11/26/16

Weekly Featured Profile – Tom Burke

KeyWiki.org

Tom Burke

Tom Burke, aka Tomas de Bourgha, has been a leader of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! in Chicago and Minneapolis,

He now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In the 1980s, Tom Burke was involved in the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organizationand their college front group the Progressive Student Network. He helped lead the 1990 split in Freedom Road which led to the formation of their rival Freedom Road Socialist Organization FightBack! faction.

Tom Burke was an activist with Humanity Allied Against Racist Mascots and the pro-Irish Republican Irish American Student Association.

On April 3rd, 2008, Tom Burke of Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! endorsed Bail Out the People Movement‘s “March on Wall Street”;

Because we must demand that the needs of the people come before the greed of the super rich. Millions are jobless and homeless, and millions more will be living on the streets if the government continues to waste trillions of dollars on saving wealthy bankers instead of saving people.

In October 2008, several thousand college professors, students and academic staff signed a statement in support of Bill Ayers in solidarity with former Weather Underground Organization terrorist Bill Ayers.

In the run up to the U.S. presidential elections, Ayers had come under considerable media scrutiny, sparked by his relationship with presidential candidate Barack Obama.

We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack…

Tom Burke signed the statement.

On September 24th, the FBI raided the homes of twelve FightBack! supporters activists across the USA, looking for links to foreign terrorist organizations. Burke was one of those whose home was raided and who is being investigated by the FBI.

70 student activists from all over the country arrived in Gainesville, Florida to attend the annual Students for a Democratic Society National Convention on Oct. 27-28, 2012.

Tom Burke, of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, was also on one panel.

Afterwards, Burke said, “Speaking to the SDS Convention was a powerful experience. I spoke about the FBI raids and grand jury repression, including members of SDS. I relayed my student experience with the Divest Now! campaign to smash racist Apartheid in South Africa. Then, with the Progressive Student Network in the 1980s, we organized campus protests against CIA recruitment. We acted in solidarity with the revolutionary movements of Nicaragua and El Salvador. In 1991, the PSN helped organize mass rallies to oppose the first U.S. Gulf War on Iraq.”

Burke continued, “Today’s student activists have known nothing but the U.S. always being at war. I spoke and emphasized the importance of supporting liberation struggles in Colombia and Palestine today, to stop U.S. intervention.”

Tom Burke, right

Grand Rapids, Michigan-based activist Tom Burke, one of the lead organizers for what’s billed as the Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC, says the protest has two aims. “One is it helps to build movements in this country by tying local groups to national issues. Secondly, it has an impact on the elections because the media starts to cover what the protesters are saying. We have a very different agenda than the Republican Party— and this year, in particular.”

(Tom Burke|more…)

11/26/16

Elite Media Plot New Censorship Regime

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

media

Under the guise of suppressing “fake news,” the elite media and their allies are creating a censorship regime to ban legitimate conservative news from platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

In a November 19 editorial, The New York Times complained about “millions of people” having been taken in by “fake news stories,” such as that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president. Think about this claim. For over a year Pope Frances has been denouncing capitalism and calling for open borders. Trump had been openly critical of the pope. If anyone believed the pope had suddenly endorsed Trump for president, they were living in a fantasy land. It’s extremely doubtful that millions believed such rubbish.

But the Times went further, citing a “BuzzFeed News analysis” finding that “during the last three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top fake news stories on Facebook generated more engagement—shares, likes and comments—than the 20 top stories from real news websites.”

Forget for a moment about what constitutes “real news.” Does the Times really want to cite BuzzFeed as a respectable source of news and information? Didn’t President Obama once joke about the site in the context of noting that when he was growing up in Hawaii, a “buzz feed” was associated with smoking marijuana?

I visited the site on Thanksgiving Day and found such stories as, “The Naked Rowers Are Back And Their Butts Are Ready To Fight Homophobia.”

It’s nice to see that a left-wing journalist, Robert Parry of Consortium News, has written a piece noting that the Times, with its focus on “fake news,” is seeking nothing less than censorship of the Internet. He dismisses the notion that “fake news” was exclusively pro-Trump, saying, “I also know that Clinton supporters were privately pushing some salacious and unsubstantiated charges about Trump’s sex life, and Clinton personally charged that Trump was under the control of Russian President Vladimir Putin although there was no evidence presented to support that McCarthyistic accusation.”

Parry then adds, “The simple reality is that lots of dubious accusations get flung around during the heat of a campaign—nothing new there—and it is always a challenge for professional journalists to swat them down the best we can. What’s different now is that the Times envisions some structure (or algorithm) for eliminating what it calls ‘fake news.’” That structure is being set in place by Facebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, in association with Google, whose parent company chairman, Eric Schmidt, worked hand-in-glove with the Clinton campaign. Google has already been caught altering search engine results to benefit Clinton during the campaign.

Parry cites examples of what he calls “fake news” carried by the Times and asks, “So, should Zuckerberg prevent Facebook users from circulating New York Times stories?”

Parry notes that “the Times and other mainstream news outlets—along with some favored Internet sites—now sit on a Google-financed entity called the First Draft Coalition, which presents itself as a kind of Ministry of Truth that will decide which stories are true and which are ‘fake.’” He says, “If the Times’ editorial recommendations are followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them.”

He links to a Reuters article noting that “Facebook and Twitter have joined a network of over 30 news and technology companies to tackle fake news and improve the quality of information on social media…” Reuters said, “Members of the group include the New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse, and CNN.”

It’s much bigger than that. This group even includes a division of the Qatar-financed Al Jazeera, the pro-Jihadist “news” agency once known as the voice of al Qaeda.

The “First Draft” coalition says it wants to expose “Hoaxes and fake stories generated for financial or political gain.” But Washington Free Beacon writer Bill McMorris has written a very informative article, “All the News That’s Fit to Fake,” about the fake news The New York Times published during the 2016 presidential campaign. He cites Times stories about how the Hispanic vote was going to carry Hillary to victory, and how whites weren’t going to turn out for Trump. Other “fake news” stories in the Times concerned how Clinton hoped a mandate and coattails would give Democrats control of the House and Senate, and how the stock market would crash if Trump won. The latter ran under the headline, “Debate Night Message: The Markets Are Afraid of Donald Trump.”

The Dow has hit a new high of 19,000 in the wake of Trump’s victory.

The push to ban “fake news” by the elite media, in association with fringe sites like BuzzFeed and Al-Jazeera, is outrageous. But outrage won’t stop the First Draft Coalition from implementing a censorship regime in coordination with Facebook and Google.

In fact, the process is already underway. The misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which is one of the richest components of the extreme left, is working with Twitter on the “content-policing” of its platform, in order to ban what it considers accounts that spread “hate speech.” USA Today reported that Heidi Beirich, a spokeswoman for the group, told the paper that “the center had asked Twitter to remove more than 100 accounts of white supremacists who violated Twitter’s terms of service.” The banning of these accounts has already begun.

Of course, “white supremacy” is a term that can be assigned to a variety of groups, some of them truly objectionable, but others which simply want to give a voice to the concerns of European-Americans and supporters of Judeo-Christian values.

Twitter might have a case to make if the advocacy of certain views could be directly linked to violence against minorities. Ironically, however, it’s the SPLC that once inspired violence at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group falsely accused of “hate.”

The SPLC itself spews fake news, in the form of false allegations picked up by the media which claim that people like me are radical extremists associated with bigoted members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the New Black Panthers.

The fact that the elite media and outlets like Twitter use information provided by the SPLC is an ominous indication of where the new censorship regime is headed. It’s time for more honest journalists on the left to follow Robert Parry’s example and speak out against the 1984-style “Ministry of Truth” that is emerging right before our eyes.


Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

11/26/16

Wealthy in India are turning ‘Nigerian Prince Scam’ honest

By: John | New Zeal

India : 500 Indian Rupees : Obverse

Progressives have salivated for a “war on cash” ever since the invention of digital money. Allowing the populace to have possession of their finances is way too much freedom when compared to the digital form that must be stored in easily taxable banks. As reported and applauded by many news outlets, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modia has taken the first shots in the war by announcing that 500 and 1000 rupee notes would become worthless by the end of the year.

Owners of said bills have until then to either deposit the notes (and take a haircut if the amount seems suspicious to the government) or exchange up to the equivalent of $65 per day for other currency. To put this in perspective, these bills are the equivalent of $8 and $15 respectively and account for 80 percent of the money supply in India.

Proponents of the plan state that it will curb counterfeiting and prevent the wealthy from hoarding cash to elude taxes, but it has had dramatic effects on the lower classes in a country where 95 percent of small businesses and traders deal in cash. As expected, this has been the reaction:



One of the more interesting phenomena occurring from the ban is the rise of the honest “Nigerian Prince scam”.

In the dishonest version a person is contacted, generally through email, and given a sob story about how the author is in an authoritarian state and has a large amount of currency they need to smuggle out of the country so that it isn’t confiscated. They offer the victim a percentage of the money in return for allowing the use of the victim’s bank account. All of this is followed by a request for account information and when successful, the scammer drains the account instead of adding millions to it. In the honest version playing across India, the wealthy are turning to their employees and others and asking them to deposit sums of around 250,000 rupees, an amount that won’t be scrutinized by the government.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Maids, drivers, nannies, and cooks in India are experiencing unusual politeness from their employers. Beyond the work they do every day, they suddenly have another use – to launder the undeclared cash which the rich have been hoarding in steel wardrobes, under the mattress and in under-bed storage.

The money is to be kept in the account until a safe point in the future where it will be withdrawn minus a fee to the depositor. While there are other methods such as buying and exporting gold or paying employees months in advance, the “honest Nigerian Prince (not-a-scam) is perhaps the most inventive and goes to show that no matter what a government does to attempt to strong-arm tax money out of its populace, some will find a work around to keep what is theirs.”

(H/T Zerohedge.com)

11/26/16

The SPLC’s laughable claim of an uptick in hate crimes since Donald Trump’s election

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Mob beats Chicagoan David Wilcox calling him ‘white boy Trump supporter’ via CNN

“Fears of heightened bigotry and hate crimes have turned into reality for some Americans after Donald Trump’s presidential win. And the list of incidents keeps growing.” – A big whopper by Holly Yan, Kristina Sgueglia and Kylie Walker of CNN, who tie Donald Trump to unsourced “hate crimes,” Nov. 21 2016

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) promises “deeper analysis and more documentation” to prove their obviously false assertion that there have been 701 “hateful incidents of harassment around the country” since Donald Trump has been elected. The insinuation is that evil Trump supporters have been emboldened upon Trump’s election to attack basically anyone who is not a white, straight male.

There are no suspects, no police reports, no due process, and no convictions in any of the SPLC’s thread-bare report. In fact, they even admit that their “hateful incidents of harassment around the country” are largely “anecdotal.” 

Allegations are not facts.

George Soros has jumped on the bandwagon, pledging to “commit $10 million from his personal foundation to combat a rise in hate crimes that he linked to the ‘incendiary rhetoric’ of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign,” as reported at the New York Times:

“His nonprofit group, the Open Society Foundations, plans to spend at least $5 million in coming weeks to fund grants of as much as $150,000 to community groups and civil rights organizations to develop plans for combating the recent spate of hate crimes and to work with victims.”

There is NO “spate of hate crimes.” But there IS an uptick in fake hate crimes.

Read more here…

11/26/16

The Denise Simon Experience – 11/24/16

The Denise Simon Experience

Hosted by DENISE SIMON, the Senior Research / Intelligence Analyst for Foreign and Domestic Policy for numerous flag officers and intelligence organizations.

SEGMENT 1:  Lee Edwards, Distinguished Fellow at Heritage Foundation B. Simon Center for Principles and Policy talks about the immediate conservative agenda items for the Trump administration, including tax reform, immigration, sequestration and cyber.

SEGMENT 2:  David Ibsen, President of United Against a Nuclear Iran, speaking about nuclear agreement violations of Iran, the sanctions platform, collaboration with North Korea, the growing Iran power in the region and across the globe.

SEGMENT 3:  Richard Weikart, acclaimed author and professor of Modern European History has just released his newest book, Hitler’s Religion, which is a chapter in history previously unknown, Hitler was not a Christian, nor a supporter of any church except for propaganda reasons.

SEGMENT 4:  Frank Wuco, 23 years Navy Intelligence Officer and former CENTCOM official spoke to Trump’s first 100 days in office and the opposition his administration will face.

BROADCAST WORLDWIDE:  –  WDDQ – TALK 92.1FM, WJHC – TALK 107.5FM, and on RED NATION RISING RADIO

#RedNationRising