Original, Privacy

Malaysian Airlines phones reportedly active, why hasn’t NSA tracked them?

By AlternativeFreePress.com

The NSA collects about 5 billion records a day on the locations of cell phones around the world. The Washington Post reported back in December 2013, “Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.” Whistleblower Edward Snowden released documents cited in the report which provide evidence of the CO-TRAVELER tools described as providing “the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale.”

On March 10th the Washington Post reported that cell phones of the missing passengers are still ringing and some instant message accounts seem to be showing active.

Why has the NSA not found any of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 passengers phones?

Why is tracking law abiding citizens 24/7 considered proper use of government resources?

Why is tracking down a missing airplane full of people less important than tracking supposedly free citizens?

Sources for this article:
1. NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents showhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

2. Vanished Malaysia Airlines flight leaves relatives with anger and phantom phone calls http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/vanished-malaysia-airlines-flight-leaves-relatives-with-anger-and-phantom-phone-calls/2014/03/10/fdb78642-a862-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

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Drugs

The Terrifying Substances Prohibition Adds To Cocaine

The Terrifying Substances People Put in Cocaine

By Kim Gosmer, as told to Morten Vammen
Vice: March 10, 2014

I specialized in cocaine research during my time at the Section for Toxicology and Drug Analysis at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark. The cocaine I worked with included everything from small, impure street samples to high-grade bricks straight from the source. The latter was the most interesting, as it revealed the “science” used to enhance the effect of cocaine by adding adulterants. Most people know that cocaine is often diluted with fillers like as sugars and creatine, and that these dilutions are disguised with caffeine, lidocaine, or benzocaine to mimic the stimulating and local anesthetic properties of cocaine. But only a few are aware that even more chicanery goes into what ends up in your baggie.

Levamisole is an anthelmintic drug, meaning it can be used to kill parasitic worms. The drug was previously used to deworm both humans and livestock, but since it was discovered to cause agranulocytosis (a severe depletion of white blood cells that leaves the body susceptible to infection), it’s only been used to treat worm-infested cattle. In addition to being a popular cow dewormer, it has become a very popular cocaine adulterant.

All over the world, forensic chemists report finding levamisole-tainted cocaine in increasing frequency from every level of distribution, ranging from the street to huge multi-ton shipments. This means that the adulterant is added in South America before the cocaine has been exported. So the question is, why bother diluting high-grade cocaine that costs almost nothing to produce (compared to street prices) with a compound that’s more expensive than other adulterants and diluents? The amount of levamisole found in cocaine is typically not that large, so it’s not to add weight, and it’s neither a stimulant nor a local anesthetic. But it is known that one of the metabolites of levamisole is a compound called aminorex, which has amphetamine-like stimulation properties.

Another possibility could be the fact that levamisole increases the amount of dopamine released by raising glutamate levels in the brain. Since cocaine gets most of its euphoric effect from blocking the dopamine transporter protein—which then increases the available amount of dopamine to interact with the dopamine receptors of the brain—levamisole could potentially increase the effect of cocaine through its release of dopamine. Some people even suggest that levamisole can pass cocaine purity tests, but frankly why would any coke producer care about that? They’ve already been paid by the time the drug hits the market. To me, the aminorex and dopamine releasing theories are by far the most likely explanations, simply because I haven’t heard of any other plausible theories. Essentially, levamisole enhances the rush.

In 2005, levamisole was found in almost 2 percent of the cocaine seized by the DEA. In 2007, the frequency went up to 15 percent, and by 2011 a staggering 73 percent of all cocaine seized by the DEA had been cut with levamisole. The same tendency is seen in Europe and in the samples I have analyzed myself. From 2008 to 2009, the frequency was around 66 percent, and from 2011 to 2012 it had gone up to 90 percent in Danish cocaine. The side effects from levamisole are not necessarily something the average user should worry about, since their exposure is not on a daily basis. Yet the more habitual consumer should definitely take it into consideration.

Agranulocytosis is comparable to a chemical form of AIDS, where the immune system is so severely inhibited that even small infections and scratches can develop into life-threatening diseases. Because you contract an illness from a secondary infection, it is impossible to make a list of symptoms, and agranulocytosis is therefore very difficult for a doctor to diagnose—unless they know what to look for. It’s therefore difficult to put an exact figure on the number of lives taken by this tainted cocaine. Several deaths are known to have occurred, and there have been many more cases of agranulocytosis that were discovered before it was too late.

When it comes to the chain of production, this starts at ground level (or level one), with the farmer, who is also typically responsible for the initial extraction of the coca leaves, using a mixture of gasoline and cement to make crude cocaine paste. The paste is more easily transported than large quantities of leaves, but it has a short life span, so the farmer sells it to the second-level “collector.” This guy is either a wholesale dealer operating on his own, or a collector employed by a jungle lab (level three). The cocaine paste is purified by either level two or three to increase the stability of cocaine. A common method for this is the oxidizing of the paste’s impurities with potassium permanganate, a very strong oxidant with a vivid purple color.

In an attempt to impede this part of cocaine production, the DEA began Operation Purple in 2000, the purpose of which was to monitor the world’s shipping and distribution of potassium permanganate in an attempt to prevent cocaine production. To some extent, the operation has been successful. Yet inevitably, the multibillion dollar cocaine industry came up with a way to substitute potassium permanganate, and—surprise—there’s still plenty of cocaine on the market.

At the third level, hydrochloric acid is added to the base cocaine to convert it to the corresponding salt, which is then precipitated to what we know as crystalline, high-grade cocaine. From here, the exporters and importers come into the picture as level four. If you’re lucky enough to know an importer, this is where you might get the good stuff—unless the supply came through Africa. This is a common smuggling route, as it’s easier to traffic cocaine into Europe from Africa than trafficking it directly from South America. But it’s also a place where additional dilution of the product is highly likely. The same goes for Eastern Europe. The opportunities to interfere with the purity and content of the cocaine are almost limitless and really depend on the creativity of the smugglers.

One thing is certain, though: Because there’s so much money to be made in dealing the drug, each level of the supply chain adds some sort of white powder to the cocaine to maximize profits. This usually spirals out of control when the cocaine has arrived at its destination country and is being divided into smaller portions. Everyone wants a piece of the cake, whether it’s the gang members responsible for the “primary” import or their supporters distributing the gear to the dealers.

The average purity of English cocaine is no more than 20 to 30 percent. Given the chemical diversity of available diluents and adulterants used in cocaine, it’s very difficult for a user to assess the quality of a street-level bag. Of course, if you are—or know—a chemistry student, it’s possible to do a purification test, but at that point you’ll have already spent your savings on a sketchy product, and it would take at least ten grams of the stuff to make it worthwhile.

(Read the full article at: Vice)

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Corporate Welfare

Why did Chrysler ask for $700M in taxpayer money? Because it’s there

By Andrew Coyne
National Post: March 5, 2014

I think we should give the chairman of Chrysler the benefit of the doubt. I think he is entitled to the presumption that, when the company demanded $700-million in government grants and loans to retool its Windsor and Brampton, Ont., plants, it was acting in good faith; that when he warned without such assistance, the company might take its investments elsewhere — the periodic payment of such enormous subsidies to gigantic multinational auto manufacturers being essential to maintaining Canada as “a globally competitive jurisdiction” in the competition to subsidize gigantic multinational auto manufacturers — he was being perfectly sincere, in the sense he sincerely wanted the money.

That is, I think we should assume, when Chrysler asked for the $700-million in January, it had no plans to renounce it in March: or in other words, it was not just completely jerking us around.

But then if, as the company has now revealed, the money was never actually needed — if it will go ahead with the investment even without the government lolly or, as a company press release boldly announced, “fund out of its own resources whatever capital requirements the Canadian operations require” — then why did it ask for it in the first place?

Leave aside, for the moment, whether there is any economic rationale for taking from every other company and industry, the ones that can compete without subsidy, to give to a company that, by its own account, can’t. What Chrysler is now saying is there isn’t even a business case for it. The project is not, as claimed, dependent on it, either in an absolute (we can’t afford it) or even contingent (others will pay us more for it) sense. It was all a bluff.

Which being the case, we must reluctantly confront the possibility the only reason Chrysler asked for the money was … because it was there. To be fair, that’s more or less what Chrysler’s chairman was telling us, between the lines. In his celebrated op-ed piece for the Globe & Mail (“Why I’m asking taxpayers for money to invest”), Sergio Marchionne never actually came out and said “we can’t be bothered to raise the capital ourselves” or “this investment cannot be justified on its merits,” or even “nice assembly plants you got there, pity if anything should happen to them.”

Rather, all was coy ambiguity, heavily suggestive, yet free of anything the company could be held to account for. Chrysler was “committed” to Canada — and yet “our ability as a country to retain and attract manufacturing investments is severely challenged.” We “remain forever grateful” for the $2.9-billion bailout the company received from Canadian taxpayers not five years ago — and has not fully paid back — and yet not so grateful as to prevent us from coming back for more. But the key line was this: “in light of the federal government’s and the Ontario government’s past practices of providing support,” he wrote, “Chrysler Canada approached the governments to assess their level of interest in the investment.”

So: the reason we asked for the money now is because they gave us the money before. Or in other words, because it’s there. Whaddya expect us to do, he seemed to say, turn it down?

But if the money was not needed in this event, chances are it was not needed on all those previous occasions. If it will not accept this handout, perhaps it ought to give back the ones it accepted before — and its fellow automakers likewise. The company complains the issue has become a “political football” — Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak, among others, has urged rejection of its demand — but perhaps it should have become one long ago. For as inexplicable as the industry’s willingness to take money it does not need is the willingness of successive governments to press more upon it.

(Read the full article at: National Post)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Global Debt Exceeds $100 Trillion

Global Debt Exceeds $100 Trillion as Governments Binge, BIS Says

By John Glover
Bloomberg: March 9, 2014

The amount of debt globally has soared more than 40 percent to $100 trillion since the first signs of the financial crisis as governments borrowed to pull their economies out of recession and companies took advantage of record low interest rates, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

The $30 trillion increase from $70 trillion between mid-2007 and mid-2013 compares with a $3.86 trillion decline in the value of equities to $53.8 trillion in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jump in debt as measured by the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS in its quarterly review is almost twice the U.S.’s gross domestic product.

Borrowing has soared as central banks suppress benchmark interest rates to spur growth after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sent the world into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yields on all types of bonds, from governments to corporates and mortgages, average about 2 percent, down from more than 4.8 percent in 2007, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index.

“Given the significant expansion in government spending in recent years, governments (including central, state and local governments) have been the largest debt issuers,” according to Branimir Gruic, an analyst, and Andreas Schrimpf, an economist at the BIS. The organization is owned by 60 central banks and hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group of regulators and central bankers that sets global capital standards.

Austerity Measures

Marketable U.S. government debt outstanding has surged to a record $12 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion at the end of 2007, according to U.S. Treasury data compiled by Bloomberg. Corporate bond sales globally jumped during the period, with issuance totaling more than $21 trillion, Bloomberg data show.

Concerned that high debt loads would cause international investors to avoid their markets, many nations resorted to austerity measures of reduced spending and increased taxes, reining in their economies in the process as they tried to restore the fiscal order they abandoned to fight the worldwide recession.

(Read the full article at: Bloomberg)

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Privacy

Julian Assange Warns SXSW of “Military Occupation of the Internet Space”

By Liz Gannes
Recode: March 8, 2014

“There has been a military occupation of Internet space — a very serious phenomenon,” Assange told the crowd, responding to texted questions from a moderator, and checking periodically to see if people in the cavernous ballroom could see him via show of hands.

Predictably, the U.S. government was Assange’s main rhetorical target. “There is a question if the Barack Obama administration is at all serious, and who really wears the pants,” he said. “Is it the security agencies, or the civilian part?”

The evidence to back up that allegation, according to Assange, is found in the lack of firings, prosecutions, budget cuts and other punitive actions that might have occurred in the eight months since the original Snowden revelations.

Before Wikileaks brought this style of disclosure and whistle-blowing to the headlines four years ago, “We weren’t actually living in the world, we were living in some fictitious representation of the world,” Assange argued.

Now that people are starting to understand the extent of government surveillance and secrets, the Internet has gone from an apathetic space to a political space, Assange said.

Going forward, Assange urged people to be aware that anything they do online is being watched.

And it’s troubling, he said, that control of Internet services rests with such a small number of companies. The fact that Google knows that one million Android phones are activated per day is a problem in and of itself, Assange asserted.

“There’s a single group that’s able to capture that much information,” Assange said. “That’s a surveillance nightmare.”

(Read the full article at: Recode)

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Health/Environment

The Giant Lie About Fukushima

By Karl Grossman
Counterpunch: March 3, 2014

With the third anniversary of the start of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe coming next week, the attempted Giant Lie about the disaster continues—a suppression of information, an effort at dishonesty of historical dimensions.

It involves international entities, especially the International Atomic Energy Agency, national governmental bodies—led in Japan by its current prime minister, the powerful nuclear industry and a “nuclear establishment” of scientists and others with a vested interest in atomic energy.

Deception was integral to the push for nuclear power from its start. Indeed, I opened my first book on nuclear technology, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, with: “You have not been informed about nuclear power. You have not been told. And that has been done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark was deemed necessary by the promoters of nuclear power if it was to succeed. Those in government, science and private industry who have been pushing nuclear power realized that if people were given the facts, if they knew the consequences of nuclear power, they would not stand for it.”

Published in 1980, the book led to my giving many presentations on nuclear power at which I’ve often heard the comment that only when catastrophic nuclear accidents happened would people fully realize the deadliness of atomic energy.

Well, massive nuclear accidents have occurred—the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima catastrophe that began on March 11, 2011 and is ongoing with large discharges of radioactive poisons continuing to be discharged into the environment.

Meanwhile, the posture of the nuclear promoters is denial—insisting the impacts of the Fukushima catastrophe are essentially non-existent. A massive nuclear accident has occurred and they would make believe it hasn’t.

“Fukushima is an eerie replay of the denial and controversy that began with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” wrote Yale University Professor Emeritus Charles Perrow in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year. “This is the same nuclear denial that also greeted nuclear bomb tests, plutonium plant disasters at Windscale in northern England and Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, and the nuclear power plant accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States and Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine.”

The difference with Fukushima is the scale of disaster. With Fukushima were multiple meltdowns at the six-nuclear plant site. There’s been continuing pollution of a major part of Japan, with radioactivity going into the air, carried by the winds to fall out around the world, and gigantic amounts of radioactivity going into the Pacific Ocean moving with the currents and carried by marine life that ingests the nuclear toxins.

Leading the Fukushima cover-up globally is the International Atomic Energy Agency, formed by the United Nations in 1957 with the mission to “seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world.”

Of the consequences of the Fukushima disaster, “To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the accident,” declared the IAEA in 2011, a claim it holds to today.

Working with the IAEA is the World Health Organization. WHO was captured on issues of radioactivity and nuclear power early on by IAEA. In 1959, the IAEA and WHO, also established by the UN, entered into an agreement—that continues to this day—providing that IAEA and WHO “act in close co-operation with each other” and “whenever either organization proposes to initiate a program or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.”

The IAEA-WHO deal has meant that “WHO cannot undertake any research, cannot disseminate any information, cannot come to the assistance of any population without the prior approval of the IAEA…WHO, in practice, in reality, is subservient to the IAEA within the United Nations family,” explained Alison Katz who for 18 years worked for WHO, on Libbe HaLevy’s “Nuclear Hotseat” podcast last year.

On nuclear issues “there has been a very high level, institutional and international cover-up which includes governments, national authorities, but also, regrettably the World Health Organization,” said Katz on the program titled, “The WHO/IAEA—Unholy Alliance and Its Lies About Int’l Nuclear Health Stats.” Katz is now with an organization called IndependentWHO which works for “the complete independence of the WHO from the nuclear lobby and in particular from its mouthpiece which is the International Atomic Energy Agency. We are demanding that independence,” she said, “so that the WHO may fulfill its constitutional mandate in the area of radiation and health.”

“We are absolutely convinced,” said Katz on “Nuclear Hotseat,” “that if the health and environmental consequences of all nuclear activities were known to the public, the debate about nuclear power would end tomorrow. In fact, the public would probably exclude it immediately as an energy option.”

WHO last year issued a report on the impacts of the Fukushima disaster claiming that “for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.”

Then there is the new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who last year insisted before the International Olympic Committee as he successfully pushed to have the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (180 miles from Fukushima): “There are no health-related problems until now, nor will there be in the future, I make the statement to you in the most emphatic and unequivocal way.” Abe has been driving hard for a restart of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants, all shut down in the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe.

His is a totally different view than that of his predecessor, Naoto Kan, prime minister when the disaster began. Kan told a conference in New York City last year of how he had been a supporter of nuclear power but after the Fukushima accident “I changed my thinking 180-degrees, completely.” He declared that at one point it looked like an “area that included Tokyo” and populated by 50 million people might have to be evacuated. “We do have accidents such as an airplane crash and so on,” Kan said, “but no other accident or disaster” other than a nuclear plant disaster can “affect 50 million people… no other accident could cause such a tragedy.” Moreover, said Kan, “without nuclear power plants we can absolutely provide the energy to meet our demands.” Japan since the accident began has tripled its use of solar energy, he said, and pointed to Germany as a model with its post-Fukushima commitment to shutting down all its nuclear power plants and having “all its power supplied by renewable power” by 2050. The entire world could do this, said Kan. “If humanity really would work together… we could generate all our energy through renewable energy.”

A major factor in Abe’s stance is Japan having become a global player in the nuclear industry. General Electric (the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants) and Westinghouse have been the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically building or designing 80 percent of them. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse’s nuclear division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE in its nuclear division. Thus the two major nuclear power plant manufacturers worldwide are now Japanese brands. Abe has been busy traveling the world seeking to peddle Toshiba-Westinghouse and Hitachi-GE nuclear plants to try to lift Japan’s depressed economy.

As for the nuclear industry, the “Fukushima accident has caused no deaths,” declares the World Nuclear Association in its statement “Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors…Updated October 2013.” The group, “representing the people and organizations of the global nuclear profession,” adds: “The Fukushima accident resulted in some radiation exposure of workers at the plant, but not such as to threaten their health.”

What will the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster be?

It is impossible to know exactly now. But considering the gargantuan amount of radioactive poisons that have been discharged and what will continue to be released, the impacts will inevitably be great. The claim of there being no consequences to life and the prediction that there won’t be in the future from the Fukushima catastrophe is an outrageous falsehood.

That’s because it is now widely understood that there is no “safe” level of radioactivity. Any amount can kill. The more radioactivity, the greater the impacts. As the National Council on Radiation Protection has declared: “Every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.”

There was once the notion of there being a “threshold dose” of radioactivity below which there would be no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses—that there is a five-to-40-year “incubation” period

Projecting a death toll of more than a million from the radioactivity released from Fukushima is Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk who has been a professor at a number of universities. . “Fukushima is still boiling radionuclides all over Japan,” he said. “Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse.”

Indeed, a report by the Institute for Science in Society, based in the U.K., has concluded: “State-of-the-art analysis based on the most inclusive datasets available reveals that radioactive fallout from the Fukushima meltdown is at least as big as Chernobyl and more global in reach.”

A death toll of up to 600,000 is estimated in a study conducted for the Nordic Probabilistic Safety Assessment Group which is run by the nuclear utilities of Finland and Sweden.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told a symposium on “The Medical Implications of Fukushima” held last year in Japan: “The accident is enormous in its medical implications. It will induce an epidemic of cancer as people inhale the radioactive elements, eat radioactive vegetables, rice and meat, and drink radioactive milk and teas. As radiation from ocean contamination bio-accumulates up the food chain…radioactive fish will be caught thousands of miles from Japanese shores. As they are consumed, they will continue the the cycle of contamination, proving that no matter where you are, all major nuclear accidents become local.”

Dr. Caldicott, whose books on nuclear power include Nuclear Madness, also stated: “The Fukushima disaster is not over and will never end. The radioactive fallout which remains toxic for hundreds to thousands of years covers large swaths of Japan will never be ‘cleaned up’ and will contaminate food, humans and animals virtually forever.”

Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, has said: “The health impacts to the Japanese will begin to be felt in several years and out to 30 or 40 years from cancers. And I believe we’re going to see as many as a million cancers over the next 30 years because of the Fukushima incident in Japan.”

At Fukushima, “We have opened a door to hell that cannot be easily closed—if ever,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at the U.S.-based group Beyond Nuclear last year.

Already an excessive number of cases of thyroid cancers have appeared in Japan, an early sign of the impacts of radioactivity. A study last year by Joseph Mangano and Dr. Janette Sherman of the Radiation and Public Health Project, and Dr. Chris Busby, determined that radioactive iodine fall-out from Fukushima damaged the thyroid glands of children in California. And the biggest wave of radioactivity in the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima is slated to hit the west coast of North America in the next several months.

Meanwhile, every bluefin tuna caught in the waters off California in a Stanford University study was found to be contaminated with cesium-137, a radioactive poison emitted on a large scale by Fukushima. The tuna migrate from off Japan to California waters. Daniel Madigan, who led the study, commented: “The tuna packaged it up [the radiation] and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.”

There is, of course, the enormous damage to property. The Environmental Health Policy Institute of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in its summary of the “Costs and Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster” cites estimates of economic loss of between $250 billion and $500 billion. Some 800 square kilometers are “exclusion” zones of “abandoned cities, towns, agricultural land, homes and properties” and from which 159,128 people have been “evicted,” relates PSR senior scientist Steven Starr. Further, “about a month after the disaster, on April 19, 2011, Japan chose to dramatically increase its official ‘safe’ radiation exposure levels from 1 mSv [millisievert, a measure of radiation dose] to 20 mSv per year—20 times higher than the U.S. exposure limit. This allowed the Japanese government to downplay the dangers of the fallout and avoid evacuation of many badly contaminated areas.”

And last year the Japanese government enacted a new State Secrets Act which can restrict—with a penalty of 10 years in jail—reporting on Fukushima. “”It’s the cancerous mark of a nuclear regime bound to control all knowledge of a lethal global catastrophe now ceaselessly escalating,” wrote Harvey Wasserman, co-author of Killing Our Own, in a piece aptly titled “Japan’s New ‘Fukushima Fascism’.”

(Read the full article at: Counterpunch)

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Geopolitics/War

Official says air defense systems stolen in Ukraine

Man-portable air defense systems could be stolen in Ukraine amid turmoil

RT: March 8, 2014

Highly dangerous type of weaponry – man-portable air defense systems (MANPADs) – have gone missing from two Ukrainian military units, according to a high-ranking official in Kiev.

Several, and maybe even several dozen 9K38 Igla (Needle) air defense systems (SA-18 Grouse in NATO’s classification) have been stolen, a Ukrainian military official, who wished to remain anonymous, told RIA Novosti.

The shortage was, according to him, registered in Ukraine’s 80th airmobile regiment, which had 54 MANPADs, and the 27th airmobile brigade, stationed 45 km away from Lvov, which possessed 90 Iglas.

The new leadership of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is, according to the RIA source, taking measures to “camouflage the grave situation” by adding old and experimental items of the weapon to the stockpile.

(Read the full article at: RT)

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Geopolitics/War

‘Vlad the Bad’ Moves His Chess Pieces

By Eric Margolis
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity: March 8, 2014

Soviet leader Josef Stalin used to shrug off critics by his favorite Central Asian saying: “The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.”

Russia’s hard-eyed president, Vladimir Putin, is following the same strategy over Ukraine and Crimea.

Putin swiftly moved his knight into the empty chess square of Crimea, thereby regaining full control of one of Russia’s four strategic port regions: Sevastopol, Murmansk, St Petersburg and Vladivostok.

Sevastopol, now firmly in Moscow’s hands, is Russia’s sole gateway to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and Mideast. The vast, co-shared Russian-Ukrainian Sevastopol naval base was a shaky, awkward arrangement doomed to eventual failure.

Semi-autonomous Crimea, over 60% ethnic Russian, will hold a referendum on 16 March to decide to remain in Ukraine or rejoin Russia. A referendum is clearly the answer to the whole Ukraine-Russia problem.

Ukraine has been a corruption-ridden failed state since it separated from Russia in 1991. This writer has long suggested that partition of Ukraine into Western and Russian-oriented halves is the sensible solution, with Crimea returning to Russia.

Putin asks if Western-backed Kosovo can go independent of Serbia, why can’t Ukraine break its links with Crimea?

The temporary attachment of majority ethnic Russian Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 after 250 years of Russian rule was unnatural, a ticking time bomb. It has now exploded, triggered in part by the West’s successful effort to overthrow the elected but corrupt government in Kiev of Viktor Yanukovich.

Overturning regimes deemed uncooperative or hostile has long been a CIA specialty. Its first big success came in 1953 with the subversion of Iran’s democratic-nationalist leader, Mohammed Mossadegh by a combination of propaganda, rented crowds, and bribes. We saw this same technique used – enhanced by modern social media – in Ukraine’s first Orange Revolution, Georgia, again in Iran (unsuccessfully), and, with the help of US and British special forces, in Libya and Syria. Egypt came next, where a US-backed tinpot military dictator, the self-appointed “Field Marshall al-Sisi” claims he is “answering the people’s call.” Not a peep from Washington. Or about the crushing of opposition by Bahrain’s US-backed monarchy.

Russia, which used to be adept at subversion, has lagged in recent years but it still knows the signs. The Kremlin is convinced that Ukraine’s latest revolution was engineered by Washington. The US Undersecretary of State for Europe admitted Washington has spent $5 billion over recent years in Ukraine to bring it into the West’s orbit – aka “building democracy.”

Two points to note. Did Washington think that tough Vlad Putin would just take its coup lying down?

Second, it’s amazing how determined Washington’s cold warriors remain to tear down Russia. The bankrupt US, $17 trillion in debt, running on money borrowed from China, with bridges collapsing and 44 million citizens on food stamps, suddenly finds the money to offer bankrupt Ukraine a new $1 billion loan – just to compete with Moscow. A loan unlikely to be repaid.

America has a bad habit of personalizing foreign affairs and demonizing uncooperative leaders. Remember when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was denounced as “Hitler on the Nile”? “Khadaffi, Mad Dog of the Mideast”? Most Americans have little knowledge of geography, history, or world affairs so the easiest way to market overseas adventures to them is by creating foreign bogeymen like Khadaffi and Saddam.

Vladimir Putin is the latest. He is being hysterically demonized by the US and British media. Vlad the Bad.

Disturbingly, US Republicans and the usual media propagandists are heaping blame on President Barack Obama for “losing Crimea,” as if any of them knows where it was before last week. John McCain and his sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham have been demanding that Obama “get tough.”

Sure. Let’s mine Russia’s ports or blockade its oil and gas exports. Nothing like a nuclear war to show how weak the Democrats are. Thank God McCain did not win the presidency. The dolts at Fox TV can’t tell the difference between caution and cowardice.

President Putin’s ambition is to slowly reassemble some parts of the old USSR, Ukraine being the most important. Doing so is in Russia’s national interest, much as we may not like it. Nearly all Russians believe Putin is on the right track. By contrast, Washington wants to keep Russia weak and treat it as an obsequious, defeated nation, like postwar Germany or Japan.

The US won’t accept that Russia has any legitimate spheres of influence, while Washington’s span the globe. Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry, who used to be a sensible fellow before becoming corrupted by power, blasted Russia: “you just don’t invade a country under a phony pretext!”

I guess Kerry has never heard of the US invasions of the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. Or can’t remember Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin “incident.”

(Read the full article at: The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity)

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Geopolitics/War

What the US Media’s Celebration of Protesting RT Anchors Conveniently Ignores

By: Kevin Gosztola
The Dissenter: March 6, 2014

In the past few days, the Russian state-funded media organization, RT, has had two of its staff members express some level of protest against the editorial line of the organization and how it is currently covering the Russia-Ukraine “crisis” that has been unfolding.

Abby Martin, anchor of “Breaking the Set,” a show with an editorial perspective of its own, declared at the end of her show’s broadcast on March 3, “Just because I work here for RT doesn’t mean I don’t have editorial independence. And I can’t stress enough how strongly I am against any state intervention in a sovereign nation’s affairs. What Russia did is wrong.”

Liz Wahl, who anchored a block of straight news each evening and technically did not have her own program, took a more drastic step and resigned on air. She could no longer bring herself to push “Putinist propaganda” on air. She said on “The Last Word” on MSNBC she felt someone needed to speak up about a network out to make “America look like the bad guy,” “make excuses” for President Vladimir Putin, who she referred to as a dictator and “whitewash his decisions.”

Her resignation stung RT worse than Martin’s expression of independence. It has animated neoconservatives like young James Kirchick, who took his own stand when he appeared on RT against “homophobic repression.” The reason being, as Kirchick wrote in his story on Wahl, is they believe RT “portrays every Western military intervention as an act of imperialism while depicting Russian ones as mere humanitarian attempts at ‘protecting’ local populations, as the network constantly describes Moscow’s role in Crimea.”

That is probably true. However, for people like Kirchick, this analysis is premised on the fact that most, if not all, Western military interventions have inherently good motivations. The United States must take action or failure to intervene will mean conflicts get worse without its moral leadership. Reality is somewhere in between—that both Russia and the US are superpowers which will employ, support or threaten the use of force to protect national interests.

CNN was eager to have Martin and Wahl on their programs because the protest at a state-owned media network that broadcasts to American and international audiences suggests that Putin is losing. It advances an anti-Putin narrative without seriously examining the issues of journalistic or editorial independence in media that are fundamental to these stories of protest at RT.

Piers Morgan’s show had them on to talk about what they did because, as CNN put it, “It may be a new Cold War between Russia and the rest of the world.”

Here’s the critical part of Martin’s appearance:

MORGAN: What is your specific criticism about the way RT America has covered this crisis?

MARTIN: You know, I just saw the higher media apparatus was covering it. I mean, RT was covering it in a different way that I didn’t agree with, and then I saw the corporate media coverage almost wanting to revive the Cold War. I mean, I felt like people were egging on Obama to attack militarily.

I mean, it’s insane living in a time where we have corporate media actually supporting military intervention and action against Russia. I mean, this is no joke here. We got to really take a step back and think about how we can do things peacefully and diplomatically and not continue to warmonger and fearmonger the American people about what’s going on.

MORGAN: And tell me this, I mean, you’ve — in the clip we played at the start when you made your dramatic statement, you conceded you weren’t an expert in what is going on in Ukraine or indeed in Ukraine itself.

I presume now you probably come up to speed pretty quickly given all the attention that you’ve had. What do you think with all your experience in broadcasting on RT America is the correct way for this crisis to be resolved?

MARTIN: I hope it resolves diplomatically, Piers, you know, you could imagine the last couple of days that have been pretty hectic, I hadn’t really been able to keep up with the day to day but I just hope for a peaceful outcome with no more military aggression, I hope the military aggression scaled back and I hope we can see a peaceful outcome.

But I think that the real question that should be asked is why do I have to work for RT to tell the truth about corporations and the U.S. government? I mean, seriously, you guys will be holding to advertisers that you cannot criticize and that’s why I work for a station that I can criticize …

MORGAN: Well, hang on, hang on …

MARTIN: Sure.

MORGAN: I’m free to say what the hell I like …

MARTIN: Sure.

MORGAN: … no one’s ever told me I can’t criticize advertisers or corporate entity. That conversation has never happened in the three years I’ve been on air in CNN.

MARTIN: Fair enough, Piers, but I think a lot of people deal with self-censorship all across the media spectrum.

MORGAN: I certainly don’t. That’s probably one of my problems. [emphasis added]

What is striking about this exchange is that Morgan does not think he has engaged in self-censorship at CNN. Both Morgan and Anderson Cooper, who covered recent developments at RT, omitted the fact that journalists have quit CNN because they were being asked to censor their coverage.

Amber Lyon, who worked for CNN, went to Bahrain to produce a one-hour documentary on democracy activists using social media and internet technology. CNN International refused to broadcast the documentary. And, as journalist Glenn Greenwald reported, CNN came under pressure from the Bahraini regime to include their claims “about the violence in their country,” even when Lyon knew with certainty those claims were false.

Greenwald explored in a related post how CNN International relied on “revenue from Middle East regimes,” including an arrangement to “market Lebanon as a tourism destination.” It aired programming on Kazakhstan that was sponsored by the Kazakh government. He highlighted how complaints from Bahrain or Saudi Arabia would be given deference because they are close allies of the US government.

As Jay Rosen, a media critic and New York University professor, described:

…The value of what CNN is trying to do to be this consensus news product around the world – not just in the western economic club but around the world – has many serious consequences. One of the consequences is that it puts you into business with ruling regimes in order to get on the air. Of course, there’s a relationship between what you broadcast, what you put out as news, and the likelihood of getting accepted by regimes…

However, viewers have no idea that CNN may have business interests that require it to tacitly endorse the actions of repressive regimes. This is understandably not something CNN advertises. On the other hand, viewers know full well what they are getting from RT: it will be news from a Russian perspective.

*

There is this view in US establishment media that they are immune to advancing nationalistic narratives in the same way that the Kremlin-backed news organization RT does. However, the coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War was such a moment where independent journalism was forsaken for state-identified journalism that amplified a case for war that rested upon neoconservative propaganda.

Currently, there is minimal attention, if any attention, to the US government’s claimed authority to target and kill Americans or how President Barack Obama has embraced drones. (In fact, one might argue “The Daily Show,” a satirical news program, has had better coverage than most US media.)

And, consider how reluctant and difficult it was for news programs on television to confront the reality that the US government was engaged in torture or how they studiously avoid that there are over a hundred people being indefinitely detained at Guantanamo Bay (the vast majority of which have been deemed to pose absolutely no threat to the US yet have not been transferred home).

Any time journalists cover how another media outlet functions, they run the risk of unfairly suggesting in their critiques that what is happening at that outlet is unique to that outlet, that what is happening there could not happen where they work.

In the rush to impose sanctions or to consider sending a billion dollars of aid to Ukraine, is there any reflection on what this does to the crisis and whether it will de-escalate tensions? Is there any meaningful attempt to report on the extent to which US was funding and actively backing forces that were protesting and destabilized Ukraine?

No part of this post is intended to suggest that somehow RT has been fair and accurate in its portrayal of what has been happening with Russia and Ukraine (it hasn’t), but consider how much of the US broadcast news media coverage has been the inverse of RT’s editorial line.

—WOLF BLITZER, CNN: …When we come back, does Vladimir Putin have a double standard when it comes to military intervention in other countries? We’re going to take a closer look at his controversial strategy in this crisis… (March 4)

—FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN: …I’ve had a few chances to meet with him in small groups — very small groups. And he is — you — when it comes to process, very intelligent, very tough, and a deep sense of a Russian nationalism, a deep sense of the greatness of Russia if you were Russian exceptionalism.

So I think that, you know, you’re dealing with somebody with whom you cannot make appeals to international norms and laws that these things are not going to be as important. It is brutal understanding of Russia’s interest. And I think that the “Off Ramp” that we might find, it lies in — what Putin said in his press conference. The most important thing he said in that long, rambling press conference was that he does not intend to annex (ph) Crimea… (March 4)

—BILL NEELY, NBC News Chief correspondent: Words laced with menace from President Putin. “There is no need for further Russian military intervention in Ukraine,” he says. But the possibility still exists. It is a veiled threat…

…The US is looking at economic sanctions. But does Russia`s president care? Amidst the crisis, Russian war games, led by President Putin, a display of Russian power, the timing deliberate. Putin defiant as he redraws Europe`s map. The exercises are not over, the takeover of Crimea is not, nor is the standoff at Ukraine`s military bases… (March 4)

—DAVID GREGORY, NBC News host: (interviewing Sen. Marco Rubio) …You`re saying as you did in a piece that you wrote for Politico about how to confront Russia that we`ve got to the use blunt talk. So I ask you for some blunt talk. Is Russia an enemy of the United States now? (March 2)

All of US media is making comparisons to the Georgia-Russia conflict that occurred in 2008, but they inaccurately are suggesting that Russia started the war when, in fact, according to a study by the European Union, it was Georgia that “started the conflict with Russia with an attack that was in violation of international law.”

Here’s New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cartoonishly asking, who is really the villain here?

Is Obama really to blame for the Ukraine crisis? My column finds a better villain http://t.co/sDkGSemiev pic.twitter.com/GS58hSjBwa

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 6, 2014

This would be laughed at if RT tweeted Obama on a bicycle and reduced the situation to a battle of good versus evil.

As Sam Knight, who once was a segment producer at RT, said during an interview for the National Journal:

…The corporate media is staffed with fleshy bags of walking sycophancy—pathetic excuses for journalists, really—and a lot of these stories about RT reek of projection and insecurity. These “Neo-nazis in Kiev are overstated,” or “Putin is just doing this because he can” stories are childish and absurd, boiling the entire conflict down to black and white “democracy vs. authoritarianism” or a cartoonish pantomime portrait of a guy, who, in reality, has support that can’t be easily dismissed—both at home and in Crimea. This doesn’t excuse RT’s coverage of the conflict. But it’s state-owned. What are these jingoistic American hacks’ excuses?

(Read the full article at: The Dissenter)

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Corporate Welfare

Canada’s growing corporate welfare shipbuilding problem

Shipbuilding memo shows more delays, cost overruns

By Terry Milewski
CBC News: March 7, 2014

An internal government memo obtained by CBC News shows that all four parts of the government’s huge shipbuilding program are either over budget, behind schedule, or both.

Written Oct. 7 last year by the deputy minister of national defence, Richard Fadden, the memo shows that three of those four programs also face “major challenges” of a technical nature, as well as difficulties lining up skilled manpower to get the ships built at all.

The memo, released to the CBC following an Access to Information request, leaves little doubt that Canada’s crippled supply ship, HMCS Protecteur, won’t be replaced before the year 2020.

The spectacle of the 46-year-old Protecteur, Canada’s only supply ship in the Pacific, being towed into Honolulu after an engine-room fire has thrown the lack of a replacement into sharp focus. Although there’s a plan to build two new supply ships, there’s no sign the work will even begin until late 2016. That means a new one won’t enter service until the end of the decade.
Yellow alert

The Fadden memo was intended to assure Defence Minister Rob Nicholson that there are “many success stories” in the procurement saga that has dogged the government for years.

But the attached details show no major program without problems.

A chart summarizing the state of the shipbuilding effort uses green and yellow squares to indicate where those problems are — the green meaning, on track, and yellow meaning, trouble — and there’s a lot of yellow.

For the Joint Support Ships — that’s the pair of supply ships — the chart shows trouble with both the schedule and the price. The memo explains that this means the program is up to 20 per cent behind schedule and up to 10 per cent over budget.

For the Arctic Patrol Ships, the chart shows yellow for three measures: the cost, “HR” — meaning Human Resources, or skilled workers — and technical issues. The memo describes these as “major challenges in finding solutions; significant scope changes may be required.” That suggests the ships may need to be redesigned in order to fix the technical problems.

All of those same issues — cost, manpower and technical — also dog the plan to upgrade Canada’s Halifax-class frigates.

But for the biggest program of all — the $38-billion project to build 15 new warships known as “Surface Combatants” — there is trouble cited on four measures: the schedule, the technical and manpower issues and the procurement strategy itself. It doesn’t say how any of those can be fixed, but it does say they are fixable.

In response to a request for comment, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson’s office said in a statement the auditor general had concluded the acquisition of the ships was being managed “in a timely and affordable manner that will support the shipbuilding industry for years to come.”
$100B may not be enough

The cost of the government shipbuilding strategy was already known to be enormous: roughly $105 billion to build and operate all the ships over their expected lifetimes. The capital cost of the two supply ships is officially estimated at $2.6 billion for the pair — although the Parliamentary Budget Officer said a year ago that it would really be over $4 billion. The government also plans to spend $3.2 billion on an unknown number of Arctic Patrol Ships — but experts doubt it will get more than half of the “6-to-8” ships that were promised.

Fadden’s memo, however, does not make any judgment on the amount of money budgeted — only whether the project is staying within it or not. That leaves unasked the question of whether the budget is too high or too low for the task at hand.

Take the supply ships. “Yellow” suggests they’re over budget, but doesn’t indicate what the budget should be. But comparisons with Canada’s allies could raise eyebrows even further.
Five times the price … for smaller ships

Britain, for example, opted to build its four new naval supply ships much more cheaply, at the Daewoo shipyard in South Korea. The contract is for roughly $1.1 billion Cdn. That’s for all four. By contrast, Canada plans to build just two ships, in Vancouver, for $1.3 billion each. So Canada’s ships will be roughly five times more costly than the British ones.

But there’s a twist. Canada’s supply ships will also carry less fuel and other supplies, because they’ll be smaller — about 20,000 tonnes. The U.K. ships are nearly twice as big — 37,000 tonnes. Canadians will lay out a lot more cash for a lot less ship.

(Read the full article at: CBC)

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