Siemens announces massive job cuts worldwide

Dietmar Henning

The Siemens Group has increased the number of jobs that it aims to cut worldwide. At the presentation of its quarterly figures in London last Thursday, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser announced an additional 4,500 jobs would go, including 2,200 in Germany.

At the beginning of February, Siemens had announced the slashing of 7,800 jobs worldwide, especially in administration. And earlier, in October last year, 1,200 jobs were targeted in the power generation business Power & Gas.

In total, Kaeser plans to axe 13,500 jobs this year. In this regard, Kaeser compares favourably to his predecessor at Siemens, Peter Löscher. In the six years Löscher was at the head of the group, the number of employees fell from 475,000 to 370,000. That was at the end of 2012, a good six months before Kaeser moved from chief financial officer to the CEO position. At the end of March 2015, only 342,000 people worked at Siemens, with 115,000 in Germany.

The Siemens board of directors wants to save billions at the expense of the workforce through its restructuring plan and make the group profitable for its shareholders.

In the last quarter, Siemens reported a net income of €3.9 billion. Although this is more than three times as much as in the same period the previous year, the figure includes €3.2 billion from the sale of the hearing aids division and its holdings in the Bosch-Siemens Household Appliances subsidiary. By contrast, results from the industrial side of the business shrank by five percent, mainly due to declining figures in Power & Gas.

In London, Kaeser and his CFO Ralf Thomas emphasized that the global group was keeping “all options open” in relation to its unprofitable businesses. Although they wanted to try to restructure these divisions in-house, there were also “other options”. Kaeser intends to save €1 billion in fiscal year 2016. In other words, the next attacks are already being drafted.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called it a “shocking figure” that “around 30 percent of Siemens’ revenue was attributable to unprofitable businesses.” The newspaper regretted that these businesses were not being dumped immediately. The article spoke of a “tabula rasa”, or blank slate for layoffs, for which employees were not yet prepared “emotionally or mentally”.

As always, the IG Metall trade union and works council representatives play an important role. The piecemeal announcement of more and more job cuts is clearly agreed upon between the trade union, works council and management.

It was the IG Metall and works council representatives who also announced exactly which jobs would disappear. Elisabeth Mongs of the IG Metall in Erlangen in Bavaria told broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk she assumed that probably “several hundred jobs” would go at this location alone. Around 400 additional jobs are threatened in the Berlin gas turbine factory in Moabit. “There is now a total of 800 jobs that are to be lost here,” said Klaus Abel, the senior IG Metall representative in Berlin.

In the steam turbines and generators plant in Mülheim an der Ruhr, which with 4,800 employees is currently the largest site in North Rhine-Westphalia, 450 jobs were scheduled to go even before the recently announced cuts. Now another 400 to 500 jobs could fall victim to the cuts.

Other sectors of the business with low profit margins are to be restructured. Newspapers talk about a reduced workforce in the transformer business. Transformers are manufactured by Siemens in 19 locations worldwide, including in Germany in Nuremberg, Dresden and Kirchheim.

On the same day Kaeser announced the increased job cuts, the company’s Economic Committee met, which includes the works council representatives and management board, and agreed to all of the planned cuts. The never-ending destruction of jobs is part of “Transformation Program PG2020”, about which the works council is constantly consulted by personnel chief Janina Kugel, who belongs to the narrow circle of advisers to Kaeser and who leads the Economic Committee.

The works council is helping to implement the job cuts by pushing out older workers from the business. In 2010, it had concluded an agreement titled “Radolfzell 2” which enshrined this manner of “restructuring”.

Another method employed by the works council is to offload job cuts on workforces in other countries. The works council at the German Siemens sites of Power & Gas, where 13,000 people are employed, immediately appealed to the board that “the planned measures should not lead to unilateral offshoring”.

In this way, the workforces at individual sites are pitted against each other, especially against those at other energy companies such as the French Alstom, the Swiss ABB or the US General Electric Group, all of which are facing the same attacks.

The works council representatives and IG Metall functionaries are handsomely rewarded for assisting in the job losses, which will also dramatically worsen the working conditions of those remaining. In total, the so-called workers’ representatives on the Siemens Supervisory Board received more than €1.8 million in the past year, according to the annual report. Birgit Steinborn alone receives more than a half million euros per year as group works council chairman and deputy chairman of the supervisory board.

Steinborn took over the post of supervisory board deputy chairman from former IG Metall leader Berthold Huber at the end of January. Huber is now not only president of the Siemens Foundation but also chairman of the Volkswagen supervisory board.

Ex-CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling sentenced to three years in prison

Thomas Gaist

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to 42 months in prison Monday by Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema, after being convicted in January on nine counts relating to his alleged disclosure of national security information to the New York Times.

Sterling had been threatened by prosecutors with a jail sentence of more than 20 years for allegedly passing classified information about “Operation Merlin,” an operation launched by the CIA in 2000 aiming to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program using dirty tricks, including the provision of flawed nuclear bomb blueprints.

Sterling refused to apologize or admit guilt after the sentence was read, according to the Guardian.

For allegedly assisting New York Times journalist James Risen to expose the CIA’s involvement in large-scale industrial sabotage, Sterling was convicted on nine counts of violating the Espionage Act, a federal law passed in 1917 and used to target and silence opponents of the First World War.

In recent years, the Obama administration has repeatedly used the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who reveal information about the government’s activities, often of a criminal character, to the press.

Before sentencing Monday, the Justice Department attorneys launched vociferous attacks against Sterling, pressing for the harshest possible sentence and denouncing the former government employee for his “crimes.”

US government prosecutors demanded a “severe” and “substantial” sentence, including 20-25 years imprisonment. Sterling was “vindictive,” “selfish,” and acted out of “pure spite,” US attorneys claimed in a document submitted to the court Monday.

Sterling’s actions had “made the agency appear hapless, even reckless, in its handling of the program,” a US government memo previously stated, suggesting another possible motivation for his aggressive prosecution.

Major figures within the US ruling elite, including former CIA Directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, and former Vice President Dick Cheney, have been implicated in “leaks” of classified information during the past decade, without facing any official reprimand, let alone jail sentences.

On the other hand, Sterling, a man whose supposed “crime” was speaking to a journalist at the “newspaper of record” about an illegal and reckless geopolitical provocation involving attempted sabotage of nuclear weapons production, is now to be locked away for more than three years.

The ferocious assault against whistleblowers and investigative journalists spearheaded by the Obama administration has gone into overdrive in recent years. Last year saw an “unprecedented rise” in reports of retaliatory measures against whistleblowers emanating from the federal government, with a total of some 5,200 incidents, according to the US Office of Special Counsel.

The US ruling class has clearly been shaken by the emergence of growing opposition from within the lower levels of the state, including figures such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

For their combined efforts, which exposed historic US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the erection of a vast spying apparatus by the US National Security Agency (NSA), Manning and Snowden have both faced the full wrath of the US elite.

Manning is currently serving a 35-year sentence in military prison. Snowden remains in exile in Russia, unable to return to the United States, where he is threatened by either a sham trial or state murder.

Lesser known whistleblowers have also received substantial jail sentences, including John Kiriakou and Stephen Kim, who received 30-month and 13-month sentences respectively. In each incident, US attorneys sought to exploit the cases to establish new precedents expanding the government’s power to punish those who reveal state secrets and crimes.

In the lead up to Sterling’s trial, the Justice Department sought to utilize the ex-CIA employee’s connection to Risen to assert its authority to forcibly seize the names of confidential sources from investigative journalists.

Risen has faced years of threats and harassment by the federal government for his research, publication of aspects of which was suppressed in 2003 by the editorial leadership at the New York Times at the behest of the Bush administration. As recently as last year, the Obama Justice Department was continuing to threaten Risen himself with jail time in an effort to force him to reveal his sources, including the source connected with his reporting on Operation Merlin.

Risen declared in an interview with the New York Times last year that President Obama is “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

Seymour Hersh exposes official lies about Bin Laden killing

Niles Williamson

Nearly four years since the US Special Forces raid that resulted in the murder of Osama bin Laden, an extraordinary political exposure by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published Sunday in the London Review of Books has torn the mask off the official narrative by the US government.

The wealth of details laid out in Hersh’s article calls attention to the reality that nothing that any government official says on the record can be taken as the truth, and that the mainstream media operates as an echo chamber for official lies. Hersh asserts that the accounts given by President Barack Obama and members of his administration “might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” author of Alice in Wonderland.

White House photo-op of Situation Room during operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden

Among the claims exposed as fabrications are that the CIA torture program contributed to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout; that the raid was carried out without the knowledge of the Pakistani government; that the Special Operations team intended to take bin Laden alive, and only killed him after he resisted; and that bin Laden was given an Islamic burial at sea from the carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Hersh writes that the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden was initiated in August 2010 after a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to give the CIA bin Laden’s location in return for the $25 million bounty the US government had placed on the Al Qaeda leader’s head in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In its broadcast Monday night, NBC News said that it had independently confirmed that Pakistani intelligence sources had given bin Laden’s location to the CIA in 2010—perhaps the most important claim made in Hersh’s report, and a devastating refutation of the official Obama administration cover story.

The Al Qaeda leader’s location was not discovered via the CIA’s torture program, as depicted in the propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty. This claim and the film were used to bolster public support for the CIA’s illegal operations and further reinforce the Obama administration’s concocted narrative about the killings.

The walk-in told the CIA that bin Laden had lived with several of his wives and children undetected in the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2006 when his location was betrayed by local tribesman bribed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Bin Laden was then transferred to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was held as a prisoner of the ISI. The residence was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy and a 15-minute helicopter ride from Tarbela Ghazi, an ISI covert operations base.

Bin Laden’s location in a headquarters town of the Pakistani military, crawling with security agents, has always been the weakest link in the official US narrative of the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader. Hersh’s account provides a far more convincing explanation of why bin Laden was in Abbottabad—he was being held under house arrest by the Pakistani authorities while they discussed his fate with their American paymasters.

According to the retired US official interviewed by Hersh, Saudi Arabia was financing bin Laden’s upkeep in Abbottabad and worried that if the American government discovered that he was being held by the ISI they would force him to give up the details of the Saudi monarchy’s support for Al Qaeda. The Pakistanis in turn worried that the Saudis might provide the US with information on his location, sparking a conflict with the US. These relationships demonstrate the fraud of the “war on terror,” since bin Laden was being housed and financed by two of the leading US allies in the alleged struggle against Al Qaeda.

In fact, Saudi Arabia has longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, and members of the Saudi monarchy—likely with the knowledge of sections of the US state—financed and supported the hijackers who participated in the September 11 attacks.

Hersh’s source makes absolutely clear that it was the intention of the Obama administration from the outset to kill bin Laden, and that this was enthusiastically supported by all concerned, the Pakistanis and the Saudis, for the time-honored reason that “dead men tell no tales.” The raid against bin Laden’s compound, blessed by the ISI, was nothing less than a hit ordered by Obama, the executioner-in-chief. The informant had told the CIA that bin Laden was in poor health and would not put up any resistance.

The retired official stated that the operation against bin Laden “was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.” A former Seal commander told Hersh, “We were not going to keep bin Laden alive—to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, ‘Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.’”

The Obama administration has maintained since the assassination that killing bin Laden was seen only as a last resort, and that the primary mission was to capture him alive.

According to Hersh, the US commandos moved into the compound unopposed. There was no firefight as claimed by US officials. Using explosives to blow open steel security doors, the Special Forces operatives methodically made their way to the third-floor rooms where bin Laden was living. The Al Qaeda leader retreated to his bedroom where two of the Navy Seals opened fire with their automatic rifles, cutting his body to pieces. The commandos did not shoot in self-defense, the gravely ill bin Laden never reached for an AK-47, and he never tried to use one of his wives as a human shield.

Hersh writes that “a carefully constructed cover story would be issued” following the killing of bin Laden, in part to avoid revealing the role of the Pakistani state in providing the US with information about his location. A week after the killing, “Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border…. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests….”

The White House decided to announce bin Laden’s assassination on the night that it happened, however, in part due to the fact that a US helicopter had crashed in bin Laden’s compound, making the operation impossible to hide. The announcement—which Hersh describes as a “series of self-serving and inaccurate statements”—also provided the White House with an opportunity to rally support for the expansion of militarism abroad and the assault on democratic rights within the US.

The claim that bin Laden’s body was subsequently given a proper Islamic burial at sea from the USS Carl Vinson is also exposed as a lie. Instead, what remained of bin Laden’s bullet-riddled body, including his head, which is described as having “only a few bullet holes in it,” was unceremoniously tossed into a body bag. On the commandos’ helicopter trip back to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, pieces of the body were dropped over the Hindu Kush mountains.

Hersh has come under immediate attack from the mainstream media for his reliance on anonymous sources. Such criticism means little coming from a media that relies consistently on anonymous government and intelligence sources to push the official line in the “war on terror” and in support of US provocations from Ukraine to the South China Sea. In the eyes of the government stenographers in the corporate-controlled media, Hersh’s main sin is that he uses anonymous sources to challenge the official narrative rather than regurgitate it.

Based on the historical record, Hersh is a far more reliable witness than the innumerable millionaire anchor-persons and pundits who serve as apologists for American imperialism. He was the first journalist to expose the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In 2013-2014, he published two devastating exposures of the US claims that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, demonstrating that it was far more likely that the US-backed “rebels” were responsible.

It is far from certain that Hersh has provided the final accounting of the events that led to bin Laden’s death. While it relies chiefly on the account of a single anonymous retired senior intelligence official corroborated by other unnamed intelligence officials in the US and Pakistan, his narrative is a far more robust and believable story than the account spun by the propaganda of the Obama administration and the corporate media.

Al Qaeda In Bangladesh: The Mythology And Pathology Of Terror

Taj Hashmi

Al Qaeda has recently claimed it was behind the killing of Avijit Roy – the freethinking author and founder of the Mukto Mona blog – who was killed on 26th February near Dhaka University. A couple of unknown assailants killed him and severely wounded his wife with meat cleavers in front of hundreds of onlookers, and in close proximity to police, who failed to catch the killers for some mysterious reasons. Purportedly, the India-based Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) has circulated a video in the social media, claiming their role in the killing of the blogger.

What we can make out of the “AQIS video”, about its alleged role in the killing of Avijit Roy are: a) the video cannot be authentic; the claim was phony, al Qaeda did not kill the blogger; b) the AQIS’s taking credit for killing someone with meat cleavers would have smacked of its weakness, not strength; c) it is least likely that al Qaeda – which staged the 9/11 attacks – is desperately trying to get some publicity, and that too two months after the killing of a blogger in Bangladesh; and c) some vested interest group might have produced the video to get some dividends by raising a false alarm about al Qaeda’s presence in Bangladesh.

Those who understand terrorism, especially the Islamist variant of the phenomenon espoused by al Qaeda and its ilk, know as to how terrorists operate; and politicians use the bogey of terrorism for the sake of legitimacy. It not only happens in the West but also in Bangladesh. Then again, while Bush and Blair successfully mobilized mass support for their “War on Terror” by lying to their people, politicians in Bangladesh have not so far learnt the art of raising the right alarm at the right time. We know in Bangladesh, implicating rival politicians in terrorist activities failed in the past. If the latest “AQIS video” was another political ploy or a false flag operation, then it has also failed miserably. Not only a U.S.-based Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) – a private intelligence group – has rejected the AQIS claim that al Qaeda was behind the killing of Avijit Roy, but various intelligence agencies and media in Bangladesh have also rejected the claim as far fetched.

Al Qaeda is not a criminal group run by gangsters, smugglers and criminals, as we watch in Hollywood and Bollywood movies. Ayaman al Zawahiri is not a mafia boss, and al Qaeda has not run out of sophisticated weapons and bombs that it would resort to meat cleavers to kill people, especially those not known beyond a small circle of people. Avijit Roy could be a prime target for some fanatic groups or individuals in Bangladesh, but he was never a prime al Qaeda target for assassination. Al Qaeda and mega terrorist groups believe in mass killing or assassination of VIPs for drawing global attention to their cause.

Nevertheless, the propaganda about the presence of al Qaeda or its “India-based offshoots” like Ansarullah in Bangladesh is politically motivated. Although this sort of political propaganda seldom pays any political dividends (at least, not in Bangladesh), yet politicians are politicians! They never give up playing the game of mutual vilification. Portraying political opponents in Bangladesh – read arch enemies – as Indian or Pakistani agents, anti-Liberation, or even as agents of al Qaeda has been going on for decades.

And we know, as politics is negatively correlated with the truth, so is terrorism, which unlike ordinary crime is politically motivated (ideology-driven) publicity seeking violence against total strangers and innocent people. Margaret Thatcher, as early as in 1985, rightly asked the open society in the West to deny the terrorists any “oxygen of publicity”. Bangladesh would do better by not giving any publicity to terrorist propaganda, let alone using terrorist threats against political adversaries.

Interestingly, while criminals hide their crimes and deny committing any, terrorists publicly brag about their crime, make false claims, and threaten people and governments of further violent attacks in the future. The ISIS claim, “the gunmen were our soldiers”, in the wake of the 4th May shoot out at an exhibition of Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons at Garland, Texas, is possibly a false claim. Then again, White House’s skepticism about any ISIS links to the attacks is an example of good counterterrorism (CT) operation.

We want similar mature behaviour from our government, politicians, analysts and experts. There are hardly any well-versed and well-trained CT experts in Bangladesh. Some of those who think they are, are not free from political bias, arrogance, and ignorance about what they write in newspaper columns and discuss in media about terrorism and counterterrorism. Watching some “terrorism experts” exchanging verbal slurs at each other on television is not amusing at all. These are all signs of lack of CT expertise in the public and private sectors. Politicians, journalists and analysts seem to be busy encashing dividends from imaginary and exaggerated terrorist threats from al Qaeda and other Islamist terror outfits.

Some Bangladeshi politicians raise alarm about the “impending terrorist attacks” in the country, and even worse, portray their political opponents as al Qaeda, HUJI or JMB agents. The cry wolf about “terrorists are coming”, or “terrorists are already inside”, predates 9/11 attacks; and is grossly counterproductive to effective CT operation. One recalls the Bangladesh Government’s cancelling President Clinton’s scheduled visit to a NGO-run rural development project in the outskirts of Dhaka city in March 2000, on the specious ground that Islamist terrorists might ambush his motorcade. One understands the actuality was somewhat different; and the theatrical was all about portraying the “others” as untrustworthy and terrorist sympathizers.

Some political rivals of the BNP played the terrorist card again on the eve of the Parliamentary Elections in October 2001. Colourful posters came out overnight on walls in Dhaka city displaying Khaleda Zia’s portrait side by side with Osama bin Laden’s. This was done days after 9/11, obviously to gain political leverage by portraying the BNP as an al Qaeda operative, hence untrustworthy.

Within weeks after the circulation of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s video message in late January 2014 in the social media, that urged Bangladeshi Muslims to wage an intifada against the Government for its alleged killing of Muslim clerics in Dhaka, some armed miscreants ambushed a prison van at Trishal (in Mymensingh), killed one guard, and snatched away three JMB prisoners, two of them in death rows. This was a false flag operation, another attempt to give credence to the false alarms about the presence of al Qaeda in Bangladesh. Soon it was evident that not al Qaeda operatives but some local ruling party activists were involved in the ambush of the prison van.

In view of the false flag operations, overblown al Qaeda and Islamist terror threats, the culture of vilifying political opponents as al Qaeda agents, and the tendency to generalize all Islamist parties and movements, including the “Islam-loving” BNP and obscurantist Jamaat-e-Islami as Islamist terror outfits – out of prejudice and ignorance, and to gain political leverage – it appears that Bangladesh is not going to recover from the endemic political crisis and social unrest in the foreseeable future.

The upshot being the state of perpetual uncertainties in the country, there has been a rapid erosion in the level of civility, democracy, accountability and transparency of the government machinery. Since the nation has already created so many Frankenstein’s Monsters collectively – through sham elections, compliant judiciary, bureaucracy and election commission, partisan police and security apparatus – it does not need al Qaeda to destabilize it further.

Fostering Arab Springs To Civil And Sectarian Wars In The Middle East

G. Asgar Mitha

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed ―from the Adolf Hitler Book (2008). Remarkably Hitler's legacy is now applicable to the US, NATO friends, Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies.

Soon after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by 2004, civil unrests or Arab Spring started in the Arab world as a wave of popular uprisings against oppressive autocratic regimes due to high levels of unemployment, poverty, extrajudicial killings, and nepotism, preventing freedom of speech, high inflation and rampant corruption of leaders, their families and cronies.

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia in December 2010 and led to the overthrow of President Zine el Abedine Ben Ali in January 2011 after 24 years in power. Zine El Abedine and his family fled to Saudi Arabia with over one ton of gold and other valuables, cash and jewellery worth US$150 million. Saudi Arabia has been known to offer asylum to repressive leaders along fraternal grounds including Uganda's Idi Amin in 1980 and Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif in 1999 among others. Those granted asylum were provided so at the behest of the US and UK to purchase their silence against their former colonial masters. In other words, the neo-colonial powers were responsible for instigating and supporting the repressions through covert actions.

The Arab Spring quickly spread to Egypt, Libya and Yemen and by 2012 it had led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt after 30 years in power, killing of President Gaddafi of Libya after 45 years in power and overthrow of Yemen's kleptocratic President Ali Abdullah Saleh who flew to Saudi Arabia after 22 years in power after ceding power to President Abd Mansur Hadi of Yemen in February 2012. Saleh regained control of Yemen in early 2015 and forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia.

Civil uprisings and unrests followed in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Western Sahara, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, Mali and other Arab countries without the killings and overthrowing of leaders. By late 2013 the usage of Arab Spring had been discontinued. What has, however, replaced it is civil wars with the most recent one on-going in Syria to remove the Al-Assad dynasty which has been ruling the country since 1971. Syria is a testing ground for other civil wars with the most recent one in Yemen while simultaneously testing out the potential for sectarian wars in the region. The civil unrests or the Arab Spring, uprisings, civil wars and the coming sectarian wars are the brainchild of the western powers in collusion with their two most important proxies Israel and the Gulf monarchies, notably Saudi Arabia.

The western interests for the regional wars - civil or sectarian - are to ensure the permanent geographical, political, resources and economic domination or hegemony of the region by the US. However what are most important are three ingredients that are needed for the domination recipe. The first is the covert intelligence provided by the US and the second by Israel towards the understanding of the fundamental tribal psyche that both unites and splits the Arabs as well as the religious divisions along historical lines. The third which in my opinion is more important is the financial ingredient and more so since the financial crisis of 2008 and to maintain a balancing of the economic power from China. The western powers and the US can ill afford to undertake geopolitical risks that might lead to further financial erosion. Accordingly Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been the financiers for the Arab Springs, civil and sectarian wars.

The Gulf monarchies have amassed trillions of dollars of oil wealth in western banks over the past five decades. No one country understands the oil game better than the US who has pioneered the base industry since its inception in the early twentieth century. The Gulf producers not only need the political support but the essential technology to keep the oil wells flowing to maintain their luxurious and wasteful lifestyles. While the US and Israel have provided the first two ingredients, the Gulf oil producing monarchies have managed the financial support to eliminate the risk of financial erosion for the western powers. Moreover the success of the Arab Springs and civil unrests have served notice on the Gulf monarchies that they too are vulnerable to internal civil unrests and sectarian wars within their countries which can be stoked by Iran together with Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The first such step in the sectarian war was initiated by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) which suddenly came into being in July 2014 in full military force in eastern Syria and north-western Iraq. The acronym suggests that the jihadists-terrorists want to establish an Islamic empire in the region but one that, interestingly, has no resemblance whatsoever to Islam (which implies peace) but towards Wahhabism that prevails predominantly in Gulf countries. The western media have suggested the theory that al-Qaeda and other splinter groups formed ISIS but that financing was provided by certain powerful Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabian and Qatari royalists who've been clandestinely led to believe that the Shia Iranians are determined to dominate the Middle East militarily and religiously and are therefore pursuing the nuclear program with the ulterior objective of obtaining the bomb.

Why would the US-EU then engage in talks to diffuse Iran's N-program and the Sunni Arab fear associated with it? Either the west intends to remove sanctions on Iran so that it'd be in a financial position to engage in the coming major sectarian war or create a pretext to derail the deal. On 30 April 2015, US Vice President Joe Biden provided Iran remarks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's soref symposium http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/30th-anniversary-gala-dinner in which he outlined the consequences of Iran reneging on the deal. Biden mentioned that "There’s nothing simple, minimal, or predictable about a war with Iran. If required, it will happen." Following Biden's comments, some muted threats from Kerry in Israel on 3 May and harsh threats from Netanyahu, Iran's Khameni warned "Why do they make threats? They say if this doesn’t happen or that doesn’t happen they may take military action. First of all, the hell you will…. the Iranian nation will not set free someone who wants to invade. We will pursue.”

In all reasoning, the world should hold out the hope that a catastrophic sectarian war can be prevented but knowing the past behaviors of US and Israel of fomenting crisis after crisis in the region over the past four decades, it is difficult that such a hope can materialize now or in the near future, more so now since the Gulf monarchies are willing partners due to their imbibed fear of Iran.

Russell Brand And The Currency Of Revolution

Nozomi Hayase

Recently, the news hit social media that comedian and actor Russell Brand is embracing cryptocurrency. Well known for his political activism, Brand has now teamed up with Max Keiser, host of a popular financial program on RT to help fund his ideas for changing the world. Keiser, together with UK based entrepreneur Jamie Scott, co-founded StartJOIN, a crowdfunding website that combines the platform with its own unique currency called StartCOIN. Calling it a “currency of revolution”, he predicted that “cryptocoins such as Bitcoin or StartCOIN will put all central banks out of business” and help ordinary people create their own economy outside of the existing debt-based extractive capitalism. Keiser gave away free crypto scratch cards and described how StartJOIN specifically encourages the idea of “it pays to share” and how with it they are “monetizing altruism”.

This crowdfunding technology was the perfect app to carry Brand’s vision that he articulated in his latest book Revolution, namely to help people transit from “a paradigm of competition and domination to one of symbiosis and cooperation, from greed to altruism”. His digital literacy project aimed to give away 1000 laptops to bring digital access to disadvantaged communities in East London.

The birth of cryptocurrencies broke the paradigm of money as a tool of political control used to impose a social reality constructed through top-down dictated narratives. Up till now, currency has been derived mainly through nation-state sovereignty and its flow captured and directed by those who control the ledger. Now authority over creation and flow is being distributed to the people.

What made all this possible was the invention of the blockchain that was put forward in 2008. It enabled distributed trust; the ability for strangers to achieve consensus at a large scale without any central authority. Keiser, whose astute financial analysis often cuts to the core of current socioeconomic problems saw the potent power in blockchain technology to address social problems that used to be approached through narrow ideological and political frameworks. He once shared on twitter; “Capitalism is not the problem and socialism is not the answer. Corporatism is the problem and the blockchain is the answer”.

The Creative Power of Math

In the existing financial system, money creation is monopolized by central banks printing money under the supervision of 'professional' economists. Professor of journalism David S. Allen (2005) explains how science has become a methodology that backs up professional legitimacy. Expert knowledge and professionalism rely heavily on the so-called creed of objectivity. This creed is the dominant logic based in a positivist and empiricist epistemology accepted by scientists and experts in many fields. It claims impartiality for researchers, as if they are free from their own agendas and biases, when in reality, as one of founders of sociology Max Weber pointed out, value-free objectivity of researchers is simply impossible.

Under this pretense of objectivity, elite subjective bias and interests bypass democratic consensus and are encoded right into monetary policy. This is a pseudoscience of economics that closes the system off from feedback and till now helped it escape critical examination. It creates math that is divorced from the reality of people's needs and is used to enact the current Ponzi pyramid scheme of wealth redistribution from the bottom to the top. Digital numbers on computers can become abstractions that tend to divert the flow of real work or stagnate real economic activity. This manipulated ledger deprives the power of ordinary people to work creatively with numbers that represent their true value. These numbers have become weapons of mass deception to enslave people through debt, usury and devaluation through quantitative easing.

Bitcoin is a breakthrough of imagination that has unleashed a creative force inherent in man. It provides a way for people to opt out of the singularity of an official narrative within this fraudulent aristocratic economy. Unlike central banks, whose monetary policy is subject to printing at will, with the open source protocol of the blockchain, people can predict monetary policy and participate in checking and balancing of the transactional flow. Also, when the source code not controlled, those who wish to create a new currency can modify it, and this fosters voluntary entry and exit from any system.

Now, anyone can create money and program unique features. When algorithms are in the hands of the people, mathematical processes become subject to democratic peer-to-peer review. Algorithmic consensus redeems abstract fragmented numbers, which through modern oligarchical intermediaries have lost connection to basic human relationship.

StartJOIN crowdfunding is an example of a practical application of this new math-based currency. For instance, the platform implements a mechanism called “the Karma Score” to help grow a social network where community members look after each other’s needs. Users who pledge to other projects are rewarded with coins every Friday. This further incentivizes good will, creating a ripple effect of giving.

Keiser pointed to how decentralized digital currency “combined with Russell Brand’s political revolution can now set the stage for a new era”. This powerful team has also launched a people’s Hedge Fund called Trew Boycott (TBHF). With cryptocurrencies, they fund boycotts to decapitalize corporations that are acting unethically.

Crypto is backed up by real immutable numbers that are distributed through decentralized supercomputers around the world. When this network is powered with compassionate hearts, it can generate a bottom up flow of the will of ordinary people that no state violence or tyrannical central banks can stop.

The blockchain innovation has already opened the floodgates. The currency of revolution is showing that solutions to systematic abuse of power are within us. All we need to do is unite our will with what moves us from within and become the diverse currencies of our unfettered wishes and dreams.

Obama, Osama bin-Laden And Lies By Government And Media

Jon Kofas

We live in the age of conspiracy theories and the thirsting of the public for a story that challenges the manufactured news of the corporate media and government. The reason for this is that indeed news is so slanted toward molding public opinion than of informing, and government so intentionally bent on inducing political conformity the truth of a news story is never the issue. Disinformation has been an integral part of foreign policy in modern history. This is even more so with the US from the Spanish-American War when it launched its imperial global reach. It is even more so in the 21st century of modern surveillance and drone warfare when the US is clinging to the institutionalization of counterterrorism as a mechanism to keep a strong defense and justify the increasingly weak social structure rooted in an ever larger socioeconomic gap.

The latest news story that is receiving modest attention in the US and only to refute it, but a great deal of attention in the rest of the world has to do with the claims of award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In the May 2015 issue (Vol. 37 No. 10), Hersh is reporting that according to a confidential Pakistani source, the government of Pakistan had captured Osama bin-Laden in 2006 and was holding him in a secret compound until the US military operation that resulted in his capture and death.

Hersh claims that in exchange for a payment of $25 million, a Pakistani intelligence office walked into the US embassy and revealed that his government was holding bin-Laden prisoner in a secret compound. Because of the Pakistani government had itself lied about not knowing bin-Laden’s location it was and is in a very difficult position telling what actually took place. It had no choice but to yield to the US on the manner the Navy Seals operation for the capture would unfold exactly as Washington demanded, evidently staged if the sources of Hersh are telling the truth. Even before Hersh’s story, there were some unconfirmed reports that bin-Laden was indeed held in a compound in Abbottabad. Neither the US nor the Pakistani officials would acknowledge it and it is understandable that they could not possibly do so for they would derive no benefit of any sort.

Although Hersh claims that the Obama administration was facing reelection and needed a glorified heroic Osama capture to put him over the top with increasingly skeptical voters, the fact is that the US could not possibly permit Pakistan to simply hand Osama over for trial. After all, the US had spent hundreds of billions in taxpayer money and many lives on the global war on terror and it insisted that it would prevail no matter what. It was symbolically significant for the US to carry out the capture and killing of bin-Laden in the manner it unfolded to prove to the voters at home and to the world that the policy of the war on terror rooted in military interventionism was working. Therefore, taxpayer dollars were not wasted on some wild goose chase where the Pakistanis catch the goose and hand it over.

It is true that Pakistan was receiving about $2 billion, perhaps more covertly and who knows about bribes through third parties to various officials in government, military and intelligence services. US aid was largely because the Pakistani government had agreed to be actively engaged in the US war against al-Qaeda and jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In exchange for occupying Pakistan militarily, determine Pakistan’s foreign and defense policy, and in the process ask Pakistan to accept “collateral damage” fatalities resulting from misdirected missions, the US had to provide aid. It is entirely possible, that Pakistan gave bin-Laden to the US because it feared cuts in aid and wanted to make sure that it secured even greater benefits if it cooperated, especially when it had no choice, according to Hersh. Given the nature of Pakistan’s internal politics and the sympathy within the government and intelligence services, it is possible bin-Laden represented a great deal of leverage for Pakistan and that is how they used it.

The publicly-stated US goal in invading Afghanistan and coercing Pakistan to accept US military intervention on its soil after 9/11 from which to launch operation against the Afghan regime, Taliban and al-Qaeda was to capture and/or kill Osama bin-Laden thus eliminating the terrorism threat to the US. That goal placed the US in a very limited position because it entailed only a military solution was possible to the “manufactured war on terror” intended to replace the Cold War as the rationale for continuing the same foreign policy from the Truman administration to the present.

The unspoken US goal was to establish a foothold next to Iran or to encircle Iran and force it into making concessions on the development of nuclear weapons under the guise of developing energy. In short, the real goal of the US was to determine the balance of power so that Iran does not enjoy that role or at least its power is considerably diminished. Osama bin-Laden was the catalytic symbol that held together an otherwise futile and contradictory US foreign policy with detrimental consequences to the economy drained by massive defense spending while China was capturing market share even in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the US controlled militarily. In other words, the US was desperate and needed a symbolic victory so that it avoids the Vietnam syndrome, considering that Iran and China had actually benefited from the US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Seymour Hersh is not the focus of this story he uncovered but the credibility of the US government and American media. If his sources are valid, there is two larger issues here: 1) under Obama with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State there was a massive lie and cover up of what actually took place; and 2) the role of the media in aiding the government with an incredible lie about what took place. One day after the story was published, the US government has not commented. No one expects confirmation that indeed Hersh is correct that the Obama administration blatantly falsified facts for that would unrealistic. Some sort of a denial would be just as bad, so the best option is to let the story fade, just as the mainstream media is doing.

Assuming Hersh is correct, it is easy to understand why the US would want to cover up what actually took place with Osama bin-Laden. In the 1980s during the Mujahedin war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, the US helped to create Osama bin-Laden along with US ally Saudi Arabia. In the last decade, the US has played all sides of the war on terror, directly and through third parties like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States siding with jihadists in Libya and Syria, opposing them in Afghanistan. These kinds of contradictions of playing all sides are a reflecting a policy rooted not in ideology and principles of freedom and democracy, but opportunism and deception with the intent of stretching out the counterterrorism regime.

The US war on terror has been at the core of the US foreign and domestic policy. It impacts the federal budget, while it has a great impact on keeping the defense industry strong, with massive banking financing behind them. Above all the war on terror helps to keep both the domestic and global agendas focused not on the absence of social justice and the massive problems confronting people’s lives with unemployment, underemployment, low-paying jobs, dwindling middle class and massive capital concentration in the hands of a few billionaires. In short, the domestic and international counterterrorism campaign that the US government has institutionalized that has become an integral part of the American culture keeps the existing political economy intact and the existing social structure is backfiring both at the foreign affairs field as well as the domestic one where democracy has fallen victim to counterterrorism with minorities paying the price in urban centers and the middle class continuing to weaken.
The mainstream media that has always been enthusiastic to reflect and reinforce the views of the government, especially the CIA and Pentagon, is skeptical about Hersh’s story because he does not reveal the informant’s name and he does not offer incontrovertible proof - written documents, audio or video to back this story. Common sense tells us that in the absence of a Snowden-like or Wikileaks-type revelation, it is very difficult to offer evidence of a Pakistani intelligence officer walking into the US embassy and making a deal on Osama.

However, it is important to consider that the US government has denied numerous stories about operations that in time proved the government had engaged in disinformation. This is everything from conducting medical experiments at home and other countries half a century ago, to carrying out counterinsurgency operations in Africa, Latin America and Asia, to assassinating political leaders, as the Frank Church intelligence committee uncovered and where Seymour Hersh was also a key player as an investigate journalist. Eventually, at least some part of the truth emerges and the world will find out some of the facts as they took place rather than the disinformation the media has been feeding the public. For example, for decades, the US government and media denied any CIA involvement in Salvador Allende’s Chile. We know now that they were blatantly lying.

The disturbing element in all of this is how the media has a very close relationship with former defense, national security analysts working as “news commentators” trying to mold if not reinforce the lies and deception. Part of the reason is the connection with defense contractors, but also the role that finance capital plays as well. When FOXNEWS covered the Hersh story, it relied on a former Reagan administration official on security who simply denied that there is any legitimacy to what Hersh is claiming because he cannot prove it. Her argument was that she believed the CIA director whom she has known for years and “he is a good man” who presumably would not lie on a serious matter such as this. In other words, the media always reinforces the official version until it becomes politically necessary to do so, let us say to use the information Hersh has uncovered against Hillary Clinton running for president because she too was part of the alleged Obama lie on Osama bin-Laden.

Exactly 70 years ago (1941), Orson Welles made Citizen Kane based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst whose newspapers molded public opinion and influenced politics to a degree that some argue the corporate press determined the course of politics instead of reporting it in an open society where people are provided with information from all sides and all perspectives so they can make up their own minds. In an open society "Citizen Murdoch" and corporations with management that thinks like Murdoch have the right to present their views freely and to reinforce disinformation that the CIA and other government agencies dish out. We know that to expand a media empire or an internet corporation that shares private information with the NSA means insider political influence will result in political favors and contracts among other perks for the media and communications industry.

In a democratic society, the public is 'consuming news' often unaware that it is really disinformation. This is a major reason that conspiracy theories have become fso popular. For example, the more that the US tried to demonize Putin over the Ukraine crisis, the more the disinformation was backfiring, leaving the Obama team to argue that more money was needed to devote on countering the Russia propaganda campaign. This reveals that the only response for the ineffective disinformation campaign was more disinformation, as though the Russians enjoy such a ubiquitous influence over Western public opinion.

Time will prove if the Hersh story is legitimate, if it is partially true, if it is even worse than he described it. For now, we are left with the Obama administration that came to office in 2009 with the pledge to end exactly the kind of practices he has been pursuing in foreign policy and in the process lying to the American people, as in the case of US drones killing of a US and Italian hostage in January 2015. This does not mean that the world will ever know a single version of what took place with Osama bin-Laden, the Pakistanis and the Americans, but a clearer picture will emerge at some point. Meanwhile, the foreign policy of destabilizing the Middle East, the foreign policy of contradictions, and the defense policy of outspending all rivals to maintain Pax American will continue until it brings the nation deeper in debt, economically weaker with a dwindling middle class in a country where the word democracy will not have much meaning.

War Threat Rises As Economy Declines

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts, Keynote Address to the Annual Conference of the Financial West Group, New Orleans, May 7, 2015

The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs offshoring, and financial deregulation. In these events we find the basis of our foreign policy problems and our economic problems.

The United States has always had a good opinion of itself, but with the Soviet collapse self-satisfaction reached new heights. We became the exceptional people, the indispensable people, the country chosen by history to exercise hegemony over the world. This neoconservative doctrine releases the US government from constraints of international law and allows Washington to use coercion against sovereign states in order to remake the world in its own image.

To protect Washington’s unique Uni-power status that resulted from the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 penned what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. This doctrine is the basis for Washington’s foreign policy. The doctrine states:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

In March of this year the Council on Foreign Relations extended this doctrine to China.

Washington is now committed to blocking the rise of two large nuclear-armed countries. This commitment is the reason for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda. China is now confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington’s control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests.

9/11 served to launch the neoconservatives’ war for hegemony in the Middle East. 9/11 also served to launch the domestic police state. While civil liberties have shriveled at home, the US has been at war for almost the entirety of the 21st century, wars that have cost us, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, at least $6 trillion dollars. These wars have gone very badly. They have destabilized governments in an important energy producing area. And the wars have vastly multiplied the “terrorists,” the quelling of which was the official reason for the wars.

Just as the Soviet collapse unleashed US hegemony, it gave rise to jobs offshoring. The Soviet collapse convinced China and India to open their massive underutilized labor markets to US capital. US corporations, with any reluctant ones pushed by large retailers and Wall Street’s threat of financing takeovers, moved manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs, such as software engineering, abroad.

This decimated the American middle class and removed ladders of upward mobility. US GDP and tax base moved with the jobs to China and India. US real median family incomes ceased to grow and declined. Without income growth to drive the economy, Alan Greenspan resorted to an expansion of consumer debt, which has run its course. Currently there is nothing to drive the economy.

When the goods and services produced by offshored jobs are brought to the US to be sold, they enter as imports, thus worsening the trade balance. Foreigners use their trade surpluses to acquire US bonds, equities, companies, and real estate. Consequently, interests, dividends, capital gains, and rents are redirected from Americans to foreigners. This worsens the current account deficit.

In order to protect the dollar’s exchange value in the face of large current account deficits and money creation in support of the balance sheets of “banks too big to fail,” Washington has the Japanese and European central banks printing money hand over fist. The printing of yen and euros offsets the printing of dollars and thus protects the dollar’s exchange value.

The Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking had been somewhat eroded prior to the total repeal during the second term of the Clinton regime. This repeal, together with the failure to regulate over the counter derivatives, the removal of position limits on speculators, and the enormous financial concentration that resulted from the dead letter status of anti-trust laws, produced not free market utopia but a serious and ongoing financial crisis. The liquidity issued in behalf of this crisis has resulted in stock and bond market bubbles.

Implications, consequences, solutions:

When Russia blocked the Obama regime’s planned invasion of Syria and intended bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that while they had been preoccupied with their wars in the Middle East and Africa for a decade, Putin had restored the Russian economy and military.

The first objective of the Wolfowitz doctrine–to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival–had been breached. Here was Russia telling the US “No.” The British Parliament joined in by vetoing UK participation in a US invasion of Syria. The Uni-Power status was shaken.

This redirected the attention of the neoconservatives from the Middle East to Russia. Over the previous decade Washington had invested $5 billion in financing up-and-coming politicians in Ukraine and non-governmental organizations that could be sent into the streets in protests.

When the president of Ukraine did a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed association of Ukraine with the EU, he saw that it didn’t pay and rejected it. At that point Washington called the NGOs into the streets. The neo-nazis added the violence and the government unprepared for violence collapsed.

Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt chose the new Ukrainian government and established a vassal regime in Ukraine.

Washington hoped to use the coup to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Russia’s only warm water port. However, Crimea, for centuries a part of Russia, elected to return to Russia. Washington was frustrated, but recovered from disappointment and described Crimean self-determination as Russian invasion and annexation. Washington used this propaganda to break up Europe’s economic and political relationships with Russia by pressuring Europe into sanctions against Russia.

The sanctions have had adverse impacts on Europe. Additionally, Europeans are concerned with Washington’s growing belligerence. Europe has nothing to gain from conflict with Russia and fears being pushed into war. There are indications that some European governments are considering a foreign policy independent of Washington’s.

The virulent anti-Russian propaganda and demonization of Putin has destroyed Russian confidence in the West. With the NATO commander Breedlove demanding more money, more troops, more bases on Russia’s borders, the situation is dangerous. In a direct military challenge to Moscow, Washington is seeking to incorporate both Ukraine and Georgia, two former Russian provinces, into NATO.

On the economic scene the dollar as reserve currency is a problem for the entire world. Sanctions and other forms of American financial imperialism are causing countries, including very large ones, to leave the dollar payments system. As foreign trade is increasingly conducted without recourse to the US dollar, the demand for dollars drops, but the supply has been greatly expanded as a result of Quantitative Easing. Because of offshored production and US dependence on imports, a drop in the dollar’s exchange value would result in domestic inflation, further lowering US living standards and threatening the rigged, stock, bond, and precious metal markets.

The real reason for Quantitative Easing is to support the banks’ balance sheets. However, the official reason is to stimulate the economy and sustain economic recovery. The only sign of recovery is real GDP which shows up as positive only because the deflator is understated.

The evidence is clear that there has been no economic recovery. With the first quarter GDP negative and the second quarter likely to be negative as well, the second-leg of the long downturn could begin this summer.

Moreover, the current high unemployment (23 percent) is different from previous unemployment. In the postwar 20th century, the Federal Reserve dealt with inflation by cooling down the economy. Sales would decline, inventories would build up, and layoffs would occur. As unemployment rose, the Fed would reverse course and workers would be called back to their jobs. Today the jobs are no longer there. They have been moved offshore. The factories are gone. There are no jobs to which to call workers back.

To restore the economy requires that offshoring be reversed and the jobs brought back to the US. This could be done by changing the way corporations are taxed. The tax rate on corporate profit could be determined by the geographic location at which corporations add value to the products that they market in the US. If the goods and services are produced offshore, the tax rate would be high. If the goods and services are produced domestically, the tax rate could be low. The tax rates could be set to offset the lower costs of producing abroad.

Considering the lobbying power of transnational corporations and Wall Street, this is an unlikely reform. My conclusion is that the US economy will continue its decline.

On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America’s self-image as the “exceptional, indispensable” country with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war. Neither Russia nor China will accept the vassalage status accepted by the UK, Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The Wolfowitz Doctrine makes it clear that the price of world peace is the world’s acceptance of Washington’s hegemony.

Therefore, unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our likely future.

Washington’s aggression and blatant propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic alliance. Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebration of the defeat of Hitler is a historical turning point. Western governments boycotted the celebration, and the Chinese were there in their place. For the first time Chinese soldiers marched in the parade with Russian soldiers, and the president of China sat next to the president of Russia.

The Saker’s report on the Moscow celebration is interesting. http://thesaker.is/todays-victory-day-celebrations-in-moscow-mark-a-turning-point-in-russian-history/ Especially note the chart of World War II casualties. Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia that defeated Hitler. In the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out of the story the Red Army’s destruction of the Wehrmacht. In line with the rewritten history, Obama’s remarks on the 70th anniversary of Germany’s surrender mentioned only US forces. In contrast Putin expressed gratitude to “the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory.” http://thesaker.is/15865/

For many years now the President of Russia has made the point publicly that the West does not listen to Russia. Washington and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan do not hear when Russia says “don’t push us this hard, we are not
your enemy. We want to be your partners.”

As the years have passed without Washington hearing, Russia and China have finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war. Had there been any intelligent, qualified people in the National Security Council, the State Department, or the Pentagon, Washington would have been warned away from the neocon policy of sowing distrust. But with only neocon hubris present in the government, Washington made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity.

German Firestorm Rises About Angela Merkel's Lies

Eric Zuesse

Starting on Friday May 8th, some German news media have been reporting on the release of previously secret emails from the office of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These emails make clear that when her underlings have said, ever since 2013, that the U.S. has promised to stop tapping the phones and other communications of Germans and even of the German Chancellor herself, no such promise had actually been received from anyone in the U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama. Instead, this claim from the Chancellor's office was being made simply in order for her to be able to win the 22 September 2013 parliamentary elections. It was contrary to fact. And it still is.

North German TV headlined on 8 May 2015, “No-Spy-Abkommen war nie in Sicht,” or “No Agreement Against Spying Was Even Considered,” and reported that Merkel's office had received on 19 July 2013 from Obama's Advisor Karen Donfried an email saying that she could only convey “sad news” to Merkel, despite “the difficult situation of the Chancellor,” and that this sad news was that, "the question of whether German law on German soil is respected” isn't one that the U.S. can deal with, because, "Here, the focus of course is that we comply with the U.S. law.” The North German TV report said, “United States showed little interest in no-spy agreement.” In other words: Obama was communictiong through his underlings that he would not even consider Chancellor Merkel's request for Obama's people to stop spying on any German they wish to spy on — the spying would simply continue, on a routine basis. 

Subsequently, in January of 2014, Merkel's office tried again. and asked on January 7th, whether the Chancellor's office was understanding things correctly, that the text which the U.S. is willing to offer “does not exclude the possibility that the U.S. Government will spy on Geman citizens without our consent and without our knowledge … correct me if I'm wrong.” The very next day was received: “You're right — there will be no no-spy agreement, and I think that everybody on our side has clearly expressed this.”

The news-report further says: "Publicly, the Federal Government still gives the impression, a no-spy deal will come. Regarding the status of the negotiations, the Government refers to the confidentiality of the talks.” In other words: this lie continues, and “the talks” are imaginary — that's just another lie from the Chancellor's office.

The next day, on Saturday May 9th, Der Spiegel headlined, “Lüge über No-Spy-Abkommen: SPD fordert Erklärung von Kanzleramt,” or “Lie about No-Spy Agreement: SPD calls for Explanation from the Chancellery,” and Spiegelrevealed that Merkel's chief official who was handling this matter had said, just days before the 22 September 2013 parliamentary elections, that, “Clearly, for electoral reasons, an untruth must be told." 

On Sunday, May 10th, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a normally pro-Merkel magazine, bannered, “No-Spy-Abkommen: SPD wirft Kanzleramt Täuschung vor” or “No-Spy Agreement: SPD raises Chancellery deception,” and reported that the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Left Party, all intended to raise the issue of this ongoing lie by the nation's leader, in the coming political campaign season.

Already, Spiegel had run a major news story, on May 4th, “America's Willing Helper: Intelligence Scandal Puts Merkel in Tight Place,” detailing instances in which the Obama Administration and the George W. Bush Administration before it, had used this snooping in order to obtain commercial advantage for U.S.-based firms against firms that are based in Germany. For example: "By 2010 at the latest, the Chancellery had received indications that the NSA had attempted to spy on European firms, including EADS, the European aerospace and defense company that is partly owned by German shareholders.” Moreover, “It appears that the terms of the agreement [that the U.S. had signed with Germany back in April 2002 not to spy on German companies] were largely forgotten,” or, at any rate, they were ignored by the U.S. Government — and this still is the case.