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Sunday 7 December 2014

New law would make taxpayers potentially liable for TRILLIONS in derivatives losses

Derivatives

© The Economic Collapse Blog



If the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble implodes, who should be stuck with the bill? Well, if the "too big to fail" banks have their way it will be you and I. Right now, lobbyists for the big Wall Street banks are pushing really hard to include an extremely insidious provision in a bill that would keep the federal government funded past the upcoming December 11th deadline.

This provision would allow these big banks to trade derivatives through subsidiaries that are federally insured by the FDIC.


What this would mean is that the big banks would be able to continue their incredibly reckless derivatives trading without having to worry about the downside. If they win on their bets, the big banks would keep all of the profits.


If they lose on their bets, the federal government would come in and bail them out using taxpayer money. In other words, it would essentially be a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.


Just imagine the following scenario. I go to Las Vegas and I place a million dollar bet on who will win the Super Bowl this year. If I am correct, I keep all of the winnings. If I lose, federal law requires you to bail me out and give me the million dollars that I just lost.


Does that sound fair?


Of course not! In fact, it is utter insanity. But through their influence in Congress, this is exactly what the big Wall Street banks are attempting to pull off. And according to the Huffington Post, there is a very good chance that this provision will be in the final bill that will soon be voted on...




According to multiple Democratic sources, banks are pushing hard to include the controversial provision in funding legislation that would keep the government operating after Dec. 11. Top negotiators in the House are taking the derivatives provision seriously, and may include it in the final bill, the sources said.




Sadly, most Americans don't understand how derivatives work and so there is very little public outrage.

But the truth is that people should be marching in the streets over this. If this provision becomes law, the American people could potentially be on the hook for absolutely massive losses...




The bank perks are not a traditional budget item. They would allow financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. - potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by the risky contracts.




This is not the first time these banks have tried to pull off such a coup. As Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg has detailed, bank lobbyists tried to do a similar thing last year...

Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:


Derivatives Bill

Unsurprisingly, the main backer of the bill is notorious Wall Street lackey Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Goldman Sachs employee who has discovered lobbyist payoffs can be just as lucrative as a career in financial services. The last time Mr. Himes made an appearance on these pages was in March 2013 in my piece: Congress Moves to DEREGULATE Wall Street.

Fortunately, it was stopped in the Senate at that time.

But that is the thing with bank lobbyists. They are like Terminators - they never, ever, ever give up.


And they now have more of a sense of urgency then ever, because we are moving into a period of time when the big banks may begin losing tremendous amounts of money on derivatives contracts.


For example, the rapidly plunging price of oil could potentially mean gigantic losses for the big banks. Many large shale oil producers locked in their profits for 2015 and 2016 through derivatives contracts when the price of oil was above $100 a barrel. As I write this, the price of oil is down to $65 a barrel, and many analysts expect it to go much lower.


So guess who is on the other end of many of those trades?


The big banks.


Their computer models never anticipated that the price of oil would fall by more than 40 dollars in less than six months. A loss of 40, 50 or even 60 dollars per barrel would be catastrophic.


No wonder they want legislation that will protect them.


And commodity derivatives are just part of the story. Over the past couple of decades, Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world. At this point, the amounts of money that these "too big to fail" banks are potentially on the hook for are absolutely mind blowing.


As you read this, there are five Wall Street banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives. The following numbers come from the OCC's most recent quarterly report (see Table 2)...


JPMorgan Chase


Total Assets: $2,520,336,000,000 (about 2.5 trillion dollars)


Total Exposure To Derivatives: $68,326,075,000,000 (more than 68 trillion dollars)


Citibank


Total Assets: $1,909,715,000,000 (slightly more than 1.9 trillion dollars)


Total Exposure To Derivatives: $61,753,462,000,000 (more than 61 trillion dollars)


Goldman Sachs


Total Assets: $860,008,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)


Total Exposure To Derivatives: $57,695,156,000,000 (more than 57 trillion dollars)


Bank Of America


Total Assets: $2,172,001,000,000 (a bit more than 2.1 trillion dollars)


Total Exposure To Derivatives: $55,472,434,000,000 (more than 55 trillion dollars)


Morgan Stanley


Total Assets: $826,568,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)


Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,134,518,000,000 (more than 44 trillion dollars)


Those that follow my website regularly will note that the derivatives exposure for the top four banks has gone up significantly since I last wrote about this just a few months ago.


Do you want to be on the hook for all of that?


Keep in mind that the U.S. national debt is only about 18 trillion dollars at this point.


So why in the world would we want to guarantee losses that could potentially be far greater than our entire national debt?


Only a complete and utter fool would financially guarantee these incredibly reckless bets.


Please contact your representatives in Congress and tell them that you do not want to be on the hook for the derivatives losses of the big Wall Street banks.


When this derivatives bubble finally implodes and these big banks go down (and they inevitably will), we do not want them to take down the rest of us with them.


Woman cut off from welfare payments for not reporting she was in a coma

coma

© www.webmd.com



Ohio resident Kimberly Thompson was recuperating from a month-long, medically induced coma when she was told that she'd no longer be receiving welfare payments. A letter from the county reportedly explained that because she hadn't informed them that she was in a coma, she was being kicked off of welfare.

According to NBC News, Thompson, 43, who spent years scraping by while raising a teenage daughter, applied for Medicaid earlier this year after being unable to work due to a hysterectomy she had in May. After the surgery, Thompson contracted an infection that led to gradual organ failure. She was placed in a coma while doctors worked to save her, and when she awoke she learned that she'd been cut off from $700 per month in government assistance.


"They told me I'd lost the benefits because I didn't go to class," Thompson told NBC News, referring to a job-training program she'd enrolled in when she began receiving Medicaid, welfare and food stamps. "How are you supposed to go to class when you're in a coma?"


Because she was unable to work in the first few months after her coma, Thompson resorted to sleeping on couches and spending time living with relatives. Her teenage daughter lived with her father during that time.


Thompson said she is confused as to why her Medicaid caseworker didn't inform her welfare caseworker of her condition; a problem that a county spokesperson admitted has affected others before. After a hearing officer ordered that Thompson's benefits be reinstated, she received the money that she missed out on after being cut off and is now receiving food stamps. NBC News says that the county is "still deciding whether to reinstate welfare payments in the future, since her daughter does not currently live with her."


"If I'd had that money after the coma, if I'd had it all along, I could have had a place for me and my daughter, but now because she doesn't live with me it's impossible to get us back together until I can get work again," Thompson said.



The triumph of propaganda in the wars waged by media

propaganda

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the and the deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?


These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.


The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.


The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.


This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."


I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.


Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.


In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.


In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"


He replied that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq."


That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.


In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.




Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr. Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."


The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.


What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.


The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.


Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.


The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the .


The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.


This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.


Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.


The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since World War 2 is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.


And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.


Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.


What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.


Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the , the and the - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.


There is almost the of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".


"If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."


Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."


In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.


In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?


In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.


In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the , the , the and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?


Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?


Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.


But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?


Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.


The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?


In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the revealed something similar in this country.


None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.


It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.


Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.


None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the , Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.


What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.


"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."


It's this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.


In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.


It's 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."


It's time they knew.


Change in tactics? Poroshenko calls for urgent Contact Group session to achieve ceasefire


© Sputnik. Mikhail Palinchak



Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has stressed that the Contact Group on Ukraine has to hold an urgent session in order for a ceasefire to be achieved in the southeast of the country by Tuesday, the official website of the Ukrainian president informs.


According to the website, Poroshenko stressed "the important role of the Trilateral Contact Group and expressed hope that [Special Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office] Heidi Tagliavini would continue her important work despite the completion of Switzerland's chairmanship in the OSCE".


"At the same time, the President emphasized that the session of the Trilateral Contact Group had to be held as soon as possible in order to achieve the ceasefire already on December 9," the website added, saying that Poroshenko made the remarks during a meeting with Tagliavini on Sunday.


According to the website, Tagliavini said that the Minsk agreements, which comprise the September 5 protocol and the September 19 memorandum are "the basis for the peaceful resolution of the situation in the Donbas".


On Sunday, Kiev said that the next meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine was to take place on Tuesday, December 9, excluding the possibility of a date shift.


The Contact Group includes representatives from Ukraine, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics (DPR, LPR), as well as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Russia.


The conflict in Ukraine escalated in April, when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in the country's southeast. On September 5, during a Contact Group meeting in Minsk, a ceasefire deal was reached between the two sides. However, numerous breaches of the ceasefire regime have been reported since then, with both Kiev forces and independence fighters accusing each other of violating the truce.


California cop is being fired for NOT using violence to resolve a situation

police

© Unknown



Seaside, CA - A 20 year veteran of the CSU Monterey Bay police force, was given a notice of termination this week for choosing NOT to immediately resort to violent escalation during a confrontation with a suicidal student.

The unidentified officer was the first one on the scene when responding to an incident involving a suicidal college student in his CSUMB dorm room in February of this year. The officer showed an heartening level of restraint when dealing with a student, who was in his room with a knife and hammer, and was also threatening to light himself on fire.


"He was clearly a danger to himself and he was in crisis," Marina Police Chief Edmundo Rodriguez said. "We were trying to keep him from accessing the weapons or leave, to get him medical attention."


Instead of immediately resorting to violence, this officer was talking the student down and de-escalating the situation. The officer was successful in calming the student down and was going to get him a glass of water when the Marina police department showed up, and immediately began tasering the student.


The campus officer refused to taser the student, as he did not perceive a threat. Subsequently Rodriguez's department later issued a "failure to act" complaint against the campus officer, accusing him of not engaging in a "highly agitated situation."


"It defies logic and is extremely disappointing that, at a time when law enforcement is under fire for using more force than necessary, an officer is being terminated for attempting to use civilized methods to resolve a situation," the student's father said.


"Our officer did not believe he was any threat at all," said Jeff Solomon, the union's president.


"The other officers started yelling and screaming to get down, Tased him multiple times, and from what we understand (told the university officer) to Tase him again," Solomon said.


The officer has been on paid leave since April according to his attorney who said she will now file a lawsuit against the university.


"We believe the officer in this case exercised restraint and good judgment in not tasing a student that was suffering from mental health issues," said the officer's attorney Kathleen Storm.


This incident highlights the sick and twisted state of today's police force. Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed teenager, and was not fired. Officer Daniel Pantaleo of the NYPD, placed Eric Garner in a chokehold, a maneuver which has been prohibited by the department since 1993, eventually killing the man. The entire incident was caught on video and Pantaleo was not fired.


This campus officer chose to use non-violence to try and resolve a situation, instead of killing or maiming a person, and he is being fired for it.


Precedent set: Killing a person - all is well. Not using violence to resolve a situation - fired. Let that sink in.



"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." -Mahatma Gandhi



Russia launches new, upgraded 'wartime government HQ'


© Russia Defense Ministry

NDCC war room. Computer simulation.



Russia is launching a new national defense facility, which is meant to monitor threats to national security in peacetime, but would take control of the entire country in case of war.

The new top-security, fortified facility in Moscow includes several large war rooms, a brand new supercomputer in the heart of a state-of-the-art data processing center, underground facilities, secret transport routes for emergency evacuation and a helicopter pad, which was deployed for the first time on Nov. 24 on the Moscow River. The Defense Ministry won't disclose the price tag for the site, but it is estimated at the equivalent of several billion dollars.


The new National Defense Control Center (NDCC) is a major upgrade on what was previously called the Central Command of the General Staff, a unit tasked with round-the-clock monitoring of military threats against Russia, particularly ballistic missile launches, and deployment of strategic nuclear weapons. It was roughly a counterpart to the US National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's principal command and control site.


The NDCC inherits all those functions, but also has plenty of extra roles as well. In peacetime, an additional task is to monitor all of Russia's important military assets, from hardware being produced by defense contractors to the state of oil refineries, to weather conditions and their effect on transportation routes.


And if Russia does get into a war, the center would act as a major communication hub and a form of wartime government, delivering reports to the country's military command and giving orders to all ministries, state-owned companies and other organizations, according to the needs of the armed forces.


The creation of NDCC was one of the biggest military projects of the past few years. The closest analogy in the past in terms of functions and tasks was the Commander-in-Chief HQ in 1941-45, which centralized all controls of both the military machine and the economy of the nation in the interests of the war," Lt. General Mikhail Mizintsev, the NDCC chief, told Lenta.ru in an interview.


The military says the upgrade has been long overdue. The national security situation may be very fluid in modern times, and instead of days the leadership may have only an hour to take crucial military decisions. The center's job is to offer the Defense Minister and the President options in case of emergency, which would be based on facts, figures and accurate projections.


Potentially the biggest part of the upgrade was the creation of communication and data processing equipment that would give the military computer power and software needed to factor in hundreds of parameters in their mathematical models. The Defense Ministry had to use only domestically-produced hardware due to security considerations, which limited its options.


According to officials, the result is a very robust computer network with state-of-art data encryption and multiple backup sites spread throughout the country, which would keep the center functional even if its main facility in Moscow is damaged by an enemy attack or sabotage.


The center employs over 1,000 officers working on a rotating watch system. Mizintsev said the armed forces selected their best officer for the posts, many of which are new for the Russian military and require skills not previously taught to officers on a regular basis until recently. They have been operating in trial mode since April.


A thoroughly military facility, the NDCC has an unexpected civilian component to it. Its location in Moscow is close to two major hospitals, including the Pirogov trauma center. Both hospitals are quite old and their original designs didn't provide for dedicated helicopter pads.


The Defense Ministry said the medics can share NDCC's new pad on the Moscow River for emergency patient transportation. The pad can accommodate helicopters weighing up to 15 tons, enough to land a Mil Mi-8, world's most-produced transport helicopter, or a Mil Mi-38, its designated replacement.


HR 758 - An historic decision and a total news blackout


© Unknown



America is on a war footing. While, a World War Three Scenario has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years, military action against Russia is now contemplated at an "operational level". Similarly, both the Senate and the House have introduced enabling legislation which provides legitimacy to the conduct of a war against Russia.

The adoption of a major piece of legislation by the US House of Representatives on December4th (H. Res. 758) would provide (pending a vote in the Senate) a de facto green light to the US president and commander in chief to initiate - without congressional approval - a process of military confrontation with Russia.


Global security is at stake. This historic vote - which potentially could affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people Worldwide - has received virtually no media coverage. A total media blackout prevails.


The World is at a dangerous crossroads. Moscow has responded to US-NATO threats. Its borders are threatened.


On December 3, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation announced the inauguration of a new military-political entity which would take over in the case of war.




Russia is launching a new national defense facility, which is meant to monitor threats to national security in peacetime, but would take control of the entire country in case of war. (RT, December 3, 2014)




Timeline of War Preparations

In May 2014, the Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA) was introduced in the US Senate (S 2277), calling for the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States and the stationing of US and NATO troops on Russia's doorstep:


S.2277 - Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014


Directs the President to: (1) implement a plan for increasing U.S. and NATO support for the armed forces of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and other NATO member-states; and (2) direct the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO to seek consideration for permanently basing NATO forces in such countries.


Directs the President to submit a plan to Congress for accelerating NATO and European missile defense efforts.


While The S 2277 resolution was sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for review, its essential premises are already in the process of being implemented. In mid-July, NATO's Europe commander General Philip Breedlove in consultation with the Pentagon and Britain's Ministry of Defence, called for:



"stockpiling a base in Poland with enough weapons, ammunition and other supplies to support a rapid deployment of thousands of troops against Russia".(RT, July 24, 2014).



According to General Breedlove, NATO needs "pre-positioned supplies, pre-positioned capabilities and a basing area ready to rapidly accept follow-on forces":


"He plans to recommend placing supplies - weapons, ammunition and ration packs - at the headquarters to enable a sudden influx of thousands of Nato troops"(Times, August 22, 2014, emphasis added)




Breedlove's "Blitzkrieg scenario" - which could potentially lead to military escalation - was reaffirmed at the September NATO Summit in Wales. A so-called NATO action plan directed against the Russian Federation was decided upon. The Wales Summit had given the "green light".

Barely a month later, in October, US-NATO military drills were held in the Baltic States. In early November, a second round of drills was held in both the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.


As part of this broader endeavour, NATO's Iron Sword 2014 military exercises - involving the participation of nine member countries of the Atlantic Alliance - were launched in Lithuania in early November:




"US tanks rolled in to Lithuania earlier this month is a show of force to Russia that it's not welcome in the region."




The military exercises were explicitly directed against Russia. According to Moscow, they consisted in "increasing operation readiness" as well the transfer of NATO "military infrastructure to the Russian borders".

In response to NATO deployments on Russia's borders, the Russian Federation also conducted in early November extensive war games in the sea of Barent. The Russian drills consisted in testing "its entire nuclear triad consisting of strategic bombers; submarines" and the "silo-based Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Plesetsk in Arkhangelsk Oblast" on November 1st.


The US House of Representatives H.Res. 758 Resolution


On 18 November, a major resolution H. Res. 758 was introduced in the House of Representatives. Its main thrust consists in portraying Russia as an "Aggressor Nation", which has invaded Ukraine and calling for military action directed against Russia:


[embedded content]




H.RES.758 - Whereas upon entering office in 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intention to 'reset' relations with the Russian Federation, which was described by former United States Ambassador... (Introduced in House - IH)

HRES 758 IH


113th CONGRESS


2d Session


H. RES. 758


Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.


(The full text of H. RES. 758 is contained in annex to this article)


H. Res. 758 not only accuses Russia of having invaded Ukraine, it also invokesarticle 5 of the Washington Treaty, namely NATO's doctrine of collective security.




An attack on one member of the Atlantic alliance is an attack on all members of the Alliance.





© Unknown



The underlying narrative is supported by a string of baseless accusations directed against the Russian Federation. It accuses Russia of having invaded Ukraine. It states without evidence that Russia was behind the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17, it accuses Russia of military aggression.

Ironically, it also accuses the Russian Federation of having imposed economic sanctions not only on Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova but also on several unnamed member states of the European Union. The resolution accuses the Russian Federation of having used "the supply of energy for political and economic coercion."


In essence, House Resolution 758 were it to become law would provide a de facto green light to the President of the United States to declare war on the Russian Federation, without the formal permission of the US Congress.


In this regard, it could be interpreted as "mildly unconstitutional" in that it contravenes the substance of Article 1, Section 8, of the US Constitution which vests in the Congress "the Power to declare war..."


The resolution urges the President of the United States in consultation with the US Congress to:




"conduct a review of the force posture, readiness, and responsibilities of the United States Armed Forces and the forces of other members of NATO to determine if the contributions and actions of each is sufficient to meet the obligations of collective self defence under article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and to specify the measures needed to remedy any deficiencies" .




What the above paragraph suggests is that the US is contemplating the use of NATO's collective security doctrine under article 5 with a views to triggering a process of military confrontation with the Russian Federation.

The structure of military alliances is of crucial significance. Washington's intent is to isolate Russia. Article 5 is a convenient mechanism imposed by the US on Western Europe. It forces NATO member states, most of which are members of the European Union, to act wage war on Washington's behalf.


Moreover, a referendum on Ukraine's membership in NATO is contemplated. In case Ukraine becomes a member of NATO and/or redefines its security agreement with NATO, article 5 could be invoked as a justification to wage a NATO sponsored war on Russia.


"Fast Legislation"


The speed at which this legislation was adopted is unusual in US Congressional history. House resolution 758 was introduced on November 18th, it was rushed off to the Foreign Affairs Committee and rushed back to the plenary of the House for debate and adoption.


Two weeks (16 days) after it was first introduced by Rep. Kinzinger (Illinois) on November 18, it was adopted by 411-10 in an almost unanimous vote on the morning of December 4th.


Members of Congress are puppets. Their vote is controlled by Washington's lobby groups. For the defence contractors, Wall Street and the Texas oil giants, "war is good for business".


In the words of Dennis Kucinich in an open letter published on December 2:




The resolution demands Russia to be isolated ... In other words, 'let's get ready for war with Russia.'


This is exactly the type of sabre rattling which led to the initiation and escalation of the Cold War. It is time we demanded that the US employ diplomacy, not more military expenditures, in the quest for international order.




Media Blackout

One would expect that this historic decision would has been the object of extensive news coverage.


In fact what happened was a total news blackout.


The nation's media failed to provide coverage of the debate in House of Representatives and the adoption of H Res 758 on December 4.


The mainstream media had been instructed not to cover the Congressional decision.


Nobody dared to raise its dramatic implications. its impacts on "global security". "World War III is not front page news."


And without mainstream news concerning US-NATO war preparations, the broader public remains unaware of the importance of the Congressional decision. .


In Annex to this article is the google news feed for H. Rep. 758 (7pm ET prior to the publication of this article). We suggest that readers check the news feed on online search engines as well as print media.


Spread the word. Reverse the tide of war.


Break the mainstream media blackout.


The rise of German imperialism and the phony "Russian Threat"


Introduction

The principle Nazi ideological prop that secured massive financial and political support from Germany's leading industrialists was the Communist and Soviet threat. The main Nazi military drive, absorbing two-thirds of its best troops, was directed eastward at conquering and destroying Russia. The 'Russian Threat' justified Nazi Germany's conquest and occupation of the Ukraine, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, with the aid of a substantial proportion of local Nazi collaborators.


After Germany's defeat , division and disarmament, and with the extension of Soviet power, the US reinstated the Nazi industrial and banking giants, officials and intelligence operatives. At first they were engaged in rebuilding their domestic economy and consolidating political power, in collaboration with the US military occupation forces.


By the late 1960's Germany regained economic primacy in Europe and was at the forefront of European 'integration', in association with France and England. It soon came to dominate the principle decision - making institutions of the European Union(EU). The EU served as Germany's instrument for conquest by stealth. Year by year, through 'aid' and low interest loans, the EU facilitated German capitalist's market penetration and financial expansion through out south and central Europe. Germany set the agenda for Western Europe, gaining economic dominance while benefiting from US subversion and encirclement of Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic and Balkan states.


Germany's Great Leap Forward: The Annexation of East Germany and the Demise of the USSR


Germany's projection of power on a world scale would never have occurred if it had not annexed East Germany. Despite the West German claims of beneficence and 'aid' to the East, the Bonn regime secured several million skilled engineers, workers and technicians, the takeover of factories, productive farms and, most important, the Eastern European and Russian markets for industrial goods, worth billions of dollars. Germany was transformed from an emerging influential EU partner, into the most dynamic expansionist power in Europe, especially in the former Warsaw Pact economies.


The annexation of East Germany and the overthrow of the Communist governments in the East allowed German capitalists to dominate markets in the former Eastern bloc. As the major trading partner, it seized control of major industrial enterprises via corrupt privatizations decreed by the newly installed pro-capitalist client regimes. As the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgarian, the Baltic States "privatized" and "de-nationalized" strategic economic, trade, media and social service sectors, 'unified' Germany was able to resume a privileged place. As Russia fell into the hands of gangsters, emerging oligarchs and political proxies of western capitalists, its entire industrial infrastructure was decimated and Russia was converted into a giant raw-material export region.


Germany converted its trade relations with Russia from one between equals into a 'colonial' pattern: Germany exported high value industrial products and imported gas, oil and raw materials from Russia.


German power expanded exponentially, with the annexation of the "other Germany", the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the ascendancy of client regimes eager and willing to submit to a German dominated European Union and a US directed NATO military command.


German political-economic expansion via 'popular uprisings', controlled by local political clients, was soon accompanied by a US led military offensive - sparked by separatist movements. Germany intervened in Yugoslavia, aiding and abetting separatists in Slovenia and Croatia. It backed the US-NATO bombing of Serbia and supported the far-right, self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), engaged in a terrorist war in Kosovo. Belgrade was defeated and regime change led to a neo-liberal client state. The US built the largest military base in Europe in Kosovo. Montenegro and Macedonia became EU satellites.


While NATO expanded and enhanced the US military presence up to Russia's borders, Germany became the continent's pre-eminent economic power.


Germany and the New World Order


While President Bush and Clinton were heralding a "new world order", based on unipolar military supremacy, Germany advanced its new imperial order by exercising its political and economic levers. Each of the two power centers, Germany and the US, shared the common quest of rapidly incorporating the new capitalist regimes into their regional organizations - the European Union (EU) and NATO - and extending their reach globally. Given the reactionary origins and trajectory into vassalage of the Eastern, Baltic and Balkan regimes, and given their political fears of a popular reaction to the loss of employment, welfare and independence resulting from their implementation of savage neoliberal "shock policies", the client rulers immediately "applied" for membership as subordinate members of the EU and NATO, trading sovereignty, markets and national ownership of the means of production for economic handouts and the 'free' movement of labor, an escape valve for the millions of newly unemployed workers. German and English capital got millions of skilled immigrant workers at below labor market wages, and unimpeded access to markets and resources. The US secured NATO military bases, and recruited military forces for its Middle East and South Asian imperial wars.


US-German military and economic dominance in Europe was premised on retaining Russia as a weak quasi vassal state, and on the continued economic growth of their economies beyond the initial pillage of the ex-communist economies.


For the US, uncontested military supremacy throughout Europe was the springboard for near-time imperial expansion in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. NATO was 'internationalized' into an offensive global military alliance: first in Somalia, Afghanistan then Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine.


The Rise of Russia, The Islamic Resistance and the New Cold War


During the 'decade of infamy' (1991-2000) extreme privatization measures by the client rulers in Russia on behalf of EU and US investors and gangster oligarchs, added up to vast pillage of the entire economy, public treasury and national patrimony. The image and reality of a giant prostrate vassal state unable to pursue an independent foreign policy, and incapable of providing the minimum semblance of a modern functioning economy and maintaining the rule of law, became the defining view of Russia by the EU and the USA. Post-communist Russia, a failed state by any measure, was dubbed a "liberal democracy" by every western capitalist politician and so it was repeated by all their mass media acolytes.


The fortuitous rise of Vladimir Putin and the gradual replacement of some of the most egregious 'sell-out' neo-liberal officials, and most important, the reconstruction of the Russian state with a proper budget and functioning national institutions, was immediately perceived as a threat to US military supremacy and German economic expansion. Russia's transition from Western vassalage to regaining its status as a sovereign independent state set in motion, an aggressive counter-offensive by the US-EU. They financed a neo-liberal-oligarchy backed political opposition in an attempt to restore Russia to vassalage via street demonstrations and elections.Their efforts to oust Putin and re-establish Western vassal state failed. What worked in 19991 with Yeltsin's power grab against Gorbachev was ineffective against Putin. The vast majority of Russians did not want a return to the decade of infamy.


In the beginning of the new century, Putin and his team set new ground-rules, in which oligarchs could retain their illicit wealth and conglomerates, providing they didn't use their economic levers to seize state power. Secondly, Putin revived and restored the scientific technical, military, industrial and cultural institutions and centralized trade and investment decisions within a wide circle of public and private decision makers not beholden to Western policymakers. Thirdly, he began to assess and rectify the breakdown of Russian security agencies particularly with regard to the threats emanating from Western sponsored 'separatist' movements in the Caucuses, especially, in Chechnya, and the onset of US backed 'color revolutions' in the Ukraine and Georgia.


At first, Putin optimistically assumed that, Russia being a capitalist state, and without any competing ideology, the normalization and stabilization of the Russian state would be welcomed by the US and the EU. He even envisioned that they would accept Russia as an economic, political, and even NATO partner. Putin even made overtures to join and co-operate with NATO and the EU. The West did not try to dissuade Putin of his illusions. In fact they encouraged him, even as they escalated their backing for Putin's internal opposition and prepared a series of imperial wars and sanctions in the Middle East, targeting traditional Russian allies in Iraq, Syria and Libya.


As the 'internal' subversive strategy failed to dislodge President Putin, and the Russian state prevailed over the neo-vassals, the demonization of Putin became constant and shrill. The West moved decisively to an 'outsider strategy', to isolate, encircle and undermine the Russian state by undermining allies, and trading partners.


US and Germany Confront Russia: Manufacturing the "Russian Threat"


Russia was enticed to support US and NATO wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in exchange for the promise of deeper integration into Western markets. The US and EU accepted Russian co-operation, including military supply routes and bases, for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The NATO powers secured Russian support of sanctions against Iran. They exploited Russia's naïve support of a "no fly zone" over Libya to launch a full scale aerial war. The US financed so-called "color revolutions" in Georgia and the Ukraine overt, a dress rehearsal for the putsch in 2014. Each violent seizure of power allowed NATO to impose anti-Russian rulers eager and willing to serve as vassal states to Germany and the US.


Germany spearheaded the European imperial advance in the Balkans and Moldavia, countries with strong economic ties to Russia. High German officials "visited" the Balkans to bolster their ties with vassal regimes in Slovenia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Under German direction, the European Union ordered the vassal Bulgarian regime of Boyko "the booby" Borisov to block the passage of Russian owned South Stream pipeline to Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and beyond. The Bulgarian state lost $400 million in annual revenue . . . Germany and the US bankrolled pro-NATO and EU client politicians in Moldavia - securing the election of Iurie Leanca as Prime Minister. As a result of Leanca's slavish pursuit of EU vassalage, Moldavia lost $150 million in exports to Russia. Leanca's pro-EU policies go counter to the views of most Moldavians - 57% see Russia as the country's most important economic partner. Nearly 40% of the Moldavian working age population works in Russia and 25% of the Moldavians' $8 billion GDP is accounted for by overseas remittances.


German and the US empire-builders steamroll over dissenting voices in Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as Moldova and Bulgaria, who's economy and population suffer from the impositions of the blockade of the Russian gas and oil pipeline. But Germany's, all out economic warfare against Russia takes precedent over the interests of its vassal states: its theirs to sacrifice for the 'Greater Good' of the emerging German economic empire and the US - NATO military encirclement of Russia. The extremely crude dictates of German imperial interests articulated through the EU, and the willingness of Balkan and Baltic regimes to sacrifice fundamental economic interests, are the best indicators of the emerging German empire in Europe.


Parallel to Germany's rabid anti-Russian economic campaign, the US via NATO is engaged in a vast military build-up along the length and breadth of Russia's frontier. The US stooge, NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg, boasts that over the current year, NATO has increased 5-fold the warplanes and bombers patrolling Russian maritime and land frontiers, carried out military exercises every two days and vastly increased the number of war ships in the Baltic and Black Sea.


Conclusion


What is absolutely clear is that the US and Germany want to return Russia to the vassalage status of the 1990's. They do not want 'normal relations'. From the moment Putin moved to restore the Russian state and economy, the Western powers have engaged in a series of political and military interventions, eliminating Russian allies, trading partners and independent states.


The emergent of extremist, visceral anti-Russian regimes in Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania served as the forward shield for NATO advancement and German economic encroachment. Hitler's 'dream' of realizing the conquest of the East via unilateral military conquest has now under Prime Minister Merkel taken the form of conquest by stealth in Northern and Central Europe, by economic blackmail in the Balkans, and by violent putsches in the Ukraine and Georgia.


The German economic ruling class is divided between the dominant pro-US sector that is willing to sacrifice lucrative trade with Russia today in hopes of dominating and pillaging the entire economy in a post-Putin Russia (dominated by 'reborn Yeltsin clones'); and a minority industrial sector, which wants to end sanctions and return to normal economic relations with Russia.


Germany is fearful that its client rulers in the East, especially in the Balkans are vulnerable to a popular upheaval due to the economic sacrifices they impose on the population. Hence, Germany is wholly in favor of the new NATO rapid deployment force, ostensibly designed to counter a non-existent "Russian threat" but in reality to prop up faltering vassal regimes.


The 'Russian Threat', the ideology driving the US and German offensive throughout Europe and the Caucuses, is a replay of the same doctrine which Hitler used to secure support from domestic industrial bankers, conservatives and right wing overseas collaborators among extremists in Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria.


The US-EU seizure of power via vassal political clients backed by corrupt oligarchs and Nazi street fighters in Ukraine detonated the current crisis. Ukraine power grab posed a top security threat to the very existence of Russia as an independent state. After the Kiev take-over, NATO moved its stooge regime in Kiev forward to militarily eliminate the independent regions in the Southeast and seize the Crimea thus totally eliminating Russia's strategic position in the Black Sea. Russia, the victim of the NATO power grab, was labelled the "aggressor". The entire officialdom and mass media echoed the Big Lie. Two decades of US-NATO military advances on Russia's borders and German-EU economic expansion into Russian markets were obfuscated. Ukraine is the most important strategic military platform from which the US-NATO can launch an attack on the Russian heartland and the single largest market for Germany since the annexation of East Germany.


The US and Germany see the Ukraine conquest as of extreme value in itself but also as the key to launching an all-out offensive to strangle Russia's economy via sanctions and dumping oil and to militarily threaten Russia. The strategic goal is to reduce the Russian population to poverty and to re-activate the quasi-moribund opposition to overthrow the Putin government and return Russia to permanent vassalage. The US and German imperial elite, looking beyond Russia, believe that if they control Russia, they can encircle, isolate and attack China from the West as well as the East.


Wild-eyed fanatics they are not. But as rabid proponents of a permanent war to end Russia's presence in Europe and to undermine China's emergence as a world power, they are willing to go to the brink of a nuclear war.


The ideological centerpiece of US-German imperial expansion and conquest in Europe and the Caucuses is the "Russian Threat". It is the touchstone defining adversaries and allies. Countries that do not uphold sanctions are targeted. The mass media repeat the lie. The "Russian Threat" has become the war cry for cringing vassals - the phony justification for imposing frightful sacrifices to serve their imperial 'padrones' in Berlin and Washington - fearing the rebellion of the 'sacrificed' population. No doubt, under siege, Russia will be forced to make sacrifices. The oligarchs will flee westward; the liberals will crawl under their beds. But just as the Soviets turned the tide of war in Stalingrad, the Russian people, past the first two years of a bootstrap operation will survive, thrive and become once again a beacon of hope to all people looking to get from under the tyranny of US-NATO militarism and German-EU economic dictates.


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New technique invented to spray solar cells on flexible surfaces

spray on solar cells

© Uniersity of Toronto



Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.

That's Illan Kramer's hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) - a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.


"My dream is that one day you'll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof," says Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada's Research and Development Centre.


Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane's wing. A surface the size of your car's roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbs - or 24 compact fluorescents.


He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.


Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing - an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.


Kramer built his sprayLD device using parts that are readily available and rather affordable - he sourced a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store.


"This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it," says Kramer. "We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll."


"As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it's important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable," said Professor Ted Sargent, vice dean, research in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at University of Toronto and Kramer's supervisor. "We were thrilled when this attractively manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity."


In a third paper in the journal ACS Nano, Kramer and his colleagues used IBM's BlueGeneQ supercomputer to model how and why the sprayed CQDs perform just as well as - and in some cases better than - their batch-processed counterparts. This work was supported by the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, and by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.


SOTT EXCLUSIVE: Terror in Chechnya, economic subterfuge, and Saudi Prince Bandar's not-so-covert war against Russia and Syria


© Unknown

On July 31, 2013 President Vladimir Putin, a strong supporter of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, met Saudi Arabia's crowned Prince of evil and intelligence chief Prince Bandar, after which both Moscow and Riyadh kept a lid on the substance of the talks. For a time.



Only hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual address before the Russian Assembly last week, a group of armed men dressed as police killed three police officers and took siege of two buildings in Grozny, the capital of Russian Federation's Chechnya. Ostensibly Chechen militants, whose planned to carry out a larger attack were killed in a stand-off with Grozny's security forces, who were already aware of the group as they made their way into the area. When it was over, 9 militants and 10 police were killed. After the confrontation Ramzan Kadyrov, head of Chechnya, stated that he did not rule out the possibility of these militants coming from a different region altogether. See Harrison Koehli's SOTT EXCLUSIVE for further coverage of the attack.

© Unknown

The Press House in flames in Grozny, Chechnya



Another case of Chechen militants fighting for independence from Russia - years after Russia brought peace and stability to the area after the war in Chechnya? Maybe. Or perhaps it was a message, like so many messages sent to Russia by Saudi Arabia and its allies in the West via terrorist proxy. And if so, what was that message? Not too hard to guess actually: "We don't like what you're doing because we're the boss!"

The conversation


In what is probably the most overt use of threatening language recently addressed to any world leader (and most often made to Vladimir Putin these days), it is now public knowledge that Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia aka "Bandar Bush" - because of his close ties to the Bush family - read Putin the riot act in July of 2013 in a meeting they had regarding the fate of Syria.


As Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported:



Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia's naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia's Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord.


''I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the Games are controlled by us,'' he allegedly said.


Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on and off.


''We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria's political future.''



Bandar also magnanimously offered to make a lucrative deal with Putin, if only he would get out of the way of letting Saudi Arabia topple Assad:

"Every two years, Bandar bin Sultan meets his Russian counterparts, but this time, he wanted to meet the head of state," said a European diplomat who shuttles between Beirut and Damascus. "During the meeting at the Kremlin, the Saudi official explained to his interlocutor that Riyadh is ready to help Moscow play a bigger role in the Middle East at a time when the United States is disengaging from the region."


Bandar proposed that Saudi Arabia buy $15 billion of weapons from Russia and invest "considerably in the country," the source said.


The Saudi prince also reassured Putin that "whatever regime comes after" Assad, it will be "completely" in the Saudis' hands and will not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports, the diplomat said.



So Bandar held out the stick and the carrot to Putin, but Putin politely responded 'nyet'. Putin's refusal to be cowed by threats or enticed by bribes - both in the same conversation - may have something to do with the fact that he not only knows how the game is being played, but has enough integrity and character to resist playing it. The Russian President is also well aware of the fact that Bandar is a snake and a psychopath of the first order. It is well known in intelligence circles that Bandar is not only behind the "Assad is using chemical weapons on his own people" story, but was key in manufacturing the event and guilty of killing hundreds of innocent Syrians to do it:

Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal says that Prince Bandar and his Saudi Intelligence Agency manufactured "evidence" that the Syrian government had used sarin gas prior to the al-Ghouta attack.


Entous stated during a Democracy Now interview: "Bandar's intelligence agency concluded that chemical weapons were being used on a small scale by the regime. Followed by that, the Brits and the French were convinced of the same conclusion. It took US intelligence agencies really until June to reach that conclusion."


In other words, Bandar used his money, clout, and connections to make sure that "the intelligence would be fixed around the policy" - just like Bush did with the alleged Iraqi WMDs in 2003.


How did Bandar convince Western intelligence agencies to accept his extremely dubious claims that Assad was using sarin gas? Bandar found a Syrian who had been exposed to sarin and flew him to Britain to be tested. When the Syrian victim tested positive for sarin, Bandar pushed his Western intelligence colleagues to accept the far-from-obvious conclusion that Assad must have been responsible.


According to Entous: "What the British found when they did the testing was that this Syrian was exposed to sarin gas, which the US and British and French intelligence believe is only in the possession of the Syrian regime."


But do the US and British and French intelligence really believe that Bandar - who commands hundreds of billions of dollars and a sophisticated network of covert operators and killers - could not have poisoned the Syrian victim himself? Obviously, they are not that naïve. Western intelligence is complicit in Bandar's attempt to frame Assad for the use of sarin. They were looking for an excuse to attack Syria, and Bandar gave it to them.


Then when the huge sarin attack struck al-Ghouta on August 21st, knowledgeable observers immediately suspected a false-flag attack by Bandar's forces. According to Associated Press Mideast correspondent Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh: "... from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture (from the Western mainstream media narrative) emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the deadly gas attack."


More evidence that the terrorist prince orchestrated the attack on al-Ghouta emerged when it was revealed that the photos of dead children were not what they appeared. According to VoltaireNet.org:



"Following the broadcasting of the images of the massacre in Ghouta, distributed by the Free Syrian Army and relayed by US and French services, Alawite families from Latakia have filed a complaint for murder."


"Some of these videos were filmed and posted on Youtube before the events they picture."


"They show children suffocating from a chemical intoxication that can't possibly be sarin gas (the latter provokes yellow drool, not white drool)."


"The children do not correspond to a sample of the population: they are all almost of the same age and have light hair. They are not accompanied by their grieving families."


"They are in fact children who were abducted by jihadists (i.e. mercenaries of Prince Bandar) two weeks before in Alawite villages in the surroundings of Latakia, 200km away from Ghouta."


"Contrary to the claims of the Free Syrian Army and the Western services, the only identified victims of the Ghouta massacre are those belonging to families that support the Syrian government. In the videos, the individuals that show outrage against the 'crimes of Bashar el-Assad' are in reality their killers."



Is terrorist prince Bandar really shameless enough to kidnap children, murder them, and then present the dead children as alleged victims of his enemies? In a word: Yes.




A photo taken by Marco di Lauro/AP in Iraq in 2003 was presented by US State Secretary Kerry on August 30, 2013 as evidence of the ‘Assad’s chemical attack’.



Bandar's oily ways

Bandar, like his counterparts in the West, are nothing if not committed to the destruction of not only Syria's sovereignty, but of Russia's too. After Putin's refusal to accept the Prince's offer back in July of 2013, Russia initiated and helped broker a deal that prevented an imminent attack on Syria by the US military. Syria agreed to hand over all it's chemical weapons to UN representatives, and the critical situation, for the time being, was diffused. If this wasn't enough, Russia had two naval vessels stationed off the coast of Syria to create it's own 'red line' for acceptable behavior towards Washington. By then, September of 2013, it had to have become very clear to Bandar that when Putin said no to the offer two months earlier, he meant it - and was willing to do whatever it took to protect Russia and Syria's interests in its refusal to be bullied.


But Bandar and his US cohorts had another trick up their grimy sleeves: This time in the form of deliberately lowering the price of oil - just to hurt Russia's economy. In of all places, the New York Times, we read this:



Is it just my imagination or is there a global oil war underway pitting the United States and Saudi Arabia on one side against Russia and Iran on the other? One can't say for sure whether the American-Saudi oil alliance is deliberate or a coincidence of interests, but, if it is explicit, then clearly we're trying to do to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exactly what the Americans and Saudis did to the last leaders of the Soviet Union: pump them to death - bankrupt them by bringing down the price of oil to levels below what both Moscow and Tehran need to finance their budgets.


Think about this: four oil producers - Libya, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria - are in turmoil today, and Iran is hobbled by sanctions. Ten years ago, such news would have sent oil prices soaring. But today, the opposite is happening. Global crude oil prices have been falling for weeks, now resting around $88 - after a long stretch at $105 to $110 a barrel.


The price drop is the result of economic slowdowns in Europe and China, combined with the United States becoming one of the world's biggest oil producers - thanks to new technologies enabling the extraction of large amounts of "tight oil" from shale - combined with America starting to make exceptions and allowing some of its newfound oil products to be exported, combined with Saudi Arabia refusing to cut back its production to keep prices higher, but choosing instead to maintain its market share against other OPEC producers. The net result has been to make life difficult for Russia and Iran, at a time when Saudi Arabia and America are confronting both of them in a proxy war in Syria. This is business, but it also has the feel of war by other means: oil .


The Russians have noticed. How could they not? They've seen this play before. The Russian newspaper Pravda published an article on April 3 with the headline, "Obama Wants Saudi Arabia to Destroy Russian Economy." It said:



"There is a precedent [for] such joint action that caused the collapse of the U.S.S.R. In 1985, the Kingdom dramatically increased oil production from 2 million to 10 million barrels per day, dropping the price from $32 to $10 per barrel.[The] U.S.S.R. began selling some batches at an even lower price, about $6 per barrel. Saudi Arabia [did not lose] anything, because when prices fell by 3.5 times [Saudi] production increased fivefold. The planned economy of the Soviet Union was not able to cope with falling export revenues, and this was one of the reasons for the collapse of the U.S.S.R."



Indeed, the late Yegor Gaidar, who between 1991 and 1994 was Russia's acting prime minister, observed in a Nov. 13, 2006, speech that:

"The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices. ... During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed. ... The Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive."



Neither Moscow nor Tehran will collapse tomorrow. And if oil prices fall below $70 you will see a drop in U.S. production, as some exploration won't be cost effective, and prices could firm up. But have no doubt, this price falloff serves U.S. and Saudi strategic interests and it harms Russia and Iran. Oil export revenues account for about 60 percent of Iran's government revenues and more than half of Russia's.

Short of an all-out declaration of 'hot war' (and this may be coming soon) Saudi Arabia and the US are pulling all the stops in trying to destabilize Russia and Syria economically and security-wise.

What next?


So far, Saudi Arabia and the US's threats of toppling Assad, employing "Syrian rebels," Chechen terrorism, imposing economic sanctions, and now economic warfare (to say nothing of the bluster we now see regarding Ukraine and the acceptance of Crimea into the Russian Federation), have not slowed Putin down. And, actually, it seems like not a week has gone by in recent months when we haven't seen Putin and his cabinet pull some new diplomatic rabbit out of their hat, or secure a new economic relationship that puts the Russian President in even better standing with countries and leaders of good will around the world.


In the meantime though, Putin still has to contend with events like the recent attack in Grozny. His patience - and Putin seems to be a very patient man - may soon be wearing thin. Last week's events in Grozny act like reverberations for other egregious attacks that beg for some kind of response, such as the terror inflicted upon Volgograd almost a year ago:



Russian intelligence has now reportedly obtained solid proof that Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the twin terror attacks on the city of Volgograd.


The attacks killed more than 32 people and injured over 100 others. Most of the victims were civilians.


According to an informed Russian official source, reported by the Fars News Agency, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has informed President Vladimir Putin of the Saudi link to the Volgograd massacre.


This will come as no surprise to Putin. The Russian leader was warned by the Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan during a heated four-hour private meeting back in July that Wahhabi-sponsored terrorists based in the North Caucasus region of Russia would be targeting the Sochi Winter Olympics.


The Sochi Games are due to open on February 7. Volgograd is a key transport hub linking Moscow with the southern Russian territory and the Black Sea resort city of Sochi in particular, where the Winter Olympics are to be held.


The double bombings on Volgograd's transport system on 29-30 December were therefore unmistakably an assault on Russia's hosting of the Olympics. The atrocity caused the deaths of several women and children, and in the aftermath President Putin was livid in his disgust at the attacks. He said there was no justification, whatsoever, for the killing of innocent civilians and he vowed to "destroy the terrorists" behind the bombings.


This raises the onerous question: What will Putin do next if he has, in fact, been told that the authors of the Volgograd crime against humanity are connected to the Saudi rulers? This could be construed as an act of war.




There are unconfirmed reports that Putin and his senior intelligence officers have already drawn up plans to "destroy Saudi Arabia" over its systematic sponsoring of terrorism on Russian territory.




The Volgograd atrocity is just the latest in a long series of terrorist acts connected to Saudi-sponsored radicals in the North Caucasus. Back in October, another suicide bomb on a packed bus in Volgograd left six dead.

One thing's for sure, if these attacks continue, Putin will likely respond in a way that will make Bandar's head spin. And possibly right off. But aside from the moral and ethical dimensions to this no longer covert conflict - why anyone would test Putin's resolve in this way is beyond comprehension. You'd have to be plumb crazy. Or a psychopath. Or both.

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'Dear John': Ukraine will no longer transport Russian gas, says Gazprom head

putin gazprom

"Nord Stream" and a Turkey pipeline will make the transit of gas through Ukraine meaningless, announced the head of Gazprom Alexey Miller in an interview to the TV program "Vesti on Saturday with Sergey Brilev": "Yes, in fact, the role of Ukraine as a transit country is reduced to zero," - said Miller.

"The decision to stop the "South Stream" is a beginning of the end of our business model, when we focused on the delivery to a final consumer in the European market."


At the same time, he noted that Russia will supply Ukraine with all its gas needs for domestic consumption. "In fact, we will provide the amount that Ukraine needs for its domestic consumption. Deliveries to Europe will be made by alternative routes,"- said Miller.


At the same time, he stressed that the cancellation of "South Stream" is not associated with the requirements of the Eurocommission's third energy package. "The decision to shut down "South Stream" was adopted in the framework of the visit of our President to Turkey, but on this very day the pipelaying ship went out in the Black Sea in order to carry out work on laying the pipeline. But how can we proceed with this work, when Bulgaria did not even give permission to build in the territorial waters, in the special economic zone, and have not issued a construction permit to build on land... This issue has nothing to do with the third energy package," - explained Miller.


In particular, explained the head of the company, the requirements of the European Commission have no relation to this situation, because "the construction permit is issued by the government of Bulgaria."


According to Miller, frank blocking of "South Stream" is a deliberate policy of the European Union.


"As for the decision to stop the project... it is dictated by the fact that to implement the project in the atmosphere of delays and outright blocking, in principle, is impossible. And of course, it's a deliberate policy of the European Union. On April 17 of this year the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the prohibition of South Stream," - said Miller.


The head of Gazprom said that there is no guarantee that in the event of resurrecting the "South Stream" the situation with delays and blocking on part of the European Union will not be repeated.


"Actually, if you talk about the time, about the efforts that we invested (on "South Stream") - it's years. Of course, in addition to the time spent and money invested ... we have acquired certain knowledge and experience... Now we can say that we know the European bureaucracy very well ... Who can guarantee that this will not happen again in a month, two, six months?" - said Miller.


In turn, Brilev asked, if European countries will have to purchase gas on the border of Turkey and Greece. "Yes, without a doubt, that is correct," - replied the head of Gazprom.


According to Miller, the infrastructure of Gazprom worth about 4 billion euros, built in Russia for "South Stream," will be used for the Turkey gas pipeline project.


"We invested around 4 billion euros in transport infrastructure on the territory of Russia on the development of the southern corridor for gas supplies to Krasnodar region, for delivery to the compressor station "Russian", and all of these investments will be needed for the offshore project for the pipeline to Turkey. So "everything stays in the house," " - said Miller.


Recall, on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country cannot under the present circumstances continue implementation of "South Stream". This decision, as later stated by the Minister of Energy Alexander Novak, was adopted by Putin personally.



You shall not pass! Turkey blocks Kiev's access to U.S. gas shipments

bosporus strait

© Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images



Ukraine's plan to diminish its energy dependence on Russia is adrift in the Bosporus Strait.

The nation, which gets half its gas from Russia, wants to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Black Sea and held talks with Cheniere Energy Inc. (LNG) to import U.S. cargoes. The only path to the terminal is through Istanbul's 17-mile waterway.


Turkey doesn't allow LNG shipments through the Bosporus because of safety concerns and congestion. The strait is about half a mile wide at its narrowest point and classified as a maritime chokepoint, among the most difficult to navigate.


"If Turkey were to agree to LNG ships transiting the Bosporus to deliver fuel to Ukraine, other states in the Black Sea would also want to invest in their own terminals," Michelle Berman, the head of shipping and freight research at Business Monitor International in London, wrote in an e-mail Nov. 27. "This would lead to a considerable ramp up in the volume of traffic passing through the already congested Bosporus."


Ukraine's LNG plans may be further complicated by Russia's decision this week to scrap its $45 billion South Stream gas pipeline to Europe, favoring instead a Black Sea link to Turkey. Strengthening ties between Russia and Turkey may make it even less likely that the government in Ankara would open up the Bosporus to LNG tankers. Russia already supplies 59 percent of Turkey's gas.


Faster Approval


Russia provides about 30 percent of Europe's energy, half of which travels through pipelines crossing Ukraine, making it a linchpin in the region's energy security. Four Republican Senators introduced the North Atlantic Security Act in July, requiring the U.S. Energy Department to approve applications to export LNG to Ukraine, Japan and NATO nations.


Ukraine will proceed with its LNG terminal plan even as companies say they can't guarantee that ships will be allowed through the Bosporus, Energy Minister Yuri Prodan told reporters in Kiev on Nov. 19. A facility can be ready by the end of 2015, Sergiy Yevtushenko, the head of Ukraine's investment agency, said in April.




Floating storage and regasification units of the type Ukraine is considering are generally cheaper than land-based import terminals. The , a regas ship leased to Lithuania last month, cost about $330 million to deliver, according to owner Hoegh LNG Holdings Ltd., while Poland expects to spend about $700 million on a land-based terminal being built.

LNG Terminal


Turkey "does not view positively" an LNG terminal in the Black Sea, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said in June. That position hasn't changed and Turkey doesn't want more congestion on the Bosporus, a spokesman for the ministry said Nov. 14, asking not to be identified by name because of policy.


Traffic through the Turkish straits is regulated by a 1936 convention which guarantees free passage of merchant vessels in times of peace. Turkey introduced laws in 1994 that give it legal powers over vessel movements and what type of ships can use the Bosporus.


"It's entirely at Turkey's discretion if they decide, or are persuaded by others to decide, that LNG tankers should pass through the Bosporus on the basis of those regulations," Nick Austin, a marine and international trade partner at Clyde & Co., the world's biggest shipping law firm, said by phone Nov. 4.


Transits through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which link Turkey to the Aegean Sea, reached 2.9 million barrels a day of crude and oil products last year, from 2.6 million in 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.


"We are already having huge problems with the oil tankers," Fatih Baltaci, president of Istanbul-based Akfel Holding AS, a closely held Turkish gas importer, said in an Oct. 22 interview in Amsterdam. "I don't see it as feasible or viable," he said of Ukraine's plan.


Divert Traffic


Turkey plans a canal parallel to the Bosporus that will divert traffic away from the strait and connect the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea via a route running west of Istanbul. The nation's ruling party expects to finish the plans in 2014 and complete the project in the next five years, it said on its website.


While Turkey and Ukraine may eventually seek to use the canal for LNG, this wouldn't provide a solution "in the short or medium term," Anthony Skinner, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at risk-advisory firm Maplecroft in Bath, England, said by e-mail Oct. 28.


Economics may scuttle Ukraine's project anyway. The Ukrainian hryvnia weakened more than 13 percent against the dollar last month, the worst performer among more than 170 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. The nation's economy will contract 7 percent this year, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Nov. 18. The conflict over Crimea, which Russia annexed in March, has claimed more than 4,300 lives.


'Complete Chaos'


"This is a state in complete chaos, with no money and it's talking about building exotic gas infrastructure which it basically doesn't need," Jonathan Stern, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said by phone Nov. 28.


Turkey allows liquefied-petroleum-gas vessels, which are usually smaller than those carrying LNG, to sail through the Bosporus. It also lets LNG tankers through the Dardanelles Strait to its own import terminal in the Sea of Marmara.


"Lots of LPG goes through the Bosporus, which is a lot more dangerous than LNG," Jason Bennett, a partner at Baker Botts LLP, a law firm negotiating about $500 billion in LNG sales agreements, said in a Nov. 19 interview in Paris. "An LNG terminal in the Black Sea makes economic sense."