Friday, December 30, 2016

In several of my blog posts I’ve remarked on the difference between Stalin’s “iron curtain” created to keep Russians and members of conquered eastern European countries from learning how much better life was in the west (at that time) …and Obama’s new “iron curtain” preventing the average American from knowing that (1) things are actually better in Russia than they are in the US and (2) the truth of the American role in Syria …i.e. arming murderous terrorists groups known as Daesh, Islamic State (IS), ISIS, ISIL, etc. …whereas the lying US “mains stream media” has been claiming that the murders have been the is work of Assad and Putin’s Russia. So the only way for any American to decide which of the two “iron curtains” is true, and which is a lie, is to compare your evening news with the journalism of someone continuously working on the far side of Obama’s “iron curtain.” For that purpose, the following column by The Saker below will bring you up to date as of December 17, 2016.



























There are clear signs that the Neocons running the AngloZionist Empire and its “deep state” are in a state of near panic and their actions indicate they are truly terrified.

The home front

One the home front, the Neocons have resorted to every possible dirty trick on the book to try to prevent Donald Trump from ever getting into the White House: they have
  • organized riots and demonstrations (some paid by Soros money)
  • encouraged the supporters of Hillary to reject the outcome of the elections (“not my President”)
  • tried to threaten the Electors and make them either cast a vote for Hillary or not vote at all
  • tried to convince Congress to refuse the decision of the Electoral College and
  • they are now trying to get the elections annulled on the suspicion that the (apparently almighty) Russian hackers have compromised the election outcome (apparently even in states were paper ballots were used) and stolen it in favor of Trump.
That is truly an amazing development, especially considering how Hillary attacked Trump for not promising to recognize the outcome of the elections. She specifically said that Trump’s lack of guarantees to recognize the outcome would threaten the very basis of the stability of the US political system and now she, and her supporters, are doing everything in their power to do just that, to throw the entire electoral process into a major crisis with no clear path towards resolution. Some say that the Democrats are risking a civil war. Considering that several key Republican Congressmen have said they do support the notion of an investigation into the “Russian hackers” fairy tale, I submit that the Republicans are doing exactly the same thing, that this is not a Democrat vs Republican issue, but a “deep state vs The People of the USA” issue.

Most experts agree that none of these tactics are going to work. So this begs the question of whether the Neocons are stupid, whether they think that they can succeed or what their true objective is.
My guess is that first and foremost what is taking place now is what always happens when the Neocons run into major trouble: they double down, again. And again. And again. That is one of the key characteristics of their psychological make-up: they cannot accept defeat or, even less so, that they were wrong, so each time reality catches up to their ideological delusions, they automatically double-down. Still, they might rationalize this behavior by a combination of hope that maybe one of these tricks will work, with the strong urge to do as much damage to President-Elect Trump before he actually assumes his office. I would never underestimate the vicious vindictiveness of these people.
What is rather encouraging is Trump’s reaction to all this: after apparently long deliberations he decided to nominate Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of Defense. From a Neocon point of view, if General Michael Flynn was bad, then Tillerson was truly an apocalyptic abomination: the man actually had received the order of “Friend of Russia” from the hands of Vladimir Putin himself!
Did Trump not realize how provocative this nomination was and how it would be received by the Neocons? Of course he did! That was, on his part, a totally deliberate decision. If so, then this is a very, very good sign.

I might be mistaken, but I get the feeling that Trump is willing to accept the Neocon challenge and that he will fight back. For example, his reaction to the CIA accusations about Russian hackers was very telling: he reminded everybody that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”. I think that it is now a safe bet to say that as soon as Trump take control heads will roll at the CIA.
[Sidebar: is it not amazing that the CIA is offering its opinion about some supposed Russian hacking during the elections in the USA? Since when does the CIA have any expertise on what is going on inside the USA? I thought the CIA was only a foreign intelligence agency. And since when does the CIA get involved in internal US politics? Yes, of course, savvy observers of the USA have always known that the CIA was a key player in US politics, but now the Agency apparently does not even mind confirming this openly. I don't think that Trump will have the guts and means to do so but, frankly, he would be much better off completely dissolving the CIA. Of course, that could get Trump killed – messing with the Fed and the CIA are two unforgivable crimes in the USA – but then again Trump is already very much at risk anyway, so he might as well strike first].
One the external front

On the external front, the big development is the liberation of Aleppo by Syrian forces. In that case again, the Neocons tried to double-down: they made all sorts of totally unsubstantiated claims about executions and atrocities while the BBC, always willing to pick up the correct line, published an article about how much the situation in Aleppo is similar to what took place in Srebrenica. Of course, there is one way in which the events in Aleppo and Srebrenica are similar: in both cases the US-backed Takfiris lost and were defeated by government forces and in both cases the West unleashed a vicious propaganda war to try to turn the military defeat of its proxies into a political victory for itself. In any case, the last-ditch propaganda effort failed and preventing the inevitable and Aleppo was completely liberated.

The Empire did score one success: using the fact that most of the foreign forces allied to the Syrians Putin will soon liberate Palmyra once again, but until this happens the reoccupation of Palmyra is rather embarrassing for the Syrians, Iranians and Russians. (Hezbollah, Iranian Pasdaran, Russian Spetsnaz, etc.) were concentrated around Aleppo, the US-backed Takfiris succeeded in breaking the will of the Syrians, many of whom apparently fled in panic, and first surrounded and then eventually reoccupied Palmyra. This will be short lived success as I completely agree with my friend Alexander Mercouris who says that

It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that the Daesh movement towards Palmyra was undetected by the various Syrian, Iranian and Russian intelligence agencies (at least once source reports that Russian satellites did detect it) and I therefore conclude that a deliberate decision was made to temporarily sacrifice Palmyra in order to finally liberate Aleppo. Was that the correct call?
Definitely yes. Contrary to the western propaganda, Aleppo, not Raqqa, has always been the real “capital” of the US backed terrorists. Raqqa is a relatively small town: 220,000+ inhabitants versus 2,000,000+ for Aleppo, making Aleppo about ten times larger than Raqqa. As for tiny Palmyra, its population is 30,000+. So the choice between scrambling to plug the holes in the Syrian defenses around Palmyra and liberating Aleppo was a no-brainer. Now that Aleppo has been liberated, the city has to be secured and major engineering efforts need to be made in order to prepare it for an always possible Takfiri counter-attack. But it is one thing to re-take a small desert town and quite another one to re-take a major urban center. I personally very much doubt that Daesh & Co. will ever be in control of Aleppo again. Some Neocons appear to be so enraged by this defeat that they are now accusing Trump of “backing Iran” (I wish he did!).

The tiny Palmyra was given a double-function by the Neocon propaganda effort: to eclipse the “Russian” (it was not solely “Russian” at all, but never mind that) victory in Aleppo and to obfuscate the “US” (it was not solely “US” at all, but never mind that) defeat in Mosul. A hard task for the tiny desert city for sure and it is no wonder that this desperate attempt also failed: the US lead coalition in Mosul still looks just about as weak as the Russian lead coalition looks strong in Aleppo.

Any comparison between these two battles is simply embarrassing for the USA: not only did the US-backed forces fail to liberate Mosul from Daesh & Co. but they have not even full encircled the city or even managed to penetrate beyond its furthest suburbs. There is very little information coming out of Mosul, but after three months of combat the entire operation to liberate Mosul seems to be an abject failure, at least for the time being. I sincerely hope that once Trump takes office he will finally agree to work not only with Russia, but also with Iran, to finally get Daesh out of Mosul. But if Trump delivers on his promise to AIPAC and the rest of the Israel Lobby gang to continue to antagonize and threaten Iran, the US can basically forget any hopes of defeating Daesh in Iraq.
Our of despair and spite, the US propaganda vilified Russia for the killing of civilians in Aleppo while strenuously avoiding any mention of civilian victims in Mosul. But then, the same propaganda machine which made fun of the color of the smoke coming out of the engines of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov (suggesting that she was about to break down) had to eat humble pie when it was the US navy’s most expensive and newest destroyer, the USS Zumwalt, which broke down in the Panama canal and had to be immobilzed, while the Kuznetsov continued to do a very good job supporting Russian operations in Syria.

Over and over again, the AngloZionist propaganda machine has failed to obfuscate the embarrassing facts on the ground and it now clearly appears that the entire US policy for the Middle-East is in total disarray and that the Neocons are as clueless as they are desperate.

The countdown to January 20th

It is pretty obvious that the Neocon reign is coming to an end in a climax of incompetence, hysterical finger-pointing, futile attempts at preventing the inevitable and a desperate scramble to conceal the magnitude of the abject failure which Neocon-inspired policies have resulted in. Obama will go down in history as the worst and most incompetent President in US history. As for Hillary, she will be remembered as both the worst US Secretary of State the US and the most inept Presidential candidate ever.

In light of the fact that the Neocons always failed at everything they attempted, I am inclined to believe that they will probably also fail at preventing Donald Trump from being sworn in. But until January 20th, 2017 I will be holding my breath in fear of what else these truly demented people could come up with.

As for Trump, I still can’t figure him out. On one hand he nominates Rex Tillerson in what appears to be a deliberate message of defiance against the Neocons, while on the other hand he continues to try to appease the Israel Lobby gang by choosing a rabid Zionist of the worst kind, David M. Friedman, as the next US ambassador to Israel. Even worse then that, Donald Trump still does not appear to be willing to recognize the undeniable fact that the US will never defeat Daesh as long as the anti-Iranian stance of the Neocons is not replaced by a real willingness to engage Iran and accept it as a partner and ally.

Right now the Trump rhetoric simply makes no sense: he wants to befriend Russia while antagonizing China and he wants to defeat Daesh while threatening Iran again. This is lunacy. Still, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but somebody sure needs to educate him on the geopolitical realities out there before he also end up making a total disaster of US foreign policy.
And yet, I still have a small hope.

My hope is that the latest antics of the Neocons will sufficiently aggravate and even enrage Trump to a point where he will give up on his futile attempts at appeasing them. Only by engaging in a systematic policy of “de-neoconization” of the US political establishment will Trump have any hopes of “making America great again”. If Trump’s plan is to appease the Neocons long enough from him to be sworn in and have his men approved by Congress – fine. Then he still has a chance of saving the USA from a catastrophic collapse, but only as long as he remains determined to ruthlessly crack down on the Neocons once in power. If his hope is to distract the Neocons by appeasing them on secondary or minor issues, then his efforts are doomed and he will go down the very same road as Obama who, at least superficially, initially appeared to be a non-Neocon candidate and who ended up being a total Neocon puppet (in 2008 the Neocons had placed their bets on McCain and they only infiltrated the Obama Administration once McCain was defeated).

One way or another, we are headed for a crisis, the only open question whether the USA will come out of this crisis liberated or doomed.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Here I step aside and allow Michael Nevradakis to interview Paul Craig Roberts on the subject of Donald Trump and what he might due as President vis-a-vis US oligarchs, fake news, and Russia



- MintPress News - https://www.mintpressnews.com -

Former Reagan Secretary Paul Craig Roberts: Oligarchs Are True Purveyors Of Fake News






















ATHENS, Greece — The post-election climate in the United States has been nothing short of bizarre. Recount efforts in several states are being championed by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, accusations have repeatedly been made that the “Russian menace” influenced the presidential elections and the victory of Donald Trump, and that Russia is also behind an online disinformation campaign which the mainstream media describes as “fake news.”

One of the websites accused of delivering “fake news” is that of former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts. An author and analyst and former Wall Street Journal editor, Roberts has become a vocal critic of neoliberalism, austerity, and those who seek confrontation with Russia and China.

In this interview, originally aired on Dec. 8 on Dialogos Radio, Roberts discusses Trump’s electoral victory and Hillary Clinton’s defeat, what interests may be behind the electoral recount efforts, the “Brexit” vote and recent Italian referendum result, and the conflict in Syria. He also shares his reaction to the accusations of delivering “fake news.”

MintPress News (MPN): Why did Donald Trump win the election, and what does a Trump presidency mean for the United States and for the world?

 Paul Craig Roberts (PCR): We don’t know yet what it will mean. We know what we hope it will mean. Trump won because he spoke directly to the people in a way that they haven’t experienced in my lifetime. He told them that the ruling oligarchy did not and would not have their interests in mind, that they had been sold out with the oligarchy moving their jobs offshore to where labor is cheaper while still expecting from the unemployed American workforce to buy the products that are brought in from China and Indonesia and India and elsewhere. This resonated with people, as they have been experiencing this now for roughly a quarter of a century. There’s been no growth in real median family income in decades. Young people can’t find jobs to support an independent existence. The value of a university education is collapsing because there is no employment for that type of an education, and people realize that the economic policy of the country has been captured by the oligarchs and serves only a very few interests. The consequence has been a massive change in the distribution of income inside the United States. The United States now has one of the worst income distributions in the world. In fact, it’s worse than income distributions in many Third World gangster states.

[Trump] spoke directly to these things. He also said that he would not see the point of conflict with Russia, which no one sees in an era of thermonuclear weapons, and he also said that he didn’t understand the function of NATO, 25 years after the Soviet collapse. This also resonated with the public, because they understand that all of these supposed threats are bleeding them in order to put hundreds of billions of dollars into armaments industries. That’s the reason why he won the election, and the reason we are hopeful is that we assume he is sincere about this. We assume he’s sincere because of the fierce opposition he has from the ruling oligarchy and from their media “presstitutes,” who did anything they could to demonize Trump, to turn him into a “Putin agent,” and so forth. But the public ignored them, or at least enough of the public ignored them for Trump to carry almost all of the states except for a few really large cities on the coast.

MPN: Do you believe President-elect Trump will keep his campaign promises, and what do you make of his Cabinet selections thus far?

PCR: We don’t know if he will be able to. The oligarchy’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost, so the oligarchy lost the election, but they did not lose it by such a great margin that they’ve given up. They’re still in the fight, they’re still there. Trump has a billion dollars but they have trillions. They’re well-established. They have many, many servants and think tanks and university faculty and the media [on their side], and of course, the neoconservatives, who have dominated American foreign policy since the Clinton regime. So they’re still there, and Trump is in combat with these people.
Trump’s appointments, we don’t know whether they will support what he wants to do or not. If they support him, they are the type of people he needs. They are well-to-do, they’re self-confident, they don’t need money from the oligarchs, they don’t have to worry about their careers when they leave government. So he does have the kind of person you’ve got to have if you’re president, to bring about any change. So the real question is, will they support him or will they go with the oligarchs? We don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. We can’t judge them based on their past associations. I don’t think any of them are actual representatives of an oligarch’s agenda. So there’s a chance they will support him and that they will be strong enough people that he’ll have the government that will actually do something. But you can’t take it for granted, because as I said, the oligarchs lost but they weren’t routed. They’re still there.

MPN: What would a Hillary Clinton victory have meant for the United States and the world, particularly in terms of foreign policy?

PCR: It would have meant war with Russia and China and the end of life on Earth. She’s an insane warmonger, she demonizes Russia and the president of Russia, calling him the “new Hitler.” She said that the South China Sea is an area of the United States’ national interest. You can’t be more provocative than this, and if you have a president who convinces Russia and China that they’re going to be attacked, they’re not going to sit there and wait. So we really have escaped Armageddon by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. This would have been the worst possible outcome imaginable. Of course, it would have been bad on the other score — jobs, I mean, she’s the agent of the big banks, they made her rich! She and her husband have a personal fortune of $120 million, given to them by the oligarchs, and their foundation has $1.6 billion, also given to them but not just by domestic oligarchs, but by oligarchs abroad. [The Clintons] sold influence for money.

MPN: What is your reaction to the recount effort being led by Jill Stein? Who do you believe is behind all of these efforts?

PCR: The oligarchs, obviously. I mean, Jill Stein couldn’t get any funding for her presidential campaign, but she instantly got something like five or six or seven times the amount of funding she got for her entire campaign, for the recount! Where did that money come from? Not her supporters. And what this is about … the oligarchs were positioned to steal the election for Hillary. But they got deceived by their own propaganda, that she was the shoo-in winner, The New York Times telling them that it was 94 percent certain that she would be elected. They didn’t bother to steal the election, because they didn’t think they needed to. And they were shocked, everyone was shocked — that is, not the people voting for him, but the media, the oligarchs, the established interests. They were shocked by the election results, and so they’ve used Jill Stein, who really has no standing in this issue, since it doesn’t involve her campaign, she has no chance of benefiting from a vote recount. So they’re using this corrupt woman, who sold out the Green Party, to try and throw a monkey wrench into the Electoral College. The only states being recounted are the three that he won which he wasn’t expected to win [Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin], and his margin in these three states is not very great. They’re not recounting votes in states that he lost by small margins, only where he won by small margins. This is an effort to steal the election from the working class who elected him, and Jill Stein is part of it.

MPN: One of the reactions of the mainstream media has been to attack online news outlets which they claim are delivering so-called “fake news.” Your website was included on this list of alleged “fake news sites.” What’s your response to these claims, and who do you believe are the true purveyors of fake news?

PCR: We know the true purveyors are the media, the press prostitutes. We call them “presstitutes.” The mainstream media throughout the West is totally corrupt and has no integrity. What you see happening is that the independent internet media is taking away the oligarchy’s control over the explanations that people receive. So everywhere you see the subscription rates of newspapers falling dramatically, the viewers of TV programs falling dramatically, and internet readership rising. And so this is an effort to try to discredit the people who actually tell the truth by identifying them with Russia. They are hoping that all the demonization of Russia during Obama’s second term has aroused fears that the “Russian menace” is back, and they’re hoping this fear is substantial and that by associating those of us who challenge their lies, with Russia, they will discredit us.

Who’s funding it? We don’t know, because the people who prepared this list, no one knows who they are. When the Washington Post gave it [the group PropOrNot] all that publicity, they very carefully did not say who these people are. It is a new internet site that didn’t exist before a couple of months ago. Who is funding it? I would say the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a U.S. State Department-funded [organization]. It could be the CIA. It could be George Soros. But it is an oligarch operation, which, of course, involves the military-security complex, because they are the greatest beneficiaries, in terms of money and power, of all the threats, all the wars. They want a Russian threat, for their budgets and for their police state powers. Those are the people who are most likely funding it, but it hasn’t worked! All it did was to provide people with 200 sites they could go to, to find out what the truth is!

I think it’s failed, but it shows the desperation of the oligarchs, and what they will do now is, they will use the people they still control, in the House and the Senate — the oligarchs will get some type of legislation passed that will put pressure on people who dissent from official lines of the oligarchy, that dissent from stories they plant in the “presstitute” media. And so it’s going to be perhaps harder to express dissent or tell the truth in the United States, but we’ll just have to see what they do to Trump. Some people say that he was always a fake, but that doesn’t make sense to me because the oligarchs didn’t need him when they had Hillary. And they clearly didn’t want Trump in the election. They tried to deny him the Republican nomination, and then they used the media against him in very vicious ways during the presidential campaign. Trump said once that he believes in revenge, and I hope he does. I hope he exacts revenge on the oligarchs.

MPN: What has been the aftermath of the Brexit vote for Britain, and have the doom-and-gloom scenarios regarding the impact on the British economy come to fruition?

PCR: No, of course not. The opposite! What’s happened with Brexit is, I think it’s been overturned. The United States is not going to permit Brexit, Washington won’t permit it. Now, this may change with Trump, but under Obama, you may remember he traveled to London to tell the British prime minister to forget all about leaving the EU. The EU is a creation of the CIA. It was created so that the United States could more easily maintain control of Europe. It’s easier to control the EU Commission than to control 20-something different governments. What has happened is, the United States government used three corrupt British judges that decided, “Well, the people may have voted, but you did not really have to pay attention to them, it’s all up to Parliament and Parliament can decide that we’re not [leaving].” And, of course, Washington is now lobbying the Parliament very hard, with promises and money and, no doubt, threats.

So I don’t think Brexit will happen, it’s being overturned. The notion that it would take two years to get out — when that came out, instantly I said, “They’ll never get out.” Two years is all Washington needs to overturn it. I think it’s already overturned with that court ruling. So we had three two-bit punk judges overruling the majority vote of the British people, and they call it democracy! What kind of democracy is it? That’s not a democracy, when three two-bit punk judges who don’t amount to anything overrule the majority vote of the British people! And they call it democracy, oh boy! What a joke! There are not any democracies in the West. Europe is a collection of American vassals. It’s been that way since World War II.

MPN: Italian voters recently voted no in a referendum on amendments to the nation’s constitution. What does this vote, in your estimation, mean for Italy and for Europe?

PCR: It’ll end up being overturned, like the Brexit vote. Just like they are trying to overturn Trump’s election! I mean, that’s what this vote recount is about. It’s the oligarchy trying to overturn the people’s will, just like the three judges in Britain, like what happened in Greece [in the July 2015 referendum]. The vote, in itself, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Brexit hasn’t happened, I don’t think it ever will. We don’t even know if Trump is going to be president. But that’s the whole purpose of the vote recount, to block it. They wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. They’ve got all kinds of agents to use, all kinds of things to do.

One of our best journalists, Chris Hedges, who has had to go independent because the prostitute media no longer will publish his work … he’s concluded that elections can’t change anything, only revolution can change things. I think that’s what the oligarchy is proving. They are proving that you can’t change things with elections, because it’s really not a democracy, it’s a facade, and when the people vote, in come the oligarchs and they overturn it one way or the other. How will they overturn the vote in Italy? I don’t know, but they’ll overturn it, or they’ll ignore it, or some judge will rule that Italian law is subject to EU law, that EU law is supreme. They can do all kinds of things.

MPN: Do you believe that we are heading toward that revolution that Chris Hedges spoke of?

PCR: I don’t know. It depends on the people. They don’t seem to be nearly as feisty as they used to be. In previous times in the United States, when we reached this kind of situation, the government was scared of the people and had to make concessions. I don’t see the government afraid of the people today. They’ve got a police state established, they’ve got internment camps built, they’ve militarized the police, the police are as well armed as the military, the police routinely shoot people down the streets. I just don’t know how hard the people have to be pressed. Maybe they just simply will cease to have any gain in their living standards and some slight declines over time but won’t actually be facing starvation and homelessness, as they have in the past. So who knows? I don’t know. But I don’t think they will succeed in changing anything with elections. Possibly, Trump being the kind of very strong-willed, determined, ego-type person that he is, that’s the kind of person you need for a leader if things are going to be changed. You can’t have some conciliatory, shrinking violet who wants to get along with everybody. You can’t get change out of that.

It could well be that Trump is already rich, he doesn’t need any more money, he has a big ego, and he wants to go down in history as the man who saved America, “Trump the Great.” So if he has that kind of a goal, then the oligarchs are up against a real formidable president. If he can find other people to back him, we can get some change. But it remains to be seen. We can’t know that in advance. That’s the hope. What the result is, we don’t know, but that’s the hope. The hope is … Trump has a huge ego, wants to be “Trump the Great,” wants to save America, and that that’s more important than having a few more billion dollars, that he doesn’t care about all these people, these oligarchs, they haven’t supported him. So maybe something will happen, we’ll just have to see. Maybe they’ll prove Chris Hedges wrong. But it’s hard to bet one way or another.

MPN: What’s your take on recent developments in Syria, including the attempted invasion of Syria by Turkish troops, and what do you believe we’ll see in Syria going forward in light of a Trump presidency?

PCR: As far as I can tell, the Russians and Syrians have won that war. They’ve defeated the Washington-supported ISIS. The Obama regime sent ISIS to Syria to overthrow [Syrian President Bashar] Assad when the Russians prevented our involvement. So that way we can pretend we don’t have anything to do with it. But I think the Russians, as I said, defeated ISIS. I think it could have happened much sooner, but [Russian President Vladimir] Putin kept pulling out, kept trying to appease the Europeans, hoping they would see they didn’t need to be American puppet states, but he seems now to have finished the job, more or less. I don’t think the Turks would be permitted to invade Syria, the Russians would just tell them no. And, I don’t think the Turks think they are a match for Russia or that the Turks are stupid enough to think Europe and the United States are going to come to their aid if they get in a war with Russia.

These nuclear weapons are very, very powerful. Russia can wipe out all of Europe in a few minutes. For these itty-bitty European politicians to be running around fomenting trouble with Russia, they’ve got to be insane. There’s no way Europe can come out of this. The same with the United States. Here we are demonizing Russia and China. These are powerful nuclear powers. We can’t possibly survive a conflict with them, no one can. It’s all insanity, it’s nonsense. Europe is unable to produce leadership that’s intelligent. Putin, he’s intelligent. For some reason the Chinese can produce intelligent leadership. Who in Europe has intelligent leadership? Nobody. Maybe we finally have it with Trump, we don’t know yet. But there’s not any intelligent leadership, none in Europe. 


Article printed from MintPress News: https://www.mintpressnews.com

URL to article: https://www.mintpressnews.com/paul-craig-roberts-oligarchs-are-true-purveyor1s-of-fake-news/223266/

Copyright © 2012 MintPress. All rights reserved.


Tuesday, December 13, 2016

For a different view, the blogger adds a man by the name of Craig Murray who stated that he "had a call from a Guardian journalist" the afternoon of Dec 10 (or thereabout). He went on: "The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype: "The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government." "Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims 'bullshit', adding: 'They are absolutely making it up.'” “I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things." “If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States." “America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers." "They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”





The Conspiracy to Shut Down Truth, Donald Trump, and The American People


December 13, 2016 |

The Conspiracy to Shut Down Truth, Donald Trump, and The American People

Paul Craig Roberts

There is circumstantial evidence that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the rest of the presstitute media are part of a conspiracy with the oligarchs, the military/security complex, the Hillary Democrats, and neoconized Republicans to shut down the dissident Internet alternative media and to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

Consider the brand new website PropOrNot and its fake news list of 200 Internet Russian agents. PropOrNot is a website hidden behind multiple screens as would be an offshore tax avoidance scheme. In other words, no known, responsible entity is behind the site, which has libeled 200 other websites, or if it is, it is too ashamed of what it is doing to be associated with it publicly.

Consider the expertise and money required to shield the identity of an organization, whether tax avoidance or website. This is not something that just anyone can do. This type of Klingon cloaking requires real money or the CIA.

As long as it pretends to be a newspaper, the Washington Post is subject to journalistic ethics. But the PropOrNot story by Craig Timberg violated journalistic ethics. Unsupported accusations were leveled against 200 websites, a McCarthyism record.

How did a story, which would have been instantly quashed by editors in my day as a Wall Street Journal editor get past Timberg’s editor?
That is the question.

Here we have the Post committing libel against 200 websites, all of whom can sue for damages. There go Bezos’ billions.

Would a Washington Post editor of any intelligence have published such a libel-inviting story unless the owner, Bezos, gave the OK or the order?

How can the Washington Post feel secure in an act of libel?

Is it because Bezos is protected by his reported membership on a US government committee, along with the Google CEO, that is believed to conspire against the privacy of the American people?

PropOrNot would have amounted to nothing except for the Washington Post. Craig Timberg’s story was written as if PropOrNot was the real goods. Yet, Timberg does not reveal who is behind PropOrNot.

Add to this picture the hyping by the Washington Post, New York Times, and TV presstitutes of the unattributed CIA charge that Russia hacked the Hillary emails and used them to elect Trump with the help of Russian agent websites. This fake news charge is challenged by Wikileaks and by a number of experts who asked why unattributed allegations are accepted in the place of evidence, and the charge is not supported by the FBI. How do we know that the alleged unattributed CIA charges are actually made by the CIA or whether there is consensus within the agency?

How can the presstitutes, such as the NYT and Washington Post give us all these claims without a shred of evidence or any attribution to the CIA officials allegedly reporting the story? What kind of journalism is this?

The conspiracy against truth and against president-elect Trump is real. The oligarchs and their presstitutes, rogue elements of the CIA and the neocon establishment hope to drag alternative media before McCarthyite congressional hearings run by the American hegemonists who want power over the world.

Whatever you think of Trump, clearly the oligarchs who rule us fear him. The oligarchs are trying to keep Trump out of the presidency, and they are trying to associate truthful reporting with foreign influence.

Who wins this war determines the fate of America.



Thursday, December 08, 2016

According to The Guard US briefing today: “A group of senior House Democrats has written to the president seeking a classified briefing for colleagues on ‘Russian entities’ hacking of American political organizations; hacking and strategic release of emails from campaign officials; the WikiLeaks disclosures; fake news stories produced and distributed with the intent to mislead American voters; and any other Russian or Russian-related interference or involvement in our recent election.” From my (the blogger’s) point of view, it would have been impossible for Russian hackers to have entered and modified the vote counts at thousands of voting stations all over the US, each using counting methods differing substantially from the other. On the other hand, without question the “fake news stories” have been promulgated by the so-called “mainstream media” …and all these have been aimed at Russia. Why is that? In answering that, I first remark that after WW II Stalin created an “iron curtain” to prevent Russians and their European vassals from discovering that life in the West was superior to that in Communist Russia. My punch line is that today our despicable “mainstream media” has invented an “iron curtain” going in the opposite direction to prevent Americans and their European vassals from learning that Russia is now the most democratic country in the world, and the least inclined to start a nuclear war (which it would win …if any humans survive). While I salute the work of The Real News below, you may notice that at one point moderator Paul Jay sounds as though he has been affected by some of the home-grown ‘main stream fakery’ aimed at Russia. To find out whether Vladimir Putin is a tyrant or a Dwight David Eisenhower please check here: http://impactglassman.blogspot.mx/2014/10/who-is-vladimir-putin-monster-if-thats.html7 Ups sorry, but this blog of mine has just been destroyed by the evil powers that be. What you would have seen was Vladimir Putin giving a 3-hour of state-of-the-union address in a measured voice, followed by frankly answering questions raised by the audience.



Dear viewers,

Much has been made through this election cycle about "fake news."

Just last week, the Washington Post reported that much of this fake news "got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.” The Post promoted a report by a shadowy group called PropOrNot, which accused hundreds of sites of publishing pro-Russia propaganda - some of which are sites that The Real News believes to be verifiable, independent journalism.

What the Post failed to mention is that corporate news is the biggest fake news of all. Between the failure to report on devastating climate change, the lack of information about the push for regime change (and a potential war) in Iran, and the inadequate coverage of who has been responsible for the economic crisis in the US, it's corporate news that's failed Americans the most.

For more on this, you can watch Paul Jay's interview with journalist Abby Martin.

Independent, fact-based media is needed more than ever. Please consider making a tax deductible donation today. Without you, we can't make Real News.

                               _____________________ ⍐ _______________________

Here below, the blogger has captured the video from the YouTube mentioned on the still shot above.

https://youtu.be/n2-F0QFoifY 

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Probably as many as 90% of all Americans believe without questioning everything they hear from the so-called mainstream media, known by members of the 10% as “prestitutes” paid by the military/industrial/security complex to lie about the truth or be fired. Here I list a few passages taken from Paul Craig Roberts’ latest post, beginning with “Russian news services are under attack from the EU and Western presstitutes as purveyors of ‘fake news’.” “As George Orwell predicted, telling the truth is now regarded by Western 'democratic' governments as a hostile act.” And finally “Abiding by its Washington master’s orders, the EU actually passed a resolution against Russian media for not following Washington’s line.” Accordingly, “Russian President Putin said that the resolution is a ‘visible sign of degradation of Western society’s idea of democracy’.” Now the 90% may say “so what”. The answer is that (1) Russia doesn’t want another World War, having lost 20 million civilians and soldiers in the last one, (2) whether or not the US military/industrial complex knows it, Russia has vastly superior weapons, and (3) if Russia is ever forced into a nuclear war, those of us in the west will not survive (though many in Russia may survive due to superior anti-ballistic missiles). Recently, we had a Presidential election and against all bets, Trump was the winner. How did that happen? Well, many are convinced that the elections were rigged ...but by whom? It couldn't have been alleged Russian hacking because such a hack required people with access to every polling place in every State of the Union. Impossible! Personally, I think it was done by members of our own military, who knew that if Hillary had been elected she would have pressed to start a war with Russia, in which case we might all end up dead. Whereas, Trump had made it clear early on that he has no problem working out some kind of a detente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Apropos, if you should be thinking of leaving the 90% to join the 10%, please meet Putin here: http://impactglassman.blogspot.mx/2014/10/who-is-vladimir-putin-monster-if-thats.html7


___________________________________________________________________________________
The Western War On Truth — Paul Craig Roberts

The Western War On Truth

Paul Craig Roberts

The “war on terror” has simultaneously been a war on truth. For fifteen years—from 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and “al Qaeda connections,” “Iranian nukes,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” endless lies about Gadaffi, “Russian invasion of Ukraine”—the governments of the so-called Western democracies have found it essential to align themselves firmly with lies in order to pursue their agendas. Now these Western governments are attempting to discredit the truthtellers who challenge their lies.

Russian news services are under attack from the EU and Western presstitutes as purveyors of “fake news.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/moscow-accused-of-propagating-fake-news-eu-resolution-on-russian-propaganda/5558835 Abiding by its Washington master’s orders, the EU actually passed a resolution against Russian media for not following Washington’s line. Russian President Putin said that the resolution is a “visible sign of degradation of Western society’s idea of democracy.”

As George Orwell predicted, telling the truth is now regarded by Western “democratic” governments as a hostile act. A brand new website, propornot.com, has just made its appearance condemning a list of 200 Internet websites that provide news and views at variance with the presstitute media that serves the governments’ agendas.

http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html Does propornot.com’s funding come from the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros?

I am proud to say that paulcraigroberts.org is on the list.

What we see here is the West adopting Zionist Israel’s way of dealing with critics. Anyone who objects to Israel’s cruel and inhuman treatment of Palestinians is demonized as “anti-semitic.” In the West those who disagree with the murderous and reckless policies of public officials are demonized as “Russian agents.” The president-elect of the United States himself has been designated a “Russian agent.”

This scheme to redefine truthtellers as propagandists has backfired. The effort to discredit truthtellers has instead produced a catalogue of websites where reliable information can be found, and readers are flocking to the sites on the list. Moreover, the effort to discredit truthtellers shows that Western governments and their presstitutes are intolerant of truth and diverse opinion and are committed to forcing people to accept self-serving government lies as truth.

Clearly, Western governments and Western media have no respect for truth, so how can the West possibly be democratic?

The presstitute Washington Post played its assigned role in the claim promoted by Washington that the alternative media consists of Russian agents. Craig Timberg, who appears devoid of integrity or intelligence, and perhaps both, is the WaPo stooge who reported the fake news that “two teams of independent researchers”—none of whom are identified—found that the Russians exploited my gullibility, that of CounterPunch, Professor Michel Chossudosky of Global Researh, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo and that of 194 other websites to help “an insurgent candidate” (Trump) “claim the White House.”
Note the term applied to Trump—“insurgent candidate.” That tells you all you need to know.
You can read here what passes as “reliable reporting” in the presstitute Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html

See also: http://www.alternet.org/media/washington-post-promotes-shadowy-website-accuses-200-publications-russian-propaganda-plants 

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, which somehow escaped inclusion in The 200, unloads on Timberg and the Washington Post here: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ 

Western governments are running out of excuses. Since the Clinton regime, the accumulation of war crimes committed by Western governments exceed those of Nazi Germany. Millions of Muslims have been slaughtered, dislocated, and dispossessed in seven countries. Not a single Western war criminal has been held accountable.

The despicable Washington Post is a prime apologist for these war criminals. The entire Western print and TV media is so heavily implicated in the worst war crimes in human history that, if justice ever happens, the presstitutes will stand in the dock with the Clintons, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Obama and their neocon operatives or handlers as the case may be.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Friday, November 11, 2016

Dear reader of my blog: By incredibly good luck I have received a life membership of the current day-to-day works of David A Stockman, Ronald Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget. (I also received a free copy of his #1-New-York-Times-best-selling-author publication entitled "Trumped!".) Here I reproduce his latest email. And below is his latest explanation of the US stock market about to implode. So if you have savings in the stock market, read the below and then watch his hours-old video imbedded at the bottom ...and then take heed.


A Sucker's Rally Like No Other



This week has seen a political earthquake followed by a financial eruption. But don't be fooled. The Dow's 500 point surge amounts to a Sucker's Rally like no other; it was just a case of raging robo-machines determined to tag an all-time high on the charts

After all, what happened Tuesday night is that for all practical purposes the US became ungovernable. The ruling establishment pulled out every stop to smash Trump's insurgent candidacy, and, instead, it ended up getting unceremoniously and shockingly fired.

Indeed, yesterday's ceremonial make nice session between Donald Trump and President Obama said everything you need to know. To wit, the two had never even shaken hands before, meaning that the Imperial City is literally being sacked by political outsiders, outlaws and anti-establishment brigands.

In the longer run, of course, that is a very good thing because the addiction of the Wall Street/Washington establishment to war, debt, bubble finance and beltway racketeering would have brought American democracy and capitalism to its knees. This year's political revolt in Flyover America, in fact, purged the nation's two leading crime families---the Clintons and the Bush's----from public life once and for all, and that's an especially good thing.

Yet in the here and now, the great national nightmare has just begun. That's because the smirking incumbent who greeted the Donald in the Oval Office neglected to tell him about the giant stink bomb he and the odious former House Speaker, John Boehner, deposited on the front door of the US Treasury Department back in October 2015.

In a word, the March expiration of the nation's $19.6 trillion debt ceiling will stop Donald Trump's ballyhooed First 100 Days cold in its tracks. The purported giant fiscal "stimulus" and Trump economic revival plan that the headline-sniffing algos got giddy on during the last two days will be DOA.

At some point soon, it will become evident that the parabolic line in the chart below is what will really dominate, fracture and paralyze the Imperial City during the Trump presidency. The irony, of course, is that this $20 trillion fiscal albatross has been almost entirely accumulated since 1981 when Ronald Reagan was forced to request an increase in the debt ceiling to $1 trillion for the first time.

So the ruling establishment that Trump unhorsed at the ballot box is gone, but not done. The dead-hand of 30 years of feckless fiscal profligacy will smoother his best intentions and efforts in a veritable fiscal death trap.

The latter was built brick-by-brick over the decades since 1981 by the beltway's bipartisan establishment. It amounted to a conspiracy of convenience under which the debt ceiling was raised episodically as needed in order to accommodate the cost of multi-trillion wars, giant un-financed tax cuts, Obamacare and entitlement accretion and the beltway pork barrel as usual. In all, it was the product of a moveable feast of political accommodation among the Imperial City's factions and K-Street racketeers.

But having smashed the bipartisan consensus, Trump will soon find himself in a political no-man's land. He will find it impossible to accumulate a Congressional  majority to raise the debt ceiling by the trillions that will be needed to accommodate the soaring built in deficit from pre-Trump policy and the coming recession.

In fact, the de facto public debt today is $35 trillion. That is, there is another $10 trillion built-in from current entitlement, defense, domestic spending and tax policies, according to the CBO, and that's assuming a Rosy Scenario set of economic assumptions and that the US will experience 206 straight months through 2026 without a recession

But that's rank idiocy. The average business cycle expansion since 1950 has been 61 months and the longest was 117 months in the 1990's------an unsustainable aberration that ended in the dotcom crash and ultimately the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Realistic economic assumptions, therefore, including a good dose of pie-in-the-sky growth acceleration from anything Trump might manage to enact, adds another $5 trillion of red ink to the projections.

In short, the job of the next one-term President, and the one after that and the one after that, will be to raise the public debt to $35 trillion or 140% of  realistically projected GDP over the next decade. And that task will shatter whatever capacity for fiscal governance that may be salvaged from the coming political chaos in the Imperial City.

Yet we did not even mention Donald Trump's ballyhooed stimulus program because that would come on top; it would take the national debt to $40 trillion or even more. That is to say, the "growth" part of the equation is already built into the current unachievable Rosy Scenario embedded in the CBO's current 10-year projections.

Trump's fiscal nightmare would therefore require trillions more to fund his promises to slash taxes by $4 trillion, rebuild defense, pump more funding into Veterans programs that already cost $150 billion per year, build the Wall and enforce the borders and launch the biggest infrastructure program in American history.

Needless to say, its not going to happen. This week's raging  robo-traders will soon see that the letter of the day is not "S" for stimulus, but a giant "G" for gridlock of an insuperable variety.

Or perhaps an even bigger triple letter called FCA or Fiscal Catastrophe Ahead.


 In the days ahead we will be reviewing the facts and figures behind the dire outlook described above.  Meanwhile, here is the summary of what lies ahead as I explained on Fox Business last evening.



Saturday, October 29, 2016

Hillary Clinton has described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “the new Hitler” …yet a few days ago Germany reported their plan to send their best tanks to the border between Lithuania and Russia to augment the armies of other NATO countries now abutting Russia, since the US had long ago reneged on its promise NOT to move NATO forces to the boundary. Given that Hitler’s Germany attacked Russia (not the other way around) and that Russian casualties in World War II were the highest of any other country (over 20 million!!!), doesn’t it seem that Hillary and the US “mainstream media” are inviting WW III …presumably on the false supposition that Russia is weak? When I was in grade school the “Cold War” was on, and the media constantly told us to crawl under of desks if a Russian attack was imminent. However, that was back when nuclear weapons were in their infancy, so the thought of monster weapons that could kill us all was not yet possible. So why are Hillary, her neocon compadres in Washington, and the collaborating “prestitute” media drumming up a nuclear war with Russia …without saying a word about the grave danger that such a war would be to the American people? The short answer is that they are all insane. However, if you read this article, you will see that Vladimir Putin and his country have not been sleeping. Instead they have been secretly creating superior weapons, regular as well a nuclear, light years ahead of the incompetent US “military/industrial complex,” whose incompetence I learned first-hand in my last decade (1990 – 2001) working as a materials scientist in a US Government laboratory.


OpEdNews Op Eds

Russia Calls the War Party's Bluff

By     

opednews.com                           
Headlined to H2 10/28/16

Snowden/Obama -- Double Focus Prism










Cold War 2.0 has reached unprecedented hysterical levels. And yet a hot war is not about to break out -- before or after the November 8 US presidential election.

From the Clinton (cash) machine -- supported by a neocon/neoliberalcon think tank/media complex -- to the British establishment and its corporate media mouthpieces, the Anglo-American, self-appointed "leaders of the free world" are racking up demonization of Russia and "Putinism" to pure incandescence.

And yet a hot war is not about to break out -- before or after the November 8 US presidential election. So many layers of fear and loathing in fact veil no more than a bluff.

Let's start with the Russian naval task force in Syria, led by the officially designated "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser" Admiral Kuznetsov, which will be stationed in the eastern Mediterranean at least until February 2017, supporting operations against all strands of Salafi-jihadism.


The Admiral Kuznetsov is fully equipped with anti-ship, air defense, artillery and anti-submarine warfare systems -- and can defend itself against a vast array of threats, unlike NATO vessels.

Predictably, NATO is spinning with alarm that "all of the Northern Fleet," along with the Baltic Fleet, is on the way to the Mediterranean. Wrong; it's only part of the Northern Fleet, and the Baltic Fleet ships are not going anywhere. The heart of the matter is that when the capabilities of this Russian naval task force are matched with the S-300/S-400 missile systems already deployed in Syria, Russia is now de facto rivaling the firepower of the US Sixth Fleet.

To top it off, as this comprehensive military analysis makes clear, Russia has "basically made their own no-fly zone over Syria"; and a US no-fly zone, viscerally promoted by Hillary Clinton, "is now impossible to achieve." That should be more than enough to put into perspective the impotence transmuted into outright anger exhibited by the Pentagon and its neocon/neoliberalcon vassals.

Add to it the outright war between the Pentagon and the CIA in the Syrian war theater, where the Pentagon backs the YPG Kurds, who are not necessarily in favor of regime change in Damascus, while the CIA backs further weaponizing of "moderate," as in al-Qaeda-linked and/or infiltrated, "rebels."

Compounding the trademark Obama administration Three Stooges school of foreign policy, American threats have flown more liberally than Negan's skull-crushing bloody baton in the new season of The Walking Dead.


Pentagon head Ash Carter, a certified neocon, has threatened "consequences," as in "potential" strikes against Syrian Arab Army (SAA) forces to "punish the regime" after the Pentagon itself broke the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire.

President Obama took some time off weighing his options. And in the end, he backed off. So it will be up for the virtually elected -- by the whole US establishment -- Hillary Clinton to make the fateful decision. She won't be able to go for a no-fly zone -- because Russia is already doing it. And if she decides to "punish the regime," Moscow already telegraphed, via Russia's Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, there will definitely be "consequences" for imposing a "shadow" hot war.

Sun Tzu doesn't do first-strike.  Washington, of course, reserves for itself a "first-strike" nuclear capability, which Hillary Clinton fully supports (Donald Trump does not, and for that he's also demonized).  If we allow the current hysteria to literally go nuclear, then we must consider the matter of the S-500 anti-missile system -- which effectively seals Russia's air space; Moscow won't admit it on the record because that would unleash a relentless arms race.

A US intel source with close connections to the Masters of the Universe but at the same time opposed to Cold War 2.0 as "counter-productive," adds the necessary nuance: "The United States has lost the arms race, indulging in trillions of dollars of worthless and endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now is no longer a global power as it cannot defend itself with its obsolete missiles, THAAD, Patriot and Aegis Land Based Ballistic Defense System, against Russian ICBMs, even as the Russians have sealed their airspace. The Russians may be as much as four generations ahead of the US."
Moreover, in the deep recesses of shadow war planning, the Pentagon knows, and the Russian Defense Ministry also knows, that in the event some Dr. Strangelove launched a nuclear preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian population would be protected by their defensive missile systems -- as well as nuclear bomb shelters in major cities. Warnings on Russian television have not been idle; the population would know where to go in the -- terrifying -- event of nuclear war breaking out.
Needless to add, the ghastly possibility of US nuclear first-strike turns all these WWII-style NATO war games in Eastern Europe into a pile of meaningless propaganda stunts.
So how did Moscow plan for it all? According to the US intel source, "they took out almost all the military budget from their stated federal budget, lulling the West into thinking that Russia could not afford a massive military buildup and there was nothing to fear from Russia as they were finished as a world power. The [stated] military budget was next to nothing, so there was nothing to worry about as far as the CIA was concerned. If Putin showed publicly his gigantic military buildup, the West could have taken immediate remedial actions as they did in 2014 by crashing the oil price."
The bottom line then would reveal the Pentagon as totally unprepared for a hot war -- even as it threatens and bluffs Russia now on a daily basis; "As Brzezinski has pointed out, if this is the case it means the US has ceased to be a global power. The US may continue to bluff, but those that ally with them will have nowhere to go if that bluff is called, as it is being now called in Syria."
The US intel source is adamant that "one of the greatest military buildups in history has taken place right under the nose of the Russian Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina and the Russian Ministry of Finance while the CIA awaits what they think will be the inevitable Russia collapse.

The CIA will be waiting forever and eternity for Russia to collapse. This MGB maneuver is sheer genius. And demonstrates that the CIA, which is so drowned by data inputs that they cannot connect the dots on anything, must be completely reorganized.

In addition, the entire procurement system of the United States military must also be reorganized as it cannot ever keep up if new weapon programs as the F-35 take 20 years to develop and then are found obsolete before they even enter service.

The Russians have a five-year development program for each new weapons system and they are far ahead of us in every key area.... If this analysis is correct, it goes against even the best and most precise Russian estimates, according to which military potential may be strong, asymmetrically, but still much inferior to US military might.

Well-informed Western analysts know that Moscow never brags about military buildups -- and has mastered to a fault the element of surprise. Much more than calling a bluff, it's Moscow's Sun Tzu tactics that are really rattling loudmouth Washington. 

Friday, October 21, 2016

Paul Craig Roberts: One of the reasons that countries fail is that collective memory is continually destroyed as older generations pass away and are replaced by new ones who are disconnected from what came before.











As We Face Armageddon the Western World Is Leaderless


As We Face Armageddon the Western World Is Leaderless

Paul Craig Roberts

Please contribute to the success of the June quarterly appeal by donating to this website.

According to news reports, the validity of which cannot be ascertained by the general public, a crazed US government came within ten minutes of igniting a general conflagation in the Middle East, the consequences of which could have been catastrophic for all.

The moronic warmongers in high office—Bolton, Pompeo, and Pence—and their Israel Lobby masters are determined, and they have not abandoned their campaign for war with Iran.  Of course, the liars say that Iran will just accept its punishment for defending its territory and there will be no war.  But this is not what Iran says.  I believe Iran.

Some of the tiny percentage of people in the Western World who are still capable of thought regret that Trump called off the insane plan.  They think the consequences would have been the destruction of the Saudi and Israeli governments—two of the most evil in history—and the cut-off of oil to the US and Europe, with the resulting depression causing the overthrow of the Western warmonger governments.  They believe that catastrophic American defeat is the only way peace can be restored to the world.
  
In other words, it is not clear whether Trump calling off the attack saved us or doomed us.  The Israel Lobby and their neoconservative agents have not been taught a lesson.  Trump has not fired Bolton and Pompeo for almost igniting a conflagation, and he has not dressed down his moronic vice president.  So, it can all happen again.
  
And likely will.  The lesson that Bolton and Israel have learned is that the fake news about an Iranian attack on a Japanese freighter, denied by the Japanese, was not sufficient to lock Trump into “saving face” by attacking Iran.  So be prepared for a larger orchestrated provocation. Bolton and Israel know that the Western presstitutes will lie for them.  Watch for a provocation that allows Trump no alternative to an attack.

Washington’s use of fake news and false flag attacks to launch military attacks goes back a long way.  In the 21st century we have had a concentrated dose—Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, Russian invasions, Maduro starving his own people, the endless lies about Gaddafi.  Yes, I know there are more.  I am writing an article, not an encyclopedia.

Washington has grown accustomed to attacking countries on false pretenses and getting away with it.  Therefore, there is nothing to discourage the Israel Lobby and its Washington puppets from continuing to set-up Iran for an attack.  Success breeds incaution.  The attack on Iraq was stage-managed by a credible US Secretary of State before the UN.  The attack on Libya was stage-managed by a UN resolution that a deceived Russia and China failed to block.  In situations such as these, Washington arranged a green light for its war crimes.  However, Washington has failed to stage-manage a green light for an attack on Iran. 

Moreover, Iran is a more powerful military force than Iraq and Libya, and the extent of the depth of Russian and Chinese support for Iran is unknown to Washington.
If Israel succeeds in having its Washington puppet attack Iran, Israel and its neoconservative agents will not welcome failure of their objective.  They will fight against failure with more dangerous moves.  I can easily imagine the fanatics having Trump “save face” by destroying the world and issuing some kind of ultimatums to Russia and China or resorting to the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
  
The insouciant American—indeed, Western—people are kept unaware by design.  It is the function of the presstitutes to control the explanations given to the people.  The US Congress is bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby, as are most important politicians in the UK and Europe.  What I am telling you is that it is very easy for fanatics to produce Armageddon.

Stephen Cohen and I, and a few surviving others, lived through the 20th century Cold War. In recent years we both have reported on numerous occasions that the threat of nuclear war today is far higher than during the Cold War.  One reason is that during the Cold War US and Soviet leaders worked to defuse tensions and to build trust.  In contrast, since the Clinton regime the US has worked consistently to build tensions.  Both Cohen and I have listed on many occasions the tension-building activities pursued by all post-Reagan/George H.W. Bush administrations.

The Russians no longer trust Washington, and neither do the Chinese.  Washington has lied to, and about, Russia so often in the 21st century that Russian trust of Washington is exhausted.  No matter how earnestly the Russian government wants to trust Washington, it dare not do so.

Therefore, it takes very little miscalculation for the morons in Washington to cause a threat-ending response from Russia as Washington has convinced the Russian government that the US intends to destroy them.
  
The orchestration of Russiagate by the Democratic Party, military/security complex, and their media whores has, as Stephen Cohen has emphasized, forced President Trump in an act of self-preservation to adopt the neoconservative attitude toward Russia and other “non-compliant” governments.  This attitude is dangerous enough in the best of times.  It is extremely dangerous after trust has been destroyed by years of lies and false accusations.  
Perhaps there is someone in the Trump administration who has the intelligence to understand the dangerous situation and who has Trump’s confidence.  But I do not know who that person is.

We have to face the fact that as we face Armageddon the Western World is leaderless.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

No wonder! Janet Yellen's repeated assertion that there is full employment is believed implicitly by the mavens of the stock markets. However, smarter people know that (1) 23% of working-age Americans have given up looking for a job, because there are virtually none to be had, whereas (2) Yellen treats those 23% as though dead. However, the not so bright mavens of industry and the stock market read her claim of full employment as a signal that there are millions of Americans out there who can and will buy their products. Wrong! Because of their stupidity the mavens of the stock market push their stocks ever higher. In the meanwhile those with common sense know that the deepest stock market crash of all times will soon take place. Corrolary: The silver and gold presently being depressed will skyrockt when the crash arrives.


The stock market is turning into a sloppy, ugly mess—and it could get worse

Published: Oct 14, 2016 5:06 p.m. ET

Dow industrials on pace for longest streak of monthly losses in 5 years. Here are some of the reasons behind the slide

It is rough out there.

 It is getting dicey out there for Wall Street investors, although stocks eked out a modest rise on Friday.

U.S. equities have been bouncing around lately. And the trend has been predominantly lower. Although it hasn’t been the sort of dizzying tumble for equities that would elicit an instant spike in fear, it has been, however, the kind of plodding descent that has the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.22%  down nearly 300 points since the end of July.
 
In fact, the Dow and the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.02%  are on the verge of tallying three straight months of declines, with October shaping up to be the ugliest monthly fall since January—the month after the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time in a decade. (Friday’s jump on better bank earnings will have to be factored after the close.)

But, if the Dow posts a loss in October it would be the first time the blue-chip index logged three consecutive monthly declines since the period ended in September 2011. The S&P 500 notched three consecutive monthly loses earlier this year, ended February.

On Friday, stocks ended nearly flat, with only the Dow posting a significant gain buoyed by a rise in the banking sector’s Goldman Sachs Group GS, +1.85% Friday’s wobbly moves, where stocks started off sharply higher before fading, has characterized a market that appears to be increasingly on tenterhooks. Here’s what may be contributing to the recent spike in Wall Street anxiety levels:

1. October trade
Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist at LPL Financial, points out that October is inherently a volatile month for stocks. “October has a reputation as a month you better buckle your seat belts for a reason. Nearly all the volatility records seem to take place during this month,” Detrick said in a recent research note.
 
Read: Will October kill yet another bull market?

Detrick points out that 10 of the largest one-day drops were in October, dating back to 1928 (as the following table shows):



2. Ominous charts point to a crash (a la October 1987)
A number of analysts are pointing to the possibility of a big selloff in stocks, citing bearish technical patterns. Murray Gunn, technical analyst at HSBC, in a Wednesday note said investors should look out below if the S&P 500 closes between 2,116-1,991 and if the Dow industrials breach the 17,992-17,063 level. The thinking behind that call is those levels represent recent lows that may trigger buying by computer-driven traders and other investors. In other words, those levels then tend to act as so-called support. But slipping below them can mean a painful dip into darkness.



Other market statisticians, including Carter Braxton Worth of Cornerstone Macro, have pointed out that although stocks have been hovering around all-time records, their recent crawl lower is a bad sign and suggests that equities are gradually breaking down.

Here’s a chart of important levels for the S&P 500 put together by MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore:


On Thursday, the S&P 500 hit a low of 2,114 before bouncing back, while the Dow’s Thursday low was 17,959, before rebounding somewhat. Still, Murray said “the possibility of a severe fall in the stock market is now very high,” and compared recent moves in stocks with those that preceded the 1987 stock-market crash.

3. Weak corporate earnings
Alcoa Inc. AA, -1.16% delivered weak third-quarter results to unofficially kick off earnings season. S&P Global Market Intelligence warned that earnings season is turning out to be a story of tepid growth, down 1.2% for the third quarter. S&P said particular attention needs to be paid to the consumer-discretionary sector, which includes brands like Nike Inc. NKE, -0.79% Ford Motor Co. F, +0.00% and Staples Inc. SPLS, -1.18% and is on track to report its lowest quarterly results since 2012 (as the chart below shows):


Why is this bad? Weak earnings can mean there is not a lot of fundamental justification to buy stocks, which are considered risky compared with, say, the U.S. 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, +0.00% Better earnings from stocks mean that investors are getting good value for their buck. Weak or stagnant earnings suggest that investors are overpaying. And there have been a raft of market participants pointing to bubbles forming in the market, citing things like price-to-earnings ratios.


Indeed, S&P 500 companies are expected to post their sixth straight quarter of declining earnings, according to FactSet data. And although it is still early in the season, several corporations have issued profit and/or sales warnings over the past few weeks. That all implies that there is still weakness in the economy, despite a labor market that has been chugging along. Tepid earnings are a big reason the market is bound to sink, or, at the very least, can’t go much higher, some industry experts argue.

4. Biotech woes
The biotech market can be a canary in the coal mine as a measure of risk-taking. And it is starting to lose steam after a nice run, trading below both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages, as gauged by the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF IBB, -1.86% Falling below or trading above a moving average is usually interpreted as a measure of momentum.
 
Problems in biotech are multiple, but the primary forces could be centered on a scaling back of general risk appetite, as the sector is a proxy for bullish bets on U.S. stocks, and as a bet on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has been critical of biotech companies, which can pressure the sector if investors believe she’s likely to win the race for the White House.

5. The pound and the dollar
The pound GBPUSD, -0.5386% which has been battered by intensifying talk of the U.K.’s plan to exit from the European Union, is hovering around its trade-weighted low, while the dollar has been creeping higher.
The dollar DXY, +0.55% has been a headwind for stocks and its abrupt surges higher on shifting views of a rate increase by the Federal Reserve have been disruptive to markets of late. A stronger buck means reduced sales for U.S. multinationals when money is repatriated into dollars. And a sustained rise could cause companies to lower their earnings outlooks for future quarters. The dollar has surged almost 3% so far in October.

Meanwhile, the pound’s steady drop has been a cause for worry because it is unclear how the U.K.’s economy will fare amid the tumbling currency, despite the benefits it offers the FTSE 100 UKX, +0.62% which is comprised predominantly of multinational companies that profit from exporting goods. Uncertainty in Europe is a problem that can cause jitters for the U.S., because it hints at broader global problems.

6. China
Concerns about China’s economy have resurfaced. Lackluster export data on Thursday reminded investors of the view that the world’s second-largest economy is petering. In August 2015, it was China’s stock-market woes and its sluggish economy that sent global markets into a tailspin.

7. U.S. presidential election
Like the market, Trump has been on a losing streak.
 
Republican candidate Donald Trump’s recent debacles have begun to lead some strategists to believe that a victory for Clinton isn't just assured, but that Democrats might see sufficient gains during the November elections to gain control of the House. That is not viewed as a categorical good thing for the market—financials KBE, +0.48% XLF, +0.47%  and the aforementioned biotech sector have been wobbly

To be sure, there is plenty of time to right the stock-market ship. Earnings could surprise to the upside and calm may set in after the election, pushing the S&P 500 and the Dow to fresh records, but right now it is looking a bit iffy.

Market columnist Mark Hulbert says the market is setting up for a monster rally and points out that the Dow has gained an average of 6.8% from its lowest point in October through the end of that same year.