Research links massive cyber spying ring to Russia

Foregoing crime, the group targets European, US governments in 7-year spree.

by Robert Lemos - Oct 28 2014,http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/research-links-massive-cyber-spying-ring-to-russia/

A professional espionage group has targeted a variety of Eastern European governments and security organizations with attacks aimed at stealing political and state secrets, security firm FireEye stated in a report released on Tuesday.
The group, dubbed APT28 by the company, has targeted high-level officials in Eastern European countries such as Georgia, and security organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminal groups are known to conduct massive campaigns aimed at stealing money and financial information, APT28 focuses solely on political information and state secrets, according to FireEye.
The report argues that the group is closely tied to Russia and likely part of Moscow’s intelligence apparatus.
“This group, unlike the China-based threat actors we track, does not appear to conduct widespread intellectual property theft for economic gain,” FireEye stated in the report. “Nor have we observed the group steal and profit from financial account information.”
While linking specific actions on the Internet to people in the real world is difficult, FireEye used the report to make the case that a variety of espionage operations can be laid on the collective keyboards of APT28 and that the group is tightly linked to Russia.
This is not the first time the company has taken aim at nation-state cyber espionage. In 2013, Mandiant, now a subsidiary of FireEye, released a report on a Chinese group, APT1, which the company argued was part of the People's Liberation Army and which Mandiant researchers tied to attacks on more than 100 companies. The report has shaped much of the debate over online espionage between countries.
Attributing APT28’s efforts to Russia seems straightforward. More than half of the language setting in the compiled executable are Russian. Also, 96 percent of the malware samples analyzed by FireEye were compiled between Monday and Friday, from 8 am to 6 pm in the GMT+4 time zone, which matches Moscow. Such regularity suggests that the programmers were working during the regular work week in Moscow, the report argues.
The group behind the tools used by APT28 has frequently updated the software and focused on making the resulting binaries difficult for defenders to reverse engineer, according to the report. The technical components include a downloader, dubbed “SOURFACE” by FireEye, a program to give hackers remote access (“EVILTOSS”), and a group of modules to enhance functionality of the espionage software (“CHOPSTICK”). The modular nature of the program, similar to other espionage threats such as Flame and Duqu, allowing attackers to pick and choose the final functionality of any particular attack, as well as tailor the eventual malware to the target's environment.
The code’s sophistication and complexity suggests a professional development group, the company said.
“The coding practices evident in the group’s malware suggest both a high level of skill and an interest in complicating reverse engineering efforts,” the report stated.
For the most part, the analysis focuses on the group’s interests and how those interests are closely tied with the Russian government.

New Book Sheds Further Light on US Government Protection of Ex-Nazis   ~ Oops !

By Thomas Gaist

Global Research, October 29, 2014

World Socialist Web Site

Region: Europe, USA

Theme: Culture, Society & History, Intelligence

A new book published Tuesday, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, by New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau, details the close relations developed by the US government with Nazi war criminals during and after the Second World War.
Lichtblau’s work extends and deepens previous research demonstrating that the US government gave extensive support to top Nazi intelligence personnel as part of its efforts to create a new intelligence apparatus in West Germany, known as the BND. Former Nazis were especially valued by the US government for their experience conducting espionage and waging war against the Soviet Union.
Investigations carried out by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) during the late 1990s and early 2000s examined thousands of documents relating to US government collaboration with former Nazis.
The CIA documents provided the basis for a 2004 report, assembled by professional historians, titled US Intelligence and the Nazis, showing that the top Nazi intelligence officer on the Eastern Front, General Reinhard Gehlen, was recruited by the US military at the end of the war. Gehlen’s intelligence network, developed during the Nazi war of extermination against the Soviet Union, included at least 100 high-ranking Nazi military and intelligence personnel. It was to become the embryo of the new West German intelligence agency.
“The most important transmission belt for rehabilitating former Nazis was the West German intelligence service, which the US funded and helped create,” Timothy Naftali, historian and co-author of US Intelligence and the Nazis, told the World Socialist Web Site. “The US government wanted to develop the BND, understanding that a strong intelligence service was a necessary foundation for the new West German state.”
“Because of their experience in the war, they were seen as useful for collecting information about the Soviet bloc,” Naftali said.

“Former top Nazi Reinhard Gehlen recruited former SS officers and, although he did not reveal how many SS were serving in the BND ranks to his US patrons, the US did not push the issue. It is clear, however, that the West German intelligence service was honey-combed with former members of the SS.”

Documents stemming from the IWG’s work proved that at least five top associates of the holocaust organizer, Adolf Eichmann, were employed by the CIA after the war, and that the agency sought to establish relations with at least 23 other Nazi officials.
Lichtblau’s new book builds on the work of the IWG and the US Intelligence and the Nazis report, proving that officials at the highest levels of the American state went to great lengths to shield major war criminals from prosecution. The US government brought thousands of former Nazis to the US, where they lived in comfort while serving as spies, researchers and covert operatives for US military and intelligence agencies, Lichtblau’s research shows.
Lichtblau’s work provides ample evidence that scientists known to the US government to be involved in programs performing human experimentation and utilizing slave labor were recruited for leading research posts inside the US military.
Under Project Paperclip, authorized by President Harry Truman in 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, initiated plans that would bring at least 1,500 German scientists to the US. Scientists with Nazi Party affiliations were allowed to serve as scientists for the US government after providing a one-page statement explaining their reasons for membership, Lichtblau notes.
After heading a research program supported by tens of thousands of slave laborers, Wernher Von Braun, described by Lichtblau as “the boy wonder of Germany’s V-2 rocket program” with “deep ties to Hitler and to the Nazi Party,” was relocated by the US government to the US military base at Fort Bliss, Texas, along with his family and some 100 members of his V-2 production team.
The former Nazi paramilitary leader Emil Salmon, previously convicted of burning down a synagogue by a denazification court, was hired by the US Air Force after the war to work at an Ohio base as a jet engineer, Lichtblau shows.
Lichtblau also highlights the case of Doctor Hubertus Strughold, known as “the father of space medicine,” who became a top researcher for the US Air Force after the war despite ample evidence of his complicity in human experimentation.
Scientists at Dr. Strughold’s research clinic in Berlin conducted experiments on human subjects including children, Lichtblau’s research shows. In one case, epileptic children from a local asylum were placed in a high-altitude chamber and subject to sudden shifts in oxygen levels to determine whether such conditions would produce seizures, as they had during previous experiments on rabbits.
In another incident described by Lichtblau, scientists under Dr. Strughold’s direct authority forced groups of “social gypsy half-breeds” to consume large volumes of seawater infused with silver after being deprived of food for days.
In 1942, Dr. Strughold participated actively in a medical conference on “Medical Problems Arising from Distress at Sea and Winter Hardships,” focusing on the response of the human body to conditions of extreme cold.
Discussions during the conference were informed by ongoing experiments by doctors at the Dachau concentration camp, including prolonged submersion of subjects in tubs of ice and confinement of naked subjects outdoors in cold weather until death.
In his lecture to the conference, Dr. Strughold called for further research into human survivability in ice-cold ocean water. “With regard to the experimental scientific research … it is of interest to know what temperatures are to be counted on in the oceans conceded during the various seasons,” he told the conference.
Although Dr. Strughold’s name appeared fourth from the top on a roster of Nazi doctors involved in “Experimentation on Human Beings” drawn up by the Nuremberg tribunals, and he was initially interrogated by investigators associated with the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals who suspected him of involvement in human experimentation, investigation into Strughold was abruptly dropped in 1947. The doctor was then rapidly transferred to Texas by US authorities, where he was given a top research post with the US Air Force, according to Lichtblau’s research.
Recruitment and protection of former Nazis was carried out systematically by the US military and intelligence establishment. Internal military documents cited by Lichtblau show common usage of the phrase “beating a dead Nazi horse” to express contempt for any lingering opposition to the employment of former Nazis, who were seen as valuable assets by the US military and intelligence agencies.
As part of a deal struck by CIA Director Allen Dulles with a group of SS officers known as the Members of the Black Order during the final months of the war, Dulles personally arranged the release of Nazi Supreme Commander in Italy, General Karl Wolff, Lichtblau notes.
Wolff, formerly the SS liaison officer to Adolf Hitler and Chief of Personal Staff for Heinrich Himmler, was captured by anti-Nazi guerrillas on the Swiss-Italian border. After the war, Dulles went to great lengths to protect Wolff, who was listed as one of 20 some “major war criminals” by Nuremberg investigators. Dulles concealed evidence from Nuremberg prosecutors and prepared documents in Wolff’s defense.
General Wolff was subsequently dropped from the list of top war criminals, becoming a witness in support of the Nuremberg prosecutions before going on to a successful career in advertising.
Similar efforts by the US government to protect former Nazis continued over decades, Lichtblau shows.
During the 1970s, when asked by local reporters about a former Nazi with CIA ties working as a track coach in San Diego, then CIA Director George H. W. Bush stated openly, “If it were in my knowledge, I’m not sure I’d tell you,” Lichtblau notes.
In 1980, the FBI refused to share information on 16 suspected Nazis with the Justice Department, because the individuals in question were FBI assets who had provided the agency with reports about alleged “Communist sympathizers” inside the US. In 1994, the CIA sought to quash investigations into one of its former assets, who was directly involved in massacres of Jews in Lithuania during the war, according to Lichtblau.
Lichtblau’s research starkly illustrates the solidarity with Nazism on the part of the most powerful sections of the US ruling elite. As the Second World War drew to a close, terrified by the threat of world socialist revolution, the US ruling class and its military and intelligence henchmen eagerly embraced remnants of the Nazi regime as key components of imperialist policy.
In the process of documenting these relations, Lichtblau’s book provides a damning exposure of the propaganda claims that the Second World War was a “war for democracy” and a “war against fascism.” In fact, the American ruling class sought to exploit widespread popular opposition to the crimes of Nazism in pursuit of its own imperialist ambitions, in Europe and internationally.

Crony Capitalism, Empire and America’s Military Industrial Complex   ~ hows bout we start voting ..NO CONFIDENCE !!!

(Or Why You Should be Voting as Green as Possible)

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

Global Research, October 29, 2014

Region: USA

Theme: Law and Justice

In his 1960 farewell address, the moderate Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to warn us naïve and trusting Americans about the nefarious agendas of the amoral, pro-corporate, pro-war, imperialistic military/industrial (i.e., corporate)/national security/congressional complex (especially the weapons industries, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI) that Ike had seen acquiring excessive power during his administration. 

Americans after WWII were feeling increasingly prosperous and optimistic about the future because the nation’s infrastructure, industries, productivity, markets and non-military citizens had not been victimized or blasted to smithereens like their economic competitors in Europe and Asia. Ike’s prescient warnings were essentially ignored or censored out of the public’s consciousness by nefarious anti-democratic entities that were operating behind the scenes.

Eisenhower had experienced the horrors of wars up close, and he despised them, and he was therefore no Hawk, unlike so many of the pro-war Republican bigwig Chicken Hawks that followed him in positions of power in that political party. He had managed to keep the US out of war during his 8 years in office, and he never could see the justification for the US military’s use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ike knew that Japan had already lost the war well before the atom bombs were dropped on those unarmed, innocent civilian populations.

Eisenhower was also one of the last Republican presidents that understood the dangers of unregulated corporate power when it was combined with unrestrained governmental/military power. He probably knew better than most how the Italian dictator to Benito Mussolini defined fascism (“Fascism should…be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power”)

Sometime after Ike’s speech, between the political assassinations of the liberal political leaders JFK, MLK and RFK (during the 1960s) and the end of the  20^th century, progressives have felt increasingly distrustful of the emerging far-right, pro-corporate, pro-militarist, pro-wealth, anti-intellectual, Christian fundamentalist-influenced agendas of the Republican Party. And justifiably so.

Many progressives have frequently felt betrayed by the right-ward shift of the national Democratic Party which has been increasingly influenced by pro-corporate, pro-militarist, pro-wealth agendas. The national Democratic Party, despite its often honorable past fighting for the rights of the little guy (with their party platforms frequently supporting children’s rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, etc) seems to have abdicated those honorable stances to the American Green Party. (See the list of Green Party values at: http://www.gp.org/tenkey.php.)

I mourn the rapidly disappearing years when progressive Minnesotans could feel good about being able to vote for courageous, ethical, liberal democratic candidates like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy and Paul Wellstone. Democratic President Back in the 1940s, Harry Truman warned Democrats about promoting agendas that appealed to the wealthy, the corporations and the militarists when he said “If a voter has a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who acts like a Republican, he’ll vote for the Republican every time.”

But Republicans like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Newt Gingrich, ad nauseum, kept getting elected; and we citizens – just like the naïvely  trusting place-kicker Charlie Brown when the devious Lucy jerked the football away – always seem to realize too late that we have been bamboozled again. Of course the group of politicians above usually wound up discrediting themselves over their warmongering in Vietnam or Lebanon or Granada or Nicaragua or El Salvador or Columbia or because of their greedy inclinations to maintain their power, prestige, prerogative and the need to serve their anonymous paymasters.

The consequences of living in a corporatized, militarized, national security-obsessed nation has always made me especially wary of the GOP, and the more neo-fascist that that party leans and the more it is influenced by excessively wealthy special interest groups that profit from war and globalization, the more I distrust and fear it.

The 12 years of unrestrained crony capitalism during the anti-democracy mis-leadership of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush tricked most of us into naively believing in their fraudulent “Trickle-down Economics”. Simultaneously those administrations tried to freak us out into going along with their agendas by endlessly exaggerating the military (and economic) threats from the Soviet Union. Reagan called the USSR the “Evil Empire” and they called Ronald Wilson Reagan (old “666” himself) the “The Great Satan”. Both monikers seemed justified to many.

The wealthy investor classes and financial markets loved the Reagan-era’s tax cuts for the wealthy, the unrestrained borrowing, spending and permanently indebting of America (to the tune of 4 trillion dollars [in 1980 dollars] just during the Reagan years) , and the US Treasury has ever since, been paying out hundreds of billions of dollars of interest annually to the wealthy investors on Wall Street).

One of the doctrines of American conservatism is a strong and well-funded military/national security apparatus (in order to protect private and corporate investments abroad). The mass purchases (using borrowed money, not tax money) of unaffordable, often useless (and sometimes unwanted, even by the Pentagon) weapons systems were justified by appealing to America’s orchestrated mass paranoia about the arms races with the USSR, including, of course, huge amounts of borrowed money for “modernizing” and enlarging America’s destabilizing nuclear arsenals.

Seeing Through the Myths of the GOP’s “Compassionate Conservatism” and its “Big Tent”

A campaign image that cunning GOP strategists in the past have tried to convey is the notion that Republicans are “Compassionate Conservatives” with a “Big Tent” that welcomes everybody, when most of the national and state party platforms, especially those in Bible Belt states, espouse exclusivist agendas that are anything but welcoming or compassionate towards racial and ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gays and lesbians, women (especially pregnant women and those with children), disadvantaged children, immigrants, war refugees, anti-war activists, peacemakers, the environment and the sick, poor, hungry, under-employed and homeless.

Cunning Republican strategists and their politicians were perpetrating the lie that their party, which attracts virulent nationalists, pro-war militarists, war profiteers of every ilk, anti-environmentalists, sociopathic billionaires, compassionless corporations, union breakers, racists, climate change deniers, holocaust deniers, anti-intellectuals, sexists, liberal-haters like the KKK and Aryan Nation, homophobes, xenophobes, sexists, people who believe in the Rapture (!), people who believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old (and therefore insist on teaching pseudoscientific creationism to their children as real science) and other right-wing groups.

That is a partial list of who is already in the fictional “Big Tent”. People of conscience will not feel welcome there because true liberals with open-minds have already been fingered as mortal enemies.

Most progressive thinkers wouldn’t want to be rubbing elbows with some of the folks in the Big Tent, especially the ones who refuse to listen to reason, who refuse to give any credence to the scientific method or who disbelieve established and documented facts.

The GOP Big Tent Myth is a Big Lie propaganda trick that is designed to get the brain-washed and the dis-informed to believe something that isn’t true so that they can be convinced to vote against their own best interests.

Near the end of this essay are two important lists of reasons to be wary when voting in an election that is dominated by the two major parties in America that have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on mostly inane, repetitive, often negative TV advertising. Further below are a number of quotes from well-known conservative Republicans. They should give every thinking voter pause.

The term “thinking voter” reminds me of a story about the brilliant Democratic Party politician Adlai Stevenson, who was the endorsed Democratic Party candidate for president who twice ran unsuccessfully against the war hero Eisenhower. He was known for giving powerful, highly reasoned and humorous campaign speeches. During one such speech, a woman in the crowd called out“Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson simply smiled and replied, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”

I am afraid that we are in an era where the majority of Americans are 1) too distracted (with sports, entertainment, drug or celebrity addictions) to vote intelligently, are 2) too poor, oppressed, malnourished, disinterested or disillusioned with both parties even to want to vote or 3) are too under-informed or ignorant of the issues to figure out which party or candidate best represents their children’s interests.

 If such eligible voters actually do tear themselves away from the mass entertainment media or their “I don’t give a damn” drugs long enough to actually vote, many of them will vote for the candidate with the most expensive or most meaningless or negative campaign ads on TV and not for the party or candidate that espouses agendas that would be best for their children, themselves, the survival of the planet or the nation. It’s obvious that most voters don’t fully appreciate that the best candidates might be the ones that don’t have enough money to even pay for one TV ad or even purchase lawn signs (which, unfortunately, is true for many worthy Green Party candidates).

America still has a thinking problem. And that is why propaganda and million dollars per minute commercials, that only the rich can afford to purchase, continue to effectively sell plastic crap a person doesn’t really need, including hidden political agendas.

Before concluding, I want to add that, in my opinion, Stuart Mills, the One Trick Pony and GOP-endorsed candidate for Minnesota’s District 8 US House of Representatives has none of the qualities necessary to be a credible, independently thinking member of the US Congress. Mills would undoubtedly be a simple drone in Congress, a me-too voter for the low corporate tax agenda and anti-Obama Congressional gridlock of Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Mills would undoubtedly be totally beholden to his many out-of-state financial supporters that include the Koch Brothers cabal, the mining corporations, the supporters of the democracy–killing Citizen’s United ruling (allowing corporate personhood and unlimited, anonymous campaign bribery), the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Rifle Association (which is another One Trick Pony that cares not one iota for any parts of the US Constitution except for the mis-interpreted 2^ndAmendment). I say One Trick Pony because Mills, the NRA and the wealthy gun manufacturing corporations that fund the NRA are all irrationally (and laughably) paranoid about the ridiculous Fox News-promulgated myth that Democrats want to take away their hunting rifles and shotguns.

I hasten to add that Mills might be a qualified candidate (and far less harmful to our democracy) if he were running for the assistant executive directorship of Northern Minnesota’s NRA; but please, not for Congress!

Green Party candidate Skip Sandman and DFL candidate Rick Nolan both beat Mills all  hollow on every issue that is important to common folks, but Sandman is better than both on anti-corporate issues, anti-war issues, on the sustainability of the planet and on the cautious approach that is essential before potentially “game over” sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota is allowed to proceed. The out-of-state mining company PolyMet has an unproven (for safety) plan to mine copper, nickel, zinc and rare earth metals in environmentally-sensitive northern Minnesota, a plan which opens up the distinct possibility of disastrous, irreversible, irremediable and century’s long deadly poisoning of the habitat, the drinking water, the ground water, rivers, lakes and wild rice beds in northern Minnesota, much of which is on native American land and thus in violation of native treaty rights.

What I say about Stuart Mills can be said for Becky Hall, the GOP-endorsed candidate for state house of representatives in House District 7A. Hall is another one of those cute, smiley-faced, blond Republican females (and well-groomed for remembering talking points) that have emerged in abundance in the Republican Party over the years. She is a Tea Party favorite (like Sarah Palin), a pro-NRA candidate and a naïve believer in everything that the sociopathic mining corporation PolyMet has told her.

One of Hall’s endorsements has come from a minor entity of the pro-Big Business, pro-PolyMet, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Like Stuart Mills, Hall would be a lapdog legislator, (hopefully, but unlikely to be, somewhat uncomfortable with the various co-opted folks that are beholden to the party bosses who call the shots). If elected, Hall would likely be absorbed into the GOP caucus and be expected to vote for every anti-democracy, pro-corporate agenda item at the capitol. Green Party candidates for House District 7A (Duluth, MN) Kriss Osbakken and Jennifer Schultz both beat Hall on every issue that is important to common folks.

Immediately below are two important “voter guide” lists that expand on what I have been saying above. They were posted recently on www.npr.org: http://www.npr.org/2014/10/18/356942426/in-alaska-race-for-governor-democrats-try-an-unusual-tactic-dropping-out

If you believe corporations are people, vote Republican.
If you believe money is Free Speech, vote Republican.
If you believe only Republicans should vote in elections, vote Republican.
If you believe our government should take care of Corporations & Foreign Countries First, vote Republican.
If you believe Unions are your enemy, vote Republican.
If you believe trickle-down economics has been successful, vote Republican.
If you believe only the Rich, CEO’s & Politicians should have Health Insurance, vote Republican.
If you believe Corporations that make Billions in Profits should be Tax Free, vote Republican.
If you believe gay people do not deserve equal rights, vote Republican.
If you believe the minimum wage should be eliminated, vote Republican.
If you believe the EPA should be eliminated, vote Republican.
If you believe sick people who cannot afford health care should die in the street, vote Republican.
If you believe the poor should starve to death, vote Republican.
If you believe pregnancy via rape is “God’s will”, vote Republican.
If you believe we should eliminate Women’s reproductive rights and return to the days of back alley abortions, vote Republican.
If you believe Women do not deserve equal pay for equal work, vote Republican.
If you believe we should have a legal system based on biblical law, vote Republican.
If you believe our schools should be teaching creationism instead of evolution, vote Republican.
If you believe we should eliminate the social safety net and let Americans suffer, vote Republican.
If you believe Americans on Social Security should get 1% raises each year while Congress gets Thousands of Dollars in Raises, vote Republican.
If you believe all baby’s should be born but do not care if they starve, go homeless, or without health insurance, vote Republican.
If you believe every problem in America that W., his daddy & Reagan caused is Obama’s fault, vote republican.
If you believe the Republican Lie that we hear in every election, “Elect us & we will bring all the good paying American jobs back to America”, vote Republican.
If you believe there should be Less Laws for the Rich & Big Business & More Laws for everyone else, vote Republican.
If you don’t believe that man is adding to global warming, vote Republican.
If you don’t believe in science, vote Republican.
If you believe the environment doesn’t need to be taken care of, vote Republican.
If you believe the EPA needs to be dismantled because big business will do what right and not pollute, vote Republican.
If you believe the FDA needs to be dismantled because Big Agribusiness and Big Food won’t sell us contaminated foods, vote Republican.
If you believe regulations on everything need lifting because nobody in another country would sell us contaminated toys any more than our own companies, vote Republican
If you believe Big Business would never do anything to compromise safety and kill people, vote Republican.
If you believe that tort reform doesn’t set a fixed price on American lives and keeps insurance rates down and doesn’t restrict your right to a fair trial, vote Republican.
If you believe that “job creators” need to pay less taxes at the same time that pay rates and tax revenues are on the decline, vote Republican.

BUT IF YOU ESPOUSE GREEN VALUES, YOU WILL  REJECT EACH OF THE FOLLOWING SCENARIOS AND YOU WILL TRY TO VOTE AS GREEN AS POSSIBLE THIS ELECTION CYCLE:

If you want more war: vote democrat or republican
If you want more crony capitalism: vote democrat or republican
If you want billions given to autocratic governments: vote democrat or republican
If you support the NSA spying on US citizens: vote democrat or republican
If you support the war on drugs, vote democrat or republican.
If you love the military/industrial complex, vote democrat or republican.
If you believe people who disagree with your politics are stupid and/or evil: vote democrat or republican
If you support targeted assassinations of US citizens abroad without due process, vote democrat or republican.
If you support indefinite detention: vote democrat or republican.
if you support the drone war, vote democrat or republican
If you support a complicated federal tax code that tries harder to socially engineer our choices instead of just raising revenue, vote democrat or republican.
If you want bureaucrats and lawyers to run US education policy, vote democrat or republican.
If you LOVE having the lesser of two evils in office, vote democrat or republican.
If you LOVE the status quo, vote democrat or republican.

And here is a revealing list of quotes from famous conservative Republicans. Read them before you go to the polls

A Small Sampling of Quotes From American “Big Tent” Conservatives

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our (Trilateral Commission) meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march toward a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” – David Rockefeller (R-New York) billionaire banker, in a speech, given to the Trilateral Commission in 1991)

 ”Some people believe we Rockefellers are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family … as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” – David Rockefeller  (R-NY)

“If the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.” — Ex-president George H. W. Bush (R-Texas)

“God told me to smite Osama bin Laden, so I invaded Afghanistan. Then He told me to smite Saddam Hussein, so I invaded Iraq. Now he wants me to work on the Middle East problem…” — Ex-President George W. Bush (R-Texas)

“I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” – George W. Bush (R-Texas)

“I don’t understand how poor people think.” – George W. Bush (R- Texas)

“What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians…and Christian values.” “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” – Ralph Reed (R-Georgia) past associate of Jesse Helms, Jack Abramhoff, Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay and Christian Coalition executive director 1987-1989
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”  Henry Kissinger (R-CT), unindicted international war criminal.
“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”  J. Edgar Hoover (R-deceased head of the FBI and probable co-conspirator in the JFK assassination)
“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.” – Vitriolic talk show host Rush Limbaugh (R-NY)
“This guy (President Obama) is, I believe, a racist.” – Fox News commentator Glenn Beck (R-Texas)
“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. ) – Glenn Beck (R-Texas)
“Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.” – Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas)
“I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” – Pat Robertson (R-Va) 700 Club founder, who once predicted that the end of the world was coming in October or November 1982.
”In my opinion, the right to privacy doesn’t exist in the United States Constitution.” – Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)
“Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.” – Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska)
“We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.” – Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas)
“Probably nothing.” – Jeb Bush, (R-Florida), when asked what he would do for black people if elected.
”George W. Bush is in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.” –Lt. General William G. Boykin, (R-Va) Christian Fundamentalist, current executive vice president at Family Research Council and retired Deputy Undersecretary of Defense.
“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.” – Ann Coulter (R-Fla) Talk Show Host, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conf., 02-26-02.FoxNews.
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” – Grover Norquist (R-DC) President of Americans for Tax Reform.
“Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen can be directly traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.” – Rep. Don Davis (R-NC)
“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” – Barbara Bush, (R-Tx), Ex-First Lady, on the day before the Iraq war started.

“I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” – Gen. George Patton (R-deceased Commander of 3^rd Army, WWII)

Dr Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, Minnesota who is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and often writes about mental ill health, toxic food issues, corporate pollution, the corporate-controlled media, corporate-controlled politics, crony capitalism, militarism, racism, fascism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements.

“Fake Science”: Biotech’s Studies on GMOs are Flawed, Inaccurate

According to Peer Reviewed Research

By Christina Sarich

Global Research, October 28, 2014

Natural Society 27 October 2014

Theme: Biotechnology and GMO

Remember when doctors and scientists told us cigarettes were safe, with doctors even showing up on commercials puffing away? Or how about when Vietnam Vets were told that being sprayed with Agent Orange wouldn’t cause them any significant health problems? The ‘studies’ supported by biotech on GMOs have been suspected of being falsified in one way or another, and now there is an independent, peer-reviewed study to prove it.
Many believe that if enough individuals think there is enough ‘proof’ that GMOs are perilous, then the U.S. government will have no choice but to stop biotech companies like Monsanto from making them, but I believe this is an erroneous assumption.
A growing number of people are starting to think that the U.S. government is using flawed science on purpose to justify centralized manufacture, production, storage, and distribution of an altered world food supply to be used for political power and international rule. If we don’t eat our GMOs, take our vaccines, and assent to being sprayed with chemtrails while our municipal water is being poisoned, then their aims will be supported by our military and police forces.
Until we oust practically every criminal in office, including those who are about to run for office (i.e. Hilary Clinton, who cheerleads for  biotech), we will continue to have this problem.
In a recent study that reviewed the histopathology on rats who ate three of the most predominantly consumed GMO genes by humans, the following was surmised:

“Our review also discovered an inconsistency in methodology and a lack of defined criteria for outcomes that would be considered toxicologically or pathologically significant. In addition, there was a lack of transparency in the methods and results, which made comparisons between the studies difficult. The evidence reviewed here demonstrates an incomplete picture regarding the toxicity (and safety) of GM products consumed by humans and animals.
Therefore, each GM product should be assessed on merit, with appropriate studies performed to indicate the level of safety associated with them. Detailed guidelines should be developed which will allow for the generation of comparable and reproducible studies. This will establish a foundation for evidence-based guidelines, to better determine if GM food is safe for human and animal consumption.”

Furthermore, the significant differences between say non-GMO corn, which contains well – corn, and GMO corn which may contain E coli bacteria, antibiotic resistant markers, up to six varieties of Bt toxins, pesticide residues, and RoundUp residues, how can these crops be compared to regular food at all?
The researchers:

“…found 21 studies for nine (19%) out of the 47 crops approved for human and/or animal consumption. We could find no studies on the other 38 (81%) approved crops. Fourteen out of the 21 studies (67%) were general health assessments of the GM crop on rat health. Most of these studies (76%) were performed after the crop had been approved for human and/or animal consumption, with half of these being published at least nine years after approval. Our review also discovered an inconsistency in methodology and a lack of defined criteria for outcomes that would be considered toxicologically or pathologically significant.”

GMOs are not safe. It’s about time we wake up to the reality that biotech and the U.S. government won’t listen to a single study saying they are cancerous, cause birth defects, or destroy human embryo cells. It’s time we take a different track altogether. You can assess what you and your family should do in such a hostile environment where our food is concerned.

Τhe Transnational Elite and the New World Order (NWO)  ...time we kick "their"(elites) ass's outta "their" own party ..lets try that 1 once ? :o

By Takis Fotopoulos

Global Research, October 28, 2014

Inclusive Democracy

Region: Europe

Theme: Global Economy

 This article attempts a brief historical description of the emergence of the New World Order (NWO) based on neoliberal globalization, in the last thirty or so years ago. The Transnational Elite is defined in this context as a network of interconnected elites controlling each major field of social life (economic, social, ideological and so on) and its function is similar to that of the national elite in the pre-globalization era of nation-states. It is shown that a transnational market economy needed its own transnational political and economic elites to control it in exactly the same way as when the market economy was mainly “national,” when the role of enforcing the market rules was assigned to the “nation state” ― through its monopoly of violence ― and the political and economic elites controlling it. The conclusion drawn is that, contrary to the systemic propaganda, the conception of the Transnational Elite (as well as the NWO itself) has nothing to do with “conspiracies” of any kind.
Last weekend thousands of European citizens across Europe took part in demonstrations against the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization and the Transnational Elite (TE) ― mainly the transnational elites’ network based in the G7 countries ― which runs it. The reason was the latest TE plan for a transatlantic trade deal called “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP).[1] Negotiations for this new agreement are in fact well advanced and have taken place between representatives of the political and economic elites of USA and EU. A similar agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) is being negotiated between nations of the Pacific Rim (Canada, the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei).
One could immediately notice that both Russia and China are deliberately excluded from these negotiations, which instead take place exclusively among members of the TE, and those fully integrated into the NWO as associate or subordinate members of it. As I tried to show in a previous Pravda article, Russia is not fully integrated into the NWO,[2] despite recently joining the World Trade Organization, whose aim is to fully integrate into the New Order of neoliberal globalization as many countries of the world as possible, provided they would agree to fully open and liberalize their markets for commodities, so that Transnational Corporations (TNCs) do not have any tariff or other barriers restricting their activities.
However, despite the fact that the World Trade Organization was highly successful in opening and liberalizing goods markets, it was not so successful in opening services markets given that many countries still try to protect basic needs services like Health, Education, Transportation and Communications, which are still characterised as social services and are not therefore left free to become easy prey for the TNCs and their profit making activities. This is unlike the US case, where meeting these basic needs depends on market forces (i.e. on how thick the citizen’s wallet is), rather than on collective social decisions taken democratically. On top of this, the World Trade Organization was not particularly successful in opening and liberalizing some production sectors in the “South” (e.g. the agriculture sector), which are still the main production sectors (at least in terms of providing employment) to many of those countries. As an expert on the field stressed:

“To put it mildly, the World Trade Organization has not proven terribly popular. In fact, the organization has mainly been used as a vehicle to force open vulnerable economies and make the rich richer and the poor poorer around the world. Thus, unsurprisingly, talks on further liberalization measures within the World Trade Organizations’ global framework have stalled. (…) Hence, the confusingly abbreviated TTIP and TTP, which are being negotiated by more exclusive sets of countries whose leaders happen to (mainly) agree that it would be a good idea to go much further down the trade liberalization rabbit hole than even the hugely unpopular World Trade Organization has. One of the most concerning ways they want to do this is by seeking to institutionalize what is known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) within the agreements’ framework.”[3]

So, these agreements are in fact part of the same process that began with the emergence of the NWO following the mass expansion of TNCs in the last thirty years or so­­ ― which is a new phenomenon in the history of the capitalist market economy ― and the parallel collapse of the USSR and the soviet bloc in general. As a result of the mass expansion of TNCs, which, by 2009, numbered more than 80,000, accounting for about two-thirds of world trade, several experts on the field talk today about a hyper globalization. As a New Scientist study has shown, today, just 1,318 core TNCs, through interlocking ownerships, own 80% of global revenues and 147 companies out of them (i.e. less than 1 per cent of the network) form a “super entity,” controlling 40 per cent of the wealth of the entire network![4] This vast expansion of TNCs would have been impossible without open and liberalized markets for commodities and capital, which have been established all over the world in the last thirty years or so by governments of every persuasion: Christian democrats, social democrats, liberals and any combination between them. This was not the result of some conspiracy by ‘bad’ economists and politicians, exploiting any kind of crisis, as some best-seller conspiracy theorists suggest.[5] Instead, this was just the inevitable effect, which followed the collapse of the social-democratic model that was based on national markets, and which was not compatible anymore with the growing internationalization of the market economy. In other words, governments in the new framework had to follow neoliberal policies to make their economies competitive and capable of continued growth and the expansion of the consumer society.
However, the creation of an internationalized market economy necessitated some sort of international economic and political “regulation.” When the market economy was mainly “national,” the role of enforcing the market rules was assigned to the “nation-state” ― through its monopoly of violence ― and the political and economic elites controlling it. This included the old national empires, like the British colonial empire, which in effect had its own internal market for trade and capital investment. However, a transnational economy needs its own transnational political and economic elites to control it. Although the state monopoly of violence still remains in the present internationalized market economy, it is now supplemented by a transnational form of violence, which is enforced not just by one state ― even if this happens to be the last “empire” in the classical sense of the word (USA) ― but by the main military powers in the G7 i.e. France, UK, US (the “FUKUS” powers). Therefore, even though economic power is spread today among a few hundred TNCs, which originated, mainly, in the G7 countries (i.e. FUKUS plus Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy), the USA, due to its unambiguous military supremacy, has a de facto leading position ― but it is not the Emperor. In other words, the NWO is an “Empire,” in the sense of a unipolar world, but without an Emperor ― unless we consider as “emperor” the entire TE.
In this framework, we may define the “transnational elite” as the elite that draws its power (economic, political or generally social power) by operating at the transnational level ― a fact which implies that it does not express, solely or even primarily, the interests of a particular state. It consists of a network of interconnected elites controlling each major field of social life (economic, political, ideological and so on). Therefore, the following elites constitute the major components of the transnational elite:

• The transnational economic elites in charge of economic globalization, which control the main TNCs (corporate directors, executive managers, major shareholders of the main TNCs), as well as the directorates of the main international economic organizations (IMF, World Bank, OECD and so on);
• The transnational political elites in charge of political globalization, which control the distinctly politico-military dimension of the NWO and consist of globalizing bureaucrats and professional politicians functioning either within major international organizations or in the state machines of the major market economies (principally the G7 countries);
• The transnational propaganda elites in charge of promoting the ideology of the New World Order, through their control of transnational mass media (e.g. CNN, BBC and the likes), as well as the elites involved in implementing this ideology in dealing with the protection of human rights etc. (leading cadres of international NGOs financed by the transnational economic elites, like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc.). Transnational media and international NGOs, as well as the so-called “social media” of the Internet (blogs, facebook, twitter etc) have played a crucial role in the manufacturing of “news” (and of the legitimacy of “insurgents”), let alone in supporting the propaganda about the supposed progressive role of criminal organizations like NATO. It is now known, for instance, that DARPA ― the Pentagon-run Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency ― has in one way or another funded several studies recently that set out to explore the fact that social networking sites, as well as users of Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter etc. (as well as its Social Media in Strategic Communications, or SMISC, program), have as a general goal the pure manipulation of social data information, so that the TE’s line is filtered through them. As its goal is described: “Through the program, DARPA seeks to develop tools to support the efforts of human operators to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information.”[6]
• The transnational academic elites, namely the prominent systemic academics in various transnational organizations (foundations, institutes, think tanks and the likes) in charge of creating/improving the ideology of the NWO and globalization, “scientifically” justifying the need for globalization, as well as disorienting people on the real causes of the present multi-dimensional crisis.
• The transnational cultural elites, namely the film industry (mainly controlled by the Transnational and Zionist elites that control the dominant Hollywood industry) which plays a crucial role in propagating the values of globalization and the “normal” way of living (which “by coincidence” happens to be the one consistent with the bourgeois way of life and values!), the music industry (particularly the pop industry which is also controlled by TNCs) and so on.

Needless to add that the globalization process run by the TE has already led to an unprecedented concentration of wealth and income and as the just published Credit Swisse report shows, the richest 1 percent on the planet now own 48.2 percent of the world’s wealth, up from 46 percent last year, whereas the bottom half of the global population own less than 1 percent of the total wealth![7]
The twofold aims of the TE since the rise of the NWO have been:
First, to expand globalization into countries which have not yet lost all national and economic sovereignty within the globalization process, mainly Russia and also countries still controlled by governments that came to power through national liberation movements (Syria and Iran, following the destruction by the same TE of countries like Iraq and Libya) or, alternatively through socialist movements (Cuba, Venezuela and others). The means used to achieve this aim were either economic violence, as e.g. with respect to the EU peripheral countries, or physical violence, exercised directly by the TE or its proxies (as e.g. in the Middle East), or some combination of the two forms of violence.
Second, to deepen the globalization process into areas not yet covered by the World Trade Organization rounds and particularly the movement of capital, whose complete freedom to move, up to now, has only been secured within the EU and NAFTA and as regards to other countries mainly through bilateral agreements. The new agreements (TTIP and TTP) propose clauses that will create universal mechanisms to settle disputes between TNCs and states. Thus, unlike individual deals on developing specific natural resources, the TTIP and TTP cover a wide range of what are considered to be investments in the states. Therefore, as the same expert points out “incorporating these clauses would mean that if a country later makes a law that contravenes the terms of the TTIP or TTP, for example, in the interests of protecting public health, that a company that suffers damages (for example, because they have been making a product that contravenes the new rule) can sue the state for compliance with the treaty, bypassing the normal court system. In other words, foreign companies are placed above the law of the host State through these agreements.”[8] Thus, TNCs with a stake in the UK health service, for instance, could sue the government if it decided to pursue a program of nationalization. No wonder that Unite’s (a major British Trade Union) Assistant General Secretary Gail Cartmail urged congress delegates in the last TUC conference to oppose the TTIP and rally support amongst people in the UK to demand Prime Minister David Cameron keep Britain’s health services out of the TTIP agreement. As it was reported at the time:

“It is clear this government thought they could do this deal in secret ― a deal that would mean the irreversible sell-off of our NHS to America,” Cartmail said. “Wall Street financiers like Blackrock and Invesco are already heavily invested in the NHS ― over 70 percent of new contracts are now in private hands. Over £11 billion of our money in the hands of casino capitalists,” she added.[9]

It is not therefore surprising that some of the campaigners against TTIP worry that once this agreement is converted into EU law and then finds its way to domestic parliaments (as it is well known at least 75% of each EU country’s legislation originates in the EU Commission) then it could open the way to privatize any social service still available, following the onslaught of the NWO of neoliberal globalization and the mass neoliberal legislation adopted in the last 30 years by both conservative, Christian Democratic and social democratic parties in power. Environmentalists are also concerned that the dispute settlement procedure could well be used by TNCs to block moves to protect the environment. The conduct of the negotiations is also contentious. Campaigners say they are secretive and undemocratic, as of course it should be expected as they are, in fact, (despite formalities) carried out between unelected US and EU bureaucrats, who owe their posts to the transnational political and economic elites, and representatives of TNCs.
The effects of globalization particularly as far as the continuous squeezing of employees’ real incomes is concerned (in the context of liberalizing labor markets, so that they could become more competitive), are being realized now widely by many people all over the world. The present “job miracle,” for instance, in Britain (which is characterized as “the job creation capital of the western economies”), hides the fact that “unemployment is low largely because British workers have been willing to stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the Victorian era”[10] ― all this as a result of globalization. It is not therefore surprising that even the conservative London Times had to admit this fact in explaining the reasons why the nationalist Right under Nigel Farage’s UKIP is rising rapidly:

“The surge in support for UKIP is not simply a protest vote. The party has a constituency among those left behind by globalisation… the globalisation of the economy has produced losers as well as winners. As a rule the winners are among the better off and the losers among the least affluent.”[11]

The same process is repeated almost everywhere in Europe with people (and particularly working class people) turning to the nationalist Right not because they suddenly became “nationalists” let alone “fascists” (as the “Left” accuses them) but simply because the present degenerate Left does not wish to lead the struggle against globalization, while, at the same time, the popular strata have realised that national and economic sovereignty is incompatible with globalization. The strong patriotic movement in Russia encompassing all those opposing the integration of Russia into the NWO, i.e. from nationalists up to communists and from Christian orthodox to secularists, is just such a movement.
The typical reaction of the ideological organs of the TE, either in the media or in universities, think tanks, NGOs and the like, is to attack this rapidly rising global movement against the NWO of neoliberal globalization with two parallel aims:

a) to slander as “fascist” such popular movements against globalization[12] (while looking the other way concerning the actions of the real fascists in Ukraine whom it used as its main organs for its “coup from below”)[13] and;
b) to try to marginalize or even defame as conspiracy theorists every writer who does not toe the TE’s line on globalization, while, at the same time directly or indirectly promoting liberal or even Marxist “Left” authors and publications, who ignore globalization and the TE and prefer to talk about today’s reality in terms of completely outdated theories of the past two centuries, developed well before the emergence of globalization. Clearly, this Palaeolithic Marxist Left (apart from some enlightened Marxists who attempted ― in a genuine Marxist fashion ― to use the classical Marxist tools to develop new theories for today’s reality[14]) is today politically and ideologically dead.

Neil Clark, aptly described the systematic effort by the TE organs to describe any effective critique of present reality like the above as a “conspiracy theory”:

“The labelling of people as ‘conspiracy theorists’ by gatekeepers in the West has nothing to do with how much evidence there is to support a claim or the quality of that evidence, but is a political call, based on who the conspiracy theory concerns and who is making it. Establishment gatekeepers are not objective judges, but are heavily biased and label any idea they don’t like as a ‘conspiracy theory’. Labelling someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is their standard way of declaring that person to be ‘off-limits’, i.e. he/she is an unreliable source and a ‘crank’. It’s a way that dissent and debate is stifled in what appear to be free, democratic societies ― and how people who challenge the dominant establishment narrative are deliberately marginalized.”[15]

Thus a common slander against the conception of the TE I gave above is that it implies the presence of a well organized international elite which decides for the planet’ s future in a way that “History is written on the basis of the commands of this elite which represents the ‘New World Order’.”[16] Of course, as I have consistently stressed, History is always a creation, something that rules out both any kind of conspiracies and, alternatively, any “objective” laws determining its outcome. Naturally, this does not mean that the elites do not plot. The example of the TE conspiracy about the supposed weapons of mass destruction in order to dismantle the Iraqi Ba’athist regime is particularly topical. Yet, whether a conspiracy will succeed or not always depends on the outcome of the social struggle.
As I attempted to show elsewhere,[17] in describing the process leading to the NWO, the new form of internationalized market economy that has been established in the last thirty years or so represents a structural change, a move to a new form of modernity, i.e., a move from statist to neoliberal modernity, rather than a change in economic policy and an ideology, as the reformist Left argues. In this sense, today’s globalisation is indeed a new phenomenon, although it is the outcome of the interaction of the social struggle with the dynamics of the market economy, which was established two centuries ago and has led to the marketization process, i.e. to the process of minimising social controls on the markets and particularly those aiming to the protection of labour and the environment that were coming inevitably into conflict with economic “efficiency” and profitability. The emergence and rapid expansion of multinational corporations (a new phenomenon in the history of the capitalist market economy), has initially led to an informal opening and liberalisation of markets that was later institutionalised by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. It was this development that, together with the change in the subjective conditions, i.e., the decay of the labour and socialist movements in the aftermath of de-industrialisation in the West, signalled the collapse of social democracy and the rise of neoliberal globalization.

* This article is based on extracts from the author’s forthcoming book SUBJUGATING THE MIDDLE EAST: Integration into the New World Order, Vol.1: Pseudo Democratization (Progressive Press, 2014). A shorter version of it was published in Eleftherotypia on 19/10/2014. This article has also been published simultaneously by english.pravda.ru. It was edited by Jonathan Rutherford.

Notes

[1] see e.g. Andrew Walker, “Concerns rise over US-EU trade talks,” BBC News, 11/10/2014, 

[2] Takis Fotopoulos, “Russia, the Eurasian Union and the Transnational Elite,” Pravda.ru (01/09/2014). 

[3] Roslyn Fuller, “Pyrrhic victory for whistleblowers on Transatlantic Trade Agreement,” RT (02/04/2014).  

[4] Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world”, New Scientist Magazine, issue 2835 (24/10/2011).

[5] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Penguin, 2007)

[6] “Pentagon spent millions studying how to influence social media in Darpa-funded research,” RT (08/07/2014). 

[7] “Richest 1% own 50% of world wealth- Credit Suisse report,” RT (16/10/2014).

[8] Roslyn Fuller, Pyrrhic victory for whistleblowers on Transatlantic Trade Agreement, op.cit

[9] “No TTIP: Mass protests slam US-EU trade deal as ‘corporate power grab’,” RT (11/10/2014).

[10] Ed Conway, “The UK is paying the price of its jobs miracle,” The Times (14/10/2014).

[11] Editorial, “The People’s Revolt”, The Times (11/10/2014).

[12] see Takis Fotopoulos, Ukraine: The attack on Russia and the Eurasian Union (published shortly by Progressive Press), ch. 10. 

[13] Takis Fotopoulos, “The Russian embargo and the Ukrainian ‘coup from below’,” Pravda.ru, (18/08/2014). 

[14] see e.g. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).  

[15] Neil Clark, “Conspiracy theories? No one does it better than West’s elite,” RT (13/11/2013). 

[16] see e.g. a collective work on “The conspiratorial discourse in the Greek political system”, University of Thessaloniki, 2010.

[17] Takis Fotopoulos, “Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation “Movement”,” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2001). 

Police State Targets Dissidents: Government To “Impose Extreme Disruption Orders On Individuals” ~  hehe fucking~a ...time 2 kick the motherfuckers the fuck OUT of "their" own party ,folks ! Lol  let me ask ya WORLD ..hows it go~in , wit these ass pipes(elites) fucks run~in things  Huh ...hows that work`in fer US  Hum Lol  time 2 boot em the fuck OUT!    .....  oh ah um &leave We The Peoples shit (you've been stealing) at the door ...ass pipe in~bred rat fucking bastards  Lol  Oops   OH um & time 2 geet a fucking job !!!... yea at 1 of yer great mega~corps  ..parasite fucks :o

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Mac Slavo

The battle for hearts and minds is on and the elite are getting fed up with citizen proles who believe it a right to speak freely and openly about their ideologies and criticisms of government policies.
Their attempts to control the agenda and conversation have repeatedly been met with protests, both online and off, as traditional mainstream audiences migrate by the millions to alternative media and citizen journalism.
But this obvious threat to the establishment’s status quo won’t be allowed to go on much longer. A recent interview with the head of England’s Ministry of Home Security, the British counterpart of America’s Department of Homeland Security, shows just how dangerous open thought and free speech are.
Home Secretary Theresa May explains what the freedom-loving people of the United Kingdom can come to expect in the very near future if their online commentary is deemed to be hatred or extremist thought by the government. And this, as you’ll see below, isn’t just about the UK, which has often been used as a petri dish for global regulators who want to see what does or doesn’t work on a smaller scale before introducing their policies and legalese in the United States.

The police would also be given new powers to apply to a court to impose extreme disruption orders on individuals, using the same criteria.
This could result in those targeted being stopped from taking part in public protests, from being present at all in certain public locations, from associating with named people, from using of conventional broadcast media and from “obtaining any position of authority in an institution where they would have influence over vulnerable individuals or children”.
Breach of the restrictions – which would be time limited – would be a criminal offence. (BBC)

An interview of Theresa May discussing how these new policies will keep Brits “safe and secure” shows the Secretary repeating the same talking points over and over in defense of her position. When questioned about whether innocent people just speaking their minds could get caught up in the extremist web, May goes to her default answer:

What we are looking at is a situation where believe we need to take powers necessary to be able to deal with those people who are preaching hatred on our streets and that is an extremism which can lead others into violent acts.
Of course not all extremists are violent and not all violence comes out of that extremism. But there is a link. There is a thread between this. And I believe we need to be able to deal with that if we are going to do the job we want to do, which is keeping people safe and secure.

Theresa May Seeks NWO Powers Against "Hate Speech" (Redsilverj)

(Video via Steve Quayle and All News Pipeline)

But such things like supplanting political thought or the free expression of views only happens elsewhere. Such ludicrous ideas could never be introduced here in America.
Unless of course you consider that a bi-partisan Congressional panel is now looking to impose similar restrictions on free speech right here in the good ol’ USA:

A key Democrat on the Federal Election Commission called for burdensome new rules on Internet-based campaigning, prompting the Republican chairman to warn that Democrats want to regulate online political sites and even news media like the Drudge Report.
Ravel’s statement suggests that she would regulate right-leaning groups like America Rising that posts anti-Democrat YouTube videos on its website.
FEC Chairman Lee E. Goodman, a Republican, said if regulation extends that far, then anybody who writes a political blog, runs a politically active news site or even chat room could be regulated. He added that funny internet campaigns like “Obama Girl,” and “Jib Jab” would also face regulations. (Washington Examiner)

Make no mistake. Such regulatory and legislative policy would not only target conservative web sites. Every single American citizen would be subject to its rules.
Want to post a video with political undertones? Banned.
Did you mention a political candidate’s name in your social media post? Banned.
Did you send an email to friends and family promoting a particular idea that runs contrary to the traditionally accepted government policy? Banned.
Are you wearing a T-shirt that upsets the politically correct crowd? Banned.
And not just banned. In the United Kingdom you would face criminal repercussions. In the United States, as noted in the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Acts, you could literally be swept up by militarized government SWAT teams and held indefinitely without charge or trial.

A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act “”dangerous to human life”” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to:  (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.  Additionally, the acts have to occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and if they do not, may be regarded as international terrorism.
Source: USA Patriot Act

We can see by the broad language how easily one can be accused of “intimidation” or “coercion.” In the end it really just boils down to be a matter of interpretation, and you could bet your bottom dollar that Federal prosecutors and secret terrorism courts will ensure that you fall well within the Patriot Act should you step out of line.
In a recent piece penned by Paul Joseph Watson we can see these new regulations already taking shape through a redefining of terms such as “suspicious activity.”

Purchasing train tickets with cash, exiting a train before or after other passengers, or appearing calm or nervous are all examples of behavior that Amtrak employees have been told to report as “suspicious activity.”

A document entitled Guidelines for Amtrak Customer Service Employees, which was obtained by the ACLU after an FOIA request, lists a number of different behaviors that are “indicative of criminal activity” and should immediately be reported to law enforcement personnel by Amtrak ticket agents.

Are you calm when purchasing a ticket? That could mean you’re a terrorist.
What about nervous? Do you look at little nervous? Yup, that probably makes you a terrorist, too.
This is what the free people of the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world are facing from entrenched elite financial, economic and geo-political organizations who mean to control every aspect of our lives.
And be assured, they’re not war-gaming civil unrest scenarios and stockpiling billions of rounds of ammunition just so they can play target practice.
Many Americans see what’s coming and are taking steps to prepare for a completely different world. But most don’t even have a clue.
Your views and ideas make you an enemy of the state.
In fact, the United Nations Charter on Human Rights addresses people like you, and despite the fact that our founders forbade international treaties for this very purpose, our government is a long-time proponent of these ideals and policies. The Charter talks a big game with, among other things, freedom of expression, the right to live peacefully, and protections to ensure you can’t be detained indefinitely without trial until, that is, you reach Article 29, Section 3:

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

So, as long as you tow the party line you can enjoy your “freedom.”
For those that don’t, one day soon these international and domestic legislative implements will give them the pretext to come looking for you, as well as those who, as Theresa May stated, have a “thread” that might be connected to you.
Mac Slavo is the Editor of SHTFplan.com