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The Citadel Is Breached: Congress Taps the Fed for Infrastructure Funding
Ellen Brown
In a landmark infrastructure bill passed in December, Congress finally penetrated the Fed’s “independence” by tapping its reserves and bank dividends for infrastructure funding.
The bill was a start. But some experts, including Congressional candidate Tim Canova, say Congress should go further and authorize funds to be issued for infrastructure directly.
For at least a decade, think tanks, commissions and other stakeholders have fought to get Congress to address the staggering backlog of maintenance, upkeep and improvements required to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century. Countries with less in the way of assets have overtaken the US in innovation and efficiency, while our dysfunctional Congress has battled endlessly over the fiscal cliff, tax reform, entitlement reform, and deficit reduction.
Both houses and both political parties agree that something must be done, but they have been unable to agree on where to find the funds. Republicans aren’t willing to raise taxes on the rich, and Democrats aren’t willing to cut social services for the poor.
German Economic News Interviews Seymour Hersh on Obama’s Syria Policy
Eric Zuesse
German Economic News: You recently issued a highly acclaimed essay in the London Review of Books in which you demonstrate that the US military was against the US invasion of Syria, but Obama didn’t listen to their advice. Why?
Hersh: I don’t know, I have no explanation. The fact is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gone to Obama and told him: If Assad falls, chaos will break out. General Dempsey said that we must support Assad against the Islamists. Even the Federal Intelligence Service (BND [Germany’s intelligence agency]) supplied information to the Americans indicating that Assad is firmly supported by the Syrian people.
Latest ISIS Atrocity
Stephen Lendman
CIA operatives, US special forces and their rogue state counterparts train ISIS recruits in the fine art of committing gruesome atrocities, including beheadings, use of chemical and other toxic agents, as well as mass slaughtering civilians.
US-led Western imperial ruthlessness bears full responsibility for the latest horrific incident.
Dier Ezzor is Syria’s seventh largest city, its largest eastern one, located 280 miles northeast of Damascus. Pre-war, its population exceeded 200,000. Syrian oil fields are located in the area. The province connects ISIS’ declared capital Raqqa with Iraqi territory it controls.
Reports indicate their fighters slaughtered around 280 people, including women, children and whole families loyal to Assad’s government.
Mass murder followed Russia initiating efforts to provide area residents with desperately needed humanitarian aid, conducting airdrop operations.
Does Washington Plan Greater Middle East War?
Stephen Lendman
The region already is cauldron of endless violence and chaos. US imperial ruthlessness bears full responsibility.
Iranian naval commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi accused Washington of reckless moves, risking war with the Islamic Republic.
His remarks followed seizure of two small US vessels illegally operating in Iranian waters, briefly detaining their crew members.
Before their release, “the US navy and a US aircraft-carrier showed unprofessional behavior for about 40 minutes and made some moves in the air and the sea in the region,” said Fadavi - provocations risking direct confrontation. America’s regional presence, including in Persian Gulf waters, is hugely destabilizing. No clashes occurred this time. Longstanding US hostility toward Iran suggests next time may be different.
Washington’s aim to replace Iranian sovereign independence with Western-controlled puppet governance risks direct confrontation.
US War on ISIS: A Complete Hoax
Stephen Lendman
US post-9/11 war on terror reflects willful state-sponsored deception - media scoundrels complicit in conning the public to believe Washington opposes what it actively supports.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and various splinter groups are US creations, used as imperial foot soldiers, flourishing because Washington and rogue partners arm, fund, train and direct them.
Obama’s vow to “degrade and destroy” ISIS is one of his many Big Lies - saying one thing while supporting a universal scourge. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced scores newly deployed US commandos in Iraq - ahead of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of combat troops to follow.
In September 2014, Obama said US troops “do not and will not have a combat mission” in Iraq against ISIS.
Obama-Appointed Head of Ukraine Seems to Have Been Ousted
Eric Zuesse
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the banker whom, on 4 February 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs instructed the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine to lead Ukraine after the planned coup would be over (which occurred 18 days later), was apparently ousted from his post, on Thursday, January 14th, barely shy of his second anniversary as Ukraine’s Prime Minister.
The person who ousted him appears to have been the former CIA asset whom the U.S. Administration allowed to run as a candidate in Ukraine’s Presidential election on 25 May 2014, and who had won that election — the billionaire Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko had assisted in the coup, and admitted it to the EU’s investigator who was sent right after the overthrow. (The information that it had been a coup instead of an authentic revolution came as a shock to the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister.)
Message of the Markets: Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Stephen Lendman
Black Friday may be signaling big trouble ahead. What can’t go on forever won’t and never will. Eventually day of reckoning time arrives. Whether now is the moment of truth remains to be seen.
Paul Craig Roberts calls the US economy “a house of cards.” Phony government data created “the illusion of recovery.”
Monied interests never had it better for years, profiting hugely from Wall Street-orchestrated casino capitalism and manipulated markets, creating an unprecedented, unsustainable wealth effect, an open-ended near zero-interest rate climate money grab - doing nothing to create jobs and economic growth.
Wealth transference from ordinary people to super-rich elites and corporate interests was never greater in world history - reflecting government-sanctioned unprecedented greed and grand theft.
Economic State of Emergency in Venezuela
Stephen Lendman
Right-wing opposition elements winning National Assembly control for the first time in 16 years initiated war on Bolivarian fairness.
Right-left confrontation along with plunging oil prices got President Nicholas Maduro to declare a 60-day economic state of emergency.
His announced decree came hours ahead of his annual state of the union address, intending a package of proposed reforms.
According to the government’s official gazette, he declared “a state of emergency in the entirety of the national territory, in compliance with the constitution…for a period of 60 days.”
Days earlier, he said new measures would be implemented to increase production, distribution, commercialization and price controls.
Phony Claims of Iranian Rockets Fired Near Western Vessels
Stephen Lendman
Unrelenting US anti-Iranian hostility persists. Media repeated propaganda highlights it.
Tehran remains a strategic Washington enemy, intending new sanctions, wrongfully claiming its legitimate ballistic missile tests violate last year’s nuclear agreement.
Security Council Resolution 1929 only prohibits Iranian development of missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. Tehran has none, has no plans to develop any. No evidence suggests otherwise.
It’s tests are entirely legitimate, in full compliance with Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) terms. Claims otherwise are false.
US imposition of sanctions will constitute a serious JCPOA breach - showing Washington was never serious about terms it agreed to. Its sordid history shows treaties and other deals consummated systematically violated, spurious reasons given.
The Deplorable US State of the Union
Stephen Lendman
America represents the greatest pure evil force in world history. Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead blasted Obama’s deplorable agenda, calling it:
“more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate.”
“Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of ‘do what I say and not what I do’ hypocrisy.” Annual US presidential State of the Union Addresses are exercises in duplicity, hyperbole, self-aggrandizement, promises made to be broken and bald-faced lies.
Obama’s final annual address to Congress and the US public was like his earlier ones, beginning-to-end demagoguery - a con man concealing his ruthless agenda, exclusively serving wealth and power interests, waging endless wars on humanity at home and abroad, an imperial agenda threatening life on earth.
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