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see // http://www.irr.org.uk/news/establishing-a-framework-for-understanding-the-rise-of-fascism/
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Establishing a framework for understanding the rise of fascismApril 24, 2014 — Review
========================Written by Liz Fekete
A review of a report on the extent of Golden Dawn’s penetration of the Greek state.
An excellent free downloadable report published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is not only an essential primer for understanding the parliamentary rise of the neo-nazi criminal organisation Golden Dawn (GD), but a much-needed corrective to academic fashions that see the far Right as emblematic of extremist tendencies on the margins of society. Mapping ultra-Right extremism, xenophobia and racism within the Greek state apparatus is written by five of Greece’s most serious academic and legal experts. As its title suggests, the aim of the report is to provide an explanation of why, until moves to criminalise and dismantle it were instigated in September 2013, GD was so successful in penetrating the state apparatus, particularly the police and the military. Its conclusion that GD reflects a convergence of affinities and affiliations at both the periphery and centre of Greek society is one that needs to be absorbed by all those studying and challenging fascism in other European contexts.
The centrality of the state in bolstering GD ideas
Divided into five chapters and running to nearly 100 pages, Mapping ultra-Right extremism is more like a book than a report. It draws on the deep knowledge of its authors and provides a history of the relationship between GD and the police, judiciary, military and church. At first glance, it might seem odd to include a chapter on the Orthodox Church of Greece. But the Greek Constitution states that ‘the prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ’, and priests are public servants paid by the government. This in itself makes the Orthodox Church worthy of consideration as part of the state apparatus. But historically, the Orthodox Church co-operated with fascism and dictatorship and never underwent a political cleansing during the transition to democracy. Today, its anti-Communist ideology, its deep hatred of Islam, its crusading anti-homosexual stance, has led it to bolster neo-nazism by ‘disguising’ its ideology as ‘religiously right’.
After the murder of the anti-fascist Pavlos Fyssas on 17 September 2013, the New Democracy/Pasok government moved swiftly to dismantle GD. The myth took hold that the Greek state acted out of disgust at the young left-wing musician’s death. But the authors are sceptical, as the criminal activities of GD – including the murder of at least one Pakistani migrant – were well known prior to this. Could it be that the government moved to save itself?
Anti-democratic tendencies within the state
The chapter on the military by Dimosthenis Papadatos-Anagnostopoulos gives us pause to doubt the government’s self-serving narrative. The day before the murder of Pavlos, the Special Forces Reserve Officers Community announced online its intent to stage a coup d’état on 28 September 2013. It was on that day that the leader of GD, Nikos Michaloliakos MP, and four of its MPs were arrested, and investigations started into claims that key military camps had been used as training sites for GD, with the army’s connivance. Up until this point, the official line was that there were only ‘droplets’ of support for GD in the military and police. Suddenly the Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, who had previously threatened to sue the Guardian when it raised accusations of official tolerance of GD and the police torture of anti-fascists, was leading the hunt for the Nazi murderers.
As the chapter on the police makes clear, there was far, far more than mere ‘droplets’ of support for GD amongst the police and the military. What had taken place within the Hellenic Police was a deep-seated systematic ‘intrusion and infiltration’ by GD. This had first come to public attention in 2001, when an internal police document was leaked showing that the police had used GD, posing as ‘indignant citizens’, to beat up left-wing demonstrators at the annual rally commemorating over twenty students murdered during the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the Greek military junta. (There is a long history of the Greek state employing criminal fraternities to act as informants and provocateurs, and to beat up students and Leftists). In fact, the government could only dismantle the neo-nazi party after first purging the police of GD sympathisers. A week after Pavlos Fyssas’ assassination the government announced the resignation of some of the country’s leading police officers, while others were simply replaced or relocated (including the head of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit, the head of the Division of Weapons and Explosives and officers from the rapid support unit, DELTA). As one GD MP stated at the moment of his arrest, ‘They dismantled the whole of the police and the NIS [National Intelligence Service] in order to arrest us.’
Dimitris Christopoulos, who also edited the report, has done a great job in documenting GD’s infiltration of the police, unearthing the wider undemocratic trends in policing behind the current known facts. Christopoulos shows how the authoritarian mentality of the police and their engagement in methods of covert policing and practices such as torture, associated with the two dictatorships, have now resurfaced in response to immigration. For the Border Guard and the Special Guard, recently created, poorly educated and badly trained units whose numbers and powers are constantly growing, immigrants replaced Communists as the greatest threat facing the nation. And another new corps was created, in central Athens: the infamous DELTA squad, made up of police officers who had served in the army special force. Initially formed to crack down on attacks on property by anarchists, it soon gained a reputation for acting with ‘excessive cruelty’ towards left-wing demonstrators, and for attacking migrants. And it was in this ‘poorly educated squad that the ultra-right snake found a suitable environment to lay its eggs’.
The centrality of the judiciary in perpetuating GD
Racial violence is given a more thorough treatment in the chapter by Clio Papapantoleon which focuses on the failures of the judiciary. A number of outrageous judicial decisions are charted, starting with the decision to acquit GD MP Elias Kasidiaris of charges arising from his assaulting and punching two female MPs during a live television show. Judges declared his innocence on the legally water-tight ground that ‘both the defendant and his organisation condemn violence’. The chapter contrasts the courts’ upholding of the blasphemy laws against artists with its failure to use incitement provisions against a number of GD MPs.
Protest by religious groups and Golden Dawn against the performance of Corpus Christi in Athens in 2012
Over several weeks in 2012, the police and prosecution service looked the other way while the Chytirio Theatre in Athens came under siege from rioting ‘religious citizens’, clergymen and GD members who threatened to kill actors performing in the play Corpus Christi, finally beating them up and causing substantial damage to the theatre. In the end, the Athens prosecutor did take decisive action – prosecuting the actors and producers of the play (including the director, choreographer and lightning technicians) for malicious blasphemy and defamation of religion! (Seemingly as an afterthought, one GD MP was singled out for prosecution.) Case after case shows bias within the judiciary, with a lenient approach to GD crimes. One reads this chapter on the judiciary in a mood of angry disbelief. As the authors rightly state, an ethnocentric approach to the law in Greece is reproducing the culture of the ultra-Right and establishing it as the normative horizon (i.e. the common view of what is just) of the Greek political community.
Wider lessons
For the authors, ‘the Greek ultra-right symptom is nothing but an extreme version of the European symptom’. The burning question they ask, was ‘the impunity granted to Nazi violence a product of tolerance due to affiliation or of distance due to fear’, is one that they have attempted to answer through deep study of the wider political culture. In the UK context we need to learn from the report’s methodology. For instance, we could take a long hard look at the Crown Prosecution Service to see what role it has played in the growth of the EDL. Those who believe that the situation in the UK has nothing in common with Greece should ask themselves this question: Why is it that Tommy Robinson is currently languishing in Woodhill Prison, not for systematic acts of incitement and intimidation of Muslim neighbourhoods across the UK over a span of six years, but for a £160,000 mortgage fraud?
RELATED LINKSDownload the report here
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Discredited is as discredited does (Hat tip dannyb and Dave Thomas at JREF) ??
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Len Colby gives ye old tip of the hat to discredited DAVE THOMAS as man to discredit truther RICHARD GAGE.
=== see
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19339&p=257327
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Its Dave Thomas who is discredited.......I would say those who use him as a source are discredited....IMHO.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
see /// http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/
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Steel-Wool Iron Spheres Debunked Again: Shame on NMSR´s Dave Thomas
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Mr. Dave Thomas announced on the JREF 9/11 forum, on the 19th of October, 2011, that he had posted a YouTube video called Iron microspheres prove Thermite? Despite some controversy, Mr. Thomas still advertizes the video on his NMSR webpage, where he states that:
The "thermodynamic size effect" does not apply to any materials at the WTC in 2001 because nano-sized iron was not yet commercially available small enough to benefit from the phenomenon. The video does not demonstrate it either because no melting is involved and no spheres are formed. Dave Thomas seems to believe that he has debunked the best evidence in Dr. Harrit´s 2009 nanothermite paper: the peculiar red/gray chips ignite at about 420C, and form the iron-rich spheres that several researchers discovered in the WTC dust. The spherical shape indicates previously melted iron and therefore a reaction temperature above 1400C, which is beyond the capability of conventional combustion in open air, including a jet-fueled building fire. Specialized high temperature coal furnaces can create spheres rich in iron-oxides, but the red/gray chips form spheres rich in elemental iron, and that is the hallmark of a thermite reaction."The answer to the mystery of the microspheres - "Iron melts only at temperatures far higher than possible in normal fires, so how could microspheres have possibly been formed on 9/11?" – is simply that very small metal particles have much lower melting points than their bulk material counterparts (around 900 o C for iron nanoparticles, as opposed to 1535 o C for bulk iron). This is called the "thermodynamic size effect." The towers contained thousands of computers and electric gadgets. Wires and filaments and meshes from electronics, as well as thin rust flakes and other small iron particles, could all have easily been made into microspheres during the WTC conflagration. To see a vivid demonstration of this phenomenon, watch the video on NMSR's YouTube channel, 'theNMSR', in which a BIC lighter is used to burn steel wool, creating numerous iron microspheres without any Thermite at all!"
Dave Thomas claims his YouTube experiment proves that normal fire temperatures easily form iron spheres, but this statement has three major problems: The first two problems are that the alleged "iron spheres" from his steel-wool experiment are neither iron nor spheres. The third problem is that Dave Thomas has known that his experiment is invalid since the day after the debut of the video, because his JREF forum colleague debunked it on the forum that day!
Part 1: Oystein confronted Dave Thomas on the JREF forum, the day after the initial release of the video, and debunked it from several different angles. Most notably, Oystein recognized that burning steel-wool nets iron-oxide, not iron:"At 6:23, you commit a blunder,a false statement: "...spheres were indeedpure iron". Urr say what?"In response, Dave Thomas retracted the video the same day, and Oystein boasted to Miragememories that "...the difference between faithful truthers and skeptics: We listen to good criticism and hasten to correct our mistakes" And MM replied, "Nice to know Dave has some integrity." http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=7688677&postcount=54
But Oystein was too quick to assume that the JREF forum could live up to the standard of true skeptics, and MM was too quick to congratulate Dave for having integrity, because Dave Thomas re-posted the same old video again a couple of weeks later, without retracting any claims: http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=7750048&postcount=74
None of Dave´s fellow "debunkers" on the JREF forum had a problem with that, and in 2014, Dave and friends continue to advertize the video and pretend to know nothing about the controversy. And that says all there is to say about the faithful pseudo-skeptics of the JREF forum: http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=9931547&postcount=24Part 2: Someone noted another problem in January 2012, on the same thread that originally introduced Dave´s YouTube video. Steen Svanholm had performed the steel-wool experiment on Danish TV and received a response from Dr. Harrit, who stated that: "The particles he points to after the experiment are ironoxide and they are not round." http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=7949220&postcount=78
By this time, Oystein had decided to toe the line and obfuscate his previous observation of iron-oxide in the alleged "spheres," and Harrit´s observation about non-spheres was simply left unaddressed by Oystein and all the others: http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=7957237&postcount=113
Part 3: Dave Thomas happens to be the president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, and NMSR states that the group,"consists of individuals, including scientists and non-professionals alike, who share the goals of promoting genuine science, the scientific method, and rational and critical thinking....We are skeptical, however, of those groups who misuse and misrepresent science. We oppose the use of fabrication, flawed logic, distortion of facts, and pseudoscientific propaganda by any and all groups who twist science to suit their own ends..."Yet, the president´s YouTube pseudo-science is the depiction of this kind of distortion of facts to suit an agenda. Dave´s re-posting of an experiment that has been falsified by his own colleague on his own forum is inexcusable. And a forum of proper skeptics would not tolerate this behavior, but nothing has changed since Dr. Greening gave up and left the JREF 9/11 forum in 2007, denouncing it for "smothering scientific debate". This kind of misconduct is currently known as pseudo-skepticism, and interestingly enough, it was none other than Marcello Truzzi who revived the term to describe these kinds of tactics. Truzzi was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which is currently called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. CSI is known as the original forum of skeptics, the forerunner of JREF, and the publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer. Truzzi actually left CSI early on because he felt the members "tend to block honest inquiry" and "move the goal-posts" - echoing Dr. Greenings comments about the "debunkers" at the JREF 9/11 forum. Dave Thomas happens to be a member of CSI, but he is also a teacher of physics and critical thinking at New Mexico Tech, which is a much more serious matter! The misrepresentation of data is a form of scientific misconduct in the academic world, and this can have dire consequences!
Related articles:
http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2014/03/csicops-dave-thomas-thermodynamic-size.html
http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2013/09/dave-thomas-pulls-iron-spheres-out-of.html
http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2014/03/matching-peaks-part-2-dave-thomas.html
http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2014/03/mohr-misunderstanding-rj-lee-did-not.html -
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/tag/u-s-economy
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If the U.S. economy is getting better, then why are major retail chains closing thousands of stores? If we truly are in an "economic recovery", then why do sales figures continue to go down for large retailers all over the country? Without a doubt, the rise of Internet retailing giants such as Amazon.com have had a huge impact. Today, there are millions of Americans that actually prefer to shop online. Personally, when I published my novel I made it solely available on Amazon. But Internet shopping alone does not account for the great retail apocalypse that we are witnessing. In fact, some retail experts estimate that the Internet has accounted for only about 20 percent of the decline that we are seeing. Most of the rest of it can be accounted for by the slow, steady death of the middle class U.S. consumer. Median household income has declined for five years in a row, but all of our bills just keep going up. That means that the amount of disposable income that average Americans have continues to shrink, and that is really bad news for retailers. (Read More....)
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Is the U.S. economy steamrolling toward another recession? Will 2014 turn out to be a major "turning point" when we look back on it? Before we get to the evidence, it is important to note that there are many economists that believe that the United States never actually got out of the last recession. For example, data compiled by John Williams of shadowstats.com show that the U.S. economy has continually been in recession since 2005. So if anyone out there would like to argue that America is experiencing a recession right now, I certainly would not have a problem with that. In fact, that would fit with the daily reality of tens of millions of Americans that are deeply suffering in this harsh economic environment. But no matter whether we are in a "recession" at the moment or not, there are an increasing number of indications that we are rapidly plunging into another major economic slowdown. The following are the top 12 signs that the U.S. economy is heading toward another recession... (Read More....)
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If the economy is really "getting better", then why have millions upon millions of formerly middle class Americans been pushed to the point of utter despair? The stories that you are about to read are absolutely heartbreaking. I don't know how anyone can read them without getting chills. In America today, if you lose a good job, there is a good chance that you will get back on your feet before too long. But there is also a good chance that you won't be able to find a decent job and will plunge into the abyss of depression and desperation that so many millions of other Americans have fallen into. As I wrote about earlier this month, the U.S. economy is definitely not getting any better. For example, if you assume that the percentage of Americans that want to work is about at the long term average, then the official unemployment rate in the United States would be above 11 percent. And compared to six years ago, 1,154,000 fewer Americans are working today even though our population has gotten significantly larger since then. Behind all of these numbers are real flesh and blood people, and you are about to hear from some of them. The following are 10 stories from the cold, hard streets of America that will break your heart... (Read More....)
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The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
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Eva Golinger
RINF Alternative NewsAnti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.
These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than$100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.
At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.
The NED, a “foundation” created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA’s work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED’s 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure, $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another $590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition. More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro’s government politically.
One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (http://www.forma.org.ve), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others.
Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.
In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to “share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia…and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries”. Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: “To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts. The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries.”
IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI’s president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI’s role in a pressrelease claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”
Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.
What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela’s democracy.
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Eva Golinger is the author of The Chavez Code. She can be reached through her blog.
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Louisiana the song remains the same
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In 1934, Banister joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was present at the killing of John Dillinger. Originally based in Indianapolis, he later moved to New York City where he was involved in the investigation of the American Communist Party. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by Banister's work and, in 1938, he was promoted to run the FBI unit in Butte, Montana. He also served in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis and Chicago. In Chicago, he was the Special Agent in Charge for the FBI.[5] He retired from the FBI in 1954.
Banister moved to Louisiana and, in January 1955, became Assistant Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, where he was given the task of investigating organized crime and corruption within the police force. It later emerged that he was also involved in looking at the role that left-wing political activists were playing in the struggle for civil rights in New Orleans.[6] On the campuses of Tulane University and Louisiana State University, he ran a network of informants collecting information on "communist" activities. He submitted reports on his findings to the FBI through contacts.[7]
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Louisiana Creates Database of Citizens Who Represent “A Risk to the State” Information hub would detect potential future criminals and allow government to “intervene”==================================Authorities in Louisiana are compiling a database of information on every citizen in order to identify people who are “a risk to the state,” as well as pinpointing future criminals in an effort to allow the state to “intervene in that person’s life”.
Details of the program were recently divulged by Chris Broadwater, Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from District 86, in the following YouTube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fFuT1wzHjI4
The Comprehensive Person Profile, developed by software company SAS, uses information from every agency of state government to compile personal data entries on Louisiana residents which are centralized on one database.
Originally set up to combat fraudulent workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance claims, the program was expanded to create a “centralized data warehouse” that allows “every agency within state government” to both submit and access data on every person within the state.
The purposes of the database, in the words of Broadwater, are to “detect fraud” and to identify people who are “a risk to the state down the road based upon the information we know about the individual,” enabling authorities to quickly identify “an individual who is going to be at risk of incarceration down the road,” a process that sounds an awful lot like ‘pre-crime’.
Broadwater remarks that the state having such a treasure trove of information about each individual will allow authorities to “intervene in that person’s life”.
The program is also being introduced under the guise of making the lives of Louisiana residents “better” by way of things like speeding up the process of renewing a drivers license. Broadwater notes that during this process, state workers would be able to access information about the applicant’s children and make recommendations about health insurance.
Very little information about how the state of Louisiana is actually using the program is in the public domain besides what Broadwater reveals in the video above.
Activist outfit The People, LLC is calling on citizens of Louisiana to support Rep. Schroder’s HB 1076 (data privacy) bill, which would go some way to nullifying that information that could be shared with the state database.
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Please don't pollute this thread with your negative conspiracy claims please, Steven.
OK ...so you believe this a positive ?? RIGHT ??
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The best-kept conspiracy in Australian history
On top of the awkward fact that the Aboriginal population grew strongly right through the whole period it was supposedly subject to genocide, there is another oddity about the Stolen Generations. Why did this not become a public issue before Peter Read emerged on the scene in 1981? If, as the Human Rights Commission claimed, its origins went back to 1910, why didn’t earlier Aboriginal activists make a fuss? At the high point of Aboriginal radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the attempt to put an end to Aboriginality by removing children never received a mention in any major agenda of Aboriginal political grievances.
During the lead-up to the successful 1967 constitutional referendum to give the Commonwealth powers in Aboriginal affairs, not one of the political activists campaigning for reform mentioned stolen children as an issue to be rectified. In 1970, neither the ten-point Policy Manifesto of the National Tribal Council, nor the Platform and Program of the Black Panthers of Australia, nor the 1972 Five-Point Policy of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Parliament House, Canberra, or any other political manifesto of the time, mentioned stolen children, let alone the genocide that Aborigines had purportedly been suffering for the previous 60 years. Aboriginal activists of that era proved very adept at gaining attention from the news media and very capable of articulating their case. Black Panthers spokesmen included Gary Foley, later a university lecturer, Paul Coe, subsequently a barrister, and Dennis Walker, son of one of Australia’s leading literary figures. They and their colleagues were politically astute enough to mount the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House — an inspired piece of political symbolism — yet could not recognize the genocide and child stealing taking place right beneath their noses.
A greater mystery is that some of the best-known of an earlier generation of Aboriginal activists had been in an even better position to see what was going on. In the 1940s and 1950s, William Ferguson, Walter Page and Pearl Gibbs actually served as directors of the Aborigines Welfare Board of New South Wales, one of the very organizations then purportedly committing genocide. Yet they never realized what was happening. Of all people, they were the ones who should have identified it first. How could they possibly have missed it? If the Stolen Generations story was true, then at that very time, right across Australia, in all states and territories, scores of white welfare officials, backed by parliamentarians and senior public servants, were forcibly removing Aboriginal children to put an end to Aboriginality. How did these hundreds of white people, for a period of more than 60 years, maintain the discipline needed to keep the whole thing so quiet that Aboriginal activists like Ferguson, Page and Gibbs were oblivious to its existence? Why did no one leak the truth? A conspiracy on this scale must have been the best-kept secret in Australian history. On these grounds alone, the inherent implausibility of Read’s thesis should always have been self-evident.
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Stolen Generations - the definitionThe central charge made by the advocates of the Stolen Generations is as follows:
Children were forcibly removed from indigenous Australians as young as possible for the immediate purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people, and for the ultimate purposes of suppressing any distinct Aboriginal culture, thereby ending the existence of the Aborigines as a distinct people.
Or in the words of the Australian National University historian Peter Read:
Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home.[1]
According to Australia’s Human Rights Commission, this amounted to genocide:
The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled ‘genocidal’ in breach of binding international law.[2]
Using the above works as its sources, the SBS television series First Australians encapsulated the charge for a popular audience:
Between 1910 and 1970 an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal children were removed from their families. Most were aged under five.[3]
[1] Peter Read, ‘Clio or Janus? Historians and the Stolen Generations’, Australian Historical Studies, 33, 118, 2002, p 57
[2] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry Into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Families, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, April 1997, p 275
{3}Episode Five: “An Unhealthy Government Experiment”, First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, script by Beck Cole and Louis Nowra, SBS Television, 2008
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Poland’s Hand in Ukraine Coup d’Etat: Trained Putchists Two Months in Advance, on Behalf of US-NATO
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Lies have shorter and shorter legs. Two months after the change of regime in Kiev, the Polish press has disclosed the role of Donald Tusk’s government in preparing the coup.
The new revelations belie Western discourse and demonstrate that the current interim government of Oleksandr Tourtchynov was imposed by NATO in violation of international law.
The Polish left-wing weekly Nie (No) published a startling witness account of the training given to the most violent of the EuroMaidan [1] activists.According to this source, in September 2013, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector (Sector Pravy), allegedly in the context of a university exchange program. In reality, the guests were not students, and many were over 40. Contrary to their official schedule, they did not go to the Warsaw University of Technology, but headed instead for the police training center in Legionowo, an hour’s drive from the capital. There, they received four weeks of intensive training in crowd management, person recognition, combat tactics, command skills, behavior in crisis situations, protection against gases used by police, erecting barricades, and especially shooting, including the handling of sniper rifles. Such training took place in September 2013, while the Maidan Square protests were allegedly triggered by a decree suspending preparations for the signing of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, which was issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on November 21, i.e. two months later. The Polish weekly refers to photographs attesting to the training, which show the Ukrainians in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.These revelations warrant a fresh look at the resolution adopted in early December 2013 by the Polish Parliament (Sejm), pledging its
“total solidarity with Ukrainian citizens who, with strong determination, are showing the world their desire to achieve the full membership of their country in the European Union.“In his capacity as EU negotiator, Radosław Sikorski signed a crisis settlement agreement with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, in the evening of February 21, 2014. The following morning, the men he had secretly trained in Poland were about to take power.
Naturally, the MPs were not yet aware of their country’s involvement in the training of the very individuals who were planning – and ultimately achieved – a violent takeover of power. This scandal illustrates the role assigned by NATO to Poland in Ukraine, analogous to the one entrusted to Turkey in Syria. The government of pro-European liberal Donald Tusk is fully committed to playing its role. Foreign Affairs Minister Radosław Sikorski – a journalist and former political refugee in the United Kingdom – was the mastermind behind Poland’s integration into NATO. As a member of the “Weimar Triangle”, he was one of three EU representatives who brokered the 21 February 2014 agreement between President Viktor Yanukovych and the three main EuroMaidan leaders [2].
Needless to say, the Ukrainian president was unaware of the Polish representative’s entanglement with the rioters. As for the Interior Minister and special services coordinator, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz (the great grand-son of novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, best known for Quo Vadis?), he co-founded the Office for State Protection (Urzd Ochrony Państwa), Poland’s current intelligence agency. He also co-created and served as vice-president of the Centre for Eastern Studies (Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich), a national think-tank dealing with the situation in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, with particular emphasis on Ukraine and Turkey. It exerts a profound influence on the West’s perception of current events, through its agreements with Carnegie Foundation [3].
During Yulia Tymoshenko’s government (2007-2010), the current interim president of Ukraine, Oleksandr Tourtchynov, had served as intelligence chief and deputy prime minister. He liaised at the time with the Poles Donald Tusk (already Prime Minister), Radosław Sikorski (then Defense Minister) and Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz (director of the private intelligence firm ASBS Othago).
To overthrow the government of its neighbor state, Poland resorted to Nazi activists in the same way that Turkey uses Al-Qaeda to overthrow the Syrian government. Not only is it not surprising to see the current Polish authorities rely on the grand-children of the Nazis that the CIA tucked into the NATO Gladio network to fight against the Soviet Union, but we should also be reminded of the controversy which broke out in the 2005 Polish presidential election, when journalist and MP Jacek Kurski revealed that Józef Tusk, the grandfather of Donald Tusk, had intentionally enrolled in the Wehrmacht.
After denying the facts, the Prime Minister finally admitted that his grandfather had indeed served in the Nazi army, but claimed he had been forcefully conscripted after the annexation of Danzig. A recollection that speaks volumes about how Washington selects its agents in Eastern Europe. In summary, Poland trained a mob of thugs to overthrow the democratically-elected president of Ukraine and pretended he was subscribing to an appeasement agreement with him on 21 February 2014, while his rioters were in the process of seizing power. Moreover, there is no doubt that the coup was sponsored by the United States, as evidenced by the telephone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt [4]. Similarly, it is clear that other NATO members, including Lithuania (in the past, Ukraine was dominated by the Polish-Lithuanian empire), and Israel in its capacity as a de facto member of its military command structure, took part in the coup [5]. This arrangement suggests that NATO now runs a new Gladio network in Eastern Europe [6]. In addition, following the coup, mercenaries working for Greystone Ltd., a subsidiary of Academi, were deployed in the country in coordination with the CIA [7].
These facts radically modify the perception that we may have had of the coup of 22 February 2014. They undermine the arguments provided supplied to the press by the U.S. Department of State (points 3 and 5 of the factsheet dated March 5) [8] and constitute an act of war under international law. Therefore, the arguments peddled by the West regarding the ensuing the events, including the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation and the current uprisings in East and South Ukraine, are null and void.
Notes
[1] « Tajemnica stanu, tajemnica Majdanu », Nie, n°13-2014, 18 April 2014.
[2] “Agreement on the Settlement of Crisis in Ukraine”, Voltaire Network, 21 February 2014.
[3] “The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”, Voltaire Network, 25 August 2004.
[4] “What about apologizing to Ukraine, Mrs. Nuland?”, Oriental Review/Voltaire Network, 7 February 2014. And “The Secret Agenda of Ashton and Nuland Revealed”, by Wayne Madsen, Strategic Culture Foundation/Voltaire Network, 12 March 2014.
[5] “Camouflaged Israeli soldiers on Maidan Square”, Voltaire Network, 3 March 2014.
[6] “The new Gladio in Ukraine”, by Manlio Dinucci, Voltaire Network, 21 March 2014.
[7] “US mercenaries deployed in Southern Ukraine”, and “CIA director in Kiev searching for missing mercenaries”, Voltaire Network, 4 March and 16 April 2014.
[8] “State Department Fact Sheet on Putin’s False Claims About Ukraine”, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2014.
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21 April 2014, 08:14US Russophobia approaching pathological transference
© Photo: Flickr.com/NASA HQ PHOTO/cc-by-nc
The headline in the Boston Globe reads: "Obama focuses updated Cold War approach on Putin" and the New York Times article by one Peter Baker that follows is one of the one of the most acidic, fact-starved, sanctimonious, self-righteous, chest beating, Russophobic, war-propagandistic, Putin-envious, out-of-touch diatribes to come out of the western media in the current tidal wave of Gleichschaltung-like anti-Russian war-propaganda.
The attack is almost criminal in its eschewing of the truth and if you dear reader ever entertained the idea that Boston was a bastion of liberal truth and that the first black American president was some sort of Martin Luther King, you may now group Boston with the vilest redneck burgs in Alabama and the president to the right of the farthest right of the neo-conservative war profiteers.
Rarely does an article deserve to be taken apart at the seams but this one does as the outright lies and vitriol are so blatant that there is a danger if even a small portion of the masses believe even 10% of it.That danger is not to the world, or to us over here in Moscow (we are unfortunately used to these kinds of attacks from the Russophobic lunatic fringe), that danger is to the American public, who continue to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a president and a government that is ready to send them off to die and force countless generations to come into slavery to pay for their maniacal excesses.
Openly Reviving the Cold War
To begin with the headline and the first paragraph take no issue with the fact the Cold War is over. However it does serve to announce to the world that what even three months ago was a well kept secret and something denied by politicians and those in power in Washington, namely that the US/NATO were pursuing a continuation of the Cold War, is now official policy and neither Obama and his henchmen nor the US media establishment have the slightest reservation (due to their delusional architecture) in admitting to what is in fact the complete and utter failure that is forcing the US to cling to a desperate outdated recidivist strategy that it now hopes to apply to a democratic country.
Baker writes: "The crisis in Ukraine defies easy resolution and President Obama and his national security team are looking to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment."
The outright idiocy of the first sentence (as if the US is actually looking for a resolution) denies the fact that it is the US that destabilized Ukraine in the first place and that they continue to support the illegitimate coup government and the neo-nazis who brought the junta to power.
"... updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment."
We must recall that this strategy was supposed to be against the Soviet Union and in order to stop the spread of Communism. Yet like bringing nazis back to power in Europe, we can see that the US never learns history's lessons and continues to pursue dangerous, confrontational, aggressive caveman policies on the international stage.
The US Pariah's Psychotic Transference
Let read the next installment:
"Just as the United States resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union and its global ambitions, Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state."
Clearly the pathological transference of those directing the writer and the manipulation in the above is aimed at painting Obama as some sort of great "war president" when in fact he is a cowardly puppet who gets pleasure from authorizing extra-judicial executions and destroying countries.
The pathological transference of applying outdated policies designed as tools against the Soviet Union to Russia and accusing Russia of having "expansionist ambitions" is stunning. Just the fact that Obama and the US think they have some right to meddle and dictate to Russia and Europe, what they can do in their own neighborhood is a sign of their own expansionist mindset.
The unbelievable arrogance, hypocrisy and self-serving historical revisionism is also stunning in the above as we know that it was the US that destabilized Ukraine, organized the armed takeover of a democratic European nation and brought nazis to power in Europe who are calling for killing Russians.
The truest pariah and rogue criminal state in the world is the United States of America. Guilty of multiple acts of aggressive war, continuing to maintain an illegal torture prison, continuing to execute its own citizens, executing people worldwide without trial or charge and overthrowing governments and killing leaders whenever the whim pleases them makes the US the most dangerous pariah nation in the history of mankind.
Now tell me. In what way is Russia a pariah nation?
Obama Stomps His Feet and Holds His Breath
The writer says Obama has "concluded he will never have a constructive relationship with Putin" no matter what. I dare say after the campaign by the US to ruin the Sochi Olympics, Obama running around the world trying to implement sanctions against Russia for the coup d'état he himself signed off on, the non-stop placing of NATO war elements closer and closer to Russia and the fiasco in Syria, I think it would be safe to say that it is President Putin, who has continuously tried to work with Obama, who should refuse to have anything to do with Nobel-Peace-Prize-fraud president.
Ignore the Master?
"Obama will try to minimize the disruption Putin can cause. .. ignore the master of the Kremlin."
The disruption Putin might cause? What "disruption" is the writer talking about? Disrupting plans by Washington to violate further the sovereign state of Ukraine or NATO continuing to surround Russia and the People's Republic of China or perhaps the extermination of Russians in Ukraine and the attempted destruction of the Slavic World or the invasion of the next country that Washington is planning to destroy?
And what is with the "master" thing? This is a new one. Is this another transference of endemic US racism and an attempt to conjugate and/or elicit slave/master images?
“That is the strategy we ought to be pursuing,” said Ivo H. Daalder, formerly Obama’s ambassador to NATO, "... it may solve your Russia problem.”
Your "Russia problem"? Perhaps Mr. Daalder has also lost it? Maybe he will enlighten us with a "final solution"? Unbelievable!
McFaul 2.0: Dangerous Russophobe
The article states that John F. Tefft, a Russia hater who served as US Ambassador to Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania and promoted the invasion of South Ossetia while in Georgia, the current crisis and the resurgence of fascist forces in Ukraine and the rabid Russophobia and demonization of Russia in Lithuania, has been chosen to be the next US Ambassador to Russia. Tefft was extremely active and involved and one might say instrumental in bringing about the aforementioned anti-Russian events. As McFaul failed to organize the destabilization of Russia and the ouster of President Putin, apparently Obama is seeking more experiences hands.
Dangerous rhetoric
With regard to the assignment the article states: "... now there is no reluctance to offend the Kremlin."
The US insists on isolating itself even further, for such a policy will backfire as Russian diplomats and leaders continue to stay open to dialogue and diplomacy. Again the arrogance is stunning.
An International Consensus: Coalition of the Willing 2.0
The US is becoming more and more hated every day. As Europeans and the world realize that Obama and his myopic, knuckle-dragging foreign policy elites vetted (like Obama himself) by senile-rabid-Russophobe Brezhinsky are only interested in resources and expanding their own caveman hegemony by force, the consensus against the US will grow thousand-fold. The writer tries to say China is against Russia, this is while China and Russia are discussing plans for tighter military cooperation against the ongoing provocation that is the placing of NATO war elements around both countries.
"The administration’s priority is to hold together an international consensus against Russia, including even China, its longtime supporter on the UN Security Council."
The US is Broke
The writer revealed a little too much I think with the following statement:
"... economic advisers and White House aides urging a measured approach have won out, prevailing upon a cautious president to take one incremental step at a time out of fear of getting too far ahead of skittish Europeans and risking damage to still-fragile economies on both sides of the Atlantic."
We know the US economy is about to collapse and we know that in contrast to the $15 billion Russia was ready to single-handedly hand Ukraine, the entire US/NATO/Eu could only come up with a $1 billion "loan".
Money talks, as they say.
More Sanctions Blackmail: Outright Lies
"The White House has prepared another list of Russian figures and institutions to sanction in the next few days..."
The first round did not phase Russia and was laughed off. I doubt this round will be more successful. Washington might take heed: Your sanctions will backfire I can promise you that.
"... while Putin seems for now to be enjoying the glow of success, he will eventually discover how much economic harm he has brought on his country. Obama’s aides noted the fall of the Russian stock market and the ruble, capital flight from the country and increasing reluctance of foreign investors to expand dealings in Russia."
Again Washington must be delusional, the Russian economy is going strong, the country is in the black and unlike almost all of Europe which is suffering from austerity measures, and the US with forced austerity where the public pay approximately 33% of their income in taxes and are enslaved to the military industrial complex for the next 1,000 years or more, Russia is growing stronger by the day.
Oops! Did I let the cat out of the bag? But then again, that is the real "Russia problem" isn't it?
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Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_04_21/US-Russophobia-approaching-pathological-transference-1010/ -
5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything From Miracle Drugs to Science Research
Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.
In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.
Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recentfront-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.
Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, “Human After All“, sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.
1. Why Do We Have Intellectual Property Rights?The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:
“The Congress shall have power … To promote the progress ofand useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…”Notice the reasoning: We the People, through our representatives, grant intellectual property rights so that we can move knowledge forward — not enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else.
The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson’s day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.
Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.
2. Patents Have Exploded Since the 1980s.
If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.
Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.
But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.
As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated $1982 million in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.
3. Intellectual Property Rights Can Block Innovation.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role — it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.
In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.
Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.
More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.
Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:
============ “Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.”
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4. The Public Is Getting Harmed and Cheated.
It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes. Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.
Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this. The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.
5. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way.
While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:
==========“It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.”
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Several of the economists I spoke to at the INET/CIGI conference, such as Italian economist Giovanni Dosi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have suggested other ways of rewarding inventors, such as prizes. Stiglitz has pointed out that prizes, as opposed to patents, could help reward research that might not be commercially profitable, like developing a cure for AIDs, or other urgent global problems.
Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public good get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.
We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren’t hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.
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Cause of Suicide: Austeriy
New study finds direct link between Greek austerity cuts and increase in male suicides
Sarah Lazare
RINF Alternative NewsAs governments across the world slash public goods in the name of austerity, a new study finds that such measures in Greece directly correspond with a rise in suicides among males.
Entitled The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy, the study was published in April by University of Portsmouth researchers in the journalSocial Science and Medicine.
The torrent of austerity measures following the 2008 global recession led to an increase in male suicides. According to the findings, between 2009 and 2010, 551 men in Greece took their lives “solely due to fiscal austerity.”
Researchers found that every one percent cut in public spending corresponded with a 0.43 percent increase in suicides among men in Greece.
Men between the ages of 45 and 89 are at the highest risk of austerity-caused suicide, the researchers found.Sarah writes for Common Dreams.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/cause-suicide-austerity/ -
The 1% Wants to Ban Sleeping in Cars Because It Hurts Their 'Quality of Life' - Depriving homeless people of their last shelter in life is Silicon Valley at its worst.
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Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor ... by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car.
This happened most recently in Palo Alto, in California's Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial "homeless capital of America", where lawyers are currently defending a similar vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court. Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called "quality of life" laws. But they certainly don't protect the quality of life of the poor.
To be sure, people living in cars cannot be the best neighbors. Some people are able to acquire old and ugly – but still functioning – recreational vehicles with bathrooms; others do the best they can. These same cities have resisted efforts to provide more public toilet facilities, often on the grounds that this will make their city a "magnet" for homeless people from other cities. As a result, anti-homeless ordinances often spread to adjacent cities, leaving entire regions without public facilities of any kind.
Their hope, of course, is that homeless people will go elsewhere, despite the fact that the great majority of homeless people are trying to survive in the same communities in which they were last housed – and where they still maintain connections. Americans sleeping in their own cars literally have nowhere to go.
Indeed, nearly all homelessness in the US begins with a loss of income and an eviction for nonpayment of rent – a rent set entirely by market forces. The waiting lists are years long for the tiny fraction of housing with government subsidies. And rents have risen dramatically in the past two years, in part because long-time tenants must now compete with the millions of former homeowners who lost their homes in the Great Recession.
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Read more: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/1-wants-ban-sleeping-cars-beca...
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H-1B loophole may help California utility offshore IT jobs It is the second major utility in a year to announce IT outsourcingApril 17, 2014 05:41 PM ET
Computerworld - Southern California Edison is outsourcing part of its IT operations, and the jobs may be going overseas.
Edison (SCE) is working with Infosys, which is based in India, and iGate, a New Jersey-based company with major offshore centers, as it prepares to lay off workers, according to U.S. government records.
SCE said it is still actively evaluating outsourcing vendors, "and expects to select vendor partners by mid-year." It didn't say which vendors are in consideration.
Northeast Utilities, last fall, announced it was outsourcing part of its IT operations to Infosys and another Indian-based IT services giant, Tata Consultancy Services, and cut about 200 jobs. SCE isn't disclosing how many jobs may be cut, but the Los Angeles Times reports the number is in the hundreds.
H-1B battle- H-1B loophole may help California utility offshore IT jobs
- H-1B applications surge to 172,500, twice the cap
- U.S. hits H-1B cap with 'high number' of petitions
- Durbin warns Republicans standalone H-1B hike plan will fail
- Offshore firms took 50% of H-1B visas in 2013
- H-1B visas produce net IT job boost, trade group says
- Gates sees software replacing people; Greenspan calls for more H-1Bs
- Use of H-1B alternative skyrockets
- GOP presses ahead on H-1B, green cards with vague, muddy statement
- 5 reasons why your IT job search is getting harder
NU employees have been training their replacements as a condition of their severance, a process that will likely occur at SCE, if it goes forward with its plan.
Edison said it expects to pick a vendor by mid-year.
The evidence pointing to offshore outsourcing, and to Infosys and iGate as at least two of the vendors, is based on government records. Edison runs some of its IT operations in Irwindale, Calif. As part of the hiring process for H-1B visa-holding workers, outsourcing vendors file a Labor Condition Application (LCA), a U.S. document with salary information and the address of the visa workers' worksite. There were as many as 130 LCAs filed by Infosys alone in the past year for the Irwindale address associated with SCE's offices, according to a large sampling of those filings collected by visa data analysis firm MyVisaJobs.
H-1B rules make it relatively easy for offshore outsourcing companies to replace U.S. workers, despite a rule to curb it.
If H-1B workers comprise 15% or more of an employer's workforce, the employer is classified as "H-1B dependent" by the U.S. government and subject to additional requirements. All the major offshore firms, including Infosys and iGate, are H-1B dependent.
H-1B dependent firms are required to take "good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for the job for which the alien worker is sought" as well as to "offer the job to any U.S. worker who applies and is equally or better qualified than the H-1B worker," according to the government rules. But there's an easy workaround.
H-1B-dependent employers are exempted from U.S. worker protection rules if the H-1B worker is paid at least $60,000 or has a master's degree.
An annual salary of $60,000 is low for an IT professional, especially in the high-wage region of Southern California. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported this month that the average starting salary for new college graduates -- nationally -- in computer science was $61,741.
The offshore companies, iGate and Infosys, both pay wages of more than $60,000 a year and therefore aren't obligated to meet the H-1B dependent rules.
Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said H-1B-dependent firms are required to make three attestations: They must make a good faith recruitment of American workers prior to filing an LCA; they can't replace their American workers with H-1B workers; and they can't replace American workers employed with a client's company.
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FROM Weston's Spiders WebOn November 22 while Bergin was flying home from a business meeting in Chicago, his employees were preparing to watch the parade. Avery Davis, Judy McCully, Jane Berry, and Betty Thornton were outside standing in front of the building. Mary Hollies and Betty Foster were on the fourth floor looking out of a window in the stock area between the Scott Foresman office and the west wall of the building. Inside the office were Yola Hopson and Ruth Nelson at a window on the west side, and to their left were Dorothy Garner, Sandra Styles, Victoria Adams, and Elsie Dorman grouped around two more windows. Elsie brought her husband’s movie camera to film the motorcade as it entered Dealey Plaza.+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Other directors of First City Bancorporation are John Diesel, pres. of Tenneco, which interlocks with the George Bush oil firm, Zapata Oil Corp., whose chmn John Mackin is a director of Tenneco; Randall Meyer, pres. Exxon; M.A. Wright, former chmn Exxon 1966-76, now chmn Cameron Iron Works.
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6th floor DATA = http://jfk.org/go/exhibits/home-movies/elsie-dorman
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Post assassination Elsie Dorman son got a job at Tenneco.
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By July William Weston hopes to have out another article,some of which has TSBD material.
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UPDATE ALTERNATIVE FUELS 4/19/14
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An Abundant and Inexpensive Water-Splitting Photocatalyst With Low ToxicityApr. 16, 2014 — Researchers in Japan have discovered a new photocatalyst, Sn3O4, which facilitates the production of hydrogen fuel from water, using sunlight as an energy ... full story-
Engineers Develop New Materials for Hydrogen StorageApr. 15, 2014 — Engineers have created new ceramic materials that could be used to store hydrogen safely and efficiently. The researchers have created for the first time compounds made from mixtures of calcium ... full story
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Making Ethanol Without Corn or Other PlantsApr. 9, 2014 — A copper-based catalyst that produces large quantities of ethanol from carbon monoxide gas at room temperature has been developed by scientists. This promising discovery could provide an eco-friendly ... full story
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Study Pegs Fuel Economy Costs of Common PracticesApr. 9, 2014 — People who pack their cars and drive like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's 'Vacation' pay a steep penalty when it comes to fuel economy. For the study, researchers tested a sport ... full story
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Scale Model WWII Craft Takes Flight With Fuel from the Sea ConceptApr. 9, 2014 — Navy researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Materials Science and Technology Division, demonstrate proof-of-concept of novel NRL technologies developed for the recovery of carbon ... full story
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Tiny Power Generator Runs on SpitApr. 3, 2014 — Saliva-powered micro-sized microbial fuel cells can produce minute amounts of energy sufficient to run on-chip applications, according to engineers. Biomedical devices using micro-sized microbial ... full story
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Magnetic Behavior Discovery Could Advance Nuclear FusionMar. 19, 2014 — Inspired by the space physics behind solar flares and the aurora, a team of researchers has uncovered a new kind of magnetic behavior that could help make nuclear fusion reactions easier to ... full story
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Biodiesel from Alligator Fat Reduces WasteMar. 18, 2014 — Animal fat from chicken, pork, beef and even alligators could give an economical, ecofriendly boost to the biofuel industry, according to researchers who reported a new method for biofuel production. ... full story
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Promising News for Producing Fuels Through Artificial PhotosynthesisMar. 7, 2014 — There's promising news from the front on efforts to produce fuels through artificial photosynthesis. A new study shows that nearly 90 percent of the electrons generated by a hybrid material ... full story
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Biofuel-to-Hydrocarbon Conversion Technology LicensedMar. 6, 2014 — Vertimass LLC has licensed an ORNL technology that directly converts ethanol into a hydrocarbon blend-stock for use in transportation fuels. The technology offers a new pathway to biomass-derived ... full story
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Newly Discovered Catalyst Could Lead to the Low-Cost Production of Clean Methanol from Carbon DioxideMar. 2, 2014 — Scientists have discovered a potentially clean, low-cost way to convert carbon dioxide into methanol, a key ingredient in the production of plastics, adhesives and solvents, and a promising fuel for ... full story
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Portable Hydrogen Fuel Cell Unit to Provide Green, Sustainable Power to Honolulu PortFeb. 25, 2014 — Clean hydrogen power that’s expected to lower emissions and reduce energy consumption will be coming to the Port of Honolulu in 2015 after the completion of a new fuel cell technology ... full story
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New Technique Promises Cheaper Second-Generation Biofuel for CarsFeb. 24, 2014 — Producing second-generation biofuel from dead plant tissue is environmentally friendly -- but it is also expensive because the process, as used today, needs expensive enzymes, and large companies ... full story
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New, Inexpensive Production Materials Boost Promise of Hydrogen FuelFeb. 21, 2014 — Generating electricity is not the only way to turn sunlight into energy we can use on demand. The sun can also drive reactions to create chemical fuels, such as hydrogen, that can in turn power cars, ... full story
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Artificial Leaf Jumps Developmental HurdleFeb. 18, 2014 — Scientists report advances toward perfecting a functional artificial leaf. Designing an artificial leaf that uses solar energy to convert water cheaply and efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen is an ... full story
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Solar-Induced Hybrid Fuel Cell Produces Electricity Directly from BiomassFeb. 18, 2014 — Researchers have developed a new type of low-temperature fuel cell that directly converts biomass to electricity with assistance from a catalyst activated by solar or thermal ... full story
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Waste from Age-Old Paper Industry Becomes New Source of Solid FuelFeb. 12, 2014 — In today's search for renewable energy sources, researchers are turning to the hi-tech, from solar and hydrogen fuel cells, and the very low-tech. The latest example of a low-tech alternative ... full story
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Approach Helps Identify New Biofuel Sources That Don't Require FarmlandFeb. 5, 2014 — While the debate over using crops for fuel continues, scientists are now reporting a new, fast approach to develop biofuel in a way that doesn't require removing valuable farmland from the food ... full story
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First Affordable Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Powered Mass Transport Vehicle Under Development?Feb. 5, 2014 — Birmingham City University is set to showcase the concept and design behind what could prove to be the world’s first affordable hydrogen fuel-cell powered mass transport ... full story
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Atomic-Scale Catalysts May Produce Cheap HydrogenJan. 22, 2014 — Researchers have shown that a one-atom thick film of molybdenum sulfide (MoS2) may work as an effective catalyst for creating hydrogen. The work opens a new door for the production of cheap ... full story
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Controlling the Lens: The Media War Being Fought Over Ukraine Between the Western Bloc and Russia The BBC and CNN versus RTGlobal Research, March 27, 2014**********************************************************************
Governments and major corporations control or, at least, try to manipulate public opinion and discursive processes through mass media communication. They also wage information wars through the use of mass media communication. Like other geopolitical events, this is the case concerning the Ukrainian anti-government protests and the proceeding February 2014 coup in Kiev. This information war is a contest where the international news networks and major newspapers act as armies, the weapons being used are the media, and the frontline is the interactive space known as the public sphere. Radio frequencies, air waves, satellite feeds, social media, cellular or mobile phone uploads, communication networks, and the internet are all part of the war.
What is an Information War?
Different technologies and modes of communication are used to enforce certain themes in the conflict. Language, selective words, particular expressions, specific pictures, multimedia presentations, and communication are all the ammunition for the war.
The aims of information warfare are to use discourse to influence populations across the world and to establish a total monopoly on the flow of information, the perceptions of audiences, and the discursive processes shaping the modern world. At its basis power and relationships are being realized through mass media communication.
The messages and ideas that the mass media transmit through mass communication are constructed by those that control the media and, in succession, used by them to construct the perceptions of audiences. Since what the majority of people in most modern societies know is heavily shaped by the mass media, the mass media is used to lead audiences into forming certain opinions and to make their decisions on the bases of those opinions. This is done either subtly or overtly through the delivery of repetitive messages.
The messages, being delivered to audiences by the mainstream media and information networks, are generally a form of social action, because the delivery of information by these outlets takes the reactions of audiences into account before any information is disseminated. The reactions that are taken into consideration include physical reactions or material processes. This also includes considerations about the manifestation of protests as a reaction to the information delivered or economic considerations such as investor withdrawals, currency devaluation, and market shifts.
Monopolizing the narrative being delivered to the public and discrediting alternative or rival narratives, be they true or false, is an important aspect of the information war. Although this form of warfare is not new, it is becoming increasingly sophisticated and intensifying as it becomes an important tactic in the tool box of non-conventional warfare that is becoming increasingly characteristic of the current century.
The type of information management that both privately-owned and publicly-owned major news networks seek eventually creates what social scientists call a common sense assumption that informs the actions and reactions of the audiences towards particular subjects and situations. These common sense assumptions are not based on any real facts that exist in the real world, but are formed on the basis of what has repeatedly been presented as fact and conventional knowledge. In the reporting of international affairs the deeply politicized messages being delivered to audiences have led to common sense attitudes that believe that Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims are bitter blood enemies or that Hugo Chavez was a autocrat or that there is an irreversible deep seated hatred between Serbs and Croats. None of these assumptions are grounded in reality, but it has slowly trickled into the canon of false assumptions that inform a segment of international audiences about international issues. Moreover, in many cases these messages are delivered under the disguise of apolitical neutral objectivity, which prevents large portions of the audience from questioning the motives and implications of the messages being transmitted.
Ukraine is currently a front, just as Syria and Venezuela are, in a global information war, which is being reflected through a battle of the international media networks. The objectives of this media war are to secure and manage domestic and international public opinion in support or opposition of the coup that took place in Kiev and the new Ukrainian transitional government in Kiev.
International Media War: Move over BBC World and CNN International
The United States of America used to enjoy a near monopoly in the dissemination of information in the international media, but that has changed over the years as countries like Russia, Iran, China, and Venezuela respectively setup international news networks like Russia Today (RT), Press TV, Chinese Central Television (CCTV), and the pan-Latin American La Nueva Televisora del Sur (teleSUR) to challenge the international media networks of the US and its allies. These new anti-establishment international media networks — if they can be described thus — from Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, and elsewhere collectively begun to challenge the status quo in the international media.
The prevailing narratives being presented by the dominant international news networks, particularly the Atlanta-based Cable News Network (CNN) and the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had a near monopoly on the international stage, were disrupted and slowly eroded. To borrow from the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, while he was visiting the Moscow studios of RT in June 2013, the task of anti-establishmentarian international news networks like RT is to “try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.”
The newer international news networks, like RT and Press TV, became so effective in challenging the discourse being propagated by major news networks like CNN, BBC, Fox News, and Sky News that American and British officials began to reconsider their media strategies and examine ways to challenge and cripple the international news networks challenging their control on the flow of information. The steps taken by the US and its allies included the blocking of the English-language Press TV, the Arabic-language Al-Alam, and other state-owned Iranian stations in Europe and elsewhere.
The near monopoly that the US and Britain enjoyed on the international stage was clearly broken by the time 2011 arrived as many viewers began to diversify their sources of information. Stations like CNN and BBC were heavily discredited about their coverage on the US-led NATO war against the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
Hillary Clinton, while she was the sixty-seventh secretary of state of the US, was even forced to publicly outline the important role that international news networks and the mass media played in the success of US foreign policy. While speaking to a 2011 congressional committee dealing with foreign affairs in the US Congress, Clinton declared that Washington was losing the global information war. She told the committee she was testifying to that the US needed to revert to Cold War-style media transmissions and outreach methods while requesting increased funding for US state media operations as a means of waging an information war against foreign media networks that carry diverging messages. She denounced RT without naming it directly, describing it as the English-language channel of the Russians and saying “it is quite instructive.”
Secretary Clinton lamented that the US and the state-owned BBC were cutting back their international media operations and that Washington needed to reverse the cutbacks “to get America’s message out.” She, however, was wrong about the US and BBC cutbacks. Resources were not the issue; the decreasing number of audiences tuning in to stations like CNN International or BBC World was the real problem.
Clinton’s statements echoed the state-run Broadcasting Board of Governors US federal agency, which runs Radio Free Europe, Voice of America (VOA), Alhurra in Iraq, and all the state-run international broadcasting of the US. Walter Isaacson, its chairman, declared a few months earlier that the US was waging an information war and that “America cannot let itself be out communicated by its enemies.” Isaacson, who was formerly the CEO of CNN, also emphasized that “delivering the news top down needs to be complemented by a new approach that catalyzes social networks.” This is very important to keep in mind when considering the interface between anti-government protests, social media, and the mainstream media.
While addressing Secretary Clinton’s 2011 declaration about US involvement in a global information war, the coverage of the mainstream media in the US about her statements was selective and distorted to portray a friendly and innocent image of the US government simply working to communicate with the outside world. Instead of displaying any reflectivity or making any substantive analytical reports explaining that what was taking place on Capitol Hill was a discussion by US officials about sharpening the US government’s overseas propaganda and dominating the information available to the international public, US media outlets casually glossed over Secretary Clinton’s statements at the hearing or entirely overlooked it.
The Washington Post, for example, made no attempt in its reporting to analyze what Clinton and the US senators were discussing. For instance, when Senator Richard Lugar, a known war hawk and military expansionist, said that the international media operations of the Broadcasting Board of Governors are “still a great force of diplomacy, to get our message across,” The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick did not even elaborate that what Lugar was talking about was the US government exerting its power over other nations by using the mass media to influence their governments through a US-tailored flow of information to their populations.
This passiveness of the mainstream media that the coverage on Clinton’s testimony demonstrated is usually justified on the basis of a false objectivity. This is very common when it comes to important issues involving governments, corporations, individuals, or entities that the mainstream media do not want to criticize or undermine. The claim is that the facts are simply being reported without bias or subjective interpretations.
The US mainstream media coverage of the event would have been much different if it were a Russian official speaking to a parliamentary committee in the Duma about using the Russian media to influence foreign countries. The same standards are not applied when these same outlets deal with rival entities. Instead assertive reporting that involves an active or assertive voice by the mainstream media about the news being covered is then applied to attack or undermine the decisions and actions of these rival entities in the name of investigative journalism and critical analysis.
Western Media Lashes out at Iranian, Chinese, Russian Media on Failures in Syria
While there has been an ongoing information war, a very distinct media war began to become visible in 2011. The NATO war on Libya, where international media networks played an important role in the war effort, highlighted this. The new anti-establishment news networks had matured enough to challenge US propaganda and provide alternative narratives that challenged the legitimacy of the broadcasts from CNN and BBC, even hurting their credibility and reducing their international and domestic viewership. Libya, however, was merely the start whereas Syria displayed an open and intense conflict between these news networks being fought mainly in the English, Arabic, and Spanish languages. The effectiveness of the anti-establishmentarian media networks in challenging the discourse of networks like CNN, BBC, Fox News, and Al Jazeera about Syria demonstrated that the days of a US stranglehold on the flow of information where long gone.
The US and British media began to very distinctly condemn the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian international media networks for their narratives about Syria by the start of 2012. The BBC incorrectly claimed, as one of its titles illustrated, that the “Chinese, Iranian press alone back UN Syria veto” on February 6, 2012 while Robert Mackey of The New York Times opined that, as the title for his text illustrates, the “Crisis in Syria Looks Very Different on Satellite Channels Owned by Russia and Iran” a few days later, on February 10, 2012. Lashing out at the perspectives of the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian media, the US and British press overlooked the segments of the African, Arab, Asian, European, and Latin American media that shared the same views as the Iranian, Chinese, and Russian media in countries like Algeria, Argentina, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Namibia, Serbia, South Africa, Ukraine, and Venezuela. While trying to deliberately undermine and understate the support that Syria enjoyed from a segment of the international community to their audiences, the US and British media betrayed the frustration of the political agendas of the directorships controlling their discourse.
The media war is a reflection of rivalries between powerful actors in the real world. This is why it should come as no surprise that it was during the same juncture that Hillary Clinton began to publicly exhibit US frustration against the Russians and the Chinese. Secretary Clinton began lecturing her fellow foreign ministers from the other countries gathering at the international conferences that support regime change and military operations against Syria. She told the other foreign ministers that the Russians and Chinese had to “pay a price” for opposing Washington’s idea of “progress.”
It is worth revisiting Clinton’s statements from July 2012. She said as follows: “I don’t think Russia and China believe they are paying any price at all — nothing at all — for standing up on behalf of the Assad regime. The only way that will change is if every nation represented here [at the conference] directly and urgently makes it clear that Russia and China will pay a price because they are holding up progress — blockading it — that is no longer tolerable!” Clinton’s definition of progress in Syria, it should be mentioned, means regime change in Damascus and a military bombing campaign against the Syrians. She was expressing Washington’s rage, because she made the statement after Moscow and Beijing refused to allow the US, Britain, and France to get the United Nations Security Council to authorize a war against Syria.
After Washington displayed its infuriation at Russia for preventing regime change in Syria, the US began to seriously contemplate ways it could apply sanctions against the Russians and methods to target the international Russian media networks in the information and media war being waged between the two camps. Those considerations are now materializing or being activated with the crisis in Ukraine. The calls for sanctions against the Russians, however, are not merely the result of the crisis in Ukraine; they are part of an inclination that Washington already had and even consideration by US officials on how to undermine the mega oil-for-goods trade deal that the Russians and Iranians have been negotiating.
How the Western Media is Framing the Actors in the Ukrainian Crisis
The mainstream media selects which narratives and messages get out and dominant conversations. Certain voices are only allowed to be heard while others are excluded or utterly ignored from the conversation while circumstances that could challenge what the mainstream media is trying to frame for audiences are in many cases left out from narratives or trivialized and discredited.
A manipulated narrative that supports European Union and NATO expansion in Ukraine is being constructed where a distorted reality is being represented about what took place in Kiev. The vocabulary chain or series of related words setting the tempo of the discourse on the anti-government protests is very telling. President Viktor Yanukovych is constantly presented as corrupt, as the constant media focus on his wealth and mansion present, and pro-Russian whereas the protesters have been presented as activists and democrats with little delving into the backgrounds of the opposition leaders.
The words and phrases indicate or, to put it more bluntly, betray the political position of the media networks. These descriptions and messages are formulated on the basis of judgment calls that are conveying the position of the supposedly objective media sources. The en masse conveyance of these news networks starts turning more and more into psychological imposition as it gradually becomes accepted by audiences as they are constantly bombarded by the same view points and narratives about the anti-government protests in Ukraine.
The narrative being framed is that a corrupt pro-Russian regime has been ousted by a democratic revolution. This has no bearing to what has happened. The same media sources that have portrayed Yanukovych as a greedy figure and corrupt autocrat fail to mention that the opposition figures that they present so favourable are also wealthy and have mansions, priceless art, pools, car collections, and vast wealth. They also fail to mention that the main opposition leaders were already in power before and lost popularity, because of their mismanagement and corruption. Nor is the fact that the opposition leaders took power through a coup mentioned. As for the allegations of Yanukovych being pro-Russian, any source that mentions this is either lying or utterly ignorant about Ukrainian politics; Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions caters mostly (but not only) to Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians in Ukraine (which do prefer Russia to the US and the EU), but his party is not pro-Russian at all and has even advanced cooperation with NATO and even disappointed its constituents by trying to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union, instead of Russia, after the most recent elections in Ukraine.
The vilifying language being used against Russia and Vladimir Putin in these reports is very telling too. This language illustrates or presents the attitudes or beliefs that these media outlets want to project about the Russian Federation and Putin. President Putin is being framed as an autocrat and militaristic brute. Putin’s ex-KGB background is frequently referred to as a means of demonizing him whereas the CIA background of George H. W. Bush Sr. was almost never referred to by the same outlets when the latter was president of the US; when the CIA background of George H. W. Bush Sr. was mentioned, it was done either in a passive or positive voice. The negative language that has been reserved for Putin about a Russian invasion of Crimea has never been used by networks like CNN or the BBC to describe any US president or British prime minister involved in the invasions and wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya either.
These attitudes framing the discourse on Russia and Putin are based on an adversarial stance towards Russia as an economic and geopolitical rival, which is structurally engrained in the power structure controlling the mass media in North America and the European Union. Journalists and media sector employees consciously or subconsciously work around its contours and either knowingly or unknowingly serve its objectives to vilify Russia and otherizing it as an adversary or alien.
Western Media Target RT and the Russian Media to Control the Narrative on Ukraine
During the start of the crises in Libya and Syria the US and its allies refused to admit that they were supporting militants with deviant and intolerant views that many have described as either Al-Qaeda forces or affiliates of Al-Qaeda. With time the US and its allies were slowly forced to admit that these intolerant deviant forces did exist in Libya and Syria. This acknowledgment by the US and its allies was the result of the successful information campaign being waged by the mass media of Syrian allies like Iran, China, and Russia. The Qatari-based Al Jazeera Network’s overbearing position in the Arab World was even marred as channels like Rusiya Al-Yaum, Al-Manar, and Al-Mayadeen challenged its coverage on the Syrian crisis.
The case with the Ukraine has been the same. The US and its allies have tried to deny the ultra-nationalist involvement and to frame the story that benefits their interests in Ukraine. The Russian media, however, has been a thorn in their side and challenging their discourse. So a campaign has been initiated against the Russian media by the US and its allies. Like the frustration that was expressed against the Russian international media networks over their coverage of Syria, the aim of the mainstream media in North America and the European Union is to present the Russian mainstream media as unobjective and untrustworthy; that is why the US state-run RFE’s Claire Bigg reported in a December 2013 article, as her opening line says, that “Russia’s state-run television channels are not known for their impartiality” and tries to paint a conspiratorial picture of the Russian media where they claim that the bad weather is linked to the protests in Ukraine by taking one Russian meteorologist’s comments out of context.
The campaign against the Russian media particularly targets its English-language segments and international arms, namely RT America and RT International, which have challenged the narrative that Washington and Brussels want to sell to public opinion about the coup in Ukraine. The comments of two RT employees and the issue of Crimean autonomy have been used in the attack against RT America and RT International. In the case of the latter point, it is worth noting that when it looked like there was a possibility that the coup against the Ukrainian government could fail (speculatively speaking, probably because they expected the coup to take place on February 20 after the snipers murdered protests), the Atlanticist media started reporting about how the western portion of Ukraine could breakaway without any traces of concern.
The Guardian reported the following about the situation on February 21, 2014: “While protests continue on the streets of central Kiev, the cities in the west of Ukraine are slipping towards autonomy with new parallel governments and security forces that have openly admitted they have deserted to the side of protesters.” Albeit it is important to note that the report fails to mention the role of ultra-nationalist militias in taking over the western cities and intimidating their politicians, the point is that the Crimean move towards independence in the Atlanticist media has been overtly treated under a totally different standard. The mainstream media in North America and the European Union had no problem with autonomy in the western half of Ukraine, but clearly do not apply the same standards to Crimea and oppose it. The same media ignores or downplays the agency of the Crimean people, instead framing the Crimean move towards independence as a decision taken by the Kremlin.
Repetitively RT has been blasted either subtly or overtly by the mainstream media in North America and the European Union as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin on the basis that it refuses to report “truthfully” about a Russian invasion of Crimea like the BBC, CNN, Fox News, Sky News, and France 24. Yet, it is CNN and these news networks and outlets that have a very well known track record of distorting the facts. They are now steadily demonizing the people of Crimea that are pro-Russian. The Telegraph in a March 11, 2014 report authored by Patrick Reevell and David Blair has even gone so far as to report that the voting in the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea has only two choices for the Crimean population: join Russia now or later. Stretching its interpretation of the question on the ballots, the British newspaper says that the referendum will ask the people of Crimea if they want to join the Russian Federation directly or through parliamentary means. Instead of directly saying that the referendum will ask the people of Crimea if they want to join Russia or remain a part of Ukraine under the 1994 Crimean Constitution, which could allow for the possibility of a parliamentary vote to join Russia, the British newspaper uses contorted language to confuse the matter as a means of discrediting the referendum.
Another example of this type of demonizing reporting is an article written by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh, Laura Smith-Spark, and Ben Brumfield that near the start says, “If you come by train, expect to be searched by pro-Russian militia. If you want to rally in favor of Ukraine’s West-leaning interim government, expect to be surrounded by pushy pro-Russians.” In this narrative the people being repressed are those that support the unconstitutional post-coup government in Kiev while those that are pro-Russian are conveniently portrayed as aggressive, as the comment about being search by pro-Russian militias and being surrounded by “pushy pro-Russians” if you try to express yourself are intended to mean. Not only does the narrative being presented paint Russia and those in Crimea that want to join Russia negatively, it ignores the coup that took place in Kiev and the fact that the searches on the border are aimed at preventing any armed agents or ultra-nationalist individuals from destabilizing Crimea.
Both visual and verbal modes of communication have been used to discredit RT. For example the BBC claimed that RT was presenting the eastern and southern portions of Ukraine as a part of Russia in its reporting on the basis of a map that was taken out of context. Other claims showed a map of Crimea out of context saying that RT had recognized it as a part of Russia. The individual or individuals at the BBC and elsewhere that decided to reproduce the de-contextualized visuals from RT are categorically dishonest and unprincipled. They intentionally misrepresented the meaning of the images by presenting footage or screen grabs that were taken out of context. They omitted the facts that the maps were presented as part of a report showing internal demographic breakups in Ukraine’s geography or the different possibilities that the Crimean people faced.
The BBC has a history of misrepresenting footage and images. The BBC has been caught red handed with these types of fabrications many times whereas there is no case of RT being involved in this type of reporting. Tibetan monks being beaten by Indian security forces were presented by the BBC as Tibetans being oppressed by the Chinese government in 2008. Another case is when Indians at a rally waving Indian flags were billed to audiences as Libyans celebrating the ouster of the Libyan government in 2011. More recently, the BBC was caught even doing voice overs in its coverage of the Syrian crisis in 2013. Former British diplomat Craig Murray is worth quoting about the BBC’s Syria fabrication: “The disturbing thing is the footage of the doctor talking is precisely the same each time. It is edited so as to give the impression the medic is talking in real time in her natural voice – there are none of the accepted devices used to indicate a voiceover translation. But it must be true that in at least one, and possibly both, the clips she is not talking in real time in her own voice.”
What Simple Questions From the Mainstream Media Say
The role of journalists in the clash cannot be underemphasized either. For example, BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray presented Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the following questions:
(1) Do you regularly have meetings at the Kremlin or with Russian government officials? Can you describe them, if so? How much direct influence does the Kremlin have over what RT reports?(2) Why is your office apparently located on a different floor than the newsroom, as one employee told me?(3) Also, was Anastasia Churkina hired because of who her father is? Why was she allowed to interview her own father on camera?(4) I’m told that RT Arabic is run by President Putin’s former translator — is that how that position was filled?It is hard to tell if the questions are serious or an insult. No reporters in North America have dared asked how Mika Brzezinski got her job at MSNBC and if her father Zbigniew Brzezinski had anything to do with her employment. If questions like this are asked, they are much more subtle. Yet, North American media and its journalists do not apply the same standards when dealing with Russians or members of other societies.
Regardless of the seriousness of the inquiries, the questions are deeply flawed or designed to get specific outputs from the respondent. Firstly, the questions are leading, because they are designed to lead the answers in a certain direction to embarrass and discredit RT as a news network. Secondly the questions are loaded, because they include assumptions and try to limit the answers to serve the reporter’s agenda. A model example of a loaded question is as such: “Have you stopped beating your children?” The premise of the entire question is based on an incorrect assumption. In most cases, no matter what the responded says, they are put in an embarrassing situation and offer the question some legitimacy by merely answering it.
In response, Margarita Simonyan mocked Gray’s loaded questions. [1]
The Dangerous Abuses of Mass Media Communication in the Information Age
The divisions that exist between the US and Russia will harden as the situation in Ukraine continues to simmer. The ramifications of this crisis will be felt globally from Syria, the Korean Peninsula, and the United Nations to the negotiating table about the Iranian nuclear program between Tehran and the P5+1.
Ultimately, the waging of an information war between the US and Russia may sound appropriate for a juncture in history that has been dubbed the Information Age. Its role, however, is a gloomy one. The control and manipulation of information by the mass media prevents individuals from being authentically cognizant about the world around them and the social relationships that are behind the structures of their daily lives. Its power to inform decisions, socialize individuals, and shape popular culture is being misused.
The information war is not only waged between rival powers and economic blocs. The control and manipulation of information is used internally by governments and corporations against the lower echelons of society. It atomizes information as a means of creating a blinding closed system that ignores the social realities about privilege and the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
Even those behind the fabrications and false narratives can be overtaken as hostages to an inauthentic and de-humanizing view of the world. The propagandists can become hostages of that which their own hands have sown. The discourse about the might of the Pentagon makes policymakers in the US think that a confrontation between the United States and either the Russian Federation or China will have diminutive consequences and not entail the possibility of a nuclear war. Both Russia and China form a formidable alliance with a deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons and major military resources. A clash between the US and either Russia or China could have apocalyptic consequences for all life on this planet.
If information is not used properly during the Information Age we may return to the Stone Age as Albert Einstein once said.
NOTE
[1] The table’s could have been easily turned on Rosie Gray and BuzzFeed using the same tactic tying them to Thor Halvorssen Mendoza. In response, Gray could have been asked if she supported the anti-government protests in Venezuela due to her connection to Thor Halvorssen who is the first cousin of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopolodo Lopez Mendoza.
Halvorssen has questionably presented his cousin at his Oslo Freedom Forum as a leader in human rights. Halvorssen and Lopez are members of the Venezuelan oligarchy that tried to remove Hugo Chavez by any means possible.
According to the journalist Max Blumenthal, Halvorssen not only comes from a family of CIA assets, but himself is a former “campus activist who has leveraged his fortune to establish a political empire advancing a transparently neoconservative agenda behind the patina of human rights.” What Blumenthal is saying is that Halvorssen is hiding behind humans, which is something very common as was proved by the involvement of human rights organizations in enabling regime change in Libya through a NATO war.
Blumenthal also says that “Among Halvorssen’s main PR megaphones is Buzzfeed, whose correspondent Rosie Gray flew to Oslo in 2013 to write a fawning profile of him and his Oslo Freedom Forum. (Gray has not disclosed whether Halvorssen covered her travel expenses or provided her with resources like food and lodging).”
It is worth asking if Gray shares the same views about regime change that Halvorssen has. Halvorssen predominately seems to have get-togethers with the rich and power and/or dissidents targeting the governments of countries like Venezuela, Russia, Sudan, China, North Korea, and Belarus. One may ask why there appears to be an absence of dissidents that are opposed to the governments of the Philippines, Singapore, Columbia, Israel, South Korea, France, and the US around Halvorssen.
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Report questions long-term safety of composite planes
- 03 November 2011 by Paul Marks
- Magazine issue 2837.
ON 1 NOVEMBER the first aircraft with a pressurised fuselage and wings made from carbon-fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) flew its first passengers from Tokyo to Hiroshima. The All Nippon Airways Boeing 787's composite structure makes it around 15 per cent lighter than a typical aluminium-based plane of that size, increasing fuel efficiency and making aviation greener.
But the media hoopla over the flight disguised some worrying questions about the long-term safety of composite aircraft. On 20 October, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report which, while accepting that the 787 has been certified as airworthy, questions the ability of the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, to ensure that inspectors are capable of assessing and repairing damage to composite structures over the long life of a plane.
"It is too early to fully assess the adequacy of FAA and industry efforts to address safety-related concerns and to build sufficient capacity to handle composite maintenance and repair," says the GAO.
Until now, only smaller, isolated pieces of secondary structure, such as tail fins and wing leading edges, have been made from composites. The GAO reviewed the scientific literature and interviewed engineers about the evidence underpinning the expansion of composite use to incorporate the whole fuselage. On damage and ageing issues it found the science wanting.
The GAO found that engineers don't know how such materials will behave when damaged, what such damage will look like, and how these factors change as the material ages. Because composite damage is hard to detect - indeed it can be effectively invisible - working out what risk a dent poses is difficult. Too few inspectors are being trained to diagnose such damage, the GAO report adds.
Boeing has no doubts. "We test, we analyse and we demonstrate that even in extreme conditions - which may never be experienced in a full life of service - the airplane is safe and durable," the firm said in a statement.
A composite is made by combining multiple layers of carbon fibres with an epoxy resin. It has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than aluminium and resists corrosion. But it has different fatigue problems: it tends to snap, rather than bend or stretch over time like a metal.
Although the Boeing 787 is deemed safe, the GAO says regulators must focus on assessing composite damage in service. "The long-term ageing behaviour of these composite materials is indeed an unknown," says Philip Irving, an aviation structures specialist at Cranfield University in the UK. "What is going to happen to these structures, which are often bonded as a single piece, in the 30-year lifetime of an aircraft?" Much is known about metal, he says. "There is almost nothing equivalent published on composite-structure damage, visibility and growth - and the necessary research is still under way," he says.
Some of that research is being done by the Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee, says Boeing, an industry-wide effort involving regulators and manufacturers, including Airbus (which is building its own composite fuselage plane, the A350). In the meantime, Irving says ground staff will need to wield one of their most powerful tools to track down damage in composite planes: "Their eyeballs."
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Ex-CIA Agent Reveals HOW Venezuelan “STUDENTs” Get PUTSCHIST TrainingBy Paul Capote and The 4th MediaThe 4th MediaThursday, Apr 17, 2014In a recent interview in Havana, a former CIA collaborator, Cuban Raúl Capote, revealed the strategy of the CIA in Venezuelan universities to create the kind of destabilizing opposition student movement the country is currently facing. He also discusses media manipulation, and alleges that one of the U.S. diplomats that President Maduro expelled from Venezuela last September was in fact a CIA agent.
Paúl Capote is a Cuban. But not just any Cuban. In his youth, he was caught up by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They offered him an infinite amount of money to conspire in Cuba. But then something unexpected for the US happened. Capote, in reality, was working for Cuban national security. From then on, he served as a double agent. Learn his story, by way of an exclusive interview with the Chávez Vive magazine, which he gave in Havana:
Q. What was the process by which you were caught up?
It started with a process of many years, several years of preparation and capture. I was leader of a Cuban student movement which, at that time, gave rise to an organization, the Saiz Brothers Cultural Association, a group of young creators, painters, writers, artists. I worked in a city in southern-central Cuba, Cienfuegos, which had characteristics of great interest to the enemy, because it was a city in which an important industrial pole was being built at the time. They were building an electrical centre, the only one in Cuba, and there were a lot of young people working on it. For that reason, it was also a city that had a lot of young engineers graduated in the Soviet Union. We’re talking of the last years of the 1980s, when there was that process called Perestroika. And many Cuban engineers, who arrived in Cuba at that time, graduated from there, were considered people who had arrived with that idea of Perestroika. For that reason, it was an interesting territory, where there were a lot of young people. And the fact that I was a youth leader of a cultural organization, which dealt with an important sector of the engineers who were interested in the arts, became of interest to the North Americans, and they began to frequent the meetings we attended. They never identified themselves as enemies, or as officials of the CIA.
Q. Were there many of them, or just always the same person?
Several. They never presented themselves as officials of the CIA, nor as people who had come to cause trouble, or anything.
Q. And who do you suppose they were?
They presented themselves as people coming to help us and our project, and who had the ability to finance it. That they had the chance to make it a reality. The proposal, as such, sounded interesting because, okay, a project in the literary world requires that you know a publisher, that you have editorial relations. It’s a very complex market. And they came in the name of publishers. What happened is that, during the process of contact with us, what they really wanted became quite evident. Because once they had made the contact, once they had begun frequenting our meetings, once they began to promise financing, then came the conditions for being financed.
Q. What conditions did they demand?
They told us: We have the ability to put the markets at your disposal, to put you on the markets of books or sculpture or movies or whatever, but we need the truth, because what we’re selling in the market, is the image of Cuba. The image of Cuba has to be a realistic one, of difficulties, of what’s going on in the country. They wanted to smear the reality of Cuba. What they were asking is that you criticize the revolution, based on anti-Cuba propaganda lines, which they provided.
Q. How big was these people’s budget?
They came with an infinite amount of money, because the source of the money, obviously, we found out over time from whence it came. For example, there was USAID, which was the big provider, the overall contractor of this budget, which channeled the money via NGOs, many of them invented just for Cuba. They were NGOs that didn’t exist, created solely for this type of job in Cuba, and we’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars. They weren’t working on small budgets. To give you an example, at one time, they offered me ten thousand dollars, just to include elements of anti-Cuba propaganda, in the novel I was writing.
Q. What year are we talking about?
Around 1988-89.
Q. How many people could have been contacted by these people, or captured?
In reality, their success didn’t last long, because in Cuba there was a culture of total confrontation with this type of thing, and the people knew very well that there was something behind that story of them wanting to “help” us. It was nothing new in the history of the land, and for that reason, it was very hard for them to get to where we were. In a determined moment, around 1992, we held a meeting, all the members of the organization, and we decided to expel them. They weren’t allowed to attend any more of our meetings. Those people, who were already coming in with concrete proposals, and also preconditioned economic aid they were giving us. What happened is that at the moment we did that, and rejected them, we expelled them from the association headquarters, then they started to particularize. They began to visit with me, in particular, and other comrades as well, young people. With some they succeeded, or should I say, they succeeded in getting some of them out of the country as well.
Q. What kind of profile were they looking for, more or less, if any kind of profile could be specified?
They wanted, above all at that time, to present Cuba as a land in chaos. That socialism in Cuba had not managed to satisfy the needs of the population, and that Cuba was a country that socialism had landed in absolute poverty, and which, as a model, no one liked. That was the key to what they were pursuing, above all, at that time.
Q. How long were you an agent of the CIA?
We were in this initial story until 1994. Because in 1994, I went to Havana, I came back to the capital and here, in the capital, I began to work for the Union of Cultural Workers, a union which represented the cultural workers of the capital, and I became more interesting yet to them, because I went on to direct — from being a leader of a youth organization with 4,000 members, to directing a union with 40,000 members, just in the city of Havana. And then, it gets much more interesting. Contacts followed. In that period there appeared a woman professor from a new university who came with the mission of kick-starting the production of my literary work, to become my representative, to organize events.
Q. Can you give her name?
No, because they used pseudonyms. They never used real names. And that type of work, promoting me as a writer, was what they were very interested in, because they wanted to convert me into a personality in that world. Promoting me now, and compromising me with them in an indirect manner. And then, in 2004, there arrived in Havana a person well known in Venezuela, Kelly Keiderling. Kelly came to Havana to work as Chief of the Office of Press and Culture. They set up a meeting. they arranged a cocktail party, and at that party I met with 12 North American functionaries, North Americans and Europeans. They weren’t only North Americans. All of them people with experience, some also inside the Soviet Union, others who had participated in training and preparation of the people in Yugoslavia, in the Color Revolutions, and they were very interested in meeting me. Kelly became very close to me. She began to prepare me. She began to instruct me. I began to receive, from her, a very solid training: The creation of alternative groups, independent groups, the organization and training of youth leaders, who did not participate in the works of our cultural institutions. And that was in 2004-5. Kelly practically vanished from the scene in 2005-6. And when I started to work, she put me in direct contact with officials of the CIA. Supposedly, I was already committed to them, I was ready for the next mission, and they put me in touch with Renee Greenwald, an official of the CIA, who worked with me directly, and with a man named Mark Waterhein, who was, at the time, the head of Project Cuba, of the Pan-American Foundation for Development.
This man, Mark, as well as directing Project Cuba, had a direct link to Cuba, in terms of financing the anti-revolutionary project, as well as being involved in working against Venezuela. That is, he was a man who, along with much of his team of functionaries of that famous project, also worked against Venezuela at that time. They were closely connected. At times it took a lot of work to tell who was working with Cuba, and who was not, because many times they interlocked. For example, there were Venezuelans who came to work with me, who worked in Washington, who were subordinates of the Pan-American Foundation and the CIA, and they came to Cuba to train me as well, and to bring provisions. From there arose the idea of creating a foundation, a project called Genesis.
Genesis is maybe the template, as an idea, of many of the things going on in the world today, because Genesis is a project aimed at the university youth of Cuba. They were doing something similar in Venezuela. Why? The idea was to convert universities — which have always been revolutionary, which have produced revolutionaries, out of those from which many of the revolutionaries of both countries came — and convert them into factories for reactionaries. So, how do you do that? By making leaders. What have they begun to do in Venezuela? They sent students to Yugoslavia, financed by the International Republican Institute (IRI), which was financed by USAID and by the Albert Einstein Institute, and sent them, in groups of ten, with their professors.
Q. Do you have the names of the Venezuelans?
No, we’re talking of hundreds being sent. I spoke with the professor, and watched one group and followed the other. Because they were working long-term. The same plan was also in place against Cuba. Genesis promoted, with in the university, a plan of training scholarships for Cuban student leaders and professors. The plan was very similar. Also, in 2003, they prepared here, in Havana, a course in the US Interests Section, which was called “Deposing a leader, deposing a dictator”, which was based on the experience of OTPOR in removing Slobodan Milosevic from power. And that was the idea, inside the Cuban university, to work long-term, because these projects always take a long time in order to reap a result. For that reason, they also started early in Venezuela. I believe as well — I don’t have proof, but I believe that in Venezuela it began before the Chávez government, because the plan of converting Latin American universities, which were always sources of revolutionary processes, into reactionary universities, is older than the Venezuelan [bolivarian] process, to reverse the situation and create a new right-wing.
Q. Did the CIA only work in Caracas?
No, throughout Venezuela. Right now, Genesis has a scholarship plan to create leaders in Cuba. They provide scholarships to students to big North American universities, to train them as leaders, with all expenses paid. They pay their costs, they provide complete scholarships. We’re talking 2004-5 here. It was very obvious. Then, those leaders return to university at some time. They’re students. They go to end their careers. Those leaders, when they end their student careers, go on to various jobs, different possibilities, as engineers, as degree-holders in different sectors of Cuban society, but there are others who go on constantly preparing leaders within the university. One of the most important missions of the university leaders was to occupy the leadership of the principal youth organizations of the university. In the case of Cuba, we’re talking about the Union of Communist Youth, and the University Student Federation. That is, it was not to create parallel groups at that time, but to become the leaders of the organizations already existing in Cuba. Also, to form a group of leaders in the strategies of the “soft” coup. That is, training people for the opportune moment to start the famous “color revolutions” or “non-violent wars”, which, as you well know, have nothing to do with non-violence.
Q. What were they looking for in a professor, in order to capture them?
Professors are very easy. Identify university professors discontented with the institution, frustrated people, because they considered that the institution did not guarantee them anything, or didn’t recognize their merits. If they were older, even better. They didn’t specify. Look for older persons, so you can pick them. If you send a scholarship plan, or you send it and, first crack, they receive an invitation to participate in a great international congress of a certain science, they will be eternally grateful to you, because you were the one who discovered their talent, which has never been recognized by the university. Then that man you sent to study abroad, if you’re from his university, and participating in a big event, and publish his works, and constructing him a curriculum. When that person returns to Cuba, he goes back with a tremendous curriculum, because he has participated in a scientific event of the first order, has passed courses from big universities, and his curriculum reaches to the roof, then the influence he could have in the university will be greater, because he could be recognized as a leading figure in his specialty, even though in practice the man could be an ignoramus.
Q. And how effective were these types of captures, that type of missions they came to accomplish here?
In the case of Cuba, they didn’t have much of a result. First, because there was a most important reason, because I was the one directing the project, and I, in reality, was not an agent of the CIA, I was an agent of Cuban security, and so, the whole project passed through my hands, and they thought I was the one who would execute it. And the plan always passed through the work I was able to do, and what we did was slow it down as much as possible, knowing right away what was being planned. But just think, the goal of their plan, they were calculating for the moment in which the historic figures of the Revolution would disappear. They were figuring on a five- or ten-year term, in which Fidel would disappear from the political scene, and Raúl, and the historic leaders of the land. That was the moment they were waiting for, and when that happened, I was to leave university, with all the support of the international press and that of the NGOs, USAID, and all the people working around the CIA’s money, and that there would arise an organization which would present itself before the light of the public, as an alternative to what the Revolution was doing. That is what was to have happened with the Genesis Foundation for Freedom.
Q. What is that Foundation?
The Genesis Foundation for Freedom was to have a discourse, apparently revolutionary, but the idea was to confuse the people. The idea is that they would say they were revolutionaries, that what they wanted was to make changes in the government, but, when it comes to practice, when you get to the essence of the project, when you ask yourself “What is the project?” the discourse was, and the project was, exactly the same as those of the traditional right-wing. Because the changes they promoted, were the same that the right-wing, for a long time, has been promoting in the country. In practice, they almost had their big opportunity, according to their criteria, in 2006, when the news came out on TV that Fidel, for health reasons, was stepping down from his governmental responsibilities, and they have always said that the Cuban Revolution would die when Fidel died. Because the Revolution was Fidel, and on the day Fidel was no longer there, either by dying or leaving government, the next day the Revolution would fall. And they calculated that there would be internal confrontations, that there would be discontent with this or that. Calculations that I don’t know where they got them from, but they believed it. And in that moment, they believed that the time had come to act.
Q. We’re talking about 2006. What was the plan?
They called me automatically. We met, the CIA station chief and I, here in Havana. Diplomatic functionaries also showed up, and one of them said to me, we’re going to organize a provocation. We’re going to organize a popular uprising in a central neighborhood in Havana. There will be a person going there to rise up for democracy, and we’re going to execute a group of provocations, in different locations, in such a way that Cuban security forces will be forced to act against these people, and later we’ll start a big press campaign and start explaining how all of this will function. The interesting part of that, what really caught my attention, was this: How was it possible that a functionary of the US Interests Section could have the power to call upon the principal media, and that those people would obey with such servility? It was really attention-getting. The idea was — and I even told them this — what you’re telling me is just crazy. This man you mentioned to me, called Darcy Ferrer — the guy they picked, a young agent, a doctor — they picked him to be the ringleader of the uprising. I told them, that guy won’t budge anyone. No one is going to rise up in the centre of Havana. The date they picked was none other than Fidel’s birthday, and they told me that day! And I said, Look, buddy, if that man, on that day, decides to go make proclamations, or to start some kind of uprising in the middle of Havana, the people are going to respond harshly. It’s even possible that they might kill him. Why, how could you put him in a humble working-class neighborhood to start those things, the locals…And he told me, flat out, the best thing that could happen for us is if they kill that man, it would be perfect, and they explained to me what would happen. All he had to do was provoke. They would go into the street, and there would be a clash there. If that happened, the press would do the rest, and they told me, we’re going to start a huge media campaign to demonstrate that there is chaos in Cuba, that Cuba is ungovernable; that in Cuba, Raúl is unable to hold the reins of government; that the civilian population is being killed; that students are being repressed in the street, and the people in the street, that the police are committing crimes. What a resemblance to Venezuela! It’s not a coincidence. It’s like that.
Q. So, what was supposed to happen in those circumstances?
Once all the opinion matrices were created, and all the media matrices had constructed that image, the whole world was supposed to have the image of Cuba as a great disaster, and that they’re killing the people, that they are killing them all. Then, my organization was to complete the final task.
Q. What was the final task?
Well, to gather the international press, in my capacity as a university professor, and as a writer, and as a leader of that organization, that I go out publicly to ask the government of the United States to intervene in Cuba, to guarantee the lives of the civilians and to bring peace and tranquility to the Cuban people. To speak to the country in the name of the Cuban people. Just imagine that!
That plan fell apart on them. It gave them no result, but as you could see, later, the way the war in Libya went, and the way it was set up. More than 80% of the information we saw, was fabricated. They’re doing the same in Syria, and they’ve done the same in Ukraine. I have had the opportunity to converse with a lot of Ukrainians, since they were in the bases. People in favor of uniting with Europe. I tried to talk with them these days. Trying to find out, what are those processes like? And they were surprised at the images which were transmitted around the world. What happened in Miami, and they themselves said so, but we’ve been protesting there, but those things that appear on TV, that was a group, or rather, there were sectors, there were places where there were right-wing groups, of the very far right, where there were incidents of that type, and where they burned things, but the greater part of the demonstrations didn’t have those characteristics. Or that this is, once more, the repetition of the scheme, using all the communication media.
Q. The relationship between the CIA and the embassies, in the respective lands, are they direct, then?
Yes, completely direct. In every embassy in Latin America, all the US embassies have CIA officials, working within them, using the façade of diplomatic functionaries.
Q. From what you know, is there a greater CIA presence in the region?
Well, at a certain moment, Ecuador was a major power in that, it had a strong concentration of them, and of course, Venezuela, because in 2012, when I attended the Book Fair in Caracas, all those people who had worked with me against Cuba, all the CIA officials, including Kelly Keiderling, were in Caracas at that time. And I was on a TV show, on VTV, where we talked about this subject, being very careful, because we were talking about two countries who have relations. That’s not the case with Cuba, or rather, Cuba has no relations with the United States. That’s a declared enemy. But we were talking about functionaries who had diplomatic relations, and it was very awkward to do it, without having concrete proofs you could present. However, the interview happened, and the denunciation was made of what was going on. Kelly Keiderling is an expert in this type of war. I have not the slightest doubt. When one follows the itinerary she has, in the countries where she’s been, and when I was in that type of conflict.
She has toured a series of countries in the world where very similar situations have occurred, like what she tried to do in Venezuela. And when you analyze Venezuela, and what has happened nowadays and the way in which she has acted, I think that in Venezuela, the characteristic that has been that they are tremendously aggressive in the manipulation of the information.
Tremendously aggressive. To the point where you say it’s a blunder, because there are images which are so obviously not from Venezuela. I saw a very famous one, in which a soldier appears with a journalist, with a camera.They are Koreans. It’s an image from Korea. They’re Asian. They don’t look like Venezuelans at all. Also, the uniforms they wear. They’ve been very aggressive with that image which has projected what’s going on in Venezuela to the world. The greater part of the world’s people, this image is the one they’re seeing, of what they’re trying to say.
Q. They control the media. Do you know any case of any journalist which has been, as you have seen, known or unknown, which you have seen in the process of training?
No.
Q. CNN, for example?
No, there was a guy who had a lot of ties to me at the time here, who served as a link for meeting an official from the CIA, Antony Golden, of Reuters. But, all right, he was an element independent of Reuters. CNN has always been very closely linked to all these things. CNN, from its first moments of operation, above all this latest step, and above all, CNN en Español, has been an indispensable tool for these people, but the problem is that you have to understand one thing: to understand what’s going on, and to be able to mount a campaign, you have to understand that nowadays, there is no TV station that acts on its own. There are the conglomerates, and the communications conglomerates — who directs them? Because, for example, Time Warner and AOL, and all those big communications companies — cable TV, movie TV, TV in general — who is the boss, in the end? Here it’s Westinghouse, there it’s General Electric. The same who build warplanes, the same US arms industry, the same people who are the owners of TV networks, movie studios, publications, book publishers. So, the same guys who produce warplanes, the cookie you’ll eat at night, that presents an artist to you, are the same who rule the newspapers of the entire world. Who do these people answer to?
Q. When you see what’s happening in Venezuela, and you compare it with what you did here [in Cuba], what conclusion can you draw?
It’s a new strategy, which they’ve been developing based on the experience they’ve had all over the world, but I see, I’m convinced, that they’ve only gotten results when people in those places don’t support the revolution. They managed it with Milosevic, because Milosevic was a Yugoslavian leader whose image had fallen far, thanks to things that happened in Yugoslavia. The same happened in Ukraine, because Yanukovych was a man with very little popular support, and it has given results in other places where the governments had little support from the people. Wherever they have a legitimate government, a solid government, and people disposed to defend the revolution, the plan has failed on them.
Q. And what phase do they enter when the plan fails?
They’re going to keep on doing it, they’ll go on perfecting it. We are the enemy. That is, Venezuela, Cuba, everything going on in Latin America as an alternative. We are the dissidents of the world. We live in a world dominated by capitalism. Where that new capitalist way of being dominates, so that now one can’t even call it imperialist, it’s something new, something that goes way beyond what students of Marxism wrote in history years ago. It’s something new, novel. It’s a power, practically global, of the big transnationals, of those megalopolies they’ve created. Therefore, we are the enemy. We are presenting an alternative project. The solution that the world proposes to us, is not that. We know how to do it, and Cuba, Venezuela, the ALBA countries, have demonstrated that it can be done, that one or two days more are nothing. The Cuban revolution has been in existence for 55 years, and with political will, it has achieved things that the US government, with all the money in the world, has been unable to do. So that’s a bad example.
And I’ve told my students: Can you imagine that the Indignants in Spain, the thousands and millions of workers out of work in Spain, that the Greeks, that all those people in all the world, know what we’re doing? Can you imagine that these people get to know who Chávez is? Or who Fidel is? Or of the things we’re doing here? Or the things we’re doing with so few resources, only the will to make revolution and share the wealth? What will happen to capitalism? How much longer will capitalism last, which has to spend billions of dollars, every day, to build its image and fool the people? What would happen if the people knew who we really are? What is the Cuban Revolution, really, and what is the Venezuelan Revolution? Because, if you talked to a Spaniard and asked him about Chávez, and he gives you a terrible opinion of Chávez, because it’s what they’ve constructed in his mind/ And you meet an unemployed person who tells you that Chávez is a bad guy, because the media have convinced him of that, but if these people knew how things really were! So they can’t allow that such formidable enemies as ourselves should be there, at the door.
Q. From the viewpoint of the national sovereignty of our people, how can we stop the CIA? We’ve already talked about the consciousness of the people, which is fundamental in these types of actions, but, in the concrete, how does one foresee the CIA’s work? What can be done? What recommendations do you have?
I think of a thing that Chávez said, and that Fidel has always said, that is the key to defeating the empire, and that is unity. It’s not a slogan, it’s a reality. It’s the only way you have of defeating a project like that. A project that comes from the Special Services and from capitalism. One can only do it with the unity of the people.
Q. Are we talking about the civilian-military?
Yes, unity in all senses. Unity based in diversity, in the peoples, but unity as a nation, unity as a project. Wherever the people are divided, there is another reality.
Q. Where do they have to concentrate? In what area must they concentrate forces to defend us from this type of actions, this type of attacks?
The army to defeat that is the people. I believe that the Cuban experience has taught that very well. There are experiences in the world which mark you very clearly. What has happened in the world, when the people have not been protagonists in defence of the Revolution? And when the people have been protagonists, what happened? And there’s the case of Cuba. We have managed to defeat the CIA and the empire millions of times, because the people have been the protagonist.
Q. Does the CIA use the databases of the social networks, and that sort of thing, to define their plans?
They’re the masters. They’re the masters of that. Fine, there are the denunciations of Snowden and all that has come out of Wikileaks, and all those things that are no secret to anyone, because we suspected, but it’s been demonstrated. It’s been demonstrated that the servers, the Internet, are theirs. All the servers in the world, in the end, die in the North Americans’ servers. They are the mother of the Internet, and all the networks and services are controlled by them. They have access to all the information. And they don’t hesitate to record it. Facebook is an extraordinary database. People put everything on Facebook. Who are your friends? What are their tastes, what movies have they seen? What do they consume? And it’s a source of firsthand information.
Q. Have you been in contact with Kelly Keiderling, after what happened in Venezuela?
No, I haven’t had contact with her. I don’t know what was her final destination, after what happened (she was expelled from Venezuela for meeting with and financing terrorists).
Q. With the experience she has, how far was she able to penetrate into Venezuela, and Venezuelan universities?
I am certain that she got quite far. She’s a very intelligent agent, very well prepared, very capable, and very convinced of what she’s doing. Kelly is a person convinced of the job she is doing. She is convinced of the justness, from her point of view, of what she is doing. Because she is an unconditional representative of capitalism. Because she comes from capitalism’s elite. She is organic of the actions she is doing. There is no contradiction of any kind. And, based on the experience of her work, of her capability, I am sure that she managed to get very far, and gave continuity to a job which is not just for now, it’s a job she will go on doing for a long time, to reverse the process in Venezuelan universities. What’s going on is that up to whatever point they can reach, in the long term, that is what will show the Bolivarian process, in the measure of which the people are aware of what could happen. If that fascist right wing becomes uncontrollable, it could get into power again.
Q. What kind of person who has contacts, who could reach the people, such as by being an activist in a movement, could be captured by the CIA?
They will find them, they will try to do it. If it’s a young person and a leader, they will try to capture them for their interests. We have to train our leaders. We can’t leave that to spontaneity, we can’t leave that to the enemy. So, if we leave them to the enemy, those are spaces which the enemy will occupy. Any alternative project that we leave unattended, any alternative project that we don’t realize the necessity of getting close to, that is a project that the enemy will try, by all means, to take advantage of. Using the enormous amount of money they have for that, which has no limits, in terms of resources to be used, because they are playing with the future and, above all, the young are the key.
The good thing is that the young are the present of Latin America. The Latin American revolution which is there, which is everywhere, is of the young. If not, fine, it will never have results, and if you manage to make young people think differently, if you succeed in getting these youngsters to believe that savage capitalism is the solution to all their problems, then there will be no revolution for Latin America. It’s that simple.
Translation: Sabina C. Becker
Original interview in Spanish -
Nato’s Action Plan in Ukraine Is Right out of Dr Strangelove
US pushes to dominate the Eurasian landmass
by John Pilger / April 18th, 2014
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I watched Dr Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major TJ “King” Kong goes “toe to toe with the Rooskies” and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it’s left to General “Buck” Turgidson to reassure the president. Strike first, says the general, and “you got no more than 10-20 million killed, tops”. President Merkin Muffley: “I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” General Turgidson: “Perhaps it might be better, Mr President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.”
The genius of Stanley Kubrick’s film is that it accurately represents the cold war’s lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant, yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same “invisible government”, as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.
In 1964, the year Dr Strangelove was made, “the missile gap” was the false flag. To build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John F Kennedy approved the CIA’s propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This filled front pages as the “Russian threat”. In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in production of the missiles, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato enlargement project. Reneging on the Reagan administration’s promise to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.
In February, the US mounted one of its proxy “colour” coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly antisemitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia. Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler’s Nazis, who were supported by the infamous Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA) which was responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, of which the UPA was the military wing, inspires today’s Svoboda party.
Since Washington’s putsch in Kiev – and Moscow’s inevitable response in Russian Crimea to protect its Black Sea fleet – the provocation and isolation of Russia have been inverted in the news to the “Russian threat”. This is fossilised propaganda. The US air force general who runs Nato forces in Europe – General Philip Breedlove, no less – claimed more than two weeks ago to have pictures showing 40,000 Russian troops “massing” on the border with Ukraine. So did Colin Powell claim to have pictures proving there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What is certain is that Barack Obama’s rapacious, reckless coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.
Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, invented a “nuclear rogue” in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone.
A Nato membership action plan – straight from the war room of Dr Strangelove – is General Breedlove’s gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. “Rapid Trident” will put US troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games in eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on the US’s borders. Cue General Turgidson.
And there is China. On 23 April, Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his “pivot” to China. The aim is to convince his “allies” in the region, principally Japan, to rearm and prepare for the possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war.
In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Cheju, less than 400 miles from Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US. Obama’s “pivot” is designed to undermine China’s influence in its region. It is as if a world war has begun by other means.
This is not a Dr Strangelove fantasy. Obama’s defence secretary, Charles “Chuck” Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea to China’s complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. “You cannot go around the world,” said Hagel with a straight face, “and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation.” As for America’s massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is “a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide”.
Obama is seeking a bigger budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Dr Strangelove. The US is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a “manifest destiny” made right by might.
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Glaring Q.E. Failure Spotted - Money Velocity Is Falling Rapidly
Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing Apr 16, 2014 - 04:21 PM GMT
By: Jim_Willie_CB
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Sometimes pictures are far more effective in communicating an important point. They are extremely effective in undermining respect and confidence, when in the cartoon format. A sequence of graphics struck the cognitive circuits recently. Long explanations will not serve well. The US Federal Reserve has been printing money since 2011 to cover USGovt debt securities in a frenetic manner. They have lost control. They call it stimulus, when it is actually the opposite. It does assist the speculators with nearly zero cost money to borrow, but one must be a club member to win loan grants.
The Quantitative Easing programs are deceptive. When the program was initially announced, the Jackass claimed it would be part of an endless sequence. With QE1 and QE2 and Operation Twist and QE3, following the failed trial balloon called Taper Talk, it is quite clear to anyone with an active brain stem and absent rose colored glasses that the USFed is caught in a trap called QE to Infinity. It is not stimulative. Instead, the uncontrollable bond monetization causes capital destruction. It causes economic degradation. It causes lost jobs and vanished income. It is a gigantic wet blanket to smother and destroy the USEconomy slowly, amidst unending propaganda. QE is the device that will result in Systemic Failure, which is already flashing signals of its arrival.
MONEY VELOCITY FALLING RAPIDLY
Money Velocity continues to fall rapidly in both the USEconomy and that of Canada, reaching 50-year lows in the Untied States. The indication is failure in monetary policy, as hyper inflation has killed capital on an extensive basis. The capital destruction is in its fourth year, probably having reached critical mass. Compared and contrasted with fast rising money supply, the systemic failure is obvious to conclude. The exception is to morons, Wall Street junkies, Big Bank criminal elite, and USGovt hacks. The fast decline in Money Velocity means that it is not moving in the body economic. The reason is simple. The blood system is contaminated with the USDollar, a toxic currency with no backing in a hard asset. The new money is toxic currency under phenomenal debasement by its own steward, the USFed itself. They redouble their harmful policy instead of abandoning it.
The Money Velocity picture is not pretty. The declining rate has broken lows set 50 years ago. Technically, the velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase domestically produced goods and services within a given time period, like an inventory cycle time. In other words, it is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy. The result would be that growth (as measured in GDP) should be rising. With falling velocity of money, then fewer transactions are occurring and a recession is indicated. Such is the present case in astonishing rapid deterioration. Consumers and business are holding firm their money rather than investing it, as they see poor prospects. New capital formation is not occurring inside the USEconomy, or pitifully little. Debts are being dissolved, usually in default. It should be noted that the velocity of money has also been falling in the EU and Japan. The entire global economy is in recession, the pathogenesis shared.
DESTRUCTION OF CAPITAL
The claim that the QE bond monetization is stimulus is pure propaganda, and could not be further from the truth. The claim disguises the nature of the hidden Wall Street bailout, which is to cover their worthless mortgage bonds, and to cover all manner of derivatives, in addition to the obvious coverage of USTreasury Bond sales. Nobody wants the USGovt bonds anymore, except for Belgium operating as hidey hole on behalf of the Euro Central Bank, and for Japan operating as the usual lackey servant. The claim of stimulus is 180 degrees wrong. The bond monetization is pure unsterilized monetary inflation, free money shoved into the system without offset. To be sure, Bernanke had a machine to produce money at no cost, except that like with acid it ruins capital. The result is pure inflation, and extreme motivation for the entire world to take on hedge positions with energy, metals, farmland, and more in order to protect themselves from the ruin of money. The effect is felt as a rising cost structure, felt across the world, and thus shrinking profit margins for the entire global business sector.
As businesses realize the lost profitability, they shut down and retire their capital. They turn idle their factor machinery, their design workstations, their office computers, their transportation vehicles, their company buildings and offices. The destruction of capital is the ugliest dirty secret behind the official New Normal of central bank monetary policy. They are killing the system, so as to avoid liquidating the big banks. By refusing to take the proper capitalism path in liquidating failed corporate structures, they have instead chosen to kill capital, force income engines to the sidelines, generate capital formation in other nations (like the East & Asia), and destroy the USEconomy. The US and West has forgotten capitalism and embraced socialism with a fascist twist.
RAMPANT MONETARY GROWTH
Contrast the declining Money Velocity with fast rising Money Supply growth (presented in March). The conclusion is both galloping economic recession and systemic failure, hardly a reward. Yet it continues without interruption, only the promise of interruption. The systemic failure and breakdown is upon us, the evidence stacking up, the message no longer escapable. The two charts back to back make the point convincingly. New money is wrecking the financial structures and economic systems by destroying capital. The USFed balance sheet is well over $3 trillion, and continues to grow. The new money is going largely in a hidden Wall Street bailout of their bonds and derivatives. The USFed is a grand xxxx, as their QE volume is growing, not tapering. They are using proxies and back doors, in addition to airborne dirigibles like the Interest Rate Swap contract. Like with the Hindenburg, the floating monsters will explode someday. The growth in money supply is frightening and alarming, evidence of the wrecked capital and wrecked system. Many have called the Jackass a lunatic and alarmist, but they seem incapable to explain the fast rise in monetary base, yet fast decline in money velocity. Monetary policy is a failure. The fiat paper money is toxic. The big banks are insolvent. The global franchise system of central banks should be shut down, except they control the governments, control the finance ministries, control the central banks, control the regulators, and control the militaries.
LOST CRITICAL MASS IN INDUSTRY
It is very confusing that money velocity is falling fast, yet central banks are creating new money very rapidly. Imagine a Ferrari or Lamborghini race car spinning its gears, burning its engine out, running out of oil, making no movement. It aint working, started by Alan Greenspan, amplified by Benjamin Bernanke, and to be continued by Janet Yellen. They are stuck with failed monetary policy, and cannot alter the destructive course. The Jackass has maintained that a critical error was committed by granting China the Most Favored Nation status for trade. It was actually a fatal error. The industrial investment is taking place in Asia, led by China. Wall Street and the USGovt leadership at the time, under President Clinton and Robert Rubin, betrayed the nation. They leased gold from the Chinese, in order to perpetuate the fiat paper USDollar regime. They deployed the lunatic Rubin Doctrine, to wreck next year for a few more tomorrows. In doing so, the Chinese benefited from $23 billion in foreign direct investment in the space of a mere two to three years. But the blowback was fatal. The USEconomy lost its industrial critical mass, and has inadequate traction from monetary policy in accommodation. It still has some industry, but not enough. The ultra-low interest rate makes borrowing costs low, but grotesquely inadequate new capital formation has taken place in the USEconomy. It is being done in Asia. Worse, the new industrial parks are springing up across the US landscape, operated by Chinese industrial masters. The QE is not stimulating the USEconomy because 1) the US lacks critical mass industrially, 2) the regulator burden and corporate tax burden and ObamaCare burden are too great, and 3) the nation is too busy with court cases against the big banks and waging war against fabricated enemies. This is Game Over !!!
As David Chapman points out, "It all seems counter-intuitive that the velocity of money should be falling even as the ECB, the Fed, the BOJ, and the Bank of Canada have been maintaining low interest rates for years in order to encourage borrowing and keep the cost of money low. The central banks have also pumped billions of dollars into the economy through QE and other stimulative measures. The result has been an explosion in the monetary base, a sharp rise in M1 but lower growth for M2 and sluggish M3. The economies are weighed down with debt, banks are reluctant to lend, consumers and corporations are unwilling to borrow. The money instead has been used for speculation, primarily going into risk assets such as the stock market. Corporations instead of investing in new plants and investment are sitting on cash hoards or buying back their own shares. Both are non-productive."
CANADA DITTO ON FAILURE
The Jackass howls in laughter at the claim that Canada is different, an independent nation, a refuge of wiser leadership, the Great White North with more integrity. What nonsense! Canada is in the US pocket, and has been for a very long time. The arguments that Canada is different or better or free from gold corruption are truly baseless and stupid. The big Canadian banks short gold with Wall Street banks, and have been doing so for a long time. See the Scotia Mocatta alliance with JPMorgan in recent months. The Canadian Govt efficiently vacated all their gold in the 1980 and 1990 decades. It was probably stolen in part by Mulroney, just like as Bush & Clinton & Rubin stole the US gold. See the hidden brisk activity at Barrick Gold, where the ex-prime minister sat on the Board of Directors. Pay close attention to the Evergreen gold contracts by Barrick, which never force under contract the delivery of gold, only the sale under dubious specious contracts. Then the big Canadian banks are deeply committed in the Wall Street and London derivative entanglements, just like the big US banks. All their big banks are hollow reeds, just like in the Untied States. Lastly, the Canadian stock exchanges engage in rampant naked shorting of the mining stocks, not by those who wish to preserve the fiat currency system, but rather by the investment banks that fund the capital requirements for the mining firms themselves. They sell more shares than granted on finance deals. The most disturbing gold factor from Canada in the last year has been the collusion of Scotia Mocatta with JPMorgan in the provision of gold bullion. They have been offered some special deal for the future, but that future will include a charred landscape and devils as warlords. Scotia Mocatta is in Satan's service at the Wall Street altar. The old formula still holds: CANADA = UNITED STATES / 10 (just like always). The Jackass expects an extreme conflict very soon, as Canada is far more a Chinese commercial colony than the Untied States. My expectation is that Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver will soon begin marching to a different drummer out of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. A big hat tip to David Chapman for his recent article (CLICK HERE) on the Money Velocity subject, where the graphic was obtained.
BLACK HOLE DYNAMICS
Bernanke was correct. The cost of newly printed electronic money is zero. But he left out the other half of the statement, since he is a lousy economist. The value of the newly printed electronic money is zero. Due to his pathetic education, Bernanke overlooked or fails to comprehend the effect of hyper monetary inflation. Endless spigots of new fiat money are not the salvation of a system, but rather a cornucopia of new capital formation can lift the system in an effective legitimate manner. The unchecked inflation results in the destruction of capital, the wreckage of income producing engines, the extreme ruin of jobs. The new money goes down a drain. The curvature to the drain is defined by toxic bonds even as the inflection is marked by harmful derivatives. The stubborn behavior of the central bank franchise system operations, their deep collusion, their phony patches to the bond structures, their self-dealing $23 trillion in near zero interest loans to themselves, their waged war to protect the King Dollar regime, it is all destructive. Sooner or later the people and madding crowds will awaken, surely very late in the end game.
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(PROBLEMS FRONT-RIGHT-CENTER,GAAL)
THE WARREN COMMISSION'S FAILED INVESTIGATION
@All Rights Reserved
http://michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/failed.htm
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DAVID had some interesting friends.(Gaal)================================DAVIDBorn in 1915 and youngest son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Descendant of the German-Jewish Roggenfelder family which came to the United States in 1722. Attended school in New York City and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English history and literature from Harvard University in 1936. This was followed with a Ph.D. (1940) in economics from the University of Chicago and a study at both Harvard and the London School of Economics. Married Margaret "Peggy" McGrath in September 1940 and they raised six children, including son David Rockefeller Jr. Along with his brothers - John D. III, Nelson, Laurance, and Winthrop, David Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) in 1940. Became a trustee of The Rockefeller Institute (later transformed into a university) for Medical Research in 1940. Trustee Rockefeller University 1940-1995. Secretary to New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia 1940-1941. Assistant regional director of the United States Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Service 1941-1942. Enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. Military Intelligence officer in North Africa and Southern France 1942-1945. Set up an intelligence network in Algiers and was an insider to the battle between Charles De Gaulle and Henri Giraud for control over the French resistance. First became friends with William Paley (Pilgrims) and C.D. Jackson in Algiers.(BTW Edwin Pauley,John McCloy,Allen Dulles were also Pilgrims,Gaal)
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Tens of thousands in France, Italy protest austerity measures
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooBy Kumaran Ira WSW.org
14 April 2014========================
On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in France and in Italy, protesting the social-democratic governments’ austerity measures and pro-market labour reforms.
The Paris demonstration. Banner: "No to austerity policies"
The protest in Rome, attended by tens of thousands of people, ended in violence as police attacked protesters. The police used tear gas and baton-charged demonstrators. There were dozens of lighter injuries among police and protesters, and at least six arrests, police said.
In France, the protest was called by the unions and their pseudo-left supporters, the New Anti-capitalist Party and the Left Front, a coalition of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and the Left Party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In the rally, Alexis Tsipras, the chairman of the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), marched alongside Pierre Laurent of the PCF, Mélenchon and NPA spokesman Olivier Besancenot. Tsipras is the European Left (EL) candidate for the Presidency for the European Commission in the European elections.
Turnout at the Paris protest was around 25,000 people, according to police estimates, though the PCF claimed 100,000 participated. Several other protests were also called in other French cities, including a protest of 1,600 in Marseille.
The protest in Paris. Banner: "Capitalists cost too much, let's give it back to them an eye for an eye."
In Paris, protesters carried banners criticizing austerity measures being carried out by the Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande. Banners read, “Enough, Hollande,” “If you’re left-wing, you tax the financial sector,” “If you’re left-wing, you help the workers,” or “If you’re left-wing, Europe means people first.”
The relatively low turnout for the rally in Paris, despite deep opposition to the social agenda of the EU and of France’s PS government, reflects deepening popular disillusionment and anger with the reactionary politics of the European pseudo-left. The rally drew largely on the membership and periphery of the pseudo-left parties and had the air of a family festival.
A banner in the Paris protest says, "PS equals pseudo-socialist"
The Left Front and the NPA play a similar role to their counterpart, Syriza, which helped the “troika”—the European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank—impose devastating austerity measures on the Greek working class. While making tactical criticisms of EU policy, Syriza did everything to block social opposition and tacitly backed the crushing of strikes against austerity. This allowed the “troika” to cut wages by 30 percent or more and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs.
As for the PS, after a humiliating defeat in the March municipal election that saw a significant victory for the neo-fascist National Front (FN), it is shifting further to the right, vowing to intensify austerity and making law-and-order appeals to the FN. The government is planning to slash €50 billion in yearly public spending under Hollande’s so-called “Responsibility Pact.”
The sharp turn to the right reflects the disintegration of bourgeois “left” politics in France and Europe as a whole. Workers’ deep social opposition to these reactionary policies finds no expression in the reactionary politics of the protest organisers, the NPA and Left Front, however, which are key allies of the PS and supporters of the EU.
Their empty opposition to Hollande is a political fraud. The NPA and the Left Front supported Hollande against right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2012 presidential elections, working to promote illusions in the PS. While acknowledging that Hollande would carry out austerity policies, they claimed that the PS could be pressured to adopt left-wing policies. These claims have proven completely bankrupt.
After the rally, the Left Front and the NPA cynically claimed that they would not allow the PS to carry out austerity measures. Besancenot said, “The message is clear, Manuel Valls is starting out with a first protest, and it’s important because this means a new political scenario is opening.”
Mélenchon said, “This is a message sent to the government… There is a left in this country, and it is unacceptable for it to be usurped to carry out a right-wing economic policy.”
Such remarks are a backhanded acknowledgement of the widespread sentiment in the population that there is no political left in France, and that the PS and its allies, including the Left Front and the NPA, are indifferent or hostile to workers’ interests.
The verbal opposition of Mélenchon and Besancenot to the PS offers nothing to workers seeking to fight EU-dictated austerity measures, however. They are mere political shadows of the PS itself. Their aim in calling this protest is to subordinate the working class to the reactionary agenda of the EU and the PS government, blocking a politically independent movement of the working class against the capitalist ruling elite.
The protest in Rome was called against rising housing costs, unemployment and labour market reforms amid a slowdown of the Italian economy. Protesters denounced the social-democratic Democratic Party (PD) government of Matteo Renzi, who is planning to reform labour rules to make it easier for companies to hire and fire employees.
Renzi was brought to power after his predecessor Enrico Letta failed to carry out economic reforms demanded by the European Union. Renzi has pledged that his government will enact economic reforms quickly, slashing public spending.
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The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance
April 18, 2014
Exclusive: After U.S. neocons helped stir up a crisis in Ukraine—with a big assist from the biased American press corps – the Obama administration looked for a diplomatic off-ramp, but this pattern of hyped outrage and belated reconciliation is a risky way to make foreign policy, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The American mainstream news media has rarely bought in so thoroughly to a U.S. government propaganda campaign as it has in taking sides in support of the post-coup government in Ukraine and against Russia and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Part of this is explained by the longstanding animus toward Russian President Vladimir Putin for his autocratic style, his shirtless photographs and his government’s opposition to gay rights. Another part is a hangover from the Cold War when the Russkies were the enemy. In Official Washington, there is palpable nostalgia for the days of Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist swagger and “Red Dawn” fantasies.
Secretary of State John Kerry attending a four-way diplomatic conference in Geneva on April 17, 2014, involving the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and the European Union. (State Department photo)
But another reason for the biased coverage from the U.S. press corps is the recent fusion of the still-influential neoconservatives with more liberal “responsibility to protect” (R2P) activists who believe in “humanitarian” military interventions. The modern mainstream U.S. news media is dominated by these two groups: neocons on the right and R2Pers on the center-left.
As one longtime Washington observer told me recently the neocons are motivated by two things, love of Israel and hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, the R2Pers are easily enamored of idealistic young people in street protests.
The two elements of this alliance – the neocons and the R2Pers – also now represent the dominant foreign policy establishment in Official Washington, with the few remaining “realists” largely shoved to the side, including to some degree President Barack Obama who has “realist” tendencies but continues to cede control over his administration’s actions abroad to aggressive neocon-R2P operatives.
During Obama’s first term, he made the fateful decision to create a “team of rivals” of powerful political and bureaucratic figures – the likes of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus. They skillfully funneled the President into hawkish decisions that they wanted, such as a “surge” of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and a major confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. (Both positions were pushed aggressively by the neocons.)
In 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers teamed up for the war against Libya, which was sold to the United Nations Security Council as simply a limited intervention to protect civilians in the east whom Muammar Gaddafi had labeled “terrorists.” However, once the U.S.-orchestrated military operation got going, it quickly turned into a “regime change” war, eliminating longtime neocon nemesis, Gaddafi, to Hillary Clinton’s hawkish delight.
In Obama’s second term, the original “team of rivals” is gone, but foreign policy is being defined by the likes of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon, and Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, a leading R2Per, with a substantial supporting role by neocon Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona. Obama defeated McCain in 2008, but McCain now is pulling the strings of Secretary of State John Kerry, who also appears enamored of the hawkish stances demanded by Nuland and Power.
Power was a passionate advocate for bombing Syria to degrade the military capabilities of President Bashar al-Assad who is in the midst of a bloody civil war. For her part, Nuland threw the weight of the U.S. government behind Ukrainian protesters who – with crucial help from neo-Nazi militias – ousted elected (but corrupt) President Viktor Yanukovych in February.
To the surprise of many people who knew Kerry in his early days – as a Vietnam veteran against the war and as an aggressive Senate investigator in the 1980s – Kerry has consistently taken the side of the neocons and the R2Pers. As Secretary of State since February 2013, he also has built a dubious reputation for himself as someone who rushes to judgments and disregards evidence when the facts are inconvenient. [see Consortiumnews.com’s “What’s the Matter with John Kerry?”]
Sarin Attack
After a sarin gas attack last Aug. 21 outside Damascus, Kerry jumped to the conclusion that Assad’s government was at fault despite serious doubts within the U.S. intelligence community and among independent analysts. Then, without presenting a shred of verifiable evidence, he gave a bellicose speech on Aug. 30 claiming repeatedly that “we know” that the regime did it.
Though it still has not been ascertained whether regime forces or the rebels were responsible, it is now clear that Kerry was wrong in asserting U.S. government certainty, especially after a team of rocket scientists determined that the one rocket found to carry sarin had a maximum range of about two kilometers, much less than was needed to fit with Kerry’s claims.
One of those scientists, MIT’s Theodore Postol, told MintPress News that “According to our analysis, I would not … claim that I know who executed the attack, but it’s very clear that John Kerry had very bad intelligence at best or, at worst, lied about the intelligence he had.”
Postol compared Kerry’s presentation to the Bush-43 administration’s assertions about Iraq possessing WMD in 2002-03 and the Johnson administration citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964. Postol also noted the failure of the U.S. press to question the U.S. government’s accusations against Syria.
“To me, the fact that people are not focused on how the administration lied is very disturbing and shows how far the community of journalists and the community of so-called security experts has strayed from their responsibility,” Postol said. “The government so specifically distorted the evidence that it presented a very real danger to the country and the world. I am concerned about the collapse of traditional journalism and the future of the country.”
Just this week, Kerry further augmented his new reputation as a person who doesn’t check his facts and simply spouts propaganda. On Thursday, after a Geneva conference called to tamp down tensions in Ukraine, Kerry rhetorically poured fuel on the fire by citing a claim about pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine threatening local Jews.
“Just in the last couple of days, notices were sent to Jews in one city indicating that they had to identify themselves as Jews. And obviously, the accompanying threat implied is – or threatened – or suffer the consequences, one way or the other,” Kerry said.
“In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable; it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that.”
However, in the days before Kerry spoke, the distribution of the leaflet in Donetsk had been denounced as a black-propaganda hoax designed to discredit the pro-Russian protesters.
A Reported Hoax
As JTA, “the Global Jewish News Source,” reported on Wednesday, “Pro-Russian separatists from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine denied any involvement in the circulation of fliers calling on Jews to register with separatists and pay special taxes.” Among those denying the legitimacy of the fliers was Denis Pushilin, the person whose name was signed at the bottom. He termed the fliers a “provocation” designed to discredit the resistance in eastern Ukraine against the post-coup regime in Kiev.
The issue of anti-Semitism has been a sensitive one for the Kiev regime because neo-Nazi militias played a key role in overthrowing President Yanukovych on Feb. 22, and now – renamed as Ukraine’s “National Guard” – these militias have joined in the repression of the protests in eastern Ukraine, including the killing of three protesters this week.
The right-wing Szoboda party and the Right Sektor, which spearheaded the decisive attacks that forced Yanukovych to flee for his life, trace their political lineage back to Stepan Bandera, a World War II Nazi collaborator whose paramilitary force collaborated in the extermination of Jews and Poles as part of a campaign to ethnically purify Ukraine.
So, the distribution of anti-Semitic fliers would have served an important political purpose for the Kiev regime by allowing it and its American backers to deflect questions about neo-Nazis in the west by fingering pro-Russians in the east for anti-Semitism. The men who passed out the leaflets were dressed up as pro-Russian paramilitaries but their identities are unknown.
On Friday, the New York Times sought to dispute the possibility that the men might have been pro-Kiev provocateurs by arguing that “there is no evidence” that pro-Kiev operatives are functioning in Donetsk.
But the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy has on its payroll a number of activists and “journalists” operating in Donetsk and elsewhere in the east, according to NED’s list of 65 projects in Ukraine. Founded in 1983, NED took over – in a quasi-public fashion – many of the covert operations formerly run by the CIA.
Last September, NED’s neocon president Carl Gershman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that called Ukraine “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
By citing the suspect flier without noting that its supposed author had already denied its authenticity, Kerry reinforced the growing impression that he is an erratic and biased if not dishonest diplomat.
Obama’s Equivocation
Obama’s role in his administration’s foreign policy fiascos has mostly been to be caught off guard by mischief that his independent-minded underlings have stirred up. Then, once a crisis is touched off – and the propaganda machinery starts churning out hyperbolic alarms – Obama joins in the rhetorical exaggerations before he tries, quietly, to work out some compromise.
In other words, rather than driving the agenda, Obama goes with the neocon-R2P flow before searching for a last-second off-ramp to avert catastrophe. That creates what looks like a disorganized foreign policy consisting of much tough talk but little actual hard power. The cumulative effect has been to make Obama appear weak and indecisive.
One example was Syria, where Obama drew a “red line” suggesting a U.S. military strike if Assad’s regime used chemical weapons. When sarin was used on Aug. 21 resulting in hundreds of deaths, Official Washington’s neocons and R2Pers quickly fingered Assad, firmed up that “group think,” and ridiculed anyone who doubted this conventional wisdom.
With Kerry running near the front of the stampede, Obama tagged along repeating what all the important people thought they knew – that Assad was guilty– but Obama steered away from the war cliff at the last minute. He referred the issue to Congress and then accepted a compromise devised by Putin to have Assad surrender all his chemical weapons, even as Assad continued denying a role in the Aug. 21 attack.
After that Syrian deal was struck, the neocons and R2Pers pummeled Obama for weakness in deciding not to launch major military strikes against Syrian targets. Obama managed to avert another Mideast war but he faced accusations of vacillation.
The Ukraine crisis is following a similar pattern. The neocons and R2Pers immediately took the side of the western Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan as they challenged elected President Yanukovych who hails from eastern Ukraine.
Assistant Secretary Nuland openly supported the rebellion, reminding Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” literally passing out cookies to the protesters and secretly plotting who should replace Yanukovych. Her choice, “Yats” or Aresniy Yatsenyuk, not surprisingly ended up as prime minister after the Feb. 22 coup, and he quickly pushed through the parliament a harsh austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
R2Pers also rallied to the cause of the Maidan protesters, citing a principled responsibility to protect civilians resisting government repression. However, the R2Pers have taken a remarkably different stance toward the Ukrainians in the east who have risen up against the unelected post-coup regime in Kiev. Those protesters are simply dismissed as pawns of the Russians, deserving whatever they get.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent R2Per, even wants the U.S. government to arm the Kiev regime so it can put down the pro-Russian protesters violently. On Thursday, Kristof wrote from Kiev: “For decades, Ukrainians have been starved, oppressed and bullied by Russians, and with Russia now inciting instability that could lead to an invasion and dismemberment of eastern Ukraine, plenty of brave Ukrainians here say they’ve had it and are ready to go bear-hunting.”
So, while virtually no one in the mainstream U.S. media will acknowledge the well-documented role played by American neocons and other operatives in inciting instability in Kiev, leading to the violent overthrow of the elected president, almost everyone in the MSM accepts as indisputable fact that the eastern Ukrainian protests against the post-coup regime in Kiev are simply Russian provocations deserving of a violent response.
Economic Pressures
But an oddly discordant note was sounded in the Washington Post of all places. On Thursday, correspondent Anthony Faiola reported from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom he interviewed said the unrest was driven by fear over “economic hardship” and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder.
“At a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund,” Faiola reported.
In other words, even as Kerry, the neocons and the R2Pers blame only the Russians for the unrest in the east, a rare case of actual reporting from the scene finds a more realistic explanation, that many people in eastern Ukraine feel disenfranchised by the violent overthrow of their candidate Yanukovych and are frightened at the prospects of soaring heating bills and other cuts in their already austere lifestyles.
As for President Obama — as a timid “realist” — he has played his typical double game. He responded to the pro-Kiev bias of Official Washington by piling on with angry denunciations of Putin, but – recognizing the painful consequences that would come from a full-blown confrontation with Russia – Obama authorized negotiations to reduce tensions, an agreement that was announced on Thursday in Geneva.
Yet, even if the Ukrainian crisis is gradually walked back from the edge, I’m told that lasting damage has been done to the working relationship that had developed, behind the scenes, between Obama and Putin, collaboration that helped avert a U.S. war on Syria and hammered out a compromise to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.
Putin had hoped that Russian cooperation on those two dangerous issues would open the door to other collaboration with Obama. But the Ukraine crisis brought those prospects to a halt. The Russians are particularly sensitive to the harsh rhetoric emanating from Kerry but also from Obama.
One adviser to the Russian government told me that the people around Putin feel that they are being treated shabbily even as Obama has benefited from their help.
The adviser summed up the Russian attitude: “How can you expect me to work with you during the day when you sleep with my wife at night? How can you whisper in my ear that we are friends and then go out in public and say terrible things about me? It doesn’t work that way"
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
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Two More Victims Of The Retail Apocalypse: Family Dollar And Coldwater Creek===========Source: Michael Snyder
Did you know that Family Dollar is closing 370 stores? When I learned of this, I was quite stunned. I knew that retailers that serve the middle class were really struggling right now, but I had no idea that things had gotten so bad for low end stores like Family Dollar. In the post-2008 era, dollar stores had generally been one of the few bright spots in the retail industry. As millions of Americans fell out of the middle class, they were looking to stretch their family budgets as far as possible, and dollar stores helped them do that. It would be great if we could say that the reason why Family Dollar is doing so poorly is because average Americans have more money now and have resumed shopping at retailers that target the middle class, but that is not happening. Rather, as you will see later in this article, things just continue to get even worse for Americans at the low end of the income scale.
I was also surprised to learn that Coldwater Creek is closing all of their stores...
Women's clothing retailer Coldwater Creek Inc. on Friday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer said it plans to close its stores by early summer.Coldwater Creek joins other retailers to seek protection from creditors in recent months as consumers keep a lid on spending.The company said it plans to wind down its operations over the coming months and begin going-out-of-business sales in early May, before the traditionally busy Mother's Day weekend.Coldwater Creek, which has 365 stores and employs about 6,000 people, has five stores in Maryland.I remember browsing through a Coldwater Creek with my wife and mother-in-law just last year. At the time, my mother-in-law was excited about getting one of their catalogs. But now Coldwater Creek is going out of business, and all that will be left of that store is a big, ugly, empty space.
Of course the fact that a couple of major retailers are closing stores is nothing new. This kind of thing happens year after year.
But what we are witnessing right now is really quite startling. So many retailers are closing so many stores that it is being called a "retail apocalypse". In a previous article entitled "This Is What Employment In America Really Looks Like…", I detailed how major U.S. retailers have already announced the closing of thousands of stores so far this year. If the economy really was "getting better", this should not be happening.
So why are so many stores closing?
Well, the truth is that it is because the middle class is dying. With each passing day, more Americans lose their place in the middle class and fall into poverty. The following is an excerpt from the story of one man that this has happened to. His recent piece in the Huffington Post was entitled "Next Friday, I'll Be Living In My Car"...
For the past 13 years, I've mostly been doing facility management in several locations across the state. After the position turned into more of a sales role, they laid me off. Since then, I've been looking to find any type of work. I've applied for food stamps, and I'm waiting for that. I'm mostly eating soup from a food pantry.I've been on several interviews -- second, third, fourth interviews -- and just haven't been able to land a job for whatever reason. I definitely have the qualifications and the experience. Last week, I had a job offer that I thought was secure, and we were talking my work schedule. They decided to call me back and go with an assistant rather than a manager.For a number of applications, I've dumbed down my resume. I don't even go with a resume sometimes, just because I don't want them to know that I'm educated and have a master's degree. It shoots me in the foot. They don't want me because they don't think I'm going to stay. I don't blame them. I was making six figures at $60-70 an hour. Now, I'm looking for a $10 an hour job.There are millions upon millions of Americans that can identify with what that man is going through.
Once upon a time, they were living comfortable middle class lifestyles, but now they will take any jobs that they can get.
Just today I came across a statistic that shows the massive shift that is happening in this country. A decade ago, the number of women working outnumbered the number of women on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.
Wow.
How could things have changed so rapidly over the course of just one decade?
And sadly, things continue to go downhill. Every day in America, more good jobs are being sent out of the country or are being replaced by technology. I really like how James Altucher described this trend the other day...
Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.The working class. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, “how are we going to fire all this dead weight?”. 2008 finally gave them the chance. “It was the economy!” they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. I asked many of these CEOs: did you just use that as an excuse to fire people, and they would wink and say, “let’s just leave it at that.”I’m on the board of directors of a temp staffing company with one billion dollars in revenues. I can see it happening across every sector of the economy. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now.Flush.There is so little loyalty in corporate America these days. If you work for a major corporation, you could literally lose your job at any moment. And you can be sure that there is someone above you that is trying to figure out a way to accomplish the tasks that you currently perform much more cheaply and much more efficiently.
Most big corporations don't care if you are personally successful or if you are able to take care of your family. What they want is to get as much out of you as possible for as little money as possible.
This is a big reason why 62 percent of all Americans make $20 or less an hour at this point.
The quality of our jobs is going down, but the cost of living just keeps going up. Just look at what is happening to food prices. For a detailed examination of this, please see my previous article entitled "Why Meat Prices Are Going To Continue Soaring For The Foreseeable Future".
As the middle class slowly dies, less people are able to afford to buy homes. Mortgage originations at major U.S. banks have fallen to a record low, and the percentage of Americans that live in "high-poverty neighborhoods" is rising rapidly...
An estimated 12.4 million Americans live in economically devastated neighborhoods, according to American Community Survey data collected from 2008 to 2012. That's an 11 percent jump from the previous survey, conducted from 2007 to 2011. Even more startling, it's a 72 percent increase in the population of high-poverty neighborhoods since the 2000 Census.If nothing is done about the long-term trends that are slowly strangling the middle class to death, all of this will just be the beginning.
We will see millions more Americans lose their jobs, millions more Americans lose their homes and millions more Americans living in poverty.
The United States is being fundamentally transformed, and very few people are doing much of anything to stand in the way of this transformation. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions are starting to catch up with us, and unless something dramatic is done right away, all of these problems will soon get much, much worse.
New book by one of Billie Sol Estes' attorneys
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted