Let me put it this way. It would mean a lot more than winning a few GMO-labeling initiatives.

"The right to choose what's in your food" does not stop the ongoing gene drift, from GMO crops to non-GMO, across America. This drift is well on its way to making organic crops into genetically modified food, whether we like it or not.

And the blown-on-wind spread of tons and tons of Roundup, the poisonous Monsanto herbicide so "vital" to GMO farming...well, that's straight-out chemical warfare.

As it continues, what organic farmer will be able to guarantee his crops are pristine?

In Hawaii, we have a far different situation. Voters on the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai, against all odds, have managed to pass measures that would block Monsanto (and other biotech giants) from continuing their GMO/pesticide operations.

In other words, ban, not label.

The St. Louis County and Municipal Police Academy held a special class on October 24 for "upper-echelon law enforcement professionals." The subject:

OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTING - YOU CAN WIN WITH THE MEDIA

The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as "Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson)." A flyer promoting the class promised, "In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!"

Sound boring? Not at all! "The training is also highly entertaining," the flyer emphasized. "You will learn a lot, and you'll have fun doing it!"

That does sound like fun - learning how to best manipulate the media after your colleagues have killed a human being.

How do you get €300 billion in (probably largely useless) "infrastructure investment" in Europe? Banning a $40 billion project from going forward is probably not going to help, not to mention that this one would actually have been useful. After Gazprom announced last week that it has had enough and is ditching the South Stream pipeline project (see "South Stream Dies" for details) after having invested $5 billion and run into countless politically motivated obstacles, EU commissariat president Juncker engaged in a back-tracking exercise, garnished with some nonsense about "Russia holding Bulgaria to ransom". Very likely he got an earful from Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borisov about the EU's sabotage of the project:

"European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has insisted the $40 billion South Stream natural gas pipeline can still go ahead and accused Russia of holding EU-member Bulgaria to ransom when it said it had abandoned the project.

Speaking after talks with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, whose country South Stream would traverse making it a major beneficiary, Juncker rebutted Russia's statement that EU competition rules had killed it. He told reporters issues relating to the pipeline were not insurmountable and he was working with Bulgaria to address them.

Russia said on Monday it had abandoned the pipeline, which would have bypassed Ukraine, Gazprom's traditional transit route for Russian gas, citing EU competition requirements for a pipeline's ownership to be divorced from its cargo. It said it was working on an alternative route via Turkey.

Juncker accused Moscow of blackmailing Bulgaria, which retains strong political and economic ties with Moscow and is almost entirely dependent on Russia for its gas. "I am not accepting the simple easy idea that Bulgaria can be blackmailed as far as these energy relations are concerned," Juncker said.

"We'll take ... all the necessary steps to make sure that our relations with Russia will be improved, but it doesn't depend only on the willingness of the EU, of the European Commission. To dance a tango ... you need two dancers."

Borisov also said South Stream could be built and agreed it had to comply with EU rules, including legislation known as the third energy package, which limits how much of a pipeline a company can own if it also controls its contents. Further efforts to bring the project in line will be made on Tuesday, when EU energy ministers meet for regular talks. "I hope that all these technical details will be solved at this meeting including the third energy package," Borisov said. He added he had not received any official notice from Russia that South Stream was not going ahead.

EU sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia's calculation could have been that its announcement of South Stream's demise would place the Commission under pressure from some member states to soften its regulatory stance. At the same time, Russia has a struggle [sic, ed.] to find the cash for South Stream, given a falling oil price and economic sanctions."

(emphasis added)

A few remarks to the above: yes, the Bulgarians are understandably up in arms, but had it been up to them, the construction activities would never have been interrupted in the first place. As things stand, the previous Bulgarian government was badgered by the EU and visited by John McCain, whose primary mission was apparently to stop the pipeline from being built. The government announced that all construction on the pipeline would be stopped two hours after McCain left.

If the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble implodes, who should be stuck with the bill? Well, if the "too big to fail" banks have their way it will be you and I. Right now, lobbyists for the big Wall Street banks are pushing really hard to include an extremely insidious provision in a bill that would keep the federal government funded past the upcoming December 11th deadline.

This provision would allow these big banks to trade derivatives through subsidiaries that are federally insured by the FDIC.

What this would mean is that the big banks would be able to continue their incredibly reckless derivatives trading without having to worry about the downside. If they win on their bets, the big banks would keep all of the profits.

If they lose on their bets, the federal government would come in and bail them out using taxpayer money. In other words, it would essentially be a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.

Just imagine the following scenario. I go to Las Vegas and I place a million dollar bet on who will win the Super Bowl this year. If I am correct, I keep all of the winnings. If I lose, federal law requires you to bail me out and give me the million dollars that I just lost.

Does that sound fair?

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

The official website of the Ukrainian president informed that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that the Contact Group on Ukraine has to hold an urgent session in order for a ceasefire to be achieved in the southeast of the country.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has stressed that the Contact Group on Ukraine has to hold an urgent session in order for a ceasefire to be achieved in the southeast of the country by Tuesday, the official website of the Ukrainian president informs.

According to the website, Poroshenko stressed "the important role of the Trilateral Contact Group and expressed hope that [Special Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office] Heidi Tagliavini would continue her important work despite the completion of Switzerland's chairmanship in the OSCE".

"At the same time, the President emphasized that the session of the Trilateral Contact Group had to be held as soon as possible in order to achieve the ceasefire already on December 9," the website added, saying that Poroshenko made the remarks during a meeting with Tagliavini on Sunday.

According to the website, Tagliavini said that the Minsk agreements, which comprise the September 5 protocol and the September 19 memorandum are "the basis for the peaceful resolution of the situation in the Donbas".

On Sunday, Kiev said that the next meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine was to take place on Tuesday, December 9, excluding the possibility of a date shift.

The Contact Group includes representatives from Ukraine, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics (DPR, LPR), as well as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Russia.

The conflict in Ukraine escalated in April, when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in the country's southeast. On September 5, during a Contact Group meeting in Minsk, a ceasefire deal was reached between the two sides. However, numerous breaches of the ceasefire regime have been reported since then, with both Kiev forces and independence fighters accusing each other of violating the truce.

Russia is launching a new national defense facility, which is meant to monitor threats to national security in peacetime, but would take control of the entire country in case of war.

The new top-security, fortified facility in Moscow includes several large war rooms, a brand new supercomputer in the heart of a state-of-the-art data processing center, underground facilities, secret transport routes for emergency evacuation and a helicopter pad, which was deployed for the first time on Nov. 24 on the Moscow River. The Defense Ministry won't disclose the price tag for the site, but it is estimated at the equivalent of several billion dollars.

The new National Defense Control Center (NDCC) is a major upgrade on what was previously called the Central Command of the General Staff, a unit tasked with round-the-clock monitoring of military threats against Russia, particularly ballistic missile launches, and deployment of strategic nuclear weapons. It was roughly a counterpart to the US National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's principal command and control site.

America is on a war footing. While, a World War Three Scenario has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years, military action against Russia is now contemplated at an "operational level". Similarly, both the Senate and the House have introduced enabling legislation which provides legitimacy to the conduct of a war against Russia.

We are not dealing with a "Cold War". None of the safeguards of the Cold War era prevail.

There has been a breakdown in East-West diplomacy coupled with extensive war propaganda. In turn the United Nations has turned a blind eye to extensive war crimes committed by the Western military alliance.

Introduction

The principle Nazi ideological prop that secured massive financial and political support from Germany's leading industrialists was the Communist and Soviet threat. The main Nazi military drive, absorbing two-thirds of its best troops, was directed eastward at conquering and destroying Russia. The 'Russian Threat' justified Nazi Germany's conquest and occupation of the Ukraine, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, with the aid of a substantial proportion of local Nazi collaborators.

After Germany's defeat , division and disarmament, and with the extension of Soviet power, the US reinstated the Nazi industrial and banking giants, officials and intelligence operatives. At first they were engaged in rebuilding their domestic economy and consolidating political power, in collaboration with the US military occupation forces.

By the late 1960's Germany regained economic primacy in Europe and was at the forefront of European 'integration', in association with France and England. It soon came to dominate the principle decision - making institutions of the European Union(EU). The EU served as Germany's instrument for conquest by stealth. Year by year, through 'aid' and low interest loans, the EU facilitated German capitalist's market penetration and financial expansion through out south and central Europe. Germany set the agenda for Western Europe, gaining economic dominance while benefiting from US subversion and encirclement of Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic and Balkan states.

Only hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual address before the Russian Assembly last week, a group of armed men dressed as police killed three police officers and took control of two buildings in Grozny, the capital of Russian Federation's Chechnya. Ostensibly Chechen militants, who planned to carry out a larger attack, were killed in a stand-off with Grozny's security forces, who were already aware of the group as they made their way into the area. When it was over, 10 militants and 10 police were killed. After the confrontation Ramzan Kadyrov, Head of the Chechen Republic, stated that he did not rule out the possibility of these militants coming from a different region altogether. (However, there's a report that at least 4 or those killed were ethnic Chechens.) See Harrison Koehli's SOTT EXCLUSIVE for further coverage of the attack.

Another case of Chechen 'militants' fighting for independence from Russia - years after Russia brought peace and stability to the area after the war in Chechnya? Maybe. Or perhaps it was a message, like so many messages sent to Russia by Saudi Arabia and its allies in the West via proxy terrorists. And if so, what was that message? Not too hard to guess actually: "We don't like what you're doing because we're the boss!"