Thursday, June 19, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Obamacare’s Too Expensive For Ya? Cancel Your Cable, Peasant!
Once again, America, you’ve really let King Barry down.
On March 6, 2014, President Obama conducted a town hall meeting with Spanish-language media regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. He was asked about the concerns of many Latinos that the law is simply too expensive. He suggested that some families may be spending too much on cable television or cell phones, and not enough on health insurance.
“I don’t know his particular circumstance..” Since when has that ever stopped you, genius?
Clearly, this guy acted stupidly. He’s actually making choices for himself and his family. Um, this is America, pal!
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Central Banker Appointed as Prime Minister of Ukraine
A reshuffled Ukrainian Parliament installed following a coup last week has voted to appoint Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the new prime minister of the country. Yats, as Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. State Department, called him, is a natural choice. He is a millionaire former banker who served as economy minister, foreign minister and parliamentary speaker before Yanukovych took office in 2010. He is a member of Yulie Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party. Prior to the revolution cooked up by the State Department and executed by ultra-nationalist street thugs, Tymoshenko was incarcerated for embezzlement and other crimes against the people of Ukraine. Now she will be part of the installed government, same as she was after the last orchestrated coup, the Orange Revolution.
Yats will deliver Ukraine to the international bankers. “Ukraine is on the brink of bankruptcy and needs to be saved from collapse — Yatsenyuk has a strong economic background,” Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, told Bloomberg on Wednesday. “Ukraine faces difficult reforms but without them there won’t be a successful future.”
Discussion with the IMF is crucial, US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said earlier this week. In order to cinch the deal, the U.S. government will sweeten the pot. Lew talked with the IMF boss, Christine Lagarde, about Ukraine as he headed back from a globalist confab, the G-20 meeting in Sydney, Australia.
“Secretary Lew informed Managing Director Lagarde that he had spoken earlier in the day with Ukrainian leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk and advised him of the broad support for an international assistance package centered on the IMF, as soon as the transitional Ukrainian government is fully established by the Parliament,” MNI News reported on Monday. “Secretary Lew also noted that he had communicated to Mr. Yatsenyuk the need to quickly begin implementing economic reforms and enter discussions with the IMF following the establishment of the transitional government.”
Ukraine’s story is right out of the IMF playbook. The nation’s corrupt leaders past and present – most notably Tymoshenko, who went to prison for corruption and wholesale thievery – have enriched themselves at the expensive of ordinary Ukrainians.
“Ukraine at the dawn of independence was among the ten most developed countries, and now it drags out a miserable existence,” Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko said last year. The nation’s leaders “signed a memorandum with the International Monetary Fund to meet the requirements of the oligarchs, but on the other hand — to timely pay the interest on the IMF loans and to raise the prices for gas and electricity,” Symonenko said.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Brazil, Europe plan undersea cable to skirt U.S. spying
By Robin Emmott
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia.
At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance.
"We have to respect privacy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. We don't want businesses to be spied upon," Rousseff told a joint news conference with the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council.
"The Internet is one of the best things man has ever invented. So we agreed for the need to guarantee ... the neutrality of the network, a democratic area where we can protect freedom of expression," Rousseff said.
Rousseff postponed a state visit to Washington last year in protest at the U.S. National Security Agency spying on her email and phone and is now seeking alternative routes to U.S. cables.
Brazil relies on U.S. undersea cables to carry almost all of its communications to Europe. The existing cable between Europe and Brazil is outdated and only used for voice transmission.
EU leaders are sympathetic to Brazil's call following the revelations of fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that showed the agency also eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone and some EU institutions.
U.S. President Barack Obama has since banned spying on the leaders of close allies, but trust has been damaged.
Brussels is threatening the suspension of EU-U.S. agreements for data transfers unless Washington increases guarantees for the protection of EU citizens' data.
MERCOSUR'S MISSED DEADLINES
At the one-day summit, there was no public criticism of the United States, which remains the European Union's closest ally.
But Rousseff clearly took heart from Merkel's calls this month for a European Internet that is protected from U.S. surveillance, even if there are questions about the practicalities of setting up alternative networks in Europe.
Rousseff said Brazil and the European Union have "similar concerns" about U.S. dominance of fiber-optic cables and hoped to have a cable running from the Portuguese capital Lisbon to the northeastern Brazilian of Fortaleza from next year.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
What's going on in Venezuela right now in a nutshell!
There is a crisis in Venezuela. Already one of the most violent places on Earth — a person is murdered every 21 minutes, and there were roughly 24,700 violent deaths last year — the country is in the throes of a massive shake-up.
For the past few months, Leopold López has led an opposition movement against President Nicolas Maduro's government, which has been running the country into the ground. Since taking over for the deceased Hugo Chávez in April 2013, Maduro has led Venezuela to 56% inflation rate and a 50% increase in the budget deficit, prompting China to cut back on its $20 billion loan, and Moody's and Standard & Poor to downgrade Venezuelan bonds to "junk" status. Additionally, the once-strong dollar has dropped from an 8 to 1 exchange rate relative to the U.S. dollar at Chávez's death, to a disastrous 87 to 1. In response, Maduro has taken to blaming U.S.-backed "fascists" and the "parasitic bourgeoisie." He has also called for more state intervention. This has only made things harder for the private sector, which has since made it nearly impossible for Venezuelans to get food and other basic material necessities.
Consequently, people like López have been leading dissatisfied Venezuelans in protest. But it wasn't until Venezuela's Youth Day last week that things really took a bad turn. Swarms of young people — mostly aged 18 to 25 — took to the streets to peacefully protest Maduro's poor governance, but state police quickly tried to corral them. At least three protesters were shot dead and many more were injured. Maduro has since charged López with terrorism and murderfor inciting the riots where Maduro's government killed people.
Since then, more young people have protested Maduro's government and the awful treatment of the Venezuelan people, especially the young people who have died during these demonstrations. Because of the government's tight control of the news outlets and television networks, very little coverage has seeped out of the country. Young people have been using Twitter and other forms of social media to organize, but the government's crackdown on dissent has been swift and severe.
Maduro and his many arms of government have sworn to put a hard stop to these protests and opposition groups. But the situation is spiraling further and further out of control each day. As Businessweek points out, the last time Venezuela experienced such aggressive instability was during the 1989 Caracazo riots, which led to the regime change that placed Hugo Chávezin power.
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