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Putin’s Annual Tour de Force News Conference Underway
Stephen Lendman
Nothing in the West matches it, unimaginable for a US or other Western leader to spend hours answering scores of questions.
Putin does it annually in televised events, answering questions from journalists and others, his straightforward style always refreshing.
Questions include ones asked live from the audience, submitted online, through text messages and by phone - responding candidly like always, polar opposite standard practice by duplicitous Western politicians.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said interest in this year’s Q & A session was “huge,” the event to “be special” in Putin’s last year of his current term, intending to run for reelection next March.
Putin and Trump Speak Overnight Friday
Stephen Lendman
It’s routine for world leaders to speak to one another, not when it involves Putin and Trump. Western media bash them both, instead of urging improved bilateral relations.
A brief White House statement said both leaders discussed “working together to resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea.”
"President Trump thanked President Putin for acknowledging America’s strong economic performance in his annual press conference.”Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said they “spoke out in favor of building dialogue and contacts with North Korea and agreed to exchange information and initiatives in this regard, focusing on ways to resolve the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.”
Both leaders remain world’s apart on dealing with the DPRK. Putin urges responsible dialogue, along with suspending provocative US, South Korean, Japanese military exercises Pyongyang calls rehearsals for war.
Putin to Run for Reelection
Stephen Lendman
In a Tuesday article, I discussed Russia’s electoral process. It shames America’s money-controlled sham system, fantasy democracy. Russians have the real thing.
I noted a Kremlin source saying Putin would announce his candidacy and register as required as late as possible - likely this month, no later than the January 6 deadline.
An anti-imperial peace champion, I earlier called him the world’s preeminent leader - along with Sergey Lavrov, eminently deserving of Nobel Peace Prize recognition, notably awarded to warmakers, not peace advocates.
Both officials have gone all-out for peace and stability in Syria and Ukraine. Washington’s agenda is polar opposite under GOP or undemocratic Dem. leaders - supporting terrorism, Russia under Putin effectively combating it.
Rise and Decline of the Welfare State: Class Struggle and Imperial Wars as the Motor Force of US History
James Petras
Introduction
The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period, the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.
Between the mid 1970’s to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies for affordable housing have been gutted. ‘Workfare’ (under President ‘Bill’ Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits to an astronomical degree.
What started as incremental reversals during the 1990’s under Clinton has snowballed over the last two decades decimating welfare legislation and institutions.
The earlier welfare ‘reforms’ and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East.
Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy
Eric Zuesse
U.S. President Trump’s bold support for the apartheid dictatorship of Israel against that theocratic-racist nation’s non-Jews, fits into a larger picture of the supremacist nation that America itself has increasingly become. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, had repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.
Electoral Coup in Honduras
Stephen Lendman
It’s standard practice in banana republics and elsewhere.
The late Edward Herman explained how it works in his book titled “Demonstration Elections,” covering sham ones in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Vietnam.
They occur regularly elsewhere in countries like Egypt and nations America occupies.
Herman explained “elections held under conditions of military occupation and extensive pre-election ‘pacification’ ” aren’t free at all.
Their aim is getting an occupying force’s puppet choice installed to rule with influence wielded more by bullets than ballots to create “stability.”
Electoral fraud occurs in Western nations, notably in past US elections. Most recently, GW Bush lost to Al Gore and John Kerry, yet served two terms as an illegitimate US president.
China, Saudi Arabia and the US: Shake Up and Shake Down
James Petras
Introduction
Major changes are roiling the states, societies and ruling classes of the biggest industrial economies, oil regimes and military complexes.
China is re-allocating its economic wealth toward building the most extensive modern infrastructure system in history, linking four continents.
Saudi Arabia is transferring a trillion dollars of pillage from princes to princes, from old business parasites to up-to-date versions, from austere desert mirages to fantasies of new mega-cities.
The United States is emptying the swamp of the Capital’s corruption and immediately replenishing it with the scandal of the day.
One Cabinet Secretary is fired; another Secretary is hired; one enemy is embraced; an ally denounced; the stock market flourishes and trade agreements are abandoned. One tax is sliced and pleases the powerful; another is spliced and chokes the consumers.
Turmoil, some would say; chaos, others would claim. And the stouthearted argue, that’s the way the world turns round.
But for all the world’s current ‘shaking’, there is substance and direction: There are models for the shaking-up and paradigms for the shaking down.
America’s Electoral Choices: Liberal Fascism, versus Conservative Fascism
Eric Zuesse
In U.S. elections between the two political Parties for federal offices — Congress, and the Presidency — the choice that’s offered to the voters is almost invariably between two fascists; so, the meaning of “fascism” is first crucial to understand, in order to understand today’s America, and that it’s fascist:
Benito Mussolini, who originated fascism and named his Party after that ideology, alternatively referred to it as “corporationism,” and meant by that term, as he explained it (quoted in George Seldes’s excellent 1935 book, Sawdust Caesar, about Mussolini and fascism) Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director. Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. All the Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.
North Korea DID NOT take the World Across a Dangerous Threshold
Robert Singer
North Korea is back in the news and even if “Wednesday’s launch has now almost certainly put all major European targets within Pyongyang’s reach,” we will not be having a nuclear confrontation EVER.
In 2008 I published World War III wasn’t going to happen:
In August, F.W. Engdahl wrote, “The signing on August 14th of an agreement between the governments of the United States and Poland to deploy on Polish soil US ‘interceptor missiles’ is the most dangerous move towards nuclear war the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis.”
Now, I don’t like being in a position where I have to contradict the leading analyst of the New World Order, but there is no chance we are any closer to a nuclear war than we were in the 1950s, 1962, or any time in the last 58 years. I can’t speak for Mr. Engdahl but most NWO conspiracy theorists expect a depopulation event to rid the planet of 5 billion useless eaters. The Illuminati, they say, need only 500 million of us for slaves when they take over the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying there couldn’t be a depopulation event before 2012 but a nuclear war is not in the cards. Nuclear World War III would make too much of the planet uninhabitable and that would include the One World governors as well as the 500 million humans they need for slaves. [From World War III wasn’t going to happen.
If there is a World War III then it will be a hand to hand combat.
Did I mention that Albert Pike in his Letter to Mazzini – The Illuminati Plan for World War 3 in 1871, agrees with me?
The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion. We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.
You might also be interested in the email I sent to my list on November 12, 2017, subject: A Military Confrontation with Yemen, Syria and Iran WILL NOT HAPPEN! [1]
Robert Singer writes about Secrets, Sentient Creatures and The Federal Reserve at stateofthenation2012, The Peoples Voice and The Market Oracle
Footnotes
[1] From: Robert Singer
Socialism, Capitalism and Health Care
James Petras
Introduction
The US political and economic elites have always bragged that capitalism is far superior to socialism in terms of providing people’s personal welfare. They claim that citizens live longer, healthier and happier lives under capitalism.
The debate between the supporters of the US Affordable Care Act or ‘Obamacare’ and its most vehement opponents under President Trump is not part of any larger system debate since both ‘sides’ base their vision and plans for medical care on private, for-profit corporate insurance schemes. This source of funding would ‘harness market forces’ to deliver quality medical care…in a marketplace of ‘free competition’, in which every American, even the most fragile, cancer-ridden patient, would be an engaged stakeholder, weighing a huge menu of free choices…
The real comparison of how these economic systems provide basic health care should be based on showing which provides the best population outcomes, personal satisfaction and community security across national boundaries. National health systems top the chaotic private system in these parameters.
