World U.N. Reality

How CNET/CBS Interactive ignited and fueled the Phenomena of Internet Piracy.

2011-12-28T21:58:00.001-06:00

Check out One Candle In The Dark for some very interesting stuff.

I highly recommend it for some good background on how Internet Piracy got fueled and promoted.

This is one of the biggest if not the biggest and most trusted download and review sites on the web. Are they guilty of profiting from the placement of said software or other programs? I do not know for sure, but I would bet my money the answer is yes.

I used it myself back in the day to get reviews on most of the software that I wanted to download. It was the one stop shop for pretty much everything available for download at that time and a lot of us trusted the reviews by the editor's and the Power Downloader recommendations on Download.com

Thanks to One Candle In The Dark for the hard work that has gone into that post. And thanks to the Internet for caching all those old links and post.

Be careful what you put on the web cause one day it could come back and bite you in your virtual ass ;)

You Won't Believe How Corrupt, Lazy And Stinking Rich Our Congress Critters Have Become

2011-12-28T14:52:00.000-06:00

We starve, they keep getting fatter and fatter..Bastards.

If our founding fathers could see the cesspool that the U.S. Congress has become today, they would roll over in their graves. Most Americans don't realize this, but we already have a "part-time Congress". Members of Congress only "work" a little over a third of the days on the calendar. The rest of the time they have off. It is no wonder why so many members of Congress are involved in so much corruption - they have so much free time on their hands that they are bound to get into trouble. Many members of Congress also use their positions of power and the information they learn during the course of their duties to become fabulously wealthy. At a time when incomes nationally are actually declining, our Congress critters are becoming stinking rich at a staggering pace. Yes, politics in America has always been a game that is funded and played by wealthy individuals, but things have gotten so extreme that it is hard to argue that average Americans have any control over Congress at all at this point. Instead of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", we now have a government "of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy". If you doubt this, just keep on reading.
Over the past couple of decades, the "wealth gap" between members of Congress and average Americans has grown to ridiculous proportions. Things have gotten so bad that now even the New York Times is reporting on these things....

"Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years"

So how wealthy have members of Congress become?
Many of you won't believe the statistics posted below. The truth is that Congress has become all about money. It takes huge piles of money to get elected to Congress, it takes huge piles of money to stay in Congress, and most members of Congress seem to be able to accumulate gigantic piles of money while "serving" their country....
-Today, there are 250 members of Congress that are millionaires.
-According to the Wall Street Journal, the median net worth of members of Congress is now $913,000.
-The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress increased by 25 percent between 2008 and 2010. Meanwhile, the standard of living in the United States has fallen farther over the past three years than at any other time that has ever been recorded in U.S. history.
-After adjusting for inflation, between 1984 and 2009 the median net worth of members of Congress rose from $280,000 to $725,000 while the median net worth of all Americans actually declined slightly over that same time period.
-The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress is now slightly over 2 billion dollars. That is "billion" with a "b".
-In 2009, Congress was only scheduled to be in session for 137 days out of the 365 days of the year. In 2010, Congress was also only scheduled to be in session for 137 days out of the entire year. For much more on the pathetic "work schedule" of the U.S. Congress, just check out this video.
-The net worth of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi increased by 62 percent from 2009 to 2010. In 2009 it was reported that she had a net worth of 21.7 million dollars, and in 2010 it was reported that she had a net worth of 35.2 million dollars.
-The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, saw his wealth grow by 29 percent from 2009 to 2010. He is now worth approximately 9.8 million dollars.
-U.S. Representative Darrell Issa is worth approximately 220 million dollars. His wealth grew by approximately 37 percent from 2009 to 2010.
-The wealthiest member of Congress, U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, is worth approximately 294 million dollars.
-Those that won U.S. Senate seats during the last election spent an average of nearly $10 million on their campaigns.
-More than 5 billion dollars was spent on political campaigns back in 2008, and it is being projected that 8 billion dollars will be spent on political campaigns in 2012.
-When it comes to federal elections, the candidate that raises the most money wins about 90 percent of the time.
-Since 1964, the reelection rate for members of the U.S. House of Representatives has never fallen below 85 percent.
It is also amazing how deeply corrupt Congress has become. In a previous article, I detailed how a number of Congress critters used confidential information about the coming financial crisis that they received from U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in September 2008 to make beneficial stock market moves before the stock market crashed later that fall....

On September 16, 2008 Paulson and Bernanke held "closed door meetings" with members of Congress and warned them that the financial system was about to totally collapse.
But instead of racing out to save the financial system, author Peter Schweizer says that many of our representatives in Congress raced out to save their stock portfolios.
In his new book, Schweizer alleges the following....
*Schweizer says that U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sold $74,715 worth of stock on September 17th and $42,000 worth of stock on September 18th.
*Schweizer says that U.S. Representative Jim Moran sold off shares in 90 different corporations on September 17th.
*Schweizer says that U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse sold off at least $250,000 worth of stock between September 18th and September 24th.
*Schweizer says that U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus bet very heavily against the stock market in the days following the September 16th meeting and made tens of thousands of dollars doing so.
*Schweizer says that U.S. Senator John Kerry bought up approximately $350,000 of Bank of America stock and approximately $550,000 of Citigroup stock during October 2008 and November of 2008. It was during this time period that the bailout programs for the big banks were being developed and debated.

So has anyone gotten into trouble for any of that?
Of course not.
Congress critters play by an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us do.
At this point, the American people are absolutely disgusted with Congress. According to the latest polls, the approval rating for Congress is sitting at about 12 percent.
But of course the vast majority of our Congress critters will be re-elected over and over and over again.
Most members of Congress do not care about you. What they do care about is taking care of their political careers and taking care of their big donors. As noted earlier, it takes enormous amounts of money to win national elections in America, and most members of Congress are not about to do anything that will threaten the gravy train.
Our system is fundamentally broken. It is time to quit pretending.
But of course the mainstream media will never admit this, because mainstream media outlets are owned by many of the same corporations and wealthy individuals that fund political campaigns. For the establishment, the current system is working just fine.
So until the American people wake up and start demanding fundamental reforms, our Congress critters are going to continue to live the high life and we are going to keep on getting the same pathetic results out of Washington.

The American Dream

NDAA/S.1867/ Clarification

2011-12-16T14:14:00.000-06:00

I am writing this entry to clarify why I think it is a double edge sword waiting to be thrust into the American Peoples Heart.

I have received emails stating that the bill 'Excludes American Citizens", which in one form it does and in another form it does not.

This bill is written to confuse people like most bills are. The bill is also written with the future intention of being manipulated and changed with amendments that could become the American Citizens worst nightmare. Don't believe me, then here is a statement from the ACLU website:

Don’t be confused by anyone claiming that the indefinite detention legislation does not apply to American citizens. It does. There is an exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032 of the bill), but no exemption for American citizens from the authorization to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial (section 1031 of the bill). So, the result is that, under the bill, the military has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so. But you don’t have to believe us. Instead, read what one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Lindsey Graham said about it on the Senate floor: “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

Here is Section 1031:
SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE. (a) In General- Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war. (b) Covered Persons- A covered person under this section is any person as follows: (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks. (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces. (c) Disposition Under Law of War- The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force. (2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111-84)). (3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction. (4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.

As you can see the wording is the key factor to every document and how it can be twisted and turned into something very different then what is was originally intended for. You can believe what you want, but for me this bill is something very sinister in nature and form and I am still trying to figure out why it was even written in the first place. Could it be that they know of a coming crisis such as a larger war with a foreign military landing on the soil of America or, could it be to help detain Americans in case of large scale riots if the economy crashes and there is a major food shortage.

Either way the bill stinks to high heaven and I hope the American Citizens begin to realize that the politicians and Major Corporations that line their pockets with cash and gifts are not looking out for your best interest at all.

Start standing up and begin organizing into small groups across the land that will hopefully combine into one large well organized militia that will take the battle to the heart of the beast, Washington D.C. and the homes of these well to do, better then you, elitist jerk scumbags of human beings.

Rid the world of these Parasites before they have the chance to rid the world of you.

NDAA/S.1867

2011-12-15T17:09:00.000-06:00

"We are in danger of losing our most precious heritage not because a band of thugs threatens our freedom, but because we are at risk of forgetting who we are and what makes the United States a truly great nation," said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose district includes Ground Zero. "In the last 10 years, we have begun to let go of our freedoms, bit by bit, with each new executive order, court decision and, yes, act of Congress.

Very well said Rep. Jerry Nadler.

A critical look at ndaa S.1867

A controversial and potentially grievous act has been secretly proposed, voted on, and approved by the US Senate. According to the National Defense Authorization Act and a segment of that legislation S.1867 authored by John McCain and Carl Levin. For the first time in US history an authorization has been sought to unleash the US Army upon the civilian population of the zone interior of the United States.

Not by an act of emergency, but by the simple whim of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense should they so determine that Al qaida or Taliban operatives are active among US Citizens and will thus be apprehended, detained indefinitely, suspects will be held without legal representation. http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/.../why-obama-wants-to-veto-s-18...

In items 1031 and 1032 of S.1867 it states that this new application of military authority within the domestic realm of America will only be applied to those illegal alien, non citizen residents, and those who are complicit with elements of terrorist organizations that have undertaken acts of aggression against the US and its allies since the 911 tragedy in 2001.

So, where's the controversy? Let's examine more closely. Just weeks before another measure preceded S.1867 which was S.1253. This previous version drafted before sought the same military authorization as S.1867, but did not exclude American citizens expressly from the implications of a US Army beset upon the civilian populace under the aegis of suppressing terrorism within our very own borders. As well, unlike S.1867 which reiterated that the new authorization would not in anyway, shape, or form affect the rights of American citizens or previous laws that were already in place, S. 1253 failed to make such exceptions clear.

In a letter from the ACLU addressed to Chairman Leahy and Senator Grassley, concerns that many innocent American citizens could be detained indefinitely under the provisions of S.1253, ammendments were made and S.1867 was drafted. http://www.activistpost.com/2011/.../s-1253-will-allow-indefinite-military.h...

Does this really make NDAA S.1867 less sinister? Just think of what the implications of the Patriot Act were. Our emails, phone calls, and electronically traced whereabouts are monitored by the NSA and various other intelligence agencies. The Orwellian "Big Brother" police state is now complete though it has been implemented with subtlety.
Now S.1867 authorizes militarization of the domestic terrritorial region of America; the states themselves!

Are there any precedents for the defiance of the long standing Posse Commitatus Act of 1878 which precluded the use of the US Army in any instances of civilian domestic unrest that required government level involvement? Yes. On several occasions through out US history by executive order of the President of the United States, the US Army has indeed acted against American citizens. Too numerous to mention, I will limit my examples to 2 specific events in which the US Army was ordered to march on its own people.http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/articles/trebilcock.htm

The Civil War stands as one great example of how the federal government deployed the Union Army against the American citizens of the south in order to defeat the secession of the southern states of the Confederacy. The use of the US army under that theater of engagement produced more casualties than any other US military involvement in history.

Secondly, was the rout of the "Bonus Army" July 28, 1932. As the Great Depression raged and unemployment, homelessness, and hunger ravaged the nation, World War I veterans converged on Washington DC. They built a pitiful shanty town in protest to not receiving benefits promised to them as compensation for wages lost during their service to their country in Europe during the war against the Kaiser's Germany. Jobless and starving, war veterans came to Washington to demand money they desperately needed to feed their families.

After a couple of violent clashes between local police with the disgruntled vetarans that resulted in a few deaths and injuries, President Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to march against the starving veterans and their families taking up residence in pitifully built tents of sheets, wooden posts, and tin metal near the Capital. Using tear gas grenades, troops armed with bayonet fitted rifles, trucks equipped with machine gun crews, and old 7 ton tanks of World War I vintage, the Army brigade marched against the starving protestors driving them out of their encampments and burned down everything. Reportedly, several babies were either killed by or suffered the effects of the tear gas as the crowd withdrew offering little resistence.

The history of our very own United States of America is tainted with bloody examples of our US Army being used against the very citizens it is tasked to protect against invaders and international enemies. Will S.1867 be about the likelihood of that scenario repeating itself again? If the past provides us with an insight, I would have to say yes. It seems to me we already have enough of this type of legislation to stave off terrorism within our borders. Isn't that what the FBI and the DOJ are for?

I fear that this new NDAA S.1867 is only a harbinger of things to come. We may very well see soldiers bristling with combat gear patrolling our streets and airports just as you would expect in any third world banana republics all over the globe. You must ask yourself. What next? http://www.freedom-won.net/s-1867-the-prelude-to-war/

Examiner.com

What is a world view?

2011-11-25T20:27:00.001-06:00

Principia Cybernetica

One of the biggest problems of present society is the effect of overall change and acceleration on human psychology. Neither individual minds nor collective culture seem able to cope with the unpredictable change and growing complexity. Stress, uncertainty and frustration increase, minds are overloaded with information, knowledge fragments, values erode, negative developments are consistently overemphasized, while positive ones are ignored. The resulting climate is one of nihilism, anxiety and despair. While the wisdom gathered in the past has lost much of its validity, we don't have a clear vision of the future either. As a result, there does not seem to be anything left to guide our actions.

What we need is a framework that ties everything together, that allows us to understand society, the world, and our place in it, and that could help us to make the critical decisions which will shape our future. It would synthesize the wisdom gathered in the different scientific disciplines, philosophies and religions. Rather than focusing on small sections of reality, it would provide us with a picture of the whole. In particular, it would help us to understand, and therefore cope with, complexity and change. Such a conceptual framework may be called a "world view".

The Belgian philosopher Leo Apostel has devoted his life to the development of such an integrating world view. As he quickly understood, the complexity of this task is too great for one man. Therefore, a major part of Apostel's efforts were directed at gathering other people, with different scientific and cultural backgrounds, to collaborate on this task. Only in the last years of his life, after several failed attempts, did he managed to create such an organization: the "Worldviews" group, which includes people from disciplines as diverse as engineering, psychiatry, theology, theoretical physics, sociology and biology.

Their first major product was a short book entitled "World views, from fragmentation to integration". This booklet is a call to arms, a program listing objectives rather than achievements. Its main contribution is a clear definition of what a world view is, and which are its necessary components. The "Worldviews" group has continued to work on different components and aspects of this general objective. Many of its members are also involved in a new interdisciplinary research center at the Free University of Brussels, which is named after Leo Apostel: the "Center Leo Apostel".

The book lists seven fundamental components of a world view. I will discuss them one by one, using a formulation which is slightly different from the one in the book, but which captures the main ideas.

A model of the world: It should allow us to understand how the world functions and how it is structured. "World" here means the totality, everything that exists around us, including the physical universe, the Earth, life, mind, society and culture. We ourselves are an important part of that world. Therefore, a world view should also answer the basic question: "Who are we?".
Explanation: The second component is supposed to explain the first one. It should answer the questions: "Why is the world the way it is? Where does it all come from? Where do we come from?". This is perhaps the most important part of a world view. If we can explain how and why a particular phenomenon (say life or mind) has arisen, we will be able to better understand how that phenomenon functions. It will also help us to understand how that phenomenon will continue to evolve.
Futurology: This extrapolation of past evolution into the future defines a third component of a world view: futurology. It should answer the question "Where are we going to?" It should give us a list of possibilities, of more or less probable future developments. But this will confront us with a choice: which of the different alternatives should we promote and which should we avoid?
Values: This is the more fundamental issue of value: "What is good and what is evil?" The theory of values defines the fourth component of a world view. It includes morality or ethics, the system of rules which tells us how we should or should not behave. It also gives us a sense of purpose, a direction or set of goals to guide our actions. Together with the answer to the question "why?", the answer to the question "what for?", may help us to understand the real meaning of life.
Action: Knowing what to strive for does not yet mean knowing how to get there, though. The next component must be a theory of action (praxiology). It would answer the question "How should we act?" It would help us to solve practical problems and to implement plans of action.
Knowledge: Plans are based on knowledge and information, on theories and models describing the phenomena we encounter. Therefore, we need to understand how we can construct reliable models. This is the component of knowledge acquisition. It is equivalent to what in philosophy is called "epistemology" or "the theory of knowledge". It should allow us to distinguish better theories from worse theories. It should answer the traditional philosophical question "What is true and what is false?"
Building Blocks: The final point on the agenda of a world view builder is not meant to answer any fundamental question. It just reminds us that world views cannot be developed from scratch. You need building blocks to start with. These building blocks can be found in existing theories, models, concepts, guidelines and values, scattered over the different disciplines and ideologies. This defines the seventh component: fragments of world views as a starting point.

As an example of how a world view can be achieved, the Principia Cybernetica Project has started to build an evolutionary-systemic world view, which starts from the different concepts and principles developed in cybernetics, systems theory and the theory of evolution. Its world view can be summarized in the form of answers to a list of eternal philosophical questions.

A Cybernetic Model of a World View

The apparently disconnected components of a world view can in fact be understood as part of an encompassing scheme describing the interaction between a system or self and the world or environment. In cybernetics an autonomous system or agent is conceptualized as a control system, which tries to achieve its goals or values by initiating the right actions that compensate for the disturbances produced by the environment. For that, it needs to perceive or get information about the effects of its actions and the effects of the events happening in the world. More specifically, it needs to understand how particular events (past) cause other events (future), that is to say it needs to have a model that allows it to explain and anticipate events. The first six components of a world view cover all the fundamental aspects of this control scheme, as illustrated in the following figure. World view components (in bold) are written above the corresponding control scheme components.

Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory

2011-11-25T20:12:00.001-06:00

Friday 25 November 2011
Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday.
The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US.
The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital, was able to create a highly infectious variant of the bird flu virus H5N1. H5N1 rarely transfers from animal to human, but if it does, the infection is often fatal.
Pandemic
Fouchier was asked to find out if H5N1 could lead to a pandemic and was able to show that a couple of mutations in the virus dna changed it into an extremely virulent form. Japanese researchers have also made similar findings, the paper says.
Fouchier then offered an article on his findings to scientific journal Science which asked a US institute for bio-security to examine the result. That institute told the US government the research could be threatening to public health and security.
The Volkskrant says Fouchier is unwilling to comment on the situation because he does not want to prejudice the expert opinion. Both his and the Japanese research are currently being scrutinised. . DutchNews.nl

48% Of America Says U.S. Nearing Great Depression: CNN Poll

2011-06-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

Some economists might be worried about a double-dip recession, but a large number of Americans have an even worse scenario in mind.

Approximately 48 percent of Americans say they think that a Great Depression is either very or somewhat likely to occur within the year, according to a CNN Opinion Research Poll, the highest percentage of respondents that have stated that level of certainty since CNN first started asking the question in October 2008.

Respondents' fear that they would soon become unemployed also spiked to an all-time high of 30 percent. That stands in contrast another post-recession low: the 18 percent that said they either recently became unemployed or are related to someone who recently became unemployed. The seeming contradiction might be explained by the average length of unemployment now hitting an all-time high, as The New York Times recently reported.

That Americans seem apprehensive about their economic futures should not be surprising considering the recently lackluster job creation. Last month, the private sector created only 54,000 net jobs while public sector employment actually saw a net decrease in jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Housing prices have also continued to fall, reaching new lows during 2011's first quarter according to Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Index.

Confidence in the future is essential for economic growth, says economist Thomas Boston. "If you are concerned about job security, you are not likely to make the purchase, no matter how low interest rates might be," Boston wrote in the online publication Black Enterprise. "The same logic holds for business owners deciding whether to undertake a new investment."

The high percentage of Americans that say they believe that there will be an economic depression should raise alarm bells in and of itself, says CNN polling director Keating Holling. "That's not just economic pessimism," Holling told CNN, reflecting on the polling results, "that's economic fatalism."

Food Prices, Global Hunger to Skyrocket by 2030, Oxfam Warns

2011-06-04T15:35:00.000-05:00

Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer,
LiveScience.com

Left unchecked, climate change aligned with population explosion and low agricultural yields will drastically increase global poverty and hunger over the next two decades, warns the international aid organization Oxfam in a report released today (May 31).

The prices of staple foods such as corn and rice will speed up their ascent, Oxfam predicts, and will climb by 180 percent and 130 percent, respectively, by the year 2030.

In a world where the poorest people now spend as much as 80 percent of their incomes on food — the average Filipino spends proportionally four times more on sustenance than the average British person, for example — drastic food scarcities and price hikes will likely push many struggling populations into hunger and, potentially, starvation.

In its new report, Growing a Better Future, Oxfam says current trends indicate that the world's population will reach 9 billion by mid-century; meanwhile, the average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990. Left unchecked, the gap between food demand and supply will continue to widen.

"The food system must be transformed. By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet and demand for food will have increased by 70 percent. This demand must be met despite flatlining yields, increasing water scarcity, and growing competition over land. And agriculture must rapidly adapt to a changing climate and slash its carbon footprint," wrote Robert Bailey, Oxfam's senior climate advisor, in the report.

Climate change has already driven up food prices in many areas by causing drought and desertification, Oxfam reports, and of all the factors contributing to rising food prices, it will create the most serious impact of all in the coming decades.

"The impact of climate change on food prices is clearly closely linked to the impacts that climate change will have on crop production," Bailey wrote. Rice crop yields decline by an estimated 10 percent for every 1 degree-Celsius rise in dry-season minimum temperature, for example.

Aside from raising global temperatures, climate change "will increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts and floods which can wipe out harvests at a stroke," the report states.

Fixing the system

Global poverty is fueled by a broken system in which wealthy countries take advantage of the poor, Oxfam states. To curb the problem, the international community must address "the appalling inequities which plague the food system from farm to fork. We produce more food than we need. In the rich world, we throw much of it away. In the developing world, nearly one billion of us go without."

Industrialized countries must initiate major policy changes in order to fix the broken system, Oxfam continues. They must redirect tax breaks toward clean energy initiatives and place taxes on greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, "we must manage trade to manage risk by building a system of food reserves; increasing transparency in commodities markets; setting rules on export restrictions; and finally putting an end to trade-distorting agricultural subsidies."

The new report points to examples of the changes that must be undertaken to curb global poverty and hunger. In Brazil, social activism has led to agricultural policies that decreased hunger by one-third between 2000 and 2007. Vietnam achieved comparable results through land reform and a program of investment in smallholder agriculture — single-family farming.

"Thankfully, the vast transformation needed is already under way – led by individuals, organizations and movements who have taken the future into their own hands," the report states.

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.

Crisis - What Crisis?

2011-05-30T01:42:00.000-05:00

f17th May 2011 - Published by openDemocracy
Courtesy of STWR

The social misery the economic meltdown has inflicted has not triggered a crisis in the legitimacy of Europe’s system as such. This is puzzling. If elections are any indicator of prevailing preferences in democratic societies, the most recent round of national elections in Europe confirm that free-market capitalism has considerable popular support. In the midst of the rampant economic crisis, the vote has gone to the right, and not simply to the conservative or the xenophobic extreme right, but to parties of the economically liberal right advocating the very economic model that caused the crisis. Support to left parties is at a historic low. Social frustration, instead, is being channelled into xenophobia.

Absent is a broad cross-ideological coalition of forces that can protect society, similar to the counter-movement against free markets that Carl Polanyi observed to be taking shape in the early twentieth century. At the time, European Conservatism and Socialism came to a consensus on the need to constrain markets, a consensus on which the post-war welfare states were built. Instead, we now have governments, irrespective of their ideological allegiance, running to the rescue of finance capital and big business, and implementing austerity programmes to reassure capital markets, while society bears this with equanimity, despite the price it is paying in terms of cuts to social insurance, to basic services for the most disadvantaged, a marked rise in unemployment, and a rapid drop in consumers’ purchasing power.

Why is widespread social anxiety fuelling xenophobia, rather than a constructive counter-wave against neoliberal capitalism?

Three factors conspire.

The state: more powerful, less responsible

Over the past three decades, public authority - at both state and EU level - has accelerated action to enhance market efficiency, entailing a dramatic increase in social risk. Yet at the same time, public authority has ceased to assume responsibility for the generated risk. Rather than a retrenchment of the state, we have the new phenomenon of increase in the power of governing bodies (and their capacity to inflict social harm), while their responsibility for the social consequences of policy action decreases. This discrepancy between power and responsibility damages democracy, as the exercise of power becomes ever more autocratic, even if all rituals of democratic politics are meticulously performed.

But if the discrepancy between power and responsibility is eroding the authority of states (as Richard Sennett has claimed in his The Culture of the New Capitalism) it might be expected to trigger a legitimation crisis of the system and mass revolts. Yet no such crisis ensues. For meanwhile, the legitimacy relationship (or the social contract) between citizens and states has altered in such a way as to absolve the state from social responsibility. Let me trace the logic of this development.

The reform of the welfare state in the late twentieth century consisted in transferring responsibilities for wellbeing from public authority to citizens. Regulatory policy enforced individual self-reliance on matters ranging from finding jobs and securing pensions to remaining employable, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and protecting the environment. Justifying neo-liberal economic policy by describing globalization as ‘inevitable’, public authority has thereby effectively managed to redefine its relationship with citizens: market-regulative functions linked to the provision of social rights (wealth redistribution, guaranteed employment) have exited this relationship. A whole generation of citizens has by now been socialised into the practices and ideology of individual responsibility.

Surveys indicate that individuals, especially the young (the potential victims of 20% youth unemployment in the EU) do not expect public authority to provide economic and social safety. There is no legitimacy crisis, no mass-scale revolts, because the very social contract has been altered to exclude issues of social safety from the range of responsibility of public authority. The state has been absolved from such responsibility by the very publics suffering the increased risk of social fall-out.

While some have celebrated individual responsibilisation as a form of emancipation, as “turning collective requirements into individual opportunities for choice” (Ulrich Beck), in the context of the economic uncertainty that is typical of globalisation, it is bound to breed anxiety and engender social pathologies rather than foster emancipation. Autonomy that imposes an overwhelming burden of responsibility on individuals for their well-being quickly decays into what Erich Fromm has called the “fear of freedom”. It is exactly because public authority is perceived as incapable of managing the nebulous threats coming from a globally integrated world, that this fear of freedom is being channelled into hatred of strangers, rather than into demands for more social protection.

The ‘rich Uncle’ state

The role of the state has been further altered in recent years to allow it to actively manage the distribution of opportunities and risks via a new type of intervention: intervention aiming to lend support to specific economic actors. We have all witnessed the massive bailout of failing banks, but also the special support states have provided to specific companies (e.g. in the automotive industry) during the economic crisis. This aligns with a practice, preceding the crisis, of setting up ‘national champions’ – private companies receiving large financial benefits from their states in defiance of EU competition rules on the grounds of their being strategically important for the competitiveness of national economies. This redistribution of funds from taxpayers to particular businesses or sectors of the economy amounts to saving capitalists, rather than saving capitalism.

However, it is not only corporate capital that has profited from this privileged treatment by the states; so have groups of workers. Take the recent decision of the French Government, alarmed by the stagnating and falling incomes (together with a decline in purchasing power) triggered by its austerity measures, to introduce in April a one-off payment of 1000 euro per salaried worker. The beneficiaries of this seemingly generous provision are highly selective: workers in the largest publicly listed enterprises on the French stock-exchange (CAC 40). Left out are those working in the SMEs, public sector employers, and those on minimum wage (so called ‘smicards’).

These new distributive functions of public authority, developed well before the economic crisis, have constructed a new matrix of state-society relations. The overly-protective ‘nanny state’ of post-war welfare capitalism, and the ‘step-mother state’ of the neoliberal late twentieth century (a state which takes its distance from society), has been replaced by the “rich Uncle” state – one that readily intervenes to help select actors but only for the sake of competitiveness in the global economy.

New winners and losers

The new configuration of winners and losers takes shape, across the traditional divide between capital and labour that once formed the contours of Left and Right political families in Europe. Now a new alliance of social forces is mobilising around a ‘risk’ pole, where self-perceived losers from globalisation and neoliberal capitalism rally behind policies of economic patriotism – a combination of closed (protected) economy, as well as cultural sovereignty (anti-immigrant sentiment). On the opposite ‘opportunity’ flank converge the supporters of the centre-left and centre-right parties that embrace free and open markets, as well as culturally liberal and cosmopolitan values.

All these factors combine to create a novel type of xenophobia, now fuelling mass support to populist parties in Europe. In contrast to the old version in which hostility to foreigners was cast in terms of the protection of cultural and political sovereignty (national chauvinism), the foundation of xenophobia is now more explicitly economic. It is related to perceived threats to socio-economic wellbeing (especially job loss) brought about by open border policies in the context of globalisation. Note, for instance, that ‘classical’ post-WWII parties of the far right, such as the French Front National who have not had hitherto an explicit economic programme (though tacitly embracing free market capitalism) are now abandoning their economic liberalist stance and actively calling for social protectionism, as are newly-emerging populist parties such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Swedish Democrats and the True Finns, who are appealing for the return of the welfare state. That the far right has an explicit economic programme and, moreover, that it takes a hostile stance to free markets, are new features of the far right – features that have emerged only since the late 1990s. Ominously, this combination of xenophobia and appeals to social protection is reminiscent of the ‘third way’ Nazi and fascist parties of the interwar period.

Recent surveys corroborate this new, economic rather than cultural, foundation for xenophobia – as a significant percentage of Europeans declare that the current level of immigration is spoiling the quality of life, by combining the (perceived) threat of jobs loss with pressures on the social security system, and the state education and health systems (according to a Harris poll published in Financial Times, September 6, 2010). As fear of job outsourcing in the context of globalisation is becoming shared across the working and the middle classes, economic xenophobia has come to taint the discourse equally of centre-left and the centre-right.

Significantly, in its formative stage, the basis of this economic xenophobia is not impoverishment, and neither is it the growing gap between rich and poor, as is commonly claimed. The basis is a perception of economic insecurity and a threat to livelihood. These are different things. Note, for instance, that anti-immigration populist parties started to mobilise successfully in the affluent nineties, in conditions of good economic growth and low unemployment, but feeding on the sense of uncertainty that intensified globalisation was creating. Despite the extraordinary prosperity Europeans enjoyed in the late nineties, the sense of anxiety and insecurity on an everyday level was steadily growing, fuelling anxiety based on perceptions of physical insecurity, political disorder, cultural estrangement, and employment insecurity. What triggers these fears are perceptions of threat, rather than actual exposure to threat. For instance, the data on popular perceptions about the negative economic impact of immigration is in contrast with data indicating that the actual flow of migration is diminishing. Although 40% of Germans say immigration is making the country a worse place to live in (according to the study cited earlier), Turkish emigration to Germany has declined dramatically since 2000.

Today, anti-immigrant parties are thriving in relatively rich and egalitarian countries such as Switzerland, Sweden and Finland. In Finland, too, analysts note that a populist upsurge has been brewing for years as decline in traditional Finnish industries such as forestry and paper have brought economic insecurity. In response to this insecurity about maintaining a standard of living, including a sense of physical insecurity, a new public-order-and–safety agenda has taken shape in recent years, which is mobilising extreme-right populism around a ‘risk’ pole and ushering in a novel political era in European politics.

This era is shaped by social anxiety, whose source is the perceived fragility of the model of wellbeing, and the incapacity of individuals, without the proper help of public authority, to assume the responsibilities forced upon them. As economic liberalism and globalisation have come to be accepted in most advanced industrial democracies as having no alternative, citizens have begun to address public authority with demands for compensation for the insecurity caused by globalisation. Such demands for compensation range from curbing immigration, protection from ‘pandemics’, increased safety in public spaces, blocking EU enlargement, or most brutally – hostility to strangers.

Responsibility must go back to the State

It is not the invisible hand of the market that is generating the anxieties haunting our societies. Behind the alleged inevitability of increased market freedoms and decreased social protection stands a particular formula of policy-making that has been adopted by public authorities at both the level of EU central institutions and member-states, irrespective of governments’ nominal ideological affiliation.

First, this is the economic policy of productivity-focused jobless growth. This formula of supply-side economics, which prioritises the fast increase in productivity for the sake of competitiveness in the global economy, first emerged in the 1980s and has been preserved throughout the recent jobless economic recovery. This formula of economic policy generates insecurity even while it effectively generates growth. The second culprit is the politics of individual responsibilisation that is turning citizens’ declared right to the pursuit of happiness, dressed up as social entrepreneurship (we are all supposed to be authors of our lives) into the fear of freedom.

Therefore, one of the struggles to be launched against the plethora of pathologies haunting our societies would be to demand the economic responsibilisation of public authority vis-à-vis its citizens. Strategies of passive or active resistance, subversion, or even radical obstruction (in the spirit of the recent rise in anarchist activity in Europe) are missing the point. Paradoxically, we can be authors of our lives only if we have less responsibility for our material wellbeing – in order to direct our aspirations beyond economic and social survival. Let’s force the state do its job.

Albena Azmanova teaches political theory at the University of Kent in Brussels. Her book on political judgment The Scandal of Reason is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.

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Bin Laden's summary execution maketh the man, martyr and myth.

2011-05-04T17:30:00.000-05:00

Sydney Morning Herald

The US resembles the land of the munchkins as it celebrates the death of the wicked witch of the East. The joy is understandable but, to many outsiders, unattractive. It endorses what looks increasingly like a cold-blooded assassination ordered by a president who, as a former law professor, knows the absurdity of his statement that "justice was done".

Amoral diplomats and triumphant politicians join in applauding the summary execution of Osama bin Laden because they claim that real justice - arrest, trial and sentence - would have been too difficult in the case of public enemy No. 1. But should it not at least have been attempted?

The future depends on respect for international law, with which the US has always had an uneasy relationship. The circumstances of bin Laden's killing are unclear and the initial objection (by Pakistan's former president Pervez Musharraf and others) that the operation was an illegitimate invasion of state sovereignty must be rejected. This indicted and active international criminal needed to be captured, and Pakistan's abject failure to do so (whether through incompetence or connivance) justified Obama's order.

But the terms of that order, as yet undisclosed, are all important. Bill Clinton admitted recently he had secretly approved the assassination of bin Laden by the CIA in the 1990s, and George Bush publicly stated after September 11, 2001, that he wanted bin Laden's "head on a plate". Did Obama order his capture, or his execution?

Details of the ''firefight'' are still obscure. The law permits criminals to be shot if they or their accomplices resist arrest in ways that endanger those striving to apprehend them. They should be given the opportunity to surrender, if possible, but even if they do not come out with their hands up, they must be taken alive if that can be achieved without risk. Exactly how bin Laden came to be ''shot in the head'' therefore requires explanation. And why a hasty burial at sea without an autopsy, as the law requires?

The US is celebrating summary execution, rationalised on the basis that this is one terrorist for whom a trial would be unnecessary, difficult and dangerous. It overlooks the downsides - that killing bin Laden has made him a martyr, more dangerous in that posthumous role than in hiding, and that his legend and the conspiracy theories about September 11 will live on, undisputed by the evidence that would have been called to convict him.

Moreover, killing bin Laden gave him the consummation he most devoutly wished, namely a fast-track to paradise. His belief system required him to die mid-jihad, from an infidel bullet - not of old age on a prison farm in upstate New York. He would have refused any offer to surrender, and no doubt died with a smile on his lips.

I do not minimise the security problems of holding a trial or overlook the danger of it ending up as a squalid circus like that of Saddam Hussein. But the notion that any legal process would have been too hard must be rejected. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - also alleged to be an architect of September 11 - will go on trial shortly. Had bin Laden been captured he should have been in the dock alongside him, so that their shared responsibility could have been properly examined.

Bin Laden could not have been tried for the attacks on the twin towers at the International Criminal Court, since its jurisdiction only came into existence nine months later. But the United Nations Security Council could have set up an ad hoc tribunal in The Hague, with international judges (including Muslim jurists), to provide a fair trial and a reasoned verdict that would have convinced the Arab street of his guilt.

This would have been the best way of demystifying this man, debunking his cause and de-brainwashing his followers. In the dock he would have been reduced in stature - never more to be remembered as the tall, soulful figure on the mountain, but as a hateful and hate-filled old man. Since his videos exult in the killing of innocent civilians, any cross-examination would have emphasised his inhumanity. These benefits that flow from real justice have been forgone.

The obsessive belief of the US in capital punishment - alone among advanced nations - is reflected in its rejoicing at the manner of bin Laden's demise. Barack Obama has most likely secured re-election by approving the execution. This may be welcome, given the alternatives of Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee (who have both urged that Julian Assange be hunted down in similar fashion) or Donald Trump. But it is a sad reflection on the continuing attraction of summary execution.

It was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men more steeped in wickedness than bin Laden - the Nazi leaders - the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. The president Harry Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution "would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride . . . the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear".

He insisted upon judgment at Nuremberg, which has confounded Holocaust-deniers ever since. Killing bin Laden instead of capturing him was a missed opportunity to prove this charismatic leader was a vicious criminal, who deserved to die in prison, not as a martyr to his inhuman cause.

Geoffrey Robertson, QC, is the author of Crimes Against Humanity (New Press).

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How does radiation hurt us?

2011-04-21T21:54:00.000-05:00

Radiation is any type of energy that is sent out from a source. The light from the Sun -- or a light bulb -- is a form of radiation. So is the heat from a furnace. The energy is actually vibrations that span the so-called electromagnetic spectrum.

As the vibrations of matter increase (frequency), the length of the waves get smaller and smaller. Radio waves become heat which, if they continue to go faster, will become light, x-rays and gamma rays.

Not all radiation is harmful. Scientists distinguish between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. It's the ionizing radiation that is most harmful to life of every kind. This energy is strong enough and small enough to penetrate an atom and knock out an electron. Gamma rays, x-rays, some high-energy UV rays, and some sub-atomic particles such as alpha particles and protons are forms of ionizing radiation.

The dangerous effects of ionizing radiation come from the damage that can be done to the DNA molecule in the cells of living things.

The DNA molecule is made up of many different atoms which are held together by the electrons in their outer shell. Each atom has a specific number of electrons that allows it to attach or bind to other atoms. By changing the number of electrons in the outer shell of one atom, it cannot bind with its correct mate and mutations in the genetic code occur which eventually result in cancer.

The atomic damage can occur in a fraction of a second. Only one electron needs to be knocked out of one atom in one DNA molecule. Once the mutation has happened, damage may take months or years to manifest as cancer. Some cells are more vulnerable than others.

The thyroid gland and bone marrow are particularly sensitive to radiation. Leukemia, a type of cancer that arises in the bone marrow, is the most common radiation-induced cancer. Leukemias may appear as early as a few years after radiation exposure.

Other types of cancer strongly linked to radiation exposure in studies include:

Lung cancer
Skin cancer
Thyroid cancer
Multiple myeloma
Breast cancer
Stomach cancer

Radiation can sometimes be blocked by the skin, while other types can easily penetrate flesh. The worst damage happens when material which radiates the ionized energy (radioactive material) gets inside your body, either by inhaling or consuming it. This allows the source of the ionized radiation (for example, a small particle of radioactive material) to continuously bombard a small group of cells with which it is in physical contact. The statistical probability that an electron will be knocked out of a DNA related atom is then extremely high.

Embryos, fetuses, babies and young children are most vulnerable to ionized radiation because their cells are rapidly dividing and their bodies are growing. Mutations can express themselves more quickly and have a greater impact than in adults whose cell division has slowed.

Most of what we know about radiation and cancer comes from studying the atomic bomb survivors in Japan, people exposed during the Chernobyl nuclear accident, people treated with high doses of radiation for cancer and other conditions, and people exposed to high levels of radiation at work, such as uranium miners. Because these individuals were exposed to high levels of ionized radiation, the cause of their cancers and deaths are easy to assess. It's not so easy with lower exposures.

Getting an electron knocked out of an important DNA molecule in a vulnerable cell in your body is a rare occurrence, and it is random. It could happen the first time you are exposed to a radiation source -- or it may never happen. But the more you are exposed, the more likely it is that it will happen.

Scientists have determined that no amount of ionized radiation is healthy, since any amount can mutate your DNA. So-called "safe levels" of radiation are a misnomer. Statements such as "no immediate health risk" are also misleading and fail to acknowledge that the damage, although it may not be immediately apparent, will manifest in mutations, cancer or death in months or years to come.

The 10 Leading Theories For Dead Birds And Fish

2011-01-08T03:12:00.000-06:00

Nicholas West and Zen Gardner
Activist Post

As the mainstream media attempts to downplay the latest die-off event, which has now gone global, it is worthwhile to keep track of the story lines. Feel free to add your own to the comments section, and we will update accordingly.

Mainstream Explanations: Lightning, hail, mid-air collision, power lines, and New Year fireworks for the birds . . . but disease for the fish. This is even rolling eyes in the mainstream media. Birds are incredibly sensitive to their environment (think Canary in the coal mine), and the thought that they were caught by surprise, or that they "fowled" up their flight pattern is patently ridiculous. And where are the roasted birds from this lightning strike? And what about fish dying in the same region? Just a "disease" coincidence. One mainstream headline has to be enshrined as the saddest attempt at sensationalism, while revealing an obvious natural conclusion Falling Birds Likely Died From Massive Trauma. Really?

Meteor showers: We are in a period of intense seasonal meteor showers, and several perennial YouTubers reported hearing sonic booms in the area that could have indicated a local shock wave. This would be one non-conspiratorial, natural cause that actually makes sense, but it is hard to connect to both birds and fish, unless it produced a disabling frequency. There were indeed other sound anomalies according to the report highlighted above.

New Madrid Fault Line: An excellent article by The American Dream collated data about the recent earthquake activity along this fault line that runs along the mid-eastern section of the U.S. Combined with gas fracking, the immense geological activity in the region, and the BP oil drilling disaster, which off-gassed the dispersant, Corexit, into the atmosphere, and we should be wondering about any mass deaths in the region. Nevertheless, this has turned into a global event, so the above could be a side effect of something larger, or a direct contributing factor.

Government testing: The long history of government testing has been exposed by many researchers. The strange component to this die-off is that only certain species have been affected, but within the entire region. And some reports have indicated that the organs of these birds were liquefied, which could indicate a possible virus. Could this implicate species-specific bio-weapons? It is on record that discussions have taken place about race-specific bio-weapons; perhaps this is a test of delivery capability?

GMO mutation: Mike Adams of Natural News sets forth an interesting theory: this latest event is local, but the die-offs are happening across species as bee populations and bats are also declining. Adams points out that Monsanto has a corporate office in Arkansas. Just wondering.

Geoengineering: Could spraying in the area have caused this type of fallout? Perhaps something new added to the mixture? Chemtrails have quickly moved from conspiracy theory to documented fact. So much so, that the powers-that-be have had to admit to the program, but a beneficial one in their view. Between cloud seeding and possible connections to HAARP, chemtrail fallout must be considered, especially as it is being conducted nearly worldwide. Rosalind Peterson has been at the forefront of connecting geoengineering to GMOs as a combined source for oxygen-depleting algae blooms that very well could affect a wide spectrum of natural systems. Furthermore, some believe that the delivery system for chemtrails can also disperse pathogens. If there is a flu or disease outbreak in the coming days or weeks among the human population in areas where the birds have fallen, the chemtrail connection could be made. If this happens, the contagion could be blamed on a new, deadly bird flu. A last possibility connected to chemtrails would be nanoparticles.

HAARP: Birds and fish can be susceptible to subtle frequency alteration. An interesting YouTube post from a long-time fisherman mentioned the "pearl" plate behind the eye of the affected type of drum fish in this event. He made a plea for anyone in the area to look for signs of damage to this plate. Both birds and fish navigate in highly coordinated ways that indicate that they move and communicate via frequencies. Could the HAARP array in Alaska have short-circuited their navigation systems? Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a cascading effect from decades of electromagnetic pollution emanating from EMF and ELF waves shot around the planet via a wide range of modern communications.

Scalar Weapons: These directed energy beam weapons can be deployed via satellite and create a wide range of "natural disasters" that can be tuned to certain frequencies. Their radius is reported to be several miles. Even crazier is that we have been told that the dead birds encountered massive trauma. One of the reported abilities of scalar weapons is to create a Tesla shield of plasma, like a bubble, that could explode anything that enters its airspace. Some have speculated that this technology is in full operation. But what if it truly is still at the testing phase? Remember, this is happening in South America, too.

Project Blue Beam: Were they testing a sound generator for the global theater of alien invasion? This one is "out there" for sure, but NASA itself has announced its preparation for such a scenario. Project Blue Beam, like its counterpart HAARP, uses the natural energy present in the ionosphere as both a visual and acoustical device. Again, perhaps they are not at the ready stage yet, but, like Tesla, have made an unintentional misstep.

Geomagnetic and other Earth changes: As anyone can see from the above range of possibilities, we are facing an array of human tampering. However, the backdrop to this are the anomalies beginning to take form with the apparent wandering of our magnetic pole, as even National Geographic reported that the north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia. Add to this a dwindling magnetosphere and falling oxygen levels, and the deaths among more delicate species might portend a larger problem. Finally, an increase in sun activity and magnetic storms might be weakening our overall natural habitat.

The widespread die-off of nature should lead us to look more intently at the world around us, and to question our relationship to it, and our effect upon it. Perhaps this is what we should have been doing all along.

* Zen Gardner is the Contributing Editor for Alternative News at Before It's News, and also posts at ZenGardner.com.

The Gulf of Mexico is Dying

2010-12-28T02:46:00.001-06:00

A Special Report on the BP Gulf Oil Spill

by Dr. Tom Termotto

It is with deep regret that we publish this report. We do not take this responsibility lightly, as the consequences of the following observations are of such great import and have such far-reaching ramifications for the entire planet. Truly, the fate of the oceans of the world hangs in the balance, as does the future of humankind.

The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) does not exist in isolation and is, in fact, connected to the Seven Seas. Hence, we publish these findings in order that the world community will come together to further contemplate this dire and demanding predicament. We also do so with the hope that an appropriate global response will be formulated, and acted upon, for the sake of future generations. It is the most basic responsibility for every civilization to leave their world in a better condition than that which they inherited from their forbears.

After conducting the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference for over seven months, we can now disseminate the following information with the authority and confidence of those who have thoroughly investigated a crime scene. There are many research articles, investigative reports and penetrating exposes archived at the following website. Particularly those posted from August through November provide a unique body of evidence, many with compelling photo-documentaries, which portray the true state of affairs at the Macondo Prospect in the GOM.

http://phoenixrisingfromthegulf.wordpress.com/

The pictorial evidence tells the whole story.

Especially that the BP narrative is nothing but a corporate-created illusion – a web of fabrication spun in collaboration with the US Federal Government and Mainstream Media. Big Oil, as well as the Military-Industrial Complex, have aided and abetted this whole scheme and info blackout because the very future of the Oil & Gas Industry is at stake, as is the future of the US Empire which sprawls around the world and requires vast amounts of hydrocarbon fuel.

Should the truth seep out and into the mass consciousness – that the GOM is slowly but surely filling up with oil and gas – certainly many would rightly question the integrity, and sanity, of the whole venture, as well as the entire industry itself. And then perhaps the process would begin of transitioning the planet away from the hydrocarbon fuel paradigm altogether.

It’s not a pretty picture.

The various pictures, photos and diagrams that fill the many articles at the aforementioned website represent photo-evidence about the true state of affairs on the seafloor surrounding the Macondo Prospect in the Mississippi Canyon, which is located in the Central Planning Area of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The very dynamics of the dramatic changes and continuous evolution of the seafloor have been captured in ways that very few have ever seen. These snapshots have given us a window of understanding into the true state of the underlying geological formations around the various wells drilled in the Macondo Prospect.

Although our many deductions may be difficult for the layperson to apprehend at first, to the trained eye these are but obvious conclusions which are simply the result of cause and effect. In other words there is no dispute around the most serious geological changes which have occurred, and continue to occur, in the region around the Macondo wells. The original predicament (an 87 day gushing well) was extremely serious, as grasped by the entire world, and the existing situation is only going to get progressively worse.

So, just what does this current picture look like. Please click on the link below to view the relevant diagrams and read the commentary:

http://phoenixrisingfromthegulf.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/an-autopsy-of-the-bp-gulf-oil-well-at-the-macondo-prospect/

As the diagrams clearly indicate, the geology around the well bore has been blown. This occurred because of drilling contiguous to a salt dome(1), as well as because of the gas explosions which did much damage to the integrity of the well casing, cementing, well bore, well head, and foundation around the well head. Eighty-seven straight days of gushing hydrocarbon effluent under great pressure only served to further undermine the entire well system. Finally, when it was capped, putting the system back under pressure forced the upsurging hydrocarbons to find weaknesses throughout the greater system, which revealed all sorts of compromised, fractured and unsettled geology through which the hydrocarbons could travel all the way to the seafloor and into the GOM.

(1)“The rock beds in the vicinity of a salt dome are highly fractured and permeable due to stress and deformation which occur as the salt dome thrusted upwards.” (Per BK Lim, Geohazards Specialist)

We also have faults* to deal with in this scenario of which there are both deep and shallow. Depending on the current vital stats of the blown out well, especially its actual depth; the number, location and severity of the breaches throughout the well system; the pressure at the wellhead; as well as the type and status of geological formations/strata it has been drilled into, these faults will become prominently configured into the future stability of the whole region. Larger faults can open up much greater opportunities for the hydrocarbons to find their way to the seafloor via cracks and crevices, craters and chasms. In fact the numerous leaks and seeps throughout the seafloor surface, which are quite apparent from various ROV live-feeds, give testimony to sub-seafloor geological formations in great turmoil and undergoing unprecedented flux.

*“Once the oil gets into the shallow faulted zones, we have an uncontrollable situation. The place where most of the oil and gas is coming out is at the foot hills of the continental shelf as shown in figure 134-1 in the article “BP continues to dazzle us with their unlimited magic”. The discovery by WHOI of the 22 mile long river of oil originated from these leaks. So the leaks will be mainly along the faults where I have marked (shallow) in “What is going on at West Sirius” and deep strike-slip faults (red line) on fig 134-1.” (Per BK Lim, Geohazards Specialist)

Just how bad is this situation?

There are actually three different ongoing disasters – each more grave and challenging than the previous one – which must be considered when assessing the awesome destruction to the GOM by the Oil & Gas Industry.

I. A single gushing well at 7o – 100,000 barrels per day of hydrocarbon effluent for 87 days into the GOM at the Macondo Prospect along with two smaller rogue wells

II. Numerous leaks and seeps within five to ten square miles of the Macondo well with an aggregate outflow of an unknown amount of hydrocarbon effluent per day into the GOM

III. Countless gushers and spills, leaks and seeps, throughout the Gulf of Mexico, where drilling has been conducted for many decades, with an aggregate outflow that can not even be estimated, but is well in excess of any guesstimate which would ensure the slow and steady demise of the GOM.

It is the last scenario which we all face and to which there is no easy or obvious solution. The truth be told, there currently does not exist the technology or machinery or equipment to repair the damage that has been wrought by the process of deep undersea drilling, especially when it is performed in the wrong place. Therefore, wherever the oil and gas find points of entry into the GOM through the seafloor, these leaks and seeps will only continue to get worse. Here’s why:

Methane gas mixed with saltwater and mud makes for a very potent corrosive agent. Under high pressure it will find every point of egress through the rock and sediment formations all the way up to the seafloor where it will find any point of exit that is available. The longer and more forcefully that it flows throughout the fractured area, which is dependent on the volume, temperature and pressure at the source of the hydrocarbons, the more its corrosive effects will widen, broaden and enlarge the channels, cracks and crevices throughout the sub-seafloor geology, thereby creating a predicament that no science, technology or equipment can remedy.

Dire realities of the methane hydrate predicament

The Macondo Prospect in the GOM is just one of many throughout the oceans of the world where the seafloor has beds of methane hydrate locked in place by very high pressure and low temperatures. Likewise, there are myriad repositories and large “reservoirs” of methane clathrates in the sub-seafloor strata, and especially within the more superficial geological formations, which are being greatly impacted by all oil and gas drilling and extraction activities. It does not take much imagination to understand how the upsurging hydrocarbons (very hot oil and gas) are quickly converting the frozen hydrates to gas, thereby causing innumerable “micro-displacements”, the cumulative effect of which will translate to larger “macro-displacements” of rock, sediment and other geological formations.

When you factor in this constant vaporization of methane hydrates/clathrates both sub-seafloor as well as those scattered around the seafloor surface to the existing scenario, this devolving situation becomes that much more difficult to effectively remedy. With the resulting shifts and resettling and reconfiguration of the entire seafloor terrain and underlying strata occurring in the wake of these dynamics, we are left with a situation that is not going to get better through the use of even more invasive technology and intrusive machinery.

Question: How many times can you grout a seafloor crack that was caused by an underlying superficial fault after drilling into an old mud volcano?

Answer: “In the attempt to seal the oil from oozing through the faults, BP resorted to high pressure grouting. Basically it is like cementing the cracks in the rock by injecting grout (cement mixture) at high pressure. The way they do this is by drilling an injection hole into the shallow rocks and pumping in the grout. The grout in “slurry” state will permeate into the cracks, cure and seal up the cracks. However it is not working because of the presence of gas and oil. It is like super-glue. You need to clean the surfaces before you apply the glue; otherwise it won’t stick and will come off eventually after a few days or weeks. That is why we can see a few blown out craters – shown in my article – Is the last rite for the Macondo Well for real?” (Per BK Lim, Geohazards Specialist)

Likewise, how do you fill a newly emerging gash in the seafloor which is caused by a deep fault due to low level seismic activity, or worse, a full blown earthquake?!

Seismic activity in the GOM and the uptick in earthquakes in the Mississippi River Basin and surrounding region

The oil and gas platforms that were in operation throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2006 (per Wikipedia).

We now come to the most serious issue regarding the relentless drilling for oil and gas throughout the Gulf of Mexico. The map above clearly illustrates the density of drilling throughout the northern GOM as of 2006. Likewise, the map below demonstrates the extraordinary and increasing intensity of these very same operations off the coast of Louisiana alone.

Green lines represent active pipes (25,000 miles in all). Yellow dots represent oil rigs.

The map that follows, however, tells a story which demands the attention of every resident of the GOM coastline. The video link below the map shows the development timeline of the successively deeper wells being drilled during the last decade. Of course, with greater depths come much greater risks, as the technology and machinery have not been proportionately upgraded to accommodate the extraordinary demands and unforeseen contingencies of such a speculative and dangerous enterprise*.

*Oil and gas drilling in seawater depths of over 4000 feet, and through 15,000 to 25,000 feet of the earth’s crust and mantle, is considered extremely dangerous to those from whom reason and common sense have not yet fled.

Click on the map to enlarge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh_wNVUx9SI

It’s critical to understand the location and current activity of the various faults which exist throughout the GOM and how they connect to the New Madrid Fault Line, as well as other major faults at much greater distance. There does appear to be a emerging uptick in earthquake activity in the greater Louisiana area, as well as contiguous regions in the GOM as demonstrated by unprecedented, albeit low level earthquakes. Correlations between these earthquakes/seismic activity and major operations at the Macondo Prospect have been alluded to in our previous postings.
Earthquake Activity in Gulf of Mexico Prompts 2003 Study for MMS
Gulf of Mexico Subsea Structures May Be in Seismic Danger Zone – Part 2

Now then, the question remains just how vulnerable has the GOM been made to a truly catastrophic event, ending up with an overwhelming displacement of water producing tidal waves, in the aftermath of an undersea earthquake.

There is no question that the ceaseless fracturing of the seafloor and fissuring of the sub-seafloor geological strata by the Oil & Gas Industry has set up a quite conducive environment for HUGE unintended consequences. We leave it up to the experts to conduct the necessary risk assessments, which will most assuredly let loose a sea of red flags about what Big Oil has done, and is currently doing, in the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, we are deeply concerned that, if a permanent moratorium on all new oil and gas drilling and extraction in the GOM is not put into place poste haste, the coastal communities will remain in a very precarious situation.

Worsening GOM predicament is reflective of the status quo around the globe

Now consider the following scenario: that this very same predicament, which we have all witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico, is happening wherever oil and gas drilling is conducted in the various water bodies throughout the planet. Therefore we can multiply the Macondo Prospect disaster a hundred times and still not come close to the impacts that these ongoing gushers and spills, leaks and seeps are having the world over.

Perhaps the BP Gulf Oil Spill was the defining moment in modern history when all the nations of the world community were called by Mother Earth herself to begin transitioning the planet away from the Hydrocarbon Fuel Paradigm. After all, we may never get another chance!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Transitioning-The-Planet-Away-From-The-Hydrocarbon-Fuel-Paradigm/154984831192787?v=wall&ref=ts

Tom Termotto is National Coordinator of the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference

OilSpillSolution@comcast.net
SKYPE: Gulf_Advocate
http://oilspillsolutionsnow.org/

Towards a World War III Scenario? The Role of Israel in Triggering an Attack on Iran Part II The Military Road Map

2010-08-28T22:01:00.001-05:00

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, August 13, 2010

To consult Part I of this essay click below

Preparing for World War III, Targeting Iran
Part I: Global Warfare
- by Michel Chossudovsky - 2010-08-01

The stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the US, in liaison with NATO and Israel.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. US military sources intimated that an aerial attack on Iran could involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003:

"American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq.(See Globalsecurity )

"Theater Iran Near Term"

Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT, "Theater Iran Near Term", simulations of an attack on Iran were initiated in May 2003 "when modelers and intelligence specialists pulled together the data needed for theater-level (meaning large-scale) scenario analysis for Iran." ( (William Arkin, Washington Post, 16 April 2006).

The scenarios identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a "Shock and Awe" Blitzkrieg:

"The analysis, called TIRANNT, for "Theater Iran Near Term," was coupled with a mock scenario for a Marine Corps invasion and a simulation of the Iranian missile force. U.S. and British planners conducted a Caspian Sea war game around the same time. And Bush directed the U.S. Strategic Command to draw up a global strike war plan for an attack against Iranian weapons of mass destruction. All of this will ultimately feed into a new war plan for "major combat operations" against Iran that military sources confirm now [April 2006] exists in draft form.

... Under TIRANNT, Army and U.S. Central Command planners have been examining both near-term and out-year scenarios for war with Iran, including all aspects of a major combat operation, from mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change." (William Arkin, Washington Post, 16 April 2006)

Different "theater scenarios" for an all out attack on Iran had been contemplated: "The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerized plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near Term)." (New Statesman, February 19, 2007)

In 2004, drawing upon the initial war scenarios under TIRANNT, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a "contingency plan" of a large scale military operation directed against Iran "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States" on the presumption that the government in Tehran would be behind the terrorist plot. The plan included the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state:

"The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." (Philip Giraldi, Deep Background,The American Conservative August 2005)

The Military Road Map: "First Iraq, then Iran"

The decision to target Iran under TIRANNT was part of the broader process of military planning and sequencing of military operations. Already under the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated "in war theater plans" to invade first Iraq and then Iran. Access to Middle East oil was the stated strategic objective:

"The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President's National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Chairman's National Military Strategy (NMS) form the foundation of the United States Central Command's theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM's theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States' vital interest in the region - uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil." (USCENTCOM, http://www.milnet.com/milnet/pentagon/centcom/chap1/stratgic.htm#USPolicy, link no longer active, archived at http://tinyurl.com/37gafu9)

The war on Iran was viewed as part of a succession of military operations. According to (former) NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, the Pentagon's military road-map consisted of a sequence of countries: "[The] Five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan." In "Winning Modern Wars" (page 130) General Clark states the following:

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. (See Secret 2001 Pentagon Plan to Attack Lebanon, Global Research, July 23, 2006)

The Role of Israel

There has been much debate regarding the role of Israel in initiating an attack against Iran.

Israel is part of a military alliance. Tel Aviv is not a prime mover. It does not have a separate and distinct military agenda.

Israel is integrated into the "war plan for major combat operations" against Iran formulated in 2006 by US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). In the context of large scale military operations, an uncoordinated unilateral military action by one coalition partner, namely Israel, is from a military and strategic point almost an impossibility. Israel is a de facto member of NATO. Any action by Israel would require a "green light" from Washington.

An attack by Israel could, however, be used as "the trigger mechanism" which would unleash an all out war against Iran, as well retaliation by Iran directed against Israel.

In this regard, there are indications that Washington might envisage the option of an initial (US backed) attack by Israel rather than an outright US-led military operation directed against Iran. The Israeli attack --although led in close liaison with the Pentagon and NATO-- would be presented to public opinion as a unilateral decision by Tel Aviv. It would then be used by Washington to justify, in the eyes of World opinion, a military intervention of the US and NATO with a view to "defending Israel", rather than attacking Iran. Under existing military cooperation agreements, both the US and NATO would be "obligated" to "defend Israel" against Iran and Syria.

It is worth noting, in this regard, that at the outset of Bush's second term, (former) Vice President Dick Cheney hinted, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of the "rogue enemies" of America, and that Israel would, so to speak, "be doing the bombing for us", without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them "to do it" (See Michel Chossudovsky, Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran, Global Research, May 1, 2005): According to Cheney:

"One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked... Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," (Dick Cheney, quoted from an MSNBC Interview, January 2005)

Commenting the Vice President's assertion, former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in an interview on PBS, confirmed with some apprehension, yes: Cheney wants Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to act on America's behalf and "do it" for us:

"Iran I think is more ambiguous. And there the issue is certainly not tyranny; it's nuclear weapons. And the vice president today in a kind of a strange parallel statement to this declaration of freedom hinted that the Israelis may do it and in fact used language which sounds like a justification or even an encouragement for the Israelis to do it."

What we are dealing with is a joint US-NATO-Israel military operation to bomb Iran, which has been in the active planning stage since 2004. Officials in the Defense Department, under Bush and Obama, have been working assiduously with their Israeli military and intelligence counterparts, carefully identifying targets inside Iran. In practical military terms, any action by Israel would have to be planned and coordinated at the highest levels of the US led coalition.

An attack by Israel would also require coordinated US-NATO logistical support, particularly with regard to Israel's air defense system, which since January 2009 is fully integrated into that of the US and NATO. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Unusually Large U.S. Weapons Shipment to Israel: Are the US and Israel Planning a Broader Middle East War? Global Research, January 11,2009)

Israel's X band radar system established in early 2009 with US technical support has "integrate[d] Israel’s missile defenses with the U.S. global missile [Space-based] detection network, which includes satellites, Aegis ships on the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and land-based Patriot radars and interceptors." (Defense Talk.com, January 6, 2009,)

What this means is that Washington ultimately calls the shots. The US rather than Israel controls the air defense system: '''This is and will remain a U.S. radar system,' Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said. 'So this is not something we are giving or selling to the Israelis and it is something that will likely require U.S. personnel on-site to operate.'" (Quoted in Israel National News, January 9, 2009).

The US military oversees Israel's Air Defense system, which is integrated into the Pentagon's global system. In other words, Israel cannot launch a war against Iran without Washington's consent. Hence the importance of the so-called "Green Light" legislation in the US Congress sponsored by the Republican party under House Resolution 1553, which explicitly supports an Israeli attakc on Iran:

"The measure, introduced by Texas Republican Louie Gohmert and 46 of his colleagues, endorses Israel’s use of “all means necessary” against Iran “including the use of military force.” ... “We’ve got to get this done. We need to show our support for Israel. We need to quit playing games with this critical ally in such a difficult area.”’ (See Webster Tarpley, Fidel Castro Warns of Imminent Nuclear War; Admiral Mullen Threatens Iran; US-Israel Vs. Iran-Hezbollah Confrontation Builds On, Global Research, August 10, 2010)

In practice, the proposed legislation is a "Green Light" to the White House and the Pentagon rather than to Israel. It constitutes a rubber stamp to a US sponsored war on Iran which uses Israel as a convenient military launch pad. It also serves as a justification to wage war with a view to defending Israel.

In this context, Israel could indeed provide the pretext to wage war, in response to alleged Hamas or Hezbollah attacks and/or the triggering of hostilities on the border of Israel with Lebanon. What is crucial to understand is that a minor "incident" could be used as a pretext to spark off a major military operation against Iran.

Known to US military planners, Israel (rather than the USA) would be the first target of military retaliation by Iran. Broadly speaking, Israelis would be the victims of the machinations of both Washington and their own government. It is, in this regard, absolutely crucial that Israelis forcefully oppose any action by the Netanyahu government to attack Iran.

Global Warfare: The Role of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)

Global military operations are coordinated out of US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska, in liaison with the regional commands of the unified combatant commands (e.g.. US Central Command in Florida, which is responsible for the Middle East-Central Asian region, See map below) as well as coalition command units in Israel, Turkey, the Persian Gulf and the Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean. Military planning and decision making at a country level by individual allies of US-NATO as well as "partner nations" is integrated into a global military design including the weaponization of space.

Under its new mandate, USSTRATCOM has a responsibility for "overseeing a global strike plan" consisting of both conventional and nuclear weapons. In military jargon, it is slated to play the role of "a global integrator charged with the missions of Space Operations; Information Operations; Integrated Missile Defense; Global Command & Control; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Global Strike; and Strategic Deterrence.... "

USSTRATCOM's responsibilities include: "leading, planning, & executing strategic deterrence operations" at a global level, "synchronizing global missile defense plans and operations", "synchronizing regional combat plans", etc. USSTRATCOM is the lead agency in the coordination of modern warfare.

In January 2005, at the outset of the military deployment and build-up directed against Iran, USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." (Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Global Research, January 3, 2006).

What this means is that the coordination of a large scale attack on Iran, including the various scenarios of escalation in and beyond the broader Middle East Central Asian region would be coordinated by USSTRATCOM.

Map: US Central Command's Area of Jurisdiction

Tactical Nuclear Weapons directed against Iran

Confirmed by military documents as well as official statements, both the US and Israel contemplate the use of nuclear weapons directed against Iran. In 2006, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) announced it had achieved an operational capability for rapidly striking targets around the globe using nuclear or conventional weapons. This announcement was made after the conduct of military simulations pertaining to a US led nuclear attack against a fictional country. (David Ruppe, Preemptive Nuclear War in a State of Readiness: U.S. Command Declares Global Strike Capability, Global Security Newswire, December 2, 2005)

Continuity in relation to the Bush-Cheney era: President Obama has largely endorsed the doctrine of pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons formulated by the previous administration. Under the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Obama administration confirmed "that it is reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against Iran" for its non-compliance with US demands regarding its alleged (nonexistent) nuclear weapons program. (U.S. Nuclear Option on Iran Linked to Israeli Attack Threat - IPS ipsnews.net, April 23, 2010). The Obama administration has also intimated that it would use nukes in the case of an Iranian response to an Israeli attack on Iran. (Ibid). Israel has also drawn up its own "secret plans" to bomb Iran with tactical nuclear weapons:

"Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said."(Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran - Times Online, January 7, 2007)

Obama's statements on the use of nuclear weapons against Iran and North Korea are consistent with post 9/11 US nuclear weapons doctrine, which allows for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the conventional war theater.

Through a propaganda campaign which has enlisted the support of "authoritative" nuclear scientists, mini-nukes are upheld as an instrument of peace, namely a means to combating "Islamic terrorism" and instating Western style "democracy" in Iran. The low-yield nukes have been cleared for "battlefield use". They are slated to be used against Iran and Syria in the next stage of America's "war on Terrorism" alongside conventional weapons.

"Administration officials argue that low-yield nuclear weapons are needed as a credible deterrent against rogue states. [Iran, Syria, North Korea] Their logic is that existing nuclear weapons are too destructive to be used except in a full-scale nuclear war. Potential enemies realize this, thus they do not consider the threat of nuclear retaliation to be credible. However, low-yield nuclear weapons are less destructive, thus might conceivably be used. That would make them more effective as a deterrent." (Opponents Surprised By Elimination of Nuke Research Funds Defense News November 29, 2004)

The preferred nuclear weapon to be used against Iran are tactical nuclear weapons (Made in America), namely bunker buster bombs with nuclear warheads (e.g. B61.11), with an explosive capacity between one third to six times a Hiroshima bomb. The B61-11 is the "nuclear version" of the "conventional" BLU 113. or Guided Bomb Unit GBU-28. It can be delivered in much same way as the conventional bunker buster bomb. (See Michel Chossudovsky, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO112C.html, see also http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf03norris) . While the US does not contemplate the use of strategic thermonuclear weapons against Iran, Israel's nuclear arsenal is largely composed of thermonuclear bombs which are deployed and could be used in a war with Iran. Under Israel's Jericho‐III missile system with a range between 4,800 km to 6,500 km, all Iran would be within reach.

Conventional bunker buster Guided Bomb Unit GBU-27

B61 bunker buster bomb

Radiactive Fallout

The issue of radioactive fallout and contamination, while casually dismissed by US-NATO military analysts, would be devastating, potentially affecting a large area of the broader Middle East (including Israel) and Central Asian region.

In an utterly twisted logic, nuclear weapons are presented as a means to building peace and preventing "collateral damage". Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons are a threat to global security, whereas those of the US and Israel are instruments of peace" harmless to the surrounding civilian population".

"The Mother of All Bombs" (MOAB) Slated to be Used against Iran

Of military significance within the US conventional weapons arsenal is the 21,500-pound "monster weapon" nicknamed the "mother of all bombs" The GBU-43/B or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB) was categorized "as the most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever designed" with the the largest yield in the US conventional arsenal. The MOAB was tested in early March 2003 before being deployed to the Iraq war theater. According to US military sources, The Joint Chiefs of Staff had advised the government of Saddam Hussein prior to launching the 2003 that the "mother of all bombs" was to be used against Iraq. (There were unconfirmed reports that it had been used in Iraq).

The US Department of Defence has confirmed in October 2009 that it intends to use the "Mother of All Bombs" (MOAB) against Iran. The MOAB is said to be "ideally suited to hit deeply buried nuclear facilities such as Natanz or Qom in Iran" (Jonathan Karl, Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? ABC News, October 9, 2009). The truth of the matter is that the MOAB, given its explosive capacity, would result in extremely large civilian casualties. It is a conventional "killing machine" with a nuclear type mushroom cloud.

The procurement of four MOABs was commissioned in October 2009 at the hefty cost of $58.4 million, ($14.6 million for each bomb). This amount includes the costs of development and testing as well as integration of the MOAB bombs onto B-2 stealth bombers.(Ibid). This procurement is directly linked to war preparations in relation to Iran. The notification was contained in a 93-page "reprogramming memo" which included the following instructions:

"The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high threat environments. The MOP [Mother of All Bombs] is the weapon of choice to meet the requirements of the UON [Urgent Operational Need]." It further states that the request is endorsed by Pacific Command (which has responsibility over North Korea) and Central Command (which has responsibility over Iran)." (ABC News, op cit, emphasis added). To consult the reprogramming request (pdf) click here

The Pentagon is planning on a process of extensive destruction of Iran's infrastructure and mass civilian casualties through the combined use of tactical nukes and monster conventional mushroom cloud bombs, including the MOAB and the larger GBU-57A/B or Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which surpasses the MOAB in terms of explosive capacity.

The MOP is described as "a powerful new bomb aimed squarely at the underground nuclear facilities of Iran and North Korea. The gargantuan bomb—longer than 11 persons standing shoulder-to-shoulder [see image below] or more than 20 feet base to nose" (See Edwin Black, "Super Bunker-Buster Bombs Fast-Tracked for Possible Use Against Iran and North Korea Nuclear Programs", Cutting Edge, September 21 2009)

These are WMDs in the true sense of the word. The not so hidden objective of the MOAB and MOP, including the American nickname used to casually describe the MOAB ("mother of all bombs'), is "mass destruction" and mass civilian casualties with a view to instilling fear and despair.

"Mother of All Bombs" (MOAB)

GBU-57A/B Mass Ordnance Penetrator (MOP)

MOAB: screen shots of test: explosion and mushroom cloud

State of the Art Weaponry: "War Made Possible Through New Technologies"

The process of US military decision making in relation to Iran is supported by Star Wars, the militarization of outer space and the revolution in communications and information systems. Given the advances in military technology and the development of new weapons systems, an attack on Iran could be significantly different in terms of the mix of weapons systems, when compared to the March 2003 Blitzkrieg launched against Iraq. The Iran operation is slated to use the most advanced weapons systems in support of its aerial attacks. In all likelihood, new weapons systems will be tested.

The 2000 Project of the New American Century (PNAC) document entitled Rebuilding American Defenses, outlined the mandate of the US military in terms of large scale theater wars, to be waged simultaneously in different regions of the World:

"Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars".

This formulation is tantamount to a global war of conquest by a single imperial superpower. The PNAC document also called for the transformation of U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs", namely the implementation of "war made possible through new technologies". (See Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses Washington DC, September 2000, pdf). The latter consists in developing and perfecting a state of the art global killing machine based on an arsenal of sophisticated new weaponry, which would eventually replace the existing paradigms.

"Thus, it can be foreseen that the process of transformation will in fact be a two-stage process: first of transition, then of more thoroughgoing transformation. The breakpoint will come when a preponderance of new weapons systems begins to enter service, perhaps when, for example, unmanned aerial vehicles begin to be as numerous as manned aircraft. In this regard, the Pentagon should be very wary of making large investments in new programs – tanks, planes, aircraft carriers, for example – that would commit U.S. forces to current paradigms of warfare for many decades to come. (Ibid, emphasis added)

The war on Iran could indeed mark this crucial breakpoint, with new space-based weapons systems being applied with a view to disabling an enemy which has significant conventional military capabilities including more than half a million ground forces.

Electromagnetic Weapons

Electromagnetic weapons could be used to destabilize Iran's communications systems, disable electric power generation, undermine and destabilize command and control, government infrastructure, transportation, energy, etc. Within the same family of weapons, environmental modifications techniques (ENMOD) (weather warfare) developed under the HAARP programme could also be applied. (See Michel Chossudovsky, "Owning the Weather" for Military Use, Global Research, September 27, 2004). These weapons systems are fully operational. In this context, te US Air Force document AF 2025 explicitly acknowledgedthe military applications of weather modification technologies:

"Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally... It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, improve communications through ionospheric modification (the use of ionospheric mirrors), and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power." (Air Force 2025 Final Report, See also US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, AF2025 v3c15-1 | Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning... | (Ch 1) at www.fas.org).

Electromagnetic radiation enabling "remote health impairment" might also be envisaged in the war theater. (See Mojmir Babacek, Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons:, Global Research, August 6, 2004). In turn, new uses of biological weapons by the US military might also be envisaged as suggested by the PNAC: "[A]dvanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." (PNAC, op cit., p. 60).

Iran's Military Capabilities: Medium and Long Range Missiles

Iran has advanced military capabilities, including medium and long range missiles capable of reaching targets in Israel and the Gulf States. Hence the emphasis by the US-NATO Israel alliance on the use of nuclear weapons, which are slated to be used either pr-emptively or in response to an Iranian retaliatory missile attack.

Range of Iran's Shahab Missiles. Copyright Washington Post

In November 2006, Iran tests of surface missiles 2 were marked by precise planning in a carefully staged operation. According to a senior American missile expert (quoted by Debka), "the Iranians demonstrated up-to-date missile-launching technology which the West had not known them to possess." (See Michel Chossudovsky, Iran's "Power of Deterrence" Global Research, November 5, 2006) Israel acknowledged that "the Shehab-3, whose 2,000-km range brings Israel, the Middle East and Europe within reach" (Debka, November 5, 2006)

According to Uzi Rubin, former head of Israel's anti-ballistic missile program, "the intensity of the military exercise was unprecedented... It was meant to make an impression -- and it made an impression." (www.cnsnews.com 3 November 2006)

The 2006 exercises, while creating a political stir in the US and Israel, did not in any way modify US-NATO-Israeli resolve to wage on Iran.

Tehran has confirmed in several statements that it will respond if it is attacked. Israel would be the immediate object of Iranian missile attacks as confirmed by the Iranian government. The issue of Israel's air defense system is therefore crucial. US and allied military facilities in the Gulf states, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq could also be targeted by Iran.

Iran's Ground Forces

While Iran is encircled by US and allied military bases, the Islamic Republic has significant military capabilities. (See maps below) What is important to acknowledge is the sheer size of Iranian forces in terms of personnel (army, navy, air force) when compared to US and NATO forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Confronted with a well organized insurgency, coalition forces are already overstretched in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Would these forces be able to cope if Iranian ground forces were to enter the existing battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan? The potential of the Resistance movement to US and allied occupation would inevitably be affected.

Iranian ground forces are of the order of 700,000 of which 130,000 are professional soldiers, 220,000 are conscripts and 350,000 are reservists. (See Islamic Republic of Iran Army - Wikipedia). There are 18,000 personnel in Iran's Navy and 52,000 in the air force. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "the Revolutionary Guards has an estimated 125,000 personnel in five branches: Its own Navy, Air Force, and Ground Forces; and the Quds Force (Special Forces)." According to the CISS, Iran's Basij paramilitary volunteer force controlled by the Revolutionary Guards "has an estimated 90,000 active-duty full-time uniformed members, 300,000 reservists, and a total of 11 million men that can be mobilized if need be" (Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Wikipedia), In other words, Iran can mobilize up to half a million regular troops and several million militia. Its Quds special forces are already operating inside Iraq.

US Military and Allied Facilties Surrounding Iran

For several years now Iran has been conducting its own war drills and exercises. While its Air force has weaknesses, its intermediate and long-range missiles are fully operational. Iran's military is in a state of readiness. Iranian troop concentrations are currently within a few kilometers of the Iraqi and Afghan borders, and within proximity of Kuwait. The Iranian Navy is deployed in the Persian Gulf within proximity of US and allied military facilities in the United Arab Emirates.

It is worth noting that in response to Iran's military build-up, the US has been transferring large amounts of weapons to its non-NATO allies in the Persian Gulf including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

While Iran's advanced weapons do not measure up to those of the US and NATO, Iranian forces would be in a position to inflict substantial losses to coalition forces in a conventional war theater, on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Iranian ground troops and tanks in December 2009 crossed the border into Iraq without being confronted or challenged by allied forces and occupied a disputed territory in the East Maysan oil field.

Even in the event of an effective Blitzkrieg, which targets Iran's military facilities, its communications systems, etc. through massive aerial bombing, using cruise missiles, conventional bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons, a war with Iran, once initiated, could eventually lead into a ground war. This is something which US military planners have no doubt contemplated in their simulated war scenarios.

An operation of this nature would result in significant military and civilian casualties, particularly if nuclear weapons are used.

The expanded budget for the war in Afghanistan currently debated in the US Congress is also intended to be used in the eventuality of an attack on Iran.

Within a scenario of escalation, Iranian troops could cross the border into Iraq and Afghanistan.

In turn, military escalation using nuclear weapons could lead us into a World War III scenario, extending beyond the Middle East Central Asian region.

In a very real sense, this military project, which has been on the Pentagon's drawing board for more than five years, threatens the future of humanity.

Our focus in this essay has been on war preparations. The fact that war preparations are in an advanced state of readiness does not imply that these war plans will be carried out.

The US-NATO-Israel alliance realizes that the enemy has significant capabilities to respond and retaliate. This factor in itself has been crucial over the last five years in the decision by the US and its allies to postpone an attack on Iran.

Another crucial factor is the structure of military alliances. Whereas NATO has become a formidable force, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which constitutes an alliance between Russia and China and a number of former Soviet republics has been significantly weakened.

The ongoing US military threats directed against China and Russia are intended to weaken the SCO and discourage any form of military action on the part of Iran's allies in the case of a US NATO Israeli attack.

What are the countervailing forces which might prevent this war from occurring? There are numerous ongoing forces at work within the US State apparatus, the US Congress, the Pentagon and NATO.

The central force in preventing a war from occurring ultimately comes from the base of society, requiring forceful antiwar action by hundred of millions of people across the land, nationally and internationally.

People must mobilize not only against this diabolical military agenda, the authority of the State and its officials must be also be challenged.

This war can be prevented if people forcefully confront their governments, pressure their elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens as to the implications of a nuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the armed forces.

The holding of mass demonstrations and antiwar protests is not enough. What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network which challenges the structures of power and authority.

What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of war, a global people's movement which criminalizes war.

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. he can be reached at the globalresearch.ca website

Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown

2010-04-22T12:35:00.001-05:00

Thousands of people in one county of southern China have been sterilized in just days as part of a crackdown on violations of the country’s controversial one-child policy.

A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.

Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.

Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.

The brother of 38-year-old Zhang Lizhao, who is the father of two young sons, was detained while Zhang was out of town buying supplies for his wholesale fruit business. Zhang rushed home to get sterilized – after his wife was already forced to have the same operation – so that his brother would be released.

“This morning my wife called me and said they were forcing her to be sterilised today,” Zhang said. “She pleaded with the clinic to wait because she has her period. But they would not wait a single day. I called and begged them but they said no. So I have rushed back. I am satisfied because I have two sons.”

Another man being held is the 68-year-old father of Huang Ruifeng, whose son has three daughters. Huang is refusing to submit to the surgery because he wants his wife to give birth to a son. He also said that he was too busy to attend hospital and that he did not have confidence in local medical techniques.

About 100 people were being held in one family planning center that was just 2,150 square feet in size. Detainees huddled together on the mats provided, which did not leave enough space for everyone to lie down at the same time.

“It’s not uncommon for family planning authorities to adopt some tough tactics,” said an official at the Puning Population and Family Planning Bureau, who declined to be identified.

The detentions are the latest tactic in the county’s bid to reduce violations of the rules as part of a bid to secure Puning second-tier county status. Couples with illegal children or their relatives who apply for permits to build a house are rejected. Illegal children are also refused residency registration, a penalty that denies them access to healthcare and education.

The county is under criticism from provincial authorities to slow a population growth that is reflecting badly on the entire province. One reason for Puning’s large population is that families in the mainly rural region often have up to three or four children.

However one official said that an investigation would be launched to establish whether authorities in Puning had exceeded their remit. A state-level regulation stipulates that couples who violate the one-child policy must not be punished without proper authorization and family members may not be penalized to put pressure on couples.

Rules in Puning, as throughout rural China, allow farmers to have a second child if the first is a daughter. After that couples must stop. The population control policy, referred to by the Chinese Government as the family planning policy, has been in force since 1978. Weird Asia News

Goldman Sachs ‘Buy’ Ratings at 5-Year High Undaunted by SEC

2010-04-20T22:50:00.002-05:00

By Lynn Thomasson

Allegations that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. deceived its customers have done little to hurt Wall Street’s stock recommendation, the most bullish since 2005.

Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG, Citigroup Inc. and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. reiterated “buy” ratings on the New York-based company since April 16, when the Securities and

Exchange Commission filed a fraud suit that has sent the shares down 11 percent. Twenty-two firms advise that clients purchase Goldman Sachs, which may say today that first-quarter profit rose 22 percent from a year earlier to $4.14 a share. One, Oppenheimer & Co., downgraded the stock since the claims were announced, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Analysts are speculating Goldman Sachs will preserve its reputation and benefit from an expanding economy that helped lift its shares 214 percent since November 2008. The stock climbed 1.6 percent yesterday after two people with knowledge of the vote said the SEC split 3-2 along party lines to approve the enforcement action.

“I didn’t sell any,” said Stephen Lieber, chief investment officer of Alpine Woods Capital Investors LLC, which manages more than $7 billion, including Goldman Sachs shares, from Purchase, New York. “Do we have sufficient information to provide an overall take at this point? No. The underlying business of Goldman Sachs remains a suitable investment.”

Picking CDOs

The SEC said Goldman Sachs sold collateralized debt obligations tied to subprime mortgages in 2007 without disclosing that New York-based hedge fund Paulson & Co. helped pick the underlying securities. The actions were fraudulent because Goldman Sachs didn’t tell investors that Paulson was betting against the CDOs, according to the complaint. The bank said the allegations are unfounded.

The sell-off in Goldman Sachs was an overreaction to the SEC charges, said Michael Carrier, who covers the company for Deutsche Bank in New York. He kept his “buy” rating and said valuations remain attractive, according to an April 16 note.

Goldman Sachs trades at 9 times projected profit for 2010, half the average multiple for financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The stock has lost 3.3 percent in 2010.

“The market is looking at this as if this were a franchise-destroying issue,” Brad Hintz, an analyst for New York-based Bernstein, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It isn’t.”

Earnings Power

While the charges against Goldman Sachs may lead to stricter regulatory reform and a short-term loss of business from public pension funds, they probably won’t cause “massive” changes to earnings, wrote UBS’s Glenn Schorr on April 16. The analyst for the Zurich-based bank predicts the stock may rise 29 percent in the next year.

Chris Kotowski of Oppenheimer was the only analyst of 29 covering the firm to change his recommendation following the SEC’s lawsuit. He cut his rating to “perform” from “outperform,” citing vulnerability to more lawsuits and fines.

“It’s not a good thing to have your primary regulator hunting after you and the SEC clearly has an agenda,” Kotowski said in an April 19 phone interview from New York. “It’s a risk factor that you don’t really need to take.”

Goldman Sachs is the third highest-rated company among analysts covering banks, brokerages and insurers in the S&P 500. The stock carries a rating of 4.48, calculated from analyst “buy,” “sell” and “hold” ratings that are compiled by Bloomberg, plotted on a 1-to-5 scale and averaged. The figure trails New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Increased takeovers, improving capital markets and a cheap valuation may help drive Goldman Sachs shares up 30 percent in the next year, estimates tracked by Bloomberg show. The projected gain is the 15th highest in the U.S. equity benchmark.

“There are certainly people who are sanguine enough to say it’s an even better buy now,” said John Wilson, chief technical strategist at Morgan Keegan & Co., which manages about $120 billion in Memphis, Tennessee. “Goldman can probably afford better lawyers than the government.” Blommberg

Just How Bad Is Meat-Eating For the Environment?

2010-03-30T10:18:00.001-05:00

By Jeremy Hance

Recent scepticism over the significance of greenhouse gas emissions that result from burgeoning meat production misses the point. The wider environmental impacts of the ‘livestock revolution’, such as overuse of water and deforestation, can no longer be ignored, writes Jeremy Hance.

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29th March 2010 - Published by Mongabay.com

Meat is booming. In the past thirty years, livestock production has increased threefold. In many parts of the world where incomes are expanding, meat, once a delicacy, is now eaten regularly and voraciously. But what are the environmental impacts of this 'livestock revolution'?

Two recent studies look at the global impact of the livestock industry; one alleges that its environmental impacts in relation to greenhouse gas emissions has been overestimated, while the other takes a holistic view of the industry's environmental impact.

Questioning Livestock's Share of Emissions

Eating meat and dairy isn't as bad for the climate as recently reported, according to research by air quality expert Dr. Frank Mitloehner from the University of California-Davis. A number of organizations and campaigns have linked meat-eating to higher carbon emissions; however Mitloehner says this is based on faulty data, at least in terms of comparing the importance of cutting down meat consumption to making the transition from fossil fuels to green energy.

"We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk," said Mitloehner is a press release. "Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries."

Mitloehner says that an executive summary from a 2006 UN reports, entitled "Livestock's Long Shadow" is partly responsible for the current sense that livestock are a major player in greenhouse gas emissions. According to the report global livestock is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gases—more than transportation.

However, Mitloehner says that the study measured the full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of livestock, including emissions from growing livestock feed, animals' digestive emissions, and processing meat and milk into food products, whereas, the report only looked at the direct emissions created from transportation, i.e. the burning of fossils fuels.

"This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue," Mitloehner said.

He says that instead of focusing on cutting down on meat and dairy, the industrialized world must focus on the way it produces and consumes energy. For example, according to the EPA, in the US livestock emissions are approximately 3 percent of its total greenhouse gas emissions, while transportation is 26 percent, although this percentage gives less weight to carbon emitted due to land use changes than the UN figures.

He advises that "the developed world should focus on increasing efficient meat production in developing countries where growing populations need more nutritious food. In developing countries, we should adopt more efficient, Western-style farming practices to make more food with less greenhouse gas production."

For many people in poor countries, meat when available and affordable is an important source of protein.

Impact Still Huge

So, livestock may make-up a smaller share of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (an exact percentage was not given), but, on the other hand, livestock production does put a considerable strain on the environment, through pollution, water-consumption, deforestation, and land-use.

A second study conducted by an international team of scientists and policy experts recently looked at the booming livestock industry in a two volume report entitled 'Livestock in a Changing Landscape'.

"The livestock industry is massive and growing," said Harold A. Mooney, co-editor of the report and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

According to the report, livestock impact on land-use is massive. Currently, a quarter of the world's land is used for 1.7 billion livestock animals. This ongoing shifting from wild lands to pasture has impacted biodiversity and ecosystems worldwide. For example, cattle ranching in Brazil has led both directly and indirectly to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

But this isn't even the total land required for the world's livestock. Livestock have to eat, and land—a lot of land—is required to feed everything from cattle to pigs to poultry. The report estimates that one third of the globe's arable land is employed to grow food for livestock. In all, forty percent of the world's agricultural gross domestic product goes to feeding livestock. Yet, according to the UN a record one billion people in the world do not have enough food.

However, the world's poor certainly depend on livestock. "Too much animal-based protein is not good for human diets, while too little is a problem for those on a protein-starved diet, as happens in many developing countries," Mooney said. The study points to a study in Kenya, which showed that children with access to meat-protein had better physical growth, cognitive function, and performed better in school than children who didn't.

It is estimated that one billion poor derive at least some of their living from domestic animals. However, commercialized industrial livestock has reduced employment for many people, especially in countries such as India and China where large-scale industrial livestock production has replaced many small, rural livestock owners.

"We want to protect those on the margins who are dependent on a handful of livestock for their livelihood," Mooney said. "On the other side, we want people engaged in the livestock industry to look closely at the report and determine what improvements they can make."

Livestock production is an intensive industry consuming large amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and fossil fuels—all of which contribute to global pollution and environmental degradation. Waste from the nearly 2 billion livestock is an additional environmental issue.

"Because only a third of the nutrients fed to animals are absorbed, animal waste is a leading factor in the pollution of land and water resources, as observed in case studies in China, India, the United States and Denmark," the report reads.

Even after tripling in thirty years, the livestock industry is expected to continue growing: the report estimates that the industry could double by 2050.

"Without a change in current practices, the intensive increases in projected livestock production systems will double the current environmental burden and will contribute to large-scale ecosystem degradation unless appropriate measures are taken," said co-editor Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

"So much of the problem comes down to the individual consumer," said co-editor Fritz Schneider of the Swiss College of Agriculture (SHL). "People aren't going to stop eating meat, but I am always hopeful that as people learn more, they do change their behavior. If they are informed that they do have choices to help build a more sustainable and equitable world, they can make better choices."

Whether such reports compel people to eat less meat, it is clear that in a world where the human population—and meat-consumption—continues to boom, the environmental impacts of raising (and eating) livestock can no longer be ignored. Nor should the focus on livestock and the environment be only on greenhouse gas emissions, but water-consumption, pesticide and fertilizer use, deforestation, waste, biodiversity loss, and land-use. mongabay.com

Debt Dynamite Dominoes: The Coming Financial Catastrophe

2010-03-18T09:53:00.002-05:00

Assessing the Illusion of Recovery

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Understanding the Nature of the Global Economic Crisis

The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the ruse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.

In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the Western world were warning of an impending depression if actions were not taken to quickly prevent this. The problem was that this crisis had been a long-time coming, and what’s worse, is that the actions governments took did not address any of the core, systemic issues and problems with the global economy; they merely set out to save the banking industry from collapse. To do this, governments around the world implemented massive “stimulus” and “bailout” packages, plunging their countries deeper into debt to save the banks from themselves, while charging it to people of the world.

Then an uproar of stock market speculation followed, as money was pumped into the stocks, but not the real economy. This recovery has been nothing but a complete and utter illusion, and within the next two years, the illusion will likely come to a complete collapse.

The governments gave the banks a blank check, charged it to the public, and now it’s time to pay; through drastic tax increases, social spending cuts, privatization of state industries and services, dismantling of any protective tariffs and trade regulations, and raising interest rates. The effect that this will have is to rapidly accelerate, both in the speed and volume, the unemployment rate, globally. The stock market would crash to record lows, where governments would be forced to freeze them altogether.

When the crisis is over, the middle classes of the western world will have been liquidated of their economic, political and social status. The global economy will have gone through the greatest consolidation of industry and banking in world history leading to a system in which only a few corporations and banks control the global economy and its resources; governments will have lost that right. The people of the western world will be treated by the financial oligarchs as they have treated the ‘global South’ and in particular, Africa; they will remove our social structures and foundations so that we become entirely subservient to their dominance over the economic and political structures of our society.

This is where we stand today, and is the road on which we travel.

The western world has been plundered into poverty, a process long underway, but with the unfolding of the crisis, will be rapidly accelerated. As our societies collapse in on themselves, the governments will protect the banks and multinationals. When the people go out into the streets, as they invariably do and will, the government will not come to their aid, but will come with police and military forces to crush the protests and oppress the people. The social foundations will collapse with the economy, and the state will clamp down to prevent the people from constructing a new one.

The road to recovery is far from here. When the crisis has come to an end, the world we know will have changed dramatically. No one ever grows up in the world they were born into; everything is always changing. Now is no exception. The only difference is, that we are about to go through the most rapid changes the world has seen thus far.

Assessing the Illusion of Recovery

In August of 2009, I wrote an article, Entering the Greatest Depression in History, in which I analyzed how there is a deep systemic crisis in the Capitalist system in which we have gone through merely one burst bubble thus far, the housing bubble, but there remains a great many others.

There remains as a significantly larger threat than the housing collapse, a commercial real estate bubble. As the Deutsche Bank CEO said in May of 2009, “It's either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.”

Of even greater significance is what has been termed the “bailout bubble” in which governments have superficially inflated the economies through massive debt-inducing bailout packages. As of July of 2009, the government watchdog and investigator of the US bailout program stated that the U.S. may have put itself at risk of up to $23.7 trillion dollars.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Entering the Greatest Depression in History. Global Research: August 7, 2009]

In October of 2009, approximately one year following the “great panic” of 2008, I wrote an article titled, The Economic Recovery is an Illusion, in which I analyzed what the most prestigious and powerful financial institution in the world, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), had to say about the crisis and “recovery.”

The BIS, as well as its former chief economist, who had both correctly predicted the crisis that unfolded in 2008, were warning of a future crisis in the global economy, citing the fact that none of the key issues and structural problems with the economy had been changed, and that government bailouts may do more harm than good in the long run.

William White, former Chief Economist of the BIS, warned:

The world has not tackled the problems at the heart of the economic downturn and is likely to slip back into recession. [He] warned that government actions to help the economy in the short run may be sowing the seeds for future crises.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, The Economic Recovery is an Illusion. Global Research: October 3, 2009]

Crying Wolf or Castigating Cassandra?

While people were being lulled into a false sense of security, prominent voices warning of the harsh bite of reality to come were, instead of being listened to, berated and pushed aside by the mainstream media. Gerald Celente, who accurately predicted the economic crisis of 2008 and who had been warning of a much larger crisis to come, had been accused by the mainstream media of pushing “pessimism porn.”[1] Celente’s response has been that he isn’t pushing “pessimism porn,” but that he refuses to push “optimism opium” of which the mainstream media does so outstandingly.

So, are these voices of criticism merely “crying wolf” or is it that the media is out to “castigate Cassandra”? Cassandra, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was granted by the God Apollo the gift of prophecy. She prophesied and warned the Trojans of the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon and the destruction of Troy. When she warned the Trojans, they simply cast her aside as “mad” and did not heed her warnings.

While those who warn of a future economic crisis may not have been granted the gift of prophecy from Apollo, they certainly have the ability of comprehension.

So what do the Cassandras of the world have to say today? Should we listen?

Empire and Economics

To understand the global economic crisis, we must understand the global causes of the economic crisis. We must first determine how we got to the initial crisis, from there, we can critically assess how governments responded to the outbreak of the crisis, and thus, we can determine where we currently stand, and where we are likely headed.

Africa and much of the developing world was released from the socio-political-economic restraints of the European empires throughout the 1950s and into the 60s. Africans began to try to take their nations into their own hands. At the end of World War II, the United States was the greatest power in the world. It had command of the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, as well as setting up the NATO military alliance. The US dollar reigned supreme, and its value was tied to gold.

In 1954, Western European elites worked together to form an international think tank called the Bilderberg Group, which would seek to link the political economies of Western Europe and North America. Every year, roughly 130 of the most powerful people in academia, media, military, industry, banking, and politics would meet to debate and discuss key issues related to the expansion of Western hegemony over the world and the re-shaping of world order. They undertook, as one of their key agendas, the formation of the European Union and the Euro currency unit.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve. Global Research: August 3, 2009]

In 1971, Nixon abandoned the dollar’s link to gold, which meant that the dollar no longer had a fixed exchange rate, but would change according to the whims and choices of the Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States). One key individual that was responsible for this choice was the third highest official in the U.S. Treasury Department at the time, Paul Volcker.[2]

Volcker got his start as a staff economist at the New York Federal Reserve Bank in the early 50s. After five years there, “David Rockefeller’s Chase Bank lured him away.”[3] So in 1957, Volcker went to work at Chase, where Rockefeller “recruited him as his special assistant on a congressional commission on money and credit in America and for help, later, on an advisory commission to the Treasury Department.”[4] In the early 60s, Volcker went to work in the Treasury Department, and returned to Chase in 1965 “as an aide to Rockefeller, this time as vice president dealing with international business.” With Nixon entering the White House, Volcker got the third highest job in the Treasury Department. This put him at the center of the decision making process behind the dissolution of the Bretton Woods agreement by abandoning the dollar’s link to gold in 1971.[5]

In 1973, David Rockefeller, the then-Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and President of the Council on Foreign Relations, created the Trilateral Commission, which sought to expand upon the Bilderberg Group. It was an international think tank, which would include elites from Western Europe, North America, and Japan, and was to align a “trilateral” political economic partnership between these regions. It was to further the interests and hegemony of the Western controlled world order.

That same year, the Petri-dish experiment of neoliberalism was undertaken in Chile. While a leftist government was coming to power in Chile, threatening the economic interests of not only David Rockefeller’s bank, but a number of American corporations, David Rockefeller set up meetings between Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser, and a number of leading corporate industrialists. Kissinger in turn, set up meetings between these individuals and the CIA chief and Nixon himself. Within a short while, the CIA had begun an operation to topple the government of Chile.

On September 11, 1973, a Chilean General, with the help of the CIA, overthrew the government of Chile and installed a military dictatorship that killed thousands. The day following the coup, a plan for an economic restructuring of Chile was on the president’s desk. The economic advisers from the University of Chicago, where the ideas of Milton Freidman poured out, designed the restructuring of Chile along neoliberal lines.

Neoliberalism was thus born in violence.

In 1973, a global oil crisis hit the world. This was the result of the Yom Kippur War, which took place in the Middle East in 1973. However, much more covertly, it was an American strategem. Right when the US dropped the dollar’s peg to gold, the State Department had quietly begun pressuring Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations to increase the price of oil. At the 1973 Bilderberg meeting, held six months before the oil price rises, a 400% increase in the price of oil was discussed. The discussion was over what to do with the large influx of what would come to be called “petrodollars,” the oil revenues of the OPEC nations.

Henry Kissinger worked behind the scenes in 1973 to ensure a war would take place in the Middle East, which happened in October. Then, the OPEC nations drastically increased the price of oil. Many newly industrializing nations of the developing world, free from the shackles of overt political and economic imperialism, suddenly faced a problem: oil is the lifeblood of an industrial society and it is imperative in the process of development and industrialization. If they were to continue to develop and industrialize, they would need the money to afford to do so.

Concurrently, the oil producing nations of the world were awash with petrodollars, bringing in record surpluses. However, to make a profit, the money would need to be invested. This is where the Western banking system came to the scene. With the loss of the dollar’s link to cold, the US currency could flow around the world at a much faster rate. The price of oil was tied to the price of the US dollar, and so oil was traded in US dollars. OPEC nations thus invested their oil money into Western banks, which in turn, would “recycle” that money by loaning it to the developing nations of the world in need of financing industrialization. It seemed like a win-win situation: the oil nations make money, invest it in the West, which loans it to the South, to be able to develop and build “western” societies.

However, all things do not end as fairy tales, especially when those in power are threatened. An industrialized and developed ‘Global South’ (Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia) would not be a good thing for the established Western elites. If they wanted to maintain their hegemony over the world, they must prevent the rise of potential rivals, especially in regions so rich in natural resources and the global supplies of energy.

It was at this time that the United States initiated talks with China. The “opening” of China was to be a Western project of expanding Western capital into China. China will be allowed to rise only so much as the West allows it. The Chinese elite were happy to oblige with the prospect of their own growth in political and economic power. India and Brazil also followed suit, but to a smaller degree than that of China. China and India were to brought within the framework of the Trilateral partnership, and in time, both China and India would have officials attending meetings of the Trilateral Commission.

So money flowed around the world, primarily in the form of the US dollar. Foreign central banks would buy US Treasuries (debts) as an investment, which would also show faith in the strength of the US dollar and economy. The hegemony of the US dollar reached around the world.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve. Global Research: August 3, 2009]

The Hegemony of Neoliberalism

In 1977, however, a new US administration came to power under the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was himself a member of the Trilateral Commission. With his administration, came another roughly two-dozen members of the Trilateral Commission to fill key positions within his government. In 1973, Paul Volcker, the rising star through Chase Manhattan and the Treasury Department became a member of the Trilateral Commission. In 1975, he was made President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful of the 12 regional Fed banks. In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave the job of Treasury Secretary to the former Governor of the Federal Reserve System, and in turn, David Rockefeller recommended Jimmy Carter appoint Paul Volcker as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, which Carter quickly did.[6]

In 1979, the price of oil skyrocketed again. This time, Paul Volcker at the Fed was to take a different approach. His response was to drastically increase interest rates. Interest rates went from 2% in the late 70s to 18% in the early 1980s. The effect this had was that the US economy went into recession, and greatly reduced its imports from developing nations. A the same time, developing nations, who had taken on heavy debt burdens to finance industrialization, suddenly found themselves having to pay 18% interest payments on their loans. The idea that they could borrow heavily to build an industrial society, which would in turn pay off their loans, had suddenly come to a halt. As the US dollar had spread around the world in the forms of petrodollars and loans, the decisions that the Fed made would affect the entire world. In 1982, Mexico announced that it could no longer service its debt, and defaulted on its loans. This marked the spread of the 1980s debt crisis, which spread throughout Latin America and across the continent of Africa.

Suddenly, much of the developing world was plunged into crisis. Thus, the IMF and World Bank entered the scene with their newly developed “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs), which would encompass a country in need signing an agreement, the SAP, which would provide the country with a loan from the IMF, as well as “development” projects by the World Bank. In turn, the country would have to undergo a neoliberal restructuring of its country.

Neoliberalism spread out of America and Britain in the 1980s; through their financial empires and instruments – including the World Bank and IMF – they spread the neoliberal ideology around the globe. Countries that resisted neoliberalism were subjected to “regime change”. This would occur through financial manipulation, via currency speculation or the hegemonic monetary policies of the Western nations, primarily the United States; economic sanctions, via the United Nations or simply done on a bilateral basis; covert regime change, through “colour revolutions” or coups, assassinations; and sometimes overt military campaigns and war.

The neoliberal ideology consisted in what has often been termed “free market fundamentalism.” This would entail a massive wave of privatization, in which state assets and industries are privatized in order to become economically “more productive and efficient.” This would have the social effect of leading to the firing of entire areas of the public sector, especially health and education as well as any specially protected national industries, which for many poor nations meant vital natural resources.

Then, the market would be “liberalized” which meant that restrictions and impediments to foreign investments in the nation would diminish by reducing or eliminating trade barriers and tariffs (taxes), and thus foreign capital (Western corporations and banks) would be able to invest in the country easily, while national industries that grow and “compete” would be able to more easily invest in other nations and industries around the world. The Central Bank of the nation would then keep interest rates artificially low, to allow for the easier movement of money in and out of the country. The effect of this would be that foreign multinational corporations and international banks would be able to easily buy up the privatized industries, and thus, buy up the national economy. Simultaneously major national industries may be allowed to grow and work with the global banks and corporations. This would essentially oligopolize the national economy, and bring it within the sphere of influence of the “global economy” controlled by and for the Western elites.

The European empires had imposed upon Africa and many other colonized peoples around the world a system of ‘indirect rule’, in which local governance structures were restructured and reorganized into a system where the local population is governed by locals, but for the western colonial powers. Thus, a local elite is created, and they enrich themselves through the colonial system, so they have no interest in challenging the colonial powers, but instead seek to protect their own interests, which happen to be the interests of the empire.

In the era of globalization, the leaders of the ‘Third World’ have been co-opted and their societies reorganized by and for the interests of the globalized elites. This is a system of indirect rule, and the local elites becoming ‘indirect globalists’; they have been brought within the global system and structures of empire.

Following a Structural Adjustment Program, masses of people would be left unemployed; the prices of essential commodities such as food and fuel would increase, sometimes by hundreds of percentiles, while the currency lost its value. Poverty would spread and entire sectors of the economy would be shut down. In the “developing” world of Asia, Latin America and Africa, these policies were especially damaging. With no social safety nets to fall into, the people would go hungry; the public state was dismantled.

When it came to Africa, the continent so rapidly de-industrialized throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s that poverty increased by incredible degrees. With that, conflict would spread. In the 1990s, as the harsh effects of neoliberal policies were easily and quickly seen on the African continent, the main notion pushed through academia, the media, and policy circles was that the state of Africa was due to the “mismanagement” by Africans. The blame was put solely on the national governments. While national political and economic elites did become complicit in the problems, the problems were imposed from beyond the continent, not from within.

Thus, in the 1990s, the notion of “good governance” became prominent. This was the idea that in return for loans and “help” from the IMF and World Bank, nations would need to undertake reforms not only of the economic sector, but also to create the conditions of what the west perceived as “good governance.” However, in neoliberal parlance, “good governance” implies “minimal governance”, and governments still had to dismantle their public sectors. They simply had to begin applying the illusion of democracy, through the holding of elections and allowing for the formation of a civil society. “Freedom” however, was still to maintain simply an economic concept, in that the nation would be “free” for Western capital to enter into.

While massive poverty and violence spread across the continent, people were given the “gift” of elections. They would elect one leader, who would then be locked into an already pre-determined economic and political structure. The political leaders would enrich themselves at the expense of others, and then be thrown out at the next election, or simply fix the elections. This would continue, back and forth, all the while no real change would be allowed to take place. Western imposed “democracy” had thus failed.

An article in a 2002 edition of International Affairs, the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the British counter-part to the Council on Foreign Relations), wrote that:

In 1960 the average income of the top 20 per cent of the world’s population was 30 times that of the bottom 20 per cent. By 1990 it was 60 times, ad by 1997, 74 times that of the lowest fifth. Today the assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP [Gross National Product] of all least developed countries and their 600 million people.

This has been the context in which there has been an explosive growth in the presence of Western as well as local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa. NGOs today form a prominent part of the ‘development machine’, a vast institutional and disciplinary nexus of official agencies, practitioners, consultants, scholars and other miscellaneous experts producing and consuming knowledge about the ‘developing world’.

[. . . ] Aid (in which NGOs have come to play a significant role) is frequently portrayed as a form of altruism, a charitable act that enables wealth to flow from rich to poor, poverty to be reduced and the poor to be empowered.[7]

The authors then explained that NGOs have a peculiar evolution in Africa:

[T[heir role in ‘development’ represents a continuity of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary organizations that cooperated in Europe’s colonization and control of Africa. Today their work contributes marginally to the relief of poverty, but significantly to undermining the struggle of African people to emancipate themselves from economic, social and political oppression.[8]

The authors examined how with the spread of neoliberalism, the notion of a “minimalist state” spread across the world and across Africa. Thus, they explain, the IMF and World Bank “became the new commanders of post-colonial economies.” However, these efforts were not imposed without resistance, as, “Between 1976 and 1992 there were 146 protests against IMF-supported austerity measures [SAPs] in 39 countries around the world.” Usually, however, governments responded with brute force, violently oppressing demonstrations. However, the widespread opposition to these “reforms” needed to be addressed by major organizations and “aid” agencies in re-evaluating their approach to ‘development’:[9]

The outcome of these deliberations was the ‘good governance’ agenda in the 1990s and the decision to co-opt NGOs and other civil society organizations to a repackaged programme of welfare provision, a social initiative that could be more accurately described as a programme of social control.

The result was to implement the notion of ‘pluralism’ in the form of ‘multipartyism’, which only ended up in bringing “into the public domain the seething divisions between sections of the ruling class competing for control of the state.” As for the ‘welfare initiatives’, the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies set aside significant funds for addressing the “social dimensions of adjustment,” which would “minimize the more glaring inequalities that their policies perpetuated.” This is where the growth of NGOs in Africa rapidly accelerated.[10]

Africa had again, become firmly enraptured in the cold grip of imperialism. Conflicts in Africa would be stirred up by imperial foreign powers, often using ethnic divides to turn the people against each other, using the political leaders of African nations as vassals submissive to Western hegemony. War and conflict would spread, and with it, so too would Western capital and the multinational corporation.

Building a ‘New’ Economy

While the developing world fell under the heavy sword of Western neoliberal hegemony, the Western industrialized societies experienced a rapid growth of their own economic strength. It was the Western banks and multinational corporations that spread into and took control of the economies of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Russia opened itself up to Western finance, and the IMF and World Bank swept in and imposed neoliberal restructuring, which led to a collapse of the Russian economy, and enrichment of a few billionaire oligarchs who own the Russian economy, and who are intricately connected with Western economic interests; again, ‘indirect globalists’.

As the Western financial and commercial sectors took control of the vast majority of the world’s resources and productive industries, amassing incredible profits, they needed new avenues in which to invest. Out of this need for a new road to capital accumulation (making money), the US Federal Reserve stepped in to help out.

The Federal Reserve in the 1990s began to ease interest rates lower and lower to again allow for the easier spread of money. This was the era of ‘globalization,’ where proclamations of a “New World Order” emerged. Regional trading blocs and “free trade” agreements spread rapidly, as world systems of political and economic structure increasingly grew out of the national structure and into a supra-national form. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in an “economic constitution for North America” as Reagan referred to it.

Regionalism had emerged as the next major phase in the construction of the New World Order, with the European Union being at the forefront. The world economy was ‘globalized’ and so too, would the political structure follow, on both regional and global levels. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was formed to maintain and enshrine global neoliberal constitution for trade. All through this time, a truly global ruling class emerged, the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), or global elite, which constituted a singular international class.

However, as the wealth and power of elites grew, everyone else suffered. The middle class had been subjected to a quiet dismantling. In the Western developed nations, industries and factories closed down, relocating to cheap Third World countries to exploit their labour, then sell the products in the Western world cheaply. Our living standards in the West began to fall, but because we could buy products for cheaper, no one seemed to complain. We continued to consume, and we used credit and debt to do so. The middle class existed only in theory, but was in fact, beholden to the shackles of debt.

The Clinton administration used ‘globalization’ as its grand strategy throughout the 1990s, facilitating the decline of productive capital (as in, money that flows into production of goods and services), and implemented the rise finance capital (money made on money). Thus, financial speculation became one of the key tools of economic expansion. This is what was termed the “financialization” of the economy. To allow this to occur, the Clinton administration actively worked to deregulate the banking sector. The Glass-Steagle Act, put in place by FDR in 1933 to prevent commercial banks from merging with investment banks and engaging in speculation, (which in large part caused the Great Depression), was slowly dismantled through the coordinated efforts of America’s largest banks, the Federal Reserve, and the US Treasury Department.

Thus, a massive wave of consolidation took place, as large banks ate smaller banks, corporations merged, where banks and corporations stopped being American or European and became truly global. Some of the key individuals that took part in the dismantling of Glass-Steagle and the expansion of ‘financialization’ were Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve and Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers at the Treasury Department, now key officials in Obama’s economic team.

This era saw the rise of ‘derivatives’ which are ‘complex financial instruments’ that essentially act as short-term insurance policies, betting and speculating that an asset price or commodity would go up or go down in value, allowing money to be made on whether stocks or prices go up or down. However, it wasn’t called ‘insurance’ because ‘insurance’ has to be regulated. Thus, it was referred to as derivatives trade, and organizations called Hedge Funds entered the picture in managing the global trade in derivatives.

The stock market would go up as speculation on future profits drove stocks higher and higher, inflating a massive bubble in what was termed a ‘virtual economy.’ The Federal Reserve facilitated this, as it had previously done in the lead-up to the Great Depression, by keeping interest rates artificially low, and allowing for easy-flowing money into the financial sector. The Federal Reserve thus inflated the ‘dot-com’ bubble of the technology sector. When this bubble burst, the Federal Reserve, with Allen Greenspan at the helm, created the “housing bubble.”

The Federal Reserve maintained low interest rates and actively encouraged and facilitated the flow of money into the housing sector. Banks were given free reign and actually encouraged to make loans to high-risk individuals who would never be able to pay back their debt. Again, the middle class existed only in the myth of the ‘free market’.

Concurrently, throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the role of speculation as a financial instrument of war became apparent. Within the neoliberal global economy, money could flow easily into and out of countries. Thus, when confidence weakens in the prospect of one nation’s economy, there can be a case of ‘capital flight’ where foreign investors sell their assets in that nation’s currency and remove their capital from that country. This results in an inevitable collapse of the nations economy.

This happened to Mexico in 1994, in the midst of joining NAFTA, where international investors speculated against the Mexican peso, betting that it would collapse; they cashed in their pesos for dollars, which devalued the peso and collapsed the Mexican economy. This was followed by the East Asian financial crisis in 1997, where throughout the 1990s, Western capital had penetrated East Asian economies speculating in real estate and the stock markets. However, this resulted in over-investment, as the real economy, (production, manufacturing, etc.) could not keep up with speculative capital. Thus, Western capital feared a crisis, and began speculating against the national currencies of East Asian economies, which triggered devaluation and a financial panic as capital fled from East Asia into Western banking sectors. The economies collapsed and then the IMF came in to ‘restructure’ them accordingly. The same strategy was undertaken with Russia in 1998, and Argentina in 2001.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Forging a “New World Order” Under a One World Government. Global Research: August 13, 2009]

Throughout the 2000s, the housing bubble was inflated beyond measure, and around the middle of the decade, when the indicators emerged of a crisis in the housing market a commercial real estate bubble was formed. This bubble has yet to burst.

The 2007-2008 Financial Crisis

In 2007, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most prestigious financial institution in the world and the central bank to the world’s central banks, issued a warning that the world is on the verge of another Great Depression, “citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.”[11]

As the housing bubble began to collapse, the commodity bubble was inflated, where money went increasingly into speculation, the stock market, and the price of commodities soared, such as with the massive increases in the price of oil between 2007 and 2008. In September of 2007, a medium-sized British Bank called Northern Rock, a major partaker in the loans of bad mortgages which turned out to be worthless, sought help from the Bank of England, which led to a run on the bank and investor panic. In February of 2008, the British government bought and nationalized Northern Rock.

In March of 2008, Bear Stearns, an American bank that had been a heavy lender in the mortgage real estate market, went into crisis. On March 14, 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York worked with J.P. Morgan Chase (whose CEO is a board member of the NY Fed) to provide Bear Stearns with an emergency loan. However, they quickly changed their mind, and the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, working with the President of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, and the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs), forced Bear Stearns to sell itself to JP Morgan Chase for $2 a share, which had previously traded at $172 a share in January of 2007. The merger was paid for by the Federal Reserve of New York, and charged to the US taxpayer.

In June of 2008, the BIS again warned of an impending Great Depression.[12]

In September of 2008, the US government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two major home mortgage corporations. The same month, the global bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, giving the signal that no one is safe and that the entire economy was on the verge of collapse. Lehman was a major dealer in the US Treasury Securities market and was heavily invested in home mortgages. Lehman filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, marking the largest bankruptcy in US history. A wave of bank consolidation spread across the United States and internationally. The big banks became much bigger as Bank of America swallowed Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan ate Washington Mutual, and Wells Fargo took over Wachovia.

In November of 2008, the US government bailed out the largest insurance company in the world, AIG. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, with Timothy Geithner at the helm:

[Bought out], for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

As Bloomberg reported, since the New York Fed is quasi-governmental, as in, it is given government authority, but not subject to government oversight, and is owned by the banks that make up its board (such as JP Morgan Chase), “It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank.”[13]

The Bailout

In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration sought to implement a bailout package for the economy, designed to save the US banking system. The leaders of the nation went into rabid fear mongering. The President warned:

More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically.

The head of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, as well as Treasury Secretary Paulson, in late September warned of “recession, layoffs and lost homes if Congress doesn’t quickly approve the Bush administration’s emergency $700 billion financial bailout plan.”[14] Seven months prior, in February of 2008, prior to the collapse of Bear Stearns, both Bernanke and Paulson said “the nation will avoid falling into recession.”[15] In September of 2008, Paulson was saying that people “should be scared.”[16]

The bailout package was made into a massive financial scam, which would plunge the United States into unprecedented levels of debt, while pumping incredible amounts of money into major global banks.

The public was told, as was the Congress, that the bailout was worth $700 billion dollars. However, this was extremely misleading, and a closer reading of the fine print would reveal much more, in that $700 billion is the amount that could be spent “at any one time.” As Chris Martenson wrote:

This means that $700 billion is NOT the cost of this dangerous legislation, it is only the amount that can be outstanding at any one time. After, say, $100 billion of bad mortgages are disposed of, another $100 billion can be bought. In short, these four little words assure that there is NO LIMIT to the potential size of this bailout. This means that $700 billion is a rolling amount, not a ceiling.

So what happens when you have vague language and an unlimited budget? Fraud and self-dealing. Mark my words, this is the largest looting operation ever in the history of the US, and it's all spelled out right in this delightfully brief document that is about to be rammed through a scared Congress and made into law.[17]

Further, the proposed bill would “raise the nation's debt ceiling to $11.315 trillion from $10.615 trillion,” and that the actions taken as a result of the passage of the bill would not be subject to investigation by the nation’s court system, as it would “bar courts from reviewing actions taken under its authority”:

The Bush administration seeks “dictatorial power unreviewable by the third branch of government, the courts, to try to resolve the crisis,” said Frank Razzano, a former assistant chief trial attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission now at Pepper Hamilton LLP in Washington. “We are taking a huge leap of faith.”[18]

Larisa Alexandrovna, writing with the Huffington Post, warned that the passage of the bailout bill will be the final nails in the coffin of the fascist coup over America, in the form of financial fascists:

This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.

[. . . ] The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks [is] needed.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.[19]

At the same time, the US Federal Reserve was bailing out foreign banks of hundreds of billions of dollars, “that are desperate for dollars and can’t access America’s frozen credit markets – a move co-ordinated with central banks in Japan, the Eurozone, Switzerland, Canada and here in the UK.”[20] The moves would have been coordinated through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, Switzerland. As Politico reported, “foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout.” A Treasury Fact Sheet released by the US Department of Treasury stated that:

Participating financial institutions must have significant operations in the U.S., unless the Secretary makes a determination, in consultation with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that broader eligibility is necessary to effectively stabilize financial markets.[21]

So, the bailout package would not only allow for the rescue of American banks, but any banks internationally, whether public or private, if the Treasury Secretary deemed it “necessary”, and that none of the Secretary’s decisions could be reviewed or subjected to oversight of any kind. Further, it would mean that the Treasury Secretary would have a blank check, but simply wouldn’t be able to hand out more than $700 billion “at any one time.” In short, the bailout is in fact, a coup d’état by the banks over the government.

Many Congressmen were told that if they failed to pass the bailout package, they were threatened with martial law.[22] Sure enough, Congress passed the bill, and the financial coup had been a profound success.

No wonder then, in early 2009, one Congressman reported that the banks “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”[23] Another Congressman said that “The banks run the place,” and explained, “I will tell you what the problem is - they give three times more money than the next biggest group. It's huge the amount of money they put into politics.”[24]

The Collapse of Iceland

On October 9th, 2008, the government of Iceland took control of the nation’s largest bank, nationalizing it, and halted trading on the Icelandic stock market. Within a single week, “the vast majority of Iceland's once-proud banking sector has been nationalized.” In early October, it was reported that:

Iceland, which has transformed itself from one of Europe's poorest countries to one of its wealthiest in the space of a generation, could face bankruptcy. In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Geir Haarde conceded: "There is a very real danger, fellow citizens, that the Icelandic economy in the worst case could be sucked into the whirlpool, and the result could be national bankruptcy."

An article in BusinessWeek explained:

How did things get so bad so fast? Blame the Icelandic banking system's heavy reliance on external financing. With the privatization of the banking sector, completed in 2000, Iceland's banks used substantial wholesale funding to finance their entry into the local mortgage market and acquire foreign financial firms, mainly in Britain and Scandinavia. The banks, in large part, were simply following the international ambitions of a new generation of Icelandic entrepreneurs who forged global empires in industries from retailing to food production to pharmaceuticals. By the end of 2006, the total assets of the three main banks were $150 billion, eight times the country's GDP.

In just five years, the banks went from being almost entirely domestic lenders to becoming major international financial intermediaries. In 2000, says Richard Portes, a professor of economics at London Business School, two-thirds of their financing came from domestic sources and one-third from abroad. More recently—until the crisis hit—that ratio was reversed. But as wholesale funding markets seized up, Iceland's banks started to collapse under a mountain of foreign debt.[25]

This was the grueling situation that faced the government at the time of the global economic crisis. The causes, however, were not Icelandic; they were international. Iceland owed “more than $60 billion overseas, about six times the value of its annual economic output. As a professor at London School of Economics said, ‘No Western country in peacetime has crashed so quickly and so badly’.”[26]

What went wrong?

Iceland followed the path of neoliberalism, deregulated banking and financial sectors and aided in the spread and ease of flow for international capital. When times got tough, Iceland went into crisis, as the Observer reported in early October 2008:

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan.

[. . . ] The discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.[27]

In 2007, the UN had awarded Iceland the “best country to live in”:

The nation's celebrated rags-to-riches story began in the Nineties when free market reforms, fish quota cash and a stock market based on stable pension funds allowed Icelandic entrepreneurs to go out and sweep up international credit. Britain and Denmark were favourite shopping haunts, and in 2004 alone Icelanders spent £894m on shares in British companies. In just five years, the average Icelandic family saw its wealth increase by 45 per cent.[28]

As the third of Iceland’s large banks was in trouble, following the government takeover of the previous two, the UK responded by freezing Icelandic assets in the UK. Kaupthing, the last of the three banks standing in early October, had many assets in the UK.

On October 7th, Iceland’s Central Bank governor told the media, “We will not pay for irresponsible debtors and…not for banks who have behaved irresponsibly.” The following day, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, claimed that, “The Icelandic government, believe it or not, have told me yesterday they have no intention of honoring their obligations here,” although, Arni Mathiesen, the Icelandic minister of finance, said, “nothing in this telephone conversation can support the conclusion that Iceland would not honor its obligation.”[29]

On October 10, 2008, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “We are freezing the assets of Icelandic companies in the United Kingdom where we can. We will take further action against the Icelandic authorities wherever that is necessary to recover money.” Thus:

Many Icelandic companies operating in the U.K., in totally unrelated industries, experienced their assets being frozen by the U.K. government--as well as other acts of seeming vengeance by U.K. businesses and media.

The immediate effect of the collapse of Kaupthing is that Iceland's financial system is ruined and the foreign exchange market shut down. Retailers are scrambling to secure currency for food imports and medicine. The IMF is being called in for assistance.[30]

The UK had more than £840m invested in Icelandic banks, and they were moving in to save their investments,[31] which just so happened to help spur on the collapse of the Icelandic economy.

On October 24, 2008, an agreement between Iceland and the IMF was signed. In late November, the IMF approved a loan to Iceland of $2.1 billion, with an additional $3 billion in loans from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Poland.[32] Why the agreement to the loan took so long, was because the UK pressured the IMF to delay the loan “until a dispute over the compensation Iceland owes savers in Icesave, one of its collapsed banks, is resolved.”[33]

In January of 2009, the entire Icelandic government was “formally dissolved” as the government collapsed when the Prime Minister and his entire cabinet resigned. This put the opposition part in charge of an interim government.[34] In July of 2009, the new government formally applied for European Union membership, however, “Icelanders have traditionally been skeptical of the benefits of full EU membership, fearing that they would lose some of their independence as a small state within a larger political entity.”[35]

In August of 2009, Iceland’s parliament passed a bill “to repay Britain and the Netherlands more than $5 billion lost in Icelandic deposit accounts”:

Icelanders, already reeling from a crisis that has left many destitute, have objected to paying for mistakes made by private banks under the watch of other governments.

Their anger in particular is directed at Britain, which used an anti-terrorism law to seize Icelandic assets during the crisis last year, a move which residents said added insult to injury.

The government argued it had little choice but to make good on the debts if it wanted to ensure aid continued to flow. Rejection could have led to Britain or the Netherlands seeking to block aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[36]

Iceland is now in the service of the IMF and its international creditors. The small independent nation that for so long had prided itself on a strong economy and strong sense of independence had been brought to its knees.

In mid-January of 2010, the IMF and Sweden together delayed their loans to Iceland, due to Iceland’s “failure to reach a £2.3bn compensation deal with Britain and the Netherlands over its collapsed Icesave accounts.” Sweden, the UK and the IMF were blackmailing Iceland to save UK assets in return for loans.[37]

In February of 2010, it was reported that the EU would begin negotiations with Iceland to secure Icelandic membership in the EU by 2012. However, Iceland’s “aspirations are now tied partially to a dispute with the Netherlands and Britain over $5 billion in debts lost in the country's banking collapse in late 2008.”[38]

Iceland stood as a sign of what was to come. The sovereign debt crisis that brought Iceland to its knees had new targets on the horizon.

Dubai Hit By Financial Storm

In February of 2009, the Guardian reported that, “A six-year boom that turned sand dunes into a glittering metropolis, creating the world's tallest building, its biggest shopping mall and, some say, a shrine to unbridled capitalism, is grinding to a halt,” as Dubai, one of six states that form the United Arab Emirates (UAE), went into crisis. Further, “the real estate bubble that propelled the frenetic expansion of Dubai on the back of borrowed cash and speculative investment, has burst.”[39]

Months later, in November of 2009, Dubai was plunged into a debt crisis, prompting fears of sparking a double-dip recession and the next wave of the financial crisis. As the Guardian reported:

Governments have cut interest rates, created new electronic money and allowed budget deficits to reach record levels in an attempt to boost growth after the near-collapse of the global financial system. [. . . ] Despite having oil, it's still the case that many of these countries had explosive credit growth. It's very clear that in 2010, we've got plenty more problems in store.[40]

The neighboring oil-rich state of Abu Dhabi, however, came to the rescue of Dubai with a $10 billion bailout package, leading the Foreign Minister of the UAE to declare Dubai’s financial crisis as over.[41]

In mid-February of 2010, however, renewed fears of a debt crisis in Dubai resurfaced; Morgan Stanley reported that, “the cost to insure against a Dubai default [in mid-February] shot up to the level it was at during the peak of the city-state's debt crisis in November.”[42] These fears resurfaced as:

Investors switched their attention to the Gulf [on February 15] as markets reacted to fears that a restructuring plan from the state-owned conglomerate Dubai World would pay creditors only 60 per cent of the money they are owed.[43]

Again, the aims that governments seek in the unfolding debt crisis is not to save their people from a collapsing economy and inflated currency, but to save the ‘interests’ of their major banks and corporations within each collapsing economy.

A Sovereign Debt Crisis Hits Greece

In October of 2009, a new Socialist government came to power in Greece on the promise of injecting 3 billion euros to reinvigorate the Greek economy.[44] Greece had suffered particularly hard during the economic crisis; it experienced riots and protests. In December of 2009, Greece said it would not default on its debt, but the government added, “Salaried workers will not pay for this situation: we will not proceed with wage freezes or cuts. We did not come to power to tear down the social state.” As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote for the Telegraph in December of 2009:

Greece is being told to adopt an IMF-style austerity package, without the devaluation so central to IMF plans. The prescription is ruinous and patently self-defeating. Public debt is already 113pc of GDP. The [European] Commission says it will reach 125pc by late 2010. It may top 140pc by 2012.

If Greece were to impose the draconian pay cuts under way in Ireland (5pc for lower state workers, rising to 20pc for bosses), it would deepen depression and cause tax revenues to collapse further. It is already too late for such crude policies. Greece is past the tipping point of a compound debt spiral.

Evans-Pritchard wrote that the crisis in Greece had much to do with the European Monetary Union (EMU), which created the Euro, and made all member states subject to the decisions of the European Central Bank, as “Interest rates were too low for Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland, causing them all to be engulfed in a destructive property and wage boom.” Further:

EU states may club together to keep Greece afloat with loans for a while. That solves nothing. It increases Greece's debt, drawing out the agony. What Greece needs – unless it leaves EMU – is a permanent subsidy from the North. Spain and Portugal will need help too.[45]

Greece’s debt had soared, by early December 2009, to a spiraling 300-billion euros, as its “financial woes have also weighed on the euro currency, whose long-term value depends on member countries keeping their finances in order.” Further, Ireland, Spain and Portugal were all facing problems with their debt. As it turned out, the previous Greek government had been cooking the books, and when the new government came to power, it inherited twice the federal deficit it had anticipated.[46]

In February of 2010, the New York Times revealed that:

[W]ith Wall Street’s help, [Greece] engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.[47]

Even back in 2001, when Greece joined the Euro-bloc, Goldman Sachs helped the country “quietly borrow billions” in a deal “hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, [and] helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.” Further, “Greece owes the world $300 billion, and major banks are on the hook for much of that debt. A default would reverberate around the globe.” Both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase had undertaken similar efforts in Italy and other countries in Europe as well.[48]

In early February, EU nations led by France and Germany met to discuss a rescue package for Greece, likely with the help of the European Central Bank and possibly the IMF. The issue had plunged the Eurozone into a crisis, as confidence in the Euro fell across the board, and “Germans have become so disillusioned with the euro, many will not accept notes produced outside their homeland.”[49]

Germany was expected to bail out the Greek economy, much to the dismay of the German people. As one German politician stated, “We cannot expect the citizens, whose taxes are already too high, to go along with supporting the erroneous financial and budget policy of other states of the eurozone.” One economist warned that the collapse of Greece could lead to a collapse of the Euro:

There are enough people speculating on the markets about the possible bankruptcy of Greece, and once Greece goes, they would then turn their attentions to Spain and Italy, and Germany and France would be forced to step in once again.[50]

However, the Lisbon Treaty had been passed over 2009, which put into effect a European Constitution, giving Brussels enormous powers over its member states. As the Telegraph reported on February 16, 2010, the EU stripped Greece of its right to vote at a crucial meeting to take place in March:

The council of EU finance ministers said Athens must comply with austerity demands by March 16 or lose control over its own tax and spend policies altogether. It if fails to do so, the EU will itself impose cuts under the draconian Article 126.9 of the Lisbon Treaty in what would amount to economic suzerainty [i.e., foreign economic control].

While the symbolic move to suspend Greece of its voting rights at one meeting makes no practical difference, it marks a constitutional watershed and represents a crushing loss of sovereignty.

"We certainly won't let them off the hook," said Austria's finance minister, Josef Proll, echoing views shared by colleagues in Northern Europe. Some German officials have called for Greece to be denied a vote in all EU matter until it emerges from "receivership".

The EU has still refused to reveal details of how it might help Greece raise €30bn (£26bn) from global debt markets by the end of June.[51]

It would appear that the EU is in a troubling position. If they allow the IMF to rescue Greece, it would be a blow to the faith in the Euro currency, whereas if they bailout Greece, it will encourage internal pressures within European countries to abandon the Euro.

In early February, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Telegraph that, “The Greek debt crisis has spread to Spain and Portugal in a dangerous escalation as global markets test whether Europe is willing to shore up monetary union with mucle rather than mere words”:

Julian Callow from Barclays Capital said the EU may to need to invoke emergency treaty powers under Article 122 to halt the contagion, issuing an EU guarantee for Greek debt. “If not contained, this could result in a `Lehman-style’ tsunami spreading across much of the EU.”

[. . . ] EU leaders will come to the rescue in the end, but Germany has yet to blink in this game of “brinkmanship”. The core issue is that EMU’s credit bubble has left southern Europe with huge foreign liabilities: Spain at 91pc of GDP (€950bn); Portugal 108pc (€177bn). This compares with 87pc for Greece (€208bn). By this gauge, Iberian imbalances are worse than those of Greece, and the sums are far greater. The danger is that foreign creditors will cut off funding, setting off an internal EMU version of the Asian financial crisis in 1998.[52]

Fear began to spread in regards to a growing sovereign debt crisis, stretching across Greece, Spain and Portugal, and likely much wider and larger than that.

A Global Debt Crisis

In 2007, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), “the world's most prestigious financial body,” warned of a coming great depression, and stated that while in a crisis, central banks may cut interest rates (which they subsequently did). However, as the BIS pointed out, while cutting interest rates may help, in the long run it has the effect of “sowing the seeds for more serious problems further ahead.”[53]

In the summer of 2008, prior to the apex of the 2008 financial crisis in September and October, the BIS again warned of the inherent dangers of a new Great Depression. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote, “the ultimate bank of central bankers” warned that central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, would not find it so easy to “clean up” the messes they had made in asset-price bubbles.

The BIS report stated that, “It is not impossible that the unwinding of the credit bubble could, after a temporary period of higher inflation, culminate in a deflation that might be hard to manage, all the more so given the high debt levels.” As Evans-Pritchard explained, “this amounts to a warning that monetary overkill by the Fed, the Bank of England, and above all the European Central Bank could prove dangerous at this juncture.” The BIS report warned that, “Global banks - with loans of $37 trillion in 2007, or 70pc of world GDP - are still in the eye of the storm.” Ultimately, the actions of central banks were designed “to put off the day of reckoning,” not to prevent it.[54]

Seeing how the BIS is not simply a casual observer, but is in fact the most important financial institution in the world, as it is where the world’s central bankers meet and, in secret, decide monetary policy for the world. As central banks have acted as the architects of the financial crisis, the BIS warning of a Great Depression is not simply a case of Cassandra prophesying the Trojan Horse, but is a case where she prophesied the horse, then opened the gates of Troy and pulled the horse in.

It was within this context that the governments of the world took on massive amounts of debt and bailed out the financial sectors from their accumulated risk by buying their bad debts.

In late June of 2009, several months following Western governments implementing bailouts and stimulus packages, the world was in the euphoria of “recovery.” At this time, however, the Bank for International Settlements released another report warning against such complacency in believing in the “recovery.” The BIS warned of only “limited progress” in fixing the financial system. The article is worth quoting at length:

Instead of implementing policies designed to clean up banks' balance sheets, some rescue plans have pushed banks to maintain their lending practices of the past, or even increase domestic credit where it's not warranted.

[. . . ] The lack of progress threatens to prolong the crisis and delay the recovery because a dysfunctional financial system reduces the ability of monetary and fiscal actions to stimulate the economy.

That's because without a solid banking system underpinning financial markets, stimulus measures won't be able to gain traction, and may only lead to a temporary pickup in growth.

A fleeting recovery could well make matters worse, the BIS warns, since further government support for banks is absolutely necessary, but will become unpopular if the public sees a recovery in hand. And authorities may get distracted with sustaining credit, asset prices and demand rather than focusing on fixing bank balance sheets.

[. . . ] It warned that despite the unprecedented measures in the form of fiscal stimulus, interest rate cuts, bank bailouts and quantitative easing, there is an “open question” whether the policies will be able to stabilize the global economy.

And as governments bulk up their deficits to spend their way out of the crisis, they need to be careful that their lack of restraint doesn't come back to bite them, the central bankers said. If governments don't communicate a credible exit strategy, they will find it harder to place debt, and could face rising funding costs – leading to spending cuts or significantly higher taxes.[55]

The BIS had thus endorsed the bailout and stimulus packages, which is no surprise, considering that the BIS is owned by the central banks of the world, which in turn are owned by the major global banks that were “bailed out” by the governments. However, the BIS warned that these rescue efforts, “while necessary” for the banks, will likely have deleterious effects for national governments.

The BIS warned that, “there’s a risk central banks will raise interest rates and withdraw emergency liquidity too late, triggering inflation”:

Central banks around the globe have lowered borrowing costs to record lows and injected billions of dollars [or, more accurately, trillions] into the financial system to counter the worst recession since World War II. While some policy makers have stressed the need to withdraw the emergency measures as soon as the economy improves, the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and European Central Bank are still in the process of implementing asset-purchase programs designed to unblock credit markets and revive growth.

“The big and justifiable worry is that, before it can be reversed, the dramatic easing in monetary policy will translate into growth in the broader monetary and credit aggregates,” the BIS said. That will “lead to inflation that feeds inflation expectations or it may fuel yet another asset-price bubble, sowing the seeds of the next financial boom-bust cycle.”[56]

Of enormous significance was the warning from the BIS that, “fiscal stimulus packages may provide no more than a temporary boost to growth, and be followed by an extended period of economic stagnation.” As the Australian reported in late June:

The only international body to correctly predict the financial crisis - the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) - has warned the biggest risk is that governments might be forced by world bond investors to abandon their stimulus packages, and instead slash spending while lifting taxes and interest rates.

Further, major western countries such as Australia “faced the possibility of a run on the currency, which would force interest rates to rise,” and “Particularly in smaller and more open economies, pressure on the currency could force central banks to follow a tighter policy than would be warranted by domestic economic conditions.” Not surprisingly, the BIS stated that, “government guarantees and asset insurance have exposed taxpayers to potentially large losses,” through the bailouts and stimulus packages, and “stimulus programs will drive up real interest rates and inflation expectations,” as inflation “would intensify as the downturn abated.”[57]

In May of 2009, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned that Britain faces a major struggle in the next phase of the economic crisis:

[T]he mountain of debt that had poisoned the financial system had not disappeared overnight. Instead, it has been shifted from the private sector onto the public sector balance sheet. Britain has taken on hundreds of billions of pounds of bank debt and stands behind potentially trillions of dollars of contingent liabilities.

If the first stage of the crisis was the financial implosion and the second the economic crunch, the third stage – the one heralded by Johnson – is where governments start to topple under the weight of this debt. If 2008 was a year of private sector bankruptcies, 2009 and 2010, it goes, will be the years of government insolvency.

However, as dire as things look for Britain, “The UK is likely to be joined by other countries as the full scale of the downturn becomes apparent and more financial skeletons are pulled from the sub-prime closet.”[58]

In September of 2009, the former Chief Economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), William White, who had accurately predicted the previous crisis, warned that, “The world has not tackled the problems at the heart of the economic downturn and is likely to slip back into recession.” He “also warned that government actions to help the economy in the short run may be sowing the seeds for future crises.” An article in the Financial Times elaborated:

“Are we going into a W[-shaped recession]? Almost certainly. Are we going into an L? I would not be in the slightest bit surprised,” [White] said, referring to the risks of a so-called double-dip recession or a protracted stagnation like Japan suffered in the 1990s.

“The only thing that would really surprise me is a rapid and sustainable recovery from the position we’re in.”

The comments from Mr White, who ran the economic department at the central banks’ bank from 1995 to 2008, carry weight because he was one of the few senior figures to predict the financial crisis in the years before it struck.

Mr White repeatedly warned of dangerous imbalances in the global financial system as far back as 2003 and – breaking a great taboo in central banking circles at the time – he dared to challenge Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, over his policy of persistent cheap money [i.e., low interest rates].

[. . . ] Worldwide, central banks have pumped [trillions] of dollars of new money into the financial system over the past two years in an effort to prevent a depression. Meanwhile, governments have gone to similar extremes, taking on vast sums of debt to prop up industries from banking to car making.

These measures may already be inflating a bubble in asset prices, from equities to commodities, he said, and there was a small risk that inflation would get out of control over the medium term if central banks miss-time their “exit strategies”.

Meanwhile, the underlying problems in the global economy, such as unsustainable trade imbalances between the US, Europe and Asia, had not been resolved.[59]

In late September of 2009, the General Manager of the BIS warned governments against complacency, saying that, “the market rebound should not be misinterpreted,” and that, “The profile of the recovery is not clear.”[60]

In September, the Financial Times further reported that William White, former Chief Economist at the BIS, also “argued that after two years of government support for the financial system, we now have a set of banks that are even bigger – and more dangerous – than ever before,” which also, “has been argued by Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund,” who “says that the finance industry has in effect captured the US government,” and pointedly stated: “recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.”[61]

In mid-September, the BIS released a warning about the global financial system, as “The global market for derivatives rebounded to $426 trillion in the second quarter [of 2009] as risk appetite returned, but the system remains unstable and prone to crises.” The derivatives rose by 16% “mostly due to a surge in futures and options contracts on three-month interest rates.” In other words, speculation is back in full force as bailout money to banks in turn fed speculative practices that have not been subjected to reform or regulation. Thus, the problems that created the previous crisis are still present and growing:

Stephen Cecchetti, the [BIS] chief economist, said over-the-counter markets for derivatives are still opaque and pose "major systemic risks" for the financial system. The danger is that regulators will again fail to see that big institutions have taken far more exposure than they can handle in shock conditions, repeating the errors that allowed the giant US insurer AIG to write nearly "half a trillion dollars" of unhedged insurance through credit default swaps.[62]

In late November of 2009, Morgan Stanley warned that, “Britain risks becoming the first country in the G10 bloc of major economies to risk capital flight and a full-blown debt crisis over coming months.” The Bank of England may have to raise interest rates “before it is ready -- risking a double-dip recession, and an incipient compound-debt spiral.” Further:

Morgan Stanley said [the] sterling may fall a further 10pc in trade-weighted terms. This would complete the steepest slide in the pound since the industrial revolution, exceeding the 30pc drop from peak to trough after Britain was driven off the Gold Standard in cataclysmic circumstances in 1931.[63]

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote for the Telegraph, this “is a reminder that countries merely bought time during the crisis by resorting to fiscal stimulus and shunting private losses onto public books,” and, while he endorsed the stimulus packages claiming it was “necessary,” he admitted that the stimulus packages “have not resolved the underlying debt problem. They have storied up a second set of difficulties by degrading sovereign debt across much of the world.”[64] Morgan Stanley said another surprise in 2010 could be a surge in the dollar. However, this would be due to capital flight out of Europe as its economies crumble under their debt burdens and capital seeks a “safe haven” in the US dollar.

In December of 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported on the warnings of some of the nation’s top economists, who feared that following a financial crisis such as the one experienced in the previous two years, “there's typically a wave of sovereign default crises.” As economist Kenneth Rogoff explained, “If you want to know what's next on the menu, that's a good bet,” as “Spiraling government debts around the world, from Washington to Berlin to Tokyo, could set the scene for years of financial troubles.” Apart from the obvious example of Greece, other countries are at risk, as the author of the article wrote:

Also worrying are several other countries at the periphery of Europe—the Baltics, Eastern European countries like Hungary, and maybe Ireland and Spain. This is where public finances are worst. And the handcuffs of the European single currency, Prof. Rogoff said, mean individual countries can't just print more money to get out of their debts. (For the record, the smartest investor I have ever known, a hedge fund manager in London, is also anticipating a sovereign debt crisis.)

[. . . ] The major sovereign debt crises, he said, are probably a couple of years away. The key issue is that this time, the mounting financial troubles of the U.S., Germany and Japan mean these countries, once the rich uncles of the world, will no longer have the money to step in and rescue the more feckless nieces and nephews.

Rogoff predicted that, “We're going to be raising taxes sky high,” and that, “we're probably going to see a lot of inflation, eventually. We will have to. It's the easiest way to reduce the value of those liabilities in real terms.” Rogoff stated, “The way rich countries default is through inflation.” Further, “even U.S. municipal bonds won't be safe from trouble. California could be among those facing a default crisis.” Rogoff elaborated, “It wouldn't surprise me to see the Federal Reserve buying California debt at some point, or some form of bailout.”[65]

The bailouts, particularly that of the United States, handed a blank check to the world’s largest banks. As another favour, the US government put those same banks in charge of ‘reform’ and ‘regulation’ of the banking industry. Naturally, no reform or regulation took place. Thus, the money given to banks by the government can be used in financial speculation. As the sovereign debt crisis unfolds and spreads around the globe, the major international banks will be able to create enormous wealth in speculation, rapidly pulling their money out of one nation in debt crisis, precipitating a collapse, and moving to another, until all the dominoes have fallen, and the banks stand larger, wealthier, and more powerful than any nation or institution on earth (assuming they already aren’t). This is why the bankers were so eager to undertake a financial coup of the United States, to ensure that no actual reform took place, that they could loot the nation of all it has, and profit off of its eventual collapse and the collapse of the global economy. The banks have been saved! Now everyone else must pay.

Edmund Conway, the Economics Editor of the Telegraph, reported in early January of 2010, that throughout the year:

[S]overeign credit will buckle under the strain of [government] deficits; the economic recovery will falter as the Government withdraws its fiscal stimulus measures and more companies will continue to fail. In other words, 2010 is unlikely to be the year of a V-shaped recovery.[66]

In other words, the ‘recovery’ is an illusion. In mid-January of 2010, the World Economic Forum released a report in which it warned that, “There is now more than a one-in-five chance of another asset price bubble implosion costing the world more than £1 trillion, and similar odds of a full-scale sovereign fiscal crisis.” The report warned of a simultaneous second financial crisis coupled with a major fiscal crisis as countries default on their debts. The report “also warned of the possibility of China's economy overheating and, instead of helping support global economic growth, preventing a fully-fledged recovery from developing.” Further:

The report, which in previous years had been among the first to cite the prospect of a financial crisis, the oil crisis that preceded it and the ongoing food crisis, included a list of growing risks threatening leading economies. Among the most likely, and potentially most costly, is a sovereign debt crisis, as some countries struggle to afford the unprecedented costs of the crisis clean-up, the report said, specifically naming the UK and the US.

[. . .] The report also highlights the risk of a further asset price collapse, which could derail the nascent economic recovery across the world, with particular concern surrounding China, which some fear may follow the footsteps Japan trod in the 1990s.[67]

Nouriel Roubini, one of America’s top economists who predicted the financial crisis, wrote an article in Forbes in January of 2010 explaining that, “the severe recession, combined with a financial crisis during 2008-09, worsened the fiscal positions of developed countries due to stimulus spending, lower tax revenues and support to the financial sector.” He warned that the debt burden of major economies, including the US, Japan and Britain, would likely increase. With this, investors will become wary of the sustainability of fiscal markets and will begin to withdraw from debt markets, long considered “safe havens.” Further:

Most central banks will withdraw liquidity starting in 2010, but government financing needs will remain high thereafter. Monetization and increased debt issuances by governments in the developed world will raise inflation expectations.

As interest rates rise, which they will have to in a tightening of monetary policy, (which up until now have been kept artificially low so as to encourage the spread of liquidity around the world), interest payments on the debt will increase dramatically. Roubini warned:

The U.S. and Japan might be among the last to face investor aversion—the dollar is the global reserve currency and the U.S. has the deepest and most liquid debt markets, while Japan is a net creditor and largely finances its debt domestically. But investors will turn increasingly cautious even about these countries if the necessary fiscal reforms are delayed.[68]

Governments will thus need to drastically increase taxes and cut spending. Essentially, this will amount to a global “Structural Adjustment Program” (SAP) in the developed, industrialized nations of the West.

Where SAPs imposed upon ‘Third World’ debtor nations would provide a loan in return for the dismantling of the public state, higher taxes, growing unemployment, total privatization of state industries and deregulation of trade and investment, the loans provided by the IMF and World Bank would ultimately benefit Western multinational corporations and banks. This is what the Western world now faces: we bailed out the banks, and now we must pay for it, through massive unemployment, increased taxes, and the dismantling of the public sphere.

In February of 2010, Niall Ferguson, a prominent British economic historian, wrote an article for the Financial Times entitled, “A Greek Crisis Coming to America.” He starts by explaining that, “It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies.” He explained that this is not a crisis confined to one region, “It is a fiscal crisis of the western world,” and “Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.” Ferguson writes that, “the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes,” and the US is no small risk:

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Ferguson points out that, “The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.” Ferguson explains that debt will hurt major economies:

By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted – as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.[69]

In late February of 2010, the warning signs were flashing red that interest rates were going to have to rise, taxes increase, and the burden of debt would need to be addressed.

China Begins to Dump US Treasuries

US Treasuries are US government debt that is issued by the US Treasury Department, which are bought by foreign governments as an investment. It is a show of faith in the US economy to buy their debt (i.e., Treasuries). In buying a US Treasury, you are lending money to the US government for a certain period of time.

However, as the United States has taken on excessive debt loads to save the banks from crisis, the prospect of buying US Treasuries has become less appealing, and the threat that they are an unsafe investment is ever-growing. In February of 2009, Hilary Clinton urged China to continue buying US Treasuries in order to finance Obama’s stimulus package. As an article in Bloomberg pointed out:

The U.S. is the single largest buyer of the exports that drive growth in China, the world’s third-largest economy. China in turn invests surplus earnings from shipments of goods such as toys, clothing and steel primarily in Treasury securities, making it the world’s largest holder of U.S. government debt at the end of last year with $696.2 billion.[70]

The following month, the Chinese central bank announced that they would continue buying US Treasuries.[71]

However, in February of 2009, Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest individuals, warned against buying US Treasuries:

Buffett said that with the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department going "all in" to jump-start an economy shrinking at the fastest pace since 1982, "once-unthinkable dosages" of stimulus will likely spur an "onslaught" of inflation, an enemy of fixed-income investors.

"The investment world has gone from underpricing risk to overpricing it," Buffett wrote. "Cash is earning close to nothing and will surely find its purchasing power eroded over time."

"When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s," he went on. "But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary."[72]

In September of 2009, an article on CNN reported of the dangers if China were to start dumping US Treasuries, which “could cause longer-term interest rates to shoot up since bond prices and yields move in opposite directions,” as a weakening US currency could lead to inflation, which would in turn, reduce the value and worth of China’s holdings in US Treasuries.[73]

It has become a waiting game; an economic catch-22: China holds US debt (Treasuries) which allows the US to spend to “save the economy” (or more accurately, the banks), but all the spending has plunged the US into such abysmal debt from which it will never be able to emerge. The result is that inflation will likely occur, with a possibility of hyperinflation, thus reducing the value of the US currency. China’s economy is entirely dependent upon the US as a consumer economy, while the US is dependent upon China as a buyer and holder of US debt. Both countries are delaying the inevitable. If China doesn’t want to hold worthless investments (US debt) it must stop buying US Treasuries, and then international faith in the US currency would begin to fall, forcing interest rates to rise, which could even precipitate a speculative assault against the US dollar. At the same time, a collapsing US currency and economy would not help China’s economy, which would tumble with it. So, it has become a waiting game.

In February of 2010, the Financial Times reported that China had begun in December of 2009, the process of dumping US Treasuries, and thus falling behind Japan as the largest holder of US debt, selling approximately $38.8 billion of US Treasuries, as “Foreign demand for US Treasury bonds fell by a record amount”:

The fall in demand comes as countries retreat from the "flight to safety" strategy they embarked on at the peak of the global financial crisis and could mean the US will have to pay more in debt interest.

For China, the sale of US Treasuries marks a reversal that it signalled last year when it said it would begin to reduce some of its holdings. Any changes in its behaviour are politically sensitive because it is the biggest US trade partner and has helped to finance US deficits.

Alan Ruskin, a strategist at RBS Securities, said that China's behaviour showed that it felt "saturated" with Treasury paper. The change of sentiment could hurt the dollar and the Treasury market as the US has to look to other countries for financing.[74]

So, China has given the US a vote of non-confidence. This is evident of the slippery-slide down the road to a collapse of the US economy, and possibly, the US dollar, itself.

Is a Debt Crisis Coming to America?

All the warning signs are there: America is in dire straights when it comes to its total debt, proper actions have not been taken to reform the monetary or financial systems, the same problems remain prevalent, and the bailout and stimulus packages have further exposed the United States to astronomical debt levels. While the dollar will likely continue to go up as confidence in the Eurozone economies tumbles, this is not because the dollar is a good investment, but because the dollar is simply a better investment (for now) than the Euro, which isn’t saying much.

The Chinese moves to begin dumping US Treasuries is a signal that the issue of American debt has already weighed in on the functions and movements of the global financial system. While the day of reckoning may be months if not years away, it is coming nonetheless.

On February 15, it was reported that the Federal Reserve, having pumped $2.2 trillion into the economy, “must start pulling that money back.” As the Fed reportedly bought roughly $2 trillion in bad assets, it is now debating “how and when to sell those assets.”[75] As the Korea Times reported, “The problem: Do it too quickly and the Fed might cut off or curtail the recovery. Wait too long and risk setting off a punishing round of inflation.”[76]

In mid-February, there were reports of dissent within the Federal Reserve System, as Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, warned that, “The US must fix its growing debt problems or risk a new financial crisis.” He explained, “that rising debt was infringing on the central bank’s ability to fulfill its goals of maintaining price stability and long-term economic growth.” In January, he was the lone voice at a Fed meeting that said interest rates should not remain near zero for an “extended period.” He said the worst case scenario would be for the US government to have to again ask the Fed to print more money, and instead suggested that, “the administration must find ways to cut spending and generate revenue,” admitting that it would be a “painful and politically inconvenient” process.[77]

However, these reports are largely disingenuous, as it has placed focus on a superficial debt level. The United States, even prior to the onset of the economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, had long been a reckless spender. The cost of maintaining an empire is astronomical and beyond the actual means of any nation. Historically, the collapse of empires has as much or more to do with a collapse in their currency and fiscal system than their military defeat or collapse in war. Also important to note is that these processes are not mutually exclusive, but are, in fact, intricately interconnected.

As empires decline, the world order is increasingly marred in economic crises and international conflict. As the crisis in the economy worsens, international conflict and wars spread. As I have amply documented elsewhere, the United States, since the end of World War II, has been the global hegemon: maintaining the largest military force in the world, and not shying away from using it, as well as running the global monetary system. Since the 1970s, the US dollar has acted as a world reserve currency. Following the collapse of the USSR, the grand imperial strategy of America was to dominate Eurasia and control the world militarily and economically.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III. Global Research: October 16, 2009]

Throughout the years of the Bush administration, the imperial strategy was given immense new life under the guise of the “war on terror.” Under this banner, the United States declared war on the world and all who oppose its hegemony. All the while, the administration colluded with the big banks and the Federal Reserve to artificially maintain the economic system. In the latter years of the Bush administration, this illusion began to come tumbling down. Never before in history has such a large nation wages multiple major theatre wars around the world without the public at home being fiscally restrained in some manner, either through higher taxes or interest rates. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The trillion dollar wars plunged the United States deeper into debt.

By 2007, the year that Northern Rock collapsed in the UK, signaling the start of the collapse of 2008, the total debt – domestic, commercial and consumer debt – of the United States stood at a shocking $51 trillion.[78]

As if this debt burden was not enough, considering it would be impossible to ever pay back, the past two years has seen the most expansive and rapid debt expansion ever seen in world history – in the form of stimulus and bailout packages around the world. In July of 2009, it was reported that, “U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies, said Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.”[79]

That is worth noting once again: the “bailout” bill implemented under Bush, and fully supported and sponsored by President-elect Obama, has possibly bailed out the financial sector of up to $23.7 trillion. How could this be? After all, the public was told that the “bailout” was $700 billion.

In fact, the fine print in the bailout bill revealed that $700 billion was not a ceiling, as in, $700 billion was not the maximum amount of money that could be injected into the banks; it was the maximum that could be injected into the financial system “at any one time.” Thus, it became a “rolling amount.” It essentially created a back-door loophole for the major global banks, both domestic and foreign, to plunder the nation and loot it entirely. There was no limit to the money banks could get from the Fed. And none of the actions would be subject to review or oversight by Congress or the Judiciary, i.e., the people.[80]

This is why, as Obama became President in late January of 2009, his administration fully implemented the financial coup over the United States. The man who had been responsible for orchestrating the bailout of AIG, the buyout of Bear Stearns as a gift for JP Morgan Chase, and had been elected to run the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by the major global banks in New York (chief among them, JP Morgan Chase), had suddenly become Treasury Secretary under Obama. The Fed, and thus, the banks were now put directly in charge of the looting.

Obama then took on a team of economic advisers that made any astute economic observer flinch in terror. The titans of economic crisis and catastrophe had become the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Those who were instrumental in creating and constructing the economic crises of the previous decades and building the instruments and infrastructure that led to the current crisis, were with Obama, brought in to “solve” the crisis they created. Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and architect of the 1980s debt crisis, was now a top economic adviser to Obama. As well as this, Lawrence Summers joined Obama’s economic team, who had previously been instrumental in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department in dismantling all banking regulations and creating the market for speculation and derivatives which directly led to the current crisis.

In short, the financial oligarchy is in absolute control of the United States government. Concurrently, the military structure of the American empire has firmly established its grip over foreign policy, as America’s wars are expanded into Pakistan, Yemen, and potentially Iran.

Make no mistake, a crisis is coming to America, it is only a question of when, and how severe.

Imperial Decline and the Rise of the New World Order

The decline of the American empire, an inevitable result of its half-century of exerting its political and economic hegemony around the world, is not an isolated event in the global political economy. The US declines concurrently with the rise of what is termed the “New World Order.”

America has been used by powerful western banking and corporate interests as an engine of empire, expanding their influence across the globe. Banks have no armies, so they must control nations; banks have no products, so they must control industries; banks have only money, and interest earned on it. Thus, they must ensure that industry and governments alike borrow money en masse to the point where they are so indebted, they can never emerge. As a result, governments and industries become subservient to the banking interests. Banks achieved this masterful feat through the construction of the global central banking system.

Bankers took control first of Great Britain through the Bank of England, building up the massive might of the British Empire, and spread into the rest of Europe, creating central banks in the major European empires. In the 20th Century, the central bankers took control of the United States through the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, prior to the outbreak of World War I.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Power and Global Government: Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System. Global Research: July 21, 2009]

Following World War I, a restructuring of the world order was undertaken. In part, these actions paved the way to the Great Depression, which struck in 1929. The Great Depression was created as a result of the major banks engaging in speculation, which was actively encouraged and financed by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks.

As a result of the Great Depression, a new institution was formed, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), based in Basle, Switzerland. As historian Carroll Quigley explained, the BIS was formed to “remedy the decline of London as the world’s financial center by providing a mechanism by which a world with three chief financial centers in London, New York, and Paris could still operate as one.” He explained:

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.[81]

The new order that is being constructed is not one in which there is another single global power, as many commentators suggest China may become, but rather that a multi-polar world order is constructed, in which the global political economy is restructured into a global governance structure: in short, the new world order is to be marked by the construction of a world government.

This is the context in which the solutions to the global economic crisis are being implemented. In April of 2009, the G20 set into motion the plans to form a global currency, which would presumably replace the US dollar as the world reserve currency. This new currency would either be operated through the IMF or the BIS, and would be a reserve currency whose value is determined as a basket of currencies (such as the dollar, yen, euro, etc), which would play off of one another, and whose value would be fixed to the global currency.

This process is being implemented, through long-term planning, simultaneously as we see the further emergence of regional currencies, as not only the Euro, but plans and discussions for other regional currencies are underway in North America, South America, the Gulf states, Africa and East Asia.

A 1988 article in the Economist foretold of a coming global currency by 2018, in which the author wrote that countries would have to give up monetary and economic sovereignty, however:

Several more big exchange-rate upsets, a few more stockmarket crashes and probably a slump or two will be needed before politicians are willing to face squarely up to that choice. This points to a muddled sequence of emergency followed by patch-up followed by emergency, stretching out far beyond 2018-except for two things. As time passes, the damage caused by currency instability is gradually going to mount; and the very trends that will make it mount are making the utopia of monetary union feasible.[82]

To create a global currency, and thus a global system of economic governance, the world would have to be plunged into economic and currency crises to force governments to take the necessary actions in moving towards a global currency.

From 1998 onwards, there have been several calls for the formation of a global central bank, and in the midst of the global economic crisis of 2008, renewed calls and actual actions and efforts undertaken by the G20 have sped up the development of a “global Fed” and world currency. A global central bank is being offered as a solution to prevent a future global economic crisis from occurring.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government. Global Research: April 6, 2009]

In March of 2008, closely following the collapse of Bear Stearns, a major financial firm released a report stating that, “Financial firms face a ‘new world order’,” and that major banks would become much larger through mergers and acquisitions. There would be a new world order of banking consolidation.[83]

In November of 2008, The National, a prominent United Arab Emirate newspaper, reported on Baron David de Rothschild accompanying Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a visit to the Middle East, although not as a “part of the official party” accompanying Brown. Following an interview with the Baron, it was reported that, “Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a new world order. In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance.”[84]

In February of 2009, the Times Online reported that a “New world order in banking [is] necessary,” and that, “It is increasingly evident that the world needs a new banking system and that it should not bear much resemblance to the one that has failed so spectacularly.”[85] However, what the article fails to point out is that the ‘new world order in banking’ is to be constructed by the bankers.

This process is going hand-in-hand with the formation of a new world order in global political structures, following the economic trends. As regionalism was spurred by economic initiatives, such as regional trading blocs and currency groupings, the political structure of a regional government followed closely behind. Europe was the first to undertake this initiative, with the formation of a European trading bloc, which became an economic union and eventually a currency union, and which, as a result of the recently passed Lisbon Treaty, is being formally established into a political union.

[See: Andrew Gavin Marshall, Forging a “New World Order” Under a One World Government. Global Research: August 13, 2009]

The new world order consists of the formation of regional governance structures, which are themselves submissive to a global governance structure, both economically and politically.

‘New Capitalism’

In the construction of a ‘New World Order’, the capitalist system is under intense reform. Capitalism has, since its inception, altered its nature and forms. In the midst of the current global economic crisis, the construction of the ‘New Capitalism’ is based upon the ‘China model’; that is, ‘Totalitarian Capitalism’.

Governments will no longer stand behind the ‘public relations’ – propagandized illusion of ‘protecting the people’. When an economy collapses, the governments throw away their public obligations, and act for the interests of their private owners. Governments will come to the aid of the powerful banks and corporations, not the people, as “The bourgeoisie resorts to fascism less in response to disturbances in the street than in response to disturbances in their own economic system.”[86] During a large economic crisis:

[The state] rescues business enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the masses to foot the bill. Such enterprises are kept alive with subsidies, tax exemptions, orders for public works and armaments. In short, the state thrusts itself into the breach left by the vanishing private customers. [. . . ] Such maneuvers are difficult under a democratic regime [because people still] have some means of defense [and are] still capable of setting some limit to the insatiable demands of the money power. [In] certain countries and under certain conditions, the bourgeoisie throws its traditional democracy overboard.[87]

Those who proclaim the actions of western governments ‘socialist’ are misled, as the ‘solutions’ are of a different nature. Daniel Guerin wrote in Fascism and Big Business about the nature of the fascist economies of Italy and Germany in the lead up to World War II. Guerin wrote of the actions of Italian and German governments to bail out big businesses and banks in an economic crisis:

It would be a mistake to interpret this state intervention as ‘socialist’ in character. It is brought about not in the interest of the community but in the exclusive interest of the capitalists.[88]

Fascist economic policy:

[I]ssues paper and ruins the national currency at the expense of all the people who live on fixed incomes from investments, savings, pensions, government salaries, etc., - and also the working class, whose wages remain stable or lag far behind the rise in the cost of living. [. . .] The enormous expenses of the fascist state do not appear in the official budget, [hiding the inflation].[89]

[. . . ] The hidden inflation produces the same effects as open inflation: the purchasing power of money is lessened.[90]

The bureaucracy of the fascist state becomes much more powerful in directing the economy, and is advised by the ‘capitalist magnates’, who “become the economic high command – no longer concealed, as previously, but official – of the state. Permanent contact is established between them and the bureaucratic apparatus. They dictate, and the bureaucracy executes.”[91] This is exactly the nature of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, most especially since the Obama administration took office.

In November of 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) issued a report in collaboration between all sixteen US intelligence agencies and major international foundations and think tanks, in which they assessed and analyzed general trends in the world until 2025. When it reported on trends in ‘democratization’, discussing the spread and nature of democracy in the world, the report warned:

[A]dvances [in democracy] are likely to slow and globalization will subject many recently democratized countries to increasing social and economic pressures that could undermine liberal institutions. [. . . ] The better economic performance of many authoritarian governments could sow doubts among some about democracy as the best form of government.

[. . . ] Even in many well-established democracies [i.e., the West], surveys show growing frustration with the current workings of democratic government and questioning among elites over the ability of democratic governments to take the bold actions necessary to deal rapidly and effectively with the growing number of transnational challenges.[92]

The warning from Daniel Guerin is vital to understanding this trend: “The bourgeoisie resorts to fascism less in response to disturbances in the street than in response to disturbances in their own economic system.”[93] Totalitarianism is on the rise, as David Lyon wrote:

The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization. [. . . ] Is abolition of borders intrinsically (morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance, refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss? [I]f globalization undermines the tested, state-based models of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian etatization, [i.e., centralization and control].[94]

In 2007, the British Defense Ministry released a report in which they analyzed future trends in the world. It stated in regards to social problems, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” Interestingly:

The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: ‘The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest’. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the ‘sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism’.[95]

The general trend has thus become the reformation of the capitalist system into a system based upon the ‘China model’ of totalitarian capitalism. The capitalist class fear potential revolutionary sentiment among the middle and lower classes of the world. Obama was a well-packaged Wall Street product, sold to the American people and the people of the world on the promise of ‘Hope’ and ‘Change.’ Obama was put in place to pacify resistance.

Prior to Obama becoming President, the American people were becoming united in their opposition against not only the Bush administration, but Congress and the government in general. Both the president and Congress were equally hated; the people were uniting. Since Obama became President, the people have been turned against one another: ‘conservatives’ blame the ‘liberals’ and ‘socialists’ for all the problems, pointing fingers at Obama (who is nothing more than a figurehead), while those on the left point at the Republicans and ‘conservatives’ and Bush, placing all the blame on them. The right defends the Republicans; the left defends Obama. The people have been divided, arguably more so than at any time in recent history.

In dividing the people against each other, those in power have been able to quell resistance against them, and have continued to loot and plunder the nation and people, while using its military might to loot and plunder foreign nations and people. Obama is not to provide hope and change for the American people; his purpose was to provide the illusion of ‘change’ and provide ‘hope’ to the elites in preventing a purposeful and powerful opposition or rebellion among the people. Meanwhile, the government has been preparing for the potentiality of great social and civil unrest following a future collapse or crisis. Instead of coming to the aid of the people, the government is preparing to control and oppress the people.

Could Martial Law Come to America?

Processes undertaken in the American political establishment in previous decades, and rapidly accelerated under the Bush administration and carried on by the Obama administration, have set the course for the imposition of a military government in America. Readily armed with an oppressive state apparatus and backed by the heavy surveillance state apparatus, the ‘Homeland Security’ state is about controlling the population, not protecting them.

In January of 2006, KBR, a subsidiary of the then-Vice President Cheney’s former corporation, Halliburton, received a contract from the Department of Homeland Security:

[T]o support the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency. [The contract] has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.

[It further] provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. [. . . ] The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. [emphasis added][96]

Put simply, the contract is to develop a system of ‘internment camps’ inside the United States to be used in times of ‘emergency’. Further, as Peter Dale Scott revealed in his book, The Road to 9/11:

On February 6, 2007, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the fiscal year 2007 federal budget would allocate more than $400 million to add sixty-seven hundred additional detention beds (an increase of 32 percent over 2006). [This was] in partial fulfillment of an ambitious ten-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named Endgame, authorized in 2003, [designed to] remove all removable aliens [and] potential terrorists.[97]

As Scott previously wrote, “the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 ‘readiness exercise’ in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary ‘refugees,’ in the context of ‘uncontrolled population movements’ over the Mexican border into the United States.” However, it was to be a cover for the rounding up of ‘subversives’ and ‘dissenters’. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the ‘Pentagon papers’ in 1971, stated that, “Almost certainly this [new contract] is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters.”[98]

In February of 2008, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, co-authored by a former US Congressman, reported that, “Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.”[99]

Further, in February of 2008, the Vancouver Sun reported that:

Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other's borders during an emergency, but some are questioning why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal. [. . .] Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas [but the] U.S. military's Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation in a civil emergency.

[. . . ] If U.S. forces were to come into Canada they would be under tactical control of the Canadian Forces but still under the command of the U.S. military.[100]

Commenting on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the legislation “authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.” Further, it states that the legislation “grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.” Not only that, but, “ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials.” Startlingly, “Legal residents who aren't citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president's suspicions.”[101]

Senator Patrick Leahey made a statement on February 2007 in which he discussed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, saying:

Last year, Congress quietly made it easier for this President or any President to declare martial law. That’s right: In legislation added at the Administration’s request to last year’s massive Defense Authorization Bill, it has now become easier to bypass longtime posse comitatus restrictions that prevent the federal government’s use of the military, including a federalized National Guard, to perform domestic law enforcement duties.

He added that, “posse comitatus [is] the legal doctrine that bars the use of the military for law enforcement directed at the American people here at home.” The Bill is an amendment to the Insurrection Act, of which Leahey further commented:

When the Insurrection Act is invoked, the President can — without the consent of the respective governors -- federalize the National Guard and use it, along with the entire military, to carry out law enforcement duties. [This] is a sweeping grant of authority to the President. [. . . ] In addition to the cases of insurrection, the Act can now be invoked to restore public order after a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, or — and this is extremely broad — ‘other condition’.[102]

On May 9, 2007, the White House issued a press release about the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 51, also known as the “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive.” This directive:

[P]rescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.

The document defines “catastrophic emergency” as, “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.” It explains “Continuity of Government” (COG), as “a coordinated effort within the Federal Government's executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency.” [emphasis added]

The directive states that, “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator.”[103]

Essentially, in time of a “catastrophic emergency”, the President takes over total control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in order to secure “continuity”. In essence, the Presidency would become an “Executive Dictatorship”.

In late September of 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Army Times, an official media outlet of the Pentagon, reported that, “Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army,” as the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, having spent years patrolling Iraq, are now “training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.” Further:

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.[104]

None of the authorizations, bills, executive orders, or contracts related to the declaration of marital law and suspension of democracy in the event of an ‘emergency’ have been repealed by the Obama administration.

In fact, as the New York Times revealed in July 2009, the Obama administration has decidedly left in place the Bush administration decisions regarding the government response to a national emergency in ‘Continuity of Government’ (COG) plans in establishing a ‘shadow government’:

A shift in authority has given military officials at the White House a bigger operational role in creating a backup government if the nation’s capital were “decapitated” by a terrorist attack or other calamity, according to current and former officials involved in the decision.

The move, which was made in the closing weeks of the administration of President George W. Bush, came after months of heated internal debate about the balance of power and the role of the military in a time of crisis, participants said. Officials said the Obama administration had left the plan essentially intact.

Under the revamped structure, the White House Military Office, which reports to the office of the White House chief of staff, has assumed a more central role in setting up a temporary “shadow government” in a crisis.

The Obama administration announced that their continuity plans were ‘settled’ and they “drew no distance between their own policies and those left behind by the Bush administration.”[105] In July of 2009, it was also reported on moves by the Obama administration to implement a system of ‘preventive detention’. With this, any semblance of democratic accountability and freedom have been utterly gutted and disemboweled; the Republic is officially dead:

[‘Preventive detention’] is to be a permanent, institutionalized detention scheme with the power vested in the President going forward to imprison people with no charges.

. . . ] Manifestly, this isn't about anything other than institutionalizing what has clearly emerged as the central premise of the Obama Justice System: picking and choosing what level of due process each individual accused Terrorist is accorded, to be determined exclusively by what process ensures that the state will always win. If they know they'll convict you in a real court proceeding, they'll give you one; if they think they might lose there, they'll put you in a military commission; if they're still not sure they will win, they'll just indefinitely imprison you without any charges.

[. . .] It's Kafkaesque show trials in their most perverse form: the outcome is pre-determined (guilty and imprisoned) and only the process changes. That's especially true since, even where a miscalculation causes someone to be tried but then acquitted, the power to detain them could still be asserted.[106]

Society, and with it, any remaining ‘democracy’ is being closed down. In this economic crisis, as Daniel Guerin warned decades ago, the financial oligarchy have chosen to ‘throw democracy overboard’, and have opted for the other option: totalitarian capitalism; fascism.

In Conclusion

The current crisis is not merely a failure of the US housing bubble, that is but a symptom of a much wider and far-reaching problem. The nations of the world are mired in exorbitant debt loads, as the sovereign debt crisis spreads across the globe, entire economies will crumble, and currencies will collapse while the banks consolidate and grow. The result will be to properly implement and construct the apparatus of a global government structure. A central facet of this is the formation of a global central bank and a global currency.

The people of the world have been lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, living under the illusion of an economic recovery. The fact remains: it is only an illusion, and eventually, it will come tumbling down. The people have been conned into handing their governments over to the banks, and the banks have been looting and pillaging the treasuries and wealth of nations, and all the while, and making the people pay for it.

There never was a story of more woe, than that of human kind, and their monied foe.

Truly, the people of the world do need a new world order, but not one determined and constructed by and for those who have created the past failed world orders. It must be a world order directed and determined by the people of the world, not the powerful. But to do this, the people must take back the power.

The way to achieving a stable economy is along the path of peace. War and economic crises play off of one another, and are systematically linked. Imperialism is the driver of this system, and behind it, the banking establishment as the financier.

Peace is the only way forward, in both political and economic realms. Peace is the pre-requisite for social sustainability and for a truly great civilization.

The people of the world must pursue and work for peace and justice on a global scale: economically, politically, socially, scientifically, artistically, and personally. It’s asking a lot, but it’s our only option. We need to have ‘hope’, a word often strewn around with little intent to the point where it has come to represent failed expectations. We need hope in ourselves, in our ability to throw off the shackles that bind us and in our diversity and creativity construct a new world that will benefit all.

No one knows what this world would look like, or how exactly to get there, least of all myself. What we do know is what it doesn’t look like, and what road to steer clear of. The time has come to retake our rightful place as the commanders of our own lives. It must be freedom for all, or freedom for none. This is our world, and we have been given the gift of the human mind and critical thought, which no other living being can rightfully boast; what a shame it would be to waste it.
Global Research

An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III

2009-10-24T19:54:00.004-05:00

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Introduction

In the face of total global economic collapse, the prospects of a massive international war are increasing. Historically, periods of imperial decline and economic crisis are marked by increased international violence and war. The decline of the great European empires was marked by World War I and World War II, with the Great Depression taking place in the intermediary period.

Currently, the world is witnessing the decline of the American empire, itself a product born out of World War II. As the post-war imperial hegemon, America ran the international monetary system and reigned as champion and arbitrator of the global political economy.

To manage the global political economy, the US has created the single largest and most powerful military force in world history. Constant control over the global economy requires constant military presence and action.

Now that both the American empire and global political economy are in decline and collapse, the prospect of a violent end to the American imperial age is drastically increasing.

This essay is broken into three separate parts. The first part covers US-NATO geopolitical strategy since the end of the Cold War, at the beginning of the New World Order, outlining the western imperial strategy that led to the war in Yugoslavia and the “War on Terror.” Part 2 analyzes the nature of “soft revolutions” or “colour revolutions” in US imperial strategy, focusing on establishing hegemony over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Part 3 analyzes the nature of the imperial strategy to construct a New World Order, focusing on the increasing conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa; and the potential these conflicts have for starting a new world war with China and Russia.

Defining a New Imperial Strategy

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-NATO foreign policy had to re-imagine its role in the world. The Cold War served as a means of justifying US imperialist expansion across the globe with the aim of “containing” the Soviet threat. NATO itself was created and existed for the sole purpose of forging an anti-Soviet alliance. With the USSR gone, NATO had no reason to exist, and the US had to find a new purpose for its imperialist strategy in the world.

In 1992, the US Defense Department, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney [later to be George Bush Jr.’s VP], had the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz [later to be George Bush Jr.’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and President of the World Bank], write up a defense document to guide American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, commonly referred to as the “New World Order.”

The Defense Planning Guidance document was leaked in 1992, and revealed that, “In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union,” and that, “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”

Further, “the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document “postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea,” and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further “suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf.”[1]

NATO and Yugoslavia

The wars in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s served as a justification for the continued existence of NATO in the world, and to expand American imperial interests in Eastern Europe.

The World Bank and IMF set the stage for the destabilization of Yugoslavia. After long-time dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, a leadership crisis developed. In 1982, American foreign policy officials organized a set of IMF and World Bank loans, under the newly created Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), to handle the crisis of the $20 billion US debt. The effect of the loans, under the SAP, was that they “wreaked economic and political havoc... The economic crisis threatened political stability ... it also threatened to aggravate simmering ethnic tensions.”[2]

In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic became President of Serbia, the largest and most powerful of all the Yugoslav republics. Also in 1989, Yugoslavia’s Premier traveled to the US to meet President George H.W. Bush in order to negotiate another financial aid package. In 1990, the World Bank/IMF program began, and the Yugoslav state’s expenditures went towards debt repayment. As a result, social programs were dismantled, the currency devalued, wages frozen, and prices rose. The “reforms fueled secessionist tendencies that fed on economic factors as well as ethnic divisions, virtually ensuring the de facto secession of the republic,” leading to Croatia and Slovenia’s succession in 1991.[3]

In 1990, US the intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart, erupt in civil war, and the report then placed blame on Serbian President Milosevic for the coming destabilization.[4]

In 1991, conflict broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia, when it, too, declared independence. A ceasefire was reached in 1992. Yet, the Croats continued small military offensives until 1995, as well as participating in the war in Bosnia. In 1995, Operation Storm was undertaken by Croatia to try to retake the Krajina region. A Croatian general was recently put on trial at The Hague for war crimes during this battle, which was key to driving the Serbs out of Croatia and “cemented Croatian independence.” The US supported the operation and the CIA actively provided intelligence to Croat forces, leading to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing.[5] The Croatian Army was trained by US advisers, and the general on trial was even personally supported by the CIA.[6]

The Clinton administration gave the “green light” to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims and “from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia.” Further, “Iran, and other Muslim states, helped to bring Mujihadeen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the Muslims against the Serbs, 'holy warriors' from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan.”

It was “Western intervention in the Balkans [that] exacerbated tensions and helped to sustain hostilities. By recognising the claims of separatist republics and groups in 1990/1991, Western elites - the American, British, French and German - undermined government structures in Yugoslavia, increased insecurities, inflamed conflict and heightened ethnic tensions. And by offering logistical support to various sides during the war, Western intervention sustained the conflict into the mid-1990s. Clinton's choice of the Bosnian Muslims as a cause to champion on the international stage, and his administration's demands that the UN arms embargo be lifted so that the Muslims and Croats could be armed against the Serbs, should be viewed in this light.”[7]

During the war in Bosnia, there “was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah.” Further, “the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs.”[8] Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs.[9]

The US had influenced the war in the region in a variety of ways. As the Observer reported in 1995, a major facet of their involvement was through “Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a Virginia-based American private company of retired generals and intelligence officers. The American embassy in Zagreb admits that MPRI is training the Croats, on licence from the US government.” Further, The Dutch “were convinced that US special forces were involved in training the Bosnian army and the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO).”[10]

As far back as 1988, the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create “a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia,” and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the “German economic zone.” So, US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as “advisers” and brought in US Special Forces to help.[11] During the nine-month cease-fire in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, six US generals met with Bosnian army leaders to plan the Bosnian offensive that broke the cease-fire.[12]

In 1996, the Albanian Mafia, in collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant guerilla organization, took control over the enormous Balkan heroin trafficking routes. The KLA was linked to former Afghan Mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.[13]

In 1997, the KLA began fighting against Serbian forces,[14] and in 1998, the US State Department removed the KLA from its list of terrorist organizations.[15] Before and after 1998, the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had a close political relationship with KLA leader Hashim Thaci.[16]

Both the CIA and German intelligence, the BND, supported the KLA terrorists in Yugoslavia prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s, the same period that the KLA was establishing its Al-Qaeda contacts.[17] KLA members were trained by Osama bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan. Even the UN stated that much of the violence that occurred came from KLA members, “especially those allied with Hashim Thaci.”[18]

The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretense of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and “may have been killed” by the Serbs. Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. Eventually, the official estimate was reduced to 10,000, however, after exhaustive investigations, it was revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs. During the NATO bombing campaign, between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians were killed, and NATO committed war crimes, including the bombing of a Serb TV station and a hospital.[19]

In 2000, the US State Department, in cooperation with the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, held a conference on Euro-Atlantic integration in Slovakia. Among the participants were many heads of state, foreign affairs officials and ambassadors of various European states as well as UN and NATO officials.[20] A letter of correspondence between a German politician present at the meeting and the German Chancellor, revealed the true nature of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo. The conference demanded a speedy declaration of independence for Kosovo, and that the war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO, Serbia was to be excluded permanently from European development to justify a US military presence in the region, and expansion was ultimately designed to contain Russia.[21]

Of great significance was that, “the war created a raison d'être for the continued existence of NATO in a post-Cold War world, as it desperately tried to justify its continued existence and desire for expansion.” Further, “The Russians had assumed NATO would dissolve at the end of the Cold War. Instead, not only has NATO expanded, it went to war over an internal dispute in a Slavic Eastern European country.” This was viewed as a great threat. Thus, “much of the tense relations between the United States and Russia over the past decade can be traced to the 1999 war on Yugoslavia.”[22]

The War on Terror and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

When Bill Clinton became President, the neo-conservative hawks from the George H.W. Bush administration formed a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. In 2000, they published a report called, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. Building upon the Defense Policy Guidance document, they state that, “the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.”[23] Further, there is “need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars,”[24] and that “the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times.”[25]

Interestingly, the document stated that, “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[26] However, in advocating for massive increases in defense spending and expanding the American empire across the globe, including the forceful destruction of multiple countries through major theatre wars, the report stated that, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[27] That event came one year later with the events of 9/11. Many of the authors of the report and members of the Project for the New American Century had become officials in the Bush administration, and were conveniently in place to enact their “Project” after they got their “new Pearl Harbor.”

The plans for war were “already under development by far right Think Tanks in the 1990s, organisations in which cold-war warriors from the inner circle of the secret services, from evangelical churches, from weapons corporations and oil companies forged shocking plans for a new world order.” To do this, “the USA would need to use all means - diplomatic, economic and military, even wars of aggression - to have long term control of the resources of the planet and the ability to keep any possible rival weak.”

Among the people involved in PNAC and the plans for empire, “Dick Cheney - Vice President, Lewis Libby - Cheney's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld - Defence Minister, Paul Wolfowitz - Rumsfeld's deputy, Peter Rodman - in charge of 'Matters of Global Security', John Bolton - State Secretary for Arms Control, Richard Armitage - Deputy Foreign Minister, Richard Perle - former Deputy Defence Minister under Reagan, now head of the Defense Policy Board, William Kristol - head of the PNAC and adviser to Bush, known as the brains of the President, Zalmay Khalilzad,” who became Ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq following the regime changes in those countries.[28]

Brzezinski’s “Grand Chessboard”

Arch-hawk strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, former National Security Adviser and key foreign policy architect in Jimmy Carter’s administration, also wrote a book on American geostrategy. Brzezinski is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group, and has also been a board member of Amnesty International, the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy. Currently, he is a trustee and counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major US policy think tank.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski outlined a strategy for America in the world. He wrote, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power.” Further, “how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination.”[29]

He continued in outlining a strategy for American empire, stating that, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.”[30] He explained that, “Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them: [and] second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above.”[31]

What this means is that is it of primary importance to first identify states that could potentially be a pivot upon which the balance of power in the region exits the US sphere of influence; and secondly, to “offset, co-opt, and/or control” such states and circumstances. An example of this would be Iran; being one of the world’s largest oil producers, and in a strategically significant position in the axis of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Iran could hold the potential to alter the balance of power in Eurasia if it were to closely ally itself with Russia or China, or both – giving those nations a heavy supply of oil as well as a sphere of influence in the Gulf, thus challenging American hegemony in the region.

Brzezinski removed all subtlety from his imperial leanings, and wrote, “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”[32]

Brzezinski referred to the Central Asian republics as the “Eurasian Balkans,” writing that, “Moreover, they [the Central Asian Republics] are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.”[33] He further wrote that, “It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”[34] This is a clear example of America’s role as an engine of empire; with foreign imperial policy designed to maintain US strategic positions, but primarily and “infinitely more important,” is to secure an “economic prize” for “the global community.” In other words, the United States is an imperial hegemon working for international financial interests.

Brzezinski also warned that, “the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power,”[35] and he, “puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy.” Thus, “The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.”[36]

The War on Terror and Surplus Imperialism

In 2000, the Pentagon released a document called Joint Vision 2020, which outlined a project to achieve what they termed, “Full Spectrum Dominance,” as the blueprint for the Department of Defense in the future. “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.” The report “addresses full-spectrum dominance across the range of conflicts from nuclear war to major theater wars to smaller-scale contingencies. It also addresses amorphous situations like peacekeeping and noncombat humanitarian relief.” Further, “The development of a global information grid will provide the environment for decision superiority.”[37]

As political economist, Ellen Wood, explained, “Boundless domination of a global economy, and of the multiple states that administer it, requires military action without end, in purpose or time.”[38] Further, “Imperial dominance in a global capitalist economy requires a delicate and contradictory balance between suppressing competition and maintaining conditions in competing economies that generate markets and profit. This is one of the most fundamental contradictions of the new world order.”[39]

Following 9/11, the “Bush doctrine” was put in place, which called for “a unilateral and exclusive right to preemptive attack, any time, anywhere, unfettered by any international agreements, to ensure that ‘[o]ur forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States’.”[40]

NATO undertook its first ground invasion of any nation in its entire history, with the October 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan war was in fact, planned prior to the events of 9/11, with the breakdown of major pipeline deals between major western oil companies and the Taliban. The war itself was planned over the summer of 2001 with the operational plan to go to war by mid-October.[41]

Afghanistan is extremely significant in geopolitical terms, as, “Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of ‘diversifying energy supply’ and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets.”[42]

As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out a mere two weeks following the 9/11 attacks, “Beyond American determination to hit back against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, beyond the likelihood of longer, drawn-out battles producing more civilian casualties in the months and years ahead, the hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word: oil.” Explaining further, “The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a map of the world's principal energy sources in the 21st century. The defense of these energy resources -- rather than a simple confrontation between Islam and the West -- will be the primary flash point of global conflict for decades to come.”

Among the many notable states where there is a crossover between terrorism and oil and gas reserves of vital importance to the United States and the West, are Saudi Arabia, Libya, Bahrain, the Gulf Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and Algeria, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia and eastern Turkey. Importantly, “this region accounts for more than 65 percent of the world's oil and natural gas production.” Further, “It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America's Chevron, ExxonMobil and Arco; France's TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the region.”[43]

It’s no secret that the Iraq war had much to do with oil. In the summer of 2001, Dick Cheney convened an Energy Task Force, which was a highly secret set of meetings in which energy policy was determined for the United States. In the meetings and in various other means of communication, Cheney and his aides met with top officials and executives of Shell Oil, British Petroleum (BP), Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Chevron.[44] At the meeting, which took place before 9/11 and before there was any mention of a war on Iraq, documents of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals were presented and discussed, and “Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country’s oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals.”[45] Both Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum have since received major oil contracts to develop Iraqi oilfields.[46]

The war on Iraq, as well as the war on Afghanistan, also largely serve specifically American, and more broadly, Western imperial-strategic interests in the region. In particular, the wars were strategically designed to eliminate, threaten or contain regional powers, as well as to directly install several dozen military bases in the region, firmly establishing an imperial presence. The purpose of this is largely aimed at other major regional players and specifically, encircling Russia and China and threatening their access to the regions oil and gas reserves. Iran is now surrounded, with Iraq on one side, and Afghanistan on the other.

Concluding Remarks

Part 1 of this essay outlined the US-NATO imperial strategy for entering the New World Order, following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The primary aim was focused on encircling Russia and China and preventing the rise of a new superpower. The US was to act as the imperial hegemon, serving international financial interests in imposing the New World Order. The next part to this essay examines the “colour revolutions” throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, continuing the US and NATO policy of containing Russia and China; while controlling access to major natural gas reserves and transportation routes. The “colour revolutions” have been a pivotal force in geopolitical imperial strategy, and analyzing them is key to understanding the New World Order. Global Research

Duty to Warn: Diet Coke is Poison

2009-10-18T09:02:00.003-05:00

By Gary G. Kohls MD, Posted by Stephen Fox

For OpEdNews: Posted by Stephen Fox - Writer

I was on a long road trip last week and, feeling rather drowsy, stopped at a convenience store for some coffee and refreshments. As I walked up and down the aisles to find something to munch on for the next leg of the trip, I discovered nothing that seemed to be real food on any of the shelves. So I thought I would at least buy some chewing gum, something I used to do decades ago when gum only cost a penny a stick. I fondly remembered the refreshing taste of Wrigley's Doublemint, Juicy Fruit or Spearmint gum.

Reading the fine print on the gum labels (a habit I always urged my patients to adopt whenever making purchases in grocery stores), I was annoyed and a bit alarmed to find that NONE of the 20 flavors had good old dextrose or sucrose in them. Instead, 100% of the choices contained, as their sweetener, a synthetic chemical called aspartame, AKA, NutraSweet/Equal/Spoonful.

Now I have read the book Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills, written by Russell Blaylock, MD (http://www.russellblaylockmd.com), one of the neuroscientists who has thoroughly studied the toxicities of the common food additives aspartame and monosodium glutamate (MSG). I have also seen the sobering video documentary about aspartame poisoning entitled: Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World, which proves without any doubt how dangerous this synthetic sweetener can be. (You can order a copy by emailing .)

Aspartame, which is in thousands of processed food products that are usually labeled "lite" or "diet" products, was synthesized in 1965 by a G. D. Searle chemist who, when he was trying to create an anti-ulcer drug, combined two amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine and found that the resulting dipeptide (a molecule consisting of two amino acids) had an intensely sweet taste to the tongue. Searle soon saw aspartame as a product that could compete in the low calorie food industry and obtained, in 1974, FDA approval for its use in dry foods. However the FDA approval was rescinded within 6 months because of toxic reactions and widespread concerns by a number of scientists. These scientists knew that aspartame was a lethal poison! In fact, in a 1996 report compiled from 10,000 consumer complaints obtained during the pre-marketing testing period, the FDA listed 92 aspartame-related symptoms, ranging from seizures to death! Still, the tenacious Searle, led by its cunning management team, refused to give up its effort to obtain FDA approval and denied that they had a sweet poison on their hands.

Interestingly, Searle's CEO at the time was Donald Rumsfeld (which is why some prefer to call Aspartame Disease Rumsfeld's Disease).Here is an excerpt from an article entitled: Aspartame (NutraSweet):
Something Evil This Way Comes written by Betty Martini, of MISSION POSSIBLE INTERNATIONAL, an organization devoted to exposing aspartame as the dangerous substance it is:

"Listen to Attorney James Turner who, with famed Dr. John Olney, tried to prevent aspartame's approval. Turner tells what it took to get a deadly poison approved. The FDA attempted to have Searle indicted for fraud and making false statements. Both U.S. prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. For 16 years the FDA refused to allow it on the market. When Reagan was elected, Don Rumsfeld, CEO of Searle, said he'd call in his markers to get aspartame approved. This is documented by a UPI investigation and congressional record. The day after Reagan took office Arthur Hayes was appointed as FDA Commissioner to get it
approved.
"Reagan knew it might take 30 days to get Hayes installed, so he wrote an Executive Order making the outgoing FDA Commissioner powerless to act against aspartame before he departed. Then the FDA set up a Public Board of Inquiry (PBOI) that revoked Reagan's petition for approval because it had not been proved safe and causes brain tumors. Hayes overruled the PBOI and let slip the hounds of disease, disability and death on an innocent unwarned population. Soon he became a consultant for the NutraSweet Company's public
relations outfit on a 10-year contract at $1,000/day. Hayes then refused to talk to the press."

In 1981 the Reagan FDA approved aspartame in dry food and in 1983 aspartame was approved for use in soda pop. In 1985 Rumsfeld's Searle was acquired by Monsanto, making Rumsfeld rich and Searle Pharmaceuticals and The NutraSweet
Company separate subsidiaries! And the rest, as they say, is history.

Suffice it to say, I passed on the chemically-contaminated chewing gum. I have learned to avoid swallowing synthetic flavor enhancers (or other chemicals in food) whenever I am able, preferring to use natural, unrefined and unbleached table sugar if I feel the need to sweeten tea or coffee.

Understanding the chemical breakdown products of aspartame informed my decision long ago and will help the readers to try to break their diet pop habits also. It is my professional duty to warn. Each molecule of NutraSweet, when it reaches a temperature of 86 degrees F (recall that the body's normal temperature is 98.6 and warehouses in the summer's sun can reach temperatures far higher than that)) breaks down into its two amino acids (a molecule each of phenylalanine and aspartic acid, both excitotoxins) and a molecule of methanol (wood alcohol!) which then metabolizes into formaldehyde (embalming fluid and a known carcinogen), formic acid (the acid that causes the intense itching from the prickles of burning weed) and diketopiperazine (a known carcinogen).

Perhaps a small amount of any of these toxins can be tolerated by some people, especially those who are well nourished, but I wouldn't want to take the chance, for there is too much evidence for its being a poison. The long list of neurodegenerative, psychological and other health problems aspartame can cause can be found at: They include seizures, multiple sclerosis, headaches, lupus, insomnia, fibromyalgia, arthritis, depression, anxiety and dozens more. If that isn't enough to convince readers to gradually withdraw (Diet Coke is also addicting) from your NutraSweet habit, it might give you extra motivation if you recall the list of evil geniuses listed above that have played a part in this tragedy.

There, you've been warned.

For more on the health-destroying properties of aspartame, check out these

resources:

http://www.dorway.com; http://www.aspartame.com

OpEdNews

CIT Group Amends $29 Billion Debt Exchange to Avoid Collapse

2009-10-17T09:23:00.001-05:00

By Pierre Paulden

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- CIT Group Inc., the 101-year-old commercial lender seeking to avoid collapse, changed the terms of its $29 billion debt exchange to increase support among its bondholders.

Maturities on new notes issued in exchange for existing bonds will be shortened, the New York-based company said yesterday in a statement distributed by Business Wire. CIT will also boost the amount of equity offered to subordinated debt holders and include notes due after 2018 that previously weren’t part of the exchange offer or reorganization plan.

CIT is seeking to reduce debt by at least $5.7 billion after being locked out of the unsecured debt markets it relies on for funding and posting nine quarters of losses totaling more than $5 billion. It turned to bondholders in July for $3 billion in rescue financing after failing to win access to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. program to sell U.S.-backed debt.

“Given our expectation for the exchange to fail, they would have to amend it to avoid bankruptcy,” Adam Steer, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York said in a telephone interview Oct. 14.

Moody’s Investors Service said Oct. 8 that CIT may need to liquidate if too few investors agree to either the swap or a prepackaged bankruptcy. Credit rating firm Egan-Jones Ratings Co. recommended that bondholders reject the offer. CIT said Oct. 13 that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Peek plans to resign at yearend.

Under the out-of-court restructuring, bondholders were to receive 70 cents to 90 cents on the dollar in the form of new debt, plus 94 percent of the equity in the company, CIT said Oct. 2 in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This excluded most unsecured notes.

Oct. 29 Deadline

With the prepackaged bankruptcy plan, bondholders would have received 70 cents on the dollar in the form of new 7 percent notes, plus 83.4 percent of equity in the reorganized company, according to an Oct. 8 report from CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. This excludes most unsecured notes maturing after 2018, which are left in place, CRT said.

The exchange offer expires at 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 29, according to the filing. CIT said yesterday that the offer to exchange notes due after 2018 will expire Nov. 13.

CIT may receive a loan of as much as $6 billion from bondholders that helped provide the emergency financing, a person familiar with the matter said this month. The funds are intended to finance a prepackaged bankruptcy if the out-of-court exchange fails to gain enough support, another person familiar with the matter said this month.

CIT, which has $42.8 billion in bonds and loans outstanding, funds about 1 million businesses from Dunkin’ Brands Inc. in Canton, Massachusetts, to Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc., the bankrupt clothing chain in Bellevue, Washington. The company says it’s the third-largest U.S. railcar-leasing firm and the world’s third-biggest aircraft financier.

Pimco, Baupost

A collapse would ripple across the “small and medium-sized businesses who rely on the finance company to operate -- to pay their vendors, ship goods to their customers and make their payroll,” CIT said in internal documents obtained by Bloomberg News in July that make the case for its importance to the U.S. economy.

Talks with regulators broke off July 15 and “there is no appreciable likelihood of additional government support being provided over the near term,” CIT said in a statement at the time. The U.S. government committed $2.33 billion in taxpayer funds in December to keep CIT afloat.

Pacific Investment Management Co. and Baupost Group LLC resigned more than a month ago from a steering committee that had to approve the restructuring plan. The remaining creditors on the committee are Centerbridge Partners LP, Oaktree Capital Management LLC, Capital Research & Management Co. and Silver Point Capital LP.

The lender may be unable to create a “long-term, viable” source of funding even if the debt swap succeeds, Moody’s said in its Oct. 8 report. Bloomberg

The US presidency is being consistently diluted

2009-10-13T09:47:00.001-05:00

Oct. 12, 2009
YOAV TENEMBAUM , THE JERUSALEM POST

President Barak Obama has diluted the authority of the presidency like no other United States president has in living memory.

He has appeared more frequently in television interviews, so far, than any other president. There is hardly a political initiative of his administration in which he is not publicly and openly involved right from the start.

To paraphrase a predecessor of his President Woodrow Wilson, who believed in open international agreements openly arrived at, President Obama seems to be on the same course. He announces the policy concerned and then goes on to implement it almost as a solo show. This kind of political behavior not only dilutes his authority as president, but also limits his freedom to maneuver. He is constrained by his own statements.

For instance, Obama previously announced that Israel must declare a total freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Although Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was ready to go a long way toward achieving a common denominator on this matter, a total freeze was not going to happen.

Had the Obama administration refrained from making public statements on this issue, and proceeded to conduct a quiet dialogue with the Israeli government, the current Israeli position could hardly have been presented as an American failure.

INDEED, BY making his position publicly known, President Obama forced Mahmoud Abbas to adopt an identical stance thus rendering a move on the peace process even more difficult. The Palestinian Authority leadership negotiated with previous Israeli governments without demanding a freeze on Israeli settlements as a precondition. Once Obama declared in public that such a freeze was necessary to restart negotiations, he left Abbas no other alternative but to adopt the same position. After all, Abbas couldn't be less demanding than Israel's staunch ally was.

Further, the contrived tripartite meeting involving Netanyahu, Abbas and Obama in New York last month was hardly conducive to the domestic and international authority of the US president. If at all, this meeting should have been convened by a lower-ranking political figure, such as the Secretary of State or the officially appointed mediator, Senator George Mitchell. . There was precious little to be gained by the president from such a meeting.

On every issue, Obama personalizes the policy he wishes to adopt right from the get-go.

To be sure, a presidential political system tends to personalize the policies pursued by the executive branch more so than a cabinet-parliamentary system. But in the case of Obama, there is a sense that the policies seem to revolve around him not only at a conceptual level, but also at a political level right from the outset of the decision-making process.

Obama has become the White House spokesman. He appears on a daily basis to explain his policies on almost every channel, on almost every program. It is said that he is a great speaker. Indeed, he is. But the value of a singular speech or an extraordinary interview resides in its being selectively made.

A president has to preserve his or her authority in order to be effective. The president has to discriminate as to where he appears, who he talks to, and in which stage of a political process he intervenes.

SO FAR, Obama has done the exact opposite. This has led to a process of increasing "political inflation," as the value of the president and of his office has diminished. Indeed, if there were an officially endorsed level of political inflation, as there is in the economic realm, the United States presidency might be said to be in the midst of a hyper-inflationary process. This process is reversible. It is up to President Obama to decide if he wishes to be remembered as an able and charismatic White House spokesman or as an effective and persuasive president. To be sure, the latest decision by the Nobel Committee to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize may have, paradoxically, reinforced this process.

The surprise and bewilderment which this decision has caused both in the United States and in other countries, and not only among Obama's political rivals, has done precious little to enhance his authority.

Usually, the decision to award the prize helps to elevate the status of the person being bestowed with it. In this particular case, due to the many question raised in light of his brief tenure and his lack of any concrete achievement thus far, many people may construe the decision as a forced exercise deserving scant respect. The decision is peculiar not for being objectionable, but for being incoherent. This could hardly help enhance Obama's presidential authority.

The writer is a lecturer in the Diplomacy Program at Tel Aviv University. He holds a doctorate in Modern History from Oxford University. THE JERUSALEM POST

Last Time Carbon Dioxide Levels Were This High: 15 Million Years Ago, Scientists Report

2009-10-11T00:15:00.002-05:00

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science.

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.

By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth's atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.

Tripati, before joining UCLA's faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said. "This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.

"During the Middle Miocene (the time period approximately 14 to 20 million years ago), carbon dioxide levels were sustained at about 400 parts per million, which is about where we are today," Tripati said. "Globally, temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, a huge amount."

Tripati's new chemical technique has an average uncertainty rate of only 14 parts per million.

"We can now have confidence in making statements about how carbon dioxide has varied throughout history," Tripati said.

In the last 20 million years, key features of the climate record include the sudden appearance of ice on Antarctica about 14 million years ago and a rise in sea level of approximately 75 to 120 feet.

"We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 100 parts per million, a huge change," Tripati said. "This record is the first evidence that carbon dioxide may be linked with environmental changes, such as changes in the terrestrial ecosystem, distribution of ice, sea level and monsoon intensity."

Today, the Arctic Ocean is covered with frozen ice all year long, an ice cap that has been there for about 14 million years.

"Prior to that, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic," Tripati said.

Some projections show carbon dioxide levels rising as high as 600 or even 900 parts per million in the next century if no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide, Tripati said. Such levels may have been reached on Earth 50 million years ago or earlier, said Tripati, who is working to push her data back much farther than 20 million years and to study the last 20 million years in detail.

More than 50 million years ago, there were no ice sheets on Earth, and there were expanded deserts in the subtropics, Tripati noted. The planet was radically different.

Co-authors on the Science paper are Christopher Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the department of Earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Robert Eagle, a postdoctoral scholar in the division of geological and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

The research was funded by UCLA's Division of Physical Sciences and the United Kingdom's National Environmental Research Council.

Tripati's research focuses on the development and application of chemical tools to study climate change throughout history. She studies the evolution of climate and seawater chemistry through time.

"I'm interested in understanding how the carbon cycle and climate have been coupled, and why they have been coupled, over a range of time-scales, from hundreds of years to tens of millions of years," Tripati said.

In addition to being published on the Science Express website, the paper will be published in the print edition of Science at a later date. Science Daily

How to Share The World's Resources: A Proposal

2009-10-04T13:16:00.002-05:00

Written by Rajesh Makwana

Edited by Adam W. Parsons

Introduction

A growing body of progressives within the global justice movement, including environmentalists, economists and policy makers, broadly agree that a significant overhaul of the world’s economic and political systems is long overdue, and that without significant restructuring our most pressing problems will never be tackled.

Whilst financial wealth soars to new heights for the few, the majority world are growing relatively poorer in the face of unfair trade, debt-based finance and grossly insufficient international aid. At the same time, developing countries have to endure the harsh environmental consequences of the industrial growth that fuels the skewed generation of wealth. Instead of being given the tools to end poverty they find themselves forced to systematically abdicate democratic control over their economies and resources to economically dominant countries and corporations.

Whilst economists and policy makers of the G8 nations remain comfortable in their runaway train of neo-liberal policies, we cannot rely on governments to instigate change until after the train collides. Their systematic prioritization of competition, self-interest, market forces, economic growth and the blatant subsidizing of corporate activity has created an unsustainable, commercialized society and has distorted the very meaning and function of economics. In a world where 2.7 billion people live on less than two-dollars-a-day and 50,000 people die as a result of poverty each day, economic practice can no longer claim to ensure the efficient distribution of resources for all, but rather the maximization of wealth generation without regard for consequence.

It is clear to many that the rogue train is on a collision course with environmental devastation and global economic and financial instability . If that isn’t enough, old Cold War divisions from renewed competition over resources and resentment from marginalized communities throughout the world present themselves as security threats, which are potentially catastrophic in a nuclear age.

It is time for a significant re-evaluation of global economic and political values and the creation of an economy that serves the needs of the global community as a whole, within our environmental limitations. It may seem a vein hope that policy makers will wake-up before the collision, but we can at least be sure that they will take heed once they emerge from the wreck.

The question arises - along what lines should a sustainable economy be based? To answer this, it is useful to outline the key problems:

* A rapidly globalizing market-based economy with self-interest and competition at its heart, prioritizing profit over people.
* The privatization of resources for the sake of security and profit, and the propagation of economic growth as the panacea for development.
* A corrupt and unstable global financial architecture based largely on speculation and bearing no relevance to the lives of most people.
* The monopolizing power and influence of multinational corporations and the welfare they receive to propagate economic growth and shape the ideals of society.
* Inefficient and damaging export-oriented trade and agricultural practices that prioritize profit over food security.
* Grave environmental neglect and climate change as a result of overconsumption and excessive commercialization.
* The neglect of mass poverty and growing inequality by policy makers who mistakenly leave the provision of basic human rights to commerce, market forces and the so called ‘trickle down’ effect.
* The minimization of true democratic institutions and influence.
* Political and economic competition between nations and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
* The commercialization and homogenization of our values and cultures.

The list could be extended but is sufficiently comprehensive for the purposes of this analysis. On the other hand, a just and sustainable economy must:

* Secure basic human rights and needs for all people everywhere as a priority.
* Create effective and interdependent local economies that co-exist harmoniously within a stable world financial system.
* Create democratic and representative global and local institutions to regulate economic activity and to guarantee social and economic rights.
* Ensure that corporate enterprise serves the public good and is rooted locally where possible.
* Ensure that all economic activity occurs with ecological limits and within a strict framework for emission reductions.

An effective and uniting global framework for economic and political activity must supersede the restrictive and often divisive prescriptions of socialism, communism and capitalism. Once we overcome such ideologies, many comprehensive and inclusive solutions to these problems present themselves through the work of individuals and institutions around the world. Proposals by ‘green economists’, the International Forum on Globalization, proponents of ‘localization’ and others propose generally to root economic activity in local communities as a way of reducing CO2 emissions, reducing corporate power and reinforcing participatory democracy.
What is missing from these and other proposals, which have at times been interpreted as protectionist and regressive, is an overarching concept for how the global community can continue to operate in an interdependent and globalised capacity, in line with the observable cultural shift towards international unity. The more basic question is how can the outdated values of privatization, self-interest and competition - which drive economic globalization - be fundamentally transformed to reflect principles that more accurately embody our humane nature?

Shifting Economic Values

Privatization, or the enclosure of the global commons for the sake of marketable and profitable commodities, is (and has been since the Middle Ages) the process at the very heart of our individualistic and competitive economy. For centuries, various forms of privatization have allowed corporations to proliferate and amass wealth and influence at the behest of dominant governments and to the advantage of the minority world. Both the commercial drive for profit and the increasingly hostile relationships between many countries stems from this same urge to secure and protect national interests. If these selfish drives are not directly transformed as part of any new political and economic framework, any restructuring will be superficial and a return to current geo-political tensions will be inevitable.

Common ground must be established and humanity’s common needs acknowledged; cooperative global interests must replace competitive self-interests. On an individual basis, within families and communities, people have established this sense of unity through the simple act of sharing what they own. Sadly, the process of sharing has been neglected at the international level where it can ensure that the basic needs of all are secured. Sharing, as a simple economic process, cuts to the heart of international relations and has the potential not only to unite, but to transform the driving values which underpin the global economy and thereby guarantee the permanency of political and economic reform.

Ensuring that those resources which are essential to life are no longer owned by corporations or controlled by nationalistic governments is a crucial step in creating a sustainable world economy which does not segregate or disenfranchise, but guarantees to secure the basic needs of all stakeholders. The global cooperative ownership of resources such as basic food, clean water, energy and medicine will involve the transformation of a variety of institutions and the creation of an international trust which can manage these resources on behalf of the global community.

The positive ramifications of identifying and sharing essential resources are manifold and will address many of the key problems presented above, including a significant reduction in corporate power, corporate trade and commodity speculation as essential resources are removed from commercial activity. The prioritization of local economies, food security and the rapid distribution of the necessary resources needed to achieve this will also lead to a rapid relief from poverty, reduction in inequality, and the end of inadequate aid mechanisms which are often ‘tied’ to benefit donors.

An international commitment to equally sharing our right to the atmosphere, and our right to pollute it, alongside strict targets for emissions reductions, will go a long way to ensuring the viability of life on earth for future generations. The contraction and convergence mechanism works in line with the principle of sharing and provides the necessary framework for CO2 sustainability.

Most importantly, sharing the world’s resources will necessarily internationalize and reinforce economic and political cooperation, thus encouraging peaceful relations between nations. This can pave the way for renewed international agreements on disarmament and non-proliferation, and help end regional, national and sectarian conflicts over resources such as land, water and minerals. With the basic human needs of all people secured, the reasons for disenfranchisement are directly addressed and the threat of terrorist activity greatly reduced.

It should be reiterated that the goal of implementing a system of sharing is twofold. Firstly to rapidly prioritize the needs of the majority world, who presently go without essentials such as adequate food, clean water and basic healthcare; and secondly to ensure that political and economic reform penetrates the very heart of the ‘the system’, transforming the values upon which it is built and not just its operation. Unlike existing theories such as socialism, Marxism or capitalism, sharing cannot be perceived as a divisive ideology, but a simple and familiar human process which asks for little more than:

* The recognition of the inherent unity of all people and nations.
* The establishment of sustainable world economic and political systems that reinforce this recognition and serve the public good.
*

The global common ownership of essential resources by the people to rapidly secure all basic human needs and rights.

Proposing A System of Sharing

The proceeding sections outline a possible framework within which resources can be efficiently shared across the world to secure basic human needs. This ‘proposal’ is not meant to constitute the definitive method for establishing such a system, but merely presents a possible and logical skeleton for consideration that can be amended over time as further research is undertaken. Ultimately, global economic reform and the establishment of any system of sharing will only be possible after extensive dialogue at the international level, quite probably under the auspices of the United Nations.

This proposal presents campaigners and activists with a viable structure for reform to be considered and debated, and is aimed at clarifying and substantiating a global call for sharing the world’s resources by seeking to answer the question ‘how can sharing be implemented in the global economy?’

It is unlikely that the necessary changes will occur until there is a dramatic turn-around in the thrust of international policy objectives, which may be most likely to occur after significant economic or environmental crises, both of which are likely to occur in the near future as economically dominant nations and multinational corporations maintain the attitude of ‘business as usual’.

The world reveals a very different set of circumstances to those present at the time of the Great Depression, where both the effects of and the economic cures for the economic crash were focused primarily in the US. The economic, financial and even social systems of the world are now far more interdependent. The US Dollar is effectively the international reserve currency; the US is a major and integral component of the world economy, being the consumer of last resort and the natal home of the multinational corporation; and Washington and Wall Street, alongside other G8 Nations, dictate the global financial architecture and trade conditions for the majority world. Economic reform, whether it be self-initiated or the result of crises, will necessarily involve and impact upon the entire global community of nations.

The probable environmental consequences of run-away climate change may be somewhat more polarized and likely to continue to disproportionally affect those in the developing world. However, there has been a significant increase in freak weather conditions in both the US and Europe which often have claimed the lives of many. Reports from agencies such the IPCC are increasingly bleak, yet there is little or no determination by primary polluters to significantly curb their emissions. Whereas economic collapse may present theoretical and structural challenges to policy makers, environmental devastation from climate change is likely to present immediate and sudden challenges, and efforts to restore the atmosphere will not pay dividends quite possibly for decades.

It is inevitable that, sooner or later, policy makers accept that excessive consumption, fuelled by the liberalization of market forces and short-sighted profit maximization, is the direct cause of climate change, and that these same commercial forces have created an unstable global economy based on speculation and sustained by governments pursuing economic growth at all costs.

If not before, then it will be at this point of crisis that proposals for far-reaching reform will be considered, and a recognition established that we must work together as a global community if we are to create a fairer and sustainable economy. Implicit and fundamental to such thinking must be the recognition that securing the basic needs of those who live in poverty must be the primary objective of any economic system.

Any attempt to redistribute resources more equitably will require global consensus for action and the transfer of economic power away from multinational corporations to a council of governments as they organize a framework within which essential resources, production and services can be re-directed to prioritize the securing of basic human needs.

International discussion is likely to centre on the United Nations whose vast humanitarian experience places it in good stead to coordinate reform, despite its many flaws.

The United Nations

Given its international membership and humanitarian charter, the UN system is clearly the only international body with the experience and resources to address global economic reform. In its current state, however, the UN is far too handicapped to initiate such change. Over the past 20 years, the US in particular has undermined the UN’s effectiveness by withholding pre-agreed and essential funding. The main reason for this is self preservation, as US economic hegemony is not compatible with the UN’s humanitarian principles. Instead, funding has been diverted to the largely undemocratic international financial institutions that favor America’s economic ideologies – The WTO, World Bank and IMF.

The situation has been made worse by the Security Council’s excessive influence over UN decisions, and the permanent members’ use of undemocratic and outdated veto powers. The accumulative result is an under-funded and under-staffed UN system that is consistently bypassed on global economic and security matters. The UN system must be restructured and revitalized, firstly to ensure that the democratic power to make and act upon decisions resides within the General Assembly. It should be also provided with all the resources necessary to fulfil its original mandate of regulating global economic affairs, strengthening international cooperation and promoting peace. The UN must be allowed to live up to its charter, in particular Article 55 which states:

"With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the United Nations shall promote:

a. higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development;
b. solutions of international economic, social, health, and related problems; and international cultural and educational cooperation;
c. universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."

International dialogue for reform must be centred on these principles, alongside the principle of sharing as the appropriate value with which to secure these universal rights. Once sharing has been accepted as the guiding principle for a reformed economic system, it would be necessary to create an additional, fully representative and accountable body within the UN responsible for organizing a global framework for sharing and thereafter to coordinate the global redistribution of resources.

This new agency could be established as a subsidiary to the General Assembly under article 22 of the UN Charter. Alternatively, an agency can be formed with intergovernmental agreement and brought into association with the UN via the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) according to articles 57 and 63 of the UN Charter.

For the time being we can call such a body the ‘UN Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS)’.

A United Nations Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS)

All participant countries should be fairly represented in the UNCRS, and all members would subscribe to a declaration of mutual benefit and equality. At all stages, the process should be transparent and directed by member countries representing their citizens’ needs. The activities of the UNCRS would be strictly in the interests of the global community, would be free of any national political or commercial gain and would eventually replace existing international aid, development and poverty reduction strategies. It would be important for the new Council to work very closely with existing UN agencies.

Involvement with the program should not be enforced upon any country; nations should remain free to develop economically in their own way. Nor should there be any conditions attached to sharing resources, although it seems wise that participating countries agree not to consume more than their ‘fair share’ and to entrust their excess production and/or resources to the UNCRS in order to cooperate in the international effort to secure everyone’s basic needs.

Since a significant portion of the world’s goods and services that are currently commoditized can be considered ‘essential resources’, and therefore shared instead of traded for profit alone, the UNCRS would become a crucial part of the framework for the governance of a new global economy.

Sharing essential resources would naturally create a more manageable international trade and finance framework, under which existing international financial institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO) would be rendered broadly redundant and could be progressively dismantled. Established agencies, such as the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), are well equipped to take over as the arbiters and overseers of the remaining international trade, finance and development mechanisms.

An international strategy to rapidly alleviate extreme poverty and to ensure that essential resources are shared in the longer term will require the UNCRs to initiate two programs of reform:

* In the Short Term: A United Nations Emergency Redistribution Program (UNERP) – to end needless deaths from extreme poverty.

* In the Longer Term: Global System for Sharing Essential Resources – The Global Sharing Network (GSN) – to ensure an ongoing sharing of resources that can create a more sustainable economy.

We will consider each function in turn below:

1. The United Nations Emergency Redistribution Program (UNERP)

The most immediate program that the UNCRS should undertake is an Emergency Redistribution Program (UNERP) to end extreme poverty and unnecessary deaths. A similar program to transfer essential resources from 'north to south' was first proposed in the Brandt Report (1980) but, despite widespread approval, the necessary political will to implement the proposals was sadly lacking. Humanity cannot afford this level of political complacency again; not to act is to condemn millions of people to needless hardship and death.

The process of an UNERP would be structurally and ideologically different from existing aid mechanisms, and the goal would be to prevent the deaths of the 50,000 people who die each day from poverty, within a three year period. This would be achieved through the universal provision of essential resources, regardless of cost implications. The emphasis would be on the redistribution of existing material resources, outside of the market system, and not simply the pooling and redirection of patronage aid.

The entire process would be coordinated by the United Nations Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS), which would have an internationally agreed mandate to ensure that they can manage the collection and distribution of these resources from donors. Necessarily, countries with the greatest surpluses of each individual resource would be first in line to share their excess, a responsibility that would naturally fall on the shoulders of more affluent and productive countries.

The UNCRS would utilize existing sources of data from UN agencies, the World Bank and NGOs for these figures. Where there is insufficient or disputed data, the UNCRS would turn to member country governments and where necessary conduct local surveys within countries. This information would form the basis of a global network for sharing resources (as detailed below) as part of a more comprehensive system of sharing.

The program would be initiated earlier than a more comprehensive system of sharing could be mobilized, and the following steps would need to be followed:

A. Calculating the most urgent national and global requirements.

Data from member countries and existing statistical resources would allow the UNCRS to coordinate a global assessment of the quantity and types of emergency provisions required and an analysis of where they are required. In most cases these will be food, water and medicine:

Food: The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) food basket or ration usually consists of a variety of basic food items (cereals, oil and pulses, sugar and salt), and possibly additional ‘complementary’ food items (meat or fish, vegetables and fruit, fortified cereal blends, sugar, condiments) which enhance nutritional adequacy and palatability.

Equipment and energy supplies for cooking food are also essential.

Medicine: Medication to prevent and treat diseases such as malaria and HIV/Aids, and other basic medical supplies. Basic health centers and trained medical personnel to administer medication and provide basic health services.

These resources would be country specific and should be determined by the World Health Organization (WHO) and similar agencies.

Water: Water pumping, treatment, storage and distribution equipment. The international standard for emergency water provision is 15 litres a day per person, approximately four gallons.

All of the above essentials require infrastructure in the form of roads and transportation to ensure that supplies can reach those who need them. Given the lack of this infrastructure in some of the least developed countries, the provision of transportation vehicles, fuel, personnel and the building of necessary roads and infrastructure also would be necessary.

B. Sourcing provisions to meet global needs.

Similar data would enable the UNCRS to determine the quantities of each of these provisions that donors must supply, and determine which countries are best placed to supply them.

Where possible the provisions would be redistributed as raw materials, goods and services as opposed to finance. In these cases, redistribution should be organized so that those who produce goods in excess of their domestic needs can easily share their excesses. In some countries, a simple redistribution nationally would be the priority. Other, more affluent countries would be in a position to concentrate on redistribution internationally.

C. Redistributing these resources.

The United Nations Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS) would coordinate international efforts to redistribute these essential resources to where they are most urgently required.

The UNCRS would work closely with their members as they mobilized resources for distribution, and donor countries would be informed where the quantity of each resource should be sent. It is feasible that the army, navy, air force and other military bodies would be involved in transporting goods. This act of military service could replace the existing and largely wasteful military operations that are commonly pursued as part of selfish foreign policy objectives.

Another possible source of international assistance is the global public who, through their goodwill, may wish to give their time and resources to assist in the collection, transportation and distribution of the emergency supplies- in both donor and recipient countries. Qualified individuals may also be able to provide more specialist assistance as doctors or nurses, or in the construction and maintenance of crucial infrastructure, such as roads and heath centers.

History provides many examples of how a motivated and informed global public often leads the way in humanitarian assistance, often being the catalyst to more effective action by governments. Examples of such a heartfelt response to humanitarian crises are plentiful, including many natural and manmade disasters such as the Ethiopian famine in the 1980’s, and more recently the Asian Tsunami of 2004. Already, large numbers of people volunteer to work with agencies of all types, in both developed and impoverished countries, to provide humanitarian assistance in various fields. It would seem prudent for donor governments to specifically request public support for this global initiative, coordinate a public campaign and ensure that individuals can, where appropriate, obtain the necessary assistance to apply themselves to this program at a local, national or international level.

Emergency Redistribution as an Alternative to Aid

It is clear that the UN Emergency Redistribution Program (UNERP) is immense in scope and purpose, requiring the combined effort of the international community, coordinated by the UNCRS. It differs from existing development structures as most of the ‘aid’ or redistributed resources will not be channelled through governmental bureaucracies, but mobilized directly on the ground where it is required in the form of food, water and medicine. The resulting self-sufficiency and direct access to resources will end the dependency that developing countries have on systems of aid, which will in turn bring an end to the existing aid mechanisms which are grossly insufficient and often corrupted by political, economic or commercial interests, or nation-specific foreign policy objectives.

The effective implementation of a UNERP can result in the elimination of extreme poverty, potentially saving the lives of some 50,000 people each day. It would embody the most urgent and important aspect of international aid, emergency and development programs. The UNERP could be expected to span a period of around 3 years, by which time it is hoped that extreme poverty would be largely eradicated.

It must again be emphasized that the UNERP would only constitute the first part of a wider economic reform to ensure that essential resources are shared internationally, as discussed in more detail below.

2. Restructuring the World Economy and Sharing Resources

Reform of the world economy and the establishing of a wider system of sharing should begin as soon as the UN Emergency Relief Program (UNERP) has gained momentum. Whereas the UNERP is a tool for the immediate relief of those in extreme poverty, a parallel restructuring of the global economy would be necessary to ensure that the wider basic needs of the global public can be met in perpetuity. This includes the right to healthcare, education, housing and clothing.

Since the world economy is largely capitalistic at present and based on production and consumption for the sake of wealth accumulation, the aim of reform would be to mitigate the prevalence of market forces and commercialization. In order to correct the unequal distribution of resources around the world, to end poverty and to highlight the commonality of nations, those resources which are common to all people and necessary for life must be made universally available. Re-establishing the stake that humanity has in the world's natural resources, produced goods and services will necessarily involve government intervention to minimize corporate and nationalistic control over them.

The management, production and distribution of essential resources must be organized to ensure that only after the basic human needs of all people are satisfied can they be made commercially available to other economic entities for the purpose of profitable production or consumption. This must occur within a reformed commercial framework which benefits local communities and ensures that resources are made available for all nations to become self sufficient and productive to the best of their capabilities.

Broader political and economic reform on a global scale will also be necessary if sustainability and economic justice is to be permanently established. Many suitable measures for global reform have gained wide support amongst progressives, activists and alternative economists world-wide. Measures which would compliment a system of sharing by providing ancillary mechanisms and support for more comprehensive reform include:

Strengthening, democratizing and refinancing the UN system.

* Progressively decommissioning the IMF, World Bank and WTO.
* Implementing the principles of economic localization and subsidiarity to significantly reduce corporate influence, regulate corporate activity and strengthen local economies, production and food security.
* Implementing the contraction and convergence model of global carbon emissions reduction, encouraging energy efficiency and investing in renewable energy.
* Shifting to sustainable, non-carbon intensive agricultural practices.
* Cancelling all multilateral debt owed by developing countries.

Comprehensive reform can ensure that the selfish interests of economic entities, whether they are countries or corporations, will be superseded by the combined interests of the global community. A true internationalism which can foster peaceful relations between nations and the cooperative advancement of humanity can then be established. Clearly many of the above measures are interdependent. For example, by encouraging the local production and consumption of resources, the inefficient and carbon heavy practices of international freight transportation of many resources will be significantly reduced, making it easier to achieve stricter emissions targets.

In order to institute a broader system of sharing it will be necessary to determine more comprehensively what constitutes ‘essential resources’, and therefore come to a global consensus regarding levels of need and consumption. It will also be necessary to create a framework to safeguard these resources and to establish a global network to facilitate their international distribution. Each of these issues is considered in more detail below.

Determining Essential Resources and Needs

Over and above the provision of resources as part of an emergency relief program, the UNCRS would need to determine which resources are deemed ‘essential’ and are to be shared internationally. The consultation process should be carried out away from any political or commercial influences and in conjunction with UN member countries, UN agencies and other humanitarian bodies.

A system of sharing would also be based on a set of assumptions regarding the level of need that each person has for each particular resource. Such measurements will obviously vary from country to country and are also likely to differ within a country. Implicit in any such system, however, is the need for affluent countries which currently over-consume resources to consume less and learn to live sustainably within global ecological limits. If the citizens of affluent society lived simpler lives and did not pursue material gain and maximum instant gratification alone, the environment, local community and social fabric would immeasurably benefit. Reducing over-consumption and preventing unnecessary waste would ensure that sufficient resources are available globally to meet all citizens’ needs.

With a combination of educational measures and the prioritizing of essential needs amongst developing nations, excessive over-consumption would have to be counteracted in affluent countries. Rampant and unnecessary commercialization can be addressed through measures to regulate corporate activity; energy consumption can be reduced by cutting back on inefficient corporate trade structures and lowering food miles; and economic localization and sharing resources according to need can help further develop distributional efficiency.

A gradual contraction and convergence method, similar to that applied to emission reductions by the Global Commons Institute, would have to be employed in relation to general consumption around the world. Over time, as a degree of equality establishes itself across the globe, differences in consumption would decrease in size. Until then, such measurements would be specific to countries, regions, or even towns and villages. The fluctuating quantities will be monitored locally, regionally and internationally to provide feedback for a global network that could ensure the correct resources and quantities are distributed.

An accepted definition of what the universal basic requirements are for living a normal, healthy life should be has already been agreed in article 25 of the UN declaration of Human Rights, which states that:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…”

We can extrapolate from this that, broadly speaking, the following types of resources are essential for securing basic human needs:

* Land – for housing and agriculture
* Energy – required at all stages of development and all aspects of life
* Water – essential for life, agriculture, sanitation and industry
* Materials - derived from minerals for constructing roads and buildings
* Technology, equipment and machinery for infrastructure, building, manufacturing, agriculture and processing
* Infrastructure and transportation for energy, food, water, machinery, materials and people
* Knowledge and training for an effective workforce

In order to consider how the ownership and management of these various resources could be organized, it is useful to group them according to type. There are three general categories:

* Naturally occurring resources – e.g. land, water, oil, gas and mineral ores
* Produced goods – e.g. agricultural produce, medicines, building materials and machinery
* Services – e.g. utilities, healthcare and education

The management of each of these types of resources would have to be structured differently at the international level, which will require an invigoration of some existing international bodies and the creation of certain new mechanisms, as outlined below.

Holding Natural Resources in Trust - A Global Commons Trust

To reverse the insidious and selfish enclosure of the global commons, the right for all to have access to and benefit from common resources must be returned to world citizens. Only through responsible trusteeship divorced from the profit motive can we be sure that the world’s natural complement of resources can be managed sustainably to secure the urgent needs of current and future generations. Common resources could include land, water, the atmosphere, oil, gas, coal, iron, bauxite, copper and other essential minerals and metals.

A trust is a suitable legal mechanism to ensure that essential resources are managed in the interests of the global community. Internationally identified common resources can be written into a ‘Global Commons Trust (GCT)’. The beneficiaries of the trust would be all world citizens, whilst the trustees would be a fully representative and international body – the UN Council for Research Sharing (UNCRS). The trust would be created on the premise that the specified common assets must be utilized in a manner that prioritizes securing the basic needs of humanity.

Generally, the ‘entrusted’ resources would require extraction and/or the application of productive processes or distribution to create useable goods or services. The options this presents the international community are outlined below.

Producing Essential Goods

Where it makes sound ecological and economical sense, the production of goods from raw materials should be sited near to where the resources are naturally located. Governments, working in cooperation with the UNCRS, would then be responsible for organizing production to ensure that global needs can be secured. Depending on the country of origin, levels of local need, aggregate global needs and other factors, a proportion of produced goods would be allocated for global redistribution, whilst a portion would be made available for local consumption.

Within the context of the wider reforms mentioned above, governments would have a range of options open to them for how to organize the production of goods such as basic agricultural produce, essential medicine, and much-needed building materials. They could establish national production facilities for goods which suit their national compliment of resources through a process of full or part nationalization of existing industries. However it may be more efficient, especially in the early stages, to make use of the existing productive facilities owned by multinationals, for example existing producers could be mandated to donate a suitable proportion of their goods to help secure global needs. Another option is that larger corporations are broken down into their smaller components for local communities to organize cooperative production facilities, as has been the case in some Latin American countries such as Argentina.

The combination of options adopted would vary from nation to nation, depending upon their particular set of circumstances, and the expertise of the UNCRS and other UN bodies would be made readily available to counties which require assistance in restructuring their local economies along these lines.

Providing Essential Services

To ensure that there is universal provision of essential services such as healthcare, education and access to utilities, global institutions which can coordinate their provision must be strengthened and new organizations created to oversee the distribution process around the world.

Currently the World Health organization (WHO) leads the field in facilitating international healthcare and has detailed research on where and which types of healthcare services are required. Similarly, the United Nations Educational and Social Council (UNESCO) is at the forefront of the ‘Education for All’ movement and has information regarding how and where programs should be implemented and which resources are necessary to secure universal education.

Apart from various awareness-raising and monitoring NGOs, however, there is no global agency which is directly involved in overseeing the provision of utilities such as water or energy. Increasingly, these services are not even managed by governments but are in the hands of private corporations.

Once the right to energy and water is internationalized through a Global Commons Trust, a new World Utility Organization can begin to coordinate the provision of essential utilities and engage in research activities to ensure that relevant and up-to-date information is available where required. Such an organization could coordinate local groups, non-profit companies and cooperative organizations to manage the provision of utility services. It may also be possible in the short term for existing corporations, under international mandates, to lend their expertise and resources to these projects.

The UNCRS would be directly involved in coordinating this process by ensuring that resources such as water, energy and infrastructure are redirected to where they are most urgently required.

A Global Sharing Network (GSN)

In order to practically establish a system of sharing within the global economy, the UN Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS) would set up and coordinate a Global Sharing Network (GSN). This would be a computerized system that acts upon information from governments around the world. The GSN would measure the changing levels of excess production in each country, then calculate how much of any resource a country is able to redistribute to another. The system would automatically adjust for the changing levels of ‘need’ and ‘productive output’ individual countries may experience. Such fluctuations would also occur as consumption in affluent countries contracts and world consumption converges to sustainable levels as developing countries lift themselves out of poverty. The GSN would ensure that excess resources are shared efficiently and with minimal impact on the environment, by ensuring that goods travel the shortest possible distance at all times.

Cooperation between nations is essential for this system to work effectively. National governments would work closely with the UNCRS in order to provide up-to-date information about (a) which essential resources are available to share through the GSN; (b) which resources the public are in need of; and (c) the location of these relative excesses and insufficiencies. The national government would be responsible for ensuring that resources are distributed appropriately within the country, a task that the GSN would facilitate.

The UNCRS would provide logistical support in the creation of networks within countries to ensure that correct information is fed back to the GSN. Such networks are likely to comprise of civil society groups which monitor resource levels locally and regionally, and a governmental body which coordinates and collates this information to feedback to the GSN. Members of the community would be encouraged to form local and regional assemblies to ensure that the basic needs of the public are accurately represented. They would also assist in the distribution of resources received from other regions or countries.

The process of sharing basic resources in this way is essentially a democratic and direct route to economic development. The method would ensure a ‘bottom up’ development controlled by those most affected, and not an imposed ‘top-down’ process. Local and regional assembly structures of this kind would also enable genuine political participation to become a reality.

Given the scale of the task, the involvement and expertise of existing development NGOs and UN agencies such as the FAO, UNDP and ECOSOC would prove essential. The UN agencies in particular have established links both at the local and governmental level in developing countries and possess a wealth of practical experience, research and statistics. These will prove invaluable when implementing poverty reduction and development strategies, locally and nationally.

How Sharing can Transform the World Economy

In a global economy where essential resources are shared, the primary objective would not be commerce, trade liberalization or economic growth, but the production and global distribution of all resources that are essential to life. Adopting a system of sharing will mean that the majority of commodities and goods that are currently traded would instead be cooperatively owned and distributed by the global public through the UN Council for Resource Sharing (UNCRS). As a result, international trade in commodities and their derivatives will be significantly reduced and confined to non-essential goods, and commercial interests would have no direct influence on economic sharing. Corporations would operate within this new global framework to serve the remaining economic, industrial and technological needs of society.

Sharing will ensure that essential domestic needs are largely met at the local level, thereby reducing dependency on foreign imports of essential goods. As a consequence, there would be less need for developing countries to agree to prohibitive trade agreements, whether multilateral or bilateral. This would free the population to develop their own industry and economy, making it eventually possible to decommission the WTO. Divorcing essential resources from financial markets will dramatically reduce the amount of stock and financial derivatives related to the stocks that are speculated upon and traded. This will help to reduce the global financial instability that many economists and analysts believe will, sooner or later, result in an international economic crisis and world stock market collapse.

Sharing resources will also mean that developing nations will require less foreign exchange reserves as they will be purchasing fewer goods from abroad. This will reduce the need for developing countries to turn to the IMF for loans and accrue crippling debts. It would therefore be possible to eventually decommission the IMF. Sharing in the way described is essentially a democratic and participatory process. Once economic and social justice has been achieved, these democratic structures can be utilized to further a nation’s integration into a democratic global economy. The mutual benefit of sharing will be clear as the existing system of patronage aid is replaced and once the developing world is living healthily and in a self-sustaining manner. At this stage, international trade and exchange is likely to increase significantly as development proceeds and societies share their cultural inheritance.
Conclusion

A system of sharing should be implemented within a framework for wider economic reform once policy makers admit that economic instability and climate change are the result of unfettered market forces, commercialization and overconsumption. The overriding impetus for reform must be to create the necessary economic and political conditions for ending poverty, protecting the environment and creating a united world in which justice replaces inequality.

The common ownership of resources, goods and services which are essential to life and their cooperative management by the international community goes further than existing calls for economic reform which include localization, subsidiarity and corporate regulation. Implementing the principle of sharing in world economic and political affairs replaces the values of competition and self-interest upon which these systems are based with the more humane values of cooperation and common interest. In this way, economic sharing ensures that fundamental issues such as the prevalence of market forces are addressed by removing key resources from commercial control, thereby reducing corporate power and influence and destabilizing speculative activity on financial markets.

Much more research and dialogue is clearly required at the international level before any program of international reform and economic sharing can be constructed. The above proposal, however, provides a starting point for further research and demonstrates that it is both necessary and possible for reform on this scale to be initiated if the world community seriously commits itself to ending poverty, mitigating climate change and creating a sustainable economy. STWR

Recession Rising Like Phoenix With Area Delinquencies Surging

2009-10-01T14:11:00.002-05:00

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Drive up to the Peaks Corporate Park in north Scottsdale, Arizona, and the only person you’ll encounter at the luxury office complex is a security guard.

The development was planned to offer executive suites with views of the McDowell mountains, neighbors such as General Electric Co. and a location just minutes away from Jack Nicklaus’s Desert Mountain golf courses. Plans to lure tenants haven’t materialized and today the complex in this city next to Phoenix is empty, the entrance blocked by a traffic barricade.

Delinquencies in the Phoenix area on loans backed by office, industrial, retail and apartment properties have risen more than five-fold since March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Phoenix region has the second-worst U.S. delinquency rate, behind Detroit’s 10 percent. In Phoenix, the economic recovery looks a lot like a recession.

“A commercial recovery in markets that are heavily dependent on construction will be slow, which means the overall recovery will lag the nation as a whole,” said Susan Wachter, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. “These are more volatile markets and getting back to normal could take years.”

Phoenix and other southern and western cities such as Atlanta, Houston and Dallas grew because they offered an affordable lifestyle to middle-class Americans, said Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That growth has slowed.

Slowing Growth

The Phoenix area’s population is forecast to increase 1.6 percent in 2009 from 2008 and 1.8 percent in 2010, according to a forecast by Scottsdale, Arizona-based real estate and economic consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack & Co. That’s the slowest growth since at least 1990. Employment may fall 6 percent in 2009 and another 1 percent in 2010, according to the firm.

The real estate crisis has brought economic growth to an end. Arizona had the highest unemployment rate since 1983 in July at 9.2 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate fell to 9.1 percent in August. Single- family building permits in metropolitan Phoenix may fall to 5,973 this year, down 81 percent from 2007, according to a consensus forecast of real estate and consulting firms and universities compiled by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

“The economy in Phoenix is in tatters right now,” said Matthew Anderson, a partner at Foresight Analytics LLC in Oakland, California. “It’s now really hit the skids.”

The decline demonstrates that it may take even longer for states with slower growth to emerge from the recession.

Rising Unemployment

In August, 19 states had higher unemployment rates than Arizona’s, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

Worse, more real estate is at risk of defaulting throughout the U.S. Investors in commercial mortgage-backed securities are holding assets with a delinquent unpaid balance of $28.9 billion, up more than five fold since June 2008, according to a report issued by the Congressional Oversight Panel. Under a worst-case scenario, the panel estimates that commercial real estate and construction loan losses through 2010 may total $81.1 billion at 701 banks with assets of $600 million to $80 billion.

“The problems in commercial real estate are just getting started and they will dampen what is already going to be a weak economic recovery,” said Jim Rounds, senior vice president and senior economist at Elliott D. Pollack. “In Arizona, the recession is probably going to last to the middle of the next calendar year.”

Growth Fallout

Wachter, who has been studying housing markets for more than two decades, predicts that Phoenix won’t see a recovery until at least 2012.

The city of Phoenix is suffering the fallout from growth that boosted its population from 983,403 in 1990 to 1.6 million in 2008, according to the Census Bureau. Single-family building permits in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, rose more than five-fold from 1975 to the peak earlier this decade.

Delinquencies for loans backed by office, industrial, retail and apartment properties that were bundled into securities in Phoenix increased five-fold since March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Phoenix office vacancy rate probably exceeds 30 percent, including space that’s leased yet vacant because the tenants have pulled out, Rounds said.

More offices are becoming available. Los Angeles-based commercial broker CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. said in a second quarter report 2.2 million square feet will be ready for occupancy this year and in early 2010.

Late Payments Rise

As tenants abandon space, landlords are struggling to meet their obligations. Commercial properties with mortgage payments 60 days late or more rose to 8.5 percent as of August in the Phoenix, up from 1.6 percent in March, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“The commercial markets are the second shoe to drop,” said Marshall Vest, the director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management in Tucson. Vest has lived in Tucson since 1970 and worked at the business school studying and forecasting the Arizona economy for 30 years.

For the last three decades, Arizona’s population growth has exceeded most of the nation’s. From 1970 to 2007, the state’s population more than tripled to 6.3 million. Its population growth ranked second or third in the U.S. from 1970 through 2008, according to Pollack data.

Onetime Growth Engine

The state was also an engine for job growth. Arizona was fourth in the U.S. in employment growth from 2000 to 2008 and second from 1990 to 2000. Arizona’s gross state product, a measure of overall economic activity, jumped to $249 billion last year from $30.3 billion in 1980.

Residential construction soared from 1980 to 2005, the peak of the new-home market boom in the state. Single-family building permits rose from 22,919 in 1980 to 87,415 in 2005, according to data on Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center Web site.

The fallout can be seen throughout the Phoenix. Completed and empty office buildings and retail developments dot the desert landscape of the region, the 12th-largest metro region in the U.S. Vacant retail shops are hard to ignore.

‘Going Under’

“It’s kind of going under locally,” said Chris Dellrie, who was working at Axis Sports, a sporting goods and clothing store, one of at least two businesses open in a Gilbert shopping center that’s mostly empty.

The slump forced Opus West Corp., one of the region’s biggest real estate developers, to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, listing debts of $1.46 billion and $1.28 billion in assets, according to bankruptcy records. Opus West is part of the Opus Group, a real estate developer based in Minneapolis.

“It’s really nothing out of the ordinary,” said Craig Henig, senior managing director at CB Richard Ellis in Phoenix. “They believed like everyone that the market would expand.”

At 24th at Camelback II, an 11-story, 300,000-square-foot office building going up in Phoenix near the Arizona Biltmore Country Club, developer Hines hasn’t preleased any of the space. The building will be finished in the first quarter of 2010, said Kim Jagger, a spokeswoman for the Houston-based real estate company. Jagger said there are at least half a dozen potential tenants.

‘Horrible Economy’

People who’ve moved to Phoenix and adjacent suburbs have found life difficult as the economy has slumped.

Ambre Mauro moved to Gilbert, a suburb of Phoenix, in March after struggling in Oregon.

“The economy was horrible there,” said Mauro, 25, who graduated from Brigham Young University-Hawaii with a degree in exercise sports science. “Eventually I decided to come here.”

Things aren’t much better in Arizona. Mauro now holds two jobs. She’s a personal trainer and front desk clerk at a local gym and a waitress at a Japanese restaurant, where she makes about $10 an hour, including tips.

“I have a four-year degree and I never expected to be a waitress,” Mauro said.

About 25 miles northeast of downtown Phoenix, the Peaks Corporate Park stands as a reminder of just how optimistic developers were about the region’s growth prospects.

Prestigious Neighbors

The office complex was built in one of the most prestigious and wealthy parts of the state, where the median price for a new home was $920,000 in the second quarter.

A Web site for the development boasts that it’s near several resort hotels including the Boulders, a Waldorf Astoria property, and “neighbors such as General Electric, Pacesetter, DHL, Taser, USF Bestways, Toll Brothers, Pulte Homes.” Dale Dowers, a principal with the developer, didn’t return calls or e-mails for comment.

With no tenants, the development’s courtyard is barren but for a sculpture featuring wildlife. Bloomberg

Obama Risks Military Coup (Full Text)

2009-09-30T17:07:00.006-05:00

What a Idiot this guy is.

By John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the“Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.” Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America’s troop strength is allowed to sag.They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do? Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam? Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World? What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, “I’m not interested in victory”) that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out,consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse? Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America’s military leadership is lost in a fool’s fog.Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility? Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation.Skilled,military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say,“We can always worry about that later.” In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass. © 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved. John L. Perry

Tribulation Or Not??

2009-09-30T10:08:00.005-05:00

Hi and good morning,

What do you think about what is happening in the world right now?

We have had 2 major red dust storms that turned Australia and New Zealand blood red during the day. Plus 2 massive earthquakes in 24hrs time (never has happened before) with Tsunami warnings to boot. Plus 2 of our planets having 2 very large holes punched in them. 1st a comet hits Jupiter and 2nd a asteroid hits our sister planet Venus and tears it apart. Now we have the US dollar about to be dropped and a new more "world friendly currency" being introduced by Russia and China. Then we have Iran and the religious freaks of that country trying to bring back Mahdi "the guided one" and the end of days. They have quit trading oil in US dollars and have switched to the Euro. This is a very big deal cause oil is the lynch pin and if other oil producing countries follow then all hell will break loose and a global war will soon follow very quickly. Then you have their now 2 Nuclear facilities and the Saudis (do we really trust them) giving Israel the green light and the use of their airspace to bomb Iran. We know how Israel feels about Iran and the comments by "freak boy" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about wiping Israel of the face of the map.

Our we in the "Prophesied End of Days" and nearing the end of Tribulation or, are we just entering Tribulation and we have yet to see the worst that God and his wrath are about to unleash and engulf on this third green blue planet from the sun and into something that none of us want to see or live through.

I think we have failed miserably as a race of people and it is time for us all to get on our knees and start praying and asking for forgiveness and, to start treating the world and the people of it the way God intended us to do.

Wall Street risks red October

2009-09-20T11:50:00.003-05:00

By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - Analysis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Financial markets are off to the races and Wall Street has all but declared victory.

A surge in prices for both risky and safe assets is alarming some analysts who say emergency rescue measures that helped markets rebound may be setting them up for a new fall.

But most institutional investors just aren't listening.

Talk of a virtual circle of recovery in asset values and the real economy abounds at big banks, a sharp if cautious contrast to the dire pessimism which prevailed until recently.

Unusual simultaneous rallies in equities, U.S. government bonds and commodities are linked to one factor: super-cheap monetary policies adopted around the world.

Bank stocks have led the runaway U.S. equity markets which have catapulted indexes nearly 60 percent above March lows. This has meant better earnings, rising profits and bigger bonuses.

"We're in a sweet spot for the financial cycle," said Jonathan Basile, economist at Credit Suisse in New York.

"Central banks are in no hurry to remove stimulus so that suggests risky assets could do better and fixed income could also do better."

An analysis from Bespoke Investment Group captures the lightning speed of the rush into equities. Six months ago, the S&P 500 .SPX was trading further below its 200-day moving average than at any other time since the Great Depression.

"Today, we are in the midst of one of the strongest bull market rallies since the 1930s," Bespoke said in a report. "This has helped to lift the S&P 500 further above its 200-day moving average than at any other time since 1983."

Few disagree with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's contention that he had to flood markets with cash to prevent another Great Depression. But critics say his tactics pose risks of their own, making it harder for monetary authorities to gauge the exact level of stimulus their measures deliver.

BITTERSWEET SPOT?

One obvious candidate for an abrupt turnaround is the U.S. stock market. Not only has it recovered more than half its value in the past six months, but the rebound has also been largely predicated on a rally in shares in financial firms, many of which are still believed to rest on shaky ground.

An ongoing deterioration in consumer debt repayments and a worsening picture in commercial real estate are all putting additional strain on already-heavy balance sheets.

Joseph Stiglitz, a prominent economist and Nobel Laureate from Columbia University in New York, argued last week that the U.S. banking sector is now in worse shape than before the collapse of major investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008, because banks seen as too big to fail before the crisis had grown even larger.

Lehman's demise set off a cascading storm across financial markets that stifled lending, crippled global industrial production and exacerbated an already severe economic slump.

Much of the ground regained by equities since that period reflects understandable relief that both the Treasury and Fed rescues appear to have pulled the world back from the brink.

Coupled with explicit guarantees of an extended period of ultra-loose monetary policy from central banks, which emerged from the Fed's August gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this has underpinned much of the market's optimism.

Solid results from key banks have also assuaged concerns. Goldman Sachs (GS.N) reported $3.4 billion in second-quarter net income, its best performance ever.

Yet bank profitability is expected to come under pressure from both increased credit losses and a tighter regulatory environment. JP Morgan (JPM.N) estimates new rules alone will reduce long-term earnings potential by a quarter.

Beyond that, a grim housing outlook and high unemployment cast doubt on the viability of any consumer-led expansion.

"I'm not sure real estate is going to be a great investment ... and I still think the housing market still has a little bit further to decline, said Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the CATO Institute in Washington.

A Reuters poll shows economists expect a 14 percent fall in home values for 2009 followed by a 2 percent rise next year.

The stock of vacant and existing homes has begun to come down but is still above 1.5 million units -- not nearly enough, say economists at Deutsche Bank, to bring the excess supply of housing in line with historical trends.

The pace of job losses has abated but the unemployment rate continues to climb, and is soon expected to breach 10 percent. That will be more than double its level before the recession started, the biggest jump since the Great Depression.

The average time people are left without a job has also grown and is now close to 6 months, the highest on record.

"The bleeding in the labor market continues to lessen," said T.J. Marta, strategist and founder of Marta on the Markets. "Unfortunately, the structural overhang in various industries, like finance, housing and autos, is preventing the absorption of those who have already lost their jobs."

High unemployment lends the latest leg of the rally an unsettling whiff of the irrationally exuberant era of Alan Greenspan, the former Fed Chairman whose critics say he fought bubble-led downturns by creating more bubbles.

It remains to be seen whether the unprecedented quantities of central bank funding can be removed before it has any unwanted side-effects. Already, a swooning dollar is making inflation-adjusted returns look less favorable.

Stock valuations are also increasingly less attractive. The ratio between share prices and expected company is almost 16 from 11 in March, when the equity market hit its 12-year low.

Moreover, many believe Americans are undergoing a secular shift from spending freely to saving avidly.

A report from the Fed on Thursday offered more evidence of rising savings, showing household ownership of U.S. Treasury bonds rose to $605.9 billion in the second quarter from $576.4 billion in the prior period, a trend which suggests serious limitations to any investment strategy that relies on a quick bounce-back from battered U.S. consumers. (Editing by James Dalgleish)
Reuters

African virus a new threat to West

2009-09-20T11:42:00.001-05:00

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) - The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.

Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.

"We're very worried," Dr. James Diaz of the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center told a meeting on airlines, airports and disease transmission sponsored by the independent U.S. National Research Council.

"Unlike West Nile virus, where nine out of 10 people are going to be totally asymptomatic, or may have a mild headache or a stiff neck, if you get Chikungunya you're going to be sick," he said.

"The disease can be fatal. It's a serious disease," Diaz added. "There is no vaccine."

Chikungunya infection causes fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, rash and joint pain. Symptoms can last a few weeks, though some suffers have reported incapacitating joint pain or arthritis lasting months.

The disease was first discovered in Tanzania in 1952. Its name means "that which bends up" in the Makonde language spoken in northern Mozambique and southeastern Tanzania.

The virus could spread globally now because it can be carried by the Asian tiger mosquito, which is found in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

In the United States, the mosquito species tends to live in southern regions east of the Mississippi but has been found as far afield as western Texas, Minnesota and New Jersey.

Health officials are greatly concerned about the appearance of Chikungunya in the islands of the Indian Ocean -- Mauritius, Seychelles and Reunion -- which have beach resorts frequented by European tourists.

"It is hyper-endemic in the islands of the Indian Ocean," Diaz told the meeting.

"Travel by air will import the infected mosquitoes and humans," he added. "Chikungunya is coming."

Diaz warned of possible double-infections involving Chikungunya and dengue fever or malaria, which are also carried by the Asian tiger mosquito.

The spread of the disease could be greatest in so-called mega-cities such as Mumbai and Mexico City, which have large and impoverished populations, poor health controls and water systems that provide ready breeding grounds for mosquitoes, Diaz said.

West Nile, spread by a different mosquito species, first appeared in New York in 1999 and now can be found in most of North America. (Editing by Maggie Fox and Paul Simao)
Reuters