IMF approves $17.5 billion "aid" package to Ukraine. Let the plunder begin.

"Loan approved." Haha. Like it was never going to happen in the first place? Of course it was.

How many times do we have to see this to know that it's the biggest ripoff scam in history? The IMF, for decades now, has been the duly established "agent" of Western oligopolistic interests. It was established by these robber barrons so that they can pull off the same scam over and over and over again and look semi-legitimate while doing it. Pad your executive board with the likes of Harvard economists and high level policy figures--a veritable Who's Who that looks like a roster right out of a Bilderberg Group meeting.

Anyway, here's how it works: First the Wall Street bankers and financial predators come in and burden down a country with massive amounts of debt that they're never going to be able to repay. Of course it is all put on them by means of highly sophisticated and established schemes of fraud that the finance criminals have honed over generations.

After that when the country goes broke, they get a regime change, usually with the help from the CIA and the US State Department. A "new government" (read: puppet, US installed oligarch, big-business friendly mafia) is installed and that leads to them asking the IMF for "help." The IMF then offers mafia style loans with usury interest and terms like forced, firesale privatizations of national wealth to the very same people and their accomplices that got them in the mess in the first place. Everything is liquidated. That means public infrastructure, raw materals, plants and equipment, pension funds...everything that can be stolen is stolen with the US courts and even the threat of the US military assuring that the transfer takes place whether the people like it or not.

In the end, the citzenry is left, stripped naked, demoralized, with any semblance of democracy in tatters and wrecked politically, economically and socially while the 1% just got a lot richer.

This is what you bargained for, Ukraine. It's a well-oiled scam with the US military providing the muscle.

British government getting ready to use water cannons against the very citizens it's stealing from

Britain has purchased a bunch of  water cannons to use on its citizens should they decide to protest the dismantling of their social safety nets or otherwise wholesale looting of their wages, pensions, education, health care and housing.

(Here in the U.S. law enforcement doesn't pussy foot around with water cannons. Police departments have tanks.)

This would be the first time ever that Britain has employed these devices. More humane, perhaps, than teargas and rubber bullets or outright head smashing with batons some would say. What's not humane or moral or just is the  policy of granting massive welfare benefits to the rich and big business in the form of tax breaks, privatizations and interest payments.

Let's also not forget the total immunity that is given to the financial predators (i.e. the entire class of finance capitalists) who are routinley caught rigging markets, trading on inside information or, blowing up the economy with outrageous speculative bets, leaving poor stiff working class British taxpayers on the hook. (Some of the very same taxpayers who will be on the receiving end of those water cannons.)

And, yes, the spending cuts and austerity "needed" to make the predators whole are nothing more than tax increases on the working class and poor.

But, hey, at least those downtrodden masses won't be dirty. They'll get a nice shower from the water cannons.