SPY

As tensions between all parties in Eastern Europe boil over, Chris Martenson provides a brief tour through just some of the antics surrounding the US' involvement in bringing about change (you can believe in!) in Ukraine. We raise these items to counter the usual clutter and complete lack of context being provided in the US press and to illustrate that the US is already in pretty deep and therefore unlikely to back down now. Before we move on, do you not find it at all strange that the US media, usually extremely sensitive to anti-semitism, has given the McCain and Nuland support of the Svoboda party a complete pass? I find it to be like the case of "the dog that did not bark", meaning the silence reveals a very fickle moral compass at the heart of the western press. The demonization of Putin as the bad guy here is near complete in western media. But there’s plenty of mischief all around and, as usual, the US finds itself with some pretty strange bedfellows as it seeks an outcome it likes.

This system is on the way out. It will reset. Like feudalism before, our system will go the way of the historical dust bin. And future historians will look back (just as we view feudalism) and say “why did they put up with that nonsense…? This reset is nothing to fear. Human beings are incredible creatures who have a long-term track record of growth. We rise. We progress. As Jobs notes, human beings were fundamentally tool creators. We take our situation, however grim or rudimentary, and we make it better.

What you have to realize is that this trend is inevitable... we are hopelessly lost in a declining spiral vortex of debt and corruption that will only change with war and civil unrest.

The Conservative Canadian government’s hard line on sanctions against Russia has scuttled the launch of a key Canadian military satellite that was to be put into orbit by a Russian rocket. As The Ottawa Citizen reports, on the heels of Russia expelling a Canadian diplomat in Moscow, labelling him a spy, Canadian Space Agency spokeswoman Maya-Olivia Eyssen said the spy satellite, which was to have been launched from Russia’s facilities in Kazakhstan, is now trying to find another country or private company willing to send it into space. Russia has indicated it is more than willing to launch the Canadian satellites, say sources.

For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him not only the richest head of state in world history but possibly the richest man alive in the world today, period. Now, the quest to track down, and isolate, Putin's billions launches in earnest.

You just can’t make this stuff up. A few days ago the President of the United States signed into public law bill S. 2195, now known as Pub.L. 113-100. The law aims to “deny admission to the United States to any representative to the United Nations who has been found to have been engaged in espionage activities or a terrorist activity against the United States and poses a threat to United States national security interests.” In other words, if the US government thinks that if you have been spying on the United States, then they won’t let you in the country. Gee, let’s think for a moment - who has been engaging in espionage against the United States? Anyone? Ah, right. The US government. Mr. Obama himself.

Those munificently rising stock prices and options cash-outs owe much to the Fed’s campaign to suppress interest rates and fuel stock market based ”wealth effects”, but the CEOs are doing their part, too. They have become full-time financial engineers who use the Fed’s flood of liquidity, cheap debt and soaring stock prices to perform a giant strip-mining operation on their own companies.  That is, through endless stock buybacks and M&A maneuvers they create the appearance of “growth” while actually liquidating the balance sheet equity and future asset base on which legitimate earnings growth depends. The poster boy for this deformation is IBM which for all intents and purposes has become a stock buyback machine on steroids. It had a bad hair day yesterday, reporting still another year/year decline in sales, but that goes right to the heart of the matter. During the last seven years IBM has been a stock traders dream, climbing an almost picture perfect chart from $94 per share in March 2007 to a recent peak of $212.

While the western media paints Vladmir Putin as some cross between Napoleon and Hitler marauding across Europe breaking international laws willy-nilly, there is one red line he is apparently unwilling to cross. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, none other than Edward Snowden called in to a Putin live telethon and asked the Russian President: "Does Russia intercept millions of citizens’ data?" Putin's response (whether true or not) is worth paying attention to by his opponent on the world stage: "Russia uses surveillance techniques for spying on individuals only with the sanction of a court order. This is our law, and therefore there is no mass surveillance in our country."

It didn't take long for Putin to respond to the latest news from the west that NATO was about to boost its military presence in proximity to Russia. Specifically he said that Putin does not see a reason to fear NATO which was to be expected. But the even more predictable punchline: Russia must respond when NATO moves closer to country’s border, President Vladimir Putin says during annual televised call-in show. The Russian president made his views clear during a nationally televised question-and-answer session in Moscow on Thursday, ahead of the Geneva two-day meeting during which the Ukraine problam is (again) supposed to get a diplomatic solution (it won't). During the Q&A Putin also accused the Kiev government of committing "a serious crime" by sending in troops to quell unrest in Ukraine's east, as a clash overnight left three pro-Russian protesters dead and 13 wounded. And just to make sure there is a solid enough soundbite, the former KGB spy accused the authorities in Kiev of plunging the country into an "abyss".

Within the last fourteen years, there have been two major market corrections, both of which saw drops of 55% from their highs. That, or more, is the potential for what lies ahead. For those who went through these markets, it was not enjoyable... and those who 'stayed long' have been lucky. To put into perspective how lucky he was, it took 25 years for the Dow Jones to recover to its pre-crash highs after the Great Depression. Likewise, the Dow hit an intraday high of 1,000 in 1962 but never closed above 1,000 until about twenty years later. Whether recent market behavior proves to be merely a dip in the chart is almost irrelevant. The country and financial markets are nearing what could very well be an existential event. Do not be investing like your father or grandfather. Markets today are more like casinos than a way to invest in American growth. Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve has made it impossible to go elsewhere other than your mattress.

I am sure those who were buying the "Kool-aid" at the market highs feel that way, but the numbers tell a different story.

Read Seymour Hersh’s devastating account of Obama’s Red Lines and Rat Lines and weep for the Republic. It is no more.

It is one thing for the NSA to spy on everyone in the world, especially US citizens because all of them are obviously potential "terrorizers" just waiting for their opportunity to blow shit up (except for anything in close proximity to the Boston marathon - those things the NSA promptly filters out), but when the NSA itself is found to have not only known and itself abused the prevalent and widespread Heartbleed bug, but left consumers exposed, then it may be time to finally launch a class action lawsuit against Obama's favorite means to eavesdropping on the entire world.

This is Carey Wedler (the one with the Obama shirt) approximately six years ago, when she was, in her own words, a fervent "Obama girl" who believed the myth about "hope and change."... And this is Carey Wedler now, grown up, who has finally "googled the news", and having seen through the lies, realizes that Obama has "become exactly like the George Bush" that she "used to so vitriolically hate." 

"Mr. Obama - you are the biggest fraud that has ever been perpetrated on the American people and it's been a long time since I bought into it so I think it's about time to burn your shirt."

You’d think a guy like Rogers who aggressively lobs untrue accusations against a journalist trying to inform the American public about government criminality would have a squeaky clean background himself. After all, he was a former FBI agent. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Incredibly, Dick Morris points out that until recently Mike Rogers’ wife was the president and the CEO of the company that was contracted by the State Department to provide intelligence-based and physical security services. While this sort of crony capitalism is seen as “business as usual” in the cesspool that is D.C., the really crazy part of this story is that as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers is charged with investigating the adequacy of security at the Benghazi compound prior to the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack. You can’t find a bigger conflict of interest than that...