After Blacklisting Hezbollah Is The EU Experiencing ‘Buyer’s Remorse’?

Damascus — It may well have seemed like a fine idea at the European Union’s Foreign Ministers cocktail reception in Brussels, where ample alcohol freely flowed the night before last week’s vote to blacklist the “military wing” of Hezbollah.  But shortly after the vote the EU appeared to be experiencing a severe hangover as the stark reality of its impetuous decision began to soak in.

After periodical discussion of the US-Israel demand for blacklisting Hezbollah for more than a year, and adding its name to the EU list of 26 organizations and 11 individuals currently being designated as ‘terrorists’ is in becoming clearer by the day the EU actions may not have been in anyone’s interest except possibly Israel’s.

It is true there was never much enthusiasm at EU HQ for taking the blacklisting step given some fundamental uncertainties  of what it would mean in reality.  But American and British pressure, and headlines from Israel screaming:  “We told you  about rising anti-Semitism from Europe” following the EU decision to  blacklist illegal  Zionist colonies implanted on the West Bank portion of occupied Palestine, weeks earlier.   To round up EU votes, the US State Department staff designated to lobby the 28 EU foreign ministries also focused on the unproven Bulgaria bus attack, and Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria as reasons to go along with the blacklisting decision which required a unanimous vote for the 28 EU countries foreign ministers.

Minutes after the EU vote, problems began to appear and it became obvious that buying into the US-UK Hezbollah “military wing” blacklisting project was not an attractive product after all.

Some of the reportedly emphasized ‘talking points’ to the EU Foreign Ministries from Washington and London included the following:

·         The EU blacklisting Hezbollah’s military wing would “compensate” Israel, as it has been demanding, for the EU vote early this month that essentially boycotted Zionist colonial projects throughout the illegally occupied West Bank

·         The action would not affect UNIFIL or UNSCR 1701 because Hezbollah  has good relations with UNIFIL and they would likely continue to work with the 15 European countries nations making up UNIFIL including the five EU members ,France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Ireland who have troops patrolling the Lebanon-Palestine border;

·         Israel would be assuaged and can claim a victory in its war with Hezbollah;

·         The Lebanese political parties backed by certain EU member states and the Gulf Countries such as Saudi Arabia would benefit in terms of establishing a new pro-March 14^th   dominated government, significantly pressuring Hezbollah’s delegation in Parliament and  at the ballot box by the blacklisting—although it was not spelled out precisely how to would work;

·         US-led western aid to the Lebanese army would likely increase and Hezbollah’s international reputation would suffer;

·       There would be no damage to EU-Lebanese relations and any negative reactions would soon dye down.

However great all this may have sounded in some capitols before the ill-considered vote, a rude awakening began to dawn almost immediately after the votes were counted. Criticisms, complications and doubts from the EU action are continuing to be voiced and second thoughts are spreading despite efforts of the EU Ambassador to Lebanon, Ms. Angeline Eichhorst at damage control.

Even before the EU’s decision to blacklist Hezbollah’s “military wing” was publicly released, Ms. Eichhorst sought and was granted appointments with Hezbollah’s Ammar al-Musawi, Liaison for International Relations, and Minister of State Mohammad Fneish,  at which she repeatedly offered assurances that the EU vote will have zero effect on relations with the group’s “civilian wing.”  She assured the gentlemen that the EU votes do not reflect on the Lebanese government in any way, explaining that the EU “has no problem with Hezbollah participating in any future government.”

Ambassador Eichhorst declared that “this decision is a political message to Hezbollah for the attack in Burgas, Bulgaria, which is a terrorist attack on European soil.”

She added, however, that this does not reflect on the Lebanese government in any way, explaining that the EU “has no problem with Hezbollah participating in any future government.” After her meeting with Hezbollah’s minister in the current caretaker government, she stated, “Financial assistance will continue, of which Minister Fneish’s ministry gets a sizable share, and we want for this cooperation to continue.”

For his part, and ever gracious towards the EU’s well-meaning Ambassador , who appeared to understand some of the diplomatic complications the EU action unlearned, Hezbollah MP Fneish reminded the ambassador that “Israel occupied our land for many years, and we did not hear a single objection  (from the EU) “we were careful to maintain good relations with Europe, despite the terrible legacy Europe left behind among our people – from the Palestinian cause to colonialism – and despite this, you choose to remind us again of this painful history.”

Minister Fneish reiterated Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s statement that the European decision will provide Israel with political cover for any future attack on Lebanon, in which case Hezbollah would consider the EU a partner in such a crime. Eichhorst replied that the EU decision has nothing to do with Resistance to Israel or Lebanese sovereignty.”

Both Musawi and Fneish stood their ground in their discussions with EU ambassador Eichhorst, insisting that the decision was an insult to the Resistance. They dismissed the decision as politically motivated, particularly given that the outcome of the Burgas investigation is rooted in allegations and conjecture, even by the admission of the ambassador herself who conceded that there are no firm results regarding responsibility for the Burgas incident that cost innocent lives.

Ms. Eichhorst’s hosts were reportedly far too polite to ask the EU ambassador just how the EU planned to somehow go about distinguishing a “civil wing” and a “military wing”.

And they are not alone in appearing a bit puzzled. According to a lawyer at the American Society of International Law in Washington DC, the EU decision was a big mistake from an international law standpoint and could be an international lawyer’s worst nightmare or a dream come true. Which would depend if the lawyer was representing the EU in trying to unravel the civil-military conundrum or advising thousands of EU member states businesses and agencies wanting to continue any business with the Lebanese government, UNIFIL, or countless NGO’s who regularly interact with Hezbollah.

“It’s a real legal mess!” the ASIL source explained, as he described the legal confusion the EU action caused.  “The best thing for EU credibility and international relations right now on this subject would be for the EU to forget what it did and to desist from any implementation whatsoever.  And then let the designation be removed after the six months trial period as provided by EU regulations.  Otherwise, their decision will swamp courtrooms and complicate Middle East-European political and economic relations with challenges from all points on the compass with uncertain outcomes to say the least.”

It is not only Hezbollah, the leader of the National Lebanese Resistance and American international lawyers who have expressed concerns about the EU action last week.  It seems that nearly everyone else does too and this reaction is adding to the EU’s ‘morning after’ queasiness.

Many citizens of Lebanon are expressing concern that the EU brush stroke aimed at Hezbollah’s “military wing” may tar them as well due to the ‘terrorism’ label toxicity these days. A Sunni taxi driver wondered if his children could now get visas to Europe because of the ruling.  Lebanon is very sensitive to the issue of Visas as they see fellow citizens are being forced out of Gulf countries due to fabricated claims of association with Hezbollah. In these countries hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have had visas for decades. It is the uncertainly among many-understandably paranoid Lebanese living and working abroad than is causing near panic among some in Lebanon.

It’s hard to find in Lebanon, even among Hezbollah detractors, a political party that is publicly endorsing the EU decision because they basically see no advantage for Lebanon of their own tightly controlled sects, whether Christian, Muslim, or Druze.

On 7/27/13 Former premier Fouad Saniora, head of al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc, no friend of Hezbollah,   voiced “concern and regret over the reasons that led the European Union to take the decision of putting Hezbollah’s so-called military wing on its terror list.”   Saniora added in a statement released from his party’s media office:

“We had commented on this issue in the bloc’s statement and voiced our regret and also our concern over the reasons that led the EU to take such a decision, especially that we in Lebanon have ties of solid friendship with 28 European countries, and thus none of us would have liked to see this happening.”

Saniora’s friend and colleague, Phalange Party leader Amin Gemayel argued over the week-end that the European Union’s decision to blacklist Hezbollah’s military wing is “ambiguous,” pointing out that it will have a negative impact on the country. In an interview with Voice of Lebanon radio (100.5) he argued that “The decision confused the Lebanese situation and will constitute negative repercussions on all matter especially the cabinet formation process,” Gemayel said. He pointed out that the decision targets Hezbollah members who his party considered “ghosts,” saying: “The members that are responsible for Hezbollah’s military action are unknown.”

Even Israeli officials have problems with the EU’s decision. Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman and MK Avigdor Lieberman slammed the EU’s decision to put military wing of Hezbollah on terrorist list, saying that not only military wing, but the entire organization should be blacklisted. “

As usual, Lieberman found some antisemitism lurking among the Europeans, claiming that they were satisfied with going only halfway, and like the West Bank Settlements EU decision, the EU wants to punish not the terrorists but those (like-Israel!) who reject terrorism and fight it. Half a dozen other Israeli officials including the ever garrulous Shimon Peres chimed in to form a chorus condemning the EU.

Far be it for this observer to advise the European Union’s Foreign Ministry or to promote an American association’s legal analysis and advice.  However, the American Society of International Law lawyer, quoted above, makes a valid point.

The best move for the EU now, as it tries to recover from the current self-inflicted debacle is to do nothing to inflame the situation by cooking up some dubious terrorist lists.  Rather, in six months the EU should assure that this month’s blacklisting decision acquiesced in under US-Israel pressure, lapses.

Jobs Report Shows America In Decline

Headlines cheered America’s June report. Bloomberg said “US Employers Added More Workers in June Than Forecast.”

“Employment roared ahead in June.” America’s “economy is poised for faster growth as it shakes off the impact of tax increases and budget cuts.”

The Wall Street Journal headlined “Job Gains Show Staying Power,” saying:

June showed “solid promise.” Doing so suggests “the economy might be strong enough to grow with less help from the Federal Reserve.” More on that below.

Bond investors “rush(ed) to sell.” Ten-year Treasuries spiked above 2.7%. In May, yields were about 1.6%. Friday’s level was the highest since August 2011.

According to ED&F Man Capital Markets fixed income analyst Tom di Galoma:

“A huge bond bubble was created, and that will take some time to resolve itself.”

Thirty-year Treasury yields jumped from 3.45% in April to 4% in June. Junk bonds spiked from 5.79% in April to 7.72% in June.

Vanguard Group bond manager Gregory Nassour expects trouble. “The market is saying (it) think(s) tapering is going to happen much faster than anticipated and that cash flows are going to get very negative.”

Fixed income analyst Mike Larson compared what’s happening to the dot.com bust.

He calls the bond bubble bigger than late 1990s tech mania. Follow the money, he says. The more speculative investment in asset classes, the greater the risk.

Values skyrocket to irrational levels. “(W)hen everyone (piles in), you can be sure valuations will get ridiculous, and that the groundwork will be laid for a painful bust.”

From 2009 through April 2013, investors poured $1.15 trillion into bonds. Doing so excludes ETF investments. They include around another $300 billion.

Last month, another $80 billion overall was added. Bond bubble mania awaits unwinding. It’ll likely come incrementally. Expect many months south ahead. Forewarned is forearmed.

Irrational exuberance affects equity investors. Momentum profits don’t last forever. Analyst Graham Summers understands. He knows bubbles when he sees them.

He warns about ugly times ahead. He expects worse trouble than 2008. Perhaps it already began, he suggests. No one rings a bell and says so. Markets fluctuate.

Ordinary investors stick with what works. They’re mindless of huge risks. Most don’t know they’ve been had until too late. Current problems are too important to ignore.

China faces a potential liquidity crisis. It’s slowing its economy to avoid greater trouble later on. Despite unprecedented QE, Japan’s economy shows weakness.

Multiple indicators flash America’s economy heading south. Corporate profits are down. Europe’s back in crisis mode.

Disruptive protests rage in Egypt and Turkey. Others do intermittently in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere across Europe.

Washington’s war on Syria rages. It spilled cross border to Lebanon. It threatens regional stability.

QE may slow sooner than expected. Economist David Rosenberg expects it.

It’s no longer justifiable, he said. He’s not alone saying so. More on that below.

Paul Craig Roberts commented on Friday’s job report. “No Hope on The Jobs Front: Rising Unemployment in America,” he headlined.

“For the umpteenth consecutive month and year,” he said, June’s report was less than meets the eye. High-paying/good benefit jobs weren’t created. They haven’t been for years. America’s being thirdworldized.

June added 195,000 jobs. Hold the cheers. A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reportexplained, saying:

Leisure and hospitality: +75,000

Professional and business services: +37,000

Retail: +37,000

Healthcare (mostly ambulatory services): +20,000

Financial activities: +17,000

Federal government: -5,000 (down 65,000 year-over-year)

“Employment in most other major industries, including mining and

logging, construction, manufacturing, and transportation and

warehousing, showed little change in June.”

In other words, except for modest financial services gains and some highly sought skill areas, virtually zero high-quality jobs were created.

The average workweek and overtime hours were unchanged. Year-over-year hourly earnings rose 2.2%. At around 9% based on 1980s calculations, inflation is multiple times higher than official numbers.

According to economist John Williams, full-time June employment plunged by 240,000. “Economic issues accounted for 75% of” part-time jobs. “Payroll gains were warped heavily by inconsistent seasonal factors.”

Discouraged workers rose by 197,000. Involuntary part-time ones spiked by 322,000. Real unemployment’s 23.4%. The headline 7.6% figure is fake.

According to Roberts:

“This deplorable report provided the cover for the market riggers to take the stock market up and the gold market down.”

“Remember that economic theory about ‘rational markets?’ Another deception.”

For weeks, Fed officials suggested slowing QE ahead. Only its timing remains uncertain. According to Graham Summers, investors hoping for continuity “are in for a rough surprise.”

QE did wonders for equity investors. It didn’t land on Main Street. When consumers have money, they spend it. Doing so stimulates growth. Jobs are created. Maybe better ones than now.

Central banks are losing control, said Summers. Big trouble ahead looms, he suggests.

Martin Feldstein’s an establishment economist. He’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) president emeritus. On July 1, he headlined “The Fed Should Start to ‘Taper’ Now,” saying:

It shouldn’t wait. It “should emphasize that the pace of quantitative easing must adjust to the likely effectiveness of the program itself, and to the costs and risks of continuing to buy large quantities of bonds.”

“Although the economy is weak, experience shows that further bond-buying will have little effect on economic growth and employment.”

“Meanwhile, low interest rates are generating excessive risk-taking by banks and other financial investors.”

Doing so “could have serious adverse effects on bank capital and the value of pension funds.”

“In Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s terms, the efficacy of quantitative easing is low and the costs and risks are substantial.”

Where was Feldstein earlier? QE’s been ongoing since late 2008. Mortgaged-backed securities (MBS) were bought. QE continued wrongly directed. It’s done nothing for economic growth.

Bernanke suggested slowing it weeks earlier. He reiterated doing it in June. He made it conditional on labor market improvement. He said judgment depends on more than the (U-3) unemployment rate.

Year-over-year, there’s been “no increase in the ratio of employment to population, no decline in the teenage unemployment rate, and virtually no increase in the real average weekly earnings of those who are employed,” said Feldstein.

“The decline in the number of people in the labor force in the past 12 months (way) exceed(s) the decline in the number of unemployed (based on U-3 calculations).”

Real unemployment’s the highest in decades. It reflects Depression levels. It’s shows a troubled economy. It’s getting worse, not better. Half of more of US households are impoverished or bordering on it.

Social safety net protections are eroding when increasing them is vital. Force-fed austerity assures harder than ever hard times.  Growing millions are affected.

Creating money for speculation excludes it for economic growth. America’s economy is weak, not strong. Conditions are bleak. Nothing ahead looks promising.

Manufacturing is slowing. Exports are down. So is personal income. Corporate profits are declining. Aggregate demand’s weak. Rising interest rates spell trouble. Investors accepting significant risks do so at great peril.

“The danger of mispricing risk is that there is no way out without investors taking losses,” said Feldstein. “And the longer the process continues, the bigger those losses could be.”

“That’s why the Fed should start tapering this summer before financial market distortions become even more damaging.” He suggests ending it entirely by mid-2014.

Equitable QE works. Bernanke spurned it. He’s Wall Street’s man in Washington. He threw money at banks. He’s doing it now. What can’t go on forever, won’t.

Wrongheaded policy continues. It’s been that way far too long. Greenspan and Bernanke prioritized money printing/bond buying recklessness. Push eventually meets shove. A day of reckoning looms.

The longer money printing madness continues, the greater the eventual trouble. Feldstein’s partly right. Money printing madness should be slowed en route to ending it altogether. It should be done as quickly as possible.

At the same time, he omitted explaining what matters most. Money printing works when done responsibly. David Stockman was Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget Director.

In late 2010, he said:

QE “is injecting high grade monetary heroin into the financial system of the world, and one of these days it is going to kill the patient.”

In early 2009, Michael Hudson said America “reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase. We are not in a cycle but (at) the end of an era. The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored.”

Delaying the inevitable postpones a painful day of reckoning. QE helped wreck America’s economy. It didn’t have to be this way. Responsible officials would have prevented it. America’s not run that way.

Monied interests alone are served. Popular needs go begging. Safety net protections are quaint and out-of-date. Speculative gains matter most.

Money printing madness reflects one of the greatest disconnects of all time. It robs poor Peter to benefit rich Paul. It prioritizes rising markets. It’s done so at the expense of economic and human wreckage.

QE works when used constructively. Money injected responsibly into the economy creates growth. America once was sustainably prosperous. It can be again. It won’t be with rogues making policy. Feldstein didn’t explain.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

 

Giulio Andreotti: A Career

Almost two months have passed since the death of Giulio Andreotti, arguably the most powerful politician in Italy’s post-World War II history. In recent weeks I have struggled with a draft obituary of this complex man who deserves to be better known abroad, but the task proved daunting. There are too many loose ends, strange events, and unexplained mysteries in Andreotti’s long life that require detailed expert knowledge of the setting and dramatis personae, harking all the way back to the Fascist era; so I’ve asked Slobodan Janković, a research fellow at Belgrade’s Institute of International Politics and Economy, an alumnus of Rome’s La Sapienza and a leading expert on Italian politics, to help me tell the story.

That story needs to start with Italy’s current predicament. Since April 28 the country has had a new government, headed by “a new Mario Monti,” Enrico Letta (46). This man, oddly charmless for an Italian, is a fanatical Eurocrat, a participant in the deliberations of the Trilateral Commission, an associate of the Bilderberg Group, and vise-president of the Aspen Institute in Italy; in other words, a member of the globalist elite par excellence. As a prominent leader of Italy’s “center-left,” in 2006-2007 he was Secretary to the Council of Ministers in the second Prodi Cabinet. (Interestingly, he was preceded and succeeded in that post by his uncle Gianni Letta, a stalwart Berlusconi loyalist.)

Having started his political career in 1990 in the youth organization of the Italian Christian Democrats, Enrico Letta quickly rose to the presidency of the youth division of the European People’s Party (EPP), a conservative bloc in the European Parliament. By the mid-1990’s, however, he moved to the Partito Popolare Italiano, which marked his decisive turn to the left following the collapse of Christian Democracy (DC). At 31 he became the PPI’s deputy leader. Within years he joined a motley crew of ex-communists and leftists to form the Ulivo  (olive tree) party, on whose list he was elected first to the European Parliament and then to the Italian parliament, before rising to the senior government post under Prodi. In 2007, Ulivo joined the former communists to form the Democratic Party (PD). Once again, Letta was in the middle of the action, as Der Spiegel’s commentator has noted; but when he set out to become party leader, he was badly beaten: “When it came time to tally the ballots—which were filled out not only by party members but by all interested citizens—he ended up with just 11 percent, putting him in third and last place. His victorious rival Walter Veltroni received about 75 percent of the vote. By the time he was nominated … for Rome’s top political office, he had more or less put his career in party politics behind him.”

Letta’s career indicates the extent to which Italy is ruled by men who are devoid of popular support, whose sole ideology is power, and who are servile to supranational interest groups in order to enjoy the privileges that come with such servility. As Slobodan Janković says, how else can we explain the fact that Emma Bonino was first considered for the post of the President of Italy, and then on April 28 was appointed the country’s foreign minister, in spite of her crushing defeat in the general election of February 24-25, when her list received one-fifth of one percent (0.20%) of the popular vote? How can someone so odious to Italy’s voters be in the race for presidency, and then receive a key cabinet post? “Maybe for that very reason,” according to Janković. “Perhaps this was the way to give yet another European nation a slap in the face, to tell that nation that such choices are not made by her people but by someone else.” Bonino’s appointment was suggested by another protégé of the transnational elite, former prime minister Mario Monti.

This was a strange choice, coming from the man who last February headed an electoral list that included the remnant of the Christian Democratic remnant. “Bonino is a prominent hater of life,” Janković points out. “She was Italy’s leading advocate of free abortion on demand in the 1970’s, ostentatiously taking part in illegal abortions well before the procedure was made lawful in 1978, and gloating that she’d have a good laugh while throwing fetuses into trash.” Bonino was arrested once, having been caught red handed while performing ‘vacuumization’ with a bicycle pump, but was let off scot free. She went into politics instead of going to jail, making a name for herself as an advocate of “LGBT rights,” euthanasia, and legalization of hard drugs. Far from being “a radical rebel,” Bonino soon became a participant in the Bilderberg Group meetings, a friend of George Soros, and the recipient of his Open Society Foundation’s annual award for 2004. Bonino’s career is but one of countless examples of Italy’s multifaceted decline, Janković says:

“If the process of Italy’s transformation from a traditional Roman Catholic country into the current spiritually and materially devastated land is to be linked to a single name, that name is Giulio Andreotti . . . The life-long Senator died last May 6, and took many secrets to the grave. For decades he was the éminence grise of Italian politics, helping make it what it is today. On top of that, there is ample evidence that for much of his political career Andreotti was the true capo di tutti capi.“

The extent of Andreotti’s power is incomprehensible without some grasp of the remarkable influence of Freemasonry, first on the Risorgimento, and later on the political, economic and social life of modern Italy. Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy and the prophet of Risorgimento, became a mason as a student and died a 33rd degree master. An early advocate of the United States of Europe, in 1831 Mazzini joined the Carbonari, a secret society dedicated to Italy’s unification, which was strongly anti-Catholic and organized in the fashion of Masonic lodges. His vision of a future united Italy was reflected in the crude mockery of Christian rites he staged at the Vatican on Easter Sunday 1849.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the best known grand master of the Grand Orient of Italy, receiving the highest, 33rd degree of initiation in 1864. His landing in Messina, and his subsequent conquest of Sicily and the South, would not have been possible without the help of local British masons among the merchant expatriate community, and the support from The Royal Navy. The capture of Rome in 1870 was the moment of triumph of Freemasonry over the Catholic Church. The pope was confined to the walls of the Vatican, and the new Kingdom became part-Masonic El Dorado, part-Tammany Hall.

The Vatican’s reconciliation with the Italian state became possible only after 1925, when Mussolini simultaneously and successfully clamped down on rural banditry in the South and outlawed Freemasonry. The latter paved the way for the Concordat of 1929. As Janković points out, at the time of the Concordat for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire Italy had a strong central power—but Italian Freemason émigrés did not give up: “In the 1930’s they regrouped in exile. One of their leaders, Randolfo Pacciardi (a 30th degree initiate) went to Spain in 1937 to lead the Italian battalion Garibaldi, an important unit within the notorious International Brigades which fought Franco’s forces.”

After the Spanish Civil War Pacciardi repeatedly visited the United States. After 1945 he was a prominent member of four successive Italian governments, most of that time as defense minister (1948-1953). In that capacity he arranged Italy’s entry into NATO, campaigned against monarchy, and enthusiastically supported the country’s accession to the European Coal and Steel Community. In these endeavors he worked closely with two fellow Masons who spent the war years in the United States, foreign minister Carlo Sforza and Italy’s first postwar ambassador in Washington Alberto Tarchiani.

“It is widely assumed that the Allied landing in Sicily was carried out in coordination with the Mafia.” Janković says, “It defies logic that an organization thoroughly suppressed by Mussolini could play a significant role, yet it did because the Americans wanted it that way.” Had Biaggio Max Corvo had his way, Janković adds, this would not have happened. Born in Sicily but raised in the United States since the age of 8, Corvo volunteered for the U.S Army in 1941 and on his own initiative drew up plans for operations against Mussolini. His work impressed senior officers, and he was soon transferred to the Italian Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. A devout Catholic and a life-long antifascist, in addition to rejecting contacts with the Mafia, Corvo was also opposed to cooperation with the Masonic Mazziniani—the approach favored by the British—or with the Communist-dominated resistance forces. He established links with the Catholic secret group Pro Deo (founded in Portugal in 1941) instead, and maintained friendly relations with Don Luigi Sturzo, the 1919 founder of the Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano, PPI), who spent the war in exile in the U.S. Through his Vatican connections Corvo even managed to contact Japanese diplomats who had realized that their country was doomed and wanted to establish channels of communication with the U.S.; but in early 1945 Washington severed the link. According to Janković,

“Young Corvo was rewarded for his work with the papal Lateran Cross, but he had powerful enemies on both sides of the Atlantic. The British preempted his efforts to save Mussolini’s life in April 1945 and to obtain the trove of documents the fallen dictator was carrying on his person during that doomed trip north. Yes, the story of the British-American rivalry in Italy in the final days of the Second World War is yet to be told. In the United States Corvo’s enemies included Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and the Office of Naval Intelligence, which unabashedly cultivated the Mafia connection. In 1943 the ONI released 850 Mafia members imprisoned by Mussolini in Palermo, and subsequently relied on the advice of Lucky Luciano and Calogero Vizzini in political and personnel matters.”

Other trusties, who became uomini d’onore after the war, included personal translator to Col. Charles Poletti, the 46th governor of New York and the U.S. Army civil affairs officer in Italy. This was none other than “don” Vito Genovese, who had fled New York in the 1930s to escape prosecution for murder and subsequently became il capo di tuti capi. Another was Max Mugniano, who was placed in charge of all U.S. Army medical warehouses in Italy at a time when penicillin was worth many times its weight in gold (as per The Third Man), and who subsequently became Luciano’s superintendant of the narcotics trade.

The Mafia was backin action, after two lean decades under Mussolini. In Italy’s 1947 Peace Treaty with the Allies, a short but highly significant provision—Article 16—was inserted almost as an afterthought: “Italy shall not prosecute or molest Italian nationals, including members of the armed forces, solely on the ground that during the period from June 10, 1940, to the coming into force of the present Treaty, they expressed sympathy with or took action in support of the cause of the Allied and Associated Powers.” Of course “including members of the armed forces” was just a smokescreen. The real benefactors were the “sympathizers” and “activists” in the Allied cause, like Genovese, Mugniano, their 850 cohorts from the Palermo jail, and many other persons south of Naples, known and unknown. The Italian authorities were prevented from seeing, let alone vetting, the names of those “Italian nationals” protected by the Treaty.

After Mussolini’s murder, which was carried out by communists but arranged by the British, power was taken by an uneasy alliance of Christian Democrats and Freemasons—the latter group including Pacciardi, the International Brigades commander who duly became a born-again anticommunist. The party’s leader was Alcide De Gasperi, one of the founders of what is today the European Union. A veteran leader of the Popular Party after the Great War, persecuted by the fascist regime, De Gasperi recruited a student by the name of Giulio Andreotti into the ranks of the semi-clandestine Italian Catholic Federation of University Students (Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, FUCI) in 1941. According to Andreotti’s account, they met by chance in the Vatican Library, where De Gasperi worked at the time, and Andreotti was looking for some books. The Federation’s president was Aldo Moro, a young lecturer in law and devout Catholic from Apulia. When Moro was drafted into the Italian army in 1942, Cardinal Cesare Montini—who was to become pope Paul VI—supported De Gasperi’s suggestion that Andreotti be appointed to the newly vacant post.

In the turbulent months of 1945 De Gasperi appointed Andreotti to the provisional National Advisory Council, the precursor of Italy’s republican parliament. In 1947, at the age of 28, Andreotti became a junior minister in the prime minister’s office. In that position he had more real power and patronage than some cabinet members. “It caused envy in other politicians,” he later remembered, which caused them to wonder about the source of his power. Even as a young man, he struck others as cynical and devoid of passion. His un-Italian disdain of grimaces and gestures helped cultivate the image of focused power. His sardonic quips could be viciously funny, mostly at other people’s expense. Aloof and secretive, he was disliked by his peers but respected by the senior party leaders as a hard worker. He was elected to the Constitutional Assembly in 1947 and remained a member of parliament for 66 years; he died as a senator-for-life. Andreotti stayed as De Gasperi’s undersecretary in several successive governments (1947-1954), when at the age of 34 he became minister of the interior. In the ensuing decades he occupied one ministerial post or another 27 times, eight times as minister of defense. He was Italy’s prime minister an unprecedented seven times, known as divo Giulio to friends and enemies alike—not because he was touched by divine grace, but because he was inordinately powerful. As Andreotti acquired reputation for sinister dealings, his foes dubbed him Beelzebub. “Giulio is so capable in everything,” De Gasperi said in the late 1940’s, “that he could become capable of anything.” Many decades later Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that Andreotti “seemed to have a positive aversion to principle.”

Aldo Moro was a different type of person: deeply but unostentatiously pious, witty, scholarly. He survived the war and returned to politics, while initially maintaining a teaching position at the University of Bari. (Andreotti, by contrast, had no fall-back professional option: all his life he was a full-time politician.) Moro also was destined to occupy influential posts in the years to come. He, too, was a deputy of the constituent assembly and a lawmaker until his early death. He became head of the Christian Democrat parliamentary group in 1953, DC party secretary (1959-1964), and president from July 1976 until his murder in 1978. He was Italy’s prime minister five times. “The two men came to embody two faces of Italy’s Christian Democracy,” Janković says, “as well as Italy’s two divergent post-war paths”:

“Moro was a statesman and a patriot. In the 1950’s he put together a team of men focused on Italy’s development, on her industrialization and technological advance, and who were committed to enhancing her weight and reputation in international affairs. Moro was also a Catholic traditionalist—a political moderate and economic reformer, but culturally a conservative. Andreotti was opposed to Moro’s strategy of state-guided economic recovery, favoring foreign private investors instead. He was an economic ‘neoliberal’ in the 1950’s-60’s meaning of the term. He also opposed the 1962 Christian Democratic-Socialist (DC-PSI) coalition, which gave Italy over a decade of relative stability and unprecedented prosperity.”

Moro’s policy of creating large public enterprises, especially in the energy sector, was the foundation of Italy’s economic miracle. The banks were encouraged to provide easy credit to domestic investors, with the central bank (Banca d’Italia) playing an active role. Between 1951 and 1972 Italy’s average growth rate was 5.3 percent, slightly below that in Germany (5.7 percent) but well above that in Britain and the United States. The DC-PSI coalition reformed the dysfunctional taxation system, secured years of industrial peace through long-term agreements with the unions, and put Italy on the map as a global economic player.

By the early 1960’s Andreotti emerged as the informal leader of opposition to Moro’s strategy on the Christian Democratic “right.” Heavily Masonic in composition, Andreotti’s wing of the party included individuals connected with large multinational corporations, especially in the energy sector. There is strong evidence that some of these people were involved in the murder of Enrico Mattei in 1962. A Catholic resistance veteran, in 1945 Mattei was put in charge of dismantling the state petroleum company Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli), founded by the Fascist regime in 1926. He changed his mind about the project, however, when he realized that several U.S. oil companies were eagerly waiting to grab Agip’s assets for a song. Mattei reorganized the company into the National Fuel Trust (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI) instead. Under his direction ENI negotiated key oil concessions in the Middle East and a drilling agreement with the Soviet Union, all of which helped break the previous stranglehold of the “Seven Sisters” (a term he coined to refer to the dominant oil companies) on the oil industry. To the multinationals’ horror, Mattei also inaugurated the ENI rule that any country in which it operated would receive 75 percent of the profits. This secured important concessions in Iran and North Africa. By the late 1950’s ENI was competing with giants like Esso andShell. In 1960, after concluding the agreement with the Soviet Union and while negotiating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American oil monopoly was over.

On October 27, 1962 on a flight from Catania to Milan, Mattei’s executive jet crashed and all three men on board were killed: Mattei, his pilot, and an American journalist. The official inquiry—personally overseen by Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s defense minister at the time—declared it “an accident.” It is now known that crucial evidence was immediately destroyed at the crash site, and all flight instruments were dissolved in acid. In October 1995, the exhumation of Mattei’s remains resulted in the discovery of metal debris fragments—indicative of an explosion—embedded deep in his bones. In 2005 the incident was reclassified as homicide, with perpetrator(s) unknown.

(An additional mystery connected with this case remains unresolved. While working on the documentary The Mattei Affair in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked Mauro De Mauro, a prominent investigative journalist, to join the project. De Mauro soon obtained what he termed important evidence about Mattei’s final days, but disappeared eight days later without a trace. His body has never been found. Several investigators involved in the search for De Mauro were later killed, including the Carabinieri general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.)

Mattei’s murder did not interrupt Italy’s longest period of calm and prosperity in modern history. Starting in 1969, however, a wave of terrorist attacks hit the country, allegedly perpetrated by the far left or the far right. Most of them remain unresolved to this day. Two fascists were convicted in 1995 of planting a bomb at the railway station in Bologna which killed 85 people and wounded 200 others in August 1980. We still do not know who ordered the attack and with what motive in mind. We do know that the probe was side-tracked for 15 years by Andreotti’s associate Licio Gelli, who later gained notoriety as the grand master of the secretive Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge. In November 23, 1995, Italy’s Court of Cassation convicted  Gelli and three other Masons, Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte, of obstructing investigation into the Bologna Massacre. (“He was a politician highly trained and honest, ready to tackle the tasks that were entrusted to us,” Gelli (93) said upon learning of Andreotti’s death. “He knew how to keep the secrets that were entrusted to him. Andreotti did his duty, using the secrets to promote the well-being of the people. He kept the secrets, and he took them with him. What a man…”)

One of those secrets concerns Andreotti’s role in setting up and developing a clandestine NATO “stay-behind” network in Italy during the Cold War known as Operation Gladio. The role of the CIA in sponsoring Gladio and its involvement in terrorist attacks during Italy’s Years of Lead remains contentious. The origin of the operation itself is not: it was based on confidential “NATO protocols,” committing the secret services of all member states to prevent communist parties from coming to power. A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals that Gladio, “in case of a Soviet military invasion,” would organize resistance by internal subversion. More significantly, it was to play “a determining role… also in the politics of emergency.” Secret arms arsenals were set up and personnel recruited and sworn to secrecy.

Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s defense minister at the time of the 1959 memorandum, denied “unequivocally” Gladio’s existence under oath on two occasions—in 1974 and 1978—to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. On October 24, 1990, as Prime Minister, Andreotti finally acknowledged Gladio’s existence to the Chamber of Deputies; by that time it had ceased to be a secret. In his admission Andreotti described Gladio as a “structure of information, response and safeguard,” with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave the parliamentary commission in charge of investigations on bombings, a list of 622 civilians who were allegedly part of Gladio; but the list subsequently proved to be incomplete. Andreotti said that 127 arms depots had been dismantled.

Following the revelation, the P2 Lodge treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, launched a spirited defense of Gladio’s concept and importance. Later that year, a decade after the Bologna massacre, Judge Libero Mancuso—who had led the investigation and secured the initial convictions of the bombers—broke his silence to the (London) Guardian: “We [investigators] are isolated, and the objects of a campaign of aggression. This is what has happened to the commission into the P2, and to the magistrates. The personal risks to us are small in comparison to this offensive of denigration, which attempts to discredit the quest for truth. In Italy there has functioned for some years now a sort of conditioning, a control of our national sovereignty by the P2—which was literally the master of the secret services, the army and our most delicate organs of state.”

In the course of his 1990 admission, Andreotti assured the deputies that Gladio had not been involved in any of the terrorist attacks. A decade later, however, in 2000, the Italian Senate published a report which stated that “[t]hose massacres, bombs, and military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” The report claimed that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several attacks, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place.

General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, told the March 2001 Piazza Fontana bombings trial that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event and approved terrorismas a means of preventing Italy’s leftward slide. “Don’t forget that Nixon was in charge. “Maletii added, “and Nixon was a peculiar man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.” Slobodan Janković does not consider such claims too far fetched:

“The U.S. elite did not look with approval on the Italian economic model. Its financial interests were threatened outside Italy as well, especially by ENI’s expansion. The Americans tried to smear Moro by implicating him in the Lockheed bribes scandal, but he successfully defended himself in the court of law. More dangerous than public slanders were threats, especially when coming from people capable of carrying them out. According to the 1980 testimony by Moro’s widow to the parliamentary commission of investigation, during a visit to Washington in 1974 Moro was openly warned not to pursue his policy of “historic compromise” with the Left, or else he’d ‘pay a price.’ Moro paid that price on March 16, 1978, when he was kidnapped and all five of his bodyguards killed in an attack allegedly carried out by the Red Brigades. His body was found on May 9 in the trunk of a car. The kidnappers, according to the official version, saw Moro as a symbol of ‘imperialism’ who deserved punishment, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Moro was a patriot, a Catholic, a statesman and a family man. On the day of his kidnapping a new government, headed by Giulio Andreotti, was supposed to be formed. This was eventually done, but because of Moro’s kidnapping the historic compromise was abandoned.”

During his seven-week captivity, Aldo Moro wrote several letters to various political figures, including Andreotti. In October 1990, a cache of previously unknown letters was discovered in a Milan apartment which had once been used as a Red Brigade hideout. One of those letters made reference to the involvement of both NATO and the CIA in an Italian-based secret “parallel army.” That safe house had been searched at the time of Moro’s death by Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the head of counter-terrorism division who was put in charge of investigating the kidnapping. Dalla Chiesa was murdered in 1982.

Moro’s kidnapping and murder were also investigated by a government committee under the guidance of then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti. It included the heads of two security agencies (General Santovito of SISMI and General Grassini of SISDE) and the commander of the Financial Police (Guardia della Finanza), General Raffaele Giudice. All three of them were members of P2. The only service chief who was not a Mason, Prefect Gaetano Napoletano ofCESIS, was removed by Andreotti in the early stages of investigation and replaced by yet another P2 member, General Walter Pelosi. The committee proceeded to make several spectacular lapses. One of them was the fact that telephone lines suddenly went down in the area where Moro and his escort were passing—five minutes before the attack—and came back to normal half an hour later. This caused a delay in alerting the authorities to the attack. Director-General of SIP (the telephone company) was Michele Principe, yet another P2 member. The police commissar in charge of liaison with SIP was Antonio Esposito—yes, you’ve guessed it, also a P2 member. Furthermore, years later it became known that someone at the SIP switchboard prevented the monitoring of phone calls which the kidnapers were making to Moro’s family.

Immediately following Moro’s death, investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated. He drew a connection between Gladio and Moro’s death. Pecorelli, who was on Licio Gelli’s list of P2 members discovered in 1980 but had fallen out with Gelli before Moro’s death, was assassinated on March 20, 1979. It was immediately suspected that Pecorelli’s murder was related to the Prime Minister, but there was no proof. Almost two decades later, when a former Mafia member testified that Andreotti had ordered the hit, the aging senator-for-life was charged and brought to trial. In 2002 Andreotti was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in the murder. That sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals, however; he never went to jail.

Two days after Moro’s kidnapping and the formation of a new government, Licio Gelli (b. 1919) gathered in Rome the representatives of all 496 Grant Orient Loges of Italy. Gelli was confirmed as Italy’s grand master and as leader of the more secretive and influential P2. Gelli, known under the nickname Belfagor, was a fascist in his youth, a double (German-communist) agent during the war, a U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) asset after the war, and a key man in setting up Operation Gladio. In his diaries (Diari 1976-1979) Andreotti mentions meeting Gelli in the aftermath of Moro’s murder—but only to discuss Latin America! The security services appear to have had no active files on Gelli, which seems unbelievable in view of his prominence and activities. Some of his files were likely burned in 1974, when Andreotti ordered the destruction of 157,000 personal dossiers. Only the Financial Police kept three reports on active file, concerning Gelli’s illegal arms deals in the Middle East and South America and his contacts with Junio Valerio Borghese’s banned far-right group, prior to the latter’s mysterious death in Spain in 1974. Of the four investigators who composed those reports, one was murdered, one committed suicide, one went into early retirement… and one joined Gelli’s P2 Lodge.

When asked in 2009, about his links with the P2, Andreotti replied. “Ah, yes… That strange lodge—Gelli’s one.” The Guardian’s reporter was stunned: “He said it distractedly, with the air of a man recalling the bridge circle he had once heard was run by the wife of the friend of a very distant cousin. You would never have thought the revelation of the P2’s activities infused Italian politics with scandal for years—years in which Andreotti was a leading player, if not the leading player, on the political scene.” He denied being a mason, although the wife of Roberto Calvi, the banker found mysteriously hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, testified that he was. More than just a member, in fact: “he was accused of being the hidden string puller behind the lodge [P2] to which Calvi belonged.”

The most damaging, and most extensively proven accusations against Andreotti concerned his links to organized crime. An early connection concerned Salvatore “Salvo” Lima, described in the final report of the first Antimafia Commission (1963–1976) as one of the pillars of mafia power in Palermo. Developing his political career in the DC that began in the 1950s, Lima became close to Andreotti in 1964. He was often referred to as Andreotti’s “proconsul” in Sicily and once held a junior cabinet post, which resulted in the ministry’s most senior civil servant resigning in protest. In 1992 Lima was shot dead by a Mafia assassin, presumably for failing to deliver on some pledges. Years later the Guardian’s John Hooper put it to Andreotti that he must have known he was dealing indirectly with the mafia. “But Lima never spoke to me about these things” Andreotti replied. “A lot of people in Sicily have links with the mafia. That isn’t just true of the Christian Democrats, but of others.” “Lima never spoke to me about these things” did not sound like an overly spirited denial, especially for a man of Andreotti’s experience and acumen.

In the mid-1990s a string of mafia informers emerged to testify that Andreotti had been Cosa Nostra’s protector in Rome, known as “uncle Giulio.” Andreotti was charged and the judges ruled that, prior to 1980, there had been “concrete collaboration” between Andreotti and the mafia, which “induced its members to feel protected at the highest level.” He was not convicted or sentenced because his crimes were covered by a statute of limitations. “The only thing they haven’t said about me,” Andreotti quipped years later, “is that I’m a freemason.” It would be funny, but for the trail of bodies and corruption which il Divo had left in his wake.

Following the Tangentopoli scandal and the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigation, Italy’s affairs passed into the “capable” hands of Giuliano Amato—now retired on a $40,000 monthly pension—and Mario Draghi, now head of the European Central Bank. Eurofanatics and blind followers of the Washington Consensus, in the 1990’s they carried out a privatization plan as catastrophic for Italy’s economy as anything seen east of the Iron Curtain following the collapse of communism. A century and a half after Italy shook off first Austrian rule and French tutelage, it still proved vulnerable to the vincolo esterno, the external constraint—this time to the international bankers, Brussels bureaucrats, and the IMF.

Berlusconi’s three terms as prime minister did not change much. He had failed to create, enact and apply a bold vision of Italy for the 21^st century. As I wrote in 2011, his private peccadilloes and dubious business practices could have been overlooked had he not left Italy, after almost ten years in office, in no better state than he found her in 1994:

“The economy is grotesquely over-regulated, yet the old system of corrupt government contracts and phony jobs for the well-connected is alive and well. The central bureaucratic machine is as bloated and inefficient as ever. An estimated third of potential tax revenues remain uncollected. Italy is, in terms of growth, the sick man of Europe: only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in 2000-2010. The public debt, at $2.6 trillion, is 120% of GDP. A quarter of Italy’s under-30s are unemployed and another quarter is subsisting on dead-end, 1,000 euros-per-month jobs in mamma’s care, thus contributing to a demographic collapse far worse than that in Central and Northern Europe. There was no improvement in productivity under Berlusconi: Italy’s international competitiveness has actually declined over the past decade. Public spending has been outstripping growth for years; since 2009, it has accounted for more than one-half of the GDP.”

Slobodan Janković’s assessment is also grim: “Between 1945 and 1992 there were many ranking Italians of professional and personal integrity at all levels of the state and society who were prepared to risk much, even their lives, in the struggle against organized crime, secret societies, and power centers connected to foreign political and financial interests. In the present era of Monti, Letta and Bonino, however, the patriots and traditional Catholics have no power and no voice.”

Berlusconi’s seven-year prison sentence for abusing power and having sex with an underage prostitute changes nothing. He will appeal, the sentence will be overturned, and the current unnatural coalition will continue on its long road to nowhere in particular. The economy will continue to stagnate, and the process of moral and spiritual decay will continue to turn one of the most civilized countries in the world into a shadow of its former self.

Alas, poor Italy…

Vladimir Putin: Monsanto Protection Act = WAR

While I was listening to a recent interview with Graham Hancock about his new novel and his , the startling claim was made that Russian President Vladimir Putin commented that war might be a necessary result of the Monsanto Protection Act.

I was skeptical, but did a little digging around, and it turns out the story checks out…

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting last month with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.

At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.

So grave has this situation become, the MNRE reports, the full European Commission (EC) this past week instituted a two-year precautionary ban (set to begin on 1 December 2013) on these “bee killing” pesticides following the lead of Switzerland, France, Italy, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine, all of whom had previously banned these most dangerous of genetically altered organisms from being used on the continent.

Two of the most feared neonicotinoids being banned are Actara and Cruiser made by the Swiss global bio-tech seed and pesticide giant Syngenta AG which employs over 26,000 people in over 90 countries and ranks third in total global sales in the commercial agricultural seeds market.

Important to note, this report says, is that Syngenta, along with bio-tech giants Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont, now control nearly 100% of the global market for genetically modified pesticides, plants and seeds.

Also to note about Syngenta, this report continues, is that in 2012 it was criminally charged in Germany for concealing the fact that its genetically modified corn killed cattle, and settled a class-action lawsuit in the US for $105 million after it was discovered they had contaminated the drinking supply of some 52 million Americans in more than 2,000 water districts with its “gender-bending” herbicide Atrazine.

To how staggeringly frightful this situation is, the MNRE says, can be seen in the report issued this past March by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) wherein they warned our whole planet is in danger, and as we can, in part, read:

“As part of a study on impacts from the world’s most widely used class of insecticides, nicotine-like chemicals called neonicotinoids, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has called for a ban on their use as seed treatments and for the suspension of all applications pending an independent review of the products’ effects on birds, terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife.

“It is clear that these chemicals have the potential to affect entire food chains. The environmental persistence of the neonicotinoids, their propensity for runoff and for groundwater infiltration, and their cumulative and largely irreversible mode of action in invertebrates raise significant environmental concerns,” said Cynthia Palmer, co-author of the report and Pesticides Program Manager for ABC, one of the nation’s leading bird conservation organizations.

ABC commissioned world renowned environmental toxicologist Dr. Pierre Mineau to conduct the research. The 100-page report, “The Impact of the Nation’s Most Widely Used Insecticides on Birds,” reviews 200 studies on neonicotinoids including industry research obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act. The report evaluates the toxicological risk to birds and aquatic systems and includes extensive comparisons with the older pesticides that the neonicotinoids have replaced. The assessment concludes that the neonicotinoids are lethal to birds and to the aquatic systems on which they depend.

“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” Palmer said. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid — called imidacloprid — can fatally poison a bird. And as little as 1/10th of a neonicotinoid-coated corn seed per day during egg-laying season is all that is needed to affect reproduction.”

The new report concludes that neonicotinoid contamination levels in both surface- and ground water in the United States and around the world are already beyond the threshold found to kill many aquatic invertebrates.”

Quickly following this damning report, the MRNE says, a large group of group of American beekeepers and environmentalists sued the Obama regime over the continued use of these neonicotinoids stating: “We are taking the EPA to court for its failure to protect bees from pesticides. Despite our best efforts to warn the agency about the problems posed by neonicotinoids, the EPA continued to ignore the clear warning signs of an agricultural system in trouble.”

And to how bad the world’s agricultural system has really become due to these genetically modified plants, pesticides and seeds, this report continues, can be seen by the EC’s proposal this past week, following their ban on neonicotinoids, in which they plan to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with the European Union, and as we can, in part, read:

“Europe is rushing towards the good ol days circa 1939, 40… A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”

It’s called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.”

This MRNE report points out that even though this EC action may appear draconian, it is nevertheless necessary in order to purge the continent from continued contamination of these genetically bred “seed monstrosities.”

Most perplexing in all of this, the MRNE says, and which led to Putin’s anger at the US, has been the Obama regimes efforts to protect pesticide-producer profits over the catastrophic damaging being done to the environment, and as the Guardian News Service detailed in their 2 May article titled “US rejects EU claim of insecticide as prime reason for bee colony collapse” and which, in part, says:

“The European Union voted this week for a two-year ban on a class of pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, that has been associated with the bees’ collapse. The US government report, in contrast, found multiple causes for the collapse of the honeybees.”

To the “truer” reason for the Obama regimes protection of these bio-tech giants destroying our world, the MRNE says, can be viewed in the report titled “How did Barack Obama become Monsanto’s man in Washington?” and which, in part, says:

“After his victory in the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA: At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center. As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.”

Even worse, after Russia suspended the import and use of an Monsanto genetically modified corn following a study suggesting a link to breast cancer and organ damage this past September, the Russia Today News Service reported on the Obama regimes response:

“The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week – including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.

The rider, which is officially known as the Farmer Assurance Provision, has been derided by opponents of biotech lobbying as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” as it would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.

The provision, also decried as a “biotech rider,” should have gone through the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees for review. Instead, no hearings were held, and the piece was evidently unknown to most Democrats (who hold the majority in the Senate) prior to its approval as part of HR 993, the short-term funding bill that was approved to avoid a federal government shutdown.”

On 26 March, Obama quietly signed this “Monsanto Protection Act” into law thus ensuring the American people have no recourse against this bio-tech giant as they fall ill by the tens of millions, and many millions will surely end up dying in what this MRNE report calls the greatest agricultural apocalypse in human history as over 90% of feral (wild) bee population in the US has already died out, and up to 80% of domestic bees have died out too.

Source: Political Blind Spot  

Edward Snowden

In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that “several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets.”

Yes, there was a sign they missed – Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best – the most patriotic – of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1

So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists, that compel the National Security State – in pure self defense – to spy on the entire world.

Eavesdropping on the planet

The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective …

Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.

Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images … captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena … if God has a phone, it’s being monitored … maybe your dog isn’t being tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.

Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate a network of massive, highly automated interception stations, covering the globe amongst them. Any of the partners can ask any of the others to intercept its own domestic communications. It can then truthfully say it does not spy on its own citizens.

Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message – all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings – is searched for keywords, which could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON “dictionary” – “He lives in a lovely old white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes.” Within limitations, computers can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.

ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget – far from being greatly reduced – was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War was not a battle against something called “the international communist conspiracy”.

The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the continent’s affairs. The parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: “The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network [Internet] accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report denounced Britain’s role as a double-agent, spying on its own European partners.

Despite these concerns the US has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in Europe, partly because of heightened interest in commercial espionage – to uncover industrial information that would provide American corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals.

German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s research laboratory and its production unit some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention were then passed on to Kenetech.

In 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United States in 1995 over auto parts trade.

German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. “German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.

That same year, Germany demanded that the United States recall three CIA operatives for their activities in Germany involving economic espionage. The news report stated that the Germans “have long been suspicious of the eavesdropping capabilities of the enormous U.S. radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich”, which is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The Americans tell us it is used solely to monitor communications by potential enemies, but how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces of information that we think should remain completely secret?” asked a senior German official. Japanese officials most likely have been told a similar story by Washington about the more than a dozen signals intelligence bases which Japan has allowed to be located on its territory.

In their quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of the US national security establishment have been engaged for years in a campaign to require American telecommunications manufacturers and carriers to design their equipment and networks to optimize the authorities’ wiretapping ability. Some industry insiders say they believe that some US machines approved for export contain NSA “back doors” (also called “trap doors”).

The United States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it “back-door” access to encryption programs, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement agencies. However, a report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials.

For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world’s most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them – including prime US intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia – confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because of a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington, uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being sold to them, so that when they used them the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could the morning newspaper.

In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten with Crypto AG’s machines and switched to another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libya’s, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known and the scam began to unravel in earnest.

In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special “keys” into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun – Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA’s “back door” in the world’s most commonly used operating system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.” The report stated that there had been a “strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates’ development teams.” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the world.

Recent years have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States had listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.

It’s as if the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.” And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged.” 2

The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee

Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake … before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack … there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information about US foreign policy that any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.

Philip Agee spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin America. His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 – a pioneering work on the Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences – appeared in about 30 languages around the world and was a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.

Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, “our minister of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”, journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and – presto! – instant scandal.

Agee’s goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.

A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.

Wooing the working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them.

In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what theNew York Times had reported.

“As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case officer’ operates … All of it … presented with deadly accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one’s even close; due in part to his traveling to Cuba and having long-term contact with Cuban intelligence.)

In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents it released.

In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing”).

While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company – at times literally running for his life – Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually gave him asylum because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.) Agee’s account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book On the Run (1987). It’s an exciting read.

Notes

1. To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002) ↩
2. See Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above. ↩

The Illuminati Depopulation Agenda

While the global elite construct underground bunkers, eat organic and hoard seeds in Arctic vaults; the global poor are being slowly starved thanks to high commodity prices and poisoned with genetically modified (GMO) food. Austerity measures aimed largely at the poor are being imposed on all the nations of the world. Weather events grow more deadly and brushfire wars more frequent. An AK-47 can be obtained for $49 in the markets of West Africa. The depopulation campaign of the inbred Illuminatibankers is accelerating.

In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower, who later warned of a “military-industrial complex”, commissioned a panel of scientists to study the issue of overpopulation. The scientists put forth Alternatives I, II and III, advocating both the release of deadly viruses and perpetual warfare as means to decrease world population.

The first supposition dovetailed nicely with the pharmaceutical interests of the Rockefellers. According to Nexus magazine, the Rockefellers own one-half of the US pharmaceutical industry, which would reap billions developing medicines to “battle” the deadly viruses about to be released.

In 1969 the Senate Church Committee discovered that the US Defense Department (DOD) had requested a budget of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for a program to speed development of new viruses which target and destroy the human immune system. DOD officials testified before Congress that they planned to produce, “a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could be acquired… Most important is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.” House Bill 5090 authorized the funds and MK-NAOMI was carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Out of this research came the AIDS virus which was targeted at “undesirable elements” of the population. The first AIDS viruses were administered through a massive smallpox vaccine campaign in central and southern Africa by the World Health Organization in 1977. A year later ads appeared in major US newspapers soliciting “promiscuous gay male volunteers” to take part in a Hepatitis B vaccine study. [1]

The program targeted male homosexuals age 20-40 in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco. It was administered by the US Centers for Disease Control which, under its earlier incarnation as the US Public Health Department in Atlanta, oversaw the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African American males. [2]

San Francisco has been a target of numerous CIA experiments, due to its high population of left-leaning and gay citizens, which the Illuminati views as “undesirables”. According to Dr. Eva Snead, San Francisco has one of the highest cancer rates in the country. For years, malathion – first developed by the Nazis – was sprayed over the city by helicopters from the CIA’s Evergreen Air, whose Arizona base is used, according to author William Cooper, as CIA transshipment point for Columbian cocaine. The mysterious Legionnaire’s Disease occurs often in San Francisco and the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control bad acid program was based there.

The intellectual force behind the introduction of AIDS was the Bilderberger Group, which became fixated on population control after WWII. Author Cooper says the Policy Committee of the Bilderbergers gave orders to DOD to introduce the AIDS virus. The Bilderbergers are close to the Club of Rome, which was founded on a Rockefeller estate near Bellagio, Italy and is backed by the same European Black Nobility who frequent Bilderberger meetings. A 1968 study by the Club of Rome advocated lowering the birth rate and increasing the death rate. Club founder Dr. Aurelio Peccei made a top-secret recommendation to introduce a microbe that would attack the auto-immune system, then develop a vaccine as a prophylactic for the global elite. [3]

One month after the 1968 Club of Rome meeting Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The book hints at a draconian depopulation plan in the works. On page seventeen Ehrlich writes, “The problem could have been avoided by population control…so that a ‘death rate solution’ did not have to occur.” A year later MK-NAOMI was born. Peccei himself authored the Club of Rome’s much-touted Global 2000 report, which President Jimmy Carter pushed on his BCCI shakedown cruise of Africa. Peccei wrote in the report, “Man is now vested with unprecedented, tremendous responsibilities and thrown into the role of moderator of life on the planet- including his own”.

The Bilderbergers were behind the Haig-Kissinger Depopulation Policy, a driving force at the State Department and administered by the National Security Council. Pressure is applied to Third World countries to reduce their populations. Those that do not comply see their US aid withheld or are subject to Pink Plan low-intensity war that targets civilians, especially women of child-bearing age. In Africa famine and brush-fire wars are encouraged. AK-47 rifles can be bought at West African markets for under $50. The same is true in the markets of Peshawar, Pakistan. In 1975, a year after attending a Club of Rome conference on the topic, Secretary of State Kissinger founded the Office of Population Affairs (OPA).

DOD officials testified before Congress that they planned to produce, “a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could be acquired… Most important is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”

Latin American OPA case officer Thomas Ferguson spilled the beans on OPA’s agenda when he stated, “There is a single theme behind all our work; we must reduce population levels. Either they do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut…Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…The professionals aren’t interested in reducing population for humanitarian reasons…Civil wars are somewhat drawn-out ways to reduce population. The quickest way to reduce population is through famine like in Africa. We go into a country and say, here is your goddamn development plan. Throw it out the window. Start looking at your population…if you don’t …then you’ll have an El Salvador or an Iran, or worse, a Cambodia”. [4]

Ferguson said of El Salvador, “To accomplish what the State Department deems adequate population control, the civil war (run by CIA) would have to be greatly expanded. You have to pull all the males into fighting and kill significant numbers of fertile, child-bearing age females. You are killing a small number of males and not enough fertile females to do the job…If the war went on 30-40 years, you might accomplish something. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many instances of this to study”.

Report from Iron Mountain

In 1961 Kennedy Administration officials McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, all CFR and Bilderberger members, led a study group which looked into “the problem of peace”. The group met at Iron Mountain, a huge underground corporate nuclear shelter near Hudson, New York, where CFR think tank The Hudson Institute is located. The bunker contains redundant offices in case of nuclear attack for Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and JP Morgan Chase. [5] A copy of the group discussions, known as , was leaked by a participant and published in 1967 by Dial Press.

The report’s authors saw war as necessary and desirable stating “War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. (War is) the principal organizing force…the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.” The group worried that through “ambiguous leadership” the “ruling administrative class” might lose its ability to “rationalize a desired war”, leading to the “actual disestablishment of military institutions”.

The report goes on to say, “…the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until…we know exactly what we plan to put in its place…The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power…The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers. War has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary classes.”

Historian Howard Zinn described this conundrum when he wrote, “American capitalism needed international rivalry- and periodic war- to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements”.

The Iron Mountain gang was not the first to discover the virtues of war. In 1909 the trustees of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for International Peace met to discuss pre-WWI American life. Many of the participants were members of Skull & Bones. They concluded, “There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of an entire people…How do we involve the United States in a war?”

The Report from Iron Mountain goes on to propose a proper role for those of the lower classes, crediting military institutions with providing “antisocial elements with an acceptable role in the social structure.  The younger and more dangerous of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System…A possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political process, of slavery…The development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace.”

“…the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until… we know exactly what we plan to put in its place… The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power… The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers. War has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary classes.”  

The Iron Mountain goons, though thrilled by the idea of slavery, listed as other socioeconomic substitutions for war: a comprehensive social welfare program, a giant open-ended space program aimed at unreachable targets, a permanent arms inspection regime, an omnipresent global police and peacekeeping force, massive global environmental pollution which would require a large labor pool to clean up, socially-oriented blood sports and a comprehensive eugenics program. [6]

The Iraqi genocide fulfilled the dreams of the Club of Rome Zero Population Growth maniacs, while also providing a testing ground for two of the war substitutes proposed by the Iron Mountain fascists: an arms inspection regime and UN peacekeepers.  Both concepts gained traction in the international community thanks to the Gulf War.

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Let the Iraqi Genocide Begin

Estimates of Iraqi casualties during the Gulf War are sobering.  Some organizations like Greenpeace put the death toll at near one million people.  It was a war in which the media was denied access on a scale never before seen, so casualty figures vary greatly.  According to Tony Murphy, a researcher at the International War Crimes Tribunal, the US attack on Iraq killed 125,000 civilians, while destroying 676 schools, 38 hospitals, 8 major hydroelectric dams, 11 power plants, 119 power substations and half the country’s telephone lines.  The attacks occurred mostly at night when people were most vulnerable.

In the months following the war the death rate of Iraqi children under five tripled.  Thirty-eight percent of these deaths were caused by diarrhea. [7]  Victor Filatov, a Russian journalist reporting for Sovetskaya Rossiya from post-war Baghdad wrote, “What further bloodshed do these barbarians of the 20th century need?  I thought the Americans had changed since Vietnam…but no, they never change.  They remain true to themselves.”

According to former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the US was found guilty of nineteen war crimes against Iraq before the .  The US dropped 88,000 tons of bombs on Iraq during the Gulf War and has rained down countless more bombs since.  Many bombs were tipped with armor piercing depleted uranium (DU) warheads, which may account for chronic Iraqi health problems.  Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, a German physician who came to Iraq to help its people, became gravely ill when he handled just one cigar-sized fragment from a DU warhead.  Dr. Gunther measured the tiny object’s radioactivity to be 11 microSv per hour, whereas an acceptable exposure is no more than 300 microSv per year. [8]  Three hundred tons of DU ammunition was deployed during the war.

Many believe DU is responsible for Gulf War Syndrome, which has killed and permanently injured many US soldiers who fought in the Persian Gulf theater.  Since 2000, nearly 11,000 US Gulf War veterans have died from Gulf War Syndrome, while the Pentagon continues to cover up this travesty.

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Satanism & Psychotronic Warfare

The US also tested numerous top-secret high-tech weapons systems in the Gulf theatre, while utilizing some old low-frequency favorites.  When Iraqi ground forces surrendered, many of them were in a state of delirium and lethargy that could have been induced by extremely low-frequency radio waves, which the US used as a weapon as early as the Vietnam conflict.

Yale University and CIA psychiatrist Dr. Jose Delgado studied mind control for the Company during the 1950’s as part of the MK-ULTRA program.  Delgado determined, “Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact…it is even possible to create and follow intentions…By electronic stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command…by remote control.”

According to a military document written by Colonel Paul Valley and Major Michael Aquino titled From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory, the US Army used an operational weapons system “to map the minds of neutral and enemy individuals and then to change them in accordance with US national interests”.  The technique was used to secure the surrender of 29,276 armed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers in 1967 and 1968.  The US Navy was also heavily involved in “psychotronic” research. [9]  Many US soldiers who served near the DMZ that divided North and South Vietnam claimed to see UFOs on a regular basis.  The Pentagon Papers revealed that an electronic barrier was placed along the DMZ by the secretive JASON Society.

Major Michael Aquino was an Army psyops specialist in Vietnam, where his unit specialized in drug-inducement, brainwashing, virus injection, brain implants, hypnosis, and use of electromagnetic fields and extremely low-frequency radio waves.  After Vietnam, Aquino moved to San Francisco and founded the Temple of Set.  Set is the ancient Egyptian name for Lucifer.  Aquino was now a senior US Military Intelligence official. [10]  He’d been given a Top Secret security clearance on June, 9, 1981.  Less than a month later an Army intelligence memo revealed that Aquino’s Temple of Set was an off-shoot of Anton La Vey’s Church of Satan, also headquartered in San Francisco. Two other Set members were Willie Browning and Dennis Mann.  Both were Army Intelligence officers.

The Temple of Set was obsessed with military matters and political fascism.  It was especially preoccupied with the Nazi Order of the Trapezoid.  Aquino’s “official” job was history professor at Golden Gate College.  The Temple recruited the same Hells Angels who Billy Mellon Hitchcock had used to dole out his bad CIA acid.  Its members frequented prostitutes where they engaged in all manner of sadomasochistic activities. [11]  Director of Army Counter-Intelligence Donald Press revealed that Dennis Mann was assigned to the 306 PSYOPS Battalion and that Aquino was assigned to a top secret program known as Presidio.

Presidio is also the name of a spooky complex in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly frequented as the Soviet Union was falling apart.  Was Aquino part of an operation to “map the mind” of the Soviet Union’s last leader and induce him into proposing both glasnost and perestroika, the two free market policies that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s demise?  Remember the curious mark which suddenly appeared on Gorbachev’s forehead?  Was he implanted with some sort of microchip mind-control device to make him think “in accordance with US national interests”?

Such Orwellian technology is marketed on a regular basis throughout the world.  International Healthline Corporation and others sell microchip implants in the US, Russia and Europe.  The Humane Society has adopted a policy of micro-chipping all stray pets. The State of Hawaii requires that all pets be micro-chipped.  Six thousand people in Sweden have accepted a microchip in their hand, which they use for all purchases. Trials are also underway in Japan.  In July 2002, National Public Radio reported a similar trial beginning in Seattle.  Later in 2002, after a rash of suspicious abductions of young girls, BBC reported that a British company plans to implant children with microchips so that their parents can monitor their whereabouts.

Dr. Carl Sanders, a highly acclaimed electronics engineer, revealed that a microchip project he launched to help people with severed spinal cords was taken over by Bill Colby’s in a series of meetings organized by Henry Kissinger.  Sanders says the optimal spot for a microchip implant is just below the hairline on a person’s forehead, since the device can be recharged by changes in body temperatures, which are most pronounced there.  Interestingly, this is the location of the pineal gland or Third Eye.

The 1986 Emigration Control Act grants the President the power to mandate any kind of ID he deems necessary. [12]  Researchers at Southern California have developed a chip which mimics the hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with memory.  Pentagon officials are interested in using it in experiments to create a “super-soldier”. [13]  Another microchip called Brain Gate is being implanted in paralyzed people.  It allows them to control their environment by simply thinking. [14]

In Iraq, psychological warfare gave way to slow genocide.  According to UNICEF, as of late 2001, 1.5 million Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions, while one child in ten died before their first birthday.  Thalassemia, anemia and diarrhea were the biggest killers and could have been prevented were it not for a chronic shortage of blood and medicine in Iraq due to the sanctions.  UN Committee 661 served as arbiter of what constituted a “dual use” item and therefore banned for import into Iraq.  As of 2001, over 1,600 Iraqi contracts with Western companies for medical equipment had been blocked by 661. [15]

Yale University and CIA psychiatrist Dr. Jose Delgado studied mind control for the Company during the 1950’s as part of the MK-ULTRA program.  Delgado determined, “Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact…it is even possible to create and follow intentions…By electronic stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command…by remote control.”

The Gulf War decimated Iraq’s sewer and water treatment systems.  Iraqis were forced to drink polluted water, leading to numerous health problems.  Iraq was not allowed to import chlorine to clean the water since 661 deemed it a potential chemical weapon.  Electrical power was rationed in three-hour daily increments per household since the Iraqi government couldn’t get the parts it needed to fix its power plants after the US bombed its entire power grid.  With the devaluation of the Iraqi dinar and the ban on the export of 2.4 million barrels of oil per day, the average Iraqi lived on $2.50 a month- enough to buy a pair of shoes.  The only Iraqis not affected were the wealthy elite, who had long ago stashed their savings overseas in US dollars.

UNICEF estimates that 28% of Iraqi children no longer went to school.  Before the war almost all children attended.  Often families could only afford to send one child to school because of the cost of simple things like backpacks, shoes and notebooks.  Rafah Salam Aziz, Director of Mansour Children’s Hospital, said parents were often forced to make similar decisions about their children’s lives.  Aziz said, “Many times it’s easier for a family to let a baby die rather than let the whole family go hungry and get sick.”[16]

In 1996 Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry announced a new military buildup in the Persian Gulf.  Soon cruise missiles were again raining down on Baghdad.  Many nations now grew weary of both US bombing and the sanctions regime, which was brutalizing the Iraqi people while strengthening the grip of Saddam Hussein.  Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose country signed a deal with Iraq to rebuild its shattered oil sector, said he was disturbed at the use of “extreme and radical force against the Arab world”.  The Russian opposition offered a more scalding appraisal.  Alexander Lebed stating angrily, “The US is like a strong master who spits on everybody.”[17]

Turkey, Jordan and Syria all expressed unease over the new round of bombing.  Even the Saudis, where Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise and two major bombings had occurred at US bases, now refused to allow the US to use its bases to bomb Iraq.  Many countries, including France, began openly flaunting the UN embargo against Iraq in the late 1990’s.

Dennis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary of the UN who initially headed the UN Humanitarian Program to Iraq, resigned his post in protest. He said sanctions were demolishing the very class of Iraqi people who wanted to create a better government in the country.  He was scornful of the UN Oil for Food Program under which the US received 70% of Iraqi oil.  Halliday stated plainly, “We are guilty of committing genocide, through the Security Council, against Iraq.”[18]

Halliday’s 1998 successor was Hans Van Sponeck, who watched as the UN unfurled the UNSCOM arms inspection regime, paid for by Iraqi oil sales.  US inspector Scott Ritter confirmed Iraqi suspicions that UNSCOM was gathering intelligence for CIA and Mossad.  UNSCOM was just the latest CIA tool.  In 1996 the Iraqi government claimed international relief agencies, including the World Food Program, which claimed to be helping the Kurds, were actually CIA operatives attempting to destabilize the country.

In fact the CIA had spent more than $20 million in its support of the Iraqi National Congress, led by long-time CIA surrogate Jalal Talibani’s PKK Kurdish faction. [19]  In January 1997 Iraq uncovered two Mossad spy rings in one month following the attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein’s son. [20]  Hans Van Sponeck had seen enough. He too resigned in protest.

In early 1999 it was revealed that the US had used UNSCOM to plant electronic bugging devices in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.  Arms inspector Scott Ritter said the CIA was using UNSCOM to “provoke a crisis”.  In December 1998 UNSCOM, faced with the embarrassing accusations of espionage, pulled out of Iraq.  On December 15th the US launched a new round of bombing.  Ritter says intelligence gathered by UNSCOM was used for targeting. UNSCOM spokesman David Kay resurfaced in 2003 calling for a US invasion of Iraq. He now worked for SAIC, which landed numerous Pentagon contracts to rebuild Iraq.

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Dean Henderson is the author of four books: , ,  and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve.To subscribe to Dean’s weekly blog, Left Hook, go to www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

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Footnotes:

• [1] Behold a Pale Horse. William Cooper. Light Technology Press. Sedona, AZ. 1991. p.166
• [2] Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway Books. Bath, UK. 1994. p.305
• [3] Cooper. p.166
• [4] Ibid
• [5] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.114
• [6] Ibid. 116
• [7] “Child Death Rate Jumps in Iraq”. AP. Great Falls Tribune. 9-24-92. p.8
• [8] “Depleted Uranium”. Siegwart-Horst Gunther. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.2
• [9] Cooper. p.369
• [10] Icke. p.221
• [11] Cooper. p.361
• [12] Icke. p.223
• [13] Inquirer. UK. 10-25-05
• [14] PhysOrg News. 11-1-95 www.physorg.com/news7746.html
• [15] “Greetings from Missile Street”. Free Speech TV. Boulder, CO. 12-23-01
• [16] “US Economic Sanctions Taking Very Human Toll in Iraq”. Great Falls Tribune. 9-13-92.
• [17] “Slamming Saddam”. Time. 9-16-96. p.31
• [18] “The Unfinished War”. CNN. 1-6-02
• [19] Evening Edition. National Public Radio. 9-10-96
• [20] BBC World News. 1-8-97

Source: Dean Henderson | VeteransToday

Now You Can’t Drink Water

Americans take so many mood-altering and addictive pills that water supplies are being contaminated. Just ask the fish. Do the drugs in your water pose a risk to your health—and even your sobriety?

The idea that we’re being unwittingly drugged when we drink a glass of ordinary tap water smacks of dystopian science fiction or political conspiracy theory. Accusations that Communists were spiking America’s water with sedatives—under the cover of the federally instituted fluoridation program—were such a staple of Cold War–era paranoia that Stanley Kubrick satirized it in his 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. While such fear-mongering may seem quaint, what’s truly ironic is that Americans today are consuming prescription drugs—including addictive psychoactive ones—via the water supply. Who knew?

There’s a good chance that if you live in an urban area, your tap water is laced with tiny amounts of antidepressants (mostly SSRIs like Prozac and Effexor), benzodiazepines (like Klonopin, used to reduce symptoms of substance withdrawal) and anticonvulsants (like Topomax, used to treat addiction to alcohol, nicotine, food and even cocaine and crystal meth). Such are the implications of environmental studies that have been leaking out over the past decade. Whether or not this psychoactive waste has any effect on the human nervous system remains unclear, but when such pharmaceuticals are introduced into the ecosystem, the fallout for other species is demonstrable—and potentially dire.

There’s no mystery to the way prescription medications wind up in our tap water. Whether you flush a bottle of old pills down the toilet or, more likely, excrete the remains of a daily dose (an estimated 80% isn’t broken down in our bodies), active chemicals get recycled back into reservoirs because sewage treatment plants aren’t able to filter them out. “They just fly right through,” says Michael Thomas, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Idaho State University.

Although government officials and scientists are in no rush to look into this potential threat, some environmentalists are becoming worried. In a preliminary study at the University of Idaho, fathead minnows were plunked in water spiked with a combination of SSRIs and anticonvulsants—a lab version of American tap water. After swimming in the contaminated water for 18 days, the minnows exhibited 324 genetic alterations associated with human neurological disorders, including autism.

Mutated minnows admittedly do not signal a hazard of global-warming dimensions. Yet messed-up genes are what cause disease. Studies have shown that regular doses of SSRIs can sometimes damage human DNA, most notably in sperm. The minnows offer evidence that even trace amounts of SSRIs can infiltrate DNA. For now, the implications for humans of ongoing exposure can only be extrapolated from the effects on wildlife: According to a 2008 AP investigation, trace pharmaceuticals already contaminate a wide variety of species, from algae on up to mammals.

The peculiarities of sedative-fed perch were highlighted last month in a front- page article in The New York Times. The fish had been fed trace doses of oxazepam—a benzodiazepine commonly used in Europe—over a period of two months, as part of a Swedish study. The fish exposed to the anti-anxiety medication socialized less but ate more zooplankton and swam further, behaviors with potential long-term consequences for local ecosystems. This sparked fears among environmentalists that under the influence, the fish are more susceptible to predators, which could weaken the strength of the species. Not mentioned in the Times piece is the fact that SSRIs have been detected in plankton, which are a “foundation” organism in the food chain. “It’s inescapable,” Sudeep Chandra, an associate professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, told the AP. “There’s enough global information now to confirm [trace pharmaceuticals] are affecting organisms and wildlife.”

“This looks like a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public,” a British Parliament member charged.

This drugs-in-our-drinking-water issue has remained mostly below the radar of the government, researchers and the media. The AP chalked up the lack of focus on the issue partly to government agencies’ and nonprofits’ wariness about stoking public fear. “It’s a hard topic to talk about without creating fear in the general public,”said the Water Research Foundation’s Robert Renna.

While the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that other kinds of contaminants, such as pesticides and lead, be filtered out before our drinking water flows through a municipal tap, there remain no guidelines at all for pharmaceuticals, despite the fact that as far back as 2000, a US geological survey found low levels in 80% of the rivers and streams sampled. Nor is much funding available for even rudimentary studies of this potential public health problem.

The EPA does not even track the statistics collected by the few municipalities that do surveillance. In 2008, after surveying results from the municipalities that did test, the AP found over 50 pharmaceuticals that “could harm humans” in the water of 41 million Americans. Because most cities don’t test—and those that do generally refuse to release their findings, citing “security concerns” —the actual number of affected people is almost certainly much higher. “I think we have a lot of work to do,”said the EPA’s Benjamin Grumbles.

The problem is not restricted to the US. Over a hundred trace pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the globe, from Pakistan to Finland. But the highest concentrations of drug pollution by far are here at home, where nearly half the population is on at least one prescribed medication. The 10% of Americans who take antidepressants (mostly SSRIs) accounted for 255 million scripts in 2010. With all that runoff, you might think Americans would be happier—and less addiction prone—than they are.

In Britain, where psychoactive drugs are prescribed at a fraction of US levels, a 2004 Environment Agency study cited “low-level, almost continuous discharge” of Prozac through the tap water there. Parliament member Norman Baker stated ominously, “This looks like a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public.” Yet no US municipalities have done similar measurements that quantify the amount of each drug detected. It’s reasonable to assume, however, that consistent quantities of trace antidepressants flow through American taps—especially since fish collected in fresh-water bodies near several urban centers have tested positive for these contaminants.

New York City is widely believed to have the nation’s cleanest tap water, which is supplied from protected upstate reservoirs. The feds consider these reservoirs so pure that the Big Apple’s H2O is not required to be filtered. As far as is known, no official agency has tested the city’s water supply for pharmaceuticals. Yet a 2008 study by Stony Brook University found a number of sedatives and anti-depressants in upstate waterways that feed the reservoirs. A just-released study by the Citizens Campaign for the Environment found that contrary to public health guidelines, over 50% of the medical facilities in nearby Suffolk County flush their unused meds down the toilet.

Because pharmaceutical compounds make their way into the watershed itself, private wells are also affected; as for the bottled stuff, it’s no purer than most tap water because it comes from the same water sources. If prescription medications are being passed into the water supply, it follows that some illegal drugs must take the same route, although in substantially lower quantities. Sure enough, aSpanish study found cocaine in 22 of 24 random samples of that country’s tap water and an Italian study found cocaine flowing through the Po River.

The future social and ecological fallout, if any, from the drugs in our drinking water is impossible to foresee. But in the short term, within the 12-step community, the issue could have a special resonance. Many AA members believe that true sobriety requires abstinence from all mood-altering drugs, whether addictive (like benzodiazepines) or not (like antidepressants). A pamphlet issued by AA’s General Services Conference warns that it’s “generally accepted” that these meds can “threaten the maintenance of sobriety.” But given the prevalence of these substances in the water supply, it appears that you can’t even drink a glass of good, old tap water without going off the wagon. Where does that leave people who believe in a literal interpretation of the Big Book? Crossing Italy and Spain off the travel itinerary is easy enough. It may also be time, for sanity’s sake, to take another look at what “total abstinence” means.

Matt Harvey is an award-winning freelance journalist whose writing has appeared on AnimalNY.com, Black Book, the New York Post and the New York Press, among other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

Source: The Fix

The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts

Don’t be surprised when the global elite confiscate money from your bank account one day.  They are already very clearly telling you that they are going to do it.  Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is the president of the Eurogroup – an organization of eurozone finance ministers that was instrumental in putting together the Cyprus “deal” – and he has said publicly that what has just happened in Cyprus will serve as a blueprint for future bank bailouts.  What that means is that when the chips are down, they are going to come after YOUR money.  So why should anyone put a large amount of money in the bank at this point?  Perhaps you can make one or two percent on your money if you shop around for a really good deal, but there is also a chance that 40 percent (or more) of your money will be confiscated if the bank fails.  And considering the fact that there are vast numbers of banks all over the United States and Europe that are teetering on the verge of insolvency, why would anyone want to take such a risk?  What the global elite have done is that they have messed around with the fundamental trust that people have in the banking system.  In order for any financial system to work, people must have faith in the safety and security of that financial system.  People put their money in the bank because they think that it will be safe there.  If you take away that feeling of safety, you jeopardize the entire system.

So exactly how did the big banks in Cyprus get into so much trouble?  Well, they have been doing exactly what hundreds of other large banks all over the U.S. and Europe have been doing.  They have been gambling with our money.  In particular, the big banks in Cyprus made huge bets on Greek sovereign debt which ended up failing.

But what happened in Cyprus is just the tip of the iceberg.  All over the planet major financial institutions are being incredibly reckless with client money.  They are leveraged to the hilt and they have transformed the global financial system into a gigantic casino.

If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy.

If they lose on their bets, they know that the politicians won’t let the banks fail.  They know that they will get bailed out one way or another.

And who pays?

We do.

Either our tax dollars are used to fund a government-sponsored bailout, or as we have just witnessed in Cyprus, money is directly confiscated from our bank accounts.

And then the game begins again.

People need to understand that the precedent that has just been set in Cyprus is a game changer.

The next time that a major bank fails in Greece or Italy or Spain (or in the United States for that matter), the precedent that has been set in Cyprus will be looked to as a “template” for how to handle the situation.

Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem has even publicly admitted that what just happened in Cyprus will serve as a model for future bank bailouts.  Just check out what he said a few days ago…

“If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”

Dijsselbloem insists that this will cause people “to think about the risks” before they put their money somewhere…

“It will force all financial institutions, as well as investors, to think about the risks they are taking on because they will now have to realise that it may also hurt them. The risks might come towards them.”

Well, as depositors in Cyprus just found out, there is a risk that you could lose 40 percent (and that is the best case scenario) of your money if you put it in the bank.

Why would anyone want to take that risk – especially in a nation that is already experiencing very serious financial troubles such as Greece, Italy or Spain?

As if that was not enough, Dijsselbloem later went in front of the Dutch parliament and publicly defended a wealth tax like the one that was just imposed in Cyprus.

Dijsselbloem is being widely criticized, and rightfully so.  But at least he is being more honest that many other politicians.  His predecessor as the head of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, once said that “you have to lie” to the people in order to keep the financial markets calm…

Mr. Dijsselbloem’s style contrasts with that of his predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, who spoke in a low mumble at news conferences and was expert at sidestepping questions. Mr. Juncker once even advocated lying as a way to prevent financial markets from panicking—as they did Monday after Mr. Dijsselbloem’s comments.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” Mr. Juncker said in April 2011. “If you have pre-indicated possible decisions, you are feeding speculation in the financial markets.”

But Dijsselbloem is certainly not the only one among the global elite that is admitting what is coming next.  Just check out what Joerg Kraemer, the chief economist at Commerzbank, recently told Handelsblatt about what he believes should be done in Italy…

“A tax rate of 15 percent on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product”

Yikes!

And as I wrote about the other day, the Finance Minister of New Zealand is proposing that bank account holders in his nation should be required to “take a haircut” if any banks in his nation fail.

They are telling us what they plan to do.

They are telling us that they plan to raid all of our bank accounts when the global financial system fails.

And calling it a “haircut” does not change the fact of what it really is.  The truth is that when they confiscate money from our bank accounts it is outright theft.  Just check out what the Daily Mail had to say about the situation in Cyprus…

People who rob old ladies in the street, or hold up security vans, are branded as thieves. Yet when Germany presides over a heist of billions of pounds from private savers’ Cyprus bank accounts, to ‘save the euro’ for the hundredth time, this is claimed as high statesmanship.

It is nothing of the sort. The deal to secure a €10 billion German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island is one of the nastiest and most immoral political acts of modern times.

It has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens, because it establishes a dire precedent.

And when you cause paralysis in the banking system, a once thriving economy can freeze up almost overnight.  The following is an excerpt from a report from someone that is actually living over in Cyprus…

As it stands now, nowhere in Cyprus accepts credit or debit cards anymore for fear of not being paid, it is CASH ONLY. Businesses have stopped functioning because they cannot pay employees OR pay for the stock they receive because the banks are closed. If the banks remain closed, the economy will be destroyed and STOP COMPLETELY. Looting, robberies and theft are already on the rise. If the banks open now, there will be a massive run on the bank, and the banks will FAIL loosing all of its deposits, also causing an economic crash. TONIGHT there are demonstrations at most street corners and especially at the parliament building (just 2 miles from me).

Many are thinking that the ECB and EU are allowing Cyprus to fail as a test ground for new financial standards.

Just wanted all you guys to know the real story of whats going on here. Prayers are appreciated (although this is very interesting to watch) many of my local friends have lots of money in the banks.

Would similar things happen in the United States if there was a major banking crisis someday?

That is something to think about.

In any event, the problems in the rest of Europe continue to get even worse…

-The stock market in Greece is crashing.  It is down by more than 10 percent over the past two days.

-The stock markets in Italy and Spain are experiencing huge declines as well.  Banking stocks are being hit particularly hard.

-The Bank of Spain says that the Spanish economy will sink even deeper into recession this year.

-The latest numbers from the Spanish government show that Spain’s debt problem is rapidly getting worse…

“The central government’s interest bill surged 15 percent last year to 26 billion euros, while tax receipts slumped 21 percent. The cost of servicing debt represented 30 percent of the taxes collected at the end of December, up from 20 percent a year earlier.”

-The euro took  on Thursday and the euro will likely continue to decline steadily in the weeks and months to come.

For a very long time I have been warning that the next major wave of the economic collapse is going to originate in Europe.

Hopefully people are starting to see what I am talking about.

As this point, the major banks in Europe are leveraged about 26 to 1, and that is close to the kind of leverage that Lehman Brothers had when it finally collapsed.  As a whole, European banks are drowning in debt, they are taking risks that are almost incomprehensible and now faith in those banks has been greatly undermined by what has happened in Cyprus.

Anyone that cannot see a crisis coming in Europe simply does not understand the financial world.  A moment of reckoning is rapidly approaching for Europe.  The following is from a recent article by Graham Summers…

At the end of the day, the reason Europe hasn’t been fixed is because CAPITAL SIMPLY ISN’T THERE. Europe and its alleged backstops are out of money. This includes Germany, the ECB and the mega-bailout funds such as the ESM.

Germany has already committed to bailouts that equal 5% of its GDP. The single largest transfer payment ever made by one country to another was the Marshall Plan in which the US transferred an amount equal to 5% of its GDP. Germany WILL NOT exceed this. So don’t count on more money from Germany.

The ECB is chock full of garbage debts which have been pledged as collateral for loans. If anyone of significance defaults in Europe, the ECB is insolvent. Sure it can print more money, but once the BIG collateral call hits, money printing is useless because the amount of money the ECB would have to print would implode the system.

And then of course there are the mega bailout funds such as the ESM. The only problem here is that Spain and Italy make up 30% of the ESM’s supposed “funding.” That’s right, nearly one third of the mega-bailout fund’s capital will come from countries that are bankrupt themselves.

What could go wrong?

Right now, close to half of all money that is on deposit at banks in Europe is uninsured.  As people move that uninsured money out of the banks, the amount of money that will be required to “fix the banks” will go up even higher.

It would be wise to try to avoid the big banks at this point – especially those with very large exposure to derivatives.  Any financial institution that uses customer money to make reckless bets is not to be trusted.

If you can find a small local bank or credit union to do business with you will probably be better off.

And don’t think that this kind of thing can never happen in the United States.

One of the key players that was pushing the idea of a “wealth tax” in Cyprus was the IMF.  And everyone knows that the IMF is heavily dominated by the United States.  In fact, the headquarters of the IMF is located right in the heart of Washington D.C. not too far from the White House.  When I worked in D.C. I would walk by the IMF headquarters quite a bit.

So if the United States thought that confiscating money from bank accounts was a great idea in Cyprus, why wouldn’t they implement such a thing here under similar circumstances?

The global elite are telling us what they plan to do, and the game has dramatically changed.

Move your money while you still can.

Unfortunately, it is already too late for the people of Cyprus.

 

Source: The Economic Collapse

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!

Is This The Beginning Of A Horrifying Stock Market Crash In Europe?

Are we witnessing the start of a historic financial meltdown in Europe?  In recent days, two massive corruption scandals have greatly shaken confidence in European financial markets.  The first involves Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.  It is being alleged that he has been receiving illegal cash payments, and the calls for his resignation grow louder with each passing day.  The second is a derivatives scandal at the third largest bank in Italy.  Allegedly, there were some very large unreported derivatives deals that were supposed to help hide losses at the bank, but instead they actually made the losses much larger.  The investigation that is looking into this derivatives scandal is starting to spread to other banks, and nobody is quite sure how far down the rabbit hole this thing goes.  But what everyone does agree on is that this derivatives scandal has shaken up Italian politics, and the outcome of the upcoming election is now very uncertain.  Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is rapidly rising in the polls, and the European establishment is less than thrilled about that.  Meanwhile, stock indexes all over Europe fell rapidly on Monday, and even the Dow was down 129 points.  So will all this blow over in a few days, or is this the beginning of a full-blown stock market crash in Europe?

That is a very good question.  Perhaps there would not be so much concern if the overall European economy was doing well, but the truth is that the underlying economic fundamentals in Europe have continued to get even worse.  The unemployment rate in the eurozone is at an all-time high, and the unemployment rates in both Greece and Spain are now over 26 percent.  Much of southern Europe is already in the midst of a full-blown economic depression, so it really has been remarkable that the financial markets in Europe have been able to hold up as well as they have so far.

But now all of that may be changing.  Just check out what happened on Monday according to Bloomberg…

National benchmark indexes declined in all of the 18 western European markets, except Greece and Denmark. Italy’s FTSE MIB Index (FTSEMIB) sank 4.5 percent, the most in six months. Spain’s IBEX 35 slid 3.8 percent for a sixth day of declines, the longest losing streak in 10 months. France’s CAC 40 plunged 3 percent for the biggest drop since April. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 dropped 1.6 percent and Germany’s DAX lost 2.5 percent.

Unfortunately, what happened on Monday was just the continuation of a trend that started last week.  The following is from Zero Hedge…

The last four days have seen the biggest plunge in over six months with the IBEX (Spain -5.7%) and Italy’s MIB -6.7%. At the same time, Europe’s seemingly invincible OMT-promise-protected sovereign bond market has started to underwhelm. Italian bond spreads are 32bps wider and Spain 28bps wider – the biggest increase in risk in two months.

European banks have been hit particularly hard during this recent downturn.

Just check out some of the huge declines that European banking stocks experienced on Monday…

UniCredit SpA: -8.3 percent

Commerzbank AG: -5.9 percent

Santander: -5.7 percent

Intesa Sanpaolo SpA: -5.4 percent

Credit Agricole SA: -5.4 percent

Société Générale SA: -4.8 percent

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA: -4.7 percent

Those are huge moves for just a single day of trading.  If we have a couple of more days like that, everyone is going to be talking about a “stock market crash” in Europe.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that any solutions to the scandals that are shaking up southern Europe right now will be forthcoming any time soon.

In Spain, it is increasingly looking like the Prime Minister may actually have to resign.  A recent CNN article explained what the scandal is all about…

Rajoy denied on Saturday allegations that he and other leaders of his conservative People’s Party had received secret cash payments from a fund operated by the party’s former treasurer. Rajoy said he would publish details of his personal wealth and income tax states on the prime minister’s website.

Of course politicians all over the world are accused of doing evil things all the time, but in this instance it appears that there may be some solid evidence that Rajoy may not be able to deny.  The following comes from a Bloomberg report…

Newspaper El Pais last week published allegations of illegal cash payments, featuring extracts from handwritten ledgers by the former People’s Party Treasurer Luis Barcenas showing payments to officials including Rajoy.

At this point, opinion polls are showing that even most of his own supporters do not believe him…

Polls show that 60pc of his own supporters do not believe the official explanation. A national petition drive calling for his resignation has already collected almost 800,000 signatures. Socialist oppo­sition leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba yesterday joined the chorus calling for Mr Rajoy’s head, saying the country had ­become “ungovernable”.

So definitely expect things in Spain to get worse before they get better.

Meanwhile, the derivatives scandal in Italy continues to get more “interesting”.  Italy’s third largest bank is on the brink of collapse due to huge problems with derivatives contracts, and that bank just happens to be closely linked with the Italian politician that is currently leading in the polls…

The Italian scandal is related to Italy’s third-biggest bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which has received two government bailouts and may yet have to be nationalized as its losses mount.

The bank is closely associated to Italy’s Democratic Party, whose leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, is leading in the polls, though slipping from his highs as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi makes a late surge before the Feb. 25th general election. “The Monte [banking] scandals now look like overwhelming the Italian election campaign and put [Mr.] Bersani and the Democratic Party’s victory at risk,” James Walston, political commentator at the American University of Rome,  said in his Monday blog.

The Monte scandal centres on allegedly unreported derivatives deals that were apparently designed to hide losses and instead made the losses deeper. The bank, now under new management, has admitted that the derivatives losses might total more than €700-million.

So who benefits from all of this?  Well, it turns out that as a result of this scandal former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is rapidly gaining more support.  The following is from a recent Telegraph article…

But even if none of these scandals had happened, it was inevitable that the gigantic debt bubble in Europe would end up bursting at some point.

In fact, the entire globe is on the verge of a debt implosion.  This was something that Bill Gross of Pimco discussed in his February newsletter…

“So our credit-based financial markets and the economy it supports are levered, fragile and increasingly entropic – it is running out of energy and time. When does money run out of time? The countdown begins when investable assets pose too much risk for too little return; when lenders desert credit markets for other alternatives such as cash or real assets.”

No debt bubble can expand indefinitely.  At some point it can no longer hold itself together.

Europe is rapidly approaching that point, and so is the United States.

So how much time do we have left?

Source: The American Dream

All That Pivots Is Gold

To quote the immortal line in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, as filmed by John Huston, “Let’s talk about the black bird” – let’s talk about a mysterious bird made out of gold. Oh yes, because this is a film noir worthy of Dashiell Hammett – involving the Pentagon, Beijing, shadow wars, pivoting and a lot of gold.

Let’s start with Beijing’s official position; “We don’t have enough gold”. That leads to China’s current, frenetic buying spree – which particularly in Hong Kong anyone can follow live, in real time. China is already the top gold producing and the top gold importing nation in the world.

Gold accounts for roughly 70% of reserves held by the US and Germany – and more or less the same for France and Italy. Russia – also on a buying spree – is slightly over 10%. But China’s percentage of gold among its whopping US$3.2 trillion reserves is only 2%.

Beijing is carefully following the current shenanigans of the New York Federal Reserve, which, asked by the German Bundesbank to return the German gold it is holding, replied it would take at least seven years.

German financial journalist Lars Schall has been following the story since the beginning, and virtually alone has made the crucial connection between gold, paper money, energy resources and the abyss facing the petrodollar.

Whenever Beijing says it needs more gold, this is justified as a hedge “against risks in foreign reserves” – aka US dollar fluctuation – but especially to “promote yuan globalization”. As in, suavely, having the yuan compete with the US dollar and the euro “fairly” in the “international market”.

And here’s the (elusive) heart of the matter. What Beijing actually wants is to get rid of the US dollar peg. For that to happen, it needs vast gold reserves. So here’s Beijing pivoting from the US dollar to the yuan – and trying to sway vast swathes of the global economy to follow the path. This golden rule is Beijing’s Maltese Falcon: “The stuff dreams are made of”.

Have drone, will travel

Qatar also does pivoting – but of the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) kind. Doha has been financing Wahhabis and Salafis – and even Salafi-jihadis – as in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rebels in Libya, Free Syrian Army gangs in Syria, and the pan-Islamic gang that took over northern Mali.

The State Department – and later the Pentagon – may have woken up to it, as in the arrangement brokered by Doha and Washington together to spawn a new, more palatable Syria “coalition”. But still very potent are those dangerous liaisons between the francophile Emir of Qatar and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris – which gathered plenty of steam already during the reign of King Sarko, aka former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Every informed geopolitical observer has tracked leak after leak by former French intelligence operatives to the deliciously wicked satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, detailing Qatar’s modus operandi. It’s a no-brainer. Qatar’s foreign policy reads as Muslim Brotherhood Here, There and Everywhere (but not inside the neo-feudal emirate); this is Qatar’s Maltese Falcon. At the same time Doha – to the delight of French elites – is an avid practitioner of hardcore neoliberalism, and a top investor in France’s economy.

So their interests may coalesce in promoting disaster capitalism – successfully – in Libya and then – still unsuccessfully – in Syria. Yet Mali is something else; classic blowback – and that’s where the interests of Doha and Paris diverge (not to mention Doha and Washington; at least if one does not assume that Mali has been the perfect pretext for a renewed AFRICOM drive.)

Algerian media is awash in outrage, questioning Qatar’s agenda (in French). Yet the pretext – as predicted – worked perfectly.

AFRICOM – surprise! – is on a roll, as the Pentagon gets ready to set up a drone base in Niger. That’s the practical result of a visit by AFRICOM’s commander, General Carter Ham, to Niger’s capital Niamey only a few days ago.

Forget about those outdated PC-12 turbo props that have been spying on Mali and Western Africa for years. Now it’s Predator time. Translation: chief-in-waiting John Brennan plans a Central Intelligence Agency shadow war all across the Sahara-Sahel. With permission from Mick Jagger/Keith Richards, it’s time to start humming a remixed hit: “I see a grey drone/ and I want it painted black”.

AFRICOM does Niger is indeed sweeter than cherry pie. Northwest Niger is the site of all those uranium mines supplying the French nuclear industry. And it’s very close to Mali’s gold reserves. Imagine all that gold in an “unstable” area falling into the hands of … Chinese companies. Beijing’s Maltese Falcon moment of finally having enough gold to dump the US dollar peg would be at hand.

The Pentagon even got permission for all its surveillance gear to refuel in – of all places – crucial Agadez. The French legion may have been doing the hard work on the ground in Mali, but it’s AFRICOM which will ultimately reap the profits all across the Sahara-Sahel.

Don’t you know about the (Asian) bird?

And that brings us to that famous pivoting to Asia – which was supposed to be the number one geopolitical theme of the Obama 2.0 administration. It may well be. But certainly alongside AFRICOM pivoting all over the Sahara/Sahel in drone mode, to Beijing’s growing irritation; and Doha-Washington pivoting in their support of the former “terrorist” turned “freedom fighter”, and vice-versa.

And we did not even mention the non-pivoting involved in this noir plot; the Obama 2.0 administration keeping its appalling embrace of the medieval House of Saud and “stability in the Arabian peninsula”, as recommended by an usual suspect, a mediocre – yet influential – “veteran intelligence official“.

Play it again, Sam. In that outstanding Maltese Falcon scene at the start of our plot between Humphrey Bogart (let’s say he plays the Pentagon) and Sydney Greenstreet (let’s say he plays Beijing), the official is the goon, the third guy in the picture. The pivoting to Asia is essentially a product of Andrew Marshall, an allegedly Yoda-like totem of US national security.

Marshall has been behind the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – all of you Donald Rumsfeld freaks know about it – failed Shock and Awe (which only served to destroy Iraq almost beyond repair, even with disaster capitalism involved); and now the concept calledAir Sea Battle.

Air Sea Battle’s premise is that Beijing will attack US forces in the Pacific, which is, frankly, ridiculous (even with help from a monster false-flag operation). The US would then retaliate via a “blinding campaign” – the naval equivalent of Shock and Awe. Both the US Air Force and the US Navy loved the concept because it implies a lot of hardware spending to be stationed in plenty of sophisticated Pacific bases, and in the high seas.

So even as David Petraeus-style counterinsurgency has pivoted to John Brennan’s CIA shadow wars, the real deal is the pivoting to Asia; a pseudo-strategy, concocted to keep the Pentagon budget at exorbitant levels, promoting a new cold war with China. “They will never amass enough gold to impose their evil plans”, one could hear Marshall say about China (without Bogart or Greenstreet’s aplomb, of course). Hammett would be appalled; Marshall’s Maltese Falcon is the stuff (war) dreams are made of.

Pepe Escobar is the author of  (Nimble Books, 2008). He may be reached at .

Source:  Asia Times

A $14 Trillion Extortion For A Global Warming Scam

The latest megalomaniacal threat from the financial globalists wants to saddle the world economy with a cost of trillions of dollars that benefits favorite corporatists. The phony global warming cult has a core purpose. Their objective is to drive down the standard of living for non-elites and prevent the use of fossil fuel energy. The fallacious science used to create a disinformation scare for politically unsophisticated “True Believers” is a direct result of transnational money manipulators. The Davos crowd sponsors the educational and media institutions that trump up junk research and manufacture idealistic solutions.

Make no mistake about it, the Davos Elites Enjoys the Global Depression, and love corporate welfare. They greatly profit from government subsidized “Green” ventures, which drive up energy costs and line the pockets of compadre companies, under the control of the financial barons. As the rest of us struggle to survive, pronouncements declare an every greater burden to bear. Note the ominous future in Davos Report Calls For Additional $14 Trillion To Restrain Global Warming.

“The world must spend an additional $14 trillion on clean energy infrastructure, low-carbon transport and energy efficiency to meet the United Nations’ goal for capping the rise in average global temperatures, according to a World Economic Forum report released on Monday.”

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon states the globalist viewpoint.

“Economic growth and sustainability are inter-dependent, you cannot have one without the other, and greening investment is the pre-requisite to realizing both goals.”

What can be expected from these “greening investment” projects? In order to anticipate future plans, a comprehensive understanding of the past and present shady business practices is crucial.

Examine the industrial wind and solar model in detail. The Washington Post reports in, Sting operations reveal Mafia involvement in renewable energy, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“The still-emerging links of the mafia to the once-booming wind and solar sector here are raising fresh questions about the use of government subsidies to fuel a shift toward cleaner energies, with critics claiming that huge state incentives created excessive profits for companies and a market bubble ripe for fraud. China-based Suntech, the world’s largest solar panel maker, last month said it would need to restate more than two years of financial results because of allegedly fake capital put up to finance new plants in Italy. The discoveries here also follow “eco-corruption” cases in Spain, where a number of companies stand accused of illegally tapping state aid.

Because it receives more sun and wind than any other part of Italy, Sicily became one of Europe’s most obvious hotbeds for renewable energies over the past decade. As the Italian government began offering billions of euros annually in subsidies for wind and solar development, the potential profitability of such projects also soared — a fact that did not go unnoticed by Sicily’s infamous crime families.

Roughly a third of the island’s 30 wind farms — along with several solar power plants — have been seized by authorities. Officials have frozen more than $2 billion in assets and arrested a dozen alleged crime bosses, corrupt local councilors and mafia-linked entrepreneurs. Italian prosecutors are now investigating suspected mafia involvement in renewable-energy projects from Sardinia to Apulia.”

The in-depth analysis, Big Wind Energy Subsidies: A Hurricane of Carnage, Cronyism and Corruptionis a good primer on the way plungers game the system and pay off politicians at the taxpayers’ expense.

“Lewis “Lew” Hay, III is executive chairman of NextEra Energy, Inc., and it is estimated by Forbes, that CEO “Hay earns nearly $10 million in total compensation from NextEra.” Despite the fact that Hay was actually a “major political contributor to Sen. John McCain in 2008,” he quickly learned which side his power company could generate the title of the “Third Largest Recipient of DOE Risky Loans.” Hay too joined wealthy Democratic donorson Obama’s  in 2011, along with the other two I have tackled in this series, “Spreading the Wealth to Obama’s Ultra-Rich Job Council” –– Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt CEO of General Electric has raked in $3 billion and counting, meanwhile John Doerr, along with his “climate buddy” Al Gore’s, VC firm Kleiner Perkins is tied to at least $10 billion of stimulus funds. Both General Electric and Doerr were key contributors to what went into the 2009 Stimulus.

No matter how you slice it, whether we are sending money abroad or fueling corporate welfare here in the United States as well as the egregious practice of crony capitalism, the 2009-Recovery act is a lie, a travesty and a scam, favoring wealthy financial backers of President Obama and the Democratic Party as well as those with influential political connections to both. And with a president that’s dead set on pushing a fierce and radical climate change agenda and funding green energy with taxpayer money, no matter the long list of failures, there is no end in sight to this green corruption scandal.

Besides NextEra Energy taking full advantage of the federal production tax credit (PTC), we now can confirm that the Bank of Obama has rewarded this conglomerate of a power company, and his millionaire job council buddy Lewis Hay, with two large DOE loans ($2.3 billion); one large stimulus smart-grid grant ($200 million); and six 1603 stimulus grants totaling $398.5 million. Thus NextEra’s green tab is on its way to $3 billion of taxpayer money, and that’s not factoring in the PTC.”

With this background and sorry record of corruption to build upon, the World Economic Forum at Davos sets the agenda for the global economy.

Davos 2013: Green Governance To ’Save the World’ is all about enacting their Agenda 21 authoritarianism. Elizabeth Leafloor from RedIceCreations.com writes:

“The WEF suggests a crisis of leadership and debt are some of the biggest challenges facing the world, and that ’global governance’ is the key to stabilization. Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organisation, said: ‘We need proper global governance that has the necessary tools, power and energy to create a more level playing field at the international level.’

At the end of the day, a push for increased global governance and an environmental agenda is on the table for Davos 2013, under the banner of ’Resilent Dynamism’:

“Mr. Klaus Schwab (WEF Founder and executive chairman) said that the world is seeing “a new reality of sudden shocks and prolonged global economic malaise, particularly in major economies experiencing economic austerity”. He also mentioned, “Future growth in this new context requires dynamism – bold vision and even bolder action.

Either attribute – Resilience or Dynamism – alone is insufficient, as leadership in 2013 will require both”.

The “Greening” leadership translates into forcing upon the world a “Cap and Trade” dictatorship. The Calderon bandits that sip champagne from their Swiss chateau want to extend their aristocratic bondage upon a gullible public. The proper dictum is “Save the World” from the New World Order elites.

Read the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act – S. 2191, for the vision of the controlled carbon-trading scheme.

“The L-W CSA allows covered facilities to satisfy up to 15% of their compliance obligation with specific domestic offsets. An additional 15% can be covered using international emission allowances. Unlimited banking is allowed and owners and operators of covered facilities can borrow up to 15% of their annual compliance obligation from future years. The L-W CSA also creates a Carbon Market Efficiency Board to monitor the carbon trading market and implement specific cost relief measures, including increased borrowing and use of offsets.”

What a boondoggle for the consumer and a windfall for organized crime. If you worry about mob infiltration into this extortion racket, you had better focus on the true mafia; namely, the globalist plutocrats.

If the disclosed goal is to extract $14 Trillion from the distressed world economies, one can only reasonably conclude that the surreptitious objective is to widen the income gap between the ultra-rich and the peons. People pay the costs of taxation exploitation. The privileged elites view the masses as useless eaters, destined to be herded into pens of servitude.

The fake global warming panic is pure political propaganda, used to bolster a guilt complex to justify insider theft. A Cap and Trade ploy is designed to push up the costs of fossil fuel with full knowledge that “Greening Dreams” are no substitutes to real energy.

Research projects into technological alternative sources, based upon efficiency and reliability standards are valid. However, allowing governmental cronyism to impose limits on cheap energy, distorts the marketplace. The Davos crews of corporatist gangsters fly into their feast on private jets. The sycophant media reporting by the business toadies that attend the gala celebration of global autocracy should be indisputable evidence that the globalist own the public relations spin.

Even so, such distorted coverage does not blind those who understand the true nature of the planetary struggle. The monopolist plan for adding unwarranted tolls on your family budget, sold as a noble necessity, will only accelerate the systematic impoverishment of your economic existence.

Is Algeria Next?

On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility for the raid on the In Amenas gas facility near the Libyan border. Dozens of foreign hostages were taken, including at least seven Americans, as well as workers from Britain, Ireland, Norway, Japan, and other countries.

On January 17 government forces launched an operation to retake the facility. On January 18 the crisis was still continuing. Some hostages have been freed but an unknown number of others were reported killed, either by their captors or by the Algerian army fire. There has been some dismay in Western capitals over the speed and ferocity of the authorities’ response. The Algerian government strongly defended its action. “Those who think we will negotiate with terrorists are delusional,” said Mohamed Said Belaid, Algeria’s communications minister. “Those who think we will surrender to their blackmail are delusional.” The assessment seems right: allowing the attackers to escape to Libya with the hostages, or settling in for a long siege, was exactly what the Masked Brigade leaders would have hoped for.

The raid on In Amenas is the most significant military event in North Africa since the end of operations in Libya in October 2011. It was more sophisticated than the attack which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi last September 11. Its implications are far more momentous than the escalating jihadist insurgency in the landlocked and dirt-poor Mali, bordering Algeria to the south.

Western media reports have taken scant notice of the proximity of the Libyan border to In Amenas, which is a significant omission. It now seems certain that the attackers came from a stronghold in Libya, across the unguarded desert. If this is confirmed, the attack would provide further evidence that the NATO-led war—in addition to plunging Libya into chaos—has given a boost to jihadist activity in the region. It has also enabled the militants to amass a substantial arsenal of modern weaponry: Belmokhtar’s faction is known to have commandeered vast quantities of weapons from Libyan military stockpiles at the end of the war. AQIM fighters are well poised to try destabilizing Algeria again, now that they have established a cross-border sanctuary which was denied them by Qaddafy.

AQIM was formed in 2007 by veterans of two Algerian groups that fought the government during the fierce civil war in the 1990’s, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat and the Armed Islamic Group. It is one of the jihadist network’s biggest, richest and most heavily armed subsidiaries. Its “Masked Brigade” is said to have carried out the attack in retaliation for Algeria’s agreement to let France use its air space to supply French forcesbattling Islamic militants in Mali, but the assumption is too optimistic. It would have been impossible to plan such a complex operation barely a week since the beginning of the French operation in Mali. The attack must have been planned well in advance of the French military involvement, with the air space issue providing a misleading pretext which the Western media have been all to willing to accept at face value.

The Algerian extremists have bigger fish to fry. Their wider objective is to reignite the Islamic insurgency in Algeria, which the secularist government successfully suppressed over a decade ago. The authorities officially lifted the 19-year-old state of emergency in February 2011, just before the “Arab Spring” spread to Libya.

The jihadists’ new strategy may be gleaned from the fact that the assault on In Amenas is their first major attack ever on an Algerian hydrocarbon installation. Algeria is the third-largest gas supplier to Europe and one of the world’s biggest producers of liquefied natural gas. Well aware of the importance of energy revenues the rebels refrained from attacking production facilities in the 1990’s, hoping to reap the benefits after an eventual regime change. Targeting such facilities now indicates that they are smarting for a new, long fight. They are initially aiming to destroy Algeria’s image as a safe location for foreign oil and gas companies to invest and operate. In the long run they are hoping to make Algeria the next domino.

The effects of the attack were felt immediately. Snam Rete, which operates the Italian gas network, announced on January 17 that volumes of gas pumped into Italy from Algeria through a vital trans-Mediterranean pipeline had fallen from over 70 million cubic meters a day (mcm/d) to just over 60 million—a drop of 15% at a time of peak consumption.

The implications of a renewed conflict in Algeria for European energy security are immense. If similar attacks spread to the scantily protected oil and gas fields in southwest Libya, which has no effective military force controlled by the government in Tripoli, the consequences would be potentially disastrous for the consumers in Italy, France, and points further north. Algeria is the third-largest supplier of gas into the European Union (after Russia and Norway), and In Amenas’ output alone covers two per cent of total European demand, accounting for 18 per cent of Algeria’s gas exports and earning $4 billion a year in export revenues.

Russia’s Gazprom may step in to make up the shortfall, as it did in 2011 when the war in Libya brought its gas exports to an abrupt halt, but an important consequence may be to draw Europe and the United States apart on the key issue of energy politics. An ever-greater reliance on Russia’s gas runs counter to the U.S. strategy of nudging Europeans to diversify their supplies by increasing deliveries from majority-Muslim countries. Most Europeans are lukewarm about the stalled Nabucco pipeline, which has been strongly favored by the U.S., and their misgivings are bound to be reinforced by the latest developments across the Mediterranean.

The latest crisis is the direct consequence of the ill-advised, unnecessary, and self-defeating NATO intervention in Libya. It is but another reminder that Western interventionism in the Muslim world is a form of psychosis which harms the interests of the intervening powers, brings nothing but misery to the targeted lands and peoples, and benefits only the darkest enemies of civilization in today’s world.

The Ignorance of Anti-human David Attenborough

Liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” But that was decades ago, and today more leftists than ever have graduated from confusion to delusion and believe they’re entitled to their own fiction.

A good example is naturalist David Attenborough, who recently complained that man is a plague upon our planet. He warns that our burgeoning population will ensure that we consume the world’s resources like a sun-occluding swarm of high-tech locusts. Writes The Telegraph:

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he [Attenborough] told the Radio Times.

If brevity is the soul of not just wit but also delusion, we have a winner here. Four sentences, four falsehoods/fallacies — a couple of which are getting a bit stale. There is that old leftist Malthusian starvation saw that seems to have more lives than a cat; there is the man-made idea of man-made climate change; and there is what logically follows from these two assumptions, that humans are a “plague” (well, some humans are, anyway). But then there’s what is simply a falsehood: the notion that the world’s population is exploding.

The truth is just the opposite: on the horizon is a population implosion, a long understood phenomenon explored superbly in the documentary “Demographic Winter.” This may seem counter-intuitive, raised as we were on Soylent Green nightmares, but “population bomb” scenarios are your silver pony-tailed grandfather’s alarmism. And here are the facts:

• Fertility rates are below replacement level (2.1 children per couple) in more than 70 nations worldwide.
• Europe’s population is shrinking rapidly, with an overall fertility rate of 1.38; in northern Italy and certain regions of Spain, the figure is less than 1.
• Sixty-five-year-olds now outnumber fourteen-year-olds in Europe, and while eighty percent of US homes included children one-hundred years ago, the figure has dropped to thirty-two percent today.
• Russia’s population is declining by the better part of 1,000,000 people per year, despite government efforts to encourage fecundity — such as paying citizens $9000 per child. “In 40 years, the world’s largest country by area will have only 100 million citizens instead of the 142 million it has today,” writes Der Spiegel.
• Fertility rates are below replacement level even in countries one wouldn’t expect, such as Muslim nations Tunisia, Qatar, Iran, Uzbekistan, Algeria, and Lebanon, just to name a handful. Mexico’s rate (2.27) is still above replacement level but has been declining precipitously during recent times and will continue to fall. And My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a big fat Greek myth; Greece is managing only 1.39 children per woman. The lowest fertility rate in the world belongs to Singapore (.78).

Of course, the world’s population will continue to increase for a time at a steadily decelerating rate, but this trend will reverse around the middle of this century. Moreover, this is something professional demographers have long known.

So why do mainstream media, academics, politicians, and various luminaries not know it? Some do, of course, and simply lie. Like the activists who understand that popular will to outlaw the AR-15 will evaporate if people learn it’s not actually a machine gun, some population-control zealots realize that their misanthropic agenda’s ranks will depopulate if people discover demographic reality. Others, however, are like the feminists who still complained in the 1990s that society’s alleged destruction of teen girls’ self-esteem was causing poor high-school performance, even though by that point girls’ grades were higher than boys’. A day late and a few brain cells short, theirs is an ignorance bred by an indifference to truth that robs one of all impetus to search for it.

Nonetheless, it is striking that mainstream publications such as The Telegraph can print such rubbish and maintain even a shred of credibility. The only good news is that liberal journalist types often have the lowest fertility rates of all.

For those who will be around in the future, however, demographic decline will pose challenges. Demographer Phillip Longman — a liberal, mind you — wrote about this in his book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It; and famed economist Adam Smith once reminded us, “Depressions are associated with decreasing population.” Japan, the poster old boy for graying civilizations, is learning this firsthand.

Then there are the cultural implications. The people who birthed Western civilization (those of European heritage) are struggling to birth the next generation. So it’s hey, hey, ho, ho, the Westerners are gonna’ go — and take their culture to the grave with them.

All the while, our media are whistling past the empty maternity ward, seemingly oblivious to the impending population implosion. And your opinion may be that this demographic decline is a good thing; your opinion may be that it is a bad thing. But there is something that is not opinion but fact: it is a real thing. And facts don’t bend to fashions.

Climate Change, Economic Crisis And The Violence of War

“Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens” ¹

The hurricanes, the typhoons, the heat waves … the droughts, the heavy rains, the floods … ever more powerful, ever new records being set. Something must be done of course. Except if you don’t believe at all that it’s man-made. But if there’s even a small chance that the greenhouse effect is driving the changes, is it not plain that, at a minimum, we have to err on the side of caution? There’s too much at stake. Like civilization as we know it. Carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere must be greatly curtailed.

The three greatest problems facing the beleaguered, fragile inhabitants of this lonely planet are climate change, economic crisis, and the violence of war. It is my sad duty to report that the United States of America is the main culprit in each case. Is that not remarkable?

Why does Barack Obama not pursue the battle against climate change with the same intensity he pursues war? Why does he not seek to punish the American bankers and stockbrokers responsible for the financial calamity as much as he seeks to punish Julian Assange and Bradley Manning?

In both cases he’s putting the interests of the corporate world before anything else. No amount of fines or penalties will induce corporate leaders to modify their behavior. Only spending some hard time in a prison cellblock might cause the growth in them of their missing part, the part that’s shaped like a social conscience.

Only prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their partners in bombing and torture will discourage future American war lovers from following in their bloody footsteps.

The recent election result can only embolden Obama. He likely took it as an affirmation of his policies, although only 29.3% of those eligible to vote actually voted for him. And an unknown, but certainly significant, number of those who did so held their nose while voting for the supposed lesser of two evils. Hardly indicative of impassioned support for his policies.

Last week the United Nations Climate Summit was held in Doha, Qatar. The comments which came from many of the activists (as opposed to various government officials) were doomsdayish … “Time is running out … time has already run out … the climate has already changed … Hurricane Sandy, rising sea levels, the worst is yet to come.” The Kyoto protocol is still the only international treaty stipulating cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a touchstone for many environmentalists. But the United States has never ratified it. At the previous conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, the US blocked important global action and failed to honor vital pledges.

At the Doha conference the US was acutely criticized for failing to take the lead on planet protection, especially in light of its standing as the largest historic contributor to the current levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. (“The most obdurate bully in the room”, declared the Indian environmentalist, Sunita Narain. ²)

What motivates the American representatives, now as before, as ever, is concern about corporate profits. Cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions can hurt the bottom line. A suitable epitaph for the earth’s tombstone. Shamus Cooke, writing on ZSpace, sums it up well: “Thus, if renewable energy is not as profitable as oil — and it isn’t — then the majority of capitalist investing will continue to go towards destroying the planet. It really is that simple. Even the best-intentioned capitalists do not throw their money away on non-growth investments.”

A brief history of Superpowers

From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the “Allies” invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting halls and on the field of battle to set the ground rules for imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, to Christianize and ‘civilize’, to remake the maps, and to suppress revolutions and other threats to great-power hegemony. They have been deadly serious. In 1918, for example, some 13 nations, including France, Great Britain, Rumania, Italy, Serbia, Greece, Japan, and the United States, combined in a military invasion of Russia to “strangle at its birth” the nascent Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill so charmingly put it.

And following World War 2, without any concern about who had fought and died to win that war, the Western powers, sans the Soviet Union, moved to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO, along with the European Union, then joined the United States in carrying out the Cold War and preventing the Communists and their allies from coming to power legally through elections in France and Italy. That partnership continued after the formal end of the Cold War. The United States, the European Union, and NATO are each superpowers, with extensive military, as well as foreign policy integration — almost all EU members are also members of NATO; almost all NATO members in Europe are in the EU; almost all NATO members have had a military contingent serving under NATO and/or the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere.

Together, this Holy Triumvirate has torn apart Yugoslavia, invaded and devastated Afghanistan and Iraq, crippled Iran, Cuba and others with sanctions, overthrown the Libyan government, and are on the verge now of the same in Syria. Much of what the Triumvirate has told the world to justify this wanton havoc has concerned Islamic terrorism, but it should be noted that prior to the interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria all three countries were secular and modern. Will the people of those sad lands ever see that life again?

In suppressing the left in France and Italy, and later in destabilizing the governments of Libya and Syria, the Holy Triumvirate has closely aligned itself with terrorists and terrorist methods to a remarkable extent. ³ In Syria alone, it would be difficult to name any Middle East terrorist group associated with al Qaeda — employing their standard car bombings and suicide bombers — that is not taking part in the war against President Assad with the support of the Triumvirate. Is there anything — legally or morally — the Triumvirate regards as outside its purview? Any place not within its geographical mandate? Britain and France have now joined Turkey and Arabian Peninsula states in recognizing a newly formed opposition bloc as the sole representative of the Syrian people. “From the point of view of international law, this is absolutely unacceptable,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev declared. “A desire to change the political regime of another state by recognizing a political force as the sole carrier of sovereignty seems to me to be not completely civilised.” France was the first Western state to recognize the newly-formed Syrian National Coalition and was swiftly joined by Britain, Italy and the European Union. ⁴ The neck irons tighten.

The European Union in recent years has been facing a financial crisis, where its overriding concern has been to save the banks, not its citizens, inspiring calls from the citizenry of some member states to leave the Union. I think the dissolution of the European Union would benefit world peace by depriving the US/NATO mob of a guaranteed partner in crime by returning to the Union’s members their individual discretion in foreign policy.

And then we can turn to getting rid of NATO, an organization that not only has a questionable raison d’être in the present, but never had any good reason-to-be in the past other than serving as Washington’s hit man. ⁵

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 21 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

 

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” ⁶ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Placing American presidents in their proper context

“Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realize.
His name was Richard Nixon.” ⁷

Films on US foreign policy

The Power Principle is a series of three films by Scott Noble. Part one, “Empire”, is the only one I’ve seen completely so far and I can say that it’s great stuff. The three parts, with their times, are:

• Part 1: Empire (1h 35m)
• Part 2: Propaganda (1h 38m)
• Part 3: Apocalypse (1h 10m)

Featured in the films are Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Stockwell, Christopher Simpson, Ralph McGehee, Philip Agee, Nafeez Ahmed, John Perkins, James Petras, John Stauber, Russ Baker, Howard Zinn, William Blum, Nancy Snow, William I. Robinson, Morris Berman, Peter Phillips, Michael Albert, and others of the usual suspects.

To comment about these films or others by Scott Noble, write to him at .

Much more publicized is the new film and book by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. Entitled The Untold History of the United States, it is a 10-part series appearing on Showtime. Only Stone’s name could get this dark side of US history and foreign policy on mainstream television. It will be interesting to observe what the mass media has to say about this challenge to some of America’s most cherished beliefs about itself.

Notes

1. Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times, September 17, 2009 ^↩
2. Democracy Now!, December 7, 2012 ^↩
3. For France and Italy, see Operation Gladio Wikipedia; and Daniele Ganser, Operation Gladio: NATO’s Top Secret Stay-Behind Armies and Terrorism in Western Europe (2005) ^↩
4. Agence France Presse, November 26, 2012^↩
5. For the best coverage of the NATO monolith, sign up with StopNATO. To get on the mailing list write to Rick Rozoff at . To see back issues at  ^↩
6. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩
7. From the review of the book: I am the change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism by Charles Kesler. Review by Mark Lilla, The New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2012, p.1 ^↩

The End of Jewish Power

Israel suffered a humiliating defeat at The UN yesterday. The nations of the world stood up and said NO to the Jewish state – NO to Israeli occupation, NO to Israeli human rights abuse, NO to Jewish racism. In effect, they stood up and confessed to serious Zio-fatigue.

Despite Jewish success in constantly reminding Europeans of their tormented past, Europe yesterday delivered itself of its guilt and Israel’s European allies such as Germany, France, Britain and Italy also delivered a clear messages to Israel – they are right out of patience. This is a very good news indeed.

But interestingly, this united opposition to Israel is not in response the Israeli strength. On the contrary, it is actually a reaction to Israeli weakness. In the last few months we have seen the complete and final eradication of the famed Israeli power of deterrence. For months, Israel gave the impression that it was ready and willing to attack Iran nuclear facilities, only to have to admit, even to itself, that it lacked both the means and guts to do so. Israel then launched a lethal attack on the people of Gaza. It called up 75.000 IDF reservists, only to find out that it didn’t have the stomach to face Palestinian resistance.

So, just as Israel is learning to admit to its own cowardice, the rest of the world is at last finding the courage to realise that it can well do without a Jewish state that is nothing but trouble and a grave threat to world peace.

In spite of the powerful Jewish lobby, the Zionist-controlled media and Wall Street, the Jewish state and its Zionist backers have proved to be impotent. It may have the desire, the hope and even the pathos, but it just ain’t stiff enough to deliver.

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