As 2012 approaches, we'll witness the collapse of fractional reserve banking, civil unrest, riots, and food shortages. Future Shock is now. NightBlogger@mail.com
THE WORSENING ECONOMIC CRISIS has prompted the US Army War College to issue a report urging the use of military troops to contain possible civil unrest throughout America. Entitled, Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development, issued on November 4, 2008, the report argues that the US military must prepare for a “violent domestic dislocation provoked by an economic collapse.” The report was authored by Nathan Freier, an Army lieutenant-colonel and professor at the US War College in Carlyle PA - the Army’s main training institute for prospective senior officers. Freier consigns dissenting Americans to the category of “hostile groups:”
“Civil unrest would force the defense establishment to maintain domestic order. Under certain circumstances this would include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.” Preparing to implement martial law, on December 1, 2008, the Pentagon announced its plans to deploy 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 to help state and local officials respond to emergencies. And General Tommy Franks, a former US Commander in Iraq, said in a recent interview, that if another terrorist attack occurs in America, the Constitution would be discarded in favor of a military form of government. This “military form of government” is now being set up by the newly-formed Obama administration. More…
Vacancy rates in office buildings exceed 10 percent in virtually every major city in the country and are rising rapidly, a sign of economic distress that could lead to yet another wave of problems for troubled lenders. With job cuts rampant and businesses retrenching, more empty space is expected from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles in the coming year. Rental income would then decline, and property values would slide further. The Urban Land Institute predicts 2009 will be the worst year for the commercial real estate market “since the wrenching 1991-1992 industry depression.”
Stock analysts say commercial real estate is the next ticking time bomb for banks, which already have received hundreds of billions of dollars in capital and other assistance from the federal government. Big banks — like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — each hold tens of billions of dollars in commercial real estate securities. The banks also invested directly in properties. More…
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Americans must prepare themselves for a massive collapse in the dollar as investors around the world dump their US assets, a former Bank of England policymaker has warned. The long-held assumption that US assets - particularly government bonds - are a safe haven will soon be overturned as investors lose their patience with the world’s biggest economy, according to Willem Buiter. Professor Buiter, a former Monetary Policy Committee member who is now at the London School of Economics, said this increasing disenchantment would result in an exodus of foreign cash from the US. The warning comes despite the dollar having strengthened significantly against other major currencies, including sterling and the euro, after hitting historic lows last year. It will reignite fears about the currency’s prospects, as well as sparking fears about the sustainability of President-Elect Barack Obama’s mooted plans for a Keynesian-style increase in public spending to pull the US out of recession.
Writing on his blog , Prof Buiter said: “There will, before long (my best guess is between two and five years from now) be a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets. Old habits die hard. The US dollar and US Treasury bills and bonds are still viewed as a safe haven by many. But learning takes place.” He said that the dollar had been kept elevated in recent years by what some called “dark matter” or “American alpha” - an assumption that the US could earn more on its overseas investments than foreign investors could make on their American assets. However, this notion had been gradually dismantled in recent years, before being dealt a fatal blow by the current financial crisis, he said.
“The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the US materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally,” he said. “Even the most hard-nosed, Guantanamo Bay-indifferent potential foreign investor in the US must recognise that its financial system has collapsed.” He said investors would, rightly, suspect that the US would have to generate major inflation to whittle away its debt and this dollar collapse means that the US has less leeway for major spending plans than politicians realise. Source
Aptly, perhaps, for an era of hard times, coal is making a comeback as a home heating fuel. Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. And with the cost of heating oil and natural gas increasingly prone to spikes, some homeowners in the Northeast, pockets of the Midwest and even Alaska are deciding coal is worth the trouble. Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 258,000 tons in 2006— then started to rise.
It jumped 9 percent in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in the first eight months of 2008. Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders—many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer—that they are struggling to fill. More…
Carolyn Harris
Excerpted from “The Purpose of the Economic Meltdown”
The domino effect which we have begun to see will enlarge to horrific corporations, rendering those crappy burger-flipping jobs an enviable situation, except that people won’t even be able to afford those crappy burgers. Grocery stores run completely out of stock in three days; without stock being brought to them by trucks, it makes for a desperate situation and desperate people.
Without jobs, no one can consume, without consumption the entire US economy collapses. The US government is in the process of defaulting on it’s debts - SmartMoney.com said, “short-term Treasury yields actually turned negative.” The US Dollar will have to be demonetized at some point in 2009 which will instantly render all paper currency worldwide totally valueless. With empty grocery stores and no means of exchange, there will be food riots very quickly. Be assured that power companies, television and cable will still be working at that time, even though other business will not be. This is important to the plan because everyone will be glued to their “tee-vee” waiting for Mother Government to tell them what is going on and what they should do. And the New World Order plan will shift into high gear at that point.
Local representatives of Mother Government will announce that all hungry, desperate people should all go quietly and calmly to the nearest school, community center or some other large place and Mother Government will “help” them, feed them and their children. This, of course, will be the pick up points to transport people to FEMA camps (all 1400 of them) so they can be ‘taken care of’ and provided with the things they need. Here is the document that says exactly how people will be processed in. Here is the list of Executive Orders allowing the President to nix the Constitution, suspend the Congress and institute Martial Law, separate families, remove entire communities, take possession of all communication, food sources, water supplies and so on. And woe unto you if you have a skill that would be helpful to Mother Government! You can be conscripted, without remuneration and they don’t have to return you. How is that for an employer from hell?
After most hungry and scared sheeple obey the talking head on the “tee-vee” and go willingly to the camps, there will be some who have heeded the advice and taken steps necessary to provide emergency food, buy guns and ammunition and safety gear for themselves and their families. These hold-outs will be problematic for Mother Government and the New World Order plan. Rest assured that as people are processed into the camps and their information entered into the IRIS system, it will be checked against the consolidated databases and the hold-out’s names will be noted. Remember, once Martial Law is declared due to the emergency of dollar demonetization, there is no more Constitution, there are no more rights. Hold-outs will be considered enemies of the State.
When most Americans are ’safely’ within the clutches of FEMA, the squalid conditions, lack of medication, forced vaccinations, and sub-standard, irradiated and non-nutritive food will cause many deaths, but that’s fine because it is further depopulation. More people dead = less slaves to manage. Some will be assigned to work crews to demolish the abandoned and repossessed houses in the “no human activity zones,” others will be working on the cities for the massive influx of slaves [EO 1104], once the work is done and the controllers are ready to repopulate the cities.
Mother Government has an electronic dossier on each person containing any and all information obtainable - that given willingly to Mother Government and that gleaned from extensive data-mining operations, legal and illegal. It contains not only school and medical records, travel, employment and purchasing history, social network, communications, your political leanings and everything else they can get their hands on, and it all adds up to your “data double” for which they run algorithms to figure out your personality, and mental and emotional state. It contains everything there is to know about you that they can obtain, and they think they know you. With this information, they run simulations to determine what your reaction will be to any given stimulus, and the reaction of others with a similar profile, to determine the best way to eliminate you.
With extensive satellite and land-based surveillance, smart dust and other technologies, they will be able to determine where the hold-outs are, and with the results of their simulations, the best way to mitigate the trouble a hold-out may cause. This will include massive aerial spraying in order to sicken hold-outs, ruin crops and kill livestock not already in the hands of Mother Government. There will be no mercy, as those who think for themselves and truly value freedom are the most dangerous to their plan.
But do no forget that more people are waking up every day due to the dedicated and dynamic efforts of Patriots everywhere; and there are many, many more of us than there are of them. If we redouble our efforts at education (especially of law enforcement and military) and preparation, we have a real chance at not only slowing down the nefarious New World Order plan, but stopping it. Only five per cent of the population fought the British in the Revolutionary war - the colonists were out-gunned, out-manned and out-spent, but their determination to be free outweighed everything that was thrown at them. What we face is a much greater tyranny and truly diabolical people who are bent on the near destruction of the human race.
This is a hellish, nightmarish scenario, but if one reads the documents the plan is laid bare for all to see. Time is very, very short, and those who understand must do everything in their power to educate others and prepare for what is coming. If you don’t take care of yourself, Mother Government will. More…
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Maurizio d’Orlando
Milan (AsiaNews) - In the United States, the danger of debt insolvency is growing, putting at risk the currency reserves of foreign countries, China chief among them. According to new figures published by Bloomberg in recent days (Nov. 25, 2008 [1]), the American government has employed a total of 8.549 trillion dollars to stop the financial crisis. This means a total of about 24-25.4 trillion dollars of direct or indirect public debt weighing on American taxpayers. The complete tally must also include the debt - about 5-6 trillion dollars - of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now quasi-public companies, because 79.9% of their capital is controlled by a public entity, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which manages them as a public conservatorship.
In 2007, public debt in the United States was 10.6 trillion dollars, compared to a GDP (gross domestic product) of 13.811 trillion dollars. Public debt in 2007 was therefore 76.75% of GDP. In just one year, direct and indirect public debt have grown to more than 100% of GDP, reaching 176.9% to 184.2%. These percentages exclude the debt guaranteed by policies underwritten by AIG, also nationalized, and liabilities for health spending (Medicaid and Medicare) and pensions (Social Security)[2]. By way of comparison, the Maastricht accords require member states of the European Union (EU) to reduce their public debt to no more than 60% of GDP. Again by way of comparison, in one of the EU countries with the largest public debt, Italy, public debt in 2007 was equal to 104% of GDP.
In 2007, 61.82% [3] of America’s public debt was held by foreign investors, most of them Asian. So the U.S. public debt held by nonresident foreigners is equal to about 109.39% (113.86%) of GDP. According to a study by the International Monetary Fund, countries with more than 60% of their public debt held by nonresident foreigners run a high risk of currency crisis and insolvency, or debt default. On the historical level, there are no recent examples of countries with currencies valued at reserve status that have lapsed into public debt insolvency. There are also few or no precedents of such a vast and rapid expansion of public debt.
The United States also runs large deficits in its public balance sheet and balance of trade. Families and businesses are also deeply in debt: in 2007, American private debt was equal to a little more than 100% of GDP. At the moment, it is not clear how much of America’s private debt has been “nationalized” with the recent bailouts.
In the early months of next year, when the official data are published, the United States will run a serious risk of insolvency. This would involve, in the first place, a valuation crisis for the dollar. After this, the United States could face a social crisis like that in Argentina in 2001. A crisis in U.S. public debt would likely have a severe impact on the Asian countries that are the main exporters to the United States, China first among them. Chinese monetary authorities, thanks to a steeply undervalued artificial exchange rate, by about 55%, have limited imports (including food) and have achieved an export surplus. This has allowed them to accumulate a large stockpile of dollar reserves. In a currency crisis, China risks losing much of the value of its accumulated currency reserves. At the same time, pressure on imports (wheat, other grains, and meat) have led to inflation in the prices of food, the most important expenditure for more than 900 million Chinese. This is nothing more than a small confirmation of the recent statements of the pope, in his message for the World Day for Peace, where the pontiff calls the current financial system and its methods “based upon very short-term thinking,” without depth and breadth (nos. 10-12), preoccupied with creating wealth from nothing and leading the planet to its current disaster. [4] More…
America’s health is failing. And no one likely knows that better than those in Louisiana. It lands at the bottom of a list measuring the health of the nation’s 50 states. Joining it at the bottom are Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Vermont was crowned the healthiest state for the second consecutive year. Hawaii, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Utah round out the top five, according to a study published yesterday. Data for the study was provided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Center for Education Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Environmental Protection Agency, American Medical Association, Dartmouth Atlas Project and Trust for America’s Health. More
Eric deCarbonnel writes,
Iceland shows how a nation can experience deflation (stock market down 81% this year) while also experiencing high inflation (soon to be hyperinflation when it allows its currency to float). The US, like Iceland, is heavily dependent on imports (especially for oil), and has accumulated an unpayable amount of debt. Only the dollar role as the world’s reserve currency has saved us so far from Iceland’s fate, but that will soon end. In six months to a year, you will be reading stories like this written by visitors to the US.
Icelanders in shock after financial crisis
By eNews 2.0 Staff
15:22, November 18th 2008
Karlheinz Bellmann went to Iceland to find out what had happened to his savings of 110,000 euros (138,000 dollars), missing since the collapse of the country’s Kaupthing Bank. Four days later, on his way back to Germany, the father of four had other matters on his mind: “What can one do to help the people here?” Crying fathers who told him how they had lost their jobs, how their wives had experienced the same fate and how they had lost their homes left a strong impression, just as the cynical reactions among Icelandic bank executives at the bar in the Grand Hotel: “Of course we played Monopoly with the country,” they told me. “And we had fun. Most of the time it went fine.”
Finally, Kaupthing and the other major banks Landsbanki and Glitnir reached the end of the line and the 320,000 inhabitants of the Atlantic island faced national ruin. Prime Minister Geir Haarde has estimated that the aggressive expansion of the banks has resulted in a 19-billion-dollar mountain of debt. That equals two-and-a-half state budgets or twice the gross domestic product. The collapse of the financial sector and large layoffs have since October resulted in complete standstill in the construction industry, the first sign of a long downturn. Massive hoarding of goods at supermarkets and an inflation rate of 16 per cent are clear indications of the dire prospects facing the ancestors of the Vikings.
In return for a 2.1-billion-dollar loan the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has demanded that the currency, the krone, which has been weak for the past year be allowed to float freely. That would further reduce the currency’s value and make imported products for ordinary consumers even more expensive. A kilo of imported sugar will become a luxury product. The government has said that a 20 per cent inflation rate and an unemployment rate of over 10 per cent will now have to be reckoned with. Until October, Iceland’s “normal” unemployment rate was 1 per cent. “Sturdy men broke down in tears in front of me and said that the future for Iceland is like a black hole, and that one has to start back in the Stone Age,” Bellmann said.
Islanders fear that Iceland’s pension funds could be raided. They are practically the only possibility of getting funds without further running-up foreign debts. The anger expressed by ordinary citizens has been limited, so far. More and more people gather each Saturday in front of the parliament in Reykjavik. Some of the 6,000 protesters at a demonstration on Saturday threw rolls of toilet paper at the building where a few months earlier the premier had declared that the Icelandic banks were robust and the country’s finances were healthy.
Now Haarde’s party has made an about turn concerning membership of the European Union, Above all, there seems to be an mood of collective shock. “You have the feeling that the whole country has lost its self-confidence,” publicist Oskar Gudmundsson said. Bellmann expressed it differently: “It seems like on the Titanic, where people continued to dance even though the ship had hit the iceberg.” Staff at Kaupthing in Reykjavik have assured Bellmann that he is likely get back his assets.
Ilargi The Automatic Earth
“There ain’t no cure”
I know that whatever hope a new administration may evoke in the hearts and minds of Americans and people across the globe, one thing still stands. There is an untold number of trillions of dollars that needs to be sucked and wiped out of the global economic systems. These are toxic trillions. Toxic, as in: the longer they are permitted to remain within the body ‘financic’ and the body ‘politic’, the more damage they will cause.
Millions upon millions of jobs will be lost in the US alone within the next 12 months. Obama’s task will not, because it can not, be to lead his nation back into prosperous times. Certainly not before 2012, but in all likelihood not even within our lifetimes. If he wishes to prove himself to be a true leader, his mission will be to soothe the pain, to stem the bleeding, to minimize the suffering of the herd, and most of all to stop the lying and cheating that has come to define the nation, at the latest ever since Greenspan took over the Fed in 1987.
That is a role which is 1000 times harder than leading a people into prosperity. But there are no alternatives available: no-one can turn this economy around, not before it’s run its course, not until all the losses have been absorbed and many souls have perished as a result.
There will be enormous pressure on the new president to follow the path set by the IMF and the World Bank, whose solution has always been to live off the misery of people in far away corners of the planet. We can but hope that Obama has the guts to shut off access to that path. But I’m not sure of that by any means: it has been the American modus operandi for far too many years.
I see a bank merger in England, between Lloyd’s and HBOS, in which $27 billion needs to be raised in order to cut 20.000 jobs. Is that crazy or what? Moreover, the numbers pertaining to the US deficits are starting to boggle even my feeble brain. I saw yesterday how the Bush administration is being complimented on its preparations for the transition to a new government come January. And I’m thinking how I can totally imagine why they would want to transfer responsibility for all that’s in the pipeline before January 20, as soon as they can.
As soon as there’s a new president, they’ll wash their hands. However, not before they’ve run the deficit into the stratosphere. I doubt that many people still have the stomach, in the face of all the losses so far recorded, to think about what it means for the US government to borrow $2-$3 trillion in one single year, 2009. Until now, there’s never been a deficit larger than $1 trillion, not even close actually.
The new president will be left with a legacy of last-minute, legally binding, Bush, DIck and Colon commitments that will not only cause immeasurable grief on the streets of America, it will simultaneously hammer, pound and pulverize the status and value of US Treasury bonds, making it exponentially increasingly hard to finance what is needed just to keep day-to-day operations running. Treasuries are the last game left, and they too are a game that is over.
The markets will be up for a bit, hard to say for how long, but after that they will plunge in a way not seen since the 1720 South Sea Bubble. And Obama won’t be able to do anything, provided he would want to, except hold the hands of those who are drawing their last breath. He won’t be able to heal his people, or cure what is ailing the nation’s economy.
The US Constitution usurped, power has been ceded to [The Fed] fascist central bank officials — NightBlogger
From Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan
Sec. 8. Review.
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.
Ilargi
The Automatic Earth
Ben Bernanke was not elected by the people. Yet, he will be handed (even more of) the power of the nation’s money. And power over the economy is power over the nation itself. No matter what grand plans Congress comes up with, if you refuse to fund them, they ain’t happening.
Hank Paulson was not elected by the people. If you think there’s no connection between Paulson being Goldman’s CEO for 8 years, and the fact the Goldman will now be able to bury an insane amount of toilet paper in the contaminated RTC composter that is being set up in the capital’s backrooms, at the same time that shorting Goldman is banned, then I want some of the drugs you’re taking.
The members of Congress are elected. But they have no idea what is going on. The New York Times quotes even the “finance experts” among them as saying they were stunned when Ben and Hank told them about the shape of things to come. The same two dudes who until now, in every single Congressional hearing, have insisted that the economy was strong, a propaganda piece incessantly repeated by everyone involved, including Shrub.
So who do the members of Congress turn to when they have to vote on issues they don’t understand? They listen to their staff, made up to a large extent of lobbyists, who are on the payroll of the same financial institutions that Congress, see the Constitution, is mandated to regulate. And of course those lobbyists have not been elected by the people.
Shrub has asked Congress for $700 billion in additional funds to buy up worthless paper from the banks. That means that every single American hands over another $2333 dollars, and can then call themselves the proud owner of what has no value whatsoever. The idea is that, as in the original RTC set-up during the Savings and Loan debacle, the paper will eventually regain some of that value. But see, now we’re back in that faith-based casino. And call it what you will, but by now the entire world will laugh in your face if you use the term democracy to address the United States of America.
As the misery among the American people increases, you may think back of when and why I talked about a potential political crisis. It is easy to fool and manipulate a prosperous people. And as the past decade has shown, it’s even easy to fool and manipulate people into thinking they’re -still- prosperous. But it is an entirely different matter to convince cold and hungry people that they are warm and well-fed.
One last thought: $700 billion doesn’t even begin to to buy a dent into to the “wealth” of stinking mob Kleenex that is out there. What are these guys thinking? I don’t know, perhaps it’s just another giving it to you piecemeal event. I sure as hell am not going to volunteer to be downwind of the smell of this operation. And I humbly suggest you don’t either. More Also See: Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan
America’s GDP, or the total of all goods and services produced in this nation in a given year, is about $14 trillion dollars.
America the nation currently has an outstanding debt of about $10 trillion dollars, and has more than doubled in the last ten years. But this number is not the real total, because it does not count all the “promises” (read: entitlements) that people have been told they will have. Those “promises” are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in the main. They total, approximately $90 trillion dollars in current liability.
What’s worse, about 1/3rd of that was added with the “Medicare Part D” drug benefit, even though Congress was at the time fully aware that there was already $60 trillion or so sitting out there in unfunded liabilities. They did not care because the AARP, and you, screamed and demanded that Congress “do something.”
Oh they did something all right. They did the very same thing that you think you have a right to do - that is, spend more than you make.
That’s right. You have a right as an American to have a 4,000 square foot house on an acre, even if you only cut hair for a living. If you can’t get that loan honestly, you simply will make up an income and use some sort of “exotic” mortgage product to get it.
Your car broke down? Its beneath you to buy a used one, right? Just hit the home equity line and buy a new Suburban. $40,000. Cool. Oh, and charge the gas too.
Your kid comes home from school complaining that one of his friends has an iPOD. To shut him up, you go buy him one - even though you don’t have the $200 it costs. You just pull out the plastic and charge it. It will all be ok.
Your grandmother is taken deathly ill and whisked to the hospital. She’s 85, and has cancer. She has had a good life, but now it is drawing to a close. When you get there, the doctors ask what you, as her closest kin want, as she’s unconscious at the time. You tell them that they should preserve her life at all costs. Of course you don’t have any money to pay for the $500,000 in medical bills. Its ok; she was in a nursing home and didn’t have anything anyway, so there’s no estate for the bill to eat into; Medicare will pick it up. After all, she’s entitled to the best medical care money can buy as an American.
You love the $3/quart strawberries at the local WalMart. You won’t pay $3.50. As a consequence, the grower has fired all of his United States citizens as pickers and is employing illegal Mexicans. You don’t care, as you’ve got a good job - you answer the phones for Joe’s PCs and help people with their computer problems. Unfortunately Joe’s customers want to pay $50 less for that PC, so he fires you and outsources your job to India for $2/day. Oops.
Folks, what is going on in this country is exactly like what happened yesterday on the forum. Each and every day.
You drive around your neighborhood and see the “For Sale” and “Foreclosure” signs and the boarded-up businesses. You whine about $4 gasoline, $5 cheese and Ice Cream that is both more expensive and now is in a 1.5 quart instead of a 1/2 gallon container.
Your employer cuts medical benefits or expects you to pay more. You grumble or, if you’re unionized, you might actually strike. You end up capitulating anyway, then your job gets shipped to China.
We all feel the squeeze, but will we accept that we are part of the problem? That we have a spending deficit (that is, we spend more than we make), we have a savings deficit (we don’t save anything, on balance), we have a balance-of-trade deficit (we demand $30 DVD players from China, therefore, all the people who made them here are fired and they are manufactured there where workers are paid 25 cents/hour) and we have a common sense deficit (that is, we think we can continue to do this until the cows come home and there will be no consequence.)
Well, now we’ve got the beginning of the consequences, and what America is doing, for the most part, is sticking its fingers in its ears and going “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” - because actually removing the fingers from your ears requires that you admit that you are likely part of the problem as you’re in debt up to your eyeballs and are unwilling to live within your earnings capacity!
Would you like to know the rest of the consequences that are coming for you, your children and grandchildren if you don’t remove the fingers and stop chanting? Do you even know what they are? Let me lay a few out for you:
Mark Ames The Nation
Five days after Georgia invaded and seized the breakaway separatist region of South Ossetia, sparking a larger-scale Russian invasion to drive Georgian forces back and punish their leaders, Russia surprised its Western detractors by calling a halt to the country’s offensive. After all, the mainstream media, egged on by hawkish neocon pundits and their candidate John McCain, had everyone believing that Russia was hellbent on the full-scale annihilation and annexation of democratic Georgia.
But then came Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement-and we’re now forced to ask ourselves serious questions about the recent conflict: what really started it, how dangerous was it and what, with serious careful consideration, could be done to prevent it from turning into a worst-case scenario?
Up until now, this war was framed as a simple tale of Good Helpless Democratic Guy Georgia versus Bad Savage Fascist Guy Russia. In fact, it is far more complex than this, morally and historically. Then there are two concentric David and Goliath narratives here. The initial war pitted the Goliath Georgia-a nation of 4.4 million, with vastly superior numbers, equipment and training thanks to US and Israeli advisers-against David-Ossetia, with a population of between 50,000-70,000 and a local militia force that is barely battalion strength. Reports coming out of South Ossetia tell of Georgian rockets and artillery leveling every building in the capital city, Tskhinvali, and of Georgian troops lobbing grenades into bomb shelters and basements sheltering women and children. Although true casualty figures are hard to come by, reports that up to 2,000 Ossetians, mostly civilians, were killed are certainly believable, given the intensity of the initial Georgian bombardment, the wanton destruction of the city and surrounding regions and the generally savage nature of Caucasus warfare, a very personal game where old rules apply.
But you don’t hear about this story from the Western media. Indeed, you hear little if anything about the Ossetians, who seem to hardly exist in the West’s eyes, even though their grievance is the root cause of this war.
While Russia and America see the conflict in abstract terms about spheres of influence and protecting allies, for Ossetians, who still recall the centuries of massacres Georgians committed against them, it is highly personal. They will still recall the Georgian massacres in the early 1920s, when Georgia was briefly independent, which exterminated up to 8 percent of the Ossetian population. In 1990, when Georgia was again moving towards independence, the ultranationalist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished Ossetia’s limited autonomy, leading to another Ossetian rebellion that was only quelled by a peace agreement signed by Georgia, Russia and the Ossetians. Gamsakhurdia was subsequently deposed, and Georgia’s ethnic chauvinism was shelved until the rise of current president Mikhail Saakashvili in 2003.
Ossetians have traditionally relied on their powerful northern neighbor Russia for protection against Georgia. The Georgians, in turn, have tried to counter Russian hegemony, for which they are no match, by aligning closely with the United States, finding friendly ears among old cold warriors and Bush-era neocons.
When he first rose to prominence, the American-educated Saakashvili was often referred to as “Georgia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky”-the Russian ultranationalist firebrand who once promised to retake Alaska. Although Saakashvili was subsequently rebranded as a Euro-democrat, he promised to reunite Georgia and bring his separatist regions to heel, by force if necessary, whether the aggrieved ethnic groups liked it or not.
At the root of this conflict is a clash of two twentieth-century guiding principles in international relations. Georgia, backed by the West, is claiming its right as a sovereign nation to control the territory within its borders, a guiding principle since World War II. The Ossetians are claiming their right to self-determination, a guiding principle since World War I.
These two guiding concepts for international relations-national sovereignty and the right to self-determination-are locked in a zero-sum battle in Georgia. Sometimes, the West takes the side of national sovereignty, as it is in the current war; other times, it sides with self-determination and redrawing of national borders, such as with Kosovo. More
To be sure, the diminishing ability of America to influence the course of international events is now on display for all the world to see. Many cite the strong Zionist influence over America’s foreign policy for this development. And this Zionist influence has not been lost on Vladimir Putin nor on the people he rules. Putin was critical of the Zionist prompted American invasion of Iraq in 2003, saying that the invasion could not be justified because it “did not have the backing of the international community.” And with regard to America’s threats against Iran in behalf of their Zionist client, the State of Israel, Putin made the following reproof to America after his October 2007 visit to Iran: More
Since real-estate tanked, many new planned communities across the country are half-empty, with for-sale signs outnumbering residents by a large margin. Some of the projects abandoned by bankrupt developers are in places that were hotbeds of new housing construction: Southern California, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix. As of July, the percentage of vacant housing stock available for sale or rent stood at 4.8% nationally, the highest figure in at least 33 years, according to Zelman & Associates, a real-estate research firm. Daily life in these developments seems a bit post-cataclysmic. Children play on elaborate but empty playgrounds. They walk their dogs past rows of shiny houses that have never been lived in. Voices echo up and down the block. Unfinished houses and vacant lots strewn with construction debris clutter the horizon. More
The documentary divided into twelve parts tells the story of how debt combined with political corruption impoverished a nation that was once so rich that the expression “Wealthy as an Argentine” was once in common use throughout the world. When the USA took on trillions in debt starting in the early 1980s, did we enter a Dante’s hell as Argentina did when it took on its debt under a military dictatorship in the 1970s. Is it only a matter of time before US debts lead inexorably to currency crisis, inflation, and political chaos. The story will strike North Americans as uncomfortably familiar. More
Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody became the first woman in the United S tates of America History that has been nominated to serve as head of the Army’s supply arm. Dunwoody became the first four Star woman in Defense, received the orders from the President Bush on monday. Dunwoody, a native of New York, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1975 after her graduation from the State University of New York in Cortland. She also holds graduate degrees in national resource strategy and logistics management. She became the Army’s top-ranking woman in 2005 when she received her third star and became deputy chief of staff for Army logistics. More
Posted by Bebichan
Politically the ‘Bible Belt’ in America is one of the leading groups of influence—in fact it has been said that if all Evangelicals in America vote, they determine the elections (they are at about 35% of the population in America). They form a powerful voting block of Conservative fundamentalists.
To explore more about them, you have to look at how they began and what their most important beliefs are. In the final decades of the 19th Century the main protestant denominations began to adjust their beliefs to bring them into line with modern social and scientific thought. Liberals began to argue against these fundamentalists and said that if the bible was to retain any sort of intellectual credibility it would have to stop being accepted at face value.
As humans began to explore further into the history/origins/creation of the earth it became obvious that the world is older than what is stated in Genesis, and it could not have been fabricated by a creator or a “God” in seven days. Eve could not have been created from Adams ribs and hence the bible could no longer be treated as a basis of facts and merely as a compilation of metaphors. More
Economist.com
AS HOUSE prices in America continue their rapid descent, market-watchers are having to cast back ever further for gloomy comparisons. The latest S&P/Case-Shiller national house-price index, published this week, showed a slump of 14.1% in the year to the first quarter, the worst since the index began 20 years ago. Now Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and co-inventor of the index, has compiled a version that stretches back over a century.
This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, the worst point of the Depression. And things are even worse than they look. In the deflationary 1930s house prices declined less in real terms. Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year. More
Photo Benno Hansen< Leon Fisher
Regardless of whether the criminal cabal which has seized the Government of the United States proceeds with their intention to expand the war in the Mideast with an attack upon Iran, it is only a matter of time before the Country goes into a full blown depression.
While an expansion of the war into Iran would doubtless speed up the economic ruin of the United States, the die is already cast and there is no turning back. So weakened has the economy of the United States become since the implementation of so called Free Trade, as well as the lifting of regulations governing the excesses of Wall Street, no matter which political party dominates Congress and the White House and regardless of what measures they may implement, it will be
too little, too late.
If an attack on Iran does not materialize, then the price the American people will have to pay will be mostly economic. Rising unemployment, inflation, food shortages, and ever rising fuel prices will all contribute to lower the standard of living for most Americans. More
Photo laughlin James Howard Kunstler
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our “Happy Motoring” utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the “peak oil” story. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Read more
The Sun
“Admiral James Stavridis, who oversees military affairs for Latin America, told Congress on March 6 that he backs plans to designate a new fleet, led by a nuclear aircraft carrier, to patrol the waters of the Caribbean and Latin America in support of counter-terrorism operations. The move comes as South American nations, including Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador, boost military spending to counter tensions and protect oil reserves.”
Read more
“In this chilling BBC clip, a news team ventures to one of LA’s new shantytowns made up of people who’ve lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs.”
