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A leaked phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, has exposed the anti-democratic and colonialist character of the Obama administration's intervention in the former Soviet republic.
The discussion between the two officials includes a detailed review of which right-wing opposition figures Washington is working to install in office, and how it is using the United Nations to rubber-stamp the operation. While Germany and other European powers have worked closely with the Obama administration in promoting the violent protests against President Viktor Yanukovych, the leaked phone call reveals tensions between the imperialist powers. At one point Nuland tells Pyatt, "Fuck the EU."
The discussion, posted anonymously on YouTube, underscores the thoroughly cynical character of Washington's public diplomacy. The Obama administration's rhetoric about "democracy" and the Ukrainian people's right to determine their own future is a charade, concocted for public consumption. Behind the scenes, government officials speak frankly with one another about the real agenda - advancing Washington's geo-strategic and economic interests in Eastern Europe by installing pro-US and anti-Russian puppet figures in the Ukrainian capital.
The attack on food stamps comes as Obama and the Democrats posture in the run-up to this year's mid-term elections as opponents of social inequality and defenders of the poor and jobless. Nowhere in the establishment media is the glaring contradiction between what the Democrats say and what they do even discussed.
Obama's action on food stamps is indicative of the state of politics and the reality of social life in America. It is the second cut in three months to a program that provides minimal assistance for the most vulnerable sections of society. The lie that there is simply no money for basic social programs is repeated even as new reports document the unprecedented rise in the wealth of the financial elite.
The levels of wealth accumulated by a tiny layer of society - in the United States and internationally - are almost unfathomable. A report commissioned by Bloomberg last month found that the world's 300 richest people (0.000004 percent of the world's population) had a net wealth of $3.7 trillion in 2013, an increase of $524 billion (13 percent) in one year alone.
Best of the Web: Wars to continue, NSA to keep spying on everyone, new anti-smoking campaigns rolled out - but sorry, no money left for the 35% unemployed
© Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The Senate failed to move forward on a three-month extension of assistance for the long-term unemployed on Thursday, leaving it unlikely that Congress would approve the measure soon while undercutting a key aspect of President Obama's economic recovery plan.
Fifty-nine senators, including four Republicans, voted to advance the legislation, falling one vote short of the 60 needed to break a Republican filibuster effort.
Republicans and Democrats, many from the nation's most economically depressed states, had been trying to reach a solution that would allow people who have exhausted their unemployment insurance to continue receiving benefits as long as the government offset the $6 billion cost.
Ultimately, how to pay for the program proved too big a hurdle for senators to overcome.
Dazzling green fireball filmed above Belgium, January 2014
2014 has stated with a bang, literally, with a surge of loud booms being heard and felt throughout much of North America. But then again, didn't the last few years start this way? This video includes strange and extreme weather, geological and cosmic events, covering most of the month of January. Things aren't looking good for certain few heavily populated areas...
© Sydsvenskan.seDieudonné M'Bala M'Bala
Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala continues to expose a radical split in perception within the French population. The official "mobilization" against the standup comedian, first called for by Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a ruling Socialist Party gathering last summer, portrays the entertainer as a dangerous anti-Semitic rabble rouser, whose "quenelle"* gesture is interpreted as a "Nazi salute in reverse".
For his fans and supporters, those accusations are false and absurd.
The most significant result of the Dieudonné uproar so far is probably the dawning realization, among more and more people, that the "Shoah", or Holocaust, functions as the semi-official State Religion of France.
On RTL television last January 10, the well-known nonconformist commentator Eric Zemmour (who happens to be Jewish) observed that it was "grotesque and ridiculous" to associate Dieudonné with the Third Reich. Zemmour described Dieudonné as a product of the French left's multiculturalism. "It's the left that has taught us since May '68 that it is prohibited to prohibit, that we must shock the bourgeois. It is the left that has turned the Shoah into the supreme religion of the Republic..."
Zemmour suggested that Dieudonné was provoking "the respectable left-wing bourgeoisie" and that he "reproaches Jews for wanting to conserve the monopoly of suffering and steal primacy in suffering from descendants of slavery".
Best of the Web: An Idea Whose Time Has Come! California revises cottage food laws and boosts economy by creating over 1,000 new businesses
© Dustin HughesMark Stambler prepares his daily bread for his at home business in Los Angeles
This isn't a page from Kafka - it happened to Mark Stambler in Los Angeles.
For decades, Stambler has followed traditional methods to bake loaves of French bread. The ingredients are simple: distilled water, sea salt, wild yeast and organic grains. Stambler even mills the grain himself. To make it easier to steam loaves, he built a wood-fired oven in his own backyard. Stambler's loaves came in first place at the Los Angeles County Fair and the California State Fair.
Soon after that, Stambler got the idea to expand his hobby into a home business, which became Pagnol Boulanger. Word of mouth spread. In June 2011,The Los Angeles Times profiled Stambler and his bread in a full-page feature.
Unlike his bread, that profile was bittersweet. He was busted the very next day. As he described it, the health department "descended like a ton of bricks on the two stores that were selling my bread...they could no longer sell my bread."
Best of the Web: Between the NSA's power and the IRS's revenge, how can Americans not be worried about the opinions they express?
"This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario," wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. "Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive . . . will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.' "
Comment: Before they are able to express their opinion, the Americans need to educate themselves, see what is actually going on around the world, and finally express exactly how they feel about their dire situation. This might be a good place to start (warning, you might not be able to watch it fully to the end):
© Brian Jackson
"Big Brother is Watching You," George Orwell wrote in his disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell "was an optimist." Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.
In his recent speech on NSA reforms, President Obama cited as precedent Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, who patrolled the streets at night, "reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots."
This was a weak effort to find historical support for the NSA spying program. After all, Paul Revere and his associates were patrolling the streets, not sorting through people's private communications.
To get a more accurate historical perspective, Obama should have considered how our founding fathers reacted to searches conducted by the British before the revolution. The British used "general warrants," which authorized blanket searches without any individualized suspicion or specificity of what the colonial authorities were seeking.
At the American Continental Congress in 1774, in a petition to King George III, Congress protested against the colonial officers' unlimited power of search and seizure. The petition charged that power had been used "to break open and enter houses, without the authority of any civil magistrate founded on legal information."
© AP PhotoThe nation’s wealthiest 1 percent appear to be having a collective meltdown
The nation's wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown.
Economists, advisers to the wealthy and the wealthy themselves describe a deep-seated anxiety that the national - and even global - mood is turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove dangerous and hard to control.
President Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing populism in the tea party.
The collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but soon.
Comment: The elite should feel nervous. In times of catastrophe and societal collapse the population turns against its leaders.
Whales have been showing up dead on multiple beaches, bringing us a message with stomachs full of plastic. This has happened multiple times. In the summer of july 2013, a sperm whale was stranded on Tershelling, a Northern island in the Netherlands. The whale swallowed 56 different plastic items that totalled over 37 pounds. In april 2010, a gray whale died after stranding itself on a West Seattle beach, it was found to have over 20 plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, plastic pieces, duct tape, and more in its system. In March of 2013 a dead sperm whale washed up on Spain's South coast which swallowed 17kg of plastic waste.
Comment: Propaganda Alert! Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, as portrayed in the 'left-wing, liberal' British press