"You're either a cop or little people." - Police captain Harry Bryant in Blade Runner

For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

We've been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.

As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we've had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.

We've had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after "accidental" encounters with marauding SWAT teams. We've been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered "Constitution-free zones." We've had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies catalogued for future marketing overtures.

We've been given the runaround on government wrongdoing, starting with President Obama's claim that the National Security Agency has never abused its power to spy on Americans' phone calls and emails. All the while, the NSA has been racing to build a supercomputer that could break through "every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world." Despite the fact that the NSA's domestic surveillance program has been shown to be ineffective at preventing acts of terrorism, the agency continues to vacuum up almost 200 million text messages a day.

Anyone who has followed the ongoing crisis in Eastern Europe and Ukraine knows the very hostile view that the establishment news media and Washington political class have of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his policies. In the halls of Congress and in the mainstream press - almost every night on Fox News - serious charges are proffered against Russia's president and his latest outrages. Sanctions and bellicose measures get enacted by the House and Senate overwhelmingly, with only meagre opposition and almost no serious discussion.

The mainstream American media and American political leaders seem intent to present only a one-sided, very negative picture of the Russian leader.

Various allegations are continually and repeatedly expressed.

How do these charges stand up under serious examination? What is their origin? And, what do they say about the current political and cultural environment in America and the West?

The outgoing 2014 is destined, apparently, to go down in the annals of history as a special year given its share of iconic dates (note, for example, 100 years since WWI and 75 years since WWII, 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall), and due to abundance of events having worldwide significance.

Today the mankind is on the verge of epochal changes in its history, which will determine the course of the world development for decades to come. 2014 was a turning point in international relations, sharply denoting the main trend of our time - the reconfiguration of the entire world system, reformatting of global structures, the shift from a unipolar to a polycentric world in which decisions on key issues should be based on cooperation and agreements between states and their associations, relying on equal participation and consideration of the interests of the whole mankind. And the contours of this world are now visible.

On the surface, these processes take the form of a deep civilizational and geopolitical fault.

There is a weakening of the position of the United States and the West in general as the center of gravity of the world. Many European political scientists and world known academics speak explicitly about the decline of the Western civilization. European nations are homogeneous, and the continual rise of immigration in recent decades has in fact already changed the ethnic composition of the Old World. Europe found itself unable to integrate the Muslim minority, which is already more than 30 million people, but it is also unable, due to the declining population and its aging, to maintain the current standard of living and the rate of production growth without an influx of the young foreign workforce.

The European sub-ethnic group has entered the phase of obscuration and is on the verge of (according to the criteria of historical time) being absorbed by new, emerging and already prominently visible types (of sub-ethnic groups). This is the Asiansub-ethnic group - a synthesis of several types of cultures and religions. By 2020, experts anticipate a rise of the African sub-ethnic group. In the Western Hemisphere the Hispanic sub-ethnic group is being created on the basis of a huge diversity of ethnic groups and beliefs.

Pushing down global oil prices was part of Washington's rationale to destabilize the Russian economy, US President Barack Obama said in an interview to National Public Radio, a non-profit media organization.

Oil price key to Russian economy crumbling

Answering a direct question whether it was the US that collapsed oil prices globally to create problems for Russia, Obama said that Russian economy "was already contracting and capital was fleeing even before oil collapsed."

Obama revealed that it was a "part of our rationale" that the "only thing" keeping the Russian economy "afloat" was the price of oil.

Sanctions only made the Russian economy more vulnerable to the "inevitable" oil price disruptions. "They'd have enormous difficulty managing it," Obama said.

When the facts surrounding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines begin to be brought into the light, the only option left for those who manufacture, promote, and/or force vaccines onto the general population is to silence the presentation of those facts. Indeed, it is also imperative that those same forces prevent any alternatives to vaccination and financially incentivized medical dogma from becoming known amongst the general public.

Such was the mode of attack taken by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in a case that dates back to 2013 against the homeopathic remedies company, Homeopathy Plus. In the early part of 2013, the ACCC instituted Federal Proceedings against Homeopathy Plus after claiming that the company was guilty of being "misleading and deceptive" after posting a series of three articles on its website that presented the Pertussis vaccine as being ineffective in preventing the disease and largely unreliable.

Gazprom has bought out the shares of South Stream Transport BV, a company that was in charge of the construction of the cancelled gas pipeline marine section.

Italy's Eni, Wintershall of Germany, and France's EDF have decided to withdraw from the South Stream project. They have sold their shares to Gazprom, which already owned 50 percent of South Stream Transport BV.

"Due to the fact that it's difficult to predict receiving permission for South Stream, and calculate the economic consequences of delaying its construction for an indefinite period, the participants decided to close the project," said Wintershall's spokesperson commenting on the decision to sell the stake.

South Stream Transport B.V. was established to construct the offshore part of the South Stream gas pipeline from Anapa in Russia to Varna in Bulgaria.

A multi-spectrum war is being waged against Moscow by Washington. If there are any doubts about this, they should be put to rest. Geopolitics, science and technology, speculation, financial markets, information streams, large business conglomerates, intelligentsia, mass communication, social media, the internet, popular culture, news networks, international institutions, sanctions, audiences, public opinion, nationalism, different governmental bodies and agencies, identity politics, proxy wars, diplomacy, countervailing international alliances, major business agreements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), human rights, prestige, military personnel, capital, and psychological tactics are all involved in this multi-spectrum war. On a daily basis this struggle can be seen playing out on the airwaves, in the war theaters in Ukraine and the Middle East, through the statements and accusations of diplomats, and in the economic sphere.

Additionally, the debates and questions on whether a new cold war - a post-Cold War cold war - has emerged or if the Cold War never ended should be put to rest too. The mentality of the Cold War never died in the Washington Beltway. From the perspective of Russian officials, it is clear that the US never put down its war mace and continued the offensive. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, defeating the Soviets and Eastern Bloc, and seeing the Soviet Union dismantled into fifteen republics was not enough for the Cold War warriors in the US. The newly emergent Russian Federation had to be placated in their views.

Petro-politics have been a major feature of this multi-spectrum war too. [1] Not only have energy prices been a factor in this struggle, but so are financial markets and national currencies. The manipulated decline in the price of energy, which has been driven by the flooding of the global market with oil, is now being augmented by a siege on the value of the Russian ruble. This is part of what appears to be a deliberate two-pronged attack on the Russian Federation that seeks to cut Russia's revenues through market manipulation via economic sanctions and price drops. It is what you would call a «double whammy». While sanctions have been imposed on the Russian economy by the US and its allies, including Australia, Canada, the European Union, and Japan, offensives on Russia's main source of revenue - energy - and its national currency have taken place.

Washington is the cause of the conflict, which has been brewing for some time. Russia was too weak to do anything about it when the Clinton regime pushed NATO to Russia's borders and illegally attacked Yugoslavia, breaking the country into small easily controlled pieces. Russia was also too weak to do anything about it when the George W. Bush regime withdrew from the ABM treaty and undertook to locate anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia's borders. Washington lied to Moscow that the purpose of the ABM bases was to protect Europe from non-existent Iranian nuclear ICBMs. However, Moscow understood that the purpose of the ABM bases was to degrade Russia's nuclear deterrent, thereby enhancing Washington's ability to coerce Russia into agreements that compromise Russian sovereignty.

By summer 2008 Russian power had returned. On Washington's orders, the US and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian army attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia during the early hours of August 8, killing Russian peacekeepers and civilian population. Units of the Russian military instantly responded and within a few hours the American trained and equipped Georgian army was routed and defeated. Georgia was in Russia's hands again, where the province had resided during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Putin should have hung Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet installed by the Washington-instigated "Rose Revolution" as president of Georgia, and reincorporated Georgia into the Russian Federation. Instead, in a strategic error, Russia withdrew its forces, leaving Washington's puppet regime in place to cause future trouble for Russia.

Washington is pushing hard to incorporate Georgia into NATO, thus adding more US military bases on Russia's border. However, at the time, Moscow thought Europe to be more independent of Washington than it is and relied on good relations with Europe to keep American bases out of Georgia.

Today the Russian government no longer has any illusion that Europe is capable of an independent foreign policy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that Russia has learned that diplomacy with Europe is pointless, because European politicians represent Washington's interest, not Europe's. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently acknowledged that Europe's Captive Nation status has made it clear to Russia that Russian goodwill gestures are unable to produce diplomatic results.

Mustafa Barghouti has accused Israel of using the Gaza Strip as a testing ground for new weapons. Speaking during a review of 2014 in Ramallah, the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative reminded listeners that Israel is now the third largest arms exporter in the world. "There is conclusive evidence that it used the Gaza Strip as a test bed for its deadly weaponry," he claimed.

The Israelis, he added, fired around 21,000 tons of high explosives at the besieged territory during its war against Palestinian civilians in July-August 2014. That's the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, noted Barghouti. "Israel has launched four devastating wars against Gaza," he added, "during which it has used internationally-prohibited weapons, including white phosphorus, as well as barrel bombs."

According to the Palestinian politician, 2014 was the bloodiest year in the history of Israeli "criminality". Israel's "aggression" stretched from the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, in which it targeted Al-Aqsa Mosque, through to the Gaza Strip. Ongoing illegal settlements and the blockade of Gaza remain major issues. "The UN reports that Israel has destroyed 92,000 buildings and killed almost 2,300 people, 85 per cent of them within their own homes," said Barghouti. "Another 11,711 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli aggression." He warned that Gaza is set to "explode" unless reconstruction materials are allowed into the enclave and the blockade is lifted.

Israel used live ammunition to suppress peaceful demonstrations in the West Bank, he revealed, which led to the killing of 52 civilians there in 2014. "What we are witnessing in the West Bank and Jerusalem is the appearance of a new uprising, albeit in scattered waves."

Barghouti referred to the escalation of violations of the sanctity of holy sites in Jerusalem along with a significant increase in the number of attacks by armed Jewish settlers across the West Bank. Illegal settlement activity rose by 140 per cent over the figures for 2012, he said. In closing, he reminded the audience that 2014 also saw an increase in the number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, rising from 4,763 to 6,500.

If approved by Gov. Christie, bill would give municipalities with aging pipes right to sell systems to private companies.

A bill that would allow New Jersey municipalities to sell their public water utilities to private, for-profit corporations without putting the measure to voters is awaiting Gov. Chris Christie's signature.

Until now, any municipality in New Jersey that sought to sell off its water system to a private bidder had to hold a public vote. But a bill passed with bipartisan support by the state's Senate last week would allow municipalities with aging and deteriorating water systems to put their systems up for sale without holding a referendum.

While supporters of the bill say privatizing water systems could save municipalities money, it allows companies to factor the purchase price of the systems into the rates they charge customers, meaning taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook for the sale of their water systems.

Many New Jersey municipalities have turned to privatization as a way to get quick cash infusions for their deteriorating water systems. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the state would need $41 billion over the next 20 years to repair its water, stormwater and wastewater systems.

"We're an old, industrial state, and water infrastructure was built a long, long time ago," said Lawrence Hajna, a spokesman for the state's Department of Environmental Protection, which has not taken a position on the bill. "We've spent billions on upgrading, but there's still a lot more to do."