Puppet MastersS


Dominoes

Germany plans to keep UK in the EU at an 'associated partner country' status

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:00 UTC
CameronMerkel
© FreakingNews.com"Near, far, wherever you are," Merkel, Cameron and the EU Titanic
German newspaper Die Welt says Germany will offer the UK an "associated partner country" agreement to keep the UK in the EU's orbit. With the earthquake that was the Brexit result, the EU now has to deal with something it has never faced before, democracy. The will of the people won the day. The EU's damage control mechanism is now in overdrive in order to prevent France, the Netherlands, Austria, or Hungary from potentially leaving the union.

The Brexit was not a sudden event, but an evolution of past democratic referendums overturned and ignored. A year ago Greece overwhelmingly voted to reject EU/Troika austerity demands. Brussels cut off Greece's access to Euro notes, and put the Greek "revolution" quickly to rest. Recently Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected a Ukraine-European Union treaty. Brussels brushed the vote aside as nothing more than a non-binding tantrum of the peasant class.

Now the big one hit, Brexit. The UK's voice is too big to blackmail into submission, and too important to ignore. The domino effect is now in play. France's Marine Le Pen has pledged to hold a French referendum if she emerges victorious in next year's presidential elections.

For those who think the EU is officially knocked out, think again. We are just at the very beginning of European liberation from the super state that is Brussels. The scaling down of the EU, and a return to a more sensible European integration and union will be a battle hard fought and take years, if not decades to reach its conclusion.

The unelected oligarchs in Brussels will not simply stand by and watch the serfs stage a revolt. Plan B is being quickly cobbled together. Angela Merkel is leading the charge to keep her dream of a United States of Europe from faltering. Berlin's finance ministry has already drafted a strategy document, poison pill, to float to the UK public.

Comment: EU Titanic has encountered its Brexit iceberg and is looking to plug the hole. The people versus the oligarchs, who will next see the danger ahead and abandon ship?

See also: Joining the Brexit party: Netherlands, France and now Italy attempt to launch EU referendum campaigns next

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Bad Guys

Kiev officially refuses to fulfill the Minsk agreements claiming 'security issues', ignores its role in ceasefire violations


Fort Russ
Mon, 27 Jun 2016 16:22 UTC
Andriy Parubiy
Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ

The government in Kiev is not ready to perform the Minsk agreements. This was stated by the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy to the US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.

Parubiy noted that currently it's "very hard to talk about changes to the Constitution on decentralization and the law on elections in Donbass. According to him, this is due to security issues in the region. "Until we see a lasting ceasefire for at least 30, but preferably 60 days, it is very difficult to have a discussion about the following points (of the Minsk agreements)," said Parubiy.

As was reported by RIA Novosti, on June 22nd Victoria Nuland met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and the speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy. They discussed the program of reforms in Ukraine and implementation of the Minsk agreements. On 24th June, she flew to Moscow to meet with Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov. Press Secretary of Russian President Dmitry Peskov noted that this meeting would be the traditional exchange of views and comparing of notes.

The conflict in the southeast of Ukraine began in the spring of 2014. During this time, victims of the conflict reached more than 9,000 people. Measures to resolve the conflict are being discussed in the Normandy Format, as well as a special contact group. Negotiators adopted three documents governing the steps to de-escalate the conflict.

Comment: Indeed it's very hard to have a ceasefire when one side keeps shelling the other.

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Bad Guys

South Front: Brexit vote was an 'earthquake,' will affect the world for decades to come

J. Hawk
South Front
Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:24 UTC
European parliament building
© UnknownFile photo shows the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France.

The Brexit vote in favor of leaving the EU ranks as one of the most significant events of the last decade. It is an earthquake which, in addition to its immediate consequences, will be followed by aftershocks by years if not decades to come. It is an event of first-rank significance for not just the increasingly dis-United Kingdom, but also the EU, US, Russia, and much of the rest of the world.

The Causes

Brexit is, so far, the most powerful manifestation of the "boomerang effect" of the West's
JFK Russia US Russia
post-Cold War expansionism. Much of the West's prosperity in the last two decades has been underwritten by one factor alone: the ability to expand its economic power into the post-Soviet space and into developing world countries aligned with USSR. This so-called "Third Way", which was promoted by leaders such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and which in the 1990s was spearheaded by military interventions in the name of "human rights," was never sustainable. Once a country or an empire (and "the West" as a whole today can be best described as a US empire, with its various members enjoying varying privileges and obligations) adopts expansion as its default political-economic model, it must continue expanding. Until it can't.

And now Western neocolonialism is encountering resistance from Russia and China and feeling the boomerang effect of the instability Western policies have fostered. The anxiety concerning refugees from the Middle East and North Africa is building on the pre-existing resentment of economic migrants from EU members of Eastern Europe. The resentment toward Eastern Europeans in the UK was a major factor that propelled David Cameron into power and led him to propose the Brexit referendum before Middle Eastern refugees have washed up on Greece's shores.

Comment: Further reading:

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Quenelle

Russia fights corruption, arrests 'chaotic & corrupt' pro-Western politician

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:02 UTC
Putin Nikita Belykh
Putin at a meeting with Kirov Region Governor Nikita Belykh.
Nikita Belykh - prominent Russian liberal politician and governor of Kirov Region - arrested after being caught receiving 400,000 euros in alleged bribe money.

The arrest of Nikita Belykh, the governor of Russia's Kirov Region, after he was caught in a sting accepting an alleged 400,000 euro bribe, is not perhaps the sort of event that attracts world attention. After all the fact there is corruption in Russia is hardly news.

Belykh is not however a run-of-the-mill governor. Unlike all of Russia's other governors his background is firmly in Russian liberal politics and he has in the past enjoyed close links with what is sometimes called Russia's "non-system" opposition. This consists of the individuals and groups who agitate outside Russia's parliamentary system and who - almost to a man and woman - consider Putin an evil dictator who they want overthrown.

In fairness to Belykh he has been marginally more effective electorally than most of the other members of the liberal "non-system" opposition. For a time in the mid-2000s he was the leader of the ultra-liberal Union of Rightist Forces where he became close to Boris Nemtsov. A coalition he formed in 2005 with Grigory Yavlinsky's Yabloko party (Russia's oldest and biggest liberal party) won 11% of the vote in the Moscow city elections of 2005, gaining a presence in the Moscow City Duma. In 2006 his party did even better in local elections in Belykh's home region of Perm where it won 16% of the vote. However under Belykh's leadership the Union of Rightist Forces - like all other Russian "non-system" liberal parties and groups - never made a significant impact on national politics.
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Red Flag

Duplicitous National Endowment for Democracy: Undermining democracy wherever it exists

Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook
Fri, 24 Jun 2016 00:00 UTC
NED corporations
Using a front to hide illegal or immoral activities has been a feature of human criminality since the beginning of human civilization itself. Facades, both ideological and economical, have helped criminal enterprises conceal the true nature of their activities for centuries.

In ages past, organized religion would often take systems of legitimate philosophy and spirituality, and transform them into a means of organizing the masses for the benefit of an elite few, often those heading empires, kingdoms, or nation-states. More recently, patriotism and now the notion of "democracy" have been used successfully by similar cadres of special interests to conceal their self-serving agendas behind notions likely to recruit support from large segments of a population that would otherwise be disinterested.

There is no example of this more transparent than that of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to its own website, it claims:
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,200 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.
"The growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world" sounds noble enough. One would expect, then, that the NED would be led by a collection of some of the most notable activists involved in the empowerment of "the people." Instead, upon NED's board of directors, we find people representing corporate-financier interests notorious for instead, exploiting and subjugating "the people."

Unfortunately, for those receiving the millions upon millions of dollars the NED hands out annually to "nongovernmental organizations" (NGOs) around the world, few bother to actually check who it is underwriting their daily activities, and fewer still have the integrity to both turn down the money let alone inform the people they claim to represent just who is attempting to reach into their respective nations and subvert their political systems, and to what end.

Quite literally, each and every member of the NED's board of directors represents Fortune 500 corporations, insidious corporate-financier funded policy think-tanks, and a wide variety of other obvious conflicts of interest unbecoming of an organization truly interested in, "the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world."

Comment: Further reading:

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Radar

Hezbollah's existential war in Syria

Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 22:42 UTC
hezbollah
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah has announced his intentions to reinforce positions within Syria, particularly in Aleppo. Al-Manar in its article, "S. Nasrallah: Hezbollah Will Reinforce Troops in Aleppo to Achieve Major Victory," would report that:
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah confirmed on Friday that the party will send more troops to Syria's Aleppo where a major battle goes on in order to defeat the takfiri-terrorist project backed by Saudi and the US.
Nasrallah would add that the US and its regional allies were preparing to flood Syria with thousands of additional terrorist proxies in a bid to seize Aleppo. He also pointed out how the so-called "ceasefire" was used by various US-Saudi backed terrorist groups to retrench and prepare for the next phase of fighting.

Comment: As Cartalucci points out, the same is essentially true for Iran, who has also declared a surge in military engagement in Syria. See: Iran says they warned Russia that the U.S. would never accept peace - now it's time for total cooperation, more troops

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Apple Red

Soft power: How Putin's simple gestures shape politics

Ekaterina Lukina / J. Arnoldski (translator)
PolitRussia / Fort Russ
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 22:21 UTC
putin
Monday, June 20th was a truly difficult day for the whole country. Not a single person was left who could refrain from biting commentary on the shameful failure of the Russian national football team of Euro 2016....Particularly remarkable was that the president of Russia did not even watch the Russia-Wales match. Instead, Vladimir Putin chose to visit an excursion to "Lenfilm" film studio. It would seem that this is a manifestation of the simple human freedom of choice. However, such a "non-political" gesture has its own "very political" context. With such an act, the president made it clear that in the next few years the Russian team should not expect the support it formerly had. Russian film and its talented directors and actors are capable of becoming a source of national pride, which cannot be said of Russian football players.

The indirect hint of this non-political gesture was commented on by the president's press secretary Dmitry Peskov: "Russian President Vladimir Putin did not watch the Euro 2016 football match between the Russian and Welsh teams because at the time he was at the Lenfilm studio, where business with animation and restoration was much better and more effective than the game of Russian football players."

Comment: Love him or hate him, Putin consistently acts like an adult, responsible human being. The same cannot be said for his colleagues in the vast majority of other nations.

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Hearts

Natural born lovers: Israel, Turkey normalize ties


RT
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 22:11 UTC
netanyahu erdogan
© Reuters
Israel and Turkey have reached an agreement to normalize ties, a senior Israeli official told reporters, according to Reuters. This will end bitter rift over the Israeli Navy's killing of nine Turkish citizens during a Gaza flotilla raid in 2010.

The agreement, which took three years to reach, is expected to be officially announced on Monday, said the official traveling with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently in Rome.

The restoration of full diplomatic relations that deteriorated after the Israeli navy's killed nine Turkish and one Turkish-American pro-Palestinian activists in 2010 has been brokered with the help of Washington.

Israel conducted an operation against six civilian ships that belonged to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The ships fit by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) were carrying humanitarian and construction supplies to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Comment: In somewhat related news, Israel, along with Egypt and Syria have applied to join the SCO:
Syria, Egypt, and Israel have formally applied for accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Members also discussed the accession of Iran. The interest of Syria, Israel, and Egypt to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was stated at the briefing in Tashkent by special presidential representative for SCO Affairs Bakhtiyor Khakimov.

The request from Syria for a connection to work with an observer status came last year, but as the SCO member states agreed about the beginning of cooperation with newcomers from the lowest level, we are talking about a "partnership in dialogue", said Khakimov. On Friday, the Presidents of the country-members of the SCO also discussed the prospect of Iran joining with permanent membership.


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Gold Seal

Saakashvili: Ukraine is worse than Russia

Ollie Richardson (translator)
Fort Russ / Timer-Odessa
Sat, 25 Jun 2016 22:04 UTC
saakashvili
Man-baby Saakashvili.
The Chairman of the Odessa regional state administration Mikhail Saakashvili said that Ukraine's "government mechanisms are broken".

This official statement was made at the conference Grain Ukraine 2016 in Odessa. According to the head of the state administration, due to a catastrophic level of corruption, "we are no better in economic terms than that of Putin's Russia".

"It's even worse, because some decisions are centralized. There are somethings that belong to the owner, to the main "kingpin". And this "kingpin" gives orders... But here... Government mechanisms are broken. In Ukraine, the officials even of the highest rank, if he wanted to do something good, he would not be able to implement it," said the Governor of the Odessa region.

"But in Russia, if you reach a compromise with Putin, then all will be well," Saakashvili added.

Comment: From the slightly demented horse's mouth. Things have got to be bad when one of Russia's biggest and dumbest haters will admit anything is worse than its Russian equivalent.

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Handcuffs

Whistleblower says he can prove Brazil's president Temer took $300,000 bribe for construction contract


teleSUR
Sat, 25 Jun 2016 22:01 UTC
temer
The latest allegations follow the possible implication of 175 deputies and senators, a staggering 30 percent, of Brazil's entire National Congress.

Brazil's acting President Michel Temer allegedly received a bribe of US$296,000 that Engevix company owner Jose Antunes Sobrinho paid through intermediaries, Brazilian magazine Epoca reported Saturday.

The report cited allegations by the executive in efforts to secure a plea bargain with federal authorities.

In his proposed plea bargain, Antunes alleges that Joao Batista Lima, owner of the Sao Paulo-based architecture firm Argeplan and a close friend of Temer, had received work contracts in exchange for granting bribes to the current Brazilian head-of-state.

Lima, a former military police colonel, has repeatedly been accused of being the "key person involved in the dirty work" between companies and PMDB politicians.

If his plea bargain request is granted, Antunes says that he can prove Temer received a bribe of US$296,000 in exchange for a construction contract that was awarded to Argeplan to build the Angra III nuclear-generation unit, which forms part of Brazil's sole nuclear power plant.

Comment: But Rousseff "had to go". That's Western-style democracy for you.

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