Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday 27 May 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 26 May 2014 12:39 PM PDT

In a series of new reports from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) on the election of Petro Poroshenko [photo top right] as the next president of Ukraine, the overriding sentiment of Kremlin diplomatic officials can only be described as one of “astonished glee” as this most troubled of nations (provided with “substantial” help from its US-EU allies) has selected as its leader one the most corrupt, secretive and mysterious members of its criminal oligarchy class of billionaires.
Since its independence in 1991 from the former Soviet Union, these reports note, Ukraine has been looted by its oligarchs to the extent that its citizens now make barely $3,000 a year in income.
Russia itself, it should be remembered, suffered the same fate as Ukraine, during the 1990’s, after Western-backed oligarchs attempted to destroy the country, many of whom, since Putin took power in 1999, have been found mysteriously dead or imprisoned.
This latest election in Ukraine, on the other hand, these reports continue, “clearly shows” that these peoples have not learned the same brutal lessons being forced upon them by their criminal Western-backed oligarchy class as the Russian people did many years ago, but who under Putin have seen their income rise to nearly $18,000 a year.
Being hailed by the propaganda Western media as the “Chocolate King” for his ownership of candy companies, this report continues, Poroshenko (Forbes #1335 richest man in world) is most importantly known to Russian intelligence agencies as being one of the global leaders of the feared Red Mafiya (aka The Russian Mob) , a position once held by his father Alexei Valtsman from the Odessa region and who in 1956 took on the last name of his wife, Yevgenya Poroshenko.
Poroshenko, this report says, started his weapons, gambling and prostitution business by laundering the money of Soviet times’ administrators. He has never been an entrepreneur to start a business of his own, that story was invented by Western media propagandists.
Poroshenko business was dirty and it started with plundering Ukraine state property by armed gangs. The Poroshenko family had plans to expand the activities beyond Ukraine and Tatyana Mikoyan, a well-known Kiev-based lawyer, remembers what the family did in Transnistria, “It was horrible back in the 1990s: illegal arms, prostitutes, drugs – all bringing profits to father and son.”
Poroshenko Sr. was awarded for his merits and in 2009 he received the Hero of Ukraine decoration bought for him by his son who paid to then President Yushenko, the Godfather to Petro Poroshenko’s children. The now President-elect is also well known for misappropriating budget funds and has the reputation of someone who knows how to make money out of thin air.
Many times Poroshenko has been accused of being involved in large scale corruption schemes, open lobbying, embezzlement of budget allocations, tax evasion, illegal operations to acquire shares and physically threatening political opponents and competitors and has been described as one of the most odious figures in Ukrainian politics and heads the list of the country’s corrupted persons.
Poroshenko, this report continues, is most famous for owning the confectionary firm Roshen, which has factories in both Ukraine and Russia (Russian factories have been seized) and is the owner/leader of UkPromInvest, a mysterious holding company that has no website but boasts interests in bus manufacturing, car distribution, shipyards, banking and electrical cables, among other things that Russian intelligence experts list as arms dealing, drugs and prostitution.

Poroshenko and his fellow oligarchs have further walled off much of Ukraine from the prying eyes of its people, turning land that was once for everyone to enjoy into an elite playground, including his own mansion built to resemble the American White House. [photo 2nd right]
To understand why the US-EU would want such a criminal oligarch to lead Ukraine, this report warns, one must first understand that what is occurring today in Ukraine is a self-destructive financial dynamic of impoverishment, dependency and breakdown in many ways like what happened when Rome’s creditor oligarchy plunged the Empire into the Dark Age two thousand years ago.
The post-feudal real estate and financial oligarchies, the landed aristocracies of Europe and the great banking families and American trust builders have made a comeback, and the New Cold War is intended to lock in their victory. Ukraine is simply the latest battlefield, and battlefields end up devastated.
After all, it should be remembered, this is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices everything of value…such as Greece this week where these once proud peoples are being forced by their new US-EU-IMF-World Bank “masters” to sell off 110 of their most beloved and beautiful public beaches to the world’s oligarch class.
And in a further affront to the Ukrainian people, their new “masters”, like they have done in Italy this past week, will have the criminal monies made from prostitution and illegal drug sales included in their gross domestic product (GDP) calculation this year so as to extort even more money out of them for the benefit of the oligarchs.
Most sadly of all, perhaps, is that the looting of the Ukrainian people has already begun by their new “masters” as the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev (who are pretending to be a government) has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor.
Though Foreign Minister Lavrov has announced Russia is ready for dialogue with Poroshenko, this report concludes, it is only in the context that Moscow has long known how to deal with these Western criminals… “Give them enough time and they will destroy Ukraine themselves.”
Source
       
Posted: 26 May 2014 05:37 AM PDT

With the EU in economic decline, voters have demonstrated broad anger at the institutions and their aloof, incompetent stewards, ‘Democrats in Name Only’ (DINOs).
However, rest assured, mere voters are not worthy of consideration when the Brussels elite knows better.
Back in the good old days, the West used to look smugly at the gerontocracy in the Warsaw pact, where old men did everything within their powers to control an increasingly restive population. Times have changed.
In the past decade it has become increasingly clear that the Brussels apparatus seeks not to endorse liberty but rather propagate an outmoded form of centralized control. Private enterprise is being strangled unless it can afford to comply with an ever multiplying quantity of rules, regulations and red tape which create a distorted protectionist zone. As the world economy pivots east, Europe is being left behind.
The votes have been cast and the polls counted. The verdict is in: a mixture of damning indictment of EU failings married with a collective apathy towards the Brussels bubble.
However, this collective distaste for ‘more Europe’ will not trifle the mass ranks of presidents, commissioners and apparatchiks. Hypocrisy thrives at the epicenter of Brussels: democracy is essential for others, but unnecessary for an EU where the ‘great unwashed’ have an annoying habit of voting against the treaties the Eurocrats desire. Thus the EU developed a remarkable habit of insisting that referenda are rerun until the ‘right’ result is occasioned.
The Lisbon Treaty was an even greater sleight of hand. When Dutch and French voters rejected a European constitution in 2005, a ‘new’ treaty was rammed through, regardless of the will of the people. Thanks to this democratic deficit and lack of accountability at EU level, Europe is now rooted in long-term economic decline. Meanwhile the euro currency is held together by duct tape and the sheer bloody mindedness of an elite valuing deluded dogma above the economic welfare of the people.
No ‘more Europe’
The latest European elections ought to mark a turning point in the increasingly unaccountable European project but outgoing President Van Rompuy has already made it clear the misgivings of the Euroskeptic minority will be ignored. Thus the two faces of the EU are apparent – democratic platitudes on one side while on the other: dictating an outmoded big government top down approach (which is clearly failing the people).
The EU is now the preserve of the 21st century’s DINOsaurs: Brussels’ oligarchs who are ‘Democrats in Name Only’, with a distinctly archaic approach to growth, as demonstrated by their desire to expand the ‘empire’ east (into Ukraine and beyond), despite being unable to deliver coherent prosperity in their own back yard.
Thus the European People’s Party (EPP) alongside the Socialist and Democrat (S&D) parties will maintain their longstanding grand coalition agreement despite the upsurge in Euroskeptic votes. Their ‘grand coalition’ is a variant of electoral dictatorship: ramming through more regulations and above all, ‘more Europe’, at every turn.
That the people of Europe are clearly losing their enthusiasm for the EU is irrelevant to the rather archaic structure of the European politburo, busy dictating daft centralized approaches to tractor production while competing economies are driven by high tech innovation. (In a marvelously absurd outburst last week at a Brussels conference, President Barroso gave a speech on the topic of developing a more entrepreneurial Europe, wondering aloud why so many Europeans emigrants are developing new technology in silicon valley, without bothering to consider that his Jurassic Park of central planning cannot replicate the dynamic freedom from bottom up technological innovation dominant around Palo Alto.)
Adding insult to injury in their contempt for European voters’ concerns, the DINOsaurs will soon further endorse their self-imposed democratic deficit. After lavish dinners’ at taxpayers’ expense, EU leaders’ summits will fudge candidates for the various presidencies and commissioner posts. Voters will, as always, be an afterthought in a process where only those pledging blind allegiance to the Europhile mania can be considered for high office.
Welcome to business as usual in the European Union. A once-mighty continent is regulating itself into irrelevance, demoting a once proud trading bloc to being a global also ran. Europe is stagnating under the thumb of a blind dictatorship of dinosaurs. Extremist politics the EU promised to expunge are returning. While the 2014 electoral meteorite has not rendered Europhile dinosaurs extinct, another five years blithely treating voters with contempt will seriously endanger the European project.
It is time for no ‘more Europe’.
Source
       
Posted: 26 May 2014 04:47 AM PDT
British Prime Minister David Cameron
“I try not to go to bed too late,” David Cameron once remarked. How late did the prime minister decide to stay awake till on Sunday night, as Ukip triumphed in the Euro elections?
Was he up for the humiliating defeat of his fellow Tory Martin Callanan, chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament? Did he hear Nigel Farage refer to the European election results as an “earthquake” because “never before in the history of British politics has a party seen to be an insurgent party ever topped the polls in a national election?”
And did he perhaps pause to consider, as he eventually hit the sack inside Downing Street, how the rise and rise of Ukip could cost him a second term as prime minister?
Pity the poor PM. In recent years, aided and abetted by his hard-right Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, master of the ‘dog whistle,’ Cameron has tried a range of tactics to try and lance the Ukip boil: from insulting to appeasing; from imitating to ignoring.
None of them have worked.
Cameron tried belittling and mocking his right-wing, anti-Europe rivals. In 2006, the then leader of the opposition famously dismissed Ukip as a “bunch of… fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.”
By 2013, however, with Ukip grabbing a whopping 23% of the vote at the local elections, the PM had been forced to change his tune: “We need to show respect for people who have taken the choice to support this party and we are going to work really hard to win them back.”
Cameron tried seeing off Ukip with his own attempt at hardcore euroscepticism. Remember his so-called ‘Bloomberg speech’, in January 2013, in which he pledged an ‘in/out’ referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU by the end of 2017? The speech that was supposed to have shot Ukip’s fox? “The announcement,” in the words of the prime minister’s favorite columnist Dan Hodges, “that in all likelihood will see him returned to power?”
Fast forward 17 months and the PM now has influential and media-savvy Tory backbenchers, such as David Davis and Adam Afriyie, snapping at his heels, echoing Ukip’s demand to bring forward the date of his in/out referendum. His chief lieutenant, the chancellor George Osborne, conceded on Saturday that the public did not “believe” the Conservatives would hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.
Cameron tried stealing Ukip’s anti-immigration clothes. His cabinet ministers railed against benefit tourism and health tourism by EU migrants; his Home Office sent vans out into ethnically-mixed areas of London to tell illegal immigrants to ‘go home’ (a move described by Farage himself as “nasty”).
Net migration has fallen on Cameron’s watch – yet Ukip, and not the Tories, remain the most trusted political party on the toxic issue of immigration. In fact, while three out of four voters say they support the PM’s stated aim of reducing immigration to the “tens of thousands”, only one in ten think it is likely he will achieve it. As Ed Miliband put it, in his response to the Queen’s speech in May 2013, “The lesson for the prime minister is you can’t out-Farage Farage.”
So what now? How do the Tories tackle the threat posed by Farage and his merry men? What happens if Ukip, against the odds, triumph in Tory-held Newark on 5 June? Will Conservative Party high command continue to persist with its message of ‘Vote Farage, Get Miliband’?
Let’s be clear: we don’t know if Ukip is going to win the next general election, but the Farageists will win plenty of votes up and down the country next May and could very well affect the outcome of the general election. In 2009, Ukip secured 16.5% of the vote in the European elections, yet just 12 months later could only win 3.1% of the vote in the general election. This time round, however, research by the British Election Study suggests at least half of the voters who backed the anti-Europe party in this year’s Euro elections plan to stick with Ukip in the general election.
This should be the stuff of Cameron’s nightmares. Despite claims to the contrary from academics Rob Ford and Matthew Goodwin, as well as Labour figures such as policy chief Jon Cruddas and former home secretary Jacqui Smith, the truth is that Ukip doesn’t pose as much of a threat to Labour as it does to the Tories. It is Cameron’s Conservatives who are taking the biggest beating from the Farageists, which explains why it is Tory, and not Labour, MPs calling for a pact with the anti-Brussels party.
Consider the poll of over 4,000 people commissioned by Lord Ashcroft, the Tory peer, which revealed that more than half of Ukip voters backed the Tories in 2010, compared to only 15% of Ukippers who said they’d voted Labour at the last election.
Consider also the results of the local election results on Thursday: “UKIP utterly failed to make any inroads at all in big Labour cities, returning absolutely zero councilors in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle or Leeds,” noted blogger and analyst Thomas G. Clark.
As the Guardian’s Martin Kettle observed back in September 2012, even Ukip’s miniscule 3.1% vote share in 2010 “may have made some of the difference between a hung parliament and an outright Tory win. Small though it was, the Ukip vote exceeded the majority in 21 marginals the Tories failed to win in 2010, including Ed Balls’s seat in West Yorkshire.” Imagine, then, the impact on the Tories next year if Ukip win eight, nine, even 10%, in a general election which, by common consensus, will be even closer than the 2010 contest.
Farage could turn out to be the Ross Perot of British politics, splitting the anti-Europe, centre-right vote and thereby handing victory to the pro-Europe, centre-left.
Lucky Ed. Poor Dave.
The former Tory voters flocking to Ukip in counties such as Essex seem hell-bent on ignoring the PM’s ‘Vote Farage, Get Miliband’ mantra.
Despite the fact that, for once, it has the advantage of being 100% correct.
Source
       
Posted: 26 May 2014 04:32 AM PDT


Solar panels that you can drive, park, and walk on. They melt snow and cut greenhouse gases by 75-percent. Solar Roadways is a modular paving system of solar panels that can also withstand the heaviest of trucks (250,000 pounds).
These Solar Road Panels can be installed on roads, parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, bike paths, playgrounds, literally any surface under the sun.
They pay for themselves primarily through the generation of electricity, which can power homes and businesses connected via driveways and parking lots.
A nationwide system could produce more clean renewable energy than a country uses as a whole, they have many other features as well, including: heating elements to stay snow/ice free.
LEDs to make road lines and signage, and attached Cable Corridor to store and treat stormwater and provide a “home” for power and data cables.
EVs will be able to charge with energy from the sun (instead of fossil fuels) from parking lots and driveways and after a roadway system is in place, mutual induction technology will allow for charging while driving.
Source
       
Posted: 26 May 2014 04:07 AM PDT

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has described the French patriotic and Eurosceptic party’s triumph in the European Parliament elections “a shock” and “an earthquake”.
Valls made the remark on Monday, a day after the EP elections were held in France.
The French prime minister’s ruling Socialist party suffered a humiliating defeat by falling to the third place with 14 percent of the votes, while the country’s patriotic National Front Party topped the vote as it garnered 26 percent of the electoral support.
“This election is more than a warning. It is a shock, an earthquake,” said Valls.
The French prime minister also admitted that one reason for the increased support for the National Front was public anger at years of tax hikes. Valls said the results of the vote shows that it is important for his government to push through spending cuts and tax cuts.
“Until unemployment falls, until purchasing power rises, until taxes fall, the French won’t believe us,” said Valls, unfortunately still failing to understand that the poor economy is not the only issue in France.
Recent gay-marriage legalization in France was met with hundreds of thousands of protesters that were ignored and the toxic uncontrolled illegal immigration are also huge problems created by the Socialists. French people are disgusted with these issues and chose the National Front as a cure for that. In addition, Valls called on Europe to boost support for growth and employment policies, still insisting on economic-related issues only.
With his comments, Manuel Valls probably believes that he can essentially buy people’s votes, just like buying products from a supermarket. Even if more money are given to the people, there are still two huge issues left unaddressed by the Socialists. Until these so-called democratic parties understand the real issues that are bothering French citizens, they will just keep falling down the spiral.
Early results show that Eurosceptic parties across the European Union have won over 130 seats in the 751-member parliament. The anti-EU parties saw gains not only in France but also in Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Greece.
The final results of the elections, which wrapped up on Sunday, and an exact allotment of parliamentary seats are expected to be announced by the end of Monday.
       
Posted: 26 May 2014 03:10 AM PDT

The passengers and crew of Australian planes have been exposed to potentially toxic fumes on over 1,000 occasions, a report reveals. Former cabin crew are now taking legal action, alleging the exposure is linked to cancers and neurological disorders.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has released a report on aircraft safety documenting over 1,000 cases of exposure to toxic fumes on Australian flights over the past five years. While the report says that most of the cases when members of the cabin crew or passengers were affected were of “minor consequence,” there were 11 minor injuries and “one incapacitation.”
Reports of fumes filling the cabin ranged from minor smells to cases of smoke from aircraft engine fuel seeping into the plane.
The document said most of the fumes could be attributed to aircraft system issues “relating to failure or malfunction of electrical and auxiliary power unit (APU) systems.” The ATSB concludes that the risk of an incident occurring were rare and effective measures were deployed in most cases to combat the fumes.
However, former cabin crew members have complained, claiming prolonged exposure to the fumes has caused chronic health problems ranging from neurological disorders to cancer. They claim that they were never warned of the potential impact on their long-term health.
Former pilot Susan Michaelis told news.com.au that she collapsed in the cockpit of a BAe146 aircraft because of repeated exposure to fumes from heated jet oil.
“Sitting in an unhealthy environment and being exposed to chemicals every day made me sick,” she said. “There is a pattern of chronic ill-health … and it needs to be looked at further.”
Michaelis now heads research at the Global Cabin Air Quality Executive. Her work has uncovered cases of cancer and neurological problems among crew members of Australian planes.
The BAe146 came up as one of the worst aircraft for fumes according to the research from the ATSB. Australian airline Qantas responded to the allegations, saying it was phasing out the use of these aircraft and fume incidents were “incredibly rare.”
“Extensive global research has been undertaken into cabin air quality and there is no evidence linking fume events with long-term health effects for passengers or crew,” Qantas medical services director Dr. Ian Hosegood said to news.com.au.
Some former crew members are now pursuing legal action against the Australian government over the conditions onboard planes. Brett Vollus, a former flight attendant, is determined to prove the link between pesticides sprayed on international flights and his Parkinson’s disease.
“There has to be a link between these brain tumors and cancers among flight crew and the toxic environment that we are working in,” he told news.com.au. “More research needs to be done.”
Source
       
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:13