Sunday, June 2, 2013

Thousands take to streets in Turkey, clash with police

from reuters


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Demonstrators stand in front of a make shift shield during clashes with Turkish riot police in central Ankara June 2, 2013. REUTERS-Umit Bektas
By Jonathon Burch and Humeyra Pamuk
ISTANBUL/ANKARA | Sun Jun 2, 2013 10:25pm EDT
(Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Turkey's four biggest cities on Sunday and clashed with riot police firing tear gas on the third day of the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years.
The din of car horns and residents banging pots and pans from balconies in support of the protests resonated across neighborhoods in Istanbul and Ankara late into the night, as hundreds of demonstrators skirmished with riot police.
Roads around Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's office in Istanbul were sealed off as police fired tear gas to push back protesters, and police raided a shopping complex in the centre of the capital Ankara where they believed demonstrators were sheltering, detaining several hundred.
Erdogan blamed the main secular opposition party for inciting the crowds, whom he called "a few looters", and said the protests were aimed at depriving his ruling AK Party of votes as elections begin next year.
Interior Minister Muammer Guler said there had been more than 200 demonstrations in 67 cities around the country, according to the Hurriyet newspaper.
The unrest erupted on Friday when trees were torn down at a park in Istanbul's main Taksim Square under government plans to redevelop the area, but widened into a broad show of defiance against the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Erdogan said the plans to remake the square, long an iconic rallying point for mass demonstrations, would go ahead, including the construction of a new mosque and the rebuilding of a replica Ottoman-era barracks.
He said the protests had nothing to do with the plans.
"It's entirely ideological," he said in an interview broadcast on Turkishtelevision.
"The main opposition party which is making resistance calls on every street is provoking these protests ... This is about my ruling party, myself and the looming municipal elections in Istanbul and efforts to make the AK Party lose votes here."
Turkey is due to hold local and presidential elections next year in which Erdogan is expected to stand, followed by parliamentary polls in 2015.
The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) denied orchestrating the unrest, blaming Erdogan's policies.
"Today the people on the street across Turkey are not exclusively from the CHP, but from all ideologies and from all parties," senior party member Mehmet Akif Hamzacebi said.
"What Erdogan has to do is not to blame CHP but draw the necessary lessons from what happened," he told Reuters.
WIDE SPECTRUM
The protests, started by a small group of environmental campaigners, mushroomed when police used force to eject them from the park on Taksim Square.
As word spread online, the demonstrations drew in a wide range of people of all ages from across the political and social spectrum.
The ferocity of the police response in Istanbul has shocked Turks, as well as tourists caught up in the unrest in one of the world's most visited destinations.
Helicopters have fired tear gas canisters into residential neighborhoods and police have used tear gas to try to smoke people out of buildings. Footage on YouTube showed one protester being hit by an armored police truck as it charged a barricade.
The handling of the protests has drawn rebukes from the United States, European Union and international rights groups.
On Friday, the U.S. State Department said it was concerned about the number of injuries and on Sunday, Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, reiterated the importance of respect for freedom of expression, assembly and association.
"Peaceful public demonstrations are a part of democratic expression, and we expect that security forces will exercise restraint and that all parties will continue to work to calm the situation," she said.
For much of Sunday, the atmosphere in Taksim Square was festive, with some people chanting for Erdogan to resign and others dancing. There was little obvious police presence.
But in the nearby Besiktas neighborhood, riot police fired tear gas and water cannons to keep crowds away from Erdogan's office in Dolmabahce Palace, a former Ottoman residence on the shores of the Bosphorus.
There were similar scenes in Ankara's main Kizilar square.
Erdogan is due to fly to Morocco on Monday as part of an official visit that also covers Algeria andTunisia. Sources in his office said his trip would go ahead.
Erdogan has overseen a transformation in Turkey during his decade in power, turning its once crisis-prone economy into the fastest-growing in Europe.
He remains by far Turkey's most popular politician, but critics point to what they see as his authoritarianism and religiously conservative meddling in private lives in the secular republic.
Tighter restrictions on alcohol sales and warnings against public displays of affection in recent weeks have also provoked protests. Concern that government policy is allowing Turkey to be dragged into the conflict in neighboring Syria by the West has also led to peaceful demonstrations.
On Sunday, Erdogan appeared on television for the fourth time in less than 36 hours, and justified the restrictions on alcohol as for the good of people's health.
"I want them to know that I want these (restrictions) for the sake of their health ... Whoever drinks alcohol is an alcoholic," he said.

(Additional reporting by Can Sezer in Istanbul, Umit Bektas, Orhan Coskun and Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Writing by Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Mike Collett-White and David Brunnstrom)
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Court says Egypt legislature illegally elected

from the gauardian



  • AP foreign, 
HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press= CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's highest court ruled on Sunday that the nation's interim parliament was illegally elected, though it stopped short of dissolving the chamber immediately, in a decision likely to fuel the tensions between the ruling Islamists and the judiciary.
The Supreme Constitutional Court also ruled that a 100-member panel that drafted the new constitution was illegally elected.
The immediate impact of the ruling is limited. The Islamist-dominated upper house of parliament, called the Shura Council, will remain in place until elections are held for a lower house, likely early next year. The constitution, which was ratified in a nationwide referendum in December with a relatively low turnout of around 35 percent, will also remain in effect.
Still, the opposition said the verdict shows how Islamists' victories at theballot box are tainted. They argued that the ruling further challenges the legitimacy of the disputed constitution, which was pushed through the panel by Islamists allied to President Mohammed Morsi.
The two sides are squaring off for what may be a major confrontation on the streets by the end of this month.
An activist campaign claims to have collected millions of signatures on a petition demanding Morsi leave office. The organizers plan a massive rally outside the presidential palace on June 30 to mark a year since his inauguration as Egypt's first freely elected president.
"We are paying dearly for the legislative and constitutional absurdity of the Muslim Brotherhood," said prominent commentator and Brotherhood critic Abdullah el-Sinawy. "It is a situation that threatens political problems and dilemmas on the road ahead."
Morsi's backers in the Muslim Brotherhood saw Sunday's ruling as a victory, saying that it implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of the Shura Council and the constitution because it stopped short of trying to outright abrogate either.
"The ruling turns the page of media controversy over the Shura Council and the constitution," said Brotherhood spokesman Ahmed Aref. "We hope that we never see that page again."
The ruling, according to another Brotherhood figure, senior leader Essam el-Aryan, amounted to "an admission that the constitution came with the will of the people and through a free and clean referendum."
The Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the Islamist-majority lower house of parliament in June last year, saying the law governing its election was invalid. The court was widely expected to issue a similar ruling dissolving the Shura Council late last year, but Islamist protesters prevented the judges from reaching their chambers when they laid siege to the court's headquarters.
By the time they lifted the siege, the constitutional panel had already adopted the charter in an all-night session, handed Morsi a copy and a referendum was called for its ratification. The new constitution gave legislative power to the normally toothless Shura Council until a new lower house is elected. It also barred the dissolving of the Shura Council.
In both rulings — the one in June and Sunday's — the court ruled that the law governing the election of each house of parliament breached principles of fairness because it allowed political parties to run for the third of seats set aside for independent candidaites.
The Shura Council normally does not have lawmaking powers and has long been dismissed as nothing more than a talk shop. Only 7 percent of voters bothered to cast ballots in the elections fort the house, and many of the newborn political parties rooted in the protest movement that toppled Mubarak did not bother to field candidates. The 270-seat chamber is 70 percent Islamist.
Raafat Fouda, a constitutional law professor at Cairo University, pointed to the contradictions at the heart of the ruling, that the Shura Council was illegitimate but will continue to legislate.
"This is one of the wonders of our time that we have been witnessing lately in Egypt," he said. "It is certainly the result of the pressures and the terrorism the Constitutional court has been subjected to."
However, law lecturer and former legislator Ehab Ramzy said the ruling was expected since the new constitution shielded the Shura Council from dissolution.
But, he added, it could be a prelude to future, unfavorable rulings against the chamber.
The Shura Council's critics say it is ill-equipped to be the nation's sole law-making body, and complain that it's considering legislation that will have a far reach into the future rather than pass only what is absolutely necessary during the transition period.
The ruling on the legitimacy of the constitutional panel may not have any impact on the charter itself. But it could raise future questions on its legal foundations. Critics say the charter restricts freedoms and gives clerics a say in legislation. The Islamists who drafted it hail the document as the best one Egypt has ever had.
The verdict continues the political confusion that has reigned in Egypt since the 2011 ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
The ruling came as Islamist lawmakers and the judiciary have for weeks been publicly bickering over a draft legislation that lowers to 60 the retirement age of judges, thus pensioning off about 3,000 of them if adopted.
The draft, which could cost the job of more than half the Constitutional Court's 11 judges, has triggered an uproar among judges who see it as a prelude to filling their ranks with Morsi loyalists from the Brotherhood.
Morsi's backers say the judiciary is packed with Mubarak loyalists who are determined to derail the country's shift to democratic rule and force the president out. They have also spoken out against the Supreme Constitutional Court, saying its rulings hinder the nation's progress.
The new constitution restructured the court, reducing its members from 19 to 11, with the most recent join the first to go. The move removed one of Morsi's harshest critics, judge Tehany el-Gibaly.
The turmoil adds to a long list of woes that Egypt's 90 million people have to cope with in the meantime, from increasingly frequent power cuts and fuel shortages to rising prices and unemployment. News that Ethiopia began construction of a massive dam on the Nile, raising worries over Egypt's share of the river's water, reinforced a sense of siege felt by many Egyptians.
---
Associated Press reporter Tony G. Gabriel contributed to this report.
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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Banksters attack Syria to enslave America

from presstv.ir



Syrian troops (file photo)
Syrian troops (file photo)
Thu May 30, 2013 4:47AM GMT
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By Dr. Kevin Barrett
The war on Syria is not an American war on Syria, an Israeli war on Syria, an al-Qaeda war on Syria, a Qatari war on Syria, a Turkish war on Syria, or a Saudi war on Syria. It is a bankers' war on Syria."
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Israel bombs Syria and threatens Iran. Russia moves its warships into the Mediterranean, and furnishes Syria with advanced anti-aircraft weapons. Hezbollah defends Syria against al-Qaeda. Pro-Israel US Senators like John McCain join forces with al-Qaeda.


What is really going on here? Who is fighting whom, and why? Will Syria become the flash point for World War III?

Is the West attacking the Islamic world in a “clash of civilizations”? Then why are the Israeli and American governments backing al-Qaeda in Syria?

The old narratives no longer make sense.

The real war isn't between nations, civilizations, or religions.

The real war is the bankers' war to conquer the entire world.

In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins explained how it works. The bankers use their control of currency to impose debt slavery on individuals as well as nations. They force nations to accept loans that are impossible to pay back - by design. The bankers use the resulting bankruptcy and/or “restructuring agreements” to seize control of those nations and their resources.

If a nation's leader refuses to obey the bankers - as in the cases of Venezuela and Iran - that leader, or nation, is put on the bankers' “hit list.” That nation becomes a target for regime change, whether by assassination, coup d'état, a bought or stolen election, or outright invasion.

The bankers use the military and intelligence services of the nations they control to attack and subvert the nations they do not control. They also use their own private armies and intelligence services to subvert all nations.

Thus the war on Syria is not an American war on Syria, an Israeli war on Syria, an al-Qaeda war on Syria, a Qatari war on Syria, a Turkish war on Syria, or a Saudi war on Syria. It is a bankers' war on Syria.

The biggest international banking families exert a relatively high degree of control over the US, Israel, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They have only moderate influence in Syria, Russia, and China. And they have even less influence in Iran. So they are mobilizing their assets in hopes of achieving regime change in Syria. Iran, Russia, and China are next on their hit list.

The bankers are trying to create the first truly global empire. As John Perkins says, their biggest weapon is usury; military force is secondary. They first try to buy a country; if the leadership is not for sale, they try to assassinate or overthrow the leader(s); and if all else fails, they send the US military to invade the target country.

To create their global slave empire, the bankers must also control communications. If their plans were widely-known, people of all nations would revolt.

David Rockefeller spoke the truth at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden, Germany: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."


Today, the only major media operations in English that are not owned, controlled, or duped by the bankers are Press TV and Russia Today. Apparently, Iran and Russia do not appreciate being on the bankers' hit list. And they are learning how to fight back - by telling the truth to the whole world. No wonder the banker-owned US and Europe have done their best to shut down Press TV.

The people of the English-speaking world in general, and the American people in particular, need to wake up to the fact that the bankers' war on Syria (and later Iran, Russia, and China) is also a war against them. The bankers are not prejudiced. They want to enslave everyone, regardless of race, nationality, or creed.

Here in the USA, the bankers enslave young people through student loans. If you want access to higher education in the US, and you are not rich, you have no choice but to take out student loans. By the time you graduate, you will be $20,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 in debt. And that debt will keep right on accumulating interest. You will spend half your working life struggling to pay off your loans - and providing the bankers with handsome profits.

The student loan system is a form of indentured servitude. Like indentured servants, who were forced to work as slaves for seven years to pay the cost of their ticket to America, college graduates in America find themselves the slaves of the bankers. Like indentured servants, American college students seek a ticket to freedom and opportunity; and like indentured students, the price of that ticket is years of slavery.

The bankers are achieving ever-higher degrees of control over the USA. They now own both major political parties and all major US media outlets.

But they are afraid of the American people more than any other people. The USA has the world's most powerful educated middle class. If it awakens, it could overthrow the bankers and stymie their plans to eliminate the Constitution, national sovereignty, and the middle class itself.

The Syrian people and the American people are struggling against the same enemy, though few of them realize it.

It is time for people of good will in all nations to unite against the tyranny of the global oligarchs. If the world fails to rise up in revolt, we will all find ourselves working on the bankers' global slave plantation. 
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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Obama Did It for the Money

from truthdig




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Posted on May 7, 2013
AP/Carolyn Kaster
President Obama looks to longtime fundraiser Penny Pritzker after announcing her nomination to run the Commerce Department and that of economic adviser Michael Froman, left, as the next U.S. Trade Representative.
The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House from less promising days back in Chicago.
“Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency,” according to a gushing New York Times report last year that read like the soaring jacket copy of a steamy romance novel. “When she first backed him during his 2004 Senate run, she was No. 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was a long-shot candidate who needed her support and imprimatur. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.”
But don’t sell the lady short; she wasn’t swept along on some kind of celebrity joyride. Pritzker, the billionaire heir to part of the Hyatt Hotels fortune, has long been first off an avaricious capitalist, and if she backed Obama, it wasn’t for his looks. Never one to rest on the laurels of her immense inherited wealth, Pritzker has always wanted more. That’s what drove her to run Superior Bank into the subprime housing swamp that drowned the institution’s homeowners and depositors alike before she emerged richer than before.
Pritzker and her family had acquired the savings and loan with the help of $600 million in tax credits. She became the new bank’s chairwoman and ended up as a director of the holding company that owned it. Under her leadership, Superior specialized in subprime lending, hustling folks with meager means and poor credit into high interest loans that were bundled into the toxic securities that wrecked the U.S. economy. 
As federal regulators began to move in on her bank after it had dangerously inflated the value of its toxic assets, Pritzker assured its employees: “Our commitment to subprime has never been stronger.” Two months later, the bank was pronounced insolvent. At the time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s inspector general report concluded, “The failure of Superior Bank was directly attributable to the board of directors and executive management ignoring sound risk diversification principles, as evidenced by excessive concentration in residual assets related to subprime lending. ...”
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No biggie. In announcing her appointment, Obama joked, “For your birthday present, you get to go through confirmation. It’s going to be great.” It’s the same sort of joke he could have cracked in appointing Citigroup alum Jack Lew to be Treasury secretary.
It is deeply revealing that in the midst of the continuing cycle of misery brought on by the chicanery of the financial community two key Cabinetpositions dealing with business practices will likely be occupied by people who specialized in those financial rip-offs.
For Pritzker, as with the confirmation of Lew, the fix is in. The Republicans don’t dare push back too hard on shady business practices that their deregulation legislation endorsed, and Democrats will go along with anything the president wants.
The same restraint will be exhibited in exploring the offshore tax havens that have protected the Pritzker family’s immense wealth. Back in 2008, when she had been rumored for this same Cabinet post, Pritzker was queried about avoiding the sort of taxes most ordinary folks are obligated to pay, and she replied in writing: “I am a beneficiary of some non-U.S. situs trusts which were established about 50 years ago (when I was a child) and are administered by a non-U.S.–based financial institution as trustee. I do not control how those assets are administered.” If the Republicans challenge that canard, the Democrats will smugly remind them of Mitt Romney’s tax havens, as if that excuses tax avoidance within their own ranks.
Certainly the Republicans will not raise questions about the anti-union practices that helped create the Hyatt fortune in the first place and continue to this day. Nor will the Democrats, who embrace unions only at national convention time. 
“There is a huge unresolved set of issues in the Democratic Party between people of wealth and people who work,” noted Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, which attempts to organize the miserably paid workers that produced Pritzker’s wealth. “Penny is a living example of that issue.”
But it’s payback time, and even normally progressive Democrats like Pritzker’s home state Sen. Dick Durbin are prepared to roll over. Treating the appointment of billionaire Pritzker as a victory for women everywhere, the senator said she’d “broken through the glass ceiling with her extraordinary intelligence and business acumen.” 
Right, Pritzker will be a fine role model for those women working at the Asian factories that she’ll be touring as Commerce secretary extolling the virtues of the American business model.

Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book,
“The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.”

Keep up with Robert Scheer’s latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more atwww.truthdig.com/robert_scheer.


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Saturday, May 25, 2013

It’s Not Just One Bad ‘Apple’

from billmoyers



May 24, 2013
by Lauren Feeney
Earlier this week, a Senate panel investigated how Apple avoided billions in taxes through a web of offshore subsidiaries “so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen.” Although the company may have achieved, in the words of Sen. Carl Levin, the “holy grail of tax avoidance,” senators didn’t accuse Apple of doing anything illegal and it is by no means alone in its use of loopholes and gimmicks to avoid paying taxes.
Here’s a list, topped by Apple, of 10 companies that increased their offshore holdings in the past year.
Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid.
Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

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