Press TV has interviewed Michel Chossudovsky, member of Center for Research on Globalization and author of ‘The Globalization of War, America's Long War against Humanity’, to discuss Russia’s relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: In your opinion and given your extensive investigations on the issue at hand, what is the crux of the problem?

Chossudovsky: Well the crux of the problem is that we are at very dangerous crossroads in terms of strategic, geopolitical relations and of course warfare and this is not what we might describe a new Cold War because the Cold War had some safeguards with regard to nuclear weapons. There was dialogue, there was consultation and what is happening in recent years is the breakdown of communication, East-West communication. It is coupled with what we might describe as the globalization of NATO, in other words NATO is extending its grip beyond the so-called Atlantic region. It has a military agenda which is one of conquest, it states that it is a defensive agreement but in fact its actions on Russia’s borders are in fact of an aggressive nature and we have various areas of potential confrontation that are not limited to the Ukraine.

We have now the issue in southeastern Europe with confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan which is also on Russia’s doorstep, we have the issue of sanctions, we have also the issue of maritime routes, the confrontation between the United States and China in the South China Sea, bearing in mind that China and Russia [are] allies under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and then we also have the situation in the Middle East in particular in Iraq and Syria which in effect is a war of stealth between Russia and NATO.

And ... about the war on terrorism, we know that the war on terrorism is bogus and that the only effective force which is fighting the terrorists is in fact the Syrian government forces together with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah and that the United States and its allies, and that includes NATO, are covertly supporting terrorist organizations and in fact NATO right from the outset in 2011 in liaison with the Turkish high command has been involved in the recruitment of foreign fighters to join the ranks of the al-Qaeda affiliated opposition in the Syrian war.

Press TV: In your opinion, what are the dynamics behind this, let’s say, expansion of Russian influence throughout the region not just in Europe but also in the Middle East region which you just touched on?

Chossudovsky: Well I think certainly Russia is playing a different role. First of all it has military capabilities which the Western military alliance has to take account of, and it is both in terms of strategic and conventional forces, but I think the problem is that the people who are making decisions particularly within the US governmental apparatus and NATO, first of all they have very little understanding of military issues, they are civilians and they are not aware of the impacts, let’s say of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Ninety of those tactical nuclear weapons are stored in Incirlik in Turkey and they are under Turkish command. They are designated as harmless to the surrounding civilian population in Pentagon documents which is absolutely nonsensical. They have an explosive capacity between one-third and six times Hiroshima bomb, and then Hillary Clinton says nuclear weapons are on the table.

So that when we have that kind of discourse where people in very high levels of government are making statements that actually point towards a World War III scenario, we are at a very dangerous crossroads and I think we have to hope that some people within that political spectrum of Western leaders will start to see that building a relationship with Russia and China to avoid military confrontation is ultimately the solution because World War III is terminal. We cannot get into that debate but World war III is not an option and the United States will not win World War III. Nobody will win World War III.


(PRESS TV)

The Panama Papers revelations are just the latest phase of a misinformation campaign that’s been going on for decades. Today the world is turned upside down by a huge group of journalists and corporate lackeys who have set truth on its end. But my story today is about one tentacle of a beast, one facet of an NWO centurion named George Soros. His “Foundation DOTS”, formerly Soros Foundation Latvia, offers part of the irrefutable proof I speak of. Before I shine a light on this NGO, the reader should be more acquainted with George Soros the financier, George Soros the imposter philanthropist.

Epic Deceivers: George Soros

Born in Budapest in 1930, George Soros’ real names is Gyorgy Schwartz, a moniker he changed when he immigrated to London after World War II. Now estimated to be worth in excess of $26 billion dollars, Soros’ past is not simply jaded, it’s the stuff Hollywood creates super-villains from. A Nazi collaborator in Budapest in 1944 and 1945, teenage Gyorgy sold out his fellow Jews to the Nazis, he helped steal and catalogue their property, while Hitler’s denizens shipped nearly half a million Jewish Hungarians to the death camps.

Soros attended and later graduated from the London School of Economics in the 1950s. He entered the world of banking with the merchant bank Singer & Friedlander of London, and then later moved to the United States to work with F.M. Mayer of New York. Soros’ rise through the ranks of stock speculators is the stuff of legend now. His short of the British Pound play on the Bank of England on Black Wednesday earned him his first billion it is said. But it is not Soros’ money that we should focus on in order to understand his part in today’s chaos, it is his philosophy and strategies. Soros, despite all else, is a rabid deconstructive who has always been enigmatic, a man who turns every rationale in upon itself. This can be seen in his association and borrowing from world renowned philosopher Karl Popper, who theorized what a truly “Open Society” would look like back in the 1940s. There’s no space here for the political theory lesson, but Popper had a dramatic impact on the duality within George Soros. I say “duality” because of the billionaire’s early Budapest days where survival and betrayal, forged the personality Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli might have idealized. This duality is what makes Soros so dangerous, it is what allows he and many others to manipulate the public, to be a philanthropist and a greedy billionaire at the same time.

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

All anyone needs in order to understand men like George Soros is this fact. Anytime society loses, Soros and the cartel he belongs to wins. Soros is a taker, not a giver, even though he might call this fact simply “business” – and nothing more. You see Soros’ adopted the essences of brilliant men like Karl Popper, then betrayed those ideals whenever he could profit from the understanding of “Open Society” principles. But enough about George Soros, he is simply a liar to himself, and to any semblance of societal order other than elitism. Soros even deceives himself, on a daily basis.

The American Brand of Lebensraum

“We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.” – Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

Foundation DOTS, or the Soros Foundation Latvia, was established back in 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was at this time George Soros began funding academia down to the grade school level. Then in 1994 Soros initiatives engaged students at Latvian universities with enticements like study abroad, and later the grant system of “encouragements” for students. In 1995 Soros’ money was injected to influence Latvia’s judicial system, through the creation of the Latvian Judicial Training Center. This was a crucial bit of strategy, Soros linking the American Bar Association with a fledgling nation’s academic progress toward the rule of law. At the same time Soros funding helped establish an NGO Center, where government employees could receive language training for free. Thought, language, law, the implications were staggering, but it’s all labeled as philanthropy.

In 1996 the publication of “Man and Society” was a milestone for George Soros’ new order in Latvia. 26 of the world’s great philosophical works were translated into Latvian, and Soros got into textbook publishing. Soros next starts the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, and in 1998 the Riga Graduate School of Law is established. From 1990 to 2002 Soros endeavors engage in ever sphere of Latvian society from law and ethics, to the disabled and the arts. The small Baltic country becomes a sort of “conversion” template, a kind of Soros new world order experiment. Then in 2003 the Soros Foundation co-creates the Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS. This initiative, and many others undertaken by Soros, is now supported by the EU Commission, Latvia’s Ministry of Education and Science, and corporate altruism such as that we see from the Robert Bosch Stiftung. This PROVIDUS effort, shows us one method Soros used to create a transformative path, one where hundreds of NGOs, corporate, and governmental agencies now tread.

The pattern set here went forward, the successes in transformative societal manipulation have now been cloned, and this is why we see Soros and the other NWO elites so transparently. The control mechanisms are hard wired into western societies, in particular those Eastern European states where the USSR was evangelized as the enemy of freedom. But it is the EU-Soros-NWO connectives I find most interesting. A separate report I made revealed a Swiss-Romanian funding connection to these “Panama Papers”, and now I find a Swiss-Latvian connective to a Soros initiative? The Latvia-Swiss Cooperation Program that supports PROVIDUS, it mirrors the Swiss-Romanian Cooperation Program that now supports something called the “Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project”, which is an offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which spawned the Panama Papers in the first place.

Going further into this maze of collusion now will detract from the evidentiary nature of this report. I do want to show Soros’ key endeavors in Latvia, and how the strategies mirror (or facilitated) Washington’s foreign policy toward Russia and the former Soviet republics. In 2005 Soros Foundation launched a program called “Wider Europe”, where Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia were targeted as “partners” to the greater EU community. All throughout the 2000s, Soros Foundation in Latvia broadened the scope and breadth its operations in the country in every field. Money and influence was distributed farther afield into rural areas. Great cohesion in the fields of law, politics, and even influencing voters was dramatically undertaken. It was at this time, the latter 2002s, when Soros Foundation “influencers” began entering Latvian business, law, and governmental sectors. Then in 2011 Soros’ NGO created an initiative called “I can be Prime Minister”. From this initiative, something calledRe:Baltica was created. This is a non-profit organization that supposedly produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Looking at Re:Baltica we find key organizers of Soros’ network of European “think tanks” like Vita Tērauda, who is also executive director of Policy Organization for an Open Society, or PASOS. What this Soros network does is distribute the Latvian model to other countries around Europe. The implications here are staggering, to be sure. Soros’ brand of propaganda and coercion trumps Adolf Hitler’s henchmen in that it converts the masses and the intellectuals.

Latvia the Crucible

Not many western observers recognize the role Latvia has played in the various conflicts in between the west and what can be called the “Slavic” influences. Without going into a history lesson, the ideals of people like Baltic theorists and convicted Nazi war criminal Alfred Rosenberg are ages old. It is enough to understand that Latvians, and the people of all the Baltic nations, have been divided along ideological and political lines always. This was particularly true before and during World War II, when the half the country sided with Nazi Germany, while the other half fought with the Soviets. Even the secreted sections of the now infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact showed Germany and the Soviet Union dividing up nations like Latvia, and that non-aggression pact also mirrors agreements between west and east more recently. It’s fair to say, Soros could not have picked a better country to sway via his modified Lebensraum methods. I’ll discuss the other Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia in later reports.

As you can begin to see, the decades of US policy making in these regions, is inextricably linked to corporations and entrepreneurs like Soros as well. Like I said, the breadth of all this is unimaginable. From Macedonia and Moldova, to the Czech Republic to include some 32 independent policy centres from 21 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Soros seed money has not metastasized into a cancerous mechanism supported by everyone from mayors to lawyers and whole parliaments. The new world order is not some mythical apparition conspiracy theorist harp about; it is a reality that has supplanted democracy. Soros and his associates have removed the public’s capacity to understand reality, and replaced it with another truth. To illustrate how extensive and how complete these Soros networks have become interconnected we only need to look at the smaller strategies like the so-called “Brigade” competitions created by Soros Foundation in 2012. If the Riga Graduate School of Law infects and influences a vast network of schools and universities across Europe, then grants and seed funding connections for small entities can “convert” at the local and individual level. Brigade is closed down now, but it is but one of a multitude of “seeding” initiatives that turn small funding into reliable evangelism of Soros/NWO ideals. What began as a singular policy/strategy initiative by George Soros in Latvia, has now filtered down into the very fabric of the country. Prognosticators closer to the Soros leadership are knowledgeable of the new order goals, but the innocent student/citizens at the long tail of this beast are just victimized pawns. Organizers for Brigade end up in further initiatives to indoctrinate Latvian youth. This Facebook profile shows how seamlessly propaganda is fed with tantalizing links to crowd funding, and almost subliminal revolutionary symbolism. So DOTS is Soros’s foreign policy strategy come full circle. The financial impetus that nourished the seed, has flourished into a new society unaware of the nature of its origins.

So Latvia is incontrovertibly influenced by not just George Soros ideologies, but by those even more powerful than he. This says nothing for the influence of Washington and London on an independent nation and people. Make no mistake though, George Soros is not the “wizard” behind the curtain of a new world order, he is but a facilitator. He is a learned betrayer of the genius Karl Popper’s “Open Society” – Soros just uses Popper’s science for his own needs. In his book “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, the philosopher actually describes people like Soros, attributing the use of discontent for social change. For Popper someone like Soros thinks of himself like a great philosopher king, a bit like Plato. Soros and his comrades wherever they are, they are less interested in any new world, than with the fortification and then growth of the old one, the elitist one. They use humanity’s tribal nature on the one hand, while professing true liberal democracy on the other.

It is in this way people like the citizens of Latvia are courted, coerced and converted, to serve the needs of great industrialists. The Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros, are supposedly inspired in name and purpose by Popper’s book. But in reality the new world order only mystifies us with slight of hand and magic, while stealing humanity’s birthright. In this crucible of power places like Latvia become the ideological Lebensraum, necessary for the survival of tyrannical ideas.

Washington (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that the global economy faces wide-ranging threats from weak growth and rising protectionism, warning of possible "severe" damage should Britain quit the European Union.

The Fund cut its global forecast for the third straight quarter, saying economic activity has been "too slow for too long," and stressed the need for immediate action by the world's economic powers to shore up growth.

It said intensifying financial and political risks around the world, from volatile financial markets to the Syria conflict to global warming, had left the economy "increasingly fragile" and vulnerable to recession.

The IMF raised concerns over "fraying" unity in the European Union under pressure from the migration crisis and the "Brexit" possibility.

And it pointed to the contractions in large emerging market economies, most notably Brazil, where the economic downturn has been accompanied by deep political crisis that has President Dilma Rousseff facing impeachment.

Seeing a broad fall in trade and investment, the IMF cut its forecast for world growth this year to a sluggish 3.2 percent, 0.2 percentage points down from its January outlook and down from the 3.8 percent pace expected last July.

That reflects a glummer view of growth in both developed and emerging economies, with the forecasts for Japan and oil-dependent Russia and Nigeria all sharply lowered.

Growth expectations for most leading economies were pared back by 0.2 percentage points. The outlook for the United States -- hit by the impact of the strong dollar -- was trimmed to 2.4 percent this year, from 2.6 percent in January.

Only the pictures in China and developing eastern Europe were better. But at a slightly upgraded pace of 6.5 percent growth, China was still on track for a significant slowdown from last year.

- Rising threats to growth -

The growth downgrade was expected but the tone of the IMF message was more dire than in recent months.

It came as an increasing number of countries are approaching the IMF and World Bank for financial support. Last week Angola, its finances devastated by the crash in oil prices, asked the IMF for a three-year bailout program.

And the World Bank said requests for loan support had reached levels seen only during financial crises.

IMF chief economist Maurice Obstfeld said there was a risk of a full stall in global growth without efforts to boost investment and demand.

"The weaker is growth, the greater the chance that the preceding risks, if some materialize, pull the world economy below stalling speed," he said.

"Lower growth means less room for error."

- Refugee strains in Europe -

The IMF singled out the violent swings in global financial markets as a particular threat to growth this year, impairing confidence and demand.

"Since last summer, we have seen two distinct rounds of global financial turbulence," said Obstfeld.

The result, he said, is capital flight from riskier assets and economies, higher borrowing costs for developing countries, and continued weakness in commodity prices.

The second factor with global consequences, the Fund said, is the violent instability in Syria and elsewhere that has driven millions of refugees into surrounding states and Europe.

Beyond the financial and social costs from that is "a rising tide of inward-looking nationalism" which jeopardizes the long push for greater global economic progress.

"Across Europe, the political consensus that once propelled the European project is fraying," the IMF said, warning "a backlash against cross-border economic integration threatens to halt or even reverse the postwar trend of ever more open trade."

One sign of that is the looming Brexit referendum. If British voters opt to leave the EU, the IMF said it "could do severe regional and global damage by disrupting established trading relationships."

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who wants his country to remain in the European Union, agreed with that assessment.

"The IMF is right -- leaving the EU would pose major risks for the UK economy. We are stronger, safer and better off in the European Union," he said in a tweet.

THE number of missing migrants in Germany continues to grow with authorities now saying nearly 9,000 children are now unaccounted for.