Paul Craig Roberts

The aggressive and mindless stance that Washington’s warmongers have taken toward Russia and China have shattered the accomplishment of Reagan and Gorbachev.

Reagan and Gorbachev ended the cold war and removed the threat of nuclear armageddon. Now the neocons, the US budget-dependent (taxpayer dependent) US military/security complex, and the US politicians dependent on campaign funds from the military/security complex have resurrected the nuclear threat.

The corrupt and duplicitous Clinton regime broke the agreement that the George H.W. Bush administration gave Moscow in 1990. In exchange for Moscow permitting a reunified Germany to be a NATO member, Washington agreed that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. Gorbachev, US Secretary of State James Baker, US ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, and declassified documents all testify to the fact that Moscow was assured that there would be no expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1999 President Bill Clinton made a liar of the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The corrupt Clinton brought Poland, Hungary, and the newly formed Czech Republic into NATO. President George W. Bush also made a liar out of his father, George H.W. Bush, and his father’s trusted Secretary of State, James Baker. “Dubya,” as the fool and drunkard is known, brought Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania into NATO in 2004. The corrupt and hopeless Obama regime added Albania and Croatia in 2009. — In other words, over the past 21 years three two-term US presidents have taught Moscow that the word of the US government is worthless.

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Finian Cunningham

Coup plotters Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt greet the so-
called «President of Ukraine», Petro Poroshenko, in Warsaw.

In an ominous sign that the war in Ukraine is set to further escalate, US state department official Victoria Nuland arrived in Kiev where she met with senior members of the Western-backed regime.

In recent days the ceasefire brokered on September 5 has come under intense pressure as Kiev military forces have stepped up their barrage of the eastern city of Donetsk, with several civilian casualties reported almost on a daily basis.

As civilian homes burn in Donetsk, the Kiev regime has also begun openly talking about resuming its war footing by «raising combat readiness» and mobilising new army units toward the eastern Donbass regions, where it is trying to suppress a pro-independence movement in the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

For the past month, the Kiev regime has been talking out of both sides of its mouth. At times it has been declaring commitment to a ceasefire brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At other times, hardliners in the regime have been warning that there was no such truce in practice, and that it was on the verge of an all-out war with Russia.

All the while, the putative ceasefire has been in tatters largely because Kiev’s forces have refused to withdraw from the conflict lines and continued to shell civilians centres.

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Stephen Lendman

Conflict continues. Peace is a convenient illusion. Fascists don't wage wars to quit. Washington manipulates events destructively. It uses its installed stooge government to solidify unchallenged control over Ukraine.

Straightaway after assuming power, oligarch president Petro Poroshenko said:

"The first steps that we will take at the beginning of our presidential term should be focused on stopping the war, to put an end to this chaos and bring peace to a united Ukraine."

Days later he promised to crush

"pro-Russian separatist war being waged against our country." "We will end this terror," he said. "The anti-terrorist operation has finally just truly begun."

Washington offers support, encouragement and military aid. Poroshenko promised no civilian attacks. He willfully unleashed Kiev forces against them. He wrongfully blames Russia for Kiev crimes. He shamelessly accused Southeastern Ukrainian freedom fighters for earlier regime ceasefire violations.

Previous articles called chances for durable peace virtually zero. One month after both sides accepted ceasefire terms, intermittent conflict persists daily. Shelling of Donetsk continues. Residents say it never stopped.

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Patrick Martin

Speaking to students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Forum Thursday, US Vice President Joseph Biden committed what the US media characterizes as a “gaffe.” In other words, he told an embarrassing truth about US government policy, one that is usually obfuscated in the remarks of government officials and the commentaries of media pundits.

Asked about US policy in Syria, Biden touched on the dirty secret of the current US-led war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS (or ISIL as the Obama administration terms it) is essentially the creation of the United States and its allies who fomented civil war in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Referring to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Biden said,

“They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad—except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

“Now you think I’m exaggerating,” he continued, to emphasize his point. “Take a look! Where did all of this go?” Biden claimed that the US opposed arming these al Qaeda-linked groups, which included ISIS, adding, “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

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Henry Makow

We revisit "The Col. House Report" 1919 which demonstrates that almost 100 years ago, the United States already was a colony of the "Crown" i.e. the Masonic Jewish banking cartel headquartered in London.

As Col. House outlines the plot to return the US to full "British" control, under the guise of the League of Nations, he describes a "system of thought control" that today is stronger than ever. Hardly a day goes by without a new article blaming the "United States" or "Israel" for the woes of the world.

The power of these countries is analogous to how Caroll Quigley describes the power of Communist Jews in the FDR era. He wrote, "the power that these energetic left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie." (Tragedy and Hope, p.954)

In my review of "The Red Dragon" in 2007, I presented the hypothesis that the major imperial power in the world is the world central banking cartel. Because it creates money out of nothing, it wants to buy everything of real value that it can. Hiding behind the mask of British, American, French or Japanese imperialism, or Nazism, Zionism, Communism, etc. essentially the same people —Illuminati Jewish bankers and their Freemason collaborators— instigate and finance all wars, and profit from them, at the expense of humanity.

The underlying agenda expressed in the The Protocols of Zion is "to undermine all collective forces not our own" by which they mean all nations, races, religions and family. They intend to sow chaos until an exasperated and exhausted humanity succumbs to their world "super government."

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Richard Edmondson/Nahida Izzat

Screen capture from Chabad website

Nahida at Poetry for Palestine has posted a rather remarkable article extensively documenting Jewish hatred of Gentiles, as expressed on certain Jewish websites.

We often hear of “anti-Semitism” as being this terrible problem that supposedly is on the rise and that imperils Jews the world over–and in certain countries (France comes to mind especially) you can even get thrown in jail for making statements perceived as being too “anti-Semitic.”

But never do we hear about “anti-Gentilism” (which is the term Nahida coins), either in terms of condemnations of it, or otherwise, something which qualifies as a rather perverse incongruity since Jewish hatred for Gentiles seems to be a problem at least as bad, if not far worse, than the converse. I say this because not only is anti-Gentilism apparently quite widespread in the Jewish community, but it seems for the most part to be openly and blatantly expressed–by individuals and even by “respected” organizations such as Chabad–without anyone ever publicly calling them out on it.

What this boils down to on a practical level is that Gentiles can be fired from their jobs, or denied tenure, on the basis of angry or negative comments about Jews, but that the same standard does not apply when Jews express malice or distaste for Gentiles. The hostility can even reach the point of advocating, or at least justifying, the murder of Gentiles, with the offender suffering little in the way of opprobrium or retribution.

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Paul Craig Roberts

It is amazing how the government manages to continue selling Brooklyn Bridges to a gullible public. Americans buy wars they don’t need and economic recoveries that do not exist.

The best investment in America is a highly leveraged fund that invests only in large cap companies that are buying back their own stocks. Many of the firms repurchasing their stocks are borrowing in order to push up their stock prices, executive “performance bonuses,” and shareholders’ capital gains. The debt incurred will have to be serviced by future earnings. This is not a picture of capitalism that is driving the economy by investment.

Neither is consumer spending driving the economy. The US Census Bureau’s 2013 Income and Poverty Report concludes that in 2013 real median household income was 8 percent below the amount in 2007, the year prior to the 2008 recession and has declined to the level in 1994, two decades ago! Even though real household income has not regained the pre-recession level and has declined to the level 20 years ago, the government and financial press claim that the economy has been in recovery since June 2009.

Neither is an increase in consumer debt driving the economy. The only growth in personal debt is in student loans.

Real retail sales (corrected with a non-rigged measure of inflation) remain at the level of the bottom of the recession in 2009. Macy’s , J.C. Penny’s, and Sears store closings are further evidence of the lack of retail sales growth, as is the fact that two of the three dollar store chains are in trouble. Walmart’s sales are declining.

The basis of auto sales hype is subprime loans and leases taken by those who cannot qualify for a loan to purchase.

Housing starts remain far below the pre-recession level, which is not surprising when available jobs are part-time with no benefits. Such jobs cannot support the formation of households and purchase of homes.

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Michael Krieger

Some of the most memorable moments of my tabloid-filled youth consisted of watching Geraldo Rivera interviewing and confronting Neo-Nazis and racists both in his studio and on the streets. Often times, these heated encounters resulted in brawls such as the one in this video, which has over 600,000 views on YouTube.

Geraldo and many others gave “a voice” to countless hateful groups on a regular basis throughout my youth, and millions of my fellow Americans saw them and were exposed to their unenlightened and pathetic ideology. This didn’t result in hordes of youth turning to violent extremism or the beginning of a Fourth Reich. Rather, what these interviews successfully did was expose the idiocy of these groups and make them even more isolated than they were before. That is how things work in a functioning free society. You aren’t afraid of ideas, you exchange them.

On Friday, I woke up to headlines proclaiming that David Cameron had called for a criminalization of “non-violent extremism” during a speech at the UN. I thought this could be a good topic for a post, but after watching it, I decided to focus on something else. At the time, I figured it was just a politician spouting stupid nonsense as usual. It wasn’t until today that I realized his “war on free speech” was about to become a key platform of Conservative Party policy in the UK. We learn from the Guardian that:

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Shamus Cooke

Sometimes bad ideas die slowly. It was only one year ago that Obama announced he would bomb the Syrian government, only to change his mind at the last minute. Now the same fetid war talk is sprouting fresh roots in the ever-fertile U.S. military. Various media outlets reported that Obama might “enforce a no fly zone in Syria to protect civilians from the Syrian government.”

This just weeks after the U.S. public was told that ISIS was the reason the U.S. military was now in Syria. The 2014 media sound bites mimic the 2013 scare tactics, copying the “humanitarian motives” behind the push towards war with the Syrian government. For example, in 2013 The New York Times blandly discussed the “no fly zone” option:

“To establish buffer zones to protect parts of Turkey or Jordan to provide safe havens for Syrian rebels and a base for delivering humanitarian assistance would require imposing a limited no-fly zone and deploying thousands of American ground forces.”

Fast forward to September 27th 2014, where The New York Times published an article called, “U.S. Considers a No-Fly Zone to Protect Civilians From Airstrikes by Syria ,” where we read:

“The Obama administration has not ruled out establishing a no-fly zone over northeastern Syria to protect civilians from airstrikes by the Syrian government…Creating a buffer, or no-fly zone, would require warplanes to disable the Syrian government’s air defense system through airstrikes.”

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Nikolai Bobkin

The battle flag is raised and waving. The United States has launched an air campaign against the Islamic State delivering strikes in Iraq and Syria. It is done without the permission of the Syrian government and the United Nations Security Council. There were allegations on the part of Russia and Iran that the final objective of the US-initiated operation was the elimination of Syrian infrastructure. The concern Moscow and Tehran have expressed appears to be justified.

Rear Admiral John Kirby, the spokesman of US Defense Department, reported that the US aviation hit 12 oil installations on Syrian soil that were supposedly under the Islamic State control. The Admiral said more similar strikes are planned. On June 25, 2011 a memorandum of understanding on the construction of Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline was signed in Bushehr. And the unrest in Syria went on the rise right after this agreement was concluded. They are right saying the war waged by the US against the government of Bashar Assad is a war for oil and gas. Damascus was added to the list of US enemies in 2009 when Assad rejected the proposal to take part in the construction of US-sponsored Qatar-Europe pipeline going through the Syrian territory. Instead Syria preferred to strike a deal with Iran on building a gas route going across Iraq to the Mediterranean shore. Back then Henry Kissinger made his frank admittance pronouncing the phrase to become famous afterwards, «oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs».

The creation of caliphate on the territory of Iraq and Syria will make US (ExxonMobil Corporation) and British (BP è Royal Dutch Shell) oil producing companies suffer losses in Iraq and lose access to Syrian hydrocarbons (after the regime change in Damascus as Americans apply efforts to topple the Syrian government).

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Robert Barsocchini

Throughout history, as the various empires use overpowering ultra-violence to achieve domination over and profit from smaller, weaker groups, the empires have driven their victims deeper and deeper into their own extremism, as the victims try to maintain motivation for their usually hopeless resistance efforts.

Essayist Dan Sanchez here uses history to help us take a much-needed look in the mirror as we continue to look down our noses at smaller groups (that haven’t done a fraction of what we’ve done) and say they’re worse and we’re better (though, conveniently, we’re also better than every other group, too, in our fantasy world).

He gives the examples of the “Jewish Intifadas against the Greeks and Romans”, documenting how Jews were driven deeper and deeper into religious fundamentalism and extremism as they tried to resist the disgusting onslaughts of the Greek and Roman empires.

Sanchez also invites us to “imagine how Americans would respond if another country ever did to America what the U.S. government does to Muslim countries on a routine basis.”

The obvious response from US citizens “would be an armed insurgency” that would be “deeply Christian in character, and the more desperate the struggle became, the more dominant would be its religious aspects, and especially its most radically religious aspects.”

This is because resisting the overwhelming numbers and force of an empire, like ours, requires “the trans-mundane motivations and existential consolations that only religion can offer”. Some of the resistance, he points out, “may come to match and even surpass the evils of [the] dominators, as ISIS and Al Qaeda may be said to have done”.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Hong Kong: Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government

Ming Chun Tang in the alternative media CounterPunch says that the protests are against the neoliberal economic policies that are destroying the prospects of everyone but the one percent. In other words, the protests are akin to the American occupy movement.

Another explanation is that once again, as in Kiev, gullible westernized students have been organized by the CIA and US-financed NGOs to take to the streets in hopes that the protests will spread from Hong Kong to other Chinese cities. The Chinese, like the Russians, have been extremely careless in permitting Washington to operate within their countries and to develop fifth columns.

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Kevin Barrett

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's first Chief of Staff – who also served as Obama's Israeli Mossad handler – famously said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

Individuals, groups, whole industries, even nations sometimes take advantage of crises and catastrophes. Big bankers, for example, love war because it forces governments to borrow vast sums of money at compound interest. Arms manufacturers also make huge profits. And the big government always gets bigger during wartime as it confiscates people's wealth and scales back their rights.

The current ISIL crisis is making certain people very rich. According to LiveLeak.com the US government is spending 200 million dollars per week to bomb Iraq and Syria. If the overall cost of the anti-ISIL campaign reaches its $500 billion projection, LiveLeak estimates that the US would be spending $30 million dollars per member of ISIL. It might be cheaper to simply pay them $20 million each to simply go away.

But isn't just bankers, military-industrial complexes, and governments that exploit international crises? One group, above all, has proven its mastery at profiting from crisis: The Zionist movement and "Israel."

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