One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
On the 14th day of Operation Protective Edge, Gazan blogger Nalan al-Sarraj and TRNN Correspondent Yousef al-Helou discuss how Palestinians are responding to the massacre in Shujaiyeh, as well as the widespread support for the resistance against the siege - 31 min ago
Bio
Nalan al Sarraj is a Gaza-based blogger. She can be found on Twitter @NalanSarraj.
Yousef Al-Helou
is a Palestinian journalist and correspondent for The Real News Network
based in Gaza-Palestine. His work has been featured in a variety of
media outlets including BBC, GRN, CBC Radio Canada, TV New Zealand, UN
Observer, Reuters Institute, Middle East Monitor, Press TV, Al-Etejah
TV, Maan News Network, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, PNN
among many others. Yousef is a Reuters journalist fellow and a UN fellow
as well and took part in many speaking tours in the UK/Ireland about
his work experience, reporting in a war zone. Yousef covered the
infighting between Fatah and Hamas as well as the two Israeli wars on
Gaza in late 2008/early 2009 and late 2012, arrival of siege-breaking
boats and many other major events since 2006. Yousef runs Gaza TV News
page on Facebook that has more than 49,000 followers. Currently he is
working on his research about the rise of citizen journalists in Gaza
and their impact of public perception of Palestine in the West.
"U.S. Complicity Brought Up to Date" in Israel's War against Gaza
Phyllis Bennis says the calls in Israel for genocide against Gaza are not only coming from fringe elements in the political establishment - July 21, 14
Bio
Phyllis Bennis
is a Fellow and the Director of the New Internationalism Project at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer, Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis , Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer and Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer.
Dr. Mads Gilbert, Norwegian doctor providing medical assistance in Gaza. He recently recently submitted a report to the United Nations on the state of the Gaza health sector in 2014, titled "Brief Report to UNRWA: The Gaza Health Sector as of June 2014."
Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent reporting from Gaza.
In breaking news from the Gaza Strip, at least five people were killed
today and dozens wounded when the Israeli military shelled the al-Aqsa
Hospital. It is at least the third Israeli military attack on a Gaza
hospital since the ground invasion on Thursday. Speaking from Gaza’s
overrun al-Shifa Hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert accuses Israel
of directly targeting medical facilities. Gilbert helped treat many of
the victims of Israel’s attack on the Shejaiya neighborhood, where 72
people were killed. We also speak with Democracy Now! correspondent
Sharif Abdel Kouddous, reporting from Gaza City.
For years, homeowners have been battling Wall Street in an attempt to
recover some portion of their massive losses from the housing Ponzi
scheme. But progress has been slow, as they have been outgunned and
out-spent by the banking titans. In June, however, the banks may have met their match, as some equally powerful titans strode onto the stage. Investors led by BlackRock,
the world’s largest asset manager, and PIMCO, the world’s largest
bond-fund manager, have sued some of the world’s largest banks for
breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The
investors are seeking damages for losses surpassing $250 billion. That is the equivalent of one million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time. The defendants are the so-called trust banks that oversee payments
and enforce terms on more than $2 trillion in residential mortgage
securities. They include units of Deutsche Bank AG, U.S. Bank, Wells
Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
Six nearly identical complaints charge the trust banks with breach of
their duty to force lenders and sponsors of the mortgage-backed
securities to repurchase defective loans. Why the investors are only now suing
is complicated, but it involves a recent court decision on the statute
of limitations. Why the trust banks failed to sue the lenders evidently
involves the cozy relationship between lenders and trustees. The
trustees also securitized loans in pools where they were not trustees.
If they had started filing suit demanding repurchases, they might wind
up suedon other deals in retaliation. Better to ignore the repurchase
provisions of the pooling and servicing agreements and let the investors
take the losses—better, at least, until they sued. Beyond the legal issues are the implications for the solvency of the
banking system itself. Can even the largest banks withstand a $250
billion iceberg? The sum is more than 40 times the $6 billion “London
Whale” that shook JPMorganChase to its foundations.
Who Will Pay – the Banks or the Depositors?
The world’s largest banks are considered “too big to fail” for a
reason. The fractional reserve banking scheme is a form of shell game,
which depends on “liquidity” borrowed at very low interest from other
banks or the money market. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008,
triggering a run on the money market, the whole interconnected shadow
banking system nearly went down with it. Congress then came to the rescue with a taxpayer bailout, and the
Federal Reserve followed with its quantitative easing fire hose. But in
2010, the Dodd Frank Act said there would be no more government
bailouts. Instead, the banks were to save themselves with “bail ins,”
meaning they were to recapitalize themselves by confiscating a portion
of the funds of their creditors – including not only their shareholders
and bondholders but the largest class of creditor of any bank, their depositors. Theoretically, deposits under $250,000 are protected by FDIC deposit
insurance. But the FDIC fund contains only about $47 billion – a mere
20% of the Black Rock/PIMCO damage claims. Before 2010, the FDIC could
borrow from the Treasury if it ran short of money. But since the Dodd
Frank Act eliminates government bailouts, the availability of Treasury funds for that purpose is now in doubt. When depositors open their online accounts and see that their
balances have shrunk or disappeared, a run on the banks is likely. And
since banks rely on each other for liquidity, the banking system as we
know it could collapse. The result could be drastic deleveraging,
erasing trillions of dollars in national wealth.
Phoenix Rising
Some pundits say the global economy would then come crashing down. But in a thought-provoking March 2014 article called “American Delusionalism, or Why History Matters,” John Michael Greer disagrees. He notes that historically, governments have responded by modifying their financial systems:
Massive credit collapses that erase very large sums of
notional wealth and impact the global economy are hardly a new
phenomenon . . . but one thing that has never happened as a result of
any of them is the sort of self-feeding, irrevocable plunge into the
abyss that current fast-crash theories require. The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a
society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit
collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish
into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in
whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all
that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of
goods and services. This, in turn, governments promptly provide. In 1933, for example,
faced with the most severe credit collapse in American history, Franklin
Roosevelt temporarily nationalized the entire US banking system, seized
nearly all the privately held gold in the country, unilaterally changed
the national debt from “payable in gold” to “payable in Federal Reserve
notes” (which amounted to a technical default), and launched a series
of other emergency measures. The credit collapse came to a screeching
halt, famously, in less than a hundred days. Other nations facing the
same crisis took equally drastic measures, with similar results. . . . Faced with a severe crisis, governments can slap on wage and price
controls, freeze currency exchanges, impose rationing, raise trade
barriers, default on their debts, nationalize whole industries, issue
new currencies, allocate goods and services by fiat, and impose martial
law to make sure the new economic rules are followed to the letter, if
necessary, at gunpoint. Again, these aren’t theoretical possibilities;
every one of them has actually been used by more than one government
faced by a major economic crisis in the last century and a half. That historical review is grounds for optimism, but confiscation of
assets and enforcement at gunpoint are still not the most desirable
outcomes. Better would be to have an alternative system in place and
ready to implement before the boom drops.
The Better Mousetrap
North Dakota has established an effective alternative model that
other states might do well to emulate. In 1919, the state legislature
pulled its funds out of Wall Street banks and put them into the state’s
own publicly-owned bank, establishing financial sovereignty for the
state. The Bank of North Dakota has not only protected the state’s
financial interests but has been a moneymaker for it ever since. On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the
government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial
forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now
usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as
belonging to Congress. The chief problem with the paper scrip of the colonial governments
was the tendency to print and spend too much. The Pennsylvania colonists
corrected that systemic flaw by establishing a publicly-owned bank,
which lent money to farmers and tradespeople at interest. To
get the funds into circulation to cover the interest, some extra scrip
was printed and spent on government services. The money supply thus
expanded and contracted naturally, not at the whim of government
officials but in response to seasonal demands for credit. The interest
returned to public coffers, to be spent on the common weal.
The result was a system of money and credit that was sustainable without taxes, price inflation or government debt
– not to mention without credit default swaps, interest rate swaps,
central bank manipulation, slicing and dicing of mortgages,
rehypothecation in the repo market, and the assorted other fraudulent
schemes underpinning our “systemically risky” banking system today.
Relief for Homeowners?
Will the BlackRock/PIMCO suit help homeowners? Not directly. But it will get some big guns on the scene, with the ability to do all sorts of discovery, and the staff to deal with the results. Fraud is grounds for rescission, restitution and punitive damages.
The homeowners may not have been parties to the pooling and servicing
agreements governing the investor trusts, but if the whole business
model is proven to be fraudulent, they could still make a case for
damages. In the end, however, it may be the titans themselves who take each
other down, clearing the way for a new phoenix to rise from the ashes. ___________________ Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her websites are http://EllenBrown.com, http://PublicBankSolution.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.
BRICS establish $100 Billion Development Bank
to cut out Western dominance
(image by YouTube)
The headline news is that this Tuesday in Fortaleza, northeast
Brazil, the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India,
China, South Africa) fights the (Neoliberal) World (Dis)Order via a new
development bank and a reserve fund set up to offset financial crises. The devil, of course, is in the details of how they'll do it. It's been a long and winding road since Yekaterinburg in 2009, at their
first summit, up to the BRICS's long-awaited counterpunch against the
Bretton Woods consensus -- the IMF and the World Bank -- as well as the
Japan-dominated (but largely responding to US priorities) Asian
Development Bank (ADB). The BRICS Development Bank -- with an initial US$50 billion in capital
-- will be not only BRICS-oriented, but invest in infrastructure
projects and sustainable development on a global scale. The model is the
Brazilian BNDES, which supports Brazilian companies investing across
Latin America. In a few years, it will reach a financing capacity of up
to $350 billion. With extra funding especially from Beijing and Moscow,
the new institution could leave the World Bank in the dust. Compare
access to real capital savings to US government's printed green paper
with no collateral.
And then there's the agreement
establishing a $100 billion pool of reserve currencies - the Contingent
Reserve Arrangement (CRA), described by Russian Finance Minister Anton
Siluanov as "a kind of mini-IMF." That's a non-Washington consensus
mechanism to counterpunch capital flight. For the pool, China will
contribute with $41 billion, Brazil, India and Russia with $18 billion
each, and South Africa with $5 billion. The development bank should be headquartered in Shanghai -- although
Mumbai has forcefully tried to make its case (for an Indian take on the
BRICS strategy, see here)
Way beyond economy and finance, this is essentially about geopolitics --
as in emerging powers offering an alternative to the failed Washington
consensus. Or, as consensus apologists say, the BRICS may be able to
"alleviate challenges" they face from the "international financial
system." The strategy also happens to be one of the key nodes of the
progressively solidified China-Russia alliance, recently featured via
the gas "deal of the century" and at the St. Petersburg economic forum.
Let's play geopolitical ball Just as Brazil managed,
against plenty of odds, to stage an unforgettable World Cup -- the
melting of the national team notwithstanding -- Vladimir Putin and Xi
Xinping now come to the neighborhood to play top class geopolitical
ball. The Kremlin views the bilateral relation with Brasilia as highly
strategic. Putin not only watched the World Cup final in Rio; apart from
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he also met German chancellor
Angela Merkel (they discussed Ukraine in detail). Yet arguably the key
member of Putin's traveling party is Elvira Nabiulin, president of
Russia's Central Bank; she is pressing in South America the concept that
all negotiations with the BRICS should bypass the US dollar.Emphasis the blogger. Putin's extremely powerful, symbolic meeting with Fidel Castro in
Havana, as well as writing off $36 billion in Cuban debt could not have
had a more meaningful impact all across Latin America. Compare it with
the perennial embargo imposed by a vengeful Empire of Chaos. In South America, Putin is meeting not only with Uruguay's President
Pepe Mujica -- discussing, among other items, the construction of a
deepwater port -- but also with Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia's
Evo Morales. Xi Jinping is also on tour, visiting, apart from Brazil, Argentina, Cuba
and Venezuela. What Beijing is saying (and doing) complements Moscow;
Latin America is viewed as highly strategic. That should translate into
more Chinese investment and increased South-South integration. This Russia-China commercial/diplomatic offensive fits the concerted
push towards a multipolar world -- side by side with political/economic
South American leaders. Argentina is a sterling example. While Buenos
Aires, already mired in recession, fights American vulture funds -- the
epitome of financial speculation -- in New York courthouses, Putin and
Xi come offering investment in everything from railways to the energy
industry. Russia's energy industry of course needs investment and technology from
private Western multinationals, just as Made in China developed out of
Western investment profiting from a cheap workforce. What the BRICS are
trying to present to the Global South now is a choice; on one side,
financial speculation, vulture funds and the hegemony of the Masters of
the Universe; on the other side, productive capitalism -- an alternative
strategy of capitalist development compared to the Triad (US, EU,
Japan). Still, it will be a long way for the BRICS to project a productive model
independent of the casino capitalism speculation "model," by the way
still recovering from the massive 2007/2008 crisis (the financial bubble
has not burst for good.) One might view the BRICS's strategy as a sort of running, constructive
critique of capitalism; how to purge the system from perennially
financing the US fiscal deficit as well as a global militarization
syndrome -- related to the Orwellian/Panopticon complex -- subordinated
to Washington. As Argentine economist Julio Gambina put it, the key
question is not being emergent, but independent.
In this piece,
La Stampa's Claudio Gallo introduces what could be the defining issue
of the times: how neoliberalism -- ruling directly or indirectly most of
the world -- is producing a disastrous anthropological mutation that is
plunging us all into global totalitarianism (while everyone swears by
their "freedoms"). It's always instructive to come back to Argentina. Argentina is
imprisoned by a chronic foreign debt crisis essentially unleashed by the
IMF over 40 years ago - and now perpetuated by vulture funds. The BRICS
bank and the reserve pool as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank
offer the possibility for dozens of other nations to escape the
Argentine plight. Not to mention the possibility that other emerging
nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Turkey may soon contribute
to both institutions. No wonder the hegemonic Masters of the Universe gang is uneasy in their leather chairs. This Financial Times piece neatly summarizes the view from the City of London -- a notorious casino capitalism paradise. These are heady days in South America in more ways than one. Atlanticist
hegemony will remain part of the picture, of course, but it's the
BRICS's strategy that is pointing the way further on down the road. And
still the multipolar wheel keeps rolling along.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent
for Asia Times. His regular column, "The Roving Eye," is widely read. He
is an analyst for the online news channel Real News, the roving
correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and
TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows
ranging from the US to East Asia. He argues that the world has become
fragmented into "stans" -- we are now living an intestinal war, an
undeclared global civil war. He has published three books on
geopolitics, including the spectacularly-titled "Globalistan: How the
Globalised World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War". His latest book is "Obama Does Globalistan."
July 16, 2014. The first two days this week gold was subjected to a
series of computer HFT-driven “flash crashes” that were aimed at cooling
off the big move higher gold has made since the beginning of June.
During this move higher, the hedge funds, who typically “chase” the
momentum of gold up or down, built up hefty long positions in gold
futures over the last 6 weeks. In order to disrupt the upward momentum
in the price of gold, the bullion banks short gold in the futures market
by dumping large contracts that drive down the price and make money for
the banks in the process.
As we explained in previous articles on this subject, the price of
gold is not determined in markets where physical gold is bought and sold
but in the paper futures market where contracts trade and speculators
place bets on the price of gold. Most of the contracts traded on the
Comex futures market are settled in cash. The value of the contracts
used to short gold and drive down the price is well in excess of the
actual amount of physical gold that is kept on the Comex and available
for delivery. One might think that regulators would pay attention to a
market in which the value of contracts outstanding exceeds by several
multiples the amount of physical gold available for delivery.
The Comex gold futures market trades 23 hours per day on a global
computer system called Globex and on the NYC trading floor from 8:20
a.m. EST to 1:30p.m. EST (the 8:30 a.m. opening time on the face of the
graph below is a draftsman’s error). The Comex floor trading session is
the highest volume trading period during any 23 hour trading period
because that is when most of the large U.S. financial institutions and
other users of Comex futures (jewelry manufactures and gold mining
companies) are open for business and therefore transact their Comex
business during Comex floor hours in order to achieve the best trading
execution at the lowest cost.
The big hedge funds primarily trade gold futures using computers and
algorithm programs. When they buy, they set stop-loss orders which are
used to protect their trading positions on the downside. A “stop-loss”
order is an order to sell at a pre-specified price by a trader. A
stop-loss order is automatically triggered and the position is sold when
the market trades at the price which was pre-set with the stop-order.
The bullion banks who are members and directors of Comex have access
to the computers used to clear Comex trades, which means they can see
where the stop-loss orders are set. When they decide to short the
market, they start selling Comex futures in large amounts to force the
market low enough to trigger the stop-loss orders being used by the
hedge fund computers. For instance, huge short-sell orders at 2:20 a.m.
Monday morning triggered an avalanche of stop-loss selling, as shown in
this graph of Monday’s (July 14) action (click on graph to enlarge):
In the graph above, the first circled red bar shows the flash crash
that was engineered at 2:20 a.m. EST, a typically low-volume, quiet
period for gold trading. 13.5 tonnes of short-sales were unloaded into
the Comex computer trading system. The second circled red bar shows a
second engineered flash-crash right before the Comex floor opened at
8:20 a.m. EST. This was triggered by sales of futures contracts
representing 27.5 tonnes of gold. A third hit (not shown) occurred at
9:01 a.m. This time contracts representing 40 tonnes of gold hit the
market.
The banks use the selling from the hedge funds to cover the short
positions they’ve amassed and book trading profits as they cover their
short positions at price levels that are below the prices at which their
short positions were established. This is insider trading and
unrestrained financial terrorism at its finest.
As shown on the graph below, on Tuesday, July 15, another flash-crash
in gold was engineered in the middle of Janet Yellen’s very “dovish”
Humphrey-Hawkins testimony. Contracts representing 45 tonnes of gold
were sold in 3 minutes, which took gold down over $13 and below the key
$1300 price level. There were no apparent news triggers or specific
comments from Yellen that would have triggered a sudden sell-off in gold
— just a massive dumping of gold futures contracts. No other related
market (stocks, commodities) registered any unusual movement up or down
when this occurred:
Between July 14 and July 15, contracts representing 126 tonnes of
gold was sold in a 14-minute time window which took the price of gold
down $43 dollars. No other market showed any unusual or extraordinary
movement during this period.
To put contracts for 126 tonnes of gold into perspective, the Comex
is currently reporting that 27 tonnes of actual physical gold are
classified as being available for deliver should the buyers of futures
contracts want delivery. But the buyers are the banks themselves who
won’t be taking delivery.
One motive of the manipulation is to operate and control Comex
trading in a manner that helps the Fed contain the price of gold,
thereby preventing its rise from signaling to the markets that problems
festering in the U.S. financial system are growing worse by the day.
This is an act of financial terrorism supported by federal regulatory
authorities. Another motive is to help support the relative trading
level of the U.S. dollar, as we’ve described in previous articles on
this topic. And, of course, the banks make money from the manipulation
of the futures market.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the branch of government
which was established to oversee the Comex and enforce long-established
trading regulations, has been presented with the evidence of
manipulation several times. Its near-automatic response is to disregard
the evidence and look the other way. The only explanation for this is
that the Government is complicit in the price suppression and
manipulation of gold and silver and welcomes the insider trading that
helps to achieve this result. The conclusion is inescapable: if
illegality benefits the machinations of the US government, the US
government is all for illegality.
Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler, and John Williams
The third and final estimate (until the annual GDP revisions) of
first quarter 2014 real GDP growth released June 25 by the US Bureau of
Economic Analysis was a 2.9% contraction in GDP growth, a 5.5 percentage
point difference from the January forecast of 2.6% growth. Apparently,
the first quarter contraction was dismissed by those speculating in
equities as weather related, as stock averages rose with the bad news.
Stock market participants might be in for a second quarter surprise.
The result of many years of changes made to the official inflation
measures is a substantially understated inflation rate. John Williams
(www.shadowstats.com) provides inflation estimates based on previous
official methodology when the Consumer Price Index still represented the
cost of a constant standard of living. The 1.26% inflation measure used
to deflate first quarter nominal GDP is unrealistic, as Americans who
make purchases are aware.
A reasonable correction to the understated deflator gives a much
higher first quarter contraction. The two main causes of inflation’s
understatement are the substitution principle introduced during the
Clinton regime and the hedonic adjustments ongoing since the 1980s that
redefine price rises as quality improvements. Correcting for excessive
hedonic adjustments gives a first quarter real GDP contraction of 5%.
Correcting for hedonic and substitution adjustments gives a first
quarter real GDP contraction of 8.5%.
Realistic economic analysis is a rarity. The financial press echoes
Wall Street, and Wall Street economists are paid to help sell financial
instruments. Gloomy analysis is frowned upon. Even negative quarters are
given a positive spin.
Years of understatement of inflation has resulted in years of
overstatement of GDP growth. Thinking about the many years of
misstatement, we realized that the typical computation in nominal terms
of the ratio of debt to GDP is seriously misleading.
Consider that debt is issued in nominal terms and repaid in nominal
terms (except for a few Treasury bonds with inflation adjustments).
However, nominal wealth or nominal GDP overstates real economic
strength. The debt is growing, but both the nominal and real values of
the output of goods and services are not keeping up with the rise in
debt.
To understand how risky the rise of debt is, nominal debt must be
compared to real GDP. Spin masters might dismiss this computation as
comparing apples to oranges, but such a charge constitutes denial that
the ratio of nominal debt to nominal GDP understates the wealth dilution
caused by the government’s ability to issue and repay debt in nominal
dollars. We know that inflation favors debtors, because debts can be
repaid in inflated dollars.
The graph below shows three different debt to GDP ratios. The bottom
line is nominal debt to nominal GDP, the financial press ratio. The
middle line is the ratio of nominal debt to the official measure of real
GDP. The top line is the ratio of nominal GDP to Shadowstats’ corrected
measure of real GDP that puts back in some of the inflation that is no
longer included in official measures. The basis for this corrected
measure is also 2000, but as the GDP number for 2000 is lower due to
correction, this graph begins with the ratio at a slightly higher point.
The nominal debt to GDP ratio shows that as of the end of the first
quarter of 2014 total US Treasury debt outstanding is 103 percent of US
GDP. The ratio of Treasury debt to official real GDP shows debt at 136% of GDP.
The ratio of debt to real GDP deflated with more a more realistic
measure of inflation, one more in keeping with the experience of
consumers, puts US public debt at 185% of GDP. In other words, the
burden of US debt on the real economy is almost twice the burden that is
normally perceived.
The Shadowstats adjustment we made to real GDP does not fully correct
for what we believe has been a growing understatement of inflation
since the 1980s. The adjustment we made corrects the implicit price
deflator for a two-percentage point understatement of annual inflation
due to hedonic distortion. Real GDP with this correction since 2000
looks like this:
We have calculated the ratios of US public debt to nominal GDP and to
two measures of real GDP. The ratios of debt to GDP would be much
higher if we used total credit outstanding, or total public and private
debt, and if we used the government’s unfunded liabilities. The fact
seems clear that debt is a major and unappreciated issue for the US
economy. The enormous debt, especially with the middle class economy
largely offshored, implies substantially lower living standards for the
99 percent.
The first quarter contraction, especially our corrected number,
implies a second quarter negative real GDP. In other words, the years of
Quantitative Easing (money printing) by the Federal Reserve has not
resulted in economic recovery from the 2008 downturn and has not
prevented further contraction.
Massive money creation and huge fiscal deficits have protected the
balance sheets of “banks too big to fail” but have harmed the American
people. Retirees and pension funds have been deprived for years of
interest income as the Federal Reserve engineered zero or negative
interest rates for the sake of a handful of oversized banks.
The extraordinary creation of new dollars diluted the dollars held by
peoples, companies, institutions, and central banks throughout the
world, raising fears that the dollar would lose exchange value and its
role as world reserve currency.
Washington’s use of financial sanctions to force other countries to
bend to Washington’s will is causing countries to leave the dollar
payments system. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisor has said
that the dollar must be crashed as the only way to prevent US
aggression. The Chinese have called for “de-americanizing the world.”
The imperialistic US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA),
which comes into full force July 1, 2015, imposes such heavy reporting
costs on foreign financial institutions that these institutions might
opt out of dollar transactions. All together, the result could be a
serious tumble in the value of the US dollar, more wealth contraction,
higher inflation via import prices, and less US wealth available to
support US debt.
In view of this reality, why is Washington pushing its puppet in Kiev
toward war with Russia? Why is Washington pushing NATO to spend more
money and build more bases on which to deploy more troops in the Baltics
and Eastern Europe, especially when Washington’s contribution will be
the largest part of the cost? Why is Washington re-entering the Middle
East conflict that Washington began by inciting Sunni and Shia against
one another? Why is Washington constructing new naval and air bases from
the Philippines to Vietnam in order to encircle China?
If Washington is this unaware of its budget constraints and its
financial predicament, it cannot be long before Americans experience
economic catastrophe.
John Williams, an expert on government economic statistics, has been a private consulting economist for more than thirty years (www.shadowstats.com). Dave Kranzler ( www.investmentresearchdynamics.com
) has years of experience in financial markets. Paul Craig Roberts is
an economist and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for
Economic Policy.
Published on Jul 1, 2014 LIKE Breaking the Set @ http://fb.me/JournalistAbbyMartin FOLLOW Abby Martin @ http://twitter.com/AbbyMartin Abby Martin interviews Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, journalist for The Guardian, about a recent article he wrote concerning the Pentagon's multimillion dollar project to study peaceful protest movements and prepare for the collapse of industrial society due to factors ranging from income inequality to climate change.
Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements
The Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of "social
contagions" that could damage US strategic interests. Photograph: Jason
Reed/REUTERS
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research
programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and
tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the
supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme
is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant
insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense
policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant
commands."
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative'
partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the
social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions
of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the
projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led
study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which
aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement
mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical
mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital
traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian
Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
park protests in Turkey."
Twitter posts and conversations will be
examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and
when they become mobilised."
Another project awarded this year to
the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under
which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic
change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences."
The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on
"large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in
enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.
Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?'
which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of
political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they
do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly
sets out to study non-violent activists:
"In every
context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family,
cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage
in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed
militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed
groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently,
attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about
terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."
The
project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten
or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though
sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."
I
contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of
the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists
working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence –
and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no
response.
Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a
series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical
causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national
security threat of interest to the DoD.
Among my questions, I asked:
"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism
in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If
so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements
aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national
security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements'
and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and
democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate
such issues?"
Minerva's programme director Dr Erin
Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached
out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more
detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement
from the DoD's press office:
"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States,
its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security
challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve
the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that
helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes
instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding
these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense
can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."
In
2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration
with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.
From
the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75
million over five years for social and behavioural science research.
This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by
US Congress.
The
internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the
project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural
and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon
officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are
deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be
integrated with operations."
Although Office of Naval Research
supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the university researchers at
the outset that the project was merely "a basic research effort, so we
shouldn't be concerned about doing applied stuff", the meeting in fact
showed that DoD is looking to "feed results" into "applications," Corman
said in the email. He advised his researchers to "think about shaping
results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application
for tools that can be taken to the field."
Many independent
scholars are critical of what they see as the US government's efforts to
militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the
American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government
noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of infrastructure for
evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research" in a way
that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review", calling
for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the
National Science Foundation (NSF).
The following month, the DoD
signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on
the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned
that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF's
merit-review panels. "Pentagon officials will have decision-making power
in deciding who sits on the panels":
"… there remain
concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when
it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the programme,
including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns
that the programme would discourage research in other important areas
and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent
discussion and critique of the military."
According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State,
"when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they
sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical
research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared
themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification.
Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow
individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the
larger project."
Prof Price has previously exposed
how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to
embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely
conducted training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."
Citing
a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former
employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN
[counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the
USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective
as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and
challenging law and order."
One war-game, said Price, involved
environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant
near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental
NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were
'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of
the population whom would be the target of the information operations to
move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values
which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."
James
Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New
York, concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists
tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study
of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he
said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."
Minerva
is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating
nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD
officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple
fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.
On Wednesday, July 2nd, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko resumed
unlimited war against the residents of southeastern Ukraine, whom he
calls “terrorists” for their wanting not to be killed by his troops.
European leaders (especially Merkel of Germany, Hollande of France, and
Putin of Russia) urged
him not to resume his bombing campaign against the southeast, but the
U.S. (specifically President Obama) supports the bombings, and that’s
enough for Poroshenko; so, he did it. As the U.S. State Department
said, “he has a right to defend his country.” Reuters reports that
Poroshenko gave as his reason for the resumption, “to rid Ukraine of ‘parasites’.” Adolf Hitler had given the same reason for ethnically cleansing his country. Here are videos and photos of the Obama Administration’s sponsored ethnic
cleansing to reduce the population in the areas of Ukraine that had
voted overwhelmingly “the wrong way” in Ukraine’s final nationwide
election, in 2010: the areas of Ukraine that overwhelmingly chose as Ukraine’s President the man whom Obama’s coup overthrew in February 2014.
After this ethnic cleansing, maybe Ukraine can have another nationwide
election, which will produce the type of outcome that the U.S.
Government likes. But on 25 May 2014, we held in Ukraine an election
where people voted only in the pro-American portion of Ukraine, and only
leaders who were acceptable to the U.S. White House were allowed onto
the ballot. America’s “news” media are not reporting on America’s
ethnic-cleansing program in Ukraine. It’s happening in the dark, as far
as the American public are concerned: they don’t know about it. But, here it is: this, is what they are hiding from you. Washington’s people do not call this ethnic cleansing operation what it is; they instead call it Ukraine’s “Anti Terrorist Operation,” or “ATO” for short. The people we’re massacring are “Terrorists.” What they actually
are is simply the residents in the parts of Ukraine that had voted
overwhelmingly for Viktor Yanukovych on 7 February 2010 to become
President, the final nationwide election in Ukraine. And here these
millions of “Terrorists” are now, being bombed by us, and fleeing to refuge in Russia (you
can see it, and hear it happening, right there: those “Terrorists,”
fleeing our bombs) — it’s part of our ethnic-cleansing operation, not of
any Anti Terrorist Operation, at all. Because it is we, the United
States itself, that are terrorizing them, to flee. And “we” — our
Government, as if they really represented us (which they obviously do not) — are therefore mass-murdering them. This is what the U.S. “news” media have been hiding from us,
by stenographically reporting Obama’s lies, as if those lies
represented truths instead of lies — just like Bush’s lies about
“Saddam’s WMD” did, and the U.S. media did, before we invaded Iraq on 19
March 2003. And the Government that Obama put in place in Kiev, which is a
government by Ukrainian oligarchs whom Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland
selected and placed in control, is now advertising
on the television stations that those oligarchs own, advertising that
the people who live in Ukraine’s southeast are destroying the country
and must therefore be destroyed by patriotic Ukrainians. The
government’s Defense Minister announces publicly that concentration
camps are being established in order to deal with any who don’t flee.
The message to those “Terrorists” is clear: flee, or else die. The
government has even announced that the military volunteers who go to the
southeast to do the killing are patriots, whose reward will be that they will receive the properties of everyone they kill. A google-search of “Ukraine” at a typical U.S. news site yields
little — and nothing at all about this slaughter that our Government is
financing and put into place there. For example, at Huffington Post, the search produces
articles about supposed “aggression” by Russia for its accepting Crimea
back into the Russian Federation after all public opinion polls and a
public referendum in that region, which had been Russian until 1954,
showed massive public support there for rejoining Russia. (And a recent Gallup poll of Crimeans confirmed
that they craved to rejoin Russia and are now delighted that they did.)
HuffPo has only news-wire reports about Ukraine, mainly AP and Reuters,
and typical headlines there are like “Russia Resumes Military Buildup
Near Ukraine Border,” and “Ukraine Vows To Punish Rebels Who Downed
Plane.” There’s nothing about the genocide. For example, there’s no
mention that this “plane” had been carrying 49 troops to murder
civilians in the southeast where a genocide is taking place to clear the
land and terrify the residents to flee into Russia. It’s a classic
ethnic-cleansing campaign, and Obama put it into place. Americans don’t
know. One article is a March 3rd poll, which showed “Few Americans want the
United States getting involved in policing the political turmoil in
Ukraine.” The presumption there was that “we” shouldn’t fix “their”
problems.” Who knew that “we,” our own President, is the mastermind
behind that “turmoil,” and of this actual ethnic cleansing campaign? Similarly, http://www.pollingreport.com/ukraine.htm has
many such poll-results, all showing a widespread public assumption that
Russia initiated the “turmoil” and that the U.S. are just nice guys
regarding Ukraine. To see what a lie that impression is — a deception of the U.S. public by not only the “news” media but by the U.S. Government that’s behind
this “turmoil” — clickhere and here and here and here and here,
because you will then learn a great deal about this made-in-America
horror story, which will only grow as the years roll by, just as is
already happening in Iraq. Remember Iraq? This one will be vastly worse. You’ll see. Just click on those links. You’ll see. Because, if the American public doesn’t start investigating this now, then the results for all of us will be far worse, especially because this one could end in a nuclear war. And here is a video
exposing the lies of the Obama Administration and its stooge-regime in
Kiev about the May 3rd massacre in Odessa that sparked Ukraine’s civil
war — our ethnic cleansing of the people who live in Ukraine’s southeast. Barack Obama’s Ukrainian gambit is the most evil and worst part of
his entire Presidency, and you will be shocked to learn about it, and
how evil it is. Because the American press hasn’t told you about it. But
it’s not too late for you to find out. (If you already know about it,
please pass this article along to any of your friends who might not, and
otherwise get the word out, by distributing this article far and wide,
so that maybe this horror can be stopped if enough people learn of it.) ———-
