The poor countries from Latin America and Africa need an international bailout plan such as the Marshal Plan to Europe after the world war, with economic loans at low bank interest of 1% and 2% and more than 40 years to pay, which is could extend to 60 years term to pay and up to 80 years term, not as now happens with the perversion of the capital market with economic loans to 7% and 8% bank interest with only 5 year to pay to poor countries due to moral degeneration of Wall Street people who lives in Park Avenue … it is also necessary to allow the transfer of technology from rich countries to poor countries to build cars, trucks, buses, industrial machinery, tractors, televisions, computers, cell phones, build nuclear power plants and ensure that poor countries can grow at 5% of GDP per year over the next 50 years to reduce poverty, violence, migration, pay the foreign debt also and maintain world peace…
Source of the above will remain unattributed.
Below: recent documentary coverage of the collapse of Venezuela’s economy.
The fingers were erect and wagging at Obama as anti-Semite and turncoat, which I found a bit radical.
Of course, other analyst-pundits have been weighing in on the UN’s latest gang-up on the world’s One Jewish State and the Administration’s dithering abstention, and that cacophony doubtless includes similar charges (or language) from Right side of the aisle.
Be that as it may, the chorus was heard with the original poster’s complaint that no dissent had been heard.
If there is, has been, or will be a contest between “medieval political absolutism” and the “modern democratic and checked distribution of power”, the same involves meeting the challenges posed by the “Phantoms of the Soviet” (the Union died 25 years, Dec. 25, 1991).
I think the west too quick to march on in post-Cold War glory — and the rush to do business with the reforming new Russia — and it got taken in by Moscow while Moscow, as represented by “Vertical-of-Power” Putin has gently but firmly twisted the state’s narrative from “Glasnost” all the way back to proto-fascist ultra-nationalism and neo-imperialism — backed by the demonstration of barbarism (in Syria), aggression (in Ukraine), and the possession of nuclear arms and updated weapons systems.
Is anyone feeling lucky?
While it’s true the Obama Administration has avoided direct confrontation with Moscow (how unseemly that would look! And I say that as cynically as any here), it has weakened Moscow’s ability to project and sustain military aggression in the near abroad. It will then be left to President Trump to address Putin and either abet, contain, or push back against what the Moscow Revival presents to western interests.
The UN resolution was execrable in every dimension!
However, the true target in east-west relations and in the middle east conflict remains a recalcitrant Moscow. A dangerous Moscow. A dictator’s Moscow (and check out the alignments on the voting).
Between Trump (Manafort, Millian, Kilimnik) and Putin, let’s hope the superficial media-relayed “bromance” is over — or it will be our lives more organized along more feudal principles in conflict with modern (democratic) ones.
Loosely related but from another conversation —
I wanted to suggest to you that a working “secular democracy” actually enables the full expression of religious passion as a private and private community matter. The system supports boundaries and a common agreement on the prudence and sensibility of good law, i.e., law that sustains a free and vibrant social order.
Jihad, provocation, and terrorism mean to upset civil order — and they can do it!
When will the west again push back against criminal, fascist, and proto-fascist aggression, I don’t know but know that as it loses its principles and values, if it does, it will have to respond to absolutism.
Track the themes – 1, 2, and 3 – and have your say as I’ve had mine.
Intervening and other variables:
— President Elect Trump may be getting the education through briefings that he seems not to have had when standing before the public as Candidate Trump.
–President Elect Trump has not “stepped off” as President in either action or words.
IF in his foreign affairs he gives NATO full support and continues blocking neo-imperial Moscow at Crimea and continues the struggle with Syria, good, but if he caves to his authoritarian narcissism in the manner of Erdogan and Orban, we may never recover our meaning or stature — and Moscow will happily continue spreading its absolutism and the chaos and destruction it pushes ahead of itself.
Not only America but the free world — EU, NATO, the “democratic open societies of the west” and other democratic societies worldwide — have worries with President Elect Trump.
Those who have suffered beyond imagination in Syria in relation to Bashar al-Assad’s shaping of that war into “Assad vs The Terrorists” exist today inside a purgatory special to totalitarian Hell, a place between Assad’s sadism matched by Moscow’s own and its military presence, and, sigh, “The Terrorists”, whom Assad helped developed (go ahead and click and look over the points and references made the earlier BackChannels post).
Ukraine, which “leaned west” in its revolt against Viktor Yanukovych and his manner of little black book keeping, works with a different problem, i.e., Moscow’s occupation of Crimea, but it has the same worry: what does America mean today? What does and what will “Washington” represent in the spectrum of politics between “political absolutism” — autocracy, fascism, kleptocracy, totalitarianism — and a responsible and responsive democratic governance possessed of integrity?
Posted to YouTube by Muhammed Al Mousa on September 4, 2016
Homs represents a brutal depopulating. It brings to my mind the drought that impelled a combination of “Arab Spring” and economic protest in 2011 that would be met with a brutality and sadism far out of proportion to the regime’s political needs. In turn, that would make sense of Assad’s choosing to produce a general bloodbath in Syria out of which he could then play to his own family’s advantage as owners of a Russian client state, as an enemy of the west, and as a symbol of state order against “The Terrorists”, both anyone not with Assad as well as the al-Qaeda types incubated expressly to serve for blackmailing and goading the west and as a foil for the aligned powers, Moscow-Damascus-Tehran.
The absence of conscience on the part of the Assad regime in its military actions, an aspect that reaches its nadir with the use of chemical weapons, and the historically astigmatic vision of the Al Qaeda-types serve to keep “awareness, self-awareness, and conscience” — God’s gift to humanity in my interpretation of the Jewish ethos expressed in Genesis 2 and 3 — restricted to their own minds, concerned only with themselves, and consequently locked in true “mortal combat” on a small stage surrounded by mirrors of their own image.
I like Max Fisher’s term in the lead, ” . . . possibly imminent series of limited military strikes . . .” and the later too true observation, “The government responded, there is no getting around this, like monsters.”
However, over time the FSA became dominated by Islamist extremists (including some affiliated with Al Qaeda), bolstered by Sunni rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The rebels, as the overarching group is now referred to, slowly split into fractured groups, with the more radical fighters taking over areas to the north and east of Damascus, and the more secular fighters holding court in the southern suburbs.
In Seija’s backgrounder, the Assad will-to-dynasty gets referenced but not its dependence on the politics of the Cold War and the prism provided by Putin’s now delicate diplomacy of the day, which has seen the retrieval of Russian civilian and military personnel and assets from Syria while fulfilling old military contracts at the Iran-Syria nexus.
Russia may be yet interested in defeating the “Yankee Imperialists” in the cause of the “New Russian Oligarchs” — just a thought — but it has to work at keeping itself apart from the European part of NATO identity as a Christian state fending off Islamist intentions in Chechnya and as a modern proto-democratic (all the parts are in place) still autocratic state enjoying a somewhat pagan muscularity.
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Is that above an Ayatollah’s best buddy?
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Back on center stage, Amos Harel writing for Haaretz asks, “In all the global talk over the last week about the chemical weapons attack in Syria and the expected U.S. response, one interesting question has been shunted aside: Why on earth did Syrian President Bashar Assad do it?”
Syria, specifically, and Putin in Syria, specifically, and a fair number of interlopers, not so specifically, would seem to be running around in there without much of a moral compass.
Again, “Syria Dark Star” consumes energy without transforming itself into a positive region although some of what has been taking place may be moving toward that, e.g., the Kurdish separation from Syria forced by the presence of Al Qaeda in the Kurdish sphere amid the absence of Syrian state forces; the fact that the seemingly moderate General Idris remains afield with a capable force fighting both Assad’s military and such as Al Nusra.
Still: where can the Syrian Civil War resolve?
The inability of Syrians and the world at large to address that question both ideally and politically serves to keep the conflict, in the way of fire, consuming and deadening.
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An Aside on Generalized Syrian Anti-Semitism
The presence and effects of general Syrian anti-Semitic acculturation also spells a dismal future, for that facet also stands signal to a lost humanity.
The absence of conscience on the part of the Assad regime in its military actions, an aspect that reaches its nadir with the use of chemical weapons, and the historically astigmatic vision of the Al Qaeda-types serve to keep “awareness, self-awareness, and conscience” — God’s gift to humanity in my interpretation of the Jewish ethos expressed in Genesis 2 and 3 — restricted to their own minds, concerned only with themselves, and consequently locked in true “mortal combat” on a small stage surrounded by mirrors of their own image.
In a sense, these actors cannot see themselves.
Those not a part of it and out searching on the World Wide Web may nonetheless see the same as they are and caught in a predicament of their own making, starting with the “malignant narcissism” so well displayed by the Assad’s in their “Arab Spring” response to their constituents.
“The government responded, there is no getting around this, like monsters,” wrote Max Fisher a few hours ago, and that is the truth.
How is it that they could not see themselves when they needed to see themselves most accurately, most completely, and most of all?
The coin “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” may apply, but it serves as an aid to observation of leadership type and may not provide quite the key to insight and guidance needed in Syria.
Unfortunately, the conventions of diplomacy and war fighting won’t quell the dark energy in Syria either because in some the accumulated language-based “content of mind” has pushed them beyond the reach of their own and better humanity. In reach-out, one may point to those who have exceeded limits, but, here’s the problem, they are also those fulfilling their programming.
One of the bombs exploded near the Taqwa mosque as worshippers spilled out of the religious center following Friday prayers. Minutes later a second explosion struck the Salam mosque in the Mina area near the waterfront.
Address it, air it, channel it, deal with it, work with it: the “passions” — the underlying programming in social grammar — that surfaces in the sadism implied in the above-quoted description arrives without conscience or humanity. Throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars, the same would seem to serve as its most familiar motif.
What could be more cruel, more of the devil, more evil, and more inhuman than to deploy a weapon among innocents away from the field of battle and close by the sanctuary afforded by a space built and sustained on faith in God and the human relationship with the All? Casualties of a war alive inside the hearts of killers — truly, the “warfare” of interest leaks from poisoned minds obsessed alternatively with power and hiding — today’s dead and injured in Tripoli had gone into their mosques for prayers and been made to come out at the Gates of Hell.
“This piece of information is significant for a number of reasons,” wrote Gallagher, but the most crucial perhaps is how it compares to Microsoft’s remarks last year. As RT wrote in 2012, Microsoft was awarded a patent that summer that provides for “legal intercept” technology that allows for agents to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session” without asking for user authorization.
The rogues are going to need their own satellites.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the massive U.S. surveillance programs, revealed last week by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, “generally practicable” and “the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.”
Both the wicked and the wise know that a thing can be hidden if it is not spoken about, or if it is spoken about, channeled selectively, or, effectively, not heard.
“SIGINT” is, for all intents, an international field probably skewed by growing electronic prowess.
Have my advertisers — that’s “MARKINT” for “Market Intelligence” I guess — gone too far tracking my shopping-related browsing and slipping into my online browsing experience repeated — and nuisance — reinforcing advertising?
After I’ve bought whatever it was I was looking at, I wish they would quit.
It must noted that 9/11 and the Boston Marathon attacks took place beneath extraordinary effort and traffic in security-minded organizations. One may ask how either was possible if these systems were so powerful? In at least two other instances, the shooting in Little Rock and the Fort Hood Massacre, it would seem “HUMINT” (yes, “Human Intelligence”) was just not sexy enough to promote the detention of either perpetrator before the fact.
BackChannels 