Small newspaper reports about vaccine-damaged children receiving financial compensation from the federal vaccine court

The corporate media won't report such cases because their bottom line is more important than being honest with their readers, but vaccine damages do occur, even if the big newspapers don't want to risk their pharmaceutical industry ad purchases to tell you about them.

But not all media is corrupted in that manner, so our hats go off to the small-time , of Charlotte, North Carolina, which had the courage to tell the story of a local resident whose child has no future, thanks to vaccines.

As the paper reported in its February 28 edition online:

As they started their family, Mooresville residents Theresa and Lucas Black dutifully got their children immunized, never doubting their doctor's word that vaccines are safe and necessary.

But their faith in those promises was shaken in 2001, when their 3-month-old daughter, Angelica, developed life-threatening seizures and brain damage just three days after getting several vaccinations.

A neurologist in Charlotte diagnosed Angelica with vaccine-related encephalopathy - a brain injury. And in 2006, she was awarded $2 million plus $250,000 from a little known federal judiciary called the "vaccine court," which was established just for this purpose: Paying out vaccine-related injury claims.

'Anti-vaxxers' derided and compared to common criminals who should be jailed

So much for vaccines never causing harm; they have done so with such frequency that there had to be a special federal court established to handle the claims.

And now, Theresa Black, Angelica's mother, is being forced to suffer again, as the recent measles outbreak in California is causing her to feel bullied. If anyone has a right to oppose mandatory vaccinations, it is certainly the parent of a child permanently and irreparably damaged by them.

Federal, state and local health officials insist without reserve that vaccines are safe - always. Many have even strongly hinted that any parent who doesn't vaccinate their children ought to be charged with child abuse and even jailed.

"Anti-vaxxers often claim the right not to put 'poison' in their children's bodies. That is ludicrous," wrote Alex Berezow, founding editor of RealClearScience.com and co-author of , in a January 28 column in .

"A mountain of data has demonstrated that vaccines are safe and effective. Insisting otherwise is akin to believing that the moon landing was faked," he continued. "It is time to end this insanity. Though jail sounds drastic, it could be the only way to send a strong message about the deadly consequences of failing to vaccinate children."

Such radicalism angers parents like Black.

"There's people out there calling for us to get jailed," Black said. "I am not a freak. I am not trying to endanger anyone's child. ... I actually think vaccinating is a good thing. My problem is I don't think they are as safe as they could be. ... There are bad things that happen."

It is good this case got some press

But, as Angelica reminds her daily, there is nothing inherently safe about vaccines. Today, at 14 years old, Angelica is severely disabled, and she always will be. She is stricken with cerebral palsy and has a seizure disorder. She cannot speak and she must be fed through a tube. She is confined to a wheelchair. And because she is a 24-hour care case, her parents had to quit work to be at home for her 'round the clock.

Renee Gentry, a Virginia lawyer who represented the Blacks before the vaccine court, added that she has also been disturbed by some of the reaction to the measles outbreak.

"People are saying there's absolutely no evidence that vaccines cause brain injury, and we're sitting here with all these cases. It's rare ... but they clearly have happened," Gentry told the .

Not that rare. In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program . Set up within the Department of Health and Human Services, the program "was established to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines, stabilize vaccine costs, and establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines."

You can read about Angelica's case here. Bravo to for covering the story.

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Government propaganda, automated bots, and Internet trolls - The battle to control public opinion and manipulate social media

Rampant Disinformation

NATO has announced that it is launching an "information war" against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation.

It's well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion . Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies.

Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets , i.e. fake social media identities . See this, this, this, this and this.

In 2013, the American Congress the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there's even to constrain propaganda than before.

Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes:

• The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues ... to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral

Automated Propaganda

Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs.

We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media.

One of America's top cyber-propagandists - former high-level military information officer Joel Harding - wrote in December:

I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon. The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a "Social Networking Influence Engine".

***

The implications seem to be profound for the information environment.

***

The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don't even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.

How Can This Be Real?

Gizmodo reported in 2010:

Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations!

Leck's bot, @AI_AGW, doesn't just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source.

As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don't know they've been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor's line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot's been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up.

Technology has come a long way in the past 5 years. So if a lone programmer could do this 5 years ago, imagine what he could do now.

And the big players have a lot more resources at their disposal than a lone climate activist/software developer does. For example, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government "quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type " (and see this ). So if the lone programmer is doing it, it's not unreasonable to assume that the big boys are widely doing it.

How Does It Work?

How does this work?

We have no inside knowledge, but we can imagine some possibilities:

• Any article that includes the words "Russia" or "Ukraine" automatically triggers comments accusing Russia of seeking to form a new empire, Putin of being the new Hitler, and the Russians invading and being responsible for all of the violence Ukraine

• Any article including the words "NSA", "spying" or "mass surveillance" automatically triggers comments saying that the government is just trying keep us safe, and anyone who questions their actions is a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who lives in his mom's basement

• Any article mentioning the phrases "Federal Reserve" or "quantitative easing" automatically launches comments saying that the Fed is doing the best it can under difficult circumstances, and that the economy would be much worse without QE

So that moron who keeps spewing garbage - and doesn't seem like he's even listening to responses - may actually be a bot.

How Effective Are Automated Comments?

Unfortunately, this is more effective than you might assume ...

Specifically, scientists have shown that name-calling and swearing breaks down people's ability to think rationally ... and intentionally sowing discord and posting junk comments to push down insightful comments are common propaganda techniques.

Indeed, an automated program need not even be that sophisticated ... it can copy a couple of words from the main post or a comment, and then spew back one or more radioactive labels such as "terrorist", "commie", "Russia-lover", "wimp", "fascist", "loser", "traitor", "conspiratard", etc.

Given that Harding and his compadres consider anyone who questions any U.S. policies as an enemy of the state - as does the Obama administration (and see this ) - many honest, patriotic writers and commenters may be targeted for automated propaganda comments.

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Above the law: Cops in the U.S. kill citizens at 70 times the rate of other first world countries

In case you've been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kill people, even unarmed people, even on video, and do so with impunity.

The tallying methods, or rather lack thereof, used by both the FBI and individual police departments to count the amount of people killed by police, have been shown to be staggeringly inaccurate.

However, this inability of the government to count the number of people it kills, has been met with multiple alternative means of calculating just how deadly the state actually is.

One of these citizen run databases, is the website http://bit.ly/1HtU3T8. The site is basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.

The tally for 2014? 1,100 people killed by those sworn to protect. That is an average of three people a day.

Do not mistake this as saying that those who were killed were innocent. However, when we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.

While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.

When we look at citizens killed by police over the last two years, deaths have increased 44 percent in this short time; 763 people were killing by police in 2013.

As a comparison, the total number of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2014 was 58.

Fewer soldiers were killed in war than citizens back home in "the land of the free" in 2014, by a large margin.

So why is that?

Is this some natural tendency of police in "free societies" to kill their citizens more, in an effort to maintain this freedom? Hardly, and hardly is the US a free country.

According to the 2014 Legatum Prosperity Index released in November, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica.

Other such rankings systems show the US as low as 46.

Let's look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US.

If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities.

From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England's, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.

China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.

Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people.

It doesn't stop there.

From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.

In the entire history of Iceland police, they have only killed 1 person ever. After exhausting all non-lethal methods to detain an armed man barricaded in his house who actually shot 2 police officers, police were forced to take the 59-year-old man's life. The country of Iceland grieved for weeks after having to resort to violence.

So why are police in the US so much more likely to kill than all of these other first world countries?

To better understand the multi-dimensional answer to that question, we can start by looking at the prison population of the US.

America imprisons almost twenty five percent of all people imprisoned in the world, although containing only about 5% of the worlds population, an extremely disproportionate share of people imprisoned globally.

The U.S. houses 2.3 million inmates, while China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., is a distant second with 1.6 million prisoners.

The war on drugs coupled with the military industrial state created by the US playing police of the world, has created a deadly combination.

A constant pursuit of new weaponry by the military has paved the way for the hand-me-down cycle of military gear to police departments.

The idea was that if the U.S. wanted its police to act like drug warriors, it should equip them like warriors, which it has—to the tune of around $4.3 billion in equipment, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

What we are calling the has already taken place, on a large scale. We are now seeing a domestic pretending to be a police force.

The time for peaceful resistance is now and more and more people are beginning to understand this.

Even retired police chiefs of large cities are watching from the sidelines with anxiety as they see their once, only slightly corrupt cities, turn into occupied militarized zones, ready to pounce on the first instance of civil opposition.

The most recent of former police chiefs coming to terms with the horrid consequences of their actions is Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle Police. Stamper was recently on the Colbert Report and Stephen Colbert asked him what happened during the infamous Seattle WTO protests in 1999 under his leadership. "Well we gassed non-threatening, non-violent protesters," replied the former Chief of police for Seattle Washington.

Of course while Norm Stamper was a cop, he didn't realize that his actions, no matter how "justified" by the state, would be contributing to a hellish future police state. Stamper, like myself a 4 year veteran of the USMC, and most of those who serve, or have served the state in some way, are unable to think outside of the paradigm while simultaneously supporting it.

"Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service." -Two time medal of honor recipient General Smedley Butler, USMC

Because Stamper is out of the paradigm, he can see clearer now. According to his website, he wants to:

End the Drug War... Drive Bigotry and Brutality Out of the Criminal Justice System... Honor the Constitution... Build Respect for Cops...

So far, Stamper has been quite outspoken against the police state of which he was once complicit in creating. In order to affect change more people like Stamper need to come out. If half of the officers that contacted the Free Thought Project spoke publicly about their concerns, we'd be in a much better place.

Unfortunately when officers do speak out against their own department they are met with horrid backlash from their peers.

The Free Thought Project is contacted regularly by police officers who know the system they uphold is completely corrupt, but they find it nearly impossible to call out the corruption.

Most recently an officer in Texas contacted us, who wanted to help prevent brutality and corruption. When we told him that speaking out and refusing to enforce immoral laws is how to change things, he replied by stating that he does refuse to arrest people for marijuana possession, but that he

When police fear the police, it is high time for change.

The overwhelming majority of police brutality cases stem from the war on drugs. When so many people are tasked with finding and prosecuting those in possession of a substance deemed illegal, the interactions become more frequent and less cordial. If we end that, we get the state out of the private lives of most individuals. This will only serve to lessen the scope of police harassment, in turn lessening the instance of brutality and killings.

The Free Thought Project is currently planning a world wide day of peaceful resistance to #End the Drug War.

We are also starting a Go Fund Me campaign to help support whistleblower police officers. With enough 'good cops' coming out against corruption in their departments, this would help to speed up the awakening process for Americans who still support the police state.

We've seen the change that one or two good cops can effect, imagine 100.

The time for peaceful action is now.

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Oldest weather observatory in US breaks seasonal snowfall record

© Simón Rios/WBUR

With just 1.8 inches of snow falling, Blue Hills Observatory & Science Center finally breaks the seasonal snowfall record.

Now that spring has officially begun, Blue Hills Observatory & Science Center in Milton has finally broken its snowfall record.

With 1.8 inches falling Friday into Saturday, this year's snowfall surpassed the seasonal record set in 1996 with 145.8 inches, according to the Observatory.

Blue Hills is the oldest operating weather observatory in the nation, with observers tracking snowfall there since 1885.

Observatory chief Don McCasland says this winter will be a subject of folklore.

"They'll say, 'Oh, you know, February 2015 was the worst. The only one almost as bad was 1978,'" he said.

WBUR visited Blue Hills last week as they were waiting patiently for the final inch and spoke to chief observer Brian Fitzgerald:

"I've had a lot of people all around me say, 'You're living through history right now,' which is kind of a funny sentiment," Fitzgerald says. "But it makes you really think about what you're recording now, how you're going to look back at something like this. Is this the new normal? Will we ever see this again?"

McCasland says this season's 145.8 inches could continue climbing.

"We still have a long ways to go with more of March and all of April and even sometimes snow in May, so I was very confident that we would break the record for the season, but was not positive that it was going to happen by today."

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Russia puts Northern Fleet on full alert amid NATO war games

As the U.S. and several Eastern European NATO countries conduct a series of military exercises near Russia's border, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his Northern Fleet "to full alert in a snap combat readiness exercise" in the Arctic, state-run media reported Monday.

At least one Russian leader described the drill as routine and unrelated to the "international situation."

The fleet got its orders at 8 a.m. Monday, according to Sputnik, launching a land, sea and air drill that will involve 38,000 troops, 41 ships, 15 submarines and 110 aircraft.

"The main task of the (combat readiness drill) is to assess the armed forces from the Northern Fleet's capabilities in fulfilling tasks in providing military security of the Russian Federation in the Arctic region," Russian Defense Minister Gen. Sergey Shoigu told the media outlet. "New challenges and threats of military security demand the further heightening of military capabilities of the armed forces and special attention will be paid to the state of the newly formed strategic merging (of forces) in the North."

The drills will run through Friday, Sputnik reported.

A flotilla of minesweepers will support the Northern Fleet's nuclear submarines in the Barents Sea as part of the drill, the Tass news agency reported, citing a Defense Ministry statement.

"Mine-sweeping groups of the Kola Flotilla have moved to the designated areas of the Barents within the framework of a snap check of combat readiness of the Northern Fleet forces for supporting the deployment of the main forces of the fleet, including the deployment of nuclear and diesel submarines of the Northern Fleet," the statement says.

The ships will conduct magnetic, acoustic and contact demining sweeps during the drill, Tass reported.

Despite a number of countries participating in various military drills in Eastern Europe, a Kremlin spokesman described the Northern Fleet inspection as routine practice aimed at improving military capabilities.

"The practice of snap checks will become regular, as it is beneficial for improving the mechanisms of control and operation of the armed forces. This is an absolutely regular process of the armed forces' operation, of preparation and development of Russia's armed forces,"Dmitry Peskov told Tass on Monday.

Conversely, a diplomat told Tass that Russia was "deeply concerned" about NATO drills near its border.

"It is especially surprising that this is happening in Northeastern Europe, which is the most stable region not only on our continent, but also maybe in the whole world," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexey Meshkov said. "Such NATO actions lead to destabilization of the situation and increasing tensions in Northeastern Europe."

Among the recent drills in Eastern Europe:

- In its largest military operation in decades, Norway sent 5,000 troops to conduct military exercises between Alta and Lakselv in Finnmark county, which borders Russia, according to the Barents Observer.

- About 100 U.S. soldiers are expected to conduct an exercise this month using a Patriot missile battery and a Polish air defense brigade "at a location on Polish territory," Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said. The exercise is part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which began in response to Russia's involvement in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea last year, the U.S. Defense Department said.

- Also as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, the U.S. Army will soon send armored Stryker vehicles on a 1,100-mile convoy through six European countries to show solidarity with its allies. The "highly visible" convoy will travel through Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia and the Czech Republic en route to Vilseck, Germany, a U.S. Army Europe spokesman told the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.

- In a "regularly scheduled" exercise aimed at demonstrating NATO's commitment to "collective defense" in the Black Sea, the Standing NATO Maritime Group Two -- a collection of warships -- will train with the Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish navies and visit Varna, Bulgaria, to meet with local authorities and navy officials, NATO said.

- The U.S. Air Force moved a dozen A-10 Thunderbolt "tankbuster" attack jets to an air base in Germany and the U.S. military placed hundreds of tanks and military vehicles in Latvia, where they'll be matched up with 3,000 troops from Fort Stewart, Georgia.

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BEST OF THE WEB: Kiev's poison pill for Minsk 2.0

By adding a poison pill to legislation implementing the latest Minsk agreement, the Ukrainian government has effectively guaranteed a resumption of the civil war, which U.S. hardliners and the mainstream U.S. media will no doubt blame on ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. media has focused on the so-called Minsk-2 agreement's cease-fire component, first claiming it was being sabotaged by the rebels and Russia but now acknowledging that it is shaky but relatively successful. But the larger point of Minsk-2 was that it would provide for a political settlement of the civil war by arranging talks between Kiev and authorities in the east that would lead to giving those areas extensive self-rule by the end of 2015.

But the implementing law that emerged this week from the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev inserted a clause requiring the rebels to first surrender to the Ukrainian government and then letting Kiev organize elections before a federalized structure is determined.

The Minsk-2 agreement had called for dialogue with the representatives of these territories en route to elections and establishment of broad autonomy for the region, but Kiev's curveball was to refuse any talks with rebel leaders and insist on establishing control over these territories before the process can move forward, in effect requiring a rebel capitulation.

Reflecting that view, Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev, said: "Ukraine isn't going to go along with any legalization of those so-called people's republics. We need them to be dismantled," according to the .

The leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" have protested this bait-and-switch tactic, declaring in a statement that the change was unacceptable: "We agreed to a special status for the Donbass within a renewed Ukraine, although our people wanted total independence. We agreed to this to avoid the spilling of fraternal blood."

Kiev's maneuver - reflecting the bellicose position of neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and other U.S. hardliners - puts pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to either get Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko to return to the original understanding of Minsk-2 or watch the fighting resume leading to a potential showdown between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States on Russia's border.

The surrender-first-negotiate-later stipulation also raises questions about the strength of Merkel and President Barack Obama to overcome resistance from America's powerful neoconservatives who have exploited the Ukraine crisis to isolate Russia and drive a wedge between Obama and Putin. The two leaders had cooperated to reduce tensions with Syria and Iran in 2013 when the neocons were hoping for more "regime change."

Following those Obama-Putin collaborations, Nuland and other neocons both inside the Obama administration and in Congress took aim at Ukraine, egging on public disruptions in Kiev to destabilize the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych during the winter of 2013-14. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Neocons — Masters of Chaos."]

To a great extent, the Ukraine crisis became Nuland's baby as she rallied Ukraine's business leaders and political activists to challenge Yanukovych and discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in early February 2014 how, in his words, to "midwife this thing."

In that same conversation, Nuland expressed her disgust at the European Union's less aggressive approach to the crisis with the pithy expression, "Fuck the EU." She also handpicked new leaders, ruling out some politicians and declaring that "Yats is the guy," a reference to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who became the post-coup prime minister. (This past week, it was Yatsenyuk who oversaw the insertion of the poison pill into the legislation for implementing the Minsk-2 agreement.)

Cue in the Neo-Nazis

The uprising in Kiev reached its peak on Feb. 22, 2014, when a violent coup - spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias from western Ukraine - drove elected Yanukovych from office, with the U.S. State Department immediately declaring the new regime "legitimate." The coup government then sought to impose its control over the ethnic Russian east and south, which had been Yanukovych's base of support.

Protected by Russian troops who were already based in Crimea on a base-lease agreement, the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, an annexation that took place one year ago. Uprisings also occurred in the eastern Donbass region with hastily arranged referenda also seeking independence from Kiev.

The coup regime responded by declaring those resisting in the east to be "terrorists" and mounting a punitive "anti-terrorist operation" that relied on army artillery to bombard cities and neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias to go in for the brutal street-to-street fighting.

Thousands of ethnic Russians were killed in these offensives as the rebels were pushed back into their strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, receiving supplies and other assistance from Russia, the rebels turned the tide of the conflict and began driving the Ukrainian military back, inflicting heavy losses.

To stop the rout of government forces last September, the first Minsk ceasefire established a tentative frontline around the rebel strongholds. But Kiev continued to squeeze the rebel-held cities by cutting off access to banking and other services while neo-Nazi and other militias undertook "death squad" operations to kill rebel sympathizers in government-controlled zones.

When that first cease-fire broke down, the rebels made new gains against the Ukrainian military, prompting Merkel and Hollande to broker a second ceasefire, which included a structure for resolving the crisis with a political settlement to grant eastern Ukraine substantial autonomy.

But Nuland and other U.S. hard-liners objected to the concessions and trade-offs arranged by Merkel and Holland and accepted by Poroshenko and Putin. The U.S. hard-liners began plotting how to reverse what they claimed was "appeasement" of "Russian aggression."

The German press has reported on some of this U.S. strategy after the newspaper obtained details of conversations that Nuland and other U.S. officials held behind closed doors last month at a security conference in Munich. Nuland was overheard disparaging the German chancellor's initiative, calling it "Merkel's Moscow thing," according to , citing unnamed sources.

Another U.S. official went even further, the report said, calling it the Europeans' "Moscow bullshit."

Talking Themselves into a Frenzy

The tough talk behind the closed doors at a conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel seemed to be contagious as the American officials, both diplomats and members of Congress, kept escalating their rhetoric, according to the account.

Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the practical impact of the Ukraine war on Europe: "They're afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia."

Another U.S. politician was heard adding: "It's painful to see that our NATO partners are getting cold feet" - with particular vitriol directed toward German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen as "defeatist" because she supposedly no longer believed in a Kiev victory.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, got himself worked up into such a lather that he started making comparisons to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain going to Munich to "appease" Adolf Hitler, likening Merkel to Chamberlain and Putin to Hitler: "History shows us that dictators always take more, whenever you let them. They can't be brought back from their brutal behavior when you fly to Moscow to them, just like someone once flew to this city."

According to the story, Nuland laid out a strategy for countering Merkel's diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis in a way that stops the Europeans from backing down. "We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them," Nuland reportedly said.

NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons would "raise the battlefield cost for Putin." Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that "I'd strongly urge you to use the phrase 'defensive systems' that we would deliver to oppose Putin's 'offensive systems.'"

Yet, through all of the past year's scheming and maneuvering by Nuland and other U.S. officials, the mainstream U.S. media has studiously ignored the coup side of the story, insisting that there was no coup and adopting an "I-see-nothing" response to the presence of neo-Nazi militias leading the fight against the ethnic Russian east.

For the , the and the rest of major U.S. press, everything has been explained as "Russian aggression" with Putin supposedly having plotted the entire series of events as a way to conquer much of Europe as the new Hitler. Even though the evidence reveals that Putin was caught off-guard by the coup next door, the U.S. media has insisted on simply passing along Nuland's propaganda themes.

Thus, it is a safe bet that when the current ceasefire breaks down and the killing resumes, all the American people will hear is that it was Putin's fault, that he conspired to destroy the peace as part of his grand scheme of "aggression." And, the Nuland-Yatsenyuk sabotage of Minsk-2 will be the next part of this troubling story to disappear into the memory hole.

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Privatization: Empowering the wealthy while impoverishing the masses

'USPS is so inexpensive, in fact, that Fedex actually uses the U.S. Post Office for about 30 percent of its ground shipments,' writes Buchheit.

'USPS is so inexpensive, in fact, that Fedex actually uses the U.S. Post Office for about 30 percent of its ground shipments,' writes Buchheit. (Photo: file)

The Project on Government Oversight found that in 33 of 35 cases the federal government spent more on private contractors than on public employees for the same services. The authors of the report summarized, "Our findings were shocking."

Yet our elected leaders persist in their belief that free-market capitalism works best. Here are a few fact-based examples that say otherwise.

Health Care: Markups of 100%....1,000%....100,000%

Broadcast Journalist Edward R. Murrow in 1955: Who owns the patent on this vaccine?

Polio Researcher Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

We don't hear much of that anymore. The public-minded sentiment of the 1950s, with the sense of wartime cooperation still in the minds of researchers and innovators, has yielded to the neoliberal winner-take-all business model.

In his most recent exposé of the health care industry in the U.S., Steve Brill notes that it's "the only industry in which technological advances have increased costs instead of lowering them." An investigation of fourteen private hospitals by National Nurses United found that they realized a 1,000% markup on their total costs, four times that of public hospitals. Other sources have found that private health insurance administrative costs are 5 to 6 times higher than Medicare administrative costs.

Markup reached 100,000% for the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which grabbed a patent for a new hepatitis drug and set the pricing to take whatever they could get from desperate American patients.

Housing: Big Profits, Once the Minorities Are Squeezed Out

A report by a coalition of housing rights groups concluded that "public housing is a vital national resource that provides decent and affordable homes to over a million families across the country." But, according to the report, a privatization program started during the Clinton administration resulted in "the wholesale destruction of communities" and "the displacement of very large numbers of low-income households of color."

It's gotten even worse since then, as Blackstone and Goldman Sachs have figured out how to take money from former homeowners, with three deviously effective strategies:

1. Buy houses and hold them to force prices up


2. Meanwhile, charge high rents (with little or no maintenance)


3. Package the deals as rental-backed securities with artificially high-grade ratings

Private Banks: Giving Them Half Our Retirement Money

The public bank of North Dakota had an equity return of 23.4% before the state's oil boom. The normally privatization-minded Wall Street Journal admits that "The BND's costs are extremely low: no exorbitantly-paid executives; no bonuses, fees, or commissions; only one branch office; very low borrowing costs.."

But thanks to private banks, interest claims one out of every three dollars that we spend, and by the time we retire with a 401(k), over half of our money is lost to the banks.

Internet: The Fastest Download in the U.S. (is on a Public Network)

That's in Chattanooga, a rapidly growing city, named by Nerdwallet as one of the "most improved cities since the recession," and offering its residents Internet speeds 50 times faster than the American average.

Elsewhere, 61 percent of Americans are left with a single private company, often Comcast or Time Warner, to provide cable service. Now those two companies, both high on the most hated list, are trying to merge into one.

The Post Office: Private Companies Depend on it to Handle the Unprofitable Routes

It costs less than 50 cents to send a letter to any remote location in the United States. For an envelope with a two-day guarantee, this is how the U.S. Postal Service recently matched up against competitors:

• U.S. Post Office 2-Day $5.68


• Federal Express 2-Day $19.28


• United Parcel Service 2 Day $24.09

USPS is so inexpensive, in fact, that Fedex actually uses the U.S. Post Office for about 30 percent of its ground shipments. As Ralph Nader notes, the USPS has not taken any taxpayer money since 1971, and if it weren't required by an inexplicable requirement to pre-fund employee benefits for 75 years, it would be making a profit. Instead, this national institution has been forced to cut jobs and routes and mailing centers.

Privatization places profits over people. Average Americans are the products, and few of us see any profits.

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