The Sick Man On The Senne

Contrary to popular belief, Brussels is not the only major European capital which is away from the seacoast as well as devoid of a river. The Senne is a far cry from the similar-sounding Seine further south, however: it is a nasty, brutish, mercifully short waterway. By the mid-1800’s it had become so putrid and unstable that the city elders decided to cover it—the massive project was known as the voûtement de la Senne—and to build boulevards and public edifices on top. The city did not gain much in charm, but its denizens’ life expectancy was instantly improved. (Whether living a long life in Belgium’s capital is a blessing or a curse is a separate issue.)

There is an equally nasty but infinitely more brutish monstrosity in today’s Brussels that cannot be dealt with so neatly. The European Union today is like the “Socialist Community” under Leonid Brezhnev in his dotage: totalitarian yet inefficient, glorified by its self-serving nomenklatura yet unloved by its subjects, devoid of any unifying ideology beyond the worn-out phrases and platitudes parroted by the absurd men and repulsive women in dull suits.

For the reality of this “United Europe,” as it is today, let us be dryly empirical for a moment and look at a few EU-related news items reported on one day—Thursday, March 14, 2013:

• EU leaders gathered in Brussels for a two-day summit in an attempt to negotiate the dilemma between austerity and growth. Thousands of protestors from all over the 27 member nations converged outside the EU HQ.

• Eurozone employment dropped by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared with the third, despite the Christmas shopping season. Experts say the unemployment rate will remain above 11% until early 2018.

• European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi says that “generally unsatisfactory economic developments in Europe” will improve in the course of 2013, but only if governments implement austerity measures and structural reforms. His fellow-Eurocrat, EU-appointed Italian prime minister Mario Monti, nevertheless says he will have to ask his EU partners to grant Italy more “flexibility” in its budget deficit reduction targets.

• The troika of international lenders—the EU, the ECB, and the IMF—left Greece without resolving a dispute with the government in Athens over further budgetary cuts. In the meantime, Greek shipyard workers protested outside the development ministry and hundreds of Greek students blocked up the education ministry to protest cuts resulting from EU-imposed austerity measures.Unemployment in Greece is 26%, up from 24.8% in the third quarter of 2012. Among under-24’s it is 57.8%. The percentage of unemployed Greeks who have been looking for a job for more than one year is 65.3%.

• In Spain, eviction proceedings against defaulters have soared since 2007 to 450,000. The number of repossessions ending in evictions increased by 135% in 2012 from the year before, indicating worsening trends. Spanish retail sales dropped 10.2% in the year to January, continuing the decline of the past 31 months.

• Cyprus bailout talks are crucial to next stage of crisis, but deep divisions remain over how to manage a bailout. Without a cut in the €17bn cost, Cypriot sovereign debt will reach 145% of GDP, by far the highest in the eurozone except for Greece.

• President François Hollande has said that France won’t be able to cut the public deficit to the EU limit of 3% of GDP this year; it was more likely to reach 3.7%. Amazingly, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble subsequently corrected Hollande, saying not that he “hoped,” or “expected,” but that he was “sure that France would, like us, respect the rules” on the public deficit. (Perhaps Herr Schäuble knows a thing or two about France’s future finance policy that Monsieur le Président de la République does not!)

• Germany, meanwhile, smugly claims that its finances are the model for all humanity. Its 2014 budget plans, revealed on March 13, show the structural deficit dropping to zero. “With all modesty [sic!], this is a result of historic proportions,” economy minister Philipp Rösler declared on that occasion. “Germany is in the vanguard in Europe. Our success with a policy of growth-oriented consolidation is the envy of the world.” Ach, modesty—the quintessential German weakness…

This is but a quick selection on a randomly selected day—the day of this writing. The tenor and substance have not changed much in recent months and years; and things will likely change for worse—OK, with that oneenviable exception, perhaps—in the months and years ahead.

Unsurprisingly, anti-EU feeling is escalating all over the continent. On March 1, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party was beaten into third place in the Eastleigh by-election, in southern England, by a party that wants Britain to leave the EU. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) supporters were once described by Cameron as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”—but they accounted for 28 percent of the vote in the traditionally Tory constituency. UKIP leader Nigel Farage declared the vote “a protest against an entire political class.” Under pressure from UKIP, Cameron had earlier promised to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU by the end of 2017 if he wins the next election, but many British Euro-skeptics see this as a mere ploy to deflect the threat from UKIP.

Marine Le Pen, who finished third in the French presidential election, also demands a referendum on France’s membership. On Mach 3 she declared that the FN wants France to leave the EU unless four reforms are agreed: the return to the franc; the abolition of the Schengen single-borderarea; the primacy of France’s economic interests over “Europe’s”; and the primacy of national law over EU law. Otherwise, Le Pen has promised to transform the European elections a year from now into a referendum for or against Europe. Having polled 18% of the vote in the presidential election last year, Mlle Le Pen has a solid base to build upon.

In Italy, two anti-austerity, anti-euro parties—led by Silvio Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo—captured over half the vote and paralyzed the political system. Berlusconi returned from the dead to take just over 29% of the vote, less than one half of one percentage point behind the first-placed Center-Left. Newcomer Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), entirely created via the web outside the traditional party system, took just over 25% of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies—and demolished Italy’s balance of political forces. Pro-EU Monti’s coalition came fourth with a paltry ten percent.

Even in Germany, the apparent hegemon, there is little popular enthusiasm for the Euro-project. The recently-founded Alternative for Germany (AfD) is not even a political party yet, but expects to be a serious player come federal elections on September 22. It demands dissolution of the “coercive euro association,” an orderly end of the monetary union, and a referendum to decide if “the Basic Law, the best constitution that Germany ever had,” was violated to allow the transfer of sovereignty to the EU. Dr. Bernd Lucke—the AfD co-founder, economics professor and a life-long CDU supporter until he turned against Merkel in 2011 over her bailout policies—is adamant that Germany “has a government that has failed to comply with the law… and has blatantly broken the word that it had given to the German people.” With 14,000 paid members thus far, the AfD is respectable and distinctly upper-middle-class, with a higher concentration of PhDs than any party. Among its early supporters is Hans-Olaf Henkel, ex-president of the Federation of German Industry representing 100,000 businesses. Let it be added that as of now 26% of Germans say they would consider voting for a party committed to leaving the monetary union.

It will be a tough fight. Political, media and cultural elites in the leading countries of the Union are overwhelmingly pro-EU, pro-euro, pro-immigration, and vehemently opposed to any sign of national or ethno-linguistic coherence. If those elites have their way, there will be many more “Europeans” by the end of this century than today—some atheist, but mostly Muslim; some black, but mostly brown—but there will be precious few great-grandchildren of Europeans. The native populations are aborting and birth-controlling themselves into minorities. If Euro-elites have their way, disused churches will be converted into teeming mosques. Just over a decade ago, they refused to acknowledge Christian heritage as an element of European identity—but today they insist Islam is essential to that identity. Brussels rejects the notion that Europeans are defined by blood ties, collective memories, emotional bonds, culture, and kinship. Instead, “Europe” marches along the path of “civilization, progress and prosperity, for the good of all its inhabitants, including the weakest and most deprived… to deepen the democratic and transparent nature of its public life, and to strive for peace, justice and solidarity throughout the world…”

This is the mindset of 1792 and 1917 all over again. Its derivative expressions are foreseeable. The EU relentlessly encourages abortion, sexual deviancy, and population replacement as “basic human rights.” Its political process means the manufacture of ideologically correct outcomes as defined by the unelected Brussels machine, before the quasi-democratic machine of the European Parliament and the member countries’ institutions are set in motion. The preamble of the EU Charter on Human Rights claims to be “based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law” (implying the two were not in conflict), and concludes that “Enjoyment of these rights entails responsibilities and duties with regard to other persons, to the human community and to future generations.” Those rights are naturally demarcated by those who reserve the right to decide what exactly one’s obligations to “the human community” and “future generation” happen to be.

The true meaning of “the rule of law” is defined by the European Arrest Warrant, a hideous device created by the Lisbon Treaty, under which any citizen of a member country—or even a visitor from outside the Union—is liable to arrest and extradition at the behest of a judge in any other EU member country, under one of 32 categories of “crime.” Those offenses include murder, terrorism, as well as “racism and xenophobia.” The EU thus came to equate beliefs, opinions and sentiments with the worst of actual crimes, in the best tradition of Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence.

The workings of the machine are mainly in the hands of the European Commission (EC), whose members are appointed by the 27 prime ministers who make up the Council. The EC has the authority to create and impose policies, but it cannot be removed or held accountable by any electorate. Its duty is to uphold the interests of the Union as such: its members swear that they will discard any vestige of loyalty to any nation. The only EU institution that has any claim to democratic credentials is the European Parliament, the least powerful of the three key bodies.

How and why did the monstrosity get this way? Gradually at first, with a great deal of patience and cunning exercised by its visionary creators. In 1945 Western Europe was in ruins, a shadow of what it had been only four decades previously. The old, pre-1914 balance-of-power system had collapsed, and the interwar mechanisms of collective security were neither collective nor secure. The beginnings were seemingly pragmatic: the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community—as engineered by Robert Schuman—seemed like a sound idea, a plus-sum-game if there ever was one. But the upholders of Euro-federalism had a bigger fish to fry. From the outset they held that a sense of common history had to be developed, as well as a sense of an existing and growing common identity, to complement those early economic integration mechanisms. As Jean Monnet, the father of the project (and, significantly, a man never elected to a public office), admitted six decades ago, “Europe has never existed; one has genuinely to create Europe.”

Monnet and his disciples had a long way to go. The initial ideological basis for the project was de Gaulle’s distinctly non-federalist vision of l’Europe des patries. A concert of nation-states, brought together by a common interest, would seek the withering away of their old hostilities—with France and Germany leading the way—but all of them would retain their substance and identity regardless of the institutional arrangement. This was the “Europe” of the Six, a logical heir to the pragmatic Coal and Steel Community. Euro-integralists—notably Belgium’s prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak and Monnet himself—nevertheless kept their powder dry for a more opportune moment when the European Economic Community might be steered in the direction of a political union. De Gaulle and his immediate successor, Georges Pompidou, did not want that; and until the early 1970’s the institutional framework remained essentially the same.

Then came the notion of Europe’s unity in diversity, the reverse of the Europe of the Fatherlands. (In 2000 In varietate concordia was adopted as the official motto of the European Union.) The new concept coincided with the European Community’s expansion to the Nine, then to the Twelve. Its proponents claimed that Europe was not only a mosaic of cultures but an organic whole. The implication that this whole required a single source of decision-making authority gave rise to the method of European integration Monnet had advocated from the outset: a series of gradual yet regular transfers of small slices of national sovereignty—in ostensibly technical areas—from national capitals to Brussels. The Community apparat made a quantum leap toward this goal with the Single European Act (SEA, July 1987). It was a thorough revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, but in the direction of a super-authority rather than a superstate.

The distinction is essential. The standard Eurosceptic accusation that the Brussels machine is plotting the creation of a single federal state is incorrect. The people who run the Brussels machine have never wanted the end result to be a superstate modeled after the United States. In the context of pan-European federal statehood they would be held more accountable and would come under far greater public scrutiny than if they remained faceless and continued to operate from the corridors of the monstrous EU HQ at Barleymont. The strategy was for the states to be drained gradually of statehood and their power transferred to Brussels, but without the unwelcome trappings and limitations of statehood itself. Its guiding spirit was then-Commission PresidentJacques Delors, a French Socialist. From the SEA on, the EU became—in the words of British MEP Roger Helmer—“a slow-motion coup d’etat.” In addition to the creation of the eurozone 12 years ago, which has grown to 17 member-states since, the Schengen Agreement (1990), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the Amsterdam Treaty (1998), the Treaty of Nice (2000), and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) have transferred vast powers from national capitals to Brussels.

The era of Delors coincided with the rise of the Generation of 1968 to the positions of power. The activists had cut their hair, put on suits and ties, and discovered that it was more fruitful and comfortable to take the Gramscian long road through the institutions than to blow them up. The veterans of the hard-left era, like Catherine Ashton and Jose Manuel Barroso, still subscribe to the concept of permanent revolution, but it is wrapped into the open-ended evolution of the EU that they now control. The result is a European Union in a state of indeterminacy and permanent flux, a postmodern edifice within which the meaning of sovereignty is relativized and the separation of foreign and domestic policies blurred to the point of interchangeability. What all of these Euro-enthusiasts share—as John Laughland has noted—is a love of indeterminacy and permanent change, and a hostility to what they regard as inadequate, old-fashioned, and simplistic certainties of classical sovereign statehood.

Far from being the “capital of Europe,” Brussels is the regional HQ of the post-Christian anti-Europe, just as Washington DC has morphed into the global HQ of the same project. The goals of the project managers are the same because their degenerate minds are the same. They cannot be shamed into changing their ways through arguments or defeated through the ballot box any more than a malignant cancer can be arrested with aspirin. A stronger medicine is needed.

To paraphrase a bad man from a time much better than our own, écrasez l’infâme!

Pope Francis

Many of us non-RC traditionalist all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation. In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis, the first non-European Bishop of Rome since Gregory III (d. 741), is universally described as “modest” and “moderate”—which is much preferred to the dreaded “bold” or “courageous,” in the sense that those words are used by the global media.

“He lives like a monk in a small apartment, travels by bus, and detests all vanity,” Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro told me when he heard the news. His Grace has visited Buenos Aires repeatedly in recent years as the Orthodox Diocesan Administrator, but he has not met Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who was mostly in Rome on those occasions. “I’ve heard from many local people, however, both lay and clergy, that he radiates a burning faith,” says the Metropolitan and adds that his simplicity and compassion for the poor go hand in hand with doctrinal firmness.

Two examples illustrate this dichotomy. When Pope John Paul II appointed him a cardinal in 2001, Bergoglio appealed to affluent Argentines not to fly to Rome to celebrate his investiture but instead to donate to charity the money they would have spent on air fare. In 2010 he furiously opposed Argentina’s legalization of same-sex “marriages,” arguing that children need to have the right to be raised and educated by a father and a mother. In a letter to the faithful he spoke strongly: “Let us not be naïve, we are not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.” Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner reacted by saying that his tone was reminiscent of “medieval times and the Inquisition.”

After an unprecedented 35 years of non-Italian pontificates, many observers had expected the Italian contingent in the College of Cardinals to insist on one of their own. Jorge Bergoglio is as close to being an Italian, however, as is possible for a straniero. He was born in Argentina in 1936 to first-generation Italian immigrants, speaks Italian without an accent, and has a deep grounding in Italian culture, arts and literature. At 76, Pope Francis is significantly older than expected by laity or predicted by punditry. His election is a compromise which will keep most traditionalists contented, if not exactly enthused, while giving the reformist zealots another decade or so to select a strong, charismatic candidate for their long-planned onslaught. Pope Benedict’s sudden decision has caught them off-guard and unprepared.

Among the congratulatory messages sent to Francis, the one from France’s President Francois Hollande was remarkable for its cold, Christophobic rudeness. Hollande said that France, “faithful to its universal principles of liberty, equality and fraternity,” would continue its “dialogue” with the Holy See for “peace, justice, solidarity and human dignity.” That country used to be Christian, once. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, on the other hand, made an innocent mistake when stating that the new pope’s “choice of the name Francis suggests that he wants to call us all back to the transformation that St Francis knew and brought to the whole of Europe.” As a Jesuit—the first ever to become pope—Bergoglio was guided in his choice of the name by the co-founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Francis Xavier.

Government Subsidizes And Bankrupt Companies

There are many forms of government subsidies. Ambitious politicians ingeniously design schemes to expand their power and repay their donor patrons. Opportunist corporate enterprises beg for favor to fund projects or guaranteed loans. The role of government venture capitalism has produced a much-sordid record for the taxpayer. The sheer concept of picking winners and losers is a pure political play that defies pragmatic prudence. In spite of this, actuality, the rush to squander public money is one of the few growth industries. The pitiful results of the predictable bankruptcy are the common fate of this flawed business model.

The latest outrage has Buyers Circle Around Ailing Fisker Automotive. Yet, some critics of this assessment would have you believe that Fisker Automotive is in a sharp contrast to competitor Tesla Motors.

“But the fact that potential buyers are from China is already raising alarms about Fisker, which raised $1.2 billion in venture capital and spent about $192 million in federal loans to build a factory. “Technology developed with American taxpayer subsidies should not be sold off to China,” Republican senator Charles Grassley told Bloomberg. He compared it to the acquisition of A123 Systems by China-based auto parts company Wanxiang Group.

By contrast, Tesla Motors, which also received a DOE loan to build its factory, is crossing into higher volume production. Yesterday, Tesla announced that it expects to be profitable this quarter and is making its Model S at a rate of 400 a month, which will allow it to hit its annual target and meet demand for the electric sedan. (See, Tesla’s Explosive Revenue Suggests a Bright Future.)

One crucial difference between Tesla and Fisker, which is well known for its bold designs, has been Tesla’s manufacturing expertise. Fisker may well still go public and be a successful EV supplier. But for energy-related startups to go the route of Tesla rather than Fisker, they’ll need innovative technology, access to capital, supportive policies, and great business execution.”

The Obama environmental cult would argue that it is largely appropriate to spend public resources to fund private technological businesses. Some will be successful while others will fail. However, the partnership role with government in this new state/capitalist prototype is necessary to achieve the greater good of a fossil free ecosystem. Expensive cars, not designed for the commuter, are now joint venture public finance missions, in order to curtail gas fumes.

Henry Ford is rolling in his grave and Enzo Ferrari is searching for the electric switch.

The notorious “Green” sector has vivid examples of bribery, theft, incompetence and high-priced inefficient technology. The Foundry publishes a most informative list ofPresident Obama’s Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures. “So far, 34 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having gone bankrupt or laying off workers or heading for bankruptcy.” Examine the specific site links for expanded details.

 

1.    Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*	12.  Abound Solar ($400 million)*	23.  Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
2.   SpectraWatt ($500,000)*	13.  A123 Systems ($279 million)*	24.  Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
3.    Solyndra ($535 million)*	14.  Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*	25.  Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
4.    Beacon Power ($43 million)*	15.  Johnson Controls ($299 million)	26. GreenVolts ($500,000)
5.    Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)	16.  Brightsource ($1.6 billion)	27.  Vestas ($50 million)
6.    SunPower ($1.2 billion)	17.  ECOtality ($126.2 million)	28.  LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
7.    First Solar ($1.46 billion)	18.  Raser Technologies ($33 million)*	29.  Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
8.    Babcock and Brown ($178 million)	19.  Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)	30.  Navistar ($39 million)
9.    EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*	20.  Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*	31.  Satcon ($3 million)*
10.  Amonix ($5.9 million)	21.  Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*	32.  Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
11.  Fisker Automotive ($529 million)	22.  Range Fuels ($80 million)*	33.  Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

 

Now expand the creativity of the subsidy culture to the bankruptcy constituency. The report, Union That Bankrupted Hostess to Receive Generous Government Subsidies, will push you over the edge.

“Last year, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union refused to accept concessions that would have kept Hostess in business. The company had tried to cut costs as it faced high labor expenses, rising ingredient costs, and decreasing sales. The Teamsters union accepted the concessions, but the Bakery union would not, choosing to strike. Unable to continue operating, Hostess filed for bankruptcy.

Now those who helped bring down an American icon will receive generous, taxpayer-funded benefits from the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. These generous benefits come in addition to existing unemployment insurance, job placement, and job training programs. TAA benefits include:

• Up to two years of job training in an approved training program,

• Up to 52 weeks of Trade Readjustment Allowances for workers in job training,

• Job search and relocation allowances,

• A refundable “health care tax credit” that covers 65 percent of a worker’s health insurance premiums in qualifying health plans, and

• A two-year wage insurance program that partly replaces workers’ earnings if they accept lower-paying jobs.”

The civic grant philosophy is not just for corporatists. Union goons prefer that their rank in file lose their livelihood, so that they can enjoy the welfare stipends of the state-run insolvent society. The prospects of a Mandarin logo on a Fisker vehicle are hardly on the same scale of transferring innovative technology to Cantonese creditors. However, the common practice of squandering national treasure for dubious purposes seems to be the primary product of the political careerists.

Leave it to the progressives over at The American Prospect, for an unintended analogy, in the essay The Twinkie Defense - the unions made us do it. “Hostess Brands is classic case of private equity engineers and executives looting a viable company, loading it up with debt, and then asking the employees to make up the difference.”

Regretfully, but with no remorse; the political class plays the role of private equity engineers, as the government plunders our economy, through crony spending and swelling of the debt, while saddling the taxpayer with the bill.

Burn, Burn – Africa’s Afghanistan

LONDON – One’s got to love the sound of a Frenchman’s Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like… a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

Apparently, it’s a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people – with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years – in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

So welcome to the latest African war; Chad-based French Mirages and Gazelle helicopters, plus a smatter of France-based

Rafales bombing evil Islamist jihadis in northern Mali. Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent this past Tuesday in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The formerly wimpy Hollande – now enjoying his “resolute”, “determined”, tough guy image reconversion – has cleverly sold all this as incinerating Islamists in the savannah before they take a one-way Bamako-Paris flight to bomb the Eiffel Tower.

French Special Forces have been on the ground in Mali since early 2012.

The Tuareg-led NMLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), via one of its leaders, now says it’s “ready to help” the former colonial power, billing itself as more knowledgeable about the culture and the terrain than future intervening forces from the CEDEAO (the acronym in French for the Economic Community of Western African States).

Salafi-jihadis in Mali have got a huge problem: they chose the wrong battlefield. If this was Syria, they would have been showered by now with weapons, logistical bases, a London-based “observatory”, hours of YouTube videos and all-out diplomatic support by the usual suspects of US, Britain, Turkey, the Gulf petromonarchies and – oui, monsieur – France itself.

Instead, they were slammed by the UN Security Council – faster than a collection of Marvel heroes – duly authorizing a war against them. Their West African neighbors – part of the ECOWAS regional bloc – were given a deadline (late November) to come up with a war plan. This being Africa, nothing happened – and the Islamists kept advancing until a week ago Paris decided to apply some Hollandaise sauce.

Not even a football stadium filled with the best West African shamans can conjure a bunch of disparate – and impoverished – countries to organize an intervening army in short notice, even if the adventure will be fully paid by the West just like the Uganda-led army fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia.

To top it all, this is no cakewalk. The Salafi-jihadis are flush, courtesy of booming cocaine smuggling from South America to Europe via Mali, plus human trafficking. According to the UN Office of Drugs Control, 60% of Europe’s cocaine transits Mali. At Paris street prices, that is worth over $11 billion.

Turbulence ahead 

General Carter Ham, the commander of the Pentagon’s AFRICOM, has been warning about a major crisis for months. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what’s really going on in what the New York Times quaintly describes as those “vast and turbulent stretches of the Sahara”?

It all started with a military coup in March 2012, only one month before Mali would hold a presidential election, ousting then president Amadou Toumani Toure. The coup plotters justified it as a response to the government’s incompetence in fighting the Tuareg.

The coup leader was one Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who happened to have been very cozy with the Pentagon; that included his four-month infantry officer basic training course in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2010. Essentially, Sanogo was also groomed by AFRICOM, under a regional scheme mixing the State Department’s Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership program and the Pentagon’s Operation Enduring Freedom. It goes without saying that in all this “freedom” business Mali has been the proverbial “steady ally” – as in counterterrorism partner – fighting (at least in thesis) al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Over the last few years, Washington’s game has elevated flip-flopping to high art. During the second George W Bush administration, Special Forces were very active side by side with the Tuaregs and the Algerians. During the first Obama administration, they started backing the Mali government against the Tuareg.

An unsuspecting public may pore over Rupert Murdoch’s papers – for instance, The Times of London – and its so-called defense correspondent will be pontificating at will on Mali without ever talking about blowback from the Libya war.

Muammar Gaddafi always supported the Tuaregs’ independence drive; since the 1960s the NMLA agenda has been to liberate Azawad (North Mali) from the central government in Bamako.

After the March 2012 coup, the NMLA seemed to be on top. They planted their own flag on quite a few government buildings, and on April 5 announced the creation of a new, independent Tuareg country. The “international community” spurned them, only for a few months later to have the NMLA for all practical purposes marginalized, even in their own region, by three other – Islamist – groups; Ansar ed-Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”); the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO); and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Meet the players

The NMLA is a secular Tuareg movement, created in October 2011. It claims that the liberation of Azawad will allow better integration – and development – for all the peoples in the region. Its hardcore fighters are Tuaregs who were former members of Gaddafi’s army. But there are also rebels who had not laid down their arms after the 2007-2008 Tuareg rebellion, and some that defected from the Malian army. Those who came back to Mali after Gaddafi was executed by the NATO rebels in Libya carried plenty of weapons. Yet most heavy weapons actually ended up with the NATO rebels themselves, the Islamists supported by the West.

AQIM is the Northern African branch of al-Qaeda, pledging allegiance to “The Doctor”, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Its two crucial characters are Abu Zaid and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, former members of the ultra-hardcore Algerian Islamist outfit Salafist Group for Predication and Combat (SGPC). Belmokhtar was already a jihadi in 1980s Afghanistan.

Abu Zaid poses as a sort of North African “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, with the requisite black flag and a strategically positioned Kalashnikov featuring prominently in his videos. The historical leader, though, is Belmokhtar. The problem is that Belmokhtar, known by French intelligence as “The Uncatchable”, has recently joined MUJAO.

MUJAO fighters are all former AQIM. In June 2012, MUJAO expelled the NMLA and took over the city of Gao, when it immediately applied the worst aspects of Sharia law. It’s the MUJAO base that has been bombed by the French Rafales this week. One of its spokesmen has duly threatened, “in the name of Allah”, to respond by attacking “the heart of France”.

Finally, Ansar ed-Dine is an Islamist Tuareg outfit, set up last year and directed by Iyad ag Ghali, a former leader of the NMLA who exiled himself in Libya. He turned to Salafism because of – inevitably – Pakistani proselytizers let loose in Northern Africa, then engaged in valuable face time with plenty of AQIM emirs. It’s interesting to note in 2007 Mali President Toure appointed Ghali as consul in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. He was then duly expelled in 2010 because he got too close to radical Islamists.

Gimme ‘a little more terrorism’ 

No one in the West is asking why the Pentagon-friendly Sanogo’s military coup in the capital ended up with almost two-thirds of Mali in the hands of Islamists who imposed hardcore Sharia law in Azawad – especially in Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal, a gruesome catalogue of summary executions, amputations, stonings and the destruction of holy shrines in Timbuktu. How come the latest Tuareg rebellion ended up hijacked by a few hundred hardcore Islamists? It’s useless to ask the question to US drones.

The official “leading from behind” Obama 2.0 administration rhetoric is, in a sense, futuristic; the French bombing “could rally jihadis” around the world and lead to – what else – attacks on the West. Once again the good ol’ Global War on Terror (GWOT) remains the serpent biting its own tail.

There’s no way to understand Mali without examining what Algeria has been up to. The Algerian newspaper El Khabar only scratched the surface, noting that “from categorically refusing an intervention – saying to the people in the region it would be dangerous”, Algiers went to “open Algerian skies to the French Mirages”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Algeria last October, trying to organize some semblance of an intervening West African army. Hollande was there in December. Oh yes, this gets juicier by the month.

So let’s turn to Professor Jeremy Keenan, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University, and author of The Dark Sahara (Pluto Press, 2009) and the upcomingThe Dying Sahara (Pluto Press, 2013).

Writing in the January edition of New African, Keenan stresses, “Libya was the catalyst of the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the ‘Global War on Terror’ has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.”

In a nutshell, Bush and the regime in Algiers both needed, as Keenan points out, “a little more terrorism” in the region. Algiers wanted it as the means to get more high-tech weapons. And Bush – or the neo-cons behind him – wanted it to launch the Saharan front of the GWOT, as in the militarization of Africa as the top strategy to control more energy resources, especially oil, thus wining the competition against massive Chinese investment. This is the underlying logic that led to the creation of AFRICOM in 2008.

Algerian intelligence, Washington and the Europeans duly used AQIM, infiltrating its leadership to extract that “little more terrorism”. Meanwhile, Algerian intelligence effectively configured the Tuaregs as “terrorists”; the perfect pretext for Bush’s Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative, as well as the Pentagon’s Operation Flintlock – a trans-Sahara military exercise.

The Tuaregs always scared the hell out of Algerians, who could not even imagine the success of a Tuareg nationalist movement in northern Mali. After all, Algeria always viewed the whole region as its own backyard.

The Tuaregs – the indigenous population of the central Sahara and the Sahel – number up to 3 million. Over 800,000 live in Mali, followed by Niger, with smaller concentrations in Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya. There have been no less than five Tuareg rebellions in Mali since independence in 1960, plus three others in Niger, and a lot of turbulence in Algeria.

Keenan’s analysis is absolutely correct in identifying what happened all along 2012 as the Algerians meticulously destroying the credibility and the political drive of the NMLA. Follow the money: both Ansar ed-Dine’s Iyad ag Ghaly and MUJAO’s Sultan Ould Badi are very cozy with the DRS, the Algerian intelligence agency. Both groups in the beginning had only a few members.

Then came a tsunami of AQIM fighters. That’s the only explanation for why the NMLA was, after only a few months, neutralized both politically and militarily in their own backyard.

Round up the usual freedom fighters

Washington’s “leading from behind” position is illustrated by this State Department press conference. Essentially, the government in Bamako asked for the French to get down and dirty.

And that’s it.

Not really. Anyone who thinks “bomb al-Qaeda” is all there is to Mali must be living in Oz. To start with, using hardcore Islamists to suffocate an indigenous independence movement comes straight from the historic CIA/Pentagon playbook.

Moreover, Mali is crucial to AFRICOM and to the Pentagon’s overall MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) outlook. Months before 9/11 I had the privilege to crisscross Mali on the road – and by the (Niger) river – and hang out, especially in Mopti and Timbuktu, with the awesome Tuaregs, who gave me a crash course in Northwest Africa. I saw Wahhabi and Pakistani preachers all over the place. I saw the Tuaregs progressively squeezed out. I saw an Afghanistan in the making. And it was not very hard to follow the money sipping tea in the Sahara. Mali borders Algeria, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Guinea. The spectacular Inner Niger delta is in central Mali – just south of the Sahara. Mali overflows with gold, uranium, bauxite, iron, manganese, tin and copper. And – Pipelineistan beckons! – there’s plenty of unexplored oil in northern Mali.

As early as February 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T Moeller wassaying that AFRICOM’s mission was to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”; yes, he did make the crucial connection to China, pronounced guilty of ” challenging US interests”.

AFRICOM’s spy planes have been “observing” Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara for months, in thesis looking for AQIM fighters; the whole thing is overseen by US Special Forces, part of the classified, code-named Creek Sand operation, based in next-door Burkina Faso. Forget about spotting any Americans; these are – what else – contractors who do not wear military uniforms.

Last month, at Brown University, General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, once more gave a big push to the “mission to advance US security interests across Africa”. Now it’s all about the – updated – US National Security Strategy in Africa, signed by Obama in June 2012. The (conveniently vague) objectives of this strategy are to “strengthen democratic institutions”; encourage “economic growth, trade and investment”; “advance peace and security”; and “promote opportunity and development.”

In practice, it’s Western militarization (with Washington “leading from behind”) versus the ongoing Chinese seduction/investment drive in Africa. In Mali, the ideal Washington scenario would be a Sudan remix; just like the recent partition of North and South Sudan, which created an extra logistical headache for Beijing, why not a partition of Mali to better exploit its natural wealth? By the way, Mali was known as Western Sudan until independence in 1960.

Already in early December a “multinational” war in Mali was on the Pentagon cards.

The beauty of it is that even with a Western-financed, Pentagon-supported, “multinational” proxy army about to get into the action, it’s the French who are pouring the lethal Hollandaise sauce (nothing like an ex-colony “in trouble” to whet the appetite of its former masters). The Pentagon can always keep using its discreet P-3 spy planes and Global Hawk drones based in Europe, and later on transport West African troops and give them aerial cover. But all secret, and very hush hush.

Mr Quagmire has already reared its ugly head in record time, even before the 1,400 (and counting) French boots on the ground went into offense.

A MUJAO commando team (and not AQIM, as it’s been reported), led by who else but the “uncatchable” Belmokhtar, hit a gas field in the middle of the Algerian Sahara desert, over 1,000 km south of Algiers but only 100 km from the Libyan border, where they captured a bunch of Western (and some Japanese) hostages; a rescue operation launched on Wednesday by Algerian Special Forces was, to put it mildly, a giant mess, with at least seven foreign hostages and 23 Algerians so far confirmed killed.

The gas field is being exploited by BP, Statoil and Sonatrach. MUJAO has denounced – what else – the new French “crusade” and the fact that French fighter jets now own Algerian airspace.

As blowback goes, this is just the hors d’oeuvres. And it won’t be confined to Mali. It will convulse Algeria and soon Niger, the source of over a third of the uranium in French nuclear power plants, and the whole Sahara-Sahel.

So this new, brewing mega-Afghanistan in Africa will be good for French neoloconial interests (even though Hollande insists this is all about “peace”); good for AFRICOM; a boost for those Jihadis Formerly Known as NATO Rebels; and certainly good for the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT), duly renamed “kinetic military operations”.

Django, unchained, would be totally at home. As for the Oscar for Best Song, it goes to the Bush-Obama continuum: There’s no business like terror business. With French subtitles, bien sur.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

Source: Asia Times Online

A Multicultural Society Is Not Logical Or Workable

“A multicultural society is a physical and sociological impossibility.” Satoshi Kanazawa, college professor.

One look around the globe shows that religious and cultural factions fight and kill one another with accelerating violence as they come in closer competition for water, energy, land and food. One look at Lebanon, United Kingdom, Holland, France, Norway, Iraq and many other countries where cultures co-exist—amply illustrates Kanazawa’s contention.
Another look around the world shows that cultures compete for dominance in every country where cultures attempt to co-exist. It doesn’t work in Canada or Mexico. It’s not working in the United States of America.

Racial and cultural unrest checker every year of every decade of America’s existence. It smolders and simmers under the surface in 2012. The more incompatible cultures imported into America, they will boil over and scald many in the years ahead.

What is culture?

Edward Tylor said that culture is, “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor’s time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

“Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon,” said Tylor. “It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns–they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.”

In 2012, many western countries like Canada, France, Norway, Sweden and others find their own cultures being usurped if not destroyed by mass immigration.

Can cultures co-exist in the same country? Answer: no!

“When I used to teach “Introduction to Sociology” at the University of Washington, I had back-to-back lectures during the first week on culture and society,” said Kanazawa. “I explained to my students that culture and society were two sides of a coin; one cannot exist without the other. Culture needs society (and its inhabitants) to sustain its existence and initiate its change, and society needs culture to hold it together and survive. Just as there is no such thing as a coin with only one side, there is no such thing as culture without society or society without culture. It is physically impossible to construct a coin with only heads without tails or a coin with only tails without heads. It is equally impossible to have a culture without society or a society without culture.”

When any society begins to speak multiple languages via immigration, it begins to fracture as to communication among its citizenry. Once communications and “similar thinking” fragment, balkanization and separation ensue. Today in America, Muslims cannot and do not assimilate into American culture or any Western cultures. They enclave. The same holds true for Mexicans in America. They separate into their own barrios. It’s not racist; it’s biological; it’s tribal.

“As an integral aspect of human culture, language cannot exist without a society of speakers speaking it daily and interacting with each other,” said Kanazawa. “Nobody disputes these truisms about culture and society from the social sciences, yet the same people also claim that we now live in a “multicultural society.” If you think about it for a moment, you’d realize that the notion of “multicultural society” is a logical and physical impossibility. It is similar to a coin with only one heads but several tails. It is physically impossible to construct such a coin.”

Kanazawa exposes the obvious. Competing cultures cannot and do not work within a country. It goes against millions of years of human activity.

Can multiple societies exist within a civilization? Can one coin possess one head and two tails? Answer: no!

“That culture needs society to sustain its existence means that multiple cultures require multiple societies,” said Kanazawa. “That society needs culture to hold it together means that multiple societies require multiple cultures. There must be exactly the same number of cultures as there are societies, just as there must be exactly the same number of societies as there are cultures. In any bag of coins, regardless of how many coins there are, there are exactly as many heads as there are tails, and vice versa. One culture, one society. “Multicultural society” is a physical (and sociological) impossibility.”

If the United States and Canada or Western Europe hope to survive in the 21st century as viable and cohesive societies, they must curtail mass immigration from incompatible cultures. If they fail to take action, they will face endless strife for their citizens as well as the immigrants. Multiculturalism doesn’t work on every level of human interaction.

As resources diminish, food grows scarcer and energy depletes, we will witness more clashing cultures within all Western countries that imported large numbers from incompatible cultures.

Samuel Huntington, author of Clash of Civilizations, said it rather logically: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Capitalism’s Two Step Survival Plan – Austerity And Structural Reform

The coast is clear, the media tells us; economic disaster has been averted. The Euro Zone is finally stable and the U.S. economy is recovering. Whew!

Why, then, are government policies internationally still pursuing extremist measures? In the U.S., a third round of excess money printing —called Quantitative Easing — began recently in which banks are directly profiting by unloading their toxic mortgages on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet (another backdoor bailout paid by taxpayers).

After the U.S. presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans are committed to different versions of historic cuts to social services, education, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and very likely Social Security. This bi-partisan plan is often referred to as a “grand bargain,” the details of which both parties are still haggling over.

In Europe things are no better. After the Euro Zone central bank promised investors its full backing to bailout all Euro Zone members — by printing money — the world economy sighed a heavy relief. But still the Euro Zone — along with the U.S. — is pursuing a two-pronged solution for an extreme economic crisis: austerity measures and the less-discussed “structural reforms.”

What are these policies? Austerity is simple enough: government cuts to social spending, health care, education, pensions, etc. — to balance heavily indebted public budgets (at the expense of working people, rather than taxing the rich and corporations). Austerity can also be achieved through privatization, where once publicly run programs/facilities are sold cheaply to private firms to make a profit, thus taking the cost off the government’s budget.

Structural reforms on the other hand are meant to boost economic (corporate) growth, by government intervention in commodity markets — most commonly the labor market. It’s called structural reform because markets are usually relatively stable. For example, the labor market is deep-rooted in powerful social forces — wages, benefits, and working conditions are heavily influenced by unions, who use their organization and strike threat to pressure corporations and governments to pay living wages. Non-union workers benefit directly by the unions’ ability to alter the national labor market, since non-union companies have to compete with union companies for workers, who naturally go where wages are higher. Professional, higher-paid workers benefit too, since society expects them to get higher wages than, say a carpenter.

In Europe, structural reforms targeting the labor market — alongside austerity measures — are rousing the unions and broader community into the streets with massive demonstrations: Spain, Portugal, Greece, and other countries are fighting reforms that politicians are euphemistically calling “labor market flexibility.” This simply means that unions will be undermined by their inability to protect workers’ jobs, making firing easier (“flexibility”), which results in compelling workers into accepting lower wages and benefits.

The pro-corporate Economist magazine reports about Portugal:

“With his decision to finance a reduction in company [corporate] costs through a sharp cut in workers’ take-home pay, Pedro Passos Coelho, Portugal’s prime minister, appears to have taken reform past the limit of what is deemed acceptable by large sections of the electorate.”

And France:

“… [President] Hollande has given union leaders and bosses until December to negotiate [anti-union] labor-market changes. On the table are various options, including making it possible for firms [corporations] to reduce hours and salaries in a downturn against a guarantee of job security, along the lines introduced by [Germany's prime minister]… in 2003.”

And Spain:

“… the new [labor] law makes it easier and cheaper to lay off workers. For most firms, maximum lay-off payments [unemployment benefits] will be reduced from 42 months’ pay to 12 months… it will hugely boost business confidence.”

Reducing unemployment benefits is a very popular labor market structural reform for the 1%, since it makes workers more desperate for work, and thus more accepting of low-wage jobs — consequently lowering workers’ power in the labor market overall, as wages are lowered nationally.

And while Europe’s austerity and structural reforms are on the front page of international media — due to the giant protests and general strikes against them — the exact same policies have been pursued by the U.S. with barely a murmur. Were it not for the labor upsurges in Wisconsin and more recently Chicago, these policies would be completely off the public’s radar.

The Wisconsin uprising was in response to a labor-market structural reform pursued by Republicans, denying unions bargaining rights — effectively destroying the union. Democrats, however, are pursuing anti-labor structural reforms — weakening unions — as national policy also, though less directly, by demanding that unions across the country take massive concessions in wages and benefits — a slower, yet more effective form of labor market restructuring.

The teachers in Chicago went on strike against another form of anti-labor structural reform pursued by both Democrats and Republicans. The media-hype around “firing bad teachers” is really a labor-market reform in disguise; the real intention is to bust unions, who are only able to stay strong by their ability to protect the jobs of their members (of course there already exists ways to fire bad teachers).

Teacher merit pay is yet another labor reform measure aimed to weaken unions, since it effectively lowers wages by preventing raises (there is zero evidence that merit pay raises education standards, or that charter schools outperform public schools). It means that every teacher’s salary is negotiated individually, and it allows management to punish its critics by denying them merit pay raises.

The teachers are especially targeted in the U.S. because they are the strongest union in the country, due to their numbers, organization, and connections to the community. If they are forced to give “structural” concessions, other unions will be heavily pressured to do so, and thus the labor market will be altered to the benefit of the corporations.

The labor reform attacks — combined with austerity budget cuts — are happening in different forms on a city, state, and federal level with the full backing of the Democrats and Republicans (there is no “debate” in the presidential election about education policy). Thus, if not for the Wisconsin and Chicago struggles, there would be little social consciousness around these issues.

The reasons that austerity and structural adjustment have not produced a Europe-like movement yet is because most labor unions have increasingly accepted these concessions without putting up a real fight. Many labor leaders would simply rather accept these policies, since fighting them would put them in conflict with their “friends,” the Democratic politicians pursuing these anti-labor policies.

Hopefully, the post-Occupy movement can show the labor movement the way forward. On November 3rd there will be protest demonstrations against austerity in a number of cities across the country. These protests are targeting the ongoing state by state cuts — and federal post-election cuts — to education, transportation, health care, social programs, and public-sector workers. The protests are challenging the very concept of austerity, as working people refuse to pay for the crisis created by the rich and corporations. There is a potential for these protest demonstrations to teach the American public the word “austerity,” assuming they are large enough and connect with the broader community that directly experiences these policies.

Regardless of the results of November 3, demonstrations about the austerity issue in the U.S. will inevitably continue, since even mainstream economists mostly agree that there will be no return to the pre-recession economy. The policies of austerity and structural reform — along with war — are long-term survival strategies of capitalism, which is evolving to survive a global-wide crisis of corporate growth rates by creating a “new normal” of social expectations: lower wages and fewer social programs.

The first step in fighting these measures is mobilizing working people and the broader community in massive Europe-like demonstrations. This tactic educates the whole nation about the issues, which would otherwise remain in the dark. Once the 99% is in the streets together screaming collective demands with a united voice, the movement will decide how best to act, whether it be the general strikes or new political parties that have emerged in Europe.

The U.S. post-election austerity surprises will give new opportunities for millions of people to get into the streets. They will no longer be able or willing to remain ignorant about the nation’s new normal.

http://www.economist.com/node/21563352
http://www.economist.com/node/21563303
http://www.economist.com/node/21547831

Terrorist Attacks Intensify After Western War Threats Against Syria

Over the weekend the Western-backed opposition in Syria stepped up its attacks on government buildings, military facilities and civilians as it aims to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and install a pro-Western client regime in Damascus.

Fighting between the Syrian army and Western proxy forces has been intensifying since US President Barack Obama threatened Syria with direct military intervention two weeks ago. Last week French President Hollande, British Foreign Secretary of State William Hague and Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi demanded Assad’s fall. Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu also called for a no-fly zone over Syria. However, for the moment decisions to enforce a no-fly zone and launch open warfare against Syria have not been finalized.

The Western powers are still relying on their armed proxy forces inside Syria—like the Turkey-based Free Syrian Army (FSA) and various Sunni Islamist terrorist groups—to fight Assad.

Media reports indicated intense fighting between the Syrian army and anti-Assad forces throughout the weekend. Opposition sources said that armed insurgents had seized an air defense base close to Deir-Ez Zor on Saturday, and that battles were raging near a military airport in the area. Opposition fighters also claimed that they had targeted the regime’s air installations near Aleppo and Idlib in the northern part of Syria close to the Turkish border, and that they had shot down a Syrian fighter jet.

On Saturday a car bomb near the Muaz Bin Jabal mosque in the Sbaineh suburb of Damascus killed 15 civilians. The explosion also reportedly wounded several people and caused damage to buildings in the area. The Sbaineh district is dominated by Palestinian refugees who are mostly reluctant to join the pro-Western opposition against Assad.

The Syrian state-run news agency, SANA, reported that earlier on Saturday another bomb killed Brigadier General Taher Subeir, when he got into his car in front of his home in the Damascus district of Rukn Addien. Since the outbreak of armed struggle in Syria, over 8,000 soldiers and security personnel have been killed by the Western-backed armed opposition.

In Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in eastern Syria, a suicide bomb attack on the pro-government al-Akhbariya TV station killed one person and injured two children.

On Sunday a bomb attack at the Syrian army’s General Staff headquarters in the Abu Rummaneh district in central Damascus wounded four officers. Islamist forces in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) took responsibility for the attack. A video statement released by the Grandsons of the Prophet brigade, a section of the FSA, said that “bombs were planted inside the army headquarters” and that “the operation targeted officers in the Assad army who have been planning and giving the go ahead for the massacres against the Syrian people.”

The blast was in the same district where an FSA suicide bomber killed four high-ranking Syrian officials—including Defense Minister Dawould Rajha and his deputy, Assef Shawkat—on August 15, and 55 people in a twin suicide car bombing outside a military intelligence building on May 10.

The FSA said it carried out the bombing as retaliation for an August 25 massacre in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, where more than 300 people were reportedly killed. While the FSA and other opposition groups blame the Syrian regime for the deaths, a report by Robert Fisk, the first Western journalist reporting from Daraya after the massacre, indicates that the FSA itself was involved in the killings.

Another element of the US-backed propaganda campaign is the release of ever-higher casualty figures, which are all blamed on the Syrian government. On Sunday the London-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said that 5,440 people, including 4,114 civilians were killed in August. The Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), a faction of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), put the toll at 4,933 civilians.

Lakhdar Brahimi, the new United Nations (UN) envoy to Syria made clear that the offensive for regime change in Syria will be continued. In an interview withal-Arabiya TV he said that “the need for change is urgent and necessary. The Syrian people must be satisfied and their legitimate demands are met.”

He stated that the Syrian government is primarily responsible for the violence. Calling on both parties to stop the violence, he said that “this call is primarily directed to the government. More than others, it is the duty of governments, under any circumstances and anywhere, not just in Syria, to ensure security and stability for their people.”

Brahimi’s comments are deeply cynical. It is the intensification of the campaign by the US and its allies to oust Assad that is primarily responsible for the humanitarian disaster.

A former colonel of the Syrian army told the New York Times that he would not have defected if he had known that he would end up in a refugee camp in Jordan. He said: “We thought the regime would collapse in two months” explaining that now “the Syrians are getting killed in a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

This comment is particularly significant, in that it shows that Syrian refugees—presented in the Western media purely as victims of the Assad regime—view themselves as caught between the Iranian backers of the Assad regime and the reactionary Saudi monarchy, which is backing the anti-Assad forces together with Washington. They do not see the anti-Assad armed opposition as fighting for democracy, but for the strategic interests of the Persian Gulf monarchies.

Washington views regime change in Syria as the next step to deepen its hegemony over the energy-rich and geostrategically crucial Middle East and Central Asian regions. Iran feels increasingly threatened by the US war-drive against Syria and pointed to the danger of a wider regional war in the case of a US attack on its ally.

With cooperation from Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, America has the goal of striking a blow against Syria and making preparations for the fall of the Syrian government,” Mohammad Ali Assoudi, the deputy for culture and propaganda of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said.

He added, “if America were to attack Syria, Iran along with Syria’s allies will take action, which would amount to a fiasco for America. In the case of American stupidity and a military attack by this country on Syria, the joint military pact [Iran and Syria signed a mutual defense pact in 2006] of Syria’s allies would be implemented.”

Source: wsws.org

Has The Perfect Moment To Kill The Dollar Arrived?

The idea of “collapse”, social and financial, comes with an incredible array of hypothetical consequences ranging from public dissent and martial law, to the complete disintegration of infrastructure and the devolution of mankind into a swarm of mindless arm chewing cannibals.  In an age of television nirvana and cinema overload, I have found that the collective unconscious of our culture has now defined what collapse is based only on the most narrow of extremes.  If they aren’t being hunted down by machete wielding looters or swastika wearing jackboots, then the average American dupe figures that the country is not in much danger.  Hollywood fantasy has blinded us to the tangible crises at our doorstep.

The reality is that collapse is not a singular event, but a process.  It is a symphony of doom, composed of a series of exponentially more powerful crescendos.  If the past four years since the implosion of the derivatives bubble have proven anything, it is that catastrophe has the ability to drown a nation slowly like a river of molasses, rather than sweep it away like a flash flood.  That said, almost every recorded collapse of modern societies in the past century has been preceded by a primary trigger event; a moment in which the mathematical certainty of failure becomes clear, even if the psychological certainty is muddled.

In 2012, we still await that trigger event, which I believe will be the announcement of QE3 (or any unlimited stimulus program regardless of title), and the final debasement of the dollar.  At the beginning of this year, I pointed out that we were likely to see such an announcement before 2012 was out, and it would seem that the private Federal Reserve is right on track.

Last month, the Fed announced that it was formulating a plan to “expand its tool kit”.  This includes an openly admitted possibility of a third round of quantitative easing starting as early as September:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/24/us-usa-fed-tools-idUSBRE86N1G120120724

This timeline appears to coincide perfectly with the breakdown of the EU, which may also see a climax event in September.  In that month, EU policymakers will return from summer holiday.  German courts will make a ruling which could put an end to any chance that the country will support a eurozone rescue fund.  The Dutch, which are anti-bailout, will vote in elections.  Greece will be attempting to renegotiate its financial lifeline.  And, the ECB will have to assess the impending chaos in Spain and Italy:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/29/us-eurozone-crisis-idUSBRE86S05J20120729

As far as the Fed’s ability to remedy the fiscal situation goes, let’s clear something up right here; the Fed has NO TOOLKIT.  Sorry, but central banks have only two options when attempting to shift the tide of the economy:  They can lower interest rates to zero, and, they can print-print-print.  That is it.  We’ve had TARP, numerous bailouts, QE1 and QE2, Operation Twist, and interests rates have been kept near zero for years!  These so called solutions have been strapped like millstones around our necks and absolutely nothing has been accomplished since 2008.

Real unemployment still stands at over 20%.  The housing crisis remains an unstoppable juggernaut.  Europe is on the verge of meltdown (despite the trillions in American taxpayer dollars handed to EU banks).  The national debt continues to grow at a pace far beyond what the Obama Administration and mainstream economists (who should have been fired long ago) predicted in 2010.  There are no secret magic tricks up the sleeve of Ben Bernanke.  Even if the Fed actually wanted to save our financial system, and our currency (which they don’t), there is nothing they can do except make the situation worse.  Central banks are perhaps the most useless institutions ever devised, unless, of course, their true purpose is to diminish the financial health of a country and siphon away its economic sovereignty…

Enter the death of the dollar.

The IMF has been consistently calling for the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and for its replacement by the SDR (Special Drawing Rights):

http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/10/markets/dollar/index.htm

http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2011/010711.pdf 

The new president of France, Francois Hollande, has recommended the expulsion of the dollar as the go-to reserve, a deeper relationship between France and the BRIC nations:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE08Dj06.html

China has been demanding an end to dollar primacy for years:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123780272456212885.html

And so has Russia…

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/01/content_11109506.htm

And so has the UN…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/6152204/UN-wants-new-global-currency-to-replace-dollar.html

It’s not as if it’s a big secret that the dollar is on everyone’s hit list.  Until recently, alternative economists could only point out circumstantial evidence that this sentiment was a product of collusion between the world’s central banks and elements of various governments.  Suggesting that China, Russia, the UN, the IMF, and the Federal Reserve were working in tandem to devalue the dollar and replace it with a global currency has always elicited at least a few jeers and the ever present standby catch-all accusation of “conspiracy theory”.  However, the times they are a’ changen’…

With the exposure of the Libor Scandal, we now have definitive proof and even open confessions from international banks, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury, admitting that the true debt problems of major institutions have been hidden, deliberately, in tandem with multiple agencies in multiple countries, from the general public, with the full knowledge of numerous governments.  The most vital and shocking element of the Libor Scandal is that it shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is indeed a conspiracy which has melded the corporate world and the political world into a single ominous creature.

The collusion has become so brazen, central banks around the globe now institute policy initiatives within the same hour of each other:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/us-centralbanks-action-idUSBRE8640RN20120705

Years back, I wrote an article about the most important signs to watch for when facing a heightened state of collapse.  One of those signs was the advent of openly admitted corruption on the part of the banks.  When criminals become absolutely transparent and nonchalant about their criminality, it is usually because they no longer fear the threat of justice or reprisal.  This is exactly the atmosphere we have in 2012.  But, what could possibly have made the banksters so confident that they are willing to flaunt their racket to the world?  I can only surmise that an event is on the horizon.  One so distracting that the hucksters believe we will forget all about them.

Looking at it from another perspective; if I was a globalist hell bent on undercutting the dollar as the world reserve and replacing it with a centralized standard while turning the U.S. into a third world pit in the process, I would probably pull the plug soon.  Here are some reasons why:

Drought Crisis Provides Inflationary Cover

The drought which has struck half of the U.S. agricultural centers and which has also hit Russian production is the perfect cover event for dollar devaluation.  The full view of crop production and yields will be revealed this autumn, and according to the mainstream, the numbers will be dismal.  Maybe they will be, maybe they won’t, but the likelihood of inflation in food prices all over the planet is high.  If the Fed announces QE3 and sets an implosion of the dollar in motion, the price spikes this will cause in commodities, especially grains and other foodstuffs, can be easily blamed on drought, rather than the destruction of the greenback.  At least for a time.

Syria And Iran Theater

If the UN pulls observers from Syria, expect an attack by either the U.S., Israel, or both is on the way.  Expect Russia to be quite unhappy.  Expect China to respond with financial warfare.  Expect Iran to fulfill its mutual defense pact with Syria and come to their aid.  Expect hard core catastrophe.  I have been warning about Syria as a catalyst for global crisis for quite some time.  Long before anyone ever heard the name “Assad”:

http://www.alt-market.com/neithercorp/press/2010/01/will-globalists-trigger-yet-another-world-war/

Every time I catch a glimpse of the MSM, whether it be MSNBC, CNN, or FOX, they are all spewing the same rhetoric:  The U.S. should have invaded Syria months ago.  It would seem that the American people are being psychologically prepped for a new war, but in reality, they are being prepped to be distracted from the banking sector’s primacy in the economic calamity that is about to unfold.

European Seesaw Of Destruction

With the EU in shambles, and only getting worse, the ECB has been attempting to work around the rules of its own charter which forbid the infusion of capital directly into governments.  The latest weapon in the fight against the financial stupidity of EU member countries?  European stimulus!  That’s right folks, the U.S. is not the only country that will be raping its own currency this year!  Be sure to catch the euro-sized version of QE:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/03/maybe-draghis-speech-wasnt-a-disaster-after-all/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-01/berlusconi-says-ecb-must-print-euros-or-italy-may-say-ciao-1-.html

I believe, in keeping with the collusion central banks have already shown, that the Federal Reserve and the ECB will announce new stimulus measures very close to each other, if not in tandem.  The continued devaluation of the Euro will help to hide the effect of the falling dollar as the two currencies seesaw back and forth, allowing for a delayed reaction from the public as well as investment markets.  Investors looking for a safe haven currency will be scrambling in confusion.

Stocks Ready To Bust

Finally, it is very likely that the Fed will wait for markets to dive in the wake of faltering demand for goods and raw materials in all major economies, as well as declines in manufacturing.  As I have said in the past, the Fed wants us to beg for QE3.  The only reason this decline has not occurred yet is because investors that are still participating are salivating for new stimulus and expect it shower them with riches soon.  So, to put this in perspective, the Dow is above 13,000 right now because investors have already priced in a QE package not just in the U.S., but in the EU as well.  If they do not get it fast, they will pull out, and stocks will plummet.  The market addiction to fiat injection is so pervasive now, I cannot imagine how they would react if the pipeline was cut off.  It would probably induce a fiscal bloodbath.

What Will Collapse Really Be Like?

I expect the event will be spectacular in some ways, but subdued and subversive in many other ways.  Triggers may be swift and startling, but the reactions of the populace slow, uncertain, and presumptive.  There will be fissures in our foundation, but the complete extent of the danger may take a few more years to become evident.  While the public continues to maintain its fixation on some Mad Max nightmare scenario, the real collapse will be taking place right under their noses in the form of 25%-50% increases in food and fuel, tightened job availability with pensions swallowed by austerity, food lines hidden by food stamps until the government finally defaults and pulls the rug out from under entitlement programs, etc.  For a time, it will look and feel like a slightly darker version of today, and not the cinematic melodrama that we have come to envision.  The worst of times that we often find extolled in the pages of history books come at the cost of years of almost equal disparity, and usually, the lead up is far more difficult to handle than the finale…

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Global Banks are the Financial Services Wing of the Drug Cartels

“Steal a little,” wrote Bob Dylan, “they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king.” These days, he might recraft the line to read: deal a little dope, they throw you in jail; launder the narco billions, they’ll make you apologise to the US Senate.

Two months ago in Washington DC, a poor black man called Edward Dorsey Sr was convicted of peddling 5.5 grams of crack cocaine. Because he was charged before a recent relative amelioration in sentencing, he was given a mandatory 10 years in jail.

Last week, managers from Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, lined up before the Senate’s permanent sub-committee on investigations – just across the Potomac river from the scene of Dorsey’s crime – to be asked questions such as: “It took three or four years to close a suspicious account. Is there any way that should be allowed to happen?”

The “suspicious account” was that of a “casa de cambio”, a currency exchange house operated in Mexico on behalf of the largest criminal syndicate in the world and one of the most savage, the Sinaloa drug-trafficking cartel. The dealings had been flagged up to HSBC bosses by an anti-money laundering officer, but to no avail – the dirty business continued. “No, senator,” came the reply from a bespectacled Brit called Paul Thurston, chief executive, retail banking and wealth management, HSBC Holdings plc.

The same casa de cambio, called Puebla, was known to be under investigation in another case involving the Wachovia bank during the time HSBC was entertaining its money. US authorities had seized $11m from Wachovia’s Miami office, on the way to securing the biggest settlement in banking history with Wachovia in March 2010, detailed in this newspaper last year.

Wachovia was fined $50m and made to surrender $110m in proven drug profits, but was shown to have inadequately monitored a staggering $376bn through the casa de cambio over four years, of which $10bn was in cash. The whistleblower in the case, an Englishman working as an anti-money laundering officer in the bank’s London office, Martin Woods, was disciplined for trying to alert his superiors, and won a settlement after bringing a claim for unfair dismissal.

No one from Wachovia went to jail – and, said Woods at the time of the settlement: “These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world. But no one goes to jail. What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing. It encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars.”

HSBC has been found to have handled $7bn in narco cash, “and this is the starter for 10″, Woods now says. “We’ll get the full picture over time. But what’s the sanction on these banks? What’s their risk? The cartels should renegotiate their charges with the banks. They’re being priced for a risk element that isn’t there.”

Wachovia was not the first, neither will HSBC be the last. Six years ago, a subsidiary of Barclays – Barclays Private Bank – was exposed as having been used to launder drug money from Colombia through five accounts linked to the infamous Medellín cartel. By an ironic twist, Barclays continued to entertain the funds after British police had become involved after a tip-off, from HSBC.

And the issue is wider than drug-money. It is about where banks, law enforcement officers and the regulators – and politics and society generally – want to draw the line between the criminal and supposed “legal” economies, if there is one.

Take the top-drawer bank to the elite and Her Majesty the Queen, Coutts, part of the bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland. On 23 March, the UK Financial Services Authority issued a final notice to Coutts, fixing a penalty of £8.75m for breach of its money-laundering code.

The FSA reviewed 103 “high-risk customer files” and “identified deficiencies in 73 files”, showing “failure to conduct appropriate ongoing monitoring” over three years. In two cases, private bankers involved had “failed to identify serious criminal allegations against those customers”. Rory Tapner, chief executive of the wealth division of RBS said that “since concerns were first identified by the FSA, Coutts & Co has enhanced its client relationship management process”. The refrain was the same from HSBC last week, and every other bank after every other shameful revelation: we went awry, but we’ve fixed it.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, to know Coutts’s private view of Wachovia’s case – or, at least of people such as Woods who do root out criminal laundering?

As it happens, through a rare glimpse, we do. Last year, the Wachovia whistleblower was offered a job at Coutts. But the bank suddenly withdrew its job offer. An internal email sent by the interviewer to a director of Coutts’s wealth management programme explained the bank had “a very generic reason for our decision, citing the fact that we had become aware of an incident at Wachovia, one of Martin Woods’s previous employers, and that Coutts was keen to avoid any risk of reputational damage that might relate to the incident”.

The thought occurs to Woods, who is taking legal action against Coutts for mistreatment of a whistleblower, that he was too tenacious at Wachovia. Coutts declined to comment.

No one at Coutts was called to account for the FSA’s alarming findings. No one was sanctioned under criminal law last month when the ING bank was fined $619m for illegally moving billions of dollars into the US banking system, in breach of sanctions – as HSBC has done with money from North Korea and Iran. Neither were they in 2009, when Lloyds TSB – 43% owned by the British taxpayer – was fined $350m for whitewashing Iranian money into the US. The fines seem huge to us, but banks pay them from petty cash.

If there is a prosecution, it is always “deferred”, as with Wachovia, and a Californian bank called Sigue used by HSBC to receive the Mexican drug money. Be good for a year, and we’ll forget about it. Since when did the likes of Edward Dorsey of Washington enjoy that kind of leniency?

A foremost trainer of anti-money laundering officers in the US is Robert Mazur, who infiltrated the Medellín cartel during the prosecution and collapse of the BCCI bank in 1991, and who tells the Observer that “the only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom”.

It remains to be seen whether HSBC’s barons will, like Wachovia’s, avoid Dorsey’s fate.

“People don’t like to ask how close the banker’s finger is to the trigger of the killer’s gun,” says Woods.

But in this newspaper – when we revealed the original “cease and desist” order against HSBC – the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, posited that four pillars of the international banking system are: drug-money laundering, sanctions busting, tax evasion and arms trafficking.

The response of politicians is to cower from any serious legal assault on this reality, for the simple reasons that the money is too big (plus consultancies to be had after leaving office). The British government recruits a former chairman of HSBC as trade secretary just as the drug-laundering scandal breaks.

Herein, along with Dylan’s dictum, lies the problem. We don’t think of those banking barons as the financial services wing of the Sinaloa cartel.

The stark truth is that the cartels’ best friends are those people in pin-stripes who, after a rap on the knuckles, return to their golf in Connecticut and drinks parties in Holland Park.

The notion of any dichotomy between the global criminal economy and the “legal” one is fantasy. Worse, it is a lie. They are seamless, mutually interdependent – one and the same.

Source: The Guardian

Can America Withstand The Coming Transformation of Itself?

It happened to the Romans. It happened to the American Indians. It happened to the Incas of South America. It happened to the aborigines of Australia. It happened to South Africans. It’s happening to Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Australia, Belgium, France and Spain.

It is happening to the United States of America.

What is “it”?

All those ancient civilizations experienced migration of other civilizations so great in numbers that “it” changed their languages, religions, cultures and ways of life.

The Romans lost their empire. The American Indians lost everything and found themselves stuck on internment camps better known as “reservations.” Today, they cope with alcohol, domestic violence, poverty and purposelessness. The Spaniard Pizarro, using his guns, degraded the Inca nation into oblivion. The Australian aboriginals, like the American Indians, lost their continent to the British invasion. The same happened with South Africa.

Today, Great Britain, by its own hand, watches itself change from “British” to Middle Eastern Islamic right before its eyes. The same goes for Norway, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France, Canada, Australia and Spain.

While academics and social elites call it “multiculturalism and diversity”, such numbers of humanity racing into first world countries—flood host countries with incompatible cultures, religions and sheer numbers.

But today, another aspect of mass migration percolates to the surface, but nobody wants to talk about it much less deal with it. Top leaders of every country avoid addressing it at all costs. Average citizens don’t know it exists much less understand its growing ramifications.

For example, Great Britain today, already crowded beyond sustainability, houses 61 million people on its tiny islands with a sum total landmass smaller than the State of Oregon. Nonetheless, they continue importing people that will add a projected 11 million additions within two decades. No one will whisper a word about it and no one knows when the additions will stop or if Britain will choose to or be able to stop them. Since the third world adds 80 million people annually, there is no end of the line for the numbers of desperate humanity.

Great Britain provides a 21st century rendition of Easter Island’s legendary population debacle back in the 1800s.

Holland provides another rendition in that it houses 18 million people in a tiny landmass about 90 miles wide by 180 miles long. They must import everything into their country in order to feed, warm, house and transport themselves. They cannot sustain 18 million people on such a tiny landmass without total dependence on the outside world.

Today, China, adding 8.1 million net gain annually, buys farmland in Africa and South America in order to feed its projected addition of 300 million by 2050—a scant 38 years.

Can America withstand the coming transformation of itself?

In the past 40 years, America endured immigration that added 100 million people by October of 2008 to the lower 48 states. This country, at present rates of mass migration, will add another 100 million people by 2035. We will add another 38 million on top of that by 2050. Total: 438 million from our current 315 million. (Sources: PEW Hispanic Center, “US Population Projections” Fogel/Martin, US Census Bureau)

On July 11, 2012, ABC’s anchor Diane Sawyer reported on New York adding two to five million more residents in the coming decades. She said that 300 square foot apartments would be the norm of the future. A 300 square foot apartment equals the size of two car parking spaces. Is this the kind of transformation we want as individuals and communities? Do we want to repeat Rome’s path? Great Britain’s? China’s? India’s? Mexico’s?

How will adding another 100 million people within 38 years help our water, energy, resources, standard of living and quality of life?

If allowed to proceed, this transformation will affect every aspect of our freedom, quality of life, environment and the planet itself. None of it positive!

The Plan to Kick Greece Out of The Eurozone

“Men and women of Greece, it is with a sense of dignity and patriotic duty, that we made the decision not to betray your hopes and aspirations…The pro-bailout parties did not simply want us to support a government that would impose more austerity, they wanted us to agree to measures that would increase poverty and desperation. We didn’t do them the favor.”

– Alexis Tsipras, Chairman of the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza)

The endgame for Greece is now in sight. Attempts to form a unity government have failed and public opposition to austerity is growing. The uncertain political situation has triggered a bank run which drained nearly $900 million in deposits from Greek banks on Monday alone. Panicky Greeks are moving their money out of the country fearing that a default will collapse the banking system or that an unexpected return to the the Drachma will slash their life savings in half. Withdrawals are pushing yields on German bund to historic lows, signalling rising anxiety. Absent the European Central Bank’s Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) program, the Greek banking system would have imploded already taking down creditors in Germany, England and France. But the ECB’s aid will not last forever nor is it unconditional. If the anti-austerity parties take power in Athens, the bailouts will stop, capital flight will accelerate, and the banking system will crash.

No one can say with certainty what the impact of a Greek default will be, but analysts estimate that the losses for financial institutions could be as high as 400 billion euros. That means the ECB may need to deploy emergency funds to backstop teetering banks that could be overwhelmed by the flood of red ink. If the central bank refuses to act as lender of last resort or to intervene with another round of bond purchases, matters will deteriorate quickly as debt-stricken countries slip deeper into crisis. What worries economists is that the Greek virus will spread to other countries that are already battered by high unemployment, negative growth, and rising yields on government debt. A default in Greece would send a message to investors that EZ policymakers are no longer committed to the euro-project. If that belief takes root, a euro-wide (capital) exodus will ensue increasing the chances of a breakup of the 17-member union. There are already signs that this process is underway as banks in both Spain and Italy have seen a steady uptick in withdrawals.

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and newly-elected French President Francois Hollande promised to “consider measures to spur economic growth in Greece” provided that Greece continue to meet the terms of its bailout agreements. While Hollande tried to strike a more sympathetic tone than Merkel, he fully-backed her hardline policies saying that the austerity measures “must to be adhered to.” Hollande did not demand that Merkel amend the policy to include a “pro growth” component as he had promised in his presidential campaign. In fact, he did not veer from Merkel’s policy recommendations at all, which suggests that the difference between the two leaders is merely stylistic. As the Financial Times pointed out in an article on Monday, Hollande is as committed to debt consolidation and balanced budgets as his German counterpart. According to Hollande’s economic advisor, Philippe Aghion, the French president is also an advocate of “supply side” economics (not “Keynesian”) as well as a strong proponent of “labor reforms”, which is code for union busting. In short, Hollande’s liberal-sounding platform seems to have been largely a fraud that was used to win the election. There will be no push for fiscal stimulus under Hollande. Greece will have to meet its deficit targets through internal devaluation, an excruciating process which has failed to end the 5-year long slump.

ECB president Mario Draghi has avoided commenting on recent political developments in Greece, but the bank’s position is clearly stated in this excerpt from a policy paper entitled “A Fiscal Compact for a Stronger Economic and Monetary Union”:

“…the SGP (Stability and Growth Pact) did not succeed in securing fiscal discipline. Good economic times before the crisis were not used to achieve sustainable budgetary positions. Revenue windfalls were spent instead of being used to foster fiscal consolidation, violations of the deficit criterion were only slowly corrected and the debt criterion was largely ignored. The most important reason was that the SGP was only implemented half-heartedly as enforcement of the fiscal rules through peer pressure was weak.

The sovereign debt crisis has demonstrated that unsustainable macroeconomic, financial and fiscal policies of any EMU member amplify each other and affect other euro area countries via negative spillover effects. This, in turn, endangers the financial stability of the euro area as a whole. As a consequence, the ECB repeatedly demanded a “quantum leap” in the EU economic governance framework to ensure the stability and smooth functioning of EMU.” (“Super SGP coming – ECB: “A stronger and stricter fiscal framework is required”, credit writedowns)

In other words, the ECB and the other members of the EZ ruling establishment are as committed to austerity as ever; the sharp downturn in economic activity and the high unemployment have taught them nothing. It’s still thin gruel and hair shirts as far as the eye can see.

On Tuesday, the ECB stopped lending to 4 Greek banks saying that it wanted to “limit its risk” and preserve “the integrity of our balance sheet.” The move came after ECB president Mario Draghi admitted for the first time that Greece could leave the monetary union. Some analysts think that Draghi is using his power to coerce the political result he wants, which is more support for austerity and bailouts. Increasing opposition to austerity in Greece, particularly the rise of the The Radical Left Coalition (Syriza), have put the policy at risk. This may be the ECB’s way of firing a shot over Syriza’s bow and reminding them of the price they will pay for their resistance.

A recently-released paper by Goldman Sachs lays out what will happen if the troika (The ECB, the European Commission and the IMF) suspends its loans to Greece and the government can no longer fund operations or pay salaries. Here’s an excerpt from the document:

“This “stop” in payments would precipitate an immediate fall in economic activity, given the need to abruptly close the primary fiscal deficit …As government arrears fail to get paid, supplies to public sector companies … and hospitals would be disrupted and their output and activities curtailed. In this context, the inflexibility of Greek wages will result in higher unemployment…Whether the banking system remains functional will largely depend on the ECB’s reaction to any troika decision to stop payments to Greece.” (zero hedge)

So, the banks will close, activity will grind to a standstill, and the country will slip further into depression. And yet, this seems to be the direction that Greece is already headed, austerity measures have only deepened the slump. According to der Speigel: “Economic output has shrunk by a fifth, unemployment is at almost 22 percent and youth unemployment is at more than 53 percent. The ranks of the unemployed grew by 95 percent between March 2008 and March 2011.” Even after Greece’s unprecedented “debt haircut” which slashed claims on Greek bonds by 75 percent, the nation’s debt is still an unsustainable 160 percent of GDP. The hopelessness of the situation has not been lost on policymakers in Frankfurt, Brussels and Berlin, all of who now appear to be preparing for a Greek exit from the eurozone.

German leaders in particular have never felt that Greece belonged in the monetary union, but recently, they have been making preparations for the worst-case scenario. Here’s an excerpt from Der Speigel which explains what’s going on behind the scenes:

“For around the last year, a “Greece Task Force” appointed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been developing a possible exit resolution. Isolated from the rest of the German Finance Ministry, the group is working out models and scenarios on the potential consequences of a withdrawal, both for the rest of the euro zone and for Greece itself.

The task force’s most important conclusion is that a large share of Greece’s debt is now held by public creditors, most notably the ECB. According to Finance Ministry officials, the Frankfurt-based monetary watchdogs hold between €30 billion and €35 billion in Greek government bonds.

These holdings become dangerous if Greece stops servicing these debts because it is no longer receiving any money from the European bailout funds. This is why crisis experts in Berlin have dreamed up a particularly cunning solution for the problem. They don’t want to completely cancel the tranches from the aid packages the Greeks are scheduled to receive. Instead, under their proposal, the country would have to do without the portion of the aid that was meant to flow into the government coffers to cover pensions, public sector wages and other expenses. But the billions that are earmarked to service the bonds held by the ECB would be paid into a special account, thereby averting problems at the central bank. In return, the ECB has already signaled its intention to resume its program to buy up the government bonds of other debt-ridden countries if they come under pressure following a Greek withdrawal from the euro.

The mechanism essentially amounts to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) paying for up to €35 billion of Greece’s sovereign debt. The last bond held by the ECB matures in 2030.” (“Time to Admit Defeat –Greece Can No Longer Delay Euro Zone Exit”, Der Speigel)

So, a plan is in place to deal with Greece’s exit from the eurozone. German policymakers have made every effort to protect themselves and to make sure that Greece does not become the next Lehman Brothers. Counterparties and bondholders have been compensated, the ECB is on “stand by” with emergency funding, and –if need be–the central bank will resume its sovereign bond purchases (QE) to keep yields within a sustainable range. There is even a plan to assist Greece in its transition back to the Drachma, although the details have not yet been released. All that’s left, is for Greece to refuse to follow through on its bailout agreements–which means a rejection of the structural adjustment program laid out in the reviled 43-page Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The troika will use that as an excuse to cancel all future loans and to kick them out of the union.

This is what’s in store for Greece, banishment; because it refused to cut payrolls and pensions deep enough, because it spent “too much” on life-saving drugs or failed to lift constraints on selling restricted baby food, or because it protected its state-owned enterprises, or didn’t dismantle social security fast enough or crush its unions with sufficient gusto or auction off its national treasures to foreign capital according to plan. Now, after two straight years of penalties, pillaging and plunder, Greece will be removed from the EZ and left to fend for itself.

Economic Alert: If You’re Not Worried Yet…You Should Be

For the past four years I have been covering the progression of the global economic crisis with an emphasis on the debilitating effects it has had on the American financial system.  Only once before have I ever issued an economic alert, and this was at the onset of the very first credit downgrade in U.S. history by S&P.  I do not take the word “alert” lightly.  Since 2008 we have seen a cycle of events that have severely weakened our country’s foundation, but each event has then been followed by a lull, sometimes 4 to 6 months at a stretch, which seems to disarm the public, drawing them back into apathy and complacency.  The calm moments before each passing storm give Americans a false sense of hope that our capsized fiscal vessel will somehow right itself if we just hold on a little longer…

I don’t have to tell most people within the Liberty Movement that this is not going to happen.  Unfortunately, there are many out there who do not share our awareness of the situation.   Debt implosions and currency devaluation NEVER simply “fade away”; they are always followed by extreme social and political strife that tends to sully the doorsteps of almost every individual and family.  The notion that we can coast through such a tempest unscathed is an insane idea, filled with a dangerous potential for sour regrets.

There are some people who also believe that the private Federal Reserve with the Treasury in tow has the ability to prolong the worst symptoms of the collapse indefinitely, or at least, until they have long since kicked the bucket and don’t have to worry about it anymore (the ‘pay-it forward to our grandkids’ crowd) .  I can say with 100% certainty that most of us will live to see the climax of the breakdown, and that this breakdown is about to enter a more precarious state before the end of this year.  You can only stretch a sun-boiled rubber band so far before it snaps completely, and America’s financial elasticity has long been melted away.

A pummeling hailstorm of news items and international developments have made the first half of 2012 almost impossible to track and analyze.  The frequency at which negative information has surfaced is almost dizzying.  However, a pattern and a recognizable motion are beginning to take shape, and, I believe, a loose timeline is beginning to form.

At the end of January, I covered the incredible nosedive of the Baltic Dry Index (a measure of global shipping rates that signals a fall in global demand) to historic lows.  I pointed out the tendency of stocks and the general economy to crash around 8 months (sometimes a little longer) after the BDI makes such a dramatic downturn.  Mainstream analysts, of course, attributed the fall to an “overproduction of ships”, which is the same exact excuse they used when the BDI collapsed back in 2008 just before the derivatives bubble burst.  It would seem that the cable TV talking heads were wrong yet again, as the international market facade quickly evaporates right in line with the BDI’s almost prophetic knack for calling an economic derailment in advance.

Here are some of the most important reasons why every American should be prepared for much harder days, especially before the end of 2012:

The European Union Is Officially Dead In The Water

Stick a fork in er’, the EU is done!  We are talking about full scale dismantlement, likely followed by a reformation of core nations and multiple collapse scenarios of peripheral countries.  The writing is all over the wall in the wake of the latest election results in Greece and France, where, as alternative researchers have been predicting for some time, the battle between the government spending crowd and proponents of austerity has reached a fever pitch.

The Greeks and the French are royally pissed over draconian cuts in public programs and the destruction of pensions which have been a mainstay of their economies for quite some time.  They are also furious over being sold off like collateral to the IMF and World Bank.  Rightly so.  Like the American taxpayer, the taxpayers of floundering EU nations are wrongly being held responsible for the financial mismanagement and fraud of their governments and global banks which have remained untouched and unpunished for their trespasses.  The problem is, the voters of both countries are signing on to the socialist/quasi-communist bandwagon in response.  In Greece, the Left Coalition Party, a splinter group of the traditional communist party, has now taken a primary position of power:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-greece-idUSBRE8440DG20120507

In France, voters have elected socialist Francois Hollande (a Bilderberg attendee), whose latest promise is to spend France into recovery through his “pro-growth agenda”:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/french-president-elect-hollande-won-t-difficult-obama-195617064.html

I have no doubt that the elections of the EU are as manipulated by elitists as they are here in the U.S., and I’m sure false paradigms abound.  Have Europeans forgotten that it was overt government spending that set them on the path to calamity in the first place?  Or, are they like Americans; just desperate for any change in the ranks of leadership?  One would think that they would take note of the problems here in our country and realize that electing a socialist to replace another socialist is no way out of economic hardship.

Former officials like Nicolas Sarkozy may have claimed to be distanced from the socialist ideal, but, as with all globalist puppets, their actions did not match their rhetoric, and they have always supported policies of centralization and big government.  The French and the Greeks have essentially replaced closet collectivists with outspoken collectivists, and will see NO relief from the crisis in the Euro-zone as a result of the political reordering.  In fact, the stage has now been set for a volatile chain of dominos.  Germany, which is the only economy left holding the EU together, has been unyielding on austerity cuts.  A conflict between France and Germany is now inevitable.  Neither will compromise their position, and I can see no other eventual result than a reexamination and perhaps abandonment of the EU charter.

How does this affect America?  Being that international banks and corporations have forced our countries into interdependency through the engineered chicanery of globalization, any collapse in Europe is going to strike hard around the world, but the worst will hit the U.S. and China.  Which is probably why China is disengaging trade away from the U.S. and the EU and focusing on other developing nations:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/08/us-china-economy-trade-idUSBRE84702N20120508

If you thought the Greek rollercoaster was a pain in the neck for investment markets, just wait until the whole of the EU is in a shambles!

Spain is next in line, with a 25% official unemployment rate and a massive black market economy forming.  As I have been saying for years now, when governments disrupt the financial survival of the people, they WILL form their own alternatives, including black markets and barter markets.  It is about survival.  The Spanish government does not care much for these alternatives, though, and has now banned cash transaction over 2500 euros in a futile attempt to squeeze taxes out of the populace through digitally tracked payment methods:

http://thedailybell.com/3814/Spain-Bans-Cash

Another major concern for Americans is the fact that Europeans are inching towards an abandonment of the dollar.  Francois Hollande has openly called for an end to the dollar’s world reserve status, and with a majority backing of the French people, he could easily make this happen, at least where France is concerned.  All it takes is for a few key countries to publically and completely drop the Greenback and the dollar’s reputation as a safe haven investment will be quashed.  This could very well happen before 2012 is over.

QE3 Is The End

Here is the bottom line; U.S. growth is a theater of shadows.  There has been no progress, no recovery, only the misrepresentation of statistics.  Millions of Americans have fallen off unemployment rolls because they have been jobless for too long, which lowers the unemployment rate, but does not change the fact that they are still without work.  Durable goods orders are dropping like an avalanche.  U.S. credit has been lowered yet again by rating agency Egan-Jones.  With China making bilateral trade deals in numerous countries on the condition that the dollar be dropped as the primary purchasing mechanism, and with the EU turning to economic mulch, the currency’s safety is nonexistent.  Traditional investors who cling to the idea that a falling Euro spells dollar strength will be sorely disappointed when the currency is suddenly being rejected in international currency markets.

The Federal Reserve has already stated that any signs of “relapse” into recession (the recession that we never left) will be met with all options on the table, including QE3:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12/us-usa-fed-idUSBRE83B1KD20120412

I believe that QE3 will probably be announced this year (due in large part to trauma from Europe), and, that this will trigger a mass movement by foreign nations to drop the dollar as the world reserve.  QE3 will be the straw that broke the camel.  How exactly this will play out socially and politically, I do not know (I could take a good guess though).  But, the technical results are predictable.  The Fed will respond to the lack of treasury purchases by ramping up fiat printing in order to cover the ever increasing costs of the government machine.  The Greenback will immediately lose a large portion of its value, at least in terms of imported goods, causing inflation in prices.  Oil and energy prices will skyrocket if OPEC follows suit (which they will, though the Saudis may still honor dollars for a time).  Doing any traditional business will become nearly impossible, and price inflation will dominate the lives and the minds of average unprepared citizens.

The amount of time that it will take for these difficulties to unfold is also not clear.  We are operating in uncharted territory, and dealing with a collapse scenario on a truly planetary scale.  My best advice is to assume that the avalanche will move fast.

While markets in our country have seen only mild disruptions so far this year, their solidity is predicated on a host of props and costume pieces, any one of which could pull the rug out from under America’s suspension of disbelief if it strays but a little from the illusion.  As long as the dollar holds, stocks can be infused with bailout juice through major banks.  So can major companies and even desperate state governments on the verge of bankruptcy.  The Dow will remain relatively friendly, and day traders and the public will remain happy.  As soon as the dollar comes into question, all bets are off…

Does This Mean Doom, Or Just Another Bad Day?

The real beginning of today’s collapse is tied to the events of 2008.  The pace of it has been deceptive, but also, in a way, it is a gift.  Over the past four years, I have personally seen the awakening of thousands of people that may have never had the chance if the system had gone into full spectrum breakdown right away.  The question now is, how much longer can the U.S. wobble along on one wheel?  In my view, and from the evidence I see in markets at the moment, not much longer.

It is hard to set aside any expectations that the next leg down will be easy to digest for the populace.  The reality of our predicament is starting to hit home.  All the tax return checks have been spent.  The credit cards have been maxed.  The new cars have been sold off and traded in for ghetto-mobiles.  The good jobs have been replaced with Taco Bell slavery.  A trip to see The Avengers is now the family vacation.  And, the distractions of reality TV just aren’t buttering our bread anymore.  It’s the little things at first that really signal the financial mood of a society, as well as reveal the more vital and looming issues just over the horizon.

All indicators suggest that this year will be unlike any other before.  In 2008, we saw the first trigger events for the collapse.  In 2008/2009, we saw the creation of the bailout culture, setting the stage for inflation and dollar disintegration.  In 2010, we saw the first bilateral trade deal cutting out the dollar between China and Russia, which is now the template for trade deals all over the globe.  In 2011, we saw the first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the crisis in the EU become epidemic.  In 2012, I see not just another difficulty to add to the mountain, but a culmination of all these detriments to produce something entirely new; a vast and subversive realignment forcing many of us to take a more aggressive stance in the fight for an economically and socially free America.

Financial disasters have always been a convenient catalyst for a host of even more frightening obstacles, including civil unrest, and blatant totalitarianism.  This is the cusp.  It is one of those moments that people of later generations read about in awe, and sometimes horror.  The “doom” is not in the event, but in the response.  What we make of the days approaching determines the darkness that they cast upon the future.  It is a test.  It is not something to be dreaded.  It is something to be seized upon, and dealt with, as great men and women before us have done.  At the very least, we know that it is coming.  That, in itself, could well seal our success…

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Sarkozy The Demagogue

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced March 30 that French police have arrested 19 persons suspected of belonging to violent Muslim networks. “These arrests are linked to the world of a certain sort of radical Islamism,” Sarkozy told Europe 1 Radio, and added that automatic weapons were found in the homes of some of those arrested in the raids in and around Paris and several other French cities.

It is striking that Sarkozy added matter-of-factly that the arrests were not related to Mohamed Merah, the Muslim terrorist killed by police last week after he murdered seven people in the Toulouse area. This raises some troubling questions.

If the arrests were not related to Merah, it stands to reason that the authorities were in possession of information warranting today’s action well in advance of his murderous spree. That the raids were not carried out earlier indicates either a culture of permissive negligence in the French security apparatus—the one that allowed Merah to operate freely, in spite of his long history of terrorist connections—or else a political ploy by Sarkozy, calculated to improve his rating in advance of a two-round presidential election scheduled for April 22 and May 6. Most likely both elements were present: the police had not considered those 19 potential jihadists worthy of a commando-style raid until prompted by the Élysée Palace to deliver a high-profile action now.

In his bid for a second five-year term, Sarkozy has been trailing his main adversary, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party, and he sees his chance for victory in attracting votes from the supporters of Marine Le Pen. Over the years, the National Front leader has rightly criticized Sarkozy for being soft on immigration, and in the aftermath of Merah’s murders she declared that the “Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated” in France, allowing political-religious groups to flourish due to the “laxism” of the authorities.

Le Pen’s recent warning that “security is a theme that has just signed up to the presidential campaign” seems to be confirmed by Sarkozy’s other gestures. After Toulouse, he declared that he would propose several new anti-terrorism laws for swift enactment, including a provision that would make visits to extremist “Islamist” Web sites a crime. Since then, however, Sarkozy’s own aides have noted that the National Assembly has adjourned for the duration of the presidential campaign, which makes it certain that the proposals will not be debated—let alone adopted—for weeks after the campaign is over.

Furthermore, as French legal experts of different political hues have pointed out, the apparent unconstitutionality of such a law makes its eventual passage unlikely. Sarkozy knew all that when he made his announcement, of course, but grabbing headline news for a day with a “tough” statement took precedence over its legal substance. Sarkozy’s agenda is also apparent in his latest claim that the Toulouse shooting was “a bit like the trauma that followed in the U.S. and New York after 9⁄11.” It was nothing of the kind, but the French head of state is not making a diagnosis—he is suggesting a narrative that would serve his political ends.

Sarkozy’s reference to “a certain form of radical Islamism” (une forme d’islamisme radical) that would no longer be tolerated in France raises further questions about his understanding of the threat. It contains indirect admission that this particular “form,” epitomized by hidden handguns and Kalashnikovs, has been effectively put up with until now—just as Miss Le Pen had warned for years.

On closer scrutiny Sarkozy appears guilty of not one or two, but three logical errors:

1. To start with, he routinely uses the term “Islamism”—a widely-spread misnomer that artificially distinguishes hard-core, relentlessly activist Islam from the purported mainstream model of the Religion-of-Peace-and-Tolerance.

2. Sarkozy’s language further suggests that there is an “Islamism” which is not “radical.” Even those who advocate the distinction between Islam and Islamism (notably Daniel Pipes) readily concede that the latter is inherently radical in its mindset, goals, and methods. Sarkozy’s use of the adjective “radical” is therefore redundant, or else it postulates the existence of non-radical Islamism, which is contradictio in adjecto.

3. The French head of state then goes a step further and suggests that, even within the nonsensically constructed realm of “radical Islamism,” there are some initiates who are no longer to be tolerated and there are others whose continued presence in France is acceptable. In other words, there are some “forms of radical Islamism” that are deemed acceptable now and would continue to be tolerated in the future.

For a former student of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) and a lawyer presumably acquainted with of the logical strictures of Descartes and the finer points of Napoleonic jurisprudence, it is indeed remarkable to display this level of intellectual and moral confusion. For his nation’s journalists, academics and public figures not to take Nicolas Sarkozy to task for these particular errors—detrimental to that nation’s very survival—is a sad testimony to France’s current condition.

Power Without Blessing

A Conversation of Tyranny…

The “Daily Bell” is a Libertarian internet site that provides news and commentary.  Anthony Wile is editor and the page has an impressive list of Libertarian advisors.  DB is a foundation that solicits donations.

Libertarian Pages like “Freedom Phoenix”, “Lou Rockwell”, “The Daily Bell” and others provide sources for monitoring the advancement of tyranny in America and throughout the world.  I am a Christian, I am not a Libertarian, but the common quest for truth often brings us together.

Some of the DB editorials are marked “Staff report” and although they speak for the site are not signed by a particular writer.  DB frequently presents their opinion on the Jewish phenomenon; one article was entitled “The Conversation of Freedom is Not Jewish”.

The writer takes issue with Henry Makow’s opinion that Libertarianism has a Jewish character.  DB gives the Philosophy an umbrella that would cover Ayn Rand at one end and Gary North at the other.  The DB model is described with a small “L”, different from the formal Libertarian Party.  To the accusation that Libertarians eschew social justice DB sites a previous article where they recommended a return to private justice where “people avenge their own via duels, feuds and the like” and “organize around various forms of private theology”.  It goes on to chide the antediluvian nature of some of the Jewish conspiracy theories.

However, DB makes a huge error at the outset by labeling Jewish conspiracy theories as “anti-Semitic”.  The a-S label squelches all attempts to bring veracity to the Jewish phenomenon allowing the truth to remain hidden.  If we allow the a-S label to censor truth we fertilize the common contemporary practice of allowing fantasy to pose as reality.  Attempts to squelch free speech by refusing to acknowledge truth creates insoluble problems by making proper understanding impossible.

That said consider this:  Jews are a very small minority in the United States.  They make up less than 3 percent of our population.  However, if I shop at Home Depot I am shopping at a Jewish owned store; if I go to Lowes it is also Jewish owned; Walgreens is Jewish owned as is CVS; every department store carries several product lines that are Jewish owned; Google was a Jewish brainchild; Facebook was developed by a Jewish Harvard student; Jewish interests control money worldwide; education, particularly higher education, has been co-opted by Jewish intellectuals; from the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present every U. S. president has been surrounded by Jewish advisors; congressmen cannot get elected without supporting Israel and Jewish interests; T. V. commentators, movie actors, producers, consultants etc. are predominately Jewish; book reviews on C-Span are mostly by Jewish authors; the book publishing industry is controlled by Jews; the media – newspapers, movies, TV, radio, and records – are under Jewish control; and, the intellectual base for classic Libertarianism is Jewish,  Rothbard, Mises, and Rand were all Jewish and Mise’s student, Hayek, had Jewish blood through the Wittgensteins. According to one source 87 percent of Jewish children attend college while the United States average is about 40 percent.  A third or more of the students at Harvard are Jewish and in my current favorite TV drama the two major characters are played by Jewish actors and all positions of power are held by Blacks or women or both.  The facts are astounding – only severe myopia could obscure them.    Read more here.

Dr. Stephen Steinlight a respected Jewish thinker has been pilloried by militant Jewish partisans for attempting to ameliorate the immigration debate.  In one of his monographs he describes his upbringing: “I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.”

Part of the problem is that many Jews among us tend to think of themselves this way: “I am not anAmerican citizen of the Jewish faith, I am a Jew. I have been an American for sixty-three sixty-fourths ofmy life, but I have been a Jew for 4000 years.”  Quote from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, speaking before a rally in New York in 1938.

In our Jewish dominated society complicity with Jewish interests is often a successful business strategy.  World Net Daily has become popular and successful supporting Zionism while truthtellers Pat Buchanan and the team of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have dropped from prominence.  The erstwhile anti-Zionist publication “Spotlight”, assiduously exposed Jewish shenanigans. It was forced into bankruptcy and silenced.  There is tremendous pressure from powerful Jewish quarters to suppress the truth.

Wealth and power are usually products of consistent work to obtain knowledge and to conduct ones affairs in an orderly and profitable manner.  Jews have worked hard to get where they are.  There is diversity in their ranks but there is also cohesion.  They have extensive control of the world’s money supply.  From outsiders they extract interest but to their fellow Jews loans are free.  Individually they are knowledgeable and interesting to know and claim as friends.  If they vested their power in the One True God and were obedience to His Commandments the world would be a far better place.  But instead there is a huge downside to their astounding racial success.

Dr. Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach, is a prolific author who has suffered some nasty episodes for carefully compiling a trilogy of books on the Jewish phenomenon.  For anyone interested in studying Jewish history his books are excellent.  The Webpage is here.  In “The Culture of Critique” MacDonald quotes Walter Kerr, “The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly.  It has been taught to, and it was ready to.  After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, and theologians.  Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders: they form ways of seeing.” MacDonald goes on to describe Jews as being ambitious, persistent, cohesive, and group oriented; he cites their “dazzling verbal skills”, their high level of energy, and their strength of conviction, claiming “these traits have been central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy throughout history”.

Henry Makow’s use of the word “Illuminate” is an apt description but is meaningless to most Americans.  Evangelical Christians imbued with the cultish Dispensational theology consider Jews to be God’s Chosen People.  With gossamer piety they proclaim the Second Coming using the man-made nation of Israel as an impetus.  With no understanding of Judaism and a tiny, often distorted, knowledge of the Bible they frantically support the theology Jesus condemned.  It is the Talmud (Satanic theology) with its hate for the Goyum, its Jewish racial superiority, its promotion of deception, and its gross immorality that guides Zionist leadership.

The impact of Jewish hegemony is not overtly evident in the everyday life of American citizens.  It is not understood that the agendas for the major segments of our society are always set by the Jewish mind. No one seems upset that we are never exposed of the genocide of neo-Israel’s Palestinian captives. We have been so thoroughly brain washed that our sympathies automatically go to the Holocaust and the suffering inflicted on Jews by the Third Reich.  While neo-Israel steals their land, imprisons them in a gulag, and kills them at will, most Americans believe it is the Palestinians that are culpable.

The brain washing has been so successful that we are not aware that more Christians than Jews were murdered during WWII.  There is no lament for the millions of Christians murdered by a mostly Jewish cadre in Russian and by Hitler’s regime in Germany.  No movies have been made about the suffering of Christians and few, if any, books have been published on this subject.  The emphasis has always been on the Jews.  Movies have been presented, a museum has been erected, and a constant bombardment of propaganda has accompanied the Holocaust while Christians and Russian Jewish involvement in their murder has been completely erased from the minds of the public and removed from current history.

Our universities have experienced a similar Jewish brain washing.  Multiculturalism, racial factions, sexual liberation, feminism, homosexuality, socialist politics, and politically correct speech have become part of University life.  Free speech and freedom of association have been curtailed disallowing the discussion of forbidden subjects.  Brain washing in colleges has resulted in a politically correct environment that distorts justice, vies with reality, and fails to provide a full orbed education. MacDonald writes that John Dewey, who was a major influence in forming the American educational system, was “promoted by Jewish intellectuals” and helped establish the New School of Social Research and the America Civil Liberties Union “both essentially Jewish organizations”.

The Christian Church has been the bulls eye of the Jewish target in America. Since the Church forsook its duty to censor the products of Hollywood motion pictures have become progressively more immoral and attacks on Christianity more frequent and severe.   Practices forbidden in the Bible are favorably depicted on movie screens; adultery, fornication, infidelity, divorce, and homosexuality are routine. Christian ministers are shown as lustful charlatans, wimps, or fools while secular characters are compassionate, long suffering, and altruistic.  The legal attack on the Church has been devastating. Christianity and all of its symbols have been banned from the public square and shoved into captivity behind church walls.  One Jewish atheist can destroy Christian traditions that have existed for centuries.

The United States is not the first nation to be overcome by Jewish power.  Before WWII Jews were a powerful faction in Germany.  Dr. MacDonald quotes I. Deak: “Jews were responsible for a great part of the German culture.  The owners of three of Germany’s greatest newspaper publishing houses; the editors of the “Vossische Zeitung” and the Berliner Tageblatt; most book publishers; the owners and editors of the Neue Rundschau and other distinguished literary magazines; the owners of Germany’s greatest art galleries were all Jews.  Jews played a major part in theater and in the film industry as producers, directors, and actors.  Many of Germany’s best composers, musicians, artists, sculptors, and architects were Jews.  Their participation in literary criticism and in literature was enormous: practically all of the great critics and many novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists of Weimar Germany were Jews.  A recent American study has shown that thirty-one of the sixty-five leading German ‘expressionists’ and “neo-objectivists’ were Jews.”

The Russian writer Igor Shafarevich writes “that Jews were critically involved in actions that destroyed traditional Russian institutions, particularly in their role of dominating the secret police and the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate).  He stresses the Jewish role in liquidating Russian nationalists and undermining Russian patriotism, murdering the Czar and his family, dispossessing the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church.”  Kevin MacDonald says of Shafarevich, “He views Jewish ‘Russophobia’ not as a unique phenomenon, but as resulting from traditional Jewish hostility towards the Gentile world considered as “tref” (unclean) and toward Gentiles themselves considered as sub-human and as worthy of destruction —.”

It is not difficult to relate the results of Jewish domination in Russia and Germany with what is happening in the United States.  The arts and the media is under complete Jewish domination and our culture is being decimated with multiculturalism and massive immigration both promoted by Jewish intellectuals and the organizations they have created.  Jews control our government and foreign policies as well as the Federal Reserve which is swimming in profits while our nation faces bankruptcy. America’s moral columns have been destroyed with the banning of social Christianity and the enforced legal status for abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage.  Jews have decimated America!

In 2002 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his last major work “Two Hundred Years Together”.   It has been translated and published in Europe but has been blocked by Jewish partisans in America. Solzhenitsyn was a hero.  He died in 2008 but during his life he was an ardent seeker and purveyor of truth.  I suspect his book would corroborate the work of Dr. MacDonald.

Americans tend to think these highly talented people are close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, The One True God, and to think of them as intrinsic in His plans for His creation.  Evangelical Christians provide Jews with substantial monetary and spiritual support.

Michael Hoffman’s book “Judaism’s Strange Gods” shatters this illusion by delving deeply into the beliefs that are promoted by the Rabbis.  It liberates “the reader from the accumulated shackles of decades of misinformation and shows that Judaism’s god is not the God of Israel, but the strange gods of Talmud and Kabbalah, and the racial self-worship they inculcate”; in the process it shatters the DB opinion that the Talmud and Kabbalah are paper tigers.

Keeping these facts under wrap and destroying honest critiques is not good for our nation nor is it good for Jews.  Vishal Mangalwadi, an East Indian Christian, has written a book entitled “Truth and Transformation”, a “Manifesto for Ailing Nations”.  His examples of the contagious nature of dishonesty and the devastating results of institutionalized theft on the prosperity of societies breaks new ground in support of God’s overarching moral code.  The moral code God gave to those who enjoyed His first love should be their gift to His creation but instead it has been forsaken and replaced with the clandestine cloak of Devilish, Talmudic lies.

Vishal Mangalwadi begins his book by relating a story about his own experience with honesty. Someone told him that a particular country was a good place to do business because its people trusted each other.  At first he did not understand why trust was important but later, in Holland, a friend took him to a dairy farm where milk was sold on the honor system with the customer trusted to put the required cost into a bowl;  there was not attendant.   Vishal said to his friend  “if you were an Indian, you would take the milk and the money”.  Later Vishal told this story at a meeting in Indonesia where and Egyptian gentleman laughed and said, “We are cleverer than Indians.  We would take the milk, the money, and the cows.”

Vishal then began to understand that if people took the milk and the money the owner would need to hire an attendant and the cost of the milk would then go up to cover the cost of the attendant.  Further, he concluded “if customers are dishonest, why should the supplier be honest?  He would add water to the milk to increase the volume.  Being an activist, I would protest that the milk was adulterated; the government must appoint milk inspectors.  But who would pay for the inspectors?  Me, the taxpayer.”

“If the consumer and the suppliers are dishonest, why would the inspectors be honest?  They would extract bribes from the suppliers.  If they didn’t get the bribes, they would use one law or another to make sure the sales is delayed enough to make the nonrefrigerated milk curdle.  Who would pay for the bribes?  Initially the supplier, but ultimately the consumer.”

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” – attributed to Abraham Lincoln, a hero for many Jews.  The historic results of Jewish illegitimate hegemony, subterfuge, manipulation, apartheid, and racial arrogance have always been disastrous.  It would be a great blessing to world Jewry as well as to Gentiles if Jewish leaders would squelch the self pity, learn humility, and begin to use their considerable talents to bring the world peace, justice, and personal freedom by obeying the Commandments of the God that created them and without Whom they would never have existed as a people. It was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that fulfilled His promise to make them a great nation and it was the same long suffering and merciful God that scattered them at the Diaspora because of their disobedience.  Obedience would bring reconciliation, the Talmud and the Kabbalah will not.

DB is right the conversation of freedom is not Jewish; however, it is often tyrannical.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”

Mayer Amschel Rothschild   Does DB understand who controls the money and the results of that control?

Changing Our Country Into Several Countries

Make no bones about it; America continues changing itself right before our eyes as we add another 125,000 third world immigrants every 30 days.  One to two million annually!  Our culture changes from its intelligent, rich and vibrant former self into a polyglot culture of illiteracy, violence to women and other aspects of “multiculturalism.”

A reader Helen related, “I live in Bridgeport, Connecticut and I feel I am in a foreign country.  I have lived here since I was 11 years old and am now 82 years old.  We have been invaded by the enemy.  This is not America anymore.  Every time I go to the market or to Burger King all the food is  foreign.  Clothes here are sexy looking and deep, stark colors for Hispanic women not tailored or feminine anymore for American women.  There are many changes here.  I notice that we also have a lot of Asian people here.  Naturally they are drawn to America because they can have more children here than the one allowed in China.  It is madness here.  White people are moving out of Bridgeport and the government that demanded that we integrate with the blacks cannot force whites to live with them because of all their violence and black culture.  Our taxes are building them new homes.  They are born here yet many cannot be understood when they speak.  Multiculturalism is a sham.”

In Detroit, Michigan, immigrant women suffer mistreatment from their husbands.  Arranged marriages grow while this new American tribe covers up honor killings as “domestic abuse” incidents.

In the latest edition of Newsweek’s My Turn (March 12, 2012), Pakistani immigrant Sabatina James said, “When I was 18, my parents threatened to kill me.  And they meant it. If they had their way, I would probably be dead today.  My parents shipped me off to Islamic school to “get educated” as my mother said. I lived in a room with 30 other girls, no chairs, not beds and no ventilation.  In that room, we did nothing all day but study the Koran, pray and listen to lectures on the prophet from a mullah, who stood behind a curtain. If a girl spoke out of turn, she would be publically caned in the courtyard.  Flies and vermin swarmed the washrooms. There were no sanitary napkins, just blood stained towels. The toilet was a hole in the ground.

“When I refused an arranged marriage, I sparked a violent war with my mother and a threat to my life.  When you’re becoming a mature woman and your mother is beating you, it’s very damaging.”

This kind of violence is happening in Germany, Uk, France, Norway, Sweden, Holland and now in the United States with recent immigrants from the Middle East.

Last week, in southern California, now known as Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson, one writer Priscilla said, “’We are creating a polyglot society where we will essentially be strangers in our own land.’  This is how I feel driving into Perris, California!  The new foreigners won’t even look me in the eye. They are probably all illegally here! Driving in our freeways and living in our cities. I am so angry! We Americans can tell who is who! Do these leaders think we are blind?”

Priscilla reported to me about a race riot at a local high school where the Mexicans and blacks pounded on each other. Over 30 cop cars arrived to quell the riot.  She said, “It at first was reported to be a racial fight and then the media changed it to a tagging fight. These are usually fights between blacks and Latinos.  For more details:

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=8572595

In his book, Suicide of a Superpower by Patrick Buchanan, he said, “America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What unites us is dissolving. And this is true of Western Civilization…. meanwhile; the state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.”

When he said, “What unites us is dissolving,”  he means that we were once “one” people with a shared and common history—meaning blacks, whites and browns. 

Today, we continue injecting endless millions from places like Somalia, China, India, Brazil, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan and hundreds of other cultures that possess nothing in common with Americans.

Buchanan said, “We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.”

If you want this deformation of our country to continue, simply do nothing. Take no action. Demand no moratorium on all immigration.  Do not stand up. Do not speak out.  Remain in your “Illusion of Permanency.”

Within the next 38 years, with an added 100 million immigrants, you will get your wish and America will no longer be America.

The Menace of Multiculturalism in America, Europe, Canada and Australia

Each week, the media reports racially motivated attacks on different races in America.  Last summer, “flash mobs” leaped into the spotlight in Wisconsin where black youths ran around beating up white people. Also in New Jersey. Mayor Nutter told the flash mobs, “Don’t embarrass your race.”  On the East Coast this week, the FBI arrested four police officers for beating up Hispanic citizens and illegal immigrants.  In Los Angeles, Mexican immigrants form gangs that specifically chase African-Americans out of their neighborhoods according to the late radio talk show host Terry Anderson.   Racial tension surfaces daily across America whether reported upon or lost in the conglomeration of news.  The FBI arrested a Denver, Colorado Muslim immigrant Jamshid Muhtorov (Uzbekistan refugee) this week for supporting the terrorist Islamic Jihad Union in the USA.

Today in America, we suffer from “honor killings”, arranged marriages, female genital mutilation and a host of ongoing rituals such as cock fighting by recent immigrants into the United States.

Nonetheless, politicians like New York Mayor Bloomberg tell us that our diversity and multiculturalism are our strengths and create a more dynamic country.  When in fact, multiculturalism is:

CREATING NATIONAL DISUNITY

The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and all of Europe suffer from the tentacles of multiculturalism.  In a recent report in Oslo, Norway, where my brother has lived for 30 years, 99 percent of the rapes of Norwegian women came at the hands of Muslim immigrants. Sweden features similar percentages.  In reality, diversity fails on every level.

While our Congress forces multiculturalism down our throats, those members live in gated communities to escape the results. They send their children to private schools.   While high powered movie stars prance and parade with celebration of multiculturalism, they return to their gated and guarded homes in Hollywood for a peaceful night’s rest away from the gunfire in the multicultural streets of Los Angeles.

Multiculturalism discounts and demeans the host country’s culture

In Boulder, Colorado, mothers, driving $40,000 SUVs sporting “Celebrate Multiculturalism” bumper stickers, drive their kids to all white schools or enroll them in private schools so their children escape the poverty, linguistic chaos and tensions in schools like Mapleton Elementary where the illegal aliens’ children dominate classrooms.

Australian writer Cameron McKenzie said, “Multiculturalism is an unsound political theory, advocated by liberals, academics, media personnel, social theorists, government officials and politicians. While it is supported by those people, it is actually opposed by the overall majority of Australians.

“It is a deliberate policy to actively maintain, support and build foreign cultures in Australia, to the direct detriment of the Australian identity, culture and way of life. Instead of allowing immigrants, and their native-born offspring to naturally assimilate into the Australian culture, governments are knowingly creating bases of foreign culture in this country. These deliberately divisive policies are carried out in two areas.”

The United Kingdom, France and Holland find themselves struggling to maintain their own language and cultures.  They’re losing.  The greater numbers of the immigrants the faster host countries lose their language, cultures and cohesiveness.

America and Canada continue on similarly self-destructive paths

First, most American businesses feature a phone recording of press “1” for Spanish and “2” for English.  In Detroit, Michigan, you may press “3” for Arabic. By losing our U.S. language, at some point, we will not maintain our identity as a single people but a polyglot of cultures and languages—all fighting among ourselves.

Secondly, continued mass immigration overwhelms America’s culture and creates “pods” of immigrant cultures that remain alien and antagonistic to America’s equal rights for women, children’s rights, religious rights and free speech.  These new enclaves can be called “mirco-nations” within our own nation.

As the immigrants remain alienated as to language and culture, they form gangs. In Denver, where I live, we house 12,000 gang members that spray paint, ransack, steal, vandalize and run drug rings.  Those ethnic gangs prey on our citizens and their own.

As Australian Professor Blainey stated: “Recent governments emphasize the merits of a multicultural society and ignore the dangers. And yet the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high. Many of our refugees actually come from multicultural societies that are faltering or in disarray.” Also, Professor Loring Danforth has admitted that, “Ironically, Australia’s own commitment to multiculturalism may also encourage immigrants to involve themselves in the national conflicts of their homelands. This policy of multiculturalism … defines people in ethnic categories and makes it possible for them to maintain their identities as Italians, Greeks, or Macedonians. Multiculturalism, with its emphasis on community languages and ethnic media, promotes the development of these ethnic identities and impedes the development of a strong Australian national identity.”

“We do not need a crystal ball to see where multiculturalism will lead us,” said McKenzie.  “The future will bring a vast amount of inter-ethnic rivalry and resultant clashes, even leading to race riots reminiscent of those clashes in the UK and USA. Australia faces the spectre of being another dis-unified “multicultural” society like Sri Lanka, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Fiji, etc.; not to mention the USA and the UK, with their continually strained communities, and occasional race riots. The prospects of such a dis-unified nation are appalling.”

What will you do fellow Americans to stop mass immigration and multiculturalism?

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