person:lee fang

Germany’s new Nazis see Israel as role model |

The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/germanys-new-nazis-see-israel-role-model

“Unfortunately, our worst fears have come true,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the electoral success in Sunday’s general election of Alternative for Germany.

Known by its German initials AfD, the extreme nationalist party won almost 100 seats in Germany’s lower house.

“A party that tolerates far-right views in its ranks and incites hate against minorities in our country is today not only in almost all state parliaments but also represented in the Bundestag,” Schuster said.

The party is notorious for harboring all manner of racists and extremists, including [apologists for Germany’s war record and Holocaust revisionists.

It was a disaster that Germany’s mainstream politicians saw coming.

Sigmar Gabriel, the country’s foreign minister, warned earlier this month that if AfD scored well at the ballot box, “then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War II.”

Pro-Israel funder backs new Nazis
While Germany needs no lessons in how to be racist, this catastrophe can in part be attributed to leaders in Israel and their fanatical supporters: for years they have made common cause with Europe’s far right, demonizing Muslims as alien invaders who must be rejected and even expelled to maintain a mythical European purity.

It can also be attributed to German leaders who for decades have strengthened this racist Israel by financing Israel’s military occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

What happened in Germany is another facet of the white supremacist-Zionist alliance that has found a home in Donald Trump’s White House.

In the past few weeks, liberal flagships The New York Times and The Washington Post have been hunting for the nonexistent shadows of Russian interference in the German election.

Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept, the Gatestone Institute, the think tank of major Islamophobia industry funder Nina Rosenwald, was flooding German social media with “a steady flow of inflammatory content about the German election, focused on stoking fears about immigrants and Muslims.”

The Gatestone Institute is chaired by John Bolton, the neoconservative former US diplomat notorious for his hawkish support of the invasion of Iraq.

Gatestone articles making claims about Christianity becoming “extinct” and warning about the construction of mosques in Germany were regularly translated into German and posted by AfD politicians and sympathizers.

Story after story claimed that migrants and refugees were raping German women and bringing dangerous diseases to the country, classic themes of the Nazi propaganda once used to incite genocidal hatred of Jews.

In a tragic irony, Rosenwald’s father, an heir to the Sears department store fortune, used his wealth to help Jewish refugees flee persecution in Europe.

Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone?
Lee Fang on February 19, 2014 -
▻http://m.thenation.com/article/178460-shadow-lobbying-complex

http://www.thenation.com//sites/default/files/lobby_graphic_for_web.png

On paper, the #lobbying industry is quickly disappearing. In January, records indicated that for the third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister in droves. In 2013, the number of registered lobbyists dipped to 12,281, the lowest number on file since 2002.

But experts say that lobbying isn’t dying; instead, it’s simply going underground. The problem, says American University professor James Thurber, who has studied congressional lobbying for more than thirty years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, adds that his research suggests the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000.

A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying.

#Etats-Unis

Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits ?
Lee Fang on September 12, 2014 - 3:40PM ET
▻http://m.thenation.com/article/181601-whos-paying-pro-war-pundits

Rappel toujours nécessaire devant la masse monumentale uniforme d’"#analyses" d’"#experts"

... what you won’t learn from media (...) is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

[Retired General Jack] Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His #think_tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on ISIS used for multiple stories by The #New_York_Times, the #BBC and other leading outlets.

(...)

To portray Keane as simply a think tank leader and a former military official, as the media have done, obscures a fairly lucrative career in the contracting world. For the #General_Dynamics role alone, Keane has been paid a six-figure salary in cash and #stock_options since he joined the firm in 2004; last year, General Dynamics paid him $258,006.

#MSM #complexe_militaro_industriel #manipulations #Etats-Unis

Why DC Lobbyists are Vanishing | Interview with Lee Fang
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/why-dc-lobbyists-are-vanishing-interview-with-lee-fang

Abby Martin with journalist and The Nation contributor, Lee Fang, discussing his investigation into Washington’s ’Shadow Lobbying Complex’ and the evidence proving that lobbying isn’t decreasing...