Thursday, November 28, 2019

Incremental

Baby Stepping,

I am in the habit of looking at what history demands of us going forward, and also what history has provided at similar junctures in the past.
Right now, at the Wile-E-Coyote moment of global economy, with the cheap and easy resources all in terminal decline, and toxic waste products already a big problem for a long time, we need to steer out of exploitive  economic and military competition, and into cooperative stewardship of life on earth. 
We will need an efficient economy, in terms of meeting human and ecological needs.
What history has provided in the past is massive war, but there was always resource to exploit somewhere to pay for the war after it ended.
Not this time.
Therefore massive war is clearly against global elite interests, though some rigid nationalist elites may speculate a gain for themselves (see Israeli politics).
Cooperative resource stewardship is clearly against power elite goals, but not dangerously so. It won't kill half of them.
As long as there is a path of little, incremental steps, going forward, then massive war will be the riskier step each time. 
If we can make not-WW-3 the obvious step for every power-lizard, every day, then we may keep living to work on this very complicated problem.
Trump threatening war for the media, and not pushing the big red button, is par for the course, as far as I can tell.
What comes next?

North Korea launched a couple of missiles in the general direction of Japan, with high trajectories, which plunked down in Korean waters, far from Japan. Just showing that they can...

China responds to Trump signing Hong Kong Rights legislation, in unanimity with Congress.
 The United States signed the so-called "Hong Kong Bill of Rights and Democracy" into law. This move seriously interfered with Hong Kong affairs, seriously interfered with China's internal affairs, and seriously violated international law and basic norms of international relations. It was a naked hegemonic act, and the Chinese government and people firmly opposed it.
 Since the return of Hong Kong to the motherland, "one country, two systems" has achieved universally recognized success, and Hong Kong residents enjoy unprecedented democratic rights in accordance with the law. The United States ignored the facts, turned black and white, and blatantly supported the violent criminals who smashed and burned innocent people, trampled against the rule of law, and endangered social order. They are extremely bad in nature and very dangerous. Their fundamental purpose is to undermine Hong Kong ’s prosperity and stability, The great practice of "one country, two systems" undermines the historical process of the Chinese nation's great rejuvenation.

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Stay Home!
 Global Times editor-in-chief and notorious twitter troll, Hu Xijin ,tweeted Thursday that China is considering adding those who drafted the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and Democracy Act into law on a no-entry list, banning them from traveling to China's mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau.

 WSJ summarized, for all its huffing and puffing, "China’s leadership still wants a deal to help alleviate pressure on its fast-weakening economy", which incidentally coincides with Trump's own interest as he hopes to clinch a deal to boost his re-election bid.
 Indeed, as the WSJ's Lingling Wei also notes, Trump "Trump also chose the evening before Thanksgiving to sign the measure, a time guaranteed to get little attention in the U.S. While his signature still makes the bill law, his timing suggests he was trying to play down the political impact at home.

 The cat is out of the bag: Boris Johnson is dancing to Donald Trump’s tune, regardless of the damage this might cause to Britain. His promises to maintain Britain’s ‘high standards’ after Brexit are not worth the paper they’re written on.
 That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from a set of leaked papers detailing trade talks between US and UK officials over the last 3 years. The minutes, redacted versions of which Jeremy Corbyn held up at last Tuesday’s leaders debate, were posted by an anonymous source on the discussion website, Reddit. They show how the US administration has already successfully bullied Britain into taking a harder Brexit position, which is good for Trump’s geopolitical games and US big business, but bad for Britain’s economy and British welfare...
​ ​Papers from the time of Theresa May’s ‘Chequers plan’ are illuminating because the administration is clearly furious at May’s promise of long-term alignment with EU standards which would prevent the dilution of British food regulations which US agribusiness hopes to benefit from.​..
   US officials explicitly mention the infamous chlorine-washed chickens, promising to help the British government sell the concept to a sceptical British public. They attack attempts to reduce sugar in food, the protection of regional products (like Stilton cheese and Cornish pasties) and even nutritional labelling, which they say is more harmful than it is useful.​..
 ... They call the European Parliament’s decision to temporarily ban the Monsanto-owned chemical glyphosate “unhelpful”.​..
...​US seems interested in introducing a ‘corporate court system’ in a US-UK deal, formally known as ‘investor state dispute settlement’ or ISDS, a mechanism regularly used in other trade deals to make government action on climate change more difficult. ISDS would allow thousands of US multinationals access to secretive tribunals, for the first time, where they can sue the British government for treating them ‘unfairly’.​..
 Both the British and American sides agree that these talks should be secret – exempt from freedom of information rules – and it’s clear to see why.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/leaked-us-trade-talks-show-how-trump-is-dictating-johnsons-approach-to-a-hard-brexit/  


French farmers drive tractors through Paris to protest plans for further beatings with globalist sticks. 
It has been a long time since farmers got a carrot.

Thanksgiving Meditations

Let's Get Together, Jefferson Airplane (band of Dino Valenti, the songwriter)

Before The Deluge, Jackson Browne

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Blessings

More Equal.

George Galloway: 
​ ​The grand old Duke of York sleeps tonight on a feather pillow in a royal palace. Julian Assange, the publisher of the century sleeps in the hell of Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s own Guantanamo Bay.
​ ​The Duke of York lied about the length duration and nature of his relationship with the presumed deceased child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Julian Assange told the truth about the high crimes and misdemeanours of the rich and powerful during times of war and peace.
​ ​The FBI need to speak to the Queen’s favorite son, but no power on earth will be deployed to make him testify about what he might have seen, or even have participated in, at the townhouse in Manhattan, a Sodom and Gomorrah of our times.​  ​

 https://www.rt.com/op-ed/474374-prince-andrew-epstein-assange/
Justice blind or blinded by titles? A tale of Prince Andrew and Julian Assange

Today, almost every Democratic presidential campaign starts with what one close adviser to Barack Obama calls “The Pilgrimage”: the journey to the West End to meet the former president. 
It's like kissing The Pope's Ring. Barkie never had Tulsi over for a luau. Where's the Aloha?

Barkie Hates Bernie: 
Word is out that Obama would have come out to publicly detest Sanders, if he got too high in early primary polling. 

Progressive journalist: MSNBC doesn't try to hide 'contempt' towards Gabbard
​ ​Progressive journalist Michael Tracey claimed Tuesday that MSNBC is has dropped all pretenses for their “contempt” towards Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).
​ ​The political news contributor said the left-leaning network has treated her fellow 2020 Democratic candidates, including businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unfairly, but he argued that with Gabbard it, “crosses a certain threshold.”
​ ​“Fundamentally they’re beholden to whatever the market incentives are and right now it’s within their market interests to depict Tulsi as an infiltrator, as a Trojan horse in the Democratic Party and not deal on the substance with what she’s saying which is why over and over again they tar her as a Russian plant essentially​.​

Our Girl, Helen of DesTroy​ via Russia Today, a journalistic niche she found:​
​ ​Professional journalists are losing touch with the moral code that once galvanized the profession, a new study shows. But what truth-slinger wouldn’t be having an existential crisis in an industry where facts no longer matter?  ​...​
 ​ ​Punishing good work while reporting bad has drained journalism not just of morality but credibility. While some might be tempted to blame the industry’s fall from ethical grace on President Donald Trump’s voluble scorn for the press as the “enemy of the people,” the disintegration of the profession’s moral center has been underway for years. The constant “disruption” of the journalism industry over just the last 13 years saw online media kill off newspapers, the 24-hour news cycle take over TV, and ad sales vanish, sucked up by the Google-Facebook industrial complex.
​ ​To survive this shifting landscape, as the morality study explains, journalists have had to adapt, leaving their identities in flux. A well-developed sense of professional ethics can be a liability in a newsroom where writers are pressured to deliver clicks by any means necessary. In upside-down-world “news” where speed, novelty and ideological fealty are more important than truth, morality all but disqualifies one to be a journalist.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/474033-journalists-moral-compass-fake-news/  

Caitlin Johnstone has a couple of stories about the fake-chlorine attack in Syria being leaked. (Truthy Tucker, too.)
​ ​So you know that Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons scandal we've been talking a lot about lately? The one where evidence keeps piling up that the US, UK and France launched airstrikes against the Syrian government last year in retaliation for a poison gas attack which never took place, and then manipulated an ostensibly independent and international chemical weapons watchdog organization into covering it up?
​ ​Well, it turns out that bigtime news media outlets haven't been all that interested for some strange and mysterious reason. But just today they broke the silence with a new report that mentioned the scandal, and they've totally spun it in a way that makes the US and its allies look good! Can you believe that?

​Moon of Alabama figures the Democratic Party has way too much to lose if it votes to impeach Trump in the House, win or lose. Discovery in the Senate will reveal vast criminality, not just Biden and Ukraine scams. Can't have that. 
What if they LOSE a vote to impeach?​ That road also leads to a Trump windfall.
The House Democrats can safely vote to say "BAD PRESIDENT" and it will be over, without further downside risks.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/the-house-will-not-vote-on-impeachment-it-will-censure-trump.html 

​China and Russia have interests in getting the stalled Iranian gas pipeline to Pakistan project back in play and finished soon.​ It looks like China has passed legislation to get that project back on track. (Washington shouts at Karachi.)

Politics of plutonium. Let the bidding begin!
​ ​In the time it will take for South Carolina’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to decay, you could repeat most of human history, starting back in the Stone Age.
​ ​By the time its byproducts lose the explosive potential to be used in nuclear weapons, some 7 billion years will have passed. The Earth itself will have doubled in age, and then some.
​ ​The U.S. government will officially decide in the next few years where the plutonium — the metal used to trigger nuclear weapons — will spend that eternity. And when it does, it will ask another part of the country to bear a profound burden: to house thousands of barrels filled with scraps of the Cold War and America’s nuclear arms race, a legacy that may well outlast our civilization.
​ ​That question will soon be posed to New Mexico, where the U.S. Department of Energy has excavated cavernous vaults deep below the ruddy soil in the state’s southeastern corner.

Even ideal electric vehicles contribute more CO2 per mile than diesel, and that does not appear, in this German study, to include the sunk environmental degradation of mining rare-earth metals for the motors and lithium for the batteries, nor the fact that you can't recycle a Tesla.

No disrespect to NATO or the New York Fed, but...
The Bundesbank (the German central bank) published a book last year named Germany’s Gold. In the introduction, written by the President of the Bundesbank Jens Weidmann, the view of this bank leaves no room for interpretation. Weidmann writes (emphasis mine):
​ ​Ask anyone in Germany what they associate with gold and, more often than not, they will say that it is synonymous with enduring value and economic prosperity.
Ask us at the Bundesbank what our gold holdings mean for us and we will tell you that, first and foremost, they make up a very large share of Germany’s reserve assets ... [and they] are a major anchor underpinning confidence in the intrinsic value of the Bundesbank’s balance sheet.
​ ​The Bundesbank produced this publication to give a detailed account, the first of its kind, of how gold has grown in importance over the course of history, first as medium of payment, later as the bedrock of stability for the international monetary system.

​Trusting in God​

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Chinese People

Squeezed Tightly,

Whether residents of Hong Kong want to retain special freedoms compared to the rest of China is no longer a question since Sunday's votes were cast (hand counted paper ballots).
​I​n a statement on Monday, city leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor promised to reflect on the voters’ message.
“There are various analyses and interpretations in the community in relation to the results, and quite a few are of the view that the results reflect people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and the deep-seated problems in society,” the statement read.
It added that the government would “listen to the opinions of members of the public humbly and seriously reflect”.
Youthful, fresh-faced candidates, many active in the anti-government protests roiling the city over the past six months, were among prominent winners of the historic district council elections which had a record turnout of 2.94 million voters, representing 71.2 per cent of registered electors, up from the previous figure of 47 per cent in 2015.


​The rest of China has these massive and growing re-education camps (satellite photos). All of China has electronic micro-surveillance with AI embedded in all communications devices, facial recognition street-cameras, and so on.
​ ​A series of classified Chinese government documents were leaked by a group of journalists describe the secret operations of detention camps in Xinjiang, reported Reuters.
​ ​Published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Sunday, the documents offer a rare look into the massive internment camp for Muslim-majority Uyghur in the troubled western region of China.
​ ​The 2017 documents reveal a list of guidelines "that effectively serves as a manual for operating the camps now holding hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs and other minorities," said ICIJ.
​ ​The leak shows intelligence briefings of "how Chinese police are guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of Xinjiang residents for detention," said ICIJ.


​I hear most transactions in China are paid by smartphone now. 
Chinese rulers are historically autocratic. Chinese peasants occasionally revolt.
China's 'Official' Virtual Currency Could Be Arriving "Quite Soon" To "Challenge The U.S."

​The US deep state is feeding anti-authoritarian movements in China, and brutal dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.​ Why?
 Reuters notes in a series of headlines on Tuesday, China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi criticized US lawmakers for supporting protestors in Hong Kong.
CHINA'S TOP DIPLOMAT YANG JIECHI SAYS CHINA STRONGLY CONDEMNS US BILL ON HONG KONG HUMAN RIGHTS -XINHUA
CHINA'S TOP DIPLOMAT YANG JIECHI SAYS LODGED STERN REPRESENTATIONS WITH US ON HONG KONG BILL-XINHUA


Alistair Crooke asks, "Is Trump a covert ally to the multipolar order?" (I think that's called "realism".)
​ ​We are led to understand that the unipolar ‘moment’ of US ascendency is giving way – grudgingly – to a multipolar world: a reversion perhaps to a more nineteenth century ‘concert’ of powers (or, of significant ‘poles’ – since size is not always the prime determinant). And that Trump is trying simply to prolong that hegemonic, US moment – albeit through different means, which is to say, adopting seemingly bizarre, and sometimes counterproductive, acts and language, that infuriate the American foreign policy establishment.​..
(This part is fun.) ​ ​ In practical terms, Obama can be viewed, as some in Moscow suggest, as the Gorbachev of the American regime, (i.e. the man who began the retrenchment out from certain of the Empire’s more extended nodes); and Trump then, in this analogy, is the Yeltsin of this regime: (i.e. the president who has re-focused on the internal arena, and on reducing the burdens of the republics that used to constitute parts of the Soviet Union).​..
 Wherever you look around the globe, America’s policies have strengthened the sovereigntists: i.e. Iran, Russia and China. Is this simply paradoxical – or deliberate? As one Russian thinker has noted, “Trump’s conservative tendencies and his deep isolationist predisposition, are placing him in the position of being an objective ally of ours (i.e. Russia and China). One who is facilitating the realisation of our project.”​...
 And, as a final speculation: Is this somewhat similar to what has been going on between Trump and Xi (i.e. a play analogous to that with Iran)? Is Trump ramping up the max-pressures, and threats of Cold War against China, to substitute for the military war that some of his deep state might love him to fight, but which Trump has no intention of doing?

What's the world coming to?! Nice story of practical community action at the right time...​
When a deep red town’s only grocery closed, city hall opened its own store. Just don’t call it ‘socialism.’


Home Grown

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Naked Apes

Social Anthropoids,

John Kennedy supported human self-determination, as globalism tried to re-assert the European empires from before WW-2. He sought negotiation and cooperation, against the wishes of the Dulles Brothers and their capitalist-fascist global-financial interests. He also, wanted to get the US completely out of Vietnam, after consulting with DeGaulle. He pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and negotiated the Test-Ban Treaty. He was going to take the creation of American money back from the bankers. Not mentioned here is the fact that he was working very hard to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons, something LBJ covertly aided. 
This is a thoughtful piece, incomplete, imperfect, but the fascist global capitalists won, and still rule us today.
(Oswald was a patsy, not an assassin, folks.)
​ ​Allen Dulles had prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba months before Kennedy entered the scene which was a near disaster for the world. Just days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Allan Dulles ensured that a pro-Kennedy ally who had just recently gained power in the Congo named Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in cold blood knowing that JFK would be blamed, and every effort was made to back up the French fascists trying to stop the Algerian independence movement behind JFK’s back. Both the Cuban invasion and the assassination of Lumumba have been blamed on Kennedy to this day.
​ ​In response to this treachery, JFK made the bold move of firing CIA director Allan Dulles, and two Wall Street-connected CIA directors on November 29, 1961 saying that he would soon “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”


​Burisma and Billions for Bidens stories that go directly against imperial/criminal interests. 
The Impeachment hearings are screaming for shreds when the big crime is right here. Don't LOOK! 
(Not a Trump fanboy. Go Tulsi!)

Today's long and thought-provoking read is from Professor Nate Hagans, an ecological-economics analysis of how we got to where we are, where we are, what is left in the gas tank, and where we might go as it runs out. Superb!
​ ​A bunch of mildly clever, highly social apes broke into a cookie jar of fossil energy and have been throwing a party for the past 150 years. The conditions at the party are incompatible with the biophysical realities of the planet. The party is about over and when morning comes, radical changes to our way of living will be imposed. Some of the apes must sober up (before morning) and create a plan that the rest of the party-goers will agree to. But mildly clever, highly social apes neither easily nor voluntarily make radical changes to their ways of living. And so coffee and stimulants (credit, etc.) will be consumed during another lavish breakfast, but with the shades drawn. It’s morning already.
​ ​It is likely that, in the not-too-distant future, the size, complexity, and (literal) `burn rate' of our civilization will be much reduced by forces other than human volition. This paper suggests that we will not plan for this outcome.
​Apeman

Friday, November 22, 2019

Truth Or Politics

Breathing Fresh Air,

8 minutes of Tulsi Gabbard. Her campaign says she was the most googled candidate again. 
( I couldn't find any tally yesterday when I looked) 
Glad to hear it. She's righteous. No blinks or pauses. 8 minutes, one, single, brief "uh".
No slack for the swamp from this warrior-sister! 
She slays with truth. (They may have to JFK her.)

Truth is incomprehensible within worldview of partisan politics. I sent Tulsi another little VISA-vote.
 Tulsi Gabbard trashed the Democratic Party as “not the party that is of, by and for the people,” accused Kamala Harris of trafficking in “lies and smears and innuendo” and attacked Pete Buttigieg as naive.
 Her performance at Wednesday’s debate earned an attaboy from the Trump War Room. And some rank-and-file Democrats are at wit's end with the congresswoman who Hillary Clinton called “the favorite of the Russians.”...
​ ​“She sort of seems to be filling a pretty strange lane. Is there a part of the party that hates the party?” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It’s a little hard to figure out what itch she’s trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.”  
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/21/tulsi-gabbard-dems-072672  

Netanyahoo, Indicted For Bribery, Fraud And Breach Of Trust, Becomes More Dangerous
 The Attorney General of Israel just indicted Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahoo in three cases. The announcement comes at a time of political stalemate. It might help to resolve it.
 Israel had two parliament elections this year which both ended in a political stalemate. Neither Prime Minister Netanyahoo of the Likud Party nor Blue and White coalition leader Benny Gantz managed to form a government. Both were unable to find enough additional votes to form a coalition and to gain a majority.
 Now the parliament has 21 days to find a majority. It will likely fail and a third election seems inevitable...
 The charges have been known for quite some time and the timing of the official announcement seems political.
 Netanyahoo will now come under intense pressure to resign. It is very much his personality that blocked the forming of a new government. Should he be removed over the next 21 days it might be possible for the parliament to form a government and to avoid a third election.
 But Netanyahoo will fight tooth and nail to gain and keep immunity. He will try to delegitimize the judicative and he will use any available trick to stay in office.
 That makes him even more dangerous than he usually is.
 He might even decide to something, like starting a big war, to prevent his removal from power.
Lebanon, Syria and Iran must watch out.  

​Lebanon color revolution update:
​ It should be said at this point that Hezbollah is a responsible stakeholder in Lebanon’s stability and therefore understands the need to make tactical decisions in pursuit of the larger strategic end of preventing external forces from driving wedges between the country’s cosmopolitan socio-religious groups, hence why it’s entered into the certain political partnerships that it’s had out of its interest in working within the legal system to carry out responsible reforms to the best of its ability. These noble intentions have been deliberately misportrayed by those who have wanted to remove Hezbollah from the government for some time already as part of their never-ending campaign to delegitimize it, after which they believe that it’ll become more susceptible to the joint US-“Israeli”-GCC Hybrid War against it.

Let's all talk peaceful co-existence in a multipolar world before the nuclear-weapons Jinni gets out of the bottle, OK?
Three months after a major and still somewhat mysterious rocket explosion in Russia's far north which caused radiation levels to spike at least sixteen times above normal, President Putin confirmed in statements Thursday that his military is developing a weapon that has "no equal in the world," according to Interfax news agency...
At the time Reuters cited dangerously high levels of radiation emitted from the military test facility: "Greenpeace has cited data from the Emergencies Ministry that it said showed radiation levels had risen 20 times above the normal level in Severodvinsk around 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Nyonoksa."
Enough official descriptions of the experimental weapon had been pieced together for analysts to speculate at the time that it had been a prototype nuclear-powered cruise missile known in Russia as the 9M730 Burevestnik and by Nato as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.
Putin had first unveiled the experimental technology during a 2018 speech showcasing Russian defense technology developments. The chief stunning claim behind the hypersonic missile is that it can traverse the globe indefinitely at "faster than Mach 5" based on its nuclear powered core.  


​ The major Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun revealed this week that Chinese officials issued a stern to warning to Japan and South Korea against any move to host intermediate-range missiles on their soil.
​ ​Citing both Japanese and US sources, the newspaper said Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued the message to his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in August — an action apparently triggered by President Trump's announced official withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia.
​ ​Given a key administration criticism of the INF is that it doesn't account for developing technology and advanced missiles of major powers like China, Beijing is said to be worried over the fallout of a potential new US-Russia arms race for southeast Asia.  

 We just witnessed one of the most monumental events of the entire decade, and yet most Americans still don’t understand what has happened.  In recent months, the global economy and stock markets around the world have been buoyed by the hope that the U.S. and China would soon sign a new trade agreement.  Unfortunately, there is no way that is going to happen now.  On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the House of Representatives passed the same bill by a 417 to 1 vote on Wednesday.  Needless to say, the Chinese are beyond angry that Congress has done this.  In part one of this article, I showed that China is warning the U.S. to “rein in the horse at the edge of the precipice” and that there will be “revenge” if this bill is allowed to become law.  And it looks like this bill will actually become law, because Bloomberg is reporting that President Trump is fully expected to sign it.

​Hurling Insults​

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Left Unsaid

Distracted,

Look​ there​, an ​I​mpeachment!
​ ​House Democrats have slipped an unqualified renewal of the draconian PATRIOT Act into an emergency funding bill – voting near-unanimously for sweeping surveillance carte blanche that was the basis for the notorious NSA program.​..​
​ ​A roll-call vote on the bill was split exactly along party lines, with all 230 Democrats standing up for unconstitutional mass surveillance – including progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who spoke out against it earlier. Two other Democrats opted not to vote, but not a single representative dared oppose party groupthink.

​China is back on historical track. Chinese history is many thousands of years of China ruling everybody, except when it was having internal strife. 
I'm not sure how well westerners grasp that. 
China being weak has been a blip, and it's over.
That Dragon is Awake, and not going back to sleep. 
​ ​Our relationship with China just went from bad to worse, and most Americans don’t even realize that we just witnessed one of the most critical foreign policy decisions of this century. The U.S. Senate just unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the Chinese are absolutely seething with anger. Violent protests have been rocking Hong Kong for months, and the Chinese have repeatedly accused the United States of being behind the protests. Whether that is true or not, the U.S. Senate has openly sided with the protesters by passing this bill, and there is no turning back now.

​Chinese power elites are pragmatic. They are ramping up coal-fired electrical generation, because they have coal, and they can burn Chinese coal when coal shipments from Australia and the US are cut off in wartime. "China First"
​ ​China’s growing appetite for new coal-fired power stations has outstripped plant closures in the rest of the world since the start of last year, data shows.
​ ​Elsewhere countries reduced their capacity by 8GW in the 18 months to June because old plants were retired faster than new ones were built. But over the same period China increased its capacity by 42.9GW despite a global move towards cleaner energy sources and a pledge to limit the use of coal.
​ ​Christine Shearer, an analyst at the NGO Global Energy Monitor, said: “China’s proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach, even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/20/china-appetite-for-coal-power-stations-returns-despite-climate-pledge-capacity  

Reserve currency status ultimately destroys the productive capacity of a nation, because industry cannot export, or even compete with imports. 
The $US is old enough to fall from that graceful status. No more cheap-stuff for Americans after that.
ANZ told CNBC that China would likely diversify into British pounds, Euros, and Japanese yen... and gold.
ANZ believes China is building "shadow reserves" as a way to diversify from the dollar.
"In fact, we believe that the Chinese government has already discreetly diversified its offshore portfolios to include alternative investments," the report said.

​My read on Trump diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula is that he is suddenly adding this $5 billion increased price for keeping American occupation forces in South Korea, to facilitate a step-down of those forces, which is what North and South Korean governments want. Koreans don't want to be 2 countries at war with each other, just because they were occupied by competing outside powers after WW-2.​ Maybe I'm wrong, but I see a pattern.
​ ​Though South Korea had successfully negotiated cost sharing agreements for decades, the current timing to the crisis couldn't be worse, given stalled US-DPRK talks and threats of new missile tests, not to mention the looming US presidential elections next year. CNN reports of the crisis:
​ ​The sudden end to the talks, which were in their third round, comes amid renewed tensions between the allies after President Donald Trump hiked the price tag for US forces roughly 400% for 2020, a move that frustrated Pentagon officials and deeply concerned Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

​Impeach Trump! 
Ukrainian MP Claims $7.4 Billion Obama-Linked Laundering, Puts Biden Group Take At $16.5 Million
 A Ukrainian MP says a document leaked from the Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General contains claims against Burisma owner Nikolai Zlochevsky, as well as Hunter Biden and his partners - who allegedly received $16.5 million for their 'services' - according to Alexander Dubinsky of the ruling Servant of the People Party.
Dubinsky made the claim in a Wednesday press conference, citing materials from an investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma.
 "Zlochevsky was charged with this new accusation by the Office of the Prosecutor General but the press ignored it," said the MP. "It was issued on November 14."
 "The son of Vice-President Joe Biden was receiving payment for his services, with money raised through criminal means and money laundering," he then said, adding "Biden received money that did not come from the company’s successful operation but rather from money stolen from citizens."
 According to Dubinsky, Hunter Biden's income from Burisma is a "link that reveals how money is siphoned [from Ukraine]," and how Biden is just one link in the chain of Zlochevsky's money laundering operation which included politicians from the previous Yanukovich administration who continued their schemes under his successor, President Pyotr Poroshenko.
 

Google search results by candidate are not released this time. 
Tulsi Gabbard led each of the previous times. 
That's not a preferred narrative.​ Bernie, either...
Would MSNBC ever dare favor the Democratic Party establishment? Of course not!
​ ​Just kidding. But I at least thought that the de facto media arm of the Democratic National Committee might be a little bit more discreet. Wednesday night’s debate in Atlanta, moderated by MSNBC, was openly skewed toward Warren and tried to all but ignore outsiders such as Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang.
​ ​This was evident from the debate’s very first half hour. Warren got at least three questions before Yang or Gabbard were even acknowledged.

​Bernie Sanders gets routinely slandered by MSNBC, not merely ignored. 

Sanders took a principled stand on US Foreign (AKA "war") Policy. This is a huge initiative.
​ ​“One of the big differences between the vice president and myself is he supported the terrible war in Iraq, and I helped lead the opposition against it,” declared Sanders. “And not only that, I voted against the very first Gulf War as well. And I think we need a foreign policy which understands who our enemies are that we don’t have to spend more money on the military than the next ten nations combined.”
​ ​Responding to a question about whether he would negotiate a deal with the Taliban in order to get the United States out of Afghanistan, Sanders argued that the time has come to “rethink the entire War on Terror.”
​ ​“I think it is time, after spending many trillions of dollars on these endless wars which have resulted in more dislocation and mass migrations and pain in that region, it is time to bring our troops home,” said Sanders.​..
​ Sanders seized every opportunity to outline foreign-policy alternatives in the fifth round of Democratic debating. Joining several of the candidates in calling out President’s Trump’s approach to Saudi Arabia, he declared that “Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally.” Sanders argued that the United States must promote negotiations between the Saudis and the Iranians, telling both “we are sick and tired of us spending huge amounts of money and human resources because of your conflicts.”
That in itself was a strong statement, but the senator did not stop there.
“The same thing goes with Israel and the Palestinians,” said Sanders. “It is no longer good enough for us to be pro-Israel, I am pro-Israel, but we must treat the Palestinians with the dignity they deserve.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/palestine-debate-bernie-sanders/  

Pepe Escobar relates comments by Iranian foreign Minister Zarif, who speaks without notes at the Astana Club.
​ ​Netanyahu “managed to destroy the JCPOA. What is the problem? The problem is we decided not to fold. That is our only crime. We had a revolution against a government that was supported by the United States, imposed on our country by the United States, [that] tortured our people with the help of the United States, and never received a single human rights condemnation, and now people are worried why they say ‘Death to America’? We say death to these policies, because they have brought nothing but this farce. What did they bring to us? If somebody came to the United States, removed your president, imposed a dictator who killed your people, wouldn’t you say death to that country?”  
​ ​Zarif inevitably had to evoke Mike Pompeo: “Today the Secretary of State of the United States says publicly: ‘If Iran wants to eat, it has to obey the United States.’ This is a war crime. Starvation is a crime against humanity. It’s a newspeak headline. If Iran wants its people to eat, it has to follow what he said. He says, ‘Death to the entire Iranian people.’”  
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/11/article/irans-only-crime-is-we-decided-not-to-fold/  

Turkey (aided covertly by Kissinger) invaded Cyprus in 1974, and still holds northern Cyprus. Cyprus is a peripheral (exploited) EU member, with gas in her territorial waters, which Turkey wants and the EU wants. It's a power-play. 
Turkey threatens to flood the EU with millions of shell-shocked war refugees who speak Islamic-fundamentalist, if Turkey doesn't get plenty of gas for Turkish-occupied "Northern Cyprus".

Making concrete involves heating limestone to 1500 degrees by burning coal. The limestone releases CO2, and you get "coker", which is ready to react with water to make concrete for your buildings and roads. This is a huge CO2 release.
“When it comes to buildings, we don’t usually demolish them because they’re structurally failing,” Gregory said. “Usually we demolish them because they go out of style or aren’t needed.” The longer we can use old buildings, the fewer new ones we’ll have to build, and the less cement we’ll need to manufacture.  

​Project Censored's top 10 ​suppressed stories of 2018:

Missed That

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Extra Rich People

Regular Folks,

Peter Turchin has set up analysis, based on Complexity Theory, that predicts periods of political discord. When the ratio of rich people to working people rises, it eventually leads to fighting among the elites and aspiring elites, which somehow involves regular people killing each other in droves. The severity of the die-off is one of the ways of grading mild, moderate or severe. The 2020s are poised to be one of those periods for the US. These are the transcript and slides of an hour lecture, given in Utrechet, Netherlands, earlier this month. The transcript link doesn't work for me today, but the slides tell the story. 
Rich people are very expensive to keep, and are inclined to lie, cheat and steal when playing with others on a good day...

Charles Hugh Smith:
All the status quo "fixes" only hasten the collapse of the status quo.
That economic, social and political conflict is accelerating is self-evident. 

What's open to debate are the core drivers of conflict / disorder /unraveling.

"​Algorithmic Feudalism"​
​ ​Google has the power to shape your mind by limiting what you have access to, while at the same time wielding the power to destroy your livelihood with a tweak of an algorithm. Although a lot of the most nefarious stuff is still being conducted at the margins so the masses don’t realize what’s happening, stealth censorship will continue to be rolled out until the internet most people use becomes for all practical purposes an information gulag where nothing but shameless propaganda is pumped onto screens by hidden algorithms tweaked (for your own good) by billionaires.
​ ​A perfect example of this can be seen in how YouTube hides ones of the most popular videos ever made regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The short clip made by James Corbett, is titled 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory, and has over 3.2 million views. Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube spits out if you search by the exact title of the video.
​   ​
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/11/18/algorithmic-feudalism/  
​ ​Keep scrolling and you still won’t find it. This isn’t YouTube helping users find the information they want, it’s YouTube hiding content from its users. Moreover, the only reason I’m aware of the censoring of this particular item is because I’m familiar with the video from years ago. You can be certain this sort of thing is more common than you realize and will only get worse.  


Do The World's Energy Policies Make Sense?, Gail Tverberg​ 
(The reset will be into a world of less fossil fuel, less, manufacturing, less "wealth")​
​ ​In order for coal production to grow as much as the higher emission scenarios assume, there needs to be a major turnaround in the situation. World coal prices would need to rise substantially. In fact, coal in very difficult locations for extraction, such as under the North Sea, need to become profitable to extract. This situation seems very unlikely.
​ ​It seems to me that climate modelers should be considering more realistic scenarios regarding CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. One scenario which should be considered is the possible near term collapse of several governmental organizations, such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the governments of several oil exporting countries.


Charles is right again. People won't get healthier as long as it is so much more profitable to sell us addictive crap that makes us sick, and patch the problems with medicines that we need to buy every month, and all those appointments, tests and procedures. Good health is bad business. Still, Medicare-for-all is coming. Jobs-for-all would be useful.
Medicare-for-All "Socialism" Is Just Another Racket
​ ​The entire system of health needs to be re-organized from the ground up, and funding the rackets will only speed the collapse of the system.
​ ​The core problem with "socialist" proposals such as Medicare-for-All is that they don't actually fix what's broken--they just expand existing rackets such as the healthcare/sickcare racket, the higher education racket, and so on.


Middle East Self-Correction (despite the ongoing efforts of US/NATO/Israel)
 “Two years, three years, five years’ maximum from now, you will not recognize the same Middle East”, says the former Egyptian FM, Arab League Secretary General and Presidential Candidate, Amr Moussa, in an interview with Al-Monitor...
 The present regional turbulence, he suggests, is [essentially] a reaction to the US playing the sectarian card – manipulating “the issues of sect and religion, et cetera, was not only a dangerous, but a sinister kind of policy”. He added however, “I don’t say that it will happen tomorrow, but [the discord between Sunnis and the Shi’a fading away], will certainly happen in the foreseeable future, which will reflect on Lebanon too.”
 

​ ​US Secretary of State ​("rapture")Mike Pompeo announced Monday that Washington no longer views Israeli settlements in the West Bank as inconsistent with international law. It marked a reversal of America’s longstanding legal opinion labeling them illegal since 1978.
​ ​The move triggered a massive condemnation, with Palestinians saying that the measure “endorses law of the jungle.” UN for its part reiterated its point that the settlements are in breach of international law.
https://www.rt.com/news/473795-moscow-us-israeli-settlements/  

Rubbing it in the face of the world serves who?
​ ​Monday’s announcement was the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration — declaring occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and the movement of the US embassy to Jeru​sa​lem — aimed at weak​en​ing Palestinian claims of statehood.
​ ​“The announcement marks a continuation of the Trump Administration’s efforts to undermine years of progress on refining parameters for an agreed-upon resolution of the core issues of the conflict,” Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said in a statement.
​ ​The group called the announcement “an Orwellian absurdity,” saying “no declaration will change the fact that the settlements were built on occupied territory, in contravention of international law, and that they pose among the greatest obstacles to peace.”

Monday, November 18, 2019

Anti Judo

Faked Out,

This article from Oriental Review starts out as Trump-plays-5D-chess, which we see sometimes, but it is worth going just a bit farther, because there is a lot to corroborate the view that Rump is something like a political Houdini, holding his breath and making a lot of weird movements, which actually break the imperial system. They figure he has found a way to coordinate with Putin to bring down the relocated-since-WW-2 UK global financial empire, fought previously by Presidents Jackson and Lincoln.
It's quite lovely, if even half true.

Judo master, known for his conservative pronouncements...
Vladimir Putin: "The Dollar Enjoyed Great Trust Around The World. But For Some Reason It Is Being Used As A Political Weapon, Imposing Restrictions. Many Countries Are Now Turning Away From The Dollar As A Reserve Currency. US Dollar Will Collapse Soon."  

​"Democracy"-for-export:​
Bolivia’s Self-Declared 'Interim President' Believes Indians Are 'Satanic,' Shouldn’t Be Allowed in Cities
"I dream of a #Bolivia free of Indigenous satanic rites, the city is not for 'Indians,' they better go to the highlands or El Chaco," Senator @JeanineAnez said on her Twitter account about her country where more than 65% of the population is Indigenous.  

​Paul Craig Roberts:
​ ​Jeanine Anez, one of the Bolivian Spanish elite, has declared herself the President of Bolivia. She is one of the elite allied with Washington who accused Evo Morales of rigging his reelection. But the CIA’s Bolivian lackeys who forced Morales to resign his presidency don’t bother with elections. They just declare themselves president like Juan Guaido, the CIA creep in Venezuela, who hoped to unseat Maduro, the elected president, by declaring himself president. Neither Anez nor Guaido ran for the office. They just self-appointed themselves president. The organization of American States, a CIA front organization, accepted the unelected presidents as rightful rulers. President Trump declared the CIA coup to be an increase in freedom and democracy.
​ ​As Trump approves of the attempted coup against Venezuela’s Maduro and the successful coup against Bolivia’s Morales, how can he complain about the CIA/DNC ongoing coup against him?
Live by the sword and die by the sword.


​Evo Morales is the only legal President of Bolivia, even if one disputes his re-election. His term is not over. These people know they are facing fascist dictators now. This story from "the beeb".
​ ​The death toll in Bolivia continues to rise after violent clashes between security forces and supporters of former President Evo Morales.
​ ​On Friday, security forces opened fire on supporters of Mr Morales in Sacaba, killing at least eight people.
A doctor in the city told the Associated Press that most of those killed and injured had bullet wounds.
The country's national ombudsman said a total of 19 people had died since the disputed election on 20 October.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50441867

N​ext generation of journalists is taught which side the bread gets buttered on. Thanks Helen.
​ A renowned journalism school’s paper recently apologized for ‘traumatizing’ students by posting photos of their participation in a public protest. Is protecting people from the consequences of their actions now the media’s duty?
​ ​The purpose of journalism is “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” according to a quote frequently attributed to newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. At Northwestern University – home to a renowned journalism school – the profession’s task seems to be comforting the comfortable, while belittling the afflicted.
​ ​University paper The Daily Northwestern printed a fulsome apology for “contributing to the harm students experienced” as they protested an appearance by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a campus College Republicans event. The nature of that harm? Reporters assigned to cover the event photographed the protesters and posted the photos on social media – a breathtakingly normal act of journalism that they realized only afterwards was “retraumatizing and invasive,” according to the apology.
​ ​The obsequious screed apparently took eight people to write, including the paper’s “Diversity and Inclusion Chair.”

​The empire has more where she came from...
WikiLeaks lawyer Jen Robinson said Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the judge presiding over Julian Assange’s extradition proceedings who is embroiled in a conflict of interest, will no longer be sitting on the case.

​The French majority is dispossessed, those outside of the cities. Gilets Jaunes one year on.​
​ ​The 2017 election was supposed to be a watershed moment. France had rejected populism and had instead embraced a new centrist politics. Emmanuel Macron was held up as a liberalising reformer, an adept technocrat and a popular anti-populist. The former Rothschild banker was to be the saviour of France and of the EU. The Economist, the bible of liberal centrists, celebrated his election victory by depicting him as a modern-day Jesus: literally walking on water.
​ ​But beneath the headlines, disenchantment with the political class was clear. Some 10million people expressed their anger by voting for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National (re-named National Rally in 2018). According to IPSOS polling, the only socioeconomic category to back Le Pen over Macron was blue-collar workers. Among voters who said they found it ‘very difficult’ to cope financially at their current income level, 69 per cent voted for Le Pen.
​ ​Though many voters might have relished giving the establishment a bloody nose, clearly Le Pen’s unpalatable politics was not a price worth paying. Abstentionism was perhaps a more acceptable outlet for voters’ frustrations. In the second round of the presidential election, there was a record three million votes blancs (expressing a preference for neither candidate). The legislative elections that followed had the lowest turnout in the history of the Fifth Republic.
It took the emergence of the gilets jaunes to galvanise members of forgotten France. Around the time of the first yellow-vest protests, just 25 per cent of French voters said they approved of President Macron. In contrast, 73 per cent told pollsters they supported the gilets jaunes.


​RT has story and some illustrative video clips:
A shopping mall and several bus stops were vandalized when the protesters vented their anger over what they deem as government inaction towards their demands, made throughout a full year of weekly demonstrations.

More video, from within the tear gas and smoke, up close and personal:

Grappling

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Worth Working For

Cooperative Workers,

Gathering in Groups as Society Falls Apart (harder than it may sound)
“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?
Individualism is one of the many privileges of ‘the privileged’ in Western society. We have options and choices about where we live, with whom, of what genders, ages or races, whether we are child-free or have a brood, what we eat, what we believe, jobs we’ll accept, and on and on and on. As people look at civilizational breakdown in detail, though, they realize that to survive, other people might not be optional – joining a group, a farm, a small town might be necessary.
Survival is not a solo sport. If it happens, it will happen in community – intentional, multi-generational family, accidental – where we can share the work, grow food, trade, defend ourselves, socialize, learn, teach, repair. Civilization, it turns out, has a lot of services built in that will need to be maintained as long as possible or created anew… or done without.


 The technical starting point of any major war is, in fact, incidental. Most any excuse will suffice. What’s necessary is two opponents, each of whom accuses the other of attempting to foment aggression. At that point, all that’s needed to light the spark is a young soldier or agitator with an itchy trigger finger, or a politician with a show of bravado, or a military leader who chooses to break from his orders to stand down.
In many cases, if the war does not start spontaneously, a false-flag incident suffices.
 One country creates an event which it purports is an act of aggression by its opponent. (The recent events in the Strait of Hormuz have a distinct false-flag odour about them.)
Again, the actual catalyst matters little. Once the rattling of sabres begins, as it has, presently, in the Middle East, all that’s required to create a major war is a slipup or a nudge.


From 9/11/2018, not outdated, not for "Coincidence Theorists"... Thanks Cat.
“‘ISRAEL’ DID 9/11, NOT MUSLIMS, AND ANYONE WHO THINKS OTHERWISE 17 YEARS ON IS AN IDIOT”  

Helen of DesTroy has an op-ed, looking at the ancient 1960s roots of the CIA-manufactured moniker, "Conspiracy Theorist".
 The tradition of labeling ideas conspiracy theories to discredit them is itself a conspiracy - a documented one. The term was weaponized in 1967 in a CIA memo about how to quash criticism of the Warren Report, the product of the government investigation into President John F. Kennedy's murder. The memo laments that some 46 percent of Americans did not believe the assassin acted alone, and details how the agency might "counter and discredit the claims of the conspiracy theorists" suggesting others were involved. It recommends "employ[ing] propaganda assets to refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose." The agency had infiltrated mainstream media through its Operation Mockingbird, paying or even planting journalists to push favorable viewpoints, and a flood of articles denouncing ‘conspiracy theorists’ followed, pushing the term into the popular lexicon.  

Ousted Bolivian President Evo Morales has accused the US-headquartered Organization of American States of making a political decision in backing the right-wing opposition, saying the coup continues to wreak havoc after his exile.
Speaking from Mexico a day after he fled Bolivia, Morales said: "The OAS is in the service of the North American empire."
Morales said he “could not understand” how his military commanders could show such “disloyalty.”
“That confirms that my great crime is to be indigenous. It’s a class problem,” 
he said.
The exiled president said that after freeing itself from the International Monetary Fund, the Bolivian economy was doing better.
We had big plans in the field of exports.
Yet, the coup plotters “do not accept the nationalization of natural resources,” Morales said.
Morales also claimed that a mechanical failure on a helicopter he was traveling on in early November was “not accidental” and said he wants the incident to be investigated. The helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing just after takeoff due to a “mechanical fault in the tail rotor.”  


 According to Max Keiser, there could be “a catastrophic trapdoor opening underneath the US economy.”
When China announces as a surprise its 20,000 tons of gold and a gold-backed cryptocurrency that “will kill the US dollar deader than a doornail,” it will be a “Pearl Harbor-type event and it’s coming in the next six to nine months,” he predicts.

Dan sends a long and well fleshed out article about Israeli/US Mideast policy, currently in awkward transition, but still with the basic objective of "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists", as George Bush eloquently explained.
 In Lebanon, the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (the main financial patron of the Hariri family and the Sunni elite) are determined to destroy Hezbollah—because Hezbollah is allied with Iran, because it has proved itself as an effective fighting force against both jihadis in Syria and against the Israeli Army, and because it has built great political legitimacy for itself in Lebanon across sectarian lines. It will be impossible to sideline or break the power of Hezbollah without igniting a new civil war.
 And that is exactly what the US/Israel/KSA are willing to do. Do not forget: For them, chaos is preferable to tolerating any resistance to Zionism, US imperialism, or Saudi control of Sunni Lebanon (and the greater Middle East).

Pipelines to Europe are a major physical asset under contention in global power games. 
Europe is quickly becoming one of the most important export destinations for gas exporters. Production is decreasing quickly due to political and technical developments. The next few decades are promising for exporters. Nord Stream 2 is arguably one of the most contentious projects currently under development. Denmark recently granted the last necessary permit to start construction activities in its EEZ and analysts now agree that the project’s completion is only a matter of time. In reality, the pipeline’s future was decided long before construction even started due to external factors such as Poland’s decision to diversify away from Russian gas and Western Europe’s determination to turn away from nuclear and fossil fuel production.  

Coincidence Theorist

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Sociopaths At War

Citizens,

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was overthrown in a military coup on November 10. He is now in Mexico
. Before he left office, Morales had been involved in a long project to bring economic and social democracy to his long-exploited country. It is important to recall that Bolivia has suffered a series of coups, often conducted by the military and the oligarchy on behalf of transnational mining companies. Initially, these were tin firms, but tin is no longer the main target in Bolivia. The main target is its massive deposits of lithium, crucial for the electric car.
Over the past 13 years, Morales has tried to build a different relationship between his country and its resources. He has not wanted the resources to benefit the transnational mining firms, but rather to benefit his own population. Part of that promise was met as Bolivia’s poverty rate has declined, and as Bolivia’s population was able to improve its social indicators. Nationalization of resources combined with the use of its income to fund social development has played a role. The attitude of the Morales government toward the transnational firms produced a harsh response from them, many of them taking Bolivia to court.
Over the course of the past few years, Bolivia has struggled to raise investment to develop the lithium reserves in a way that brings the wealth back into the country for its people. Morales’ Vice President Álvaro García Linera had said that lithium is the “fuel that will feed the world.” Bolivia was unable to make deals with Western transnational firms; it decided to partner with Chinese firms. This made the Morales government vulnerable. It had walked into the new Cold War between the West and China. The coup against Morales cannot be understood without a glance at this clash...
China’s Tianqi Lithium Group, which operates in Argentina, was going to make a deal with YLB. Both Chinese investment and the Bolivian lithium company were experimenting with new ways to both mine the lithium and to share the profits of the lithium. The idea that there might be a new social compact for the lithium was unacceptable to the main transnational mining companies.
Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government. 
Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go.
After the coup, Tesla’s stock rose astronomically.

​Moon of Alabama has more analysis:
Evo Morales found asylum in Mexico. Bolivia will now turn into a neoliberal hell and a quasi-dictatorship
It will take time, a lot of effort and probably a civil war to regain what was lost through this coup.
What can one learn from this?
​ ​As one person remarked to me: "When one wants to win and keep a socialist revolution one has to bring guillotines."
Socialist movements who come into power must neutralize their biggest local enemies. They need to build their own defenses. They can not rely on those institutions, like the military and police, they inherit from previous regimes.
Such movements must never rely on U.S. affiliated organizations like the OAS or on military and police personal that had come under U.S. indoctrination.
A movement needs a public voice. It must build its own media locally and internationally.
​ ​Hugo Chavez knew this all this. As soon as he won the presidential election in Venezuela he built the necessary forces to defend the state. It is the only reason why his successor Nicolás Maduro defeated the coup attempt against him and is still in power.

Death by Oligarchy:
​ Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich. This forces an underfunded government to borrow from the banks, further enriching the oligarchs, and impose punishing austerity programs on the public. They privatize traditional government services, including utilities, intelligence gathering, large parts of the military, the police, the prison system and schools to make billions in profits. They create complex financial mechanisms that ensure usurious interest rates on mortgages, personal and student loans. They legalize accounting fraud and suppress wages to keep the public trapped in a crippling debt peonage. They loot trillions in taxpayer money when their speculative bubbles burst.
They are no longer capitalists, if we define capitalists as those who make money from the means of production. They are a criminal class of financial speculators that rewrite the laws to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They are parasites that feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They manipulate money. And this gaming of the system and seizure of political power by finance capital is why the wealthiest 1% of America’s families control 40% of the nation’s wealth.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/death-by-oligarchy/ 

​Charles Hugh Smith looks at government of the sociopaths, by the sociopaths and for the sociopaths:
​ As long as central banks create and distribute trillions in conscience-free credit to conscience-free financiers and corporations, the incentives for sociopathy only increase.
 "Sociopath" is a word we now encounter regularly in the mainstream media, but what does it mean? Here is a list of 16 traits, many of which are visible in lionized corporate and political leaders and entrepreneurs.
 One key trait is a lack of moral responsibility or conscience; the sociopath feels no remorse if he/she takes advantage of people or exploits them.
 Sociopaths are masters of superficial charm, intelligence and confidence, and adept at massaging or misrepresenting reality up to and including outright lying to persuade others or get their way.

​What happens AFTER bankers "own" everything?​ Things break. Then what?
​ ​The bubbles of the 1920s were unleashed with the early death of President William Harding in 1923 and grew under the careful guidance of JP Morgan’s President Coolidge and financier Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary) who de-regulated the banks, imposed austerity onto the country, and cooked up a scheme for Broker loans allowing speculators to borrow 90% on their stock. Wall Street was deregulated, investments into the real economy were halted during the 1920s and insanity became the norm. In 1925 broker loans totalled $1.5 billion and grew to $2.6 billion in 1926 and hit $5.7 billion by the end of 1927. By 1928, the stock market was overvalued fourfold!
 When the bubble was sufficiently inflated, a moment was decided upon to coordinate a mass “calling in” of the broker loans. Predictably, no one could pay them resulting in a collapse of the markets. Those “in the know” cleaned up with JP Morgan’s “preferred clients”, and other financial behemoths selling before the crash and then buying up the physical assets of America for pennies on the dollar. One notable person who made his fortune in this manner was Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman, who went onto bailout a bankrupt Nazi party in 1932. These financiers had a tight allegiance with the City of London and coordinated their operations through the private central banking system of America’s Federal Reserve and Bank of International Settlements.​..​
​...​In the midst of the crisis, the City of London removed itself from the gold standard in 1931 which was a crippling blow to the USA, as it resulted in a flight of gold from America causing a deeper contraction of the money supply and thus inability to respond to the depression. British goods simultaneously swamped the USA crushing what little production was left.
It was in this atmosphere that one of the least understood battles unfolded in 1933​...
​​...​The ​City of London announced that a new global system controlled by Central Banks had to be created post haste. Their objective was to use the economic crisis as an excuse to remove from nation states any power over monetary policy, while enhancing the power of Independent Central Banks as enforcers of “balanced global budgets”.
​...(German)  Chancellor Schleicher’s resistance to a bankers’ dictatorship was resolved by a “soft coup” ousting the patriotic leader in favor of Adolph Hitler (under the control of a Bank of England toy named Hjalmar Schacht) in January 1933 with Schleicher assassinated the following year. 
​ ​In America, an assassination attempt on Roosevelt was thwarted on February 15, 1933 when a woman knocked the gun out of the hand of an anarchist-freemason in Miami resulting in the death of Chicago’s Mayor Cermak (1).
​ ​Without FDR’s dead body, the London conference met an insurmountable barrier, as FDR refused to permit any American cooperation.​ ​ Roosevelt recognized the necessity for a new international system, but he also knew that it had to be organized by sovereign nation states subservient to the general welfare of the people and not central banks dedicated to the welfare of the oligarchy.​..
 ​The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural speech on March 4th saying: “The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit”.
​ ​ FDR declared a war on Wall Street on several levels, beginning with his support of the Pecorra Commission which sent thousands of bankers to prison, and exposed the criminal activities of the top tier of Wall Street’s power structure who manipulated the depression, buying political offices and pushing fascism. Ferdinand Pecorra who ran the commission called out the deep state when he said “this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the United States.”  
​ ​ Pecorra’s highly publicized success empowered FDR to impose sweeping regulation in the form of 1) Glass-Steagall bank separation, 2) bankruptcy re-organization and 3) the creation of the Security Exchange Commission to oversee Wall Street. Most importantly, FDR disempowered the London-controlled Federal Reserve by installing his own man as Chair (Industrialist Mariner Eccles) who forced it to obey national commands for the first time since 1913, while creating an “alternative” lending mechanism outside of Fed control called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which became the number one lender to infrastructure in America throughout the 1930s​...
...​ From 1933-1939, 45 000 infrastructure projects were built. The many “local” projects were governed, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative today, under a “grand design” which FDR termed the “Four Quarters” featuring zones of megaprojects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority area in the south east, the Columbia River Treaty zone on the northwest, the St Laurence Seaway zone on the North east, and Hoover Dam/Colorado zone on the Southwest. These projects were transformative in ways money could never measure as the Tennessee area’s literacy rose from 20% in 1932 to 80% in 1950​...​  
... Those who criticize the New Deal today ignore the fact that its failures have more to do with Wall Street sabotage than anything intrinsic to the program...... Wall Street did everything it could to choke the economy at every turn...
.​..​When, in 1937, FDR’s Treasury Secretary persuaded him to cancel public works to see if the economy “could stand on its own two feet”, Wall Street pulled credit out of the economy collapsing the Industrial production index from 110 to 85 erasing seven years’ worth of gain, while steel fell from 80% capacity back to depression levels of 19%. Two million jobs were lost and the Dow Jones lost 39% of its value. This was no different from kicking the crutches out from a patient in rehabilitation and it was not lost on anyone that those doing the kicking were openly supporting Fascism in Europe. Bush patriarch Prescott Bush, then representing Brown Brothers Harriman was found guilty for trading with the enemy in 1942!
​ ​The bankers didn’t limit themselves to financial sabotage during this time, but also attempted a fascist military coup which was exposed by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his congressional testimony of November 20, 1934. Butler had testified that the plan was begun in the Summer of 1933 and organized by Wall Street financiers who tried to use him as a puppet dictator leading 500 000 American Legion members to storm the White House. As Butler spoke, those same financiers had just set up an anti-New Deal organization called the American Liberty League which fought to keep America out of the war in defense of an Anglo-Nazi fascist global government which they wished to partner with.
The American Liberty league only changed tune when it became evident that Hitler had become a disobedient Frankenstein monster who wasn’t content in a subservient position to Britain’s idea of a New World Order. In response to the Liberty League’s agenda, FDR said “some speak of a New World Order, but it is not new and it is not order”​.
 While FDR’s struggle did change the course of history, his early death during the first months of his fourth term resulted in a fascist perversion of his post-war vision.
​ ​Rather than see the IMF, World Bank or UN used as instruments for the internationalization of the New Deal principles to promote long term, low interest loans for the industrial development of former colonies, FDR’s allies were ousted from power over his dead body, and they were recaptured by the same forces who attempted to steer the world towards a Central Banking Dictatorship in 1933.
​ ​The American Liberty League spawned into various “patriotic” anti-communist organizations which took power with the FBI and McCarthyism under the fog of the Cold War. This is the structure that Eisenhower warned about when he called out “the Military Industrial Complex” in 1960 and which John Kennedy did battle with during his 900 days as president.
​ ​ This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America... 
​ ​ The Bank of England-authored Green New Deal and Synthetic Hegemonic Currency which promise to impose draconian constraints on humanity’s carrying capacity in defense of saving nature from humanity have nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and they have less to do with the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. These are merely central bankers’ wet dreams for depopulation and fascism “with a democratic face” which their 1933 conference failed to achieve and can only be imposed if people remain blind to their own recent history.  
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/08/how-to-crush-bankers-dictatorship-lesson-from-1933/?fbclid=IwAR2lf0LTf_1M6NT_6g8WwNzQFvkm7X3I2elOu3cWV_HQEX_GUFbxcdQgNGQ  

The Wall Street Journal has found that Turkish-backed Syrian forces currently fighting US-backed Kurdish groups as part of 'Operation Peace Spring' are guilty of war crimes, including summary executions of Kurdish civilians.
​ ​"U.S. military officials watched live drone feeds last month that appeared to show Turkish-backed Arab gunmen targeting civilians during their assault on Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, attacks the Americans reported to their commanders as possible war crimes, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the incidents," reports the WSJ.
​ ​What the report fails to mention, however, is the blatantly obvious and relevant recent history that the Islamist militants carrying out such atrocities are the very same militants which were a few short years ago funded, armed and trained by the CIA and Pentagon.
 ​Erdogan's proxy ground invasion force known as the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA), more commonly called the Syrian National Army, has even recently been filmed deploying CIA-supplied TOW missiles against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as we previously detailed.
​ ​It's also been well-documented that the Turkey invasion forces of Syrian National Army are stacked with former ISIS, Nusrah, and FSA jihadists... who clearly brought their CIA toys with them.
​ ​And oh the Pentagon now wants you to know that US officials have suddenly become aware of their war crimes, despite the very same groups having carried out similar crimes against Syrian civilians for years as they fought pro-Assad forces.​..
​ ​Among the drone footage includes a “clear-cut case of prisoners with tied hands being shot”, and another includes the assassination of a Kurdish politician on a highway.
​ ​The very groups currently committing war crimes have been seen with CIA-supplied anti-tank weapons in recent weeks​.

Civilian