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Senate Caves on Fast Track
by Stephen Lendman
It's all over but the impending disaster awaiting US consumers and the environment.
After cloture ended debate on Tuesday, Senate members overwhelmingly caved to corporate predators, giving them the right to plunder freely - their top priority to profit hugely by ripping off consumers, compromising digital freedom, polluting the environment and overriding national laws for their own benefit.
House members caved days earlier. Overwhelming popular sentiment didn't matter. Congress handed corporate predators blank check authority to do any damn thing they wish - no matter the harm to consumers, the environment or rule of law.
Irresponsible Iran Bashing
by Stephen Lendman
The world's number one human rights abuser on a global scale annually publishes individual country reports excluding itself. One-sided bias describes how Washington views independent governments it wants replaced by ones it controls - vilifying them irresponsibly.
Its latest 2014 Iran human rights report contains a litany of exaggerations, misinformation and Big Lies.
Included are false claims of speech, press, religion and assembly restrictions, disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, murder, denial of free elections, due process and judicial fairness, anti-Semitism among other misreported allegations listed.
Why are some Lebanese Sunni Muslims becoming sympathetic toward Da’ish (ISIS)?
Franklin Lamb
Damascus
As recent developments in the Levant make plain, the Sunni-Shiite conflict is increasingly dominating political and strategic initiatives and calculations in Lebanon. In the twelve months since declaring its "caliphate” on June 29, 2014, the “Islamic State” (IS/ISIS/Da’ish), basically a political power movement as opposed to being a religious project, continues birthing international and local franchises. The numbers of foreign fighters from diverse countries traveling to join Da’ish or Nusra increases after every victory. The US State Departments just released 2014 Country Reports (6/18/2015) spends considerably more time discussing the growth in popularity of the group's ideology than previous reports.
Congress Approves Greater Corporate Predation
by Stephen Lendman
On June 18, House members narrowly approved fast track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) - using procedural gimmicks, bribes and heavy pressure, the usual way corrupt politicians operate.
On June 23, Senate members followed suit. A cloture motion to end debate passed - clearing the way for a Wednesday vote expected to support TPA.
Public Citizen President Robert Weissman commented saying: The usual "legislative contortions an gimmicks…hand(ed) (corporate predators) their top priority" - the right to ram through Congress with minimal debate and no amendments anti-consumer rapacious trade deals no responsible societies would tolerate.
Plans for Destroying Greece Stall
by Stephen Lendman
Monied interests want vVV destroyed - trapped in endless debt peonage. Industry groups said nearly 60 Greek companies shut down daily since January 1 - costing over 600 jobs and 22 million euros in GDP every 24 hours.
EU officials complicit with the IMF and ECB (the so-called Troika) want Greek enterprises and assets handed to Western corporate predators at fire sale prices and its citizenry reduced to impoverished serfdom with no rights whatever.
It wants democracy entirely eliminated in its birthplace. It wants Western plunder turning Greece into a dystopian wasteland - a nightmarish ruler/serf society enforced by police state harshness. It wants it serving as a model for what's intended for other European countries and America. So-called Western civilization was never civilized. It's on a devastating race to the bottom for ordinary people - beyond the worst of what Orwell envisioned.
IMF Violates IMF Rules, to Continue Ukraine Bailouts
Eric Zuesse
The IMF whose bailout operations are absorbed by the taxpayers in the member countries whenever a particular bailed-out nation defaults, announced on Friday, June 19th, that it will "continue to support Ukraine through its Lending-into-Arrears Policy even in the event that a negotiated agreement with creditors in line with the program cannot be reached in a timely manner.” Though this new “Lending-into-Arrears” policy violates two IMF rules, it was justified by the IMF’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde on the basis of the Ukrainian government’s “continued efforts to reach a collaborative agreement with all creditors.”
In other words: a statement by Ukraine’s government that it wants to reach an agreement with its private creditors is being used by the IMF as if it were an excuse to extend into the indefinite future the IMF’s continued taxpayer-guaranteed financing of (‘lending’ to) the Ukrainian government, despite the fact that the IMF is violating two of the IMF’s own most-basic rules restricting its lending-authority — these rules are lending-restrictions whose purpose was to reduce the riskiness of the IMF’s lending, and so to minimize the amount that the IMF will be taking from taxpayers to fund its losses:
John Kerry: War Criminal, Profiteering from Stolen Palestinian Natural Gas
by Stephen Lendman
Kerry's involvement in US imperial wars causing mass slaughter, destruction and human misery makes him one of many unindicted US war criminals.
His considerable wealth together with his wife's fortune includes them among the world's billionaires.
He had an earlier million dollar stake in Houston-based Noble Energy - the US firm co-owning Israeli rigs developing Leviathan and Tamar gas fields containing an estimated 25 trillion cubic feet supply plus potentially billions of barrels of oil.
Operations are in Palestinian waters - part of Israel's longstanding grand theft plan, confiscating resources not its own - including what belongs to Lebanon and Syria.
The Western Mediterranean Levantine Basin is oil and gas rich. Israel wants as much of its resources as possible for itself - shutting out Palestinians entirely.
America’s U.N. Ambassador Continues Standing Up for Nazis
Eric Zuesse
Recently, President Barack Obama’s friend whom he appointed to represent this Vcountry at the United Nations visited Ukraine and used the Ukrainian-language translation and variant of the German Nazi Party’s “Deutschland über alles,” or “Germany above all,” to honor Ukraine’s own racist fascists, that nation’s ideological nazis, whom the U.S. had used in February 2014 for overthrowing Ukraine’s neutralist democratically elected President. This was not our U.N. Ambassador’s first foray into international nazi political pandering.
On 21 November 2014, Samantha Power, America’s U.N. Ambassador, had, in fact, been one of only three out of the 173 nations at the U.N., who voted against a resolution that condemned nazism and all forms of state-sponsored bigotry, and that specifically condemned Holocaust-denial; and she gave as the reason, that the resolution offended the government of Ukraine; but Ukraine wasn’t even mentioned in it. Canada voted against it because the United States did; and the United States voted against it because Ukraine did. Both Canada and U.S. were thus supposedly copying Ukraine.
Israel Criminalizes Delivering Humanitarian Aid
by Stephen Lendman
Gazans have been blockaded under siege for over nine years - for political, not security reasons.
Claims otherwise are outrageous Israeli lies - repeated to justify the unjustifiable. Efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to Gazans are systematically blocked the way Saudis now slowly starve Yemenis to death and deprive them of vitally needed medical care.
Freedom Flotilla III is heading for Gaza - aiming to break Israel's blockade. Flotilla I and II were blocked. The first May 2010 mission cost nine activists' lives aboard the Mavi Marmara along with dozens more wounded and everyone brutally treated and arrested. Flotillas will continue sailing "until the illegal blockade of Gaza is permanently lifted," its sponsors maintain.
"Our voyage is a natural, brotherly action. Our objective is humanitarian. Our basis lies in international humanitarian law. (O)ur method is non-violen(t)."
NATO Preparing for War with Russia?
by Stephen Lendman
Washington dominates NATO. It makes policy decisions. Other members march in lockstep, often harming their own self-interest. Imposing sanctions on Russia hurting their own economies is as good an example as any.
So is acting belligerently against an important neighbor threatening no one, wanting mutual cooperation - risking another European war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is a convenient US stooge - taking orders from Washington. He supports its likely intention to deploy nuclear weapons targeting Russia on the phony pretext of its nonexistent Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) violations - a policy only lunatics would endorse.
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