Stop the Hogs!

Stephen Harper won’t rule out sending lethal weapons for Ukraine

[ http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015 ... raine.html ]

After meeting with Germany’s Merkel, Stephen Harper says Russian President Vladimir Putin should halt fighting in Ukraine by Russian-backed rebels.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Ottawa, Canada where she met Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

By: Les Whittington Ottawa Bureau reporter, Published on Mon Feb 09 2015

OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined to rule out supplying lethal military aid to Ukraine if diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict with Russian-backed rebels in the eastern part of that country fail.

“We’ll look at all options,” Harper said, when asked if Canada would be in favour of a shift in aid to Ukraine from humanitarian and to lethal defensive weapons.

“But obviously we will proceed extremely cautiously in partnership and collaboration with all our allies,” he added at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel, who stopped briefly in Ottawa Monday evening after a visit to Washington, is engaged in a furious round of shuttle diplomacy over Ukraine. Worried about the possibility of a proxy war in Ukraine between the West and Russian President Vladimir Putin, she is stressing the need to find a diplomatic solution to the deepening conflict.

“I hope we will be able to solve this conflict by diplomatic means because I think, by military means, it cannot be solved,” Merkel said.

Earlier at the White House, U.S. President Barack Obama weighed in on Ukraine after a meeting with Merkel. The U.S. has so far provided only non-lethal aid to Ukraine but Obama said Monday he might reverse his position if diplomacy fails to make headway in ending the fighting there.

"We will proceed extremely cautiously in partnership and collaboration with all our allies,” Stephen Harper said Monday at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The possibility of lethal defensive weapons is one of those options that’s being examined,” Obama told reporters.

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[ http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015 ... raine.html ]

The Global Stakes of the Ukraine Crisis. The Failure of Western Civilization

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global ... on/5432144 ]

By Prof. John McMurtry Global Research, February 20, 2015

War party bigotry and hate may be enough to drive neo-Nazis leading Kiev in the Ukraine civil war. But the reverse blame of Putin and Russia by corporate media and states has a deeper interest. It propels the geostrategic economic and military war of movement through East Europe to Russia. It is the indispensible big lie to mask their set up for foreign financial predation. A big pay-off matrix looms in Ukraine for US-led arms corporations and military services, agribusiness and GMO’s, speculator funds on debts and currency, monopoly providers of privatized social services, Big Oil frackers for newly discovered rich deposits, junk food suppliers like Poroshenko in US-frankenfood alliance, and – last but not least – the IMF money party waging a war of dispossession by financial means.

The IMF enforces the global money-sequence cancer system by its defining policy commands on debt-impoverished countries to open them up to foreign feeding on their domestic markets and fire-sale enterprises, drastically reduced workers’ wages and benefits, stripped public pensions, healthcare and education, sell-off of historic infrastructures to pay ever more bank-created debts, and – in general- multiplying transnational money demand and profit invading their life functions at all levels. The IMF and Wall Street have been cumulatively hollowing out Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, South Europe and the US itself in these ways over 35 years. Now it is the turn of the once social democratic Europe, state by state, beginning with the most indebted and helpless. Ukraine on the outskirts of Europe next to Russia is where the military option has been required to strip it and its former Slavic economic union with Russia. This historic relationship has been the last line of life defence in the way, a conservative but sharing ethos of resource-rich societies with Putin as a superior leader facing the US-EU’s many-times more powerful economic levers and lethal arms to bully him and Russia into submission.

To take the naturally rich Ukraine for transnational bank and corporate looting, the public must be sold the story of Putin as the villain. Only then can debt screws be applied and the country opened to long-term and full-spectrum financial, foreign and oligarch control beneath the people’s notice. The IMF is already in motion to ensure that the Kiev coup state provides all of this. Few observe the underlying fact that the crushing bank debt eating societies alive across the world is all debt money created by big private banks with no legal tender to back 97% of it. Ukraine is the latest nation to fall into the deadly trap without a sound. Here public money for public need is ended, although it created the US itself. As Ben Franklin has testified, to regain public money issue was the prime reason for the American Revolution. Public banking was also what made modern Canada from 1938 to 1974 by public investment money without private debt-servicing loaned by the public Bank of Canada for construction of Canada'’s material and social infrastructures from the St Lawrence Seaway to public pensions and universal healthcare.

The same is true of almost every society that has economically succeeded in the modern world.

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[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global ... on/5432144 ]

Ukraine preparing for 'full-scale war,' says former envoy to Canada

[ http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine ... -1.2964887 ]

Vadym Prystaiko, now deputy foreign minister, calls on the West to 'stiffen up in the spine'

CBC News Posted: Feb 21, 2015 7:00 AM ET| Last Updated: Feb 21, 2015 9:30 AM ET

Ukraine's deputy foreign minister says he is preparing for "full-scale war" against Russia and wants Canada to help by supplying lethal weapons and the training to use them.

Vadym Prystaiko, who until last fall was Ukraine's ambassador to Canada, says the world must not be afraid of joining Ukraine in the fight against a nuclear power. [ . . . ]