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Tillerson: US has direct channels of communication with Pyongyang, not 'blackout' situation


RT
Sat, 30 Sep 2017 12:56 UTC
Rex Tillerson
© Amr Alfiky / Reuters
Washington has direct channels to communicate with Pyongyang, there's no "blackout" situation according to the US State Secretary Rex Tillerson.

The US is "probing" North Korea to see if it is interested in dialogue, Tillerson told reporters during his visit to China on Saturday.

"We are probing, so stay tuned," Reuters cited Tillerson as saying. "We ask: Would you like to talk? We have lines of communications to Pyongyang. We're not in a dark situation."
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Propaganda

Americans blame Facebook for fake news - New "Democratic party operative" poll

Alex Roarty
The Seattle Times
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 22:04 UTC
Voters in the poll, by a big majority, want Facebook to keep foreign powers from running ads during a U.S. election, and think "Facebook should hold itself to the same standard as other media companies to only publish accurate stories about candidates during election season."
Facebook
© AP Photo/Noah Berger, FileIn this April 18, 2017, file photo, conference workers speak in front of a demo booth at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, in San Jose, California
The public has a tough message for Facebook: The social-media giant needs to stop fake news - especially when it's funded by Russia.

According to a new poll commissioned by the Factual Democracy Project, a group trying to fight the spread of intentionally fabricated news stories on social media, 73 percent of voters say Facebook should not allow foreign powers to run ads targeting Americans during an election.

It's not just Russian-linked fake news the public is concerned about either: 78 percent of people said they want Facebook to prevent inaccurate stories from being widely shared on its platform.

Comment: Here is the latest blame game of presidential loser Hillary Clinton: Killary's postmortem blame cycle now targeting married women, producing autopsy comedy gold

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Blue Planet

SOTT Focus: How Globalism Works Like the Mafia

Chris Kanthan
Sott.net
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:05 UTC
Globalism
Globalism is just like mafia, but with lot more complexity and respectability. If you have watched mob films such as The Godfather, you can understand how the world works. For example, in Godfather II, a bunch of mobsters get together in Havana, Cuba, to celebrate Hyman Roth's birthday. As the birthday cake is symbolically cut into pieces and distributed, Roth tells the group how Cuba will be split up among the guests. Extrapolate this scene to the world, you can visualize how the world works.

Corporations to Central Banks

The power structure of global elites is like nested Russian dolls made up of corporations. How many people realize that KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are owned by the same corporation? Or that HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, and Cartoon Network all report to the same boss? Or that whether you drink Budweiser, Corona, Stella, Busch or Michelob (and dozens of others), you end up paying one giant corporation?

Who controls these corporations? It's not the CEO, as most people believe. The real control lies in the hands of the largest shareholders and/or the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors of all giant corporations are linked to each other by one or two degrees of separation. Some elites even sit on multiple boards at the same time. For example, Rochelle Lazarus sits on the boards of Merck, GE and Blackstone; Jon Huntsman sits on the boards of Hilton, Ford, Caterpillar and Chevron; and Timothy P. Flynn is a director at JP Morgan Chase, Wal-Mart, Alcoa and United Healthcare. Think for a moment how all these corporations would seem totally unrelated to a regular person.
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Snakes in Suits

Top 'Israel-first' megadonors to Trump are pushing him to reject Iran deal

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:00 UTC
Sheldon Adelson
© Flash90Casino mogul and GOP financier Sheldon Adelson.
You'd think that in Year 15 of the Iraq debacle, neoconservative would be a dirty word in America; but neoconservatives are having a field day! Phil Giraldi's article blaming American Jews for stoking the "war engine," followed by Valerie Plame's retweet of the article, has given neocons (adherents of a hawkish ideology that came out of the Jewish community) an opportunity to grandstand about the supposed anti-semitism of the antiwar community.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times and Jamie Kirchick are using the occasion to paint all critics of the Israel lobby as anti-Semites. So is Israel lobbyist Omri Ceren.

The righteous outbursts could not be coming at a worse time. Donald Trump seems to be leaning toward decertifying the Iran deal, and the Israel lobby is hard at work to make that happen. Trump is "clearly listening to the hawks on Iran, not the realists," says Scott McConnell, in the National Interest, and he sees a financial angle in the policy-making. The president
"is I think somewhat more dependent than anyone anticipated on neoconservative donors, because of his and administration's looming legal bills. In that sense, the liberal push to prosecute Trump for 'Russia' might have some very illiberal consequences."
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Windsock

Promise reversal, Trump gives up on private sector infrastructure investments

Christian Britschgi
Reason.com
Wed, 27 Sep 2017 04:50 UTC
Trump
© Arutz Sheva
Infrastructure was one of the few areas where a Donald Trump presidency offered any cause for optimism among libertarians.

On the campaign trail and in office, Trump had promised to tap private capital to deliver $1 trillion in infrastructure investments, spin off the nation's air traffic control system from direct federal management, and pump the breaks on the billions in federal pork currently wasted on local transit projects.

None of this has happened.

Despite his self-proclaimed skill at deal-making, the president has so far failed to shepherd air traffic control reform through a reluctant Congress. His Department of Transportation has continued to greenlight spending on rail boondoggles, including California's high-speed rail disaster.

And now, in a stunning reversal of pretty much everything he has said over the past year, Trump is abandoning the idea of tapping private investment capital for his trillion-dollar infrastructure dream.

According to a Tuesday Washington Post report, Trump told congressional Democrats in a closed-door meeting he was abandoning plans to employ public-private partnerships for infrastructure investment preferring, instead, the old-fashioned tax, borrow, and spend method.

"He dismissed it categorically and said it doesn't work," said Rep. Brian Higgins (D - New York), who was in the meeting with Trump. A White House Official later confirmed this, telling the Post that private investment was "not the silver bullet for all of our nation's infrastructure problems."

"I was both astonished and dismayed," says Bob Poole, director of transportation policy for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website. "Everything the administration had said up until yesterday was that public private partnerships and private investment in infrastructure improvements was going to be the core of the program."

Comment: Scraping a signature promise overnight, deemed good for business and the nation, suggests Trump is either a chump, the recipient of significant interference from an influential source or up against an immovable object.

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Footprints

Spain's Balearic Islands mull independence vote, following in Catalonia's footsteps


Sputnik
Thu, 28 Sep 2017 13:15 UTC
Balearic Islands
© Calvin Smith/Cabrera-Penyal BlancPuerto Cabrera, Balearic Islands, Spain
As the residents of Catalonia are set to vote in an independence referendum on October 1, a similar initiative has been proposed by another Spanish region, the Balearic Islands. The move, if launched, is expected to be negative for Spain and other European nations, an analyst told Sputnik.

The MÉS per Mallorca coalition in the Balearic Islands wants a referendum on the region's independence in 2030.

The Socialist Party of the Balearic Islands (PSIB), the regional branch of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), has approved a roadmap that will be discussed at a party meeting on October 28. The document clarifies that the main goal is to establish the Republic of Majorca, with the following declaration of independence of the other islands of the archipelago.

Alarming Tendencies

In an interview with Sputnik Mundo, Armando Fernández Steinko, a professor of sociology at the Complutence University of Madrid (UCM), spoke against independence efforts in Spain, warning that they risk triggering a trend toward disintegration.

According to him, this trend looks like an attempt to "blow up Spanish statehood." The professor stressed that if Catalonia becomes independent this will launch "dangerous dynamics" for several future decades and may result in a situation resembling that of the Balkans in the 1990s.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

ISIS' Al-Baghdadi 'rises from the dead' alive and well

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 01:49 UTC
Al-Baghdadi
© Abb Takk News
Conclusive evidence that ISIS's leader, the man known as Ibrahim Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi, is still alive despite Russian claims earlier this year that he was killed in a Russian air strike, has appeared in the form of a 46 minute long recording from Al-Baghdadi himself, which must have been made recently - after the date of the air strike in which it was claimed he was killed - since it refers to the Iraqi army's recapture of Mosul and North Korea's recent nuclear tests.

Publication of the recording incidentally confirms that Al-Baghdadi's authority within ISIS is undiminished despite ISIS's recent defeats, and that within ISIS he continues to be accepted as Islam's true Caliph and therefore as ISIS's undisputed leader.

Comment: See also:

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Clipboard

Putin: Conditions in place to end war in Syria, joint success with Turkey


RT
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:07 UTC
PutinErdogan
© Yahoo
Vladimir Putin has termed the progress in the peaceful solution of the Syrian crisis 'a joint success' between Moscow and Ankara after talks with the Turkish leader. He said the agreements created "conditions" to end the bloodshed in the war-torn state.

The de-escalation zones "have de-facto created the necessary conditions for the end of the fratricidal war in Syria and the final defeat of terrorists as well as for the Syrian people's return to normal life," Putin said at the news conference in the capital of Turkey, Ankara.

He added that it was an "issue of crucial significance" not only for the Syrian people and the Middle East, but also for the whole world as it created the necessary climate for Syrian refugees to return home.

Erdogan also positively assessed the Syrian peace process by saying he is "happy" with the progress made at the talks in Astana. He added that these negotiations "strengthen peace."

He said further that the Astana process guarantors, including Turkey and Russia, should now "focus even more on confidence building measures."

Erdogan added that Moscow and Ankara are "committed to the political solution of the Syrian crisis."


Comment: A masterful conclusion to an unnecessary and horrific conflict, should plans not go awry or the West rear its ugly head to undermine or sabotage the effort.

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Attention

World War III with China and how it might be fought

Alfred W. McCoy
Information Clearing House
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 03:19 UTC
computerchina
© linkedin.com
For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system of global hegemony, backed by the world's wealthiest economy and finest military, affected. The country was, after all, the planet's "indispensible nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed in 1998 (and other presidents and politicians have insisted ever since). The U.S. enjoyed a greater "disparity of power" over its would-be rivals than any empire ever, Yale historian Paul Kennedy announced in 2002. Certainly, it would remain "the sole superpower for decades to come," Foreign Affairs magazine assured us just last year. During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised his supporters that "we're gonna win with military... we are gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning." In August, while announcing his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, Trump reassured the nation: "In every generation, we have faced down evil, and we have always prevailed." In this fast-changing world, only one thing was certain: when it really counted, the United States could never lose.

No longer.

The Trump White House may still be basking in the glow of America's global supremacy but, just across the Potomac, the Pentagon has formed a more realistic view of its fading military superiority. In June, the Defense Department issued a major report titled on Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World, finding that the U.S. military "no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors," and "it no longer can... automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range." This sober assessment led the Pentagon's top strategists to "the jarring realization that 'we can lose.'" Increasingly, Pentagon planners find, the "self-image of a matchless global leader" provides a "flawed foun­dation for forward-looking defense strategy... under post-primacy conditions." This Pentagon report also warned that, like Russia, China is "engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority"; hence, Beijing's bid for "Pacific primacy" and its "campaign to expand its control over the South China Sea."

Comment: Even if the US managed to prevail in a world war level conflict with China, the declining US society and substandard intellectual mastery would be unable to support the advancement necessary to maintain control and superiority on a global scale. Upcoming earth changes may dwarf even this WWIII scenario to a mute point.

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Bomb

1500 explosives destroyed by Russian engineers in Deir ez-Zor demining operation


RT
Fri, 29 Sep 2017 02:20 UTC
Syrian mine fields
© Sputnik International
Russian sappers equipped with the latest demining technology have managed to find and destroy over 1,500 explosives since they began clearing the streets of Deir ez-Zor as the Syrian Army continues clearing the city and surrounds from remaining ISIS terrorists.

A group of 170 mine clearance specialists were sent to the Syrian city shortly after the army lifted the blockade of Deir ez-Zor. On Thursday, the Russian defense ministry announced that the detachment from the International Mine Action Center of the Russian Armed Forces had already made progress in their difficult and dangerous assignment.

In a matter of days, the sappers divided into 10 groups, checked and cleared 8 kilometers of roads, 8 buildings and about 3 hectares of the surrounding terrain. Focusing their work on clearing the streets that lead to vital city social infrastructure - hospitals, water supply, and electricity facilities - the teams, have so far, discovered and destroyed around 1,500 explosive items, including roughly 100 homemade and improvised devices.

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