http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
The United States of Weinstein: Complicity, Greed and Corruption Is the Status Quo
The sordid story of Harvey Weinstein is being presented as an aberration. It is not an aberration; it is merely a high-profile example of how the status quo functions in the USA, a.k.a. The United States of Weinstein, in which complicity, greed and corruption reign supreme in every sector and in every nook and cranny of power.
The dirty secret of America's status quo is that power and wealth are both extremely concentrated, which means there are gatekeepers who must be bribed, sated or serviced if you want to claw your way up the wealth-power pyramid. Mr. Weinstein's alleged conduct and payoffs of those he exploited is par for the course in the corridors of power in the USA.
As a gatekeeper in Hollywood, Mr. W. could make or break careers with absurd ease.
Gatekeepers are the key functionaries in a rentier economy in which the few at the top skim the wealth of the many. Want to play in the big leagues of Hollywood, Washington D.C., the Pentagon, or the various HQs of Global Corporate America? You have to pay the Gatekeepers what they demand.
It might be the casting couch or a slice of the profits, or a vote in committee, but the price of admission will always include complicity--silence about the crimes committed and the endemic corruption, and a sacrifice of moral standards. This is the minimal price of "success" in the elite circles of wealth and power in America.
If you doubt this, dig deep into any concentration of power in America and see what you find. Outsiders won't find anyone willing to talk, of course; that's how complicity works.
The overheated engine of complicity is greed. Hollywood kept quiet about Mr. Weinstein because insiders and wannabes alike hoped to score a plum role in Mr. W.'s next hitmaking production, or secure a couple of points of the gross. (1 point = 1%.)
This is the evil fruit of a system that ruthlessly concentrates power and wealth, not just in Hollywood and Washington D.C. but in the judiciary, in higher education, in Big Pharma, the National Security State, Corporate America and yes, the Deep State, which is comprised not of the bureaucratic functionaries (sorry to pop your balloon) of the state but those one level above the gatekeepers.
Every American has a simple but profound choice. Either place your integrity above all else, and refuse to climb the putrid pyramid of wealth and power, or succumb to greed and become complicit in an empire of greed, complicity and corruption.
If "success" means a fat salary, points of gross, invitations to A-list parties, access to the inner circle, being the right-hand boy/girl of someone powerful, a seat on the private jet, etc., then you will be required to service the gatekeepers and sacrifice whatever integrity you once possessed.
If integrity means more than any of these baubles, then prepare to fail. You won't clamber up the putrid pyramid, you won't get past the gatekeepers, and you won't be invited to join the elite skimming the nation's wealth for its own gratification and greed.
But you will still have yourself, your pride, and your integrity.
It's not an easy choice. Choose wisely. As Orwell observed about a totalitarian oligarchy, some are more equal than others. But the sacrifices required to become more equal than than the bottom 99.5% are irrevocable--you will have to sacrifice everything but your greed, your appetite for corruption and your willingness to hide the truth from the outside world.
True success lies outside the empire of greed, complicity and corruption.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Saturday, October 14, 2017
SC151-5
https://srsroccoreport.com/worlds-largest-oil-companies-deep-trouble-as-profits-vaporize-while-debts-skyrocket/
WORLD’S LARGEST OIL COMPANIES: Deep Trouble As Profits Vaporize While Debts Skyrocket
The world’s largest oil companies are in serious trouble as their balance sheets deteriorate from higher costs, falling profits and skyrocketing debt. The glory days of the highly profitable global oil companies have come to an end. All that remains now is a mere shadow of the once mighty oil industry that will be forced to continue cannibalizing itself to produce the last bit of valuable oil.
I realize my extremely unfavorable opinion of the world’s oil industry runs counter to many mainstream energy analysts, however, their belief that business, as usual, will continue for decades, is entirely unfounded. Why? Because, they do not understand the ramifications of the Falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested, and its impact on the global economy.
For example, Chevron was able to make considerable profits in 1997 when the oil price was $19 a barrel. However, the company suffered a loss in 2016 when the price was more than double at $44 last year. And, it’s even worse than that if we compare the company’s profit to total revenues. Chevron enjoyed a $3.2 billion net income profit on revenues of $42 billion in 1997 versus a $497 million loss on total sales of $114 billion in 2016. Even though Chevron’s revenues nearly tripled in twenty years, its profit was decimated by the falling EROI.
Unfortunately, energy analysts, who are clueless to the amount of destruction taking place in the U.S. and global oil industry by the falling EROI, continue to mislead a public that is totally unprepared for what is coming. To provide a more realistic view of the disintegrating energy industry, I will provide data from seven of the largest oil companies in the world.
The World’s Major Oil Companies Debt Explode Since The 2008 Financial Crisis
To save the world from falling into total collapse during the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed and Central Banks embarked on the most massive money printing scheme in history. One side-effect of the massive money printing (and the purchasing of assets) by the central banks pushed the price of oil to a record $100+ a barrel for more than three years. While the large oil companies reported handsome profits due to the high oil price, many of them spent a great deal of capital to produce this oil.
For instance, the seven top global oil companies that I focused on made a combined $213 billion in cash from operations in 2013. However, they also forked out $230 billion in capital expenditures. Thus, the net free cash flow from these major oil companies was a negative $17 billion… and that doesn’t include the $44 billion they paid in dividends to their shareholders in 2013. Even though the price of oil was $109 in 2013; these seven oil companies added $45 billion to their long-term debt:
As we can see, the total amount of long-term debt in the group (Petrobras, Shell, BP, Total, Chevron, Exxon & Statoil) increased from $227 billion in 2012 to $272 billion in 2013. Isn’t that ironic that the debt ($45 billion) rose nearly the same amount as the group’s dividend payouts ($44 billion)? Of course, we can’t forget about the negative $17 billion in free cash flow in 2013, but here we see evidence that the top seven global oil companies were borrowing money even in 2013, at $109 a barrel oil, to pay their dividends.
Since the 2008 global economic and financial crisis, the top seven oil companies have seen their total combined debt explode four times, from $96 billion to $379 billion currently. You would think with these energy companies enjoying a $100+ oil price for more than three years; they would be lowering their debt, not increasing it. Regrettably, the cost for companies to replace reserves, produce oil and share profits with shareholders was more than the $110 oil price.
There lies the rub….
One of the disadvantages of skyrocketing debt is the rising amount of interest the company has to pay to service that debt. If we look at the chart above, Brazil’s Petrobras is the clear winner in the group by adding the most debt. Petrobras’s debt surged from $21 billion in 2008 to $109 billion last year. As Petrobras added debt, it also had to pay out more to service that debt. In just eight years, the annual interest amount Petrobras paid to service its debt increased from $793 million in 2008 to $6 billion last year. Sadly, Petrobras’s rising interest payment has caused another nasty side-effect which cut dividend payouts to its shareholders to ZERO for the past two years.
Petrobras Annual Dividend Payments:
2008 = $4.7 billion
2009 = $7.7 billion
2010 = $5.4 billion
2011 = $6.4 billion
2012 = $3.3 billion
2013 = $2.6 billion
2014 = $3.9 billion
2015 = ZERO
2016 = ZERO
You see, this is a perfect example of how the Falling EROI guts an oil company from the inside out. The sad irony of the situation at Petrobras is this:
If you are a shareholder, you’re screwed, and if you invested funds (in company bonds, etc.) to receive a higher interest payment, you’re also screwed because you will never get back your initial investment. So, investors are screwed either way. This is what happens during the final stage of collapsing oil industry.
Another negative consequence of the Falling EROI on these major oil companies’ financial statements is the decline in profits as the cost to produce oil rises more than the economic price the market can afford.
Major Oil Companies’ Profits Vaporize… Even At Higher Oil Prices
To be able to understand just how bad the financial situation has become at the world’s largest oil companies, we need to go back in time and compare the industry’s profitability versus the oil price. To find a year when the oil price was about the same as it was in 2016, we have to return to 2004, when the average oil price was $38.26 versus $43.67 last year. Yes, the oil price was lower in 2004 than in 2016, but I can assure you, these oil companies weren’t complaining.
In 2004, the combined net income of these seven oil companies was almost $100 billion….. $99.2 billion to be exact. Every oil company in the group made a nice profit in 2004 on a $38 oil price. However, last year, the net profits in the group plunged to only $10.5 billion, even at a higher $43 oil price:
Even with a $5 increase in the price of oil last year compared to 2004, these oil companies combined net income profit fell nearly 90%. How about them apples. Of the seven companies listed in the chart above, only four made profits last year, while three lost money. Exxon and Total enjoyed the highest profits in the group, while Petrobras and Statoil suffered the largest losses:
Again, the financial situation is in much worse shape because “net income” accounting does not factor in the companies’ capital expenditures or dividend payouts. Regardless, the world’s top oil companies’ profitability has vaporized even at a higher oil price.
Now, another metric that provides us with more disturbing evidence of the Falling EROI in the oil industry is the collapse of the “Return On Capital Employed.” Basically, the Return On Capital Employed is just dividing the company’s earnings (before taxes and interest) by its total assets minus current liabilities. In 2004, the seven companies listed above posted between 20-40% Return On Capital Employed. However, this fell precipitously over the next decade and are now registering in the low single digits:
In 2004, we can see that BP had the lowest Return On Capital Employed of 19.68% in the group, while Statoil had the highest at 46.20%. If we throw out the highest and lowest figures, the average for the group was 29%. Now, compare that to the average of 2.4% for the group in 2016, and that does not including BP and Chevron’s negative returns (shown in Dark Blue & Orange).
NOTE: I failed to include the Statoil graph line (Magenta) when I made the chart, but I added the figures afterward. For Statoil to experience a Return On Capital Employed decline from 46.2% in 2004 to less than 1% in 2016, suggests something is seriously wrong.
We must remember, the high Return On Capital Employed by the group in 2004, was based on a $38 price of oil, while the low single-digit returns by the oil companies in 2016 were derived from a higher price of $43. Unfortunately, the world’s largest oil companies are no longer able to enjoy high returns on a low oil price. This is bad news because the market can’t afford a high oil price unless the Fed and Central Banks come back in with an even larger amount of QE (Quantitative Easing) money printing.
I have one more chart that shows just how bad the Falling EROI is destroying the world’s top oil companies. In 2004, these seven oil companies enjoyed a net Free Cash Flow minus dividends of a positive $34 billion versus a negative $39.1 billion in 2016:
Let me explain these figures. So, after these oil companies paid their capital expenditures and dividends to shareholders, they had a net $34 billion left over. However, last year these companies were in the HOLE for $39.1 billion after paying capital expenditures and dividends. Thus, many of them had to borrow money just to pay dividends.
To understand how big of a change has taken place at the oil companies since 2004, here are the figures below:
Top 7 Major Oil Companies Free Cash Flow Figures
2004 Cash From Operations = …………$139.6 billion
2004 Capital Expenditures = ……………..$67.7 billion
2004 Free Cash Flow = ………………………$71.9 billion
2004 Shareholder Dividends = …………..$37.9 billion
2004 Free Cash Flow – Dividends = $34 billion
2016 Cash From Operations = ……………..$118.5 billion
2016 Capital Expenditures = ………………..$117.5 billion
2016 Free Cash Flow = …………………………..$1.0 billion
2016 Shareholder Dividends = ……………….$40.1 billion
2016 Free Cash Flow – Dividends = -$39.1 billion
Here we can see that the top seven global oil companies made more in cash from operations in 2004 ($139.6 billion) compared to 2016 ($118.5 billion). That extra $21 billion in operating cash in 2004 versus 2016 was realized even at a lower oil price. However, what has really hurt the group’s Free Cash Flow, is the much higher capital expenditures of $117.5 billion in 2016 compared to the $67.7 billion in 2004. You will notice that the net combined dividends didn’t increase that much in the two periods… only by $3 billion.
So, the lower cash from operations and the higher capital expenditures have taken a BIG HIT on the balance sheets of these oil companies. This is precisely why the long-term debt is skyrocketing, especially over the past three years as the oil price fell below $100 in 2014. To continue making their shareholders happy, many of these companies are borrowing money to pay dividends. Unfortunately, going further into debt to pay shareholders is not a prudent long-term business model.
The world’s major oil companies will continue to struggle with the oil price in the $50 range. While some analysts forecast that higher oil prices are on the horizon, I disagree. Yes, it’s true that oil prices may spike higher for a while, but the trend will be lower as the U.S. and global economies start to contract. As oil prices fall to the $40 and below, oil companies will begin to cut capital expenditures even further. Thus, the cycle of lower prices and the continued gutting of the global oil industry will move into high gear.
There is one option that might provide these oil companies with a buffer… and that is massive Fed and Central Bank money printing resulting in severe inflation and possibly hyperinflation. But, that won’t be a long-term solution, instead just another lousy band-aid in a series of band-aids that have only postponed the inevitable.
The coming bankruptcy of the once mighty global oil industry will be the death-knell of the world economy. Without oil, the global economy grinds to a halt. Of course, this will not occur overnight. It will take time. However, the evidence shows that a considerable wound has already taken place in an industry that has provided the world with much-needed oil for more than a century.
Lastly, without trying to be a broken record, the peak and decline of global oil production will destroy the value of most STOCKS, BONDS and REAL ESTATE. If you have placed most of your bests in one of these assets, you have my sympathies....
In the comment section of this article,
Conventional Oil Peaked in 2006 –IEA-EIA-NATURE-ENERGY
http://imgur.com/a/uCz7V
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7382/full/481433a.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544213009420
New Oil discoveries by scientists have been declining since 1965 and last year was the lowest in history –IEA
http://imgur.com/a/W60yn
We have been draining our oil reserves by consuming more oil than we discover since the 1980’s – ASPO
http://imgur.com/a/uJ0Rg
Aging giant oil fields produce more than half of global oil supply and are declining (Hook, 2009)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421509001281
Saudi Arabian oil reserves are overstated by 40% – Wikileaks
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
BP 1.7 Trillion barrels proven oil reserves NOT so proven
http://crudeoilpeak.info/oil-reserves-and-resources-as-function-of-oil-price
IEA Chief warns of world oil shortages by 2020 as discoveries fall to record lows
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Warns of World Oil Shortages Ahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-minister-sees-end-of-oil-price-slump-1476870790
UAE warns of world oil shortages ahead by 2020 due to industry spending cuts
http://www.arabianindustry.com/oil-gas/news/2016/nov/6/more-spending-cuts-as-uae-predicts-oil-shortages-5531344/
Saudi Aramco CEO believes oil shortage coming despite U.S. shale boom
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/07/10/saudi-aramco-ceo-believes-oil-shortage-coming-despite-u-s-shale-boom.html
Halliburton CEO says oil will spike due to oil shortages by 2020 after Industry Cuts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/halliburton-sees-2020-oil-spike-after-industry-cuts-2-trillion
Total CEO warns we are going to have oil shortages around 2020 due to lack of investment & new discoveries
http://www.boursorama.com/actualites/je-suis-convaincu-qu-on-va-manquer-de-petrole-selon-le-pdg-de-total-patrick-pouyanne-9b2d911a65572f5f989a74319b68d296
Chevron CEO warns US shale oil alone cannot meet the world’s growing demand for crude
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/01/us-shale-cannot-meet-the-worlds-growing-oil-demand-chevron-ceo-warns.html
HSBC Global Bank warns 80% of the worlds conventional fields are declining and world oil shortages ahead
https://www.research.hsbc.com/R/24/vzchQwb
UBS Global Bank warns of industry slowdown and world Oil Shortages by 2020
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/12136886/Oil-slowdown-to-trigger-supply-crisis-by-2020-warns-bank.html
CitiBank CEO warns of oil shortages coming as soon as 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/citi-says-get-ready-for-an-oil-squeeze-than-an-opec-supply-surge
Wood Mackenzie warns of oil supply crunch and world oil shortages around 2020
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Next-Oil-Price-Spike-May-Cripple-The-Industry.html
Energy watchdog warns oil and electricity shortages could develop as investment falls
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/watchdog-warns-of-oil-and-electricity-shortages-as-investment-falls.html
Oil Discoveries at 70-Year Low Signal Supply Shortfall Ahead
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-29/oil-discoveries-at-a-70-year-low-signal-a-supply-shortfall-ahead
Why investors’ should brace for a devastating oil shortage ahead around 2020
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-investors-should-brace-for-a-devastating-oil-shock-ahead-2017-07-03
People are almost completely ignoring a looming crisis for oil
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-oil-supply-and-demand-2016-9
IEA Says Price Spike Coming In 2020 due to oil shortage caused by oil depletion
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/IEA-Price-Spike-Coming-in-2020.html
Oil demand may exceed supply by up to 4 million bpd by 2019: Trafigura
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-oil-appec-trafigura/oil-demand-may-exceed-supply-by-up-to-4-million-bpd-by-2019-trafigura-idUSKCN1C10AM
World Oil Shortages To Lead To Oil Price Spike By 2020s, warns VP Goldman Sachs
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Supply-Crunch-To-Lead-To-Oil-Price-Spike-By-2020s-Expert-Says.html
China Government Study: Says its Oil Production About to Peak in 2018 & Coal in 2020 (Wang, 2017)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12182-017-0187-9
Mexico Oil Reserves Gone in 9 Years Without New Finds
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-31/down-10-mexico-oil-reserves-gone-in-9-years-without-new-finds
Saudi Arabia may be out of oil to export by 2030 – Citibank
http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/middleeast/2012/09/35876.html
Does OPEC really have 80 percent of the world’s oil? Maybe not.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2012/0913/Does-OPEC-really-have-80-percent-of-the-world-s-oil-Maybe-not
Kuwait Oil Reserves only Half the Official Government Estimates
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-01-20/kuwait-oil-reserves-only-half-official-estimate-piw/
Edinburgh Study: Only 10 years of UK’S North Sea Oil and Gas Remaining (Thompson, 2017)
https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2017/uk-oil-and-gas-reserves-may-last-only-a-decade
The world’s biggest oil trader Vitol says US oil production will peak in 2018
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-commodities-summit-vitol/u-s-oil-output-may-be-set-for-last-spike-in-2018-vitolidUSKBN1CF1MZ
The Mighty U.S. Shale Oil Industry to Lose Another $20 Billion In 2017
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-mighty-u-s-shale-oil-industry-to-lose-another-20-billion-in-2017/
MIT Technology Review: Shale Oil Will Boost U.S. Production, But It Won’t Bring Energy Independence
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507446/shale-oil-will-boost-us-production-but-it-wont-bring-energy-independence/
Long-term estimates of the (EROI) of coal, oil, and gas global productions (Court, & Fizanie, 2017)
https://victorcourt.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/court-fizaine-2017_long-term-estimates-of-fossil-fuels-erois1.pdf
EROI of different fuels and the implications for society, Energy, EROI and quality of life. (Lambert, & Hall, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513006447
Cornell University: Energy Studies in the College of Engineering. The Challenges of Peak Oil
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/energy/the_challenges/peak_oil.html
The End of Peak Oil? Why this topic is still relevant despite recent denials (Chapman, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151300342X
The Global Oil & Gas Industry Is Cannibalizing Itself To Stay Alive
https://srsroccoreport.com/warning-the-global-oil-gas-industry-is-cannibalizing-itself-to-stay-alive/
WORLD’S LARGEST OIL COMPANIES: Deep Trouble As Profits Vaporize While Debts Skyrocket
https://srsroccoreport.com/worlds-largest-oil-companies-deep-trouble-as-profits-vaporize-while-debts-skyrocket/#comment-50898
USA DOE Study: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION (Hirsch, 2005)
https://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf
USA GAO Study: Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply. Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf
Australian Government (Leaked) Study: concludes world peak oil around 2017
https://web.archive.org/web/20170415190328/https://www.aspo-australia.org.au/References/Bruce/BITRE-Report-117-Oil_supply_trends-2009.pdf
German Government (leaked) Peak Oil study concludes: oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 90% of all manufactured products, so a shortage of oil would collapse the world economy & world governments
https://www.permaculture.org.au/files/Peak%20Oil_Study%20EN.pdf
UC Davis Study: It Will Take 131 Years to Replace Oil with Alternatives (Malyshkina, 2010)
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es100730q
University of Chicago Study: predicts world economy unlikely to stop relying on fossil fuels (Covert, 2016)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.1.117
‘WORSE THAN 2007’: Top banker warns of looming wave of worldwide bankruptcies
http://www.businessinsider.com/worse-than-2007-top-banker-warns-of-looming-wave-of-worldwide-bankruptcies-2016-1
The World is drowning in Debt, warns Goldman Sachs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11625406/The-world-is-drowning-in-debt-warns-Goldman-Sachs.html
Perching Tree: Return of the Global Depression 2.0
https://www.perchingtree.com/return-of-great-depression/
Perfect Storm: Energy, Finance and the End of Growth -Dr Tim Morgan Global Head of Research
https://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/TPSI_009_Perfect_Storm_009.pdf
Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08 (Hamilton, 2009)
https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/causes-and-consequences-of-the-oil-shock-of-2007-08/
World Scientists “Warning to Humanity” signed by 1,700 scientists including the majority of all Nobel Prize Winners
http://www.ucsusa.org/about/1992-world-scientists.html#.WeKJx49Sziw
NASA Study: Industrial Civilization is headed for Irreversible Collapse (Motesharrei, 2012)
http://jayhanson.us/_Biology/OvershootCollapse.pdf
UK Royal Society Study: Now, for the First Time, a Global Collapse Appears Likely (Ehrlich, 2013)
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845
Study: Limits to Growth was Right. Research shows we’re nearing Global Collapse (Turner, 2014)
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
Study: Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: in Global Systemic Collapse (Korowicz, 2012)
http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/
The End of the Human Race will be that it will Eventually Die of Civilization –Ralph W Emerson
WORLD’S LARGEST OIL COMPANIES: Deep Trouble As Profits Vaporize While Debts Skyrocket
The world’s largest oil companies are in serious trouble as their balance sheets deteriorate from higher costs, falling profits and skyrocketing debt. The glory days of the highly profitable global oil companies have come to an end. All that remains now is a mere shadow of the once mighty oil industry that will be forced to continue cannibalizing itself to produce the last bit of valuable oil.
I realize my extremely unfavorable opinion of the world’s oil industry runs counter to many mainstream energy analysts, however, their belief that business, as usual, will continue for decades, is entirely unfounded. Why? Because, they do not understand the ramifications of the Falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested, and its impact on the global economy.
For example, Chevron was able to make considerable profits in 1997 when the oil price was $19 a barrel. However, the company suffered a loss in 2016 when the price was more than double at $44 last year. And, it’s even worse than that if we compare the company’s profit to total revenues. Chevron enjoyed a $3.2 billion net income profit on revenues of $42 billion in 1997 versus a $497 million loss on total sales of $114 billion in 2016. Even though Chevron’s revenues nearly tripled in twenty years, its profit was decimated by the falling EROI.
Unfortunately, energy analysts, who are clueless to the amount of destruction taking place in the U.S. and global oil industry by the falling EROI, continue to mislead a public that is totally unprepared for what is coming. To provide a more realistic view of the disintegrating energy industry, I will provide data from seven of the largest oil companies in the world.
The World’s Major Oil Companies Debt Explode Since The 2008 Financial Crisis
To save the world from falling into total collapse during the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed and Central Banks embarked on the most massive money printing scheme in history. One side-effect of the massive money printing (and the purchasing of assets) by the central banks pushed the price of oil to a record $100+ a barrel for more than three years. While the large oil companies reported handsome profits due to the high oil price, many of them spent a great deal of capital to produce this oil.
For instance, the seven top global oil companies that I focused on made a combined $213 billion in cash from operations in 2013. However, they also forked out $230 billion in capital expenditures. Thus, the net free cash flow from these major oil companies was a negative $17 billion… and that doesn’t include the $44 billion they paid in dividends to their shareholders in 2013. Even though the price of oil was $109 in 2013; these seven oil companies added $45 billion to their long-term debt:
As we can see, the total amount of long-term debt in the group (Petrobras, Shell, BP, Total, Chevron, Exxon & Statoil) increased from $227 billion in 2012 to $272 billion in 2013. Isn’t that ironic that the debt ($45 billion) rose nearly the same amount as the group’s dividend payouts ($44 billion)? Of course, we can’t forget about the negative $17 billion in free cash flow in 2013, but here we see evidence that the top seven global oil companies were borrowing money even in 2013, at $109 a barrel oil, to pay their dividends.
Since the 2008 global economic and financial crisis, the top seven oil companies have seen their total combined debt explode four times, from $96 billion to $379 billion currently. You would think with these energy companies enjoying a $100+ oil price for more than three years; they would be lowering their debt, not increasing it. Regrettably, the cost for companies to replace reserves, produce oil and share profits with shareholders was more than the $110 oil price.
There lies the rub….
One of the disadvantages of skyrocketing debt is the rising amount of interest the company has to pay to service that debt. If we look at the chart above, Brazil’s Petrobras is the clear winner in the group by adding the most debt. Petrobras’s debt surged from $21 billion in 2008 to $109 billion last year. As Petrobras added debt, it also had to pay out more to service that debt. In just eight years, the annual interest amount Petrobras paid to service its debt increased from $793 million in 2008 to $6 billion last year. Sadly, Petrobras’s rising interest payment has caused another nasty side-effect which cut dividend payouts to its shareholders to ZERO for the past two years.
Petrobras Annual Dividend Payments:
2008 = $4.7 billion
2009 = $7.7 billion
2010 = $5.4 billion
2011 = $6.4 billion
2012 = $3.3 billion
2013 = $2.6 billion
2014 = $3.9 billion
2015 = ZERO
2016 = ZERO
You see, this is a perfect example of how the Falling EROI guts an oil company from the inside out. The sad irony of the situation at Petrobras is this:
If you are a shareholder, you’re screwed, and if you invested funds (in company bonds, etc.) to receive a higher interest payment, you’re also screwed because you will never get back your initial investment. So, investors are screwed either way. This is what happens during the final stage of collapsing oil industry.
Another negative consequence of the Falling EROI on these major oil companies’ financial statements is the decline in profits as the cost to produce oil rises more than the economic price the market can afford.
Major Oil Companies’ Profits Vaporize… Even At Higher Oil Prices
To be able to understand just how bad the financial situation has become at the world’s largest oil companies, we need to go back in time and compare the industry’s profitability versus the oil price. To find a year when the oil price was about the same as it was in 2016, we have to return to 2004, when the average oil price was $38.26 versus $43.67 last year. Yes, the oil price was lower in 2004 than in 2016, but I can assure you, these oil companies weren’t complaining.
In 2004, the combined net income of these seven oil companies was almost $100 billion….. $99.2 billion to be exact. Every oil company in the group made a nice profit in 2004 on a $38 oil price. However, last year, the net profits in the group plunged to only $10.5 billion, even at a higher $43 oil price:
Even with a $5 increase in the price of oil last year compared to 2004, these oil companies combined net income profit fell nearly 90%. How about them apples. Of the seven companies listed in the chart above, only four made profits last year, while three lost money. Exxon and Total enjoyed the highest profits in the group, while Petrobras and Statoil suffered the largest losses:
Again, the financial situation is in much worse shape because “net income” accounting does not factor in the companies’ capital expenditures or dividend payouts. Regardless, the world’s top oil companies’ profitability has vaporized even at a higher oil price.
Now, another metric that provides us with more disturbing evidence of the Falling EROI in the oil industry is the collapse of the “Return On Capital Employed.” Basically, the Return On Capital Employed is just dividing the company’s earnings (before taxes and interest) by its total assets minus current liabilities. In 2004, the seven companies listed above posted between 20-40% Return On Capital Employed. However, this fell precipitously over the next decade and are now registering in the low single digits:
In 2004, we can see that BP had the lowest Return On Capital Employed of 19.68% in the group, while Statoil had the highest at 46.20%. If we throw out the highest and lowest figures, the average for the group was 29%. Now, compare that to the average of 2.4% for the group in 2016, and that does not including BP and Chevron’s negative returns (shown in Dark Blue & Orange).
NOTE: I failed to include the Statoil graph line (Magenta) when I made the chart, but I added the figures afterward. For Statoil to experience a Return On Capital Employed decline from 46.2% in 2004 to less than 1% in 2016, suggests something is seriously wrong.
We must remember, the high Return On Capital Employed by the group in 2004, was based on a $38 price of oil, while the low single-digit returns by the oil companies in 2016 were derived from a higher price of $43. Unfortunately, the world’s largest oil companies are no longer able to enjoy high returns on a low oil price. This is bad news because the market can’t afford a high oil price unless the Fed and Central Banks come back in with an even larger amount of QE (Quantitative Easing) money printing.
I have one more chart that shows just how bad the Falling EROI is destroying the world’s top oil companies. In 2004, these seven oil companies enjoyed a net Free Cash Flow minus dividends of a positive $34 billion versus a negative $39.1 billion in 2016:
Let me explain these figures. So, after these oil companies paid their capital expenditures and dividends to shareholders, they had a net $34 billion left over. However, last year these companies were in the HOLE for $39.1 billion after paying capital expenditures and dividends. Thus, many of them had to borrow money just to pay dividends.
To understand how big of a change has taken place at the oil companies since 2004, here are the figures below:
Top 7 Major Oil Companies Free Cash Flow Figures
2004 Cash From Operations = …………$139.6 billion
2004 Capital Expenditures = ……………..$67.7 billion
2004 Free Cash Flow = ………………………$71.9 billion
2004 Shareholder Dividends = …………..$37.9 billion
2004 Free Cash Flow – Dividends = $34 billion
2016 Cash From Operations = ……………..$118.5 billion
2016 Capital Expenditures = ………………..$117.5 billion
2016 Free Cash Flow = …………………………..$1.0 billion
2016 Shareholder Dividends = ……………….$40.1 billion
2016 Free Cash Flow – Dividends = -$39.1 billion
Here we can see that the top seven global oil companies made more in cash from operations in 2004 ($139.6 billion) compared to 2016 ($118.5 billion). That extra $21 billion in operating cash in 2004 versus 2016 was realized even at a lower oil price. However, what has really hurt the group’s Free Cash Flow, is the much higher capital expenditures of $117.5 billion in 2016 compared to the $67.7 billion in 2004. You will notice that the net combined dividends didn’t increase that much in the two periods… only by $3 billion.
So, the lower cash from operations and the higher capital expenditures have taken a BIG HIT on the balance sheets of these oil companies. This is precisely why the long-term debt is skyrocketing, especially over the past three years as the oil price fell below $100 in 2014. To continue making their shareholders happy, many of these companies are borrowing money to pay dividends. Unfortunately, going further into debt to pay shareholders is not a prudent long-term business model.
The world’s major oil companies will continue to struggle with the oil price in the $50 range. While some analysts forecast that higher oil prices are on the horizon, I disagree. Yes, it’s true that oil prices may spike higher for a while, but the trend will be lower as the U.S. and global economies start to contract. As oil prices fall to the $40 and below, oil companies will begin to cut capital expenditures even further. Thus, the cycle of lower prices and the continued gutting of the global oil industry will move into high gear.
There is one option that might provide these oil companies with a buffer… and that is massive Fed and Central Bank money printing resulting in severe inflation and possibly hyperinflation. But, that won’t be a long-term solution, instead just another lousy band-aid in a series of band-aids that have only postponed the inevitable.
The coming bankruptcy of the once mighty global oil industry will be the death-knell of the world economy. Without oil, the global economy grinds to a halt. Of course, this will not occur overnight. It will take time. However, the evidence shows that a considerable wound has already taken place in an industry that has provided the world with much-needed oil for more than a century.
Lastly, without trying to be a broken record, the peak and decline of global oil production will destroy the value of most STOCKS, BONDS and REAL ESTATE. If you have placed most of your bests in one of these assets, you have my sympathies....
In the comment section of this article,
Conventional Oil Peaked in 2006 –IEA-EIA-NATURE-ENERGY
http://imgur.com/a/uCz7V
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7382/full/481433a.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544213009420
New Oil discoveries by scientists have been declining since 1965 and last year was the lowest in history –IEA
http://imgur.com/a/W60yn
We have been draining our oil reserves by consuming more oil than we discover since the 1980’s – ASPO
http://imgur.com/a/uJ0Rg
Aging giant oil fields produce more than half of global oil supply and are declining (Hook, 2009)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421509001281
Saudi Arabian oil reserves are overstated by 40% – Wikileaks
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
BP 1.7 Trillion barrels proven oil reserves NOT so proven
http://crudeoilpeak.info/oil-reserves-and-resources-as-function-of-oil-price
IEA Chief warns of world oil shortages by 2020 as discoveries fall to record lows
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Warns of World Oil Shortages Ahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-minister-sees-end-of-oil-price-slump-1476870790
UAE warns of world oil shortages ahead by 2020 due to industry spending cuts
http://www.arabianindustry.com/oil-gas/news/2016/nov/6/more-spending-cuts-as-uae-predicts-oil-shortages-5531344/
Saudi Aramco CEO believes oil shortage coming despite U.S. shale boom
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/07/10/saudi-aramco-ceo-believes-oil-shortage-coming-despite-u-s-shale-boom.html
Halliburton CEO says oil will spike due to oil shortages by 2020 after Industry Cuts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/halliburton-sees-2020-oil-spike-after-industry-cuts-2-trillion
Total CEO warns we are going to have oil shortages around 2020 due to lack of investment & new discoveries
http://www.boursorama.com/actualites/je-suis-convaincu-qu-on-va-manquer-de-petrole-selon-le-pdg-de-total-patrick-pouyanne-9b2d911a65572f5f989a74319b68d296
Chevron CEO warns US shale oil alone cannot meet the world’s growing demand for crude
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/01/us-shale-cannot-meet-the-worlds-growing-oil-demand-chevron-ceo-warns.html
HSBC Global Bank warns 80% of the worlds conventional fields are declining and world oil shortages ahead
https://www.research.hsbc.com/R/24/vzchQwb
UBS Global Bank warns of industry slowdown and world Oil Shortages by 2020
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/12136886/Oil-slowdown-to-trigger-supply-crisis-by-2020-warns-bank.html
CitiBank CEO warns of oil shortages coming as soon as 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/citi-says-get-ready-for-an-oil-squeeze-than-an-opec-supply-surge
Wood Mackenzie warns of oil supply crunch and world oil shortages around 2020
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Next-Oil-Price-Spike-May-Cripple-The-Industry.html
Energy watchdog warns oil and electricity shortages could develop as investment falls
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/watchdog-warns-of-oil-and-electricity-shortages-as-investment-falls.html
Oil Discoveries at 70-Year Low Signal Supply Shortfall Ahead
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-29/oil-discoveries-at-a-70-year-low-signal-a-supply-shortfall-ahead
Why investors’ should brace for a devastating oil shortage ahead around 2020
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-investors-should-brace-for-a-devastating-oil-shock-ahead-2017-07-03
People are almost completely ignoring a looming crisis for oil
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-oil-supply-and-demand-2016-9
IEA Says Price Spike Coming In 2020 due to oil shortage caused by oil depletion
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/IEA-Price-Spike-Coming-in-2020.html
Oil demand may exceed supply by up to 4 million bpd by 2019: Trafigura
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-oil-appec-trafigura/oil-demand-may-exceed-supply-by-up-to-4-million-bpd-by-2019-trafigura-idUSKCN1C10AM
World Oil Shortages To Lead To Oil Price Spike By 2020s, warns VP Goldman Sachs
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Supply-Crunch-To-Lead-To-Oil-Price-Spike-By-2020s-Expert-Says.html
China Government Study: Says its Oil Production About to Peak in 2018 & Coal in 2020 (Wang, 2017)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12182-017-0187-9
Mexico Oil Reserves Gone in 9 Years Without New Finds
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-31/down-10-mexico-oil-reserves-gone-in-9-years-without-new-finds
Saudi Arabia may be out of oil to export by 2030 – Citibank
http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/middleeast/2012/09/35876.html
Does OPEC really have 80 percent of the world’s oil? Maybe not.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2012/0913/Does-OPEC-really-have-80-percent-of-the-world-s-oil-Maybe-not
Kuwait Oil Reserves only Half the Official Government Estimates
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-01-20/kuwait-oil-reserves-only-half-official-estimate-piw/
Edinburgh Study: Only 10 years of UK’S North Sea Oil and Gas Remaining (Thompson, 2017)
https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2017/uk-oil-and-gas-reserves-may-last-only-a-decade
The world’s biggest oil trader Vitol says US oil production will peak in 2018
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-commodities-summit-vitol/u-s-oil-output-may-be-set-for-last-spike-in-2018-vitolidUSKBN1CF1MZ
The Mighty U.S. Shale Oil Industry to Lose Another $20 Billion In 2017
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-mighty-u-s-shale-oil-industry-to-lose-another-20-billion-in-2017/
MIT Technology Review: Shale Oil Will Boost U.S. Production, But It Won’t Bring Energy Independence
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507446/shale-oil-will-boost-us-production-but-it-wont-bring-energy-independence/
Long-term estimates of the (EROI) of coal, oil, and gas global productions (Court, & Fizanie, 2017)
https://victorcourt.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/court-fizaine-2017_long-term-estimates-of-fossil-fuels-erois1.pdf
EROI of different fuels and the implications for society, Energy, EROI and quality of life. (Lambert, & Hall, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513006447
Cornell University: Energy Studies in the College of Engineering. The Challenges of Peak Oil
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/energy/the_challenges/peak_oil.html
The End of Peak Oil? Why this topic is still relevant despite recent denials (Chapman, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151300342X
The Global Oil & Gas Industry Is Cannibalizing Itself To Stay Alive
https://srsroccoreport.com/warning-the-global-oil-gas-industry-is-cannibalizing-itself-to-stay-alive/
WORLD’S LARGEST OIL COMPANIES: Deep Trouble As Profits Vaporize While Debts Skyrocket
https://srsroccoreport.com/worlds-largest-oil-companies-deep-trouble-as-profits-vaporize-while-debts-skyrocket/#comment-50898
USA DOE Study: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION (Hirsch, 2005)
https://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf
USA GAO Study: Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply. Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf
Australian Government (Leaked) Study: concludes world peak oil around 2017
https://web.archive.org/web/20170415190328/https://www.aspo-australia.org.au/References/Bruce/BITRE-Report-117-Oil_supply_trends-2009.pdf
German Government (leaked) Peak Oil study concludes: oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 90% of all manufactured products, so a shortage of oil would collapse the world economy & world governments
https://www.permaculture.org.au/files/Peak%20Oil_Study%20EN.pdf
UC Davis Study: It Will Take 131 Years to Replace Oil with Alternatives (Malyshkina, 2010)
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es100730q
University of Chicago Study: predicts world economy unlikely to stop relying on fossil fuels (Covert, 2016)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.1.117
‘WORSE THAN 2007’: Top banker warns of looming wave of worldwide bankruptcies
http://www.businessinsider.com/worse-than-2007-top-banker-warns-of-looming-wave-of-worldwide-bankruptcies-2016-1
The World is drowning in Debt, warns Goldman Sachs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11625406/The-world-is-drowning-in-debt-warns-Goldman-Sachs.html
Perching Tree: Return of the Global Depression 2.0
https://www.perchingtree.com/return-of-great-depression/
Perfect Storm: Energy, Finance and the End of Growth -Dr Tim Morgan Global Head of Research
https://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/TPSI_009_Perfect_Storm_009.pdf
Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08 (Hamilton, 2009)
https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/causes-and-consequences-of-the-oil-shock-of-2007-08/
World Scientists “Warning to Humanity” signed by 1,700 scientists including the majority of all Nobel Prize Winners
http://www.ucsusa.org/about/1992-world-scientists.html#.WeKJx49Sziw
NASA Study: Industrial Civilization is headed for Irreversible Collapse (Motesharrei, 2012)
http://jayhanson.us/_Biology/OvershootCollapse.pdf
UK Royal Society Study: Now, for the First Time, a Global Collapse Appears Likely (Ehrlich, 2013)
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845
Study: Limits to Growth was Right. Research shows we’re nearing Global Collapse (Turner, 2014)
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
Study: Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: in Global Systemic Collapse (Korowicz, 2012)
http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/
The End of the Human Race will be that it will Eventually Die of Civilization –Ralph W Emerson
SC151-4
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-defence-secretary-calls-on-military-to-be-ready-for-war-against-north-korea-there-are-no-risk-free-options/5612855
US Defence Secretary Calls on Military to be “Ready” for War Against North Korea. “There are No Risk Free Options”
In comments that underscore the advanced US preparations for war with North Korea, Defence Secretary James Mattis declared yesterday that the armed forces had “to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed.”
Mattis’s remarks to the Association of the US Army Exposition on Building Readiness directly echoed President Trump’s instruction last Thursday to a meeting of his top military and intelligence chiefs, including Mattis.
“I also expect you to provide me with a broad range of military options, when needed, at a much faster pace,” Trump stated.
The defence secretary yesterday emphasised that “the US army must stand ready.” He pointedly urged his military audience to read T.R. Fehrenbach’s “This Kind of War”—a history of the bloody US-led Korean War of 1950–53—to make clear that the army could well be flung into another devastating conflict in the near future.
In a chilling indication of what is being planned and what would be required of the army, Mattis quoted Fehrenbach:
“You may fly over a nation forever, you may bomb it, atomise it, pulverise it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it… you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did: by putting your young men in the mud.”
Speaking to the media at the same military gathering, US Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley declared that the military was ready to act, warning that time was short.
“It’s not an indefinite amount of time. And there will be a decision made, there is no question about it,” he said.
Like Mattis, Milley warned of what lay in store in a war on North Korea:
“There are no good, easy, risk-free options here. This is extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily dangerous. No one should underestimate it.”
In his comments, Mattis maintained that the White House is engaged in “a diplomatically-led, economically sanction-buttressed effort to try to turn North Korea off this path [towards war].”
President Trump, however, has repeatedly and openly dismissed efforts to start talks with North Korea, declaring just last week that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time” in putting out feelers for negotiations with Pyongyang.
Yesterday, Trump echoed his threatening tweet on Saturday that “only one thing will work” with North Korea—namely, a war of total destruction. On Monday, he tweeted:
“Our country has been unsuccessfully dealing with North Korea for 25 years, giving billions of dollars & getting nothing. Policy didn’t work?”
Trump’s crude, ignorant and menacing threats evoke no significant opposition or criticism in the compliant American and international media, which once again serves as a propaganda arm for war, through its incessant demonisation of the Pyongyang regime. The real threat to the world is not North Korea and its limited nuclear arsenal, but US imperialism, which is on the brink of launching a war that could drag in all of the major nuclear-armed powers.
Over the past 25 years, successive US governments have pursued a policy of undisguised hostility towards Pyongyang and have never negotiated in good faith. In 1994, President Clinton was on the brink of launching an all-out war against North Korea. He only pulled back at the last moment when his generals made clear that there would be tens of thousands of US military casualties and nearly half a million South Korean military casualties in the first three months of a war.
The Clinton administration never carried out the terms of the hastily reached 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, which was rapidly overturned by the incoming Bush administration. Bush himself only negotiated the 2007 denuclearisation agreement with Pyongyang because the American military was bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He effectively sabotaged the deal by unilaterally demanding a new, more intrusive inspection regime. Obama never attempted to resurrect talks.
Trump’s declaration that “only one thing will work” in dealing with North Korea makes clear that nothing short of Pyongyang’s complete capitulation to Washington’s demands will halt the US drive to war.
The imminence of a war in North East Asia with incalculable consequences is generating tensions within Washington, including within the White House, as well as in capitals around the world.
Concerned about the danger of a broader conflict and the potential for an eruption of anti-war opposition, Mattis and Tillerson have both stressed the need to exhaust diplomatic avenues, while backing the so-called “military option.”
Other longstanding establishment figures, none of whom are fundamentally opposed to a war on North Korea, have voiced similar concerns.
On CNN yesterday, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that Trump should “cool” his statements, which North Korea “could easily construe… as a declaration or at least a threat of war.” He warned that Trump’s “bellicose rhetoric” only heightened the danger that Pyongyang would respond.
Speaking to an International Bar Association conference in Sydney on Monday, former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stated that a pre-emptive US strike on North Korea would be a “big mistake” that risked triggering a devastating war. “At what point do the tweets become provocative and create a situation in which any incident could lead to a much broader conflict?” he asked.
In the wake of Trump’s belligerent tweets, Russia and China yesterday called on all sides to pull back. Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov appealed for all parties “to exercise restraint and to avoid steps that would only worsen the situation.” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying described the situation as extremely complex and serious. While both countries have opposed North Korea’s nuclear programs, neither wants a major war on its doorstep.
At the same time, the US and its allies are preparing for conflict. South Korea’s Hankyoreh reported last week that the aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Ronald Reagan would be joining South Korean warships in mid-October for “high intensity joint exercises.” The Australian navy is reportedly sending two navy frigates to South Korea later this month to participate in a week of military exercises.
In Britain, the Daily Mail reported that British officials are drawing up war plans that could involve the dispatch of the navy’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and other warships to a US war in North East Asia.
US Defence Secretary Calls on Military to be “Ready” for War Against North Korea. “There are No Risk Free Options”
In comments that underscore the advanced US preparations for war with North Korea, Defence Secretary James Mattis declared yesterday that the armed forces had “to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed.”
Mattis’s remarks to the Association of the US Army Exposition on Building Readiness directly echoed President Trump’s instruction last Thursday to a meeting of his top military and intelligence chiefs, including Mattis.
“I also expect you to provide me with a broad range of military options, when needed, at a much faster pace,” Trump stated.
The defence secretary yesterday emphasised that “the US army must stand ready.” He pointedly urged his military audience to read T.R. Fehrenbach’s “This Kind of War”—a history of the bloody US-led Korean War of 1950–53—to make clear that the army could well be flung into another devastating conflict in the near future.
In a chilling indication of what is being planned and what would be required of the army, Mattis quoted Fehrenbach:
“You may fly over a nation forever, you may bomb it, atomise it, pulverise it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it… you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did: by putting your young men in the mud.”
Speaking to the media at the same military gathering, US Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley declared that the military was ready to act, warning that time was short.
“It’s not an indefinite amount of time. And there will be a decision made, there is no question about it,” he said.
Like Mattis, Milley warned of what lay in store in a war on North Korea:
“There are no good, easy, risk-free options here. This is extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily dangerous. No one should underestimate it.”
In his comments, Mattis maintained that the White House is engaged in “a diplomatically-led, economically sanction-buttressed effort to try to turn North Korea off this path [towards war].”
President Trump, however, has repeatedly and openly dismissed efforts to start talks with North Korea, declaring just last week that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time” in putting out feelers for negotiations with Pyongyang.
Yesterday, Trump echoed his threatening tweet on Saturday that “only one thing will work” with North Korea—namely, a war of total destruction. On Monday, he tweeted:
“Our country has been unsuccessfully dealing with North Korea for 25 years, giving billions of dollars & getting nothing. Policy didn’t work?”
Trump’s crude, ignorant and menacing threats evoke no significant opposition or criticism in the compliant American and international media, which once again serves as a propaganda arm for war, through its incessant demonisation of the Pyongyang regime. The real threat to the world is not North Korea and its limited nuclear arsenal, but US imperialism, which is on the brink of launching a war that could drag in all of the major nuclear-armed powers.
Over the past 25 years, successive US governments have pursued a policy of undisguised hostility towards Pyongyang and have never negotiated in good faith. In 1994, President Clinton was on the brink of launching an all-out war against North Korea. He only pulled back at the last moment when his generals made clear that there would be tens of thousands of US military casualties and nearly half a million South Korean military casualties in the first three months of a war.
The Clinton administration never carried out the terms of the hastily reached 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, which was rapidly overturned by the incoming Bush administration. Bush himself only negotiated the 2007 denuclearisation agreement with Pyongyang because the American military was bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He effectively sabotaged the deal by unilaterally demanding a new, more intrusive inspection regime. Obama never attempted to resurrect talks.
Trump’s declaration that “only one thing will work” in dealing with North Korea makes clear that nothing short of Pyongyang’s complete capitulation to Washington’s demands will halt the US drive to war.
The imminence of a war in North East Asia with incalculable consequences is generating tensions within Washington, including within the White House, as well as in capitals around the world.
Concerned about the danger of a broader conflict and the potential for an eruption of anti-war opposition, Mattis and Tillerson have both stressed the need to exhaust diplomatic avenues, while backing the so-called “military option.”
Other longstanding establishment figures, none of whom are fundamentally opposed to a war on North Korea, have voiced similar concerns.
On CNN yesterday, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that Trump should “cool” his statements, which North Korea “could easily construe… as a declaration or at least a threat of war.” He warned that Trump’s “bellicose rhetoric” only heightened the danger that Pyongyang would respond.
Speaking to an International Bar Association conference in Sydney on Monday, former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stated that a pre-emptive US strike on North Korea would be a “big mistake” that risked triggering a devastating war. “At what point do the tweets become provocative and create a situation in which any incident could lead to a much broader conflict?” he asked.
In the wake of Trump’s belligerent tweets, Russia and China yesterday called on all sides to pull back. Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov appealed for all parties “to exercise restraint and to avoid steps that would only worsen the situation.” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying described the situation as extremely complex and serious. While both countries have opposed North Korea’s nuclear programs, neither wants a major war on its doorstep.
At the same time, the US and its allies are preparing for conflict. South Korea’s Hankyoreh reported last week that the aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Ronald Reagan would be joining South Korean warships in mid-October for “high intensity joint exercises.” The Australian navy is reportedly sending two navy frigates to South Korea later this month to participate in a week of military exercises.
In Britain, the Daily Mail reported that British officials are drawing up war plans that could involve the dispatch of the navy’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and other warships to a US war in North East Asia.
Friday, October 13, 2017
SC151-3
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48011.htm
Power Corrupts: A Culture of Compliance Breeds Despots and Predators
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”― Frank Herbert
Power corrupts.
Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.
We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.
A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and a school and gets away with it.
Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sexual harassment, government corruption, or the rule of law.
For instance, 20 years ago, I took up a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of a young woman—a state employee—who claimed that her boss, a politically powerful man, had arranged for her to meet him in a hotel room, where he then allegedly dropped his pants, propositioned her and invited her to perform oral sex on him.
Despite the fact that this man had a well-known reputation for womanizing and this woman was merely one in a long line of women who had accused the man of groping, propositioning, and pressuring them for sexual favors in the workplace, she was denounced as white trash and subjected to a massive smear campaign by the man’s wife, friends and colleagues (including the leading women’s rights organizations of the day), while he was given lucrative book deals and paid lavish sums for speaking engagements.
William Jefferson Clinton eventually agreed to settle the case and pay Paula Jones $850,000.
Here we are 20 years later and not much has changed.
We’re still shocked by sexual harassment in the workplace, the victims of these sexual predators are still being harassed and smeared, and those who stand to gain the most by overlooking wrongdoing (all across the political spectrum) are still turning a blind eye to misconduct when it’s politically expedient to do so.
This time, it’s Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—longtime Clinton associate and a powerhouse when it comes to raising money for Democrats—who is being accused of decades of sexual assaults, aggressively sexual overtures and harassment.
I won’t go into the nauseating details here. You can read them for yourself at the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Suffice it to say that it’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.
From what I’ve read, this was Hollywood’s worst-kept secret.
In other words, everyone who was anyone knew about it. They were either complicit in allowing the abuses to take place, turning a blind eye to them, or helping to cover them up.
It’s not just happening in Hollywood, however.
And it’s not just sexual predators that we have to worry about.
For every Harvey Weinstein (or Roger Ailes or Bill Cosby or Donald Trump) who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.
The cop who shoots the unarmed citizen first and asks questions later might get put on paid leave for a while or take a job with another police department, but that’s just a slap on the wrist. The shootings and SWAT team raids and excessive use of force will continue, because the police unions and the politicians and the courts won’t do a thing to stop it. Case in point: The Justice Department will no longer attempt to police the police when it comes to official misconduct. Instead, it plans to give police agencies more money and authority to “fight” crime.
The war hawks who are making a profit by waging endless wars abroad, killing innocent civilians in hospitals and schools, and turning the American homeland into a domestic battlefield will continue to do so because neither the president nor the politicians will dare to challenge the military industrial complex. Case in point: Rather than scaling back on America’s endless wars, President Trump—like his predecessors—has continued to expand America’s military empire and its attempts to police the globe.
The National Security Agency that carries out warrantless surveillance on Americans’ internet and phone communications will continue to do so, because the government doesn’t want to relinquish any of its ill-gotten powers. Case in point: The USA Liberty Act, proposed as a way to “fix” all that’s wrong with domestic surveillance, will instead legitimize the government’s snooping powers.
Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.
Police officers will continue to shoot and kill unarmed citizens. Government agents—including local police—will continue to dress and act like soldiers on a battlefield.
Bloated government agencies will continue to fleece taxpayers while eroding our liberties. Government technicians will continue to spy on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors will continue to make a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
And powerful men (and women) will continue to abuse the powers of their office by treating those around them as underlings and second-class citizens who are unworthy of dignity and respect and undeserving of the legal rights and protections that should be afforded to all Americans.
As Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the at the University of California, Berkeley, observed in the Harvard Business Review, “While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing; when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade. The powerful are more likely than other people to engage in rude, selfish, and unethical behavior.”
After conducting a series of experiments into the phenomenon of how power corrupts, Keltner concluded: “Just the random assignment of power, and all kinds of mischief ensues, and people will become impulsive. They eat more resources than is their fair share. They take more money. People become more unethical. They think unethical behavior is okay if they engage in it. People are more likely to stereotype. They’re more likely to stop attending to other people carefully.”
Power corrupts.
And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.
As researchers Joris Lammers and Adam Galinsky found, those in power not only tend to abuse that power but they also feel entitled to abuse it: “People with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.”
That sense of entitlement and immunity from charges of wrongdoing dovetails with Richard Nixon’s belief that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
For too long now, America has played politics with its principles and allowed the president and his colleagues to act in violation of the rule of law.
“We the people” are paying the price for it now.
Americans have allowed Congress, the White House and the Judiciary to wreak havoc with our freedoms. They have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots. They have paid homage to patriotism while allowing the military industrial complex to spread death and destruction abroad. And they have turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient.
This culture of compliance must stop.
The empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.
For starters, let’s go back to the basics: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Let’s recommit to abiding by the rule of law.
Here’s what the rule of law means in a nutshell: it means that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.
Let’s demand scrutiny and transparency at all levels of government, which in turn will lead to accountability.
We need to stop being victimized by these predators.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, I’m not just talking about the political predators in office, but the ones who are running the show behind the scenes—the shadow government—comprised of unelected government bureaucrats whose powers are unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.
There is no way to erase the scars left by the government’s greed for money and power, its disregard for human life, its corruption and graft, its pollution of the environment, its reliance on excessive force in order to ensure compliance, its covert activities, its illegal surveillance, and its blatant disdain for the rule of law.
“We the people”—men and women alike— have been victims of the police state for so long that not many Americans even remember what it is to be truly free anymore. Worse, few want to shoulder the responsibility that goes along with maintaining freedom.
Still, we must try.
Power Corrupts: A Culture of Compliance Breeds Despots and Predators
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”― Frank Herbert
Power corrupts.
Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.
We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.
A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and a school and gets away with it.
Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sexual harassment, government corruption, or the rule of law.
For instance, 20 years ago, I took up a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of a young woman—a state employee—who claimed that her boss, a politically powerful man, had arranged for her to meet him in a hotel room, where he then allegedly dropped his pants, propositioned her and invited her to perform oral sex on him.
Despite the fact that this man had a well-known reputation for womanizing and this woman was merely one in a long line of women who had accused the man of groping, propositioning, and pressuring them for sexual favors in the workplace, she was denounced as white trash and subjected to a massive smear campaign by the man’s wife, friends and colleagues (including the leading women’s rights organizations of the day), while he was given lucrative book deals and paid lavish sums for speaking engagements.
William Jefferson Clinton eventually agreed to settle the case and pay Paula Jones $850,000.
Here we are 20 years later and not much has changed.
We’re still shocked by sexual harassment in the workplace, the victims of these sexual predators are still being harassed and smeared, and those who stand to gain the most by overlooking wrongdoing (all across the political spectrum) are still turning a blind eye to misconduct when it’s politically expedient to do so.
This time, it’s Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—longtime Clinton associate and a powerhouse when it comes to raising money for Democrats—who is being accused of decades of sexual assaults, aggressively sexual overtures and harassment.
I won’t go into the nauseating details here. You can read them for yourself at the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Suffice it to say that it’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.
From what I’ve read, this was Hollywood’s worst-kept secret.
In other words, everyone who was anyone knew about it. They were either complicit in allowing the abuses to take place, turning a blind eye to them, or helping to cover them up.
It’s not just happening in Hollywood, however.
And it’s not just sexual predators that we have to worry about.
For every Harvey Weinstein (or Roger Ailes or Bill Cosby or Donald Trump) who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.
The cop who shoots the unarmed citizen first and asks questions later might get put on paid leave for a while or take a job with another police department, but that’s just a slap on the wrist. The shootings and SWAT team raids and excessive use of force will continue, because the police unions and the politicians and the courts won’t do a thing to stop it. Case in point: The Justice Department will no longer attempt to police the police when it comes to official misconduct. Instead, it plans to give police agencies more money and authority to “fight” crime.
The war hawks who are making a profit by waging endless wars abroad, killing innocent civilians in hospitals and schools, and turning the American homeland into a domestic battlefield will continue to do so because neither the president nor the politicians will dare to challenge the military industrial complex. Case in point: Rather than scaling back on America’s endless wars, President Trump—like his predecessors—has continued to expand America’s military empire and its attempts to police the globe.
The National Security Agency that carries out warrantless surveillance on Americans’ internet and phone communications will continue to do so, because the government doesn’t want to relinquish any of its ill-gotten powers. Case in point: The USA Liberty Act, proposed as a way to “fix” all that’s wrong with domestic surveillance, will instead legitimize the government’s snooping powers.
Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.
Police officers will continue to shoot and kill unarmed citizens. Government agents—including local police—will continue to dress and act like soldiers on a battlefield.
Bloated government agencies will continue to fleece taxpayers while eroding our liberties. Government technicians will continue to spy on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors will continue to make a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
And powerful men (and women) will continue to abuse the powers of their office by treating those around them as underlings and second-class citizens who are unworthy of dignity and respect and undeserving of the legal rights and protections that should be afforded to all Americans.
As Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the at the University of California, Berkeley, observed in the Harvard Business Review, “While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing; when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade. The powerful are more likely than other people to engage in rude, selfish, and unethical behavior.”
After conducting a series of experiments into the phenomenon of how power corrupts, Keltner concluded: “Just the random assignment of power, and all kinds of mischief ensues, and people will become impulsive. They eat more resources than is their fair share. They take more money. People become more unethical. They think unethical behavior is okay if they engage in it. People are more likely to stereotype. They’re more likely to stop attending to other people carefully.”
Power corrupts.
And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.
As researchers Joris Lammers and Adam Galinsky found, those in power not only tend to abuse that power but they also feel entitled to abuse it: “People with power that they think is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.”
That sense of entitlement and immunity from charges of wrongdoing dovetails with Richard Nixon’s belief that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
For too long now, America has played politics with its principles and allowed the president and his colleagues to act in violation of the rule of law.
“We the people” are paying the price for it now.
Americans have allowed Congress, the White House and the Judiciary to wreak havoc with our freedoms. They have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots. They have paid homage to patriotism while allowing the military industrial complex to spread death and destruction abroad. And they have turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient.
This culture of compliance must stop.
The empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.
For starters, let’s go back to the basics: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Let’s recommit to abiding by the rule of law.
Here’s what the rule of law means in a nutshell: it means that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.
Let’s demand scrutiny and transparency at all levels of government, which in turn will lead to accountability.
We need to stop being victimized by these predators.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, I’m not just talking about the political predators in office, but the ones who are running the show behind the scenes—the shadow government—comprised of unelected government bureaucrats whose powers are unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.
There is no way to erase the scars left by the government’s greed for money and power, its disregard for human life, its corruption and graft, its pollution of the environment, its reliance on excessive force in order to ensure compliance, its covert activities, its illegal surveillance, and its blatant disdain for the rule of law.
“We the people”—men and women alike— have been victims of the police state for so long that not many Americans even remember what it is to be truly free anymore. Worse, few want to shoulder the responsibility that goes along with maintaining freedom.
Still, we must try.
SC151-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48009.htm
Anglo-American War Plan for North Korea
The United States and Britain – the two countries responsible for so many recent wars and conflicts – are at it again. This time, the diabolical double-act has North Korea in its sights, despite the risk that such an attack could ignite a global nuclear war.
Over the past week, US President Donald Trump has sharpened his bellicose rhetoric towards North Korea, now declaring that “only one thing works” in regard to the security crisis over the Korean Peninsula. That “one thing”, according to Trump, is evidently the “military option”.
For the past several months, the Trump administration has indeed repeatedly threatened the North Korean state led by Kim Jong-un with military force over the latter’s nuclear weapons program. But the American threats have always been conveyed in the context that other options, including diplomacy, were also being considered, or even preferred.
Now Trump is openly admitting that the apparent option of diplomacy is no longer on the table. It’s a belated admission by Trump that the diplomatic option was only ever a cynical charade, not under genuine consideration.
Washington is instead moving towards war with North Korea.
Adding to the gravity of the moment are reports in the British media that Britain’s military chiefs have drawn up plans for deploying forces along with the US against North Korea.
British military chiefs are quoted as saying that they are ready to dispatch a new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, as well as several destroyers and frigates, to the Korean Peninsula in support of its US ally.
Just last week Britain’s defense secretary Michael Fallon also delivered a belligerent speech to the Conservative Party conference in which he declared readiness to order “warships, aircraft and troops” in support of the US and other allies.
Fallon repeated earlier warnings that his government was fully prepared to order a first-strike nuclear attack against North Korea or any other “enemy state”.
The British minister accused North Korea of threatening Britain’s national security, saying that “Manchester and London are closer to Pyongyang than Los Angeles”.
Fallon’s shrill rhetoric echoed the scaremongering claims once made by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 2003 when he justified the imminent Anglo-American war on Iraq because then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was allegedly capable of mounting a missile attack on Britain “within 45 minutes”. Blair’s war pretext turned out to be a vile fraud.
Britain’s long-standing readiness to join in American military operations around the world is a convenient political-legal cover that gives the impression of “an international coalition” acting in supposed defense of “the international community”.
But the historical record shows that such Anglo-American militarism is nothing other than illegal aggression carried out by Washington and London, which has led to the ruination of whole nations and the unleashing of sectarian conflicts and terrorism. The British-aided American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 continue to wreak havoc across the Middle East today.
Yet, in spite of these disasters, not to say criminal wars, Britain’s defense secretary “Sir” Michael Fallon arrogantly asserts that “we should not be squeamish” about committing to further military deployments elsewhere, and in particular with regard to North Korea.
This coupling of American and British military power focused on North Korea is an ominous sign that the Anglo-American war machine is cranking up again.
Earlier this month, President Trump issued an extraordinary rebuke to his secretary of state Rex Tillerson over the latter’s public comments about pursuing diplomatic contacts with North Korea. Trump rebuffed Tillerson for “wasting his time” in negotiations with Pyongyang.
Since then Trump has gone on to sharpen the rhetoric to the point now where he is saying the US is considering “only one option” – a military strike on North Korea.
Last week, while hosting US military leaders and their spouses at a dinner in the White House, Trump made the menacing remark that the gathering was the “calm before the storm”. He subsequently refused to clarify what he meant by that cryptic remark.
A couple of days later on October 7, Trump then declared through his usual Twitter feed that diplomacy with North Korea was over. He said the past 25 years of diplomacy under previous administrations had failed, adding, “only one thing will work!”
This is while the US is sending the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and a full battle group of warships towards the Korean Peninsula to commence joint operations with allied South Korean forces over the coming days.
It also follows this week long-distance practice bombing raids by US strategic B1-B Lancer warplanes over the Korean Peninsula. It was reportedly the first time that these US warplanes were accompanied by both South Korean and Japanese fighter jets in the same maneuver.
When Trump and his officials, including defense secretary James Mattis, have previously warned of using military force against North Korea they have let it be known that the action would be “overwhelming” and “catastrophic”. This can be understood to mean the US using nuclear weapons in any action against Pyongyang.
Trump is now positioning the US on an all-out war footing against North Korea by contriving a situation whereby diplomacy has been forfeited.
This is a heinous travesty. American diplomacy towards North Korea to settle the decades-old conflict on the Peninsula has never been genuinely pursued, not under Trump nor previous administrations.
Trump is accelerating US war plans on North Korea. US Pentagon chief James Mattis this week warned American forces to be ready for action and said military plans were being furnished for Trump. Mattis’ willingness to defer to Trump shows that this is a government policy, not merely the depraved recklessness of a lunatic president.
The fact too that Britain, America’s loyal war accomplice, is concurrently drawing up military contingencies over North Korea is a disturbing indicator of how far the Anglo-American war machine is gearing up.
Both Russia and China have repeatedly urged restraint by all parties. This week, Moscow said the US naval build-up around the Korean Peninsula was a dangerous escalation. Russia also said that the newly deployed US anti-missile THAAD system in South Korea was targeting its territory, as well as that of North Korea and China.
If the US and Britain go ahead with their war plans on North Korea, as seems likely, they will ignite a war that threatens the whole planet.
How quintessentially Anglo-American is the arrogance and criminality.
Anglo-American War Plan for North Korea
The United States and Britain – the two countries responsible for so many recent wars and conflicts – are at it again. This time, the diabolical double-act has North Korea in its sights, despite the risk that such an attack could ignite a global nuclear war.
Over the past week, US President Donald Trump has sharpened his bellicose rhetoric towards North Korea, now declaring that “only one thing works” in regard to the security crisis over the Korean Peninsula. That “one thing”, according to Trump, is evidently the “military option”.
For the past several months, the Trump administration has indeed repeatedly threatened the North Korean state led by Kim Jong-un with military force over the latter’s nuclear weapons program. But the American threats have always been conveyed in the context that other options, including diplomacy, were also being considered, or even preferred.
Now Trump is openly admitting that the apparent option of diplomacy is no longer on the table. It’s a belated admission by Trump that the diplomatic option was only ever a cynical charade, not under genuine consideration.
Washington is instead moving towards war with North Korea.
Adding to the gravity of the moment are reports in the British media that Britain’s military chiefs have drawn up plans for deploying forces along with the US against North Korea.
British military chiefs are quoted as saying that they are ready to dispatch a new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, as well as several destroyers and frigates, to the Korean Peninsula in support of its US ally.
Just last week Britain’s defense secretary Michael Fallon also delivered a belligerent speech to the Conservative Party conference in which he declared readiness to order “warships, aircraft and troops” in support of the US and other allies.
Fallon repeated earlier warnings that his government was fully prepared to order a first-strike nuclear attack against North Korea or any other “enemy state”.
The British minister accused North Korea of threatening Britain’s national security, saying that “Manchester and London are closer to Pyongyang than Los Angeles”.
Fallon’s shrill rhetoric echoed the scaremongering claims once made by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 2003 when he justified the imminent Anglo-American war on Iraq because then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was allegedly capable of mounting a missile attack on Britain “within 45 minutes”. Blair’s war pretext turned out to be a vile fraud.
Britain’s long-standing readiness to join in American military operations around the world is a convenient political-legal cover that gives the impression of “an international coalition” acting in supposed defense of “the international community”.
But the historical record shows that such Anglo-American militarism is nothing other than illegal aggression carried out by Washington and London, which has led to the ruination of whole nations and the unleashing of sectarian conflicts and terrorism. The British-aided American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 continue to wreak havoc across the Middle East today.
Yet, in spite of these disasters, not to say criminal wars, Britain’s defense secretary “Sir” Michael Fallon arrogantly asserts that “we should not be squeamish” about committing to further military deployments elsewhere, and in particular with regard to North Korea.
This coupling of American and British military power focused on North Korea is an ominous sign that the Anglo-American war machine is cranking up again.
Earlier this month, President Trump issued an extraordinary rebuke to his secretary of state Rex Tillerson over the latter’s public comments about pursuing diplomatic contacts with North Korea. Trump rebuffed Tillerson for “wasting his time” in negotiations with Pyongyang.
Since then Trump has gone on to sharpen the rhetoric to the point now where he is saying the US is considering “only one option” – a military strike on North Korea.
Last week, while hosting US military leaders and their spouses at a dinner in the White House, Trump made the menacing remark that the gathering was the “calm before the storm”. He subsequently refused to clarify what he meant by that cryptic remark.
A couple of days later on October 7, Trump then declared through his usual Twitter feed that diplomacy with North Korea was over. He said the past 25 years of diplomacy under previous administrations had failed, adding, “only one thing will work!”
This is while the US is sending the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and a full battle group of warships towards the Korean Peninsula to commence joint operations with allied South Korean forces over the coming days.
It also follows this week long-distance practice bombing raids by US strategic B1-B Lancer warplanes over the Korean Peninsula. It was reportedly the first time that these US warplanes were accompanied by both South Korean and Japanese fighter jets in the same maneuver.
When Trump and his officials, including defense secretary James Mattis, have previously warned of using military force against North Korea they have let it be known that the action would be “overwhelming” and “catastrophic”. This can be understood to mean the US using nuclear weapons in any action against Pyongyang.
Trump is now positioning the US on an all-out war footing against North Korea by contriving a situation whereby diplomacy has been forfeited.
This is a heinous travesty. American diplomacy towards North Korea to settle the decades-old conflict on the Peninsula has never been genuinely pursued, not under Trump nor previous administrations.
Trump is accelerating US war plans on North Korea. US Pentagon chief James Mattis this week warned American forces to be ready for action and said military plans were being furnished for Trump. Mattis’ willingness to defer to Trump shows that this is a government policy, not merely the depraved recklessness of a lunatic president.
The fact too that Britain, America’s loyal war accomplice, is concurrently drawing up military contingencies over North Korea is a disturbing indicator of how far the Anglo-American war machine is gearing up.
Both Russia and China have repeatedly urged restraint by all parties. This week, Moscow said the US naval build-up around the Korean Peninsula was a dangerous escalation. Russia also said that the newly deployed US anti-missile THAAD system in South Korea was targeting its territory, as well as that of North Korea and China.
If the US and Britain go ahead with their war plans on North Korea, as seems likely, they will ignite a war that threatens the whole planet.
How quintessentially Anglo-American is the arrogance and criminality.
SC151-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48016.htm
The Deep State's Bogus 'Iranian Threat'
Yesterday we identified a permanent fiscal crisis as one of the quadruple witching forces arising in October 2017 which will shatter the global financial bubble. Today the Donald is on the cusp of making the crisis dramatically worse by decertifying the Iranian nuke deal, thereby reinforcing another false narrative that enables the $1 trillion Warfare State to continue bleeding the nation's fiscal solvency.
In a word, the whole notion that Iran is a national security threat and state sponsor of terrorism is just as bogus as the Russian meddling story or the claim that the chain of events resulting from the coup d' etat fostered by Washington on the streets of Kiev in February 2014 is evidence of Russian expansionism and aggression.
Likewise, it's part of the same tissue of lies which led to Washington's massive, destructive and counterproductive interventions in Syria and Libya -- when neither regime posed an iota of threat to the safety and security of the American homeland.
To the contrary, all of these false narratives are the cover stories which justify the Warfare State's massive draw on the nation's broken finances. We will get to the Big Lie about Iran momentarily, but first it is useful to demonstrate just how enormously excessive the nation's defense budget actually is, and why the denizens of the Imperial City---especially the neocon ideologues----find it necessary to peddle such threadbare untruths.
Spoiler alert: Iran has actually never attacked a single foreign nation in modern history whereas Washington has chosen to unilaterally intervene in or arm virtually every surrounding country in the region.
Here's some historical context that dramatizes our point about Washington's hideously excessive spending on defense. Back in 1962 on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US defense budget was $52 billion, which would amount to $340 billion in today's (2017$) purchasing power.
Needless to say, the world came to the brink of nuclear Armageddon at a time when the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power and was armed to the teeth. In addition to thousands of nuclear warheads deliverable by missiles and bombers, it had 50,000 tanks facing NATO and nearly 4 million men under arms.
The now open Soviet archives, of course, show that the Soviets had far more bark than bite and never conceived of attacking the US or even western Europe; they didn't remotely have the wherewithal or the strategic nerve.
Nevertheless, by 1962 false moves and provocations by both sides had created a state of "cold war" that was real. Yet even then, the $340 billion military budget was more than adequate to deter the Soviet threat. Nor is that our view as an armchair historian.
The 1962 defense budget was essentially President Dwight D. Eisenhower's budget, and it is one that he had drastically slashed from the $500 billion (in today's dollars) he had inherited from Truman at the end of the Korean War.
That is to say, the greatest general who ever led American forces had concluded that $340 billion was enough. And that came as he left office warning about just the opposite----the danger that the military/industrial complex would gain inordinate political power and pursue foreign policies which required ever larger military spending.
Unlike standard cold warriors, Ike believed that the ultimate national security resource of America was a healthy capitalist economy and that excessive government debt was deeply inimical to that outcome.
That's why he balanced the Federal budget three times during his tenure and presided over a fiscal consolidation---thanks to sharply reduced defense spending---that generated an average deficit of hardly 1 percent of GDP. That's an outcome scarcely imaginable at all in the present world.
Even then, the Soviet empire with all the captive republics that have become independent nations since 1991 (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.) had a GDP in 1960 that was estimated to be 50 percent the size of the US. So Ike's bet was that capitalist growth over time was the ultimate source of national strength; that a healthy domestic economy would eventually leave the centralized command-and-control Soviet economy in the dust; and that ultimately the Kremlin's brand of statist socialism and militarism would fail.
He was right. Russia today is a shadow of what Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. Its GDP of $1.3 trillion is smaller than that of the New York metro area ($1.6 trillion) and only 7 percent of total US GDP.
Moreover, unlike the militarized Soviet economy which devoted upwards of 40 percent of output to defense, the current Russian defense budget of $60 billion is just 4.5 percent of its vastly shrunken GDP.
So how in the world did the national security apparatus convince the Donald that we need the $700 billion defense program for FY 2018----12X bigger than Russia's---- that he just signed into law?
What we mean, of course, is how do you explain that---- beyond the fact that the Donald knows virtually nothing about national security policy and history; and, to boot, is surrounded by generals who have spent a lifetime scouring the earth for enemies and threats to repel and reasons for more weapons and bigger forces.
The real answer, however, is both simple and consequential. To wit, the entire prosperity and modus operandi of the Imperial City is based on a panoply of "threats" that are vastly exaggerated or even purely invented; they retain their currency by virtue of endless repetition in the groupthink that passes for analysis. We'd actually put it in the category of cocktail party chatter.
For crying out loud. Why is Russia considered a threat to the American homeland when it doesn't even have a blue water navy or any other basis to project offensive power to the North American continent?
Indeed, its "attack" fleet consists of a single, 40-year old smoke-belching aircraft carrier that could never get out of the Mediterranean bathtub ringed by overwhelming US forces.
Beyond conventional offensive power there is the non-power of its 1500 or so deployable nuclear warheads. Whatever you may think of Vlad Putin's kleptomania and hard-edged suppression of internal dissent, he is surely the "Cool Hand Luke" of the modern world. Do you think he would be rash or suicidal enough to threaten the US with nuclear weapons?
Or for that matter that Russia with its pipsqueak $1.3 trillion GDP and limited military capacity actually intends to invade and occupy Europe, which has a GDP of $17 trillion and sufficient military force---even without the US----to make such a project unthinkable
Likewise, so what if the Chinese want to waste money building sand castles (i.e. man-made islands with military uses)in the South China Sea. It's their backyard---just as the Gulf of Mexico is ours.
Besides, the great Red Ponzi is utterly dependent upon exporting $2 trillion per years of goods to the US, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea etc. Without those markets its massively leveraged, speculation-ridden, malinvested bubble economy would collapse in 6 months or less. So does anyone really think that the PLA (People Liberation Army) will be bombing 4,000 Wal-Marts in America any time soon?
The truth is, the US defense budget is hideously oversized for a reason so obvious that it constitutes the ultimate elephant in the room. No matter how you slice it, there just are no real big industrialized, high tech countries in the world which can threaten the American homeland or even have the slightest intention of doing so.
Indeed, to continue with our historical benchmarks, the American homeland has not been so immune to foreign military threat since WW II. Yet during all those years of true peril, it never spent close too the Donald's $700 billion boondoggle.
For instance, during the height of LBJs Vietnam folly (1968) defense spending in today's dollars was about $400 billion. And even at the top of Reagan's utterly unnecessary military building up (by the 1980s the Soviet Union was collapsing under the weight of its own socialist dystopia), total US defense spending was just $550 billion.
That gets us to the bogus Iranian threat. It originated in the early 1990s when the neocon's in the George HW Bush Administration realized that with the cold war's end, the Warfare State was in grave danger of massive demobilization like the US had done after every war until 1945.
So among many other invented two-bit threats, the Iranian regime was demonized in order to keep the Imperial City in thrall to its purported national security threat and in support of the vast global armada of military forces, bases and occupations needed to contain it (including the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and US bases throughout the region).
The truth, however, is that according to the 2008 NIE ( National Intelligence Estimates) of the nation's 17 intelligence agency, the Iranian's never had a serious nuclear weapons program, and the small research effort that they did have was disbanded by orders of the Ayatollah Khamenei in 2003.
Likewise, what the Imperial City claims to be state sponsored terror is actually nothing more than Iran's foreign policy---something that every sovereign state on the planet is permitted to have.
Thus, as the leader of the minority Shiite schism of the Islamic world, Iran has made political and confessional allliances with various Shiite regimes in the region. These include the one that Washington actually installed in Bagdad; the Alawite/Shitte regime in Syria; the largest political party and representative of 40 percent of the population in Lebanon(Hezbollah); and the Houthi/Shitte of Yemen, who historically occupied the northern parts of the country and are now under savage attack by American weapons supplied to Saud Arabia.
In the case of both Syria and Iraq, their respective governments invited Iranian help, which is also their prerogative as sovereign nations. Ironically, it was the Shiite Crescent alliance of Iran/Assad/Hezbollah that bears much of the credit for defeating ISIS on the ground in Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and elsewhere in the now largely defunct Islamic State.
In tomorrow's installment we will address the details of the Iran nuke agreement and why the Donald is making a horrible mistake in proposing to decertify it. But there should be no doubt about the consequence: It will reinforce the neocon dominance of the Republican party and insure that the nation's $1 trillion Warfare State remains fully entrenched.
Needless to say, that will also insure that the America's gathering fiscal crisis will turn into an outright Fiscal Calamity in the years just ahead.
The Deep State's Bogus 'Iranian Threat'
Yesterday we identified a permanent fiscal crisis as one of the quadruple witching forces arising in October 2017 which will shatter the global financial bubble. Today the Donald is on the cusp of making the crisis dramatically worse by decertifying the Iranian nuke deal, thereby reinforcing another false narrative that enables the $1 trillion Warfare State to continue bleeding the nation's fiscal solvency.
In a word, the whole notion that Iran is a national security threat and state sponsor of terrorism is just as bogus as the Russian meddling story or the claim that the chain of events resulting from the coup d' etat fostered by Washington on the streets of Kiev in February 2014 is evidence of Russian expansionism and aggression.
Likewise, it's part of the same tissue of lies which led to Washington's massive, destructive and counterproductive interventions in Syria and Libya -- when neither regime posed an iota of threat to the safety and security of the American homeland.
To the contrary, all of these false narratives are the cover stories which justify the Warfare State's massive draw on the nation's broken finances. We will get to the Big Lie about Iran momentarily, but first it is useful to demonstrate just how enormously excessive the nation's defense budget actually is, and why the denizens of the Imperial City---especially the neocon ideologues----find it necessary to peddle such threadbare untruths.
Spoiler alert: Iran has actually never attacked a single foreign nation in modern history whereas Washington has chosen to unilaterally intervene in or arm virtually every surrounding country in the region.
Here's some historical context that dramatizes our point about Washington's hideously excessive spending on defense. Back in 1962 on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US defense budget was $52 billion, which would amount to $340 billion in today's (2017$) purchasing power.
Needless to say, the world came to the brink of nuclear Armageddon at a time when the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power and was armed to the teeth. In addition to thousands of nuclear warheads deliverable by missiles and bombers, it had 50,000 tanks facing NATO and nearly 4 million men under arms.
The now open Soviet archives, of course, show that the Soviets had far more bark than bite and never conceived of attacking the US or even western Europe; they didn't remotely have the wherewithal or the strategic nerve.
Nevertheless, by 1962 false moves and provocations by both sides had created a state of "cold war" that was real. Yet even then, the $340 billion military budget was more than adequate to deter the Soviet threat. Nor is that our view as an armchair historian.
The 1962 defense budget was essentially President Dwight D. Eisenhower's budget, and it is one that he had drastically slashed from the $500 billion (in today's dollars) he had inherited from Truman at the end of the Korean War.
That is to say, the greatest general who ever led American forces had concluded that $340 billion was enough. And that came as he left office warning about just the opposite----the danger that the military/industrial complex would gain inordinate political power and pursue foreign policies which required ever larger military spending.
Unlike standard cold warriors, Ike believed that the ultimate national security resource of America was a healthy capitalist economy and that excessive government debt was deeply inimical to that outcome.
That's why he balanced the Federal budget three times during his tenure and presided over a fiscal consolidation---thanks to sharply reduced defense spending---that generated an average deficit of hardly 1 percent of GDP. That's an outcome scarcely imaginable at all in the present world.
Even then, the Soviet empire with all the captive republics that have become independent nations since 1991 (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.) had a GDP in 1960 that was estimated to be 50 percent the size of the US. So Ike's bet was that capitalist growth over time was the ultimate source of national strength; that a healthy domestic economy would eventually leave the centralized command-and-control Soviet economy in the dust; and that ultimately the Kremlin's brand of statist socialism and militarism would fail.
He was right. Russia today is a shadow of what Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. Its GDP of $1.3 trillion is smaller than that of the New York metro area ($1.6 trillion) and only 7 percent of total US GDP.
Moreover, unlike the militarized Soviet economy which devoted upwards of 40 percent of output to defense, the current Russian defense budget of $60 billion is just 4.5 percent of its vastly shrunken GDP.
So how in the world did the national security apparatus convince the Donald that we need the $700 billion defense program for FY 2018----12X bigger than Russia's---- that he just signed into law?
What we mean, of course, is how do you explain that---- beyond the fact that the Donald knows virtually nothing about national security policy and history; and, to boot, is surrounded by generals who have spent a lifetime scouring the earth for enemies and threats to repel and reasons for more weapons and bigger forces.
The real answer, however, is both simple and consequential. To wit, the entire prosperity and modus operandi of the Imperial City is based on a panoply of "threats" that are vastly exaggerated or even purely invented; they retain their currency by virtue of endless repetition in the groupthink that passes for analysis. We'd actually put it in the category of cocktail party chatter.
For crying out loud. Why is Russia considered a threat to the American homeland when it doesn't even have a blue water navy or any other basis to project offensive power to the North American continent?
Indeed, its "attack" fleet consists of a single, 40-year old smoke-belching aircraft carrier that could never get out of the Mediterranean bathtub ringed by overwhelming US forces.
Beyond conventional offensive power there is the non-power of its 1500 or so deployable nuclear warheads. Whatever you may think of Vlad Putin's kleptomania and hard-edged suppression of internal dissent, he is surely the "Cool Hand Luke" of the modern world. Do you think he would be rash or suicidal enough to threaten the US with nuclear weapons?
Or for that matter that Russia with its pipsqueak $1.3 trillion GDP and limited military capacity actually intends to invade and occupy Europe, which has a GDP of $17 trillion and sufficient military force---even without the US----to make such a project unthinkable
Likewise, so what if the Chinese want to waste money building sand castles (i.e. man-made islands with military uses)in the South China Sea. It's their backyard---just as the Gulf of Mexico is ours.
Besides, the great Red Ponzi is utterly dependent upon exporting $2 trillion per years of goods to the US, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea etc. Without those markets its massively leveraged, speculation-ridden, malinvested bubble economy would collapse in 6 months or less. So does anyone really think that the PLA (People Liberation Army) will be bombing 4,000 Wal-Marts in America any time soon?
The truth is, the US defense budget is hideously oversized for a reason so obvious that it constitutes the ultimate elephant in the room. No matter how you slice it, there just are no real big industrialized, high tech countries in the world which can threaten the American homeland or even have the slightest intention of doing so.
Indeed, to continue with our historical benchmarks, the American homeland has not been so immune to foreign military threat since WW II. Yet during all those years of true peril, it never spent close too the Donald's $700 billion boondoggle.
For instance, during the height of LBJs Vietnam folly (1968) defense spending in today's dollars was about $400 billion. And even at the top of Reagan's utterly unnecessary military building up (by the 1980s the Soviet Union was collapsing under the weight of its own socialist dystopia), total US defense spending was just $550 billion.
That gets us to the bogus Iranian threat. It originated in the early 1990s when the neocon's in the George HW Bush Administration realized that with the cold war's end, the Warfare State was in grave danger of massive demobilization like the US had done after every war until 1945.
So among many other invented two-bit threats, the Iranian regime was demonized in order to keep the Imperial City in thrall to its purported national security threat and in support of the vast global armada of military forces, bases and occupations needed to contain it (including the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and US bases throughout the region).
The truth, however, is that according to the 2008 NIE ( National Intelligence Estimates) of the nation's 17 intelligence agency, the Iranian's never had a serious nuclear weapons program, and the small research effort that they did have was disbanded by orders of the Ayatollah Khamenei in 2003.
Likewise, what the Imperial City claims to be state sponsored terror is actually nothing more than Iran's foreign policy---something that every sovereign state on the planet is permitted to have.
Thus, as the leader of the minority Shiite schism of the Islamic world, Iran has made political and confessional allliances with various Shiite regimes in the region. These include the one that Washington actually installed in Bagdad; the Alawite/Shitte regime in Syria; the largest political party and representative of 40 percent of the population in Lebanon(Hezbollah); and the Houthi/Shitte of Yemen, who historically occupied the northern parts of the country and are now under savage attack by American weapons supplied to Saud Arabia.
In the case of both Syria and Iraq, their respective governments invited Iranian help, which is also their prerogative as sovereign nations. Ironically, it was the Shiite Crescent alliance of Iran/Assad/Hezbollah that bears much of the credit for defeating ISIS on the ground in Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and elsewhere in the now largely defunct Islamic State.
In tomorrow's installment we will address the details of the Iran nuke agreement and why the Donald is making a horrible mistake in proposing to decertify it. But there should be no doubt about the consequence: It will reinforce the neocon dominance of the Republican party and insure that the nation's $1 trillion Warfare State remains fully entrenched.
Needless to say, that will also insure that the America's gathering fiscal crisis will turn into an outright Fiscal Calamity in the years just ahead.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
SC150-15
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48001.htm
Finding Our Way Back to Truth by Following a String of Facts
If you find yourself lost and confused in a dark wood, then perhaps following this network of knots strung on a long string of dates listed below will help you find your way back home, where the bread of truth awaits you on the kitchen table.
As we know, children love to trace, to connect the dots, to make connections, but often the connections they make frighten adults who try to ignore their points or offer some ridiculous circumlocutions. Maybe we adults are much like children in our desires to make connections, but the thought of it frightens us, even when we are already frightened by being lost amidst a forest of propaganda. Suppose we could for a while calm those fears and concentrate long enough to trace through the dim glimmerings of a faded pattern a clarifying story that would jolt us into an awareness that could change our lives and society. I offer here an arc of history that you may consider tedious. Try patience. I could yell, I could scream, I could try all the classical argumentation and logic that comes “naturally” to me. I could be a wise guy, amuse you, try to provoke you, curse, sing a song, stomp my feet – even write post-modern gibberish. As Andre Vltchek says, it’s hard – I’m putting it nicely – to get through, to have an impact that counts. We desperately want to believe in a world where we really are children and BIG Daddy (apologies to Burl Ives) has told the truth. And yet we know that is an illusion. Obviously I have reached some stern conclusions, but I think the conclusions follow from the facts. See what you think. Follow these knots. They are a sampling. There are many more.
1957 – Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy delivers a Senate speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism. The speech causes an international uproar, and Kennedy is harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. He is praised in the third world.
1959 – George H. W. Bush moves his oil company – Zapata Offshore – to Houston, Texas. One of Zapata’s drilling rigs, Scorpion, having been moved from the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, is now operating 54 miles north of Cuba
1960 – On March 17 President Eisenhower approves the Bay of Pigs project.
1961 – On January 17, in anticipation of Kennedy’s inauguration in three days, the Belgian government in complicity with the CIA assassinates Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. On February 13th a devastated Kennedy receives a belated phone call informing him of Lumumba’s murder.
1961 – April. More than a week before the CIA led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – code-named the Zapata Operation – the CIA discovers that the Soviets have learned the date of the invasion and informed Castro. Knowing the invasion is doomed in advance, the CIA Director Allen Dulles doesn’t tell Kennedy. When the invasion fails, the CIA blames JFK who angrily says he wants “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy fires Dulles.
1962 – On June 13 Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and alleged traitor, returns from the Soviet Union with a loan from the State Department that also arranges for him, together with his Russian wife, to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by Spas T. Raikin, an official of an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections. Oswald soon moves to Dallas, Texas where, at the behest of the CIA, he is chaperoned around by CIA asset and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, George de Mohrenschildt.
1963 – June 10. JFK delivers his famous American University address calling for an end to “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
1963 – On October 11 Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and all of them by the end of 1965.
1963 – November 2. At the last minute JFK cancels his trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Air Force football game when it is learned that a four-man rifle team has plotted to assassinate him. The four are never charged or named, but an alienated ex-Marine scapegoat with CIA connections, Thomas Arthur Vallee, is arrested on a pretext. Vallee works in a building overlooking a dog-leg turn where JFK’s car was to pass.
1963 – November 22. JFK is shot in Dallas on a dog-leg turn at 12:30 P.M. and dies at 1 P.M. At 1:38 P.M. Walter Cronkite makes the first public announcement of the president’s death. At 1:45 P.M. George H. W. Bush, who is in Tyler, Texas an hour and a half southeast of Dallas, telephones Houston FBI agent Graham W. Kitchel to inform him that he’s heard gossip that a Houston man, James Parrot, has been talking about killing Kennedy when he comes to Houston (JFK had been in Houston the day before). Parrot is questioned and deemed harmless. Bush tells the FBI agent that he’ll be going to Dallas in the evening, though he fails to mention that he was there the night before. At 1:50 PM the Dallas police arrest Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theatre and charge him with the murder of Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippett. A few minutes after Oswald’s arrest and his exit out the front door to waiting police cars, a second Oswald is arrested in the theatre and surreptitiously taken out the back door. Later in the day Oswald is charged with also killing President Kennedy from behind from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head comes from his right front.
1963 – Two days later Jack Ruby kills Oswald, who claimed he was a patsy, in the Dallas police building. That same afternoon LBJ tells Henry Cabot Lodge that “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”
1963 – November 29. LBJ announces the formation of the Warren Commission whose key member is Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director fired by Kennedy.
1963 – On December 24th Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.”
1964 – August. The fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Incidents and Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The Admiral in charge of the U.S. fleet is George Stephen Morrison, the father of the singer Jim Morrison, who the following year will settle into Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles together with, among others, Frank Zappa, “Papa” John Philips, Davis Crosby, and Stephen Stills, all children of parents of the military/intelligence complex. Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War starts in earnest.
1964 – September. The Warren Commission findings are made public. Oswald is declared the lone assassin with the magic bullet explanation being the key.
1966 – The CIA’s Phoenix Program, an intelligence gathering, assassination, “pacification,” and drug running program, is organized in Vietnam. It conducts countless assassinations and tortures throughout Vietnam. Its organizational structure later becomes the structure for Homeland Security and the “war on terror,” while its drug-dealing modus operandi, joined to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), floods the United States with illegal drugs up to the present day.
1967 – Martin Luther King delivers his Riverside Church speech – “A Time to Break Silence” – denouncing the Vietnam War and calling for opposition to it, while linking it to social, racial, and economic oppression at home. He says that the three linked devils of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation can only be solved together.
1967 – On June 8 Israel attacks the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 U.S. sailors and Marines and wounding 171 others.
1968 – April 4. Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis. The authorities blame it on James Earl Ray, a petty criminal loner. It is later proven that King was killed by U.S. government forces in coordination with Memphis police and local Mafia.
1968 – On June 6 in Los Angeles, Senator Robert Kennedy, on the cusp of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, is assassinated. The accused lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was standing in front and to the right of RFK. None of the bullets from his gun struck the Senator. The autopsy shows Kennedy was killed by a bullet from behind and below that entered his head behind his right ear. Sirhan is subsequently convicted as the lone crazed gunman, despite many witnesses seeing a girl in a polka dot dress with a male companion, running down the back stairs of the hotel, shouting. “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Senator Kennedy.”
1968 – November. Richard Nixon, vowing to end the Vietnam War, is elected President after secretly sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks. He subsequently continues the war and secretly expands it to Cambodia and Laos.
1972 – June 17. Five CIA employees and veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation are arrested inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. Together with H. Howard Hunt (CIA) and G. Gordon Liddy, they are later indicted. The burglars are caught by a security guard who notices that these skilled undercover operatives have taped locks open from the outside so that the tape is showing.
The Watergate story is primarily reported by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who work at the Washington Post under Editor Ben Bradlee. Woodward had earlier served in Naval Intelligence, as had Bradlee, while Bradlee and the Washington Post have deep ties to the CIA and intelligence communities.
1973 – September 11. A CIA organized coup overthrows the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, killing thousands.
1974 – August 9. Nixon is forced to resign. He is the second president in eleven years to be removed from office. Gerald Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission assumes the presidency. Dick Cheney is named White House Chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
1976 – January30. Having been nominated by Ford, George H. W. Bush assumes the Directorship of the CIA, despite critics arguing that he has no intelligence experience. He serves in that capacity for 365 days.
1976 – George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s CIA handler and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, writes a letter to CIA Director Bush begging for help “we are being followed everywhere….”
1977 – March 27. George de Mohrenschildt, about to be questioned by investigator Gaeton Fonzi of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, allegedly commits suicide in Florida.
1979 – November 4. Fifty-two Americans are taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
1980 – Ronald Reagan is elected president and George H. W. Bush, vice-president. It is later alleged that Bush, CIA officer Robert Gates, and CIA Director William Casey met secretly with Iranian officials in Paris before the election and made a secret deal to insure Reagan/Bush an election victory by not releasing the hostages before the vote. The hostages were subsequently released a few minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn in on January 20, 1981.
1985-88 – The Iran-Contra scandal plays out as it is discovered that the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the proceeds to illegally arm the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland amendment. Oliver North becomes the public face of the secret machinations while Reagan and Bush plead ignorance. Many are indicted, while Bush, when running for president in 1988, claims he was “out of the loop.”
1988 – July 16. In the midst of the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Dukakis, the Nation magazine publishes an article by Joseph McBride, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ CIA Operative.” The article centers around a newly discovered memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963, concerning the JFK assassination and an oral briefing the bureau had given on November 23rd regarding the assassination to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” A Bush spokesman denies it was candidate Bush.
1988 – July 3. The USS Vincennes shoots down in Iranian airspace civilian Iran Flight 655 killing 299, including 66 children. Vice President Bush says, “ I will never apologize for the U.S. I don’t care what the facts are … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
1988 – George H. W. Bush is elected president.
1990-91 – President Bush attacks Iraq, called the Gulf War, public and congressional support for which is given a huge boost on the testimony of a nurse who claims she witnessed Iraqi soldiers In Kuwait City hospital grabbing babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor to die. It is later discovered that the “nurse” in question was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that she hadn’t lived in Kuwait at the time. Her story had been hatched by the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm and was a lie – a successful lie.
1991 – May 19. A few weeks after filming had begun on Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the Washington Post’s national security reporter George Lardner, Jr. writes a scathing review of the film based on a stolen copy of the first draft of the screenplay.
1991 – December 20. Stone’s film, JFK, is released.
1991 – On December 24 President Bush grants pardons to six former members of the Reagan/Bush administration facing prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandal.
1993-2000 – President Bill Clinton bombs Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan … killing untold numbers of people, while maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq.
1995 – April 19. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, blamed exclusively on Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Evidence pointing to others involved was dismissed, even the report of Air Force General Benton K. Partin, the U.S. Air Force’s top explosive expert, showing in detail that explosives were planted inside the building at critical structural points on the third floor.
1996 – May 12. On CBS’s Sixty Minutes Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht says that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions are worth i1997 – The Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative enterprise, three of whose signees are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush, is launched. Among other things, they call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Ten signees of the statement of principles go on to serve in the George W. Bush administration.
1999 – On April 26 CIA headquarters was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in honor of former president George H.W. Bush who served as CIA Director for 357 days.
1999 – A jury in Memphis, Tennessee returns a verdict in a civil trial brought by Martin Luther King’s family concluding that King was killed, not by James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving agencies of the U. S. government and the Memphis police.
2000 – September. The Project for the New American Century releases a position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stating that the United States will not be able to enforce its will on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan and maintain a Pax Americana “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” The paper introduces a new word to refer to the United States of America – “the homeland.”
2000 – November. George W. Bush is elected president after a disputed ballot count and the intervention of the Supreme Court. Dick Cheney becomes vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld is named Secretary of Defense.
2001 – May 1. George W. Bush gives a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University and says that the U.S.A. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable,” giving public notice that the U. S. planned to withdraw from the ABM treaty. He warns against “weapons of mass destruction” and “weapons of terror” in the hands of rogue actors. The speech closely follows the reasoning of the PNAC paper of the previous year in urging an aggressive foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld are in the audience.
2001 – June 22-23 Exercise Dark Winter takes place at Andrews Air Force base. The scenario involves anonymous threatening letters sent to mainstream media. The letters threaten more letters to come with anthrax. Judith Miller, author of Germs, and a notoriously deceptive Iraq war hawk for The New York Times, participates, playing Judith Miller of the New York Times.
2001 – September 11. The terrorist attacks in NYC and Washington, D.C. occur. The media immediately starts referring to them as another Pearl Harbor, a new Pearl Harbor. CBS News reports that before going to bed at night George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” The site of the Twin Towers is first referred to as “ground zero,” a nuclear war term, by Mark Walsh, identified as a freelancer for Fox News by the Fox News interviewer on the street of lower Manhattan. Presciently anticipating the official explanation for the buildings collapse, Walsh adds that the towers obviously collapsed “mostly due to structural failure since the fires were too intense.”
2001 – September 12. The New York Times headlines a story: “Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush that Became the Unthinkable.” Another headline under the byline of future editor Bill Keller, Iraq war hawk, reads, “America’s Emergency Line: 9/11.” The endless emergency and war on terror begin. Henceforth, for the first time in American history, a very important day is referred to by numbers, not by name – an emergency phone number.
2001 – September 22. Tom Ridge is named Director of the newly created Homeland Security and becomes in charge of politically motivated terror alerts.
2001 – September-October. Real and fake anthrax attacks occur. A sham investigation follows with the FBI eventually accusing government scientist Bruce Ivins on little to no evidence, resulting in Ivins’ alleged suicide.
2001 – Throughout the first three weeks of October the major media use the word “unthinkable” repetitively, echoing its association with nuclear war, just as the World Trade Center site is similarly referred to as “ground zero,” another nuclear term. A phony “anthrax” letter containing a harmless white powder, postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida on September 20, is sent to Tom Brokaw of NBC. The letter, not made public until October 22 after the media’s repeated use of the word “unthinkable,” begins: “The Unthinkabel” Sample Of How It Will Look. Judith Miller of the New York Times receives an anthrax threat letter also sent from St. Petersburg.
2001 – October 7. The U.S.A attacks Afghanistan.
2001 – October 27. The Patriot Act is passed.
2001 – December 4. George W. Bush says when he was outside the classroom in Florida on September 11th he “had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on….” Problem: No one saw the first plane hit the North Tower since it wasn’t televised live. Much later a tape someone had made was shown on television.
2002 – October 2. At the Cincinnati Museum Center President Bush gives a speech linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks and says that “we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” He urges the disarming of Iraq.
2002-10 – Regular color-coded terrorist alerts
2003 – February. Secretary of State Colin Powell gives false testimony at the U.N., asserting that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and must be confronted.
2003 – March. The U. S. attacks Iraq based on lies.
2003-8 – Bush wages war on Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Homeland “security” leads to indefinite detention, black sites, torture, spying on Americans, the loss of Constitutional rights, etc.
2007 – February 10. Barack Obama, having been a U.S. Senator for 2 years 1 month announces he is running for president.
2008 – September. An international financial meltdown occurs. The government claims it was unforeseen. The Bush administration bails out the big banks and financial institutions.
2008 – November. A seriously inexperienced Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, comes out of nowhere to be elected president on a populist platform of “hope” and “change.” He receives more backing from Wall Street than his Republican rival. Liberals and progressives go wild for joy. Hope and change is proclaimed.
2009 – Lawrence Summers, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, takes up his position as head of Obama’s economic team. Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve, whose father, Peter Geithner, oversaw the Ford Foundation’s programs in Indonesia developed by Obama’s mother (who also worked for another notorious CIA front, USAID) becomes Secretary of the Treasury. And Robert Gates, former CIA Director and George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense continues in that position for Obama.
2009 – March. Obama meets with the CEOs of fifteen big banks and tells them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks …. I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.”
2009 – Obama intensifies the war on Afghanistan.
2009 – October 9. Obama is given the Nobel Peace Prize.
2009 – December. Obama sends 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, saying this “will bring this war to a successful conclusion.”
2010 – Obama vows to carry forward the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.
2010 – and ongoing. Obama chooses his drone war kill list every Tuesday; says the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki “is an easy one.”
2011 – Obama and partners attack Libya and brutally kill Muammar Gaddafi. Libya descends into chaos. Hilary Clinton exults.
2009 – and ongoing. Obama attacks Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, etc. Does nothing to stop the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Supports and arms terrorists in Syria and other countries. Engineers a coup d’etat in Ukraine and supports neo-Nazi forces attacking eastern Ukraine. Encircles Russia with NATO troops and military exercises. Starts a new Cold War. Maintains military commissions and indefinite detention. Prosecutes more whistleblowers than all previous American presidents combined, but does not prosecute any banksters or torturers. Charges Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, et al of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Acquiesces in the military coup against the democratically elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and his subsequent imprisonment. Spies on Americans and other countries. Maintains a national state of emergency and the Patriot Act with minor adjustments. Prosecutes “the war on terror” initiated by George W. Bush. Rules over a technological, computerized war of killing all over the globe and a technological, computerized spying apparatus here at home. Spreads USAFRICOM throughout Africa, killing black Africans and undermining governments with Special Forces. And does all this and more with a smile. Then, before leaving office he creates the fraudulent Russia gate story to continue the new Cold War and to undermine any possible cooling of US/Russians tensions under a possible Trump presidency.
2016 – Trump is elected President to the shock and awe of the Democrats and their supporters. Immediately, the undermining of Trump begins to make sure he doesn’t follow through on his promise to reduce nuclear tensions with Russia.
2017 – Donald Trump, the new reality-TV president, takes office and comes under incessant attack from the Democrats and the main stream media. He reneges on most of his campaign promises, including reconciliation with Russia, and tweets so many moronic messages that he plays into the Democrats’ hands. Propaganda expands exponentially as the game of personality politics plays on. Meanwhile, the structures of oligarchic rule continue un-abated, both at home and abroad. Trump continues Obama’s war policies, killing people around the world.
It should be clear from this small portion of events over the years that there is a connecting link, that there is a bloody thread running through them connecting key players and the obvious ongoing presence of a secret structure that recruits its team to maintain this oppressive system. To see it should be gutsy child’s play. It is not an issue of either/or; we can’t explain how we have come to this terrifying situation of rule by a murderous, militarized national security apparatus serving the wealthy elites by concentrating on either individuals or structures. People such as Barack Obama, the Bushes, Trump et al. don’t emerge from thin air (though in Obama’s case it seems that way, and some have speculated on his CIA links). These people grow out of a system that has cultivated and nurtured them. They become spokesmen for the secretive and powerful moneyed forces some call the Deep State, the shadow government, the power elite, etc. (The scholar Peter Dale Scott sees a hidden link between the JFK assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.) Spokesmen, yes, they are that, but executive spokesmen; they are not innocent victims; they are free executive executioners, ordering death and destruction around the world and threatening a nuclear holocaust. People and ongoing structures are intertwined. Individuals count, but so do structures.
We are now living within a structure of non-stop and almost total propaganda that individuals, with the help of alternative structures of communication such as alternative media, can penetrate and understand, but only if they are willing to trudge through the forest of history that will allow for context and the connecting of dots. In the end, it takes desire and work. There are no excuses when, at least for now, the World Wide Web makes available so many voices for truth....
Finding Our Way Back to Truth by Following a String of Facts
If you find yourself lost and confused in a dark wood, then perhaps following this network of knots strung on a long string of dates listed below will help you find your way back home, where the bread of truth awaits you on the kitchen table.
As we know, children love to trace, to connect the dots, to make connections, but often the connections they make frighten adults who try to ignore their points or offer some ridiculous circumlocutions. Maybe we adults are much like children in our desires to make connections, but the thought of it frightens us, even when we are already frightened by being lost amidst a forest of propaganda. Suppose we could for a while calm those fears and concentrate long enough to trace through the dim glimmerings of a faded pattern a clarifying story that would jolt us into an awareness that could change our lives and society. I offer here an arc of history that you may consider tedious. Try patience. I could yell, I could scream, I could try all the classical argumentation and logic that comes “naturally” to me. I could be a wise guy, amuse you, try to provoke you, curse, sing a song, stomp my feet – even write post-modern gibberish. As Andre Vltchek says, it’s hard – I’m putting it nicely – to get through, to have an impact that counts. We desperately want to believe in a world where we really are children and BIG Daddy (apologies to Burl Ives) has told the truth. And yet we know that is an illusion. Obviously I have reached some stern conclusions, but I think the conclusions follow from the facts. See what you think. Follow these knots. They are a sampling. There are many more.
1957 – Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy delivers a Senate speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism. The speech causes an international uproar, and Kennedy is harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. He is praised in the third world.
1959 – George H. W. Bush moves his oil company – Zapata Offshore – to Houston, Texas. One of Zapata’s drilling rigs, Scorpion, having been moved from the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, is now operating 54 miles north of Cuba
1960 – On March 17 President Eisenhower approves the Bay of Pigs project.
1961 – On January 17, in anticipation of Kennedy’s inauguration in three days, the Belgian government in complicity with the CIA assassinates Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. On February 13th a devastated Kennedy receives a belated phone call informing him of Lumumba’s murder.
1961 – April. More than a week before the CIA led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – code-named the Zapata Operation – the CIA discovers that the Soviets have learned the date of the invasion and informed Castro. Knowing the invasion is doomed in advance, the CIA Director Allen Dulles doesn’t tell Kennedy. When the invasion fails, the CIA blames JFK who angrily says he wants “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy fires Dulles.
1962 – On June 13 Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and alleged traitor, returns from the Soviet Union with a loan from the State Department that also arranges for him, together with his Russian wife, to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by Spas T. Raikin, an official of an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections. Oswald soon moves to Dallas, Texas where, at the behest of the CIA, he is chaperoned around by CIA asset and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, George de Mohrenschildt.
1963 – June 10. JFK delivers his famous American University address calling for an end to “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
1963 – On October 11 Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and all of them by the end of 1965.
1963 – November 2. At the last minute JFK cancels his trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Air Force football game when it is learned that a four-man rifle team has plotted to assassinate him. The four are never charged or named, but an alienated ex-Marine scapegoat with CIA connections, Thomas Arthur Vallee, is arrested on a pretext. Vallee works in a building overlooking a dog-leg turn where JFK’s car was to pass.
1963 – November 22. JFK is shot in Dallas on a dog-leg turn at 12:30 P.M. and dies at 1 P.M. At 1:38 P.M. Walter Cronkite makes the first public announcement of the president’s death. At 1:45 P.M. George H. W. Bush, who is in Tyler, Texas an hour and a half southeast of Dallas, telephones Houston FBI agent Graham W. Kitchel to inform him that he’s heard gossip that a Houston man, James Parrot, has been talking about killing Kennedy when he comes to Houston (JFK had been in Houston the day before). Parrot is questioned and deemed harmless. Bush tells the FBI agent that he’ll be going to Dallas in the evening, though he fails to mention that he was there the night before. At 1:50 PM the Dallas police arrest Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theatre and charge him with the murder of Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippett. A few minutes after Oswald’s arrest and his exit out the front door to waiting police cars, a second Oswald is arrested in the theatre and surreptitiously taken out the back door. Later in the day Oswald is charged with also killing President Kennedy from behind from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head comes from his right front.
1963 – Two days later Jack Ruby kills Oswald, who claimed he was a patsy, in the Dallas police building. That same afternoon LBJ tells Henry Cabot Lodge that “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”
1963 – November 29. LBJ announces the formation of the Warren Commission whose key member is Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director fired by Kennedy.
1963 – On December 24th Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.”
1964 – August. The fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Incidents and Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The Admiral in charge of the U.S. fleet is George Stephen Morrison, the father of the singer Jim Morrison, who the following year will settle into Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles together with, among others, Frank Zappa, “Papa” John Philips, Davis Crosby, and Stephen Stills, all children of parents of the military/intelligence complex. Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War starts in earnest.
1964 – September. The Warren Commission findings are made public. Oswald is declared the lone assassin with the magic bullet explanation being the key.
1966 – The CIA’s Phoenix Program, an intelligence gathering, assassination, “pacification,” and drug running program, is organized in Vietnam. It conducts countless assassinations and tortures throughout Vietnam. Its organizational structure later becomes the structure for Homeland Security and the “war on terror,” while its drug-dealing modus operandi, joined to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), floods the United States with illegal drugs up to the present day.
1967 – Martin Luther King delivers his Riverside Church speech – “A Time to Break Silence” – denouncing the Vietnam War and calling for opposition to it, while linking it to social, racial, and economic oppression at home. He says that the three linked devils of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation can only be solved together.
1967 – On June 8 Israel attacks the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 U.S. sailors and Marines and wounding 171 others.
1968 – April 4. Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis. The authorities blame it on James Earl Ray, a petty criminal loner. It is later proven that King was killed by U.S. government forces in coordination with Memphis police and local Mafia.
1968 – On June 6 in Los Angeles, Senator Robert Kennedy, on the cusp of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, is assassinated. The accused lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was standing in front and to the right of RFK. None of the bullets from his gun struck the Senator. The autopsy shows Kennedy was killed by a bullet from behind and below that entered his head behind his right ear. Sirhan is subsequently convicted as the lone crazed gunman, despite many witnesses seeing a girl in a polka dot dress with a male companion, running down the back stairs of the hotel, shouting. “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Senator Kennedy.”
1968 – November. Richard Nixon, vowing to end the Vietnam War, is elected President after secretly sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks. He subsequently continues the war and secretly expands it to Cambodia and Laos.
1972 – June 17. Five CIA employees and veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation are arrested inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. Together with H. Howard Hunt (CIA) and G. Gordon Liddy, they are later indicted. The burglars are caught by a security guard who notices that these skilled undercover operatives have taped locks open from the outside so that the tape is showing.
The Watergate story is primarily reported by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who work at the Washington Post under Editor Ben Bradlee. Woodward had earlier served in Naval Intelligence, as had Bradlee, while Bradlee and the Washington Post have deep ties to the CIA and intelligence communities.
1973 – September 11. A CIA organized coup overthrows the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, killing thousands.
1974 – August 9. Nixon is forced to resign. He is the second president in eleven years to be removed from office. Gerald Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission assumes the presidency. Dick Cheney is named White House Chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
1976 – January30. Having been nominated by Ford, George H. W. Bush assumes the Directorship of the CIA, despite critics arguing that he has no intelligence experience. He serves in that capacity for 365 days.
1976 – George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s CIA handler and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, writes a letter to CIA Director Bush begging for help “we are being followed everywhere….”
1977 – March 27. George de Mohrenschildt, about to be questioned by investigator Gaeton Fonzi of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, allegedly commits suicide in Florida.
1979 – November 4. Fifty-two Americans are taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
1980 – Ronald Reagan is elected president and George H. W. Bush, vice-president. It is later alleged that Bush, CIA officer Robert Gates, and CIA Director William Casey met secretly with Iranian officials in Paris before the election and made a secret deal to insure Reagan/Bush an election victory by not releasing the hostages before the vote. The hostages were subsequently released a few minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn in on January 20, 1981.
1985-88 – The Iran-Contra scandal plays out as it is discovered that the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the proceeds to illegally arm the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland amendment. Oliver North becomes the public face of the secret machinations while Reagan and Bush plead ignorance. Many are indicted, while Bush, when running for president in 1988, claims he was “out of the loop.”
1988 – July 16. In the midst of the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Dukakis, the Nation magazine publishes an article by Joseph McBride, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ CIA Operative.” The article centers around a newly discovered memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963, concerning the JFK assassination and an oral briefing the bureau had given on November 23rd regarding the assassination to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” A Bush spokesman denies it was candidate Bush.
1988 – July 3. The USS Vincennes shoots down in Iranian airspace civilian Iran Flight 655 killing 299, including 66 children. Vice President Bush says, “ I will never apologize for the U.S. I don’t care what the facts are … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
1988 – George H. W. Bush is elected president.
1990-91 – President Bush attacks Iraq, called the Gulf War, public and congressional support for which is given a huge boost on the testimony of a nurse who claims she witnessed Iraqi soldiers In Kuwait City hospital grabbing babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor to die. It is later discovered that the “nurse” in question was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that she hadn’t lived in Kuwait at the time. Her story had been hatched by the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm and was a lie – a successful lie.
1991 – May 19. A few weeks after filming had begun on Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the Washington Post’s national security reporter George Lardner, Jr. writes a scathing review of the film based on a stolen copy of the first draft of the screenplay.
1991 – December 20. Stone’s film, JFK, is released.
1991 – On December 24 President Bush grants pardons to six former members of the Reagan/Bush administration facing prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandal.
1993-2000 – President Bill Clinton bombs Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan … killing untold numbers of people, while maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq.
1995 – April 19. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, blamed exclusively on Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Evidence pointing to others involved was dismissed, even the report of Air Force General Benton K. Partin, the U.S. Air Force’s top explosive expert, showing in detail that explosives were planted inside the building at critical structural points on the third floor.
1996 – May 12. On CBS’s Sixty Minutes Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht says that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions are worth i1997 – The Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative enterprise, three of whose signees are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush, is launched. Among other things, they call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Ten signees of the statement of principles go on to serve in the George W. Bush administration.
1999 – On April 26 CIA headquarters was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in honor of former president George H.W. Bush who served as CIA Director for 357 days.
1999 – A jury in Memphis, Tennessee returns a verdict in a civil trial brought by Martin Luther King’s family concluding that King was killed, not by James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving agencies of the U. S. government and the Memphis police.
2000 – September. The Project for the New American Century releases a position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stating that the United States will not be able to enforce its will on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan and maintain a Pax Americana “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” The paper introduces a new word to refer to the United States of America – “the homeland.”
2000 – November. George W. Bush is elected president after a disputed ballot count and the intervention of the Supreme Court. Dick Cheney becomes vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld is named Secretary of Defense.
2001 – May 1. George W. Bush gives a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University and says that the U.S.A. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable,” giving public notice that the U. S. planned to withdraw from the ABM treaty. He warns against “weapons of mass destruction” and “weapons of terror” in the hands of rogue actors. The speech closely follows the reasoning of the PNAC paper of the previous year in urging an aggressive foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld are in the audience.
2001 – June 22-23 Exercise Dark Winter takes place at Andrews Air Force base. The scenario involves anonymous threatening letters sent to mainstream media. The letters threaten more letters to come with anthrax. Judith Miller, author of Germs, and a notoriously deceptive Iraq war hawk for The New York Times, participates, playing Judith Miller of the New York Times.
2001 – September 11. The terrorist attacks in NYC and Washington, D.C. occur. The media immediately starts referring to them as another Pearl Harbor, a new Pearl Harbor. CBS News reports that before going to bed at night George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” The site of the Twin Towers is first referred to as “ground zero,” a nuclear war term, by Mark Walsh, identified as a freelancer for Fox News by the Fox News interviewer on the street of lower Manhattan. Presciently anticipating the official explanation for the buildings collapse, Walsh adds that the towers obviously collapsed “mostly due to structural failure since the fires were too intense.”
2001 – September 12. The New York Times headlines a story: “Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush that Became the Unthinkable.” Another headline under the byline of future editor Bill Keller, Iraq war hawk, reads, “America’s Emergency Line: 9/11.” The endless emergency and war on terror begin. Henceforth, for the first time in American history, a very important day is referred to by numbers, not by name – an emergency phone number.
2001 – September 22. Tom Ridge is named Director of the newly created Homeland Security and becomes in charge of politically motivated terror alerts.
2001 – September-October. Real and fake anthrax attacks occur. A sham investigation follows with the FBI eventually accusing government scientist Bruce Ivins on little to no evidence, resulting in Ivins’ alleged suicide.
2001 – Throughout the first three weeks of October the major media use the word “unthinkable” repetitively, echoing its association with nuclear war, just as the World Trade Center site is similarly referred to as “ground zero,” another nuclear term. A phony “anthrax” letter containing a harmless white powder, postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida on September 20, is sent to Tom Brokaw of NBC. The letter, not made public until October 22 after the media’s repeated use of the word “unthinkable,” begins: “The Unthinkabel” Sample Of How It Will Look. Judith Miller of the New York Times receives an anthrax threat letter also sent from St. Petersburg.
2001 – October 7. The U.S.A attacks Afghanistan.
2001 – October 27. The Patriot Act is passed.
2001 – December 4. George W. Bush says when he was outside the classroom in Florida on September 11th he “had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on….” Problem: No one saw the first plane hit the North Tower since it wasn’t televised live. Much later a tape someone had made was shown on television.
2002 – October 2. At the Cincinnati Museum Center President Bush gives a speech linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks and says that “we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” He urges the disarming of Iraq.
2002-10 – Regular color-coded terrorist alerts
2003 – February. Secretary of State Colin Powell gives false testimony at the U.N., asserting that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and must be confronted.
2003 – March. The U. S. attacks Iraq based on lies.
2003-8 – Bush wages war on Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Homeland “security” leads to indefinite detention, black sites, torture, spying on Americans, the loss of Constitutional rights, etc.
2007 – February 10. Barack Obama, having been a U.S. Senator for 2 years 1 month announces he is running for president.
2008 – September. An international financial meltdown occurs. The government claims it was unforeseen. The Bush administration bails out the big banks and financial institutions.
2008 – November. A seriously inexperienced Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, comes out of nowhere to be elected president on a populist platform of “hope” and “change.” He receives more backing from Wall Street than his Republican rival. Liberals and progressives go wild for joy. Hope and change is proclaimed.
2009 – Lawrence Summers, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, takes up his position as head of Obama’s economic team. Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve, whose father, Peter Geithner, oversaw the Ford Foundation’s programs in Indonesia developed by Obama’s mother (who also worked for another notorious CIA front, USAID) becomes Secretary of the Treasury. And Robert Gates, former CIA Director and George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense continues in that position for Obama.
2009 – March. Obama meets with the CEOs of fifteen big banks and tells them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks …. I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.”
2009 – Obama intensifies the war on Afghanistan.
2009 – October 9. Obama is given the Nobel Peace Prize.
2009 – December. Obama sends 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, saying this “will bring this war to a successful conclusion.”
2010 – Obama vows to carry forward the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.
2010 – and ongoing. Obama chooses his drone war kill list every Tuesday; says the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki “is an easy one.”
2011 – Obama and partners attack Libya and brutally kill Muammar Gaddafi. Libya descends into chaos. Hilary Clinton exults.
2009 – and ongoing. Obama attacks Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, etc. Does nothing to stop the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Supports and arms terrorists in Syria and other countries. Engineers a coup d’etat in Ukraine and supports neo-Nazi forces attacking eastern Ukraine. Encircles Russia with NATO troops and military exercises. Starts a new Cold War. Maintains military commissions and indefinite detention. Prosecutes more whistleblowers than all previous American presidents combined, but does not prosecute any banksters or torturers. Charges Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, et al of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Acquiesces in the military coup against the democratically elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and his subsequent imprisonment. Spies on Americans and other countries. Maintains a national state of emergency and the Patriot Act with minor adjustments. Prosecutes “the war on terror” initiated by George W. Bush. Rules over a technological, computerized war of killing all over the globe and a technological, computerized spying apparatus here at home. Spreads USAFRICOM throughout Africa, killing black Africans and undermining governments with Special Forces. And does all this and more with a smile. Then, before leaving office he creates the fraudulent Russia gate story to continue the new Cold War and to undermine any possible cooling of US/Russians tensions under a possible Trump presidency.
2016 – Trump is elected President to the shock and awe of the Democrats and their supporters. Immediately, the undermining of Trump begins to make sure he doesn’t follow through on his promise to reduce nuclear tensions with Russia.
2017 – Donald Trump, the new reality-TV president, takes office and comes under incessant attack from the Democrats and the main stream media. He reneges on most of his campaign promises, including reconciliation with Russia, and tweets so many moronic messages that he plays into the Democrats’ hands. Propaganda expands exponentially as the game of personality politics plays on. Meanwhile, the structures of oligarchic rule continue un-abated, both at home and abroad. Trump continues Obama’s war policies, killing people around the world.
It should be clear from this small portion of events over the years that there is a connecting link, that there is a bloody thread running through them connecting key players and the obvious ongoing presence of a secret structure that recruits its team to maintain this oppressive system. To see it should be gutsy child’s play. It is not an issue of either/or; we can’t explain how we have come to this terrifying situation of rule by a murderous, militarized national security apparatus serving the wealthy elites by concentrating on either individuals or structures. People such as Barack Obama, the Bushes, Trump et al. don’t emerge from thin air (though in Obama’s case it seems that way, and some have speculated on his CIA links). These people grow out of a system that has cultivated and nurtured them. They become spokesmen for the secretive and powerful moneyed forces some call the Deep State, the shadow government, the power elite, etc. (The scholar Peter Dale Scott sees a hidden link between the JFK assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.) Spokesmen, yes, they are that, but executive spokesmen; they are not innocent victims; they are free executive executioners, ordering death and destruction around the world and threatening a nuclear holocaust. People and ongoing structures are intertwined. Individuals count, but so do structures.
We are now living within a structure of non-stop and almost total propaganda that individuals, with the help of alternative structures of communication such as alternative media, can penetrate and understand, but only if they are willing to trudge through the forest of history that will allow for context and the connecting of dots. In the end, it takes desire and work. There are no excuses when, at least for now, the World Wide Web makes available so many voices for truth....
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