Puppet Masters
A Department of Defense document declassified in 1997 shows that the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces had drafted and approved a plan to attack and kill Americans and to blame it on Cuba.
The original document is stored at the National Security Archives at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and is available in PDF form HERE. (HTML version).
The plan was rejected by President John F. Kennedy, after it was presented by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General of the Army Lyman Lemnitzer, to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. The plan was intended to "provide justifications for US military intervention in Cuba."
© The Economic Collapse Blog
The government debt to GDP ratio in Japan will reach 247 percent this year, and the Japanese currently spend about 50 percent of all central government tax revenue on debt service. Realistically, there are only two ways out of this overwhelming debt trap for the Japanese. Either they default or they try to inflate the debt away.
At this point, the Japanese have chosen to try to inflate the debt away. They have initiated the greatest quantitative easing experiment that a major industrialized nation has attempted since the days of the Weimar Republic.
Over the next two years, the Bank of Japan plans to zap 60 trillion yen into existence out of thin air and use it to buy government bonds. By the time this program is over, the monetary base in Japan will have approximately doubled. But authorities in Japan are desperate. They know that the Japanese debt bomb could set off global panic at any time, and they are trying to find a way out that will not cause too much pain.
Unfortunately, the only way that this bizarre quantitative easing program will work is if investors in Japanese bonds act very, very irrationally. You see, the only way that Japan has been able to pile up this much debt in the first place is because they have been able to borrow gigantic piles of money at super low interest rates.
"It's not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs," Obama declared at a White House news conference. "The American people have to have confidence as well."
Among other things, Obama called for the creation of an outside task force to advise his administration on how to balance civil liberties and security issues. He also said he had directed the intelligence community to make public as much information about the spying programs as possible and directed the NSA to create a website that would be a "hub" for that information.
© Unknown
Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji
Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji
The unique aspect of Hamilton's study is that he examines federal debt that has not been publicly released, specifically the government's support for "housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds."
© Unknown
Saudi Arabia has offered Russia economic incentives, including a major arms deal and a pledge not to challenge Russian gas sales if Moscow scales back support for the Syrian government, Middle-East sources and western diplomats said.
Saudi Arabia has offered Russia economic incentives, including a major arms deal and a pledge not to challenge Russian gas sales if Moscow scales back support for the Syrian government, Middle-East sources and western diplomats said.
Russia has supported the Syrian government with arms and diplomatic cover throughout the conflict and any change in Moscow's stance would remove a major obstacle to action on Syria by the certain western and Arab states, al-Alam reported.
Syrian opposition sources close to Saudi Arabia said Prince Bandar offered to buy up to $15bln of Russian weapons as well as ensuring that Persian Gulf gas would not threaten Russia's position as a main supplier to Europe.
In return, Saudi Arabia wanted Moscow to ease its strong support of the Syrian government and agree not to block any future UN Security Council resolution on Syria, they said.
Make a plan; then make another plan. Both won't work.This is getting ridiculous. The President of the United States (POTUS) screamed and shouted because he wanted his spy (Edward Snowden) back. Snowden, following Russian laws, was granted temporary asylum. The White House was "disappointed".
- Bertolt Brecht
Then POTUS snubbed the bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow coinciding with the Group of 20 in St Petersburg in early September. The Kremlin was equally "disappointed".
Putin sent a telegram to George "Dubya" Bush - wishing him a quick recovery from heart surgery. [1] POTUS went to a US talk show and said Russia tended to "slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality."
Brechtian distancing tells us that "ridiculous" does not even begin to describe it. The Cold War mentality is actually impregnated in the Beltway genes - from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon. As for POTUS, he acted like a diplomatic dilettante at best. "Yes, We Can" has morphed into "Yes, We Scan"; and now it's "Yes, We Scorn". This may apply to assorted poodles of European breeding, but it won't stick to Vlad the Hammer.
The White House justified its decision by "lack of progress" on everything including missile defense, arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, human rights and civil society. Nonsense; this was all about an impotent POTUS prevented from prosecuting his war against whistleblowers. Putin's foreign affairs adviser, Yury Ushakov, was closer to the truth when he said, "The US is not ready to build relations on an equal basis."
© Unknown
Water Wars: Corporations Begin To Lay Claim To the World's H20
Water Wars: Corporations Begin To Lay Claim To the World's H20
But now he's dipped his toes into the water supply, indicating that the world's water supply should - and will soon - come under the control of corporations such as Nestlé. He believes that water should be managed by businesses and governing personnel. In short, Brabeck-Letmathe wants water to be controlled, privatized and delegated, monitoring and controlling people's water use - including amounts and how and where it's used.
And let's be honest . . . since Brabeck unwaveringly supports GM farming, you can bet that GM foods would have first priority of water rights, while organic farming would be forced out.
You can view the video of Brabeck-Letmathe speaking his mind about GM farming and water supply in this interview:
Under conditions where the report has potentially explosive consequences for contemporary politics, the Greens are seeking to conceal issues relating to the involvement of today's Bavarian state apparatus in murders perpetrated by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU) terrorist group.
The two Green Party parliamentary members, Sepp Dürr and Susanna Tausendfreund, emphasised in their initial statements that the current mindset of the Bavarian intelligence agency - the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) - had been brought into question because "for years investigations have been launched in the wrong direction". In the investigation of murders of immigrants committed by the NSU, there had been repeated references to the "attitude of the authorities".
The only 'specific threat' in Pakistan is this one
The US state department has pulled out diplomats from its consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, and warned citizens against travelling to the country.
Washington said it had received a specific threat to its diplomatic mission in Pakistan's second-largest city and said it had ordered non-essential staff to leave.
In a travel warning, the state department said the presence of several foreign and indigenous terrorist groups posed a potential danger to US citizens throughout Pakistan.
The personnel drawdown at the Lahore consulate was a precautionary measure and not related to the recent closures of numerous US diplomatic missions in the Muslim world, two US officials said.
The consulate in Lahore was scheduled to be closed for the Eid holiday from Thursday through Sunday and no reopening had been scheduled, one of the officials said.
Comment: When the U.S. made a similar announcement with respect to Yemen three days ago, and followed up with airstrikes to 'make real the threat', SOTT.net called it correctly:
Lies, damn lies: U.S. warns citizens to leave Yemen after Feds issue fake terror alert - prelude to more Americans being assassinated by Obama's drones?
Without warning, US bombs Yemen
President Obama today canceled a long-scheduled summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in part because the US president is upset that Russia defied his personal directive to hand over Edward Snowden despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the two nations. That means that US media outlets will spend the next 24 hours or so channeling the government's views (excuse the redundancy) by denouncing the Russian evil of refusing extradition. When doing so, very few, if any, establishment media accounts will mention any of these cases:
Comment: These "new efforts to increase transparency and build greater confidence" are to be seen in the stunt the US government pulled last week by shutting down its embassies in a swathe of predominantly Muslim countries, massively stepping up its bombing campaigns in several of them, and terrorising its citizens from straying beyond US borders.