Will the Neocon’s Bitch, the European Union be Put Down?

Will the European Union, the Neocon’s bitch, be put down?  The world is littered with the hollowed out carcasses of nations like Greece and Ukraine, lured into the EU with promises of loans.  But those loans have repayment terms that Payday Lenders and mafia hit men would salivate over, in other words the loans were designed to be a death spiral.

The European Union may be on the verge of collapse according to The Nation:

Excerpt:

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell a quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States squandered its peace dividend in an attempt to maintain global dominance and Europe quietly became more prosperous, more integrated and more of a player in international affairs….

… the European project is currently teetering on the edge of failure. Growth is anemic at best and socio-economic inequality is on the rise. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe, even relatively successful Poland, have failed to bridge the income gap with the richer half of the continent. And the highly indebted periphery is in revolt….

When the Virtuous Turn Vicious

For decades, European integration created a virtuous circle—prosperity generating political support for further integration that, in turn, grew the European economy. It was a winning formula in a competitive world.

I think they are talking about the Clinton Economy when all boats were lifted.  Through raising taxes on the rich, welfare reform, heavy investment in science and technology, 401K retirement accounts, tuition reimbursement, paid internships, low mortgage rate loans, and a highly regulated banking system the Clinton years rose all ships. 

However, as the European model has become associated with austerity, not prosperity, that virtuous circle has turned vicious. A challenge to the Eurozone in one country, a repeal of open borders in another, the reinstitution of the death penalty in a third—it,  too, is a process that could feed on itself, potentially sending the EU into a death spiral, even if, at first, no member states take the fateful step of withdrawing.

Yes, indeed the treachery of the U.S. Supreme Court has turned America into a Taliban style government.  Science, logic and reason are no longer part of America’s lexicon and the European Union has been dragged down into the medieval abyss of darkness and ignorance.  From Reader SupportedNews:

Excerpt:

Don't ever claim that Republican Supreme Court judges are not activists. Selecting Bush President resulted in two wars at a cost estimated at $4 trillion accompanied by tax breaks for the wealthiest, a full-scale assault on civil liberties, an invasive, ineffective 'homeland security' bureaucracy, criminal acts including torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, secret government, and an agenda that will make us a fascist, militarized empire.

In selecting Bush, the Court assured the wreck of our republic. His legacy lives on in the Supreme Court.

Yes, America we hardly recognize you.

The Court has sided with corporate interests consistently for a long time: In its 'wisdom', it decided that corporations are people, some with religious beliefs, whose only motive is profit, and that money is speech. The Citizens United and McKutcheon rulings will complete our transition to an oligarchy. Elections clearly are for sale now.

A corporate person, motivated only by profit, is a sociopath. He doesn't care if the planet is destroyed by his pollution. He has no loyalty to community. He is no patriot for he has no binds of citizenship and will move to the lowest wage, least regulated country, avoid all taxes by keeping profits offshore, and will buy as many politicians as necessary to mold policy in his favor….

Republicans allowed lobbyists to draft legislation for monopoly industries and they created ALEC. This policy has led to massive redistribution of income, restructuring of the economy, corrupt politics, extreme income inequality, and an economy that is unfair, unjust, unstable, and unsustainable.

Yes, that is the model that was exported to “old Europe” by the Bush Administration and put on steroids in the Obama Administration.  A highly corrupt, untethered banking cartel stealing the wealth of nations through extortion and extraction.  In 2001, after Bush was installed in office, Goldman Sachs packaged a loan deal with Greece and we are just starting to see the details of that loan, and it is telling.  From Bloomberg:

Excerpt:

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start….

There’s no such thing as a “mistake” on Goldman Sachs part, it was a long-planned assault.

On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan …. had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said….

Papanicolaou and his predecessor, Christoforos Sardelis, revealing details for the first time of a contract…. said the country didn’t understand what it was buying and was ill-equipped to judge the risks or costs….

Goldman Sachs understood what it was selling a death certificate.

Goldman Sachs’s instant gain on the transaction illustrates the dangers to clients who engage in complex, tailored trades that lack comparable market prices and whose fees aren’t disclosed.

Harvard University, Alabama’s Jefferson County and the German city of Pforzheim all have found themselves on the losing end of the one-of-a-kind private deals typically pitched to them by securities firms as means to improve their finances.

Those kind of deals used to be illegal.  But when the United States Government was overthrown December 12, 2000 banks like Goldman Sachs were unleashed to bankrupt the countries of the world with their crap investments like derivatives. 

Prior to Gramm Leach Bliley rating firms, like Standard and Poor’s were paid by the investor to rate the risk involved with different investment products, to insure the integrity of the financial instrument.  Therefore, the rating agencies’ fiduciary responsibility was to the investor. 

After the deregulation of derivatives, the banks paid the rating agencies to rate the worthless crap derivatives as AAA, meaning they were safe investments and therefore could be sold to municipalities, pensions and governments who were only allowed to invest in AAA rated investments.

Goldman Sachs DNA

“Like the municipalities, Greece is just another example of a poorly governed client that got taken apart….  “These trades are structured not to be unwound, and Goldman is ruthless about ensuring that its interests aren’t compromised -- it’s part of the DNA of that organization.”

‘Extremely Profitable’

The trading costs on the swap rose because the deal had a notional value of more than 15 billion euros, more than the amount of the loan itself, said a former Greek official with knowledge of the transaction who asked not to be identified because the pricing was private….

I’ll bet that Greek official didn’t want to be identified.

To repay the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed from the bank, Greece entered into a separate swap contract tied to interest-rate swings….

Falling bond yields caused that bet to sour, and tweaks to the deal failed to prevent the debt from almost doubling in size by the time the swap was restructured in August 2005.

Greece, which last month secured a second, 130 billion-euro bailout, is sitting on debt equal to about 160 percent of its GDP as of last year.

Yes, that’s how it works.  The Federal Reserve Bank secretly bailed out crooked banks to the tune of $43 trillion dollars, paying massive bonuses to the cartel members.  From the excellent investigative journalist, Gregory Palast at TruthDig:

Excerpt:

Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony

Ha ha, I love that “Trojan Hearse” how apt.

Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Greece.

Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.

Oddly, Syriza also promises that it will remain in the leper colony. That is, Syriza wants to rid Greece of the cruelty of austerity imposed by the European Central Bank but insists on staying in the euro zone.

The problem is, austerity run wild is merely a symptom of an illness. The underlying disease is the euro itself.

For the last five years, Greeks have been told that, if you cure your disease—that is, if you dump the euro—the sky will fall. I guess Greeks haven’t noticed, the sky has fallen already. With unemployment at 25 percent, with doctors and teachers eating out of garbage cans, there is no further to fall.

Sound familiar America?  That’s the same plan that has been rolled out across America, by the U.S. Senate and especially GOP Governors like Scott Walker.   

In 2010, when unemployment was a terrible 10 percent, a year into the crisis, the “Troika” (the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) told the Greeks that brutal austerity measures would restore their economy by 2013….

Can Greece survive without the euro? Greece is already dead, but the Germans won’t even bother to bury the corpse. Greeks are told that if they leave the euro and renounce its debts, the nation will not be able to access world capital markets. The reality is, Greece can’t access world markets now: no one lends to a corpse.

There’s a way back across the River Styx. But it’s not by paddling on a euro.

Can Greece just dump the euro? They have happy precedents to follow. Argentina was once pegged to the U.S. dollar much as Greece is tied to the euro today. In 2000, Argentines, hungry and angry, revolted. Argentina ultimately overthrew the dollar dictatorship, the IMF diktats and the threats of creditors, and defaulted on its dollar bonds.  Free at last!

In the decade since, the Argentine economy soared. Yes, today, Argentina is under attack by financial vultures, but that is only because the nation became so temptingly wealthy.

Ha, ha.  That’s right Argentina is under assault by the United States Supreme Court ordering them to pay Paul Singer and the derivative vulture funds ransom money.

I was in Brazil when its President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the IMF to go to hell—and rejected privatization of the state banks and the state oil company, rejected cutting pensions and thumbed his nose at the rest of the austerity nonsense. Instead, Lula created the bolsa familia, a massive pay-out to the nation’s poor….

But austerity has nothing to do with economics. It is religion: the belief by the stern Lutheran Germans that Greeks have had too much fun, spent too much money, and spent too much lazy time in the sun—and now Greeks must pay a price for their sins.

The Euro’s Father Describes His Little Bastard

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, would like to pretend that austerity and the euro are two different things, that you can marry the pretty girl but not invite her ugly sister to the wedding.

Apparently, the Syriza chief is blissfully ignorant of the history of the euro. The horror of austerity is not the consequence of Greek profligacy: it was designed into the euro’s plan from the beginning.

Exactly, it was the plan from the beginning.

This was explained to me by the father of the euro himself, economist Robert Mundell of Columbia University. (I studied economics with Mundell’s buddy, Milton Friedman.) 

Mundell not only invented the euro, he also fathered the misery-making policies of Thatcher and Reagan, known as “supply-side economics”—or, as George Bush Sr. called it, “voodoo economics.”

Yeah St. Ronnie of Reagan was the dimwitted spaghetti western, washed up actor that was the perfect face for selling “supply-side economics.”  Reagan’s most ardent of admirers is none other than Barack Obama.

Supply-side voodoo is the long-discredited belief that if a nation demolishes the power of unions, cuts business taxes, eliminates government regulation and public ownership of utilities, economic prosperity will follow.

You know, these policies have failed over and over again, if you measure success by the living standard of the average citizen.  However if you measure success by the accumulation of wealth at the top and devastation for everyone else, supply side economics has been wildly successful.

It is argued that Greece owes Germany, the IMF and the European Central Bank for bail-out-billions. Nonsense. None of the billions in bail-out funds went into Greek pockets.  It all went to bail out Deutsche Bank and other foreign creditors.

The EU treasuries swallowed 90 percent of its private bankers’ bonds. Germany bailed out Germany, not Greece.

The EU is the bitch that has outlived its usefulness and now must be put down.  The Ukraine adventure will prove to be the end of the E.U.  From The Telegraph:

Excerpt:

Ukraine fiasco marks end of the EU’s imperial dream

The EU, dedicated to eliminating national identity, has finally run up against the rock of a national interest that will not give way.

Normally when a country’s people give a referendum vote that the EU doesn’t like, they are just told to vote again to put it right.

Yes, just like the Supreme Court in America stepped in during the 2000 election to “correct” the voters mistake and “make it right.”

In the case of Crimea, however, where 96 per cent of the people voted to return to Russia, the EU was in no position to ask them to think again. Even if they did, considering that Crimea, where the tsars, Tolstoy and Chekhov used to spend their summers, has been part of Russia for most of the past 230 years, that 60 per cent of its people are ethnic Russians and that 82 per cent speak Russian at home, they would be unlikely to change their minds.

The hard fact is that, whatever we think of President Putin, this episode has been the most salutary fiasco the “European project” has ever brought upon itself in 60 years….

For years the EU has been wooing Ukraine with that “Association Agreement” as the next step towards making it a full member. But by pushing its “soft power” right up to the Russian border, this strange organisation dedicated to eliminating national identity has finally run up against the rock of a national interest that will not give way.

And to what a pitiful state this has reduced our own supposed “leaders” in the West. They haven’t a clue what to do.

So the Ukrainians are trapped between a rock and a place that turns out to be too soft to help them, On Friday, when their acting prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, came to Brussels to sign that Association Agreement, the EU was so embarrassed that the ceremony had to take place behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the media. The poor man was not even allowed a microphone, but had to shout out his wish still to see Ukraine as an EU member.

Yep, Yats had to sneak in to sign the agreement like a cockroach avoiding the light of day.

The EU knows it is powerless to prevent Mr Putin in due course absorbing Ukraine’s Russian-speaking industrial heartland, leaving the EU to look after what remains of that bankrupt country, like a dismembered corpse.

But there is no sign that those impotent nonentities who pose as our leaders have yet realised that their ambition to take over Ukraine must now rank alongside the euro as the two leading examples of how their collective act of make-believe is finally hitting the brick wall of reality.

Yes, the rabid dog, wandering around frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon must be put down.  The EU’s rabies are becoming airborne and in danger of infecting Asia, so it must be isolated and eventually put down.  But the illegal junta in Kiev is sticking with the Reagan Thatcher failed policy.  From Russia Times:

Situation in Ukraine ‘nearing humanitarian catastrophe’ – Amnesty Intl

“While it may be too early to call this a humanitarian catastrophe, it’s clearly progressing in that direction,” Krivosheev said, adding that pensioners are the most vulnerable part of the population.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also expressed major concern for the elderly, pointing to Kiev’s dangerous decision to transfer payouts of social benefits and pensions to government-controlled areas.

So what is the response of the illegitimate United States government?  Double down, cut Social Security Disability and send the money to Ukraine for more war.  From CNBC:

Excerpt:

Rebels press Ukraine offensive as Obama pledges action

U.S. President Barack Obama said Washington was considering all options short of military action to isolate Russia. The European Union called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers of its 28 member states.

"We are deeply concerned about the latest break in the ceasefire and the aggression that these separatists -- with Russian backing, Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops -- are conducting," Obama told a news conference during a visit to India.

Good old, tone deaf imbecile blathers on about Russian aggression while Americans abroad are being treated like inbred relatives.  From Tom Dispatch:

Excerpt:

Americans who live abroad—more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government)—often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States. 

America we hardly recognize you, what happened?

Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world….

Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people—in the Middle East, no less—willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.  Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004.

Well Americans were not allowed to correct the Supreme Court’s decision to end democracy in the United States, the corrupt two party system has been codified into law.  The last president elected by the people of America was William Jefferson Clinton.

So now, America’s lap dog the European Union is a mangy disease riddled cur, and must be put down.  In the words of the EU’s neocon dominatrix Victoria Nuland, Fuck the EU, time to put the neocons’ bitch down. 

By Patricia Baeten

Koch Brothers vs. Brooks Brothers Who Will Win the 2016 Sale of the Century?

During the 2008 primary and subsequent election, Wall Street banks laundered three-quarters of a billion dollars into the Obama campaign.  Obama was the first presidential candidate from either party to refuse public financing since the landmark McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law was enacted.  What we are seeing now is the Koch Brothers vs. the Brooks Brothers, whose money will buy the 2016 election?

The Supreme Court and the United States Senate are the architects of today’s elections where people like the Koch Brothers and Jamie Dimon can purchase a government with money they’ve stolen from the American people.

Funny, that it would take “Democrat” Barack Obama to make earth shattering firsts that will affect the lives of Americans for generations to come; I don’t mean in a good way.  It was candidate Barack Obama that voted give retroactive immunity to telecom companies that illegally spied on their customers for the Bush Administration. 

It would be “Democrat” Barack Obama who would be the first President to cut Social Security funding and benefits, first by withholding cost of living raises for years then a “payroll” tax holiday. 

It would be Barack Obama that would take a horrific Wall Street profit driven healthcare system and codify it into law, ensuring Wall Street profits backed by the U.S. Treasury.

So, it’s interesting to see the news that the Koch Brothers are taking a page out of the Obama 2008 campaign book and plowing an amount of money almost equal to that of the 2008 Obama campaign into the 2016 election.  Politico reports the following:

The Kochs put a price on 2016: $889 million

The Koch brothers’ operation intends to spend $889 million in the run-up to the 2016 elections — a historic sum that in many ways would mark Charles and David Koch and their fellow conservative megadonors as more powerful than the official Republican Party.

It’s interesting, that the Republican Party is beginning to feel like a whore that’s past prime and having to do things they never imagined they would do in order to exist.  Wisconsin has become the hybrid of Koch Brothers’ governments with their Frankenstein’s Bride, Scott Walker.  God help the Republican that strays away from their masters.  From PRWatch:

Excerpt:

Money Trail Revealed: Did Eric O’Keefe Pay James O’Keefe for Hatchet Job on GOP Senate President?

You remember James O’Keefe, the guy that wore his mom’s mink coat to look like a pimp?  He was all over Fox News.

In 2014, as March drew to an end but the cold Wisconsin winter refused to let go, State Senate President Mike Ellis (R-Neenah) stopped at his favorite after-work hangout to relax after a long session in the Capitol. After a few drinks, Ellis was approached by what he thought were two young constituents and the veteran GOP lawmaker started holding forth, as he was wont to do.

What he did not know, however, was that his new-found drinking buddies were not from his district or even from the State of Wisconsin. They were, however, on a mission to end his career.

A few weeks later, the right-wing’s favorite attack dog for hire, James O’Keefe, released a video of the conversation showing an inebriated Ellis spinning a tale about setting up a “Super PAC” to run attacks on his Democratic opponent in that year’s election….

..A few days later, the Senate President who was first elected to the Senate in 1982, announced that he would not be running for re-election.

Ellis was an unabashed conservative, but he had split with Governor Scott Walker and his increasingly right-wing party on issues like school vouchers and the corrupting influence of big money in politics.

Yep, poor old Mike Ellis, the corrupting influence of big money in politics got him.  So how does a political system owned and operated by billionaires work for the average Joe?  Maybe the answer is in this article from The Atlantic: 

Excerpt:

After the Spill: Life in West Virginia's Coal Country

One year after the Elk River chemical disaster, has the Mountain State's approach to mining changed?

CHARLESTON, W. Va.—At 8:16 a.m. on the morning of January 9, 2014, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection received the first of what would quickly become an avalanche of complaints.

A man in Charleston, the state’s capital, called to report that there was “something in the air” and it was irritating his wife’s throat. Two-and-a-half hours later, the first media report of the incident surfaced on a local NBC affiliate’s Facebook page: “BREAKING: Firefighters are investigating a strong smell in the Kanawha Valley.” “Is it safe to go out?” asked the first commenter on the post.

DEP inspectors arrived at the Freedom Industries Charleston plant, which sits along the Elk River on the edge of town, at 11:15 a.m. They quickly discovered the source of the smell was 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, an industrial chemical used for purifying coal before it is burned.

The toxic substance was pouring from two small holes, one about the size of a penny and the other half as big, on the bottom of a single storage tank at the Freedom Industries facility, which had not been inspected since 1991. Over a span of at least 20 hours, approximately 10,000 gallons of the MCHM chemical mixture leaked out of Tank 396 and into the Elk River, eventually finding its way to Charleston’s main water treatment plant.

Yes, that is what you get when your government has been bought by billionaires.  Smaller government means less inspections, less safety for citizens, less government services to help citizens when they are injured as a result of unfettered, fascism.

At 5:36 p.m., Governor Earl Ray Tomblin finally issued a statement, an ominous message posted to his Twitter page: “EMERGENCY: Do NOT use tap water for drinking, cooking, washing, or bathing in Boone, Lincoln, Kanawha, Jackson, Putnam counties.”

By the end of the day, Tomblin declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard. A do-not-use order commanded that the contaminated water only be used for flushing toilets and extinguishing fires. The spill left more than 300,000 West Virginians, about one-sixth of the state’s total population, without access to potable water.

I don't think I would want to take responsibility for saying that water was OK to use on fires, have you seen Gasland?

Schools were closed. Restaurants, bars, and hotels were also shuttered. Residents scrambled to supermarkets, gas stations, and even vending machines to secure bottled water, which quickly sold out everywhere. Hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed with hundreds of patients who all exhibited the same pattern of symptoms, including diarrhea, nausea, headache, itching, rash, vomiting, and stomach pain.

Yes, that’s what ordinary citizens get from a government owned by billionaires.  So, when I saw Obama was designating ANWAR as a wilderness area, I thought sounds like that’s one for the Brooks Brothers.  Dirty, filthy, environment killing energy is the Koch Brothers’ hallmark and Alaska is ruby red Republican.  From Bloomberg News:

  

Excerpt:

The president's move to protect more of the refuge from oil drilling has Republican officials in the state fighting mad.

Those are fighting words.

President Barack Obama's decision to ask Congress to designate parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, putting the land off-limits for oil drilling, is not going over well with Republicans in the state, to say the least.

Obama's plan, which the administration unveiled on Sunday, would protect 12.28 million acres in addition to the 7 million acres already designated as wilderness, according to the Department of the Interior. It comes amid falling oil prices that have left Alaska's economy on shaky ground…

“It's clear this administration does not care about us, and sees us as nothing but a territory,” Murkowski said in a statement. “The promises made to us at statehood, and since then, mean absolutely nothing to them.”

Ha, ha.  Hey, Lisa, guess what, Obama doesn’t give a rip the environment or any statehood treaties any more than you do as a United States Senator.  From Indian Country Today:

Excerpt:

57 Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians Urge Senate to Nix Sacred Land Giveaway

More than 70 tribal nations have urged the U.S. Senate to defeat or remove a section of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act that would transfer a part of the publicly-owned Tonto National Forest that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe to a giant international corporation for a massive, environmentally devastating copper mine…

“If such a land transfer provision seems out of place in a defense bill, that’s because it is. If the idea of transferring the ownership of federal forest lands to foreign mining companies seems absurd, it’s because that’s true, too…..”

The Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act is a House bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). It was tacked on to the annual must-pass NDAA along with several other land-related bills by Sen, John McCain (R-AZ)…

….If approved by the Senate and signed by President Obama, the land swap provision will allow Resolution Copper Co., a subsidiary of the controversial international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, to acquire 2,400 acres of the federally protected public land in the Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona in exchange for 5,000 acres in parcels scattered around the state….

Resolution Copper plans a massive deep underground copper mine on the San Carlos Apache’s sacred landscape and has already begun drilling the shaft in anticipation of the land swap bill’s approval.

Well, that would be one for the Koch Brothers, and how arrogant is that?  They are so sure of their control of congress that they already started drilling on Public Lands.  Lands that are sacred Indian trusts.  But then, the Koch Brothers have heavily invested in State judges, and it is paying off big time.  From Think Progress:

Excerpt:

The Nebraska Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that nullified the controversial Keystone XL pipeline route through Nebraska Friday, meaning that Keystone XL once again has a legal route through Nebraska.

Four out of the seven judges on the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed with a district court’s February 2014 decision that Nebraska’s LB1161 law was unconstitutional, but according to Nebraska’s constitution, the court needed the agreement of a super majority — five out of the seven judges — to officially label the law as unconstitutional….

But since just four members of the court, not five, found the law unconstitutional, the Court writes that “the citizens cannot get a binding decision from this court,” and the district court’s decision is vacated.

Isn’t that rich, even though a majority of the judges said the law is unconstitutional, they lost because you need a Koch Brother majority on the court in Nebraska.

“While the outcome may not be what we had hoped for, I believe we have successfully sent the message that Nebraska citizens are willing to stand up and fight back against the politically corrupting influence of rich and powerful corporations,” Randy Thompson, one of the Nebraska landowner plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement reacting to Friday’s decision…

You’ve got that right Randy, you don’t have to tell Ex-Wisconsin State Senate President Mike Ellis about the corrupting influence of rich and powerful.

So now, Obama is opening up the Atlantic Coastline for drilling.  From New York Times:

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved Tuesday to open up a vast stretch of East Coast waters to oil and gas drilling, a decision that could have a profound impact on the economic and environmental future of states from Virginia to Georgia….

In an announcement that outraged environmentalists and brought grudging cheers from the oil and gas industry, the Interior Department unveiled the latest part of its five-year plan for the government to sell leases for oil and gas development in federal waters from 2017 to 2022.

The plan would open up one lease sale area off the southeast stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard, an area the oil industry has long hungered to exploit.

So who will win in the 2016 Sale of the Century?  Will it be the Koch Brothers or the Brooks Brothers?

By:  Patricia Baeten

  

America’s Descent Into Madness: Mop Up Ukraine and It’s On to Cuba

Man oh man, it’s like America is locked in a recurring nightmare of war after war with no end in sight; a nightmare that began December 12, 2000.  The 2000 Presidential election was the culmination of over 60 years of planning, plotting and executing the grand plan, “The New World Order.” America has descended into madness.

Just like Alice’s curiosity caused her to lose her footing and fall down the rabbit hole, America’s apathy and ignorance led her to lose her footing, only instead of a rabbit hole America has fallen down the Hell Hole.

Maybe it's time to put America on the “couch” to try and figure out how America got to be so fucked up.  I guess maybe the best place to start is to look at some of America’s most recent actions and figure out, “what in America’s past caused her to commit such a horrific acts”? 

The world is beginning to realize that there’s something really wrong with America’s psyche.  More and more the world is recoiling in disgust at America’s actions that border on criminally insane. Germany has been having misgiving for a long time and is growing tired of being the sanest lunatic in the asylum.  From Salon:  

  

Excerpt:

Distortions, lies and omissions: The New York Times won’t tell you the real story behind Ukraine, Russian economic collapse

A note arrived a few days ago from one of my best informants in Europe. He had just met across a hotel dining table with a senior German executive, and the topic quickly turned to the crisis in Ukraine and the sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Russia.

I can do no better than give you the pertinent passage in the note:

“… I spoke … breakfast time in Europe… with the head of one of the largest companies in Germany. This declaration was one of the first items he mentioned. I took notes—because it is one of my clients—and here is what he said: ‘It is urgent for Europe to bring Obama and the people making the decisions behind him back to reality.

If not, this will spiral first into a financial collapse, which will slam into all of Europe, and then who knows where it goes after that? Everywhere, far-right nationalist forces are building. Look at the last U.S. Congressional elections, and think what is coming. Will America ever have had a more nationalist Congress?

Man, that sent a chill down my spine.  Germany is right to look at the November 4^th election in the United States and freak out at what they see.  The November 4^th U.S. election has brought a sober, somber realization to the world, America’s elections are sham elections much like the sham election Hitler won.  As a matter of fact, the last time there was an election with that low of turnout was when Hitler was in power.  From Time:

Excerpt:

The last time voter turnout was this low, the U.S. was fighting WWII

The last time voter turnout for a national election was as low as it was on Nov.4, Hitler was still in power, and Mitch McConnell was only nine months old.

Only 36.4% of eligible voters voted in this year’s midterm elections, down from 40.9% who voted in 2010, according to preliminary analysis by Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. The last time voter turnout was that low was 1942, when only 33.9% of voters cast ballots, according to the United States Elections Project.

Hmmm,

The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

Joseph Stalin

The Made in America sham elections are styled in the Adolph Hitler/Joseph Stalin model, it’s the same model that was used in Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan.  If you reject an American Made Sham Election as Syria did, you become the victim of a mass murderer.  

Its wash, rinse repeat but the results are always devastating for the world, but the people most devastated are American’s hostages, the American people.  America has been demonstrating mental illness since December 12, 2000.

I wish I could say the German exec’s question is a good one, but the grim answer is too obvious. They can see nothing in Washington. We witness the single most reckless, destructive foreign policy this administration has yet devised, comparable in magnitude to Bush II’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Did you hear that?  The coup in Ukraine is the “single most reckless, destructive foreign policy of the Obama Administration equal to Bush’s invasion of Iraq.”  Wash, rinse repeat.

President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry wanted Middle East peace to stand as their legacy on the foreign side. Now they propose restored relations with Cuba as the bronze monument. Forget about it. The devastation of ties with a global power, the dissolution of Ukraine and very possibly the ruination of Europe’s barely beating economic recovery will be what we live with after this administration makes its exit.

Wash, rinse repeat.   Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  If that is the definition of insanity what would you call doing the same thing over and over again in order to achieve the same devastatingly horrific results? 

America doesn’t expect different results, America is so insane that they want the same results.  America’s hostages are kept hungry, sick and dying chained in a dank, cold Hell Hole of poverty, war, homelessness, illness, with poisoned water, soil and air.

I am awestruck as news of recent events unfolds. Ukraine is more than an economic, political and military mess: It is a major humanitarian tragedy now. As the German CEO wants to know, how can we possibly arm neo-Nazis in Ukraine while right-wing extremists and anti-immigration atavists rise all over Europe?

The body blows the State Department and Treasury are dealing Russia in response to the Ukraine crisis—as precipitated by State, of course—would be irresponsible under any circumstances for the risks they carry. In the current global environment, this starts to shape up as monomania….

Yes, Europe is beginning to feel a kind of helpless terror, their teenage child is a murderer, just like the Sandy Hook shooter, insane, indulged, armed and ready to kill again.  Europe is feeling the kind of terror where your scalp feels too small for your head.

And on the E.U.-Ukraine pact: “It was recognized only at the last moment that it was a real ordeal for Ukraine to choose between the E.U. offer and the [comprehensive bailout] offer from Vladimir Putin, which was better suited to the realities faced by Ukraine in the fall of 2013. Ukraine needs to be free to build its own relationships with both Europe and Russia……”

Here is what Roland Hinterkoerner, a thoughtful analyst at RBS Asia-Pacific, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Hong Kong outpost, had to say about Ukraine in a recent economic report:

“The country is clinically dead…. There is nothing government or the central bank can do to stop the decline. The population is being pushed further and further into poverty. Food prices are up 25 percent and rent, electricity, gas and water by 34 percent…. This is the picture of a Ukraine that is looking an economic collapse in the eye.

That sounded familiar, it’s like Deja vu all over again just like America after December 12, 2000.  America’s mental illness seems to include eating disorders and food is viewed as an enemy or a weapon.  This is from a 2007 article in Rense.Com:

That bowl of Kellogg's Cornflakes on the breakfast table, or the portion of pasta or corn tortillas, cheese or meat on the table is going to rise in price over the coming months as sure as the sun rises in the East. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the new world food price shock, conveniently timed to accompany our current world oil price shock….

Today we can say almost the same about corn or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in grain prices, for all major grains including maize, wheat, rice that we have seen in three decades. Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains cultivated in the world….

In 2006 more than 50% of Iowa and South Dakota corn went to ethanol refineries. Farmers across the Midwest, desperate for more income after years of depressed corn prices, are abandoning traditional crop rotation to grow exclusively soybeans or corn with dramatic added impact on soil erosion and needs for added chemical pesticides.

In the US some 41% of all herbicides used are already applied to corn. Monsanto and other makers of glyphosate herbicides like Roundup are clearly smiling on the way to the bank.

Man, oh man.  America is really fucked up. So let’s go back to the article in Salon on Ukraine:

But its government is still attempting to channel money into the military to fend off the big bear’s aggression…. The danger for Ukraine is not Russia. It is its own demise….”

Yes, America the psychopath is holding Ukraine hostage in an American made Hell Hole, and it can only get worse.

Bloomberg published an interesting report earlier this month on Ukraine’s external position…. The news in it is that Ukraine’s 2017 bond is now selling at 58 cents, down from par ($1) a year ago.

Translation: The markets are now pricing in an across-the-board default. Kiev currently pays a yield of 35 percent on its debt.

Connect a few dots in the Bloomberg piece. Further tranches of the IMF’s $17 billion bailout, launched last April, are now blocked until Kiev makes more and very deep cuts in public spending…

Hey, is anyone thinking what I’m thinking, Argentina?  Calling Paul Singer, carcass in aisle four.  Now Singer can buy up Ukraine’s debt for 35% of value and then turn around and demand a 200% return, go to the United Supreme Court who will order Ukraine to default on all other creditors to pay Paul Singer.  

Wash, rinse repeat.  Man oh, man. 

Do you see what is going on here? The IMF’s bailout is not marked for Ukrainian social services or any other benefit to the citizenry. All that is about to be taken away, in the neoliberal style. The bailout money goes to Kiev and back out again to the Western financial institutions holding Ukrainian debt.

In effect, debt held by private-sector creditors is transferred to the IMF, which uses it to leverage Ukraine into a free-market model via its standard conditionality: No austerity, no dough.

It’s funny how “bailout” can be used interchangeably with “ransom”.  Either way, you’re fucked.  Do you hear that Cuba?  You are officially in the serial killer’s crosshairs.  

First comes the seduction, “I know I abused you, I know I hit you, starved you, laughed at you, humiliated you, but I’ve changed honey, I’ve really changed."  I’m different now, trust me. 

America is stalking its next victim.  From Washington Post:

Excerpt:

U.S., Cuba find ‘profound differences’ in first round of talks

HAVANA — The Cuban and American delegations sat at parallel tables, eight wary diplomats on each side, facing each other across a distance of about six feet and a gulf filled with more than a half-century of grievances….

…“What you have to recognize,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson (Cuba’s Victoria Nuland) said after the initial session, “is that we have . . . to overcome more than 50 years of a relationship that was not based on confidence or trust.”

Hey, trust me, what do you have to lose?  Come on baby, I told you I changed.

Josefina Vidal, Jacobson’s counterpart at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry….

Even that will require further negotiation. For example, Vidal said, “it would be very difficult to explain that there has been a resumption of diplomatic relations . . . while our country unjustly continues to be included on the [U.S.] list of state sponsors of terrorism.”

Come on honey, I’m different.  Drop the restraining order and I promise you are going to love it. 

If body language and ease of public presentation was any guide, Vidal, clearly on her own turf, seemed far more forthcoming than Jacobson in addressing the dozens of U.S. journalists who have traveled to Cuba to cover the talks along with other international news media. She took more questions than Jacobson and translated her own Spanish into fluent English.

Ha ha, maybe America’s mental illness is of a masochistic nature.  Maybe Cuba will warm up to the overture, give into to the candlelit dinners, the silky soft allure of the romantic music, after all America’s changed, she said so.

But, what the hell??????   Just moments after leaving Cuba’s bed chambers, America was spotted out prowling for kinky sex, a little whip and chain activity.  You know America likes it rough.  From Reuters:

Excerpt:

Senior U.S. diplomat ruffles Cuba by meeting dissidents

(Reuters) - A senior U.S. diplomat in Cuba for negotiations on restoring long-frozen diplomatic relations met a group of dissidents on Friday, seeking to underline Washington's concern over human rights but irritating the island's communist government.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson, the highest-ranking U.S. government official to visit the island in nearly 40 years, held a breakfast meeting with the dissidents a day after talks with Cuban government officials. The State Department said it was an opportunity for Jacobson to exchange views and hear their perspectives.

So Cuba, being suspicious about America’s true intentions decided to use the new “Google” to see what America’s been up to since they split in the 1960’s.   Bingo, welcome to Google. 

From New York Times:

Excerpt:

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects…

With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

Oh, my God, that psycho has been keeping, and torturing hostages in my back yard for years. 

I’m no Psycho-Analyst, but my best judgment says America’s descent into madness began December 12, 2000.   America is in the “mop up” stage of RAND Corporation’s action plan for Poroshenko in Ukraine.  Next stop is Cuba.

By Patricia Baeten