On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
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In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.8 This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9
Rampant silver manipulation? Rampant gold manipulation? Rampant LIBOR manipulation? Hiding MF Global client assets? These are all happening at JP Morgan according to an open letter reportedly written by an anonymous employee of the firm. The whistleblower also warns of a “cascading credit event being triggered” by derivatives related to Greek government debt. Unlike Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, this whistleblower has chosen to remain anonymous for now. According to the letter, the whistleblower is still an employee of JP Morgan and has not resigned. But that does make it much more difficult to confirm what he is saying. With Greg Smith, we know exactly who he is and what he was doing at Goldman. As far as this anonymous whistleblower is concerned, all we have is this letter. So we must take it with a grain of salt. However, the information in this letter does agree with what whistleblowers such as Andrew Maguirehave said in the past about silver manipulation by JP Morgan. And this letter does mention Greg Smith's resignation from Goldman, so we know that it must have been written in the past few days. Hopefully this letter will cause authorities to take a much closer look at the crazy things that are going on over at JP Morgan and the other big Wall Street banks.
This anonymous letter was addressed to the CFTC, but unfortunately it looks like the CFTC has already chosen to ignore it.
The original letter from this anonymous whistleblower has already been taken down from the CFTC website. When you go there now, all you get is this message….
“The Comment Cannot Be Found. Please Return to the Previous Page and Try Again.”
Fortunately, there are many in the alternative media that copied this entire letter from the CFTC website.
The following is a copy of the original letter that the anonymous whistleblower from JP Morgan submitted to the CFTC….
New report released by the Institute for Economics & Peace analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military since World War II.
The report studies five periods – World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars – exposing the effect of war financing on debt, consumption, investment, jobs, taxes, government deficits, and inflation.
The findings of the report show devastating trends for US tax, debt and deficit debates.
The U.S. has paid for its wars either through debt [World War II, Cold War, Afghanistan/Iraq], taxation [Korean War] or inflation [Vietnam]. In each case, taxpayers have been burdened, and private sector consumption and investment have been constrained as a result.
Report highlights
The report shows the following economic indicators experiencing negative effects either during or after the conflicts:
Public debt and levels of taxation increased during most conflicts
Consumption as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
Investment as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
Inflation increased during or as a direct consequence of these conflicts
The higher levels of government spending associated with war tends to generate some positive economic benefits in the short-term, specifically through increases in economic growth occurring during conflict spending booms. However, negative unintended consequences occur either concurrently with the war or develop as residual effects afterwards thereby harming the economy over the longer term.
Phi Beta Iota: There appears to be a continued reluctance to address the real causes of our terrible situation: corruption across the board. No amount of intellectual posturing, whether in a book or in a conference, is a substitute for full transparency and the truth — the whole truth. The lack of integrity across all eight tribes — academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit — is the ROOT CAUSE of our collapse.
When I lived in New York 20 years ago, the United States was beginning a 20-year war on Iraq. We protested at the United Nations. The Miami Herald depicted Saddam Hussein as a giant fanged spider attacking the United States. Hussein was frequently compared to Adolf Hitler. On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she’d been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. The Kuwaiti disinformation campaign for the Gulf War would be successfully reprised by Iraqi groups favoring the overthrow of the Iraqi government twelve years later.
I think two opposing trends have been at work in U.S. history. One is that of allowing more people to vote. This is an ongoing struggle, of course, but in some significant sense we've allowed poor people and women and non-white people and young people to vote. The other trend, which has really developed more recently, is that we've made voting less and less meaningful. Of course it was never as meaningful as many people imagine. But we've legalized bribery, we've banished third parties and independents, we've gerrymandered most Congressional districts into meaningless general elections and left one party or the other to exercise great influence over any primary. Rarely does any incumbent lose, and rarely does a candidate without the most money win. Extremely rare is a winning candidate who lacks some major financial backing. Rarer still is a candidate who even promises to pursue majority positions on most major issues, or who convincingly commits to following the will of the public over the will of the party. Most Congress members are pawns in a government with two partisan voices, not the voices of 535 individual representatives and senators. Rare, as well, is any possibility in a close primary or general election of verifying the accuracy of a vote count.
There appears to many observers little, sometimes even nothing, to be gained by voting. A lack of decent education and news media, combined with negative campaign ads that make the whole process seem filthy are probably a turn off. Yet roughly 55% of voting age people in the U.S. continue to vote in presidential elections and roughly 35% in off-year elections. And those numbers would probably go up if we didn't take people's right to vote away when we convict them of crimes, if we didn't deny citizenship to so many immigrants, or if we made voter registration automatic, stopped trying to intimidate people out of voting or forcing them to vote on second-class provisional ballots, made election day a holiday, etc.
We've also created a dominant media cartel that can — without any exaggeration — instruct large numbers of people whom to vote for — a situation that outrages some of us, but by definition is deemed acceptable by many others. Or, rather, it's not deemed acceptable, but it's either unnoticed or it's viewed as a tragedy of the commons that cannot be countered by any individual alone. On the Kucinich 04 presidential campaign, he would win the most applause, but then people would say “I'd vote for him if he were serious,” because their televisions had told them he wasn't one of the real, serious, viable choices, and either they believed that or they believed that everyone else believed it which left them powerless to single-handedly do anything about it.
One day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out at the US and implied that more than one US soldier was involved in the mass murder of 16 Afghans in Kandahar's Panjwai district last weekend, a delegation from the Afghan parliament is claiming that at least 15 US soldiers “accompanied by 2 helicopters” were involved in the massacre. From Khaama Press:
A delegation of the Afghan parliament members who visited Kandahar province said at least 15 US troops were behind the assassination of 16 Afghan villagers at Panjwai district in this province.The delegation included 5 Afghan parliament members who were sent by the Afghan House of Representatives to find out the facts behind the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians at Panjwai district.
The delegation presented its findings report to the Afghan House of Representative which states that the civilians massacre was plotted where at least 15 US troops were involved.
A member of the Afghan parliament Shakila Hashimi who presented the report to the Afghan House of Representatives said false statements were given to the Afghan people by provincial governor Toryalai Weesa and US commander saying that the shooting was carried out by a single US soldier.
She also added, the assassination was carried out by 2 groups of US soldiers consisting of 15 to 20 soldiers and were accompanied by 2 helicopters.
How two scorpions trapped in a bottle weaken each other while they strengthen Hamas and Iran and increase the risks of nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East.
Attached is an excellent explanation of this. Not addressed specifically, but nevertheless implicit in the discussion is the universal influence of domestic politics in the shaping or a nation's foreign policy.
by Immanuel Wallerstein, Agence Global, 15 Mar 2012
EXTRACT:
Were either Israel or the United States to bomb Iran preemptively, there would be enormous political consequences immediately. First of all, it would almost certainly be relatively inefficacious in terms of stopping the Iranian project. Secondly, it would weaken politically the position of both Israel and the United States in the whole world. The two reasons together explain why there is so much opposition by the military and intelligence services of both Israel and the United States to the whole military discourse. What they fear is that the discourse would catch on and permit some political leaders not presently controlling the Israeli or U.S. governments to be foolish enough to start the war.
or are they engaged in a mutual backscratching operation?
My good friend Pierre Sprey took exception to Wallerstein's analysis, which I distributed in my last blaster (and is repeated below for convenience of reference). Readers may recall that I noted Wallerstein did not address the universal influence of domestic politics in shaping a nation's foreign policy. Pierre addresses the implications of that oversight in the attached comment:
Chuck,
Wallerstein's heart is in the right place and he is certainly right that neither Netanyahu nor Obama have the slightest illusions about the ridiculous uselessness of bombing Iran.
One of the benefits of having a son that is a scholar of ancient warfare, from Alexander the Great to the Byzantine Empire to the Mongols, is that we can have wide ranging discussions on very deep topics. Of perennial interest to us: why do complex societies/civilizations collapse?
One of interesting working theories we have is that while complex societies can be in decay for a long period of time, they only collapse when its favored elites abandon it/betray it.
Here's an example from Roman history written by Joseph Tainter:
The Collapse of The [Western] Roman Empire
One outcome of diminishing returns to complexity is illustrated by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. As a solar-energy based society which taxed heavily, the empire had little fiscal reserve. When confronted with military crises, Roman Emperors often had to respond by debasing the silver currency (Figure 4.2) and trying to raise new funds. In the third century A.D. constant crises forced the emperors to double the size of the army and increase both the size and complexity of the government. To pay for this, masses of worthless coins were produced, supplies were commandeered from peasants, and the level of taxation was made even more oppressive (up to two-thirds of the net yield after payment of rent). Inflation devastated the economy. Lands and population were surveyed across the empire and assessed for taxes. Communities were held corporately liable for any unpaid amounts. While peasants went hungry or sold their children into slavery, massive fortifications were built, the size of the bureaucracy doubled, provincial administration was made more complex, large subsidies in gold were paid to Germanic tribes, and new imperial cities and courts were established. With rising taxes, marginal lands were abandoned and population declined. Peasants could no longer support large families. To avoid oppressive civic obligations, the wealthy fled from cities to establish self-sufficient rural estates. Ultimately, to escape taxation, peasants voluntarily entered into feudal relationships with these land holders. A few wealthy families came to own much of the land in the western empire, and were able to defy the imperial government. The empire came to sustain itself by consuming its capital resources; producing lands and peasant population (Jones 1964, 1974; Wickham 1984; Tainter 1988, 1994b). The Roman Empire provides history's best-documented example of how increasing complexity to resolve problems leads to higher costs, diminishing returns, alienation of a support population, economic weakness, and collapse. In the end it could no longer afford to solve the problems of its own existence.
A more recent example of this is how the bureaucratic elites of the former Soviet Union, turned on the system and quickly gutted it through privatization, when their privileges were reduced. An accelerant of the process was the availability of an external financial system to deposit the newly looted wealth.
The big question for those of us in the US/EU is whether we are seeing this process at work in our system. Are the government/business elites turning against the system?
