Mahmoud Abbas: Letter to The Criminal Occupation Prime Minister

The letter below was sent by the Palestinian "President" Mahmoud Abbas to the Prime Minister of the Zionist occupation state of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. President Abbas, who holds the placebo presidential chair of the PA for a handful of US, European and Arab dollars, recently sent a long letter begging his criminal counterpart, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu to release some hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The message caused us headache and disgust because of the unending talk about it in the media, and in the end it did not bring us as Palestinians anything new. It simply was a desperate step by Abbas to justify more begging money from western countries for the PA finances, a couple more millions of dollars which President Abbas has become so used to receive whenever he feigns for a moment that he "thinks" about Palestine and the Palestinians. Everybody thought that Abbas would dissolve the PA after all the lamenting, but such a step would never be taken by a loser accustomed to a life of treason and beggary and living off of others. The message of Abbas to Netanyahu, as published in the Hebrew media, is below: Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, State of Israel. H.E. Prime Minister Netanyahu: In 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Declaration of Principles (The Oslo Accords) and exchanged letters of mutual recognition with the Government of Israel. The Declaration of Principles defined its aim as the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which would begin with a transitional period, and culminate with negotiations on all the final status issues including Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugees, water, security, relations with neighboring countries, and other matters of mutual interest.

DW: NATO Failings Led To Attacks by Taliban

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has accused NATO of failing to prevent the multiple attacks staged by the Taliban insurgents across Afghanistan on Sunday. NATO says the attacks will not affect its long-term exit planning. The Taliban's coordinated attacks that gripped Afghanistan on Sunday lay bare intelligence failures by both NATO and Afghan troops, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Monday. "The terrorists' infiltration in Kabul and other provinces is an intelligence failure for us and especially for NATO and should be seriously investigated," said Karzai in a statement. But Karzai lauded what he called the "bravery and sacrifice of the security forces who quickly and timely reacted to contain the terrorists." "Afghan security forces proved to the people that they can defend their country successfully," he added. NATO: no changes to the plan. Meanwhile, NATO was adamant that the attacks will not affect the 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops. "Clearly we still security challenges," NATO spokeswoman Ona Lungescu said at a news briefing. "This was not the first such attack and I do not expect it to be the last." "But such attacks don't change the transition strategy, they don't change the goal and they don't change the timeline that we all agreed to at the Lisbon summit in November 2o10, she insisted. Ban: strengthen counter-terrorism. The United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon also emphatically decried on Monday the Taliban insurgency, adding that it had exposed the need to beef up the country's security forces. Ban condemned "in the strongest possible terms" the siege, warning: "We need to strengthen the capacity of counter-terrorism efforts and of Afghan security." "These issues will be discussed in detail at the forthcoming NATO summit in May" he told reporters at a press conference in Brussels.

Jim Kirwan: Let's Cut To The Chase!

What we have now is total insanity masquerading as "total protection" for every citizen in the middle of a Free-fire Zone where the same people that are supposed to be protecting us are trying to kill us all. On the one hand, we have a government who believes that they must make every single thing that any of us do every minute of every day. In other words, instead of treating us like adults, the government has decided, with no prompting from the public, to step into every decision that we make every day and night. No matter what is the government is there: Telling us what we MUST do, what we CANNOT DO, and fining or charging us for every single unwanted decision which they are trying to force us to accept. This is true for every human need or desire, every decision surrounding food, diet, medicine, education, jobs, reading or entertainment event: And now they insist on government approval for programs or video that we might watch, but only with their permission! Government also wants to control who we speak with, what we talk about and what we may NOT talk about. Sorry that was last year: This year it's what we may be ALLOWED to think as well, because this year we can now commit THOUGHT CRIMES too. And since the government has appointed itself to watch and respond to everything we do NOT do: The only thing left for the government to do to us is to assign each and every one of us "a personal minder." This was used by the Stasi in East Germany, and we know how well that turned out for the East Germans. But this is America and Americans are just too stupid to make any of their own decisions for themselves. So we "NEED" the government; according to the government, just so we don't hurt ourselves psychologically, physically, mentally, or even accidentally?

Philip Giraldi: The Babylonian Captivity of Washington

The most troubling prerogative of modern government is the ability of the sovereign or head of state to go to war. War means death, debt, and, if the decision is a bad one, the very end of civil society and the prevailing political order. Because war is potentially so terrible, a number of nations have curtailed the ability of the executive authority to make such a decision without first satisfying conditions imposed through constitutional and other political restraints. It is perhaps ironic that the world's oldest republic, the United States, has ignored its own constitution to grant to the president the authority to enter into armed conflict through the simple expedient of not actually declaring war. America has been de facto at war continuously since 2001 and the recent National Defense Authorization Act has codified an unending conflict in which the whole world is a battlefield and everyone in it is a potential enemy combatant subject to no constitutional or legal protection. Many critics of the perennially lopsided relationship that the United States enjoys with Israel have noted a disturbing shift in the relationship during the first three years of the Obama Administration. To be sure, Obama appears to genuinely dislike Israel's arrogant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a sentiment that is fully reciprocated. But Obama is bound hand and foot into an engagement with Israel in which he lacks leverage over what might or might not take place. Even George W. Bush was able to say no to Israel when it was mooted that Tel Aviv might attack Iran, but Obama has painted himself into a corner where the United States has little influence over what might occur. Whether the Obama reticence is due to the control exercised by his Chicago billionaire patrons, the Crown and Pritzker families, both of which are strong supporters of the Middle East status quo, or whether it is just a more generalized fear about what might happen in the upcoming national elections, the result has been paralysis in Washington.

Ben Schreiner: The Imperial "Friends" of Syria!

As the proposed April 10 Syrian ceasefire goes up in smoke, so, too, does the hope for a Syrian-led political process to resolve the crisis. Quite predictably, the US propaganda machine has rushed to lay blame for the abortive ceasefire solely at the feet of the Syrian government. As a New York Times headline averred Monday: "Cease-fire in Doubt as Syria Demands New Conditions." These "new" conditions, the article detailed, include "written guarantees' that rebels would stop fighting before it pulled back its troops under the cease-fire plan." Of course, the six-point peace initiative proposed by joint United Nations and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, which has already been agreed upon by the Syrian government, explicitly calls for the "cessation of violence in all its forms by all parties to protect civilians and stabilize the country." In service to propaganda, however, the US media has largely sidestepped such matters in propagating a narrative of one-sided Syrian governmental intransigence. Thus, the maneuvering over the weekend by the armed Syrian opposition to undermine the Tuesday ceasefire, was largely ignored. Yet as Reuters reported Saturday, "Rebel Free Syrian Army commander Colonel Riad al-Asaad said his men would cease fire, provided 'the regime withdraws from the cities and returns to its original barracks." Reuters went on to admit, "Annan's plan does not stipulate a complete army withdrawal to barracks or mention police." Still, the concerted move to undo the Annan peace initiative did not begin this past weekend. Rather, it began a full week prior. Lest one forgets, the armed Syrian opposition, which the self-proclaimed "friends" of the Syrian people so readily laud and seek to now shower with cash, was publicly chided a mere two weeks ago by Human Rights Watch for committing myriad human-rights abuses against the Syrian people.

Jill Treaner: Eurozone Crisis has entered a 'more lethal phase'

George Soros says Europe's financial crisis has taken 'a turn for the worse' and outlines a series of measures to solve it. George Soros has warned that the euro-zone has entered a "more lethal phase" and outlined a series of measures to solve the crisis, including an idea that all countries should be able to refinance their debt at the same interest rate. Soros, known as the man who broke the Bank of England by betting that the UK would be forced to devalue the pound during the 1992 currency crisis, said that "far from abating, the euro crisis has recently taken a turn for a worse". Soros, who is chairman of Soros Fund Management, which in 2011 stopped managing money for outside investors, warned that Europe was facing "a long period of economic stagnation or worse" whether or not the euro endures. He also warned that while countries in Latin America suffered a lost decade after their economic crisis in 1982, the European Union would not survive such an economic malaise. "The deflationary debt trap threatens to destroy a still incomplete political union," he said in an article published in the Financial Times. While the European Central Bank's injections of large sums of cheap funding into the financial markets through its long-term financing operation (LTRO) helped to prevent a credit crunch, it failed to solve the underlying problems of the eaurozone where the gap between the richer countries such as Germany is widening against the indebted nations such as Greece. "the crisis has coincided with a sharp change in the mood on the financial markets since the end of the first quarter, when stock markets in the US enjoyed the strongest performance since first quarter of 1998. Since the start of this week, markets have been more cautious, with bond yields in Spain reaching their highest level in four months on Tuesday, amid concern about the scale of the austerity measures being imposed by the government and fears that the country might need a bailout.

Bill Moyers: The Rich Pay Fewer Taxes!

Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you're a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner, death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way. In a story headlined, "For Big Companies, Life Is Good," The Wall Street Journal reports that big American companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more profitable than ever: flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country's income. But, the paper notes,"Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the US. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries." To add to this embarrassment of riches, the consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice reports that more than two dozen major corporations, including GE, Boeing, Mattel and Verizon, paid no federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. They got a corporate tax break that was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Corporate taxes today are at a 40-year-low, even as the executive suites at big corporations have become throne rooms where the crown jewels wind up in the personal vault of the CEO. Then look at this report in The New York Times: Last year, among the 100 best-paid CEOs, the median income was more than 14 million, compared with the average annual American salary of $45,230. Combined, this happy hundred executives pulled down more than two billion dollars. What's more, according to the Times "these CEO's might seem like pikers. Top hedge fund managers collectively earned $14.4 billion last year." No wonder some of them are fighting to kill a provision in the recent Dodd-Frank reform law that would require disclosing the ratio of CEO pay to the median pay of their employees. One never wishes to upset the help, you know. It can lead to unrest.