Puppet MastersS


Red Flag

EU cuts off its nose to spite Russia: Yields to US blackmail on sanctions

US sanctions Russia
http://en.itar-tass.com/world/741049
Moscow considers new package of the US sanctions against Russia "a primitive attempt at revenge for the course of events in Ukraine"

The European Union yielded to the US blackmail despite its own interests and chose the path of anti-Russian sanctions, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

Moscow pointed to the conclusions of the European Council meeting about the situation in Ukraine on July 16.

"We are disappointed that the European Union, contrary to its interests, yielded to the US administration blackmail and went the path of anti-Russian sanctions," the Ministry said. "Brussels, like Washington, uses "the mirror world logic", where all problems are blamed on those who make real efforts to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine, while flagrant facts such as the incessant refugees flow from Ukraine to Russia, shelling of the Russian territory and other anti-Russian provocations are conspicuously hushed up.

Supporting anti-Russian sanctions, the European Union "takes responsibility for Kiev's ongoing military operation that kills people every day", the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

"Instead of using the opportunities available to start a dialogue between Kiev and respresentatives of the country's southeast, the European Union did bidding of those who advocate resolution of the internal Ukrainian conflict by force and provoking confrontation with Russia in this situation," the Ministry said.

Russia hopes that the European Union will put forward its own position in international affairs meeting interests of all countries on our continent.

Comment: It is interesting that the EU has yielded to US pressure despite the potential negative economic consequences. One might wonder what the US is holding over the heads of EU politicians?

Senior EU official: EU should avoid economic sanctions against Russia
Realism: Italian PM Renzi speaks against building Europe in opposition to Russia
Russia may impose retaliatory sanctions against West if third wave of isolation measures is introduced
Whistleblower explains 'massive blackmail' potential from NSA spying on politicians
Is NSA spying really about blackmail?


Water

As California suffers drought, Nestle pumps water for bottling from tribal land

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© Via facebook
Nestle continues to draw water to sell from wells located on a California reservation despite worsening drought conditions that have prompted conservation measures limiting personal use.

The company has been drawing water for more than a decade from wells near a spring on the Morongo Band of Mission Indians' reservation, but neighbors have grown concerned about the operation as the statewide drought continues into its third year.

"Why is it possible to take water from a drought area, bottle it, and sell it?" said Linda Ivey, a Palm Desert real estate appraiser.

The Desert Sun reported that Nestle Waters North America Inc., which leases the property from the tribe, had previously submitted annual reports on its groundwater extraction to local water districts.

Those reports show the company drew between 1,366 and 595 acre-feet from two wells in Millard Canyon that it then sold under the Arrowhead and Nestle Pure Life brands.

Comment: Water is gold in the greedy, resource-hoarding U.S. of A:
  • Profits for psychopathic corporations! Nestlé CEO says water should be privatized - not a basic human right
  • Water Wars: Corporations laying claim to the world's H20



Eye 2

Michele Bachmann compares immigrant children to rapists, calls them 'invaders'

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Outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) derailed a CNN discussion on Tuesday about the thousands of undocumented immigrants arriving in the U.S. from Central America by calling them "invaders" and linking them to at least one rape case and an auto accident from six years ago.

"Foreign nationals that have come into the United States are between 300- to 500,000," Bachmann told an incredulous Crossfire co-host Van Jones. "My heart is broken for a female college student in Minnesota who was raped, murdered and mutilated by a foreign national who came into our country. We had a school bus full of kids in Minnesota - four children were killed on that school bus because an illegal alien driving a van went into that schoolbus."

"There are lines that can't be crossed here," Jones responded. "I'm sorry, congresswoman. Are you gonna scapegoat children for the crime of this despicable person?"

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

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© 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

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© 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.