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Before the West spreads democracy abroad maybe it could get some for itself. The US is an oligarchy in which government is answerable to six powerful private interest groups. In Europe governments are answerable to the EU, Washington, and private bankers and not to their peoples. In the UK the military brass has declared its hold on the reins of power.

Jeremy Corbyn is the first Labourite to lead the Labour Party in a long time. Considering the stupidity and immorality of the Tories, Corbyn could become prime minister of Britain. Should this occur, Corbyn would shift the budget priorities away from supporting Washington’s wars toward refurbishing the social welfare state that made life for ordinary Britishers more secure and less stressful.

A senior serving general of the British army said that the army would not allow the people to “put a maverick in charge of the country’s security. The Army just wouldn’t stand for it and would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

In other words, a democratic outcome unacceptable to the English military will be overthrown. Just like in Egypt.

Here we have the incongruity of Washington and London bringing democracy to others through what Vladimir Putin calls “airstrike democracy,” while tolerating a democracy deficit themselves. The safest conclusion is that democracy is a cloak for an aggressive agenda, not a value in itself to the US and UK elites, who rule and who intend to continue to rule these countries for their personal benefit.

Jonathan Cook reports that the use of “whatever means possible, fair or foul,” against Labour prime ministers who actually stood for the people rather than for the elites is not unique to Corbyn.
Labour Prime Minister Harald Wilson faced similar pressure and resigned. http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-09-20/army-plots-against-british-pms-are-not-new/

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forget the Greek Crisis, Immigration Will Divide Europe Against Itself

September 12, 2015

Forget the Greek Crisis, Immigration Will Divide Europe Against Itself

Europe has complex immigration rules. As the EU web site shows, there are multiple layers of immigration regulations encompassing both the local national level and the EU level.

But, as the recent influx of refugees and economic migrants has shown, the EU government is able to flex its muscle in an ad hocfashion in the service of compelling member states to accept the migrants and refugees. The “quota plan” being forwarded by the EU government would divide up migrants and refugees among the EU member states, and, of course, over time, these migrants would qualify for those member states’ taxpayer funded public benefits. In Germany, for example, officials “estimate that as many as 460,000 more people could be entitled [next year] to social benefits.”

Big Countries vs. Little Ones

The proposal could become a mandate if approved by a “qualified majority” of EU member governments, a type of majority that is weighed in favor of the larger members. Most of those larger members are in favor. If adopted, however, one doesn’t need to be exceptionally perceptive to see how mandates apposed on dissenting member states could be a source of significant division among member states, and especially, their populations.

Writing in the UK independent yesterday, John Lichfield avers:

North vs south; east vs west; Britain vs the rest; German leadership or German dominance. The refugee crisis is like a diabolical stress test devised to expose simultaneously all the moral and political fault lines of the European Union.

Germany leads to way in calling for more migrants. While part of it is no doubt Germany’s ongoing attempt to rehabilitate itself from its fascist past, there may be other considerations as well. Claire Groden in Fortunenotes:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

So you really want to make Syrian Refugees an Election Issue?

September 9, 2015

So you really want to make Syrian Refugees an Election Issue?

Thomas Pynchon once wrote: ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.’ Words to live by for the the major political parties in Canadian Federal politics.

The refugee crisis in Syria, Iraq and spilling into Europe has become an election issue, with each of the major parties pulling magic numbers out of their ears around “how many” is the “right number” of refugees to admit to Canada, which once again underscores the Libertarian criticism that the both major political parties espouse largely uniform campaign platforms in which the issues are for the most part homogenous while the really important questions are rendered conveniently out-of-scope (and even the NDP’s, sniffing a faint shot at power, are pivoting off their principles in order to get it)

If we peer behind the veil of mainstream media oversimplification we find that the humanitarian crisis we are faced with today are the straight line consequences of a decades-old policy on the part of the West (defined as the US, the UK, Israel and including complicit Canada) to subvert and destabilize the very nations that are submerged in civil war and strife.

A String of Coup D’Etats

Syria and Iran were both once full-on democracies who’s duly elected governments committed the literal, mortal sins of offending Western corporate powers. Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh wanted to audit the books of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was instead overthrown and replaced with the Shah. We’re all aware how that turned out why Iran is so fond of the West to this day.

Syria’s plight is not as well known, our (meaning the West’s) first political coup d’etat against their elected government was in 1949, when the CIA over throws Shure al-Quwatly and replaces him with the first of many military strongmen in Syria, Colonel Husni al-Zaim.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Quantitative Easing for People: The UK Labour Frontrunner’s Controversial Proposal

September 9, 2015

Quantitative Easing for People: The UK Labour Frontrunner’s Controversial Proposal

British MP Jeremy Corbyn has proposed a “People’s QE” that has critics crying hyperinflation and supporters saying it’s about time.

Dark horse candidate Jeremy Corbyn, who is currently leading in the polls for UK Labour Party leadership, has included in his platform “quantitative easing for people.” He said in a July 22nd presentation:

The ‘rebalancing’ I have talked about here today means rebalancing away from finance towards the high-growth, sustainable sectors of the future. How do we do this? One option would be for the Bank of England to be given a new mandate to upgrade our economy to invest in new large scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects: Quantitative easing for people instead of banks.

As his economic advisor Richard Murphy further explains it:

People’s quantitative easing is . . . a highly directed process where the debt that is . . . repurchased has been deliberately created and issued either by a green investment bank or by local authorities, health trusts and other such agencies for the specific purpose of funding new investment in the economy at the time when big business and financial markets are completely failing to deliver the scale of investment that is needed to get the UK working again and to restore our financial prosperity.

According to the Positive Money group:

Ideas in a similar vein have been advocated or at least suggested by notable economists including J M Keynes (1), Milton Friedman (2), Ben Bernanke (3), William Buiter (4) and Martin Wolf (5). Most recently, Lord Adair Turner (6) has proposed similar ideas, highlighting that ‘there are no technical reasons to reject this option’.

Perhaps, but critics have found plenty to criticize. Peter Spence writes in the UK Telegraph:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are All Preppers Now

August 28, 2015

We Are All Preppers Now

Damian McBride is the former head of communications at the British treasury and former special adviser to Gordon Brown, erstwhile Prime Minister of the U.K. Yesterday he tweeted some surprising advice in response to the plunge in global equities markets.;

Advice on the looming crash, No. 1: get hard cash in a safe place now; don’t assume banks & cashpoints will be open, or bank cards will work.

Crash advice No. 2: do you have enough bottled water, tinned goods & other essentials at home to live a month indoors? If not, get shopping.

Crash advice No. 3: agree a rally point with your loved ones in case transport and communication gets cut off; somewhere you can all head to.

Evidently, McBride interprets the wipe-out of over $3 trillion in total global market cap during the three-day rout as a prelude to a much broader and deeper financial crash that will precipitate civil unrest. According to McBride,

We were close enough in 2008 and what’s coming is on 20 times that scale.

Western Democracy Is An Endangered Species On Its Way To Extinction

August 26, 2015

Western Democracy Is An Endangered Species On Its Way To Extinction

The British Labour Party no longer represents the working class. Under UK prime minister Tony Blair, the Labour Party became a vassal of the One Percent. The result has been a rebellion in the ranks and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a principled Labourite intent on representing the people, a no-no in Western “democracies.”

Corbyn is too real for the Labour Party Blairites, who hope to be rewarded with similar nest eggs as Blair for representing the capitalist One Percent. So what is the corrupted Labour Party doing to prevent Corbyn’s election?

The answer is that it is denying the vote to Corbyn supporters. You can read the story here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/britains-labour-party-purge-is-underway-preventing-supporters-from-voting-for-jeremy-corbyn/5471194

The illegal Egyptian military dictatorship that overthrew on Washington’s orders the first democratically elected government in Egyptian history has issued an edict prohibiting journalists from contradicting the military dictatorship. In brief, the dictatorship installed by Washington has outlawed facts.

Washington rejected the government that the Egyptian people elected, because it appeared that the democratically elected government would have a foreign policy that was at least partially independent of Washington’s. Remember, according to the neocons who, together with Israel, control US foreign policy, countries with independent foreign policies, such as Iran, Russia, and China, are America’s “greatest threats.”

The Egyptian military thugs, following Washington’s orders, have more or less eliminated all of the leadership of the political party that was democratically elected. The party was called the Muslim Brotherhood. In the presstitute Western media, the political party was described more or less as al Qaeda, and how are the ignorant, brainwashed, and propagandized Americans to know any difference? Certainly neither “their” government nor the presstitute media will ever tell them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New UN Privacy Chief Proclaims – UK Digital Surveillance is “Worse than Orwell”

August 26, 2015

New UN Privacy Chief Proclaims – UK Digital Surveillance is “Worse than Orwell”

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Cannataci says we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen. “It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.

– UN Privacy chief, Joseph Cannataci

The UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, pulls no punches when it comes to privacy. It’s hard to disagree with what he has to say.

From the Guardian:

The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

He added that he doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter, and said it was regrettable that vast numbers of people sign away their digital rights without thinking about it.

One thing that is certainly going to come up in my mandate is the business model that large corporations are using

“Some people were complaining because they couldn’t find me on Facebook. They couldn’t find me on Twitter. But since I believe in privacy, I’ve never felt the need for it,” Cannataci, a professor of technology law at University of Groningen in the Netherlands and head of the department of Information Policy & Governance at the University of Malta, said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Psychologist’s Work for GCHQ Deception Unit Inflames Debate Among Peers

August 9, 2015

Psychologist’s Work for GCHQ Deception Unit Inflames Debate Among Peers

A British psychologist is receiving sharp criticism from some professional peers for providing expert advice to help the U.K. surveillance agency GCHQ manipulate people online.

The debate brings into focus the question of how or whether psychologists should offer their expertise to spy agencies engaged in deception and propaganda.

Dr. Mandeep K. Dhami, in a 2011 paper, provided the controversial GCHQ spy unit JTRIG with advice, research pointers, training recommendations, and thoughts on psychological issues, with the goal of improving the unit’s performance and effectiveness. JTRIG’s operations have been referred to as “dirty tricks,” and Dhami’s paper notes that the unit’s own staff characterize their work using “terms such as ‘discredit,’ promote ‘distrust,’ ‘dissuade,’ ‘deceive,’ ‘disrupt,’ ‘delay,’ ‘deny,’ ‘denigrate/degrade,’ and ‘deter.’” The unit’s targets go beyond terrorists and foreign militaries and include groups considered “domestic extremist[s],” criminals, online “hacktivists,” and even “entire countries.”

After publishing Dhami’s paper for the first time in June, The Intercept reached out to several of her fellow psychologists, including some whose work was referenced in the paper, about the document’s ethical implications.

One of the psychologists cited in the report criticized the paper and GCHQ’s ethics. Another psychologist condemned Dhami’s recommendations as “grossly unethical” and another called them an “egregious violation” of psychological ethics. But two other psychologists cited in the report did not express concern when contacted for reaction, and another psychologist, along with Dhami’s current employer, defended her work and her ethical standards.

A British law firm hired to represent Dhami maintained that any allegations of unethical conduct are “grossly defamatory and totally untrue.”

The divergent views on the paper highlight how the profession of psychology has yet to resolve key ethical concerns around consulting for government intelligence agencies. These issues take on added resonance in the context of the uproar currently roiling the American Psychological Association over the key role it played in the CIA torture program during the Bush administration.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales

August 1, 2015

Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales

In the scramble to access Kurdistan’s oil and gas wealth, the US and UK are turning a blind eye to complicity in ‘Islamic State’ oil smuggling

Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have both supported secret ISIS oil smuggling operations and even supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.

One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.

Genel operates in the KRG with the backing of the British government, and is also linked to a British parliamentary group with longstanding connections to both the British and KRG oil industries.

The relationship between British and Kurdish energy companies, and senior British politicians, raises questions about conflicts of interest — especially in the context of a ‘war on terror’ that is supposed to be targeting, not financing, the ‘Islamic State.’

Kurds, Turks and blind eyes

One of ISIS’ most significant sources of revenue is oil smuggling. The Islamic State controls approximately 60% of Syria’s oil, and seven major oil-producing assets in Iraq.

Using a carefully cultivated network of intermediaries and ‘middlemen’ in the Kurdish region of Iraq, as well as in Turkey, ISIS has been able to produce a phenomenal 45,000 barrels of oil a day, raking in as much as $3 million a day in cash by selling the oil at well below market prices.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK Police Confirm Ongoing Criminal Probe of Snowden Leak Journalists

July 25, 2015

UK Police Confirm Ongoing Criminal Probe of Snowden Leak Journalists

A secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists working with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents remains ongoing two years after it was quietly launched, The Intercept can reveal.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service has admitted it is still carrying out the probe, which is being led by its counterterrorism department, after previously refusing to confirm or deny its existence on the grounds that doing so could be “detrimental to national security.”

The disclosure was made by police in a letter sent to this reporter Tuesday, concluding a seven-month freedom of information battle that saw the London force repeatedly attempt to withhold basic details about the status of the case. It reversed its position this week only after an intervention from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the public body that enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws.

Following Snowden’s disclosures from the National Security Agency in 2013, the Metropolitan Police and a lawyer for the British government separately stated that a criminal investigation had been opened into the leaks. One of the London force’s most senior officers acknowledged during a parliamentary hearing that the investigation was looking at whether reporters at The Guardian had committed criminal offenses for their role in revealing secret surveillance operations exposed in the Snowden documents.

In January, The Intercept sought details about the status of the investigation through requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. But the Metropolitan Police, the largest and most powerful of the 45 regional police forces across the United Kingdom, stonewalled the requests. It cited fears about “increased threat of terrorist activity” and claimed that it could not reveal details about the investigation because they could “assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK Furious At Proposed €7 Billion Greek Ponzi-Perpetuating Bridge Loan

July 15, 2015

UK Furious At Proposed €7 Billion Greek Ponzi-Perpetuating Bridge Loan

The two most important stories out of Greece on Tuesday were: 1) the IMF’s leaked report on Greek debt sustainability, and 2) the race to secure between €7 and €12 billion in bridge financing to hold Greece over until the ESM gets off the ground.

Although a new program is in the works and should get the greenlight once Tsipras succeeds in forcing Greek lawmakers to legislate away their sovereignty and any semblance of pride they have left, Athens has bills that need paying, the most important of which comes due to the ECB (on its SMP holdings) on July 20. The Greeks must make the payment to Mario Draghi – otherwise the central would be compelled to interrupt the liquidity drip that’s keeping the Greek banking sector from collapsing altogether. There’s also the issue of public sector salaries and pension payments which Greeks would prefer to receive in euros as opposed to the IOUs suggested by German FinMin Wolfgang Schaeuble.

We outlined the options available for bridge financing on Tuesday morning, noting that all alternatives involve creditors effectively paying themselves either literally or in spirit or otherwise entail the perpetuation of some manner of ponzi scheme (i.e. allowing Greece to sell T-bills to Greek banks).

On Wednesday, the EU Commission decided to go the EFSM route and will look to tap €7 billion of the €11-12 billion that remains in the fund. The formal request by the EU Commission says the funds from the EFSM “aim to provide a bridge financing to allow Greece to face some urgent financial obligations until it starts receiving financial assistance under a new programme from the ESM [and] would safeguard financial stability in the Union and in the euro area.”

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. The EFSM was replaced by the ESM and wasn’t really supposed to be used again, so going back to the well is problematic from a political perspective. There are a number of issues here, but for the sake of brevity, here’s FT’s summary:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are Coal, Oil and Gas the Subprime Assets of the Future?

June 25, 2015

Are Coal, Oil and Gas the Subprime Assets of the Future?

That question was actually asked by British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey last year, and its ramifications are extensively explored in a provocative report released today by the Center for International Environmental Law, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

According to CIEL, the answer to Davey’s question is a resounding “yes.”

The report makes a compelling case that the three big financial rating agencies – Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poor – that gave clean bills of health to the toxic financial products that caused the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown are giving similarly bad advice to investors by rating fossil fuel investments without acknowledging climate change-related risk.

Along the way, the report, called “(Mis) Calculated Risk and Climate Change: Are Ratings Agencies Repeating Credit Crisis Mistakes?,” stresses the potentially enormous legal liability for the agencies if their ratings understate the pitfalls of what are likely to be severe climate impacts on oil, gas, and particularly coal companies.

Coal is not only the leading contributor to atmospheric CO2 levels, it is the most financially dangerous investment. Coal prices have plummeted. Between 2010 and 2014, three coal plants were delayed or scrapped for every one built. After being dropped from Standard and Poor’s 500 Index in September, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal firm, was dropped from Standard & Poor’s MidCap Index today because its market cap has plunged from $3.9 billion to just $700 million.

Other recent developments have made the idea of stranded fossil fuel assets far more tangible. These have included the G-20 conference asking for an investigation into $6 trillion in planned fossil fuel extraction investments, the wholesale divestment from coal by the Norwegian Pension Fund, and the International Monetary Fund’s repeated calls for an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There’s Something Wrong With The World Today and It’s 1995

June 25, 2015

There’s Something Wrong With The World Today and It’s 1995

There weren’t any surprises in the “final” GDP update for Q1. Going back to -0.2%, the same interpretations still apply, especially and including the inventory contribution. Economists and policymakers want to talk particularly about how Q1 is prone to “residual seasonality” but that is missing the bigger part of the problem. Whether Q1 was -0.2% or +2% doesn’t really matter, as what truly makes this a dangerous economic situation is that Q1 and all the prior quarters were not a steady +4%.

To listen to economists today is to suggest that such an expectation amounts to wishful thinking, and that such “normal” growth is no longer. That sentiment may apply, but only to the narrow manner in which orthodox economics can integrate real world factors. In other words, “they” accept that there is something wrong but cannot answer the relevant and primary question as to what that might be.

This problem is obvious in every economic account, including GDP. Using year-over-year figures to harmonize among other economic systems, the lack of growth is striking post-crisis – made all the more so by the size of the huge hole left in the wake of the Great Recession itself. That means, even by this count, the opportunity cost of this non-recovery is severely understated.

I picked 1995 as a starting point for a reason, which I’ll get back to below. Suffice to say, in isolating only the growth periods of each economic cycle the current version is by comparison about half that of the late 1990’s. The middle cycle, the housing bubble age, shows what is plainly a transition from the first to the third. The primary opportunity cost is not simply the difference between them, but rather far more importantly the compounding nature of time. In other words, the longer these deficiencies drag the more costly in very real economic distortions that cannot be measured.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bank Of England Accidentally E-mails Top-Secret Brexit Plan To Newspaper

May 23, 2015

Bank Of England Accidentally E-mails Top-Secret Brexit Plan To Newspaper

The first rule of “Project Bookend” is that you don’t talk about “Project Bookend.”

In retrospect, maybe the first rule should have been “you don’t accidentally e-mail ‘Project Bookend’ to a news agency”, because as the Guardian reports, one of its editors opened his inbox and was surprised to find a message from the BOE’s Head of Press Jeremy Harrison outlining the UK financial market equivalent of the Manhattan project.

Project Bookend is a secret (or ‘was’ a secret) initiative undertaken by the BOE to study what the fallout might be from a potential ‘Brexit’, but if anyone asked what Sir Jon Cunliffe and a few senior staffers were up to, they were instructed to say that they were busy investigating “a broad range of European economic issues.”

Here’s more from The Guardian:

Bank of England officials are secretly researching the financial shocks that could hit Britain if there is a vote to leave the European Union in the forthcoming referendum.

The Bank blew its cover on Friday when it accidentally emailed details of the project – including how the bank intended to fend off any inquiries about its work – direct to the Guardian.

According to the confidential email, the press and most staff in Threadneedle Street must be kept in the dark about the work underway, which has been dubbed Project Bookend…

MPs are now likely to ask whether the Bank intended to inform parliament that a major review of Britain’s prospects outside the EU was being undertaken by the institution that acts as the UK’s main financial regulator. Carney is also likely to come under pressure within the Bank to reveal whether there are other undercover projects underway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In the Same Week, the US and UK Hide Their War Crimes By Invoking ‘National Security’

May 22, 2015

In the Same Week, the US and UK Hide Their War Crimes By Invoking ‘National Security’

Colonel Ian Henderson was a British official dubbed “the Butcher of Bahrain” because of atrocities he repeatedly committed during the 30 years he served as chief security official of that Middle Eastern country. His reign of terror began in 1966 when Bahrain was a British “protectorate” and continued when the post-“independence” Bahraini King retained him in the same position. In 1996, The Independent described him as “the most feared of all secret policemen” in Bahrain, and cited “consistent and compelling evidence that severe beatings and even sexual assaults have been carried out against prisoners under Henderson’s responsibility for well over a decade.”

A 2002 Guardian article reported that “during this time his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists”; his official acts “included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners”; and “on many occasions they are said to have detained children without informing their parents, only to return them months later in body bags.” Needless to say, Col. Henderson wasnever punished in any way: “although Scotland Yard launched an inquiry into the allegations in 2000, the investigation was dropped the following year.” He was showered with high honors from the U.K.-supported tyrants who ran Bahrain.

Prior to the massacres and rapes over which he presided in Bahrain, Henderson played a leading role in brutally suppressing the Mau Mau insurgency in another British colony, Kenya. In the wake of his Kenya atrocities, he twice won the George Medal, “the 2nd highest, to the George Cross, gallantry medal that a civilian can win.” His brutality against Kenyan insurgents fighting for independence is what led the U.K. government to put him in charge of internal security in Bahrain.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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