Terror Risk High as Obama Ponders Afghan Fiasco (November Prediction of Christmas Day False Flag Operation by Christopher Bollyn) November 18, 2009 The risk of another false-flag terror attack like the terror atrocities of 9-11 is currently very high. This is not a prediction but a warning based on my analysis of 9-11 and the predicament that the U.S. and NATO find themselves in as they try to “pacify” occupied Afghanistan, a nation of fighting men who have always resisted foreign occupiers since Alexander the Great conquered the region and built Kandahar (Alexandria) in 330 B.C.
Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.
A California school district has added a new book to the controversial list of literature that is considered unfit for young eyes. . . . It's the dictionary.
The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”
A new US assessment of Venezuela's oil reserves could give the country double the supplies of Saudi Arabia.
Scientists working for the US Geological Survey say Venezuela's Orinoco belt region holds twice as much petroleum as previously thought.
The geologists estimate the area could yield more than 500bn barrels of crude oil.
Phi Beta Iota: This is consistent with both the Brazilian discoveries and the rare nature of the Amazon region. All signs point to a re-emergence of the United Nations of South America (UNASUR) as a major political, socio-eceonomic, ideo-cultural, and techno-demographic “bloc” in the next quarter century. If they create their own Multinational Engagement network for regional information-sharing and sense-making, with a model that can be ported to South Africa for extension into that continent, and to the Indonesia-Malaysia axis with Singapore as a central hub for Chinese diaspora influence, the balance of power in the world will change dramatically. The “closed model” of top down command and control has faded, the “open model” of networks is emergent. Latin American populism is a force that cannot be repressed, it can only be respected.
Now that the mega banks have been bailed out, there is growing pressure in the US and the EU to cut back on state deficits. In the US, which is now under the constraints of of it highest burden private debt burden in recorded economic debt burden (i.e., level of debt related to size of GDP), a reduction in government spending runs a clear risk of a debt deflation — where the economy shrinks because consumers and businesses cut back of spending to reduce their debts. In theory, if the government retrenched and triggered a debt deflation, the US government could reverse course and return to a policy of fiscal stimulus, in part because it has a sovereign economy with its own currency.
The situation is very different in the EU, were the burdens of private debt are lower but burdens of public debt are higher. Moreover, as my friend Marshall Auerback argues below, the economic situation is fundamentally different for each nation in the European Union, because the common currency, together with the accompanying centralized bureaucracy, which is necessary to manage that currency, constrains the ability of individual state governments, like that of Spain, to respond to their own peculiar conditions.
I find Auerback's analysis to be deeply troubling, because it makes sense. I have viewed the EU from the other end of the telescope since 2005, and my greatest impression has been one of its economic benefits — I have seen at the local level in rich and poor countries alike how a rising tide was lifting all boats. To be sure there were inefficiencies and waste, like excessive and shoddy construction in Spain and unfinished projects in Greece, and chaos in Italy, but all in all, what has impressed me the most was level of positive atmosphere in all the EU countries I have visited and lived in. When the EU is growing, the system of open borders; free movement of labour and capital, and a common currency works like oil in an economic engine; rich countries, like the Netherlands, can transfer funds to poorer countries, like Greece. Smaller economies can run big deficits without worrying about the value of their currency.
But, if Auerback is right, when overall growth slows or reverses, the EU engine gets sand in its gears, and as its internal friction increases, it slows down even more. Moreover, the EU's complex centrally controlled nature naturally makes the engine less adaptable to changing conditions. If he is right, this could spell real trouble.
Phi Beta Iota: The world and its populations are trapped right between an Industrial Era “too big to fail” set of governments and corporations and central banks, and a fragmenting complexity and speed of decomposition local landscape that begs for adaptive localized decision-making. We are in an interruggum between the collapse of the old systems of governance and the emergence of new bottom-up networks that would include Open Money and dismiss the fraudulent scarcity and hoarding characteristic of traditional money.
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, lays out the political case for “Trust Busting” in the 21st Century — it is a political argument that Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would have understood and probably approved of.
At this stage in the electoral cycle, Democrats should be running hard against big banks and their consequences. Some roots of our current economic difficulties lie in the Clinton 1990s, but the real origins can be traced to the financial deregulation at the heart of the Reagan Revolution – and all the underlying problems became much worse in eight years of George W. Bush’s unique brand of excess and neglect.
The theme for the November midterms should be: Which part of the 8 million jobs lost [since December 2007] do you not understand? The big banks must be reined in and forced to break themselves up, or we’ll head directly for another such crisis.
Instead, the Democrats have fallen into a legislative and electoral trap that – amazingly – they built for themselves.
President Obama has a rapidly vanishing opportunity to achieve historical greatness as a trust buster by breaking up the banks. Trust busting is an almost risk free path to lasting respect — Teddy Roosevelt's honored place in American history is more a result of his trust busting than his gross imperialism.
In the attached article, my good friend Marshall Auerback explains why Obama's faux populism attacks the symptom rather than the disease now infecting our financial system.
My guess is that Obama's “reform” policies — i.e., change we can believe in — will not even be smart politics in the long run, because at the end of the day, suckering the Tea Baggers (not to mention the so-called progressives) with phony populist appeals, while supporting cosmetic banking reforms, will alienate just about everyone except the oligarchical elites benefitting from his protectionist policies. In this sense, Mr. Obama is rapidly becoming just another Bill Clinton, a highly intelligent, self-made man of the people who squandered his opportunity for greatness on the altar of short-sighted service to the rich and powerful.
