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BREAKING! US Intervention in Syria? Not under Trump
Udo Ulfkotte, Media Slayer, Dies in Heart-Attack As Germany Descends into dictatorship
If you believe in truth, freedom of speech, and democracy, th(e)n you want Dr. Udo Ulfkotte to haunt the (failed!) media profession AND his coward former “colleagues” who chose to take the easy road in life and pay lip service to their masters: censorship, propaganda, and indoctrination.
Dr. Ulfkotte, author of Corrupt Journalists and Warning: Civil War in Germany, had the courage to speak up against our corrupt media and expose their manipulation and political agenda. This meant sure career suicide, of course, but he took it, because he needed a clear conscience and (to) deliver hard facts. What must have driven him to the fringes of his own sanity, he nevertheless always presented in a calm voice and professional manner. His interviews on Youtube are a riot.
He will be remembered by thousands of compatriots in Germany, Europe, and in the rest of the world who are, just like he was, looking (on) in shock and despair at the fall of free Germany and Europe. How could this happen? Dr. Ulfkotte explained it: Because the German key media are in complete cahoots with the regime.
This year Angela Merkel and her favorite ministers, Heiko Maas and Thomas De Maiziere, are going to prosecute most opposition, alternative and social media, and hunt down the popular resistance leaders (the AfD) They will effectively criminalize the native Germans by ruthless “hate speech laws” that will put an end to freedom of speech (if there ever was one).
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Journalist and German political scientist Dr. Udo Ulfkotte has passed (away). Ulkotte reveals how fake news permeates the mainstream media.
His unbending commitment to truth in media as well as his legacy will be remembered. (Michel Chossudovsky, January 15, 2017)
Recently, Dr.Udo Ulfkotte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.
He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.
It’s important to keep in mind that Dr. Ulfakatte is not the only person making these claims; multiple reporters have done the same and this kind of truthfulness is something the world needs more of.
One (out of many) great examples of a whistle-blowing reporter is investigative journalist and former CBC News reporter Sharyl Attkisson.
She delivered a hard-hitting TEDx talk showing how fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.
Another great example is Amber Lyon, a three-time Emmy award winning journalist at CC, who said that they are routinely paid by the US government and foreign governments to selectively report and even distort information on certain events. She has also indicated that the government has editorial control over content.
Ever since Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to control mainstream media, more and more people are expressing their concern that what we see in the media is nothing short of brainwashing.
This is also evident by blatant lies that continue to spam the TV screen, especially when it comes to topics such as health, food, war (‘terrorism‘), poverty, and more.
Things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, in fact, so it is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies, even without the help of whistle-blowers like Dr. Ulfakatte.
One great example is the supposed ‘war on terror,’ or ‘false flag terrorism.’ There are even Wikileaks documents alluding to the fact that the United States government planned to “retaliate and cause pain” to countries refusing GMOs.
Mainstream media’s continual support of GMOs rages on, despite the fact that a number of countries are now banning these products.
The list of lies goes on and on. It’s time to turn off your T.V. and do your own research if you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up.
And along the same line we have this newly published book:
The CIA As Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World Paperback
January 15, 2017
by
Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine’s research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam.
While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA’s relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States.
Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ. Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, and John Jay College.
This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA’s ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA’s activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States.A common theme is the CIA’s ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability. Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.
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Chris Hedges on "On Contact" interviews the great Glen Ford, editor of the "Black Agenda Report," providing even more data on exactly what's threatening our lives from the professional management team (but whose we'd like to know):
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You may not want to listen to much more of Thom Hartmann, who has been shining light on the movement to get rid of middle- and lower-class protections in U.S. law for years now, and generally supporting Democratic in figures like Obama and Hillary Clinton (I value listening to his program for his coverage on other issues as well - especially on Free Speech TV, Link TV and RT), but no matter your past experience, you'd be making an incredibly huuuuge mistake to miss this dialogue just because you're tired of the past Obama/Hillary ones). On this Thom segment we hear this Dick, who is on our side; and for whom we should thank our lucky stars that there is at least one Dick (Richard Wolfe) out there trying to reform the economic system in our favor.
Our Dick elucidates what Trump's trade policies will undoubtedly result in: billions less to the government in corporate taxes; trade wars with Mexico, China, etc.; and the laying off of millions of Federal and state workers. And this is just the start of what Trump's brand of libertarian politics will cause to descend on our country.
And as far as Trump's plans for the replacement program for the ACA/ObamaCare health insurance system? Larry Cohen, Bernie Sanders and Norman Solomon discuss the probabilities.
Trump's plan sounds great for the richest among us (or he might try to get the Mexicans to pay for it). Stay tuned!
John Pilger has been a sort of economic and political pillar of virtue for me since reading his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He's even better now.
Professor Chomsky has a few history lessons for the Trump revolutionaries that might prove interesting. He mentions that looking at corporate wealth is far more definitive of world leadership than just looking at national wealth.
Click his name and Bill Black will help just about anyone understand just about anything we'd like to better in these most confusing economic times: The Trump Era (no, not ERA).
Avedon Carol chimed in last week with suggestions for maintaining sanity for the polity:
One of the loopier themes I've seen on my Twitter feed accepts that Clinton was the wrong candidate but posits that this is because she wasn't a "sensible" candidate like, of all people, Barack Obama. This is a bit like the people who seemed to think that Michael Bloomberg was the perfect candidate. Or maybe they are even the same people, I don't know. After seeing the behavior of Democrats over the last few months, I have no idea how many of them might find excuses to support him, but the simple fact is that he's never been able to rouse much enthusiasm and there's every reason to believe he'd just be another loser._ _ _ _ _ _ _
But, as Branko Marcetic says in "Nobody for Bloomberg," the fetish of the elite for "sensible centrism" isn't sensible and certainly isn't popular among voters. Obama didn't win because he was "sensible", he won because he was charismatic and symbolic and anyway everyone was sick of Bush. But on policy, "Despite the certainty of political elites that the path to political success sits directly down the middle - a belief typically based on nothing but gut instinct - there is plenty of evidence that policies typically considered far to the left enjoy broad support."
Obama was certainly not being sensible when he referred to people who opposed Social Security cuts - about 90% of Americans - as "the crazy far-left." That's exactly the kind of thing that makes people lose their minds and vote for the likes of Trump.
"This is the trend for a whole host of other supposedly far-left policies. Large majorities of Americans believe money has too much influence on politics and want campaign finance reform. 58 percent favor replacing Obamacare with a federally-funded health insurance program, with only 22 percent in favor of repealing it with no replacement. 61 percent say the wealthy pay too little in taxes. Just over half think the Obama administration failed to do enough to prosecute bankers. And 54 percent agree with the statement that a 'political revolution might be necessary to redistribute money from the wealthiest Americans to the middle class. The ideas championed by 'firebrands' like Sanders are not fringe policies to be abandoned in the rush to the center. They are the center."
It's nice to know there is someone showing enough leadership to be talking about what matters. "Bernie Sanders: We need serious talk on serious issues: In my view, the media spends too much time treating politics like a baseball game, a personality contest or a soap opera. We need to focus less on polls, fundraisers, gaffes and who's running for president in four years, and more on the very serious problems facing the American people - problems which get relatively little discussion. I hope that's what our town meeting on CNN tonight will accomplish."
* CNN Bernie Sanders Town Hall 1/9/17, with Chris Cuomo.
Meryl Streep made a little speech at the Golden Globes that upset right-wingers but generated lots of applause among everyone else. Almost, but James Risen had a real point at the end of December when he said, "If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama."
Norman Solomon, "The Democratic Party Line That Could Torch Civil Liberties - and Maybe Help Blow Up the World [...] Many top Democrats are stoking a political firestorm. We keep hearing that Russia attacked democracy by hacking into Democratic officials' emails and undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign. Instead of candidly assessing key factors such as longtime fealty to Wall Street that made it impossible for her to ride a populist wave, the party line has increasingly circled around blaming Vladimir Putin for her defeat. Of course partisan spinners aren't big on self-examination, especially if they're aligned with the Democratic Party's dominant corporate wing. And the option of continually fingering the Kremlin as the main villain of a 2016 morality play is clearly too juicy for functionary Democrats to pass up - even if that means scorching civil liberties and escalating a new cold war that could turn radioactively hot.
Glenn is absolutely right about anti-Russia hysteria, and his scathing evaluation of Howard Dean's McCarthyism is spot on. Watching this craziness is disgusting. And Glenn is also absolutely right that Democrats need to stop obsessing on Russia conspiracy theories and address the real and present danger of Republicans' plans to destroy our institutions. Now.
Jimmy Dore is right, too, that when even Tucker Carlson can tear you full of holes, you really need to get your act together - and nothing in this whole Russia scare is doing any good for the American people, or even for the Democratic Party.
The "Baltimore Sun" has William Binney and Ray McGovern saying the Emails were leaked, not hacked, and they certainly have more credibility than all these other "experts."
Leonid Bershidsky has no love for Putin, but even he doesn't b(u)y the Russian hacking story. The trouble with these "security" people who think they know what happened is that they start with inference and keep building. Their stack of assumptions makes the whole story shaky, weak as the foundation is.
Meanwhile, people are working overtime to make Julian Assange look like the villain who gave Trump the election - even at the "Guardian," which ginned up some juicy quotes it made up and spread all around the net.
At "The American Conservative," the whole thing looks like "Christmas Crackers, Moscow-Style." I just can't help but concur.
And Matt Taibbi says, "Something About This Russia Story Stinks." Well, it does.
And Marcy Wheeler On the Joint Analysis Review, AKA the False Tor Node Positives Report says, "As I noted here, everyone agrees that the Joint Analysis Report released with Obama's sanctions package is a shitshow (here's the best explanation of why). But aside from complaining about how the shitshow JAR undermines the Administration's claims to have confirmed Russia's role in the DNC hack, no one has tried to explain why the Administration would release such a shitshow report."
Micah Lee checked some data. "The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog. They Aren't. After the U.S. government published a report on Russia's cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog. The U.S. report, which boasted of including 'technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services,' came with a list of 876 suspicious IP addresses used by the hackers, and these addresses were the clues I needed to, in the end, understand a gaping weakness in the report. An IP address is a set of numbers that identifies a computer, or a network of computers, on the internet. Each time someone loads my website, it logs their IP address.
So I searched my web server logs for the suspicious IP addresses, and I was shocked to discover over 80,000 web requests from IPs used by the Russian hackers in the last 14 months! Digging further, I found that some of these Russian hackers had even posted comments (mostly innocuous technical questions)! Even today, several days after publication of the report (which used a codename for the Russian attack, Grizzly Steppe), I'm still finding these suspicious IP addresses in my logs - although I would expect the Russians to stop using them after the U.S. government exposed them. [...] I found out, after some digging, that of the 876 suspicious IP addresses that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of National Intelligence put on the Russian cyber-attacker list, at least 367 of them (roughly 42%) are either Tor exit nodes right now, or were Tor exit nodes in the last few years."
Barry Lynne in "The Washington Monthly," "Democrats Must Become the Party of Freedom: Re-embracing anti-monopoly will reinvigorate American liberty and beat back Trumpism."
* * * * * "Here's what to tell people who love to remind blacks that Democrats were pro-slavery in the 19th century"
In 1932, about 70% of blacks voted for Republican Herbert Hoover but by 1936 a historic realignment began. Most Blacks were poor before the Great Depression and they continued suffering, even more than whites, during it; black poverty and unemployment rates were about twice as high than for whites. Though Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies did not target black poverty - and Southern Democrats managed to carve out huge, racist exceptions that severely disadvantaged blacks - millions of blacks benefited. FDR's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, also pushed him toward black equality, earning her the enmity of sexists and racists alike. As a result of tangible gains, African Americans started voting Democratic. In 1936 71% voted for FDR, perhaps the single most dramatic shift of any group of American voters in a four-year period.* * * * *
Matt Taibbi, "The Vampire Squid Occupies Trump's White House" - It does seem that Trump is appointing an awful lot of people who Obama should have put in jail.
Did I mention that Trump's expected nominees seem to be mostly people who should have been prosecuted by the Obama administration? Well, they are. And Steve Mnuchin is one of those people who should have been aggressively prosecuted for numerous documented crimes leading up to and evolving from the financial crisis, but funnily enough, he was never prosecuted. Who was the state AG who made that decision? "The Elephant in the Room Is a Donkey (Reflections on Kamala Harris) [...] In other words, how many Democratic leaders wish they had run the general election with Sanders in the lead? Not one. Just listen; you won't hear a single regret.
There's no point in controlling the country, as they see it, if they don't control the party as well. Without control of the party, which of their donors would back them?
With Sanders jailing Wall Street bankers, where who would pay Chuck Schumer to stay in office? With Sanders in the White House, the current class of Democratic leadership would have to find new donors - actual humans perhaps, as Sanders did - or retire from public life on their previous gains and lobby for a living."
* David Dayen wrote the story on Mnuchin on 3 January, with a follow-up on the 5th, "Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn't Prosecute Steven Mnuchin's Bank. Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged "The Intercept"'s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin's "OneWest Bank" for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation. 'It's a decision my office made,' she said, in response to questions from "The Hill" shortly after being sworn in as California's newest U.S. senator. 'We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it's a decision my office made,' Harris said. 'We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.'"
But as near as I can tell, her office advised her to prosecute, and the decision not to was made entirely by Kamala Harris.
It's always worth remembering The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations.
Naturally, Al From is in the "Guardian" trying to sell more of his snake oil. "Conventional wisdom among many pundits and Democratic strategists is that to win over more of them, we need to offer a populist agenda - associated with senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - that rails against the wealthy. This thinking would also relegate the growth-oriented New Democrat-Third Way agenda associated with President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which I played an active part in promoting, to the scrapheap of history. I disagree. In fact, I believe the opposite is true."
What he does believe is warmed-over GOP rhetoric that was a lie when we first heard it, and still is.
"TPP: How Obama Traded Away His Legacy: Donald Trump is preparing to wipe President Barack Obama's legacy from existence.
The Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and protections for the environment and immigrants all are set to disappear in no part small part thanks to President Obama himself and his relentless advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) right through Election Day."
Paul Street, "Barack Obama's Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump" - The Inauthentic Opposition Earned Us This.
Cornell West, "Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama: Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility." West actually gives Obama more slack than I would.
Gaius Publius, "How Obama Traded Away His Legacy: I'm about to say the obvious, but with so many dots getting connected in this post-election, pre-Trump interregnum, I want to connect just these two and let the obvious sink in.
Obama's push for TPP not only cost Clinton the election (among other factors, of course), it very likely cost Obama his legacy - all of it."
Jon Schwarz, "Chuck Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time: When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader - and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.
That's a terrible roll of the dice for Democrats, because Schumer might as well have been grown in a lab to be exactly the wrong face for opposition to Donald Trump."
He's got a list.
Torture apologist Alan Dershowitz says he'll leave the Democratic Party if Keith Ellison is made chair of the DNC.
Dershowitz has gone full-Likud since 9/11, it's embarrassing.
With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security._ _ _ _ _ _ _
The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along.
The change was in the works long before there was any expectation that someone like Trump might become president. The last-minute adoption of the procedures is one of many examples of the Obama administration making new executive powers established by the Bush administration permanent, on the assumption that the executive branch could be trusted to police itself.
Executive Order 12333, often referred to as “twelve triple-three,” has attracted less debate than congressional wiretapping laws, but serves as authorization for the NSA’s most massive surveillance programs — far more than the NSA’s other programs combined. Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo’s data centers overseas, and more.
In 2014, "The Intercept" revealed that the NSA uses 12333 as a legal basis for an internal NSA search engine that spans more than 850 billion phone and internet records and contains the unfiltered private information of millions of Americans.
In 2014, a former state department official described NSA surveillance under 12333 as a “universe of collection and storage” beyond what Congress has authorized.
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who gave reporters documents that revealed the breadth of the 12333 surveillance, tweeted this:
As the rule change made its way through the review process, Robert Litt, the top lawyer for the intelligence community, publicly explained the rationale: The rules “respond to the widely recognized lesson learned from the 9/11 attacks that intelligence should not be ‘stovepiped’ by individual agencies but should be shared responsibly within the intelligence community.”
But this massive database inevitably includes vast amount of American’s communications — swept up when they speak to people abroad, when they go abroad themselves, or even if their domestic communications are simply routed abroad. That’s why access was previously limited to data that had already been screened to remove unrelated information and information identifying U.S. persons. The new rules still ostensibly limit access to authorized foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes — not ordinary law enforcement purposes — and require screening before they are more widely shared. But privacy activists are skeptical.
Activists have long been concerned about the erosion of barriers between law enforcement surveillance and NSA spying.
With access to the NSA’s intercepts, law enforcement could search Americans’ private information for evidence of criminality without going to a judge — a loophole privacy activists have called the “backdoor search loophole.”
My favorite comic reporter (or is that reporter comic?) provides insight into what the Women's March was supposed to achieve:
Published on Jan 21, 2017
Yes Obama DID commute Chelsea Manning’s sentence! But before you start throwing your panties at Barry, let us not overlook a presidency that includes a disgraceful invasion of our privacy and countless ignored requests for public information that exposes government waste, fraud and abuse. Lee Camp tells Trump about the legacy he’ll inherit and more on "Redacted Tonight."
Eamonn Fingleton from Forbes Magazine calls in from Ireland to speak with Thom Hartmann about the coming Trump failure based on a number of factors including that manufacturing cannot be brought back from Asia as the U.S. would be unable to compete with the high-tech manufacturers and would have to institute tariffs against the entire world (which will not work now by the way). He's full of unacknowledged quips.
Allan Lichtman (on CBS) predicted the Trump win in spite of the Trump Campaign (while also saying that Comey and the Russians had nothing to do with it).
(Long after I did. Honest. Look it up.)
His method of analysis is quite interesting and it relies quite a bit on the inadequacies of the Democratic Party under Obama while also explaining how pollsters and clerks (like Nate Silver) can be so spectacularly wrong (as he was this time).
P.S. He lists all the reasons that Trump could be impeached. And he expects it. Heck, he predicts it.
(This video has had over 1,100,000 views.)
Published on Nov 9, 2016
Big Picture Interview: Ralph Nader, Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think. If Donald Trump's election represented anything - it was the complete and utter repudiation of the Clintonite Democratic establishment. Are we about to witness a permanent realignment of the parties?
How Did the Elites Get This So Wrong?
Jon Stewart returns briefly to comment on the Trump win.
Stewart elucidates exactly what makes the Trump presidency horrible.
Lee Camp at "Redacted Tonight" deals with all the crap we don't want to.
President Zuck?
Kind of a Huck Finn moment.
Except way more evil. Look out Jim!
(I'm keeping a personal look out for the Duke and the King.)
At this point, I’ve seen enough. It’s becoming quite clear that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants to be President of these United States.
The topic first piqued my interest about a week ago when I read an article published at Vanity Fair entitled, Will Mark Zuckerberg be Our Next President?
Increasingly, a number of influential people in Silicon Valley seem to think that Mark Zuckerberg will likely run for president of the United States one day. And some people, including myself, believe that he could indeed win. “He wants to be emperor” is a phrase that has become common among people who have known him over the years.
We’ll get to my theory on what that means a little later. First, let’s zip through the myriad indications that he might choose to throw his hoodie into the ring. Last year’s Facebook proxy statement articulated that Zuckerberg can run for office and still maintain control of his company. (To this end, Trump’s controversial precedent may facilitate any thorny political complications regarding the matter.) Then, over the holidays, Zuckerberg responded to a question about being an atheist, a belief he once professed, with a decidedly more politically circumspect answer: “I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.” (No one likes a president who doesn’t believe in some sort of God.)
More recently, President Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, joined the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to lead policy and advocacy. Other politicians from both parties have also joined the organization. And then there was the most obvious intimation: earlier this year, Zuckerberg, who has a habit of posting his annual New Year’s resolution on his Facebook page, declared that after conquering the previous challenges of learning Mandarin, and building an artificial-intelligence butler for his home, this year he was going to meet “people in every state in the US.” He noted that he’s “spent significant time in many states already, so I’ll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge.” I wonder how many of those states are swing states?
If he does want the job, Zuckerberg definitely has the personality for it. When Facebook went public in 2012, I co-authored a profile of the young C.E.O. During the reporting, I heard from several friends about his penchant for playing world-conquering board and video games. Early childhood pals told me that one of Zuckerberg’s favorite video games as a boy was "Civilization," the game in which you have to “build an empire to stand the test of time.” Others have told me that, to this day, Zuckerberg loves to play Risk, a strategy board game where you have to essentially take over the world. Believe it or not, he ended up applying some of these theories while forging and managing the extraordinary growth of Facebook, organizing his product teams in similar ways to his battalions in the board games. (According to someone close to him, these days Zuckerberg loves "Game of Thrones" and enjoys cooking a meat-laden “Dothraki Feast” while watching Westeros fall in and out of anarchy.)
Then, this morning, I came across the following tweets.
Zuck straight up delivering stump speeches on his Facebook page now pic.twitter.com/U5R9VB8Hk6— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 19, 2017Public: Zuck, you running for President?— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 19, 2017
Zuck: Well, here’s me meeting with teachers, eating local food and calling people “folks” pic.twitter.com/n1iZUjgZZJZuck recap:
1) No longer an atheist
2) Will visit every state
3) Hires Obama 2008 campaign manager
4) …..https://t.co/j6KroIKGEX— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 10, 2017
Naturally, Zuck doesn’t spend all of his free time smooching on Texas babies. So what’s he doing in between the professional photo shoots, Dothraki feasts, and playing cuddly tech oligarch for “ordinary” Americans? Well he’s suing native Hawaiians to get off his 700-acre, $100 million estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, of course.
As reported by the "Daily Mail:"
Mark Zuckerberg is suing Hawaiian families in an attempt to get them to sell their land to make his 700-acre property more secluded, a Honolulu newspaper reported Wednesday.
Almost a dozen of small parcels on the Facebook co-founder’s $100 million Kauai property belong to Hawaiian citizens who acquired them through legislation dating back to 1850, called the Kuleana Act, according to the Star Advertiser.
As such, these land owners are allowed to walk through Zuckerberg’s domain. But the billionaire is believed to have filed lawsuits against a few hundred people in the hope that they will sell their parcels at a public auction.
Using the law to induce land sales, which isn’t uncommon in Hawaii, can be viewed as problematic because it severs the native Hawaiian community’s link to ancestral land.
Zuckerberg is believed to have sued a few hundred people via several companies that he controls, the Star Advertiser reported. Some of these people, who inherited or owned interest in the land, are dead.
Similar auctions have in the past led to below-market sales, but according to the Star Advertiser, some of those involved in the Zuckerberg cases believe the billionaire will offer a fair amount of money.
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