Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday, 9 November 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 08 Nov 2014 12:38 PM PST


A somber Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) report circulating in the Kremlin today is advising all diplomatic personal that due to the success of the “war party” elections held in the United States this past week, this once constitutional republic should now be viewed as having become an Oligarchy—a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people.
According to this report, the United States was founded as a constitutional republic to prevent what one of its Founders, Thomas Jefferson, described as “elective despotism” in order to prevent a political system of unbridled democracy in which the majority enjoys absolute power by means of democratic elections which could vote to impose tyranny on themselves and the minority opposition.
As ordered by their founding documents, this report continues, the United States created their constitutional republic so that the powers of government could be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

What this past week’s US election shows, however, the MoFA in this report says, are that all of the Republican and Democratic Party candidates for office (Federal and State) were funded by just forty-two people who were responsible for nearly a third of Super PAC monies raised, and only 666,773 wealthy individuals out of a nation having a population of over 319 million.
Super PAC’s, this report notes, are a new kind of American political action committee created in July 2010 following the outcome of a US Federal Court case known as SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission which allows the American elite classes to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates—which in this past weeks election totaled over $3.7 billion, the most expensive in their nations history.


With the US having over 492 billionaires (85 of whom have more money combined than the lowest 3.5 billion of the poorest peoples on Earth), this report further states, the “normal constraint” the people of America would have to put upon their government has been effectively destroyed and now resides in the hands of their Oligarchy alone.
Where the absence of this “normal constraint” most endangers the Federation, this report warns, is the new American Oligarchy’s propensity for global war, and which within three days of this election, President Obama began the expansion of a new Middle Eastern war by the ordering of thousands of more US forces to Iraq—but which in September, prior to this past weeks election, he had promised his nation would not happen.
Even worse, this report notes, are that the Obama regimes plans for a massive war with the Federation will now be accelerated, a sentiment echoed this week by the great American philosopher Noam Chomsky who warned that the US and Russia are “ominously close to nuclear war.”


Chomsky’s fears of a US-Russian nuclear war, we have previously reported on, are indeed valid, this report continues, due to President Putin’s moves to strike down the American petrodollar which the Obama regime has retaliated against by provoking a war in Ukraine, leveling sanctions (along with its EU allies) against Russia, and with its Middle Eastern allies collapsing the price of oil in its strategy of trying to bankrupt Russia.
Russia, however, in anticipating these actions by the Obama regime, this report notes, has amassed one of the largest gold reserves in the world to counter these economic warfare moves against the Federation no matter how low the price of oil goes, a strategic point not lost to the former US Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan who in speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) last week stunningly admitted, “Gold is currency, no fiat currency, including the US Dollar, can match it.”
With Russia “fully prepared” to accomplish its end-game of destroying the US petrodollar system with its gold reserves and combined energy-mineral wealth (which is the greatest in the world valued at over $75 trillion), MoFA analysts in this report conclude, the new Oligarchy ruling America, in a “last stand effort” to protect its “paper only” fiat currency wealth may, indeed, see global war as its only alternative to protect itself.
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Posted: 08 Nov 2014 05:57 AM PST


Pentagon’s main innovation unit is looking for promising ideas that would help thwart infectious disease outbreaks, including Ebola epidemic that already claimed almost 5,000 lives out of 13,241 officially confirmed cases worldwide.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pentagon’s research organization tasked with developing advanced military technology has announced a tender for innovative research proposals of interest to the Biological Technologies Office (BTO).
“BTO is interested in a range of emerging technical areas, including but not limited to human-machine interfaces, human performance, infectious disease, and synthetic biology. The overarching goal is to develop, demonstrate, and transition biologically-based technologies as part of the national security toolkit,” the solicitation reads.
The Pentagon’s technology arm is prepared to invest up to $700,000 in a promising idea that shows potential in “revolutionary advances in science, technologies, or systems.” It calls on scientists to “radically change established practice.”
“DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which launched earlier this year, looks at biology as a technology, with a focus on harnessing living systems or integrating those systems with nonliving systems,” said Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s biological technologies office.
The global Ebola crisis which has already affected a number of US states, is one of the concerns for the Department of Defense, but overall the research aims to tackle other potential virus-related threats.
“We are trying to rethink that paradigm. We’re not just interested in solving the Ebola crisis. We want to be prepared for the next thing. We’re looking for a way to completely transform the way we’re attacking these problems, either with a vaccine or therapeutics or diagnostics,” said Jackson.
Jackson wants the applicants to submit white papers no longer than two pages. In-house DARPA managers will review the proposals before asking some teams to proceed with a longer treatment.
DARPA with an annual $2.915 billion budget was just awarded another $112 million from emergency funding announced by the White House to support the response to Ebola at home and abroad.
“The request includes funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to support immediate efforts aimed at developing technologies that are relevant to the Ebola crisis, such as providing immediate temporary immunity, including through the use of antibodies from survivors of Ebola and other infectious diseases that will help provide a stop gap until an effective vaccine is available, and developing new technologies that could shorten the vaccine development timeline from years to months,” a White House statement reads.
In order to help contain the disease, the US has already deployed over 1,900 troops in Liberia and Senegal. Upon their return to American soil, AP reports, the personnel will be quarantined for 21 days in one of 5 specially designated military bases – Fort Hood and Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; and Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
Up to 5,000 more Ebola deaths likely unreported – WHO
The official death toll from the Ebola epidemic has risen to 4,950 out of 13,241 confirmed cases, WHO announced on Friday.
“Case incidence is declining in some districts in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, while steep rises persist in other districts,” the organization said basing it on the latest figures to November 4.
However, some 5,000 fatalities could be missing from the count, WHO´s strategy chief Christopher Dye, told AFP the day before.
“There are lots of missing deaths in this epidemic,” he said, clarifying that this figure stems from the knowledge that the fatality rate in the epidemic centered in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone stands at about 70 percent.
On Friday the UN agency also issued a guideline for burials of those who have died from the deadly disease. Burial preparation are highly dangerous as they often require close contact with the body and personal property, which still contains high levels of the Ebola virus.
“At least 20 percent of new Ebola infections occur during burials. By building trust and respect between burial teams, bereaved families, and religious groups, we are building trust and safety in the response itself,” Pierre Formenty, one of the WHO’s top Ebola medical experts told Xinhua.
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Posted: 08 Nov 2014 05:45 AM PST
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has promised the families of 43 students, who went missing in the southern city of Iguala in September, that justice will be served.
Nieto vowed to hunt down all perpetrators of the case after three gang members confessed to murdering all the students in the state of Guerrero.
The students were killed after they were handed over to the suspects by gang-related police between the city of Iguala and the neighboring town of Cocula.
The suspects said they incinerated the remains of the students over a 14-hour period. They then crushed the charred bodies, stuffed them in bags, and tossed them in a river.
On the 26th of September, 43 students, all trainee teachers, disappeared in Iguala following an attack by police forces suspected of having links to drug gangs. The incident took place during a protest rally over teachers’ rights.
Earlier in the week, Mexican police apprehended fugitive Iguala mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife in connection with the case.
Investigators have said the police attack on the students was ordered by Abarca over fears that the students might disrupt a speech by his wife Pineda Villa.
On November 5, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Mexico City to protest against the government’s inability to find out the fate of the missing students.
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Posted: 08 Nov 2014 05:38 AM PST

President Obama threatened to write his own laws through executive orders while claiming “that’s how democracy works.”
Responding to the Republican takeover of Congress yesterday, Obama said he will use executive orders if Congress doesn’t pass bills he wants to sign into law.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll take some actions that some in Congress will not like,” he said. “That’s natural.”
“That’s how our democracy works.”
Obama singled out amnesty for illegals in particular, stating that if Congress passes an immigration bill which allows millions of illegal aliens to stay in the U.S., his executive actions will disappear.
“You send me a bill that I can sign, and those executive actions go away,” he said.
Obama is equating dictatorship with democracy.
“The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) wrote in an op/ed in January. “The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: ‘There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.’”
“America’s Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.”
The father of the Constitution, James Madison, spoke about the dangers of an executive holding legislative power in the Federalist Papers No. 47.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” he wrote.
Even if Obama wasn’t equating a dictatorship with democracy, he still believes that the U.S. was founded as a democracy, which is false; it was founded as a republic.
“Democracy is the ‘direct’ rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success,” states a U.S. Army training manual from 1928. “Our Constitutional fathers, familiar with the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy, with fixed principles definitely in mind, defined a representative republican form of government.”
“They made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic.”
In other words, the Founding Fathers feared a democracy in which the birth rights of the minority could be voted away by the majority, so they founded a republic meant to protect the rights of all.
But Obama has surpassed their greatest fears by turning the presidency into an autocracy which can whittle away the republic – and the birth rights of all – through executive orders.
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Posted: 08 Nov 2014 05:31 AM PST


The top US Army official says the United States is learning from Israel’s tactics on how to limit civilian casualties in a war, despite the international outcry over the regime’s brutality in Gaza.
Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that the Pentagon has sent a team to see what lessons could be learned from the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza on how to limit civilian casualties.
Dempsey said the Pentagon had sent the team of senior officials and non-commissioned officers three months ago “to include the measures they took to prevent civilian casualties and what they did with tunneling” in US military operations.
He claimed the Israeli military went to “extraordinary lengths” to limit civilian casualties in the 50-day Gaza war.
The remarks came as the recent war has been widely condemned by the international community over the killing of civilians including women and children. Even, the White House criticized Israel for causing “indefensible and unacceptable” deaths during the war.
Dempsey blamed the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, Hamas, for creating what he called “very nearly a subterranean society,” referring to the Palestinian defense infrastructure.
“In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you’re going to be criticized for civilian casualties,” the general said during an appearance at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.
He praised the so-called roof-knocking technique as some of the measures used by the Israeli military to avoid civilian casualties. The technique involves dropping a low-yield explosives device on the roof of a building before launching a full-blown attack.
The technique was criticized by rights groups over its ineffectiveness in warning civilians. The groups say it can kill residents of a building instead of making them leave it.
The Israeli regime launched its war on Gaza on July 8 and later expanded its military campaign with a ground invasion of the Palestinian territory.
At least 2,140 Palestinians were killed during the recent Gaza war, mostly civilians. During the operation, Israel even attacked UN-run schools, prompting the Amnesty International to condemn Israel’s “callous indifference” to the carnage caused by attacks on civilian targets.
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Posted: 08 Nov 2014 02:53 AM PST
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at their meeting in Budapest.
25 years ago, Hungary was being toasted in the West for opening its border with Austria to East Germans, in a move which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now the Western elites are not happy with Budapest which they consider far too independent.
The refusal of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to join the new US and EU Cold War against Russia, which has seen the Hungarian parliament approving a law to build the South Stream gas pipeline without the approval of the European Union, in addition to the populist economic policies Fidesz has adopted against the largely foreign owned banks and energy companies, has been met with an angry response from Washington and Brussels.
Hungarian officials have been banned from entering the US, while the European Commission has demanded that the Hungarians explain their decision to go ahead with South Stream. That’s on top of the European Commission launching legal action against the Hungarian government for its law restricting the rights of foreigners to buy agricultural land.
The bullying of Hungary hasn’t made many headlines because it’s so-called “democrats” from the West who have been doing the bullying.
Viktor Orban is not a communist, he is a nationally-minded conservative who was an anti-communist activist in the late 1980s, but the attacks on him and his government demonstrate that it doesn’t matter what label you go under – if you don’t do exactly what Uncle Sam and the Euro-elite tell you to do – your country will come under great pressure to conform. And all of course in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”
Fidesz has been upsetting some powerful people in the West ever since returning to power in 2010. The previous “Socialist”-led administration was hugely popular in the West because it did everything Washington and Brussels and the international banking set wanted. It imposed austerity on ordinary people, it privatized large sections of the economy, and it took out an unnecessary IMF loan. Ironically, the conservative-minded Fidesz party has proved to be much better socialists in power than the big-business and banker friendly “Socialists” they replaced.
One of the first things that Fidesz and its coalition allies, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, (KDNP) did was to introduce an $855m bank tax – the highest such tax in Europe – a measure which had the financial elite foaming at the mouth.
Orban clashed with the IMF too, with his government rejecting new loan terms in 2012, and paying off early a loan taken out by the previous government, to reduce interest payments.
In 2013, Orban took on the foreign-owned energy giants with his government imposing cuts of over 20% on bills. Neoliberals expressed their outrage at such “interventionist” policies, but under Orban, the economy has improved. Although it’s true that many still look back nostalgically to the days of “goulash communism” in the 1970s and 80s when there were jobs for all and food on the table for everyone. Unemployment fell to 7.4 percent in the third-quarter of this year; it was around 11 percent when Fidesz took power, while real wages rose by 2.9 percent in the year up to July.
The man his enemies called the “Viktator,” has shown that he will pursue whatever economic policies he believes are in his country’s national interest, regardless of the opinions of the western elite who want the Hungarian economy to be geared to their needs.
His refusal to scrap his country’s bank tax is one example; the closer commercial links with Russia are another. Russia is Hungary’s third biggest trading partner and ties between the two countries have strengthened in the last couple of years, to the consternation of western Russophobes. In April, a deal was struck for Moscow to loan Hungary €10 billion to help upgrade its nuclear plant at Paks.
Orban’s policy of improving trade and business links with Russia, while staying a member of the EU and NATO, has however been put under increasing strain by the new hostile policy towards Moscow from Washington and Brussels.
Orban again, has annoyed the West by sticking up for Hungary’s own interests. In May he faced attack when he had the temerity to speak up for the rights of the 200,000 strong Hungarian community living in Ukraine.”Ukraine can neither be stable, nor democratic, if it does not give its minorities, including Hungarians, their due. That is dual citizenship, collective rights and autonomy.” Hungary’s Ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Kiev. Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, the US’s most obedient lapdog in Eastern Europe, called Orban’s comments “unfortunate and disturbing” as if it was anything to do with him or his country.
In August, Orban accurately described the sanctions policy of the West towards Russia as like “shooting oneself in the foot.”“The EU should not only compensate producers somehow, be they Polish, Slovak, Hungarian or Greek, who now have to suffer losses, but the entire sanctions policy should be reconsidered,” Orban said.
In October, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto also questioned the sanctions on Russia, revealing that his country is losing 50 million forints a day due to the policy.
Hungary has made its position clear, but for daring to question EU and US policy, and for its rapprochement with Moscow, the country has been punished.
It’s democratically elected civilian government which enjoys high levels of public support, has ludicrously – and obscenely – been likened to military governments which have massacred their opponents. “From Hungary to Egypt, endless regulations and overt intimidation increasingly target civil society,” declared US President Barack Obama in September.
Last month there was another salvo fired at Hungary – it was announced that the US had banned six unnamed Hungarian government officials from entering America, citing concerns over corruption- without the US providing any proof of the corruption.


“At a certain point, the situation, if it continues this way, will deteriorate to the extent where it is impossible to work together as an ally,” warned the Charge D’Affaires of the US Embassy in Budapest, Andre Goodfriend. The decision and the failure to provide any evidence, understandably caused outrage in Hungary. “The government of Hungary is somewhat baffled at the events that have unfolded because this is not the way friends deal with issues,” said Janos Lazar, Orban‘s chief of staff.
The timing of the ban has to be noted, coming after the Hungarian government had criticized the sanctions on Russia and just before the national Parliament was due to vote on the South Stream pipeline. The pipeline, which would allow gas to be transported from Russia via the Black Sea and the Balkans to south and central Europe without passing through Ukraine, is a project which Russophobes in the West want cancelled.
“I am inclined to think that it is a punishment for the fact that we talk to Russia,” said Gabor Stier, the head foreign policy editor of the leading Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet.
“America thinks that we are corrupt, but we are a sovereign state, and it is our business. Many people in the United States do not like that Viktor Orban is very independent…..Corruption is just an excuse.”
It’s hard to disagree with Stier’s conclusions. Of course, there is corruption in Hungary, as there is in every country, but it pales in comparison with some countries who are faithful US allies and who Washington never criticizes. The 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International, reveals that Latvia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina are all below Hungary, as indeed is Italy. Yet it’s Hungarian officials that the US is banning.
True to form, the attacks on Orban and his government in the Western media have chimed with the political attacks. ‘Is Hungary, the EU’s only dictatorship?’ asked Bloomberg View in April. The BBC ran a hostile piece on Orban and Fidesz in October entitled Cracks Emerge in leading party, and which referred to “government corruption” and “the playboy lifestyle of numerous party officials.”
The piece looked forward to the end of Fidesz rule.
While earlier this week, the New York Times published an OpEd by Kati Marton, whose late husband Richard Holbrooke, was a leading US diplomat, entitled Hungary’s Authoritarian Descent. You’d never guess that the Hungarian government wasn’t the flavor of the month in the West would you?
The question which has to be asked is: will Hungary be the next country to be the target of a US/EU sponsored regime change?
We all know what happened to the last Viktor who refused to sever links with Russia. Will Orban suffer the same fate as Ukraine’s Yanukovich? There are good reasons for believing that he won’t.
Fidesz did make a mistake by announcing the introduction of a new internet tax last month, which brought thousands onto the streets to protest but they have since dropped the plans and the problem for the US and EU is that Orban and his government remain too popular. In October’s local elections Fidesz won 19 of Hungary’s 21 larger towns and cities, including the capital city Budapest, not bad for a party that‘s been in power since May 2010.
Orban’s brand of economic populism, combined with moderate nationalism, goes down well in a country where people remember just how awful things were when the neoliberal “Socialists” were in power. His style of leadership may be authoritarian, but Hungarians prefer having a leader who has cut fuel bills and reduced unemployment to one who mouths platitudes about “liberal democracy” but who imposed harsh austerity measures and leaves them unable to afford the daily essentials.
Moreover Hungary, is already a member of the EU and NATO unlike Ukraine under Yanukovich and isn’t about to leave either soon. On a recent visit to America Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the US TODAY newspaper “US is our friend, US is our closest ally.” The US clearly wants more from Hungary than just words, but while both Washington and Brussels would like to see a more obedient government in Budapest, the “liberal” and faux-left parties they support simply don’t have enough popular support for the reasons outlined above. And things would be even worse for the West if the radical nationalist party Jobbik, the third largest party in Parliament, and which made gains in October’s local elections, came to power- or if there was a genuine socialist/communist revival in the country. The fact is that Orban is in a very strong position and he knows it. That’s why he feels able to face down the threats from abroad and maintain a level of independence even though total independence is impossible within the EU and NATO.
We can expect the attacks on Orban and his government to intensify but the more the West attacks, the more popular Orban, who is able to present himself as the defender of Hungary’s national interests, becomes.
Hungary gave the West everything it wanted in 1989, and, as I pointed out here, its “reform” communist leadership was richly rewarded. But in 2014 it’s a very different story. In the interests of democracy and small countries standing up to bullying by powerful elites, long may Hungary’s spirited defiance continue.
Hajra, magyarok! Hajra Magyarorszag!
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 20:32