* HE WAS THE DECIDER, AFTER ALL

John Kerry Poses As Masseuse To Get Few Minutes With Putin (yes, The Onion)

John Kerry Poses As Masseuse To Get Few Minutes With Putin



MOSCOW—Having waited until the Russian leader was lying facedown on the massage table before quietly slipping into the room behind him, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is said to have posed as a masseuse at a high-end Moscow spa Monday in order to spend a few minutes alone with Vladimir Putin. “You seem very tense, Mr. Putin—how have things been going lately?” the United States cabinet member reportedly said while kneading Putin’s shoulders as gentle panpipe music played around them. “You sure have a lot of knots in your back. Have you been hunching over lately while drawing up plans for an imminent large-scale invasion of Ukraine, or maybe tensing up at the thought of crippling Western economic sanctions? You’d probably feel a lot more relaxed if you just invalidated yesterday’s referendum results in Crimea and acknowledged publicly that such a vote was illegal under the Ukrainian constitution.” Sources confirmed that Putin turned around with suspicion following Kerry’s suggestion that the Russian president could ease his muscle stiffness by withdrawing troops from Ukraine, at which point the secretary of state hastily poured water onto some nearby heated sauna stones to create a veil of steam, claimed to need more massage oil, and dashed out of the room.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/john-kerry-poses-as-masseuse-to-get-few-minutes-wi,35546/

“Out of work? Nowhere to live? Nowhere to go? Nothing to eat? Come to Fukushima.”

MONDAY, MAR 17, 2014 09:11 AM PDT
Fukushima’s “crisis of manpower”: Unskilled and destitute workers have taken over the cleanup process



The serious and delicate business of decommissioning Fukushima’s crippled nuclear plant is being undertaken by a series of unskilled, poorly trained workers, the New York Times reports, in a “crisis of manpower” that can have dangerous implications both for environmental safety and for the workers themselves.

A series of mishaps, coupled with the dangerous nature of the work to begin with, has made the cleanup a less than desirable gig — Reuters, which has been following the worksite closely, has already reported on how homeless men are being rounded up and paid below minimum wage to clean up radioactive fallout.

The Times has more on the scary state of affairs at Fukushima, summed up by this online ad: “Out of work? Nowhere to live? Nowhere to go? Nothing to eat? Come to Fukushima.”

MORE:
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/17/fukushimas_crisis_of_manpower_unskilled_and_destitute_workers_have_taken_over_the_cleanup_process/

There is no planet B

The Mask Has Been Lifted From Putin's Face

The sanctions so far are a joke –travel bans and such. More substantial ones will be on the way. Russia’s central bank is bracing for what’s coming. But these measures, even if they truly hurt, are not what will isolate Moscow. Instead, it is the mask that has been lifted from Putin’s face. He has declared himself. He has shown he’s not willing to play by the rules if he doesn’t like the rules. From now on, Putin will be the odd man out, the European leader that other leaders cannot trust. His word is worthless. No more can he flash his smile and rely on the picture to obscure his deeds. The tale that émigrés tell of a ruler who simply takes what he wants has been substantiated in Crimea.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/03/17/putin-exposed/

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare - BY Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of five books, the latest of which is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Transcript

GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Thanks again.

JAY: So, one more time, Gareth is a historian, an investigative journalist. He covers U.S. and foreign and military policy. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
So, in the first part we talked a bit about Gareth's background, but we got up to the point where it was clearly the policy of the American neocons, of Israel—and I think we now know the Saudis were very much on board—from the late 1990s, at least, if not before, regime change in Iran was the big foreign policy objective. We talked about the Project for the New American Century, which kind of laid this all out fairly clearly, a document created by neocons towards the end of the Clinton administration. As the weapons of mass destruction narrative helped Bush and Cheney invade Iraq, they needed a narrative for an attack eventually on Iran. And that begins what Gareth picks up in his new book.

So thanks, Gareth.

So they needed to manufacture a whole narrative that would justify war. So how do they go about doing that?

PORTER: They went about doing it first of all by establishing John Bolton, who was the primary policymaker on WMD for the Bush administration, was—.

JAY: Who helped manufacture the whole Iraq narrative.

PORTER: He was the person who was coordinating this on the American side with Israel, working very closely with them, clearly. And his first move was to make sure that the IAEA would not be able to allow Iran to get by without being accused of having a nuclear weapons program, and he didn't believe that would be possible unless some special moves were made.


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way more, just finished reading it:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11611

Rich people taking all their profits off the top-leaving nothing for the 99%—We've heard this before

The debate was whether they should “allow” the Irish to eat the food that they themselves had worked to grow on the landlord’s farm:

“The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect”

John Nichols: Ryan is a sorry son of Ireland

............His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence…

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”…

You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.

“The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect,” said Christine Kinealy, a professor of Irish studies and director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. “It’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.”…


http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/john-nichols-ryan-is-a-sorry-son-of-ireland/article_8ec8a43d-538f-5454-9c4d-e0b1a8d7b097.html

Pensiongate? Christie Campaign Donors Won Huge Contracts While trumpeting “pension reform”

This was Chris Christie's much-vaunted "pension reform" [The Nation, firewalled] -- namely, move the money to private firms run by contributors who take big fees and make high-risk investments. I wish more voters understood these issues, because all they hear is "reform" and they assume it's good. It's not. Public money should be invested conservatively, and under the greed mentality of the 90s, it wasn't. It has cost the public big-time, as we see in the attacks on public pensions:



Pensiongate? Christie Campaign Donors Won Huge Contracts
While trumpeting “pension reform,” the New Jersey governor placed retiree assets in the hands of hedge fund managers bankrolling his political career.

Lee Fang March 17, 2014

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State pension plans that rely on hedge funds and other so-called “alternative investments” perform worse overall than those with more conservative strategies such as Treasury notes or the S&P 500, according to many studies, including recent reports from the Maryland Tax Education Foundation and Yale professor Roger Ibbotson. Critics charge that hedge funds not only are far more risky investments, but also that they produce less value because they carry hefty management fees and are entitled to a portion of future profits.

Early in his administration, Christie appointees at the Division of Investment pledged to double its allocation for “alternative investments,” with a goal of moving 33.2 percent of the $74.7 billion fund into an array of hedge funds, private equity firms and real estate deals. “For large pools of capital, I think it’s prudent to have both private equity and hedge funds as part of the mix of a diversified portfolio,” said Grady in 2010, shortly after voting to substantially increase the amount of New Jersey pension funds managed by hedge funds and other alternative investments.

“This started with Corzine,” says Hetty Rosenstein, head of CWA New Jersey, part of the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents many public workers in the state. “Many years ago, these investments were very conservative. But now they’ve changed that, and we’re invested in hedge funds and much more volatile investments from outside managers with high fees.”

According to industry reports, New Jersey now has the second-largest allocation in the country of state retiree money being managed by hedge funds. In 2013, the New Jersey pension program delivered a return of 11.79 percent—lower than the pension median of 16.1 percent that year. Part of the lower return, according to analysts, related to the amount allocated to alternative funds rather than to US equities. Fees also contributed to the smaller return. For example, hedge funds typically charge a 2 percent management fee on top of a 20 percent performance fee. The fees can quickly eat into any future gains, while making losses even more painful. In contrast, index funds or other, more traditional investments carry few (if any) fees.



MORE:
http://www.thenation.com/article/178862/pensiongate-chris-christie-steered-huge-contracts-campaign-donors?page=full#
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/christies-wall-st-donors-won-huge

"There’s no moral difference between a stealth bomber & a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people"