http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48305.htm
Russiagate Explained
Michael Flynn is in the news again. Russiagaters are gushing with excitement at the revelation that Flynn’s lawyers are no longer sharing information with the president’s legal team now that Robert Mueller’s investigation is looking more closely at the former National Security Advisor’s involvement in the production of a film about an exiled cleric from Turkey. The story goes that this separation means that Flynn has struck a deal with Mueller, which Mueller wouldn’t permit him to do if he didn’t have damning information on Trump.
Of course this excitement is dependent on the false belief that Mueller’s job is to get the president impeached, and that he would only cut deals toward that ultimate end. It is also dependent on the false belief that there is any evidence to be found that Trump illegally colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. And, like the rest of the Russiagate enthusiasm around Flynn, it is also somewhat dependent on compartmentalizing away from the fact the Turkey and Russia are two completely different countries.
This is all par for course in the interminable dance of soaring excitement followed by thinly veiled disappointment that Russiagaters have been engaged in for over a year. I’ve been receiving some complaints that I don’t recap enough on the specific details of why I reject the establishment Russia narrative so aggressively, so if you’re just tuning in, what follows is a quick synopsis of how this weird thing has been going so far.
At the beginning of 2015 Hillary Clinton was already scaring people with her intensely hawkish positions on Russia, long before she went all-in on her horrifying support for a no-fly zone in a region where Russian military planes were conducting operations. Coincidentally this same nation Clinton wanted to fight happens to be the nation everyone in her political party is supporting new cold war escalations with today.
When WikiLeaks began releasing Democratic party emails, those ever-trustworthy truth angels collectively known as the US intelligence community began asserting that the leaks were provided by Russian hackers, a claim WikiLeaks denies. Clinton, still widely expected to win the presidency, used that opportunity to call for “military responses” to cyber intrusions, saying as president she would “make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.”
In a debate with Trump in October of 2016, Clinton asserted that “17 intelligence agencies” had all concluded that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks releases, which this year we learned was actually four agencies, which was actually three agencies plus Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which was actually two dozen agents from the CIA, FBI and NSA that Clapper hand-picked himself. James Clapper is a known Russophobic racist who has said that Russians “are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,” and that “It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States and to Western democracies.”
Clinton has continued to repeat the “17 intelligence agencies” lie long after it was conclusively debunked, and Democratic party loyalists continue to repeat it to this day. They do this to manufacture the illusion that this is something agreed upon by the entire US intelligence community and not two dozen analysts picked by a man with a seething eugenicist hatred of Russians.
Russia, incidentally, functions with regard to the United States as the right arm of China, the chief rival of the US power establishment Clinton has spent her career immersed in.
In January Clapper’s ODNI released its much anticipated intelligence report on the Russian hacking allegations to the public, which spent much of its space bizarrely talking about the fact that RT America covers third party presidential candidates and Occupy Wall Street. It ties Guccifer 2.0 to the WikiLeaks releases on very shaky grounds, despite an abundance of evidence that “Guccifer 2.0” is in fact an US establishment psyop and not a hacker at all.
To this day we’ve seen no hard evidence of Russian hacking the Democratic party emails despite assurances from NSA veterans that if such evidence exists it can surely be found on NSA records and safely shared with the public without exposing any sources or compromising any methods that aren’t public knowledge already. And yet the anti-Russia sentiment that assertion sparked has been used to manufacture support for sanctions, troops along Russia’s border, NATO expansionism and proxy conflicts. This is simply unacceptable in a post-Iraq invasion world. When it comes to assertions which lead to war, including cold war, the US intelligence community must be considered guilty until proven innocent. They have lost the trust of every sensible person forever.
The many, many gaping plot holes in the Russian hacking narrative are likely why as 2017 has worn on establishment loyalists have been opting to focus more on allegations that Russia used a pervasive propaganda campaign to get Trump elected. This includes RT America, which has the temerity to air the anti-establishment opinions of Americans whom mainstream media outlets refuse to platform, Pikachu-gate, and a narrative about $100,000 in Facebook ads somehow influencing a $6.8 billion election despite the fact that the ads in question rarely mentioned the election and most of them not being seen until after it was over.
Most disturbingly, the “Russian propaganda” angle has led to a large percentage of the US population supporting and promulgating the narrative that Americans need to be protected from ideas or information, which has led to enormous increases in corporate censorship across all major social media platforms. Which of course works out nicely for the unelected power establishment which has a vested interest in manipulating the ideas and information that Americans consume.
So that’s the narrative about Russia’s half of Russiagate. The story about Trump’s half is even more absurd.
The notion that Democrats may be able to get Trump impeached for colluding with Russia really took hold in January with the release of the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier, which alleges that Russians have been blackmailing Trump into compliance with their agendas using a video they took years prior of Trump paying a bunch of prostitutes to urinate on a bed the Obamas once slept in. Apart from the obvious fact that nothing about this is even remotely believable, the dossier itself is riddled with significant errors and mostly unverified, and Steele himself has been distancing himself from parts of it. Some of the more high-octane Russiagaters have claimed that since some small parts of the Dossier have been confirmed to contain accurate basic information it must therefore all be true, which is the same as claiming that since Alex Jones was right about Iraq WMDs he’s definitely right about everything else he says as well.
Oh, and the position on Ukraine that the dossier alleges Trump was blackmailed into espousing? It’s virtually identical to Obama’s, and arguably more anti-Russia.
You’ll also hear a lot of talk about how Trump has “financial ties to Russia”, meaning he is necessarily therefore financially beholden to the Kremlin. This story of course requires that you ignore the many, many other foreign countries with which Trump has financial ties in order to view this as significant. Why would Trump exclude Russia from his map of business deals when the arm-waving hysteria about that country didn’t start until last year? In order to make Russian business ties look significant amid a sea of other foreign business ties you need to make the case that Russia is uniquely nefarious among nations, and few Americans saw it that way until the anti-Russia propaganda campaign began last year.
There’s talk about how some campaign officials met with Russians, which is only suspicious if you ignore all the other foreign nationals they met with and doublethink your way into believing that Russia has always been viewed as uniquely malicious among nations. Manafort and Gates were indicted for stuff that had nothing to do with Trump or Russia, and back in August the Washington Post ran a story explicitly stating that Papadopoulos was a very low-level aide whose attempts to arrange meetings between campaign officials and Russians were consistently rejected by the Trump campaign.
Taken individually, parts of Russiagate look like they could maybe possibly somehow lead somewhere plausible. Taken together, it’s obvious that the American people are being manipulated toward an anti-detente agenda by the Democrats who just want Trump impeached and the US power establishment which wants to secure geopolitical power by aggressively undermining its potential rivals.
The term Gish gallop refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which one barrages one’s opposition with a deluge of individually weak arguments which take far too long to debunk individually in a way that sustains the audience’s interest. This is all Russiagate amounts to. When Russiagaters tell you that there’s “too much smoke for there not to be fire”, they are unwittingly telling you “I’ve been won over by a Gish gallop fallacy.” Every single aspect of their argument can be easily debunked without exception, but since there’s so much of it and since pundits are assuring them of its reality so confidently, they believe.
Every few weeks there’s some major new “bombshell” revelation which Russiagaters get all excited about, only to have people read the actual information in the “bombshell” and find out it’s not actually anything incriminating or particularly remarkable. Take all those “bombshells” together, though, and you create the illusion of something real. That’s all this nonsense is.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
SC154-9
http://energyskeptic.com/2017/world-scientists-warning-to-humanity-a-second-notice/
World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience.
" I’m sure anyone reading this post knows it is too late to do anything but eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow … Although this warning was widely published, it was left out of over half of the top circulation newspapers, such as the New York Times. Not that it would matter. Most people don’t read newspapers, don’t understand science, are full of mindless optimism from sci-fi TV and movies, don’t want to read depressing articles, or think The Rapture is coming any day now so it doesn’t matter "
Over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed the second notice.
The first warning (here) was made in 1992, when more than 1,700 scientists — including a majority of the living Nobel laureates at the time — signed a “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” published by the Union of Concerned Scientists. They stated that humans were on a collision course with the natural world from our current, impending, or potential damage to Earth via ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine fishery collapses, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing the Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the planet can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm.
This second warning is even more urgent about changes needing to be made because conditions have worsened since 1992 significantly.
“Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that the Earth with all its life is our only home.”
Among the negative trends are:
Declining Freshwater availability: Per capita freshwater availability is less than half of levels of the early 1960s with many people around the world suffering from a lack of fresh clean water. Much of this decrease in available water is due to an accelerated pace of human population growth and increases in agricultural water use. It is likely that climate change will have an overwhelming impact on the freshwater availability through alteration of the hydrologic cycle and water availability. Future water shortages will be detrimental to humans, affecting everything from drinking water, human heath, sanitation, and the production of crops for food.
Unsustainable marine fisheries: In 1992, the total marine catch was at or above the maximum sustainable yield and fisheries were on the verge of collapse, peaking in 1996 at 130 million tons in 1996 and has been declining ever since , despite an increase in fishing effort
A 75 % increase in the number of ocean dead zones. Coastal dead zones which are mainly caused by fertilizer runoff and fossil-fuel use, are killing large swaths of marine life. Dead zones with hypoxic, oxygen-depleted waters, are a significant stressor on marine systems and identified locations have dramatically increased since the 1960s, with more than 600 systems affected by 2010.
Deforestation. A loss of nearly 300 million acres of forestland, much of it converted for agricultural uses. Between 1990 and 2015, total forest area decreased from 4,128 to 3,999 million hectares, a net loss of 129 million hectares, approximately the size of South Africa.
Dwindling biodiversity. The world’s biodiversity is vanishing at an alarming rate and populations of vertebrate species are rapidly collapsing. Global ly,fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012. Freshwater, marine, and terrestrial populations declined by 81%, 36%, and 35% respectively.
Continuing significant increases in global carbon emissions and average temperatures
Overpopulation. Over 2 billion people have been born since 1992 – a 35 % rise in human population.
We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
Humanity is now being given a second notice as illustrated by these alarming trends (figure 1). We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats (Crist et al. 2017). By failing to adequately limit population growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, halt deforestation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere....
World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience.
" I’m sure anyone reading this post knows it is too late to do anything but eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow … Although this warning was widely published, it was left out of over half of the top circulation newspapers, such as the New York Times. Not that it would matter. Most people don’t read newspapers, don’t understand science, are full of mindless optimism from sci-fi TV and movies, don’t want to read depressing articles, or think The Rapture is coming any day now so it doesn’t matter "
Over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed the second notice.
The first warning (here) was made in 1992, when more than 1,700 scientists — including a majority of the living Nobel laureates at the time — signed a “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” published by the Union of Concerned Scientists. They stated that humans were on a collision course with the natural world from our current, impending, or potential damage to Earth via ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine fishery collapses, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing the Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the planet can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm.
This second warning is even more urgent about changes needing to be made because conditions have worsened since 1992 significantly.
“Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that the Earth with all its life is our only home.”
Among the negative trends are:
Declining Freshwater availability: Per capita freshwater availability is less than half of levels of the early 1960s with many people around the world suffering from a lack of fresh clean water. Much of this decrease in available water is due to an accelerated pace of human population growth and increases in agricultural water use. It is likely that climate change will have an overwhelming impact on the freshwater availability through alteration of the hydrologic cycle and water availability. Future water shortages will be detrimental to humans, affecting everything from drinking water, human heath, sanitation, and the production of crops for food.
Unsustainable marine fisheries: In 1992, the total marine catch was at or above the maximum sustainable yield and fisheries were on the verge of collapse, peaking in 1996 at 130 million tons in 1996 and has been declining ever since , despite an increase in fishing effort
A 75 % increase in the number of ocean dead zones. Coastal dead zones which are mainly caused by fertilizer runoff and fossil-fuel use, are killing large swaths of marine life. Dead zones with hypoxic, oxygen-depleted waters, are a significant stressor on marine systems and identified locations have dramatically increased since the 1960s, with more than 600 systems affected by 2010.
Deforestation. A loss of nearly 300 million acres of forestland, much of it converted for agricultural uses. Between 1990 and 2015, total forest area decreased from 4,128 to 3,999 million hectares, a net loss of 129 million hectares, approximately the size of South Africa.
Dwindling biodiversity. The world’s biodiversity is vanishing at an alarming rate and populations of vertebrate species are rapidly collapsing. Global ly,fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012. Freshwater, marine, and terrestrial populations declined by 81%, 36%, and 35% respectively.
Continuing significant increases in global carbon emissions and average temperatures
Overpopulation. Over 2 billion people have been born since 1992 – a 35 % rise in human population.
We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
Humanity is now being given a second notice as illustrated by these alarming trends (figure 1). We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats (Crist et al. 2017). By failing to adequately limit population growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, halt deforestation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere....
SC154-8
https://goldswitzerland.com/11000-kg-gold-for-a-painting-will-cost-110-kg-in-2025/
11,000 KG GOLD FOR A PAINTING – WILL COST 110 KG IN 2025
What is absolutely certain is that global wealth will be totally decimated in the next 4-8 years. It doesn’t matter if you are very rich or “just own a house” with some equity left. Most of it will come down in value by 75-95% in the next few years as the debt and asset bubbles implode.
But what very few people realise or plan for, is the confiscation of wealth that will take place in coming years. There will be confiscation on many levels.
With times deteriorating, governments will be thrown out as ordinary people become dissatisfied with their rapidly declining ability to survive. Many people will lose their jobs and governments’ ability to help the poor and hungry will decline rapidly due to falling tax revenues. During that process, opposition parties will promise the earth. Thus we will see a society in upheaval due to political turbulence, social unrest, dire economic circumstances as well as anarchy.
TAXES WILL BE PUNITIVE
Many countries in the West have turned socialist in latter years, and this trend will continue as the climate deteriorates. With the ruling party desperately fighting for its own survival, their task becomes increasingly impossible as there is no money left in the coffer and printed money no longer has any value.
Opposition parties will promise solutions to all the problems and will have no difficulty becoming elected. But as they get into power they will also fail desperately. In most Western countries there will be left wing parties ruling but we might also see far right leaders emerging due to the anarchic situation.
As tax revenues decline rapidly, governments will desperately look for new ways of increasing the state’s income. Normal people will at this stage be very poor so it will serve no purpose to tax them. The obvious target will of course be the wealthy but also the middle classes. At that stage, the wealthy might already have lost half of their fortune or more, but socialist governments looking for revenue will ensure that most of their remaining wealth also disappears.
CONFISCATION BY TAXATION
Wealth taxes will be confiscatory and reach levels of 75% at least and possibly up to 90%. This will not only be popular with ordinary people who at that point are poor and suffering. It will also be what the desperate masses will demand, whether it is done peacefully or with violence.
What is happening in Saudi Arabia presently with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman confiscating the wealth of other Saudi Princes and Saudi businessmen might set an example.
Governments in the US, UK or Germany, for example, could just decide to freeze the assets of the wealthy and issue arrest warrants demanding transfer of say 85% of their wealth. Refusal would not be an option since it would lead to a long prison sentence plus confiscation of 100% of the wealth.
Now is the time to plan for the risks of confiscation and punitive taxation. Soon it will be too late.
All this sounds totally draconian and unrealistic in today’s “civilised” society. But anyone who doubts that these measures could happen only needs to study history. There are endless examples of confiscation of wealth. Often it is linked to periods of excess and decadence with major gaps between the rich and the poor, just as today. During the French Revolution in 1789 , the aristocracy not only lost much of their wealth, they also lost their lives. Same in the Russian Revolution in 1918 when both wealth and lives of the aristocracy were extinguished.
DANGEROUS TO FLAUNT WEALTH
We could easily then reach a state of anarchy due to the suffering of the masses. At that point they would turn against banks, governments and the wealthy leading to major violence as history repeats itself. Anything representing wealth will be despised by the masses, whether it is houses, cars, jewellery or clothes or other luxury assets. The flaunting of wealth that we see all over the world today could be very dangerous or even fatal at that time.
The majority of people, would call all this scaremongering and sensationalism. The problem is that because we live today, we think it is different now. Many believe it is totally acceptable to see bespoke Rolls Royces, or Ferraris in New York, London or Hong Kong costing $250,000 or more. Today very few protest against the enormous top prices paid for a house in the above cities costing $100 million or more. And to buy a painting for over $100 million happens regularly.
1/2 BILLION DOLLARS FOR A PAINTING
But if you want a Leonardo da Vinci, you must pay the neat sum of $450 million as an anonymous buyer did this week at the Christie’s auction in New York. A price level which very few can fathom.
Will almost $1/2 trillion be the record for a painting for decades or longer. Yes, in today’s money, that could certainly be the case. 11 tonnes of gold for a painting will probably not be beaten for the next 100 years or more. In the next 4-8 years, that painting can probably be bought for much less than 1 tonne of gold, more probably for 110 kilos or less (110 kg gold is today worth $4.5 million).
LAW AND ORDER WILL BREAK DOWN
For ordinary people, most of whom are not aware of these excesses, $1/2 billion for a painting is the ultimate decadence. This dangerous trend will not go unpunished in the future. And nobody must believe that law and order including police or military will function when society breaks down. Sadly, there will be no protection for the target groups.
Weapons will hardly help against the crowd. Best is to live in a place where you are surrounded by like minded or in a country which is less exposed. All this is not an option for many people but worth thinking about when there is still time.
Let me stress that I sincerely hope that none of what I have outlined will happen. But looking at risk and probabilities, we are now at a point in history when these events are likely to take place whether it is in the next few years or at some later point. Excesses of the magnitude we are seeing today as well as the gap between rich and poor will not continue without returning to the mean at least.
SWISS BANK REFUSES TO GIVE CLIENT HIS GOLD
Coming back to confiscation, it looks like banks are already playing that game. In a recent article, I discussed how Swiss banks don’t have the physical gold that their clients have bought. I also mentioned how banks are refusing to release the gold that the client holds in the bank.
This week I was contacted by a person who went to his bank in Zurich, one of the two largest in Switzerland, to get his physical gold out. He had seen my article on the subject. The bank, one of the biggest Asset Management banks in the world, told him that he couldn’t have his own gold because of new rules within the bank.
But this man did not give up that easily. He asked for a letter from the bank confirming that they refused to hand his gold to him. He told the bank that he would take this letter to the police. The bank clearly got scared and after three hours’ wait, the gentleman was told by the bank that they would hand his gold to him. So very generous of the bank to hand the client’s asset back to him!
This is yet another confirmation that banks are not going to give the clients their assets back without a major legal fight. But that is just the first stage, in my view. Soon banks will be under such pressure that they will hold on to clients’ assets. Few people believe that this is possible, but it is guaranteed that, in the not too distant future, insolvent banks will not be in a position to hand anything back to clients. Again I urge people to get assets out of the banks, in Switzerland or any other country. The financial system is already bankrupt, whatever central bank chiefs say....
11,000 KG GOLD FOR A PAINTING – WILL COST 110 KG IN 2025
What is absolutely certain is that global wealth will be totally decimated in the next 4-8 years. It doesn’t matter if you are very rich or “just own a house” with some equity left. Most of it will come down in value by 75-95% in the next few years as the debt and asset bubbles implode.
But what very few people realise or plan for, is the confiscation of wealth that will take place in coming years. There will be confiscation on many levels.
With times deteriorating, governments will be thrown out as ordinary people become dissatisfied with their rapidly declining ability to survive. Many people will lose their jobs and governments’ ability to help the poor and hungry will decline rapidly due to falling tax revenues. During that process, opposition parties will promise the earth. Thus we will see a society in upheaval due to political turbulence, social unrest, dire economic circumstances as well as anarchy.
TAXES WILL BE PUNITIVE
Many countries in the West have turned socialist in latter years, and this trend will continue as the climate deteriorates. With the ruling party desperately fighting for its own survival, their task becomes increasingly impossible as there is no money left in the coffer and printed money no longer has any value.
Opposition parties will promise solutions to all the problems and will have no difficulty becoming elected. But as they get into power they will also fail desperately. In most Western countries there will be left wing parties ruling but we might also see far right leaders emerging due to the anarchic situation.
As tax revenues decline rapidly, governments will desperately look for new ways of increasing the state’s income. Normal people will at this stage be very poor so it will serve no purpose to tax them. The obvious target will of course be the wealthy but also the middle classes. At that stage, the wealthy might already have lost half of their fortune or more, but socialist governments looking for revenue will ensure that most of their remaining wealth also disappears.
CONFISCATION BY TAXATION
Wealth taxes will be confiscatory and reach levels of 75% at least and possibly up to 90%. This will not only be popular with ordinary people who at that point are poor and suffering. It will also be what the desperate masses will demand, whether it is done peacefully or with violence.
What is happening in Saudi Arabia presently with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman confiscating the wealth of other Saudi Princes and Saudi businessmen might set an example.
Governments in the US, UK or Germany, for example, could just decide to freeze the assets of the wealthy and issue arrest warrants demanding transfer of say 85% of their wealth. Refusal would not be an option since it would lead to a long prison sentence plus confiscation of 100% of the wealth.
Now is the time to plan for the risks of confiscation and punitive taxation. Soon it will be too late.
All this sounds totally draconian and unrealistic in today’s “civilised” society. But anyone who doubts that these measures could happen only needs to study history. There are endless examples of confiscation of wealth. Often it is linked to periods of excess and decadence with major gaps between the rich and the poor, just as today. During the French Revolution in 1789 , the aristocracy not only lost much of their wealth, they also lost their lives. Same in the Russian Revolution in 1918 when both wealth and lives of the aristocracy were extinguished.
DANGEROUS TO FLAUNT WEALTH
We could easily then reach a state of anarchy due to the suffering of the masses. At that point they would turn against banks, governments and the wealthy leading to major violence as history repeats itself. Anything representing wealth will be despised by the masses, whether it is houses, cars, jewellery or clothes or other luxury assets. The flaunting of wealth that we see all over the world today could be very dangerous or even fatal at that time.
The majority of people, would call all this scaremongering and sensationalism. The problem is that because we live today, we think it is different now. Many believe it is totally acceptable to see bespoke Rolls Royces, or Ferraris in New York, London or Hong Kong costing $250,000 or more. Today very few protest against the enormous top prices paid for a house in the above cities costing $100 million or more. And to buy a painting for over $100 million happens regularly.
1/2 BILLION DOLLARS FOR A PAINTING
But if you want a Leonardo da Vinci, you must pay the neat sum of $450 million as an anonymous buyer did this week at the Christie’s auction in New York. A price level which very few can fathom.
Will almost $1/2 trillion be the record for a painting for decades or longer. Yes, in today’s money, that could certainly be the case. 11 tonnes of gold for a painting will probably not be beaten for the next 100 years or more. In the next 4-8 years, that painting can probably be bought for much less than 1 tonne of gold, more probably for 110 kilos or less (110 kg gold is today worth $4.5 million).
LAW AND ORDER WILL BREAK DOWN
For ordinary people, most of whom are not aware of these excesses, $1/2 billion for a painting is the ultimate decadence. This dangerous trend will not go unpunished in the future. And nobody must believe that law and order including police or military will function when society breaks down. Sadly, there will be no protection for the target groups.
Weapons will hardly help against the crowd. Best is to live in a place where you are surrounded by like minded or in a country which is less exposed. All this is not an option for many people but worth thinking about when there is still time.
Let me stress that I sincerely hope that none of what I have outlined will happen. But looking at risk and probabilities, we are now at a point in history when these events are likely to take place whether it is in the next few years or at some later point. Excesses of the magnitude we are seeing today as well as the gap between rich and poor will not continue without returning to the mean at least.
SWISS BANK REFUSES TO GIVE CLIENT HIS GOLD
Coming back to confiscation, it looks like banks are already playing that game. In a recent article, I discussed how Swiss banks don’t have the physical gold that their clients have bought. I also mentioned how banks are refusing to release the gold that the client holds in the bank.
This week I was contacted by a person who went to his bank in Zurich, one of the two largest in Switzerland, to get his physical gold out. He had seen my article on the subject. The bank, one of the biggest Asset Management banks in the world, told him that he couldn’t have his own gold because of new rules within the bank.
But this man did not give up that easily. He asked for a letter from the bank confirming that they refused to hand his gold to him. He told the bank that he would take this letter to the police. The bank clearly got scared and after three hours’ wait, the gentleman was told by the bank that they would hand his gold to him. So very generous of the bank to hand the client’s asset back to him!
This is yet another confirmation that banks are not going to give the clients their assets back without a major legal fight. But that is just the first stage, in my view. Soon banks will be under such pressure that they will hold on to clients’ assets. Few people believe that this is possible, but it is guaranteed that, in the not too distant future, insolvent banks will not be in a position to hand anything back to clients. Again I urge people to get assets out of the banks, in Switzerland or any other country. The financial system is already bankrupt, whatever central bank chiefs say....
Monday, November 27, 2017
SC154-7
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.jp/2017/11/our-national-madness.html
Our National Madness
The nation has lost its common sense, its soul and its sanity. Can we summarize the source of this remarkably pervasive madness?
Our efforts are now focused not on solving core problems but on covering up core problems, as if covering up problems is a substitute for solving them. Down this path lies madness, for this substitution of false narratives for reality erodes our ability to distinguish not just between reality and fantasy but our ability to distinguish between moral rights and wrongs.
The efforts of those in positions of power are now focused on obscuring the truth, marginalizing critics, blaming malevolent external forces, cloaking self-interest with virtue signaling and staking claims to victimhood. These are the five dynamics that are powering the nation's descent into madness and dysfunction.
Consider Harvey Weinstein. Evidence is now emerging that Mr. Weinstein and his army of toadies, bullies, thugs, et al. put enormous effort and resources into obscuring the truth, marginalizing critics, and cloaking self-interest with virtue signaling. Next up for Mr. Weinstein's team of apologists: blame the Russians (or an equivalently malevolent Other), and claim to be a victim of all those testifying against him.
This is the model for everyone in positions of power. The only variation is which of the five will be spewed as a first line of defense, and which will be held in reserve for the last-ditch defense against the truth becoming public.
I'm sorry if this is a shock, but the economic "recovery" is nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to obscure the pillage of the nation's wealth and income by state-protected cartels. The central bank can't actually fix what's broken in our economy, but it can manually push the needle of the stock market higher.
So rather than actually fix what's broken, the "solution" is to make the stock market the primary measure of "prosperity." In effect, the stagnation of real prosperity is a problem that would require profound (and painful to those gorging at the feeding trough) changes in the status quo; so the solution is to label the stock market "the measure of prosperity" and then shove it higher.
This substitution of trickery for reality solves nothing. It is the exact equivalent of the student who didn't study and who learned nothing erasing his F grade and forging an A in its place. Nothing has actually changed in terms of the student's knowledge or skillset, but he has fooled the authorities focusing on superficialities: incompetent, self-serving administrators who then tout the student's high grade as evidence of their own success, the media which mindlessly accepts the fake grade as evidence that all is peachy-keen in the school district, and so on down the line.
If this happens often enough, the student actually starts believing he can get away with trickery as a solution for all problems: just BS your way through any challenge, and if that fails, then marginalize one's critics, blame malevolent external forces, furiously virtue-signal, and if all else fails, stake a claim to victimhood.
In other words, the student loses touch with reality and is lost. The USA has lost touch with reality, for its leadership has embraced the notion that trickery and fakery that covers up problems is a substitute for solving problems--and if this fails to convince an increasingly jaded and cynical public, then body-slam the public with the other four tactics: marginalize critics, blame malevolent external forces, cloak self-interest with virtue signaling and stake claims to victimhood.
Unfortunately for our nation, madness is repeating what's failed and thinking it will work next time. Trickery, maligning critics, virtue signaling, blaming outside forces and claiming victimhood no longer have the desired effect on all but the most delusional (or self-serving) supporters of our profoundly corrupt leadership.
Actions have consequences. Fakery and trickery are not solutions; they are a form of self-delusional madness that destroys the nation's ability to face reality squarely and choose real solutions, no matter how painful the choice and path might be.
Our National Madness
The nation has lost its common sense, its soul and its sanity. Can we summarize the source of this remarkably pervasive madness?
Our efforts are now focused not on solving core problems but on covering up core problems, as if covering up problems is a substitute for solving them. Down this path lies madness, for this substitution of false narratives for reality erodes our ability to distinguish not just between reality and fantasy but our ability to distinguish between moral rights and wrongs.
The efforts of those in positions of power are now focused on obscuring the truth, marginalizing critics, blaming malevolent external forces, cloaking self-interest with virtue signaling and staking claims to victimhood. These are the five dynamics that are powering the nation's descent into madness and dysfunction.
Consider Harvey Weinstein. Evidence is now emerging that Mr. Weinstein and his army of toadies, bullies, thugs, et al. put enormous effort and resources into obscuring the truth, marginalizing critics, and cloaking self-interest with virtue signaling. Next up for Mr. Weinstein's team of apologists: blame the Russians (or an equivalently malevolent Other), and claim to be a victim of all those testifying against him.
This is the model for everyone in positions of power. The only variation is which of the five will be spewed as a first line of defense, and which will be held in reserve for the last-ditch defense against the truth becoming public.
I'm sorry if this is a shock, but the economic "recovery" is nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to obscure the pillage of the nation's wealth and income by state-protected cartels. The central bank can't actually fix what's broken in our economy, but it can manually push the needle of the stock market higher.
So rather than actually fix what's broken, the "solution" is to make the stock market the primary measure of "prosperity." In effect, the stagnation of real prosperity is a problem that would require profound (and painful to those gorging at the feeding trough) changes in the status quo; so the solution is to label the stock market "the measure of prosperity" and then shove it higher.
This substitution of trickery for reality solves nothing. It is the exact equivalent of the student who didn't study and who learned nothing erasing his F grade and forging an A in its place. Nothing has actually changed in terms of the student's knowledge or skillset, but he has fooled the authorities focusing on superficialities: incompetent, self-serving administrators who then tout the student's high grade as evidence of their own success, the media which mindlessly accepts the fake grade as evidence that all is peachy-keen in the school district, and so on down the line.
If this happens often enough, the student actually starts believing he can get away with trickery as a solution for all problems: just BS your way through any challenge, and if that fails, then marginalize one's critics, blame malevolent external forces, furiously virtue-signal, and if all else fails, stake a claim to victimhood.
In other words, the student loses touch with reality and is lost. The USA has lost touch with reality, for its leadership has embraced the notion that trickery and fakery that covers up problems is a substitute for solving problems--and if this fails to convince an increasingly jaded and cynical public, then body-slam the public with the other four tactics: marginalize critics, blame malevolent external forces, cloak self-interest with virtue signaling and stake claims to victimhood.
Unfortunately for our nation, madness is repeating what's failed and thinking it will work next time. Trickery, maligning critics, virtue signaling, blaming outside forces and claiming victimhood no longer have the desired effect on all but the most delusional (or self-serving) supporters of our profoundly corrupt leadership.
Actions have consequences. Fakery and trickery are not solutions; they are a form of self-delusional madness that destroys the nation's ability to face reality squarely and choose real solutions, no matter how painful the choice and path might be.
SC154-6
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/11/19/top-nsa-whistleblower-claims-russiagate-fake-increase-war-spending.html
Top NSA Whistleblower Claims ‘Russiagate’ a Fake to Increase War-Spending
William Binney is the mathematician and Russia-specialist, who quit the NSA in 2001 as its global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis, because of the lying about, and manipulations of, intelligence, that he saw — distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush Administration — in order to ‘justify’ systematic, massive, and all-encompassing, Government snooping into all Americans’ private electronic communications. His, and some colleagues’, efforts to get the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense to investigate the matter, produced FBI raids into their homes, and seizures of their computers, so as to remove incriminating evidence they might have against higher-ups. According to Binney, NSA's Director, Michael Hayden, had vetoed in August 2001 a far less intrusive and more effective system of signals-intelligence collection and analysis, which might have enabled the 9/11 attacks to be blocked — a more effective system that would have been less expensive, less intrusive, and not violated Americans’ Constitutional rights. Hayden went on to head the CIA, until the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency. Afterward, Hayden joined the Chertoff Group and other military-industrial-complex contractors of the US federal Government. There were no such rewards for any of the whistleblowers.
Binney viewed Hillary Clinton as continuing George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, and so, though reluctantly, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
On November 15th, an interview of Binney was published at the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, in which Binney provides technical details to explain why he strongly believes that the Democratic Party’s allegations, which say that Russia was the source of the leaks of information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, are nothing more than intentional concoctions and distortions, which are backed and promoted by America’s military-industrial complex, whose stock-values rise accordingly with the lies.
He believes,
there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …
Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider. …
And he stressed:
If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.
Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.
After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.
His technical explanation of how he came to this conclusion, is provided in that Washingtonsblog article. He doesn't think that the elements within the intelligence community which are promoting the Russiagate allegations can possibly be so stupid as to actually believe what they are saying. He claims that they know that what they are saying is false, because if it weren’t false, then they could provide, to the public, evidence that it is true, and do it without violating anyone’s rights, nor revealing any legitimate US national-security information.
Basically, he is saying that the keepers of the keys are blocking the public from the truth, because they know that the truth will expose the fact that they’ve been lying to the public, all along.
His technical explanation of the details employs a number of undefined terms, which aren’t understandable to persons who are not themselves technically knowledgeable about the field, such as his saying:
First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network. And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.
From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from. That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.
All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).
Binney explained what these numbers mean: Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.
However, no one who is promoting the Russiagate allegations is taking him on, to debate Binney’s allegations. Instead, all of the newsmedia are plastered with allegations of ‘Russia’s meddling in American democracy’.
There are people who know what the terms that Binney is using refer to. But, thus far, none of these people is saying that Binney is a liar. Instead, they’ve all just been ignoring him — and none of the major newsmedia have been inviting Binney and the promoters of the military-industrial-complex’s position onto their forums in order to debate these issues in public. It’s just like the situation was about ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ in 2002 and 2003 prior to our invasion and destruction of Iraq as a supposed ‘response’ to the 9/11 attacks.
Top NSA Whistleblower Claims ‘Russiagate’ a Fake to Increase War-Spending
William Binney is the mathematician and Russia-specialist, who quit the NSA in 2001 as its global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis, because of the lying about, and manipulations of, intelligence, that he saw — distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush Administration — in order to ‘justify’ systematic, massive, and all-encompassing, Government snooping into all Americans’ private electronic communications. His, and some colleagues’, efforts to get the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense to investigate the matter, produced FBI raids into their homes, and seizures of their computers, so as to remove incriminating evidence they might have against higher-ups. According to Binney, NSA's Director, Michael Hayden, had vetoed in August 2001 a far less intrusive and more effective system of signals-intelligence collection and analysis, which might have enabled the 9/11 attacks to be blocked — a more effective system that would have been less expensive, less intrusive, and not violated Americans’ Constitutional rights. Hayden went on to head the CIA, until the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency. Afterward, Hayden joined the Chertoff Group and other military-industrial-complex contractors of the US federal Government. There were no such rewards for any of the whistleblowers.
Binney viewed Hillary Clinton as continuing George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, and so, though reluctantly, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
On November 15th, an interview of Binney was published at the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, in which Binney provides technical details to explain why he strongly believes that the Democratic Party’s allegations, which say that Russia was the source of the leaks of information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, are nothing more than intentional concoctions and distortions, which are backed and promoted by America’s military-industrial complex, whose stock-values rise accordingly with the lies.
He believes,
there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …
Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider. …
And he stressed:
If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.
Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.
After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.
His technical explanation of how he came to this conclusion, is provided in that Washingtonsblog article. He doesn't think that the elements within the intelligence community which are promoting the Russiagate allegations can possibly be so stupid as to actually believe what they are saying. He claims that they know that what they are saying is false, because if it weren’t false, then they could provide, to the public, evidence that it is true, and do it without violating anyone’s rights, nor revealing any legitimate US national-security information.
Basically, he is saying that the keepers of the keys are blocking the public from the truth, because they know that the truth will expose the fact that they’ve been lying to the public, all along.
His technical explanation of the details employs a number of undefined terms, which aren’t understandable to persons who are not themselves technically knowledgeable about the field, such as his saying:
First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network. And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.
From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from. That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.
All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).
Binney explained what these numbers mean: Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.
However, no one who is promoting the Russiagate allegations is taking him on, to debate Binney’s allegations. Instead, all of the newsmedia are plastered with allegations of ‘Russia’s meddling in American democracy’.
There are people who know what the terms that Binney is using refer to. But, thus far, none of these people is saying that Binney is a liar. Instead, they’ve all just been ignoring him — and none of the major newsmedia have been inviting Binney and the promoters of the military-industrial-complex’s position onto their forums in order to debate these issues in public. It’s just like the situation was about ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ in 2002 and 2003 prior to our invasion and destruction of Iraq as a supposed ‘response’ to the 9/11 attacks.
SC154-5
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/16/mccarthyism-redux-attacks-on-the-russian-media/
McCarthyism Redux: Attacks on the Russian Media
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not fearful men, not descended from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow, spoke these words in the 1950s, protesting against the witchhunt of communists, alleged communists, and of anyone thought to evince anything resembling sympathy or support for ideas associated with communism by Senator Joseph McCarthy, inspired by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of the 1940s.
McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.
In 2017 we are witnessing the rebirth of McCarthyism across the West in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter. In the process critical thinking and reason has been sacrificed on the altar of Pavlovian conditioning and unreason, resulting in the embrace of hysterical Russophobic nostrums by a liberal political and media class for whom Russia can only ever exist as a vanquished foe or a foe that needs to be vanquished.
When a think-tank with the impertinence of naming itself ‘European Values’ feels emboldened to compile and publish a ‘hit list’ of over 2000 contributors to RT, as it did recently, made up of politicians, former diplomats, journalists, and academics from across the West, the foundations of Western liberal democracy start to crack. And when the US Congress passes a bill to force RT America to register as a ‘foreign agent’ then we are talking war being waged not against Russian media per say, but the thousands of US citizens who work for Russian media and their right to ply their trade in the land of the free.
When it comes to foreign agents, isn’t it telling that neither the pro-Israel lobby group (AIPAC), nor its pro-Saudi counterpart (SAPRAC), are considered such, despite their undeniably and inarguably malign influence on US foreign policy.
There is nothing that RT or Sputnik International does that other state-funded broadcasters – the BBC, Voice of America, and France24 et al. – are not doing when it comes to their operations overseas. All state-funded media engage in cultural outreach, and each proffers an analysis via the prism of their own cultural, ideological and national worldview.
But let us not be naïve. It would be a mistake to divorce this ongoing, ever-intensifying campaign to drive RT and Sputnik out of existence from the wider geopolitical struggle over the Washington-led unipolar status quo and the multipolar alternative demanded by Moscow’s recovery and re-emergence as a global power, along with Beijing. In this regard, in the context of this geopolitical struggle, Russian media in the West is seen as low hanging fruit, an easy target by which to render Russia a bloody nose.
Does anyone really believe for a moment that if Russia had or did accept its place as a neo-satellite of Washington that this campaign against RT and Sputnik would be taking place? If both media channels were echo chambers of the Washington Consensus you can best believe they would be allowed to operate freely and without molestation, without their employees or contributors being traduced as ‘Kremlin propagandists’ or de facto ‘Russian agents’.
The entire thing is a sham – a malicious and ideologically driven attempt to police the portals of news dissemination and analysis to the point where rigid acceptance and obeisance to the aforementioned Washington Consensus, responsible for upending the lives of millions at home and abroad over the years, is total.
There is a simple rule of thumb that will never let you down. It dictates that those who tell you who your enemy should be are usually your enemy. It begs the question of whether Russophobia has become the acceptable form of racism for a liberal class whose hypocrisy is only exceeded by its mendacity?
As for those on the so-called left who have remained silent, or worse are gloating over the moves to shut down Russian media, they are like people feeding a crocodile hoping it will eat them last. The precedent being set by this anti-Russian hysteria is self-evident, one that it would be folly to ignore. Thus when the day comes that Russian media is driven out of existence, theirs will be a hollow victory that bespeaks the collapse of anything resembling opposition to the neoliberal, interventionist, and imperialist status quo.
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
McCarthyism Redux: Attacks on the Russian Media
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not fearful men, not descended from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow, spoke these words in the 1950s, protesting against the witchhunt of communists, alleged communists, and of anyone thought to evince anything resembling sympathy or support for ideas associated with communism by Senator Joseph McCarthy, inspired by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of the 1940s.
McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.
In 2017 we are witnessing the rebirth of McCarthyism across the West in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter. In the process critical thinking and reason has been sacrificed on the altar of Pavlovian conditioning and unreason, resulting in the embrace of hysterical Russophobic nostrums by a liberal political and media class for whom Russia can only ever exist as a vanquished foe or a foe that needs to be vanquished.
When a think-tank with the impertinence of naming itself ‘European Values’ feels emboldened to compile and publish a ‘hit list’ of over 2000 contributors to RT, as it did recently, made up of politicians, former diplomats, journalists, and academics from across the West, the foundations of Western liberal democracy start to crack. And when the US Congress passes a bill to force RT America to register as a ‘foreign agent’ then we are talking war being waged not against Russian media per say, but the thousands of US citizens who work for Russian media and their right to ply their trade in the land of the free.
When it comes to foreign agents, isn’t it telling that neither the pro-Israel lobby group (AIPAC), nor its pro-Saudi counterpart (SAPRAC), are considered such, despite their undeniably and inarguably malign influence on US foreign policy.
There is nothing that RT or Sputnik International does that other state-funded broadcasters – the BBC, Voice of America, and France24 et al. – are not doing when it comes to their operations overseas. All state-funded media engage in cultural outreach, and each proffers an analysis via the prism of their own cultural, ideological and national worldview.
But let us not be naïve. It would be a mistake to divorce this ongoing, ever-intensifying campaign to drive RT and Sputnik out of existence from the wider geopolitical struggle over the Washington-led unipolar status quo and the multipolar alternative demanded by Moscow’s recovery and re-emergence as a global power, along with Beijing. In this regard, in the context of this geopolitical struggle, Russian media in the West is seen as low hanging fruit, an easy target by which to render Russia a bloody nose.
Does anyone really believe for a moment that if Russia had or did accept its place as a neo-satellite of Washington that this campaign against RT and Sputnik would be taking place? If both media channels were echo chambers of the Washington Consensus you can best believe they would be allowed to operate freely and without molestation, without their employees or contributors being traduced as ‘Kremlin propagandists’ or de facto ‘Russian agents’.
The entire thing is a sham – a malicious and ideologically driven attempt to police the portals of news dissemination and analysis to the point where rigid acceptance and obeisance to the aforementioned Washington Consensus, responsible for upending the lives of millions at home and abroad over the years, is total.
There is a simple rule of thumb that will never let you down. It dictates that those who tell you who your enemy should be are usually your enemy. It begs the question of whether Russophobia has become the acceptable form of racism for a liberal class whose hypocrisy is only exceeded by its mendacity?
As for those on the so-called left who have remained silent, or worse are gloating over the moves to shut down Russian media, they are like people feeding a crocodile hoping it will eat them last. The precedent being set by this anti-Russian hysteria is self-evident, one that it would be folly to ignore. Thus when the day comes that Russian media is driven out of existence, theirs will be a hollow victory that bespeaks the collapse of anything resembling opposition to the neoliberal, interventionist, and imperialist status quo.
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
SC154-4
https://dailyreckoning.com/the-illusion-of-growth/
The Illusion of Growth
The Wall Street Journal published a superb example of hopium recently in a sunny-side-up story entitled “U. S. Manufacturing Rides Rising Tide, Buoyed by Global Growth, Optimism.”
Indeed, this lazy cheerleading excuse for journalism captured the sum and substance of why the punters keep buying the dips despite troubles gathering all around.
That is, as the tax bill falters, the crusade to remove the Donald from office gathers strength, the Fed moves into balance sheet normalization and instability breaks out all over the world from the Persian Gulf to the Korean peninsula.
You would think the title says it all, but the WSJ was not nearly done. It cited a 156,000 pick-up in manufacturing employment since last November, rising energy and commodity prices as evidence of a booming global economy and double digit growth in business investment earlier this year, among other things.
American manufacturing has picked up pace over the last 12 months thanks to steady global economic growth, a rise in energy and other commodity prices, and increased business confidence.
Although progress isn’t being felt by all industries, makers of items ranging from bulldozers to semiconductors to food products are on the upswing as various measures of spending, sentiment and employment have climbed, while stock markets have hit record highs.
Yet every one of the trends cited in the WSJ article are less than a year-old. They coincide with the Great Coronation Boom in the Red Ponzi ( the run-up to Xi Jinping’s ascension to total power at the 19th Party Congress); represent only a minor up-tick from the 2014-2015 global deflation; and in the context of the current feeble recovery from the 2008 crisis represent nothing at all to write home about.
Indeed, I am confident that as the Red Ponzi goes into a stabilization and credit containment mode, as is already evident from the October economic data (fudged as it is), that the slight lift to global activity engendered by the latest China credit impulse will quickly fade. And with it the entire trading meme reflected in that WSJ puff piece.
But short of that yet to unfold but predictable global mini-cycle, the actual data on U.S. manufacturing output trends through September reveal nothing to smile about.
In fact, overall U.S. manufacturing production is still down 4.3% from its pre-crisis high back in December 2007, and was no higher last month than it was three years ago in November 2014.
Of course, global commodity prices did perk up during the last 18 months. Not only did they rebound off the bottom in normal cyclical fashion, but the hands of China’s central bank were more than a little evident.
When they unleashed the latest credit tsunami in early 2016, the hordes of Chinese speculators dutifully bought up all the iron ore, copper, steel, diesel fuel etc that was to be had and which could be readily financed in cash and futures markets alike.
Presently, they will be selling, too, as the post-coronation signals coming out of Beijing become unmistakably clear.
Nor is the above even the half of it. If you look at output of U.S. consumer goods, which is much less attached to the global commodity/industrial cycle, the rising tide of manufacturing output is nowhere to be seen.
In fact, consumer goods production has flat-lined for the last two years, and is still below where it was at the pre-crisis peak.
The same is true of manufacturing employment. There is no “rising tide.” Thus, between October 2007 and the April 2010 bottom, the U.S. lost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs — representing a loss of 76,000 high paying jobs per month.
By contrast, during the three years since October 2014, the U.S. has recovered about one-tenth of that loss — with manufacturing jobs expanding at a rate of just 6,000 per month. That is to say, the WSJ was essentially trumpeting statistical noise.
We are now 120 months from the pre-crisis peak in November 2007. Yet the compound annual growth rate of manufacturing is just 0.08%. Which is to say, nothing.
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By contrast, every prior peak-to-peak recovery pales that tiny beep of white noise into insignificance. Thus, between July 1981 and the July 1990 peaks, industrial production expanded at 2.18% a year during the so-called Reagan boom.
Likewise, during the Greenspan tech boom of the 1990s, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for industrial production was 4.02%. Even during the highly artificial and unsustainable Greenspan housing boom between December 2000 and November 2007, the index rose at a rate of 1.31% per year.
So Thursday’s industrial production number for October actually signaled that the U.S. industrial economy remains dead in the water. It is floundering in a manner that is off the historical charts — and not in a good way.
But stocks keep marching higher.
In short, financial information has been totally corrupted by the distortions of monetary central planning. Accordingly, when the third and greatest financial bubble of the 21st century collapses — and it is coming soon — it will also arrive as a great surprise.
As I keep insisting, monetary central planning systematically falsifies asset prices and corrupts the flow of financial information. That’s why bubbles seemingly inflate endlessly and massively, and also why financial crashes and economic corrections appear to come out of the blue without warning.
Back in the winter of 1999-2000, for example, we were allegedly in the midst of a “new age economy.” The revolution in technology then underway, it was claimed, meant all historic valuation benchmarks — like P/E multiples, cash flow and book values — were irrelevant to stock prices.
Likewise, in the fall of 2007 there was nary a cloud in the economic skies. That’s because the Great Moderation led by the geniuses at the Fed had purportedly engendered a “goldilocks” economy destined to expand indefinitely.
Within months of the dotcom epiphanies, however, the highflying NASDAQ 100 crashed — eventually hitting bottom 83% below its new age heights. And 15 months after the S&P 500 reached its goldilocks peak of 1570 in October 2007 it staggered around in smoldering ruins at 670 — down 57% from its housing bubble high.
Today, the so-called stock market now consists entirely of what amounts to day traders and HST (high speed trading) machines. There is no “price discovery” in the classic sense of divining the true economic and political fundamentals. The casino has become entirely a ward of the central banks.
Needless to say, we are again on the precipice of a crash and correction that no one sees coming, but this one has an added twist.
Namely, three strikes and you are out!
What I mean, of course, is that the Fed and other central banks are out of dry powder. They are now stranded near the zero bound with bloated balance sheets that have actually reached hideous girth relative to current GDP and all historical experience — meaning they will have almost no capacity to reflate the next busted bubble, as they quickly did in 2001 and 2009.
Do yourself a favor and get out of the casino now.
The Illusion of Growth
The Wall Street Journal published a superb example of hopium recently in a sunny-side-up story entitled “U. S. Manufacturing Rides Rising Tide, Buoyed by Global Growth, Optimism.”
Indeed, this lazy cheerleading excuse for journalism captured the sum and substance of why the punters keep buying the dips despite troubles gathering all around.
That is, as the tax bill falters, the crusade to remove the Donald from office gathers strength, the Fed moves into balance sheet normalization and instability breaks out all over the world from the Persian Gulf to the Korean peninsula.
You would think the title says it all, but the WSJ was not nearly done. It cited a 156,000 pick-up in manufacturing employment since last November, rising energy and commodity prices as evidence of a booming global economy and double digit growth in business investment earlier this year, among other things.
American manufacturing has picked up pace over the last 12 months thanks to steady global economic growth, a rise in energy and other commodity prices, and increased business confidence.
Although progress isn’t being felt by all industries, makers of items ranging from bulldozers to semiconductors to food products are on the upswing as various measures of spending, sentiment and employment have climbed, while stock markets have hit record highs.
Yet every one of the trends cited in the WSJ article are less than a year-old. They coincide with the Great Coronation Boom in the Red Ponzi ( the run-up to Xi Jinping’s ascension to total power at the 19th Party Congress); represent only a minor up-tick from the 2014-2015 global deflation; and in the context of the current feeble recovery from the 2008 crisis represent nothing at all to write home about.
Indeed, I am confident that as the Red Ponzi goes into a stabilization and credit containment mode, as is already evident from the October economic data (fudged as it is), that the slight lift to global activity engendered by the latest China credit impulse will quickly fade. And with it the entire trading meme reflected in that WSJ puff piece.
But short of that yet to unfold but predictable global mini-cycle, the actual data on U.S. manufacturing output trends through September reveal nothing to smile about.
In fact, overall U.S. manufacturing production is still down 4.3% from its pre-crisis high back in December 2007, and was no higher last month than it was three years ago in November 2014.
Of course, global commodity prices did perk up during the last 18 months. Not only did they rebound off the bottom in normal cyclical fashion, but the hands of China’s central bank were more than a little evident.
When they unleashed the latest credit tsunami in early 2016, the hordes of Chinese speculators dutifully bought up all the iron ore, copper, steel, diesel fuel etc that was to be had and which could be readily financed in cash and futures markets alike.
Presently, they will be selling, too, as the post-coronation signals coming out of Beijing become unmistakably clear.
Nor is the above even the half of it. If you look at output of U.S. consumer goods, which is much less attached to the global commodity/industrial cycle, the rising tide of manufacturing output is nowhere to be seen.
In fact, consumer goods production has flat-lined for the last two years, and is still below where it was at the pre-crisis peak.
The same is true of manufacturing employment. There is no “rising tide.” Thus, between October 2007 and the April 2010 bottom, the U.S. lost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs — representing a loss of 76,000 high paying jobs per month.
By contrast, during the three years since October 2014, the U.S. has recovered about one-tenth of that loss — with manufacturing jobs expanding at a rate of just 6,000 per month. That is to say, the WSJ was essentially trumpeting statistical noise.
We are now 120 months from the pre-crisis peak in November 2007. Yet the compound annual growth rate of manufacturing is just 0.08%. Which is to say, nothing.
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By contrast, every prior peak-to-peak recovery pales that tiny beep of white noise into insignificance. Thus, between July 1981 and the July 1990 peaks, industrial production expanded at 2.18% a year during the so-called Reagan boom.
Likewise, during the Greenspan tech boom of the 1990s, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for industrial production was 4.02%. Even during the highly artificial and unsustainable Greenspan housing boom between December 2000 and November 2007, the index rose at a rate of 1.31% per year.
So Thursday’s industrial production number for October actually signaled that the U.S. industrial economy remains dead in the water. It is floundering in a manner that is off the historical charts — and not in a good way.
But stocks keep marching higher.
In short, financial information has been totally corrupted by the distortions of monetary central planning. Accordingly, when the third and greatest financial bubble of the 21st century collapses — and it is coming soon — it will also arrive as a great surprise.
As I keep insisting, monetary central planning systematically falsifies asset prices and corrupts the flow of financial information. That’s why bubbles seemingly inflate endlessly and massively, and also why financial crashes and economic corrections appear to come out of the blue without warning.
Back in the winter of 1999-2000, for example, we were allegedly in the midst of a “new age economy.” The revolution in technology then underway, it was claimed, meant all historic valuation benchmarks — like P/E multiples, cash flow and book values — were irrelevant to stock prices.
Likewise, in the fall of 2007 there was nary a cloud in the economic skies. That’s because the Great Moderation led by the geniuses at the Fed had purportedly engendered a “goldilocks” economy destined to expand indefinitely.
Within months of the dotcom epiphanies, however, the highflying NASDAQ 100 crashed — eventually hitting bottom 83% below its new age heights. And 15 months after the S&P 500 reached its goldilocks peak of 1570 in October 2007 it staggered around in smoldering ruins at 670 — down 57% from its housing bubble high.
Today, the so-called stock market now consists entirely of what amounts to day traders and HST (high speed trading) machines. There is no “price discovery” in the classic sense of divining the true economic and political fundamentals. The casino has become entirely a ward of the central banks.
Needless to say, we are again on the precipice of a crash and correction that no one sees coming, but this one has an added twist.
Namely, three strikes and you are out!
What I mean, of course, is that the Fed and other central banks are out of dry powder. They are now stranded near the zero bound with bloated balance sheets that have actually reached hideous girth relative to current GDP and all historical experience — meaning they will have almost no capacity to reflate the next busted bubble, as they quickly did in 2001 and 2009.
Do yourself a favor and get out of the casino now.
Saturday, November 25, 2017
SC154-3
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-old-songs/
The Old Songs
What if the fun and games of 2017 are over? The hidden message behind the sexual harassment freak show of recent weeks is that nothing else is sufficiently serious to occupy the nation’s attention. We’re living in the Year of Suspended Reality, stuck in the sideshow and missing the three-ring circus next door in the big tent.
It probably all comes down to money. Money represents the mojo to keep on keeping on, and there is probably nothing more unreal in American life these days than the way we measure our money — literally, what it’s worth, and what everything related to it is worth. So there is nothing more unreal in our national life than the idea that it’s possible to keep on keeping on as we do.
The weeks ahead may be most illuminating on this score. The debt ceiling suspension runs out on December 8, around the same time that the tax reform question will resolve one way or another. The debt ceiling means that the treasury can’t issue any more bonds, bills, or notes. That is, it can’t borrow any more money to pretend the government can keep running. Normally these days (and it’s really very abnormal), the treasury pawns off paper IOUs to the Federal Reserve and the Fed makes digital entries on various account ledgers that purport to be “money.” And, by the way, the Fed is a consortium of private banks not a department of government — which is surely one of a thousand ways that the public is confused and deceived about what condition our condition is in, as the old song goes.
There’s a fair chance that congress may not be able to resolve the debt ceiling deadline. The votes may just not be there. If the deadline comes and goes, the treasury can only use incoming tax revenues to cover its costs, and it won’t be enough. It will have to choose whether it issues paychecks to the roughly 2.7 million US government employees, or pays the vendors that sell things like warplanes to the military, or pay out so-called entitlements like Medicare and SNAP cards, or pay the interest on the previously-issued bonds, debts, and bills that the US has racked up over the years. Believe it or not, making those interest payments is probably the top priority, because failing to do that would shove the nation officially into default for the first time and destroy the country’s credit standing. The full faith and credit in the US dollar would shatter.
And then the fun and games would really cease. The country would discover it doesn’t have its mojo working, as another old song goes. The reality of being truly broke will set in. After all, there are two basic ways of going broke as a nation: you can run out of money; or you can have plenty of money that is worthless. Take your pick.
There is some kind of revolution coming to American life. One way or another, it amounts to a much lower standard of living. The journey there may take the public by surprise, a la Ernest Hemingway’s crack about how a character in one of his stories went broke: slowly, and then all at once. The main question about this journey must be whether it is accompanied by political violence. One would have to think the potential for that is pretty high, given levels of animosity and delusional thinking among the two opposing factions — can we even call them Left and Right anymore? — which may even exceed the ill-feeling of 1861.
The tax reform bill, whether it lives or dies, may only become a laughable footnote to the greater quandary of national insolvency. And, anyway, the proposals so far amount to a hall of mirrors inside a three-card-monte house of horrors that almost nobody really understands. As yet another old song says, this ain’t no Mud Club… this ain’t no foolin’ around. Meanwhile, down in the rococo dining room of Mar a Lago, the Golden Golem of Greatness tweeted yesterday that he was presiding over the greatest stock market ever! Kind of reminds me of the moment that old Joe Kennedy got a stock tip from his shoeshine boy.
The Old Songs
What if the fun and games of 2017 are over? The hidden message behind the sexual harassment freak show of recent weeks is that nothing else is sufficiently serious to occupy the nation’s attention. We’re living in the Year of Suspended Reality, stuck in the sideshow and missing the three-ring circus next door in the big tent.
It probably all comes down to money. Money represents the mojo to keep on keeping on, and there is probably nothing more unreal in American life these days than the way we measure our money — literally, what it’s worth, and what everything related to it is worth. So there is nothing more unreal in our national life than the idea that it’s possible to keep on keeping on as we do.
The weeks ahead may be most illuminating on this score. The debt ceiling suspension runs out on December 8, around the same time that the tax reform question will resolve one way or another. The debt ceiling means that the treasury can’t issue any more bonds, bills, or notes. That is, it can’t borrow any more money to pretend the government can keep running. Normally these days (and it’s really very abnormal), the treasury pawns off paper IOUs to the Federal Reserve and the Fed makes digital entries on various account ledgers that purport to be “money.” And, by the way, the Fed is a consortium of private banks not a department of government — which is surely one of a thousand ways that the public is confused and deceived about what condition our condition is in, as the old song goes.
There’s a fair chance that congress may not be able to resolve the debt ceiling deadline. The votes may just not be there. If the deadline comes and goes, the treasury can only use incoming tax revenues to cover its costs, and it won’t be enough. It will have to choose whether it issues paychecks to the roughly 2.7 million US government employees, or pays the vendors that sell things like warplanes to the military, or pay out so-called entitlements like Medicare and SNAP cards, or pay the interest on the previously-issued bonds, debts, and bills that the US has racked up over the years. Believe it or not, making those interest payments is probably the top priority, because failing to do that would shove the nation officially into default for the first time and destroy the country’s credit standing. The full faith and credit in the US dollar would shatter.
And then the fun and games would really cease. The country would discover it doesn’t have its mojo working, as another old song goes. The reality of being truly broke will set in. After all, there are two basic ways of going broke as a nation: you can run out of money; or you can have plenty of money that is worthless. Take your pick.
There is some kind of revolution coming to American life. One way or another, it amounts to a much lower standard of living. The journey there may take the public by surprise, a la Ernest Hemingway’s crack about how a character in one of his stories went broke: slowly, and then all at once. The main question about this journey must be whether it is accompanied by political violence. One would have to think the potential for that is pretty high, given levels of animosity and delusional thinking among the two opposing factions — can we even call them Left and Right anymore? — which may even exceed the ill-feeling of 1861.
The tax reform bill, whether it lives or dies, may only become a laughable footnote to the greater quandary of national insolvency. And, anyway, the proposals so far amount to a hall of mirrors inside a three-card-monte house of horrors that almost nobody really understands. As yet another old song says, this ain’t no Mud Club… this ain’t no foolin’ around. Meanwhile, down in the rococo dining room of Mar a Lago, the Golden Golem of Greatness tweeted yesterday that he was presiding over the greatest stock market ever! Kind of reminds me of the moment that old Joe Kennedy got a stock tip from his shoeshine boy.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
SC154-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48263.htm
Syria, Russia & Iran Shift to Diplomacy, While US and Allies Push for War
In a big week for Syrian peace talks, President Assad was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, where the leaders of Iran and Turkey are also to convene. Fittingly, perhaps, the US had no input into the renewed effort for peace in Syria.
Putin said that with the defeat of ISIS (Daesh, Islamic State) and other terror groups in Syria now virtually achieved, the parties to the conflict must underpin the political means to win the peace. Significantly, the talks in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi reinforce the earlier Geneva accord which assents to President Bashar Assad and his government in Damascus as the sovereign authority of Syria.
The demand by Washington and its European allies for Assad to “stand down” has long ago expired. That void is a tacit acknowledgment the nearly seven-year covert war in Syria for regime change has been defeated or at least the covert war in its guise of Western-backed proxy militant groups.
The absence of US and European officials at the peace talks in Sochi this week speaks volumes about their pernicious role in the Syrian war.
While Syria, Russia, Iran, and Turkey endeavor to revamp the peace negotiations, it is significant that Pentagon chief James Mattis was last week saying that US military forces would be digging in further on Syrian territory.
The reluctance of US forces to pack up in Syria despite the demise of the terror groups is perhaps best viewed as part of a regional resurgence of an American military presence. Under President Trump – despite his election campaign promises – the level of US forces has increased substantially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Deployment in Syria fits into this pattern of a regional buildup.
The increasing level of US military strength in the region also underlines the ominous signs of Saudi Arabia and Israel ramping up hostility toward Iran and Lebanon.
Last week, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said American forces would be staying in Syria despite the contradiction of terror groups being routed. Mattis' claims that US forces have a legal United Nations’ mandate for their presence in Syria were dismissed by Russia and Syria as a flawed understanding of international law.
But even on Mattis’ own faulty reasoning, his claims are dubious. If US forces have a mandate to be in Syria to defeat terrorists, as claimed, then why are they there given the terrorists have been largely defeated?
Mattis said the new purpose of US forces were to “prevent ISIS 2.0” arising. Despite the fact that the Americans hardly ever engaged in fighting against ISIS, and indeed, as the BBC even reported, gave the militants safe passage, including helicopter airlifting commanders out of harm’s way.
It was the Syrian Arab Army, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah who did all the heavy lifting to roll back the terror groups, which had been covertly armed and financed by the US and its NATO and regional client regimes. ISIS, Nusra, and all the other alphabet-soup terror groups were only ever a pretext for the US to deploy its warplanes and Special Forces in Syria – a presence which actually constitutes foreign aggression, as the Syrian government and Russia have repeatedly pointed out.
And yet here we have Mattis claiming that it was the US which defeated ISIS in Syria, and warning that the specter of this American asset reemerging as ISIS 2.0 is grounds for continuing to occupy Syrian territory. The Americans’ handy phantom-enemy is serving twice over. That is to “legitimize” the US intervening in Syria; and now to justify US forces staying there – just when the real victors against the terrorists, Syria, Russia, and Iran are trying to demilitarize the country.
Far from the public view, US forces are scaling up their presence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Politico has called it an “official charade.” The Trump administration and the Pentagon are going behind the American people’s backs to deploy thousands more troops across the Middle East.
Much to the displeasure of Washington, Turkey disclosed last week that the US has 13 military bases in Syria. Russia, apparently, has only five bases, even though that country had a much greater military impact on defeating ISIS and other terrorist networks over the past two years.
One of the biggest US bases is near Kobani, about 140 kilometers from the northern city of Raqqa. This is the location no doubt where Mattis was referring to when he said last week that US forces would be digging in.
The US airbase at Kobani has been dramatically upgraded over the past year from what was a rough airfield accommodating only a select few types of aircraft to one now where “every type of air frame” in the Pentagon’s fleet can be landed, including the largest troop-carrying and cargo planes.
The US base at Kobani is also part of a chain of new airfields that connect from Qayarrah West in northern Iraq, to the Taqba Dam, also north of Raqqa.
Officially, there are supposed to be only 500 troops in Syria under the Pentagon’s Force Management Level policy. But as with Afghanistan and Iraq, the real numbers are believed to be much higher than what is officially acknowledged.
A large part of the false accounting arises because the Pentagon doesn’t count units which spend less than 120 days in the country. These units include engineers and troops who are charged with building bridges, roads, and landing strips.
There is a direct analogy here with how US and NATO forces underestimate force levels in the Baltic and Black Sea regions by arbitrarily not counting troops, warplanes and ships described as “rotating presence.” But if you rotate frequently enough, the force levels in effect become permanent and are much larger in practice than is officially admitted.
In addition to ensuring its proxies don’t come back as “ISIS 2.0” (how’s that for chutzpah!), Mattis also said that the expanded US forces were there to ensure the future peace talks in Geneva, resuming on November 28, would gain “traction.”
“We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has traction,” said Mattis last week while in London meeting his British counterparts.
What this suggests is that Washington is using its illegitimate military occupation of Syrian territory as a way to leverage the political process. By forcibly holding on to Syrian territory, Washington is perhaps calculating that the Assad government might cede to its demands on standing down or allowing a defeated opposition more say in drawing up a new constitution.
If the US were genuinely committed to a political process in Syria, then why aren’t its diplomats giving momentum to the Russian-brokered talks in Sochi this week in preparation for the subsequent Geneva summit?
But even more sinister is the region-wide context of US force buildup – largely in secret unknown to the American public. With Washington’s client regimes, Saudi Arabia and Israel, pushing for a confrontation with Iran, directly or via Lebanon and Yemen, the expanding military presence in Syria indicates war in that country is far from over. Instead, it could be but a prelude to a more devastating regional conflagration.
Syria, Russia & Iran Shift to Diplomacy, While US and Allies Push for War
In a big week for Syrian peace talks, President Assad was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, where the leaders of Iran and Turkey are also to convene. Fittingly, perhaps, the US had no input into the renewed effort for peace in Syria.
Putin said that with the defeat of ISIS (Daesh, Islamic State) and other terror groups in Syria now virtually achieved, the parties to the conflict must underpin the political means to win the peace. Significantly, the talks in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi reinforce the earlier Geneva accord which assents to President Bashar Assad and his government in Damascus as the sovereign authority of Syria.
The demand by Washington and its European allies for Assad to “stand down” has long ago expired. That void is a tacit acknowledgment the nearly seven-year covert war in Syria for regime change has been defeated or at least the covert war in its guise of Western-backed proxy militant groups.
The absence of US and European officials at the peace talks in Sochi this week speaks volumes about their pernicious role in the Syrian war.
While Syria, Russia, Iran, and Turkey endeavor to revamp the peace negotiations, it is significant that Pentagon chief James Mattis was last week saying that US military forces would be digging in further on Syrian territory.
The reluctance of US forces to pack up in Syria despite the demise of the terror groups is perhaps best viewed as part of a regional resurgence of an American military presence. Under President Trump – despite his election campaign promises – the level of US forces has increased substantially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Deployment in Syria fits into this pattern of a regional buildup.
The increasing level of US military strength in the region also underlines the ominous signs of Saudi Arabia and Israel ramping up hostility toward Iran and Lebanon.
Last week, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said American forces would be staying in Syria despite the contradiction of terror groups being routed. Mattis' claims that US forces have a legal United Nations’ mandate for their presence in Syria were dismissed by Russia and Syria as a flawed understanding of international law.
But even on Mattis’ own faulty reasoning, his claims are dubious. If US forces have a mandate to be in Syria to defeat terrorists, as claimed, then why are they there given the terrorists have been largely defeated?
Mattis said the new purpose of US forces were to “prevent ISIS 2.0” arising. Despite the fact that the Americans hardly ever engaged in fighting against ISIS, and indeed, as the BBC even reported, gave the militants safe passage, including helicopter airlifting commanders out of harm’s way.
It was the Syrian Arab Army, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah who did all the heavy lifting to roll back the terror groups, which had been covertly armed and financed by the US and its NATO and regional client regimes. ISIS, Nusra, and all the other alphabet-soup terror groups were only ever a pretext for the US to deploy its warplanes and Special Forces in Syria – a presence which actually constitutes foreign aggression, as the Syrian government and Russia have repeatedly pointed out.
And yet here we have Mattis claiming that it was the US which defeated ISIS in Syria, and warning that the specter of this American asset reemerging as ISIS 2.0 is grounds for continuing to occupy Syrian territory. The Americans’ handy phantom-enemy is serving twice over. That is to “legitimize” the US intervening in Syria; and now to justify US forces staying there – just when the real victors against the terrorists, Syria, Russia, and Iran are trying to demilitarize the country.
Far from the public view, US forces are scaling up their presence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Politico has called it an “official charade.” The Trump administration and the Pentagon are going behind the American people’s backs to deploy thousands more troops across the Middle East.
Much to the displeasure of Washington, Turkey disclosed last week that the US has 13 military bases in Syria. Russia, apparently, has only five bases, even though that country had a much greater military impact on defeating ISIS and other terrorist networks over the past two years.
One of the biggest US bases is near Kobani, about 140 kilometers from the northern city of Raqqa. This is the location no doubt where Mattis was referring to when he said last week that US forces would be digging in.
The US airbase at Kobani has been dramatically upgraded over the past year from what was a rough airfield accommodating only a select few types of aircraft to one now where “every type of air frame” in the Pentagon’s fleet can be landed, including the largest troop-carrying and cargo planes.
The US base at Kobani is also part of a chain of new airfields that connect from Qayarrah West in northern Iraq, to the Taqba Dam, also north of Raqqa.
Officially, there are supposed to be only 500 troops in Syria under the Pentagon’s Force Management Level policy. But as with Afghanistan and Iraq, the real numbers are believed to be much higher than what is officially acknowledged.
A large part of the false accounting arises because the Pentagon doesn’t count units which spend less than 120 days in the country. These units include engineers and troops who are charged with building bridges, roads, and landing strips.
There is a direct analogy here with how US and NATO forces underestimate force levels in the Baltic and Black Sea regions by arbitrarily not counting troops, warplanes and ships described as “rotating presence.” But if you rotate frequently enough, the force levels in effect become permanent and are much larger in practice than is officially admitted.
In addition to ensuring its proxies don’t come back as “ISIS 2.0” (how’s that for chutzpah!), Mattis also said that the expanded US forces were there to ensure the future peace talks in Geneva, resuming on November 28, would gain “traction.”
“We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has traction,” said Mattis last week while in London meeting his British counterparts.
What this suggests is that Washington is using its illegitimate military occupation of Syrian territory as a way to leverage the political process. By forcibly holding on to Syrian territory, Washington is perhaps calculating that the Assad government might cede to its demands on standing down or allowing a defeated opposition more say in drawing up a new constitution.
If the US were genuinely committed to a political process in Syria, then why aren’t its diplomats giving momentum to the Russian-brokered talks in Sochi this week in preparation for the subsequent Geneva summit?
But even more sinister is the region-wide context of US force buildup – largely in secret unknown to the American public. With Washington’s client regimes, Saudi Arabia and Israel, pushing for a confrontation with Iran, directly or via Lebanon and Yemen, the expanding military presence in Syria indicates war in that country is far from over. Instead, it could be but a prelude to a more devastating regional conflagration.
SC154-1
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Goodbye_American_Dream%3A_The_Average_U.S._Household_Is_%24137%2C063_In_Debt%2C_And_38.4%25_Of_Millennials_Live_With_Their_Parents/61750/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Goodbye American Dream: The Average U.S. Household Is $137,063 In Debt, And 38.4% Of Millennials Live With Their Parents
Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is steadily being eroded. The middle class became a minority of the population for the first time ever in 2015, and just recently I wrote about a new survey that showed that 78 percent of all full-time workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time. But most people still want to live the American Dream, and so they are going into tremendous amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to live that kind of a lifestyle.
According to the Federal Reserve, the average U.S. household is now $137,063 in debt, and that figure is more than double the median household income…
The average American household carries $137,063 in debt, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest numbers.
Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income was just $59,039 last year, suggesting that many Americans are living beyond their means.
As a nation, we are completely and utterly drowning in debt. U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt overall, and many will literally spend the rest of their lives making debt payments.
Over the past couple of decades, the cost of living has grown much faster than paychecks have, and this has put a tremendous amount of financial stress on hard working families. We are told that we are in a “low inflation environment”, but that is simply not true at all…
Medical expenses have grown 57% since 2003, while food and housing costs climbed 36% and 32%, respectively. Those surging basic expenses could widen the inequality gap in America, as a quarter of Americans make less than $10 per hour.
Getting our healthcare costs under control is one of the biggest things that we need to do. As I talked about the other day, some families have seen their health insurance premiums more than triple since Obamacare became law.
As the cost of living continues to rise, an increasing number of young people are discovering that the only way that they can make ends meet is to live with their parents. As a result, the percentage of adults age 26 to age 34 that live at home continued to rise even after the last recession ended…
The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.
About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm.
A staggering 59.8 percent of younger Millennials (18 to 25) are now living with relatives, and overall an all-time record 38.4 percent of all Millennials are currently living with family.
If so many of our young people are unable to live the American Dream, what is the future of this nation going to look like?
Consumers are not the only ones that have been struggling to make ends meet. Corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, and it now stands at a record high of 8.7 trillion dollars…
Fueled by low interest rates and strong investor appetite, debt of nonfinancial companies has increased at a rapid clip, to $8.7 trillion, and is equal to more than 45 percent of GDP, according to David Ader, chief macro strategist at Informa Financial Intelligence.
According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial corporate debt outstanding has grown by $1 trillion in two years.
“Everything is fine until it isn’t,” Ader said. “We don’t need to worry about that until we’re in a slowdown and profit declines.”
And let us not forget government debt. State and local governments all over the nation have piled up record amounts of debt, and the debt of the federal government has approximately doubled over the past decade.
But the fact that we are now 20 trillion dollars in debt as a nation does not tell the full story. According to Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff, the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years…
We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt. We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books…
If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $210 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap. That’s our true indebtedness.
We were the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the history of the planet, but that was never good for us.
We always had to have more, and so we have been on the greatest debt binge in human history.
Now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and those that believe that we can escape the consequences of our actions are being extremely delusional.
Goodbye American Dream: The Average U.S. Household Is $137,063 In Debt, And 38.4% Of Millennials Live With Their Parents
Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is steadily being eroded. The middle class became a minority of the population for the first time ever in 2015, and just recently I wrote about a new survey that showed that 78 percent of all full-time workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time. But most people still want to live the American Dream, and so they are going into tremendous amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to live that kind of a lifestyle.
According to the Federal Reserve, the average U.S. household is now $137,063 in debt, and that figure is more than double the median household income…
The average American household carries $137,063 in debt, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest numbers.
Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income was just $59,039 last year, suggesting that many Americans are living beyond their means.
As a nation, we are completely and utterly drowning in debt. U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt overall, and many will literally spend the rest of their lives making debt payments.
Over the past couple of decades, the cost of living has grown much faster than paychecks have, and this has put a tremendous amount of financial stress on hard working families. We are told that we are in a “low inflation environment”, but that is simply not true at all…
Medical expenses have grown 57% since 2003, while food and housing costs climbed 36% and 32%, respectively. Those surging basic expenses could widen the inequality gap in America, as a quarter of Americans make less than $10 per hour.
Getting our healthcare costs under control is one of the biggest things that we need to do. As I talked about the other day, some families have seen their health insurance premiums more than triple since Obamacare became law.
As the cost of living continues to rise, an increasing number of young people are discovering that the only way that they can make ends meet is to live with their parents. As a result, the percentage of adults age 26 to age 34 that live at home continued to rise even after the last recession ended…
The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.
About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm.
A staggering 59.8 percent of younger Millennials (18 to 25) are now living with relatives, and overall an all-time record 38.4 percent of all Millennials are currently living with family.
If so many of our young people are unable to live the American Dream, what is the future of this nation going to look like?
Consumers are not the only ones that have been struggling to make ends meet. Corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, and it now stands at a record high of 8.7 trillion dollars…
Fueled by low interest rates and strong investor appetite, debt of nonfinancial companies has increased at a rapid clip, to $8.7 trillion, and is equal to more than 45 percent of GDP, according to David Ader, chief macro strategist at Informa Financial Intelligence.
According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial corporate debt outstanding has grown by $1 trillion in two years.
“Everything is fine until it isn’t,” Ader said. “We don’t need to worry about that until we’re in a slowdown and profit declines.”
And let us not forget government debt. State and local governments all over the nation have piled up record amounts of debt, and the debt of the federal government has approximately doubled over the past decade.
But the fact that we are now 20 trillion dollars in debt as a nation does not tell the full story. According to Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff, the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years…
We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt. We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books…
If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $210 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap. That’s our true indebtedness.
We were the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the history of the planet, but that was never good for us.
We always had to have more, and so we have been on the greatest debt binge in human history.
Now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and those that believe that we can escape the consequences of our actions are being extremely delusional.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
SC153-15
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/the-surveillance-state-an-inexorable-march-toward-totalitarianism_11102017
The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism
Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach. Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing. Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.
Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:
“11/02/17 12:31pm Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.
Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.
(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…) If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.
surveillance
Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”
This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.
These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.
Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.
The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.
China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17.
Here is an excerpt from that important article:
For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives. The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.
The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.
That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.
In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State? The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17. This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:
Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark. The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit . China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.
China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars. The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:
The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower. The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”
There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”
As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens. The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.
The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism
Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach. Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing. Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.
Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:
“11/02/17 12:31pm Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.
Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.
(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…) If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.
surveillance
Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”
This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.
These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.
Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.
The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.
China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17.
Here is an excerpt from that important article:
For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives. The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.
The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.
That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.
In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State? The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17. This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:
Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark. The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit . China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.
China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars. The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:
The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower. The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”
There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”
As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens. The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.
Monday, November 20, 2017
SC153-14
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48254.htm
America’s Renegade Warfare
Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined “global war on terror,” the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law, says Nicolas J S Davies.
Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War. The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons.
Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea’s population and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats of war. Most significantly, the U.S. has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to discount North Korea’s legitimate defense concerns as it confronts the threat of a U.S. war machine that has only grown more dangerous since the last time it destroyed North Korea.
The North has lived under this threat for 65 years and has watched Iraq and Libya destroyed after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs. When North Korea discovered a U.S. plan for a Second Korean War on South Korea’s military computer network in September 2016, its leaders quite rationally concluded that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only way to guarantee their country’s safety.
What does it say about the role the U.S. is playing in the world that the only way North Korea’s leaders believe they can keep their own people safe is to develop weapons that could kill millions of Americans?
The Changing Face of War
The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought, with at least 75 million people killed, about five times as many as in the First World War. When the slaughter ended in 1945, world leaders signed the United Nations Charter to try to ensure that that scale of mass killing and destruction would never happen again. The U.N. Charter is still in force, and it explicitly prohibits the threat or use of military force by any nation.
It was not just the scale of the slaughter that shocked the world’s leaders into that brief moment of sanity in 1945. It was also the identities of the dead. Two-thirds of the people killed in the Second World War were civilians, a drastic change from the First World War, only a few decades earlier, when an estimated 86 percent of the people killed were uniformed combatants. The use of nuclear weapons by the United States raised the specter that future wars could kill an exponentially greater numbers of civilians, or even end human civilization altogether.
War had become “total war,” no longer fought only on battlefields between soldiers, but between entire societies with ordinary people, their homes and their lives now on the front line. In the Second World War:
–Fleets of warplanes deliberately bombed cities to “dehouse” civilian populations, as British officials described their own bombing of Germany. “As I write this,” George Orwell wrote from London in 1941, “Highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
–Submarines sank hundreds of merchant ships in an effort to starve their enemies into submission. General Carter Clarke, who was in charge of interpreting Japanese intelligence for President Truman, said in a 1959 interview that Japan surrendered because it faced mass starvation due to the sinking of its merchant shipping, not because of the gratuitous U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was estimated that 7 million more civilians would die of starvation if Japan fought on until 1946.
–Genocidal mass extermination campaigns killed civilians based only on their political affiliation or ethnicity. Under cross-examination by a young American prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf explained patiently to a courtroom in Nuremberg why he found it necessary for the “preemptive defense” of Germany to order the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. He explained that even children had to be killed to prevent them too becoming enemies of Germany when they grew up and found out what happened to their parents.
Despite the U.N. Charter and international efforts to prevent war, people in countries afflicted by war today still face the kind of total war that horrified world leaders in 1945. The main victims of total war in our “modern” world have been civilians in countries far removed from the safe havens of power and privilege where their fates are debated and decided: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia; Pakistan; Yemen; Libya; Syria; Ukraine. There has been no legal or political accountability for the mass destruction of their cities, their homes or their lives. Total war has not been prevented, or even punished, just externalized.
But thanks to billions of dollars invested in military propaganda and public relations and the corrupt nature of for-profit media systems, citizens of the countries responsible for the killing of millions of their fellow human beings live in near-total ignorance of the mass killing carried out in their name in these “red zones” around the world.
People in ever-spreading war zones are living under the very conditions of total war that the world recoiled from at the end of the Second World War. Like Orwell in London in 1941, they hear highly civilized human beings flying overhead trying to kill them, human beings who know nothing about them beyond the name of the city where they live and its strategic value in wars that offer them, the victims, nothing but death or destitution.
In the case of drones, the human beings trying to kill them from the other side of the world are so highly civilized that they can hop into cars and drive home to have dinner with their families at the end of their shifts, while another “team member” efficiently takes over the “joy-stick” and carries on killing.
People in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya have been subjected to hunger and starvation under sieges and naval blockades that are as brutally effective as German and American submarines were in World War Two. Millions of people in Yemen face an imminent danger of starvation under the U.S.-backed naval blockade and Saudi and Emirati bombing of Yemeni ports.
In retaliation for one missile fired at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last week, the U.S.-backed coalition completely closed all Yemen’s ports, tightening the blockade on millions of starving people. The requirements of necessity and proportionality, which have been basic principles of customary international law since the Nineteenth Century, lie buried in the graveyards of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is the U.S. Guilty of Genocide?
The U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq quickly adopted “divide and rule” strategies that targeted Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Sunni Arabs in Iraq. When I pointed this out to a friend who teaches military history in 2005, he asked only, “How else can you do it?” I reminded him that “you” don’t have to “do it” at all.
U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have killed at least 10-15 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and displaced about half of them. Sunni Arabs have been relentlessly targeted for detention, torture and summary execution since 2004, when ex-Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief Steven Casteel, retired Colonel James Steele and a CIA team reportedly based on the eighth floor of the Iraqi Interior Ministry recruited, trained and equipped “Special Police” death squads to conduct a reign of terror that tortured and killed tens of thousands of men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere.
After training by James Steele’s Special Police Training Teams, each Iraqi Special Police unit worked closely with a U.S. Special Police Transition Team (SPTT), and their operations were commanded and controlled from a high-tech command center staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel. An SPTT assigned to the notorious Wolf Brigade in Baghdad was from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Nightstalkers,” who usually provide helicopter transport for U.S. special operations but in this case appear to have used their helicopters mainly to fly detainees to their deaths.
After the exposure of their Al Jadiriyah torture prison in November 2005, the Special Police were rebranded as the National Police (and the Wolf Brigade, incongruously, as the Freedom Brigade). But their torture and killing raged on, under cover of an official narrative of “sectarian violence” which scrupulously ignored the command and control of these forces by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the CIA and the U.S. military.
At the peak of this campaign in July-October 2006, supported by the U.S. Operations Together Forward I & II, National Police death squads flooded the main morgue in Baghdad with up to 1,600 bodies per month. Thousands more Iraqis were killed and buried elsewhere or just disappeared, while 2 million people were displaced inside Iraq and another 2 million fled the country.
This ethnic cleansing campaign has continued under the U.S-backed Shiite government and has kept driving Sunni Arab Iraqis into armed resistance groups, of which Islamic State is only the latest, creating pretexts for endless violence against them. Kurdish military intelligence reports have estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent U.S.-led assault on Mosul, by tens of thousands of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and “coalition” warplanes, U.S. Marine 220-lb HiMARS rockets and U.S., French and Iraqi heavy artillery. This is still only an estimate, and the true number of civilians killed in Mosul was probably higher.
From 2004 on, the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs has been a deliberate, calculated element of the U.S.’s “divide and rule” policy in Iraq, with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That is the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The working title of my book about the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq was From Aggression to Genocide.
As for the killing of “enemy” children, President Obama justified the murder of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in October 2011, two weeks after the assassination of his father, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president, he authorized a U.S. special operations attack that killed Abdulrahman’s 8-year old sister Nawar and other family members in January 2017 – after Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to kill the families of suspected terrorists.
Benjamin Ferencz, the by then 81-year-old American lawyer who prosecuted SS Gruppenfuhrer Ohlendorf and his accomplices at Nuremberg, was interviewed by NPR eight days after the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.
“It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done,” Ferencz insisted. “We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened… I say to the skeptics, ‘Follow your procedure and you will see what happens.’ … We will have more fanatics and more zealots deciding to come and kill the evil, the United States.”
But in the courtroom of American politics, hopelessly corrupted by the CIA’s politicized intelligence and manufactured crises and the “unwarranted influence” of the Military Industrial Complex, our leaders chose Ohlendorf’s logic over Ferencz’s. Neither the millions of people killed in 16 years of war, nor its legacy of ruin and chaos in country after country, nor the utter failure of the “war on terror” on its own terms have led to any change in this illegitimate, criminal and, in the case of Sunni Arabs in Iraq, genocidal U.S. policy.
The Geneva Conventions
As well as the unfulfilled promise of peace in the U.N. Charter, the post-World War II effort to prevent the future mass slaughter of civilians led to a major revision of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. That included a brand new convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, dedicated entirely to the protection of civilians in wartime or under military occupation.
Two additional protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, to adapt them to the changing nature of war and to provide even greater protections to civilians. The First Additional Protocol has been signed and ratified by 174 countries and the Second by 168 countries. The United States has not ratified either of the Additional Protocols, but it is legally bound by them because treaties that have been ratified by large majorities of countries automatically become part of customary international law, which is universally binding.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1949 Conventions in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted a survey of 17,000 people in 17 countries to see how well people around the world understood “the rules and limits of what is permissible in war” under the Geneva Conventions. The study was titled People on War – Civilians in the Line of Fire.
The 17 countries surveyed included 12 where wars had recently been fought, four of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Switzerland, where the ICRC is based. The introduction to the People on War report noted that 90 percent of the people killed in recent wars were civilians and that, in today’s world, “war is war on civilians.” But the report went on:
“…the more these conflicts have degenerated into wars on civilians, the more people have reacted by reaffirming the norms, traditions, conventions and rules that seek to create a barrier between those who carry arms into battle and the civilian population… Large majorities in every war-torn country reject attacks on civilians in general and a wide range of actions that by design or default could harm the innocent.”
People interviewed in Switzerland and the four Security Council permanent member countries were asked to choose between a firm statement that armed forces “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone,” and a weaker statement that, “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible.” About three-quarters of respondents in the U.K., Russia, France and Switzerland chose the first statement, which correctly summarizes the rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while 26 percent in the U.K. and 16-17 percent in Russia, France and Switzerland chose the weaker one.
When it came to the United States, though, a very different pattern emerged. Only 52 percent of Americans understood that attacking civilians is strictly prohibited, while 42 percent chose the weaker option, twice as many as in the other four countries. The ICRC report noted that, “Across a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax.”
The survey also asked whether it is lawful to attack “enemy combatants in populated villages or towns in order to weaken the enemy, knowing that many civilians would be killed.” Once again, while only 20-29 percent of people in the other four countries thought this was allowed, that increased to 38 percent among Americans. Since 1999, this question has arisen again and again across America’s war zones, most recently in the U.S.-led massacres of Iraqi and Syrian civilians in Mosul and Raqqa.
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, U.N. human rights reports repeatedly reminded U.S. officials of their duty as an occupying power to protect civilians, and notified them that U.S. military operations in civilian areas were routinely violating international humanitarian law. John Pace, who headed the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, compared U.S. efforts to police Iraq by military force to “trying to swat a fly with a bomb,” a fitting metaphor for the entire “war on terror.”
The People on War survey also found large discrepancies in attitudes to the Geneva Conventions themselves. In countries that had recently experienced war, only 28 percent of people agreed with a statement that the Conventions “make no real difference” to the brutality of war. But in the U.S. (57 percent) and U.K. (55 percent), twice as many people agreed with that statement.
U.S. War Crimes
We could speculate on why Americans are so exceptionally “lax” in their attitudes toward protecting civilians in wartime. But in practice, the real-world impact of these exceptional attitudes could be overcome if Americans who joined the armed forces received serious training in their responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tragically, they do not.
U.S. military recruits receive only a 50-minute class on the laws of war, focused mainly on the Third Geneva Convention and the rights of POWs, and a refresher of the same 50-minute class before deployment. A retired JAG officer who taught law of war classes and veterans who have sat through them have all told me that the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rights of civilians as “protected persons” were barely mentioned, if at all.
The lax attitude of Americans toward the killing of civilians and the poor training of U.S. troops in their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions have combined to make invasion and occupation by American forces especially deadly, dangerous and terrifying for civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever U.S. forces are deployed.
In practice, U.S. forces operate under much lower standards than those of the Geneva Conventions, and civilians whose countries have fallen prey to U.S. aggression do not enjoy the protections guaranteed to them under the laws of war. As I wrote in an article in 2016, this is a classic case of the “normalization of deviance,” a sociological term for the way that powerful institutions like the U.S. military tend to develop weaker, looser norms of conduct than the formal or legal rules that officially apply to them.
Illegal U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan have included: systematic, theater-wide use of torture; orders to “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants; orders to “kill all military-age males” during certain operations; and “weapons-free” zones that mirror Vietnam-era “free-fire” zones. A U.S. Marine corporal told a court martial prosecuting one of his men for “dead-checking” a wounded Iraqi civilian that “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency,” nullifying the critical distinction between combatants and civilians that is the very basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When junior officers or enlisted troops have been charged with war crimes against civilians, they have often been exonerated or given light sentences because courts martial have found that they were acting on orders from more senior officers. But the senior officers implicated in these crimes have been allowed to testify in secret or not to appear in court at all, and have almost never been charged.
To make matters even worse for civilians in Iraq, U.S. military and civilian officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, misled the troops they sent to kill and die in Iraq with lies about shadowy connections between the people of Iraq and the young Saudis who committed the crimes of September 11th. In 2006, three years into the war, a Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq found that 85 percent of them still believed that their mission in Iraq was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
A million Iraqis have paid with their lives for these American lies and the war crimes they have served to justify, while the U.S. officials involved are still walking free, and in many cases still climbing the twisted ladder of success inside the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. Colonel Jeffrey Buchanan, who headed a Special Police Transition Team in Iraq at the time of the exposure of the Al Jadiriyah torture prison in 2005, has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and is currently in charge of hurricane relief to Puerto Rico.
A New Body of Research
After 16 years of ever-spreading and intractable war, a significant body of research is finally emerging to clarify who exactly the U.S. is fighting in its ever-expanding war zones and what drives civilians to join armed groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Islamic State.
In the looking-glass world of U.S. propaganda, U.S. forces are “fighting them there” so that we don’t have to “fight them here.” But researchers are learning that, like the Iraqis who rose up to resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country, most of the people joining armed groups across Africa and the Middle East are only fighting at all because U.S. and allied forces are “fighting them there,” in their countries, cities, villages and homes.
Researchers have interviewed people who have joined armed resistance groups in countries across the world to ask them about what drove them to join an armed group and take part in guerrilla warfare or terrorism. In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled, The People’s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict. One of its main findings was that, “The most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.”
If most of the people fighting U.S. forces and their allies across the world, from Niger to Ukraine to the Philippines, are just trying to defend themselves and their families against our “counterterrorism” operations, that turns the whole basis of the U.S. “war on terror” on its head. The most effective way to reduce violence and terrorism would obviously be to stop putting them in such an intolerable position in the first place.
Also in 2015, Lydia Wilson, a researcher for the Center for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, was allowed to interview a number of captured Islamic State fighters in Kirkuk, Iraq. Wilson’s fellow researchers included retired U.S. Major General Doug Stone, who managed U.S. military prisons in Iraq during the U.S. occupation and did some of the first serious Western research into the motivations of Iraqi resistance fighters.
It was hard for Wilson to find captured Islamic State fighters to interview, because Kurdish and U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces summarily execute Islamic State fighters that they capture. But the police in Kirkuk were at least putting prisoners on trial before killing them, so Wilson got permission from the police chief to talk to some prisoners who were awaiting execution.
The first prisoner Lydia Wilson interviewed was captured, tried and sentenced to death for exploding at least four car-bombs and a scooter-bomb in Kirkuk. But his interview was not exceptional – Wilson found that his account of his motivations was repeated by every other prisoner. He explained that his first loyalty was to his wife and two children, and that he joined ISIS (as Islamic State is commonly known) to support his family. He told Wilson, “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war… all I want is to be with my family, my children.”
At the end of the interview, Wilson asked the prisoner if he had any questions. By then he knew that General Stone, one of Wilson’s colleagues, was ex-U.S. military, and, instead of asking a question, he just exploded in anger at him, “The Americans came. They took away Saddam but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
General Stone was not surprised. This was the same outraged speech he had heard from nearly every prisoner since he started interviewing his own prisoners in Iraq in 2007, identifying the poisonous and blood-soaked legacy of the U.S. invasion and occupation as the driving force behind their actions.
Lydia Wilson summarized what she learned about the prisoners in Kirkuk in an article for The Nation: “They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death by execution or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity, but cultural, tribal and land-based, too.”
The recent killing of four U.S. soldiers in Niger surprised many Americans, but the U.S. has 6,000 troops in 53 countries in Africa, so we should be ready to welcome home flag-draped coffins from seemingly random countries across the continent. But before our deluded leaders reduce the entire continent of Africa to a new U.S. “battlefield,” Americans should take note of a new report published by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment.
This report is based on 500 interviews with militants from across Africa. As its title suggests, the interviewers questioned the militants specifically about the “tipping point” that decided each of them to actually join an armed group such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabab or Al Qaeda. By far the largest number (71 percent) said that some kind of “government action,” such as ”killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend,” was the final straw that pushed them over the red line from civilian life to guerrilla war. By contrast, religious ideology was generally not a decisive factor in that decision.
The report concluded, “State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse.” In its section on “Policy Implications,” it added, “The Journey to Extremism research provides startling new evidence of just how directly counter-productive security-driven responses can be when conducted insensitively.”
Across the world, it is obvious, and now well-documented, that U.S. aggression and militarism are causing the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. By design or default, U.S. policy is confusing cause and effect to justify military operations that turn civilians into combatants, fueling an ever-escalating, ever-spreading cycle of increasingly global violence and chaos.
As the world confronts critical problems and demands on its resources, from climate change to poverty and inequality, it can no longer afford to follow the pied piper of American “leadership” that leads only to war and chaos.
U.S. leaders often raise the specter of “appeasement” to guilt-trip reluctant allies into supporting U.S.-led wars. But maybe it is time for world leaders to recognize that the real appeasement they have been engaged in is the appeasement of the United States, by actively or tacitly encouraging it in an illegal policy of militarism and serial aggression that is spreading violence and chaos across the world.
Surely the real lesson of the 1930s and the Second World War, now reinforced by the experience of the past 20 years, is that it is not enough to simply sign treaties that prohibit aggression and war crimes. The world must be ready to actually enforce the prohibition against the threat or use of military force in customary international law, the 1928 Kellogg Brand Pact and the U.N. Charter – by uniting peacefully and diplomatically to stand up to U.S. aggression and militarism before they lead to a cataclysmic total war that will kill tens or even hundreds of millions of civilians, in Korea or somewhere else.
America’s Renegade Warfare
Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined “global war on terror,” the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law, says Nicolas J S Davies.
Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War. The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons.
Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea’s population and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats of war. Most significantly, the U.S. has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to discount North Korea’s legitimate defense concerns as it confronts the threat of a U.S. war machine that has only grown more dangerous since the last time it destroyed North Korea.
The North has lived under this threat for 65 years and has watched Iraq and Libya destroyed after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs. When North Korea discovered a U.S. plan for a Second Korean War on South Korea’s military computer network in September 2016, its leaders quite rationally concluded that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only way to guarantee their country’s safety.
What does it say about the role the U.S. is playing in the world that the only way North Korea’s leaders believe they can keep their own people safe is to develop weapons that could kill millions of Americans?
The Changing Face of War
The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought, with at least 75 million people killed, about five times as many as in the First World War. When the slaughter ended in 1945, world leaders signed the United Nations Charter to try to ensure that that scale of mass killing and destruction would never happen again. The U.N. Charter is still in force, and it explicitly prohibits the threat or use of military force by any nation.
It was not just the scale of the slaughter that shocked the world’s leaders into that brief moment of sanity in 1945. It was also the identities of the dead. Two-thirds of the people killed in the Second World War were civilians, a drastic change from the First World War, only a few decades earlier, when an estimated 86 percent of the people killed were uniformed combatants. The use of nuclear weapons by the United States raised the specter that future wars could kill an exponentially greater numbers of civilians, or even end human civilization altogether.
War had become “total war,” no longer fought only on battlefields between soldiers, but between entire societies with ordinary people, their homes and their lives now on the front line. In the Second World War:
–Fleets of warplanes deliberately bombed cities to “dehouse” civilian populations, as British officials described their own bombing of Germany. “As I write this,” George Orwell wrote from London in 1941, “Highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
–Submarines sank hundreds of merchant ships in an effort to starve their enemies into submission. General Carter Clarke, who was in charge of interpreting Japanese intelligence for President Truman, said in a 1959 interview that Japan surrendered because it faced mass starvation due to the sinking of its merchant shipping, not because of the gratuitous U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was estimated that 7 million more civilians would die of starvation if Japan fought on until 1946.
–Genocidal mass extermination campaigns killed civilians based only on their political affiliation or ethnicity. Under cross-examination by a young American prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf explained patiently to a courtroom in Nuremberg why he found it necessary for the “preemptive defense” of Germany to order the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. He explained that even children had to be killed to prevent them too becoming enemies of Germany when they grew up and found out what happened to their parents.
Despite the U.N. Charter and international efforts to prevent war, people in countries afflicted by war today still face the kind of total war that horrified world leaders in 1945. The main victims of total war in our “modern” world have been civilians in countries far removed from the safe havens of power and privilege where their fates are debated and decided: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia; Pakistan; Yemen; Libya; Syria; Ukraine. There has been no legal or political accountability for the mass destruction of their cities, their homes or their lives. Total war has not been prevented, or even punished, just externalized.
But thanks to billions of dollars invested in military propaganda and public relations and the corrupt nature of for-profit media systems, citizens of the countries responsible for the killing of millions of their fellow human beings live in near-total ignorance of the mass killing carried out in their name in these “red zones” around the world.
People in ever-spreading war zones are living under the very conditions of total war that the world recoiled from at the end of the Second World War. Like Orwell in London in 1941, they hear highly civilized human beings flying overhead trying to kill them, human beings who know nothing about them beyond the name of the city where they live and its strategic value in wars that offer them, the victims, nothing but death or destitution.
In the case of drones, the human beings trying to kill them from the other side of the world are so highly civilized that they can hop into cars and drive home to have dinner with their families at the end of their shifts, while another “team member” efficiently takes over the “joy-stick” and carries on killing.
People in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya have been subjected to hunger and starvation under sieges and naval blockades that are as brutally effective as German and American submarines were in World War Two. Millions of people in Yemen face an imminent danger of starvation under the U.S.-backed naval blockade and Saudi and Emirati bombing of Yemeni ports.
In retaliation for one missile fired at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last week, the U.S.-backed coalition completely closed all Yemen’s ports, tightening the blockade on millions of starving people. The requirements of necessity and proportionality, which have been basic principles of customary international law since the Nineteenth Century, lie buried in the graveyards of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is the U.S. Guilty of Genocide?
The U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq quickly adopted “divide and rule” strategies that targeted Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Sunni Arabs in Iraq. When I pointed this out to a friend who teaches military history in 2005, he asked only, “How else can you do it?” I reminded him that “you” don’t have to “do it” at all.
U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have killed at least 10-15 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and displaced about half of them. Sunni Arabs have been relentlessly targeted for detention, torture and summary execution since 2004, when ex-Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief Steven Casteel, retired Colonel James Steele and a CIA team reportedly based on the eighth floor of the Iraqi Interior Ministry recruited, trained and equipped “Special Police” death squads to conduct a reign of terror that tortured and killed tens of thousands of men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere.
After training by James Steele’s Special Police Training Teams, each Iraqi Special Police unit worked closely with a U.S. Special Police Transition Team (SPTT), and their operations were commanded and controlled from a high-tech command center staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel. An SPTT assigned to the notorious Wolf Brigade in Baghdad was from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Nightstalkers,” who usually provide helicopter transport for U.S. special operations but in this case appear to have used their helicopters mainly to fly detainees to their deaths.
After the exposure of their Al Jadiriyah torture prison in November 2005, the Special Police were rebranded as the National Police (and the Wolf Brigade, incongruously, as the Freedom Brigade). But their torture and killing raged on, under cover of an official narrative of “sectarian violence” which scrupulously ignored the command and control of these forces by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the CIA and the U.S. military.
At the peak of this campaign in July-October 2006, supported by the U.S. Operations Together Forward I & II, National Police death squads flooded the main morgue in Baghdad with up to 1,600 bodies per month. Thousands more Iraqis were killed and buried elsewhere or just disappeared, while 2 million people were displaced inside Iraq and another 2 million fled the country.
This ethnic cleansing campaign has continued under the U.S-backed Shiite government and has kept driving Sunni Arab Iraqis into armed resistance groups, of which Islamic State is only the latest, creating pretexts for endless violence against them. Kurdish military intelligence reports have estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent U.S.-led assault on Mosul, by tens of thousands of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and “coalition” warplanes, U.S. Marine 220-lb HiMARS rockets and U.S., French and Iraqi heavy artillery. This is still only an estimate, and the true number of civilians killed in Mosul was probably higher.
From 2004 on, the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs has been a deliberate, calculated element of the U.S.’s “divide and rule” policy in Iraq, with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That is the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The working title of my book about the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq was From Aggression to Genocide.
As for the killing of “enemy” children, President Obama justified the murder of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in October 2011, two weeks after the assassination of his father, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president, he authorized a U.S. special operations attack that killed Abdulrahman’s 8-year old sister Nawar and other family members in January 2017 – after Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to kill the families of suspected terrorists.
Benjamin Ferencz, the by then 81-year-old American lawyer who prosecuted SS Gruppenfuhrer Ohlendorf and his accomplices at Nuremberg, was interviewed by NPR eight days after the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.
“It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done,” Ferencz insisted. “We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened… I say to the skeptics, ‘Follow your procedure and you will see what happens.’ … We will have more fanatics and more zealots deciding to come and kill the evil, the United States.”
But in the courtroom of American politics, hopelessly corrupted by the CIA’s politicized intelligence and manufactured crises and the “unwarranted influence” of the Military Industrial Complex, our leaders chose Ohlendorf’s logic over Ferencz’s. Neither the millions of people killed in 16 years of war, nor its legacy of ruin and chaos in country after country, nor the utter failure of the “war on terror” on its own terms have led to any change in this illegitimate, criminal and, in the case of Sunni Arabs in Iraq, genocidal U.S. policy.
The Geneva Conventions
As well as the unfulfilled promise of peace in the U.N. Charter, the post-World War II effort to prevent the future mass slaughter of civilians led to a major revision of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. That included a brand new convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, dedicated entirely to the protection of civilians in wartime or under military occupation.
Two additional protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, to adapt them to the changing nature of war and to provide even greater protections to civilians. The First Additional Protocol has been signed and ratified by 174 countries and the Second by 168 countries. The United States has not ratified either of the Additional Protocols, but it is legally bound by them because treaties that have been ratified by large majorities of countries automatically become part of customary international law, which is universally binding.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1949 Conventions in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted a survey of 17,000 people in 17 countries to see how well people around the world understood “the rules and limits of what is permissible in war” under the Geneva Conventions. The study was titled People on War – Civilians in the Line of Fire.
The 17 countries surveyed included 12 where wars had recently been fought, four of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Switzerland, where the ICRC is based. The introduction to the People on War report noted that 90 percent of the people killed in recent wars were civilians and that, in today’s world, “war is war on civilians.” But the report went on:
“…the more these conflicts have degenerated into wars on civilians, the more people have reacted by reaffirming the norms, traditions, conventions and rules that seek to create a barrier between those who carry arms into battle and the civilian population… Large majorities in every war-torn country reject attacks on civilians in general and a wide range of actions that by design or default could harm the innocent.”
People interviewed in Switzerland and the four Security Council permanent member countries were asked to choose between a firm statement that armed forces “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone,” and a weaker statement that, “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible.” About three-quarters of respondents in the U.K., Russia, France and Switzerland chose the first statement, which correctly summarizes the rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while 26 percent in the U.K. and 16-17 percent in Russia, France and Switzerland chose the weaker one.
When it came to the United States, though, a very different pattern emerged. Only 52 percent of Americans understood that attacking civilians is strictly prohibited, while 42 percent chose the weaker option, twice as many as in the other four countries. The ICRC report noted that, “Across a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax.”
The survey also asked whether it is lawful to attack “enemy combatants in populated villages or towns in order to weaken the enemy, knowing that many civilians would be killed.” Once again, while only 20-29 percent of people in the other four countries thought this was allowed, that increased to 38 percent among Americans. Since 1999, this question has arisen again and again across America’s war zones, most recently in the U.S.-led massacres of Iraqi and Syrian civilians in Mosul and Raqqa.
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, U.N. human rights reports repeatedly reminded U.S. officials of their duty as an occupying power to protect civilians, and notified them that U.S. military operations in civilian areas were routinely violating international humanitarian law. John Pace, who headed the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, compared U.S. efforts to police Iraq by military force to “trying to swat a fly with a bomb,” a fitting metaphor for the entire “war on terror.”
The People on War survey also found large discrepancies in attitudes to the Geneva Conventions themselves. In countries that had recently experienced war, only 28 percent of people agreed with a statement that the Conventions “make no real difference” to the brutality of war. But in the U.S. (57 percent) and U.K. (55 percent), twice as many people agreed with that statement.
U.S. War Crimes
We could speculate on why Americans are so exceptionally “lax” in their attitudes toward protecting civilians in wartime. But in practice, the real-world impact of these exceptional attitudes could be overcome if Americans who joined the armed forces received serious training in their responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tragically, they do not.
U.S. military recruits receive only a 50-minute class on the laws of war, focused mainly on the Third Geneva Convention and the rights of POWs, and a refresher of the same 50-minute class before deployment. A retired JAG officer who taught law of war classes and veterans who have sat through them have all told me that the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rights of civilians as “protected persons” were barely mentioned, if at all.
The lax attitude of Americans toward the killing of civilians and the poor training of U.S. troops in their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions have combined to make invasion and occupation by American forces especially deadly, dangerous and terrifying for civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever U.S. forces are deployed.
In practice, U.S. forces operate under much lower standards than those of the Geneva Conventions, and civilians whose countries have fallen prey to U.S. aggression do not enjoy the protections guaranteed to them under the laws of war. As I wrote in an article in 2016, this is a classic case of the “normalization of deviance,” a sociological term for the way that powerful institutions like the U.S. military tend to develop weaker, looser norms of conduct than the formal or legal rules that officially apply to them.
Illegal U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan have included: systematic, theater-wide use of torture; orders to “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants; orders to “kill all military-age males” during certain operations; and “weapons-free” zones that mirror Vietnam-era “free-fire” zones. A U.S. Marine corporal told a court martial prosecuting one of his men for “dead-checking” a wounded Iraqi civilian that “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency,” nullifying the critical distinction between combatants and civilians that is the very basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When junior officers or enlisted troops have been charged with war crimes against civilians, they have often been exonerated or given light sentences because courts martial have found that they were acting on orders from more senior officers. But the senior officers implicated in these crimes have been allowed to testify in secret or not to appear in court at all, and have almost never been charged.
To make matters even worse for civilians in Iraq, U.S. military and civilian officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, misled the troops they sent to kill and die in Iraq with lies about shadowy connections between the people of Iraq and the young Saudis who committed the crimes of September 11th. In 2006, three years into the war, a Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq found that 85 percent of them still believed that their mission in Iraq was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
A million Iraqis have paid with their lives for these American lies and the war crimes they have served to justify, while the U.S. officials involved are still walking free, and in many cases still climbing the twisted ladder of success inside the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. Colonel Jeffrey Buchanan, who headed a Special Police Transition Team in Iraq at the time of the exposure of the Al Jadiriyah torture prison in 2005, has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and is currently in charge of hurricane relief to Puerto Rico.
A New Body of Research
After 16 years of ever-spreading and intractable war, a significant body of research is finally emerging to clarify who exactly the U.S. is fighting in its ever-expanding war zones and what drives civilians to join armed groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Islamic State.
In the looking-glass world of U.S. propaganda, U.S. forces are “fighting them there” so that we don’t have to “fight them here.” But researchers are learning that, like the Iraqis who rose up to resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country, most of the people joining armed groups across Africa and the Middle East are only fighting at all because U.S. and allied forces are “fighting them there,” in their countries, cities, villages and homes.
Researchers have interviewed people who have joined armed resistance groups in countries across the world to ask them about what drove them to join an armed group and take part in guerrilla warfare or terrorism. In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled, The People’s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict. One of its main findings was that, “The most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.”
If most of the people fighting U.S. forces and their allies across the world, from Niger to Ukraine to the Philippines, are just trying to defend themselves and their families against our “counterterrorism” operations, that turns the whole basis of the U.S. “war on terror” on its head. The most effective way to reduce violence and terrorism would obviously be to stop putting them in such an intolerable position in the first place.
Also in 2015, Lydia Wilson, a researcher for the Center for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, was allowed to interview a number of captured Islamic State fighters in Kirkuk, Iraq. Wilson’s fellow researchers included retired U.S. Major General Doug Stone, who managed U.S. military prisons in Iraq during the U.S. occupation and did some of the first serious Western research into the motivations of Iraqi resistance fighters.
It was hard for Wilson to find captured Islamic State fighters to interview, because Kurdish and U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces summarily execute Islamic State fighters that they capture. But the police in Kirkuk were at least putting prisoners on trial before killing them, so Wilson got permission from the police chief to talk to some prisoners who were awaiting execution.
The first prisoner Lydia Wilson interviewed was captured, tried and sentenced to death for exploding at least four car-bombs and a scooter-bomb in Kirkuk. But his interview was not exceptional – Wilson found that his account of his motivations was repeated by every other prisoner. He explained that his first loyalty was to his wife and two children, and that he joined ISIS (as Islamic State is commonly known) to support his family. He told Wilson, “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war… all I want is to be with my family, my children.”
At the end of the interview, Wilson asked the prisoner if he had any questions. By then he knew that General Stone, one of Wilson’s colleagues, was ex-U.S. military, and, instead of asking a question, he just exploded in anger at him, “The Americans came. They took away Saddam but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
General Stone was not surprised. This was the same outraged speech he had heard from nearly every prisoner since he started interviewing his own prisoners in Iraq in 2007, identifying the poisonous and blood-soaked legacy of the U.S. invasion and occupation as the driving force behind their actions.
Lydia Wilson summarized what she learned about the prisoners in Kirkuk in an article for The Nation: “They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death by execution or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity, but cultural, tribal and land-based, too.”
The recent killing of four U.S. soldiers in Niger surprised many Americans, but the U.S. has 6,000 troops in 53 countries in Africa, so we should be ready to welcome home flag-draped coffins from seemingly random countries across the continent. But before our deluded leaders reduce the entire continent of Africa to a new U.S. “battlefield,” Americans should take note of a new report published by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment.
This report is based on 500 interviews with militants from across Africa. As its title suggests, the interviewers questioned the militants specifically about the “tipping point” that decided each of them to actually join an armed group such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabab or Al Qaeda. By far the largest number (71 percent) said that some kind of “government action,” such as ”killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend,” was the final straw that pushed them over the red line from civilian life to guerrilla war. By contrast, religious ideology was generally not a decisive factor in that decision.
The report concluded, “State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse.” In its section on “Policy Implications,” it added, “The Journey to Extremism research provides startling new evidence of just how directly counter-productive security-driven responses can be when conducted insensitively.”
Across the world, it is obvious, and now well-documented, that U.S. aggression and militarism are causing the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. By design or default, U.S. policy is confusing cause and effect to justify military operations that turn civilians into combatants, fueling an ever-escalating, ever-spreading cycle of increasingly global violence and chaos.
As the world confronts critical problems and demands on its resources, from climate change to poverty and inequality, it can no longer afford to follow the pied piper of American “leadership” that leads only to war and chaos.
U.S. leaders often raise the specter of “appeasement” to guilt-trip reluctant allies into supporting U.S.-led wars. But maybe it is time for world leaders to recognize that the real appeasement they have been engaged in is the appeasement of the United States, by actively or tacitly encouraging it in an illegal policy of militarism and serial aggression that is spreading violence and chaos across the world.
Surely the real lesson of the 1930s and the Second World War, now reinforced by the experience of the past 20 years, is that it is not enough to simply sign treaties that prohibit aggression and war crimes. The world must be ready to actually enforce the prohibition against the threat or use of military force in customary international law, the 1928 Kellogg Brand Pact and the U.N. Charter – by uniting peacefully and diplomatically to stand up to U.S. aggression and militarism before they lead to a cataclysmic total war that will kill tens or even hundreds of millions of civilians, in Korea or somewhere else.
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