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Yoda

'Bon appétit,' Putin tells hypocritical G7 leaders dishing the dirt on Russia in Brussels


RT
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 19:09 UTC
A G7 leaders meeting
© Reuters / Yves HermanA G7 leaders meeting at European Council headquarters in Brussels June 4, 2014
President Putin wished "bon appétit" to G7 leaders who patronized Russia - excluded from the club over Ukraine - and set conditions it has to meet to restore ties with the West. Otherwise, Obama and his allies threatened, more sanctions would follow.

On Thursday, as the G7 summit was wrapping up in Brussels, Vladimir Putin was asked to comment on what he thinks about the western leaders holding their gathering without Russia. The only comment that followed was: "I want to wish them, 'Bon appétit.'"

This week's summit of the world's leading industrialized nations became the first in 17 years when Russia was not participating. That comes as the US "mobilized the international community," as President Barack Obama earlier put it, "to isolate Russia" over the Ukraine crisis.

Originally, the summit was to take place in Russia's Sochi, but the plan was canceled after Crimea reunited with Russia - a move that infuriated the West, labeling it an "illegal annexation" of territory.

Despite being uninvited, Moscow got its fair share of judgments and accusations thrown at it during the gathering. The G7 leaders wagged their fingers at Russia, warning that more sanctions would follow unless it helps to deescalate the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
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Arrow Down

British taxpayers in line to lose their entire £45bn stake due to RBS 'black hole'

Tom Harper and Nick Kochan
The Independent
Sun, 01 Jun 2014 13:34 UTC
An explosive book says the failure of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to reform the bank after it received a mammoth taxpayers' bailout leaves it vulnerable
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© IndependentTanking bank: Book claims RBS sponsored motor sport because Fred Goodwin is a fan.
British taxpayers risk losing their entire £45bn stake in Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which is in grave danger of failing within 10 years, according to an explosive new book.

A new study of the disgraced bank, which brought the UK to the brink of financial ruin, reveals RBS still has a £100bn "black hole" in its finances due to "five broad areas of alleged criminality and wrongdoing".

They include the mis-selling of financial products such as payment protection insurance, the alleged duping of investors who were persuaded to plough more than £12bn into RBS shares just before the banking crash in 2008, further fallout from the Libor scandal, and current criminal investigations into the manipulation of the £3trn-a-day foreign exchange markets.

Comment:
Bailed-out and nationalized Royal Bank of Scotland to ignore EU caps on bonuses and pay executives 200% salary bonuses, despite 2013 company profit loss of £8 billion

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Bullseye

Institutionalized murder: Death to the death penalty

Marjorie Cohn
Truth-out.org
Sat, 24 May 2014 09:57 UTC
Image
© Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, dog ma
The recent torturous execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has propelled the death penalty into the national discourse. The secret three-drug cocktail that prison authorities administered to Lockett - the first to render him unconscious, the second to paralyze him, and the third to stop his heart and kill him - didn't work as planned. After writhing in pain for 43 minutes, he finally died of a heart attack. Madeline Cohen, a lawyer who witnessed the botched execution, said Lockett had been "tortured to death." Seasoned reporters, also witnesses, called it "horrific." President Obama found it "deeply disturbing" and promised a review of how the death penalty is administered.

But the issue is not simply the most "painless," fair and efficient method the 32 death penalty states should use to put someone to death. It is not just a problem of executing innocent people, or the dubious constitutionality of the death penalty, or racism in its application and imposition, or that the death penalty does not deter homicide, or the higher cost of keeping someone on death row, or that nearly all industrialized countries have abolished capital punishment. The premeditated killing of a human being by the state is just plain wrong, and the United States should abolish it.

Comment: In sum, the death penalty is killing people that kill people to show people that killing people is wrong. That sort of thinking and the "let's kill them" ideology is a hallmark of the hystericization of society:
"How could this happen?

The answer is that a few generations' worth of 'good times' results in the above described societal deficits regarding psychological skills and moral criticism. Long periods of preoccupation with the self and 'accumulating benefits' for the self, diminish the ability to accurately read the environment and other people. But the situation is more serious than just a generalized weakness of a society that could be 'toughened up' with a little 'hard times'.

Lobaczewski writes:
The psychological features of each such crisis are unique to the culture and the time, but one common denominator that exists at the beginning of all such 'bad times' is an exacerbation of society's hysterical condition. The emotionalism dominating in individual, collective, and political life, combined with the subconscious selection and substitution of data in reasoning, lead to individual and national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyperirritability and hypocriticality on the part of others. It is this feature, this hystericization of society, that enables pathological plotters, snake charmers, and other primitive deviants to act as essential factors in the processes of the origination of evil on a macro-social scale."
Further reading:
35 Years Of Death Penalty Regrets

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Dollar

Western elites met in Yalta, Crimea last September for annual 'Eastern Bilderberg' conference

Mrs Moneypenny
Financial Times
Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:27 UTC
Attending a conference about a country I had never visited was a somewhat surreal experience

Image
Hillary Clinton in Crimea last September.
Walking around the Italian garden in the Livadia Palace in Yalta last weekend, I could not help but feel the weight of history. It was here that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were photographed in February 1945 as they worked out who got what at the end of the second world war.

These days Yalta continues to make history, albeit with fewer far-reaching consequences. The annual Yalta European Strategy Meeting, a sort of mini Davos with better architecture, is hosted here by businessman and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. The Ukrainian billionaire founded the event in 2004, when he persuaded 30 people to come together to discuss and plan Ukraine's best approach to joining the EU. These days the meeting is quite a bit bigger.

Comment: Prescient observations from the author, but for all the wrong reasons, as we now know.

It's unlikely that the plot to overthrow Yanukovych was hatched at this specific conference - which had been running annually for 8 years by that point - but it's nevertheless revealing that this event in Crimea had turned into a kind of 'Eastern Bilderberg'. Incorporating Ukraine within the West's empire was clearly a big deal to these people.

Thankfully, at least, the people of Crimea have been spared from these snakes in suits. But the bloodshed in the rest of Ukraine is a direct consequence of the ruthless and alien mindset of this slew of pathological characters.

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Heart - Black

Kiev's siege on Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine taking its toll on local population

Johnny Miller
Press TV
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 07:49 UTC
Image
People in Ukraine's eastern city of Slavyansk are facing a shortage of food and medicine as violence rages on in the restive region, Press TV reports.

The Ukrainian army is continuing its offensive against pro-Russia forces in Slavyansk as part of its ongoing military operation in the country's southeast.

Alexander Boroday, the prime minister of Donetsk People's Republic, has warned that locals have difficulty meeting their basic needs.

"As you know, there is a war going on here. This war is turning into genocide. There is severe fighting around Slavyansk. Heavy artilleries are being used. We are running out of medicine. We already don't have enough food. We have a lot of sick, old and retired people. There are sick children," he said.

The fighting, which broke out on Tuesday, has forced many civilians to seek refuge in makeshift underground shelters in Slavyansk.

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Stock Down

Negative interest rate introduced in Eurozone for first time, European Central Bank cuts deposit rate below zero in historic move


RT
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 07:21 UTC
Image
The European Central Bank lowered its benchmark interest rate to -0.10% as the continent battles deflation after many failed monetary policy attempts.

The European Central Bank cut its main refinancing rate to 0.15 percent from 0.25 percent, and the deposit rate from zero to -.10 percent, the first time the ECB has seen a negative rate.

The new interest rate will apply to all member states of the EU.

Lowering the bank's rate below zero would mean that banks will in a sense be 'punished' for keeping too much money on deposit and not giving out enough loans.

Previously Mario Draghi said the bank was considering a US-style quantitative easing stimulus, which would inject more than 240 billion euro into the slowly recovering economy.

The eurozone's 9.5 trillion euro economy is still emerging from the longest recession since the introduction of the single currency.

Inflation in the euro zone is dangerously low, and the Consumer Price Index only rose 0.5 percent in May, below the forecast 0.7 percent. Both numbers are far below the Bank's target of 2 percent inflation.

Comment: So what does this mean?

Some useful analysis from Neil Irwin at the New York Times:
Aren't there other ways the E.C.B. could try to get Europe out of its low-inflation trap? There are, but Mario Draghi, the bank's president, has resisted the preferred tool of the American, British, and Japanese central banks, which is "quantitative easing," or buying longer-term securities to pump money into the financial system.

It would be politically risky for the E.C.B. to buy bonds issued by European governments, a no-no in the founding mission of the common central bank. And private European debt markets are not as developed in the United States, so it would be hard for the E.C.B. to emulate, for example, the Fed's strategy of buying mortgage-backed securities that fund home loans in the United States.

That brings us back to NIRP. Now central bank watchers will get to watch yet another monetary policy experiment in an era that has been filled with them.
If European central bankers think Europe is protected because it doesn't stoop so low as to simply print money into existence, they have another thing coming. Being so completely enmeshed in the petrodollar system means Europe will burn along with the US when the dollar collapses and hyperinflation hits the Western world. It's going to take more than tweaking interest rates, albeit in innovative ways, to pull Europe out of this fire.

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Attention

Obama's Europe doctrine: Too much stupid, not enough serious

Pepe Escobar
RT.com
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:00 UTC
POTUS
© Reuters/Kevin LamarqueWith an F-16 fighter in the background, U.S. President Barack Obama makes remarks upon his arrival in Warsaw June 3, 2014.
What to make of the 'new' Obama foreign policy doctrine?

In a previous RT article I called it the "Take it to the Morgue - Quietly" doctrine - as it ostensibly privileges shadow wars instead of "Shock and Awe."

Then, in another article, I showed how much the still exceptionalist doctrine borrows from prime neo-con (and conceptualizer of the war on Iraq) Robert Kagan - husband of the notorious Victoria, Queen of Nulandistan.

But that was definitely too conceptual. In fact, as peddled off the record by the White House, the "doctrine" is nothing but a prosaic "Don't Do Stupid S**t," a denomination fully adopted by The New York Times.

Stupid s**t though, doesn't even begin to describe Obama's first act after announcing the doctrine last week at West Point. For those who don't get the message, one picture is enough to tell the whole story; Obama and the Polish president in front of an F-16 exhibition at a military airport near Warsaw.

Stupid s**t also irretrievably takes a backseat to serious s**t during Obama's current European tour. We just need to examine what's in store at the selected pit stops.

First is Warsaw - whose nervous poodle, US vassal government is absolutely hysterical over an imminent Russian "threat." Then it's the G7 in Brussels - the "ex-G8," from which Russia was expelled by the self-proclaimed "great powers." One of the items in the agenda is the possibility of slapping even more sanctions over Moscow's "threat" to the Ukraine.
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Handcuffs

North Carolina GOP pushes unprecedented bill to jail anyone who discloses fracking chemicals

Molly Redden
Mother Jones
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 20:29 UTC
Image
© Chris Carlson/AP
As hydraulic fracturing ramps up around the country, so do concerns about its health impacts. These concerns have led 20 states to require the disclosure of industrial chemicals used in the fracking process.

North Carolina isn't on that list of states yet - and it may be hurtling in the opposite direction.

On Thursday, three Republican state senators introduced a bill that would slap a felony charge on individuals who disclosed confidential information about fracking chemicals. The bill, whose sponsors include a member of Republican party leadership, establishes procedures for fire chiefs and health care providers to obtain chemical information during emergencies. But as the trade publication Energywire noted Friday, individuals who leak information outside of emergency settings could be penalized with fines and several months in prison.
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Display

Best of the Web: 'Russian troops in Ukraine? Got any proof?' Full Putin interview with French media (including transcript)


RT
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 20:03 UTC
putin

Vladimir Putin faced a barrage of tricky questions from French media ahead of his meeting with world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Here are his best replies on key issues: Ukraine, Crimea and relations with the US.

On Ukraine, its sovereignty and Russian troops:

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has been occupying the center of international attention since the end of last year. While the coup-appointed government in Kiev is carrying out a military crackdown on the southeast of the country, the US said that Russian troops are allegedly involved in the crisis and they have proof of that.

"What about proof? Why don't they show it?" Putin told French media.

"The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You know - it's one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence."

"After the anti-constitutional coup in Kiev in February, the first thing the new authorities tried to do was to deprive the ethnic minorities of the right to use their native language. This caused great concern among the people living in eastern Ukraine."

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Whistle

New Jersey police officer files lawsuit over profiling quotas

Peggy Wright
USA Today
Thu, 29 May 2014 16:53 UTC
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© Mendham Township Police Department
A cop who said he refuses to profile young drivers for tickets has filed a lawsuit saying he's been passed over for promotions and overtime because of his actions.

Patrolman Robert Wysokowski, 43, of the Mendham Township Police Department filed suit Wednesday in Superior Court here under New Jersey's Conscientious Employee Protection Act, also known as the Whistleblower Law. He seeks promotion to sergeant, punitive and compensatory damages for "all lost benefits, wages and rights," and damages for emotional distress.

Wysokowski contends that he has consistently met department standards on enforcement of motor vehicle laws but beginning in 2005, under now-former Police Chief Thomas Costanza, he was told he had to "increase his numbers." The suit said that in 2005, Steven Crawford, who was then a sergeant but now is chief, advised Wysokowski to "seek out and target younger drivers for motor vehicle stops."

"Crawford told plaintiff that it was 'good police work,' or words to that effect," the lawsuit said. The complaint said superiors advised Wysokowski that he always could find an infraction when he stopped a vehicle.
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