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The Comcast/Time Warner merger and the war between centralization and decentralization

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Sun, 16 Feb 2014 15:18 UTC
Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Until recent years, the struggle between the forces of "centralization" and "decentralization" was more of a full on slaughter-fest than an actually battle or war. As Americans sat there blissfully asleep for decades, every facet of our lives has been carefully consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of corporations, and hence individual executives. This trend is undeniable in everything from food, banking, media and everything in between.

Myself and many others saw the financial crisis of 2008 as a gigantic wakeup call. The disasters caused by powerful financial institutions and the greedy people that ran them should have been used as a rallying cry to break these institutions up. To recognize the dangers of too much power in one particular place.This is especially important in something as crucial as banking. However, as we are all painfully aware, this is not what happened. Rather, the institutions were bailed out, the industry consolidated even more than it was before, and the perpetrators of the crisis emerged from it even more wealthy and powerful.

My personal focus on this website has been to expose the unique dangers presented by centralization in the financial industry and the monetary system. However, many others are dedicated to the equally important and disturbing trends in other industries. Consumer goods is one of these areas, and a very telling diagram went around late last year showing how 10 companies basically control everything you buy. Take a look below:
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Passport

How to sell your soul to the Devil: Canada granted Israeli Mossad agent new identity, businessman claims


Haaretz
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 14:50 UTC
Arian Azarbar says Israeli spy was granted news passport after participating in the 2010 plot to kill Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel.
Image
© Courtesy Ch. 2
Mossad operatives who allegedly assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010, dressed in tennis garb.
An Israeli Mossad agent living in Canada was secretly provided a new identity and passport by the government, a Canadian-Iranian businessman alleged in an interview, the Canoe website reported Saturday.

Arian Azarbar says the Israeli spy was granted the new identity after participating in the 2010 plot to kill Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel. Al Mabhouh, part of the military wing of Hamas, was wanted by the Israeli government for the kidnap and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989.

Al-Mabhouh was killed on January 19, 2010 when a team of assassins broke into his hotel room and killed him silently, leaving a 'do not disturb' sign on the door. The hotel security cameras caught images of the alleged killers sharing an elevator ride with Mabhouh prior to the assassination.

Comment: Mossad Psychopaths Behind Murder of Hamas Official In Dubai

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Red Flag

The Struggle for Ukraine - Protests made in Germany, America and the EU

Peter Schwarz
Global Research
Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© AP/Sergei Grits
Protesters chant slogans outside the Parliament in Kiev, Ukraine, on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013. Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday opened a high-tension session in which the opposition aims to put forward a vote of no-confidence in the government in the wake of both the president's shelving an agreement with the European Union and police violence against demonstrators protesting that decision.
The current wave of protests in Ukraine bears the label "Made in Germany," "Made in the EU" and "Made in America." The Western media has gone to great lengths to portray the demonstrations in Kiev as a struggle for democracy and the rule of law. In fact, they are part of a conflict over geostrategic issues. The aim is to repel Russian influence and subject Ukraine to the domination of Germany, the European Union and NATO.

Nine years ago, the Orange Revolution was organized with massive political and financial support from the US government and American NGOs such as the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros. These forces were able to annul the presidential election and ensure that the pro-EU and pro-US tandem of Viktor Yushchenko and Julia Tymoshenko took over as head of state and head of government in place of Viktor Yanukovich, who was considered to be in the pocket of Russia. The duo quickly fell out, however, and Yanukovich was able to assume the post of president in 2010.

Now another attempt is being made to bring a regime to power that will subordinate the former Soviet Republic and granary of the Russian Empire to the EU. An examination of the political leadership of the protests reveals their reactionary character. They are led by three parties, two of which have close relations with the conservative camp in the EU, while the third is openly fascist.

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Alarm Clock

Horse Hockey! 250 returning jihadis spark UK terror alert


Sunday Times, UK
Sun, 16 Feb 2014 07:35 UTC
Image

The 'terra threat', made in the UK
The full scale of the terrorist threat to Britain can be revealed today with the disclosure that about 250 British-based jihadis who went to train and fight in Syria have returned home.

Senior security officials say the high number of "returnees" - five times the figure that has been previously reported - underlines the growing danger posed by "extremist tourists" going to the war-torn region.

MI5 and police have already thwarted one serious plot last autumn by a cell of "returnee" jihadis who were allegedly preparing a Mumbai-style gun attack on civilians, probably in a crowded public place in London.

The security services are closely monitoring the 250 returnees, who include several veteran hardliners who have fought in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They are suspected of wanting to carry out attacks here or of inciting others to do so.
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Star of David

The Misplaced Minister: Ireland and Israel's Alan Shatter

Camillus
The Occidental Observer
Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
For the past two years Ireland's immigration policy has been in the hands of Alan Shatter, a Jew and an outspoken partisan of Israel. Alan Shatter, born and bred in Dublin of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, has made it Irish policy to increase Third World immigration to the Emerald Isle. As Minister of Justice, Equality, and Defence, Shatter is exerting his considerable clout to skew the Republic's Middle East policy, formerly supportive of the Palestinians and critical of Israel, toward Zionist aims.

Before Shatter, the Irish government had taken steps to reduce non-European immigration, including abolishing automatic citizenship for children born to foreigners in Ireland and drastically reducing the admission of asylum seekers. Since taking office in early 2011, after his Fine Gael party ousted the ruling Fianna Fail amid Ireland's continuing economic woes, Shatter has busied himself with increasing the numbers of Africans and Asians resident in Ireland.

Immigration to Ireland from outside Europe during 2011 was twice that of the previous year. Last year, the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service granted visas to 91 percent of the 88,000 non-Europeans who applied for them (citizens of the twenty-six other member states of the European Union can travel to Ireland without having to obtain a visa). An additional 115,000 migrants from outside Europe were given permission to remain in Ireland in 2012, with India, China, Nigeria, Turkey, and the Philippines among the top six countries of origin. To be sure, the number of permits to non-Europeans to reside in Ireland has declined over the previous two years - but only because Shatter's ministry has been granting them citizenship, at several times the rate of the preceding years.
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Bad Guys

Market-rigging: Bank of England staff knew about and condoned currency trader's conduct

Suzi Ring, Gavin Finch and Liam Vaughan
The Guardian
Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:58 UTC
Image
© Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
The Bank of England stands on Threadneedle Street in London.
Bank of England officials told currency traders it wasn't improper to share impending customer orders with counterparts at other firms, a practice at the heart of a widening probe into alleged market manipulation, according to a person who has seen notes turned over to regulators.

A senior trader gave his notes from a private April 2012 meeting of currency dealers and two central bank staff members to the Financial Conduct Authority about six weeks ago because of mounting media coverage of the investigation, said the person, who asked not to be named while probes are under way.

Traders representing some of the world's biggest banks told officials at the meeting that they shared information about aggregate orders before currency benchmarks were set, three people with knowledge of the discussion said. The officials said there wasn't a policy on such communications and that banks should make their own rules, according to the people. The notes could drag the U.K. central bank into another market-rigging scandal two years after it was criticized by lawmakers for failing to act on warnings that Libor was vulnerable to abuse.

If traders can show "they made Bank of England officials aware of practices in the FX market some time ago, then the bank will be at risk of being characterized as having endorsed, by its silence and inaction, the very practices which are now under investigation," said Simon Hart, a lawyer at RPC LLP in London.
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Propaganda

In U.S., headlines write themselves: Cold War imagery resurrected in Sochi bashing


RT.com
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:24 UTC

The campaign to boycott the Sochi Olympic Games in the Western media appears to be thriving on almost the same imagery that was used three decades ago, at the peak of the Cold War, to project fear of the USSR ahead of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

For months leading up to the biggest sport event of the year widespread calls to boycott the 2014 Sochi Olympics saturated the Western media and social networks.

With numerous online and offline boycotts, protests and petitions around the world it led to a number of world's leaders not attending the opening ceremony of Sochi Olympic Games. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and David Cameron chose to ignore the festivities, a move criticized by Thomas Bach, head of the International Olympic Committee.

Comment: The reaction of the West's pathocrats to the success of the Russian Olympics is totally ridiculous and malicious at the same time. Yet what it clearly reveals is their fear of the Russian Bear!
And oft, my jealousy shapes faults that are not - Shakespeare


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Heart - Black

Dresden bombing, Britain's forgotten war crime of WWII


Press TV
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:14 UTC
desden

While Britain claims to be an advocate of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and many other countries around the world, British history itself is corroborating evidence that Britain, the greatest human rights preacher, has also been the most flagrant human rights breacher.

More than 500,000 German civilians and refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by Britain's saturation bombing in 1945, one of the worst massacres of all time.

Over 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million defenseless inhabitants of German city Dresden under Britain's then Prime Minister Winston Churchill's order, which not only reduced one of the greatest centers of northern Europe to flaming ruins, but also led to one of the worst war crimes of the Second World War.

Comment: This remains an unpunished war crime that Britain ought to have paid reparations for.

See also:

SOTT focus: From Dresden to Gaza - Some people never change

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Wall Street

Currency market unsettled by trader exits on Lawsky probe

Greg Farrell and Ambereen Choudhury
Bloomberg News
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 19:38 UTC
Image
© The Real Deal
Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services and the DFS headquarters at 25 Beaver Street.
The foreign-exchange trading business was in upheaval across Wall Street as senior executives resigned and others were fired amid an expanding probe of possible currency manipulation.

Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of New York's Department of Financial Services, asked more than a dozen firms including Deutsche Bank AG (DB), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Citigroup Inc. (C) for documents on their currency-trading practices, said a person with knowledge of the matter. Deutsche Bank, the top foreign-exchange trader, fired four dealers after an internal probe, people with knowledge of the move said. Goldman Sachs lost two partners while Citigroup said its foreign-exchange chief will leave in March.

Lawsky's investigation is at least the 12th opened by authorities in Europe, the U.S. and Asia since Bloomberg News reported that traders at the world's largest banks colluded to manipulate the benchmark WM/Reuters rates. Even staff who aren't being probed are reassessing career plans as the scandal forces firms to change fundamental practices as revenue falls.

The Libor Scandal Sets Off a Wave of Probes

"Currency traders are now sitting in an unprecedented and unwelcome spotlight," said John Purcell, chief executive officer of Purcell & Co., a London-based executive-search firm. "Regulatory pressures, scandals and attendant reputational issues are making it a much more challenging environment."

At least 16 traders have been suspended or put on leave amid the global probe. Citigroup last month fired European spot trading chief Rohan Ramchandani.

Comment: Connection?

JP Morgan executive becomes 5th banker to die in last 2 weeks
4th Financial Services Executive found dead; "From self-inflicted nail-gun wounds"
Former Fed member is third banker 'found dead' this week
Two top American bankers commit suicide in London as one jumps 500ft to his death from JP Morgan skyscraper and another hangs himself

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Brick Wall

Putin: Criticism of games reflects Cold War mentality

Mike Collett-White
Reuters
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:43 UTC
Putin at games
© Reuters/Alexander Demianchuk
Russian President Vladimir Putin watches from the stands during the Team Ladies Free Skating Program at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, February 9, 2014.
Western criticism of Russia's Winter Olympics was reminiscent of Cold War ambitions to hold the Soviet Union back, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday, despite signs that the world was warming to the most expensive Games ever held.

The buildup to the Olympics in Sochi on the Black Sea coast has been overshadowed by threats of Islamist militant violence, an international outcry over a contentious "anti-gay propaganda" law and allegations of widespread corruption and profligacy.

As the third full day of competition drew to a close, that hostility had begun to melt away and the thrills and spills on snow and ice, and a hugely popular Russian gold in the team figure skating on Sunday, began to win the critics around.
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