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SANTIAGO, Chile: Chilean accused of murder, torture taught 13 years for Pentagon | Nati... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...accused-of-murder-torture.html war & peace National-Defense-Univ human rights Chile Colombia Operation-Condor
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past. Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who sexually tortured him.Despite knowing of the allegations, State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense University until last year .Human rights groups also question the school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military commander.
  • Some Latin America experts said the hirings by the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies reflected a continuing inclination by the U.S government to overlook human rights violations in Latin America, especially in countries where it funded efforts to quash leftists. But those experts were especially troubled by Garcia Covarrubias’ long tenure at one of the nation’s most renowned defense institutions. “His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,” said Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer from 1982 to 2010 who specializes in Latin America. “If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell other countries how they should be fighting terrorism?” To his supporters, Garcia Covarrubias is a brilliant thinker with a Ph.D. and purveyor of leadership skills. To his alleged victims, he’s a sadistic torturer with a penchant for horsewhips and perversity.
  • A 2008 Chilean military document reviewed by McClatchy identified Garcia Covarrubias as a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the feared spy agency known by its acronym DINA.“DINA was simply the most sinister agency in Latin America,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, which secured the release of U.S. government classified documents underscoring the complicit relationship between the U.S. and Pinochet. “Anyone associated with that agency should never have been allowed into this country, let alone given this job.”Officials with the Pentagon, the State Department and the school refused to comment. Garcia Covarrubias is now back in Chile, ordered by an investigative judge in January 2014 to remain in the country while an inquiry continues into his alleged role in the deaths of seven people in Temuco weeks after the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on Sept. 11, 1973. His case is one of 108 involving tortured, disappeared or murdered supporters of the deposed elected president, Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 people died at the hands of the regime, and in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell offered regrets for U.S. involvement in the coup, calling it “not a part of American history that we're proud of.”
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  • The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him. “We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”McClatchy, however, located one of his alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him. “They submitted us to torture, twice a day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”According to Carrasco, the torture unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids, genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.“He was the person who tortured us, with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts, which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic behavior.”
  • Despite very graphic torture accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.
  • As the center supported Garcia Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications chief said.Last September, Andersen filed a complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen. Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment. “It’s shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said. The details uncovered about Garcia Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.“The American people deserve to know that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.
  • While most of the concerns focused on Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University school.He was hired at the request of the Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls Downie, the center’s director at the time. “The Colombians wanted, for his own safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie. “This is a guy we certainly wanted to have as a professor.”Human rights groups, however, criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province, where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for the Washington Office on Latin America. “If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”“Having officers like that, the implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15
     
    See also http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Military-University-Accused-of-Hiring-Human-Rights-Abusers--20150313-0015.html
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Carter: Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-explained-at-30-000-feet.html Obammunism financial-collapse fascism crony-politics crony-socialism
shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Party Doesn’t Matter
  • “I don’t understand why Washington does this to us," he resumes. By "us," he means people who run businesses of less- than-Fortune-500 size. He tells me that it doesn’t much matter which party is in office. Every change of power means a whole new set of rules to which he and those like him must respond. ‘‘I don’t understand,” he continues, “why Washington won’t just get out of our way and let us hire.”
  • Thinking of Selling
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • No `Installed Base'
  • `Invisible
  • “I know there are things the government has to do. But they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.” He reflects for a moment, then finds the analogy he seeks. “Government should act like my assistant, not my boss.”
  • For medium-sized firms like his, however, there is little wiggle room to absorb the costs of regulatory change. Because he possesses neither lobbyists nor clout, he says, Washington doesn’t care whether he hires more workers or closes up shop.
  • Recessions have complex causes, but, as the man on the aisle reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Sep 11
     
    Simplicity.  Who would have guessed it's this easy!  It turns out that Obammunism is a political formula of Spend Big, Borrow Big, Regulate with a heavy boot, Take care of your big big campaign contributors (Call it Fascism or Crony Politics - it's still the same criminal corruption of using power to enrich yourself and your friends at the expense of your countrymen). excerpt from a conversation on a plane flight that takes place between an ivy league elitist and a SMB business owner: Demand for his product is up. But he still won't hire. "Why not?" "Because I don't know how much it will cost," he explains. "How can I hire new workers today, when I don't know how much they will cost me tomorrow?" He's referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can't afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he's hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.
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Goggle Hires Obama's Campaign E-Team - America Conservative 2 Conservative - 0 views

americac2c.com/...-hires-obama-s-campaign-e-team Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist-Media_elites Google NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA
shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13
     
    Looks like Florian was right after all.  Google is a front for the big Media-Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist elites. excerpt: "The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation's biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama's 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google. This week, Bloomberg reported that Obama's data mining team, used to such great effect during his 2012 re-election for president, has been hired nearly wholesale to go work for Google. This may not come as such a great surprise, however, as Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, helped organize and run Obama's re-election e-team. Schmidt "helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization," Bloomberg reports. Since he came onto the national political scene, Barack Obama has campaigned like a veritable David vs Goliath with evil corporations standing in for Goliath while Obama presents himself as David loading his sling shot to do battle. But the reality is not quite that cut and dried and Google has been a big recipient of Obama's largesse. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney points out that the administration is filled with Googleites and that President Obama and Google have a long standing love affair. Remember Obama's No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google's former top lobbyist-who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing polic.... Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board. Then there was the time when Google chief Schmidt is reported to have told a Google staffer to make sure that the search engine did not connect his entries to his own political donations so that it was a bit harder to find out to whom he donated campaign cash."
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Clifford S. Asness: Uncertainty Is Not the Problem - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...4259304576375950266610760.html obammunism financial-collapse
shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 11
     
    Bulls-eye!! Uncertainty isn't the problem.  Bad government policies are exactly what's wrong and the reason things are certain to get worse.  It's a huge mistake to hire a hardcore Marxist to fix a capitalist-constitutional problem!! By CLIFFORD S. ASNESS Many commentators blame our continuing economic woes on "uncertainty." They allege that recent and anticipated dramatic policy changes make business planning difficult, and that this is retarding growth and employment. This view is not wrong-but our main problem is not the uncertainty surrounding new policies. It is the policies. Consider two uncertain situations. In the first, our business is waiting to find out the location decision for a customer's new industrial plant, so we know where to build our new supply facility. Until this is resolved, we will not invest in building nor will we hire staff. In the second situation, we know we are in for some pain, someone is going to make our business less productive and profitable, but we do not yet know how much. Planning is marginally more difficult, but the main reason we will not grow in the second situation is that investment is less attractive regardless of the precise resolution of uncertainty.
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Billionaire hires impeachment 'army' to 'remove Trump from power' - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...rmy-to-remove-trump-from-power Trump impeachment Steyer Axelrod
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, a friend and donor to Obama and Clinton, is hiring an army of more than 50 political operatives in a major campaign to help Democrats get control of the U.S. House this year and “remove Trump from power.” “Need to Impeach” Founder Steyer, 60, announced Thursday that he is hiring a team of 50 political and communications strategists to coordinate his campaign. While Steyer launched his $20 million campaign to impeach Trump last year, he has now promised to double that amount and also spend $30 million on 2018 House races through his super PAC, NextGen America. “The team, including 50 staff members, is adding thousands of new supporters to the impeachment movement each day, creating a digital army of activists who are mobilizing to take back the House of Representatives in the 2018 election and remove Trump from power,” read a Thursday statement from “Need to Impeach.” Separately, House Democrats announced Thursday that they plan to target as many as 101 Republican-held congressional seats this year, the most in a decade.
  • Nonetheless, even Obama’s former top adviser, David Axelrod, has condemned Steyer’s campaign to impeach Trump, saying the effort is too much, too soon. In November, Axelrod tweeted: “Steyer impeachment ads seem to me more of a vanity project than a call to action. It is – at least at this point – an unhelpful message. If imepachment becomes a political tool, it will be as damaging to our democracy as the degradations @realDonaldTrump has inflicted on it.”
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A Distorted Lens Justifying An Illegitimate Ukrainian Government - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...186661 war & peace Ukraine coup snipers
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Support it or oppose it, a coup d’état took place in Kiev after an EU-brokered agreement was signed by the Ukrainian government and the mainstream opposition on Feb. 21. The agreement called for power sharing between both sides through the formation of a national unity government and for an end to the opposition-led street protests in Kiev. President Viktor Yanukovych ordered the Ukrainian police and security forces to withdraw from their positions, and even earlier, he had made multiple concessions to the opposition leadership. Instead of keeping its end of the bargain, the Ukrainian mainstream opposition executed a coup through the use of violence by organized ultra-nationalist gangs, which some analysts have compared to stay-behinds or secretive militias that were created by NATO during the Cold War. These armed ultra-nationalist groups took over administrative bodies in Ukraine and fought until they managed to oust the Ukrainian government and opened the path for opposition leaders to take power on Feb. 25. The Ukrainian mainstream opposition used the EU-brokered agreement, which the Brussels-based European Commission deliberately refused to enforce, as a means of justifying the formation of a coup-imposed government.
  • In the absence of almost half the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, or Ukrainian Parliament, the opposition parties began to arbitrarily pass unconstitutional laws. They also unconstitutionally selected Oleksandr/Aleksandr Valentynovych Turchynov as the acting president of Ukraine before President Viktor Yanukovych was even impeached. Intimidation and violence were additionally used to secure the cooperation of any disagreeing parliamentarians or state officials in Kiev. Saying that the ultra-nationalists and fascists are marginal elements, the mainstream media networks in North America and the European Union have simply dismissed the armed ultra-nationalist groups involved in the coup that are presently integrated into the putsch regime running Kiev. The militant ultra-nationalists, however, are very influential and amassing power under the illegal premiership of Arseniy Yatsenyuk.  Yatsenyuk, himself, is from Yulia Tymoshenko’s notoriously corrupt All-Ukrainian Union Fatherland Party (Batkivshchyna) and essentially a U.S. and EU appointee. There is even a pre-coup leaked telephone interception, likely either recorded by the intelligence services of Russia or Ukraine, in which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victory Nuland says that Yatsenyuk will be appointed as the prime minister of the Ukrainian government that the U.S. is putting together.
  • It is unlikely that Yatsenyuk and the loosely-knit alliance of the governing parties that ran Ukraine under the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko governments, foreign-based Ukrainians, and the forces behind the Orange Revolution that form the Orangist camp which he belongs to could have gotten back into power in Ukraine without pressure, the use of force and foreign backing. Yatsenyuk was even threatened and booed by the Ukrainians gathered at Independence Square when it was announced that he would be appointed as the prime minister of the post-coup government. A vast segment of the protesters made it clear that Tymoshenko, Yatsenyuk’s party leader, was no alternative to the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in their eyes, either, when it was announced that she wanted to run for prime minister. The Orangists do not have the support of a majority of the population, nor did they form the parliamentary majority in the Verkhovna Rada. Their Orangist president, Viktor Yushchenko, only got 5 percent of the vote in January 2010, in a show of no-confidence, whereas Viktor Yanukovych won the first and second rounds of the presidential elections in 2010. According to Victoria Nuland, the U.S. has also poured $5 billion into “democracy promotion” inside Ukraine. This is U.S. State Department doublespeak for politicized funding that Washington has sent to Ukraine to organize the Orange Revolution and its Euromaidan sequel or what can frankly be described as regime change.
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  • To rule Ukraine once more, the Orangists and their foreign backers have used and manipulated the ultra-nationalist elements of the population — some of which are openly anti-European Union — as their foot soldiers in an application of force against their democratically-elected opponents. Despite their views, the ultra-nationalists are actually more honest than the Orangist liberal figures like Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Unlike the misleading and utterly corrupt Orangist leaders, the ultra-nationalists do not hide their agendas and platforms.
  • The ultra-nationalists have inconsolably anti-Russian attitudes. Many of them also dislike a vast spectrum of other groups, including Jews, Armenians, Roma, Poles, Tatars, supporters of the Party of Regions and communists. In this context, it should come as no surprise that one of the first decisions that the post-coup regime in Kiev made was to remove the legal status of the Russian language as the regional language of half of Ukraine. Right Sector is, itself, a coalition of militant ultra-nationalists. These militants were instrumental in fighting government forces and taking over both government buildings in Kiev and regional governments in the western portion of Ukraine. Despite the protests of First Deputy Defense Minister Oleynik, Deputy Defense Minister Mozharovskiy and Defense Minister Babenk, Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s post-coup government has even given the ultra-nationalist opposition militias official status within the Ukrainian military and security forces. Yatsenyuk and the Orangists also dismissed all the officials that protested that the move would fracture the country and make the political divide in Ukraine irreversible.
  • Several members of Svoboda have been given key cabinet and government posts. One of the two junior deputy prime ministers, or assistant deputy prime ministers, is Oleksandr Sych. The ministry of agriculture and food has been given for management to Ihor Shvaika. The environment and natural resources ministry has been assigned to Andry/Andriy Mokhnyk. The defense minister is Ihor Tenyukh, a former admiral in the Ukrainian Navy who obstructed Russian naval movements in Sevastopol during the Russo-Georgian War over South Ossetia and who was later dismissed by the Ukrainian government for insubordination. Oleh Makhnitsky, another member of Svoboda, has been assigned as the new prosecutor-general of Ukraine by the coup government. Andry Parubiy, one of the founders of Svoboda, is now the post-coup secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (RNBO). He was the man controlling the so-called “Euromaidan security forces” that fought government forces in Kiev. His job as secretary is to represent the president and act on his behalf in coordinating and implementing the RNBO’s decisions. As a figure, Parubiy clearly illustrates how the mainstream opposition in Ukraine is integrated with the ultra-nationalists. Parubiy is an Orangist and was a leader in the Orange Revolution. He has changed parties several times. After founding Svoboda, he joined Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine before joining Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party and being elected as one of the Fatherland Party’s deputies, or members of parliament.
  • While the mainstream media in North America and the EU look the other way about the ultra-nationalists in the coup government in Kiev, the facts speak for themselves. Both the EU and the U.S. governments have rubbed their elbows with the ultra-nationalists. Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda (formerly the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine), was even part of the opposition triumvirate that all the U.S. and EU officials visiting Kiev met with while performing their political pilgrimages to Ukraine to encourage the protesters to continue with their demonstrations and riots demanding Euro-Atlantic integration. Svoboda has popularly been described as a neo-Nazi grouping. The World Jewish Congress has demanded that Svoboda be banned. The ultra-nationalist party was even condemned by the EU’s own European Parliament, which passed a motion on Dec. 13, 2012 categorically condemning Svoboda.
  • The ultra-nationalists are such an integral part of the mainstream opposition that the U.S.-supported Orangist president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, posthumously awarded the infamous Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera the title and decoration of the “Hero of Ukraine” in 2010. Foreign audiences, however, would not know that if they relied on reportage from the likes of the U.S. state-run Radio Free Europe, which tried to protect Yushchenko because he wanted to reorient Ukraine toward the U.S. and EU. Parubiy also lobbied the European Parliament not to oppose Yushchenko’s decision. Other smaller ultra-nationalists parties were also given government posts, and several of the independent cabinet members are also aligned to these parties. Dmytro Yarosh from Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor) is the deputy secretary of the RNBO, and the Trizub Party was given the education ministry. Trizub had Sergey Kvit appointed to the post of education minister.
  • The role of the ultra-nationalists in executing the coup has been essentially ignored by the mainstream media in North America and the EU. The roots of the bloodshed in Kiev have been ignored, too. The shootings of protesters by snipers have simply been presented as the vile actions of the Ukrainian government, never taking into consideration the agitation of the armed ultra-nationalist gangs and the mainstream opposition leaders for a conflict. According to a leaked telephone conversation on Feb. 26 between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and European Union Commissionaire Catherine Ashton, which was leaked by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) , the snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Ukrainian opposition leaders. Estonian Foreign Minister Paet made the statements on the basis of details he was given by one of the head doctors of the medical team of the anti-government protests, Olga Bogomolets, an opponent of Viktor Yanukovych’s government who wanted it removed from power. Paet tells Ashton the following first: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” This is also corroborated by the fact that Yanukovych actually had ordered the Ukrainian riot police and security forces not to use lethal force.
  • The Estonian official then mentions that it was verified to him that the same snipers were killing people on both sides. He tells Ashton the following: “And second, what was quite disturbing, this same Olga [Bogomolets] told as well that all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.” Another important point that Paet makes to Ashton is the following: “[Dr. Olga Bogomolets] then also showed me some photos she said that as a medical doctor she can say that it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened.” Past reports that the mainstream media were hostile to the ousted Ukrainian government also raise serious questions that corroborate what has been said about the snipers intentionally killing protesters to instigate regime change.
  • The Telegraph reported on Feb. 20 that “[a]t least three of the bodies displayed single bullet wounds to the heads,” and “were shot in the head, the neck or the heart. None were shot anywhere else like in the legs.” This means that the snipers were making kill shots by design, which seems like the last thing that the Ukrainian government would want to do when it was trying to appease the protesters and bring calm to Kiev. The Ukrainian journalist Alexey Yaroshevsky’s account of the sniper shootings is also worth noting, and it is backed up by footage taken by his Russian crew in Kiev.  Their footage shows armed opposition members running away from the scene of the shooting of anti-government protesters. What comes across as unusual is that the armed members of the opposition were constantly agitating to start firefights at every opportunity that they could get.
  • The commandant of the SSU, Major-General Oleksandr Yakimenko, has testified that his counter-intelligence forces were monitoring the CIA in Ukraine during the protests. According to the SSU, the CIA was active on the ground in Kiev and collaborating with a small circle of opposition figures. Yakimenko has also said that it was not the police or government forces that fired on the protesters, but snipers from the Philharmonic Building that was controlled by the opposition leader Andriy Parubiy, which he asserts was interacting with the CIA. Speaking to the Russian media, Yakimenko said that 20 men wearing “special combat clothes” and carrying “sniper rifle cases, as well as AKMs with scopes” ran out of the opposition-controlled Philharmonic Building and split into two groups of 10 people, with one taking position at the Ukraine Hotel. The anti-government protesters even saw this and asked Ukrainian police to pursue them, and even figures from Right Sector and Svoboda asked Yakimenko’s SSU to investigate and apprehend them, but Parubiy prevented it. Major-General Yakimenko has categorically stated that opposition leaders were behind the shootings. Following the release of the conversation between Paet and Ashton, the Estonian Foreign Ministry confirmed that the leak was authentic, whereas the European Commission kept silent. The mainstream media in North America and the EU either ignored it or said very little. The Telegraph even claimed that Dr. Bogomolets told it that she had not treated any government forces even though she contradicts this directly in an interview with CNN where says she treated military personnel.
  • CNN, on the other hand, quickly glossed over the story, giving it only enough attention to create the impression that the network is fairly covering the news. Opting not to give the story the airtime that it deserved, CNN instead posted it on its webpage. The conversation is immediately discredited, undermined and dismissed in the first sentence of the article, which is attributed to Foreign Minister Paet: “Don’t read too much into the conversation.” The article was deliberately structured by CNN to undermine the important information that would challenge the narrative that the U.S. mainstream media have been painting. The title, sub-titles and opening sentences of most texts act as microcosms or summaries of the articles, and in many cases, readers evaluate or decide to read the articles on the basis of what these texts communicate. Moreover, the first sentence of the article sets the tempo for readers and and influences their opinion, too. Although anyone who listens to the conversation between Paet and Ashton and considers the evidence that is being discussed would realize just how important the news was, the message being set forth by CNN was a dismissive one.
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Cops And Second Chances In America | Popehat - 0 views

www.popehat.com/19591 police misconduct perjury civil liberties bad-cops
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Officer Rush's arguments were ultimately rejected: Karla Rush, an officer based in East Oakland, faced especially severe charges. Of the 40 search warrants she had filed between March of 2007 and August 2008, 39 were fraudulent. Rush claimed that her misconduct was the result of poor training, but an arbitrator rejected her assertion, saying, "telling the truth is not a matter of training," according to court documents.
  • But isn't this America? Isn't Karla Rush an American? Isn't America a place where people like Carlos Danger get second chances? Yes. Yes it is. So Karla Rush — fired for multiple fraudulent search warrant applications — is employed as a law enforcement officer again. Maybe this isn't a shock to you. The criminal justice system decides to rely upon (and often conceal the misconduct of) dirty cops all the time. Just look at cops like Armando Saldate, Jr. in Arizona. Karla Rush probably got re-hired by some ultra-conservative small town department in some red state, right?
  • Yep. That's right. UC Berkeley — the hobgoblin of conservatives, the famously nutty liberal enclave — re-hired a police officer fired for filing fraudulent search warrants. After all, what's important in hiring a police officer?
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  • Now, citizen, if you're concerned that misconduct is too easily forgiven and ignored in our society, take heart: the vast majority of people who get in serious trouble experience life-altering consequences that prevents them from ever getting similar jobs again, even after any draconian criminal sentences. Felony convictions, for instance, reliably keep people out of most positions of responsibility, not to mention housing, loans, youth activities, etc. So don't worry: the class of people who can commit grave misconduct with few long-term consequences is usually limited to law enforcement and, you know, banks and stuff. We want to be safe, right? So why should it bother us that, even in hotbeds of "liberalism," law enforcement misconduct generates little more than a shrug? Why should we be concerned that the "left" — once reliably protective of the rights of the accused — is now often a mouthpiece for "law and order" and contemptuous of the rights of the accused?
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 13
     
    The author, Ken White, is a former U.S. Dept. of Justice criminal prosecutor, a Libertarian, but he plays no favorites; he's also a civil libertarian and a leader in protection of First Amendment rights. He's one of my favorite bloggers. He has a real gift for sarcasm, which shines all over this gem. Well worth the read; this is a shining example of exemplary writing.
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Virtual Economy's Phantom Job Gains Are Based on Statistical Fraud. And More Fraud Is i... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5390330 banksters oligarchy employment stats
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Washington can’t stop lying.  Don’t be convinced by last Thursday’s job report that it is your fault if you don’t have a job. Those 288,000 jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate are more fiction than reality.  In his analysis of the June Labor Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, John Williams (www.ShadowStats.com) wrote that the 288,000 June jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate  are “far removed from common experience and underlying reality.” Payrolls were overstated by “massive, hidden shifts in seasonal adjustments,” and the Birth-Death model added the usual phantom jobs.  Williams reports that “the seasonal factors are changed each and every month as part of the concurrent seasonal-adjustment process, which is tantamount to a fraud,” as the changes in the seasonal factors can inflate the jobs number.  While the headline numbers always are on a new basis, the prior reporting is not revised so as to be consistent.
  • The monthly unemployment rates are not comparable, so one doesn’t know whether the official U.3 rate (the headline rate that the financial press reports) went up or down. Moreover, the rate does not count discouraged workers who, unable to find a job, cease looking. To be counted among the U.3 unemployed, the person must have actively looked for work during the four weeks prior to the survey. The U.3 rate automatically declines as people who have been unable to find jobs cease trying to find one and thereby cease to be counted as unemployed. There is a second official measure of unemployment that includes people who have been discouraged for less than one year. That rate, known as U.6, is seldom reported and is double the 6.1% rate. Since 1994 there has been no official measure than includes discouraged people who have not looked for a job for more than a year. Including all discouraged workers produces an unemployment rate that currently stands at 23.1%, almost four times the rate that the financial press reports.
  • What you can take away from this is the opposite of what the presstitute media would have you believe.  The measured rate of unemployment can decline simply because large numbers of the unemployed become discouraged workers, cease looking for work, and cease to be counted in the U.3 and U.6 measures of the unemployment rate.   The decline in the employment-population ratio from 63% prior to the 2008 downturn to 59% today reflects the growth in discouraged workers.  Indeed, the ratio has not recovered its previous level during the alleged recovery, an indication that the recovery is an illusion created by the understated measure of inflation that is used to deflate nominal GDP growth.
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  • Insurance (most likely the paperwork of Obamacare) contributed 8,500 jobs. As so few can purchase homes, “real estate rental and leasing” contributed 8,500 jobs. Professional and business services contributed 67,000 jobs, but 57% of these jobs were in employment services, temporary help services, and services to buildings and dwellings.   That old standby, education and health services, accounted for 33,700 jobs consisting mainly of ambulatory health care services jobs and social assistance jobs of which three-quarters are in child day care services.   The other old standby, waitresses and bartenders, gave us 32,800 jobs, and amusements, gambling, and recreation gave us 3,500 jobs.
  • In other words, the economy did not gain 288,000 new jobs last month.   But let’s assume the economy did gain 288,000 jobs and exam where the claimed jobs are reported to be. Of the alleged 288,000 new jobs, 16,000, or 5.5 percent are in manufacturing, which is not very promising for engineers and blue collar workers.  Growth in goods producing jobs has almost disappeared from the US economy.  As explained below, to alter this problem the government is going to change definitions in order to artificially inflate manufacturing jobs. In June private services account for 82 percent of the supposed new jobs.  The jobs are found mainly in non-tradable domestic services that pay little and cannot be exported to help to close the large US trade deficit. Wholesale and retail trade account for 55,300 jobs.  Do you believe sales are this strong  when retailers are closing stores and when shopping malls are closing?
  • Another indication that there has been no recovery is that Sentier Research’s index of real median household income continued to decline for two years after the alleged recovery began in June 2009.   There has been a slight upturn in real median household income since June 2011, but income remains far below the pre-recession level.   The Birth-Death model adds an average of 62,000 jobs to the reported payroll jobs numbers each month. This arbitrary boost to the payroll jobs numbers is in addition to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ underlying assumption that unreported jobs lost to business failures are matched by unreported new jobs from new business startups, an assumption that does not well fit an economy that fell into recession and is unable to recover.   John Williams concludes that in current BLS reporting, “the aggregate average overstatement of employment change easily exceeds 200,000 jobs per month.”
  • Local government, principally education, gave us 22,000 jobs.   So, where are the jobs for university graduates?  They are practically non-existent. Think of all the MBAs, but June had only 2,300 jobs for management of companies and enterprises. Think of the struggle to get into law and medical schools.  There’s no job payoff. June had jobs for 1,200 in legal services, which includes receptionists and para-legals.  Where are all the law school graduates finding jobs? Offices of physicians (mainly people who fill out the mandated paperwork and comply with all the regulations, which have multiplied under ObamaCare) hired 4,000 people.  Outpatient care centers hired 700 people.  Nursing care facilities hired 2,400 people.  So where are the jobs for the medical school graduates? Aside from all the exaggerations in the jobs numbers of which ShadowStats.com has informed us, just taking the jobs as reported, what kind of economy do these jobs indicate:  a superpower whose pretensions are to exercise hegemony over the world or an economy in which opportunities are disappearing and incomes are falling?
  • Do you think that this jobs picture would be the same if the government in Washington cared about you instead of the mega-rich? Some interesting numbers can be calculated from table A.9 in the BLS press release.  John Williams advises that the BLS is inconsistent in the methods it uses to tabulate the data in table A.9 and that the data is also afflicted by seasonal adjustment problems.  However, as the unemployment rate and payroll jobs are reported regardless of their problems, we can also report the BLS finding that in June 523,000 full-time jobs disappeared and 800,000 part time jobs appeared. Here, perhaps, we have yet another downside of the misnamed Obama “Affordable Care Act.”  Employers are terminating full-time employment and replacing the jobs with part-time employment in order to come in under the 50-person full time employment that makes employers responsible for fringe benefits such as health care. Americans are already experiencing difficulties making ends meet, despite the alleged “recovery.”  If yet another half million Americans have been forced onto part-time pay with consequent loss of health care and other benefits, consumer demand is further compressed, with the consequence, unless hidden by statistical trickery, of a 2nd quarter negative GDP and thus officially the reappearance of recession.
  • What will the government do if a recession cannot be hidden?  If years of unprecedented money printing and Keynesian fiscal deficits have not brought recovery, what will bring recovery?  How far down will US living standards fall for the 99% in order that the 1% can become ever more mega-rich while Washington wastes our diminishing substance exercising hegemony over the world? Just as Washington lied to you about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Waco, and any number of false flag or nonexistent attacks such as Tonkin Gulf, Washington lies to you about jobs and economic recovery.  Don’t believe the spin that you are unemployed because you are shiftless and prefer government handouts to work.  The government does not want you to know that you are unemployed because the corporations offshored American jobs to foreigners and because economic policy only serves the oversized banks and the one percent. Just as the jobs and inflation numbers are rigged and the financial markets are rigged, the corrupt Obama regime is now planning to rig US manufacturing and trade statistics in order to bury all evidence of offshoring’s adverse impact on our economy.
  • The federal governments Economic Classification Policy Committee has come up with a proposal to redefine fact as fantasy in order to hide offshoring’s contribution to the US trade deficit, artificially inflate the number of US manufacturing jobs, and redefine foreign-made manufactured products as US manufactured products.  For example, Apple iPhones made in China and sold in Europe would be reported as a US export of manufactured goods. Read Ben Beachy’s important report on this blatant statistical fraud in CounterPunch’s July 4th weekend edition: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/04/we-didnt-offshore-manufacturing/ China will not agree that the Apple brand name means that the phones are not Chinese production. If the Obama regime succeeds with this fraud, the iPhones would be counted twice, once by China and once by the US, and the double-counting would exaggerate world GDP. For years I have exposed the absurd claim that offshoring is merely the operation of free trade, and I have exposed the incompetent studies by such as Michael Porter at Harvard and Matthew Slaughter at Dartmouth that claimed to prove that the US was benefitting from offshoring its manufacturing.  My book published in 2012 in Germany and in 2013 in the US, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, proves that offshoring has dismantled the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and is responsible for the decline in US economic growth. The lost jobs and decline in the middle class has contributed to the rise in income inequality, the destruction of tax base for cities and states, and loss of population in America’s once great manufacturing centers.
  • For the most part economists have turned a blind eye. Economists serve the globalists.  It pays them well. The corruption in present-day America is total. Psychologists and anthropologists serve war and torture. Economists serve globalism and US financial hegemony. Physicists and chemists serve the war industries. Physicists and computer geeks serve NSA. The media serves the government and the corporations. The political parties serve the six powerful private interest groups that rule the country. No one serves truth and liberty. I predict that within ten years truth and liberty will be forbidden words uttered only by “domestic extremists” who are a threat that must be exterminated without due process of law. America has left us.  We now have the tyranny of the Orwellian state that rules, not by the ballot box and Constitution, but by force and propaganda.
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The Guardian Hires Chelsea Manning | Mediaite - 0 views

www.mediaite.com/...guardian-hires-chelsea-manning leakers Manning Guardian
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Guardian‘s U.S. news wing announced on Tuesday that it has hired Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning) as a contributing opinion writer. The Guardian‘s U.S. editor-in-chief Katharine Viner announced the news on Twitter, adding that Manning will write about “war, gender, freedom of information.” Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 after being convicted of leaking classified national security documents to WikiLeaks.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15
     
    In related news, hundreds of U.S. officials were treated in hospital emergeny rooms for attacks of apoplexy. 
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Why Is Google Hiring Journalists To Flood Newsrooms Around America? - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...232171 journalism Google
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • oogle is ramping up its media presence with the announcement that the Google News Lab will be working with Report For America (RFA) to hire 1,000 journalists all around the country. 
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Trump's Infrastructure Boondoggle - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...umps-infrastructure-boondoggle economy Trump infrastructure
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is not an infrastructure plan and it won’t put $1 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy. It’s basically a scheme for handing over public assets to private corporations that will extract maximum profits via user fees and tolls. Because the plan is essentially a boondoggle, it will not lift the economy out of the doldrums, increase activity or boost growth.  Quite the contrary. When the details of how the program is going to be implemented are announced,  public confidence in the Trump administration is going to wither and stock prices are going to plunge.   This scenario cannot be avoided because the penny-pinching conservatives in the House and Senate have already said that they won’t support any plan that is not “revenue neutral” which means that any real $1 trillion spending package is a dead letter.  Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the Trump’s plan is exposed as a fraud and the sh** hits the fan.
  • Here are more of the details from an article at Slate: “Under Trump’s plan…the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.” (“Donald Trump’s Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges”, Slate) Normally, fiscal stimulus is financed by increasing the budget deficits, but Maestro Trump has something else up his sleeve.  He wants the big construction companies and private equity firms to stump up the seed money and start the work with the understanding that they’ll be able to impose user fees and tolls on roads and bridges when the work is completed.  For every dollar that corporations spend on rebuilding US infrastructure, they’ll get a dollar back via tax credits, which means that they’ll end up controlling valuable, revenue-generating assets for nothing. The whole thing is a flagrant ripoff that stinks to high heaven.   The corporations rake in hefty profits on sweetheart deals, while the American people get bupkis. Welcome to Trumpworld.  Here’s more background from Trump’s campaign website:
  • “American Energy and  Infrastructure Act Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” (Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter”) In practical terms, ‘revenue neutral’ means that every dollar of new spending has to be matched by cuts to other government programs.  So, if there are hidden costs to Trump’s plan, then they’ll have to be paid for by slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps etc. But, keep in mind, these other programs are much more effective sources of stimulus since the money goes directly to the people who spend it immediately and help grow the economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan doesn’t work like that. A lot of the money will go towards management fees and operational costs leaving fewer dollars to trickle down to low-paid construction workers whose personal consumption drives the economy. Less money for workers means less spending, less activity and weaker growth.
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  • Here’s more on the topic from the Washington Post: “Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports…. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. … There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for … expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects… Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. … Buried inside the plan will be provisions to weaken prevailing wage protections on construction projects, undermining unions and ultimately eroding workers’ earnings. Environmental rules are almost certain to be gutted in the name of accelerating projects.” (Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Washington Post) Let’s summarize:  “Trump’s plan” is “massive corporate welfare plan for contractors” and the “tax breaks”…”could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects.”
  • What part of this plan looks like it will have a positive impact on the economy? None. If Trump was serious about raising GDP to 4 percent, (another one of his promises) he’d increase Social Security payments, beef up the food stamps program, or hire more government workers.  Any one of these would trigger an immediate uptick in activity spurring more growth and a stronger economy.  And while America’s ramshackle bridges and roads may be in dire need of a facelift,  infrastructure is actually a poor way to inject fiscal stimulus which can be more easily distributed  by simply hiring government agents to stand on streetcorners and hand out 100 dollar bills to passersby. That might not fill the pothole-strewn streets in downtown Duluth, but it would sure as hell would light a fire under GDP. So what’s the gameplan here? What’s Trump really up to? If his infrastructure plan isn’t going to work, then what’s the real objective? The objective is to allow wealthy corporations to buy public assets at firesale prices so they can turn them into profit-generating enterprises. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s why the emphasis is on “unconventional financing programs”, “public-private partnerships”, and “Build America Bonds” instead of plain-old fiscal stimulus, jobs programs and deficit spending. Trump is signaling to his pirate friends in Corporate America that he’ll use his power as executive to find new outlets for profitable investment so they have some place to stick their mountain of money. Of course, none of this has anything to do with rebuilding America’s dilapidated infrastructure or even revving up GDP. That’s just public relations bunkum. What’s really going on is a massive looting operation organized and executed under the watchful eye of Donald Trump, Robber Baron-in-Chief.
  • And Infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg. Once these kleptomaniacs hit their stride, they’re going to cut through Washington like locusts through a corn field. Bet on it.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17
     
    Mike Whitney always tells it like it is.
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Leaked Document: Military Internment Camps in U.S to be Used for Political Dissidents -... - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch Internment-and-Resettlement-Operations Obammunism
shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 13
     
    "Published on Mar 4, 2013 Internment camps for political dissidents in the U.S. aren't a conspiracy theory. The Department of Defense document entitled "INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS" or FM 3-39.40 proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Visit our website: http://StormCloudsGathering.com Download link for FM 3-39.40: http://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-InternmentResettlement.pdf Army hiring for these internment camps: http://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/legal-and-law-enforcement/internment-resettlement-specialist.html
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INFOGRAPHIC: How The NSA Intercepts The Electronic Communications Of Americans - Busine... - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/unications-of-americans-2012-5 Prism NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden Bill-Binney
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13
     
    Nice INFOGRAPHIC that includes the timeline.  We're still in the early days of discovering just how awful and un-constitutional the Feds worldwide dragnet really is.  But this infographic does a good job of pulling it all together.  These are far more than impeachable offenses.  This treason.  This is a coupe d'etat. "We've covered how, since 9/11, the National Security Agency has spied on electronic communications of Americans without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. The organization has done this by hiring Israeli contractors to bug the U.S. telecommunications network and building massive complexes such as their secretive $2 billion Utah spy center. Now the American Civil Liberties Union has created this handy infographic that shows how the NSA's domestic spying program thrives with impunity today:"
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Where Bank Regulators Go to Get Rich - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...regulators-go-to-get-rich.html SEC revolving-door
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Mary Schapiro, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, must take us for fools. No need to worry about her and the so-called revolving door between government and Wall Street, she told the Wall Street Journal on April 2, after announcing she would be joining the Promontory Financial Group LLC as a managing director in its Washington office, in charge of its governance and markets practice. “In my case, there’s no revolving door,” she said. “I won’t ever be going back to government.”
  • About 100 of the 400 Promontory employees are former Washington regulators; some 5 percent, like Ludwig, come from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates all banks with federal bank charters, including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Last year, the firm hired Julie Williams, the former chief counsel of the OCC. To keep things in the family, the agency hired as Williams’s replacement Amy Friend, a Promontory managing director.
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U.S. Caves to Russia on Syria - Won't Continue Protecting Al Qaeda - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...tinue-protecting-al-qaeda.html war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Syrian war negotiations Russia al-Nusrah
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • On Friday, September 9th, America’s Secretary of State John Kerry, and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, came to an agreement on Syria, for the second time. (The previous agreement fell apart). Like the first ‘cease-fire’, this one concerns the ongoing occupation of many parts of Syria by foreign jihadists, who have been hired by America’s allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in order to overthrow Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. (It’s nothing like a democratic revolution there; it’s a war over pipelines.)The main sticking-point in these negotiations has been much the same as it was the first time around: America’s insistence that Russia and Syria be prohibited from bombing Al Qaeda in Syria, which is the international group under the name of “Al Nusra” there. The United States has not tried to protect ISIS in Syria — only Al Nusra (and their subordinate groups), and it protects them because Nusra has provided crucial leadership to the jihadist groups that the United States finances in Syria for overthrowing and replacing Assad. Whereas the U.S. government doesn’t finance all of the jihadist groups in Syria (as the allied royal owners of Saudi Arabia and of Qatar do), the U.S. does designate some jihadist groups as ‘moderate rebels’, and this second round of cessation-of-hostilities will protect these groups (but this time not the Nusra fighters who lead them) from the bombings by Syria and by Russia. This new agreement is a complex sequence of sub-agreements laying out the means whereby Syria and Russia will, supposedly, continue to bomb Nusra while avoiding to bomb the U.S.-financed forces in Syria. Now that the U.S. has 300 of its own military advisors occupying the parts of Syria that the U.S.-sponsored jihadists control, Nusra will (presumably) no longer be quite so necessary to America’s overthrow-Assad campaign.
  • In the joint announcement on Friday night in Geneva, Secretary Kerry said, “Now, I want to be clear about one thing particularly on this, because I’ve seen reporting that somehow suggests otherwise: Going after Nusrah is not a concession to anybody. It is profoundly in the interests of the United States to target al-Qaida — to target al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, which is Nusrah.”
  • Gareth Porter bannered on February 16th, “Obama’s ‘Moderate’ Syrian Deception”, and he reported that, “Information from a wide range of sources, including some of those the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces is engaged in a military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it,” and he stated that “instead of breaking with the deception that the CIA’s hand-picked clients were independent of Nusra, the Obama administration continued to cling to it.” Porter was pretending that the U.S. leadership originated at the CIA, instead of at the White House — which was actually the case. The CIA was simply doing what the U.S. President wanted it to do there. Porter continued his upside-down attribution of leadership and responsibility in the matter, by adding that, “President Obama is under pressure from these domestic critics as well as from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other GCC allies to oppose any gains by the Russians and the Assad regime as a loss for the United States.” In no way was/is it obligatory for the U.S. President to adhere to “domestic critics” and “GCC [royal Arabic] allies,” much less for him to be ordered-about by his own CIA — quite the contrary: “The buck stops at the President’s desk.” Obama isn’t forced to hire and promote neoconservatives to carry out his foreign policies — he chooses them and merely pretends to be blocked by opponents.
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  • On February 20th, Reuters headlined “Syrian opposition says temporary truce possible, but deal seems far off”, and reported that, “A source close to peace talks earlier told Reuters [that] Syria’s opposition had agreed to the idea of a two- to three-week truce. The truce would be renewable and supported by all parties except Islamic State, the source said. It would be conditional on the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front no longer being attacked by Syrian government forces and their allies.” In other words: up till at least that time, the U.S. was still at one with the Sauds’ insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda in Syria. On March 1st, Steve Chovanec headlined, “Protecting al-Qaeda”, and he made clear that the group that Obama was backing, the Free Syrian Army (so named with assistance from their CIA minders), were almost as despised by the Syrian people as were ISIS itself. Citing a Western polling firm’s findings, he noted that, “According to a recent poll conducted by ORB, it was found that most Syrians more or less hold both ISIS and the FSA in equal disdain, 9% saying the FSA represents the Syrian people while 4% saying that ISIS does. The similarity in [Syrians’] opinion is reflective of the similarity in [those two groups of jihadists’] conduct.” Furthermore, as I have noted, both from that polling-firm and another Western-backed one, the vast majority (82%) of Syrians  blame the U.S. for the tens of thousands of foreign jihadists who have been imported into their country, and 55% of Syrians want Assad to be not only the current President but their next President, as a consequence of which the U.S. government refuses to allow Assad to run for the Presidency in the next election. (Indeed, that’s largely the reason why Obama has been trying to overthrow Assad and replace him with a jihadist government, like the Sauds.)
  • Clearly, the U.S. Government’s top objective in Syria is to overthrow Assad, whereas the Russian Government’s top objective there is to prevent America’s allies from seizing the country. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has well explained and documented, the U.S. CIA has been trying ever since 1949 to overthrow Syria’s government and replace it with one that the Sauds (and etc., including U.S. oil, gas, and pipeline companies) want. So, this is normal American foreign policy. This doesn’t mean that our Presidents have to behave this way — only that they do (even if the U.S. ‘news’ media don’t report it, and many U.S. ‘historians’ likewise ignore it decades later).
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The Trump Bubble - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...the-trump-bubble-3 Trump Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel wall-street
shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 17
     
    "Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger. Before the election candidate Trump blasted Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates too low for too long to keep the economy humming along while Obama was still in office. The president elect accused Yellen of being politically motivated suggesting that the Fed's policies had put the country at risk of another stock market Crash like 2008. "If rates go up, you're going to see something that's not pretty," Trump told Fox News in an interview in September. "It's all a big bubble." Yellen of course denied Trump's claims saying, "We do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions." As we shall see later in this article, Yellen was lying about the political role the Fed plays in setting policy, in fact, last week's FOMC statement clearly establishes the Fed as basically a political institution that implements an agenda that serves a very small group of powerful constituents, the 1 percent. If serving the interests of one group over all of the others is not politics, than what is it? The problem we have with Trump is not his critique of the market or the Fed. The problem is his remedy which can be sussed out by reviewing his economic plan. Trump wants to slash personal and corporate taxes in order to put more money into the economy to increase business investment, boost hiring, and rev up growth. Regrettably, his tax plan achieves none of these. First of all, slashing taxes for the wealthy does not boost growth. We know that. It doesn't work. Period."
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Trump floats ban on defense firms hiring military procurement officials | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...sa-trump-defense-idUSKBN13Y2NQ Trump-administration purchasing-agents defense-contractors hiring ban
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday said he was considering imposing a lifetime ban on U.S. military procurement officials going to work for defense contractors, a move that could dramatically reshape the defense industry.Three days after publicly rebuking Boeing Co over the cost of the next-generation Air Force One presidential aircraft, Trump floated the idea of such a ban at a rally for Republican supporters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana."I think anybody that gives out these big contracts should never ever, during their lifetime, be allowed to work for a defense company, for a company that makes that product," Trump said. "I don't know, it makes sense to me."He added that he "got the idea yesterday" as he thought about "massive" cost overruns for military equipment but needed to "check this out" first before making any decisions.Trump said such a ban would make "a big, big difference because the purchasing in this country is out of control, for everything, not only military."
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Portrait of an Assassin: Obama's Revenge - The Unz Review - 0 views

www.unz.com/...-of-an-assassin-obamas-revenge Trump Secret-Service private-guards
shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Trump sensing Obama’s resort to violent retaliation against Russia, and the likelihood he would turn the gun to ‘Putin’s accomplice’, the President-elect decided to take precautionary measures, he replaced Obama’s secret service by his private security guards.
  • Conclusion We live in extraordinarily dangerous times. A deranged violent President is in command of a willing media and an intelligence apparatus ready and willing to obey. There is little doubt that the murder of the Russian Ambassador will be the beginning of a cycle of violent assassinations. It is certain that Putin and Trump will take the appropriate defensive measures. With a psychotic, frustrated and failed President refusing to concede defeat, we enter the beginning and most sinister period prior to his exit.
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Jan 17
     
    Author James Petras is a respected investigative journalist. This entire article is well worth reading. But I thought well worth highlighting his report that Trump doesn't trust the Secret Service and has hired private security guards.
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NSA 'not interested in' Americans, privacy officer claims | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ericans-privacy-officer-claims surveillance state NSA not-interested Richards
shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency’s internal civil liberties watchdog insisted on Thursday that the agency has no interest in spying on Americans under its controversial spying tools. “Our employees are trained to not look for U.S. persons,” NSA privacy and civil liberties officer Rebecca Richards said on Thursday.
  • “We’re not interested in those U.S. persons. We’re trying to look away from those,” she added. “Instead, we’re looking for where are our targets?”Richards’s comments came up during a Capitol Hill panel discussion about a new report on U.S. spying from the Brennan Center for Justice.The analysis looks at aspects of a presidential order that dates back to Ronald Reagan and was updated by then-President George W. Bush, called Executive Order 12333.
  • Programs under the order, which is meant to guide foreign surveillance, “have implications for Americans’ privacy that could well be greater than those of their domestic counterparts,” the organization wrote in its analysis. “The vast majority of Americans — whether wittingly or not — engage in communication that is transmitted or stored overseas.”“This reality of the digital age renders Americans’ communications and data highly vulnerable to NSA surveillance abroad.”
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  • NSA surveillance under Executive Order 12333 is separate from the agency’s higher profile bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, which ended last year. It also occurs under separate legal powers than a controversial provision of the 2008 update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which comes up for renewal at the end of 2017.The executive order targets foreigners, but can “incidentally” pick up data about Americans if their activity on the Internet crosses international borders, Richards acknowledged.“Our procedures are designed to say: There are occasions when you are going to get U.S. persons,” she said, “and when you get those U.S. persons, here’s the rules.”
  • Richards is the agency’s first ever civil liberties officer. She was hired in early 2014, on the heels of fallout from Edward Snowden’s leaks about the spy agency. 
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 16
     
    Not interested. Apparently that's why NSA was turning over raw search results to Israel without filtering out "U.S. persons" data. And why they just decided to give other agencies including law enforcement access to raw search results. And why Gen. Keith Alexander personally put together a program to ruin people's reputations including a "U.S. person." And why Russell Tice said that he personally had Obama's NSA dossier in his hands when Obama was running for the U.S. Senate. And why Tice says NSA had similar dossiers on members of Congress and the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and targeted "lots of lawyers." On and on.  Ms. Richards appears to have become a quick study in NSA's hallmark skill of lying to the public. 
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Byron York: Justice Department demolishes case against Trump order | Washington Examiner - 1 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2613988 Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17
     
    "James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump's executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried. Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State's claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart's brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department's response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground. Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart's restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president's constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and "second-guesses the president's national security judgment" about risks faced by the United States. Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, "How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?" "Your Honor, I don't have that information," said Bennett. "Let me tell you," said Robart. "The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you're here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there's no support for that."
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