Puppet MastersS


Attention

America is broke and 'fiscally responsible' Republicans couldn't care less

Doug Bandow
The American Conservative
Fri, 19 Jan 2018 20:34 UTC
raining money cash
© langdu/Shutterstock
These poseurs of fiscal responsibility are about to drive up debt to its highest levels since World War II.

The United States is effectively bankrupt, but that doesn't matter to the GOP. Once evangelists of fiscal responsibility and scourges of deficit spending, Republicans today glory in spilling red ink. The national debt is now $20.6 trillion, greater than the annual GDP of about $19.5 trillion. Alas, with Republicans at the helm, deficits are set to continue racing upwards, apparently without end.

This flood of red ink will increase. Last year the Congressional Budget Office figured the U.S. was going to again run trillion dollar deficits around 2022. An extra $10 trillion would be added to the deficit over the following decade.

But under Republican fiscal "stewardship," analysts now believe the deficit could hit a trillion dollars next year. Why? Congress relaxed the sequester, eliminating its modest pressure for fiscal responsibility, and approved disaster relief, without making any corresponding spending cuts. Legislators also inflated military outlays, even though much of the Pentagon budget constitutes defense welfare, subsidies for prosperous and populous allies.

Comment:

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Bad Guys

Tillerson blames Russia for alleged Syrian chemical attack no matter who actually carried it out


RT
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 20:14 UTC
Rex Tillerson
© Francois Lenoir / ReutersUS Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pointed the finger at Syrian President Bashar Assad for the reported chemical incident in East Ghouta, while ultimately blaming Russia for it, regardless of who actually committed the attack.

Tillerson produced his accusations against Moscow while speaking at a conference in Paris, designed to a create the 'International Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons.' The meeting, hosted by France, had the stated aim of designing a mechanism to target those deemed responsible for chemical attacks worldwide, but largely in Syria. The 24 nations that participated in the gathering agreed to work more closely on the issue and impose sanctions on alleged perpetrators.

Just ahead of the event, reports emerged of a new chemical incident in Syria, in which it is alleged that over 20 civilians were injured in a possible chlorine gas attack in East Ghouta on Monday.

Comment: Russia and Syria have won the war against terrorism and have done so with efficiency and accuracy while providing safety for local population. It doesn't make a lick of sense for Assad to attack his own people. If he despised his people so much he wouldn't have taken such exhaustive measures to protect his people during the war.

The United States is lashing out precisely because Russia and Syria have so effectively accomplished the things the United States only makes claims about.

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Snakes in Suits

Top DOJ and FBI officials allegedly use burner phones to avoid scrutiny from federal investigators


True Pundit
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 20:09 UTC
comey phones
Members of the FBI and Justice Department's top brass at their Washington D.C.headquarters and other field offices are now using burner phones to stay under the radar of federal investigators and lawmakers, according to FBI insiders.

The shocking revelations come on the heels of news that the FBI deleted thousands of text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents before investigators could review their content.

While that is disturbing on one level, FBI and DOJ hierarchy employing the telecom habits of drug cartel bosses reaches a new low for the once-heralded federal law enforcement agency and the DOJ. And breaks federal laws as well.
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USA

FBI's standard operating procedure is suppressing and destroying evidence

James Bovard
The Hill
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 20:02 UTC
fbi emblem
© Getty
Congressional investigators were rocked this weekend when the FBI notified them that five months of text messages from a top FBI investigator into the Trump campaign's Russian connections had mysteriously vanished.

The FBI-issued cell phone of Peter Strzok, whose previous texts to his mistress (also an FBI employee) showed fierce hostility to Trump, suddenly had problems due to "software upgrades" and other issues - and voila - all the messages between the two from Dec. 14, 2016, to May 17, 2017 vanished. Strzok, who oversaw the Trump investigation from its start in July 2016, was removed from Mueller's Special Counsel investigation last summer after the Justice Department Inspector General discovered his anti-Trump texts.

Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, notified a Senate committee that "data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected." The missing texts could have obliterated the remnants of credibility of the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign.
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Star of David

Israeli pilots take a stand by refusing to 'deport refugees to their death' amid mass deportation of Africans


RT
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:55 UTC
israel deportation African migrants
© Ronen Zvulun / ReutersMore than 8,000 people have signed a petition urging pilots and ground crews at Ben Gurion Airport to not cooperate with the government’s deportation flights of asylum seekers.
Israeli pilots are taking a stand against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's mission to expel tens of thousands of African migrants from the country, publicly declaring they will not "deport refugees to their death."

The government is forcing Eritreans and Sudanese asylum-seekers to accept relocation to countries in Africa or face imprisonment. A number of pilots from Israel's flag carrier El Al have made public declarations on their social media accounts outlining their position.

"I have joined many of my good friends, in declaring that I will not fly refugees to their deaths. I won't take part in that barbarism," El Al pilot Iddo Elad wrote on his Facebook page.

Other pilots stated that the nation must remember its history and the horror experienced by Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Comment: Previously:

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Whistle

Could it be this man knows more than Robert Mueller?

Simon van Zuylen-Wood
Daily Intelligencer
Sun, 21 Jan 2018 09:06 UTC
SnowdenGreenwald
© Everett CollectionEric Snowden • Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald's war on the Russia investigation.

It's 10:45 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time. Glenn Greenwald and I are finishing dinner at a deserted bistro in Ipanema. The restaurant, which serves its sweating beer bottles in metal buckets and goes heavy on the protein, is almost aggressively unremarkable (English menus on the table, a bossa-nova version of "Hey Jude" on the stereo). Greenwald avoids both meat and alcohol but seems to enjoy dining here. "I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted." He eats a panko-crusted shrimp. "It just gives me this huge buffer. You've seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears."

Greenwald, now 50, has seemed to live in his own bubble in Rio for years, since well before he published Edward Snowden's leaks and broke the domestic-spying story in 2013 - landing himself a Pulitzer Prize, a book deal, and, in time, the backing of a billionaire (that's Pierre Omidyar) to start a muckraking, sh*t-stirring media empire (that's First Look Media, home to the Intercept, though its ambitions have been downgraded over time). But he seems even more on his own since the election, just as the agitated left has regained the momentum it lost in the Obama years.

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there's a conspiracy, he suspects, it's one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees "McCarthyism." Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking - and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as "enemies."
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Die

Gilbert Doctorow: 'The coming Russia-Ukraine war (maybe)'

Gilbert Doctorow
Une parole franche
Sun, 21 Jan 2018 20:24 UTC
ukrainebarbs
© The Great Courses Daily
While the United States and a good many countries around the world this weekend have been reflecting on the first anniversary of Donald Trump's move into the Oval Office, drawing up balance sheets of his promises and achievements, Russia has had a rather different issue on the front-burner: the coming war with Ukraine.

The situation in Donbass (South-Eastern Ukraine) has been an intermittent feature of Russia's political talk shows for the past couple of years, along with the military campaign in Syria and more recently the stages in the preparation for presidential elections on 18 March.

To be sure, minds became focused on Donbass in the closing weeks of 2017 as military action on the front lines separating the forces of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk enjoying Russian support from Ukrainian militias and armed forces reached an intensity not seen for more than a year. This, despite the heralded exchange of military prisoners by both sides before New Year's under talks supervised by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Kirill.

Comment: Ukraine has sadly shifted from its position as a respected and productive republic to being the groveling pawn of the US/Western puppet masters. The touch of evil is festering and should Ukraine succumb to the above analysis, the fate of all involved will be sealed.

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Hourglass

Back to the future: Trump Administration's new defense strategy is Cold War redux

John Wight
Sputnik
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 21:36 UTC
Mattis
© UnknownDefense Secretary James Mattis
19 January 2018 will go down in history as the date of Washington's declaration of a new Cold War, delivered by Defense Secretary James Mattis in the course of a speech he gave at John Hopkins University, marking a new low in US foreign policy.

Mr. Mattis' speech confirms that any lingering idea or hope that the Trump administration will reorient relations with Russia on a more positive footing than before is as dead as the proverbial Dodo. Instead, it leaves those countries that refuse to accept the writ of the Empire no option but to draw closer in common cause against it - economically, militarily, and geopolitically.

In his book Frontline Ukraine, Richard Sakwa makes the salient point that the "Trotskyite roots of neocon thinking are well-known, and for them the world revolution was not cancelled but only transformed: the fight now was not for revolutionary socialism but for capitalist democracy - to make the world safe for the US." Unabashed neocon scribe Thomas Friedman made the same point more succinctly when he infamously asserted, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps."

Comment: The US is a country so deeply entrenched within its groove of self-delusion and role-playing, it can't escape.

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Rocket

North Korean government: We made "absolutely the right choice" by boosting our nuclear capabilities


RT
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 12:23 UTC
Kim Jong-un
© AP/Korean News Service
North Korea can counter any nuclear threat, its representative told a conference on disarmament in Geneva. He warned the US against bringing its strategic assets to and around the Korean Peninsula. North Korea said it had made "absolutely the right choice" by boosting its nuclear capabilities.

Pyongyang's representative has urged the US to completely stop joint exercises with South Korea and "all nuclear war drills" in the region and has spoken out against US's military presence on the Korean Peninsula "under the pretext of the security of the Olympic Games. This is a dangerous act of throwing a wet blanket over the current positive atmosphere of inter-Korean relations," the representative said.

The US disarmament ambassador at the talks advocated for North Korea's denuclearization and further pressure on Pyongyang, saying "The US will not recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapon state."

Comment: Well done, North Korea.

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Dollar Gold

Draft of Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan leaked

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:58 UTC
Trump walking
As was widely expected, the White House has leaked what appears to be a six-page rough draft of its $1 trillion infrastructure plan to Axios as it rushes to release a fully formed iteration of the plan before the end of the month.

The draft, which can be viewed below, provides incentives for state and local governments - as well as private developers, metropolitan authorities, and regional authorities - to break ground on a range of different infrastructure products, including: Surface transportation, passenger rail, maritime and inland waterway ports, flood control, water supply, hydropower, water resources, drinking water facilities, storm water facilities as well as Brownfield and Superfund sites.

Applicants must show how they plan to attract non-federal funding to ensure that the projects are completed. They must also explain how the projects will spur economic growth.

Comment: If indeed this plan shows a move toward privatization, it'll be a challenge for Trump to explain how this will make America great again. See also:

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