Feb 2, 2020 – What does a self-proclaimed “independent” media regulator do in the UK when one of its member newspapers prints fabrications?
The Times of London ran a lying commentary calling for a UK Magnitsky Law, ie a law that allows the government to charge and punish targeted individuals (in “enemy” countries) without charges, evidence or due process.
Charles Fuller‘s mystery race play, brilliantly directed by Kenny Leon, is still a stunner, nearly 40 years after it debuted on Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Jan 28, 2020 – In December, the Danish Press Board rejected a complaint that tax fraudster William Browder filed against Finans, Finans.dk, a Danish financial news outlet, part of the national daily Jyllands-Posten, that reported on his tax evasion and invented Magnitsky story in a documented exposé by journalists Jette Aagaard and Kristoffer Brahm.
Laura Linney creates a fine portrait of a women seeking to pull a life out of a harrowing childhood in a play that unfortunately descends into soap opera.
The Nation, Jan 22, 2020 – Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, MBK in his homeland, is the most famous Russian “oligarch,” the name given by their compatriots to a handful of men who, when communism fell, turned it into gangster capitalism. With an estimated $16 billion fortune, he became the richest man in Russia. When the rules changed, he didn‘t adapt and spent a decade in prison.
This riveting 1937 play is a combination of Brechtian social criticism and Ionesco political allegory, both à propos for a surreal story about Nazi era Europe. When he wrote the play, Hitler was in power and the Nuremberg laws in effect. There‘s a sense of Germanic gothic.
Dec 19, 2019 – Tom Graham, managing director at Kissinger Associates, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations Dec 17th on prospects for stability in U.S.-Russian relations. He is on the moderate side of the current Russophobia but will not look into the evidence that the Browder hoax is blocking the improved U.S.-Russia relations he wants.
Dec 16, 2019 – I talked today on Fault Lines about the illicit Russian stock buys and tax evasion of the Ziff Brothers, whose Russian investments were handled by William Browder. This expands on and explains what I said in the half-hour broadcast.
Dec 15, 2019 -This is German news magazine Der Spiegel’s response to a complaint by William Browder to its editor and to the German Press Commission about its exposé that proved he was a fraudster and his Magnitsky story a fabrication. Key parts are marked in bold. The text and documents show the Spiegel story to be correct and Browder to be a charlatan.
Dec 14, 2019 – Democrats refusing to cross a picket line in a labor dispute with French multinational Sodexo should also know that the food service company is a documented thief, stealing from universities, schools, hospitals, even the military. I exposed that in 2009.
Dec 11, 2019 – William Browder has filed a complaint with the German Press Commission against the German magazine Der Spiegel’s exposé of his corruption, of his tax evasion and fake Magnitsky story.
Even if you don‘t like rock, you will appreciate Adrienne Warren‘s bravura performance in this feminist story about a woman who puts up with abuse for years and finally throws off her Svengali to become a world-famous singer.
Dec 8, 2019 – The editor of OCCRP, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a self-described investigative news site with links to the U.S. government and to fraudster William Browder, refuses to sign a statement in support of whistleblower publisher Julian Assange.
On the menu of this clever, succulent play are the characters who make up the back of a boutique restaurant in Park Slope, a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn where playwright Theresa Rebeck lives. Director Moritz Von Stuelpnagel makes them all eminently real, albeit somewhat New York neurotic in their own ways.
Dec 3, 2019 – Angela Zumpe, a Berlin filmmaker, media artist and painter, was in New York in November to present a film and also a book that intercuts the story of László Moholy-Nagy, a visionary lighting designer and the most experimental of the Bauhaus artists, with her own story. Zumpe is a media artist and was a professor at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, where the Bauhaus was based.
Dec 2, 2019 – On Fault Lines today, I talk about two important financial corruption stories the U.S. press ignores. Both involve the offshore system that western banks and governments protect, the first in the British Virgin Islands, Guernsey and Cyprus, the second in Antigua.
La Tanya Hall is a classy cabaret singer whose moody voice ranges from low to high in dulcet tones with a distinctive jazzy inflection. Songs are delivered with a mellow, honeyed often understated sound which sometimes has a hint of New Orleans.
You could have been, literally, blown away by this year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Winds of 20mph and higher gusts forced the high-flying balloons to dip low. You could see the cord-handlers struggling. Here‘s low-flying Nutcracker and Smokey Bear.
They couldn‘t have picked a better title to describe the leading Democrats and Republicans, one side defending a leader who sets a record for lying and the other doing so more subtly with fakery supported by a Deep State outraged that it can‘t make policy.
The costumes seem South Asian and place the dancers in a real world. In the first piece, “Tilted Arc,” there is a lively pulsating South Asian sound created by classical piano and horn, and the dancers exude energy.
I knew Bella Abzug, so my reaction to this play is deeper and more personal than it might otherwise be. I started out wondering how a guy could create the story of a feminist woman. Would this slip into drag?
Nov 24, 2019 – Two years after I wrote the first exposé of fraudster William Browder and his Magnitsky hoax published by the investigative website 100Reporters, and after growing social media and some alternative media reports about his fabrications, a major western publication, the German Der Spiegel, has run a story by Benjamin Bidder, a reporter posted to Russia for seven years, who exposes Browder as a fraud and his Magnistky story as a fake.
Nov 22, 2019 – There have been revealed links between lawyers representing Julian Assange, William Browder and his collaborators, and the U.S. government.
Here is an article. And here is an audio interview on Fault Lines.
Consortium News, Nov 21, 2019 – Part of the ongoing U.S. demonization of the Nicolas Maduro government of Venezuela is to accuse it of corruption. In 2017, for example, U.S. prosecutors charged five former Venezuelan officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) with soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable treatment from state oil company PdVSA from 2011 to 2015. (Hugo Chávez was president 2006 to 2013, and Maduro became president in 2013.)
However, there‘s another example of PdVSA bribery that the U.S. never felt compelled to pursue. It is the alleged and never investigated Halliburton bribery of Venezuelan oil company officials in the late 1990s when Halliburton was run by Dick Cheney, who would leave it to become vice-president under George W. Bush.
This is an amazing play. With Robert Schenkkan‘s 2014 “All the Way,” first part of his Lyndon Johnson story, it is among the most important historic American plays.
It could be a Shakespeare play, a tragedy that engulfs a complex, larger-than-life figure. And one who is brought down by his own hubris. The story moves between the civil rights movement and the American war against Vietnam. And because I knew some of the characters, I have strong feelings about it.
