Puppet MastersS


Dollar

The real economy is underground commerce

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© BATR
As the deadline for filing yearly income taxes is rapidly approaching, businesses especially hard pressed to make a profit in a depressed economy struggle with their tax compliance. Reporting legitimate deductions and costs is the easy part. When you are losing money, disclosing a diminished income stream based upon lower margins, is not a difficult decision. Nevertheless, small enterprises burdened with government regulation costs and tax obligations, often are unable to conduct business and retain a net return. Self-proprietorships frequently are so scared that many look to the cash underground economy to hide income earnings.

This shadow commerce, practiced throughout the world, is the real economy. Actually, in the United States, tax compliance is quite high by comparison. With the acceptance of instruments of credit, the banking system has become more of a tax reporting service than a financier of a healthy economy. The taxman would have you believe that voluntary transactions in cash constitute a black market in illegal dealing. Casting the dispersion of seedy activities upon the motivation to subsist is a common practice of governmental revenue agents.

Stormtrooper

Illegitimate Kiev government launches 'anti-terrorist operation' against protesters in Kharkov, East Ukraine

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Ukraine's Interior Ministry has launched an anti-terrorist operation in the eastern city of Kharkov by blocking the city center, said acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. At least 70 activists have been arrested by the police.

"The anti-terrorist operation has begun. The center of the city and Metro stations are closed. As soon as we finish the operation, we will unblock them," wrote Avakov on his Facebook page, "The building of Regional State Administration is totally free from the separatists who seized it earlier."

According to Avakov, no weapons have been used during the operation.

On Monday police clashed with anti-coup protesters in an effort to push the activists back from the city administration building. Kharkov demonstrators in the second-largest Ukrainian city took control of the building earlier in the day, after proclaiming independence of the region from Kiev.

Police reportedly used fire-hoses, stun grenades, and tear gas to push the crowd back from the building. In response, protesters threw several Molotov cocktails at the building and set a pile of tires on fire. The blaze soon spread to the first floor of the building.


Comment: So the protesters in Kiev were 'revolutionaries', but the protesters in Kharkov, Donestsk and Odessa are terrorists? Right...

And Yanukovych couldn't arm his security forces against armed 'protesters', but the new regime has no compunction about arming its goons against unarmed protesters? Interesting double standards...


Quenelle - Golden

The speech that made him prime minister? On anniversary of French 9/11, Manuel Valls spits fury against anyone criticising Jews in France

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Old anti-Semitism of French extreme right 'feeds off hate for Israel,' France's Manuel Valls says at memorial for Toulouse attack.

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls called anti-Zionism "an invitation to anti-Semitism" at a Paris memorial remembering four Jews who were murdered in Toulouse in 2012.

Valls made his remarks on Wednesday - the two-year anniversary of the fatal shootings at a Jewish day school of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler; his two sons, Arieh, 6, and Gabriel, 3; and Miriam Monsenego, 8.

The old anti-Semitism of the French extreme right "is renewed," Valls said. "It feeds off hate for Israel. It feeds off anti-Zionism. Because anti-Zionism is an invitation to anti-Semitism."

The memorial was organized by the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities on Trocadero Square near the Eiffel Tower, where more than 1,000 participants gathered to remember the victims of Mohammed Merah, the 23-year-old Islamist.

Light Saber

Best of the Web: Sergei Lavrov's olive branch to the West: "It's not Russia that is destabilising Ukraine - If we don't co-operate soon, chaos may take hold"

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© ITAR-TASS/Barcroft MediaA rally for a secession referendum in Lenin Square, Donetsk, Ukraine. Federalization of the country looks like the only solution. Of course, 'balkanization' of Ukraine may have been the goal all along...
The west has been needlessly whipping up tension - if we don't co-operate soon, chaos may take hold

The profound and pervasive crisis in Ukraine is a matter of grave concern for Russia. We understand perfectly well the position of a country which became independent just over 20 years ago and still faces complex tasks in constructing a sovereign state. Among them is the search for a balance of interests among its various regions, the peoples of which have different historical and cultural roots, speak different languages and have different perspectives on their past and present, and their country's future place in the world.

Given these circumstances, the role of external forces should have been to help Ukrainians protect the foundations of civil peace and sustainable development, which are still fragile. Russia has done more than any other country to support the independent Ukrainian state, including for many years subsidising its economy through low energy prices. Last November, at the outset of the current crisis, we supported Kiev's wish for urgent consultations between Ukraine, Russia and the EU to discuss harmonising the integration process. Brussels flatly rejected it. This stand reflected the unproductive and dangerous line the EU and US have been taking for a long time. They have been trying to compel Ukraine to make a painful choice between east and west, further aggravating internal differences.

Comment:
...our country has steadily promoted a system of equal and indivisible security in the Euro-Atlantic area. We proposed signing a treaty to that effect, and advocated the creation of a common economic and human space from the Atlantic to the Pacific which would also be open to post-Soviet countries.
Unfortunately, Sergei, as we're sure you well know, this is precisely what the Anglo-American Western Alliance will not allow. They stirred up two World Wars to prevent it happening. They absolutely hate the idea that the Eurasian landmass will naturally come together and leave their millennial dream of world domination in tatters.

Geopolitics of Empire: Mackinder's Heartland Theory and the Containment of Russia


Vader

Flashback Barroso, unelected 'Prime Minister of Europe': European Union is a 'non-imperial empire'

Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, tells journalists that he likes to compare the European Union to a "non-imperial empire."


Comment: So if we believe Barroso, we are to believe that the subjects in this 'empire', which is really just a canton of the US empire, voluntarily subjected themselves to their imperial masters.

Except that they didn't. Barroso believes that because he is one of those who creates castles in the sky and actually moves into them.

French voters rejected the EU Constitution, Dutch voters rejected the EU Constitution, Irish voters rejected the EU Constitution.

So the Eurocrats gave up asking people to vote and used financial terrorism to implement austerity measures rather than soldiers on the streets coercing conformity. Imperialists today have learned that economic guns to the heads of people are more effective. In the end however, their empire will collapse under the weight of its hubris, injustice and degeneracy - just like all the others in history.


Binoculars

A list of known NSA spying techniques

NSA
© Police State USAIs the NSA listening to your phone calls? Yes.
The scope of the National Security Agency's spying abilities has increased dramatically in the last few of years. Rumors have been circulated for years about the agencies clandestine abilities. Many of those rumors have been confirmed, thanks to leaked documents and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

Below is a list of powers and tricks used by the NSA. Many of these abilities are shared by the NSA's spying counterpart in the United Kingdom, known as the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ). Interestingly, most of the reporting about the USA's Orwellian playbook comes from foreign publications.

Police State USA will attempt to update this list as evidence of the police state continues to unfold.

Quenelle

Hillary Clinton poses with Pussy Riot

hillary clinton and pussy riot
© twitterHillary Clinton with two members of Pussy Riot
Former Secretary of State and presumed 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner, Hilary Clinton took time on Thursday at the fifth annual Women in the World Summit in New York to pose for a photo with two members of the Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot.

A photograph of Hillary Clinton with two members of the Russian punk rock protest band taken on Thursday evening has been tweeted by Mrs. Clinton with the message:

Great to meet the strong & brave young women from #PussyRiot, who refuse to let their voices be silenced in #Russia.

The tweet quickly went viral with close to 5,000 favorites and close to 4,100 retweets in six hours.

Comment: For more on the "irony" of Mrs. Clinton's support of Pussy Riot see Joe Quinn's SOTT article:
'Pussy Riot', the U.S. State Department and Economic Shock Therapy
When the US government sanctioned the beating and arrest of US citizens for swaying from side to side in the Jefferson Memorial a couple of years ago, it provoked no response from the Western media (and therefore the Western zombie-citizens who rely entirely on the media for their 'opinions'). Yet the Russian government, sorry, 'Putin' (because everyone knows Putin is a dictator, right?) is broadly denounced as a 'tyrant' by these same Western zombies (again because their 'outraged opinion' was deftly inserted into their brains by the Western media) for putting a stop to the ugly spectacle of deranged Russian women sticking chickens up their vaginas in supermarkets, daubing outlines of phalli on bridges, staging 'orgies' in a museum and defiling the peace and tranquility of Russian Orthodox churches as part of their three year long international attack on the Russian government.

Disconnect? For sure, but, like I said, don't expect any logic from the collective mind of the citizens of Western zombie nations. All you can hope to do is understand the psychopathic logic of Western governments and the way it infects the minds and manipulates the emotions of Western citizens.

'Pussy Riot', or 11 Russian women between the ages of 20-33, has received direct moral support from the US State Department and likely indirect financial support, and appears to be one aspect of the US government's decade-long attempt to undermine Russian society and its president, Vladimir Putin.

NED-funded Oksana Chelysheva of the US State Department-funded "Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, who is also coordinator of the 'Pussy Riot' campaign in Finland.For the last 30 years the US State Department has created and used phony NGOs in many countries as an advance guard for 'regime change'. Funneling $billions into 'student' and 'activist' groups in foreign countries, the US government attempts to carefully prepare the local population for 'revolution' that is not of their making and has nothing to do with improving their lot (if indeed it needs improving) and everything to do with getting rid of a, usually democratically-elected, leader of a sovereign country because, in one way or another, he or she refuses to roll over and play dead for 'pax americana'.



War Whore

Rand Paul says Dick Cheney pushed for Iraq war after 9/11 to benefit his former employer Halliburton

Rand Paul
In a videotaped 2009 speech before student Republicans at Western Kentucky University, Rand Paul - who was just beginning his run for the Senate seat he eventually won - explained that former Vice President Dick Cheney, who counseled against war in Iraq in 1995, pushed for war following 9/11 to benefit his former employers at military contractor Halliburton.

Wall Street

Casino capitalism: FBI investigating high-frequency insider trading on Wall Street

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© Business Insider
The FBI is investigating whether high-speed trading firms trade on non-public information, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The agency is working with the SEC and CFTC.

Bloomberg's Keri Geiger and Patricia Hurtado also have an update:

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation's inquiry stems from a multiyear crackdown on insider trading, which has led to at least 79 convictions of hedge-fund traders and others. Agents are examining whether traders abuse information to act ahead of orders by institutional investors, according to the person, who asked not to be named because the probe is confidential. Even trades based on computer algorithms could amount to wire fraud, securities fraud or insider trading."

Compass

California AG candidate wants death penalty for corrupt lawmakers - Firing squad, public hanging or lethal injection?

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© CBSSFYee in custody as he arrives at the Federal Courthouse in San Francisco.
A Republican candidate for California attorney general said Friday that state lawmakers who are found guilty of crimes that endanger the lives of others should face the death penalty.

Phil Wyman, who spent 17 years in the state Legislature, said he was motivated by the case of Democratic Sen. Leland Yee. Yee faces federal charges that include an attempt to coordinate an international gun-running scheme from the Philippines.

Wyman also criticized Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris for being "silent as a mouse" on the corruption cases that have marred the state Senate this year. A campaign spokesman for Harris declined comment.

Wyman said in a news release and subsequent telephone interview that the "most egregious" abusers of their public office, if convicted, should be able to choose their method of death - public hanging, firing squad or lethal injection - as a deterrent to others.