Top 25 censored stories for 2009

• #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
• # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
• # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
• # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
• # 5 Seizing War Protesters' Assets
• # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
• # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
• # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
• #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
• # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
• # 11 El Salvador's Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
• # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
• # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
• # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
• # 15 Worldwide Slavery
• # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
• # 17 UN's Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
• # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
• # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
• # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
• # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
• # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
• # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
• # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
• # 25 Bush's Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

~ Project Censored ~

World Bank secret documents consumes Argentina - Alex Jones interviews reporter Greg Palast

AJ: This is earth shattering. Can you break it down for us and tell us what the economists have done?

GP: Well, I'll tell you two things. One, I spoke to the former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz who was fired by the (World) Bank. So I, on BBC and with Guardian, basically spent some time debriefing him. It was like one of the scenes out of Mission Impossible, you know where the guy comes over from the other side and you spend hours debriefing him. So I got the insight of what was happening at the World Bank. In addition, he did not brief me but I got some other sources. He would not give me inside documents but other people handed me a giant stash of secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

AJ: So to insulate himself, somebody else did it.

GP: No, I'm telling you. He wouldn't touch it but I really did get from completely independent sources a big stack of documents.

AJ: Just like you got W199I, from the same folks we got it from.

GP: And so one of the things that is happening is that, in fact, I was supposed to be on CNN with the head of the World Bank Jim Wolfensen and he said he would not appear on CNN ever if they put me on. And so CNN did the craziest thing and pulled me off.

AJ: So now they are threatening total boycott.

GP: Yea right. So what we found was this. We found inside these documents that basically they required nations to sign secret agreements, in which they agreed to sell off their key assets, in which they agreed to take economic steps which are really devastating to the nations involved and if they didn't agree to these steps, there was an average for each nation that signed one-hundred and eleven items that they are required to sign on to. If they didn't follow those steps they would be cut-off from all international borrowing. You can't borrow any money in the international marketplace. No one can survive without borrowing, whether you are people or corporations or countries - without borrowing some money and having some credit and ...

AJ: Because of the debt inflation pit they've created.

GP: Yea, well, see one of the things that happened is that - we've got examples from, I've got inside documents recently from Argentina, the secret Argentine plan. This is signed by Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank. By the way, just so you know, they are really upset with me that I've got the documents, but they have not challenged the authenticity of the documents. First, they did. First they said those documents don't exist. I actually showed them on television. And cite some on the web, I actually have copies of some...

AJ: Greg Palast dot com?

GP: Yea, gregpalast.com. So then they backed off and said yea those documents are authentic but we are not going to discuss them with you and we are going to keep you off the air anyway. So, that's that. But what they were saying is look, you take a country like Argentina, which is, you know, in flames now. And it has had five presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed.

AJ: Isn't it six now?

GP: Yea, it's like the weekly president because they can't hold the nation together. And this happened because they started out in the end of the 80s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets. I mean, things we wouldn't think of doing in the US, like selling off their water system.

AJ: So they tax the people. They create big government and big government hands it off to the private IMF/World Bank. And when we get back, I want to get to the four-parts that you elegantly lay out here where they actually pay off the politicians billions to their Swiss bank accounts to do this transfer.

GP: That's right.

AJ: This is like one of the biggest stories ever, Sir. I'm sorry, please continue.

GP: So what's happening is - this is just one of them. And by the way, it's not just anyone who gets a piece of the action. The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to a company called Enron. A pipeline was sold off, that runs between Argentina and Chile, was sold off to a company called Enron.

AJ: And then the globalists blow out the Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation and then they just roll the theft items off.

GP: You've got it. And by the way, you know why they moved the pipeline to Enron is that they got a call from somebody named George W. Bush in 1988.

AJ: Unbelievable, Sir. Stay right there. We are talking to Greg Palast.

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"Kanenas", vote for "none of the above"

In a recent opinion in Greece people were asked following all the civil unrest which party they would vote for, PASOK the socialist party won around 26 per cent Nea Dimikrotia the conservative party won around 26 per cent, but way out in the lead was "kanenas" at 48 per cent.

Who is "kanenas" you may ask?  Well the word "kanenas" means nobody in Greece, so the leading force in politics in Greece galvanizing Greeks, is that nobody is able to steer Greece through its current crisis, and Greeks have lost faith in its politicians.  How true is this for the rest of Europe also?

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Europe and the specter of 1968

Fears are mounting in political circles within Europe that the past two weeks of riots in Greece raise the specter of copycat demonstrations in other European nations. Already demonstrations stimulated by the global financial and economic crisis are beginning to ripple across the Continent.

Young Europeans are increasingly publicly clamoring in the streets in outcry against loss of employment prospects and the lack of overt government initiatives to bail them out of rapidly rising unemployment in a faltering job market.

With unemployment rates already at between 20 and 30 percent for youth in Spain, Italy and France in addition to Greece, tensions are riding high on the streets in these countries. Already, in the wake of the riots in Greece, public protests have started in Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Bordeaux. With an eye to history, the deputy editor of the Paris daily newspaper Liberation declared, “We would be wrong to consider what's happening in Athens as an exotic upheaval in a setting of ancient ruins and blue sea. It's in Europe that revolts burst out.”

President Sarkozy of France was more explicit. Referring to the Paris riots of 1968, which led to the fall of the De Gaulle administration, he mused, “We can't have a European May '68 for Christmas” (Le Canard Enchaîn, December 22).

Economic hard times have a record of producing ugly public protests in Europe. Recently EU education reforms have combined with hiking unemployment to spawn a rash of street protests on the Continent. In the largest student demonstration since the riotous '60s, hundreds of thousands of students and academics gathered in Rome on October 30 to vent their feelings against the EU reforms publicly. This mass demonstration came hard on the heels of similar protests in Paris, Finland and Croatia. In Sweden, youth have been caught up in running street battles with police recently.

A leading member of the French Socialist Party, Laurent Fabius, is quoted as observing, “The 'Greek Syndrome' menaces all countries today, as we find ourselves in a truly grave crisis with an explosion of social inequalities” (EUobserver, December 23).

To compound the unsettling situation in Europe, Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin threw a spanner in the works yesterday. In his very calculating way, fully realizing the difficulties that Europe is currently facing, Putin declared to the world, and, in particular, his major gas customer, the European Union, that the day of cheap gas was ending.

To add insult to injury, Gazprom, Europe's main supplier of natural gas, announced on Monday that for the third consecutive winter, Europe faced interruptions to its gas supply. Alluding to a squabble with Ukraine over an alleged $2 billion of payments in arrears for Russian gas, Viktor Zubkov, who is Russian first deputy minister as well as chairman of Gazprom, said: “We cannot rule out that the position of the Ukrainian side, and certain steps, which are linked to gas transit through Ukrainian territory, could lead to a disruption of supply stability to Europe.”

Public protests, student unrest, rising unemployment, banking crisis, credit crunch, threats of no heating in winter—it all adds up to the prospect of a real season of discontent in Europe.

When politicians begin to make comparisons with 1968, you know they fear the damage that any revisiting by Europe to that terribly disruptive year could bring. This fear is severely emphasized by the fact that few pundits see 2009 as bringing any real hope of global economic recovery. To the contrary, as each month goes by, new gigantic areas of debt are revealed, pushing off even further into the future any real prospect for economic regeneration.

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Balkans 2008: Macedonia -- neither NATO membership, nor EU accession negotiations (PART I)

In 2008, Macedonia did not get a definite date for the start of the negotiations over country's accession to the European Union. Neither did the country get the long-awaited invitation for NATO membership. Things have clear explanation – no solution was found to Macedonia's name dispute. The year was also marked by early general elections.

European and European-Atlantic integration
The beginning of the year seemed promising for Skopje, as the European Unions was presided by Slovenia. One of the prior tasks before the Slovenian EU presidency was to stir up the European perspective of Skopje. However, it did not happen. Despite the progress registered in terms of meeting the EU criteria, some member states felt reserved about Macedonia's EU membership. This reservation was explained not only with the tension between Macedonians and Albanians, but also with the EU's enlargement exhaustion. Thus, the talks over the date for the start of the pre-accession negotiations with the Balkan country were postponed for the future.

In 2008, Macedonia did not manage to cross NATO's threshold. At the summit meeting of the Alliance, organized in April in Bucharest, the country did not receive a membership invitation. Greece took advantage of its right to impose a veto, which it grounded with the unsolved Macedonia's name dispute. The name issue remains unsolved for yet another year.

There were several meetings of the negotiating teams and the special UN mediator Matthew Nimitz. In 2008, Nimitz did not offer concrete solution but a “package of ideas”, providing key directions leading to some solution. However, neither of the proposals was officially announced. There was information that there are proposals such as “Republic of Macedonia (Skopje)” and “Republic of North Macedonia”. Athens, on the other hand, said it would be an allowance for it to accept a derivative name containing the word “Macedonia”. It was said that Washington has a plan for solution, which was negotiated with Skopje. The official authorities denied the information. Anyway, the problem is still unsolved.

Over the last moths, there were several events that could possibly bear some effect on the development of the name dispute. The White House has a brand new president – Barack O[bam]a. However, it is believed that the new president will not consider the Macedonian - Greek problem a priority. There were reshuffles in Macedonia's negotiating team. The government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski decided to file a claim against Greece at the International Court of Justice in Hague over violation of the Interim Accord of September 1995, which obliges Greece not to hamper Skopje's membership in international organizations under the name of Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

The ruling's decision, however, did not find good response – neither abroad, nor in the country itself. President Branko Crvenkovski declared that precious time has been lost with that claim. According to experts, the case at Hague could take two to five years.

~ FOCUS Information Agency ~