Puppet MastersS


Vader

The right storms Europe vote: Your quick guide to the anti-EU hardline - Nazi lovers in there!

Fascism, Europe
© Reuters/Nikola Solic
The EU parliamentary elections have seen a marked shift towards both right-wing and Euroskeptic political parties. From the National Front to UKIP, RT has drawn up a list of the need-to-know political parties coming to prominence in the EU.

The National Front

The National Front far-right party in France gleaned 25 percent of the votes in the latest EU elections, according to early results. It's well ahead of the opposition center-Right UMP party, which received 20.6 per cent - a 9 percent drop since the last elections.

Dollar Gold

'Ukraine must pay gas debts' - EU Energy Commissioner

Gas, Natural Gas
© AFP Photo/Sergei Supinsky
Moscow and Kiev have tentatively agreed on the total amount of the first gas debt tranche that Ukraine should pay, which is 2.5 billion dollars, said Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak. The EU stressed the need for Kiev to pay its bills.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed that Kiev will partly pay its gas bills to cover supplies from November to May, inclusively, Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said after holding talks in Berlin with Gazprom Deputy CEO Aleksandr Medvedev and EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger.

"The total amount of payments can reach 2.5 billion US dollars. We are ready to continue discussing prices for gas which we deliver to Ukraine. We hope that the Ukrainian side will discuss our proposals with its leadership," Novak elaborated.

Brick Wall

US pivot setback: Thai coup stings Western meddlers

Thai military coup
© Unknown
"America's Pacific Century," Foreign Policy magazine declared in an op-ed published by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The by-line would continue by saying, "the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."

And indeed, it has been in the middle of the action. With an army of deeply entrenched US-funded NGOs masquerading as human rights, press freedom, and pro-democracy advocates, the US has been busy subverting and attempting to overthrow indigenous institutions across Southeast Asia either in support of US proxy regimes already in power, or to pave way for disruptive "color revolutions" seeking to install them.

The idea is to align Southeast Asia, along with India and Pakistan, as well as Korea and Japan, into three united fronts to encircle and contain China. Detailed first in the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers" and continuously updated over the following decades, confrontation with China is now the admitted purpose of the US "pivot."

Comment: See also:


Eye 2

Petro Poroshenko: Oligarchic 'chocolate king' now Ukraine's next president

Ukraine just had a revolution to oust sleazy oligarchs. Why is it about to elect one as its leader?

Petro Poroshenko is the Chocolate King of Ukraine. What does that mean in a country where average yearly income still hovers around a few hundred dollars a month, where pensioners are impoverished by just about any definition and where the hunger to blame someone, anyone, for the country's troubled post-Soviet path has produced not one but two revolutions in the last decade? For starters, that he lives like a king, a real one.

 Poroshenko's palace
© segodnya.uaPoroshenko's palace, in a quiet suburb of Kyiv that was once a proletarian retreat.
Poroshenko's palace is a short ride outside central Kyiv in Kozyn, a suburb that, in Soviet times, used to be a proletariat retreat, dotted with tall, slender pine trees and small wooden cabins for workers' families to enjoy the summer months by the Dnieper River. Today, a few vintage compounds with rusted metal gates remain, and dilapidated houses stand in the center of town. But the choice land close to the river has been bought up by wealthy Ukrainians who have erected mansions along its banks. Poroshenko's grand manse - complete with a white portico and columns that recall, not at all subtly, the White House, is surrounded by a yellow brick wall. Over the top, you can see rows of freestanding Roman archways, metal-leaf gates and the golden cupola of an Orthodox chapel.

Although it's technically illegal, Poroshenko and many others in the neighborhood have cut off access to the shorefront along their property. The high gates blocking the water have become a visible symbol of the excesses of a crony capitalism that has walled off much of Ukraine from the prying eyes of its people, turning land that was once for everyone to enjoy into an elite playground. "I don't like it," one of Poroshenko's neighbors told me. "But what can you do?"

By the count of those keeping score, Poroshenko is Ukraine's seventh richest man today, worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. A 48-year-old with a large jowl and pompadour-styled salt-and-pepper hair, he owns UkPromInvest, a mysterious holding company that has no website but boasts interests in bus manufacturing, car distribution, shipyards, banking and electrical cables, among other things. He is most famous for owning the confectionary firm Roshen, which has factories in both Ukraine and Russia and produces all manner of flashy gold-wrapped chocolate wafers, bars and candies. Perhaps even more relevantly in these troubled times, Poroshenko is also the owner of Channel 5, known as the country's main opposition television station and a leader of the revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych this winter.

Wall Street

Future markets are not rigged sez Wall Street CEO, as futures traders file "clandestine" conspiracy lawsuit

Image
© Wallstreetonparade.comTerrence Duffy of the CME Group Testifying Before the Senate on May 13, 2014.
Someone is perjuring themselves to Federal officials and that individual(s) should enjoy a nice long sabbatical at the courtesy of the taxpayer, forgoing the staid Armani for the more robust orange jump suit.

Following SEC Chair Mary Jo White's less than credible testimony to the House Financial Services Committee on April 29 that "the markets are not rigged," Terrence Duffy, Executive Chairman and President of the CME Group which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the largest futures exchange in the world, delivered the same message to the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday.

Duffy testified that "Our market data is sent to everyone at once. While customers have several options in terms of how they can receive data from us, we do not restrict access. Having multiple connectivity options makes our markets accessible to a broader array of participants."

Comment:
U.S. stock markets are rigged, sez author Michael Lewis


X

Russian Parliament approves 'none of the above' option for municipal polls

Russians casting votes.
© www.theguardian.comCasting the ballots, a vote in progress.
Russian State Duma has voted to pass a bill allowing protest voting in the country at its second and main reading. According to the current draft, the option is only allowed in municipal elections.

The bill also provides that in cases when most voters vote for none of the above the authorities must organize a re-run.

The bill was prepared and submitted to the Lower House by a group of senators headed by Upper House chair Valentina Matviyenko. The original document allowed the return of the "none of the above" option to ballots on all election levels, but this met strong opposition from Lower House MPs.

The head of the State Duma Committee for Constitutional Law, Vladimir Pligin, said during the debates that the return of a protest vote was undesirable because the objective of the elections was to form the bodies of power, not just gather information about popular preferences. At the same time Pligin admitted that the "none of the above" vote was possible at a municipal level, where the public has good personal knowledge of candidates.

Comment: A bona fide checkmate moment! Imagine a U.S. election where voters could induce a re-run election by unanimously protest voting for 'none of the above.' It would require a public more awake and willing to seek new candidates than resignedly suffer four long years with (one can only hope) the lesser of two evils.


Ark

Pentagon building $44-million EMP bunker in Alaska

bunker
Money better spent elsewhere.
Fort Greely, Alaska is home to one of America's two domestic missile defense bases. Now it's getting armored against high-altitude electromagnetic energy attacks - like the kind emitted from nuclear blasts.


Comment: Not just nuclear blasts; also bolide explosions.


It's a far-fetched scenario, but the Pentagon is spending millions on a bunker designed to protect against exactly that. According to contract documents from the Army Corps of Engineers, the military plans to spend $44 million on an "HEMP-protected" bunker housing the base's missile launch control systems.

By HEMP, the contract is referring to high-altitude electromagnetic pulses. The base at Fort Greely houses anti-ballistic missile interceptors stored in silos, and can also control and direct interceptors fired from a similar site at Vandenberg Air Force base in California.

It's worth noting the money is pocket change compared to the $41 billion the Pentagon is spending on its ground-based mid-course defense program through 2017. The plan calls for installing dozens of missile interceptors in Alaska and California.

Comment: We wonder if the Pentagon might be up to something more than just "protecting their missile defense system", especially given the elephant in the global living room: the increasing threat posed by meteors and comet fragments and massive destruction they can cause. See the latest book from SOTT editors Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk for the details: Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection.


Stock Down

Gold manipulation - the obvious and not so obvious

Image
© gata.org
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Commodity market analyst Dan Norcini yesterday ridiculed what he described as assertions that the British Financial Conduct Authority's fining Barclays Bank for an incident of gold market manipulation "is proof positive that every single big move lower in gold is the result of evil, nefarious forces suppressing the price of gold on behalf of the government":

http://traderdannorcini.blogspot.com/2014/05/ukraine-election-moves-to-f...

Norcini didn't identify the parties making such assertions but GATA is not among them.

For the Barclays case establishes only that one investment bank manipulated the gold market at least once and that the mechanism of the daily London gold fixing facilitates such manipulation. The Barclays case does not establish that every big move lower in gold is a government operation.

Comment: Dan Norcini is heavily invested in his "technical analysis" of the metals markets. This technical analysis is useless when applied to a market that is deeply manipulated. Thus Norcini must maintain a position of minimum intervention to preserve his credibility - even in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.


Dollar

Rickards interview on the death of money

Image
James Rickards
Financial expert and best-selling author James Rickards' latest book predicts "the coming collapse of the international monetary system." One of the sign posts is countries like Russia declaring it will shed the U.S. Dollar as reserve currency in international trade. Rickards explains, "Putin said he envisions a Eurasian economic zone involving Eastern Europe, central Asia and Russia. The Russian Ruble is nowhere near ready to be a global reserve currency, but it could be a regional reserve currency."

Rickards' latest best-selling book, "The Death of Money," was released in April. Even Rickards is surprised at how fast the economic situation is unfolding. Richards says,
"If you ask me what has happened since you finished writing the book that comes as a surprise, I would say a lot of the things I talk about in my book are happening faster than I would have expected. Things that I thought would happen in the 2015 or 2016 time frame seems to be happening now in some ways. If anything, the tempo of events is faster than expected. Therefore, some of these catastrophic outcomes may come sooner than I wrote about."

Magnify

Russia, Chechnia and the Ukraine - The role of Kadyrov in the release of the Russian journalists and the *choice* to keep hoping for the impossible

Kadyrov
© UnknownRamzan Kadyrov
As you probably know, the two Russian journalists who worked for the LifeNews, Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko, were finally freed and brought back home via Grozny in Chechnia. You might even have heard that the President of Chechnia, Ramzan Kadyrov, played a special role in their liberation. I think that the importance of this event might be under-estimated by many observers and I want to briefly comment on that.

It all really began in Crimea where, before the operation of the Russian Polite Armed Men in Green (PAMG), when there were some very serious tensions between the various parties including the Muslim Tatars. At that time, Ramzan Kadyrov for the first time made a statement from faraway Grozny saying that he will not tolerate any "abuses against the Chechen" minority in Crimea. Since there are not all that many Chechens in Crimea and since soon thereafter PAMG solved the problem anyway, this statement was rapidly forgotten. But think again, besides being a statement in support of the Chechens in Crimea, who was that statement directed against? Clearly, the threatened party was not the pro-Russian one, but the pro-Ukrainian forces, including those Tatars (mainly linked to Turkey) who had been manipulated by the USA to take action against the pro-Russian population of Crimea. It is now clear that what happened in this instance is that Kadyrov did openly say that which Putin could not (for obvious political reasons). In the end, it was Putin who eventually engaged his PAMG, but it was Kadyrov who had made the threat.