Puppet MastersS


Brick Wall

Boomerang effect! Putin: US sanctions contradict its national interests, will backfire

Russian President Vladimir Putin
© Unknown
Imposing sanctions on Russia and blaming it for destabilizing Ukraine contradicts US national interests, President Putin said at the BRICS summit in Brazil, emphasizing that declared support of Ukrainians should not be limited to the country's oligarchs.

Speaking to the press following the BRICS summit in Brazil, Vladimir Putin was asked to comment on the new package of sanctions against Russia announced just minutes earlier by the US President.

"We aren't the ones introducing sanctions, you should ask them," Putin said.

"But as for sanctions, they usually have a boomerang effect, and without a doubt will force US-Russian relations into a corner," he elaborated. "This is a serious blow to our relationship. And it undermines the long term security interests of the US State and its people."

Putin said that it is "regrettable" that "our partners" have chosen to impose new sanctions, but Russia "will not close doors to negotiations."

"We're open to finding ways out of this situation," Putin said. "I really hope that common sense and the willingness to resolve all issues through peaceful diplomatic means will prevail."

Colosseum

Realism: Italian PM Renzi speaks against building Europe in opposition to Russia

Italian flag
© Flickr.com/Bruno/cc-by-sa 3.0
Commenting on the Ukrainian crisis Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi urged to give up calls for a new Cold War and underlined that Europe should not be built in opposition to Russia.

"Within the EU we need to respect the cry for freedom of the Ukrainian people but we cannot build Europe in opposition to our neighbor - Russia," Renzi said speaking at the Democratic Party PD National Assembly late Tuesday.

The Prime Minister of Italy, which has recently taken over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from Greece, noted that "today we do not need to declare a Cold War, but should be capable of creating means for a dialogue."

EU leaders will discuss additional sanctions to be imposed on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis later Wednesday.

Last week, 11 new names have already been added to the sanctions list.

Star of David

Chris Hedges: Imploding the Myth of Israel

Israeli flag
© carmelanorth.wordpress.com
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy - which was always exclusively for Jews - has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens - 1 million of them - have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists - Israeli and Palestinian - are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America's democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories.

student subjugated by Israeli army
© www.tiki-toki.comIsraeli soldiers subjugate Palestinian youth.
Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country's parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

Comment: Blumenthal's book has been deemed "mostly technically accurate" by his most avid critics. One of his commentators suggests viewing these powerful and recent documentaries: Five Broken Cameras, The Gatekeepers and The Law in These Parts for more insights to the continuing tragedy of the Palestinians and the "corrosive damage to the Israeli soul and spirit that is an inevitable price for the role they are playing."


Briefcase

Monster $250 billion lawsuit against big banks in housing crisis. Did the other shoe just drop?

wicked witch of the east
For years, homeowners have been battling Wall Street in an attempt to recover some portion of their massive losses from the housing Ponzi scheme. But progress has been slow, as they have been outgunned and out-spent by the banking titans.

In June, however, the banks may have met their match, as some equally powerful titans strode onto the stage. Investors led by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and PIMCO, the world's largest bond-fund manager, have sued some of the world's largest banks for breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The investors are seeking damages for losses surpassing $250 billion. That is the equivalent of one million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time.

The defendants are the so-called trust banks that oversee payments and enforce terms on more than $2 trillion in residential mortgage securities. They include units of Deutsche Bank AG, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Six nearly identical complaints charge the trust banks with breach of their duty to force lenders and sponsors of the mortgage-backed securities to repurchase defective loans.

Why the investors are only now suing is complicated, but it involves a recent court decision on the statute of limitations. Why the trust banks failed to sue the lenders evidently involves the cozy relationship between lenders and trustees. The trustees also securitized loans in pools where they were not trustees. If they had started filing suit demanding repurchases, they might wind up sued on other deals in retaliation. Better to ignore the repurchase provisions of the pooling and servicing agreements and let the investors take the losses - better, at least, until they sued.

Beyond the legal issues are the implications for the solvency of the banking system itself. Can even the largest banks withstand a $250 billion iceberg? The sum is more than 40 times the $6 billion "London Whale" that shook JPMorganChase to its foundations.

Bullseye

John Oliver on income inequality: The rich keep the game rigged while Americans cling to false optimism

Image
© RawStory
In an extended segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver turned his gaze on income inequality, noting that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the system favors the rich while, at the same time, accepting it, believing they too will somehow be rich someday.

"Our main story tonight, is income inequality." Oliver began. "A good way to figure out which side of it you're on, is whether you are currently paying for HBO, or stealing it."

Noting that President Obama recently delivered a speech where he used the expression 'income inequality,' twenty-six times, calling it "the defining issue of our times," Oliver pointed out that Democrats immediately retreated on the issue in the face of accusations of class warfare.

"So basically, income inequality has become just another topic of conversation we prefer to avoid in America, like Japanese internment camps or that time we gave Roberto Bengini an Academy Award. National tragedies, equally wrong," he said.

Light Saber

U.S. District Court judge rules against California death penalty

Image
© UPI Photo/Terry Schmitt
A federal judge ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional Wednesday, writing that lengthy and unpredictable delays have resulted in an arbitrary and unfair capital punishment system.

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney represents a legal victory for those who want to abolish the death penalty in California and follows a similar ruling that has suspended executions in the state for years.

Ruling in a case brought against the warden of San Quentin state prison by Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned in 1994, Carney called the death penalty an empty promise.

"Inordinate and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State," Carney wrote.

He continued, writing that "arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed."

Comment: See also:
  • 35 Years Of Death Penalty Regrets
  • Institutionalized murder: Death to the death penalty



Star of David

Hamas truce an offer Israel can only refuse

gaza rocket
© REUTERSA Hamas rocket fired from Gaza heads toward Israel on Tuesday.
Following Hamas' rejection of a ceasefire proposal by Egypt, the group may have announced its own terms for a 10-year truce, replete with conditions that Israel will never be willing to meet.

Early reports are signaling that Hamas, along with the Gaza terrorist group Islamic Jihad, are proposing a cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners who were initially released in the prisoner exchange that freed kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. A number of the men were rearrested during Israel's operation to find the men who abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last month.

The Times of Israel reports some of the other demands:
[Hamas also] demands that all crossings to the Gaza Strip be opened, and that the Rafah crossing to Egypt be secured by UN forces. It calls for an airport to be established in the Strip, that fishing areas be expanded, and that Israeli aircraft alter their flight routes such that none fly over the coastal enclave.
The Israeli site Arutz Sheva adds:
There is no official confirmation of the offer and it is being greeted with skepticism, as more of a trial balloon than an actual offer.
It seems fair to say that few of these demands will be taken seriously by Israel. Let's have a look at them.

Comment: Israel will get away with rejecting this proposal because it is 'unacceptable'. Yet when Hamas rejects a proposal, it's because it doesn't want peace. According to Ma'ariv (Hebrew), courtesy of MondoWeiss, these are the conditions:
Withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the Gaza border.

Freeing all the prisoners that were arrested after the killing of the three youths.

Lifting the siege and opening the border crossings to commerce and people.

Establishing an international seaport and airport which would be under U.N. supervision.

Increasing the permitted fishing zone to 10 kilometers.

Internationalizing the Rafah Crossing and placing it under the supervision of the U.N. and some Arab nations.

International forces on the borders.

Easing conditions for permits to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Prohibition on Israeli interference in the reconciliation agreement.

Reestablishing an industrial zone and improvements in further economic development in the Gaza Strip.



Book

Why Hamas rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal, and why Israel accepted it

Israel
© AP
An Egyptian ceasefire proposal aimed at ending the week-long battle between Israel and Hamas was accepted by Israel's cabinet on Tuesday, but rejected by Hamas. Here's what you need to know.

A new Egypt makes all the difference

Egypt mediated the last ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in 2012, but those were entirely different days. Back then, Egypt's ruler was Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood bona fides made him a natural ally of Hamas. With Morsi deposed and military rule restored, Egypt did not pursue the kinds of concessions that Morsi extracted from Israel in 2012. (Israel initially rejected a ceasefire in 2012 before agreeing on one.)

This time around, Egypt also didn't include Hamas in the negotiations. Feeling left out, Hamas acted out a little bit.

The proposal

What the ceasefire proffered by Egypt was pretty straightforward. Most importantly, a cessation of hostilities and some ease of movement and goods along the borders. The basic components of it returned things back to its 2012 ceasefire state.

Why Hamas rejected it

Hamas, in essence, needs to justify why it just went through the trouble of making Gaza the target of some nearly 1,600 Israeli airstrikes. In order to do so, the ceasefire needed to include something that would be construed as a victory for Hamas. In other words, some improvement over the 2012 ceasefire conditions or some of the demands the group has been calling for.

Comment: A joke of a ceasefire -- accepted by Israel and rejected by Hamas -- is propaganda gold for Israel. Now it can say, "See?? Hamas doesn't want peace! We are the most peaceful, compassionate, merciful country in the universe, and look what we have to deal with!"


Light Saber

Kiev caving in? Sets truce talks after Russian troop build-up and downing of military plane

Donetsk militant
© AFP Photo/Dominique FagetA Donetsk militant stands guard at a checkpoint in Marinka, 25 kilometers west of Donetsk, on July 15, 2014.
Ukraine's Western-backed leaders on Tuesday invited pro-Kremlin insurgents to a videoconference aimed at halting spiralling violence and what Kiev warned was an imminent invasion by thousands of Russian troops.

Kiev sharply raised the stakes in Europe's most explosive crisis in decades by declaring on Monday that a Ukrainian transport plane downed in the eastern conflict zone had been hit by a rocket fired from the Russian side of the frontier between the two ex-Soviet states.

Russia has broken with its traditional denials of all links to the uprising by not publicly responding to the charge.

A top Ukrainian general went a step further by telling a live television audience in Kiev that he feared a Russian invasion was imminent.

"Ukraine, like never before, stands on the cusp of a wide-scale aggression from our current northern border," said National Security and Defence Council Deputy Secretary Mykhaylo Koval.

The former defence minister said the Kremlin had parked 22,000 troops in the annexed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and had other units stretching from the north-central region of Chernigiv to the southeastern edge of the Russian-Ukranian border on the Sea of Azov.

Comment: It looks like all it took was a minor flex of Russia's arms to scare Kiev into backing off. That, and the increasingly effective resistance offered by the self-defense militias in the east. Kiev knows what it would be up against if it followed the U.S.'s diktats in provoking Russia. But what kind of pressure will the U.S. now put on their puppet Poroshenko?


Laptop

COINTELPRO: Hacking online polls and other ways British spies seek to control the Internet

poll
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, "amplif[y]" sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be "extremist." The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

The tools were created by GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG's use of "fake victim blog posts," "false flag operations," "honey traps" and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an "emergency" to "help keep us safe," a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called "JTRIG Tools and Techniques" provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit's operations are. The document - available in full here - is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG's "weaponised capability" when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker's buffet for wreaking online havoc.

Comment: SOTT has been talking about manipulated online polls and 'artificially' inflated views/likes for years, not to mention COINTELPRO trolls paid to post pro-government nonsense all over the Internet. It's old news and has been going on for a long time, but it's nice to see it confirmed. This has to stop, and idiots like David "we spy on you for your own good" Cameron need to be booted out of office, preferably into the closest prison cells available.