Wayne Madsen

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS Annapolis breaks
through three feet of ice while participating in Ice Exercise
(ICEX 2009) in the Arctic Ocean (Photo credit: WMC)

Although President Obama's «pivot to Asia» is receiving media attention, his little-known push to establish American hegemony over the rapidly melting Arctic polar zone has gone largely unnoticed. Using three NATO allies, all of them monarchies, Obama is trying to establish a U.S.-led condominium of the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark over the Arctic, conspicuously leaving Russia out of the equation. Obama’s military and intelligence push into the Arctic could be taken from the pages of the 1960s Cold War thriller by Alistair MacLean, «Ice Station Zebra», With the depletion of the Arctic ice pack opening up formerly non-navigable Arctic maritime zones to shipping, Obama and his Wall Street handlers are eyeing the Arctic as America’s new region for natural resource exploitation. And, as always, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence Community are ready to act as the centurions for the investment bankers and hedge fund tycoons.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s Arctic Strategy was unveiled in Halifax in November 2013. Hagel said the Pentagon’s «Arctic Strategy» is centered upon the U.S. bolstering its military capabilities in the Arctic region with the opening of new sea lanes for natural resource «exploration».

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Konrad Kreft & Clara Weiss

Skoropadskyi with officers of the Hetman

Part one - The roots of Ukrainian nationalism

The Western media is seeking to downplay the prominent role of fascists in the new Ukrainian government. Several of the regime’s ministries are headed by members of the far-right Svoboda party, and the militias of the neo-fascist Right Sector are active in violently repressing resistance in the east of the country.

Both Svoboda and Right Sector played a crucial role in the February 22 coup in Kiev, which was strongly backed by Berlin and Washington. This is no coincidence. The close collaboration of Germany and the US with Ukrainian fascists has a long history, reaching back over the last hundred years.

In contrast to many other European countries, there has never been a strong bourgeois national movement in Ukraine. Ukraine has been divided between Poland and Russia since the late Middle Ages. After the carve-up of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire. Only a section of what is now western Ukraine was integrated into the Hapsburg Empire.

The weakness of the Ukrainian national movement was due on the one hand to the country’s economic backwardness and lack of a strong middle class. Significant industrialisation occurred only in the era of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, a large proportion of the urban population consisted of Russians, Germans and Jews, while the rural population was mainly Ukrainian.

When bourgeois forces finally erected a Ukrainian nation-state, following the 1917 February Revolution’s overthrow of the tsar in Russia, they were immediately confronted with a revolutionary working class. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia in October, received powerful support from the workers of Ukraine. Ever since then, bourgeois nationalism in Ukraine has been characterised by virulent anti-communism, pogroms against revolutionary workers and Jews, and attempts to win the support of imperialist powers.

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Mike Head

(L-R) Angela Merkel, Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin

With US Vice President Joseph Biden in the audience, Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire confectioner, was formally sworn in Saturday as president of Ukraine. Delivering a bellicose speech, he pledged to confront Russia, suppress the separatists in Ukraine’s east and fully militarise the country. At the same time, he alluded to his plans to impose brutal austerity measures on the Ukrainian working class.

Poroshenko began by paying homage to the fascistic forces that spearheaded his installation, via a US- and European Union-backed putsch in February followed by an election held May 25 amid a reign of terror and military violence in eastern Ukraine. He enthused over the “victorious revolution” by “Ukrainian patriots” and “warriors.”

While the Western media portrayed it as a powerful performance, the speech only underscored the fact that Poroshenko is nothing but a front man for German and particularly American imperialism, and is entirely dependent on them. Adopting a provocative stance toward Russia, he declared he would never accept Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and vowed to repudiate the Budapest Agreement that restricts the deployment of Western military forces within former Soviet states.

“Russia occupied Crimea, which was, is and will be Ukrainian soil,” Poroshenko insisted. Referring to a brief meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the D-Day commemoration in France, he said: “Yesterday, in the course of the meeting in Normandy, I told this to President Putin: Crimea is Ukraine soil. Period. There can be no compromise on the issues of Crimea, European choice and state structure.”

Fresh from talks in France with US President Barack Obama, Poroshenko rejected any negotiations with pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine’s east. He vowed instead to swiftly put an end to the resistance to February’s pro-Western, fascist-led coup in Kiev.

He depicted those holding control in dozens of eastern cities and towns as “bandits,” “criminals,” “terrorists” and “Russian mercenaries,” foreshadowing a renewed offensive by the Ukrainian military and allied right-wing militias.

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Diana Johnstone

Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe — Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. He could under-react, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

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Umberto Pascali

“It’s only the tip of the iceberg. A grand geopolitical project is beginning to materialize…...

On June 6 2014, the official Russian news agency Itar Tass announced what many were expecting since at least the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis: Russian main energy company, Gazprom Neft has finally “signed agreements with its consumers” to switch from Dollars to Euros (as transition to the ruble) “for payments under contracts”.

The announcement that the agreement has been actually signed and not just discussed was made by Gazprom’s Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Dyukov.

Despite the pressures from Wall Street and its military, propaganda and political apparatus, 9 out of 10 consumers of Gazprom’s oil and gas agreed to pay in Euros. Of course, the big watershed was the Gazprom unprecedented 30-years $400Bl natural gas supply to China signed in Shanghai last May 21 in the presence of President Putin and President Xi Jinping in the middle of the Anglo-american sponsored violent destabilization of Ukraine. In fact it is improper to talk a dollar denominated $400Bl, because this “biggest deal” will not be using dollars but the Renminbi (or Yuan) and the Russian Ruble. It links China and Russia economically and strategically for three decades, de facto (and maybe later also de jure) creating an unshakable symbiotic alliance that necessarily will involve the military aspect.

The Russia-China agreement is a clear defeat of the obsessive geopolitical attempts by Wall Street to keep the two country in a situation of competition or, ideally, war-like confrontation. It changes the structure of alliances. It strikes at the historical foundations of British colonial geopolitics (Divide and Rule). Under escalating pressures and threats to their national security, Russia and China overcame brilliantly historical, ideological, cultural differences which had previously been been by the colonial powers (and their financial heirs in Wall Street and the London’s city) for their “Divide & Conquer” strategy.

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Paul Craig Roberts

American Troops Landing on D-Day, Omaha Beach, Normandy
Coast, 1944 (Robert Capa, 1913–1954, metmuseum.org)

If there were any doubts that Western “leaders” live in a fantasy make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled the doubts.

The howlers issuing from these occasions are enough to split your sides. Obama and his lap dog Cameron described the Normandy landing on June 6, 1944, as “the greatest liberation force that the world has ever known” and took all the credit for the US and Britain for the defeat of Hitler. No mention was made of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which for three years prior to the Normandy landing had been fighting and defeating the Wehrmacht.

The Germans lost World War II at the Battle of Stalingrad, which was fought from August 23, 1942 until February 2, 1943, when most of the remnants of the powerful German Sixth Army surrendered, including 22 generals.

Nineteen months previously the largest invasion force ever assembled on planet earth invaded Russia across a one thousand mile front. Three million crack German troops; 7,500 artillery units, 19 panzer divisions with 3,000 tanks, and 2,500 aircraft rolled across Russia for 14 months.

By June 1944, three years later, very little of this force was left. The Red Army had chewed it up. When the so-called “allies” (a term which apparently excludes Russia) landed in France, there was little to resist them. The best forces remaining to Hitler were on the Russian front, which collapsed day by day as the Red Army approached Berlin.

The Red Army won the war with Germany. The Americans and the British showed up after the Wehrmacht was exhausted and in tatters and could offer little resistance. Joseph Stalin believed that Washington and London stayed out of the war until the last minute and left Russia with the burden of defeating Germany.

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Ibrahim Hewitt

Introduction by Kenny's Sideshow — Today there are many of us who would like to dismantle the NSA and the related false flag criminal syndicate we call the US government. On June 8, 1967 our 'best friend' took it on themselves to try and take down a small part of the NSA, the USS Liberty, during the 1967 so called "Six-Day War" which actually never ended. This crime was not only never officially acknowledged but as time went on we have found that the NSA came to backdoor all of its data theft directly to Israel to use as it pleases. Crimes against humanity and especially the killing of Americans often get rewarded in zionist occupied territory.

It is often assumed that Israel was on the defensive in the Six-Day War of June 1967. That is testimony to the success of its propaganda, because the reality was very different.

"From the very beginning," wrote James Bamford in Body of Secrets (2001), "an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public." The facts reveal that being Israel's main ally did not mean that American citizens were safe. The story of the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli air force and navy still has the power to shock, as has the official cover-up that has persisted ever since.

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Conn Hallinan

British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had three laws of war:

One, never march on Moscow;
Two, never get in a land war in Asia;
Three, never march on Moscow.

So why are the United States, the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) all on the road to the Russian capital? And exactly what are they hoping to achieve?

Divided Command — As in all battlefields on the Eastern Front, complexities abound. For beginners, the multiple armies marching eastward are not exactly on the same page. This sort of “divided command” (to use the military term) generally ends in debacle. Add to that the fact that many of the weapons are of such dubious quality that they might end up backfiring. And to top it all off, as in all great crises there’s a cost—in this case the sticker price may give even fire breathers pause.

That’s not to say that these aggressors are amateurs—to the contrary, professional armies are involved. NATO has deployed troops, aircraft, and naval forces in the region, and the Russians have parked 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border.

So far, bloodshed has been minimal. With the exception of the horrendous deaths of over 40 demonstrators in Odessa and dozens of separatist fighters killed in clashes over Donetsk’s airport, the crisis has been a remarkably calm affair. The Russians took over Crimea virtually without a shot, and while a worrisome increase of violent incidents has occurred in the south and east, they hardly measure up to the French and German invasions in 1812 and 1941, respectively. But that doesn’t mean things couldn’t turn dangerous. Which is why it’s important to know the agendas of the players involved.

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Anthony Migchels

The enslavement is total: most people work the first two and half days of the week to pay off the bank.

Capitalism is Usury. Its defining belief is ‘return on investment’. This is an extension of the ‘time value’ of money, which is the central tenet of modern economics. Capitalism is unthinkable without banking and banking is institutionalized Usury.

Usury is Plutocracy. Compound interest makes it unavoidable that the very richest own everything in generations.

And this is indeed what happened: Capitalism is one huge global monopoly. All the major banks own each other and most Transnationals plus a huge chunk of land. This juggernaut was built with the plunder of Usury.

We have all seen that Rothschild was worth 50 billion in 1850. At 5% per year, this fortune would now be a trillion, at 8% per year Rothschild would now be worth hundreds of trillions. This is why it has been said that ‘compound interest is the strongest force in the Universe’. This is Usurious Usurpation.

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Paul Craig Roberts

What are we to make of this?

Two 12 year-old white American girls who look perfectly normal stabbed their 12-year old friend 19 times in a murder attempt. By murdering their friend the girls hoped to win the acceptance of a totally fictitious cartoon character on a website.

Does this mean that not only has the enculturation process in the US deleted morality but also that American kids can no longer tell the difference between fiction and reality?

On several occasions I have written that Americans live in The Matrix, just as in the movie, only there is no “The One” to release them. Has the electronic existence in which children are raised destroyed their humanity?

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Andre Damon

Recent weeks have seen a proliferation of violent and often fatal attacks by police in cities and towns across the United States.

● Last week, an Atlanta SWAT team critically wounded a one-year-old toddler by throwing a flash grenade into a house in an early morning no-knock raid to serve an arrest warrant. The toddler remains in a medically induced coma and is fighting for his life. Such no-knock warrants are becoming increasingly common. Police carried out 50,000 such raids in 2005, up from 3,000 in 1981, and the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that between 70,000 and 80,000 no-knock raids occur each year in the US.
● Last Thursday, the Albuquerque Medical Investigator’s office released the autopsy report for James Boyd, the 38-year-old homeless man who was killed by police on March 16, confirming that he was shot in the back. Since that incident, Albuquerque police have carried out two further fatal shootings. The Albuquerque police department has been responsible for 25 deadly shootings since 2010, according to the US Justice Department.
● On May 20, three police officers in Salinas, California fired more than five shots at close range at migrant farm worker Carlos Mejía, killing him as he was backing away from them.
● On May 11, five California Highway Patrol officers in Imperial County, California, beat to death Tommy Yancy, a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, following a routine traffic stop.
● On April 27, Jason Conoscenti, 36 was shot to death in Long Beach, California as he fled from police officers.
● Last Friday, a grand jury indicted a Cleveland police officer on charges of manslaughter for the 2012 execution-style killing of two unarmed occupants of a disabled car following a chase. The officer “Fired at least fifteen shots ... downward through the windshield at close range as he stood on the hood” of the unarmed victims’ car, according to a federal prosecutor.

According to official statistics, the police on average commit between one and two “justifiable homicides” every day in the United States. Last week, the Supreme Court provided legal cover for such homicidal attacks.

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Peter Schwarz

“If one tells a big lie, and repeats it often enough, then people will believe it in the end.” This principle of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, today serves many in the German media as a guideline for writing columns opposing the widespread resistance to a revival of German militarism.

Since Berlin and Washington helped a right-wing regime come to power in Ukraine, and thereby provoked a dangerous conflict with Russia, leading German media outlets have not shrunk from any lie in order to justify this policy. They play down the significance of the fascists of Svoboda and the Right Sector, depict the resistance in eastern Ukraine as a Russian conspiracy, and denounce their critics for daring to “understand Putin.”

But that is not enough. In order to undermine the opposition to the “end of military reticence” announced by the German government, they are even prepared to deny the historical crimes of German imperialism.

On Monday, the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) carried a comment piece uniting both positions, headlined “One-sided friendship.” It combined hateful attacks on Putin and Russia with a presentation of the Second World War which one usually reads only in Nazi publications.

FAZ editor Frank Pergande complains about the “understanding shown for Putin’s policies, especially in eastern Germany,” and ridicules the “apparent friendship with the ‘big brother’ in the GDR [former East Germany].” He praises Chancellor Merkel, who “already at a time when she wasn’t even a politician” (i.e. in the GDR), knew “what was to be thought of Russia.”

Indeed, according to Pergande, the relationship with the Soviet Union was also marked by fear in the GDR. “Those who had experienced the end of the war,” he writes, “had to keep silent about their vile experiences: murder and suicides, expulsion, rape, camps, reparations. On the way to Berlin, the onslaught of the Red Army destroyed towns like Frankfurt (Oder), Prenzlau or Demmin, to the extent that the wounds ache to this day.”

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The 9/11 Consensus Panel

Post Collapse WTC 7 (Pinterest)

Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts - Professor Daniele Ganser’s guest article on false flag attacks and his lecture on 9/11 will rescue you from the web of official lies spun by the government and presstitute media. The latest research establishes that World Trade Center Building 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition. The press release below will suffice to inform you of the latest developments.

The 24-member 9/11 Consensus Panel – which includes physicists, chemists, engineers, commercial pilots, attorneys and lawyers – today announced three new studies confirming the controlled demolition of World Trade Center 7.

The studies scientifically refute the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) claim that, for the first time in history, fire caused the sudden and complete collapse of a large, fire-protected, steel-framed building on 9/11.

(Note that whereas the Consensus Panel uses a scientific methodology to peer-review its work, the NIST report was not peer-reviewed.)

The first Panel study deals with the NIST computer simulations, which purported to show that fire-induced thermal expansion caused a girder to be pushed off its seat at Column 79, thereby initiating a global collapse of the entire 47-storey building at 5:21 in the afternoon.

However, a recent FOIA request has produced WTC 7 architectural drawings showing that the NIST simulations omitted basic structural supports that would have made this girder failure impossible.

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Pepe Escobar

Amid much hysteria, the notion has been widely peddled in the United States that President Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine, announced last week at West Point, rejects neo-cons and neo-liberals and is, essentially, post-imperialist and a demonstration of Realpolitik.

(Clockwise:) Neoconservatives
Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol and
Dan Senor (Photo credit: FPI)

Not so fast. Although stepping back from the excesses of the Cheney regime - as in bombing whole nations into "democracy" - the "desire to lead" still crystallizes might is right.

Moreover, "exceptionalism" remains the norm. Now not so blatant, but still implemented via a nasty set of tools, from Financial warfare to cyber-war, from National Endowment for Democracy-style promotion of "democracy" to Joint Special Operations Command-driven counter-terrorism, drone war and all shades of shadow wars.

In the early 2000s, the model was the physical destruction and occupation of Iraq. In the 2010s the model is the slow-mo destruction, by proxy, of Syria.

And still, those who "conceptualized" the destruction of Iraq keep rearing their Alien-like slimy head. Their icon is of course Robert Kagan - one of the founders of the apocalyptically funereal Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and husband of crypto-Ukrainian hell raiser Victoria "F**k the EU" Nuland (thus their dream of Ukraine as the Khaganate of Nulands, or simply Nulandistan.)

Kagan has been devastatingly misguided on everything, as in his 2003 best-seller Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, an eulogy of "benign" Americans standing guard against the "threats" (as in Muslim fundamentalism) emanating from a Hobbesian world way beyond the cozy Kantian precinct inhabited by Europe.

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Stephen Lendman

America OKs mass murder. It permits flouting rule of law principles, norms and standards. America is a terror state. Criminality continues on an unprecedented scale.

Permanent war is official US policy. One country after another is ravaged and destroyed. Millions of corpses attest to America's barbarity. No nation in world history matches it. Obama exceeds the worst of his predecessors. He's a war criminal multiple times over.

Advancing America's imperium matters most. US hegemonic ambitions risk global war. So does its rage for full spectrum dominance over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary. International laws, treaties, conventions, standards and norms don't matter. Washington rules alone apply. Might v. right reflects them.

Obama's proxy war on Syria rages without end. Events in Ukraine reflect US-led NATO's drive East. Co-opting it into the Atlantic Alliance ensures encroaching on Russia's entire Western flank. US military strength on its borders cuts it off from Europe. Marginalizing, isolating and weakening it at the same time.

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