Category: Crime

  • When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

    — Richard Nixon

    Many years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?

    The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

    There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

    Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

    Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

    Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

    It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

    Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

    Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

    In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

    Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

    Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation’s capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.

    According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

    The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

    When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

    Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

    People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

    Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests…. [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century … and the other one is ‘America.’”

    The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

    We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

    Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

    Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”

    But what does this really mean in practical terms?

    It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the people” are the ones that call the shots.

    Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

    For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

    That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

    Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

    Yet if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

    This much I know: we are not faceless numbers.

    We are not cogs in the machine.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are not slaves.

    We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

    The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

    Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free, and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

    The post Criminality in the White House: The Rise of the Political Psychopath first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Miriam Zarriga and Gorethy Kenneth in Port Moresby

    Fires from the 24-hour spate of looting, rioting and mayhem in Papua New Guinea’s Port Moresby — the worst ever social unrest in the city — have all but subsided into skeletal remains of ash and buildings in National Capital District (NCD).

    The smoke has cleared with six members of Parliament resigning from the Pangu Pati-led government, 10 people are dead in in Lae and NCD, 46 are wounded and hospitalised, and multiple people are suffering non-threatening injuries.

    The government responded by declaring a State of Emergency in NCD and suspending Police Commissioner David Manning and secretaries of the Department of Finance Sam Penias, Treasury Andrew Oeka, Personnel Management Taies Sansan for 14 days.

    Under fire Prime Minister James Marape
    Under fire Prime Minister James Marape . . . 14-day suspension of police chief and other top civil servants. Image: PNGPC

    The Post-Courier understands there was disagreement on the suspension and that the SOE was not the way forward. However, National Executive Council decided on going ahead with the SOE and suspension.

    According to details released by Prime Minister James Marape, cabinet deliberated yesterdy afternoon and in a decision invoking Section 226 of the Constitution a a 14-day SOE was declared in Port Moresby only.

    “14 days is the limit of the SOE, any longer period would require Parliament approval,” Marape said.

    Meanwhile, according to the details released by Marape, Deputy Commissioner of Police-Special Operations Donald Yamasombi is now acting Police Commissioner and Controller of the country.

    “Secretaries for Treasury, Finance and Personnel Management who are suspended for 14 days, their respective deputies are now acting.”

    Looted, burnt and damaged businesses count the cost in Port Moresby
    Headlines from yesterday’s Asia Pacific Media Network coverage of the Port Moresby rioting. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    Prime Minister Marape reiterated his claim that Wednesday’s riots in Port Moresby had been organised, but declined to say they were political, instead saying his government would only be removed on floor of Parliament.

    He said that Chief Secretary and others would undertake an investigation of what happened in Port Moresby.

    After the rioting . . . Port Moresby back in business
    After the rioting . . . confusion as Port Moresby waits to be back in business. Image: PNGPC

    In other coverage of the crisis by the weekend edition of the Post-Courier, Claudia Tally reports:

    Few shops open
    Port Moresby was in confusion yesterday following the aftermath of the worst ever civil disorder as reality sets in leaving people with no shops open to buy food and essentials from.

    While the PNG Defence Force and members of the police patrolled the city’s streets in an attempt to restore normalcy many genuine city residents were queued at the only three service stations open to refuel their vehicles in anticipation of the weekend.

    A-Mart supermarket at Manu Auto Port was the only shop open within the vicinity of Taurama and Boroko suburbs where angry shoppers crowded around the shop begging for entry which was heavily guarded by PNG Defence Force soldiers.

    On Wednesday, more than 20 shops were looted and 8 others burnt leaving the streets of Port Moresby covered in papers and plastics from the items that were looted by hundreds of people who took advantage of the city polices strike over their salaries.

    A mother of four who wished to be anonymous was worried where she would buy food for her children over the next couple of weeks as all the shops, she knows have been either looted, burnt or are closed for security reasons.

    “I went to a shop at Hanuabada and waited for three hours for it to open to buy my children’s food but unfortunately, it was not open so I came back,” she said.

    The Post-Courier's cover stories today after Wedesday's rampage in Port Moresby
    The Post-Courier’s cover stories today after Wedesday’s rampage in Port Moresby. Image: PNGPC

    ‘How are we going to survive’
    “If these issues are not resolved, how are we going to survive.

    “These shops are our gardens. They are where we get our food from.”

    Meanwhile, many tucker boxes and canteens in the city were open today and their prices have sky rocketed only hours after Wednesday’s wild rampage.

    For example, at Konedobu a 1kg packet of rice now costs K10 (NZ $4.50) — double the price prior to the looting.

    Following the disorder, many clinics were also closed to the public over safety concerns.

    Miriam Zarriga, Gorethy Kenneth and Claudia Tally are PNG Post-Courier reporters. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A political crisis is starting to brew in Papua New Guinea as calls are made for Prime Minster James Marape to step down in the wake of deadly riots in parts of the country.

    Violence broke out with shops and businesses being set alight late yesterday, after public servants, including police and army personnel, went on strike over a pay roll issue.

    At least 10 people have been confirmed dead — eight in Port Moresby and two others in the northern city of Lae. [Al Jazeera reports 15 dead while ABC Pacific says 16 have been killed].

    Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape at the MSG meeting in Port Vila
    PNG Prime Minster James Marape . . . under fire over the rioting. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony/File

    On Thursday morning, Marape appealed to citizens not to take to the streets and “do anything and everything they feel”.

    “Ill-discipline in the police force will not be tolerated, ill-discipline in the defence will not be tolerated, you can have one moment in the sunlight but this moment won’t last forever,” he said at a news conference on Thursday.

    There has been widespread anger over Marape’s handling of the dispute as the violence and looting continues.

    Police and defence personnel are trying to restore order, with 180 additional police flying into Port Moresby today.

    ‘Complete breakdown’
    Six MPs have resigned from Papua New Guinea’s government. They are Sir Puka Temu, David Arore, James Donald, Maso Hewabi, Keith Iduhu and James Nomane.

    Chauve MP James Nomane and Hiri-Koiari MP Kieth Iduhu made their resignations public via social media.

    Both blamed Marape for the riots in Port Moresby, and which are now spreading to other parts of the country.

    Nomane and Iduhu are members of Marape’s ruling Pangu Pati, and have called on him to resign.

    “Today, I have tendered my resignation from the Marape-Rosso government due to my lack in confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership,” said Iduhu in a Facebook post.

    “I join the call of my colleague MPs in asking for the Prime Minister’s resignation based on the complete breakdown of our societal values and welfare,” he added.

    The Port Moresby rioting was featured on Al Jazeera world news tonight
    The Port Moresby rioting was featured on Al Jazeera world news tonight with the network reporting 15 dead. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Iduhu went on to accuse Marape of failing to address the grievances raised by Papua New Guinea’s police and military.

    Core issue
    “The core issue surrounding the grievances raised by the disciplinary forces was completely avoidable had it not been for bureaucratic negligence, and ensuing events even after the government was made aware of the situation displayed a lack of care for the potential for the situation to spiral of control,” he said.

    Nomane’s statement of resignation was much harsher. He steps down from a senior role as PNG’s Vice Minister of National Planning.

    He accused Marape of failing to run the country.

    “I, now on this 11th day of January 2024, resign from the Marape-led government. I have no confidence in the prime minister,” Nomane said.

    James Nomane, MP for Chauve District.
    Chauve MP James Nomane . . . “I have no confidence in the prime minister”. Image: RNZ Pacific

    James Nomane, MP for Chuave District. Photo: Papua New Guinea Parliament

    “Do the honourable thing and resign as the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea. Resign for being indecisive and weak … resign for the country slipping into a Banana Republic, and for this crisis happening under your watch.

    “What happened in Port Moresby yesterday was absolutely unacceptable . . . and warrants the immediate resignation of James Marape as the prime minister.

    “The time has come for James Marape to stop pretending and step aside as the prime minister to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own . . .  This facade must stop.”

    RNZ has approached the prime minister for comment.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A political crisis is starting to brew in Papua New Guinea as calls are made for Prime Minster James Marape to step down in the wake of deadly riots in parts of the country.

    Violence broke out with shops and businesses being set alight late yesterday, after public servants, including police and army personnel, went on strike over a pay roll issue.

    At least 10 people have been confirmed dead — eight in Port Moresby and two others in the northern city of Lae. [Al Jazeera reports 15 dead while ABC Pacific says 16 have been killed].

    Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape at the MSG meeting in Port Vila
    PNG Prime Minster James Marape . . . under fire over the rioting. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony/File

    On Thursday morning, Marape appealed to citizens not to take to the streets and “do anything and everything they feel”.

    “Ill-discipline in the police force will not be tolerated, ill-discipline in the defence will not be tolerated, you can have one moment in the sunlight but this moment won’t last forever,” he said at a news conference on Thursday.

    There has been widespread anger over Marape’s handling of the dispute as the violence and looting continues.

    Police and defence personnel are trying to restore order, with 180 additional police flying into Port Moresby today.

    ‘Complete breakdown’
    Six MPs have resigned from Papua New Guinea’s government. They are Sir Puka Temu, David Arore, James Donald, Maso Hewabi, Keith Iduhu and James Nomane.

    Chauve MP James Nomane and Hiri-Koiari MP Kieth Iduhu made their resignations public via social media.

    Both blamed Marape for the riots in Port Moresby, and which are now spreading to other parts of the country.

    Nomane and Iduhu are members of Marape’s ruling Pangu Pati, and have called on him to resign.

    “Today, I have tendered my resignation from the Marape-Rosso government due to my lack in confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership,” said Iduhu in a Facebook post.

    “I join the call of my colleague MPs in asking for the Prime Minister’s resignation based on the complete breakdown of our societal values and welfare,” he added.

    The Port Moresby rioting was featured on Al Jazeera world news tonight
    The Port Moresby rioting was featured on Al Jazeera world news tonight with the network reporting 15 dead. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Iduhu went on to accuse Marape of failing to address the grievances raised by Papua New Guinea’s police and military.

    Core issue
    “The core issue surrounding the grievances raised by the disciplinary forces was completely avoidable had it not been for bureaucratic negligence, and ensuing events even after the government was made aware of the situation displayed a lack of care for the potential for the situation to spiral of control,” he said.

    Nomane’s statement of resignation was much harsher. He steps down from a senior role as PNG’s Vice Minister of National Planning.

    He accused Marape of failing to run the country.

    “I, now on this 11th day of January 2024, resign from the Marape-led government. I have no confidence in the prime minister,” Nomane said.

    James Nomane, MP for Chauve District.
    Chauve MP James Nomane . . . “I have no confidence in the prime minister”. Image: RNZ Pacific

    James Nomane, MP for Chuave District. Photo: Papua New Guinea Parliament

    “Do the honourable thing and resign as the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea. Resign for being indecisive and weak … resign for the country slipping into a Banana Republic, and for this crisis happening under your watch.

    “What happened in Port Moresby yesterday was absolutely unacceptable . . . and warrants the immediate resignation of James Marape as the prime minister.

    “The time has come for James Marape to stop pretending and step aside as the prime minister to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own . . .  This facade must stop.”

    RNZ has approached the prime minister for comment.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Miriam Zarriga in Port Moresby

    Soldiers and police were jointly patrolling the streets of the Papua New Guinea capital Port Moresby today as the country takes stock of yesterday’s unprecedented looting and rampage by hooligans and rioters.

    Prime Minister James Marape confirmed that the National Executive Council had met and approved the army to be called out to assist police restore law and order after a day of total chaos in the capital city.

    Five people were killed in Waigani while several more were injured and admitted to the Port Moresby and Gerehu hospitals.

    Business leaders called the day the “darkest day” in the history of PNG where millions of kina in property and goods were lost.

    As buildings lay smouldering in ruins last night, Police Commissioner David Manning confirmed that an additional 50 police officers from Lae had been flown to Port Moresby.

    These police will provide backup for security personnel that have been on duty for extended periods, and will increase force strength if tensions increase, Manning said.

    “Cabinet has approved a call-out of PNGDF personnel, and they are working with police to restore calm.”

    Parkop calls for ‘normalcy’
    NCD Governor Powes Parkop appealed for normalcy to be restored and for looting to stop.

    He said: “What has happened is unacceptable, unforgivable, and unjustified under any circumstances.

    “We cannot afford to allow this turmoil to persist another night or day. We must uphold our pledge to safeguard the people and the state. Let us restore order and stability in our city with the support of the PNGDF.”

    What started as a simple standing down from duties because of pay cuts by disgruntled security personnel in the city turned into mayhem and chaotic scenes as opportunists ransacked shops and assaulted innocent bystanders.

    A group of security personnel was seen descending into Parliament House demanding to see Prime Minister Marape. Several more personnel were also seen throwing
    stones at the Central Government Office, breaking the gate and eventually burning the guard house at Manasupe Haus where PM Marape was holding a press conference.

    In Konedobu, multiple gunshots could be heard outside the Post-Courier newspaper office after looters broke into Desh Besh supermarket.

    The Port Moresby General Hospital CEO Dr Paki Molumi yesterday confirmed receiving the first wave of cases that included casualties of two chest, one thorax, one multiple wounds in shock and nine limb and abdomen wounds.

    Strikers in Kavieng, New Ireland
    Strikers in Kavieng, New Ireland, as the unrest spread to other towns across Papua New Guinea. Image: PNGPC

    Razed by looters
    In Gerehu, at Rainbow, the Stop and Shop was looted, while the main shopping centre near the market was razed. Waigani’s Stop and Shop also razed by looters.

    Patients at Gerehu Hospital were also evacuated and taken to Port Moresby General Hospital amid the chaotic scenes.

    Across the city reports of widespread looting of shops were coming in from Gerehu, Waigani, Tokarara, Konedobu, Manu Auto-Port, Badili, Hohola, Gordons and other areas.

    St John Ambulances were called to many of the locations with multiple emergency calls relating to shootings and monitoring a number of fire incidents in the city.

    Police vehicles drove by looters and rioters, some even giving a thumbs up and telling them to continue what they were doing.

    The chaos yesterday was sparked by a simple technical glitch on the government’s Alesco Payroll System which paid public servants on a previously rescinded tax regime which resulted in workers including police and defence forces receiving heavily reduced pay packets.

    This angered police to stand down from their duties and soldiers and police to march on the Parliament demanding answers to their pay cuts.

    Strikers demand answers
    At 10am, security personnel descended onto Unagi Oval in Gordons demanding answers as to why some of them were receiving 100 to 350 PNG kina (US$26-$80).

    Minister for Internal Security Peter Tsiamalili Jr was shouted down with a thrown plastic container missing the minister as he left the oval.

    The personnel drove into Parliament, and also shouted at acting Governor-General Job Pomat that they wanted to speak to PM Marape.

    By 3pm, frustrated with the lack of response, the attention was now on Manasupe House. A vehicle and the guard house was destroyed and burned.

    At 5pm, Assistant Commissioner of Police-NCD and Central Anthony Wagambie Jr confirmed that the PNGDF had been called on to support the police as they worked to bring peace and order in the city.

    Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent; Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist; and Kelvin Anthony, RNZ Pacific lead digital and social media journalist

    At least 10 people are dead and dozens injured after 24 hours of looting in Papua New Guinea, during which several buildings were torched.

    Chaos broke out in Port Moresby as looters and opportunists took advantage of a protest by the country’s police and military.

    People have been ordered to leave the streets of the capital after yesterday’s violent riots, and have been warned authorities will use “live rounds”.

    Looting has spread to at least four other towns, including Kavieng, reports the PNG Post-Courier.

    Footage and images circulating on social media show crowds of people leaving shops with looted goods — everything from merchandise to soft drinks to freezers — as the National Capital District (NCD) descended into chaos overnight.

    How the PNG Post-Courier reported the looting 11 Jan 24
    How the PNG Post-Courier reported today on the capital of Port Moresby’s “darkest day”. Image: PNG Post-Courier

    The national daily newspaper PNG Post-Courier labelled the events the “Darkest day in our city” and NCD Governor Powes Parkop appealed to the looters to stop.

    Port Moresby General Hospital say eight people have been killed, and another two have been confirmed dead by police central command in Lae, the country’s second biggest city.

    ‘My heart goes out’
    “The cost of the ensuing looting and destruction is substantial, and my heart goes out to all the businesses in the city that have been affected,” Parkop said according reports.

    People flee with merchandise as crowds leave shops with looted goods in Port Moresby.
    People flee with merchandise as crowds leave shops with looted goods in Port Moresby. Image: Andrew Kutan/RNZ

    Unverified videos have also emerged of bodies of several men allegedly shot dead who were involved in the unrest on Wednesday and children and women wailing around them in Port Moresby.

    RNZ Pacific is trying to verify the footage.

    Police and the PNG Defence Force reinforcements have been called from outside the capital to restore order.

    Emergency service providers have been working overnight attending to high numbers of people injured in the violence at various locations.

    “The ambulance service has received a large number of emergencies calls in the National Capital District relating to shooting incidents and persons injured in an explosion,” St. John Ambulance Service said on their Facebook page.

    “The ambulance operations centre are prioritising high-priority emergencies only at this point.”

    Stretched to limit
    The Papua New Guinea Fire Service has had its resources stretched to its limits as it struggled to contain fires in multiple locations.

    The Port Moresby General Hospital had to close overnight while a smaller hospital at the Gerehu suburb, evacuated its patients as a nearby shop was set on fire.

    Large businesses suffered big losses in just a few hours.

    The City Pharmacy Limited (CPL) group, which owns one of the biggest supermarket and pharmacy chains in Port Moresby, had most its shops raided and burned overnight.

    Looters also stole electronic appliances from warehouses and shops owned by the Brian Bell group of companies.

    Police Commissioner David Manning called on all people in Port Moresby that to clear the streets and go home.

    Mobile squad called in
    Last night, additional police from the Highlands Mobile Group (HMG) were flown in from from Lae to help restore order.

    The government also issued a call out for the military to assist police.

    Looting in Port Moresby
    A protest over unexplained pay deductions to salaries of police, military and correctional services staff has triggered looting in Port Moresby. Image: RNZ

    The events began on Wednesday morning local time, after about 200 police and the military personnel gathered at the Ungai Oval to protest over pay deductions from their wages.

    They wanted answers from authorities about the “tax” in their most recent pay period, but a government minister who addressed them could not convince them why the deductions had been made.

    The tax office said the issue caused by a “glitch” in the accounting system.

    What triggered the chaos
    In the last fortnight pay cycle, several service members saw a reduction in their pay, ranging from $100 PNG kina to $350 PNG kina (US$26-US$80).

    It was not clear whether it was due to a tax, or a glitch in the system.

    Many of them were told later, through a statement from the Internal Revenue Commission (IRC), and the prime minister’s office that there was a glitch in the payrolls system.

    That triggered a gathering of about 200 policemen and women, military personnel and correctional services personnel in Port Moresby. They demanded an answer from the government, saying a “glitch” wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

    They then moved from Unagi Oval to Parliament house, opened the gates of Parliament, and the Police Minister Peter Siamali Jr tried to address them. The security personnel then withdrew their services, and the city descended into chaos overnight.

    Initially it was sporadic looting in various suburbs of Port Moresby. In the Gerehu suburb one shop was burned, and a few kilometres down to Waigani there was a shop that was burnt, and over the next three to four hours it became worse and several more shops were looted because there was no police presence there.

    Policemen were there, but nothing could be done to the looters, so it has degenerated to a point where there is widespread looting.

    The Finance Department and prime minister have tried to explain the so-called “glitch”, saying it was being fixed, but that has not gone down well with the service members.

    The Northern Mobile Group, a mobile squad unit from out of Port Moresby which looks after one part of the region, has been flown into Port Moresby, and is expected to restore order.

    The military has been called out to assist police.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent; Finau Fonua, RNZ Pacific journalist; and Kelvin Anthony, RNZ Pacific lead digital and social media journalist

    At least 10 people are dead and dozens injured after 24 hours of looting in Papua New Guinea, during which several buildings were torched.

    Chaos broke out in Port Moresby as looters and opportunists took advantage of a protest by the country’s police and military.

    People have been ordered to leave the streets of the capital after yesterday’s violent riots, and have been warned authorities will use “live rounds”.

    Looting has spread to at least four other towns, including Kavieng, reports the PNG Post-Courier.

    Footage and images circulating on social media show crowds of people leaving shops with looted goods — everything from merchandise to soft drinks to freezers — as the National Capital District (NCD) descended into chaos overnight.

    How the PNG Post-Courier reported the looting 11 Jan 24
    How the PNG Post-Courier reported today on the capital of Port Moresby’s “darkest day”. Image: PNG Post-Courier

    The national daily newspaper PNG Post-Courier labelled the events the “Darkest day in our city” and NCD Governor Powes Parkop appealed to the looters to stop.

    Port Moresby General Hospital say eight people have been killed, and another two have been confirmed dead by police central command in Lae, the country’s second biggest city.

    ‘My heart goes out’
    “The cost of the ensuing looting and destruction is substantial, and my heart goes out to all the businesses in the city that have been affected,” Parkop said according reports.

    People flee with merchandise as crowds leave shops with looted goods in Port Moresby.
    People flee with merchandise as crowds leave shops with looted goods in Port Moresby. Image: Andrew Kutan/RNZ

    Unverified videos have also emerged of bodies of several men allegedly shot dead who were involved in the unrest on Wednesday and children and women wailing around them in Port Moresby.

    RNZ Pacific is trying to verify the footage.

    Police and the PNG Defence Force reinforcements have been called from outside the capital to restore order.

    Emergency service providers have been working overnight attending to high numbers of people injured in the violence at various locations.

    “The ambulance service has received a large number of emergencies calls in the National Capital District relating to shooting incidents and persons injured in an explosion,” St. John Ambulance Service said on their Facebook page.

    “The ambulance operations centre are prioritising high-priority emergencies only at this point.”

    Stretched to limit
    The Papua New Guinea Fire Service has had its resources stretched to its limits as it struggled to contain fires in multiple locations.

    The Port Moresby General Hospital had to close overnight while a smaller hospital at the Gerehu suburb, evacuated its patients as a nearby shop was set on fire.

    Large businesses suffered big losses in just a few hours.

    The City Pharmacy Limited (CPL) group, which owns one of the biggest supermarket and pharmacy chains in Port Moresby, had most its shops raided and burned overnight.

    Looters also stole electronic appliances from warehouses and shops owned by the Brian Bell group of companies.

    Police Commissioner David Manning called on all people in Port Moresby that to clear the streets and go home.

    Mobile squad called in
    Last night, additional police from the Highlands Mobile Group (HMG) were flown in from from Lae to help restore order.

    The government also issued a call out for the military to assist police.

    Looting in Port Moresby
    A protest over unexplained pay deductions to salaries of police, military and correctional services staff has triggered looting in Port Moresby. Image: RNZ

    The events began on Wednesday morning local time, after about 200 police and the military personnel gathered at the Ungai Oval to protest over pay deductions from their wages.

    They wanted answers from authorities about the “tax” in their most recent pay period, but a government minister who addressed them could not convince them why the deductions had been made.

    The tax office said the issue caused by a “glitch” in the accounting system.

    What triggered the chaos
    In the last fortnight pay cycle, several service members saw a reduction in their pay, ranging from $100 PNG kina to $350 PNG kina (US$26-US$80).

    It was not clear whether it was due to a tax, or a glitch in the system.

    Many of them were told later, through a statement from the Internal Revenue Commission (IRC), and the prime minister’s office that there was a glitch in the payrolls system.

    That triggered a gathering of about 200 policemen and women, military personnel and correctional services personnel in Port Moresby. They demanded an answer from the government, saying a “glitch” wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

    They then moved from Unagi Oval to Parliament house, opened the gates of Parliament, and the Police Minister Peter Siamali Jr tried to address them. The security personnel then withdrew their services, and the city descended into chaos overnight.

    Initially it was sporadic looting in various suburbs of Port Moresby. In the Gerehu suburb one shop was burned, and a few kilometres down to Waigani there was a shop that was burnt, and over the next three to four hours it became worse and several more shops were looted because there was no police presence there.

    Policemen were there, but nothing could be done to the looters, so it has degenerated to a point where there is widespread looting.

    The Finance Department and prime minister have tried to explain the so-called “glitch”, saying it was being fixed, but that has not gone down well with the service members.

    The Northern Mobile Group, a mobile squad unit from out of Port Moresby which looks after one part of the region, has been flown into Port Moresby, and is expected to restore order.

    The military has been called out to assist police.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is in even more trouble after a new indictment alleges that his corruption went on even longer than previously known – and it involved more foreign countries sending him bribes. Also, experts are ringing the alarm bells about the role that artificial intelligence could play in this year’s elections. A.I. can […]

    The post Indictment Reveals Menendez Bribery Goes Much Deeper & A.I. Could Shape 2024 Election appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Two years ago New Zealand joined 22 other countries in supporting the Ukrainian case against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its invasion of Ukraine.

    We sent a legal team to The Hague where the ICJ is based and our representatives spoke directly to the court on New Zealand’s behalf. We used international law to argue the Russian invasion was illegal and warranted sanction by the ICJ.

    Successive New Zealand governments for as long as I can remember have said we believe in an “international rules-based order” of which the ICJ and the ICC are an important part.

    This makes sense because we are a small country without the economic or military clout to take unilateral action to protect our interests. Like other small countries we rely on international rules to provide a measure of protection when bigger countries, like Russia in this case, break the rules.

    We have used such rules ourselves by making applications to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when our trade interests have been threatened. Without such rules the biggest bully will win every time.

    Last week South Africa filed papers at the ICJ alleging Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past 12 weeks amount to genocide.

    South Africa said it “is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants”.

    It described its case saying “acts and omissions by Israel . . .  are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . .  to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

    Their court papers go on to claim that, “the conduct of Israel — through its state organs, state agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

    Australian protesters against Israel's genocide in Gaza
    Australian protesters against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in Rundle Mall, Adelaide. Image: David Robie/APR

    This case is important because Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and South Africa are all signatories of the Genocide Convention and are bound to abide by any decision made by the court.

    The most important part of South Africa’s case is its application for an interim injunction to stop Israel’s indiscriminate killing immediately. If this interim injunction is successful it could put in place an immediate ceasefire to end the war and Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians.

    It would allow unfettered humanitarian aid to enter Gaza where the need for food, water, fuel, medicine and vaccinations is desperate.

    This is the outcome the majority of people in New Zealand, and across the world, want to see. New Zealand should back up the South African case which is most likely to get a first hearing on January 11.

    Those who have been paying attention will not be surprised at claims of genocide.

    Genocide always begins with words and there is a wealth of reporting on the dehumanising language being used by Israel’s political and military leaders to set the scene for what has followed.

    For example, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”, and two days after the attack Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant spelt out genocidal intentions saying:

    “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

    Israelis more generally have taken up this talk across social media with calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed”. More tragic is a social media post showing Israeli children singing “we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza.

    Israel’s Defence Minister’s statement matches the UN Convention closely to the point where Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal, has described Israel’s rhetoric and actions as “a textbook case of genocide”.

    It is clear Israel’s political and military leaders have a case to answer before the International Court of Justice, just as Russia does for its invasion of Ukraine.

    As well as backing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice we should also call for a swift, well-resourced International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes committed in the October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli response.

    This investigation should include examining the crimes of genocide and apartheid.

    Palestinians deserve our support as much as the people of Ukraine.

    John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Post and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Two years ago New Zealand joined 22 other countries in supporting the Ukrainian case against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its invasion of Ukraine.

    We sent a legal team to The Hague where the ICJ is based and our representatives spoke directly to the court on New Zealand’s behalf. We used international law to argue the Russian invasion was illegal and warranted sanction by the ICJ.

    Successive New Zealand governments for as long as I can remember have said we believe in an “international rules-based order” of which the ICJ and the ICC are an important part.

    This makes sense because we are a small country without the economic or military clout to take unilateral action to protect our interests. Like other small countries we rely on international rules to provide a measure of protection when bigger countries, like Russia in this case, break the rules.

    We have used such rules ourselves by making applications to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when our trade interests have been threatened. Without such rules the biggest bully will win every time.

    Last week South Africa filed papers at the ICJ alleging Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past 12 weeks amount to genocide.

    South Africa said it “is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants”.

    It described its case saying “acts and omissions by Israel . . .  are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . .  to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

    Their court papers go on to claim that, “the conduct of Israel — through its state organs, state agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

    Australian protesters against Israel's genocide in Gaza
    Australian protesters against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in Rundle Mall, Adelaide. Image: David Robie/APR

    This case is important because Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and South Africa are all signatories of the Genocide Convention and are bound to abide by any decision made by the court.

    The most important part of South Africa’s case is its application for an interim injunction to stop Israel’s indiscriminate killing immediately. If this interim injunction is successful it could put in place an immediate ceasefire to end the war and Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians.

    It would allow unfettered humanitarian aid to enter Gaza where the need for food, water, fuel, medicine and vaccinations is desperate.

    This is the outcome the majority of people in New Zealand, and across the world, want to see. New Zealand should back up the South African case which is most likely to get a first hearing on January 11.

    Those who have been paying attention will not be surprised at claims of genocide.

    Genocide always begins with words and there is a wealth of reporting on the dehumanising language being used by Israel’s political and military leaders to set the scene for what has followed.

    For example, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”, and two days after the attack Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant spelt out genocidal intentions saying:

    “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

    Israelis more generally have taken up this talk across social media with calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed”. More tragic is a social media post showing Israeli children singing “we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza.

    Israel’s Defence Minister’s statement matches the UN Convention closely to the point where Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal, has described Israel’s rhetoric and actions as “a textbook case of genocide”.

    It is clear Israel’s political and military leaders have a case to answer before the International Court of Justice, just as Russia does for its invasion of Ukraine.

    As well as backing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice we should also call for a swift, well-resourced International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes committed in the October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli response.

    This investigation should include examining the crimes of genocide and apartheid.

    Palestinians deserve our support as much as the people of Ukraine.

    John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Post and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is in even more trouble after a new indictment alleges that his corruption went on even longer than previously known – and it involved more foreign countries sending him bribes. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

    The post Dems Can’t Seem To Quit Corrupt Bob Menendez appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • America’s Lawyer E80: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was hit with a superseding indictment this week that includes even more bribery allegations than were previously revealed. The EPA is about to approve a dangerous pesticide even though the agency admits that it DOES NOT meet safety standards. And experts are predicting a massive wave of misinformation […]

    The post The Elon Musk Double Standard appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • The workers that helped save the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster are now developing illnesses that they say is a direct result of the work they performed. Plus, victims of Jeffrey Epstein have reached a settlement with banking giant JP Morgan. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a […]

    The post New Illness Develops From Cleaning Up BP’s Mess & Epstein Allies Remain A Mystery After Settlement appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • A lawyer in New York is facing sanctions – and possibly worse – after he used the AI service Chat GPT to create a legal brief. The artificial intelligence bot created a list of fake court cases that the lawyer used in his brief, but he got busted when the opposing side couldn’t find any […]

    The post Lawyer Was Caught Using A.I. To Create Phony Cases & Disabled Man Left In Van To Die Of Heatstroke appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • On 27 Dec 2023 Ana Paula Oliveira posted for Global Initiative on the Report of an interesting topic: the convergences between organized crime and human rights agendas, as well as communities’ responses to mitigate the negative impact of organized crime on human rights over the past year.

    The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (VDPA), which in 2023 celebrated 30 years since it was adopted….Global issues such as digitization, climate change and conflict pose multiple challenges to human rights. Organized crime cuts across many of these challenges. In this context of reflection on the effectiveness of the human rights framework, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) has worked to raise awareness of the convergences between organized crime and human rights agendas, as well as communities’ responses to mitigate the negative impact of organized crime on human rights over the past year. In 2023, the topic was selected for the GI-TOC’s Resilience Fund Fellowship. In this context, the Fund organized its first in-person Fellowship meeting with a group of grantees and Fellows to discuss pressing human rights implications of organized crime. The meeting provided a platform for the Fellows to share experiences and current challenges related to the human rights impact of organized crime in their communities.

    Building on this work, the GI-TOC, with the support of the Sector Programme on Human Rights of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on behalf of the Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ) and the government of Norway, launched the first institutional report on the issue, ‘Four reasons why organized crime is a human rights issue’ during the 24-hour Organized Crime Conference (OC24). This report draws attention to four areas where synergies in human rights and anti-crime regimes should be enhanced, so that safeguards for human rights are woven into states’ policy responses to transnational organized crime.

    As a final 2023 activity and part of the series of follow-up events to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the VDPA (VDPA+30) and the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, the GI-TOC organized a series of events to raise awareness of the intersection between organized crime and human rights in Vienna with the support of the Government of Austria. The programme comprised a two-day expert group meeting held from 29 November to 30 November in Vienna and a public event. The expert group meeting (EGM) brought together experts based in Vienna and selected global experts (comprising academia, non-governmental organizations, and representatives from international and grassroots organizations) from both the human rights and crime prevention fields to discuss the multifaceted interactions between organized crime and human rights. It was designed to spark discussion on organized crime as a global challenge that keeps human rights from being fulfilled, based on our research and evidence on the issues.

    During this series of discussions, the GI-TOC also hosted a public panel at the Vienna Diplomatic Academy. This was followed by a reception where participants could engage more informally. This event reflected on high-level principles, community experiences and responses, as well as the dissemination of community tools to respond to organized crime violence through a human rights lens.

    This report summarizes the key points discussed in this series of events and proposes a way forward for those who want to pursue further work on the issue.

    https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/human-rights-responses-organized-crime/

    Conference report

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • A new lawsuit claims that the prison system in Alabama is engaged in a form of modern day slavery. The state has been leasing out inmates to private businesses and then taking their wages to keep for themselves. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse […]

    The post Alabama Prisons Are Leasing Out Inmates To Work In Fast Food appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • America’s Lawyer E79: A federal lawsuit claims that the state of Alabama is using prison inmates as slave labor, leasing them out to fast food restaurants and other businesses and then taking their money for themselves. Billionaires are funding trips for federal judges all over the planet – and their money has managed to buy […]

    The post Alabama Prisoners Used For Slave Labor appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Hunter Biden has been indicted for failing to pay more than one million dollars in federal income taxes, and he could be looking at 17 years in prison. But the indictment does more than just outline potential criminal behavior – it paints a picture of a man that was taking advantage of everyone around him. Mike […]

    The post DOJ Humiliated Into Filing Charges Against Hunter Biden appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is ready for his nemesis Matt Gaetz to face the same fate as George Santos, and McCarthy recently told a reporter that Gaetz may have committed crimes that put Santos to shame. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any […]

    The post McCarthy Says Gaetz Committed WORSE Crimes Than George Santos appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Globally, homicide is a bigger killer than armed conflict and terrorism combined.

    © Unsplash/David von Diemar

    On Friday 8 December 2023 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that more people were killed due to homicide than armed conflict and terrorism combined in 2021, with an average of 52 lives lost per hour worldwide. The Global Study on Homicide analyzes the complex dynamics behind these violent deaths and includes a special section on how organized crime is driving death rates up in Latin America and the Caribbean.

    The report examines homicides related to criminal activities and interpersonal conflict, as well as “socio-politically motivated homicides” such as the deliberate killing of human rights defenders, humanitarian workers and journalists.

    UNODC chief Ghada Waly said the loss of thousands of lives each year to homicide is “a sombre reminder” of the collective failure of the international community to reduce all forms of violence by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report revealed that during the period from 2019 to 2021, an average of roughly 440,000 deaths worldwide were due to homicide – more than conflict-related or terrorist killings combined. 

    UNODC said 2021 “was an exceptionally lethal year”, marked by 458,000 homicides.  The spike was in part linked to economic repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic and to a rise in organized crime and gang-related and socio-political violence in several countries.

    Organized crime accounted for 22 per cent of homicides globally, and 50 per cent in the Americas, where competition among organized crime groups and gangs can spark a sudden and sharp rise in “intentional homicides”, as has happened in Ecuador and Haiti.

    The Americas also lead the world in highest regional homicide rate per capita, with 15 per 100,000 population in 2021, or 154,000 people.

    Africa had the highest absolute number of homicides at 176,000, or 12.7 per 100,000 population, “and available data suggests that the homicide rate is not falling, even as decreases have been registered in other regions,” the report said.  Meanwhile rates in Asia, Europe and Oceania were far below the global per capita average of 5.8 per 100,000 population in 2021.

    Firearms were used in most killings in the Americas in 2021, or roughly 75 per cent, whereas in Europe and Asia they were involved in 17 and 18 per cent of homicides, respectively. 

    Men accounted for 81 per cent of homicide victims and 90 per cent of suspects, but women are more likely to be killed by family members or intimate partners. “Although they represent 19 per cent of homicide victims in total, they account for 54 per cent of all killings in the home and 66 per cent of all victims of intimate partner killings,” UNODC said. 

    Aid workers under attack 

    The data also showed that the deliberate killings of human rights defenders, environmental defenders, community leaders, journalists, and aid workers represented nine per cent of global homicides. “The threat has increased for humanitarian aid workers, who witnessed a higher average number of fatalities over the period 2017-2022 than 2010-2016,” the authors said. 

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144392

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • White Collar criminal prosecutions from President Biden’s Justice Department are close to being at an all time low as Attorney General Merrick Garland refuses to take on corporate criminals. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

    The post DOJ Continues To Prove How Useless They Are appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Leaders in the tech industry are sounding the alarm bells about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, with some going as far as to say that the development of A.I. could eventually lead to humanity’s extinction. Then, crime is going to be a big talking point in the 2024 election. We already hear candidates like Ron […]

    The post Tech Leaders Sound The A.I. Doomsday Alarm & Crime Stat Talking Points Backfire On Florida’s GOP appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Billionaires from Google, Hyatt Hotels, and venture capital firms have all been hit with subpoenas as part of a lawsuit looking at how JP Morgan helped Jeffrey Epstein for years and years. Also, the Pentagon has restarted their propaganda department – and that isn’t hyperbole. Last year, the federal government ramped up their production of […]

    The post Investigation Targets Epstein Enabling Billionaires & Pentagon Ramps Up Pro US Propaganda appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • I am a Black man in prison, and I want to talk about trauma. I want us all to be able to talk about trauma.

    I’m here because when I was a teenager and young man, I made many bad life choices involving drugs and violence. Living with the consequences of my actions is not always easy, but I keep moving forward toward redemption. As I have struggled to understand those choices, I also have realized I must go further back in my life, long before I committed a crime, if I want to heal myself.

    When I was a child, I was sexually abused by a man.

    Facing that fact has been even harder than confronting the ways I have hurt others, but I know there is no redemption without working to understand how that has affected me.

    All three of those aspects of my identity—male, Black, incarcerated—are part of this struggle.

    Everywhere we turn, the dominant society tells us that masculinity is primarily about being tough, which can make it hard to deal with the emotional scars of trauma. In the Black community, taboos against men speaking about being abused have constrained many of us. And, in prison, where any sign of weakness can be dangerous, acknowledging that one needs help to deal with childhood trauma seems risky.

    An example of how fraught this subject can be: Recently I was talking with a friend about trauma in the lives of Black men, and I started to describe my plans for this article. He clearly wanted to avoid the issue, apparently concerned that I wanted him to talk about trauma in his life. As we talked, he started physically shaking, and I quickly assured him that I was not going to press him to discuss his experiences. He breathed a sigh of relief, and I decided to move along to other topics.

    I understood his reaction. I still am not always sure how to speak about being abused and how to process all of the emotions. For much of my life, I worked hard not to appear vulnerable or weak, afraid that I would be seen as a victim, especially in the eyes of other Black men. But when I was one year into my life-without-parole sentence, I decided to seek counseling and come to terms with that abuse. Facing that pain is essential to transformation, for me as an individual and for our communities, and so I continue to speak about it, including here for the first time in print.

    My Early Life Story

    My story starts when I was eight years old and sent to visit my father. My mother thought it would be good for me to spend time with the man who fathered me but had not been in my life. Instead, it turned into a nightmare for me and her. For a year, she did not know where I was, nor could she have imagined the abuse I would endure at the hands of the man she once loved. I left my mother a pretty normal eight-year-old and returned to her a broken boy.

    My mother, who also had been sexually abused as a child, knew something was different about me when I was returned to her care, but I said nothing. When I was 11 or 12, detectives called asking if I had been abused, part of their investigation of allegations against my father involving another child. When I was questioned about the abuse I denied it, not wanting my father to go to jail. My mother did talk to some family members about it, but I avoided the subject, and we never really dealt with it. She feels responsible, but I have told her that it’s not her fault—just as it wasn’t mine. It took a long time for me to understand that.

    My mother took me to a therapist, but I protected my father and denied everything. By the time I was 15, I was drinking and smoking weed, unable to stay out of trouble. I wanted to forgive my father, but I was also ashamed about what had happened. Against my mother’s wishes, I would return to my father, enduring the emotional stress that came with holding this secret because I wanted the relationship that I thought all boys should have with their dads. I watched my father create more nurturing relationships with my stepbrothers, leaving me feeling rejected.

    To say I was confused is an extreme understatement. When I thought about the abuse, I became depressed. The man who was supposed to be my role model had hurt me and then manipulated me into fearing that my masculinity was in question. It’s an all-too-common story in a society still saturated with homophobia: If sexual abuse happened, I must have wanted it to happen, which would mean I was gay, though I didn’t feel gay. I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, which was to suppress the feelings, to disconnect.

    From there I started selling drugs, immersing myself in the life of the streets. I thought that if my father wasn’t going to teach me how to be a man, the streets would. My grades were horrible, and I was held back twice. I was finally kicked out of school after I was caught with drugs. My father’s wife did not understand why I acted out, and when I finally explained—in the presence of my father—that he had sexually abused me when I was younger, he denied it.

    From that point, my life spiraled out of control. I tried to move past my trauma, but depression always seemed to surface in moments when I was doing well. Prior to my incarceration, I had quit my job and was being evicted. I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t see a way out. The process felt like a slow death, and I did not start truly living and caring for myself until I began addressing what was killing my spirit.

    At the age of 23, after a year in prison, I was in a dark place psychologically, overwhelmed by despair and hopelessness. It was a place I had been many times since the abuse, but I was finally ready to try to build a better life for myself. I felt compelled to talk to someone about my emotions but couldn’t connect with anyone in my immediate environment, which was defined by the toxic masculinity that tends to define men’s lives in prison.

    My Story in Prison

    Obviously not everyone in prison has the same experience as I do. But after more than a decade incarcerated, I have no doubt that most of the inmates I’ve met have lived through at least one serious trauma; many of them have never had an opportunity to confront it in healthy ways; and many have avoided the limited opportunities that exist.

    My experience—burying the hurt and pain I felt instead of finding the help I needed—isn’t idiosyncratic but, rather, grew out of common ideas about what it means to be a man, and especially to be a Black man. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak about what I’ve seen and heard from other Black men.

    Robin D. Stone, a mental health counselor in New York City, confirms my observations about trauma and abuse. “In many homes and social circles, the topic is still avoided—it’s taboo,” she told Counseling Today. “In some cases, men haven’t shared with anyone that they’ve had this experience, that they have this history. That leaves them with psychological wounds that they learn to ‘pack away’ for years.”

    The hyper-masculine environment of a prison creates additional impediments. Inmates fear that any sign of weakness might lead another inmate to take advantage, another reason not to speak openly with others. Sexual abuse is at the top of the list of things prisoners will not talk about.

    Going to a therapist in prison also can be interpreted as weakness, another risk that other inmates will prey on you. For me, it took a desire to escape that dark place—what I would learn later was a state of depression—to go to therapy.

    At first, it wasn’t easy talking to the therapist I was assigned. She was an older White woman who was nice, but my biases and insecurities made it difficult for me to open up to her at first. By going to a counselor, I was breaking a rule I learned from my community—don’t talk to White people about what goes on in Black households—and I felt like I was selling out my mother. But I needed to confront what was killing me on the inside.

    I am accountable for the actions that landed me in prison. I’m not here solely because I was sexually abused as a child. But, after therapy, it’s hard not to wonder where I would be today if I had not been abused.

    Community Stories

    Individuals who live through abuse can find healing through therapy, but as with any problem that is rooted in social dysfunction, the deeper solutions are at the collective and community level. Some people will find the help they need, summoning the courage to take those first steps on the road to recovery. But many more suffer in silence, and we cannot blame the problem on victims who don’t find that help.

    The core problem is disparities in power and status that flow from systems that allow some people to abuse and exploit others with relative impunity—most centrally the hierarchies in sex, race, class, and nationality. In a world defined by hierarchies, children especially will be at risk. As social movements challenge those inequalities, communities also have to recognize how many are suffering and provide more ways for people to get help.

    There are too few resources, throughout society and especially in Black communities, for those who have been abused. We need more affordable and accessible counseling. Beyond the services of mental-health professionals, healing circles led by experienced community members can help those suffering from trauma in the context of restorative justice. We need to let go of toxic ideas about what it means to be a man, which too often leads to people excusing the abuse of girls and women. And we need to challenge the homophobia that leads to people ignoring the sexual abuse of boys.

    We have to confront the link between masculinity and violence. In her 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks argues that violence is not just a product of boyhood socialization but, instead, that violence is the essence of boyhood socialization. When boys are cut off from our mothers far too early, we are less able to express our feelings and be sensitive to others. Being a man too often means sucking it up and moving on past difficult emotions. As hooks puts it, “Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.”

    We, Black men, need to talk about this. Most people are concerned about their image in the eyes of others. In my experience, that is especially true for Black men, who connect their status in their community with hyper-masculinity. Too often, violence is the easiest way to shore up that sense of being a man. In some settings, it can feel as if violence is the only way to prove our masculinity.

    History matters as well. Black people who came here enslaved were not men and women but property. African values and traditions that socialized boys into manhood and girls into womanhood were lost. Our sense of self too easily became rooted in White expectations, though we would never truly be accepted in certain spaces due to our Blackness.

    Today, I have learned to challenge many of the ideas I was raised with. I am inspired by the courage it takes for our brothers and sisters in the LGBTQ+ community to be honest and open about who they are and speak about the traumas they have endured. It takes strength to challenge harmful social norms, but that courage is at the heart of liberation, at our quest to live to our fullest potential.

    These problems exist in every community. But, as a Black man, it is my responsibility to challenge the social norm of hiding sexual abuse in Black families and ignoring the effects on Black boys and girls. All children need safe places to talk about their experiences and struggles. Without those spaces, too many will gravitate to gangs, drugs, crime, and violence to deal with the pain, which only inflicts more trauma on more people, and the cycle continues.

    Our Stories

    With the help of a therapist, I have been fortunate to confront my trauma and develop an analysis about abuse. I have become more comfortable telling people I’m close with, no longer feeling I have something to hide. I now know that the abuse didn’t happen because of anything I did. It wasn’t my fault. I continue to work through the anger, guilt, and shame I have felt, allowing me to address my depression. It has been a struggle, but it is liberating. I know who I am, and what other people think about me does not matter as much.

    When we don’t have opportunities to confront trauma, our pain can turn into behavior that is self-destructive, abusive to others, and a threat to our own community. From the outside looking in, most would wonder why this destructive behavior continues. If some individuals are able to find help to overcome these behaviors, why is it so difficult for others? I repeat: The answer is not to blame people who have been abused and traumatized for not getting help. The answer is to change our society and provide more opportunities for those who have been hurt.

    It has not been easy for me to write about such a deeply personal subject. I have had second thoughts many times, questioning whether it is worth doing. But then I think about everyone who is dealing with the same kind of trauma and realize we need each other if we are to develop the courage to speak about these things.

    These are hard truths to face: Sexual abuse of Black girls has too often been accepted as inevitable, and too often we pretend that sexual abuse of Black boys doesn’t happen. These are hard challenges to face: How do we end this abuse? Until it ends, how do we ensure that no child grows up feeling they have to hide their abuse?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Catholic Church diocese in Baltimore is trying to get bankruptcy protection as the laws are changed to remove the statute of limitations for lawsuits brought by sexual assault survivors. This seems like a fairly clear admission of guilt by the Church. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]

    The post Catholic Church Faces Hundreds Of Abuse Lawsuits appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate of 1.15 U.S. invasions per year during Cold War One (1945-1991), it rose to 7.87 per year during Cold War Two (1991-2022).

    Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

    Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.

    Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)

    The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.

    One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.

    Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

    Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.

    Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.

    This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).

    On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:

    Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.

    Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.

    So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.

    On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:

    The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

    While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

    During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

    “What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”

    Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”

    “Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”

    Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”

    The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.

    At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”

    “We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”

    Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.

    However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. …  Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”

    Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”

    Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:

    Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.

    Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.

    Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …

    The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.

    More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.

    I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:

    *****

    On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

    An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

    Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

    The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

    Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

    Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

    Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

    *****

    On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:

    Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

    Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

    It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

    Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

    Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.

    If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string

    Stratfor Popović wikileaks

    produces finds such as

    https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html

    https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html

    of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.

    However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.

    Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:

    On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:

    The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.

    On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.

    The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …

    The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.

    The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.

    September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.

    Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.

    The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:

    CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.

    However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.

    Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf

    https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/

    https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf

    They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.

    And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:

    As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?

    The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for  nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • More information has been revealed about how a major banking CEO helped Jeffrey Epstein with his illicit activities. Plus, a third major drug company has announced that they are cutting the price of insulin, but Senator Bernie Sanders says that’s just a start – he wants across the board price cuts for prescription drugs and […]

    The post Bank CEO Had Epstein Dress Girls Like Disney Characters & Bernie Fights To Lower ALL Drug Prices appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • By Aubrey Belford, Stevan Dojcinovic, Jared Savage and Kelvin Anthony in an OCCRP investigation

    • The operator of a Pacific-wide network of pharmacy companies, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji, was sentenced to four years prison in New Zealand in August for illegally importing millions of dollars worth of pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical of methamphetamine.
    • Umarji, a Fijian national, had long been a target of police in his home country but had for years escaped justice thanks to what Fijian and international law enforcement say was an unwillingness by the previous authoritarian government of Voreqe Bainimarama to seriously tackle meth and cocaine trafficking.
    • Fiji’s new government, which was elected last December, is now investigating donations that Umarji and his family made to the previous ruling party, as well as “potential connections” to top law enforcement officials.

    Until recently, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji was — in public at least — a pillar of Fiji’s business community.

    With ownership of a Pacific-wide pharmacy network, Umarji and his family were significant donors to the party that repressively ruled the country until it lost power in elections last December. He was also a major figure in sports, serving as a vice president of the Fiji Football Association and as a committee member in soccer’s global governing body, FIFA.

    And he did it all as an internationally wanted drug trafficker.

    Umarji’s fall finally came in August this year, after he ended a period of self-imposed exile in India and surrendered himself to authorities in New Zealand to face years-old charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison for importing at least NZ$5-$6 million (US$2.9-3.5 million) worth of pseudoephedrine — a precursor for methamphetamine – into the country.

    His sentencing was hailed by Fijian police as a blow against a “mastermind” whose operations stretched across the region.

    But behind the conviction of Umarji, 47, lies a far murkier story of impunity, a joint investigation by an Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), The Fiji Times, The New Zealand Herald and Radio New Zealand has found.

    Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji, on right, shakes hands with Fiji Football Association President Rajesh Patel.
    Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji (right) shakes hands with Fiji Football Association President Rajesh Patel. Image: Baljeet Singh/The Fiji Times

    Umarji was able to thrive for years amid a failure by senior officials of Fiji’s previous authoritarian government to confront a rise in meth and cocaine trafficking through the Pacific Island country.

    And when New Zealand authorities finally issued an international warrant for his arrest, Umarji was able to flee Fiji under suspicious circumstances.

    Reporters found that Umarji and his family donated at least F$70,000 (US$31,000) to the country’s former ruling party, FijiFirst, in the years after he was first put under investigation. This included F$20,000 (US$8,700) given to the party ahead of last December’s election — roughly three years after he was first charged.

    The party’s general secretary, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, was Fiji’s long-serving attorney-general and justice minister at the time.

    Reporters also found that the Umarji family’s business network has continued to expand despite his legal troubles, and currently operates in three Pacific countries. The newest of these pharmacy companies, in Vanuatu, was founded just last year.

    Fiji’s Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, Pio Tikoduadua, told OCCRP an investigation has been opened into how Umarji was able to flee the country.

    Ships at anchor in the harbor of Fiji’s capital, Suva.
    Ships at anchor in the harbour of Fiji’s capital, Suva. Image: Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific

    He said authorities are also investigating donations Umarji and his family made to FijiFirst, and any “potential connections” he may have had to top officials in the former government, including Sayed-Khaiyum and the now-suspended Police Commissioner, Sitiveni Qiliho.

    “Certainly, I am deeply concerned about the potential influence of drug traffickers in Fiji, especially over officials and law enforcement,” Tikoduadua said.

    “The infiltration of these criminal elements poses a significant risk to our society and institutions.”

    Umarji declined a request for an interview and did not respond to follow-up questions. His Auckland lawyer, David PH Jones, said a request from reporters contained “numerous loaded questions which contain unsubstantiated assertions, a number of which have little or nothing to do with Mr Umarji’s prosecution”.

    Sayed-Khaiyum and Qiliho did not respond to written questions.

    ‘A hub of the Pacific’
    The rise in drug trafficking through Fiji is just one part of a booming trans-Pacific trade that experts and law enforcement say has become one of the world’s most profitable.

    In Australia, the most recent data shows that drug seizures have more than quadrupled over the last decade, and Australians now consume 4.7 tonnes of cocaine and 8.8 tonnes of meth a year. In much smaller New Zealand, drug users strongly prefer meth to cocaine, consuming roughly 720 kilograms a year.

    Consumers in both countries pay some of the highest prices on earth for cocaine and meth, much of it exported from the Americas. Lying in the vast blue expanse between the two points are the Pacific Islands.

    Pacific meth cocaine route map.
    The Pacific meth cocaine route map. Map: Edin Pasovic/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific

    “Fiji is a hub of the Pacific. You’ve got the ports, you’ve got the infrastructure, and you’ve got the ability to come in and out either by [water] craft or by airplane,” said Glyn Rowland, the New Zealand Police senior liaison officer for the Pacific.

    “So that really leaves Fiji quite vulnerable to be in that transit route off to New Zealand and off to Australia.”

    Fiji has long been eyed by international organised crime for its strategic location close to Australia and New Zealand’s multi-billion dollar drug markets.

    In the early 2000s, for example, an international police operation took apart a “super lab” in Fiji’s capital, Suva, run by Chinese gangsters with enough precursor chemicals to produce a tonne of meth.

    But after early successes, Fiji in recent years went cold on the fight against hard drugs.

    The previous government of Voreqe Bainimarama, who first took power in a 2006 coup, showed little interest in tackling meth and cocaine trafficking, according to current and former law enforcement officers from Fiji and the US. Despite recent signs that trafficking was increasing, the police force under Bainimarama’s hand-picked commissioner, Qiliho, seemed to overlook the problem, the officers told OCCRP.

    Bainimarama did not respond to questions.

    Ernie Verina, the Oceania attaché for US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said his agency had become worried about trafficking through Fiji.

    In mid-2022, HSI assigned an agent to be based in the country. But when the agent raised the issue of meth with top officials from Bainimarama’s government, he was met with total pushback, Verina said.

    “Categorically, like, ‘There is no meth’,” Verina said of the Fijian response.

    “That’s what they told the agent.”

    A lot of influence
    Despite high-level denials, Fiji’s narcotics police were very much aware of the country’s drug trafficking crisis. In fact, they had long had Umarji in their sights. But he was a difficult target.

    As far back as 2017, Umarji was identified as “one of the tier one” suspected traffickers in the country, said Serupepeli Neiko, the head of the Fiji Police’s Narcotics Bureau.

    Umarji’s hometown of Lautoka, Fiji.
    Umarji’s hometown of Lautoka, Fiji. Image: Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific

    While the drug trade through Fiji is also the domain of transnational organised crime groups, Umarji was suspected of having carved out a niche for himself by using his network of pharmacies, Hyperchem, to legally import pseudoephedrine and divert it onto the black market, Neiko said.

    In early 2017, Umarji and one of his colleagues were charged with weapons possession after scores of rifle bullets were found on his yacht, moored in his hometown of Lautoka. But the charges were “squashed in court,” Neiko said.

    “So that gave a red flag to us that a [drug trafficking] case against Umarji would have been challenging as well.”

    A former senior Fijian officer, who declined to be identified because he is not authorised to speak to the media, put it more bluntly: “Umarji had a lot of influence with the previous government.”

    Reporters found no evidence that any senior Fijian officials intervened against investigations into Umarji. But the perception that he had influence was powerful, current and former police officers said.

    Indeed, since the fall of Bainimarama’s government last year, multiple senior officials have faced charges that they abused their positions, but none have been convicted.

    The suspended police commissioner, Qiliho, and the former prime minister, Bainimarama, were both acquitted by a court on October 12 of charges that they had illegally interfered in a separate police investigation.

    Former Attorney-General Sayed-Khaiyum is also currently facing prosecution in another unrelated abuse of office case.

    Despite becoming a top-level police target, Umarji continued to expand his influence in Fiji.

    Company records show that, in 2015, he and his wife, Zaheera Cassim, opened Hyperchem companies in Fiji, Solomon Islands, and a now-defunct branch in Samoa.

    In May 2017, Umarji opened a new company, Bio Pharma, in New Zealand.

    Ahead of elections the following year, Umarji and his relatives donated a total of at least F$50,000 to the FijiFirst party, declarations from the Fiji Elections Office show.

    Umarji also made a name for himself in soccer, getting elected a vice-president of the Fiji Football Association in December 2019.

    Pills and cash
    By 2019, it was clear that avenues for a Fijian investigation were closed. So police in New Zealand stepped in instead. Reporters were able to reconstruct what happened next via court records and interviews.

    While seconded that year to Fiji’s Transnational Crime Unit, New Zealand detective Peter Reynolds heard whispers about Umarji’s alleged criminal activity from his local colleagues. On returning to New Zealand, he decided to take things into his own hands.

    Digging through police files, Reynolds found a lucky break in a case from nearly two years prior.

    In late 2017, an anonymous member of the public had reached out to an anti-crime hotline with a tip that a businessman, Firdos “Freddie” Dalal, had a suspicious amount of money in his home in suburban Auckland.

    Acting on a warrant, police made their way inside and found NZ$726,190 in cash and 4000 boxes of Actifed, a cold and flu medicine that contains pseudoephedrine.

    Umarji NZ route map.
    Umarji NZ route map. Image: Edin Pasovic, James O’Brien/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific

    Known as Operation Duet, the investigation that led to Dalal’s conviction provided the information that Reynolds needed to go after Umarji. It turned out that Dalal, who owned an Auckland-based freight forwarding company, was also listed as the director of Umarji’s New Zealand company, Bio Pharma.

    Reynolds soon figured out how it all worked. Using his Pacific-wide Hyperchem network, Umarji ordered Actifed pills to be delivered from abroad to his pharmacies in Fiji and Solomon Islands. The shipments were set to transit through New Zealand, where Dalal’s forwarding company was responsible for the cargo.

    While the drugs sat in a restricted customs holding area, Dalal simply went inside and swapped them out for other other medicine, such as anti-fungal cream, which was then sent on to their island destinations. The purloined pseudoephedrine was sold on New Zealand’s black market.

    Dalal did not respond to questions.

    In just three shipments between January and October 2017, Umarji’s operation brought in an estimated 678,000 Actifed pills containing about 40.7 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, Auckland District Court would later find.

    But if deciphering Umarji’s operation was straightforward, arresting him would prove anything but.

    New Zealand Police filed charges against Umarji in December 2019, but Reynolds told the Auckland court that he believed they faced little chance of getting Umarji to voluntarily fly to Auckland and show up in court.

    “If the summons were to be served it would likely result in Umarji fleeing [Fiji] to a country that has no extradition arrangements with New Zealand,” the detective said in an affidavit.

    So New Zealand authorities decided to go through the arduous process of requesting extradition. In November 2021, a Fijian court agreed to the request, and New Zealand Police issued an Interpol red notice.

    Despite all the effort, within days Fiji Police had to contact their New Zealand counterparts with an embarrassing admission: Umarji had fled the country, and was in India.

    New Zealand Police’s Pacific liaison, Rowland, declined to comment on how Umarji was able to flee Fiji, but added: “The reality is, sometimes corruption isn’t about what you do. Sometimes corruption is about what you don’t do, or turn a blind eye to.”

    Despite his legal troubles, Umarji remained a respectable public figure in Fiji, thanks in part to a restrictive media environment that made it difficult for reporters to look into him in detail.

    In May 2021, while Umarji was still in Fiji and his extradition case was pending, he was elected to FIFA’s governance, audit and compliance committee. He kept the position even after his flight abroad later that year, and was re-elected unopposed as Fiji Football Association vice president this June. He only resigned both positions on August 7, two days before his sentencing.

    FIFA and the Fiji Football Association did not respond to questions.

    Umarji also made little effort to hide during his exile in India. At one stage last year, he recorded an online video testimonial for a stem cell clinic outside of Delhi where he said he was getting treatment for diabetes.

    His family’s second round of donations to FijiFirst, F$20,000 ahead of last December’s elections, were similarly made while Umarji was on the run.

    But the drug trafficker eventually tired of exile.

    In early 2022, he first contacted his high-powered Auckland lawyer, Jones, to arrange his surrender to New Zealand Police. He pleaded guilty to the Auckland court earlier this year and was allowed to return to Fiji to sort his affairs before handing himself in for sentencing.

    Hyperchem’s warehouse and office in Lautoka.
    Hyperchem’s warehouse and office in Lautoka. Image Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific

    New focus
    With Umarji now in prison, Fijian authorities say they are continuing to investigate his operations.

    Umarji’s pharmaceutical business continues to run with his wife, Cassim, at its head. Cassim has for years been a significant public face for the businesses, including publicising its charitable work. She declined to respond to reporters’ questions.

    OCCRP visited Umarji’s companies in Lautoka in late June, during the period in which he was allowed by the New Zealand court to briefly return to Fiji. Reporters found a bustling network of businesses, including a well-staffed warehouse and office on the edge of town for Hyperchem.

    Reporters contacted Umarji by phone from the warehouse’s reception area, but he declined to come out for an interview and referred reporters to his lawyer.

    Homeland Security Investigations’ Verina said the new government of Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has since removed roadblocks to investigating these sort of trafficking operations.

    “We have started to see enforcement operations and arrests and holding individuals accountable for the methamphetamine smuggling,” Verina said.

    An Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) investigation. Additional reporting by Lydia Lewis (RNZ) and George Block (New Zealand Herald). This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.