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Islamic bogeyman in Syria strikes fear in Washington - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...380-isis-syria-iraq-washington war & peace surveillance-state politics of fear War-Party terrorists™
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • High-ranking US officials, while offering little in way of evidence to support their claims, are sounding the alarm on the possibility of foreigners in Syria initiating an attack on the US, sparking fears over airport security. The message out of Washington at the weekend was at best incoherent, at worst downright dangerous. In the same week that US President Barack Obama asked Congress to fork over $500 million to support the Syrian opposition in its three-year battle to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, the American leader also warned on the possibility of European passport holders in Syria slipping into America to wreak unholy havoc.
  • “We have seen Europeans who are sympathetic to their cause traveling into Syria and now may travel into Iraq, getting battle-hardened,” Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “Then they come back. They've got European passports. They don't need a visa to get into the United States.” “Now, we are spending a lot of time, and we have been for years, making sure we are improving intelligence to respond to that,” he added. Obama said the US must enhance reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, and US Special Forces will likely play a role, as well as beefing up security clearance at airports, already the source of agitation with many American travelers.
  • Why Syrian rebels would attempt an attack on US interests at the same time Washington is supporting their anti-government efforts was not touched upon in the interview. In fact, much of Obama’s anxiety over some imminent attack on the US homeland appears to stem less from solid evidence out of Syria and more from Republican doom-mongering.
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  • The warnings were nothing short of hysterical, going so far as to suggest the Republicans were fishing for supporters in a sea of gloom and doom of their own creation. “Right now, sources tell us, at this moment in Syria, Al-Qaeda bomb makers are trying to design a new generation of explosives, including nonmetallic bombs. And the US government is wrestling with how to respond,” Pierre Thomas, ABC senior justice correspondent, warned out of the gates. What followed was a chorus of right-wing handwringing, led by the Republican Peter King, the former Chairman of Homeland Security, who pointed to ‘Americans in Syria’ as the nation’s gravest threat. “Syria is our biggest threat right now because not only are there thousands of Europeans who have visas sent to the United States going to Syria, there’s also at least 100 or so – 100-plus Americans who are over there in Syria right now,” King told ABC. “I can’t go into all the details, but that is very important…because a number of [overseas] airports don’t have the type of security they should have.”
  • Republican Mike Rogers from Michigan chimed in that “this is exactly the kind of threat that keeps me up at night.” “I've been on the Intelligence Committee for 10 years, chairman for the last four years. I have never seen a threat matrix so serious, so varied, and so many different streams of threat,” Rogers added. Meanwhile, amid the sudden wave of angst now gripping Washington, the Obama administration is attempting to grapple with the sudden rise of a militant group that fashions itself as the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIS), a Sunni-led movement with the stated goal of creating a caliphate, or Islamic state, throughout Iraq, Syria and the Levant.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jul 14
     
    It ain't just Republicans. Note the central role played by Democrat Barack Obama. It's the War Party, which crosses visible party boundaries in the U.S. And of course Obama wants to beef up intelligence-gathering, And tighter security at airports, of course, so that the American public realizes that the threat of  terrorists™ trumps rights secured by the Constitution. 
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DHS insider update: "It has begun" « Northeast Intelligence NetworkNortheast ... - 1 views

www.homelandsecurityus.com/...7978 Cypress-bank-tax Globalist Banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 13
     
    The forced confiscation of citizen savings held in Cypress bank accounts is a test by the International Bank to see if people will roll over or fight.  The Global elites are ready to pull the trigger on world wide economic collapse, and they're testing to see what the response will be. clip: "According to the most recent information provided to me from my source within the Department of Homeland Security known as "Rosebud," the final preparations are being made to deploy heavily armed federalized forces onto the streets of America. They will be deployed under the pretext of "restoring and maintaining order from the chaos brought about by the economic collapse," adding that "many will demand and embrace their deployment on the streets of America. They will get what they ask for, and more." Much like the security theater we have seen following the attacks of 9/11, we will be subjected to the jack-booted control of a federal army whose allegiance is not to the American people, but to the very architects of the chaos. "This is the reason that drones are flying over U.S. cities and farmland, and gun control legislation is on the fast track for complete implementation," stated this source. "How can people look at the situation in Cyprus and not think it won't happen here? It will, and the blowback will be unlike this country has ever seen. Surveillance, disarming the public, and conditioning the people to believe it's for their own safety is and has been  part of the plan all along. Anyone owing a gun will be demonized and described as contributing to the problem." "What happens when the middle class loses much of their wealth, or it is confiscated, by the stroke of a pen or a keyboard? What will the stores look like when people, unprepared due to the damn lies of the corporate media and the shills for the ruling elite, run to empty out everything they can get their hands on as the world, as they know it, collapses around them?" It was
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America: Freedom to Fascism - Full. - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch freedom-liberty Freedom-to-Fascism Aaron-Russo
shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 13
     
    uncut movie  Uploaded on May 10, 2011 Determined to find the law that requries American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo (Bette Midler'sThe Rose, Trading Places) set out on a journey to find the evidence. Neither left nor right-wing, this startling examination of government exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913 when the Federal Reserve system was fraudulently created. Through interviews with two U.S. Congressmen, former IRS Commissioner and former IRS and FBI agents, tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, and the national identity card, which becomes law in May 2008 and will use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
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WikiLeaks: Clinton Campaign Panics After Obama's Statements On Private Email Server - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...221805 Auction 2016 Clinton-emails Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • An email hacked from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, is raising new questions about when President Barack Obama found out about Clinton’s private email server. In a March 7, 2015 interview with CBS News’ senior White House correspondent Bill Plante, Obama said he hadn’t been aware of Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state until “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”
  • On Tuesday, WikiLeaks’ highlighted a March 7, 2015 email found in its archives of Podesta’s emails, writing: “Clinton campaign panics after Obama misleads public over Clinton emails.”
  • In the original email sent shortly after the CBS interview aired, Josh Schwerin, spokesperson for Hillary For America, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, alerted Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s director of communications, about Obama’s statements. Schwerin wrote: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.” The email also includes a link to a March 7, 2015 tweet from Katherine Miller, a political editor at Buzzfeed. “I have some questions here,” she wrote about Obama’s statement.
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  • Schwerin’s email was also sent to Nicholas Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, and other close Clinton associates. Merrill, in turn, forwarded the email to Cheryl Mills, former White House counsel to Bill Clinton and a top aide to Hillary Clinton. Hours later, Mills forwarded the email chain to Podesta, writing: “we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov” On Tuesday, Jon Scott, host of Fox News’ “Happening Now,” said the email showed Mills going into “damage control mode.” He added: “That is going to be the matter of some discussion, you would imagine, on Capitol Hill. What the president told the world versus what he may have known or perhaps should have known.” Some conservative news sources have suggested the email chain shows the president lied or was involved in a cover-up about Clinton’s private email server.
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Paul Albaugh: Death and Hillary Clinton - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/44198 Hillary
shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Did Clinton’s emails seal this man’s fate? As National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes, “[I]t’s unnerving to see she was discussing such material on an insecure system. We don’t know for certain that the Iranians had successfully hacked into Clinton’s server — as FBI Director Comey said, hackers are good at covering their tracks — but it seems foolish to assume Tehran could not. Friendly references to Amiri in private email by Hillary and her staff would destroy his claims to his captors that he wasn’t voluntarily helping American intelligence.” More likely than Iran doing the hacking is that Russia is the culprit. The two nations are thick as thieves when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, and it’s extremely likely that Moscow has some valuable dirt on Clinton, some of which was perhaps shared with the mullahs.
  • So what of Clinton’s emails? In 2010, Jake Sullivan sent two emails about a week apart to Hillary’s private server. Neither of the emails mentioned Amiri by name, but the first email notes that the videos were a “psychological” issue and that “our friend has to be given a way out.” The second email, sent two days before CNN reported a $5 million payout, warned of “problematic news stories” to come as a cover for Amiri’s return to Iran. So while the emails didn’t mention Amiri by name, Iranian intelligence could have no doubt figured out that the person she was referring to in these emails was indeed Amiri. This is what FBI Director James Comey meant when he called Hillary “extremely careless in the handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
  • There are other untimely, mysterious deaths in the last six weeks as well — all with ties to the Clintons. Last week, there were two deaths within two days. The first was a prominent Clinton critic, researcher and reporter for the American Free Press named Victor Thorn. He was found in his home, dead of a gunshot wound to the head, in what has been reported as a suicide. It was his 54th birthday. The second was a Bernie Sanders supporter named Shawn Lucas, who was serving the Democrat National Committee and former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz with a class action lawsuit for alleged fraud and rigging the primary election in favor of Hillary Clinton. He was found dead on Aug. 2, on the floor of his bathroom. There are several others who have died strange and untimely deaths with unsatisfactory explanation. But the common denominator is that they were somehow tied to or knew something about the Clintons and had either reported or were about to blow the whistle on their wrongdoings.
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  • It feels like the 1990s all over again, when Vince Foster and numerous others met an untimely and suspicious demise. This is the Hillary Clinton that the Leftmedia doesn’t want you to know about. The same woman who recently said that she may have “short circuited” her recent email explanation. Speaking of deaths and lies, the parents of two Benghazi victims — Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, and Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods — filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Clinton Monday. The two allege that Clinton’s “reckless handling” of classified information contributed to their sons' deaths. And while the circumstances surrounding the Iranian scientist or the two Americans are mysterious, we know that Clinton is responsible for the deaths of Smith, Woods and two others in Benghazi. And then she lied about it for political gain. Indeed, she lied to the public and then has the audacity to lie and say that she didn’t lie. This woman is filled with corruption and lies yet she is the “most qualified person ever” to run for president? Too few seem to know about her wrongdoings and malicious behavior. Or they don’t care.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 16
     
    "For as long as the Clintons have been in the national spotlight, people linked to them have turned up dead. We're sure that's only the stuff of mythology among the "vast right-wing conspiracy," but this week brings news of more of the same. Despite FBI and Leftmedia attempts to keep Americans as uninformed as possible about Hillary Clinton's history of corruption and lies, there is new information about the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist named Shahram Amiri. Normally, the death of a foreigner wouldn't catch the attention of many Americans. But in this case, Amiri was in contact with Clinton via email, and the circumstances and timing of his death are more than suspicious. Who was this man that was just publicly hanged shortly after returning to Iran? Amiri was one of Iran's nuclear scientists, and in 2009 he disappeared while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, and he reappeared in several online videos in the United States. The timing of his disappearance was at the height of Western efforts to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. In 2010, he returned to Iran, and was greeted with a hero's welcome. Soon after, he disappeared again. This past weekend, he was publicly tried and executed. According to an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Amiri had access to Iran's secret and classified information and was linked to Iran's number one enemy (and financier), America. He was also accused of providing the U.S. with vital and secret information about Iran. So what happened between his 2010 return to Iran and this past weekend? Well, the revelations of Hillary Clinton's email scheme and the release of her emails, which contained several references to Amiri. "
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US Regime-Change Operation in Ukraine Exposed in Leaked Diplomatic Phone Call | Global ... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5367807 war & peace foreign policy U.S. Ukraine pipelinestan
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A leaked phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, has exposed the anti-democratic and colonialist character of the Obama administration’s intervention in the former Soviet republic. The discussion between the two officials includes a detailed review of which right-wing opposition figures Washington is working to install in office, and how it is using the United Nations to rubber-stamp the operation. While Germany and other European powers have worked closely with the Obama administration in promoting the violent protests against President Viktor Yanukovych, the leaked phone call reveals tensions between the imperialist powers. At one point Nuland tells Pyatt, “Fuck the EU.”
  • Nuland continues: “Yats [Yatsenyuk] is the guy that who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.” Pyatt later warns Nuland that “Klitschko has been the top dog” within the opposition, and that she will need to “move fast on all this stuff” and speak with the UDAR leader as part of their “personality management” of the opposition leadership. The utter criminality of Washington’s drive to install a pliant regime in Kiev sharply emerges in Nuland and Pyatt’s discussion of Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the neo-fascist All-Ukrainian Union (Svoboda) party. Nuland describes Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” within the opposition leadership. The State Department operative goes on to tell Pyatt that “what [Yatsenyuk] needs [after he is installed in office] is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside—he needs to be talking to them four times a week.” These remarks confirm that there is no confusion whatsoever within the Obama administration that it is working in partnership with fascist movements in Ukraine.
  • Tyahnybok is the leader of the Svoboda party, which was initially called the Social-National Party of Ukraine and featured a neo-Nazi logo. In 2004, Tyahnybok praised right-wing Ukrainian partisans in World War II, who, he declared, “did not fear, but took up their automatic rifles, going into the woods to fight Muscovites, Germans, Jewry and other filth.” He added that Ukraine still had to be liberated from a “Moscow-Jewish mafia.” In 2005, Tyahnybok signed an open letter to Ukrainian leaders demanding a halt to the “criminal activities” of “organised Jewry,” which, he declared, was attempting to commit “genocide” against the Ukrainian people. This is one of the “big three” figures with whom the Obama administration is working to install a client regime in Ukraine. Yesterday, Nuland met with several opposition figures, among them Oleh Tyahnybok. No details of the discussion have been made public, but Ambassador Pyatt released via Twitter a photo of a smiling Nuland posing next to the pro-Nazi leader and his colleagues.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14
     
    There was far more in that telephone conversation than an F-bomb leveled at the E.U., not that you would learn this from mainstream media.
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Ukraine: Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Snyper Shootin... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5371611 war & peace foreign policy Ukraine UNA-UNSO NATO snipers
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • An legitimately-elected (said by all international monitors) Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovich, has been driven from office, forced to flee as a war criminal after more than three months of violent protest and terrorist killings by so-called opposition. His “crime” according to protest leaders was that he rejected an EU offer of a vaguely-defined associate EU membership that offered little to Ukraine in favor of a concrete deal with Russia that gave immediate €15 billion debt relief and a huge reduction in Russian gas import prices. Washington at that point went into high gear and the result today is catastrophe. A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led to the collapse of the elected government.
  • Snipers began shooting into the crowd on February 22 in Maidan or Independence Square. Panic ensued and riot police retreated in panic according to eyewitnesses. The opposition leader Vitali Klitschko withdrew from the deal, no reason given. Yanukovich fled Kiev.[3] The question unanswered until now is who deployed the snipers? According to veteran US intelligence sources, the snipers came from an ultra-right-wing military organization known as Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
  • Strange Ukraine ‘Nationalists’ The leader of UNA-UNSO, Andriy Shkil, ten years ago became an adviser to Julia Tymoshenko. UNA-UNSO, during the US-instigated 2003-2004 “Orange Revolution”, backed pro-NATO candidate Viktor Yushchenko against his pro-Russian opponent, Yanukovich. UNA-UNSO members provided security for the supporters of Yushchenko and Julia Tymoshenko on Independence Square in Kiev in 2003-4.[4] UNA-UNSO is also reported to have close ties to the German National Democratic Party (NDP). [5] Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the crack-para-military UNA-UNSO members have been behind every revolt against Russian influence. The one connecting thread in their violent campaigns is always anti-Russia. The organization, according to veteran US intelligence sources, is part of a secret NATO “GLADIO” organization, and not a Ukraine nationalist group as portrayed in western media. [6] According to these sources, UNA-UNSO have been involved (confirmed officially) in the Lithuanian events in the Winter of 1991, the Soviet Coup d’etat in Summer 1991, the war for the Pridnister Republic 1992, the anti-Moscow Abkhazia War 1993, the Chechen War, the US-organized Kosovo Campaign Against the Serbs, and the August 8 2008 war in Georgia. According to these reports, UNA-UNSO para-military have been involved in every NATO dirty war in the post-cold war period, always fighting on behalf of NATO. “These people are the dangerous mercenaries used all over the world to fight NATO’s dirty war, and to frame Russia because this group pretends to be Russian special forces. THESE ARE THE BAD GUYS, forget about the window dressing nationalists, these are the men behind the sniper rifles,” these sources insist. [7]
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  • If true that UNA-UNSO is not “Ukrainian” opposition, but rather a highly secret NATO force using Ukraine as base, it would suggest that the EU peace compromise with the moderates was likely sabotaged by the one major player excluded from the Kiev 21 February diplomatic talks—Victoria Nuland’s State Department.[8] Both Nuland and right-wing Republican US Senator John McCain have had contact with the leader of the Ukrainian opposition Svoboda Party, whose leader is openly anti-semitic and defends the deeds of a World War II Ukrainian SS-Galicia Division head.[9] The party was registered in 1995, initially calling itself the “Social National Party of Ukraine” and using a swastika style logo. Svoboda is the electoral front for neo-nazi organizations in Ukraine such as UNA-UNSO.[10]
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Israel's ex-security chiefs stand with the international community on Iran deal - Diplo... - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/....premium-1.560262 war & peace Iran Iranian-nukes-myth Israel negotiations intelligence-chief
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Amid the cries of woe echoing from the cabinet since Sunday, we could have expected the former intelligence chiefs to join the government’s battle to convince the world of the dangers of the Geneva agreement. But that didn’t happen. “When I heard the reactions in Jerusalem, I mistakenly thought for a moment that Iran had begun to develop a nuclear warhead,” said former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin. His predecessor, Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, warned about the expected damage from the increasingly bitter rift between Israel and the United States.
  • The question at this late stage is what alternatives Israel has. It was Netanyahu who decided in previous years not to attack the nuclear sites. And now Iran is gradually emerging from its international isolation thanks to the negotiations with the world powers. For a moment it seemed that Israel, as it quarrels with the United States and the European Union on settlement construction, insisted on filling Iran’s shoes as international pariah.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 13
     
    Poor Bibi and crew. Their justification for goading the U.S. into war against Iran just got taken off the table. And they're upset about it because it never was really about the mythical Iranian nuclear weaponization. It was about removing the only military force in the region capable of stopping an Israeli invasion. Iran, the nation that came to the aid of Syria when the Izzies and the Saudis wanted to destabilize Syria and break it into smaller pieces and almost persauded the U.S. to launch missile strikes against Syria under the pretext of a false flag nerve gas attack actually carried out by Saudi puppet jihadis. Poor Bibi. No U.S. war against Iran. And to be told this by a black president. (Israel's right-wing is far from kind to black Africans in Israel. They get treated like they were Arab Palestinians.) But Bibi can't burn that bridge with the U.S. and stay in power. U.S. support is the only reason that Israel still exists.        
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Saudi Arabia warns of shift away from U.S. over Syria, Iran | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...audi-usa-idUSBRE99L0K120131022
shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Upset at President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Syria, members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family are threatening a rift with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington and the kingdom to its lowest point in years. Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a "major shift" in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday.Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to act effectively against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said."The shift away from the U.S. is a major one," the source close to Saudi policy said. "Saudi doesn't want to find itself any longer in a situation where it is dependent."It was not immediately clear whether the reported statements by Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years, had the full backing of King Abdullah.
  • Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a "major shift" in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday.Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to act effectively against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said."The shift away from the U.S. is a major one," the source close to Saudi policy said. "Saudi doesn't want to find itself any longer in a situation where it is dependent."It was not immediately clear whether the reported statements by Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years, had the full backing of King Abdullah.The growing breach between the United States and Saudi Arabia was also on display in Washington, where another senior Saudi prince criticized Obama's Middle East policies, accusing him of "dithering" on Syria and Israeli-Palestinian peace.
  • In unusually blunt public remarks, Prince Turki al-Faisal called Obama's policies in Syria "lamentable" and ridiculed a U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons. He suggested it was a ruse to let Obama avoid military action in Syria."The current charade of international control over Bashar's chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people," said Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence.The United States and Saudi Arabia have been allies since the kingdom was declared in 1932, giving Riyadh a powerful military protector and Washington secure oil supplies.The Saudi criticism came days after the 40th anniversary of the October 1973 Arab oil embargo imposed to punish the West for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war.That was one of the low points in U.S.-Saudi ties, which were also badly shaken by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
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  • Saudi Arabia gave a clear sign of its displeasure over Obama's foreign policy last week when it rejected a coveted two-year term on the U.N. Security Council in a display of anger over the failure of the international community to end the war in Syria and act on other Middle East issues.Prince Turki indicated that Saudi Arabia will not reverse that decision, which he said was a result of the Security Council's failure to stop Assad and implement its own decision on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."There is nothing whimsical about the decision to forego membership of the Security Council. It is based on the ineffectual experience of that body," he said in a speech to the Washington-based National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations.
  • Prince Bandar is seen as a foreign policy hawk, especially on Iran. The Sunni Muslim kingdom's rivalry with Shi'ite Iran, an ally of Syria, has amplified sectarian tensions across the Middle East.A son of the late defense minister and crown prince, Prince Sultan, and a protégé of the late King Fahd, he fell from favor with King Abdullah after clashing on foreign policy in 2005.But he was called in from the cold last year with a mandate to bring down Assad, diplomats in the Gulf say. Over the past year, he has led Saudi efforts to bring arms and other aid to Syrian rebels."Prince Bandar told diplomats that he plans to limit interaction with the U.S.," the source close to Saudi policy said."This happens after the U.S. failed to take any effective action on Syria and Palestine. Relations with the U.S. have been deteriorating for a while, as Saudi feels that the U.S. is growing closer with Iran and the U.S. also failed to support Saudi during the Bahrain uprising," the source said.The source declined to provide more details of Bandar's talks with the diplomats, which took place in the past few days.
  • But he suggested that the planned change in ties between the energy superpower and the United States would have wide-ranging consequences, including on arms purchases and oil sales.Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, ploughs much of its earnings back into U.S. assets. Most of the Saudi central bank's net foreign assets of $690 billion are thought to be denominated in dollars, much of them in U.S. Treasury bonds."All options are on the table now, and for sure there will be some impact," the Saudi source said.He said there would be no further coordination with the United States over the war in Syria, where the Saudis have armed and financed rebel groups fighting Assad.The kingdom has informed the United States of its actions in Syria, and diplomats say it has respected U.S. requests not to supply the groups with advanced weaponry that the West fears could fall into the hands of al Qaeda-aligned groups.Saudi anger boiled over after Washington refrained from military strikes in response to a poison gas attack in Damascus in August when Assad agreed to give up his chemical weapons arsenal.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 13
     
    This lengthy article from Reuters deserves attention. The peace initiatives by Russia/Syria and by Iran are forcing realignment of foreign policies throughout the Mideast. The U.S. is no longer perceived as being on the side of only Sunni Muslim states. One of the most visible changes (after cancellation of the U.S. military strike on Syria) is a go-it-alone declaration by the House of Saud that parallels the stance taken by Israel's ruling right-wing coalition. Both Israel and the Saudis had very successfully isolated the U.S. from the non-Sunni Arab nations, fueling and deepening a religious divide within the Arab nations. It remains to be seen whether the declarations by the House of Saud and Bibi Netanyahu will translate into effective military action against Iran and Syria, although Saudi money and weapons will continue to flow into Syria for the foreseeable future. Both nations will continue attempts to undo the looming Iran-U.S. thaw in relations. Predictably, the Zionist/Neocon hawks in Congress are pushing legislation to put a big freeze back on the Iran-U.S. thaw in relations, including a bill to stiffen economic sanctions on Iran and authorize military strikes against Syria. But that legislation seems to be going nowhere; the mood of the U.S. population (and thus of those up for election next year) has shifted to profoundly anti-war, at least as applied to Syria and Iran. It would be ironic if Russia/Syria and Iran's peace initiatives actually resulted in a lasting U.S. shift away from the Zionist/Neocon strategy to destabilize all of Israel's neighboring states except Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan (those three have already been destabilized and swept into Israel's influence). If so, Obama might yet leave a positive legacy.
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New Israeli legal campaign accuses Abbas of 'terrorism' | Maan News Agency - 0 views

www.maannews.net/...ViewDetails.aspx war & peace Israel Palestine war crimes ICC chutzpah
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Right-wing Israeli political parties have begun a campaign to sue president Abbas for "war crimes" at the International Criminal Court in response to the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to join international conventions and treaties.The campaign comes amid a near breakdown in ongoing peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO, and seeks to file legal procedures against Abbas accusing him of supporting "terrorism" and aiding to terrorist organizations.Beginning on Friday, Israeli newspapers and websites have published advertisements calling on Israeli lawyers to join the campaign led by the Israel Law Center to sue Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on charges of supporting terrorist organizations.
  • Right-wing Israeli political parties have begun a campaign to sue president Abbas for "war crimes" at the International Criminal Court in response to the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to join international conventions and treaties.The campaign comes amid a near breakdown in ongoing peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO, and seeks to file legal procedures against Abbas accusing him of supporting "terrorism" and aiding to terrorist organizations.Beginning on Friday, Israeli newspapers and websites have published advertisements calling on Israeli lawyers to join the campaign led by the Israel Law Center to sue Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on charges of supporting terrorist organizations.
  • Palestinian minister of justice Ali Muhanna told Ma'an that the Israeli government had "lost balance both politically and legally." Their response, he said, reflects the degree of rage in Israel towards the PA for attempting to join international conventions. Muhanna confirmed that Israel "cannot engage in any legal action at the ICC because Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court." "Such legal proceedings are submitted through the ICC's Attorney General or through the UN Security Council.""Abbas' move isn't a war crime. But the ongoing Israeli settlement construction, confiscation of Palestinian money, killing and detention of children are war crimes," he added.
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Alleged Colombian Paramilitary Wanted for Murder of Robert Serra Arrives in Venezuela |... - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11404 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Venezuela paramilitaries coup-attempts
shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Alleged Colombian paramilitary Leiva Padilla, alias “El Colombia,” arrived in Venezuela on Saturday where he will face trial for the murders of socialist politician, Robert Serra (27), and his comrade and political assistant, Maria Herrera (26).  Leiva is considered by Venezuelan authorities to be the head of an eight man group responsible for assassinating the two young political activists on October 1st last year. He was arrested on November 5th 2014 by Colombian authorities in Cartagena after Venezuela issued an Interpol request for his capture. The extradition of the alleged paramilitary, who has dual Venezuela-Colombia nationality, was approved by Colombian president, Manuel Santos, early in May. 
  • In the days following the assassination of Serra and Herrera, the Venezuelan government released CCTV footage of six men entering Serra’s house in the working class barrio of Caracas, La Pastora. Authorities maintain that the group immediately “neutralised” an unsuspecting Herrera, who answered the door, and then proceeded to go upstairs where they violently assassinated Serra before leaving just several minutes later.  The legislator was tied, gagged and stabbed somewhere between twenty to fifty times in the chest and four times in the back. At the time, then-Venezuelan Minister of Justice, Peace and the Interior, Miguel Rodriguez Torres, affirmed that the attack bore all the hallmarks of a politically motivated assassination. 
  • In the months prior to his death, he was conducting a parliamentary investigation into the activities of Lorent Saleh, a young rightwing activist arrested in 2014 for allegedly plotting alongside Colombian paramilitaries to carry out a series of terrorist attacks and political murders in Venezuela. Also extradited from Colombia, Saleh is a chief ally of former Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, currently under investigation for his alleged links to paramilitary networks. Uribe had also been accused of being linked to Saleh by Serra less than two weeks before his death.  According to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the murders were planned and financed by an unknown person in Colombia. They have been widely interpreted as an attempt to intimidate those who support the country’s leftwing Bolivarian Revolution.  Many have also cited the crime as a sign of the increasing presence of rightwing paramilitary forces operating in the country.
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  • Key in the upcoming trial, which promises to be kept highly confidential, will be the testimony of Serra’s chief bodyguard, Edwin Torres Camacho. Camacho was arrested soon after the murders and admitted to having been approached by “El Colombia” and paid to betray the socialist legislator. The confession is one of the strongest pieces of evidence against Leiva, who is also reported by Venezuelan press to have been aided and abetted by his wife and accompanied by his son on the night of the murder.  The high profile case has seen ten other people arrested in connection to the plot and international arrest warrants issued for another three. 
  • Leiva’s capture is perhaps the most significant development in the case so far. His testimony could provide a clue as to the identity of the financial backer in Colombia, responsible for ordering the assassination, as well as shed light on one of the most high profile political assassinations of the last fifteen years in Venezuela. 
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jun 15
     
    The right-wing paramilitaries have been closely involved in 3 coup attempts in Venezuela, all of which traced back to covert U.S. intervention.
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As Ambassador Power praises ADL, Abe Foxman savages John Kerry | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...-abe-foxman-savages-john-kerry war & peace Iranian nukes myth Kerry Israel Israel-firsters
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has launched a stinging attack on US Secretary of State John Kerry. Foxman’s open attack on a US secretary of state, especially one who has been so friendly to Israel, is unusual. What makes it more extraordinary is that it comes after another Obama administration official has heaped lavish praise on Foxman and the ADL. “I think Kerry’s outrageous behavior will unite the American Jewish community,” Foxman told Israeli army radio, Haaretz reports.
  • “It is chutzpah to lecture Israel about the risks of peace and war,” Foxman added from Jerusalem, where he is currently visiting. The ADL is one of the most prominent pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian organizations in the United States. It recently published a McCarthyite list of the “Top 10 anti-Israel organizations” which included a number of peace and justice groups. The sources of Foxman’s rage include US diplomacy with Iran, which Kerry has championed, and Kerry’s recent criticism of (though total inaction on) Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestinian land. Foxman claimed there was a “crisis of trust” between the US and Israel because Kerry had not kept Israel sufficiently informed of the Geneva talks over Iran’s nuclear energy program. Those talks ended last night without a much-anticipated breakthrough, after a last minute French intervention scuppered a deal.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 13
     
    Make no mistake: Israel's right-wing government and its Zionist/Neoliberal stooges in the U.S. are squarely aimed at blocking any deal that would get in the way of the U.S. launching a war against Iran. 
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SteveLendmanBlog - 0 views

sjlendman.blogspot.mx/...d-coup-attempt-in-ecuador.html war & peace Ecuador U.S.-foreign-policy coup-attempts
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • cuador is in the eye of the storm. Obama's earlier 2010 attempt to forcibly unseat popular President Rafael Correa failed.  He's trying again. Ecuadorean democracy is being attacked. Since early June, US-orchestrated right-wing protests (mainly in Quito and Guayaquil) erupted. They continue at times violently to replace Correa with fascist rule. They began on the pretext of announced higher inheritance and capital gains taxes affecting about 2% of the population - the Law to Redistribute the Wealth now being debated after Correa halted its implementation to make rich Ecuadorians pay more along with creating more social enterprises, collectives and cooperatives.  Protest leaders want Correa forcibly ousted. Interior Minister Jose Serrano revealed a plot to storm the presidential palace, block airports and bridges on the Colombian and Peruvian borders, as well as attack security forces.
  • Serrano said opposition lawmakers Andres Paez and Lourdes Tiban conspired with former Col. Mario Pazmino to instigate violence and chaos during protests. Pazmino was former army military intelligence head - "very close to the CIA," according to Correa. In 2008, he was sacked for colluding with Colombia's bombing of Ecuador.
  • On Thursday, violent clashes erupted. Right-wing extremists attacked Ecuadorean police near Quito's presidential palace. Their plan to breach their lines failed. Four officers sustained injuries.
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  • Washington wants Correa's government replaced by a regime it controls, neo-colonial rule most Ecuadoreans oppose - following the pattern of earlier failed Venezuelan protests.  So far, popular support for Correa prevails. At the same time, dark forces headquartered in Washington never end their dirty game for unchallenged global dominance - a plot to create unfit to live in ruler-serf societies worldwide.
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Israeli Elections To Be Held March 17 | nsnbc international - 0 views

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shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the bill to dissolve the Knesset passed the first reading, Wednesday, in a 22 to 0 vote, preparing to head for new elections on March 17, 2015. The developments came less than a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, and Finance Minister Yair Lapid.
  • Haaretz said the vote came just a few hours after the bill to dissolve the Knesset passed a preliminary reading with a 84 to 0 vote, with one abstention. It added that the umbrella proposal grants the Knesset a period of three to five months to prepare for new election after the Knesset has been dissolved. There will be two more readings at the Knesset next week, and after the approval, the Knesset moves to elections recess.
  • On Tuesday, Netanyahu fired both Livni and Lapid after accusing them of trying to out throw him, and for defying his own polices, including his insistence that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish State, and his policies regarding the “Iranian Nuclear File.”
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    Netanyahu's approval rating is down around 20 per cent. The only problem there is that the next higher rating of another politico is 7 per cent. The pundits seem to agree that Netanyahu's Likud Party will likely be charged with forming a new ruling coalition, which keeps Netanyahu and Israel's right wing in power. 
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Two Supermarket Executives Charged With Hoarding in Venezuela | venezuelanalysis.com - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11294 war & peace Venezuela U.S.-foreign-policy hoarding litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Two managers of the private supermarket chain Dia Dia were formally charged by the Venezuelan state prosecutor yesterday with the alleged crimes of boycott and destabilization of the economy. Manuel Andrés Morales Ordosgoitti and Tadeo Arriechi Franco were arrested at the beginning of February after state authorities uncovered ton loads of basic items in a Dia Dia warehouse in Caracas. The indictments are part of a ramped up effort on the part of the Venezuelan government to crack down on hoarding and speculation by large private retailers, which is a primary contributing factor to inflation and widespread scarcities of basic goods.
  • The Bolivarian government has regulated the prices of everyday goods for years, in order to ensure access by the majority of Venezuelans for whom they were unaffordable under previous administrations. Nonetheless, the government has accused the private sector of exploiting this policy by hoarding cheap subsidized goods, creating consumer gaps, then selling them at exorbitant prices on the black market in what President Maduro has termed an “economic war” waged to destabilize the socialist government. Last month, board members of the private firms Dia Dia and Carnica 2005 were arrested for their companies’ role in a massive hoarding operation.
  • Carnica 2005 was nationalized and integrated into the state food distribution network PDVAL. Dia Dia operates 35 supermarkets throughout Venezuela, which are largely found in low-income communities.
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  • On Monday, Venezuelan Vice-President Jorge Arreaza inaugurated the first of the nation’s “people’s military commands” in Lara state, which will be charged with “generating a victory in the economic war.” Last month, President Nicolas Maduro unveiled his plan for the creation of “peoples’ military commands” throughout the nation designed to combat “economic sabotage” at the local level by ensuring the supply of basic food and hygiene products as well as medicines. “The men and women who form these commands have the responsibility of attending to the denunciations of the people and safeguarding their access to food, medicine, and all necessary products,” declared the vice-president.
  • The people’s commands will reportedly operate in coordination with social movements, communal councils and communes, and state security organs, although details remain limited as the project is gets off the ground. 
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 15
     
    It's a big problem in Venezuela. The government subsidizes the purchase of consumer goods so that they can be priced lower for those with low incomes. But the right-wing "capitalists" aligned with U.S. covert agencies hoard the goods, creating artificial market shortages, then sell the goods on the black market at inflated prices. The current response by the government is criiminal prosecutions coupled with nationalization of businesses that don't hear the message. I suspect that the government may be forced at some point to drop the subsidies and begin writing welfare checks to low income citizens instead. The Bolivarian government is absolutely committed to ending poverty in Venezuela. Of course this smells too much of socialism for U.S. government tastes, which has been attempting to overthrow the Bolivarian government ever since it nationalized the oil industry. 
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Netanyahu Ups the US Ante | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...netanyahu-ups-the-us-ante war & peace Israel Palestine U.S.-foreign-policy BDS Netanyahu Progressives
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to play the tune to which U.S. politicians, including presidents and presidential candidates, dance. Now, his price for a future swirl around the dance floor is being raised to $4.5 billion a year, as retired Army Col. Ann Wright explains.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15
     
    Actually, the increase in U.S. aid to $4.5 billion annually was a done deal before Netanyahu's arrival. Netanyahu's trip to the U.S. was an unmitigated disaster for the Israeli Zionist right wing. He drew huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago. And his appearance before the Democratic think tank Center for American Progress caused major news coverage of progressive Democrats' objections to Netanyahu being invited into the Democratic sanctum despite his mistreatment of the Palestinians, further cementing the Zionist cause into a Republican-only venue in Congress. All directly counter to Netanyahu's goal of patching up relations with Democratic Progressives. 
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Hillary Clinton, With Little Notice, Vows to Embrace an Extremist Agenda on Israel - 0 views

theintercept.com/...-an-extremist-agenda-on-israel Auction 2016 Greenwald Hillary Israel-lobby
shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Photo: Alex Brandon/APFormer President Bill Clinton on Monday met in secret (no press allowed) with roughly 100 leaders of South Florida’s Jewish community, and, as the Times of Israel reports, “He vowed that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would make it one of her top priorities to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance.” He also “stressed the close bond that he and his wife have with the State of Israel.” It may be tempting to dismiss this as standard, vapid Clintonian politicking: adeptly telling everyone what they want to hear and making them believe it. After all, is it even physically possible to “strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance” beyond what it already entails: billions of dollars in American taxpayer money transferred every year, sophisticated weapons fed to Israel as it bombs its defenseless neighbors, blindly loyal diplomatic support and protection for everything it does? But Bill Clinton’s vow of even greater support for Israel is completely consistent with what Hillary Clinton herself has been telling American Jewish audiences for months. In November, she published an op-ed in The Forward in which she vowed to strengthen relations not only with Israel, but also with its extremist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • Her comments on Israel have similarly contained implicit criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy: namely, that he has created or at least allowed too much animosity with Netanyahu. In her Forward op-ed, she wrote that the Israeli prime minister’s “upcoming visit to Washington is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel.” She pointedly added: “The alliance between our two nations transcends politics. It is and should always be a commitment that unites us, not a wedge that divides us.” And in case her message is unclear, she added this campaign promise: “I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.” Last month, Clinton wrote an even more extreme op-ed in the Jewish Journal, one that made even clearer that she intends to change Obama’s policy to make it even more “pro-Israel.” It begins: “In this time of terrorism and turmoil, the alliance between the United States and Israel is more important than ever. To meet the many challenges we face, we have to take our relationship to the next level.”
  • “With every passing year, we must tie the bonds tighter,” she wrote. Tie those bonds tighter. Thus: As part of this effort, we need to ensure that Israel continues to maintain its qualitative military edge. The United States should further bolster Israeli air defenses and help develop better tunnel detection technology to prevent arms smuggling and kidnapping. We should also expand high-level U.S.-Israel strategic consultations. As always, there is not a word about the oppression and brutality imposed on Palestinians as part of Israel’s decadeslong occupation. She does not even acknowledge, let alone express opposition to, Israel’s repeated, civilian-slaughtering bombing of the open-air prison in Gaza. That’s because for Clinton — like the progressive establishment that supports her — the suffering and violence imposed on Palestinians literally do not exist. None of this is mentioned, even in passing, in the endless parade of pro-Clinton articles pouring forth from progressive media outlets.
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  • Clinton partisans — being Clinton partisans — would, if they ever did deign to address Israel/Palestine, undoubtedly justify Clinton’s hawkishness on the ground of political necessity: that she could never win if she did not demonstrate steadfast devotion to the Israeli government. But for all his foreign policy excesses, including on Israel, Obama has proven that a national politician can be at least mildly more adversarial to Israeli leaders and still retain support. And notably, there is at least one politician who rejects the view that one must cling to standard pro-Israel orthodoxy in order to win; just yesterday, Donald Trump vowed “neutrality” on Israel/Palestine. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Clinton advocates are understandably desperate to manufacture the most trivial controversies because the alternative is to defend her candidacy based on her prior actions and current beliefs (that tactic was actually pioneered by then-Clinton operative Dick Morris, who had his client turn the 1996 election into a discussion of profound topics such as school uniforms). If you were a pro-Clinton progressive, would you want to defend her continuous vows to “strengthen” U.S. support for the Netanyahu government and ensure that every year “we must tie the bonds tighter”?
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 16
     
    Glen Greenwald (a Jew) tackles Hillary's promise to increase support for Israel's right-wing government, at the expense of Palestinian liberty. With friends like Israel, who needs enemies?
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Maduro Makes Moves toward Economic Reform as New Poll Predicts PSUV Win | venezuelanaly... - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11599
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro unveiled  a series of economic measures on Tuesday following the release of a new poll predicting a victory for the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) in December parliamentary elections. Among the measures are various modifications to Venezuela’s Fair Price Law aimed at fighting speculation by private retailers, which has become rampant amid soaring inflation.
  • A new category of maximum price will applied to all goods and services, stipulating a 30% maximum profit for retailers determined on the basis of “real costs of production and commercialization”. Within this new schema, importers will be entitled to a maximum profit of 20%, while domestic producers will be allowed to take in a 30% maximum gain in an effort to stimulate national production. By capping profits in each rung of the production chain, the government aims to put a halt to the speculative spiral rapidly driving up the prices of everyday goods, which constantly erodes the purchasing power of Venezuela’s popular sectors. Additionally, Maduro announced a modification applying to food and health services, a category, which the government says has been manipulated by private retailers. The new “Fair Price” registry will be determined unilaterally by Venezuela’s National Superintendence of Fair Prices over the next 30 days. In order to enforce the new “fair price” regime, Maduro also unveiled tougher punishments for speculation, which will be detected by evaluating the net income of private firms in light of new regulations on maximum price and maximum profit. The government will now impose steeper penalties on retailers who remark the price of goods, which may include jail time. Furthermore, the common practice of fixing prices on the basis of the parallel dollar will now be considered an offense. Apart from measures against speculation, Maduro also announced a 30% across-the-board salary increase for public sector workers and armed forces personnel, which comes on the heels of a 30% raise in the national minimum wage announced last week. The salary adjustment was coupled with the approval of 110,000 new pensioners as part of the national pension system, which has been massively expanded under the Bolivarian administrations of Chávez and Maduro.
  • Lastly, the Venezuelan president indicated that the ministries of industry and commerce would be fused in order to better coordinate efforts to combat speculation and guarantee the distribution of essential goods.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 15
     
    Socialist (and populist) Venezuela is under siege by right wing businessmen and the U.S. government, with two attempted coups in the last few years, one earlier this year. Hoarding of goods by businessmen opposed to the government in an attempt to undermine government support has been a big problem. The profit-capping measures just announced are directed at that problem. 
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Hard choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...latinamericaforeignpolicy.html Auction 2016 Hillary Honduras-overthrow lies
shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.”
  • Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony. First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” Clinton writes. “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.” This may not come as a surprise to those who followed the post-coup drama closely. (See my commentary from 2009 on Washington’s role in helping the coup succeed here, here and here.) But the official storyline, which was dutifully accepted by most in the media, was that the Obama administration actually opposed the coup and wanted Zelaya to return to office.
  • The question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin American leaders, the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies vehemently demanded his immediate return to office. Clinton’s defiant and anti-democratic stance spurred a downward slide in U.S. relations with several Latin American countries, which has continued. It eroded the warm welcome and benefit of the doubt that even the leftist governments in region offered to the newly installed Obama administration a few months earlier. Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.
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  • In addition to her bold confession and Clinton’s embrace of the far-right narrative in the Honduran episode, the Latin America chapter is considerably to the right of even her own record on the region as secretary of state. This appears to be a political calculation. There is little risk of losing votes for admitting her role in making most of the hemisphere’s governments disgusted with the United States. On the other side of the equation, there are influential interest groups and significant campaign money to be raised from the right-wing Latin American lobby, including Floridian Cuban-Americans and their political fundraisers.
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Goldberg Sees Crisis in US-Israel Ties, Blames Bibi « LobeLog - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/-in-us-israel-ties-blames-bibi U.S.-foreign-policy Mideast Israel-divorce
shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • 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.”
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14
     
    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
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