Puppet MastersS


Stock Down

US meddling takes its toll as Venezuelan cash reserves reach 'catastrophic low'

Venezuela Central Bank
© AP/Ariana CubillosA cleaning woman walks by replicas of Venezuela’s currency bills, hung in a hallway at the Central bank office building in Caracas, Venezuela.
Years of efforts to destabilize and weaken Venezuela's leftist government have taken their toll, with the South American nation now down to its last 10 billion dollars in cash reserves.

Despite having the world's largest oil reserves, Venezuela's economy has struggled to stay afloat in recent years. The Venezuelan government, led by Nicolás Maduro, has been forced to take out loans from China and Russia to avoid an economic collapse.

Unsurprisingly, Western media has continually blamed Venezuela's economic difficulties - and the resulting civil unrest - entirely on the nation's government, accusing it of gross mismanagement of its resources and wealth. But these dominant narratives consistently fail to consider the U.S.' long-standing efforts to remove Venezuela's leftist governmentfrom power, beginning first with former President Hugo Chávez and now his successor Nicolas Maduro. Venezuela's leadership may have changed, but U.S. tactics like the imposition of sanctions and the manipulation of global oil prices largely remain the same.

Bad Guys

EU60 and the failure of the European Union

Banca Centrale Europea
The 60th anniversary of the formation of the European Economic Union is coming up. However momentous this occasion is though, the Treaty of Rome has clearly favored some European nations over others. A pall shadow now looms over the experiment that was supposed to bring peace and prosperity to hundreds of millions. Here's a look at a stopgap initiative called EU60, an attempt to rescue what remains of a once powerful idea for Europeans.

The European Union has failed most of its citizens. The parliamentarians in Brussels, harnessed to the fragmented national players and institutions, are now tattered threads holding together a frayed idea. Those who questioned the union's efficacy from the start are now being proven right. Euroscepticism in the UK has caught fire in countries from Latvia to France. This reality is obvious by both the level of protest and activism against Brussels policies, and in the context of "nationalism" rekindled across much of Europe and the western hemisphere. Donald Trump's win in America, the Brexit vote, the emergence and popularity of right wing candidates like France's Marine Le Pen all reveal the weakness of the Eurozone today. What's more, today's acute problems really only validate the original skeptism critics had. But the desperate measures EU leaders like Jean-Claude Juncker are undertaking shows the real danger of an EU breakup soon.

Arrow Up

POST-ISIS ERA: Balance of power in Middle East

Post-ISIS MiddleEast
© South Front
In March, Moscow became the center of the diplomatic activity of global and regional powers involved in a number of the ongoing crises in the Middle East. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due in Moscow March 9 for a two-day visit. He will meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and will participate in a session of the Council on High-Level Cooperation between Russia and Turkey. At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Moscow and to meet Putin. The two leaders will discuss the current situation in the Middle East and aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement, according to the Kremlin press service. UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow in the coming weeks. It will be the first UK foreign secretary visit to the country since 2012. High profile Swiss diplomats involved in the so-called "Geneva format" aimed on "resolving the Syrian conflict" and some military and political officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran will also visit Moscow, according to available information. On March 8-9, Germany's Foreign Minister Siegmar Gabriel will make a visit to Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart.

Comment: While the US establishment fights with Donald Trump, the Middle East and EU is increasingly looking towards Russia for a possible solution to the complex regional crisis. With the Syrian government victory in Aleppo, Palmyra under Russian supervision and steady advance of Iraqi army in Mosul, the world is very close to pushing ISIS out of power in Syria. Though lot more needs to be done before ISIS is completely defeated, this is a clear indication of change in power balance away from the uni-polar world controlled by United State. Don't expect this news to be found in Western mainstream #fakenews media.


Info

The Korean Crisis: US' next phase of Pan-Eurasian containment

Korean trucks carrying US missile launchers
© AP Photo/ U.S. Force Korea
The security situation has markedly deteriorated on the Korean Peninsula in recent days following the North's latest missile test, which Pyongyang antagonistically said was a drill for striking US bases in Japan in response to the latest US-South Korean military exercises that it rightly views as a sign of hostility.

These surprise launches prompted the Pentagon to speed up its planned deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system to South Korea, which has drawn the immediate ire of Russia and China who previously warned that it would set the precedent for undercutting their nuclear second-strike deterrent and spy on their territories.

North Korea's latest moves have also led to talk in Japan for a "first-strike option" to complement Tokyo's militant reinterpretation of its post-war (supposedly) pacifist constitution. Not to be outdone, the Trump Administration ominously reiterated that "all options are on the table", which Reuters reports could include "a return of U.S. nuclear weapons to South Korea, and even pre-emptive air strikes on North Korean missile installations." China has frantically sought to cool down the dangerously rising temperatures on the peninsula and kick start a new round of negotiations by wisely calling for the dual suspension of the North's nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the US and South Korea putting their joint military exercises on hold.


Comment: Update: The U.S. is reportedly planning to send B-52 bombers to South Korea after the North's missile launches.


Airplane

Pentagon's trillion-dollar pitch: US nuclear triad too old to fight Russians

US Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber
© Tim Chong / Reuters
The US military urgently needs to modernize all three legs of the "nuclear triad" because its existing weapons are getting old and won't be able to breach Russian air defenses in the very near future, senior Air Force and Navy officers told Congress.

There are "scheduled realities" to the US nuclear weapon systems, US Air Force General Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Ohio-class submarines, Minuteman III ballistic missiles and B-52 strategic bombers are all rapidly approaching the end of their useful lifespan, according to Selva and three other senior officers testifying.

"Our nuclear deterrent is nearing a crossroads," Selva said. "We are now at a point where we must concurrently modernize the entire nuclear triad and the infrastructure that enables its effectiveness."

Light Saber

WikiLeaks' Vault 7 password is a nod to anti-CIA JFK quote

jfkennedy
© Unknown
On Tuesday WikiLeaks began releasing a series of encrypted documents dubbed "Vault 7," detailing the surveillance activities of the CIA.

As part of the release, the organization posted to Twitter a password for "Vault 7" that read as follows: "SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds."

That password was a subset of words spoken by President John F. Kennedy 54 years ago, only a month before he was assassinated:

"I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind," were his exact words, according to a Kennedy administration official who spoke with The New York Times for a report published three years after JFK's death.

Comment: How America's modern shadow government can be traced back to one single psychopath - Allen Dulles


People

French insurgents thrust establishment aside in crucial vote

France election candidates puppets
© Eric Gaillard/Reuters
The old order is fading in France.

Every election since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic more than half a century ago has seen at least one of the major parties in the presidential runoff and most have featured both. With Republicans and Socialists consumed by infighting and voters thoroughly fed up, polls suggest that neither will make it this year.

For the past month, survey after survey has projected a decider between Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old rookie who doesn't even have a party behind him, and Marine Le Pen, who's been ostracized throughout her career because of her party's history of racism.

"We've gone as far as we can go with a certain way of doing politics," said Brice Teinturier, head of the Ipsos polling company and author of a book on voters' disillusionment. "Everyone feels the system is blocked."

MIB

Berlin notices Turkey 'significantly' stepping up spying in Germany

Germany's Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz (BfV)
© Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters
Turkish intelligence has "significantly' increased its activities in Germany amid the ongoing diplomatic spat between the two countries ahead of April's referendum on widening the Turkish president's powers, Germany's domestic intelligence service says.

Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency has noticed "a significant increase in Turkish intelligence activities in Germany," it said in a statement on its website.

Tensions between the members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) outlawed in Turkey and far-right extremists are increasing and are "mirrored in Germany," the statement also noted.

"We have long seen that the conflicts in Turkey also have an impact on the security situation in Germany," it said.

"There is a risk that these disputes between PKK supporters and right-wing extremists will escalate, since there is a high, powerful danger potential on both sides," Hans-Georg Maassen, Bfv President, explained.

MIB

CIA knew #Vault7 was coming months ago

Computer screen
© Monika Skolimowska / www.globallookpress.com
US intelligence and law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Wednesday that the CIA had been aware of the impending leak of its cyberwarfare arsenal since the end of last year.

The unnamed officials also confirmed that an internal investigation by the agency into the source of the leak is focused primarily on contractors, who the agency believe passed the documents to WikiLeaks.

They also stated their belief that the 8,761 documents contained within the current "Year Zero" leak, the first of the "Vault 7" series, appear to be authentic. On Wednesday, the FBI also announced its federal criminal investigation into WikiLeaks following the latest release and stated that it will be coordinating their efforts with the CIA.


The leak has already been described by experts as potentially more significant than the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Bullseye

'We are looking at George Orwell's 1984' - CIA whistleblowers and former officers on Wikileaks revelations

wikileaks
© Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / www.globallookpress.com
WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA and its scope of activity show that this is not only a security issue - it impacts businesses while the privacy we take for granted is at risk. It is a very dangerous path for democracy to go down, experts told RT.

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released on Tuesday a part of confidential documents on America's Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks said that this collection of leaked CIA documents which revealed the extent of its hacking capabilities was "less than one percent of its Vault 7 series".

These documents also includes revelations that the CIA is apparently able to disguise its own spying as the work of other countries.

RT discussed the revelations with former CIA officers, whistle-blowers and IT experts.