Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Top Russian officials have threatened to retaliate with force if President Donald Trump orders an attack that could endanger the lives of its soldiers stationed there in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s campaign against rebels and jihadis near Damascus.Army General Valery Gerasimov warned on Tuesday that the U.S. was preparing to launch raids against Moscow’s ally, the Syrian government, as it attempted to clear the pockets of insurgents—some of which were once backed by the West—in the suburbs of the capital city of Damascus. Gerasimov, who acted as chief of Russia’s general staff and deputy defense minister, claimed that the U.S. would strike under the false pretense of a chemical weapon attack—a tactic that Russia has denied the Syrian military utilizes—and vowed to fight back.

“In the event of a threat to our military servicemen’s lives, Russia’s armed forces will take retaliatory measures to target both the missiles and their delivery vehicles,” Gerasimov said, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.

By M.K. Bhadrakumar October 5, 2016 9:54 AM (UTC+8) Share 0 Tweet Print Email Comment 0 Asia Times is not responsible for the opinions, facts or any media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report. On Monday, the Barack Obama administration fulfilled its week-old threat to suspend bilateral talks with Russia over the Syrian crisis. Does this signal that the dogs of war are about to be unleashed? The thought may seem preposterous but tensions are palpable. US spy planes are spotted ever more frequently in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea over Russian bases, especially Tartus and Hmeimim in Syria.

Russia has deployed SA-23 Gladiator anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems in Syria, the first-ever such deployments outside Russia. Western analysts see it as a pre-emptive step to counter any American cruise missile attack. Russia is not taking any chances.

Moscow factors in that the US may use some rebel groups to ensure that Russian “body bags” are sent to Moscow, as threatened explicitly by US state department spokesman John Kirby last week. Moscow suspects American involvement in the missile attack on the Russian embassy in Damascus — “Brits and Ukrainians clumsily helped the Americans”, a Russian statement in New York said on Tuesday. Indeed, passions are running high. There could be several dozen western intelligence operatives trapped with the rebel groups in east Aleppo. Clearly, the turning point was reached when the US and western allies undertook a fierce air attack on the Syrian army base at Deir Ezzor lasting an hour and killing 62 government troops. The US explanation of that being an accident lost credibility, since within an hour of the airstrike, extremist groups of al-Qaida followed up with ground attack as if acting in tandem.

The tensions between Russia and the USA have reached an unprecedented level. I fully agree with the participants of this CrossTalk show – the situation is even worse and more dangerous than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both sides are now going to the so-called “Plan B” which, simply put, stand for, at best, no negotiations and, at worst, a war between Russia and the USA.

In theory, these are, very roughly, the possible levels of confrontation: A military standoff à la Berlin in 1961. One could argue that this is what is already taking place right now, albeit in a more long-distance and less visible way. A single military incident, such as what happened recently when Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 and Russia chose not to retaliate. A series of localized clashes similar to what is currently happening between India and Pakistan. A conflict limited to the Syrian theater of war (say like the war between the UK and Argentina over the Malvinas Islands). A regional or global military confrontation between the USA and Russia. A full scale thermonuclear war between the USA and Russia During my years as a student of military strategy I have participated in many exercises on escalation and de-escalation and I can attest that while it is very easy to come up with escalatory scenarios, I have yet to see a credible scenario for de-escalation. What is possible, however, is the so-called “horizontal escalation” or “asymmetrical escalation” in which one side choses not to up the ante or directly escalate, but instead choses a different target for retaliation, not necessarily a more valuable one, just a different one on the same level of conceptual importance (in the USA Joshua M. Epstein and Spencer D. Bakich did most of the groundbreaking work on this topic).

The main reason why we can expect the Kremlin to try to find asymmetrical options to respond to a US attack is that in the Syrian context Russia is hopelessly outgunned by the US/NATO, at least in quantitative terms. The logical solutions for the Russians is to use their qualitative advantage or to seek “horizontal targets” as possible retaliatory options. This week, something very interesting and highly uncharacteristic happened: Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Chief of the Directorate of Media service and Information of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, openly mentioned one such option. Here is what he said: “As for Kirby’s threats about possible Russian aircraft losses and the sending of Russian servicemen back to Russia in body bags, I would say that we know exactly where and how many “unofficial specialists” operate in Syria and in the Aleppo province and we know that they are involved in the operational planning and that they supervise the operations of the militants. Of course, one can continue to insist that they are unsuccessfully involved in trying to separate the al-Nusra terrorists from the “opposition” forces. But if somebody tries to implement these threats, it is by no means certain that these militants will have to time to get the hell out of there.” Nice, no? Konashenkov appears to be threatening the “militants” but he is sure to mention that there are plenty of “unofficial specialists” amongst these militants and that Russia knows exactly where they are and how many of them there are. Of course, officially, Obama has declared that there are a few hundred such US special advisors in Syria. A well-informed Russian source suggests that there are up to 5’000 foreign ‘advisors’ to the Takfiris including about 4’000 Americans. I suppose that the truth is somewhere between these two figures.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a controversial character. But there’s no denying the emails he has picked up from inside the Democrat Party are real, and he’s willing to expose Hillary Clinton. Now, he’s announcing that Hillary Clinton and her State Department were actively arming Islamic jihadists, which includes the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. Clinton has repeatedly denied these claims, including during multiple statements while under oath in front of the United States Senate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, I want to mention something else. In March, you launched a searchable archive for over 30,000 emails and email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state. The 50,547 pages of documents span the time from June 2010 to August 2014; 7,500 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton herself. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the U.S. State Department as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. Why did you do this, and what’s the importance, from your perspective, of being able to create a searchable base? JULIAN ASSANGE:

So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates. So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails. There’s more than 1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about Libya alone.

As the numerous and obvious ethical conflicts surrounding the Clinton Foundation receive more media scrutiny, the tactic of Clinton-loyal journalists is to highlight the charitable work done by the foundation, and then insinuate — or even outright state — that anyone raising these questions is opposed to its charity. James Carville announced that those who criticize the foundation are “going to hell.” Other Clinton loyalists insinuated that Clinton Foundation critics are indifferent to the lives of HIV-positive babies or are anti-gay bigots. That the Clinton Foundation has done some good work is beyond dispute. But that fact has exactly nothing to do with the profound ethical problems and corruption threats raised by the way its funds have been raised. Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat, and tyrannical regimes such as the Saudis and Qataris jointly donated tens of millions of dollars to an organization run by her family and operated in its name, one whose works has been a prominent feature of her public persona. That extremely valuable opportunity to curry favor with the Clintons, and to secure access to them, continues as she runs for president.

The claim that this is all just about trying to help people in need should not even pass a laugh test, let alone rational scrutiny. To see how true that is, just look at who some of the biggest donors are. Although it did not give while she was secretary of state, the Saudi regime by itself has donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, with donations coming as late as 2014, as she prepared her presidential run. A group called “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” co-founded “by a Saudi Prince,” gave an additional amount between $1 million and $5 million. The Clinton Foundation says that between $1 million and $5 million was also donated by “the State of Qatar,” the United Arab Emirates, and the government of Brunei. “The State of Kuwait” has donated between $5 million and $10 million. Theoretically, one could say that these regimes — among the most repressive and regressive in the world — are donating because they deeply believe in the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation and want to help those in need. Is there a single person on the planet who actually believes this? Is Clinton loyalty really so strong that people are going to argue with a straight face that the reason the Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti and Emirates regimes donated large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation is because those regimes simply want to help the foundation achieve its magnanimous goals?

All those who wish to argue that the Saudis donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation out of a magnanimous desire to aid its charitable causes, please raise your hand. Or take the newfound casting of the Clinton Foundation as a champion of LGBTs, and the smearing of its critics as indifferent to AIDS. Are the Saudis also on board with these benevolent missions? And the Qataris and Kuwaitis?

The Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from some officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials.State Department officials also were privately skeptical of the Saudi military's ability to target Houthi militants without killing civilians and destroying "critical infrastructure" needed for Yemen to recover, according to the emails and other records obtained by Reuters and interviews with nearly a dozen officials with knowledge of those discussions.U.S. government lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether U.S. support for the campaign would make the United States a "co-belligerent" in the war under international law, four current and former officials said. That finding would have obligated Washington to investigate allegations of war crimes in Yemen and would have raised a legal risk that U.S. military personnel could be subject to prosecution, at least in theory.

For instance, one of the emails made a specific reference to a 2013 ruling from the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor that significantly widened the international legal definition of aiding and abetting such crimes.The ruling found that "practical assistance, encouragement or moral support" is sufficient to determine liability for war crimes. Prosecutors do not have to prove a defendant participated in a specific crime, the U.N.-backed court found.Ironically, the U.S. government already had submitted the Taylor ruling to a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to bolster its case that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda detainees were complicit in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.The previously undisclosed material sheds light on the closed-door debate that shaped U.S. President Barack Obama’s response to what officials described as an agonizing foreign policy dilemma: how to allay Saudi concerns over a nuclear deal with Iran - Riyadh's arch-rival - without exacerbating a conflict in Yemen that has killed thousands.The documents, obtained by Reuters under the Freedom of Information act, date from mid-May 2015 to February 2016, a period during which State Department officials reviewed and approved the sale of precision munitions to Saudi Arabia to replenish bombs dropped in Yemen. The documents were heavily redacted to withhold classified information and some details of meetings and discussion.(A selection of the documents can be viewed here: tmsnrt.rs/2dL4h6L; tmsnrt.rs/2dLbl2S; tmsnrt.rs/2dLb7Ji; tmsnrt.rs/2dLbbIX)

In a statement issued to Reuters before Saturday's attack, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said, "U.S. security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is not a blank check. ... We have repeatedly expressed our deep concern about airstrikes that allegedly killed and injured civilians and also the heavy humanitarian toll paid by the Yemeni people."The United States continues to urge the Kingdom to take additional steps to avoid "future civilian harm," he added.

Russia is ordering all of its officials to fly home any relatives living abroad amid heightened tensions over the prospect of global war, it has been claimed.Politicians and high-ranking figures are said to have received a warning from president Vladimir Putin to bring their loved-ones home to the 'Motherland', according to local media.It comes after Putin cancelled a planned visit to France amid a furious row over Moscow's role in the Syrian conflict and just days after it emerged the Kremlin had moved nuclear-capable missiles near to the Polish border.Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has also warned that the world is at a 'dangerous point' due to rising tensions between Russia and the US.According to the Daily Star, administration staff, regional administrators, lawmakers of all levels and employees of public corporations have been ordered to take their children out of foreign schools immediately.Failure to act will see officials jeopardising their chances of promotion, local media has reported.The exact reason for the order is not yet clear.But Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky is quoted by the Daily Star as saying: 'This is all part of the package of measures to prepare elites to some 'big war'.' Relations between Russia and the US are at their lowest since the Cold War and have soured in recent days after Washington pulled the plug on Syria talks and accused Russia of hacking attacks.

The Kremlin has also suspended a series of nuclear pacts, including a symbolic cooperation deal to cut stocks of weapons-grade plutonium. Just days ago, it was reported that Russia had moved nuclear-capable missiles near to the Polish border as tensions escalated between the world’s largest nation and the West.The Iskander missiles sent to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Nato members Poland and Lithuania, are now within range of major Western cities including Berlin.Polish officials – whose capital Warsaw is potentially threatened – have described the move as of the 'highest concern'. Putin's decision to cancel his Paris visit came a day after French President Francois Hollande said Syrian forces had committed a 'war crime' in the battered city of Aleppo with the support of Russian air strikes.Putin had been due in Paris on October 19 to inaugurate a spiritual centre at a new Russian Orthodox church near the Eiffel Tower, but Hollande had insisted his Russian counterpart also took part in talks with him about Syria.The unprecedented cancellation of a visit so close to being finalised is a 'serious step... reminiscent of the Cold War', said Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov.'This is part of the broader escalation in the tensions between Russia and the West, and Russia and NATO,' he told AFP.The Kremlin has also been angered over the banning of the Russian Paralympic team from the Rio Olympics amid claims of state-sponsored doping of its athletes.

Meanwhile, the top advisor to US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has said the FBI is investigating Russia's possible role in hacking thousands of his personal emails.But Russian officials have vigorously rejected accusations of meddling in the US presidential elections and dismissed allegations that Moscow was behind a series of recent hacks on US institutions. Retired Russian Lt. Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky told the BBC: 'Of course there is a reaction. As far as Russia sees it, as Putin sees it, it is full-scale confrontation on all fronts. If you want a confrontation, you'll get one.'But it won't be a confrontation that doesn't harm the interests of the United States. You want a confrontation, you'll get one everywhere.'Earlier this week British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson waded into the row, calling for anti-war campaigners to protest outside the Russian embassy in London.Johnson said the 'wells of outrage are growing exhausted' and anti-war groups were not expressing sufficient outrage at the conflict in Aleppo.'Where is the Stop the War Coalition at the moment? Where are they?' he said during a parliamentary debate.

The United States government has already declared that in regards to what it alleges to be a Russian cyberattack against the U.S. Democratic Party, the U.S. reserves the right to go to war against Russia. NATO has accordingly changed its policy so as to assert that a cyberattack (in this case actually cyber-espionage, such as the U.S. government itself perpetrates against even its own allies such as Angela Merkel by tapping her phone) constitutes an act of war by the alleged cyberattacker, and so requires all NATO member nations to join any cyberattacked NATO nation in war against its alleged (cyber)attacker, if the cyberattacked member declares war against its alleged cyberattacker. Excuses are being sought for a war against Russia; and expanding the definition of “invasion,” to include mere espionage, is one such excuse. But it’s not the only one that the Obama Administration has cooked up. U.S. Senator Mike Lee has asserted that President Barack Obama must obtain a declaration of war against Syria — which is allied with and defended by Russia — before invading Syria. Syria has, for the past few years, already been invaded by tens of thousands of foreign jihadists (financed mainly by the royal Sauds and Qataris, and armed mainly with U.S. weaponry) who are trying to overthrow and replace the Syrian government so that pipelines can be built through Syria into Europe to transport Saudi oil and Qatari gas into the EU, the world’s biggest energy-market, which now is dominated by Russia’s oil and gas. Since Syria is already being defended by Russia (those royals’ major competitor in the oil and gas markets), America’s invasion of Syria would necessarily place U.S. and Russia into an air-war against each other (for the benefit of those royal Arabs — who finance jihadist groups, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledges): Syria would thus become a battleground in a broader war against Russia. So: declaring war against Syria would be a second excuse for World War III, and one which would especially serve the desires not only of U.S. ‘defense’ firms but of the U.S. aristocracy’s royal Arabic allies, who buy much of those ‘defense’ firms’ exports (weaponry), and also U.S. oilfield services firms such as pipelines by Halliburton. (It’s good business for them, no one else. Taxpayers and war-victims pay, but those corporations — and royal families — would profit.)

The U.S. government also declares that Russia ‘conquered’ Crimea in 2014 and that Russia must restore it to Ukraine. The U.S. government wants Ukraine to be accepted into NATO, so that all NATO nations will be at war against Russia if Russia doesn’t return Crimea to Ukraine, of which Crimea had only briefly (1954-2014) been a part, until Crimeans voted on 16 March 2014 to rejoin Russia. This Crimean issue is already the basis for America’s economic sanctions against Russia, and thus Russia’s continuing refusal to coerce Crimeans to accept again being part of Ukraine would be yet a third excuse for WW III.

Hillary Clinton says “As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.” She alleges that when information was unauthorizedly made public from Democratic National Committee computers, the cyberattacker was Russia. She can be counted as a strong proponent of that excuse for WW3. She’s with Barack Obama and the other neocons on that. She has furthermore said that the U.S. should shoot down any Russian and Syrian bombers in Syria — the phrase for that proposed U.S. policy is to “establish a no-fly zone” there. She makes clear: “I am advocating the no-fly zone.” It would be war against not only Syria, but Russia. (After all: a no-fly zone in which the U.S. is shooting down the government’s planes and Russia’s planes, would be war by the U.S. against both Syria and Russia, but that’s what she wants to do.) She can thus be counted as a strong proponent of those two excuses for WW3.

In an article published by the Financial Times on Monday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif laid out the country’s proposed framework for bringing stability to the Middle East region. “ISIS displayed the darkest depths of human evil,” Zarif wrote. Yet it also provided an opportunity to come together to battle an existential threat. The cooperative relationships forged in this fight can usher in a new era. We need new approaches and new terminology to make sense of a world which is transitioning to a post-western global order. Here are two concepts to shape the emerging paradigm in west Asia: the idea of a strong region, and security networking, whereby small and large countries — even those with historical rivalries — contribute to stability.” It appears that Iran’s significant contribution to ISIS’ defeat and demise — coupled with its new injection as a major player to be reckoned with in the Middle East — has given the country newfound confidence. Iran is using its battlefield success to propose a new vision for the Middle East — one that would allegedly include open dialogue and cooperation. Zarif continues: The objective of a strong region — as opposed to a quest for hegemony and the exclusion of other actors — is rooted in recognizing the need to respect the interest of all stakeholders. Any domineering effort by one country is not only inappropriate but essentially impossible: those who insist on following that path create instability. The arms race in our region is an instance of this kind of destructive rivalry: siphoning vital resources into the coffers of arms manufacturers has contributed nothing to achieving peace and security. Militarism has only served to fuel disastrous adventurism.” [emphasis added]

Most of the usual modes of forming alliances have also become obsolete. Given our interconnected world, the idea of collective security is now defunct, especially in the Persian Gulf, for one basic reason: it assumes commonality of interests. Security networking is Iran’s innovation to address issues that range from divergence of interests to power and size disparities. Its parameters are simple but effective: rather than trying to ignore conflicts of interests, it accepts differences. Equally, being premised on inclusivity, it acts as a firewall against the emergence of an oligarchy among big states and allows smaller states to participate. The rules of this new order are straightforward: common standards, most significantly the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, such as sovereign equality of states; refraining from the threat or use of force; peaceful resolution of conflicts; respect for the territorial integrity of states; non-intervention in the domestic affairs of states; and respect for self-determination within states.” [emphasis added]

Zarif suggests that the reason for this instability is rooted in a “dialogue deficit.” Opening up such a dialogue could help countries understand that all nations have “similar concerns, fears, aspirations, and hopes” and that this dialogue should replace the rampant propaganda that has plagued the region. This proposed dialogue would be accompanied by “confidence-building measures: promoting tourism; joint task forces on issues ranging from nuclear safety to pollution to disaster management; joint military visits; pre-notification of military exercises; transparency measures in armament; reducing military expenditures; and all leading eventually to a non-aggression pact,” according to Zarif. In proposing this newfound vision for the Middle East, Zarif is extending an olive branch to the rest of the region, stating that as a first step, “the Islamic Republic proposes establishing a Regional Dialogue Forum in the Persian Gulf. Our longstanding invitation to dialogue remains open, and we look forward to the day our neighbors will accept it, and their allies — in Europe and elsewhere in the west — will encourage it.”

Commonwealth Bank of Australia ’s oversight of money transfers from that account to Lebanon last year was among many failures cited by the Australian federal government’s financial intelligence agency in its nearly US$530 million fine of the bank on Monday. If approved, the fine—meant to settle a lawsuit brought by the agency and founded on breaches of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Act—would be the largest corporate civil penalty ever paid in Australia. Australia’s banks have long held a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. But a series of scandals over the past year has rocked the country’s top financial institutions. Commonwealth Bank has seen separate penalties for conduct in alleged interest-rate rigging and bad governance. On Friday, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it would defend against criminal prosecution for alleged cartel conduct in a 2015 capital raising. A public inquiry into the sector, launched last autumn by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has heard accusations against Australia’s leading financial firms of inappropriate lending, collecting fees from dead customers for financial advice and lying to regulators. The tribunal has already claimed several big scalps. Beginning in late April, the chief executive, chairman and several board members at Australia’s largest wealth management company, AMP Ltd. , resigned after the company admitted it had misled regulators and been slow to compensate customers for fees charged for financial advice it didn’t deliver.

Disoriented investors now fear tighter regulation of a sector that has reliably returned a run of record annual underlying profits and solid dividends. The government has already beefed up penalties for corporate wrongdoing, including prison time, and strengthened the corporate regulator’s investigative powers. Commonwealth Bank shares recently tumbled to 5-year lows.

Those mistakes included not assessing the inherent risk of so-called intelligent deposit machines before mid-2015. Commonwealth Bank also didn’t limit the number of times that customers could deposit money each day, or create reports on thousands of deposits of A$10,000 (US$7,569) or more at the machines. These flaws created an architecture that money launderers could exploit, the financial-intelligence agency said.

Dispossessed Americans rose up. They ignored the presstitute media, or perhaps were driven to support Trump by the hostility of the media. Trump was elected by dispossessed America, by the working class. The working class is out of favor with the elite liberal/progressive/left which abhors the working class as racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun nuts who oppose transgendered toilet facilities. Thus, the working class, and their chosen representative, Donald Trump, are under full assault by the presstitutes. “Trump Must Go” is their slogan. And well he might. Trump, in a fit of stupidity, dismissed his National Security Advisor, Gen. Flynn, because Flynn did what he should have done and spoke with the Russian ambassador in order to avoid a Russian response to Obama’s provocation of expelling Russian diplomats at Christmas. Russians have been demonized and ascribed demonic powers. If you speak to a Russian, you fall under suspicion and become a traitor to your country. This is the story according to the CIA, the Democratic Party, the military/security complex, and the presstitute media. Once Trump put Flynn’s blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, “the Russian connection” black mark is operating against Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next.

Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA’s media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth.

But if President Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees who spoke to a Russian are unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores that comprise the Western media. Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are “Russian agents”?

The U.S. government must get a grip on the massive opening that the CIA, through its misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, has created. If Tuesday’s WikiLeaks document dump is authentic, as it appears to be, then the agency left open electronic gateways that make all Americans vulnerable to spying, eavesdropping and technological manipulation that could bring genuine harm. That the CIA has reached into the lives of all Americans through its wholesale gathering of the nation’s “haystack” of information has already been reported. It is bad enough that the government spies on its own people. It is equally bad that the CIA, through its incompetence, has opened the cyberdoor to anyone with the technological skills and connections to spy on anyone else. The constant erosion of privacy at the hands of the government and corporations has annihilated the concept of a “right to privacy,” which is embedded in the rationale of the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are sliding down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism, where private lives do not exist.

We have entered a condition of constitutional crisis that requires a full-throated response from the American people. I have repeatedly warned about the dangers of the Patriot Act and its successive iterations, the execrable national security letters that turn every FBI agent into a star chamberlain, the dangers of fear-based security policies eroding our republic. We have crossed the threshold of a cowardly new world, and it’s time we tell the government and the corporations who have intruded to stop it. 

Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is not an infrastructure plan and it won’t put $1 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy. It’s basically a scheme for handing over public assets to private corporations that will extract maximum profits via user fees and tolls. Because the plan is essentially a boondoggle, it will not lift the economy out of the doldrums, increase activity or boost growth.  Quite the contrary. When the details of how the program is going to be implemented are announced,  public confidence in the Trump administration is going to wither and stock prices are going to plunge.   This scenario cannot be avoided because the penny-pinching conservatives in the House and Senate have already said that they won’t support any plan that is not “revenue neutral” which means that any real $1 trillion spending package is a dead letter.  Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the Trump’s plan is exposed as a fraud and the sh** hits the fan.

Here are more of the details from an article at Slate: “Under Trump’s plan…the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.” (“Donald Trump’s Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges”, Slate) Normally, fiscal stimulus is financed by increasing the budget deficits, but Maestro Trump has something else up his sleeve.  He wants the big construction companies and private equity firms to stump up the seed money and start the work with the understanding that they’ll be able to impose user fees and tolls on roads and bridges when the work is completed.  For every dollar that corporations spend on rebuilding US infrastructure, they’ll get a dollar back via tax credits, which means that they’ll end up controlling valuable, revenue-generating assets for nothing. The whole thing is a flagrant ripoff that stinks to high heaven.   The corporations rake in hefty profits on sweetheart deals, while the American people get bupkis. Welcome to Trumpworld.  Here’s more background from Trump’s campaign website:

“American Energy and  Infrastructure Act Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” (Donald Trump’s ContrAct with the American Voter”) In prActical terms, ‘revenue neutral’ means that every dollar of new spending has to be matched by cuts to other government programs.  So, if there are hidden costs to Trump’s plan, then they’ll have to be paid for by slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps etc. But, keep in mind, these other programs are much more effective sources of stimulus since the money goes directly to the people who spend it immediately and help grow the economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan doesn’t work like that. A lot of the money will go towards management fees and operational costs leaving fewer dollars to trickle down to low-paid construction workers whose personal consumption drives the economy. Less money for workers means less spending, less Activity and weaker growth.

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Department of Justice for records related to the meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton while his wife was under an FBI investigation in the 2016 presidential campaign. The conservative nonprofit watchdog group filed the suit after the Justice Department failed to respond to a June 29, 2016, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking transcripts of the June 2016 meeting, communications regarding the encounter, and any references to the meeting in Lynch’s calendar.

“The infamous tarmac meeting between President Clinton and AG Lynch is a vivid example of why many Americans believe the Obama administration’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton was rigged,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “Now it will be up to Attorney General Sessions at the Trump Justice Department to finally shed some light on this subversion of justice,” Fitton said. (VIDEO: Why Did Bill Clinton And Loretta Lynch Meet On Her Airplane In Phoenix This Week?) Clinton and Lynch met privately on a plane parked at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International airport on June 27, 2016. The FBI was investigating a private email server Clinton’s wife and then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used during her time as secretary of state. The FBI interviewed her just days after her husband met with Lynch. Lynch admitted that the meeting “cast a cloud” over the investigation. Clinton was not punished for what FBI Director James Comey called “extremely careless” actions surrounding her server. Judicial Watch also requested the Justice Department’s inspector general investigate the meeting. The watchdog group also filed a lawsuit in October seeking FBI interviews into Clinton’s email practices, related communications, and records regarding the tarmac meeting.

A month after President Trump ordered a military strike on the Syrian regime as punishment for using chemical weapons, his administration has yet to offer a rationale for what lawful authority he had to carry out the attack.Now, a government watchdog group run by former Obama administration lawyers is suing to force the Trump administration to disclose its legal theory — or concede that it launched the April 6 attack without thinking about the law. While the attack attracted bipartisan support as a political and policy matter, its legal basis was disputed.The United States had no self-defense rationale, and neither Congress nor the United Nations Security Council authorized the attack, raising questions about the scope and limits of Mr. Trump’s power as a matter of domestic law and the United States’ power as a matter of international law. The Trump administration has not answered them.On Monday, the watchdog group, Protect Democracy, filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information act for all emails, memos and other records discussing Mr. Trump’s legal authority to launch the strike.

The UK government is secretly planning to force technology companies to build backdoors into their products, to enable intelligence agencies to read people’s private messages. A draft document leaked by the Open Rights Group details extreme new surveillance proposals, which would enable government agencies to spy on one in 10,000 citizens – around 6,500 people – at any one time.  The document, which follows the controversial Investigatory Powers Act, reveals government plans to force mobile operators and internet service providers to provide real-time communications of customers to the government “in an intelligible form”, and within one working day.

This would effectively ban encryption, an important security measure used by a wide range of companies, including WhatsApp and major banks, to keep people’s private data private and to protect them from hackers and cyber criminals. 

South Korea’s Constitutional Court, on Friday, upheld the motion to impeach president Park Geun-hye. Acting Chief Justice Lee Jung-Mi read the ruling on the impeachment in a nationwide televised broadcast saying the Court’s decision by the eight justices was unanimous.

outh Korean law stipulated that the ruling has immediate effect – which means Park Geun-hye has been impeached and ousted from the presidency with immediate effect. She will be required to leave the presidential residence  – the Blue House – as soon as possible. A presidential election will be held in 60 days.

Since the December 9 adoption of the impeachment bill in the National Assembly, a total of 20 hearings had been held in the court. It took 92 days before the court’s final decision. Park will now possibly be subject to indictment and detention by prosecutors as she lost her presidential immunity following the court’s ruling. Prosecutors have identified Park as an accomplice of her longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil, who is at the center of a corruption scandal that led to Park’s impeachment for multiple charges including bribery, abuse of privileged information and nepotism. Having been impeached, Park will be stripped of most of the privileges granted to former presidents, including a monthly pension worth 12 million won or 10,400 U.S. dollars –  to 13 million won per month, one paid chauffeur and three paid secretaries. Free medicine and costs for a personal office will not be given to the impeached leader either. Moreover, the period during which she will have a special presidential security detail will be reduced from ten to five years.

What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the "wire tapping" of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging. The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over "growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies." Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn's former lobbying company FIG. Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son-in-law of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey. Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey.  Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project. Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story. Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn's pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position. Flynn's real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan: In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting. The meeting Woolsey described was under the "Turkish" Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network: Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments. It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue. The Leviatan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been payed in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this: An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a "friendly atmosphere" for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan. After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria. The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn's conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such "wiretapping" of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.) The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the "wiretapping" of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn's dealing was and is used against Trump. Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn's lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is "coming clean" and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.) The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of "hacking" of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.

More than a month after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) requested information about US Customs and Border Protection's practice of searching cell phones at US borders and airports, he's still waiting for answers—but he's not waiting to introduce legislation to end the practice. "It's very concerning that [the Department of Homeland Security] hasn't managed to answer my questions about the number of digital searches at the border, five weeks after I requested that basic information," Wyden, a leading congressional advocate for civil liberties and privacy, told Mother Jones on Tuesday through a spokesman. "If CBP were to undertake a system of indiscriminate digital searches, that would distract CBP from its core mission, dragging time and attention away from catching the bad guys." Wyden's request to DHS and CBP came on the heels of a February 18 report from the Associated Press of a "fivefold increase" in electronic media searches in fiscal year 2016 over the previous year, from fewer than 5,000 to nearly 24,000. It also followed Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly's suggestion that visitors from a select group of countries, mainly Muslim, might be required to hand over passwords to their social media accounts as a condition of entry. (That comment came a week after President Donald Trump first unveiled his executive order⁠ banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries.) The Knight First Amendment Institute, which advocates for freedom of speech, sued DHS on Monday for records relating to the seizure of electronic devices at border checkpoints. Wyden requested similar data on CBP device searches and demands for travelers' passwords. "There are well-established legal rules governing how law enforcement agencies may obtain data from social media companies and email providers," Wyden wrote in the February 20 letter to DHS and CBP. "By requesting a traveler's credentials and then directly accessing their data, CBP would be short-circuiting the vital checks and balances that exist in our current system." The senator wrote that the searches not only violate civil liberties but could reduce international business travel or force companies to outfit employees with "burner" laptops and mobile devices, "which some firms already use when employees visit nations like China."

"Folks are going to be less likely to travel freely to the US with the devices they need if they don't feel their sensitive business information is going to be safe at the border," Wyden said Tuesday, noting that CBP can copy the information it views on a device. "Then they can store that information and search it without a warrant." Wyden will soon introduce legislation to force law enforcement to obtain warrants before searching devices at the border. His bill would also prevent CBP from compelling travelers to reveal passwords to their accounts. A DHS spokesman said in a statement that "all travelers arriving to the US are subject to CBP inspection," which includes inspection of any electronic devices they may be carrying. Access to these devices, the spokesman said, helps CBP agents ascertain the identity and admissibility of people from other countries and "deter the entry of possible terrorists, terrorist weapons, controlled substances," and other prohibited items. "CBP electronic media searches," the spokesman said, "have resulted in arrests for child pornography, evidence helpful in combating terrorist activity, violations of export controls, convictions for intellectual property rights violations, and visa fraud discoveries." In a March 27 USA Today op-ed, Joseph B. Maher, DHS acting general counsel, compared device searches to searching luggage. "Just as Customs is charged with inspecting luggage, vehicles and cargo containers upon arrival to the USA, there are circumstances in this digital age when we must inspect an electronic device for violations of the law," Maher wrote.

But in a unanimous 2014 ruling, the Supreme Court found that police need warrants to search cell phones. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion that cell phones are "such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy." In response to a Justice Department argument that cell phones were akin to wallets, purses, and address books, Roberts wrote: "That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon." The law, however, applies differently at the border because of the "border search doctrine," which has traditionally given law enforcement wider latitude under the Fourth Amendment to perform searches at borders and international airports. CBP says it keeps tight controls on its searches and is sensitive to personal privacy. Wyden isn't convinced. "Given Trump's worrying track record so far, and the ease with which CBP could change its guidelines, it's important we create common-sense statutory protections for Americans' liberty and security," he says.

A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, Citizen's Income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income, or universal demogrant[2]) is a form of social security[3] in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. An unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes referred to as a partial basic income. Basic income systems that are financed by the profits of publicly owned enterprises (often called social dividend, also known as citizen's dividend) are major components in many proposed models of market socialism.[4] Basic income schemes have also been promoted within the context of capitalist systems, where they would be financed through various forms of taxation.[5] Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism. The phrase "social dividend" was commonly used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, after which the phrase "basic income" gained widespread currency.[6

Contents  [hide]  1 Policy aspects 1.1 Transparency 1.2 Administrative efficiency 1.3 Poverty reduction 1.4 Basic income and growth 1.5 Freedom 1.6 Work incentives 1.7 Affordability 1.7.1 Key principles 1.7.2 Case studies 2 Pilot programs 3 Basic income and ideology 3.1 Economic perspectives 3.2 Georgist views 3.3 Right-wing views 3.4 Feminist views 3.5 Technological unemployment 4 Criticism 4.1 Economics research 4.2 Political debate 5 Worldwide 6 Advocates 6.1 Europe 6.2 The United States and Canada 6.3 Asia, Africa, Latin America, Oceania 7 Petitions and referendums 8 Public opinions 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links

Technological unemployment[edit] Concerns about automation and other causes of technological unemployment have caused many in the high-tech industry to turn to basic income proposals as a necessary implication of their business models. Journalist Nathan Schneider first highlighted the turn of the "tech elite" to these ideas with an article in Vice magazine, which cited figures such as Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Peter Diamandis, and others.[47] The White House, in a report to Congress, has put the probability at 83% that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose their job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent.[48] To better address both the funding concerns and concerns about government control, one alternative model is that the cost and control would be distributed across the private sector instead of the public sector. Companies across the economy would be required to employ humans, but the job descriptions would be left to private innovation, and individuals would have to compete to be hired and retained. This would be a for-profit sector analog of basic income, that is, a market-based form of basic income. It differs from a job guarantee in that the government is not the employer (rather, companies are) and there is no aspect of having employees who "cannot be fired", a problem that interferes with economic dynamism. The economic salvation in this model is not that every individual is guaranteed a job, but rather just that enough jobs exist that massive unemployment is avoided and employment is no longer solely the privilege of only the very smartest or highly trained 20% of the population. Another option for a market-based form of basic income has been proposed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) as part of "a Just Third Way" (a Third Way with greater justice) through widely distributed power and liberty. Called the Capital Homestead Act,[49] it is reminiscent of James S. Albus's Peoples' Capitalism[50][51] in that money creation and securities ownership are widely and directly distributed to individuals rather than flowing through, or being concentrated in, centralized or elite mechanisms.