Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 29 Apr 2014 03:55 AM PDT

An ominous new report prepared by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) on President Putin’s order yesterday to accelerate the opening of the St. Petersburg Exchange (SPE), where prices for Russian oil and natural gas will be set in rubles instead of US dollars, is warning that this “catastrophic blow” to the petrodollar amounts to nothing less than “all-out war” against the West and that an “Armageddon response” from the Obama regime should be expected to swiftly follow.
According to this report, Putin’s order regarding the SPE was in direct response to the Obama regimes placing sanctions yesterday upon Igor Sechin the CEO of the Russian energy giant Rosneft and a nominated board member of the SPE, and of which Deputy Minister for foreign relations, Sergey Ryabkov, had warned: “A response of Moscow will follow, and it will be painfully felt in Washington DC.”
Sechin, this report notes, was directly threatened by the Obama regime earlier this month due to his October 2013 remarks at the World Energy Congress in Korea where he called for a “global mechanism to trade natural gas” and went onsuggesting that “it was advisable to create an international exchange for the participating countries, where transactions could be registered with the use of regional currencies”.
Sechin, as one of the most influential leaders of the global energy trading community now has the perfect instrument to make this plan a reality with the SPE where reference prices for Russian oil and natural gas will be set in rubles instead of US dollars and could literally destroy the petrodollar.
The use of this “Financial Nuclear Weapon” (the sale of oil in a currency other than the US dollar) which was previously deployed by Saddam Hussein, this report continues, resulted in the total destruction of Iraq, but it failed to deter other countries angry with the highhandedness of the US.
Libya made another attempt and it resulted in the destruction of the country and the brutal murder of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Next was Iran. The US and the global financial war party found it much more difficult to isolate and annihilate Iran, even when it was threatened with outright nuclear attack by US and Israel. And in spite of unprecedented sanctions against Iran (which constitute economic warfare and are war crimes in itself), Iran stood defiant.

The leading members of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Russia and China restrained themselves so as to preserve global stability.
However, the war party faction of the Obama regime (the leftovers of the Bush regime) took such restraint as weakness and went on a spree of regime change throughout the world to undermine the growing strength of BRICS.
The “straw that broke the camels’ back” was the unbridled and reckless coup against the elected President of Ukraine by US and NATO and orchestrated by the US State Department and led by the war-monger Victoria Nuland, who openly admitted that the US had disbursed through such organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) over $5 Billion to facilitate the coup.
Critical to understand about the current Ukrainian Crisis, this report says, is that it has “absolutely nothing” at all to do with either Ukraine or its people, but should be understood for what it really is…a “sledgehammer” the Obama regime is attempting to use against Russia to prevent the opening and expansion of the SPE.
By perpetually expanding the US money supply, it’s important to note, America’s standard of living for its elite classes increases as well. The only problem with this situation is that the only way that it can be sustained is if the demand for the dollar and for US debt securities remains consistently strong.
Grasping this last point is extremely important. For if the artificial global US dollar demand, made possible by the petrodollar system, were ever to crumble, foreign nations who had formerly found it beneficial to hold US dollars would suddenly find that they no longer needed the massive amounts that they were holding.
This massive amount of dollars, which would no longer be useful to foreign nations, would come rushing back to their place of origin… America.
Obviously, an influx of dollars into the American economy would lead to massive inflationary pressures within their economic system and collapse it, along with that of the EU too.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this concept as the entire American monetary system literally hinges on this “dollars for oil” system. Without it, Washington would lose its permission slip to print excessive numbers of dollars.
With thousands of NATO-backed Romanian troops now moving to the Ukraine border, along with British and French fighter jets now being deployed to Lithuania and Poland to join their recently arrived US military allies, this report grimly continues, it cannot be ruled out that the Obama regime will attempt to start a war with Russia in order to protect their petrodollar scheme.
In spite of the fact that all Russian military forces have returned to their permanent bases and Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu assured his US counterpart Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel yesterday during an hour long phone conversation that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine, this report notes, Moscow has become increasingly “alarmed” by the combined US-NATO military buildup on its borders that Minister Shoigu called “unprecedented”.
As for the Ukrainian people themselves being used as pawns by the Obama regime against Russia in this “petrodollar war”, this report concludes, their lives are quickly turning from despair to outright misery as they are forced to swallow the “bitter pill” being forced upon them by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which is forcing their fuel and energy costs to skyrocket and taxes being raised on everything from alcohol to tobacco, not to mention the tens-of-thousands of public jobs being made redundant (layoffs and firings) and the nearly 5% cut in payments to pensioners.
Even worse for these “Obama Pawns”, wages now in Ukraine are, as a rule, not enough to feed a family, and the devaluation of their currency will make it totally impossible for these people to absorb these costs.
On the other hand, Western currency speculators will be able to profit from fluctuations in Ukraine’s currency and multinational corporations stand to benefit from privatization of those state assets that haven’t already been sold off.
And though not mentioned in this MoF report, it is critically important to note that back in 2008, when the US brought to world to the very brink total economic collapse, then Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia should seize opportunities created by the weak US dollar. “Today, the global economy is going through uneasy times,” he said. “The role of the key reserve currencies is under review. And we must take advantage of it.”
Six years later that is what Putin is doing…nobody can say that they weren’t warned.
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Posted: 29 Apr 2014 03:47 AM PDT

China is on track to have the world’s largest telescope, as large as 30 football fields, installed in its southwest.
The installation process, due for completion in 2016, is currently being undertaken in Pingtang County of Guizhou Province.
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) which is basically nothing more than just a bigger clone of the US Arecibo Observatory (305 meter), has undergone five years of construction and takes shape with the spherical edge constructed out of 5,600 tons of steel beams.
Nan Rendong, the chief scientist of the project, said, “With larger diameter and higher accuracy, the telescope will better detect more distant and dim celestial bodies. The good thing is that we will observe more samples from which we can discover more strange astronomical phenomena.”
According to Li Di, chief scientist of the National Astronomy Observatory of China said the aim is to capture the farthest-ever view into the universe.
He said that the US Arecibo Observatory is to be outdone by FAST, whose observation sensitivity upon completion will, according to Nan, be two times larger than the American radio telescope.
The telescope was first proposed in 1994. The project was approved by the National development and reform commission in October 2008.
On December 26, 2008, a foundation laying ceremony was held on the construction site. Construction started in March 2011.
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Posted: 29 Apr 2014 03:24 AM PDT


Obama and Hillary Clinton operative David Brock told CNN his organization, Media Matters for America (MMFA), uses George Soros money to influence the corporate media and work directly with establishment journalists.
The New York Times has called Brock a “prominent Democratic political operative.”
MMFA is deeply embedded within the Democrat establishment. Former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff, John Podesta, helped the Democrat propaganda operation get its start. Hillary Clinton advised MMFA to emulate conservative think tanks in its organizational approach.
According to the Daily Caller, MMFA works as a de facto propaganda arm for the Obama White House. “Media Matters held weekly strategy calls with former White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki and other groups like the Center for American Progress,” Fox News reported in February 2012.
“Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration,” The Daily Caller reported. “According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, (David) Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president’s closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.”
Fox News pointed out Brock’s objective is to destroy the alternative media. As we noted recently in a report covering the so-called Clinton Papers, a paranoid effort to undermine and destroy so-called conservative media, including Drudge Report, has obsessed Democrats since Hillary Clinton made public her fear of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in 1998.
“Media Matters has habitually attempted to denigrate and smear Alex Jones and his message of liberty, by dismissing Jones as a crazed ‘conspiracy theorist’ and then connecting him to other targets of their attacks, people like Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Lou Dobbs and the Fox News network,” Paul Joseph Watson reported for Infowars on February 13, 2012.
“Media Matters has now been completely exposed as little more than an attack dog for the Obama administration. The fact that Alex Jones is regularly smeared by this organization proves that Infowars is hitting the establishment where it hurts and taking flak from the very top of the power structure.”
The desire to undermine the First Amendment and attack perceived political enemies has carried over into the Obama White House. In 2010 we reported on Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, at the time Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and his plan for government infiltration of conspiracy groups in order to undermine them through postings on chat rooms and social networks, as well as real meetings. The plan was outlined in an article Sunstein wrote for the Journal of Political Philosophy.
In 2010, Brock formed a super-PAC, American Bridge, created to get establishment Democrats elected. He currently sits on the board of Priorities USA Action, a super-PAC formed to get Hillary Clinton elected president in 2016.

The original video here was pulled down within minutes of this post going live. Fortunately, there is a lot of redundancy on Youtube.
Brock made the comments about Soros and the MMFA agenda of injecting liberal propaganda in the media during an interview about the journalist Sharyl Attkisson.
Attkisson resigned from CBS due to the network’s liberal bias. Her fall from CBS began after she did stories on the ATF’s Fast & Furious, reportage which earned her an Emmy Award and the CBS Evening News the Radio and Television News Directors Association’s National Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video Investigative Reporting.
Despite the kudos, MMFA accused Attkisson of “unsubstantiated” and “shoddy reporting” after she countered the Obama administration’s discredited narrative on the Benghazi attack and the murder of U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens. She was also criticized by the Soros operation for stories on Obamacare and the dangers of vaccines.
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Posted: 29 Apr 2014 02:50 AM PDT

The US’s newly developed radar-evading F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will not be able to escape Russian radars.
“The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter… is not, in fact, stealthy in the eyes of a growing number of Russian and Chinese radars,” the Aviation Week said.
It said the jet, which the Pentagon hopes would be stealthy, is “having all sorts of shortcomings.”
The report said the jet is not even effective in “jamming enemy radar”, adding the US Defense Department is spending “hundreds of billions of dollars” for a “fighter that will need the help of specialized jamming aircraft.”
It said the F-35 is even “susceptible to detection by radars operating in the VHF bands of the spectrum.”
The report said Russian armed forces have been armed with a “highly counterstealth radar system” – unveiled at an air show near Moscow last August – that is able to “track small targets once the VHF radar has detected them.”
The F-35 has not been equipped with “onboard jamming,” the report said.
“Had the JSF requirements been tightened by one iota since the program started, its advocates would be blaming that for the delays and overruns,” it said.
The new US fighter’s “jamming is mostly confined to the X-band,” the report said.
Speculation about the US fighter comes at a time US President Barack Obama is apparently set to turn the ongoing crisis in Ukraine into a war with Russia.
Tensions between Moscow and the West mounted after Crimea separated from Ukraine and requested to join Russia after a referendum on March 16, in which nearly 97 percent of the participants voted for rejoining Russia. Moscow subsequently accepted Crimea’s request.
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Posted: 29 Apr 2014 02:19 AM PDT

After three years of legal wrangling, a Texas family has won its case against a company engaged in hydraulic fracturing near their home. The family, which suffered tangible health deterioration after the fracking began, was awarded $3 million.
A Dallas jury ruled Tuesday in favor of the Parr family, which sued Aruba Petroleum in 2011 after each member of the family noticed a decline in health that, their attorneys argued in court, was the result of dozens of gas wells surrounding their home in Wise County, Texas.
The family was awarded nearly $3 million in what is believed to be the first fracking trial in US history.
“They’re vindicated,” the family’s attorney David Matthews wrote in a blog post. “I’m really proud of the family that went through what they went through and said, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore’. It takes guts to say, ‘I’m going to stand here and protect my family from an invasion of our right to enjoy our property.’
“It’s not easy to go through a lawsuit and have your personal life uncovered and exposed to the extent this family went through.”
Aruba Petroleum will appeal the jury’s decision, according to MSNBC. The company argues that there are dozens of gas-drilling operations in the area, thus it is difficult to tell who is responsible for the family’s degenerative health.
Other companies that own wells around the Parr’s home settled with the family, EcoWatch reported.
The Parrs – Bob, Lisa, and their daughter Emma – said their health suffered beginning just months after hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations started in their area, which was in 2008. Lisa said her breathing was impaired, and she was inflicted with nausea and headaches. Bob reported suddenly having around three nosebleeds per week, an anomaly compared to the rest of his life, he said. And Emma also reported nosebleeds, as well as nausea and rashes. She was diagnosed with asthma soon after the drilling began.
“We can’t drink our well water,” Bob Parr told Dallas’ FOX 4 in 2011. “We can’t breathe the air without getting sick.”
The lawsuit was definitely not the first levied against a fracking company over health impacts, though it has been common for plaintiffs in such cases to settle with companies along with agreeing to strict gag orders.
Last year, a Pennsylvania family reached a $750,000 settlement with gas companies – Range Resources Corporation, Williams Gas/Laurel Mountain Midstream, and Markwest Energy – after suing them for environmental and health impacts caused by their fracking operations near the gas-rich Marcellus Shale. In exchange for the award, however, Chris and Stephanie Hallowich agreed that no member of their family – even their 7- and 10-year-old children – could comment on the case “in any fashion whatsoever.”
Anti-fracking advocates see the Parr’s victory as a sign that energy companies, which have worked obsessively to shield themselves from the public harms associated with fracking, may not hold as much sway in the future.
“When evidence of fracking’s impacts are [sic] shown to an impartial jury in a court of law, they find them to be real and significant,” Earthworks Energy Program Director Bruce Baizel said in a statement. “And it shows why the fracking industry is reluctant to allow lawsuits of this type to go to trial.”
Baizel said companies attempt to settle out of court, but only with an accompanying gag order that helps hide fracking’s effects. Meanwhile, he said, industry and government continue to insist fracking is harmless.
“We hope this lawsuit will make regulators, in Texas and around the country, reexamine their assumptions about fracking’s dangers, and their responsibility to keep the public safe,” Baizel said.
To unleash natural gas deep underground, fracking requires large volumes of water, sand, and chemicals to be pumped underground. This process has been linked to groundwater contamination, seismic activity, and a laundry list of health concerns for humans and the local environment.
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Posted: 28 Apr 2014 03:34 PM PDT

Much of northern Mississippi remained on tornado watch Monday afternoon after a twister made its way through Tupelo, according to a National Weather Service report. Major damage has been reported, although the number of casualties is still unknown.
Parts of Alabama, Arkansas, and western Georgia were also placed under tornado watch until Monday night as the storm system slowly traveled north from Mississippi to the mid-Atlantic states.
Rescue workers, volunteers, and residents were searching for answers in Tupelo Monday afternoon after a tornado struck at approximately 3:00 local time. A number of photos chronicling devastated buildings were quickly published on social media and submitted into local media outlets.
Meteorologists reported seeing a “debris ball” signature on their Doppler radar, a clear warning that a potentially dangerous tornado was incoming. Television news anchors and weathermen at WTA-TV in Tupelo, in trying to relay the warning to the public, were forced to evacuate the studio for their own safety.
Tupelo, with some 140,000 residents, experienced heavy winds and downed power lines after at least 16 people died in Arkansas and other states due to additional storms that ravaged the central and southern US. At least 14 people died in Little Rock, Arkansas after a massive tornado created 80 miles of destruction through the suburbs around the state capital.
“Just looking at the damage, this may be one of the strongest that we’re seen,” Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe told Fox News Monday. “And preliminarily – we haven’t done any records checking – but it looks like this is the largest loss of life that we’ve seen in one tornado since I’ve been governor.”
Just as Tupelo residents were assessing the damage from the storm that swept through their town, a second tornado appeared 100 miles to the south in Winston County.
As the first tornado was seen moving east-northeast from Louisville a second tornado was reported moving into the area from the west.
The National Weather Service warned that the Little Rock tragedy would not be the last before the end of storm season. Governors in multiple states declared states of emergency, with meteorologists advising that the potential of sudden tornado formation will be present into the beginning of the week.
“This is a multi-day event and today is the second day of significant tornado risk and unfortunately, probably not the last,” Bill Bunting, operations chief at the NWS’ Severe Storm Predictions Center in Norman, Oklahoma, told Reuters Monday.


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Posted: 28 Apr 2014 03:23 PM PDT

Trials are underway in a town south of Amsterdam on roads bearing markings, which absorb light during the day and diffuse it at night potentially superseding street lighting.
The markings on the roads in Oss, 100 kilometers south of the Dutch capital, have used a special paint containing a special “photo-luminizing” powder, which glows after dark.
The luminescent effect lasts for up to eight hours.
Interactive artist Daan Roosegaarde has pioneered the idea. He has joined forces with a Dutch civil engineering company to put the idea into effect.
“These are “Glowing Lines”, which form part of the Smart Highway project. We developed a type of paint, which charges up during the day, and glows at night. So, it works if there’s enough sun, and if it’s cloudy, we can supply a little bit of electricity to top them up a little. We use a solar panel so it’s energy-neutral. It’s functional, but I also find it very artistic,” Roosegaarde has explained.
Also up his sleeve is giant weather symbols which can appear on the road to warn drivers of icy conditions.
“We are working on roads that charge electric cars whilst driving. We are developing a paint that will be used to print snowflakes on the surface of the road and will light up when it’s slippery. It’s a dynamic paint that appears when necessary and then disappears again,” Roosegaarde has said.
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Posted: 28 Apr 2014 03:07 PM PDT

An anti-immigration leaflet being distributed in the Toronto suburb of Brampton has prompted calls for hate crime charges to be leveled against its creators, raising the prospect that harsh condemnation of immigration policy could now be considered a criminal offense in Canada.
The flyer, which was produced and handed out by Immigration Watch Canada, shows an image of Caucasians above a separate photograph of a group of Sikhs with captions that read “from this…to this…”
The flyer points out that in 2001, Brampton’s Canadian population stood at 59.6%, a figure that dropped to 32.9% according to the 2011 census. “Is this what you really want?” asks the flyer. Brampton’s 521,000 population consists of 200,000 people from a South Asian background.
Ontario’s premier Kathleen Wynne responded by saying the leaflet illustrated the “hateful politics of division in Ontario,” adding, “They can’t be tolerated. That kind of divisive action really is not consistent with who we are as Canadians,”
Immigration Watch spokesman Dan Murray said it was laughable that anyone was even talking about hate crime charges.
University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon was unsure whether the leaflet constituted a hate crime, noting that, “It doesn’t attribute anything to members of any group.”
While the leaflet may be offensive to many, the idea of it being characterized as a “hate crime” represents a huge chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Indeed, some are calling for hate crime charges to be filed simply as a means of discouraging others from speaking out against immigration.
“Otherwise… in the future other people are going to start doing that. And they’re going to be hard to control,” said Ranjit Dulay, chairman of the Ontario Sikhs & Gurdwara Council.
Meanwhile, in the United States, critics fear that legislation aimed at combating hate crime could also be applied to censor legitimate criticism of immigration policy.
The recently introduced Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014, which targets offensive speech made on radio, television or the Internet, was labeled a “frankly chilling proposition” by a Boston Herald editorial.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:53