Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Amazon is a thriving business - thanks to your taxpayer dollars

David Dayen
New Republic
Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
The tech giant has received more than $1 billion in tax breaks. The government is also funding food stamps for many of its workers.
Jeff Bezos
© David Ryder/Getty Images
As Amazon builds up its distribution network, it's hit on a trick long practiced by the likes of Walmart: using the federal government to help pay its workers. A new study by Policy Matters Ohio found that more than 700 Amazon employees receive food stamps, or more than 10 percent of the tech giant's 6,000-strong workforce in the state. Some of those recipients may be part-time help, but the fact that they need federal aid to survive suggests that they would be happy to work more. "Why is this giant, successful company offering such limited pay and hours of work that many of its workers need help buying food?" asked Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters.

Amazon ranks nineteenth among Ohio businesses in number of employees on food stamps, behind Walmart, McDonald's, and Kroger. But Amazon is only the fifty-third-largest employer in Ohio, suggesting a higher rate of employees on food stamps than its counterparts. More important, Amazon has obtained at least $123 million in state tax incentives to place warehouse and data center locations in Ohio. This reflects a perverse form of double-dipping: Amazon gets a bounty to create jobs in Ohio, and then a good chunk of the jobs are so low-paying that workers have to seek federal assistance, providing a second subsidy for the e-commerce giant.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Austrian government calls for "restrictive asylum policy" amid growth in crime committed by "foreigners"


RT
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 20:32 UTC
Austria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (L) and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache in Seggau, Austria, on January 5, 2018.
© Heinz-Peter Bader / ReutersAustria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (L) and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache in Seggau, Austria, on January 5, 2018.
The number of crimes committed by "foreigners" in Austria increased to 40 percent of the total in 2016, a new government report says. Interior Minister Herbert Kickl says a "strict asylum policy" is needed to tackle the issue.

In 2016, some 500,000 offenses were registered in Austria, with 40 percent of them being committed by "foreigners," a new security report presented by the Interior Ministry says. According to Kickl, the number of foreign offenders increased by 13 percent.

The Austrian vice chancellor and head of the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPO), Heinz-Christian Strache, also told journalists following the government meeting that asylum seekers accounted for almost 46 percent of foreign offenders. He described the figure as "significant" and called for a stricter refugee policy.
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Arrow Down

Russiagate "case" continues to crumble: Mueller accepts no collusion in Veselnitskaya-Trump Jr meeting

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 03:28 UTC
Natalia Veselnitskaya trump
Natalia Veselnitskaya
Sources within Mueller investigation confirm Veselnitskaya/Trump Junior meeting no longer seen as evidence of Trump/Russia collusion

As is now becoming the way as the Russiagate scandal unravels, confirmation of the collapse of one of its central pillars - the claim of proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign which some have claimed to see in the meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 between the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Junior - has slipped out in the most covert way possible.

Nonetheless the confirmation is there and originates in what all the indications suggest is a deliberate leak either from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team or from the White House's legal team.
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Hourglass

Bill and Hillary Clinton facing massive exposure over FBI probe - Analyst Charles Ortel

Ekaterina Blinova
Sputnik
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 01:53 UTC
cinton's
© Brian Snyder/REUTERS
It appears that the Clinton Foundation will not be able to escape scrutiny this time, Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel told Sputnik. Judging solely from publicly available records, one may easily suspect a longstanding set of frauds, the analyst noted, adding that millions of dollars vanished during the Clintons' political campaigns.

For years the Clinton Foundation has repeatedly got a free pass, although the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been seemingly keeping an eye on the entity, Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel notes, adding that time seems to be up.

"The Clintons have played central roles embracing unregulated globalism and cronyism on national and international stages since January 1993, so there is a long pattern and practice of suspicious transactions, and clear evidence that the family went from being 'dead-broke' and in debt, to now being multi-millionaires, all the while working in 'public service', or as 'philanthropists'," Ortel told Sputnik.
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Arrow Down

Wet dream of climate dictators: Climate skeptics to be exiled to 'international convict settlements'

Joann Nova
JoNova
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 23:32 UTC
Kerguelen Island 1903
© Wikimedia CommonsKerguelen Island 1903
Tony Thomas has unearthed a ten year old document that reads like a wet dream for mini-climate dictators. It envisages, by 2028, that the first climate skeptics will be convicted of denying the existence of climate change and exiled to three penal colonies in, wait for it, Kerguelen Island, South Georgia and New Zealand's South Island. Magically, these are "International convict settlements." So it's globalist prisons for the deplorables who say unpermitted things, because they are so bad, we wouldn't want them mixing with normal criminals back home who believe in climate change but rort the carbon markets.

Luckily their fantasy fiction is even less accurate than climate models. By 2030 they are tipping Africa as an economic powerhouse:
2030 ... the global economy today is less dominated by the big three of China, India and the US. Instead, economic blocs such as the African Union, the Latin American Trade Council and the Alliance of Turkic States have emerged as powerful players on the scene.
As Tony Thomas points out they also estimated oil would rise from $150 in 2008 to $400 by 2022. So far it has risen all the way to $60. They also predicted a global depression in 2009-18. Instead we got "Dow Record highs ". I guess they didn't see Donald Trump coming either.
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Megaphone

A renewed hysteria on Kremlin trolls

Virginia Tilley
CounterPunch
Fri, 29 Dec 2017 21:29 UTC
putin devil
On Christmas day, CounterPunch readers who opened the Washington Post were confronted by a startling lede in the top article. Under the alarmist headline, "Kremlin Trolls Burned across the Internet as Washington Debated Options." the piece reported that one "Alice Donovan" had contacted CounterPunch back in February 2016 and later posted articles on its website. She had claimed to be a freelance journalist, but her first email to CounterPunch, sent at 3:26 a.m. (which, the Post reminded us darkly, was "the middle of the day in Moscow"), was shared to buttress the central claim drawn from FBI sources: "Donovan" was actually a covert Russian agent.

According to the Post, "The FBI was tracking Donovan as part of a months-long counterintelligence operation code-named 'NorthernNight.' Internal bureau reports described her as a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of Kremlin-led trolls seeking to undermine America's democratic institutions." CounterPunch had become the hapless propaganda patsy of this troll "army" and editor Jeffrey St. Clair was scrambling fruitlessly to sort out what had happened.

So far, so alarming. But CounterPunch readers are used to parsing media claims and under the briefest scrutiny the Post article quickly fell apart into a mass of unsupported assertions-even leaving aside obvious mysteries, such as why we are now supposed to take writing in the wee hours as revealing someone's true location in Eastern Europe (I now wonder what my insomniac messages are suggesting) and why a writer as obscure as Donovan warranted the Post's lede in the first place.

Comment: Perhaps they have friends in 'deep' places. See also:

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Cheeseburger

Flashback Glen Greenwald: Yet another major Russia story falls apart. Is skepticism permissible yet?

Glen Greenwald
The Intercept
Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:48 UTC
Putin TVs
© Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty Images
Last Friday, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security. "Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year's presidential election, officials said Friday," began the USA Today story, similar to how most other outlets presented this extraordinary claim.

usatoday headline

Comment: Amen! Going back to this piece in September gives some perspective on how little has changed in the intervening months. The MSM and US gov are completely hysterical about the "Russian threat" and continue to blame them for everything in need of a scapegoat. See also:

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X

UK: Social media giants face sanctions if fail to give 'proof' of Russian interference

Julie Hyland
World Socialist Web Site
Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
tied lamb
© Political TheologyThe new look of freedom.
A parliamentary committee has set a deadline of January 18 for Facebook and Twitter to provide information on supposed "Russian misinformation" or face sanctions.

Damian Collins, Conservative chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, declared the deadline before the New Year, insisting that Facebook and Twitter supply details of social media accounts and pages allegedly operated by Russian "misinformation actors."

The select committee is investigating so-called "fake news," centering on accusations of foreign interference in the June, 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union and the June, 2017 general election.

Both polls resulted in shock setbacks for the ruling elite, with the "Leave" vote narrowly winning the Brexit referendum and Prime Minister Theresa May losing her parliamentary majority in the general election.

The inquiry is bogus. If the committee were remotely concerned with false information, its first port of call would be parliament itself.

Comment: An international campaign: Sanctions to be issued for social media if they don't produce Russian collusion evidence. Will they fall for this and offer falsified proof and sacrificial lambs to avoid financial and oversight penalties? Fiction has become more important than truth and the cost to freedom and damage to the global community has gone beyond comprehension.

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Attention

Kushner receives $30M from Israeli firm while shaping ME/Israeli policy

Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
The Don/Neti/Kushner
© Drew Angerer/Getty Images
"Are you comfortable with having Jared Kushner be the beneficiary of huge amounts of Israeli financing at the same time he's overseeing U.S. foreign policy on Israel?"

President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is once more under intense scrutiny after new reporting revealed that his lucrative financial relationship with Israel has deepened even as his influence over U.S. Middle East policy - from his leading role in Trump's effort to "derail" a U.N. vote against Israel to his sway over the president's Jerusalem move - has continued to grow.

According to a report published Sunday by the New York Times, Kushner's real estate firm received a $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim - one of Israel's largest financial institutions - just before he accompanied Trump on his first diplomatic trip to Israel last year.

"The deal, which was not made public, pumped significant new equity into 10 Maryland apartment complexes controlled by Mr. Kushner's firm," the Times notes. "While Mr. Kushner has sold parts of his business since taking a White House job last year, he still has stakes in most of the family empire - including the apartment buildings in and around Baltimore."

Comment: The US is entrenched in supporting Israel with a bought Congress and 'blinders-on' foreign policy. Israel's grand mesmerize and icy fingers have finally and effectively infiltrated the inner circle of the presidency, a Netanyahu dream come true.

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Binoculars

Upcoming: NSA surveillance bill would legalize FBI ability to spy on Americans without a warrant

Alex Emmons
The Intercept
Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:59 UTC
NSA guy
© Law Enforcement Cyber Center"Gotcha!"
With major NSA surveillance authorities set to expire later this month, House Republicans are rushing to pass a bill that would not only reauthorize existing powers, but also codify into law some practices that critics have called unconstitutional.

The bill takes aim at reforming how federal law enforcement can use data collected by the National Security Agency, putting a modest constraint on when the FBI can conduct so-called backdoor searches of Americans' communications. But because such searches make use of a legal loophole, critics say the current bill may do more harm than good by explicitly writing the practice into law.

The bill would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which serves as the basis for some of the NSA's largest surveillance programs, and keep it on the books through 2023. The law was first passed in 2008 after the George W. Bush administration's secret warrantless wiretapping was made public, effectively to legalize what the administration was doing.

The law allows the intelligence community to spy on Americans' transnational communications without a warrant so long as the "targets" are not Americans. In 2013, documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA vacuums up a tremendous amount of wholly domestic communications through the program as well.

Comment: "What's in YOUR emails?" See also:

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