Chinese Workers "Disappeared" While Investigating Ivanka Trump Brands

Chinese police are cracking down on labor activists attempting to expose sweatshop-like working conditions at a local factory that manufactures shoes for Ivanka Trump"s label. One activist working on the campaign has been detained, while two others have disppeared, and are presumably in police custody, according to Western media reports.

Hua Haifeng, Li Zhao and Su Heng, who were working undercover under the direction of New York-based workers" rights organization China Labor Watch, have been unreachable by phone over the weekend, Li Qiang, the founder of the advocacy group, told Bloomberg. The three men had been investigating labor conditions at factories that produce shoes for Ivanka Trump’s brand and other Western brands. A picture of Zhao, published in the WaPo, can be seen below:

Local police contacted Hua’s wife by phone Tuesday afternoon and told her that he’d been detained for “illegal eavesdropping,” Bloomberg reported.

The factory, operated by shoe manufacturer Huajian Group and located in the southeast province of Jiangxi, is one of 15 that supposedly makes shoes for the brand founded by President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter, Bloomberg reported. In a letter sent to Ivanka Trump in April, the group alleged several labor violations at two of these factories, including that employees were forced to work at least 12 1/2 hours a day for wages below China’s legal minimum, a pay rate equal to about $1 an hour, Bloomberg said.

The arrest and disappearances come at a time of sustained pressure on labor activists in China amid a crackdown on civil society under President Xi Jinping, Reuters reported.

In 17 years of activism, including investigations of hundreds of factories in China, no member of Li’s group has ever been arrested for suspicion of having committed a crime, Li told Reuters. He also told The Washington Post that having three people detained was “rare.”

"This is the first time we"ve come across this kind of situation," he told Reuters, adding the accusation against Hua had "no factual basis".

Amnesty International called for the three to be released if they were being held only for investigating possible labor abuses at the factories.

"Activists exposing potential human rights abuses deserve protection not persecution," Amnesty’s China researcher, William Nee, told Reuters.

Huajian has previously said it has been making shoes for the U.S. president’s daughter for nearly a decade, accounting for one-third of her shoes made in China – though her shoes account for only a small portion of the company’s total output, according to WaPo.

The effort has been under intense police scrutiny for months, according to China Labor Watch. Two of the activists were told they were not allowed to leave China in April and May, Li said, a request he characterized as “relatively common,” according to WaPo.

The Daily Beast reported that Ivanka-branded shoes were being produced at the factory back in December, when the media organization published a photoessay documenting its working conditions. Some of these photos can be seen below:

The crackdown on the labor activists follows a public détente between President Trump and China. The former has dropped his protectionist rhetoric and praised China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for offering to work with the US on helping to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambition.

However, escalating tensions related to China’s buildup of artificial reefs in disputed waters in the South China Sea, have recently led to a series of uncomfortable encounters between Chinese fighter jets and the US military. Last week, two Chinese jets attempted to “intercept” a US military surveillance plane flying near Hong Kong, with one jet reportedly coming within 200 yards of the US aircraft.

The Republic Has Fallen: The Deep State's Plot To Take Over America Has Succeeded

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

No doubt about it.

The coup d’etat has been successful.

The Deep State - a.k.a. the police state, a.k.a. the military industrial complex - has taken over.

The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.

When in doubt, follow the money trail.

It always points the way.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought—lock, stock and barrel—and made to dance to the tune of the Deep State.

Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC.

Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump has paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Just recently, for instance, Trump agreed to sell Saudi Arabia more than $110 billion in military weapons.

Meanwhile, Trump—purportedly in an effort to balance the budget in 10 years—wants to slash government funding for programs for the poor, ranging from health care and food stamps to student loans and disability payments.

The military doesn’t have to worry about tightening its belt, however. No, the military’s budget—with its trillion dollar wars, its $125 billion in administrative waste, and its contractor-driven price gouging that hits the American taxpayer where it hurts the most—will continue to grow, thanks to Trump.

This is how you keep the Deep State in power.

The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, the military will get more militaristic, America’s endless wars will get more endless, and the prospect of peace will grow ever dimmer.

As for the terrorists, they will keep on being played for pawns as long as Saudi Arabia remains their breeding ground and America remains the source of their weapons, training and know-how.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”

Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion...

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

It will not be revived or restored without a true revolution of values and a people’s rebellion the likes of which we may not see for a very long time.

America is a profitable business interest for a very select few, and war—wars waged abroad against shadowy enemies and wars waged at home against the American people—has become the Deep State’s primary means of income.

After all, war is big business.

In order to maintain a profit margin, one would either have to find new enemies abroad or focus on fighting a war at home, against the American people, and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with today.

• Local police transformed into a standing army in the American homeland through millions of dollars’ worth of grants to local police agencies for military weapons, vehicles, training and assistance.

• The citizenry taught to fear and distrust each other and to welcome the trappings of the police state.

Had the government tried to ram such a state of affairs down our throats suddenly, it might have had a rebellion on its hands. Instead, the American people have been given the boiling frog treatment, immersed in water that slowly is heated up—degree by degree—so that they’ve fail to notice that they’re being trapped and cooked and killed.

“We the people” are in hot water now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.

From Clinton to Bush, then Obama and now Trump, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

The republic has fallen to fascism with a smile.

Elections will not save us.

Learn the treacherous lessons of 2008 and 2016:  presidential elections have made a mockery of our constitutional system of government, suggesting that our votes can make a difference when, in fact, they merely serve to maintain the status quo.

Don’t delay.

Start now—in your own communities, in your schools, at your city council meetings, in newspaper editorials, at protests—by pushing back against laws that are unjust, police departments that overreach, politicians that don’t listen to their constituents, and a system of government that grows more tyrannical by the day.

If you wait until 2020 to rescue our republic from the clutches of the Deep State, it will be too late.

Kim Jong Nam Assassination Caught On Tape

Chilling closed-circuit security footage has emerged of the killing of Kim Jong Nam last week, showing two attackers took less than three seconds to carry out the assault on the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. As the WSJ first reported, the video clips from security cameras were obtained by a Japanese media outlet and posted by a third party on YouTube.

The clip shot inside Kuala Lumpur International Airport shows Kim arriving alone at a busy, well-lit departures hall shortly before 9 a.m. on Feb. 13. Police said he had been in Malaysia about a week, and intended to take a 10:50 a.m. AirAsia flight back to his home in Macau. From an airport mall area, Kim, wearing loafers, light-blue jeans, a sport coat and a flat cap, and with a black backpack slung over his right shoulder, strides past three police officers into a crowded departures hall.

Once he arrives at the entrance of the departure lobby, he stops momentarily to look up at the flight schedules. After checking the flight schedules, he then moves to a nearby self-check-in kiosk.

In a flash, the next scene shows two women approaching Kim, one in a whitetop appearing to lunge as she places her hand over Kim’s face. There is a flurry of movement, then after a matter of two or three seconds, the three break apart. The woman in white - whose hair and dress resembles a woman dressed in a top with an “LOL” slogan who Malaysian police said was connected to the killing - walks briskly away.

Japan-based Fuji TV aired the video compilation late Sunday night. A spokeswoman declined to say how it obtained the footage, citing an obligation to protect its source. The video has since been circulated by Japanese and other media, and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube before being removed.

As the WSJ explains, in the next clip, Kim is standing at one of the kiosks when a person that police believe was Siti Aisyah, a 25-year-old Indonesian woman who authorities said was working as a masseuse at a spa in Kuala Lumpur, approaches on his left, getting his attention. A second later, a person police believe to be Doan Thi Huong, a 28-year-old Vietnamese woman, swoops in behind Mr. Kim. She reaches up with both arms and wraps them around Mr. Kim’s head, appearing to either hold a cloth to his face or to hold him in place.

It isn’t clear what action, if any, Ms. Aisyah takes. Mr. Kim’s backpack slips off from his shoulder and he stumbles backward as both women then slide away quickly but calmly in opposite directions. Mr. Kim appears to watch Ms. Aisyah departing, seemingly never having seen Ms. Huong. He stands motionless for several seconds. Huong’s contact with Mr. Kim lasted 2.33 seconds, according a timer added to the video compilation.

The clip of the assault near the kiosks is blurrier than the previous clips, which police told The Wall Street Journal was because a camera closer to the scene wasn’t working. They said another camera that would have caught the assailants at a departure point was also out of order. 

A subsequent clip, of better quality from a different camera, shows Kim walking quickly to the nearby customer-service desk. There he tells an airport employee that two women had just wiped a wet cloth on his face, and that he feels dizzy, according to police, who have said they are also investigating whether a spray was used in the assault. The airport worker escorts him out to the hallway where Mr. Kim speaks animatedly with the police he had passed minutes earlier. Mr. Kim repeatedly motions toward his face.

The next clip shows a far less crowded area downstairs from the departures hall, where a police officer and an airport employee calmly escort Mr. Kim to a small, glass-fronted airport medical clinic. Mr. Kim, now moving less steadily, enters.

An unspecified amount of time passes, and the next clip shows Mr. Kim on a stretcher at the clinic, being moved. Police said he had a seizure, and medical workers sent him to Putrajaya Hospital. Mr. Kim died en route.

Local police arrested Ms. Aisyah and Ms. Huong last week for possible involvement in the case. Neither has been charged, and both are being detained by police for one week. Police have also arrested a North Korean man and a Malaysian man suspected of being involved in the assault, and say they are searching for others, including several North Korean men.

As reported last week, police have said they believe Kim was poisoned during the assault, but are awaiting confirmation from autopsy results. Malaysia’s health minister said results could be released as early as Wednesday. 

According to SCMP, Malaysia shot back at North Korea’s allegations that authorities were purposely delaying the investigation, including the release of Kim Jong-nam’s remains. “North Korea can say anything, but, as far as we are concerned, we follow the legal requirements of our country,” Noor Rashid said.

Pyongyang is behind the death, a South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman alleged Sunday. “The government assumes that North Korea’s regime is behind the incident,” Defense Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said, adding that there would be no further comment while Malaysian police conduct their investigation.