Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

FIRE everything and forget the future - elite psychopaths

Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:19 UTC
Image
Oh, that feeling of being lied to that most of us had all those years - well it's safe to say it's not just a feeling any more.

Think of all the wonderfully dressed financial 'experts' we've seen on our televisions over the last seven years, all so confident, with the pretense and arrogance required to be a mainstream media pundit. At first it seemed funny and amusing - every prediction and statement muttered on air - all wrong, and completely off the mark. We knew they didn't know what they were talking about, and enjoyed a laugh at their expense. Only, now it's not funny anymore. Financial and political sock puppets have since left the port of ignorance, and are now permanently moored at the dock of deception.

Blowtorch the Economy

Known to many but understood by few, the Finance-Insurance-Real Estate economy has taken control in what are schizophrenically called the "advanced industrial/post-industrial" nations, AKA the "mature democracies" - where mega-debt, unemployment, slow-to-zero growth, extortionate energy tariffs and income inequality are the main features. Above all, a deregulation-happy, laisser-faire political mindset rules, and we're told that nothing can be done about the firestorm.
Read More...
Dollar Gold

Tabloid sez: Obamas fight over her 'seeing the world on the American taxpayers' dime'

Steve Herz
The National Enquirer
Thu, 03 Apr 2014 05:40 UTC
Image
© Frugal-Cafe
In a major behind-the-scenes blowout, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle waged their worst White House fight ever over her lavish vacation trip to China!

Sources tell The Enquirer that Obama exploded when Michelle refused to cancel her pricey getaway - even after White House advisers warned him that the first couple's six-year string of extravagant vacations had already drained the U.S. Treasury of a whopping $150 million in taxpayers' money.

Instead of postponing her trip, a furious Michelle - still seething over the embarrassing "selfie" Barack recently snapped with a leggy blonde head of state - announced that she was taking her mother along for company.

She further declared that she didn't want reporters covering her activities overseas.

"This was a blowout of epic proportions - probably the nastiest White House fight they've ever had," a Washington, D.C., insider told The Enquirer
Read More...
Cards

U.S. sanctions against Russia undermine America's global domination

Ekaterina Blinova
Voice of Russia
Fri, 04 Apr 2014 21:43 UTC
Image
© Daily Mail
"Welcome to the digital world, where regions can achieve scale through cooperation within months. Inclusive globalization is clearly under threat", writes Patrick L. Young, an expert in global financial markets, in his article "Upside down: America's war on globalization?" Mr. Young believes that Russia has bright prospects regarding its future digital processing system that can become even more flexible than its American analog.

As a result of financial sanctions imposed by Obama on Russian financial institutions over Crimea, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing transactions for several Russian banks. Patrick L. Young thinks that this decision may hit back at the American economy. Obama has, in fact, undermined the idea of globalization: faced with a financial crackdown, Russia is likely to create its own payment processing system now, the expert says. That means that Visa and MasterCard are going to lose a big share of Russia's inner market.

Mr. Young is confident that Russia's domestic electronic payment system will be a success. The new digital networks are faster, cheaper and more efficient than the American payment legacy system based on analogue architecture, he says. For those who doubt that a Russian solution can be more flexible than the American one, Patrick L. Young cited the example of the Moscow Exchange:
Read More...
Quenelle - Golden

With record low popularity rating, President Hollande promotes Manuel Valls as Prime Minister of new French government


The Economist
Sat, 05 Apr 2014 13:59 UTC
Image
François Hollande's new prime minister, Manuel Valls, is a centrist and a bruiser. He will need these qualities if he is to help turn France round

Five years ago, in 2009, after Manuel Valls urged his unreconstructed party to drop the word "socialist" from its name, he was ordered by its leader to shut up or quit. Two years later, after explaining how painful it would be to remedy France's economic weaknesses, he scored less than 6% in the party primary for the 2012 presidential nomination. Yet on March 31st François Hollande, the French president, appointed the party's most heretical activist as his new prime minister, in place of the bland Jean-Marc Ayrault. It was a move as uncharacteristically bold as it is potentially encouraging for the cause of economic reform in France.


Comment: That is, he's the man who will have no compunction about unleashing extreme right-wing neo-liberal "austerity measures" on the French population in order to apply so-called "economic shock therapy".


That the ultra-cautious Mr Hollande has made such an appointment reflects how crushing was his defeat in the local elections held on March 23rd and 30th. Thanks to high unemployment, high taxes, low growth and inept government, the Socialists lost over 150 towns, mostly to the mainstream right, including Toulouse, which they thought safe, Roubaix and Tourcoing, two towns in the industrial north with a long left-wing heritage, and Limoges, held by the left ever since 1912. Marine Le Pen's populist National Front picked up eleven more town halls, including Fréjus and Béziers, to add to Hénin-Beaumont, which it won in the first round, a big step forward for her party. The only consolation for the Socialists was that Anne Hidalgo won Paris (coincidentally, she shares with Mr Valls the distinction of Spanish birth and family origins).

Comment: See also:

Who is Manuel Valls? France's Socialist Sarkozy

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has a paranoid conspiracy theory: 'Comedian Dieudonne is financed by Iran'

Read More...
Stock Down

Billionaire warns: Horrific stock market crash is coming, and the next bust will be 'unlike any other'


Money News
Fri, 04 Apr 2014 14:35 UTC
Image
© The AustralianGMO chief investment strategist Jeremy Grantham.
Another horrific stock market crash is coming, and the next bust will be "unlike any other" we have seen.

That's the message from Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO, a Boston-based firm with $117 billion in assets under management.

Grantham pulls no punches when he discusses who he holds responsible for the coming financial carnage. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he calls Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen "ignorant" and said the Federal Reserve all but killed the economic recovery.

He also says that he isn't putting his clients' money into the market right now.

"We invest our clients' money based on our seven-year prediction. And over the next seven years, we think the market will have negative returns. The next bust will be unlike any other, because the Fed and other central banks around the world have taken on all this leverage that was out there and put it on their balance sheets. We have never had this before."
Read More...
Chess

Oops! Moscow raises discounted gas tariff for Kiev twice this week, almost doubling it in three days

Pavel Polityuk and Henning Gloystein
Yahoo! News
Fri, 04 Apr 2014 14:06 UTC
Image
© Economic Times
Ukraine is in emergency talks with European Union neighbors on the possibility of importing natural gas from the West, following a leap in the price it pays for Russian supplies, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said on Friday.

The urgency of securing affordable supplies has grown since Moscow - which annexed Crimea from Ukraine last month - raised its discounted gas tariff for Kiev twice this week, almost doubling it in three days.

Yatseniuk told reporters that one possibility was "reverse flows", in which EU countries would send gas back down pipelines normally used in the transit of Russian supplies through Ukraine to the West.

"We are carrying out emergency talks with our European partners. One way to solve the problem is reverse gas from EU countries," he said, adding that the main candidates for imports were Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.
Read More...
Stop

Leaner and meaner Russian Army on display in Crimea, rattling NATO, raising alarm

Fred Weir
Yahoo! News
Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:03 UTC
Image
© Pavel Golovkin/APRussian officers gesture to the driver of Russian tank T-72B at the Ostryakovo railway station near Simferopol, Crimea, on Monday.
But while the Russian Army's latest showing was far better than its blundering in Georgia in 2008, Crimea offered advantages that the Kremlin is unlikely to see elsewhere

The last time the Russian military machine was on public display in Europe, its performance did not impress. But this is no longer the force that NATO observed blundering its way through a brief but messy war with its tiny neighbor, Georgia, back in 2008.

A new, leaner and meaner Russian Army has been on display in Crimea and war-gaming on the Ukrainian border over the past month or so. Its vanguard is now made up of just a few elite divisions of highly-motivated, well trained, and fully equipped volunteer soldiers, capable of deploying swiftly anywhere in the former Soviet Union on the Kremlin's command.

And that fact is raising alarms about the potential for wider Kremlin aggression that haven't been heard in the West since the end of the cold war.

Comment: "F**k The EU" - U.S. State department blasts Europe; revealed as alleged mastermind behind Ukraine unrest

Read More...
Airplane

Federal judge throws out drone strike lawsuit against Obama administration

Reuters
The Guardian
Fri, 04 Apr 2014 22:15 UTC
Image
© APAnwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen.
A US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against the government by the families of three American citizens killed by drones in Yemen, saying senior officials cannot be held personally responsible for money damages for the act of conducting war.

The families of the three - including Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born militant Muslim cleric who had joined al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate, as well as his teenage son - sued over their 2011 deaths in US drone strikes, arguing that the killings were illegal.
Read More...
Sherlock

The new Cold War has begun - let us embrace it with relief!

The Saker
The vineyard of the Saker
Sat, 05 Apr 2014 04:57 UTC
Cold war cartoon
Considering the relative lull which seems to be taking place in the Ukraine, this might be a good time to look at the impact which the dramatic developments in the Ukraine have had upon the internal political scene in Russia and what that, in turn, could mean for the international (dis)order. In order to do that, I would like to begin by a short summary of a thesis which I have already mentioned in the past (for a discussion please see here, here, here and here):

Setting the Russian part of the stage

First, some bullet-style reminders on topics previously covered on this blog:
  1. There is no real Parliamentary opposition in Russia. Oh, not at all because "Putin is a dictator" or because "Russia is not a democracy", but simply because Putin has brilliantly managed to either co-opt or defang any opposition. How? By using his personal authority and charisma to promote an agenda which the other parties could not openly oppose. Formally, opposition parties do, of course, still exist, but they completely lack credibility. This might eventually change with the new Law on Political Parties.
  2. The only "hard" opposition to Putin in modern Russia are the various openly pro-US individuals (Nemtov, Novodvorskaia, etc) and their associated movements and parties. At best, they represent something in the range of 5% (max!) of the population.
  3. Putin did a "judo move" on his real opponents (more about them later) by using the strongly "presidential Constitution" adopted in 1993 to basically concentrate all the power in his hands.
  4. The *real* "opposition" to Putin and his project can only be found *inside* the Kremlin, the "United Russia" party and some influential figures. I refer to this real opposition as the "Atlantic Integrationists" (AI) because their key aim is to integrate Russia into the AngloZionist worldwide power structure.
  5. The *real* power base of Putin is in the Russian people themselves who support him personally, the All-Russian People's Front, and in the group which I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" (ES) whose primary aims is to develop a new, multi-polar, world order, to to break free from the current AngloZionist controlled international financial system, to re-orient as much of the former USSR as possible towards an integration with the East, and to develop of the Russian North.
Read More...
Treasure Chest

IMF chief Christine Lagarde: Ukraine's economy would have collapsed without Russian aid


RIA Novosti
Sat, 05 Apr 2014 04:41 UTC
Christine Lagarde
© RIA Novosti. Vladimir PesnyaChristine Lagarde
Ukraine's ailing economy would have collapsed without Russia's financial help, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said that the Eastern European country's economy had hit a wall last year and was heading for disaster when Russian bailout money averted a catastrophe.

"Without the support that they were getting from this lifeline that Russia had extended a few months ago, they were heading nowhere," Lagarde said in an interview broadcast on the US PBS channel.

Russia made a crucial decision to invest a hefty $15 billion in Ukrainian eurobonds late last year, disbursing the first tranche of $3 billion in December. Moscow and Kiev also agreed to steeply cut gas prices for Ukraine in an effort to boost the country's ailing economy.

But the cash injections and discounts were frozen following a coup amid violent protests in February that led to far-right parties gaining key positions in the new government.

The IMF chief confessed that Ukraine had been cut off from international financial markets. She stressed that IMF money comes at a price, meaning Ukraine was expected to do what it had to do to reform its economy, including making some hard choices.

"It's an economy that needed reforms, that needed profound transformation of its fiscal policy, of its monetary policy, and of its policies on energy," Lagarde said.

The Washington-based fund said last week it had signed a binding accord with Ukraine, under which Kiev was to receive $14 to $18 billion in standby credit in exchange for painful economic reforms. Ukraine expects to get a total of $27 billion in the next two years.
Read More...