Puppet MastersS


Snakes in Suits

Palestinian prime minister's resignation complicates U.S. plan

Salam Fayyad, Obama
© Reuters/Jason ReedU.S. President Barack Obama (R) watches a cultural event alongside Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at the Al Bireh Youth Center in Ramallah March 21, 2013.
Palestinian officials and the United States voiced optimism on Sunday that the resignation of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad would not hinder Washington's planned development initiative for the West Bank.

Fayyad quit on Saturday after months of tension with President Mahmoud Abbas, leaving the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in confusion just as the United States tries to revive peace talks with the Jewish state.

His exit came less than a week after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited and promised a plan to remove "bottlenecks and barriers" to economic development in the West Bank.

Kerry told reporters in Tokyo on Sunday the United States would pursue its initiative "no matter what" and there is "more than one person that (the United States) can do business with".

"We will continue to work at this and hope that President Abbas finds the right person to work with him in a transition and to work with us and to establish confidence," Kerry said.

U.S.-educated Fayyad, a former World Bank official, was appointed in 2007 and drew Western praise for his efforts to develop institutions fit for a future Palestinian state. But his popularity sank amid 25 percent unemployment and soaring prices.

Palestinian officials said Fayyad, trusted by the West as a non-corrupt conduit for aid funds, would not handle the U.S. development plan as interim caretaker prime minister.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: The Orwellian Paradigm: Killing you, for your own safety

Orwell
© BBC
Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television's gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell's 1984.

Contrary to Postman's critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell's profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought.

War is peace

Formulating the Language of Perpetual War - From AUMF to "Associates of Associates."

The semantic deception began shortly after September 11, 2001. "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda," Bush said in his State of the Union address, "but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated (emphasis added)."

Propaganda

Best of the Web: North Korea Psyop deception to deflect attention away from failing U.S. administration

North Korea
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So far the conflict between the USG and North Korean is a virtual false-flag only. A major Psyops designed to deflect attention away from a seriously failing US Administration which is pulling out all the stops to pass gun-control laws which are designed to eventually lead to complete confiscation.

This current conflict with North Korea has been engineered and portrayed as a real state of conflict when it is virtual only. In practical terms, North Korea and America are now only involved in a state of virtual war which is unlikely to be followed with an actual real shooting war.

Virtual war is an imaginary war fought only in the major mass media and the enemy is the news consumer or the public which is psychologically managed. Virtual war is a newer type of warfare which is a major Psychological operation, (aka a Psyop), that is, an act of Mindwar against the people.

Vader

Gitmo guards fire rounds during prison raid over protests

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© file imageInmates have been on a hunger strike for three months
Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison, including an ongoing hunger strike, boil over into violent clashes.
Guantanamo Bay prison guards have fired several rubber shots to quell prisoner unrest as they moved inmates into individual cells, US military officials said.


The violence erupted during an early morning raid carried out because, according to military officials, prisoners had covered up security cameras and windows as part of a protest and hunger strike over their indefinite confinement and conditions at the US base in Cuba.

Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks and mop handles when troops arrived to move them, said Robert Durand, a military spokesman.

Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds" in the section of the prison known as Camp Six, he said.

Mr Durand said there were "no serious injuries to guards or detainees" during the operation aiming "to reestablish proper observation" at the facility.

The rounds included a modified shotgun shell that fires small rubber pellets as well as a type of bean-bag projectile, said Army Colonel Greg Julian.

Vader

Bankster Blankfein hauls in $21M, makes him highest paid banker

Goldman Chariman Lloyd Blankfein
© Jim Young/ReutersProtestors jeer Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein as he prepares to face US Senators over the banking crisis.
Goldman Sachs chief gets $13m in restricted shares and $5.7m cash bonus on top of his $2m annual salary

Goldman Sachs paid its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, $21m last year - and granted him a further $5m in bonus shares in January.

The Wall Street bank handed Blankfein $13.3m (£8.7m) in restricted shares and a $5.7m cash bonus on top of his $2m annual salary last year.

His total 2012 pay was $9m more than in 2011, and the highest since the $68m he received in 2007, before the financial crisis struck.

The payout, disclosed in a filing with the US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), makes Blankfein, 58, the world's best paid banker.

On top of his annual pay Goldman granted him long-term incentive plan (LTIP) shares worth an additional $5m at today's share price. But he will have to meet performance targets in order to collect the full amount, and the value of the shares could go up or down.

Blankfein's top four lieutenants collected a total of $72m in annual pay, bonuses and share options last year.

Comment: Another clue that the psychopathic elites don't care one whit for the well-being of ordinary people. These ridiculous bonuses are occurring at a time when millions of people are jobless, record numbers of people are in poverty and one in four children in the US are on food stamps.
The Looting Of America: The Federal Reserve Made $16 Trillion In Secret Loans To Their Bankster Friends And The Media Is Ignoring The Eye-Popping Corruption That Has Been Uncovered
Over a quarter of U.S. kids on food stamps
Unemployment soars worldwide, with youth the most vulnerable
Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True


Che Guevara

Best of the Web: A Practical Utopian's guide to the coming collapse

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© Randall Enos
Whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it's unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur - as with, say, the rise of feminism - it's likely to take an entirely different form. It's not that revolutionary dreams aren't out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

Control Panel

Controlled opposition - from Goldstein to Soros and beyond

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Jewish power is the unique capacity to stop us from discussing or even contemplating Jewish power. It is the capacity to determine the boundaries of the political discourse and criticism in particular.

In his new book, "The Invention Of The Land of Israel", Israeli academic Shlomo Sand, manages to present conclusive evidence of the far fetched nature of the Zionist historical narrative - that the Jewish Exile is a myth as is the Jewish people and even the Land of Israel.

Yet, Sand and many others fail to address the most important question: If Zionism is based on myth, how do the Zionists manage to get a way with their lies, and for so long?

Top Secret

Judge orders pink slime silence to protect company

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Iowa State University has conducted food safety research of the beef product deemed "Pink Slime" by the mass public.

Lean-finely-texturized-beef (LFTB) is a meat filler made from ammoniated boneless lean beef scraps, connective tissue or similar products, which are considered unfit for human consumption until ammonium hydroxide has been added - due to e.coli and salmonella. It was dog food until the meat industry lobbied its use as meat filler for us.

South Dakota-based company Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) filed legal action in 2010 to block records release after they were requested by a Seattle food safety law firm and the New York Times. Last month, District Judge Dale Ruigh upheld the block and ruled that releasing those records would do "irreparable harm" and reveal information about proprietary food-processing techniques.

The harm to both company and consumer has already been done. What is so scandalous that we don't already know?

Megaphone

Exposed: Monsanto's chemical war against indigenous Hawaiians

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Hawaiians are fighting back against the GMO giant.

At 9 am on an overcast morning in paradise, hundreds of protesters gathered in traditional Hawaiian chant and prayer. Upon hearing the sound of the conch shell, known here as Pū, the protesters followed a group of women towards Monsanto's grounds.

"A'ole GMO," cried the mothers as they marched alongside Monsanto's cornfields, located only feet from their homes on Molokai, one of the smallest of Hawaii's main islands. In a tiny, tropical corner of the Pacific that has warded off tourism and development, Monsanto's fields are one of only a few corporate entities that separates the bare terrain of the mountains and oceans.

This spirited march was the last of a series of protests on the five Hawaiian islands that Monsanto and other biotech companies have turned into the world's ground zero for chemical testing and food engineering. Hawaii is currently at the epicenter of the debate over genetically modified organisms, generally shortened to GMOs. Because Hawaii is geographically isolated from the broader public, it is an ideal location for conducting chemical experiments. The island chain's climate and abundant natural resources have lured five of the world's largest biotech chemical corporations: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF. In the past 20 years, these chemical companies have performed over 5,000 open-field-test experiments of pesticide-resistant crops on an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 acres of Hawaiian land without any disclosure, making the place and its people a guinea pig for biotech engineering.

Dollar Gold

The entire economy is a Ponzi scheme. The global financial system is insolvent

financial elites
© unknown
Ponzinomics

Bill Gross, Nouriel Roubini, Laurence Kotlikoff, Steve Keen, Michel Chossudovsky, the Wall Street Journal and many others say that our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme.

Former Reagan budget director David Stockton just agreed:

So did a top Russian con artist and mathematician.

Even the New York Times' business page asked, "Was [the] whole economy a Ponzi scheme?"

In fact - as we've noted for 4 years (and here and here) - the banking system is entirely insolvent. And so are most countries. The whole notion of one country bailing out another country is a farce at this point. The whole system is insolvent.

As we noted last year: Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz pointed out the Ponzi scheme nature of the whole bailout discussion: