CABLES CUT DELIBERATELY – WRONG MESSAGE SENT

Guess what?

The long awaited, much delayed Iran Oil Bourse has once again failed to open by its latest deadline after four vital undersea fiber optic cables linking much of the Middle East to Gulf states and the rest of the world were recently severed in five places.

The unprecedented Internet outages came just as Iran announced the discovery of a major gas field with “huge reserves” estimated at 11 trillion cubic feet off its Gulf coast. Already possessing the world’s second-largest proven gas reserves after Russia, the announcement seemed certain to kick-start the Iran’s petroleum trading exchange, announced by Teheran to open by February 10, 2008. [english.aljazeera.net Feb 02/08]

It didn’t happen.

According to a trusted, long-time source with contacts throughout the Middle East, the U.S. defense establishment and the Vatican, and with whom I have broken major stories over the past 16 years – my earlier posts speculating on deliberate U.S. sabotage to prevent the Iran Oil Bourse from opening were, as the say in the oil biz, “spot on.”

“I can confirm that the cables were cut,” Hank said. “The cables were cut to send a message: ‘Don’t do the bourse.’”

Just one week after George Bush’s quixotic Persian Gulf mission to somehow rally Arab nations around U.S. and Israeli plans of “confronting Iran’s nuclear program before it is too late,” Russia’s military chief of staff General Yuri Baluyevsky promised “to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies.”

The general then clarified, “Military forces will be used, including, preventively, the use of nuclear weapons.”

So much for the “maniac running around threatening everyone with a razor,” as Putin recently publicly described Bush.

Bush and Cheney’s plans to carpet bomb Iran were put on indefinite hold after General Baluyevsky added that although Russians have no plans of attacking anyone, they nevertheless “consider it necessary for everyone around the world community to clearly understand that” nuclear weapons will be used if the U.S. attacks Iran – where Russian oil and nuclear power investments were recently ante-upped with the first major delivery of Russian nuclear fuel to the Bushehr reactor. [liveleak.com; gather.com;americanfreepress.com]

Or maybe not.

ATTRACTING THE ENERGY THEY PUT OUT
Press TV, Iran is reporting: “Israel calls for shelter rooms to be set up in a bid to prepare the public for yet another war, this time, one of raining missiles.” This after retired general Udi Shani assured the nation, “The next war will see a massive use of ballistic weapons against the whole of Israeli territory.” [Global Research]

A pugnacious Putin has already dispatched a naval task force into the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic. According to the Canadian analysis org, Global Research, “The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva guided missile cruiser, joined up with Russian naval warships in the Mediterranean on January 18 to participate in the current maneuvers… The current operation is the first large-scale Russian Navy exercise in the Atlantic in 15 years. All combat ships and aircraft involved carry full combat ammunition loads. [Global Research]

France is also gearing up for major military maneuvers in the Straits of Hormuz, through which most of the world’s oil passes. Scheduled to take place from February 23 to March 5, 2008, Operation “Gulf Shield 01″ will involve more than 5,300 French, Emirate and Qatari personnel operating a half-dozen warships, 40 aircraft, and dozens of armored vehicles in war games targeting oil platforms off the coast of Iran. [DefenseNews.com]

In yet another Alpha male “threat display” aimed at giving pause to any country aggrieved by attacks on its soil, the Aegis cruiser USS San Jacinto is now in Haifa, Israel showcasing its advanced ability to defend against counter-attacking Iranian aircraft, submarines – or missiles. According to Whitney, writing in Online Journal, “Bush is convinced that if he doesn’t confront Iran, then no one will. He also believes that if he doesn’t militarily defend the dollar, then America’s days as ‘the world’s only superpower’ will soon be over. [Online Journal Feb 6/08]

BUSTING THE BOURSE
If it had opened on schedule, the Iran Oil Bourse could have pushed GW Bush over the edge of the Armageddon abyss. Modeled after the French stock exchange in Paris – the Federation Internationale des Bourses de Valeurs – in June 2004 Iran’s Bourse Council was given the mullah’s go ahead to establishment of the first-ever oil, gas and petrochemical stock market in the Islamic Republic.

On July 11, 2005 the Bourse Council issued legal permits for the establishment of Oil Bourse and instructed the fractious Ministry of Petroleum to stop fighting internally for political position and make it happen.

The new euro-dominated bourse was to go head to head with London’s International Petroleum Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange. Both are owned by U.S. corporations and both oil exchanges trade in depreciating dollars. Since the European Union imports more oil from OPEC producers than does the USA, importing more than 45% of its oil from Middle East, trading for that increasingly valuable commodity in dollars makes sense. [strategytalk.org;muckraker.com]

But not for the United States, where a sudden seismic shift away from dollar-dominated foreign oil would force a massive overnight “restructuring” of that severely bankrupt economy.

The U.S. attack on Iraq months after its president shifted that country’s oil trade from dollars to euros is a lesson not lost on Teheran, which has repeatedly “postponed” opening of its own euro oil bourse in the face of Washington’s threats.

In March 2006, instead of commencing trading as previously announced a spokesman for the Iranian Oil Ministry raised eyebrows when he told the Russian press, “We have no information on opening an oil exchange in the free economic zone on Kish Island.” [RIA Novosti ; en.rian.ru Mar 20/06]

Soon after the surprise non-announcement, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting carried Iranian oil minister’s latest update. Iran, Vaziri Hamaneh re-affirmed, was ready to launch its oil bourse one week after the unexplained delay. Denying that he had previously stated that the Iran Oil Bourse will bring down the US economy, Hamaneh told reporters, “I don’t know who has speculated that. I’ve not talked about U.S. economy.” [raisethehammer.org]

It didn’t happen.

In October 2006, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad underlined the necessity to set up the Oil Bourse, regretting the delay. Most transactions were to be carried out through the Internet using a nexus of undersea fiber-optic cables [iranian.ws]

SILENCE IN THE WHIRLWIND
In February 2008 vital Internet cables were sabotaged to underline points made less than two weeks previously by GW Bush, who had called on Middle East nations to continue linking their oil to the dollar, or they were going to “sleep with the fishes,” as Middle East analyst Mike Whitney put it.

“For the last two months, a number of sheiks and finance ministers have been publicly groaning about the falling dollar – threatening to break from the so-called “dollar-peg” and covert to a basket of currencies. Bush’s trip appears to have rekindled the spirit of brotherly cooperation. The grumbling has stopped and everyone is back ‘onboard,’” Whitney observed.

Amazingly – with a panicked U.S. Federal Reserve slashing interest rates 125 basis points on $1 trillion in capital invested by the sheiks in US Treasuries and securities…

… with Reuters reporting inflation spiraling out of control in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates

… forcing governments there to intervene “directly in loans, property and commodity markets to offset rate cut” and “provide food subsidies for their people”… as well as massive wage increases for “some Emeriti federal government employees”

… as commercial property values double in the UAE since last year –

… as migrant workers riot in Dubai over price hikes

… and the Saudi riyal rockets to a 21-year peak, with another 8% rise in the dirham and riyal expected by April

Oh hum.

Or as Whitney remarks, after Bush’s series of one-on-ones, “regional leaders now seem less bothered by the fact that inflation is trashing their economies and driving food, labor, energy and housing through the roof.” [Online Journal Feb 6/08]

SOMETHING DIFFERENT THIS WAY COMES
With their inimitable inability to plan for contingencies coupled to an uncanny knack of turning opportunities for dialogue into deepening disasters, the fundamentalists in the Washington have once again “misunderestimated” an ancient, highly disciplined and desert-savvy culture. The business, government, medical and academic people I came to know as a reporter in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait operate a sophisticated tribal network and trading milieu so far beyond their ken, the White House might as well be dealing with severe time and comprehension delays while sending increasingly irrelevant directives from an oxygen-starved location somewhere on Mars.

In yet another marathon 10 hour interview , Hank updated our “Loose Nukes,” “Poppers” and “U.S. Drops Atomic Bombs On Iraq and Afghanistan,” and “Fatal Flaw” stories posted on willthomasonline.net.
As for cutting those cables and sending their usual insulting message to the noncompliant originators of trade, law and Western Civilization, the Bushwhackers “were looking at a financial change,” Hank explained. “They weren’t looking at the other end of things. They weren’t thinking of the other events as they unfolded. The message got across but not quite in the way they were hoping.”

Iran’s oil bourse, he explained, is “just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.”

Forget about it, he advised.

“They don’t do the bourse. It’s going to be something different.”

How different?

Quoting his Vatican source, Hank replied, “They are going to start a new bank.”

BREAKING THE BANK
“Remember the old Bank of England?” my informant urged. “Think Catholic, Bank of England – Pope.”

Consider how the Bank of England was able to consolidate its present grip on the world’s financial network through the ability of its “parent” – the Bank of Rome – to control money, resources and travel throughout the Olde World through the powerfully superstitious expedient of making all believers beholden to them for eventual passage into paradise. After baptizing them through its priestly agents, Rome can still excommunicate reluctant players and condemn them to hell, Hank pointed out. Turning to what could become a resurgent Middle East, he added, “Same thing with these guys.”

Except they have 2,000 years of technological advancement to install their own overland fiber-optic communications made from the finest signal-conducting sand on the planet. Also enough oil and incoming solar energy to power their economies, sophisticated management, their own Internet – and more than one billion highly spiritually-disciplined members who have not forgotten the scientific and academic achievements of Islam’s once-great civilization.

Or its Western betrayals.

“The oil bourse is a chip on the table in a big pile of chips,” Hank told me last night.

“Are we talking a single currency for the Gulf region?” I wanted to know.

“An Islamic currency,” Hank clarified. “They’re talking about making a hemisphere. This really is the New World.”

Though Washington’s sabotage of their undersea comm cables has confirmed the correctness of the sheiks’ vision, Hank said their ambitious plans – which include a massive ship canal now secretly under construction to bypass the Strait of Hormuz – will not be fast-tracked. Look for the financial world, as the West has come to dominate it, to turn upside down “in about a year.”

And don’t ask, What next?

William Thomas Discusses Days Of Deception

CLICK HERE TO HEAR/SAVE AUDIO

10/26/07
William Thomas discusses Days Of Deception with Meria Heller, who says:

“This is the most exciting book I’ve read in a long time. 9/11/01 in real time; what do to now – emergence; Doom & Bloom; Kucinich’s “Dept of Peace”; Richard Grove’s excellent work; turf wars inside the 9/11 “movement”; financial incentives behind 9/11, Iraq,Afghanistan, and possibly Iran; “Deep Pockets” – 9/11 a fireworks display; Pearl Harbor truth – Robert Stinnett’s “Day of Deceit”; commercial shipping moved out of the way on that day of “infamy”; the Pearl Harbor stand-down, the 9/11 stand-down; what can Bush do in a year?

“All evolves back to the Vatican and the Bank of Rome; money is why 9/11 happened; Federal Reserve; put options on 9/11; Richard’s work on financial trading software; fraudulent trading activities; the price REAL truthers pay; Bank of England; the Black Pope; the Jesuits; the micro chips made in China; Paying off 9/11 Commission to cover up Pakistan; using low level nukes in Iraq; radiation illness; Nothing can outlast the truth”. (13 min. MP3)

Subscribe to Meria’s podcasts and download the rest of this 55 min. interview here.

WILLIAM THOMAS DISCUSSES CHEMTRAILS WITH MERIA HELLER

CLICK HERE TO HEAR/SAVE AUDIO

10/26/07
William Thomas discusses chemtrails with Meria Heller, who says:

“Will Thomas is an author, journalist, photographer and filmmaker. We discuss his excellent book “Chemtrails Confirmed”. chemtrail awakening, sign the chemtrail petitions on his site; USAF new fleet of aerial tanker planes; Visual stealth technology; people only see what’s in their consciousness; NBC & Discovery on chemtrails; Morgollon’s disease; contrails vs. chemtrails; humidity and contrails; are contrails harmless? vaccines, sedatives; biological warfare under the cloak of darkness; quartz particles – transmitters of energy; electromagnetic pollution; scrambling our brains; how to protect yourself; fungus in the blood of 99% of chemtrail patients; last gasp of outdated paradigm; symptoms of chemtrail poisoning; HAARP; tunable polymers; biowarfare experiments since the 50’s; Zombie Nation – why the lack of awareness & outcry?” (12 min.)

ARE UNDERSEA CABLE CUTS ESCALATING “U.S. ECONOMIC TERRORISM”?

U.S. allies Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are helping to shield Iran’s banking system from Washington’s “financial terrorism,” the governor of Iran’s central bank, Tahmasb Mazaheri has declared.

Despite the Bush administration’s attempts to isolate Iran and cut that country’s access to the global financial system, “The pressure is not working because cultural, political and economic ties between Gulf oil producers are too strong,” MiddleEastOnline points out.

Speaking at the recent Islamic Finance Summit, Mazaheri pledged, “Neither us nor our neighbors will sacrifice our long-term interests because of the unilateral pressures.”

Teheran’s denials of having a nuclear weapons program were dramatically and independently confirmed by a U.S. Government National Intelligence Estimate leaked last December in which all U.S. intelligence agencies concurred that Iran had dropped all nuclear weapons development in 2003, and has not since resumed it.

MiddleEastOnline further points out, “Iran has long had close economic ties with Gulf states, especially in the UAE and Bahrain, Arab allies of Washington and home to the Middle East’s biggest financial centers. Even so, banks in the world’s top oil-exporting region have bowed to pressure from the United States to make doing business with the Islamic Republic more difficult.”

Bahrain’s Ahli United Bank is that country’s biggest lender. Under strong White House pressure, AUBB.BH, has “frozen” banking activity with its affiliate Future Bank inside Iran. Other UAE lenders have refrained from issuing new letters of credit to Iranian companies.

Foreign banks are also buckling, MiddleEastOnline reports: “France’s BNP Paribas and Calyon, the investment banking arm of Credit Agricole, stopped offering Letters of Credit on Iranian fuel imports because of pressure from Washington.”

“I call it kind of financial terrorism in the financial industry,” Mazaheri told reporters. “And it cannot be tolerated by the global financial system,”

Mazaheri insisted that Iran’s central bank is continuing to assist private and state-owned Iranian banks “regardless of the pressure on them.”

Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. A recent major natural gas find has also secured its place as holder of the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas.

Iran officially says it is now retaliating against U.S. economic sanctions by diversifying its more than $72 billion of cash reserves from its natural gas and oil sales away from the rapidly weakening U.S. currency.

“We have tried to avoid keeping dollars,” Mazaheri explained, adding that the motivations for Iran’s central bank to diversify its cash-for-oil reserves away from the dollar were both “political and also because of the trend of the weakening dollar.” [Middle East Online Feb 7/08]

The debt-ridden dollar remains at record lows against the euro and a basket of major currencies.

It is the contention of this veteran investigative reporter, with personal experience in the U.S. Navy and the Middle East, that the recent furor over five cuts to four vital undersea fiber-optics cables in recent days could have been carried out by USS Jimmy Carter. A five-year, $1 billion refit at the Groton, Connecticut shipyard saw this purpose-built, fiber-optic cable spy sub outfitted with high-tech upgrades, including remotely operated robot submersibles, and a special detachable chamber for splicing into the deeply submerged fiber-optic cables that carry 95% of the world’s telephone and Internet traffic – including the Persian Gulf.

Instead of attempting to intercept that data stream, the sub, working alone or in concert with divers from other submarines, could be sending a clear signal to Teheran and other Gulf countries to “think twice” before opening a long-awaited Oil Bourse on the luxury island of Kish.

Set to open for trading by February 10, 2008 after repeated postponements in the face of U.S. threats, the innovative Iran Oil Bourse – or IOB – will allow oil buyers and sellers acting for their respective governments to bypass speculators and banks acting as costly “middlemen” to trade directly in oil – online. The Internet-dependent bourse is highly vulnerable to digital disruption. And Kish lies close to Dubai, where the most serious and unprecedented breaks occurred in two new cables. [Energy Bulletin Feb 3/08]

While the possibility of U.S. interference with this vital communications network remains speculative, the non-coincidental nature of five fiber-optic cable breaks in close succession, as well as the timing of the breaks, suggests a possible link with an impending euro-based bourse that threatens to push aside a U.S. dollar totally dependent on oil being traded in that currency.

Although the sailing times and tracks of U.S. nuclear submarines are classified, it would be interesting to know whether USS Jimmy Carter is currently in port or at sea.

A COMPELLING REASON TO MESS WITH THOSE UNDERSEA CABLES OFF DUBAI

Iran’s long and nervously awaited oil bourse is once again set to open” imminently”. Iran’s Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari has just told the world press, “All preparations have been made to launch the bourse; it will open during the Ten-Day Dawn.”

The ceremonies, which mark the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, traditionally take place between February 1 and 11.

Many financial wizards expect that when the country holding one of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves begins demanding euros instead of dollars for its “black gold”, the greenback could crash dive. It’s a metaphor that brings to mind USS Jimmy Carter, a specially retrofitted U.S. nuclear submarine modified to tap into undersea fiber-optic cables that carry most of the Middle East’s telephone and Internet traffic. (See my previous blog, “Did Secret Sub Sever Cables?”) [MK/JG/RE/HAR, Iran Press TV, Energy Bulletin Feb 3/08]

Chris Cook, former director of the International Petroleum Exchange, says that oil is not priced in dollars.

Dollars are priced in oil.

“This is eerie,” comments the Energy Bulletin.

And dangerous. The U.S. economy’s weakness is that it is consumption and deficit based. “If proceeds from oil sales are not being invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds or other U.S. assets” – now increasingly seen by investors as liabilities – “then it makes it that much more difficult for the dollar to avoid further declines”, Cook comments. [Energy Bulletin Feb 3/08]

He should know. His Wimpole Consortium originated and drew up the blueprints for the Iran oil Bourse. Though Cook maintains, “The currency of the IOB contracts was never a consideration,” the Energy Bulletin notes that the Iranian Bourse “cuts out the dollar as a currency in which to trade oil. “

Oops!

The bourse’s launch has been again for years as three successive Iranian oil ministry officials failed to find hard-line political backing for a move that must have frightened the mullahs, who had seen Iraq brutally seized by invading U.S. troops soon after Saddam Hussein switched his country’s oil trading currency from dollars to euros.

Many observers see the Bush administration’s constant threats to attack Iran as intimidation aimed at scuttling the ever-impending oil bourse.

But when Chris Cook wrote directly to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, a drastic shake up of the Oil Ministry followed.

Once again, with his unfailing knack for turning opportunities into disaster, GW Bush had done it to Americans by using the U.S. Treasury Department to pressure international businesses to leave Iran. After the German Deutsche Bank’s closed its Teheran office, Treasury warned more than 40 other banks it would “follow a strict interpretation of U.S. and United Nations restrictions on doing business with Tehran.”

The Treasury Department also “bullied” two Iranian banks – Sepah and Saderat – “barring them access to the U.S. financial system for dollar transactions through third-party banks,” the Financial Times reported.

The highly controversial sanctions against Iran only slightly inconvenienced the regime, which simply switched from German and Swiss banks to Far Eastern banks, who were happy to take their business.

But as many predicted, the ill-considered move did succeed in sparking severe blowback.

The bourse was fast-tracked.

Though global oil prices are determined by supply and demand, Cook believes that the new Iranian Oil Bourse will “remove much of the current price volatility caused by a toxic combination of speculation by hedge funds and market manipulation by intermediary traders,” the Energy Bulletin reports.

But…

“The IOB’s scrapping the dollar, if not practically then psychologically is going to significantly embody a counterweight to dollar domination of the oil markets.”

If it works.

And there’s the rub-a-dub-dub.

Because the Iranian Oil Bourse for trading Middle East oil in euros (and other currencies) is Internet-dependent.

“The bourse will be trading on a concept that is new in the oil markets but which is already operating in other fields,” the Energy Bulletin explains. Just as in South America, where participating countries barter locally produced raw materials and for Venezuela’s oil, buyers and sellers in the Middle East and beyond will “connect via the Internet on a peer to peer market place.”

And this means…

“There won’t be any trading intermediaries such as investment banks as middlemen that are making hefty profits.”

The communications chokepoint of the vital undersea cable network serving the new Oil Bourse headquarters is the luxury Persian Gulf island of Kish, (pronounced “quiche”), close off Dubai. Travel brochures boast, “No headscarves here!”

And the diving is spectacular…

Demolishing the deficit-dollar by pricing oil in euros – and eliminating massive investment bank brokerage profits – is a threatened double-whammy Washington cannot ignore.

So why not use its fiber-optic tapping sub to mess with those undersea Internet cables off Dubai, while sea- and land-based electronic monitoring (ELINT) stations plot the “work-arounds” used by affected countries to reroute their Internet traffic for future targeting?

Nuking the U.S. deficit-dollar by pricing oil in euros – and eliminating massive investment bank brokerage profits – is a threatened double-whammy Washington cannot ignore.

So why not use its fiber-optic tapping sub to mess with those undersea Internet cables – while sea- and land-based electronic monitoring (ELINT) stations plot the “work-arounds” used by affected countries to reroute their Internet traffic – for future targeting?

Sheer speculation, of course.

But five cable breaks in the same region in less than two weeks is a bit too “coincidental” for comfort. And the timing of such significant Middle East Internet disruptions could also be sending another signal through those severed cables.

At the very least, spending $1 billion and five years’ shipyard downtime to retrofit a Seawolf-class attack sub with advanced tech capable of  splicing into underwater fiber optic cables shows the seriousness of US intentions to mess with crucial cable communications.

Put this technology, timing and events together and “Cable Gate” seems a
more likely explanation than interference from submerged space aliens worried about the IOB’s impact on currency exchange rates on Aldeberan.

Take your pick.

And watch for the bourse to surface.

DID SECRET SUB SEVER CABLES?

Like wounds inflicted on any neural network, the unprecedented cutting of four vital undersea communication cables within 10 days has sparked hysteria and concern across the Net. One of the principle companies hit, Flag Telecom has raised its own flags after seeing two of its brand new cables go down for the first time at the same time in the region.

The FALCON cable has been cut twice.

More than 95% of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables. The new trans-Pacific fiber optic cable can carry the equivalent of 100 million simultaneous phone calls.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan and India all experiencing severe problems before rerouting their Internet traffic.

Egypt lost more than half its Internet capacity and did not expect services to be back to normal for at least 10 days.

India’s $11 billion outsourcing industry, which provides a range of services like insurance claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the Internet not been hurt by the cable disruption due to back-up plans.

Loss of service in Iran sparked an instant Internet freakout as “quick-on-trigger” Slashdot speculated on a comms blackout as prelude to an American attack. In fact, Iran was not greatly affected. “Users in Iran have been able to connect to the internet without any atypical problem,” security tech expert Bruce Schneier wrote. “I manage a Persian-language website with many readers in Iran, so I have both the motivation and the resources to check into this. We’ve seen no decrease in traffic from within Iran. Iran is not disconnected from the Internet!” [schneier.com]

The problem was traced to pings to a single malfunctioning router. The outages in Iran did not exceed 20% of their total number of networks.

In the UAE, Qtel’s loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to alternative routes for transmission after an undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut about 50 km off Dubai – the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days. Two of the damaged cables carry three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East. UAE Internet and telephone services were largely back to normal after it used a terrestrial cable across Saudi Arabia to circumvent the problem. [omantribune.com]

The specter of lost ships “dropping anchor” toward seabeds that could not be reached with every bit of chain, rope and bedsheets onboard has been discounted. Egypt checked and found that no ships transited anywhere near the commutations “choke point” where the cables Sea Me We 4 and Europe-Asia are located. The entire region is a restricted area. [International Herald Tribune Feb 4/08]

But loss of service to five separate cables within days cannot be attributed to attrition, accident or seismic activity. Undersea cable owners still won’t speculate on cause of the continuing cable cuts.

If foul play occurred, who could have dunnit?

One guess.

The supersecret National Security Agency – otherwise known as the “No Such Agency” – used to intercept all the information it could handle by eavesdropping on satellite traffic. Today, international information mostly travels through fiber-optic cables containing eight or more strands of light-transmitting fibers.

Still in the business of minding everyone’s business, in early 1989, the NSA sequestered a special research team in their own classified labs at its Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters. Their mission: Find a way to get inside fiber-optic cables and hack the data streaming through them.

Congressional opposition was steamrollered under “national security” concerns. Ten years later, in 1998, Congress allocated funds to modify the nuclear submarine USS Jimmy Carter to accommodate what the Navy calls “advanced technology for naval special warfare and tactical surveillance.” In other words, phone tapping on a terabyte scale.

The five-year, $1 billion retrofit included the ability to tap undersea cables for the NSA. Launched in 2004, Jimmy Carter was equipped with “lock-out capability” to allow divers to leave and enter the sub via a separate undersea chamber. The sub also sported special thrusters and inertial navigation systems, allowing it to hover near the ocean floor for long periods without disrupting its tapping operation.

Other new technology allowed the sub to supply oxygen and power to the undersea chamber deployed and detached from the sub. According to naval intelligence expert, Norman Polmar, a length of cable is brought inside the special chamber, where crewmembers inside “then do the work” while the mother sub hovers nearby.

Assuming that the crew enters the chamber directly from the sub, it could be deployed a depths far beyond the survival capability of divers.

Surreptitiously tap of a live cable carrying 10,000 volts is still tricky, though! “Exposing that electricity to the water, or severing it at all, would shut down the entire system,” Polmar says. Such a shutdown would alert shoreside operators that something was wrong.
There are basically two ways to extract light – and the data it contains – from a fiber optic strands. Data thieves can attempt to bending the fiber so that some of its light shines through its thin polymer cladding for interception. But bending can easily kink the fiber. Splicing secondary fibers into each fiber in the strand is easier. This splits the same data into two identical streams.

But splice the line and you cut off the light. Even a second’s interruption will be noticed by the cable’s operators.

At least that’s the conventional wisdom. One retired NSA optical specialist insists that the NSA has devised a way to splice a fiber without being detected. [ZDNet News May 23/01]

Assuming five breaks in the same region during the same period are not coincidence, we must now descend as deep as a submarine into murky yet tantalizing speculation.

Was the U.S. Navy messing with those cables to place a tap through which information could be extracted – and PsyOps disinformation injected into the data flow?

But if its crew broke one, why didn’t the Navy or the NSA order the operation immediately halted?

Or was this a test aimed at deliberately disrupting communications so that the Navy and NSA could then trace and track the “work arounds” used by affected countries to reroute their data traffic?

If so, does re-routing around cable failures offer many randomly “organic” alternate nodes? Or are backup communications routes limited enough to now have been mapped for future targeting if an aggressor required the shut down of, say, blog, video and Internet links out of an area it meant to attack?

Stay tuned.

If you can.

THE THREE THOUSAND PERCENT FACTOR

From the man who has wrecked every enterprise he’s ever been handed comes the latest, perhaps irrecoverable blow. I refer, of course, to Dubya’s ruinous financial “stimulus” package, which amounts to the biggest credit binge in the history of the known universe.

Every credit card holder knows that even if the interest rates that pushed you into insolvency are momentarily eased, you can never clear your debt by borrowing more money.

But what that dumb shmuck in the White House does not realize is that whatever the recipients of his $300 and $1,200 handouts do with the dough, this latest $150 billion fire-extinguisher will shortly hit a raging financial conflagration like a bucket of raw gasoline.

Why?

Because, as Paul Grignon, creator of the must see animation “Money Is Debt” points out, “The banking system creates new credit based on existing credit.” So when the gummint issues a check, “depending on the type of account it is deposited in, the bank can then create a new loan for up to 100% of it.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

“Actual reserve ratios vary from 10:1 to no reserve at all, but 33:1 is common – meaning that if $1,000 is deposited at 33:1, $970 of new bank credit can be created. If that $970 is then deposited again, $940 new bank credit can be created…” on and on in a pyramid of ever-thinner air.

Noting that “cash does not necessarily enter the picture at any point,” Grignon goes on to explain that the government will initially borrow its “stimulus” money as “a Federal Reserve bank credit distributed as checks (promises to pay) that are then deposited (loaned) to a commercial bank, which can then use the government’s promise to pay as backing for a new loan. The end result, if each new ‘loan’ were deposited in a bank, would be a total of about $30,000 of new bank credit that can be created from that initial deposit of a $1,000 government check.”

That’s right, Fed fans. “The banking system, through the creation of new so-called ‘loans’, each based on a deposit that was itself just created as a so-called loan, will, if borrowers can be found “ – multiply Bush’s $150 billion handout up to 3,000 percent! And that resulting high-octane “liquidity” could ignite an unquenchable firestorm.

Why?

Because when money’s tight, sellers must slash their prices to woo buyers. But when the Fed releases a glut of money chasing the same goods and services – prices go up. Another term for this is Big Time Inflation. This means that everything that has been costing more recently because of rising oil prices and consumer and government debt – is about to cost even more.

But the Federal Reserve (which is neither “federal” nor a “reserve” but a privately-held group of extortionists who mint money into the debt that holds all Americans hostage) is now frantically slashing interest rates to take the pressure off mortgage and credit-card holders crushed under the avalanche of interest rates the Fed had just finished raising to cool off all that borrowing…

Now the fickle fed is once again easing credit, making it easier to borrow for folks who already cannot make their payments.

If an airline flew its jets like these yo-yo’s, you’d never get on their planes. But now that the wings are coming off, China and our dear friends in the Persian Gulf have been forced to buy the whole damn fleet!

It seems that the Bush Gang, who should never have been entrusted with a nickel to go buy licorice, is currently borrowing more than $2 billion a day just to keep the country afloat long enough to squeak past the next presidential selection with their heads still attached to their bodies. The biggest lender is China, which doesn’t have much choice considering how many greenbacks are already stuffed in its bulging godowns. They’re followed by Japan and Europe, who are similarly constrained from simply dumping their dollars. And of course OPEC nations are essentially making loans to the USA every day by selling their valuable oil for depreciating dollars instead of the more stable, upward-trending euro.

This is changing, though.

Meanwhile, back inside a superpower imploding as fast as its former nemesis (and for many of the same reasons that brought down the former Soviet Union), the Independent reports that two of “Wall Street’s biggest banks are preparing to write off tens of billions of dollars of investments in the US mortgage market, and to replace the capital with an $18 billion cash infusion from emerging market investors.”

You guessed it. “The biggest single new investor is likely to be the Chinese government, which has used the financial crisis to snap up large chunks of the US finance industry. Most recently it paid $5 billion for a stake in Morgan Stanley, and is also putting US$1billion into Bear Stearns. [Independent Jan 15/08]

When China owns your banks, China owns your country. But don’t get mad. Without Beijing’s loans and outright purchases of just about everything on the planet that’s not nailed down, you would be eating mud cookies alongside starving Haitians – another country savagely screwed by American intervention.

Now other nations are piling on, too, desperate to divest their dollars in the only place on the planet where greenbacks still have value – the US of A.

FIRE SALE
Here’s what else Bush forgot to tell you on his way to Armageddon:

In 1998, crude oil cost about $11 a barrel and the U.S. paid about $45 billion that year for its imported oil. “Over the past decade,” explains Michael T. Klare, author of Resource Wars, Blood and Oil and the soon-to-be-released Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, “this country has squandered approximately one and a half trillion dollars on imported oil, much of which has been poured down the tanks of grotesquely fuel-inefficient vehicles that were conveying drivers on ever lengthening commutes from the exurbs to employment in center cities.”

By 2007, the annual bill for the planet’s most profligate petroleum users exceeded $400 billion. This oil, of course, was immediately turned into burnt carbon and lofted into already feverish skies.

“As the oil import bill kept rising, the value of the dollar kept falling, and inflationary pressures kept building,” continues Klare, who is a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College. “Of course, the country’s central bankers responded in classic fashion by raising interest rates. This naturally resulted in substantially higher monthly payments for homeowners with variable-rate mortgages” who were forced into default on their mortgages.

But whether it’s gas in the tank (or Abrams tanks), home heating fuel, or just about anything you buy off a shelf – everyone still has to make the nut to buy oil for their personal use, or its downstream derivatives.

Which was why the second day of 2008 turned out to be a harbinger of all-caps DOOM, when imported oil hit $100 a barrel.

The borrowed fortunes (and futures) Americans must now spend on go-juice are now being deposited abroad in Sovereign Wealth Funds controlled by government agencies like the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Don’t go to sleep. There will definitely be a quiz, because as Klare continues, “These SWFs now control approximately $3 trillion in assets, and, with more petrodollars pouring into the petro-states every day, they are projected to hit the $12 trillion mark by 2015.”

And what are these Sovereign Wealth Funds doing with all their fast-depreciating trillions?

Move over, China.

“For one thing, buying up choice U.S. assets at bargain-basement prices,” Klare replies. “In the past few months, Persian Gulf SWFs have acquired a significant stake in a number of prominent American firms, giving them a potential say in the future management of these companies.”

Kuwait has taken a $12 billion stake in Citigroup and a $6.5 billion share in Merrill Lynch. Abu Dhabi also owns a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup. Even the private Carlyle Group bank has had to sell a $1.5 billion share of its war-profiteering stake to Mubadala Development, also run by the government of Abu Dhabi.”

Oh oh.

“These acquisitions are just a small indication of a massive, irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia,” Klare confirms. “What this means is not just the continuing enfeeblement of the American economy, but an accompanying decline in global political leverage.” [TomDispatch.com Jan 31/08]

YOUR CARD HAS BEEN DECLINED
Back on Main Street, USA the squeeze is on. Remember, 70% of the U.S. economy depends on shoppers shopping – mostly on credit. And Americans now hold almost 700 million credit cards sagging with $915 billion in consumer debt. The average borrower is trying to make next month’s compounding interest payments on more than $9,000.

“The perception… is that credit cards are used for frivolous spending, that it’s just easy money for people to use to buy their nice sneakers,” says José Garcia, a senior researcher at the think tank Demos and author of a new study called “Borrowing to Make Ends Meet”. In fact, they are “a way that people have been dealing with economic shock.” [inthesetimes.com]

Some 77 million Americans are already having difficulty paying medical bills. The average cost of college tuition increased 165% between 1970 and 2005, and went up another 6% last year alone. Meanwhile, 35 million Americans are going hungry every year – including 13 million children. And the cost of most grocery staples is rising fast. [Reuters Nov 14/07]

With credit card holders defaulting, and American homeowners set to lose as much as $8 trillion in equity, big banks are running out of financial maneuvering room, worries Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation and professor of finance at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Which means they are going to have to squeeze their credit card divisions for even more cash flow to help underwrite the loss of mortgage fees and underwriting fees.” [truthout Dec 10/07; inthesetimes.com]

This is already “affecting people across the board,” Garcia picks up. “As people feel the subprime crisis, credit card companies are putting additional strain [by raising their] credit card interest rates, which also will increase the amount of economic instability in households.”

In November 2007, credit card debt in the United States surged over 11%.

But get this: “Like mortgages, credit card debt is often carved up and sold on global debt markets as securities,” Adam Doster reveals. “Credit card debt is unsecured, meaning no portion of defaults can be salvaged. If those bundled securities of debt decline in value, as mortgage-backed securities did last summer, banks and institutional investors (pensions, mutual funds, hedge funds) could all take a major hit, which could cause comparable damage to the broader economy.” [inthesetimes.com]

RUNNING ON EMPTY
Doug Casey is the author of Crisis Investing, which spent 26 weeks atop the New York Times Best-Seller list. He also publishes the highly respected International Speculator. “I remain of the opinion that we’re headed into the biggest economic smashup in history,’ Casey predicts. “That’s an outrageous statement, “ he quickly adds.

But there it is.

Casey throws a rope over quicksand, saying the one thing that can help lever an economy out of a recession “is a large pool of savings” that can be invested in new production and purchases. But then he jerks it back by mentioning that personal savings in the U.S. are nearly nonexistent. And sinking fast.

“That’s why it’s the height of idiocy for pundits to talk about how patriotic it is to go out and shop. It can only deplete the capital that will be needed in the future, and deepen the bottom with more bankruptcies, stealing consumption from the future. That’s why the Fed’s lowering interest rates on the federal funds rate… is such a bad idea: It encourages people to save less and borrow more… guaranteeing yet a bigger bust.” [worldnetdaily.com Jan 17/02]

DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?
As everyone knows, perception drives the markets. And when public perceptions catch up with reality – or vice versa – almost everyone follows the same maxim:

“When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

Chris Skrebowski, editor of the leading oil industry trade journal Petroleum Review spent nearly a decade arguing against Peak Oil pundit Colin Campbell. “I tried hard to prove him wrong. I have failed for nine years. I am now with him. In fact, I think he’s a bit of an optimist,” Skrebowski says today.

“The perception of looming decline may be worse than the decline itself,” Campbell himself worries. “The market overreacts to even small imbalances… There will be panic.”

The threat is real. Today, more than 60 out of the 65 countries possessing oil have passed the peak of their discoveries; 49 of them have passed their production peaks,” reports the Independent’s Jeremy Leggett. “Supply will get very tight from 2008 or 2009,” Skrebowski foresees. Fuel prices “will soar. There is very little time and lots of heads are in the sand.”

2008!?!?!!

Roger Booth spent his professional life at Shell. He now believes that with Peak Oil already occurring in 2004, “A crash of 1929 proportions is not improbable.”

Campbell goes further, declaring that costs of goods and services dependent on oil to grow, manufacture, transport and acquire them – which is just about everything – “are set to soar in the absence of spare capacity until demand is cut by recessions. We will enter a volatile epoch of price shocks and recessions in increasingly vicious circles. A stock-market crash is inevitable.” [Independent Jan 20/06]

We’re almost already there, states the Bank for International Settlements’ annual report. The conditions which led up to the Not-So-Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Asian crises in the 1990s “are reflected in the current environment,” declares the central bankers’ bank. [Telegraph June 26/07]

IT’S THE WARS, STUPID
It’s not just the end of cheap oil and the greed driving both ends of fraudulent loan scams that dragged us all into this fustercluck. Casey comes to bat observing that rising GDP “doesn’t necessarily mean increased prosperity. What if the government embarked on a massive pyramid building program, an archetypical example of public works? GDP might rise, but it would add absolutely nothing to the well being of individuals.”

What if successive empire American builders spent nearly 70 years building a weapons pyramid, with those at the top taking most of the profits, and the people crushed under its country-broad base getting hosed?

Not collecting taxes from the rich, and failing to invest in the country’s physical and social infrastructure “while spending insane amounts of money on ‘defense’ projects” that profit a few government-linked corporations but “bear no relationship to the national security of the United States,” Chalmers Johnson points out – is a recipe for fiscal as well as karmic disaster.

In his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Johnson discusses “military Keynesianism”. By this he means “the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.”

What Johnson terms, “our devotion to militarism” – despite being broke and having to sell our children and all the furniture to overseas landlords – has long since cost us our manufacturing competitiveness by diverting more borrowed money to non-productive weaponry and perpetually damaging wars than all other nations’ military budgets combined.

Now add the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – which are not part of the officially disingenuous defense budget and exceed the combined military budgets of Russia and China – to the $23 billion spent every year by the Orwellian “Department of Energy” to develop, build and maintain nuclear bombs…

Plus another hidden billion dollars for recruitment and reenlistment incentives to entice reluctant RPG-fodder for lifetime service in combat, $25 billion for foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel)…

Plus $76 billion for Veterans Affairs – half of which goes for woefully inadequate long-term care of some 31,000 soldiers grievously injured, so far, in Iraq and Afghanistan (where the locals resent being invaded and occupied)…

Plus another $46 billion to turn the former home of the free into a police state under an Hitlerian Department of Homeland Security…

Plus $39 billion for the Military Retirement Fund…

Plus an extra $2 billion for the FBI’s “paramilitary activities”… (!)

Plus another $8 billion for NASA’s “military-related activities”… (!)

Not to mention “well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays”

– and you can see where all the money’s going. In 2008 alone, total spending for the U.S. military establishment that is currently bringing not freedom but FUBAR to the planet, while sucking America’s commercial lifeblood like a vampire – is “conservatively calculated” at $1.1 trillion.

And you’re saying that your school district, bridge and road repair crews, local foodbanks and shelters, green energy initiatives, dike builders, fire department, recycling depot, electric vehicle initiative, elder housing and local organic growers need some money?

What’s wrong with your priorities?

Don’t you know that terrorists have already taken over the White House?

WHEN UP IS DOWN AND DOWN IS OUT
Sorry. My Justice gene must be out of whack.

Don’t worry, be happy. Even if we can’t all buy ranches like Bush’s retreat in Paraguay, members of Congress – “who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts,” Johnson reminds us – have passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act requiring all federal agencies “to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public.”

Only one problem: “Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security has ever complied.”

No wonder that by 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the U.S. Military Inc. had reached a staggering 83% of the value of all American manufacturing plants and equipment!

But this was hardly good news for workers. At least, not for those in the United States. “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment,” concluded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. in May 2007.

Their new study showed that 66 years of diverting money away from civilian manufacturing to feed an out of control arms industry cost 4,640,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, Johnson point outs, the weaponeers Ike warned us about squandered $8 trillion in capital resources from 1947 to 1987 – including spending more than $6 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of species-threatening nuclear bombs that can never be used.

“The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the twenty-first century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated,” Johnson jeremiads. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations. Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment – from medical machines… to cars and trucks… Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone.”

Not for long, Bubba. Still, White House fundamentalists lifting their threats and slogans directly from their al-Qaeda counterparts (whom they formerly financed) – and entranced American television viewers who still believe the virtual reality assembled for them daily by news “managers” – figure they can afford the crippling expenses, if not the spiritual consequences, of waging permanent warfare against just about everyone on the planet – and the planet, besides. Because, as they put it, “We are the richest country on Earth.”

ARE YOU COMING TO OUR TEA PARTY?
Don’t believe it. These are the people whose representatives still try to sabotage every international attempt to stave off our space colony’s looming collapse, while insisting that global warming is “a hoax”. And who fervidly believe their God is coming any minute to “save” the mass-murderers who despoiled His creation.

In fact, both God and Gaia are fed up. Have you noticed the weather lately? And according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the world’s richest political place is… the European Union. As nerve.com points out, “The U.S. Economy is so deep in the crapper,” even supermodel Gisele “refuses to be paid in American greenbacks, opting in recent contracts for Euros instead.”

Smart girl. On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had topped $9 trillion. It’s all covered, of course, by foreign loans that must be repaid with interest, and the purchases of U.S. businesses, banks and real estate by foreign buyers who, when a thoroughly trashed U.S. military finally runs out of equipment and recruits, will be in an unassailable position to dictate terms.

Wake up, fellow and female Americans! Unless we do something now to reverse direction, the “hidden costs” of higher oil prices, care for wounded soldiers and interest on money borrowed to brutally bomb and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq could cost us $3.5 trillion through 2017. [Reuters Nov 13/07]

Just as Climate Shift, the End of Cheap Oil, severe water shortages, topsoil loss, depleted uranium contamination and the Karma Collection Agency catastrophically converge.

This is why Bush’s stimulus package is a problem-worsening distraction and a sick joke.

What we really need is another people’s revolution.

Not next year.

Right now.

MONEY FOR NOTHING

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. Watching network news, my other California correspondent filled me in on a story I’d read earlier in the day – and dismissed as yet another freakish hallucination inflicted by seven straight years of escalating insanity from a hijacked White House that civic-minded Canadians ought to torch again. Soon.

“No,” she said. “It’s true. They’ve just announced that they’re giving us a check for $1,200 to go out and consume. They’ve got to do something to keep the economy afloat.”

“Each?” I asked. “You mean Ted Turner and billionaires like him are going to get another twelve-hundred bucks – for nothing?”

“That’s a good question,” Karen said.

We both started laughing. There seemed no other appropriate response. But we found little humor in watching our country burn down.

“We used to joke about this,” I finally resumed. “We used to ask, when are they going to figure out that if they bankrupt the economy and put everyone out of work, no one will be able to buy their stuff.”

We used to chuckle over an absurd inevitability that would see the oligarchy sending checks to people so they could keep spending.

And now they were actually doing it!

“Jesus,” I finally managed. It was not a curse, but a prayer for divine intervention. “Seventy-percent of the U.S. economy is based on people consuming at Wal-Mart and the malls,” I told Karen. Not making stuff. Buying other people’s stuff. “And now that Americans can no longer borrow against their homes, they are about four weeks from maxing all their credit cards. And then everything stops.”

Unless Boy George keeps cutting bogus checks, one of the few tasks in which he excels.

I had another thought. “What’s twelve-hundred dollars times 350 million people?” I asked this talented artist.

Of course, no baby who survives the highest infant mortality rate in the modern world is going to get a check from Uncle Sugar. The payments are to be scaled so that the most needy – non-white people who are unemployed at three-times white jobless rates, the three-million Americans sleeping on sidewalks (one-quarter of them veterans of the wars that cause this fiscal fallout) – will receive handouts in triple digits:

Zip Zero Zilch.

If you’re making 75 grand a year, or if you and your spouse are pulling in up to $150,000, you’ll each get an extra $1,200 to stick in the bank or go spend at a tropical resort – further strangling the stratosphere on the way, and not contributing much of an economic stimulus on the home front, either way. [New York Times Jan 24/08]

But if, like a huge and growing number of menially-manacled ‘mericans, you happen to be someone making not even enough in part-time paychecks to pay taxes, you will receive – wait for it! – a whopping three-hundred bucks.

“They’re saying, don’t wait. Go out and consume right now!” Karen relayed.

“And wreck the planet quicker,” I commented. “The whole thing is insane.”

MONEY FOR NOTHING, BUT NOT FOR FREE
Like a junkie searching desperately for a fix, the elephants and asses putting this package together are talking about a $150 billion “stimulus” for mall-mesmerized Americans to rush out and buy more stuff. But wait. More than 20% of all “goods” (and “bads”) sold in the United States are actually made overseas. So you can see where this is going. Even if the neocons who proved so prescient in Iraq, Louisiana and elsewhere, cannot.

Let’s let Alan Tonelson at the United States Business and Industry Council state the obvious: “A great deal of any stimulus is going to be sent overseas.”

Mostly to a denuded, faraway land choking on the 2.5 billion tons of sulfurous, carbon-packed coal smog wafted into our space colony’s wheezing atmosphere every year in order to produce most of the our steel, cement, metals, buttons, neckties and toys. Not to mention, Beijing-bashers, half the world’s cameras, nearly one-third of our TVs, and soon (by 2015) the most cars. [Mother Jones Dec 10/07]

The “free money” Bush and his Democratic accomplices are going to be handing out is not really for free, I told Karen. “It’s not even there. The country is completely bankrupt. Which means those checks will really be coming from China and Japan.“ And whoever else is crazy or frightened enough to keep ponying up $2 billion in White House loans every day to keep the roulette wheel of consumption spinning to its planet-wrecking conclusion.

“Unfortunately, the plan… looks like a lemon,” writes Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Unhappily, those dastardly Democrats have caved once again in the face of the folks who are exporting American jobs, monkey-wrenching the economy, transferring the U.S. Treasury to their pals, and otherwise stealing the country blind.

Handing everyone making less than $75 G’s a paltry $300, and the wealthiest elite a sweet $1,200 kiss on both cheeks (and I use that word ambiguously) – “ensures that the bulk of the money would go to people who are doing O.K. financially – which misses the whole point,” Krugman correctly complains. “Money delivered to people who aren’t in good financial shape – who are short on cash and living check to check – does double duty: It alleviates hardship and also pumps up consumer spending.”

Make that “triple duty” considering what consumer spending – including the new hard drive I just ordered (on credit) to keep this website going – is doing to our spaceship.

But at least sending some trucks piled with crates of cash – a la Bremmer in Baghdad – to state and local governments, instead of Bush backers, would help avert further hardship in cities and states already devastated by federal cutbacks for endless weapons and homeland surveillance. Not to mention tickets to the “End of Oil – The Prequel”, and plummeting jobs and incomes. Such timely investment could also “head off more spending cuts,” Krugman says. Like California’s recent 10% write-down on all state funding that many economists fear could flip the feared “R” word into the doom-laded “D” word. [New York Times Jan 25/08]

Can you say 1929?

LET ME STIMULATE YOU
Krugman makes a final point: “If the money the government lays out just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts – the plan will have failed.” [New York Times Jan 25/08]

Guess what? This may be news to Dick and George, but the last big tax handout to the rich mostly padded their bank balances. And many more people are already behind on their mortgage and credit card payments. And fading fast. Because the gas pumps that once promised the freedom of mobility – and a means to get to work – are starting to grow fangs.

“Given that a lot of Americans are so deeply in debt,” suggest rocket scientists at the New York Times, “many may use the money to pay off bills rather than to buy new goods and services.”

From China?

A better way to “stimulate” a Zombie Economy that has been dead for some time but only just now beginning to realize it, is “for the government to spend more money on urgently needed domestic projects, like rebuilding bridges,” The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild remarks. “Which should be an easy sell…”

The New York Times editorial elite concur. “The best way to ensure that dollars do not leak abroad would be to spend them on state-financed public works projects employing large numbers of people – repairing levees and dams, fixing bridges or building schools. The money could also be directed to states that face shrinking tax revenues as the economy contracts. An infusion of federal money would allow them to sustain construction programs and social services for the poor,” they write.

Drawing heavily on his opinion pipe, economist Dean Baker exhales a fantasy that the government that blocked Bali, ripped up the Kyoto accords, reduced vehicle fuel economy standards, ignored Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and invaded two countries to grab their oil rigs and pipelines… “could focus on environmentally sane options.”

“We can have generous tax credits for people to install more insulation in their homes, solar panels or other improvements that will reduce energy use. This would be an effective way to reemploy many of the construction workers who are losing their jobs,” Baker believes. “We can also give people money and a powerful incentive to use mass transit by giving transit agencies money to reduce fares. If we gave public transit agencies enough money to reduce transit fares by $1 a trip, over the course of a year this would provide the same stimulus as giving a $500 tax rebate to every user of public transit.”

Why didn’t the Dems demand this? Because their corporate donors would have disowned them.

The Bushites not only favor perpetually profitable wars for the banks and weapons makers that back them. They are also big on perpetual tax cuts for big businesses. The spin is that throwing money at already profitable companies will cause them to expand and hire more workers.

They are. But most often in countries other than the US of A.

The ‘Times also learned: “If consumers lack money to spend, then businesses will stand pat or even cut back and fire people.” [New York Times Jan 25/08]

They must have been tapping my call to Karen.

HOW’S YOUR MANDARIN?
Last time I looked in December 2007, the U.S. national debt was expanding like a red-shifting galaxy stolen by Klingons – by about $1.4 billion a day.

That’s nearly $1 million a minute.

And that’s before Bush’s latest emergency bail-out, which like his dad’s in the Pacific war, is going to leave everyone else in the burning plane.

According to the Associated Press, the “mind-numbing” $9.13 trillion national debt “will top $10 trillion” around the time the tireless architect of so much calamity retires to his ranch. Not the one in Crawford. I’m referring to the big spread protected by U.S. troops he’s just acquired in Paraguay. Does Señior Arbusto know something he isn’t telling the rest of us?

It must be Y2K for real. Because, as AP points out, that $10,000,000,000,000 shackle around the ankle of every American is one digit more than the odometer-style “National Debt Clock” near Times Square can handle.

And more than we can handle, too.

“We pay in interest four-times more than we spend on education, and four-times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” harangues House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – while voting more borrowed billions for yet more wars, weapons and deaths that undermine the morality and monetary policies of her own country.

Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.2 trillion – or about 44% – of U.S. debt. (Japan is first, with 586 billion depreciating dollars. China is close behind with a reported $400 billion in greenback monopoly money. (Some economists put Beijing’s dollar “exposure” closer to a trillion.) Britain holds $244 billion in bad paper. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries are in for another $123 billion. And wondering aloud why they aren’t demanding euros to supply the biggest addiction on Earth.

If foreigners keep floating us loans, by 2050 U.S. indebtedness will hit 350% of the GDP. Everyone knows it will never be paid back . And everyone in the United States will be permanently enslaved, not just by gun-toting Blackwater thugs branching out from Baghdad and New Orleans, but by their creditors. And wouldn’t ya know it? Darn near every building, business, bank and other financial institution in the United States of America will be owned by Beijing. [AP Dec 3/07]

Will throwing another inflation-fueling 150 bil at the hemorrhaging U.S. economy keep it on life-support long enough for Republicans to escape the worst electoral drubbing in the history of the known universe, next year?

Kevin Hall isn’t taking bets on it. As this economic expert explains, “The economic growth package being prepared by President Bush and Congress may help ease the sting of an economic downturn or soften the blow of a recession, but it won’t fix the deeper structural problems that are menacing the economy.”

Buried as deeply the bombs that pulled down the WTC, these structural vulnerabilities are highlighted in the “mammoth investment banks Citigroup and Merrill Lynch,” which have just announced combined fourth-quarter losses of $20 billion – on top of combined write-downs totaling another $30 billion “for bad bets made on mortgage-related bonds.”

That’s a lot. And the cash required to plug those Titanic-size holes is needed right now.

There are more icebergs ahead, Hall warns. “Fears are mounting that insurance companies, which issued policies to protect Wall Street firms from losses on those mortgage bonds, don’t have enough money to pay up.” [McClatchy Newspapers Jan 18/08]

And here’s the kicker:

“The biggest single new investor is likely to be the Chinese government, which has used the financial crisis to snap up large chunks of the US finance industry,” Hall heralds. “Most recently it paid $5 billion for a stake in Morgan Stanley, and is also putting $1 billion into Bear Stearns. [Independent Jan 15/08]

Countries that control our debt control our future, worries Republican budget hawk, Senator George Voinovich. [AP Dec 3/ 07]

He’s right.

WRECKER’S BALL
Meanwhile, back in the Reality that stubbornly resists conforming to the White House version…

“The nation’s physical foundations seem to be crumbling beneath us,” say the editors of the New York Times. “Last week, a 40-year-old interstate highway bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, plunging rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River 60 feet below. Two weeks earlier, an 83-year-old steam pipe under the streets of Manhattan exploded in a volcano-like blast, showering asbestos-laden debris… The deterioration undermines our quality of life and retards economic growth. Traffic jams waste gasoline, pollute the air and exhaust drivers’ patience. Disabled trains and subways strand commuters. Gridlocked airports disrupt travel plans. And power failures plunge millions into darkness.”

Just wait. Already two years outdated, the American Society of Civil Engineers latest report assigned “near-failing grades of D-to drinking water, sewage treatment and navigable waterways,” tisks the Times. I’ve done the research. Drinking water from any tap in any city in the United States can kill you quite dead. [New York Times Aug 5/07]

Did the FOX in this henhouse forget to mention that some 35 million Americans went hungry in 2006? That’s 13 million malnourished American children at risk from having their physical and mental development permanently stunted – nearly the same number as their hungry, traumatized counterparts in Iraq. [Reuters Nov 14/07]

Could there possibly be a connection?

IT’S THE WARS FOR DUMMIES, STUPID
The lavish government spending Bush prefers is not to help people other than his sponsors. But to hurt them. War and weapons top his list of subsidies. Could this have anything to do with his childhood need to blow up frogs with firecrackers? Or maybe the still-standing record he set as transplanted Texas governor for the number of death row prisoners – including the certified mentally retarded and others of questionable guilt – who received this smirking Caligula’s thumbs down. With more than one million innocent people dead in Afghanistan and Iraq – and both countries in radioactive ruins from the wholesale use of weapons tipped with America’s nuclear waste – why is it taboo to talk about this? Hasn’t anybody else noticed that Dubya is a sociopath?

And why aren’t deadweight network “anchors” commenting on something else that’s obvious? Indulge in wasteful wars like Vietnam, and “Big R” Recession is always the result. Why should an even costlier quagmire in a just-as stubbornly resistant Iraq be any different?

Oh right. I forgot. They were going to pay for it.

MAKING CHOICES
“We cannot afford this war,” says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. No kidding. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the ongoing bloodshed and destruction in “Afghanaraq” will cost Americans $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years. [AP Dec 3/ 07]

That’s a lot of neglected American children, waterways, roads, schools, smokestacks, powerlines and bridges.

Factor in the “hidden costs” of these ongoing wartime disasters – higher oil prices, care for maimed, brain-damaged and traumatized soldiers, plus interest on all that borrowed money – and a recent Joint Economic Committee report says we’re looking at a $3.5 trillion price tag by 2017. That is serious sticker shock. Just as Climate Shift and the Extremely Expensive Oil kick in. [Reuters Nov 13/07]

What about the families who actually live in the places we’re bombing, as rapidly escalating urban air strikes replace boots on the ground? According to hospital records and door-to-door medical surveys published in the prestigious Lancet, more than one-million Iraqi people have died since the illegal U.S. invasion. Most of them children. Counting higher-paid mercenaries, more than 5,000 U.S. troops have been killed and more than 40,000 physically wounded. So far. You can easily triple this wounded count by including lifetime debilitation from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Actually, Harry, we cannot afford any more wars.

“The $500 billion that Bush has squandered in Iraq could have paid for 4 million new housing units, or hired 8 million new teachers. And the $2 trillion we may end up spending on this war could pay for universal health care for 12 years,” points out Anita Dances of the National Priorities Project.

Domestic spending like this – and economic incentives to create “green jobs” – would also have been much better for the economy than the endless manufacture of machinery to tear people to pieces, poison their wombs and reduce their neighborhoods to rubble.

“Every billion dollars spent on the military results – directly and indirectly – in fewer jobs and lower quality jobs than a billion dollars spent on education,” shows a recent analysis published by the Political Economy Research Institute. “That is, the effects of military spending ripple through the economy with much less vigor than government spending on other programs. Plus, domestic spending has a longer lasting impact on the economy. A well-educated, healthy workforce, along with investment in infrastructure, will fuel the new industries of tomorrow.”

Weapons spending in a permanent war economy, on the other hand, fuels inflation and debt.

HEAVY WEATHER
“When a credit system implodes, it can feed on itself with lightning speed,” warns the Telegraph’s editorial board. They should know. Right outside their London windows is “The City” where bank-driven money markets make the financial “plays” that impact everyone and everything on the planet. [Telegraph Jan 4/08]

Barney Frank is the congressional chairman of the Financial Services Committee. He says that this week’s worldwide stock market “declines” plus the panicky move by the privately-held Federal Reserve to lower interest rates by a massive three-quarters of a percentage point make it clear that yet more borrowed billions must be poured on the debt conflagration. Immediately. As he puts it, “The trigger has already been pulled.” [New York Times Jan 24/08]

Don’t sweat deepening the deficit, Frank urges. The real problem is that all this debt is not producing much, except windfall payoffs to political cronies on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Like the well-connected folks who run Blackwater, Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group. [Progressive Jan 11/08]

Still, whether Uncle Bush can dodge the bullet of his own devising by putting this new inflation shotgun to America’s dazed forehead and pulling both triggers remains to be experienced.

It probably won’t be pretty. Or fun.

Just as sailors know that when landlubbing forecasters cushioned by their climate-controlled cars and buildings speak of “windy” weather, you’d better batten down the hatches and prepare for a hurricane… similarly, when tight-lipped U.S. financial priests talk of a “decline” – think 50,000-pound bunker buster whistling toward your den.

A Swiss Central Bank governor named Thomas Jordan puts it another way. “The kind of upheaval observed in the international money markets over the past few months has never been witnessed in history.” [Telegraph Jan 4/08]

PERHAPS A COURSE CHANGE WOULD BE WISE
What if we cut back on our consumption instead? What if we got off the jets, and turned deserted malls into mini-communities of apartments, offices and small shops? What if we give the planet, our nerves, and our families a breather by investing whatever money we have in green companies that offer our children a future?

“All that is left is the one option that would have served Americans (and the world) best all along, which is to model environmental sanity,” insists Jacques Leslie in his landmark article in Mother Jones. “Stop buying products made from illegally cut wood [at Ikea and Home Depot, for example]. Stop building coal-fired power plants. Instead of subsidizing oil companies, invest government funds in research on sustainable-energy technologies. Build effective mass-transit systems in every city. Cut greenhouse gas emissions. Show China” – and a skeptical Two-Thirds World – “the benefits of responsible behavior.” [Mother Jones Dec 10/07]

Out here on the Left Coast, economist Robert Pollin stubbornly believes that a People’s Economy is possible. Pollin is pulling for the common-sense creation of one million new jobs in “health care, education, and energy conservation.”

He also advocates “extending public medical insurance to every single American who doesn’t have it today, and greatly expanding educational opportunities.”

Why not?

It’s our money, after all.

IT’S NOT BUSH

To take the name in vain of the most reviled person on the planet is understandable. No one has brought so much harm and threat to so many so quickly as this transplanted Texan who relates to the 95% of humanity living beyond U.S. borders with threats, bombast and bombs.

But bashing Bush – and I am not exactly a fan – only feeds more negative energy into the massively negative forces already unleashed by a besmirched White House to engulf the world like a never-ending tsunami of contrary policies and escalating calamities.

The bloodshed and radioactive genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan… the racist abandonment and restructuring of Louisiana… ripping up Kyoto and blocking Bali and every other international attempt to slow climate shift, elimination of federal alternate energy incentives and other measures in order to increase civilization-threatening petroleum profits and pollution at a time when the United States already outstrips even countries three-times its population in per person carbon emissions… torture and illegal gulags as established U.S. policies… total electronic surveillance of all formerly private communications within the USA… the elimination of Constitutional rights and freedoms over what Bush called “just a goddamn piece of paper”… trillions of borrowed dollars transferred to corporate cronies as China continues to buy strategic U.S. corporations and financial institutions – in other words, the country itself – along with most of the entire planet… the list of disasters not yet specifically denounced by any front-running candidate goes on. And on. But you get the drift. No one has done deeper damage than delusional Dubya.

The thing is, though…

SHADOW PLAYS
It’s not Bush. He is not in charge. This latest in a long line of ventriloquist dummies speaks in the tongues of faceless controllers who “call the shots” by calling in loans and favors… setting the interest rates that determine compounding national, individual and corporate debt… printing money and manipulating currencies that determine individual and national buying power… owning the mass media and daily inserting video clips and “stories” manufactured by far-right/fundamentalist think-tanks and disguised as “news”…

Those guys.

If you want to know who’s throwing the shadow plays on the flickering walls of our blue-lit urban caves check out the membership lists online of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council On Foreign Relations, Skull & Bones, Project For A New American Century and Defense Policy Board. See how many names and corporations overlap in this old boys’ network of interlocking interests.

And then Google Ed Bernays. Named as one of the 1000 most influential people of all time, this little known “father of public relations” wrote the bible of mass manipulation in 1928.

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,” Bernays argued in Propaganda. Eagerly read by Goebbels and every media exec who came after, Bernays’ “engineering of consent” perverted the insights and techniques of his uncle Freud to mold mass opinion. Amped up today in the carefully managed “virtual realities” of Hollywood movies and Big Network teevee, these same methods will go “hyper-real” with the coming compulsory advent of HD. (More on this in a later blog.)

“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country,” Bernays revealed. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Get the picture?

SAME OLD, SAME OLD
Anyone who believes that “getting rid of Bush” in the next election will usher in genuinely life-affirming, planet-protecting change is not paying attention to the power elite that has run the USA for personal profit and control ever since the Morgans, Rockefellers and Rothschilds established the Federal Reserve during the Congressional Christmas recess in 1913.

This interlocking power elite of military-corporate-political interests went on to increase its grip through the Vietnam War-enabling bogus Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the carefully triangulated assassination of Federal Reserve-busting President Kennedy, the FBI-assisted bombing of the WTC in 1998, the internal demolition of the Murrah building using explosives with U.S. Army serial numbers, the U.S. Air Force “stand down” that facilitated the thermate-planted “take-downs” of Towers 1,2 and 7 on 9/11, the Patriot Act passed during the Congressional anthrax scare in 2001 – and whatever we allow to come next by not questioning what has been foisted on us before.

Independent Washington journalists Allan Nair and Kelley Beaucar Vlahos recently spoke about the upcoming U.S. elections with Amy Goodman at democracynow!

Vlahos described Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy team as “throwbacks” – “old faces, old names” who “haven’t changed their real vision of the world and foreign policy” since the formative years of the last century.

As Nairn narrated the Hillary Clinton lineup:

Madeleine Albright, she was the main force behind the Iraq sanctions that killed more than 400,000 Iraqi civilians. General Wesley Clark, he was the one who ran the [Depleted Uranium] bombing of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, came out and publicly said that he was going after civilian targets, like electrical plants, like the TV station there. Richard Holbrooke, in the Carter administration he was the one who oversaw the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military as they were invading—illegally invading East Timor and killing a third of the population there, and he was the one who kept the UN Security Council from enforcing its resolution against that invasion. Strobe Talbott, he was the one who, during the Clinton administration, oversaw Russia policy, a backing of Yeltsin, which resulted in turning over the national wealth to the oligarchs and a drop in life expectancy in much of Russia of about fifteen years—massive, massive death. And you have various backers of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the recent escalation, people like General Jack Keane, Michael O’Hanlon and others. That’s just Clinton.

Allan Nairn went on to point out that Obama’s top adviser is the same Zbigniew Brzezinski who covets Central Asian oil and boasted he had created the Afghan jihadi movement that produced Osama bin Laden. Anthony Lake – another key Obama adviser – “was the main force behind the US invasion of Haiti… which they brought back Aristide essentially in political chains” to support a brutal World Bank/IMF takeover of [this black nation’s] economy.”

Another Obama adviser, Air Force General Merrill McPeak “sent fighter planes to Indonesia after the massacre in East Timor.

“Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross, oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine by insisting that the “legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government.” Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall is a former Defense official, who “wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’ Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations. That’s the Obama team.”

Also going unmentioned during the January 15 Democratic “debate” were “anti-lobbyist” John Edwards’ top advisers. As Nairn continues: “Many of the military lobbyists are working on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS.”

DIFFERENT FACES, SAME SUITS
Vlahos concludes, “The presence of these advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians, foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy.”

Nairn agrees: “Fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no choice.”

As Vlahos explains:

There is no incentive for these candidates to reach out beyond any of this orbit or galaxy of foreign policy advisers who have been linked in, you know, we’re talking decades of war and events and actions and operations. And there seems, whether it be John Edwards reaching out to the Defense contracting community or Hillary Clinton reaching out to her husband’s former security advisers and operatives or whether it’s Obama reaching out to former Clinton types, there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to reach out beyond that… I think a lot of that is linked to money, it’s sort of like this hand-in-glove symbiotic relationship, where the bigger names you have, the more familiar names, the more entrenched you have in these cliques I spoke to previously, the more money you’re bringing into your campaign. So there’s no incentive to go beyond that, unless you’re ready for some amount of rebuke and some of the spigot being turned off.

How about Washington’s own Republican Guard? Ghoul-iani wants to ramp up the Bush Doctrine of bombing everyone everywhere all the time who does not bow down before U.S. Incorporation. The team of the man connected with the “pulling” of the lightly damaged Tower 7 at the World Trade Center features Norman Podhoretz. “Podhoretz’s new book is World War IV,” Vlahos reminds us. “Podhoretz says, bomb the Iranians. And he’s not just talking about pinpoint Iranian nuclear installations; he’s saying bomb the Iranians. And he says he prays that this will happen. Ex-Senator Robert Kasten, an old major backer of the Pakistani military dictatorships and the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, he’s another key Giuliani adviser.”

Then there’s Daniel Pipes. Leading the American fascist charge against ‘Islamofascism’ on college campuses, this Pied Piper is establishing his “Campus Watch” brown-shirt pogrom against professors he deems not pro-Israeli occupation and apartheid enough. Martin Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz of the right-wing Hoover Institution also hope to vacuum up dissenters – aided by “a small galaxy of neoconservatives from familiar think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Hoover, the Hudson.”

Vlahos completes this sorry rundown with a similarly bloodthirsty Bush clone:

McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, countless other places. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft, is a leader of the realist school—the realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you win the war Scowcroft was the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you.” [democracynow.org Jan 3/08]

Take your pick.

RIGGED AGAIN
The two candidates who speak truth, stand on personal integrity, and offer the wiser and compassionate leadership of a Ghandi – Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich – “are treated like pariahs by the establishment media,” observes Mike Whitney at Information Clearing House.

“This year we can choose from a slate of 8 candidates; all of whom are members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations; and all of whom are wholly committed to the off-shoring of businesses, the outsourcing of jobs, the expansion of police-state powers, and the obscene enlargement the already over-bloated War Machine,” Whitney continues:

As for Hillary; she won nothing. The results are completely bogus. Her weepy performance before the balloting was orchestrated to create a credible narrative to explain the fraudulent shifting of votes away from Obama. It was exactly the same trick that Karl Rove played in 2004, when he had the entire corporate media standing behind his cockamamie story that 3 or 4 million fundamentalists—who had never voted before in a general election—suddenly poured down from the mountains to cast their ballot for their champion, George Bush. This absurd narrative was spouted from every media-soapbox in the nation until it was generally accepted as fact. The media then proceeded to quash any investigation of the massive voter fraud which took place across the country (particularly in Ohio) while discrediting critics as conspiracy theorists.

“Is it a conspiracy to think that the same guys who abduct foreign nationals off the streets of cities around the world and take them to black sites – where their eyes are gouged out and their finger nails ripped off – would get squeamish over something as trivial as ballot stuffing?” Whitney asks. “The system is broken… The primary was stolen.” [Information Clearing House Jan 11/08]

Prison Planet thinks so, too. “Going into New Hampshire Ron Paul was polling in the early teens and was a strong bet to take third place behind McCain and Romney. Four days before the vote, Rasmussen had Paul at 14% – a significant lead over Huckabee on 11% and Giuliani on 8% – and yet Ron Paul finished with just 8%.

“The New Hampshire town of Sutton admits that it voided every vote Ron Paul received. The Congressman got 31 votes and yet due to a ‘human error’ Sutton reported zero votes for Ron Paul. [Prison Planet Jan 9/08]

Any remaining doubts of the Democrat’s repressively Republican colors came during last week’s “debate” when the Dem’s quashed free speech by backing NBC’s refusal to include fourth place candidate Dennis Kucinich in the conversation.

Enforced just minutes from air time by a Bush-backing state Supreme Court overturning a lower court decision to let Kucinich speak, the nationally televised rigged roulette game from Las Vegas went to air with Clinton, Obama and Edwards spending only a few more minutes on – what was that again? – oh yeah, Iraq. [truthout Jan 16/08]

So Kucinich lost his first amendment right of free speech in order to “protect” the “freedom” of a press to eliminate free speech before a national audience thirsty for authenticity and truth.

HR 1955 AND YOU
Still, these goon squad tactics probably postponed long term detention of Kucinich and his crazed, Constitution-quoting followers in the homeland gulags already under rapid construction across America by Halliburton and Bechtel. Like so many other issues of extreme and urgent import – such as the deepening water crisis, and the upcoming North American Union under a single currency – the purpose of these detention centers has so far not been discussed by any candidate with access to a media megaphone.

But a bill overturning the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly sponsored by California Democrat Jane Harman and passed in the House last October is certain to be ratified as law by the Senate under the sponsored of Republican Susan Collins.

“When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas,” reports Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch. This McCarthyesque commission will hold witch-hunt hearings across the land, taking false testimony and compiling lists of “dangerous people and beliefs.”
Will you make it onto one of these “extremists” lists? If you are a civil libertarian, a critic of Israel’s policies, a skeptic of the official 9/11 mythology, a critic of this or the next administration’s illegal wars and occupations, a critic of U.S., government kidnapping, rendition and torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, a critic of illegal White House spying on Americans, or a neighborhood mom or dad standing in the way powerful interest groups – “such as politically-connected developers” – welcome to incarceration, Roberts writes.

But you can be politically as quiet as any good German who said nothing against Hitler – and still be loaded into one of those Internet-rumored boxcars. The ones with the leg manacles bolted to the floor.

“That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door – just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence… That boss who harasses you for coming late to work – he’s a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can’t fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce.”

But no every one with “extremist views” is destined to be locked up. Or worse. Unelected-President Bush and the Just Us Department can “ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency” – and not be counted as “extremists” Roberts remarks.
Roberts does not duke it out in the lightweight division. He has served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He’s a savvy insider, and a darn good writer: See his The Tyranny of Good Intentions. [Counterpunch Jan 4/08]

See him inside, too.

UNLESS…
Americans awaken from their interchangeable-candidate, rigged-elections trance and GET MOVING RIGHT NOW to take back our country and our rights.

We can start by challenging candidates on issues of immediate import – including their stance on repealing the Federal Reserve Act, nixing the North American Union, backing Bali and alternative electricity generation that does not involve burning anything, and bringing all the troops home to begin dealing with escalating eco-emergencies already engulfing the red states. (Hello?)

Allan Nairn suggests, “I am making my support conditional on you renouncing support for the murder of civilians, on you firing all of your advisers who have been involved in the killing of civilians in the past, you turning them over to the International Criminal Court if you can get the International Criminal Court to accept it, you signing a pledge that says no more killing of civilians, you signing a pledge that says we will prevent preventable death.”

Other projects for a Survivable American Century include immediate impeachment proceedings against the Bush/Cheney chimera (signalling a significant “mea culprit” course change to the rest of the world), and nationwide town and city dialogues on new directions for the USA.

This much is for sure: Voting for the “lesser evils” next November will only ensure more evil.

Start creating local economic and political alternatives now.

A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION THAT COUNTS

Although our dates differ, I side with the Chinese in celebrating New Year’s as the pre-eminent holiday. The promise of a new year, with its fresh start – another chance to court good fortune through right and reasoned action – is exhilarating. (Even if the previous year, with all the good feelings and intentions that went into its arrival, did not turn out well enough to usher in its successor without fresh feelings of optimism and relief.)

The Chinese I knew in Hong Kong honored the traditional New Year by paying off their debts, sweeping out their domiciles, and donning new clothes. So for this new year, I’ve purchased a new red shirt (symbolizing Good Luck), and have been busy with the Bissell. Paying off my credit card will have to wait.

But some debts can be put off no longer. Not when the threat of foreclosure involves the entire planet.

For 2008, a single resolution tops all lists. Yup, it’s another drastic diet. Like all diets, the benefits from this one promise to far outweigh the temporary pain of withdrawal. Like some diets, failure to achieve objective measurable goals within a limited and shrinking timeframe will have fatal consequences. But like no other New Year’s resolution, if we shirk from this one –and by “we” I mean me and you, Bubba – multitudes of future finned, furry, feathered, leaved and bipedal beings will suffer our denial and sloth with lives of hardship and terror they did not invite. Followed by extinction.

And extinction, as someone famously said, is forever.

Insulated by drugs, distractions, and the mirage of consumer well-being carefully crafted by sophisticated media manipulators, many of us still do not viscerally connect with the Sixth Great Extinction Event rolling across the world beyond our blinkered Virtual Reality screens. Even with the weird, wild weather relentlessly reported on our TV and computer monitors hammering at our windows, we refuse to change unthinking habits.

It is time, right now, on the first day of 2008 to actually undertake the diet we’ve been promising ourselves with almost the same fervor with which we’ve been putting it off. I refer, of course, to the Ultimate Diet of planetary perpetuation:

“Dr.” Gore’s Low Carbon Diet

REDLINE 350
At the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco during the closing days of 2007, scientist James Hansen provided the numerical target for the world’s urgently required crash diet in carbon reduction: 350 parts per million.

Don’t forget this number.

Three – five – zero. Meaning, 350 molecules of carbon for each million molecules of atmosphere.

This “simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet,” eco-author Bill McKibben wrote in the Washington Post at the end of 2007, is “the number that may define our future.” [Washington Post Dec 28/07]

Let’s put this speedometer in perspective. Before humans started shoveling mountains of coal into steam engines and furnaces harnessed to the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of carbon in Earth’s paper-thin atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million.

But over the past five years, as our space colony’s carbon loading headed past 380 parts per million, thousands of top atmospheric scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reached the common sense and scientifically verified conclusion that surging global temperatures, extreme weather events, and the rapid melting of slip-sliding ice sheets were already rendering their previous carbon red-line of 450 parts per million dangerously obsolete.

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm,” Hansen said last month.

Oops!

This means that the recent Bali decisions to continue debating carbon reduction schemes with a recalcitrant and delusional White house, the recently passed U.S. congressional bill to mandate gas mileage for cars to 35 milers-per-gallon a dozen years from now, and even the European Union’s laudatory moves to slash their own carbon emissions and continue turning sharply to sources of clean renewable energy must all be sharply revisited, revised and immediately acted upon.

Thing is, McKibben summarizes, “We’re already at 383 parts per million, and it’s knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways.”

The author of The End Of Nature, and more hopeful sequels, points to “reams of paleo-climatic data” showing “the last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius – which is what 450 parts per million implies – sea levels rose by tens of meters.”

With most of this watery world’s inhabitants living on or near a seacoast, a three-foot sea level rise would be catastrophic. The 27-foot rise predicted if the vast Greenland ice sheet slips into the sea means that life was we know it – our day-to- day assumptions and routines – ends in that splash. As for a 300-foot or higher rise in sea levels following the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets… we absolutely, Do Not Want To Go There.

YEAR END
We are already well on our way.

Recapping the year, the first month of 2007 was the world’s warmest January on record. “It was the first time since record-keeping began that the globe’s average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year,” the Associated Press reported.

While the United States continued to lead the world in carbon emissions, weather stations across the country broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records. Except, that is, during last August when U.S. weather stations recorded more than 8,000 heat records either set or tied.

Also that month, more than 60% of the United States was either abnormally dry or suffering from drastic drought. Lake Superior, the biggest and deepest of the Great Lakes, dropped to its lowest levels in history. Los Angeles was recording its driest year on record. Atlanta’s main water source, Lake Lanier, shriveled to a worrying all-time low. And south Florida’s Lake Okeechobee dropped to its lowest level, too.

Meanwhile, not so jolly ole England had experienced the warmest April in 348 years, shattering all previous records.
And deepening drought continued in Oz, turning global warming into an election issue Down Under.

Up Top, our planet’s climate-moderating Arctic icebox continued to rapidly defrost, melting “far beyond the previous melt record,” noted AP. [AP Dec 29/07]

Onboard the Starship Enterprise, so many whooping and shrieking life-support alarms would be spurring furious activity on the bridge – including the shutdown of all non-critical activities and systems. But onboard Starship Earth, on the day Al Gore rang multiple major alarms during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, we crewmembers jumped into our cars and trucks and “lo-cost” jets, cranked up our factories and power plants – and dumped another 70 million tons of global-heating pollution into what Gore termed the “open sewer” of our ship’s recirculating atmosphere. [Seattle Times Dec 28/07]

ABANDON SHIP?
Every year is “pivotal” now.

In the closing decades of this Last Chance Century to get it right and come to terms with ourselves, each other and the planet that sustains all life, it is useful to remember that onboard a sun-orbiting space colony surrounded by the cold, irradiated vacuum of deep space – there are no lifeboats.

GLOBAL MELTDOWN, THE SEQUEL
The planet’s been here before. Earth’s last big Global Warming event happened long before people started building cars and coal-fired power plants. In fact, it occurred long before people happened, many millions of years ago. The result: massive die-off of most terrestrial and oceanic species. The most likely culprits: rampant heat-trapping volcanism, and undersea tectonic shifts that released gigatons of frozen seabed methane into the atmosphere.

Methane traps 22-times more heat than carbon dioxide.

What makes me nervous is that our carbon-burning vehicles have already released more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the volcanoes linked to that previous catastrophe. As the Siberian, Arctic and Yukon permafrost continue thawing at record paces, releasing vast stored reservoirs of melting methane, there is also evidence that those long-dormant frozen methane “clathrates” on the seafloor are also beginning to burp into the air again.

Since we are starting 2008 already past the “350” danger line… McKibben voices the question many of us are thinking: “Does this mean we’re doomed?”

Not yet, he answers. “Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.”

That “just,” he acknowledges, is a biggie.

POWER DOWN
James Hansen, the scientist who first called the world’s attention to human-induced climate change decades ago, is now calling for an immediate ban on all new coal-fired power plants that do not capture their carbon emissions. Since the tree-replacing technology needed to safely sequester carbon is neither proven nor available, this could mean building replacement windmills and solar farms with the power plants already on-line.

But Hansen and many if not most of his scientific colleagues also want those existing coal-fired plants phased out quickly. If not sooner. They also want to see a high enough tax placed on carbon emissions to ensure that tar sands and oil shale in Canada, the USA and elsewhere are left in the ground. Returning to his medical analogy, McKibben says, “We’re not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we’re talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.”
If there is not enough power to manufacture cleaner power generators and meet our anticipated needs, the only course left is the Starship Enterprise model of drastic power downs.

Right now.

Today.

The good news is that we are so wasteful of energy in Canada and the USA, making deep reductions in carbon emissions mostly means paying attention to our actions, and linking them back to the energy they consume.

DON’T BLAME CHINA
As carbon emissions in a country of more than one billion people climb toward calamitous parity with a longstanding polluter of less than one-third as many citizens, it’s convenient for we Americans to point a scolding finger at sooty China.

Just remember, those other cupped fingers point back at us.

“China is now the factory of the world. Developed countries have transferred a lot of manufacturing to China. What many Western consumers wear, live in, even eat is made in China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang complained to reporters. “On the one hand, you want to increase this production in China. On the other hand, you want to condemn China over the issue of emissions reductions. This is unfair.” [Asia Times Dec23/05]

It’s nuts. Even as virtually the entire country acknowledges the perils of global warming, debates the costs and benefits of dirty energy, and moves toward cleaner sources – nearly one-quarter of China’s current carbon emissions are being created manufacturing goods and “knickknacks” for export to Western consumers. Some 70% of the Christmas ornaments and related holiday paraphernalia we world citizens bought this year originated in China. Eighty percent of the toys sold in the USA are Made in China. [Inter Press Service Dec 11/07]
It’s time to get real. Want to curtail coal-fired pollution in China? Stop shopping at Wal-Mart.

“THEY” AREN’T GOING TO FIX IT
At the same time, we cannot continue waiting for politicians beset by Big Oil, Big Cars, Big Banks and Big Political Parties to buck their arm-twisting paymasters in time to even acknowledge this crisis – never mind make a difference. Even with ice caps literally falling off a cliff, as Ellen Goodman writes in the Seattle Times, “The inconvenient truth of the 2008 election year is that climate change is still way down the dance card of most-talked-about topics. It’s ranked No. 12 among Democratic candidates, and No. 15 among Republicans.” [Seattle Times Dec 28/07]

Is this some kind of sick joke? While interchangeable candidates debate how many more decades American troops will remain in a ravaged country they have no business occupying in the first place, the number one security threat facing every lifeform on the planet is not even a campaign issue!

As my father, a veteran of two wars, would say: stop complaining.

And do something.

Ready for a New year’s Resolution that counts? Set a personal Low Carbon dietary goal of reducing your personal carbon-based energy use by one-third immediately.

And another one-third just as soon as you can.

DIET DELIGHTS
How?

Simple. Just take the monthly mileage for every vehicle in your household, divide by one-third – and stick to this new target. Or cut your monthly gasoline (or diesel) receipts by one-third. Then take your monthly utility bill and achieve the same money-and-Earth-saving goal by turning heaters (and air conditioners) down, turning off unneeded lights and appliances – and especially by putting all your TVs, computers, and plugging all those proliferating little black transformers into power bars and completely clicking them Off-Off when not in use.

Corporate consumption conspirators want us to fear the “lack” left by far fewer trips to the mall. But replacing our conditioning with conscious choice leads to major gains as heightened awareness of our actions and their consequences begins reconnecting us with myriad lives and wonders.

Nobody says that breaking addictions is painless. But dropping manipulations is liberating. As we simplify our lives and begin slowing down from our customary frenzy, priorities that matter most begin to emerge, while time and attention-robbing distractions – such as teevee and other nattering nabobs – fall away. Stress levels drop, while health and sleep improve. And delight in the company of family and friends more than replaces the momentary seduction of constantly calling gadgets.

Don’t like your unresponsive, rip-off government? Tired of faceless bankers calling the shots? Worried about big corporations privatizing – and profiting from – every aspect of your life?

No worries, mate. Just stop buying their propaganda and their stuff!

Help make 2008 a turn-around year.

As for those stacks of greeting cards you’ve put aside for next Christmas wishing “Peace On Earth”. Get them out now, Ellen Goodman suggests, and send them out for the New Year. After making a small correction:

“Peace With The Earth”

And good will toward all beings in 2008