Yet, instead of reducing or even just freezing levels of U.S. military aid to Israel, President Obama wants to provide Israel with $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons next year, an increase from $3.075 billion in 2012, making the State Department’s claim that this budget request “maintains last year’s record funding levels” for Israel both immodest and inaccurate. By comparison, of the nine other Near Eastern countries receiving U.S. military aid, the budget request for eight of them is unchanged from last year’s budget while the request for Tunisia declined.
The last time oil went in this direction, it caused a slowing in the global economy that led to a global financial panic.
What's causing it? Peak oil, Chinese growth and lots of potential oil disruption. Pretty much the same factors that caused it last time.
The pipeline disruption is a little different this time.
Israel
The headline player is Iran due to its nuclear program. But Iran isn't actually disrupting the production system, they are merely making threats.
If you unwind this a bit, it's pretty clear that the countries actually sending shockwaves of fear through the markets are Israel and the US. However, of the partners in this relationship, Israel is in the drivers seat. They are calling the shots on the timing of an attack on Iran and they will take the world along for a ride.
Syria: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the opposition Syrian National Council is emerging as an alternative to the Bashar al-Asad regime and that the consensus among Arab League and other nations is that the group is a credible representative.
Comment: Lacking a territory that it can defend, the opposition remains inchoate, not unified and different from city to city.That diversity probably saves it from total destruction.
It is a stretch to describe any outside political group as a credible representative of an opposition that lacks any identifiable structure or organization inside Syria and shows no loyalty to the Syrian politicians outside the country. The Western and Arab diplomacy looks disconnected from and irrelevant to what is happening in Syria.
Mike Lofgren, Huffington Post, Posted: 02/21/2012 7:05 pm
Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l'attaque, il se defend. (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself) – French proverb
It is hard not to think of that Gallic witticism when observing recent international events. Aside from almost daily threats from the governments of Israel and the United States to attack Iran — a violation of the United Nations Charter — Iran has been subject to sabotage, violations of its airspace by military drones, and assassinations of its citizens. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to hear news of attempted attacks on Israeli embassies in Georgia, India, and Thailand. Iran may very well be behind them.
Here in Moscow I recently received a dark-blue folder dated 1975. It contains one of the most well-buried secrets of Middle Eastern and of US diplomacy. The secret file, written by the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo, Vladimir M. Vinogradov, apparently a draft for a memorandum addressed to the Soviet politbureau, describes the 1973 October War as a collusive enterprise between US, Egyptian and Israeli leaders, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger. If you are an Egyptian reader this revelation is likely to upset you. I, an Israeli who fought the Egyptians in the 1973 war, was equally upset and distressed, – yet still excited by the discovery. For an American it is likely to come as a shock.
Lord James of Blackheath, House of Lords [VIDEO 11:10] from 2010, now circulating
Breaking news Lord James of Blackheath has spoken in the House of Lords holding evidence of three transactions of 5 Trillion each and a transaction of 750,000 metric tonnes of gold and has called for an investigation.
I think there are three possible conclusions that may come from it. I think there may have been a massive piece of money laundering committed by a major government which ought to know better and that it has effectively undermined the integrity of the British bank the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second alternative is that a major American department has an agency that has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which they are seeking to get at least 50 billion Euros as a payoff. And the third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud which has not been carried out but which has been prepared in order to provide a threat to one government or more if they don't pay them off. So there are three possibilities and this all needs a very urgent review.
My Lords, it starts in April and May of 2009, with the alleged transfer to the United Kingdom, to HSBC of a sum of 5 trillion dollars and seven days later, in comes another 5 trillion dollars to HSBC, and then 3 weeks later another 5 trillion. 5 trillion in each case. Sorry. A total of 15 trillion dollars is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland and we need to look at where this came from and what the history of this money is. And I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and from where it has come from for a long time.
John Pilger describes the reality hidden behind the cloak of anglo-american “democracy.”
Phi Beta Iota: This describes the crime against humanity, the atrocity, of cleansing the population of the islands now known as Diego Garcia. If We the People do not hold our government accountable, then We the People are complicit in all that is done “in our name.”
January 20, 2012 — Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”
In the early 1960s, the Labor government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitized” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”
