Hoka Hey!

Selling coal at climate change conference

A U.S. energy official says “no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability” during a U.N. climate discussions in Poland.

Preston Wells Griffith, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of International Affairs at the Department of Energy, spoke at a U.S. government-sponsored event Monday in Katowice, responding to criticism of the U.S. administration's policy of supporting the fossil fuel industry. Zlatica Hoke reports.

'I don't care about being popular'.....

Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary in Katowice, Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.

She says it all.....

They create a failed state and call it freedom

• Despite tweeting just last week that a $716 billion military budget was ‘crazy’, Donald Trump has reportedly reversed course and instead committed to the highest budget in history.

I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018

“It’s 750. Secretary Mattis secured that over lunch with the president,” an administration official told Politico, who first released the information, although an official announcement is yet to be made. It’s unclear what exactly changed Trump’s mind. He had been floating a 5% reduction in military spending for 2020, from the originally proposed (and already record-breaking) $733bn to $700bn – but Pentagon officials had told him on Friday that anything less was “a risk”, and could have “disastrous consequences”.

• One key reason for the change in Trump's thinking could be the growing cost of maintaining the existing Pentagon war machine.  One example is the US Navy has lost the equivalent of 17 ships for operational duty this year due to maintenance backlogs and delays in repair, according to an analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Add to that cost overruns for nuclear subs, destroyers, F-35 planes and the toll climate change is taking on Navy bases, like Norfolk in Virginia, that are presently sinking.  How will the government pay for these hefty increases?  The plan is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
• Congresswoman-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has drafted a Green New Deal that fails to acknowledge the existence of the US military as an environmentally destructive force, and the military budget (over 60% of discretionary spending) as a potential source of revenue. A petition has been created to demand that she confront the Pentagon’s staggering global bootprint. The US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and the largest source of greenhouse gasses. Almost 900 of the EPA's 1,300 Superfund sites are abandoned military bases, weapons-production facilities or weapons-testing sites.

• The Bangor Daily News reported this week that the next Zumwalt 'stealth' destroyer to be 'christened' at Bath Iron Works in Maine will be the USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG 1002).  Named after the Vietnam war-era president who hailed from Texas, the war ship will be christened in the spring.  LBJ was driven from office after serving one term because of his expansion of the Vietnam War.  LBJ is also believed to have been integrally involved in plans to assassinate President John F. Kennedy who he took over for after JFK was killed in Dallas.
• America's puppet government in Ukraine has recognized Bandera followers (that collaborated with the Nazis and murdered hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities including Poles, Jews, Czechs and Russians) as WAR VETERANS who will receive retirement benefits and other privileges from the government. We grieve for all the good people in Ukraine whose country has been overtaken by the dark forces.  We remember those in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union (27 million) who gave their lives fighting the Nazi invasion during WW2. Countries that support Ukraine's current regime are hypocrites pushing democracy and human rights over the cliff. 

 Bruce

Macron is president of the rich

Protests in France are about much more than a gas tax.

Good update by Jimmy Dore.

New day in Mexico?

We now see a politically experienced president in Mexico - gone are the days when Mexico kowtows to the US.

This will mean a more sovereign economic and foreign policy, says Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

It will be quite interesting to watch how far Mexico can go without the direct interference of Washington.  The US has long seen Mexico as their backyard (like much of Latin America) and has repeatedly interfered in politics there.

There can be little doubt that the massive drug trade in Mexico is directly linked to the US and I can't count how many times over the years I've heard or read that agencies like the DEA, FBI, and CIA play a role in those illegal operations.

Any efforts to truly fight corruption in Mexico will inevitably rub up against US mobsters and oligarchies who make big $$$ running drugs.

Got to wish Lopez Obrador the best of luck and hope he is for real.

Bruce

The wedding of neo-liberalism & fascism

After performing in Brazil, Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) discusses the rise of Jair Bolsonaro and the murder of Marielle Franco.

See part two of the interview here

Nazis in Ukraine's Army

RT reports that Ukraine's puppet President Petro Poroshenko has met the country's elite troops – paratroopers – ahead of their redeployment to bolster the “partial” martial law state. One of the soldiers openly sported an insignia of a Hitler Waffen SS division.

One of the troopers, standing just a few steps away from Ukraine's president proudly displayed the insignia of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf right on his chest. Here he is:

As World War II kicked off, the Totenkopf Division was created from the SS personnel of death camps and SS paramilitary units, involved in the massacres of Polish civilians. The unit fought both on western and eastern fronts during the war, committing more war crimes in progress. The division, as well as all the other SS troops were deemed war criminals during the Nuremberg trials.

The Ukrainian Army, and newly formed National Guard, are riddled with Nazis who claim as their hero Stepan Bandera who hailed from the western part of the country.  Bandera was a Nazi collaborator who welcomed Hitler's invasion of the former Soviet Union and whose forces murdered 60,000 members of the Polish minority in Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera (center) is the guiding light of Nazis in Ukraine today that are being funded, trained and directed in the US-NATO effort to draw Russia into a war with Ukraine.

US Army Special Forces from Fort Carson, Colorado are regularly assigned to a base in western Ukraine where they have been training the newly formed National Guard which is full of these Nazis.  See the video of Obama's Ambassador Pyatt to Ukraine making a trip to visit the training base here.

It was Pyatt that played a key role (along with Hillary Clinton's deputy Victoria Nuland) in the 2014 coup d' etat the US engineered in Kiev.   He was the one famously on the phone with Nuland plotting who would run Ukraine after the coup when Nuland said, 'Fuck the EU' - meaning it did not matter who the Europeans wanted to lead Ukraine.  You can listen to that phone call here.

Anyone who claims there is a 'rough equivalence' between the US-NATO and Russia is living in a dream world.  The US-NATO spend well over 50% of the global total of all military spending - Russia spends 3.8%.  Russia is not trying to replicate the former Soviet Union - they are obviously trying to protect their borders from fast approaching US-NATO military forces.

In the west the media is chock full of CIA operatives.  In the west colleges and universities are loaded with instructors that get their funding at some level from the military industrial complex and their foundation friends like the George Soros 'Open Society' foundation.  That means the western anti-Russian line is ever present in the high-level education systems and media in the US, Europe and beyond.

The US-NATO are dangerously attempting to do what Napoleon and Hitler failed to do - smash the Russian state and break it up into pieces giving the western resource extraction corporations free hand to grab the enormous resource base of the country.

Wake up and smell the stinking western agenda. We are on the brink of WW III.

Bruce

French Yellow Vests demands

Here is the full list of our demands, which go well beyond the abolition of a punitive diesel tax: 1. zero homeless (urgently) 2. much more progressive income tax (much more tax bands) 3. Living wage at 1300€ net (currently at 1050€) 4. Promote small business in towns and slow the development of large-scale commercial developments on the outskirts of towns (which encourage the use of cars) 5. Large-scale national plan to insulate houses 6. Tax the multi-nationals and lower taxes for small businesses 7. Universal social security (including for self-employed who are excluded from the system today) 8. Maintain a solidarity based state pension (today's pensions are paid by the social contributions of today's workers, and so on from generation to generation) 9. No pension below 1200€ per month 10. Abolish carbon tax 11. All public representatives (TDs) paid average industrial wage, expenses controlled 12. Wages and pensions indexed on inflation 13. Protect French industry, no delocalization 14. Abolish the EU Posted Workers Directive which allows employers to escape social contributions. Limit contractual workers in large companies, permanent contracts should be the norm 15. Seriously tackle tax evasion (80 billion€) and declare the debt "odious", end austerity 16. Tackle the root cause of forced migration 17. Improve treatment of refugees and especially child refugees. 18. Civics classes and language classes for newly arrived migrants 19. Fix a maximum wage at 15,000€ per month 20. Increase of handicapped allowance 21. Guarantee a job for all unemployed fit to work 22. Cap on rents and more affordable and student accommodation built 23. No privatisation of state infrastructure 24. Re-nationalisation of electricity and gas companies 25. Immediate end to closure of post-offices, small schools, small hospitals and local rail networks 26. Ban for-profit retirement homes, no profit off the backs of our old people 27. Maximum 25 students per class at all levels of schooling 28. People's referendum initiative introduced so that people can propose laws if over 700,000 signatures obtained 29. Extra funding for justice system including police and army 30. Retirement age set at 60 or 55 for those having worked in physically demanding jobs 31. End ex-presidents’ privileges 32. Tax maritime and aviation fuel (today tax free)

U.S. created Central American refugee crisis

It's a similar story to the refugee crisis now in Europe - with people running from US-NATO war zones in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and all over the African continent.

The war mongers know that when they create wars there will be a refugee crisis.  They do it intentionally to destabilize countries - and the media helps pit the people of a particular nation against the refugee as if they were the cause of the crisis that made them flee from home.

No one wants to flee their homeland - refugees do it because they have no choice.

Stop the wars and the destabilization of nations and the refugee crisis will halt.

Bruce

Sunday song