“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of
enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill
The Deep State government run by Zio-terrorists has been in
operation for a long, long time, however since the complete overthrow of the US
government December 12, 2000 they have been operating at full capacity. No longer are elections determining the leaders
we have, the candidates chosen by the duopoly through their corrupt primaries
and funded by Wall Street Banks. Donald
Trump is the exception having beaten the Deep State’s chosen Zio-terrorists in
2016. The Vietnam War was started after
the CIA’s false flag in the Gulf of Tonkin.
From Wikipedia:
Excerpt:
Gulf of Tonkin incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident
(Vietnamese: Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ), also known as the USS Maddox incident, was an international confrontation that led to the United States
engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved either one or two
separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the
waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents,
but eventually became very controversial with widespread belief that at least
one, and possibly both incidents were
false, and possibly deliberately so.
On August 2, 1964, the destroyer
USS Maddox, while performing a signals
intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was pursued by three
North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1][5] Maddox
fired three warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats then attacked with
torpedoes and machine gun fire.[5]
Maddox expended over 280 3-inch
(76.2 mm) and 5-inch (127 mm) shells in a sea battle. One U.S. aircraft was
damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo
boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six
more wounded. There were no U.S.
casualties.[6] Maddox "was
unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun
round."[5]
It was originally claimed by
the National Security Agency that a Second Gulf of Tonkin incident
occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead evidence was found of "Tonkin ghosts"[7] (false
radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats. In the 2003
documentary The Fog of War, the former
United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August
2 USS Maddox attack happened with no Defense Department response, but the August 4 Gulf of Tonkin attack
never happened.[8]
In 1995, McNamara met with former
Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on August 4,
1964, in the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "Absolutely nothing",
Giáp replied.[9] Giáp claimed that the
attack had been imaginary.[10]
The outcome of these two incidents
was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted
President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority
to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be
jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying
U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North
Vietnam.
Sheesh sound familiar?
“Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which
granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast
Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by
"communist aggression".
Sounds a lot like the Pompeo/Bolton plan for Iran. From the Deep State stenographers at CNN:
Excerpt:
Pompeo says US doesn't want war with Iran but warns of 'swift' response
if provoked
Washington (CNN) The Trump
administration doesn't want war with Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said
Wednesday, but he warned Tehran of a
"swift and decisive" US response to any attack.
Iran "has engaged in an
escalating series of threatening actions and statements in recent weeks,"
Pompeo said in a statement, echoing Pentagon and unnamed US officials. He provided no specifics about the nature
or scope of that threat, but other US officials have said that they've
observed Iranian forces moving missiles around on boats.
"The regime in Tehran should understand that any attacks by them or their proxies of any identity against US
interests or citizens will be answered with a swift and decisive US
response," said the top diplomat, who cut short overseas travel to fly
back to Washington Wednesday for urgent meetings on the situation with Iran and
North Korea…
Pompeo issued his statement after the US sent a Navy strike group and
bomber into the Persian Gulf, citing "specific and credible" threats
against US forces.
Bullsh*t the Zio-terrorists don’t want war, they are
salivating for a war with Iran. Since
the 2000 coup in America we have been committing terroristic wars against a
multitude of countries, some we don’t even know about. While the Vietnam intervention began under
President Kennedy, after he was assassinated by the CIA his successor President
Johnson started the ill-failed Vietnam War based on lies provided by the
National Security Agency.
The failed War in Vietnam would still be going on today were
it not for the Civil Rights movement and the liberal peacemakers, many of whom
were Vietnam War vets and Democrats demonstrating across the nation demanding
its end. During the 1960s there were
liberal members of congress who were vocal in their opposition to the Vietnam War,
such as Senator George McGovern, D-South Dakota. From The New York Times:
Excerpt:
George McGovern, Vietnam and the Democratic Crackup
On Sept. 24, 1963, George McGovern,
the junior senator from South Dakota, addressed
a full chamber on America’s growing entanglement in Southeast Asia. His
words rang like a fire bell in the night.
“The current dilemma in Vietnam is a clear demonstration of the
limitations of military power,” the 41-year-old Democrat declared, just
before the vote on a record-breaking defense appropriation. “There in the
jungles of Asia, our mighty nuclear arsenal, our $50 billion arms budget,
and our costly ‘special forces’ have proved powerless to cope with a ragged
band of illiterate guerrillas fighting with homemade weapons.”
Even
worse, in Saigon, American resources were being used “to suppress the very
liberties we went in to defend,” he continued. “The failure in Vietnam will not remain confined to Vietnam…
McGovern’s prophetic warning was
among the earliest of such trenchant commentaries in either house of Congress. It
was a prelude to his impassioned opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war, an opposition that would split
the Democratic Party in two.
Though the rift between liberal
hawks and antiwar activists is often depicted as a generational struggle,
between New Dealers and cold warriors on one hand and the student activists of
the New Left on the other, it was also between men like McGovern — principled, veteran politicians — and a
White House that they believed had led their party, and the country, toward
disaster.
McGovern was no pacifist. As a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II, he
had flown 35 missions over Germany and Austria and won the Distinguished Flying
Cross. Those combat experiences, which placed him at the center of
world-changing events, motivated him to pursue a doctorate in history and
stoked his ambition to run for Congress.
His political career was marked by
humanitarian efforts and legislative expertise in agriculture and education. In 1961, President Kennedy had appointed
him director of the Food for Peace program. Marshaling huge volumes of
surplus food and fiber, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of an overseas
school-lunch initiative that would soon be feeding tens of millions of hungry
children around the world…
McGovern was one of only a dozen
members of Congress to speak up against the war in its opening stages. In early 1965, just after the bombing
campaign known as Rolling Thunder began, he went on CBS News to denounce the
operation, and he predicted “a staggering loss of life out of all
proportion to the stakes involved,” creating such enormous instability “that indeed we invite a much worse
situation than the one that exists.”
In June 1965, a month before
Johnson escalated the ground war, McGovern pointed out that the Viet Cong were
“a part of the people and terrain” and “in many cases are farmers by day and
fighters by night. To bomb them is to bomb the women and children, the
villagers and peasants with whom they are intermingled. To destroy their crops
is to destroy the countryside on which the general population depended.” To
escalate the war, he said, “would only
strengthen the guerrilla’s cause” in the eyes of the South Vietnamese and
“destroy the moral influence of the United States in Asia…”
“I do not intend to remain silent
in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness,” McGovern began. This conflict was “the most tragic
diplomatic and moral failure in our national experience,” for it was “a defeat
for America whether we ‘win’ or ‘lose.’ ” And if it did not end soon, “our
dreams of a Great Society and a peaceful world will turn to ashes.” Only “by a crude misreading of history and a
distortion of our most treasured ideals” could anyone defend the war,
“essentially a civil conflict among various groups of Vietnamese…”
Above all, Americans must learn
that “conflicts of this kind have historical dimensions that are essentially
political, economic and psychological; they do not respond readily to military
force from the outside,” McGovern said.
Corrupt regimes like the one in Saigon did not “deserve to be saved by the
blood of American boys…”
A year later, in the wake of the
Tet offensive, Johnson’s withdrawal from
politics and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert Kennedy, a “Draft McGovern” movement thrust the senator into the
contest for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. HE DID NOT WIN THE
NOMINATION…
McGovern ran for, and won, the 1972
nomination, and then got crushed by Richard Nixon in one of the most lopsided
elections in American history…
McGovern was prescient in predicting
“a massive loss of life” that would result from the failed Vietnam War. In the end “one out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,148
were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.7 million who served. Although the
percent that died is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds
were 300 percent higher than in World War II. 75,000 Vietnam veterans are
severely disabled.”
It was after McGovern’s loss in ’72 that the Zio-terrorists
in the Democratic Party came up with the “Super Delegate” scam that allowed the
Zio-terrorists to overturn the will of the voters in the Democratic primaries
to protect the interests (illegal wars) of the Deep State. The Zio-terrorists in the Democratic Party
like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have actively purged the party of anyone who
would dare question the Zio-terroristic wars.
From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:
Excerpt:
The Liberal Embrace of War
American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the
debate. Now everyone is for regime change
CARACAS — The United States banned
all air transport with Venezuela on Wednesday over security concerns, further
isolating the troubled South American nation… A disinterested historian — Herodotus raised
from the dead — would see this as just the
latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages to topple the
regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to do the same to
his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The new play in the Trump era
involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has
been resisting. The American commercial
news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in lockstep here. Every article is seen from one angle:
Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the
only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.
There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released
results of a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in the New York Times,
Washington Post, the “big three Sunday morning talk shows” or PBS News Hour,
zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They wrote:
“Corporate news coverage of
Venezuela can only be described as a
full-scale marketing campaign for regime change.”
Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for
military invasion to the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in
a February op-ed by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called “An Urgent Call for Compromise in
Venezuela”:
“We strongly urge… a peaceful
and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of
chicken…”
So we should either remove Maduro by force, or he should leave
peaceably, via negotiation. These are the options.
After the disaster of Vietnam eons
ago, American thought leaders became
convinced we “lost” in Indochina because of — get this — bad PR.
The real lesson in Vietnam should have been that people would pay any
price to overthrow a hated occupying force. American think-tankers and
analysts however somehow became convinced (and amazingly still are) that the
problem was Walter Cronkite and the networks giving up on the war effort. Quietly then, over the course of decades,
lobbyists pushed for changes. In the
next big war, there would be no gruesome pictures of soldiers dying, no photos
of coffins coming home, no pictures of civilian massacres (enforced more
easily with new embedding rules), and no Cronkite-ian defeatism.
They got all of that by the time we
went into Iraq. The TV landscape by then
was almost completely sterilized. Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue were pulled
from MSNBC because they opposed invasion. Networks agreed not to film
coffins or death scenes.
Yet the invasion of Iraq was a
failure for the same reason Vietnam was a failure, and Libya was a failure, and
Afghanistan is a failure, and Venezuela or Syria or Iran will be failures,
if we get around to toppling regimes in those countries: America is incapable
of understanding or respecting foreigners’ instinct for self-rule.
The pattern in American
interventions has been the same for ages. We are for self-determination
everywhere, until such
self-determination clashes with a commercial or security objective. A common triggering event for
American-backed overthrows is a leader trying to nationalize the country’s
resources. This is why we ended up replacing democratically-elected
Mohammed Mossadeq with the Shah in Iran, for instance.
Disrupting trade is also a frequent
theme in these ploys, with a late-Fifties coup attempt in Indonesia or our
various Cuban embargoes key examples. The
plan often involves stimulating economic and political unrest in target nations
as a precursor for American intervention. We inevitably end up propping up
dictators of our own, and the too-frequent pattern now — vividly demonstrated
in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan — is puppet states collapsing and giving way
to power vacuums and cycles of sectarian violence. Thanks, America!
Opposing such policies used to be a
central goal of American liberalism. No more. Since 2016, it’s been stunning to watch the purging and/or conversion
of what used to be antiwar voices, to the point where Orwellian flip-flops are
now routine. Earlier this month,
onetime fierce Iraq war opponent Rachel Maddow went on TV to embrace John
Bolton in a diatribe about how the poor National Security Adviser has been
thwarted by Trump in efforts to topple Maduro.
“Regardless of what you thought
about John Bolton before this, his career, his track record,” Maddow said.
“Just think about John Bolton as a
human being.”
The telecast was surreal. It
was like watching Dick Cheney sing “Give Peace a Chance.” Bolton stood out as a
bomb-humping nut even among the Bush-era functionaries who pushed us into Iraq.
He’s the living embodiment of “benevolent hegemony,” an imperial plan
first articulated in the nineties by neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and
Robert Kagan.
It involves forcefully overturning
any regime that resisted us, to spread the wonders of the American way to, as
Norman Podhoretz once put it, “as many others as have the will and the ability
to enjoy them.” When Bush gave his famed “Axis of Evil” speech about Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea, Bolton — prophetically, it seemed — gave a speech called “Beyond
the Axis of Evil,” adding Cuba, Syria and Libya to the list.
Bolton, of course, is also on board with regime change in Venezuela,
saying “this is our hemisphere.” Echoing the sentiment, Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones
said Maduro, and his allies in Russia, need to vacate “our part of the world.”
This has all been cast as opposition to Russian support of Maduro.
Maddow was ostensibly reacting to triggering news that Trump was stepping back
on Venezuelan action after a chat with Vladimir Putin.
This isn’t about Russia, however. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post were open cheering sections even when it came to endorsing
Trump’s original decision to recognize Guaidó. It’s been much the same script
with Syria, too, where even the faintest hint of discomfort with the idea
of regime change has been excised from public view.
The social media era has made it
much easier to keep pundits in line. Propaganda is effective when it’s
relentless, personal, attacking, and one-sided. The idea isn’t to debate
people, but to create an “ick” factor around certain ideas, so debate is
pre-empted. Don’t want to invade Syria? Get ready to be denounced as an Assadist.
Feel ambivalent about regime change in Venezuela? You must love Putin and
Maduro.
People end up either reflexively believing
these things, or afraid to deal with vitriol they’ll get if they say something
off-narrative. In the media world, it’s
understood that stepping out of line on Venezuela or Syria will result in being
removed from TV guest lists, loss of speaking income, and other problems.
This has effectively made
intellectual objections to regime change obsolete. In the Trump era, things that
not long ago aroused widespread horror — from torture to drone assassination to
“rendition” to illegal surveillance to extrajudicial detention in brutal secret
prisons around the world — inspire crickets now.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times
ran an exposé about Guantanamo Bay that should have been a devastating piece of
journalism. It showed site officials building a hospice, because
prisoners are expected to grow old and die rather than ever sniff release. One
prisoner was depicted sitting gingerly in court because of “chronic rectal
pain” from being routinely sodomized in CIA prisons.
Ten years ago, Americans would have been deeply ashamed of such
stories. Now, even liberals don’t care. The cause of empire has been
cleverly re-packaged as part of #Resistance to Trump, when in fact it’s just the same old arrogance,
destined to lead to the same catastrophes. Bad policy doesn’t get
better just because you don’t let people talk about it.
I had to print the whole Taibbi article because nothing
could be truncated. Matt is right, the
entire media and almost the entire congress are promoting regime change without
any thought to what comes next. Like
George McGovern said “creating such enormous instability that indeed we invite
a much worse situation than the one that exists.” President Trump is not an interventionist but
he faces a congress and media the demand endless war. From Anti-War.com:
Excerpt:
Congressional Letter Urges Trump to Keep US Troops in Syria
Lawmakers call on Trump to
'increase pressure on Iran and Russia'
A bipartisan letter signed by nearly 400 US Congress members is calling
on President Trump to remain militarily engaged within Syria, while
claiming to be “deeply concerned” about extremists in the country.
President Trump had announced a pullout from Syria in December, but had
already disavowed it repeatedly by February. Still, lawmakers want to keep emphasizing
how enthusiastic about the Syrian War they are, and push Trump into escalating
it against various other parties.
Once a war about ISIS, the letter urges Trump to “increase pressure
on Iran and Russia with respect to their activities in Syria.” The US
already treated Syria as something of a proxy war, and the letter suggests
they do away with all pretext and just make it into a war against Iran and
Russia over Syria.
The lead signers of the letter were top party leaders and ranking
committee members in both the House and the Senate. This once again
underscores that on matters of war, Democrats and Republicans within leadership
positions are almost completely in-line on keeping the wars going.
The Deep State’s Military Industrial Complex wants more war
no matter what the cost to America and Americans. Through the Overseas Contingency Funds, a
secret slush funds trillions go unaccounted for. President Trump recently had an interview
with Steve Hilton on Fox News. From
Larouchepub:
Excerpt:
President Trump Tells Fox, There Is Military-Industrial Complex and It
Loves Perpetual War
May 20, 2019 (EIRNS)—In his
broad-ranging interview aired last night on Fox News, President Trump had some very pointed remarks to make about the
existence of a military-industrial complex in the U.S. and its desire to
have unending wars.
In the context of discussing policy
toward Iran, Trump emphasized that if he
had to take on Iran, it would be “economically.... I just don’t want them to
have nuclear weapons,” he told interviewer Steve Hilton, “and they can’t be
threatening us....”
He elaborated: “With all of
everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to
war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far
most importantly.” In response to
Hilton’s asking if he could “reassure
people you’re not looking for some conflict in Iran,” Trump replied,
“Well, I’m the one that talks about
these wars that are 19 years, and people are just there—and don’t kid yourself, you do have a
military-industrial complex. They do like war. You know, in Syria, with the
caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate.
“That doesn’t mean you’re not going
to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up
things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re
wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out
100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’
The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to
leave.”
Continuing: “I say, ‘You know what
I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to
them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it,
but you do have a group, and they call
it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want
to fight.” Trump explained, “No. I
don’t want to fight, but you do have situations like Iran. You can’t let them
have nuclear weapons. You just can’t let that happen.”
Like CIA Director Casey said “We’ll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the US public believes is false” seems that
to extend to the US Presidents too. With
Trump surrounded by Zio-terrorists it is unlikely that any of these “war
failures” will end anytime soon. But the
Zio-terrorist Empire will collapse from its own weight. From Dmitry Orlov at Russia Insider:
Excerpt:
World Ready for US Collapse as Empire Hemorrhages Gold, Oil and
Credibility
Some ironies are just too precious
to pass by. The 2016 US presidential elections gave us Donald Trump, a reality TV star whose famous tag line from his show
“The Apprentice” was “You are fired!” Focus on this tag line; it is all
that is important to this story. Some Trump Derangement Disorder sufferers
might disagree.
This is because they are
laboring under certain misapprehensions: that the US is a democracy; or that it
matters who is president. It isn’t and it doesn’t. By this point, the
choice of president matters as much as the choice of conductor for the band
that plays aboard a ship as it vanishes beneath the waves.
I have made these points
continuously since before Trump got into office. Whether or not you think that
Trump was actually elected, he did get in somehow, and there are reasons to
believe that this had something to do with his wonderfully refreshing “You are
fired!” tag line. It’s a fair guess that
what motivated people to vote for him was their ardent wish that somebody would
come along and fire all of the miscreants that infest Washington, DC and
surrounding areas.
Alas, that he couldn’t do. Figurehead leaders are never granted the
authority to dismantle the political establishments that install them. But
that is not to say that it can’t be done at all.
What happened instead was that the political establishment spent two years
thrashing about in search of a reason to say “You are fired!” to Trump but has
been unable to find one, and so Trump remains in office, although to say
that he “remains in power” would be to invite sardonic laughter from anyone who
knows what real political power smells like.
The System Fails to Depose Trump
Trump is but a prisoner in the
White House, just like his predecessor was.
Ironically, the quest for Trump’s impeachment has been fruitless as far as
firing him, but most fruitful in terms of enhancing his ability to not only
fire lots of establishment figures but perhaps even send them to jail—with
the help of the Justice Department—and his character traits of extreme rancor,
spitefulness and vindictiveness should be most conducive toward that end,
making for a fun spectacle. His
numerous enemies and detractors may yet look back wistfully on the halcyon days
when they could lambaste him with impunity.
The quest to stop Trump started
well before the election, with Obama and
the Clintons collaborating on misusing federal resources to dig up dirt on
Trump; specifically, evidence of “Russian collusion”… and they couldn’t
find any. They did manage to find some “Russian meddling” (in the form of
Facebook clickbait ads) but the evidence they dug up was too ridiculous to show
in court.
Too bad they didn’t look for Ukrainian collusion and meddling, or
Israeli collusion and meddling, or Saudi collusion and meddling, because then
they would have found plenty—enough to not only knock Hillary Clinton out
of the running but also to lock her up. It would have been a constructive, useful
exercise for them to go look for Ukrainian political meddling, but as I’ve
explained before the American modus operandi is quite the opposite, and it
compelled them to go after Russia instead.
Trump is still on the throne,
but does he wield any power?
In any case, the complete failure of Mueller’s team to find anything actionable
against Trump has left him grasping at straws, and the one straw he seized upon
was the vague possibility of accusing Trump of obstructing justice, based
on 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which specifies that someone is guilty of
obstruction as follows: “…obstructs, influences or impedes any official
proceeding, or attempts to do so.”
Apparently, a neuron snapped inside poor Mueller’s head making him
think that his own investigation was an “official proceeding,” although
if you look up this term you’ll find that it relates to things happening inside
courtrooms, with one or more judges presiding, and to launch such a proceeding
requires evidence that a crime has been committed. If there is no crime,
then there is no proceeding, and nothing to obstruct, influence or impede.
There ensued a sort of bureaucratic
danse macabre. Normally, the Attorney General has the authority to provide
guidance on such questions, and AG Jeff
Sessions could have told Mueller that 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) is only relevant
to court proceedings and that would have been it. But Sessions had the
unfortunate luck of having had a casual chat with the amiable and roly-poly
Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Sergey Kislyak
By virtue of this little chat
Sessions contaminated his precious bodily fluids (just breathing the same
air as a Russian can be politically fatal, you know) and was forced to
recuse himself from Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s legal team then reached
out to William Barr, a former AG, and asked him to chime in. Barr wrote a memo clarifying the issue and
sent it to deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who remained as second-in-command at the
Justice Department after Sessions’ recusal, and who should have read it,
understood it and acted on it, terminating Mueller’s investigation, but somehow
he didn’t.
The denouement of this bureaucratic
danse macabre played out as follows. After
the midterm elections Trump said “You’re fired!” to Jeff Sessions and William
Barr was confirmed as AG. Barr then said “You’re fired!” to both Rod
Rosenstein and Robert Mueller for being unpardonably dense.
Barr also made it clear that he plans to leave no stone unturned in
investigating this fantastic instance of misuse of official resources and
prosecutorial misconduct. This will be fun to watch, if you have nothing
more important to pay attention to, but I suspect that the phrase “You’re
fired!” will continue to bounce around the halls of Washington like a rubber
grenade for a good long time. There are, however, things to pay attention
to that are far more important.
A World Re-Aligning
There is a lot happening in the
world all at once right now. The entire planet is rapidly reconfiguring itself.
The world is begging for a new, post-capitalist,
post-industrial order to be born, but the overabundance of natural
resources that have made previous such revolutions possible (coal for the age
of steam, oil for the current oil age) simply no longer exist.
All that remains is optimizations,
enhancements and reconfigurations of the existing order of things, cutting out
that which is most harmful and most dysfunctional. To this end, Western European nations are attempting to reclaim the
sovereignty they ceded to the United States and the European Union while
Eurasia is coming together to form a massive economic and security conglomerate
centered on China and Russia. Both are playing for time, because
redirecting trade and financial flows away from the US is quite a process.
The world’s central banks are doing their best to get rid of their US
dollar reserves and to buy gold, which, as of this April, they are allowed to
consider a risk-free financial asset. Many people now expect gold to go up
as a result, but that expectation is based on an illusion. Think of gold as
a lighthouse and of fiat currencies as sinking ships: those aboard them may
look around and decide that the lighthouse is going up, but that’s just an
optical illusion. The purchasing power of fiat currencies is sure to fall (some
more than others)…
A particularly interesting piece to
the gold story is that it may turn out
that much of the gold supposedly stored in the US may in fact be missing.
Since Nixon closed the “gold window” in 1971, ending the convertibility of US
dollar for gold bullion, and until recently the US dollar has been able to
retain its position as a global reserve currency by an act of sheer financial
levitation, but that bit of magic may have actually been sleight of hand:
behind-the-scenes gold sales to the largest US creditors.
When various countries, Germany in
particular, have attempted to repatriate their gold, which they had entrusted
to the US, they were rebuffed, and when they did succeed, the gold that was
returned wasn’t the same gold, and it took a long time. The US hunger for gold has forced it to conduct rather unseemly heists,
stealing the gold reserves of Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine. Thus, when
the time comes for the US to defend its currency by employing its hoard of
gold, it may turn out that the cupboard is bare.
Gold is becoming increasingly
important, but energy is more important still, and always will be. After being
pushed into the background for a few years, questions of energy supply and
energy security are once again becoming front and center. Peak Oil turns out to not be dead after all; it was just postponed by
a few years by virtue of the US
burning through a huge pile of retirement savings while exploiting
shale oil.
But now most of the sweet spots
have been tapped already and diminishing returns on continued frantic drilling
are being added to the fracking industry’s permanently dismal financial returns. In the meantime, Russia has built several
natural gas liquefaction plants, a new oil pipeline to China and two new gas
pipelines to Turkey and Germany, and to Western Europe beyond, which will
circumvent the Ukraine, reducing its value as a geopolitical asset to
zero.
A desperate ploy by the US to
seize control of Venezuela’s oil fields has backfired in a most embarrassing
fashion; there, recent developments have brought up an important question: What
if the US threw a color revolution but nobody came? As I had predicted
would happen six years ago in my book The Five Stages of Collapse the Color
Revolution Syndicate has steadily lost its mojo. In spite of all the bluster by various Washington foreign policy
has-beens, a US military intervention in Venezuela is unthinkable: Venezuela’s
Russian S-300 air defense systems effectively make it a no-fly zone for US
planes.
Meanwhile, the US, having cut
itself off from Venezuela’s oil using its own sanctions, has been forced to
resort to importing Russian oil. (For now, but not for much longer, the US has a glut of low-quality light
crude from fracking, but it’s useless for making diesel and other distillates
unless it is blended with heavier grades of crude, which have to be imported.)
Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have been staging a noisy lover’s quarrel
over Russian oil exports to Europe, much of which go through a Belarussian
pipeline. Russia and Belarus—or Byelorussia, or White Russia—are not exactly
distinct entities in most ways, and when they fight the bystanders should
discount the foul language and instead look out for flying pots and cutlery.
The result of this family spat is
that White Russia will no longer supply
the Ukraine with products distilled from Russian oil. Another odd
development is that the Russian oil being piped to White Russia, and from
thence to the EU, has become mysteriously contaminated and the flow has been
stopped until the situation is resolved, causing a bit of a panic in Europe.
The US volunteered to unseal its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to
compensate, but then, in another bizarre twist, some of that oil too has
turned out to have gone foul. More foul yet, the US has imposed
unilateral sanctions on Iran, threatening anyone who imports Iranian oil,
bringing up another important question: What
is (sic) the US imposes unilateral sanctions on the whole world, and everybody
just yawns?
Financially ruinous and generally
nonsensical schemes such as tar sands, shale oil and industrial-scale
photovoltaics, wind generation and electric cars will only accelerate the
process of sorting nations into energy haves and energy have-nots, with the have-nots wiping themselves out
sooner rather than later.
Leaving aside various fictional and
notional schemes (nuclear fusion, space mirrors, etc.) and focusing just on the
technologies that already exist, there
is only one way to maintain industrial civilization, and that is nuclear,
based on Uranium 235 (which is scarce) and Plutonium 239 produced from Uranium
238 (of which there is enough to last for thousands of years) using fast
neutron reactors. If you don’t like this choice, then your other choice is
to go completely agrarian, with significantly reduced population densities and
no urban centers of any size.
And if you do like this choice,
then you have few alternatives other than to go with the world’s main purveyor of nuclear technology (VVER-series light
water reactors, BN-series fast neutron breeder reactors and closed nuclear fuel
cycle technology) which happens to be Russia’s state-owned conglomerate
Rosatom.
It owns over a third of the world nuclear energy market and has a
portfolio of international projects stretching far into the future that
includes as much as 80% of the reactors that are going to be built. The US hasn’t been able to complete a
nuclear reactor in decades, the Europeans managed to get just one new reactor
on line (in China) while Japan’s nuclear program has been in disarray ever
since Fukushima and Toshiba’s financially disastrous acquisition of
Westinghouse.
The only other contenders are South
Korea and China. Again, if you don’t
like nuclear—for whatever reason—then you can always just buy yourself some
pasture and some hayfields and start breeding donkeys.
Americans are not ready for
what's coming
This may seem like shocking news to someone who’s been exposed solely
to mass media in the US and other Anglophone countries or in the EU. Well,
it may be shocking, but it’s definitely not news: none of these developments is
particularly new, and none of them is unforeseen. The high level of denial
of all of the above issues in Washington, which has been ground zero in a
powerful explosion of unreality, and in Western media generally, is also
unsurprising; nor is it helpful. Upon finding these things out for yourself,
you may be tempted to shout about them from rooftops.
This, I dare say, would be
inadvisable. The proper thing to do with people who insist on remaining in
denial is to humor them, to run out the clock on any games they try to play
with you, and then to politely bid them adieu. Indeed, this is what we are
seeing: nobody particularly wants to
negotiate with US officials but they do so anyway because, as every crisis
negotiator knows, it is essential to keep talking, even if simply to stall for
time.
While they are talking the
hostages—to Wall Street, to the Pentagon, to US Treasury and Federal
Reserve—are quietly being evacuated. Time is running out for the US, and
once it has run out, what we will hear, in
a supreme twist of irony, is the whole world telling the US: “You’re fired!”
Vietnam failure, Afghanistan failure, Iraq failure, Libya
failure, Syria failure, Ukraine failure, Yemen failure, yet the Zio-terrorists
have not lost their zeal nor enthusiasm for more war and still claim today that
all the aforementioned wars are successes.
I agree with Dmitry Orlov’s
prediction “Time is running out for the US, and once it has run out, what we
will hear, in a supreme twist of irony, is the whole world telling the US:
“You’re fired!””
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