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Romania: Anti-fracking protesters target Chevron gas operation 1. C/U Protest sign 2. W/S Crowd of protesters 3. C/U Protest placard 4. SOT Brianna Caragea, protest organiser: .People basically are not only not fed the c…
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Anti fracking protest in Romania

Ah yes, The New York Times, at it again publishing a story denouncing Russia [1] , this time the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom demonized as funding and being behind the anti fracking protests in a small town in eastern Romania. The protests shut down the initial stages of a fracking operation conducted by Chevron on land it leased from the towns’ mayor.

According to the Times story, a year ago the mayor of Pungesti, Romania, one Vlasa Mirica figured he’d struck it rich when Chevron showed up and offered him green backs to do exploratory shale gas drilling on his property.

However when the town’s people and others across the country opposed to fracking got wind of the mayor’s deal with Chevron, protests erupted, “violent clashes broke out” between police and the protesters and before long he was “run out of town”.

Apparently he’s back at his office now but Chevron has since shut down its exploratory drilling operation on his land.

What was fascinating about the article there was no proof given Gazprom bankrolled the anti fracking protests. It was all speculation, fueled by “Cold War-style suspicion” and “Russian meddling”.

The article even quoted former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen when he spoke in September saying,” Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations-environmental organizations working against shale gas-to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.” He too offered no proof to his allegation saying “his judgment was based on what NATO allies had reported”.

But the coup de grace of the article was this little ditty, “Feeding what environmental groups denounce as a frenzy of paranoia have been Russian actions in Ukraine. Russia’s president, the former KGB officer Vladimir V. Putin, has deployed a powerful arsenal there dominated by stealth and subterfuge, first to annex Crimea in March and, more recently, to foment an armed separatist rebellion in the east’ i.e. eastern Ukraine.

Call it a further piling on campaign by the American corporate MSM to impugn and demonize Putin whenever possible and accuse him of being the primary antagonist in everything that has occurred in eastern Europe-primarily Ukraine since the coup in Kyiv last February, the subsequent uprising in eastern Ukraine, Crimea voting in a referendum to join the Russian Federation, the downing of the Malaysian plane in July, and most significantly, Putin being behind the separatists in eastern Ukraine who openly rejected the new western post coup government in Kyiv and thus him being solely responsible for initiating the new cold war against the West and primarily America.

I’m not about to delineate all the nonsense emanating from voices in official Washington, its complicit MSM, the post coup regime in Kyiv as well as the vassal states in eastern Europe including Romania, Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia that have latched on to Washington’s neo-con instigated campaign against Putin and Russia with its regime change fantasy agenda to eventually overthrow the Russian leader.

except it is necessary to keep the record straight and reiterate what investigative reporters such as Robert Parry, Pepe Escobar, George Eliason and others have reported notably, the coup in Kyiv was instigated by the US State Department and the CIA to install a puppet led government that followed US dictate, the uprising in eastern Ukraine is mostly Russian speaking indigenous farmers, miners and other volunteers defending their lands from a neo-Nazi infested regime in Kyiv intent on destroying and ethnic cleansing the ethnic Russian speaking population in the east, the downing of the Malaysian MK-17 plane was by a Ukrainian air force jet using machine gun fire and air to air missiles, there has been no Russian invasion into eastern Ukraine and the so called “annexation” of Crimea was the legal right of its citizens to call for a referendum and vote to separate from Ukraine and exercise its legal right to join the Russian Federation-even as Russian troops legally authorized and already stationed in Crimea as part of the Russian Black Sea fleet stood guard, not firing a shot or threatening anyone as the people in Crimea voted in a process of self determination to secede from the Ukraine coup led government in Kyiv.

As to the anti fracking protests-not only in rural eastern Romania but much of Europe and now primarily in America against the still unapproved Keystone XL pipeline project that would bring Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf coast to say nothing of the ongoing anti-fracking protests throughout the US-the position of the Times-for or against the environmentally disastrous fracking operations that despoil the water of local inhabitants-is unknown.

The Times in its obsession with objectivity-giving equal time to all sides on every issue regardless of how malevolent and perfidious a side may be-think the lies given to the MSM by former VP Dick Chaney on Iraq’s non existent WMD without checking on the veracity of what he was spouting, but in this case the environmental disaster hydraulic fracking operations are creating in America and the world-is a disgrace and a disservice to its readers and then compounded by propaganda jingoism demonizing Putin at every turn in even though when it comes to fracking he said, “It poses a huge environmental problem” and where it has been allowed people “no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime.”

Hmm; a truth coming from the lips of the “demon”, Vladimir Putin. Sacrebleu!

[1] “Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests”, by Andrew Higgins, “The New York Times, November 30, 2014

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