Ukraine Peace Talks Collapse As Fighting Continues

Ukraine Peace Talks Collapse, Kiev And Separatists Trade Blame

Peace talks on Ukraine collapsed on Saturday after just over four hours with no tangible progress towards a new ceasefire but with Ukraine's representative and separatist envoys angrily accusing each other of sabotaging the meeting.

Ukraine's representative, former president Leonid Kuchma, left the talks in Minsk, Belarus, telling Interfax news agency that separatist officials had undermined the meeting by making ultimatums and refusing "to discuss a plan of measures for a quick ceasefire and a pull-back of heavy weapons".

Denis Pushilin, one of the separatist officials, told the Russian news agency RIA that they were ready for dialogue "but not ready for ultimatums from Kiev while shelling by their forces is going on in the background of towns in the Donbass (industrialised eastern Ukraine)".

The meeting of the "contact group", which also involves a Russian envoy and an official from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, took place in the Belarussian capital even as fighting between Kiev's forces and the Russian-backed rebels raged on in Ukraine's east, claiming more civilian and military lives.

The outcome dashed hopes that a new ceasefire could be put together soon to stem nine months of conflict pitting Ukrainian government forces against Russian-backed separatists who have declared "people's republics" in eastern Ukraine.

Shortly before the Minsk talks broke up, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Russia's Vladimir Putin in a three-way phone call had expressed the hope the meeting would at least produce a ceasefire agreement.

Both sides have accused each other of deadly artillery and mortar strikes on civilian targets in the past two weeks, including on a cultural centre in the main regional city of Donetsk on Friday that killed at least five people waiting for humanitarian hand-outs.

Heavy shelling continued on Saturday in Ukraine's eastern regions as the separatists sought to tighten a circle around government forces clinging on to control of the strategic rail and road junction of Debaltseve.

Ukrainian Government: 'No Russian Troops Are Fighting Against Us'

Ukraine’s top general is contradicting allegations by the Obama Administration and by his own Ukrainian Government, by saying that no Russian troops are fighting against the Ukrainian Government’s forces in the formerly Ukrainian, but now separatist, area, where the Ukrainian civil war is being waged.

The Chief of Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, General Viktor Muzhenko, is saying, in that news-report, which is dated on Thursday January 29th, that the only Russian citizens who are fighting in the contested region, are residents in that region, or of Ukraine, and also some Russian citizens (and this does not deny that perhaps some of other countries’ citizens are fighting there, inasmuch as American mercenaries have already been noted to have been participating on the Ukrainian Government’s side), who “are members of illegal armed groups,” meaning fighters who are not paid by any government, but instead are just “individual citizens” (as opposed to foreign-government-paid ones). General Muzhenko also says, emphatically, that the “Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian army.”

In other words: He is explicitly and clearly denying the very basis for the EU’s sanctions against Russia, and for the U.S.’s sanctions against Russia: all of the sanctions against Russia are based on the falsehood that Ukraine is fighting against “the regular units of the Russian army” — i.e., against the Russian-Government-controlled-and-trained fighting forces.

The allegation to the effect that Ukraine is instead fighting against “regular units of the Russian army” is the allegation that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invaded Ukraine, and it is the entire basis for the economic sanctions that are in force against Russia.

Those sanctions should therefore be immediately removed, with apology, and with compensation being paid to all individuals who have been suffering them; and it is therefore incumbent upon the Russian Government to pursue, through all legally available channels, restitution, plus damages, against the perpetrators of that dangerous fraud — and the news reports have already made clear precisely whom those persons are, who have asserted, as public officials, what can only be considered to be major libel.

The Growing Russia-China Alliance, The Growing Problems Between Israel And The U.S.

One new alliance grows stronger, while an old alliance continues to fracture:

Growing The Russia-China New Relationship

While the Obama Administration is preoccupied with keeping an increasingly unhappy EU firm on further economic sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Putin is busy outflanking an increasingly desperate Washington. Rather than fixate on the deliberate US and NATO provocations in Ukraine, Russia is deepening its strategic ties with the other Great Eurasian land-power, the Peoples’ Republic of China. Far from Putin going begging to Beijing for money, the two powers are weaving a closer strategic counterweight to an Anglo-American elite gone bonkers as its empire slips from its hands.

Unimportant are all diplomatic declarations by Chinese deputy Prime Ministers and others in recent weeks about how China so deeply respects the unique role of the United States as sole superpower. The reality on the ground speaks of a tectonic and well-thought-through change in the geopolitical world order is underway. Not only are Russia and China signing gigantic oil and gas agreements that insulate Russia from the negative effects of a potential loss of the EU energy markets in coming months.

Now the two powers have agreed on one of the world’s largest-ever infrastructure projects that will create huge new markets across Eurasia

Russia and China have agreed to build a 7,000-kilometer high-speed rail link from Beijing to Moscow, at a cost of $242 billion, almost a quarter trillion dollars, according to the Beijing city government. The journey from Beijing to Moscow would take two days on a route passing through Kazakhstan. It will take take eight to 10 years to build. The rail project is the most ambitious rail infrastructure project in the Eurasian history, even surpassing the Trans-Siberian Railway project across Russia

Then last November as US sanctions and the US-engineered oil price collapse added a new urgency to the project, Alexander Misharin, vice-president at state-owned OAO Russian Railways, said a section would cost $60 billion to reach Russia’s border, and would cut the Beijing-Moscow journey from five days to 30 hours. Misharin at the time compared the new transport network to the Suez Canal “in terms of scale and significance.” In reality, it has the potential to far exceed the Suez Canal as it serves to unify a high-speed transport network integration vast new markets across Eurasia from Beijing to Moscow that draw in some 4.4 billion of the world population.

A close look at the new railway map by German politicians might be useful, in order for them to graphically realize where the future of Germany and of the European Union lies. A hint: it doesn’t lie with a dying American debt-bloated economy that only offers Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment scams to Europe. From Berlin, the four horses atop the historic Brandenburg Gate are symbolically pointed east, to Moscow. Sanctions cut German industry from participation in one of the largest construction projects in the world history. One might ask why?

That Eurasian integration, formal via Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and the Sino-Russian led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as informal via an escalating series of bilateral economic and military cooperation agreements between the two Eurasian Great Powers—Russia and China—is precisely what NATO and the neo-conservative war-hawks of the Obama Administration desperately try to prevent in Ukraine and with the Obama military Asia Pivot against China. The problem, for those poor loveless souls in Washington and Wall Street, is that wars don’t work the way they used to. The world is getting fed up dying in the wars of the One Percent.

'Little Is Being Done To Repair U.S.-Israel Ties' After Recent Rift

The Netanyahu government and the Obama administration have had no shortage of spats over the years, but this time around, neither Jerusalem nor Washington is reportedly doing much to fix the rifts that emerged surrounding the prime minister’s planned March 3 speech to the US Congress on Iran, a visit US officials said breached protocol as it was not coordinated with the White House

According to a report in the New York Times on Saturday, the current row reflects “six years of suspicion and mistrust and grievance, wounds from past brawls easily reopened by what might otherwise be small irritations.”

“It reflects resentment on the part of Obama, who watched Netanyahu seemingly root for his Republican opponent in the 2012 election and now sees him circumventing the Oval Office to work with a Republican Congress instead. And it reflects a conviction on the part of Netanyahu that Obama may sell out Israel with a bad deal and may be trying to influence the coming Israeli elections,” set to take place March 17, two weeks after the PM’s expected speech.

Netanyahu is widely expected to urge US lawmakers to pass a new sanctions bill against Iran to force to it comply with international demands it curb its nuclear program — a bill Obama strongly opposes and has vowed to veto, urging that such a move would hinder the P5+1 negotiations under way to secure a deal with Tehran. Officials in Jerusalem said Friday, however, that Netanyahu would focus less on sanctions and more on the dangers of a bad deal with Iran.

The row over the planned Congress speech has set off an ugly, ongoing public spat between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration, with senior US officials charging that the Israeli leader had “spat” in Obama’s face and could not be trusted.

Officials in the Netanyahu government told Israeli media Friday that theUS has already agreed in principle to a deal that would leave Iran capable of enriching enough uranium for a nuclear bomb within “mere months. A Channel 10 report quoted unnamed Jerusalem sources saying the terms of the deal would leave Iran “closer than was thought” to nuclear weapons, “mere months from producing enough material for a bomb,” and that the US has agreed to 80% of Iran’s demands.

The fallout from the row may result in a “virtual freeze in the relationship at the very top until after the 2016 American presidential vote,” according to the New York Times.

A former US ambassador to Israel told the paper that a major policy shift is not expected until after 2016. “There just seems to be too much baggage there,” said Edward Djerejian.

Richard Haass, a former US State Department official and president of the Council of Foreign Relations, told the paper that it seemed Netanyahu and his government has “written off” the Obama administration, placing all their bets on the Republicans. “They have made the calculation that to the extent possible, they will use Congress as the channel to conduct their relationship,” he said.

Netanyahu on Friday downplayed the diplomatic spat, terming it a “procedural issue” that can be resolved — unlike a “bad” deal with Tehran, which cannot be so easily mended. “We can resolve procedural issues with regard to my appearance in the US, but if Iran arms itself with nuclear weapons, it will be a lot harder to fix,” Netanyahu said.

Those remarks came shortly after The New York Times reported that Netanyahu had reached out by phone to leading Democrats in an effort to quell the tensions around his scheduled address on Iran.

“We can resolve procedural issues with regard to my appearance in the US, but if Iran arms itself with nuclear weapons, it will be a lot harder to fix,” Netanyahu said.

Last week, a senior Obama administration official charged that Dermer has been working to advance the political fortunes of Netanyahu at the expense of the US-Israel relationship, according to The New York Times. The accusation marked a striking escalation in the rhetorical spat between the White House and the Netanyahu government over the Congress speech.

The “unusually sharp criticism” by the senior official, who was not named in the report, reflected “the outrage the episode has incited within President Obama’s inner circle,” the Times suggested. “Such officially authorized criticisms of diplomats from major allies are unusual.”

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Iran: Unafraid And Undeterred

This first post comes from Caroline Glick - a highly germane editorial which leads directly into the next article from the Times Of Israel which reveals how dangerously close to a nuclear weapon Iran will be upon finalization of the U.S. lead 'deal'. 

Iran: Unafraid And Undeterred

Israel’s reported strike January 18 on a joint Iranian-Hezbollah convoy driving on the Syrian Golan Heights was one of the most strategically significant events to have occurred in Israel’s neighborhood in recent months. Its significance lies both in what it accomplished operationally and what it exposed.

From what been published to date about the identities of those killed in the strike, it is clear that in one fell swoop the air force decapitated the Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria.

The head of Hezbollah’s operations in Syria, the head of its liaison with Iran, and Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah’s longtime operational commander Imad Mughniyeh who was killed by Israel in Damascus in 2008, were killed. The younger Mughniyeh reportedly served as commander of Hezbollah forces along the Syrian-Israeli border.

Iranian losses included three generals. Brig.- Gen. Mohammed Alladadi was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps liaison officer to Hezbollah and to Syrian intelligence. He was also in charge of weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. Gen. Ali Tabatabai was the IRGC commander in the Golan Heights and, according to Shapira, an additional general, known only as Assadi, “was, in all likelihood, the commander of Iranian expeditionary forces in Lebanon.”

The fact that the men were willing to risk exposure by traveling together along the border with Israel indicates how critical the front is for the regime in Tehran. It also indicates that in all likelihood, they were planning an imminent attack against Israel.

According to Ehud Yaari, Channel 2’s Arab Affairs commentator, Iran and Hezbollah seek to widen Hezbollah’s front against Israel from Lebanon to Syria. They wish to establish missile bases on the northern Hermon, and are expanding Hezbollah’s strategic depth from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the outskirts of Damascus.

IRAN’S PRESENCE on the Golan Heights is of course just one of the many strategic advances it has made in expanding its territorial reach. Over the past two weeks, Iranian-controlled Houthi militias have consolidated their control over Yemen, with their overthrow of the US-allied government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

With the conquest of Yemen, Iran now controls the Gulf of Aden. Together with the Straits of Hormuz, Iran now controls the region’s two maritime outlets to the open sea.

From the Golan Heights to Gaza, from Yemen and Iraq to Latin America to Nantanz and Arak, Iran is boldly advancing its nuclear and imperialist agenda. As Charles Krauthammer noted last Friday, the nations of the Middle East allied with the US are sounding the alarm.

Due to the US administration’s commitment to turning a blind eye to Iran’s advances and the destabilizing role it plays everywhere it gains power, Israel can do little more than carry out precision attacks against high value targets. The flipside of the administration’s refusal to see the dangers, and so enable Iran’s territorial expansion and its nuclear progress, is its determination to ensure that Israel does nothing to prevent those dangers from growing – whether along its borders or at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israel: U.S. Deal Will Leave Iran With 6,500 Centrifuges Spinning, Months from A Bomb

Ratcheting up a confrontation with the Obama administration still further, officials in the Netanyahu government reportedly claimed Friday night that the US has already agreed in principle to a deal that would leave Iran capable of enriching enough uranium for a nuclear bomb within “mere months.”

Israel Channel 10 TV news said the deal taking shape would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium in “over 7,000″ centrifuges. It quoted unnamed Jerusalem sources saying the terms of the deal would leave Iran “closer than was thought” to nuclear weapons, “mere months from producing enough material for a bomb,” and that the US has agreed to 80% of Iran’s demands.


A similar report on Channel 2 news said the US was ready for Iran to keep enriching uranium in 6,500 of its 9,000 centrifuges. It also said that the US was proposing “a time limit” on the deal — possibly of 10 or 15 years — after which “Iran will be free to continue a nuclear industry.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was said to have indicated to confidants that he feels he has “no choice” but to speak out against the imminent deal, including at a controversial address scheduled for March 3 to Congress, Channel 10 said. Netanyahu does not intend to speak against President Barack Obama, or to give a partisan address, or to focus overly on sanctions, but rather to talk strongly against the deal, the report said.

Visiting soldiers wounded in a Wednesday cross-border missile attack by Hezbollah in which two Israeli troops were killed, Netanyahu earlier Friday held Iran responsible and said Tehran was waging a “sustained” battle against Israel and opening new fronts.

He spoke amid several overt indications of growing Iranian involvement in Hezbollah actions against Israel. The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned Friday for instance that Israel should expect heavier responses from Hezbollah after a January 18 attack, allegedly by Israel, killed 12 armed fighters, including a number of Hezbollah members and an Iranian general, in the Quneitra area of the Syrian Golan Heights. “Hezbollah’s recent attack on Israel was a response with the lowest degree of severity and we hope that they take the lesson not to repeat such mistakes (in future),” Jafari said, according to Iran’s Fars news agency.

On Friday afternoon, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that his movement was not afraid of war with Israel.The Beirut rally where his speech was broadcast was attended by Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of Iran’s influential parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy.

Charging that the Iranian regime is “working towards Israel’s destruction,” Dermer said the deal being discussed with Iran did not seek to dismantle Tehran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, but would “leave Iran as a nuclear-threshold state… I would hope that everyone would appreciate what it means to us to see that the deal that is emerging would pose a threat to the survival of Israel,” he said.

“Let me be clear that the prime minister’s visit to Washington is intended for one purpose — to speak about Iran, that openly threatens the survival of the Jewish state,” Dermer said. “The survival of Israel is not a partisan issue. It is an issue for all Americans because those who seek Israel’s destruction also threaten America.”

Birth Pangs...Of The Coming Depression

Birth Pangs Of The Coming Great Depression

The signs of the times are everywhere – all you have to do is open up your eyes and look at them.  When a pregnant woman first goes into labor, the birth pangs are usually fairly moderate and are not that close together.  But as the time for delivery approaches, they become much more frequent and much more intense.

  Economically, what we are experiencing right now are birth pangs of the coming Great Depression.  

As we get closer to the crisis that is looming on the horizon, they will become even more powerful.  This week, we learned that the Baltic Dry Index has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen in 29 years.  The Baltic Dry Index also crashed during the financial collapse of 2008, but right now it is already lower than it was at any point during the last financial crisis.  In addition, “Dr. Copper” and other industrial commodities continue to plunge.  This almost always happens before we enter an economic downturn.  Meanwhile, as I mentioned the other day, orders for durable goods are declining.  This is also a traditional indicator that a recession is approaching.  The warning signs are there – we just have to be open to what they are telling us.

And of course there are so many more parallels between past economic downturns and what is happening right now.

For example, volatility has returned to the markets in a big way.  On Tuesday the Dow was down about 300 points, on Wednesday it was down another couple hundred points, and then on Thursday it was up a couple hundred points.

This is precisely how markets behave just before they crash.  When markets are calm, they tend to go up.  When markets get really choppy and start behaving erratically, that tells us that a big move down is usually coming.

At the same time, almost every major global currency is imploding.  For much more on this, see the amazing charts in this article.

In particular, I am greatly concerned about the collapse of the euro.  The Swiss would not have decoupled their currency from the euro if it was healthy.  And political events in Greece are certainly not going to help things either.  Economic conditions across Europe just continue to get worse, and the future of the eurozone itself is very much in doubt at this point.  And if the eurozone does break up, a European economic depression is almost virtually assured – at least in the short term.

And I haven’t even mentioned the oil crash yet.

There is only one other time in all of history when the price of oil collapsed by more than 60 dollars, and that was just prior to the horrific financial crisis of 2008.

Since the last financial crisis, the oil industry has been a huge source for job growth in this country.  The following is an excerpt from a recent CNN article…

But losing good jobs is just the tip of the iceberg of this oil crisis.

At this point, the price of oil has already dropped to a catastrophically low level.  The longer it stays at this level, the more damage that it is going to do.  If the price of oil stays at this level for all of 2015, we are going to have a complete and total financial nightmare on our hands…

For the first time in 18 years, oil exporters are pulling liquidity out of world markets rather than putting money in. The world is now fast approaching a world reserve currency shift. If we see 8 to 12 months at these oil prices; U.S. shale industry will be wiped out. The effect on junk bonds will cascade to the rest of the stock market and U.S. economy.

…and this time there will be nothing left to catch the falling knife before it hits the American economy right in the heart. Not the FED nor the U.S. government can stop what’s coming. Liquidity will freeze up, our credit will be downgraded, the stock market will start to collapse, and then we can expect the FED to come in and hyper-inflate the dollar. This will cause the world to finish abandoning the world reserve currency in the last rungs of trade. This will be the end of the petrodollar.

And no article of this nature would be complete without mentioning derivatives.

I could not possibly overemphasize the danger that the 700 trillion dollar derivatives bubble poses to the global financial system.

As we enter the coming Great Depression, derivatives are going to play a starring role.  Wall Street has been pumped full of funny money by global central banks, and our financial markets have been transformed into the greatest casino in the history of the world.  When this house of cards comes crashing down, and it will, it is going to be a financial disaster unlike anything that the planet has ever seen.

And yes, global central banks are very much responsible for setting the stage for what we are about to experience.

I really like the way that David Stockman put it the other day…

The global financial system is literally booby-trapped with accidents waiting to happen owing to six consecutive years of massive money printing by nearly every central bank in the world.

Over that span, the collective balance sheet of the major central banks has soared by nearly $11 trillion, meaning that honest price discovery has been virtually destroyed. This massive “bid” for existing financial assets based on credit confected from thin air drove long-term bond yields to rock bottom levels not seen in 600 years since the Black Plague; and pinned money market costs at zero—-for 73 months running.

Even though most average citizens are completely oblivious to what is happening, many among the elite are heeding the warning signs and are feverishly getting prepared.  As Robert Johnson told a stunned audience at the World Economic Forum the other day, they are “buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand“.  They can see the horrifying storm forming on the horizon and they are preparing to get out while the getting is good.

It can be very frustrating to write about economics, because things in the financial world can take an extended period of time to play out.  Sadly, most people these days have extremely short attention spans.  We live in a world of iPhones, iPads, YouTube videos, Facebook updates and 48 hour news cycles.  People no longer are accustomed to thinking in long-term time frames, and if something does not happen right away we tend to get bored with it.

But the economic world is not like a game of “Angry Birds”.  Rather, it is very much like a game of chess.

And unfortunately for us, checkmate is right around the corner.

After Crying 'Conspiracy Theory', CNN Touts North American Union

Just a few years ago, it was all a baseless “conspiracy theory.” Now, promotion of a European Union-style merger between the United States, Mexico, and Canada is being shouted from the rooftops — by U.S. taxpayer-funded globalists writing in the very same media outlet, CNN, that tried to ridicule GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul over the North American Union issue just a few years ago. Indeed, according to the recent opinion piece by two mid-level operatives for the “New America Foundation,” the future of the United States does not rest with the U.S. Constitution, “We the People,” or even the Supreme Court. Instead, it “lies in North America,” claimed New America’s Andrés Martinez and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan.

“This is not a geographic truism, but a strategic imperative,” the duo argued. “The United States, Canada and Mexico are bound by a shared economic, environmental, demographic and cultural destiny.” In recognition of what they refer to as North America’s “shared destiny,” Martinez and Kurtz-Phelan propose the establishment of what they call a “North American passport.” The radical passport scheme would eventually facilitate the erasing of U.S. borders in exchange for “North American” borders — a plot that has been underway for years with the “Beyond the Border” initiative and other schemes. “Much like the EU passport,” the tax-funded globalists wrote, the new North American passport would ultimately allow citizens to “travel, work, invest, learn and innovate anywhere in North America.”

Apparently, at least in the minds of globalists paid with Americans’ tax dollars, the economies of the United States, Mexico, and Canada are “far more integrated” than recognized by the current immigration system — or lack thereof, in light of Obama’s imperial decrees purporting to nullify U.S. immigration laws. So, phasing out U.S., Mexican, and Canadian passports and replacing them with a single North American one would merely serve to “align our laws with reality.” Of course, it is true that, thanks largely to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. sovereignty has already suffered a severe blow. Unelected North American “tribunals,” for instance, already purport to overrule state and federal laws enacted by the American people’s elected representatives. North American bureaucracies are proliferating, too.

The fact that the radical anti-sovereignty screed promoting deeper North American integration was published by CNN, though, is especially ironic. During the 2007 GOP presidential debates, CNN selected a question for Ron Paul asking him if he really believed in the “conspiracy theory” about ongoing efforts to build a North American Union. The effort to ridicule Paul backfired, big time, after he offered an excellent answer making the questioner look foolish. But the attempt did not go unnoticed. Some years later, official U.S. government documents from the embassy in Canada leaked by WikiLeaks revealed that long before that debate, top federal officials were working hard with their counterparts in Canada on plots to create a regional currency, subvert national constitutions, and eventually create a North American regime.   

More recently, after spending years dishonestly dismissing criticism of their machinations as “conspiracy theories,” top globalists have been much more open about the potentially treasonous plot. “After America comes North America,” disgraced former General and CIA boss David Petraeus said confidently last year in answering a question about what comes “after” the United States. “Are we on the threshold of the North American decade, question mark? I threw that away — threw away the question mark — and boldly proclaimed the coming North American decade, says the title now.” He also boasted about how the three economies have been put “together” over the last 20 years as part of the “implementation” of NAFTA. Globalist mouthpiece Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, recently outlined his vision of a “New World Order” that would first have to divide the globe up into regional regimes.

While much of the scheming has come from the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, the taxpayer-funded New America Foundation appears to be playing a growing role in pushing the outlandish plot. Google boss Eric Schmidt, whose search engine stands accused of increasingly working to hide alternative media voices that oppose “North America” scheming, serves as chairman of the foundation’s board of directors. The outfit’s top funding sources included unwitting American taxpayers, forced to contribute more than $1 million — potentially much more, the foundation does not say — in 2013 alone through the U.S. State Department. Various other federal agencies also contributed taxpayer dollars. Another top source of funding was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, infamous for promoting abortion, population reduction, globalized and federalized education standards, and more. Bailed-out megabanks, globalist tax-exempt foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and more), billionaire extremist George Soros,  the World Bank, Big Media, various tax-funded universities, and other sources also finance the outfit.           

And as the name suggests, a “New America” is indeed what they are pushing for — a new America without self-government, individual rights, national sovereignty, or the principles upon which the old America was founded. 

Now, globalists are pushing not just for “permanent alliances,” but the outright surrender of U.S. independence to merge with “North America” and eventually, the world. The scheming has been underway for generations, mostly in the shadows. But, as the final phases approach, much of the agenda is now being touted openly in establishment media organs such as CNN and beyond.     

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ISIS 'Affiliate' Hits Sinai With Rockets, Bombs, 26 Slain, Gorbachev: U.S. Dragging Russia Into War, Russia In The Cross Hairs

26 Slain As Militants Pummel Sinai With Rockets, Bombs - Islamic State Affiliate Takes Credit For Attack

 Islamic State-linked militants struck more than a dozen army and police targets in the restive Sinai Peninsula with simultaneous attacks involving a car bomb and mortar rounds on Thursday, killing at least 26 security officers.

An Army spokesman immediately blamed former Islamist President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood of orchestrating the attack, which killed 25 Army soldiers and one policeman.

The wide-ranging attacks late Thursday required a previously unseen level of coordination. At least one car bomb was set off outside a military base, while mortars were simultaneously fired at the base, toppling some buildings and leaving soldiers buried under the debris, official said.

Other attacks included mortar rounds fired at a hotel, a police club and more than a dozen checkpoints, officials said.

The militants struck the Northern Sinai provincial capital el-Arish, the nearby town of Sheik Zuwayid and the town of Rafah bordering Gaza.

Hours before the attack, the Islamic State affiliate in Egypt posted on its official Twitter account pictures of masked militants dressed in black. They were carrying rocket-propelled grenades in a show of force, while flying the Islamic State black flag.

The Islamic State affiliate later took credit for Thursday’s attacks on Twitter, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

At least 60 people were wounded in the attack, according to medical officials, who also confirmed the death toll. Officials said the death toll was expected to rise. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The Thursday attacks are expected to cause a great deal of embarrassment to the Egyptian government and military after nearly a yearlong offensive in Sinai aimed at uprooting Islamic militants under the banner of fighting terrorism, is largely failing.

Gorbachev: U.S. Dragging Russia Into New Cold War, Which Might Grow Into Armed Conflict

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the US of dragging Russia into a new Cold War. The former Soviet president fears the chill in relations could eventually spur an armed conflict.

“Plainly speaking, the US has already dragged us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its idea of triumphalism,” Gorbachev said in an interview with Interfax.

The former USSR leader, whose name is associated with the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, is worried about the possible consequences.

“What’s next? Unfortunately, I cannot be sure that the Cold War will not bring about a ‘hot’ one. I’m afraid they might take the risk,” he said.

Gorbachev’s criticism of Washington comes as the West is pondering new sanctions against Russia, blaming it for the ongoing military conflict in eastern Ukraine, and alleging Moscow is sending troops to the restive areas. Russia has denied the allegations.

“All we hear from the US and the EU now is sanctions against Russia,” Gorbachev said. “Are they completely out of their minds? The US has been totally ‘lost in the jungle’ and is dragging us there as well.”

Gorbachev suggests the situation in the EU is “acute” with significant differences among politicians and different levels of prosperity among member nations.

“Part of the countries are alright, others – not so well, and many, including Germany, are excessively dependent on the US.”

In the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev served as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1985 until 1991, and as the Soviet Union's only president from 1990. He led controversial perestroika reforms that are believed to have accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s rule was marked by considerable warming in relations with the West.

Meanwhile, international relations experts in America are quite alarmed over the new Cold War possibility – although not as much as the general public. While over 48 percent of scholars answered "no" when asked whether the US and Russia are headed towards such a conflict, the scenario was deemed likely by 38 percent.

In Russia, one-third of the population believes their country and the US are on a collision course.

According to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center VCIOM in November 2014, the possibility of a new Cold War was considered likely by over 30 percent of Russians, being the highest number in the past seven years. Every fourth Russian (25 percent of respondents) believed such a conflict was already ongoing.

Russia In The Cross Hairs

Washington’s attack on Russia has moved beyond the boundary of the absurd into the realm of insanity.

The New Chief of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, Andrew Lack, has declared the Russian news service, RT, which broadcasts in multiple languages, to be a terrorist organization equivalent to Boko Haram and the Islamic State, and Standard and Poor’s just downgraded Russia’s credit rating to junk status.

Today RT International interviewed me about these insane developments.

In prior days when America was still a sane country, Lack’s charge would have led to him being laughed out of office. He would have had to resign and disappear from public life. Today in the make-believe world that Western propaganda has created, Lack’s statement is taken seriously. Yet another terrorist threat has been identified–RT. (Although both Boko Haram and the Islamic State employ terror, strictly speaking they are political organizations seeking to rule, not terror organizations, but this distinction would be over Lack’s head. Yes, I know. There is a good joke that could be made here about what Lack lacks. Appropriately named and all that.)

Nevertheless, whatever Lack might lack, I doubt he believes his nonsensical statement that RT is a terrorist organization. So what is his game?

The answer is that the Western presstitute media by becoming Ministries of Propaganda for Washington, have created large markets for RT, Press TV, and Al Jazeera. As more and more of the peoples of the world turn to these more honest news sources, Washington’s ability to fabricate self-serving explanations has declined.

RT in particular has a large Western audience. The contrast between RT’s truthful reporting and the lies spewed by US media is undermining Washington’s control of the explanation. This is no longer acceptable.

Lark has sent a message to RT. The message is: pull in your horns; stop reporting differently from our line; stop contesting the facts as Washington states them and the presstitutes report them; get on board or else.

In other words, the “free speech” that Washington and its EU, Canadian, and Australian puppet states tout means: free speech for Washington’s propaganda and lies, but not for any truth. Truth is terrorism, because truth is the major threat to Washington.

Washington would prefer to avoid the embarrassment of actually shutting down RT as its UK vassal did to Press TV. Washington simply wants to shut up RT. Lark’s message to RT is: self-censure.

A look at the facts serves to establish the political nature of the ruling. Don’t expect the corrupt US financial press to look at the facts. But right now, we will look at the facts.

Indeed, we will put the facts in context with the US debt situation.

According to the debt clocks available online, the Russian national debt as a percentage of Russian GDP is 11 percent. The American national debt as a percentage of US GDP is 105 percent, about ten times higher. My coauthors, Dave Kranzler, John Williams, and I have shown that when measured correctly, the US debt as a percent of GDP is much higher than the official figure.

The Russian national debt per capita is $1,645. The US national debt per capita is
$56,952.

The size of Russia’s national debt is $235 billion, less than one quarter of a trillion. The size of the US national debt is $18 trillion, 76.6 times larger than the Russian debt.

Putting this in perspective: according to the debt clocks, US GDP is $17.3 trillion and Russian GDP is $2.1 trillion. So, US GDP is 8 times greater than Russian GDP, but US national debt is 76.6 times greater than Russia’s debt.

Clearly, it is the US credit rating that should have been downgraded to junk status. But this cannot happen. Any US credit rating agency that told the truth would be closed and prosecuted. It wouldn’t matter what the absurd charges are. The rating agencies would be guilty of being anti-american, terrorist organizations like RT, etc. and so on, and they know it. Never expect any truth from any Wall Street denizen. They lie for a living.

According to this site: http://people.howstuffworks.com/5-united-states-debt-holders.htm#page=4the US owes Russia as of January 2013 $162.9 billion. As the Russian national debt is $235 billion, 69 percent of the Russian national debt is covered by US debt obligations to Russia.

If this is a Russian Crisis, I am Alexander the Great.

U.S. Administration Not Offended, Just Wants Bibi Out Of Office

Claims by anonymous sources that the Obama administration is deeply offended by a “breach of protocol” in the planned appearance by Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint meeting of Congress are increasing.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed official as saying the anger goes beyond John Boehner and Netanyahu, to the Israeli Ambassador:

The Obama administration, after days of mounting tension, signaled on Wednesday how angry it is with Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Republican leaders’ invitation to address Congress on Iran without consulting the White House.

The outrage the episode has incited within President Obama’s inner circle became clear in unusually sharp criticism by a senior administration official who said that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, who helped orchestrate the invitation, had repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States.

William Kristol argues that Obama views Netanyahu as an impediment to appeasement of Iran, much as Churchill was viewed with regard to the rise of fascism in Germany:

"It is Obama’s failures that explain his anger—his failures, and his hopes that a breakthrough with Iran could erase the memories of failure and appear to vindicate his foreign policy. Israel stands in the way, he thinks, of this breakthrough. Prime Minister Netanyahu stands in the way. And so Obama lashes out.

It’s of course unseemly. But it’s also dangerous. Neville Chamberlain and the British establishment were far angrier with Winston Churchill, and much harsher in their attempts to discredit him, in the late 1930s when the dreams of appeasement were failing, than earlier, when hope for the success of appeasement was alive. When you think your policies are going to be vindicated, you ignore or dismiss critics. It’s when you suspect and fear imminent failure that you lash out.

So we have an angry president, increasingly desperate for vindication of his failed foreign policy, accelerating both his appeasement of Iran and his attacks on Israel….”

I think that’s the point.

Obama doesn’t like Netanyahu and wants him out of office. That has been clear for years, and most recently when John Kerry and others reportedly urged the Palestinian Authority not to push it’s Security Council resolution prior to the Israeli elections so as not to help the Israeli right wing. Which means Netanyahu’s coalition.

The Obama administration attempted to interfere in the Israeli elections, and continues to do so through anonymous sources, including the person who called Netanyahu a “chicken****.”

While I do believe Obama is thin-skinned, I think there is much more here. He has found an opening to remove an obstacle to his plan to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice borders and to accommodate not just the Iranian nuclear program but also Iran’s role as a regional power. That is consistent with six years of Obama policy, and Netanyahu’s alleged breach of protocol changed nothing.

Obama sees an opportunity to separate Netanyahu not just from Democrats in Congress but also from Israeli voters, where the supposed damage to relations with the U.S. may help Netanyahu’s adversaries.  It may be that Boehner and Bibi handed Obama just the excuse he needed.

This entire episode is about the Obama administration breaching protocol and interfering in Israeli elections, not the other way around.

Also see:

Administration Official Criticizes Israeli Ambassador Over Netanyahu Visit

Inside HQ Of 'Obama Army' Opposing Netanyahu

Iran Targets Netanyahu Children For Assassination