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Why Are We So Afraid To Fix Banks The Right Way?* | Clusterstock Henry Blodgett - 0 views

clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/...aid-to-fix-banks-the-right-way finacial-crisis
shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jan 09 - Cached
  • a debt-equity swap
  • LIF said: Jan. 19, 3:17 PM MY PLAN 1. Mandate a 12-1 leverage cap for all financial institutions to take effect within 180 days. This 12-1 leverage cap has to be calculated using real market prices, not mark-to-model prices. 2. Temporary ban on capital raising by banks – water can’t dilute poison. You eliminate the poison first then add more water. 3. Force banks, etc to reach this 12-1 leverage cap by selling their toxic assets within 180 days via a US Govt Auction. The US Govt will be the Auctioneer but will NOT bid for assets 4. Any bank that is unable to sell sufficient assets to bring it under the 12-1 leverage cap will automatically nationalized by the US Govt at a price of $1. All shareholdrers and bond holders forfeit their assets. This will provide an incentive to the banks/financial institutions to sell these assets. 5. The US Govt will now hold all the toxic assets to maturity - this will prevent private market bidders from low-bidding in (3) above. Private market bidders in essence are being told, you buy the assets during the auction or you will not have another opportunity to buy the assets, as the US Govt will sieze them at an effective rate of ZERO and then hold them to maturity. 6. Any bank that falls under nationalization will also have its CEO, Board of Directors and members of the Management committee for the past 5-10 years disgorge all compensation earned during the past 5-10 years. 7. Create standardized CDS products that traded on an electronic exchange. All non-standard CDS products should be liquidated in the OTC market or swapped into standardized CDS products prior to the commencement of the new CDS exchange. The exchange will commence within180 days. 8. New Mortgage Financing Rules: 20-30% minimum govt mandated down payments. Strict Debt to Income limits, etc. These rules must be codified into federal law. 9. New Credit Card/Auto Finance rules: strict rules on the amount of credit card/Auto finance debt available to consumers.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jan 09
     
    You don't have to subsidize banks and their stakeholders at taxpayer expense to avoid another Lehman.  You just have to fix the banks the right way. What's the right way? * Temporarily seize the banks * Write their assets down to nuclear-winter levels (or, if desired, put them in a big bad bank, as Sheila Bair wants to do.) * Convert enough of their debt to equity to put them in a strong capital position. That's it.  No taxpayer money.  No citizen outrage.  No comical "Yes, we're lending" assurances when what the banks are really doing is, sensibly, hoarding everything. We could do this to Citigroup and Bank of America tomorrow afternoon, and on Wednesday morning, two of our biggest banks would be rock solid (they could also still be publicly traded, under the same ticker symbols, with different shareholders). 
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Obama still flush with cash from financial sector despite frosty relations - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAX4rAyL_story.html Banksters Bankster-Campaign-Funding
shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Oct 11
     
    Obama has raised more money from Wall Street Banksters than all the repubican candidates combined! But to see this connection, one has to add funds contributed to the democrat - socialist parties coffers. The more the Obama - Soros machine stirs the class warfare pot, the more money the Banksters are willing to shell out for his re-election. Maybe they know that the only way to get to a New World Order is to collapse the USA in economic and political anarchy and end the Constitution. Once the NWO is in place, there will of course be no further need for the marxist rable. excerpt: Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.

    Obama's key advantage over the GOP field is the ability to collect bigger checks because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort.

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    As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate four years ago.
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Americans enter 2014 with plunging faith in government - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...h-plunging-faith-in-government polls faith-in-government democracy U.S. U.S.-credibility
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Two months after a Congress mired in partisan congestion gave way to the first government shutdown in 17 years, a mere one in 20 Americans believe the U.S. system of democracy works well and needs no changes, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll out Thursday. Heading into the new year with a grotesquely pessimistic outlook on their country’s government, half of Americans said it needs either “a lot of changes” or a complete overhaul. And 70 percent said they’re not confident lawmakers will manage to “make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.” Those problems, respondents suggested, are topped by health care reform, jobs and the economy and the country’s debt, respectively. Eighty percent of Americans said they hope the government focuses substantial energy on those issues in the coming year, but only 76 percent said they expect to see real progress.
  • When it comes to the economy in particular, the last best hope, respondents suggested, is Americans themselves. Though a majority said they’re not optimistic about their chances of grasping the American Dream, most qualified that they have at least some faith in their abilities to handle their own problems in 2014. Still, more than half of those polled said they want a strong government hand helping them sort out “today’s complex economic problems.” In general, the population remains split on how active the government should be in the lives of citizens: half said “the less government the better,” and 48 percent said “there are more things that government should be doing.” Sloping faith in government is an aging trend: the percentage of Americans who think the United States governing system is heading in the right direction hasn’t topped 50 in almost 10 years. What’s more, few express hope that it can improve, with half saying they’re pessimistic about the United States’ ability to produce strong leaders, and 61 percent doubting the effectiveness of the way leaders are chosen.
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Land Destroyer: NATO's War on Syria Just Got Dirtier - 0 views

landdestroyer.blogspot.com/...on-syria-just-got-dirtier.html war & peace Syria WMD false-flag Brown-Moses emails Syrian-Electronic-Army
shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • But even with the West's capitulation in Syria, and months passing without a shred of credible evidence produced, hacks among Western media continue to perpetuate the original narrative. Among these are of course corporate-financier funded think-tanks and propaganda fronts like the Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy Magazine, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), and establishment papers like the Guardian. In the middle of it all is couch-potato self-proclaimed weapons expert, Eliot Higgins, a representation of the West's propaganda 2.0 campaign.  UK-based Higgins lost his job and now spends his days combing social media sites for "evidence" he then analyzes and reports on. The Western media, with its propagandists expelled from Syria and many of its "sources" in Syria exposed in humiliating attempts to fabricate and manipulate evidence, quickly picked Higgins up and elevated his armchair blogging to "expert analysis." Since then, Higgins has joined the already discredited "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" another UK-based individual, as the basis upon which the West's Syrian narrative spins. 
  • Whitaker is desperately attempting to keep the wheels on the establishment's new propaganda 2.0 vehicle - manipulating social media, much the way Hersh describes intelligence being manipulated, to create any outcome necessary to bolster a predetermined narrative.  What he doesn't address is the fact that Higgins' work almost entirely depends on videos posted online by people he does not know, who may be misrepresenting who they are, what they are posting, and their motivations for doing so - such is the nature of anonymity on the web and why this evidence alone is useless outside of a larger geopolitical context.  Both Whitaker and Higgins, who maintain that the Syrian government was behind the attacks, fail to address another glaring reality. A false flag attack is designed to look like the work of one's enemy. In other words, terrorists in Syria would use equipment, uniforms, weapons, and tactics that would pin the crime on the Syrian government. All Higgins has proved, thus far, is that the superficial details of the operation made for a convincing false flag attack. 
  • Toward the end of Higgin's piece, he, like his friends at the Guardian, attempt to claim Al Nusra, contrary to Hersh's report, are most likely not capable of producing sarin.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The e-mails illustrate prior knowledge of chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists who fully planned on using them in a false flag operation. Higgins and others had this information, and now, have Seymour Hersh's report as well, yet they still pose the argument that the militants had neither the ability nor the means to carry out the attacks. In fact, it appears that the Western media and underlings like Higgins went out of their way specifically to discredit the notion from even being considered.  In other words, a concerted cover-up.  The e-mails above, and others in the large cache also reveal the possible motivation for these lies. So-called journalists and researchers peddling the West's narrative appear to have a wide range of lucrative offers presented to them, as well as funding for them to continue doing the work they are already involved in. This of course is only the case so long as their narratives mesh with the institutions, corporations, and individuals cutting the checks. 
  • The e-mails reveal multiple correspondences regarding chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists aimed at using them in a false flag operation, Higgins' and Van Dyke's mutual "benefactor" located in Virginia, "near DC" (Langley, Virginia?), and job offers for Higgins from NGOs and a defense contractor involving "open source intelligence," the new buzzword used by Higgins and Whitaker in regards to the new form of propaganda they both participate in. 
  • While perhaps Higgins and company missed that CNN report, it is now revealed that at least Higgins, and several other journalists were told by an American contractor on the ground inside of Syria, that militants had gained access to chemical weapons and more importantly, were planning to use them in a false flag attack - this months before the August 21 attack in Damascus.   The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has released e-mails this week between American contractor Matthew Van Dyke and members of the Western media, including Higgins. The e-mails indicated that militants had chemical weapons and were planning to use them in an attack to frame the Syrian government - serving as impetus for wider foreign intervention. SEA's emails have been confirmed by Higgins himself in a series of self-incriminating tweets where he goes, point-by-point, attempting to provide explanations for the damning revelations. 
  • Why would Higgins even mention the possibility of a false flag attack, when all that would do is alienate him from the establishment he is so eagerly trying to be a part of? His recent piece in Foreign Policy and the Guardian's ceaseless promotion of his work are favors that demand reciprocation - in the form of toeing the line and selling a narrative Higgins and others know is deceitful.  That Higgins, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy are prepared to throw veteran journalist Seymour Hersh under the bus to protect their interests, gives us a look into the depths of depravity within which this "new" media Whitaker celebrates, operate.  Worst of all for the West, is that the transparency and accountability they claim to uphold, had to be kept in check by the SEA - an organization wanted by the FBI as "terrorists." We would be led to believe by the likes of Whitaker, Higgins, and Van Dyke that the Syrian government and their supporters are the villains, but in their own words and actions we see the truth. 
  • Note: The full extent of SEA's leaked e-mails exposes Van Dyke and the journalists he associates with as utterly depraved, deceitful, unprincipled individuals each driven by untethered greed and narcissism. The e-mails also reveal that "aid ships" are used to bring in weapons and foreign fighters, that the Syrians are almost entirely behind the government and that the so-called revolution was "fake." Van Dyke is exposed as having conspired to kill a man and his entire family over a trivial personal dispute and much, much more. Readers are encouraged to comb through the archives, and to follow SEA on Twitter  @Official_SEA16.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    "Brown Moses" (Eliot Higgins) has been the principle source of "evidence" that the Assad government used chemical weapons, arguing strenuously that the "rebels" had no such capability. But the Syrian Electronic Army obtained a large number of emails between Higgins and an American mercenary working in Syria showing beyond doubt that Higgins had been put on notice in May 2013 -- months before the sarin gas attack near Damascus in late August -- that the "rebels" had sarin.   Oopsies!
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Is Obama Moving the 'War on Terror' to Africa? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...obama-moving-war-terror-africa war & peace Africa U.S.-foreign-policy Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • Despite talk of a pivot to Asia, the US military’s gaze has settled on Africa. That isn’t news for anyone who has followed the expansion of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on the continent. But it’s a decisive shift that until now US officials have been loath to acknowledge. The veil lifted slightly on Wednesday when President Obama asked Congress for $5 billion to train and equip foreign governments for counterterrorism activities. Most of the countries he cited are in northern Africa, including Somalia, Libya and Mali. US Special Operations are reportedly already training new counterterrorism units in Libya and Mali, as well as Niger and Mauritania. “Today’s principal threat no longer comes from a centralized Al Qaeda leadership. Instead, it comes from decentralized Al Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused in the countries where they operate,” Obama said. “We need a strategy that matches this diffuse threat; one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military thin, or stir up local resentments.”
  • The Counter-Terrorism Partnerships Fund, as the administration dubbed the program, would apparently add more money and a new name to an existing slate of security cooperation programs. Over the last few years the United States has spent millions training proxy forces to combat local insurgents in Africa; one example is a $500 million operation called the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative that provides training and equipment to ten African partners. According to the journalist Nick Turse, who has covered AFRICOM extensively for TomDispatch, the number of operations, programs and missions conducted by the US military in Africa has increased by more than 200 percent since the command was established in 2008. In 2012 alone the United States planned fourteen major training operations across the continent, including in Mali, Morocco, Uganda, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal and Nigeria. “AFRICOM talks about this like it’s small-scale and low-key to the public, but when you listen to what they’re saying in private it’s really startling,” Turse told me. He’s heard officers refer to Africa as “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.” One AFRICOM official acknowledged to a room full of private contractors that the command had “shifted from our original intent of being a more congenial combatant command to an actual war-fighting combatant command.”
  • Counterterrorism cooperation sounds innocuous enough, particularly when presented rhetorically as an alternative to ground wars. However light-footed, the strategy Obama made explicit on Wednesday nevertheless endorses expanded US military activity on the continent. Unfortunately, the president was not so much signaling the end of the era of military adventurism as directing it towards a new arena in fresh packaging. And as with more conventional military endeavors, deeper involvement in Africa carries risks of blowback, particularly by drawing large militant networks into local conflicts.
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Transparency Toolkit - 0 views

transparencytoolkit.org/about.html transparency transparency-tools research-resources
shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • About Transparency Toolkit We need information about governments, companies, and other institutions to uncover corruption, human rights abuses, and civil liberties violations. Unfortunately, the information provided by most transparency initiatives today is difficult to understand and incomplete. Transparency Toolkit is an open source web application where journalists, activists, or anyone can chain together tools to rapidly collect, combine, visualize, and analyze documents and data. For example, Transparency Toolkit can be used to get data on all of a legislator’s actions in congress (votes, bills sponsored, etc.), get data on the fundraising parties a legislator attends, combine that data, and show it on a timeline to find correlations between actions in congress and parties attended. It could also be used to extract all locations from a document and plot them on a map where each point is linked to where the location was mentioned in the document.
  • Analysis Platform On the analysis platform, users can add steps to the analysis process. These steps chain together the tools, so someone could scrape data, upload a document, crossreference that with the scraped data, and then visualize the result all in less than a minute with little technical knowledge. Some of the tools allow users to specify input, but when this is not the case the output of the last step is the input of the next. Tools Existing and planned Transparency Toolkit tools include include scrapers and APIs for accessing data, format converters, extraction tools (for dates, names, locations, numbers), tools for crossreferencing and merging data, visualizations (maps, timelines, network graphs, maps), and pattern and trend detecting tools. These tools are designed to work in many cases rather than a single specific situation. The tools can be linked together on Transparency Toolkit, but they are also available individually. Where possible, we build our tools off of existing open source software. Road Map You can see the plans for future development of Transparency Toolkit here.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 14
     
    If you think this isn't a tool for some very serious research, check the short descriptions of the modules here. https://github.com/transparencytoolkit I'll be installing this and doing some test-driving soon. From the source files, the glue for the tools seems to be Ruby on Rails. The development roadmap linked from the last word on this About page is also highly instructive. It ranks among the most detailed dev roadmaps I have ever seen. Notice that it is classified by milestones with scheduled work periods, giving specific date ranges for achievement. Even given the inevitable need to alter the schedule for unforeseen problems, this is a very aggressive (not quite the word I want) development plan and schedule. And the planned changes look to be super-useful, including a lot of "make it easier for the user" changes.   
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U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack | Wired Enterprise ... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...nsa-cisco-huawei-china surveillance state U.S. China NSA-backdoors
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony. After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad. “We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”
  • Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale. “Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”
  • To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers. “For the most part, the article discusses typical malware exploits used by hackers everywhere,” says JR Rivers, an engineer who has built networking hardware for Cisco as well as Google and now runs the networking startup Cumulus Networks. “It’s just pointing out that the NSA is engaged in the practice and has resources that are not available to most people.” But in the end, the two types of attack have the same result: Networking gear controlled by government spies. And over the last six months, Snowden’s revelations have indicated that the NSA is not only hacking into networks but also collaborating with large American companies in its hunt for data.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Jim Lewis, a director and senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds that the Chinese view state-sponsored espionage a little differently than the U.S. does. Both countries believe in espionage for national security purposes, but the Chinese argue that such spying might include the theft of commercial secrets. “The Chinese will tell you that stealing technology and business secrets is a way of building their economy, and that this is important for national security,” says Lewis, who has helped oversee meetings between the U.S. and the Chinese, including officers in the PLA. “I’ve been in the room when they’ve said that. The last time was when a PLA colonel said: ‘In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.’” But here in the United States, we now know, the NSA may blur other lines in the name of national security. Segal says that although he, as an American, believes the U.S. government is on stronger ethical ground than the Chinese, other nations are beginning to question its motives. “The U.S has to convince other countries that our type of intelligence gathering is different,” he says. “I don’t think that the Brazils and the Indias and the Indonesias and the South Africas are convinced. That’s a big problem for us.”
  • The thing to realize, as the revelations of NSA snooping continue to pour out, is that everyone deserves scrutiny — the U.S government and its allies, as well as the Chinese and others you may be more likely to view with skepticism. “All big countries,” Lewis says, “are going to try and do this.”
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14
     
    Of course, we now know that the U.S. conducts electronic surveillance for a multitude of purposes, including economic. Check this group's notes tagged "NSA-targets" and/or "NSA-goals".
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Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5385860 transparency whistle-blowers resources ExposeFacts.org
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity. I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage. Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge. “It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week.“It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”
  • Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.” Another former Department of State official, the ex-diplomat and retired Army colonel Ann Wright, who resigned in protest of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, is crossing paths with Hoh on Friday as they do the honors at a ribbon-cutting — half a block from the State Department headquarters in Washington — for a billboard with a picture of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Big-lettered words begin by referring to the years he waited before releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. “Don’t do what I did,” Ellsberg says on the billboard.  “Don’t wait until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.
  • The billboard – sponsored by the ExposeFacts organization, which launched this week — will spread to other prominent locations in Washington and beyond. As an organizer for ExposeFacts, I’m glad to report that outreach to potential whistleblowers is just getting started. (For details, visit ExposeFacts.org.) We’re propelled by the kind of hopeful determination that Hoh expressed the day before the billboard ribbon-cutting when he said: “I trust ExposeFacts and its efforts will encourage others to follow their conscience and do what is right.” The journalist Kevin Gosztola, who has astutely covered a range of whistleblower issues for years, pointed this week to the imperative of opening up news media. “There is an important role for ExposeFacts to play in not only forcing more transparency, but also inspiring more media organizations to engage in adversarial journalism,” he wrote. “Such journalism is called for in the face of wars, environmental destruction, escalating poverty, egregious abuses in the justice system, corporate control of government, and national security state secrecy. Perhaps a truly successful organization could inspire U.S. media organizations to play much more of a watchdog role than a lapdog role when covering powerful institutions in government.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Overall, we desperately need to nurture and propagate a steadfast culture of outspoken whistleblowing. A central motto of the AIDS activist movement dating back to the 1980s – Silence = Death – remains urgently relevant in a vast array of realms. Whether the problems involve perpetual war, corporate malfeasance, climate change, institutionalized racism, patterns of sexual assault, toxic pollution or countless other ills, none can be alleviated without bringing grim realities into the light. “All governments lie,” Ellsberg says in a video statement released for the launch of ExposeFacts, “and they all like to work in the dark as far as the public is concerned, in terms of their own decision-making, their planning — and to be able to allege, falsely, unanimity in addressing their problems, as if no one who had knowledge of the full facts inside could disagree with the policy the president or the leader of the state is announcing.” Ellsberg adds: “A country that wants to be a democracy has to be able to penetrate that secrecy, with the help of conscientious individuals who understand in this country that their duty to the Constitution and to the civil liberties and to the welfare of this country definitely surmount their obligation to their bosses, to a given administration, or in some cases to their promise of secrecy.”
  • Right now, our potential for democracy owes a lot to people like NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Kirk Wiebe, and EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. When they spoke at the June 4 news conference in Washington that launched ExposeFacts, their brave clarity was inspiring. Antidotes to the poisons of cynicism and passive despair can emerge from organizing to help create a better world. The process requires applying a single standard to the real actions of institutions and individuals, no matter how big their budgets or grand their power. What cannot withstand the light of day should not be suffered in silence. If you see something, say something.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    While some governments -- my own included -- attempt to impose an Orwellian Dark State of ubiquitous secret surveillance, secret wars, the rule of oligarchs, and public ignorance, the Edward Snowden leaks fanned the flames of the countering War on Ignorance that had been kept alive by civil libertarians. Only days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in a case where a reporter had been ordered to reveal his source of information for a book on the Dark State under the penalties for contempt of court (a long stretch in jail), a new web site is launched for communications between sources and journalists where the source's names never need to be revealed. This article is part of the publicity for that new weapon fielded by the civil libertarian side in the War Against Ignorance.  Hurrah!
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Hillary admits she was wrong on Iraq war vote - 0 views

www.nation.com.pk/...she-was-wrong-on-iraq-war-vote war & peace Iraq Auction-2012 Hillary
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In a frank admission, Hillary Clinton, a potential presidential candidate, says she ‘got it wrong. Plain and simple’ when she voted as a U.S. senator to authorize the war in Iraq, according to her new memoir. Mrs Clinton’s support, in 2002, for the Iraq War Resolution dogged her unsuccessful 2008 run for President against Barack Obama, who opposed the war from the start. Clinton has distanced herself from her vote — but never in such forceful terms as in her book, ‘Hard Choices,’ which will be officially released on June 10.‘Many senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them,’ she writes, according to CBS News, which obtained an advance copy and posted excerpts on its website. ‘As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake (became) more painful,’ Clinton adds.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    Let's reword that first quote more accurately: "I gladly stampeded with a majority of the Senate instead of waiting until the facts were in. Obviously, I am unfit to become our nation's Commander in Chief because I act on the basis of false pro-war propaganda instead of reality." 
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UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights - ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ort-condemns-mass-surveillance surveillance state UN-report digital-privacy
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded. Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”
  • Mass surveillance thus “amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.” In concluding that mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty. Article 17 of the Covenant guarantees the right of privacy, the defining protection of which, the report explained, is “that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”
  • The report’s key conclusion is that this core right is impinged by mass surveillance programs: “Bulk access technology is indiscriminately corrosive of online privacy and impinges on the very essence of the right guaranteed by article 17. In the absence of a formal derogation from States’ obligations under the Covenant, these programs pose a direct and ongoing challenge to an established norm of international law.” The report recognized that protecting citizens from terrorism attacks is a vital duty of every state, and that the right of privacy is not absolute, as it can be compromised when doing so is “necessary” to serve “compelling” purposes. It noted: “There may be a compelling counter-terrorism justification for the radical re-evaluation of Internet privacy rights that these practices necessitate. ” But the report was adamant that no such justifications have ever been demonstrated by any member state using mass surveillance: “The States engaging in mass surveillance have so far failed to provide a detailed and evidence-based public justification for its necessity, and almost no States have enacted explicit domestic legislation to authorize its use.”
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  • Instead, explained the Rapporteur, states have relied on vague claims whose validity cannot be assessed because of the secrecy behind which these programs are hidden: “The arguments in favor of a complete abrogation of the right to privacy on the Internet have not been made publicly by the States concerned or subjected to informed scrutiny and debate.” About the ongoing secrecy surrounding the programs, the report explained that “states deploying this technology retain a monopoly of information about its impact,” which is “a form of conceptual censorship … that precludes informed debate.” A June report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights similarly noted “the disturbing lack of governmental transparency associated with surveillance policies, laws and practices, which hinders any effort to assess their coherence with international human rights law and to ensure accountability.” The rejection of the “terrorism” justification for mass surveillance as devoid of evidence echoes virtually every other formal investigation into these programs. A federal judge last December found that the U.S. Government was unable to “cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.” Later that month, President Obama’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies concluded that mass surveillance “was not essential to preventing attacks” and information used to detect plots “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.”
  • Three Democratic Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in The New York Times that “the usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated” and “we have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security.” A study by the centrist New America Foundation found that mass metadata collection “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism” and, where plots were disrupted, “traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case.” It labeled the NSA’s claims to the contrary as “overblown and even misleading.” While worthless in counter-terrorism policies, the UN report warned that allowing mass surveillance to persist with no transparency creates “an ever present danger of ‘purpose creep,’ by which measures justified on counter-terrorism grounds are made available for use by public authorities for much less weighty public interest purposes.” Citing the UK as one example, the report warned that, already, “a wide range of public bodies have access to communications data, for a wide variety of purposes, often without judicial authorization or meaningful independent oversight.”
  • The report was most scathing in its rejection of a key argument often made by American defenders of the NSA: that mass surveillance is justified because Americans are given special protections (the requirement of a FISA court order for targeted surveillance) which non-Americans (95% of the world) do not enjoy. Not only does this scheme fail to render mass surveillance legal, but it itself constitutes a separate violation of international treaties (emphasis added): The Special Rapporteur concurs with the High Commissioner for Human Rights that where States penetrate infrastructure located outside their territorial jurisdiction, they remain bound by their obligations under the Covenant. Moreover, article 26 of the Covenant prohibits discrimination on grounds of, inter alia, nationality and citizenship. The Special Rapporteur thus considers that States are legally obliged to afford the same privacy protection for nationals and non-nationals and for those within and outside their jurisdiction. Asymmetrical privacy protection regimes are a clear violation of the requirements of the Covenant.
  • That principle — that the right of internet privacy belongs to all individuals, not just Americans — was invoked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when he explained in a June, 2013 interview at The Guardian why he disclosed documents showing global surveillance rather than just the surveillance of Americans: “More fundamentally, the ‘US Persons’ protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.” The U.N. Rapporteur was clear that these systematic privacy violations are the result of a union between governments and tech corporations: “States increasingly rely on the private sector to facilitate digital surveillance. This is not confined to the enactment of mandatory data retention legislation. Corporates [sic] have also been directly complicit in operationalizing bulk access technology through the design of communications infrastructure that facilitates mass surveillance. ”
  • The latest finding adds to the growing number of international formal rulings that the mass surveillance programs of the U.S. and its partners are illegal. In January, the European parliament’s civil liberties committee condemned such programs in “the strongest possible terms.” In April, the European Court of Justice ruled that European legislation on data retention contravened EU privacy rights. A top secret memo from the GCHQ, published last year by The Guardian, explicitly stated that one key reason for concealing these programs was fear of a “damaging public debate” and specifically “legal challenges against the current regime.” The report ended with a call for far greater transparency along with new protections for privacy in the digital age. Continuation of the status quo, it warned, imposes “a risk that systematic interference with the security of digital communications will continue to proliferate without any serious consideration being given to the implications of the wholesale abandonment of the right to online privacy.” The urgency of these reforms is underscored, explained the Rapporteur, by a conclusion of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that “permitting the government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the state and its citizens.”
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War against Isis: US strategy in tatters as militants march on - Comment - Voices - The... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ilitants-march-on-9789230.html war & peace Syria Iraq Turkey U.S.-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • America's plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group's fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad. The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama's plan to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.
  • The US's failure to save Kobani, if it falls, will be a political as well as military disaster. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the loss of the beleaguered town are even more significant than the inability so far of air strikes to stop Isis taking 40 per cent of it. At the start of the bombing in Syria, President Obama boasted of putting together a coalition of Sunni powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to oppose Isis, but these all have different agendas to the US in which destroying IS is not the first priority. The Sunni Arab monarchies may not like Isis, which threatens the political status quo, but, as one Iraqi observer put it, "they like the fact that Isis creates more problems for the Shia than it does for them".
  • America's plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group's fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad. The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama's plan to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting. Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town's remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.
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  • In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis's toughest opponents in Syria. "Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself," said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. "The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively."
  • The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province's 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 14
     
    Obama's idiocy.
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Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East | TomDisp... - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...the_new_war_in_the_middle_east war & peace ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy must-read
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State By Peter Van Buren You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster -- a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car -- and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?” Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground. Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 14
     
    This one is a must-read. 
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AP News : UK police spied on reporters for years, docs show - 0 views

m.apnews.com/...contentdetail.htm UK civil-liberties freedom-of-the-press terrorism™ police-crackdown journalism
shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation this year to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore - all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he'd long suspected: The police were watching him."Finally," he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, "we've got them."Parkinson's documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London's Metropolitan Police and Britain's Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with recent revelations about the seizure of reporters' phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country's news media.
  • Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests - some of them for The Associated Press - said he and his colleagues had long suspected that the police were monitoring them."Police officers we'd never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us," he said.Several journalists told AP the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny and occasionally wrong.
  • Jess Hurd, a 41-year-old freelance photographer and Parkinson's partner, said she was worried the intelligence logs were being shared internationally."I go to a lot of countries on assignment," she said. "Where are these database logs being shared? Who with, for what purpose?"The revelations add to public disclosures about British police secretly seizing journalists' telephone records in leak investigations. Several senior officers have recently acknowledged using anti-terrorism powers to uncover journalists' sources by combing through the records.
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  • Union statement: https://www.nuj.org.uk/news/nuj-members-under-police-surveillance-mount-collective-legal/
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Ukrainian NATO Membership divides East and West as well as Western Alliance | nsnbc int... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...st-as-well-as-western-alliance war & peace Ukraine EU NATO Germany UK U.S.-foreign-policy France UK-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Earlier in November NATO and the Ukrainian Parliament signed an agreement on Ukraine’s non-block status as well as on a gradual transition to NATO standards.
  • German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in a recent interview published in Der Spiegel, noted that it would take a very long time before Ukraine would be ready to become a member of the European Union, referring to the country’s catastrophic economy, corruption, and other issues. Steinmeier expressed the same position with regard to a Ukrainian NATO membership, saying that Ukraine entering NATO’s partnership for peace program was one possible solution. Meanwhile, NATO’s partnership for peace program would further poise Ukraine against Russia and add to the tensions which have been created due to the stationing of NATO’s Rapid Response Force in former Warsaw Pact member Poland. Although official French, German, Slovak, Czech and other Western European governments moderate their statement, there is a growing political pressure against NATO membership and NATO’s eastward expansion within these countries which its governments cannot ignore.
  • Professor of history and peace studies at University of Basel, Switzerland, Dr. Daniele Ganser, who studied NATO and NATO’s Gladio operations extensively, once stressed that NATO Secretary-Generals mostly are Europeans. Meanwhile, Ganser noted, their function is political to make Europeans have the impression that they have an impact on NATO’s overall straegy. The actual NATO leadership in Europe is embodied in NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who always has been a U.S. American. NATO, concludes Ganser, is dominated by the United States and the Pentagon, period. The reason for the choice of the current NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh-Rasmussen, was explained in a previous article, entitled “NATO’s Summit in Wales: Why Anders Fogh-Rasmussen?” The author’s conclusions are largely corroborating Gansers position, adding that the choice of a European NATO Secretary-General is largely based on who in Europe needs to be convinced about a European “stake” in NATO and which political contacts can be instrumentalized to NATO’s or the US/UK axis’ advantage.
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  • Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas noted that NATO has developed into the “vanguard dog of the United States”, and pleaded for France to reconsider its membership in the alliance. Meanwhile, Washington and London continue supporting a development that aims at integrating Ukraine into NATO. Only about 45 percent of Germans, earlier in 2014, saw Germany as solidly anchored in NATO. About half of the German population would rather see Germany as neutral, fulfilling the function of bridge between the East and the West which is a role Germany already has geographically as well as culturally and politically. The current developments in and around Ukraine pose the question whether the trend towards the opening of a new cold war and the splitting of Europe between the East and the West ultimately also splits NATO. Many analysts suggest that a NATO expansion to Ukraine would deprive Europe of the chance to become part of the ongoing Eurasian dynamics. Analysts stressed repeatedly that the US/UK dominated eastwards expansion of NATO aims, among others, at preventing a greater integration of European and Eurasian economies and at maintaining an US/UK hegemony over continental Europe, especially over Germany.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14
     
    Previously, there had been certainty that Ukraine would never become a NATO member. Apparently there is a countering NATO faction that wants to see that happen, undoubtedly including the U.S.
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Ukraine's Made-in-USA Finance Minister | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...s-made-in-usa-finance-minister war & peace Ukraine U.S.-foreign-policy Nuland Jaresco corruption insider-trading
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. State Department officer who was granted Ukrainian citizenship only this week, headed a U.S. government-funded investment project for Ukraine that involved substantial insider dealings, including $1 million-plus fees to a management company that she also controlled. Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was cofounder and managing partner of Horizon Capital which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 to 2.5 percent of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.
  • Based on the data from WNISEF’s 2012 annual report, it also appeared that the U.S. taxpayers had lost about one-third of their investment in WNISEF, with the fund’s balance at $98,074,030, compared to the initial U.S. government grant of $150 million. Given the collapsing Ukrainian economy since the Feb. 22 coup, the value of the fund is likely to have slipped even further. (Efforts to get more recent data from WNISEF’s and Horizon Capital’s Web sites were impossible Friday because the sites were down.) Beyond the long list of “related party transactions” in the annual report, there also have been vague allegations of improprieties involving Jaresko from one company insider, her ex-husband, Ihor Figlus. But his whistle-blowing was shut down by a court order issued at Jaresko’s insistence. John Helmer, a longtime foreign correspondent in Russia, disclosed the outlines of this dispute in an article examining Jaresko’s history as a recipient of U.S. AID’s largesse and how it enabled her to become an investment banker via WNISEF, Horizon Capital and Emerging Europe Growth Fund.
  • Helmer wrote: “Exactly what happened when Jaresko left the State Department to go into her government-paid business in Ukraine has been spelled out by her ex-husband in papers filed in the Chancery Court of Delaware in 2012 and 2013. … “Without Figlus and without the US Government, Jaresko would not have had an investment business in Ukraine. The money to finance the business, and their partnership stakes, turns out to have been loaned to Figlus and Jaresko from Washington.” According to Helmer’s article, Figlus had reviewed company records in 2011 and concluded that some loans were “improper,” but he lacked the money to investigate so he turned to Mark Rachkevych, a reporter for the Kyiv Post, and gave him information to investigate the propriety of the loans. “When Jaresko realized the beans were spilling, she sent Figlus a reminder that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement” and secured a temporary injunction in Delaware on behalf of Horizon Capital and EEGF to prevent Figlus from further revealing company secrets, Helmer wrote.
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  • Jaresco, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Kiev after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has said that Western NIS Enterprise Fund was “funded by the U.S. government to invest in small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine and Moldova – in essence, to ‘kick-start’ the private equity industry in the region.” While the ultimate success of that U.S.-funded endeavor may still be unknown, it is clear that the U.S. AID money did “kick-start” Jaresco’s career in equity investments and put her on the path that has now taken her to the job of Ukraine’s new finance minister. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cited her experience in these investment fields to explain his unusual decision to bring in an American to run Ukraine’s finances and grant her citizenship.
  • The substantial U.S. government sum invested in Jaresco’s WNISEF-based equity fund also sheds new light on how it was possible for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to tally up U.S. spending on Ukraine since it became independent in 1991 and reach the astounding figure of “more than $5 billion,” which she announced to a meeting of U.S.-Ukrainian business leaders last December as she was pushing for “regime change” in Kiev. The figure was so high that it surprised some of Nuland’s State Department colleagues. Several months later – after a U.S.-backed coup had overthrown Yanukovych and pitched Ukraine into a nasty civil war – Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs Richard Stengel cited the $5 billion figure as “ludicrous” Russian disinformation after hearing the number on Russia’s RT network.
  • Stengel, a former Time magazine editor, didn’t seem to know that the figure had come from a fellow senior State Department official. Nuland’s “more than $5 billion” figure did seem high, even if one counted the many millions of dollars spent over the past couple of decades by U.S. AID (which puts its contributions to Ukraine at $1.8 billion) and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has financed hundreds of projects for supporting Ukrainian political activists, media operatives and non-governmental organizations. But if one looks at the $150 million largesse bestowed on Natalie Jaresco, you can begin to understand the old adage that a hundred million dollars here and a hundred million dollars there soon adds up to real money.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    The Ukraine coup government just keeps getting more and more absurdly corrupt. 
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ICC Threats: Worst-Case Scenario for Israel and PA - Global Agenda - News - Arutz Sheva - 0 views

www.israelnationalnews.com/...189378 war & peace Israel Palestine ICC Shurat-HaDin lawfare
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Abbas pledged to join the ICC and lodge charges against Israel there. On Wednesday evening he took the first step, signing the request along with applications to join 20 other international conventions during a meeting broadcast live on PA television, despite US criticism. Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Shurat Hadin legal center's director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said that if Abbas follows through on his threats, the PA's case would likely center around alleged war crimes committed by the IDF during the past summer's war with Gazan terrorists, as well as "settlement-building" - a euphemism for any Jewish communities built in Judea, Samaria, and large parts of Jerusalem. The veteran attorney and legal campaigner warns that if such a case is launched the prospects for Israel are bleak. "Israel will of course try to defend itself, but chances are they will lose. And if they lose and they're convicted for war crimes, it would be a game-changer. It would drop Israel to the bottom tier internationally," she said.
  • The ICC has faced serious criticism over the years for only focusing on "third-world" countries, and particularly the African continent, (since its founding in 1998 all eight cases handled by the ICC have been in African states,) and there is heavy pressure for the court to also try a "western" or allied country as well to dispel those allegations. "They need to take a different type of case, and they would gladly take upon themselves the Arab-Israeli conflict... it's a more interesting and sexier issue to be involved with, and there is tremendous pressure from countries all over the world for the court to get involved." Despite that pressure, until now the ICC has been unable to get involved due to a lack of jurisdiction.
  • But could the move be a blessing in disguise, providing Israel with an opportunity to decisively knock down the many allegations against it in the international arena - including both the legality of "settlements" and alleged war crimes - once and for all? "No, this is a biased court," Darshan-Leitner answers bluntly. "Of course Israel will bring international legal experts and explain why the territories (Judea-Samaria) are only disputed, not occupied, and how Jordan never had a right to them in the first place, for example - but Europe, and many other countries, have a different perspective," and it's from that political perspective that the ICC will analyse the case. "Once Israel is charged with war crimes it's the 'end of the game' - that's why Israel should do whatever it can not to be charged." If found guilty, "Israel would have to extradite to the court those individuals or officials, IDF commanders, etc, who will be individually charged for war crimes. Israel will obviously refuse to do so - Israel is not insane, so it's not going to extradite its own people to be blamed for war crimes - and then as a result Israel will be sanctioned... then there will be a real boycott against Israel from the court's member states.
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  • Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Shurat Hadin legal center's director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said that if Abbas follows through on his threats, the PA's case would likely center around alleged war crimes committed by the IDF during the past summer's war with Gazan terrorists, as well as "settlement-building" - a euphemism for any Jewish communities built in Judea, Samaria, and large parts of Jerusalem. The veteran attorney and legal campaigner warns that if such a case is launched the prospects for Israel are bleak. "Israel will of course try to defend itself, but chances are they will lose. And if they lose and they're convicted for war crimes, it would be a game-changer. It would drop Israel to the bottom tier internationally," she said. Darshan-Leitner emphasizes that her pessimistic prediction is not borne out of a lack of confidence in Israel's legal position. On the contrary, she believes Israel can - and would - make a very strong defense case on either issue were it forced to do so. The problem, she says, is a political one.
  • "In addition, the court will issue arrest warrants against those individuals; Interpol will make it international and those people won't be able to leave the country - it will snowball." There is hope, however. If the ICC is Abbas's "doomsday weapon", Israel's hope lies in deterrence. "That's what were working on."
  • Indeed, Shurat HaDin has already threatened a "tsunami" of prosecutions if the PA chooses to file charges against Israel at the ICC. The NGO has already made good on its threats following unilateral actions by the PA in recent months, launching charges against Mahmoud Abbas himself as well as Hamas's Qatar-based terror chief Khaled Meshaal - both of whom are Jordanian citizens and thus already covered by the ICC's jurisdiction. Should the PA succeed in joining the Court, Shurat HaDin is already preparing a long list of other Palestinian leaders to target with a wide range of charges. "It could be crimes committed during the Intifada against Israelis - all the suicide bombings, all the drive-by shooting attacks. All the heads of the different armed factions have superior liability over what was done by their forces," Darshan-Leitner explains. "And there are also crimes committed against the Palestinian people themselves," from torture to public executions and the use of human shields, she adds. But won't the ICC just dismiss such cases for the same political reasons she cited?
  • "Nobody knows for sure - and that's why it's a deterrent for the Palestinians, because they don't know how the court will take these cases. I find it hard to believe though that the court would agree to prosecute Israel and not the Palestinians." But she cautions that, even though Palestinian leaders will also likely end up in the dock, it wouldn't undo the damage done to Israel. Short of coaxing the Palestinian Authority back to the negotiating table, the only way to stave off an ICC prosecution would be via a combination of threats of counter-prosecution, and concerted political pressure. "The US has threatened to cut all funding to the PA and even UNRWA if they go through with such a move, and obviously Israel will cut off all funding as well," she notes. "And the Palestinian Authority relies almost entirely on American and Israeli funding." The many vocal backers of the PA such as Arab states and the European Union have a poor track record of coughing up the goods, "so if that happens it will essentially collapse." With those considerations in mind, an ICC prosecution is Abbas's "weapon of last resort." And it appears the only real deterrent Israel currently holds in the threat of mutually-assured destruction.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 15
     
    Note that according to a leaked U.S. State Dept. cable on Wikileaks, Ms. Darshan-Leitner confessed to officials of the U.S. Embassy that Shurat HaDin has "accepted direction" from the Israeli government and works closely with Mossad. https://cablegatesearch.wikileaks.org/cable.php?id=07TELAVIV2636
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Justice Department Lawyers Who Engage in Misconduct Sometimes Escape Discipline, Watchd... - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...metimes-escape-discipline.html corruption DoJ oversight discipline
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Within a year of being disciplined for violating professional standards, some Justice Department attorneys have been promoted or given financial rewards for good performance, a government watchdog agency reported Thursday. In addition, when the Justice Department determines that its lawyers should be disciplined for misconduct, it has not ensured that the discipline is actually carried out, the Government Accountability (GAO) said. The GAO concluded that the Justice Department could do more to hold federal prosecutors and other employees accountable for misconduct.
  • The GAO study was conducted at the behest of Congress and follows the collapse of major federal prosecutions as a result of prosecutorial violations. In 2009, for example, the conviction of former then-Senator Ted Stevens (R-Ala.) unraveled because prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped Stevens’ defense. In 2013, based on prosecutorial violations, a federal judge in Louisiana overturned convictions of five New Orleans police officers alleged to have shot unarmed civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the GAO noted. The GAO report adds to the picture. The agency, an investigative arm of Congress, found instances in which prescribed disciplinary actions had not been implemented.  “DOJ does not have a mechanism in place to ensure that component management actually implements discipline once it has been imposed,” the report said. The GAO also found that some attorneys who had been cited for misconduct also received performance-based rewards such as $2,000 in cash or 22 hours of time off from work.
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From Energy War to Currency War: America's Attack on the Russian Ruble | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5421554 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Russia China de-dollarization blowback
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  • Putin announced that Russia has cancelled the South Stream project on December 1, 2014. Instead the South Stream pipeline project has been replaced by a natural gas pipeline that goes across the Black Sea to Turkey from the Russian Federation’s South Federal District. This alternative pipeline has been popularly billed the «Turk Stream» and partners Russian energy giant Gazprom with Turkey’s Botas. Moreover, Gazprom will start giving Turkey discounts in the purchase of Russian natural gas that will increase with the intensification of Russo-Turkish cooperation. The natural gas deal between Ankara and Moscow creates a win-win situation for both the Turkish and Russian sides. Not only will Ankara get a discount on energy supplies, but Turk Stream gives the Turkish government what it has wanted and desired for years. The Turk Stream pipeline will make Turkey an important energy corridor and transit point, complete with transit revenues. In this case Turkey becomes the corridor between energy supplier Russia and European Union and non-EU energy customers in southeastern Europe. Ankara will gain some leverage over the European Union and have an extra negotiating card with the EU too, because the EU will have to deal with it as an energy broker.
  • For its part, Russia has reduced the risks that it faced in building the South Stream by cancelling the project. Moscow could have wasted resources and time building the South Stream to see the project sanctioned or obstructed in the Balkans by Washington and Brussels. If the European Union really wants Russian natural gas then the Turk Stream pipeline can be expanded from Turkey to Greece, the former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, and other European countries that want to be integrated into the energy project. The cancellation of South Stream also means that there will be one less alternative energy corridor from Russia to the European Union for some time. This has positive implications for a settlement in Ukraine, which is an important transit route for Russian natural gas to the European Union. As a means of securing the flow of natural gas across Ukrainian territory from Russia, the European Union will be more prone to push the authorities in Kiev to end the conflict in East Ukraine.
  • From the perspective of Russian Presidential Advisor Sergey Glazyev, the US is waging its multi-spectrum war against Russia to ultimately challenge Moscow’s Chinese partners. In an insightful interview, Glazyev explained the following points to the Ukrainian journalist Alyona Berezovskaya — working for a Rossiya Segodnya subsidiary focusing on information involving Ukraine — about the basis for US hostility towards Russia: the bankruptcy of the US, its decline in competitiveness on global markets, and Washington’s inability to ultimately save its financial system by servicing its foreign debt or getting enough investments to establish some sort of innovative economic breakthrough are the reasons why Washington has been going after the Russian Federation. [13] In Glazyev’s own words, the US wants «a new world war». [14] The US needs conflict and confrontation, in other words. This is what the crisis in Ukraine is nurturing in Europe. Sergey Glazyev reiterates the same points months down the road on September 23, 2014 in an article he authors for the magazine Russia in Global Affairs, which is sponsored by the Russian International Affairs Council — a think-tank founded by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Russian Ministry of Education 2010 — and the US journal Foreign Affairs — which is the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relation in the US. In his article, Glazyev adds that the war Washington is inciting against Russia in Europe may ultimately benefit the Chinese, because the struggle being waged will weaken the US, Russia, and the European Union to the advantage of China. [15] The point of explaining all this is to explain that Russia wants a balanced strategic partnership with China. Glazyev himself even told Berezovskaya in their interview that Russia wants a mutually beneficial relationship with China that does reduce it to becoming a subordinate to Beijing. [16]
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  • It is because of the importance of Irano-Turkish and Russo-Turkish trade and energy ties that Ankara has had an understanding with both Russia and Iran not to let politics and their differences over the Syrian crisis get in the way of their economic ties and business relationships while Washington has tried to disrupt Irano-Turkish and Russo-Turkish trade and energy ties like it has disrupted trade ties between Russia and the EU. [9] Ankara, however, realizes that if it lets politics disrupt its economic ties with Iran and Russia that Turkey itself will become weakened and lose whatever independence it enjoys Masterfully announcing the Russian move while in Ankara, Putin also took the opportunity to ensure that there would be heated conversation inside the EU. Some would call this rubbing salt on the wounds. Knowing that profit and opportunity costs would create internal debate within Bulgaria and the EU, Putin rhetorically asked if Bulgaria was going to be economically compensated by the European Commission for the loss.
  • It is clear that Russian business and trade ties have been redirected to the People’s Republic of China and East Asia. On the occasion of the Sino-Russian mega natural gas deal, this author pointed out that this was not as much a Russian countermove to US economic pressure as it was really a long-term Russian strategy that seeks an increase in trade and ties with East Asia. [10] Vladimir Putin himself also corroborated this standpoint during the December 18 press conference mentioned earlier when he dismissed — like this author — the notion that the so-called «Russian turn to the East» was mainly the result of the crisis in Ukraine. In President Putin’s own words, the process of increasing business ties with the Chinese and East Asia «stems from the global economic processes, because the East – that is, the Asia-Pacific Region – shows faster growth than the rest of the world». [11] If this is not convincing enough that the turn towards East Asia was already in the works for Russia, then Putin makes it categorically clear as he proceeds talking at the December 18 press conference. In reference to the Sino-Russian gas deal and other Russian projects in East Asia, Putin explained the following: «The projects we are working on were planned long ago, even before the most recent problems occurred in the global or Russian economy. We are simply implementing our long-time plans». [12]
  • According to Presidential Advisor Sergey Glazyev, Washington is «trying to destroy and weaken Russia, causing it to fragment, as they need this territory and want to establish control over this entire space». [18] «We have offered cooperation from Lisbon to Vladivostok, whereas they need control to maintain their geopolitical leadership in a competition with China,» he has explained, pointing out that the US wants lordship and is not interested in cooperation. [19] Alluding to former US top diplomat Madeline Albright’s sentiments that Russia was unfairly endowed with vast territory and resources, Putin also spoke along similar lines at his December 18 press conference, explaining how the US wanted to divide Russia and control the abundant natural resources in Russian territory. It is of little wonder that in 2014 a record number of Russian citizens have negative attitudes about relations between their country and the United States. A survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center has shown that of 39% of Russian respondents viewed relations with the US as «mostly bad» and 27% as «very bad». [20] This means 66% of Russian respondents have negative views about relations with Washington. This is an inference of the entire Russian population’s views. Moreover, this is the highest rise in negative perceptions about the US since 2008 when the US supported Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi’s war against Russia and the breakaway republic of South Ossetia; 40% viewed them as «mostly bad» and 25% of Russians viewed relations as «very bad» and at the time. [21]
  • In more ways than one the Turk Stream pipeline can be viewed as a reconfigured of the failed Nabucco natural gas pipeline. Not only will Turk Stream court Turkey and give Moscow leverage against the European Union, instead of reducing Russian influence as Nabucco was originally intended to do, the new pipeline to Turkey also coaxes Ankara to align its economic and strategic interests with those of Russian interests. This is why, when addressing Nabucco and the rivalries for establishing alternate energy corridors, this author pointed out in 2007 that «the creation of these energy corridors and networks is like a two-edged sword. These geo-strategic fulcrums or energy pivots can also switch their directions of leverage. The integration of infrastructure also leads towards economic integration». [8] The creation of Turk Stream and the strengthening of Russo-Turkish ties may even help placate the gory conflict in Syria. If Iranian natural gas is integrated into the mainframe of Turk Stream through another energy corridor entering Anatolia from Iranian territory, then Turkish interests would be even more tightly aligned with both Moscow and Tehran. Turkey will save itself from the defeats of its neo-Ottoman policies and be able to withdraw from the Syrian crisis. This will allow Ankara to politically realign itself with two of its most important trading partners, Iran and Russia.
  • Whatever Washington’s intentions are, every step that the US takes to target Russia economically will eventually hurt the US economy too. It is also highly unlikely that the policy mandarins in Beijing are unaware of what the US may try to be doing. The Chinese are aware that ultimately it is China and not Russia that is the target of the United States.
  • The United States is waging a fully fledged economic war against the Russian Federations and its national economy. Ultimately, all Russians are collectively the target. The economic sanctions are nothing more than economic warfare. If the crisis in Ukraine did not happen, another pretext would have been found for assaulting Russia. Both US Assistant-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Glaser even told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives in May 2014 that the ultimate objectives of the US economic sanctions against Russia are to make the Russian population so miserable and desperate that they would eventually demand that the Kremlin surrender to the US and bring about «political change». «Political change» can mean many things, but what it most probably implies here is regime change in Moscow. In fact, the aims of the US do not even appear to be geared at coercing the Russian government to change its foreign policy, but to incite regime change in Moscow and to cripple the Russian Federation entirely through the instigation of internal divisions. This is why maps of a divided Russia are being circulated by Radio Free Europe. [17]
  • Without question, the US wants to disrupt the strategic partnership between Beijing and Moscow. Moscow’s strategic long-term planning and Sino-Russian cooperation has provided the Russia Federation with an important degree of economic and strategic insulation from the economic warfare being waged against the Russian national economy. Washington, however, may also be trying to entice the Chinese to overplay their hand as Russia is economically attacked. In this context, the price drops in the energy market may also be geared at creating friction between Beijing and Moscow. In part, the manipulation of the energy market and the price drops could seek to weaken and erode Sino-Russian relations by coaxing the Chinese into taking steps that would tarnish their excellent ties with their Russian partners. The currency war against the Russian ruble may also be geared towards this too. In other words, Washington may be hoping that China becomes greedy and shortsighted enough to make an attempt to take advantage of the price drop in energy prices in the devaluation of the Russian ruble.
  • Russia can address the economic warfare being directed against its national economy and society as a form of «economic terrorism». If Russia’s banks and financial institutions are weakened with the aim of creating financial collapse in the Russian Federation, Moscow can introduce fiscal measures to help its banks and financial sector that could create economic shockwaves in the European Union and North America. Speaking in hypothetical terms, Russia has lots of options for a financial defensive or counter-offensive that can be compared to its scorched earth policies against Western European invaders during the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, and the Second World War. If Russian banks and institutions default and do not pay or delay payment of their derivative debts and justify it on the basis of the economic warfare and economic terrorism, there would be a financial shock and tsunami that would vertebrate from the European Union to North America. This scenario has some parallels to the steps that Argentina is taken to sidestep the vulture funds.
  • The currency war eventually will rebound on Washington and Wall Street. The energy war will also reverse directions. Already, the Kremlin has made it clear that it and a coalition of other countries will de-claw the US in the currency market through a response that will neutralize US financial manipulation and the petro-dollar. In the words of Sergey Glazyev, Moscow is thinking of a «systemic and comprehensive» response «aimed at exposing and ending US political domination, and, most importantly, at undermining US military-political power based on the printing of dollars as a global currency». [22] His solution includes the creation of «a coalition of sound forces advocating stability — in essence, a global anti-war coalition with a positive plan for rearranging the international financial and economic architecture on the principles of mutual benefit, fairness, and respect for national sovereignty». [23] The coming century will not be the «American Century» as the neo-conservatives in Washington think. It will be a «Eurasian Century». Washington has taken on more than it can handle, this may be why the US government has announced an end to its sanctions regime against Cuba and why the US is trying to rekindle trade ties with Iran. Despite this, the architecture of the post-Second World War or post-1945 global order is now in its death bed and finished. This is what the Kremlin and Putin’s presidential spokesman and press secretary Dmitry Peskov mean when they impart—as Peskov stated to Rossiya-24 in a December 17, 2014 interview — that the year 2014 has finally led to «a paradigm shift in the international system».
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Moscow hosts the final Meeting before the Establishment of the EEU in January 2015 | ns... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ent-of-the-eeu-in-january-2015 war & peace economic-warfare BRICS EEC ASEAN MERCOSUR
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  • The Supreme Eurasian Economic Council convenes in the Russian capital Moscow on Tuesday, December 23. The summit will be the final meeting before the formal establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) on January 1, 2015 and the expected accession of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan on respectively January 2, and May 15, 2015.  The Council convenes in Moscow to add the finishing touches before the formal establishment of the EEU, which constitutes a customs, trade and consumer potential of more than 170 million people. The EEU is the largest economic union in the post-Soviet era, reports the Russian news agency Tass.
  • The news agency quoted the spokesman of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yury Ushakov, as saying that the EEU is guided by the principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and that it will afford the free movement of goods, services, capital as well as labor force within the Union. The Supreme Eurasian Economic Council is, thus far, constituted by the heads of State of  Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. It is expected that the three heads of State also will make announcements pertaining the finalization of the procedures for the membership of Armenia as constituent of the EEU. Armenia is expected to join the EEU on January 2, 2015. Moreover, Kyrgyzstan is expected to join the Union on May 15, 2015 after the ratification of additional protocols.
  • A decision on the presidency over the EEU is also expected to be announced after the Council’s meeting on Tuesday. The presidency over the EEU will circulate in alphabetical order, said Ushakov. Another item on the agenda of the Council will be discussions on issues pertaining the cooperation between the EEU, its constituents, and foreign partners. In particular, are mentioned Egypt, India, Israel and Vietnam. Ushakov added that there also exist plans for the signing of cooperation memorandums with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as with the Latin American MERCOSUR.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 14
     
    BRICS on the march.
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China stakes claim in Central and Southeast Europe | Business New Europe - 0 views

www.bne.eu/...m-central-and-southeast-europe war & peace economic-warfare EU China infrastructure-investments
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  • A Chinese agreement to finance a high-speed railway from Belgrade to Bucharest was one of around $10bn worth of investments, mainly in the energy and infrastructure sectors, signed during a China-Central and Eastern Europe summit this week. By funding the railway, Beijing hopes to establish a rapid connection from Greece’s Pireaus Port through the Balkans to the EU member states of Central Europe. Several agreements on the €1.5bn railway, which will be financed by soft loans from state-owned China Exim Bank, were signed between China, Hungary and Serbia on December 17. When the line is operational, the travel time between Belgrade and Budapest will be slashed from the current eight hours to just 2.4 hours. Macedonian counterpart Nikola Gruevski was also in attendance as there are plans to extend the line south to Macedonia and Greece in future. Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, who headed a 200-strong delegation to Belgrade, said he expected the line would benefit both China and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the EU, according to a Serbian government statement.
  • Chinese shipping giant Cosco Pacific took over the management rights to half of Piraeus port and is now expanding two container terminals under a 35-year concession agreement, with the aim of turning the Greek port into one of Europe’s top five container ports. However, to take full advantage of Cosco’s investment in Piraeus and its potential to become a gateway to the CEE region, investments into transport links across the Balkans are needed. "We will propose construction of a rapid land and maritime route based on the Budapest-Belgrade railroad and the Greek port of Piraeus to improve regional connectivity," Li told journalists in advance of the summit, South China Morning Post reported. Investments into infrastructure to transport raw materials into China and Chinese manufactured goods to foreign markets is nothing new. Closer to home, Beijing is looking to fund a railway across Central Asia to create a direct rail link between its factories and the massive wholesale bazaars of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Further afield, in May 2014, China signed an agreement in Kenya to build a new line from Mombasa to Nairobi that will extend to four other East African states in future.
  • While land rail routes across Eurasia to Europe are also being developed, sea shipping remains the cheapest route from the Far East to Europe, and Piraeus is a convenient entry point to the continent. While growth in the region has been patchy since the recent global economic crisis, in the longer-term the EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe and future entrants from the Balkans are expected to converge with longer-established EU members from Western Europe in terms of spending power. Since 2012, when the first China-CEE summit was held in Warsaw, Chinese attention on the region has steadily increased, with a focus on energy and infrastructure. Aside from the access to new markets, there are further commercial benefits for China, as Chinese companies are selected for lucrative construction contracts on projects funded by Chinese state-owned banks. On December 16, the opening day of the summit, Li told the 16 regional leaders to attend that China would launch a $3bn investment fund for the region.
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  • Also on December 16 Albania signed a deal with Exim Bank on funding for the completion of construction works on the Arber motorway that links the capital Tirana with Macedonia. In the energy sector, Serbian and Chinese officials have signed a loan agreement for the second stage of the Kostolac B thermal power project, which includes the construction of a new 350MW plant and the expansion of the adjacent Drmno open-pit coal mine. The value of the project is expected to be $715mn, of which $608mn will come from a 20-year China Exim Bank loan. In neighbouring Bosnia, Eximbank has signed an agreement with the Bosnian Federation government for a €667.8mn credit to fund construction of the 450MW unit 7 at the thermal power plant Tuzla. China's Gezhouba Group is expected to build the unit.
  • The timing of the summit, amid a sharp falling off of Russia’s influence, may also have helped China extend its influence in the region. With some exceptions, notably Serbia, most of the would-be EU member states in Southeast Europe have opted to join EU and US sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Tit for tat sanctions imposed by Moscow caused trade between Eastern Europe and Russia to drop, a trend that is likely to continue amid the new economic crisis in Russia. Meanwhile, in a further retrenchment from the region, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on December 1 that Russia will scrap the planned South Stream pipeline that would have supplies numerous states across the region with gas. China, meanwhile, has no political axe to grind in Eastern Europe, but hopes to take advantage of Russia’s weakness to make further inroads commercially. Poland and other countries in the region are, for example, looking to China as a potential market for food products following the Russian embargo. This would add to already booming trade ties. According to Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng, trade between China and Eastern Europe may top $60bn in 2014 - five times its 2003 level, AFP reported.
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