RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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according to Russia, he's pretty impotent...
NaijaProdigy Redux
Veteran
John Kelly probably waking up right now to Trump's mayor comments like "I just wanted to sleep in today 
"
"Trump was looking for a trade war. Now he has one.
Economic historians have a term for this sort of behaviour: beggar-thy-neighbour. It usually makes things worse.
Kevin Carmichael
September 28, 2017
And so it begins.
Before he started picking on “Rocket Man,” and the National Football League, President Donald Trump, the bully-in-chief, targeted his country’s closest trading partners.
They didn’t take the bait. Countries such as Canada, China, Germany, and Mexico have done an admirable job of (mostly) ignoring Trump’s threats to blow up trade agreements and violate commercial norms.
But there is only so much a politician can stand. Trump keeps begging for a trade war, and it now seems inevitable that he is going to get one.
MORE: U.S. slams Bombardier with massive and ‘absurd’ duty of 219 per cent
The U.S. Commerce Department’s decision to tag Bombardier Inc.’s newest plane with retaliatory tariffs of more than 200 per cent was a blatant abuse of power. The complainant, Boeing Co., had asked for only an 80-per-cent penalty. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, went bigger to remind the world that he could. “The U.S. values its relationships with Canada, but even our closest allies must play by the rules,” Ross said in a press release.
Ross’s remark was telling, not because he said anything surprising, but because he chose to say anything at all.
There is nothing new about the U.S. looking out for the interests of Boeing; as Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Wednesday, just ask Airbus SE, the world’s only other supplier of large commercial airplanes. Yet there was something new about the way Ross announced the preliminary decision. Edward Alden, a reliable observer of trade policy and politics at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that it’s unusual for the commerce secretary to comment so forcefully on a determination that could technically be reversed.
Ross’s move was the equivalent of the schoolyard tough smearing a Cheez Whiz sandwich on the face of an innocent. He used the Bombardier press release to remind that his department had initiated 65 trade-related investigations since Inauguration Day, a 44 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. Economic historians have a term for this sort of behaviour: beggar-thy-neighbour. It comes from the Great Depression, when countries resorted to tariffs to “protect” jobs and only ended up making things worse.
MORE: Bombardier gets a taste of ‘America First.’ What comes next?
Thanks to Trump, we probably are about to repeat that mistake. Consider the Boeing case.
The company earned revenue of about (US) $95 billion in 2016, which is greater than the gross domestic product of Ukraine. Bombardier’s revenue was about $16 billion. Yet mighty Boeing still took issue with the Canadian company’s sale of 75 of its 110-seat, C-Series planes to Delta Airlines, even though Boeing doesn’t build such a plane. Bombardier sold the C Series to Delta at a significant discount, standard practice in the aviation business, because Delta was one of the first to place a big order. Boeing said the only reason Bombardier was able to sell its planes so cheap was because it was the recipient of unfair government subsidies.
Boeing is the recipient of as much or more government assistance as Bombardier, but that is beside the point. The Trump administration saved no jobs by siding with Boeing: the company doesn’t make the plane Delta wanted, nor was it planning to. Boeing sued Bombardier to stomp on a potential future competitor.
Bombardier’s CS100 assembly line is seen at the company’s plant Friday, December 18, 2015 in Mirabel, Que. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
Meanwhile, the Commerce decision weakens Bombardier, and therefore puts in jeopardy at least some of the more than 20,000 Americans who work for the company’s U.S.-based suppliers. The plane-making duopoly of Boeing and Airbus would continue to reign uncontested, keeping prices high for airlines and their passengers. If Bombardier fails, a Chinese buyer likely would pick up the pieces to accelerate that country’s dream of challenging the duopoly. If that happened, Boeing could say goodbye to much of its Asia business.
So how does harassing Bombardier help American workers, again?
RELATED: How Chrystia Freeland sees trade talks in the Trump era
You don’t need to be a game theorist to connect those dots. The danger is that the Trump administration doesn’t care to try. It’s on a rampage. Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, stated bluntly earlier this month that the White House intends to use the size of the American economy to muscle trading partners into accepting trade agreements on the president’s terms.
“What is the best thing to do in the face of market distortions to arrive at free and fair competition?” Lighthizer asked at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I believe—and I think the president believes—that we must be proactive, the years of talking about these problems has not worked, and that we must use all instruments we have to make it expensive to engage in non-economic behaviour, and to convince our trading partners to treat our workers, farmers, and ranchers fairly.
“We must demand reciprocity in home and in international markets,” he said. “So expect change, expect new approaches, and expect action.”
There is little reason to think any of this change will be for the better.
OPINION: Trudeau’s banana republic approach to Bombardier and Boeing
Americans, even the reasonable ones, tend to forget that politics is practiced in other countries besides their own. Bombardier builds the wings for the C-Series planes in Northern Ireland, and both Prime Justin Trudeau and British Prime Minister Theresa May are talking about stopping all business with Boeing.
Expect more of this from other countries because the U.S.insults will keep coming. The Commerce decision on Bombardier was an invitation to American companies to sue their toughest international rivals rather than out hustle them. The outrage that Canada’s political class demonstrated on Wednesday will spread to other countries. Because Trump is so unpopular, the pressure to retaliate will be great. Someone eventually will.
History is a pretty good guide for what could happen next. Maybe the lessons of the Depression will forestall the worst. But the nature of politics hasn’t changed enough to keep everyone on the high road. The trade war is coming.
Russian intelligence would have seen Paul Manafort as the perfect mark
Play Video 2:08
FBI agents raided Manafort's home in predawn search
FBI agents with a search warrant raided the home of Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, without warning July 26 and seized documents and other records, say people familiar with the special counsel investigation. (Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
For 30 years, my job as a CIA officer was to try to figure out how Russian operatives were trying to attack the United States. I oversaw intelligence operations in the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact and worked on counterintelligence and cybersecurity at CIA headquarters. So when I read the recent reports that President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had offered to briefRussian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on the presidential election last year, I was alarmed.
Because to Russian intelligence in 2016, Manafort would have looked like the ideal spy. Someone like Deripaska is exactly how they would have gotten to him.
Deripaska, an aluminum magnate worth about $6.5 billion, is a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. Putin demands fealty and pretty much whatever else he wants from people like Deripaska, who understand that if they don’t live up to their end of the bargain, they could end up like another famous former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who displeased Putin and was sent to a tuberculosis-ridden prison for more than a dozen years. Although Deripaska has repeatedly denied any connection to Russian intelligence, these oligarchs understand that in addition to making money for themselves and Putin, they occasionally will be asked to be the Kremlin’s eyes and ears, and facilitators, if need be. Russia’s security services work closely with them; unlike in Western democracies, there’s no concept of a conflict of interest. Everyone has the same interests at heart: Putin’s.
[Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation]
Manafort would have understood all of this clearly, of course. Before getting himself onto the Trump team, Manafort made a living as an influence broker, a sort of foreign lobbyist whose connections in Washington and elsewhere made him attractive to Deripaska and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. If you choose to wade in that swamp, and you are trying to make money doing it, you cannot help becoming highly attuned to the power relationships in that part of the world. From my experience with Russia, I believe it is highly likely that Ukraine’s intelligence services would have at least run Manafort’s name by their Russian counterparts, to ensure that an American working at the senior levels of the Ukrainian government was not also working for the CIA. Given Manafort’s experience, I doubt this would have surprised or alarmed him. Deripaska’s relationship with Putin was no secret when Manafort’s firm began doing business with the billionaire in 2005. (Both sides say those business dealings concluded years ago.) Not long after that, WikiLeaks published a U.S. government description of Deripaska as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”
Manafort’s representative says his offer to provide “a private briefing” on the campaign to Deripaska was part of an attempt to collect on debts. The meeting does not appear to have happened — Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni has denied it, and a spokeswoman for Deripaska has said The Washington Post’s inquiries about whether Manafort briefed Deripaska “veer into manufactured questions so grossly false and insinuating that I am concerned even responding to these fake connotations provides them the patina of reality.”
But Russian oligarchs, and their friends in the Russian government, keep track of who’s who and what jobs they have or might end up with. The prospect of using Manafort’s already existing — and already complicated — financial ties to one of Putin’s closest allies would have been irresistible to Russian intelligence services. In the world of Russian human intelligence collection, the ideal spy looks something like this: an individual with a significant financial vulnerability or motivation (such as debt or a threat of meaningful financial loss); someone with access to inside information of interest to the Russian government; a person who understands the need for discretion and, if necessary, secrecy. It is a plus to the Russian security services if the person in question also has ideological motivations (being pro-Russian, or at least not anti-Russia) and is already a known quantity.
Any Russian intelligence officer worth his salt would have identified Manafort — whom Deripaska had sued in 2014 in the Cayman Islands, alleging that he took almost $19 million without accounting for the money — as meeting all those qualifications. Russian intelligence would have been remiss had they not at least identified Manafort as an excellent target worth pursuit. If Manafort’s willingness to brief Deripaska was actually passed along to the billionaire (the evidence is inconclusive), then half the work of the Russian services was already done: Someone who fits the profile of the ideal agent had signaled his eagerness to get back in touch with a close ally of Putin’s.
[I was in the CIA. We wouldn’t trust a country whose leader did what Trump did.]
From a counterintelligence perspective, a scenario where Manafort became a target of Russian operatives does not take a lot of imagination to come up with. It is an example of a Russian “seeding” operation, where the special services attempt to recruit an asset before that person ascends to a position of true power. This is one of the many ways Russian intelligence attempts to penetrate the senior-most levels of the U.S. government.
The fact that the briefing doesn’t seem to have taken place doesn’t necessarily mean that the Russians dropped the whole matter. The normal response from Russian intelligence in such circumstances would be to increase the level of discretion and secrecy for such a promising case. Ensuring any communication with Manafort would not eventually come to light would have been a priority. The Russians would have attempted to keep any additional contact with such a promising prospect out of the view of the public, out of unprotected email, off telephones and away from computers.
Without any doubt, the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the FBI are attempting to determine whether there were additional communications between the Russians and Manafort. Mueller’s office raided Manafort’s condo last month, and the New York Times has reported that prosecutors are threatening to indict him. As a former intelligence professional, I don’t know whether Manafort broke any laws. That will be for his lawyers and the government’s lawyers to argue over. But there’s no question that he would have looked like a prime target to my former adversaries in Moscow.
Read more:
Why Americans need to close ranks against Putin’s attack on our democracy
I was an FBI agent. Trump’s lack of concern about Russian hacking shocks me.
Why would Russia interfere in the U.S. election? Because it sometimes works.
He has to go.. it's as simple as thatDude topped the NFL fukkery...by attacking a mayor under duress
John Reena
Superstar
My nikka, LINKS and a brief description will suffice.
I'll tell you what this is like:One of his more disrespectful tweets and that says a lot. This man is a sociopath
Imagine during Katrina, when Bush was being criticized to high hell, that instead of just ignoring the criticism, George Bush called Kanye West an untalented uppity entertainer and that blacks in New Orleans should figure out how to swim.
Thats basically it.
Its SO bad
How do you fukk up THIS badly? 
How do you fukk up THIS badly?
What do you mean?
It's Cheeto.
How could he not?
Low-key, Tom Price was marked the moment 45 did this:
