While the US is distracted at home by warmongering politicians competing for the Republican nomination and Israeli-neocon warmongering for launching a new war against Iran, a crisis may be metastasizing in cancer that is Afghanistan.
Below is a report in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn that describes the logistics bottleneck in the port of Karachi caused by Pakistan's closure of the Nato's crucial southern supply route.
There are three logistics routes to sending supplies into Afghanistan: one by air and two by land. Air is too expensive and of limited carrying capacity. The least costly route is the long vulnerable highway net thru Pakistan — this is the southern route (top map) that has been shut down as described below. The northern route (lower map) is much longer going from either the Baltic or the Black Seas and is dependent on the good will of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. According to the AP, The northern route at $104 million per month in total cost is at least six times as expensive as the southern route.
The AP report contained no information on the cost per ton, but that factor is likely to be much higher that six-to-one, because prior to the closure (as of last June), about 50% of Nato's total supply requirement was was flowing through the southern route, with the other 50% being divided between the norther route and the air route.]
Thousands of Nato trucks in Pakistan backlog
Dawn [Pk], 26 Jan 2012
KARACHI: Two months into Pakistan’s blockade on Nato supplies crossing into Afghanistan, thousands of trucks are crowding the port in Karachi where drivers, fed up with waiting, are starting to desert.
Read this at least three times. This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns). They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view). This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.
The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public. The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better. It is not. Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic. Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.
The ideal of an ‘American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
Charles Murray
Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012
EXTRACT
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
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As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.
. . . . . . .
Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.
Phi Beta Iota: The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows: 1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); 8) Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).
Israel already threatens war on Iran. It’s also involved with Washington, Turkey, Jordan, and other rogue Arab states behind Syria’s externally generated insurgency.
Gaza’s also threatened. On January 1, Haaretz writer Amos Harel headlined “Will 2012 bring another Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza?” saying:
Repeated Israeli air strikes and incursions target Gaza. Perhaps they precede a broader offensive. Israel’s IDF chief Benny Gantz “said on Army radio that ‘Operation Cast Lead was carried out in a professional, determined manner, and significantly strengthened Israel’s deterrent strength.’ ”
At the same time, he suggested another round of fighting is likely. “Particularly worrisome (are the alleged) weapons smuggl(ed) into the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have….many thousands of rockets; hundreds” able to reach central Israel, said Harel.
As a result, “the IDF is preparing itself for the possibility of a land operation in another few months.”
On January 16, Jerusalem Post writer Yaakov Katz headlined, “IDF preparing for major Gaza action within months,” saying:
“2013 and 2014 are what I am most worried about because this year everybody is trying to just get through the next election…Everybody is going to do their best to get us through the election. Watch out for 2013, Rogers told ET Now.
Let's see, 12,000 US troops going into Libya? Undeclared war on Iran? Absolute US guarantee of energy supply for Israel “no matter what?” Whatever could we be borrowing money for?
HOUSE TO VOTE JAN. 18 ON OBAMA'S DEBT-LIMIT INCREASE REQUEST
Two days ago we wondered how long it would take for Obama to restart the debt ceiling theater. Not that long it turns out.
OBAMA SENDS CONGRESS REQUEST TO RAISE DEBT CEILING
OBAMA NOTIFICATION STARTS 15-DAY CLOCK FOR CONGRESS TO VOTE
So with Congress in recess, will Obama succeed in passing another automatic vote using base trickery? The same Obama, who as recently as 3 hours ago warned Congress that any attempts to pass approval on the Keystone Pipeline without his involvement are “counterproductive”… In other news, America' new debt ceiling of $16.3 trillion, or 107% of GDP is now just a formality, about to be interrupted by a little circus clowning.
Under a 1975 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the USA guaranteed all Israel’s oil needs in the event of a crisis. This Memorandum of Understanding is quietly renewed every five years. It commits U.S. taxpayers to maintain a strategic U.S. reserve for Israel, equivalent to $3 billion in 2002 dollars. Special legislation was enacted to exempt Israel from restrictions on oil exports from the USA. Moreover, the U.S. government agreed to divert oil from the USA, even if this causes domestic shortages. The U.S. government also guaranteed delivery of oil in U.S. tankers if commercial shippers become unable or unwilling to carry oil from the USA to Israel.
I wonder which israel-first bastard signed this memorandum . . .
Jobs offshoring, financial deregulation, and ten years of wars have severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90% of the American population. The signs are everywhere in front of our eyes. They are in the income distribution data, the BLS jobs data, the Census data, the poverty figures, and the high number of food stamp recipients.
The signs are in the foreclosed and boarded up homes and the accompanying homelessness. They are in closed strip malls, in office building, warehouse, and shopping mall vacancies, and in the huge population losses of America’s manufacturing cities.
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As the US government is controlled by financial and armaments interests and not by the people, the government responded to the financial crisis by shoveling more debt and more hardships on the American people in order that financial interests did not have to
pay for their own mistakes and crimes. Instead of blaming the responsible parties, “our” government handed the bill to the American people.
