video

This program from Press tv Iran is interesting and useful in bringing us up to date. Iranians know a thing or two about oil production and the oil market. The issues of peak demand and peak production are very hard to estimate and no-one here pretends to have the answers, but a number of factors are canvassed, including US President Trump. As usual, however, in such programs, population growth and economic growth are skirted around. Similarly, increasing efficiency among OECD countries is taken as a given, and increasing consumption among 'developing' countries is also taken as a given. The elephant in the room is, of course, when does peak demand meet peak production.

The global demand for oil is predicted to be rising at least for the few coming decades.

The projection stems from several factors. One of the major reasons is the expectation of a drastic rise in the number of vehicles on the roads.

Economic Divide caught up with Dr. Ali Shams Ardekani to discuss the future demand of oil. He should know a thing or two about the oil industry. He serves as the President of the Iran Business For Future.

He is the current head of the energy commission for the Ministry of Oil, Planning and Development and the Ministry of Industry and Mining in Iran. People across the world are getting more and more mobile. They are expected to use more cars for transportation and also trucks for transiting consumer goods as fast as possible.

ABC 7.30 Report last night aired part one of its three-part population special, which included me as the economist. While I will reserve judgement until the final two-parts have been aired, my initial gut reaction is disappointment. The main problem I see with it so far is the ABC has inferred that a population of more than 40-million mid-century is inevitable rather than a direct policy choice. Nowhere did The ABC clearly show how the federal government massively increased Australia’s immigration intake from the early-2000

By Leith van Onselen

ABC 7.30 Report last night aired part one of its three-part population special, which included me as the economist.

While I will reserve judgement until the final two-parts have been aired, my initial gut reaction is disappointing.

The main problem I see with it so far is the ABC has inferred that a population of more than 40-million mid-century is inevitable rather than a direct policy choice.

Nowhere did The ABC clearly show how the federal government massively increased Australia’s immigration intake from the early-2000s:

Nor how immigration is the defacto driver of Australia’s population increase – both directly as migrants step off the plane, as well as indirectly when they have children (then counted as ‘natural increase’). This was made explicit by the Productivity Commission’s 2016 Migrant Intake Australia report, which showed that Australia’s population would barely increase without immigration:

While the segment at least didn’t include spruiker ‘demographers’ like Liz Allen or Peter McDonald, it instead replaced them with another cookie-cutter demographer from ANU. One wonders why Bob Birrell wasn’t contacted, who has been a strong critique of Australia’s ‘Big Australia’ Program:

Finally, the spokesperson for Infrastructure Australia (IA) claimed that “population growth is an opportunity” – conveniently ignoring that IA has issued several recent stark warnings about infrastructure failing to keep pace with population growth, as well as ignoring IA’s own recent projections showing that living standards in both Sydney and Melbourne will be crushed as their populations surge to 7.4 million and 7.3 million by 2046:

Again, while I will reserve judgement until the final two parts are aired, I am not hopeful that The ABC will analyse this issue correctly and actually inform debate.

[email protected]

Here is the Unconventional Economist, Leith van Onselen's talk at the Sustainable Australia Party venue.

Professor Bob Birrell [1] calls for better planning to stop over-development, sustainable population policy reform at a Sustainable Australia Party event. "Net overseas immigration is completely dominating the figures." The politicians tell us, "We just have to get used to it, and the way we're going to deal with it is to throw literally billions at it ... and ... eliminate suburbia." "That's what they say. But rezoning and high density doesn't actually work. The houses are too expensive. The reason is site costs. The more people the more demand for housing. If you increase the opportunity for housing on the same site, the site values go up higher.... It doesn't work." "Nor does the high rise 'solution'. You know there are tens of thousands of these being completed. When we checked the 2016 census, what we found was, that in the two areas of greatest density, CBD and South bank, only 5% of all those appartments were occupied by families with children. Well, what are we going to do about it? We have to deal with high NOM (Net Overseas Migration), it's not inevitable - and this is the key point. The high levels of NOM at present are due to government policy or government non-policy. They are a deliberate consequence of government policy. Not inevitable. For example, overseas students. It is a fact that the biggest source of growth in Net Overseas Migration in Melbourne is overseas students. There are more overseas students coming in on a student's visa each year than are leaving holding a student's visa. Okay, we don't object to students coming here for an education. the problem is that, once they get here and complete their education, they can stay on, more or less forever. Our governments have deliberately encouraged them to do so. By providing, as of right, a two year stay here, with full work rights - even if your degree is in cultural studies - and, when you've done that, you can get another student visa. Or you can become a tourist, or you can get a working holiday visa, or you can apply for a 457 temporary visa. Or you can apply for a permanent entry visa. And, as a consequence, a big chunk of overseas students are just spinning out ... over the years. So, we can change that and that would have a major impact. There are many other areas we could change. I'll just give you one or two to finish, which you may not know about. You've probably heard a lot about 'regional policy' - 'maybe we'll put people in the bush, rather than let them stay in Melbourne or Sydney. Well, currently, there's a program near 30,000 visas strong for state and regional sponsorship. The problem is that these visas do not require people to actually stay in the states or regions that sponsor them. They very quickly move off and they end up in Sydney or Melbourne. Or, consider this, and I'll finish on this note, consider the policy on spouses. [...] what happens in Australia is that you can sponsor a spouse at the age of 18 and you do not have to show that you have a job or an income which will enable you to sustain that spouse. I'm not kidding you. This is the situation. Compare that with Europe. Most countries now, you've got to be at least 22 before you sponsor a spouse, and you've got to prove that you have the funds to support that spouse. I could go on. There is massive potential to bring down the numbers. [...] We have to get the numbers down if we are really coming to grips with Melbourne's crisis of overdevelopment. I'll just leave you with one final thought, and that is that at least public opinion is moving in the right direction. [refers to TAPRIS study] Some 54 % of voters now believe that immigration should be reduced. The polls this year are putting the numbers in the 60%, so the potential is there. May I wish [Sustainable Australia Party] the best in mobilising it."

Notes

[1] Although Bob Birrell's publications in demography are very well known, his qualifications are much greater: Bob Birrell (PhD Princeton – Sociology) was Reader in Sociology and the founding director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University. He was the joint editor of the demographic journal People and Place (with Katharine Betts) from 1993 to 2010. His appointment with Monash University finished in 2014. He has been a consultant and advisor to successive Australian governments on immigration policy, most recently as part of Coalition Government’s Evaluation of the General Skilled Migration Categories, published in 2006. His research covers Australian history (A Nation of Our Own – Longman 2005), Australian education policy, urban affairs and immigration practice and policy. His most recent international publications include, ‘Media Effects and Immigration Policy in Australia,’ in Gary Freeman, et al., Eds, Immigration and Public Opinion in Liberal Democracies, Routledge, 2013 and ‘Migration: the Australian experience,’ in Sasha Bangalay and Delphine Nakache, Eds, Immigration Regulation in Federal States, Springer, 2014.

[Video inside] An internationally acclaimed film of Paga Hill community’s fight for justice from the illegal eviction and demolition of their homes in downtown Port Moresby has been banned from screening today at the PNG Human Rights Festival. It is known as 'The Opposition Film'. See trailer and details of showings here. There is a lot of Australian involvement in this disgraceful powerplay, including NSW court system and Australian developers. However, what is happening in PNG is also happening to Australians, who mostly fail to realise that they are also being treated and exploited like a 'developing country'.

“The ban highlights the lingering limits on free speech in our country and the continued attempts to censor our story of resistance against gross human rights violations” [1], claimed Paga Hill leader Joe Moses, the main character in The Opposition film who had to seek exile in the United Kingdom after fighting for his community’s rights.[2],[3]

“This censorship comes as a deep disappointment for my community who have suffered greatly over the past 6 years.”

The Opposition film tells the David-and-Goliath battles of a community evicted, displaced, abandoned – their homes completely demolished at the hands of two Australian-run companies, Curtain Brothers and Paga Hill Development Company, and the PNG state. What was once home to 3000 people of up to four generations, Paga Hill is now part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit ‘AELM Precinct’ which will take place this November.[4],[5]

Mr. Moses continued, “We appreciate the PNG Human Rights Film Festival for choosing to screen The Opposition film at their Madang and Port Moresby screenings.”

“It is shameful that our government continues to limit free speech and put such pressure on our country’s only annual arts and human rights event. How does this make us look to the world leaders who will be coming here for the APEC meeting in November?”

Under the theme “Tokautnau long senisim tumora" (Speak up today to change tomorrow) the mission of the PNG Human Rights Film Festival includes “We are all born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that the international and local human rights films “promote increased respect, protection and fulfillment of human rights in Papua New Guinea.”

Paga Hill youth leader Allan Mogerema, who also features in the film stated, “The right to freedom of speech and freedom of press is provided for under Section 46 of the PNG Constitution. By banning our story, the PNG government is in breach of our Constitution and our rights as Papua New Guinean citizens.”[6]

As a Human Rights Defender, Mr. Mogerema has been invited to the 2018 Annual Human Rights and People’s Diplomacy Training Program for Human Rights Defenders from the Asia-Pacific Region and Indigenous Australia organised by The Diplomacy Training Program (DTP) and The Judicial System Monitoring Programme (JSMP) to share his story of the illegal land grab, eviction and demolition of his community.

“The film has already been screened in settlements across PNG and at the Human Rights Film Festival’s Madang screenings. No matter how hard they try to censor us, our story continues to live, and our fight for justice continues to thrive", continued Mr. Mogerema.

"No matter how long it takes our community will get justice!”

NOTES

[1]. Dame Carol Kidu is also featured in The Opposition film. Initially an advocate for the Paga Hill community, Dame Carol turns her back on them by setting up a consultancy to be hired by the Paga Hill Development Corporation, on a contract of $178,000 for three months' work. In 2017 she launched a legal action in the Supreme Court of NSW to censor the film. In June 2017, the court ruled against Dame Carol's application.

[2]. "I was scared for my life": Paga Hill activist seeks asylum in the UK, ABC Pacific Beat, 11 August 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/radio-australia/programs/pacificbeat/i-was-scared-for-my-life:-paga-hill-activist-seeks/8796558

[3]. Papua New Guinea land activist vows to battle for his people from Britain, 8 August 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-papua-landrights-police/papua-new-guinea-land-activist-vows-to-battle-for-his-people-from-britain-idUSKBN1AO1GD

[4]. Aid to PNG without justice is no help at all, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 June 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/aid-to-png-without-justice-is-no-help-at-all-20170609-gwoeq4.html

[5]. Port Moresby settlers evicted to make way for Australian-backed development 'abandoned', Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/port-moresby-settlers-evicted-to-make-way-for-australianbacked-development-abandoned-20170609-gwodh2.html

[6]. Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/44016/70625/F868019216/PNG44016.pdf

Interview begins around 9.40 minutes into the show.Gung-ho interviewer, Bart Chilton, apparently hoping to recommend investing in Australian stocks, found out that Australia's economy is about as diverse as Uganda's and Ethiopia's, that it consists of holes and houses, and that Australian governments have stupidly marketised energy, making costs too high for Australian manufactures. "Energy and telecommunications are both being disastrously mishandled." Banks and mines dominate the Australian stock exchange, which reminds Keen of when they dominated the Japanese stock exchange - just before the 1990 bubble burst, with no important banks situated in Japan anymore. Our stock market is trivial compared to our bond market. Dr Keen also mentions the , which is worth a look.

The United States of Arms from Will Geary on Vimeo.

This little-known documentary contains rare and compelling footage of Greek villages and Greek partisans during World War 2. It also interviews male and female partisans who survived a series of international betrayals. In 1940 Mussolini attacked Greece from its colony of Albania. The attack was repulsed and the Greeks conquered one third of Albania in their counter attacks. At the time, Greece was Britain's only ally against Nazi Germany in Europe. (France Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Luxumbourg had all been conquered.) Four years later, Britain savagely turned on the same heroic Greeks who had resisted the Italians and subsequently fought against their Nazi German-allied occupiers. It was only possible for the British to succeed because the communist ELAS-Partisans trusted the Greek Communist Party (KKE).

After they landed in October 1944, the British pretended to arrest former Greek collaborators and saved them from furious Greek crowds in Athens. The former collaborators were 'imprisoned' in a hotel overlooking the central Athens. During one of the protests by Athenians against the British, the 'arrested' former collaborators opened fire on the Athenian crowds, killing many.

This provoked a ferocious fightback against the British by the ELAS-Partisans. So fierce was their fight that the British were forced to get reinforcements from the Italian front and from Belgium, where they were fighting the German Ardennes offensive. However, the communist Greek KKE, under Stalin's orders, then agreed to completely disarm and return to their homes in the suburbs of Athens and elsewhere. This was under the pretext of recognising the British puppet forces as the legitimate national Greek army.

In the suburbs of Athens many former ELAS fighters became victims of gangs of former collaborators. Many ELAS fighters were imprisoned by the British and their puppets.

In 1946 those ELAS fighters who had fled to the mountains, and many more, who had escaped from Greece, restarted the civil war against the Greek dictatorship. From 1946-1948 the ELAS partisans (who had changed their name to the Democratic Army). With heroism and brilliant leadership, they outfought superior numbers of government forces, with many from the government forces defecting to the Democratic Army. However, the Greek Government started to overcome the Democratic Army, now with the aid of United States military 'advisors' and the CIA, and from the same source, the provision of war planes capable of dropping napalm, a fearsome new weapon of the time. The Democratic Army was further hamstrung by instructions from the KKE leadership to engage in conventional warfare rather than guerilla warfare, thus enabling the government to more effectively use its numerical and logistic superiority against the Democratic Army partisans. The fighting ended in 1949, when the last of the Democratic Army partisans fled across the border into Albania. From Albania, many were granted 'exile' in the Soviet Union.

Oksana Boyko (pictured right) in US vs UN? Ft. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations her Worlds Apart interview of Sunday 24 June, generally discussed how the United Nations should handle conflicts between the United States and Russia its two most powerful members . The discussion included at least two issues which are of concern to this site, candobetter.net : 1. Border control in the United States and Europe, and 2. Syria.

Antonio Guterres attempted to put all the arguments by proponents of open borders and they were all effectively rebutted by Oksana Boyko. At one point in the discussion, after she stated that the United States as well as European countries, have the right to control their borders Oksana was accused of listening to Fox News, that is the station which features Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and other outspoken advocates for the effective control of the United States border with Mexico. The video, embedded below, is easily worth the 28 minutes of your time required to watch it.

Later in the program Oksana Boyko put to Antonio Guterres that the United Nations should oppose the United Sates' schemes to partition Syria and preserve Syria's territorial integrity. [1]

Footnote[s]

[1] The partitioning of Syria is also supported by the group Australians for Kurdistan. The group absurdly maintains that, with up to 20 U.S. military bases in Syria's Kurdistan (acccording to RT on 1 Mar 2018 and other sources) the YPG (an acronym for "People's Protection Units") is building a communist or anarchist society which is also a beacon of women's liberation. The convenor of "Australians for Kurdistan" is John Tully. In Hitler of the Middle East (6/2/18) | Tasmanian Times, ostensibly an attack on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Tully smears the popularly elected President of Syria, as "the Syrian dictator". Nowhere in his writings does Tully show any concern for the fate of Syria, including the 80,000 soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army, amongst the 400,000 citizens of Syria, who have been killed in the war against Syria since March 2011 in which which Erdogan has been complicit. That would come far closer to justifying Tully's emotive likening of Erdogan to Hitler than any of his actions against Kurdish secessionists in recent years.

There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It's Israel. (James Corbett)

The Transcript below has been republished from https://www.corbettreport.com/israelinukes/
TRANSCRIPT

DONALD TRUMP: I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. In a few moments I will sign a presidential memorandum to begin reinstating US nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime. We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction.

SOURCE: President Trump Gives Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action

When President Trump announced that the US was going to de-certify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and reinstitute sanctions on that country, one of the reasons he cited for that move was the presentation of “new” evidence from Israeli intelligence showing that the Iranians had lied about its nuclear program during the negotiation of that deal.

TRUMP: Last week Israel published intelligence documents long concealed by Iran conclusively showing the Iranians regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a ton of the material inside these vaults. And here’s what we got; 55,000 pages. Another 55,000 files on 183 CDs. Everything you’re about to see is an exact copy of the original Iranian material

SOURCE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives statement on Iran Nuclear Deal

Theatrical props and dramatic rhetoric aside, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent presentation on the “Iranian nuclear deal” in fact contained no new information.

That Iran had explored a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 has been known and admitted for years. That they have an archive of this information is not a violation of the Iranian nuclear deal completed in 2015. In fact, if anything, Netanyahu’s presentation actually proved the exact opposite of what was intended: Namely, that Iran is abiding by the terms of that treaty and is not covertly pursuing any nuclear weapons activity. That’s why they had to go back to 15 year old information and present it as if it was something new and revelatory.

But here’s the real head-scratcher in this new round of propaganda over the Iranian nuclear non-threat: There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It’s Israel.

This is the story of the real Middle East Nuclear Threat. You’re watching The Corbett Report.

Hand-wringing over Iran’s nuclear program is nothing new. It became a mainstay of western political discourse after an Iranian dissident revealed the Iranian government’s plans for a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in August 2002. But the surprising fact for Americans and others around the world who get their information from the corporate mainstream media, is that Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons program has long been known and admitted. Since 2003, when the program was scrapped, not a single piece of evidence has been presented (not even by Netanyahu or the Israeli government) that the Iranian government ever pursued anything other than what it said it was pursuing: a nuclear energy program.

Not that that fact has ever stopped Netanyahu from using any opportunity to use cartoon-level propaganda tactics to convince the world otherwise:

NETANYAHU: In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages.

The first stage: they have to enrich enough of low enriched uranium. The second stage: they have to enrich enough medium enriched uranium. And the third stage and final stage: they have to enrich enough high enriched uranium for the first bomb.

Where’s Iran? Iran’s completed the first stage. It took them many years, but they completed it and they’re 70% of the way there.

Now they are well into the second stage. By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

Ladies and gentlemen, what I told you now is not based on secret information. It’s not based on military intelligence. It’s based on public reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Anybody can read them. They’re online.

So if these are the facts, and they are, where should the red line be drawn?

The red line should be drawn right here. Before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb. Before Iran gets to a point where it’s a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

Each day, that point is getting closer. That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency.

SOURCE: Israel PM Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu Address to United Nations Sept 27, 2012

Of course, Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons and Netanyahu’s Wile E. Coyote bomb and red line warnings bore no greater semblance to reality than the cartoon propaganda surrounding Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Not only did the IAEA repeatedly confirm that Iran never diverted any nuclear material into any military program, but even the US intelligence community itself conceded that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb. Most remarkable of all was Mossad’s own assessment that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”

As I detailed earlier this year in “We Need to Talk About the Iran Protests,” fearmongering over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program was the basis for an extraordinary series of measures against the country in recent decades. These measures included “NITRO ZEUS,” a full-scale military cyberattack against Iran the best-known element of which was Stuxnet, the military-grade cyberweapon co-developed by the United States and Israel that specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.

Iran’s non-existent nuclear program also provided the pretext for sanctions aimed at crippling the country’s economy, including the de-listing of Iranian banks from the Swift Network connecting the world’s financial institutions.

The fearmongers even went so far as to plant evidence of nuclear weapons involvement on Iran to further justify these attacks.

But the great irony is that there really is a nuclear armed nation in the Middle East. It is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It does not allow inspections of its arsenal. It does not even officially acknowledge its stockpile of nuclear weapons. It has even resisted the push for an international treaty recognizing a nuclear-free zone in the middle east. And that country is Israel.

Sometimes ranked as the world’s sixth largest nuclear superpower, Israel actively pursued a nuclear program from the time of its inception as a state in 1948. By the late 1950s, they had begun building a reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona with British and French aid. And by 1967, a classified CIA report estimated that Israel would be capable of producing a nuclear warhead in “six to eight weeks.” Shortly thereafter, it is believed, Israel began producing and stockpiling a nuclear arsenal.

OLENKA FRENKIEL: It was the young Shimon Peres, back in the fifties who negotiated a secret deal with the French to buy a nuclear weapons reactor like theirs. But while Dimona was going up, intelligence reports reached Washington that Israel was building an atom bomb.

Despite claims that Dimona was for peaceful purposes only, Israel’s leader Ben Gurion was summoned to Washington. President Kennedy feared an arms race in the Middle East and demanded inspections. But when inspectors finally entered the plant in May 1961 they were tricked. They were shown a fake control room on the ground floor. They were unaware of the six floors below where the plutonium was made.

PETER HOUNAM, Freelance journalist: Well this was something of great pride and almost a legendary story in Dimona, according to Vanunu. When the Americans came they were completely hoodwinked. All the entrances including the lift shafts were bricked up and plastered over so it was impossible for anyone to find their way down to the lower floors.

FRENKIEL: After Kennedy’s assassination the pressure on Israel was off. His successor Lyndon Johnson turned a blind eye. Then In 1969 Israel’s Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon struck a deal, renewed by every President to this day. Israel’s nuclear programme could continue as long as it was never made public. It’s called “nuclear ambiguity.”

The term “nuclear ambiguity,” in some ways it sounds very grand. But isn’t just a euphemism for deception?

SHIMON PERES, Former Prime Minister of Israel: If somebody wants to kill you, and you use a deception to save your life it is not immoral. If we wouldn’t have enemies we wouldn’t need deceptions. We wouldn’t need deterrent.

FRENKIEL: Was this the justification for concealing the floors of the plutonium reprocessing areas from the Americans, the inspectors, when they came?

PERES: You are having a dialogue with yourself, not with me.

FRENKIEL: But that’s been documented in a number of books.

PERES: Ask the question to yourself, not to me.

FRENKIEL: I mean, is it not true?

PERES: I don’t have to answer your questions, even. I don’t see any reason why.

FRENKIEL: Ambiguity is a luxury unique to Israel. Today the country’s an inspection-free zone, protected from scrutiny by America and her allies.

SOURCE: Israel’s Secret Weapon

Although estimates vary, it is now believed that Israel has somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads, and that it possesses the capability to deliver these warheads to Iran.

The existence of this stockpile, while known to governments around the world for decades, was only revealed to the public in 1986, when The Sunday Times published photographic proof and a detailed account of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. That story was provided by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, who spent decades behind bars for his part in revealing this truth to the world.

NARRATOR: On October 5th, 1986, The Sunday Times announced they had evidence to prove that Israel had become the world’s sixth biggest nuclear power, having developed their arsenal beneath the Negev desert at Dimona. Photographs like this were given to the Sunday Times by a former technician at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu.

[…]

Mordechai Vanunu’s family, Moroccan Jews, settled in the Negev in the early 60s, inspired by the idea of being a part of Israel. Vanunu did national service in the army. Then, while he worked at Dimona he began studying philosophy. He became active in student politics. He opposed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Vanunu came to believe that Israel’s nuclear development program was immoral. He left Damona and, eventually, Israel itself.

Vanunu arrived in Sydney armed with photographs he’d taken inside Dimona. Here, he turned his back on Judaism and became a Christian. He met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist who urged him to sell his secrets to The Sunday Times. His evidence was processed at a local photo shop. Vanunu talked openly about what he’d done.

It’s said that by the time Vanunu arrived in London on September the 12th, 1986, Australian intelligence had already alerted MI6 and the CIA, and Mossad—Israeli intelligence—had already begun questioning his family in Israel. The Sunday Times disguised their informant and moved him from place to place for protection. But in Leicester Square one day, Vanunu met a blonde who called herself “Cindy,” a beautician from Florida. Meanwhile, Oscar Guerrero, eager to profit from what he knew, turned to The Sunday Mirror. Vanunu’s photograph appeared on page one. Vanunu began to despair. At this point, Cindy was able to lure him to Rome to sp end the weekend with her at her sister’s apartment. Not once did Vanunu suspect that Cindy was a Mossad agent and that this was the beginning of a plot to kidnap him.

In Rome, the tactics of the Mossad agents changed dramatically.

MEIR VANUNU: In the apartment, two Israeli agents attacked him and bit him and strangled him really hard. And then chained him, injected drugs [in]to his body. And later on he woke up in a small cell on a boat. The boat went to Israel for a few days and he arrived to Israel on the 7th of October, 1986.

Vanunu was assumed dead until he turned up weeks later in Tel Aviv. Vanunu himself, on his way to court, gave the first clue of what had happened to him. Scrawled on his hand was the message “Vanunu was hijacked from Rome, Italy. 30.9.86. BA 504.”

SOURCE: Vanunu’s exposure of Israels nuclear program

But a key element of the story is missing from the handful of documentaries that acknowledge Israel’s nuclear stockpile. Namely, that these weapons were not merely developed by Israeli scientists working in isolation, but with the aid of a nuclear smuggling ring that helped develop and advance Israel’s arsenal by stealing important nuclear technologies from their “ally,” the United States. These rings and their activities have been known about and even investigated by the FBI for decades, but largely kept secret from the public.

It has fallen to researchers like Grant F. Smith of IRMEP.org, author of Divert!: NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program, to piece together the story from the documents that have been released. On The Corbett Report in 2012, Smith revealed the name of one of the high-powered Israeli officials who was at the heart of a plot in the 1970s to smuggle 800 nuclear triggers from the United States.

GRANT F. SMITH: In terms of the FBI uncovering a multi-node network, this one happened to be centered in California. MILCO was a company that was incorporated in 1972 by a man named Richard Kelly Smyth. He was discovered sending 800 krytrons, which are dual-use items that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons. When he was discovered doing that, he skipped bail in the mid-1980s and disappeared until he was picked up by Interpol in the early part of 2000.

And so the story is interesting and explosive, because after multiple attempts and denials we had a document release in which the key contact, or one of the key contacts that Smyth was meeting with to set up sales in Israel was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu. And so the document—which I’m kind of holding up right here for the people who are on video—actually names Benjamin Netanyahu as being an employee of Heli Trading Company, which was the node in Israel that would receive Ministry of Defense requisitions that they would pass on to MILCO.

And so the interesting thing about this, of course, is the high-profile nature of Benjamin Netanyahu, [and] the fact that the smuggling ring ring leader has been identified as Arnon Milchan, a person any American knows for his movie productions such as Pretty Woman and other favorites, who is running this and who a recent book has named as being a top economic espionage fly a spy for LAKAM, who worked under Benjamin Bloomberg and Rafi Eitan. But the FBI documents that we published on July 4th related to an antiwar.com story which was really short and direct. And its core focus was on the fact that in a period when Netanyahu was building himself up as a leader in the terrorism industry—hosting major conferences, having just returned from his studies in the United States, hosting major conferences in the Jonathan Netanyahu Terrorism Institute, named after his brother who was killed on the Raid on Entebbe.

Here’s a person who was supposed to be working as a furniture company executive, and yet these documents which are very credible because of what they were—which is testimony from Richard Kelly Smith after he was returned his exile overseas and finally forced serve a prison sentence. These were the statements he made to an FBI agent in a district attorney office when they debriefed and wanted to know what the extent of the nuclear technology smuggling network was and—boom!—there’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

SOURCE: Corbett Report Radio 214 – Israel’s Nuclear Smuggling with Grant F. Smith

Benjamin Netanyahu. And now this unindicted nuclear smuggler is lecturing Iran about a 15 year old, long-acknowledged nuclear weapons program that never produced a single nuclear weapon.

Even more worryingly, Israel’s nuclear knowledge has not only helped to arm its own nation, but actually helped to proliferate nuclear weapons to Pakistan through the so-called Khan network. One of the men who helped to transfer the nuclear triggers used in the construction of the Pakistani bomb was Asher Karni, an orthodox Jew living in South Africa who had been a major in the Israeli army prior to emigrating to Cape Town. Upon his arrival there in 1985, he began teaching Torah at the local synagogue and educating Jewish youth, encouraging them to relocate to Israel.

In 2004, U.S. authorities arrested Karni for his role in supplying the nuclear triggers and in 2005 he was sentenced to three years in prison. It has never been officially explained why this Israeli citizen and former Israeli military officer was interested in helping proliferate nuclear technologies to Pakistan.

But perhaps the greatest irony of all is that it is Iran who has been arguing for decades that the Middle East should be a nuclear-free zone. The idea was first floated by the Shah in 1969, and was first formally proposed by Iran in a joint UN General Assembly resolution, but the idea failed to garner any support. The idea was again raised by then-Iranian President Ahmedinejad in 2006 and yet again by then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki in 2008, but these calls to banish nuclear weapons from the Middle East have not even been acknowledged by the west, let alone seriously considered.

Now more than ever, the prospect of a nuclear-free Middle East seems the only way to prevent a nuclear conflagration that threatens to draw in the world’s superpowers, and yet the idea is being ignored by Israel and its staunchest ally, the United States.

Why does Israel refuse to declare its nuclear weapons stockpile? Why do they refuse to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?

Why do they refuse IAEA inspections of their nuclear facility?

Why did they kidnap and imprison Mordechai Vanunu for 18 years for providing the proof of this nuclear program?

And perhaps most importantly, why does the United States, the only country who could single-handedly force NPT compliance from Israel, still refuse to even admit the openly-acknowledged status of Israel as a nuclear power?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for these questions to be answered by the teleprompter readers on the nightly news.

Still, as even many in the mainstream are now admitting, Netanyahu’s presentation on Iran’s nuclear non-secrets are a cheap display of political theatrics. The only thing he ended up doing is underlining the point that Iran, unlike Israel, fully cooperated with the IAEA, lived up to its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and pointedly has not violated the 2015 nuclear deal.

And now that the United States has allowed the Israeli tail to wag the American dog once again by de-certifying that Iranian deal without valid cause, negotiators in North Korea and elsewhere will be watching, reminded yet again that a promise from the American empire isn’t worth the signed agreement it’s written on.

Video inside: Tom Duggan lives in Damascus, Syria. This week he covered the Jaishal Islam (Saudi supported) terrorist group leaving Douma, Syria. He reports, "We were expecting between 3000 and 8000 hostages to be released. We got less than 100. Where did they all go? They had been held for between four and six years. Jaishal Islam submitted the names of these people, their ID numbers, and the Syrian Government, in good faith, accepted the release of the terrorists in exchange for the hostages they claimed to have. This is a huge example of genocide, but the UN has not even acknowledged it." Up to 8000 Syrians slaughtered or starved by Jaishal Islam, which the Syrian Government has been fighting, and, meanwhile the United states posing as an 'exceptional' state, is threatening to attack Syria, which will draw Russia and probably China into war, on the basis of a completely unproven allegation that the Syrian Government used 'chemical weapons' against its own people. Duggan knows there is a high risk of Damascus being attacked by the rogue 'exceptional' US state, but he has decided to remain there.

What does happiness mean to you? We tend to search for it in material things, substances, and career achievements, but often lose sight of what really matters to us in the process. London-based artist and animator Steve Cutts is taking a long hard look at this ‘rat race’ to which we’ve all found ourselves tied, and is examining our modern sources of joy in a satirical new short film that depicts us as the ‘rats’ we’ve become in the eyes of the system. It’s titled after that mysterious high we’re always chasing; “Happiness.” Take 4 minutes out of your busy day and watch the clip for yourself below, and tell us in the comments if you think Cutts hit the nail on the head.

Are Antifa just fascists fighting for turf with other fascists? Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook discusses the movement's perception that it is countering the rise of the far-right and responds to Chris Hedges' critique of the violent tactics used by the activists. Chris Hedges suggests that Antifa's targets and strategies play into the hands of the corporate enemy. He also makes an odd mistake in suggesting that German Communists failed to counter Hitler as strongly as they might have because their leader had been jailed, but there is no history of the German Communist leader of the 1930s having been jailed at the time. (In fact Stalin advised the German Communists not to form a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis and they stupidly followed that advice.) Chris Hedges thinks Antifa is dehumanising fascists the way that fascists dehumanise their targets. (i.e. Antifa are actually fascists fighting for turf with other fascists.) Mark Bray thinks it is okay to shut presumed fascists up by making them too afraid to come out of their houses. The problem with this is, essentially, that just because an Antifa thinks someone is a 'fascist' does not mean that they are, especially when Antifa is shouting too hard to hear what someone may really be saying. Bray seems to be justifying the judgement and street-policing of people on the most superficial appraisal. Everyone is entitled to a defense, but not according to Antifa. [At the beginning of this program RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the origins of Antifa and gets them terribly wrong. Just bear with it.] A critical point overlooked by Chris Hedges is that Antifa is funded by George Soros. Wonder why?

Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites.

"Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security. When Antifa assumes the right to curtail free speech, it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, especially the anti capitalists. The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous task of building relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing, that alone will make effective resistance possible. We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed the corporate state welcomes this violence, because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match." (Chris Hedges in conclusion).

Partial transcript of the interview, using You Tube's transcription service

CHRIS HEDGES: "[...] the danger comes from militarized police forces a system of mass incarceration. I teaching in a prison and my students were not put in those cages by neo Confederates, you know, from a trailer park. They were put in cages by the Democratic and the Republican Party. The wholesale surveillance the corporate kind of coup d'etat that's taken place that is eviscerating civil liberties, driving, essentially already has driven, the working class into poverty, destroying the middle class. These are the forces that already have power and that's a big difference from the 1930s."

[...]

CHRIS HEDGES: "Before the break my argument that the left, actually the anti-capitalist, that actually has moral capital and by engaging in the kind of street violence that characterizes the nativist and the neo-fascist and the - they're squandering their moral capital."

[...]

CHRIS HEDGES: The question is, who's the enemy, and how are we going to take the enemy down ? And the enemy is already in power. The corporate state. The coup is already over and, yes, they may use these figures, but we are in a situation that is in essence revolutionary. We are [incomprehensible]. If we are going to bring down this power structure, it's got to be through mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. And you saw, for instance, in Berkeley, where - this is often the case - where most of the majority of the demonstrators were peaceful, nonviolent, there was a small activity of violence by a small group of black bloc Antifa , whatever, you but what was disseminated throughout the corporate media and why were those images useful to the corporate state? Because, number one, it demonizes the protest movement. We saw this with Occupy, which was a non-violent movement, and it frightens people away from the movement, and these are classic counterinsurgency techniques."

[...]

Bray not worried about 'dehumanizing fascists'

CHRIS HEDGES: "My fear with the left is that it adopts that abstract hatred, the abstract hatred that racists use towards people of color or the GBLT community or the Muslim community, is adopted by the left towards the fascists. So they know there's a dehumanization there and and a kind of belief that all rational discussion is impossible therefore. And I think you write in the book quite clearly the idea is to essentially not to reach out to them as other human beings, but to make them too frightened to come out of their houses."

MARK BRAY: "I guess I'm just not terribly concerned about people dehumanizing fascists personally and we can have a difference of opinion about that. I also the other question I would pose to you would be curious to get your responses so if if it is fine to organize popular self-defense under occupation how bad does the threat of violence have to get before that becomes legitimate? Right? And people's do disagree about that, but anti-fascists argue you have to stop it before it gets ...

CHRIS HEDGES: It's the wrong question.

MARK BRAY: Well then tell me what's the right question.

Revolution different now that the public cannot match the state's weapons

CHRIS HEDGES: If you are going to employ violence or, let's say use lethal force, then you have to have to have access to instruments and weapons of lethal force that can counter the state. So that no for instance rebel or guerrilla movement ever succeeds unless they are bordered by a state by which they can gather weaponry, carry out training. I mean this for instance was the role of Tunisia in the Algerian Civil War. And my argument and criticism of AntiFa and the black bloc is that the the language the state speaks and is increasingly speaking, of lethal force: militarizing our police departments, putting tanks on the streets of Ferguson, is one that we can never compete against. We're not going to create staging areas in Canada or Mexico to carry out an insurgency and therefore we have to find tactics that have worked in the past revolutions I believe are fundamentally nonviolent movements.

Crane Brinton and other historians, Davies, have written no revolution succeeds and lest a significant portion of the ruling apparatus - in particular the security apparatus - refuses to defend a discredited regime. That's something I watched with the with the collapse of the Stasi state in East Germany, where they, Honaker the Communist dictator, sent down an elite paratroop division in Leipzig and they wouldn't fire on the crowd. It was over same when they sent the Cossacks into to crush the bread riots in St. Petersburg and the Cossacks refused to. The Czar was over. That is just true in Revolution after revolution after revolution, and that only happens when you reach out - not to all - I'm not naive enough to tell you that - you know they're plenty of sadists and torturers and within the system - but enough people within the system to create paralysis.

MARK BRAY: Well you know anti-fascist are not trying to organize an armed uprising they're trying to stop small and medium-sized fascist groups before they advance and they recognize that the business of doing that is dangerous and that even if a group does it non-violently the consideration of being attacked by them and having to deal with that is very legitimate especially when we can see that the police are often more sympathetic to the right and that as the FBI has documented there has been extensive white power infiltration into local law enforcement so point taken on that the question of insurgencies but that's not really the politics that they're trying to promote here.

CHRIS HEDGES: Here what is I mean one of I think you've you read my article I mean one of the my criticisms was the idea of resistance as catharsis. It's not about how we feel is it?

MARK BRAY: Well I think that most anti-fascist and I interviewed 61 anti-fascist from 17 different countries most of the people that I spoke to don't fit the sort of media stereotype of some sort of crazy bloodthirsty of person but are people who are environmentalists and unionists and activists a variety of backgrounds who would much rather be doing that work than having to confront the far-right but they believe that there is a threat in their communities that they need to respond to and so I think the notion that these are thrill-seekers and that these people love to just sort of engage in violence isn't borne out by any evidence and certainly didn't reflect the interviews that I conducted.

CHRIS HEDGES: So what's the endgame? If you manage to get the fascists or the neo-fascists off the streets, we're still in trouble, right?

MARK BRAY: Right, which is why that many anti-fascists think of militant anti-fascism as essentially a firefighting operation dealing with an immediate emergency of the organized far-right on the streets and so if you push them off the streets, then you simply go back to doing the other kinds of movement building and organizing that you and I to some extent agree on what that could look like and and go back to that so we can see that the rise and fall of militant anti-fascism in the US and elsewhere over the past decades has everything to do with the rise and fall of the far-right so it's it's not generally conceived of as a politics that can solve all problems it's about addressing a specific.

Street violence and corporate power

CHRIS HEDGES: What role does violence have when we are confronting the true engines of oppression which is corporate power?

MARK BRAY: Well you know people will disagree with with what to do and Antifa is not designed to change all of society, right. It deals with this specific part of it, but I think the notion that the the ruling class will voluntarily hand over their wealth to create a social society is not true what we agree with and so I think that you know revolutionary politics does have to have it on the menu at a certain point. People will disagree on what that looks like when that comes but I think, you know, one of the historical lessons is it's often hard to turn on militant resistance when it's too late and so that that I think needs to be borne in mind as well.

CHRIS HEDGES: But it's also you know can be deeply counterproductive. Rosa Luxemburg who was assassinated in Berlin in the uprising did not support the uprising.
MARK BRAY: That's correct, and so uprisings are not always a good idea. In fact they're usually not a good idea but they can be sometimes and so the question is in my mind not to condemn a specific tactic or politics or strategy in the abstract universally but to look at the context.

Getting back to the superior weaponry of the state

CHRIS HEDGES: But I would go back to weaponry because you know in the French Revolution the the crowds, the san-culottes were carrying muskets and so was the Swiss Guard that were protecting the royalty, right? There's a disparity now in weaponry that doesn't make that possible.

MARK BRAY: Right. And so you're right from what you said before that some of it has to do with with the need to turn certain parts of the military against the state to have them put down their weapons to not not open fire on populations and in that sense it is a question of popular politics but what we're talking about here is not. Antifa is not a recipe for changing all of society. It's a politics aimed at self defense around a specific threat.

CHRIS HEDGES: I guess that definition of self defense is one we're gonna have to quibble over. I mean the Southern Poverty Law Center has said when these far-right groups, especially in open carry states, and these people are heavily armed, we could have had a bloodbath worse than we had. You know, just don't go.

MARK BRAY: Well I think that's terrible advice. I think we do need to organize against them. We can disagree on how to do that, but I think that one of the best takeaways from the politics of anti-fascism is to stand in solidarity with each other across different political and tactical and strategic lines, because when we get divided that's when we're weakest.

CHRIS HEDGES: Okay great mark thanks that was Mark Bray, author of Antifa the anti-fascist handbook.

CHRIS HEDGES: Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security. When Antifa assumes the right to curtail free speech, it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, especially the anti capitalists. The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous task of building relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing, that alone will make effective resistance possible. We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed the corporate state welcomes this violence, because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match. Thank you for watching you can find us on rt-dot-com slash On Contact see you next week

The video inside is composed of utterly breathtaking views of Everest and surrounding mountains and snow in high definition, totally dwarfing climbers. Why have we published it on candobetter.net? Because it highlights man's place in the scheme of things and the beauty of our natural environment. Enjoy.

Australian politicians won't like this. There is a new book out by a couple of economists, called Game of Mates. Most readers of candobetter.net are familiar with how Australia's land-tenure system is stacked in favour of the psychopaths, but Paul Frijters, with Cameron Murray have come out with a number of very important videos as well as their book about how our system is wrecking our society and our wealth distribution. See inside for the videos. Please pass this article on because the publicity and public education associated with this book is absolutely crucial at a time when our land-use planning system is on the point of being privatised and taken beyond citizen or government control in Victoria and elsewhere in the context of developer organisations aiming at 8 new cities between Melbourne and Sydney and the replacement of Australia's entire population several times over in a short space of time.

The following short videos are entertaining but explore the problem and solutions. They are available on youtube but also published on the authors' blog https://gameofmates.com/videos/ Buy the book here: https://gameofmates.com/.

Fears are increasing that something terrible has happened to Julian Assange, the Australian who founded Wikileaks and exposed power elites in the United States - most recently through 'Pizzagate'. We really hope that these fears are groundless, but police presence has been removed from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Assange has been sequestered since 2012. The Anonymous video inside this article gives more detail than any other source, analysing and timelining what has happened recently with Assange. You need to start about 37 seconds in to avoid an overly long intro. Please contact candobetter.net if you have information about Assange. The Australian Government should be inquiring into his welfare - but they have failed totally to defend his rights now for years.

People will be interested to see this interview with the Syrian president's wife, someone we do not often hear about in western media because she looks and sounds too good to suit its propaganda. In March 2011, Vogue magazine called Asma' al-Assad (née al-Akhras) "A Rose in the Desert". The same magazine smeared her years later as the wife of a war criminal. Asma' al-Assad has an English accent and British citizenship because she born and lived in England. Dr Bashar al Assad, now the president of Syria, met her when he was studying eye medicine in London in the 90's, and married her after he became the president. She was at the time contemplating going to Harvard as a post grad in banking finance. She drives alone in dangerous areas of Syria, meeting widows and orphans of the war, and the mothers of soldiers killed in action (known as 'martyrs' in Syria). She describes in detail the problems of injured soldiers and how she tries to assist. Her children attend school in Syria. She says she has received offers to leave Syria with her three children to a safer area (Gulf, Europe...) with her income guaranteed, but she did not think that would help Syria and she recognised these offers as a trick to undermine Syrian morale. Arabic MSM of the Gulf has carried many false rumors about the Assad family fleeing to Iran and Russia, meeting Russian submarines in the Mediterranean, that the Assads are divorcing, that their children hate them etc. Asma' al-Assad notes the biased treatment of displaced and wounded children in Syria in its almost exclusive reporting only of those who are in the areas occupied by the so-called 'rebels', ignoring the many deaths of soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army and that the majority of Syrians live in government held areas that the so-called 'rebels' constantly target.

Update: Above video has been deleted from YouTube - 18 August 2018

The interview of the Syrian First Lady, which 20 months ago, had been embedded above has since been deleted by YouTube. The interview embedded below was published on 18 October 2016, the day before this article was first published. It is possible that this is the same interview

Syria's First Lady Asma al-Assad's interview with Russia's Channel 24

Other videos of Asma al-Assad found on YouTube with the search terms "interview with asma al assad" (quotes omitted), include: Syria: Asma al-Assad gives first interview since start of Syrian conflict (1:57min - 1 year ago), Syria's First Lady on Gaza (5:48 min, 9 years ago), Asma al Assad full interview (23/10/16) - apparently the same interview, Syria's First Lady Asma al-Assad speech at the Paris Diplomatic Academy in 2010 (52:42 min, 14/9/16), Syrian president's wife slams Western media coverage of war - Daily Mail (1:47min, 15/3/18), …

Dr Marcus Papadopoulos was interviewed by BBC News about 'russophobia' in Britain and policy in Syria . Speaking very clearly, Papadopoulos gives a history of British resentment of Russia, dating from the Crimea and thinks that Britain is acting in part out of a feeling of being left-out in the region. Islamist terrorists in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria are the only ones benefiting from this British ignorance and bias. It should be remembered that those Islamic terrorists that the west is backing, pose a huge threat to the people of Britain. The US-led coalition in Syria is not acting legally.

"[Raising immigration and open borders] would make everybody in America poorer. You're doing away with the concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create the millions of jobs." (Bernie Sanders)

Ezra Klein: Something that’s in what you said being a democratic socialist, is a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing
...

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That's a right wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States ...

Ezra Klein: But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer, you're doing away with the concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create the millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment in the United States of America today? If you're white high school graduate, it’s 33%, Hispanic 36%, African American 51%. Do you think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Ezra Klein: Then what are the responsibilities that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by say, Malaysian standards, so of the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we think about that responsibility? I guess I'm asking for – I agree. You have a nation-state structure. You always are going to, the politics don’t allow anything else.

But I guess philosophically, the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?

Bernie Sanders: I do weigh it. Well first of all, again, as a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some % of our kids living in poverty in America. Now how do you do that? What you do is understand there's been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle class to the top 1/10 to 1%. The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1% will own more than the bottom 99% in a year or so. That's absurd. That takes you to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on. I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent paying jobs, have education, have healthcare, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don't do that as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers which has already gone down very significantly.

On 18 September US-Australian-Canadian-Danish airstrikes killed 80 or more Syrian Arab Army soldiers who were attempting to combat ISIS from a Syrian military base. There seems little doubt that this was a war-crime, but it has already been displaced by media-saturation cover of a single act of terrorism in Manhattan where 29 people were injured. Well, the western media may believe it can hide the truth, but Eastern media and the alternative media cannot let this go. Inside this article there are two video debates on the motives and consequences of the US-Australian-Canadian-Danish airstrikes that killed 80 Syrian Arab Army soldiers two days ago. In the first video, "U.S. Bonus for Terrorists," Press TV conducts an interview with Brian Becker, with the ANSWER Coalition from Washington, and Frederick Peterson, a US congressional defense policy advisor from New York, to discuss these US airstrikes in Syria. This debate was originally published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/09/18/485337/US-bonus-terrorists on Sunday, September 18, 2016.

In the second video debate, "Tenuous Truce" [see video below] there was another debate on the same matter conducted with Scott Bennett, a military expert and former US army psychological warfare officer from San Francisco, and Michael Lane, the founder of American Institute for Foreign Policy from Washington, to discuss the failed ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia in Syria. This was originally published at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/09/19/485484/US-Russia-Syria-ceasefire.

How does the international community handle a rogue-state U.S.A.?

What can we do when the United States keeps on pulling more and more shocking stunts in the Middle East. It seems to be proving that it is the maddest and the baddest, and that anyone trying to stop it would risk a nuclear war. And Australia and other countries are stupidly being sucked in. Scott Bennett in the second debate, suggests that the world needs to demand a UN inquiry into the US airstrike as a war-crime and that the alternative media and the non-western media - like Rt and Press TV - have to try to raise the profile of that demand to get through the block of fizz that issues from the mainstream western media, which simply puts any challenge to US warmongering to one side:

SCOTT BENNETT: "Secretary Kerry and Obama and the political powers right now, I think, [...] they're off the chain. I think the military is doing its own thing in its own time in order to create fires that the next administration will have to put out. They're seeding their own future job applications. But the facts are - if you're arguing this in court - if you were arguing this to the United Nations Criminal Court - you simply could say, 'The United States engaged in targeting operations and the Russian intelligence forces will provide the appropriate electronic surveillance that will prove that the United States was engaged in chatter and conversations in targeting that resulted in the murder of 80 Syrian military personnel. In order to roll back the Assad military that was attempting to cleanse the country of foreign invaders that were beheading children and raping women and doing all sorts of war-crime atrocities'.

So, what do you do with war-criminals who commit atrocities? You try them. What do you do with those who give them money and back them and finance them and give them plane cover? You also try them.

So, there should be immediate calls for a United Nations war-criminal tribunal put forth by the coalition of Assad, of Iran, of Russia and China, saying, very simply, that the United States is engaged in criminal activity, war-crimes. It's aiding and abetting, financially and with military personnel, the operations of Syrian revolutionaries that are coming in from foreign countries.

These are not indigenous Syrian personnel.

And the only people, really, who should have any place at the table is Syria, Russia, Iran, Iraq.

All this was launched from Iraq. Iraq should immediately ground every U.S. and foreign plane and forbid them from engaging in these sorts of activities. And the U.S., essentially, should be kicked out. It should have no place in any future conversation, because it cannot be trusted. The American people are very quickly learning that. The European people are learning that. That's why the Brexit occurred. It's because they saw all of this destabilisation.

Then I would say to the other guest [in this debate] The Russians are not the Soviets. The Russians are the Russian people, the Russian culture, that want peace and tranquility and unity and so do the Syrians.

And, for us to go in with this neo-conservative empire agenda that is backed by the Zionist-Israeli-Wahabi nexus to target Iran and Russia, is a war-crime.

And I would testify before the United Nations; I would testify before the criminal court. I know that Senator Dick Black would and I know that there are a lot of us in the community that are stepping up because this is absolute insanity. And it's going to result in a very serious war and I hope and pray that President Putin and the other members of the coalition are very strategic and intelligent and cool-headed.

Yes, they need to decimate the illegal foreign fighters that are coming in, but they also need to do it in a very public-relations information warfare level. They need to write and blanket the American media and the European media with the truth. Because, right now, the American media has no idea - or the American people have no idea - of what's really going on. That's the way to win the hearts and minds of the American people and end this savagery."

Scott Bennett and Michael Lane explore the possibilities in the video, which is well worth watching.

Inside this article is a seven-minute video summarising what has happened in Syria. For those of you confused about this part of the world and what is happening, this clever video covers a lot in a simple way.

Some things this video does not cover: It does not go into the colonial history of similar interventions which have disorganised local power and built up to the current horrors. It does not talk about how many soldiers have died, nor of how the bulk of Syria's remaining population have fled to the government-controlled areas for safety. It does not talk about Russia's role in the area to support the government forces. Linking the creation of refugees to foreign-backed war in the region, it criticises the United States for not taking many refugees. However, for people outside Syria, the message needs to be that the west should stop creating refugees through war. This is a message that is entirely omitted by refugee activists in Australia, for instance, who seem to be quite uninterested in what is causing these floods of refugees. Australia effectively has almost no anti-war groups left. The video also does not mention the problem of growing water scarcity in Syria with Turkish diversion of the Euphrates, drought since 2006 and aquifer depletion in the context of a growing population. But drought and population growth are also matters seriously affecting other countries, such as California in the United States and most Australian states. The important difference is that California and Australia are not over-run by armed foreign-backed militia - as yet.

American boots on the ground. We hear this all too often throughout the world and now the war ravaged country of Yemen is the latest victim of US military troops. But why Yemen and why now and what are these troops trying to accomplish in a country that is facing a brutal war against it by Saudi Arabia, a war that Washington has given the green light to.

Above 23:30 minute video is from the PressTV YouTube Channel.

See also: Ansarullah Furious at US Military Build-up in Yemen (8/5/16) | FARS News Agency

Australian Politics Professor Tim Anderson recently wrote a book entitled, The Dirty war on Syria. In the embedded video, he describes the alarming ignorance of Australians generally about why the West is so down on Syria. This is a fascinating, humane and intelligent interview with Syrian TV. Among the many subjects covered are how the Australian media treats Anderson, how he became interested in the war in Syria, interpreting the propaganda war against Syria, and the future of Syria.

For people who follow French politics, France's entry into NATO was a frank change of politics. France had previously maintained an independent interest in the Middle East and tended to align away from Israel. France's involvement in recent NATO 'interventions' in Syria seemed uncharacteristically naive. In this stand-out interview, Yvan Blot, a former Gaullist parliamentarian, and closely associated with Sarkosy, when President, says that he did not agree with joining NATO. He says that French conservatives tend to be friends with Russia, in part because of business interests, and that socialist governments tend to have strained relations with Russia, since Mitterand. This interview is one of those where the person interviewed has a lot of experience and an unusually wide and historical perspective. This video transcript was first published on Sophie & Co on RT on 8 Mar, 2016 .

The West planned to create rift between Russia & Ukraine long ago - French ex-MEP

Russia's military pullout out of Syria came as a surprise to most Western nations. That, and a successful though fragile ceasefire inside Syria between Assad and the rebels, have shifted the balance on the global chessboard. Europe is struggling with the refugee flow, desperate enough to negotiate a blackmail-style deal with Turkey. As people are growing tired of the unpopular measures taken by Brussels, the upcoming elections in France, the EU's major player, may change the stakes in diplomacy as well. In this rapidly changing situation will the attitude towards Russia change? Does the West even need to carry out such a policy? And what role is NATO playing in the rift between Russia and the nations of Europe? We ask a prominent French politician, close friend of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy. Yvan Blot is on Sophie&Co today.

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Sophie Shevarnadze:  Yvan Blot, French scholar and politician, close to former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, author of “Putin’s Russia”, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us, sir.

Yvan Blot: Thank you for inviting me.

SS: So, from the latest, Russian troops are being pulled out of Syria, so we have the peace talks that are somewhat in progress right now. Truce is setting on the battlefield - do you think that Russian withdrawal, this move to pull out troops, will actually help the peace process, help de-escalate the situation, or will those who don’t want to find a compromise be emboldened by this move?

YB: It was a surprize in France to hear that Russian troops are leaving Syria, but I think it’s a good thing for the peace process, naturally.

SS: Why?

YB: It shows clearly that big powers want to seize the war and because Russia attacked the Islamist movement in Syria, some people would think that Russia wants to be in the East, and would invade, like America invaded Iraq.

SS: Make it it’s sphere of influence, basically.

YB: So we have a proof it’s not the case.

SS: How do you think the West will react to Russia’s move? Will West’s attitude towards Russia change after the withdrawal of the troops.

YB: I think, probably, Mr. Obama was informed about this decision, President Putin’s decision, so I think, normally, the West would have a good reaction, because if Washington agrees, the rest of the Western countries will agree, because America is the leader of the Western coalition in Syria.

SS: French economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed that France is actually supporting the end of anti-Russian sanctions, but all of the EU members have to be OK with that. Except France we have Hungary, we have Greece, we have Italy who do not want to extend, to renew the sanctions. What do you think will happen? Will their voices be heard? Is it possible to actually go against the EU will and not renew the sanctions individually?

YB: It’s difficult to say. I know that business circles in France are against the sanctions, they want to get rid of the sanctions, and there’s a big discussion, private discussion, between the government and the business circles. I think, Mr. Hollande is not really in favor of sanctions, but he has to take into account the American position, naturally, and for that reason, it’s difficult to say what he will do, because if for him the American pressure is too strong, he will say: “We continue the sanctions”.

SS: So it’s really more the American pressure than the fact that all EU members have to be OK with not renewing the sanctions?

YB: It’s another reason, I would say. Nothing forbids France to get rid of the sanctions if France wanted to. I think, with somebody with character, as was General De Gaulle, we would stop the sanctions, whatever the consequences. Our President is an intelligent man, but I’m not sure he wants to have these difficult relations with Washington, so I’m not sure France will be very independent in that…

SS: You often talk about America’s influence over Europe, and you have mentioned that these are American sanctions more than European sanctions… I mean, you really believe that America’s influence over Europe is so big that it can actually pressure Europe into imposing sanctions on Russia?

YB: Yes, I have examples. For instance, we have a big bank, BNP Paribas,  who had to pay enormous sums to the American Treasury because they made business with Iran, for instance. I know it was the same for Mistral, for instance. The American government told the French government, in private, naturally, that if we give Mistrals, these warships, to Russia, the sum that bank,  BNP Paribas, must pay will be much higher and, at the same time, they say that American judges are completely independent. I don’t think this is the case. There are contacts between the judges and the American government. I have some experience with this. Western countries always say that their judges are completely independent, but it’s not the case if it is a question which touches national interests. For little private conflicts the judges are independent, but it’s linked with politics, the government says “I hope you will give good sanctions against this bank”, for instance.

SS: So you think if Europe, on a larger scale, was to reset relations with Russia, then America will actually torpedo it or sabotage it?

YB: The strategy of America was clearly explained in the book by Mr.Brzezinski, “The Big Chessboard”. In this book, Mr.Brzezinski says: “The problem of America is the competition with Eurasia.” Eurasia - that is to say Europe, Russia and China and India, perhaps - and he says: “If all these countries are against us, it’s going to be terrible for us, we are not the first power in the world, so we have to divide Eurasia, to colonize Western Europe, to survey China and Russia. For us it makes really a problem, and the best thing would be to have weaker Russia and to organize conflict with Ukraine”. It was written 10 years ago, and now you see the implementation of this strategy. I think it is an American strategy.

SS: But I want to talk about Europe’s position - why do you think it’s stuck in this choice between partnership with Russia and partnership with NATO. It seems like it’s one or the other - why? Why is it stuck in this position?

YB: First, NATO has no reason to survive, because NATO was created, in the beginning, to fight against communism and against Soviet Union. There’s no longer a Soviet Union. It would have been logical to destroy NATO and to create a new order for defence and security issues, new organisation, probably, and probably without the U.S.. It was not the case, naturally, and major part of our political leaders have strong personal links with American government, it’s a fact.

SS: You think there’s no reason for NATO to survive, you’ve also said that America’s influence on Europe is in large done through NATO - now, former French PM Dominique de Villepin.

has proposed, once again, pulling France out of the NATO military command structure. Do you think it’s a good idea, do you think France should pull out? Is it even possible?

YB: I think he’s right. I know him very personally, I think he’s right. It is technically completely possible, because we have a  big industry of armaments, we have nuclear forces, so France can be independent.

SS: So why are you with NATO then? Is it just, like, symbolic, is it a question of French pride and prestige?

YB: It was a discussion between me and President Sarkozy about this, because I didn’t agree with him. It was Sarkozy who…

SS: Returned France to NATO.

YB: And he said: “We are in the same family”, his argument was “the same family, we have the same values”. Perhaps we have the same values, but since, perhaps, 10 years, all French presidents ask Americans to have one commander-in-chief of NATO. There are three staffs in NATO: for North of Europe, for Center of Europe and for South. France wanted to have the general-in-chief of the South, and the American said “No, no, no”. They said “No” to Mitterrand, they said “No” to Chirac, and they said “No” to Sarkozy. But, in spite of this Sarkozy said that it doesn’t matter, “we will integrate into it”, but I’m not sure it was a good idea.

SS: So, if France is part of the same family, as the NATO members, then why did the president Francois Hollande, after the horrible terrorist attacks, actually called on its fellow EU allies to help fight terrorism, help France, and not the NATO members?

YB: Politically, the EU is more important in France than the NATO. We don’t speak very much about NATO. But EU, yes, because it’s the same currency, it’s same economic policy, and so on. For that reason Mr. Hollande wants always to have good relations with the members of the EU, but in the future, I don’t know what we will have because it’s possible - it’s not sure, but it’s possible - that the UK leaves the EU.

SS:  So, you have studied Russian for many years, you’ve wrote a book that’s called “Putin’s Russia”. It decries a lot of myths about Putin, it also argues against looking at Russia as if it was still a Soviet Union. Are there are lot of people in the French establishment who share your view on Russia?

YB: There are part of the establishment.

SS: What’s the ratio?

YB: Partly, it’s a question of generation. Older people in France very often think that Russia is always a Soviet Union, older people. But with younger people, it’s not the case at all. So, younger people in general are much more in favor of cooperation with Russia, even within the government, or within the Parliament, and this situation, I think, it’s improving for the future cooperation between France and Russia.

SS: But, French government mostly consists of young people, so you would think that they don’t really remember the Soviet Union, yet they are for the sanctions and they still decry Putin as a dictator…

YB: Yes, the French government is socialist, you know. It is a socialist tradition in France to have bad relations with Russia, I must say, because after the WWII, the Americans gave a lot of money to socialist party to fight against the Communist Party in France. For that reason, Socialist party had always very good links with America. Especially now, they have very good links with ms. Clinton, for instance. Ms. Clinton said once, I think she didn’t want to say this, but she said it to Juppe, “Mr. President Juppe” - but a journalist told her: “But he’s not President!” - he was PM, but he wasn’t a President - “Oh yes, I am sorry, I made a mistake” - but in fact, she would like to have Mr. Juppe as partner for future.

SS: We’ll talk about the Presidential elections that are coming up. So you have part of French establishment that is very anti-Russian, and you have part of it that’s very pro-Russian.

YB: Especially, business circles.

SS: So which side will prevail?

YB: In the short run, it’s, perhaps, the anti-Russians who are rather mainstream, especially in the media, but I think in the longer run, it would be completely different. You have only to look at the geography - it’s very difficult for Western Europe not to have a special links with Russia, because it’s the same continent, in fact. So, I think it’s artificial - this fight against Russia. In fact, the majority of people who come from France to Russia can see it’s not a dictatorship. I was, in the past, in the Soviet Union, and in my hotel, I could read some Russian papers in English - there was no criticism against Mr. Brezhnev, for instance, or of the Soviet government. But now you can read articles against Mr. Putin - so it’s very clear, there’s more freedom than before.

SS: So you have Presidential election coming up, right around the corner. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Russia, you’re close to him, I believe you’re his friend. If his party wins the vote, do you think there will be a rapprochement between Russia and France?

YB: I’m sure.

SS: Really?

YB: Sarkozy always told me he wanted to have good relations with Mr. Putin. He has, I think personal good relations, and he thinks it’s very necessary, because Sarkozy is linked with business circles very much, much more than the socialists, and he wants to have better relations with Russia because they want to expand trade with Russia in every sectors of the economy. I think with Sarkozy the relations would be better, I’m sure, and even if we would have some tensions with the U.S.. We had tensions already in the past, with Sarkozy, when he went to mingle with Georgian war, for instance, Washington was not very happy about this. But he did it.

SS: Do you think he will run for Presidency again? What do you think? In your personal opinion?

YB: I think so, except, if he has such bad polls, he could perhaps say: “It’s over, it’s not possible”, but except in that extreme situation - we cannot know exactly the future so much early - I think he will be a candidate. He wants to be a candidate.

SS: But do you think the French are ready to choose again between Hollande and Sarkozy?

YB: Frankly, I’m not sure, because part of the French people would prefer to have new personalities, probably.

SS: It’s been 2 years since the Crimean referendum, pro-Russian referendum, and you have said that it’s impossible to reverse the Crimean situation. The EU however, is saying that the control over the peninsula needs to be given back to Ukraine. President Poroshenko is ordering Ukraine’s military to focus on Crimea, you have Kiev that is getting military aid from the U.S. - I mean, it does seem like the West cannot come to terms with that. Do you think that'll ever happen? When?

YB: I think Crimea will be Russian in the future. It’s not possible to change that. In France, we are not in a good place to think against it, because we made exactly the same with Mayotte in Africa, you know it’s some islands which form a Comorrean state and when they got their independence, one island said “We want to be French”, and this island is French. For that reason, France was condemned by the UNGA, we were condemned by the African Assembly of Nations, and it doesn’t change anything. We had no sanctions, because we are friends with the U.S.

SS: But we have sanctions, so if the Crimean situation is irreversible, and the sanctions are linked to the Crimean situation, does that mean that the sanctions against Russia are here to stay forever?

YB: It is a U.S. position now, with President Obama, but you cannot see future. I’m not sure, for instance, Mr. Trump, I think, perhaps, he would lift the sanctions, I’m not sure that he’s in favor of the sanctions. He’s like everybody, in general, in business circles - they don’t like sanctions. They think politicians mingling with economics is not a good thing, it’s better to be separated. With ms. Clinton, perhaps, we would have the same sanctions. So we have to wait for the American elections.

SS: Maybe, even harsher sanctions with ms. Clinton. So, let’s talk about the EU situation. The EU isn’t aligned in its relations with Russia, it has the migrant crisis, there’s the financial problem in the Eurozone, there’s  terrorism problem - a serious problem. So, if countries weren’t obliged to follow one common EU policy, do you think they would be able to deal with these issues better, individually?

YB: I’m not sure. For instance a lot of people say because we are in the EU we could have more opportunity for economic growth, but it’s not in fact the case. Switzerland or Norway are not in the EU, and their economy is much better. I’m not sure the Euro, for instance, is a good thing for French economy. Probably, it’s a good thing for German economy, but we have not the same competitiveness to have the same money - I’m not sure it’s a good idea. A lot of economists, professors of economics - I am the professor of economics -  we think the Euro is not a good idea, probably, a symbolic or a political idea, but from an economic point of view, it’s probably a mistake.

SS: So Britain is planning to have a referendum this summer on the EU exit, and according to the survey that’s been conducted by the university of Edinburgh, majority of France wants to have the same referendum. What do you think? Could the British experience set an example to follow for other members?

YB: Probably. It’s a reason for why a Commission in Brussels is a bit frightened of this situation, because if the UK leaves European Union, other countries could do the same and could be encouraged to make the same move. Perhaps, the Scandinavian countries who are very linked with the UK, perhaps, Czech Republic…

SS: Well, you have France, you have Sweden, Spain, Germany - they all want EU membership referendum. I’m not saying that they want to leave the EU, but they want to have the right to vote for it. Do you think they should be able?

YB: The people want to be consulted on this sort of issue, and one of the big problems with the EU is that it is not democratic at all. It was built not to be democratic. The power in Brussels is not in the hands of the Council of ministers and is not in the Parliament. I was for 10 years in the EU Parliament, I can tell you  that all the power, in fact, is in the Commission. It’s a government of civil servants, who have no responsibility towards different countries, and they do what they want, and for that reason, more and more people are against this sort of technician government, which is not a democratic government. I think it was a mistake at the beginning of the European Union, to create this super-Comission above all. So, it doesn’t mean we have to get rid completely with the EU, but perhaps it is necessary to re-write the treaty to suppress this Commission in Brussels, it was a bad idea. It would be Europe, naturally, if we did that. Why not?

SS: So, you have said that you are worried about the massive flow of refugees into Europe, but do you feel like, maybe, Europe has a moral obligation or responsibility to accommodate these refugees from the Middle East. I mean, are European policies partly to blame for wars that are causing this mass exodus? I mean, intervention in Libya produced a failed state right on border of Europe, you know.

YB:  You are right. I think there are some governments that have a responsibility because of the disorder they created in the MidEast, and it was one of the causes of the movement of refugees towards Europe. But the public opinion is really against it, and so, if you are in democracy, you have to take into account the opinion of the people. I think it’s necessary to have more peace, naturally, in the Middle East - that’s one of the questions, but otherwise, it’s necessary, really, to control our borders which is not the case, because we have created this Schengen area, and the Schengen area is not very well protected against illegal immigrants, and that’s really a problem. You must add to this problem the fact that among the refugees, it’s possible that you have some terrorists. Our Secret Service is persuaded it is the case, I must say.

SS: Yvan Blot, thank you very much for this interesting interview. We were talking to Yvan Blot, French politician, who used to sit in the French and the European Parliament's, past terrorism advisor to the French government, author of “Putin’s Russia”, talking about seemingly dead end of West’s relations with Russia and the future of Europe. That’s it for this edition of SophieCo, I will see you next time.

Inside are three videos warning about the dangers of signing the TransPacific Trade agreements that global organisations want to get many countries, including Australia, to sign. The first is a very quick overview. In the second video, at Democracy Now, "Secretive Deal Isn’t about Trade, but Corporate Control", Julian Assange speaks in some detail on the subject. Sophie Shevardnadze's interview on with Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation Magazine follows as a partial transcript with a link to the actual interview. We have previously published Kelvin Thomson's Australian opinion on the dangers here, which is in agreement with the other sources.

Find out more, speak up and spread the word:
http://www.StopFastTrack.com; http://www.ExposeTheTPP.org; http://www.sumofus.org/tpp

Julian Assange on the Trans-Pacific Partnership - Exclusive Interview by Democracy Now

As negotiations continue, WikiLeaks has published leaked chapters of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership — a global trade deal between the United States and 11 other countries. The TPP would cover 40 percent of the global economy, but details have been concealed from the public.

TPP agreement will deal mortal blow to democracy in US - Nation magazine chief

The following is an extract from "TPP agreement will deal mortal blow to democracy in US - Nation magazine chief" from this video of Sophie Shevardnadze interviewing Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation Magazine (United States).

SS: I want to talk about another deal that’s grabbing attention now in the U.S. and that’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership. However, the details of this agreement are unknown, Obama insists the TPP is not secret, but in reality, a deal that is supposed to affect millions of Americans is classified, and even members of Congress can’t just go and flip through the pages without minder hanging about. Why?

KVH: I don’t think it’s consistent with American principles, but I’ll tell you: it seems the trade agreements have been, for the last decades, negotiated this way. But, this time, because of a mobilization of labor groups, citizen groups, workers, people inside the Congress, business isn’t being done as usual. People are saying: “Enough! We don’t want this to be done in secrecy; we’ve learned enough from our history to see what these trade agreements have done to communities around the country and workers.” In fact, Sophie, one of the most controversial parts of the trade agreement is the investor dispute settlement provision – which is truly anti-American, allowing corporations to suit governments and countries if they try to institute health and safety measures. It was leaked by WikiLeaks, which is how people know about it. So we need a new way of doing business, we need a new way of doing trade. I’m not…progressives are not against trade, they are against the way banks and investment firms have dictated the terms of trade. In fact, the big fight over TPP is really about corporate power and who’s going to write the rules about the global game, so to speak. I think this is a wake-up moment, and I place it very clearly in this populous moment I described earlier.

SS: But the people who are most outspoken about being against this deal are trade unions and worker’s rights groups and environmentalists – those are the ones, the people who traditionally are on Obama’s side. Now, if the agreement is going to hurt them…

KVH: This is an interesting, very interesting new alignment, but it’s a very interesting new alignment that President Obama is essentially fighting the core elements of his own party. This is not fully new, because President Bill Clinton with NAFTA 20 years or so ago was also at war with his own party. But this coalition is far stronger, Sophie, far stronger, because… President Obama accuses his own coalition of peddling recycled arguments – no. This coalition has learned from history, workers have learned on their own backs, communities have died, jobs have gone, factories closed – but others are now standing up and saying: “enough! We want true enforcement mechanisms of labor and environmental protection; we want to know what’s in the agreement.” How is this truly American to have agreements, conceived in secret with private corporate courts overseeing and arbitrating agreements? No, enough!

SS: Now, you’re also saying that TPP means loss of jobs and sinking middle class, extreme inequality. But those who are in favor say that it would actually benefit the U.S. companies and create new jobs at home. Why are they wrong?

KVH: I think you need to look at history. Those were the same arguments, Sophie, peddled, 15-20 years ago, and we haven’t seen those benefits. Again, not against trade or globalization, but the way the rules have been written have shown that they don’t benefit workers, they don’t increase wages, and they don’t help environmental problems. So, I think, we need to step back – and there are, by the way, good proposals, the Congressional progressive caucus, the group of about 80 Representatives in the House, have put forward an alternative. I think we need to end this particular round, step back and think anew about what a fair trade deal would mean. Finally, President Obama now seems to be…you know, there are new arguments, the new arguments are now about how we need to really counter China in setting the rules of the global economy. This is very tricky, to use this trade agreement for that purpose.

SS: But just really quickly, in a nutshell, can you really undermine China in the region, economically? I mean, is that really possible?

KVH: No. In fact, China is already between the partnership with Russia, the Investment Bank it has set up, bringing in both the UK, I think, and Germany; what you want to do is engage, you don’t want to have a so-called “pivot”, which essentially is countering or jettisoning the relationships. So no, I don’t think so.

SS: Thank you so much for this wonderful interview, we were talking to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation Magazine, talking about what needs to change in U.S. foreign policy and if the 2016 president hopefuls will stand a chance of delivering this change. That’s it for this edition of Sophie&Co, I will see you next time.

Video inside: The Big Population Debate at the Deakin Edge in Federation Square, Melbourne, on October 13, 2014, between Kelvin Thomson and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, was a fantastic success in terms of numbers and outcome. Given the utter inertia of political process in responding to this democratic emergency, Mary Drost's call for a Referendum on Australia's Population Growth was a great idea to go forward. With both Kelvin Thomson and Mayor Doyle agreeing that a referendum on population is a good idea, Victorians and other Australians have something concrete to go forward with. The film here is of the debate. The referendum is on the open mike section, which is the next film that will be published. The debate embedded here showed that Mayor Doyle really doesn't have a handle on the issue at all, except as a loyal servant to the business end of growth. Kelvin Thomson's ability to debate the subject would make him a world leader in this area. This is a very important and historic record. Congratulations to Mary Drost of Planning Backlash for making it happen. Sheila Newman produced the video.

Video and Transcript inside: Federal Labor Member for Wills, Kelvin Thomson, spoke in Parliament against the signing of contracts and the construction of the East West Link Road Tunnel, also known as the Royal Park Freeway. Before the election the Liberals were in favour of independent cost benefit analysis for major projects, yet now in government, they are avoiding undertaking one for the East-West Link in Melbourne, the freeway through Royal Park. Mr Thomson wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development, and his Parliamentary Secretary on 27th August, to seek appropriate and publicly transparent economic modelling, environmental assessment and community consultation before tens of billions of dollars are spent on a tunnel that makes no economic sense, will damage our environment and which will hurt local communities. (23/9/14). Note that Kelvin will be publicly debating Victoria's population growth policy with Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle on 13 October in Melbourne at Deakin Edge in Federation Square from 5.30-7pm.

[Candobetter.net editor is responsible for the insertion of all headings and emphases ]

It is deeply ironic in this debate on the Infrastructure Australia Amendment (Cost Benefit Analysis and Other Measures) Bill 2014 that we should get a lecture from government members opposite about the virtues of independent cost-benefit analysis for major projects when in my own area they are running a mile from undertaking one for the East West Link in Melbourne—that is, the freeway through Royal Park.

I wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development and his parliamentary secretary on 27 August seeking appropriate and publicly transparent economic modelling, environmental assessment and community consultation before we get tens of billions of dollars spent on a tunnel that makes no economic sense, will damage our environment and will hurt local communities.

The coalition government has spent $1.5 billion for both stage 1 and stage 2 of the East West Link project to connect the Eastern Freeway to CityLink with the idea of connecting the link to Melbourne's western ring road and western suburbs. Both these stages are reported to cost between $8 billion and $10 billion.

Huge, unjustified cost to taxpayers

These are huge sums of taxpayers' money that ought to be carefully considered in the context of the need for governments to live within their means. We often hear from those opposite about the need for government to live within its means. We constantly get lectured about fiscal responsibility. One would expect that a carefully thought out economic analysis would have been undertaken and released to verify the need for the East West tunnel project and the need for large sums of taxpayers' money; however, this is not the case.

Illusory economic modeling

Media reports based on FOI and leaked information have indicated that such economic modelling that has been carried out has been based on false assumptions regarding petrol prices, incomes, car running costs and inner-city parking. Against that background, I welcome and congratulate the Victorian Labor opposition leader, Daniel Andrews, for his leadership on infrastructure issues. Back on 11 September he stated that the forthcoming election in November in Victoria will be a choice of either better public transport and local roads or the $8 billion dud East West Link road tunnel.

No certainty that any contracts for the East West Link are legally binding

Victorian Labor has obtained legal advice which states that any contract that is signed before an election for a project that is facing a Supreme Court challenge cannot be entered into safely. That legal advice was obtained by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, administrative law expert Richard Niall QC and contract law expert Siobhan Keating. Victorian Labor states that it will not be held responsible for a document that was recklessly devised in haste and error and that it does not believe that any contracts for the East West Link project can be validly entered into while a matter before the Supreme Court remains unresolved and there can be no certainty that any contracts for the East West Link are legally binding.

Victorian Labor has said if no legally binding contracts exist, then a Victorian Labor government will not proceed with the East West Link project.

Disgraceful haste to sign before elections

It is a disgrace that the Victorian Liberal Treasurer, Michael O'Brien, says the government is determined to sign the East West contracts before the onset of the pre-election caretaker period. I need to bring to the attention of the House that we need to recall that the Liberal Party said before the election that it would not build the East West Link. It did not take this issue to the voters. Now it is shamelessly trying to lock Victorian taxpayers into billions and billions of dollars on a freeway through Royal Park. This project is so big that it will eat up both Victoria's road budget and public transport budget for years. It kills off the legitimate aspirations of communities from all parts of Melbourne for improvements to their local roads, railway crossings and the like.

This fraud on the voters—trying to lock taxpayers into this lemon before an election can be held—comes from the same political party that talked up such a storm and became positively apoplectic over Julia Gillard's 'no carbon tax' pre-election statement. You have to wonder: where is that 'convoy of no confidence' when you need it? The East West tunnel project will cripple Victoria's finances for many years to come. It will crowd out the state's other core responsibilities in public transport, education and health. A proper, thorough and publicly transparent economic modelling case should be undertaken for this project. If we examine what is known in terms of economic analysis of the tunnel, then we can come to some understanding as to why this government is ducking and weaving to avoid undertaking one.

The government's business case relies totally on the assumption of what economists call an agglomeration effect in which population and economic clusters in cities lead to efficiencies and add to business productivity. The Linking Melbourne Authority, which provides information on road infrastructure projects conducted on behalf of the Victorian government, has referred to a book by the American writer Edward L Glaeser called Triumph of the City. Its main thesis is the agglomeration benefits that create cities. The Linking Melbourne Authority does not appear to have read the book, because the book does not argue that freeways are the path to create these benefits. In fact, it argues quite the opposite. Mr Glaeser argues that 'driving creates negative externalities that hamper urban economies' and he warns against highway building, calling it 'anti-urban'. He said For decades we have tried to solve the problem of too many cars on too few lanes by building more roads, but each new highway or bridge then attracts more traffic.

The Age commentator Kenneth Davidson has accurately pointed out in relation to the Royal Park freeway It will cripple the state's fiscal position for many years through massive payments to the public-private partnership consortium that will finance it.

The financial burden on the Victorian taxpayer will be so big that it will ''crowd out'' the state's core responsibilities for funding schools, hospitals, rail transport and even other roads for at least a generation.

Vic Gov Economic consultant says economic benefits wildly overstated

An email recently obtained through FOI illustrates that the Victorian government's own economic consultant, Chris Tehan of Evans and Peck, told the government that the business case 'had dramatically overestimated the wider economic benefits to get an artificial figure of a $1.40 return'. According to The Age … the methodology ''has not been used in any of [the Transport Department's] other public transport projects or program modelling to date''.

Financial case based on reverse of actual trends

The financial case for the East West Link hinges on a prediction that toll road use will jump over the next 30 years because of rising wealth and shrinking petrol and CBD parking price rises. The business case makes the controversial assumption that: first, a driver's willingness to use toll roads will increase by 1.4 per cent per annum due to rising incomes; second, the rate of increase in the cost of running a car will fall from the current two per cent per annum in real terms to half a per cent per annum by 2041; and, third, that the rate of increase in the cost of inner city parking, which is currently increasing at four per cent per annum in real terms, will fall to 0.5 per cent by 2041. I personally regard this as a remarkably heroic assumption given that the state government has decided to extend its congestion levy up from the City of Melbourne into the City of Moreland, up into my electorate, in recent times. This will of course lead to significant increases to the cost of inner city parking.

The Victorian government has been caught out manipulating modelling to produce a favourable result.

Why the public are cynical about "bigticket" infrastructure

The former Infrastructure Australia head Michael Deegan told a Senate committee that the government's unpublished business case provided an alternative estimate showing a cost-benefit ratio of just 0.8. Under this scenario, the project would return just 80c for every dollar spent, suggesting an economic loss if the stock standard analysis preferred by Infrastructure Australia is used. According to The Age, in a submission to a federal infrastructure inquiry, Infrastructure Australia outed Victoria for failing to submit a robust business case for the East West Link, singling out … the controversial $6 billion to $8 billion road as a key example of why the public are cynical about "bigticket"
infrastructure announcements.

Infrastructure Australia's 11-member council—which includes transport experts like Sir Rod Eddington and the former federal Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson—is understood to broadly recommend only those projects with benefit-cost ratios of more than 1.5. And Michael Deegan warns that big-spending promises are being made without proper scrutiny. He said This is a particular problem during election periods where commitments are often made, although robust business cases have not been prepared, let alone independently reviewed … The freeway through Royal Park is a classic example of economic mutton dressed up as lamb.

According to traffic expert Stephen Pelosi, the traffic on the East West Link during the morning peak is expected to slow to 20 to 30 kilometres per hour by 2031 as worsening congestion pushes the road close to capacity just 12 years after it is due to open. The East West Link is forecast to carry 80,000 vehicles a day on opening in 2019, increasing to between 100,000 and 120,000 a day by 2031 according to this modelling.

Stephen Pelosi said If it's reaching 120,000 we're at a position where we're reaching capacity. Unless you intervene in some manner and manage the toll rate to influence demand, you get a situation where you're near capacity.

If it is good enough for the NBN, as the previous speaker suggested to the House, it should be good enough for this project too. Why is the government only too happy to undertake economic modelling on the NBN yet, when it comes to the largest infrastructure and transport project in Victoria's history—East West Link—it refuses to do so. If the age of entitlement is over, why isn't the private sector bankrolling East West Link? If we are in the midst of a budget emergency, why aren't the belts being tightened when it comes to major projects that do not make economic sense?

That is why the amendments to the bill which Labor has moved seek to assess projects first on their merits and fund them later, not the other way around. We also seek to strengthen transparency and public disclosure of project assessments. These are strong measures that will prevent money being wasted on potential white elephants like the East West Link. If this government were serious about fiscal responsibility, if it were serious about merit based infrastructure planning then the freeway through Royal Park in Melbourne would not proceed.

Lack of due diligence

Concern with the lack of due diligence behind the decision to proceed with this freeway is growing. It is acknowledged in the transport industry that adding road capacity through the freeway will bring in more vehicles more quickly and actually worsen congestion on Haddle Street, Flemington Road, Tullamarine Freeway and other roads that are currently at capacity.

Industry assessments are that the freeway will not fix congestion, because, as the 2008 Eddington report identified, less than 20 per cent of all vehicles travel through from the east to the west. What actually goes on is that 80 per cent of all vehicles exit to inner Melbourne to access jobs and services. They will continue to do that despite the Royal Park freeway and, with more vehicles reaching exits more quickly, the risk is that congestion will actually be worse.

There is no strategic justification for this project. This is a proposal which fails critical productivity tests and runs the risk of being negative for state product and GDP. When a poor public project is selected, the community loses twice. It loses because scarce capital is misapplied and because taxes and funds raised to finance that project distort behaviour in ways which have a significant cost.

For a profit, tolls would need to rise to $10.50 per return trip

Tolls on the planned freeway would have to be three times the current cost of an average trip on Citylink for the project's investors to make a profit, according to an international study led by University College London which analysed numerous transport megaprojects, including Australian road and rail projects. It found that, for investors to get a return on the freeway, motorists would have to be charged a minimum $10.50

Source: Speech by Mr KELVIN THOMSON (Wills) (19:34): Tuesday, 23 September 2014 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 78 CHAMBER

Russia’s president has blamed the turmoil in Ukraine on the country’s newly-elected leader Petro Poroshenko. Vladimir Putin also criticized the West for its intention to turn the planet into a "global barracks."

Click here for top 10 takeaways from Putin's foreign policy speech

Russia’s president has laid the blame for the ongoing turmoil between Kiev and south-eastern regions squarely at the feet of Petro Poroshenko, after the Ukrainian leader terminated the ceasefire.

He has stressed that Russia and European partners could not convince Poroshenko to not take the path of violence, which can’t lead to peace.

“Unfortunately, President Poroshenko has made the decision to resume military actions, and we – meaning myself and my colleagues in Europe – could not convince him that the way to reliable, firm and long-term peace can’t lie through war,”

Putin said. “So far, Petro Poroshenko had no direct relation to orders to take military action. Now he has taken on this responsibility in full. Not only military, but also political, more importantly."

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko walks at the military camp near the town of Svyatogorsk in Eastern Ukraine, June 20, 2014 (Reuters / Stringer)

On Monday, the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine held a phone call in which Putin stressed the need to prolong the ceasefire and the creation of “a reliable mechanism for monitoring compliance with it and the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] should play an active role.”

Russia offered that checkpoints on the Russian side should be monitored by representatives of the Ukrainian Border service as well as OSCE observers for “the joint control of the border.”

As the violent conflict continues in the east of Ukraine and the number of refugees fleeing to Russia grows, Putin vowed to provide help to everyone who needs it.

“Everything that’s going on in Ukraine is of course the internal business of Ukrainian government, but we are painfully sorry that people die, civilians,” Putin said. He added that the killing of journalists was “absolutely unacceptable.”

“In my opinion, there is a deliberate attempt to eliminate representatives of the press going on. It concerns both Russian and foreign journalists,” the president said.

‘West should stop turning world into 'global barracks'

Speaking in front of ambassadors on Tuesday, Putin expressed hope that Western partners will stop imposing their principles on other countries.

"I hope pragmatism will still prevail. The West will get rid of ambitions, pursuits to establish a ‘world barracks’ – to arrange all according to ranks, to impose uniform rules of behavior and life of society,” Putin said.

"I hope the West will start building relations based on equal rights, mutual respect and mutual consideration of interests.”

Putin recalled the situation with France and the delivery of the Mistral-class ships that was agreed between Moscow and Paris, but was jeopardized in March.

“We know about the pressure that our American partners put on the French so that they would not deliver the Mistral [ships] to Russia,” Putin said. “And we know that [they] hinted
that if the French don't deliver Mistral, sanctions on banks will be gradually removed, or at least minimized. What is this, if not blackmail?"

A photo taken on May 9, 2014 in Saint-Nazaire, western France, shows the Vladivostok warship, a Mistral class LHD amphibious vessel ordered by Russia to the STX France shipyard. The Vladivostok warship is one of two navy ships ordered to France by the Russian army (AFP Photo)

Russia is ready to have dialogue with the US only bases of equality, Putin added.

“We are not going to stop our relations with the US. The bilateral relations are not in the best shape, that is true. But this - and I want to emphasize - is not Russia’s fault,” he told diplomats.

Speaking about international relations, Putin stressed that Russia always tried to be “predictable, to do business on an equal basis”, however, in return, its interests were quite often ignored.

‘Ukraine devised shady schemes to get gas’

Putin then touched upon a gas deal with Ukraine, saying that the country “devised some shady schemes with some of their partners” to get “the so-called reverse supplies.”

“It is artificial reverse traffic. There is no such thing in reality,” Putin said. “How is it possible to use the same pipe to pump gas both ways? You do not have to be a major specialist in the gas sector to understand that this is unrealistic," he said. “They have devised some shady schemes with some of their partners,” Putin added. “They are getting Russian gas and paying to some of their partners in Europe, who under-consume these amounts."

Original source was http://rt.com/news/169628-putin-ukraine-west-barracks/

"What's needed is a kind of "pit bull terrier" state, which would be prepared to start at least a local conflict, to show the weakened Russia how events could develop." (Andrei Fursov, speaking of Ukraine's purpose for the US.) The following article is a very readable lecture transcript by Andrei Fursov (Director of Russian Studies, Moscow University. Member of the International Academy of Sciences) dated 2014/04/14. Transcribed from the spoken Russian and compiled from translated English dubbed text. All headings added by Wikispooks to aid with readability and citation.

"What's needed is a kind of "pit bull terrier" state, which would be prepared to start at least a local conflict, to show the weakened Russia how events could develop." (Andrei Fursov, speaking of Ukraine's purpose for the US.)

All-in-all a must-read for westerners needing to understand what is really happening in both the Ukraine and the wider Anglo-US-NATO globalisation drive which it brings into sharp focus.

Original source of document is https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Battleground_Ukraine

Oligarchical topography of Ukraine
A lecture by Andrei Fursov with translated English text

Contents

1. #intro">Introduction
2. #NationalTraitors">National traitors
3. #UkrOligarchs">The Ukrainian oligarchs
4. #RockefellersEtc">Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Intelligence agencies
5. #IsraeliInterests">Israeli interests in Ukraine
6. #GlobalContext">The wider global context
7. #yellowstone">The "Yellowstone Threat"
8. #OriginOf">The origin of the current situation
9. #GoalsME">The goals of the interested parties in the Middle East
10. #FourthReichIntel">The intelligence service of the Fourth Reich at work
11. #WhyNow">Why did this happen now?
12. #WhatWestWanted">What the West wanted
13. #MuzychkosDeath">The death of Oleksandr Muzychko
14. #Kasparov">The infantile Garry Kasparov
15. #GoodbyeAmerica">Goodbye, America!
16. #ChangeRussia">The required Russian domestic changes

#intro" id="intro">Introduction

Firstly, let me say that sometimes it's pleasant to be wrong. Well, I got it wrong. At the beginning of February my colleague, Elena Ponomarëva, and I discussed the question, could we take Crimea? I was a pessimist and said, 10% chance that we'll take Crimea. We won't get it because the West will react aggressively, and our authorities lack the courage. She said, on the contrary 90% chance that we take Crimea, and 10% chance that it doesn't happen. She was right. I was wrong.

Without doubt, the re-unification with Crimea is a very important landmark. In a recent TV interview I said that this is genuinely the end of the disgraceful era which began in Malta on the 2-3rd Dec 1989, when Gorbachev surrendered absolutely everything to Bush, even what wasn't asked for.

After that everything possible was given up. Rays of hope began to appear later, during the Putin administration. There was the war of 08.08.08. But later we failed to support Libya. Although we did put the foot down at Syria. But this is all far away from Russian lands. But Ukraine and Crimea - this is a completely new situation. We started to re-take our territory, little by little. Started doing as the Muscovite princes did in the 14th, 15th century, what the first Romanovs did, and the Stalin system in the 1930s, all of which was: leaving the historical zone of defeat.

But leaving the historical zone of defeat means not only external matters, we are now tearing up the global status quo, which took shape in 1991-94. Meaning: disintegration of the Soviet Union, the uranium deal, the shooting at the Moscow White House, the Budapest Memorandum.

#NationalTraitors" id="NationalTraitors">National traitors

But overcoming defeat has not only an external aspect but also a domestic aspect. Yeltsinism gave raise to a whole stratum of people, whom our president called national-traitors. That is, the fifth column - in the authorities, in business and in the media. In particular, they revealed themselves during the events in Crimea. That was a real moment of truth, moment of choice. People's true colors became apparent, in various spheres. And it was an very import experience for this reason: One could clearly observe the application of double-standards.

What do we mean by double-standards? For example: There was a time when the Brits annexed the Falkland Islands. They said: "Well, why not. There was a referendum in the Falkland Islands and the residents came out in favor of joining up with Britain, and that's sufficient."

"Crimea is a different matter altogether ..." -- although the situation is analogous.

Today we're talking about the Ukraine situation from a number of angles. It's a multi-faceted situation, like all big situations. Many different aspects have led to what happened. Concerning not only the clash between Russia and the West. There's a lot else going on too.

Firstly, it all began with a conflict within the Ukrainian oligarchic class. A great analyst is Vladimir Matveev. I very much recommend you look him up. A number of his analyses are out on the net. Moreover you don't need to be erudite to read his books. Anyone with higher education can read them. He's been very active on the subject of Mossad in Ukraine. He gets continuously threatened. Now he needs to get out of Ukraine and is having problems with that.

We are talking about the oligarchs.

Later we'll talk about the interests of the West - The Europeans and the Americans have different interests.

Next, the interests of Israel.

Then we'll run through the key events originating from the Banderite-American coup in Kiev, which continue to unfold.

#UkrOligarchs" id="UkrOligarchs">The Ukrainian oligarchs

Firstly - the Ukrainian business clans.

Ihor Kolomoisky's Privat

The next corporate group is Privat. This is the most interesting one. It's the group of Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky's worth is 3 billion dollars. His partner is Gennady Bogolubov. Kolomoisky is a very interesting figure. Not only because he called our president a schizophrenic. 'He is the engine behind what is currently happening in Ukraine.

In 2012 analysts such as Matveev warned that there would be a very brutal conflict in 2013 between the business clans, between the oligarchs. And that's what happened.

What do we mean by clans in Ukraine? First we need to understand the division of power at the end of 2013. There are four basic clans.

Firstly the Donetsk clan - Rinat Akhmetov, whose fortune is estimated at $16 billion. His main interests are mining and steel production. This clan includes Boris Kolesnikov, the Kluevs, Yury Ivanyuschenko.

The second clan is the Yanukovych family. They control principally the customs officials, farming and infrastructure. By comparison this clan is a bit poorer, but they have held very powerful administrative positions. Yanukovych's "achievement" is that during his presidency the welfare state of Ukraine was finished off. Or rather, what was left of it. Destruction of the welfare state began during the time of Kuchma. Yuschenko and Tymoshenko significantly reduced the welfare state. And Yanukovych finished it off.

It's very interesting to examine the growth of the billionaire class. In 2010 the number of billionaires in Ukraine was 8. By only 2011 there were 21.

The Yanukovych regime greatly favored the growth of the billionaire class. Yanukovych's main sponsors were Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitry Firtash. The division of labor was: Ahkmetov controlled the government and Firtash the presidential administration.

The next massive bloc is Firtash, which is RosUkrEnergo, energy production and chemicals. They are the main partner of Rothschild in Ukraine. One of Firtash's main advisers is Robert Shetler-Jones. I'll talk about him later. An entrepreneur from the Rothschild group. Moreover, he's from MI6.

By the way, in all British corporations, in order to occupy a senior position, it is mandatory to be vetted by MI6. Otherwise you don't get it.

The next corporate group is Privat. This is the most interesting one. It's the group of Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky's worth is 3 billion dollars. His partner is Gennady Bogolubov. Kolomoisky is a very interesting figure. Not only because he called our president a schizophrenic. He is the engine behind what is currently happening in Ukraine.

Born in 1963. Jewish. He very actively supports the Hasidic group Chabad, which is not a sect, it's a movement. He's the main sponsor of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish community. An old friend of Berezovsky. He owns about 200 companies, controls 40% of Ukrnafta, the media. A big fan of soccer. He owns: FC Dnipro, of Dnepropetrovsk, Arsenal Kyiv, and Hapoel of Tel-Aviv. He's the vice president of the Football Federation of Ukraine. Its president, Surkis, is a millionaire too, albeit not as big as Kolomoisky. He owns Dynamo Kyiv. Information frequently appears in the media about Kolomoisky's connections with international organized crime. He really wanted to buy up the assets of Sevastopol. Indeed he was on the verge of buying. He is the sponsor of Yuschenko, Tymoshenko and Klitschko, and of, paradoxical though it is, the ultra-nationalist Tyaghnibok.

It might seem strange that Kolomoisky the Jew would support Tyaghnibok the ultra-nationalist. But the main goal of Tyaghnibok is to get Ukrainians and Russians fighting each other. His ultra-nationalism is not anti-semitic.

Then there's another group in Ukraine, which no-one wants to talk about. Victor Pinchuk's group. He's the son-in-law of Kuchma. Pinchuk's people are Tigipko and Yatsenuk. According to experts such as Matveev, whom I mentioned and strongly recommend you look up, because of his enormous expertise, Pinchuk is very closely linked with the United States and with British intelligence, MI6.

Finally, one more part of the Ukrainian economy, which experts prefer not to write about. Arms trade, military technology and narcotics. Experts name dozens of names here. The main ones are: Vadim Rabinovitch, citizen of Israel, Ukraine and Hungary, Sergei Maximov and the Derkatch family. The elder Derkatch is Leonid Derkatch. He was the head of the Ukrainian security service, SBU. Now he holds all the cards, as he's dealing in weapons. Rabinovitch is a very interesting figure. He supports the gay-lesbian party Raduga and the Kiev feminist group Femen. Often quarrels with other Jewish oligarchs.

In general what characterizes the situation in Ukraine is that there isn't a single political center, This propagates into Ukraine's Jewish community too. They don't have a unified center either. There are constant squabbles, to impose their point of view. There are angry clashes between the secular part and those who support the Hasids and Chabadists. For example, there was a very angry conflict over the construction of the memorial at Babi Yar. Kolomoisky insisted there be a synagogue and an iconic building. Vitaly Nakhmanovitch said no, the place should be absolutely secular. There are very severe clashes.

For example, In 2011 Kolomoisky established the European Jewish Parliament, which sits in the European Parliament. It has a leaning toward Hadism and Chabad. The secular group is, for example, Vyacheslav Kantor. They haven't accepted all of this. There is an on-going angry clash. There are humorous situations. For example, Kolomoisky supports Chabad. Chabad supported Yanukovych during the election. Kolomoisky has openly come out against Yanukovych. This whole tangle of clashes has flared up. In 2013 it got very nasty. Moreover, the greed and stupidity of Yanukovych's mafioso clan revealed itself when they imposed their fees not only on the medium-sized businesses, they even went into the small businesses. Basically, they had to pay 60% to this family.

So you can understand those who went to the Maidan. They had had enough of that clan.

A different matter is who exploited the situation. Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 about revolutions: We now know what role stupidity plays in revolutions, and how scumbags will exploit it. So that was the Ukrainian oligarchs.

#RockefellersEtc" id="RockefellersEtc">Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Intelligence agencies

The next players on the Ukrainian field are: the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds entered Ukraine immediately after Ukraine became free from the Soviet Union. The Rothschild group entered in 1991-95. Likewise MI6 entered with a free hand.

Basically all western intelligence agencies had a free hand in Ukraine. That's why some experts call Ukraine the sandpit of the intelligence agencies. The CIA has a whole floor dedicated to Ukraine. We got this information now. But those who worked under cover in Ukraine in the late '90s were already reporting that SBU is a subsidiary of the FBI and the CIA, who were actively working there. Likewise the BND (German intelligence) were very actively working with their Banderite underground. And MI6 was working more unnoticed.

I'm not even going to mention the Israeli agents. I'll come to that later. Basically they all had a completely free hand. Firtash soon became the main partner of the Rothschilds. His partner from the Rothschilds was Robert Shetler-Jones. He is considered by experts to be the instigator of the gas wars between Ukraine and Russia. He was the one getting Ukraine and Russia to fight over gas. Notice the Rothschild group is at work in the East of Ukraine. That's the area they want to get their hands on, in particular the Dnepropetrovsk region, where the bank "Rothschild Europe" and their "Royal Dutch Shell" are operating.

The interests of the Rothschilds strongly clash with the interests of Russia. Remember that when we talk about the interests of the USA and of Britain, there are different interest groups in these countries. Not for nothing the great French geopolitical analyst Alexandre Del Valle talks about not the foreign policy of the US, but the foreign politicians of the US. There are different clans. The clans behind Obama want one thing, and the clans behind the neo-cons want something completely different. So they really have different foreign policies. The Rothschilds busily exploit crises and chaos which can be manipulated by the world players in order to buy up assets in Ukraine, likewise in Central Asia, and where possible in Russia. It's about gaining control of resource economies. That's a very important aspect.

The Rockefellers have more modest interests. For example, Chevron Corporation, which is in the Rockefeller empire. The Ivano-Frankivsk region was basically handed to them by Yanukovych. It's hard to even say whether Ivano-Frankivsk belongs to Ukraine or belongs to Chevron Corporation. The Rockefellers are more interested in Western Ukraine than Eastern.

#IsraeliInterests" id="IsraeliInterests">Israeli interests in Ukraine

The next player in Ukraine is Israel, which is represented in Ukraine by Mossad and practically all of the Israeli intelligence services. Including the Komemiyut management, that's an administration within Mossad, whose business is the physical removal of Mossad's opponents. Komemiyut is Hebrew for "sovereignty". This Komemiyut administration, for example, they were the ones who killed the Iranian nuclear scientists. They are very effective, like Mossad generally. Aman is military intelligence service of the Prime Minister. Shabak is the internal security service. Shin Bet, Nativ - they are all present in Ukraine. Israel's current ambassador in Ukraine is Reuven Din El - formerly a Mossad resident in the CIS countries, he was thrown out of Moscow, and then received in Ukraine as ambassador.

Vlad Lerner of Nativ is the First Secretary of the Israeli embassy. In this respect you have to give them their dues, the Israeli intelligence services, for how they work in Ukraine. Also important to be clearly aware of - Mossad operates in close contact with CIA and MI6. It's a unified snake of intelligence agencies, which gets the job done.

All of the western intelligence agencies, including Israel's, are very active in the higher education establishments in Ukraine. This year I gave a lecture at the Seliger youth forum. Guys from Kiev told me that in almost all large institutes of higher education in Ukraine, especially in Kiev, there is a NATO room, a NATO department. If you want to make a career, you have to attend several of their programs. That's what's going on. The Anglo-american intelligence services are not falling behind Mossad.

What is Israeli intelligence doing? Under the guise of looking for students who are Jewish or have Jewish roots, they try to pick out all the talented students with good prospects, and send them to study in the West. Of all the universities in the West, where I have taught, Columbia, Yale, New York, the most powerful where I taught, was the Central European University of Soros, where only Jews are educated, moreover very well-prepared and carefully selected ones. On the course I lectured on there were three guys from Russia. Not from Moscow, but from Arkhangelsk, Ivanovo and Petersburg. These guys were really chosen ones, genuinely powerful. Central European University is the only university where I gave lectures. I was dealing with junior colleagues more than with students. The standard pace of study at the Central European University is 400 pages per day, as it was with comrade Stalin. Many can't endure it.

I know a student who came from the Russian State University for the Humanities, for example, who studied for a month, and said that she physically can't continue, and she went home. And of course the tuition is conducted in English, although they welcome people with more languages.

#GlobalContext" id="GlobalContext">The wider global context

Let's look at the situation in and around Ukraine in a wider, global context, considering the role which the West collectively, by their various games, has assigned to Ukraine.

Firstly - the battle against Russia.

secondly - the clash with China, and

thirdly - concerning the unleashing of war in the Middle East.

Let me repeat, By no means is it all groups in the West, who want to unleash war in the Middle East. But quite a few of them are interested in it. Likewise Saudi Arabia and Israel are interested, for a whole series of reasons. And these three vectors converge in Ukraine - all three plans unite into one.

That is, the global geo-economic and geo-political re-distribution of assets in the course of the global economic crisis.

#yellowstone" id="yellowstone">The "Yellowstone Threat"

Of course, there is this Yellowstone threat - I mean the super-volcano. That could completely change the rules of play at any time. The super-volcano could solve for the Western elite the very problems which they've been trying to solve for the last 50-60 years and have been unable to. An eruption of the volcano could solve those problems. But that's another subject.

Wikispooks note: On its face this seems a bizarre diversion from the subject in hand - suggestions on Fursov's reasons for the diversion welcome on the discussion page.

#OriginOf" id="OriginOf">The origin of the current situation

Let's look at how the situation came about that preceded the current situation, namely: It's 1991. The USSR has collapsed. After 10 years of robbery the Americans are wondering "should we go for more?" Evidently they decided not to, as it would have fallen to the Chinese. Besides, Yeltsin's team seemed to be running the country into the ground. Then suddenly in 2001 came the attacks in New York. The Americans' political vector shifted to the Middle East. They became occupied with the Middle East. i.e. they got distracted from the goals.

Then we had Iraq, Afghanistan. During this time the Russian Federation got room to breathe, rise onto its feet again. Then there was the war of 08.08.08, which showed the West they had somewhat let go of Russia.

After that the Medvedev episode, when we didn't react on Libya. Evidently, 08.08.08, Putin's coming to power, and our position on Syria, in spite of the West's pressure, changed the approach toward Russia of those who brought Obama to power.

Two points to note:

1. Obama established his military doctrine during his address to the Australian parliament on 17 Nov 2011, and
2. A new military doctrine of the US, established by Obama on 05 Jan 2012.

In the new doctrine of 05 Jan 2012 is established that the US can wage one war and some other indirect actions in other parts of the world. Previously it said two wars - meaning they're not up to that any more. More interesting statements made by Obama in the Australian parliament 17 Nov 2011: This was said in Obama's vague style. But if we call a spade a spade, it means:

Firstly: in this doctrine: political-economic encirclement of China. Control over the flow of energy into China. That's why we have seen their naval power being moved to the straits between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. This is why land-based energy supply routes are so important for China. Sea-based supply routes can be easily interrupted by the Americans.

Secondly: applying pressure on the Russian Federation, as a partner of China, and as a country beginning to rise up.

Really, Obama didn't say anything new here.

There's an organization Stratfor -(Strategic Forecasting Inc), a kind of private CIA. Their founder and chairman, George Friedman, said openly that the primary task of the United States is the destabilization of Eurasia, in order that there could never be a state or group of states able to challenge the US.

The key region for dealing with the problem of China and Russia is the Middle East, which is also important in and of itself: Oil, Iran, the Caspian, Azerbaijan in particular. Pay attention to Azerbaijan. Have no illusions. This is a faithful partner of Israel and the US. This country pumps oil to Israel and Ukraine, receives arms from USA, Ukraine and Israel, and has Israeli advisers busy working with its army. In the event of a conflict with the Armenians, who are good warriors, I don't think that the Azeribaijani Army would perform any better than they have up to now, but it's a fact that today they are more capable and better trained.

#GoalsME" id="GoalsME">The goals of the interested parties in the Middle East

The Americans need controlled chaos and civil war in Ukraine.

The Europeans need Ukraine whole - a market where they can dump all kinds of junk. A market for cheap labor, on top of everything else. It is truly an unexploited consumer market to be opened up with 44 million people, now minus Crimea.

Obama. That is, the clans behind Obama ( By the way, my views about Obama haven't changed. General Ovchinsky and I wrote an article, when Obama had just become president, entitled "The Cardboard Box President". We haven't changed our view since then.) When I say "Obama", I mean the clan behind him. From the very beginning these clans wanted to improve relations with Iran to the detriment of relations with Israel, obviously. How is Iran useful for the United States? Imagine Iran as a partner of the US. Firstly, it's a much bigger country than Israel. It occupies a magnificent geopolitical position. Has magnificent resources. If Iran is a partner of the US, then you have an Iran-India axis against China, against Russia, while maintaining the tension. Israel has the tension of being a Jewish state with Arabs, while Iran is Shi-ite. The tension is primarily with the Sunni monarchs, with Saudi Arabia. Thus the tension will remain.

Obama has taken a whole series of steps intended to improve relations with Iran. A whole wave of publications appeared, claiming that the US was going to abandon Israel. But Obama found himself under the powerful influence of a variety of groups, including the pro-Israel lobby. Improvement of relations with Iran isn't happening so far. What's interesting is that whether relations with Iran improve or deteriorate, it forces the Americans to solve two problems.

One is to eliminate the regime of Assad. And with that eliminate the "fabulous" organization Hezbollah. We don't regard Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It's a Lebanese Shi'ite organization, which is truly global. For example: one of the key centers of the Hezbollah is the region of Iguazu Falls. Anyone know where Iguazu Falls is? In South America. It's the border area of Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil. There is a huge number of tourists there. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas have made themselves a little nest there. But the main thing is that the Lebanese diaspora is there. When we hear "diaspora" we think of the Jewish diaspora, the Armenian diaspora. But the Lebanese diaspora is no less sizable, it's just quieter. They don't make a lot of noise. 100 years ago the Lebanese began to establish themselves in Africa, South America. They moved into the part of Africa where diamonds are mined: Sierra Leone, Liberia, and a few in Angola. In this border area, where the Lebanese diaspora is, along with Hezbollah and other organizations, they buy cocaine and transfer it on submarines to Western Africa. Previously they used submarines sold by Ukrainians. Now those submarines are out of commission and others are used. The cocaine is transferred to Sierra Leone, where it is exchanged for diamonds. With the diamonds they purchase arms. This triangle - Hezbollah, Syria, Iran - gets in the way of the Americans. They take the view, correctly, that eliminating Syria as an Arab partner of Iran, whether relations with Iran are good or bad, Iran will be weaker, and it will be easier to get an agreement with them. The removal of the Assad regime therefore became objective No.1 for the Americans. Likewise for Saudi Arabia and Israel.

But it turned out that the template for the Arab Spring didn't work in Syria, so they had to intervene militarily. But the intervention was foiled, thanks to the position of Russia and China. The West's aggression against Syria was the first really serious military phase toward re-drawing the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Let me stress: the first serious military phase. Libya doesn't count here. That had to do with the fact that Libyan oil was very important for the Americans. The production cost of Libyan oil is $1. So that was very important. But Libya and Syria are different countries with different potential. In Syria it didn't work out for them, I repeat, primarily because of the position of Russia and China. The American offensive against the Russian Federation and China in the Syrian theater failed. That plus the presidency of Putin forced the Western elite to look for other maneuvers.

They started looking for where to attack - and Ukraine came up. Because in Ukraine an explosive situation had developed on all levels: amongst the oligarchs themselves, between the oligarchs and the population. It would have been a shame for the Americans and Europeans not to exploit that. Although, the Americans and Europeans do have completely different objectives in Ukraine.

The Americans need controlled chaos and civil war. The Europeans need Ukraine whole - a market where they can dump all kinds of junk. A market for cheap labor, on top of everything else. It is truly an unexploited consumer market to be opened up with 44 million people, now minus Crimea.

In principle, Ukraine is not currently a member of NATO. But that didn't stop Ukraine participating in all four of NATO´s military campaigns. Thus Veronika Krasheninnikova was right, when she said on TV that for us the current issue with Ukraine is where the NATO boundary will be located. Doesn't matter if Ukraine joins NATO de-jure or not. It's clear that it will become a NATO country.

Moreover, it is absolutely clear that this country is intended to be absolutely anti-Russian, nationalist, Banderite and neo-Nazi. So the dual goal of establishing this anti-Russian state is to apply pressure on the Russian Federation - constantly. The long term goal is to pull Russia into the Western camp and start a fight: We put pressure on Russia. Then Russia, in order to reach agreement with the West, to solve this problem of constant provocations, turns toward the West. Next, Russia becomes a tool for the West to pressurize China. If possible, even get China and Russia fighting with each other - that would be the ideal scenario for the West.

Like they perpetually have Russia fighting with Germany and France. It's the same pattern again and again. The current situation in Ukraine, which began in late 2013, has served this purpose. Hegel talked about "the insidiousness of history". Those 30 days, 15 Feb to 17 Mar, broke everything. And changed the world.

The era which began in the period 1989-94 in our eyes is coming to an end, or has ended. We often quote Brzezinski's words: "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire." But that's not true. Russia can be a great power even without Ukraine. A different matter is that it will be more difficult and will take longer.

And what is Ukraine? The Eastern part of Ukraine was never part of Ukraine. The Bolsheviks did that. They needed to increase the proletariat ratio in Ukraine. That was the only reason why they moved those regions into Ukraine. But never mind that. The main thing is that Brzezinski's words are not original. He is repeating the words of the German general Paul Rohrbach, who at the beginning of the 20th century foretold:

"To eliminate the danger that Europe, and above all Germany, faces from Russia, it is necessary to completely separate Ukrainian Russia from Muscovite Russia".

Notice that for the German general - Ukraine and Muscovy are both Russia. He is talking about the need to bring about an internal Russian split. That wasn't original from Rohrbach either. He is developing the idea of the German politicians from the end of the 19th century, including Bismarck, who proposed specific means to solve this problem. In particular he emphasized the need to pit Ukraine against Russia, to get their peoples fighting. But why? As he wrote:

,p>"We must cultivate among the Ukrainians a people whose consciousness is altered to such an extent, that they begin to hate everything Russian".

Thus we are talking about a historical psy-op, an information-psychological sabotage, whose purpose is to establish russophobic Slavs - Orcs at the service of the western Saruman. They are the means to separate Ukraine from Russia and to oppose Russia as a kind of anti-Russian 'Rus', as a free, democratic Ukraine of the totalitarian empire. This was all devised under the Galician Project, on which the intelligence services of Austro-Germany and Kaiser German worked, followed by the intelligence service of the Third Reich, later - CIA and BND.

#FourthReichIntel" id="FourthReichIntel">The intelligence service of the Fourth Reich at work

Although I don't have direct proof, there is no doubt that the intelligence service of the Fourth Reich has been at work here, the "Fourth International", known as "Daisy". When D-day and H-hour came, the Galician project and the Banderite underground got the starting gun - figuratively and literally.

Fast forward to the Orange Revolution of 2004, which differs from the current situation. The Orange Revolution of 2004 was organized by neo-liberals. Those behind it in Ukraine and the West thought that this would be sufficient to create the anti-Russian Ukraine. But it wasn't. So during the current events a different approach was rolled out: an alliance of neo-liberals and ultra-nationalists, in effect neo-Nazis. The neo-liberals are the face of the West. And the neo-Nazi militants and storm-troopers were the ones to break the power of Yanukovych, and terrify Eastern Ukraine. Wise people did warn Yanukovych that he shouldn't play with fire with Tyaghnibok and allow him to develop his movement. Yanukovych's plan, as experts have shown, was: We'll pump up Tyaghnibok. Then, at election time, the East, terrified by Tyaghnibok, will vote for Yanukovych. He was playing a kind of chess game. But the West wasn't playing chess at all. They knocked over the pieces and used the chess board for a completely different game.

#WhyNow" id="WhyNow">Why did this happen now?

Firstly - Ukraine is an absolutely non-viable, artificial construction, which could only function normally within the framework of the Soviet Union. Despite being the only post-soviet state, apart from Russia and Belarus, which could have stood on its own feet, it didn't. The Ukrainian SSR was in ways very important in the Soviet Union. Who remembers where Ukraine was placed at the National Exhibition of Economic Achievements (????)? Right in the center! Now it has fallen into neglect, but they are at the center of that Exhibition. The importance of Ukraine was emphasized in every way. And Ukraine could only exist within the framework of the USSR. Outside the USSR Ukraine is not capable of developing. What has kept it afloat? The Soviet heritage, which they have been eating their way through for twenty years. One can marvel again at what a heritage it was, when the Ukrainian oligarchs have been stupidly eating through it more stupidly than the Russian oligarchs, and it lasted twenty years. But, as they said in ancient Rome, "Nihil dat fortuna mancipio" ("Fortune gives nothing forever.") and in 2013 that heritage was finally eaten up. Moreover, Yanukovych was very busy eating it up. Ukraine stood over the precipice. Russia could have saved them. But that was categorically undesirable for the US. That was the first part.

Secondly. After the 2004 Maidan, as I said, the Western puppet-master presumed that it was sorted: people like Yuschenko and Tymoshenko could solve all the problems. But it turned out they couldn't. Yanukovych came to power. He played almost all the same games. Played very inconsistently. Played with the Americans, with Russia. In the end he overplayed his hand.?

The scorecard from these twenty years is positive for the West. They have been very busy in Ukraine: with the help of various non-commercial, non-governmental organizations, they have done a quite fantastic job. Dozens of non-commercial Western organizations have been at work. As for us... do we have any non-governmental organizations busy at work in the sphere of foreign policy? "Russkiy Mir". When did they appear? Not long ago. Their effectiveness... Any other organizations? There is "Rossotrudnichestvo", who have little money. "Institute of CIS Countries" - that's an institution. "Gorchakov Fund" exists too. But all of this is recent initiatives and these organizations don't have the funds.

The Americans have been pumping massive amounts of money into the place. Besides, all these years there has been a Banderite underground operating in Ukraine, in cooperation with the American and West-German intelligence agencies. Moreover, geographically Ukraine is not a Baltic state. Incidentally, who knows when the last "Forest Brother" was killed in the Baltic states? 1960? - 1974. But, you know, there's nowhere to hide really in the Baltic states, but in Ukraine there is. And the Banderite underground has always been there. Of course, the West has always been working with them.

Obviously there were serious domestic reasons for the events of December, January, February (2014). Impoverishment of the population. Dissatisfaction with this miser-oligarch regime of Yanukovych. Now what do we see? The family of Yanukovych is gone. In their place has come the family of Tymoshenko. One family of oligarchs has been replaced by another. They've been putting oligarchs in charge of the cities of the East. Not by chance I quoted the words of Marx and Engels regarding the European revolution of 1848. "We now know what role stupidity plays in revolutions, and how scumbags will exploit it." Indeed, exploit they did.

As far as we can tell from the unfolding events, the greed of the ruling clan was exploited in general and in specific ways from the eventful situation. "D"-day and "H"-hour came on 21 Feb.

Since I am in science and not intelligence, my information is only indirect, but it is confirmed by another analysis too. Towards 18:00 on 21 Feb half of the Maidan was cleared. And it could have ended at that. But you know, between 18:00 and 20:00 ... There were about 15,000 Maidan protesters. There were being shifted by a group of about 3,000 some of whom gave me this information. Walking behind them was Berkut. They reported that all of a sudden Berkut stopped. "We were proceeding, but Berkut stopped." They had been given the order to stop. What happened between 18:00 and 20:00 ? Let us re-create the events. This is my version. I'm not forcing it upon anyone, by any means.

At that point Yanukovych decided that he had won and could start negotiations. Moreover, the Americans had told him they knew where his billion was stashed. Here Yanukovych decided to play a stupid country-boy trick. He decided to trick the Americans, not realizing that they would trick him, by not respecting the agreement. Any they wouldn't exactly forget his betrayal anyway. At this point, when the opportunity to clear out Maidan was lost, events turned in a different direction. I was saying on the 21st, 22nd, that this is a situational loss for Russia, because if the only pro-Russian force we could set up in 20 years was the one fronted by Yanukovych, then that is a poor performance by us.

What was Chernomyrdin up to? He was singing songs and playing the accordion with the Ukrainian oligarchs. Evidently that was his destiny - it turned out nicely for him. What Zubarov was doing we have no idea. But clearly he was making some nice gas deals, hanging out with the oligarchs. The western intelligence, and the non-governmental organizations, they worked with the oligarchs, the intelligentsia and the masses. And look at the result: although Kiev is not a Galician city, 90% of the Kiev intelligentsia are supporters of the Galician Project. That means the Western intelligence did a good job. Indeed, that was their job.

A different matter is that we didn't work like that. We were chatting with oligarchs instead of getting on with other things. Again, if our only pro-Russian force at a high political level was this person called Yanukovych, then that's our failure. Of course, losing one round doesn't mean you lost the match. Indeed, the actions of the Russian authorities in Crimea showed that having lost a round, you can still win the match. The match of the 17th-18th was won. But that match was only over Crimea. There is still Eastern, South-Eastern Ukraine.

#WhatWestWanted" id="WhatWestWanted">What the West wanted

Now let's look at what the West wanted, what their plan was. What did the West need out of this situation? Let's think like the Westerners. That is, those who planned this. This is really the right approach.

In the summer when I was in London, I read the English papers. There was a marvelous editorial in the Financial Times. This editorial was basically slamming tutors of economics at English universities. They were saying that if you want to train an economist, don't hammer into their heads what is written by economists. Teach them to think like economists. Incidentally, likewise we need to teach people to think the way the politicians do. Our political science is reduced to a model where people only know the theories of political science. But the theories of political science are very far from reality. Indeed, they exist to hide the thinking of politicians. It's a misdirection.

Plan "Minimum": the West establishes a Slavic, neo-Nazi, Banderite Reich. Constant pressure on Russia, provocations by various means. If Russia reacts - tell everyone that "the huge totalitarian Russia is harassing the free Ukraine" The same template was used on Yugoslavia: "Those poor Albanians - victims of the evil Serbs."

Plan "Maximum": same as when the German Nazi Reich was established in the 1930s. Set up the forces, which, if necessary for the West, will take on the decisive part of the war against Russia. Some will say: "What a nightmare! How are you supposed to go to war against Russia?" There are different situations. Who in Europe could wage war against Russia? Romanians, you think, could conduct a war? Poles - not themselves. What's needed is a kind of "pit bull terrier" state, which would be prepared to start at least a local conflict, to show the weakened Russia how events could develop.

If you think that's laying it on thick, refer to the history of relations between the West and Russia. Every aggression which Russia has endured in the last 200-300 years always came from the West. There was no aggression by Russia in the West. Only two points: the liberation campaign against Napoleon, which, by the way, as Kutuzov said, should have been ended in 1813. without going beyond our own borders. "Leave France and England there to love each other perversely and engage with each other". That was one campaign. The second was in 1849, Nikolai I. In my view this was a mistake, although he was a great Czar. It was assistance to suppress the Hungarian uprising in Austro-Hungary. That was unnecessary. Let the Hungarians beat up the Austrians. Let them have their own little theater of chaos in Central Europe. It will be easier for us. Apart from those, Russia never took any action in the West. That was the 19th century.

As for sending forces into Czechoslovakia, that was done in accordance with the rules, written in the Warsaw Pact. NATO has the same rules. In the statutes of NATO, in black and white, is stated:

"If any NATO state is in danger due to internal or external changes, forces are to be deployed immediately"

Yet when we sent in forces they called it the "Brezhnev Doctrine" ... It's just that our propagandists are poor. We should have explained that it was done as prescribed in the Warsaw Convention and the NATO statutes, as in all such organizations. But I was talking about the 19th century.

As for the 20th century, the Soviet leadership missed a unique opportunity in 1968. They were slow, only reacting to events. During the May unrest in Paris 1968, the Soviet leadership, by utilizing the French Communist Party, could well have gotten NATO forces to enter Paris in response to demonstrations by the communists and the unions. If NATO forces had entered Paris, we could have been shouting for 30 years about how NATO crushed the French students. Then they wouldn't be talking about any "Prague Spring". But the Soviet leader was only reacting to events. Because they were a reactive government. As Arnold Toynbee noted: "The West's policy toward Russia is one of aggression." By the way, Toynbee wasn't a russophile. "The Russian expansion is of a defensive nature", wrote Arnold Toynbee. The end goal of the North-Atlantic elite has always been the elimination of Russia. In this respect Leonid Shebarshin, one of the most visible leaders of Soviet intelligence, was of course right, when he wrote: "What the West needs from Russia is that it not exist." That was strategic.

Tactically... In 1991 the West could have begun the dismemberment of Russia. But with China already rising, it didn't seem like a good idea. Besides, they decided to harass Russia over the course of, say, 20 years. During which time Russia managed to get on its feet again. Banderastan, if that's what Ukraine is fated to become, as designed by the puppet-masters across the ocean, is to be an oligarchic, terroristic, russophobic state. Russophobic - it's clear why. Quasi-state - because even post-Soviet Ukraine was not a fully independent state.

We are already seeing external administration of the country. Kiselëv was absolutely right, when he mentioned yesterday: "The visit of the CIA director to Kiev, plus the directive of the IMF to fire 12,000 workers in the social sector." They are making brutal cuts. IMF money always comes with requirements to cut social programs. Which in turn provokes unrest among the population. The government then has to take further action and you're into a vicious cycle. This is very well described in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. He explains it all very well.

An oligarchic Banderite Ukraine is unavoidable for this simple reason: Because of their corruption, inability and unwillingness, oligarchy is the ideal vehicle for external control. Clearly, this will suit both the oligarchs and the West.

Finally: if the marionette junta in Kiev can hold out, then by logic they will conduct a policy of terror against the East and South-East. A different matter is that they don't appear to have the power to do that. They are always talking about "deadlines". But they can't do anything, because they don't have real power. Besides, it's clear that the "Right Sector" is a serious threat to the Ukrainian leadership.

What else will the banderization of Ukraine mean, if it comes to pass? Well, the East and South-East are industrially developed regions. These areas are modernized. The West is agricultural. It's clear, the EU doesn't need Ukraine's modern industries like Yuzhmash and Motor-Sich: They are competitors and they have to go. They don't need Ukraine's atomic energy either. What they need is a place to store atomic waste.

#MuzychkosDeath" id="MuzychkosDeath">The death of Oleksandr Muzychko

One theory about why Oleksandr Muzychko was eliminated, and I'm very convinced by it, you can read it on the Internet, was that Tymoshenko, in need of money, made a deal with the Europeans, that Ukraine would immediately begin disposing of nuclear waste. The thing is that Ukraine doesn't have facilities for that. Which means they are just going to bury it. They intend to bury it in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. "It's already polluted. We'll bury and hide it all there". If a person is decisive... Well, Yatsenuk and Turnychov wouldn't touch that. Tymoshenko agreed with Yarosh, and Yarosh instructed Muzychko. But Musychko, although he looks brutal, he wasn't a fool. He understood that whoever was organizing this was going to eliminate him. That's why he started acting differently than Tymoshenko expected. So there was no other way out than to eliminate him.

As far as I know, the train with nuclear waste is currently waiting at the Polish-Ukrainian border, not going anywhere. It's completely obvious - Europe needs Ukraine as a dumping ground. What surprises me about the Ukrainian leadership is this: Those who will die or become sterilized by radiation, it's not only the commoners. It will affect the elite's children too. That surprises me. Why on earth is she turning the country into a dump, a source of radio-activity, if she lives there herself? You're planning to become the president, no? You're going to live there for 4-5 years? 4-5 years is plenty then. The banderization of Ukraine will mean its de-modernization, its futurist-archaization. If this junta is completely victorious in Ukraine, which I have a lot of doubts about, then Ukraine will collapse into this futurist-archaistic zone, more extreme than that depicted in the fantasy battle novels by Alexei Kolentev.

An important lesson from the whole Ukraine crisis, which for me is a positive, concerns the Russian media. For the first time they weren't the losers in a conflict. During the 08.08.08 war quite a few of them adopt anti-Russian positions. This time only certain completely frenzied structures took an anti-Russian position, the likes of "Echo Moskvy", and even at that not everyone there. On the one hand they have hysterical menopausal women. Their boss adopted a more restrained position. A significant group was called "national-traitors" by the president, for coming out in opposition. Nevertheless, our media didn't lose the infowar over Ukraine, and acted very correctly. In Crimea everything was organized very correctly. From the point of view of international law, any attempts to discredit it simply don't have a leg to stand on. Everything was done correctly.?

Still, this crisis has highlighted a whole series of double standards. I looked through the press at the time and will highlight a few points for you.

In an editorial of the New Statesman it is claimed that "Putin violated Ukraine's sovereignty." Violated - how so? "by sending troops into Crimea". That didn't happen. Then what should we call the actions of American diplomats who organized the overthrow of the legitimate president? It is a direct lie.

Then let's take the respectable "Economist" of 8 Mar. They made the accusation that Putin "has become more autocratic". No arguments given. Unwillingness to join in the games thrust upon people by the West is interpreted as autocraticness. By the same logic 'democracy' means licking the boots of NATO.

The same deceitful pathos that we saw over Qaddafi is repeated toward Putin in the rhetoric of articles in March about the situation in Russia. such as in Time magazine of 17 Mar. Likewise in the Spectator of 8 Mar. A certain O'Sullivan writes: "Putin has broken the consensus which arose after the end of the Cold War". As if Putin considers that this particular consensus should even have existed.

This is the impudence and impunity of NATO, who bombed Yugoslavia, which, as if that wasn't enough, they covered the whole of Yugoslavia with bombs. You probably saw the films. I learned about it from Serbs long ago. Moreover, when they bombed the Serbian areas, they peppered the place with uranium. Now in Serbia there is so much cancer. The population is just dying. Additionally, they dropped spermicides everywhere, which is causing male infertility, so that the Serbs, being a pro-Russian force in Europe, will be eliminated.

Later in the same edition of "The Spectator" they reported a statement by Obama that "Russia is on the wrong side of history". Obama's logic means that the right side of history is those who nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, attacked Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, killed hundreds of thousands of people - that's the right side of history.

#Kasparov" id="Kasparov">The infantile Garry Kasparov

But what made the biggest impression on me was an article by our own Garry Kasparov. In two respects:

'Firstly, how this guy (whom the West did accept) is presented, and his representation of history. Secondly, what he is offering to the West. The article is entitled "Cut off the oligarchs, they will bring down Putin". It was published in the very serious "Wall Street Journal", 10 Mar 2014. We can judge the author's intellect by the next statement. Kasparov writes: "For the second time in six years Putin ordered his troops to cross an internationally recognized border, and occupy foreign territory." The first time, he presumably means, was 08.08.08, and the second time - Crimea. When did Putin order the troops to enter Crimea? Where was there such a decision? We didn't send our troops into Crimea. Putin belongs to an exclusive club - along with Miloševi?, Saddam Hussein, - leaders who "invaded neighboring countries." Miloševi? didn't invade anywhere. Miloševi? was dealing with Kosovo, which was part of Yugoslavia. Saddam Hussein did invade Kuwait - that was a trap. And that wasn't at all the reason why they overthrew him. It wasn't in 1990-91 that they overthrew him.

Next, Kasparov writes: "In Yalta Stalin forced the weak Roosevelt and the powerless Churchill to accept his position on Poland, while Putin's policy on Crimea is the same as Hitler's annexation of Austria and Sudetenland". If a student were to write that in an exam, I would immediately give them a "two" and send them to re-sit. The point is not even that neither Churchill nor Roosevelt was weak. Churchill and Stalin, although this sounds cynical, they swapped Poland and Greece. They agreed that the USSR would get 90% domination in Poland and 10% in Greece, and Britain vice-versa: 90% in Greece, 10% in Poland. So the Soviet Union stopped actively supporting the Greek communists. And they got crushed by the English. On the other hand, we solved our Poland problem. For us Poland was more important than Greece. Evidently, Kasparov wasn't told about that. Kasparov continues: (Why I'm talking about Kasparov, who is very active in our opposition, is to demonstrate the intellectual level of these people.) "If Putin wins", writes Kasparov, "then the world which came out of 1945 will disintegrate". Kasparov from the mid-80s is like the hero of the American short story "Rip van Winkle", who fell asleep and later woke up to find that America is no longer part of the British empire but a free country. "Rip Van Winkle" means anyone who woke up to find themself in a different world. The thing is that the world order from 1945 collapsed in 1989 in Malta, when Gorbachev gave everything away. Journalists coined the term, although it didn't stick: the "Maltese System", to replace the Yalta system. So it makes no sense any more to talk about breaking the world order from Yalta.

Here's one thing that really deserves attention: What does Kasparov recommend the West do? He says they need to "put pressure on the oligarchs", not on Putin, but on the oligarchs. If pressure is put on them, then they will carry out a coup and overthrow Putin. This is a Russian citizen telling the US State dept what they need to do to effect regime change in Russia. Imagine if this were a US citizen sitting in Russia, for example, or, who knows, in China, talking about how to overthrow Obama, I think that person would have serious problems - very serious. Yet Kasparov is free to come and go in Russia as he pleases, and no-one is revoking is citizenship.

#GoodbyeAmerica" id="GoodbyeAmerica">Goodbye, America!

No more the kind of relations that existed under the Russian authorities of the 1990s, or even during Putin's first term, or the Medvedev period, those days are gone. Because: The West won't forgive what this leadership does. And this leadership, considering the behavior of the West... Well, if they were in any doubt before: "Look, we're not Miloševi?, we're not Saddam Hussein, or Qaddafi, they wouldn't do that to us".

Well, now there can be no doubt. The West has no brakes. In trying to solve their own problems, they'll keep going until they hit the wall.

What's the importance of these February-March events? Let's get to the heart of the matter. For the first time since 1991 the West, the United States of America, they set up, albeit covertly, an aggression against the Russian world. Because Ukraine is in the territory of the Russian world. They organized an aggression far away from their own shores. Ukraine cannot possibly be in the United States' zone of interest. Mexico perhaps, maybe even Cuba. They could declare Cuba to be in their zone of interest,

But Ukraine is very far away, like Iraq is. This was an aggression for the first time since 1991. They decided that they could do this. For the first time since 1991, we gave the aggressor a pasting - big time. Despite all the shouting and bawling in the West, we didn't give up, we re-united with Crimea, and, as the president said in Red Square: "Crimea has returned to its native harbor". In spite of all the shouting and everything else. With that, the song by the group "Nautilus Pompilius" - "Goodbye, America!" - takes on a certain symbolic meaning. Indeed: "Goodbye, America!" No more the kind of relations that existed under the Russian authorities of the 1990s, or even during Putin's first term, or the Medvedev period, those days are gone. Because: The West won't forgive what this leadership does. And this leadership, considering the behavior of the West... Well, if they were in any doubt before: "Look, we're not Miloševi?, we're not Saddam Hussein, or Qaddafi, they wouldn't do that to us".

Well, now there can be no doubt. The West has no brakes. In trying to solve their own problems, they'll keep going until they hit the wall. With this marvelous re-unification with Crimea, this whole Crimean Victory, which really puts an end to a distinct era, a few problems still remain. The first problem is the incompatibility between the direction of our foreign policy toward restoring our status as a great nation and the neo-liberal economic course of the government, nominally Medvedev's. Confrontation against the West is unsustainable on a foundation of neo-liberal economics. Enduring it is only possible on the basis of a mobilization economy. At the same time, a mobilization economy is only possible within a mobilized social system. In other words, the relations with the West which are now taking shape for the period ahead require very serious domestic changes.

#ChangeRussia" id="ChangeRussia">The required Russian domestic changes

The Russian 5th Column

Those, whom Putin called the national-traitors. Quantitatively, it's a smallish group, but it includes representatives of the authorities, business, media, intelligentsia, education. You just need to look for who was shouting the loudest that the re-unification with Crimea is the same as what Hitler did with Austria.

The first change is cosmetic: A policy of lawful suppression of the fifth column. That's the very first step which has to be taken. Next we need to strengthen a number of matters relating to economics and social structure. Because in half a year, the euphoria over the re-unification with Crimea will have passed, and in the Fall our economic problems will re-surface. Our most optimistic assessments of economic growth are 1%. As a minimum we need 5-6% Of course, the population's dissatisfaction with the economic situation will be exploited by those who organized the Bolotnaya mass protest. They will take advantage of people's dissatisfaction. Of course, there will arise an alliance of neo-liberals and ultra-nationalists. It will quickly become, "the oligarchs", and "the battle against corruption", and so on. Then, if they are successful, the next group of oligarchs will come along, who will... Revolution is something which changes the socio-economic structure. Not one of these "color revolutions" brought about any change in the socio-economic structure. The regimes were replaced with pro-Western ones. Nothing more. That needs to be well understood.

If Russia switches to a system of mobilization, the North-Atlantic elite, and their network of agents in the Russian Federation, will attempt to bring down the existing regime, and, I repeat, that will be done under the banner of "fighting corruption" and so on. This is why we need to pay attention to the February Maidan in Kiev and the heroes it revealed. Look. Tymoshenko went on the stage at the Maidan and said that the events in Kiev are a model for the peoples of all post-Soviet republics in their battle against dictators. The son of the war criminal Shukhevych, Yury Shukhevych, who served a prison sentence here, declared:

"The February Maidan is the continuation of the events of 1991, the beginning of the second anti-Soviet revolution, the first being 1991-1993, which should finally destroy the dream of resurrecting the Soviet Union".

For them, clearly, the Maidan was indeed a continuation of 1991-93. Russia's tough reaction to the Maidan - protecting Crimea - they didn't expect that.

The second problem is closely connected to the first and arises from it. The fifth column. Those, whom Putin called the national-traitors. Quantitatively, it's a smallish group, but it includes representatives of the authorities, business, media, intelligentsia, education. You just need to look for who was shouting the loudest that the re-unification with Crimea is the same as what Hitler did with Austria. Moreover, these people managed to avoid the issue that Austria was given to Hitler by Britain and France: without their approval he could never have annexed Austria. The reason they let Hitler annex Austria: Hitler didn't have currency reserves, Austria did. By giving him Austria, they gave him the currency reserves needed to re-arm. Next they let him have Czechoslovakia, because he needed their military-industrial potential, which the Reich didn't have. He needed to get across the border into the Soviet Union.

The Ukraine crisis has demonstrated the unity of the people and authorities of Russia when it comes to such an important issue as bringing together the Russian world. But this crisis makes it necessary and urgent to resolve a number of issues in this country. In my view, the following issues.

Firstly. Suppression of the fifth column by political-legal measures, cut them off from the media and sources of finance, principally from the West.

Secondly. Switch over to a mobilization economy, and switch to a mobilized social system, an element of which will be the mobilization economy.

Thirdly. Re-format the legal sphere. Eliminate the precedence of international law over national law.

Incidentally, they don't have such precedence in the UK or US. That's something they've successfully foisted upon others. Terminate participation in openly anti-Russian structures, and, moreover, financing them.

Fourthly. Strengthen the military alliance with Belarus, notwithstanding the objective and subjective complications of the process. Far from everything said by Lukashenko about the situation in Crimea impressed me. But he did say one very important thing. Belarus will never do anything detrimental to Russia. That's good. In my view he should have said more.

Fifthly. Counteract the opponent, the aggressor, not only around our own borders, but in any part of the world where we have the possibility: establish their degree of vulnerability. We need to conduct ourselves toward the West exactly as they have conducted themselves toward Russia since it came into existence in 1991.

Recently the film-maker Karen Shakhnazarov said something very true when he appeared on TV: The West never ended the Cold War against Russia. The Soviet Union disintegrated, everything continued. Brzezinski spoke very honestly in one of his interviews, this was after the Cold War had already ended. He said: "Don't fool yourself. We are not at war with communism, but with Russia, whatever it may be called." If he´d said war against "the Russian spirit", then he would have been practically repeating the words of Churchill, who said in 1940:

"We are not at war with Hitler, or even the National-Socialism. We are at war with the German spirit, the spirit of Schiler, so that it may never be revived."

The kind of spiritual castration that was imposed upon the Germans after 1945, that's what they wanted to do to Russia after 1991.

In one of his interviews Alexander Rahr, he's a kind of German fringe politician, said that many Western politicians and journalist are surprised as to why Russia doesn't repent. Meaning: Russia lost the Cold War, so they must repent. One more thing he said, for which he was criticized in the West: "For the West the victory over the Soviet Union was no less important, and possibly more important, that the victory over Hitler." Because Hitler belonged to them. Russia never did. This is why we have to counteract the opponent not only on our borders and not when he invades us. We need to make problems for the opponent wherever he is vulnerable.

Sixthly. We must roll out a powerful, massive, informational counter-attack against the North-Atlantic elite. Particularly aggressive wherever they have problems. Specifically, in the Muslim and Spanish-speaking worlds.

I am working closely with the Spanish- and Arabic-language services of Russia Today. They're doing a great job. What is meant by the Spanish-speaking audience? It's not only Latin-America and Spain. There is a huge Spanish-speaking audience in the United States itself. That has to be exploited.

Seventh and last. Re-configure the public awareness for defense. It doesn't mean protecting ourselves. Defense means understanding that we are living in war-time. Train the population, especially the younger generation, to be ready to repulse any aggression: military, informational, cultural, civilizational.

I am very pleased to see the resurrection of the military-patriotic education and the concept of "Ready for Labor and Defense" (???). I remember as a school pupil taking the junior, then senior, exams of "Ready for Labor and Defense" It involved running, which we liked, throwing grenades. It's a robust approach. The reason we won the war was we had the "Societies of Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction" (??????????), we had sports organizations in the 1930s. We were really getting prepared. You want peace - be prepared for war.

We are peaceful people, but our armored train is ready in the sidings. So the changes which happened in February-March was the end of the era of defeats. Leaving the era of defeats is necessary not only on the external front, but also domestically. There are still plenty of odious characters around from the time of Yeltsin. Some have gone to Ukraine. There's a journalist Kiselëv - Evgeny Kiselëv, who shares a surname with Dmitry Kiselëv. He's been in Ukraine since many years ago. He's a Berezovsky-Gussinsky person. Has been broadcasting in Ukraine for many years. Now he says he´s ashamed to be Russian. "Ashamed", for God's sake ...

Well, we shouldn't be ashamed to learn from the West how to operate in the informational domain. Their policies are of an offensive nature. If you are reacting, then you're one step behind and you're going to lose. In the Crimean Victory we won because our leadership, above all the president, he was always a step ahead of the opponent. He took a step. They reacted. He set the agenda.