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This week on Behind the Headlines, we're discussing 'pipeline-istan', the economic battle between the West and Russia over who supplies Europe with its energy needs. Putin recently upset the EU by cancelling the planned South Stream Russian natural gas pipeline via Bulgaria... and replacing it with an alternative route to Turkey, which could possibly go from there into Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. While this development came as a surprise to some, it's actually part of a decades-old issue that reappears in different guises: the US considers Europe to be its own, therefore Russian 'invasions', even in the form of peaceful trade deals, must be kept minimal.

Running Time: 02:17:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Niall: Hello and welcome to Behind the Headlines, our new show name for this regular Sunday SOTT Radio network show. I'm Niall Bradley, my co-host as usual, Joe Quinn.

Joe: Hi there.

Niall: And joining us again Juliana Barembuem.

Juliana: Hello.

Niall: Editor at SOTT.net. In case anyone's not aware, we are now doing a second show, rather there's going to be a second show every Saturday on our newly called SOTT Radio network. Its maiden broadcast was yesterday, it's now archived as usual in the same location on the SOTT.net Blog Talk Radio page. This will be a weekly Saturday show to run in parallel with our regular Sunday show. The difference being there's going to be a separate crew, the host will be SOTT.net editor Harrison Koehli and some of his people who are also SOTT.net editors, and they're going be doing a regular weekly Saturday show so make sure you tune in and check them out. Whereas we're going to be Behind the Headlines going forwards, they're going be doing the Truth Perspective Show.

Joe: Yes, exactly. We're just expanding our operational bit and we plan to have to other shows on our network in coming weeks on different topics. Maybe on specific topics like health, diet, psychology all that kind of stuff all the good stuff and the bad stuff. Look out for some new shows coming your way with new and exciting guests and hosts of course.

Niall: Yeah, there could even be new shows in different languages in sometime the New Year.

Juliana: We've already started with the Spanish SOTT radio show, but it's not being broadcasted yet on Blog Talk Radio though, we're working on it. If any listener has any ideas about any things they'd like to listen to us talk about or fun idea's for shows and guests, feel free to post them on the chat and we'll make it happen.

Niall: Great. Well for the last couple of weeks on this show, we've interviewed some guests that talked about very interesting things but it's good to get back to this week to looking at what's going in out there. Deconstructing some of the unbelievable lies we're told everyday about what it is we're supposed to be seeing, whether its political developments, scientific developments, just even the weather. You'd think something as simple as reporting the weather would be easy to tell you, but no they neglect to tell you certain things about it and as a result people are misinformed about the simplest things.

To get a start on this week, I thought the big, big news recently would have to be this 'switcheroo in pipelineistan', as Pepe Escobar calls it. For some decades now, the European Union has been negotiating with Russia to build an alternative 'South Stream' pipeline, as opposed to the existing 'North Stream' pipeline and transport of Russian gas to meet some third of Europe's energy supply. The Europeans have a funny way of doing business; they denigrated it at every turn and made it very difficult for it to go through; obstacles here, there and everywhere. They claim that Russia failed to meet its own rules, namely that as owner of the gas being supplied to Europe, Russia could not also be majority owner of the actual pipeline structure.

But that's not really what's going on here. This goes back to the 90s and it actually is no surprise. It's the same old energy issues that go back to earlier decades. What's really going on is that the European elites, as much as the US, let's say, are adamant, or they're upset at least. They're upset that Russia's gas is state-owned. They wanted the gas to be privately owned, in another words to be available on the market for purchase so that their own oligarchs in the West could purchase ownership rights to the gas, and in that way access Russian gas. So they're not happy with the way the Russians do business, which is, essentially, they keep things under their own control. That's the old gripe, "Oh but Russia's annexed Crimea, therefore on principle we are..." No, that's just nonsense, that's just for mass consumption. What they're really griping about is that they don't have actual ownership of Russia's gas. Putin called their bluff, "Ok if you really, really don't want to do a trade deal with us, fine," and he pulled the plug on South Stream. I think they were actually surprised by this move. You would think after 10 years of not really wanting to make the trade deal they would just let it go but this came as a shock because Europe thought it had a good thing going because it has this wedge, this card over Moscow, but Moscow just cashed it in because it knows that really, it holds this card over Europe.

It was quite a shock because not only did Russia just announce that South Stream is cancelled, they only did it having secured an alternative route, and a trade gas deal with Turkey. Oh, but the first thing is that Turkey, well once you're in Turkey you're looking at Syria and the Middle East and there's a lot more going on here. Turkey is basically involved in the war with its neighbour and the neighbour is an ally of Russia. If it weren't for Russia last year, Syria would by now have been carpet-bombed, it would have had 'the Iraq treatment', and so you have a very interesting situation where a country that's similar to Ukraine actually, in the sense that its geography places it at the mid-way point between east and west. This country has switched its compass if you like to the East; to Russia.

I think before long we could see a domino effect where there's a whole string of other trade deals with other countries in the Caucasus and that region. Countries in the Caucasus and further south into the Middle East are doing a similar swinging of their compass towards Moscow and away from the West. We're not there yet but as somebody wrote in a recent SOTT article, I think it's Alexander Mercouris, he's a London journalist and he said '"Everything else before this, this year was relatively weak. This single action alone, the 45 billion dollar gas deal going to Turkey instead of to Europe is the single biggest sanction between all parties so far this year. All the others have a lesser value to either Europe or to Russia than this one". I'm like, "bring it on! What's next?"

Juliana: Well, let me ask you something because reading this news about Turkey and this new deal with Russia, economically speaking you can see its very sound for Russia because actually they're going to get to sell more gas than they would have and the southern European countries are going suffer for it as I understand, but that's the economical part. Then just weeks ago we keep hearing reports of Turkey, ISIS, sending ISIS to Syria. I mean what is the role of Turkey in all of this? That's what I'm trying to get at and is it shifting? Are we seeing a major shift in allies here? Because on the one hand you get this supposed enemy and at the same time Turkey is being rejected by the European Union or prevented from joining etc. This could be like "Well you don't want me, I'll go on the other side."

But at the same as this happened we saw Bashar Al-Assad talking, I think it was for the first time this year. He had been completely silent and there was another person, I think it was the secretary; I can't remember what her role is but Assad made very direct claims and assertions and he's right in what he said. He said that terrorism in Syria is sponsored by the US pretty much. But to me it was kind of impressive that he finally would have a voice at the same time as Russia is talking with Syria and Russia's going to be this mediator between the Syrian government and the opposition. There's all these things going on and suddenly it seems like Syria suddenly got a voice finally, I kept waiting for Assad to say something. Does the Turkish thing have something to do with it you think?

Niall: Well part of the problem is that someone like Assad has so little reception, we don't hear what's going on in Syria from his perspective, he doesn't get a platform. He did earlier on when this began, he was being interviewed on CNN and other Western media and his statements were being reported. I did wonder the same thing as you, where does Assad stand since this ISIS thing blew up in June this year, or what does he have to say? And you have to dig, but you find that he has said "We gave no permission for US air strikes in our country, we regard this as an infringement on our sovereignty." But they can just ignore him basically.

Where does he stand on this? You see Turkey is up to its neck in what's going on in Syria. It's not as clear cut as, "Turkey is now with us or against us as a NATO member." To join NATO, once you sign the papers that say you're in NATO, that's just a formality. Then there's a whole process that goes back years before that; even decades. It's a bit like joining the EU in fact, which is similar to when you accept an IMF loan, you need to make 'structural conditionalities'. Well, when it comes to the financial world it's a lot more abstract. You change your books, you change the way you do business. But when it comes to NATO, we had, let's call him a NATO expert, on our show - the guy who does the 'Stop NATO' website [Rick Rizoff]. His name escapes me but anyway he knows all the ins and outs on NATO and how it works. They spend about 10 years literally changing the infrastructure of a country to make it technologically compatible with Western, particularly US, arms manufactures and IT systems. What do I mean by that? The country will have a security system, including their computer networks; they all need to be remodelled, rebuilt and integrated with the NATO structure. So by the time you sign you're literally inside an interlocking web, and how easy is that to control from elsewhere, right? So you're in it!

Turkey is in this position where if they were serious about breaking from NATO, for example, they would have a seriously steep hill to climb, because it's far easier for someone from the outside, working from somewhere else within that integrated network, to take control of it because they know about it because they gave it to you. I'm just talking about technology there. Then there's personnel. Turkeys current government is elected yes, but I think the last two coup d'états in Turkey in the 80's and early 90's were both essentially take-overs by its military, guys who were trained at West Point in the US. They are US military people, just like on the NGO level in Ukraine, there's certain people who have power now who would have been trained in George Soros Universities as kids, as teenagers or whatever. Then they got their masters in some other institution and then they worked in a Western bank and next thing you know they're back in Kiev. They're 'Ukrainian nationals' but they're complete products of a system that is trying to absorb control of the country.

Turkey is very, very deep in this and I suspect it's in for some serious trouble. Last year when there were protests throughout Turkey, the spark that set off mass demonstrations in Turkey, it was called Occupy Gezi Park or something in Istanbul. I was supporting the protestors because like everyone else I assumed there was injustice - and there is, there's injustice everywhere; Turkey too. But their then Prime Minister, Erdogan, says something that made me go, 'hang on a minute.' He said these protests are being funded from abroad, they're being coordinated from abroad and he said "Just like..." Well he didn't say Syria but he could have. They would have natural reasons to have a common point, a common cause there. He said "Just in like Brazil." And there's a good reason now for suspecting that those protests were whipped up from without; those mass demonstrations in Brazil.

I think Turkey has made a bold move... maybe. In terms of acting, just when you're thinking of the pure interest of a country, it makes more sense to make this move. It may actually be trying to also de-escalate from its involvement in Syria; it's very hard to tell. They did issue a statement recently, about 2 weeks ago, saying that in the last 2 months, they have stopped over 7000 people, mainly from, they said, France and Belgium. From what? From trying to enter Syria via Turkey, and there were also other reports of Austrian, Swedish and even American teenagers and 20-somethings being stopped by the Turks and sent home. Then you have Joe Biden and other political people in the US and Europe making noises that suggest that they're not happy with the way Turkey is "dealing with the ISIS situation", that it may be trying to actually deal with it. They're not supposed to do it, they're supposed to facilitate it, to pretend in public that they're dealing with it, but actually it's a cover for other things like removing Assad.

Juliana: It's going to be interesting which way it goes because on the one hand you're saying basically we can consider Turkey as a US puppet but on the other hand, is it making it owns decisions now? Is it purely economical? Is it because they don't want to be used as a scapegoat later on? You got a political thing going on and almost an opposite one economically speaking and then this thing where "well are they helping ISIS are they not? Are they controlling it or are they not?"

Niall: Let's assume that they can see to some extent what we're seeing. Or maybe they see more? Maybe they're smart and can see the writing on the wall, with respect to Ukraine, which is not far from them. At the level of basic economics, it was too tempting because you see, already 60% of Turkey's gas needs are supplied from Russia. I think so, 50 or 60%. It's not that they needed more energy. What was the really nice bait for Turkey in this is that the Russians said "Ok, we just send the pipeline to you and forget all this complicated 'South Stream to Bulgaria and the EU' politics: instead of trying to then split the pipeline in-between small, different Balkan and European countries, we just do business with Turkey. We just send the pipeline to you and then you do with it what you will". And as a suggestion, which is also rife with interesting possibilities, the Turks could, on their border somewhere with Greece, build a terminal or hub or a point of sale basically with which to supply Mediterranean countries in the EU.

Joe: Well that's obviously the plan. The point in putting a pipeline through Turkey, as you just said, is Turkey doesn't need a lot of gas from Russia. So the point is to route it through Turkey as opposed to under the Black Sea and into Bulgaria and then continue to land based pipelines through Eastern Europe then into Western Europe. The alternative, since the EU has been acting like such a bunch of idiots, at the behest of the US over the sanctions on Russia and putting pressure on Bulgaria which was the first land fall after the Black Sea for this pipeline, was putting the pressure on Bulgaria not to go ahead with the plan. Russia just said "Ok we'll do the same thing", because the bottom line is that this pipeline was planned long ago based on the need for Russian gas in Eastern European countries; that need hasn't gone away.

The idea now is that the pipeline will simply go through Turkey and go to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey at which point it will be made available to European countries via boat so its calling their bluff because it's a ridiculous situation because its so short sighted that the EU and their US taskmasters couldn't have seen that Russia would do this. The idea was the EU said "No, we're going to stop your south stream, we're going to put pressure on Bulgaria and other Eastern Europeans nations to stop this process, this Russian process because Russia needs to sell its gas and it needs to use European countries to transit that gas, to sell the gas to European countries and therefore we have control over it."

It's all about control essentially, that's what Niall was saying earlier on, that's what's pissing off not just the EU but mainly the US that Russian gas is Russian and is sold primarily for profits that go to the Russian state and the Russian people. So they just called their bluff and said "Ok, you don't want it running through your countries, we'll do a deal with Turkey and run it through Turkey and then we'll just make it available at the coast of Turkey which is in the Mediterranean and anybody who wants it can buy it from there. I.e. none of your Eastern European countries in the EU, Bulgaria etc. will be getting the transit money or transit profits from having the pipeline over your country and you'll have no control over it and you have to buy it at whatever price we decide you're going buy it at, at market price." Obviously Russia has to set it at a fair price to make people buy it.

Juliana: But then Turkey is entitled to make a profit too.

Joe: Well Turkey gives France its profits essentially and cements a strategic partnership with or increases the partnership between Russia and Turkey much more. Turkey's a NATO country. Turkey isn't a part of the EU and part of the reason I think that Turkey went ahead and did this was because there's a lot of bad feeling in Turkey and there has been bad feeling for a long time in Turkey, at least on the political level and also to whatever extent amongst the population there's a bad feeling towards the EU because Turkey has been a potential member of the EU for 50 years and they delayed it and delayed it and delayed it and it's still not a EU member. It has various associative status but the EU has repeatedly put off Turkish membership of the EU.

Juliana: Do you think that Turkey did this partly because this would make them more interesting to the EU? Or more of a plausible candidate? The fact that their economy will do better or they actual depend on Turkey they can more easily strike deals and whatever?

Joe: No, it appears to be Turkey saying that they're tired of waiting and they're not interested and they understand that the EU is fundamentally a white Caucasian elitist entity, like the USA. And that the main reason that they don't want Turkey to be a part of the EU is because Turkey is full of Muslims, 100 and something million of them.

So Turkey is very much, from an elitist western European and US perspective, Turkey is effectively the Middle East and its full of Muslims and it's no different from Syria or any other country in the Middle East and it's not worthy therefore to be a part of the EU and there's all sorts of cultural and obviously religious and demographic problems that bureaucrats in the EU foresee in terms of Turkey ever being an actual part of the EU. Of course that's ignoring the fact that there are millions of Turkish people working in the EU. They're allowed to come and work in the EU and work as slaves effectively in the EU but the EU bureaucracy will not allow full Turkish membership of the EU for racist reasons and Turkey has been waiting, like I said for 50 years for that to happen and they've given up waiting and Erdogan I think has mentioned that previously in recent years, that he wasn't interested. He's only going to wait so long and obviously the geopolitical chess board is changing right now and that's not working in favour of the west or of the EU or the US because Russia is reasserting itself and establishing very definite economic relationships with countries in its sphere of influence and its asserting its rights to have those relationships as we've seen in Ukraine and in other Caucasus regions and also in Eastern European regions; in Moldova and now Turkey.

Turkey is effectively in Russia's backyard, Crimea is now a part of Russia and it's about 200-300km across the Black Sea and then you're in Turkey. So it's effectively on Russia's doorstep. Turkey is naturally a Russian partner, especially in the context of the EU dissing them for so long.

Juliana: Soon to be a Chinese partner too because they are about to join this Asian high cooperation organisation too?

Niall: Who, Turkey?

Juliana: Turkey yeah.

Niall: About to?

Juliana: Well yeah.

Niall: To what extent?

Juliana: From what I've read on one of our articles, it says it's on the verge of becoming a full member.

Niall: Wow, that's pretty big. Just to explain, the SCO, the Chinese 'Shanghai Cooperation Organisation', from statements by the Russians and Chinese, they foresee the SCO headquarters in Shanghai as being the future New York. By that I mean it would be the future headquarters of any world UN body.

Joe: Well it's interesting to see how this was spun, there was a very muted response from European, sorry, 'fuck the EU!' central in Brussels about the...

Niall: Joseph!

Joe: They're's not my words; I'm quoting the honourable Victoria Nuland of the US State Department. They didn't say very much about it, obviously it seems they were shocked to some extent by Russia just saying "Ok south stream, well we don't want to go through Bulgaria anyway, we're going to use Turkey." But Eastern European countries, Bulgaria in particular and other Balkan states who were going to profit from this pipeline were quite angry about it and they did not know anything about it, they were not consulted beforehand. Russia just announced it unilaterally so it was a surprise for everybody.

Of course when you can look then at their response in the US, there was lots of crowing and gloating by different people, John McCain included, saying that this was a blow to Russia and Russia had been set back and blah, blah, blah. It's very interesting when you just compare those 2 reactions to it, the European reaction: muted or angry and the US reaction: gloating and crowing about this and seeing it as a blow or an economic setback for Russia.

Whereas people in the EU tend to see it as an economic setback for them. The US, let's just reconfirm what's actually going on here which is that the US is not exposed in anyway by anything that is forcing and manipulating and blackmailing European countries to do in terms of sanctions against Russia. All of the pain is being felt in the EU at the behest of the US which feels no pain effectively from any sanctions and it's just amazing that we've tried to talk about it before and I think when you say blackmail you say a lot about why this bizarre, irrational situation continues to play out where the EU appears to just enjoy shooting itself in the foot and effectively slowly destroying European economies and ultimately improvising European peoples simply to fulfil some kind of bizarre ideological agenda. Where it's like "No, we're anti-Russian therefore Russia's is not allowed to do anything, we're not doing business with Russia, we're not playing ball with Russia, we're not doing anything Russian, Russia's evil and if we have to shoot ourselves in the foot and the face, in the leg or whatever other body part we will do that just to fulfil our irrational bloody minded hatred of Russia", that doesn't make sense.

Obviously these people in the EU are interested in maintaining their position of power over the people and they like the economies to be strong etc. because they get more money as a result of that and they get to stay in power. So why would they be doing that? Well blackmail must be playing a major part in it because it's all being directed from Washington; Washington has nothing to lose and everything to gain and it doesn't even care if by its manipulation and blackmailing of European leaders, if it destroys European economies it's all to the good as far as they're concerned, as long as Russia suffers.

So that's where the bizarre and ridiculous, irrational and ideological drive to do all of this comes from. It comes from Washington and it can just go ahead and do that because it doesn't suffer. Usually if you run around cutting off your nose to spite your face and shooting yourself in the foot, usually you say "Ok I'm not going to do this anymore its hurting me as much as its hurting anybody else, or more than its hurting anybody else", so you stop. You see it amongst mad people but not supposedly sane or rational people. But we see it happening in Europe, but it's actually happening from Washington and they can do that because they don't suffer as a result of what the EU does.

Juliana: There is also a split right? Because I haven't looked at the map but the north stream basically makes it so that Brussels is not affected by it right? It's going to be the southern and the Mediterranean that are most affected and then northern Europe will be pretty safe i.e. the guys in Belgium.

Joe: Well the north stream goes to Germany. That was a pipeline that was agreed several years ago between the Germans and the Russians when everything was a bit rosier and relationships were better, but Germany obviously is the power house of the EU. It's all EU bureaucratic level where supposedly they're a responsible EU country. So just because Germany may be ok to some extent for gas supplies, it has to put up a show of being concerned about all of its little children within the EU.

Niall: At the end of the day, Brussels is really just like a messenger boy or an errand boy for Washington. You get a glimpse of this when John Idiot McCain gets on the phone to Brussels in June and says "I want you to tell"; literally this is what happened: "I want you to tell your man in Bulgaria that south stream is not going ahead in his country". And then they did make a statement, promptly the next day the Bulgarian government said it would not happen. Now at some point reality hit them and recently and Bulgarians went, 'Well, maybe we'll still work at this... 10 year process of maybe, maybe, maybe...' But all it took was McCain to get on the phone and somebody then made a statement on behalf of the Bulgarian people, "we are not doing it." This is Europe's poorest country, to whom 4 billion euros in transit fees would have been very nice thank you.

Joe: It's unfortunate that European countries, particularly Eastern European countries are only finding out a bit late in the game what EU membership really means. EU membership means being part of an EU super-state kind of like the United States of Europe that is controlled from Brussels by a bunch of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Niall: And Catholics.

Joe: Well they are Catholics as well, bureaucrats who are just power mad, elite type people but they are subservient to the dictates of Washington. Eastern European countries who all joined the EU in the past number of years are only finding out now that they don't really have any sovereignty when they joined the EU. They gave up their sovereignty and at that point when they joined they became vassal States of the Anglo American or American empire because they're all entirely dependent from an economic point of view. Particularly smaller eastern European states are all entirely dependent on the EU. The economies aren't dependent on the EU and the EU HQ in Brussels can exert a lot of pressure, much more pressure than Russia could exert for example and that's why you're seeing them all fall in line because they have sold their souls to the EU and the EU now controls them.

The EU in turn is controlled by Washington. So they didn't realise it but they sold their souls to Washington and they are no longer sovereign states. They were no longer sovereign states as soon as they joined the EU and its only coming out now because Russia came on the scene and as far as exerting influence and they started pulling in the opposite direction and started making sense and started saying "let's do business, everybody gets on well, everybody gets a share of the pie etc. etc." And of course that makes sense to the average, not completely psychopathic politicians in these countries and they say "Yeah sure we'll do business with Russia".

Niall: Then they get the memo.

Joe: Then they go "what? I can't do... what do you mean I can't do business with ...what?" So the penny is dropping for all these people and it remains to be seen there's only one example of anybody really breaking ranks and that's Hungary and of course McCain has called the Hungarian president a dictator essentially, a new Hitler which that's what everybody is whenever they don't agree with you they're Hitler.

Niall: That's right, McCain spoke on the Senate floor this week and had a wee rant, he said Hungary's leader Viktor Orban is a "neo-fascist dictator cosying up to Putin". He was formally speaking to voice his complaints about certain appointees to ambassador positions by Obama. He says "I'm not against political appointees where somebody buys an ambassadorship at one of the US's provinces around the world. I understand how the game is played but Hungary is on the verge of..." this is beautiful, "...Hungary is on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a neo-fascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin and we're going to send Hollywood producer Colleen Bell producer of The Bold and the Beautiful as our ambassador there." (Laughter) Which is true, she is due to become the ambassador there.

Joe: That's one of those paid ambassadorships where we donate money to your favourite presidential candidate and if he gets to be president then he gives you an ambassadorship and it doesn't matter if you have any experience in international relations; well look at Sarah Palin!

Juliana: Well they fit the profile that they're good actors.

Joe: Exactly yeah. Now McCain needs to go back in that hole in Vietnam, he needs to go back in there and he needs to cool off for a while; really, put him in the hole!

Niall: I know he's an idiot and he says stupid things, but wherever he shows up or whatever he says something about, stuff happens. I'm not saying that's his having power, or his wishes having any weight, but rather that the messages he conveys for whoever he's an errand boy for...

Joe: But he obviously has some power and is still there working in the background. He's one of the gophers, but when you're a gopher for the elite in the US and running their errands for them, you're pretty high up.

Niall: He's like a roving ambassador.

Joe: Yeah, you're above presidential level or anything like that. You're in the know, you on the very select committees and you're really pushing policy in a particular way that has nothing to do with official policy. That's an example of the kind of calibre of person who rises to the top or rises close to the top in the US. You've got John McCain, Vladimir Putin actually described him pretty well, he said "Mr McCain fought in Vietnam. I think that he has had enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands". And he says "It must have been impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore" and he said "Mr McCain was captured and they kept him not just in prison but in a pit for several years, anyone would go nuts". That's a fairly accurate description of John McCain but it's also interesting that someone of that psychological profile was probably born a psychopath, but if he wasn't born a psychopath he soon developed a trait of one throughout his life and then he was cherry on the cake when he spent a few years in a pit in Vietnam.

Niall: Didn't something come out where his account of Vietnam from fellow POWs was trashed because they knew that he was a son of a senator himself.

Joe: Watered down, but anyway he's nuts basically. He's crazy, but when you're crazy you put that at the top of your resume when you are applying for a positions in American politics, "I'm completely bat shit crazy" and it really helps to get the job.

Juliana: Regarding the south stream, I got my favourite quote from him today, from this week. First he said "It was a big setback for Vladimir". He doesn't even call him Putin, and then he was all cheerful talking about how the US will step up to the plate now and give Europe all its natural gas. Yeah like that's going to happen in 2012 supposedly and then he says...

Joe: 2020.

Juliana: 2020, sorry. He said Bulgaria's decision not to allow the construction of the proposed south stream pipeline project.

Joe: Bulgaria's decision, yeah right.

Juliana: He is satisfied with it, good boys. "I'm glad our friends in Europe cancelled the pipeline that was going to go through Europe" he said, and then in a press release he stated that his personal efforts to urge the Bulgarian government to look toward Europe to secure its energy interests and refrain from working with Russia were successful and culminated with Russian president Vladimir Putin's decision to forego the project entirely therefore he should be congratulated for that.

Niall: Atta boy, McCain!

Joe: It's basically confirmed what we've been saying to date which is that it's effectively McCain speaking for the US government and the US power brokers saying that they're happy that the European Union has rejected a business opportunity to make a lot of money for the European Union. Obviously the European Union is not happy about that, who would be? Everybody likes money right? But the US is happy about it and they said it explicitly "We're happy that Bulgaria has decided it's cancelled."

Juliana: They're satisfied.

Joe: They're satisfied that they've decided to cancel the pipeline. But the pipeline promised hundreds and millions of dollars or euro's for the Bulgarian and other Eastern European economies. So are those other countries happy about that? No. So why is the US happy about it? Well apparently they have no shame in coming out that they are happy about it but it's quite clear, it's not like he's arguing that they were going to make a bad decision for themselves in their own interests. What he's saying is that they were going to make a good business decision and he's happy that they didn't because it serves the US interests of trying to screw over Russia and stop Russia from cementing economic ties with Eastern European countries or EU countries.

That's the last thing the US wants to see happen because the US is terrified of the EU slowly but surely waking up to the geopolitical reality which is it's on the Eurasia landmass and Russia's a big country. Russia's your main energy supplier and that's who you should go with. You should be friends with them. Instead of fuck the EU, fuck America because they're 5000 miles away across the ocean. Why are we beholden to these people? Well of course even the people in the EU are not unaware of that and all things being equal, you'll probably see real politics take hold over a course of a number of years, that's what would happen. You'd have Eurasian integration economic etc. integration and the reason it isn't happening is because the US has a certain percentage of high level politicians and bureaucrats in the EU by the cojones.

Juliana: And they're pretty insulting too. When any of those wackos talk they always avoid the topic of how it's affecting the EU. I mean like you don't count. There was Susan Rice the National security advisor psycho who said all cheerfully on Tuesday that "The news that Russia has pulled back from its south stream pipeline to southern Europe is indicative of the mounting cost that Russia's paying for its behaviour." Then she added "As a result of a major project which had been championed by Putin and the Russian government, it is now not likely to materialise when you look at where the Russian economy is in northern EU. It has suffered over the last year substantially as a result of sanctions and also as a result of declining oil prices and the combination is pretty powerful." First I want to see where Russia is really suffering.

Joe: Well Russia is suffering but it's not to the point where it's...

Juliana: Not the way she's trying to make it sound.

Joe: It's all just rhetoric and propaganda and reality creation. There was a project that wasn't just championed by Russia, it was probably championed by the EU and by European countries that were going to benefit from it but she conspicuously leaves that part of it out. This was merely some kind of a nefarious Russian agenda to sneak their pipeline into Europe and maybe smuggle some little green men in the pipes or something like that and invade Europe or that's the way it's been presented. Little green men in the form of billions of cubic feet of gas that would solidify ties between Europe and Russia. You have to deconstruct or translate everything that the US government or government representatives say about Russia, it's all in the context of: They're terrified of Russia and they hate Russia because they're afraid of them and they're afraid of them because Russia is a threat to their dominant position on the global stage and that's pretty much all it is.

Niall: A little bit more context on Hungary: The situation with Hungary isn't just that the original route of the pipeline would have ended there, no. It would have ended in Austria, it would have gone through Hungary. Something else that has been brokered in Hungary by Russia, well by both parties, is a massive network or just one nuclear plant that the Russian's would essentially build for Hungary. This is another layer that is spoken about less; we're talking about gas pipelines and oil. Let's talk about this nuclear power. There's a history when you go back to crisis decades ago of project after project to build nuclear stations in European countries and elsewhere that were axed by very, very deliberate manipulation. I heard it from Washington but who it was really coming from is the power brokers who have majority control of the world's oil. I say oil but they have the substantial valve they're the kind of people who can get onto Saudi Arabia and get them to drop the prices 40% in order to hurt Russia, these kind of people. So nuclear, I think they really, really fear nuclear because it would actually make obsolete their major valve on the control of everything on this planet.

Joe: Maybe not obsolete but it would reduce their control. One of the reasons France has some and may use its powers, its influence in this respect is, of any country in the world, France produces most of its electricity through nuclear power stations so it's less reliant on Russian gas and other European countries. And the US wants to make sure that other European countries don't go in the same direction because it frees them up essentially, it gives them a little bit more independence.

The next place to look really is Finland because Finland recently agreed a joint nuclear deal with Russia for Russia to build a nuclear power plant in Finland. It's like an 8.7 billion dollar agreement or deal. It's funny to see this all this is going on but then you see these countries doing business with Russia anyway. You should look to Finland in the coming weeks and months for pressure being put onto Finland to reject this kind of a deal because obviously it's an economic deal, it's a long term economic deal and its solidifies relationships between Finland and Russia and the problem with Finland is, is that getting Finland to renege in that deal is going to be very difficult because Finland relies on Russia for 100% of its gas supply. So Finland gets all of its gas from Russia, that's a serious bit of leverage that Russia has and it makes it very difficult for anybody to come in and try convince the Fins to stop doing business over nuclear deals with Russia because everybody knows that Russia they won't listen.

"Because you're not going to do business with us then we don't want to do business with you so we'll just shut up your gas." For Finland that's a serious problem, 100%. Is the US going to be riding in on their gas ships and filling everybody up in Europe who's - who in the right mind would rely on or the sense of responsibility or the sense of loyalty of the psychopaths in the US to actually make good on their promises? "We'll supply all your energy needs, just wait 10 years. It'll be a bit cold for a while but just stop buying Russian gas and we'll get there eventually, we promise." Yeah right. They don't give a shit about Russia, they don't give a shit about the EU, they only care about screwing over Russia and they only care about the EU to the extent that they can use the EU to screw over Russia, and the EU is meant to bend over and take it because "You're our slave", essentially, "We own you."

Niall: The idea that Russia is playing some game in order to dominate the countries and make them dependent for their energy needs...

Joe: That's the bullshit narrative.

Niall: I know.

Joe: Doing business means that you are the big fat psycho cats in the USA who own it all and just leave the scraps for other people where you rule supreme. Anybody coming in and taking a piece of the pie means less for you and they cannot conceive of such a possibility. They will not give it up, not one inch and it's not that they'd be giving up something to the detriment of the entire world or it would be some horrible thing for the countries or any countries, it's all about freedom and democracy; that's all bullshit.

It's about greed, unfettered greed but they simply would not give up the complete control they have over pretty much everything, or they think they have over everything. They are not willing to give it up. So it's not like there's some negative involved here. It's coming from the US position of extreme greed and corruption and them wanting to maintain that, and Russia casting the spectre of them having to give that up just on the basis of free trade. "Let's no one be too greedy here where we can all share the wealth amongst ourselves" and the US is like "whaaat? What the hell are you talking about?"

Niall: It's incomprehensible to them.

Joe: That's what Russia's proposing and the US portrays that in all the ways that it's been portraying it: Hitler; Russian Empire; Soviet Union; Communists are coming to get you. They come up with all sorts of bullshit scaremongering tactics simply trying to scare people into believing that that's what's actually happening and what's actually happening behind the scenes and what the US is actually scared of is equality, they hate equality. Why? Because they rule supreme, they own it all.

Niall: And they're challenged on it and their response is something along the lines of American exceptionalism, what the hell does that mean? They say they know what it means, they give some expression of it; they're chosen ones and screw the rest of you.

Joe: They're exceptional alright but not in the way they think.

Niall: It's so backwards.

Joe: Not in the way they say. They're exceptionally psychopathic, that's what America exceptionalism is all about. Anyway, there's been other stuff going on recently obviously since we've had a behind the headlines type show i.e. where we have another guest on and there's been the Ferguson shootings and Ferguson really set things off. Not Ferguson shooting sorry, this Ferguson grand jury result and the protests.

It really set things off it seems because in the past few weeks there's this rolling wave of protests going on around the US and many different countries. There's one going just today in Berkeley, the headlines are telling us rubber bullets and tear gas in Berkeley as police disperse #Eric Gardner and #Ferguson rally and these protests have been going on in various cities across the US all on the same theme of police brutality. It seems to have been ignited by Ferguson and the obvious miscarriage of justice which makes it clear that the narrative that the media and the US government tried to build up around the Ferguson protest was that it was just black communities, the local black community just essentially being a bunch of thugs and hoodlums, rioting and burning buildings and cars etc. Obviously, that's not all it is when the same thing spreads, the same protests continue on and spread around the US and it's not just black people protesting, there's a lot of ordinary white Americans of different backgrounds.

Niall: Well the students in Berkeley are.

Joe: Yeah absolutely. This is something that has touched a nerve not just among the black community in the US but also among a lot of people throughout the US who have a bit of a conscience and feel that it is necessary to stand up and I suppose stand with the black community, but they're also standing up for themselves because the police really are off the leash in the US. They're kind of flooded with either psychopaths or with extreme authoritarian types who just want to go out and beat heads and shoot people and force everybody to "respect my authority" and people are feeling it, not just the black people communities but everybody's feeling it and they feel like it's something that they need to stand up for and stand against and it's good to see.

Juliana: Yeah and these are big protests, 1000's of people 10/12 thousand in New York, it's not just a little group of people.

Joe: It's disgusting actually to see the way that it's portrayed, the extent of the problem in the US is far, far greater than anybody admits and of course the media plays it down and the government plays it down. It's been in the news for a couple of years now, it's been brought up again that the incarceration rate per 100,000 black males in the US is, depending on when you look at it in South Africa, its 3-5 times the level of incarceration of black males in South Africa during the apartheid regime.

So during the apartheid there was no secret made of the fact that blacks were second class citizens. Africans in South Africa were second class citizens. You would expect there to be incarceration rate there with particularly the male black South Africans but in the US its somewhere between 3 and 5 times the number of people of black African Americans who are put in prison by the US so if apartheid is a yard stick. Black people in the US are treated worse than blacks during apartheid in South Africa.

Niall: Joe, but Joe, this hurts my brain. Why? Because the presidents black.

Joe: Because freedom and democracy.

Niall: The president's black so everything's awesome.

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: Right?

Joe: Yeah but it's got nothing to do with it.

Niall: Actually about the president, he's been very quiet hasn't he? The outgoing attorney general holder, he is also half black I think. Between him and Obama, they've made a few statements about it and they've made a few moves to sort of deal with the situation. One of them was immediately after the grand jury and the restart of the recent round of protests/riots in Ferguson Missouri. It was that Obama declared/decreed or whatever that police officers would wear cameras so everything would be above board so to speak because everything could be seen whenever there's a call in police intervene in anything. I get the impression that Obama's not simply siding with the police state as a whole on this; I think he wishes he had more power to really do something about it. I don't think he is liking what he's seeing.

Joe: You reckon?

Niall: No, because some of the things he's said. I know saying and doing isn't the same thing when it comes to something like that but...

Joe: Do you think he has say those things because he's black? Just to keep people on his side?

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: It'd be bit of an egregious kind of slap in the face to all those black people all over the world from him if he, as a black president were to not say something nominally in support of his race. As people expect him to, he keeps them on side in that sense. It gives them some hope that there's still some accountability, we still have a black president. So it's a savvy move, a propaganda move for him to do that but I can't imagine that he gives a shit one way or another. In any real way.

Niall: One of the things he said was that this was not about race first and foremost, it was about police brutality and he used those terms. He's giving voice there to the protestors, they are protesting against police brutality.

Joe: It is about race, so he's full of shit. It's about police brutality and race. Police brutality of a racist slant which is not surprising. Any police state or agents of a police state or security forces in a police state which America is, tend to always pick on the minorities because minorities are marginalised. Usually they're the first target of storm trooper types. So if it's not about race, how do you explain the fact that a black male born in 2001 had a 32% chance of spending some portion of his life in prison while a white male born in the same year had a 6% chance? If it's not about race, how come in major American cities as many as 80% of young African American men have criminal records? If it's not about race, how come African Americans who use drugs are more than 4 times as likely to be incarcerated as whites who use drugs? And if it's not about race how come in 7 states African Americans constitute 80% or more of all drug offenders sent to prison?

Niall: I fold.

Juliana: I think Joe has a point here, I don't believe a word he says or any pang of conscience we could attribute to him, he's just acting.

Niall: I'm not thinking he's coming from conscience, I think he's coming from strategy.

Juliana: From strategy well yeah, he can say whatever he wants and then...

Niall: I think he sees that "The shit is going down in this country in a big way, how are we going to deal with this revolution?"

Juliana: But then he doesn't have to make sure that his decree or whatever it is is applied, that each cop has a camera, we know they are empty words and on the ground they can do whatever they want. So yeah, strategically speaking he would have to say something like that.

Joe: Just getting back to the race question cos it's an interesting question, is it about race or not? Those statistics would suggest that it is about race, but that's not the whole story because obviously those statistics argue for there being a black underclass in the US that has been marginalised for a long time, sixty or seventy years ago blacks in the US couldn't pee in the same toilet as whites and couldn't get in the same bus as whites. I mean, it's not like there isn't a history of racial segregation and discrimination in the US in recent history.

It doesn't go away very quickly or it goes away to some extent, it's like airbrushed out with all sorts of platitudes and fancy words, but it's still there as an undercurrent. But even the legacy of that racial discrimination against blacks in the US is that blacks became effectively an underclass more marginalised in society and had always worked the worst jobs for the least money and had the worst living conditions or social conditions and that became entrenched in US society and that creates a situation where disenfranchised young black men end up turning to crime. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy then right, because they constitute a greater number of people who are arrested. First because they are socially marginalised and tend towards or are forced into crime, let's say more so than whites who are more privileged and also because they're racially profiled in that sense because there's an undercurrent of racism so the 2 go together: historical marginalisation of black communities based on overt racism leading to criminality, a higher amount or percentage of criminality among black populations in certain areas that then confirms a stereotype or confirms the racist tendencies which compounds itself.

Juliana: Yeah I think if anything the racist element is more of a cue here because they can use this stereotype to trigger those things in people. Last week it was sometimes appalling to just read comments on twitter and the social networks about the protests and how some people who were obviously middle class saying "yeah but they shouldn't be so violent, they shouldn't behave like this blah, blah, blah" basically defending the cops. And you do see in the news all the time: police brutality committed against whites, so people are protesting for a real cause, a real problem and in the middle of all this because of this majority of crime plus the stereotype and the racism that carries on through generations it's almost like a scapegoat thing. Yeah they can be more, I think the media is using is a lot to make us believe that it's a question of race when they're trying to cover up the fact that people are really pissed off because there is police brutality against every single citizen; against their own children.

Joe: Yeah well that'll be harder and harder to cover up as more and more white people get on the streets and protest as well which is what should happen and would dispel that myth that it's just a problem for black people. There's the other aspect of the CIA effectively having a policy, not the war on drugs but the war of drugs where they basically ran drugs from South America and from Asia during the 50's, 60's and 70's and 80's and continued to do today and effectively flooded the last low income areas, which were very often black areas, with drugs. They're a CIA business, that's partly how the CIA maintains its black budget is through the sale of drugs and has done for 40/50 years and they make a lot of money from selling drugs, from running drugs and selling drugs and they put them on the streets in America. There's a few other statistics about that, the US prison population for most of the 1900's, the most of the last century harboured around 24,000 people but in the 1980's there was a startling rise in the prison population to nearly a quarter of a million. So it rose like ten times in the 1980's from what it was for most of the rest of the century and the main cause was the war on drugs. Suddenly they had this war on drugs which was under Reagan. He launched this war on drugs.

Niall: No, that was Nixon.

Joe: No, but in the 1980's under President Reagan his war on drugs coincided with this massive increase in the prison population which obviously was disproportionately of blacks and the whole 3 strikes law, 3 strikes and you're out. So essentially the justice system for drug offenses became much more severe and draconian which massively increased the prison population but the drug problem itself had been created by the CIA so it's almost like they deliberately did it to make money. They're responsible for it and then the government puts laws in place to actually to put in prison all these people the CIA is selling drugs to and offering drugs to, giving drugs to essentially.

And the other aspect of it is privatisation of the prison population and the prison system in the US where prisons were no longer state run but they were privatised. They were run by companies and those companies that are today running prisons aim for the demand where they have to have a 97% quota fill rate because they are paid by the state for looking after prisoners. So the more prisoners they have in prison the more money they get and if they don't reach a certain amount the state has to give them money i.e. tax payers money has to go to the prison that isn't full to effectively pay for what? This is bizarre, it'll kind of bake your noodle, tax paper money has to be paid to a private prison company for every cell that doesn't have a prisoner in it because the prison is set up and the guy says "I'm only going to start prison here if I can make all the money I can get out of it here. I am building rooms aka cells here and putting investment into it and you're going to pay me for looking after prisoners that come into these cells. If my cells are empty, I'm losing out on my investment". In that case the state has to pay using tax payers money for the empty cells so the state doesn't want to pay that money because through the rational that well, there's criminals out there so those prison cells should be full.

So essentially it's a quota system where police working in US security forces are working in conjunction or in league with the private prison authorities to make sure that people go into the cells. So it's like a cop goes out on the beat and says they had a meeting just after he goes out on the beat and they're all told "listen our local prison here, its only at 80% capacity, we need to get people in there and we know there's criminals out there so you guys aren't doing your jobs so can you please go and find some criminals."

Niall: Here take some of these drugs, plant them.

Joe: Do whatever and that contributes to and plays into a heavy handed attitude by police. It compounds itself.

Niall: Listen to this, compoundisation, don't know what the word is: 50% of the material, not actual weaponry but bullet proof vests, the uniforms; 50% of the equipment used by all military personnel in the United States is manufactured by the prisoners. That is then sold on. What is no longer in use by the military goes to the police forces. Police forces then use it...

Joe: To put more people in prison who will then make more equipment for more police to put people in prison and on it goes. That kind of situation obviously can only go down and down and implode upon itself at some point. It's so ripe for something just to break, for it to collapse under its own weight of corruption and sleaze and greed, something just has to go wrong. The unknown, the wildcard is the ordinary population of the US who, when that level of corruption and sleaze and greed amongst people in power gets too much, something in some way or other can break out. Not that it's going to change much but it would certainly shake it up and maybe provide an opportunity for more people to wake up and to see the nature and the extent of the corruption.

Niall: We had the occupy Wall Street movement; they beat the crap out of that. Now we have something else and well we'll see how it goes. Its gathering momentum in a way that, if you watch it, you can see how it's nonlinear. Among the protests taking place across the US right now, there's one that's specific to one issue and separate issues, not to do with how the police handled the case, it involves a rape case in the University of Virginia I think; UVA. It's just on the back of the Rolling Stone article you may have heard about last month or last week which gives a story of someone who was viciously gang raped in one of the fraternity houses of this university and that gave the courage to either people she knew or people who attend the university to protest about it, and it became a public protest. Rolling Stones has since wimped out and retracted some of what was said because the victims story was not reliable so there's some serious perception management going on there. I think in any other situation as horrible as that case was it would not have garnered an actual protest but it's happening in the context of another let's say overall outbreak of anger.

Joe: ...fundamental injustice. We have Kent from West Virginia on the line so, hi Kent how are you doing?

Kent: Yeah pretty good. I've got a couple of observations about the war on drugs. I heard something which I checked on the internet, what really happened was the man behind it was not so much Ronald Reagan as Tip O'Neill who was the speaker of the house. It was during the Reagan presidency but the interesting thing of it is is I remember it pretty well because I grew up and lived in Washington and there was a basketball player by the name of Len Bias and he played at the University of Maryland which is right by Washington so it's like the local team there. He was foreign and he got a big contract to make a lot of money and play for a professional team and he went out and partied and tried a lot of drugs and this created a scandal. "How could that have happened?" sort of attitude and it created the impetus for Tip O'Neill to push through all these draconian laws, mandatory minimum sentences for drugs; for instance crack cocaine which is what poor black people of used. A small amount would get you a big sentence whereas powdered cocaine, you have to have like a bucket full to get a maximum sentence. I'll give you a website: drugwarrant.com it's free to look at for information. Like you say in the prisons, it's almost like the people have to go in there and work, it's almost like modern day slavery. That is what it amounts to more or less. Drugwarrant.com is a good source of information on that.

Joe: Alright, we'll check it out.

Kent: OK, well thanks.

Joe: Alright thanks for calling Kent.

Niall: Thanks Kent.

Juliana: Thank you.

Niall: Yeah you've got a great point, its modern day slavery, it's incredible how this situation has come full circle or never left the circle. The same latent underlying racism is made manifest just in a different way. You have institutions largely full of black people who work for free.

Juliana: Yes, I was listening to Joe. I kept wondering OK he talked about the empty cells and that the government has to pay for that but who pays for the prisoners? The prisoner's food? The prisoner's clothes? And then it becomes clear when you know it's an industry going on within the prison and they make their own business deals, they sell the equipment that you were talking about; they need the workers at the factory basically. Slavery, for free. And they make profit out of them and so each individual that joins the prison is then made to work for the company.

Joe: Sounds like one of the major industries, prisons in the US are not giving prisoners training and skills so that they can go back to work and be responsible productive citizens when they get released but rather to put them to work to gear the police with state equipment. Essentially to perpetuate the corrupt prison system where we find a ridiculously large percentage of prisoners per capita; US's number 1. There's more people in prisons in the world per capita than any place in the world and there are a really disproportionate number of black people in prisons and they're all victims effectively. Obviously there's some particular cases but a vast majority of them have had to be put down as victims and they're been victimised by the state.

Niall: Just on protests and Ferguson, Juliana you mentioned you were surprised by some of the reaction on some tweets on twitter you saw. I was surprised by some of the reactions on our own website on SOTT.net from regular readers. WOW this is some serious vitriol that was directed at yours truly and all of us here and also on our Facebook page.

Joe: I have to stand up here and say that I got the worst of it.

Niall: OK.

Juliana: Oh you were both even on that one.

Joe: I think I poked the bears.

Niall: Alrighty. So I can expect worse in future cases.

Joe: Yeah so what's your point?

Niall: Well I have a wee theory as to why this upsets them so much. I noticed that in a lot of cases, I couldn't identify specific people, but say other websites, the alternative media, they're putting a spin on this that is somewhere between apologising for the cop and accepting that there's something big going on. That there's been injustice, and then they're suggesting to people, and I've seen our own SOTT radio people repeat this back to us, that the Ferguson shooting specifically was a contrived conspiracy. All of it had been planned, it had been deliberately whipped up by someone powerful for some ends and purposes unknown. I haven't seen anyone follow through with the logical conclusion because I don't understand really what they're trying to suggest here. I can understand that something happens and then somebody tries to put some spin on a situation to provoke it in a certain way in order to better control the fallout from it. But to deliberately cause protests and riots in order to do what? It doesn't make any sense to me.

What I would say though is that there are people who have analysed some of the footage. I think its police and also journalist's footage of the August situation in Ferguson and there are some very suspicious incidents where some of the fires that they started in the businesses, shop stores, in cars, in parking lots and so on even in downtown Ferguson, they're very suspicious because those areas were already under lock down. There were no large crowds of protesters there. Alas the next morning in the front page headlines 'riot erupts in Ferguson' and they show an image of the same parking lot with every single car torched.

There's something going on I think. There may have been some deliberate sabotage which would make sense because we know that they do have agent provocateurs, people who will pretend to be protesters, deliberately trying to start a riot by throwing something at a cop or whatever. So that was definitely going on I think; the riot effect so they could set off fires. I think this was also done deliberately but this wasn't with the view to creating a national protest movement, this with a view to tarnishing the protest movement. Those alternative sites really need to be getting behind it, not criticising it as all one big left-wing conspiracy of some kind.

Joe: It tries to tarnish and diminish the actual continuing grievances and injustices that people will be expressing in, for example, places like Ferguson, by giving the media something else to focus on which is riots and burning etc. And that's totally its standard operative procedure, even in peaceful protests, and Ferguson started out as a peaceful protest. So as soon as you have a peaceful protest anywhere in the US that's of any size and anywhere else, particularly in the western world, you're going to have members of the security forces in there masquerading as protesters and causing violence because violence immediately allows the media to focus on it and to play it up and in that way tarnish the nature of the protest as not really about some genuine grievance but just about a bunch of rioters and people out in the street trying to loot and steal things.

It blackens the name and allows a lot of people to dismiss it, it prevents the message that the original protestors on the streets actually wanted to convey. It prevents that message from reaching the ears, at least in an objective way, in a clean way. It prevents it from reaching the ears of a large number of people, particularly white America for example, who might then actually say "well yeah these people do have a genuine grievance and we should support it." It's very difficult for the average white American, far removed from any of those protests, to support such a thing when it's presented to them as a bunch of crazed black people out in the streets wrecking and looting and burning and attacking things and attacking the police. So its spin, it's all just spin you know.

Juliana: It discredits the whole movement, and I would add too, that it actually gives an excuse for more police control and more police violence because they're 'defending themselves'. And that's when you get people who, like those trolls we were talking about last week, who were pretty much defending police brutality and calling you a lawless... what was it? One of them was saying "well what would you do? You want no law? No order?" They completed twisted the whole thing to call you an anarchist pretty much.

Joe: Creating protests allows for people like that to actually make that argument, obviously they go to that extreme when they say "what you're an anarchist? You don't want any law and order?" and that's a ridiculous argument. It's like black and white thinking, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is it's a nuanced situation and you're full of shit. {Laughter}

But you toe this line and you're also an authoritarian follower and the idea of there not being an authority in your life with some politician ruling over you scares the crap out of you and pee your pants at the very concept of it. So anything you say from that irrationally emotional place is nonsense. It can be dismissed out of hand until you can go and get a grip on yourself and understand yourself and understand that you have an unhealthy attachment to authority and it's unhealthy because the authority that you're attached to is fundamentally corrupt. Until you can understand that about yourself and do something about it, you have nothing to say on the matter.

Niall: Well a lot of these people are people who, if you said that to them before this event, would be going "totally! Right on! The police state sucks!" I see it and I'm sick and tired of it. Hell they would even say "yeah we need a revolution or some kind or massive change." I think when it actually came to it, when for whatever combination of reasons, I have a little theory about why. I think it took off in Ferguson not because the blacks are animals or any variation of that but because actually there was a community feeling and "one of ours was just shot on the street". Everyone on the street saw, the word got around.

If anything, that's why there was a reaction to this event anyway. I think once the rest of America, particularly white America saw the push back they crapped their pants as you said because they realised there and then just for a split second if nothing else, this could be it. But when it came to it they would just take the first lie thrown at them from Darryl Wilson or whoever and just go "No, no, no!"

Joe: Back in their comfort zone where they're not responsible for anything because the authorities are responsible for them and they don't have to take responsibility for anything going on in their community. Or god forbid take responsibility for the corruption amongst the supposed elected leaders that they supposedly elected to represent them. They have essentially put in power people who are fundamentally corrupt and not working in the interests of the local communities and that's when you got to go, ok I have to do something about this, but people don't want to do anything about this. They want the dream.

Niall: They hate the congress, congress is the least popular, they know at least at some intellectual level that the authorities...

Joe: At a narrative level, they tell themselves, that's their narrative, it'll all be ok and they fall back asleep. They do that "need to go out and vote and elect good people the next time" so they're allowed to criticise other elected representatives and stuff and say that they're a bunch of crooks or whatever etc. "What we need to do is next election, 4 years it's not even a few years, it's not so far away. We're going to change it all". It's just this merry go round and they don't realise that government elections every 4 years are nonsense, that there's a power elite behind that who dictate policy and that's not even a secret government conspiracy theory.

It's very clear that some presidents and presidential teams only have a 4 year term. They're only in power for 4 years, they come in really with no experience of running the country. It's not like someone who has never been president just came up through the ranks and got elected or ran for election. Anybody can be a president to America right? Joe Bloggs, Joe the plumber can become the president? No he can't.

How's he going to run the country? He's the commander chief! He's going to decide on all the important topics? What kind of bullshit, fairy tale, childish narrative is that? There are clearly people in power and have been in power for a long time who are well versed in running the country, in deciding domestic and foreign policy and their think tanks and various other institutions who all, not even secretly, tell the government. The government or whatever administration is in power goes to these think tanks or gets policy papers from these think tanks and that's what sets policy.

So if you want to know who's running your country and deciding policies, domestic and foreign in the US and in other countries, look at the people who are making the policies, these think tanks as they're called in the US, like Brookings etc. The people involved there are the ones who are effectively running the country and making decisions and the president is a figure head; a puppet. He's like the Queen of England. At least if they had a monarchy in the US they would call the King or the Queen, the commander and chief for something. Everybody would see, like in England, they would realise that they don't do anything. But in the US there's a myth around the president and he comes out with it, the president will come out with it and say "I made this decision and I'm going to decide to do this and I think we should..." It's all just nonsense, just so much hot air. It's amazing that some people actually still believe it.

Juliana: But you know that what you're saying actually makes me think that in this case in particular, when it concerns police is that it creates an even stronger narrative because you were saying people can't think that in 4 years' time, "the president will go. A good guys going to come over, we'll choose better the next time" whatever. But when it touches your everyday life, when you know that a cop can show up at your door or shoot you or Taser you in the middle of the street, then they're too fearful to actually go there and even people who, like you were saying Niall, who can see that there's something wrong with the government, with the authorities, it's just too scary.

Joe: But that's because it's got to the point where they have allowed it to go so far. Where they have allowed this police brutality to increase over the years to the point that the people are, as you say, too afraid to do anything about it. The police have been allowed to show their hand, to show their pathology, to show their aggression publicly and to get away with it.

This culture of cronyism and corruption within for example. It's in all law enforcement in the US, the FBI has some statistic that over the past 10 years or something, the FBI has investigated 250, let's say, incidents of possible FBI misconduct. As in misconduct of their officers involved in a shooting or whatever. And in every single one of them they said "nope we did everything perfectly, no one to blame here." It's obviously unbelievable and the same applies in the police force. The police force protect their own. It's got to the point where there is no police officer in the US who can, in the course of fulfilling his duty, effectively commit a crime up to and including shooting someone out of hand and be prosecuted for it in any significant way. Just use Darren Wilson in the Ferguson shooting as an example. That's what happens and it's not just within the police force.

They're supported because obviously the chief police in any particular district or area is closely tied to the state authorities etc. and they all have the same interests in the Ferguson case it was very clear that the state prosecutor that was meant to be representing the interests of the victim, Mike Brown's family actually acted as a defence attorney for the police officer. And that district attorney and particularly the 2 assistant district attorneys who are running the grand jury and presenting evidence and stuff, presented all this evidence and it was effectively evidence that exonerated the police officer. When they were meant to be presenting evidence indicting the police officer. Which they shouldn't have been doing anyway.

The prosecutor, a prosecutor in Missouri, that's a legislative state or political position in Missouri. I mean you don't have to go too far up any more steps until you understand that you're in the political elite system in the US that was protecting a single officer against a judgement against him for unlawfully shooting a black teenager. He was protected by the entire system, why? Well because it's the system. The average police officer in the street who's out there on the beat is part of that system and that's an impressive corrupt system that means to keep people under control. Keep them controlled, keep them down and keep them in their place and increasingly as more and more people start to show that they don't want to be kept in that oppressive place, well they're just going react in the same way they've always done to that kind of a threat, which is that they put it down with big sticks or guns or whatever.

Talking about the article that one of our editors wrote on it that got a lot of flak, there were a few people on the comments commenting on the article and you were mentioning them and one the first criticisms was that this was not news, this was not factual news. This was opinion and therefore he called it inflammatory, biased, opinion etc. So he was dismissing the entire article because it was opinion. There's this myth that people hold to that the mainstream media presents objective facts and then what we do for example was we would give an opinion on that and that's inherently biased. We present our truth and everybody can present their own truth and then everybody down there has the reality.

Niall: Yeah and that's freedom of speech.

Joe: Well yeah but they can argue amongst themselves what they think about this and it's all undecided, nobody knows what the truth is. But if you really want to know what the actual truth is, stick with the facts as presented to you by the mainstream media. But of course anybody with half a brain realises that the media doesn't present the facts, they present some of the facts and they present particular facts that present a very particular version of the story that leave the reader with an impression or dare I say an opinion. Therefore it's entirely possible and in fact happens all the time that the mainstream media presents facts.

Yes they're all facts but it's actually an opinion, it's forming opinion, it's a manufacturing of opinion in the public by the limited presentation of facts. I don't need to explain, you can think it yourself you take the facts of a story and leave out half of them and present that as the story. People are going to come away with a particular opinion. If you presented all the facts they might have a different opinion.

So in case any bodies wondering, the mainstream media presents opinion all the time. There is nothing but opinion, there are no facts in this world. Well we present the facts because we go and we find all of the story and we get as close to the actual objective facts that the mainstream media supposedly present as possible. We're the ones who do that, the media effectively presents opinion and it's the opinion, it's the biased opinion of the elite, the system.

So turn it around. That guy who was saying stick to the facts. No, the facts that you got about the Ferguson case from the mainstream media was a biased opinion. Well what we are presenting in our article is more of the facts, more of the whole situation allowing you to come to a more objective conclusion about it and the objective conclusion about the Ferguson case when you look at all the facts was that Darren Wilson went out and, unnecessarily at the very least, illegally shot Mike Brown. Of course the official judgement is that he didn't but hello! What's new? That's the world you live in.

Niall: Yeah and they don't just present facts by leaving some out, they do that of course.

Joe: Well they get so bad.

Niall: It gets so bad that you could be reading it, and this is where psychology is important people, because you're reading it and you go "well that's a statement and fact" and you check it out and it's the polar opposite of the truth. When that happens you're being, let's say, mind fucked because you are experiencing a reverse blockade where very deliberately the direct opposite of the truth is being told to you and the normal reaction from a human being is, even if they react to it as if "uh this doesn't sound right", the mind finds a way to incorporate that "fact". Except it's not it's a "lie", they incorporate that into their reality and so they end up with some variation of the same lie.

And this is embodied this week by this bill passed in congress by an overwhelming vote in which it outlines Russia's crimes. I'm just calling it the anti-Russia bill, I'm not sure what they called it. It outlines Russians crimes and then said what we must do to rectify the situation. You should check it out there are summaries of it on SOTT, also the whole thing of course is available online somewhere I'm sure, and it is an incredible read because each one of them is the opposite of reality and this is the whole of congress with a few honourable exceptions voting yes, saying yes this is how all America sees the world.

Juliana: It's called The House Resolution 758 for those who are looking for it and it was passed on the 3rd of December.

Joe: It's called the "we hate Russia bill" and it was basically a resounding denunciation of Russia as being the epitome of all evil in the world and in that respect it was a complete exercise in pure fantasy imagination. It's what they want to believe, if you want to just read it, it's not that long and you can read a few of the stipulations of the points, the whereas and the etc. It's what they all want to believe, it's clearly not the case even from a fact based perspective, the things that they say, and the things they accuse Russia of are clearly not true by any standard of reason. They're not true at all, it's not the case but that's what they want. I don't know, they get in line they're all so bottom souled at this stage. Members of congress are just complete lackeys and they're mind programmed idiots and they're all in it for themselves. They see nothing past the end of their own noses, they're so inured in American exceptionalism and USA, USA that its actually funny at this point, they're comical.

Juliana: Well just to give you an idea of one of the main points, it calls for Russia to reverse its illegal annexation of Crimea; I mean right there, one of the main lies. The other one: in violation of the September 2014 ceasefire. I mean the list just goes on and on and it asks the president to help basically, to create more visa bans and sanctions for Russian without any reason whatsoever, any facts whatsoever. It just says Russia poses a threat to international peace.

Joe: Yeah, it's funny.

Niall: And on the same day, I'm putting my tin foiled conspiracy hat on here just to sort of bring the point home, on the same day there was a massive terrorist attack in Grozny, Chechnya. Now I think Harrison and the crew on yesterday's show discussed this briefly. I think Harrison was saying, well there have been some terrorist attacks in Chechnya over the years, not really, there was a war in the 90's and again in the early 2000. But since 2004 it's been relative stable, in fact the city's been completely rebuilt. I think there was a suicide bomber or something earlier this year. There have been some incursions but the place is completely different from before. There's still a problem with terrorists the Caucasus or whatever they call themselves causing trouble in Chechnya but in the longer game, these people - of course this bordering with Georgia - they're probably coming through from Georgia and they're also going to be in Syria at the moment as well.

Joe: Yeah, they're mercenaries paid by the US.

Niall: I'm not sure of the situation. Maybe it's over now but at some point they were trying to put out... I think BBC was trying to suggest that Grozny had completely been taken over by the terrorists.

Joe: No, there was a terrorist attack but that's what they want, terrorists. That's what the US does, it spreads terrorism around the world, it finances the people to do it, it's a proxy. It gets mercenaries to carry out terrorist attacks in countries in an effort keep pressure on them, to destabilise them as a terrorist haven; keep up that appearance particularly in the west of this part of the country being this part of the world being subjected to terrorism or being a terrorist hot spot etc. etc. It keeps it on the back burner and prevents a normalisation essentially to some extent it prevents normalisation of trade etc. with that country. It prevents an integration of that particular part of that world with the rest of the world.

The US is all about preventative integration essentially because it survives and thrives on domination and control and it can't have anybody, any countries around the world effectively really doing business and getting on with each other, with its neighbours etc. without the US being in control. So anybody who isn't under the US's control comes under threat of terrorism and that's how they control it.

There was another interesting story from the thing about Russia in that part of the world. The Russian the puppet regime in Ukraine; Poroshenko has given Ukrainian citizenship to 3 people this past week with the intent of giving them positions in power. The first person is in a high level position in the Ukrainian government, the first is a US citizen surprise, surprise. Does that not bear out everything we've been saying about the nature of the Ukrainian revolution and the change it's undergone over this past year? The first person, a US citizen, is Natalie Gresko and she is going to run the ministry of finance, she's essentially going to be the Ukrainian economics minister. She's going to have her hands on Ukraine's purse strings. What isn't mentioned in most places is that she's a former state department official. A US state department official is now in control of Ukraine's finances.

Niall: I see.

Joe: So she'll direct the funds that the IMF arrange to prop up the Ukrainian economy.

Juliana: Very subtle.

Joe: She'll control the terms of those deals with the IMF etc. from the US' standpoint and following its lead or its directives. The second is a Lithuanian citizen, I won't pronounce his name, maybe I will, Ivaraouse Abromovich, and anyway he's a Lithuanian citizen who has now been given Ukrainian citizenship. He's a former top executive at a company called East Capital. He addressed the Ukrainian parliament by saying "I'm from Europe, we will work together European style" {laughter} He'll also be in the economics ministry. And then the last guy is who you were talking about, he's a Georgian and he's been given Ukrainian citizenship. His name is Alexander Govitashvili? They're all called shilly or something, shilled, they're all shills in Georgia. He's US educated and he was a former government official under this Saakashvili the former Ukrainian or Georgian prime minister, who was such a pusillanimous little worm, anti-Russian like, blindly rabidly anti-Russian, and sucking up to the US. He is actually now the former president or prime minister, president I think of Georgia. He's got a tenure post in a US university.

Niall: Because he's wanted back home.

Joe: Where he spouts a load of bullshit. But just to give you an idea, this guy who worked under him was in the health ministry in Georgia and he's now going to be running the health and welfare ministry in Ukraine. But in Georgia under Saakashvili he opened dozens of clinics and hospitals several years ago and he was getting all the equipment from US pharmaceutical companies to open these hospitals. But it turned out that when he was supposedly opening all these hospitals in Georgia he simply would open one hospital have the media there, have a press conference, show all the equipment on the news and then he would have people take all the equipment over to the next hospital that they built which was empty and then film the same equipment in that.

The current Georgian government has opened a criminal case on him for that kind of corruption and other economic misdeeds and so he's now going to be the public health ministry. He's going to head the public health ministry in Ukraine. He also studied under Soros study grant, so he'll make Ukraine safe for Western American pharmaceutical companies and also the only other thing that porky-stinko or Poroshenko did in terms of giving citizenship to people was he gives citizenship to all the foreign nationals who fought and are fighting in the Ukrainian military and the regulars and the irregulars i.e. the mercenaries. So all those Nazis or not Nazis or South Africans or wherever they came from...

Niall: Poles.

Joe: ...They're all going to get Ukrainian citizenship if they wanted so that they can go under cover effectively.

Niall: Yeah, it's harder to track them or find out who they were. The broader context of what's going on there in Ukraine, or first of all a comment on - this is such a joke - how more obvious could it be that it's a technocratic government? A foreign imposed Government. State departments Soros graduates are just literally plonked in there. By the way, they have been appointed. Maybe I have got later news than you but they have been appointed. Their Ukrainian citizenship only came through on the day of their appointment.

Some broader context, Biden went to Kiev a couple of weeks ago, apparently what he told Poroshenko was that he needed to form a new government within days, not weeks. What's going on is that Ukraine is basically on the verge of default and this is a desperate effort to stave it off. If it has a former sovereign debt default, yes it substantially comes under IMF, what do they call it? It happened to Ireland and all the other countries, IMF temporary ownership? A troika will basically run the country. But the reason that they want to stave that off, I mean you think well that would be good, no. Because a major contributor of the actual allocation of funds, a major creditor due to coming in is Russia. So Russia will be on the board of directors of the temporary managing team of technocrats for Ukraine. So they're trying to avoid this at all costs; form a new government and they've got their people in. I think to secure whenever the cabinet votes they want to get enough people to make sure every single thing the IMF prescribes is met. Yes I think that's what's going on here because the IMF have been meeting furiously over Ukraine.

We know this is a big issue for them because George Soros felt it was important enough to actually write an article in a foreign policy magazine in the US so they cannot let Ukraine default, that's what they're trying to avoid. But the situation is beyond a country actually defaulting. Ukraine is the worst performing economy by numbers, ok that's one thing, it's also in dire straits. They have a worse electricity power grid system right now than Gaza does. The energy ministry in Kiev has imposed limits on consumption between 8 and 11 in the morning and between 4 and 8 in the evening.

Joe: They're getting desperate they've imported about 50,000 tonnes of Russian coal recently. It's just so obnoxiously obtuse what they're doing, on the one hand they're screaming all sorts of anti-Russian slogans and attacking Russia and at the same time the reality on the ground is that these people need to do business with Russia, they need to import things from Russia.

Niall: They will see off several million useless eaters in Ukraine before they do business with Russia. This is what structural adjustments means - shock therapy.

Joe: Many millions of people will die and all for the good. 2016, is Hillary going to be president?

Niall: Oh my god.

Joe: God forbid.

Niall: I think she might.

Joe: I really think about Hillary.

Niall: She gave a statement recently, she's been pillared from the right in the US because she said they took a quote from her and said she said in her speech to university of somewhere that it's important to empathise with your enemies. She was saying it in the context of the Philippines in which the enemy really was controlled opposition in the sense that there wasn't really a threat to the US interest there and she's been attacked from the right being a pacifist. She's putting on this, dare I say a mask of normalcy I think in preparation for being.

Joe: I think she's saying that from the perspective of having a multiple personality disorder. {Laughter}

Niall: Hilary seems happy about it.

Joe: What about that for a laugh, I mean she's like the wicked witch of the west, she really should have been in the Wizard of Oz, she fits the profile perfectly. She's demented, she's a demonic entity and she'd be a perfect candidate for president to leave the American people because not that they deserve that but certainly that someone like Hillary will be representative of the complete lack of responsibility that American people have taken towards their own society and themselves and their communities and allowed that kind of psychopathy and the ponerisation of a society from the top down as the result of psychopaths in power.

She'd be a culmination of it because the woman clearly is extremely evil, if I can use that word. If I was going to be more clinical about it I would say that she clearly has some kind of some kind of a personality disorder. It may be multiple personality disorder or it may just be something a bit more benign. I mean there's that kind of a laugh where she was talking in an interview about potentially bombing Iran, that was what she was gleefully laughing about and she's no real stranger to gleefully laughing about very serious matters. She was on camera gleefully gloating and laughing about the public murder of Muammar Gaddafi by US mercenaries. She said "we came, we saw, he died" and then burst out laughing and when the interviewer asked her did she think that his death, his murder had anything to with her arrival there because she arrived there on the same day I think or it happened on the day after and she said "oh no, no, no" but then she laughed and said "well then maybe" and then she laughed again. So she was essentially laughing at the possibility that there was a ritual murder effectively in her honour of the president or not even the president, the leader let's say of another country. So she was just laughing.

Niall: She's so narcissistic that her initial reaction was "oh that reflects well on me".

Joe: Oh yeah, "someone would have organised it that the videotaped public execution in a brutal fashion of another human being was in my honour, that's so sweet. All of those guys in the CIA, they're such darlings that they would do that for me and it's so fitting because I am an evil witch."

You see this stuff that American politicians say compared to stuff that Putin says for example. In the way that he says things, you would never hear western politicians speaking in the way Putin speaks about certain things. First of all they tell us the truth about a lot of things and he's very modern about lot of things, he's very balanced and he talks sense and explains things in a very plain objective way, in a way that ordinary people can relate to. He touches on values that ordinary people have and that make sense, things that are real for ordinary people. Whereas in the west politicians are generally bellicose and up their own backsides essentially, and full of their own self-importance and it all tends to be sabre rattling, "We're so great and we're so powerful." Whereas Putin is coming from a more humanistic point of view and that speaks volumes about him because if he was in some way pathological, he wouldn't be able to bring himself to say that kind of stuff effectively. He certainly wouldn't be pursuing the policies that he's pursuing. He would have made a deal with the devil by now but the fact that he's not made a deal with the devil, that he's taken all of this flak from western politicians and that he's still being reasoned in his speech about the whole situation and even going to the extent of talking about things like the meaning of life.

Where would you hear a US politician saying that the meaning of our whole life and existence is to love? And that it is love of family and of children and of the motherland? I mean maybe you have heard a western politician say that but when you put it in context of their actions, it obviously strikes a very different note coming from the 2 different camps. But just back on Hillary, Hillary's got a past that reveals an awful lot about her, for a while she was an attorney and earlier this year there were audio recordings of an interview she gave to someone which were discovered from the early 1980's when she was in her late 20's.

She was an attorney and she had been asked to defend a guy who had been accused of raping a 12 year girl by some other lawyer who asked her because the defendant, the man who raped the 12 year old girl wanted a female attorney for some reason. So she talks about this in the audio recordings, this case that she dealt with and well for me it exposed her as a psychopath. Because she shows no concern whatsoever, she was defending this rapist and she admits that it was obvious that he did it. She ordered a polygraph test, a lie detector test and he passed it and she said that made her forever lose her faith in the idea of a polygraph test because it was so obvious. Because there was evidence, the girl herself and 2 other friends had said it was him and there was no question that he was responsible you know and she says in the story of the case that they had his underpants that had blood on them and they sent them to the lab, the prosecution. I.e. the other attorney sent them to the lab to get them tested and they cut out the piece that had blood on them to identify it and they identified it but then they threw that piece away and sent the underpants with a hole in it back to the evidence box.

So all that was left as evidence was a pair of underpants without any incriminating evidence so Hillary went to the bother of going to some world renowned forensic investigator and had him look at the underpants with the piece that was missing, that had no evidence on them and got him to agree to testify that there was nothing on these that could indict this man, because there's no evidence on them whatsoever. Then she presented that to the prosecution and said "listen this is all you've got and I've got this guy who's willing to come from new York to testify and here's his credentials and he said that there's no evidence linking this guy and these underpants to that crime" and she even said "you don't want to involve ourselves in a miscarriage of justice here."

She said all this knowing the guy was guilty and he had raped the 12 year old girl and she defended him and she got him off, basically he got time served, he spent 2 months in prison. You can listen to the audio recording. The way that she describes it all, the fact that she did it and then later on she comes out with a claim that she's all about woman's rights, that she's set up various charities for or she supports various charities for protection of women and all this kind of stuff. And other people have commented on Hillary's psychological state.

Juliana: I believe she even made a comment about the victim on the case, I don't know if you remember?

Joe: She argued that she had a history of making things up and lying to people and blah, blah. All knowing that the girl, a 12 year old girl had been raped by this guy and she did everything she possibly could to defame the girls' reputation and effectively manipulated evidence and hide evidence to get this guy off. That's the kind of person she is, can you imagine yourself in that situation?

Niall: The system is perfect for people like that too.

Joe: And she has the cojones to claim that the trial in particular inspired her to co-found the first rape crisis hotline. There's a book written called The Extreme Makeover of Hillary Clinton by republican strategist Bay Buchanan, she's suggested that Clinton may have a disorder involving narcissistic personality disorder and she said we are talking about a clinical condition that could make her dangerously ill-suited to become president commander and chief. Yeah her and all the others.

Juliana: That's a nice way of calling her a psychopath by the way.

Niall: She's being gentle on her, if it helps bring the point home that she shouldn't be in a position. It's too late and she has been a position of power for some time now, who knows how much influence she held in Obamas administration.

Joe: Yeah and her biographist, a woman called Gail Sheehy, wrote in her 1999 biography, I don't know what it was called but it was about Hillary Clinton, she said in that book, among other things, that empathy was not characteristic of Hillary.

Niall: Apparently not, no.

Joe: Clintons well known for telling a big porky pie about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire during NATO bombing of Bosnia. I think she was just the first lady then, she landed in Bosnia and she claimed that when they landed that there was supposed to be some kind greeting ceremony at the airport but instead "we just ran with our heads down to get into vehicles to get to our base because of sniper fire all around." So she was in a war zone and stuff. But after she had said that on the nightly news one of the news stations showed what really happened. She had no helmet or flak jacket or anything, she just had a long black coat and she walked about 50 feet to an 8 year old girl who was standing on the runway waiting to give her something and then she just went into a building.

So it didn't happen at all and she just made it up and you can imagine how much else she has made up over the past 10 - 15 years or longer. But yeah that's Hillary Clinton. Our sound man Tim sent me a video of a song, a YouTube video, I don't know what's it called yay for Hillary or something or time for Hillary or whatever and it's a country song. It's this guy with a Stetson and he's singing and playing. It's a slow country air and it's all about how basic law defied Hillary Clinton and time for Hillary and Hillary in 2016 blah, blah, blah. It's just so sickening. It's so bad it's almost like you'd think it's a parody, you think they're going to come out with something that ridicules her. But apparently it's genuine and yeah ...it's amazing.

Niall: In a way he's right. It is time for Hillary. The US has reached a point where needs a completely insane leader. Mind you, Bush was the same but someone even more pathological would be the one to usher in the eschaton. {laughter} I mean nothing else can happen with a complete psychopath.

Juliana: And if you're thinking that it can't be because she's a woman well, there's research made by the colleges who actually tell you and show you why and how psychopathic women can be far more dangerous than men. In fact we had Sandra Brown on, she's an expert on psychopathy and when she was asked the question she said "I would much rather be in a room alone with a psychopath male than with a woman."

Joe: So there you go, there's something to think about and take home.

Niall: We're about ready to wrap things up. I would just like to briefly comment on another story, hang in there.

Joe: Make it brief.

Niall: Make it brief, ok since about 6 weeks ago, drones have been appearing over nuclear sites in France in spurts. Bursts of activity will be over several sites, several nuclear power stations. Which Joe mentioned in France is a lot because it's fully energy independent, which is rare for a country other than the United States; they've been appearing and hovering over.

Joe: The US isn't energy dependent, what you talking about?

Niall: It's not?

Joe: No. The US has to import almost half of its oil, that's why it's so worked up about the Middle East. The US produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day but it consumes about 18 million of barrels of oils a day.

Niall: So why are they all gung ho about exporting LNG; Shell gas?

Joe: Because they have it and they want to get rid of it. Because they have the rest of the world sewn up basically.

Niall: Alright, I was assuming a rational solution. I was assuming when I heard that they have all this LNG to export that maybe it's because they have no need for themselves.

Joe: They may be predicting that they have enough to cover their own needs plus exports but that's all in the future. Like Juliana said earlier on they're talking about 2020 and stuff but not in terms of oil there. I was just going to say that the fact that they consume 18 million barrels of oil a day, that's by far the most because I got the stats. The next one, way down low is like Japan. I don't know the next biggest country, China maybe the next one. But China is way down at like 5 or 6 million or something like that and everybody else is in the low single digits. The US is 18 million barrels of oil a day. Anyway carry on.

Niall: So they began in waves in mid-October I think, then again in November and the French government is obviously like "OK what's going on?" because they have no clue who's doing it. They arrested some kids, some students or something and I think they were released because they're still investigating it; they're still happening. There was another wave of this last week or 2 weeks ago and we're basically talking about those quadro-copter helicopter drones that just fly around or buzz or in some way enter the air space above nuclear power stations, which is protected air space in France and they have no clue what's going on.

Joe: And these aren't the ones you buy on Amazon, obviously.

Niall: No, let me just read a couple of things: French police have said these are efficient and high speed helicopters. Actual police helicopters have given chase to follow the drones but couldn't keep up with them. They are some high tech stuff, they might be tiny but they can travel at the speed of aircraft essentially. A recent spate of 5 coordinated visits in one evening to nuclear reactors hundreds of miles apart have put the government under high alert. They're mostly in the north; Normandy, the border with Germany, but they're convinced that they're looking at an elaborate and advanced planning. It says furthermore that whatever tech it is, it's not stuff you can buy on amazon on direct with a smart phone. It's hi tech, military grade stuff.

Joe: So who spies on everybody all the time? That's the question. And who wants to keep people in line in Europe and who wants to send a subtle message to the French government and keep them on edge? That "we're watching you and we know where your nuclear power plants are"?

Niall: And who, for the first time since the Ukraine crisis and Kiev coup, visited Putin, the first and only Western leader to do so? The Leader of France yesterday, President Hollande made an unexpected stop at Moscow's airport where he met Putin on his way to Kazakhstan. I think that could be significant because no one has gone near it because there's clearly a memo that went out.

Joe: Anyway we'll leave it there for this week folks, thanks to our listeners and to our caller Kent and to our chatters, I hope you all had fun. We'll be back next week with another show, until then have a good one.

Juliana: Bye, bye.

Niall: Bye.