more than two years, so it’s expected he’ll join Fox in the International Trade department. Goss also helped on Johnson’s 2012 campaign.

Fox has made a remarkable come-back after he was forced to resign as shadow Defence Secretary in 2011 amidst controversy over his relationship with friend and self-styled, unofficial adviser Adam Wherrity and their work for the now defunct Atlantic Bridge organisation which held close ties to US neocon groups.

While shadow Defence Secretary, one of Fox’s three SpAds included Luke Coffey, an American army captain who now works for the Washington DC-based free market, climate denying Heritage Foundation (where incidentally, Fox gave a speechin 2014).

Boris Johnson

Will Walden is expected to continue working with Johnson as his new SpAd after spending years working as the former London Mayor’s communications director. Prior to that, Walden worked in the media for 20 years and was poached by Johnson from the BBC.

Andrea Leadsom, Greg Clark, and David Davis

One of Leadsom’s new SpAds at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is expected to be Lee Cain, Vote Leave’s former head of broadcast.

According to Guido Fawkes’s running updates, it looks like Greg Clark will be taking his SpAds Jacob Wilmer and Meg Powell-Chandler with him to the new Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) department.

Meanwhile, no word yet on who’s going to be heading up Davis’ SpAd team over at the Brexit Department. We'll be updating this page as new information comes in.

Debacle over Liam Fox & his links to the USA

which ended in his resignation was well documented at the time and since but in view of the recent elevation of Andrew Dunlop to the Lords and his subsequent insensitive appointment to the Scottish Office I decided to dig around the archives to see what might surface. It seemed to me that the Charity Commission was over much eager to put the charity to bed without chastising the Trustees who had failed in their duties. The report will be lengthy and perhaps not for the faint hearted but given the characters will be heavily involved in Scottish politics I believe the journey to be worthwhile. The first post will provide an opening narrative and I expect to add to it daily.

Margaret Thatcher’s Scottish “Rat Pack”. Hurt and dangerous they wait patiently to strike

*. Dr “old Blue Eyes” Liam Fox (offered a role in the new cabinet but turned it down. Will return to lead the Party sometime before the next election)

*. Adam “Mr Bojangles” Werritty ( Still around, in London, Near to Westminster. Still close friends with Liam Fox)

*. Michael “Northern Light” Gove (appointed to a key role as Justice Secretary)

*. Andrew “Rich Boy” Dunlop (recently elevated to the Lords by David Cameron and given a key role in the Scottish Office overseeing a potentially troublesome SNP dominated Holyrood)

The Atlantic Bridge Research and Education Scheme

The scheme was an educational charity founded in 1997 with Margaret Thatcher as its President to promote Atlanticism, a philosophy of cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States regarding political, economic, and defence issues.

It was set up by Liam Fox, former Secretary of State for Defence of the United Kingdom. It was dissolved in September 2011, following a critical report from the Charity Commission the previous year.

In discussion with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Fox claimed that the think tank was intended to “bring people together who have common interests and recognise that…[they] will all be called upon to defend those… interests”.

Its work largely consisted of uniting British and American Conservatives and foreign policy hawks. This included meetings with John Ashcroft and Karl Rove and the presentation of awards to Rudy Giuliani and Henry Kissinger.’

In 2003, when Fox was Shadow Secretary for Health, he also chaired a conference on “scientific research and medical provision”. Speakers included Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Timothy Morris of GlaxoSmithKline and Peter Farrow of Pfizer.

The Atlantic Bridge was briefly a partnership program of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free-market organisation with extensive links to American State Legislators and corporate and industrial groups. It hosted events with the Center for Security Policy, the Heritage Foundation and representatives from Lehman Brothers.

Patrons of the Atlantic Bridge included Pfizer, UK Conservative Party donor Michael Hintze and Michael Lewis of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.

The Atlantic Bridge gained charitable status in 2003 as an “education and research scheme”.

In September 2009, the Charity Commission started a regulatory compliance case after receiving complaints about the charity’s political activity which, as a 501(c) organisation, the US-arm, Atlantic Bridge Inc, was “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” The offending statement was:

“Americans should look forward to 6 May 2010, after which David Cameron and his government will likely assume power. He will be good for America and better for the Special Relationship.” – Atlantic Bridge CEO Amanda Bowman. Other allegations have Conservative shadow cabinet ministers, sitting on the management structures of the charity, responsible for rubbishing the NHS in US healthcare debates.

A 2010 report by the Charity Commission ruled that it was “not evident that [it] had advanced education” and “may lead members of the public to call into question its independence from party politics”. It was ordered to enact a 12-month review to bring it into line with its charitable objectives. On 30 September 2011, The Atlantic Bridge was dissolved by its remaining trustees.

The Atlantic Bridge drew upon the experience and expertise of a board of directors, advisory council and an executive council. Each entity included experienced individuals from political, business and academic backgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic.

Honorary Patron

The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC

Advisory Council

Dr Liam Fox MP – UK Chairman

Senator Jon Kyl – Honorary US Chairman

Lord Astor of Hever DL – Trustee

Congressman John Campbell

Senator Lindsey Graham

Eleanor Laing MP

Senator Mel Martinez

Congressman Adam Putnam

John Whittingdale OBE MP

Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling have also sat on the advisory panel, as have American senator Joe Lieberman.

Executive Council

Scott Syfert – Executive Council Chairman

Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr.

Alan Guarino

Michael Hintze

Nicholas Howard

Clark S. Judge

Malcolm Scott

Board of Directors

Ross Bevevino

Amanda Bowman

Andrew Dunlop – Trustee

Craig Earnshaw

John Falk

Professor Robert MacLaren

Professor Patrick Minford – Trustee

Staff Members

Catherine Bray – US Executive Director

Adam Werritty – UK Executive Director

Kara Watt – Operations Director

Gabby Bertin – Later David Cameron’s spokeswoman, admitted at interview by Sir Gus McPherson (head of the civil service) that she knew Mr Werritty from her time working for Mr Fox when the Conservatives were in opposition and Mr Cameron knew she had worked for The Atlantic Bridge.

...

https://caltonjock.com/2015/05/18/ultra-right-wing-liam-fox-returned-to-power-with-his-neo-con-colleagues-attached-is-a-comprehensive-expose-of-misdeeds-in-public-office-ill-wills-of-change-are-being-foisted-on-scotland-with/

http://www.alternet.org/environment/her-first-day-office-uks-new-pm-theresa-may-sacked-her-nations-climate-agency-so-now

When the United Kingdom surprised the world last month by voting to leave the European Union, a brief period of panic ensued as global markets struggled to absorb the news: The world’s sixth-largest economy had just voluntarily withdrawn from a powerful consortium whose 28 partners collectively represent nearly a quarter of global GDP.

Once the practical details of Brexit began to emerge, markets stabilized and much of the anxiety subsided. A mix of genuine concern and speculative curiosity took over. Who would replace Prime Minister David Cameron, who had kept his pledge to resign should the “Yes” vote he so vigorously opposed carry the day? Might remorseful voters or cagey MPs find some way to wriggle out of it? If not, how long would it take for Brexit to become final—and what would the terms and conditions of the divorce look like?

In all the uncertainty of the moment, one question few people thought to ask was: What impact would the Brexit vote have on the U.K.’s laudable efforts to curb pollution and reverse climate change, which the country spelled out very clearly during last year’s COP21 gathering in Paris?

We didn’t have to wait very long to get a hint.

Queen Elizabeth II named Conservative MP Theresa May on July 13. May’s first order of business was to publicly affirm that Brexit would indeed be taking place. Her second order of business, alas, was to announce that she would be shuttering her country’s Department for Energy and Climate Change, merging it with the newly created (and somewhat ominously named) Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Environmental figures within the United Kingdom immediately deemed the decision to be “deeply worrying” and “a terrible move.”

And May certainly didn't assuage environmentalists’ fears with her next move: naming Andrea Leadsom—a fellow Conservative MP whose voting record on climate change, deforestation, and wildlife issues leaves much to be desired—as her country’s environment secretary.

Hopefully, what we’re seeing from the new British government has more to do with transitional awkwardness than any sort of creeping agenda. Although May’s voting record on climate and energy issues is by no means stellar, she’s no American-style climate denier. The person appointed by May to lead the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy,Greg Clark, seems to understand the gravity of the threats posed by climate change; Clark has said in the past that green policies will create jobs, cut energy costs, and reduce Britain’s dependence on foreign oil. And Philip Hammond, the new chancellor—the equivalent of the U.S. Treasury secretary—has publicly voiced his agreement.

But with so many Brexit-related question marks floating around 10 Downing Street—and with so much political maneuvering taking place at such a furious clip—it’s impossible to tell where things are going with any degree of certainty. At moments like this one, Britain may well need the guidance of its most trusted friend and ally.

After meeting with newly named British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry affirmed that the connection between our two countries was, as ever, “special and unbreakable,” intentionally echoing language that Winston Churchill famously used to describe this relationship back in 1946. As Britain’s brand-new government tries to find its environmental-policy footing amid the tumult of Brexit, it’s worth reiterating that candor is always at the heart of any close friendship.

With that stipulated, then, it’s incumbent on the United States to candidly tell its partner across the pond that now is not the time—now cannot be the time—for the United Kingdom to start cutting corners on the ambitious climate commitment it made in Paris. Surely our special relationship allows us to let Britain know, in no uncertain terms, that it’s now more important than ever for it to adhere to its 2008 promise to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. And if this relationship is truly unbreakable, then presumably no harm can be done by reminding the United Kingdom that the world is watching closely to make sure it follows through on its vow to phase out coal energy over the next 10 years, with the country’s last coal-fired power station slated to shut down by 2025.

Supporting our friend during this tumultuous time also means speaking to her honestly and forthrightly. The last woman to hold the office of British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, memorably urged President George H.W. Bush not to "go wobbly” when considering whether to take military action against Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a decision she strongly supported. The Iron Lady never shied from sharing her opinion; in this instance, her thinking prevailed.

As we all learned in Paris, dismantling and defeating climate change is going to take worldwide cooperation and commitment from all partners. There’s no room for backsliding or second-guessing.

Don't go wobbly on us, Theresa.