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Although details surrounding Ledezma’s exact role in the recently discovered “Blue” coup plot are still unclear, it appears that the opposition politician is implicated beyond his call for a transitional government.  Following the announcement of the coup plot last Thursday, the Maduro administration suggested that further arrests were to be made once there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the political ringleaders of the plan.  “In these intelligence investigations, we have discovered a codified message, in another language,  by an important leader of a party. On translating it, we found that it gave the details, the elements of the coup. We are about to capture the person who brought the script that they were going to read, the script they were going to read out was already written, and circulated by a person who I will name at the correct moment”, said Maduro, referencing a preplanned statement which was to be read out to the public following the aerial bombardment, announcing a “rebellion” of the armed forces against the government. 

It is not the first time that Ledezma has been implicated in a plan to violently overthrow the government. In 2002, he participated in an attempted coup which saw socialist president of the time, Hugo Chavez, ousted for a period of 47 hours. Last year, he was also named several times as a “principal ally” by currently detained terror plotter, Lorent Saleh. Saleh was one of the main underground activists fuelling the armed barricades known as guarimbas which last year claimed the lives of at least 43 Venezuelans. He had planned to go on a killing spree with the help of Colombian paramilitaries but was arrested before the plan could take place.  

Popularly known as “the vampire”, Ledezma began his political career in 1973 as a member of the “Democratic Action” Party. In 1989, he infamously became Governor of the Federal District of Caracas, when he oversaw one of the most violent periods in the history of the Caracas Metropolitan Police.  The police body, which was since disbanded in 2010 due to its human rights violations, regularly opened fire on unarmed student protests, systematically repressed street vendors, pensioners and the unemployed, as well as regularly disappeared political activists.   During this period he also oversaw the “Caracazo,” when up to 3000 people were killed and disappeared by security forces in the wake of violent protests against a government imposed austerity programme.  This particular period of Ledezma’s career earnt him the reputation of “student killer” amongst working class Venezuelans. He is founder and current leader of the rightwing party known as the “Brave People’s Alliance”. 

It also escalated an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. The evidence indicates that an alliance of elements of the Maidan opposition and the far right was involved in the mass killing of both protesters and the police, while the involvement of the special police units in killings of some of the protesters cannot be entirely ruled out based on publicly available evidence. The new government that came to power largely as a result of the massacre falsified its investigation, while the Ukrainian media helped to misrepresent the mass killing of the protesters and the police. The evidence indicates that the far right played a key role in the violent overthrow of the government in Ukraine. This academic investigation also brings new important questions that need to be addressed.

Now we are again reading similar terrorizing stories in the mass media, this time about Ebola–fears stoked by the pharma-industry-controlled WHO in Geneva under Director General Margaret Chan’s Scientific Advisory Group of Experts and their ties to Big Pharma giants, and the US Government Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. What exactly is the Ebola test that is being used by doctors or health workers in Sierre Leone or Liberia to “prove” Ebola in a sick person? When the African man was re-hospitalized in Dallas, the head of the CDC, Tom Frieden, declared the patient was diagnosed with Ebola based on a test that is “highly accurate. It’s a PCR test of blood.” But that PCR test of blood is not highly accurate. Rather it is highly flawed. As Jon Rappoport points out, “Among the problems of the PCR test is that it is open to errors. Is the sample taken from the patient actually a virus or a piece of a virus? Or is just an irrelevant piece of debris? Another problem is inherent in the method of the PCR itself. The test is based on the amplification of a tiny, tiny speck of genetic material taken from a patient—blowing it up millions of times until it can be observed and analyzed. Researchers who employ the test claim that, as a result of the procedure, they can also infer the quantity of virus that is present in the patient. This is crucial, because unless a patient has millions and millions of Ebola virus in his body, there is absolutely no reason to think he is sick or will become sick.”

Nor can the Mullis PCR test count the number of Ebola viruses in a person’s blood. Yet the CDC claims, wrongly according to Mullis, that it can. Can it be that the entire Ebola fear campaign launched by Chan’s WHO and the CDC is based on fiction and a pharmaceutical industry ready to jab millions with their untested “Ebola vaccines”?

That may be, but even if it is difficult to obtain interviews with Iranian government officials, it is extremely easy to interview Iranian experts, scholars, journalists and other authoritative voices from Tehran. Last week, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez hosted a fascinating hour-long discussion about Iran with Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator for Iran who was Iran’s ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997, and now teaches at Princeton. Just this week, CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed Tehran University Professor Sadegh Zibakalam about Tehran’s views and actions in the Iran deal. Beyond those in Iran, there are Iranian-American groups and Iranian-American experts who actually speak Farsi who don’t see the world the way Jeffrey Goldberg and Lindsey Graham do. Outside the Sunday shows, Iranian officials have been interviewed occasionally by U.S. media figures. In sum, the only way to exclude Iranian voices is if you choose to exclude them. That’s exactly what Sunday morning television programs have done, and continue to do. And it matters a great deal for several reasons.

For one, excluding the Iranian viewpoint ensures that these shows spew propaganda to the American public. Iran is talked about, almost always in demonic terms, but is almost never heard from. That means that these shows, which endlessly boast of their own “objectivity,” are in fact far more akin to state media. My Intercept colleague Jon Schwarz this week wrote an article detailing seven historically indisputable facts about what the U.S. has done to Iran — which cause some in that country to chant “Death to America” — and it went viral. Why? Because those facts, though quite well-established, are virtually never mentioned in U.S. media accounts that depict Iran as filled with irrational, primitive, inexplicable hatred for the U.S., designed to show how unstable and blindly hateful they are. That is propaganda by definition: amplifying one side’s views (the U.S. and Israeli governments’) while suppressing others’. Then there’s the ease with which those who are rendered invisible are easily demonized. For decades, the key to depicting gay people as mentally ill predators was ensuring they were never heard from, forced to be mute in the closet; once they were out in the open and understood, that demonization became impossible.

This has also been the favored foreign policy dynamic in the U.S. for decades. When Americans are killed by a foreign Muslim, we are deluged with information about the American victims and their grieving families, while we hear almost nothing about the innocent victims killed by the U.S. or its allies — not even their names. This gross imbalance in coverage creates the illusion that Americans are innocent victims of terrorism but never its perpetrators. Identically, when American journalists are imprisoned by an adversary of the U.S. government, American journalists trumpet it endlessly, while foreign journalists imprisoned for years with no trial by the U.S. government are all but disappeared. Silencing The Other Side is a key U.S. media propaganda tactic. There are all sorts of dubious claims presented about Iran, the U.S. and Israel that are treated as unchallenged truth in U.S. media discourse. The range of “debate” allowed by the U.S. media — is Obama’s deal with Iran a good idea or not? — all assumes those dubious claims about Iran to be true. But those claims are vehemently disputed in large parts of the world, certainly in Tehran. But Americans, especially the millions who get their news from Sunday morning television or from outlets whose agenda is shaped by those programs, literally have no idea about any of that, because the people who can best advocate those views — i.e. Iranians — are simply never heard from.

It’s remarkably telling that the only voices heard on Sunday morning TV shows are those who spout the U.S. government line about Iran, including officials from the repressive regimes most closely allied with the U.S. Obviously, one can find the arguments of Iranians unpersuasive or even harbor hostility to that nation’s government, but what possible justification is there for the leading Sunday morning news shows in the U.S. to simply suppress those views altogether?

For companies such as Severstal, which exports nearly 20 percent of its output, the benefits of devaluation are obvious: All of the costs that go into producing steel in Russia—iron ore, manganese, nickel, labor, electricity—are priced in rubles. That means the companies’ costs relative to their international competitors’ have plummeted. At the same time, any steel they sell abroad is priced in either U.S. dollars or euros—both of which have risen in value against the ruble. When the companies bring those sales dollars home, they are worth far more in rubles than they were a year ago.The same phenomenon applies in a big way to Russia’s vast energy sector. Moscow exports huge amounts of oil and gas, and brings in dollars for it. That’s why Rosneft, a huge oil producer with close ties to Putin’s Kremlin, reported a revenue increase of 18 percent last year, compared with an increase of less than 1 percent for its international competitors, according to Bloomberg data. This is a big part of the reason why Russia’s tax revenue has not fallen off a cliff, mitigating somewhat the pain of last year’s crisis. Russia’s oil output is still near record highs—one of the reasons, along with continued full-tilt Saudi output, that prices remain so weak.

The world shouldn’t have been surprised by what has happened. More or less the same thing happened in 1998, when the Asian financial crisis spread to Russia and Moscow both defaulted on its international debt and devalued the ruble. There was an immediate negative economic shock, followed by an import substitution-led recovery that was sharper than most international economists at the time believed would occur. “This argues for an economic recovery now similar in nature, if not necessarily in magnitude, to the one after 1998,” says Ivan Tchakarov, an economist at Citicorp.

When oil prices crumbled last year, there was a fair bit of hope in Western capitals that the pain would do what sanctions hadn’t yet: force a Russian climbdown in Ukraine, and perhaps prompt Putin to turn back inward and tend to his troubles at home.Maybe that was wishful thinking. Whatever the case, it’s now a moot point. The Russian economy is showing enough resilience that it appears unlikely to check Putin’s behavior abroad. Public opinion surveys at home provide little evidence that the people have turned on him. For Washington and its allies, the time for wishful thinking is over. Vladimir Putin is not going anywhere. 

This is why we have so many bankers, corporate moguls, political statesmen, authors, pundits, artists, publishers and priests working today to undercut the country. Being "the best and the brightest," they were taught in their youth that capitalist America is an evil nation. They, thus, have gone out and risen to positions of power with a globalist worldview that believes economic freedom can't work in the modern day, that American sovereignty is an anachronism belonging to the nineteenth century. Since they are the nation's intelligentsia, they are immensely influential. Their socialist-collectivist worldview is spread to the masses which then elect legislators sympathetic to such irrationality to Congress and the White House.

Every one of us has to choose whether we will try to make a difference or give in to indifference. Will we fight to inform our neighbors or succumb to the easy road of apathy? Will we opt for principle or popularity? Will we succumb to the statist thugs on the far left, or fall for the anarchic screwballs on the far right? The "mean" of constitutional sanity beckons to the percipient among us. Will it survive the tumult ahead?

What the elites fear is a populace with the strength of William Wallace fighting King Edward at Sterling Bridge in 1297, the daring of Washington's band crossing the Delaware in the dead of winter. They fear those willing to fight for the original America. Up against such heady citizens, our collectivist tyrants will scatter like feeding jackals in face of approaching hunters. Our job is to build an army of such heady citizens. You can help by joining the cause. Read the books of freedom and sound money, and pass them on as the early Americans did with Common Sense. Bring people to the website where you are reading this essay. Bring them to AFR's website. Bring them to a state of urgency. Bring them to the truth of our Constitution and to the laws of Nature and Nature's God. Nothing other than this kind of effort will suffice. You cannot help truth and freedom by watching moronic TV shows at night. That is how the elites control you. They flood the airwaves with mindless entertainment. It's today's version of Brave New World's "soma for the masses." Today's TV is for zombies and dullards. The same applies to our movies. Next time you're in the theater, look around you at all the hoi polloi stuffing their faces with popcorn and their psyches with over-the top-violence and trashy sex.

The cause of America is the cause of REAL freedom. It won't be found with the malefic forces of statism on the left, nor with the eccentric cults of anarchism on the right. Both are living death, a fool's game for those devoid of the capacity to see the big picture, i.e., to see that the spectrum of reality is not two-poled, but three-poled with multifarious gradations and a golden mean of truth in between. The nature of human existence is complexity, wrapped up in mystery, contained in inconceivability, subsumed under the power of Truth. We will never create a free society by denying this and ignoring the results of logic and the record of history. This is what statists and anarchists do. REAL freedom is impossible without a grasp of logic and a deep knowledge of history, which teach us that the cornerstones of freedom are equal rights, strictly limited government, gold money and self-reliant people. The statists violate logic and ignore history because they are callous brutes who place power above all and simply don't care. The anarchists violate logic and ignore history because logic and history show their political system to be unworkable.

The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has been working to investigate claims of retaliation and get favorable actions for many of the VA whistleblowers who have come forward. Since April 2014, the OSC has successfully obtained corrective actions for over 25 whistleblowers.[7] But the OSC still has over 100 pending VA reprisal cases to investigate, among the highest of any government agency, according to Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner.[8] Although the VA has been cooperative with the OSC and their recommendations, merely addressing isolated incidents is not enough.[9] The VA has been struggling with a culture problem for decades and something more must be done.

VA employees who have concerns about management or fear retaliation are supposed to be able to turn to the VA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). But whistleblowers have come to doubt the VA IG’s willingness to hold wrongdoers accountable. Since 2014, the IG Office has not yet publically released any investigation into employee retaliation, making it difficult to assess how seriously the IG’s office is taking this issue. Furthermore, the VA IG’s office issued an administrative subpoena to POGO in May 2014 that was little more than an invasive fishing expedition for whistleblowers. The IG demanded “All records that POGO has received from current or former employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other individuals or entities.”[10] Though POGO did not comply with the subpoena, such an action was cause for concern for many of the whistleblowers who had shared information with us. POGO remains concerned that there is not a permanent VA IG in place and that the position has been vacant for over a year.[11] Our own investigations have found that the absence of permanent leadership can have a serious impact on the effectiveness of an IG office.[12] Acting IGs do not undergo the same kind of extensive vetting process required of permanent IGs, and as a consequence usually lack the credibility of a permanent IG. Acting IGs also often seek appointment to the permanent position, which can compromise their independence by giving them an incentive to curry favor with the White House and the leadership of their agency.[13] Perhaps most worrisome, given the significant challenges facing the VA IG, a 2009 study found that vacancies in top agency positions promote agency inaction, create confusion among career employees, make an agency less likely to handle controversial issues, result in fewer enforcement actions by regulatory agencies and decrease public trust in government.[14]

It appears the VA IG may be subject to this dangerous lack of independence. For example, the VA OIG has failed to release the results of 140 health care investigations since 2006.[15] Furthermore, the Department of Treasury IG sent a letter to this Committee just last month raising concerns about another VA IG investigation. After speaking to witnesses familiar with the situation, the Treasury IG concluded that their testimony, “calls into question the integrity of the VA OIG’s actions in this particular manner.” The Treasury IG’s investigation also found that multiple witnesses stated a VA employee boasted about his ability to influence the VA OIG’s investigations.[16]

In POGO’s 2014 letter, we recommended concrete steps for incoming VA Secretary McDonald to take in order to demonstrate an agency-wide commitment to changing the VA’s culture of fear, bullying, and retaliation. Neither Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson nor Secretary McDonald have responded to our multiple requests for a meeting. Clearly, an important first step will be for the President to nominate a permanent IG for the VA. Hopefully strong and committed leadership in that office will correct its current course. POGO recommended that Secretary McDonald make a tangible and meaningful gesture to support those whistleblowers who have been trying to fix the VA from the inside. Once the OSC has identified meritorious cases, Secretary McDonald should personally meet with those whistleblowers and elevate their status from villain to hero. These employees should be publicly celebrated for their courage, and should receive positive recognition in their personnel files, including possibly receiving the types of bonuses that have been provided to wrongdoers in the past. Retaliation against whistleblowers is already a prohibited personnel practice, but it will be up to the senior-most VA leadership to ensure that this rule is enforced by the agency. This should not be an isolated event done in response to recent criticisms but an ongoing effort. Whistleblowing must be encouraged and celebrated or wrongdoing will continue.

But it’s not just the VA Secretary who can work to fix this problem. Congress should enact legislation that codifies accountability for those who retaliate against whistleblowers. The definition of “wrongdoing” must include retaliation. The cultural shift that is required inside the Department of Veterans Affairs must be accompanied by statutory mandates that protect whistleblowers and witnesses inside the agency from retaliation. Legislation should ensure that whistleblowers are able to be confident that stepping forward to expose wrongdoing will not result in retaliation, and should provide a system to hold retaliators within the VA accountable. Congress should also extend whistleblower protections to contractors and veterans who raise concerns about medical care provided by the VA. POGO’s investigation found that both of these groups also fear retaliation that prevents them from coming forward. While federal employees working at the VA enjoy whistleblower protections, contractors do not. Congress should extend the same protections to contractors in order to promote internal oversight in an increasingly contractor-heavy landscape.

In addition, a veteran who is receiving poor care should be able to speak to his or her patient advocate without fear of retaliation, including a reduction in the quality of health care. Without this reassurance, there is a disincentive to report poor care, allowing it to continue uncorrected. Congress should extend whistleblower protections to veteran whistleblowers. The VA and Congress must work together to end this culture of fear and retaliation. Whistleblowers who report concerns that affect veteran health must be lauded, not shunned. And the law must protect them.

Late last year its current president, William Dudley, was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee after reports from ProPublica and NPR’s This American Life that focused on a New York Fed examiner who said her warnings about certain business practices and deals at Goldman Sachs were ignored or brushed aside by her superiors. She provided recordings of her dealings with Fed officials to back up her case. “We’ve got on tape higher-ups at the New York Fed calling off the regulators,” Warren told Dudley at the November hearing. “And I’m just asking the same kind of question — is there a cultural problem at the New York Fed? I think the evidence suggests that there is.”

Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.            What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.

The Clinton Foundation swore off donations from foreign governments when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. That didn’t stop the foundation from raising millions of dollars from foreigners with connections to their home governments, a review of foundation disclosures shows. Some donors have direct ties to foreign governments. One is a member of the Saudi royal family. Another is a Ukrainian oligarch and former parliamentarian. Others are individuals with close connections to foreign governments that stem from their business activities. Their professed policy interests range from human rights to U.S.-Cuba relations. All told, more than a dozen foreign individuals and their foundations and companies were large donors to the Clinton Foundation in the years after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, collectively giving between $34 million and $68 million, foundation records show. Some donors also provided funding directly to charitable projects sponsored by the foundation, valued by the organization at $60 million.

Former President Bill Clinton promised the Obama administration the foundation wouldn’t accept most foreign-government donations while his wife was secretary of state. The agreement didn’t place limits on donations from foreign individuals or corporations. Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union. In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. During Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department, Mr. Schoen, the pollster, registered as a lobbyist for Mr. Pinchuk, federal records show. Mr. Schoen said he and Mr. Pinchuk met several times with Clinton aides including Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American and then a State Department ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. The purpose, Mr. Schoen said, was to encourage the U.S. to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych to free his jailed predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko.

Mr. Schoen said his lobbying was unrelated to the donations. “We were not seeking to use any leverage or any connections or anything of the sort relating to the foundation,” he said. Please Schoen, don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

After all, Baker said, no military solution could work in his assessment: an American strike would only generate more support among Iranians for the fundamentalist government, and an Israeli strike would neither be as effective nor carry American support. This isn’t the only tough moment in U.S.-Israeli relations, Baker said, recounting some of his own head-butting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In those days, the administration was dealing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a hard-liner who referred to Netanyahu as “too soft,” according to Baker. The danger now, Baker said, is the personalization and politicization of the disputes between the governments in Washington and Jerusalem. “This is of course a delicate moment in the Middle East, and will require clear thinking from leaders,” Baker said. “That clear thinking should not be muddled by partisan politics.”

How Can This Real? Gizmodo reported in 2010: Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations! Leck’s bot, @AI_AGW, doesn’t just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source. As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don’t know they’ve been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor’s line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot’s been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up. Technology has come a long way in the past 5 years. So if a lone programmer could do this 5 years ago, imagine what he could do now. And the big players have a lot more resources at their disposal than a lone climate activist/software developer does.  For example, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (and see this).  So if the lone programmer is doing it, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the big boys are widely doing it.

How Effective Are Automated Comments? Unfortunately, this is more effective than you might assume … Specifically, scientists have shown that name-calling and swearing breaks down people’s ability to think rationally … and intentionally sowing discord and posting junk comments to push down insightful comments  are common propaganda techniques. Indeed, an automated program need not even be that sophisticated … it can copy a couple of words from the main post or a comment, and then spew back one or more radioactive labels such as “terrorist”, “commie”, “Russia-lover”, “wimp”, “fascist”, “loser”, “traitor”, “conspiratard”, etc. Given that Harding and his compadres consider anyone who questions any U.S. policies as an enemy of the state  – as does the Obama administration (and see this) – many honest, patriotic writers and commenters may be targeted for automated propaganda comments.