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I have just been watching the news and, frankly, I ended up laughing.

To be serious, I really am amazed by what is going on.  Western politicians seem to be stuck in total "lala land" or "bizarro world" (pick your expression).  There is such an absolute disconnect between what is actually happening in Banderastan (north and west), the rump-Ukraine (east and south), Crimea and Russia on one hand, and the mental representation which people in the West seem to have about it that I often wonder, yet again, whether the world has not gone completely mad.  I almost feel sorry for western politicians when I hear them speak.  They sound like a flat-earth society meeting and yet they try so hard to look dignified and important it's almost sad.  I say almost, because I realize that these want-to-look-dignified politicians are also the prime culprits for the hell which the (now ex-) Ukraine is going through. Lastly, I am amazed to see that the White House does not realize a basic dilemma it is facing: either the sanctions against Russia are ridiculously ineffective or, in theory, they could really hurt Russia (booting Russia out of the SWIFT system, revoking overflight and landing rights for Russian airlines, etc.).  Then what would happen?  Does the White House not know that Russia holds US$164 billion in US Treasury Securities?  That Russia could simply shut down the northern evacuation route for US forces in Afghanistan?  The millions of dollars in US and EU investment in Russia ( US$300,1 billion) could also be seized?  That Russia can shut down the "northern route" to US ships or stop cooperating on security and terrorism issues?  Fundamentally - does it do any good for the US to really hurt Russia (assuming that it could)? The US and EU remind me of a toddler playing with a hand grenade: either it is a very boring toy and nothing happens, or it works, but then you are dead. Western international diplomacy as a dead baby joke - how pathetic....

When the payroll report was released last month, the world finally noticed what we had been saying for nearly three years: that the US was slowly being converted to a part-time worker society. This slow conversion accelerated drastically in the last few months, and especially in June, when part time jobs exploded higher by 360K while full time jobs dropped by 240K. In July we are sad to report that America's conversation to a part-time worker society is not "tapering": according to the Household Survey, of the 266K jobs created (note this number differs from the establishment survey), only 35% of jobs, or 92K, were full time. The rest were... not.

We assume it is a coincidence that on the day in which we demonstrate China's relentless appetite for gold, driven by what we and many others believe is the country's desire to have a call option on a gold-backed reserve currency when the time comes, just posted in China's official press agency, Xinhua, is an op-ed by writer Liu Chang in which he decries the "US fiscal failure which warrants a de-Americanized world" and flatly states that the world should consider a new reserve currency "that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States." Of course, if China were serious, and if the world were to voluntarily engage in such a (r)evolutionary reserve currency transition, then all Magic Money Tree theories that the only thing better than near infinite debt is beyond infinite debt, would promptly be relegated to the historic dust heap of idiotic theories where they belong. Some of China's (which as a reminder is the single largest offshore holder of US Treasury paper, and the second largest of all only second naturally to the Federal Reserve whose $85 billion in monthly monetizing "flow" is what is keeping rates from exploding higher) thoughts as captured in the Xinhua Op-ed:

Reform of the world’s financial system should include the introduction of a new internatonal reserve currency to replace the U.S. dollar The international community could thus permanently stay away from the spillover of intensifying domestic political turmoil in the U.S. Fiscal impasse in the U.S. is a good time for “befuddled world” to start considering building a “de-Americanized world” Impasse has left many nations’ dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community agonized Other cornerstones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanized world, including respect for sovereignty, recognizing authority of UN in handling global hotspot issues and giving developing and emerging market economies more say in major international financial institutions Purpose of such changes is not to “completely toss the United States aside,” rather to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs Of course, if and when the day comes that the USD is no longer the reserve currency, kiss America's superpower, or any power, status, which is now based purely on the USD's reserve currency status, and the ability to fund half the US budget deficit with debt promptly monetized by the Fed, goodbye.

As we have discussed numerous times, nothing lasts forever - especially reserve currencies - no matter how much one hopes that the status-quo remains so, in the end the exuberant previlege is extorted just one too many times. Headline after headlines shows nations declaring 'interest' or direct discussions in diversifying away from the US dollar... and as SCMP reports, Standard Chartered notes that at least 40 central banks have invested in the Yuan and several more are preparing to do so. The trend is occurring across both emerging markets and developed nation central banks diversifiying into 'other currencies' and "a great number of central banks are in the process of adding yuan to their portfolios." Perhaps most ominously, for king dollar, is the former-IMF manager's warning that "The Yuan may become a de facto reserve currency before it is fully convertible." The infamous chart that shows nothing lasts forever...

Over the past year, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined by the Department of Justice. Our investigation found: Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see our charts page and searchable database.)

Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action. With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.) In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case. Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says Martin Stolar, a lawyer who represented a man caught in a 2004 sting involving New York's Herald Square subway station. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror."

We think that the world needs to know who comprises the TCC and thus who makes the financial decisions regarding global capital. This is actually a fairly straightforward—if labor-intensive—research effort: most of the information is not only public but also online. We started with the top ten most centralized companies from the previously cited 2011 Swiss study.20 This identified the world’s most centralized and interconnected financial organizations. We also wanted to consider those groups managing the largest volumes of financial capital, so we added the top asset management firms from 2012 to our data set.21 The following chart shows the rankings in trillions of dollars of assets managed for the top thirty-five asset management firms in the world.

How did the US propel itself so far ahead, to the point that it could, alone, comprise about half of global military spending? Professor of history at Cornell University: “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African-Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.” Even divided in half, the two halves of the US would still be tied for the lead in global military spending, 89 billion dollars each ahead of the number two spender, China.

Also notice how North Korea’s spending is represented by a pin-prick dot above South Korea, and that Iran’s budget is not high enough even to be given a number on the chart (it was under 10 billion in 2009). It would take 16 billion dollars to clean up the un-exploded bombs the US left in Laos, which continue to kill thousands of people, mostly children.  But the US won’t pay it.

Seven out of the top ten countries afflicted by terrorist attacks are predominately Muslim, according to the Australia-headquartered Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index for 2014, which is based on the University of Maryland’s meta-analytic Global Terrorism Database. Using a maximum value of ten and a minimum value of zero, the entire international community is systematically ranked. Although the definition of terrorist incidents in the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database can definitely be debated over, important inferences can be made from its data sets and the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index. Several key features can be noticed, if readers look at the nature and identities of the perpetrators of what is classified as acts of terrorism among the top thirty countries in the Global Terrorism Index for 2014. The first feature is that the violence generated from the ascribed terrorist groups falls within the framework of insurrections and civil wars that are generally equated as acts of terrorism. For example, this is the case for countries like Somalia, the Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, Turkey, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nepal, which are respectively ranked seventh, ninth, tenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth place. Under closer examination several of these insurgencies can be tied to international rivalries and power plays by the US and its allies. This becomes obvious when more observations are made.

The second feature is that the majority of the cases of terrorism in the indexed countries, especially the higher ranked they are on the list, are connected to Washington’s direct or indirect interference in their affair. For example, this is the case for Iraq, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Russia, Lebanon, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, China, and Iran, which are respectively ranked first, second, third, fifth, seventh, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-eighth. US-led wars, Pentagon interventions, US-backed coups, or US government support for so-called «opposition» groups or proxy regimes have all been a basis for the affliction of terrorism in these countries. Out of the above countries, according to the Global Terrorism Index, 82% of global deaths that are assigned to acts of terrorism happen in NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Nigeria. The ties to US foreign policy should be clear.

It has been claimed that if all terrorists are not Arabs or Muslims, that most terrorists are Arabs or Muslims. Is this true or another myth? An empirical look at data compiled in the US and Europe will help answer this question. In the US, which is ranked thirtieth in the Global Terrorism Index for 2014, the majority of terrorists are not Muslims and are non-Muslims according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Inside the US, 6% of terrorist cases from 1980 to 2005 were committed by Muslim terrorists. [1] The other 94% of terrorism cases and terrorists — in other words, the vast majority — were not related to Arabs, Muslims, or Islam. [2] While the FBI’s methodology on what is a terrorist attack and what is not a terrorist attack is questionable, it will be accepted herein for arguments sake. According to the same FBI report, there were actually more terrorist attacks launched by Jews from 1980 to 2005 on US soil. The same FBI data was compiled by the Princeton University-linked webpage loonwatch.com in a chart that describes the breakdown of cases of terrorist attacks on US soil from 1980 to 2005 as follows: 42% Hispanic terrorism; 24% extreme left-wing group terrorism; 16% other types of terrorists that do not fit into the other main categories; 7% Jewish terrorists; 6% Muslim terrorists; and 5% communist terrorists. [3] While Muslim terrorists comprised 6% of the attacks on US soil from 1980 to 2005, Jewish terrorists and Hispanic terrorists respectively comprised 7% and 42% of the terrorist attacks in the US during the same period. There, however, is no fear mongering about Jews or Hispanic people. The same media and government focus is not given to them as is given to ethnic Arabs and Muslims.

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Neocons do like to declare victory, especially regarding the Iraq War. So it came as no surprise that Paul Wolfowitz, apparently unimpressed by Iraq’s mounting crisis, regaled a recent panel discussion at the U.S.-Africa Summit with the blunt proclamation, “We have won it — in  2009.” Unsurprisingly, that’s when Team Bush left the White House — and approximately 150,000 troops behind in Iraq. Perhaps also not surprisingly, war-weary Americans didn’t pay much attention to Paul’s pronouncement. No doubt they are as tired of Wolfowitz as they are of the war he helped to start. It probably rang as hollow as the faint echo of his earlier pitch for a quick, all-expenses-paid war against 2003’s Hitler of the Moment — Saddam Hussein.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. The issue got more complicated shortly after the Africa summit when President Barack Obama — who had pinned his legacy on extricating the United States from Iraq — suddenly found himself at a podium to announce limited, but open-ended military action to halt the dreaded march of The Islamic State (often called ISIS or ISIL) through the repeatedly rocked Cradle of Civilization. Many have explained the organization’s plan for creating a fundamentalist caliphate and its reliance on shockingly brutal tactics that make ISIS something that even al-Qaeda could never be, nor perhaps ever wanted to be. Many others have prodded the dying corpse of Iraq to assign blame here, there and everywhere. But the most basic reason for more bombing is found right there in the self-aggrandizing quip by Paul Wolfowitz. The simple fact is that the Iraq War was a smashing success – at least for the neocons – because it smashed the keystone in the arch of the region’s stability. By removing Saddam Hussein, his government and the Republican Guard, neocons removed a bulwark against the very jihadism that has policymakers and pundits forever wringing their hands raw, military contractors ringing their cash registers, and the denizens of the national security state resting assured under a blanket of secrecy.

Considering the persistent ubiquity of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, their growing presence around the Horn of Africa and extension into Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolfowitz’s declaration of victory may not be ironic or delusional; it may have some measure of truth – at least from his perspective – but for a reason most would not consider victorious. That “victory” achieved something the neocons could only dream of during a fitful slumber brought on by counting the media’s sheep, i.e. a permanent war in the Middle East.

Back in November, before most grasped just how serious the collapse in crude was (and would become, as well as its massive implications), we wrote "How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed", because for the first time in almost two decades, energy-exporting countries would pull their "petrodollars" out of world markets in 2015.  This empirical death of Petrodollar followed years of windfalls for oil exporters such as Russia, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. Much of that money found its way into financial markets, helping to boost asset prices and keep the cost of borrowing down, through so-called petrodollar recycling. We added that in 2014 "the oil producers will effectively import capital amounting to $7.6 billion. By comparison, they exported $60 billion in 2013 and $248 billion in 2012, according to the following graphic based on BNP Paribas calculations."

The problem was compounded by its own positive feedback loop: as the last few weeks vividly demonstrated, plunging oil would lead to a further liquidation in foreign  reserves for the oil exporters who rushed to preserve their currencies, leading to even greater drops in oil as the viable producers rushed to pump out as much crude out of the ground as possible in a scramble to put the weakest producers out of business, and to crush marginal production. Call it Game Theory gone mad and on steroids. Ironically, when the price of crude started its self-reinforcing plunge, such a death would happen whether the petrodollar participants wanted it, or, as the case may be, were dragged into the abattoir kicking and screaming. It is the latter that seems to have taken place with the one country that many though initially would do everything in its power to have an amicable departure from the Petrodollar and yet whose divorce from the USD has quickly become a very messy affair, with lots of screaming and the occasional artillery shell. As Bloomberg reports Russia "may unseal its $88 billion Reserve Fund and convert some of its foreign-currency holdings into rubles, the latest government effort to prop up an economy veering into its worst slump since 2009." These are dollars which Russia would have otherwise recycled into US denominated assets. Instead, Russia will purchase even more Rubles and use the proceeds for FX and economic stabilization purposes. 

"Together with the central bank, we are selling a part of our foreign-currency reserves,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in Moscow today. “We’ll get rubles and place them in deposits for banks, giving liquidity to the economy." Call it less than amicable divorce, call it what you will: what it is, is Russia violently leaving the ranks of countries that exchange crude for US paper.

Still, is the Justice Department’s airborne dragnet program legal? The answer is “maybe.” Federal authorities have employed similar tools in the past. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is known to use a surveillance tool called a “stingray,” a portable transceiver that tricks cell phones within a certain area into relaying their locations, not unlike the equipment onboard the Marshals’ aircraft. A government vehicle with a stingray can net hundreds of nearby cell phones’ approximate locations just by driving through a typical neighborhood. The government has said it doesn’t need a probable cause warrant to use stingrays because investigators don’t collect the content of phone calls, just the locations of those phones. Government officials, meanwhile, have said they get court approval to use the devices. Much of the government’s warrantless use of stingray-style technology hinges on a 1979 Supreme Court decision titled Smith v. Maryland. Smith involved law enforcement’s use of a device called a pen register that, when attached to a suspect’s phone line, recorded the numbers of outgoing calls, but not the calls themselves. The Smith decision upheld the warrantless use of such devices because the suspect’s phone company would record the same data picked up by the pen register, and therefore the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy when it came to that information. Currently, the law requires a court to approve the use of a pen register, but investigators only have to show that the device’s use is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” a much weaker standard than a probable cause warrant requires.

However, to get back to the Smith decision, wireless carriers do store your location history for several months to several years, information they obtain by keeping a record of the cell towers to which your device connects as you move from place to place. That could mean Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy over their location data and the Smith precedent applies, making the DoJ’s aerial surveillance program legal. Still, that would be a matter for the courts to decide. “There are a lot of tricky questions whether a stingray or dirtbox operated by the government directly is a pen register, or the Fourth Amendment concerns dismissed by the Supreme Court 35 years ago in Smith v. Maryland are more applicable here,” Fakhoury said.

Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney at the pro-privacy Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the Department of Justice could use the Smith precedent as legal justification for the airborne dirtbox program. However, Fakhoury also highlighted a key problem with that argument: Location. Pen registers aren’t intended to pick up location data beyond an area code, whereas the airborne dirtboxes can track a person down to a single building. Many courts, he said, have expressed that location data deserves greater constitutional protection than is afforded to other kinds of information.

Documents from the Reagan presidential library reveal that two major institutions promoting “democracy” and “freedom” — Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy — worked hand-in-glove, behind-the-scenes, with a CIA propaganda expert in the 1980s, reports Robert Parry.

But the Russian law would impede NED’s efforts to destabilize the Russian government through funding of political activists, journalists and civic organizations, so it was denounced as an infringement of human rights and helped justify Freedom House’s rating of Russia as “not free.”The Russian government’s concerns were not entirely paranoid. On Sept. 26, 2013, Gershman, in effect, charted the course for the crisis in Ukraine and the greater neocon goal of regime change in Russia. In a Washington Post op-ed, Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and explained how pulling it into the Western camp could contribute to the ultimate defeat of Russian President Vladimir Putin.“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”With NED’s budget now exceeding $100 million a year — and with many NGOs headquartered in Washington — Gershman has attained the status of a major paymaster for the neocon movement with his words carrying extra clout because he can fund or de-fund many a project.

Thus, three decades after CIA Director William Casey and his propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. struggled to arrange funding for Freedom House and other organizations that would promote an interventionist agenda, their brainchild – the National Endowment for Democracy – was still around picking up those tabs.

The recession may have officially ended in mid-2009, but millions of working Americans have seen their income remain frustratingly stagnant since the economy collapsed. New figures from the U.S. Census Bureau confirm that the median household income in the U.S. was $53,482 between 2010 and 2014, down from $56,568 between 2005 and 2009 when adjusted for inflation—a drop of 5%. By the same metric, just 1,038 of 3,142 counties have a higher median income than they did five years ago. The following map shades every county by its growth or decline in median income since 2009.

Data for 2009 comes from the American Community Survey’s five-year sample from 2005-2009 in 2009 dollars, while data for 2014 is from the ACS five-year survey for 2010-2014. (Five-year samples are necessary to get data for every county.) The 2009 figures in these maps and charts are adjusted up by 10% using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim. The chart, provided by the generally pro-State Department think tank, puts in stark terms how much destruction the U.S. has leveled on other countries. Whether or not one thinks such bombing is justified, it’s a blunt illustration of how much raw damage the United States inflicts on the Muslim world:

It does not appear to be working either. Despite the fact that the U.S. dropped 947 bombs in Afghanistan in 2015, a recent analysis in Foreign Policy magazine found that the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001. The U.S. has entered its 16th year of war in Afghanistan despite several promises by the Obama administration to withdraw. In October of last year, President Obama reversed his position and decided to keep American troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2017. The last four U.S. presidents have bombed Iraq, and that includes the current one since airstrikes were launched on Aug. 7, 2014. The war against ISIS was originally framed as a “limited,” “humanitarian“ intervention. Since then, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has insisted it will be a “30-year war” and the White House has spoken vaguely of a “long-term effort” in both Iraq and Syria. Another red flag Zenko noted was the complete lack of civilian deaths being tallied as a result of those 23,144 bombs. Remarkably, they also claim that alongside the 25,000 fighters killed, only 6 civilians have “likely” been killed in the seventeen-month air campaign. At the same time, officials admit that the size of the group has remained wholly unchanged. In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the size of the Islamic State to be between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters, while on Wednesday, Warren again repeated the 30,000 estimate. To summarize the anti-Islamic State bombing calculus: 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000.

So after more than 20,000 bombs, the U.S. Defense Department only cops to the deaths of six civilians. This is a position largely accepted by the media, which rarely asks who is actually being extinguished by the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. In October, 30 civilians died after the U.S. bombed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The incident is still being investigated, but it has already been revealed that many elements of the original story were either false or deliberately misleading.

The post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have been fought with borrowed money, enough to require up to $8 trillion in interest payments in coming decades, a new report says. Unlike America’s previous wars, its 21st-century conflicts have been paired not with a tax hike or massive sale of U.S. bonds, but a tax cut. The federal government has been operating at a deficit since 2002, accruing a national debt that now totals $20 trillion and counting. “We have to recognize that we have been borrowing for 16 years to pay for military operations,” said Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It’s the “first time really in history with any major conflict that we have borrowed rather than ask people to contribute to the national defense directly, and the result is we’ve got this huge fiscal drag…that we’re not really accounting for or factoring into deliberations about fiscal policy as well as military policy.” The 2017 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project arrives as U.S. lawmakers and President Donald Trump strive to enact tax changes that will add at least $1.5 trillion to the national debt.

The US Pentagon has inked plans to the White House to fight in Somalia for two more years, the New York Times reported yesterday.

According to the blueprint, the US will conduct an internal review on Somalia within 24 months to decide whether to continue fighting in the country. The news comes off the back of an escalation in counter-terrorism drone strikes in Somalia under President Donald Trump.

rump has already provided the US military and CIA broader authority to execute strikes in Somalia, considering it an “area of active hostilities”. As a result, 30 airstrikes have been executed in Somalia, with the most recent killing some 100 Somalis. Controversial raids have also taken place under Trump, with the most notable taking place in August, killing 10 civilians in southern Somalia as they ran and took cover behind banana trees. A US investigation concluded that no civilians were killed in the raid, despite human rights groups disputing the claim.