Democracy Now: Brian Williams Suspended, But Media's Real Scandal is the War Lies Spun Daily

Brian Williams Suspended for False Iraq Tale, But Media's Real Scandal is the War Lies Spun Daily

The Fallujah Option for East Ukraine

The Real Reason Washington Feels Threatened by Moscow
The Fallujah Option for East Ukraine
by MIKE WHITNEY

Washington needs a war in Ukraine to achieve its strategic objectives. This point cannot be overstated.

The US wants to push NATO to Russia’s western border. It wants a land-bridge to Asia to spread US military bases across the continent. It wants to control the pipeline corridors from Russia to Europe to monitor Moscow’s revenues and to ensure that gas continues to be denominated in dollars. And it wants a weaker, unstable Russia that is more prone to regime change, fragmentation and, ultimately, foreign control. These objectives cannot be achieved peacefully, indeed, if the fighting stopped tomorrow, the sanctions would be lifted shortly after, and the Russian economy would begin to recover. How would that benefit Washington?

It wouldn’t. It would undermine Washington’s broader plan to integrate China and Russia into the prevailing economic system, the dollar system. Powerbrokers in the US realize that the present system must either expand or collapse. Either China and Russia are brought to heel and persuaded to accept a subordinate role in the US-led global order or Washington’s tenure as global hegemon will come to an end.

This is why hostilities in East Ukraine have escalated and will continue to escalate. This is why the U.S. Congress approved a bill for tougher sanctions on Russia’s energy sector and lethal aid for Ukraine’s military. This is why Washington has sent military trainers to Ukraine and is preparing to provide $3 billion in “anti-armor missiles, reconnaissance drones, armored Humvees, and radars that can determine the location of enemy rocket and artillery fire.” All of Washington’s actions are designed with one purpose in mind, to intensify the fighting and escalate the conflict. The heavy losses sustained by Ukraine’s inexperienced army and the terrible suffering of the civilians in Lugansk and Donetsk are of no interest to US war-planners. Their job is to make sure that peace is avoided at all cost because peace would derail US plans to pivot to Asia and remain the world’s only superpower.

Debt mountains spark fears of another financial crisis

Source: Financial Times

The world is awash with more debt than before the global financial crisis erupted in 2007, with China’s debt relative to its economic size now exceeding US levels, according to a report.

Global debt has increased by $57tn since 2007 to almost $200tn — far outpacing economic growth, calculates McKinsey & Co, the consultancy. As a share of gross domestic product, debt has risen from 270 per cent to 286 per cent.

McKinsey’s survey of debt across 47 countries — illustrated in an FT interactive graphic — highlights how hopes that the turmoil of the past eight years would spur widespread “deleveraging” to safer levels of indebtedness were misplaced. The report calls for “fresh approaches” to preventing future debt crises.

“Overall debt relative to gross domestic product is now higher in most nations than it was before the crisis,” McKinsey reports. “Higher levels of debt pose questions about financial stability.”

Read more: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2554931c-ac85-11e4-9d32-00144feab7de.html

Democracy now - Is Ukraine a Proxy Western-Russia War?

Here is the video from youtube:

Is Ukraine a Proxy Western-Russia War?

The Propaganda War Over Crimea's Break From Ukraine - Truthout

*A very good read for those who want to understand the fact from fiction on Crimea (Ukraine conflict)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27891-the-propaganda-war-over-crimea-s-break-from-ukraine

The Propaganda War Over Crimea's Break From Ukraine
By Roger Annis,
Truthout | News Analysis


Defence Ministers working session at the NATO summit in Wales. (Photo: NATO Summit Wales 2014)

In the propaganda campaign being waged by the NATO countries and the government of Ukraine against Russia and in support of Kiev's war in the east of the country, the events in Crimea of the past nine months occupy a pivotal place.

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NATO might be upsetting the entire military and political balance of Europe by continuing to push eastward today in Ukraine, but the drumbeat of Western government and media propaganda claims the heightened tensions of this past year are all Russia's fault. Russia's supposed annexation of Crimea in March is the example par excellence that a new "Russian aggression," harkening back to Soviet Union times, is afoot. It must be stopped at all costs before Ukraine falls, too.

In this made-up world, Kiev's murderous, illegal war against its own population disappears. The war is an "ongoing conflict" between "armed groups" in which the only actors with a purpose, it seems, are "pro-Russian separatists" and their purported backer in Moscow. An emerging subset of the theme of Crimea as victim of annexation is that it's also a land of disappearing human rights.

Given the very high stakes involved in all of this for the future of Europe, if not the world, it is time to step back and examine what is actually taking place in Crimea.

Fact From Fiction

Full story:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27891-the-propaganda-war-over-crimea-s-break-from-ukraine

Howard Zinn: A Just Cause (does not equal) A Just War

(Very interesting talk by Zinn in 2009. Keep in Mind this is a Philosophical discussion, not an argument, to keep our minds open and consider options when we discuss war and it's real value). I am posting a longer excerpt as since it is a transcript of his speech it is fair use, but still the Progressive has the entire speech which is well worth reading)

A Just Cause ? A Just War
Howard Zinn
The Progressive

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Editor's Note: Today we remember our legendary columnist Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States and champion of pacifism, civil rights, and the voices of the marginalized. On this fifth anniversary of his death in January 27, 2010, we present a classic essay on nonviolence adapted from his speech on May 2, 2009, at The Progressive’s 100th anniversary conference.

I want to talk about three holy wars. They aren’t religious wars, but they’re the three wars in American history that are sacrosanct, that you can’t say anything bad about: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.

Let’s look carefully at these three idealized, three romanticized wars.

It’s important to at least be willing to raise the possibility that you could criticize something that everybody has accepted as uncriticizable.

We’re supposed to be thinking people. We’re supposed to be able to question everything.

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

You might say it was a good cause to get Spain out of Cuba in 1898. Spain was oppressing Cuba. But did that necessarily mean we needed to go to war against Spain? We have to see what it produced. We got Spain out of oppressing Cuba and got ourselves into oppressing Cuba.

You might say that stopping North Korea from invading South Korea was a good idea. The North Koreans shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t right. Does that mean we should have gone to war to stop it? Especially when you consider that two or three million Koreans died in that war? And what did the war accomplish? It started off with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. And it ended up, after two to three million dead, with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea.

The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

I’d be very careful about rushing from one thing to another, from just cause to just war.

How many people died in the Revolutionary War?

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.

You might consider that worth it, or you might not.

Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?