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Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - What TARP Boss Neil Barofsky Told Me Yesterday Should Shock You - 1 views

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    " The Daily Bell Newswire Editorial FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013 What TARP Boss Neil Barofsky Told Me Yesterday Should Shock You By Bill Bonner 8 Bill Bonner The financial news is getting boring. The Dow goes only one way - up. But gold fell below $1,400 per ounce yesterday. Rather than trying to figure it out, yesterday evening we drove down to Zombietown. A friend in Washington had promised to introduce us to Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the TARP program. You remember TARP? It was the feds' $700 billion program to rescue the US economy from a correction. Neil Barofsky was in charge of it. So we decided to go down and ask him how it turned out... Meanwhile, in yesterday's International Herald Tribune was a small note: "Economists agree that spending cuts and tax increases have slowed the US recovery." Readers will recognize this as the usual claptrap. Government spending does not bring a genuine "recovery." C'mon... how many times do we have to explain? You take $5 worth of resources and give them to an armed 19-year-old in Afghanistan. He shoots a round or two into a mountainside... poof... the $5 is gone. Or you have an ATF official. He's idling his motor as he stakes out a house believed to be used by a cigarette smuggler. In a few minutes, or even seconds, the $5 has vanished. Or give the money to a disabled person; he buys a MoonPie and a Coke. Economists may record the spending as part of GDP... But how are you better off? You're $5 poorer, not $5 richer. But GDP growth is something economists feel they can control. So they go to work on it like a sex maniac strangling a prostitute. Nothing good comes of it. But at least they get results. And here comes Paul Krugman with more garroting wire! The New York Times Magazine: Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn't a morality play - that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared
Gary Edwards

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012 - The Daily Beast - 2 views

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    Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi
Paul Merrell

Goldberg Sees Crisis in US-Israel Ties, Blames Bibi « LobeLog - 0 views

  • While everyone ritually insists that the bonds between Israel and the United States are “unbreakable,” yesterday’s analysis by Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here,” argues that they’re currently under unprecedented strain and that the fault lies mainly with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. The analysis argues further that, post-November, the Obama administration may no longer be inclined to protect Israel (at least to the same pathetic extent) at the UN Security Council and may even be willing to go a step further by presenting “a public full lay-down of the administration’s vision for a two-state solution, including maps delineating Israel’s borders. These borders, to Netanyahu’s horror, would based on 1967 lines, with significant West Bank settlement blocs attached to Israel in exchange for swapped land elsewhere. Such a lay-down would make explicit to Israel what the U.S. expects of it.” I’m not a big fan of Goldberg, but this analysis is definitely worth a read if for no other reason than his voice is a very important one in the US Jewish community, including among the right-wing leadership of its major national organizations. And he essentially gives over most of the article—in a way that suggests he shares their views—to anonymous administration officials who have clearly grown entirely contemptuous of the Israeli leader, calling him, among other names, “chickenshit.” Goldberg himself describes the Netanyahu government’s policy toward Palestinians as being “disconnected from reality” and stresses what he calls the “unease felt by mainstream American Jewish leaders about recent Israeli government behavior.” It seems that his chief envoy and confidante here, Ron Dermer, is not doing a good job.
  • Of particular interest to readers of this blog, however, are Goldberg’s observations about how the administration views Bibi’s bluster about Iran: The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.” This assessment represents a momentous shift in the way the Obama administration sees Netanyahu. In 2010, and again in 2012, administration officials were convinced that Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, the cowboyish ex-commando Ehud Barak, were readying a strike on Iran. To be sure, the Obama administration used the threat of an Israeli strike in a calculated way to convince its allies (and some of its adversaries) to line up behind what turned out to be an effective sanctions regime. But the fear inside the White House of a preemptive attack (or preventative attack, to put it more accurately) was real and palpable—as was the fear of dissenters inside Netanyahu’s Cabinet, and at Israel Defense Forces headquarters. At U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, analysts kept careful track of weather patterns and of the waxing and waning moon over Iran, trying to predict the exact night of the coming Israeli attack.
  • Today, there are few such fears. “The feeling now is that Bibi’s bluffing,” this second official said. “He’s not Begin at Osirak,” the official added, referring to the successful 1981 Israeli Air Force raid ordered by the ex-prime minister on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The belief that Netanyahu’s threat to strike is now an empty one has given U.S. officials room to breathe in their ongoing negotiations with Iran. This is a significant passage. It suggests that the administration has decided to essentially ignore Netanyahu and his threats to take unilateral action, including when they are conveyed by members of Congress close to the Israel lobby. It also suggests strongly that the administration will not back up Israel if it should indeed undertake a strike of its own in hopes that Washington would be dragged into to finishing the job.
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  • Goldberg’s analysis about the state of the relationship is, in some ways, mirrored by Bret Stephens’s weekly “Global View” column in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “Bibi and Barack on the Rocks,” although he, entirely predictably given his pro-settler worldview, sees Bibi as the wronged party. And, unlike Goldberg, he doesn’t see the US as the more powerful. Noting how Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon was snubbed by senior administration officials with whom he requested to meet, Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, writes: The administration also seems to have forgotten that two can play the game. Two days after the Yaalon snub, the Israeli government announced the construction of 1,000 new housing units in so-called East Jerusalem, including 600 new units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood that was the subject of a 2010 row with Joe Biden. Happy now, Mr. Vice President? Stephens calls for a “trial separation” by the two countries in which Israel will give up its $3 billion dollar/year US aid package to free itself from US interference
  • The administration likes to make much of the $3 billion a year it provides Israel (or, at least, U.S. defense contractors) in military aid, but that’s now less than 1% of Israeli GDP. Like some boorish husband of yore fond of boasting that he brings home the bacon, the administration thinks it’s the senior partner in the marriage. Except this wife can now pay her own bills. And she never ate bacon to begin with. It’s time for some time away. Israel needs to look after its own immediate interests without the incessant interventions of an overbearing partner. The administration needs to learn that it had better act like a friend if it wants to keep a friend. It isn’t as if it has many friends left. This is precisely where Goldberg believes current Israeli policy is leading it.
  • Netanyahu, and the even more hawkish ministers around him, seem to have decided that their short-term political futures rest on a platform that can be boiled down to this formula: “The whole world is against us. Only we can protect Israel from what’s coming.” …But for Israel’s future as an ally of the United States, this formula is a disaster.”
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    If Goldberg and Stephens have it right, a U.S./Israel divorce might just spell the end of the appartheid state of Israel. It is only the U.S. veto on the U.N. Security Council that has enabled Israel to continue to treat Palestinians with impunity and to retain control of and colonize the territory it seized in the 1967 war that it launched. (The right to acquire territory by conquest was abolished by the U.N. Charter and the Fourth Geneva Convention in the late 1940s.)  Israel is now a pariah state internationally, with only the U.S., Canada, and a few minor island nations dependent on the U.S. still voting for Israel even in the U.N. General Council. Moreover, the U.S. public is fed up with the foreign wars the U.S. has been waging in the Mideast in aid of Israel's empirical goal of destabilizing and Balkanizing Israel's Arab neighbors. A U.S./Israel divorce would almost certainly bring down Netanyahu's government. On the other hand, the Obama Administration's relationship with Israel has been a departure from the historical norm in the U.S. and Obama's likely successor, Hillary Clinton, has long been much more friendly with the Israel Lobby than Obama.  Many close observers believe that Netanyahu's strategy with Obama has been to wait until Obama is out of office, betting that his successor will be much more amenable to Bibi's desires. But with Bernie Sanders hat in the ring for Auction 2016 and possibly Elizabeth Warren as well, it's conceivable that issues they raise might push Hillary to adopt a less Israel-friendly stance. But on yet another hand, Obama's stance on ISIL is entirely consistent with Israel's longstanding goal of regime change in Syria and Balkanization of Iraq into three nations along ethnic/religious lines, an independent  Kurdistan in the north, a Shia-stan in the South, and a Sunni state in the middle. Note in this regard Obama's strategy of arming "moderate" Syrians only to defend territory ISIL has not yet seized, then to bring down t
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - America's Coming Crackup - 0 views

  • Our government bankers print money today like loons in an asylum spew absurdity. Glib media shills lure us every night into a disgraceful indolence. And our corporations lust like spoiled children after mega-billions of illicit lucre. Cataclysm is coming. No one with a minimal awareness of history, politics and proper economics today has faith that our society can continue much longer at its present level of government privilege and debt accumulation. There is a Grand Piper that must be paid, and he will manifest in any number of scenarios, none of which will be pleasant. One thing is for sure: The next two decades are going to be tumultuous and tragic. The events that unfold will be far more radical than we dare envision today. Paradigms in banking, politics and philosophy will be overturned. Wrenching lifestyle shifts will be forced upon millions. Something akin to what happened in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism in 1991 will take place in America. Our ruling regime will collapse and bring Russian-style economic hardship to us all. How exactly things unfold will depend upon whether the nation's intelligentsia bring themselves to seriously question the shams of statism, or whether the government-media-academy triad is able to continue bamboozling them. What is extremely unnerving is that whoever wins this battle to control the destiny of our country will determine the fate of freedom on the planet for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. A monumental clash of ideology and propriety looms up ahead.
  • Why We Are Disintegrating as a Society
  • America's dilemma is this: We are being propelled toward an Orwellian style despotism that's purpose is to centralize government power in Washington, phase out American sovereignty and move our country as much as possible into subordination to the United Nations and eventually alignment with Canada, Mexico and Central America into a regional government. The world is moving toward the nightmare of Oceana, Eurasia and East Asia in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will extinguish freedom and merge mankind into a tyrannical egalitarianism. Why is this happening? Such is the influential force of ideology. We are being destroyed because of what historian Clarence Carson called a "collectivist curvature of the mind" that took over our intellectuals back in the early twentieth century. This curvature of the mind functions as the grand fueling mechanism for the goals of government centralization and ending our national sovereignty. It's horrifying, but every year our schools form the "best and the brightest minds" into collectivist apparatchiks to go out in the world and work their way into the power centers of society. The schools do this via false teachings in philosophy, economics, political science and history. This "ideological indoctrination" teaches every new generation that capitalism is an evil, exploitative, racist, warmongering system and must be phased out of modern societies. It teaches that national sovereignty is anachronistic and must be given up. Such indoctrination is being done very subtly and sophisticatedly, but it is a powerful, pervasive theme instilled into all our children from the first grade on.
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  • This is why we have so many bankers, corporate moguls, political statesmen, authors, pundits, artists, publishers and priests working today to undercut the country. Being "the best and the brightest," they were taught in their youth that capitalist America is an evil nation. They, thus, have gone out and risen to positions of power with a globalist worldview that believes economic freedom can't work in the modern day, that American sovereignty is an anachronism belonging to the nineteenth century. Since they are the nation's intelligentsia, they are immensely influential. Their socialist-collectivist worldview is spread to the masses which then elect legislators sympathetic to such irrationality to Congress and the White House.
  • Every one of us has to choose whether we will try to make a difference or give in to indifference. Will we fight to inform our neighbors or succumb to the easy road of apathy? Will we opt for principle or popularity? Will we succumb to the statist thugs on the far left, or fall for the anarchic screwballs on the far right? The "mean" of constitutional sanity beckons to the percipient among us. Will it survive the tumult ahead?
  • All quite clear and horrifying. But how are we, as mere laymen with no access to national media or huge fortunes, to confront this destruction of freedom and sanity in America and throughout the West?
  • We must take a page from the story of the old man and the starfish. After a huge storm had brought a mini-tidal wave to his beach community one night, there were tens of thousands of starfish washed up on the shore that next morning. Amidst the masses of starfish the old man could be seen patiently picking them up and tossing them back into the sea. Along came a young lad in his twenties with green hair, eyebrow rings and a scornful face. He started laughing and mocked the old man with cynical derision. "You have to be crazy, old timer. You can't possibly save those starfish; there's thousands of them. You're wasting your time, you fool. YOU CAN'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE!" The old man looked up at the insolent youth and smiled. He then reached down and picked up one of the struggling starfish and winged it far out into the water, replying to his tormentor, "Made a difference with that one, didn't I?"
  • Making a Difference
  • A Diplomatic Nuisance
  • Not everyone, naturally, has the time and mental wherewithal to forcefully fight the "ideological indoctrination" destroying our country today. But many of us do. Our power lies in our minds and the strength of our personalities. We who possess this inner strength feel compelled to spread the word in any way we can for as long as we live. We feel compelled to wing as many starfish back to life as we can. The apathetic and cynical will scorn all this as senseless, just as the green-haired youth did. They will choose to remain wards of the state and sanction their enslavers. This has always been the nature of most humans. When such wards see others fighting valiantly against seemingly insurmountable odds for the freedom they have scorned, they are subconsciously humiliated because they are not deep in the thick of the fight themselves. They have chosen to avoid the fight and sanction the tyrants who are destroying our way of life. Thus, they must find a way to salve their consciences. That way is to caustically mock the Davids who go up against the Goliaths, to smear the Rolands of Roncesvalles that history hands down to us as heroic exemplars.
  • You the reader have a paramount decision to make regarding all this. It is High Noon for the cause of freedom. Will you fight with the heroic exemplars? If you choose to fight, then your first necessity is to become aware of WHAT is happening and WHY it is happening. That awareness can only be found via fervent curiosity and a commitment to the study of libertarian and conservative literature.
  • Your second duty is to emulate Paul Revere and warn all those in your sphere of influence. You do this by making a diplomatic nuisance of yourself, by pleasantly pestering your comrades to wake up to the elite's usurpations growing by leaps and bounds in our lives. You do it by convincing them that there are grander values in life than shiny new SUVs and country club memberships. There is something called the American way of life that requires personal independence.
  • Time is short. Collectivism steals over us like crack cocaine filters into a ghetto. It devastates everything of worth in its path. All the stoic traditions of strength, all the great lessons of logic, all the revered truths of Nature that have been handed down to us throughout the centuries are being assailed. The weasel-tyrants and their unctuous lackeys have gained control of the intellectual, political and banking power centers of our country, but they can't control the ultimate factor – the truth – because they can't control our minds unless we let them. They can't prohibit defiance. Solzhenitsyn showed us this. They can't extend their enslavement UNLESS WE SANCTION IT!
  • What the elites fear is a populace with the strength of William Wallace fighting King Edward at Sterling Bridge in 1297, the daring of Washington's band crossing the Delaware in the dead of winter. They fear those willing to fight for the original America. Up against such heady citizens, our collectivist tyrants will scatter like feeding jackals in face of approaching hunters. Our job is to build an army of such heady citizens. You can help by joining the cause. Read the books of freedom and sound money, and pass them on as the early Americans did with Common Sense. Bring people to the website where you are reading this essay. Bring them to AFR's website. Bring them to a state of urgency. Bring them to the truth of our Constitution and to the laws of Nature and Nature's God. Nothing other than this kind of effort will suffice. You cannot help truth and freedom by watching moronic TV shows at night. That is how the elites control you. They flood the airwaves with mindless entertainment. It's today's version of Brave New World's "soma for the masses." Today's TV is for zombies and dullards. The same applies to our movies. Next time you're in the theater, look around you at all the hoi polloi stuffing their faces with popcorn and their psyches with over-the top-violence and trashy sex.
  • Aldous Huxley was the first to point out that modern totalitarian regimes leave the "activities of sex" alone, but regiment the "activities of production." This allows those who are servile to think they are still free as they vote away their REAL freedom – their freedom to acquire and keep wealth, to associate with whom they please, to speak and worship as they please. Look around you. There are far more servile people in this human race than there are independent people. This is the reason why dictatorships dominate the history of man; the majority of humans want to be ruled. They want to relinquish their meaningful freedom; it requires too much self-assurance and grit.
  • Logic and History
  • The cause of America is the cause of REAL freedom. It won't be found with the malefic forces of statism on the left, nor with the eccentric cults of anarchism on the right. Both are living death, a fool's game for those devoid of the capacity to see the big picture, i.e., to see that the spectrum of reality is not two-poled, but three-poled with multifarious gradations and a golden mean of truth in between. The nature of human existence is complexity, wrapped up in mystery, contained in inconceivability, subsumed under the power of Truth. We will never create a free society by denying this and ignoring the results of logic and the record of history. This is what statists and anarchists do. REAL freedom is impossible without a grasp of logic and a deep knowledge of history, which teach us that the cornerstones of freedom are equal rights, strictly limited government, gold money and self-reliant people. The statists violate logic and ignore history because they are callous brutes who place power above all and simply don't care. The anarchists violate logic and ignore history because logic and history show their political system to be unworkable.
  • The truths we learn from logic and history are the disinfectants we must hurl into Washington's swamp of political leeches that are sucking all verity from our lives. When the Washington leeches have so stultified our nation that ghastly ruin prevails throughout, then is when the crackup will commence. All readers should take note. A meltdown is coming; a revolution will follow. We must make sure this revolution goes in the direction of the Founding Fathers, not in the direction of the statist left, nor in the direction of the anarchistic right. Statism and anarchism are like the AIDS virus; they will always be deadly to life. It is to Aristotle, Locke and Jefferson that we must turn. They will always be sustaining to life.
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    Wow, if this article isn't a MUST READ, then nothing is. Spot on call-to-arms. "Nelson Hultberg is a freelance scholar/writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic. Nelson's articles have appeared in such publications as American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman and The Dallas Morning News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsHultberg (at) aol.com."
Paul Merrell

What's the big deal between Russia and the Saudis? - RT Op-Edge - 0 views

  • Amidst the wilderness of mirrors surrounding the Syrian tragedy, a diamond-shaped fact persists: Despite so many degrees of separation, the Saudis are still talking to the Russians. Why? A key reason is because a perennially paranoid House of Saud feels betrayed by their American protectors who, under the Obama administration, seem to have given up on isolating Iran.
  • From the House of Saud’s point of view, three factors are paramount. 1) A general sense of ‘red alert’ as they have been deprived from an exclusive relationship with Washington, thus becoming incapable of shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East; 2) They have been mightily impressed by Moscow’s swift counter-terrorism operation in Syria; 3) They fear like the plague the current Russia-Iran alliance if they have no means of influencing it.
  • That explains why King Salman’s advisers have pressed the point that the House of Saud has a much better chance of checking Iran on all matters - from “Syraq” to Yemen - if it forges a closer relationship with Moscow. In fact, King Salman may be visiting Putin before the end of the year.
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  • One of the untold stories of the recent Syria-driven diplomatic flurry is how Moscow has been silently working on mollifying both Saudi Arabia and Turkey behind the scenes. That was already the case when the foreign ministers of US, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia met before Vienna.Vienna was crucial not only because Iran was on the table for the first time but also because of the presence of Egypt – incidentally, fresh from recent discovery of new oil reserves, and engaging in a reinforced relationship with Russia.The absolute key point was this paragraph included in Vienna’s final declaration: “This political process will be Syrian-led and Syrian-owned, and the Syrian people will decide the future of Syria.”It’s not by accident that only Russian and Iranian media chose to give the paragraph the appropriate relevance. Because this meant the actual death of the regime change obsession, much to the distress of US neocons, Erdogan and the House of Saud.
  • The main point is the death of the regime change option, brought about by Moscow. And that leaves Putin free to further project his extremely elaborate strategy. He called Erdogan on Wednesday to congratulate him on his and the AKP’s election landslide. This means that now Moscow clearly has someone to talk to in Ankara. Not only about Syria. But also about gas.Putin and Erdogan will have a crucial energy-related meeting at the G20 summit on November 15 in Turkey; and there’s an upcoming visit by Erdogan to Moscow. Bets are on that the Turk Stream agreement will be – finally – reached before the end of the year. And on northern Syria, Erdogan has been forced to admit by Russian facts on the ground and skies that his no-fly zone scheme will never fly.
  • That leaves us with the much larger problem: the House of Saud.There’s a wall of silence surrounding the number one reason for Saudi Arabia to bomb and invade Yemen, and that is to exploit Yemen’s virgin oil lands, side by side with Israel – no less. Not to mention the strategic foolishness of picking a fight with redoubtable warriors such as the Houthis, which have sowed panic amidst the pathetic, mercenary-crammed Saudi army.Riyadh, following its American reflexes, even resorted to recruiting Academi – formerly Blackwater - to round up the usual mercenary suspects as far away as Colombia.It was also suspected from the beginning, but now it's a done deal that the responsible actor for the costly Yemen military disaster is none other than Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the King’s son who, crucially, was sent by his father to meet Putin face-to-face.
  • Meanwhile, Qatar will keep crying because it was counting on Syria as a destination point for its much-coveted gas pipeline to serve European customers, or at least as a key transit hub on the way to Turkey.Iran on the other hand needed both Iraq and Syria for the rival Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline because Tehran could not rely on Ankara while it was under US sanctions (this will now change, fast). The point is Iranian gas won’t replace Gazprom as a major source for the EU anytime soon. If it ever did, or course, that would be a savage blow to Russia.
  • In oil terms, Russia and the Saudis are natural allies. Saudi Arabia cannot export natural gas; Qatar can. To get their finances in order – after all even the IMF knows they are on a highway to hell - the Saudis would have to cut back around ten percent of production with OPEC, in concert with Russia; the oil price would more than double. A 10 percent cutback would make a fortune for the House of Saud.So for both Moscow and Riyadh, a deal on the oil price, to be eventually pushed towards $100 a barrel, would make total economic sense. Arguably, in both cases, it might even mean a matter of national security.But it won’t be easy. OPEC’s latest report assumes a basket of crude oil to be quoted at only $55 in 2015, and to rise by $5 a year reaching $80 only by 2020. This state of affairs does not suit either Moscow or Riyadh.
  • Meanwhile, fomenting all sorts of wild speculation, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still manages to collect as much as $50 million a month from selling crude from oilfields it controls across “Syraq”, according to the best Iraq-based estimates.The fact that this mini-oil caliphate is able to bring in equipment and technical experts from “abroad” to keep its energy sector running beggars belief. “Abroad” in this context means essentially Turkey – engineers plus equipment for extraction, refinement, transport and energy production.One of the reasons this is happening is that the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) – which includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey - is actually bombing the Syrian state energy infrastructure, not the mini oil-Caliphate domains. So we have the proverbial “international actors” in the region de facto aiding ISIS/ISIL/Daesh to sell crude to smugglers for as low as $10 a barrel.Saudis – as much as Russian intel - have noted how ISIS/ISIL/Daesh is able to take over the most advanced US equipment that takes months to master, and instead integrate it into their ops at once. This implies they must have been extensively trained. The Pentagon, meanwhile, sent and will be sending top military across “Syraq” with an overarching message: if you choose Russia we won’t help you.ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, for their part, never talks about freeing Jerusalem. It’s always about Mecca and Medina.
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    Pepe Escobar brings us up to speed on big changes in the Mideast, including the decline of U.S. influence. Not mentioned, but the Saudis' feelings of desertion by the Washington Beltway and its foreplay with Russia could bring about an end to the Saudis insistence on being paid for oil in U.S. dollars, and there goes the western economy. 
Gary Edwards

The Project To Restore America - 0 views

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    Yes, it's a confusing proposal - but not when compared to what we have now; a financial industry run by "To-Big-To-Fail Banks" able to loot the public treasury at will.  Never to Big to Bail, and taxpayers voted for four more years of looting.  Limited Purpose Banking is based on equity.  Which is quite different from the fractional-reserve-lending model used by the To-Big-Fail Banksters. "The history of banking is a long and sorry record of promises that can't be kept - promises that were either overly optimistic or outright fraudulent. Since banks are leveraged, failing to deliver on their promises leads them to collapse. But unlike standard bankruptcies, bank failures produce enormous economic fallout.   There's a reason. Banks not only market financial products. They also make financial markets. Markets, be they for apples or loans, constitute critical public goods whose provision should not be jeopardized.     Making a market -- getting buyers and sellers to meet at the same time and place always represents a feat of coordination. The main purpose of banks is to effect financial coordination - to bring together borrowers and lenders and investors and savers.     When banks fail, particularly large ones, this coordination breaks down. Moreover, bank failures can be contagious. Any given bank's failure raises the prospect that fraud or very poor judgment was at fault and that other banks are engaged in the same practice. This leads to runs on, actually away from, banks in general. In addition, since banks borrow and lend to one another, the failure of bank A can bring bank B down if A owes money to B.     Worst of all, financial collapse, even by a few major financial players can coordinate non-financial companies as well as households on the belief that times are bad. And when millions of separate firms and tens of millions of households start expecting bad times, they take actions to make bad times happen. Thus, the state of confidence, what Key
Gary Edwards

The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government - BlackListedNews.com - 1 views

  • Please read this rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled – how these disclosures have “set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype” – and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he performed an immense public service?
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”.
  • It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
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  • The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid.
  • The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.
  • What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing.
  • The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists.
  • It’s the American people.
  • The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true.
  • What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
  • And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures.
  • What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.
  • If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.
  • At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face. “These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”
  • “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”
  • “Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.
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    Extremely well linked story from "Washington's Blog" excerpt: "The Government's Hypocrisy Is the Core Problem Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. are hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles.  If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies,  the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn't need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn't be nationalized, because that would be socialism.  Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector - or breaking them up - the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy.  But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn't really help the homeowner. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama's hypocrisy in slamming Bush's spying programs … and then expanding them  (millions more). And in slamming China's cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And - while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country - it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (ba
Paul Merrell

Donald Trump Backs Off Promise To Bring Back Torture - 0 views

  • President-elect Donald Trump has backed off of one of the most controversial pledges of his campaign today, his promise to bring back torture of detainees, saying following a talk with retired Gen. James Mattis that he was told torture doesn’t work as well as building a rapport with prisoners. During the primaries, Trump emphasized his belief that the US needed to bring back waterboarding and “worse” tactics to better compete with ISIS’ own brutality. At the time, he dismissed arguments torture didn’t work on the grounds that the people being tortured “deserve it.” He also called the US ban on torture a “sign of weakness.” Though it did not figure prominently in the general election campaign, Trump was still seen to be favoring torture as part of his war plan, to the extent that Human Rights Watch was expressing concern about Trump’s intentions after the election. Gen. Mattis, who is seen as a front-runner for Secretary of Defense, told Trump that in his experience torture and abuse didn’t work well, and that he’d do better with “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.” Trump cited this conversation in his statement today backing away from torture.
  • Assuming Trump remains swayed on the matter, this is extremely good news for America’s future human rights record, and also may bolster Mattis’ candidacy for the Defense Secretary post. Sen. John McCain (R – AZ) and others have expressed opposition to a return to torture, and being the man who talked Trump out of such a return would likely make Mattis’ nomination hearings go smoothly.
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    Thank you, Gen. Mattis. One should never forget that respectful treatment of prisoners of war is the best protection you can get for your own soldiers when they are captured. Those who advocated torture should have learned their lesson when Nick Berg was decapitated in Iraq, wearing an orange jumpsuit like the ones worn by suspected al Qaeda prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, where prisoners were tortured and humiliated by American soldiers. In the decapitation video, explicit mention of Abu Ghraib was made: "We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Berg
Gary Edwards

A Victory for All of Us - Liberty in the Breach - 0 views

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    Details of how a federal Judge came to rule that the insideous NDAA law is un Constitutional. excerpt: Posted on May 18, 2012 By Chris Hedges In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where-as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31-the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government's claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won't last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are
Gary Edwards

A First Look at the Book "The Liberty Amendments", by Mark Levin - Tea Party Command Ce... - 0 views

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    Excellent youtube interview! "Mark Levin has just published his much-anticipated book The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Three of his eleven proposed Constitutional amendments appear below, and a Sean Hannity interview of Levin appears at the bottom of this post. Levin's book is centered around the Constitution's Article V (aka "Article 5″). That article specifies two methods for amending the Constitution. Just briefly - In the first method of creating amendments, Congress proposes and the States dispose. In the second method of creating amendments, the States propose and the States dispose. The second method has never been used successfully, although there have been many attempts.  It is that second method that the Founders provided as a remedy for an overreaching federal government. In the second method, neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Supreme Court have any voting or veto authority whatsoever.  The states are in full control. Period. It is, by design, the ultimate override for an over-spending, over-taxing, over-regulating, and increasingly dictatorial and lawless federal government. Clearly, its time has come. In that second method, Congress has at most a mere ministerial role.  Of course Congress is very protective of its power, and could, through delay and inaction, attempt to convert their mere ministerial role into a de facto veto power, halting any attempt for a state-driven amendment action. Apparently Congress has done exactly that many times, acting in bad faith and contrary to the Framers' spirit and intent for Article V which is clearly expressed in the Federalist Papers. Legal scholars have been trying to find a way around the federal government's intransigence, so far with little success. Now more than ever, it is time for We the People to bring the power of Article V to the center ring of American politics. That starts with awareness, and Levin's book will br
Gary Edwards

"War is a Racket" by General Smedly Butler - 1 views

  • by MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY D. BUTLER, USMC - Retired TWO-TIME Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient FULL TEXT ON LINE FREE
  • GET THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION including two bonus titles.
  •  
    An accidental find, the full text online of USMC Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's 1935 book, War Is a Racket. Butler served in the Marine Corps from 1899 to 1931 and at the time of his retirement was the most-decorated Marine in history, for both valor and accomplishments. Following his retirement, he became a vehement anti-war activist and public speaker.  This book is easily his most-cited and most-quoted published work. You can capture the flavor from an article he published in a magazine that included the following lines: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler#Lectures  I look forward to reading this book. The book was reprinted in 2003 and is available from the linked web site, together with two bonus titles. 
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    "WAR IS A RACKET" - free online book CHAPTER ONE WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations. For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds g
Paul Merrell

Julian Assange unlikely to face U.S. charges over publishing classified documents - The... - 0 views

  • The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.
  • Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
  • “We have repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to tell us what the status of the investigation was with respect to Mr. Assange,” said Barry J. Pollack, a Washington attorney for Assange. “They have declined to do so. They have not informed us in any way that they are closing the investigation or have made a decision not to bring charges against Mr. Assange. While we would certainly welcome that development, it should not have taken the Department of Justice several years to come to the conclusion that it should not be investigating journalists for publishing truthful information.”
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  • There have been persistent rumors that the grand jury investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks had secretly led to charges. Officials told The Post last week that there was no sealed indictment, and other officials have since come forward to say, as one senior U.S. official put it, that the department has “all but concluded” that it will not bring a case against Assange.
Paul Merrell

2014 Press Release - NSA Announces New Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer" - 0 views

  • GEN Keith Alexander - Commander, U.S. Cyber Command/Director, NSA/Chief, CSS - announced today that well-known privacy expert Rebecca Richards will serve as the National Security Agency's new Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer. She most recently worked as the Senior Director for Privacy Compliance at the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Selected to lead the new NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Office at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters, Ms. Richards' primary job will be to provide expert advice to the Director and oversight of NSA's civil liberties and privacy related activities. She will also develop measures to further strengthen NSA's privacy protections.
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    Softball Interview here. . I wasn't really expecting Obama to reach out to the ACLU and EFF for a good civil liberties lawyer recommendation, but this appointment is lame, the former Director of Privacy for Dept. of Homeland Security, those wonderful folk who keep the homeland safe from terra-ists. The airport gropers, secret no-fly listers, and masters of border protection, where all Constitutional privacy rights do not apply, per the Supreme Court., the coordinators of our glorious "fusion centers," the provisioners of funding for armored cars and surveillance equipment for local police, etc. A sample from her interview linked above that I transcribed (omitting all the umhs and ahs): "When you think about NSA, privacy there for them was privacy of its employees, about contractors, about the average person walking down the street - it was not as concentrated on, this is the big collection that we're getting through these means, and so what this job does is that it brings it up under direct reports to the director of NSA and it is just as a focal point, to bring all of those and -- I walked in the building and people were already asking questions so ..." Heaven help us; has this lassie's brain yet matured to the point of completing her first sentence? This is the lady who is going to keep Admiral Rogers on the straight and narrow path of respecting our civil liberties? I suspect not.  I may return to this inarticulate and non-assertive young lady in later posts. Let it suffice for now to observe that the Dept. of Homeland Security, whose raison d'etre is a virtually non-existent terrorist threat manufactured by the politics of fear, has not exactly been a champion of the People's civil liberties. Moreover, I've had recent occasion to dig rather deeply into exactly what it is that Privacy Officers do and don't do. Telling heads of agencies that they cannot lawfully do what they want to do is no
Paul Merrell

Billionaire chocolate baron wins Ukraine election - World - NZ Herald News - 0 views

  • Chocolate baron Petro Poroshenko has claimed victory in Ukraine's presidential election, vowing to bring peace after months of turmoil and a pro-Russian insurgency that thwarted voting across much of the separatist east. The 48-year-old self-made billionaire, who exit polls said on Sunday had won almost 56 per cent of the vote, swiftly declared he would work to bring peace to Ukraine. "My first decisive step will be aimed at ending the war, ending chaos, and bringing peace to a united and free Ukraine," he said at a press conference in Kiev. "I am certain that our decisive actions will bring fairly quick results," he added. "The presidential election showed that Ukrainians have chosen the path of European integration," Poroshenko said.
  • The results put him far ahead of his nearest rival Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister who spearheaded the 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution but then became embroiled in corruption scandals that saw her put behind bars by the old pro-Russian regime. If confirmed by election officials, the results will avoid the need for a June 15 runoff that would have extended political uncertainty at the most painful moment in Ukraine's 23-year-old post-Soviet history. Poroshenko vowed to pay his first trip outside the capital to the eastern industrial rust belt where pro-Moscow insurgents have proclaimed the creation of their own independent republic. Ukrainians had voted en masse in the capital Kiev and the west of the country but the insurgency thwarted voting across most of the separatist east.
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing the threat of more US and EU sanctions, appeared to make a major concession on Friday by saying he was ready to work with the new Kiev team. "We understand that the people of Ukraine want their country to emerge from this crisis. We will treat their choice with respect," he said.
Joe La Fleur

Obama Brings UN's Gun-Grabbing Resolution to Limelight - 1 views

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    OBAMA WANTS YOUR GUNS
Paul Merrell

Congress cuts U.S. military and development aid for Afghanistan - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • With no perceptible opposition from the Obama administration, Congress has quietly downscaled Washington’s ambitions for the final year of the Afghan war, substantially curtailing development aid and military assistance plans ahead of the U.S. troop pullout. As congressional appropriators put the final touches on a huge spending bill in recent weeks, they slashed Afghanistan development aid by half and barred U.S. defense officials from embarking on major new infrastructure projects. After making a bid last year for $2.6 billion worth of “critical” capabilities such as mobile strike vehicles for Afghan security forces, the Pentagon agreed it could do with just 40 percent of what it had sought.
  • The Obama administration had long hoped to bring the Afghan war to a dignified conclusion this year and viewed the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday as an opportunity to describe the end of America’s longest war as a foreign policy success. But Washington’s appetite to remain engaged in Afghanistan appears to be eroding precipitously, in large part because of how poisonous its relationship with the country’s president has become.
  • The prevailing sentiment in Washington toward President Hamid Karzai, who has thus far refused to sign a security agreement that would keep U.S. troops and funding in Afghanistan beyond 2014, was even codified in the Afghan portion of the spending bill, which was drawn up without significant public debate. “The bill prohibits the obligation or expenditure by the United States government, of funds appropriated in this or any other act, for the direct personal benefit of the President of Afghanistan,” appropriators wrote, an unprecedented move that President Obama signed into law last week.U.S. officials said the cuts and restrictions might appear starker than they actually are because agency heads will retain significant flexibility to use unspent funds from previous years or draw from other sources. But many see the reductions as the unmistakable end of an era of wartime largesse.
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    Attention: major history rewrite in progress. "... the final year of the Afghan war ...  The Obama administration had long hoped to bring the Afghan war to a dignified conclusion this year." Blither.
Paul Merrell

Largest Syrian rebel groups form Islamic alliance, in possible blow to U.S. influence -... - 0 views

  • BEIRUT — American hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s fractious rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed opposition coalition and announced the formation of a new alliance dedicated to creating an Islamic state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group, which will further complicate fledgling U.S. efforts to provide lethal aid to “moderate” rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
  • Gen. Salim Idriss, the head of the moderate Supreme Military Council and the chief conduit for U.S. aid to the rebels, cut short a visit to Paris after the announcement of the alliance overnight Tuesday and will head to Syria on Thursday to attempt to persuade the factions to reconsider, according to the council’s spokesman, Louay al-Mokdad.The new alliance stressed that it was not abandoning Idriss’s council, only the exiled political opposition coalition, which, it said in a statement, “does not represent us.”The creation of the bloc nonetheless leaves Idriss’s council directly responsible for just a handful of small units, calling into question the utility of extending aid to “moderate” rebels, according to Charles Lister of the London-based defense consultancy IHS Jane’s. If the development holds, he said, “it will likely prove the most significant turning point in the evolution of Syria’s anti-government insurgency to date.”“The scope for Western influence over the Syrian opposition has now been diminished considerably,” he added.
  • Mokdad acknowledged that by aligning themselves with Jabhat al-Nusra, the other rebel factions could jeopardize hopes of receiving outside military help, just as the Obama administration says it is starting to step up its support after more than a year of hesitation.But, he said, the United States and its allies are to blame, for failing repeatedly to deliver on promises to provide assistance as the death toll in Syria, now well over 100,000, steadily mounted. The development appeared to take the Obama administration by surprise. A senior State Department official, briefing reporters Tuesday night on a meeting at the United Nations between Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Syrian Opposition Coalition Chairman Ahmad al-Jarba, was unaware of the rebel announcement that had been made several hours earlier.In a statement Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that officials had “seen the reports” and were “discussing with the moderate opposition what impact this will have going forward.”“A divided opposition benefits the Assad regime and opportunists who are using the conflict to further their own extreme agenda,” Psaki said. U.S. aid would continue, she said, “taking into account that alliances and associations often change on the ground based on resources and needs of the moment.”
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  • At a time when the United States and Russia are accelerating efforts to hold a peace conference in Geneva that would bring together the government and the opposition, the defection of some of the most significant rebel factions comes as a reminder that any negotiated settlement will also have to take into account the wishes of those who wield power on the ground, said Amr al-Azm, a history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who is Syrian and supports the opposition.
  • Mokdad said that Idriss had called some of the rebel leaders Wednesday, “and they told us they signed this because they lost all hope in the international community.”“They said: ‘We are really tired, Bashar al-Assad is killing us, all the West is betraying us, and they want to negotiate with the regime over our blood.’ ”Abu Hassan, a spokesman for the Tawheed Brigade in Aleppo, echoed those sentiments, citing rebel disappointment with the Obama administration’s failure to go ahead with threatened airstrikes to punish Assad for using chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus last month, as well as its decision to strike a deal with Russia over ways to negotiate a solution. “Jabhat al-Nusra is a Syrian military formation that fought the regime and played an active role in liberating many locations,” he said. “So we don’t care about the stand of those who don’t care about our interests.”
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    And Hillary's Syrian Opposition Coalition, on the eve of the Geneva peace talks, suddenly finds itself without any military forces left, virtually all defected to the "non-moderate" wing of the Syrian government's opposition on the ground. So what will you do next, Mr. Obama? According to the State Dept., you are going to continue to supply weapons to the opposition even though it's now united with Al Nusrah, an official U.S. government "terrorist organization. Does Obama have any option left other than a military strike on the Syrian government to try to bring *some* of the opposition back into an uneasy Alliance with the U.S., et ilk?  A "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" Hail Mary pass?  
Paul Merrell

Don't Go Back to Iraq! - 0 views

  • Iraq is on the verge of full-scale civil war along the fault lines set in place when U.S. troops invaded and occupied the country more than a decade ago. We need to demand that our government do five things right away: First, do no harm. There is no military solution in Iraq—so end the threats of airstrikes, bring home the evac troops and Special Forces, and turn the aircraft carrier around. Second, call for and support an immediate arms embargo on all sides. That means pressuring U.S. regional allies to stop providing weapons and money to various militias. Third, engage immediately with Iran to bring pressure to bear on the Iraqi government to end its sectarian discrimination, its violence against civilians, and its violations of human rights.
  • Fourth, engage with Russia and other powers to get the United Nations to take the lead in organizing international negotiations for a political solution to the crisis now enveloping Iraq as well as Syria. Those talks must include all sides, including non-violent Syrian and Iraqi activists, civil society organizations, women, and representatives of refugees and displaced people forced from their homes. All relevant outside parties, including Iran, must be included. Building on the success of the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Washington should continue to broaden its engagement with Tehran with the goal of helping to bring the Syrian and Iraqi wars to an immediate end.
  • Fifth, get help to the people who need it. The Iraq war is creating an enormous new refugee and humanitarian crisis, escalating the crisis of the Syrian war, and spreading across the entire region. The United States has pledged one of the largest grants of humanitarian aid for refugees from Syria, but it is still too small, and much of it has not been paid out. Simultaneously with the announcement of an immediate arms embargo, Washington should announce a major increase in humanitarian assistance for all refugees in the region to be made immediately available to UN agencies, and call on other countries to do the same. This is how wars can be stopped.
Paul Merrell

House Intelligence Bill Fumbled Transparency - Federation Of American Scientists - 0 views

  • Intelligence community whistleblowers would have been able to submit their complaints to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) under a proposed amendment to the intelligence authorization act that was offered last week by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). This could have been an elegant solution to the whistleblowing conundrum posed by Edward Snowden. It made little sense for Snowden to bring his concerns about bulk collection of American phone records to the congressional intelligence committees, considering that they had already secretly embraced the practice. The PCLOB, by contrast, has staked out a position as an independent critical voice on intelligence policy. (And it has an unblemished record for protecting classified information.) The Board’s January 2014 report argued cogently and at length that the Section 215 bulk collection program was likely unlawful as well as ineffective. In short, the PCLOB seemed like a perfect fit for any potential whistleblower who might have concerns about the legality or propriety of current intelligence programs from a privacy or civil liberties perspective.
  • But when Rep. Gabbard offered her amendment to the intelligence authorization act last week, it was not voted down– it was blocked. The House Rules Committee declared that the amendment was “out of order” and could not be brought to a vote on the House floor. Several other amendments on transparency issues met a similar fate. These included a measure proposed by Rep. Adam Schiff to require reporting on casualties resulting from targeted killing operations, a proposal to disclose intelligence spending at the individual agency level, and another to require disclosure of the number of U.S. persons whose communications had been collected under FISA, among others. In dismay at this outcome, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and I lamented the “staggering failure of oversight” in a May 30 op-ed. See The House Committee on Intelligence Needs Oversight of Its Own, MSNBC.
  • The House did approve an amendment offered by Rep. John Carney (D-DE) to require the Director of National Intelligence “to issue a report to Congress on how to improve the declassification process across the intelligence community.” While the DNI’s views on the subject may indeed be of interest, the amendment failed to specify the problem it intended to address (erroneous classification standards? excessive backlogs? something else?), and so it is unclear exactly what is to be improved.
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  • However, a more focused classification reform program may be in the works. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that he would introduce “a comprehensive security clearance reform bill” that would also address the need to shrink the national security classification system. The Thompson bill, which is to be introduced “in the coming weeks,” would “greatly expand the resources and responsibilities of the Public Interest Declassification Board,” Rep. Thompson said during the House floor debate on the intelligence bill on May 30. “A well-resourced and robust Board is essential to increasing accountability of the intelligence community,” he said.
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    I don't agree that whistleblowers need a secret system for their complaints. Secrecy is the problem, not the solution.In a supposedly democratic republic, every bit of government secrecy runs directly contrary to the citizen's right to be know what their government is up to.  All of the NSA reform measures in Congress share a fundamental flaw: they focus on what the NSA is allowed to do in secret. Any sane legislative approach would begin by identifying and clarifying what digital privacy rights citizens have and the obligation of government agencies and the private sector to report violations to their victims. Then one can proceed to examine how intelligence agencies might function within those parameters.  But the approach in Congress has been a catfight over "NSA reform" with secrecy accepted as the norm and without consideration of citizens' privacy rights, not even their Constitutional rights. But it is our privacy laws and their enforcement that needs attention, not directions to the Dark Government that is still allowed to remain in the dark. In other words, it is the public that should be informed of whistleblowers' revelations, not selected members of Congress, not secret courts, not some Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board whose public reports are only summaries with all data they examine hid from view.  Bring that Dark Government into the sunlight and then real reform can happen but not before.
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    +1 The Constitutional and Natural rights of citizens come first. The legality of the NSA activities as well as other gov ops follows. This is an excellent point you make Paul! I hope others take up the cross and realize what an important point you are making in your comment.
Paul Merrell

Israeli Knesset brings back bill to forcibly transfer Palestinian Bedouins | nsnbc inte... - 0 views

  • The Israeli Knesset (Parliament) announced that on Sunday July 12th, they will bring back a bill to forcibly remove 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their homes in the Negev desert in southern Israel.
  • The Israeli government has managed to force the transfer of tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins into a reservation near the city dump of Jerusalem, but 40,000 more have refused to be moved from their ancestral homes.
  • The bill had been tabled in 2013 after widespread international condemnation of the forced transfer plan. According to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Israeli authorities had initially approved the plan, known as the ‘Prawer Plan’, in 2011, but delayed it indefinitely after the UN and other international bodies condemned the plan. The Palestinian Bedouin communities of southern Israel have lived in their homes for hundreds of years, but when Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli government refused to recognize their villages. As such, their homes have been destroyed dozens of times by the Israeli government, each time rebuilt by the Bedouin community.
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  • The re-introduction of the bill is being carried out by the Israeli minister of agriculture, Uri Ariel of the Habayit Hayehudi party (Jewish Home) party. Palestinian Bedouins have compared the forced displacement plan to the U.S. system of ‘reservations’ for the native American population, by which hundreds of thousands of American Indians were forcibly displaced from their homelands in what has since been termed a genocidal colonial operation by the invading European colonists.
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