Month: July 2014

The #ebola outbreak…by the numbers: http://ift.tt/1AF9Olh

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) July 31, 2014

 

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

If the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history reaches the United States, federal law permits "the apprehension and examination of any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease".  These individuals can be "detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary".  In other words, the federal government already has the authority to round people up against their will, take them to detention facilities and hold them there for as long as they feel it is "reasonably necessary".

In addition, as you will read about below, the federal government has the authority "to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill".  If you want to look at these laws in the broadest sense, they pretty much give the federal government the power to do almost anything that they want with us in the event of a major pandemic.  Of course such a scenario probably would not be called "martial law", but it would probably feel a lot like it.

If Ebola comes to America and starts spreading, one of the first things that would happen would be for the CDC to issue "a federal isolation or quarantine order".  The following is what the CDC website says about what could happen under such an order…

Isolation and quarantine are public health practices used to stop or limit the spread of disease.

 

Isolation is used to separate ill persons who have a communicable disease from those who are healthy. Isolation restricts the movement of ill persons to help stop the spread of certain diseases. For example, hospitals use isolation for patients with infectious tuberculosis.

 

Quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill. These people may have been exposed to a disease and do not know it, or they may have the disease but do not show symptoms. Quarantine can also help limit the spread of communicable disease.

 

Isolation and quarantine are used to protect the public by preventing exposure to infected persons or to persons who may be infected.

 

In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.

"Isolation" would not be a voluntary thing.  The federal government would start hunting down anyone that they "reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease" and taking them to the facilities where other patients were being held.  It wouldn't matter if you were entirely convinced that you were 100% healthy.  If the government wanted to take you in, you would have no rights in that situation.  In fact, federal law would allow the government to detain you "for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary".

And once you got locked up with all of the other Ebola patients, there would be a pretty good chance that you would end up getting the disease and dying anyway.  The current Ebola outbreak has a 55 percent percent mortality rate, and experts tell us that the mortality rate for Ebola can be as high as 90 percent.

Once you contracted Ebola, this is what it would look like…

Sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. That is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function and internal and external bleeding.

The "external bleeding" may include bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and just about every other major body cavity.

So how is Ebola spread?

Well, medical authorities tell us that it can be spread through the blood, urine, saliva, stools and semen of a person or animal that already has Ebola.

If you are exposed to the disease, the incubation period can be from anywhere from two days up to 21 days.  But the average is usually about eight to ten days.

In other words, you can be spreading it around for over a week before you even know that you have it.

There is no vaccine for Ebola and there is no cure.

Not everyone dies from the virus, but most people do.

Needless to say, this is about the last disease that you want to catch.  And the doctors that are treating Ebola patients in Africa are going to extreme lengths to keep from getting it…

To minimise the risk of infection they have to wear thick rubber boots that come up to their knees, an impermeable body suit, gloves, a face mask, a hood and goggles to ensure no air at all can touch their skin.

 

Dr Spencer, 27, and her colleagues lose up to five litres of sweat during a shift treating victims and have to spend two hours rehydrating afterwards.

 

They are only allowed to work for between four and six weeks in the field because the conditions are so gruelling.

 

At their camp they go through multiple decontaminations which includes spraying chlorine on their shoes.

But despite all of those extraordinary measures, multiple doctors have already gotten sick.

For example, one of the doctors leading the fight against Ebola, Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, died on Tuesday…

A doctor who was on the front lines fighting the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone has died from complications of the disease, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday.

 

Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan fell ill early last week while overseeing Ebola treatment at Kenema Government Hospital, about 185 miles east of Sierra Leone's capital city, Freetown.

 

He was treated by the French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres — also known as Doctors Without Borders — in Kailahun, Sierra Leone, up until his death, spokesman Tim Shenk said.

And two American doctors that went over to Africa to help fight the disease are now battling for their own lives…

Dr. Kent Brantly, who was treating victims of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, is currently being treated in an isolation unit in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, the AP reported Tuesday.

"I'm praying fervently that God will help me survive this disease," Brantly said in an email Monday to Dr. David Mcray, the director of maternal-child health at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. The Texas-born Brantly, 33, completed a four-year medical residency at the hospital, the AP said.

 

Brantly's wife and two young children left Liberia to return to Abilene, Texas, days before he began to show symptoms of Ebola. They are being monitored for any signs of fever, a City of Abilene spokeswoman told the AP.

 

A second American, aid worker Nancy Writebol of Charlotte, N.C., is also stricken with Ebola, according to CBS/AP. Writebol had been working as a hygienist to help decontaminate people at an Ebola care center in Monrovia.

This is not like other Ebola outbreaks.

Something seems different this time.

But instead of trying to keep things isolated to a few areas, global health authorities are going to start sending Ebola patients to other parts of the globe.  For example, one German hospital has already agreed to start receiving Ebola patients…

A German hospital has agreed to treat Ebola patients amid widespread fears of a possible outbreak of the deadly disease in Europe. Over 670 people have already been killed by the disease in West Africa with doctors struggling to control the epidemic.

 

A German hospital in Hamburg agreed to accept patients following a request from the World Health Organization (WHO), Deutsche Welle reports. Doctors assure that the utmost precautions will be taken to make sure the disease does not spread during treatment. The patients will be kept in an isolation ward behind several airlocks, and doctors and nurses will wear body suits with their own oxygen supplies that will be burned every three hours.

Will Ebola patients also soon be sent to hospitals in the United States?

And of course there are many other ways that Ebola could spread to this country.  For instance, all it would take would be for one infected person to get on one airplane and it could all be over.

Federal authorities seem to have been preparing for such an outbreak for quite a while.  As my good friend Mac Slavo has pointed out, "biological diagnostic systems" were distributed to National Guard units in all 50 states back in April…

The Department of Defense informed Congress that it has deployed biological diagnostic systems to National Guard support teams in all 50 states, according to a report published by the Committee on Armed Services. The report, published in April amid growing fears that the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus might spread outside of West Africa, says that the portable systems are designed for “low probability, high consequence” scenarios.

 

Some 340 Joint Biological Agent Identification and Diagnostic System (JBAIDS) units have thus far been given to emergency response personnel. The systems are “rapid, reliable, and [provide] simultaneous identification of specific biological agents and pathogens,” says executive officer for the DOD’s Chemical and Biological Defense group Carmen J. Spencer.

Let us certainly hope for the best.

Let us hope that this latest outbreak fizzles out and that we won't even be talking about this by the end of the year.

But experts are warning that if a major global pandemic does break out that millions upon millions of people could die.

If that happens, many people will go crazy with fear.

And we got just a little taste of some of the paranoia that an Ebola epidemic in America would create in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this week…

A corridor of Carolinas Medical Center – Main’s Emergency Room was roped off on the first floor, near the entrance Wednesday.

 

A security guard was posted outside, to prevent anyone from crossing the line.

 

During a 4 p.m. press conference Katie Passaretti, who is an infectious disease specialist with CMC, said precautions were put into place when patient was brought in Tuesday night.  The patient was traveling from Africa and arrived at the hospital around 11:30 p.m.

 

Around 3 a.m. the security precautions were put into place at the hospital, Passaretti said.

 

Passaretti said they determined the patient did not have Ebola.  The patient has been discharged home.

It is not too hard to imagine forced quarantines and people being rounded up and shipped off to Ebola detention facilities.

In fact, if Ebola were to start spreading like wildfire in this country, many people would actually start demanding such measures.

For example, one member of Congress is already proposing that citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone (and any foreigner that has recently visited those nations) be kept out of the United States…

In a letter addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, proposed that citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as "any foreign person who has visited one of these nations 90 days prior to arriving in the United States" be kept out of the country. He urged the secretaries to "consider the enhanced risk Ebola now presents to the American public".

*  *  *

If you think that is all a little far-fetched since we have been reassured that there is no risk to the US… it's already here…

 

As NBC News reports, Emory University Hospital in Atlanta said Thursday it was preparing a special isolation unit to receive a patient with Ebola disease within the next several days.

“We do not know at this time when the patient will arrive,” Emory said in a statement. The university also did not say whether the patient was one of two Americans battling Ebola infection in Liberia – charity workers Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly.

 

“Emory University Hospital has a specially built isolation unit set up in collaboration with the CDC to treat patients who are exposed to certain serious infectious diseases,” the hospital said. “It is physically separate from other patient areas and has unique equipment and infrastructure that provide an extraordinarily high level of clinical isolation. It is one of only four such facilities in the country."

 

…

 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Thomas Frieden said he doubted Ebola could spread in the United States. "That is not in the cards," he told reporters Thursday.

 

"If and when that happens…every precaution will be taken to move the patients safety and securely to provide critical care en route and to maintain strict isolation upon arrival in the United States," she added.

*  *  *
What do you believe will happen if Ebola comes to America?

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1rOFgHN Tyler Durden

Moments ago, after weeks of relentless humiliation for John Kerry, Israel and Hamas agreed to yet another 72 hour ceasefire – one which if the previous “ceasefires” are any indication, will be broken within hours if not minutes. Regardless, Kerry, who cobbled this agreement after much “hard work” alongside the UN’s Ban Ki-moon, was ecstatic: “We urge all parties to act with restraint until this humanitarian ceasefire begins, and to fully abide by their commitments during the ceasefire,” Kerry and Ban said. “This ceasefire is critical to giving innocent civilians a much-needed reprieve from violence.”

What Kerry did not say is that the ceasefire is merely an extended occupation by the IDF: as Reuters reported, the ceasefire statement said “forces on the ground will remain in place” during the truce, implying that Israeli ground forces will not withdraw. Which also assures that it is only a matter of time before yet another stray rocket is launched into Israeli fields, before the IDF retaliates by blowing up another school or hospital allegedly housing Hamas rockets, and so on.

However, while this too ceasefire will come and go, something far more insidious is taking place in Gaza : as the Daily Beast reports, “The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.”

To be sure, Israel has been quite clear about its intentions and has given Gazans plenty of advance notice:

It’s not like Israel didn’t plan this. It told tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee so its air force, artillery and tanks could create this uninhabitable no-man’s land of half-standing, burned-out buildings, broken concrete and twisted metal. During a brief humanitarian ceasefire some Gazans were able to come back to get their first glimpse of the destruction this war has brought to their communities, and to sift through their demolished homes to gather clothes or other scattered bits of their past lives. But many were not even able to do that.

They will have a chance to do so again for the next three days, or whenever the ceasefire is broken again which will come first.

In the meantime, constant shelling and bombing have converted nearly half of Gaza into a inhospitable wasteland:

What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”

The author of the original article reflects on a world that may as well have emerged from a TS Eliot poem:

In Beit Hanoun the systematic destruction mirrors Al Shajaya. I walk past old men and teenagers trying to lift cinderblocks and slabs of stucco with their bare hands, sometimes in search of a mattress and other times in search of a relative.

 

The desert of demolition only becomes more vast as I get closer to the Israeli border. Individually razed homes and stores give way to gray and white plains of obliterated walls with hills of contorted iron bars and broken-up slabs. Here the bodies are hidden under the new landscape and it will take more than a brief pause in fighting to unearth the gruesome extent of the town’s suffering.

 

“Scorched earth,” historically, means destroying land to deprive the encroaching enemy of its use. Israelis shy away from using the phrase to describe what they are doing because, in Israel, it brings to mind the strategy of the Nazi retreat from Russia at the end of the Second World War.

For Israel, there is a perverse strategy in leveling everything in their path: the practice of systematically flattening neighborhoods is focused on saving the lives of Israeli soldiers, who might otherwise be more exposed to hit-and-run attacks. “Israel is more sensitive than any other country in the West to the death of its soldiers,” says Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi “The death of [Palestinian] civilians is a moral crisis but is without political impact.”

Precisely. And yet the ordinary [Palestinian] civilians, those who have never fired a gun in their lives, lives which sadly have zero “political impact” this is a tragedy beyond words:

When Rania Haels got within 60 feet of the debris that was once her family home in Al Shajaya on Saturday, a machine-gun on top of a nearby Israeli Merkava tank started firing. Probably these were warning shots pumped in her direction, but the 42-year-old mother of seven ran for her life. Now she stays with her family in an overcrowded parking garage in Gaza City and spends her days sitting in a public park full of refugees displaced by the Israeli push.

 

“We lost our homes and so now we live in the streets,” said Haels, holding a toddler in her arms who clings to her pastel-patterned hejab. “This war has destroyed me.” She says at least she knew where her home was. Some of her neighbors could not find their homes as they walked down streets made unrecognizable by the wreckage and horrifying by the presence of death.

 

Rashid al Delo and his 11 children were, like Haels, blocked by Israeli machine-gun fire when they tried to return to their home near the bombed-out Wafa Hospital in Al Shajaya. But despite the dire reality, al Delo, who used to work in Israel but has been unemployed these last 15 years, is determined to salvage his life.

At least they are not dead. However, with every passing day the probability of their survival declines. What is most tragic, however, is that regardless of who is to blame for the ongoing war which is merely the culmination of a middle-east conflict that has continued for thousands of years and whose origins are lost in the sands of time, the international community, so vocal when it comes to the pretense of humanitarian intervention in any other part of the world, is so remarkably incapable to do anything for the ordinary Palestinians who face not only the obliteration of their homes but systematic eradication. All the while the world screams but does nothing.

Why? So that a few rich men can promote their military interests and get even richer: a reason as old as the world itself.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1n8GZn8 Tyler Durden

Moments ago, after weeks of relentless humiliation for John Kerry, Israel and Hamas agreed to yet another 72 hour ceasefire – one which if the previous “ceasefires” are any indication, will be broken within hours if not minutes. Regardless, Kerry, who cobbled this agreement after much “hard work” alongside the UN’s Ban Ki-moon, was ecstatic: “We urge all parties to act with restraint until this humanitarian ceasefire begins, and to fully abide by their commitments during the ceasefire,” Kerry and Ban said. “This ceasefire is critical to giving innocent civilians a much-needed reprieve from violence.”

What Kerry did not say is that the ceasefire is merely an extended occupation by the IDF: as Reuters reported, the ceasefire statement said “forces on the ground will remain in place” during the truce, implying that Israeli ground forces will not withdraw. Which also assures that it is only a matter of time before yet another stray rocket is launched into Israeli fields, before the IDF retaliates by blowing up another school or hospital allegedly housing Hamas rockets, and so on.

However, while this too ceasefire will come and go, something far more insidious is taking place in Gaza : as the Daily Beast reports, “The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.”

To be sure, Israel has been quite clear about its intentions and has given Gazans plenty of advance notice:

It’s not like Israel didn’t plan this. It told tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee so its air force, artillery and tanks could create this uninhabitable no-man’s land of half-standing, burned-out buildings, broken concrete and twisted metal. During a brief humanitarian ceasefire some Gazans were able to come back to get their first glimpse of the destruction this war has brought to their communities, and to sift through their demolished homes to gather clothes or other scattered bits of their past lives. But many were not even able to do that.

They will have a chance to do so again for the next three days, or whenever the ceasefire is broken again which will come first.

In the meantime, constant shelling and bombing have converted nearly half of Gaza into a inhospitable wasteland:

What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”

The author of the original article reflects on a world that may as well have emerged from a TS Eliot poem:

In Beit Hanoun the systematic destruction mirrors Al Shajaya. I walk past old men and teenagers trying to lift cinderblocks and slabs of stucco with their bare hands, sometimes in search of a mattress and other times in search of a relative.

 

The desert of demolition only becomes more vast as I get closer to the Israeli border. Individually razed homes and stores give way to gray and white plains of obliterated walls with hills of contorted iron bars and broken-up slabs. Here the bodies are hidden under the new landscape and it will take more than a brief pause in fighting to unearth the gruesome extent of the town’s suffering.

 

“Scorched earth,” historically, means destroying land to deprive the encroaching enemy of its use. Israelis shy away from using the phrase to describe what they are doing because, in Israel, it brings to mind the strategy of the Nazi retreat from Russia at the end of the Second World War.

For Israel, there is a perverse strategy in leveling everything in their path: the practice of systematically flattening neighborhoods is focused on saving the lives of Israeli soldiers, who might otherwise be more exposed to hit-and-run attacks. “Israel is more sensitive than any other country in the West to the death of its soldiers,” says Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi “The death of [Palestinian] civilians is a moral crisis but is without political impact.”

Precisely. And yet the ordinary [Palestinian] civilians, those who have never fired a gun in their lives, lives which sadly have zero “political impact” this is a tragedy beyond words:

When Rania Haels got within 60 feet of the debris that was once her family home in Al Shajaya on Saturday, a machine-gun on top of a nearby Israeli Merkava tank started firing. Probably these were warning shots pumped in her direction, but the 42-year-old mother of seven ran for her life. Now she stays with her family in an overcrowded parking garage in Gaza City and spends her days sitting in a public park full of refugees displaced by the Israeli push.

 

“We lost our homes and so now we live in the streets,” said Haels, holding a toddler in her arms who clings to her pastel-patterned hejab. “This war has destroyed me.” She says at least she knew where her home was. Some of her neighbors could not find their homes as they walked down streets made unrecognizable by the wreckage and horrifying by the presence of death.

 

Rashid al Delo and his 11 children were, like Haels, blocked by Israeli machine-gun fire when they tried to return to their home near the bombed-out Wafa Hospital in Al Shajaya. But despite the dire reality, al Delo, who used to work in Israel but has been unemployed these last 15 years, is determined to salvage his life.

At least they are not dead. However, with every passing day the probability of their survival declines. What is most tragic, however, is that regardless of who is to blame for the ongoing war which is merely the culmination of a middle-east conflict that has continued for thousands of years and whose origins are lost in the sands of time, the international community, so vocal when it comes to the pretense of humanitarian intervention in any other part of the world, is so remarkably incapable to do anything for the ordinary Palestinians who face not only the obliteration of their homes but systematic eradication. All the while the world screams but does nothing.

Why? So that a few rich men can promote their military interests and get even richer: a reason as old as the world itself.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1n8GZn8 Tyler Durden

With the world waiting for tomorrow’s “most important data of the year” payrolls report as their signal to BTFD or follow Yellen Capital’s recommendation and “sell,” we thought it perhaps of note that this morning’s Challenger jobs data was extremely weak. Layoffs in July surged 49% (the most since May 2012) to 46,887. This is the 2nd most layoffs in 11 months. The heaviest layoffs were in the Western region and also most concentrated in the auto industry.

 

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1m36AhE Tyler Durden

If you’re a woman looking for some fun… we strongly urge you to avoid Turkey. Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc has some strong opinions on the female of the species. First, on Monday, he exclaimed women needed to be “morally upright” and “not laugh out loud in public.” And now, the senior Turkish minister, that some women “don’t have self control and can’t stop themselves from climbing up a pole.” Of course his actions sparked an avalanche of social media posts of women laughing-out-loud and on-the-pole… which is ironic given that Twitter reports that Turkey accounts for 43% of all global requests for content removal.

 

No laughing out loud…

Bulent Arinç, who is also the spokesperson for the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), said on Monday women needed to be “morally upright” and “not laugh out loud in public,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

 

He said women should not “laugh out loud in front of everyone” and needed to “remain descent” at all times. The conservative Turkish politician also said a woman needed to be able to discriminate effectively between what was decent and what was not.

 

…

 

“Stop giving us speeches in morality, instead, tell us about the money you’ve stolen,” btürkmen, another user wrote in Turkish, clearly referring to the corruption scandal Erdogan and his entourage have been facing since December.

And get off that pole…

Arinc said in televised comments Wednesday that those remarks had been taken out of context and he had wanted to comment on the “general rules of morality.”

 

But he added: “There are women who leave on holiday without their husbands and others who don’t have self control and can’t stop themselves from climbing up a pole.”

 

“Anyone can live like this. I can’t be angry against you but I can just have pity for you,” he said.

Which prompted exactly the opposite reaction amongst Twitter users…

 

Yo?un istek üzerine #direnkahkaha
Ar?nç’ ve avarelerine gelsin… http://ift.tt/1kpmV5u

— Xemrevîn (@zeynebduygu) July 29, 2014

 

 

Pole fitness even on holiday ????#PoleFitness #DrunkenFun #Turkey http://ift.tt/1kpmV5y

— Amy Louise Walker ? (@Aimzidoodles) July 27, 2014

 

Arinc’s latest remarks appear to have been prompted by the wife of a prominent Turkish footballer who posted a picture of herself pole dancing on Instagram with the slogan “when I see a pole, I just can’t resist.”

 

The woman, the wife of Caner Erkin, a prominent player for Istanbul giants Fenerbahce, has since deleted the image from her account. Mimicking the Twitter campaign Tuesday over Arinc’s comments on laughing, bloggers posted pictures of their pets climbing up poles or flags proudly flying from poles.

 

…

 

“We know what kind of society, woman and morality you are trying to reconstruct. We are following it closely but we don’t like it. And we don’t choose it,” she wrote.

Which is ironic given the following:

• Twitter: 43% of Global Requests to Remove Content From Turkey

So there is a nation with a lower transparency than the US.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1puwkre Tyler Durden

Submitted by Chris Martenson via Peak Prosperity,

For reasons that have no rational explanations at this time, the US and Europe have embarked on a concerted program to demonize Putin, ostracize Russia, and bring the world as close to a major conflict as it’s been since the Cold War, a time hardly memorable to many in the current crop of our elected officials.

Within hours of the MH-17 plane crash, the United States pinned the blame on Russia generally, and Putin particularly. The anti-Putin propaganda (and if there were a stronger term I’d use it) has been relentless and almost comically over-the-top (see image above, and those below).

The US and the UK in particular, are leading the charge. Indeed, the UK’s Daily Mail managed to crank out an article on the MH-17 affair within just a few hours on the very same day it occurred with this headline:

The blood on Putin’s hands…

Jul 17, 2014

 

The world may have averted its gaze towards Israel and Gaza, but this week the rumbling warfare in eastern Ukraine has been erupting into something growing daily more dangerous.

 

Meanwhile the Russian bear, still pretending to be an innocent party despite blood dripping from its paws, has begun stealthily rebuilding its forces on the border.

 

Now we may well have witnessed the kind of shocking event that happens when heavy armaments are placed in the hands of untrained and desperate militias.

That’s really an amazing piece of journalism to have managed to have figured out the who, the what and the why of a major catastrophe without the benefit of any evidence or investigation.  One wonders who the author’s source was for obtaining what have become very crisp talking points that both the US and Europe are echoing as they exert increasing pressure on Russia?

Nearly two weeks later, neither the US nor Europe has provided substantial evidence of any sort to support their assertions that Ukrainian separatists and/or Russia are to blame for the MH-17 catastrophe. There’s literally been nothing. 

In the meantime, very important questions surrounding the shoot-down have gone entirely unaddressed by US officials and the western media. Why? Perhaps because they raise the possibility that there could be an alternative explanation:

• What about the Russian satellite photos showing Kiev controlled BUK-1 missile batteries in the area on July 17th?
• What about Russia’s evidence that the radar of these units were active on July 15th, 16th and 17th?
• What were on the air traffic control recordings that were immediately seized by Ukrainian authorities, and why have they not been released?
• Why was a Ukrainian SU-25 flying within a few kilometers of MH-17 at the moment of the shoot-down and what did that pilot see?
• Why has the US not responded to nor released the satellite images and data from its spy satellite that Russia claims was in the right position to capture the precise moment of the MH-17 shoot-down?

So far, the entire case made by the US State Department and Obama administration boils down to a few highly-questionable social media clips gathered right after the incident, plus several out-of-date low-resolution satellite photos taken from a private company (DigitalGlobe) along with a bevy of ‘trust us’ statements.

Nonetheless, despite the lack of solid, verified and credible evidence, the current narrative has now been embedded firmly in the media cycle and nearly everyone on the streets of the US, UK and most European nations will tell you that Putin and/or Russia was responsible. 

Similarly, in 2007, years after all the facts were verified and known, when asked  “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”  41% of Americans answered ‘yes’ when the proper answer was (and remains) ‘Absolutely not.’

It’s a fact of modern life that most people really don’t pay close attention to important world events. Due to that lack of engagement, even the most patently obvious lies can quickly become entrenched in the public mind as truth if touted by mainstream news outlets. 

Here now in July 2014, there is a rush towards war similar to those that proceeded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Important questions are not being asked by the media, our once again missing-in-action fourth estate, and unsubstantiated and unverified political talking points are simply being reprinted as facts.

But this time the war fervor is being directed at a nuclear powerhouse, not a derelict Middle East country. And the stakes could hardly be higher. For Europe, even if things don’t progress much further than they already have, economic damage (we don’t know how much yet, or how much worse it may get) has already been done to its fragile recovery. The people of Europe really ought to be asking what exactly they’re hoping to achieve by attempting to box Putin into a corner. 

After all, that might not even be possible. He enjoys an 83% approval rating in Russia, a level beyond the fantasies of most western politicians, plus his country supplies a vast amount of Europe’s natural gas and a hefty percentage of the world’s exported oil. Temporary loss of either would be a painful body blow to Europe, while a sustained loss of oil exports would be crippling to the world at large.

In all of the thousands of column inches I’ve read demonizing Putin over the developments in Ukraine and MH-17, I’ve yet to identify a single compelling answer to this question: What vital US interest is at stake if Russia keeps Crimea and helps to defend the Russian-speaking people along its border?  To my knowledge, it’s not yet been articulated by anyone at the State Department or White House. 

At this stage, all we know is: the West thinks that Russia is bad, and Putin is worse. But, given the stakes involved, we all deserve to know more than that.  A lot more.  We deserve proper and complete answers.

There’s a lot of context to this story. It involves broken promises, desirable resources, power plays, and a dangerous lack of diplomatic sophistication by the current US administration.

Diplomacy and Statesmanship

My greatest concern in seeing the this rush towards judgment before the facts are in — or worse — war, is that the people running the show in the White House and the US State Department are not cut from the same cloth as the old-school diplomats that preceded them.

After all, extremely dangerous conflicts transpired in the past (the Cuban Missile crisis, anyone?) and yet talks between sides were held and resolutions reached, preventing the more dire of outcomes from coming to pass. 

In that spirit, I found this recent piece by Pat Buchanan (someone I’ve not always agreed with in the past), to be spot on:

Is Putin Worse Than Stalin?

 

When then did this issue of whose flag flies over Donetsk or Crimea become so crucial that we would arm Ukra
inians to fight Russian-backed rebels and consider giving a NATO war guarantee to Kiev, potentially bringing us to war with a nuclear-armed Russia?

 

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

 

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

 

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

 

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

 

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

 

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

 

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

(source)

That’s really an amazing piece of context. Past US presidents managed to hold dialogs with Stalin, who killed millions, and Khrushchev, who directly threatened the US with nuclear missiles.

What exactly has Putin done to surpass the excesses of past Russian/Soviet leaders? What the US still refers to as the “illegal annexation of Crimea” was actually the result of a heavy turn-out vote by the Crimean people where 97% of the votes cast were in favor of rejoining Russia.

So, to recap, Crimea’s people voted overwhelmingly to shape their future in the way they best saw fit, and not one life was lost during the annexation. That sounds pretty peaceful and democratic if you ask me. What would Washington DC prefer? To undo that particular vote and have the people of Crimea be forcibly reunited with Ukraine? For what purpose? To prevent map makers from having to once again redraw Ukraine’s wandering borders?

More likely — and this is the part that concerns me — is that the current people in power in Washington DC are just not the equals of the statesmen of old.

In researching this piece, I came across this 1998 interview with George Kennan that I found both illuminating and troubling:

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.

 

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home.

 

”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

 

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years.

 

‘‘I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

 

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,’‘ said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952.

 

”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

 

(…)

 

As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ”This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

(source)

The master statesman pretty much nailed it.  Instead of bringing Russia into the fold, a petulant strain of ‘diplomacy’ took over that goaded and threatened Russia and now we are, in fact, being treated to endless repetitions of oh you know – that’s just how Russians are. Instead we might also note that the current debate seems superficial and ill-informed.

As I recently wrote in the piece on the Ukraine Flashpoint, the expansion of NATO to the east towards Russia happened even though the US had previously struck an explicit agreement not to progress any further. Not one inch, was the vow. That vow was consciously and repeatedly broken.  So who exactly is it that has cause not to trust the other?

The West had the opportunity to bring Russia and its extensive abilities and resources closer into partnership. But for some reason (Military industrial complex anyone?  Campaign contributions from same?), the decision was made during the Clinton administration to violate the NATO agreement instead and move many millions of inches eastward. 

The last encroachment both brought NATO right to Russia’s borders and placed millions of culturally-Russian people under the heavy-handed rule of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.  Some of these same ultra-nationalists were caught on tape recommending that the 8 million Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine should be “nuked”.

Perhaps an idle threat. However, one of the first actions of Kiev’s new government this February was to immediately revoke legal equality for the use of Russian language:

Perhaps the most obvious of the new Kiev government’s mistakes came last week, when deputies in the nationalist party Svoboda, or Freedom, pushed through the cancellation of a law that gave equal status to minority languages, such as Russian.

The previous law had allowed regions across the country to use languages other than the official national language, Ukrainian, on commercial signs, in schools and government documents. When it passed in 2012, it was seen as a victory for the areas where Russian was the dominant language,
particularly in the east and south. 

(source) 

Suffice it to say, there’s a very long list of very good reasons why the Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine might want nothing to do with being under the rule (thumb?) of western Ukraine.

Propaganda

Propaganda is information that is designed to mislead and provoke an emotional response. The covers of western newspapers and magazines have been absolutely choked with anti-Putin propaganda. After such yellow journalism, what sort of dialog, what rapprochement, can be proposed with Putin?

Would not Obama (or any other leader) be seen as ‘siding with the enemy’ if he engaged in dialog with Putin after all this?

That Newsweek cover with the darkened face and mushroom clouds reflected in the glasses is especially ominous.  Exactly what’s the message being represented there? Well that’s easy. It’s Armageddon.

Before you take Newsweek’s views too seriously, you need to know that the once respectable publication went through some hard times, went out of print for while, was bought and is now run by these folks:

Moonies, Messiahs and Media: Who Really Owns Newsweek?

Aug 4, 2013

 

On Saturday, news broke that IBT Media, a company that runs the online business (at least, in theory) newspaper International Business Times, had purchased Newsweek from IAC. So IBT Media now owns Newsweek. But exactly who controls IBT Media?

 

IBT Media’s corporate leadership site lists two cofounders: Etienne Uzac, the company’s CEO, and Johnathan Davis, its chief content officer.

 

But some say that the company is actually controlled by—or at least has very close undisclosed ties to—someone whose name appears nowhere on the site: David Jang, a controversial Korean Christian preacher who has been accused of calling himself “Second Coming Christ.”

 

Before founding IBT, Mr. Davis was the journalism director at Mr. Jang’s Olivet University. 

(source)

So Newsweek may or may not have a larger agenda to push beyond just getting the facts out. It’s another case where knowing that an editorial slant exists can be helpful in maintaining a healthy stance of skepticism.  

But beyond Newsweek, the entire suite of publications ranging from the NYTimes, Washington Post, Financial Times, and nearly every other main pillar of the Fourth Estate have been running with the “Putin’s responsible” meme.

And, it bears repeating, all without any solid evidence, none(!), plus a host of legitimate serious questions that are being met with zero investigative vigor by the mainstream media and complete radio silence from the government agencies that should be examining and addressing them.

This relentless campaign of propaganda directed against Russia (generally) and Putin (specifically) is now at a fever pitch. My caution to you is that you should be actively suspicious of any media outfit that chooses to run this propaganda.

Perhaps their travel and dining sections can be trusted; but I’d advise reading the front section with a huge grain of salt.

Poking the Bear

With all of that background, we’re now at the point where we can understand just how annoyed Russia must be at the sanctions that have been recently levied against it, various of its industries, and in certain cases, specific wealthy and influential citizens.

Since the MH-17 downing and all of those resulting accusations of Russian responsibility, Russia has been accused of firing artillery and rockets across its border into Ukraine. The only “evidence” to this is the aforementioned crude satellite photos taken by a private company. These photos were then drawn upon (literally) to show trajectories the missiles *could* have followed. These very non-rigorous images were then tweeted out of the account of one Geoffrey Pyatt as hard fact. If his name isn’t familiar to you, he’s the US Ukrainian ambassador who was famously caught on tape with Victoria Nuland (Asst. Sec. of State) discussing the imminent coup against then-Ukrainian President Yanukovych.

Next, a western tribunal in The Hague suddenly ruled that the former shareholders of the dismantled Russian oil giant Yukos were entitled to $50 billion in compensation to be paid by the Russian government. Surprise!

In chilling response, a person close to Putin reportedly said,  “There is a war coming in Europe. Do you really think this matters?”

Following that,  the US accused Russia of violating the 1987 nuclear arms treaty by testing ground based missiles in…wait for it…2008. I’m sure the timing of this is in no way connected to the dust-up over Ukraine…

And most recently, both the US and the EU levied additional sanctions on Russia and certain Russian individuals:

Obama Joins Europe in Expanding Sanctions on Russia

Jul 29, 2014

 

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced expanded sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, just hours after the European Union imposed its most sweeping measures yet penalizing Moscow for its role in supporting separatists in neighboring Ukraine.

 

The latest American actions took aim at more Russian banks and a large defense firm, but they also went further than past moves by blocking future technology sales to Russia’s lucrative oil industry in an effort to inhibit its ability to develop future resources. The measures were meant to largely match those unveiled earlier in the day in Europe.

 

“Today is a reminder that the United States means what it says and we will rally the international community in standing up for the rights and freedom of people around the world,” Mr. Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House.

(source)

While one could be forgiven for thinking that the “rights and freedom of people” might include the freedom to vote for the future one wants, and the right not to be ruled over by people hostile to one’s language and customs, apparently the Obama administration has other ideas for the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

The final act of hostility by the US towards Russia that bears mention here concerns a Senate bill introduced by the ranking member of the foreign relations committee, Sen. Bob Corker, that outlines what would happen if Russia does not ‘comply’ and leave Crimea and Ukraine entirely within seven days of the act’s passage:

A GOP Ultimatum to Vlad

Jul 29, 2014

 

Corker’s bill would declare Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine “major non-NATO allies” of the United States, move NATO forces into Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, accelerate the building of an ABM system in Eastern Europe, and authorize U.S. intel
ligence and military aid for Ukraine’s army in the Donbass war with Russian-backed separatists.

 

U.S. aid would include antitank and antiaircraft weapons.

 

S. 2277 would direct the secretary of state to intensify efforts to strengthen democratic institutions inside the Russian Federation, e.g., subvert Vladimir Putin’s government, looking toward regime change.

 

If Putin has not vacated Crimea and terminated support for Ukraine’s separatist rebels within seven days of passage of the Corker Ultimatum, sweeping sanctions would be imposed on Russian officials, banks and energy companies, including Gazprom.

 

Economic relations between us would be virtually severed.

 

In short, this is an ultimatum to Russia that she faces a new Cold War if she does not get out of Ukraine and Crimea, and it is a U.S. declaration that we will now regard three more former Soviet republics – Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia – as allies.

(source)

Poor George Kennan. Once again the US Senate is operating without the benefit of either humility or historical perspective.

The people of Russia are not in any mood to be bullied by the US Senate, just as the US Senate would refuse to be dictated to by the Russian parliament.  That’s just common sense.

It’s completely obvious that the impact of any such Act passed by the US legislature would be to further erode, if not collapse, relations and economic ties between Russia and the US.

The main conclusion here is that not only is the US poking the bear, but it is doing so with increasing frequency and upping the ante dangerously with each step.

In Part 2: How The Coming Confrontation Will Unfold, we examine the most likely scenarios for where the current tensions between the West and Russia may head. Whichever path we head down, there will be at least some degree of pain experiences by the West, which Europe will feel first and worst (though the US will not be immune). And, sadly, it’s safe to say that this East-West conflict will only accelerate the coming correction of the unstable over-leveraged, bubblicious world markets.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1oSGDGt Tyler Durden

Submitted by Chris Martenson via Peak Prosperity,

For reasons that have no rational explanations at this time, the US and Europe have embarked on a concerted program to demonize Putin, ostracize Russia, and bring the world as close to a major conflict as it’s been since the Cold War, a time hardly memorable to many in the current crop of our elected officials.

Within hours of the MH-17 plane crash, the United States pinned the blame on Russia generally, and Putin particularly. The anti-Putin propaganda (and if there were a stronger term I’d use it) has been relentless and almost comically over-the-top (see image above, and those below).

The US and the UK in particular, are leading the charge. Indeed, the UK’s Daily Mail managed to crank out an article on the MH-17 affair within just a few hours on the very same day it occurred with this headline:

The blood on Putin’s hands…

Jul 17, 2014

 

The world may have averted its gaze towards Israel and Gaza, but this week the rumbling warfare in eastern Ukraine has been erupting into something growing daily more dangerous.

 

Meanwhile the Russian bear, still pretending to be an innocent party despite blood dripping from its paws, has begun stealthily rebuilding its forces on the border.

 

Now we may well have witnessed the kind of shocking event that happens when heavy armaments are placed in the hands of untrained and desperate militias.

That’s really an amazing piece of journalism to have managed to have figured out the who, the what and the why of a major catastrophe without the benefit of any evidence or investigation.  One wonders who the author’s source was for obtaining what have become very crisp talking points that both the US and Europe are echoing as they exert increasing pressure on Russia?

Nearly two weeks later, neither the US nor Europe has provided substantial evidence of any sort to support their assertions that Ukrainian separatists and/or Russia are to blame for the MH-17 catastrophe. There’s literally been nothing. 

In the meantime, very important questions surrounding the shoot-down have gone entirely unaddressed by US officials and the western media. Why? Perhaps because they raise the possibility that there could be an alternative explanation:

• What about the Russian satellite photos showing Kiev controlled BUK-1 missile batteries in the area on July 17th?
• What about Russia’s evidence that the radar of these units were active on July 15th, 16th and 17th?
• What were on the air traffic control recordings that were immediately seized by Ukrainian authorities, and why have they not been released?
• Why was a Ukrainian SU-25 flying within a few kilometers of MH-17 at the moment of the shoot-down and what did that pilot see?
• Why has the US not responded to nor released the satellite images and data from its spy satellite that Russia claims was in the right position to capture the precise moment of the MH-17 shoot-down?

So far, the entire case made by the US State Department and Obama administration boils down to a few highly-questionable social media clips gathered right after the incident, plus several out-of-date low-resolution satellite photos taken from a private company (DigitalGlobe) along with a bevy of ‘trust us’ statements.

Nonetheless, despite the lack of solid, verified and credible evidence, the current narrative has now been embedded firmly in the media cycle and nearly everyone on the streets of the US, UK and most European nations will tell you that Putin and/or Russia was responsible. 

Similarly, in 2007, years after all the facts were verified and known, when asked  “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”  41% of Americans answered ‘yes’ when the proper answer was (and remains) ‘Absolutely not.’

It’s a fact of modern life that most people really don’t pay close attention to important world events. Due to that lack of engagement, even the most patently obvious lies can quickly become entrenched in the public mind as truth if touted by mainstream news outlets. 

Here now in July 2014, there is a rush towards war similar to those that proceeded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Important questions are not being asked by the media, our once again missing-in-action fourth estate, and unsubstantiated and unverified political talking points are simply being reprinted as facts.

But this time the war fervor is being directed at a nuclear powerhouse, not a derelict Middle East country. And the stakes could hardly be higher. For Europe, even if things don’t progress much further than they already have, economic damage (we don’t know how much yet, or how much worse it may get) has already been done to its fragile recovery. The people of Europe really ought to be asking what exactly they’re hoping to achieve by attempting to box Putin into a corner. 

After all, that might not even be possible. He enjoys an 83% approval rating in Russia, a level beyond the fantasies of most western politicians, plus his country supplies a vast amount of Europe’s natural gas and a hefty percentage of the world’s exported oil. Temporary loss of either would be a painful body blow to Europe, while a sustained loss of oil exports would be crippling to the world at large.

In all of the thousands of column inches I’ve read demonizing Putin over the developments in Ukraine and MH-17, I’ve yet to identify a single compelling answer to this question: What vital US interest is at stake if Russia keeps Crimea and helps to defend the Russian-speaking people along its border?  To my knowledge, it’s not yet been articulated by anyone at the State Department or White House. 

At this stage, all we know is: the West thinks that Russia is bad, and Putin is worse. But, given the stakes involved, we all deserve to know more than that.  A lot more.  We deserve proper and complete answers.

There’s a lot of context to this story. It involves broken promises, desirable resources, power plays, and a dangerous lack of diplomatic sophistication by the current US administration.

Diplomacy and Statesmanship

My greatest concern in seeing the this rush towards judgment before the facts are in — or worse — war, is that the people running the show in the White House and the US State Department are not cut from the same cloth as the old-school diplomats that preceded them.

After all, extremely dangerous conflicts transpired in the past (the Cuban Missile crisis, anyone?) and yet talks between sides were held and resolutions reached, preventing the more dire of outcomes from coming to pass. 

In that spirit, I found this recent piece by Pat Buchanan (someone I’ve not always agreed with in the past), to be spot on:

Is Putin Worse Than Stalin?

 

When then did this issue of whose flag flies over Donetsk or Crimea become so crucial that we would arm Ukrainians to fight Russian-backed rebels and consider giving a NATO war guarantee to Kiev, potentially bringing us to war with a nuclear-armed Russia?

 

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

 

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

 

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

 

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

 

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

 

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

 

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

(source)

That’s really an amazing piece of context. Past US presidents managed to hold dialogs with Stalin, who killed millions, and Khrushchev, who directly threatened the US with nuclear missiles.

What exactly has Putin done to surpass the excesses of past Russian/Soviet leaders? What the US still refers to as the “illegal annexation of Crimea” was actually the result of a heavy turn-out vote by the Crimean people where 97% of the votes cast were in favor of rejoining Russia.

So, to recap, Crimea’s people voted overwhelmingly to shape their future in the way they best saw fit, and not one life was lost during the annexation. That sounds pretty peaceful and democratic if you ask me. What would Washington DC prefer? To undo that particular vote and have the people of Crimea be forcibly reunited with Ukraine? For what purpose? To prevent map makers from having to once again redraw Ukraine’s wandering borders?

More likely — and this is the part that concerns me — is that the current people in power in Washington DC are just not the equals of the statesmen of old.

In researching this piece, I came across this 1998 interview with George Kennan that I found both illuminating and troubling:

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.

 

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home.

 

”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

 

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years.

 

‘‘I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

 

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,’‘ said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952.

 

”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

 

(…)

 

As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ”This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

(source)

The master statesman pretty much nailed it.  Instead of bringing Russia into the fold, a petulant strain of ‘diplomacy’ took over that goaded and threatened Russia and now we are, in fact, being treated to endless repetitions of oh you know – that’s just how Russians are. Instead we might also note that the current debate seems superficial and ill-informed.

As I recently wrote in the piece on the Ukraine Flashpoint, the expansion of NATO to the east towards Russia happened even though the US had previously struck an explicit agreement not to progress any further. Not one inch, was the vow. That vow was consciously and repeatedly broken.  So who exactly is it that has cause not to trust the other?

The West had the opportunity to bring Russia and its extensive abilities and resources closer into partnership. But for some reason (Military industrial complex anyone?  Campaign contributions from same?), the decision was made during the Clinton administration to violate the NATO agreement instead and move many millions of inches eastward. 

The last encroachment both brought NATO right to Russia’s borders and placed millions of culturally-Russian people under the heavy-handed rule of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.  Some of these same ultra-nationalists were caught on tape recommending that the 8 million Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine should be “nuked”.

Perhaps an idle threat. However, one of the first actions of Kiev’s new government this February was to immediately revoke legal equality for the use of Russian language:

Perhaps the most obvious of the new Kiev government’s mistakes came last week, when deputies in the nationalist party Svoboda, or Freedom, pushed through the cancellation of a law that gave equal status to minority languages, such as Russian.

The previous law had allowed regions across the country to use languages other than the official national language, Ukrainian, on commercial signs, in schools and government documents. When it passed in 2012, it was seen as a victory for the areas where Russian was the dominant language, particularly in the east and south. 

(source) 

Suffice it to say, there’s a very long list of very good reasons why the Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine might want nothing to do with being under the rule (thumb?) of western Ukraine.

Propaganda

Propaganda is information that is designed to mislead and provoke an emotional response. The covers of western newspapers and magazines have been absolutely choked with anti-Putin propaganda. After such yellow journalism, what sort of dialog, what rapprochement, can be proposed with Putin?

Would not Obama (or any other leader) be seen as ‘siding with the enemy’ if he engaged in dialog with Putin after all this?

That Newsweek cover with the darkened face and mushroom clouds reflected in the glasses is especially ominous.  Exactly what’s the message being represented there? Well that’s easy. It’s Armageddon.

Before you take Newsweek’s views too seriously, you need to know that the once respectable publication went through some hard times, went out of print for while, was bought and is now run by these folks:

Moonies, Messiahs and Media: Who Really Owns Newsweek?

Aug 4, 2013

 

On Saturday, news broke that IBT Media, a company that runs the online business (at least, in theory) newspaper International Business Times, had purchased Newsweek from IAC. So IBT Media now owns Newsweek. But exactly who controls IBT Media?

 

IBT Media’s corporate leadership site lists two cofounders: Etienne Uzac, the company’s CEO, and Johnathan Davis, its chief content officer.

 

But some say that the company is actually controlled by—or at least has very close undisclosed ties to—someone whose name appears nowhere on the site: David Jang, a controversial Korean Christian preacher who has been accused of calling himself “Second Coming Christ.”

 

Before founding IBT, Mr. Davis was the journalism director at Mr. Jang’s Olivet University. 

(source)

So Newsweek may or may not have a larger agenda to push beyond just getting the facts out. It’s another case where knowing that an editorial slant exists can be helpful in maintaining a healthy stance of skepticism.  

But beyond Newsweek, the entire suite of publications ranging from the NYTimes, Washington Post, Financial Times, and nearly every other main pillar of the Fourth Estate have been running with the “Putin’s responsible” meme.

And, it bears repeating, all without any solid evidence, none(!), plus a host of legitimate serious questions that are being met with zero investigative vigor by the mainstream media and complete radio silence from the government agencies that should be examining and addressing them.

This relentless campaign of propaganda directed against Russia (generally) and Putin (specifically) is now at a fever pitch. My caution to you is that you should be actively suspicious of any media outfit that chooses to run this propaganda.

Perhaps their travel and dining sections can be trusted; but I’d advise reading the front section with a huge grain of salt.

Poking the Bear

With all of that background, we’re now at the point where we can understand just how annoyed Russia must be at the sanctions that have been recently levied against it, various of its industries, and in certain cases, specific wealthy and influential citizens.

Since the MH-17 downing and all of those resulting accusations of Russian responsibility, Russia has been accused of firing artillery and rockets across its border into Ukraine. The only “evidence” to this is the aforementioned crude satellite photos taken by a private company. These photos were then drawn upon (literally) to show trajectories the missiles *could* have followed. These very non-rigorous images were then tweeted out of the account of one Geoffrey Pyatt as hard fact. If his name isn’t familiar to you, he’s the US Ukrainian ambassador who was famously caught on tape with Victoria Nuland (Asst. Sec. of State) discussing the imminent coup against then-Ukrainian President Yanukovych.

Next, a western tribunal in The Hague suddenly ruled that the former shareholders of the dismantled Russian oil giant Yukos were entitled to $50 billion in compensation to be paid by the Russian government. Surprise!

In chilling response, a person close to Putin reportedly said,  “There is a war coming in Europe. Do you really think this matters?”

Following that,  the US accused Russia of violating the 1987 nuclear arms treaty by testing ground based missiles in…wait for it…2008. I’m sure the timing of this is in no way connected to the dust-up over Ukraine…

And most recently, both the US and the EU levied additional sanctions on Russia and certain Russian individuals:

Obama Joins Europe in Expanding Sanctions on Russia

Jul 29, 2014

 

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced expanded sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, just hours after the European Union imposed its most sweeping measures yet penalizing Moscow for its role in supporting separatists in neighboring Ukraine.

 

The latest American actions took aim at more Russian banks and a large defense firm, but they also went further than past moves by blocking future technology sales to Russia’s lucrative oil industry in an effort to inhibit its ability to develop future resources. The measures were meant to largely match those unveiled earlier in the day in Europe.

 

“Today is a reminder that the United States means what it says and we will rally the international community in standing up for the rights and freedom of people around the world,” Mr. Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House.

(source)

While one could be forgiven for thinking that the “rights and freedom of people” might include the freedom to vote for the future one wants, and the right not to be ruled over by people hostile to one’s language and customs, apparently the Obama administration has other ideas for the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

The final act of hostility by the US towards Russia that bears mention here concerns a Senate bill introduced by the ranking member of the foreign relations committee, Sen. Bob Corker, that outlines what would happen if Russia does not ‘comply’ and leave Crimea and Ukraine entirely within seven days of the act’s passage:

A GOP Ultimatum to Vlad

Jul 29, 2014

 

Corker’s bill would declare Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine “major non-NATO allies” of the United States, move NATO forces into Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, accelerate the building of an ABM system in Eastern Europe, and authorize U.S. intelligence and military aid for Ukraine’s army in the Donbass war with Russian-backed separatists.

 

U.S. aid would include antitank and antiaircraft weapons.

 

S. 2277 would direct the secretary of state to intensify efforts to strengthen democratic institutions inside the Russian Federation, e.g., subvert Vladimir Putin’s government, looking toward regime change.

 

If Putin has not vacated Crimea and terminated support for Ukraine’s separatist rebels within seven days of passage of the Corker Ultimatum, sweeping sanctions would be imposed on Russian officials, banks and energy companies, including Gazprom.

 

Economic relations between us would be virtually severed.

 

In short, this is an ultimatum to Russia that she faces a new Cold War if she does not get out of Ukraine and Crimea, and it is a U.S. declaration that we will now regard three more former Soviet republics – Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia – as allies.

(source)

Poor George Kennan. Once again the US Senate is operating without the benefit of either humility or historical perspective.

The people of Russia are not in any mood to be bullied by the US Senate, just as the US Senate would refuse to be dictated to by the Russian parliament.  That’s just common sense.

It’s completely obvious that the impact of any such Act passed by the US legislature would be to further erode, if not collapse, relations and economic ties between Russia and the US.

The main conclusion here is that not only is the US poking the bear, but it is doing so with increasing frequency and upping the ante dangerously with each step.

In Part 2: How The Coming Confrontation Will Unfold, we examine the most likely scenarios for where the current tensions between the West and Russia may head. Whichever path we head down, there will be at least some degree of pain experiences by the West, which Europe will feel first and worst (though the US will not be immune). And, sadly, it’s safe to say that this East-West conflict will only accelerate the coming correction of the unstable over-leveraged, bubblicious world markets.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1oSGDGt Tyler Durden