Adam Dick at RonPaul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Five Minutes Five Issues: War Escalation, Canada Marijuana, FBI Hack, EU Regime, Senate Snoopers
...Issue four.
The Obama administration has worked to accomplish regime change in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. However, the president thinks at least one sort of regime change is wrong. Obama, in a Friday London Telegraph editorial, urged people in Great Britain to vote in June for staying in the European Union (EU).
Given Obama’s history of bad calls on regime changes, maybe British people would do well to consider Obama’s editorial as a factor weighing in favor of voting for a “Brexit.”....
Abby Martin on the evil incarnation in the person of Hillary Clinton
Having removed the reformist President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Washington is now disposing of the reformist President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.
Washington used a federal judge to order Argentina to sacrifice its debt restructuring program in order to pay US vulture funds the full value of defaulted Argentine bonds that the vulture funds had bought for a few pennies on the dollar. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/us-vulture-funds-argentina-bankruptcy These vultures were called “creditors” who had made “loans” regardless of the fact that they were not creditors and had made no loans. They were opportunists after easy money and were used by Washington to get rid of a reformist government.
President Kirchner resisted and, thus, she had to go. Washington concocted a story that Kirchner covered up an alleged Iranian bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994. This implausible fantasy, for which there is no evidence of Iranian involvement, was fed to one of Washington’s agents in the state prosecutor’s office, and a dubious event of 22 years ago was used to clear Kirchner out of the way of the American looting of Argentina.
In Brazil, Washington has used corruption insinuations to get President Rousseff impeached by the lower house. Evidence is not necessary, just allegations. It is no different from “Iranian nukes,” Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” Assad’s “use of chemical weapons,” or in Rousseff’s case merely insinuations. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, notes that Rousseff “hasn’t been accused of anything.” The American-backed elites are simply using impeachment to remove a president who they cannot defeat electorally.
In short, this is Washington’s move against the BRICS. Washington is moving to put into political ....
AND if you thought transgender or androgynous folks were only a product of the West and the Far East, think again. Plenty to be found in Russia as the following documentary shows. I haven't watched the continuing episodes but if the two trans shown in this episode are anything to go by, then Russia has far better looking trans than any you might have seen to date.
Craig Murray at his blog The New McCarthyism – The “Anti-Semitism” Hysteria Gripping the UK Tony Greenstein has been suspended from the Labour Party for alleged anti-Semitism. Tony is 100% Jewish from an Orthodox family. But he is also one of the founders of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and in the current hysterical witch-hunt, being pro-Palestinian rights is sufficient indication of anti-Semitism. Just as making herbal medicine used to make you a witch.
The catalyst for the campaign is that one of the clearest dividing lines between Blairites and Corbyn supporters is Israel. Blairites are unanimously, unequivocally pro-Israel and prepared to defend even the most blatantly disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza, land grabs or checkpoint shootings as self-defence. Corbyn supporters unanimously have more sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and are critical of what they view (and I agree) as the apartheid state Israel has developed. ....
Poor President Barack Obama flew to Saudi Arabia this past week but its ruler, King Salman, was too busy to greet him at Riyadh’s airport.
This snub was seen across the Arab world as a huge insult and violation of traditional desert hospitality. Obama should have refused to deplane and flown home.
Alas, he did not. Obama went to kow-tow to the new Saudi monarch and his hot-headed son, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef. They are furious that Obama has refused to attack Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria’s Assad regime.
They are also angry as hornets that the US may allow relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi royal family, which is widely suspected of being involved in the attack.
Interestingly, survivors of the 34 American sailors killed aboard the USS Liberty when it was attacked by Israeli warplanes in 1967, have been denied any legal recourse.
The Saudis, who are also petrified of Iran, threw a fit, threatening to pull $750 billion of investments from the US. Other leaders of the Gulf sheikdoms sided with the Saudis but rather more discreetly.
Ignoring the stinging snub he had just suffered, Obama assured the Saudis and Gulf monarchs that the US would defend them against all military threats – in effect, reasserting ......
Meet the Bundy women and hear part of the story from their viewpoint. I am sure there are other aspects to the unholy mess but what got me was the horrific behaviour of the law enforcement officers' treatment of the Bundy men.
Jonathan Marshall at ConsortiumNews How the New Yorker mis-reports Syria Only 6 percent of Americans surveyed in a new national poll say they have a lot of confidence in the media — a result driven by a widespread perception that news stories are one-sided or downright inaccurate. That finding came to mind as I heard New Yorker editor David Remnick introduce an April 17 segment on Syria on the New Yorker Radio Hour.
“For the last five years Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has framed the revolution in his country as a conspiracy fueled entirely by foreign powers,” Remnick claimed. “His security agencies have . . . killed hundreds of thousands and displaced possibly half of the entire country.” The New Yorker is famous for its fact checkers, but Remnick evidently failed to consult them. Even a casual listener might have questioned his remarkable attribution of Syria’s entire death toll and refugee crisis to Assad’s security agencies, as if ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other rebel forces were mere innocent bystanders.
In fact, the dead include somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 pro-government forces, comparable to the number of opposition fighters killed, and human rights organizations report that “Opposition armed groups in Syria have indiscriminately attacked civilians in government-held territory with car bombs, mortars, and rockets.”
But what about Remnick’s claim that Assad’s crackdown was driven by paranoia about foreign conspiracies? Like a feature article in his magazine’s April 18 issue, Remnick’s shorthand attempt to portray Assad as insane as well as ruthless fails the test of good journalism.
The article by Ben Taub, which describes efforts by international rights activists to smuggle government documents out of Syria for future war crimes trials, says that Assad “declared his intention to suppress dissent in the brutal tradition of his father” during an address to the Syrian nation on March 30, 2011, shortly after the outbreak of anti-government demonstrations in several cities.
Taub makes his point with a few choice quotes from the speech: “Syria is facing a great conspiracy, whose tentacles extend” to foreign powers that were plotting to destroy the country, [Assad] said. “There is no conspiracy theory,” he added. “There is a conspiracy.” He closed with an ominous directive: “Burying sedition is a national, moral, and religious duty, and all those who can contribute to burying it and do not are part of it.” He emphasized, “There is no compromise or middle way in this.”
Forgotten History The quotes are accurate, but the missing context tells us important facts both about the origins of Syria’s violent conflict and what’s wrong with much advocacy journalism today. Assad certainly did see foreign conspiracies at work in Syria, but he was not paranoid. Unlike most of Taub’s readers, Assad knew that the first military coup in Syria’s modern was instigated in 1949 by agents of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.
That was not the last foreign covert intervention in Syria. In 1957, according to .....
Meet Michael Hanes and Rory Fanning, two war veterans whose consciences have awoken after years of falling victim to government brainwashing.
In my humble opinion, with the recent move of removing/replacing historical figures from the US$20 bill, the powers-that-be are deliberately creating more hatred and division between races in the USA. There was absolutely no need to replace Jackson. The Tubman woman could have been easily added without having to make place with a deletion. This has been done on purpose and deep malice.
Alexander Hart at VDare The Tubman Turncoats: Cuckservatism Inc. Has Learned To Love Big Sister ou would think Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill would have provoked a massive conservative backlash. But you would be underestimating the extent and speed of Conservatism Inc.’s transformation into Cuckservatism Inc.—submitting to, and even slobbering over, the very forces it is nominally pledged to resist.
Some individuals, notably Donald Trump, along with some of his high profile supporters and sympathizers like Pat Buchanan, Ben Carson, Greta Van Susteren, and Ann Coulter did indeed oppose Lew’s move.
However, when Donald Trump called the move “pure political correctness,” Red State’s Leon Wolf [Email him] said that it was “evident that he is once again signaling to his white supremacist basis of support” [Trump’s Hypocrisy on Harriet Tubman “Political Correctness” Proves that he is Actively Courting Racists, April 21, 2016]....
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of the American People,” there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman.
“An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War—Andrew Jackson.....
Thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Tuesday in support of an army medic who was caught on video last month apparently executing a wounded Palestinian suspect following a knife attack in the occupied West Bank.
The medic, Sgt. Elor Azaria, 19, was charged with manslaughter by an Israeli military court on Monday for firing a single bullet into the head of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, killing him, on March 24 in the city of Hebron. Sharif was one of two young Palestinians suspected of lightly wounding an Israeli soldier in an area of the city inhabited by Jewish settlers.
Video of the incident recorded by a Palestinian witness and posted online by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, showed that Sharif was lying prone on the ground, already immobilized by previous gunshots, when Azaria cocked his gun and shot him....
As 2015 came to a close, the Grand Ballroom of the Conrad Hotel in Manhattan presented a diverse tableau: Around the meticulously set tables sat Muslim women wearing colorful headscarves with oriental motifs, African-American clergymen from Queens, Jewish students from a Turkish charter school and veteran New York state politicians....
Abstract This paper seeks to establish that for citizens to turn their bellicose state into one that espouses peace, they must be aware of the operation not only of their Public State, but also of their Deep State. Moreover, this paper establishes that The Deep State acts for reasons that are not always readily apparent and in ways that are not always apparently legal. On some occasions, The Deep State even acts in ways that could be considered treasonous. The Public State then lies to cover up the actions of The Deep State. Insightful citizens understand government lies, but may not be aware of the operation of The Deep State. This paper argues that in order for citizens to turn belligerent governments into peaceful ones, they must understand that a powerful clue has been emitted whenever the government narrative doesn’t make sense. Therefore, under these circumstances, the patriotic act is disbelief of the government narrative thereby rendering the actions of The Deep State dysfunctional. Finally, this paper examines the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in light of past “Deep Events” that include the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 2005 London Bombing.
Charlie Hebdo Incident Details According to a recent internet search, at least five major mainstream media outlets produced a timeline of the Charlie Hebdo events. On January 7, the date of this murderous event, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) produced a timeline of events complete with a map and audio of an English-speaking witness.[1]The CBC article includes that the gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they entered the Hebdo office. The Telegraph Newspaper in London and the International Business Times in New York City followed suit on January 8th with their timelines.[2]The Guardian, The Independent, EuroNews, and CNN all published timelines, also. This is the most basic set of events in all of the timelines:
Can't believe how Americans' votes mean nothing, nil, zero, crap! Will Trump be cheated out of a rightful win? Will both the parties make sure that Clinton gets elected no matter what? The GOP knows that only Trump has a chance against Hillary but yet they won't give it to him - and that should tell all those who are still blind and deaf to the truth that the outcome of the 2016 election was determined many years prior by the actual owners and rulers of the USA.
Turkey on Sunday denied claims that its military opened fire on Syrian refugees fleeing clashes between Islamic State group jihadists and rebels in northern Syria. Human Rights Watch on Friday accused Turkish border guards of shooting at the refugees as they approached the border in Syria's Aleppo province....
From TelSur Rosario Dawson Arrested, Sanders Tax Returns Show Modest Income Cops cuffed Dawson during the Democracy Spring protests, and a report shows that Clinton made more in hours than Sanders in an entire year.
Actress and pro-Bernie Sanders activist Rosario Dawson has been arrested on Friday night, pop culture website TMZ reports.
Dawson was among about a dozen people arrested at the Democracy Spring rally going on in Washington, D.C.....
Azerbaijan and Israel are strategic allies. I had the privilege of laying the foundations for that alliance in 1993, shortly after Azerbaijan obtained independence for the second time. The first time was in 1918, when the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic became the first secular Muslim republic in history.
At the beginning of April, fierce fighting erupted between the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies in the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. A tenuous cease-fire has since been declared. As in any region entangled in a complex web of international interests, the international community is expected to play a major role in the short- and long-term future of this strip of land. Now, however, when Azerbaijan needs all the diplomatic help it can muster, Israel is not rushing to its aid.
The alliance between the two countries has a firm basis in geopolitical realpolitik. Azerbaijan takes special care to maintain its status as a secular state, while its two large neighbors, Turkey and Iran, are best characterized as Islamist regimes with imperial ambitions. Iran especially has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that a country on its border, particularly one with a majority Shiite population, maintains a modern Western, secular lifestyle. Azerbaijan also takes care to uphold a cautious policy of neutrality toward the two regional powerbrokers, Turkey and Russia, even while Ankara and Moscow are engaged in a heated diplomatic, near military, conflict....
If there were any doubts that Hillary Clinton favors a neoconservative foreign policy, her performance at Thursday’s debate should have laid them to rest. In every meaningful sense, she is a neocon and – if she becomes President – Americans should expect more global tensions and conflicts in pursuit of the neocons’ signature goal of “regime change” in countries that get in their way.
Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other....
Ari Berman at TheNation Clinton and Sanders Sue Arizona Over 5-Hour Lines in the March Primary Arizona’s election problems showed the disastrous consequences of gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Alejandra Ruiz went to vote on her lunch break in downtown Phoenix during Arizona’s March 22 primary. A registered Democrat of Mexican-American origin, Ruiz had recently moved to Maricopa County. Because downtown Phoenix had only one polling place for thousands of residents and the line was too long, she decided to vote at a different polling place after work. But things were even worse when she arrived at the West Thomas Baptist Church polling place at 6:30, located in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood on the city’s west side.
Ruiz waited nearly six hours to vote, finally casting her ballot at 12:07 am, more than five hours after the polls closed. When she left there were still at least 100 people still waiting in line to vote. ...
As explosions from detonated mines continued in the background a Syrian general confirmed in some detail an ugly truth: Washington and its close allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel backed the ISIS takeover and destruction of Palmyra.
Most of the weapons ISIS used were from the US , with some ammunition from Israel . ISIS had US Hummers, spinning explosive projectiles and military rations from the US , Turkey and Saudi Arabia .
That should not have been a surprise. US officials admitted in 2014 that their allies Turkey , the Saudis and Qatar were backing every single armed group in Syria , in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian Government led by President Bashar al Assad.
Our group of 30 journalists visited liberated Palmyra on 14 April, 18 days after the Syrian Army freed the historic city from a ten month reign of terror. Syrian bulldozers were cleaning debris while Russian sappers continued exploding mines. Three thousand had been cleared and another 30 exploded in the two hours we were there.
Major protests have gripped South Africa in recent months as political forces have emerged to give voice to a growing discontent with the government and ruling party. Beneath the surface of these demonstrations organized around legitimate grievances, however, there’s an undercurrent of political manipulation.
South Africa and its ruling African National Congress (ANC) party have been targeted for destabilization due to the country’s burgeoning relationship with China and other non-Western nations, most obviously typified by South Africa’s inclusion in BRICS, the association of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Last year, for example, China surpassed the United States and European Union as South Africa’s largest trade partner, and the ANC has been hard at work promoting further trade cooperation. Answering questions in the National Assembly, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa explained: “We trade more effectively with China because the relationship is based on win-win; mutual benefit that they can get out of the relationship and that we can get out the relationship.”....
Felicity Arbuthnot at Information ClearingHouse ....HRW obtained a list of one hundred and forty people, including young children, said to have died in the last few months “from lack of food and medicine.” The names have been withheld for fear that ISIS, which forbids the population making contact outside the city “would punish the relatives of the dead.”
Residents are reported to be eating bread made from flour from ground date stones and soup made from grass. Food still available is sold at staggering prices. “A 50-kilogram sack of flour goes for US$750, and a bag of sugar for $500.” In Baghdad, just seventy kilometres away: “ the same amount of flour costs $15 and of sugar $40 … each day starving children arrive at the local hospital … most foodstuffs are no longer available at any price … the hospital has run out of baby food.”....
A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.
That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.......
when Cons were power. Making excuses for supplying $15 B worth of arms to the most disgusting nation on this our good Earth, will not cut it, definitely not with "thinking" Canadians. Where was Trudeau and the rest of his hypocrites when Harper+Cons were approving the deal? Are the Libs trying to get away from this major sin by pushing the entire blame on the Cons? Won't work. Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely. Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite, a liar and worst of all he is a greedy, lying ham trying to appear like he is doing the "respectable" thing by keeping to an agreement.
Harper+Cons lost because of Israel and now Trudeau+Libs will lose because of Saudi Arabia. Are our Canadian politicians fast becoming as utterly disgusting as those we often criticize from down South? Needless to say, I am totally in sync with the following comment from Man-O-Man at the last link.
Man-O-Man I couldn't agree more with Daniel Turp. This deal is a travesty and a huge mistake for Canada. I don't care about the 3,000 jobs in London. Let them join the 70,000 jobless in Alberta due to Saudi Arabia controlled oil prices. All parties are guilty on this - even the NDP who were told by the union in London to back off criticism of the deal. We need a socially responsible party that isn't controlled by unions in this country.
From CBC As Liberals defend Saudi arms deal, U.S. report highlights human rights concerns Canada is applying a 'double standard' when it comes to human rights, Amnesty International says
The Liberal government continued to defend Canada's $15-billion sale of light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia as "a matter of principle," just as a new report highlighting the U.S government's concerns with widespread human rights violations in the kingdom was released this week.
"Fundamentally, this issue is a matter of principle," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from London, Ont., steps away from the company supplying the LAVs to Saudi Arabia. "The principle at play here is that Canada's word needs to mean something in the international community."
Trudeau maintained his government would respect the contract even if it was signed in 2014 under Stephen Harper's Conservatives.
"It is important that people know that when they sign a deal with Canada, that when they sign a commercial agreement, a change in government isn't going to lead to that contract being ripped up," Trudeau said on Thursday.
However, a new report highlighting the U.S government's concerns with human rights violations in Saudi Arabia could give critics of the contract more ammunition to put pressure on Canada to cancel it........
Neil Macdonald at CBC On Saudi arms deal, the new boss in Ottawa is just like the old boss Well. If further proof was needed that the sunny new regime in Ottawa is perfectly capable of behaving just like the un-sunny previous regime, we now have it, in a memo that was stamped "Secret," then rather inconveniently laid bare in the Federal Court of Canada.
Besides, anti-tank weapons and heavy machine-guns don't kill people; people kill people.
With a single checkmark, Dion concurred with everything in the memo.
Among other things, Dion explicitly endorses Saudi Arabia's ruinous military campaign in Yemen, the victims of which, according to the United Nations, are overwhelmingly civilian....
Daniel Turp filed for a judicial review of the deal last month in Federal Court, hoping a judge would block the sale due to the country's human rights violations.
Both the pieces here from John Pilger are a MUST READ. After reading the one at the link below, read his article "A World War has Begun: Break the Silence" Pay close attention to what the author says on how USA+gang has circled China, a nation with a Billion+ population which is aligned with India, another nation with a Billion+ population and both allied with superpower Russia. Can we still be so blind to presume that we are not already well into WW3? If it's nukes you are looking for to break your nonchalance, they are likely coming soon.
Trump and Clinton - Censoring the Unpalatable ....My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a "review" and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout's "editorial committee". The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:
Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama ... The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system... As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope".
The "editorial committee" clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme danger to the world. Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my work to a "process of revision" meant she had to take it off her "publication docket". Such is the gatekeeper's way with words.
At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent. Like Obama's "hope", Clinton's gender is no more than a suitable facade.....
Craig Murray at his blog Goldman Sachs: Just 5 Billion dollar Fine Compared to 13 Billion Dollar Taxpayer Bailout Goldman Sachs aggressively sold sub-prime packages to investors as a first class product, while at the same time laying equally aggressive bets that those packages would fail. That is not my analysis; it is one of the things they have admitted as part of the deal in the United States that means that, in return for a 5 billion dollar fine, yet again no corrupt and fraudulent bankers are going to jail.
The ultimate irony is that the 5 billion dollar fine is dwarfed by the 13 billion dollar taxpayer bailout they received after the banks’ immoral antics caused massive economic collapse. So the net result of their appalling behaviour has been that they collect not only the profit from those bets the system would collapse, but an eight billion dollar net payment from ordinary taxpayers thrown in. Which eight billion dollars has been just a contribution to the bonuses and partner remuneration which have continued to bulge in their over-stuffed pockets since 2008, uninterrupted by the crash, thanks to the generosity of poor taxpayers struggling to balance their personal budgets...
Matt Agorist at FreeThought Project A Single Delaware Address is Home to 200,000 Shell Companies — Including 2 of Hillary Clinton’s Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama disingenuously called for international tax reform in the wake of the massive leak of millions of documents from Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. In what amounted to a complete dog and pony show, meant to appease the masses, Obama said the Panama Papers illustrated the immense scale of tax avoidance by Fortune 500 companies, which is estimated at trillions of dollars worldwide.
The calls for reform ring hollow as Obama remained conveniently mum on the companies operating within the US providing a tax haven for the world’s elite.
The words of Andrew Penney, managing director of Rothschild & Co., were extremely clear to international investors, as noted in a written draft for a presentation in San Francisco in which he wrote that the U.S. “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.”
One of these such havens is a single address in Wilmington, Delaware. 1209 North Orange Street, according to the Washington Free Beacon, has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.
What sets this shell company factory aside from the rest....
Ongoing protests in Washington DC that the MSM are trying to push under the carpet. If not for the Alternative Media (AM) hardly anybody would know what's going on in the streets of Washington DC.
Paul Craig Roberts at his blog Washington Continues To Destroy Latin American Reformers Currently, Washington is conducting operations against Latin American presidents who tried to represent their own peoples instead of American business interests and Washington’s foreign policy. Washington is trying to unseat and indict President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, President Evo Morales in Bolivia, President Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Washington has succeeded in getting the president of Argentina, Chistina Kirchner, out of office, and is now seeking to have her indicted. To round off its attack on Brazil’s reformist political party, Washington is orchestrating crimes with which to tar and indict Rousseff’s predecesor, Lula da Silva.
Everyone on Washington’s Latin American list of people to be destroyed is a far better person than anyone in Washington. Washington’s Latin American targets have far more integrity, are tainted with far less corruption, and are far more committed to those who voted for them than anyone in Washington.
The danger that these reformers face is due to their innocence. They naively believe in good will between classes. They think that the rich elites, who are well connected to Washington, and that Washington itself, will accept democratic outcomes.
They believe this despite the fact that Washington, using the Spanish elite that Hugo Chavez left unmolested, overthrew Chavez. Chavez had to be rescued from Venezuela’s Spanish elite, who are .....
Translated by Joelle El-Khoury from Kamal Sheikho's original Former IS captive: Calling it a genocide is not enough Janet and Immanuel decided to speak about their daughter Mary, who had been captured by the Islamic State more than a year ago. They sat together holding a large photo of the entire family, whose surname they preferred to withhold. Eyes filled with tears, Janet said in a sad voice, “This picture was taken a month before she was captured. We were attending a concert and she insisted that we take a group photo. She looked stunning that night.”
Mary’s family is from the area of Tal Shamiram, in the southwest neighborhood of Tell Tamer, in Hasaka city, where she was captured along with 234 others, including her parents, by IS militants. The abduction followed a major IS offensive on Assyrian villages at dawn on Feb. 23, 2015.
On Nov. 7, 2015, IS freed 37 Christians, including Immanuel, after nine months of detention. He told Al-Monitor that prior to his release, he “asked IS officials about my wife and Mary, but to no avail.” He contented himself with believing that they would soon be freed as well....
The town was retaken by Russian-backed Syrian forces and their allies earlier in the week.
Some 21 Christians were murdered when almost 300 Christians remained in the city after IS captured it last August, said the head of the Syrian Orthodox Church.
They included three women, Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II told the BBC.
He said some died whilst trying to escape while the others were killed for breaking the terms of their "dhimmi contracts", which require them to submit to the rule of Islam....
Patrick Cockburn at CounterPunch The Corruption Revealed in the Panama Papers Opened the Door to Isis Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid Under Cheops‘ pyramid‘ Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions?
The message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions – and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.
Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men....
As an Economic Hit Man (EHM) in the 1970s I spent a great deal of time in Panama. I hate to admit it, but I helped forge the system that has now been exposed in the Panama Papers. It is a system of legalized crimes. How else can we describe it?
This EHM system has created a global economy where 62 individuals have as much wealth as half the world’s population, big corporations enjoy the airports and highways, fire and police departments, school systems, and other infrastructure of countries like the United States without paying for them and where governments are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals. The hard-earned tax dollars of the average US citizen finances the infrastructure and social services that benefit the very rich and their corporations while they shelter their incomes in tax havens.
Although the tax sheltering schemes disclosed in the Panama Papers were developed in the 1970s – during my time as an EHM in that country – the foundations of the system go back more than a century. In 1903 President Teddy Roosevelt fomented a rebellion to wrest Panama from Colombia so that the US could build the Panama Canal. JP Morgan and Company was appointed as the new country’s official fiscal agent. Soon after that, Panama passed laws that enabled John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company to avoid US taxes and regulations by registering its ships in Panama. It was just the beginning. . .
I was sent to Panama in the early 1970s to convince its head of state...........
The Guardian has a new section titled “The Web We Want.” It opened April 11 and currently has 11 articles running on it. Its face is festooned with images of gently smiling people from different ages, sexes and ethnic groups, making us think this is going to be a discussion about pluralism, inclusiveness – freedom.
And in a sense we’d be right. This is intended to be a discussion about all those things. Or rather about how to persuade people to give up the last named in some ill-defined “defence” of the other two.
It doesn’t say who the “we” referred to might be. The assumption is it means all of us. The readers. Members of the human race. But of course it doesn’t. There’s been no poll, no referendum to ascertain public opinion. The “we” in this sense is purely a gesture, or a rhetorical flourish toward democracy. The discussion that follows is neither democratic nor diverse. There are no shades of opinion on offer. No debates between those with different views on what the Web should be. ....
because of those personal "special" favors she does for you. What kind of a person does that make you? A1 Scumbag! US Senator Lindsey Graham is that kind of a scumbag and so also are the voters who keep him in the Senate. The special "favors" the despicable Graham will get, will of course be, the kind that the Panama Papers are all about.
A top US senator is floating an ambitious proposal to rebuild Egypt and other Middle East trouble spots, prompting congressional soul-searching into whether the region's strongmen have any desire to change.
The chairman of the Senate Appropriations panel on foreign aid, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., laid out his vision for a "Marshall Plan" in an April 7 briefing with reporters following his trip to the region. As a preliminary step, he said he would work within his subcommittee on emergency funding of "multiple billions" of dollars for Egypt and several other countries.
"One thing I will talk to [Democratic counterpart Patrick] Leahy [D-Vt.] about is an emergency appropriation that will help Egypt, Jordan and probably Lebanon to deal with the stresses they're facing," Graham told reporters. "And we need to get some money into the system to help Israel create some capabilities to shore up borders that have been compromised."
Graham made the remarks following a congressional delegation he led to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, during which he and several other lawmakers met with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and other national leaders. Separately, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., also met with Sisi on April 7.
"I was stunned at how things have deteriorated," Graham said, notably in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel. "If you go to Egypt and don't realize they need some help yesterday, you're making a huge mistake."
Graham did not offer specifics about his proposed emergency appropriation, which would go beyond the $1.3 billion in military aid and $150 million in economic assistance that the State Department has requested for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. Several senators who went on the trip with him also argued for beefed up support for Cairo.....
Where are the really nasty ones, the ones responsible for creating wars for profit? Where are the names of Americans and Britishers profiteering from unnecessary wars? The puppet-masters dumping this stink on us, want us to believe that those foul people actually believe in paying their taxes? Tell me another! The ultimate Question should be: Why was this leak kept under wraps for over a year in spite of the files being shared by 400 journalists in countless countries? Are journalists that inefficient that it took 400 of them over a year to write one measly article which was then copied/pasted passed around to lazy functionaries at other MSM outlets. Believe you me, this is yet another nail in the MSM's coffin. Good riddance. What a load of crap the Soros scumbags have offloaded and keep offloading. Really and truly vomit-inducing. Soros has created umpteen number of NGOs to escape taxes and at the same time use them to create trouble in every corner of the world. "Avaaz" is one of the nastiest of his entities, imagine a satanic entity operating in the guise of an angel. Very demonic indeed. The first time I saw something from "Avaaz" I could smell the stink coming at me straight off from the web page. I am pretty good at smelling out EVIL, even if I do say so myself. My expensive champagne bottle (kept on hold awaiting Soros' end) is screaming to be opened and I keep telling it "wait, wait, it's almost time." Let it be soon, dear God.
Below are some of the opinions and views, all from the Alternative Media, on the Soros-USAid crap dumped on us.. It's not worth it to read anything from the MSM as whatever it says is usually totally RUBBISH. In the case of this latest crap, the scumbags have plastered Putin's pic all over their front pages when, lo and behold, the papers don't even implicate him personally BUT have a few names of his friends and that's it. Nothing else! The MSM, with this latest gimmick, has lost every shred of any credibility it probably had with some of the sheeple. Guardian was somewhat okay during the Snowden leak but has gone downhill pretty fast since then.
James Corbett below has done a great job in showing us how agenda-driven and ridiculous Guardian has become.
A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted “leak” of such data to several NATO supporting news organization and a US government financed “Non Government Organization” is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor....
Already some 16 month ago Ken Silverstein reported for Vice on a big shady shell company provider, Mossak Fonseca in Panama. (Pierre Omidyar’s Intercept, for which Silverstein was then working, refused to publish the piece.) Yves Smith published several big stories about the Mossak Fonseca money laundering business. Silverstein also repeated the well known fact that ....
And, then there's one of the MSM's voices, Australia's Channel4 (Four Corners) all super excited about the Much Ado About Finding the Lowest Few of the 1%.
AND, of course, there are those of us who might give a thought or two that this could be something orchestrated by Russia. However, we shouldn't give it more than those two thoughts, especially now that the Brookings Institute wants us to lean that way.
As I wrote on Monday, ever since I started reading about the Panama Papers “leak” something kept rubbing me the wrong way. From the absence of any well known, politically powerful Americans on the list, to the anonymous nature of “John Doe” as whistleblower and the clownish reporting from Soros and USAID affiliated organizations, the whole thing stunk from the start.
The first plausible theory I came across attempting to explain the strangeness of it all was proposed by Craig Murray, and it basically went something like this. The leaker is a real whistleblower, but he placed the information in the wrong hands, therefore the organizations and journalists reporting on the story were not giving us the whole truth. Here’s some of that theory from the post, Are Corporate Gatekeepers Protecting Western Elites from the Leaked Panama Papers?....
The one bright spot in all the crap shoved on us, is the nugget implicating the smug David Cameron who is now in piping hot water. Will it bring his downfall? I saw someone commenting somewhere that if shagging a pig hasn't done anything to Cameron, this likely won't bring him down. I tend to agree, but we can still hope, can't we?
AND, just in case you don't know who those might be, they are the "Coalition of the Unwilling To kill jihadis" or better known as USA/EU/Israel/KSA+gang.
Robert Fisk at Independent Why is David Cameron so silent on the recapture of Palmyra from the clutches of Isis? In the end, it was the Syrian army - and its Hizballah chums from Lebanon, and the Iranians, and the Russians - who drove the Isis murderers out of Palmyra The biggest military defeat that Isis has suffered in more than two years. The recapture of Palmyra, the Roman city of the Empress Zenobia. And we are silent. Yes, folks, the bad guys won, didn't they? Otherwise, we would all be celebrating, wouldn't we?
Less than a week after the lost souls of the 'Islamic Caliphate' destroyed the lives of more than 30 innocent human beings in Brussels, we should - should we not? - have been clapping our hands at the most crushing military reverse in the history of Isis. But no. As the black masters of execution fled Palmyra this weekend, Messers Obama and Cameron were as silent as the grave to which Isis have dispatched so many of their victims. He who lowered our national flag in honour of the head-chopping king of Arabia (I'm talking about Dave, of course) said not a word.
As my long-dead colleague on the Sunday Express, John Gordon, used to say, makes you sit up a bit, doesn't it? Here are the Syrian army, backed, of course, by Vladimir Putin's Russkies, chucking the clowns of Isis out of town, and we daren't utter a single word to say well done.
After a Russian commercial airliner was downed over Egypt’s Sinai last October, Western media reported that the Islamic State bombing was retaliation against Russian airstrikes in Syria. The killing of 224 people, mostly Russian tourists on holiday, was matter-of-factly treated as an act of war by a fanatical group without an air force resorting to terrorism as a way to strike back.
Yet, Western militaries have killed infinitely more innocent civilians in Muslim lands than Russia has. Then why won’t Western officials and media cite retaliation for that Western violence as a cause of terrorist attacks on New York, Paris and Brussels?
Instead, there’s a fierce determination not to make the same kinds of linkages that the press made so easily when it was Russia on the receiving end of terror. ...
....Before the major invasion and air wars in Iraq and Libya of the past 15 years, the 1950s was the era of America’s most frequent, and mostly covert, involvement in the Middle East. The Eisenhower administration wanted to contain both Soviet influence and Arab nationalism, which revived the quest for an independent Arab nation. After a series of coups and counter-coups, Syria returned to democracy in 1955, leaning towards the Soviets.....
....Wading into the psychology of why someone turns to terrorism is an unenviable task. The official Western view is that Islamist extremists merely hate modernity and secularism. That might be their motive in wanting to backwardly transform their own societies by removing Western influence. But it’s not what they say when they claim responsibility for striking inside the West.
To ignore their words and dismiss their violent reaction to the long and ongoing history of Western intervention may shield Americans and Europeans from their partial responsibility for these atrocities. But it also provides cover for the continuing interventions, which in turn will surely produce more terrorism.....
Corey Schink and Mike Tutundjian Armenia vs Azerbaijan, East vs West: Nagorno-Karabakh crisis and the NATO-Israeli connection Victoria 'F**K the EU' Nuland's visit to Azerbaijan last year had analysts wondering whether something was afoot. While Nuland surely wouldn't visit a country in order to oversee destabilization along Russia's border (she's never done than that before, right?), a heated conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan would do just that. The sudden and violent eruption of this 'frozen conflict' at a time of vastly improving Iranian-Azeri-Russian economic and military cooperation provides both the means and motive for NATO/Israeli forces - an opportunity to destabilize Russia and Iran in one blow.
Historical background Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at war two times over the Nagorno-Karabakh region - once in 1918 and the second time in 1988, in the last years of the Soviet Union. Azeris began massacring Armenians in Azerbaijan, causing a large number of people to flee. Then they attacked the ethnically Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan with a modernized military, attacking people trying to defend themselves with hunting rifles or whatever they could get hold of. The Azeris blockaded Nagorno-Karabakh and all transport and shipments into Armenia proper. Turkey joined the blockade, while Georgia was having its own civil war with Abkhazia, making border crossing there very difficult. So the only border Armenia had that wasn't blockaded (or impaired) was its Iranian one. That blockade is still in place today, although the Georgian border has generally calmed down. ....
Robert Fisk at Independent Echoes of Stalinism abound in the very modern Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict The same old enemies are clanking around the black mountains of Karabagh: Russian power, Turkish expansionism and Armenian nationalism ...Now I have to say that I always thought that the current war in Nagorno-Kharabagh was a particularly dirty conflict. When it was rekindled with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1988, one of Yerevan’s excuses for “taking it back” was that it contained some of the nation’s oldest churches. True. But there are plenty of Turkic historical roots in Karabagh. In much the same way, eastern Europe contains some of Teutonic Germany’s oldest buildings, and much of the Balkans boasts fine Ottoman Turkish architecture. But the ruins of ancient heritage make a very dodgy excuse for war.
By the time I was covering the Karabagh war in the early 1990s, Armenian militia bands were murdering Azeri villagers in massacres eerily similar – though on a smaller scale – to those which occurred during Turkey’s genocide of the Armenian people in 1915; no wonder the Armenians in the capital of Yerevan denied these well-documented modern killings – those at Khojali in 1992, for example – for they undermined the victimhood of the Armenian people.....
How stingy a friend Britain proved to be when - following much political grand-standing and calls for a very 'humanitarian intervention' against the Gaddafi regime in Libya - it could only muster £50,000 towards Libya’s reconstruction for 2016.
Following what can only be described as a brutal leveling of Libya’s infrastructure in the name of ‘democracy building’ in 2011, the very powers that volunteered their military assistance so that liberty’s flame could shine brighter in North Africa (as the story goes) have completed deserted the Libyan people.
Let me repeat that ridiculous figure one more time so it can truly sink in: £50,000! £50,000… Unless Libyans possess magical powers by way of making money stretch a long ways, I’m not quite sure what Britain’s donations will achieve - if not maybe hurt Libyans’ pride....
From WashingtonPost Saudi Arabia passes Russia as world’s third biggest military spender Global military spending reached almost $1.7 trillion in 2015, marking a year-on-year increase for the first time since 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms expenditure around the world.
The United States remained far and away the top spender, which despite a dip from 2014, accounted for more than a third of total global spending. It was followed by China and then, perhaps surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, which supplanted Russia in third place. (The figure for China in the chart below is based on a SIPRI estimate.).....
Eric Draitser at MintPress BRICS Under Attack: The Empire’s Destabilizing Hand Reaches Into South Africa An undercurrent of political manipulation pulses beneath the surface of popular South African demonstrations organized around legitimate grievances. But who’s pulling the strings? And why?
Major protests have gripped South Africa in recent months as political forces have emerged to give voice to a growing discontent with the government and ruling party. Beneath the surface of these demonstrations organized around legitimate grievances, however, there’s an undercurrent of political manipulation.
South Africa and its ruling African National Congress (ANC) party have been targeted for destabilization due to the country’s burgeoning relationship with China and other non-Western nations, most obviously typified by South Africa’s inclusion in BRICS, the association of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Last year, for example, China surpassed the United States and European Union as South Africa’s largest trade partner, and the ANC has been hard at work promoting further trade cooperation. Answering questions in the National Assembly, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa explained: “We trade more effectively with China because the relationship is based on win-win; mutual benefit that they can get out of the relationship and that we can get out the relationship.”
But recent protests against the ANC government have threatened the ruling tripartite coalition of the ANC, along with the South African Communist Party and Congress of South African Trade Unions.
...The deliberate US (Zionist)-EU-Saudi strategy to divide and conquer Iraq initially involved working closely with Sunni feudal tribal leaders and other extremists to counter the rising power of pro-Iranian Shia. They promoted a policy of fragmenting the country with the Kurds dominating in the North, the Sunnis in the center and the Shia in the south (the so-called Joseph Biden-Leslie Gelb Plan of national dismemberment and ethnic cleansing). The rationale was to create a weak central authority completely under US-EU tutelage and loose group of fragmented subsistence fiefdoms in what had been the most advanced secular Arab republic.
Despite pouring billions of dollars in arms from the US to create a puppet-colonial Iraqi ‘national army’, the Saudis and Israelis pursued their own policy of financing sectors of the Kurds and violent Sunni opposition – with the latter forming the original mass base of ISIS.
As the US-client Shia regime in Baghdad focused on stealing billions while killing or exiling hundreds of thousands of educated Sunnis, Christians and other secular Iraqis from the capital, the morale of its US-puppet troops plummeted. With the entire experienced and nationalist Iraqi officer core purged (slaughtered or driven into hiding), the new puppet officers ....
From ChristianPost Father Thomas Uzhunnalil Not Crucified by ISIS but Alive and 'Safe,' Indian Minister Says Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has said Catholic priest Tom Uzhunnalil, who was previously feared to have been crucified by the Islamic State on Good Friday, is alive, safe, and efforts are being organized for his release. Catholic Bishops' Conference of India spokesman Father Gyanprakash Topno told the Press Trust of India that Swaraj met with CBCI delegates and told them that reports claiming Uzhunnalil has been killed are not true....
A smarty-pants somebody has spliced and diced Nigel Farage slamming into the EU and shown actual scenes to match everything Farage states in his comments to the EU reps. I couldn't find Part 1, but these 2 vids says and shows aplenty. We ARE living in interesting times. We are seeing the death of the EU - a failed enterprise from Day One.
A previously unseen video of one of Britain's most infamous spies describing his career as a Soviet agent has been uncovered by the BBC.
The tape is of Kim Philby giving a secret lecture to the Stasi, the East German Intelligence Service, in 1981.
It is the first time the ex-MI6 officer can be seen talking about his life as a spy from his recruitment to his escape.
He describes his career rising up the ranks of MI6 whilst providing its secrets to the Soviet Union's KGB.
He ends with advice to the East German spies. "Dear Comrades."
With those two words spoken in an impeccable upper-class English accent, one of Britain's most famous spies and its greatest traitor begins a masterclass in betrayal to a select audience of East German spies.
Philby's hour-long address was preserved on video tape and never seen in public until now.
The BBC unearthed it in the official archives of the Stasi in Berlin.
It was never made for public consumption (and the grainy video and poorly synchronised sound shows the....
Don't let the Empire's propaganda machine mislead you on what's happening in Brazil. Everything portrayed by the MSM is a farce, a sham, a gigantic lie and is meant to brainwash us into thinking that foreign hands (USA+gang) are not involved in the present political upheaval in Brazil. The truth is something else altogether. The Empire's evil machinery is targeting the BRICS furiously from every kind of minion willing to obey the Empire. All but India is under attack and that's because greedy India allowed itself to be bribed with free military arsenal and other bribes. In this post, I have collected items relevant only to Brazil.
Does Brazil have internal problems and corruption amongst the politicians. Definitely. But then, which country is immune from those sins? Let Brazil handle their own problems and arrive at their own solutions in due time. Taking opportunity of people's discontent with their government to destabilize the legitimate power in office is exactly what leads to further misery as we have been seeing in each and every case that the self-appointed World Policeman has poked its long nose into.
You may remember that back in August Brazilians took to the streets of cities and towns across the country for anti-government protests, trying to oust Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. This came on the heels of a corruption scandal that has embroiled politician from her workers party, as well as a weakening currency and rising inflation in Brazil. The forces behind those protests were mostly portrayed to be populist, but our guest today did some digging and found that if you look behind the curtain there's a more complex story to be told.
Now joining us to share that story is Michael Fox. He's the co-author of the book Latin America's Turbulent Transitions, and he joins us now from Quito, Ecuador. Thanks for joining us, Michael.
MICHAEL FOX: Thanks so much for having me.
DESVARIEUX: So Michael, let's get right into it. Who's behind these anti-Dilma marches in Brazil, and will you please just cite specific evidence proving that we can make these sort of links?
FOX: I mean, the most important thing here is what we're basically talking about, and the folks that were on the ground in August, are essentially the Brazilian Tea Party. There's several different groups. There's the Free Brazil movement, which is a group of youth, student, kind of neoliberal activists that really champion Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ideology. There's Students for Liberty [and Come] to the Streets, which also have kind of funding from different sources, from the Koch brothers. And even the head of Come to the Streets I think is the former--he receives financing from the [sturdy] foundation, and is also the head of AmBev. So it's a major corporation we're talking about here.
There's Revolted Online, which is another--these are all kind of online Tea Party groups. Revolted Online is a former evangelical, and that's actually a huge connection between the United States and Brazil, the evangelical movement. And they've actually been calling for the overthrow of Dilma. And as of even recently were calling for military intervention, if she wasn't going to step down.
DESVARIEUX: Just quickly let our viewers know, what's their motivation? Why do this?
FOX: You know, obviously things in Brazil aren't good right now. The economy is kind of faltering, the real compared to the dollar is increasing, it's inflating. But really what we're talking about are twelve years of Workers' Party poverty alleviation programs. And this is the flip side of what they actually want. So they're really out against the PT, they're out against the President Dilma. What's interesting however is that when these marches happened in August they were actually much smaller than the marches that happened in March.
DESVARIEUX: Okay. But just give us a sense of what's motivating--like the Koch brothers, for example. Why do they want Dilma out?
FOX: I mean, it's the same things that were happening in the United States, right. We're looking at what are the, you know, they're trying to push free market policies. They're trying to push, we don't want the big government. It's the same thing that we're talking about in the U.S., that folks are really talking about Brazil, these are some of the connections that are really, really strong. And on the flip side what you had after these marches were taking place, just four or five days later, you had nearly a million people out in the streets in pro-government marches that were obviously there in support of the Dilma government, in support of the democratic process.
Because the thing about these opposition marches which is really.......
While international media focuses on Brazil’s mass demonstrations against corruption, efforts behind the façade precipitate regime change, restoration of a pre-Lula order, and a struggle against the BRICS nations. The U.S. feels threatened by an era of multi-polarity, which deeply implicates China, and other emerging economies.
In August 2016, Rio de Janeiro should host South America’s first-ever Olympic games, which were supposed to be its great coming out carnival, even amid campaigns against the Zika virus. Only a few years ago, Brazil exemplified the BRIC dream of rapid growth. Now it is coping with its most severe recession in a century. But there’s worse ahead.
When Brazil’s first working-class President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003, the poor nation was on the verge of an economic implosion. President Lula’s center-left Workers’ Party (PT) and its coalition won the markets with conservative fiscal policy and lifted millions from poverty, while living standards rose by 60 percent.
Timing was favorable. A year after China joined the World Trade Organization; Lula initiated Brazil’s economic reforms. To modernize, Brazil needed demand for its commodities; to industrialize, China needed commodities. In the subsequent eight years, the U.S. share of Brazil’s exports plunged, while China’s soared. Regionally, Brazil became Latin America’s growth engine. Brazil and China shunned President George W. Bush’s unipolar foreign policy; each supported a more multipolar view of the world.
So Washington’s neoconservatives began to strengthen ties with Brazil’s center-right opposition. Politically, this opposition....
Color revolutions would never be enough; Exceptionalistan is always on the lookout for major strategic upgrades capable of ensuring perpetual Empire of Chaos hegemony.
The ideological matrix and the modus operandi of color revolutions by now are a matter of public domain. Not so much the concept of Unconventional War (UW).
UW was spelled out by the 2010 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare manual. Here’s the money quote:
“The intent of US [Unconventional Warfare] UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish US strategic objectives… For the foreseeable future, US forces will predominantly engage in irregular warfare (IW) operations.”
“Hostile” powers are meant not only in a military sense; any state that dares to defy any significant plank of the Washington-centric world “order” – from Sudan to Argentina – may be branded “hostile”. The dangerous liaisons between color revolutions and UW have now fully blossomed as Hybrid War; a warped case of Flowers of Evil. A color revolution is nothing but the first stage of what will become Hybrid War. And Hybrid War can be interpreted essentially as the weaponization of chaos theory – an absolute conceptual darling of the US military (“politics is the continuation of war by linguistic means”). My 2014 book Empire of Chaos essentially tracks its myriad manifestations.....
The last decade has seen a remarkable coalescing of non-Western nations in both economic and political partnerships. These multilateral institutions have been championed as alternatives to Western organs of political and economic power such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
From the growth of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union, China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy to link much of the Eurasian landmass via trade and investment, and most recently the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, many have viewed these developments as essential for the decentralization of global power away from the imperial centers of Washington, Wall Street, London and Brussels.
But perhaps none of the emerging Global South international groupings has been more promising in terms of both public relations and real economic partnership than that of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
BRICS countries account for 46 percent of the world’s population – over 3 billion people, as of 2015 – making it the single largest bloc in terms of human capacity among global alliances. The scope of BRICS, combined with its increasing assertiveness as an economic power unto itself, has undoubtedly ruffled a few feathers in Washington and elsewhere in the West.
It should come as no surprise that major moves have been taken in the last 12 to 24 months to undermine each BRICS member nation and destabilize them through political and economic means. And it is no coincidence that those leaders shown smiling and shaking hands at recent BRICS summits are now either the targets of destabilization efforts and subversion – as in the cases of Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa – or are a target of a military ....