Monthly Archives: October 2007

>Red Terror File: Pre-election bus blast in Togliatti, Russia kills at least 8, injures 45; Kremlin fingers Islamic radicals; Zyuganov: regime helpless

>The Russian city of Togliatti is named after the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, and is the headquarters of Russia’s largest automobile manufacturer Avtovaz, which produces the Lada line of cars. The security organs, state-run Interfax reports, have already discovered the so-called “Islamic trace” in this incident, meaning that Islamic terrorists–not secret police operatives–are responsible for this outrage. “Currently, all possible theories are being considered. Among them the most likely is the so called ‘Wahhabist trail’ which might be related with various Islamic extremists,” affirmed Interfax’s anonymous source, pushing the Kremlin line that Russia, like the USA, is the object of Islam’s wrath. “Radical Islamic movements have quite a strong influence in the Volga region, including in Togliatti.”

At least 8 killed, 45 injured in city bus explosion in Volga area -2
11:1631/ 10/ 2007

SAMARA, October 31 (RIA Novosti) – At least eight people died and 45 were injured on Wednesday morning in a suspected terrorist blast on a bus in central Togliatti, a city on Russia’s Volga River.

A spokesman for the regional police department said an explosive device with a charge of 1 kilogram of TNT equivalent, with no solid encasement, had been discovered fastened to underside of the bus.

Vladimir Artyakov, the governor of the Samara Region in which Togliatti is located, said a criminal case has been launched to investigate the explosion as a terrorist attack.

Andrei Derbenev, a spokesman for the city’s rescue service, earlier said 20 people had been hospitalized, of whom two were in a critical condition.

Several others have also have requested medical help. “Many of them were a long way from the bus at the time of the blast, but were hit by fragments. The shockwaves smashed windows on the ground and first floors of a nearby building.”

Togliatti, with a population of about 700,000 people, is home to Russia’s largest automaker Avtovaz, which produces cars under the Lada brand.

Source: Novosti

Suspiciously, the incident occured only four weeks before the State Duma election. It is therefore likely that this incident was concocted by Comrade Nikolai Patrushev’s henchentities at the Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB). Moreover, it probably serves two purposes: 1) discredit the Putinist/Chekist/Gryzlovist/Surkovist regime as ineffective in the face of “Islamic terrorism” and 2) herd the Russian electorate into the waiting arms of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, CPRF Chairman Gennady Zyuganov, who was interviewed today by Ekho Moskvy radio station, referred to the “helplessness of the authorities, which cannot ensure the safety of citizens.” He then described Russia’s political institutions as being occupied by the “real criminals,” meaning United Russia and President Vladimir Putin’s cronies.

Earlier this month Russian prosecutors charged FSB agent Pavel Ryaguzov with providing “logistical support” to the murderer(s) of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin. State-run Russia Today reports that “Mr Ryaguzov is accused of passing information to Politkovskaya’s murderers about her place of residence.” The attempt to discredit the FSB with such revelations could itself be a plot by the Kremlin’s hidden communist masters to present “the Party” as Russia’s savior.

>USSR2 File: Duma election’s media campaign to begin Nov. 3, United Russia backs out of televised debates; Zyuganov: Putin’s party panicking

>With the State Duma election slated for December 2, state-run Russia Today reports that “the eleven political parties taking part in the Russian parliamentary elections are being allocated part free and part paid-for time on TV and radio stations.” Intriguingly, the potemkin “party of power,” United Russia, is refusing to participate in televised debates, a decision that will without question adversely affect the party’s image and electoral success. For Kremlinologists who subscribe to the Golitsynian thesis, namely that the communists are Russia’s hidden masters to this very day, one can only wonder if President Vladimir Putin’s support group in the Russian parliament is purposely caving in to the country’s only viable opposition, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union.

Duma election’s media campaign kicks off Saturday
October 30, 2007

The eleven political parties taking part in the Russian parliamentary elections are being allocated part free and part paid-for time on TV and radio stations. The media blitz will start on Saturday, and last a month, until the election on December 2nd.

With less then a month till polling stations open, the preparations are in full swing. And even thought their campaigns have been meticulously fine-tuned, there are still some aspects of the race that are a gamble.

The drawing procedure distributes TV and radio air time for the 11 parties registered for the forthcoming parliamentary election. According to Russian law, parties can use this time to show their campaign ads – or use it for public debates with their opponents.

Party priorities, however, differ – and the pro-Kremlin United Russia will waste no air time on debating.

“In the coming thirty something days our task is to explain the voters the course preferred by the President in the last eight years,” claims Andrey Vorobyev of United Russia Party.

But it’s not just the politicians who have a lot on their plate. Invitations have gone out from Russia’s Central Election Committee – to all the international observers expected to monitor the December 2nd election.

Despite claims Russia was deliberately stalling inviting observers the Election Committee head Vladimir Churov explains the reason for the delay is much more simple. “It took a long time to invite observers because registration procedures changed. And how can we invite people before we know how many parties are in the running? Now, we have sent out the invitations. We have asked representative from PACE, OSCE, CIS, SCO and election committee representatives from a number of European countries to attend,” said he.Around 400 international observers are being invited to monitor the Duma election.

With the clocks ticking, parties are shifting their focus from preparations to actions. Campaigning officially starts on Saturday. Many believe politicians will be squeezing the most out of the air time they are allotted so watch this space.

In response to United Russia’s withdrawal from the multi-party debates, CPRF Chairman Gennady Zyuganov slammed the “party of power”:

There is nothing new in the solution of United Russia to withdraw from participation in the television debates. In truth, that party’s position has not changed since the last elections. It has nothing to say to the country. It is panicking and fears any discussion, any open comparison of positions, any dispute on the eyes in the entire country.

United Russia continues to hide behind different kinds of mirages and myths, like the so-called “Plan of Putin,” from which the President himself has already repeatedly and publicly distanced himself, calling this simply pre-election technology by United Russia.

In the light of international practices and even simple elementary democratic procedures, which Russia within the framework of the OSCE was obligated to implement, then the behavior of United Russia shows to what extent it is indifferent to the political rights and the public interests of citizens, how disrespectfully it conducts itself with respect to other participants in the political process in our country.

It may be that United Russia, like the other phony parties of “post”-communist Russia, has served its historic mission of confusing the West and relegitimizing communism in the eyes of Russia’s citizen-slaves.

In a March 2006 interview with state-run Interfax Zyuganov accused the USA of launching biological warfare against Russia in the form of avian influenza, or bird flu:

The forms of warfare are changing. It’s strange that not a single duck has yet died in America – they are all dying in Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why. I have good knowledge of war gases. I dealt with them during my army service. I tested all kinds of war gases at a range myself. I not only suggest this, I know very well how this can be arranged. There is nothing strange here.

This man, who admits he practiced with chemical warfare in the Soviet Army, could be the next president of Russia and the first president of the restored Soviet Union. Got gas mask?

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Moscow launches first GLONASS military satellites of 2007, completing Soviet-era project; Putin: outperforms GPS

>GLONASS (GLObal’naya NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema; English: Global Navigation Satellite System) is a radio-based satellite navigation system developed by the Not-So-Former Soviet Union and presently operated by the Russian Space Forces, a branch of the Russian Armed Forces reestablished in 2001. GLONASS provides the Russian military with real-time position and velocity determination in order to navigate and target ballistic missiles. The US counterpart to GLONASS is the Global Positioning System (GPS). The Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces blog reports that on October 26 the Kremlin successfully launched a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, delivering three GLONASS-M navigation satellites into orbit. The RSNF blog adds: “The launch was originally scheduled on October 25, 2007, but was postponed because of a Kazakhstan holiday that day. Previous launch of Glonass satellites took place on December 25, 2006. Russia is expected to launch three more Glonass-M satellites on 25 December 2007.” These launches are simply one more element in Moscow’s war preparations against the West, as state-run Novosti confirms: “In December 2005, President Vladimir Putin ordered the system to be ready by 2008, and First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Glonass would be available to domestic users for military as well civilian purposes by the end of 2007.” In March 2007 Putin boasted: “The global navigation system Glonass should be cheaper and of better quality than the GPS system. You know what attention I pay to Glonass, and I hope relevant attention will be paid to it.” Pictured above: GLONASS military receiver.

>Blogger’s Note: New blogsite feature: "Post"-Communist Russia’s Secret Leninist Leadership

>Please note our new exclusive feature, a chart displaying “post”-communist Russia’s secret Leninist leadership, located here and under News Reports.

>Russian Leninist Leadership

>

>China File: Moscow-Beijing-New Delhi Axis meets in Harbin; China: US NMD "undermines global strategic balance"; Pravda: PRC holds US dollar hostage

>On October 24 the foreign ministers of the Moscow-Beijing-New Delhi Axis met in Harbin, China to consolidate their strategic triangle. This was their third meeting since last year. Russia, China, and India constitute three-fourths of BRIC, an unofficial but real political-economic-social-military alliance that also embraces Brazil, as well as the backbone of the Communist Bloc.

At this meeting the Chinese foreign minister sided with the Kremlin by warning: “The placement of U.S. missile defenses in Europe will not ease global security concerns but will undermine the global strategic balance.” We have before demonstrated that the BRIC countries themselves recognize this multilateral partnership. Although state-owned Kommersant Daily describes India as being “out of the triangle,” in reality India–where communists hold the balance of power in parliament and Maoist guerrillas control one-third of the country–is merely a junior partner to the two communist superpowers. It is therefore hesistant to rattle sabers against the USA. Pictured above, left to right: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Chinese FM Yang Jiechi, and Indian FM Pranab Mukherjee.

India Out of Triangle
October 25, 2007

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi and India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee met in Harbin, northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, October 24, 2007. The ultimate purpose of the event was to manifest to the world at large that a strategic triangle of Moscow-Beijing-Delhi is gaining momentum to time of creation of the U.S.-Japan’s missile defense shield in the Pacific Ocean and the U.S. attempts to take root in Middle Asia. The tricky point is that Delhi doesn’t seem to share the saber-rattling attitude of its partners towards the United States.

The foreign chiefs of Russia, China and India hadn’t met particularly frequently until recently. In 2006, however, the three-party format was revived at the highest level during the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The contacts have become more intensive this year. Foreign ministers talked to each other in Delhi in February and Harbin hosted their third get-together Wednesday. Judging by the yesterday’s rhetoric, the ministers have good reasons for the meetings; the strong focus of at least two of them is creating and putting in practice a new security concept, as the missile defense shield of the United States could undermine strategic balance and stability worldwide. But India stands somewhat apart. Yesterday, Cautious Pranab Mukherjee avoided direct reference to those plans of the United States but was always eager to deliberate on the definite economic projects related to energy and space cooperation. Although interested in improving relations with China and in energy wealth of Russia, India isn’t ready to lash out at the United States for this purpose.

Source: Kommersant Daily

According to state-run Russia Today, Lavrov insisted that Russia “has no intention of forming a military alliance with China and India to counter U.S. missile defence plans.” This is a flagrant lie in view of the bellicose rhetoric that has emerged from the Kremlin and the Russian General Staff over the last year and in view too of two Sino-Soviet war games, the first held in 2005, the second only this past August. The same source reports that “Russia, China and India have also said they oppose sanctions against Myanmar.” In taking this stand the Moscow-Beijing-New Delhi Axis is complicit with the bloody deeds of Yangon’s genocidal regime.

While Russia consolidates its strategic triangle with China and India, the Kremlin continues to promote convergence with the West, albeit on Communist Bloc terms. Two days after the foreign ministers’ meeting in Harbin, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the European Union-Russia summit in Lisbon where he accused the USA of starting a new Cuban Missile Crisis.

Over the last several months we have documented the Communist Bloc’s stated intention to “nuke” the US economy by dumping the dollar as a reserve currency. Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union has reprinted several articles to this effect by Seeking Alpha, a financial intelligence newsletter. This, of course, proves among other things that Soviet communists closely monitor Western Internet sites. Pravda apparently agrees with the premise, articulated by some Western journalists, that the People’s Republic of China is holding the US economy “hostage.”

China makes US economy its hostage
24.10.2007

Over the last 30 years, China’s economy has grown at an average annualized rate of nearly 10%. While this statistic alone is jaw-dropping, what is more impressive is the extent to which the nominally Communist country’s economy has become intertwined in the global economy. China now exerts enormous influence over the economies of virtually every country in the world, and a slight change in its domestic economic policy has the potential to send shockwaves rippling throughout the world. Nowhere is this more apparent-and frightening-then in China’s economic relationship with the United States, which is very much at the mercy of China when it comes to prices, wages, interest rates, most importantly, the value of the Dollar.

Forex Reserve Diversification

Let’s begin with an examination of China’s forex reserves, which is probably China’s biggest bargaining chip in its economic relationship with the US. Up until two years ago, China’s currency, the RMB or Yuan, was pegged to the Dollar. As with any peg, there often develops a discrepancy between the fixed value of the currency and the value that the market would assign if the currency were permitted to float. As China’s economy surged ahead, especially over the last five to ten years, tremendous pressure began to build under the RMB. In order to maintain the peg and hold down the value of the RMB, China began accumulating foreign exchange reserves by withdrawing foreign currency from circulation. Today, China’s foreign exchange reserves are massive, at $1.4 trillion as of September 2007.

In the eyes of American policy-makers, this presents a problem because the majority of these reserves are held in Dollar-denominated assets, namely in the form of US Treasury securities. The US government theoretically could not be happier that foreign Central Banks are willing to finance its perennial budget deficits. However, this borrowing has reached a point where foreigners now control over 40% of the US national debt. Moreover, long-term US interest rates are market-driven, based on the buying and selling of US government bonds. In other words, the US has gradually ceded control of its long-term interest rates to foreign Central Banks, namely China and Japan.

As the Dollar has depreciated over the last five years, many Central Banks have begun “diversifying” their forex reserves, by switching from Dollar assets to assets denominated in other currencies. This is problematic for the Dollar for two reasons. First, switching from US assets to European assets, for example, directly causes the Dollar to depreciate. Second, the bulk sale of US treasury securities (whether or not they are replaced with other US-assets) causes US bond prices to decline and hence, yields to increase. Thus, if China suddenly decided to diversify its reserves, for economic and/or political reasons, it could potentially crash the Dollar and send US long-term interest rates skyward.

Currency Manipulation

The second aspect of the China-US economic relationship which China could wield to its advantage is the RMB itself. American public officials enjoy criticizing China for failing to allow its currency to appreciate more quickly. In fact, there is a bill that has been lying dormant in the US Congress which threatens to slap a massive across-the-board tariff on all Chinese imports if China fails to allow the RMB to appreciate adequately against the Dollar. What policymakers don’t realize is that a rapid appreciation in the RMB would actually harm the US economy.

Coupled with its growing role as the world’s factory, China’s cheap currency has made Americans wealthier, by increasing their purchasing power. As production of labor-intensive goods was outsourced to China over the last decade, prices for finished products began to fall both in real terms and in nominal terms. While the effect on US employment trends is debatable, its effect on prices has been unambiguous. Thus, even while the American economy boomed, inflation remained relatively modest by historical standards. This allowed the Federal Reserve Board to hold interest rates down and foment economic growth.

Direct Competition with US Exporters

A more potent (and plausible) weapon would be to compete more directly with US exporters, by expanding into high-technology products. Currently, China specializes in manufacturing labor-intensive products, which have long since been manufactured outside of the United States. As previously stated, a revaluation of the Chinese Yuan would surely not return production to the US. However, if China were to expand into capital-intensive and/or high-technology products, it could easily steal marketshare and jobs from the US.

Raw Material Pricing

In addition, there is the impact that China’s economic growth has exerted on global raw material prices. It has been said that 25% of the world’s construction cranes are currently located in China, to support the country’s building boom. These massive development and infrastructure projects require proportionally massive quantities of raw materials, namely cement and steel. Unfortunately, China is especially inefficient at converting raw materials into finished products. Combined with the CCP’s emphasis on the near-term (which inherently prioritizes low cost over efficiency), this is placing a tremendous strain on global energy supplies, driving prices skyward.

Competition for Energy

The global prices for oil and coal are already at record highs and China only consumes 1/15 the amount of per-capita energy as the US! Chinese energy companies are becoming increasingly visible, scouring the globe for stable supplies of energy and often coming head-to-head with American energy companies. Conveniently, China does not recognize the ethical issues which arise from purchasing energy from dictatorships and corrupt regimes, whereas US companies are limited from doing business in these places. From Sudan to Myanmar to Kazakhstan, Chinese companies have set up joint ventures where US companies could not. While energy prices have certainly risen in the US, they have not kept pace with global energy prices. In this way, China is able to ensure that its citizens and its businesses have the oil, coal, and natural gas that they require, while their American counterparts may be forced to conserve.

Two years ago, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company [CNOOC] attempted to purchase an American energy company, Unocal, for over $18 Billion. However, the deal was blocked by the US Congress, which feared Unocal’s energy reserves would be supplied to China at the expense of Americans. It did not help CNOOC’s case that 70% of the Company was effectively owned by the CCP. Needless to say, Chinese government officials were not happy with the outcome. (Unocal was ultimately sold to Chevron for a lower price). China has already shown its willingness to use extreme tactics to secure an adequate energy supply. It seems reasonable to expect its energy policy will continue to oppose and inconvenience the US.

Source: Pravda

>Latin America File: Sao Paulo Forum meeting to coincide with Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile; Brazil boosts military spending 50%

>The Seventeenth Ibero-American Summit, to be held in Santiago, Chile between November 8 and 10, will bring together delegates from Spain, Portugal, and their former colonies in Latin America. Last year’s summit met in Montevideo. The governments of most of these countries, including Spain and Portugal, are mostly leftist in orientation, albeit some more so than others.

Last year the Ibero-American Summit passed a number of resolutions that aligned summit leaders with the Communist Bloc and its appendage known as the (Not-So) Non-Aligned Movement. Among other resolutions, the summit condemned the border wall that the USA is slowly-but-not-surely building along its boundary with Mexico and expressed soliarity with Havana’s attempt to extradite Cuban-born CIA operative Luis Posada Carilles. The first article below concludes: “The issue of Bush’s border wall is certain to come up again at the XVII summit.” European and Latin American leftists are only wasting their time hyperventilating over the US-Mexican border wall since their US comrades and faux rightist globalists like President George W. Bush have no real interest in thwarting the illegal alien invasion of the USA.

Chile’s Socialist President Michelle Bachelet–whose former lover was a communist terrorist who sought to overthrow the regime of General Augusto Pinochet–will preside over the Ibero-American Summit. NewsAhead.com provides a synopsis of last year’s summit and a potential agenda for the current meet-and-greet of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking heads of government.

Pictured above: Bachelet and Venezuelan Tyrant in Training Hugo Chavez, united in their dream of a Red Latin America, divided only in their tactics. Comrade Hugo has successfully “wooed,” ideologically speaking, South America’s two female presidents: Chile’s Bachelet and Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

SANTIAGO. 8-10 Nov 2007. Chile hosts XVII Ibero-American summit. Who will attend?

One of the first questions regarding the XVII Ibero-American Summit is who will attend? Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Guatemala’s Oscar Berger, Nicaragua’s Enrique Bolanos, Panama’s Martin Torrijos, Peru’s Alan Garcia and the Dominican Republic’s Leonel Fernandez sent their excuses to the XVI summit, which was held in Uruguay. And Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner arrived late and left before the meeting was over. Such absences are generally reported as slights, analyzed for significance and often interpreted as a sign that the annual gathering of 22 leaders from Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in Latin America is in its death throes.

As described by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet at the close of the XVI summit, the leaders at the XVII summit will be searching for a way to “promote greater cooperation among our countries to build more integrated, more cohesive societies.”

In other business, the leaders will hear reports on the implementation of measures decided on at the XVI summit. At that meeting they signed 12 multilateral documents, the chief of which was the Montevideo Commitment calling on donors to promote development, especially in vulnerable communities, as a means of slowing migration. “Governments have to work hard to prevent migration forced on citizens for political and economic motives, so that no one should feel obliged to leave their home country,” Uruguay’s President Tabare Vazquez told the conference’s closing session.

They also expressed support for Panama’s plan to improve the nation’s Canal; condemned a United States plan to build a wall on the border with southern neighbor Mexico; expressed support for a Cuban bid to extradite Luis Posada Carilles, a Venezuelan citizen wanted in connection with a bomb attack that killed 73 people traveling on a Cuban airline; and called for Britain and Argentina to return to talks over the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas. The two nations went to war over the South Atlantic island group, which is governed by London, in the early 1980s.

The Commitment seeks to ensure human rights for migrants, while bolstering socio-economic development as a means of stemming the outflow to the United States and elsewhere.

Chile is one Latin American country experiencing an in-flow of migrants, according to Bachelet. At the Uruguay summit she said the consolidation of democracy and economic growth in Chile had made it a country that now receives a large number of foreigners who come in search of better jobs.

The issue of Bush’s border wall is certain to come up again at the XVII summit.

“Coinciding” with the Ibero-American Summit will be another mid-annual meeting of the narco-terrorist-communist Sao Paulo Forum, which will converge in Santiago between November 1 and 4. La Voz del Sandinismo, the mouthpiece of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front, reveals that Bachelet’s Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Chile, which supported ousted KGB asset Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, will host the FSP congress.

Representatives of political parties of 12 member countries of the Sao Paulo Forum will meet in Chile for four days on the eve of XVII Latin American Summit. About 28 delegates from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela will meet between November 1 and 4, and address subjects such as “the struggle by the aim to the exclusion and the integration of the peoples.” The designated working group of the Sao Paulo Forum will meet with the directors of the Communist Party [of Chile] and the Socialist Party of [Chile], according to the preliminary program.

Meanwhile, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who co-founded the FSP with Cuban Tyrant Fidel Castro, is combining his slow-motion red revolution with a boost in Brazil’s military budget.

Brazil boosts military spending more than 50 percent

From correspondents in Brasilia
October 29, 2007 11:56am
Article from: Agence France-Presse

BRAZIL has announced it plans to boost its military spending by more than 50 percent in 2008, to around US$5 billion ($5.4 billion), and draw up a new defense plan, but told its neighbors they should not worry.

“Brazil has well established, peaceful relations with all South American nations … one of our political priorities is economic and structural integration of the region … (and in 2008) we’ll also be strenghtening our military links,” Defense Minister Nelson Jobim, said in a public speech.

Brazil, he added, cannot “neglect its defense. Therefore, we will increase our budget outlays and investment in the army, navy and air force by more than 50 percent”.

He also said Brazil “is elaborating a national stretegy defense plan that will determine each military branch’s mission and the equipment it needs for its activities”.

Mr Jobin said the military equipment envisioned in the plan includes new fighter jets.

Brazil in 2002 mothballed military programs to buy 12 fighther jets worth around four billion dollar, and build a nuclear submarine over 10 years for a total cost of 1.3 billion dollars. These programs could be relaunched in 2008.

According to official figures made public on Sunday, Brazil has requested in its 2008 budget proposal to Congress some $5 billion for its military forces, with the possibility of raising it to $5.64 billion.

In 2007, Brazil’s military budget was around $3.5 billion.

Source: News.com

Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim states above: “Brazil has well established, peaceful relations with all South American nations … one of our political priorities is economic and structural integration of the region … [and in 2008] we’ll also be strenghtening our military links.” If Brazil has “well-established, peaceful relations with all South American nations,” then why is Brasilia rearming the country and with whom will Brasilia be strengthening its “military links”? The answer to these questions are probably found in the ideological cross-linkages among the pink and red regimes of Latin America, Chavez’s call to transform the political-economic-social Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas into an anti-“imperialist” (anti-USA) military alliance, and the Venezuelan regime’s troubling paranoia about a pending US invasion of South America. The pro-Chavez Communist Party of Venezuela, which is a member of the FSP, recently implicated former US National Security Director Paul Wolfowitz and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a plot to thwart the constitutional reform (communization) of Venezuela. If the PCV was not a ruling party, then this would be an amusing scenario since I would expect Albright, who held a post in former US President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, to support red revolutionary Chavez. However, communist conspiracy theories are symptomatic of a deeper derangement.

Finally, in view of its strategic partnership with Brazil, Russia will no doubt take advantage of Lula da Silva’s decision to pad the national defense budget to offload some fighter jets in Latin America’s largest and most populous country . . . just as the Kremlin has done with its other strategic partner Venezuela.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Putin: USA creating new Cuban Missile Crisis; Russia holds large military exercise in Far East, test launches ICBM

>Soviet Russia, in collaboration with Red China and other members of the Communist Bloc, continues its preparations for a pre-emptive military strike against the West. The Russian Far East frequently hosts military maneuvers, often carried out under the guise of “anti-terrorist” drills. Predictably, state-run Novosti reports below: “The exercises will be supervised by Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, and will aim to practice measures to localize internal armed conflicts, destroy illegal armed formations and terrorist groups, the press office said.” General Baluyevsky, it should be pointed out, has been strident in his opposition to the US National Missile Defense system.

Russia begins large-scale military exercises in Far East
11:5328/ 10/ 2007

KHABAROVSK, October 28 (RIA Novosti) – Russia began on Sunday large-scale military exercises in the Far East to practice interoperability between troops, the press office of the Far Eastern military district said.

“The strategic command-and-staff military exercises to practice control of force groupings in the Eastern region, East-2007, are being held in accordance with the training plans of the Russian Armed Forces. The exercises will be held from October 28 through November 3,” the press office said.

The exercises will be supervised by Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, and will aim to practice measures to localize internal armed conflicts, destroy illegal armed formations and terrorist groups, the press office said.

In addition, the exercises are intended to study the operation of the single system of troops’ logistic and technical support in the Far Eastern region, the press office said.

Source: Novosti

Per earlier state media annoucements, Russia is also test launching several ICBMs, presumably to knock out cave-dwelling FSB/KGB assets like Osama bin Laden. Today’s launch occured at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which was also the site of a recent “anti-terrorist” drill by the Russian FSB and the Belarusian KGB, which still operates under that nefarious name. Novosti reports that “The SMF commander, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, said last Friday that RS-18 (SS-19 Stiletto) and RS-12M (SS-25 Sickle) will be gradually replaced by new RS-24 ICBMs, equipped with MIRV warheads and characterized by high missile-defense penetration capability.” I am not convinced that Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces require “high missile-defense penetration capability” to take out Osama (if he’s still alive). Another target must be in mind . . . possibly somewhere in the Continental USA.

Russia launches ICBM RS-18 from Baikonur in Kazakhstan -1
13:16 29/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 29 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) have successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile RS-18 (SS-19 Stiletto) from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan, an SMF spokesman said.

Russia’s SMF regularly launch missiles to test their performance characteristics and decide whether they can remain in service.

“The launch of the ICBM RS-18 was successfully conducted at midday Moscow time [8:a.m. GMT] October 29 from the Baikonur space center,” Colonel Alexander Vovk said.

“A simulated warhead has reached the Kura testing site on the Kamchatka peninsula [in the Russian Far East],” the official said.

He said the launch had been conducted in order to assess the possibility of extending the service life of the Stiletto ICBMs, which have so far been operational for 29 years.

“As a result of the successful test launch, the service life of one of our most reliable missile complexes will be extended to 31 years,” Vovk said.

RS-18 missiles have a combat range exceeding 9,600 km [more than 6,000 miles], and are considered to be highly reliable.

Over 100 silo-based Stiletto missiles are currently in service with the SMF, with each missile carrying six 550-kiloton warheads.

The SMF commander, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, said last Friday that RS-18 (SS-19 Stiletto) and RS-12M (SS-25 Sickle) will be gradually replaced by new RS-24 ICBMs, equipped with MIRV warheads and characterized by high missile-defense penetration capability.

Source: Novosti

Meanwhile, at the European Union-Russia summit in Lisbon, on October 26, neo-Soviet Tyrant Vladimir Putin accussed the USA of instigating a new Cuban Missile Crisis by insisting upon the deployment of its interceptor missiles in Central Europe. Even though the Soviets were in fact responsible for that superpower showdown in 1962 by deploying its own missiles in Cuba, Putin lamented: “The situation is quite similar technologically for us. We have withdrawn the remains of bases from Vietnam and Cuba, but such threats are being created near our borders.” Only one day before Putin made this comment Russian bombers approached the Netherlands where NATO defense ministers huddled. The communists are clearly still smarting from the fact that US President John F. Kennedy–surrounded though he was like most post-Second World War presidents by globalist advisors–stood up against Soviet aggression in the Western Hemisphere.

Russia’s strategic aviation capability is again on combat duty after 15 years of playing dead. Today state-run Itar-Tass offers an update on the multi-theater maneuvers that have spanned the last two weeks of October.

The Air Force commander’s aide Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky told Itar-Tass on Monday that “over 25 planes T-160, Tu-95 MS and Il-78 are engaged in air patrolling tasks.” “Over the past ten days, long-haul planes have made over 20 flights,” Drobyshevsky said. “The flights were made both in daytime and nighttime.” The “flights were made in strict accordance with international rules of air space use over neutral waters without violating the borders of other states,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the Russian Air Force continues to insist bomber “flights were made in strict accordance with international rules of air space use over neutral waters without violating the borders of other states.” To reiterate our complaint from Friday, does this alleged adherence to “international rules” include the unauthorized August 17 flight by a Russian military aircraft over Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay in Labrador, which is 210 kilometres inland from the North Atlantic Ocean? I don’t think so.

While Moscow prepares to clobber Washington, communist-scripted East-West convergence and strategic deception continue with yet another joint US-Russian war game, this time to be held at the Russian General Staff Academy on October 30 and November 1. State-run Interfax reports:

Russia, U.S. to have joint war games on Oct 30 – Nov 1
Oct 29 2007 4:31PM

MOSCOW. Oct 29 (Interfax-AVN) – Russia and the United States will hold joint war games at the Russian General Staff Academy on October 30 -November 1.

“The war game operation may later be used in joint peacekeeping operations,” Assistant Army Commander Col. Igor Konashenkov told Interfax-AVN.

The drill will imitate the formation of a coalition staff, its interaction with international non-governmental organizations, and the planning of a peacekeeping operation.

The war game was prepared in the German city of Garmisch on October 10-13.

Deputy Army Commander Lt. Gen. Valery Yevnevich will be the Russian supervisor of the drill, Konashenkov said.

He said they would hold the drill under the military cooperation plan for 2007.

In the controlled environment of the Russian General Staff Academy, the Soviets will be in a position to apply various propaganda, disinformation, and possibly psychotropic and psychotronic techniques to the unsuspecting visiting US military personnel. The last joint military exercise between the USA and Russia, called Pacific Eagle, was held in the Amur Sea in September.

>USSR2 File: CPRF promotes “People’s Plan” against United Russia’s “Putin’s Plan”; Levada Center: 38% of Russians support "Soviet model"

>According to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union there are only two viable political parties in Russia: the “party of power” United Russia and the CPRF, which is the true power behind the scenes in “post”-communist Russia. Both United Russia and the CPRF are authoritarian. Both parties glorify Russia’s Soviet legacy. Both parties are anti-USA and anti-Israel. This converence of ideology, however, should come as no surprise to Kremlinologists who subscribe to the Golitsynian thesis, namely that the collapse of communism in Russia in 1991 was a strategic deception on the part of Moscow’s Leninist cabal. United Russia is merely one of many potemkin parties, the leadership of which is staffed by “ex”-communists and “ex”-KGB/GRU types. President Vladimir Putin represents both camps.

State-run Itar-Tass reports that Russian voters/slaves are being presented with essentially two options in the December 2 State Duma election: the “People’s Plan,” promoted by the overt communists, or “Putin’s Plan,” promoted by the covert communists. Presidential candidate and CPRF Chairman Gennady Zyuganov, who rubbed elbows with Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez in Moscow in July, has declared: “Twenty- first-century socialism is knocking at our door.” How nice. CPRF Vice Chairman and Moscow State University professor Ivan Melnikov, moreover, citing data released by the Levada Center polling agency, insisted that 38% of Russians support the “Soviet model.” Back in the USSR indeed.

The article below notes that “One of the key ideas of the communist ‘Plan of the People’ is to nationalize the principal sectors of the national economy.” In this case Comrade Czar Putin, who has already nationalized many of the “principal sectors” of the Russian “economy,” has given the CPRF a head start. The Itar-Tass article continues a pattern of favorable coverage for the communists by the Kremlin media.

Communists offer “People’s Plan” instead of “Putin Plan”
29.10.2007, 16.04

MOSCOW, October 29 (Itar-Tass) – President Vladimir Putin’s decision to head the United Russia Party election ticket gives the Communist Party even more chances to score success at the upcoming Duma elections, communist leaders believe. “Whereas formerly only three or four parties could vie for Duma mandates, the configuration of political forces is different today,” First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Ivan Melnikov told a press conference here on Monday.

“Now, the political field is definitely split in two: them, the party of power, and us – the opposition,” he stated.

Melnikov stressed that this also facilitated the tasks of the canvassing campaign. Touching on the main slogan of the United Russia Party, that is on “The Putin Plan – Victory of Russia”, Melnikov reported that the Communist Party was prepared to issue its own new slogan – “The KPRF Plan – Plan of the People”. Distinct from the blue and white billboards of the United Russia Party, the communists will have red and white boards. “This will stress the alternative, which the Communist Party is offering the electorate,” the chief party ideologist explained.

“We are not planning to set the electors at loggerheads with anybody. We have our own realistic alternative program for the country’s development,” Melnikov underscored.

In turn, Communist Party Leader Gennady Zyuganov is sure that the socialist idea is cherished by the majority of the country’s population, who are perfectly aware of the heritage of the October Revolution. “Twenty- first-century socialism is knocking at our door,” he declared.

One of the key ideas of the communist “Plan of the People” is to nationalize the principal sectors of the national economy. Zyuganov said his party was determined to revert after the elections to the idea of holding a referendum on the 17 most important problems of the nation. “We shall broach this theme again after the elections and nationalization will be one of the key problems,” he stated.

Referring to the conclusions of sociologists, the communist leaders are now stressing that the majority of the country’s population are in favour of nationalizing the natural resources and the key sectors of the economy. “More than 70 percent of them are in favour of a planned market economy or even of a Soviet-model planned economy,” Melnikov stated. Referring to data released by the Levada Centre, he noted that the so-called “Soviet model” is backed by 38 percent of Russians.

Meanwhile, state-run Novosti reports that “Russia will invite international observers to monitor the country’s parliamentary elections set for December 2, the head of the Central Election Commission said on Monday.” Monitoring teams will come from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Nordic Council, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. While the OSCE and the PACE, which passed an anti-communist resolution last year much to the annoyance of Zyuganov and communists worldwide, might be expected to provide impartial observers, the new communist blocs known as the CIS and the SCO can be expected to turn a blind eye to election “irregularities” in the neo-Soviet state.

The Soviet communists will endeavor to win the election and openly rule Russia with a veneer of democratic accountability and international approval.

>Latin America File: Argentine President Kirchner’s wife Cristina elected to succession, pledges to advance Peronist left wing, alliance with Chavez

>The left wing of the Peronist movement, in power since 1989, is consolidating its hold on Argentina through the dynastic succession of charismatic Senator Cristina Fernandez, the wife of outgoing President Nestor Kirchner. Fernandez launched her political career in the Revolutionary Tendency faction of Juan Peron’s Justicialist Party in the 1970s, was elected to the provincial legislature of Santa Cruz in 1989 and again in 1993, and was elected to represent Santa Cruz in the federal Senate in 1995 and the Chamber of Deputies in 1997. In 2001 Fernandez was again elected to the Senate.

Fernandez, variously billed as a new “Eva Peron” and “Argentina’s Hillary Clinton,” has pledged to advanced her husband’s domestic and foreign policy, including Argentina’s close alliance with neo-communist Venezuela. During yesterday’s victory speech she crowed: “We need to deepen the changes.” Indeed, but what sort of changes? “We saw a vote for the continuity of economic policies that have helped to improve social conditions in the country,” observed Buenos Aires-based pollster Carlos Fara. In a September 2007 interview with Time, Fernandez discloses some of her political orientations.

With respect to economics, Fernandez currently plays the “social democratic” card. Time asked: “You often speak of ‘social and inclusive capitalism.’ Is your brand of leftist Peronism [the powerful populist party founded in the 1940s by Eva Peron’s President husband, Juan Peron] more economically pragmatic?” Fernandez replied: “We’re not averse to capitalism. But if they [the communists] used to say, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ then we also say today, ‘Capitalists of the world, assume your social responsibility!'”

With respect to Hugo Chavez, Fernandez has no objections to linking Argentina’s destiny with that of the Bolivarian/Socialist Republic of Venezuela and perceives no human rights abuses in the other country. Time asked: “A big question regarding foreign relations is whether you plan to draw leftist Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, whose oil wealth helped ease Argentina out of its financial crisis, into a closer alliance or create some distance?” Fernandez replied: “We have good relations with Venezuela and President Chavez [see picture above] not only because he’s helped us with the question of our debt and our energy crisis, but also because of our understanding that he’s won his presidential elections with the approval of international observers. Let me reiterate that no one selects Argentina’s friends but Argentina. President Kirchner, [Brazilian President] Lula, Chavez, are all in sync with regard to the need to integrate into our own regional bloc, and Venezuela meets our criteria with regard to democracy and human rights.”

The article below reports that “Fernandez’s support is drawn mostly from unions, the poor and the lower-middle class, the traditional base for Peronists.”

In summary, with the entrance of a new president in Argentina Latin America’s Red Axis and envy manipulators remain entrenched.

Argentine Senator Fernandez Leads Presidential Vote (Update5)
By Eliana Raszewski and Bill Faries

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) — Argentine Senator Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said her victory in today’s election to succeed her husband, President Nestor Kirchner, gives her a mandate to extend policies that cut unemployment to a 15-year low.

Fernandez received 42.5 percent of the ballots, enough to avoid a second-round vote, with 25.1 percent of polling stations reporting. Former Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, her closest rival, won 20.1 percent and ex-congresswoman Elisa Carrio won 19.8 percent, the electoral commission said.

Speaking at a rally in Buenos Aires, Fernandez, 54, pledged to fight poverty and unemployment, and maintain government policies that fuel economic growth. Under Kirchner the economy expanded 9 percent annually as it bounced back from a four-year recession.

“We need to deepen the changes,” said Fernandez, who was joined by her husband and running mate Julio Cobos on stage.

Under Argentine law, there’s no runoff if the first-round leader either takes 45 percent of the vote or wins at least 40 percent of the vote with a 10 percentage point lead over the next closest candidate.

Fernandez, 54, has said little about how she plans to address the country’s energy shortages and quickening inflation, arguing both are natural outcomes of economic growth.

“We saw a vote for the continuity of economic policies that have helped to improve social conditions in the country,” said Carlos Fara, director of Buenos Aires-based pollster Carlos Fara & Asociados.

‘Just Begun’

In 2002, before Kirchner took office, gross domestic product shrank 11 percent, and the peso lost 70 percent of its value. The collapse followed Argentina’s decision to default on $95 billion of debt in late 2001.

“After what we went through in 2001, it’s very good to have normal elections,” President Kirchner said, before he and his wife cast their ballots this morning in the Patagonian city of Rio Gallegos.

Fernandez, who has spent six years in the Senate, campaigned on the slogan “The Change Has Just Begun” and a pledge to “deepen” her husband’s policies.

“The basis for Fernandez’s support is clearly a desire for continuity with Kirchner policies that produced economic growth,” said political analyst Fabian Perechodnik at Buenos Aires polling company Poliarquia Consultores.

Kirchner’s mix of price controls, government spending and dollar purchases to keep exports competitive rescued the country, Fernandez said. Unemployment dropped from 22 percent in 2002 to 8.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. GDP grew 40 percent from 2003 through 2006.

Inflation, Energy

In a speech on Oct. 24, Fernandez responded to opponents’ complaints that growth is fueling inflation, while a lack of investment in the energy industry because of rate caps has left the country short of power. Lavagna, 65, who was Kirchner’s economy minister until November 2005, has said the real rate of inflation is double the official 8.6 percent.

“We understand that we can’t stop economic growth,” Fernandez told business executives in Cordoba. “There’s no way to regulate the level of growth as if we had a switch.”

More investment will solve the “tensions caused by growth,” she said.

Fernandez, running as the candidate of a coalition she and Kirchner founded in 2003, never held a news conference during the campaign and didn’t issue a platform. She only sat for interviews in the last two days of the campaign. Her television ads focused on the contrast between conditions today and during the 2001 crisis.

Union Support

Fernandez’s support is drawn mostly from unions, the poor and the lower-middle class, the traditional base for Peronists, politicians who adhere to the ideas of Juan Domingo Peron, Argentina’s three-time president between 1946 and 1974, said Luciana Grandi, a political analyst at polling company Ipsos Mora y Araujo in Buenos Aires.

Opposition candidates have focused on rising consumer prices. Lavagna, Kirchner’s chief strategist for restructuring $104 billion in defaulted debt, said price controls failed to stem inflation. He said he’d tighten monetary and fiscal policies.

Carrio, 50, who pledged to name former Central Bank President Alfonso Prat-Gay her economy minister, proposed slowing growth to about 6 percent.

Both agreed with workers at the National Statistics Institute who say inflation data has been rigged since January when Kirchner replaced the official in charge of calculating the consumer price index.

Presidential Power

While Fernandez said the index is accurate, Argentina’s benchmark inflation-linked bonds have tumbled 24 percent this year, making the country’s debt market the worst performer in the world, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bloomberg.

In Congress, controlled by the Kirchners’ coalition, Fernandez took the lead in shepherding government legislation. Last year she pushed through a bill giving the president power to alter budgeted spending without Congressional approval, a measure former President Raul Alfonsin, from the opposition Radical Party, said meant the “death of the Republic.”

“Cristina will be able to solve what’s needed — to improve the country’s international relationships, get more investments and create more jobs,” said Maria del Rosario Solis, 50, a homemaker in Buenos Aires.

Source: Bloomberg.com

>USSR2 File: Kremlin imposes Soviet-style price controls on food, United Russia resorts to red rhetoric, runaway inflation endangers Putin’s popularity

>Will the implementation of Soviet-style price controls on food by the Kremlin and the potemkin, crypto-Stalinist United Russia party pre-empt the electoral resurgence of Russia’s open communists, such as Gennady Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF)? The Telegraph, below, reports that even Federation Council speaker, Just Russia leader, and Kremlin stooge Sergei Mironov, who is often hired to float controversial Kremlin-sponsored proposals, has promoted the re-introduction of a state food monopoly.

Unofficially, the annual inflation rate in Russia is about 10%, down from 20% in 2000, when “ex”-communist/”ex”-KGB Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency. On October 18 the International Herald Tribune reported: “Russia may return to double-digit inflation in 2007 after a slowdown last year, officials said on Thursday, acknowledging the biggest economic policy failure of President Vladimir Putin’s second term in office.”

According to the CPRF, the Kremlin’s pre-election gimmick of price controls will not have the desired effect. The new controls, in effect since October 15, will extend until January 31. At that point, just prior to the March presidential election, the cost of living will surge upwards again, thus conveniently facilitating Comrade Gennady’s election. In our assessment, Zyuganov is the top contender for president. Intriguingly, CPRF vice chairman Ivan Melnikov (pictured above) has taken note of the similarities between United Russia and the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, Melnikov asserts that the Russian electorate wants one dominant party and a strong state, and cherishes the legacy of the old CPSU which, in a brazen lie, provided Soviets with a high standard of living and social safeguards. The CPSU was openly restored in 2004 under the leadership of August 1991 coup mastermind Oleg Shenin.

Russia’s inflation crisis reveals the “one-dimensional” nature of the post-Soviet economy, which can be spelled out in three letters: O-I-L. Pavel Trunin, economist at the Gaidar Institute in Moscow, observes: “The fact that in this situation the government could come up with no measures except for administrative interference shows how weak the economy really is. It shows that the economy is dependent on oil prices.” The planned collapse of Russian “capitalism” is merely an extension of the planned “collapse” of Russian communism. The CPSU’s long-range strategy for reconsolidating its power and deceiving the West is working exceptionally well.

Soviet-style food prices return to Russia
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:41 am BST 25/10/2007

The Kremlin has been accused of abandoning a commitment to market economics after it imposed Soviet-style price controls on basic food items in an attempt to shore up President Vladimir Putin’s popularity.

The state’s extraordinary intervention in the market has been seen as a pre-election manouevre to assuage growing discontent among Russia’s poor over soaring food prices.

But analysts said that it also underscored the weakness of Russia’s apparently mighty economy — an achievement for which Mr Putin has claimed credit to almost universal adulation among his people.

The Kremlin tried to portray the controls, which will see prices frozen on staples such as bread and milk at their October 15 levels, as a voluntary and patriotic gesture undertaken by Russia’s food producers and retailers.

But analysts said that business leaders were coerced into making concessions that could do greater economic damage in the long term.

“It is known for a fact that they were summoned to the Kremlin,” said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Centre. “It’s easy to imagine the conversation. They were told to fix prices voluntarily — or else. And of course they will comply. Business in Russia always complies.” The cost of food has soared in Russia in recent months, with milk rising 9.2 per cent in September alone.

In some regions, bread is reported to have doubled in price since the beginning of the year.

The dramatic inflation has spooked the Kremlin.

With Yeltsin era shortages and the empty shelves of the Communist era still fresh in Russia’s collective memory, the price of food can often make or break a president’s popularity.

Until now, Mr Putin has enjoyed widespread support, basking in approval ratings of over 70 per cent.

But the issue of food price inflation — blamed on rising global costs, higher salaries and pensions and old-fashioned local greed – has begun to dominate political discourse.

While Russians blame the crisis on the government rather than on Mr Putin — who is universally credited with raising salaries — the Kremlin has decided to take no chances ahead of back-to-back parliamentary and presidential elections in December and March.

Highlighting the government’s anxiety, ruling party politicians have begun to revert to the rhetoric of the Communist era. Mr Putin has railed at regional monopolies in the food market and speculators — considered in Soviet times as the country’s greatest traitors — for artificially inflating prices.

Upper house Speaker Sergei Mironov, who is often used to float controversial Kremlin-backed proposals, has even suggested re-introducing a state food monopoly.

While the state’s intervention may help to stave off the Kremlin’s greatest fear — that of panic buying and hoarding which could seek the crisis spiraling out of control — economists say the policy damages Russia’s free market credentials.

The Kremlin has already come under criticism for expanding the state’s presence in the oil and gas sectors at the expense of private enterprise.

It is energy that has driven the Russian economy, which continues to grow at rates far outstripping western rivals, and with oil prices just below record levels of $90 a barrel a slowdown is unlikely.

But the inflation crisis, economists argue, shows how one-dimensional and vulnerable the Russian economy really is.

“The fact that in this situation the government could come up with no measures except for administrative interference shows how weak the economy really is,” said Pavel Trunin, an economist at the Gaidar Institute in Moscow. “It shows that the economy is dependent on oil prices.”

Source: The Telegraph

Meanwhile, the Red Youth Vanguard, the militant youth section of the restored CPSU, reports that is has withdrawn from the anti-Putinist Other Russia coalition. In July former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov announced that he too was defecting from Garry Kasparov’s coalition in order to throw his weight behind Zyuganov’s presidential bid. To use communist jargon, Other Russia, like the Communist Party of China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-1957), appears to have served its historic mission of identifying Soviet communism’s opponents in preparation for their “neutralization.”

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Bear bombers test cruise missiles over southern Russia in ongoing maneuvers; ballistic missile tests planned

>State-run Novosti reports: “Although NATO countries expressed concern over possible violations of their airspace and scramble their fighters as a ‘routine response’ when Russian bombers fly close to their borders, Moscow says all the latest flights are within air patrolling corridors permitted by international regulations.” Does “air patrolling corridors permitted by international regulations” include the unauthorized August 17 flight by a Russian military aircraft over Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay in Labrador, which is 210 kilometres inland from the North Atlantic Ocean? I don’t think so.

Russian Bear bombers conduct cruise missile practice
16:41 26/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 26 (RIA Novosti) – Two Russian Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers will practice on Friday launches of cruise missiles at a testing site in southern Russia, an Air Force spokesman said.

Russian strategic bombers began on October 16 a series of long-range training flights over the Arctic region, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the Black Sea with simulated bomber raids and missile launches missiles at testing grounds in northern and southern Russia. The exercises will continue until October 30.

Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky also said up to 10 Tu-95MS bombers and two Il-78 aerial tankers flew scheduled flight patrols on Thursday in neutral airspace, and were accompanied for at least five hours by NATO F-16 and Tornado fighters.

Russia has stepped up practice runs of its strategic bombers ever since President Vladimir Putin announced the resumption of strategic patrol flights on August 17. The president said at the time that although the country halted long-distance strategic flights to remote regions in 1992, other nations had continued the practice, compromising Russian national security.

Although NATO countries expressed concern over possible violations of their airspace and scramble their fighters as a “routine response” when Russian bombers fly close to their borders, Moscow says all the latest flights are within air patrolling corridors permitted by international regulations.

Source: Novosti

Additional military exercises over the next several months include the test-launch of two SS-21 Scarab short-range ballistic missiles from Siberia between November 13 and 17, as well as the test launching of five intercontinental ballistic missiles by year’s end. On October 26 Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, boasted: “Therefore, Russia already possesses weapons that can penetrate any modern missile defenses.”

Moscow’s war preparations continue in the field of economic warfare too, as Russia’s international gold and currency reserves continue their relentless climb. State-run Interfax reports: “Russia’s international reserves grew $6.1 billion to $440.1 billion in the week to October 19, the Central Bank said on Thursday. The reserves stood at $434 billion on October 12.” During his recent annual address to “the people,” President Vladimir Putin boasted that Russia has the third largest forex reserves in the world.

>Africa File: Marxist guerrillas in Nigeria attack Italian oil platform; oil hits $92 per barrel on NYME in historic record, $100+ high predicted

>There’s nothing out there to stop oil from going to $100.
— Chip Hodge, Managing Director, MFC Global Investment Management, Boston

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an explosive market without a major correction. There is a combination of factors that continue to send prices higher and we’ve run out of bearish news.
— Phil Flynn, Senior Trader, Alaron Trading Corp., Chicago

Oil hits an all-time high of $92 per barrel. The White House designates the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its Quds force as a supporter of terrorism. Turkish forces deploy for a full-scale assault on Kurdish positions in northern Iraq. In Africa, Nigeria’s Marxist guerrillas storm another oil platform, possibly in an attempt to drive the price higher and expand Russia’s share and profit in the petroleum market, which since 2006 has been the world’s largest, outproducing even Saudi Arabia. Pictured above: Traders at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Nigerian militants attack Italy-owned oil platform, no casualties – UPDATE
10.26.07, 8:04 AM ET

LAGOS (Thomson Financial) – Armed militants attacked a boat near an Italian-owned offshore oil platform in Nigeria early today, industry sources and the Italian government said.

No one was hurt in the attack in the volatile and oil-rich Rivers State, the Italian oil giant ENI said in a statement.

The militants targeted an offshore platform owned by Agip, a unit of ENI, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the giant Bonny oil terminal in Rivers State.

‘Several men attacked a boat near the platform but were unable to board the platform itself,’ ENI said on its Internet site.

‘No one was hurt according to currently available information.’

Source: Forbes.com

Oil Rises to Record Above $92 on Increased U.S.-Iran Tension
By Mark Shenk

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) — Oil rose above $92 a barrel for the first time in New York after the U.S. accused Iran’s military of supporting terrorism and announced new sanctions on the country that holds the world’s second-biggest oil reserves.

“There’s nothing out there to stop oil from going to $100,” said Chip Hodge, a managing director at MFC Global Investment Management in Boston, who oversees a $4.5 billion oil and gas company bond portfolio. “There are plenty of bullish factors such as the continued dispute between Turkey and Iraq, the new sanctions against Iran and falling inventories.”

The U.S. wants Iran to halt uranium enrichment that it suspects is a cover for developing nuclear weapons. Prices also rallied on Turkish warnings of a wider military assault on northern Iraq. U.S. crude-oil supplies fell last week to the lowest since January, a government report showed on Oct. 24.

Crude oil for December delivery rose 74 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $91.20 a barrel at 10:55 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures climbed to $92.22, the highest since trading began in 1983. Oil is up 51 percent from a year ago.

Brent crude oil for December settlement rose 73 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $88.21 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Brent reached $89.30, the highest since trading began in 1988.

“I think we are going to $100, if for no other reason than because there are some traders who want to say they took oil there,” said Sarah Emerson, managing director of Energy Security Analysis Inc., a consulting firm in Wakefield, Massachusetts. “When you get close to a psychological number, reaching it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

U.S. Inventories

U.S. crude-oil supplies fell 5.29 million barrels to 316.6 million barrels last week, the Energy Department said this week. The drop left stockpiles the lowest since the week ended Jan. 5.

“This rally was triggered by the big decline in crude oil we saw on Wednesday” said James Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Illinois. “The crude-oil number has made us sensitive to any geopolitical news at all, regardless of the significance.”

Industry stockpiles of crude oil and petroleum products in the world’s most developed economies declined by 33.3 million barrels during the third quarter, counter to the trend of the past five years, the International Energy Agency said on Oct. 11.

“We did not build global inventories during the second and third quarters because demand outpaced supply,” Emerson said. “That reality is sinking in and is partially responsible for the rise from $70 to $80 and then $90 a barrel.”

New Sanctions

The Bush administration yesterday announced new sanctions against Iran that designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its Quds force as a supporter of terrorism. The sanctions freeze the Iranian military’s U.S. assets and bar Americans from doing business with its leaders.

Turkey is threatening to send troops into northern Iraq unless Iraq and the U.S. take measures to stop about 3,500 Kurdish militants from attacking targets in Turkey, including closing the group’s camps and cutting off supply routes. The U.S. has urged restraint from the Turkish government.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an explosive market without a major correction,” said Phil Flynn, senior trader at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago. “There is a combination of factors that continue to send prices higher and we’ve run out of bearish news.”

Source: Bloomberg.com

>USSR2 File: Russian hackers devise Storm Worm botnet, "lobotomize" anti-virus programs worldwide, force human rights site offline

>The computer hackers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (KGB/FSB) and China’s People’s Liberation Army are honing their cyberskills in order to “drop” the Internet, no doubt immediately prior to Missile Day. eWeek reported on October 24 that “the ever-mutating, ever-stealthy Storm Worm botnet is adding yet another trick to its vast repertoire: Instead of killing anti-virus products on target systems, it’s now doing a hot fix with a memory patch to render them brain-dead.” The Storm Worm botnet operates in the following manner:

According to an Oct. 22 posting by Sophos analyst Richard Cohen, the Storm botnet—Sophos calls it Dorf, and it’s also known as Ecard malware—is dropping files that call a routine that gets Windows to tell it every time a new process is started. The malware checks the process file name against an internal list and kills the ones that match—sometimes. But Storm has taken a new twist: It now would rather leave processes running and just patch entry points of loading processes that might pose a threat to it. Then, when processes such as anti-virus programs run, they simply return a value of 0.

According to the September 14 edition of The Register, moreover, the Storm Worm botnet’s place of origin is Russia: “Based on the tactics and techniques used in outbreaks, MessageLabs reckons the Storm Worm gang is a small group of young adults, likely to be in their early 20s, and from Russia.” Paul Wood, MessageLabs security analyst, revealed: “StormWorm’s closest rival botnet, Warezov, is likely to be Asian in origin.” For “Asian” read Chinese.

Meanwhile, on October 22 Russia’s independent Prima-News reported that the website of Human Rights in Russia has been subject to a merciless denial-of-service attack, forcing it offline. As of October 26 the HRO site is still down. FSB/KGB hackers are indeed busy these days.

>MISSILE DAY ALERT: Bears, Blackjacks fly near Norway, Netherlands as EU, Russia meet in Lisbon; Oslo’s leftist regime: Bombers no threat

>Russian military provocations continue under the guise of strategic aviation maneuvers. The Times, citing the Norwegian military, reports today that “Two Russian bombers yesterday flew close to the Netherlands where Nato defence ministers were meeting.” The article continues: “The Tupolev 160 strategic bombers stayed in international airspace. Two Russian Tupolev 95 bombers had earlier flown close to Norwegian airspace, prompting Norway to send F16 fighters to intercept them. In recent months, Russia has flown bombers close to other countries in an apparent demonstration of its military might.” The Norwegian military characterized these particular Russian bomber flights as an “unusual practice run.” Military spokesman Lt. Col. John Espen Lien informed the Associated Press by telephone from northern Norway: “It could have been a coincidence, but there is also a chance that it was a signal.”

Meanwhile, Norway’s leftist government does not consider Russia’s increased military activity near its coast as a threat. The ruling Red-Green Coalition consists of the Norwegian Labor Party, Socialist Left Party, and Centre Party. The Socialist Left Party was founded in 1973 as a merger of the Socialist People’s Party, Communist Party of Norway, Democratic Socialists-AIK, and independent Socialists.

Pictured above: Norway’s Minister of Defense and Labor party member Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen. Strøm-Erichsen responded to the current Kremlin saber rattling by saying: “I see it [the flights] as an expression of the improved Russian economy and an upgrading of their defense. But we are following developments, since they have flown more along the Norwegian coast in the past year than they have in the past ten to twelve put together.” Are you surprised that this comment emerged from the mouth of a leftist?

President Vladimir Putin is presently in Lisbon to attend the 20th European Union-Russia summit, which is being held concurrently with the NATO defense ministers’ conference in the Dutch city of Noordwijk.

Not viewed as threat
October 26, 2007

Norway’s Minister of Defense Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen says she does not view increased Russian military activity in the north as a threat to Norwegian interests.

As NATO’s defense ministers met with their Russian counterpart for talks on Thursday, Russian bombers again flew along the Norwegian coast.

Two Russian Tupolev 95s went as far as the airspace off the NATO meeting point, Noordwijk in the Netherlands, before turning back.

Strøm-Erichsen had no idea or comment about the significance of the latest Russian demonstration, but did call the talks with Russia’s defense minister “constructive”.

“I see it (the flights) as an expression of the improved Russian economy and an upgrading of their defense. But we are following developments, since they have flown more along the Norwegian coast in the past year than they have in the past ten to twelve put together,” she told news agency NTB.

Strøm-Erichsen has contacted Russian authorities about the flights, and said that while they had no duty to inform of their exercises, “it would be good if we knew about them”.

At the NATO-Russia council the US missile shield and the agreement about Conventional Forces in Europe were hot topics, and the greatest concern is a Russian withdrawal from the CFE treaty.

Russia remains unmoved by US offers to moderate the missile defense program in Eastern Europe until there is a realistic nuclear threat in Iran, and Norway is also skeptical about the missile plan.

“I held a talk where I said that a missile shield is not necessarily the answer to the challenges we face, and that we fear a new arms race,” Strøm-Erichsen said, though she voted this summer to consider a possible NATO connection to the missile shield.

Meanwhile Russia clearly views this defense plan as a link in a new arms race.

“That is why it is important that the USA carries out this present dialog,” she said.

Source: Aftenposten

>DEFCON 1 ALERT: Canadian Forces monitor Moscow’s bomber drills, NORAD denies Russian aircraft overflew Goose Bay, Labrador on Aug. 17

>Your resident blogger is back from a two-day professional development course that prevented us from blogging earlier this week. In the meanwhile, the commies haven’t given up, so the battle for freedom continues here at Once Upon a Time in the West.

The MSM is affording scant coverage to Russia’s current, two-week-long strategic aviation exercises over the Arctic. However, Canada’s National Post reports that NORAD is denying that a Russian aircraft penetrated Newfoundland and Labrador’s airspace on August 17. Not so coincidentally, this was the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced, from the site of the Sino-Soviet war game Peace Mission 2007 in the South Urals, that Russian bombers were once again on patrol, after a 15-year hiatus.

Howard Bishop, president of the civilian workers union at Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay (pictured below), citing multiple “well-placed” sources, insists that “The [Russian] plane was asked several times to identify himself and wouldn’t, so they called in three CF-18s from Bagotville [Quebec] to escort him out. By the time they got here from Bagotville, [the Russians] were over Goose Bay. If that plane was equipped to do any damage he would have been able to [do so].” Let’s streamline Bishop’s contention: A Russian military aircraft conducted an unauthorized flight over the Canadian Forces base in Goose Bay, Labrador on August 17. This shamefully underreported story is quite remarkable since Goose Bay is actually located at the western end of Lake Melville, a long salt water lake that extends 210 kilometres inland from the Labrador Sea. In other words, if Bishop’s testimony is correct, a Russian military plane, possibly a strategic bomber, penetrated 210 kilometres over the North American landmass before being escorted away. (See map above.) Um, I’d say that’s a bit too close for comfort, wouldn’t you? No wonder NORAD is denying everything much as the US military denied Russia’s claim that its bombers overflew the US naval base at Guam in August.

On the other side of the Atlantic, NATO’s response to Russia’s renewed program of overseas bomber patrols is blase, if not outright treasonous. NATO’s supreme commander General Bantz Craddock stated: “We watch it, as we always do. At this point, I don’t see it as threatening at all.” That’s exactly how the Soviets want the North Atlantic Alliance to perceive the Kremlin’s aggressive military posture and sorties into Western airspace, namely with a sigh and a shrug.

Canadian Forces keep eye on Russian aerial exercises
Phil Couvrette
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Canadian Forces say they transferred a number of CF-18 fighter jets based in Quebec to Goose Bay, N.L. for maintenance reasons, but add they’re also keeping an eye on a Russian military exercise in the Arctic.

“It still keeps us in a rapid position to respond to any unidentified aircraft approaching our airspace, but this hasn’t been the case,” said Capt. Steve Neta, from Canadian Norad regional headquarters in Winnipeg.

Last week, Russia’s military announced that up to 10 of its strategic bombers would carry out patrols over the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific Oceans and the Black Sea.

“From the Norad perspective the mission hasn’t changed,” Mr. Neta said about the Russians flights. They have been “conducted in a professional way, it’s all been done in international waters and airways and obeying international flight rules, so it’s been done in a very professional exchange up to this point.”

“Up to 10 long-range aircraft, Tupolev 160s and 22M3s are taking part in these exercises, with inflight refuelling,” Air Force spokesman Col. Alexander Drobyshevsky told Russian news agencies.

He added that the flights were for training purposes and conformed with international regulations on the use of airspace.

Mr. Neta denied reports a Russian plane had flown into Labrador air space without permission on Aug. 17.

“There is no information supporting this event although we are double-checking to see if there are any flights that may have been misinterpreted,” he said. “One thing we can say with absolute certainty is that (at) no time did any aircraft, unidentified or without permission, enter sovereign airspace, at no time at all.”

But the president of the civilian workers union at CFB Goose Bay says he expected the denial but insisted that multiple sources, some “well-placed,” tell him otherwise.

“(The plane) was asked several times to identify himself and wouldn’t, so they called in three CF-18s from Bagotville to escort him out,” said Howard Bishop. “By the time they got here from Bagotville, (the Russians) were over Goose Bay. If that plane was equipped to do any damage he would have been able to (do so).”

Mr. Bishop said he has seen at least four CF-18s at CFB Goose Bay, which arrived for an unscheduled two-week training period.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the resumption of long-range flights in international air space on Aug. 17.

In the past year Russia has been flexing its military muscle, reviving strategic bomber flights to probe western air defences, investing in new strategic weapons and using the windfall from high oil prices to rebuild its weakened military, but NATO officials aren’t alarmed yet.

“We watch it, as we always do,” Gen. Bantz Craddock, the supreme NATO commander told reporters earlier this month, referring to the resumption of Russian strategic bomber flights. “At this point, I don’t see it as threatening at all.”

Beginning in 1985 Goose Bay supported allied military training but the memorandum of understanding expired in March, 2006, putting an end to what used to be a permanent allied detachment.

There is no permanent CF-18 presence at the base, which serves as a forward operating location for CFB Bagotville, providing support for that base.

Many countries have faced the same budget restrictions seen in Canada, explains Capt. Tom Burkhart, and have been doing alternative training elsewhere. The base remains a permanent establishment for allied training but none are presently at Goose Bay, he said.

With files from Agence France-Presse

Source: National Post

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We have reorganized our news alert system. “Event Convergence Alert” refers to the simultaneous convergence of significant events worldwide. “Missile Day Alert” refers to significant events that indicate that an open military confrontation between the Communist Bloc and the Free World is imminent, although ranging from minutes to months. “Defcon 1 Alert” refers to highly significant events that indicate an open military confrontation between the Communist Bloc and the Free World is underway, or some other highly significant event presaging such a war. “Defcon 1” is the highest level of activation and readiness of the US Armed Forces. It has rarely been used, if at all. In using such a term we are not pretending to know the actual activation posture of the US military. However, we believe it is a useful tool for alerting visitors to this site. Under a “Defcon 1 Alert,” postings at this site might be terminated at anytime due to a deliberate Internet crash orchestrated by Communist Bloc hackers.

>USSR2 File: CPRF insists reds can form only viable "center-left" government, Putin’s inclusion on United Russia list detrimental to "party of power"

>The Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union maintains that its fortunes will improve now that President Vladimir Putin has decided to top United Russia’s party list for the December 2 State Duma election. In previous interviews, CPRF Chairman Gennady Zyuganov maintained that, notwithstanding Kremlin propaganda, his party will receive up to 35% of the popular vote. Today, during an interview with the Echo of Moscow radio station, which is owned by state-run Gazprom Media, he declared: “There is no organized, serious opposition in the country besides us. In the second place, we alone have the mandate to form a solid center-left government. We do not say that there will be only members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. We will be united with other professional, modern, competent politicians.” The Soviet communists have cunningly refashioned themselves along “kinder, gentler” lines but, be assured, the Stalinist fist is covered with velvet.

This will be our last post until Thursday, October 25.

>Asia/USSR2 Files: India, Russia sign pact to build 5th-generation combat aircraft, lease n-sub to New Delhi; Indian reds block nuke deal with USA

>We have demonstrated on several occasions before that India is a de facto member of the Communist Bloc and, during any future open war with the USA, will most probably ally itself with its benefactors in Moscow and, by extension, Beijing. Pictured here: Today in Moscow Indian Defence Minister A. K. Antony signed an agreement to develop a fifth-generation fighter aircraft in cooperation with the Russian government. Antony’s Russian counterpart is Anatoliy Serdyukov, son in law of Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov. Disturbingly, the first article below reports that “The military of the two countries have also decided to increase the frequency and raise the level and scope of joint military exercises, as well as expand reciprocal training programmes.”

India, Russia sign pact to build combat aircraft
October 19, 2007
Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW: Defence cooperation between India and Russia has taken a great leap forward with the signing of a multi-billion pact to build a futuristic combat aircraft and the coming lease of a Russian nuclear submarine to India.

“The 5th-generation plane agreement will give a new quality to our defence ties with Russia,” Defence Minister A.K. Antony said. “It marks the start of cooperation in the development of state-of-the-art new-technology weapon systems.”

The intergovernmental agreement to jointly design, develop, and manufacture the 5th-generation multi-role jet fighter was inked at the 7th session of the Indo-Russian Intergovernmental Commission (IRIGC) on Military-Technical Cooperation on Thursday.

“Russia is also set to lease out to India an Akula-II nuclear submarine for a period of 10 years beginning with 2008 or 2009,” the Izvestia national daily reported on Thursday.

During the two-day session, co-chaired by Mr. Antony and his Russian counterpart, Anatoly Serdyukov, the sides decided to start drafting a new long-term programme for defence cooperation. The current programme for the period 2000-2010 involves 200 defence projects estimated at $18 billion.

“We will further strengthen all-round defence cooperation and extend it to the future,” Mr. Antony said after the IRIGC session closed on Thursday. “We have decided to expand our cooperation in R&D and have more co-development and co-production projects in aviation and other defence hardware.”

Landmark event

Describing the IRIGC session as a “landmark” event, Mr. Antony said an intergovernmental agreement for the joint design and manufacture of the Multi-Role Transport Aircraft (MTA) for the military would be signed shortly. Russian sources said the deal would be inked during the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Russia for a summit with President Vladimir Putin next month.

The military of the two countries have also decided to increase the frequency and raise the level and scope of joint military exercises, as well as expand reciprocal training programmes.

“This will mark the start of a new strategic relationship based on greater interaction at the various operational levels,” Mr. Antony remarked.

The Minister said all questions pertaining to the acquisition and production of T-90S Main Battle Tanks, Su-30MKI planes and other equipment had been sorted out. Russia would supply more 347 T-90S tanks and 40 Su-30MKI jets.

Summing up the results of the IRIGC, Mr. Serdyukov said: “Russian-Indian military-technical cooperation is developing dynamically and progressively in such fields as joint development of technologies, joint production and supplies of military products to third countries, and the perfection of business and financial relations with the view of attaining effectiveness and mutual benefit.”

Joint work

Commenting on the 5th-generation jet pact, the head of the Sukhoi aircraft company, which is designing the plane, said joint work on the project would be modelled along the lines of the BrahMos missile joint venture.

“We will share the funding, engineering and intellectual property in a 50-50 proportion,” Mikhail Pogosyan said. “We hope that the export potential of the new aircraft will be higher now that it is a joint project between our two countries.” He disclosed that the Indian version of the 5th-generation aircraft would be different from the Russian version because of specific Indian requirements.

“Implementation of the project will bring closer the technological basis of the Russian and Indian aircraft industries, beginning with design and ending with production technologies,” a spokesman for the Russian Federal Agency for Military-Technical Cooperation told the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Source: The Hindu

Pictured here: Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Prakash Karat (left) and Communist Party of India General Secretary A.B. Bardhan at a Mumbai meeting, October 19, 2007.

The ruling United Progressive Alliance depends on external support from India’s various communist parties, which are aligned under the banner of the Left Front. The reds, however, are determined to block all US political and military influence in the subcontinent for fear of endangering, by their own admission, the security of Russia and China. CPI (M) leader Prakash Karat openly declared “that the nuclear deal was a part of comprehensive strategic and military relations that the U.S. wanted to have with India which could ultimately result in India yielding even military bases to the Americans for placing missiles aimed at Russia and China pushing India into a dangerous situation.” The government of India cannot be trusted under such domestic political conditions.

Left will not allow India to be junior partner to U.S.: Karat
October 19, 2007
Special Correspondent

MUMBAI: CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat said here on Thursday that the Left parties were firmly against the India-U.S. nuclear deal and would not allow India to be a junior partner of the United States.

Mr. Karat told a public meeting that the deal that could hurt India on every count, would not go through so long as the Left parties were around and their support to the UPA Government would last till the coalition stuck to the Common Minimum Programme.

He said that the nuclear deal was a part of comprehensive strategic and military relations that the U.S. wanted to have with India which could ultimately result in India yielding even military bases to the Americans for placing missiles aimed at Russia and China pushing India into a dangerous situation.

“Why should we go and patrol the Strait of Malacca?” he said and regretted that U.S.S. Nimitz, the American aircraft carrier, which was instrumental in killing so many innocent people in Iraq, was anchored in the Indian waters.

Mr. Karat sharply criticised the claims that the deal was necessary for augmenting power supply so necessary for the country. “They have not answered us on the question of the cost of a nuclear power plant that could be set up under the deal and also the price of the power and who would be using the power,” he said underscoring that the deal would result in many Enrons.

The Left leader also warned that the deal would pave the way for the entry of American entities such as Wal-Mart and they could come under the garb of an Indian name or collaboration.

CPI General Secretary A.B. Bardhan ridiculed the claim made by the Government that the deal was still on.

He said, “continuous switching on and off can result in short circuit and black-out.”

He said that the deal would result in India losing its foreign policy independence and wondered if this was the freedom for which the country fought so hard and for so long. Mr. Bardhan said that both Iran and Iraq were traditional friends who had supported India during its wars with Pakistan. India should not turn against them under the U.S. pressure.

Source: The Hindu

>USSR2 File: Kremlin cuts live broadcasts of cabinet meetings, Russia becomes World Bank donor for first time, Putin to visit Lisbon

>In a further move to eradicate its feeble “post”-communist democratic structures and procedures, the Kremlin will no longer broadcast live sessions of Russian cabinet meetings. The need for “secrecy,” “convenience,” and “productivity” in government operations is cited as the pretext for Moscow’s diminishing political transparency. State-run Itar-Tass reports:

Beginning from October 18 sessions of the Russian government will no longer be broadcast to journalists live, Chief of the Protocol department of the government press and information service Alexander Zharov said on Thursday. Taking into account the character of information that if often secret the government will find it more convenient and productive to work in a closed regime, Zharov said. Journalists will be able to watch live the prime minister making an opening speech, while ministers who deliver the main reports will meet journalists upon completion of the Cabinet meetings, Zharov said.

In advocating a “closed regime,” the cabinet of “ex”-CPSU Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov clearly has something to hide.

In a somewhat related development, the Kremlin media frequently touts Russia’s robust economy, which has for the most part lined only the pockets of its elite, consisting of “ex”-communists and “ex”-KGB types, rather than the average Russian. State-run Russia Today notes that “about 20 members of the Russian parliament make the list of Russia’s richest people.” The party list of United Russia, on whose ballot is President Vladimir Putin, includes more than 20 prominent businessmen with a combined fortune of more than $US 15 billion. Even the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has two millionaire State Duma deputies.

Kremlin propaganda not only identifies Russia’s successes, but also highlights the deficiencies in the US economy. Today the Voice of Russia reports that that country will for the first time attend the annual session of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a donor nation. “Russia,” trumpets this Kremlin organ, “has fulfilled all its obligations to foreign creditors and repaid the debts of the former Soviet Union ahead of schedule. Last year alone, it repaid 47 billion dollars. After the split of the USSR, Russia assumed all former Soviet liabilities, freeing its CIS partners from the shackles of debt bondage to the West.”

Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s boastful response to the financial and stock market crisis in the USA is telling. “Had it happened five years ago, we would have been affected,” Kudrin (pictured above), admitted. “But today we have safety cushions in the form of huge gold and currency reserves and a stabilization fund. We have enough funds to help our companies if they are in trouble. The currency reserves accumulated by the Central Bank are enough to convert any amount of currency and cushion the impact of any crisis.” Russia’s Leninist elite have apparently hoarded gold and curreny reserves in preparation for some sort of looming global disaster that only they know about.

Communists are no strangers to money management (and mismanagement). The privatization of Soviet state holdings under deceased “ex”-CPSU tyrant Boris Yeltsin proved to be a profitable venture for many squealing red piggies. Oleg Shenin, Russia’s hidden kingmaker who currently heads the restored Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed a US$15 billion portfolio in Swiss bank accounts for the “old” CPSU. During the Soviet era the “razor-sharp” Shenin was secretary of the Central Committee. “Always a man in the shadows,” wrote Vladimir Kvint and Natalia Darialova for Forbes in 1991, “Shenin was in charge of the country’s two most powerful institutions: the KGB and the army. He is a man who believed that arrows from the dark hit better. So he preferred anonymity even though both the former KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and the former defense minister, Dmitri Yazov, reported to him. Equally important, Shenin controlled the Communist Party’s money.”

In the foreign affairs department, state-run Interfax reports, Putin will visit Portugal between October 25 and 26 to attend the EU-Russia Summit, the purpose of which is to find common political and economic ground for the future merger of the restored Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new European Soviet.” Interfax also reports that strategic ally and communist co-conspirator Chinese State Council Premier Wen Jiabao will visit Moscow in early November. Foreign Ministry First Asian Department Director Konstantin Vnukov has revealed too that “a summit of Russian, Indian and Chinese foreign ministers will be held in Harbin on October 24.” Once under Russian rule, Harbin is located in northeastern China, or what was once known as Manchuria. In the 1920s nearly 200,000 White émigrés settled in Harbin, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. Harbin features lingering Russian influences today.

>Latin America File: Chavez huddles with Raul in Havana, proposes Cuban-Venezuelan confederation; 3,000 ex-PDVSA oil workers flee, resettle in Alberta

>On October 17 Venezuelan Tyrant in Training Hugo Chavez wrapped up talks with Cuba’s communist leadership. During his Havana huddle, communist mouthpiece Granma reports, Chávez and Cuba’s Acting President Raúl Castro (pictured here) ratified 14 new commercial and economic joint cooperation projects in the fields of energy, agriculture, telecommunications, and construction. In addition to expanding bilateral relations between the two communist regimes, Chavez proposed the formation of a Cuban and Venezuelan confederation, presumably to consolidate the gains of Latin America’s Red Axis.

The installation of communist regimes invariably produces refugees. This has been the case with Cuba and is currently the case with Venezuela. The leftist British news source The Guardian reports that “many middle class Venezuelans are emigrating over fears of expropriations and socialist indoctrination in schools.” Over the last four years your resident blogger has lived in three different areas in Western Canada. In each case my family doctor has been a white South African, recent emigrated.

The victims of Latin American communism have now joined those of African communism by moving to Canada which, apart from being overtaxed and overgoverned, is not a Stalinist gulag yet. The prosperous province of Alberta, which include oil sands boomtown Fort McMurray (“Fort McMoney”), boasts an expatriate community of 3,000 Venezuelan oil workers (“gusanos”). Comrade Hugo sacked these highly skilled workers during the PDVSA strike in 2002-2003. (The map at this link unforgivably reverses Calgary and Edmonton.) The Wall Street Journal observes: “The loss of so many skilled oil workers has hit PdVSA hard.” Indeed, but don’t expect Chavez to admit his mistake.

Chávez talks of Cuban and Venezuelan confederation
Rory Carroll in Caracas
Wednesday October 17, 2007
Guardian

Venezuela and Cuba have cemented their alliance with a range of economic deals which President Hugo Chávez said could pave the way to a confederation.

The Venezuelan leader wrapped up a three-day visit to the communist-run island with agreements on 14 joint ventures, including oil refining, nickel production, fishing and tourism.

The package consolidated Venezuela’s role as ally and benefactor in easing Cuba’s economic crunch and boosting the regime’s chance of retaining power after the death of the ailing leader Fidel Castro.

Mr Chávez signed the deals on Monday with Fidel’s younger brother Raul, signalling a determination on both sides to sustain the alliance despite the apparent lack of chemistry between the Venezuelan and Cuba’s acting leader.

Venezuela’s socialist revolution was forging closer ties with its Caribbean brother, said Mr Chávez. “Cuba and Venezuela could easily form a confederation of states, two republics in one, two countries in one. This is no delirium.”

The former soldier, who was making his seventh visit to Havana, has used his country’s vast oil reserves to reduce Washington’s sway over Latin America and ease the impact of its embargo on Cuba.

Discounted Venezuelan oil and other deals are valued at around £1.5bn a year, not far off Moscow’s Soviet-era subsidies and a lifeline to a government struggling to ease crippling fuel, transport and food shortages.

There are plans to modernise the decaying Cienfuegos refinery so that it could process 65,000 barrels of crude a day, distil gas and make petrochemical products.

For its part Cuba has dispatched thousands of nurses, doctors and teachers to slums in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and other leftwing allies.

In addition to socialist solidarity Mr Chávez’s talk of confederation stems from his dream of uniting Latin America along the principles of Simón Bolívar, the region’s 19th century liberation hero.

Nevertheless many middle class Venezuelans are emigrating over fears of expropriations and socialist indoctrination in schools. Polls show few Venezuelans want to swap their Americanised consumer culture for Mr Chávez’s vision of a “new socialist man” but that has not dented his high popularity.

During a weekend meeting with Fidel Castro, Mr Chávez praised him in quasi-religious tones as “the father of all revolutionaries” and “our father, who is in the water, earth and air”. The 81-year-old Cuban leader, convalescing from a serious intestinal illness, looked frail but alert.

A US state department spokesman said in response: “We are delighted that Fidel Castro has had an opportunity to discuss things with his friend President Chávez. It’s too bad that in almost half a century of misrule in Cuba, he’s never had the same conversation with his own people.”

>EU/USSR2 Files: Moscow recalls outspoken diplomat from Helsinki; Kozin: Russia considers Finnish NATO membership a "direct threat"

>Finnish state media reports today that Moscow has recalled a talkative low-level diplomat from Helsinki:

The Russian foreign ministry has ordered Vladimir Kozin, a legation counsellor at the Russian embassy in Helsinki, to return to Russia, Finnish commercial broadcaster MTV3 reported Thursday evening. The diplomat had warned the day before that if Finland joined Nato the move would be interpreted as a direct threat to Russia. Alexander Rumyantsev, Russia’s ambassador to Finland, had said earlier on Thursday that Mr Kozin’s comments had been voiced in his role as a researcher and that they did not represent Russia’s official line.

Comrade Kozin will either be demoted or disappear.

>USA File: New York Board of Trade’s Dollar Index hits 77.478, weakest showing since 1973; subprime investments hurt corporate earnings

>The US dollar continues its free fall into economic recession and historical irrelevance. Bloomberg.com reports: “The New York Board of Trade’s dollar index touched 77.478 yesterday, the weakest since the index began in 1973, down from its 2007 high of 85.43 on Jan. 26. The dollar has dropped 7.7 percent against the euro and 2.9 percent versus the yen so far this year.” The same story observes that “The dollar is poised to fall for a second week against the euro as speculation increased that the U.S. housing slump may tip the economy into recession, forcing the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again.” The dollar dive is also fueled by a lack of confidence in large banks and corporations, which are admitting major trading losses: “The U.S. dollar fell to a record low yesterday versus Europe’s currency after Bank of America Corp. reported about $4 billion in trading losses, stoking concern subprime mortgage investments are hurting corporate earnings and economic growth.”

The communists, meanwhile, cry that capitalism is revealing its fundamental, uncorrectable flaws.

>Breaking News: Twin bombs target Bhutto, kill up to 60 in Karachi; former leftist PM returns to Pakistan after eight-year exile

>I would rather expect that Pakistan’s Islamic forces or Musharraf loyalists were responsible for this apparent assassination attempt. Yesterday, while still in Dubai, Pakistan’s former leftist prime minister Benazir Bhutto was queried about Islam’s position on assassinations. She responded: “Islam forbids suicide bombings. Muslims know if they attack a woman they will burn in hell.” Apparently many Muslims are unaware of these theological niceties. On October 6 the Pakistani parliament overwhelmingly re-elected General Pervez Musharraf as president, but the vote’s legality is contingent on a ruling from the country’s Supreme Court.

The story below reports: “Associated Press photographer B.K. Bangash at the scene said he saw between 50 and 60 dead or badly injured people. He said some of the bodies were ripped apart.” Islam, the religion of pieces.

Former Prime Minister Bhutto Making Return to Pakistan

KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct. 18, 2007 – Two explosions went off Thursday night near a truck carrying former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on her celebratory return to Pakistan after eight years in exile, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 100, an official said. Party workers and police said Bhutto was unhurt.

Associated Press photographer B.K. Bangash at the scene said he saw between 50 and 60 dead or badly injured people. He said some of the bodies were ripped apart.

An initial small explosion was followed by a huge blast just feet from the front of the truck carrying Bhutto during a procession through Karachi. The blast shattered windows in her vehicle and set a police escort vehicle on fire.

Those traveling atop the truck with Bhutto climbed down, with one man jumping off while others used a ladder. Bhutto’s lawyer, Sen. Babar Awan, said that the former premier was safe.

Police Chief Azhar Farooqi told Dawn News that Bhutto was rushed from the area under contingency plans.

“She was evacuated very safely and is now in Bilawal House,” Farooqi said, referring to Bhutto’s residence in Karachi.

Ghulam Mohammed Mohtaram, the provincial home secretary, said at least 30 people were killed and more than 100 injured. He said the main force of the blast appeared to be taken by the police vehicle.

Footage from the scene of the blasts showed bodies on the ground, lying motionless, under a mural that read “Long Live Bhutto.”

Men grabbed several stretchers with injured people from ambulances and rushed them into what appeared to be a hospital emergency room, while others carried the wounded in their arms. Many of the wounded were covered in blood, and some had their clothes ripped off.

Several motorcycles also lay on their sides. Flames burned in the center of the street after the explosions.

After the blast, pickup trucks filled with men rushed away from the scene and others began to run, but many more stayed and milled in between the police vehicle and those of the procession.

More than 150,000 jubilant supporters had surrounded the convoy carrying Bhutto amid massive security in Karachi.

Authorities had urged her to travel in Karachi by helicopter to reduce the risk of attack. But Bhutto, hated by radical Islamists because she supports the U.S.-led war on terrorism, brushed off the concerns.

“I am not scared. I am thinking of my mission,” she had told reporters on the plane. “This is a movement for democracy because we are under threat from extremists and militants.”

Bhutto recently courted controversy in Pakistan by saying that she would cooperate with the American military in targeting Osama bin Laden, and authorities warned that Islamic militants could launch suicide attacks and roadside bombings against her.

Asked about such threats on Wednesday in Dubai, Bhutto said Islam forbids suicide bombings and attacks on her. “Muslims know if they attack a woman they will burn in hell,” she said.

The government of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, had appealed to Bhutto to abandon plans for a snail-paced grand procession through Karachi, saying it would leave her vulnerable. The government said the main threat was from Taliban and al-Qaida.

Source: ABC7.com

>USSR2 File: Comrade Czar Putin meets Russia’s citizen-slaves, exposes elements of Soviet Communist leadership’s domestic and foreign policies

>In true czar-like fashion, Soviet Russian dictator Vladimir Putin held his annual question-and-answer session television program, broadcast from the Kremlin today. Putin answered 72 questions, supposedly fielded by Russia’s citizen-slaves, in more than three hours. State-run Novosti distilled Putin’s answers into a number of main points. Some of these points reveal the current policy directions that Russia’s Leninist rulers–who govern through the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union and potemkin parties like the crypto-Stalinist United Russia–have taken.

Pictured above: Angelic Putin. Nice Putin. Bush’s bud. Below: Demonic Putin. KGB dictator Putin. The caption states: “Putin, Our President.”

With respect to the remilitarization of Russia, Putin related that “the Russian Armed Forces will not just develop nuclear triad weapons (the Strategic Missile Forces, strategic aviation and nuclear submarines) as its main deterrent, but will create other weaponry.” In addition, “Russia is successfully working on new strategic missile systems, and will continue to develop both nuclear and conventional weapons, ” “Russia will start building another strategic nuclear submarine in 2008,” “Russia will complete work on the development of advanced fighter aircraft in 2012-2015,” and “Russia will continue modernizing Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers,” a fact about which we have already blogged. Lastly, “only contract servicemen, not conscripts, will be sent to conflict hotspots,” while “Russia is helping to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, and has allowed military cargoes to be transported via its territory.”

With respect to infiltrating the World Trade Organization, Putin explained that “Russian WTO negotiators have secured an agreement that Russia will maintain agricultural subsidies during a lengthy transitional period after joining the organization.”

With respect to Russia’s economic development and current unrest in world markets and financial centers, Putin insisted that “Russia will have no financial crisis because it has the third largest gold and currency reserves in the world ($434 billion).” Furthermore, “no monetary reform or banking crisis is expected either.” Russia’s gold and foreign currency reserves continue to climb and are presently at an all-time high. State-run Itar-Tass reports today:

Russia’s gold and foreign exchange reserves increased by 9.2 billion dollars (by 2.2 percent) from 424.8 to 434.0 billion dollars from October 6 to 12, the economic new agency PRIME-TASS reports on Thursday with reference to the Central Bank of Russia. The achieved amount of Russia’s gold and foreign exchange reserves is another record over the whole period of regular publications of this information by the Central Bank of Russia.

The Kremlin is clearly planning for a soft landing after either the US dollar becomes toilet paper or Russian missiles level US cities.

With respect to Russia’s relations with other “post”-Soviet republics, Putin said that “the CIS is unlikely to become a new EU but Eurasec [Eurasian Economic Community] can be compared to the EU, especially now that Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have agreed to form a customs union.” In addition, “Moscow is ready to cooperate with any Ukrainian government formed after snap parliamentary elections on September 30.”

As an aside, it appears that Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense Bloc and Julia Tymoshenko’s bloc will form the new government, edging out by a few seats in the Supreme Rada Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, which actually obtained the largest number of deputies. Political analyst Andrei Yermolayev, however, expects the pro-Moscow Yanukovich to use every political strategy to thwart the functioning of a “Orange” coalition government. State-run Regnum News Agency quotes Yermolayev as saying:

Until there is chance for compromise, the Regions Party will join the parliament and take a position of a wise Indian, who will be expecting for the body of his enemy floating down the river. If the president supports the coalition government and Timoshenko’s candidature for the post of prime minister, the Regions Party will apply the experience of 2007 and will be blocking the functioning of the parliament and run for extraordinary parliamentary elections, while backing the idea of early presidential election as well.

Komsomol businesswoman Tymoshenko (pictured above) might find herself again occupying the office of prime minister, but this might not sit well with Kiev’s string pullers in Moscow. “Ex”-CPSU Yanukovich is a more compliant puppet.

Putin acknowledged again that he would voluntarily step down from his office in March 2008, but insisted that he was opposed to restricting or redistributing presidential powers. He asserted that “the pro-presidential United Russia party is necessary to maintain parliament’s effectiveness and current policy direction, and this is why he decided to head its party list.”

In this admission, Putin is really exposing “the party of authority” for the communist front that it is. On a number of occasions since the beginning of the State Duma campaign Putin has left the door open to a possible communist resurgence. During his presidential Q&A session, state-run Interfax reports, he declared that “It would be useful if the opposition is represented in the State Duma. The number of parties in the parliament depends on the choice of the electorate only. In my opinion it would be useful if leftist and liberal opposition forces were represented. The elections will show who will win seats in the parliament.” Intriguingly, Russia Profile, which is owned by state-run Novosti, posed the following questions in an October 12 editorial: “Is Putin United Russia’s ace in the hole? Or could the strategy backfire for the party of power?” The answers, apparently, are no and yes.

In the meantime, the most recent sociological polls reveal that United Russia’s recent “acquisition” of Putin has had a very limited effect on the electorate, if any at all. According to the Levada Center, only 1 percent of Muscovites who planned not to vote for United Russia have changed their minds as a result of Putin’s decision. Another 8 percent “do not exclude such a possibility.” At the same time, only 29 percent of Muscovites support United Russia today, whereas 47 percent would not vote for the party of power under any circumstances.

So far, Vladimir Putin’s personal charisma has not passed on to the party of power. United Russia will have to work very hard in the months leading up to the elections to prove the opposite. Otherwise, voters might start suspecting that this peculiar charisma may not be transferred to or “inherited by” anybody at all, including President Putin’s successor.

Pictured here: On October 16, 2007, braving terrorist death plots, “Tough Guy” Putin checks up on his clients in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud (“Iwannajihad”) Ahmadinejad and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

In the foreign policy arena Putin chided the USA by contending that “one of the goals of the U.S.-led Iraq war was to establish control of its oil reserves.” This position, of course, reflects the beliefs of the Hate America Left too. He demanded that “the United States should set a deadline for the withdrawal of troops from the country.” With respect to US plans to install missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin admitted that “recent talks between Russia and the U.S. on its missile defense plans for Europe showed Washington is genuinely considering Russian proposals and looking for ways to resolve the issue.” However, he threatened that “if a decision is made without taking Russia’s opinion into account, Moscow will certainly take steps in response.”

Finally, he articulated the belief that the “assassination warnings before the trip to Iran were an attempt to disrupt the visit.”

Today also marked Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s visit to Moscow, the first since last year. Putin welcomed his guest with these smooth words: “I am glad to see you in Moscow. I remember that your previous visit to the capital was exactly one year ago. But I must say that our contacts have continued. Relations between Russia and Israel develop both in political and economic spheres. We have much to discuss.” The Russian and Israeli leaders might have much to discuss but, in the long run, Moscow will not contribute to the Jewish state’s national security vis-a-vis the Soviet clients that surround Israel, namely Syria, Iran, Palestine, Hezbollah, and Hamas. If PM Olmert has adopted that opinion then he is on a fool’s errand.

>Final Phase Backgrounder: The United Nations and "The Next Half Century" of Communist Deception and Subversion, 1984-2034

>In his famous predictive expose of Soviet deception and disinformation, New Lies for Old, former KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn suggests Moscow’s strategy for global domination might last five decades. Golitsyn published his first book in 1984 when he made this comment. In his assessment, therefore, the war between the Communist Bloc and the Free World (or what remains of it today) might extend to 2034. Communism’s long-range plan of peaceful convergence/co-existence was established at the Eighty-One Party Congress in Moscow, on December 5, 1960. In summary, Golitsyn projected that the communists would patiently scheme for nearly three-quarters of a century in order to overthrow capitalism. There is no comparable national strategy in the West, which is the main reason the shopping mall regimes are unable to perceive the existence of such a tenacious enemy. Golitsyn writes:

Suppose all that has been suggested here were to happen. Suppose the Western alliance did publicly proclaim its realization that it had been deceived by communist disinformation, that its policies of detente and arms limitation had been misguided, that the alliance was now united in its determination to face the challenge. What then? It is obvious that there can be no quick solution to an ideological struggle that has continued unabated since 1917. Perhaps there never can be a solution. Perhaps the two camps, each representing a way of life abhorrent to the other, must for all foreseeable time oppose each other. But is this so bad a thing? Is it unthinkable that ideological and political competition should be come permanent? Might not open competition between two fundamentally opposed systems be the best way to sort things out? Might not the two systems, in vying with one another, improve each other?

There seem to be three possible scenarios around which the history of the next half century will be written.

In the first, communism, meeting neither ideological nor political resistance from the West, continues along its present course to disarmament, then to convergence with the West on its own terms, and so to world domination.

In the second, the West realizes in time the nature of the communist threat, solves its own national problems, unites the noncommunist world, and adopts a policy of open competition between the two systems; as a result, the peoples of the communist bloc repudiate their leaders and the communist empire disintegrates.

The third scenario resembles the second except that both systems remain intact and competition continues for a very long time.

And who shall say that unrelenting competition between two opposing systems of government, each secured by the nuclear deterrent, would not prove fruitful? But where are the statesman who will recognize this path to possible safety and guide their peoples along it? (New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation; New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1984; pages 365-366)

The first scenario that Golitsyn posits appears to be the one unfolding at present: “Communism, meeting neither ideological nor political resistance from the West, continues along its present course to disarmament, then to convergence with the West on its own terms, and so to world domination.” The third scenario, however, embraces the deception that has so successfully confounded the West through the cosmetic changes in the East Bloc: “The peoples of the communist bloc repudiate their leaders and the communist empire disintegrates.”

In reality, the Kremlin is utilizing a pincer strategy to destroy the Free World. One prong, as noted above, consists of peaceful convergence/co-existence, especially via the United Nations, an embryonic world government conceived by Moscow’s Leninist masterminds and the pro-communist Council on Foreign Relations’ globalist utopians. The placement of the UN headquarters in New York City is not accidental. Over the objections of Western Europeans and the disinterest of Americans, the Soviets insisted that UN’s permanent HQ be located on the East Coast for the purpose of advancing communist deception, disinformation, and subversion on US soil. The reds have always considered the USA to be their arch-nemesis. The real estate in Manhattan on which the UN Building was constructed, moreover, was donated by the CFR’s patron-in-chief John D. Rockefeller Jr.

G. Edward Griffin’s classic expose of the UN, The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations (Boston: Western Islands, 1964) reveals this unholy nexus of internationalist interests:

It is no mere coincidence that the United Nations headquarters are located in the United States. Most Americans think that this was a victory for us in the cold war. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only has this made it much easer for the Communists in the United Nations to “reach directly to the American masses” with their propaganda, but their spies and espionage agents posing as delegates and staff can gain entry into this country under full diplomatic immunity (page 72).

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that it was the Soviet Union, not the United States, that insisted that UN headquarters be located on our soil. Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, revealed this fact in his book In the Cause of Peace. Describing the debates over the future location of the permanent headquarters, Lie said:

The Americans declared their neutrality as soon as the Preparatory Commission opened its deliberation. The Russians disappointed most Western Europeans by coming out at once for a site in America . . . .

Andrei Gromyko, of the USSR, had come out flatly for the United States. As to where in the United States, let the American Government decide, he had blandly told his colleagues. Later, the Soviet Union modified its stand to support the East Coast (page 73).

Since the United States is, at the present time, the only nation on earth that offers the potential of real resistance to the Communist plan of world conquest, the UN blueprint has been primarily designed for us. The Communists know that if they can just get America to step completely into the cage, the rest of the world will be theirs. And so, in practical terms, the master plan can be further simplified and condensed into just one simple objective: to gain full working control of the UN and at the same time, to entice the United States to gradually surrender its sovereignty to this world government (page 74).

The UN flag was actually created in the presentation branch of the United States Office of Strategic Services in April of 1945. The man who headed this department at the time and who supervised the flag design was Carl Aldo Marzani. It was later revealed that Marzani was a member of the Communist party and operated under the party name Tony Whales. Considering this, it is possible that the striking similarity between the symbols of the United Nations and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is more than a mere coincidence (page 162).

Carl Marzani served nearly three years in prison for concealing his membership in the Communist Party USA while working for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. Marzani also worked for the New Deal agency known as the Works Progress Administration, which operated under the leadership of alleged Soviet agent Harry Hopkins. (Hopkins was a key policy maker in the Lend-Lease program that shipped US$11.3 billion of war materiel to the Soviet Union.) Later Marzani worked for the US State Department as Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence, where he oversaw the design of the UN flag. Marzani was merely the tip of the iceberg, as Griffin reveals, since the US State Department was riddled with communists before and after the Second World War.

The Kremlin is also promoting peaceful convergence/co-existence through regional political-economic blocs such as the Commonwealth of Independent States/Collective Security Treaty Organization/Eurasian Economic Community, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the European Union, the African Union, the new Union of South American Nations, and the incipient North American Union/Security and Prosperity Partnership/North American Free Trade Association.

The other prong of the Kremlin strategy consists of nuclear blackmail via the Russian military’s revitalized combat-ready status. This prong is designed to make sure that the Americans “get the message” that resistance to communism is futile. State-run Novosti reports today that Russia continues its war preparations with little interest on the part of the West:

Russia announces successful Topol ballistic missile test
11:57 18/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 18 (RIA Novosti) – Russia has successfully test-fired an RS-12 Topol intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk space center, a spokesman for the Strategic Missile Forces announced on Thursday.

The RS-12 (NATO reporting name SS-25 Sikle) has been in service since 1988. It is a road-mobile single-warhead ICBM, similar in size and shape to the U.S. Minuteman ICBM.

“A mock warhead hit a designated target at testing grounds on the Kamchatka Peninsula [in Russia’s Far East],” the spokesman said.

He said the launch from the space center in north Russia had been conducted to assess the possibility of extending the service life of Topol missiles whose technical specifications stipulate a 10-year service term.

“With this test launch the service life of Topol systems has been extended to 21 years,” the official said.

The missile will be progressively retired over the next decade. It is being replaced by a mobile version of the Topol-M (SS-27) missile, which can carry up to six nuclear warheads.

Griffin writes above: “The Communists know that if they can just get America to step completely into the cage, the rest of the world will be theirs.” America stepped into the cage of its demise in 1945 with some prodding by its treasonous political-economic elites, particularly the so-called Eastern Establishment. A large and faithful remnant of God-fearing patriots remain in the USA, but I suspect that America’s final capitulation to the Communist Bloc has already been determined by its current and future “leaders,” such as Comrade Hillary. A “national revival” will probably only occur after Missile Day, which we also suspect will come long before 2034. (See Jeff Nyquist’s Origins of the Fourth World War.)

In conclusion, it is worth reiterating one of Golitsyn’s speculations about the future progress of the war between capitalism and communism: “Might not the two systems, in vying with one another, improve each other?” Frankly, while on the one hand capitalism, which is imperfect but the most successful economic system ever devised, might be improved, I cannot see how communism can be improved except through its total disappearance.

>USA File: Japan, China lead Asia in dumping US Treasury bonds, Singapore, Taiwan, ROK, Vietnam follow; Japan shifts from dollar as reserve currency

>The dollar exodus is not only affecting Europe and the Middle East, but also Asia. The Communist Bloc is very much involved in collapsing the US currency. The articles below note that the central banks of crypto-communist Russia, China, Vietnam, and Italy and Syria, where communist parties are part of the ruling coalitions, intend to reduce their dollar holdings. “Nuking” the dollar might very well have been one of the topics of discussion between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during this week’s Second Summit of Caspian States in Tehran.

Japan and China lead flight from the dollar
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Last Updated: 5:21pm BST 17/10/2007

Japan and China led a record withdrawl of foreign funds from the United States in August, heightening fears of a fresh slide in the dollar and a spike in US bond yields.

The US requires $70bn a month in capital inflows to cover its current account deficit
Data from the US Treasury showed outflows of $163bn (£80bn) from all forms of US investments. “These numbers are absolutely stunning,” said Marc Ostwald, an economist at Insinger de Beaufort.

Asian investors dumped $52bn worth of US Treasury bonds alone, led by Japan ($23bn), China ($14.2bn) and Taiwan ($5bn). It is the first time since 1998 that foreigners have, on balance, sold Treasuries.

Mr Ostwald warned that US bond yields could start to rise again unless the outflows reverse quickly. “Woe betide US Treasuries if inflation does not remain benign,” he said.

The release comes a day after the IMF warned that the dollar was still overvalued and likely to face “some depreciation in the medium term”.

The dollar’s short-lived rally over recent days stopped abruptly on the data, increasing pressure on US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to shore up Washington’s “strong dollar” rhetoric at the G7 summit this week.

The Greenback has already fallen below parity against the Canadian Loonie for the first time since 1976 and has touched record lows against a global basket. It closed at $2.032 against the pound.

David Woo, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said Washington was happy to see the dollar slide. “They don’t care so long as the fall is not disorderly. They see it as a way of correcting the deficit. ” he said.

Mr Woo said a chunk of the August outflows may have come from foreigners borrowing in the US during the liquidity crunch to meet needs in euros. “We think it may be a one-off,” he said.
The US requires $70bn a month in capital inflows to cover its current account deficit, but the key sources of finance are drying up one by one.

BNP Paribas said America has relied on “hot money” from abroad to cover 25pc to 30pc of the US short-term credit and commercial paper market over the last two years.

This flow is now in danger after the seizure in parts of the market over the summer and after the Federal Reserve’s half point rate cut, which has shaved the US yield advantage over other countries.

Ian Stannard, a Paribas currency analyst, said the data was “extremely negative” for the dollar. “It exceeds the worst fears. It is not just foreigners who are selling US assets. Americans are turning their back as well,” he said.

Central banks in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam have all begun to cut purchases of US bonds, or signalled an intent to do so. In effect, they are giving up trying to hold down their currencies because the policy is starting to set off inflation.

The Treasury data would have been even worse if it had not been for $60bn of inflows from hedge funds based in Britain and the Caymans, which needed to cover US positions at the height of the credit crunch.

Source: The Telegraph

Meanwhile, Russian communist organ Pravda reports that Japanese oil refiners are no longer purchasing Iranian crude oil in dollars but rather yen. No doubt with some satisfaction, Pravda gloats: “Since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, the US dollar has been the world’s primary reserve currency . . . Already, approximately 65 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports are based on the euro and another 20 percent on the yen. Iran is casting off the dollar and doing all it can to persuade the oil refineries of Japan to do the same.” Pravda, like The Telegraph above, reports that “central banks in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Russia, Syria and Italy have announced plans to reduce their dollar holdings.”

Japan ceases to use US dollar as reserve currency
17.10.2007

Iran and Japan have taken another step in making the dollar’s dominance a thing of the past.

Japanese oil refiners Cosmo Oil Co. and Japan Energy Corp. have started paying for Iranian crude oil in yen instead of dollars, announced company spokesmen on October 9. Both companies are following in the footsteps of Nippon Oil Corp.-Japan’s largest oil refiner-which made the same announcement in September.

How significant is it that more and more nations are ceasing to use the dollar as a reserve currency?

Since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, the US dollar has been the world’s primary reserve currency. This has been especially true regarding the crude oil trade, in which the majority of nations pay for crude oil in dollars. The resulting massive demand for dollars has allowed the United States to accumulate trade deficits and fiscal debts without experiencing the negative economic impacts that such imbalances normally cause.

This past July, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) general manager of crude oil marketing and exports, Ali Arshi, sent a letter to Japanese oil refineries requesting that all future crude oil shipments be paid for in yen. Three major Japanese oil refiners have already complied. Will other Asian oil refiners follow suit and move away from the US dollar? As the largest overseas holder of US treasuries, Japan is a key supporter of the US dollar. Yet Iran is the third-largest supplier of Japanese oil. As one Tokyo investment securities analyst said, “What else can Japan do but accept the [Iranian] request, once the oil producer sent its wish?”

The switch to yen should have little negative impact on the Japanese economy. As the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased, the price of oil has skyrocketed to $80 a barrel. Any increase in value of the yen, due to increased oil-yen demand, will only make oil imports less expensive for a nation that is highly dependent on oil imports.

The Iranians are also optimistic about the switch. Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, the International Affairs Director of NIOC, stated that “With the arrangements we’ve made with our Asian customers, hopefully by the end of October we will have around 80 percent of our export revenues in currencies other than the dollar.”

Already, approximately 65 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports are based on the euro and another 20 percent on the yen. Iran is casting off the dollar and doing all it can to persuade the oil refineries of Japan to do the same.

Central banks in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Russia, Syria and Italy have announced plans to reduce their dollar holdings. As nations and corporations turn their back on the greenback, the decreasing demand for America’s currency may cause its already weakening value to plunge to new depths.

Source: Pravda

>Middle East/USSR2 Files: Israeli PM Olmert to visit Moscow, discuss Iran’s nuke plans with Putin; Turkey gives green light for army’s Iraq operation

>Every day the news confirms that the Middle East is the most politically volatile region on the planet. Only one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will travel to Moscow to hold a one-day meeting with the Soviet Russian dictator. While attending a summit of Caspian state leaders, Putin conferred with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pledging Russia’s commitment to completing the Bushehr nuclear power station and inviting Israel’s arch-nemesis to visit Moscow for further talks.

During Olmert’s “surprise” trip to Moscow, the Israeli PM will no doubt seek to secure assurances that the Kremlin will abandon its support for Iran’s nuclear amibitions and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). In June the Israeli media reported on Russia’s open sympathy for the Palestinian state by noting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s concern that the Hamas-Fatah civil war could rend the PNA from within.

Israel faces tough challenges if the Palestinian Authority remains divided between Hamas in Gaza and President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction in the West Bank, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Tuesday. “We do not want Palestine to be torn apart by a civil war,” he said. “United Palestine is needed by Palestinians. Otherwise, it would be impossible to resolve problems,” Lavrov said after talks with his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni.

The Olmert government is well advised to expect virtually no support and only hollow promises from the anti-Zionist regime in Moscow. Indeed, Israel should consider Russia just as much its foe as is Iran. Russia is no one’s friend. Pictured above: Olmert last visited Moscow in October 2006.

Israeli PM Olmert to talk Iran, Mideast in Moscow Thursday
18:0517/ 10/ 2007

TEL AVIV, October 17 (RIA Novosti) – Israel’s prime minister arrives in Moscow Thursday to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions and a peace conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the U.S. later this year, the premier’s spokesperson said Wednesday.

Israel, anxious about Iran gaining access to unconventional weapons, has urged Russia to use its influence to help solve the international standoff surrounding the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Tehran insists its program is for energy production.

Ehud Olmert’s visit will take place days after President Vladimir Putin’s talks with the Iranian leader in Tehran, where he appeared to show support for the country’s nuclear efforts, saying they were in line with the non-proliferation regime.

During his previous visit to Moscow last October, which marked 15 years since the two countries restored diplomatic ties, Olmert secured the Kremlin’s assurances to step up control over Russian arms exports to prevent them from being sold to third countries. Tel Aviv claimed Islamic radicals in Lebanon had used Russian antitank missiles meant for Syria in attacks on Israel.

The peace conference taking place in the U.S. in November or December is expected to result in a framework agreement on peace efforts. The Israelis want the document to set out broad settlement principles, while Palestinians seek specific terms and conditions. Their differences threaten the success of the conference.

Talks between the Jewish state and the Palestinians were resumed when PNA leader Mahmoud Abbas broke with Hamas following the seizure of the Gaza Strip by the Islamist group, which left the president and his Fatah forces only in control of the West Bank.

The United States would like other key Arab states to attend the conference, but Arab nations are skeptical and have demanded more details.

Source: Novosti

Pictured here: Erdogan and Putin, 2005.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Parliament has given its military the go-ahead for a cross-border incursion into northern Iraq to wipe out guerrilla bases of the Moscow-backed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Sixty thousand Turkish troops, the article below reports, are already massed on the Iraqi border. According to US President George W. Bush, moreover, some Turkish forces are presently operating in northern Iraq.

The PKK is the Kremlin’s chosen instrument to destabilize Turkey, even as Moscow woos Ankara with promises of an anti-American alliance, military hardware, and commerce. Officially a secular state, the pro-market, center-right Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a solid majority in the July 2007 election. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul typify the AKP’s ambiguous positions on Turkey as an “Islamic” or “European” state. However, in view of the rise of “Eurostan/Eurabia,” a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the Islamization of Europe, these two positions might not be so conflicting as they seem. Erdogan’s selection of party colleague Gul as republic president was one catalyst in the pro-secularist protests that occurred in Turkey between April and May of this year.

US-Turkish relations are currently strained over US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s intention, articulated on October 14, to push through a vote on a resolution condemning the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s precedessor state, for the Armenian genocide. Pelosi is a Democrat and, hence, this initiative could very well be an attempt to alienate an ally in the Bush Admin’s War on Terror. Pictured below: PKK members protest the US resolution in Istanbul.

Turkey approves Iraq incursion
October 17, 2007

(CNN) — The Turkish parliament has voted to allow its military to make an incursion into Iraq and chase down Kurdish rebels staging cross-border attacks.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government had asked parliament in Ankara on Monday to authorize a military incursion, and the lawmakers responded with overwhelming approval, 507 to 19.

Parliamentary approval, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before the debate, would not necessarily trigger immediate military action and many analysts doubt a full-scale invasion will be launched.

Turkey has already massed 60,000 troops in the region and over the weekend it shelled farms across the border.

But the chances of such military action raises great concerns in the United States, which fears it would undermine the stability of the American-backed government in Baghdad and jeopardize the supply lines that support U.S. troops in Iraq.

And it heightens anxiety in Iraq, where officials have been taking all-out diplomatic efforts to keep Turkey from carrying out cross-border assaults against Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels in northern Iraq.

Speaking as news of the vote was announced, U.S. President George W. Bush — who said there already are Turkish troops stationed in Iraq — said “we are making it very clear to Turkey that we don’t think it is in their interests to send troops into Iraq.”

He noted that Iraq considers the issue sensitive. Saying Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi traveled to Ankara to discuss the issue with Turkish officials, he said the diplomatic discussions on the issue are positive.

“There’s a better way to deal with the issue than having the Turks send massive troops into the country,” said Bush.

Meanwhile, Barhim Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, who is Kurdish, told CNN that Iraqis believe the “prospect of unilateral action will mean irreparable damage to bilateral relations, and will be a bad consequence to Iraq, bad consequence to Turkey, bad consequence to the region.”

Salih said before Wednesday’s parliamentary vote in Turkey that such a move would also set a grim precedent.

“If Turkey were to give itself the right to interfere in Iraq militarily, what is there to stop other neighbors from doing so?”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called for a series of steps to tackle the dispute, including the dispatching of top-level political and security delegation to Turkey.

Al-Maliki phoned Erdogan on Wednesday and reassured him that Iraq has banned PKK terror activities, his office said.

The office said Erdogan expressed his desire for good relations with Iraq and stressed Turkey’s determination to cooperate with the government to deal with the PKK and welcomed negotiations and talks on the issue.

SNIP

Armenian issue

The United States has been attempting to use its influence to keep Turkey from launching an incursion but a U.S. domestic political dispute involving the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire around 90 years ago has enflamed passions in Turkey and presented challenges for American diplomacy.

Ties between the NATO allies are strained over a symbolic measure making its way through Congress that would declare the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians “genocide.”

Bush on Wednesday urged Congress to drop the House resolution. “One thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire. The resolution on the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 is counterproductive,” Bush told reporters.

Two senior U.S. military officials told CNN that commanders in Europe have been told to be “prepared to execute” alternatives to using Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey if Turkey follows through on threats to restrict U.S. use of the base in retaliation for the resolution, which a House of Representatives committee approved last week.

Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that Pentagon planners are looking at “a broad range of options” to keep food, fuel and ammunition flowing to U.S. troops in Iraq if Turkey pulls the plug on Incirlik.

“We’re confident that we’ll find ways to do that,” Ham told reporters at the Pentagon. “There’s likely to be some increased cost and some other implications for that, and obviously we’d prefer to maintain the access that we have.”

The move is a preliminary step to ensure that alternative aircrews, planes, fuel and routes are lined up and that troops in Iraq will see minimal interruption in their supply lines, the senior officials told CNN.

Source: CNN.com

>MISSILE DAY ALERT: Blackjacks appear off Norwegian coast today per Kremlin news release; bomb threat at Norway’s northern military command

>Now that Russia is on open war footing, while the sleepwallking shopping mall regimes of the West barely crack an eyelid, strategic bomber patrols like these might become too numerous to report as separate posts. Yesterday the Kremlin-controlled media announced another two weeks of overseas activity on the part of its revived air force. Like clockwork, the bombers appeared yet again off the Norwegian coast. Thus far, Huntsville, Alabama is the only major city in North America to reactivate its Cold War-era bomb shelter system. Got bug out plan?

Today’s (not so) coincidental bomb threat at Norway’s northern military command in Bodø, mentioned in the Norwegian media report below, could be a dry run by a Soviet agent. Although this incident occurred several hours after the Blackjack bombers were intercepted, during a real Soviet assault NATO bases could be the targets of sabotage during a strategic nuclear attack. In 1998 Norway expelled two Russian diplomats on charges of espionage.

Russian flights set off new defense scramble
October 16, 2007

More Russian bombers flew off Norway’s coast on early Tuesday, prompting the military to scramble once again, just hours before a bomb threat kept them busy on land.

Two Norwegian F16s were dispatched from Bodø to identify the flights, which turned out to be two TU-160 “Blackjack” flights, according to NATO’s description.

The bombers were introduced in 1987, and are among the heaviest fighter aircraft ever built.

NATO’s air operations center at Reitan outside Bodø said they seldom try to get the Russian flights to change course. Instead, the Norwegian military’s goal is to identify foreign aircraft and control their movements near Norwegian territory.

The Norwegians also want to consistently demonstrate that they are closely monitoring unidentified aircraft that fly near Norwegian air space.

The Norwegian F16s followed the Russian flights as they flew south, but returned to Bodø after about 45 minutes. The Russian flights continued south towards Britain, where they were met by British fighter jets.

It was the latest in a series of such flights, which the Russians claim are training missions. NATO officials believe the Russians are trying to demonstrate renewed military muscle.

Mysterious package

Norway’s northern military command, meanwhile, was faced later on Tuesday with a bomb threat, after someone placed a package outside the main entrance to the Landsdelskommando Nord-Norge in Bodø.

The unidentified package weighed about 15 kilos and was immediately removed from the gate after it was discovered about 7:30am.

Officials said they have clear photos of the car that delivered the package, which was taken to a football field for any necessary dismantling.

Source: Aftenposten

>USSR2/Middle East Files: Putin and Ahmadinejad in Tehran: "Foreign countries" (USA) should stay out of Caspian region; Russia woos Spain at Sochi

>According to the October 16, 2007 edition of Pravda, the organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their counterparts from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have issued a warning to “foreign countries” not to launch military action from or against the states bordering the Caspian Sea. The unstated recipient of this warning, of course, is Washington, which is urging international sanctions to halt Tehran’s (Moscow-supported) nuclear program. According to the Associated Press, “It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.” During the Second Summit of Caspian States, which took place in Tehran, “Putin underlined his disagreements with Washington last week, saying he saw no ‘objective data’ to prove claims that Iran is trying to construct nuclear weapons.”

Contrary to the coverage provided by Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, which stated that Putin and Ahmadinejad did not enter separate bilateral “side talks” prior to the main summit, Pravda admits that: “Following the summit, Putin and Ahmadinejad went into talks. Putin indicated the meeting would touch on the Iran’s disputed nuclear program, but he did not elaborate. Putin also planned to meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.” State-run Iranian media, moreover, continued to characterize the alleged terrorist assassination plot against Putin as “Zionist disinformation”: “About 24 hours prior to President Putin’s visit to Iran, certain Zionist sources started a new bid and a psychological warfare to prevent his visit claiming that there was an imminent “assassination plot” against the Russian president during his Tehran visit.”

Whether or not Iran possesses nuclear weapons or is in the process of building them is almost irrelevant–at least for the USA but not for Israel–in view of the fact that Russia owns thousands of such destructive devices and is capable of hurling them at or detonating them in North America. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear program are sideshows compared to the main event in geopolitics, which is the Kremlin’s continuing war preparations against and communist subversion of the West. The US occupational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan merely contribute to the American electorate’s weariness with the US Republican Party’s perceived “warmongering” and the logistical “stretching” of the US Armed Forces. Both situations are advantageous to Moscow which, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, has not abandoned its dream of placing a red flag over America’s capital.

Socialist Spain Joins France, Germany, and Italy in Russian Orbit, Putin “Divulges” Successor’s Name to Sarkozy

Meanwhile, in a somewhat related story yesterday we considered the extent to which the leaders of France, Germany, and Italy–three major Western European countries–have been sucked into Moscow’s orbit. We neglected to mention Spain, which fell to the Socialists at the ballot box only three days after the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings. This terrorist action, which was by its own admission orchestrated by the Kremlin-backed Al Qaeda “Green Team,” apparently repulsed many voters away from the conservative People’s Party, which had supported Washington’s War on Terror. On September 28 Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero demonstrated his subservience to the neo-Soviet state by travelling to Putin’s holiday residence in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. As the first article below reports, Putin and Zapatero last met during the Soviet Russian dictator’s state visit to Spain in February 2006. New Europe reports that both Spain and Russia advocate closer ties between Moscow and Brussels:

Putin, Zapatero hope EU-Russia ties will improve
30 September 2007 – Issue : 749

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero held negotiations in Sochi on September 28. The meeting took place at the presidential residence Bocharov Ruchei. Putin and Zapatero had last met during Putin’s state visit to Spain in February 2006. The last time a Spanish prime minister visited Russia was in December 2004.

Putin, who was speaking at a joint news conference with Zapatero expressed hope that relations between Russia and the EU would be more intensive in the second half of 2007, the period when Portugal is holding the rotating EU presidency. Zapatero also said investment, trade and economics in general were priorities in Spanish- Russian relations. There are competitive infrastructural and energy companies in Spain that are willing to come into the Russian market, he said.

Spain is holding chairmanship at the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) in 2007, and the two leaders were expected to talk about ways to improve this organisation’s efficiency. Putin and Zapatero are also expected to sign a memorandum on starting a dialogue between civil society in Russia and Spain. The tax problems of the Moscow Cervantes Institute have been solved, Zapatero announced on September 28.

In addition to bilateral relations, according to state-run Itar-Tass, citing sources in the Spanish government, Zapatero “will discuss the situation in the Middle East, around Iran and Kosovo, the activities of NATO and the OSCE, the fight against terrorism and illegal drug trafficking. Madrid noted “a coincidence of views” with Russia on all the issues.”

Indeed, there is a “coincidence of views”–all of which look dimly or dubiously at the USA–in Moscow, Madrid, Berlin, Paris, and Rome. Even the tough-talking French President Nicholas Sarkozy has wilted under Russian influence. Intriguingly, according to state-run Moscow News Weekly, Putin has apparently taken Sarkozy into his confidence by privately indicating his preferred successor for president of Russia!

Meanwhile, the French leader noted progress in reaching agreement on numerous issues, foremost the Iranian nuclear program and Russia’s energy policy. Sarkozy also hinted on developing friendly relations with the Russian president by saying that Putin had told him the name of the person he would like to see the next leader of Russia. Sarkozy refused to disclose the successor’s name.

Sarkozy might have refused to disclose Putin’s successor’s name to reporters but, upon surveying the current slate of candidates, the one most likely to win next March’s presidential election, in our assessment, is none other than Soviet communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. We believe that Putin has on several occasions over the last several months left open the door to a communist coup in Russian politics. Speaking at the Russian-German Forum in Wiesbaden on October 15 Russia’s KGB tyrant hinted: “I’m certain the renewed leadership, and Russia will have another power configuration, other people will come [to power], will maintain continuity in cooperation with Germany and Europe.”

The “neutral, socialist Europe” that KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn warned about in his first predictive work New Lies for Old (1984) has been achieved:

The United States, betrayed by her former European allies, would tend to withdraw into fortress America or, with the few remaining conservative countries, including perhaps Japan, would seek an alliance with China as the only counterweight to Soviet power. The greater the fear of a Soviet-socialist European coalition, the stronger the argument for “playing the China card”–on the false assumption that China is a true enemy of the Soviet Union (page 342).

The USA’s disastrous economic dependency on Red China, which has been openly allied with “post”-communist Russia since the 1990s, and the Bush-Clinton dynasty’s commitment to free trade might be interpreted as yet another well-craft prediction on Golitsyn’s part.

>Event Convergence Alert: Northcom’s Vigilant Shield ’08, Homeland Security’s Topoff 4, latest Russian bomber exercises to span last half of October

>In a previous post today we reported about this week’s announced Russian Air Force strategic bomber exercise, the latest in a series of many this past year. Last week we posted about Russian warnings related to another potential “dirty bomb” attack in the West. While the White House’s response to Moscow’s new combat-ready status has been frustratingly low-key and symptomatic of the Bush Admin’s apparent blindness to Soviet strategic deception, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Topoff 4 drill, planned for this week, imparts the illusion that the federal government is “doing something” about potential threats to national security. The DHS website reports:

The Topoff 4 Full Scale Exercise takes place October 15-19, 2007, it will feature thousands of federal, state, territorial, and local officials. These officials will engage in various activities as part of a robust, full-scale simulated response to a multi-faceted threat. The exercise will address policy and strategic issues that mobilize prevention and response systems, require participants to make difficult decisions, carry out essential functions, and challenge their ability to maintain a common operating picture during an incident of national significance.

One element of the Topoff 4 drill will entail dealing with the effects of a dirty bomb attack in Portland, Oregon.
Concurrently, US Northern Command is holding the Vigilant Shield 2008 exercise across the USA and in cooperation with Canada, Australia, and Britain:

VS-08 will be conducted concurrent with Top Officials 4 (TOPOFF 4), the nation’s premier exercise of terrorism preparedness sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and several other linked exercises as part of the National Level Exercise 1-08. These linked exercises will take place October 15-20 and are being conducted throughout the United States and in conjunction with several partner nations including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Territory of Guam.

Predictably, leftists, such as those writing for the Ottawa-based Center for Research on Globalization, are spinning these government drills as a pretext for launching an attack against Russia, China, or Iran. Others, such as those at Online Journal, argue that Vigilant Shield and Topoff represent a White House-orchestrated false flag operation on US soil to install a military dictatorship. Still, the overall convergence of terrorism-related events in the USA and Russia should be watched carefully by all students of communist deception.

>USA File: Congressional support for free trade erodes, globalist President Bush ramps up media blitz for red scheme, 3 million jobs lost since 2001

>Communism’s modern founder Karl Marx, former Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster, and US President George W. Bush agree: protectionism is bad, free trade is good.

I know many Americans feel uneasy about new competition and worry that [free] trade will cost jobs. So the federal government is providing substantial funding for trade adjustment assistance that helps Americans make the transition from one job to the next. We are working to improve federal job-training programs. And we are providing strong support for America’s community colleges, where people of any age can go to learn new skills for a better, high-paying career.
— President Bush

A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world.
— Foster, Toward Soviet America (1932), page 326

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
— Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade,” speech delivered to Democratic Association of Brussels, January 9, 1848

Even though the US Democratic Party, which is heavily infiltrated by communists and their fellow travellers, controls the House of Representatives, the USA’s Republican President had decided that Congress is not doing enough to hasten the demise of America. The MSNBC article below reports that more than three million manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas since Bush took office in 2001. Is this not economic treason under another name?

Bush: Protectionism will cost U.S. jobs
President ramps up free trade blitz amid flagging support for new pacts
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:59 p.m. MT Oct 13, 2007

WASHINGTON – Alarmed by slipping support for free trade even among Republicans, President Bush is arguing that protectionism will cut Americans out of chances for more — and better — jobs.

Bush has launched a blitz on behalf of pending free trade pacts with four nations. He continued the push Saturday in his weekly radio address.

“More exports support better and higher-paying jobs,” the president said. “And to keep our economy expanding, we need to keep expanding trade.”

His radio address followed a speech on trade he delivered Friday in Miami. Bush also granted interviews this week to business-oriented news organizations.

Since Democrats took control of Congress in January, it has not approved any free trade agreements that the administration has negotiated, and it has allowed Bush’s authority to negotiate future deals under expedited procedures to expire.

Before lawmakers now are agreements with Peru and Panama, considered likely to pass, and with Colombia and South Korea, both seen as precarious. The deal with Colombia is in trouble over human rights issues and there is strong opposition to the South Korea agreement because of barriers erected by Seoul to keep out U.S. autos and beef.

Bush pledges funds to retrain workersThe administration already has reached agreement with Democrats to include tougher language on protecting worker rights and the environment. But critics say five consecutive years of record U.S. trade deficits have played a major role in the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office in 2001.

“I know many Americans feel uneasy about new competition and worry that trade will cost jobs,” Bush said. “So the federal government is providing substantial funding for trade adjustment assistance that helps Americans make the transition from one job to the next. We are working to improve federal job-training programs. And we are providing strong support for America’s community colleges, where people of any age can go to learn new skills for a better, high-paying career.”

‘Get these agreements to my desk’

He said the deals would level the playing field for American businesses and farmers, many of which now face high tariffs on exported products while other countries enjoy relatively open access to U.S. markets. And he argued that freer trade with allies serves “America’s security and moral interests” around the globe.

“Expanding trade will help our economy grow,” Bush said. “So I call on Congress to act quickly and get these agreements to my desk.”

After spending Friday in Florida talking trade and raising money for the Republican Party, Bush flew to Texas for a weekend stay at his ranch. He travels Monday to Rogers, Ark., for a speech on the budget and to Memphis to raise money to help Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., in his re-election bid. The president returns to Washington Monday evening.

Source: MSNBC

>EU/USSR2 Files: Russia woos France, Germany; Putin meets (red?) Merkel in Wiesbaden, ominously alludes to new power structure in Russia after election

>Germany and Russia are bound together by a strategic partnership. We desire good relations at all levels.
— German Chancellor Angela Merkel, statement made during weekly official broadcast, October 13, 2007

Western Europe Lost to Soviet Communist Influence, Gorbachev to European Union: “Trust Russia More”

Following hard on the heels of Nicholas Sarkozy’s visit last week to Moscow, where France’s “rightist” president toned down his anti-Kremlin rhetoric by characterizing attempts to “obstruct Russia’s return to the ranks of leading world powers as senseless,” neo-Soviet Tyrant Vladimir Putin is presently visiting Germany, where he is “wooing” Chancellor Angela Merkel and consolidating the support of the German government. The venue is the so-called St. Petersburg Dialogue, which was organized by Putin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2001. The dialogue is one element of the Russian-German Forum, which itself is designed to advance Russia and Germany’s strategic partnership. Attending this year’s dialogue was former Soviet Tyrant Mikhail Gorbachev, who urged the European Union to “get over” its fears of Moscow and “trust Russia more.”

High on the agenda for bilateral relations between Russia and Germany are: the proposed Nord Stream pipeline that will pump natural gas from Russia to Western Europe via the Baltic Sea, bypassing the current transit states; sanctions against Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program; US National Missile Defense deployments in Central Europe; and the future status of United Nations-administered Kosovo, which Russia insists should remain Serbian territory. During the follow-up press conference with his German counterpart, as reported below by state-run Russia Today, Putin deflected questions about the murder of his outspoken critic journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.

Russia and Germany confirm common goals
October 15, 2007

On the final day of their two-day summit in Wiesbaden, the leaders of Russia and Germany said that the two countries are moving closer together on a range of issues and share many common goals. The upbeat assessment follows two days of inter-governmental talks at the annual Petersburg Dialogue.

Although a range of global problems were discussed, the governments of Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel spent most of their time working on trade and business ties between Russia and Germany – the main focus of the annual summit.

Predictably enough, energy took centre stage.

And joint projects such as the Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea received much attention. The controversial pipeline will pump gas directly to Europe from Russia, bypassing the so-called transit states.

German Chancellor Angela Mekrel underlined Germany’s commitment to the pipeline, saying she wanted it up and running as soon as possible. “We spoke a lot about the Nord Stream pipeline project. Germany supports it and wants it finished,” she said.

Stressing a huge rise in business between the two nations, the German Chancellor went on to announce some specific areas of increased investment.”

And now we are going to increase the co-operation in automobile industry in order to provide new quality to it. Important steps were also taken in the field of research. And there are some initiatives in the field of airplane production,” Angela Merkel said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin echoed his German counterpart, pointing other areas of potential growth.

“I draw your attention to the fact that in the first half of this year the trade turnover as compared to the similar period of 2006 has increased by 13.5 per cent and comes to almost $US 23 BLN. German investments in the Russian economy are growing, including the energy sector,” he said.

A number of international issues were slated for discussion at the Wiesbaden talks. These included U.S. plans to build an anti-missile defence shield in Eastern Europe – a move fiercely opposed by Moscow. Discussions were also held on the future status of Kosovo, Serbia’s breakaway republic. But most attention was devoted to Iran’s controversial nuclear programme. Many western states, including Germany, are calling for more UN sanctions to be slapped on Iran if it refuses to suspend uranium enrichment.

Vladimir Putin flies to Tehran from Germany to take part in summit of Caspian sea states.

Mr Putin says the success the world had in dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat can be repeated with the Iranians.

“Let’s remember the emotional discussion around the North Korean nuclear programme. We can see positive changes on the Korean Peninsula. The same should be applied to the Iranian nuclear programme. Intimidating anyone – in this case, the Iranian leadership or the Iranian people – is useless,” Vladimir Putin said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, insisted that tougher sanctions were still an option.

“The Russian president will soon speak to the Iranian leadership in order to bring transparency, to check whether Iran is meeting the demands of the UN Security Council resolution. So that if we see it is not, we can introduce new sanctions. We must not implement sanctions immediately. We should do everything we can first,” she said.

Domestic policy in Russia was raised at a news conference held by the two leaders. Commenting on the probe into the murder of Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, President Putin said the law must be allowed to take its course.

“The Prosecutor General declared the investigation is in its final stage, and I think that is how it is. I think the investigation is heading in the right direction. The question remains: who ordered the killing. But I don’t think that during the investigation of such cases we should jump ahead of ourselves. We can be satisfied only when the court has passed its verdict. Until that moment everyone should be considered innocent,” Mr Putin stressed.

Answering a question about next year’s presidential election in Russia, Vladimir Putin said power will be transferred in a transparent way.

Source: Russia Today

Following his two-day trip to Germany, Putin will visit Soviet ally Iran, where an alleged assassination plot was unearthed yesterday. In the previous post, we speculated that this “plot” is very probably a Kremlin-concocted disininformation scheme to portray Russia and the Islamic Republic as victims, not perpetrators, of terrorism.

Pictured here: Putin, Merkel, and Mike (“I’ll Always Be a Communist”) Gorbachev in Wiesbaden, Germany, October 15, 2007. Born in West Germany, Merkel actually grew up in East Germany and joined the state-sponsored communist Free German Youth as a student. Angela resided in East Germany until the German Democratic Republic (GDR) merged with the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990. Shortly after her birth Merkel’s father, a Lutheran pastor, had been assigned to a church in the GDR. For that reason Gerd Langguth, a former member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to which Merkel presently belongs, has speculated that Angela’s father Horst Kasner, who moved freely back and forth between the two Germanies, had a special arrangement with the communist regime in East Berlin. Intriguingly, Angela co-founded Democratic Awakening, an East German “opposition” party that facilitated the “collapse” of communism in the GDR and advanced Moscow’s perestroika deception throughout Eastern Europe.

In summary, it is very possible that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, like the prime minister of Italy, Romano Prodi, is a secret communist agent or KGB asset. The governments of Germany, France, and Italy are clearly under the sway of Russia. Western Europe is all but lost to Soviet communist influence. This is why the Kremlin is so brazenly sending its strategic bombers aloft again.

“New Management” Coming to Russia

At Wiesbaden Putin not only commented on Russian-German relations but also on the Russian political power structure after the December-March election season. Indeed, the Soviet Russian dictator’s latest comments impart a new spin to Western perceptions that Putin intends to hold onto power after he is constitutionally obligated to step down from the presidency. In view of his commitment to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s long-range strategic deception, his appointment of fellow “ex”-communist Viktor Zubkov to the post of PM (and apparently to the chairmanship of the Union State of Russia and Belarus), and his cordial working relationship with Communist Party of the Russian Federation leader Gennady Zyuganov, Kremlinologists who subscribe to the Golitsynian thesis–namely, that communism is not dead in Russia–should not be faulted for speculating that perhaps Putin is providing an open window for a red coup, peaceful or otherwise, in Moscow. Ominously, Putin refers to a “renewed leadership” that will be taking over Russia and that will maintain “continuity in cooperation with Germany and Europe.”

Other People to Come to Power After Elections
October 15, 2007

New leadership of Russia will maintain continuity in relations and cooperation with Europe, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin pledged during the Petersburg Dialog Forum that is held in Wiesbaden. But quite other people will be in power after the elections, the president emphasized.

“I’m certain the renewed leadership, and Russia will have another power configuration, other people will come [to power], will maintain continuity in cooperation with Germany and Europe,” the president pointed out.

Today’s relations with the European states, Putin went on, “match the aspiration of Russia’s residents” and correspond to the national interests. “No changes will happen and could happen,” the president vowed.

As to the economic relations of Russia and Germany, there is nothing to boast, Putin said, reminding that the German business has recently injected roughly €7 billion in Russia’s economy. “Just a single company of Italy invested $6 billion in power engineering and intends to invest another $3 billion,” Putin specified.

Source: Kommersant Daily

>MISSILE DAY ALERT: Putin to visit Iran in face of terrorist death plot, Zubkov to head Russia-Belarus Union State, bomber exercises slated for Oct. 16

>I think the rapid growth in Russian military spending definitely bears watching. And frankly, some of the efforts – for instance, Bear flights in areas that we haven’t seen for a while – are really not helpful to security.
— US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, statement made during October 14, 2007 interview with ABC News; quoted by Novosti

Significant developments have transpired in Russia and Iran over the weekend that portend great danger to the West. Russian and Western media are reporting that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), formerly the KGB’s international component, has informed “ex”-CPSU President Vladimir Putin of an assassination plot, to be carried out against him by suicide bombers during his October 16 visit to Iran, the leader of which is Mahmoud (“Iwannajihad”) Ahmadinejad. Both men sit at the top of the international terrorist network, as we have demonstrated here, while Putin especially covertly promotes Islamo-Marxist terrorism to advance international communism and the Soviet long-range plan.

While in Tehran Putin will attend the Second Summit of Caspian States, which includes four “post”-Soviet republics–Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan–and Russia’s strategic partner and client Iran.

On October 15 state-run Interfax quoted a source with the FSB/SVR/KGB as saying: “Corresponding [intelligence] agencies, in cooperation with their foreign partners are taking steps following yesterday’s information about a terrorist threat to the Russian president.” Meanwhile, the presidential Bodyguard Service refuses to comment on the alleged plot against Putin. Kremlin media reports that Putin will proceed with his visit, notwithstanding the allged plot. When the story broke yesterday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the allegations as “ungrounded,” and branded them as part of a “psychological war waged by Tehran’s enemies.” State-run Novosti reports:

Putin to visit Iran despite assassination warning
10:0415/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Iran this week despite a warning by his secret service that an alleged plot to assassinate him has been in the works, the Kremlin press service said Monday.

During his October 15-16 visit, Putin will meet with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and attend Tuesday’s summit of Caspian Sea nations. It is the first visit of a Russian or Soviet leader to Iran since 1943, when Joseph Stalin met with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Tehran for a wartime conference.

The press service did not comment on the alleged assassination plot, and said preparations were continuing for Putin to take part in the Caspian summit.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday the allegations were ungrounded, and called them part of a psychological war waged by Tehran’s enemies.

“These reports [on a planned assassination attempt] are part of a psychological war waged by the enemies of Iran to harm Iranian-Russian relations,” said Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

It is not the first time the media has circulated reports of assassination attempts against the current Russian leader.

In October 2001, Azerbaijan’s law enforcement agencies said they had thwarted an assassination plot against Putin during his official visit to Baku on January 9-10. They said the would-be killer was an Iraqi national with links to Chechen militants.

In June 2007, foreign media reported a possible attempt on Putin’s life during his visit to Turkey to attend the Black Sea Economic Cooperation summit.

Putin’s upcoming trip to Iran will test Russia’s ability to wield international political influence amid the ongoing controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.

The nuclear program is seen by some Western countries as a scheme to develop nuclear weapons, despite Iranian statements to the contrary.

President Putin stressed during a recent meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates that in the course of his visit to Iran he would continue the current line of work with the Iranian leadership, which reflects the collective position of the Iran Six and the UN Security Council.

The six nations involved in talks to persuade Iran to drop uranium enrichment are China, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

The U.S. and France have urged for tougher penalties against the Islamic Republic, but Russia said it was against unilateral sanctions against Tehran and wanted the Iranian issue to be resolved through collective efforts and political dialogue.

The International Herald Tribune’s coverage of the alleged Putin death plot is typical of the Western media’s response to this story in that there is no recognition whatsoever of communist deception:

Kremlin: Putin told of plot to assassinate him during visit to Tehran
The Associated Press
Sunday, October 14, 2007

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin has been told of a plot to assassinate him during a visit to Iran this week, a Kremlin spokeswoman said Sunday.

The spokeswoman, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, refused further comment.

Interfax news agency, citing a source in Russia’s special services, said suicide terrorists had been trained to carry out the assassination.

Putin is to travel to Tehran on Monday night from Germany after meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During his visit to Iran, Putin is to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and attend Tuesday’s summit of Caspian Sea nations. He is the first Kremlin leader to travel to Iran since Josef Stalin attended the 1943 wartime summit with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In Tehran, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, denied any such plot had been uncovered and he characterized the news as disinformation spread by Iran’s adversaries.

“These sort of reports are completely baseless and in direction with psychological operations of enemies of relations between Iran and Russia,” Hosseini said in a statement.

Hosseini said, “Reporting of this type of sheer lie … has no news value and cannot harm the planned schedule.”

The official Islamic Republic News Agency called the reports part of a psychological war by the Western intelligence services aimed at forcing the cancellation of Putin’s visit to Tehran.

Officials have reported uncovering at least two other plots to kill Putin on foreign trips since he became president in 2000.

Ukrainian security officials said they foiled an attempt to kill Putin during a summit in Yalta in August 2000.

In 2001, Russian security officials said a plot to assassinate Putin earlier that year in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, had been uncovered by the Azeri special services.

Russian officials linked both alleged plots to Chechen separatists. Putin had sent troops back into the southern Russian republic to crush resistance to Moscow’s rule.

While this particular development stinks of communist disinformation designed to portray Russia and Iran as victims, rather than perpetrators, of terrorism, real or fabricated assassination attempts against the Russian president should be viewed as potential indications of an imminent strategic or terrorist nuclear attack against the USA and its (few remaining) allies or, possibly, of an open communist coup in Moscow. Alternately, Putin’s sudden disappearance could also indicate that he has been spirited away to the underground nuclear war-fighting city at Yamantau Mountain in the Urals or another nuclear bunker designed for the neo-Soviet leadership.

Meanwhile, Russia’s new prime minister and Putin appointee, “ex”-CPSU Viktor Zubkov, has been assigned a second portfolio, chairman of the government of the Union State of Russian and Belarus, which serves as a building block for the soon-to-be-restored Soviet Union. Interfax reports:

Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov will chair a meeting of the Russia-Belarus Union State Council of Ministers in the capacity of the Union State premier in Minsk on October 19, a source in the Union Permanent Committee’s Minsk office told Interfax on Monday. “Zubkov has been put in charge of the Union State Council of Ministers,” office deputy head Anatoly Komisarchuk said. “The formalities have been settled. The Union State Council of Ministers will have its next meeting in the Belarusian capital city on October 19,” he said.

The leader of the Union State since 2000 has been Pavel Borodin, who was charged with money laundering in Switzerland in 2001. The communist dictator of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko is on comradely terms with Gennady Zyuganov, chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), and openly sympathizes with the restoration of the “CCCP.” Between November 4 and 5 the pro-Lukashenko Communist Party of Belarus and the CPRF will jointly host the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in the Belarusian capital Minsk. This new version of the Communist International was held last November in Lisbon.

In a not unrelated story, a Russian Air Force spokesentity, shrugging off the feeble protests of a few double-minded Western politicians, insists that permanent strategic bomber patrols, officially resumed on September 6, 2007 but in actuality restored in 2006, will continue over the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Interfax reports:

Russian strategic bombers will continue to fly missions over the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans and other remote regions, Russian Air Force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky told Interfax-AVN on Monday. “The strategic bombers combat training will continue in line with the plan confirmed by the military command, despite the concerns being voiced over this by individual Western politicians. The Russian strategic air force has been performing flights in line with the international rules on the use of airspace over neutral waters without violating the borders of other states,” Drobyshevsky said.

Novosti confirms that Russia’s bomber fleet will once again be conducting a series of “long-range training flights, with simulated bomber raids and missile launches” between October 16 and 30. The mainstays of Moscow’s strategic air power, the Blackjack, the Bear, and the Backfire, will be involved in these sorties over three oceans and the Black Sea.

Russian strategic bombers to conduct exercises Oct. 16-30
13:3915/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – Russian strategic bombers will conduct October 16-30 a series of long-range training flights, with simulated bomber raids and missile launches, an Air Force spokesman said on Monday.

“Russian strategic bombers Tu-160, Tu-95 and Tu-22M3, and Il-78 aerial tankers will conduct flights over the Arctic region, the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, and the Black Sea, with simulated bombing raids and firing of cruise missiles at testing grounds in northern and southern Russia,” Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky said.

Colonel General Alexander Zelin, the commander of the Russian Air Force, will supervise the exercises.

Moscow announced in mid-August that regular patrol flights by strategic bombers had been resumed, and would continue on a permanent basis, with patrol areas including commercial shipping and economic production zones.

The U.S. administration expressed concern about the resumption of patrol flights by Russian strategic bombers.

“I think the rapid growth in Russian military spending definitely bears watching,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview with ABC News on October 14.

“And frankly, some of the efforts – for instance, Bear flights in areas that we haven’t seen for a while – are really not helpful to security.”

During an October 14 interview with ABC News US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice indicated that the Bush White House is finally being forced to reckon with the revived combat-ready status of the Russian Air Force, as Novosti itself reports above: “I think the rapid growth in Russian military spending definitely bears watching. And frankly, some of the efforts – for instance, Bear flights in areas that we haven’t seen for a while – are really not helpful to security.” After 16 years and more of Moscow’s perestroika deception, the US Air Force boasts no Strategic Air Command (SAC) to deter a combat-ready Russian Bear. SAC was dismantled in 1992, after communism “collapsed” in Eastern Europe.

>USSR2/Asia Files: Russian Air Force receives Myanmar military delegation, Moscow and China urge junta to negotiate with opposition leader Suu Kyi

>Without blinking, Moscow receives a delegation from its client, the genocidal socialist military dictatorship of Myanmar, while at the same time, in collaboration with Beijing, calling for a “genuine dialogue” between the regime and crypto-communist opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose cause is openly championed by reds worldwide.

MYANMAR MILITARY DELEGATION VISITS RUSSIA
Friday, October 12, 2007; Volume 11, Number 189

A delegation of the Myanmar Air Force headed by Lieutenant General Myint Hlaing arrived in Russia on October 11, Interfax reported. A Russian Air Force spokesman said that “the delegation will meet with representatives of the Russian Air Forces Command and high-ranking representatives of military and industrial organizations. It will visit the Air and Space Defense Academy in Tver and the Sokol research and development institute in Kazan.” At the UN in New York on October 11, Russia and especially China for the first time ended their opposition to any Security Council moves against Myanmar and voted for a nonbinding statement criticizing the military-run government’s recent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations, international media reported (see “RFE/RL Newsline,” October 5, 2007). The statement also called for a “genuine dialogue” between the regime and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the release of “all political prisoners and remaining detainees.” PM

Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Norwegian Air Force photo shows "dummy" cruise missile attached to Tu-22M bomber on Aug. 28 flight

>On August 21, 2007 state-run Voice of Russia reported on the Russian Air Force’s revived combat-ready status:

Russian planes are on a combat mission in the most far-away geographic regions, having dummy missiles, not nuclear weapons, on board, as the deputy commander of the Russian long-range air force Anatoly Zhikharev said. The flights began on August 17th , after the 1992 break, by the decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief — President of Russia. The flights take place over the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic oceans. The general says that the flights of the Russian strategic aviation are common practice during a combat mission.

On August 28, 2007 the Norwegian Air Force intercepted a Tupolev Tu-22M “Backfire” strategic bomber off Norway’s northern coast. Pictured above, note the cruise missile on the aircraft’s underside. Real or dummy? You decide, but by then it might be too late.

The governments of Scandinavia are clearly worried about Russia’s aggressive military posture. On October 11 the Norwegian media reported: “The heightened Russian activity is being closely watched, however, and was a topic of talks this week among the foreign ministers of Norway, Sweden and Finland in the northern city of Bodø. There, they received a briefing from military brass inside a NATO facility.” Alarmingly, the Aftenposten reveals: “While 29 Russian military flights have been photographed [presumably in 2007], an equal number haven’t been.”

Cold War shivers re-emerge
First published: 11 Oct 2007, 11:29

Norway’s military has felt it necessary to dispatch fighter jets 29 times so far this year, to monitor Russian military flights offshore. Now it’s emerged that at least one of the Russian aircraft was equipped with a cruise missile.

Newspaper Aftenposten carried a photo of the Russian Tupolev 22 bomber on its front page on Thursday. The photo was taken by a Norwegian fighter jet crew sent out to monitor the flights of two such aircraft about seven weeks ago.

Military officials say the two Russian flights were in “classic position” to fire cruise missiles off Bodø, but both turned away before reaching Norwegian territory, 12 nautical miles from land.

The maneuvers were said to be “unusual,” and part of a series of Russian flights in recent months that many are beginning to view as “sabre-rattling” on the part of Russian officials keen to assert their authority in the area.

Norwegian military officials are quick to note that the missile incident wasn’t considered a direct provocation. Tor Sandlie, chief of NATO’s air operations in northern Norway, told Aftenposten that “we look at this as normal training activity.”

On the agenda

The heightened Russian activity is being closely watched, however, and was a topic of talks this week among the foreign ministers of Norway, Sweden and Finland in the northern city of Bodø. There, they received a briefing from military brass inside a NATO facility.

While 29 Russian military flights have been photographed, an equal number haven’t been. The Russian activity over the Barents, Norwegian and North Seas has extended as far south as Great Britain, and it’s increasing, but remains nowhere near the scale of activity during the Cold War.

Foreign Ministers Ilkka Kanerva of Finland, Carl Bildt of Sweden and Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway agreed that the activity doesn’t appear aimed at the Nordic countries and that it can be considered part of legitimate training operations. Local politicians hope residents of northern Norway won’t be frightened by the flights, and instead view them merely as Russian officials’ desire to demonstrate that they once again have military muscle.

The ministers, meanwhile, expressed solidarity and cooperation on security issues in the north, with Kanerva of Finland noting that among the three countries, “there aren’t any foreign or security policy questions that can’t be discussed.”

Aftenposten English Web Desk
Nina Berglund

Source: Aftenposten

Meanwhile, according to state-run Novosti, Russia has successfully test-fired a short-range anti-ballistic missile at a test site in Kazakhstan. Space Forces Lieutenant Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin indicated that “the launch had been conducted to assess the possibility of extending of the service life of interceptor missiles on combat duty around Moscow.” At least 68 short-range A-135 interceptors (NATO designation: Gazelle) are currently deployed in the Moscow missile defense system to protect radars and strategically critical infrastructure.

>Latin America File: Former World Bank Senior VP and Chief Economist Stiglitz meets Chavez, "blesses" red dictator’s regional Bank of the South

>Although the United Nations’ World Bank is dedicated to “fighting poverty” in developing countries, communists like Venzuelan Tyrant in Training Hugo Chavez contend that these institutions actually promote “neo-liberalism,” a communist codeword for capitalism. In other words, although the UN is fundamentally a communist project, the capitalist nations have sprinkled their leaven into its institutions. Thus, the need to create Banco del Sur (Bancosur), or the Bank of the South. On October 8 the finance ministers of seven South American nations converged in Rio de Janeiro to displace the WB with Chavez’s pet project.

Bank of the South sets launch date on Nov. 3 in Venezuela
The Associated Press
Published: October 8, 2007

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: The Bank of the South — once just a gleam in the eye of South American leaders — now has a due date.

Finance Ministers from seven nations announced Monday that the multinational funding institute, which will operate similarly to the Inter-American Development Bank, will be founded Nov. 3 in Caracas, Venezuela.

The bank is the brainchild of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has been promoting it as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund, which he blames for perpetuating poverty and contributing to inflation in Latin America.

“We can now say that the Bank of the South is about to become reality,” Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega told reporters in Rio de Janeiro. “It will finance integration and will be open to all of South America’s 12 countries.”

“There is still important work to be concluded,” Mantega said, adding that the countries involved have yet to determine details such as the bank’s financial structure and how much each nation will contribute.Chavez has touted the bank as a counterweight to U.S. influence and a way for the region to chart its own economic course.

But Venezuelan Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas said Monday that “the bank is not against anything or anyone. It is in favor of the people of South America.”

“This is not a bank of one country or of one president,” he added.The bank will lend for development projects at interest rates similar to those charged by other multilateral institutions, Mantega said.

He added that the finance ministers of each member nation will sit on the bank’s administrative council and that each country will have one vote.

The launch date was agreed to during a daylong meeting between the finance ministers of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Source: International Herald Tribune

In addition to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, Chavez’s buds in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, namely Fidel Castro and his minion Daniel Ortega, will more than likely join Bancosur.


Granted, not all Latin American leftists believe that Bancosur will ameliorate the region’s gross economic disparities. Plinio Soares de Arruda, economist at Brazil’s State University of Campinas, insists that Bancosur should finance socialist economies in order to justify its existence. Nevertheless, former World Bank Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, New Keynesian devotee, and Columbia University prof Joseph Stiglitz has lent his prestige to Bancosur. New Keynesians, although more dubious about the advantages of activist economics than their “old” Keynesian forebears, argue that demand management by central banks produces more efficient macroeconomic outcomes than a laissez faire approach. This appears to be the philosophy of US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben (“Bailout”) Bernanke. The Chavezista cheerleaders at Venezuelanalysis.com gush about Stiglitz’s fawning endorsement of the virulently anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:

In his latest book “Making Globalization Work,” Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, “have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist’ because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor.” “It is not only important to have sustainable growth,” Stiglitz continued during his speech, “but to ensure the best distribution of economic growth, for the benefit of all citizens.”

“Old” Keynesianism or New Keynesianism, either way expect more social democratic mismanagement of the economy wherever Stiglitz and his ilk hold sway. As far as Bancosur is concerned, it will probably become a haven for well-salaried leftist academics and drag the economy of Latin America into the abyss. The leftist Guardian Unlimited reports:

Nobel economist endorses Chávez regional bank plan
Rory Carroll in Caracas
Friday October 12, 2007

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has endorsed an ambitious plan by Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, to create a pan-regional bank for Latin America. Professor Stiglitz, a Washington insider and former World Bank chief economist, said the Bank of the South would benefit the region and give a welcome shakeup to western lending institutions.

The bank, known in Spanish as Banco del Sur, is due to be founded next month in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, with start-up capital of up to $7bn from seven South American countries. It represents a victory for Mr Chávez, who conceived the project and drove it through numerous obstacles. Mr Chávez, a self-described socialist revolutionary, argued that the bank would wean the region off Washington-dominated prescriptions and help to deliver economic independence.

Prof Stiglitz gave his blessing after meeting the president in Caracas. “One of the advantages of having a Bank of the South is that it would reflect the perspectives of those in the south,” he told a media conference. It would boost Latin America’s development and provide a useful alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“It is a good thing to have competition in most markets, including the market for development lending,” Prof Stiglitz said.

The celebrity economist and bestselling author has argued that globalisation could benefit everyone if the rules of the game were not rigged in favour of the US and other rich countries. Coming from a former member of Bill Clinton’s administration and chief economist at the World Bank, the view carries the weight of an insider.

Latin America has an unhappy history with western lending institutions. It racked up huge debts in the 1970s and 1980s and was forced into painful retrenchement to repay the loans in the 1990s, prompting complaints that the international financial system was a form of neo-colonialism which kept the region mired in poverty.

The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay are expected to join Mr Chávez in Caracas at a November 3 summit to launch the Bank of the South.

>EU/USA Files: European finance ministers urge China to dump dollar, float yuan against euro; US options traders prepare for crash

>The US dollar continues to stagger as the world’s financial elites openly conspire to undermine the American economy in collaboration with the Communist Bloc by fomenting a “dollar exodus.” The article below reports that European Union Monetary Affairs Commissioner “Almunia will travel to China later this year with European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and Luxembourg Prime and Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker to discuss the matter with their Chinese counterparts.” The matter to be discussed is depegging the yuan from the dollar and floating it against the European currency. Adam Boyton, New York-based senior currency strategist for Deutsche Bank AG, warns: “As far as the dollar is concerned, you’ll see more of the same, with [US Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson reiterating support for a strong dollar but that not being followed by any action.”

EU Calls on China to Let Yuan Appreciate Against Euro (Update3)
By John Fraher

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) — European finance ministers, after failing to find a common position on the euro’s rally to a record against the dollar, urged China to allow the yuan to appreciate against their currency.

“China and other emerging-nation economies should introduce more flexibility in their exchange-rate management,” European Union Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters in Luxembourg today as he arrived for a second day of talks with ministers and policy makers.

European officials, who are preparing for next week’s meeting of the Group of Seven nations in Washington, are becoming irked with China after a July 2005 revaluation of its currency failed to stem trade imbalances between the two economies. While the yuan has gained almost 10 percent versus the dollar in the past two years, it has fallen more than 5 percent against the euro in the period.

Almunia will travel to China later this year with European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and Luxembourg Prime and Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker to discuss the matter with their Chinese counterparts.

“China’s yuan has appreciated more than 9 percent in the past two years and I can assure you China will continue to adopt a reform oriented policy on its exchange-rate mechanism,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said today in a regular briefing in Beijing.

“But these adjustments have to be done gradually and in line with the market. In the meantime, we are willing to hold dialogue with other nations.”

Rate Move “Desirable”

Europe’s trade deficit with China jumped 22 percent to a record in the first half of this year. Euro-region officials published a statement late yesterday saying that “it is desirable” that “effective exchange rates move” in China and other emerging economies.

“European opinion is pretty split on the issue of the dollar but there is an agreement on the need for emerging Asian currencies like China’s to appreciate against the euro,” said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank. “On China, there is a consensus.”

Officials can’t agree on how to respond to the European currency’s advance against the dollar, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy says threatens to hurt a euro-area economy already confronted by a rise in credit costs.

While French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said last week she would push at the Luxembourg meeting for the central bank to sell euros to stem the currency’s rise, the ministers’ statement repeated rhetoric recently used by the ECB’s Trichet.

“Great Attention”

“We have noted with great attention that the U.S. authorities have reaffirmed that a strong dollar is in the interest of the U.S. economy,” ministers said in a statement published late yesterday.

The euro has risen almost 5 percent against the dollar since mid-August and reached a record $1.4283 on Oct. 1. It traded at $1.4044 at 9:45 a.m. in Luxembourg, almost unchanged from yesterday.

EU finance ministers will today also consider new disclosure rules for banks following losses caused by the sudden increase in credit costs, which led to a run on the deposits of Northern Rock Plc last month, according to a confidential document.

Northern Rock, the U.K. mortgage lender bailed out by the Bank of England, said today that the government will now guarantee all customer deposits until financial markets become less volatile.

Japan’s “Recovery”

Regarding the yen, the euro-region ministers said investors should recognize that Japan’s economy “is on a sustainable recovery path” and markets “should be aware of one-way bets.” That repeated language used by G-7 officials at a meeting in Essen, Germany, earlier this year.

Ministers also said European governments and companies have done enough to help address so-called global imbalances, suggesting emerging Asian economies need to take up the slack.

“The euro area is playing its role for an orderly reduction of the imbalances by implementing structural reforms and contributing to a rebalancing of growth,” the ministers said in the statement.

The U.S. government is showing little inclination to encourage an appreciation of the dollar. While Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may tell his G-7 counterparts that he continues to back a “strong dollar,” he may resist an explicit criticism of the currency’s weakness because it is helping to support the U.S. economy.

“As far as the dollar is concerned, you’ll see more of the same, with Paulson reiterating support for a strong dollar but that not being followed by any action,” said Adam Boyton, a senior currency strategist in New York at Deutsche Bank AG.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Meanwhile, on October 8 Bloomberg reported that options traders are preparing for a full-blown stock market crash:

Skittishness over the U.S. stock market’s record-setting rally is reaching a crescendo among options traders who are preparing for a crash. Investors are paying the most ever to protect against a drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, data compiled by Morgan Stanley show. The gap between the price of so-called put options on the benchmark for U.S. equity and the cost to wager on further gains has averaged about 8 percentage points since August. That’s more than the previous high in July 2001, before the index dropped 34 percent and fell to the lowest this decade.

The US economy is tanking and, according to MarketWatch, 41 million employed Americans cannot afford the basic needs of life, nor do they qualify for government assistance due to their higher income bracket: “Many of these workers earn too much to qualify for ‘work supports’ such as Medicaid and food stamps, while their employer-provided health insurance doesn’t cover enough of their basic medical costs, according to the report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts.” Voters in economic straits are easy prey for politicians who live off envy. Enter Comrade Hillary Clinton and a raft of Democratic presidential wannabes.

>Middle East File: Ahmadinejad will set "no limits" on expanding ties with Russia, "Zionist regime" main source of regional instability

>Only hours after his brief but stormy visit to Columbia University on September 24, Iranian Tyrant/Arch-Terrorist Mahmoud (“Iwannajihad”) Ahmadinejad dropped his mask of friendship with the American people and, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, declared: “The brutal Zionists carry out targeted assassinations of Palestinians in their homes and cities, and terrorists are decorated with medals of peace and receive support from the big powers.” Today Iran’s state-run media, below, quotes Ahmadinejad as saying: “Another positive result of the trip to New York was that strong barrier of censorship in that country broke and the American nation directly listened to our real points of view on various global issues and welcomed them.” The only elements of the “American nation” that would have “welcomed” Ahmadinejad’s Columbia University rant-in and United Nations tirade was the Hate America Left, which feigns outrage over Iran’s treatment of homosexuals, and underground Islamic terrorist cells.

IRNA, meanwhile, also announced yesterday that the Islamo-Nazi Republic will set “no limits” to expanding ties with Russia. In light of remarks made earlier this year by the General Secretary of the Collective Security Treaty Organization regarding the absorption of Iran into that alliance, will the restored Soviet Union annex Iran as another “Soviet Socialist Republic?” If this proposal becomes reality, then Moscow will finally have a warm-water port–on the Persian Gulf.

Ahmadinejad: Iran calls for effective, comprehensive ties with Russia
Tehran, Oct 11, IRNA


President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not to set any limit for expansion of ties with Russia and seeks a durable, effective and all-out ties with that country.

“Iran’s authority would be to the benefit of Russia and vise versa,” he said.

Ahmadinejad made the remarks in an interview with Russian news agency Itar Tass and Russian TV network on Thursday.

Given their geographical, political, and cultural status, the two nations are to live together, underlined the president.

Iran and Russia are naturally united, he said.

Despite many ups and downs in two sides’ relations in the past, the two countries are determined to fully bolster and broaden their mutual relations, he said.

Mutual cooperation between Iran and Russia would leave positive impacts on the region as well as the whole world, he pointed out.

The two sides enjoy ample economic potentials to meet each other’s requirements, he said.

Expansion of mutual cooperation between Iran and Russia would be to the benefit of both nations, regional countries and the world, he said.

Both Iran and Russia as two big powers playing significant role in regional and global equations, he said.

On his latest trip to New York and his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, he said the United Nations is an international venue for exchange of views and expressing ideas and Iran did the same thing which was welcomed by the whole world.

All countries in the world including Russia put the seal of approval on Iran’s viewpoints about freedom and justice seeking, he said.

“Another positive result of the trip to New York was that strong barrier of censorship in that country broke and the American nation directly listened to our real points of view on various global issues and welcomed them,” he said.

Iran’s nuclear activities are within IAEA rules and regulations and have a peaceful nature, he said, adding that the reports released by the IAEA is a good proof of this claim that Iran has not deviated from peaceful nuclear activities.

Since a number of western countries believe that they have lost their interests in Iran they try to put the blame on Iran by raising such claims as lack of confidence building in nuclear issue, he said.

Since the western countries have adopted an hostile policy towards Iran, their judgment on the country’s nuclear activities is not acceptable, said the president.

Iran’s nuclear activities have become political by those western countries which have suffered a loss as a result of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, he said.

The so-called advocates of IAEA and NPT, have ignored them and are now testing a new generation of nuclear weapons and are not accountable for their measures, he said.

The US tries to sow seeds of discords in various parts of the world to achieve its goals and the country’s measure in setting up missiles bases in Europe is a good evidence of this claim, he said.

On the Caspian Sea, he said, the Caspian Sea littoral countries have many commonalties and should live together in peace.

“We hope the upcoming summit of Caspian Sea littoral states in Tehran will bear fruitful results and help maintain peace and welfare of their nations,” he said.

Current unrest in the Middle East have roots in interference of foreign countries, he said.

Ahmadinejad said that western countries have rushed to the Middle East region to plunder its oil and gas reserves and the Zionist regime is the main cause of insecurity in that region.

Regional nations are vigilant and never let the aliens carry out their plots and partition the Middle East, he underlined.

“We call for restoration of security and tranquility to the Middle East region and believe that the issue should be resolved by regional nations,” he said.

Source: Islamic Republic News Agency

>USA/USSR2 Files: Moscow superpower summit fails, Putin threatens to scrap INF Treaty, upholds CFE moratorium; Patrushev: Western spies everywhere

>Today Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin welcomed US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice to Moscow for the purpose of discussing Washington’s plans to install elements of its National Missile Defense program in Poland and the Czech Republic. During the summit neo-Soviet Tyrant Putin threatened to pull Russia out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated intermediate-range nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles. As early as February Yuri Baluyevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces warned: “Many countries are developing and perfecting medium-range rockets . . . Unfortunately, by adhering to the INF Treaty, Russia lost many unique missile systems.” The neo-Soviet state has already declared a unilateral moratorium on compliance with the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.

Russia, US could leave INF treaty – Putin
12.10.2007, 12.53

NOVO-OGAREVO, October 12 (Itar-Tass) – If the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty does not get a global character, it will be difficult for Russia to stay in it, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

Putin said Russia and the US should seek together the global nature of the INF treaty on destruction of these missiles.

“If this does not work out, the both countries can leave the INF treaty,” the Russian president said.

“In our opinion, the matter should be taken to giving this Russian-American treaty a global character and to persuade other participants of the international community to assume the same obligations as Russia and the US have assumed,” Putin said at a meeting with Russian and US defence and foreign ministers on Friday.

“If we cannot reach that goal, it will be difficult for us to stay within the framework of this agreement, where other states are actively developing such weapons systems, including the states that are in an immediate vicinity of our borders,” Putin said.

“We have earlier discussed the problem of destruction of medium and short-range missiles. This treaty is already 20 years old. The participants in this treaty are only the US and Russia as a successor to the Soviet Union. Other countries, unlike us, have the right to develop these weapons systems, and they are successfully developing them,” Putin said.

“We count on understanding of American colleagues and on active work to promote the idea of giving these accords a global character,” the president said.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed on December 8, 1987. It came in force on June 1, 1988.

The treaty envisioned the liquidation of Soviet and American missiles with a 1000 to 5000 kilometre-range, and of a 500 to 1000 kilometre-range together with their launchers, pads and bases in the Western European countries, Russia, other former Soviet republics, the German Democratic Republic and in Czechoslovakia.

The Russian National Centre for Reduction Of Nuclear Risk was established in the Soviet Union and the Risk Reduction Agency in the US for the implementation of the treaty.

The centres informed each other and set up inspection services that operated during 13 years.

The inspection period ended in 2001 after Russia and the US had carried out 1216 inspections that involved over 7,000 people on the Russian side and 13,000 on the American.

The inspections were completed without mutual claims.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, under which two classes of missiles were liquidated, has played a major disarmament role and demonstrated the ability of Russia the US to progress towards international strategic stability.

Source: Itar-Tass

With its refusal to observe the CFE requirements and reiterated threat to withdraw from the INF stipulations, Russia is thumbing its nose at two international treaties that restrain its renewed military adventurism–in the form of permanent strategic bomber patrols–against NATO. Meanwhile, the shopping mall regimes slumber. State-run Novosti below describes the talks between Putin and his American visitors as “tense.”

Russia, U.S. fail to agree on key issues at defense talks
18:3512/ 10/ 2007

MOSCOW, October 12 (RIA Novosti) – The U.S. and Russia failed to resolve a missile defense dispute at Friday’s talks in Moscow between the countries’ foreign and defense ministers, but agreed to resume negotiations in Washington next April.

U.S. State Secretary Condoleezza Rice said talks in the “two-plus-two” format had failed to overcome differences on U.S. plans to deploy missile defense elements in Central Europe and Russian proposals to extend the START-1 arms reduction treaty, but a decision was made to continue discussions at the level of experts.

Rice said that at the talks, she and Defense Secretary Robert Gates had tried to respond to Russia’s concerns on the missile shield, and were willing to continue efforts to allay its concerns.

Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted tense talks with Rice and Gates at his country residence near Moscow on defense issues.

Moscow strongly opposes U.S. plans to deploy elements of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, considering them a threat to its national security. Washington has insisted the European missile shield is intended to stave off the threat of missile attack from “rogue states” such as Iran or North Korea.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. side offered an alternative to its missile defense plans in a bid to allay Russia’s concerns, and said Moscow would study it. “Today our American counterparts presented their return proposal, aimed at finding a solution to the dispute,” he said.

Lavrov said the two countries would continue their consultations on missile defense in Europe in the format of foreign and defense ministers in six months in Washington.

“We have agreed that this format will deal with practical implementation of the initiatives, which our countries jointly promote and implement on the international arena for the sake of strategic stability,” he said.

The foreign minister said Russia had again urged the U.S. to freeze its plans to deploy missile defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic.

He said the Russia and the U.S. have agreed to draw up criteria to determine what should be classed as a missile threat. “If we manage to work out the criteria, it will become clear that the Third Site is not needed in the way that it was planned.”

On the controversial issue of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, aimed at limiting arms from the Atlantic to the Urals, Lavrov said Russia considers U.S. proposals on salvaging the pact to be inadequate.

“We put forward this summer our proposals on saving this treaty, suggesting how we could make it viable… Our American colleagues gave us their proposals during the Moscow talks. We have voiced our opinion – it is a step in the right direction, but we consider it to be insufficient,” the minister said, without specifying the nature of the U.S. proposals.

President Vladimir Putin declared in July a moratorium on the CFE Treaty, which limits Russian and NATO conventional forces and heavy weaponry in Europe. No NATO countries have ratified the treaty’s amended version, and the Russian moratorium is to come into force later this year if Western countries do not ratify the document.

Moscow considers the original CFE Treaty, signed in 1990 by 30 countries to reduce conventional military forces on the continent, to be outdated since it does not reflect the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the breakup of the Soviet Union, or recent NATO expansion.

Source: Novosti

Will the secretive Kissinger-Primakov “strategic vision group” rescue strained US-Russian relations and establish world peace (under a tyrannical red-dominated United Nations)? Possibly, but not, be assured, in any way that will increase US national security.

Meanwhile, according to state-run Novosti, Nikolai Patrushev, chief of the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s nom de jour, continues to pound the drum of foreign, especially British, espionage in Russia. On October 10 Comrade Patrushev declared that “More than 270 actively operating agents and 70 foreign intelligence recruits, including 35 Russians, have been exposed since 2003. Fourteen agents and 33 recruits have been caught this year alone. British intelligence is particularly active against Russia, in its attempts to influence the country’s domestic political developments.” Like Novosti, state-run Russia Today follows the Kremlin line, namely that Britain is meddling in Russia’s internal politics, which of course provides Moscow’s Leninist cabal with yet another pretext for holding bomber drills off the coast of Scotland. (See our news reports under Russian Strategic Aviation Updates, in this blog’s right column.)

UK spies trying to influence election: FSB chief
October 10, 2007, 12:29

Russia’s chief intelligence officer, Nikolay Patrushev, says highly trained British agents are putting their noses into Russian politics in a bid to influence the outcome of parliamentary and presidential elections. The FSB chief says there’s been an alarming rise in British spying activity across the Russian Federation.

In an interview with the ARGUMENTY I FAKTY, the Head of the Russian Federal Security Service says British spies target big business. He says they integrate with moneyed elites in an attempt to affect political thinking.

Mr Patrushev also pointed the finger at Turkish and Pakistani secret agents. He said they were particularly interested in Russia’s latest military technology. He added that British intelligence officers are much better equipped and therefore more difficult to track down. The Head of the FSB said his organistion arrested 47 foreign intelligence officers working against Russia in 2007 alone.

He said counter-intelligence staff pay special attention to NGOs or Non-governmental organisation.

>Useful Idiots Bin: Al Gore and UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win Nobel Peace Prize, red lies about global warming sanctified

>From the “Truth is More Hysterically Funny than Fiction” barrel in the Useful Idiots Bin comes our latest comic relief: Al (“I Created the Internet”) Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize, an award apparently designed by the inventer of dynamite for self-congratulatory, self-delusional leftist politicians. What, pray tell, is Al’s jaw-dropping accomplishment? No, no, he did not go back to high school and pick up his diploma. Comrade Al is guilty of furthering the communist lie that the sky is falling, er, the earth is warming and the polar ice caps are gonna melt and we’re all gonna drown so let’s elect Al Gore for president in 2008, de-industrialize the West, and level things out for the Communist Bloc which, of course, doesn’t exist anymore . . . OK, take a breath.

CNN reports below: “In recent weeks, Gore has been the target of a campaign to persuade him to enter the 2008 presidential race. A source involved in Gore’s past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.” Oh, great. Another rabid left-wing lunatic on the campaign trail. Someone call the dog catcher.

In an official statement the Bush White House, which refuses to ratify the anti-global warming manifesto known as the Kyoto Protocol, expressed its “happiness” for Al. I’ll bet.

Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with U.N. panel
October 12, 2007

(CNN) — Former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.

In a statement, Gore said he was “deeply honored,” adding that “the climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

The former vice president said he would donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a U.S. organization he founded that aims to persuade people to cut emissions and reduce global warming.

The White House offered an initial reaction to the Nobel win by President Bush’s 2000 opponent. “Of course, we’re happy that Vice President Gore and the IPCC are receiving this recognition,” said deputy press secretary Tony Fratto.

During its announcement, the Nobel committee cited the winners “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

The award ceremony will be held December 10 in Oslo, Norway.

In recent weeks, Gore has been the target of a campaign to persuade him to enter the 2008 presidential race.

A source involved in Gore’s past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won’t take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.

Gore repeatedly denied he has any plans to run again, but this week a group of grass-roots Democrats calling themselves “Draft Gore” took out a full-page ad in The New York Times in a bid to change his mind.

“Your country needs you now, as do your party, and the planet you are fighting so hard to save,” the group said in an open letter.

“America and the Earth need a hero right now, someone who will transcend politics as usual and bring real hope to our country and to the world.”

The Nobel committee praised Gore as being “one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians.”

“He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee.

In making the announcement, Mjos said, “Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

“Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to study climate change information. The group doesn’t do independent research but instead reviews scientific literature from around the world.

The U.N.-sanctioned group was formed by the World Meteorological Organization and U.N. Environment Program.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “delighted” with the news that Gore and the IPCC will share in prize.

A spokeswoman for the IPCC, which draws on the work of 2,000 scientists, said the panel was surprised that it had been chosen to share the award with Gore and praised his contribution to environmental campaigning.

“We would have been happy even if he had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue,” spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante said, The Associated Press reported.

The Nobel caps a series of prestigious awards associated with Gore, including two Oscars this year for the 2006 documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which followed him on a worldwide tour publicizing the dangers of climate change.

Last month, he also picked up an Emmy — the highest award in U.S. television — for “Current TV.” The show, which Gore co-created, describes itself as a global television network giving viewers the opportunity to create and influence its programming.

Previous American recipients of the peace prize include former Presidents Carter in 2002, Wilson in 1919 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

In 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shared the award with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. received the honor in 1964.

Gore was vice president for eight years under President Clinton. He won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000 and ran against Bush.

But he failed in his bid for the White House — despite winning more popular votes than Bush — when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his challenge over voting results in Florida, securing an Electoral College majority for Bush.

Source: CNN.com

>Breaking News: Unconfirmed report from Debkafile: Syrian civil defense activated Thursday night, October 11

>Using Israel’s daring September 6 raid against a military asset on Syrian soil–which might have been a shipment of North Korean nuclear material or Iranian conventional arms, depending on your media source–as a pretext for war, Damascus apparently activated its civil defense program last night. On September 16 The Times reported on two interesting developments: 1) “Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from ‘secret suppliers,’ and added that there were a ‘number of foreign technicians’ in the country. Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: ‘There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.’ He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved.” 2) “On August 14, Rim Kyong Man, the North Korean foreign trade minister, was in Syria to sign a protocol on ‘cooperation in trade and science and technology.’ No details were released, but it caught Israel’s attention.”

The Islamic religious observance of Ramadan finished yesterday too. See our earlier coverage of Syria’s war preps against Israel.

DEBKAfile Exclusive: Syrian Civil Defense Services Placed on the Ready
October 12, 2007, 12:50 AM (GMT+02:00)

Our military sources report exclusively that Thursday night, Oct. 11, Syria placed its civil defense services on a state of preparedness and mobilized their reservists.

Government and military hospitals across Syria have also been alerted.

These measures were ordered Tuesday, Oct. 9, and were in place within three days. In contrast, there is no change in the deployment of Syrian forces along the border with Israel on Golan and Mt. Hermon.

Thursday, Syrian defense minister Gen. Hassan Turkmani published a message to the armed forces calling for “readiness to withstand all aggression.”

A day earlier, the Syrian chief of staff, Gen. Ali Habib, said at an officers’ passing-out parade: “Syria is capable of beating off any conspiracies” against the country.

All these measures and this rhetoric strongly indicate the Syrian regime is convinced that either an American or Israeli assault, or attacks by both against Syria and Iran are due shortly.

Syrian president Bashar Assad articulated this fear in an interview published by the Tunisian daily Al-Shorouk Thursday. He said: I am working on the premise that the Americans will attack Iran,” explaining that this was the answer he received when he asked the Iranians how they evaluated the situation.

DEBKAfile’s sources note that the only two Iranian personalities he would have talked to would be supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Assad went on to say to the Tunisian interviewer: This means we are facing a force (the Americans) which has no respect for international laws and values, exactly as in Iraq. The United States,” he continued,” backs the enemy Israel absolutely which prevents us from perceiving the US in any other light that an enemy.”

An attack on Iran will harm the whole world but as we have seen in the Iraq War, the Americans do not enter into such calculations. “I cannot play games of anticipation,” said the Syrian ruler. “I must be ready for any US or Israeli operation against Iran or Syria.”

Source: Debkafile

>Red World: Soviet America: Elite-imposed communism in USA begins with Teddy Roosevelt, continues under almost every president since

>The ultranationalists, led by head of the liberal union Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the corrupt, homophobic, billionaire Moscow Mayor Yuri Lushzkov and leftist, the so-called “Black General” Albert Makashov, as well as the head of the Communist Party in Russia Gennady Zyuganov are behind the crackdown on democracies, even inside the country. They dream of restoring the Soviet Union to all its crumbling, dysfunctional glory. They dream of seeing the United States under a red flag (seriously).
— Tsotne Bakuria, Visiting Scholar, George Washington University; quoted in Washington Times, May 18, 2006

Pictured above: Then US Senator Barack Hussein Obama with putative cousin Raila Odinga in Kenya in 2006. Odinga has been prime minister of the East African country since April 17, 2008.

With the exception of Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands), we have now profiled every country on the planet in our Red World series. Archived profiles include: Africa (March 2006), Asia (May 2006), Western Europe (July 2006), Commonwealth of Independent States (December 2006), Eastern Europe (March 2007), Central America and Caribbean (April 2007), South America (June 2007), Mexico (August 2007), and Canada (August 2007). We consider our profile of the USA to be our magnum opus.

Below is a thought-provoking quote from William Z. Foster’s book Toward Soviet America (1932), in which the past chief of the Communist Party USA advocates not only proletarian dictatorship in America but also free trade, the clarion call today of borderless globalists and international capitalists everywhere.

A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world.

Politically, the world will be organized. There will be no colonies, no “spheres of influence,” no hypocritical “open doors.” The toilers will then have fully realized Marx’s famous slogan, “Workingmen of the World, Unite!” The interests of the toiling masses in the various countries will not be in conflict, but in harmony with each other. Those who speak of “red imperialism” repeat the calumnies of capitalism. Once the power of the bourgeoisie is broken internationally and its States destroyed, the world Soviet Union will develop towards a scientific administration of things, as Engels describes. There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. Armies and navies, rendered obsolete, will be disbanded. Grim war will meet its Waterloo (pages 326-327).

United States of America
Type of state: Republic with history of pro-communist governments since 1901
Independence: July 4, 1776 (declared, from United Kingdom)
President of the USA: Barack Hussein Obama (New Party, Chicago-based socialist party founded by Democratic Socialists of America and “ex”-cadres of Communist Party USA; communist- infiltrated Democratic Party; candidacy endorsed by Kremlin and electoral victory praised by CPUSA): January 20, 2009-present
Political composition of national legislature: In the last election for the US House of Representatives, which occurred on November 4, 2008, the seats were tentatively distributed in the following manner: Democratic Party (center-left with neo-communist factions) 257 and Republican Party (center-right with faux right and LGBT factions) 178. In the last election for the US Senate, which occurred on the same day, the seats were tentatively distributed in the following manner: Democratic Party 59 and Republican Party 41.
Next general elections: The USA’s next presidential election will take place in 2012.

Pro-communist and other presidents since William McKinley:

1) “Change We Can Believe In” presidency of Barack Hussein Obama (Democrat): 2009-present
2) “Compassionate Conservative”/communitarian (soft communism) presidency of George W. Bush (Republican) promotes Free World-Communist Bloc convergence and Security and Prosperity Partnership/North American Union: 2001-2009
3) “New Covenant” presidency of Bill Clinton (Democrat) promotes Free World-Communist Bloc convergence; possible KGB asset: 1993-2001
4) “New World Order/Thousand Points of Light” presidency of George H.W. Bush (Republican) promotes Free World-Communist Bloc convergence and North American Free Trade Agreement: 1989-1993
5) “Reagan Revolution” presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan (Republican) promotes free market domestic policy, putatively anti-communist, vilifies Soviet Union as “Evil Empire” but later accepts Moscow’s perestroika deception, which lays foundation for Free World-Communist Bloc convergence: 1981-1989
6) Jimmy Carter (Democrat) gives away Panama Canal, ultimately falls into hands of Red China; post-presidential statesmanship aids and abets leftist regimes and causes worldwide: 1977-1981
7) Gerald Ford (Republican): 1974-1977
8) “Imperial Presidency” of Richard M. Nixon (Republican) putatively anti-communist but expands domestic government intervention: 1969-1974
9) “Great Society” presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) synthesizes policies of New Deal and New Frontier: 1963-1969
10) “New Frontier” presidency of John F. Kennedy (Democrat) putatively anti-communist, continues New Deal agencies: 1961-1963 (assassinated in apparent Soviet-Cuban plot; leftists since then have blamed CIA, Mafia, and big business, while faux rightists have blamed international bankers)
11) “Dynamic Conservative” presidency of Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) putatively anti-communist, continues New Deal agencies: 1953-1961
12) “Fair Deal” presidency of Harry S Truman (Democrat) putatively anti-communist, continues New Deal agencies, opposes mandatory loyalty checks for government employees, promotes formation of United Nations, and prevents General Douglas MacArthur from decisively winning Korean War: 1945-1953
13) “New Deal” presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) supports war-time alliance with Soviet Union and embryonic United Nations, under guidance of advisor Alger Hiss (alleged Soviet “Agent ALES” and convicted perjuror), and socialism under direction of advisor Harry Hopkins (alleged Soviet “Agent 19”), with support of “New Deal Coalition” (consisting of Democratic Party, big city machines, labor unions, minorities, liberal farm groups, intellectuals, and Southern whites): 1933-1945 (died in office)
14) Progressive presidency of Herbert Hoover (Republican): 1929- 1933
15) Presidency of John Calvin Coolidge (Republican) slowed initial communization of USA: 1923-1929
16) Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Republican, Klansman) slowed initial communization of USA: 1921-1923 (died in office, funeral conducted with full Klan honors and regalia, according to Ku Klux Klan National Office)
17) Progressive presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Democrat; endorsed film The Birth of a Nation, which glorifies Ku Klux Klan; during Civil War Wilson’s family sympathized with Confederate States of America) promotes world government via League of Nations (chief advisor Edward Mandell House founds Council on Foreign Relations and authors Philip Dru: Administrator, a fictional plea for Marxism in America): 1913-1921
18) Progressive presidency of William Howard Taft (Republican): 1909-1913
19) Progressive/“Square Deal”/“New Nationalism” presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Republican) initiates communization of USA, promotes anti-monopolistic/”trust busting” economic policies: 1901-1909
20) William McKinley Jr. (Republican) signed the Gold Standard Act of 1900, supported protectionist policies, opposed concept of central bank: 1897-1901 (assassinated by Polish-American anarcho-communist Leon Frank Czolgosz)

Communist/far left parties:

1) African People’s Socialist Party (APSP): Founded in 1972 this party is radical left and black nationalist in orientation, and operates under the leadership of Omali Yeshitali.
2) All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP): Founded in 1972 this party is radical left and black nationalist in orientation.
3) Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America) (ISML): Founded in 1989 this party is Stalinist in orientation.
4) American Indian Movement-Grand Governing Council AIM-GGC: Founded in 1993 as a split from the American Indian Movement, this party is radical left and Native American nationalist in orientation, and operates under the leadership of Vernon Bellecourt.
5) American Indian Movement-International Federation of Autonomous Chapters (AIM-IFAC): Founded in 1968, this party is radical left and Native American nationalist in orientation, and operates under the leadership of Russell Means.
6) Arissa: This party is radical left in orientation.
7) Barrio Union (UB): Founded in 1981 this party is leftist and Chicano nationalist in orientation.
Bay Area Anarchist Communists: Founded in 2003 this San Francisco-based party is anarcho-communist in orientation.
8) Black Radical Congress (BRC): Founded in 1998 this party is radical left and black nationalist in orientation.
9) Bolshevik Tendency (IBT): Founded in 1982 as a split from the Spartacist League this party is Trotskyist in orientation.
10) Bring the Ruckus: Founded in 1997 this party is anarcho-communist in orientation.
11) Committee for a Unified Independent Party/International Workers’ Party (CUIP/IWP): Founded in 1979 this black nationalist party was originally known as the New Alliance Party and operates under the leadership of Fred Newman.
12) Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS): Founded in1991 as a split from the Communist Party USA, this party is left socialist in orientation.
13) Communist Party USA (CPUSA): Founded in 1919 the CPUSA associates with the annual International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Party, openly supports the Democratic Party, which has been infiltrated by fellow travelers, and operates under the leadership of Sam Webb. From 1959 until 1989, when Gus Hall attacked Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, the CPUSA received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3,000,000 in 1987. The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis, which forced the CPUSA in 1990 to transform its publication from the People’s Daily World into the People’s Weekly World.
14) Communist Voice Organization: Founded in 1995 as a split from the Chicago Workers’ Voice Group this party is ex-Maoist in orientation.
15) Communist Workers Organization (CWO): Founded in 2002 this party is Trotskyist in orientation.
16) Debs Tendency: Founded in 2003 and named after the Socialist Party USA’s past leader, Eugene Debs, this party is radical left in orientation.
17) December 12th Movement: This party is black nationalist and radical left in orientation and operates under the leadership of Omowale Clay.
18) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): Founded in 1983 this left socialist party has infiltrated the Democratic Party and associates with the Socialist International.
19) Echanges et Mouvement: This organization is left communist in orientation.
20) Federation of Northwest Anarchist Communists (FNAC): Founded in 2002 this party is anarcho-communist in orientation.
21) Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back) (FRSO (Fight Back)): Founded in 1999 as a split from the other Freedom Road Socialist Organization, this Stalinist party associates with the International Communist Seminar.
22) Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Freedom Road) (FRSO (Freedom Road)): Founded in 1985 this Stalinist party supports Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and associates with the International Communist Seminar.
23) Freedom Socialist Party (FSP): Founded in 1964 as a split from the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), the FSP, as a separate entity, has supported the SWP, Socialist Party USA, and Workers’ World Party.
24) Green Alliance: Founded in 2002 this party is left green in orientation.
25) Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN): Founded in 1995 this alliance is left socialist in orientation.
26) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): Founded in 1905 the IWW is anarcho-syndicalist in orientation.
27) International Communist Current (ICC): This party is left communist in orientation.
28) International Socialist Organization (ISO): Founded in 1977 this party is Trotskyist in orientation.
29) Internationalist Group: Founded in 1996, this party is a split from the Spartacist League.
30) Internationalist Perspective: Founded in 1986 this party is a split from the International Communist Current.
31) Internationalist Workers’ Group: This left communist party was founded in 2002.
32) Labor Party: Founded in 1996 this left socialist party operates under the leadership of Mark Dudzic.
33) Labor Standard: Founded in 1998 this Trotskyist party associates with the United Secretariat for a Fourth International and operates in entryist fashion inside Solidarity.
34) Labor’s Militant Voice (LMV): Founded in 1998 this Trotskyist party is a split from Labor Militant.
35) League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP): Founded in 1976 this Trotskyist party associates with the COFI.
36) League of Revolutionaries for a New America: Founded in 1997 this ex-Maoist party was formerly known as the Communist Labor Party.
37) Left Green Network: This left-green alliance was founded in 1989.
38) Left Party: Founded in 2002 as a split from Socialist Alternative, this Trotskyist party associates with the CIR.
39) Left Turn: Founded in 2001 as a split from the International Socialist Organization, this party is Trotskyist in orientation.
40) Liberty Union Party: Founded in the mid-1990s this radical left party operates in Vermont.
41) Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM): This party was founded in 1983.
42) Marxist-Leninist Organizer: This party is Stalinist in orientation.
43) National Black United Front (NBUF): Founded in 1980 this alliance is black nationalist and radical leftist in orientation.
44) New Afrikan Liberation Front (NALF): Founded in 1995 this party is black nationalist and radical leftist in orientation, and operates under the leadership of Herman Ferguson.
45) New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO): Founded in 1984 this party is black nationalist and radical leftist in orientation, and operates under the leadership of Chokwe Lumumba
46) New Party: This left socialist party was founded in 1991.
47) News & Letters Committees: Founded in 1955 this party was Trotskyist in orientation.
48) Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC): Founded in 2000 this anarcho-communist party associates with the ILS.
49) Organizing Committee to form the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist) OCCPUSA(ML): Founded in 1983 this party is Maoist in orientation.
50) Pan-African Revolutionary Socialist Party: Founded in 1983 this party is black nationalist and radical leftist in orientation.
51) Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL): Founded in 2004 this radical leftist party split from the Workers’ World Party.
52) Peace and Freedom Party (PFP): Founded in 1967 this left socialist party contains many tendencies.
53) Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC): Founded in 1974 this party is radical leftist in orientation.
54) Progressive Labor Party (PLP): Founded in 1965 this party is Maoist in orientation.
55) Ray O. Light Group: This Maoist party associates with the International Communist Seminar and ICMLPO[M].
56) Red and Anarchist Action Network (RAAN): Founded in 2002 this party is anarcho-communist in orientation.
57) Republic of New Afrika (RNA): Founded in 1968 this party is black nationalist and radical leftist in orientation.
58) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP): Founded in 1975 this Maoist party associates with the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and, by extension, bloody organizations such as the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist.
59) Revolutionary Workers League (RWL): Founded in 1976 as a split from the Spartacist League, this Trotskyist party associates with the ITC.
60) Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist-Posadist) RWP(T-P): This Trotskyist party associates with the TPI and operates under the leadership of Jen Cobbins.
61) Social Democrats USA (SDUSA): Founded in 1972 by the right wing of the Socialist Party USA, SDUSA members are active within the Democratic Party.
62) Socialist Action: Founded in 1983 as a split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, this Trotskyist party associates with the United Secretary of the Fourth International.
63) Socialist Alternative: Founded in 1986 as Labor Militant this Trotskyist party is active in the Labor Party and associates with the CWI.
64) Socialist Equality Party (SEP): Founded in 1966 as the Workers’ League, this Trotskyist part associates with the ICFI.
65) Socialist Labor Party (SLP): This party was founded in 1876.
66) Socialist Organizer: This Trotskyist party is active in the Labor Party and associates with the SIQI.
67) Socialist Party USA (SPUSA): This left socialist party was founded in 1901.
68) Socialist Workers Organization SWO: Founded in 2001 as a split from Socialist Action, this party is Trotskyist in orientation.
69) Socialist Workers’ Party SWP): Founded in 1937 this Trotskyist party operates under the leadership of Jack Barnes.
70) Society for Economic Equality: Founded in 1983 this party is a split from the Socialist Labor Party.
71) Solidarity: This Trotskyist party was founded in 1986.
72) Fourth International Caucus: Formerly known as the Fourth International Tendency, this Trotskyist party associates with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
73) Spartacist League of the US: Founded in 1966 as a split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, this Trotskyist party associates with the ICL and operates under the leadership of James M. Robertson.
74) The Spark: Founded in 1971 this Trotskyist party associates with the UCI.
75) Trotskyist Labor League: Founded in 2003 as a split from the WIL, this Trotskyist party associates with the ITLT and operates under the leadership of Sidney Martinez.
76) Trotskyist Unity Organization: Founded in 2003 as a split from the RWP(T-P) this Trotskyist party operates under the leadership of Joey Refallo.
77) United People’s National Party (Partido National La Raza Unida, PNRU): Founded in 1970 as the United People’s Party (Partido de la Raza Unida, PRU): this party is Chicano left nationalist in orientation.
78) Unity Organizing Committee: Founded in 1991 this party is a split from the League of Revolutionary Struggle.
79) US Marxist-Leninist Organization (USMLO): This party is a split from the Marxist-Leninist Party.
80) Vermont Progressive Party: Founded in 1999 this party is left socialist in orientation.
81) Workers’ Action: Founded in 2003 this Trotskyist party associates with the CRFI.
82) Workers’ Democracy Network: This party is Trotskyist in orientation.
83) Workers’ International League (WIL): This Trotskyist party associates with the IMT and was known as Socialist Labor until 2001.
84) Workers’ Party USA: This Stalinist party was founded in 1992.
85) Workers’ Socialist Party of the United States (WSP-US): This radical left party split from the World Socialist Party of the United States in 2002.
86) Workers’ World Party (WWP): Founded in 1959 as a split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, this pro-DPRK Stalinist party associates with the International Communist Seminar, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, Troops Out Now Coalition, MarchOnPentagon.org, and the “Open Borders Lobby.”
87) Working Families Party (WFP): This left socialist party was founded in 1999.
88) World Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS): This radical left party was founded in 1916.

Pictured here: On February 4, 1974 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley, California apartment by the leftist urban guerrilla group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). On April 15, wielding an assault rifle, she robbed the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. In her trial, which began in 1976, lawyer F. Lee Bailey claimed that members of the SLA had brainwashed his client by blindfolding, imprisoning, and physically and sexually abusing Hearst. This argument was crucial to her defense. President Bill Clinton granted Hearst a full pardon on January 20, 2001, the last day of his presidency.

Past communist insurgent groups with date of last known terrorist act, dissolution, or destruction by law enforcement:

1) Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Marxist-Leninist; 1986)
2) Black Liberation Army (Marxist, black nationalist; split from Black Panthers; mid-1980s)
3) Black Panthers Black (Marxist, black nationalist; 1972)
4) Black Revolutionary Assault Team (1971)
5) May 19th Communist Order (coalition of Weather Underground Organization and Black Liberation Army, 1986)
6) New Communist Movement (Maoist; 1970s-1980s)
7) Revolutionary Action Party (1970)
8) Revolutionary Force Seven (1970)
9) Southern California IRA (1994)
10) Symbionese Liberation Army (Maoist, black nationalist; 1975)
11) United Freedom Front (1984)
12) Weather Underground Organization (Maoist; split from old Students for a Democratic Society; 1973)

By the mid-1980s the communist/far left had largely abandoned the tactic of armed revolution in the USA. It was about this time, coincidentally or not, that many fascist/”far right” terrorists emerged and began to foment insurrection. These groups, which operate today, variously adhere to some form of fascism, national socialism, third positionism, white separatism, or white supremacism, as well as Skinhead, Christian Identity, Posse Comitatus, and Patriot Movement ideologies. Since at least the early 1990s Islamic terrorist cells have also operated in the USA. Violent Puerto Rican separatist groups are considered as a separate entry in our Red World series.

“Post”-communist far-left insurgent groups:

1) Animal Liberation Front (ALF): Founded in 1976 in the United Kingdom, this terrorist group also operates in the USA, employs anti-capitalist rhetoric, and commits sabotage against research labs, animal farms, and retail furriers to “save” animals from exploitation.
2) Earth Liberation Front (ELF): Founded in 1992 the United Kingdom, this terrorist group also operates in the USA and Canada, employs anti-capitalist and anti-suburban sprawl rhetoric, and commits sabotage against condominiums and luxury homes and vehicles to “save” the natural environment from exploitation. The founding members of the ELF came from the Earth First! radical environmental movement.
3) Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13): Founded in the late 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, this violent narco-terrorist gang operates throughout the USA and Central America, including its country of origin, El Salvador. In LA “America’s most dangerous gang” drew recruits from among the guerrillas who had fought for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, that country’s communist insurgency and now a political party. The gang is named after La Mara, a street in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital.
4) Revolutionary Cells-Animal Liberation Brigade (RC-ALB): This violent animal rights group was responsible for the bombing that occurred in August 2003 on the grounds of Chiron, an Emeryville-based biotechnology firm. The other bombing occurred a month later when the RC-ALB planted a nail bomb at the headquarters of the Shaklee Corporation, which manufactures health foods, vitamins, and cosmetics. Both groups were targeted for their association with Huntingdon Life Sciences, an animal-testing contractor. The RC-ALB might be defunct after its brief campaign of violence.
5) Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: Founded in 1977 by radical environmentalist and Canadian citizen Paul Watson, this self-proclaimed policing group is an offshoot of the Moscow-backed, Canadian-born Greenpeace organization. Based in Friday Harbor, Washington Sea Shepherd operations include interdiction against whaling in Antarctic waters, patrols of the Galapagos Islands, and action against Canadian seal hunters. In the 1980s Watson proclaimed Sea Shepherd to be the “navy” of Earth First! Although currently unaffiliated with the Green Party of British Columbia, Watson associated with this group in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986 he received over 15,000 votes when he ran for municipal office in Vancouver. Ten years later he ran for mayor, placing fourth. In 1988 he was nominated as the Green Party of Canada’s candidate for the Vancouver-Quadra federal riding but, citing vote-splitting as an issue, resigned in mid-campaign in order to endorse the communist-infiltrated New Democratic Party. In 2000 Time magazine listed Watson as one of its Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century. In April 2003 Watson was elected to the board of directors of the Sierra Club for a three-year term.

Pictured here: Actor Powers Boothe portrays the character of US Air Force pilot Lt. Col. Andrew Tanner in the 1984 movie Red Dawn, which depicts a Soviet-Cuban invasion of the USA. Film poster below.

Communist Bloc memberships: United Nations, North American Union (in formation)
Socialist International presence: Democratic Socialists of America, Social Democrats USA
Sao Paulo Forum presence: Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (neo-fascist), Socialist Front (Puerto Rico), Hostosian National Independence Movement (Puerto Rico), University Pro-Independence Federation of Puerto Rico
Moscow-Beijing-Havana-Caracas Axis political/economic/military presence: The USA has an adversarial relationship with the communist regimes in Havana and Caracas but, ironically, “plays nice” with communism’s “head offices” in Moscow and Beijing. The USA does not maintain strategic alliances with “post”-communist Russia and the People’s Republic of China as such. However, an institutional blindness toward Moscow’s long-range strategic deception and a severe trade imbalance with the pseudo-capitalist regime in Beijing has fundamentally compromised the ability of US political leaders and policy makers to successfully defend the homeland and project US interests overseas.

In proof of this blindness, in November 2001 US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement on a “new relationship” between their two countries that envisions the convergence of NATO and Russia, and the recognition of a “market economy, the freedom of economic choice and an open democratic society as the most effective means to provide for the welfare of our citizens.” The statement then declares that “the United States and Russia will continue to work together to protect and advance human rights, tolerance, religious freedom, free speech and independent media, economic opportunity, and the rule of law.” These well-meaning platitudes will never be implemented because the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a fraud, while Russia’s “post”-Soviet leaders are committed Leninists.

The USA, like many other countries in the West including Canada, the home of your resident blogger, has over the last century been heavily communized as a result of policies designed by political, business, and financial elites who are either ideologically committed to socialism or who are seeking to pre-empt a genuine “proletarian revolution” with a “managed” social democracy. Although communists and their sympathizers have been unable to communize (“nationalize”) the US economy, they have managed to ship much of the US manufacturing base to Red China. In addition, the subordination of the USA to international bodies like the United Nations–which Americans are forced to host on their own soil–the illegal alien invasion and Mexico’s Reconquista movement, the hijacking of public education by fanatical leftists, humanists, and perverts, the cultural dominance of “Hollyweird,” as well as civil asset forfeiture, hate speech/thought crime, and mental health laws constitute the last nails in the coffin that was once American liberty. In truth, a large portion of the American people, mistakenly believing that communism is “dead,” have already surrendered to this ideology and merely await a military blow from the Moscow-Beijing Axis.

The Soviet Union’s long-range deception strategy has consisted in part of accommodating the West’s own assumptions, ignorance, and self-delusions about communism’s goals. On June 12, 1987, for example, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and demanded: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Soviets obliged two years later and the West came to the false conclusion that Moscow’s Leninist masterminds had abandoned their dream of world revolution. If Reagan and his advisors in the Central Intelligence Agency had only believed Anatoliy Golitsyn’s warnings about Soviet deception, which the former KGB major first shared in the 1960s and published in New Lies for Old in 1984, then communism’s plan for world domination might have been thwarted.

While Russia, China, and their allies prepare for the downfall of the USA, American elites are diligently carrying out the communist plan for regional government ala the Council on Foreign Relations’ proposed North American Union (NAU). On October 8, 2007, during an interview with CNN host Larry King, former Mexican President Vicente Fox all but admitted that a regional union, complete with its own currency, has been devised by US, Mexican, and Canadian leaders.

KING: E-mail from Mrs. Gonzalez in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “Mr. Fox, I would like to know how you feel about the possibility of having a Latin America united with one currency?”

FOX: Long term, very long term. What we propose together, President Bush and myself, it’s ALCA, which is a trade union for all of the Americas. And everything was running fluently until Hugo Chavez came. He decided to isolate himself. He decided to combat the idea and destroy the idea…

KING: It’s going to be like the euro dollar, you mean?

FOX: Well, that would be long, long term. I think the processes to go, first step into is trading agreement. And then further on, a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA.

How Communism Took America by Stealth: The Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto Implemented in the Land of the Fee and Home of the Slave

There are a number of websites that summarize the laws, policies, and constitutional amendments that have facilitated the elite-imposed communization of America over the last century. The list below demonstrates that every plank in The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, has been partly or fully implemented in the USA.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

This plank has been fully implemented by abusive, intrusive local governments throughout the USA.

Eminent domain and property, or land, tax are direct and indirect violations, respectively, of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states in part: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

The US Constitution, which was promulgated before the rise of modern communism, and many if not all state constitutions recognize the sanctity of private property but permit the expropriation of land by government for “public use” with “just compensation” to the owner. This is called eminent domain.

The California Alliance to Protect Private Property Rights observes that for many decades governments applied that term to the expropriation of land for roads, schools, and public structures. Then courts applied eminent domain to private corporations that maintained public utilities, such as electric companies and railroads. Since 1950 local governments have applied eminent domain to the wholesale transfer of land to other private parties, such as developers, that have no obvious public interest whatsoever.

In 2005 the US Supreme Court, in the eminent domain case of Kelo v. City of New London, declared that local governments can force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed. Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote in her dissent to the ruling, “All private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded. The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent (local government) from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Ironically, the communist front American Civil Liberties Union opposes, or pretends to oppose, the heavy-handed application of eminent domain, which is a direct assault against private property, communism’s chief target for destruction. In 2005 the New Jersey section of the ACLU defended tavern owner Cheng “Terry” Tan, who was fighting the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency’s attempt to seize his restaurant by eminent domain. Jersey City officials intended to award Tan’s property to a parochial school, St. Peter’s Prep, for the purpose of constructing a football field. In this case the recipient of the land was, broadly considered, a Christian organization. The ACLU’s campaign against Christian organizations and public demonstrations of Christianity is well known.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

This plank has been fully implemented by the US federal government via a communist-inspired income tax.

Section 8 of Article 1 of the US Constitution permits Congress to impose taxes: “The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” However, the concept of a graduated income tax, whereby the rate of taxation increases with one’s income, is communistic since it penalizes the acquisition of wealth. Although temporary income taxes had been levied previously, in 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution provided for the permanent imposition of income tax. Wealth redistribution by taxation or any other means is communism. Tax protesters insist that the Sixteenth Amendment was never properly ratified by the states and, therefore, the Internal Revenue Service has no legitimate mandate.

The author of the Sixteenth Amendment was Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, who subscribed to the reformist/communist principles of the Progressive Era. This period spanned the years between the 1890s and the 1920s. Aldrich introduced the constitutional amendment to establish an income tax in 1909. Only one decade before, however, he referred to the concept of a progressive income tax as “communistic.” As a result of his control of the Senate (and his daughter Abby Greene Aldrich’s marriage to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and son Winthrop Aldrich’s later chairmanship of the Chase National Bank), Aldrich is considered to have been the most powerful politician of his time. His grandson and namesake Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller became one of the most powerful politicians of a later era and served as Vice President of the United States under President Ford.

In contrast to America’s communistic income tax system, in 2001 “ex”-CPSU President Vladimir Putin implemented a 13% flat rate for personal income tax in Russia.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

This plank has been partly implemented by the US federal government via the death tax.

Section 8 of Article 1 of the US Constitution permits Congress to impose taxes: “The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” However, the concept of an estate tax is communistic since it penalizes the transfer of wealth within a family, or between private citizens. In 1916 the current estate, or death, tax was imposed to generate revenue for the war effort. The initial rate was 10%. Unlike its predecessors, this law has been amended but never repealed. In 1935 President Roosevelt adjusted the estate tax to 75% with the intent of “soaking the rich.” Wealth redistribution by taxation or any other means is communism.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

This goal has been fully implemented by the US federal government via the draconian application of civil forfeiture law.

Civil forfeiture law is a direct violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments to the US Constitution. The Fourth states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The Fifth states in part: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

The Eighth states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

The Ninth states: “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

Civil forfeiture has recently gained new life as an instrument of federal law enforcement, particularly as a weapon in the “war on drugs,” in which property is seized on suspicion of its use in the commission of a drug-related offence. The property is normally forfeited without the arrest or conviction of the owner. As part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, congress strengthened civil forfeiture as a means of confiscating illegal substances and the means by which they are manufactured and distributed. In 1978 congress amended the act to authorize the seizure and forfeiture of the proceeds of illegal drug transactions as well. The statute provides for the forfeiture of “all moneys, negotiable instruments, securities, or other things of value furnished or intended to be furnished by any person in exchange for a controlled substance [as well as] all proceeds traceable to such an exchange.”

Civil forfeiture has become a favored method for imposing significant economic sanctions against narcotics traffickers. However, the ease with which the government can seize property and the potential hardships caused to innocent owners who seek to recover their property once the government has seized it have elicited concern from courts and commentators alike. Civil Asset Forfeiture Acts passed in 1997 and 2000 further strengthened this communistic practice. The 2000 law, however, grants people whose assets have been seized some redress through the right to legal counsel, as well as providing for the temporary return of seized assets to their owners while investigation is pending, if hardship can be proven.

The United States Marshals Service (USMS) is responsible for managing and disposing federally seized and forfeited properties. The USMS currently manages around US$1 billion worth of confiscated property.

Ironically, the communist front known as the American Civil Liberties Union opposes civil asset forfeiture, which is a direct assault against private property, communism’s chief target for destruction. However, the ACLU’s commitment to property rights is suspect since the narco-subversion of the West traces its operational headquarters to Moscow.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

This goal has been fully implemented by the US federal government via the Federal Reserve System.

Section 8 of Article 1 of the US Constitution states: The Congress shall have Power . . . To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; [and] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin . . .”

In 1913 the Federal Reserve Act created the quasi-governmental/quasi-private banking system known as the US Federal Reserve, which regulates the money supply. The public face for the movement to establish a central bank was Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, who subscribed to the reformist/communist principles of the Progressive Era. In 1908 he became the chief sponsor of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act that created the National Monetary Commission, forerunner to the Federal Reserve System. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Reserve Act, which was patterned after Aldrich’s vision.

In view of the Fed’s current intervention in the US money supply following the 2006-2007 subprime mortgage meltdown, government meddling in the economy and the further devaluation of the dollar vis-a-vis other currencies like the euro continues.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

This goal has been partly implemented by the US federal government’s past and current regulation of communication and transportation.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was established by the Communications Act of 1934 as the successor to the Federal Radio Commission and is charged with regulating all non-Federal Government use of the radio spectrum (including radio and television broadcasting), all interstate telecommunications (wire, satellite, and cable), and all international communications that originate from or terminate in the USA. The FCC took over wire communications regulation from the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC).

The Interstate Commerce Commission (or ICC) was a regulatory body created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland. The ICC’s original mandate was to regulate railroads and later trucking, impose fair rates and eliminate rate discrimination, and regulate other aspects of common carriers. Between 1910 and 1934 the ICC regulated interstate telephone services. The agency was abolished in 1995, and the agency’s remaining functions were transferred to the Surface Transportation Board, which is administratively affiliated with the US Department of Transportation.

All US railroads were nationalized as the United States Railroad Administration during the First World War as a wartime measure but were restored to their private owners almost immediately after the war. The federal government’s National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) was created in 1971 for the purpose of relieving private railroads of their legal obligation to provide inter-city rail service. In 1976 the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), another government corporation, was formed to assume the operations of six bankrupt rail lines located mainly in the Northeastern USA. Conrail was privatized in 1987.

In 2001, in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, the then-private airport security industry was nationalized and put under the authority of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The TSA is a component of the US Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for the security of the country’s transportation systems. In collaboration with state, local, and regional partners, the TSA coordinates security for highways, railroads, buses, mass transit systems, ports, and 450 airports. Some airports employ private security under contract with the TSA for screening of baggage and passengers. As of March 2007, the TSA employs around 43,000 transportation security officers, commonly referred to as “screeners.”

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

The first goal of this plank has been partly implemented by the US federal government in collaboration with foreign communist regimes, especially China.

Speaking in strictly political science terms, the current government-business arrangement in the USA is fascistic, rather than communistic. By this we mean that government heavily regulates business, which is a hallmark of fascism or corporatism, rather than owns business outright, which is a hallmark of communism. Even during emergency situations, such as the two world wars and the Great Depression, the US federal government controlled, rather than owned, business. Compared to countries with entrenched social democratic or communist regimes, government ownership of the instruments of production in the USA has been rare and highly unpopular.

The War Industries Board (WIB) was a wartime government agency established on July 28, 1917, during the First World War, and reorganized in 1918 under the leadership of anti-free enterprise financier Bernard M. Baruch. The WIB encouraged companies to use mass-production techniques to increase efficiency and eliminate waste by standardizing products. The WIB established production quotas, allocated raw materials, settled labor-management disputes, negotiated prices, and pre-empted strikes with wage increases to prevent a shortage of supplies for the war effort. Under the WIB industrial production increased 20 percent. The WIB exercised price controls at the wholesale level, but retail prices doubled between 1914 and 1918. The WIB was decommissioned by an executive order on January 1, 1919.

Later, during the Great Depression, secret communist agents and fellow travellers in the federal government tried to communize (“nationalize”) the US economy. Significant strides were made toward socialism during the first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. In compliance with the resolutions of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held in 1935, American communists advocated a popular front of all groups opposed to fascism. The Communist Party USA, therefore, abandoned its opposition to the New Deal and provided many of the organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO strongly supported FDR and the New Deal Coalition in Congress.

The National Recovery Administration (NRA), in particular, allowed industries to draft “codes of fair competition,” which were intended to reduce destructive competition and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours. Baruch, who headed the War Industries Board during the First World War, was a member of FDR’s “Brain Trust” and organized the NRA. Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, another NRA administrator, modelled the program along the lines of Fascist Italy’s corporatism. The NRA symbol, a blue eagle, was popular with workers. Businesses that supported the NRA displayed the symbol in shop windows and on packages. Membership in the NRA was voluntary, but businesses that failed to display the eagle were urged to be boycotted.

While most New Deal agencies and programs were abolished in 1943, others remain in operation in 2007. In the end, its was the Second World War, not the New Deal, that finally ended the Great Depression. Furthermore, the New Deal did not significantly alter the distribution of wealth in the US economy. Undaunted, in 1996 Gus Hall (1910-2000), then National Director of the Communist Party USA, explained how a Soviet America, true to The Communist Manifesto, would begin: “Socialism starts with nationalization of the main means of production – the plants, factories, agri-business farms and everything necessary to produce what society needs. The large monopoly corporations and banks come under public ownership, that is, under the collective ownership of the entire working class and people, who have the leading role in building socialism.”

Notwithstanding occasional recessions, the USA, after the European Union, still boasts the world’s most powerful economy in terms of nominal gross domestic product. As a result and in conjunction with constitutional protections for private property and its entrenched culture of free enterprise, domestic communists have been unable to execute a bold, frontal assault against capitalism in the USA. Foreign communist regimes like Russia and China, by contrast, have been more successful in undermining the US economy by manipulating the value of the US dollar, by shipping the country’s manufacturing base overseas, and by infiltrating sensitive economic sectors related to national security.

With respect to the demise of the manufacturing base, the US Trade and Development Agency, established in 1961 and funded by the US Congress, has encouraged the exportation of millions of US manufacturing jobs to the People’s Republic China by way of “Normal Trade Relations.” Unpatriotic American capitalists and socialist politicians and bureaucrats have for the most part unwittingly placed a large portion of the USA’s means of production under the control of nearly three million Communist Party of China cadres who work in that country’s “private sector.” America’s instruments of production are now indeed effectively owned by the state, a foreign state whose capital is located in Beijing. “The hallmark of USTDA development assistance,” states the USTDA website, “has always involved building partnerships between U.S. companies and overseas project sponsors to bring proven private sector solutions to developmental challenges.” In short, in the interest of assisting developing nations and creating new markets for US companies, the US federal government is killing the US economy.

The second goal of this plank–“the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan”–has been partly implemented by the US federal government through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA interferes with the private development of land though a number of acts and regulations related to land, air, and water pollution, endangered species, and hazardous waste removal and disposal. The EPA also oversees wetlands protection under the auspices of a tripartite arrangement between the USA, Canada, and Mexico, known as the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (1989). On July 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon transmitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 to the United States Congress by executive order, creating the EPA as a single agency from a number of smaller arms of different federal agencies.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

The second goal of this plank–“establishment of industrial armies”–has been partly implemented by the US federal government through New Deal programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps, and National Youth Administration. One of the chief architects of the New Deal was alleged Soviet “Agent 19” and WPA head Harry Hopkins. About 75 percent of WPA employment and expenditures went to public facilities and infrastructure, such as highways, streets, public buildings, airports, utilities, small dams, sewers, parks, city halls, public libraries, and recreational fields. The WPA constructed 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 buildings, and 700 miles of airport runways. While most New Deal agencies and programs were abolished in 1943, others remain in operation in 2007.

The concept of “industrial armies” in the form of voluntary service has been resurrected during the current Bush-Clinton presidential dynasty. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush signed into law the National and Community Service Act, which heralded a new era of federal “encouragement” in the area of voluntary service. This legislation organized a new independent federal agency called the Commission on National and Community Service. Enacted as part of the 1993 Defense Authorization Act, the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) was created as a pilot program to explore the possibility of allocating post-Cold War military resources to solve domestic problems. The NCCC was expressly modeled on the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1993 President William J. Clinton signed into law the National and Community Service Trust Act, which merged the federal offices of ACTION, the Commission on National and Community Service–including Learn and Serve America, Senior Corps, and NCCC–and the new AmeriCorps program to form the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). Currently, CNCS delivers several programs that are designed to help communities address poverty, environmental issues, and educational needs.

In 2002 President George W. Bush established the USA Freedom Corps with similar goals of organizing volunteer service in the USA and abroad. USA Freedom Corps falls under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President of the USA.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

The second goal of this plank–“gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country”–has been partly implemented by the US federal government via the Resettlement Administration and its successor agencies, and local governments via urban planning departments and “smart growth” prescriptions.

First, the Resettlement Administration (RA) was the vehicle for “a more equitable distribution of the populace over the country.” The RA was conceived by Rexford G. Tugwell, an economics professor at Columbia University who became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during FDR’s 1932 campaign. Tugwell, who held positions in the US Department of Agriculture, persuaded FDR to form an agency that would relocate struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government. In the summer of 1927, Tugwell and other future New Dealers sojourned to the Soviet Union where they were received by dictator Joseph Stalin for a full six hours. Although neither communists nor fascists, leftist ideas profoundly influenced Tugwell and his colleagues, an influence now admitted by contemporary historians. FDR established the RA under Executive Order 7027 in 1935. Tugwell became its first and only head. The RA operated through the end of 1936 when, due to Congressional opposition, its operations were rolled into a new organization, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which operated from 1937 to 1942.

The FSA was designed to reverse the effects of rural poverty by purchasing submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettling them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. Critics, including the Farm Bureau strongly opposed the FSA as an experiment in collectivizing agriculture. The program failed because the farmers wanted ownership. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land and continues in operation today as the Farmers’ Home Administration, organized in 1946. The FSA became part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America.

Second, cities throughout the USA feature urban planning departments that endeavor to control every aspect of the lives of its residents through “smart growth.” In and article titled “Is Urban Planning Creeping Socialism?” Randal O’Toole, writing for The Independent Review, observes:

Socialism is commonly defined as government ownership of the means of production. With the exception of a number of services that are viewed as natural monopolies, such as sewer and water supplies, socialism in the form of government ownership has never achieved prominence in the United States. Instead, governments here have relied on regulation as a way of obtaining the same goals that socialists claim to seek: efficiency, equality, and control of externalities. If this approach is socialism, then urban planning has represented creeping socialism since around 1920. But it has recently accelerated and is now running rather than creeping. Moreover, it has such a head start that lovers of freedom may not be able to halt it, much less turn it around.

Urban planning rests on the ideas that urban residents impose numerous externalities on one another and that planning and regulation can minimize such externalities. Despite their claim of scientific expertise, planners often have little idea what they are doing: cities are simply too complex to understand or control. As a result, the history of urban planning is the story of a series of fads, most of which have turned into disasters. Urban renewal and public housing are two obvious examples.

O’Toole concludes: “Smart growth is clearly an example of creeping social regulation, if not creeping socialism.”

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

This first goal in this plank–“free education for all children in public schools”–has been fully implemented by the US federal government via the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which was established in 1953, and a separate Department of Education, which was created in 1979 under the purview of the Department of Education Organization Act.

Since the early 1960s, moreover, unconstitutional rulings by the US Supreme Court effectively banished Christianity from the schools and placed an “iron curtain” of left-wing political correctness over classroom curriculum. The pro-communist public school teacher’s union, the National Education Association, has utilized such rulings to promote socialism and sodomy, which in the absence of scientific support for its practice, is now legally protected by Orwellian “hate speech” codes. Meanwhile, the National “Science” Teachers Association promotes evolution as a “major unifying concept in science,” that is, as a total world view or religion, even though the scientific evidence supports Biblical creationism with respect to the observable fixity of species, the mathematical impossibility of chance mutations producing higher orders of life, and the historicity of a global flood in antiquity as the origin of the fossil record.

Two landmark US Supreme Court decisions, in particular, namely Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp (consolidated with Murray v. Curlett), handed down in 1962 and 1963 respectively, forced America’s founding religion out of the public school system. The first ruling forbade state officials from composing an official school prayer and requiring its recitation in public schools, while the second ruling declared school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools to be unconstitutional. The briefs that led to the Engel v. Vitale case were submitted by the American Ethical Union, the American Jewish Committee, and the Synagogue Council of America (defunct since 1994). The brief that led to the Abington School District v. Schempp case was submitted by Edward Schempp, a Unitarian Universalist, who objected to the enforcement of a Pennsylvania law that required his son to participate in Bible reading exercises.

In 1960 atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore, Maryland School District in which she claimed it was unconstitutional for her son William to be required to participate in Bible readings at Baltimore public schools. Her case was consolidated with Abington School District v. Schempp. O’Hair demonstrated leftist inclinations. In 1957 she attended meetings of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Two years later she attempted to defect, with her two children, to the Soviet Union, but her application was rejected. O’Hair’s son William later became a born-again Christian and preacher, leading to a permanent estrangement within the family. O’Hair was murdered in 1995. An employee of American Atheists, David Waters, who boasted convictions for violent crimes, was later convicted of murdering O’Hair. Waters died in prison in 2003.

The US public school system has been effectively communized and has produced several generations of Americans who will offer little resistance to the planned Soviet takeover.

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on communism:

The day I’m afraid to sit down with people I do not know because five years from now someone will say that five of those people were Communists and therefore, you are a Communist – that will be a bad day. I want to be able to sit down with anyone who may have a new idea and not be afraid of contamination by association. In a democracy you must be able to meet with people and argue your point of view – [with] people you have not screened before hand. That must be part of the freedom of people in the United States.
— Eleanor Roosevelt, Address to the Americans for Democratic Action 1950 Convention

>Middle East File: US military returns to Lebanon after 25-year absence; Kleiat air base to be located 22 miles from Russian naval base in Syria

>We have previously blogged about Russia’s intended expansion of a “logistical supply point” in Tartus, Syria into a “full-fledged” naval base for elements of its Black Sea Fleet. There is only one other location on the planet where US and Russian military bases are located in close proximity to each other: the capital of the Kyrgyz Republic. As of October 2003 the Russian Armed Forces maintained 500 troops and 20 combat and transport planes and helicopters at the Kant Air Base, near Bishkek, under the authority of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The USA maintains the Manas Air Base, which is also near Bishkek, and uses this facility to support military operations in Afghanistan.

DEBKAfile Exclusive: The US plans new military presence in Lebanon including big air installation close by Syrian border

October 9, 2007, 9:42 PM (GMT+02:00)

The air base, according to DEBKAfile’s military sources, will be located at Kleiat in northern Lebanon roughly 75 air miles from Damascus, which these days doubles as a shared Syrian-Iranian military hub and Tehran’s eastern Mediterranean forward base. The American air installation will also lie 22 air miles from Tartous, Syria’s main naval base and the Russian Mediterranean fleet’s command center. And the aircraft posted there will be minutes away from the joint Syrian-Iranian arms and missiles industries at Homs and Hamma.

DEBKAfile’s source report the Bush administration’s drastic change of policy on Lebanon was settled in consultations at the Pentagon and National Security Council after the talks the chief of the US Central Command Adm. William Fallon held with Lebanese government heads on July 29.

This new direction was confirmed after the Israeli air raid over Syria of Sept. 6.

It brings the American military back to Lebanon after a 25-year absence. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan pulled US troops out of the country after Syrian military intelligence orchestrated terrorist bombing attacks on the US embassy and Marines headquarters in Beirut, which left more than 300 soldiers, diplomats and CIA agents dead.

The first stage of construction will reactivate the small defunct air base at Kleiat as a joint US-Lebanese venture. Prime minister Fouad Siniora will explain that the four months of bloody fighting to crush the Fatah al-Islam revolt in the northern Nahar al-Bared camp demonstrated how badly the Lebanese army needs an operational air base in the region. US Air Force engineers and technicians have begun work on the new air field. At a later stage, it will be expanded for American military use.

Source: Debkafile

>USSR2 File: Ukrainian politicians wrangle over new government formation; Yanukovich visits Moscow, meets Putin, Zubkov

>The September 30 snap election for Ukraine’s Supreme Rada have done little to resolve that country’s political strife. Indeed, the results have only exacerbated the situation between the “pro”-Western Orange forces, under leaders President Viktor Yushchenko and Komsomol businesswoman and past prime minister Julia Tymoshenko, and the pro-Moscow Blue forces under “ex”-CPSU Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. The latter’s Party of Regions is cobbling a coalition with its old ally, the Communist Party of Ukraine, and the leftist Lytvyn Bloc, while the Julia Tymoshenko Bloc is seeking an alliance with Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense Bloc. The crypto-communist Party of Regions received the most votes and seats, but together Tymoshenko and Yushchenko can form a workable government with two Rada seats over the required amount. With the threat of another cold winter without Gazprom’s natual gas supplies looming over Ukraine, both the pro-Russian Yanukovich and “anti”-Russian Tymoshenko are feeling out Moscow’s position on the direction of Ukrainian politics.

Today PM Yanukovich dutifully trekked to Moscow where he met with Russia’s “ex”-CPSU Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov (here) and “ex”-CPSU President Vladimir Putin (above). There, in addition to reassuring his masters that Kiev will remain within Moscow’s orbit, he promised to cough up US$2 billion to pay Ukraine’s gas debt to the Kremlin. State-run Novosti reports:

Gas supplies have been a focus of bilateral talks during Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych’s ongoing visit to Moscow. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov told Yanukovych that the Ukrainian government should take control of the debt settlement. He also said Ukraine would transfer gas to Gazprom from RosUkrEnergo’s reserves, but did not elaborate. Zubkov said that as of the beginning of October, the debt totaled $2 billion, well above the figure of $1.3 billion previously quoted by officials.

This is not the first time that Yanukovich has humbled himself before his superiors in Moscow in recent weeks. In August he “bumped” into Putin at the MAKS 2007 air show. On September 6 Andranik Migranyan, professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, editorialized for Novosti under the title, “Russia does not want to give Yanukovich unreserved support.” Migranyan admits that “Russia knows full well that Ukraine is the most important geopolitical factor for it in the post-Soviet space.” He adds, however, that “It is not in Russia’s interests to return to the logic of 2004, that is, to promise Ukraine to sell gas at low prices and write off debts for its loyalty. It is clear that under the circumstances Yanukovich is simply unable to make a radical shift towards Moscow. Russia will suffer more economic losses if it supports him gratis. This is why it is not as active in these elections as it was in 2004.” Notwithstanding Moscow’s low-key support for Yanukovich in 2007, Migranyan reveals that “to an extent, Moscow is definitely backing the Party of Regions – after all, Yanukovich came to the MAKS air show in Moscow, where he met with Vladimir Putin, ostensibly by accident.” The “ex”-CPSU Russian President and the “ex”-CPSU Ukrainian Prime Minister met at the MAKS 2007 air show in Moscow “by accident”? Yeah, sure, whatever.

Although she has yet to grovel before her masters in Moscow, Tymoshenko recently dispatched one of Urkaine’s oligarchs to the Russian capital. State-run Regnum News Agency reported on October 5 that “A delegation of Yulia Timoshenko’s Bloc headed by tycoon Tariel Vasadze, who is one of Yulia Timoshenko’s allies and sponsors, visited Moscow on October 4, a REGNUM correspondent informs. Probably, BYT leader Yulia Timoshenko will try to obtain support of certain circles in the Russian capital on the threshold of the decisive stage of the coalition talks.”

>EU/USSR2 Files: Sarkozy drops Russophobic stance in Moscow, urges West to welcome Russia’s return as "world power"; Putin: France "key partner"

>Following his election in May French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “If you asked me which of the [two] countries France will have closer relations with–the United States or Russia, known to us for its Chechen war–‘the U.S.’ would be my answer.” He also characterized Russia’s occupation of its internal republic of Chechnya as “genocide”: “We cannot claim ignorance anymore, so we are loosing the possibility of remaining silent in the face of genocide or criminal behavior. Our silence, when faced with 200,000 deaths and 400,000 refugees in Chechnya, is unbearable. China and Russia are great powers, but it should not prevent us from denouncing their human rights violations. Russia’s recent behavior makes me quite nervous.” Sarkozy was in Paris when he made these statements.

In the wake of his current meeting in Moscow with neo-Soviet Tyrant Vladimir Putin, “Sarko” moderated his tough Russophobic stance somewhat. State-run Interfax reports:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said attempts to obstruct Russia’s return to the ranks of leading world powers are senseless. Sarkozy said during talks with President Vladimir Putin that he was aware of the difficulties Russia experienced in recent years and the effort it took to overcome them. “Of course, France understands Russia’s determination to return to the international scene and regain its position. Disagreeing with this would be senseless,” he said.

Having scratched Putin’s back, the “ex”-KGB/”ex”-CPSU Russian dictator returned the favor, referring to France as a “key partner of Russia.” State-run Itar-Tass reports:

France is a major partner of Russia, President Vladimir Putin told his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy in Novo-Ogaryovo on Tuesday. “France was, is and, I hope, will be our key partner in Europe and the world at large. Our relations are developing successfully,” Putin said. Russia and France maintain contacts at a high level, Putin said, recalling the recent meetings of the foreign and economy ministers. “We are glad to welcome the French president to Moscow,” he remarked. “We agreed on this meeting during the G8 summit in Heiligendamm [this June],” Putin said. “I know that you have a busy schedule and I am glad that you have accepted my invitation and come to Russia.”

Sarkozy is yet another “conservative” politician, like US President George W. Bush and his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who has become mesmerized by the eyes of the Russian Bear.

>Red Terror File: Russian security officer pushes Kremlin’s plausible deniability campaign, warns terrorists preparing to use "dirty bomb"

>The Kremlin has invested at least 16 years of propaganda, since the “collapse” of the Soviet Union, into manipulating Western officialdom and the shopping mall regimes into believing that nuclear terrorism in the West will be the result of Islamic cells, not Spetsnaz. Referring to Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, who was by its own admission assassinated by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB) in 2006, American geopolitical analyst Jeff Nyquist wrote in 2002:

If Shamil Basayev and the other pro-Wahhabi commanders in Chechnya were operatives of the Russian General Staff, as suggested by one researcher after another, then we find ourselves face-to-face with a very serious red flag regarding Russia’s strategic intentions (i.e., to facilitate a deniable nuclear attack on America via a chain of proxies). In this matter independent “Muslim” Chechnya might be viewed as a kind of device for the movement of Soviet nuclear weapons into terrorist hands. It is a device that leaves Moscow blameless and without apparent responsibility. According to Bodansky, bin Laden has been attempting to recruit former SPETSNAZ troops trained in the use of nuclear weapons. “If bin Laden succeeds in finding a nuclear-qualified former SPETSNAZ trooper, he will have overcome the greatest hurdle to carrying out a nuclear terrorist strike in the West – specifically in the United States.”

In November 1998 a Russian GRU defector told me something puzzling. What he said came out of the blue, without prompting. He warned that I should not believe any future report about Muslim terrorists exploding a nuclear device on American soil. He said that such an attack would be from Russian SPETSNAZ because Muslim terrorists were not sophisticated enough to operate such weapons. He was emphatic in his statement.

The Kremlin is again playing the “Islamic terrorists dunnit” card at a recent international conference for security experts.

Russian Warns of Dirty Bomb Attack
Friday, October 5, 2007 9:43 PM

A high-ranking Russian security officer warns that terrorists are stepping up efforts to obtain nuclear materials that could be fashioned into a radiation-spewing “dirty bomb.”

Speaking at an international conference of security experts in Khabarovsk, Russia, Militia Colonel General Andrey Novikov disclosed that authorities in dozens of states had detected increased activities on the part of militants seeking access to weapons of mass destruction.

He told the conference: “In 2005 alone, Western special services prevented 16 attempts at contraband smuggling of plutonium and uranium.”

Referring to International Atomic Energy Agency data from recent years, he stressed that “since 2002, in Europe, the number of acts of contraband smuggling of radioactive materials, suitable for the manufacture of a ‘dirty bomb,’ has doubled.”

Novikov said the “creeping away” of radioactive materials from unmonitored facilities in a number of countries is creating an opportunity for terrorist acts, according to a published report.

He cited “idle uranium mines and abandoned enterprises” that had used radioactive materials, as well as medical and scientific establishments, as potential sources of materials for terrorists.

At the conference, Novikov warned: “Without a doubt, the terrorists will also search for access to technologies for the manufacture of a ‘simplified nuclear weapon.’ A chain reaction in such a bomb is not possible, but its use will lead to the contamination of a locality with radiation.

“In a number of cases, its intensity will not be high enough to have a significant effect on the health of people, but the very use of such a device and the threat of the dispersion of radiation can cause fear and panic among the population.”

Source: NewsMax.com

Pictured above: US citizen and “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir or Muhajir Abdullah), was convicted in August 2007 for conspiracy to commit terrorism in connection with Al Qaeda. He was arrested in May 2002 on suspicion that he was involved in a plot to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in the USA. Intriguingly, The New York Times reports, “Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Mr. Padilla’s capture a month later in a special news conference from Moscow, saying that an ‘unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb’ had been disrupted, an attack with the potential to cause ‘mass death and injury.'” The dirty bomb allegations were not part of Padilla’s eventual conviction more than five years later.

Meanwhile, state-run Interfax reported on October 7 that a resident of Lithuania attempted to drive a minibus with a bomb attached to its underside into Russia. Lithuania’s Border Guard apprehended the man and defused the bomb. The report does not specify which part of Russia the Lithuanian resident was seeking to enter. However, the only part of Russia that the Not-So-Former Soviet republic borders is the exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, which is home to Russia’s Kaliningrad Chkalovsk naval air base. Kaliningrad, it should be noted, might already contain active nuclear warhead-tipped missiles, per First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov’s threat in July of this year to counter US proposals to install its national missile defense system in neighboring Poland.

Lithuania stops minibus with bomb entering Russia – guards

VILNIUS. Oct 7 (Interfax) – Lithuanian border guards on Sunday seized a minibus that about to cross the border into Russia with a bomb attached to its bottom, Lithuania’s Border Guard said.

“Border guards who were checking the papers of a Volkswagen Transporter minibus whose driver was a 48-year-old resident of Kaunas [Lithuania] found suspicious wires in the back of the vehicle that were leading to an object fixed under the left-hand front side panel,” spokesman Gedrius Misutis told Interfax.

Traffic through the checkpoint where the incident occurred was suspended and terrorism experts were called in. They found a bomb attached to the bottom of the minibus and defused it, Misutis said.

The minibus and its driver were handed over to the police.

Traffic through the checkpoint resumed in the afternoon.

While it is true that the above incident could be explained away as representing a personal vendetta or a Mafia-related hit, it also contributes to the image that Russia, like the USA, is a victim of terrorism.

We have at times posted “Event Convergence Alerts” in which we speculate that Moscow is preparing to launch an imminent false flag operation on Western soil that will produce mass casualties, such as that described above by GRU defector Stanislav Lunev. Since we are not privy to the inner workings of Moscow’s Leninist cabal we can only conclude, as do most terrorism experts, that the next WMD attack in the West will occur sooner or later. We would hasten to urge security and intelligence experts to consider the possibly that such attacks might be carried out in conjunction with a deceptive WMD attack on Russian soil and “coincidental” Russian bomber exercises which, since President Vladimir Putin’s August 17 announcement, are again a permanent feature in the skies over the Arctic, North Pacific, and North Atlantic Oceans.

>Final Phase Backgrounder: The "Chechen Trace": Kremlin media predictably links Russian terrorists in Lebanon to breakaway republic

>On Friday we published an article by state-run Russia Today that reported on the charging in Lebanon of four Russian citizens involved with the Al Qaeda-linked Fatah al-Islam Group. We predicted that the Kremlin media–which has used the “Chechen trace” story ever since the Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB) orchestrated the 1999 apartment bombings that propelled Vladimir Putin into power–would spin this story as a case of “Chechen terrorists” joining a foreign terrorist group. We were right. Russia Today quotes Walid Choucair, Director of the National Desk at the Dar Al-Hayat newspaper, as saying: “It seems that these Russian citizens are from Chechnya. The Fatah al-Islam movement who now battle against the army, have brought some Islamic militants, who have been told that they would come to Lebanon in order to have some training and then go back to Iraq. Now there will be an investigation and trial afterwards. One of the Russians is arrested and three others have managed to escape.”

Diplomats to probe case of Russians suspected of terrorism in Lebanon
October 8, 2007, 8:57

Russian diplomats are expected to meet Lebanese authorities to clarify the situation regarding four Russians suspected of terrorist activities.

The men are thought to be part of the radical Palestinian movement Fatah al-Islam and could face the death penalty if found guilty.

One of the suspects, who is still a teenager, is currently under arrest while the remaining three are still at large.

The purpose of the meeting between Russian diplomats and the representatives of the Lebanese Prosecutor General’s office will be two-fold. First, it is to determine whether these four are in fact Russian nationals. Second, the diplomats will be informed whether the embassy will be allowed to have access to the imprisoned 18 year-old.

In fact, the group of four was charged on Friday, together with other 20 people. Currently, more than 330 people face the same charges of terrorism and alignment to Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon.

Lebanon has been gripped by a recent wave of violence including terror acts in one of the country’s Palestinian refugee camps. Terrorists took control of one of the camps in May, while Lebanese military forces fought to remove them. It left about 420 people dead. In August, information appeared that Fatah al-Islam could be an affiliation of Al Qaeda.

Dr Imad Rizk is writing a book about the Islamist group, known as Fatah al-Islam. Its members are known to come from across the Arab world.

“Maybe there are some 12 to 50 persons who have come to Lebanon to have lessons about how they can make special attacks. When they finish the preparation, maybe, they will go to Chechnya, Pakistan, or Uzbekistan to make special attacks,” he said.

Rumours of Russians fighting in Lebanon have been circulating inside the country for some time. But the Russian Embassy in Beirut says it still needs to verify that this is the case. If true, the four men will become the first known non-Arab foreigners to be members of Fatah al-Islam accused of serious charges.

“We were greatly surprised by this news because until now we have not had information like this; no one from the Russian citizens took part in this battle and standoff between Lebanese troops and Fatah al Islam,” noted Vladimir Cherepanov, the press attaché at the Russian Embassy in Lebanon.

Meantime, some 10,000 Russian citizens live in Lebanon. While it is not uncommon for Muslims from former Soviet republics and Russia to join militant Islamic groups, the latest revelations point to the ever-increasing threat of global terrorism.

Experts and ordinary people believe that even if the suspects are found guilty and face death penalty, this will have little impact on diplomatic ties between the two countries as Russia is seen as a close ally in Lebanon.

This article, moreover, admits that “it is not uncommon for Muslims from former Soviet republics and Russia to join militant Islamic groups.” In this admission is a crucial component of Moscow’s strategy for promoting the international terrorist network with which it can subvert, attack, and wear out the West with a “thousand cuts” before Missile Day. In a March 1990 memorandum addressed to the US Central Intelligence Agency, published in The Perestroika Deception (1995, 1998), KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn explains:

It is not only against the Western democracies that the deployment of the Soviet political and security potential has begun. It is being extended against the anti-Communist Muslim and Arab countries, beginning with the Soviets’ neighbours, Iran and Turkey. Here, the offensive is being launched, not through Communist Parties or the Soviet Army, but through Soviet Muslims in the guise of “independent,” “nationalist,” “anti-Communist” Muslims in the “anti-Soviet” Republic of Azerbaijan who are deceptively identifying themselves with the Islamic religion and its values. This is the key to understanding the developments in Azerbaijan and the emergence of “independent fronts” and guerrilla groups,” and their entry into Iran (page 115).

Three years later, in another memo to the CIA, Golitsyn writes:

Under concealed Russian guidance, the Muslims of the former USSR, especially the Azers, will seek to cooperate and ally themselves with Muslims in Iran and the Arab states while Russia maintains its open policy of cooperation and partnership with the West. In this way China openly and Russia secretly will jointly attempt to swing the balance of power in their favour in the highly strategic, oil-producing Arab/Iranian areas of the Middle East (page 215).

Golitsyn’s memos refer to Azerbaijan and Iran. Within the context of this “post”-communist Soviet strategy of fomenting Islamic terrorism–which is harmonious with the old Soviet-era practice of the same–we find not only Azeris and Iranians, but also Chechens, as well as specific groups like Fatah al-Islam and “international fronts” like Al Qaeda, which indeed is also known as the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. Al Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, as we have repeatedly noted, is none other than an alleged FSB-trained operative.

>USSR2 File: Former PM Fradkov appointed head of SVR following Lebedev’s transfer to CIS leadership; Lavrov: CSTO-SCO cooperation not "new East Bloc"

>The collective leadership of the restored/continuing Communist Party of the Soviet Union would not appoint former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to the post of head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) if Fradkov was not a reliable “Party man.” Conversely, unless Fradkov is some sort of “sacrificial lamb,” his Jewishness does not appear to be an obstacle to promotion within the neo-Soviet regime after all. We previously speculated that this was the case. The appointment is both surprising and intriguing because unlike Lebedev, Fradkov is not a career Chekist but, rather, has specialized in economic relations and taxation. Without question, though, the chess pieces are being rearranged on the game board in preparation for a communist coup in Russian politics.

Fradkov appointed head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service-1
18:0706/ 10/ 2007

DUSHANBE, October 6 (RIA Novosti) – Former prime minister of Russia Mikhail Fradkov has been appointed the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service, President Vladimir Putin said Saturday.

Fradkov will replace Sergei Lebedev, who occupied the post since 2000 and was selected Friday to head the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose union of former Soviet republics.

“You all know well the man, who will head the Russian foreign intelligence service – this is Mikhail Fradkov,” said Putin, who is currently on a visit to Tajikistan.

Fradkov was dismissed by President Putin from the post of the country’s prime minister on September 12 upon his own request.

The president also said that Grigory Rapota, 63, a former secretary general of the Eurasian Economic Community (Eurasec) organization, will be appointed presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District.

“Grigory Rapota worked well and effectively and we have reached positive results in Eurasec largely due to his efforts,” Putin said.

Eurasec is an international economic organization, consisting of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine have an observer status.

Rapota will take the post, which was held previously by current Minister of Regional Development Dmitry Kozak.

Kozak was appointed the minister in a major cabinet reshuffle, which came 12 days after the resignation of Fradkov.

Source: Novosti

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, is denying that the new memorandum of understanding between the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization heralds the formation of a “new East Bloc” or “Eastern NATO.” Lavrov insisted: “There is no hidden agenda. This is normal working interaction.” Indeed, the neo-Soviet state is working just fine. Meanwhile, state-run Interfax reports, CSTO states will enjoy the ability to purchase Russian arms at “domestic” rates. External clients like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Malaysia, and apparently China will pay market value.

>Red Terror File: Lebanese authorities charge four Russians with terrorism, hold one suspect, three at large; accused linked to Fatah al-Islam Group

>In a story that somehow slipped by Kremlin censors state-run Russia Today reports today that Lebanese authorities have charged four Russian citizens with terrorism in connection with the Al Qaeda-linked Fatah al-Islam Group. One Russian is being held, three accused are at large. Fatah al-Islam was organized in 2006 in the Nahr-al-Bared camp for expatriate Palestinians. The camp is operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Russians charged with terrorism in Lebanon
October 5, 2007

Four Russians have been charged in Lebanon with terrorism. They are part of a group of 20 people who have been accused of belonging to the Al-Qaeda inspired Fatah Islam Group.

Lebanon has been gripped by a recent wave of violence including terror acts in one of the country’s Palestinian refugee camps.

Terrorists took control of the site in May, while Lebanese military forces fought to remove them.

More than 150 lebanese troops and more than 200 militants have been killed while about 200 others have been arrested.

One of the accused Russian nationals, is currently being held. The authorities say the rest remain at large.

The alleged terrorists are probably agents of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. President Vladimir Putin toured the new GRU headquarters in Moscow in November 2006.

If this story is accurate, then it would not be the first time that Moscow’s agents have been linked to Al Qaeda and its affiliates. According to FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered in November 2006, Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri is an agent of of Litvinenko’s former employer. “Perhaps most notably,” BBC News relates in an obituary for the deceased spy, “he alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before the 9/11 attacks.” Do not be surprised, however, if the Kremlin media turns around and attempts to portray the accused as “Chechens,” as opposed to ethnic Russians.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Modernized Su-24 Fencer tactical bomber to be supplied to Russian Air Force’s Far Eastern regiment

>Modernized bombers to be supplied to Far Eastern regiment
05.10.2007, 22.24

MOSCOW, October 5 (Itar-Tass) — Modernized Sukhoi Su-24 will be supplied to a regiment of the Russian Air Force this November, Air Force spokesman Col. Alexander Drobyshevsky said on Friday.

“Warplanes of the Far Eastern air wing are under planned modernization. The modernization started with fighter jets, primarily the Sukhoi Su-27SM. Now they are modernizing bombers,” he said.

“The modernized Su-24 bombers will be supplied from Novosibirsk to a Far Eastern regiment this November,” he said.

Source: Itar-Tass